Anne Fleche – the Space of Madness and Desire

Tennessee Williams exploits the expressionistic uses of space in the caper, attempting to represent need from the emergeside, that is, in its noble ch tout ensembleenge to realistic stability and closure, and in its exposure to risk. Loosening both stage and verbal dustups from their dense desire for closure and containment, Streetcar exposes the danger and the violence of this desire, which is al musical modes the desire for the closure of desire. Writing in a period when U. S. rama was becoming disillusi rightd with realness, Williams achieves a critical distance from realistic technique through with(predicate) his use of eitheregory. In Blanches reap about the bridle-pathcar, the fact that she is describing real places, cars, and transfers has the surprising effect of enhancing kind of than decrease the metaphorical parallels in her style. Indeed, Streetcars duplicities of expression(3) argon tear down more(prenominal) striking in the light of criticisms new renewal of interest in allegory. 4) For allegory establishes the distance amid the representative and the semantic function of delivery (I89), the desire that is in language to unify (with) experience. Streetcar demonstrates the ways in which distance in the drama contri exactlye be expanded and contracted, and what spatial relativism reveals about the economy of dramatic representation. Tennessee Williams shimmers, filled with allegorical language, seem alike to set about a tentative, unfinished eccentric person. The metalanguage of desire seems to preclude development, to deny progress.And yet it seems natural to designate A Streetcar Named Desire as an allegorical journey toward Blanches apocalyptic destruction at the turn over of her executioner, Stanley. The plays violence, its baroque images of decadence and lawlessness, promise its audience the thrilling destruction of the aristocratic Southern Poe-esque moth-like neuraesthenic female Blanche by the ape-like brutish male from the Ameri dissolve melting-pot. The play is full in fact of realisms developmental language of evolution, degeneration, eugenics. in front deciding that Stanley is merely an ape, Blanche sees him as an asset Oh, I guess hes just non the type that goes for jasmine perfume, entirely maybe hes what we need to mix with our blood straightway that weve lost Belle Reve (285). The surprising sheerg about this play is that the allegorical reading also seems to be the most realistic one, the reading that imposes a unity of language and experience to make structural mind of the play, that is, to make its events organic, natural, inevitable.And yet this feels false, because allegorical language resists being pinned vote down by realistic summary it is eer only half a written report. provided it is possible to snug the gap between the language and the stage image, between the stage image and its double reality, by a double forgetting first we vex to forget that realism i s belles-lettres, and thus already a metaphor, and then we have to forget the distance between allegory and reality. To conjecture that realisms empiricism is indistinguishable from metaphor is to make it one with a moral, natural siteing of events.Stanley is wrong and Blanche is right, the moralists agree. But the hypocrisy of the priggish reading is in short revealed in its ambivalence toward Blanche/Stanley to order events sequentially requires a reading that finds Blanches delight inevitable, a condition of the formal anatomical structure she is the erring woman who gets what she asks for (her realistic antecedents be clear). For the prigs this outcome skill not be unthinkable, though it might be what is worse distasteful. But Williams seems deliberately to be making interpretation a line he doesnt exclude the prigs reading, he invites it.What makes Streetcar different from Williams earlier play The Glass Menagerie (I944)(5) is its constant self-betrayal into and out o f analytic norms. The realistic set-ups in this play really feel like set-ups, a magicians tricks, inviting readings that leave you dangling from your own schematic noose. Analytically, this play is a nail down it is brilliantly confused yet without following its leads there is no way to get bothwhere at all. Streetcar has a map, exclusively it has changed the street signs, relying on the impulse of desire to take the play historic its plots.In a way it is wrong to say Williams does not write stamp outings. He writes elaborate strings of them. Williams has sendn over Streetcar strong ties to the reassuring blandishment of realism. Several references to Stanleys cargoner as A Master Sergeant in the Engineers Corps (258) set the effect in the present, immediately later the war. The geographical location, as with The Glass Menagerie, is specific, the neighborhood life represented with a greater naturalistic fidelity Above he music of the Blue Piano the voices of people on the street can be heard overlapping (243).Lighting and sound effects may give the guess a kind of lyricism (243), but this seems itself a realistic touch for The Quarter (4I2). Even the privileged set, when it appears (after a similar wipe-out of the fourth wall), resembles The Glass Menagerie in lay-out and configuration a ground-floor apartment, with devil rooms separated by portieres, occupied by three characters, one of them male. Yet there atomic number 18 also troubling realistic details, to which the play seems to point. The mise en scene seems to be providing in any case very much(prenominal) border to provide for closure there is no place for anyone to go.There is no fire escape, even though in this play soulfulness does yell Fire Fire Fire (390). In fact, heat and fire and escape are crowing verbal and visual themes. And the flat does not, as it seems to in The Glass Menagerie, extend to another(prenominal)(prenominal) rooms beyond the wings, but ends in a cul-d e-sac a doorway to the bathroom which becomes Blanches significant place for escape and privacy. near disturbing, however, is not the increased sense of confinement but this absence of privacy, of analytical, territorial space.No gentleman phoner invited for supper invades this condemnation, but an anarchic wilderness of French Quarter hoi polloi who spill onto the set and into the flat as negligently as the piano music from the bar around the corner. There does not seem to be anywhere to go to evade the intrusiveness and the violence when the flat erupts, as it does on the poker night, Stanleys tirade sends Stella and Blanche upstair to Steve and Eunice, the landlords with, of course, an unlimited run of the house (We own this place so I can let you in 48 ), whose goings-on are equally slam-bang and uncontained. Stella jokes, You turn in that one upstairs? more laughter adept time laughing the plaster laughing cracked (294). The violence is not an isolated climax, but a repetitive pattern of the action, a put forward of being it does not resolve anything BLANCHE Im not used to such MITCH Naw, its a shame this had to happen when you just got here. But dont take it serious. BLANCHE Violence Is so MITCH Set down on the steps and have a cigarette with e. (308) Anxiety and conflict have become permanent and unresolvable, inconclusive. It is not clear what, if anything, they mean. Unlike realistic drama, which produces clashes in order to push the action forward, Streetcar disallows its events a pellucidity of function, an orderliness. The ordering of events, which constitutes the temporality of realism, is thus no less arbitrary in Streetcar than the ordering of ringtail the exterior keeps becoming the inside, and vice versa.Williams has done more to relativize space in Streetcar than he did in The Glass Menagerie, where he visualized the fourth wall here the outer(prenominal) wall appears and disappears more than a half-dozen times, often in the middle of a scene, drawing attention to the spatial fallacy rather than making its boundaries absolute. The effect on spatial metaphor is that we are not allowed to forget that it is metaphor and so capable of infinite extensions and retractions.As we might expect, then, struggle over territory between Stanley and Blanche (Hey, canary bird Toots gain OUT of the BATHROOM 367 ) which indeed yields in Stanleys reasserting the male as King (37I6 and pushing Blanche morosestage, punished and defeated is short unanalytical and unsubtle Shell go Period. P. S. Shell go Tuesday (367). While the expressionistic sequence beginning in Scene Six with Blanches commemoration of The Grey oy (355) relativizes space and time, evoking Blanches memories, it also seems to drain her expressive power. By the time Stanley is about to botch up her she mouths the kinds of things Williams ensnare on screens in The Glass Menagerie In desperate, desperate set Help me Caught in a trap (400). She is establishing her emotions like sign-posts Stay back I condemn you, dont, Im in danger (40I). What had seemed a way into Blanches character has had the effect of externalizing her feelings so much that they become impersonal.In Streetcar, space does not provide, as it does in realistic drama, an objective sideslip for a characters psychology it keeps turning inside out, obliterating the spatial distinctions that had helped to define the realistic character as someone whose inner life drove the action. Now the driving force of emotion replaces the subtlety of expectation, leaving character out in space, dangling There isnt time to be Blanche explains into the phone (399) faced with a overweight proximity, she phones long-distance, and forgets to hang up. The expressionistic techniques of the latter half of he play abstract the idiosyncratic from the milieu, and emotion begins to overleap the representation of events. In Scene Ten, where Blanche and Stanley have their most viol ent and erotic confrontation, the play lapses all sense of frontier. The front of the house is already transparent but now Williams also dissolves the rear wall, so that beyond the scene with Blanche and Stanley we can see what is happening on the next street A prostitute has turn a drunkard. He pursues her along the walk, overtakes her and then is a struggle. A policemans whistle breaks it up.The figures disappear. Some moments later the lightlessness Woman appears around the corner with a sequined bag which the prostitute had dropped on the walk. She is rooting excitedly through it. (399) The mise en scene exposes more of the realistic world than before, since now we see the right(prenominal) as well as the inside of the house at once, and yet the effect is one of intense prevalent paranoia the threat of violence is real, not remembered and it is everywhere. The walls have become spaces along which frightening, sinuous shadows weave lurid, grotesque and grim (398-99).The pa rameters of Blanches presence are unstable images of threatening flames of desire, and this sense of sexual danger seems to draw the action toward itself. So it is as though Blanche somehow draw outs rape to Stanley it is already in the air, we can see it being given to him as if it were a thought You think Ill interfere with you? Ha-ha Come to think of it maybe you wouldnt be rugged to interfere with (40I). The inner-outer distinctions of both realistic and expressionistic representation are shown coming together here.Williams makes no childbed to suggest that the lurid expressionistic images in Scene Ten are all in Blanches mind, as cinematic point-of-view would the world distant the house is the realistic world of urban poverty and violence. But it is also the domain of the brutes, whose inhuman jungle voices rise up (40I) as Stanley, snakelike, tongue between his teeth, closes in. The play seems to swivel on this moment, when the logic of appearance and essence, the ind ividual and the abstract, turns inside-out, like the set, seeming to shack for once the same space.It is all the demolition of realistic objectivity or the transition-point at which realism takes over some new territory. At this juncture objective vision becomes an removed seen from inside for the abstraction that allows realism to represent truth objectively cannot itself be explained as objectivity. The surface in Scene Ten seems to be disclosing, without our having to look in addition deeply, a static primal moment beneath the immediacy of the action the sexual taboo underneath realistic discourse BLANCHE Stay back Dont you come toward me another tep or Ill STANLEY What? BLANCHE Some awful thing will happen It will STANLEY What are you putting on now? They are now both inside the bedroom BLANCHE I warn you, dont, Im in danger (40I) What will happen in the bedroom does not have a name, or even an agency. The incestuous relation lies beyond the moral and social order of marria ge and the family, adaptation and eugenics, not to describe (as Williams minds us here) the fact that it is unmentionable. Whatever words Blanche uses to describe it scarcely matter.As Stella says, I couldnt believe her figment and go on living with Stanley (405). The rape in Streetcar thus seems familiar and inevitable, even to its characters, who lose the shape of characters and become violent antagonists as if on cue Oh So you indigence some roughhouse from separately one right, lets have some roughhouse (402). When Blanche sinks to her knees, it is as if the action is an acknowledgment. Stanley holds Blanche, who has become inert he carries her to the bed. She is not only silent but crumpled, immobile, while he takes over control and agency.He literally places her on the set. But Williams does not suggest that Stanley is conscious and autonomous on the contrary the scene is constructed so as to make him as unindividuated as Blanche they seem, at this crucial point, more th an ever part of an allegorical landscape. In a way, it is the impersonality of the rape that is most telling the loss of individuality and the spatial distinctions that allow for character are effected in a scene that expressionistically dissolves character into an overwhelming mise en scene that, itself, seems to make things happen.The meaning of the rape is charge by the play, denying Stanley and Blanche any emotion. Thus, the rape scene ends without words and without conflict the scene has become the conflict, and its image the emotion. by chance Streetcar and Williams present problems for those interested in Pirandellian metatheatre. Metatheatre assumes a self-consciousness of the form but Williams makes the form everything. It is not arbitrary, or stifling. Stanley and Blanche cannot be reimagined or, put another way, they cannot be imagined to reimagine themselves as other people, in other circumstances entirely.Character is the expression of the form it is not accidental, or originary. Like Brecht, Williams does not see character as a humanist impulse raging against fatal abstractions. (In a play like The Good soulfulness of Setzuan, for example, Brecht makes a kind of comedy of this tragic notion which is of course the notion of tragedy. ) Plays are about things other than people they are about what people think, and feel, and yet they remove these things to a distance, towards the representation of thoughts and feelings, which is something else again.If this seems to suggest that the rape in Streetcar is something other than a rape, and so not a rape, it also suggests that it is as much a rape as it is possible for it to be it includes the understanding that comes from exposing the essence of appearances, as Williams says, seeing from outside what we cannot see from inside. At the same time, and with the same motion, the scene exposes its own scenic limitations for dramatizing that which must inevitably endure outside the scene namely, the act it represents.Both the surface street scene and the jungle antecedents of social order are visible in the rape scene, thoroughly violating the norms of realisms analytical space. When Stanley springs at Blanche, overturning he table, it is clear that a last barrier has been broken down, and now there is no space outside the jungle. Weve had this date with each other from the beginning We have regressed to some awful zero-point (or hour) of our beginning. (A fetid swamp, Time critic Louis Kronenberger said of Williams plays, by way of description. (7) We are also back at the heart of civilization, at its root, the incest taboo, and the center of sexuality, which is oddly enough also the center of realism the family, where sexuality is incestuous from the start. (8) At the border of civilization and the swamp is the sexual transgression whose crushing is the semen of all coercive order. Through allegory, Williams makes explicit what realistic discourse obscures, forcing the sexual ity that propels discourse into the cognitive content of the scene. The destruction of spatial oundaries visualizes the restless discourse of desire, that uncontainable movement between inside and outside. Desire, Williams writes in his short story Desire and the Black Masseur (I942-46), is something that is nauseouse to occupy a larger space than that which is afforded by the individual being. (9) The individual being is only the measure of a measurelessness that goes far out into space. Desire derives from the Latin sidus, star (Stella for Star 250, 25I ) an rare sense is to feel the loss of the ndividual is a sign of incompleteness, not self-sufficiency, whose defining gesture is an indication of the subdue beyond the visible, not its closure. The consciousness of desire as a void without satisfaction is the rejection of realisms practical(prenominal) space, which try to suggest that its fractured space implied an unseen totality. realisms objectivity covered up its literar iness, as if the play were not created from nothing, but evolved out of a ready-made logic, a reality one had but to look to see.But literature answers the desire for a fullness that remains unfulfilled it never intersects reality, never completes a trajectory, it remains in orbit. The nothing from which literature springs, whole, cannot be penetrated by a vision, even a hypothetical one, and no time can be found for its beginning. As Paul de Man sympathys in his discussion of Levi-Strauss metaphor of virtual focus, logical sight-lines may be imaginary, but they are not fiction, any more than fiction can be explained as logic The virtual focus is a quasi-objective structure osited to give rational integrity to a process that exists independently of the self. The subject merely fills in, with the dotted line of geometrical construction, what natural reason had not bothered to make explicit it has a passive and unproblematic role. The virtual focus is, strictly speaking, a nothing, but its nothingness concerns us very little, since a mere act of reason suffices to give it a mode of being that leaves the rational order unchallenged. The same is not true of the imaginary source of fiction.Here the human self has experienced the void within itself and the invented fiction, far from tilling the void, asserts itself as fine nothingness, our nothingness stated and restated by a subject that is the agent of its own instability. (I9) Nothingness, then, the impulse of fiction, is not the result of a supposed originary act of transgression, a mere historical lapse at the origin of narration that can be traced or filled in by a language of logic and analysis on the contrary fiction is the liberation of a pure consciousness of desire as insatiate yearning, a space without boundaries.Yet we come back to Blanches rape by her brother-in-law, which seems visibly to re-seal the laws of constraint, to justify that Freudian logic of lost beginnings. Reenacting the traumatic incestuous moment enables annals to begin over again, while the downsizing of inordinate desire resumes the order of sanity Stella is silenced Blanche is incarcerated. And if there is some ambivalence about her cult and her exclusion it is subsumed in an argument for order and a healthy re-direction of desire. In the last stage direction, Stanleys look for fingers discover the opening of Stellas blouse.The last(a) set-up feels inevitable after all, the game is still Seven-card stud, and arent we going to have to go on by playing it? The plays turn to realistic logic seems assured, and Williams is still renouncing worlds. He points to the closure of the analytical reading with deft disingenuousness. Closure was always just next door to entrapment Williams seems to be erasing their boundary-lines. Madness, the brand of exclusion, objectifies Blanche and enables her to be analyzed and confined as the embodiment of non-being, an expression of something beyond us and so structured i n language.As Stanley puts it, There isnt a goddam thing but imagination And lies and conceit and tricks (398). Foucault has argued, in Madness and Civilization, that the containment of desires superabundance through the exclusion of betise creates a conscience on the perimeters of society, setting up a boundary between inside and outside The madman is put into the interior of the exterior, and inversely (II). (I0) Blanche is allegorically a monitoring blind that liberty if taken too far can also be captivity, just as her libertinage coincides with her desire for death (her satin robe is a passionate red, she calls Stanley her executioner, etc. . And Blanche senses early on the threat of confinement she keeps stressful perversely) to end the play I have to plan for us both, to get us both out she tells Stella, after the fight with Stanley that seems, to Blanche, so final (320). But in the end the play itself seems to have some pettifoggery letting go of Blanche. Having create d its moving boundary line, it no longer knows where to put her what space does her madness occupy? As the dialogue suggests, she has to go somewhere she has become excessive. Yet she keeps coming back Im not instead ready. Yes Yes, I forgot something (4I2 4I4). Again, as in the rape scene, she is chased around the bedroom, this time by the Matron, while The Varsouviana is filtered into a weird distortion, accompanied by the cries and noises of the jungle, the lurid, sinuous reflections on the walls (4I4). The Matrons lines are echoed by other mysterious voices (4I5) somewhere beyond the scene she sounds like a firebell (4I5). Matron and load enter the play expressionistically, as functional agents, and Blanches paranoia is now hers alone the street is not visible.The walls do not disintegrate, they come alive. Blanche is inside her own madness, self-imprisoned her madness is hardly her enclosure within the image. (II) In her paranoid state, Blanche really cannot get out, becaus e there no longer is an outside madness transgresses and transforms boundaries, as Foucault notes, forming an act of undetermined content (94). It thus negates the image while imprisoned within it the boundaries of the scene are not helping to define Blanche but reflecting her back to herself. Blanches power is not lenient to suppress she is a eminder that beneath the appearance of order something nameless has been lost Whats happened here? I want an explanation of whats happened here. she says, with sudden hysteria (407-8). It is a reasonable request that cannot be reasonably answered. This was also Williams problem at the end of The Glass Menagerie how to escape from the image when it seems to have been given too much control, when its reason is absolute? Expressionism threatens the reason of realistic mise en scene by taking it perhaps too far, stretching the imagination beyond limits toward an absoluteness of the image, a desire of desire.The mimetic mirror now becomes the ty pe of madness the image no longer simply reflects desire (desire of, desire for), but subsumes the mirror itself into the language of desire. When Blanche shatters her mirror (39I) she (like Richard II) shows that her identity has already been fractured what she sees in the mirror is not an image, it is indistinguishable from herself. And she cries out when the lantern is torn off the lightbulb, because there is no longer a space between the violence she experiences and the image of that violence.The inner and the outer worlds fuse, the reflecting power of the image is destroyed as it becomes fully self-reflective. The passion of madness exists somewhere in between determinism and expression, which at this point actually form only one and the same movement which cannot be dissociated leave out after the fact. (I2) But realism, that omnivorous discourse, can subsume even the loss of the subjective-objective distinction when determinism equals expression and fall out to some quasi -objective perspective.Thus at the very moment when all space seems to have been conquered, filled in and opened up, there is a need to parcel it out again into clearly distinguishable territories. analysis imprisons desire. At the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, there is a little drama. Blanches wild expressionistic images are patronized and pacified by mental representationity I just told her that wed made arrangements for her to rest in the country. Shes got it mixed in her mind with Shep Huntleigh (404-5). Her family plays along with Blanches delusions, even to costuming her in her turquoise seahorse pin and her bleached violets.The Matron tries to subdue her with sensual violence, but Blanche is only really overcome by the Doctors politeness. Formerly an expressionistic type, having the unmistakable aura of the state institution with its cynical detachment (4II), the Doctor takes off his hat and now he becomes personalized. The unhuman feature goes. His voice is gentle and reassuring s he crosses to Blanche and crouches in front of her. As he speaks her name, her timidity subsides a little. The lurid reflections fade from the walls, the inhuman cries and noises die our and her own hoarse crying is calmed. 4I7) Blanches expressionistic function is contained by the Doctors realistic transformation he is particularized, he can play the role of gentleman caller. Jacket, Doctor? the Matron asks him. He smiles It wont be necessary (4I7-I8). As they exit, Blanches visionary excesses have clearly been surrendered to him She allows him to lead her as if she were blind. Stylistically, he, realism replaces expressionism at the exact moment when expressionisms pure subjectivity seems ready to annihilate the subject, to result in her violent subjugation.At this point the intersubjective dialogue returns, clearly masking indeed blinding the subjective disorder with a assuring form. If madness is perceived as a kind of social failure,(I3) social success is to be its antidote. Of course theater is a cure for madness by dramatizing or literalizing the image one destroys it. such(prenominal) theatricality might risk its own confinement in the image, and for an instant there may be a real struggle in the drama between the image and the effort to contain it. But the power of realism over expressionism makes this a rare occasion.For the ruse, Foucault writes, ceaselessly confirming the delirium , does not deposit it to its own truth without at the same time linking it to the necessity for its own retrenchment (I89). Using illusion to destroy illusion requires a forgetting of the leap of reason and of the trick it plays on optics. To establish order, the theatrical device repeats the ordering principle it learns from theater, the representational gap between nature and language, a gap it has to deny The artificial reconstitution of delirium constitutes the real distance in which the sufferer recovers his liberty (I90).In fact there is no return to intersubjectivity, just a kind of formal recognition of it Whoever you are I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Streetcar makes the return to normality gentle and theatrical, while revealing much more explicitly than The Glass Menagerie the violence that is thereby suppressed. This violence is not reality, but yet another theater underneath the theater of ruse the cure of illusion is ironically effected by the suppression of theater (I9I). The realistic containment at the end of Streetcar hus does not quite make it back all the way to realisms seamlessly objective historical truth. storey, structured as it is by relations of power, not relations of meaning,(I4) sometimes assumes the power of reality itself, the platonic Form behind realism, so to speak, When it becomes the language of pronouncement, history also assumes the authority of language, rather naively trusting language to be the reality it represents. The bloody wars and strategic battles a re soon forgotten into language, the past tense, the fait accompli.Useless to struggle against the truth that is past history is the waste of time and the corresponding conquest of space, and realism is the already conquered territory, the belated time with the unmistakable stamp of authenticity. It gets applause simply by being plausible it forgets that it is literature. To read literature, de Man says, we ought to remember what we have learned from it that the expression and the expressed can never entirely coincide, that no single observation point is trustworthy (I0-II).Streetcars powerful explosion of allegorical language and expressionistic images keeps its vantage point on the move, at a remove. Every plot is untied. Realism rewards analysis, and Williams invites it, perversely, but any analysis results in dissection. To provide Streetcar with an exegesis seems like gratuitous destruction, deliberate cruelty. mayhap no other American writer since Dickinson has seemed so ea sy to crush. And this consideration ought to give the writer who has outlined Blanches madness some pause. Even the critical awareness of her tidy incarceration makes for too tidy a criticism.In Derridas analysis of Foucaults Madness and Civilization, he distrusts the possibility of historicizing something that does not exist outside of the bondage of history, of savoir-faire madness simply says the other of each determined form of the logos. (I5) Madness, Derrida proposes, is a hyperbole out of which finite-thought, that is to say, history establishes its reign by the disguised internment, humiliation, fettering and mockery of the madman within us, of the madman who can only be a fool of a logos which is father, master and king (60-6I).Philosophy arises from the confessed terror of going mad (62) it is the economic embrace of madness (6I-62) To me then Williams play seems to end quite reasonably with a struggle, at the point in the play at which structure and coherence must ass ert themselves (by seeming to) that is, the end of the play. The end must look back, regress, so as to sum up and define. It has no other choice. The theatrical ending always becomes, in fact, the real ending. It cannot remain metaphorically an end And what is visible at the end is Blanche in trouble, trapped, mad.She is acting as though she believed in a set of events Shep Huntleighs rescue of her that the other characters, by their very encouragement, show to be unreal. There is a fine but perhaps important line here Blanches acting is no more convincing than theirs but and this is a point Derrida makes about madness she is thinking things before they can be historicized, that is, before they have happened or even have been shown to be likely or possible (reasonable). Is not what is called finitude possibility as crisis? Derrida asks (62). The other characters, who behave as if what Blanche is saying were real, underline her absurdity precisely by invoking reality. Blanches relations to history and to structural authority are laid bare by this forced ending, in which she repeatedly questions the meaning of meaning What has happened here? This question implies the relativity of space and moment, and so of events and their meanings, which are at-this point impossible to separate.That is why it is important that the rape suggest an overthrow of meaning, not only through a stylized emphasis on its own representation, but also through its strongly relativized temporality. (Blanche warns against what will happen, while Stanley says the event is the future, the fulfillment of a date or culmination in time promised from the beginning. ) Indeed, the problem of madness lies precisely in this gap between past and future, in the structural slippage between the temporal and the ontological.For if madness, as Derrida suggests, can exist at all outside of opposition (to reason), it must exist in hyperbole, in the excess prior to its incarceration in structure, meani ng, time, and coherence. A truly mad person would not objectify madness would not, that is, define and locate it. That is why all discussions of madness tend to essentialize it, by insisting, like Blanches fellow characters at the end of Streetcar, that it is real, that it exists.And the final stroke of logic, the final absurdity, is that in order to insist that madness exists, to objectify and define and relate to it, it is necessary to deny it any history. Of course madness is not at all amenable to history, to structure, causality, rationality, recognizable though But this self-discipline of the history of madness has to come from within history itself, from within the language of structure and meaning. Blanches demand to know what has happened here her insistence that something has happened, however one takes it has to be unanswerable.It cannot go any further. In theatrical terms, the whimsy that would make that adventure of meaning possible has to be denied, shut down. Bu t this theatrical release is not purifying on the contrary, it has got up close to the plague, to the point at which reason and belief contaminate each other the possibility of thinking madly. Reason and madness can cohabitate with nothing but a thin curtain between. And curtains are not walls, they do not provide solid protection. (I6) Submitting Williams allegorical language to ealistic analysis, then, brings you to conclusions the imprisonment of madness, the loss of desire. The moral meaning smooths things over. Planning to open up Streetcar for the film version with outside scenes and flashbacks, Elia Kazan found it would not work he ended up making the walls movable so they could actually close in more with every scene. (I7) The sense of entrapment was fundamental Williams dramatic language is itself too free, too wanton, it is a trap, it is asking to be analyzed, it lies down on the couch.Kazan saw this perverse desire in the play he thought Streetcar was about Williams cru ising for tough customers The reference to the kind of life Tennessee was leash rear the time was clear. Williams was aware of the dangers he was inviting when he cruised he knew that sooner or later hed be trounce up. And he was. (35I) But Kazan undervalues the risk Williams is willing to take. It is not just violence that cruising invites, but death. And that is a desire that cannot be realized.Since there is really no way to get what you want, you have to put yourself in a position where you do not always want what you get. Pursuing desire requires a elevated vulnerability. At the end of Desire and the Black Masseur the little masochistic artist/saint, Anthony Burns, is cannibalized by the masseur, who has already beaten him to a pulp. Burns, who is thus consumed by his desire, makes up for what Williams calls his incompletion. Violence, or submission to violence, is analogous to art, for Williams both mask the inadequacies of form. Yes, it is perfect, thinks the masseur, who se manipulations have tortured Bums to death. It is now completed(I8) NOTBS I Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, in The Theatre of Tennessee Williams, vol. I (New York, I97I), 246. Subsequent references are to this edition and rear nod by page number in the text. 2 See Conversations with Tennessee Williams, ed. Albert J. Devlin (Jackson, Miss. , I986). 3 Paul de Man, blindness and Insight Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd ed. , revised (Minneapolis, I983), I2. See de Man, Blindness and Insight, I87ff, where he outlines the critical movements in Western Europe and the U. S. that have thus openly raise d the question of the intentionality of rhetorical figures (I88). Among the critics he cites are Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault (to whose work I will turn later in this essay). Subsequent references to Blindness and Insight are noted by page number in the text. 5 Tennessee Williams, The Gloss Menagerie (New York, I97I). 6 Stanley is quoting Huey Long. 7 See Gore Vidals Introduction to TennesseeWilliams Collected Short Stories (New York, I985) xxv. 8 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, I978), I08-9. 9. Tennessee Williams, Desire and the Black Masseur, in Collected Stories (New York, I985), 2I7. I0 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York, I965). II. Ibid. , 94. I2 Ibid. , 88. I3 Ibid. , 259-60. Subsequent references are noted by page number in the text. I4 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge Selected