by
Laura Nutten
Through madness, a work that seems to drown in the world, to reveal there its non-sense, and to transfigure itself with the features of pathology alone, actually engages within itself the world’s time, masters it, and leads it; by the madness which interrupts it, a work of art opens a void, a moment of silence, a question without answer, provokes a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.
– Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
A Mouthful of Birds, written by Caryl Churchill and David Lan, is, to quote Helene Keyssar, “an elaborate theatrical representation of violence” (140), particularly violence enacted by women. A “pathology” of our postmodern world, violence is routinely considered a sort of contemporary “madness.” However, as suggested by Foucault, such madness in art rarely functions as a simple mimesis of the world within which that art is created; rather, it serves notice to the world that it must “acknowledge responsibility” for its history and ultimately its future (Keyssar 146). A Mouthful of Birds is no exception: Churchill and Lan use drama to construct a “dangerous history” of gender and gender roles (Keyssar 136), employing madness both to unsettle normative categories of identity and to explore the risks involved in playing within subversive space.
Madness, as Francios Boissier de Sauvages suggested in 1772, is ‘a blind surrender to our desires’ or ‘an incapacity to control or to moderate our passions” (cited in Foucault 85). Madness, in short, is an altered state of consciousness, wherein the individual becomes more mindful of his/her carnality and less attentive to restrictive social mores. As such, Foucault argues, madness threatens the Cartesian notions of reason and rationality and is the embodiment of “absolute freedom” (84). Conversely, however, madness can also be the epitome of imprisonment, for the reality of madness, as James Glass points out, is often one of ‘immense suffering, alienation, and distortion’ (xv). Madness, then, is a paradox: on the one hand, it allows for a freer agency, often subverting normative cultural forces and discourse systems. On the other hand, when too ‘disruptive’ or ‘dangerous,’ madness can also mean the loss of agency, for normative cultural forces often fall back upon the mad, incarcerating it and alienating it from society.
Equally paradoxical in terms of agency is the notion of the postmodern subject. Postmodernism incessantly questions the existence of “an ahistorical transcendent self” or autonomous being (Allen 278), arguing instead for, in Derrida=s words, a subject which is an “effect of forces” outside itself (17). Some critics have adopted this postmodern position in an attempt to understand how identity is constructed by cultural practices. Monique Wittig, for example, argues that feminism should begin with the deconstruction of the “myth of woman” as submissive, sensitive, and nurturing, a myth constructed by the patriarchy and sustained by modern psychology. Moreover, for such a deconstruction to be an effective means of protest, one must make the opposition of man and woman and the construction of that myth “brutally apparent” (31), otherwise the conflict will go unnoticed and no transformation will be possible.
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