Theatre Survey 38:1 (May 1997) Jody Enders EMOTION MEMORY AND THE MEDIEVAL PERFORMANCE OF VIOLENCE "Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible." — Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double When Constantin Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares first appeared in English translation in 1936, the Moscow Art Theater had already made a great impact on American theatre. Particularly influential in the Soviet director's theories of acting was his concept of emotion memory. In An Actor Prepares, the young actor, Kostya, tries to understand how to access the "memory of life" rather than the "theatrical archives of his mind" and has an epiphany at the moment when he recalls and relives the violence of an isolated vehicular accident that had dismembered its victim: On a boulevard we ran into a large crowd. I like street scenes, so I pushed into the centre of it, and there my eyes fell on a horrible picture. At my feet lay an old man, poorly dressed, his jaw crushed, both arms cut off. His face was ghastly; his old yellow teeth stuck out through his bloody moustache. A street car towered over its victim. ... This picture made a deep impression on me. ... In the night I awoke, and the visual memory was even more terrifying than the sight of the accident itself had been. Probably because at night everything seems more fearful. But I ascribed it to my emotion memory and its power to deepen impressions. 1 Centuries before Stanislavski ever codified such principles of acting technique, however, classical and medieval theorists had accomplished much the same thing in their own treatments of the origins, the imagery, the violence, and the virtual performativity of the ars memorandi or "art of memory." If Kostya's emotion memory owed its genesis to a gruesome, incomprehensible, yet Jody Enders is a professor of French at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is the author of the forthcoming The Medieval Theater of Cruelty (Cornell) and of Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama (Cornell, 1992).