Language of a Broken Mind: Sarah Kane & 4.48 Psichosys
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Transcript of Language of a Broken Mind: Sarah Kane & 4.48 Psichosys
Larenas
Language of a Broken Mind: Suicidal Poetic Techniques and Dramatic Dialogue in 4.48 Psychosis
Gabriel Nicolás Larenas Rosa1
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary --Sylvia Plath in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
Psychosis 4.48 is a play of agony. A thread. The exhausting, ill-tempered world of
suicide.2 A play to think about killing yourself. 4.48 Psychosis is a claustrophobic dark-room and
it doesn’t allow anyone to go out until the curtains are opened. Curtains which might be as well
arm-flesh; the rope to the neck; breath to mouth.
Kane masters her dramaturgia by the use of poetic writing techniques. These are used to
construct a very specific type of dramatic existentialist dialogue. Given that the critics argue that
4.48 Psychosis is more of a poetic work than a theater play, the following paper will analyze3 the
juxtaposition of poetry and dramatic dialogue in this play, so as to understand it as a visual play.
Its studies why the purpose of this dramatic-poetic writing is to achieve a dense psychological,
suicidal, atmosphere. The main objective is to explore how 4.48 Psychosis creates its own
dramatic structure so as to create a psychological dialogue through its poetic means. It will
consider, so as to read its psychological meanings, how the play refers to psychosis4 without
1 B.A on Literature and Aesthetics, from the Catholic University of Chile, and currently obtening a Master’sdegree in Cultural Studies and Gender at the Arcis University of Chile. 2 To think of suicide is exhausting. As a formal process, it has the weight of a final action be remembered by.3 (Note I wrte at the time I’m revising this paper) It has been over a year since I worked with Sarah Kane’s play. This would not be a complete text without me giving any signs of how much this text demanded from me, and how much I mentally suffered, even in joy, doing this. I wrote this paper as my final seminar to obtain my B.A in English Literature. I was 25 years old. I had previously suffered from depression myself; but at the time I had agreed depression is immanent, some are more articulated than others, and it is not a direct interference with the moments of happyness. I decided to work with this play because of its seductive literary doom. Because it was explicit. Deathly and unique. It did provoke me a breakdown, and that is something I would like people to pay attention on. Working with these kind of literary subjects, if you truly love writing, affects your daily life, affects your sleeping, it gets into every nerve. This is not a symptom that something is wrong. It is a good notice that you are becoming passionate about your research object. Sadly, univesirties and institutions will not even care. Working with Kane and finishing the paper is surviving Kane. Surviving on your own. Without the help of anybody. 4 Thinking basicly of psychosis as a psychiatric condition of those who loose contact with reality
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specifically articulating the pathology but played linguistically. It is done so as to create a
dialogue that recreates, in the receiver, a mental state of mind.
It is agreeable that not all poetry openly declaimed has to be theatrical; as well as not
classic poetry must suit perfectly the written text. A theater play is an organic unit. There is
something beyond its forms that makes them work or not (as if it were that simple). Dialogues are
essentials, since it is how the a play breathers out and stops being a form. In this case, the path is
poetic, and what is beyond the strategy is to reach into the reader a psychological nerve that will
connect text and reader in the same theatrical room, the same fear of suicide.
4.48 Psychosis is mainly written in blank verses. The text is visually constructed in unusual
forms that will not usually be expected in a dialogue. Added to the overly charged semiotics, the
reader is pushed into a strong, written poetic presence that changes the habitual structure of
dramatic dialogue. However, it does not change its functions. Kane is not writing a collection of
poems, she is writing a dramatic piece. The voices undergo a poetic state of reasoning, but always
in interaction with a none-given receptor. She presents this distinction in contrast, as the play
opens. The very first lines indicate the clear presence of dramatic dialogue,
(A very long silence.)
- But you have friends.
(a long silence)
You have a lot of friends.
What do you offer your friends to make them so
supportive? (205)
Though it does not say who is addressing to whom (absence of the specific names of characters),
the voices are clearly dialogical and not monological. The dialogue is marked by a hyphen. A
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voice is addressing another with two statements, a question, and to someone else, not to itself.
This is different from the type of dialogue that will follow,
a consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting
hall near the ceiling of a mind whose floor shifts as ten
thousand cockroaches when a shaft of light enters as all
thoughts unite in an instant of accord body no longer
expellant as the cockroaches comprise a truth
which no one ever utters. (205)
This is an example of how Kane creates a change throughout a poetic dialogue. She installs the
imagery of the subject: the mind, a dark room, fragile floor, invaded with cockroaches; insects
that bring a message, a truth. These insects could represent in fact words; dark words which
invade the mind, words that are not pronounced and that are trapped in the body (the truth that is
never uttered) which is a reading of psychosis from Lacan point of view, thinking that for Lacan
symptoms are words that the body does not want to expel; words trapped in a body. This is what
the text wants to portray. If the poetic function is recognized as being predominant in a specific
text, the text can become more cryptic, enigmatic, allowing the reader of the play to manage a
wider range of interpretations of any read information.
If the reader is not able to be interactive with the voices (the non-titled characters) by
visually interpreting the fragments, the dialogue becomes automatically a monologue and it does
not function. Therefore, Sarah Kane uses very particular words that cannot be easily avoided.
Knowing that the crawling cockroaches will call the attention of the reader by physically
responding to it, she repeats it twice in the same sentence. She places it next to a word that does
not have a visual equivalent: mind, hence its visual interpretation must be done by the readers.
By forcing them to execute this action, she creates a dialogue.
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The extract also is an example of how Sara Kane makes references of Lacan, because of
the constant signification of reality through language. The given text is in present tense (a
consolidated consciousness resides in a darkened banqueting hall). It does not use words such as
“like”; it is not a poetic simile. For the voice, the message of this text is extracted from reality,
the situation is happening as it is being said in the text. But for the reader, as there is a thought
character speaking, the presence of these words signifies something different. 4.48 Psychosis is
a one-act play, though it is never explicit that Kane thought of acts when writing it. However, all
texts have a solid connection between one and another. Even if the tone changes, the language is
coherent with its dramatic flow. This is why the next lines can be analogous with the previous
text:
the broken hermaphrodite who trusted hermself alone finds the
room in reality teeming and begs never to wake
from the nightmare (205).
With this quote, Kane brings back the room so as to reuse a previously constructed image and
add more meanings to it. This is a strategy cleverly repeated throughout the whole play and it is
the reason why this play is so dense. It never suggests a conveyed meaning as a thread to be
followed, so each time repetition
The presence of the words “hermaphrodite” and “hermself” is the linguistic sex ambiguity of the
voice, in which characters can be both male and women separately but with the fact that they
once shared a mutual body. As there is no names in this play, there is no clear identity, which
makes the context much more richer, since it becomes intersexual. There is never clear evidence
about who is speaking. There are no implied genders. Presenting the figure of the intersexed is a
technique that allows readers from both sexes to apprehend the text at the same level. It is
difficult, because the intersexed is part of our invisibility. Kane dares the reader.
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It is a form of ambiguity which redirects the reader into wider possibilities of
interpretation. This emphasis is starting to reveal the need for the reader to be an active
participant in the development of the play, and not just a witness of it. The reader, or virtual
audience, will be needed as the nucleus of the dramatic dialogue for this play to succeed.
Ambiguity will also be needed a hand for the visual constructions that must come alive through
this dialogue between the declaiming voices and the interpretative reader.
It is important to know that the dialogues are built in dramatic verse. As J. L. Stylan
explains in his book The Elements of Drama,
Poetry can make the drama uniquely precise not only for the
actor to work with, but also for the audience to react to. [. . .] It
will compel drama on the stage of such a kind that the image of it
in the audience’s mind will be something wider and yet
finer[. . .] The poetry is there to express and define patterns of
thoughts and feeling otherwise inexpressible and indefinable”
(33)
In this sense, if the play portrays death and suicide as the main subjects, poetry is justified, since
there is a mandatory need to construct images, sometimes by repetitions that are inexpressible,
but expressible only through language. That is the pattern. Poetry will not be considered as such
in the thought of dialogue, but as a monologue that has an interaction with an unknown receptor.
4.48 Psychosis is integral, complex and organic for analyzing the crossing between poetry
and drama. As mentioned before, the intensity of the poetic forms presented in the play has led
many critics to argue that 4.48 Psychosis is not a play because it does not function dramatically.
It is claimed that the play is an extended poem that can be declaimed in an open stage. Kane
writes, “just a word on a page and there is the drama” (213) in order to state that the written word
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can even be ironically theatrical, questioning who decides whether there is drama or not. Despite
the fierceness of poetry in Sarah Kane’s work, 4.48 Psychosis works as a play beyond all doubts.
When analyzing dialogue, the written dramatic text demands an intense work from the
reader, since it constantly appeals to all possible interpretations. In order to analyze, would have
to choose from an original first reading and others led by theory. The performance itself,
however, is more deceitful in analysis because the given messages have to undergo more
channels of recognition besides interpretation, even though the live transmission is more
categorical. Messages, according to Pfister, are sensible to change by any small variation of both
internal and external communication.
The type of dialogue built by Sarah Kane suits the stage perfectly, as a play, not as an
open declamation. No matter how language is performed, the specific messages consider the
reaction of the reader. It chooses the exact words to provoke him/her even in writing. Though
4.48 Psychosis is not a full-dressed hybrid, it comes very close to one. Its proposed anatomy finds
its own ways to give the reader an opportunity to understand our proposed crossing. This is why
words are so important in the analysis. They build a safety net for the messages not to be
corrupted by any external interference.
Pfister claims in Theory and Analysis of Drama that “normally, the poetic function only
applies to the external communication system” (119) because in order to reach internal
communication the voice would have to “express their astonishment to his “unnatural” manner of
speaking”. Sarah Kane is aware of this differentiation, because the voice actually exclaims the
required astonishment. Kane writes in the beginning, “I had a night in which everything was
revealed to me. / How can I speak again?” (204), and then she repeats the bewilderment in the
middle of the play with “how can I return to form / now my formal thought has gone?” (213).
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This is an evident, and clever, paradox about formalism and trying to compose structures without
feelings.
The voice is aware of the language used, its articulations and forms. The poetic function
connects both structure and meaning; verses, words and significations. The way she writes and
how she writes it. She assigns logic in the apprehension of the text/words. It places everyone in
the same position.
Nevertheless, that the play is written mostly in free verse as said before, is not the main
condition for the poetic function to get hold of this work. It is in fact, the dialogue that is
constructed by this predominant function. Since poetry needs a receiver that is able to both
decipher and interpret messages emotionally, in theater both the reader of the text and the
audience of the performance becomes automatically that receiver in a more active way than
someone who just witnesses a conversation. This, according to Ubersefeld, is one of the main
characteristics of the poetic function, its figure of speech, the one that “conditions theatrical
dialogue, [. . .] because the audiences know that all pronounced words are addressed to them”
(132).
The quote that was previously mentioned, “how can I return to form / now my formal
thought has gone?” (213), can also be applicable to how Kane feels about her own play and
Formalism. Artistic formality would manifest in structures and its clefts. Her language, spirited
passion about death, breaks the common dialogical structure since it does not allow a transit from
passion to form. In order to accomplish coherence, she breaks the comfortable structures of
theater, habituated dialogue, recognizable characters, distinguishable stage directions, and
translates them under structures that correspond strictly to poetry. Poetry is the main written form
that supports the so called less formal structures such as blank verse. Blank verse is adaptable for
many situations, since it comes from an unstructured creativity; it becomes stageable. This does
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not mean that all blank-versed poetry is suitable for the stage. It needs a thread, it needs a reason
to be, and that is the brilliance of this particular play; it accomplishes its goals completely. It
creates its own undefined, natural form.
To rely on this function as principal and not secondary is defiant. In this play, the style of
the dialogue questions the repetitive form of dramatic dialogue, the “observable conversation”.
The actual reason for this construction is to speak, loudly, about pain. It transmits without any
kind of considerations, the pain of the writer to an audience that becomes more sensitive
throughout the chosen words.
The poetic dialogues in 4.48 Psychosis are always attached to their own suggestions of
reality, “what is going to happen”, as seen in the previous example, or expressing feelings such as
the following: “when he wakes he will envy my sleepless night of thought and speech unslurred
by medication” (208). In this sentence a “he” that had never been mentioned, appears. An out-of-
context situation is present (someone that is waking up) and the voice is waiting for a
consequence “when he wakes”. The sentence is the portrayal of how the voice is signifying her
insomniac uneasiness which the reader knows occurs every night at 4.48 am. The voice is
constantly trying to explain what this time means, without mentioning it all the time. A signified
reality is presented in a voice that is not aware about its distance with reality.
Words are chosen to articulate a pressured life that wants to get away. A work written by
the intuition of suicide and that changes its own artistic codes that are intervened by this lucid
depression. Intuition is mainly lead by words and facial expression. The chosen language triggers
a transit between life and death. The same happens, for example, in the last work of Sylvia Plath,
Ariel, found in Plath’s desk after she committed suicide. The most famous verses of this work are
closely related to her suicide; she writes in her poem “Lady Lazarus”: “Dying is an art / like
everything else / I do it exceptionally well” (43-45). For Plath and Kane, death had a very similar
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signification and it is not surprising that both of them are famous for how they portrayed suicide
in literary works of art.
Al Alvarez, author of The Savage God, a Study of Suicide, was a close friend of Sylvia
Plath at the time of her death. The approach Alvarez has about death is daring, since there are not
many texts that speak about suicide with such theoretical, yet caring, closeness. He comprehends
“the power the act has exerted over the creative imagination” (166) which is compelling for this
particular analysis. Both writers depicted death with a strange, yet appealing, seduction. Kane
flaunts her own threat to an executing reader. “They will love me for that which destroys me”
(213) writes Kane, just as it happened with the work of Plath, who became a fashionable icon of
suicide. The visual field becomes sweetly mined, a perfect trap.
Because of the need to find words that exactly characterize a need for death and suicide,
the dramatic language is altered to meet everything that is needed to create the imagery necessary
to understand the codes of theatre and suicide. Language creates images which are strong enough
to condition an action. If readers are constructing a place they cannot recognize, the dialogue
between the ones who are inside this place and the outsiders will raise the suggestions necessary
for them to build this place into their own familiar codes.
The most effective strategy is to constantly repeat words in different situations for the
reader to conceive diverse significations upon the same image/word. Because repetition will be
found in different times and places, these will become more obscure concepts. They cannot be
given, because a sudden mention of them will assume concepts of reality which the play avoids
and the repetition would not work. Thus, the semantic field is the key to unveil the place.
The play has an eye/ear-catching emphasis on certain words. The following words, for
example, are extracted from the text; words that repeat constantly or that are highlighted within
their context: silence, consciousness, dark, mind, nightmare, sad, hopeless, bored, dissatisfied,
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failure, guilty, punished, kill myself, cry, tears, loneliness, fear, disgust, death, alone, depressed,
mortality, suicide, unconsciousness, sleepless, pain, bitter, grief, expressionless, dismay,
humiliation, illness, panic, shame, anguish, grave, hurt, lies, falsehoods, betrayal, nothing,
anger, scare, unhappy, hell, destroy, sickness, nervous breakdown, repugnant, aching, tears,
lobotomy, brain, pathological grief, darkness, madness, insanity, pain.
These are Kane’s cockroaches; the words that populate the play. Most of them are
repeated more than three times throughout the whole play. With this strategy, Kane leads the
reader to visually interpret death giving specific instructions of how the imagery must be
constructed. The weight of these words deal with attitudes and mental states; they speak of
desperation as well a severe depression, as if the cockroaches could multiply due to the lack of
light that these words apprehend. However, none of them are concrete; most of them are abstract
nouns defining an abstract picture. In contrast, Kane presents in two full pages, nouns that are
corporeal with the situation, concrete identifiable nouns such as the ones given in the following
lines,
Symptoms: Not eating, not sleeping, not speaking, no sex
drive in despair, wants to die.
Diagnosis: Pathological grief.
Sertraline, 50 mg. Insomnia, worsened, severe anxiety, anorexia
(weight loss 17kgs), increase in suicidal thoughts, plans and inten
tion. Discontinued following hospitalization. (223)
These examples are given in the next following two pages of the play, with medications and
symptoms. The former, gives an exact anatomical reference to what is happening to the voice due
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to a psychiatric condition. It makes the visual field more accurate by the presentation of concrete
nouns that the reader might be more familiar with.
Because of the need of visual suggestion for this play to achieve its goal, it can be
assured we are in presence of a dialogue and not a monologue; the voice its clearly speaking to an
other, giving information about its actual condition that has led her to the staged moment.
Without the repetition of words, there could be no construction of imagery; hence there would be
no dialogue between voice and reader. If this dialogue is not present, then the actions would be
declamatory and the play would become a poetry collection.
Repetition seems to be the main strategy for Sarah Kane to make the dialogue work. For
Lacan, repetition has a major significance in a psychosis. It is given as an impulse. The psychotic
tends to repeat acts and words constantly, producing a disorganization of the mind. Every time
something is repeated, it signifies something different and it can lead to a different context.
However, the root of that repetition will remain the same. This is not only seen in the play with
the major repetitions of words, but with dialogues as well. As we have previously seen, the play
opens as follows,
(A very long silence.)
- But you have friends.
(a long silence)
You have a lot of friends.
What do you offer your friends to make them so
supportive? (205)5
At the beginning it is not clear, but this dialogue is actually a repetition. It shows that every piece
of text can have a different signification. To read this dialogue in page 205 is different than to
5 Many of the lines quoted in the analysis are written as they appear in the text.
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read it in the middle of page 236. It blurs the concept of time since the text does not specify what
action came first. This is where the text establishes the loss of contact with reality on its own. It is
not a character, nor a voice, the one that is producing this repetition. The text repeats itself for the
reader. The repetition of words is necessary to make this division. Death is repeated for the reader
to assemble images with respect to their own private visions of death. It is important that the
word death drives the dialogue between play and reader, because this is the instance where the
play achieves its desired communication; ridden interpretation.
Death is present twenty-one times in the play, from beginning to end, plus seven forms of
dying and seven references to the act of killing. Number seven is an important key in the play. It
is implicitly repeated in the text, such as in this number of repetitions. It a religious icon present
as a negative bonding. The anger with God is violently present on the text. It can represent the
anger toward living against a will of an own: “fuck you God for making me love a person who
does not exist, FUCK YO FUCK YOU FUCK YOU” (215). In this sense, it is not a surprise that
there is an explicit bond between death, religion and a mental state (anger). Number seven is also
part of a mental treatment. It consists in making patients subtract from seven to seven (known as
“Serial 7”). Numbers are presented in the following display, page 208, which beyond all doubts
provokes an optic impact on the reader:
100 91
84 81
72
69 58
44 37
42 21 28
12
7
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It is contrasted with how they are presented later on in the play, page 232:
100
93
86
79
72
65
58
51
44
37
30
23
16
9
2
The visual representation of numbers is perhaps the most characteristic visual presentation of the
play. It influences the reading. Because of the play’s poetic structure, verses, calligraphy and free
punctuation, Kane forces the reader to interpret by means of his/her own channels. Interpretations
in this play are not conveyed by the observation of different linguistic alternations; they are
produced by the sensual reactions of the readers when they find themselves as the receiving
other. The constant repetition of “death” is not the representation of a compulsive character; on
the contrary, is producing compulsion in the reader.
This is the reason why the importance of words, as fragments, cannot be conceived as part
of the portrayed mental disorder, but a strategy. “The strongest impressions are clearer
impressions”, states Alexander Gottlieb in Reflexiones Filosóficas, “hence more poetic than the
less clear ones. It is poetic, in a high degree, to excite the more vehement affections” (49). A
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poetic structure in theater would work then only if it is able to rouse emotions violently. The
interpretation needs to be aggressive, not just a passive codification of what the words means to
whoever is speaking. Soon after the beginning, Kane will reveal this intention in the following
dialogue:
- Yes. It’s fear that keeps me away from the train tracks. I just hope to
God that death is the fucking end. I feel like I’m eighty years old. I’m
tired of life and my mind wants to die
- That’s a metaphor, not reality.
- It’s a simile.
- That’s not reality.
- It’s not a metaphor, it’s a simile, but even if it were, the defining feature
of a metaphor is that it’s real. (210)
By announcing the wish for mind-death as a simile6, what is truly meant is that wanting to
die can be comparable. It never says with what can be compared to, since “my mind wants to
die” is an outer embodiment, a despersonificación, not a simile. The previous “like” is
descriptive. The reader will tend to think of their own thoughts of suicide, constructing a
personal imagery towards death. This is the desired action. The negation of the metaphor is a
despersonification of her longing. It is an affirmation that supports the consciousness of the
speaker towards reality.
The former extract is rich for explaining the many attitudes and approaches 4.48 Psychosis
has. On a flighty surface, it is taken as a literary discussion of similes and metaphors; how they
can be recognized in language use. However, it is a far more intricate example. Structurally, it
6 This discussion I understood in time, telling my own therapist that every cliché spoken about madness is not a metaphor, is in fact a similie. It is happening. It is not as if it were to happen. The discussion about metaphore and similies is the drawing line between those who are truly suffering from depression and those we see it from the outside or think they might be crazy or depressed.
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denotes the use of voices as dialogical characters proposed by Sarah Kane. These are more
regular type of dialogues marked by a hyphen. The tones of the voices are clearly different; they
can be set apart as individuals. No matter how many hyphens might be found in the text, the final
decision of “how many characters there are” must be taken first by the reader and his/her virtual
performance while reading, and then by the director who wants to take 4.48 Psychosis up to the
stage.
The play can never be converted in a mere representation of the dialogue between director
and text; it has to work all the stageable-linguistic proposals for the audience never to lose their
role as receivers. On the other hand, the director will need to know how to transcribe all the
complex linguistic elements into the play for them never to lose their functions given by the text
itself. In this sense, “Silence”, the second most repeated word in the whole play, is probably the
most complex translation from text to stage. Specially because it is given as a multifunctional
stage direction.
In Theater as Sign-System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance Aston and Savona claim
that the main body of the dramatic text and the text containing stage directions should be
distinguished from each other. For them, stage directions are pieces of highly relevant
information for the play itself, whether extra or intra-dialogic, and they must always be
considered and analyzed. In 4.48 Psychosis the stage directions are as important as the dramatic
text, because it part of it. They cannot be divided from the text. The only written stage directions
are silences, so the reader might attribute them to characters, space, acts, as well as part of the
poetic writing; as if Kane would be using brackets in the style of e.e. cummings.
If considered only as stage directions, they would have an internal effect on the text as well
as in the psychological definition of voices. The play opens with “(A very long silence)”. In
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brackets and curved, as stage directions are written. It illustrates a command given by its implied
form. The requirement is not there to help to construct a mood, it settles it.
(Silence) will be repeated several times from beginning to an end; 38 times to be exact. It
becomes a fragment. Even though this is the first form of repetition given in the text, it is never
complete until the very end where the last (silence) is followed by “I was trying to explain” (238)
and when this fragment is replaced by “(but Nothing)” (231), a “Nothing” that is capitalized, that
is, given the title of a place, a land of nothing. Why is it silence the chosen opening medium?
Answering to the psychiatric nature of the play, it denotes a mental process as well as uneasiness
with communication. Stage directions become a key to understanding the importance of the
interpretation of the reader. However, because of the ambiguity of the text, and that there is an
emphasis in only giving silence as a stage direction, that piece of writing can be also interpreted
not as a Stage Direction per se, but as part as well of the integral text which has a meaning over
the previous and following texts. It depends on how the reader wants to take advantage of the
form. Symbolically, it is the place in which the author takes a breath herself, in silence, and
allows the voice to rest as well, as if, because of the intensity of the words, that was the only
action truly required.
(Silence) can be considered within an unconventional phatic function as well. As Pfiester
recognizes it, the Pathic Function refers to the “psychological willingness of both parties to
communicate” as well as helping to “create and intensify the dialogical contact between the
various figures” (113). In the following example it can be seen how the figure of silence
intervenes in communication:
- You are not eighty years old.
(Silence)
Are you?
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(A Silence)
Are you
(A Silence)
Or are you?
(a long silence) (212)
As it was mentioned, 4.48 Psychosis does not have structured characters. It can be from
one voice to several voices. When it was first staged in the year 2000, three characters were
presented. In Chile, the play was directed by Alfredo Castro in 2004. Two characters were staged.
It is always a personal decision that comes from the reader. As there are no turns in dialogue, the
different types of silences can be considered as answers, that is to say, as part of the dialogue, a
silence that is not portrayed in speech. It can be seen also as a gap in which the other voice gives
room for another question to appear. It can be a refusal to the questions. It is never a closing
feature.
In the following example, silence will be a figure of speech that leads the voice to
continue the dialogue with the reader:
Do you think it’s possible for a person to be born in the
wrong body?
(Silence) (215)
(Silence) can be translated as a time for breathing while the voice is speaking to itself, as
well as a moment for the reader, or virtual audience, to feel that they are being addressed
personally. This will encourage dialogue to develop, always in a psychologically manner as
Pfister would notice.
These forceful breaks in structure signify the emotional psychological breakdowns of the
writer. 4:48 am is the time Kane would wake up, everyday, due to paranoia. Even though nor the
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reader nor the audience must be aware of this fact, it is a fundamental truth that configures
dialogue and its fragments, because from this repetitive silence, the flow of words emerge.
Silence is not a code that asks for a reply, but it does provoke a reaction in the other. It
situates them in an awkward, uncomfortable place which leads to the unraveling dialogues. Susan
Sontag, in her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence” expresses a notion of silence which is
fundamental to understand the opening of the play. She addresses the question of how literally
silence figures in art. She answers,
silence exists as a decision – in the exemplary suicide of the artist,
who thereby testifies that he has gone “too far” [. . .]. Silence
also exists as a punishment, in the exemplary madness
of artists who demonstrate that sanity itself may be the price of
trespassing the accepted frontiers of consciousness” (9).
Sontag seems to precisely delimit the concept of silence used in 4.48 Psychosis. The
frontiers of consciousness are taken, literally, to the boundaries of theater and what could be its
limitations; silence as a stage direction in the very opening. However, this first rupture of the rule,
that trespassing, a silence that is mandatory stageable with ambiguous determinations of time (“a
long silence, a very long silence, silence”) has a deep communicative meaning. Because it is a
neutral zone, semantically uncharged, it leads the reader to what Ubersfeld would recognize as
“presupposing what is not said”7 because in silence there is a constant expectation for words,
what is going to be said in order to break the tension.
The absence of pronunciation must be portrayed by the actors on stage. Because of the
constant repetition done in different units of meaning, every time silence appears in the play it
7 According to her, in her book El diálogo teatral, page 151, what is not said, “lo no dicho”, is part of the poetic form of dialogue.
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will join the previous sentences pronounced. The intuition in the other will be provoked by the
face that joins the silence; a face that will rearrange the hearing words and that has the power
enough to modify the ones that will be said. Whether positive or negative, it will affect the flow
of dialogue. The proposed silence is never a place for resting. It is always tensional. As it
produces constant expectations, the psychological space is used, first as a time to gather the given
information, and then to build, at the same time, more expectations about the development;
expectations that always tend to be more negative as the dark intensity of the play grows. In this
sense, the expectation, what it is not said, formulates a language of its own. In this place, where
hearable language is not present, words flow inside the reader’s mind, a constant questioning; the
complete lack of silence.
This is how the dialogue begins between the play and its readers. It follows a
psychological order, since it is psychology, the failure of it, the fight against the institutionalized
rules of the mind versus the true self, the main concern of the play; the reason of speech. In this
logic, silence approximates what Esslin in his essay "Language and Silence" would define as a
refusal to communicate. However, in this particular case, silence would be a simulation of that
refusal, as another strategy. The dialogue results to be a very intimate, still crudely rough,
sharing of death wishes, images, feelings, etc. It always attempts to defy the psychology of the
reader, to prove how long they can resist while being confronted with their own visions of death.
Because of this psychological intensity, a psychoanalytical approach to the play would be easier,
but dangerous, since as Aston and Savona explain those types of analysis can make the text loose
a severe amount of edges. This is why we will consider a psychological approach only to add
meaningful views to the rich construction of language and communication in 4.48 Pyschosis.
Viewing the effects that this psychological comprehension has upon the text itself, I could
not agree more with “Teoría de la Expresión Poética” where Carlos Bousoño claims that “poetry
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is the contemplation of a real state of mind. Poetry does not communicate what it is being felt,
but its contemplation” (20). This statement reinforces the way in which the play was written.
Bousoño highlights the difficulty in comprehending the meaning of communication when it
comes to poetry, because of this crossing between communication and interpretation in a
subjective field. He claims that what the reader must always have in mind is that everything that
is being communicated is imaginary with codes that are real language, which determines
everything that has to be imagined. In this sense, the various messages that can be decoded are
completely valid. Bousoño affirms that poetry follows an “intuitive understanding, not a logic
one” (53).
The dialogues marked by hyphens are clearly about treatment; it is usually recognized as a
patient and her therapist. To allow the other to decide whether these dialogues follow a
pathological disorder means that the author is forcing the other to assume the role of a therapist
when labelling the artistic drive. Dialogues are articulated under a penetrating artistic insight.
Whether sick or healthy, it should not infer any form of prejudice towards the work itself. Kane
presents in her work how difficult it is to write under the constant pressure of an outsider who
determines what is healthy, what is not, what is a metaphor, what is a simile. For art sake, it is
clinical censure.
One of the main pathological characteristics of psychosis is the loss of contact with reality
together with a derangement of personality. For many readers, the main voices as well as the
author might be driven by a psychotic state of mind, but it is not technically necessary as a
general truth. 4.48 Psychosis is not a delirium; a psychotic mind can never interpret a delirium.
The voice that speaks of mental states is clearly eloquent; hence the voice comes from a severe
depression, clever enough to have a theoretical approach to mental diseases.
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There is a voice who feels inside a prison; the opinion of the doctor who is trying to make
an own version of her, trying to psychologically decode her. If Kane is trying to shape death as a
major desire; what she would be reflecting is the death of the judgemental voice that criticizes
her. The true self emerges, for Lacan, in delirium. Kane seems to know precisely what her
deliriums are. Even though there are sentences in which the signifier differs from what is being
signified, the critic self-recognition assures her in a reflexive state of mind, not a psychotic one.
There is no Foreclusion8 in the dialogue, that is to say, there are no forgotten radical
rejections. The voice is able to articulate everything that is happening under her own language;
her views of reality. If the reader decides that the voice is ill, that this is the voice of someone that
is trying to kill herself, then she is, because the reader is giving the voice a suicidal identity. The
voice is coherent with its depression, but in a degree that gives her certain logic that keeps her
mind lucid to declaim her inner truths.
As we know, if the signified is always changed, but it keeps the signifier, every time a
word is repeated it will mean something different. All this different significations are part of an
identity that is able to visually construct meanings. Psychosis justifies repetition as trying to
release a specific trauma. Now, it is not “what is repeated” but what is meant by it. As explained,
if the author repeats “death” over and over, it is not the actual concept of death what is trying to
be portrayed, but something deeper. However, the imagery constructed to reach the meaning, the
“signify” out of it, comes from all images attached to the word. In this sense, if it is suicide what
triggers the action, “to explain suicide” is absolutely not the main goal of the play.
8 This is a very specific Lacanian term, which is used when a child grows out of his/her connections between the real and the imagery; specifically because of the ingrown relations with the father. For a post feminist reading of this play, this foreclusion must be something to be developed together with the postulates of role and genders (for example, thinking the doctor as the pressence of a father).
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An important aspect that psychotics manifest through their language structure is the way
they deal with their loss of identity. This loss is one of the main issues of 4.48 Psychosis. In the
following lines, examples of alienation are presented
I will drown in Dysphoria9
In the cold black pond of my self
The pit of my immaterial mind (223).
Dysphoria is a bipolar disorder, in which grief release a confrontation with another self within the
self. “We are anathema / The pariahs of reason” (228). Anathema is a gift made to the gods,
lifted, separated from the earth. If they are used as an adjective to describe the “I”, it implies that
the speaker feels that she is not part of her own self as a unit, that there is always a division; an
earthly body and an atmospheric one. This representation is seen as Kate writes
Here am I
and there is my body
dancing on glass (230).
Identity is a delicate issue in 4.48 Psychosis. It arises in both text and performance. It is
addressed in dialogue itself. Lacan assures that the identity is not formed by how the “I”
conceives itself in language (I am), but how the other constructs the identity of the other “I”; that
is to say, how the other sees me is how I will see myself. This is called “Otherness”. In a lecture
given on October 2007, at the National Library of Chile, Stéphane Thibierge explained that for
Lacan the self is something we project to bare everything that for us belongs to the other. For this
reason, the speaker will tend to be narcissistic; the image the “I” has about itself is fed by the
other. The “I” will tend to emphasize the need to hear itself repeated.
9 Having in mind that we are reading from Identity concepts; when evidently Disphorya is the climax of the Gender Analysis of the play.
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The play soundly opens with the opinion of that other “But you have friends” (205); a
grammatical conjunction that immediately implies an explication or justification. As the reader
will probably interpret later on, the character that opens with this line represents the voice of the
other; most probably a doctor and/or a very judgmental voice. The constructed self, a self that is
always feeling attacked, is the one that the outsider is trying to build by attaching every word to a
psychological reason to be. It can be understood that the voices are a written polyphony which
articulate a conclusion of her state of mind before committing suicide. This is the one point in
which the notion of interpretative dialogue becomes more than essential.
The most unstructured voice might hallucinate the appearance of other characters (which
does not have to be two), or he/she can play them, assuming a disorder of personality or a
schizophrenia. Even though readers can freely assume these positions, because in their mind they
can have all possibilities, this will be a difficult choice for the director, because she/he will take a
personal interpretation of the dialogues into a stage, conditioning the perception of the reader and
defining the dialogue that will be shared. This is also an instance in which readers, in their role as
virtual directors, and the directors themselves become “doctors”. This fact is violent, because the
play would attack the reader from beginning to an end.
Personally, I believe that 4.48 Psychosis is the most intense piece written by Kane. Its
brilliance relies on how the play instates its own dramatic structure by means of poetic dialogues.
By writing in blank-verses, Kane fixes a form of dialogue that portrays the inner functioning of a
depressive mind, how clear death appears to those who have been called “unstable”. She
questions identity by suggesting the reader how to build conclusions about sanity. Sarah Kane
uses violence to make her play work. She always thinks about how readers will construct their
own intuitions by their possibly reactions suggested by the words she writes. 4.48 Pyschosis is a
dramatic piece of work led, exclusively, by its poetry, its words.
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Though poetry and theatre have come across together repeatedly in history; though many
forms of poetry can be vividly declaimed on a stage, Kane is clearly a playwright. She revels
against formal dramatic structure without ever stopping using it. The most clear example is how
she uses stage directions; impossible to follow without the other’s interpretation. There is no clear
presentation of characters. If three, two are called “ - ” and the other one has no name, no title.
Kane is smart enough to cross-examine the characteristic of language and its functions.
She knows exactly how to construct a dialogue from her proposed forms. Kane knows precisely
how to work with language in order to affect dialogue effectively. For this reason, even though it
can be easily argue that 4.48 Psychosis is a poem because of the way it is written; it is, beyond all
doubts, a penetrating play which requires an extraordinary alertness from the reader. The play
will find no difficulty to achieve such. Language per se is privately rich, and it apprehends
attention with its high suicidal notes.
The title of the play hints to a known mental disorder called psychosis. However, there are
not any exact references about this state of mind, since the voices, though highly metaphorical,
are always coherent with their own truth. As we have seen, the reference to psychosis is done in
order to execute an approach to the linguistic work of Jacques Lacan, a French psychiatrist who
paid particular attention to language in different states of mind. The text follows the main two
points that Lacan sees in a psychosis; a detachment from reality and a problem of identity;
identity that is looked for in the other not in the self. In this sense, the psychotic will not be any
of the characters, nor the author, but the play itself.
Portraying a language of her own, choosing very carefully what words will conduce each
reading, Kane proves to be a gifted writer who suffered from an unspeakable pain. The text gives
hopes of light “I want to live” (237); however it was death who would win the battle. This fact
sometimes seems to outshine the work of art as such. As David Greig argues in the introduction
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of Sarah Kane’s complete works, she must not be acknowledged for her will to suicide, but
because of her accurate literary talent. I hope the analysis provided sufficient clues for a personal
literary approach to the play; clues, not forced interpretations, since they would not work well for
Sarah. The reading of this play must always be a personal experience.
Works Cited
Kane, Sarah. 4.48 Psychosis. Complete Plays. London: Methuen Publishing, 2001.
Álvarez, A. The Savage God. London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.
Aston, Elaine & George Savona. Theater as a Sign System. New York: Routledge, 1991
Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Reflexiones filosóficas acerca de la poesía. Buenos
Aires: Aguilar, 1975.
Bousoño, Carlos. Teoría de la expresión poética. Madrid: Gredos, 1985.
Carlson, Marvin. A Performance : a critical introduction. New York: Routledge, 2004
Eliot, T. S., 1888-1965. On poetry and poets. London: Faber & Faber, 1957.
Naudón de la Sotta, Mario. Apreciación teatral. Santiago, Chile: Del Pacífico, 1956.
Pfeiffer, Johannes Sierich. La poesía: hacia la comprensión de lo poético. México:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959.
Pfister, Manfred. The Theory and Analysis of Drama. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991.
Sontag, Susan. “The Aesthetics of Silence”. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar,
Strauss and Giroux, 1969.
Styan, J.L. The Elements of Drama. Great Britain: Cambridge, 1960.
Ubersfeld, Anne. El Diálogo Teatral. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2004.
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