The Relief of Sarah Kane
please open the curtains
I
I get choked up when I talk about the wire. In Costa, I’m listening to Japanese jazz through my headphones with a copy of Dracula on the table. It’s a much better read than I expected. The image of the old count straddling towards the void below his castle hangs over my mind. Beyond the glass there are cigarettes tussling every so often in the light breeze. Then when the electric bass comes in, I decide I am done distracting myself from suicide.
Sarah Kane killed herself when she was 28. She hanged herself with her own shoelaces. I don’t like to write about most writers like this. I probably wouldn’t write about Sylvia Plath this way, who is too much interpreted as a dead girl who happened to write and too little as a humourist who happened to die. With Kane -somehow- it works. As in Adorno’s Minama Moralia, there is a spider’s web under her body of literature, a mass connecting or projecting everything out of itself. Her own corpse? I know. I know. I’m giving you a lot more than usual. But the only suitable precondition to analysing Kane is your own attitude to her. I can’t read her short sharp scenes without imagining the air going out of her neck.
The three bodies lie completely still. Eventually, Hippolytus opens his eyes and looks at the sky. Hippolytus. Vultures. (He manages a smile.) If there could have been more moments like this. Hippolytus dies. A vulture descends and begins to eat his body.
In the Hellenic culture Euripides’ play Hippolytus came from (the original to Kane’s Phaedra’s Love) the human soul is frequently portrayed as a smaller version of the owner but with wings, as a bird headed person, or simply as a bird. There’s a touch of the universal to this concept; in Finnish folklore the Sieliuintu, or soul-bird, is similarly a representation of the Psyche of the dead. And different souls have different birds. The parasitic, but at least self-aware Hippolytus has a vulture for good reason. As well as being an ironic punishment for his own predatoriness -consuming the bagatelles of “the people” just as he consumed them sexually- it is, oddly, an image of his grace. ‘There is a kind of purity in you,’ says the Priest before Hippolytus fucks his face. By really being willing to ‘burn in hell’ for his abuse of Phaedra, there is a sense in which Hippolytus confirms a Greek soul-image of himself. He trounces the Priest’s forgiving C of E style God by acknowledging ‘there’s one thing he can’t do. . .He can’t make me good.’ And so, the play that set itself in the liminal time of a fake Hellenic England, of a fake monarchy, a fake religion, arrives at a genuinely potent spiritual destiny. The whole cavalcade of Hippolytus’ celebrity is burnt. He isn’t wanking on the couch anymore but dying like he should be. For his sins.
The line ‘If there could have been more moments/ like this.’ disassociates the image of the vulture from its far too obvious evocations of mass media (the parasitic consumers who literally grill Hippolytus’ genitals on the barbecue) and the broad celebrity upper class (who suck the poor’s blood in a way far too metaphysical to be noticed). The vulture is instead something awaited. It’s an encapsulation of and compliment to ‘moments/ like this’ -with ‘this’ seeming to gesture to the bird as well as to the ultimate moment that comes before one’s death. This is the moment when you have the privilege of reflecting on your whole existence, the fate that was created by who you were. Hence the line we are discussing is a complete sentence rather than the clausal fragment ‘If’ implies it should be. The tone it communicates is satisfied, over and done with. There is no ellipsis; the need for language disappears as the full sentiment, the fucking state of Hippolytus, makes itself known.
What would be the point of a great speech from the original Euripides? The scene of violence is total ‘like this’. Everything is finished. The theorist Mark Fisher claims ‘what the death drive ultimately seems to be aiming towards, at least in one of its versions, is acquiescence, peace, ultimate calm -the release from desire itself.’ That is the Post-Capitalist desire at the end of the play. The need to compete, to feast, to fuck no more, as confirmed by Hippolytus. . .is a huge relief. To be without other ‘moments’ is in a sense to be a finished product. And thus to be free from behaviourally or psychologically degenerating further is, for some of us, the final freedom. Isn’t the real question suicidal people ask not ‘How much am I willing to endure?’ but ‘How much more?’
On a technical note, ‘like this’ is also a beautiful demonstration of the tension between a pyrrhic phrase -or weak metrical foot- and the crisp certainty of Kane’s syntax in ‘moments/ like this.’ The fact ‘like this’ occupies a different line gives the phrase a hidden certainty -coupled with the full stop- that makes what it says seem heavy, true. At last death has come. There is -finally!- some relief from fearing it, from pretending that life goes on forever and that the laws of eternity apply to us. Well, here’s true eternity! Here is the last gasp that’s so all-encompassing it might as well mean Heaven or Hell. Whether or not divinity is real becomes a category error. Regardless of your religion, you will be made to reflect on who you were and suffer for your mistakes. I have met some priests who talk about giving up their lives in order to be nearer this emotion, whereas in fact their failure to live is what makes them ethereally drift over it like God. You need to live yourself to death to be like Hippolytus. You need to commit suicide through living so much. Kane dangles in a dark room filled with love. And if I can’t speak for her, I have spoken myself.
II
Nothing could be more wrong than to think that Christ did not demand the complete and total removal of the individual from the world. The gospels leave no room for doubt. –Philipp Mainländer
What does the word ‘lovely’ mean anyway? [I promise this comes back to death and relief.] Putting aside the straightforward definitions of the term, whenever we use it we find it has a great series of meanings. But as opposed to the ‘meme phrase’ or the new bit of slang which spread and encompass definitions like viruses, one has the impression that ‘lovely’ was always this way, is rightfully. In reaction to horror, you can say the word to bring joy. And it will. It is never vulgar, never really ironic. Perhaps suggesting it is multifoliate is really an expression of my puzzlement that it can remain so close to the form it emits, letting the light in in situations like this:
Cate Blocks out everything else. Once- Ian [I'll] Make love to you. Cate It's like that when I touch myself. Ian is embarrassed. Cate Just before I'm wondering what it'll be like, and just after I'm thinking about the next one, but just as it happens it's lovely, I don't think of nothing else.
Cate is talking about having a seizure in front of the man who is about to abuse her. The delicacy of this moment is only believable because of ‘lovely’ -the same word Cate uses earlier describing the smell of flowers. But despite being linked at once to the jouissance of orgasm and the ego death of a Dostoevskyian fit, ‘lovely’ seems to work in and of itself. Or rather, it contains something that the contexts of orgasmic and epileptic escape only preface. Potentially it is some element from another world, or paradise, where Kane’s characters are safe from harm. ‘I don’t think of nothing else’ is a Cockney ouroboros that surreptitiously gestures to something beyond or outside itself. . .to the positive thing that exists when the negative of ‘think[ing]’ and ‘nothing’, the negative of being, negate one another. Different from the triumphal exhaustion of ‘like this’, the word ‘lovely’ is about the only keystone in Kane’s work that glimmers, makes us wonder why a whole landscape of such brightness might not exist.
But are ‘like this’ and ‘lovely’ really as different in meaning as in effect? Evidently there is an argument to be made that the mode of “the message” is inseparable from “the message” itself. Yet even if this distinction fails I want to impose something like it. As I hope will become clear, these terms have identical formal roles, although they are aesthetically oppositional. In short, ‘Like this’ occupies the perspective of a porn addicted cynic -the drained Hippolytus- and identifies life itself as the catastrophe to be escaped, whereas, in contrast, ‘lovely’ is initially used by Cate -as Kane herself describes her, a beautiful, kind girl who is also ‘fucking stupid’: innocent as well as disabled, however one feels about the use of that word. ‘[L]ovely’ is then both a failure on her part to articulate her brief escape from life and an announcement of genuinely absolute hope -and hope in life. It is therefore important that the obviously clever Hippolytus sees his own death as the only accessible means of attaining a similarly post-linguistic state. In Kane’s world if you believe in God -as Cate does- and are willing, because of him, to sell your body to feed and forgive your abuser -as Cate is- you are obviously incompetent. You are not a wartime Mary. For the world is such that only the ‘defective’ and un-scholastic are capable of believing in goodness. Or, on a note more applicable to the life of your correspondent, the only people who seem capable of happiness are those that lack knowledge of humanity. All things chthonic. So at least in Phaedra’s Love and Blasted ‘like this’ and ‘lovely’ can be said to respond to the same issues of life from different perspectives: suicidal and dumb.
Yet the exception to this dynamic are Cleansed’s sufferers, who also say ‘lovely’.
Graham No one. Nothing. Never. Out of the ground grow daffodils. They burst upward, their yellow covering the entire stage. Tinker enters. He sees Grace. Voices All dead? He goes to Grace and kneels beside her. He takes her hand. Tinker I'm here to save you. Graham picks a flower and smells it. He smiles. Graham Lovely.
Now that I’m throttling this out at a pub on a different night, I can’t help but giggle at the name ‘Grace’. Kane is one of those playwrights whose work might be even better on the page. Rather than having the ridiculous theatrical complexities of Beckett, she is comfortable writing cutting, impossible, beautiful images like the daffodils bursting from the ground. Likewise, when we see an actress onstage we have to actively name her in order to make her her character. Yet on paper her body is her name: she becomes the metaphor. She is the ‘Grace’ of losing yourself, of going insane in a concentration camp, being happy; Tinker calls her ‘Lunatic Grace’ in another scene. The Nazi allusions in this article are not unfounded in Kane’s work. She wrote Cleansed to elaborate on Roland Barthes’ idea that ‘To be in love is to be in Dachau.’ -If you can con yourself into a Cate-like stupidity, seizure or ‘affection’. . .that might be your way out. Here ‘Lovely’ is spoken by the dead brother Graham whose identity Grace takes on as her own. The word is an emission either of the already post-human or the psychic projection of a mind going insane —the flowers Cate plucked emerging from the ground here merely in breakdown.
But why merely? The improbable helpfulness of the Mengele-like Tinker, the impossibility of Graham’s apparent revival, the un-stageability of flowers bursting through the floor —all these cohere around the miraculousness of ‘Lovely’. In Kane, the word is the only transcendent relief that is not the “finally-being-done” of ‘like this’. At the same time, this is seemingly just because reason has become inaccessible to Grace. But perhaps the concept of Grace does not belong to reason. Being in love and traumatised rather than in power and bored, she cannot embody Hippolytus: she is not her own enemy to mock or destroy. And ‘lovely’ contains ‘love’ obviously. She can say it; she says it; Graham says it. However unreasonable, if it is better to say than just dying then why not? Maybe Hippolytus only had to die because he was reasonable, because he was a consumer of material things and didn’t believe in more.
Despite the apparent fittingness of the epigraph I’ve taken from Mainländer, the suicidal philosopher who believed non-existence to be kinder than existence, I don’t think the tone applies much to Kane. Or some of her escapes it. I can’t conceive of her agreeing that ‘The true follower of Christ goes through death to paradise, i.e. in absolute nothingness’. In her work there is always weirdly something else.
Cate lives when she says ‘lovely’ and continues living kindly -even if insane!- by perpetuating the word’s sentiment. Likewise Graham-Grace, the one having transformed into the other, smiles at the end of Cleansed as ‘The sun gets brighter and brighter, the squeaking of rats louder and louder.’ in an apparent elaboration of ‘lovely’s tone. His appointed status as ‘vermin’ by Tinker for being transgender instead becomes the radical, visual means of his liberation. He is almost transfigured into the rats in the sun, relieved -yes!- and still alive. At last himself.
Perhaps suicide must only be the domain of the forever alone, those untouched by Heaven, those who, like Mainländer, Nietzsche described as ‘the apostle[s] of virginity’. But even that sounds too much. Maybe everybody can be saved.