ABSTRACT
In Peter Weiss’s famous play, the Marquis de Sade describes the Bastille as the liberator, rather than the suppressor, of an overwhelming inner criminality:
In prison I created in my mind monstrous representatives of a dying class who could only exercise their power in spectacularly staged orgies I recorded the mechanics of their atrocities in the minutest detail and brought out everything wicked and brutal that lay inside me In a criminal society I dug the criminal out of myself. (Weiss 53)
This statement is manifestly political and addresses the play’s overt philosophical concerns. Weiss uses Sade-the man of isolation and the inner, imaginative life-as a counter to Jean-Paul Marat-the man of action, social conscience, and reform. The latter represents both the French Revolution and revolutionary principles in general, while the former embodies the vices of the ancien regime and the politically narcissistic in general. This binary thematic is reinforced by the play’s setting-Charenton asylum, a kind of jail for the madwhich stresses the contrast between freedom and confinement, outside and in. In this context, Sade’s perception of the prison as liberating the inner outlaw is a paradox that powerfully ironizes both the play’s binaries and the Brechtian aspects of its dramaturgy. The sense of conflicting poles and the counter-rhythms that
undermine them is stressed by the play’s intellectual action. The anchoring debate between individualism on the one hand and collective responsibility on the other is well known.1 Weiss generates a protracted dialogue between his two iconic antagonists-a conversation both languid and feverish, reflecting the ennui of the one and the desperation of the other. Swirling around these interchanges, the energies of madness and revolution are embodied in the actor/patients and the audience of the play-within-a-play. In the counterpoint of ceremonious speech and embodied wildness, the play seeks an explosive balance between opposites that are, nevertheless, always already collapsing into each other.
