14.+Kane

//Please discuss this statement in GROUP 3 discussions ONLY.//
Ryan Claycomb (West Virginia University)

=Sarah Kane's //4.48 Psychosis//=

.

Sarah Kane, as every biographical portrait of her notes, burst onto the London theatre scene in 1995 with her play, Blasted, one that made the radical statement that a rape in a Leeds hotel room had something to do with the civil war in Bosnia. The play became tabloid fodder, and her follow up plays, including the even more explosive Cleansed in 1998, garnered publicity based on Kane’s reputation for shock more than on her formal innovation, or her rich language. When she committed suicide by hanging in 1999, she left behind //4.48 Psychosis//, a “play” with no stage directions, characters, or even much in the way of recognizable dialogue. The title of the play is derived from the time of morning statistically most likely that suicide will occur, and for the voice of the play, it is “when sanity visits, for one hour and twelve minutes I am in my right mind.” The play is a fragmentary, poetic, often muddled and just as often brilliant piece of writing for the stage. First produced by the Royal Court Theatre in 2000, the work received the unabashed critical success that her work rarely received in her lifetime.

It is no wonder, given the timing of the play’s introduction to the world, that much of the critical response to Kane’s last play struggles with the impulse to read it autobiographically, as a theatrical suicide note written just before she ended her life. David Greig, in his introduction to the playwright’s //Complete Works//, urges readers “not to search for the author behind the words, but to freight the plays with our own presence” (xviii). Indeed, her own brother and executor, Simon Kane, delayed the release of performance rights in the U.S. on the fear that literal minded Americans would only interpret it as autobiography. Because the play is “about suicidal despair[. . . ] it is understandable that some people will interpret the play as a thinly veiled suicide note” writes her brother: “this simplistic view does both the play and my sister's motivation for writing it an injustice.' (qtd. in Sierz)

This anti-autobiographical stance is understandable: by connecting the madness of the play directly to Kane’s selfhood, we might unwittingly justify accusations that her entire oeuvre is the work of a sick mind. But the alternative choice—to universalize the suicidal despair of //4.48 Psychosis//—refuses to link the writing to the body and voice of its author: Kane’s own anger, despair, and indeed self-determination is written out if we have chosen not to read a specific self in question. At the risk of revealing myself to be a “literal-minded American,” I choose to read Kane’s work as autobiography, even as that choice carries with it a kind of danger, lets the work itself answer that question, by speaking on behalf of the body whose death it narrates and whose absence it performs. Doing so raises important questions about the absence of the playwright, especially the female playwright, one that exceeds a mere Barthesian death-of-the-author, to become a performance of absence itself. Whatever we may say about Kane’s life and other work, //4.48 Psychosis// provides us with a way to think about the absent body of the playwright (and therefore a necessary presence of some other performing body) as a component of a performed women’s autobiography, one that assumes the fragmentary nature of identity, and in doing so, utilizes the collaborative nature of theatrical production to literalize and express that fragmentation.

It is a commonplace that Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” teaches against authorial fallacy, favoring the primacy of the text, the intertext, even the reader. But while Barthes generally supposes to elide the specific historical identity of the //auteur//, only to replace it with the anonymous language worker, the //scriptor//, that worker’s maleness is never up for debate. When Barthes writes, “Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within //him// passions, humors, feelings, impressions” (225, emphasis mine), he acknowledges the gender of the scriptor as male (the original French offers him no other choice). Barthes seeks to accord the scriptor the same status as he sees accorded to the reader: “without history, biography, psychology” (225). But when we view Barthes’ theoretical desire to elide the author against this play, we find that women become the collateral damage of Barthes’ de(con)structive impulses. When we take away Sarah Kane’s “history, biography, psychology,” we elide precisely that which has been denied her and other women __across__ history. While Barthes’ desire to kill off the author does nothing to disrupt the status of men’s contributions to a history of subjectivity, women’s contributions to that history are still by no means well established, and much of what //is// established comes from precisely this type of source: women writers and their texts. To elide the spectre of the body of the author (even in that body’s conspicuous absence) is to prevent women generally, and Sarah Kane specifically, from writing themselves back into history.

Of course, there are critical and theoretical dangers to such an autobiographical reading of Kane’s work. And I agree with Kane’s surviving circle that reading the play merely to find salacious details about the playwright’s life is unsophisticated and gossipy. But to understand it more broadly as a specific kind of subject construction lends far more to the play—its understanding of identity fragmentation, of the kinds of discursive maneuvers that circumscribe women’s bodies, of the anger that women are still punished for expressing, as well as for the critical mechanisms it provides for reading suicide in literature generally, as well as autobiographical suicide literature. All of these become particularized and therefore politicized when we choose to read this not as a universal portrait of pain, but as the representations of //this// woman’s subjectivity, of //this// woman’s anger, and theatricalized violence against //this// woman’s (now dead) body.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland “The Death of the Author”, //Image-Music-Text//. New York: Hill and Wang 1978. 142-149. Rpt. In //Falling Into Theory//. Ed. David Richter. Boston: Bedford, 1994. 221-226.

Grieg, David. “Introduction” //Sarah Kane: Complete Plays//. London: Methuen Drama, 2001. ix-xvii.

Sierz, Aleks. “Sarah Kane” IN-YER-FACE THEATRE. Acccesed 14 Sept. 2009 [] (An earlier version of this article appeared as 'The Short Life of Sarah Kane' in //The Daily Telegraph// on 27 May 2000.