Containing Chaos

Abstract

This chapter returns from performance art to dramatic theatre to analyze the relation of pain to laughter in the midst of violence that seems to turn the world upside down or inside out. Playwright Sarah Kane typically elicits an empathetic squirm but blocks sympathetic imagination, so that we react to horror but must find our own place to stand with respect to violence. She purposely gives us no viable position, drawing us into an experience of abjection. Her dark humor draws some lines around this unmanageable experience, but the shape remains provisional, subject to fresh rupture. Like Kane’s plays, medieval theatre juxtaposes humor of a sort with violence that has been compared to the horror film. Unlike Kane’s plays, though, the saint plays with which this book is concerned present a clear-cut hierarchy and unambiguous moral valuation. The spatial schema within which they operate encompasses vertical hierarchy and circles of containment, both susceptible to inversion. The humor (if that’s what we want to call it) and chaotic violence in medieval performance operate according to a logic similar to the post-modern abject but to different ends. As Le Mystre de Saint Sbastien illustrates, the medieval grotesque serves to affirm order and to position the spectator more firmly within a coherent hierarchy.