Against Interpretation and Other Essays

by Susan Sontag

The prescriptions which Artaud offers in The Theater and Its Double describe better than anything else what Happenings are. Artaud shows the connection between three typical features of the Happening: first, its supra-personal or impersonal treatment of persons; second, its emphasis on spectacle and sound, and disregard for the word; and third, its professed aim to assault the audience. The appetite for violence in art is hardly a new phenomenon. As Ruskin noted in 1880 in the course of an attack on “the modern novel” (his examples are Guy Mannering and Bleak House!), the taste for the fantastic, the outré, the rejected, and the willingness to be shocked are perhaps the most remarkable characteristics of modern audiences. Inevitably, this drives the artist to ever greater and more intense attempts to arouse a reaction from his audience. The question is only whether a reaction need always be provoked by terrorization. It seems to be the implicit consensus of those who do Happenings that other kinds of arousal (for example, sexual arousal) are in fact less effective, and that the last bastion of the emotional life is fear.