Approaching Artaud From ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’ by Susan Sontag VINTAGE 300KS, [A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE NEW YORK 1981The movement to disestablish the “author” has been at work for over a hundred years. From the start, the impetus was—as it still is—apocalyptic: vivid with complaint and jubilation at the convulsive decay of old social orders, borne up by that worldwide sense of living through a revolutionary moment which continues to animate most moral and intellectual excellence. The attack on the “author” persists in full vigor, though the revolution ei- ther has not taken place or, wherever it did, has quickly stifled literary modernism. Gradually becoming, in those countries not recast by a revolution, the dominant tradi- tion of high literary culture instead ‘of its subversion, modernism continues to evolve codes for preserving the new moral energies while temporizing with them. That the historical imperative which appears to discredit the very /13UNDER THE SIGN OF SATURN practice of literature has lasted so long—a span covering numerous literary generations—does not mean that it was incorrectly understood. Nor does it mean that the malaise of the “author” has now become outmoded or inappropri- ate, as is sometimes suggested. (People tend to become cynical about even the most appalling crisis if it seems to be dragging on, failing to come to term.) But the longevity of modernism does show what happens when the prophe- sied resolution of drastic social and psychological anxiety is postponed—what unsuspected capacities for ingenuity and agony, and the domestication of agony, may flourish in the interim. In the established conception under chronic challenge, literature is fashioned out of a rational—that is, socially accepted—language into a variety of internally consistent types of discourse (e.g., poem, play, epic, treatise, essay, novel) in the form of individual “works” that are judged by such norms as veracity, emotional power, subtlety, and relevance. But more than a century of literary modernism has made clear the contingency of once stable genres and undermined the very notion of an autonomous work. The standards used to appraise literary works now seem by no means self-evident, and a good deal less than universal. They are a particular culture’s confirmations of its notions of rationality: that is, of mind and of community. Being an “author” has been unmasked as a role that, whether conformist or not, remains inescapably respon- sible to a given social order. Certainly not all pre-modern authors flattered the societies in which they lived. One of the author’s most ancient roles is to call the community to account for its hypocrisies and bad faith, as Juvenal in the Satires scored the follies of the Roman aristocracy, and Richardson in Clarissa denounced the bourgeois institu- /14