Conclusion

The Conclusion begins with a consideration of parallels between two works written around 1900: Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1955) and Strindberg’s A Dream Play (1901). These works, which were reactions to failure to unify natural science and psychology, correspond with the return to interpretation at the end of a nervous century. This neurologically informed turn to hermeneutics at century’s end ultimately sets the stage for Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty, a new and more virulent theater of sensation. Artaud’s insistence that all thought and feeling must be communicable and yet that words are fundamentally inadequate to this task leads inexorably to the conclusion that language must be concretized—must become pure corporeal sensation—and that this force of sensation must be as all-inclusive as thought itself is to the thinker..