Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama 9781501735370

Citation preview

Bodied Spaces

Also by Stanton B. Garner,

Jr.

The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater

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Phenomenology and Performance

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tn Contemporary Drama

Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

Copyright © I994 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 5 I 2 East State Street, Ithaca, New York I48 50. First published I994 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Garner, Stanton B., I955Bodied spaces : phenomenology and performance in contemporary drama I Stanton B. Garner, Jr. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN o-80I4-3039-9 (cloth : acid-free paper).- ISBN o-80I4-82I8-6 (paper: acid-free paper) I. Theater-Philosophy. 2. Movement (Acting) 3· Theater audiences-Psychology. I. Title. PN2039·G37 I994 792°.0I-dC20 94-I3I26

@) The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39·48-I984.

"For Avigdor Arikha," from Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, by Samuel Beckett. Copyright © I984 by Grove Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The Caretaker, by Harold Pinter. Copyright © I96o by Theatre Promotions Limited. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. "I know the place," from Poems and Prose I949-I977, by Harold Pinter. Copyright © I978 by H. Pinter Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

The Conduct of Life, from Plays, by Maria Irene Fornes. Copyright© I986 by PAJ Publications, © I986 by Maria Irene Fornes. Excerpts reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, by Ntozake Shange. Copyright© I975, I976, I977 by Ntozake Shange. Excerpts reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company and of Russell & Volkening as agents for the author.

For Debbie

Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION CHAPTER 1

lX

Occupations

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Phenomenology and Performance Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body

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Staging the Body: Toward a Phenomenology of Mise-en-scene 39 CHAPTER 2

(Dis)figuring Space: Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays

52

Modernist Scenography and the Theater of Form 52 Light, Darkness, and the Image in Flight Movement; Depthless Space; Ex-centricity " ... still living flesh" CHAPTER 3

63 72

78

Object, Objectivity, and the Phenomenal Body 87 Staging "Things": Realism and the Theatrical Object

87

Function and Physiology: Shepard's Props (Dis)placing the Body: The Chairs and Happy Days

I03

Phenomenal Fields: The Caretaker

I IO

94

viii

CONTENTS CHAPTER 4

The Performing "1": Language and the Histrionics of Place

I 20

Re-embodying the Word: Struck Dumb

I 20

Deixis and the Site of Utterance: Breaking the Silence, American Buffalo, Not I I24 Language as Mise-en-scene

I

36

Scenic Negotiation: No Man's Land

144

The Discourse of Theater: Offending the Audience I 5 I CHAPTER 5

Post-Brechtian Anatomies: The Politics of Embodiment

I

59

Brecht, Verfremdung, and the Suffering Body

I

59

The Body and Beyond: Trotsky in Exile and Marat/Sade I 66 Violence and the Trauma of Representation: Lear I76 CHAPTER 6

Female Landscapes: Phenomenology and Gender I 8 6 (En)gendering Pain: The Conduct of Life

I89

Movement, Body, Space: Vinegar Tom, A Mouthful of Birds, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf I98 Pregnancy and Embodiment: Gestation, Spell #7 2 I 5 AFTERWORD

Traces: The Dragons' Trilogy Bibliography Index

25I

2 3I

225

Acknowledgments

The happiest part of a project like this is the opportunity to acknowledge those individuals whose engagement was important to its development. Of the many who have read segments of this book, discussed its issues with me, or suggested further reading, a number deserve special mention: Rudolf Arnheim, Arnold Aronson, Enoch Brater, Allen Dunn, Linda Gregerson, Amy Koritz, William Lovitt, Mary E. Papke, Sheila M. Rabillard, and W. B. Worthen. Joseph Chaikin was kind enough to clarify a point concerning the staging of Struck Dumb, which I had seen two years earlier, and I am grateful to Deb Margolin for mailing me a videotape of her performance piece Gestation (and for allowing me to quote from it). Any study of the phenomenology of performance, of course, owes a debt to the work of Bert 0. States, and I am additionally grateful for his friendship and support. Michael L. Quinn gave the manuscript a careful and insightful reading, and in its final form the book owes much to his shrewd suggestions. Portions of this project were delivered at Modern Language Association Conventions (in San Francisco and Chicago), the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Convention (in Atlanta), the Association for Theater in Higher Education Conference (in San Diego), the Conference on New Languages for the Stage (in Lawrence, Kansas), and the International Shepard Symposium (in Brussels), and to audiences at the University of Michigan, the University of Florida, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am grateful for the many useful comments I received as a result of these presentations. I owe a particular debt, as

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

always, to my students-past and present, undergraduate and graduate-who formed the earliest audience for many of the book's ideas. I thank Robert Weisbuch and Peter 0. Steiner for a summer research grant at the University of Michigan and the trustees of the John C. Hodges Better English Fund at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for a summer research grant and for a semester's leave that enabled me to complete Bodied Spaces. The UTK Faculty Senate-Research Council Exhibit, Performance, and Publication Expense Fund provided additional support. Special thanks are also in order to D. Allen Carroll, who has been particularly solicitous and supportive on this and other projects, and to the staff of the Hodges Library at the University of Tennessee-particularly the resourceful members of the Interlibrary Loan Office-who made sure I had what I needed, often on short notice. I am also grateful to Bernhard Kendler, the staff of Cornell University Press, and copy editor Ruth Veleta for guiding the manuscript on its journey to publication. The first section of Chapter I and portions of the fourth section of Chapter 2 have previously appeared in "Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body," Theatre Journal 45 (December 1993): 443-60, while the second and third sections of Chapter 2 are adapted from "Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays," Comparative Drama 21 (Winter 1987-88): 349-73. The fourth section of Chapter 4 was previously published as "Correcting the Space: Scenic Negotiation in No Man's Land," Pinter Review (1989): I-8. An earlier version of Chapter 5 can be found in "Post-Brechtian Anatomies: Weiss, Bond, and the Politics of Embodiment," Theatre Journal42 (May 1990): 145-64. The discussion of The Dragons' Trilogy in the Afterword is excerpted from a review of that play in the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5 (Spring 1991): 201-6. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of these journals for kind permission to use this material in its revised form. My final and deepest thanks go to Deborah R. Geis. Partner in so many ways, she has shared the joys and challenges of this project, and her presence has graced it at every turn. S. B. G.,

JR.

Bodied Spaces

Introduction Occupations The stage is in total darkness. We hear, faintly at first, growing gradually louder and more insistent, a sung version of The Internationale. A projected image slowly emerges: the famous Tbi ("You-have you enrolled as a volunteer yet?" D. S. Moore, Russia,

1920).

It's held, red

and challenging, for several moments. Cut suddenly, as a fast spot reveals writhing

POLYA

bending over the bed to inject the

ANGELICA. ANGELICA

shudders, quietens.

POLYA

cools her brow with a cloth. Music down. Excited hubbub of conference. Take out spot a second after the VOICE

begins. Replace with [a projection of El]

Lissitzky's

1920

abstract, With the Red Wedge Divide the

Whites. -Trevor Griffiths, Occupations, opening stage directions

As its title suggests, Bodied Spaces is a book about two of drama's most essential and elusive elements: spatiality, through which plays establish fields of visual and environmental relationship, and the human body, through which these fields receive their primary orientation. It is also a book about theatrical watching, and about the spatial conjunction of bodies, objects, and other performance elements that constitute at once the object of such watching and the field in which it takes place. Bodied spatiality is at the heart of dramatic presentation, for it is through the actor's corporeal presence under the spectator's gaze that the dramatic text actualizes itself in the field of performance. These relationships are rendered explicit in the opening sequence of Trevor Griffiths's 1970 play Occupations. Exploiting the technical resources that have created new spatial possibilities for the contemporary theater, Griffiths's directions set the stage in dialogue with other media: painting, poster art, slide projection, music. Yet even as it foregrounds the technological

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BODIED SPACES

manipulation of space, this multimedia juxtaposition discloses the nontechnological grounding of theatrical representation in the performing body, which asserts itself (in Griffiths's play as in all theatrical performance) as both visual element and spatializing center. Angelica stands as an emblem of civil disturbance in the Italy of 1920, and she does so through her corporeal presence: writhing in silent convulsions, the actress's body performs the struggle to escape its internal suffering at the same time that it forces both character and audience to focus spatial awareness on this point of physical distress. Counterpointed by the more strictly pictorial images of Moore and Lissitzky, the center of Griffiths's scenic field is the body in space, both site and means of theatrical "occupation." The nature of this occupation, and its implications for our understanding of the theatrical experience, have provoked the curiosity out of which this book was written. Because I approach the theatrical environment as a field perceptually and materially oriented in terms of spectator, actor, and character, this book is largely phenomenological in aims and methodology. "Phenomenology," as I am appropriating the term, refers to an observational stance and set of theoretical strategies associated with the philosophical tradition founded by Edmund Husserl. Generalizations are risky with a field that has included figures as various as Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, and Paul Ricoeur; it might be more accurate to speak of "phenomenologies" in reference to these and others in the philosophical tradition, and to the applications of phenomenological methods to disciplines as diverse as medicine, the social sciences, the visual and plastic arts, literary studies, and education. Yet all these figures and movements are joined by a mutually entailing set of aims: to redirect attention from the world as it is conceived by the abstracting, "scientific" gaze (the objective world) to the world as it appears or discloses itself to the perceiving subject (the phenomenal world); to pursue the thing as it is given to consciousness in direct experience; to return perception to the fullness of its encounter with its environment. "Why do precisely these objects which we behold make a world?" asks Thoreau. 1 Phenomenology concerns itself with this question in its most radical sense. How does my "life-world" (Lebenswelt) constitute itself as world? What are the modes of presence and absence by which this world manifests itself to me? In what ways do I come to know and 1

Henry D. Thoreau, Walden, ed.

1971), 215.

J.

Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

3 INTRODUCTION

interact with a world of which I am always, inescapably and ambiguously, a part?2 As Bruce Wilshire and Bert 0. States have demonstrated, theater offers fertile ground for phenomenological inquiry. 3 This inquiry has uncovered and continues to uncover elements and principles generally neglected by other, more "objectivizing" theoretical approaches. For theater "stages," "puts into play" variables and issues that have comprised the special province of phenomenological inquiry from its inception: perception and the constitution of meaning, objects and their appearances, subjectivity and otherness, presence and absence, body and world. On a multitude of levels, theater engages the operations of world-constitution implicit in Thoreau's question, as spectator, actor, and character seek to situate themselves in relation to the world, both make-believe and radically actual, that confronts and surrounds them. The phenomenological approach-with its twin perspective on the world as it is perceived and inhabited, and the emphasis on embodied subjectivity that has characterized the work of certain of its practitioners (notably Merleau-Ponty and those influenced by his work in philosophy and medical phenomenology)-is uniquely able to illuminate the stage's experiential duality. On one hand, the field of performance is scenic space, given as spectacle to be processed and consumed by the perceiving eye, objectified as field of vision for a spectator who aspires to the detachment inherent in the perceptual act. On the other hand, this field is environmental space, "subjectified" (and intersubjectified) by the physical actors who body forth the space they inhabit. From this perspective, theatrical space is phenomenal space, governed by the body 2 0ne of the best general introductions to phenomenology is David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and Its Literature, 2d ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, I990). See also Pierre Thevenaz, What Is Phenomenology? And Other Essays, ed. James M. Edie, trans. James M. Edie, Charles Courtney, and Paul Brockelman (Chicago: Quadrangle, I962); Hugh]. Silverman, "Phenomenology," Social Research 47 (Winter I98o): 704-20; Robert Sokolowski, "The Theory of Phenomenological Description," in Descriptions, ed. Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, I985), I4-24; and Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth, and Russell Keat, Understanding Phenomenology (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I99I). The most complete historical survey of the movement (through the I95os) is Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: An Historical Introduction, 2 vols., 2d ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, I965). 'Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I982); Bert 0. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, I985), and idem, "The Phenomenological Attitude," in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, I992), 369-79.

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BODIED SPACES

and its spatial concerns, a non-Cartesian field of habitation which undermines the stance of objectivity and in which the categories of subject and object give way to a relationship of mutual implication. MerleauPonty writes: "Experience discloses beneath objective space, in which the body eventually finds its place, a primitive spatiality of which experience is merely the outer covering and which merges with the body's very being. To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world. Our body is not primarily in space: it is of it." 4 This implication includes the audience, which is situated in the phenomenological continuum of space through physical proximity, linguistic inclusions, and the uniquely theatrical mirroring that links audience with performer in a kind of corporeal mimetic identification. Investigated phenomenologically, even the act of seeing discloses its source in the phenomenal realm and in the body that represents its spatial location. The embodied I of theatrical spectatorship is grounded, one might say, in an embodied eye. As disclosed by phenomenology, in other words, performance field is characterized by an ambiguity between the perceptual and the habitational, in which space and object oscillate between visual objectification and phenomenal embodiment. At the center of this ambiguity is the human body, situated in space while bearing its inscriptions, simultaneously subject and object. The phrase "bodied spaces" is designed to evoke this twinness of performance when subjected to specifically phenomenological attention. Theatrical space is "bodied" in the sense of being comprised of bodies positioned within a perceptual field, but it is also "bodied" in the more fundamental sense of "bodied forth," oriented in terms of a body that exists not just as the object of perception, but as its originating site, its zero-point. To stage this body in space before the witness of other bodies is to engage the complex positionality of theatrical watching. Because of this complexity, a disclaimer is in order. Although I will investigate a range of issues connected with these topics, Bodied Spaces proposes no "complete" phenomenology of theatrical perception, the performing body, or the stage itself. Indeed, I am unsure what such a totalizing phenomenology-gathering the disparate elements and multiple participants of theatrical performance in a unified theoretical field-would look like. It would, I suspect, lose its theoretical and descriptive power in the very triumph of its inclusiveness, for phenom4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, I962), I48.

5

INTRODUCTION

enology is less a systematic set of methodological aims than a particularizing mode of attention. Though it is concerned with the structure of such phenomena as perception, corporeality, and imagination, the phenomenological attitude chooses the perspectival over the universal; it seeks to ground the general in the local instance. Moreover, studies based on this point of view often offer themselves as prolegomena to more systematic studies. In keeping with this tradition, and with the restricted nature of my own topics and methodologies, the chapters of this book explore facets of theatrical experience-with the word facets understood as the sides or surfaces that present themselves when an object is held before the gaze. The book's chapters-which deal with the theatrical image, stage objects, dramatic language, the suffering body, and the stagings of gender-reflect a central preoccupation with the body as agent of theatrical experience, and in their account of this embodiedness they draw on the work of Merleau-Ponty and other theorists who have explored the ambiguity and variability of the body's modes of givenness. At the same time, this book does not constitute a closed study of theatrical corporeality and perception, nor is it meant to exhaust the questions to which these phenomena might be subjected. If the effect of its individual discussions is cubist rather than perspectival, this is in keeping with the book's field and methodology. A few additional words on this book's procedures: It may appear surprising to some that a study concerned with the phenomenological parameters of theatrical performance should conduct its investigation largely in reference to the dramatic text, that prescriptive artifact whose traditionally literary authority contemporary performance theory has

sought to overthrow. Dramatic performance, it is often maintained, is only a subset of theatrical performance (which is itself only a subset of performance in its broadest meaning, a category that has grown to include the other performing and media arts, ritual, and various forms of social performance). But if drama is historically, formally, and even culturally restricted in its uses of performance, and to varying degrees imperialistic in its privileging of the written text, its specificity and determinacy make it useful for phenomenological analysis by grounding analysis in a mode of particularity at once textual and theatrical. To speak of theatrical props, for instance, is one thing; to explore this issue through the cluttered set of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker (1960) allows one to confront "abjectness" in terms of its specific theatrical and perceptual manifestations. The dramatic text, in short, is a valuable means of access to the stage in particular phenomenological configurations.

6

BODIED SPACES

I am obviously proposing a markedly different notion of the dramatic text from that of traditional literary study. Whether it has the scrupulously detailed stage directions of a late Samuel Beckett play or the minimal scenic specifications of Caryl Churchill's drama, the written text is both a blueprint for performance and a specific discipline of body, stage, and eye. In its directions for setting, speech, and action, the dramatic text coordinates the elements of performance and puts them into play; reading "through" this text, one can seize these elements in specific and complex relationships. Even its interpretive gaps and indeterminacies-the fact that Churchill's text allows (indeed, demands) decisions as to specific stage items, their arrangement, and their handling during performance-supports the specific needs of phenomenological analysis. Phenomenology pays unusual attention. to what Husserl-echoing King Lear-calls "the things themselves," and though all forms of performance provide analysis with a grounding in the actual, that subset of performance we call drama offers "the thing itself" uniquely poised between the general and the particular. This balance derives from the hypothetical referentiality characteristic of dramatic textuality. Unlike a specific performance event (or its description), the dramatic text deals with the actual in its possible manifestations. The presence of what Roger Gross has called its "parameters" and "tolerances"5 allows the text to project the theatrical event (and its elements) as variable within essential boundaries: Hamlet holds Yorick's skull, though individual Hamlets will hold it in a potentially infinite number of ways. In this sense, the dramatic text effects a version of the epoche or "reduction," whereby phenomenology suspends awareness of the object's actual existence in one place and one time in order to disclose this actuality in its own parameters and tolerances, its dialectic of the variable and the invariable. Drama, in short, presents "the thing itself" as a bounded (or floating) facticity, available to a variety of specific actualizations. To deepen the book's grounding in the material conditions of performance, data from specific productions, descriptions of actual theatrical conditions, and references to nondramatic forms of performance (the work of performance artists, for instance) are introduced at every possible opportunity, but they will be brought into discussion to 5 Roger Gross, Understanding Playscripts: Theory and Method (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, I974), I34-36. The term parameter refers to what must happen in the staging of a playtext, tolerance to what may not happen.

7

INTRODUCTION

illuminate the play of possible actuality already posited by the dramatic text. Finally, dramatic performance rewards phenomenal investigation through the complex participations of the dramatic event: as a subset of theatrical performance in general, its field includes not only the spectator and the performer who offers his or her body to view, but also the character whom this performer bodies forth. With its characterological dimension, drama projects the experiential phenomena particular to performer and spectator-corporeal presence, perceptual and linguistic operations-into the figures of its represented world. This multiple positionality contributes to the phenomenal "layering" of dramatic performance, through which the theatrical event is implicated in the overlap (and divergence) of experiential and perceptual worlds. From this point of view, dramatic representation affords phenomenological analysis the opportunity to confront a peculiarly rich, complex intersubjectivity. If the dramatic text allows us to approach the performance field through specific scriptings-specific bodily configurations and perceptual orientations-readings of this text in light of the phenomenology of performance enable a more experientially intricate understanding of the text than traditional dramatic criticism has tended to provide. Specifically, such reading discloses in the playtext a richness of phenomenal variables; it uncovers a field of perceptual and corporeal activity that exists as a latency within the text. Resisting the neo-Aristotelianism that still governs much critical theory, with its predilection for the abstract and the conceptual, phenomenological reading seeks to reembody, materialize the text, draw out this latency-not simply as a teleological point of realization beyond the playscript, but as an intrinsic component of dramatic textuality itself. Although the issues considered in this book are by no means exclusive to any single historical moment, Bodied Spaces focuses on drama produced between the early 19 50s (the years of Bertolt Brecht's last plays and Beckett's first) and 1993 (the year of this book's completion). The multiplicity of texts and styles included within these boundaries renders suspect any attempt at periodization, of course, but the drama demarcated by these years nonetheless provides an important field for an exploration of the issues addressed in this volume. Brecht's theatrical revolutions established a set of representational procedures for staging the body in political theater, and these procedures have reflected assumptions concerning theatrical corporeality that have been challenged

8

BODIED SPACES

and revised (I argue) by post-Brechtian political playwrights. With Waiting for Godot (1953), on the other hand, Beckett inaugurated what we might think of as the first drama of sustained phenomenological intent; through his own dramatic career and through the considerable drama that continues to be influenced by his theatrical innovations, this movement (historically misrepresented by the label "absurdism") has explored with unprecedented interest the phenomenological components of dramatic performance, particularly those connected with perception and the body. Finally, the influence of Antonin Artaud and certain currents of experimental and performance theater-the celebratory body-theater of the Living Theater, the phenomenological theater of Robert Wilson and Richard Foreman, the body-art of Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and others-have further reinforced the contemporary dramatic concern with theatrical vision and the body in space. Any study that proposes a field as extensive as this one does must resign itself to the problem of play selection: although I have made a determined effort to work with as broad a range of texts as possible, any approach inevitably tends to highlight certain examples at the expense of others. I will include dates (of first production) for the contemporary plays I cite or discuss-to allow the period in question its internal history-but I do not propose a study that is in any way inclusive of world drama since 1950, nor do I intend my textual selection to be exhaustive of other texts or of the field as a whole. I have chosen to work with certain texts because of their usefulness in foregrounding a set of theatrical preoccupations that recur-to varying degrees and in varying manifestations-throughout the period under discussion. That Beckett's drama has a central place in my discussion, for instance, is less because of this drama's prominence in the theater of our time (though this is undeniable) than because it manifests these preoccupations with such self-consciousness and complexity. If my approach and conclusions have any explanatory power, they should demonstrate this when applied to playwrights and texts other than those considered here. Limiting the historical field has another purpose, as well. It has been claimed that phenomenology, while pursuing the interaction of consciousness with its object, seeks to dispense with history. I return to this claim later in order to argue what I simply assert here: that phenomenology (particularly as it has developed from the work of Husserl's late period) has the potential to offer history its living face and thereby offer experiential grounding to the facts of history; that the field of phenomenological investigation is always (in irreducible ways) historical; and

9 INTRODUCTION

that it is incumbent on a phenomenological analysis of performance to acknowledge the impact on its variables of historical contingency. As States has suggested, for example, it means something different for a Shakespearean character to handle an object than it does for a character in the elaborately materialized world of a Chekhov play: in each case, the gesture effects a different relationship between actor/character and physical setting. 6 Such discoveries do not render phenomenological conclusions untenable; rather, they suggest that historical variability is intrinsic to such conclusions, and that features of the phenomenal "inside" (the subject's interaction with objects, for instance) are always subject to the impingement of a historical "outside" that can never fully be bracketed from consideration. In the words of Don Ihde, a contemporary phenomenologist, "The histories of perception teach us that every version of microperception is already situated within and never separate from the human and already cultural macroperception which contains it." 7 The impingements of history are evident even in more complex issues of historical and ideological constitution. In what Elin Diamond characterizes as "the intensity of the phenomenological spotlight" -that focusing of attention through which the phenomenologist seeks access to the object in its givenness-she sees the loss of the materialist subject in its historical contradiction. 8 In a similar vein, Brecht wrote, "It is scarcely possible to conceive of the laws of motion if one looks at them from a tennis ball's point of view." 9 This analogy is not without its validity: the physics of a cross-court backhand are no doubt inaccessible to the tennis ball as it sails across the net. Yet if Brecht's ball could perceive its flight (and then tell us about it), it would remind us that motion is not without its powerful register in the phenomenal realmthat this peculiar form of "lived motion" manifests itself in the vertiginous tension between forward propulsion and objectival inertness. Such a subjective account of movement could make no claims to replace Newtonian physics, but it would give access to a dimension-the States, Great Reckonings, 59-60, 70-79. Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 42. 8 Elin Diamond, "The Violence of 'We': Politicizing Identification," in Critical Theory and Performance, 394-95. 9 Bertolt Brecht, "Can the Present-day World Be Reproduced by Means of Theatre?" (19 55), in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 275. 6

7

10 BODIED SPACES

lived-from which scientific analysis alone (Brechtian or otherwise) is barred. This principle applies to the historical subject, as well. Phenomenological analysis may value the registers of consciousness over the external operations of historical causality and constitution, but it can provide a perspective denied to retrospective forms of historical analysis: a description of history as it is experienced, as its forces and outlines are perceived (or not). It can explore the particular modes of attention engaged by history, the ways in which history is both manifested and constituted in personal and intersubjective fields. In this way, phenomenology can offer the cultural or materialist critic access to the individual and social life-worlds within which history arises and manifests itself, and save contemporary theory from the irony of a materialism that has surrendered contact with experience in its actual materiality. The very concern with issues of perception and corporeality that recurs in the contemporary theater with the force of an obsession is conditioned in its most subjective reaches by the historical moment in which it is situated, and by specific historical exigencies, each radical in its demands for a new questioning of the theatrical body in space. Among those influences from outside the field of theater, I would single out an obsession with the visual peculiar to modernity; the emergence of a televisual culture, with its technological redefinitions of vision and corporeality; feminist concerns with gendered forms of embodiment; and a broader, collective trauma over the status of the individual body that constitutes a legacy of this century, which has seen it so often violated. In the field of theater, contemporary drama has responded to the following historical opportunities: developments in twentieth-century scenographic design, which parallel innovations within the visual and plastic arts and which draw on unprecedented innovations in the technology of theater (lighting, sound, theater design); the continuing legacy of earlier-century scenographic movements that aspire to a formalist conception of the performing body; an emerging emphasis on materiality and corporeality in the realist tradition, with its essentially conflicting loyalties to verisimilitude and illusionism; and examinations of theatrical spatiality and the performing body from the earliest theorists of the avant-garde through contemporary experimental and performance movements such as those alluded to earlier. Although this book is not a study of theater craft in its development and influences, I hope to suggest that the phenomenological problems and dynamics that characterize the performance field in the contemporary theater have their roots in a set of specifically theatrical problems that stretches back

11

INTRODUCTION

through the fervor of our own century well into the nineteenth. To consider the perceptual experience of Beckett's spectator against the corporeal preoccupation of early twentieth-century scenographic movements, for instance, is to glimpse one face of the historical at the heart of the lived. The question of history, of course, extends much deeper than the technological and other contextual factors. To the degree that history and its material/discursive fields have come to be seen as constituting the human subject itself, historicity directs attention to the heart of the phenomenological project, which has traditionally claimed as its domain the structures or consciousness given in a kind of pure reflection. From its Husserlian beginnings, phenomenology has been concerned with the essences of phenomena (eidos, Wesen), with "essential insight" (Wesensschau). Consequently, it has been accused of eliding difference within totalizing models and branded "essentialist" by theorists bent on conceiving the subject exclusively in constructionist, culturally derived terms. Roland Barthes spoke of "this disease of thinking in essences, which is at the bottom of every bourgeois mythology of man," 10 and the words essence and essentialism continue to be employed against phenomenology (as they have against other approaches) both as terms of opprobrium and as vehicles for a wide range of automatic meanings and associations: Platonic Forms, unitary structure, ontological stability, identity, category, quintessence, being, the "metaphysics of presence," generalness, timelessness, fixity, determinism, naturalness, pureness, originality, universality. Speaking of the term essentialism, Diana Fuss suggests that "few other words in the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory are so persistently maligned, so little interrogated, and so predictably summoned as a term of infallible critique." 11 It is important, then, to darify what is meant by the notion of phenomenological essences and to disengage this notion from its accumulated associations. Though phenomenology has concerned itself with experience "in general," it has never conceived of the structures it uncovers in Platonic, Cartesian, or Kantian terms (to the extent that Husserl's eidetic reduction has had idealist implications, these have been strongly resisted by many of his follow10 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 75· 11 Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), xi.

12

BODIED SPACES

ers).U Defining consciousness as an intentional relation to its object, phenomenology deals with the modes of givenness intrinsic to experience, and it seeks to uncover the invariable structure of these modes. But such a statement must be qualified, for the invariables particular to phenomenological description disclose themselves as fields of variability. To claim, as Husserl does, that a perceptual object is "essentially" perspectival as a phenomenon-that it discloses one face to us as it hides its others-is not to claim that individual objects will be seen the same by different subjects, that the act of vision is unconditioned by circumstantial or cultural factors, or that the perceiving subject and its object exist in a kind of privileged ideality. Husserl's phenomenological proposition is simultaneously more and less ambitious: it is intended to reveal the perspectival aspect intrinsic to any act of perception conducted by an embodied subject, a variable invariably present in terms of which individual perceptual experience is conducted. Similarly, to speak of the structures of embodiment-the ambiguity of the body-as-lived and the body-as-object, for instance-is not to posit a body (male, female, or indeterminate in terms of gender, race, or other categories) whose experience subsumes difference, but to posit a set of terms in which experiential difference is manifested. "Essentialism," Elizabeth V. Spelman writes, "invites me to take what I understand to be true of me 'as a woman' for some golden nugget of womanness all women have as woman." 13 The pregnant body discussed in Chapter 6, however, is not the body of Everywoman; on the contrary, the experiential structures disclosed by this phenomenological description-abstracted from individual descriptions of pregnancy by feminist phenomenologists and in contemporary women's theater-are designed to indicate the field of variables that constitute the very possibility of difference and individual manifestation. Given the theoretical turns toward lived experience in such fields as history, medicine, and feminist studies, and in view of voices calling for limited appropriations of essentialism itself in theory, it may be time to abandon the automatic dismissal of essence in any form. "There is no essence to essentialism," Fuss suggests: "we can only speak of essentialisms" (xii). Defined in terms of invariable or necessary variables, the Stewart and Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology, 40-4I. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, I988), I 59· 12

13

13

INTRODUCTION

category of essences need not evoke the secure humanism of "universal human nature," the "bourgeois mythology" that Barthes decries. Theoretical deployment of essential structures, with an eye to parameters and limitations, can allow an opening, rather than a mystification, of the theoretical field. For while the rejection of essentialism has enabled the development of discursive and materialist critical practices, it has also tended to remove questions of experience and subjectivity from theoretical debate and to relegate their presentation (by default) to nonor even antitheoretical discussions. Reclaiming these categories for theory, as phenomenology has the potential of doing, offers both a return of experience and subjectivity (the cornerstones of givenness) to the theoretical field and an articulation of variability and its structures, in the absence of which difference is literally unthinkable. Building on this brief introduction, Chapter I seeks to establish further ground for those that follow: in addition to providing a fuller description of the stage as phenomenal space, it continues discussion of the phenomenological methodologies and presuppositions that make such description possible. As a necessary part of what I hope will. be the book's contribution to a phenomenological critical practice (or set of practices) in drama and theater studies, the chapter briefly considers some of the historical arguments by which poststructuralism has sought to displace this critical stance. If my discussion of these issues has a polemical cast at times, it is because I am trying to reclaim a space in the critical discourse of performance for phenomenology and the insights that it is uniquely able to provide. I intend to challenge the apparent ease with which contemporary theory has dispatched the phenomenal (or lived) body in favor of the representational (or signifying) body. This shift, to be true, has opened powerful interpretive channels for theorists concerned with the body as it is constructed by and within discursive systems, but it has not been without its casualties. Though we have discovered much about the textualized body-marked, read, displayed before the conceptualizing gaze-we still understand little about the body as it inhabits its theatrical fields, or the more strictly perceptual activities by which this body is known to itself or to those before whom it discloses itself. As the philosophy of givenness (with a specific body of insights into perception and corporeality), phenomenology offers the most sophisticated vehicle for "reembodying" this body and returning both actor and spectator to the complexity of their environmental encounters. Pierre Thevenaz has characterized phe-

14 BODIED SPACES

nomenology as "a consecration of the already there, as respect for the real." 14 If reality in the age of Jean Baudrillard seems irretrievably caught in the mirror-play of simulacra, phenomenology offers to approach such ontological and epistemological play through its experiential reference points. To the extent that theory involves an unquestioned flight from the corporeal subject and the materiality of its phenomenal fields, the phenomenology of a realm as penetrated with actuality as the theater will necessarily and strategically invoke resistance, in the technical sense of opposing or retarding motion. Against the transparency of theoretical disembodiment, it points to that which challenges such erasure-to adapt Herbert Blau's pointed phrasing, "the opacity, some collision with the irreducible." 15 In its effort to seize this opacity and illuminate this collision before they are theorized away, phenomenology has adopted its own version of Clifford Geertz's "thick description" 16-a description, in this case, designed to reembody the fields that we inhabit and perceive, to reclaim such experiential "stuff," forgotten and disowned, as even theory is made on. Of course, any contemporary phenomenology-particularly one staking claim in the fields of literary or performance studies-must acknowledge the reciprocity of its activity with those theoretical approaches of a more objectivist bent, which view phenomena as the already constituted. Jacques Derrida suggests that "the moment of crisis" for phenomenology is "the moment of signs," 17 for the sign is that which is both inside and outside, a phenomenon to be seized in an act of meaningful perception and that which points beyond itself in the plane of referentiality. As the constituted inseparable from the act of constitution, the trace of absence at the heart of presence, the sign will always represent a check to any aspirations that phenomenology might harbor toward totalizing description. If phenomenology tends to privilege experience over referentiality and the externally constituted-those components of the cultural object emphasized by contemporary theory-the critical deployment of phenomenology need not be thus conThevenaz, What Is Phenomenology?, 77· Herbert Blau, Take Up the Bodies: Theater at the Vanishing Point (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 99· 16 Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973 ), 3-30. 17]acques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husser/'s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), Sr. 14

15

15 INTRODUCTION

strained. Bert States speaks of the "binocular vision" of phenomenology and semiotics, complementary ways of seeing that disclose the object in two ways at once, and he has noted that the phenomenological stance can come and go within a given critical exercise (even in the work of non-phenomenologists). 18 Though "pure" phenomenological experience is always, to some extent, "asymbolic experience" (Max Scheler), "an attempt to forestall the retreat of the object into signification" (States),l 9 the phenomenological critic can maintain broader awareness of signification as the essential other dimension of the perceptual object, the other pole in the object's oscillations between the experiential and referential, the "always already" of external constitution. But this movement into dialogue is also an assertion of place: as phenomenology acknowledges its position in this theoretical dialectic, it can propose its experiential accounts as the inescapable other face of signification, as the fields (subjective, perceptual, and corporeal) that condition, and infiltrate, the sign. In "Interrogation: An Exercise in Self-Exorcism," the dialogue that ends his semiotic study Languages of the Stage, Patrice Pavis acknowledges as much: "There is every reason to believe that it is in time, in silence and in the body, that the sign is made and unmade."20 Exploiting the mutual entailment of inside and outside, the following chapters in this book adopt a phenomenological approach that is simultaneously descriptive and strategic. In other words, while it isolates the set of variables and principles fundamental to a phenomenology of the theatrical body, its descriptions also engage in dialogue with descriptions and analyses provided by other theoretical approaches. In casting the book this way, I have pursued openings: those moments when phenomenological perception encounters the culturally, historically, and analytically constituted, as well as those moments when objectivist critical theory opens to questions of subjectivity, experience, and embodiment. Chapter 2, for instance, presents a perceptual analysis 18 States, Great Reckonings, 8, and idem, "The Phenomenological Attitude," 374-77 (States discusses phenomenological moments in passages by Patrice Pavis and Roland Barthes). See also Keir Elam, review of States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, in Times Literary Supplement (7 March I986): 250. The notion of binocular vision recalls Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussion of "aspect"; see Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, [I973]), I93-2I4. 19 Max Scheler, Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I973), 202; States, "The Phenomenological Attitude," 378. 20 Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, I982), 203.

16 BODIED SPACES

of theatrical imagery in Beckett's late plays, in order to demonstrate how this imagery plays on (and destabilizes) the variables governing such formalist analysis. Chapter 5 describes, in the drama of postBrechtian political dramatists, a correlation between corporeality as it is socially marked and the phenomenal landscapes of pain. Throughout the book, the site of these (and other) exchanges is that positional entity which most strikingly displays the dialectic of inside and outside: the human body, in the theater as in life both witnessed and lived. Drawing on the increasingly complex understanding of embodiment in contemporary phenomenology, and the equally probing explorations of this experiential field in drama since 19 so, I hope to demonstrate that phenomenology brings its own sophistication to an arena currently dominated by poststructuralist modes of investigation. In the end, as I hope this book demonstrates, not only are such rigid oppositions as sign/phenomenon unnecessary, they are also theoretically untenable, the product of philosophical and theoretical traditions that have forced themselves onto mutually divergent paths. In 1929 Husserl observed: "The philosophies lack the unity of a mental space in which they might exist for and act on one another." 21 Though we have abandoned the dream of intellectual unity, of a unified intellectual field, there remains a profound need in performance theory for the mental spaces in which dialogue and mutuality become possible. In The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, G. B. Madison calls for a "poststructuralist phenomenology, a phenomenology which will have made profitable use of the many pertinent criticisms that poststructuralism has addressed not only to the Tradition but also to phenomenology itself."22 Phenomenology after Husserl can only assert its place in the theoretical arena by coming to terms with the practices that now occupy it; as Hugh J. Silverman suggests, "In order to appreciate its contemporary situation, phenomenology ... will have to take Derrida seriously."23 For its part, a field of performance theory dominated by these practices risks an analytic desiccation if it persists in denying the phenomenal dimensions of its object, and if it loses contact with human corporeality in its ambiguities and resistances. In an impressive irony, it risks losing the very livedness that theater so boldly puts into play. 21 Edmund Husser!, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, r96o), 5· 22 G. B. Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and Themes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), xiii-xiv. 23 Silverman, "Phenomenology," 720.

17

INTRODUCTION

It is against this loss that phenomenology has historically taken its stand. Drawing on this tradition and its distinctive modes of attention, Bodied Spaces attempts to return performance theory to the body and its perceptual worlds.

CHAPTER

1 Phenomenology and Performance In so far as we believe in the world's past, in the physical world, in 'stimuli,' in the organism as our books depict it, it is first of all because we have present at this moment to us a perceptual field, a surface in contact with the world, a permanent rootedness in it, and because the world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore. -Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception Theater remains the form most dependent upon, fascinated with, drawn, quartered by, and fixated upon the body, its vulnerabilities, pain, and disappearance. -Blau, To All Appearances

Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body When Samuel Beckett died in 1989, a critical movement was already well under way to reassess the relationship of his career to its twentiethcentury philosophical and literary contexts. Rejecting the traditional placement of Beckett's work in the "theater of the absurd," such books as Steven Connor's Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text (1988), the volume Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (1990), and Thomas Trezise's study of Beckett's prose, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (1990), have attempted to resituate Beckett's literary and dramatic canon in the theoretical milieu of poststructuralism and to find in Beckett's art an epistemological and linguistic critique closer to Derrida and Deleuze than to Sartre and Heidegger. As a result of this critical movement, what we might call the phenomenological/existentialist Beckett has been increasingly

19

PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

displaced by the account of a more radically contemporary, deconstructive artist. 1 Among these recent studies, Into the Breach offers perhaps the most conscious theoretical attempt to reread Beckett from this perspective, and its particular targets make clear the extent to which this critical revisionism has set itself, explicitly or implicitly, against phenomenological modes of reading. Discussing the shift from third- to first-person narration in Beckett's fiction, Trezise writes: [The] adoption of the first person bespoke ... an extraordinary intensification of Beckett's concern with the problem of subjectivity, and furthermore, came at the very moment wh~n French intellectual life experienced the overwhelming influence of existential phenomenology, especially in its Sartrian tendencies. While the historical coincidence of these two developments may not have fostered a distinct phenomenological school of Beckett criticism, it certainly favored the pervasive association of Beckett's work with the ideology of existential humanism. And since this ideology derives from a phenomenological understanding of the human subject, any interpretation taking issue with it must ask the basic and long-neglected question whether his explicit preoccupation with the status of the subject necessarily makes of Beckett a phenomenologist, and hence whether his mature prose genuinely lends itself to a phenomenological reading. The present study was born of this question, or more precisely, of the conviction that the phenomenological approach gains whatever insight it may afford from a conspicuous blindness to the dimension of Beckett's prose that signals the exhaustion or failure of phenomenology itself. (4-5)

Trezise tracks this phenomenology to its historical origins in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, and he critiques its supposed assumptions through strategies deliberately modeled on Derrida's deconstructive reading of Husserlian phenomenology in Speech and Phenomena (r967) 'Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis, eds., Rethinking Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays (London: Macmillan, 1990); Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). One might also in-

clude the recent collection of essays The World of Samuel Beckett, ed. Joseph H. Smith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), although its emphasis is more strictly psychoanalytic.

20 BODIED SPACES

and other texts of the r96os. 2 His reading of Beckett's prose seeks to establish the Beckettian "exhaustion" in these terms: that the unitary subject within Beckett's fiction is caught up in "the immemorial dispossession of subjectivity itself" (3 3 ), through which such principles as origin, identity, and interiority are subject to deferral and felure, or breach. Beckettian subjectivity, Trezise argues, is never given to itself as something distinct, unvarying, present; rather, it is displaced by the "already" of temporality and signification, invaded by an intersubjectivity and by "the pre-originary impersonality of the first person itself" (66). Beckett's oeuvre-and "the subject of literature" as it is posited therein-must be understood in terms of "a general economy of signification that conditions and exceeds the universe of phenomenology" (r6o). This particular form of theoretical revisionism, with its attack on phenomenological models of subjectivity and perception, is, of course, a familiar feature of the contemporary theoretical landscape. Although the phenomenological revolution inaugurated by Husserl continues to make profound methodological contributions to philosophy and other disciplines, its application to the fields of literary and performance studies has been challenged-and, with isolated exceptions, largely precluded-by a number of interlocking theoretical assaults. Semiotics has shifted "meaning" from the intending consciousness to signifying systems, relocating the perceptual object within the codified boundaries of the sign and abandoning a dialogue with phenomenology that characterized both traditions at an earlier time. 3 For its part, deconstruction has attacked the notions of constituting subjectivity and self-presence, 2 Derrida's principal discussions of Husserl can be found in the following texts: Edmund Husser/'s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas Hays, 1978); Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husser/'s Theory of Signs; and Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 3 ln Roman ]akobson's Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism (trans. Catherine Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976]), Elmar Holenstein demonstrates the profound influence of Husserl on Jakobson and the Prague structuralists. Far from being incompatible with the structuralist tradition, Holenstein suggests, "phenomenology represents the historical and logical 'condition of possibility' of structuralism" (3). See also Holenstein, "Jakobson's Contribution to Phenomenology," in Roman ]akobson: Echoes of His Scholarship, ed. Daniel Armstrong and C. H. van Schooneveld (Lisse, Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1977), 145-62. Phenomenology has also been influenced by interactions with structuralism: Merleau-Ponty, for instance, who had known Claude LeviStrauss since 1929, was strongly indebted in his later writings on language to the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure; see Kerry H. Whiteside, Merleau-Ponty and the Foundation of an Existential Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 256-58.

21

PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

as well as such binary categories as subject and object, inside and outside, the essential and the sensory, on which (so it is claimed) phenomenology hinges. Marxism, gender and cultural studies, and other modes of materialist analysis have furthered the "depersonalizing" of experience by proposing that subjectivity is discursively constituted, a function of cultural, political, and socioeconomic operations. On the artistic front, certain currents of postmodernism have extended this assault on the subject through an aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) of decentering and fragmentation. Indeed, perhaps nothing links the diverse movements of contemporary literary and performance theory more completely than this turning away from the subject as experiencing agent. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes: If there is one approach that I do reject ... it is that (one might call it,

broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity-which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness. It seems to me that the historical analysis of scientific discourse should, in the last resort, be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice.•

Though the target of Foucault's rejection in this passage is phenomenology in its most Husserlian (or "transcendental") form, his language moves to include the phenomenological in all its manifestations, thereby reflecting a broader theoretical movement away from experiencing consciousness that was already well under way by the time of Foucault's pronouncement (1966): an observational shift in which subjectivity is reconfigured for the externalizing gaze in terms of "subject positions" and consciousness is dispersed within the field of the already constituted.5 4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, I970), xiv. As I hope to demonstrate, a phenomenology that renounces any claims to absolute origins and to the purely transcendental is not at all antithetical or irrelevant to discursive analysis. 5 The occasional decision in this chapter to present semiotics, deconstruction, and different forms of material and discursive analysis as a group is not meant to suggest that these approaches are in any way interchangeable, nor is it intended to elide their profound theoretical differences. Deconstruction, for instance, is as much poststructuralist as it is postphenomenological. What I wish to call attention to is a remarkably unified stance on the part of these approaches (at least as they are practiced today) toward the phenomenological project and toward certain questions concerning experience, subjectivity, and the body.

22 BODIED SPACES

It is not my intent here to challenge poststructuralism as a body of critical practices or to dispute the deconstructive reading of Beckett's canon, a reading that is clearly overdue and which has often brilliantly illuminated the play of Beckett's language and such signature Beckettian principles as deferral, dispossession, repetition, and absence. Rather, I question the repudiation of phenomenology on which this poststructuralist/deconstructionist revisionism so frequently depends. For this purpose, Trezise's argument is particularly useful, since it renders explicit a set of methodological assumptions and procedures prevalent in contemporary applications of Derridean theory. I would like to pause over its central theoretical strategy-the rehearsing of Derrida reading Husserl-in order to forestall, on two grounds at least, the closure implied in its dismissal of phenomenology. My first area of concern has to do with what is admitted under the term phenomenology. Through his almost exclusive focus on the Husserlian formulation of phenomenology, Trezise (like Derrida) fixes this tradition in its opening, most preliminary articulations, robbing it of its developments and internal revisions-in short, of its historical contingency, its literal status as "movement." Husserl himself stated that the phenomenological project was developmental: "We have expounded phenomenology as a science in its beginnings." 6 The subsequent history of phenomenology has confirmed this assessment, as philosophers and theorists in various fields have subjected the models and methodologies of phenomenological investigation to recurrent internal critique, reinterpreting and often abandoning such aspects of Husserlian phenomenology as transcendental subjectivity and the "bracketing" of the empirical, pressing this analysis toward fuller engagement with what Derrida considered the "torments" of phenomenology: temporality and intersubjectivity.? "There are presently many phenomenologists," wrote Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard in his 1954 study Phenomenology; the meaning of phenomenology "is still 'in process,' unfinished precisely because it is historical. " 8 When we consider the theoretical richness of the phenomenological tradition-the ontological problematics of Heidegger and Sartre; Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological hermeneutics; Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space"; phenomenological explorations of the 6 Edmund Husser!, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (I93I; New York: Macmillan, I962), 259. 7 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 6. 8 Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard, Phenomenology, trans. Brian Beakley (Albany: State University of New York Press, I99I), 34·

23 PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

body by Elaine Scarry and medical philosophers; feminist appropriations of phenomenology by Judith Butler, Iris Marion Young, and Sandra Lee Bartky; the emergence of life-world issues in history, sociology, and the theory of technology; the aesthetic theories of Mikel Dufrenne, Roman Ingarden, and recent reader-response theorists; and other applications of phenomenological models and insights to the. study of literature, film, and (in the work of Wilshire and States) drama itself9it is hard to escape the conclusion that the phenomenology repudiated by Trezise is, in large part, a polemical construction, narrowly derived from a single reading of historically limited texts. The phenomenological subject as theorized in the most Kantian phase of Husserl's thought-a subject present to itself in transcendental ideality-is clearly in retreat in the writings of Beckett, but this retreat actually began much earlier, through the critiques of a phenomenological tradition that the Husserlian revolution had in fact inspired. As Silverman and others have emphasized, revisionism has characterized this tradition from the start. 10 The second area where one might question Trezise's repudiation of phenomenology concerns the theoretical relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction, and the place of this critique in Derrida's thought as a whole. Derrida by no means intended a blanket dismissal of phenomenology; while challenging the "metaphysical" direction of Husserlian idealism and its methodological commitment to the subject's self-givenness, the Derridean critique presupposes a role for such concepts as presence and subjectivity, if radically revised and purged of their privileged, transcendent ideality. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, using language that bears more than a faint echo of the Husserlian project, "We must ... exhaust the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain, by deconstruction, •Space does not permit broader citation of the texts that constitute the interdisciplinary field of theoretical and applied phenomenology; a useful (though selective) introduction to the phenomenological tradition can be found in Stewart and Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology. 10 Silverman claims that phenomenology today is in its "fifth wave," as contemporary phenomenologists reexamine the discipline's achievements and assess its opportunities and limitations in the light of recent theoretical currents; see "Phenomenology," 718-20. Husserl's own career, it should be pointed out, was itself subject to development and self-revision. Anticipating later directions in phenomenology, Husser! shifted in the works of his final years (notably The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology [written 193437; published 1954]) from transcendental consciousness to the more experientially grounded "life-world" (Lebenswelt), a concept that would prove central to subsequent phenomenologists.

24 BODIED SPACES

its ultimate foundation." 11 Deconstruction, Christopher Norris suggests, is "an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce," and in light of Derrida's obvious and repeated admiration for aspects of Husserlian philosophy, it is possible to read a text such as Speech and Phenomena as more deeply implicated in the tradition of phenomenological debate than Trezise and others acknowledge.U As with Derrida's critique of the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, we must be careful not to underestimate the links that .bind heresy to the very orthodoxy against which it rebels. 13 Far from signaling the "exhaustion" of a phenomenology restricted to its Husserlian prototype, Beckett's drama-and (I will argue) the theatrical event as a whole-falls squarely within a set of ontological and epistemological problems that constitute the heart of phenomenology as it has continued to be revised and rearticulated. This is not the place to explore the intricate relationship of Beckett's literature to the post-Husserlian philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre; such explorations have been ably conducted by others. 14 Rather, I propose setting Beckett 11 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 6o. Compare Derrida's words with these of Paul Ricoeur: "Subjectivity must be lost as radical origin, if it is to be recovered in a more modest role" ("Phenomenology and Hermeneutics," in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thompson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 113). 12 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London: Methuen, 1982), 48. See also Norris's What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 150. 13 "Derrida is as far from 'rejecting' Husser! as he is from simply dismissing the linguistics of Saussure or the structural anthropology of U:vi-Strauss" (Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, 48). In "The Theory of Phenomenological Description," Sokolowski argues that Derrida's own use of language presupposes the phenomenological categories he challenges, and that the mutual inherence of absence and presence in Husserl's theory of perception anticipates in some ways Derrida's attack on the notion of presence as pure givenness. Derrida's debt to Heidegger is, of course, considerable. For a critique of Derrida's reading of Husser!, see J. Claude Evans, Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). After a detailed examination of Speech and Phenomena and the Husserlian texts it purports to address, Evans faults Derrida for "the misreadings of Husser!, the simple ignoring of relevant texts, and the arguments that began to fall apart as soon as they were distilled from the obscure prose" (182). Norris, it should be noted in contrast, considers Speech and Phenomena "one of the finest achievements of modern analytic philosophy" (What's Wrong with Postmodernism, 150). 14 See, for instance, David H. Hesla, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), especially 167-205; Eugene F. Kaelin, The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett (Dordrecht:

25 PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

in a different philosophical context: that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a "second-generation" phenomenologist whose writings-including his most widely known work, the Phenomenology of Perception (1945)center on corporeality and the "embodiedness" of consciousness. This concern with the body, in its problematic facticity, led Merleau-Ponty (between the 1930s and his death in 1961) to an understanding of subjectivity that resonates powerfully in relation to Beckett's work. I propose to read Beckett in the light of Merleau-Ponty (and Merleau-Ponty in the light of Beckett) in order to suggest that Beckett's drama explores and radicalizes an approach to the body similar to that of his philosophical contemporary, and that these concerns informed and structured his texts throughout his career. 15 Like the history of phenomenology itself, Beckett's work represents an evolving and increasingly complex response to a set of essentially phenomenological questions concerning subjectivity, embodiedness, and perception. By emphasizing the body as the ambiguous site of subjectivity, the tradition of post-Husserlian phenomenology inaugurated by MerleauPonty presents the critic of Beckett's plays with a corporeal problematics different from (though complementary to) the more familiar linguistic/textual problematics of poststructuralism. That the Phenomenology of Perception, like Merleau-Ponty's other writings, is characterized by a striking number of theatrical metaphors suggests the specific relevance of these questions to that staging of embodiment we call "theater." To think in these terms is to confront, by contrast, the marginalization of the theater in those studies of Beckett that seek to replace phenomenological with deconstructive models of reading. 16 The frequent neglect of the drama evident in these studies suggests a latent bias of the deconstructive approach with important consequences for drama and performance theory-a "scriptocentrism" that, deriving from deconstruction's linguistic and textual interests, may also condiD. Reidel, 1981); and Lance St. John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable (London: Macmillan, 1984). 15 Although there is no evidence that the two met or were familiar in any way with each other's work, it is of at least passing interest that Merleau-Ponty's years as a student in Paris at !'Ecole Normale Superieure (1926-30) overlapped with Beckett's appointment there as lecteur d'anglais (1928-30). 16 Into the Breach restricts itself to the prose, with Beckett's drama receiving only brief mention in the footnotes, and Rethinking Beckett offers only two essays (out of eleven) on the plays-one of which is a condensed version of Connor's discussion of the drama (two chapters out of eight) in Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text.

26 BODIED SPACES

tion and limit its field of inquiry. Reopening phenomenological lines of investigation allows us to redress the current of antitheatricality that runs through much poststructuralist criticism, an attitude symptomatic (like all antitheatricality) of a deeper uneasiness with the body-in this case, with the body as a site of corporeal and subjective elements that always resist reduction to the merely textual. This revision of the theoretical field has relevance not only for Beckett's plays, but for non-Beckettian texts and for theater studies in general. Reclaiming the body for philosophy, the phenomenological tradition offers a way of reembodying the discourse of theater, as it has done in the other disciplines where it has found a place. Phenomenology is the study of givenness (the Greek phainomenon, derives from phainein, to show), of the world as it is lived rather than the world as it is objectified, abstracted, and conceptualized. To render the world of experience available to conceptual manipulation, scientific (or theoretical) reflection performs a rational operation on it, detaching its elements from their lived field and reconfiguring them as objective facts, constructs of an abstracting operation. "What characterizes objectivism," Husser! claimed, "is that it moves upon the ground of the world which is pregiven, taken for granted through experience, seeks the 'objective truth' of this world, seeks what, in this world, is unconditionally valid for every rational being, what it is in itsel£." 17 By calling for a return to "the things themselves" (die Sachen selbst), Husser! sought to ground logic, the sciences, and philosophy itself in the very structures of experience from which these disciplines had abstracted their fields of observation. His procedural point of departure was the natural world as it surrounds the perceiving subject, oriented in terms of experience even when it stands as background, necessarily perspectival in its manifestations: I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing, etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somehow spatially distributed are for me simply there, in verbal or figurative sense "pres-

17 Edmund Husser!, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 68.

27 PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

ent," whether or not I pay them special attention by busying myself with them, considering, thinking, feeling, willing. 18

The phenomenological revolution, as Husserl inaugurated it, involved a shift in positionality, whereby the descriptions of a detached observer "posited" in front of its object would yield ground to an account of consciousness and its objects as these exist within a field of mutual inherence. Such a shift entails profound reconceptualizations; the essentially analytic (or "objective") space of Euclidian geometry, Cartesian philosophy, or Newtonian physics is distinctly different, for instance, from lived, or inhabited, spatiality, with its perceptual contours and structures of orientation. Husserl's own methodological procedures carried this revolution in a direction that subsequent phenomenologists have often strongly resisted. Following Franz Brentano, Husserl defined consciousness as intentional ("All consciousness is consciousness of something") and thus situated subjectivity inextricably in relation to the world. At the same time, his pursuit of phenomenological "essences" led him to employ the phenomenological epoche (or reduction) to bracket off, or put out of play, all belief in the reality-status of the empirical world. In Herbert Spiegelberg's words, "The reduction ... 'de-realizes' area after area of the world which was taken as real in the naive or natural attitude." 19 Among those elements of the empirical world "bracketed" from consideration by Husserl is the human body in all its material facticity. Merleau-Ponty's response to the idealist tendencies in Husserl's thought involved returning the body to the field of subjectivity. Whereas Husserl's phenomenology suspends the materiality of an "outside" that includes the body for the sake of ideal self-presence, Merleau-Ponty posited a consciousness caught up in the ambiguity of corporeality, directed toward a world of which it is inextricably and materially a part. "To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the body," he wrote; and elsewhere: "Consciousness is being-towards-thething through the intermediary of the body." 20 Like Heidegger and SarHusserl, Ideas, 9I. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. r, 3 5. 20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences," trans. James M. Edie, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 42; and idem, Phenomenology of Perception, 138-39. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Merleau-Ponty are taken from the Phenomenology. 18

19

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BODIED SPACES

tre, Merleau-Ponty existentialized the phenomenological project, and he accomplished this through a radical corporealism. Rather than discounting the body as an accidental feature of the subject-object relationship, he considered the body "our general medium for having a world" ( q6) and the task of philosophy to "restore to things their concrete physiognomy, to organisms their individual ways of dealing with the world, and to subjectivity its inherence in history" (57). The Phenomenology of Perception explores this phenomenology at its fundamental level: the embodied subject's opening, through perception, upon the world, others, and itsel£.21 Using terminology introduced earlier in the phenomenological tradition, we might say that Merleau-Ponty replaced Korper (the body as it is given to external observation, the "thing body") by Leib (the body as it is experienced, the "lived body"), and that he turned the attention of phenomenology to Leiblichkeit, or "lived bodiliness." 22 In so doing, he opened a field of investigation with obvious pertinence to Beckett's theater. Pierre Chabert has described this theater in terms evocative of Merleau~Ponty: "One must understand [Beckett's theater] as a deliberate and intense effort to make the body come to light, to give the body its full weight, dimension, and its physical presence .... to construct a physical and sensory space, filled with the presence of the body, to affirm ... a space invested by the body." 23 Beckett's drama is a theater "of the body," both in the traditional sense that its characters are bodied forth by actors for spectatorial consumption and in a more deeply phenomenological sense in which Beckett foregrounds the corporeality of actor and character within his stage's exacting field. In Waiting for Godot, Didi and Gogo explore the boundaries of their stage environment (as do Hamm and Clov in Endgame [1957]); they gnaw turnips, carrots, and chicken bones; they urinate, register each other's smells, yield to fatigue in sleep. Specimens of Homo erectus, they contemplate erections ("with all that follows") 24 yet struggle to maintain a standing 21 The body also has a role in the philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre. See, for example, Sartre's discussion of the body in Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 401-70. 22 For an earlier use of these terms, see Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (1913-16; Evanston: Northwestern University Press,

1973), 398-99· 23

Pierre Chabert, "The Body in Beckett's Theatre," Journal of Beckett Studies 8 (Autumn

1982): 24. 24

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove, 1954), r2a.

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posture against gravity's downward draw. Waiting for Godot combines the physicality of slapstick with metaphysical reflection, yet even the latter is drawn toward bodily metaphor: crucifixion, blindness, the pains of childbirth. In "Samuel Beckett, or Presence on the Stage," an essay frequently cited in traditional accounts of the "absurdist" or "existentialist" Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet discusses the unprecedented quality of "being there" in Beckett's theater, and it would be possible merely to supplement this Heideggerian claim by focusing on the simple and obvious fact of bodily sentience in Beckett's dramatic world. 25 Yet merely to note that the body constitutes a unique "presence" in Beckett's theater is to ignore the problematic status of this term as it has been disclosed by pqststructuralism and to reopen the phenomenological approach to the critique mounted by Trezise and others. Such an attempt would also lead one to ignore the radical complications of corporeal self-presence that characterize Beckett's staging of the body, complications that continued to multiply and deepen throughout the playwright's dramatic career. Already in Happy Days (1961), the body begins to betray the fragmentation that characterizes the late plays: the play's staging reduces character to body region and body part (Winnie's upper torso, then head; Willie's head, arm), and Beckett's directions underscore this dismemberment through language that subverts the impression of bodily unity and corporeal agency: "Happy expression off," "Head up," "Impatience of fingers." 26 In Play (1963), sensory environment gives way to an indeterminate, quasi-abstract space activated by stage lighting, though this radical dephysicalization is already anticipated by the nearly bare playing area of Godot and the disembodied space that Beckett had begun exploring in the medium of radio. In one of those literalized metaphors of which Beckett was so fond, the image of Winnie buried in a mound in Happy Days parodies the idea of the body "grounded" in its world. By the time of such late works as Not I (1972), Footfalls (1976), and What Where (1983), the body is almost a ghost of itself, reduced and decentered in the minimal space it has left, doubled by words that both address and disown it. Invaded on all sides by an irremediable absence, its very presence to itself is no longer secure. 25 Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove, 1965), rrr-25. 26 These references are from Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York: Grove, r96r), r5,

13, 19.

30 BODIED SPACES

In Connor's words, "Beckett's plays resist the notion of the innocent self-evidence of the body and its language." 27 As Hamm says, both contemplating and anticipating this scene of nonpresence, "I was never there." 28 Yet one need not move beyond Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body to find similar questioning of unitary presence and innocent selfevidence, or to locate the corporeal problematics that Beckettian theater puts into play. A passage from the Phenomenology (quoted as one of the epigraphs to this chapter) reflects both the debt Merleau-Ponty owes to the Husserlian project and the profound distance between Husserl's idealism and his own philosophy of corporeal immersion: "In so far as we believe in the world's past, in the physical world, in 'stimuli,' in the organism as our books depict it, it is first of all because we have present at this moment to us a perceptual field, a surface in contact with the world, a permanent rootedness in it, and because the world ceaselessly assails and beleaguers subjectivity as waves wash round a wreck on the shore" (207). The metaphoric content of this passage reflects the epistemological/ontological paradox that animates Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of bodied subjectivity. On the one hand, the embodied subject "rooted" in its world consciously extends the Husserlian notion of Fundierung (grounding or foundation). But this material grounding also works, as the passage makes clear, to "assail" or dispossess the subjectivity thereby embodied. Since the body is both subject and object-as I can verify (to employ a Merleau-Pontean example) by touching one hand with the other-the subject's experience is caught up in ambiguity, in the impossibility of transcendental self-possession: the body I touch never coincides with the body that touches. As Gary Brent Madison expresses it: "Even though the body can turn back on itself, take itself for its own proper object and in this way accomplish a kind of reflection, it never succeeds in coinciding with itself. This circularity never results in an identity." 29 As a corollary to this non-coincidence, perception is also characterized by a presubjective level of involvement with the world of things, an entanglement with the "nonself" that subjectivity presupposes and on which it is contingent. Merleau-Ponty notes that "there is always some degree of depersonalization at the heart of Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text, 168. Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 74· 29 Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (Athens; Ohio University Press, 1981), 25. 27 28

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PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

consciousness" (I 3 7): rooted in a body which it both is and is not, subjectivity confronts a presubjective field in which it is grounded but which both eludes and invades it. "The perceiving subject," MerleauPonty remarks (in uncanny anticipation of Happy Days), is "the anonymous one [that is] buried in the world, and that has not yet traced its path."30 Elsewhere, he writes: "What enables us to center our existence is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of the body is inseparably both freedom and servitude" (8 5). Pressured by this experiential ambigui"te, Merleau-Ponty's language oscillates between a discourse of belonging and an equally pronounced discourse of subversion and contingency, whereby subjectivity becomes both that point from which the world arises into meaning and the seat of noncoincidence, "that gap which we ourselves are" (207). If the term gap evokes a play such as Not I, with its "god-forsaken hole" that speaks its fragments of a life from a void of quasi embodiment, this is because Merleau-Ponty's analysis outlines a corporeal paradox that Beckett's Mouth carries to its extreme. From the physical harshness of Godot-with its hunger, its bodily smells, its uncomfortable boots, and its irresistible gravity-to the simultaneously bodied and disembodied spaces of the late plays, Beckett's drama explores the instability between a profound material inherence in the physical body and a corresponding alienation, and it dramatizes the subject's futile pursuit of any means for overcoming its own noncoincidence. The diminished figures of late Beckett (like Mouth), seemingly abstracted from the conditions of materiality and embodiment, continue to play out this fearful ambiguity of corporeal self-presence, the urgent flight from a subjectivity that represents the impossibility of its own identity. The fact that the body seems to recede in plays like Not I and That Time (1976)-that it is fragmented, decentered, often deanimated, and that many of its regions are characterized by absence-does not obscure its place in the play of ambiguity and dispossession. "Whole body like gone," Mouth intones, in a stream of discourse that seems to come less from individual vocal cords than from the darkness that surrounds it and onto which it opens. 31 Yet while the body may seem to approach its vanishing point in a realm of the purely verbal, the qualified "like gone" precludes this disappearance. Lips continue to move in tandem 30 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I968), 20I. 31 Samuel Beckett, Not I, in Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove, I984), 22I.

32 BODIED SPACES

with the words of Mouth's monologue, and these words are themselves charged with corporeal references. Like the unspoken "1," which makes itself felt in the very energy with which it is avoided, the body asserts itself as a primary field for the play of phenomenological presence and absence and the endlessly deferred moment of self-coincidence. If Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology calls into focus a specifically corporeal dynamic at work in Beckett's handling of subjectivity, it is equally true that Beckett's late plays suggest the radical implications of this dynamic. The Phenomenology of Perception, as I have suggested, hinges on a paradox of grounding and dispossession, managing to evoke both the Husserlian foundations it recalls and the even more deeply non-Husserlian directions it anticipates. Beckett's drama pursues these directions in ways that parallel the work of more recent phenomenologists of the body who have revised the philosophy of corporeality inherited from Merleau-Ponty. Herbert Pliigge, for example, has reconsidered the phenomenological distinction between Leib and Korper in light of the experience of illness. Anticipating Elaine Scarry's study of the body in pain, 32 Pliigge argues that, in illness and other forms of bodily duress, the "thing body" intrudes in the experience of live bodiliness as a quasi-alien facticity-a husk, burden, or weight that no longer "belongs" to the experiencing subject. Although this emergence of a corporeality no longer felt as one's own becomes acute in pathological situations, Pliigge notes, the dispossession revealed in such situations discloses a more fundamental self-estrangement, the presence of something "thinglike and objectal" at the heart of subjectivity itself. 33 Clearly, this insistent materiality of a body experienced as resistant and alien registers for all of Beckett's characters, from Estragon, who struggles to remove the boot from his foot, to Mouth's more profound corporeal alienation: "the machine ... more likely the machine ... so disconnected ... never got the message ... or powerless to respond .. . like numbed" (218). Drew Leder has coined the term dys-appearance for this "alien pres32 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, I98 5). 33 Herbert Pliigge, "Man and His Body," trans. Erling Eng, in The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism, ed. Stuart F. Spieker (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, I970), 298 (this translation is excerpted from Pliigge, Der Mensch und sein Leib [Tiibingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, I967]). For a more personal account of this phenomenon, see Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: Harper and Row, I984).

33 PHENOMENOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE

encing" of the body in pain and disease, 34 though the main contribution of his more recent study, The Absent Body, is to revise Merleau-Ponty's notion of the lived body in the opposite direction. With a different Beckettian twist, Leder explores the phenomenal body in terms of its absences, its points and regions of perceptual invisibility. As the impossibility of ever directly seeing one's internal organs and the back of one's head attests, the lived body is characterized by zones of experiential inaccessibility or "disappearance." The eye, for instance, can never see itself seeing; as a consequence, "precisely as the center point from which the perceptual field radiates, the perceptual organ remains an absence or nullity in the midst of the perceived" (13). 35 Leder advocates a "phenomenological anatomy" (29), which would trace the regions of disappearance that (we might say) "ghost" the availabilityto-perception of lived embodiedness: "My self-presencing in consciousness will thus be lined by a multiplicity of absences .... The phenomenologist of the body is already, and necessarily, a hermeneut" (37).

To enter the experiential field of the lived body as this has been described and elaborated by contemporary phenomenology is thus to discover a landscape whose contours powerfully resemble those of Beckett's theater. Like its philosophical analogues, the body in Beckett's drama constitutes a field that is simultaneously Other and troue, in which any presence-to-itself is doubly foreclosed by principles of estrangement and absence (not I, not here) that lie at the heart of embodiment. This conception of the body represents a deepening of the ambigui"te that rules Merleau-Ponty's analysis of embodied subjectivity-a drawing out of what one might think of as the deconstructive possibilities inherent in the phenomenological stance itself. Particularly in the late plays, the Beckettian body radicalizes the phenomenological enterprise of the Phenomenology of Perception; indeed, this body is already present, in a sense, in the margins and footnotes-the liminal regions-of Merleau-Ponty's text. Beckett's characters, in their dismemberment and perceptual disfigurements, their problematic corporeality, call attention to those figures, mostly clinical cases, whose stories of perceptual/corporeal dysfunction are heard throughout the PhenomeDrew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 82. This inaccessibility extends to temporal versions of the body's perceptual disappearance, as in sleep. 34

35

34 BODIED SPACES

nology: schizophrenics, neuraesthenics, aphasiacs, patients afflicted with hallucinations, drug-induced symptoms, phantom limbs, and other disturbances of body image or "bodily spatiality" ("the way in which the body comes into being as a body," according to Merleau-Ponty [149]). Like earlier and later phenomenologists of the body (Pliigge and Leder are both medical philosophers),36 Merleau-Ponty is drawn to dysfunction-particularly neurological disorder-with its various forms of perceptual aberrancy. His accounts of breakdown in the subject-bodyworld relationship read like a commentary on the Beckettian world, its peculiar perceptual topography, and its modes of disclosure and nondisclosure to the characters who inhabit it. Speaking of hallucination, for instance, Merleau-Ponty evokes the decentered, monologic world of the late plays: "The patient's existence is displaced from its center, being no longer enacted through dealings with a harsh, resistant and intractable world which has no knowledge of us, but expending its substance in isolation creating a fictitious setting for itself" (342). 37 His discussions of schizophrenia offer similar glosses on time and repetition in Beckett's plays, as in this account by a patient: "The branches sway on the trees, other people come and go in the room, but for me time no longer passes .... Thinking has changed, and there is no longer any style .... What is the future? It can no longer be reached .... Everything is in suspense .... Everything is monotonous, morning, noon, evening, past, present and future. Everything is constantly beginning all over again." (283). Finally, in Merleau-Ponty's description of the effects of mescaline, we can recognize the familiar Beckettian deformations of space and body: magnification of body parts, the simultaneous elongation and collapse of spatiality, a mechanizing of the human: Under mescaline it happens that approaching objects appear to grow smaller. A limb or other part of the body, the hand, mouth or tongue seems enormous, and the rest of the body is felt as a mere appendage to it. The walls of the room are 150 yards apart, and beyond the walls is merely an empty vastness [ .... ] Sometimes motion is no longer seen, and people seem to be 36 For examples of recent explorations of the body within medical phenomenology, see the essays by Leder, Richard J. Baron, S. Kay Toombs, George Northoff et al., Donald Moss, and Iris Marion Young in The Body in Medical Thought and Practice, ed. Drew Leder (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992). 37 Merleau-Ponty's remarks on verbal hallucination (in a later lecture) offer a fascinating gloss on the depersonalized speech of Not 1: "The subject no longer has the impression that he coincides with his own speech" (Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973], 66-67).

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transported magically from one place to another. The subject is alone and forlorn in empty space, "he complains that all he can see clearly is the space between things, and that this space is empty. Objects are in a way still there, but not as one would expect.... " Men are like puppets and their movements are performed in a dreamlike slow-motion. (281-82) 38

I do not mean to propose that Beckett's characters be reduced to clinical cases, or the contours of his dramatic worlds to neurological symptoms-though the allusions to his mother's affliction with Parkinson's disease that Hugh Culik has noted in Beckett's work reinforces the sense that clinical pathology constitutes an operative level of reference in Beckett's portraits of aberrancy. 39 To whatever extent these portraits are grounded in particular forms of clinical dysfunction, the metaphoric versions of perceptual and corporeal distortion evident in Beckett's plays are clearly designed to reflect features and principles of normal corporeal subjectivity, the dispossessions at the heart of selfpossession. As such, characters like Mouth or W (in Rockaby [r98r]) occupy a phenomenological territory that the Phenomenology of Perception both explores and seeks to contain. Whereas Merleau-Ponty 38 Merleau-Ponty quotes from F. Fischer's Zeitstruktur und Schizophrenie (1929). Compare Billie Whitelaw's recollection of performing in Not I to the accounts of corporeal dislocation given earlier: "For the first couple of rehearsal performances, when the blindfold went on and I was stuck half-way up the stage, I think I had sensory deprivation. The very first time I did it, I went to pieces. I felt I had no body; I could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed, I was becoming very dizzy and felt like an astronaut tumbling into space ... I swore to God I was falling, falling ... " (James Knowlson, "Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie Whitelaw," journal of Beckett Studies 3 [Summer 1978): 87 [ellipses part of the text]). This description suggests the extent to which Beckett's actors are subject to permutations of perceptual/corporeal experience similar to those undergone by Beckett's characters. 39 Hugh Culik, "Neurological Disorder and the Evolution of Beckett's Maternal Images," Mosaic 22 (Winter 1989): 41-53. Culik argues, for instance, that May (in Footfalls) displays the contrasting rigidity and acathisia (restless pacing alternating with difficulty in initiating movement) symptomatic of Parkinson's disease (49). "May" was also the name of Beckett's mother. The frequent behavioral and perceptual resemblances between Beckett's characters and patients suffering from neurological disorder are striking. Carlee Lippman notes the uncanny similarities between Mouth's disembodiment and the experiential disembodiment of one of Oliver Sacks's patients, in "Proprioceptive Deficit in Beckett's Not I," Journal of Beckett Studies 2 (Spring 1993): 81-83. In The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), Sacks describes a woman who lost the faculty of proprioception (the "sixth sense" whereby we experience our bodies as our own) and whose body felt strange, alien: "She continues to feel, with the continuing loss of proprioception, that her body is dead, not-real, not-hers-she cannot appropriate it to herself" (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, 48). Sacks's discussion of this case is entitled "The Disembodied Lady."

36 BODIED SPACES

tends to restrict pathology to a departure from the "normal" experience of embodiment-betraying his attachment to what Alphonso Lingis calls "the imperative figure of an agent that holds on to things that are objectives and that maintains himself in the world" 40-Beckett's theater suggests that these perceptual conditions constitute a more fundamental potentiality and that they derive both from the structures of bodily experience and from what Merleau-Ponty's own analysis, anticipating this direction, calls the "gaping wound" in subjectivity itself. 41 "What remains for the eye exposed to such conditions? To such vicissitude of hardly there and wholly gone. " 42 The next chapter extends this discussion of the phenomenological body in Beckett's theater, with its intricate, conflicting modes of presencing, to the audience-the individual/collective "third body" (along with character and actor) of the stage's intercorporeal field. In their increasingly pictorial use of performance space, as we shall see, Beckett's plays reveal a deepening interest not only in the absent presence of the body as staged, but also in the dynamics of vision, an interest that recalls Merleau-Ponty's concern at the end of his career (in The Visible and the Invisible and other late writings) with the phenomenology of visibility. 43 Beckett stages his spec40 Alphonso Lingis, "Imperatives," in Merleau-Ponty Vivant, ed. M. C. Dillon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 1I4. Lingis questions this privileging of grounded perception: "We want to propose that the world itself, in Merleau-Ponty's sense, is set in depths, in uncharted abysses, where there are vortices in which the body that lets loose its hold on the levels of the world, the dreaming, the visionary, the hallucinating, the lascivious body, gets drawn and drags with it not things, but those appearances without anything appearing, those phantoms, caricatures, and doubles that even in the high noon of the world float and scintillate over the contours of things and the planes of the world" (ibid.) As I have suggested, this nongrounded world exists in what we might call the "clinical margins" of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology. 41 Continuing his discussion of hallucination, Merleau-Ponty writes: "This fiction can have the value of reality only because in the normal subject reality itself suffers through an analogous process. In so far as he too has sensory fields and a body, the normal person is equally afflicted with this gaping wound through which illusion can make its way in" (342). Despite its tendency to present dysfunction as departure and accident, in other words, the Phenomenology also conceives aberrancy as a modality of the normal. Merleau-Ponty clarifies this understanding of pathology in Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, 63-69. For a critique of Merleau-Ponty's reliance on the pathological body, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 283-88. 42 Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (New York: Grove, 1981), 37-38. 43 For a recent application of Merleau-Pontean philosophy to issues of visibility and embodiment in film theory, see Vivian Sobchak, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

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tator as deliberately as he does his characters and actors, and with a similar phenomenological emphasis: not as the disembodied eye/! of traditional realist spectatorship but as a body situated with its own positionality and material presence. Just as his late plays reveal an increasing dispossession within bodied subjectivity on the part of Beckett's characters, so these plays also involve the audience in a phenomenological displacement, disclosing the body that underlies and sustains theatrical seeing at the very moment that they subject this body to a marked perceptual displacement. Rather than signaling the exhaustion of phenomenology, then, Beckett's drama constitutes an expansion of its field, to the point where the mise-en-scene itself becomes phenomenologized and where its various elements (light, darkness, objects, sound) acquire traces of consciousness that-even more thoroughly than the phenomenological theater of Robert Wilson-layers the technological with the perceptual contours of the subjective. For characters and audience alike, the subjectivity put into play bears little resemblance to the unitary self-presence of which phenomenology is so regularly accused: like the philosophy of MerleauPonty, Beckett's late plays work toward a similar expansion and contraction of subjectivity, toward a dispersion of its centers and points of reference. Whether in the spheres of "being" or "being in face of," the subjectivity set into motion in these plays is less anorigin than a space, less a stabilizing orientation than "the phantom of the center. " 44 At the same time, this subjectivity remains oriented toward that grounding from which it can never quite free itself in Beckett's work, that facticity within which it arises and from which it is ambiguously derived. Fragmented, dehumanized by shapeless cloaks and robes, spatially restricted, the Beckettian body is drawn toward invisibility and statuary immobility. Yet together these poles represent-like the idea of ending-one of the "not quite" points of Beckett's world: that freedom from the body for which consciousness yearns but which it never attains. On the threshold of the body's disappearance into nothingness or its reversion to pure matter, there are stirrings still. Beckett's drama (and his prose, for that matter) maintain their inherence in the problematics of Leiblichkeit, an inherence that only intensifies with each 44 The phrase is Derrida's (Writing and Difference, 297). Michel Benamou gives Derrida's original wording ("le fantome du centre") further Beckettian resonance by translating it as "ghostly center" ("Presence and Play," in Performance in Postmodern Culture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello [Madison, Wise.: Coda Press, I977), 5).

38 BODIED SPACES

representation of embodiment: as Beckett's middle and late works gradually abandon the naturalistic body, with its physiological integrity and recognizably anthropomorphic environment, they more directly confront the phenomenological body, with its decentered field of subjectivity and its ambiguous modes of absence and presence. This reading of Beckett's drama of embodiment returns us to poststructuralism and its traditional argument with phenomenology. Though such concepts as "decentering" and "absence" have been appropriated in the poststructuralist critique of language, these concepts (as I have suggested) have equally powerful roots in the phenomenological tradition, especially as this tradition has sought to move beyond the originary, transcendental ego and the notion of presence as pure selfgivenness. As Madison suggests, "The history of the phenomenological movement is the history of the progressive attempt to eradicate the traces still present within it of the very resilient metaphysics of presence, to exorcise the metaphysical ghosts that continue to haunt our discourse."45 A reading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body makes it clear that the problematic subjectivity that Trezise correctly finds in Beckett's work-the breach or felure at the heart of selfpresence-was the province of the post-Husserlian phenomenology articulated by Beckett's contemporaries as it would be for the poststructuralist analysis that followed. I do not wish to cast Merleau-Ponty or other post-Husserlian phenomenologists as proto-Derrideans, or to minimize the methodological differences between phenomenology and deconstruction. 46 If phenomenology and poststructuralism arrive at congruent principles in their models of subjectivity, they do so from markedly different directions. Whereas Derridean analysis allows us to approach this breach in self-presence through the play of differance (or deferral) intrinsic to signification and textuality, post-Husserlian phenomenology approaches this breach through the ambiguities and dispossessions of subjectivity itself. Each approach posits questions that it Madison, The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, xiii. The parallels and divergences between Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and poststructuralism are the subject of several recent essays: G. B. Madison, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity," in The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity, 57-Sr, and idem, "Merleau-Ponty's Deconstruction of Logocentrism," in Merleau-Ponty Vivant, r 17-52; M. C. Dillon, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity," in Merleau-Ponty Vivant, ix-xxxv; and Hugh]. Silverman, "Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Writing on Writing," in Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), r3o-4r. Norris discusses the affinities of Derridean thought with the later writings of Merleau-Ponty in Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, 52-54. 45

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is uniquely able to address, and each is characterized by gaps, horizons, vanishing points-by the blind spots (to recall Leder) intrinsic to any field of vision. Yet these blind spots are, in the end, usefully symmetrical, and the two approaches balance each other in their separate pursuits. The dialectic of overlap and divergence that characterizes poststructuralist and phenomenological modes of analysis presents an opportunity for drama and performance theory: the opportunity to cultivate States's "binocular" approach to performance that would pursue both the signs in phenomena and the phenomena in signs. From such a perspective, phenomenology ceases to play its now-cliched role in a ritual of repudiation; rather, it claims its place as the necessary other term of a fundamental complementarity. Offering an emphasis with particular relevance to theater-that most bodied of all mediums-phenomenology complements the "always already" of signification with the "always also" of the subject's corporeal fields.

Staging the Body: Toward a Phenomenology of Mise-en-scene

Theater and the Play of Actuality If post-Husserlian phenomenology has rejected presence as unitary self-givenness in favor of a view of presence as constituted by vanishing points and dissociations, then surely few environments reward a postHusserlian phenomenological approach more richly than the theater. For beyond the structures of displacement already intrinsic to experience, theater sets into play additional levels of deferral, subjecting the perceptual status of the object to further unsettling and complication. Chief among these destabilizing features of the theater is the bifurcated mode-of-presence characteristic of the theatrical field itself. To borrow Konstantin Stanislavsky's term, theater originates in the "as if," in a transformational act through which the illusionistic is called into being by, and (in part) supplants, the "present" field and its elements. Theater hinges on the partial occlusion of the presentational by the representational, the actual by the virtual, the solidness of self-coincidence by internal difference. Boards "become" the floor of a restaurant in Tina Howe's The Art of Dining (1979): the entire field of performance is subject to a mimetic play where everything is always other than what

40 BODIED SPACES

it is, where the object in its actuality is seized and taken over by what is not there. Even those components of mise-en-scene that ostensibly stand outside the illusionistic field-the enabling actuality that both grounds and frames mimesis-is caught up in this play of otherness. Darkness, for example, is a pervasive extradramatic presence in the modern theater: establishing the playing space through its boundaries, it both guarantees the audience's invisibility in the conventionally lighted theater and "erases" the illusionistic field between dramatic segments. And yet closer consideration reveals the curious fact that-even on the modern stage, with its technologically controllable lighting-theatrical darkness is never total, never fully itself. Stage light scatters the darkness that surrounds it, while the regulations governing exit lights in most modern theater auditoriums guarantee that even the darkness between scenes or acts is never complete. Like silence-which is always rendered virtual by the inescapable sounds of a peopled auditorium-theatrical darkness is always, if only slightly, an illusion. Play, Derrida claims, is the disruption of presence,47 and nowhere is this more evident than in the play of performance, where presence (in the sense of the object's perceptual stability) is occluded, multiplied, feigned. At the same time, as we have seen, being put into play does not mean being put out of play. If the theater is always, like Madame Irma's establishment in Genet's The Balcony (1957), the house of false images, it is also the site of a radical actuality that surrounds and arrests the flight into otherness. As States reminds us, theater is "a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be." 48 The elements of performance may be caught in the imagined, the performed, the make-believe, but "the thing itself" remains as a reminder of the actuality on which the imaginary plays. In any "pure" sense, theatrical darkness may be a fiction, but the amount of actual darkness sufficient to signal "darkness" nonetheless engages responses that draw upon those provoked by darkness in its absoluteness. We might say, in keeping with a long-standing assumption concerning theatrical response, that this response is itself virtual, an act of makebelieve (My fear at a play is not a real fear; I know this danger is not real), but such a pronouncement risks oversimplifying an emotional/ physiological process that is much more complex. We may know that 47 48

Derrida, Writing and Difference, States, Great Reckonings, 20.

292.

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stage darkness is not fully "real," that it is (like everything else in the play) in part sleight of hand, but this quasi darkness nonetheless draws on the phenomenology of actual darkness, engaging its experiential displacement and its distinctive perceptual unmooring. Like other contemporary dramatists who have employed the device, Tom Stoppard evokes this unmooring for his audience as well as his characters when he opens act 3 of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) in darkness. As Merleau-Ponty writes (with a nautical metaphor relevant to the final act of Stoppard's play), "The distress felt by neuropaths in the night is caused by the fact that it brings home to us our contingency, the uncaused and tireless impulse which drives us to seek an anchorage and to surmount ourselves in things, without any guarantee that we shall always find them" (283-84). We may not succumb to the extremes of neuropathic reaction to this absence of light in Stoppard's play, but the fiction of darkness succumbs to actual darkness to the extent that we, too, find ourselves "in the dark," drawn into a version of the contingency of which Merleau-Ponty speaks. States remarks that "theater ingests the world of objects and signs only to bring images to life," 49 which is another way of saying that actuality continually infuses the alterity that seeks to displace it. Though the play of elsewhere and otherness guarantees that theater can never be spoken of in terms of uncomplicated presentness, actuality continually pressures representation/fiction/illusion with the phenomenal claims of an experiential moment. So powerful is this persistence of the actual and its modes of presence that one witnesses its phenomenal effects, curiously, even when the referent is materially absent. The verbal evocations of darkness in Shakespearean drama retain an experiential impact even in the absence of actual stage darkness, such that Banquo's line "Their candles are all out" (Macbeth, 2. I. 5) would conjure up an experience of darkness even (one presumes) in the open-air light of a London afternoon. 50 It would be easy to explain away this kind of experiential activation as "mere" effect, as evidence that all is unreal on the theater's platform of make-believe. But from another point of view, this "created darkness" can be understood equally as a variation played on and within the experiential field shared (differently) by au49 "ln the image, a defamiliarized and desymbolized object is 'uplifted to the view' where we see it as being phenomenally heavy with itself" (ibid., 37). 50 References to Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, textual ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, I974).

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dience, performer, and character-a function, in part, of a dramatic speech capable of evoking and modulating facets of experience. Seen this way, theater plays on a feature that characterizes extratheatrical experience as well, where present experience is always subject to variation and displacement by the imaginary in the guise of memories, anticipations, daydreams, fantasies, and other forms of vicariousness and virtuality. Our vocabulary fails to capture the experiential weight of this "as if" response to theatrical (or other) phenomena, this mutuality of the real and the unreal at the heart of what we call "actuality." The realityphenomenon described by Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulationwhere the difference between true and false is obscured in a reality that is both actual and staged (as with the individual who, simulating an illness, produces real symptoms)-may be more experientially fundamental than his specifically technocultural analysis acknowledges. 51 From the phenomenological standpoint, then, the theatrical field offers itself in terms of an irreducible oscillation between perceptual levels, and though spectatorial vision is thus structurally bifurcated, the theatrical mode of this presence, or givenness, is oriented in terms of an experiential actuality that transgresses (while never fully erasing) the boundaries between "is" and "as if." We might say that the actual, in its shifting manifestations, functions as the currency of ludic exchange. If theater is the disruption of actuality, actuality nonetheless infiltrates theatrical play by constituting its "ground" (in the sense that Gestalt psychologists employ the term, as the backdrop or experiential field in which an object or event is perceived). The insistence of this presentness can be felt during those moments when actuality emerges from within the outlines of fiction, when background oscillates into foreground. When Lear intones "Never, never, never, never, never" over the body of Cordelia ( 5. 3. 309 ), for instance, his repetition imperceptibly strips the word of its verbal stamp, returning it to its grounding in the reverberating echoes of stage sound. Indeed, elsewhere in the final acts of this most painful of plays, where the signs and images of selfhood are continually threatened by the battering of viscerally immediate experience, the visual and discursive are pressured by acoustical and other intrusions that constitute a physical, sensory register of its spectacle of pain. Like the blinding of Gloucester, so difficult to watch, the image of Lear's final moments and its articulation trigger a pain that exceeds 51 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), s-6.

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the boundaries of pretense, forcing the spectator into the sentience of his or her own spectatorial sphere at the precise moment when Lear's perceptual universe collapses on stage. To speak of the dramatic world of King Lear without acknowledging its intrusions of the phenomenal realm is to miss Shakespeare's profound manipulation of an actuality always latent in dramatic illusion. Poststructuralist discussions of performance tend to stop at the point where presence is made to betray its noncoincidence, its infiltration by principles of difference and noncoincidence. But this is precisely the point at which phenomenological investigation of givenness can fully begin. Understanding theatrical presence as the play of actuality (rather than as a stable essence, given in itself within the perceptual act) enables one to approach dramatic performance with an appreciation of its phenomenological complexity-a complexity that comprehends, indeed is fueled by, difference and absence. As the example of theatrical darkness makes clear, what we speak of as the "phenomenal object" (keeping in mind that this concept is not restricted to physical objects) is in fact subject to multiple, even competing modes of disclosure. Actual, simulated, fictitious, linguistically evoked-the phenomenological object is constituted by a range of manifestations, with their distinctive channels of phenomenological address and their separate (though usually overlapping) claims on actuality. When Tilden crosses the stage at the end of Sam Shepard's Buried Child (1978) and all eyes are on the bundle he carries, the phenomenal impact of this bundle is a function of the physical stage prop we observe, its grisly identity in the play's fictional level, and the verbal references by which this identity is owned, disowned, and imaginatively transformed ("Tiny little white shoot," says the offstage Halie, as Tilden approaches the stairs. "All hairy and fragile. Strong though. Strong enough to break the earth even"). 52 Instead of presence, the theater asks to be approached in terms of presencing; theatrical phenomena are multiply embodied, evoked in a variety of experiential registers, refracted through different (and sometimes divergent) phenomenal lenses. As King Lear illustrates with such starkness, the performing body constitutes the centerpiece of this play of actuality-indeed, it represents a site at which this play is brought to a point of illusionistic crisis. 53 Sam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam, 1981), 132. Like the other elements of mise-en-scene, the body is subject to multiple modes of givenness: as will become clear in Chapter 4, it manifests its presence linguistically as well as physically, through the modes of embodiment particular to language. 52 53

44 BODIED SPACES

Jointly claimed by actor and character, the body on stage is also implicated in the real and the imaginary that underlie the twinness of dramatic fiction. Considered one way, the actor's body is eclipsed, denaturalized by the character's fictional presence; we think of Lear's words as his own, their production the effort of a body that exists in what Susanne Langer has termed "virtual space." 54 And yet the actor's body never ceases asserting itself in its material, physiological facticity. On one level, of course, it does so by endowing the character-body with "borrowed" physicality, in the same way that a wooden stage device makes "real" the stocks in which Kent is placed: the Lear-body is experienced as there through the actor's corporeality. But the body inserts a much more fundamental and intrusive actuality into the field of dramatic representation, an actuality that charges even verbal reflections (and evocations) of bodily presence. A point of independent sentience, the body represents a rootedness in the biological present that always, to some extent, escapes transformation into the virtual realm. Like mimes and dancers, actors train to bring physiology under control, but the body's recalcitrant physiology breaks through in perspiration, vocal congestion, a cough, an itch. When Blau points out that the performer "can die there in front of your eyes; is in fact doing so," he is asserting only the most extreme formulation of the body's radical actuality in performance. "Of all the performing arts, the theater stinks most of mortality. " 55 Theater, of course, draws this mortality into itself, "ingests" it (to borrow States's term) in order to animate its fiction; for such contingency to intrude in something as extreme as the actor's actual death would involve the "breaking" of illusion. But, unlike the represented body in film, the body's living presence on stage asserts a physiological irreducibility that challenges the stability (and the separability) of representational levels. If the actor's body endows Lear's with its own mortality and a surrogate physicality, the character's suffering returns to charge the actor's body with physical and emotional duress; both fuse in a moment of suffering that is, like all simulation, both fictional and actual. Thus the performing body occupies a paradoxical role as both the activating agent of such dualities as presentation/representation, sign/referent, reality/illusion and that which most dramatically threatens 54 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 69-103. 55 Blau, Take Up the Bodies, 83.

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to collapse them. This is one reason why the staging of pain-prevalent throughout the history of drama and of particularly intense interest in the contemporary theater-is of such potential usefulness to the theater phenomenologist: in its evocation of corporeal duress, the suffering body brings to the point of crisis the body's representational volatility, and it casts in relief the experiential exchanges of character, actor, and spectator. The "performance" of pain invades, and is in turn invaded by, the perceptual actuality of pain in a way that foregrounds the uncanny circuitry and ambiguity of dramatic representation itself.

Visual Field, Habitational Field That the body's centrality should require emphasis may seem strange given the current theoretical attention, reinforced by a focus in contemporary theater itself, on the performer's body as a representational element, the site of cultural coding and inscription. But this signifying (or representational) body is the construction of a theorizing act that brackets the living body and its phenomenal fields in an act of objectifying abstraction; it displays itself under the terms of a transparent readability, uncontaminated by the material and perceptual variables that, in lived experience, engulf the observer as well as the thing observed. For all the analytic power that this conceptualizing of the performing body has demonstrated, it rests on a model of enactment and spectatorship essentially Aristotelian in outlines: in which the theater plays its meanings before the gaze of a privileged spectator who stands (or sits, as it were) outside the conditions of spectacle. Although this model is not without its experiential grounding-the stage, after all, does offer itself to the audience as a specular field, framed (in part) for objectifying vision-the phenomenological perspective uncovers a much more complex set of variables at work in this field, variables inextricably bound up with the body as phenomenal agent. When attention is shifted from the signifying body to the body as it is lived, the disembodied field of visibility reenters the dynamics of perception and habitation as these are engaged in the "seeing-place" of actual bodies, where even the eye (in Jean Starobinski's phrase) is "living."56 Reflection suggests, in general terms, how a phenomenological point of view opens up the play of vision and corporeality in a reem56 Jean Starobinski, The Living Eye, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, I989).

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bodied field of performance. If I imagine a stage without actors, laid out to an empty auditorium, I have posited a field that can be grasped in the "God's-eye" space of objective contemplation. At the point at which I insert myself as the lone spectator in the auditorium, this field is immediately focalized through a specific perspective, for unlike the conceptualized spatiality of "scientific" analysis-where the object discloses itself as it might appear to an abstract subject-phenomenological space is oriented space. The stage and its elements are now situated in terms of such variables as frontality, angle, and depth; to the extent that I allow myself to inhabit the point of actual perception, theatrical vision is now implicated in the laws of visual dynamics as they are engaged by these variables and as they derive from (and interact with) the fact of my embodiedness. As I add more spectators (and remind myself of the director, designers, and other collaborators in the theatrical event who have left their signatures on this mise-en-scene), I introduce variables of intersubjectivity and multiperspectivity as these impinge on my own situation within the audience, and as these constitute a perceptual field that is both private (Lebenswelt) and shared (Urnwelt). I may shift my attention from the immediate contingency of my bodily and perceptual situation to the representational and semiotic aspects of the stage as it stands before me, but this contingency manifests itself as the ground of my inherence within the theatrical environment. Up until this point, the imaginative reconstruction of the theatrical event yields an experience parallel in many ways to other forms of spectatorship in which the artistic object yields itself to view: the contemplation of a painting or piece of statuary in a crowded museum, for instance, or the viewing of a film in a darkened auditorium. As soon as an actor steps onto the stage and into this imagined theater scenario, a fundamental shift takes place with phenomenological consequences different from those for artistic genres in which the body fails to make an actual appearance. With this appearance, the phenomenological parameters of both stage and spectatorship undergo complicated reorientation. On stage, what was oriented in relation to the gaze is now also oriented in relation to the body that inhabits its boundaries. Visual field now discloses, and must accommodate, a habitational field that constitutes a rival perceptual center. Within this internally divergent (or "twinned") field, a drinking glass becomes both spectatorial object and object of handling for the performer who must encounter it as instrument or obstacle; in keeping with the discrepant play of actualities that we have already discussed, this perceptual duality is further complicated

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by the fact that this glass also exists both as spectatorial object within a fictionalized setting (Hirst's drawing room in Pinter's No Man's Land [I 97 5], for example) and as object for the characters (Hirst, Spooner) who reside therein. Unlike the other modes of artistic spectatorship noted earlier, theatrical watching confronts a field that opens to competing perceptual configurations from within, a field structurally destabilized by the same dynamic of intersubjectivity that characterizes perception outside the theater, whereby the Other represents the opening of an autonomous, differently oriented world within the perceptual boundaries of my own. This opening underscores the body's privileged status in theatrical representation. If we break down dramatic performance into its constitutive elements, we end up with the kind of objective list (setting, costumes, the actor's body, props, sound, lighting, etc.) that often serves as the basis of formalist or semiotic analysis. But from a phenomenological standpoint, this ordering is never exact or stable, never coordinated in the sense that its items are equal or commensurate, since one element-the actor's body-also constitutes a subject point from which the other elements receive competing orientation. A glass on stage exists not only for my visual consumption, but also as an instrument-zuhanden, or "ready-to-hand," as Heidegger would say57-in the actor's field of utility. With the actor's entrance, the stage as a whole becomes a differently oriented field in the broader field of spectatorship, refocused in terms of a subjectivity that is never reducible to spectatorial object. The very nature of this internal (dis)orientation adds new (and often divergent) layers of perceptual givenness to the components of mise-en-scene: the actor on stage picks up the glass and drinks from it, while the glass as visual object remains that which I may see but never touch. This rival phenomenality, of course, exists within the overall act of theatrical display; in the layering and involvement of orientations, the stage, one might say, discloses itself in the mode of for-the-actor-underthe-gaze. But the authorizing power of the audience's spectatorship does not eliminate the disruptive potential of the performer's own gaze, or its destabilizing operations within and upon the field of performance. Even within the boundaries of dramatic illusion, this gaze retains elements of a Sartrean danger as it plays on its surroundings: "The ap57 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 98.

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pearance of the Other in the world corresponds ... to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting." 58 To follow Sartre further, the appearance of the performer-as-Other represents the permanent possibility of my being seen in turn; this appearance establishes my own position as visual object in another individual's perceptual field. Barbara Freedman speaks of a "fractured reciprocity, whereby beholder and beheld reverse position in a way that renders a steady position of spectatorship impossible." 59 The sometimes vertiginous nature of this being-seen is evident in those moments when the performer actually captures the audience in a look, but such moments only underscore a general visibility of audience to performer that accompanies the being-present of performance. They suggest the extent to which the audience itself is caught up in the theater's unique game of orientation and positionality. From this point of view, Beckett's Catastrophe (1982) can be recognized as a distilled dramatization of the reverse-gaze as it animates and destabilizes theatrical performance. Immobilized, "whitened," arranged as if he were a piece of statuary, the Protagonist of Beckett's play subverts this corporeal objectification by raising his head and fixing the audience in a stare, asserting a subjectivity that reverses the assertion of spectatorial power. His gaze renders objective, suddenly and vulnerably embodied, an audience that had, through a self-effacing voyeurism, collaborated in the relegation of body to image. In so doing, he activates the disruption always latent in performance, where the body is an object of vision that can itself look back. 60 Harry Berger, Jr., seeking to contain this kind of disruption within the confines of illusionism, has argued that the actor's look never is mutual, never fully crosses the boundaries that separate the play-world from that of the audience. When the actor is "in character," according to Berger, his or her outward gaze is always directed at a virtual or Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 343· Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze: Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis, and Shakespearean Comedy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, I99I), I. 60 Although Freedman orients her discussion toward issues of gender and spectatorship in the cinema, her reflections on "new ways of looking" capture some of the subversiveness of the reverse-gaze in a play such as Catastrophe: "To return the look is to break up performance space, deconstruct the gaze, subvert the classic organization of showing and seeing, and rethink the very notion of spectatorship" (ibid., I 5I ). 58

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fictional spectator, necessarily other than the actual individual whose gaze he or she meets. To the extent that the spectator perceives this gaze, he or she responds either by assuming the role of a fictional auditor in the dramatic representation or by rendering himself or herself absent, invisible. 61 But if this analysis (what Berger calls the "textualization of the audience") has the virtue of implicating the audience in the perceptual duality that characterizes performance as a whole (like the actor, I become other than myself, to the point of rendering myself the absent or fictional correlative of the actor's performance), it does so at the expense of the actuality that constitutes the ground and the other side of theatrical fictionality. If this actuality can only fully manifest itself at the cost of the illusion it sustains, the real proximity of performer to spectator nonetheless makes itself felt throughout the actor's performance and the audience's response. Aware of our sustaining presence to the performance we witness-the fact that this spectacle is set into motion by our gaze-we sanction this being-present through our applause, our laughter, even the attentiveness of our silence. Once again, the contrast with film is pronounced: although a character/actor in a film may stare directly at the camera and hence "at" the spectator, in the absence of a live performer such a gaze is never in any genuine sense reciprocal, though we may laugh at the sleight of hand that may pretend that this is so. As a consequence, cinematic spectatorship lends itself to the condition of "imaginary" disembodiment as this has been described by film theorists, and to a mode of "gaze" that operates within significantly untheatrical parameters. Despite the insulating "otherness" of dramatic fiction, the dynamics of theatrical watching are much more complex. The performer/character's gaze, like the body's living presence that it asserts, exceeds the containing parameters of representational space and confronts the audience's gaze with an intersubjectivity that represents a potential or actual "catastrophe" in terms of spectatorial detachment. From the phenomenological point of view, the living body capable of returning the spectator's gaze presents a methodological dilemma for any theoretical modellike semiotics-that offers to describe performance in "objective" terms. Alone among the elements that constitute the stage's semiotic field, the body is a sign that looks back. 61 Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 96-102.

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Charles Levin writes: "The fact of being a body is inescapable, it cannot be deferred, lost in a chain of reference, or divided into signifier and signified. Neither differance, nor indeterminacy, nor the ideological constitution of the subject, nor the social or linguistic construction of reality, can succeed in disguising the biological status of our existence."62 Phenomenology offers to supplement the semiotic (or materialist) body with the phenomenal (and phenomenalizing) body-to counter the signifying body in its dephysicalized readability with what we might call the "embodied" body in its material resistance. By addressing issues of embodiment, phenomenology opens up the dimension of "livedness," of which objectifying theory can give no account and which it must bracket in order to maintain its analytic stance. The phenomenal body resists the epistemological model of a corporeal object yielding its meanings to a decorporealized observer; instead, as our discussion of the theater has suggested, the body's livedness involves both observer and observed in a relationship of mutual inherence within a field of observation subversive of such positional categories. The body discloses the world as ambiguity precisely because, as Merleau-Ponty maintained, it is itself the site of an irreducible ambiguite. The body is that by which I come to know the world, the perceptual ground against which the world has existence for me; at the same time, it is an object in this world, much (though not all) of which is available to my direct perception. In short, my body constitutes my primordial awareness of such dualities as subject/object, inside/outside, Leib/Korper, but it also occasions my earliest understanding of their ambiguous relationship. As more recent phenomenologists (such as Pliigge and Leder) have underscored, Korper and Leib are involved in a fundamental inextricability: my material body is charged with sentience, while the field of my lived-body is impinged on by a thingness, imperfectly grasped, from which it can never extricate itself. As the phenomenon of the reverse-gaze suggests, the components of this ambiguity are variables rather than constants in experience. The reverse-gaze catches me in the act of looking, challenging what Leder (following Heidegger) calls the ecstasis by which I "surpass" my corporeal boundaries through the outer-directedness of vision. 63 In so doing, the reverse-gaze returns me 62 Charles Levin, "Carnal Knowledge of Aesthetic States," in Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker (New York: St. Martin's, I987), I08. ''Leder, The Absent Body, 20-22.

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to myself, forcing a corporeal self-consciousness that registers itself in a physical discomfort and in the tingling of embarrassment on my face. The extent that I manage, in Berger's terms, to render myself fictional or even absent in response to this gaze is the result of the look succeeding first in rooting me where I am, causing a bodily upsurge in consciousness. Both the objectifying operations of the other's look on my bodily perception and any flight from this seizure in an act of disembodiment (putting myself outside or beside myself) indicate thatlike other variables of phenomenality-embodiedness is subject to modification and transformation, multiple and varying modes of disclosure, and that the forms of ambiguity that characterize the phenomenal realm represent experience in flux, oscillating within and between modes of perceptual orientation. This ambiguity of corporeal experience has profound implications for the phenomenology of theater, which is to an unrivaled degree the medium of the body. On the fictional level, theater emphasizes the variables of embodiedness in the stories it chooses to tell, since these stories are grounded in the physical insertion of character in environment and in the often competing operations of perception, habitation, and intersubjectivity. From this point of view, King Lear-Shakespeare's most explictly phenomenological play-renders explicit the issues of corporeality, world-constitution, and crisis latent in any portrayal of embodied subjectivity as it inhabits its perceptual fields. But such dramatizations only model the putting-into-play of these issues within the broader parameters of performance itself. For as one bodied subject confronts another across a space that is both discontinuous and shared, the experiential field of performance is subject to ambiguity and oscillation. At the center of this ambiguity is the tension between inside and outside, the irreducible twinness of a field that is-from all pointssimultaneously inhabited and seen. Drawing on the paradox of corporeality, theater displays a subjectivity always liable to objective framing and a visuality internally vulnerable to the body and its perceptual horizons. The following chapters will pursue these mutually entailing variables-body, image, subject, object-as they have been (and continue to be) set into motion on the contemporary stage.

CHAPTER

2 (Dis)figuring Space: Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself. By the hand it unceasingly changes the eye unceasingly changed. Back and forth the gaze beating against unseeable and unmakable. Truce for a space and the marks of what it is to be and be in face of. Those deep marks to show. -Beckett, "For Avigdor Arikha" Picasso ... paints out of urgency and, above all, it is urgency that he paints: he is the painter of time. Duchamp's pictures are the presentation of movement: the analysis, the decomposition, the reverse of speed. Picasso's drawings move rapidly across the motionless space of the canvas. In the works of Duchamp space begins to walk and take on form; it becomes a machine that spins arguments and philosophizes; it resists movement with delay and delay with irony. The pictures of the former are images; those of the latter are a meditation on the image. -Octavio Paz,

Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare

Modernist Scenography and the Theater of Form

Samuel Beckett, we know, was an author deeply interested in the visual arts. A frequenter of museums, "more at home in the company of painters than that of writers," he revealed this passion through a wealth of

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allusions to artists and works of art in his prose and drama. 1 But Beckett's temperament was more deeply visual than a study of allusions and influences might suggest. This temperament is most evident in the plays, for the theater's status as an imagistic medium allowed Beckett to counterpoint his exploration of language and voice with a study of vision as it is engaged by the theatrical mise-en-scene. Few dramatists have assumed such control over the theatrical image, the arrangement of its elements, its formal articulation. The minimalist stage specifications of Waiting for Godot ("A country road. A tree." [6b]) 2 leave much to the discretion of director and designer, but with Endgame (1957) Beckett appropriated a supervision of visual composition that he retained for thr rest of his dramatic career. Framed in tableau, the opening set of this play represents a performance field conceived with pictorial precision: its contours boldly rectangular, with walls, door, symmetrical windows, and reversed picture; its frontal plane laterally weighted by the pair of trash bins on one side and the stationary figure of Clov on the other, each flanking the centric chair covered with an old sheet. Coherent in its spatial conception, the set of Endgame opposes two visual principles: on one hand, a geometric strictness of line and plane, arranged with an almost gridlike regularity; and, on the other hand, the scatteredness of object (toque, rug, toy dog, gaff), the muting gray light, and the bent shapelessness of human form. As Clov and Hamm traverse this stage space in straight lines and right angles, they situate themselves within the compositional tensions of their visual world. Beckett's subsequent plays show a deepening of this attention to the theatrical image and an increasing subordination of the human body to specifically visual components and effects. Through Krapp's Last Tape (1958), Happy Days, Play, and Come and Go (1966), Beckett's specifications concerning location, formal arrangement, movement, and lighting become steadily more detailed, fixing the performance image 1 The quotation is from Martin Esslin, "A Poetry of Moving Images," in Beckett Translating/ Translating Beckett, ed. Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossman, and Dina Sherzer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 67. On Beckett's interest in the visual arts, see Dougald McMillan, "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory," in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: McGrawHill, 1975), 121-35; and Ann Cremin, "Friend Game," Art News 84 (May 1985): 82-89. 2 References to Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days are taken from the individual Grove editions; references to Beckett's other plays for theater and television are taken from the Collected Shorter Plays. For the sake of consistency, British spellings have been Americanized.

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more precisely as compositional entity. But it is in the plays of the 1970s and 198os that Beckett's interest in play as image-as structure of visual forces and object of perceptual activity-displays itself most acutely. Language continues to govern the narrative dimensions of these plays, but it is increasingly subordinated to visual modes of address. The late plays as a group are filled with references to eyes and to the shapes and colors of visual appearance, and their verbs often mirror the audience's act of watching: look, watch, see, observe, stare, peer, gaze, gape, "all the eyes passing over you" (That Time, 234). "There before your eyes," says one of the voices in That Time (229 ), and his phrase is one of many in late Beckett that call attention to the performance field as something seen, by an actual audience facing an actual stage, in a medium that is, etymologically, a "seeing-place" (theatron). It is telling, in this respect, that the texts of Beckett's late plays abandon the conventional designations of "stage left" and "stage right" for descriptions that specify location "as seen from house" (What Where, 310 ), thereby articulating the theatrical image from the audience's point of view. Billie Whitelaw has said that Beckett "writes paintings,"3 and although the phrase risks eliding the strange theatricality of so pictorial a play as A Piece of Monologue (1980), it does suggest a relentless pursuit of the image that distinguishes Beckett from even the most visually conscious of his dramatic contemporaries and places his drama in formal proximity to the so-called theater of images in contemporary performance theater. 4 With his radically visual conception of stage space, Beckett has sought the environmental and compositional control of a Robert Wilson or Richard Foreman, taking on himself the role of metteur-en-scene through an increasing imagistic use of the elements of performance. In Beckett's dramaturgy-where light, darkness, movement, and position are given status equal to the linguistic text-performance field is rearticulated as visual field, and the plays themselves reflect an essentially scenographic conception. Even the actor's body becomes (in Beckett's hands) a kind of artistic material. In Pierre Chabert's words, the body in Beckett's theater "is worked, violated even, much like the raw material of the painter or sculptor, in the service of a systematic exploration of all possible relationships between the body 'Quoted in Ruby Cohn, just Play: Beckett's Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 31. Cynthia Nadelman offers a suggestive, though brief, discussion of Beckett as a visual stage artist in "Beckett's Landscape: The Stage and Beyond," Art News 84 (May 1985): 84-85. •Bonnie Marranca, ed., The Theatre of Images (New York: Drama Book Specialists, 1977).

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and movement, the body and space, the body and objects, the body and light and the body and words." 5 The theatrical imagism of Beckett's late plays has striking antecedents in the modernist scenographic movements that flourished in Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These movementsfrom early revolutions in set design in the work of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig to expressionism, surrealism, constructivism, and other "isms" that comprised an avant-garde still active when Beckett first arrived in Paris (in 1928)-shared a reaction against both the conventional spectacles of public theater and the verisimilitude pursued in the name of theatrical realism. Although the artists who participated in these movements often held radically different aesthetic programs, they shared an interest in redefining the stage in specifically visual and plastic terms. During a time of unprecedented collaboration between theater practitioners and other artists (particularly painters)-a collaboration that extended well beyond the "scene-painting" of the traditional picture-frame stage-a number of scenographic artists sought to bring to the stage the pictorial variety and richness that characterized the more strictly visual arts. In addition to collaborating with Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, and Leonid Massine on the ballet Parade (performed by the Ballets Russes in 1917), Picasso wrote plays of his own, as did Wassily Kandinsky, who called his works "color-tone-dramas." A greatly abbreviated list of premodernist and modernist visual artists who worked in set and costume design includes Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edouard Vuillard, Edvard Munch, Georges Braque, Giacomo Balla, Picasso, Kandinsky, Natalia Goncharova, El Lissitzky, Marc Chagall, Fernand Leger, Henri Matisse, Max Ernst, Kasimir Malevich, Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Joan Mir6, and Salvador Dali. 6 In addition to the documents of actual stage and costume designs, evidence of what we might call "neopictorialism" (to distinguish it from the conventional pictorialism of the nineteenth-century proscenium stage) is found throughout the period's avant-garde drama: in Federico Garcia Lorca's Blood Wedding, for instance, with its painterly boldness of color, or the painted backdrop of Cocteau's The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower. When August 'Chabert, "The Body in Beckett's Theatre," 23. 6 The contributions of painters and sculptors to modern scenography are detailed in Henning Rischbieter, ed., Art and the Stage in the Twentieth Century: Painters and Sculptors Work for the Theater, documented by Wolfgang Storch (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1968). For discussion of how cubism was applied to the theater, see J. Garrett Glover, The Cubist Theatre (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1983).

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Strindberg decided to end his play The Ghost Sonata by turning a spotlight on Arnold Bocklin's painting The Island of the Dead (which was mounted to one side of his Intimate Theater stage), he demonstrated a fascination with the boundaries between theater and painting that he shared with his contemporaries, many of whom were seeking ways of translating the pictorial into stage design. Other scenographic artists rejected the pictorial model in favor of more architectural definitions of mise-en-scene. "For too long our stage directors have sacrificed the bodily, live appearance of the actor for the painter's dead fictions," wrote Appia, and Craig declared: "I wish to remove the pictorial scene but to leave in its place the architectonic scene." 7 This scenographic impulse, which led beyond Appia and Craig to Friedrich Kiesler's "space stage," Stanislaw Witkiewicz's Theater of Pure Form, the geometric performance field of Bauhaus theater, and more contemporary experiments in the design and construction of stage environments, 8 entailed the use of lighting, stage decor, costume, and even sound to liberate the stage's plastic and spatial possibilities. "All modern attempts at scenic reform," Appia wrote, "converge on this essential point: that is, rendering to light its complete power, and, through it, to the actor and scenic space their integral plastic value." 9 In actual practice, the scenographic currents of neopictorialism and the spatial/architectural stage overlapped and informed each other in the early years of the twentieth century. What links the two currents is their determined formalizing impulse: their efforts to highlight principles of image, movement, space, and volume, and to claim for the theater an aesthetic identity commensurate with that of the other arts. Equally important to Beckett's (and other contemporary) theater, these currents also share a specific ambivalence concerning the actor's body as an element of this formalized mise-en-scene. On the one hand, the body offered itself as a formal element among the others, and it was often 7 Adolphe Appia, "Acteur, espace, lumiere, peinture," Theatre populaire, no. 5 (JanuaryFebruary I954 [essay written before I92o]): 37-42 (translation mine); Edward Gordon Craig, diary (3 February I909), quoted in Irene Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask: Gordon Craig, Movement, and the Actor (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, I987), I65. "Stage is space," wrote Friedrich Kiesler, "picture is surface" ("Debacle of the Modern Theatre," Little Review II [Winter I926]: 65). 8 The most complete illustrated survey of twentieth-century scenography is Denis Bablet's Revolutions of Stage Design in the Twentieth Century (Paris: Leon Arnie!, I977). See also Arnold Aronson, The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, I98I). 9 Appia, "Acteur, espace, lumiere, peinture," 40.

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embraced as the centerpoint of scenic articulation, determining spatial arrangement through its specifically human outlines and movements. "Space is space only for the person who moves about in it," Kiesler wrote: "For the actor, not for the spectator." 10 On the other hand, the actor's body threatened the stage's formal autonomy through its nonaesthetic physiology, its independent sentience, the various ways by which it registers its living presence. The very body that offered these scenographic artists new visual and spatial conceptions also posed a danger to the aesthetic enterprise through its insistent naturalism. An awareness of this danger is apparent even in the writings and set designs of Appia, who (more than most of his contemporaries) stressed the actor's body as the central element of a theatrical "work of living art." Drawing on movements elsewhere in the arts that centered on the body as an expressive medium (the "eurhythmics" of Emile Jaques Dalcroze, for example), Appia designed a scenographic practice that would "maintain the living and plastic body as our point of departure." 11 Appia placed the actor at the top of the scenic hierarchy, followed (in order) by space (the three dimensions of which are placed in service of the actor's plastic form), light (which further articulates the performance image), and a distant fourth, painting.U Yet as his haunting designs attest-with their quasi-abstract shapes and volumes, their rhythmic patterns of stairs, walls, and columns-the body at the heart of Appia's theater was not the naturalistic body, with its physiology and its messy individuality. The actor's spatializing presence was a spiritualized one, expressing an abstract principle that tended to subsume the body's recalcitrant physicality. For Appia, this principle was the spirit of music, and it was Richard Wagner who provided the guiding genius of his operatic designs. The musicalized body that comprises Appia's "work of living art" is a body that achieves its privileged theatrical expressiveness by being subordinated to its own essential rhythms. "Our whole physical organism, if it submits to the laws of music, will thus become a work of art-and thus only": though the monumental volumes of Appia's sets may be far from the minimalist stagescapes of Beckett's late plays, we can hear anticipations of Beck°Kiesler, "Debacle of the Modern Theatre," 67. Adolphe Appia, The Work of Living Art and Man Is the Measure of All Things, the former trans. H. D. Albright, the latter ed. and trans. Barnard Hewitt (Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, I96o), 9· 12 Appia, "Acteur, espace, lumiere, peinture," 39· 1

11

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ett's theater of corporeal discipline when Appia speaks of the value of the human body "under the control of music." 13 The attempt to subordinate the actor to the formal requirements of the mise-en-scene, to discipline or otherwise eliminate a recalcitrant corporeality that threatens to disrupt the stage's aesthetic integrity, was carried much further by later scenographic practitioners and theorists. Practitioners of cubist and other largely pictorial theatrical styles often sought both to stylize and to deform the human body through costume, masks, denaturalized movement, and even lighting effects. In his "new theater of the beautiful object," Leger relegated the actor to being a "moving part of the scenery," with the same formal status as the other performance elements: "The object has replaced the subject, abstract art has come as a total liberation, and the human figure can now be considered, not for its sentimental value, but solely for its plastic value." 14 Similarly, in Witkiewicz's Theater of Pure Form, "The actor, in his own right, should not exist; he should be the same kind of part within a whole as the color red in a particular painting or the note C-sharp in a particular musical composition." 15 The designer/theorists of the Bauhaus explored the intersections of human and architectural space, but Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's remarks on the use of metallic masks and costumes make clear the extent to which the geometric lines and the robotic costumes of Bauhaus theater were intended to occlude the actor's corporeal individuality: "The pallid face, the subjectivity of expression, and the gestures· of the actor in a colored stage environment are therefore eliminated without impairing the effective contrast between the human body and any mechanical construction." 16 Mistrust of the performing body led to proposals that sought to eliminate the actor entirely or replace him or her with mechanical substi13 Appia, The Work of Living Art and Man Is the Measure of All Things, r27, I I2 (emphases added). On Beckett's discipline of the actor, see W. B. Worthen, "Beckett's Actor," Modern Drama 26 (December r983): 4I5-24; and idem, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, r992), IJI-42. 14 Fernand Leger, "The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle," in Functions of Painting, ed. Edward F. Fry, trans. Alexandra Anderson (New York: Viking, I973), 39-40; and idem, "The Human Body Considered as an Object," in ibid., I55· 15 Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, "On a New Type of Play" (r920), in The Madman and the Nun and Other Plays, ed. and trans. Daniel C. Gerould and C. S. Durer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, r966), 293. Witkiewicz was also a painter. 16 Laszl6 Moholy-Nagy, "Theater, Circus, Variety," in The Theater of the Bauhaus, ed. Walter Gropius, trans. Arthur S. Wensinger (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, I96I), 67.

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tutes. Of these latter, the most famous (and influential) was Craig's theory of the Uber-marionette. Drawing on symbolist theater, which had explored the puppets as a device uniquely suited to symbolic expression (Maurice Maeterlinck and Alfred Jarry had both experimented with puppets, as did Henri Signoret in his Petit Theatre des Marionettes [1888-94]), 17 Craig called for the Uber-marionette as a replacement for the actor's body, which (he claimed) constituted a flawed instrument in the production of symbolic meaning. "Alas! the human body refuses to be an instrument, even to the mind which lodges in that body." 18 Craig's almost Swiftian abhorrence of the body's disruptive physicality is evident in his condemnation of Renaissance painting: Up sprang portraits with flushed faces, eyes which bulged, mouths which leered, fingers itching to come out of their frames, wrists which exposed the pulse; all the colors higgledy-piggledy; all the lines in hubbub, like the ravings of lunacy. Form breaks into panic; the calm and cool whisper of life in trance which once had breathed out such an ineffable hope is heated, fired into a blaze and destroyed, and in its place-realism, the blunt statement of life, something everybody misunderstands while recognizing. 19

Flushed faces, bulging eyes, wrists that register the pulse's rhythmsthe human body threatens artistic control, breaks form into panic, through a physicality that stands outside and consumes (heats, fires, blazes, destroys) the formal tranquility of the spirit. The solution, for Craig, was a fully mechanized body, one that would represent the actor's corporeality without succumbing to its physiological anarchy. Revealing both his ideal of the deanimated body and his fantasy of dictatorial control over such intransigent matter, Craig quotes Napoleon on the ideal representation of the hero: "We should see him as a statue in which the weakness and the tremors of the flesh are no longer perceptible." 20 17 Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask, 3 2. For further discussion of Craig's debt to symbolism, see Christopher Innes, "In the Mind's Eye: Edward Gordon Craig and the Actor," in 40 Years of Mise en scime/40 ans de mise en scene, ed. Claude Schumacher (Dundee: Lochee Publications, 1986), 59-70. Heinrich von Kleist called for a theater of marionettes; see "On the Puppet Theater" (1810), in An Abyss Deep Enough: Letters of Heinrich von Kleist (New York: Dutton, 1982), 211-16. 18 Edward Gordon Craig, On the Art of the Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1911; New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1956), 48. 19 lbid., 89. 20 lbid., So.

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Although Craig's actorless theater was never realized, his vision of a performing body transformed into pure instrument exerted an influence on subsequent theater: on the "biomechanics" of Vsevold Meyerhold, the mask theater of William Butler Yeats, and on the mime statuaire of Etienne Decroux, the pioneer of modern mime. 21 But Craig's writings on the Uber-marionette were less singular than their historical notoriety suggests, for they reflected and carried to its logical resolution a dilemma concerning the actor's presence on stage that had characterized (and would continue to characterize) the wider formalist/aesthetic scenographic movement. If (as discussed in the next chapter) the stagecraft of realism/naturalism foregrounded the body's physiological and phenomenal actuality, scenographic movements toward the pictorial and the architectural pressed this body toward the inanimate, seeking to subordinate it, as image and instrument, in a stage conceived as visual field. Irene Eynat-Confino's remark on Craig applies to this broader theatrical enterprise: "The tiber-marionette, as a beautiful objet d'art, was in a paradoxical way a conscious attempt to deny the temporal nature of the theatrical creation, to overcome the immediacy of death by taming it, by holding it in bondage, freezing life in a manipulated statue."22 Her image of the statue (like that in Craig's Napoleon quotation) suggests that the theatrical movement that contains Appia and Craig, Witkiewicz and Leger, Meyerhold and the designers of the Bauhaus may have more in common with the nineteenth-century popular theater than its declared rejection of this theater would lead one to believe. In their concern to "freeze" the living body within the visual, both neopictorialism and the architectural/space stage share with the earlier theater a fascination with the statuary body-a fascination re21 Discussing the relationship of Craig's ideal of the marionette to his own corporeal mime, Decroux wrote: "I personally wish for the birth of this actor made of wood .... Is it not obvious that our way will have been substantially paved when the practice of corporeal mime becomes learned? After all, its movements already draw their breath from the cardinal lines of geometry" (Etienne Decroux, Words on Mime, trans. Mark Piper [Claremont, Calif.: Pomona College Theater Department, I98 5], 8). In June I945, Decroux, Jean-Louis Barrault, and Eliane Guyon held a performance of corporeal mime with Craig as guest of honor; see Thomas Leabhart, Modern and Post-modern Mime (London: Macmillan I989), 48-52. Maggie Rose discusses the influence of Craig's theories and other forms of marionette theater on the plays of Yeats and Beckett in "The Actor as a Marionette: Yeats and Beckett as Directors of Their Own Plays," in Perspectives of Irish Drama and Theatre, ed. Jacqueline Genet and Richard Allen Cave (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, I99I), 29-38. See also James Knowlson and John Pilling, "Beckett and Kleist's Essay 'On the Marionette Theatre,' " in Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, I979), 277-85. 22 Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask, 98.

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fleeted in the tableau convention of nineteenth-century drama, as well as in the tableaux vivants (or "living pictures," live models posing in scenes from painting, sculpture, and other sources) on the popular stage. 23 If this exploration of the body as image, this interest in the relationship of the stage to the other visual media, has had an impact on such contemporary theatricians of the image as Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson, it has also made itself felt, in various ways, throughout the literary drama at the end of the twentieth century. The characters of Tina Howe's Painting Churches (1983) assume the poses of paintings by Michelangelo and John Singer Sargent, and the protagonist (Mags) paints an onstage portrait of her parents. David Hare places a copy of Matisse's The Bay at Nice on the stage of his play by the same name (1986), and this stage is filled, at the end of the play, by an image of the bay that inspired Matisse's painting. Wole Soyinka's A Play of Giants (19 8 5) opens with three African dictators standing immobile, "living statues" who pose for a sculptor creating their monument. But it is in Beckett's eight theater pieces from Not I (1972) through What Where (1983) that this scenic imagism has found its fullest realization as well as its most profound interrogation. In their exploration and refinement of the theater's visual principles, these plays constitute an unprecedented "meditation" (to borrow Paz's term) on the formal possibilities-and limits-of the theatrical image. 24 The remainder of this chapter considers, in some detail, the central components of Beckett's performance image-shape, light, darkness, color, movement, depth, lateral arrangement-in order to suggest principles of visual articulation and arrangement that govern the late plays as a group. 25 Detailing such principles will contribute, I hope, to a "visual poetics" for these remarkable plays, illustrating the tension, imbalance, and instability that give Beckett's most recent work for the stage its consistency as well as its distinctive visual animation. Animation is at the center of Beckett's increasingly complex imagistic use of his theatrical elements, for plays 23 An informative discussion of this genre can be found in Jack W. McCullough, Living Pictures on the New York Stage (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, I98I). 24 0ctavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, trans. Rachel Phillips and Donald Gardner (New York: Viking, I978}, 3· 25 For a chronological study of the late plays, see Enoch Brater, Beyond Minima/ism: Beckett's Late Style in the Theater (New York: Oxford University Press, I987). Because of my concern here with the stage as performance medium, I focus my observations on Beckett's theater plays, foregoing detailed analysis of the plays for television.

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such as That Time and A Piece of Monologue juxtapose the virtual absence of explicit action with a striking complexity of compositional action. Like a Klee or a Mondrian, or like the work of twentieth-century artists Beckett most openly admired-}. B. Yeats, Bram van de Velde, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Avigdor Arikha-Beckett's theatrical material is charged with a peculiarly modern aesthetic: a celebration of subversion and imbalance; a yearning toward resolution, heightened through its frustration; and a dialectical tension between the human body and its visual deformation. In the end, any discussion of Beckett's theater of the image must move beyond a strictly formal analysis and into the realm of the spectator, who activates and indeed animates the theatrical image through the act of seeing. Visual field is, before all else, perceptual field, and it calls into play what E. H. Gombrich terms "the beholder's share" and what Rudolf Arnheim calls "the creative eye," 26 active in its scanning of visual percepts, rich in its experience of compositional balances and tensions. To introduce the spectator in this way is to disclose, once again, the living body in Beckett's theater of form, as it is disclosed in the agonized bodies of the plays themselves. Even as it presses the stage toward the inanimate, in other words, Beckett's stagecraft explores the limits of its perceptual imagism, of the formalist mise-en-scene inherited from Craig and others. In so doing, Beckett's late plays constitute a broader investigation and critique of modernity's obsession with the image (an obsession that extends back to the Renaissance) and of the Cartesian dichotomy of disembodied observer and objectified field that has undergirded this visual tradition. Martin Jay has described both "the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era" and the challenges to Cartesian perspectivalism that characterize the approach to this visual heritage on the part of twentieth-century philosophy and the visual arts. 27 Beckett participates in this challenge by carrying imagism to its extreme and uncovering the corporeal field from which its seeks to dis26 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 2d ed., rev. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I96I), I79; Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, I974). 27 Martin Jay, "Scopic Regimes of Modernity," in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, I988), esp. 3, I8. "The fundamental event of the modern age," Heidegger writes, "is the conquest of the world as picture" ("The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt [New York: Harper and Row, I977), I34. See also David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, I993).

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engage itself. In the rigor of its compositional parameters, Beckett's drama directs attention to the phenomenology of theatrical space and the issues that such a phenomenology raises: the perceptual dynamism of the theatrical image as it reflects and (dis)embodies the seeing eye; the dialectic of living body and aesthetic form; and the problematic status of perceptual (or any other) formalism within the theater's bodied space. Light, Darkness, and the Image in Flight As in the scenographic experiments that anticipated it, the visual field of Beckett's late plays is characterized by the formal predominance of shape, an emphasis that endows objects and the performance image they comprise with a high level of compositional abstraction. As theatrical setting is reduced to spare, geometric outline (the rectangular table in Ohio Impromptu [1981], the spherical globe and quadrilateral pallet edge in A Piece of Monologue, the illuminated strip in Footfalls, the circular spots of light in Not I and That Time), visual field acquires an almost classical simplicity of form, relinquishing the anthropomorphic signatures of "inhabited space" for the aesthetic surface of visual abstraction. Those vestiges of naturalism that assert themselves in the setting (the rocking chair in Rockaby, the director's chair in Catastrophe, the book in Ohio Impromptu, the megaphone in What Where) seem mocked by the essentially formal space that surrounds them, and they gradually surrender their utilitarian value for the more strictly aesthetic value of shape. In keeping with this increasingly formal conception of mise-en-scene, the characters of Beckett's late plays are themselves objectified as aesthetic components of the visual field, reduced from person to figure, or less, "as though turned to stone" (Ohio Impromptu, 287) or other inanimate matter. The djellabas, gowns, wraps, coats, cowls, and hoods with which Beckett dresses these figures streamline the visual irregularities of the human shape, subsuming the individuating features of the body within a muting broadness of form. The anatomical reduction in plays such as Not I and That Time further diminishes figural irregularity, pressing the bodily features of mouth and head into the · visual features of bordered hole and oval. 28 Insofar as these characters 28 Beckett heightens the effect of abstraction in Not I and That Time by elevating the figures of Mouth and Listener to unnatural levels above the stage surface (eight and ten feet, respec-

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often possess little more than outline and shape, the geometry of figure forms part of a larger geometry of field, contributing to a performance image that is at once sculptural and pictorial. From this perspective, the quasi-naturalistic Catastrophe reflects in its unfolding the visual progression of Beckett's dramatic oeuvre from its early to late phases. Opening with the furniture of a recognizable room, surrounded on three sides by naturalistic walls, Catastrophe enacts the falling away of naturalistic space in favor of the more formal space represented by the Protagonist, "standing on a black block r 8 inches high," "age and physique unimportant" (297). As the lighting narrows successively to figure, then head, and as the Director and Assistant are banished to darkness and to the wings, human shape gives way to the more abstract shape of a face freed from its moorings, floating as visual emblem in the stage's obscurity. 29 In even the simplest terms of visual outlines, then, Beckett's performance image reveals conflicting perceptual inclinations; it is an image in flight, caught between a theater of human bodies and the depersonalizing outlines of abstract shape. Although (as we shall see) the figures in these plays assert sentience and physiological particularity, such gestures are themselves challenged by the surrounding field and by the world of circles and quadrilaterals to which their own regularized shape joins them. Mouth, May in Footfalls, the Woman in Rockaby, and the tively). By doing so, he effectively deanthropomorphizes the performance space, liberating the illuminated figures from the contexts of normal human height and from the implicit presence of a body that such height suggests. This effect is similar to that obtained in Play, where human heads protrude from urns "about one yard high" (I47). 29 Compare this formalizing tendency with the perceptual experience of Watt while he observes the Galls, father and son, tuning Mr. Knott's piano: "Thus the scene in the musicroom, with the two Galls, ceased very soon to signify for Watt a piano tuned, an obscure family and professional relation, an exchange of judgments more or less intelligible ... and became a mere example of light commenting bodies, and stillness motion, and silence sound, and comment comment" (Samuel Beckett, Watt [New York: Grove, I959], 73). The pressure toward formal abstraction in Beckett's dramatization of the human figure can be appreciated by considering his revisions of the original What Where. In the version filmed for German television (Was Wo, I985), Beckett reduced Bam, Bern, Bim, and Born to faces alternating in a trio of nearly circular ovals, with Voice changed from a megaphone to a larger, dimly perceptible face. In a revised theater version first performed in Paris (I986), Bam, Bern, Bim, and Born remained faces, suspended in stage darkness, and Voice became a pool of orange light. For accounts of the former production, see Martha D. Fehsenfeld, "Everything Out but the Faces: Beckett's Reshaping of What Where for Television," Modern Drama 29 (June I986): 229-40; for the text of the latter, see Beckett, "What Where: The Revised Text," ed. S. E. Gontarski, Journal of Beckett Studies 2 (Autumn I992): I-Io. Unless otherwise noted, I restrict my observations in this chapter to the play's original (I983) version.

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figures of What Where may assert themselves against this pervasive reduction, but the attempt only underscores their subordination within a world of visual abstraction. Like an optical illusion, or like the perceptual conflicts achieved in cubist art, Beckett's visual field oscillates between the naturalistic and the formal, between a world of recognizable objects and figures and a world of heightened shape. It is a world where a table is both itself and an illuminated rectangle, "say 8' X 4 "' (Ohio Impromptu, 28 5 ), and where a Mouth is both an organ of human speech and a "godforsaken hole" (Not I, 216). To speak of shape in Beckett's drama is, inescapably, to speak of light, for Beckett joins Appia and Craig in making light an active, even aggressive, determinant of the theatrical image. From the inquisitorial beam in Not I through the "faint diffuse light" of A Piece of Monologue (26 5 ), Beckett's stage light participates as actively in the definition of theatrical shape as it does in the delivery of speech in the earlier Play. Scored by Beckett's meticulous stage specifications like the dynamics and phrasing of a musical composition, light offers the primary articulation of the mise-en-scene, establishing (through its illumination) the spatial contours of the visual object. The harsh reflection of light gives the white deal table its striking predominance in Ohio Impromptu, and the rectangular playing area of What Where owes its existence entirely to the light that defines it within the surrounding "shadow" (3 ro). Light provides location and outline for Mouth, Listener (in That Time), the chalklike Speaker (in A Piece of Monologue), and the conic V (in What Where). As Not I demonstrates, so authoritative is stage light as a determinant of visual form in Beckett's late plays that it dominates the human figure itself, modifying-even deforming-the body's own shape through restricted and gradated illumination. In Footfalls, Beckett subjects May to the visual distortions produced by uneven lighting, drawing her feet into the lit sphere of the walking strip while pressing her head and upper body into near invisibility. With similar intrusion, light seems to sever the head of the Woman in Rockaby (like that of Listener in That Time or the Protagonist in Catastrophe), maintaining it in a state of consistent illumination while successive fades cause chair and body to recede. 30 30 Enoch Brater offers a perceptive analysis of the play of light on the theatrical object in Rockaby: "Beckett in fact makes us see the same figure in different artificial lights, offering us an ever-shifting series of perspectives from which to encounter the image anew .... Throughout the play ... gradations of light are ... meant to shift and vary, sometimes even

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Light, then, serves as an agent in and for Beckett's performance image; indeed, as it carves illuminated space from the surrounding darkness, consolidating itself in pools on the stage floor, it approaches the status of visual object in its own right. By endowing light itself with visual substance, Beckett allows unprecedented plasticity to a theatrical element often consigned to disattention. He establishes a parallel effect with that opposite component of theatrical space, the darkness where light does not penetrate. Darkness, of course, is a conventional nonspace in theatrical performance-a region of absence that borders illumination, shrouding wings, backstage, and audience in a kind of perceptual anonymity. But in Beckett's late plays, light throws into relief the darkness around it, the comparative vastness of the "nonseen" (stage not seen, bodies not seen) that bears upon the image in its incandescence. Darkness, in Beckett's theater, frames illumination, and through its sheer predominance in plays such as Not I and Rockaby it acquires pressing visual weight, as though it shared substance with the black costumes so frequent in Beckett's late drama. When the Speaker of A Piece of Monologue alludes to his fictional counterpart, staring from the edge of lamplight "into dark whole again" (268), his play on words captures the paradoxical and innovative fullness of Beckettian stage darkness. This heightened plasticity of light and darkness has pronounced consequences for the performance image in Beckett's plays. In striking counterpoint to the traditional subordination of theatrical elements, ground becomes figure and means become ends as the conditions in which theatrical objects acquire or fail to acquire visibility themselves become a focus of theatrical attention, quasi objects with their own visual presence and weight. In contrast to the frequent passivity of visual ground in dramatic representation, light and darkness in these plays display an overt perceptual dynamism, interacting with each other as competing entities within given visual fields. In certain plays, the two perceptual elements confront each other as Manichaean absolutes, challenging each other across their shared boundaries with the boldness of their contrast, occasionally invading each other in a chiaroscuro as violent as that achieved, in painting, by El Greco. We have already considered some of the raids perpetrated by light on darkness: the sharp illuminations of figure in Not I and That Time, the spot-severance of to sparkle and gleam as the rocking chair is made to sway 'to and fro' " (Beyond Minima/ism, I68}.

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head in Rockaby and Catastrophe. But darkness reappropriates territory within these plays of pointed contrast: it fills the Mouth in Not I, for example, suggesting a cavern of visual night. Perhaps nowhere are the confrontational dynamics of light and darkness more apparent than in Ohio Impromptu, a play scored in terms of this visual polarity. The white hair of Reader and Listener join the top of the white deal table as areas of glaring brightness, luminous to the point of burning with their reflection of the overhead light (an invasion of light so strong that the figures seem to protect themselves from it by shielding their brows with their hands). But darkness mounts a number of counterassaults on the image claimed by light: through the shaded foreheads; the black coats that separate heads from table; the underside, which denies the table its legs and causes it to float, as if unattached, in stage space; and, most strikingly of all, the black, wide-brimmed hat at table center, which (viewed laterally) causes darkness to invade the illuminated plane from above and exerts a counter-push to the upward reflection.Jl Such confrontations, however, and the vivid polarities that make them possible, are exceptions in late Beckett. Bright light is much more regularly the property of such earlier plays as Happy Days ("Blazing light" [7]) and Act without Words I (1957) ("Dazzling light" [43]), and sharp dichotomies of light and dark are more overt in Act without Words II (1960), Krapp's Last Tape, and Play. 32 Come and Go and Breath (1969), and segments of Play signal a transition to a use of light much more characteristic of the late plays as a group: the modulation of brightness in a middle region, neither fully bright nor fully dark. Under the heading "MAXIMUM LIGHT," Beckett's directions for Breath contain the following specification: "Not bright. If o=dark and 10=bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back" (211). Such 31 Compare the substantiality of darkness in Beckett's late plays with the visual density of shadows in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Although his paintings differ from Beckett's plays in composition and in tone, Bacon makes similar use of the materiality of darkness to invade the body and bring about its visual deformation. See Ernst van Alphen, Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (London: Reaktion Books, 1992), 82-88. 32 "This mime should be played on a low and narrow platform at back of stage, violently lit in its entire length, the rest of the stage being in darkness" (Act without Words II, 49 ); "Table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of stage in darkness" (Krapp's Last Tape, 55). Beckett's lighting directions for Play specify "strong spots" (q8) for the play's first half and its final chorus, and fainter spots for the play's first and middle choruses and its second half. For a discussion of the thematic roles of light and darkness in Beckett's earlier prose and drama, see James Knowlson, Light and Darkness in the Theatre of Samuel Beckett (London: Turret Books, 1972).

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"middle light" hearkens back to the "gray light" of Endgame (I), but it more fully sounds the keynote of the late plays, that "faint," "dim," "diffuse," "subdued" light that only imperfectly illuminates the objects and inhabitants of the mise-en-scene. 33 Half-light plays an important role in the perceptual animation of the late plays, establishing a marked theatrical tension. Alluding to "gray light" (268), the Speaker in A Piece of Monologue echoes Beckett's television play Ghost Trio (I 97 5) and its palette of grays: "The color gray if you wish, shades of the color gray" (248). But this echo hides a contrast, for the grayness of theatrical half-light differs markedly from the grayness of the photographic or televisual image. The muted grays of Ghost Trio mediate between the poles of black and white, establishing in their neutrality a kind of visual stability. In the theater, however, the perception of light is determined much more rigorously by the poles of "normal" light and darkness, and the oppositional tensions between them. Unlike black-and-white televisual space, which is governed by the screen's fluorescent grayness, theatrical space is inhabited space, and like the world outside the theater it is more fully conditioned by the brightness polarities of day and night. In such an environment, halflight occupies an unstable middle ground, uneasily poised between normal poles of illumination. From the slight dimming of Mouth's spotlight to the more radically faint lighting of What Where, diminished lighting feels unnatural precisely because illumination and darkness constitute such a strong theatrical duality and exert such strong visual pulls. The very language of Beckett's specifications-"faint," "dim," "barely visible" -underscores the aberrational effect of such lighting and the governing polarity that makes it so. The oppositional tension of light and dark achieved in Ohio Impromptu, then, is not eliminated in the spectral plays of ghostly halflight; it is replaced by tension of a different order. Hovering between poles that it refuses to embrace, the diminished lighting in Beckett's late plays is unstable, simultaneously approaching and resisting the extremes of full illumination and the absence of light. Half-light shares both light and darkness, and this conflicting loyalty gives Beckett's stage perceptual disequilibrium, with space and the elements that inhabit it striving, 33 Anticipating this world of later Beckett, Malone characterizes the illumination in his room as "a kind of leaden light" and "gray incandescence" (Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies, in Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, trans. Patrick Bowles [New York: Grove, 1955], 220, 221). In a striking (and revealing) phrase, Clov characterizes the gray light of Endgame as "light black" (32).

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in their muted articulation, toward opposing states of visual rest. To the extent that the pulls of illumination and extinguishment make themselves felt, Beckett's "hellish half-light" (Play, 152) is light divided within itself. Beckett heightens the instability of this mutual infusion-light with darkness, darkness with light-through the techniques of fade-in and fade-out that serve to reveal and extinguish the field of illumination. In the earlier plays, Beckett employs the more abrupt framing devices of curtain and light switch to heighten the appearance of tableau as well as the visual discontinuity between illuminated image and theatrical darkness; through the sharp bracketing, each maintains perceptual autonomy. The slow fade-ins that open most of the late plays, on the other hand, underscore the gradual emergence of object and light from the surrounding darkness, whereas the concluding fade-outs emphasize their inevitable surrender. At both ends, the image crosses a gradient of illumination, modulating between light and darkness in a way that underscores their mutual interpenetration. To frame the dramatic object in this way is to consign it simultaneously to both realms-to make it a kind of visual "ghost," caught in its emergence from one perceptual world to another. 34 Of the plays that combine fade techniques with an overall half-light, few engineer the gradual shift of light intensity with more intricacy than Footfalls, a play one might think of as Beckett's study in shade. When stable, even the half-light in this play is gradated-"dim, strongest at floor level, less on body, least on head" (2 39 )-suggesting in its movement from one brightness level to another both the imperceptibility of distinction and the instability of individual brightness level. Fade-in and fade-out underscore this variability, modulating the image across the borders of obscurity: initially illuminated through a gradual fade-up, the play's visual field undergoes a sequence of slow returns to darkness and slow reemergences, each to an even more reduced brightness level ("Fade up to a little less still on strip" [242]). In the concluding image, the figure May has disappeared, and all that remains is a light barely perceptible in the surrounding darkness. On its narrative level, the play concerns May, her place among the voices and stories that fill the stage, 34 Beckett achieves this effect on the visual image even in Ohio Impromptu and Catastrophe, plays otherwise organized according to the sharper opposition of darkness and light: fade-in (in Ohio Impromptu) demonstrates the slow emergence of visual form, whereas fade-out (in both plays) dramatizes its disappearance, as stage darkness slowly corrodes the articulations of brightness.

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and the spectral consciousness of this moving shade who will never "have done ... revolving it all" (240). But on the more immediate perceptual level, Footfalls is a drama of light, of its insistent though diminishing attempts to define figure and space, and of the imperceptible shadings that merge it with darkness. May's movement, both solemn and delicate, joins in the broader choreography of light; through her participation in the play's visual field, May shares the modulations of light's middle region, and she partakes of its diminishment to that point of "lessness" where it can no longer sustain her theatrical presence. So pivotal is the interplay of darkness and light in Beckett's late plays, and so dominant the black-and-white continuum, that color plays a distinctly secondary role in the theatrical image. Compared with the hues of conventional performance, Beckett's drama is strikingly colorless, relinquishing the artist's and designer's palette for the opposition of black and white and the intermediacy of gray. Hair, clothing, props, set-all are conceived according to this austere scale. The coats of Ru, Vi, and Flo in Come and Go are muted by Beckett's description-"dull violet (Ru), dull red (Vi), dull yellow (Flo)" (r96)-and when Beckett directed the play in 1966 he further reduced the garments to different shades of gray. 35 Even the human complexion presents risks for Beckett's stage worlds: "Like that cranium?" Assistant asks Director in Catastrophe; "needs whitening," comes the reply (299 ). Alan Schneider's decision, in his 1984 New York production of Catastrophe, to fill Beckett's uncharacteristically open setting direction with a red armchair provided a performance image startlingly (and playfully) un-Beckettian in its assertion of color. Jane Alison Hale's observation concerning Eh Joe (r965) characterizes all of Beckett's plays since Happy Days: "Color belongs to the past, and the dying universe of his dying character turns to a uniform gray before we lose sight of it." 36 "Discussed in Cohn, Just Play, 235. At one point during rehearsals for the Berlin Footfalls, Beckett felt that the production displayed "too much color" (Walter D. Asmus, "Rehearsal Notes for the German Premiere of Beckett's 'That Time' and 'Footfalls' at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, Berlin," trans. Helen Watanabe, Journal of Beckett Studies, no. 2 [Summer 1977], 86). 36 ]ane Alison Hale, The Broken Window: Beckett's Dramatic Perspective (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1987), 99· Compare the movement toward the monochromatic in the "coloring" of Beckett's performance world with the following passage from MerleauPonty's discussion of the perceptual consequences of neurological damage: "The destruction of sight, wherever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colors are affected in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to

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There is color, of course, in these plays, and we must not neglect its minute disruption of the black-and-white scale: the pale wood in Rockaby, alternately soft and gleaming as it rocks in the field of light; the red and pink of lips and tongue in Not I, glistening with moisture, set off by the whiteness of teeth; the blue, green, or brown of an iris in That Time; the slightly golden tinge of hair in Ohio Impromptu; the inevitable flesh tones that maintain visual autonomy despite attempts (like the Director's) to "whiten" human skin. But when color threatens in Beckett, it is carefully muted, its singularity of hue strictly minimized. The dominance of the black-and-white continuum serves to dull what little color there is in these plays toward its monochromatic scale. The flesh tones of Reader and Listener, for instance, gravitate perceptually toward the white that subjugates the set, a white represented with glaring predominance in table and hair. In coordination with the darkening effects of shadow on the lowered faces, this influence endows natural skin hues with a pallor, pressing color toward the neutrality that the set seems to require. A more pronounced "graying" can be observed in those plays that shroud color in the muting obscurity of half-light. Mouth's lips and tongue, for instance, project a color midway between red, brown, and gray in the "faintly lit" stage world of Not I; and the same features of the Speaker's face in A Piece of Monologue display, parsimoniously, what is almost a memory of color. As with so much else in these late plays, the color represented by these isolated appearances is of a certain order, inhabiting the in-betweenness of imperfect articulation. Beckett's performance field may reach toward black and white while recalling a world of reds, greens, and blues, but it falls short of both, and the promises of color and its absence that reach out so teasingly further consign the performance image to its flight from visual stability to the no-man's-land of "not quite." 37 four and soon to two colors; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached, although the pathological color is never identifiable with any normal one" (Phenomenology of Perception, 9). 37 Rudolf Arnheim's observations on the black-and-white scale governing Picasso's Guernica bear on Beckett's theatrical subversion of color in the late plays. Such a scale, Arnheim argues, gives the painting "the character of a reduction. This is a particular form of removal from reality in that the work does not so much present 'another world' (as a painting in strong unrealistic hues might) but rather 'less than the world.' By comparison to a work in many colors, a monochrome is always strongly abstract, less substantial materially, closer to a diagram .... Monochrome, in other words, tends to move the image in the direction of a disembodied statement of properties rather than a rendition of objects" (Picasso's Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting [Berkeley: University of California Press, I962], 25).

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Movement; Depthless Space; Ex-centricity Visual articulation in Beckett's plays is also a function of location and movement. In most drama, location stands as a function of movement, continually modified by the rearranging effects of character mobility. Visual field shifts through the pattern of entrances and exits and through the changing visual dynamics of individual, duo, and group, whereas in such plays as Jean-Claude van Itallie's Motel (1965), David Mamet's American Buffalo (1975), and Trevor Griffiths's Oi for England (1982), movement and its accompanying actions effect radical rearrangement of the stage setting itself. Even in the reduced worlds of Waiting for Godot and Endgame, movement determines spatial arrangement as something volatile, self-transforming, and closer to the moving geometry of dance than to the stable surface of a painter's canvas. As with so many other features of the performance image, Beckett reverses the conventional hierarchies of movement and location in his final theater pieces. Extending a principle introduced in Happy Days, Play, and (in the ashcan-bound Nagg and Nell) Endgame, Beckett subordinates movement to position, circumscribing motion within the bounds of invariant location. The effect, far from transforming the performance image, is to confirm the fixity of position in that image. Not that movement is insignificant to the visual worlds of Beckett's late plays; on the contrary, the reduction of mobility that characterizes these plays provides the theatrical image with focal points of movement and gesture. Rocking back and forth through the stage light with a sway that modulates frontal angle as it scatters the reflections of light, the Woman in Rockaby displays a continually shifting visual presence. The tortured efforts of speech, as the elastic Mouth snaps open and shut in what amounts to a diminished danse macabre; the pinpointed opening and closing of eyes in That Time; the lifting and lowering of arms in Ohio Impromptu, balletic in their slowness as though moving through water: by banishing inessentials of action, Beckett heightens the visual weight of activity, making gesture and movement dramas in their own right. The visual force of such movement, however, is inseparable from its restraint, and-like the formalized gestures of Balinese dance that attracted both Brecht and Artaud-from the restricted range in which it is allowed. Mouth's gyrations, the opening and closing of Listener's eyes, even the Woman's rocking motion all take place within severely circumscribed boundaries, restricting movement in the compositional

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field. As a result, what Martin Esslin calls the "poetry of moving images"38 in Beckett's late plays involves a motion within stillness, confirming in its relative fixity the spatial geometry of the broader performance image. Paz's characterization of Duchamp's pictures is relevant to Beckettian drama: "Right from the start Duchamp set up a vertigo of delay in opposition to the vertigo of acceleration."39 Movement is, in a sense, frozen in the visual configurations of mise-en-scene, and it offers strikingly little effect on the outlines of this field. With its concessions to naturalism, Catastrophe constitutes an exception to this rule, for the cross-stage movements of Director and Assistant modify the configurations of character and setting. But even there, such movement eventually achieves the visual isolation of the most inert component of that setting: the standing Protagonist, his position "statuesque" even during his catastrophic final gesture. When it occurs in late Beckett, cross-stage movement presents little disruption of visual outline, and although it does introduce a fluidity absent from That Time and A Piece of Monologue, such movement-by its mechanical repetition-serves to confirm one or more images of visual fixity. The lateral pacing of Footfalls, for instance, modifies the stage image while keeping it curiously static, like the weary pacing of a caged animal; this effect is underscored by May's rigid carriage and by the sequences of motionlessness at the right and left extremes of the illuminated strip, which halt movement within two recurrent tableaux. Similarly, the exits and entrances in Beckett's original version of What Where offer slender variation on a visual pattern, and the characters Bam, Bern, Bim, and Born, shadowy in the play's half-light, present a purgatorially returning emblem, reduplicating itself with an almost arithmetic recursiveness. As with the permutated movements in the television piece Quad (1982), it seems at times that this configuration might reconstitute itself endlessly. Movement, then, highlights the solidity of location in the plays under discussion, endowing objects and figures with a sculptural quality not unlike that obtained in the theatrical and cinematic landscapes of Cocteau or of Wilson's performance tableaux. This highlighting emphasizes the placement of characters and objects in Beckett's performance field and the visual relationships established by such placement in threedimensional space. Several of Beckett's late plays manipulate depth, that dimension of visual field extending perpendicular to the audience's line 38 39

See Esslin, "A Poetry of Moving Images." Paz, Marcel Duchamp, 2.

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of sight. Not I, Catastrophe, and What Where all establish specific contrasts between forestage and backstage visual points: Auditor and Mouth, Director/Assistant and Protagonist, megaphone and players. But stage depth in these plays is no less complicated than light, color, or movement. In significant ways, Beckett undermines the effect of depth, rendering the third dimension of his performance images unstable. Diminished light reduces audience perception of depth by muting the articulation of image and the contrast essential to visual distance, and the absence of any visual backdrop that might serve as a reference point to gauge the extent (or even the direction) of depth gives the darkness surrounding and separating his visual objects a quality of "depthless space." In the words of Beckett's late prose piece Stirrings Still (199I), "Nothing to show not the same. No wall toward which or further from. No table back toward which or further from. In the same place as when paced from wall to wall all places as the same. Or in another." 40 As Gombrich notes (in a chapter of Art and Illusion entitled "Ambiguities of the Third Dimension"), this absence of third-dimension reference points creates ambiguity in the perception of size: "Where we lack other clues we cannot judge the size of an object unless we know its distance, and vice versa." 41 This effect is particularly pronounced in Not I and That Time, whose protagonists acquire the eerie effect of floating in an expanse outside measurement, alternately far away and intrusively close. Depth remains indeterminate-both itself and not itself-in part because Beckett's compositional interests lie more with the frontality of visual field, with the performance image processed by the eye in a kind of pictorial flatness. Exploiting the proscenium that frames many productions of the late plays, Beckett gives unusual precedence to the twodimensional visual projection (his work in video as a performance medium further attests to this interest). The pull toward twodimensionality is heightened by the generally frontal posture of figure and object, by frontal illumination, and by an arrangement of visual objects that stresses lateral configuration over configuration in depth. 40 Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still (New York: North Star Line, 1991 ), n.p. This indeterminacy of depth is largely eliminated from Catastrophe, a play whose action is set within a naturalistic set meant to represent a rehearsal stage. With its back wall and more familiarly naturalistic space, effects of depth are more clearly in place. Even in this play, though, the final light reduction eliminates these familiar boundaries, situating the Protagonist's illuminated head in the more familiar spatial limbo of the other late plays. 41 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 259.

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With its strict horizontality, A Piece of Monologue comes the closest to a pure stage frontality, and Beckett's other plays of the 1970s and r98os approximate its almost photographic flatness. The perceptual thickness of Beckett's stage darkness heightens this effect, "matting" the illuminated image like the black velvet of roadside art. Frontality calls attention to lateral arrangement in the performance image, and it accordingly allows exploration of one of the most prominent features governing this arrangement in Beckett's late plays: the positioning of character and object off-center in relation to the invisible vertical line bisecting the stage. This principle represents a shift from the location of visual objects in Beckett's earlier plays. There-with the exception of Waiting for Godot, a play whose spatial arrangement is left largely indeterminate-centrality rules linear configuration, often ruthlessly. 42 In Endgame, Hamm claims stage center, a middle point whose security he confirms by tracing the walled periphery of his cubic domain; and Krapp listens to the recordings of memory at a table "front center" (Krapp's Last Tape, 55). Winnie is "embedded up to above her waist in exact center" (Happy Days, 7) of a mound that is itself positioned midstage; stage direction is revealing of Beckett's intended visual effect: "Expanse of scorched grass rising center to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage. Back an abrupter fall to stage level. Maximum of simplicity and symmetry" (ibid.). Reinforced by the mound itself, the symmetry of this setting gives the performance image pronounced balance and weight, lodging it stably around the central axis. Beckett repeats these effects in the centric trios of Play and Come and Go. But even in the stage arrangement of these early plays, with their strong center points, there are indications of a competing visual principle: in Endgame, the ashcans of Nagg and Nell are located front left, at an oblique angle to Hamm's central armchair, whereas Willie's resting place is located at right rear in Happy Days. Each of these locations constitutes a secondary playing area, at visual odds with the primary position, and their tangency is underscored in the rectangular grid of Endgame's setting and the pyramidal organization of Happy Days. It is this off-center position, given primary focus, that rules the visual con42 Even in the relative absence of stage specifications, though, one can detect compositional pressures toward stage center in Godot. Gogo's boots are deposited at front center at the close of each act, and they dominate the stage in this position before Didi's entrance at the start of act 2. Similarly, the cross-stage movement between "extreme left" and "extreme right" implicitly underscores the center as a spatial reference point.

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figurations of the plays beginning with Not I. Mouth is located "upstage audience right," Auditor "downstage audience left" (Not I, 2r6); the Listener "midstage off center" (That Time, 228); May's strip "a little off center audience right" (Footfalls, 2 3 9 ); the Speaker "well off center downstage audience left," the lamp "two meters to his left," and the foot of a pallet bed "just visible extreme right" (A Piece of Monologue, 26 5 ); the Woman "downstage slightly off center audience left" (Rockaby, 275); Listener and Reader "audience right" (Ohio Impromptu, 28 5 ), near and at the end of a table set at midstage; the playing area "stage right as seen from house," and the megaphone (V) "downstage left" (What Where, }IO). The apparent exception is, once again, Catastrophe; there the Protagonist is positioned at "midstage," but his centrality must contend with the competing visual presence (and greater weight) of the Director's armchair "downstage audience left" (297). 43 This off-center positioning represents a pressing visual symbol of the decenteredness of Beckett's dramatic world and the figures who inhabit it: marginalized in time and space, disjointed from the gestures they make and the stories they tell, consigned to an unending linguistic evasion as they elude the centering subjectivity of "1." Avoiding at all costs the annihilating perception of self, the figures of these plays are living tangents, and their positioning on stage gives their "eccentricity" literal meaning. In Beckett's case, such meanings are grounded in direct perceptual response, embodied in the tensions of visual arrangement. The central positioning found in Beckett's earlier plays, for instance, and the compositional pull toward symmetry, endows these fields with a visual dynamic characteristic of Beckett's early conception of the stage. As perceptual theorists attest, the center of any composition is a point of potential rest, a location where visual weight achieves balance and where the forces of attraction and repulsion attain stability: in Arnheim's words, "A central position conveys stability. At any other location, objects are possessed by vectors that point in one or another direction." 44 At the same time, the very stability of visual centers threatens a kind of stasis, drawing the directional vectors into self-canceling inertia. As a point of balance aspired to by the surrounding elements, the center may assert perceptual harmony, but it also constitutes an 43 1t is interesting, in light of this abandonment of centricity, that when Beckett directed the Berlin production of Happy Days in I97I he shifted Winnie slightly to the right of center. For an account of this production, see Cohn, Just Play, 250-56. ••Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, I983), 84.

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absence, collapsing movement and direction into stillness and fixity. Such inertia is a kind of death, especially in the theater, which lives through the animating lines of movement and action. Like gravity, centrality in Beckett's earlier work represents not only the seductiveness of surrender and rest, but also a frighteningly imminent loss of action. As much as its stability may be yearned for ("What a curse, mobility!" [Happy Days, 46]), the center is visually static, a point (to quote Estragon) where "nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" (Waiting for Godot, 27b). With the shift to ex-centricity, Beckett galvanizes the vectors of the performance image into new perceptual configurations and forces the elements of visual field into a different dynamic relationship. If the centricity of Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, Happy Days, and Play renders the performance image heavy and inert, the shift away from center in Beckett's later plays introduces the tension of imbalance, endowing stage objects with perceptual disequilibrium in a field now charged with visual pull. As with all visual fields, the latent forces that characterize the stage are directed toward points of balance and visual rest. Given the perceptual magnetism of stage center, and the secondary attraction of the stage edges that border this center, objects located off-center are characterized by two perceptual strivings: toward the centric position they approach, and toward the stage edges that represent maximum distance from the center and, thereby, maximum independence from the center's attraction. Off-center objects are characterized, in other words, by the forces of approach and withdrawal, surrender and escape, and they establish fields of strong visual instability. Listener's imbalanced position in That Time, for instance, endows the illuminated head with powerful lateral tension: the image wants to occupy the center, feels disturbingly out of place, and may even appear to move across the field of vision as the spectator's eyes seek to resolve the perceptual instability; at the same time, by asserting a rival center, the Listener seems to pull away, as if it wanted to detach itself from the center's magnetic pull. As with the "slightly off center" Woman in Rockaby, figure and field do not "fit," and the visual field as a whole seems to strive to reconcile them, anxious for perceptual harmony. The immobility of Beckett's visual objects heightens the tension of perceptual disequilibrium, and such instability (in turn) renders the immobility of these objects all the more charged. Beckett plays occasional variations on ex-centricity and its perceptual tensions. The choreographed pacing of Footfalls, occurring within the

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bounds of an illuminated strip "a little off center audience right," presents a visual image that shifts between poles of imbalance, vaguely rocking with oscillating weight. Stage center becomes only one step among many, a space to be crossed, but its perceptual pull exerts destabilizing pressure on May's movement and her stationary positions. Like a planet in eccentric orbit, May acquires a tense heaviness at the end of the strip closest to midstage (L), drawn centripetally toward a center that she nonetheless resists, while, at the further end (R), she is pulled toward the darkness into which her illuminated strip seems to thrust. The differences are slight, but they are nevertheless felt in a performance field that addresses the eye so insistently, establishing a perceptual modulation to counterpoint both the stillness of May standing and the measured constancy of the pacing itself. " ... still living flesh" In all of the visual categories we have considered, and throughout this sequence of eight distinctly different plays, Beckett's late work for the theater reveals consistent principles of visual organization, principles that subsume particular features and individual instances. As performance images, these plays are governed by the laws of "almost" and "not quite"; subject to pulls and deflections, separation and penetration, they inhabit the unstable region of the "slightly off." Perceptually overdetermined, its elements layered with perceptual signals, the visual field in Beckett's plays contrasts markedly with performance space as it has traditionally been conceived in dramatic texts, and its elements stand outside conventional perceptual categories: figures poised between character and object, switching back and forth like the twin images of an optical illusion; illumination caught between light and darkness; color warped into the black-and-white continuum; movement and depth subordinated to the two-dimensional fixity of the frontal plane; the elements of that plane charged with the tensions of imbalance and ex-centricity. Unstable in articulation and arrangement, these theatrical images "claw"45 precisely because they violate traditional principles of 45 Discussing Endgame, Beckett has spoken of "the power of the text to claw" (letter to Alan Schneider, 21 June 1956, excerpted in Beckett, "Beckett's Letters on Endgame: Extracts from His Correspondence with Director Alan Schneider," in The Village Voice Reader, ed. Daniel Wolf and Edwin Fancher [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962], 183).

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visual composition. They are images ajar, asserting a precarious independence from more balanced display. We might be tempted to call the visual techniques of Beckett's late plays an "art of indeterminacy" were it not for the precision with which Beckett specifies the conditions of instability and the equal precision with which these conditions produce their often visceral effects. The half-lights, the color mutations, the offcenteredness, and the failed symmetries are the function of clearly defined aberrations, and their effects on audience perception result from their relationship to specific reference points of illumination, color, position, and textual reference. The visual techniques of Beckett's late plays frustrate through systematic strategies the perceptual inclinations and tendencies of the spectator as visual processor of theatrical imagery. It is here that we encounter an essential paradox of Beckett's late plays. As Beckett's characters find themselves increasingly confined in their ability to act, limited in their ability even to perceive the diminished worlds into which they are thrown, the audience finds itself involved more deeply in the activities of seeing, engaged more fully in the perception of the theatrical image. Yet the plays from Not I through What Where require seeing of a different order from that of the earlier plays and from that of conventional theatrical spectacle. The perceptual dynamics forged in late Beckett involve latency and discord, an impulse toward movement and change, the tense striving of the image to resolve itself and its unstable perceptual forces. If it is true that, as Hale notes, "Beckett sees the task of modern art to be the attempt at visual representation of movement,"46 then his late plays accomplish this task with striking theatrical innovation, combining pictorial fixity with acute visual dynamism. The diminishment of actual movement in Beckett's drama, in other words, has been accompanied by a liberation of immanent-or what Victor Vasarely called "cinetic"47-movement, in a performance field at once barely mobile and profoundly restless. It is Beckett's achievement, in his later plays, to explore the activity lodged in stillness and to investigate the depths of visual latency. The result, for this playwright of the image, is to etch the contours of performance even more in the spectator and to replace a theater of activity with a theater of perception, guided Hale, The Broken Window, I3. The term cinetic designates a mode of illusionistic or virtual movement in the visual arts; see Jasia Reichardt, "Op Art," in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos, 2d ed. (New York: Harper and Row, I974), 24I. 46

47

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by the eye and its efforts to see. Animated by a dramaturgy of middle regions and by an intensity of visual activity, the "seeing-place" of Beckett's late plays has become a performance field of unsurpassed perceptual engagement. These plays, in their effort to subordinate the elements of performance to visual ends, seem to carry the theatrical imagism explored at the beginning of this chapter to its logical conclusion: a purely formal drama in which the body is objectified within a patterned mise-en-scene and the spectator is "disembodied" in an act of pure seeing (as EynatConfino notes, Gordon Craig's theatrical innovations were designed "to cause a spectator to sever all links with his immediate physical reality").48 But Beckett's late plays subvert the pictorialism that their perceptual formalism seems to envision, and the very pursuit of the image represented by his theater serves, paradoxically, to disclose the living body as center of its spatial environment, finally resistant to formalist definition. As Beckett pares away scenic and characterological naturalism through his theatrical via negativa, in other words, it is the human presence-what Molloy calls "that unstable fugitive thing, still living flesh" 49-that limits objectification and formal reduction. Fragmented, cloaked, immobilized, and eviscerated, the body stakes its claims to sentience in Beckett's late theater in the midst of its progress toward form. In Beckett's starkest moments, there are stirrings still: the glistening of saliva, "a trace of face" or a "shiver" ("Bless his heart" [Catastrophe, 299]). The Protagonist's stare at the end of Catastrophe challenges the Director's formal conception of the human figure with a face particularized and alive. Though faint, the human pulse that Craig so wanted to eliminate from the theater-the trace of a Leiblichkeit that refuses objectification-is heard on the threshold of the body's reversion to pure matter. Equally important, the reduced body in Beckett's world remains a speaking body, and the force of its self-articulation increases as its spatializing resources become constrained, filling the sur- · rounding inertness with a dense linguistic presence. Despite the linguistic displacements and disavowals by which these monologues (spoken or electronically projected) seek to disown the bodied subject, the diminished figures onstage never succeed in masking the body as the site of this suffering: "Writhe she could not ... as if in actual agony" (Not I, 218); "Faint cry in his ear. Mouth agape" (A Piece of Monologue, 48 49

Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask, 39· Beckett, Molloy, in Three Novels, r r.

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268); "One night as he sat trembling head in hands from head to foot" (Ohio Impromptu, 287). In the silences, in the breathing and trembling that make theatrical stillness an impossibility, Beckett's figures inhabit the stage, living their condition of fixity. Finally, because they are themselves presented by actors, they offer a parallel disclosure of the performing body as it is reduced, limited, and immobilized by the requirements of Beckett's theater. Far from being effaced by Beckett's stagecraft, the actor's body reveals itself more deeply, its exigencies sharpened by the performative requirements with which they are constrained. Behind Mouth's suffering in Not I lies an anterior sufferingthat of the performing body subject to its own pain and deprivation, unified with its stage counterpart in an agon of expression. 50 In the end, though, the locus of Beckett's theater of the image remains the audience, that individual/collective "third body" (along with character and actor) of the stage's intercorporeal field. For Beckett stages his spectator as deliberately as he does his characters, consciously manipulating the experiential orientations of audience to stage. Beckett foregrounds his spectator not as the disembodied eye/! of a theatrical voyeurism, but as a body situated with its own positionality and material presence. From the early plays on, this embodiedness is emphasized by direct references to the audience's presence ("I see ... a multitude ... in transports ... of joy" [Endgame, 29])-and by elements of Beckett's dramaturgy that call attention to the performance moment. Narrative gaps and indeterminacies resist the construction of diegetic "elsewheres"; silences effect a disclosure of the theatrical present in its physiological actuality, a disclosure heightened by the formalizing of movement and gesture; and a concern with the sound of words (Krapp's savoring of "Spooool" and "viduity," for instance) draws attention to the sensory body of dramatic speech as it is produced and perceived in the theater. But as I suggested in the previous chapter, in my remarks on Beckett's characters, merely to note the heightened thereness of Beckett's audience is to neglect the deepening ways in which this presencing becomes subject, throughout Beckett's career, to phenomenological complication. Just as the later plays reveal a deepening dispossession in the bodied subjectivity of Beckett's characters, so these plays also involve the audience in a phenomenological (dis)placement, subjecting the audience to a perceptual decentering at the precise moment they disclose its body as the ground of theatrical seeing. 50

See Worthen, "Beckett's Actor."

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As with so many other features of Beckett's "theater of images," Catastrophe illustrates with particular clarity this staging of audience embodiment. For in the Director's concern with such things as lighting and sight lines, the play dramatizes the staging of the theatrical image in relation to the spectator's viewing point. The Protagonist's gesture at the end of the play-interrupting applause by fixing the audience in a stare-completes this action of putting the audience on the spot. Yet this metatheatrical "fixing" of the spectator is by no means straightforward. Although the applause that occasions the Protagonist's closing gesture anticipates our own applause, it is taped, and its effect in performance is of artificiality (as if it were arising within radio, not theatrical, space). Slightly earlier in the play, the Director steps into an auditorium that is supposedly our own ("in the front row of the stalls" [299] ), yet his voice addresses the stage from nowhere. As Hersh Zeifman notes, "We have assumed that the setting of Catastrophe is an actual theater-presumably the theater in which we ourselves are sitting-and yet D's actions shatter that illusion."51 The actual audience of Beckett's play, in other words, is both addressed and disclaimed, oriented and "disoriented," subject to the eerie superimposition of the fictional and the actual. Beckett calls attention to the audience-embodies its members as participants in an actual intercorporeal eventwhile simultaneously denying this audience the stability of unqualified presence. The late plays exploit modes of audience embodiment intimately tied to the perceptual innovations this chapter has sought to describe, "mirror effects" that suggest how deeply Beckett's most formalized work engages the channels between audience and stage. Merleau-Ponty writes: "There is an immediate equivalence between the orientation of the visual field and the awareness of one's own body as the potentiality of that field." 52 Perception, in short, is inescapably reflexive, and this is particularly evident when perceptual stimuli (an excess or deficiency of light, for instance) draw normally invisible perceptual operations to attention. The very resistance of Beckett's imagism to visual equilibrium serves to embody the audience within its own seeing, establishing a 51 Hersh Zeifman, "Catastrophe and Dramatic Setting," in 'Make Sense Who May': Essays on Samuel Beckett's Later Works, ed. Robin]. Davis and Lance St.]. Butler (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), 134. Zeifman quotes director Alan Schneider, during rehearsals for the 1983 New York production: "The audience must feel disoriented. The voice rises within what might be a vast theatre space, or some echoing void" (ibid.). 52 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 206.

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perceptual tension inimical to the passive "self-forgetting" of equilibrated vision: to see with difficulty is (phenomenologically speaking) to become that difficulty, its intransigence internalized as a physiological resistance. Reinforced by the myriad references to sight in the texts themselves, the visual instabilities of Beckett's late plays engage a distinctly metaperceptual spectatorial field, one that refuses selftranscending invisibility by stressing the body's ambiguous modes of presencing. 53 As Catastrophe illustrates, the physical positioning of the audience in Beckett's complex play of vision itself becomes a source of tension and reflexivity and of the peculiarly "displaced" self-experience of Beckett's spectator. The off-centeredness of Beckett's performance field achieves a similar effect. As anyone who has viewed Beckett's late plays will attest, these plays render every spectator-position, like the stage images themselves, "slightly off." A historical analogy drawn from the visual arts may help clarify the phenomenological decentering effected by this departure from a perceptual norm. In his study of Renaissance pictorial perspective, Michael Kubovy discusses the geometric laws structuring pictorial space in relation to a viewing point outside the painting, the "center of projection" that counterpoints the pictorial vanishing point in the painting's architecture of line and convergence. As a formal construct of perspectival composition, viewer position represents an ideal function of the artwork. "Ideal" in a strict sense: for Kubovy suggests that this virtual center can fail to correspond to the actual point of viewing, and that certain perspectival paintings manipulate this discrepancy to complicate the viewer's experience of bodily location. Through specific techniques of composition and mounting--the projective center of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper, for instance, stands more than fifteen feet above the floor-painters could effect a displacement of the viewer's perceptual "egocenter," a dissonance between actual and virtual position. "These effects," Kubovy writes, "achieve the goal of divorcing the viewer's felt point of view in relation to the scene 53 ln an essay that offers historical antecedents for the embodiment of vision in Beckett's plays, Jonathan Crary discusses a paradigmatic shift in the understanding of visuality in the early nineteenth century from the camera obscura model, with its disembodied observer, to a concern with vision as a physiological phenomenon, lodged in the body. "Classical optics, which had studied the transparency of mechanical optical systems," Crary writes, "gave way to a mapping of the human eye as an opaque territory .... The body which had been a neutral or invisible term in vision now was the thickness from which knowledge of vision was derived" ("Modernizing Vision," in Vision and Visuality, 36-37, 43).

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represented in the painting from the viewer's felt position in relation to the room in which he or she is standing."54 Perceptual displacement of this kind charges the act of seeing with a simultaneous embodiedness and disembodiedness, as the viewer stands somewhat awkwardly in the wrong spot and imaginatively elsewhere in the right one. The implications of this argument for the theater and its "staging" of the audience are intriguing. After perspective was abandoned as an aesthetic governing scenographic construction, the proscenium stage lost the precise "centers of projection" that it had borrowed from perspectival painting and that were intrinsic to its illusionistic architecture. But like much postperspective painting, the proscenium stage continues to project optimal viewing positions as insistently as it establishes visual centers for its scenic arrangement: reinforced by the stage's rectangular framing and the audience's perceptual disposition toward a symmetrical, balanced point of view, this theater tends to privilege viewing positions extending on an axis perpendicular to stage center. Ideal centrality in the auditorium mirrors ideal centrality on stage. To the extent that Beckett's late plays violate this centrality in their scenic arrangement, even fifth-row center becomes eccentric, visually off-balance, in relation to the performance image. Oriented in terms of an emptiness, facing a center point felt only in its material absence, every seat becomes subject to the angular and the unbalanced. In an obvious subversion of Cartesian observation, with its stable positioning of viewer and viewed, Beckett's audience finds itself both disembodied toward nonexistent viewing points and uncomfortably embodied in the seats they cannot escape, "clawed" by the perceptual dissonances of Beckett's stage which preclude the satisfaction of spectatorial centrality. Like the playwright's characters, the viewers of plays such as Rockaby and What Where find themselves tangentialized, situated between the places they cannot occupy and those they must. Deploying other strategies of visual (dis)arrangement, individual plays compound this dissonance of placement and displacement as it afflicts spectators seeking to orient themselves toward the field of performance. By locating Mouth eight feet above stage level, and Auditor at a height of four feet, for instance, Beckett creates an upward perceptual and physiological tension, in which the action of Not I seems ad-"Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), I 59· Kubovy's discussion of "egocenter" can be found on I5o6I.

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dressed to an audience seated several feet above itself. And by staging the Speaker in That Time with "long flaring white hair as if seen from above outspread" (228), Beckett stages his audience looking down from "above" the play's action, forcing yet another perceptual conflict between ideal and actual audience positions. If Beckett's late characters are linked by self-division-displaced in relation to a body that nonetheless constitutes an inescapable facticity-the spectators of the late plays are haunted by a similar division and displacement, unstably reembodied as they attempt the self-transcendence of unimpeded watching. This phenomenological play of the "here" and the "not here" that the audience shares with Beckett's characters is only intensified by the dramatic speech of the late plays, which (as we shall see in Chapter 4) both does and does not allude to actual performance conditions, ambiguously marking the stage with indexical references that point directly neither to what we see nor to something else. As with all aspects of Beckett's dramaturgy and stagecraft, the present moment is both actual and deferred, caught up in an oscillation between the physically here and the elsewhere, displayed for spectators who are drawn into its instabilities. Beckett praised Arikha's art for pursuing "the marks of what it is to be and be in face of."55 In their increasingly pictorial use of performance space, the late plays reveal a deepening interest not only in the stage as visual space, but also in the phenomenology of vision, and the living body that underlies them both. Animating this "theater of the image" is a paradox that extends back to the Theater of Pure Form, the Ubermarionette, "living pictures," and their shared fantasy of the bodyturned-art. For until drama abandons the human presence altogetherand thereby relinquishes the names "drama" and "theater"-it will remain dialectically bound to the imagistic and the physiological, the inert and the living. If the body is always image, always available to patterning in the stage as visual field, it is also always itself-speaking, moving, spatializing, living in its self-oriented field and thereby subverting formal definition. The picture ages; the statue comes to life. The story of Galatea and Pygmalion-favorite subject of tableaux vivants as it has been for centuries of plays-occupies an emblematic position in the history of theater, for it speaks of theater itself, that medium 55 Samuel Beckett, "For Avigdor Arikha," in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 152.

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which seeks its form in living artistic material. At its most formalizedin the human phonographs of Cocteau or the moving images of Beckett's late plays-the human body remains a self-consuming image, both threatening and promising (like the Protagonist in Catastrophe) its own corporeal emergence. Even as it embraces and extends the theater's imagistic possibilities, then, Beckett's late drama explores the limits of pure formalism, those threshold points at which Korper-the thing-body-reveals its ambiguous inherence in Leib, the body-alive-to-itself. As the medium of the body par excellence, theater always exceeds the pictorial and the purely architectural, subverting their objectifying premises from within. For all of Beckett's obvious debts to the art of painting-and despite his envy, perhaps, of its representational stability-he recognizes and exploits the corporeal paradox that both encourages the dream of a formalized mise-en-scene and consigns this dream to failure. At its most carefully articulated, Beckett's theater of the image refuses realization, maintaining instead the multivalence of the body in its tortuous, flickering autonomy.

CHAPTER

3 Object, Objectivity, and the Phenomenal Body We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in houses, streets, cities, and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and unshakeably. Cezanne's painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself.... It is an unfamiliar world in which one is uncomfortable and which forbids all human effusiveness. -Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's Doubt"

Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork'd animal as thou art.

-King Lear 3·4.106-8

Staging "Things": Realism and the Theatrical Object In his stage setting for The Screens (r96r), Jean Genet calls for a calculatedly disorienting scenographic effect. The screens that form the backdrops to the action of individual scenes are to be painted in trompe l'oeil representations of particular locales: a field of palmettos, the square of an Arab village, a cemetery. But this mobile pictorial settingwhich evokes, self-consciously, the painted flats of a nineteenth-century picture-frame theater-is confronted by elements of a different scenographic aesthetic. As Genet specifies, "Near the screen there must always be at least one real object (wheelbarrow, bucket, bicycle, etc.), the function of which is to establish a contrast between its own reality and

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the objects that are drawn." 1 When the first screen is rolled on stage, for instance, a milestone and rock pile are already positioned in front of it. By establishing this stylistic juxtaposition (which owes something to both Brecht and Luigi Pirandello), Genet extends his interest in the dynamics of illusion and theatricality to the representational conventions of the stage itself. In its confrontation between the "drawn" and the "real," The Screens illustrates (among other things) the radical incommensurateness of the pictorial aesthetic and the materiality that, under the name of "realism," would undermine this aesthetic in its nineteenthand twentieth-century forms. In view of the discussion in Chapter 2, it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the Theater of Pure Form faced its most formidable challenge when its actor/character leaned over to pick something up. For in such moments the bodyturned-instrument (represented so strikingly in the figure of the Ubermarionette) asserted itself as user-of-instruments in its environment and thereby resisted its subjection to the formalizing gaze. The Protagonist's hands are empty in Catastrophe; the handling of objects (notebook, pencil, cigar) is restricted to the Director and his Assistant. In contrast to the disembodied presence of the actor aspired to by the Theater of Pure Form, the availability of objects allows the actor to claim a place in a material world, to interact with it in terms of human intention, and to emerge as a physical presence in the field of performance. Etienne Decroux, whose theory of mime was deeply indebted to Gordon Craig's "actor made of wood," deplored objects (and the other trappings of conventional theater) because they obscured the actor: "The more he holds, the less an actor is required to hold himself well. " 2 Yet if the formalized body of Decroux's corporeal mime is indeed "hidden" by a materialized mise-en-scene, it is also true that the body emerges in a new capacity: as a site of agency within a field of things. Essential to any discussion of the body's phenomenological presence on the modern stage, in other words, is the influence of theatrical realism and its radically material conception of the stage-a current profoundly antagonistic to the more aestheticized theories of performance considered in the previous chapter but one with equal (if not greater) impact on contemporary drama. In response to realism's scenic innovations-innovations which worked to particularize the stage through 'Jean Genet, The Screens, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove, 1962), ro. Decroux, Words on Mime, 8, rsr.

2

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its physical elements-the twentieth-century theater has concerned itself to an unprecedented extent with stage materiality and the relationship between actor/character and environment. On the most intimate level, the modern theater's exploration of materiality can be traced through its props, those movable components of setting that have attained such focus in the drama of the last one hundred years: Hedda's pistol; Tyrone's bottle; Laura's glass unicorn; Guildenstern's coin; Pavlo Hummel's rifle; the yellow shoes that flower like daffodils in Friedrich Diirrenmatt's The Visit ( r 9 56) and the props of power that vanish, like their monarch, in Eugene Ionesco's Exit the King (r962); the railwaycar clutter of Stephen Poliakoff's Breaking the Silence (r984) and the indigent possessions of Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena (r969) (including an old mattress and blanket, a blackened paraffin tin, an apple box, and a piece of corrugated iron). Even when most sparse-as in the minimalist settings of Beckett's plays or Slawomir Mrozeck's Tango (1965)-props constitute privileged nodal points in the scenic field, asserting a powerful materiality and a density both semiotic and phenomenal. Props, or stage objects, have always served important functions in the mise-en-scene. Like the other components of the theatrical field-costume, language, gesture, spatial disposition-they bear a burden of signification, participating in narrative, social, and other codes. As part of this activity, props function metonymically to designate the entirety of a dramatic world, signifying its fictional extension through specific points of actual materiality. 3 But the theatrical function of props extends beyond semiosis to the body's very mode of implantation on stage. Subject to manipulation and use, props establish and reinforce the principle of instrumentality, serving as vehicles through which both actor and character operate intentionally in the material sphere. Like language, props extend the body's spatializing capacities and its projective operations. But props differ from language in their materiality, a physicality that links them with body and stage. Props establish points of contact between actor/character and mise-en-scene; they localize dramatic activity and materialize it in scenic terms. By extending and physicalizing the body's operation on its material environment, props situate the body more firmly within it. Falstaff's monumental corporeality is grounded 3 Kendall L. Walton discusses the role of nontheatrical props in the generation of fictional truths; see Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 35-43.

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in the stage moment, in part, through his play with objects, and it is telling that the bill of fare taken from his pocket while he sleeps reads like a prop list. Conversely, a relinquishing of props reflects the extent to which the medieval Everyman is severed from the temporal and theatrical worlds to which he has been physically bound. 4 Further demarcated by stage setting, movement, gesture, and dramatic speech, this body-and-world circuit constitutes a fundamental dyad of performance as it offers itself (actually and mimetically) to the eye and other senses. Theatrical props, in other words, serve both to implement the individual's self-projection through space-that process in which the subject transcends its corporeal boundaries through operations on its environment-and to ground the individual, as body, in its material surroundings. Until the advent of modern drama, this intermediacy was established through the subordination of object to actor/character; Tiresias's thyrsus and Prospera's staff serve as instruments through a principle of belongingness reflected in the unabbreviated term property. Inversions of this relationship in farce, where objects frequently dominate the human subject, only confirm the usual hierarchy governing premodern drama, a hierarchy in which character efficacy is empowered through exploitation of the material world. Even characters disenfranchised in relation to props-the coquettes of Restoration comedy, for instance, who gain power over objects largely by participating in their own sexual objectification-must maneuver within the context of "property" that serves as the dominant object mode of premodern drama. The sparsely constituted object-worlds of Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle and Racine's Phedre constitute radically different habitational environments than the domestic interiors of Ibsen's Rosmersholm or John Osborne's Look Back in Anger (1956). This subordination, and the body/object hierarchy that underlies it, grew less stable in the scenographic traditions instituted by theatrical realism and naturalism. In the advanced developments of the scene a l'italienne, with its proscenium and stage machinery designed for the framing and elaboration of scenic detail, objects proliferated in number and particularity. For much of its early history, the proscenium stage displayed an essentially pictorial conception of theatrical space, the result of its axial visual arrangement, its frontally determined backdrop and side "flats," and a two-dimensional aesthetic drawn from painting 4 See Stanton B. Garner, Jr., The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, r989), 6r-7o.

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and evident (in its earliest conception) in perspectival illusions of threedimensional depth. As the materials of this scenic structure grew in prominence, though, the scene l'italienne relinquished its exclusively pictorial modes of display for an emerging aesthetics of environment. Historical dramas staged with antiquarian concern for accuracy, the appropriation of authentic objects in the newly staged contemporary settings (boardinghouse rooms, restaurants, butcher shops), and the subsequent institution of the box set, with its minutely furnished interiors-all of these theatrical developments, though still concerned with providing visual "backdrops" to action, had the effect of emphasizing the scenic materials themselves, as historical/geographic details and as object-milieu. Supported by developments in theater technology, scenic verisimilitude inaugurated a new conception of the stage world as material field, replicating the external world in its visual and tactile particularity, and it made possible a liberation of the "thing," as prop joined setting in a new "abjectness," a materiality increasingly freed from the illustrative and the instrumental. As stage objects proliferated and asserted an increasing density, manipulability gave way to an independence from-and eventually, an antagonism toward-the human subject's attempt to appropriate and humanize its spatial surroundings. It is an easy jump from Hedda Gabler's scenic claustrophobia to the cluttered junkshop of David Mamet's American Buffalo, the "wasteground" world of Hanif Kureishi's Outskirts (r98r), or (to draw on a different dramatic tradition) the inhospitable massiveness of Mother Courage's back-breaking wagon. The modernist impulse discussed in the previous chapter-to transform the stage into a purely formal (or aesthetic) space-was counterpointed (and to some extent inspired) by this emergence in stage realism of theatrical objects as actual presences in both the world from which they were appropriated and the stage world in which they were resituated. This aesthetic of things has profound implications for a broader phenomenology of both the theatrical object and of the body on the contemporary stage. To understand these implications, and the precise terms governing the emergence of the theatrical object, we must explore in more detail one of the central contradictions inherent in realistic illusionism. States has characterized the history of the theater as "a progressive colonization of the real world,'' 5 and at no moment of its history has this been clearer than in the scenic naturalism championed

a

sstates, Great Reckonings, 3 6.

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by the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, Andre Antoine, David Belasco, and Stanislavsky. But the impulse inherent in this aesthetic-to make the stage not simply stand in for reality but become it-bears within it the potential for its own subversion. As I have suggested, the more the stage imported the materials of a world other than itself, the more the staging of this increasingly "actual" world called attention to itself, violating the otherness underpinning theatrical illusionism, and the more the materials of the scenic environment asserted themselves as physical presences of a different order, highlighted with a self-assertion rendered both luminous and unstable by their theatrical framing. When a castiron pot is "played" by a cast-iron pot, imported from actual use, the transparency of fictional semiosis is pressured by a material opacity, and the stage announces itself as a territory of surfaces, dense, particularized, sensory, radically actual. As verisimilitude increases, in other words, it risks disrupting the very illusion it was imported to serve, and perhaps nowhere is this self-canceling logic more obvious than in the importation of items from the extratheatrical world. 6 In a wry and wellknown remark, Chekhov commented on this aesthetic instability of the naturalistic mise-en-scene when told that Stanislavsky intended to have frogs, dragonflies, and dogs making sounds onstage during the Moscow Art Theater's production of The Seagull: "The stage is art. There is a canvas of Kramskoi in which he wonderfully depicts human faces. Suppose he eliminated the nose of one of these faces and substituted a real one. The nose will be 'realistic,' but the picture will be spoiled."7 This perceptual instability has had consequences for the theatrical status of the object in both the realist and the antirealist theater of the last hundred years. By contrast, props on the Elizabethan stage displayed the performance multi valency of the prenaturalistic stage, embracing with little or no dissonance the materiality of the performance milieu as well as the fictionality of its represented worlds. Just as costumes on this stage asserted a double identity (both the trappings of royalty in 6 The technology designed to improve illusionism served, paradoxically, to expose the instability of such an aesthetic in the theater. As Denis Bablet has noted, the development of lighting, originally intended to improve the illusionism of the scene a l'italienne, ironically worked to undermine that illusion, because the illusionistic effects before its inauguration had fooled the spectator in part because the stage was poorly lit, rendering it difficult to distinguish reality from artifice (Denis Babler, "La lumiere au theatre," Theatre populaire, no. 38 [1960]: 25-40). 7 Quoted in Ernest ]. Simmons, Chekhov: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 430.

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the play-world and the garments often acquired from wealthier patrons), so props inhabited a world comfortable with simultaneity, where the line between the performative and the fictional displayed a suppleness born, in part, out of theatrical necessity. Richard III's sword occupied the stage simultaneously as military weapon in the Battle of Bosworth Field and as theatrical prop, and its dual status attested to the flexibility of perceptual investment in the Globe's poor stage. In its effort to privilege one-half of this duality between the performative and the dramatic and to efface the other, scenographic naturalism supplanted multivalency with mutual estrangement, catching the theatrical object in a complex play of frames. Whereas illusionism sought to suppress the mundane materiality of the object, to incorporate it in the displaced materiality of dramatic fiction, the "actualized object" precipitated an alienation of the illusionistic field from itself, through ruptures of the "otherness" to which it was supposedly transparent. As a result of this alienation, illusionism foregrounded the object with an unprecedented, almost hyperrealistic materiality. When George Bernard Shaw placed an "open touring car" onstage in Man and Superman, he effected a perceptual shift in which the automobile became more than itself, its "automobileness" all the more dazzling in the theater whose conventions and frames it both evoked and violated. An automobile observed on the street would still have attracted notice in 1903, but this same machine "staged" in the theater acquired a technological weight that was expansive yet profoundly disruptive of illusionistic space. To resituate this object within such a space was to shift the terms by which it was seen, thereby licensing a new emergence through a transgression of frame. 8 If we look for the antecedents of the objets trouves that caused such a stir when mounted as Readymades by Marcel Duchamp (or when staged as part of the visual bruitisme of the futurists and dadaists), of the distortion and estrangement of objects in the theater of Robert Wilson and other performance artists, or even of 'Freddie Rokem notes "the development of the visual aspects of the theater-and through them of the perception of the whole theatrical event-from the realistic form of presenting a whole fictional world metonymically to the modern method of metaphorically transforming the object through constantly changing the conditions of its perception" (Theatrical Space in Ibsen, Chekhov, and Strindberg: Public Forms of Privacy [Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986), 74). Bruce Wilshire provides a fascinating description of the perceptual oscillations of the object (and other elements of the theatrical field, including the spectator) in his discussion of Light Touch, a performance work by Robert Whitman, in Role Playing and Identity, ix-xiii.

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the alienation of objects from mundane signification in Brechtian theater, we must surely look to the alienation of the object within illusionism itsel£.9 As the examples later in this chapter demonstrate, the perceptual status of the object has profound implications for the relationship between actor and world and for the "felt materiality" of this scenic ensemble. The relationship is variable, and the interaction of its central elements (body and mise-en-scene) are subject to strikingly different realizations. To be on stage means something different in a Caryl Churchill play from what it means in a play by Marguerite Duras (or Beckett, August Wilson, or David Henry Hwang)-a certain situation of the body in its environment, a specific contract between actor and stage. This relationship is linguistically conditioned: as I will argue in Chapter 4, language extends and articulates space, both locating and dislocating the body in its spatial fields. At the same time, such linguistic operations, and the modes of bodily habitation that they establish and reinforce, operate in and against the material facticity of the stage itself. This facticity is in part a function of the objects that populate this stage and that dictate the mode of materiality unique to each play. When Lennie offers a glass of water to Ruth in Harold Pinter's The Homecoming (1965), he asserts a slightly different "hold" on his environment-a different relationship to the material-than Len does when he struggles to fix the broken chair at the end of Edward Bond's Saved (1965). Yet with distinctly different ends in mind, both Pinter and Bond play out a concern with the status of the object and its relationship to the human subject that derives from the heart of the realist aesthetic. Function and Physiology: Shepard's Props Exploiting the perceptual instability that constitutes one of its historical inheritances, contemporary realism has embraced this impulse to rupture scenic transparency, to endow the theatrical object with a phenomenal density by calling attention to its material objectivity. Resisting the ease with which such innovations become conventionalized, realist scenography has continued the pursuit of the "more real" through the 9 Arthur C. Dan to explores the relationship between the real and the aesthetic in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, r98r).

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utilization of new materials and theatrical objects, and in new combinations of scenic materials. 10 Sam Shepard's drama reflects this effort to expand the category of the stageable, and his plays are charged with the transgressive self-assertion of objects drawn from spheres traditionally neglected by the theater. Shepard's plays constitute a junkscape of objects; in their particularity they reflect the commercialized surfaces and fragmentary substances of an American culture weighted down with material icons: portable barbecue with smoke coming out of it, cheerleader pom-poms, color television, guitar, Dixie cups, bottle of Nescafe, bowl of Rice Krispies, green- and white-striped bamboo chaise lounge, pale yellow lampshade with small green palm trees painted on it, small Christmas tree with tiny blinking lights, clothesline stretched across the stage. Shaw's majestic touring car becomes, in The Unseen Hand (I 969 ), "an old '51 Chevrolet convertible, badly bashed and dented, no tires and the top torn to shreds. On the side of it is written 'Kill Azusa' with red spray paint. All around is garbage, tin cans, cardboard boxes, Coca-Cola bottles and other junk." 11 In Shepard's material universe, the thing's the thing; theatrical objects, whose material isolation is reinforced through incongruous juxtaposition, parody and extend the cluttered object-worlds of the realist tradition. At the same time, the discontinuous refuse of The Unseen Hand, and of Shepard's scenic terrain as a whole, is refuse of a certain order-or, more accurately, of a strategic disorder-in which the presence of more coherent extratheatrical object-worlds continually makes itself felt. For inscribed within Shepard's objects are traces of conventional positioning and use, what Jean Baudrillard has termed "a system of functionality," through which the objects of a consumer society organize themselves in terms of "acculturated functions." 12 Behind the portable barbecue and the pale yellow lampshade, for instance, lie a cultural framework of domesticity and a network of instrumentality whereby these objects, coordinated with each other, sanction and empower specific expressions of human intention and need. In this system of accommodation, the individual is situated in a world harnessed in terms of use. Underlying See Bablet, Revolutions of Stage Design in the Twentieth Century, esp. 342-43. Sam Shepard, The Unseen Hand, in The Unseen Hand and Other Plays (New York, Bantam, I986), 3· The word AZUSA ("Everything from 'A' to 'Z' in the U. S. A." [5]) suggests the encyclopedic nature of Shepard's interest in the objects of contemporary American culture. On Shepard's relationship to the superrealist painters, see Toby Silverman Zinman, "Sam Shepard and Super-Realism," Modern Drama 29 (September I986): 423-30. 12 Jean Baudrillard, Le systeme des objets (Paris: Gallimard, I968), I9-99· 10

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such functionality is the principle of objectivity, Cartesian in its duality of subjectivity and world, through which object is subordinated to subject within a field of mutual definition. To inhabit a functional environment (like those of the 1950s and 196os domestic interiors that Shepard evokes, with their consumer visions of utility and convenience) is to discover oneself as subject within a field organized in terms of that subjectivity-a field of spaces, furnishings, fixtures, appliances, products, symbols, and information, whose use or consumption allows both an amplified mirroring of human efficacy and the transcendence of human need. In Shepard's plays, this functionality is ruptured at the very sources of its continuity, as objects stand detached from their structured milieu, rendered strange and disconnected, their availability to human need mocked by their recontextualization. The objectivity of normal "use" gives way to a less humanized abjectness, a material autonomy less bound by the harness of function. No longer does environment constitute a field of habitation; no longer do objects accommodate the subject's presence. Refrigerators are empty; cars don't run; decorations provide no cheer; everything is out of place. In Action (1975), Shooter describes an alienation that, in various forms, afflicts all of Shepard's characters as they confront this defunctionalized world and their loss of place and identity within it: "I get this feeling I can't control the situation. Something's getting out of control. Things won't work. And then I smash something. I punch something. I scream. Later I find out that my throat is torn. I've torn something loose. My voice is hoarse. I'm trembling. My breath is short. My heart's thumping. I don't recognize mysel£." 13 The catalog of objects listed earlier is taken from Shepard's plays written between 1964 and 1976 and their discontinuous, vaguely surreal appearance is simultaneously shaped by and incorporated in the stylistic mode of early Shepard: experimental, fragmentary, multilinear, continually verging on the nonnaturalistic and the theatrical. It is in Shepard's so-called family plays, with their more avowedly "realistic" frame, that props achieve their most complex perceptual dislocations and some of their most luminous forms of self-assertion. If it was Shepard's intent to return to realism with the plays between Curse of the Starving Class (1978) and A Lie of the Mind (1985), his use of props in these plays suggests that he did so to dismantle it from within, exploiting both the functionalized domestic interiors that appear only in 13

Sam Shepard, Action, in Fool for Love and Other Plays (New York: Bantam, 1984), 173.

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fragments in the earlier plays and the phenomenal instability of theatrical objects that has haunted the realist tradition from its beginnings. Shepard's dramaturgy of the object in these plays is organized around two competing but complementary disclosures intrinsic to theatrical realism. On one hand, Shepard continues his materialization of the object through the deconstruction of organized setting, a defamiliarization designed to free objects from their positions in the realistic frame and to emphasize their strangeness and their resistance to functional incorporation. Shepard employs a variety of strategies in his later plays for effecting this dislocation. Objects are multiplied beyond their normal number (Weston's artichokes in Curse of the Starving Class, Austin's toasters in True West [1980]), subject to distortions (the bathroom door in Fool for Love [1983], wired with microphones so that it bangs louder when slammed), and relocated in unusual settings (an animal pen onstage in Starving Class, corn and carrots on the floor in Buried Child, a lasso in the hotel room in Fool for Love). These objects-subject to dislocations, pressed out of the ordinary and the familiar-gradually acquire the jarring particularity evident in the early plays; but because this particularity is acquired within the familiarity that characterizes domestic realism, they do so through the destruction of organized space, with its coherent materials and systematic arrangements. Vince tosses beer bottles against the back porch, as if they were grenades; Lee smashes Austin's typewriter with a golf club as part of the broader transformation of a suburban interior into "a desert junkyard at high noon"; a fire is visible outside the window at the close of Fool for Love and in Jake's house at the end of A Lie of the Mind. 14 This spectacle of a living space reduced to an alien heap of things is the outcome, real or imagined, of Shepard's more recent plays as a group. Such an apocalypse and the exhilaration occasioned by this destruction are evident in Dodge's death speech in Buried Child, a speech in which tools, machinery, Bennie Goodman records, and their owner himself vanish in the funeral pyre's general conflagration: My shed and gasoline powered equipment, namely my tractor, my dozer, my hand tiller plus all the attachments and riggings for the above mentioned 14 Sam Shepard, True West, in Seven Plays, so. This last stage moment recalls the more overt conflagration of theatrical space envisioned at the end of The Holy Ghostly (I970): "The whole theater is consumed in flames as POP screams over and over and dances in the fire" (The Unseen Hand and Other Plays, I96). See also the onstage explosion at the end of Icarus's Mother (I 9 6 5) or the military outburst at the end of States of Shock (I 99 I).

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machinery, namely my spring tooth harrow, my deep plows, my disk plows, my automatic fertilizing equipment, my reaper, my swathe, my seeder, my John Deere Harvester, my post hole digger, my jackhammer, my lathe ... my self-tapping augers, my horse hair ropes and all related materials are to be pushed into a gigantic heap and set ablaze in the very center of my fields. When the blaze is at its highest, preferably on a cold, windless night, my body is to be pitched into the middle of it and burned til nothing remains but ash. 15

At the same time, despite Dodge's fantasy of immolation, it would be a mistake to understand the emergence in these plays of a terrain of aluminum, rusted iron, chrome, and plastic-as well as the systematic dismantling of a functionalized object-order-as a banishing of the human. On the contrary, Shepard engineers this deconstruction to reinstate the human within its field, an arena now stripped of its functional objectivity and available to more primitive, physiological modes of habitation. The recurrent word in Dodge's last will and testament, after all, is "my," signaling and reinforcing an intimacy with his possessions consummated in their mutual annihilation. Just as the rubble of Mom's interior becomes the landscape for a final confrontation between Lee and Austin, now "caught in a vast desert-like landscape" (True West, 59), Dodge's funeral inventory is counterpointed by Vince, who "climbs into the room, knife in mouth, and strides slowly around the space, inspecting his inheritance" (Buried Child, 128). In Buried Child, the house that was originally compared to a Norman Rockwell painting now asserts itself as raw space, usurped and reinhabited by its new proprietor, who surveys the room and its objects with primal territoriality. Significant in relation to this reinsertion of the body is the extent to which objects in Shepard's more recent plays eschew the materials of which props are traditionally made (wood, paper, metal) for vegetable, even animal, forms of "thingness": artichokes, bacon, ham and eggs, scraps of food, corn, carrots, toast, and "the severed hindquarters of a large buck with the hide still on it." 16 Organic props occasion such strikSam Shepard, Buried Child, in Seven Plays, 129. Sam Shepard, A Lie of the Mind (New York: New American Library, 1986), 79· Shepard's inclusion of a partial deer carcass bears striking resemblance, in the naturalist scenographic tradition, to Andre Antoine's 1888 staging of Fernand Icre's The Butchers, which included real carcasses of beef; see Oscar G. Brockett and Robert R. Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theatre and Drama since I 870 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 91. Compare the staging of a butcher shop, with real meat, in Franz Xaver Kroetz's Through the Leaves (copyrighted 1976), in Through the Leaves and Other Plays, trans. Roger Downey (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1992). 15

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ing theatrical effects in these plays precisely because they stress the sensory and nutritive openings of the body on its surroundings. This play of sensory experience and bodily need is at the center of Curse of the Starving Class, which explores the body's alimentary (and excremental) exigencies and which is governed by the presence (and absence) of food, its implements (table, refrigerator, bags of groceries), and a caged lamb that calls steady visual attention both to a potential meal and to the strata and urgencies of animal being (underscored by the lamb's struggles and frightened bleats in one recent amateur production). But the sphere of bodily existence is emphasized in all these plays; it asserts itself as a rootedness of the body in its physical field, a phenomenal mode of being present that these characters, for all their linguistic flights to other times and places, cannot escape. Driven by hunger and other forms of need, bodily life involves a biological need for the material, a physiology of nurture and exchange with the world's substance. Shepard's stagecraft is doubly radical in these terms, addressed at more than the actor/character's physical implantation in the field of performance. For as Austin places bread in his phalanx of toasters and presses down the levers, the smell of toast fills the theater (as does the smell of bacon cooking and artichokes boiling in Starving Class), activating the spectators' appetites, calling to attention their bodily sentience as they sit across from the heating toasters, and piercing illusionism as it forces the audience into involuntary empathy with Austin's victims: "There's gonna' be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning. Many, many unhappy, bewildered breakfast faces" (43 ). As Peter Handke's Speakers challenge the spectators in Offending the Audience (1966), "Try not to smell anything. Try not to salivate. " 17 The deconstruction of organized object-worlds on Shepard's stage, in other words, has radical implications for the body's insertion within the field of performance. Shepard liberates the object from its restricted place within a subject/object dualism to disclose its primary modes of interaction with the phenomenal, or lived, body. Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan note a terminological difficulty attendant on the study of objects: "The very word 'object' is problematic, since it designates both a 'thing' and the functioning of this 'thing' within a system of interrelations with other components of the system ('object' 17 Peter Handke, Offending the Audience, in Kaspar and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, I969), 2I.

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in relation to 'subject')." 18 From a phenomenological perspective, though, this conceptual ambiguity is revealing. The competing significations of the word object reflect the relational embedded in the apparently discrete, and the notion of "interrelations" provides an opening for a phenomenal inherence of which the subject/object dualism is both index and mask. Whereas semiotics concerns itself with objects as "lexemes" capable of independent movement in the system of theatrical discourse, the ambiguity of the word object can be used to suggest another dimension of the theatrical object, the "phenomenal" that precedes, infuses, indeed serves as ground of being for the objective in its discrete significations. 19 To explore the roots of abjectness is to reveal it within a habitational field and to recast the subject/object problem within that field; it is also to problematize the "subject" (a word, as we shall see, riven by similar instabilities), that point from which "objectivity" has its traditional reference, and to foreground the body as its ambiguous location and vehicle. These essentially phenomenological questions concerning objectivity and subjectivity, explored with such self-consciousness in Shepard's theater, have implications beyond the realist tradition within and against which Shepard writes. Deploying an aesthetic of estrangement, for instance, Brecht made use of the phenomenal disclosure of the object as the first stage of his Verfremdungseffekt, defamiliarizing the theatrical object to expose both the conditions of its construction as object in systems of production and the uses of this object in representational and ideological practice. Dislocating the object from its materially invisible place in normal perception and freeing it from narrowly functional definition, Brechtian dramaturgy proceeds to mark the object in terms of other interpretive systems. Thus Galileo's telescope is revealed as an object constituted in a specific historical field of knowledge and its political uses and as a theatrical prop enabling the representation 18 Shoshana Avigal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, "What Do Brook's Bricks Mean? Toward a Theory of the 'Mobility' of Objects in Theatrical Discourse," Poetics Today 2 (Spring r98r): 13. On the concept of "object," see Abraham A. Moles, "Objet et communication," Communications, no. 3 (r969): I-2I. For more extensive semiological discussions of the theatrical object, see Anne Ubersfeld, L'ecole du spectateur (Paris: Editions sociales, r98r), 125-63. 19 Mikel Dufrenne's remark is suggestive in this respect: "Phenomenology reflects on the meaning of the hyphen in the definition of intentional analysis as noetic-noematic: a hyphen that indicates the primordial moment at which subject and object have not yet become separate" ("On the Phenomenology and Semiology of Art," trans. EdwardS. Casey, in Phenomenology and Natural Existence: Essays in Honor of Marvin Farber, ed. Dale Riepe [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1973], 93).

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and critique of this field. Through the appropriation of Brechtian dramaturgy, subsequent political dramatists have continued the phenomenological stripping of the object and its reinscription at explicit ideological intersections. But this reinscription of the object within new fields of signification is never complete; even in plays as severely presentational as Brecht's Lehrstucke, the object retains a phenomenal dimension outside the interpretive containments of signification, a preobjective inherence in perceptual fields and a surplus "in-itselfness" irreducible to purely semiotic consumption. As I suggest in Chapter 5, Brechtian drama reflects a profound uneasiness with this phenomenological surplus, particularly as it manifests itself in the actor's lived bodiliness. One of the signatures of post-Brechtian political theater is its willingness to draw out this phenomenological dimension as it attempts to readmit the body as a site of political operation. That even Brecht's dramaturgy engages realism's phenomenological variables suggests the impact on the modern theater of the object's phenomenal emergence within and from the field of realistic illusionism. The object's escape from its dual subordination-to instrumentality and to the otherness of dramatic mimesis-allows it the weight of its material presence within the scenic space and the polyvalence of its phenomenal relationship with the human body. Attention to the stage's phenomenological dimension leads to a somewhat modified valuation of theatrical realism from that generally offered by contemporary theory. Elin Diamond offers one of the clearest statements of the case against realism: With Brechtian hindsight we know that realism, more than any other form of theatrical representation, mystifies the process of theatrical signification. Because it naturalizes the relation between character and actor, setting and world, realism operates in concert with ideology. And because it depends on, insists on a stability of reference, an objective world that is the source and guarantor of knowledge, realism surreptitiously reinforces (even if it argues with) the arrangements of that world. 20

From the materialist point of view, realism is an obfuscation; aesthetically bound to illusionism and verisimilitude (even when it bends these in nonrealistic directions), it tends toward representational conservatism

20

Elin Diamond, "Mimesis, Mimicry, and the 'True-Real,'" Modern Drama 32 (March

1989): 6o-6I.

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and toward the mimetic confirmation of existing social and historical configurations. But a phenomenologically focused analysis discloses a more radical dimension of the realist aesthetic, a side to realism that may account, in part, for its survival and theatrical power in contemporary drama, including political forms of this drama. Through its attention to object and environment, as I have suggested, realism offers an unprecedented disclosure of the theatrical body as it physically inhabits its material and spatial fields. Precisely because verisimilitude and illusionism work at cross-purposes, the latter wavering as the former seeks to perfect itself, realism is characterized by a structural instability that allows the body to assert its radical actuality and thereby resist its subjugation within the conventions of stage illusion. "The great naturalistic evolution," Emile Zola wrote, "has entirely to do with the gradual substitution of physiological man for metaphysical man." 21 It was this aspect of realism-its corporeality, as it were-that earned Craig's special scorn: "Do away with the actor, and you do away with the means by which a debased stage-realism is produced and flourishes. No longer would there be a living figure to confuse us into connecting actuality and art; no longer a living figure in which the weakness and tremors of the flesh were perceptible."22 The rediscovery of "physiological man" (and woman, as the plays of Maria Irene Fornes, Tina Howe, and others have demonstrated) constitutes an achievement of realism at least as significant as any tendencies it may have toward ideological silence. Although the theater has always distinguished itself as the medium of actual bodies, realism has disclosed "the weakness and tremors of the flesh" -the embodied contours of experience-to theatrical attention, and it does so through a staging of the object/body relationship diametrically opposed to the aesthetics of Craig and other theater formalists who sought to occlude the body's modes of spatial habitation. The remainder of this chapter explores several examples of early contemporary drama that highlight the interplay of the objectival and the corporeal: Ionesco's The Chairs (19 52), Beckett's Happy Days, and Pinter's The Caretaker. Sharing with Shepard's drama a scenic landscape articulated in terms of things, each 21 Emile Zola, Le naturalisme au theatre, vol. 29 of Oeuvres completes, 50 vols. (Paris: Frano;:ois Bernouard, 1927-29), 92 (my translation). 22 Craig, On the Art of the Theatre, 8 I. "If the Realists in the Theatre wish to reveal the soul's secrets, should they not first become possessed of a nobler material than their own poor bodies through which to tell these secrets of the soul?" (Craig, daybook [November 1908]; quoted in Eynat-Confino, Beyond the Mask, 164).

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of these plays investigates the shared emergence of object and body from the unstable core of theatrical realism. (Dis )placing the Body: The Chairs and Happy Days It may appear odd to mention Ionesco and Beckett in the context of realism and its phenomenological dynamics (as it may to speak of Brecht in this company). What we have long called "absurdism," after all, is generally considered one of the twentieth-century theater's principal reactions against realism. But if the Theater of the Absurd drew from earlier antirealistic currents (dada, Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, the traditions of scenographic formalism discussed in the previous chapter), it also carried over many of the issues and ..Procedures central to realism itself. As W. B. Worthen suggests, "Though [absurdist] plays openly dispense with verisimilitude, they often remain dependent upon realistic priorities."23 Among these shared priorities, we must surely include the reliance on an autonomous, physicalized mise-en-scene that serves both to enable and to constrain the actions conducted within it. The "dehumanizing" of dramatic setting so characteristic of absurdist drama and the emergence of a self-sufficient materiality as an alienation of the actor/character from fields of meaning and relationship in fact continue an environmental dilemma already explored in the materialized mise-en-scene of realistic stagecraft. Although the detailed settings of much realist theater differ markedly from the generally minimalist stage of absurdist theater, Albert Camus's well-known line from The Myth of Sisyphus can apply as easily to John Gabriel Barkman, Mary Tyrone, or Susan (David Hare, Plenty [1978]) as it does to the characters of Waiting for Godot or Ionesco's Rhinoceros (r96o): "[The] divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity."24 This continuity suggests why the aesthetic of absurdism accommodated itself so readily to realism in the plays of Albee, Pinter, Mamet, and Shepard. Considering absurdism in this light allows us to position Ionesco and the early Beckett less in the midst of new dramatic forms than at an Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, 8r. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O'Brien (New York: Random House, I95 5), s; cited in Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, 3d ed. (Middlesex: Penguin, I98o), 23. 23

24

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endgame point in realism itself-bringing to an intensified point of crisis an alienation from environmental reciprocity already evident in the drama of Chekhov, for example, where the aspirational is mocked by the material in an inert, static performance field of samovars, bookcases, and sofas. In so doing, this contextual shift also allows us to avoid some of the narrowness that characterizes the term absurdist when it is applied to plays as diverse as Happy Days, Tango, Zoo Story (1959), and The Balcony. As closer examination of these plays illustrates, absurdist alienation forms part of a fuller phenomenological exploration not only of the object and the terms of its objectivity, but of the body itselfnow put forward (as in realism) as a relational term, a coefficient in a complex scenic interaction. A brief glance at Ionesco's The Chairs suggests the affinity between absurdism's "divorce" between actor and setting and the dialectic of placement/displacement set into motion in more conventionally realist drama. Though dominated (like most of Ionesco's plays) by the histrionic staccato of language and mind, the "tragic farce" The Chairs maintains a steady attention to its material field of performance: a scenic space bound by circular walls, carefully mapped doors and windows, and furnishings introduced for human use (blackboard, dais, stool, and the chairs that accumulate to fill the stage floor). Despite its surreal touches, this arena clearly suggests an ideal of human accommodation that also constitutes a recurrent longing of realist theater and its characters (Nora, Yank, Blanche DuBois, Lee and Austin). The chairs are arranged as a kind of "speaking theater" for the Orator's address, promising a spatial and material field for linguistic self-extension and for a regaining of self-possession through speech. As the Old Woman says, "It's in speaking that ideas come to us, words, and then we, in our own words, we find perhaps everything, the city too, the garden, and then we are orphans no longer." 25 Within this field, though, Ionesco dramatizes an eerie game of absence and presence-engineered, like the Partida game of Freud's child patient in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, through the intermediacy of objects. 26 25 Eugene Ionesco, The Chairs, in Four Plays, trans. Donald M. Allen (New York: Grove, 1958), 120-21. An illuminating (if idiosyncratic) reading of The Chairs is David Mendelson's "Science and Fiction in Ionesco's 'Experimental' Theatre (An Interpretation of The Chairs)," in Ionesco: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Rosette C. Lamont (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973), 64-98. 26 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 8-Io. Freud's case concerns a one-and-a-half-year-old child who developed a

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As the stage fills with empty chairs-hurriedly supplied by the Old Man and Old Woman for invisible guests and gradually menacing the stage with their mute number-Ionesco renders uncertain both the relationship between human and object and the particular form of this relationship represented by the chair. States, discussing the inauguration of the chair on the realist stage, notes that "when characters begin to sit as naturally as they stand, the body comes fully into its own as the center of a new spatial concern."27 To sit is to claim place; "taking a seat" joins the body and its physical environment at a center-point of personal orientation. But the chairs in Ionesco's play mark a dispossession of the body from its surroundings, a destabilization of the more regular subject/object relationship that leaves the individual subject strangely unmoored from the material. The props and sound effects signifying arrivals counterpoint the visual absence of any guests, endowing the invisible with uncertain substance, while the presence of actual figures onstage is tinged with unreality (the Old Man and Old Woman slip in and out of "selves" as they interact with their individual "guests," while the Orator, Ionesco specifies, "must appear unreal" [154]). 28 Personal identity is rendered unstable in the general confusion of placement and displacement: "I am not myself. I am another. I am game in which he threw objects away from himself, crying "fort" (gone) when they had disappeared and "da" (there) when he had retrieved them. Freud interprets this game in terms of "the instinctual renunciation ... which [the child] had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach" (9 ). Freud observes an additional behavior on the part of this child, one which situates the subject itself within this play of disappearance: "It soon turned out ... that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image 'gone"' (ibid.). That the play with objects in The Chairs lends itself to a Freudian reading in these terms is reinforced by references in the text to maternal absence; sitting on the Old Woman's lap, the Old Man sobs: "Where is my mamma? I don't have a mamma anymore ... I'm an orphan" (II8). 27 States, Great Reckonings, 4 5. Chairs were sometimes painted on canvas flats in the early "pictorial" realist scenography. 28 Rosette C. Lamont describes the uncanny emergence of the Orator from linguistic into physical embodiment: "When [the Orator] materializes all of a sudden, it is as though the thick air of incantation had thickened into a presence" (Ionesco's Imperatives: The Politics of Culture [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993], 79). Ionesco's own remarks reinforce this sense of the experiential indeterminacy of presence and absence: "Two fundamental states of consciousness are at the root of my plays. These two basic feelings are those of evanescence on the one hand and of solidity on the other" (Notes and Counternotes: Writings on the Theatre, trans. Donald Watson [New York: Grove, 1964], 162).

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the one in the other" (14 5). With the proliferation of chairs, both alien and invisibly filled, the Old Man and Old Woman are crowded against the wall. Their joint suicide at the play's end suggests not the accommodation of bodies to chairs, but an erasure of actual bodies by the massing of the material and its invisible referents, the noninhabitants ambiguously designated by these crowded rows of seats. This suicide follows a logic within the proliferation of chairs, for as objects assert themselves outside the normal bounds of the subject/object relationship, the subject is overcome both as a term within a relationship of mutual definition (I qualify this object as "object"; this object qualifies me as "subject") and as agent for the functional subordination of things. Addressing the uncanny independence of objects-their transcendence in relation to consciousness and its efforts to contain them-MerleauPonty's observation could serve as an epigraph for Ionesco's play: "Every object can affirm its existence only by depriving me of mine." 29 These chairs, of course, have a secondary referent: the actual audience members who are seated in their own chairs. Ionesco's game of presence/absence, placement/displacement, reality/unreality serves to accentuate the paradoxical invisibility of the spectators in the modern theater and their phenomenal disembodiment as they sit in the dark. Like the onstage chairs, those in the theater auditorium serve as seats of displacement for an audience that surrenders to dramatic mimesis and assumes invisibility through the self-effacement of theatrical watching (a spectatorial disembodiment, as Worthen notes, often central to the aesthetic of realism). 30 The Chairs explores the paradoxical status of this 29 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 29. In his discussion of this "perpetual uneasiness in the state of being conscious," Merleau-Ponty employs a theatrical illustration that also resonates in relation to Ionesco's play: "At the moment I perceive a thing, I feel it was there before me, outside my field of vision .... The whistle of a locomotive in the night, the empty theater which I enter, cause to appear, for a lightning instant, those things which everywhere are ready to be perceived-shows performed without an audience, shadows crowded with creatures" (ibid.). 30 Discussing Sidney Kingsley's 1935 play Dead End, Worthen observes: "As the play's title implies, Dead End stages a world of material limitation, in which characters are unable to climb where they build, and an unchanging future is visible in the static present. Only the audience remains disencumbered, floating in an unimaginable freedom" (Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, So). Compare this observation with Merleau-Ponty's characterization of our everyday perceptual stance toward things, which seeks to hide their independent facticity: "It is I who bring into being this world which seemed to exist without me, to surround and surpass me. I am therefore a consciousness, immediately present to the world, and nothing can claim to exist without somehow being caught in the web of my experience. I am not this

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theater audience that is both there and not there-that, paradoxically, is there by making itself not there-and Ionesco's ending underscores the mutual, though problematic, entailment of embodiment and disembodiment: "We hear for the first time the human noises of the invisible crowd; these are bursts of laughter, murmurs, shh's, ironical coughs; weak at the beginning, these noises grow louder, then, again, progressively they become weaker. All this should last long enough for the audience-the real and visible audience-to leave with this ending firmly impressed on its mind" (160). In Ionesco's metatheatrical game, these "real and visible" audience members may have been less "present" than their chairs. The subject's presence in a field of things is equally at issue in Beckett's Happy Days, a play that makes literal the Merleau-Pontean metaphor of an individual "grounded" in the world by immobilizing its protagonist in a mound of earth under a "blaze of hellish light" (II). Beckett underscores the three-dimensional inertness of Winnie's mound by positioning it, like the actor's body, in front of a painted, perspectival backdrop ("Very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth to represent unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance"[?]). In this diminished but looming world, objects stand forward with peculiar urgency. Winnie handles the parasol and the items in her purse-toothbrush, spectacles, magnifying glass, medicine bottle, "unidentifiable odds and ends" (39)-as her primary means of physical interaction with her world and the vehicles through which she attempts to humanize and domesticate her environment. She arranges these objects around her as if seeking to roost among them, to establish what Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space as "a personal house of [her] own, a nest for [her] body, padded to [her] measure." Drawing from Jules Michelet's discussion of "bird architecture," Bachelard describes this phenomenon of "nesting" in terms resonant of Winnie's efforts to "pad" her material world to her "measure": "Michelet suggests a house built by and for the body, taking form from the inside, like a shell, in an intimacy that works physically .... The female, like a living tower, hollows out this house, while the male brings back from the outside all kinds of materials, particular person or face, this infinite being; I am a pure witness, placeless and ageless, equal in power to the world's infinity" (Sense and Non-Sense, 29). At the same time, Worthen may not be completely fair to realism; as the example of Shepard suggests, contemporary realist dramatists often draw out the potential of realist verisimilitude to emphasize the audience's physiological presence in the theater.

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sturdy twigs and other bits. By exercising an active pressure, the female makes this into a felt-like padding." 31 Obviously, Winnie's mound represents a failed nest, and the objects in her handbag constitute its failed materials. Though their functions establish specific reference to the body (toothbrush, hairbrush), these objects fail to accommodate this body within a personal enclosure shaped to its form and responsive to its exigencies. Instead, the play stresses their nonfunctional density, a physicality unadapted to human need; far from cleaning her teeth, Winnie's toothbrush asserts its alien materiality: "Fully guaranteed genuine pure hog's setae" (17-1 8). The presence of a revolver (nicknamed Brownie, in a parody of intimate address) establishes a dissonance that further undermines the potential for domestic order. Winnie tries to vivify these objects-"Things have their life, that is what I always say, things have a life" (54)-but they refuse this invitation, marking out the stage with mute physicality, and the "life of things" they assert is opaque and indifferent. By act 2, when the objects remain shut in Winnie's pocketbook and she has lost the ability to handle them, they lose both their manipulability and the fluid geometry of personal arrangement. Materialized by this progressive inertness, the vast expanse of the play's setting comprises one of the most dehumanizing spatial fields in Beckett's early drama. As objects abandon their humanizing instrumentality in this, Beckett's most object-conscious play, as well as their ability to provide the body with an environment adapted to its presence, the body itself reverts to the status of quasi object within its field of awareness. Winnie seeks to escape the mute physicality of her onstage being, finding temporary refuge in a wealth of distractions: story, conversation, song, the brave stream of "this is what I always say." But object and setting return her to her own physical substance, to the materiality inherent in her own embodiedness. Her handbag mirror underscores this materiality, by reflecting back not a body in exchange with its environment, but its fragmented, objectified surfaces. As Winnie inspects her teeth in the mirror, "pulling back upper lip to inspect gums" (9 ), teeth become enamel, gums become connective tissue, and both are framed for her in magnified autonomy. Beckett's stage directions further fragment Winnie's activities into discrete and discontinuous gestures, giving to her body and organs an independent motility that deconstructs the unity of mover 31

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), (Bachelard refers to Jules Michelet's L'oiseau [r858]).

100-101

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and moved to which we give the name "self": "smile appears" (21), "head up" (13), "stroking hand suddenly still" (29). Immobilized like the objects that surround it, the body discloses its substance and weight, and its limbs appear particularized like the parts of a machine. Beckett extends this fragmentation to the offstage Willie, who-until his final emergence from behind the mound-appears only in parts: "WILLIE's arm disappears. His hand reappears immediately, holding card" (19). The exchange between body and object in Happy Days and the leveling of the former to the condition of thingness underscore the ambiguity of the body as phenomenal entity. It is worth recalling Herbert Pliigge's discussion of Korper and Leib, the physical body, observed from the outside and subject to biomechanicallaws, and the body as it is subjectively lived, the experiential ground of perception, knowledge, intention, and self-extension beyond the body's physical boundaries. As we have seen, Pliigge argues that the physical body maintains a phenomenal existence in the lived body, evident as a trace of materiality in awareness, or as a pressure or weight inside one's bodily self-experience. Acute awareness of this physical body as "thing" within the lived body is apparent in extreme situations such as exhaustion, and in the case of gravely ill patients consumed with suffering, who can be observed to withdraw from the world and the live human body into a physical body that begins to feel like a burden, no longer "belonging" to the patient. But this experience of the physical body, Pliigge claims, is already evident in the healthy: "Out of the mute live bodiness continually merging into action something spatial, thinglike becomes evident, from one instant to another more or less clear, more or less delimitable," "this One in the Other," as he quotes Merleau-Ponty on the intertwining of the objective and the phenomenal, or (as we might recast it) this material Other at the heart of the One. 32 "Thou art the thing itself: unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, fork'd animal as thou art"-Lear's words to Edgar (disguised as Poor Tom) capture this duality of bodily experience and the reversion that marks both object and body when their usual relationship is stripped away. As the object is freed from subordination in a system of instrumentality and looms increasingly as the thing itself, the unaccommodated body likewise discloses itself as matter, poor, bare, fork'd, governed by "the art of our necessities" (King Lear, 3.2.70), sentient and suffering. The body as the seat and vehicle of self-projection, ani32

Pliigge, "Man and His Body," 297, 308.

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mating a space/time continuum through which it freely moves, is counterpointed by the body as object within that world, contingent, liable, dying in each moment (we recall Blau's observation that the actor can die in front of our eyes, "is in fact doing so"). Materialized and objectified, the body is subject to the time registered in its flesh, and its mortality is mocked by the objects surrounding it. We have seen this body resist formalist reduction in the imagistic world of Beckett's late plays, when objects and location give way to an increasingly abstract performance field. We see it even more openly in the early plays, with their vestiges of scenic illusionism. Situating his drama at a phenomenological crisis point of theatrical realism, when the theatrical object has asserted autonomy from illusionism and functional use, Beckett discloses the dying body at the center of this tradition, radically embodied in an object-world that no longer supports its self-transcendence. From Didi and Gogo to the shadowed, fragmentary figures of the late plays, Beckett's characters work desperately to avoid acknowledging this embodiedness, yet this effort fails to rescue them from their vulnerable physicality. Phenomenal Fields: The Caretaker Harold Pinter's plays, like Beckett's, constitute a body of drama deeply concerned with its phenomenal parameters, and because they exploit the realist aesthetic they foreground the issues considered throughout this chapter: the status of the theatrical object in the phenomenal field of performance, its role in the apprehension and experience of theatrical spatiality, and the dialogue between its modes of presence and those of the actor/character's body. Although Pinter's critics have concerned themselves more regularly with questions of temporality in his plays, these plays are among the most spatiallyself-conscious in contemporary drama. Driven by a fierce territoriality, his characters struggle to claim personal space within the boxed-off rooms that serve to demarcate otherwise indeterminate locales and that attest to Pinter's profound "architectural sense." 33 Within such bound33 Peter Hall, "Directing Pinter," interview with Catherine Itzin and Simon Trussler, Theatre Quarterly 4 (November 1974-]anuary 1975): 8. Discussing his 1965 production of The Homecoming, Hall describes the care with which Pinter (in collaboration with set designer John Bury) worked to refine the play's spatial setting and the centrality of this mise-en-scene to the contestations of power in the playwright's dramatic world: "[Pinter's] description of

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aries and amid the objects that serve to articulate their spatial fields, characters move in visually underscored relation to each other, drawing attention to their own bodies and to the physical and perceptual contours of their environment. Pinter's stage is the seat of a materiality both fictional and radically actual, and its parameters are distinctly corporeal, in the sense that space and object stand "bodied forth" in the theater's immediacy and in the sense that their status hinges, in part, on the body's orienting presence in a material object-world. 34 Of all the plays by Pinter, perhaps The Caretaker best illustrates the playwright's intense interest in the phenomenology of the object. Reflecting (and accentuating) an interest evident throughout his plays, Pinter here deploys deliberate strategies to emphasize the dual inherence of the object within perception and of the body within its perceptual fields. Like Shepard, and like the Beckett of Happy Days, Pinter effects a heightening of objectival inertness and the intrusiveness of materiality, deconstructing the stability of conventional setting through a stage thick with random clutter. The density of Pinter's stage description reflects the physical discontinuity of the play's mise-en-scene: A room. A window in the back wall, the bottom half covered by a sack. An iron bed along the left wall. Above it a small cupboard, paint buckets, boxes containing nuts, screws, etc. More boxes, vases, by the side of the bed. A door, up right. To the right of the window, a mound: a kitchen sink, a step-ladder, a coal bucket, a lawn-mower, a shopping trolley, boxes, sideboard drawers. Under this mound an iron bed. In front of it a gas stove. On the gas stove a statue of Buddha. Down right, a fireplace. Around it a couple of suitcases, a rolled carpet, a blow-lamp, a wooden chair on its side, boxes, a number of ornaments, a clothes horse, a few short planks of wood, a small electric fire and a very old electric toaster. Below this a pile of old newspapers. Under

[The Homecoming's] set is that it is enormous, and actually the staircase was twice as tall as an actual staircase would have been. The area they were fighting over, which was the father's chair and the sofa where the seduction takes place, and the rug in front, was an island in the middle of antiseptic cleanliness-that scrubbed lino, acres of it. And the journey from that island where the family fought each other, across to the sideboard to get the apple, was very perilous, and this was all quite deliberate-a few objects in space, and a feeling of absolute chilliness and hostility" (ibid.). 34 0n the principles governing Pinter's manipulation of stage space, see John Lahr, "Pinter the Spaceman," in A Casebook on Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, ed. John Lahr (New York: Grove, 1971), 175-93; Ewa Byczkowska-Page, The Structure of Time-Space in Harold Pinter's Drama, I957-I975 (Wroclaw: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wroclawskiego, 1983); and Katharine Worth, "Pinter's Scenic Imagery," Pinter Review 1 (1987): 31-39.

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ASTON's bed by the left wall, is an electrolux, which is not seen till used. A bucket hangs from the ceiling. 35

As Davies puts it (with comic understatement), "You got a good bit of stuff here" (II). Pinter stresses this scenic density and the particularity of its components through a variety of dramaturgical means. Characters engage in repeated indexical gestures, isolating individual objects through looks and other modes of "pointing": Mick, for instance, opens the play by silently gazing around the room, "looking at each object in turn" (7), and the dripping sound in the overhead bucket occasions stares that form part of a recurrent choreography of directed gaze in the play. This indexing is further reinforced by the play's language, itself cluttered with allusions to objects and their materiality: "bucket of rubbish," "heavy big curtains," "a bit of soap." On stage and in words, objects overwhelm this play, pressing background to the fore as they take over linguistic and theatrical space. At the same time, like the displaced objects of Shepard's plays or the personal items of Winnie's handbag, this junk bears traces of nowfragmented object orders, of Baudrillard's "functionality" as it reflects itself in interior and exterior domestic systems with their designations of education, experience, and class. Fragmented on The Caretaker's stage, these systems are apparent only in the markers they leave behind, and their inaccessibility is underscored through parody: Mick's references to the penthouse, with its table "in afromosia teak veneer, sideboard with matt black drawers, curved chairs with cushioned seats, armchairs in oatmeal tweed" (6o ); Davies' smoking jacket; or Aston's jigsaw, which (like the other objects) represents a sphere of knowledge, wealth, and experience alien to the down-and-out Davies: A jig saw, mate? Yes. Could be very useful. DAVIES. Yes. Slight pause. What's that then, exactly, then? ASTON walks up to the window and looks out. ASTON. A jig saw? Well, it comes from the same family as the fret saw. But it's an appliance, you see. You have to fix it on to a portable drill. DAVIES.

ASTON.

35

Harold Pinter, The Caretaker and The Dumb Waiter (New York: Grove, 1961), 6.

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OBJECT, OBJECTIVITY, AND THE PHENOMENAL BODY DAVIES. ASTON.

Ah, that's right. They're very handy. They are, yes. (24)

Decontextualized in this way, the objects comprising The Caretaker's scenic field point to subjects they once accommodated, functions they once assumed, relationships of property and use in which they once participated-but these subjects, positions, and relationships vanish behind the materiality of the present, arranged with self-canceling haphazardness. Gazing around the room, Mick observes, quietly: "All this junk here, it's no good to anyone. It's just a lot of old iron, that's all. Clobber. You couldn't make a home out of this. There's no way you could arrange it. It's junk" (6r). For the objects that occupy this stage-a chair on its side, a stove that doesn't work (with a Buddha on it), a shopping trolley in a tenement flat-even use has bled away. Davies remarks concerning his shoes: "So I've had to stay with these, you see, they're gone, they're no good, all the good's gone out of them" (rs). Like the "desert junkyard" of True West, the stage world of The Caretaker points to a world of structure and accommodation that recedes from its disjointed materiality; use gives way to a nonutilitarian inertness. In its particular subversions of instrumentality and use, Pinter's play evokes, with almost uncanny pertinence, Heidegger's phenomenology of object and environment. According to Heidegger, the environment in which the subject moves and operates presents itself as equipment (Zeug), characterized by manipulability and readiness-to-hand (Zuhandenheit). Equipment is defined as such in reference to the tasks or assignments to which it is subordinated; the hammer exists "in order to" hammer the nail, the nail in order to be hammered; both as part of a project of making or bringing about. In normal use, the materiality of equipment recedes from explicit awareness in the course of being used: the hammer is, in a sense, supplanted by the task to which it is put. When usefulness is subverted, however (the individual piece of equipment is damaged, something essential to the completion of the task is missing, or other things stand in the way), the equipmental object becomes obtrusive, "obstinate," nonequipmental; in such circumstances, readiness-to-hand "reveals itself as something just present-at-hand [vorhanden] and no more." Actually, Heidegger suggests, with a phrase relevant to The Caretaker, readiness-to-hand "does not vanish simply, but takes its farewell, as it were, in the conspicuousness of the unusa-

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ble." 36 As Aston continues to poke uselessly with a screwdriver at the plug he holds in his hand, both plug and screwdriver acquire this conspicuousness, a quality they share with other components of the play's nonequipmental object-world. Even Davies' shoes fall prey to this Heideggerian reversion; his remark on their uselessness (quoted earlier) recalls Heidegger's well-known discussion of Vincent van Gogh's peasant shoes: "A single piece of equipment is worn out and used up; but at the same time the use itself also falls into disuse, wears away, and becomes usual. This equipmentality wastes away, sinks into mere stuff." 37 As the character most victimized by the subversion of function and arrangement, Davies struggles to find a place for himself in this defunctionalized environment, to regain a mastery of objects through their subordination. Like other Pinter characters, he attempts to establish the distance essential to this mastery and to assert his place as meaningconferring subject within an objectivized world. As Teddy tells his family in The Homecoming, indirectly describing his tightly defended detachment: "It's a way of being able to look at the world. It's a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things[ .... ] You're just objects. You just ... move about. I can observe it. I can see what you do. It's the same as I do. But you're lost in it. You won't get me being ... I won't be lost in it." 38 But Davies' efforts to establish this relationship to matter, to regain the structures of objectivity and use, are thwarted by the play's environment, an environment that asserts itself not as functional system, but as phenomenal field, foregrounding-even heightening-the entanglement of the subject in its perceptual world. Objects are defamiliarized, and in their freedom from use, their materiality becomes at once alien and (in a Pinterian paradox) strangely intimate. In one sense, their materiality reflects an essential inaccessibility, a refusal of even mental appropriation. Bewilderment toward the world of things is evident at every turn: alone for the first time at the end of act I, Davies examines the objects in the room, subjecting them to questioning: "Paint? What's he going to paint?" (27). When he earlier holds up the statue of Buddha-"What's this?"-and Aston tells him ("That's a Buddha") all he can say is "Get on" (17). 36 Heidegger, Being and Time, ro3, ro4 (emphasis added). See also idem, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1982), 29I-JI3· "Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, I97r), 35· 38 Harold Pinter, The Homecoming (New York: Grove, 1965), 6r-62.

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But if this environment remains inaccessible (especially for Davies, since the objects in it belong to others), its very physicality is also an opening into the sensory field where the individual is in continual contact with surrounding objects. At this level, the human subject confronts its inescapable inherence in the world of objects, registered in the sensory channels through which objects exist as phenomena. MerleauPonty has written of "the thickness of the pre-objective presence," 39 and (as in Shepard's plays) this thickness continually indicates the body's sensory agency. The elements of this field in The Caretaker impinge on the body: the air from the window is cold, as is the rain that comes through it; the bedcovers are dusty; the light bulb on the ceiling is bright; objects are in the way, needing to be moved. Davies' concern to find shoes that fit suggests a broader concern with the stage environment as one that fits (or fails to fit) the individual's physiological exigencies. The play's language itself reflects this implantation of the subject in its perceptual field, as adjectives establish the sensory registers in a nounworld of things ("glaring" light, "thick" mug). Destabilized by the failure of objectivity as a system of distance and subordination, the object as it discloses itself phenomenally is characterized by the dual flight that we have been exploring throughout this chapter. In its opacity, the object flees the perceiving subject, refusing this subject the ontological definition afforded by a unified, ready-tohand world. The anxiety that this alienation causes Davies throughout the play is given symbolic form in the missing bag containing his personal belongings, in the absence of a mirror to provide him with his reflection (42), and in the missing papers that would provide the authentication Davies so desperately craves: "They prove who I am! I can't move without them papers. They tell you who I am. You see! I'm stuck without them" (r9). 40 At the same time, the phenomenal world is characterized by a flight toward the subject, as objects invade subjectivity through a prefunctional physicality, forcing the self back on itself in an objectifying self-consciousness. As we have seen, to interact with a world of objects on a phenomenal level is to engage oneself with a potential vulnerability and to discover the instabilities of self and body Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 43 3. The importance of authentication through "papers" in The Caretaker parallels the political use of passbooks as authenticating documents for black residents of South Africa under apartheid. For dramatic treatments of this politicizing of the subject/object relationship, see Percy Mtwa's Bopha! (published I986), in Woza Afrika!: An Anthology of South African Plays, ed. Duma Ndlovu (New York: George Braziller, I986), 225-57. 39 40

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within this world. This risk highlights the ambiguity evident in the word subject, which designates the self as originating reference and the self as it is "subjected," liable to the infringements of an external world. In her analysis of the sense of touch, Elaine Scarry notes an experiential oscillation between the outer and the inner, the fact that "touch" refers, ambiguously, both to a sensory exploration of the external environment and to the passive registering of its stimuli on the body's surface. 41 The bodied subject is, paradoxically, a "liable subject," passively enmeshed in the very world it seeks to transcend. For Davies, the attempt to appropriate objects to human use rebounds on itself, revealing the body not only as instrument of subjectivity, but also as an object in and to itself, with its autonomous, radically embodied needs and liabilities. Using a bed discloses the body as needing comfort and rest; eating a cheese sandwich discloses the body as hungry, needing food; when you twist an arm behind someone's back, it hurts. Only a vowel separates object from abject, and it is a natural step from Davies' corporeal vulnerability to the suffering body of One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (r988), Party Time (r99I), and the sketch New World Order (1991). Sartre, we have noted, wrote of the body's retreat into itself as an object under the gaze of another: "The shock of the encounter with the Other is for me a revelation in emptiness of the existence of my body outside as an in-itself for the Other. Thus my body is not given merely as that which is purely and simply lived; rather this 'lived experience' becomes-in and through the contingent, absolute fact of the Other's existence-extended outside in a dimension of flight which escapes me." And elsewhere: "[The Other] is the subject who is revealed to me in that flight of myself toward objectivation."42 The alienating disclosure of body as object in The Caretaker is effected, in part, through the Other's look: Davies awakens to see Aston staring at him; eating his sandwich, he is watched by Mick, who does not eat. The Caretaker, like other Pinter plays, can be plotted in terms of the look, its trajectories, and its objectifying action. This reduction of subject to object beneath the gaze suggests why it is unnerving that Mick ends his visual survey of the room at the play's beginning by staring out at the audi41 "Though touch always has both somatic and external content, it may be experienced now more as one, now more as the other; and the more it is experienced as the first, the closer it lies to pain; the more it is experienced as the other, the closer it lies to self-displacement and transformation" (Scarry, The Body in Pain, r6s-66). 42 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 46r, 345·

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ence, fixing the play's spectators in their pretended "invisibility." But the look of the Other in Pinter's drama only reinforces an equally fundamental objectification of the body in the presence of things and the particular vulnerability of the body in this interaction. At this level, we can speak of a "pursuit" of the body by things-a potential menace in the stove that looms next to Davies' bed and an actual threat in the Electrolux that attacks him in the dark. This pursuit presses the bodied subject into material passivity, robbing it of centrality and returning it to its physical contingency (as Mick does to Davies, in the linguistic arena, by pressing his assumed name into its constituent sounds: "Jenkins? ... Jen-kins" [30]). This uneasy awareness of the body implicated as quasi object in a field of things is evident in Davies' reaction when Aston accuses him of making noises in his sleep: Now wait a minute. Wait a minute, what do you mean? What kind of noises? ASTON. You were making groans. You were jabbering. DAVIES. Jabbering? Me? ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. I don't jabber, man. Nobody ever told me that before. (22) DAVIES.

The fact that the body makes its own noises, independent of awareness and attention, objectifies this body in a field that is both oneself and not oneself, and it involves an alienation not simply of the self from its surroundings, but of self from body, now revealed in its paradoxical and vulnerable facticity. 43 The stage world of Pinter's Caretaker, in its flights away from and toward the perceiving subject and its perceptual reversion from the objective to the preobjective or phenomenal, discloses and explores a primitive terror of the object. At the basis of this terror is a fear of the body's reversion to a condition of ambiguity and instability. That this alienation is also a disclosure of the body in its biological existence, however, as well as a revelation of the self's inherence in a world of objects and others, may explain the peculiar magnetism that such an experience 43 Shepard offers a striking image of this bodily alienation in Action. In this play, Shooter narrates the story of a man who began to fear his body after seeing it distorted through the water in his bathtub: "He began to feel like a foreign spy. Spying on his body. He'd lie awake. Afraid to sleep for fear his body might do something without him knowing. He'd keep watch on it." Eventually, "His body killed him. One day it just had enough and killed him .... It's still walking around I guess" (r82).

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exerts over Davies (as it does over characters elsewhere in Pinter) and that the old man's final gesture is a plea to stay in his inhospitable flat. "As we preserve the thing qua thing," Heidegger writes, "we inhabit nearness." 44 The terror of objects in Pinter's plays is also an intimacy, anguished though it may be: a rootedness that embraces the body in its biological being as it disenfranchises it from a functional relationship to things. Pliigge observes that the emergence of the physical body in the experience of live bodiedness can effect both an estrangement/displacement toward the objectival and an intense belongingness, since the physical body is "not merely a particular thing with particular characteristics, but 'the origin of relationships with a world which it chooses and by which it is chosen."'45 Bodily presence may engulf Pinter's characters in contingency, but (until the brutally objectifying institutional environment of One for the Road and the other plays of the middle and late 198os) it enables a certain mode of aliveness and an opening to sensory and perceptual being that signals a return to the biological subject, even if this self has been dismantled and laid bare like the objects furnishing Aston's flat. Paradoxically, not only does this flight into embodiment constitute "the origin of relationships with a world," but it serves as a ground of contact with the Other, a field of intersubjectivity and its modes of interaction. This mutual inherence of subject and Other suggests possibilities of relationship not accounted for by the Sartrean model of interaction, with its inaccessible Other and its exclusively co-opting, territorializing gaze. "The Other's gaze transforms me into an object, and mine him," Merleau-Ponty writes, "only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect's." 46 The body in The Caretaker-seen, heard, smelled, and touched-is a body situated in a field of inextricability, knowing and known, subject to the terrifying and thrilling promise of disclosure: as Aston recounts, "Anyway, we were just sitting there, having this bit of a conversation ... then suddenly she put her hand over to mine ... and she said, how would you like me to have a look at your body?" (24). In other words, beneath the maneuvers of speech (what Pinter has Heidegger, "The Thing," in Poetry, Language, Thought, r8r. Pliigge, "Man and His Body," 307 (Pliigge quotes from F. ]. ]. Buytendijk). 46 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 3 6r. Norman Bryson critiques Sartre's concept of vision in "The Gaze in the Expanded Field," in Vision and Visuality, 87-108. 44 45

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called "a continual evasion, desperate rear-guard attempts to keep ourselves to ourselves"47 ), the bodied subject suffers and enjoys a certain preobjective inextricability, in which distance yields to an inherence fraught with ambiguity and risk. "You ... remain," says Hamm at the close of Endgame (84), alone and not alone, surrounded by the play's few props that are both his burden and all he has left. The emergence of the body as the site of this "remaining" is a central feature of contemporary theater, and it carries forward the corporeal interest latent in the realist aesthetic. In their staging of the body, particularly the body in crisis, such plays as The Caretaker, Curse of the Starving Class, Breaking the Silence, David Rudkin's Ashes (1974), and Louise Page's Tissue (1978)-as well as the more explicitly political theater of Howard Brenton, Churchill, and recent AIDS dramatists-constitute a legacy of theatrical realism, with its pursuit of the "physiological" body and its paradoxical modes of alienation and inherence. Central to this legacy is the very abjectness of the realist stage, which transforms mise-enscene into material environment and resituates the body within its multiple (and often problematic) habitational fields. 47 Harold Pinter, "Writing for the Theater," Evergreen Review 8 (August-September I964), 8o-82; reprinted in Harold Pinter, Complete Works: One (New York: Grove, I976), I5.

CHAPTER

4 The Performing ''I'': Language and the Histrionics of Place The Latin word 'persona' (meaning "mask") was used to translate the Greek word for "dramatic character" or "role," and the use of this term by grammarians derives from their metaphorical conception of a language-event as a drama in which the principal role is played by the first person, the role subsidiary to his by the second person, and all other roles by the third person. -John Lyons, Semantics

Re-embodying the Word: Struck Dumb In the spring of 1991, Joseph Chaikin presented Struck Dumb, a play he cowrote with Jean-Claude van hallie, at the American Place Theatre in New York. Written in the voice of a fictional character named Adnan, the play was a response to the aphasia with which Chaikin was afflicted as the result of a stroke he suffered in 1984. Chaikin's performance was both moving and harrowing, for despite the therapy that gave him back much of his speech, physiological and verbal impairment remained painfully evident in both the subject of his text and its delivery. Aided by the written text in front of him, and by lines of text placed in the set and auditorium (many of which were visible to the audience), Chaikin delivered Struck Dumb with concentration and difficulty, occasionally stumbling over words and slurring or eliding others. "You see, I can't talk well": his intonation and delivery had a broken quality at times, as if the words being joined together lacked the flow and cadence, the unifying trajectories, of normal speech. 1 With the traces of 'Joseph Chaikin and Jean-Claude van Itallie, Struck Dumb, in The Best American Short Plays 1991-1992, ed. Howard Stein and Glenn Young (New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1992), 276. Struck Dumb was originally produced at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles.

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paralysis etched in his face and body, he conveyed the physical effort involved in speech, so apparent when the body as vocal instrument is damaged: To choose a word-it's a choice. Turning this way, that .... Anything to do with speech, it's work .... So my face is my words. [ADNAN looks at the audience.] Look at my face. Here it is. (272-73)

One theater critic, observing Chaikin rehearse The War in Heaven (cowritten with Sam Shepard and performed with Struck Dumb), characterized the actor as "squinting, squeezing the words out" and compared his face, during this verbal struggle, to Edvard Munch's The Scream. 2 Literally and painfully a "speech act," then, Struck Dumb staged language in the precarious conditions of its production. I open this chapter on dramatic speech by mentioning Chaikin's autoperformance for a specific reason. In the directness with which it presented Chaikin's neurological impairment, Struck Dumb foregrounded the physical act of utterance with a self-consciousness evident in much contemporary drama: in the compulsory verbal discharge of Beckett's Lucky and the later Mouth; the inarticulateness that weighs on the characters of Franz Xaver Kroetz's Farmyard (1972) and Edward Bond's Saved; and the "damaged speech" of Fornes's Olimpia (The Conduct of Life [198 5]), Shepard's Beth (A Lie of the Mind), and Churchill's Toma (whose autism shadows the third act of Mad Forest [1990]). This emphasis on the body of speech-on its substance or "heft" and on the physiological, cognitive, and sensory conditions of its production-serves as a useful counterbalance to the disembodiedness that has characterized the phenomenon of language in much current literary and performance theory. The Derridean "revenge of writing" that joins poststructuralism with certain currents of postmodernism has extended the scientific "objectification" of language that semiotics appropriated from the discipline of linguistics, and physical utterance has accordingly been effaced by the impersonality of the written word. "Writing," Elinor Fuchs notes, "which has traditionally retired behind the apparent presence of per2

Jerry Tallmer, "Struck Dumb," Theater Week 4 (I April I99I): 33·

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formance, is openly declaring itself the environment in which dramatic structure is situated." 3 Rejecting the phonocentric privileging of speech over writing, Derrida claimed that speech is always already contaminated by the traces of writing, by a textuality that subverts the claims of speech as an originating gesture. As a result, Fuchs suggests, "if there can be no assurance of the bond between thought and speech, there can be no single moment at which utterance originates" ( r 66). This chapter attempts to redress the imbalance that derives from this theoretical focus on the "revenge of writing." For all its power to illuminate textuality and its modes of play, the poststructuralist account of language and speech does not, after all, avoid its own reductive tendencies. Chief among these is what I have already called its "scriptocentrism," the tendency-evident in much poststructuralist analysis-to disperse the act of utterance within the field of textuality. The distortion attendant on this extreme position is particularly apparent in the theater, which is not just a "seeing place" but a "speaking-place," as well. In its urgent concern with delivery and its obstacles, Chaikin's play highlighted the interaction of textuality and utterance, the uniquely theatrical moment when writing stumbles, as it were, on the phenomenon of speech. Though he performed Struck Dumb in a "textualized" performance space4 -his lines literally written in front of him and throughout the stage and auditorium-Chaikin seized this text, physicalized its words in moments of delivery whose corporeality was powerfully evident in the strains of bearing and enunciation. Does this vocal performance constitute "a single moment at which utterance originates"? Not in any simple sense: Chaikin delivered a text clearly displaced, by the conditions of its scripting and its aphasic origins. As his Adnan describes it: "Thinking myself ghost. I Well, not myself, I But ghost using my voice maybe" (267). 5 At the same time, Chaikin's lines were ani'Elinor Fuchs, "Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-thinking Theatre after Derrida," Per(ormingArts]ournal9 (I985): I63. 4 The stage directions describe "a changing environment of text and light . ... AD NAN is sometimes surprised by his own thoughts when the text appears suddenly on a placard or is lit on a floor-to-ceiling scroll" (263). Intensifying this image of a textualized performance field, some of the stage objects are identified by hand-painted signs: "desk," "tapes," etc. 5 As with the decentered speech of Beckett's Mouth, aphasia effects a disconnection of self from speech. Chaikin described his state immediately after the onslaught of aphasia: "I couldn't talk .... I would say 'Yes' for 'No.' Couldn't write. Forgot my name. Had no name" (quoted in Tallmer, "Struck Dumb," 32). Tallmer notes: "It all reads like the Beckett that Joe has acted or directed so often" (ibid.). Roman Jakobson discusses the linguistic principles underlying aphasic impairment in his essay "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of

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mated at every turn by an acutely embodied subjectivity, and by acts of utterance continually at war with the fact of impairment. Though his words were dissociated, denied the integration that we associate with normal speech, they were nonetheless heavy with the effort to express and with a corporeality that was multiplied by its fragmentation and its multiple textual levels: spoken in the past, transcribed, scattered throughout the theater, read, re-owned, transformed into expressive sound, repeated from performance to performance. As I argue throughout this book, to displace is not to cancel; to be decentered is not to disappear. If it is indeed the case that language puts presence "into play" through its games of textuality and signification, it is also true that the languages of theater play their games on and within the phenomenological variables of performance. Although theatrical language may aspire, in the hands of certain artists and theorists, to the condition of pure textuality, it maintains its inherence in a field of embodied utterance, even when it subjects this field to transformation, substitution, or dispersal. In so doing, dramatic language draws upon modes of embodiment inseparable from language itself. Don Ihde stresses that language is "perceptually situated, embodied in receptive and expressive senses and bound to this primordial attachment to the world .... Language, like the subject, is always incarnate materially." 6 From a phenomenological point of view, textuality is always infiltrated by utterance, writing by the traces of speech.? In addition to its grammatical and lexical references to utterance, as we shall see, language brings its own modes of presencing to the multiple and self-displacing field of theatrical presence, through the spatiotemporal and corporeal components of its semantic structures. Dramatic discourse, in other words, both draws on its field of utterance and supplements this field with its own world-creating operations. What phenomenology offers our understanding of dramatic language is a chance to reembody it in its multiple relationships to the moment of performance. Like the actual Aphasic Disturbances," in Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language, 2d ed., rev. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 67-96. 6 Don Ihde, Consequences of Phenomenology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 27, 76. Ihde sees writing as a variation on the embodiment of language: the juxtaposition of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, for instance, "turns out not to be a debate, but a set of exercises on the phenomenologies of the verbal embodiment of Language varied with the inscriptional embodiment of Language" (76). 7 Sheets-Johnstone offers a fascinating discussion of the origin of language that focuses on the tongue as a "felt presence" and as sensory-kinetic power; see The Roots of Thinking, r 5863.

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body to which it is bound, we will find theatrical language caught up in a play of bodiedness and disembodiedness, presence and absence, self and nonself. Deixis and the Site of Utterance: Breaking the Silence,

American Buffalo, Not I As the number and variety of those studies already devoted to the subject attest, there are a range of possible strategies for approaching the question of theatrical language. I choose as my entry point a specific feature of dramatic and theatrical discourse that involves us immediately in the relationship of discourse to the performance field in which it is performed. This feature is deixis, defined by linguists to include those markers in discourse that refer to the situation of utterance. John Lyons defines deixis (which derives from a Greek word meaning "pointing" or "indicating") as "the location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee." 8 The deictic function in discourse is assumed primarily by personal and demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative adjectives and adverbs (such words as here, there, this, that, these, those) and secondarily by such lexical features as person and tense. As Alessandro Serpieri and colleagues note, deictic expressions function in theatrical language to a degree beyond other literary genres. 9 'John Lyons, Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I977), val. 2, 636, 637. "Language," Jiirgen Habermas writes, "is the medium through which speakers and hearers realize certain fundamental demarcations. The subject demarcates himself: (I) from an environment that he objectifies in the third-person attitude of an observer; (2) from an environment that he conforms to or deviates from in the ego-alter attitude of a participant; (3) from his own subjectivity that he expresses or conceals in a first-person attitude; and finally (4) from the medium of language itself" (Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy [Boston: Beacon Press, I979], 66). 9 Alessandro Serpieri et al., "Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text," Poetics Today 2 (Spring I98I): I67. Elsewhere, Serpieri writes: "In the theater ... meaning is entrusted in primus to the deixis, which regulates the articulation of the speech acts" ("Ipotesi teorica di segmentazione del testa teatrale," in Alessandro Serpieri et al., Come communica if teatro: dal testo alta scena [Milan: II Formichiere, I978], 20; excerpt trans. in Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama [London: Methuen, I98o)] qo). Serpieri and his collaborators have proposed a method for segmenting dramatic texts according to shifts in "performative-deictic orientation."

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Noting that "drama consists first and foremost precisely in this, an I addressing a you here and now," Keir Elam suggests that deixis is the means by which the "dramatic world" is removed from its status as "possible world" and actualized as the hypothetical world we view on stage. 10 In tandem with deictic gesture (physical references to the field of performance), verbal deixis completes a bridge between the material and verbal spheres (73 ). Because of its dual inscriptive function, thensituating the stage within language, and language within the stagedeixis offers a useful tool for exploring the play of person and actuality in dramatic discourse and between discourse and the embodied stage itself. An example of deictic terms and their conventional workings in dramatic discourse occurs in the opening scene of Stephen Poliakoff's Breaking the Silence, as Polya and the young Sasha enter the decrepit railway carriage that will serve as the family home after the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution (deictic terms indicated in italics): Stay there Master Alexander (as she moves into the darkened carriage alone:) and don't touch, you understand, don't touch anything. She pulls up the blinds to reveal the state of the carriage. They certainly haven't bothered to clean it for your father. SASHA (in doorway): What an extraordinary carriage, Polya ... What was it used for? POLYA: Don't come in! I told you, stay there by the door until I know it's safe for you ... there might be something here that can harm you. Something that could give you a disease. She moves away from the windows into the carriage, as an advance guard. Whatever this smell is ... I don't think the original passengers would have smelled like that. SASHA (pointing at floor): What are those? POLYA: Animal droppings-they must have used it for transporting livestock recently. That's why the beds have been chewed. SASHA (moving a little deeper into the carriage): They can't really mean this Polya! ... It needs hosing down before it's nearly ready for papa. You must have misunderstood. I am sure they only intend to show it to him ... POLY A (loud, swings around): Did I say it was safe for you to come in? No. POLYA:

10

Elam, Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 139, II3.

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stops. You can stay there now, but don't move. 11

SASHA

Sasha's gesture in the middle of this exchange-pointing at the floorepitomizes the act of inspection in which both he and Polya are engaged, but it also serves, emblematically, to underscore the "pointing" of their dialogue itself toward the field within which they speak. The words I, you, it, this, that, those, here, there, now refer directly to the situation of utterance and its participants, and they serve as explicit anchors for other lexical and grammatical elements that deepen the passage's indexical function. The imperative mode of Polya's commands inscribes Sasha as an implicit you; verb tense structures a temporal framework (heavily weighted toward the past} in relation to the present tense of their dialogue; and (although not deictic markers in any strict sense} the passage's references to the speakers' names (Master Alexander, Polya} and to the objects and features of their surroundings (carriage, door, smell, animal droppings, beds} serve an indexical function that reinforce the more strictly deictic pointers. If deictic terms ground this section of discourse to the immediate configuration of Polya, Sasha, and the railway carriage in which they speak, it is also true that these terms reflect, and in a sense negotiate, the relationship of these characters to each other and to their environment. Specific deictic operations "key" the interrelational dynamics of the scene and of the play as a whole. Polya's repeated use of the second person (particularly in conjunction with there} enforces a physical distance from Sasha (designed to keep him from entering the carriage}, at the same time as it reflects a more fundamental distance that results from her dual (and contradictory} positions of subservience and authority in relationship to the child. The tension between proximal and nonproximal terms (this and here vs. that, those, and there} and the recurrent use of it establish both the unfamiliarity of the characters with their surroundings and their attempt to remain physically uncontaminated by these surroundings-to hold their setting and its objects at arm's length, to be in this environment while also retreating from it (fear of bodily contamination is epitomized in Polya's reference to disease and in her reference to "the master" refusing to sleep between filthy sheets}. Finally, the indeterminate they establishes a mysterious agency beyond the immediate scene, a confused sense of the unnamed that will 11

Stephen Poliakoff, Breaking the Silence, 2d ed., rev. (London: Methuen, 1986), r-2.

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be acutely felt throughout this play, which registers the distant rumblings of postrevolutionary Soviet history as heard within this cramped, narrow domestic space. As this passage illustrates, to enter the actual workings of deixis in particular plays involves one in linguistic manifestations of spatial and temporal configurations, the dynamics of interpersonal interaction, and the body's placement within its world. But this kind of analysis also presents questions and phenomena that complicate the general overviews of deixis and deictic function offered by linguistics and semiotics. Directed toward the normative, such overviews stress what Lyons calls the "canonical situation-of-utterance," a one-to-one (or one-to-many) communicative situation whose participants, present and responsive to each other, exchange the roles of speaker and listener .12 The canonical situation of utterance is "egocentric" in that the speaker constitutes the focal point of the act of utterance and (hence) of the deictic realm. 13 Serpieri carries this emphasis into his discussion of theater: "On stage ... everything departs from !-here, which can be defined as the zeropoint of theatrical discourse and action." 14 "Canonical deixis," in short, is grounded in a specific relationship between discourse and utterance: a relationship, doubly egocentric, in which the focal I of language is firmly linked to the center-point of the speaking subject. I return to this paradigm (and some of what it entails) in the next section, as part of my broader attempt to refine the concept of verbal deixis from a phenomenological point of view. What I wish to consider here is the obvious challenge with which this paradigm is confronted by actual instances of dramatic speech on the modern and contemporary stage. Although traditional realism has often striven to consolidate the deictic grounding of the first person in the physiological and psychological act of utterance, a counter-pressure to complicate the discursive I and displace it from its expressive origins in the speaking subject has been evident from the start of modern drama. A powerful arena for this complication is realism itself, where the first person is 12 "The grammaticalization and lexicalization of deixis is best understood in relation to what might be called the canonical situation of utterance: this involves one-one, or one-many, signalling in the phonic medium along the vocal-auditory channel, with all the participants present in the same actual situation able to see one another and to perceive the associated non-vocal paralinguistic features of their utterances, and each assuming the role of sender and receiver in turn" (Lyons, Semantics, vol. 2, 637). 13 lbid., 63 8. 14 Serpieri et al., "Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text," 175.

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regularly subject to a persistent (if often subtle) theatricalization. A histrionic deployment of the I as mask or alter-ego is evident in the performers of modern realist drama: the Tyrones, Christy Mahon, Arthur Miller's Abigail, Wole Soyinka's Jiro. But their overt theatricality, their use of the first person as a shifting signifier, renders explicit a divorce between speaking intention and discursive utterance that represents a tendency of much realist characterization (this availability of the I to performative manipulation enables the text/subtext distinction central to Stanislavskian acting)Y When Masha sets the tone for Chekhov's The Sea Gull by lamenting, "I am in mourning for my life," she seems to signal an expressive disclosure effected through language's deictic invitation. Yet the stage that is "hurriedly [being] put together for amateur theatricals" behind her underscores the staginess that joins her declaration with those of Chekhov's other histriones-self-consciously shaped, vaguely mannered. 16 It is no great jump from the first person of Masha (or James Tyrone and Blanche DuBois, actors in their own right) to the even more radically unstable I of Pirandello's Henry IV and the performer/patrons of Madame Irma's establishment in Genet's The Balcony. A more contemporary example of theatricalized deixis can be observed in the following segment from Mamet's American Buffalo, where Teach rages over his card game with Ruth (and Grace): I say the broad's her fucking partner, and she walks in back of me I'm going to hide my hand. DON: Yeah. TEACH: And I say anybody doesn't's out of their mind. Pause. We're talking about money for chrissake, huh? We're talking about cards. Friendship is friendship, and a wonderful thing, and I am all for it. I have never said different, and you know me on this point. Okay. But let's just keep it separate huh, let's just keep the two apart, and maybe we can deal with each other like some human beings.

15 For a useful discussion of this feature of realist characterization, see Worthen, Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater, esp. 54-70. Among other things, Worthen discusses the relationship of Eugene O'Neill's mask plays to Stanislavsky's theory of realist acting. 16 Anton Chekhov, The Major Plays, trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: New American Library, 1964), 105.

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Pause.

This is all I'm saying, DonY The particular character of this passage, its psychological shape and energy, is inseparable from its canny rhythms, the vernacular deformations of syntactical rules for which Mamet has been praised. But the action of this passage is equally driven by its manipulation of the deictic conventions of speech. Here we can see the peculiar operations of concealment and disclosure through speech that constitute the interrelational matrix of Mamet's theater, and their deployment within broader exertions of power. The passage reveals an almost obsessive repetition of the first person singular pronoun; I and its related forms appear eight times. The deictic circle of reference is broadened to include the listener (Don) through one use of the second-person singular and three uses of we and us, but these references are less an expansion of the circle than a forced consolidation of its other participant in agreement with the speaker; as such, these references display intensified forms of the domination that Emile Benveniste considers structurally inherent in the use of the pronouns we and you (Don signals as much through his near-complete silence). 18 What Teach displays so forcefully is true, to varying extents, for all of Mamet's characters: they tend to talk at each other, and this is reflected in their dominating use of speech regularly oriented in terms of the speaking I. Yet this I is far from confessional. What is so remarkable about this passage, finally, and so characteristic of Mamet's dramatic speech, is the extent to which its primary discursive reference is the act of speaking itself. Virtually all of the first-person pronouns in this segment of Teach's diatribe are connected to the verbs say and talk. This gives the passage the striking (and often comical) metadiscursive quality evident in the language of Mamet's most virtuoso verbal performers: despite various assurances that "action talks and bullshit walks," characters such as Teach, Richard Roma (Glengarry Glen Ross [1983)), and Bobby David Mamet, American Buffalo (New York: Grove, 1977), 15. 0n you: "One could thus define 'you' as the non-subjective person, in contrast to the subjective person that 'I' represents"; on we: "In 'we' it is always 'I' which predominates since there cannot be 'we' except by starting with 'I,' and this 'I' dominates the 'non-1' element by means of its transcendent quality. The presence of 'I' is constitutive of 'we' " (Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek [Coral Gables, Fla.: University of Miami Press, 1971], 201, 202). 17 18

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Gould (Speed-the-Plow [r988]) present themselves in their speech largely as talkers. In the specific terms at hand, these characters draw out the latent self-reference of verbal deixis (the fact that these markers always have, as their primary reference, the situation of utterance) and intensify it. "I say," "We're talking about," "I have never said differ~ ent," "This is all I'm saying"-the I that Teach asserts is an I continually caught in (and concealed by) the act of linguistic self-regard. I is less a subjective register of motives and experiences than a discursive actor. This metadiscursive quality spreads out from the first person to enfold the other elements of Teach's discourse: his account of the card game keeps emphasizing its status as a story he's recounting, just as his various pronouncements ("Friendship is friendship") are asserted as repeated sayings, as the truisms they are. The language of American Buffalo, for all its wealth of detail and the force with which its claims on the present moment are asserted, often feels curiously unmoored from the material world of action and objects. One might note, in this regard, Mamet's signature use of this in the last line quoted earlier (one of the passage's few nonpronomial deictic markers), which refers not to the physical setting, but to the abstract space of discourse itself, of action transformed into talk. Although in each of the instances cited here the first person is constituted in a way that suggests a gap between the uttering self and the I of utterance (thus complicating the notion of "person" in relation to both discourse and person), theatricalized language still takes place within the canonical situation of utterance and so maintains the parameters of conventional deixis: I may be fictionalized, but it nonetheless stands in deictic relationship to the act of speech, designating the individual who utters it. More radical attacks on deixis have been mounted by the avant-garde. In his 1921 play The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, Cocteau allocates all dialogue to the statuary phonographs who flank the stage on either side. Played by two actors whose bodies represent the cabinets and whose mouths represent horns, the dialogue of the onstage characters is delivered at unnatural volume, speed, and intonation-as if transmitted by machine. Tristan Tzara's 1920 play The Gas Heart effects an even more striking dislocation of discourse from utterance. Rejecting any notion of unitary subjectivity, Tzara fragments character into discontinuous body parts (Eye, Nose, Eyebrow, etc.) that speak a discourse of random phrases and sentences. Since the idea of "subject" is evoked in The Gas Heart only in terms of its impossible coherence, language floats free of deictic connection to a speaking sub-

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ject. At one point, Tzara's Mouth declares: "Everybody does not know me. I am alone here in my wardrobe and the mirror is blank when I look at myself. Also I love the birds at the end of lit cigarettes." 19 The I of this passage is only incidentally related to the figure/fragment delivering it; it has no necessary referential connection to the I in Mouth's previous lines, nor is it necessarily distinct from the I as it is employed by the play's other "characters." Other deictic markers throughout the play-the here in the lines just quoted-offer little or no reference to the stage itself on any actual or fictional level; indexical meaning is scattered along random, indeterminate vectors. In Tzara's Sprechstuck of nonsequiturs, one feels that any of the lines could be spoken by any of the participants, in any place and at any time. Language comes before utterance; in some sense, it is irrelevant to the situation of utterance entirely. Although The Gas Heart precedes the automatic writing of the surrealists, the verbal anarchy that closes Ionesco's "tragedy of language," The Bald Soprano (1950), and postmodern experiments with textuality and technologized speech, the play anticipates the contemporary assault on the deictic grounding of language in individual utterance. Yet even though plays such as The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower and The Gas Heart manage to destabilize the terms and relationships of verbal deixis and deform the canonical situation of utterance on which it conventionally depends, we must ask ourselves whether these displacements succeed in breaking the link between speech and utterance that deixis reflects and (in significant part) establishes. In other words, what remains of the utterance in discourse when the conventional relationships of deictic language are transformed or deactivated, when deictic components such as "person" in language are dissociated from the speaking subject? To address these questions, I turn once again to Beckett and a play that easily stands as the contemporary theater's most intricate exploration of discourse and utterance: Not I. In its drama of language both achieved and disowned, Beckett's play investigates the parameters and possibilities of the deictic foundations on which its verbal performance seems to depend. 20 As its title indicates, Not I derives its dramatic and 19 Tristan Tzara, The Gas Heart, trans. Michael Benedikt, in Modern French Theatre: The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism, ed. and trans. Michael Benedikt and George E. Wellwarth (New York: Dutton, 1964), 143. 20 Angela Moorjani discusses the manipulation of deixis in Beckett's work; see "Beckett's Devious Deictics," in Rethinking Beckett, 20-30.

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theatrical power from an act of linguistic self-refusal, which is all the more striking in this play of compulsory verbal onslaught. This refusal is most evident, of course, in the play's scrupulous suppression of its discourse's potential deictic framework. Both the first and second person are avoided at every point at which they threaten to appear in Mouth's monologue, and the third person dominates the discourse. The few instances of this and now, the only other deictic terms in Mouth's speech, are drawn away from direct reference to the speaking present by being positioned in the past tense. The effect of these excisions and modifications is to dissociate discourse from speech and to endow the "matter" of Mouth's monologue with an independence from the stage image that confronts the spectator. Indeed, if (as Serpieri suggests) "in theatrical discourse the narrative statement is converted into a nonlinear enunciation geared to the pragmatic spatio-temporal situation,''21 and if this conversion is effected primarily through language's deictic functions, then clearly the suppression of deixis in Not I presses theatrical discourse back toward narrative. To adapt Elam's terms, we might say that the dramatic world of Mouth's monologue (the world of "she,'' with its locales and experiences) is "deactualized" in terms of the stage present and returned to the status of "possible world." With the Tzara-like fragmentation of character to a single body part, the sense of the play's monologue as an utterance produced by a speaking subject is even more dramatically undermined. Beckett intensifies this effect through his staging of this reduced figure: in the absence of a visibly complete vocal apparatus, and in light of the peculiar visual impression that Mouth's interior opens onto the surrounding stage darkness, the monologue of Not I feels at moments as if it were detached from utterance entirely-inhabiting space like the disembodied voices of the radio plays (or the taped stage voices of Krapp's Last Tape, That Time, Rockaby, and What Where) and using Mouth itself as a mere conduit. 22 In this sense, Tzara's dadaist fantasia is actually more traditional in its discursive portrayal than Beckett's play. The discourse of The Gas Heart maintains crucial features of the situation of utterance: the deictic I and the speakers who Serpieri et a!., "Toward a Segmentation of the Dramatic Text," 184. Paul Lawley uses this term; he calls Mouth "a function rather than a being, a conduit through which pour the words which testify to being" ("Counterpoint, Absence, and the Medium in Beckett's Not I," Modern Drama 26 [December 1983]: 412). 21

22

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appropriate versions of this I in discursive acts. The first person may be multiple and shifting, and individual speakers may fail to unify their different utterances, but speakers speak, and I remains their linguistic vehicle. At the same time, despite the effacement of its deictic markers, the act of utterance is prevalent in Not /-indeed, utterance haunts Beckett's play with an urgency that gives the play its fierce tension. What we see on stage, after all, is a mouth caught (like Chaikin's) in an agony of verbal delivery, an agony heightened by our secondary awareness of the actress's own vocal exertion, and the physical confinement and deprivation that intensify the difficulty of this verbal performance. The monologue itself underscores this recognition with its myriad references to speech, references that stress the labor of utterance: "All those contortions without which ... no speech possible" (2 r 9 ), "and the whole brain begging ... something begging in the brain ... begging the mouth to stop" (220). In keeping with this attention to the physiology of delivery and the painful density of the words emitted, speech is associated, in Mouth's narrative, with other kinds of specifically bodily expulsions: childbirth, defecation, urination, regurgitation. "Sudden urge to ... tell ... then rush out stop the first she saw ... nearest lavatory ... start pouring it out ... steady stream ... mad stuff" (222). Utterance infiltrates the discursive realm of Not I in other ways, as well. As critics have noted, the dramatic speech of Beckett's late plays is characterized by details that both refer and fail to refer to the performance present-quasi allusions to what we see in front of us that tease with their play of likeness and unlikeness. 23 This principle is very much in evidence in Not I, which offers descriptions that imperfectly double the theatrical conditions in which Mouth finds itself. "All the time the buzzing ... dull roar like falls ... and the beam ... flickering on and off" (22r): these details from Mouth's monologue recall the image we see in front of us, but the sound of the verbal stream we hear is not exactly a "buzz" or "dull roar," and never does the spotlight that brings this fluttering orifice to view "flicker on and off." The discrepancies may at times seem slight, but they indicate the peculiarly skewed form of verbal indexing that Beckett establishes in his final plays, where 23 See, for example, S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett's Dramatic Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 175; and Lawley, "Counterpoint," 407ro.

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the details of the stage and the experiences of characters and audience are reflected in language even as they are transmuted into that familiar Beckettian terrain of "almost" and "not quite." Despite Mouth's attempts to excise deictic reference from its verbal stream, here and now make themselves felt as a continual pressure on the tacit there and then of narrative. This entry of the speaking present is a function, in part, of the very absence of the first person on which this narrative hinges. By erasing first- and second-person pronouns and crucial tense markers in the ellipses that mark the play's fragmentary syntax, Beckett creates a temporal ambiguity where the narrative past slips into the present. This effect is compounded by the regularity with which Mouth shifts into the narrative present when recounting events and perceptions initially located in the past: "mouth on fire ... stream of words ... in her ear ... practically in her ear ... not catching the half ... not the quarter ... no idea what she's saying ... imagine! ... no idea what she's saying! ... and can't stop ... no stopping it ... she who but a moment before ... but a moment! ... could not make a sound ... no sound of any kind ... now can't stop ... imagine! ... can't stop the stream"(220). Without auxiliaries to anchor their ongoing action in the past, participials drift toward the present ("no stopping it"), suggesting action that hovers around the speaking present, as do other phrases and fragments cut free from the temporal specificity of coherent sentences ("mouth on fire ... stream of words ... in her ear"). In the midst of such temporal unmooring-and through the back door, as it were-this and now reacquire a certain measure of deictic resonance: "and now this stream ... not catching the half of it" (219). Though they never quite meet, "this world" (216) of Mouth's narrative and "this world" of the stage draw tantalizingly close. This play on the grammatical category of verbal deixis is the result of Beckett's characteristic syntactical, grammatical, and lexical calculations, and the particular reinscription of the speaking present in Not I's sphere of displacement is stylistically and dramaturgically unique. One would no more impose its specific drama of language on a play like The Gas Heart than equate the particular scenographic dynamics of Chekhovian realism with Shepard's Fool for Love. But Beckett's linguistic investigation draws on features of theatrical discourse more basic than individual technique. Beckett explores the inextricability of utterance in dramatic speech, a reference to person and context that persists despite the attempts to bring about their disengagement. Lyons claims that "deixis, in general, sets limits upon the possibility of decontex-

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tualization; and person-deixis ... introduces an ineradicable subjectivity into the semantic structure of naturallanguages." 24 But Not I (like Beckett's other plays) suggests that subjectivity is even more fundamental to language than this, that it survives the erasure of its most obvious sign, deixis. As Benveniste has suggested, "Language is marked so deeply by the expression of subjectivity that one might ask if it could still function and be called language if it were constructed otherwise."25 Even without the manipulated participles and the metadiscursive references, Mouth's utterance would be positioned in its narrative through the discursive act itself, as an implicit first person that enables the third person to be spoken at all (whether this first person had any relationship to the "she" of the narrative would be another matter, as would the specific contours of the subjectivity engaged by speech). To speak is to activate a "reference-to-utterance" that survives even the most radical attempts to displace, fragment, or erase the grammatical I. The evacuation of the first person at the start of Heiner Muller's Hamletmachine (1979) ("I was Hamlet"), for instance, is both counterpointed and informed by the implicit (here, actual) I of the performer/character's utterance.26 In the theater, overwhelmingly dominated by the spoken word, this latent reference-to-utterance is given physiological reinforcement by the vocal foundations of most theatrical discourse, its acoustical origins in the production of speech. Even when discourse is detached from actual speaking subjects, its phonic qualities retain a link to embodied utterance; indeed, the impression that heard speech is spoken speech holds true even with technologically synthesized discourse. In short, even as Not I severs the conventional deictic links that join utterance with discourse, the play discloses deeper levels at which its dramatic language is infused with the speaking present. This is in keeping with Beckett's broader investigation of subjectivity, which exerts a claim on the present in the midst of its frantic disavowal. In his note to the play, Beckett speaks of Mouth's "vehement refusal to relinquish third person" (215). Like stage center in Quad, which acquires a quasi solidity through the deliberateness with which the hooded pacers swerve to avoid it-or like a wall evoked by a mime who registers its invisible resistance with his hand-the pronoun I acquires an odd presence-in24 Lyons,

Semantics, vol. 2, 646. Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 225. 26 Heiner Miiller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1984), 53· 21

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absence while never being named. This ghostly paradox of a subjectivity whose traces are multiplied at the moment of its dispersal is the key to Beckett's theater of verbal displacement, and it is in keeping with Beckettian subjectivity as we have seen its ambiguities manifested through image, object, and body. To call Mouth "an emblem of absence" (as Paul Lawley does) 27 is to tell precisely half the story, for Mouth is equally an emblem of language's inescapable reference to utterance in its physical and subjective parameters.

Language as Mise-en-scene It is important to underscore what is at stake in the preceding discussion, to clarify the relevance of verbal deixis to a phenomenology of theatrical language. In response to the poststructuralist insistence that all language is informed by writing, deixis reminds us of the referenceto-utterance intrinsic to language, a potentiality activated when language is appropriated (as it overwhelmingly is in the theater) as speech. To claim as much is not to embrace a naive phonocentrism; rather, it is to suggest the extent to which language bears grammatical, lexical, and phonic reference to vocal moments. These nodal points in the linguistic system are what enable words to receive the imprint of individual expressive intention. Speech is a seizing of the discursive possibilities of language, the realization of an utterance already prefigured in the words themselves. If poststructuralism stresses textuality and the play of absence in its account of language, phenomenology shifts attention to the play of presence in the word-turned-speech. Whereas the latter approach seeks in some ways to reverse the deconstructive flight from speech to writing, a contemporary phenomenological account departs significantly from the model of language that Derrida found in Husserl. Husserl's phe27 Lawley, "Counterpoint," 412. In "Not I: Beckett's Mouth and the Ars(e) Rhetorica" (in Beckett at 8o/Beckett in Context, ed. Enoch Brater [New York: Oxford University Press, 1986], 124-48), Keir Elam has offered an illuminating reading of Beckett's play, one that parallels in many ways the reading I have proposed. Elam's essay suggests the refinements available when semiotics applies its analytic structures to the working of specific texts, and it provides evidence to support my contention that semiotics and phenomenology are characterized by mutual openings. In places, Elam's discussion is indistinguishable from what we might consider a phenomenological reading, such as in his remarks on sonic patterns in Mouth's monologue and the "embodying" of discourse that they bring about (140).

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nomenology of language hinged on a transcendental consciousness that realizes its expressive intentions in a moment of self-givenness, with words that exist, transparently, to make present these intentions. But though language usually does manage to express, a closer look at the phenomenal structures of deixis and speech as a whole suggests a much more complex relationship between language and utterance. Transparency and availability-in short, expressibility-constitute only one property of language, and a phenomenological approach to the language of drama must embrace the nonsubjective otherness that represents its necessary complement. Poliakoff's Sasha speaks I because I already exists to be spoken; the frequency with which the examples of discourse cited in this chapter entail some masking of the speaker suggests that this I is always, to some degree, generic, even fictional (such fictionality is evident in the narrative I that Othello fashions through his tales of exploit, or the verbal masking that characterizes !ago's use of the pronoun). This "impersonality of the personal" is already implicit in the linguistic/semiotic concept of deixis. Despite its indicative reference to the actual situation of utterance, the term deixis denotes a primarily linguistic structure of relationships. In the passage that serves as epigraph to this chapter, Lyons notes that the term person derives from the Latin persona (mask), a word that was in turn used to translate the Greek word for "role," and he suggests that the use of this term by grammarians reflects "their metaphorical conception of the language event as a drama," with the first, second, and third-person as roles within this drama. 28 This formulation is useful both in teasing out the metaphorical language with which we describe the language event and in directing attention to the basis of this metaphor in the structure of language itself. Although person (and the other deictic elements) function referentially, inscribing the situations and participants of actual utterance in discourse, they do so only to the extent to which those situations and participants are already staged in language. The act of utterance, in a sense, is always preceded by a field of relationship intrinsic to discourse itself. Dramatic deixis, then, combines two divergent modes of linguistic/ verbal "making present," each with clear phenomenal status in the theatrical event. On the one hand, dramatic language gives form to the act and situation of utterance, registering expressive intention through its semantic and acoustical resources. On the other hand, these very re28

Lyons, Semantics, vol.

2,

638.

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sources endow dramatic language with a kind of representational autonomy, a rival mode of actuality. This semantic autonomy of linguistic meaning extends well beyond the narrow realm of deictic terms. The world-creating properties of dramatic discourse-its ability to posit scenes of its own-are evident, of course, in the myriad references to what cannot be seen. The offstage, we have long known, is a linguistic entity, evoked entirely through spatiotemporal reference and other verbal details intrinsic to language. But this independence infiltrates verbal reference to the performance present, as well. Returning to the opening sequence from Breaking the Silence, we might wonder how this scene would be different if it were conducted without words (as it is for a number of seconds before Polya begins to speak). Imagining the sequence in this way allows us to dwell on that wordlessness before the play's silence is indeed "broken" by speech. Polya walks into and around the musty train carriage, perhaps turning to warn Sasha off with her hand as he makes a noise to enter. As during the silence at the opening of The Caretaker, the spectator confronts a stage cluttered with objects, displayed for us through the gaze of its inhabitants. While certain details of situation and identity remain unknown, the stage nonetheless confronts the audience as a given world, poised (if uneasily) within the spheres of actuality and fiction. Without much difficulty, one could imagine the scene performed as mime. If we replay this scene yet again, with the words that Poliakoff intended it to have, we can appreciate the phenomenal shift effected by speech. Against the silent scene we have imagined, words call attention to themselves as something added to the scene, and although language quickly establishes the personal and interpersonal "keys" discussed earlier, there is a momentary sense in which the characters and setting feel "doubled" by speech. Although their exchange identifies both them and their locale and thereby initiates them into the discursive dimension of the play's dramatic narrative, there is nonetheless a moment when this identification strikes us as the potentially arbitrary imposition of one order of disclosure on another, as when we learn the name of someone whom we have known without it, or should a performing mime begin to talk. We quickly naturalize this strangeness and proceed to respond to the speakers as Polya and Sasha and their world as an abandoned railway car in the Soviet Union of 1920, but we are responding in this way to a discursive as well as visual reality. To claim that there is some degree of redundancy involved in verbal reference to the onstage world is only to suggest that the "universe of

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discourse" (as linguistics and semiotics describe it) has an autonomy that to a certain degree always stands in for the physical world it indicates and details, even when elements of that world are in front of us. This is surely what Merleau-Ponty means when he speaks of language as "much more like a sort of being than a means" and when he suggests that this being-likeness allows words to present things to us: "[Language's] opaqueness, its obstinate reference to itself, and its turning and folding back upon itself are precisely what make it a mental power; for it in turn becomes something like a universe, and it is capable of lodging things themselves in this universe-after it has transformed them into their meaning. " 29 Language "takes place" on the stage, and the transformation it effects on the field of performance-turning this field into an "other world"-is possible because language already constitutes an "other world" itself. Because of this, we can speak of dramatic language as a form of mise-en-scene in its own right, with the ability to conjure up worlds unconstrained by the stage in its actual materiality. When Shakespeare's deposed Richard II "peoples this little world" of his prison cell with "a generation of still-breeding thoughts" (Richard II 5. 5.8-9 ), he demonstrates the broader world-creating property of theatrical speech, its ability to supplant the world of the stage with a rival order of being. There is a tendency in discussions of drama to distinguish this verbal evocation of "other scenes" from language used in direct reference to the scenically grounded dramatic world and to consign the free play of linguistic world-creation at its most nonreferential to the province of the imaginary and the fictional (semiotics displays this tendency somewhat in its use of the logical/linguistic concept "possible worlds"). It is clearly a component of a spectator's theatrical competence to distinguish between levels of actuality in discourse (where these can be distinguished); we understand, for example, that Hilda Wangel's talk in The Master Builder of trolls, Vikings, and "castles in the air" is of a different order of fictionality from Solness's more prosaic references to his present building projects, even if (like other Ibsen characters) Hilda and Solness often fail to draw such distinctions. But terms like imaginary and fictional, with their unspoken assurance that such discursive realms are "mere words," neglect the presencing powers of language, by which references to the "actual world" of the play have a fictional 29 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence," in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 43·

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component (the characters and locale of Breaking the Silence could be identified differently, after all) and by which even fictional worlds are endowed with a kind of phenomenal actuality. 30 They also neglect the meaning-stratum that characterizes all language, the fact that semantic content always precedes reference and, to some extent, always exceeds it. As Umberto Eco points out, the fact that sign-vehicles always convey a content, even when there is no verifiable referent, is what makes it possible to lieY As with the opening sequence of Breaking the Silence, we must suspend the familiarizing disattention by which we allow dramatic speech to become transparent to us-our willingness to allow language to efface itself in relation to its semantic meanings-so that we can acknowledge the independent modes of embodiment intrinsic to words. As linguists have demonstrated, the spatio-temporal structures of language reflect the structures of perceptual space particular to the human subject, including the specific aspects of this space that derive from human embodiedness (the primacy of upright posture, for instance, is reflected in the semantic relationships of such concepts as up and down, top and bottom). As Lyons notes, "Anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism are woven into the very fabric of [man's] language: it reflects his biological make-up, his natural terrestrial habitat, his mode of locomotion, and even the shape and properties of his body." 32 Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are charged with experiential traces, and it is these traces that scatter and refract, like a cinematic montage, in the verbal free play of The Gas Heart or Shepard's Tooth of Crime (1972): "Eyes traced a Nevada route. It don't matter. If you ain't from the Root Force 30 ln his essay "The Functions of Language in the Theater," Roman Ingarden offers a framework for discussing dramatic language that escapes the dichotomy of actual and fictional. For Ingarden, dramatic language and physical staging exist as parallel "objectivities" that compose the represented world (along with a third, mediating objectivity jointly comprised of perceptual and linguistic modes of representation, such as when a present object is discussed on stage) (see The Literary Work of Art: An Investigation on the Borderlines of Ontology, Logic, and Theory of Literature, trans. George G. Grabowicz [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I973l, 379-80). 31 Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I976), II6. 32 Lyons, Semantics, voi. 2, 690. For other investigations of this connection, see Herbert H. Clark, "Space, Time, Semantics, and the Child," in Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, ed. Timothy E. Moore (New York: Academic Press, I973), 27-63; and William Frawley, Linguistic Semantics (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, I992), esp. 25093· Mary LeCron Foster analyzes the roots of language in "bodily mimicry" in "Body Process in the Evolution of Language," in Giving the Body Its Due, ed. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Albany: State University of New York Press, I992), 208-30.

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you're on the Killin' floor Jack. Anyway you cut it you're a corpse." 33 Words are pictures, sounds, and smells; what allows words to evoke is this inscription in language of human perceptual contours. The title of Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind suggests what phenomenological attention discloses: the ineradicable trace of the body in the word. 34 In the theater, the mise-en-scene of language can exert such a powerful phenomenal impression that it will compete with or even eclipse the actuality of the visual present. This is perhaps most evident in those instances where verbal descriptions of offstage or fictionalized events are remembered as if they actually took place on stage (the death of Gloucester is a frequently cited Shakespearean example), or where the setting and dramatic speech are cast in deliberate incongruity (the Konrad River Woods scene in Diirrenmatt's The Visit, for instance, where a largely bare stage with actors hamming at playing trees and animals is juxtaposed with the rhetoric of romantic nostalgia). It is striking, in this regard, how often the political "theater of embodiment" (discussed in the next chapter) represents the suffering body in the mode of language, deploying the phenomenality of words to evoke a purer, more concentrated experience of corporeal violation, unimpeded by the representational compromises of the material stage. The most harrowing scenes in this drama are frequently verbal scenes, at times almost unbearably heavy with the phenomenal register of the body in agony: for example, the testimonies of Peter Weiss's The Investigation (1965), the accounts of atrocity in Maria Irene Fornes's The Conduct of Life, and David Rabe's Vietnam plays. In these discursive instances, the stage itself is suspended, taken over by the field of language with its representational and experiential capabilities and its access to the outer and inner landscapes of bodily sentience. As an aesthetic, realism has sometimes tended to resist the worldcreating autonomy of the spoken word, seeking to subordinate its phenomenal (or connotative) weight to its more denotative, utilitarian functions, identifying characters and orienting them in their surroundings while reserving freer verbal creation for the presencing of offstage worlds. When John Millington Synge deplored "Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words," he was responding Shepard, Seven Plays, 229. Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I987). 33 34

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not only to what he perceived as the prosaic flatness of these authors, but also to the broader aesthetic of transparency with which early realism often informed its staging of language, the subordination of discourse to a newly materialized mise-en-scene within the demands of conversational verisimilitude. Synge wrote that "in a good play every speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple." 35 Stopping short of the openly poetic drama that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Federico Garcia Lorca would pursue, Synge's solution to realism's linguistic impasse was to draw on a dialect still characterized by poetic selfconsciousness, richly embodied, where language (as Christy Mahon demonstrates in The Playboy of the Western World) still speaks worlds. Other twentieth-century realists have sought ways of eliciting the phonic and semantic resources of language and its unique modes of actuality: the expressive/poetic realism of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill is driven by this intent. The most striking technique employed by contemporary realist dramatists to escape the linguistic subordination inherent in the realist aesthetic is the reintroduction and development of monologue and the exploitation of its world-creating possibilities. In his foreword to Miss Julie, August Strindberg defended the use of monologue in naturalist dramaturgy by noting that one could provide the motives necessary to make this traditionally theatrical device "natural": it is natural, for instance, for a public speaker to practice his speech or for a servant girl to talk to her cat. 36 Theoretically, in such hypothetical instances, monologic speech remains bound within the discursive restrictions of the realist mise-en-scene. But as Julie's somnolent speeches at the end of Strindberg's play indicate, actual monologue easily escapes these restrictions and supplants its setting with a rival verbal scene: "I am asleep already," she murmurs ("as if in a trance") "the whole room has turned to smoke-and you look like a stove-a stove like a man in black with a tall hat-your eyes are glowing like coals when the fire is low-and your face is a white patch like ashes" ( r 13 ). It is an easy transition from lines such as these to the expressive stagecraft of A Dream Play and The Ghost Sonata, which seeks to give the stage itself the scenic fluidity 35 ]ohn Millington Synge, Preface to The Playboy of the Western World, in The Complete Plays of John M. Synge (New York: Random House, 1935), [4]. 36 August Strindberg, Author's Foreword to Miss Julie, in Six Plays of Strindberg, trans. Elizabeth Sprigge (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955), 70.

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of poetic speech. But it is no less easy to move from Miss Julie's hypnotic reverie (or Oswald's at the end of Ibsen's Ghosts) to the extended monologic excursions in more contemporary realist theater, flights of language that challenge the strictures of verisimilitude and seek to endow realism with the creative verbal power of earlier drama: Jerry's story of the dog in Albee's The Zoo Story, Winnie's rambling address in Happy Days, Lenny's anecdotes to Ruth in The Homecoming, Gerry's pick-up narrative in Churchill's Cloud 9 (I979), Styles's opening monologue in Fugard's Sizwe Bansi Is Dead (I972), the verbal arias so central to Shepard's dramaturgy, countless other examples. That these monologues are so often stories, delivered while stage action is otherwise suspended, only underscores the extent to which the form draws attention to autonomous verbal scenes. As Deborah R. Geis suggests in her study of monologue in contemporary American drama, the form's primary characteristic is its "compression of action into words, of stage space into 'narrative space.' " Monologue, she notes, allows the playwright "to dislocate, fragment, and otherwise transform [the stage present] into other temporal modes." 37 This displacement of the material by the verbal is most evident in Shepard's use of monologue, for no dramatist more consistently counterpoints the phenomenality of the physical stage with that of language and its competing modes of embodiment. At times (Halie's monologue about Ansel at the beginning of Buried Child, for example), the physical stage becomes hauntingly still, and when there is movement it is eerily stylized as the performance field yields to hypnotic verbal images. At other times, particularly in Shepard's earlier plays (the pilot story in Icarus's Mother, Carol's monologue about skiing in Red Cross [I966)), physical action even imitates the verbal, as if the stage itself were only ancillary to the mise-en-scene of language. But some of the playwright's most sophisticated experiments with language and its powers of making present occur in those instances when Shepard causes a kind of visual and sensory interference between these rival scenic fields, as in the scene at the end of Buried Child where Halie's description of the fertile fields is juxtaposed with the image of Tilden, muddy, carrying the corpse of a child-or in the segment of Curse of the Starving Class where Wesley's reminiscence/fantasy of lying in bed ("I could smell the avocado bios37 Deborah R. Geis, Postmodern Theatric(k)s: Monologue in Contemporary American Drama (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, I993), II, IO.

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soms. I could hear the coyotes. I could hear stock cars squealing down the street") jockeys against the daylight sights and smells of Emma cooking bacon. 38 Like Wesley's later story of the eagle and the lamb (and indeed like all of Shepard's monologues) his narrative about lying in bed feels surreal precisely because it creates its world out of its own material and according to its self-proliferating logic. But this kind of scenic autonomy is made possible only because dramatic discourse is itself already implicitly scenic, evoking the phenomenal density of the physical world within the independent mise-en-scene of its meaning structures. What we see repeatedly in contemporary drama-in Not I, The Investigation, and Curse of the Starving Class-is an intense interest not only in the ways language refers to its environment, but also in the status of words as embodied, world-producing elements in that environment. Anna's observation on memory in Pinter's Old Times (1971) applies equally to the phenomenology of language in the contemporary theater: "There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place." 39 Scenic Negotiation: No Man's Land

Anna's remark in Old Times about memory, coming as it does in the midst of the play's predatory interactions, suggests that the exploitation of discursive reality is by no means restricted to the solo arias of monologic speech. If speech serves to embody speaker, listener, and their environment in the space of discourse, then language constitutes an arena where the terms of presence (and nonpresence) are continually at stake. Probably no dramatist is more sensitive than Harold Pinter to the ways subjectivity hinges on its linguistic inscription, and certainly none is more attentive to the verbal politics by which these forms are contested. "I'm here, too, you know," Max insists when Lenny and Sam deliberately exclude him from their conversation in act 1 of The Homecoming; in the absence of any reference to him, it is as if this verbal exclusion has caused him, literally, to disappear. "I said I'm here, too. I'm sitting here" (12). From the interrogation of The Birthday Party 38 39

Shepard, Seven Plays, 137. Harold Pinter, Old Times (New York: Grove, 1971), 31-33.

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(I 9 58) to the institutionalized language-politics of Mountain Language (I988), speech constitutes a field of domination and resistance, disclosure and erasure. The plays of the I970s and early I98os represent Pinter's most focused exploration of language as an arena for spatial and interpersonal negotiation, and no play reveals this shift in emphasis more clearly than No Man's Land-a play that recapitulates the configurations and contests of The Caretaker. As we have seen, The Caretaker foregrounds the material foundation of Pinter's plays of the I950s and early I96os, dramatizing both the instabilities inherent in a defamiliarized mise-enscene and the often desperate efforts of "re-placement" that its characters are forced to undergo. Like The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, The Caretaker explores the environmental nexus of body, subjectivity, object, and place, and (like these plays) it addresses the body's insistent though problematic relationship to its material surroundings. In Pinter's early drama, interpersonal issues are negotiated against a backdrop of bodily exigency and violence: McCann breaks Stanley's glasses, Mick chases Davies with an Electrolux in the dark, Max punches Joey in the stomach. Until the explicitly political plays of the mid-I98os, however the plays that follow the monologic Landscape and Silence (both I969) tend to avoid the material exploration of spatiality evident in the earlier drama, that fierce contest of actual bodies to assert place and relationship within a world of objects and other bodies. There are, of course, traces in No Man's Land of an earlier, more direct scenic interest: the carefully demarcated stage room, sealed by a door and heavy curtains over the window in the heightened enclosure so prominent throughout Pinter's work; a choreography of sitting, standing, and movement that constitutes a proxemics of character interaction; and a pattern of signals that call attention to the phenomenal actuality of the performance moment, culminating in the sleight of hand that closes act I, when Foster asks Spooner: "You know what it's like when you're in a room with the light on and then suddenly the light goes out? I'll show you. It's like this. He turns the light out. BLACKOUT."40 But the articulation of spatiality, and the terms through which it is contested, are modified in No Man's Land. Despite these scenographic and metatheatrical touches, Pinter's spatial attention has shifted, for the most part, from the environmental to the linguistic, and language has replaced body and set as 40

Harold Pinter, No Man's Land (New York: Grove, I975), 53·

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the principal scenic arena. The perceptual disorientations experienced by Davies are now articulated through dialogue (Hirst: "Can you imagine waking up, finding no-one here, just furniture, staring at you?" [44]), and the play is comparatively free of the spatial references that serve to ground language in the stage's corporeal field. In The Caretaker's dialogue, language refers continually to the stage's material presence, underscoring its impingement on the speaking subject through a density of reference to the play's physical setting (environmental references in italics): This your room? Yes. DAVIES. You got a good bit of stuff here. ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. Must be worth a few bob, this ... put it all together. Pause. There's enough of it. ASTON. There's a good bit of it, all right. DAVIES. You sleep here, do you? ASTON. Yes. DAVIES. What, in that? (II, emphasis added) DAVIES.

ASTON.

In No Man's Land, on the other hand, such local references are kept to a minimum, and when references to setting make an appearance in the play's dialogue they are quickly abandoned for less environmentally directed speech: What a remarkably pleasant room. I feel at peace here. Safe from all danger. But please don't be alarmed. I shan't stay long. I never stay long, with others. They do not wish it. And that, for me, is a happy state of affairs. (r7, emphasis added)

SPOONER[ ••. ]

As a result of this repeated deflection from the material environment to a more exclusively verbal scene, language diverges from setting, attaining a kind of scenic autonomy and standing in for the field of actual spatial habitation. The characters of No Man's Land embrace the opportunity afforded by this dissociation, evoking changing and conflicting accounts of the past, strategically erasing from their conversation events that we have seen take place. When Hirst refers to Briggs as

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"Denson" in act 2, even proper names begin to unmoor themselves from the mise-en-scene and its inhabitants. This discursive "standing in," however, this opening of speech as the principal field of interpersonal negotiation, only displaces the physicality of Pinter's earlier plays. The virtual absence of physical contact on stage, for instance, is counterpointed by the references to contact that thread and border the urbane conversation-the lexical inscription of bodies, their spatializing relationships, and their modes of contact. In contrast to the drawing-room formalities of No Man's Land, the dialogue bristles with violence, homoeroticism, and bodily exposure, including references to "a kind of old stinking tramp, hallock naked" (42), "young bodies lying in the dying light" (28), and Spooner's wife, who "had everything. Eyes, a mouth, hair, teeth, buttocks, breasts, absolutely everything. And legs" (JI). In this play, language both sublimates and calls attention to the physical; actual space is challenged by discursive space, which stands in relationships of concealment, disclosure, and substitution to the configurations on stage and confronts the field of performance with its own competing fields of embodiment and activity. In their indirections and redirections, these fields comprise a formidable assembly of Other Places, to borrow the title of Pinter's 1982 collection of plays. Dialogue, in No Man's Land, is crowded with offstage locales, presented with a kind of hyper-precision. Hampstead Heath, London, Chalk Farm, Oxford, West Upfield, Siam, Bali, the Malay Straits, Amsterdam, Dijon, Hungary, Romania-No Man's Land could be mapped in terms of its verbal geography, an offstage spatiality at once fragmentary and extensive. Like the Other Places of Beckett's plays (Lake Como in Endgame, for instance, or the locales of That Time), these references represent memory worlds, subject to the laws of time and recollection that increasingly interested Pinter after Landscape and Silence. Indeed, time and place in No Man's Land are linked in a relationship of mutual implication. As in Pinter's other plays of the 1970s and early 198os, time is spatialized by memory and localized as it is staged in the linguistically conditioned scene of remembrance. For their part, the "places" brought forward through conversation remain situated within the problematic field of temporality, bound to a past unreliable in outline and detail. To contest the field of time and memory, in other words, is to contest space in its verbally conditioned modes, whereas to evoke the offstage is often, in these plays, to disclose its temporal contours.

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This linguistic mode of presencing, developed through allusion and memory game, gives No Man's Land the territorial stake explicit in the earlier plays. The displacements effected by language, and the density of linguistic spatiality, reconfigure the onstage relationship through a kind of verbal surrogacy, as narrated events impinge in various ways on the present. The locations introduced in the dialogue are peopled scenes that are overlaid with predicates concerning status, class, and relationship. Just as Mick's reference in The Caretaker to a flat with "teal-blue, copper and parchment linoleum squares" (6o) serves to exclude the indigent Davies, the evocation of offstage locales in No Man's Land constitutes specific gestures of inclusion and exclusion. Hirst and Spooner cast and recast each other in scenes of surreptitious sexuality at Oxford (a geographic reference that itself marginalizes Briggs and Foster), while Spooner recaptures the scenic initiative from Briggs and Foster by supplanting the talk of Siamese women with his own geographic claims: (to SPOONER): You're not Siamese though, are you? He's a very long way from being Siamese. FOSTER: Ever been out there? SPOONER: I've been to Amsterdam. [FOSTER and BRIGGS stare at him.} (39) FOSTER

BRIGGS:

As this exchange continues, Spooner consolidates his conversational gains: having changed the scene, he proceeds to embody and people it ("At another table, in shadow, was a man whistling under his breath, sitting very still, almost rigid" [39]), employing a densely particularized scenic description that heightens the exclusion of Briggs and Foster from this new field of reference. Like other remarks in this play, where memories contradict each other and characters are called by different names, the verifiability of this assertion remains unclear. But in the end, verifiability matters relatively little in No Man's Land. What is really at stake in the play's scenic negotiation are the location and dislocation of an I that is continually re-placing itself in the shifts of story and performance and its changing discursive relationships to you and he. The first person constitutes a performative variable in the play, and its slippage between narrative contexts makes possible the play's territorial advances and retreats. Changing the subject of conversation-from torpedo boats to Oxford, for instance-involves a larger "changing of subject": a reconfiguration of both subject position and its relationship

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to rival points of centrality. Through the linguistic strategies of move and countermove, scenic negotiation in No Man's Land involves a more fundamental "spatial correction" (to adapt a line from one of Pinter's poems) 41 between subject and object, engaging the logistics of distance so central to Pinter's theater. As Spooner himself explains: "When you can't keep the proper distance between yourself and others, when you can no longer maintain an objective relation to matter, the game's not worth the candle, so forget it and remember that what is obligatory to keep in your vision is space, space in moonlight particularly, and lots of it" (r9). At the same time Spooner's urge toward distance is countered by an inescapable involvement, an almost magnetic attraction toward the space of others, and his final monologue (like Davies') is a plea to stay. The game of "what where" that animates the play's dialogue (to borrow a phrase from Beckett) involves the discursive negotiation of self in a field of intersubjectivity, even when that self feigns escape from the present through its narrative and performative flights. 42 As the conclusion of No Man's Land makes clear, the present is "truly unscrupulous" (2o), and the distance negotiated through words has inevitable recourse to the configurations of the present, with its ambiguous field of subject and object, involvement and detachment. To "change the subject ... for the last time" (9 r ), as Hirst proposes, is to fix I within the field that language has allowed the play's characters to evade, a field no longer supplanted by Other Places. It is to locate I in a space that is both No Place and the Only Place, beyond the reference 41 Pinter wrote the poem "I know the place" in 1975, the same year No Man's Land was first presented at London's Old Vic:

I know the place. It is true. Everything we do Corrects the space Between death and me And you.

Poems and Prose, 1949-77 (New York: Grove, 1978), 42. 42 To the extent that No Man's Land reflects the broader interest in language worlds evident in Pinter's drama from Landscape to the plays of Other Places, it highlights the different configurations of scenic levels in his "political" plays of the r98os. In these plays, language becomes the scene of a brutal offstage actuality, of a pain that ruptures that measured diction employed to disguise it. On stage, spatial arrangements are marked by both the memory and the threat of physical infliction, and by the spatial positions organized through institutionalized power. Locked in the polarity of perpetrator and victim, these static scenic fields are animated less by contest than by the discursive disclosure of bodily violation.

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and replacements of geography-a kind of Alaska, both actualized and indeterminate. Changing the subject for the last time strips the past from the present, the there from the here, and it abandons vicarious movement to actual position, fixed like the photographs in Hirst's album in a composed tableau. 43 This tableau is complex, simultaneously empty and full. Like the interior spaces hinted at throughout the play (the "gap in himself," for instance, which Hirst "can't fill" [46]), this final configuration is static, a no-man's-land, "which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent" (9 5 ), stripped of linguistic recourse in the play's slow fade-out. But the field of performance, at this moment, is also inhabited space, at rest, articulated by the body and its relationships, animated by the intractability and ambiguity of corporeal presence. The no-man's-land of conversation's end, a depeopled wasteland, is also (at this point) the four-man's-land of the stage, with its highly charged geometry of proximity and interaction. In this final framing of self and other, and their problematic but real proximity within the play's discursive and material fields, the play's conclusion returns us to a "place" moored in actuality, subject to the gravity of what is there. If dramatic discourse is inescapably informed by the spatiotemporal world in which it is spoken, and if discourse refigures this world in an autonomous mise-en-scene, then the scenic negotiations of No Man's Land press the paradox of this "body in words" to one of its logical ends. For the very speech that seems to eclipse the actual body and its material surroundings, reconfiguring the stage in terms of the Other Places of language, also constitutes the vehicle through which the physical body on stage reasserts its claim to presence. With its silent fade to darkness, we might be tempted to call this concluding configuration "postverbal" were it not that the moment is also a discursive present now denied the escape through changing verbal scenes. Like the tableau at the end of Old Times (which is triggered by Kate's terminating declaration "I remember you dead" [71]), the play's closing stasis results from verbal maneuvers that cancel themselves in a self-generated fixity. The game of words in No Man's Land may be a 43 According to David K. Lewis, the concept of actuality is a function of language: " 'Actual' is indexical, like 'I' or 'here,' or 'now': it depends for its reference on the circumstances of utterance, to wit the world where the utterance is located" (Counterfactuals [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973], 86). No Man's Land, we might say, explores this indexical nature of actuality; one can see the play's end as a linguistic fixing of the actual as actual, stripped of verbal (dis)placements.

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means of controlling discursive reality, but like Bolsover Street in Brigg's monologue, it is in the end "a one-way system easy enough to get into. The only trouble was that, once in, you couldn't get out" (62). Like Old Times, No Man,s Land discloses spatiality in its inextricable duality of the verbal and the corporeal. Here exists as a discursive manifestation, subject to correction and semantic reinvestment, and as a materially irreducible field where linguistic detachment confronts what Merleau-Ponty calls the "system" of "Self-others-things."44 This here reflects the ambiguity of space in Pinter's theater and its conflicting modes of scenic presence. To negotiate this scene, as characters do in No Man's Land, is to maneuver in both a protean discursive spatiality and a field of actual bodies where space (to return Hirst's words to the stage on which he speaks them) stands manifest, closed, "as it is" (I 5). Until movement is stilled by the fixity of conversation's end, these spatial fields are subject to correction and displacement, and the very ground of their configuration is caught in a fiercely contested game of place. The Discourse of Theater: Offending the Audience Near the end of Peter Handke's 1971 play The Ride across Lake Constance, the character Emil Jannings gestures (like Poliakoff's Sasha) by pointing with his finger. Instead of following the direction of his indexical gesture, however, the other characters look at the finger itself, as (eventually) does Jannings, who finally lowers his hand. This moment is emblematic of the acute language consciousness that informs all of Handke's fiction, poetry, and drama-the interest not only in the reality to which language points but also (and, in his earliest writings, primarily) in the independent reality and operation evident in the pointing itself. Kaspar (1968) explores the possession and dispossession of consciousness through the acquisition of speech, and the protagonist of the novel The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is afflicted by a perceptual/cognitive "word-game sickness," an alienating hyper-attention to words as labels of things. 45 The multiple intertwinings of experience and language shadow even the most intimate moments of Handke's journal, Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 57· Peter Handke, The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972), 96. 44

45

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The Weight of the World: "In the middle of the night A. patted me, because she had had a nightmare; 'in the middle of the night she patted me; she had had a nightmare.' " 46 Handke's 1966 play Offending the Audience (Publikumbeschimpfung) investigates this universe of discourse as it informs both the medium and the institution of theater. In so doing it allows us to conclude our study of performative language with a focus on the discursive dimensions of the theatrical event itself. Replacing actors with speakers who address the spectators directly, Offending the Audience is one of Handke's Sprechstiicke ("speech works," "works about speech," "works comprised of speech"). As Handke writes, the Sprechstiicke "point to the world not by way of pictures but by way of words; the words of the speakers don't point at the world as something lying outside the words but to the world in the words themselves."47 Through the modes of direct address and verbal inventory, Offending the Audience attempts to illuminate the linguistic strata of the theater event, to give voice to the discursive structure that joins audience, actors, and stage. The performance features of Offending the Audience are designed to disrupt normal dramatic and theatrical activity and direct attention to the linguistic mise-en-scene. After the carefully scripted preperformance rituals (noises behind the curtain, ushers ceremoniously leading spectators to their seats)-rituals evoking the traditional theatrical behavior that the play as a whole will "offend"-the speakers emerge and approach the front of the stage. Handke specifies that the speakers do not initially notice the audience, that they instead begin moving their lips, their words only gradually becoming comprehensible as insults. "You chuckle-heads" (29), "you small-timers" (30): these and other phrases (drawn from the play's concluding series of insults) are spoken in random order, overlapping each other. The speakers "take words out of each other's mouths. They speak in unison, each uttering different words. They repeat. They grow louder. They scream. They pass rehearsed words from mouth to mouth" (6). Passed back and forth in this way, like soccer balls or the hats in Godot, words become quasimaterial, objects (not instruments) of exchange. The initial indecipherability of the vocal sounds and the attention to such nonsemantic 46 Peter Handke, The Weight of the World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 91. 47 Peter Handke, Offending the Audience, in Kaspar and Other Plays, [ix].

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variables as volume, verbal overlap, and sequence reflect the acoustical emphasis evident in Handke's "Rules for the actors": "Listen to the rhythmic chanting at demonstrations," "Listen to the simultaneous arrival and departure of trains" (3). Even before the speakers address the audience, then, Handke presents language as something autonomous, preceding individual utterance, like the sentences in Kaspar. 48 This linguistic emphasis continues throughout the audience address that constitutes the main body of Offending the Audience. Stylistically, the play's discourse operates through repetition, incremental elaboration, and contradiction; in its elaborately precise clauses and its dynamic of restatement and redefinition, this discourse resembles, as Nicholas Hern suggests, the language of a contract, will, or lawbook stripped of linking conjunctions.49 "You are not standing. You are using the seating arrangements. You are sitting" (I 8)-expanding statements through variations that are more linguistic than substantive, the play's discourse is powerfully overdetermined, and in its sheer verbal accumulation it resists its usual effacement in the flight toward meaning. Much of the initial import of the speakers' address is to arrest the specific semiotic operation by which language and the other elements of the theatrical medium "disappear" into the represented world of the fiction. The speakers are not performing; the stage presents no drama; it offers no picture of something else. Nothing on this stage is designed to "be" anything other than what it is: "This stage represents nothing . . . . You don't see any objects that pretend to be other objects .... You don't see a room that pretends to be another room. Here you are not experiencing a time that pretends to be another time. The time on stage is no different from the time off stage" (10). With a nod to Stanislavsky and the tradition of dramatic illusionism, the speakers assert, "We are not doing as if" (17). The doubleness essential to naturalistic representation, whereby what we see and hear is eclipsed by a fictional referent, is here denied, and what the play offers in its place is a radical deixis, through which language is grounded in (and only in) the actual moment 48 In his prefatory remarks to Kaspar, Handke emphasizes the mechanical impersonality of the voice's linguistic material: "Although the sense of what the voices addressing the protagonist say should always be completely comprehensible, their manner of speaking should be that of voices which in reality have a technical medium interposed between themselves and the listeners: telephone voices, radio or television announcers' voices, [etc.]" (Kaspar and Other Plays, 59). 49 Nicholas Hem, Peter Handke (New York: Frederick Ungar, I972), 4·

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of utterance. "The time here is your time. Space time here is your space time" (15). 50 "By always speaking directly to you and by speaking to you of time, of now and of now and of now, we observe the unity of time, place, and action" (20). To the extent that the play's lines call attention to themselves as received formulations, cliches drawn from theatrical parlance ("There is no deafening silence .... There is no deathly quiet" [q]), this deixis is given added metadiscursive resonance, as the language event asserts its claim as the primary field of reference. Through a catalog that provides a powerful description of the phenomenology of conventional spectatorship, the speakers systematically evoke the terms according to which the stage (and its participants) are occluded by illusionism and mimesis. This strategy of disavowal ("Here there is no") works to enable the play's central project: the disclosure, through speech, of the actuality eclipsed in the processes of dramatic semiosis-especially the actuality of that most invisible participant in dramatic illusionism, the audience. With the initially lowered house lights returned to full illumination, the speakers reverse the positions of watcher and watched and make the audience the play's theatrical "topic" (21 ). They address the audience with calculated exhaustiveness, exposing what we might call the structures of its theatrical presence. To name is to call into awareness: "Because we speak to you, you can become conscious of yourself" (2o). The speakers call attention to the audience's physiological presence ("You become aware of the flow of your saliva" [20] ), its collective arrangement in patterns of seating, its observance of certain tacit rules of conduct in the theater, its rituals for dressing, arriving at the theater, and leaving at the end. "You represent something. You are someone. You are something" (17): having stripped the stage of its conventional recourse to meanings, Handke's speakers proceed to uncover the multiple "meanings" according to which the audience is constituted (and constitutes itself) as audience. The "audience" disclosed by this verbal performance is simultaneously individual and collective. Handke specifies that the speakers "look at the public, but at no one person in particular" (6-7). Like their use of we, which designates a collection of mutually interchangeable J's (any of the speakers can speak any of the lines), their use of you oscillates imperceptibly 50Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton suggest that Handke's theater may represent "a turn to radical realism ... his plays create something that is totally and concretely real in itself" (Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie's Journey Home [Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983], ro7).

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between the singular and the plural, evoking particular experience in general terms. "You are now aware of your presence" (2I), but at the same time, "You are no personalities. You are not singular. You are a plurality of persons. Your faces point in one direction" ( I2). Instructed by the speakers, the spectator may become acutely aware of the impulse to scratch, but this experience is described in terms that render it shared and, disclosed in this way, even public. 51 Handke has described his intended effect in Offending the Audience as the spectator's gradual "encirclement in language," 52 and the progression of the play's statements are calculated to allow no refuge from their descriptive invasions: "Don't swallow.... Swallow" (2I). Even the stance of being "on to" Handke's intentions is caught in the play's discursive inventory (q). But this sense of speech as entrapment is fully understandable only if we recognize (as in No Man's Land) the ability of language to activate experience and embody it linguistically. In Handke's plays and fictions, this capture of experience in language is possible both because "the world in words" holds an evocative power over human experience and because this experience is itself infiltrated with linguistic structures, the result (as Kaspar demonstrates) of our existence and participation in a discursive order. 53 The "offensive" terms that the speakers direct at the audience at the play's close are, after all, "merely ... offensive words which you yourselves use" (29). Though some of these terms are indeed insulting, they are interspersed with phrases such as "you luminaries of science" and "you builders of a better world" (32). As the nonreferential quotation of some of these phrases in the play's opening moments attests, insults and compliments alike derive from an impersonal system of designations. The "offense" with which the play ends is thus less an individual or even group attack ("we won't offend you" [29]) than an attempt to confront the audience with the terms of its collective self-articulation. In this sense, the word offending in the play's English title is a felicitous translation, for its 51 The German Publikum captures this theatrical phenomenon of group individuality, as does the interchangeability of the singular and the plural under the German Sie. 52 Artur Joseph, "Nauseated by Language: From an Interview with Peter Handke," Drama Review 15 (Fall 1970): 59· 53 For two useful discussions of Handke's " 'textualization' of the world" and his "deconstruction of the world perceived and produced through language," see Rainer Nagele, "Peter Handke: The Staging of Language," Modern Drama 23 (January 1981): 327-38; and Michael Hays, "Peter Handke and the End of the 'Modern,' " ibid.: 346-66. The first phrase is Nagele's (328), the second Hays's (355).

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Latin root includes among its meanings both "strike against" and "come upon." When the speakers assert, "You have been discovered .... Our words catch fire on you" (12), they suggest the intimate relationship between their words and the subjectivity against which these words are directed. In view of this, we might note the paradox inherent in the speakers' early assurance that "no mirror is being held up to you" (9 ). Although Offending the Audience rejects the traditional mimetic conventions of theater-as-mirror, its abandonment of illusionism uncovers a more fundamental level at which language and experience are involved in a kind of inescapable reflection. Handke abandons the traditional mimetic relationship between object and its representation for a mimetic exchange between discourse and a linguistically conditioned subjectivity. Strictly (even severely) denotative, the language of Offending the Audience lacks the sensory and emotional registers, the imagistic resonances, of Synge's, Shepard's, or even Pinter's dramatic speech. Though Handke's Sprechstucke employ only "natural forms of expression found in reality" (ix), there is something deliberately flat, even alienating, about these words and phrases when pared down and dispassionately delivered, as if they were the verbal equivalent of the found objects in The Caretaker's setting, a kind of linguistic detritus. But this denotative impersonality, the fact that even the speakers' most personal terms have, in a sense, quotation marks around them, is inseparable from the play's phenomenological/linguistic investigation. Handke strips language of connotation in order to foreground the acoustical and semantic structures by which it infiltrates and conditions experience, and these structures are alienating because (as elsewhere in Handke's earliest work) language is itself an alienation from experience. As Kaspar laments, after succumbing to socialization through speech (what Handke describes as "speech torture" [59]), "Already with my first sentence I was trapped" (137). Commenting on Kaspar, Handke has said, "I point out the present forms of linguistic alienation .... When people are alienated from their language and their speech, as workers are from their products, they are alienated from the world as well." 54 Yet the writer who declared "sometimes talking is so repellent to me that just to finish a sentence I have to raise my shoulders and brace myself" would also claim that "language is the most valuable thing 54

Joseph, "Nauseated by Language," 6r.

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there is. " 55 As early as the Sprechstucke, we can see a counterconception of language at work, a sense of its potential power as a tool through which consciousness can take possession of itself. In its dual status-independent system and constituting instrument of subjectivity-language serves to mediate (in Handke's own terms) "the innerworld" and "the outerworld."56 In this capacity, language offers the possibility of awareness, even if this awareness is restricted to the infringements of words and the vertiginous extent to which one is already "encircled" by language. The speakers of Offending the Audience talk of "switch[ing]" the audience "on" (29): "Because we speak to you, your self-awareness increases." In Handke's They Are Dying Out (1974), Quitt says, "I don't know anything about myself ahead of time. My experiences only occur to me in the telling." 57 Handke's play seems governed not only by a mordant delight in playing within the prisonhouse of language, but also by a faith that imprisonment can turn into something else if the terms of its entrapment are brought to awareness. As is true for Brecht (though with a set of interests that owe more to Wittgenstein than Marx), to alienate alienation is to discover the beginnings of a way beyond it. For Handke, this metadiscursive scrutiny is a phenomenological first step, a way of reclaiming consciousness and language for more interiorized exploration. When Handke returned to the theater in 1981 with The Long Way Round (Uber die Dorfer [Through the Villages]), his first play in nine years, it was with a reclaimed poetic language, its "world in words" now bringing to life both consciousness and its physical and interpersonal environments. 58 55 Handke, The Weight of the World, 2IO; June Schlueter, interview with Peter Handke (23 July I979), in The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, I98I), I73· 56 These terms are taken from the title of Handke's first collection of poems: The Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, trans. Michael Roloff (New York: Seabury Press, I 97 4 ). -"Peter Handke, They Are Dying Out, in The Ride across Lake Constance and Other Plays, trans. Michael Roloff in collaboration with Karl Weber (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, I976), 255· 58 Klinkowitz and Knowlton characterize Handke's work of the late I970s and I98os (frequently discussed as examples of the New Sensibility or New Subjectivity in I970S German literature) as establishing "a new phenomenology of the 'I' as a perceiving and knowing subject immersed in a threatening world .... [These works] provide us with a protocol of consciousness reexperiencing and recreating the outerworld, thus reconstituting it as innerworld with a new concreteness and coherence" (Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, I 3-r4). Handke himself suggests the extent to which this phenomenological development in his writing-which continues into the late r98os with the novel Across and

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"One should learn to be nauseated by language, as the hero of Sartre's Nausea is by things. At least that would be a beginning of consciousness."59 Offending the Audience, its speakers tell us, is "a prologue" (9 )-pro-logos being both "the speech that comes before" and "the speech that stands before." As the speech that comes before, it constitutes, primarily, a prologue to other theater and to the ritual of life in which the ritual of theater assumes its place. But more broadly, Handke's speech-play is a prologue to awareness, and in this case the prologue, the speech that stands before, is the very play it anticipates. For what its verbal confrontation discloses are the orders of discourse and experience that underlie the theatrical event and that tend to remain, in conventional dramatic performance, invisible and silent.

the novellas collected in Repetition-still hinges on the operations of language: "When in the course of a day speech is generated, rises to consciousness, is discovered: animation of dead nature" (The Weight of the World, 230). 59Joseph, "Nauseated by Language," 6r.

CHAPTER

5 Post-Brechtian Anatomies: The Politics of Embodiment The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism ... is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. -Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach" Marat forget the rest there's nothing else beyond the body -Peter Weiss, Marat/Sade

Brecht, Verfremdung, and the Suffering Body Bertolt Brecht's death in 19 56 inaugurated a period in modern political theater whose theoretical and dramaturgical parameters have yet to be defined. It may appear presumptuous to apply the label "postBrechtian" to plays as diverse as John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959), David Edgar's The fail Diary of Albie Sachs (1978), Churchill's Cloud 9, Muller's Hamletmachine, and Tony Kushner's Angels in America (1991), but the term has more than merely historical justification. Much of the political drama since Brecht's death has been written and performed with his formidable theoretical example in view, and even those dramatists who have refused Brecht's political aesthetic have done so in the wake of its radical reconfigurations of theater art. Those dramatists who explicitly draw on Brechtian theory have participated in the broader reinterpretation of this theory in terms of evolving

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political, cultural, and theatrical milieux. "We should begin with Brecht," Edward Bond has remarked, "but we shouldn't end there." In Muller's words, "To use Brecht without criticizing him is to betray him." 1 There are a variety of ways in which one might characterize the "post-Brechtian" in its contemporary manifestations, as well as a variety of developments in which one may discern the revision of Brechtian theater practice: the postmodern radicalizing of Brechtian aesthetics and its subversion of dogmatism and "presence" in Brecht's theory of performance; the simultaneous appropriation and revision of Brechtian political theater on the part of feminists and nonWestern writers; experiments in decentering dramatic and theatrical authorship; stagings of Brecht's plays that open dialogues with Brecht's own theater practice. 2 This chapter focuses on a prominent signature of post-Brechtian political drama, a feature at the heart of its ideological and representational strategies: the almost obsessive interest in the body as a political unit, as a crucial element in the contest of subjectivity and subjection. By exploiting the body's centrality in the theatrical medium, contemporary political dramatists have refigured the actor's body as the principal site of theatrical and political intervention, thereby reconfiguring the political field in corporeal terms and establishing a contemporary "body politic" rooted in the individual's sentient presence. Of all the forms that the body has assumed on the post-Brechtian political stage, the most pervasive and urgent is the body in its deepest extremity, the suffering, violated entity that Elaine Scarry has 1

Edward Bond, "On Brecht: A Letter to Peter Holland," Theatre Quarterly 8 (Summer

1978): 34; Heiner Muller, "To Use Brecht without Criticizing Him is to Betray Him," trans. Marc Silberman, Theater (Yale) 17 (Spring 1986): 31-33. 2 For discussions of these post-Brechtian currents, see Joel Schechter, "Beyond Brecht: New Authors, New Spectators," in Beyond Brecht!Uber Brecht hinaus, The Brecht Yearbook II, ed. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, and John Willett (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983), 4 3-5 3; Philip Auslander, "Toward a Concept of the Political in Postmodern Theatre," Theatre Journal 39 (March 1987): 20-34; Klaus Vi:ilker, "Brecht Today: Classic or Challenge," Theatre Journal 39 (December 1987): 425-33; David Bathrick, "Patricide or Re-generation? Brecht's Baal and Roundheads in the GDR," Theater Journal 39 (December 1987): 434-47; Elin Diamond, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism," TDR 32 (Spring 1988): 82-94; the essays in Pia Kleber and Colin Visser, eds., Re-interpreting Brecht: His Influence on Contemporary Drama and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Janelle Reinelt, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). See also Elizabeth Wright, Postmodern Brecht: A Re-presentation (London: Routledge, 1989).

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termed "the body in pain." 3 Described through dramatic speech and represented onstage, the body in contemporary political theater is often a body tortured, disciplined, confined, penetrated, maimed, extinguished. From the murder, sodomy, and rape in Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain (1980), the onstage "pricking" scene in Churchill's Vinegar Tom (1976), and the offstage brutality of Dario Fo's Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1970), through the recounted horrors of David Rabe's Vietnam plays, the sheer scope of bodily violation in this drama creates a landscape-spectacle of atrocity whose excesses, I argue, both mark and transgress the theater's representational space. When Peter Brook characterizes the psychic traces of theatrical performance as a "silhouette" that "burns" in the mind and "scorches" the memory, his language indirectly captures the searing effect of such plays on the audience, the vicarious infliction of pain both during and after performance.4 The stoning of the baby that occasioned such outrage when it was performed in Bond's Saved, like the stage presence of the poet's tortured body in Maishe Maponya's Gangsters (published 1986), challenge the representational detachment of Brechtian political theater and claim a new field of depiction and response. Brecht sought an analytic disclosure of power and its relations; subsequent dramatists have sought to represent this power at its most elemental, through its often visceral registers in human tissue. Images of this power have occupied and traumatized the modern consciousness-Auschwitz, Hiroshima, My Lai, Cambodia, El Salvador, Beijing, Sarajevo-and they have occurred with equal frequency on the contemporary political stage. In the prophetic words of Georg Buchner's Danton: "These days everything is worked in human flesh. That's the curse of our times." 5 To restrict the staging of the suffering body to its display as image, emblem, or spectacle, however, is to ignore the complexity of this body's presence in the contemporary political theater. For the body as it is subjected in this theater is also the source of its own, characteristically ambiguous modes of habitation. Post-Brechtian theater demonstrates a recurrent and markedly phenomenological interest in the body as a political entity and in the experiential issues which this body brings into 'Scarry, The Body in Pain. Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Middlesex: Penguin, 1972), rp. 5 Georg Biichner, Danton's Death, in The Complete Collected Works, trans. Henry Schmidt (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 67. 4

J.

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focus: the world-constituting abilities of the bodied subject as it interacts with its environment, and the consequences on this subject of an external infringement directed at the body and the personal world it serves to ground. By appropriating the body as the site of sensory interchange with its natural and social environments, and by investigating the subjective contours of this embodied world, post-Brechtian theater suggests a partial revaluation of the "political," one which goes significantly against the Brechtian grain. If Brecht worked to politicize the Lebenswett, or lived world, objectifying its components and subjecting them to external analysis, many post-Brechtian dramatists have worked to phenomenalize the political, and to pursue its roots in the personal realities of embodiment and world-constitution. If we seek to understand the traumatizing, disruptive presence of the suffering body in the representational modes of contemporary political drama, we must begin with the body as zero-point of the subject's phenomenal world. In its powerful and complex modes of habitation, the body has constituted an uneasy presence in Brechtian drama and its theory. One can discern in the dramatic development from the pre-Marxist to the Marxist Brecht a suppression of the body's potentially anarchic claims to attention. The desiring, carnivalesque body rendered in the figure of Baal (and, to lesser extents, in such figures as Kragler, Anna, Garga, Shlink, and Edward II) is harnessed, in the later plays, through characters less prone to its excesses. 6 Although Schweyk and Azdak belong to a tradition of clown theater that foregrounds the body and its appetites, a tradition that extends through Fo's giullari, the Falstaffian potentials of their misrule are largely contained by their specifically political functions? In a similar vein, the suffering to which the body is liable-its hunger and pain, its vulnerability to inflictions from both inside and out-is increasingly controlled in its representation in Brecht's plays: the violence perpetrated directly and indirectly by Macheath in The Threepenny Opera is narrated through euphemisms, and the brutality that forms the backdrop of Fear and Misery in the Third 6 Darko Suvin notes the virtual absence of sex from Brecht's plays; see "Brecht's Parable of Heavenly Food: Life of Galileo," in Essays on Brecht/Versuche iiber Brecht, The Brecht Yearbook r 5, ed. Marc Silberman, John Fuegi, Renate Voris, and Carl Weber (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 2rr. 7 0n the politics of the "carnivalesque" body, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Joel Schechter discusses the political tradition of clown theater on the modern stage in Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics, and Theatre (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985).

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Reich occurs offstage. Baal stabs Ekhart in a phantasmagoric sequence of onstage violence; but of the significant number of deaths figuring in Brecht's later plays, the shooting of Kattrin in Mother Courage and Her Children is one of the few actually presented to view. Indeed, of all Brecht's later plays, Mother Courage is most darkened by suffering, yet physical violence is revealed almost exclusively in aftermath-in words ("Cutting down peasants whets the appetite") and on the body (Kattrin's dumbness-"A soldier stuffed something in her mouth when she was little"). 8 By the time of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, even verbal directness has been submerged within the detachment of parable. This is not to suggest that the body and its needs relinquished their interest for Brecht in his plays of Marxist inspiration; on the contrary, Marxism clarified for Brecht the social dimension of such needs and their function in political and economic systems. As Darko Suvin notes, all of Brecht's major plays "deal with people's alienation faced with the historical institutionalizations of their basic strivings for food, sex, friendship and knowledge." 9 These clarifications, though, were accompanied by externalizing dramaturgical and theatrical strategies, in which the desiring, suffering body was "taken out of itself" and refigured as an element, subject to analysis, in a rationalized mise-en-scene. Between Baal's boast that "my heaven is full of trees and bodies" and the lines of the First Threepenny Finale• Man has a right, in this our brief existence To call some fleeting happiness his own Partake of worldly pleasures and subsistence And have bread on his table rather than a stone

-is a gulf separating the embodied subject from an objectified body displayed to the scientific eye so essential to the politics of Brechtian reception. 10 'Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Collected Plays, vol. 5, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Random House, I972), I46, I84. 9 Darko Suvin, To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy (Sussex: Harvester Press; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, I984), 70. 10 Bertolt Brecht, Baal, trans. William E. Smith and Ralph Manheim, in Collected Plays, vol. I, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Random House, I97I), 3I; The Threepenny Opera, trans. Ralph Manheim and John Willett, in Collected Plays, vol. 2, ed. Ralph Manheim and John Willett (New York: Random House, I977), I77· On the scientistic foundations of Brecht's theater, see David Roberts, "Brecht and the Idea of a Scientific Theatre,"

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This objectification of the body represents the organizing motif of Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt as it constitutes both an aesthetics of staging and a theory of acting. The mutual estrangement of scenic elements decenters the body and its appetites as a dramatic focal point, while Brechtian acting works to recast this body as instrument and emblem. The epic actor presents his or her body not as it lives its sentient world, but as it is alienated by the analytic gaze; the actor, Brecht writes, "expresses his awareness of being watched .... The artist's object is to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work." 11 The aim of such moments in Brecht's plays is an acute visibility, in which the body stands clarified as a nexus of social relationships and becomes, through the semantic operations of Brecht's theater, a sign of itself. Brechtian Cestus highlights this body as signifying image etched in ideological outline: "The grouping of the characters on the stage and the movements of the groups must be such that ... the material conveying [the] gest is set out and laid bare to the understanding of the audience." 12 In scene 4 of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Azdak offers a lesson in the self-presentation of epic acting, subordinating the facts of sentience and appetite to their illustration, when he instructs the fugitive Grand Duke how to eat his cheese with the gestures and expressions of the poor. The moment is revealing and typical. Characters speak of hunger in Brecht's plays, but seldom from its pangs, its perceptual depletion, or its other forms of internal urgency; his characters speak of pain, but seldom with its traumatized voice. Whether or not Brecht may have equated embodied subjectivity with the unitary ego he was ideologically compelled to reject, Brechtian Verfremdung is, to a striking degree, an estrangement of the body as phenomenal site. Throughout Brecht's theoretical writings, images associated with bodily appetite are used as negative metaphors for the audience's surrender to empathy: the Dramaturg of The Messingkauf in Brecht: Performance/Brecht: Auffiihrung, The Brecht Yearbook 13, ed. John Fuegi, Gisela Bahr, John Willett, and Carl Weber (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 41-60. Roberts writes: "The individual as object and not subject of events is not only the constant theme of [Brecht's] plays, it determines the method [of] presentation of figures and events as objects of investigation, whose formula from the mid-thirties on was the term alienation" (42). 11 Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, 92. Elsewhere Brecht has written: "It is only after walking all around the entire episode that he can, as it were by a single leap, seize and fix his character, complete with all its individual features" (ibid., 200). 12 Ibid., 2oo-2or.

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Dialogues says of Brecht's theater: "His actors weren't waiters who must serve up the meat and have their private, personal feelings treated as gross importunities." 13 Brecht's Life of Galileo, we recall, contrasts the ingestive self-absorbed pleasures of eating with the outwardlydirected faculty of vision. 14 The very image of a "culinary theater" and its attendant dismissal suggest Brecht's mistrust of a theatrical experience grounded in corporeal engulfment. Subsequent political dramatists have drawn on the political concerns and the modes of staging the body evident in Brecht's plays. Extending Brecht's concern with the signifying body, these dramatists have deepened their critique of its investment, centering attention even more fully on the body's subjection to imagistic and other forms of ideological consumption.H But even those dramatists most "Brechtian" in theatrical technique have sought to undermine the exclusive hold of Korper over Leib, of objectification over corporeality as it offers itself to experience; they have supplemented the strategic displacement of alienation with an attention to the body as a privileged point in representational systems. Post-Brechtian theater, in other words, explores the political and theatrical implications of the essential fact that of all the elements that comprise semiotic fields, the human figure is the only one that is itself a source of semiotic and other forms of meaning-constitution. To express this in terms we have used before, the body represents an object of observation that actually looks back. Brecht's actor also returns the audience's look, of course, but he or she does so from a body-position whose phenomenal parameters have been bracketed or effaced and within a politics of vision that replaces illusionism with representational objectivity of a different order. In this sense, Beckett's Catastrophe-a play that stands, in many ways, diametrically opposed to the Brechtian project-offers a revealing prototype of the post-Brechtian politics of the body. As we have seen, Beckett's play stages the catastrophic reversal that occurs in representational "display" when the body-arranged, exposed, whitened, and illuminated by the resources of theater technology-asserts itself as sub13

Bertolt Brecht, The Messingkauf Dialogues, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, I965 ),

7I. 14 See Bernard Dort, "Lecture de Galilee," in Les voies de Ia creation the!itrale, vol. 3, ed. Denis Bablet and Jean Jacquot (Paris: Centre National de Ia Recherche Scientifique, I972), 2I4-I9; and Suvin, "Brecht's Parable of Heavenly Food," I87-2I2. 15 See Wright's discussion of Muller's plays and the dance theater of Pina Bausch (Postmodern Brecht, u3-37).

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ject and reorients the field of performance in relation to its own, vulnerably embodied gaze. The continuity with which this gaze extends both into Beckett's own drama (to Vladimir and Estragon, Winnie, and the Listener in That Time) and into the overtly political theater of such dramatists as Fo, Soyinka, Churchill, and Edgar suggests that contemporary political theater shares an interest with the theater of Beckett in the phenomenology of the theatrical body. Informed by this interest, post-Brechtian theater directs its attention to the politics of human embodiment, and the exploration of this politics in terms of the suffering body stands at considerable remove from the objectifying scientism of Brecht's V erfremdung. Considering the subversion of this scientism in the drama of Peter Weiss and Edward Bond (and in Chapter 6, the plays of Maria Irene Fornes), we can appreciate the often problematic presence of the body in post-Brechtian political theater and the extent to which this theater works to achieve a more deeply embodied play of the phenomenal and the representational. The Body and Beyond: Trotsky in Exile and Marat/Sade The "preobjectivist" body that has emerged in contemporary political drama has significant historical and theoretical antecedents. If a theatrical return to corporeality as it lives and suffers its world recalls the theatrical body in early Brecht, it also evokes the early political theory of Marx, before he adopted and refined the scientism of Das Kapital and the works that occupied his later years. In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of r844 and the "Theses on Feuerbach" (1845), Marx formulated a theory of economic life based on human "sensuousness" and its interactions with a nature in which the human subject seeks to externalize and (thereby) know itself through productivity: "The object of labor is ... the objectification of man's species life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created." Alienated labor under a system of private property estranges the human subject because it divorces this subject from its creative activity, rendering it an alien object unto itself amid a dispossessed object-world where even the body's desire becomes estranged, other: "Estrangement is manifested not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desire is the inaccessible posses-

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sion of another, but also in the fact that everything is itself something different from itself-that my activity is something else." Central to this philosophical and economic vision is the human body, rendered fully "human" and able to inhabit its personal and shared life-world only when liberated from an alienating economic system: "The transcendence of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object-an object made by man for man." Through this liberation, in other words, the body becomes itself, humanized in its sensory communion with nature yet vulnerable to a materiality and sentience that the individual subject can never fully transcend: "Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being-and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being." 16 Marx's analysis of labor and alienation in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts highlights a polarity that governs the politics of embodiment in the contemporary political theater. On the one hand, post-Brechtian dramatists have staged the appropriation of object and space by the human subject, the placement of this subject in its environment through language, gestural projection, and manipulation of the material world. Conceived from this point of view, the subject is fundamentally creative, seeking to transcend its material boundaries while fulfilling the body's needs. As we saw in Chapter 3, this bodily selfprojection manifests itself in the instrumental handling of objects to objectify and satisfy these needs, and to extend the individual's power of agency. This impulse underlies, as well, the building of society and its artifacts, for (as Elaine Scarry notes) "every act of civilization is an 16 Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of I 844, ed. Dirk J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), II4, 156, 139, 182. See also "Theses on Feuerbach," in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 156-58. Kostas Axelos analyzes the issues of embodiment and self-extension through labor in Marx' writings in Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx, trans. Ronald Bruzina (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), esp. 123-42, 217-69; see also Scarry, The Body in Pain, 243-77. For studies of Marxist thought from the perspective of corporeality and the life-world, see Ludwig Landgrebe, "Life-world and the Historicity of Human Existence," in Phenomenology and Marxism, ed. Bernhard Waldenfels, Jan M. Broekman, and Ante Pazanin, trans. J. Claude Evans, Jr. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 167-204; and John O'Neill, "Merleau-Ponty's Critique of Marxist Scientism," in Phenomonology and Marxism, 276-304.

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act of transcending the body in a way consonant with the body's needs." 17 On the other hand, and more urgently, post-Brechtian theater has dramatized the collapse of such self-extension within a radical embodiment, the property of a body that is mortal, isolated within itself, subject to the annihilating force of pain. The suffering body, emblem of this condition, is no longer the seat of an externalizing productivity, the center of an individual and social Lebenswelt; instead, it becomes something "thinglike and objectal" (to recall Pliigge's medical description), a self-enclosed point of sensation in a derealized world empty of human content. 18 Writing of the torture he is forced to undergo, the magistrate/narrator of J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians observes, "[My torturers] were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well." And elsewhere: "My whole being is preoccupied ... in the misery of being simply a body that feels itself sick and wants to be well." 19 To inflict deprivation, confinement, and violation on the body is to bring about an experiential collapse reflected in the ambiguous term subject, for as the body ceases to be the site of a self-transcending subjectivity, it becomes objectified, physicalized by sensation, subject (like Davies' body in The Caretaker and that of Rabe's Pavlo Hummel) to the flesh's vulnerability. The survivors of nuclear war in Bond's War Plays (1985) use stones, metal, and what tools they can find to begin rebuilding a humanized world, but in the background of this postnuclear reconstruction lies the corporeal infliction of the holocaust itself: "And as the flesh burned from faces the skulls whistled .... The heart leapt like a bird in its burning cage and the ribs whistled." 20 As Ardell tells Pavlo: "The knowledge 17 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 57· Scarry discusses "the human being's capacity to move out beyond the boundaries of his or her own body into the external, sharable world" (5). Pliigge observes that "all things take their rise in the live body ... since, phenomenologically viewed, perception is the indispensable presupposition for every emergence of all things in the world" ("Man and His Body," 294). 18 Scarry writes: "Intense pain ... destroys a person's self and world, a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe" (The Body in Pain, 35). Anthony Kubiak observes that "the moment of terror, like the instant of pain, is a moment of zero time and infinite duration .... In pain we experience history as pure subject, isolated and detached; we experience history, in other words, as a-historical" ("Disappearance as History: The Stages of Terror," Theatre journal 39 [March 1987]: 82). 19}. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), rr5, 87. 20 Edward Bond, Red Black and Ignorant, in The War Plays: A Trilogy, vol. r (London: Methuen, 1985), 5·

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comin', baby. I'm talkin' about what your kidney know, not your fuckin' fool's head. I'm talkin' about your skin and what it sayin', thin as paper. We melt; we tear and rip apart. Membrane, baby. Cellophane. Ain't that some shit." 21 Peter Weiss stands as a pivotal dramatist in the contemporary theater of embodiment. Combining Brechtian presentational styles with an Artaudian interest in bodily affliction, his plays conduct their political explorations between the phenomenological poles of self-extension and corporeal self-awareness. Vietnam Discourse (1968), like Song of the Lusitanian Bogey (1967), is firmly Brechtian in dramaturgical modesimple in costume and gesture, declarative and explanatory in verbal style-and its account of human atrocity is tightly contained within a clarity of audience address. Presentation, in this case, mirrors subject, for the play documents the historical narrative of the Vietnamese people and their continuing will to liberate the present, a self-transcending imperative that distances individual suffering. The Investigation, on the other hand, drives Brechtian detachment to the brink of collapse by emphasizing this suffering to the point where its horror risks searing the precise language crafted to convey it. If, as Scarry suggests, intense pain is "language-destroying,"22 resisting expression and description, then the agony of the concentration camps threatens to exceed and cancel its documentary format, as the list of atrocities stands mute before an unspeakableness that ruptures the detachment of staged testimony with the weight of suffering. Overwhelming the play's verbal mise-en-scene is the body in extremis: branded, confined (hung from the frame of the sadistic "swing"; forty crammed in an eight-foot-square bunker cell), deprived, broken, killed by a numbing variety of means, opened, heaped among piles of other bodies, incinerated, reduced to itself and less, mocking even the possibility of political or other vision with its assertion of mute sentience. Though its words are heavy with the body's agonized presence, The Investigation suggests a verbal impasse, that point at which language confronts a corporeal world that dismantles its public, private, and historical orderings. Weiss most fully integrates his investigation of political vision with the problem of corporeality in two plays devoted to the planning and making of revolution. Trotsky in Exile (1970) engages the poles of ex21 David Rabe, The Basic Training of Pavia Hummel and Sticks and Bones (New York: Penguin, r973), 96. 22 Scarry, The Body in Pain, 3 5.

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tension and embodiment-world-building and its collapse in bodily selffixation-with unusual clarity. The choice of Trotsky as documentary subject was no doubt partly determined by the historical figure's internationalism. Marxist revolution entails a radical transformation of political and economic order; Trotsky advocates the widest geographic scope for this revolutionary activity, discussing the political and economic conditions in Africa, Asia, and South America and defending their importance against those who would restrict the scope of societal transformation within national borders. Trotsky stands, that is, as a symbol of political vision as it advocates the transcending of its own contingency and positionality. Weiss emblematizes this selftranscendence and the projecting sensibility that makes it possible through a stage gesture repeated three times: Trotsky looks "through a telescope, describing with it a semi-circle to front." 23 But like the scientific eye of Brecht's Galileo, Trotsky's telescopic vision is vulnerable to the fact of his historical and personal situation. His travels late in life are those of exile rather than expanding world revolution. Opposed by others, tsarists and fellow revolutionaries alike, he is subject finally to the restricted space of his body, which asserts its own diminished boundaries and personal space. Weiss counterpoints Trotsky at his telescope with Trotsky at his desk, absorbed within a restricted area of attention. To the Trotsky who converses with Diego Rivera and Andre Breton on international politics, Weiss juxtaposes the Trotsky who admits to Lenin: The body. Feel it all the time. Stomach. Intestines. Heart. Kidneys. These functions often claim my attention for days on end. Growing old. The beginning of death. Time. I thought of that even as a child. Saw it once as something long, like the stone step outside the house. Chronology. Counting. Time is formless. Has no shape till you begin to count. Sometimes I wake up sobbing. Terribly disturbed. Like falling through a strange door. Into a room you don't know. An odd light. Echoing voices. This searching for connections. Books. Unknown words. References you don't understand. (52)

Weiss's fluid shifts of historical temporality in the play serve, paradoxically, to foreground the individual body as it is vulnerable to time, while Trotsky's ruminations reveal an external world potentially empty to the corporeally bound subject: "You know, a little while ago I had 23 Peter Weiss, Trotsky in Exile, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (New York: Atheneum, I972), 70 (also 87 and 97).

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great difficulty in finding out exactly where I was. Nothing but empty space. Yes. Honnefoss. Yes. Norway" (97). In the dialectic of body and vision that governs Weiss's exploration of revolutionary and political efficacy, Trotsky's exile begins before he ever leaves his country; it is an ever-immanent exile in a body often riveting in its attentional claims, where the structures of the external world indicating human presence and agency are suddenly drained of meaning. Weiss discloses the body both as biological origin of the phenomenal world and as its "vanishing point" (to borrow the title of one of his novels), that point at which visionary extension yields to enclosure. Underscoring this image of the liable body that constitutes the anatomical base of revolutionary thought and practice, Trotsky in Exile ends in a tableau, its protagonist reading a manuscript while his assassin holds an ice-pick poised above his skull. With this gesture, Trotsky in Exile recalls Marat/Sade (1964), a study of revolution that climaxes in a similar tableau-Jean Paul Marat at work in his bathtub, Charlotte Corday holding aloft the dagger that will simultaneously render his body inanimate and immortalize it as one of the revolution's visual emblems. The body's presence pervades everything in Marat/Sade, as it did the French revolution itself, a nexus of political events engineered through, and against, bodily iconographies. Memorialized through the political exploitation of its imagery, the Revolution constituted a spectacle of bodily exigency: the demanding body, seeking to redress the poverty that afflicts it, and the body punished in a historical theater of pain. In its organized forms of public violence, the revolution combined the vestiges of older rituals of punishment, inscribing marks of power on the body of the accused, with a historically newer, technologized guillotine, which enabled systematic, mechanical execution. 24 The backdrop of Marat/Sade is a bodily violation that is torrential, apocalyptic ("heaps with eyes and mouths ... hacked buttocks lying in the street"),25 and mathematical, precise-as Sade puts it, "technocratic" (49 ). This body in extremis serves a dual function in the revolutionary ideology represented by Marat. On the one hand, it constitutes both 24 0n the history of public forms of penality, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, I979). 25 Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, English version by Geoffrey Skelton, verse adaptation by Adrian Mitchell (New York: Atheneum,

I984),

20.

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the source of needs to be redressed in a newly humanized order and the instrument of that transformation, a site of desire that offers the promise (and threat) of social and political refashioning. On the other hand, it represents an obstacle to be overcome on the path to social metamorphosis, a material resistance to the realization of utopian vision. This resistance is encountered externally in the increasing number of individuals sacrificed to the revolution; as Marat observes, Once we thought a few hundred corpses would be enough Then we saw thousands were still too few. (rs)

But the politics of revolutionary vision as this is articulated by Marat extends more personally into the intransigence of the flesh, for he includes his own body as a site for the political re-creation of nature: Against Nature's silence I use action In the vast indifference I invent a meaning I don't watch unmoved I intervene and say that this and this are wrong and I work to alter them and improve them The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the whole world with fresh eyes. (26-27)

As in Trotsky in Exile, Weiss highlights the eyes as an opening on nature, the site of "vision" through which bodied consciousness extends its field into the external. To "turn yourself inside out" is to address the claims of corporeality in such a way that the outer world is seen anew, to refashion, in some way, the body and its senses-making them more genuinely "human," to recall Marx's vision of nonalienated faculties. For oneself and others, the path of revolutionary change lies directly through the body, as it impedes both action and political sight and as it presents itself for both punishment and remaking. This attitude toward the body, of course, is counterpointed in Marat/ Sade by a rival political anatomy, one which reverses the vision/body hierarchy advocated by Marat. The Marquis de Sade mocks Marat's political stance with a radical corporealism, rejecting even the possibility of transcendent self-extension "beyond the body" (91):

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As I sat there in the Bastille for thirteen long years I learned that this is a world of bodies each body pulsing with a terrible power each body alone and racked with its own unrest. (92)

Sade rewrites the French Revolution in terms of this atomic body, materially and spiritually isolated from anything but its own appetite, its experiential self-regard. Political agitation, revolutionary action-all mask a body moored in itself, relieved only by moments of orgiastic release and by the prospect of its own annihilation. The only truths we can point to are the ever-changing truths of our own experience. (31)

In this rewriting, the Bastille becomes an emblem, not of personal and social liberation, but of an irremediable incarceration in the body's walls: Mar at these cells of the inner self are worse than the deepest stone dungeon and as long as they are locked all your revolution remains only a prison mutiny to be put down by corrupted fellow-prisoners. (9 3)

To a Marat who insists "We can't begin to build till we've burnt the old building down" (58), Sade charges: So they storm all the citadels and there they are and everything is just the same. (6r)

The corporeal reduction underlying Sade's epistemological and pragmatic nihilism is reinforced, in Marat/Sade's multiple dialectic, by the play's asylum staging. By directing the assassination of Marat in this institution and casting the physically and mentally disordered as his main characters, Sade establishes the suffering body as his primary performative site and as the principal locus of political action. The screams,

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wails, and gyrations that constitute the play's backdrop confront the forestage action with an anarchy of bodily constraint and release, linking the political issues surrounding the French Revolution to the body's tormented agitation. 26 Corday's political assassination becomes erotic play, and the revolution itself a sublimated form of "general copulation" (92). In such a performance context, the problem of Marat's own corporeality receives heightened attention: played by a paranoiac, Marat is portrayed already deep within the physiological absorption of disease, and the perceptual contraction effected by his fever and itching is underscored by the circumscribed boundaries of his bathtub. Sade taunts him: Lying there scratched and swollen your brow burning in your world your bath you still believe that justice is possible. (56)

The Marat whom Sade directs is subject to distraction, delirium, and the flight of sense when even words lose their meaning:

And now doubt Why does everything sound false. (84)

From the point of view of this vulnerable physicality, one of Marat's early speeches becomes richly problematic: Simonne Simonne my head's on fire I can't breathe There is a rioting mob inside me Simonne I am the Revolution. ( r 6) 26 Weiss makes similar use of the agitated body in Trotsky in Exile, during the scene dramatizing the 1903 Brussels conference: "During the discussion there is constant unrest: some scratch themselves, stand up, wave their arms, kick their legs, throw books in corners. Now and again a participant wanders about like a sleep-walker" (2 5).

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Like the play as a whole, these lines stand poised between the macrocosmic and microcosmic, between a Marat who assumes the revolution through political self-transcendence and a Marat who stages the revolution inside-with pain and its disturbance his actors and the private "body politic" his mise-en-scene. This conflict between transcendence and embodiment, political transformation and corporeal fixity, is reflected in the dramaturgical and stylistic tensions that characterize Marat/Sade. The claims of vision and intervention find their theatrical form in Brechtian presentation-interruption of action by debate, multiple alienations of actor from role, superimpositions of historical time, and the inclusion of a discursive epilogue (cut from the 1965 Peter Brook production and missing from English editions of the play) where the characters clarify their political stances. Weiss has given evidence that his move into documentary theater and into history as dramatic subject was in part motivated-like his Trotsky's internationalism-by a desire to escape the limitations of corporeal perspective. In both their literal and their figurative meanings, his theoretical statements reveal an artistic and political concern with the body as a self-circumscribing impediment to vision: "Instead of showing reality in its immediacy, the documentary theater presents an image of a piece of reality torn out of its living context"; and, on staging history: "When I take a theme that is altogether contemporary, it often turns out to be very one-sided, for all I have is the world that immediately surrounds me, and this limits me." 27 In light of these risks, the Brechtian devices in Marat/Sade and elsewhere in Weiss's plays acquire particular urgency in the theater, that other field animated and perceived by corporeal subjects, where conceptual structures are subordinate to the physical presence of performer and spectator. Weiss's Trotsky, after all, concludes his speech to Lenin on the body's claims to attention with a theatrical analogy that highlights, with striking directness, the risks of spectatorship and the fragility of enactment: "Everything at times like on a huge stage. When I first went to a theater, Ilych, it was overwhelming. Indescribable. Out of my mind nearly at what was going on. Sat through all the intervals in case I might miss 27 Peter Weiss, "Notes on the Contemporary Theater," trans. Joel Agee, in Essays on German Theater, ed. Margaret Herzfeld-Sauder (New York: Continuum, 1985), 296; "Conversation with Peter Weiss," trans. Joel Agee, in ibid., 303. The play's epilogue has been translated and published by Roger Gross in "Marat!Sade's Missing Epilogue," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 2 (Spring 1988): 61-67.

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something. Afterwards they asked me: what did you see? I couldn't say. What had I seen? What had I seen?" (p). Yet despite his anxiety about the body's assertiveness, Weiss refuses to silence the voice of physiology: his revolutionary theater is grounded in corporeal life and in the body's ambiguous presence to itself and its world. The claims of the body-ecstatic, afflicted, self-transcending, isolated-find expression through the spectacular staging of Marat/Sade, influenced by Artaud and by the revolution's own Theater of Cruelty, its visual animation powerfully disruptive of Brechtian detachment. That Weiss's declared vision of the play moved from the spectacular to the Brechtian, from Sade to Marat, does not diminish the body's assertion in his drama of political vision or its claims to attention both as spectacle and as imprisoned site of a vanishing world. 28

Violence and the Trauma of Representation: Lear The performance field of Edward Bond's plays is one of the most materially and perceptually complex in the contemporary theater. 29 On one hand, Bond's theatrical landscapes are characterized by a spaciousness of offstage setting unmatched since Ibsen, a geographic expansiveness mapped through seas, rivers, fields, woods, the grounds of country estates, narrow roads to the deep north, the blanket of nuclear winter. In even the urban settings of The Pope's Wedding (1962), Saved, and The Cat (1983), Bond's scenic arena is liable to sudden openings onto cricket greens, parks, lakes, rooftops. At the same time, and despite their relative paucity of stage props, Bond's plays feel distinctively heavy on stage, much more so than even the materially dense performance arenas of The Caretaker or Breaking the Silence. The locus of this weight is the human body, rendered inert by a degree of onstage suffering beyond anything attempted by Bond's contemporaries. "I write about violence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners," Bond has re28 0n Weiss's changing views of Marat/Sade, and the reflection of these attitudes in the play's early productions, see John R. P. McKenzie, "Peter Weiss and the Politics of 'Marat/Sade,' " New Theatre Quarterly I (August I985): 30I-I2; and Sidney F. Parham, "Marat/Sade: The Politics of Experience, or the Experience of Politics?" Modern Drama 20 (September I977): 23 5-50. 29 0n the scenic principles of Bond's theater, particularly as these draw on a specifically British Brechtianism, see Peter Holland, "Brecht, Bond, Gaskill, and the Practice of Political Theatre," Theatre Quarterly 8 (Summer I978): 24-34.

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marked, 30 and his plays stage this violence as it is mostly described in The Investigation and Marat/Sade. Corpses hanging on the gallows in Early Morning (1968), the workman's dead body lying onstage at the opening of Lear (1971), bodies battered in a makeshift boxing ring in The Fool (1975)-the suffering body asserts its physicality in Bond's dramatic world through its sheer number and through the subjective weight of its pain. Physicality and the sentience of pain occupy, transfix Bond's stage, endowing it with a density like that of the stones which feature so prominently throughout his plays. Even the ghosts in these plays have a strange, agonized solidity, as though the spirit were itself a suffering body at one remove. This obsession with the body reflects the radically biological materialism that underlies Bond's theater, a materialism that grounds the political and the economic in human corporeality. Bond looks not to statistics, institutions, or abstractions but to the body for the signs of power and the marks of its operation. Like Weiss, Bond explores power as a claim on the body, as the usurping ability to turn the body into its sign: the dismembered remains of Shogo's naked body are nailed to a placard in Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968), the Young Woman's gibbeted body hangs in the background in Bingo (1973), Paul's body is staged for execution in The Swing (1976), the child Astyanax is thrown publicly from the Trojan battlements in The Woman (1978). But power (and the conditions it both maintains and reflects) etches itself on human corporeality in less overt ways. These plays by a writer who has claimed that "tension and aggression are even becoming the markings of our species" 31 repeatedly attempt to "read" the staged body for the signs of institutional violence. The mutual devouring of capitalist society is literalized as cannibalism in Early Morning, and the Parson's own body displays his privilege when he is stripped and accused by the indigent locals in The Fool: "Where you stole that flesh boy? Your flesh is stolen goods." 32 Whether it manifests itself openly or through more covert signs, violence in Bond's plays is power rendered apparent on the body. As in Weiss's drama, this interest in the often searing inscriptions of power on human corporeality, its semiological operation, forms part of 30 Edward Bond, Author's Preface to Lear, in Plays: Two (London: Eyre Methuen, 1978), 3· 31 Ibid., 8. Bond continues: "Many people's faces are set in patterns of alarm, coldness or threat; and they move jerkily and awkwardly, not with the simplicity of free animals." 32 Edward Bond, The Fool, in Plays: Three (London: Methuen, 1987), ro6.

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a broader understanding of the biological as an arena of political contest. For the body in Bond's plays represents not simply a slate for the marks of power, but the interface between subject and world. In his preface to Lear, Bond discusses this relationship between the body and its environment in terms of "biological expectation": "What ought we to do? Live justly. But what is justice? Justice is allowing people to live in the way for which they evolved. Human beings have an emotional and physical need to do so, it is their biological expectation" (10). Society is constituted equitably when it meets the criterion of "biological justice" (9 ), when it allows its individuals the assurances that the unborn child expects-"that its unpreparedness will be cared for, that it will be given not only food but emotional reassurance, that its vulnerability will be shielded, that it will be born into a world waiting to receive it, and that knows how to receive it" (6). A society organized in such a way allows the creation of culture as an expression of human need grounded in biological life; a society that fails to meet these biological criteria-such as the contemporary one, with its unjust institutions and emerging "technosphere" (10)-denaturalizes human behavior and fosters a cycle of aggressivity where individuals inflict on one another a violence resulting from their own biological victimization.33 The violence in Bond's plays, in other words, derives from and is directed toward the individual's physical commerce with his or her environment. Against the "world" that power seeks to unify under its operations, bodies offer discrepant "worlds" (to recall the title of Bond's 1979 play), the autonomous landscapes of an incarnate subjectivity that realizes, indeed creates, itself through the satisfaction of its needs and the implementation of its desires. Lear represents a particularly intricate exploration of this conflict as it evolves both individually and socially. In adapting Shakespeare's King Lear, which also explores the political body, Bond dramatizes the transformations that violence inflicts on the biologically grounded subject. As a result of this concern with the suffering body, Bond also foregrounds the disrupting presence of pain within the Brechtian framework of his "rational" theater. Violence is organized in Lear through a pattern of social and personal 33 Bond also discusses the sociobiological roots of aggressivity in "Drama and the Dialectics of Violence," interview with the editors, Theatre Quarterly 2 (January-March 1972): 9· Terry Eagleton accuses Bond of confusions and contradictions in his analysis of violence and human nature in "Nature and Violence: The Prefaces of Edward Bond," Critical Quarterly 26 (Spring/ Summer 1984): 127-35.

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enclosures. On the broadest political level, Lear precipitates the downfall of his kingdom by building a wall, a demarcation intended to keep the enemy out but which, like the organized enclosures of land in Bingo and The Fool, creates hardships for his subjects and polarizes opposition from without. Descending through the play's spheres of action, one encounters a narrowing of enforced enclosure-a "circle that never stops getting smaller"34-and a contraction of this enclosure toward the boundaries of bodily containment. Confinement is brought about, most obviously, through incarceration, a motif that runs powerfully through all of Bond's plays (Nazi imprisonment in Summer [1982], lsmene's immuring in The Woman, bodies trapped under rubble in The War Plays). In Lear, the bodies of Warrington and the Gravedigger's Boy are thrown into the well, Lear and his daughters are imprisoned, and prisoners march chained together. But these instances of external imprisonment reflect a more fundamental incarceration on the level of the body itself: the perceptual enclosure effected by pain and the resulting cancellation of the subject's ability to extend itself within the space it inhabits and thereby humanize this space according to its presence. If the senses constitute the means of access to the world-the registers of this world on the human subject and the primary instruments by which this subject seeks to externalize itself in its environment-then the violence that seems to subsume all else in Lear seeks to attack the individual's spatializing gestures at their origin. The piercing of Warrington's eardrums and the blinding of Lear (effected through the grotesque technology of the blinding machine) are emblems of the more pervasive incarceration of the subject in the body's limits, an enforced embodiment achieved through the "radical subjectivity" of pain. 35 As elsewhere in Bond's plays, the ultimate aim of this affliction in Lear is a penetration of damage to the innermost registers of subjectivity, a reversion of even this field to the material self-reference of objects. As the torture of Warrington and the rape of Cordelia in Lear suggest, power manifests its signs through its claim over the body's very interiority, a claim given anatomical emblem in the autopsy opening Fontanelle's body to view. 36 With this ability, power renders bodily experience inanimate, inert: in the moments before Bodice pokes her Edward Bond, Narrow Road to the Deep North (Shogo speaking), in Plays: Two, r88. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 50. 36 With this scene, Bond literalizes the image evoked by Shakespeare's Lear in the trial scene: "Then let them anatomize Regan; see what breeds about her heart" (King Lear 3.6.76-77). 34

35

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knitting needles into Warrington's ears, Fontanelle jumps on his body in sadistic exultation: "Kill it! Kill all of it! Kill him inside! Make him dead!" 37 "We must shut him up inside himself," says Bodice (29 ), and the effect of their bodily violation is to turn Warrington into "walking offal" (30). These images reflect the reversion of interiority to the purely organic, the effacement of "I" by the body's substance. Like all of Bond's plays, Lear circles obsessively around the moment of death, when the annihilating spasm of violence is successful and the animated body-once speaking, gesturing, spatializing its world-is rendered inert. But this reduction is only the culmination of a broader process that occupies the play as a whole: the deepening entrapment of the subject in the sphere of materiality, an interiorization that accompanies the excitations of pain. Lear's recurrent references to animals in cages reflect both the external imprisonment to which he is subjected and the more fundamental bodily incarceration that constitutes the perceptual mode of pain. The self-confined nature of this entrapment is underscored in Lear's lament in the final act, when he appropriates the image of the wall as symbol for the suffering body: "What can I do? I left my prison, pulled it down, broke the key, and still I'm a prisoner. I hit my head against a wall all the time. There's wall everywhere. I'm buried alive in a wall. Does this suffering and misery last for ever?" (94). Lear's gaze in a mirror symbolizes pain's enforced narcissism, and this imprisoning self-attention only intensifies when his eyes are lost. The reduction of subject to body constitutes the achievement of acts of power in this play, an obliteration of the personal and its reconstitution as object in a field of subordination. It is important not to restrict this pain and its transgressive operation on body and consciousness to the fiction dramatized by Bond's actors. Pain reaches across the boundary separating stage and author ("I find the actual business of writing almost physically painful," Bond has said, "like touching something hot"), 38 as well as the boundary between stage and spectator. Even in its dramatized (or simulated) forms, pain violates the perceptual demarcations and the differential spheres of otherness essential to representation, including the audience in its discomfort 37 Edward Bond, Lear, in Plays: Two, 28. Peter Holland offers a fascinating discussion of the role of objects in Bond's theater, and their function as part of a general "objectifying" of characters; discussing Saved, Holland notes: "The action of reducing the human to an object allows it to be used as a pawn in the social transactions of the characters" ("Brecht, Bond, Gaskill," 29). 38 Bond, "Drama and the Dialectics of Violence," II.

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through a kind of neuromimetic transferral (the impulse to close one's eyes during simulated blindings onstage reflects not simply an aversion to the representation of pain, but also a deeper defense against its sympathetic arising in the field of one's own body). Bond has theorized this transgression of the audience-play boundary under the label "aggroeffect," setting discomfort in contrast to the privileging of rationality in Brechtian theory: "In contrast to Brecht, I think it's necessary to disturb an audience emotionally, to involve them emotionally in my plays." 39 Though Bond's description focuses on the emotions, his coinage (designed to offer an alternative to Brecht's "A-effect") reflects a more physiological grounding: "aggro" suggests both aggressivity and aggregation, and both connotations point to a physical discomfort, cramped and edgy, rooted in a suffering that the audience is made to share. That this effect constitutes a mode of bodily intervention is further suggested by Bond's remarks on art: "Society is a surgeon operating on [it]self and art is part of that operation. " 40 The portrayal of pain that constitutes Bond's theatrical "surgery" poses risks given the playwright's avowed dramaturgical aims; indeed, part of the fascination of Bond's plays derives from this problematic extremity of the suffering body, from the very corporeal intrusion that Brecht's theater sought to minimize. In Bond's theory of performance, the vicarious infliction of audience discomfort activates a rationality to which it is ultimately subordinated: "The shock is justified by the desperation of the situation or as a way of forcing the audience to search for reasons in the rest of the play."41 Theoretically, the depiction of pain is subsumed within the broader system of representation governing the play, constituting merely the most extreme point in what Bond has called his "rational theater." But this formulation risks underestimating the disruptiveness of pain in a dramaturgy of rational detachment and the effect of its urgency on intellectual analysis. For pain is marked by its excessiveness, by a surplus that swamps the representational structures erected to contain it. Like the sea that reappears throughout Bond's plays, pain is characterized by receding horizons, passing beyond the boundaries of articulation toward deeper regions of sentience. This pain tends to overcome its enactment, mocking the disbelief that would 39 Edward Bond, "From Rationalism to Rhapsody," interview with Christopher Innes, Canadian Theatre Review, no. 23 (Summer 1979): rr3. 40 Edward Bond, "The Rational Theatre," in Plays: Two, xv. 41 Bond, "From Rationalism to Rhapsody," 113.

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relegate it to an actor's performance or refer it to the safety of a playwright's script. Herbert Blau comments on the staging of pain: "There is in the realization of such moments, by whatever method enacted, a resistance to alienation. Even if utterly parodied or for some conceptual reason elided or underplayed, the subversion would merely reveal that they are virtually unplayable; in that sense, emblematic, legible, unfailingly there, as if attached like an augur bit to the thing that is repressed."42 The enactment of pain in Lear and Bond's other plays asserts itself with visceral certainty, as a trauma suddenly and physically erupted, with a subjectively located reality that exceeds the attempt to depict it objectively. Though the suffering body is presented as an emblem of power's hold over the body, pain itself tends to annihilate such abstractions, transfixing consciousness before its insistent facticity. Anthony Kubiak observes that "although terror can only occur in history, it is felt as a naked singularity, existing outside all possible representation." As Bond himself has claimed, "A scream from a wounded man is not rhetorical. " 43 As the representational orderings of its perceptual world collapse, therefore, the suffering body subjects the plane of theatrical representation to similar (if momentary) rupture. From this perspective, one might speak of enacted pain as a "trauma of representation," whether that representation be organized according to illusionistic or epic tenets. The staging of this pain may indeed lead to outrage, reflection, political will. But unlike the measured, alienated representations of physical suffering in Brecht's theater, offered to rational digestion, the unmeasured portrayal of pain on Bond's stage risks paralyzing the stage with its agonized presence. The violent audience reaction to Saved (and the high walk-out rate for other, especially earlier Bond plays) suggests the risks posed to a rationally articulated mise-en-scene by the evocation of pain and its aversiveness. 44 The staging of pain presents further destabilization in Bond's theater 42 Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), r6o; Blau's reflections on the staging and witnessing of pain are on 157-89. 43 Kubiak, "Disappearance as History," 82; Edward Bond, letter to Robert Brustein, 9 August 1972, in Malcolm Hay and Philip Roberts, Bond: A Study of His Plays (London: Methuen, 198o), n6. Bond qualifies this statement somewhat by evoking the notion of illustration: "It is a precise description of a situation, and is reduced to essentials" (ibid.). 44 0n audience response to the Royal Court production of Lear, see Gregory Dark, "Edward Bond's Lear at the Royal Court," Theatre Quarterly 2 (January-March 1972): 31.

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of committed reason. As theorized by Bond, the enactment of human suffering and its vicarious replication in the audience serve to motivate action in the political/economic sphere that produces and institutionalizes this suffering. The witnessing of pain, in other words, is an awakening to political awareness and intervention in "the world we prove real by dying in it" (Author's Preface to Lear, 12). But to the extent that this witnessing is itself a vicarious reexperiencing of pain, a mimetic inhabiting of the suffering body, it finds itself subject to pain's perceptual modulations. As we saw in our discussion of Weiss, these modulations operate in contrary directions, tending not only toward a radical materialization of the body as object, but also toward an equally radical derealization of the world itself. As consciousness contracts in the circle of pain and the bodied subject is displaced by body as object, the subject/body/world continuum is characterized by increasing disengagement: the body toward thingness, and both subject and world toward a condition of disembodiment. Pain annihilates the activity of abstraction, but it also reinstates abstraction of a different order in its aftermath-the abstraction of a subject detached from the violated body and of a world no longer available to sensory commerce. Like other Bond plays, Lear is peopled by ghosts, the dead-but-not-dead, who represent (among other things) a subjectivity detached from the moorings of biologicallife. 45 And like the other plays, Lear explores the perceptual detachment from nature and society that exists as a corollary of pain, a vision of the human body against vast emptiness that recurs with Shakespeare walking through the snowy field in Bingo, and Hecuba and Mary facing the sea in The Woman and Summer. Describing his forced march with other prisoners, Lear recounts his perceptions: "There was so much sky. I could hardly see. I've always looked down at the hills and banks where the enemy was hiding. But there's only a little strip of earth and all the sky" (69 ). As Weiss's Trotsky discovers in moments of bodily distress, the world of action and efficacy gives way to a perceptual blankness, disengaged 45 The obsession with ghosts links Bond's plays with Tadeusz Kantor's "theater of everreturning apparitions" (the phrase is Jan Kott's, from "Kantor's Kaddish," in The Memory of the Body: Essays on Theater and Death [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992], 46). Although Bond and Kantor are distinguished by radically divergent political and aesthetic sensibilities, their plays explore the possibilities and implications of what Kantor calls "the Theater of Death"; see Kantor, "The Theatre of Death: A Manifesto," in Twentieth-Century Polish Theatre, ed. Bohdan Drozdowski, trans. Catherine Itzin (London: John Calder; Dallas: Riverrun Press, 1979), 97-105.

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from history and freed from its suffering-a detachment from the material whose quasi-mystical overtones are represented most consciously, in Bond's work, by the hermit/poet Basho in the opening scenes of Narrow Road. From the point of view of the life-world of the bodied subject, to die in the world is (for Bond's characters) to prove it unreal, to effect its disappearance in a self-emptying experiential field. The very pain that objectifies the human body in its material being, in other words, also dereifies the world as it exists for the subject, who is (in turn) both imprisoned in and distanced from a body rendered alien in its intrusive materiality. Lear envisions escape from this imprisonment-"The animal will slip out of its cage, and lie in the fields, and run by the river, and groom itself in the sun, and sleep in its hole from night to morning" (54)-and seeks to begin this liberation by tearing down the wall of compulsory enclosure. Such moments have obvious political import: the burden of action and social reconstruction falls to those who remain and those (on stage and off) who witness the revolutionary gesture. Moreover, these moments clarify and extend a stratum of imagery in the play that establishes (as Jenny S. Spencer points out) "the consciousness of an ecological order which is not naturally corrupt, but has been abused and violated." 46 But the actual social and political structures that the play has dramatized leave little room for the primitivism underlying Lear's vision of escape or for the pastoralism that represents its nearest social equivalent: the farm that Cordelia wishes to protect with a fence is vulnerable to the outside world, and in combating this world, Cordelia appropriates the dehumanizing violence to which she was subjected. Beyond this, the call to action and change, with its implicit faith that the walls of enclosure can be torn down and the cycle of violence ended, is counterpointed (in Lear and in Bond's work as a whole) by the insurmountable enclosure of corporeality itself and by the disengagements of self-alienated embodiment. Against his urgings that the world be changed, rendered just, Bond dramatizes the erasure of this world by pain. Cordelia directs her troops in their war of liberation, but Bond's attention in act 2, scene 3 is on the Wounded Soldier and on his dematerialized, extinguishing 46 Jenny S. Spencer, Dramatic Strategies in the Plays of Edward Bond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86. Spencer notes, for instance, Bond's appropriation of the animal imagery that figures so centrally in Shakespeare's play: "Through the animal imagery, Bond sets up an entire biological register which constantly refers us back to the body as the location of goodness, beauty, health, and pre-lapsarian innocence" (Ibid.).

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world as it is known from within: "It's dark, there are stars [ .... ] Look ... One ... Two ... Three ... [Silence.]" (59). Bond's "biological justice" is problematic in his theater not only because (as Brecht might say) we are not good enough yet, but also because of the dilemma of human embodiment, through which the subject is both self-transcending in acts of individual and social creation and bounded by its suffering corporeality. This body asks to be confronted on its own, paradoxical terms-as a phenomenal zero-point within the world of which, objectively observed, it forms only a part. Like Peter Weiss, Edward Bond stages the politics of this embodiment and the implications of its voices: the voice of self-projections and the annihilating voice of pain. And like Weiss, Bond confronts the problem of embodiedness for representation itself: the fact that the body, subject to biological exigency, subsumes narrative and ideological pattern as readily as it does its own disembodying self-projections, engulfing representational ordering within the vortices of self-regard that characterize human sentience. Both Weiss and Bond seek to incorporate this problematic sentience in their analysis of political interaction. Pursuing dramatic subjects and representational modes appropriate to this reconfiguration, each playwright complicates the Brechtian project by grounding his plays in the bodied subject, suffering and whole, and in the precarious anatomy of its political and theatrical worlds.

CHAPTER

6 Female Landscapes: Phenomenology and Gender If I go to the theater now, it must be a political gesture, with a view to changing, with the help of other women, its means of production and expression. It is high time that women gave back to the theater its fortunate position, its raison d'etre and what makes it differentthe fact that there it is possible to get across the living, breathing, speaking body, whereas the cinema screens us from reality by foisting mere images upon us. -Helene Cixous, "Aller

a Ia mer"

I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows ... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored. -Pam Gems, Queen Christina

Contemporary women's theater has staged its own explorations of the politics of embodiment, addressing the theatrical body in gender-specific terms. Although this theater has often appropriated devices of Brechtian stagecraft to effect its own forms of "complex seeing," 1 it has concerned itself with questions to which Brecht himself, with his envisioned audience of cigar-smoking men, devoted little attention: the political and ideological conventions governing the representations of women, the historical absence of women from the theater and other institutions of cultural production, and the reclamation of the stage as a site for female performative voices. 2 Central to this theater, in its diverse manifestaBertolt Brecht, Notes to The Threepenny Opera, in Brecht on Theatre, 44· 0n the emergence of this theater and its theoretical articulations, see Michelene Wandor, Carry On, Understudies: Theatre and Sexual Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986); Janelle Reinelt, "Beyond Brecht: Britain's New Feminist Drama," Theatre Journal 38 1

2

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tions, is the liberation of the female body from its subordination within traditional theatrical spectacle and from the dual form of corporeal subjection that this subordination entails. On one hand, women dramatists have challenged the disembodiment that characterizes the female presence on the traditional stage, its dephysicalization in terms of lived bodiliness and its refiguration as image or fiction. To redress this absence and "reembody" the female body on stage, Caryl Churchill, for instance, includes menstruation among the "dramatic" material of Top Girls (1982), as does Wendy Wasserstein in Uncommon Women and Others (1970), and the women characters of Sue Townsend's Womberang (1979) address pregnancy and a range of other medical conditions in the women's space they have temporarily created in a hospital waiting room. 3 Through these (and similar) reinclusions and through performative critiques of conventional female roles, contemporary women dramatists have sought to subvert the traditional imaging of women as disembodied objects of predominantly male spectatorial vision, the reversion of the female body to an image not of itself, but of its (male) cultural articulation. On the other hand, women dramatists have addressed the paradoxical corollary of this image-rendering: that the disembodiment of the female character on (and off) stage is also a form of reembodiment, and that woman as image is (covertly or veiled) woman as erotic object, voyeuristically consigned to a sexually demarcated physicality. In this way, the female subject is reduced to its corporeal parameters; its very capacities for language, gesture, and self-extension are subordinated in a culturally and theatrically imposed materiality, and the body becomes an object for fetishistic appropriation. 4 At the same time that it is dematerialized into image, in other words, the female body on stage is often subjected to an exposure both verbal and actual, where its outer surfaces-and even its inner regions-are rendered visible. Sarah Daniels explores this juncture of the imagistic and the corporeal in Mas(May I986): I54-63; Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, I988); and Karen Laughlin, "Brechtian Theory and American Feminist Theatre," in Re-interpreting Brecht, I47-6o. 3 For a discussion of the ways in which contemporary British women dramatists have sought to reclaim the female body in their plays, see Susan Carlson, Women and Comedy: Rewriting the British Theatrical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, I99I), 245-7I. 4 Simone de Beauvoir comments on this corporealizing of the female subject: "Her body is not perceived as the radiation of a subjective personality, but as a thing sunk deeply in its own immanence" (The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley [New York: Knopf, I952; New York: Random House, I989], I 57).

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terpieces (1983), a study of pornography and its representational exploitation of the female body. 5 This dual form of bodily appropriation has been historically applied to both female character and female actor, and the pressure of such performative reduction-the objectification of the female body as both organic materiality and image-can be appreciated in the energy with which it has been resisted in plays such as Franca Rame's Female Parts (1975), Pam Gems's Pia( (1978), and Timberlake Wertenbaker's New Anatomies (1981) and in the work of such performance artists as Karen Finley, Carolee Schneemann, and Rachel Rosenthal. 6 Traditional stagings of the female body, in short, both derealize it as subjective presence and rematerialize it as sexualized object. Lost in these transpositions is the female subject as center of its experiential fields and as reference point of bodily self-possession. As Helene Cixous has written, woman "is loved only when absent or abused, a phantom or fascinating abyss. Outside and also beside herself. That is why I stopped going to the theater; it was like going to my own funeral, and it does not produce a living woman or (and this is no accident) her body or even her unconscious." 7 Much contemporary women's theater has as its political and theatrical goal not only the dramatization of this experiential loss, but also a recuperation of the embodied female subject, a return of corporeality to the creative interaction of the subject and its environment. In both traditional and feminist drama, then, the theater of women's bodies involves the politics of space, as it is authored by and devolves back into the embodied subject in contact with its environment. To the extent that creative self-extension finds its primary crisis in the suffering body, the theater of women's bodies involves, as one of its central concerns, the phenomenology of pain. But if the female body is regularly subject to infliction, objectification, and constraint, it is also a vehicle for reclaiming lived embodiedness in creative contact with its environment. 5 The actual dismemberment (and disemboweling) of the female body in the most extreme forms of pornography, grimly addressed by Daniels's play, provides a disturbing context for the autopsy of Fontanelle in Bond's Lear, an opening of the female body contemplated in aesthetic terms by her father: "The things are so beautiful. I am astonished. I have never seen anything so beautiful" (73). 6 See Moira Roth, ed., The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America, I970-r98o (Los Angeles: Astro Artz, 1983); and Jeanie Forte, "Women's Performance Art: Feminism and Postmodernism," Theatre]ournal4o (May 1988): 217-35. 7 Helene Cixous, "Aller a Ia mer," trans. Barbara Kerslake, Modern Drama 27 (December 1984): 546.

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This chapter considers issues of embodiment and spatiality as these have been articulated in contemporary women's theater. It focuses on several specific issues to suggest some of the ways women dramatists have addressed the dialectical terms that constitute a phenomenology of the body: subjectivity and abjectness, transcendence and immanence, embodiment and disembodiment. Recalling the issues of the previous chapter, The Conduct of Life by Maria Irene Fornes explores the relationship of pain and gender, suggesting ways in which gender identity represents, among other things, a sign reified on and through the suffering body. Churchill and Ntozake Shange explore the constraints and possibilities that characterize female mobility: Vinegar Tom dramatizes, in extreme form, a control over women's bodies and their movements that recurs throughout the dramatic tradition, and the "choreopoem" for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf ( r 97 4) represents an exploration-through movement and speech-of the embodied female subject and her physical and linguistic powers of self-reclamation. Finally, Deb Margolin's one-woman show Gestation (1991) and Shange's Spell #7 (1979) join other plays by contemporary women dramatists that explore the experiential contours of pregnancy, reclaiming this experience from its conventional staging in the dramatic canon and implicitly challenging "universal" phenomenological accounts of subjectivity and embodiment. (En)gendering Pain: The Conduct of Life Maria Irene Fornes situates her theater at the juncture of corporeal experience and its transcendence through spatial and other acts of selfextension. Her plays imagine this juncture through stark polarities: earth/sky, animal/intellectual, dirty/clean, mundane/elevated. In the title image of her 1983 play, "mud" represents bodily life, bound to the earth and to the appetites of its lowest creatures-a stratum of existence that is at once the source of a libidinal intimacy and a self-enclosure that characters work urgently to escape. This play's central character, Mae, describes herself and her companion, Lloyd, as "animals who grow up together and mate," and she images herself as a starfish that "[lives] in the dark and [whose] eyes see only a faint light. " 8 Similarly, 'Maria Irene Fornes, Mud, in Plays (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1986), 28, 40.

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in The Conduct of Life, Leticia characterizes her husband, Orlando, as "an animal. Nothing touches him except sensuality. He responds to food, to the flesh." 9 Later she extends this judgment of blind self-regard to all the inhabitants of her unnamed Latin American country, who have relinquished their sense of history and place for the circumscribed sphere of the body and its appetites: We're blind. We can't see beyond an arm's reach. We don't believe our life will last beyond the day. We only know what we have in our hand to put in our mouth, to put in our stomach, and to put in our pocket. [... ] We don't believe in the future. Each night when the sun goes down we think that's the end of life-so we have one last fling. We don't think we have a future. We don't think we have a country. Ask anybody, "Do you have a country?" They'll say, "Yes." Ask them, "What is your country?" They'll say, "My bed, my dinner plate." (75)

This vision of corporeal confinement is reinforced throughout Fornes's plays (as it is in Bond's) by recurrent images of imprisonment: the prison cell that opens Promenade (1965), the locked room in which Isidore and Leopold enact their symbiotic struggle in Tango Palace (1963), the image in Dr. Kheal (1968) of human life as a "grotto" (in which the individual stands "always with a sense of being enclosed"), 10 the confining rooms in Sarita (1984) and Abingdon Square (1987), and numerous stage settings in which rooms are situated (juxtaposed or cutaway) "within" other rooms. Counterpointing this motif of enclosure in Fornes's drama, of the individual restricted to the sphere of immediate sentience, is the recurrent effort on the part of individual characters, particularly women, to transcend this condition. They attempt this, in part, through erotic obsession, a surrender of self expressed in bodily terms by Christina when she speaks of "being swept off your feet" in Fefu and Her Friends (1977): "The feet fly also ... but separate from the body. At the end of the leap, just before the landing, they join the ankles and one is complete •Maria Irene Fornes, The Conduct of Life, in Plays, 70. The relationship between human and animal being is also explored in Fornes's play What of the Night? (1989), in Women on the Verge: Seven Avant-Garde American Plays, ed. Rosette C. Lamont (New York: Applause, 1993), esp. 202-3, 217. 10 Maria Irene Fornes, Dr. Kheal, in Promenade and Other Plays (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987), 134.

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again." 11 But those who most consciously pursue this self-transcendence do so through language and education, which are seen as an access to a world beyond the corporeal self and a means of investing it with the subject's verbal presence. Mae and Leticia both pursue this sphere of linguistic access, out of the belief that knowledge and its articulation will not only refashion their world but also redress their invisibility in it; as the latter says, "I want to study so I am not an ignorant person. I want to go to the university. I want to be knowledgeable. I'm tired of being ignored" (70). To these characters, language transforms the world it takes as its subject, marking its environment with human reference and with the framing contours of human perception, elevating its speaker as well as what it purports to describe from the grayness of unarticulated, merely bodily life. When Henry says grace, Mae replies: "I feel grace in my heart. I feel fresh inside as if a breeze had just gone inside my heart. What was it you said, Henry? What were these words" (26).

At the same time, Fornes's plays complicate these starkly polar images of embodiedness and transcendence, suggesting interrelationships beyond the almost Calvinistic valuations offered by her characters (such as Marion in Abingdon Square, who attempts to mortify her body by stretching it rigidly while reading Dante). Despite the efforts of Mae and Leticia to transcend biology through words and education, the body makes its presence known in even the most abstract, "disembodied" verbal moments: the rehearsal in act 3 of Fefu and Her Friends for a presentation on education, for instance, devolves into a water fight, and Fornes allows the scene its full corporeal play of exhilaration and discomfort. Moreover, language in these plays stands intimately grounded in the body's sensory exchange with its environment. Not only are verbal locution and imagery tied with unusual care to the circle of bodily activity (as, in The Conduct of Life, are Olimpia's monologue assiduously listing her morning activities and Leticia's inventory of the items in her suitcase), but Fornes also draws attention to the origin of language in the vocal production of sound: Lloyd constructs the words he is trying to read by sounding out the letters, and Olimpia speaks her lines with a speech defect, laboring to make herself understood.U 11 Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1990), 30 (ellipsis within text). 12 Fornes combines this attention to the subjective, bodily basis of language with an interest in the scripted, transpersonal dimensions of its articulation-as when Isidore speaks his lines from cards and the characters of The Danube echo the lines of dialogue from a Hungarian

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Fornes's theater, then, is grounded in the phenomenology of the embodied subject conducting its interaction with itself and its environment in a field that is, inevitably, corporeal. Indeed, Fornes has defined "realism" in her theater in terms of this physiological base: "You have to be well grounded, grounded not with your intellect but with your humanity, your body, your carnality." 13 It is into this multiperspectival field-of body transforming itself through articulation, of self-extension bearing continual reminders of its origin in the confines of embodiedness-that pain intrudes with its radical operations. Fornes's plays reveal both a general interest in the phenomenon of pain and a specific concern with its intervention into the field of gender. Fornes dramatizes pain in its perceptual facticity, its declarative status in the rhetoric of sensation; as Isidore presents it in Tango Palace, "This is my whip. (Lashing Leopold.) And that is pain." 14 This universalized pain constitutes the traumatic center of The Danube (1982), making itself felt on male and female flesh through the deformation, disfigurement, and illness of an unnamed affliction (perhaps radiation sickness?). More specifically, pain emerges as an element in the constitution of gender, a social construct that involves embodiment as one of its crucial variables. This connection between pain and the dual embodiment/disembodiment of the female subject is rendered explicit in Fefu and Her Friends, through the wheelchair-bound Julia, who has internalized the voices of a male "He" and "They" and their judgments on her. These voices attempt simultaneously to erase the female body, presented in intensely material images of weight and "dirt," and to aestheticize it as spectatorial image: "He said that women's entrails are heavier than anything on earth and to see a woman running creates a disparate and incongruous image in the mind. It's anti-aesthetic" (3 3-34). But even as they decry this physicality, the voices inflict it on Julia, reducing her to immobility through a fantastic infliction of pain: "They clubbed me. They broke my head. They broke my will. They broke my han~s. They tore my eyes out. They took my voice away" (3 3 ). Pain, in Julia's scenario, language tape. See W. B. Worthen, "Still playing games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes," in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), esp. 169-73. 13 Scott Cummings, "Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes," interview with Maria Irene Fornes, Theatre (Yale) 17 (Winter 1985): 54· Compare this definition with Zola's remarks on "physiological man" discussed in Chapter 3· 14 Maria Irene Fornes, Tango Palace, in Promenade and Other Plays, 72.

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fixes her in an inert, imprisoning corporeality, specifically gendered "female" by the male voices. Fornes's most explicitly political play, The Conduct of Life, also represents her most deliberate exploration of this pain as it functions institutionally and as it operates in and on the gendered subject. 15 Fornes locates her exploration in the phenomenology of pain itself, and she traces its consequences both in the consciousness that inflicts it and upon the corporeal subject that suffers its intrusion. She establishes this bodily perspective in the play's opening moments by staging Orlando's jumping jacks in stage darkness "as long as [they] can be endured" (68). In the reading of Fornes's text, this direction risks having little impact; in performance, however, with the audience subject to the physiological and perceptual disorientations effected by darkness, the opening sequence is indeterminate and disturbing, as the theater fills with the sounds and sensations of dense material colliding with body-accompanied by the grunts and breathing of physical duress-in a rhythmic punching that is both everywhere and nowhere, addressing the spectator viscerally, without the mediations of narrative and image. The violence simulated by this sequence extends throughout The Conduct of Life, much as the spectacle of bodily mutilation constitutes the backdrop of Marat/Sade and Bond's War Plays. Leticia deplores the mutilated bodies left in the street in a grotesque iconography of power: "Sometimes you see blood in the streets. Haven't you seen it? Why do they leave the bodies in the streets,-how evil, to frighten people? They tear their fingernails off and their poor hands are bloody and destroyed. And they mangle their genitals and expose them and they tear their eyes out and you can see the empty eye sockets in the skull." (8 5). The infliction of this pain is described through Orlando's fragmentary, dreamlike accounts of torture sessions, and in Nena's blank descriptions of her own victimization at his hands: "And he did•things to me. And he beat me. And he hung me on the wall. And I got sick" (84). As they accumulate, these and other narratives of bodily violation constitute a portrait of pain's catastrophic effect on its victims. Orlando's torture accounts reveal the annihilation of consciousness and identity under the weight of physical suffering, the collapse of a subjectively ordered world 15 Jeanie Forte discusses the exploration of pain and gender in women's performance art in "Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance," in Critical Theory and Performance, 250-54.

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within the contracted circle of pain: "I had put a poker to his neck to see if he would stop. Just to see if he would shut up. He just opened his eyes wide and started shaking and screamed even louder and fell over dead" (79 ). And the terse descriptions of Nena's narrative disclose the protective self-splitting of subject from body under physical duress, an alienation from the unbearable so successful that Nena can relocate her trauma in her oppressor: "And if someone should treat me unkindly, I should not blind myself with rage, but I should see them and receive them, since maybe they are in worse pain than me" (85). Offstage and onstage achieve a tense dialogue: Leticia's urgent attempts to master language and knowledge so that she might acquire visibility take place against this background of screams and cries, in which linguistic commerce with a world outside the body reverts to the self-fixated utterances of suffering. By the end of The Conduct of Life, this violence has infiltrated even the play's orderly domestic interior. In Orlando, Fornes presents the infliction of pain from the point of view of its perpetrator, dramatizing the impulse to power which seeks to objectify its surroundings through its power to injure. It is here that we encounter most clearly the intersection of pain and gender, and their joint subordination in a politics of embodiment. Orlando's opening lines establish his pursuit of a power conceived as self-disembodiment, as an elimination of bodily appetite: "Man must have an ideal, mine is to achieve maximum power. That is my destiny.-No other interest will deter me from this.-My sexual drive is detrimental to my ideals. I must no longer be overwhelmed by sexual passion or I will be degraded beyond hope of recovery" (68). 16 Considering sexuality a weakness, he nonetheless participates in forms of violence that are deeply imbued with the sexual idiom-the repeated rape of Nena, and modes of political torture described in sexual terms: He made loud sounds not high-pitched like a horse. He sounded like a whale, like a wounded whale. He was pouring liquid from everywhere, his mouth, his nose, his eyes. He was not a horse but a sexual organ.-Helpless. A viscera.-Screaming. Making strange sounds. He collapsed on top of her. She wanted him off but he collapsed on top of her and stayed there on top of her. Like gum. He looked more like a whale than a horse. A seal. His muscles were soft. What does it feel like to be without shape like that. With16 "Virile beauty," Beauvoir writes, "lies in the fitness of the body for action, in strength, agility, flexibility; it is the manifestation of transcendence animating a flesh that must never sink back upon itself" (The Second Sex, I 57).

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out pride. She was indifferent. He stayed there for a while and then lifted himself off her and to the ground. (Pause.) He looked like a horse again. (?4)

This speech is both horrifying and revealing in its access to the psychology of cruelty. In its conflation of the act of torture with the sexual act, of the human with the animal, the speech indicates a subjection of others that draws deeply on objectification and sexual violation. Orlando reduces his victim to "a sexual organ" and thereby reconfigures him both as object of sexual violence (like Nena) and as embodiment of his own disowned sexual aggressions, projected in animal terms. From this point of view, Orlando's sadism draws its psychic energies from a displaced staging of sexual interchange-a displacement that finds its corollary in Orlando's own sexual dysfunction, evident in onanistic sexual activity (with Nena) and voyeurism (in this speech and in the interrogation scene with Leticia in the play's final scene). But to restrict the content of this speech to libidinal repression is to neglect the phenomenological field that constitutes the primary target of Orlando's intervention and the semiotic operations that the infliction of pain works to effect upon it. Like Weiss's Marquis, Orlando seeks self-transcendence through pain, and like that of the perpetrators of violence in Bond, Rabe, and Soyinka, his sadism attempts the objectification of others, a materializing of the bodied subject that seeks to brand its innermost reaches with the marks of power; as he says, "It is a desire to destroy and to see things destroyed and to see the inside of them" (82). With his political victims, this inside (as Orlando forces it into view) constitutes the normally unseen realm of the viscera, dense but formless, a place where the personal exists at its most organic. With Nena, this inside is made to represent defilement, imaged in terms of the dull materiality of dirt. As Nena explains to Olimpia, "Because I'm dirty. [ ... ] That's why he beats me. The dirt won't go away from inside me" (84). The images and accounts of such infliction are horrific, but their very aversiveness constitutes an aim of Orlando's organized brutality. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva proposes "abjection" as a process by which defilement, that which is unspeakable, is cast off by the self-consolidating ego into a realm that constitutes this ego's defining outside: "Filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin." 17 This formu17

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New

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lation is useful for an understanding of degradation as it recurs throughout Fornes's plays and as it constitutes an organizing phenomenon in The Conduct of Life. Pursuing power as a form of selfabstraction, Orlando enacts the process of abjection, transforming the suffering body into a point of aversive corporeality, an external degradation, while refiguring himself in an almost spiritualized disembodiment where even the inflicting of pain is performed "out of love" (82). Violating the boundaries of others, he seeks to consolidate and transcend his own. At the same time, this materializing of others represents a more specific form of abjection, which asserts itself through specifically gendered codes. Through the infliction of suffering, Orlando brands the body as sexual object with that gesture in which he annihilates personal sexuality and the bodily self-possession on which it hinges. He reduces his torture victim to "a sexual organ" and a twelve-year-old girl to the sexualized object of rape by branding these individuals with rigidly defined gender markings, articulated according to biological function and in the oppositional framework of aggressor/victim, and by reifying these markings through the objectifying force of pain. Even when the violated body is made to cross the line between the male and the female-as with the castrated corpses and the interrogation victim who becomes both male and female on Orlando's stage of violence-it does so within an externally articulated polarity. Abjection constitutes a materialized, inert field, in which gender accrues both solidity and emblematic fixity, a physicalization that (like the dead body staged in Bond's plays) represents a perversion of lived bodiedness. As the play's narratives of torture and rape make clear, Orlando exposes intimacy at the same time as he destroys this realm, branding it according to the biology he injures and the intersubjective, generative functions he desecrates. In so doing, he relocates gender from the realm of individual constitution-where the body (in Judith Butler's words) "becomes its gender through a series of acts which are renewed, revised, and consolidated through time" 18 into the realm of the externally reified. When Leticia describes the dead bodies left lying in the streets, their genitals "mangled" and "exposed," York: Columbia University Press, I982), 69. "As in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live" (ibid., 3). 18 Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre journal 40 (December I988): 523·

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she describes the circuit of gender as it operates throughout this play, whereby sexuality is both erased and redeployed in an iconography of power. And when Olimpia threatens to hang Orlando's penis on a tree and feed it to the birds (So), she proposes a reversal of this gendering abjection, with Orlando's own sexuality reduced to an item of display. Drawing on the resources of terror, Orlando seeks the transcendence of power by materializing the field of others and fixing it according to objectified gender roles. By dramatizing this process, Fornes explores the relationship between pain and embodiment within a politics of power and the gendering component of pain as it marks the suffering body. As in Churchill's Vinegar Tom-with its graphic portrayal of the seventeenth-century witch persecutions as a violence systematically directed at the bodies of women-pain has the ability to brand the body as nakedly, helplessly female. The male body is also exposed by Orlando's acts of torture, but in its fleshly vulnerability it shares a materiality, a bodily objectification, branded female in Orlando's world. Simone de Beauvoir writes: "In every sexual act the Other is implicated; and the Other most often wears the visage of woman." 19 To the extent that transcendence is the property of men and forced immanence the property of women in The Conduct of Life, we might adapt Beauvoir's formulation to the sadistic world explored in Fornes's play: in every act of violence the Other is implicated; and in its violation this Other is gendered Woman. The Conduct of Life, in short, explores the connections between violence and the cultural reification of gender, and it does so in conjunction with a more personal focus on the consequences of this violence for the individual in sensory commerce with his or her environment. At the heart of Fornes's gender exploration, elusive but essential, is the bodied subject in its vulnerable corporeality, a sensuousness (to borrow Marx's term) that constitutes both the precondition for having a world and the means by which this world can be lost. "Do not collapse just now, world," begins a song in Fornes's play Molly's Dream (I968). 20 We can understand The Conduct of Life as the dramatization of such a collapse-from a self-extension effected through language and relationship to the enclosure of bodily sentience-in the paradoxical fields, political and performative, of corporeal presence. 19

20

Beauvoir, The Second Sex, r68. Maria Irene Fornes, Molly's Dream, in Promenade and Other Plays, 93·

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Movement, Body, Space: Vinegar Tom, A Mouthful of Birds,

for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf In a metadramatic touch that is both deliberate and telling, the characters of Fefu and Her Friends, all women, have gathered to organize and rehearse a collective presentation. More than any of Fornes's other plays, Fefu addresses the making of theater itself and the specific efforts needed to reclaim, within this medium, a space for women's performance. These characters collaborate on their presentation in a play that is itself an all-woman production; sharing their joys and their pains, their silliness and their seriousness during the even more tightly patriarchal world of 1935, they are themselves framed (as characters in Fornes's play) in a historically male theatrical institution. In its double staging, therefore, Fefu and Her Friend enacts the "political gesture" for which Cixous calls: the drive to change, "with the help of other women, [the theater's] means of production and expression." Like other plays of the contemporary women's theater, Fefu addresses the stage and its traditions by pressuring them to accommodate the voice of women's experience. If, as Cixous suggests, the theater is where "it is possible to get across the living, breathing, speaking body," then Fefu and the plays of Fornes's women contemporaries can be seen as attempts to reclaim the stage for female corporeal experience. The obstacles to such a reclamation are, of course, formidable, in a medium that has traditionally subjected the female body to exhibitionistic display. The effort to reinvest this body with autonomous physicality, to rescue it from visual objectification, is challenged by a scopic voyeurism perhaps ineradicable from the theater and its structures of vision. In Steaming (1981), Nell Dunn creates a "women's space"-the Turkish rest room of a 1909 public bath-in which her female characters appear and interact either nude or semi-nude. But though the inhabitants of this room are protected from male intrusion in the play, their nudity risks exhibitionistic titillation in the larger, public space of the theater. 21 Even when female performers have sought to de-eroticize the body as visual object (Karen Finley smearing her body with chocolate or yams) or violate the distance essential to voyeurism (porn star/ performance artist Annie Sprinkle inviting audience members to inspect 21

76.

Michelene Wandor discusses the play and this paradox in Carry On, Understudies, 175-

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her cervix with a speculum), the extent to which they have succeeded in escaping erotic objectification has remained subject to debate. 22 Although the dynamic of female display is as deeply entrenched as the stage's own theatricality, contemporary women dramatists have shown a recurrent concern with the living female body and the variables of embodied experience familiar to women-what Shange calls "a female landscape," individual as well as collective. 23 In phenomenological terms, this focus on female lived bodiliness involves two overlapping, mutually entailing areas of dramatization: the body as experiential site and the relationship between this body and its environment. Displaying the first of these concerns, a number of contemporary women dramatists have directed their attention to female body awareness and the processes, self-images, and modes of subjectivity that this involves. Louise Page's Tissue (1978), for instance, explores the physiological and emotional realities of breast cancer and surgery, focusing on the experiential register of these developments for the protagonist, Sally. In response to those who tell Sally "It's only a bit of tissue" ("It's not as if you're married") and a culture that fetishizes breasts as erotic objects, Page investigates the subjective experiences associated, for Sally and the other women in the play, with the breast and its loss ("The place which is empty aches"). 24 The participants in the original production (at the Studio Theatre, Coventry Belgrade) intensified this emphasis on physicality and lived experience by passing around prosthetic breasts after the performance, in order that the audience could (in Page's words) "feel the weight of them. I think that really brought home to people the physical sense of losing a breast"25 I consider the female body as physiological site more directly in the final section of this chapter, when I discuss the staging of pregnancy in the contemporary theater. First, however, I would like to focus on the outwardly directed face of corporeality, those aspects of female bodily experience that involve a woman's commerce with her surroundings. It 22 For discussions of this issue, see Elinor Fuchs, "Staging the Obscene Body," TDR 33 (Spring 1989): 33-58; and Catherine Schuler, "Spectator Response and Comprehension: The Problem of Karen Finley's Constant State of Desire," TDR 34 (Spring 1990): I 31-4 5. Finley responds to Schuler's article in a letter to the editor, TDR 34 (Summer 1990): 9-10; as does Miranda Joseph, letter to the editor, TDR 34 (Winter 1990): 13-16. 23 Ntozake Shange, interview, in Kathleen Betsko and Rachel Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 375· 24 Louise Page, Tissue, in Plays by Women: Volume One, ed. Michelene Wandor (London: Methuen, 1982), 77, 95· 25 Louise Page, Afterword to Tissue, in ibid., 102.

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is significant, in this regard, that the only pre-scripted segment of the group presentation in Fefu and Her Friend is a passage from Emma Sheridan Frye's Educational Dramatics (1917) dealing with the exchange between Environment and the human senses. Yet if the senses serve as registers of the external world in the body's subjective field, movement is the practical means ("practical" in the sense of praxis, or action) by which the subject asserts-and achieves-physical commerce with this environment.26 In contrast to Frye's vision of bodily subjectivity freed into unimpeded exchange with its environment-a Blakean image of perception's doors flying open-is the visual presence of Julia, bound to her wheelchair and to the physical enclosure imposed by the male voices that torment her. Julia's mysterious disability (at one point, we briefly see her walking) evokes the broader phenomenon of mobility and immobility that we have encountered elsewhere: the characters in Beckett's late plays, Dodge in Buried Child, the quartet of characters at the end of No Man's Land, Marat, and Lear in the blinding machine. But Julia's disability also evokes a phenomenon more particularly and intimately connected to the theatrical representation of women. For unfettered mobility is not a given for most female characters, nor is immobility (or restricted mobility) an incidental disabling. Throughout the history of the theater, women characters have labored under a circumscription of bearing, a set of usually tacit limits on bodily movements. For every Theseus, a Phaedra; for every Stanley, a Blanche; for every swashbuckling Romeo, a Juliet, her youthful exuberance at odds with female propriety. Disguised as a male, Rosalind swaggers in her "swashing and martial outside" (r. 3. r 20) throughout much of As You Like It, enjoying the unbounded movements available to a man until women's clothes return her to a more statuesque modesty. The norm of female constraint is beautifully captured in the second scene of Wertenbaker's The Grace of Mary Traverse (r98 5), when the play's eighteenth-century protagonist practices "graceful" movement: (She walks. Stops and examines.) Yes. Better. (She walks again. Looks.)

Ah. There. (She walks faster now, then examines.) 26 See]. H. van den Berg, "The Human Body and the Significance of Human Movement: A Phenomenological Study," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research I3 (December I952): I59-83.

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I've done it: see the invisible passage of an amiable woman. (Pause.)

It was the dolls who gave me my first lessons. No well-made doll, silk-limbed, satin-clothed, leaves an imprint. As a child I lay still and believed their weightlessness mine. Awkward later to discover I grew, weighed. Best not to move very much. But nature was implacable. More flesh, more weight. Embarrassment all around. So the teachers came. Air, they said. Air? Air. I waited, a curious child, delighted by the prospect of knowledge. Air. You must become like air. Weightless. Still. Invisible. Learn to drop a fan and wait. When that is perfected, you may move, slightly, from the waist only. Later, dare to walk, but leave no trace. 27

These examples of circumscribed female movement point to the restriction characteristic of female body experience outside the theater. In her essay "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality," Iris Marion Young considers "the manner in which each sex projects his or her Being-in-the-world through movement" in an attempt to reveal the phenomenological structures of a woman's use of her body. 28 According to Young, women tend to make less use of their bodies than men, move parts of their bodies in an inhibited and discontinuous fashion (hence the phenomenon of "throwing like a girl"), and act in a limited physical space. Instead of transcending the body's facticity in acts of outwardly directed intentionality, women tend to project an "existential barrier" between themselves and the space beyond them; they experience the body not only as capacity, but also as object, as a point of self-reference discontinuous with the field of "over there." "To the extent that a woman lives her body as a thing, she remains rooted in immanence, is inhibited, and retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world's possibilities" (150). A woman's modalities of bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality, then, are characterized by tension, ambiguity, and duality. Following Beauvoir, Young uses the word feminine to characterize these modes of bodily experience and to underscore that their origins are social rather than physiological. Such "structures of feminine existence" (14 3) derive from Timberlake Wertenbaker, The Grace of Mary Traverse (London: Faber and Faber, I98s), 4· 28 lris Marion Young, "Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality," in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I 990 ), I 56. 27

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the fact that a woman's body is presented to her as an object rather than an instrument of possibility. Applying Foucault to the sphere of gender relations, Sandra Lee Bartky has spoken of the patriarchal culture's "discipline" of the female body. 29 In Young's words, "women in sexist society are physically handicapped" (I 53). This understanding of the socially conditioned parameters of feminine mobility and spatiality, and of the conflicted bodily experience that underlies these parameters, allows valuable insight into the staging of the female body in both early and contemporary plays. Throughout the history of drama, the image of unbounded female movement has been accompanied by fascination and suspicion. When Ibsen's Nora frantically rejects the propriety to which she has been subjected and dances her tarantella "more and more wildly" in act 2 of A Doll House ("her hair loosens and falls over her shoulders"), her husband Torvald (who in the past has directed her dancing) calls the performance "pure madness"; and though he acknowledges that her performance at the party the following night has aroused him, he characterizes it as "a bit too naturalistic-! mean it rather overstepped the proprieties of art." 30 Amazons, winged Eumenides, Bacchantes-from the start, the dramatic tradition has associated such behavior with transgression, unnaturalness, and aggressiveness. The Bacchae is a vivid example of the ambivalence and distrust occasioned by this kind of movement on the part of women. Inspired by the god Dionysus, the women of Thebes are "driven from shuttle and loom" to hills, fields, and woods, where-their "hair fall[ing] loose, down I over their shoulders"-they engage in the ecstatic revelry of the Bacchic dance. 31 "Like a colt by its grazing mother, I the 29 Sandra Lee Bartky, "Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power," in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, I99o), 63-82. Judith Lynne Hanna contrasts male and female conventions of movement (and other nonverbal behaviors) in Dance, Sex, and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I988), I6o-6r. 30 Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House, in The Complete Major Prose Plays, trans. Rolf Fjelde (New York: New American Library, I978), I73, I74, I8o-8r. Throughout A Doll House, Torvald attempts to monitor the style and range of Nora's movements, as in his remarks on embroidering and knitting: "[Embroidering] is a lot prettier. See here, one holds the embroidery so, in the left hand, and then one guides the needle with the right-so-in an easy sweeping curve .... But, on the other hand, knitting-it can never be anything but ugly. Look, see here, the arms tucked in, the knitting needles going up and down-there's something Chinese about it" (I8I-8z). As Ibsen makes clear, what underlies Torvald's rhetoric of art and artistry is a tacit struggle over the extent to which the female body can claim its bearing, movement, and spatial surroundings as its own. 31 Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in Euripides V, The Complete Greek

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Bacchante runs with flying feet, she leaps!" (I6I); "carried up by their own speed, they flew like birds I across the spreading fields" (I87); "and when they ran, I everything ran with them" (I86). But, despite the power and attraction of its intoxicating liberation (to which the Chorus and even Cadmus and Tiresias attest), this essentially female revelry is clearly marked within the play as violating the natural laws-sexual, maternal, societal-governing women's behavior; with their appetites literally gone wild, they suckle animals, rend others to pieces, pillage and destroy, fight the men who take arms against them. Moreover, in one of the play's central paradoxes, the women's freedom of action is shown to be unnatural and illusory: they fly through the fields under the god's possession; they are "driven." Far from signaling a mode of corporeal self-possession, their revelries are presented as a form of enslavement. For Agave, it is only when intoxication is lifted at the play's end (like a delirium of which she has been purged) that she is, from the play's viewpoint, returned to herself. Allowed to appear on stage for the first time, she does so in the increasingly normalized movements of civil womanhood, and it is in this state that she must confront the consequences of her license (in the mutilated body of her son) and the attendant punishment for being "unclean" (2I7). The Bacchae, in other words, dramatizes the liberation of female appetite and motility by denying its women characters their agency in connection with behavior for which they are nonetheless punished. In so doing, Euripides manages to contain the corporeal license he chooses to explore. 32 The misogynistic extreme to which the control over women's movements has been carried constitutes the cultural and theatrical background of Julia's immobility in Fefu and Her Friend. This issue of corporeal discipline also informs the plays of Caryl Churchill, a dramatist equally concerned with the conditions and constraints governing female bodily experience. Vinegar Tom, which dramatizes the witch persecutions of the seventeenth century, is Churchill's most explicit treatment of female victimization. In response to a play like Arthur Miller's The Crucible ( I9 53), which finds the causes of this historical phenomenon in generalized economic and social conditions (and which focuses its ethical dilemmas, tellingly, in terms of a male protagonist), Tragedies, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 159, 185. 32 That this behavior, like violence and other unstageable incidents elsewhere in Greek drama, is restricted to narration suggests a further dimension to Euripides' containment-as if the uncontrolled female body posed a particular danger to representational decorum.

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Vinegar Tom presents the persecutions as a violence targeted specifically at women, the physical manifestation of attitudes toward women reflected in centuries of Christian doctrine. The tenets of this doctrine and their subtle manifestations in attitudes and relationships in the play are complex, but the persecution that issues from this misogyny is characterized by violence directed at the female body as a site of disobedient "carnality."33 Women are bound, held down, "pricked," stretched on the rack, hung, drowned, burned; their heads are wrenched with a cord, their legs shattered by "boots ... that break the bones." 34 This last device makes clear the extent to which the violence of Vinegar Tom takes the form of enforced immobilization, and how fully this violence serves to abrogate what little freedom of movement these characters have. Alice dreams of journeying to London; Margery travels from house to house begging for food. Betty, a girl whose social class lessens her vulnerability to the witch hunt, nonetheless suffers what is, Churchill suggests, a discipline directed more broadly at female bodily independence. Pledged to a marriage she neither wants nor can avoid, Betty moves with a child's sense of freedom and possibility: she tells Jack and Margery, "On my way here I climbed a tree. I could see the whole estate. I could see the other side of the river. I wanted to jump off. And fly" (140). 35 When Betty next appears, she is tied down, and the Doctorwho labels her behavior "hysteria," a disorder (as the name suggests) attributed to female anatomy-is preparing to bleed and blister her, to bring her feelings to compliance and her body back to order. Like the other songs interspersed among the play's scenes, the song that precedes and follows Betty's "cure" extends the play's critique to contemporary attitudes and institutions that perpetuate the misogyny of earlier centuries. "Oh Doctor" addresses the medical profession's continued objectification of women's bodies, its technological invasion of these bodies and its effort to co-opt them from the agency and experience of women themselves: 33 As the actors playing Kramer and Sprenger (the authors of Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches) banter in the final act of Vinegar Tom: "[A woman] is more carnal than a man ... as may be seen from her many carnal abominations" (Caryl Churchill, Vinegar Tom, in Plays: One [London: Methuen, r985], 177). 34 lbid., I37· 35 The urge for freedom and transcendence evident in this description may also charge Alice's questions regarding the witch she is told about in the first scene: "Did she fly at night on a stick? Did you see her flying?" (r36). It is interesting to recall that the persecutions in Salem, Massachusetts, were triggered (as Miller's play depicts) by the spect~cle of girls dancing naked in the woods.

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Where are you taking my skin? Where are you putting my bones? ... Stop looking at me with your metal eye. Stop cutting me apart before I die. (rso)

The song calls for a reclaiming of the female body from its appropriation by men, and it offers glimpses of a bodily experience centered in the self-possession of the female subject: Stop, put me back. Stop, put me back. Put back my body.... Give me back my body. I can see myself. (rso-p)

Yet these glimpses remain just that, in Vinegar Tom as in most of Churchill's plays. Self-possession and the freedom to transcend the body's boundaries in acts of unconstrained movement are, like the promise of "cloud nine," always beyond reach. Isolated characters acquire a degree of mobility (Marion in Top Girls is the most prominent example) but the experience of the women in Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976) and Fen (r983)-and those in the opening scene of Top Girlsremains the rule, and the constricted space of their lives attests to the bodily dispossession that characterizes Churchill's female world. There is one intriguing exception. Although A Mouthful of Birds (r986), Churchill's adaptation with David Lan of The Bacchae, is not solely about women, the Bacchic image of female intoxication, with its ecstatic movements and unimpeded appetites, remains its guiding center. Through a complex network of stories, A Mouthful of Birds explores the idea of possession, of being carried outside of or beyond oneself. Like Maureen Duffy's Rites (r969) (a reappropriation of The Bacchae in the female space of a women's lavatory), Churchill's and Lan's play pays specific attention to violence as a form of possession, particularly on the part of women. 36 As the characters move through 36 "Women have traditionally been seen as more peaceful than men" (Caryl Churchill, Author's Note to Churchill and David Lan, A Mouthful of Birds [London: Methuen, I986], 5). Churchill comments more fully on the issue of violence and women in "The Common Imagination and the Individual Voice," interview with Geraldine Cousin, New Theatre Quarterly I3 (February I988): IO-I2.

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their various forms of possession, the women experience a lifting of physical constraint underscored by dance and other forms of movement exercise throughout the play (in the sensuous dance of "eating fruit," for instance, or the dance of "extreme happiness" and the tearing apart of Pentheus). Unlike the women of Euripides' play, the characters in A Mouthful of Birds, women as well as men, are all transformed by the experience of possession. This transformation takes the form of a new relationship with one's body, a new sense of corporeal possibility. Lena has come to terms with her capability for violence, Yvonne works as a butcher ("I have a feel for the strengths of a body" [7o]), and Marcia sails the ocean in freedom and solitude ("I am full of joy" [71]). Doreen feels choked by the blood and broken bones of birds in her mouth, but her turmoil is framed by the possibility of the body reclaiming itself in commerce with its world. In the words of Derek (as Herculine Barbin), whose body is now a woman's: "I smell light and sweet. I come into a room, who has been here? Me. My skin used to wrap me up, now it lets the world in" (71 ). In The Work of Living Art, as we have seen, Adolphe Appia called for an art of the theater oriented in terms of the human body and its spatializing capacities: "Dramatic art is a spontaneous creation of the body; our body is the dramatic author." Privileged among the arts that comprise the theatrical medium, the living body mediates between the verbal and physical components of the mise-en-scene: "In one hand, so to speak, the actor bears the text; in the other, as in a sheaf, he holds the arts of space." Appia envisioned a stage organized according to corporeal rhythms, and his comments accompanying "Rhythmic Spaces" (a collection of designs) stress this musical conception of the theater's bodied space: "[These remarks are] simple suggestions to the end of establishing a style under the control of the human body-which is itself stylized by music." 37 In Chapter 2, I discussed Appia in the context of a formalizing current in modernist scenography, one that opposed itself to the unruliness of the physiological body "discovered" by the naturalists. But the examples of A Doll House and A Mouthful of Birds suggest that the formalized body-in-movement has its own modes of expressive possibility. Like Craig, Appia resisted the undisciplined body, but he did so in order to engage a more aestheticized phenomenal register. If his geometrical 37

Appia, The Work of Living Art and Man Is the Measure of All Things, 54, 9, 87.

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designs can be said to anticipate the mechanical spaces and figures of Bauhaus theater, his stress on the body as "dramatic author" prefigures a different view of the body, a view articulated and explored by dance phenomenologists. In The Phenomenology of Dance, Maxine SheetsJohnstone speaks of the body as "a center of force which spatializes itself," and she characterizes dance as "a lived experience of the sheer phenomenon of movement." 38 Similarly, Sondra Horton Fraleigh describes dance as "an enactment of our embodiment," a creative activity that seeks "to unite body-subject and body-object ... the body [the dancer] is with the body imagined in the dance." According to Fraleigh, dance exploits the tensions between expression and form, the personal and the universal. Originating in the individualized body, dance surpasses the limits of the purely personal toward expression of the "poetic body." At the same time, although the dancer's body may approach the purely formal, this body is never completely objectified, never reducible to a kind of aesthetic material. "The self is objectified in dance," Fraleigh writes, "within the condition of its lived ground." 39 Both the musicalized body envisaged by Appia and the body-inmovement described by Sheets-Johnstone and Fraleigh are universally human, unmarked in terms of gender. But the history of actual bodies in actual plays suggests that it is the female rather than the male body that has most regularly explored these rhythmic relationships. 40 Nora's tarantella, the impromptu dance by the sisters in Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa (1990)-if women characters have been denied the unconstrained everyday motility of male characters, dance has often allowed them a physical commerce with their bodies and their environment, an expansion of the field of gesture beyond the constraints of social gesture. As Rabe's In the Boom Boom Room (1973; revised 1974) and Jacqueline Rudet's Money to Live (r984) remind us, female dance falls easily into the category of aesthetic/erotic display, but the ease with which Nora presses her tarantella beyond these boundaries demonstrates dan38 Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966; New York: Arno Press, 1980), 124, 141. See also idem, "Phenomenology as a Way of Illuminating Dance," in Illuminating Dance: Philosophical Explorations, ed. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1984), 124-45. 39 Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), xvi, 41, 71, 37· 40 Athol Fugard's "Master Harold" . .. and the Boys ( 1982) is one of the few plays to explore the rhythms of dance through male characters.

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ce's latent transgressiveness (a transgressiveness imaged in the "unnatural" revelries of the Bacchantes and the demonized dance of Miller's Salem girls). Certainly no play uses dance more fully and intricately to explore the expressive possibilities of the female body in space than Shange's "choreopoem" for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf. This sense of bodily possibility derives from Shange's own discoveries through dance training. As she suggests in her introductory remarks on the play, dance allowed Shange to discover both her freedom to move through space and the specific shapes, contours, experiences, and behaviors that characterized her body as female and African American: Knowing a woman's mind & spirit had been allowed me, with dance I discovered my body more intimately that I had imagined possible. With the acceptance of the ethnicity of my thighs & backside, came a clearer understanding of my voice as a woman & as a poet. The freedom to move in space, to demand of my own sweat a perfection that could continually be approached, though never known, waz poem to me, my body & mind ellipsing, probably for the first time in my life. Just as Women's Studies had rooted me to an articulated female heritage & imperative, so dance as explicated by Raymond Sawyer & Ed Mock insisted that everything African, everything halfway colloquial, a grimace, a strut, an arched back over a yawn, waz mine. I moved what waz my unconscious knowledge of being in a colored woman's body to my known everydayness .... Paula Moss & I learned the wealth of our bodies, if we worked, if we opened up, if we made the dance our own. 41

By focusing attention on the body and animating it with movement, dance allows that body to be reclaimed; "ellipsing" the abstraction of thought and the physicality of sensation, it enables the body's selfexperience-its lived embodiedness-to enter consciousness not as burden or object, but as expressive capability and opportunity for self-possession. In a way that has particular import for an African American woman whose bodily contours have been rendered invisible to her, dance transforms the body into an aesthetic field, "wealthy" in its gender and ethnic particularity.42 41 Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (New York: Macmillan, 1989), xi. (Slashes within quotations are Shange's own.) 42 Shange's notions of dance and movement evoke the "passionate physicality" that Cor-

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For colored girls incorporates these observations on the transformations and disclosures effected by dance, and in so doing, it radically challenges the physical and subjective limitations that traditionally characterize the female presence on (and off) the stage. The play's songs and stories establish the backdrop of an African American female experience without rhythm, its movements and music denied harmony or unity:

half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune distraught laughter fallin over a black girl's shoulder it's funny/ it's hysterical the melody-less-ness of her dance don't tell nobody don't tell a soul she's darrein on beer cans & shingles. (3)

This "melody-less-ness" is reflected, throughout the play's poetry, in the recurrent accounts of hopelessness and constraint, of an experience diminished and numbed through cruelty and neglect. The backdrop of for colored girls is a world of "latent rapists" (17-2I) and Beau Willie Browns, abortion and abandonment, where women sit "in windows [/] fingerin shades/ ol lace curtains [/] camoflagin despair & [/] stretch marks" (3 2) within dwindling personal space: I usedta be in the world a woman in the world i hadda right to the world then i moved to harlem for the set-up a umverse six blocks of cruelty piled up on itself nel West notes in African American religious celebration: "By passionate physicality, I mean bodily stylizations of the world, syncopations and polyrhythms that assert one's somebodiness in a society in which one's body has no public worth, only economic value as a laboring mechanism" ("Black Culture and Postmodernism," in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariari [Seattle: Bay Press, 1989], 93).

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a tunnel closin. (39)

At the heart of the African American woman's rhythmless, tuneless despair is a bodily dispossession, an experience of the body being plundered, co-opted. The threat of this loss is wryly and pointedly explored in the poem "somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff," where the attempted robbery of personal possessions-those objects with which one gathers the past and personalizes one's surroundings with the marks of selfhood-extends, with a kind of phenomenological logic, to memory, the voice, and the body itself: i wants my things/ i want my arm wit the hot iron scar/ & my leg wit the flea bite/ i want my calloused feet & quik language back in my mouth/ fried plantain! pineapple pear juice/ sun-ra & joseph & jules/ i want my own things/ how i lived them/ & give me my memories/ how i waz when i waz there/ (so)43

The word "almost" is a pivotal word in this poem's title, for it indicates a core of self-possession rescued from the threat of loss. For colored girls counterpoints the pain of diminishment, objectification, and invisibility with celebratory moments in which African American women claim their bodies as their own. The teenager of "graduation nite" chooses to surrender her virginity in the back seat of an "ol buick" and by morning "I just cdnt stop grinnin" (ro); the young girl of "taussaint" abandons her fantasy companion for a living Toussaint; and even Sechita, the exotic Egyptian goddess of creativity who performs her carnival dance before the audience's demeaning gaze ("they were aimin coins tween her thighs"), maintains traces of her namesake's power and 43 The rich particularity of passages like this reflects the intensely personalized conception of Lebenswelt in Shange's writings, and it anticipates the specific, ethnically individuated body that Adrienne Rich has called attention to in "Notes toward a Politics of Location": "When I write 'the body' I see nothing in particular. To write 'my body' plunges me into lived experience, particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolorations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me. White skin, marked and scarred by three pregnancies, a sterilization, progressive arthritis, four joint operations, calcium deposits, no rapes, no abortions, much time at the typewriter, and so forth" (in Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in the I98os, ed. Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz and Iris M. Zavala [Amsterdam: John Benjamins, I98 s], IO).

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self-expressiveness, "catchin stars tween her toes" (25). The poem "one" epitomizes the mixture of poignancy and celebration, self-loss and self-expression, that runs throughout the poems of for colored girls. In "one," the poem's "she" dresses herself in "orange butterflies & aqua sequins" (31) and struts seductively down the street, an erotic vision to entice the male gaze: she let her thigh slip from her skirt crossin the street she slowed to be examined. (31)

She wants to be "unforgettable ... a memory" (32), but when the evening of lovemaking gives way to dawn, she takes a bath to remove the glitter, butterflies, and rhinestones and reclaim her body from spectacle: layin in water she became herself ordinary brown braided woman with big legs & full lips reglar. But "reglar" is also alone, with the magic relinquished and lost, and when she has kicked out her lover, she describes her exploits in her diary, places a rose behind her ear, then cries herself to sleep. The balance is delicate: the very body that offers itself as a vehicle of freedom, transformation, and the power to attract is also the nothing-special body of a sistah worn from supportin a wd be hornplayer or waitin by the window at rest in the familiarity of loneliness. If loneliness is a form of "melody-less-ness," then dance is both the transcendence of this loneliness and its momentary resolution. "We gotta dance to keep from cryin," the performers sing, "we gotta dance to keep from dyin" (15). But dance is more than an escape from the

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pain of invisibility and invalidation; as Shange's prefatory remarks suggest, it is a means of owning the body in its physicality and its capacity for expressivity and grace. As such, the stories of for colored girls are framed by the collective dance-the visual and tactile poetry-that accompanies (and, to some extent, constitutes) the telling. That this dance performance is collaborative is essential to its dramatization of the body both claiming and transcending its boundaries. Fraleigh suggests the intersubjective range available to dance: in synchronized dance, "self becomes lost in a plurality of one," while dancing in counterpoint provides "occasions for my body to exist against the ground of, and as ground for, another." 44 Moving in both of these ways, the performers animate the space of the stage with collective rhythm; against the frequent accounts of the "black girl" alone in her experience, the cast demonstrates a shared commemoration of this experience in the mutual rhythm of dance. Language, too, participates in the body's discovery of rhythm, literally emerging from the expressive rhythms of dance. Shange has commented: "Writing is for most people a cerebral activity. For me it is a very rhythmic and visceral experience. Dance clears my mind of verbal images and allows me to understand the planet the way I imagine atomic particles experience space. I am not bogged down with the implications of language. I am only involved in the implications of movement which later on, when I do start to write, become manifest in the rhythms of my poetry."45 According to Shange, then, the dramatic language of a play like for colored girls achieves its poetic rhythms by inscribing the body's expressive movements and mirroring its modes of "experiencing space." But language is more than acoustical rhythm, and it functions in the play's dance of experience in other, more intricate, ways. As I suggested in Chapter 4, the phenomenological account of dramatic language discloses a double form of embodiment: not only does this language draw on the physical situation of utterance in its deictic and phonic features, but it evokes embodied experience through the phenomenal density and autonomy of its semantic realm. No play illustrates this linguistic opening onto experience more powerfully than for colored girls. Language may derive from the experience of movement in Shange's play, but it also gives voice to the subjectivity of the African American female experience with a richness and particularity unavail44 45

Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body, 195, 199. Shange, interview, in Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights, 365.

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able to movement alone. It is through words that Shange's performers evoke the feel of Sechita's "splendid red garters/ gin-stained n itchy on her thigh" (24) and the trauma of an abortion: metal horses gnawin my womb dead mice fall from my mouth. (22)

Shange's poetry, entering the private reaches of individual consciousness and bringing them to life on stage in their depth and_ specificity, articulates an experience all too often marked by its silence: sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she's been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn't know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty.

Language participates in the dual project of Shange's drama: reowning the bodily, emotional, and spiritual experiences particular to African American women and widening the boundaries of these experiences through acts of expression. By giving voice to experience-or, rather, by allowing experience to discover its own voice-one enables subjectivity to be both known and shared: Bring her out to know herself to know you. (4)

Here, too, the form of Shange's choreopoem is a crucial determinant of its experiential landscape. Although individual stories are spoken by

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individual performers, these stories are by no means linked to their speakers by that relationship of identity we call "character." The performers slip into and out of poems, speaking in multiple voices and of multiple lives over the course of the play, while several of these poems (such as "sorry") are delivered by a sequence of different speakers. As a result of this fluid, collaborative mode of utterance, the pronoun I acquires a complex referentiality, where the personal is at the same time the collective and where the account of individual experience becomesin the midst of its particularity-a shared expression. Stories, songs, lines, and images are passed from performer to performer like movements of their dance, and language both reflects and generates the intersubjectivity that characterizes the fluid movements of their bodies in space ("intersubjective" in the sense of an exchange of subjectivities, an interpenetration or relational matrix in which the particular exists in relation to other particulars). Shange's performers are not named; instead, they are "colored girls," identified largely by the blue, red, brown, yellow, purple, orange, and green of their dresses. At moments, particular colors stand out and occupy configurations with each other, but the overall visual effect is of a painter's canvas or a rainbow, with colors continually changing place in their shared field. In the play's final poem ("a laying on of hands"), .the lady in blue celebrates all the gods comin into me layin me open to myself. (6r)

Against a dramatic tradition that stages the female body in terms of constraint-in which (to recall Young's analysis of feminine body comportment) a woman "retains a distance from her body as transcending movement and from engagement in the world's possibilities" -for colored girls offers a theatrical vision of female experience reclaiming, through movement and voice, possession of itself and its space. 46 46 Spell #7, first performed five years after for colored girls, offers a different perspective on dance and its powers of reclamation in the theater. The cast, broadened to include both men and women, appears on stage in blackface beneath an oversized, grotesque minstrel mask, which represents the powerful stereotypes of African American black entertainers with which African American performers must continually contend. Although the minstrel mask disappears after the opening sequence and the cast removes its blackface, the giant mask reappears at the end, underscoring the fact that the play's "safe haven" allows only a temporary expressive freedom.

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Pregnancy and Embodiment: Gestation, Spell #7 In the final scene of Pam Gems's Queen Christina (1977), the play's protagonist declares: "I begin to perceive that I am a woman. What that is, heaven knows ... the philosophy is yet to be written, there is a world to be explored." 47 The discussion of motility and other issues on the part of Young and other writers suggests the extent to which feminist philosophers have sought to begin writing this philosophy and to challenge the male bias of traditional phenomenological models and descriptions. Bartky addresses the phallocentrism of the philosophical tradition in which she was trained, with its accounts of subjectivity and experience: "I am at war ... with the principal personage of traditional philosophy, that abstract subject who masquerades as everyone and anyone, but is really a male subject in disguise." 48 Although such writers as Young and Bartky employ phenomenological terminology, they seek to understand female experience in terms of its multiple, often disctinctive variables. And although these writers are unwilling to replace the abstract subject of traditional, male-focused philosophy with an equally abstract "female" subject, they and other feminist philosophers have approached women's experience as its own field, the result both of physical differences that characterize the female body and of patriarchal attitudes and institutions that discipline this body and condition the female subject's experience of it. Because pregnancy engages so directly the issues of embodiment that we have traced throughout this study, it is a useful area for illustrating the feminist revision of traditional phenomenological description. In an essay entitled "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation," Young uses the condition of pregnancy to "develop and partially criticize" the phenomenology of bodily existence as articulated by MerleauPonty, Erwin Straus, and other phenomenologists of the body. 49 Although Young seeks to continue phenomenology's undermining of Cartesianism, she challenges the assumptions, which she considers implicit within this tradition, of a unified subjectivity. "Pregnancy," she argues, "reveals a paradigm of bodily experience in which the transparent unity of self dissolves and the body attends positively to itself at Pam Gems, Queen Christina (London: St. Luke's Press, 1982), 75 (ellipsis in text). Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 6. 49 lris Marion Young, "Pregnant Embodiment: Subjectivity and Alienation," in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays, r6o. 47

48

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the same time that it enacts its projects" (I6I). By its very nature, pregnancy subverts the integration of bodily experience, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside, myself and other, and compounding the experience of subjectivity; in pregnancy, "I experience my insides as the space of another, yet my own body" (I63). Such functions as movement attain a new dynamic of instrumentality and objecthood, as the pregnant woman walks, bends, and turns with a body that has acquired unfamiliar spatiality and weight. Animating this dynamic is the phenomenon of otherness-that point of otherness that emerges and grows at the body's center and a more pervasive otherness that characterizes a body increasingly unfamiliar and changing. As Young suggests, "Reflection on the experience of pregnancy reveals a body subjectivity that is decentered, myself in the mode of not being myself" (I62). 50 Although contemporary phenomenology has anticipated and explored the phenomenon of decentered subjectivity (and thereby pursued the post-Husserlian directions of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Sartre), Young's description of pregnancy underscores the extent to which even recent phenomenological description continues to neglect gendered variables and manifestations. By focusing attention on nonuniversal modes of experience-she restricts even her own woman-oriented descriptions of pregnancy to the experience of women in technologically sophisticated Western societies (I 6 I)-Young challenges the descriptive authority of categorizing phenomenological models, particularly those derived exclusively from the perspective of men. Her discussion of the pregnant body's newfound weight, for instance, modifies the treatment of this kind of awareness by phenomenologists of the body. Young notes that, for Pliigge and other theorists, "awareness of my body as weighted material, as physical, occurs only or primarily when my in50 Julia Kristeva writes: "Cells fuse, split, and proliferate; volumes grow, tissues stretch, and body fluids change rhythm, speeding up or slowing down. Within the body, growing as a graft, indomitable, there is an other. And no one is present, within that simultaneously dual and alien space, to signify what is going on" ("Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez [New York: Columbia University Press, r98o], 237. Adrienne Rich describes her experience of an embryo as "something inside and of me, yet becoming hourly and daily more separate, on its way to becoming separate from me and of-itself. In early pregnancy the stirring of the fetus felt like ghostly tremors of my own body, later like the movements of a being imprisoned in me; but both sensations were my sensations, contributing to my own sense of physical and psychic space" (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution [New York: Norton, 1976], 63).

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strumental relation to the world breaks down, in fatigue or illness" ( r64). This tendency to attribute negative meaning to the material body is challenged, she suggests, by the condition of pregnancy, where the weighted, enlarged body becomes, in moments, the object of an "innocent narcissism" (r66) and even ordinary movements are experienced as a kind of dance. "Pregnancy roots me to the earth" ( r 6 5): the pregnant body participates in a temporality of movement, growth, and change, arid the pregnant woman experiences herself-in her body-as both source and participant in a creative process. In other words, although pregnancy puts into play the variables that characterize embodiment as a phenomenon, it manifests them in forms that reflect its own internal and external configurations, and it invests them with its own, gendered meanings. Throughout the centuries, the spectacle of the pregnant female body has occasioned a uniquely theatrical fascination. As both an inner and an outer phenomenon whose transformations are hidden and overt, pregnancy has recurred in the dramatic tradition as a vehicle of concealment, change, disclosure, causality, and obligation; indeed, even the tricks and sleight of hand by which pregnancy is simulated in the theater participate in this drama of invisibility and display. From the Wakefield Annunciation and The Duchess of Malfi to Hedda Gabler and Look Back in Anger, this tradition has strongly tended to represent pregnancy from a male perspective and to invest the pregnant female body with predominantly male fascination and fear. These attitudes include an idealization of maternity, but they are also charged with a misogyny that reflects a broader violence toward the female body: Webster's Duchess and John Ford's Annabella (in Tis Pity She's a Whore) are punished for their pregnancy in a manner that recalls Lear's rage at Goneril's "organs of increase" (King Lear 1.4.2 79) and anticipates the pious victimization of the fallen woman in nineteenth-century melodrama, the violation of the pregnant body in Bond's Lear and Rabe's Sticks and Bones (r969), and even the momentary-though pointedviolence of Stanley Kowalski and Jimmy Porter toward their expecting wives. 5 1 Women dramatists have sought to reappropriate the theatrical representation of pregnancy-to rescue what Sylvia Plath calls this "riddle "This strain of misogyny may likewise anticipate Shaw's fantasy in Back to Methuselah of a world without female conception and birth, as well as the infrequency or absence of pregnancy in such writers as Pinter, Shepard, Stoppard, and Marner.

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in nine syllables" and reinvest it with the complexity of its female meanings. 52 Among these meanings are the social, interrelational, economic, and institutional issues that characterize pregnancy from the perspective of women. Questions of proprietorship, the familial and other institutional claims over the maternal body and its child inform the staging of pregnancy in Vinegar Tom (Susan) and Top Girls (Lady Nijo). This structure of societal constraints makes itself felt even for those characters who go against its institutions: Fornes's Sarita (Sarita) and Marion (Abingdon Square), Shelagh Delaney's Jo (A Taste of Honey [I958]), Churchill's Pope Joan (Top Girls), and the protagonist of Rose's Story (I984) by Grace Dayley. Gems's Queen Christina must suffer the frustration of her maternal yearnings because she refuses to surrender her independence to the patriarchal institution of marriage. Interwoven with many of these stories are the related themes of exploitation and abandonment, and the economic and social dilemmas attendant on those who must embody the consequences of conception. Wilma, one of the inhabitants of the Hide-A-Wee Home for Unwed Mothers in Aishah Rahman's Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage (I977), speaks of the "curse" of "fatherless child, manless woman," and in the same play Paulette describes this curse as a loss of freedom, a co-opting of the body's autonomy: "Babies weigh you down, inside and outside .... A man will stop a woman. Someway, somehow, he just manages to pump you full of babies and insecurities and turn you into a rag doll that only lives through him. " 53 In "Pregnant Embodiment," Young concludes her discussion of pregnancy by suggesting that the pregnant woman's encounter with modern obstetrical medicine often alienates her from her experience of pregnancy and birth. The birthing facilities of modern hospitals, she notes, render a woman unnecessarily passive during labor, and medical instruments objectify pregnancy and birth by negating or devaluing the woman's experience of these processes (I68-72). This institutional dispossession of the lived experience of pregnancy, and the literal invasion of the pregnant woman's body by instruments that render her an object of manipulation for a doctor who is overwhelmingly likely to be male, 52 Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors," in The Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: Harper and Row, I98I), n6. Carlson discusses the staging of pregnancy in Women and Comedy,

24o-44·

53 Aishah Rahman, Unfinished Women Cry in No Man's Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage, in Nine Plays by Black Women, ed. Margaret B. Wilkerson (New York: New American Library, I986), 22I, 230.

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have also been addressed in contemporary women's theater. Sarah Daniels's Byrthrite (1988) represents the most extensive exploration of this technological impingement on lived pregnancy. Set during the seventeenth century (as are Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Vinegar Tom), the play opens with a lying-in presided over by a midwife and a gathering of local women, who celebrate "women's rite, women's right for choice in birth."54 Although Byrthrite explores the broader social and physical victimization that the characters endure at the hands of their patriarchal world and its witch persecutions, the play's action is punctuated by songs that call attention to more recent developments in gynecological, obstetric, and reproductive technology that extend what Daniels sees as a male desire to control pregnancy and birth: Interference is the plan. Making life by experimentation Women's bodies controlled by man.

(q)

The exploration of pregnancy by contemporary women dramatists is motivated, not only by the intention to expose its social and institutional meanings and constraints, but also by the desire to reclaim the experience of pregnancy, its unique forms of embodiment and subjectivity, and its distinctive physical and phenomenological parameters. These parameters are never independent of the external meanings with which pregnancy is invested (and by which it is often controlled), but women dramatists have also demonstrated a powerful and recurrent focus on the pregnant subject, on what Kristeva has termed "the mother as site of her proceedings. " 55 Through their representations of pregnancy, women dramatists have allowed this condition and experience an independent presence and voice. A direct, literal staging of pregnant embodiment was presented in Deb Margolin's 1991 one-woman show Gestation, a performance piece in which the pregnant body formed both subject and medium. In the text of Gestation, Margolin combined autobiographical discussion with readings from a maternity manual and a monologue delivered by a pregnant prostitute, but this verbal performance was framed by the actual embodiment of Margolin's own pregnancy (in its seventh month 54

55

Sarah Daniels, Byrthrite (London: Methuen, I987), Kristeva, "Motherhood," 237.

I.

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when Gestation opened at Nada, in New York). Margolin heightened the visual impact of her condition by wearing a tight spandex dress with fishnet stockings, thereby refusing the disguising shapelessness of maternity dress and challenging both the social ideals of feminine shapeliness and conventions governing the pregnant body's presentation. In an interview, Margolin commented: "Maternity clothes are supposed to 'trick the eye' -as the magazines devoted to these matters put it. They're supposed to take the eye away from the very reason they are being worn. I don't want to trick the eye. I want the audience to see exactly how fat I am and accept my body." 56 Like Chaikin (in Struck Dumb), Margolin sought to dramatize her condition by speaking from within it, by making the actual body the vehicle of its own disclosure. What emerges from this disclosure (as in Chaikin's play) is an experience of being in one's body that calls attention to itself in its differences from "normal" embodiment. Margolin spoke of her body's failing to respond to mental commands while crossing a street, and in an extended discussion of the insomnia with which she was afflicted, she explored metaphorical connections between night, cable television, and the experiential anarchy of pregnancy: TV is the vocabulary of the night, I guess, the way the night speaks to me, those images all pushed up against the dark and the baby pushed up against the bladder, and the night passing by, and I love the night, and I know the night like I know nothing else. It goes so slow. I've had a stroke called night. Johnny Carson's on where AI Goldstein used to be, and I'm all knocked up, and the joker's wild, and when they show me those dirty pictures deep in the night, all I can do is giggle and say, "Oh, that silly machine!" 57

Though most plays lack the radical presence of Margolin's actual pregnancy, other women dramatists have used the stage to explore the outlines of this transformed condition and the features of "that silly machine's" new and heightened claims to attention. Individual plays touch on specific aspects of pregnancy and birth: the increase of size 56 Deb Margolin, quoted in Judy Richheimer, "High-Heeled and Pregnant," Theater Week 5 (7 October 1991): 23. Margolin remarked, "Both in my life and as a performer, I've been very closeted about having a body. One of the amazing things about pregnancy is that it is a magic, trumpeted announcement about being in the body, about incorporation and giving someone else incorporation. This monologue will deal with this observation" (24). 57 Deb Margolin, videotape of Gestation, performance at Nada (Theater) on 2 November 1991 (property of the artist). Gestation© Deb Margolin, 1991.

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and weight, the emerging awareness of an independent life at the body's center ("It kicked me!" cries Jo in A Taste of Honey), 58 the experience of labor, the traumatic loss of miscarriage (a powerful account of which can be found in Adrienne Kennedy's A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White [1976]), even-in Sophie Treadwell's 1928 play Machinalthe heaviness of post-partum depression. Other plays have offered insights into the more general changes in body awareness that constitute the lived experience of pregnancy, including the frequent disorientation precipitated by a body apparently out of control. I want to be free Not what my body dictates to me,

sing Wilma and Paulette in Rahman's Unfinished Women (221); "Oh bloody organic confusion," cries Greta in Ann Jellicoe's The Sport of My Mad Mother (1958).59 I close this chapter with a particularly probing dramatic exploration of pregnancy and its modes of embodiment: the story of sue-jean that ends act 1 of Shange's Spell #7. Reflecting the playwright's continued concern with the inner and outer contours of a "female landscape," this poetic monologue-spoken in alternating passages by the character/performers alec and natalie-gives voice to the phenomenological transformations (and psychological issues) associated with gestation and birth. Sue-jean, "the town's no one," 60 sits in a bar dreaming of the baby she had always wanted, a baby she plans to name "myself." After a sexual encounter with the bartender, ray, which she keeps heated and brief, sue-jean at last finds herself pregnant: her "lanky body got ta spreadin & her stomach waz taut & round high in her chest/ a high pregnancy is sure to be a boy/ & she smiled" (29). This pregnancy brings about a powerful transformation. Whereas formerly sue-jean had "rarely tended her own self carefully" (28)-lying (after sex with ray) "in sawdust & whiskey stains" (29)-she now goes to the hospital to learn pre-natal care, stops going to the bar, and keeps herself clean. Subtly modulating between the performers' first-and-third person narration, Shange explores this transformation through the psyShelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey (New York: Grove, 1959), 54· Ann Jellicoe, The Sport of My Mad Mother (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 86. 60 Ntozake Shange, Spell #7, in Three Pieces (Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 30. 58 59

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chology and the bodily experience in which it is grounded. This woman, whose own mother died shortly after giving birth to her and who has been shunned by men and women alike as having a bad omen on her "from the very womb" (30), takes possession of herself in pregnancy's uniquely doubled mode of embodiment: "she waz someone she had never known/ she waz herself with child/ & she waz a wonderful bulbous thing" (30). Kristeva's description of pregnancy illuminates this paradox, whereby the body's colonization by an emerging otherness is also the occasion for an experience of wholeness: "Pregnancy seems to be experienced as the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject: redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness, of physiology and speech. This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by a fantasy of totality-narcissistic completeness."61 But this paradox, and the corporeal experience that underlies it, is already evident both in sue-jean's own fantasies of pregnancy and in her responses to her actual pregnancy and childbirth. "I always wanted to have a baby/ a lil boy/ named myself" (28): even before conception, sue-jean blurs the categories of selfhood and otherness when she imagines motherhood, thus anticipating the paradoxical self-and-otherness that manifests itself in the embodiedness of actual pregnancy. There are indications that she envisions her child as a surrogate, or replacement self, a version of herself who will be "safe from all this his mama/ waz prey to" (29). Yet it would be a mistake to see sue-jean's relationship with her child (before, during, and after conception) exclusively in terms of mirroring: the child she desires is male, and when her son is born she revels in the delicate otherness of his limbs. Sue-jean's enjoyment displays the complex narcissism intrinsic to pregnancy itself, in which embodiment becomes the field of self and other and subjectivity confronts its own division and the emergence of an intersubjectivity within the body's bounds. 62 Her decision to name her baby "myself" reflects the ambiguities and overlaps of this phenomenological mode. Young, we recall, characterized the lived experience of pregnancy as "myself in the mode of not being myself"; this phrasing becomes particularly resonant in the context of Shange's monologue/ 61

Julia Kristeva, "Woman's Time," trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7 (Autumn

1981): 3 I. 62 ln light of the death of sue-jean's own mother shortly after giving birth, Kristeva's suggestion may explain part of this narcissistic pleasure: "By giving birth, the woman enters into contact with her mother" ("Motherhood," 239).

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poem, with its exploration of "myself"-in-otherness, otherness-in"myself." This idyllic communion with an otherness that is constituted in the self continues beyond childbirth (a process that is described with its full subjective registers: "i pushed & pushed & there waz a earthquake up in my womb/ i wanted to sit up & pull the tons of logs trapped in my crotch out" [3 o]). "You knew this waz yr baby/ myself" (3I ), alec says, and sue-jean carries her child everywhere as she goes around her house. But childbirth is also a loss, and this loss increasingly makes itself felt. It reveals itself in the loss of her pregnant body, with its transformed shapes and powers: her breasts eventually dry up, and she loses "the tight gourd of a stomach i had when myself waz be in in me" (3 I). And it reveals itself in the gradual separation of her child from the body on which he has been dependent and of which he originally formed a part. Kristeva speaks of a melancholy that develops "as soon as the child becomes an object, a gift to others, neither self nor part of the self, an object destined to be a subject, an other."63 As sue-jean says, "everything waz going awright til/ myself wanted to crawl ... & discover a world of his own" (31). Her child now begins to assert himself outside the circle of self-and-otherness of which sue-jean's body was the original, self-contained site, abandoning this body to its solitary selfawareness and its diminished power and space. Unwilling to relinquish the bodily pleasures of pregnancy and the intimacy of self and nonself which characterize that mode of embodiment, a despondent sue-jean slits her baby's wrists and sucks his blood back into herself. Now freed of an actual child who would continue to grow into separateness, she effects an imaginary return to the inhabited self-containment of pregnancy: "you were always holdin yr womb/ feelin him kick & sing to you about love/ & you wd hold yr tit in yr hand" (32). Though her fantasies fail to produce another child, sue-jean remains "heavy & full all her life/ with 'myself'" (32)-with the memory of physical transformation and the pregnant body's paradoxical self-possession. In its lyrical portrait of discovery and failure, the sue-jean story forms part of the larger tapestry of experience, at once joyous and heartbreaking, that characterizes Spell #7 and Shange's dramatic/poetic world as a whole. But in the story's specific concern with pregnancy and childbirth, it sets its exploration in the lived world specific to pregnancy, with its experiential parameters and its meanings at once individual and 63

lbid.

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shared. Like the forays into this territory by other women dramatists, Shange's monologue seeks to illuminate the contours of an experience that, like pregnancy itself, has tended to be hidden away. By accomplishing this, Shange points to an important dimension in the phenomenological field of contemporary drama, one intimately tied to the female body and its public and private modes of self-awareness. What emerges from the story of "myself" is an experience of complex variables and relationships, and its landscapes ask to be included in our developing understanding of subjectivity and its modes of embodiment.

Afterword Traces:

The Dragons' Trilogy I have never been to China When I was small, there used to be houses here This used to be Chinatown Today, this is a parking lot Later, perhaps it will become a park, a station or a cemetery If you scratch the ground with your nails you are going to find water and motor oil If you dig further you are surely going to find pieces of porcelain and jade and the foundations of the houses of the Chinese that used to live here -Robert Lepage et al., The Dragons' Trilogy Ghost light. Ghost nights. Ghost rooms. Ghost graves. Ghost ... he all but said ghost loved one. -Beckett, A Piece of Monologue

In 1990, Quebec's Theatre Repere brought its much-acclaimed production The Dragons' Trilogy to the United States as part of a tour that included performances at the Chicago International Theater Festival and the Los Angeles Theater Festival. Collaboratively scripted by director Robert Lepage and members of the cast, The Dragons' Trilogy traced the interweaving histories of a group of Canadian individuals and families between the years 1910 and 1985. As backdrop to this intricately woven and expansive story, the six-hour play explored Canada's history during the twentieth century and its distinctive multicul-

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tural heritage. Segments were spoken in English, French, and Chinese, and the shift among languages reinforced the play's theatrical images of cultural difference, in a nation where such differences have always constituted a mosaic rather than a melting pot. 1 The Dragons' Trilogy opened on a sand-filled parking lot that covered the remains of Quebec City's former Chinatown, a site presided over, dragonlike, by the figure of a parking lot attendant. The play itself was a theatrical excavation of this buried past and its individuals, with their dreams and disappointments and the destinies that would carry them and their descendants on a temporal journey through the century and its changes and on a spatial journey westward, to Toronto and Vancouver. "The basic metaphor or resource for The Dragons' Trilogy," Lepage commented, "was the parking lot and seeing all those footprints. You can imagine streets in Chinatown and, if you dig deep enough, you can imagine people buried there." 2 Epic in its historical and geographic scope, its powerful narrative of fantasy and loss, and its generations of characters caught up in the century's sweep, The Dragons' Trilogy derived its power from the brilliance of its theatrical iJllagination and its original use of the theater's visual and spatial possibilities. The main playing area was a rectangular surface covered with sand; the small windowed shed at one end and a large wooden lamp pole at the other comprised its only fixed structures. This central acting space was bordered by a flat walkway, which was used by the actors for additional locales and scenes involving movement around the stage. Beyond one end of the central stage, additional space was used for the staging of scenes, while at the other end (behind the shed), a projection screen was used to announce the setting of each part and to display additional material at other moments of the performance. 'The account that follows is based on a performance of The Dragons' Trilogy given at the University of Tennessee on 8 September I990; for a fuller discussion of this production, see Stanton B. Garner, Jr., review of The Dragons' Trilogy in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 5 (Spring I99I): 20I-6. The Dragons' Trilogy was first presented as a ninety-minute piece in Quebec City in I985, then was developed into a three-hour version, which premiered in Toronto in I986. Its final, six-hour version was presented at the I987 Festival de Theatre des Ameriques in Montreal. The complete text of Dragons' Trilogy has not been published. The section from the prologue quoted as one of the epigraphs to this chapter is translated (from a published French excerpt) by Natalie Rewa in "Cliches of Ethnicity Subverted: Robert Lepage's La trilogie des dragons," Theatre History in Canada II (Fall I990): I53· In the production, these lines are spoken in French, English, and Chinese by unseen voices from three sides of the stage. 2 Robert Lepage, quoted in James Campbell, review of The Dragons' Trilogy, in Times Literary Supplement (IS November I99I): 20.

227 AFTER WORD

Within this central playing area and its adjacent sites, the members of Theatre Repere created a remarkable and varied theatrical spectacle. Just as the play itself moved among event, dream, memory, history, ritual, and myth, the performance moved seamlessly from one theatrical style and mood to another, borrowing eclectically from sources as varied as cabaret, pantomime, Asian shadow theater, Chinese festival, and theatrical expressionism. These styles were often juxtaposed in a single scene: moments of tender realism were played against other visual modes, within a stage that was continually being recast and reimagined, broken up into the different and the new. An actor lying on a suitcase with his arms stretched out became the pilot of a plane flying over the Pacific, and offstage boxes became the Hong Kong skyline to which he was flying. The sandy floor became a parking lot, the basement of a laundromat, an art gallery, and a dream landscape, while the surrounding walkway was transformed into a series of routes, actual and imagined, over which the performers walked, ran, marched, and rode. The frequent overlap of these fictional spaces and their interference with each other created a powerful sensory and emotional montage. Such scenic transformations and juxtapositions were matched by an often startling pastiche of acting styles. Cast in multiple roles for this vast panorama of individuals and generations, the actors of The Dragons' Trilogy moved fluidly from the naturalistic to the expressionistic to the epic in their performances, often from moment to moment in a single role. As a result of this presentational fluidity, the play's characters became richly layered: at once personal and stylized, continually being recast, they became shifting emblems in a surrealistic tableau. I conclude this book with a discussion of The Dragons' Trilogy because the play recapitulates the challenges and opportunities facing a contemporary theory of subjectivity in the theater and (by implication) a post-Husserlian, post-Derridean phenomenology of performance. In its discontinuities and transformations-at one point, a character is disrobed, only to be revealed as another character-The Dragons' Trilogy counterpointed the particularity of individual subjectivity with a more cinematic aesthetic of historical montage. But the very techniques that worked to estrange the personal from its exclusive moorings in individual narratives also succeeded in reinvesting the play's discontinuous elements with the texture of subjective meanings. Although the sand that comprised the principal playing area, for instance, presented a challenging environment for the performers who had to move over and through its surfaces, it proved strikingly receptive to the actors' human

228 BODIED SPACES

presence. Carefully raked in different patterns, by the end of each act the sanded arena was covered with footprints or other markings and with the holes and mounds left by characters who had sifted through it to bury, unearth, or build. In this way, the stage surface became a register of the actions and emotions that were played out on it; in a drama so concerned with what is left behind, the sand offered itself as a site of traces, testimonies. Like a fossil, with its ridges and imprints, the playing surface served as a text of the past, inscribed with the markings of the life with which it had come in contact. In the play's journey through history, the sand became a visual recording, heavy with the experiential contours of moments lost to time. The sand also worked to frame the props and furnishings set on it, endowing them with the strangeness and uncanny incongruity of objects on a beach. A barber chair standing on a floor is one thing; propped in the sand, it becomes something both ludicrous and poignant, a relic even in the midst of its use. At times, this stage had the playfulness of a sandbox; at others, it evoked the desolation and discontinuity of a junkyard. This "quotation" of props and furnishings was an important feature of the play's overall richness of meanings, for despite the simultaneous stagings, the swirls of movement and colors, and the music that helped give this production its epic punctuation, The Dragons' Trilogy relied heavily on the symbolic investment of individual objects. Through its various transformations, for instance, the onstage shed acquired the symbolic force of a watchtower, at the same time as it loomed a kind of gateway or portal between historical periods and cultural worlds. But these objects were also deeply personal in their symbolism, and they served as repositories of the subjective life with which they were invested. Of all the objects that negotiated the play's meanings, none were more symbolically and phenomenologically complex than the shoes that pervaded the action: bought, sold, worn, discarded-even, in one of the play's most dreamlike sequences, delivered as the product of childbirth. Through their appearance and reappearance on stage, shoes became symbolic repositories of experiences crucial to the play's characters: accommodation (or "fitting") with oneself and the world, pairing and its failure, the making of beauty and use with one's hands, the poignant vulnerability of the human body. In no form, by extension, was time more richly evident in its promises and its inevitable privations than in the visual emblem of empty shoes. In its journey into the individual and collective Canadian past, The Dragons' Trilogy demonstrated the imprint on this history of Leben-

229 AFTERWORD

swelt with its corporeal and subjective meanings. To this extent, the play's archaeological exercise was as much phenomenological as it was semiotic in a more externalized, historical sense. Indeed, the play blurred the distinction between sign and subjectivity: the personal in this play of cultures and epochs always signified more than itself, while signs were often the precipitates of individual and shared experience. To follow the characters from the century's early decades to the present was to watch the investment and reinvestment of historical meaning with subjective life, to discern the emergence of culture itself in the sedimentation of experience. The play's narrative and performance features endowed this phenomenological exploration with a decidedly postmodern quality. Subjectivity was always in flux, subject to the vanishings of time and to displacement within the spectacle's broader montage. Externalized through such devices as the Brechtian screen, doubled and even appropriated by other points of subjectivity, experience detached itself from the exclusivity of the perceiving subject and joined the collectivity of other performance elements in a field that became richly transsubjective. 3 As the shoes suggest, dreams, emotions, perceptions, and bodily states were evoked as much through the traces they left as through originary expression. Indeed, the presence of the parking lot and its structures throughout the play served as a reminder that all of the play's subjective worlds were known, finally, through such traces. The concept of "trace" has been appropriated not by phenomenologists, but by poststructuralists, who have employed the term as a challenge to Husserlian and other ostensibly "metaphysical" notions of presence. Derrida writes, "The living present springs forth out of its nonidentity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace." 4 But as The Dragons' Trilogy and the other plays considered in this book make clear, the recognition of traces and nonidentity is by no means at odds with the phenomenological project. Deferral signals not the closure of presence and subjectivity, but the 3 According to Deborah Levy, Lepage "constructs complicated internal landscapes with his performers, and this skill enables him to ask an audience to scrutinize a number of contradictory internal worlds at the same time" (review of The Dragons' Trilogy [production at the Riverside Studios, London], New Statesman and Society [15 November 1991]: 37). Levy's description of Lepage's Tectonic Plates (1988) also applies to The Dragons' Trilogy: "Past lives emerge .... Atmosphere and place are sculpted seamlessly. Histories and geographies collide" (ibid., 36). See Nigel Hunt, "The Global Voyage of Robert Lepage," TDR 33 (Summer 1989): 104-18. 4 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 85.

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disclosure of them in a new field of manifestation. Far from representing a movement beyond presence and subjectivity into some new arena, this disclosure establishes the terms with which the contemporary study of these phenomena may genuinely begin. As this book has suggested, it is time to reassess such terms as trace, difference, displacement, absence, temporality, and intersubjectivity and to recognize that the principles they embody are intrinsic to the study of subjectivity rather than opposed to it. The decentered subjectivity in Beckett's late plays, the drama of linguistic embodiment in Pinter and Handke, and the corporeal (dis)locations of Shepard, Bond, Fornes, and Shange represent both a deepening and a widening of the phenomenological impulse, a putting into play of its variables-or, rather, an acknowledgment that these variables always exist in a state of play, in the theater as well as outside it. If presence is always already a trace, it is also true that traces are themselves ghosts of presence, as an echo is both the absence of sound and its retention, a kind of acoustic afterimage. The Dragons' Trilogy suggests the extent to which-despite the much-heralded "disappearance of the body" in postmodernism (or "hyper-modernism")5-the phenomenal realm continues to inform the stage with its diffractions and displacements, haunting and animating the theater even as its variables are set more urgently (and playfully) into motion. How could it not? As long as theater stages the perceiving body before other perceiving bodies, it will stage its modes of subjectivity and offer up the phenomenal realm as a constitutive dimension of its spectacle. Theater may never be the unmediated thereness that the Living Theater dreamed of, but this fact does not free the stage of presence in its complex and often elusive modes of disclosure. How do we locate subjectivity in its emergence and its flight? How do we understand the presencing of absence and the absences at the heart of presence? How do we approach the ineradicable but elusive body, both I and not-1? These are the questions facing postmodern phenomenology, including the phenomenology of drama and performance. As the Husserlian tradition relinquishes its hold on the stable subject, bound in ideal self-givenness, it opens its domain to experience as we are learning to see it, in its dislocations and ambiguities, its variable modes of embodiment, its traces.

5 See Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kraker, "Theses on the Disappearing Body in the HyperModern Condition," in Body Invaders, 20-34.

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Index

Abjection, n6, 195-97 Absence, 29-39, 104-5, 124, 135-36, 230 Absurdism, 8, 103-4 Acconci, Vito, 8 Actor, 28, 35n, 152-55, 226-28; and absurdism, 103-4; and the body, 46-47, 165; and character, 43-45, 138, 153, 214; and modernist scenography, 5 s-6r; and theatrical watching, 4 s-s r. See also Body: theatrical Actuality: performance present as, 149-51; theater and, 39-45, 91-94, 125 African-American religion, 2o8-9n AIDS drama, 119, 159 Albee, Edward, 103; The Zoo Story, 143 Alienation-effect. See Brechtian theory and dramaturgy: Verfremdungseffekt Animals, 98-99, r8o, 184, 189-90, 19495 Antitheatricality, 26 Antoine, Andre, 92, 98n Aphasia, 34, 120-23 Appia, Adolphe, ss-s8, 6o, 65, 206-7 Archaeology, 225-26; phenomenological, 229 Architecture, s6, 6o, 86, IIO Arden, John, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, 159 Arikha, Avigdor, 52, 62, 85 Aristotelianism, 7, 4 5 Arnheim, Rudolf, 62, 71n, 76 Aronson, Arnold, 56n Artaud, Antonin, 8, 103, 176 Asmus, Walter D., 70n

Audience. See Spectator, theatrical Auslander, Philip, r6on Austen, Jane, 176 Avigal, Shoshana, 99 Axelos, Kostas, r67n Bablet, Denis, s6n, 92n, 95n Bachelard, Gaston, 22, 107-8 Bacon, Francis, 62, 67n Bakhtin, Mikhail, r62n Balinese dance, 72 Baron, Richard J., 34n Barrault, Jean-Louis, 6on Barthes, Roland, II, 13 Bartky, Sandra Lee, 23, 202, 215 Bathrick, David, r6on Baudrillard, Jean, 14, 42, 95, 112 Bauhaus, 58, 6o, 207 Beaumont, Francis, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 90 Beauvoir, Simone de, r87n, 194n, 201 Beckett, May, 35n Beckett, Samuel, r8-39, 52-86, ro7-ro, 13 r-36, 230; and the actor, 3 sn, 54-5 s; and the body, 25, 28-36, 48, 54-55, 8o86, 107-10, r6s-66; and clinical pathology, 33-36, 165-66; and language, 34, 53, 131-36; and objects, 107-ro; and phenomenology, 7-8, 18-39, 136n; poststructuralist readings of, I 8-22; and realist tradition, 103-4; and the spectator, 3 6, 62, 79-86; visual field in, 52-86. See also Brecht, Bertolt: and Beckett; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: and Beckett

252

INDEX Beckett, Samuel (cont.) -Works: Act without Words I, 67; Act without Words II, 67; Breath, 67; Catastrophe, 48, 63-78, 8o-86, 88, I6s66; Come and Go, 67, 70, 75; Eh Joe, 70; Endgame, 53, 6S, 72-77, SI, II9; Footfalls, 63-78; Ghost Trio, 68; Happy Days, 29, 3 I, 67-76, IO?-IO, I43; Ill Seen Ill Said, 36; Krapp's Last Tape, 67, 75, 8I, IJ2; Malone Dies, 6Sn; Molloy, So; Not I, 3I-32, 63-85, q.I, IJI-36, I44; Ohio Impromptu, 63-8I; A Piece of Monologue, 54,62-78, 8I, 225; Play, 29, 64n, 67-75; Quad, 73, I35; Rockaby, 63-78, I32; Stirrings Still, 74; That Time, 3 I, 54, 6278, 8 5, I32; Waiting for Godot, 28-29, 3I-32, 53,72-77, I03, I2I; Watt, 64n; What Where, 54, 63-78, I32 Belasco, David, 92 Benamou, Michel, 3 7n Benveniste, Emile, I 29, I 3 5 Berger, Harry, Jr., 48-49, SI Biomechanics, 6o Blau, Herbert, I4, IS, 44, IIO, IS2 Bock lin, Arnold, 56 Body: absent, 32-33; ambiguity of, I2, JI, 33, so-p, I09, II6, II?; and antitheatricality, 26; carnivalesque, I62; and chairs, I04-7, 22S; dead, ISO, I96; disengagement of self from, II?-I8, IS?88, I94; dying, 44, I Io; as form, IO, 48, 54-8I, 8s-8S, Io2, I57-SS; fragmented, 29-3I, 37,63-64, IOS-9, I30, I32;and illness or dysfunction, 32-36, I09, I7375, 2I6-I?; as lived, q, 45, so, IS8, I99; male, I94-95, 207n; and modern scenography, 5 s-6I; and music, 57-5 S, 206-7, 209-II; and nesting, I0?-8; nonunitary, 29-36, IOS-9, 2IS-I7; physiological, 28-29, 57-59, So--8I, 9SIOO, I02-3, II5, II9, I?I, I99; and power, I6I, I77, I79, I82, IS7; as prison, I73-75, I79-8o, I84, I9o; and race/ethnicity, 208-IO; relationship to material surroundings, 87-II9, I45, I6667; and shoes, I I4, 228, 229; signifying, I3, 45, so, I64-65, I95; spatializing, 8990, I09-IO, I67-76, I89-9I, 200-2I4; as spectacle, I?I, I76, I93, I9S-99, 207-S, 2ID--II; suffering, 2, IO, SI, II6, I4I, I59-85, I92-97; theatrical, IO, 4350, I75-76, 220; virtual, 44· See also Dance; Darkness: physiology of; Female body; Korper; Leib; Leiblichkeit; Pain; Pregnancy; Violence; World constitution

Bond, Edward, I6o, I76-S5, 230; and "aggro-effect," ISI; on Brecht, I6o--SI; on violence, I76 -Works: Bingo, I77, I79; The Cat, I76; Early Morning, I77; The Fool, I77, I79; Lear, I77-S s, ISSn, 200, 2I7; Narrow Road to the Deep North, I77, I84; The Pope's Wedding, I76; Saved, 94, I2I, I6I, I76, IS2; Summer, I79, IS3; The Swing, I77; The War Plays, I6S, I79, I93; The Woman, I77, I79, IS3 Box set, 9I Brater, Enoch, 6In, 6sn Brecht, Benoit, 7-S, 9, 8S, I59-66; and Beckett, I65-66; and feminism, I6o, IS6; and Marxism, I63; and phenomenology, 9-Io, IOI, I62-65. See also Brechtian theory and dramaturgy; Political theater, post-Brechtian -Works: Baal, I62, I63; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, I63, I64; Drums in the Night, I62; Edward II, I62; Fear and Misery in the Third Reich, I62-63; In the Jungle of Cities, I62; Lehrstiicke, IOI; Life ofGalileo, IOo, I65, I7o; The Messingkauf Dialogues, I64-65; Mother Courage and Her Children, 9I, I63; Schweyk in the Second World War, I62 Brechtian theory and dramaturgy, 7-S, I75, I 8 5; acting, I 64; analytic detachment, I69, I75-76; the body, I6I, I62-66, I82; culinary theater, I65; Cestus, I64; objects, 9I, 94, IOO-IOI; projection screens, 226, 229; scientific attitude, 9IO, I66, I?O; stylistic disjunction, 8S, I64; Verfremdungseffekt (Alienationeffect), 94, IOD--IOI, I64-66, ISI. See also Brecht, Benoit; Political theater, post-Brechtian Brentano, Franz, 27 Brenton, Howard, II9; The Romans in Britain, I6I Brockett, Oscar, S9n Brook, Peter, I6I, I75 Buchner, Georg, Danton's Death, I6I Burden, Chris, S Butler, Judith, 23, I96 Butler, Lance St. John, 25n Byczkowska-Page, Ewa, II In

Camera obscura, S3n Campbell, James, 226n Camus, Albert, I03 Carlson, Susan, I S7n Cartesianism, 4, II, 27, 62, 84, 96, 2I5

253 INDEX Case, Sue-Ellen, 187n Cezanne, Paul, 87 Chabert, Pierre, 28, 54 Chaikin, Joseph: Struck Dumb (with van ltallie), 120-24, 133, 220; The War in Heaven (with Shepard), 121 Character. See Dramatic character Chekhov, Anton, 92, 104; The Seagull, 92, 128 Churchill, Caryl, II9, 203-6; Cloud 9, 143, 159; Fen, 205; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, 205, 219; Mad Forest, 121; A Mouthful of Birds (with Lan), 205-6; Top Girls, 187, 205, 218; Vinegar Tom, r6r, 189, 197, 203-5, 218, 219 Cixous, Helene, r86, r88, 198 Clark, Herbert, 140n Clown theater, 162 Cocteau, Jean, 73; Parade (with Leonid Massine, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso), 55; The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower, 55, 86, 130-31 Coetzee, J. M., r68 Cohn, Ruby, 54n, 70n,76n Connor, Steven, 18, 25n, 30 Consciousness, 20, 27, p; and history, 8-9; and language, 151, 154-58, 213; and pain, 183, 193-94. See also I (first-person pronoun); Subjectivity Constructivism, 55 Costume, 63, 67, 92-93, 200, 220 Craig, Gordon, 55-56, 65, 8o, ro2; and the Uber-marionette, 59-60, 85, 88 Crary, Jonathan, 83n Cremin, Ann, 53n Cubism, 65 Culick, Hugh, 3 5 Cultural studies, 21 Cummings, Scott, 192 Dada, 93, 103. See also Tzara, Tristan Dalcroze, Emile Jaques, and eurhythmics, 57 Dance, 202-14; and aesthetic display, 207; bodily experience in, 207-14; and expression, 208-ro, 212; and intersubjectivity, 212, 214; pregnancy as, 217; and race/ethnicity, 208 Daniels, Sarah: Byrthrite, 219; Masterpieces, 18?-88 Danto, Arthur C., 94n Dark, Gregory, r82n Darkness: physiology of, 40-41, I93; theatrical, 40-41, 54, 66-70, 74-75 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 83 Dayley, Grace, Rose's Story, 218

Deconstruction, 20-21, 23-24, 136. See also Derrida, Jacques; Dif(erance; Poststructuralism Decroux, Etienne, mime statuaire (corporeal mime), 6o, 88 Deixis, 124-38, 212; canonical, 127; and dramatic world, 125; radical, 153-54; relationship to utterance, 124-36, 212; subversions of, I27-36 Delaney, Shelagh, A Taste of Honey, 2I8, 22I Derrida, Jacques, 40; critique of Husser!, 19-24, 136; on "phantom of the center," 37; and phenomenology, 14, r6, 38, 227; on "trace," 229; on writing, I2I-22. See also Deconstruction; Dif(erance; Poststructuralism Diamond, Elin, 9, IOI, r6on Differance, 38, so, 230. See also Deconstruction; Derrida, Jacques Dillon, M. C., 3 8n Discourse: analysis, 21; and audience, 15258; dramatic, 125; and speech, 132, 135, I 3 6; technologically synthesized, I 3 5, 153n; theatrical, 132, 151-58; universe of, I38-39. See also Deixis; Language, dramatic Dort, Bernard, 165n Dramatic character, 7, 78, 90, 131, 214 Dramatic setting, 97, I03-19, 125-27, I7677, 226-27. See also Dramatic world Dramatic text, 5-7, r2o, 122; parameters and tolerances, 6. See also Deixis; Discourse: dramatic; Dramatic world Dramatic world, 125-27, 138-44, I 53-54; and offstage, 138, 147, 194. See also Dramatic setting Duchamp, Marcel, p, 73; and Readymades (objets trouves), 93 Duffy, Maureen, Rites, 205 Dufrenne, Mikel, 23, roon Dunn, Nell, Steaming, 198 Diirrenmatt, Friedrich, The Visit, 89, 141 Eagleton, Terry, 178n Eco, Umberto, 140 Edgar, David, The jail Diary of Albie Sachs, 159 Eidetic reduction (epoche), 6, II, 27 Elam, Keir, I5n, 124n, I25, I36n Eliot, T. S., I42 Epoche. See Eidetic reduction Essence (eidos, Wesen), II Essential insight (Wesenschau), II Essentialism, 11-13

254 INDEX Esslin, Martin, 53n, 73 Euclidean geometry, 27 Eurhythmics, 57 Euripides, The Bacchae, 202-3, 205-6, 208 Evans, ]. Claude, 24n

Everyman, 90

Expressionism, 55 Eynat-Confino, Irene, s6n, 59n, 6o, So, 102n Fehsenfeld, Martha D., 64n Female body: and abortion, 207-13; and breast cancer, 119, 199; comportment of, 200-202, 214; and Dionysian possession, 202-3, 205-6; and dirt, 192, 195-96; disciplined, 192-93, 200-205, 215; and dispossession, 186-88, 192-205, 209-11, 219; historical representations of, 186-88, 202-3, 207-8, 214; and hysteria, 204; as image, 187, 192; invisibility of, 210, 212; and medical profession, 204-5, 218-19; and movement, 189, 199-214; naked, 198-99; and nesting, 107-8; as object, 187-88,192-93,198, 21o;as physiological site, 199; and rape, 193-94, 196; repossession of living, 188-89, 19899, 214-15. See also Feminism; Pain: and gender; Women's theater Feminism: and embodiment, 10; and phenomenology, 12, 23, 186, 196, 201-2, 214-17; and philosophy, 186, 215; and theater, 160, I86-224. See also Female body; Women's theater Figure and ground, 42 Film, 23, 46, 48n, 49; and the body, 44, 73, 186 Findlay, Robert R., 98n Finley, Karen, 188, 198-99 Fo, Daria: Accidental Death of an Anarchist, 161; giullare, 162 Food and hunger, 98-99, II6, 162-65, 190; and the audience, 88, 144; theater and metaphors of, 4I, 165 Ford, John, Tis Pity She's a Whore, 217 Foreman, Richard, 8, 54, 61 Fornes, Maria Irene, 102, 189-97, 230; on realism, I92 -Works: Abingdon Square, I9o, 19I, 2I8; The Conduct of Life, 121, 14I, 190-97; The Danube, 191-92n, I92; Dr. Kheal, I9o; Fefu and Her Friends, 190-91, 19293, 198, 203; Molly's Dream, 197; Mud, 189-91; Promenade, 190; Sarita, 190, 218; Tango Palace, 190, 192; What of the Night?, 190 Fort!da, I04-5

Forte, Jeanie, I88n, 193n Foster, Mary LeCron, I4on Foucault, Michel, 2I, I7In Fraleigh, Sondra Horton, 207, 2I2 Frawley, William, 140n Freedman, Barbara, 48 French Revolution, 171-76; as theater of pain, I7I Freud, Sigmund, on Fort/da, I04-5 Friel, Brian, Dancing at Lughnasa, 207 Frye, Emma Sheridan, 200 Fuchs, Elinor, I2I-22, I99n Fugard, Athol: Boesman and Lena, 89; "Master Harold" ... and the Boys, 207n; Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, I43 Functionality, 95-96,98, 108, II3, II4 Fuss, Diana, I I, I 2 Futurism, 93 Garcia Lorca, Federico, 142; Blood

Wedding, 55

Garner, Stanton B., Jr., 9on, 226n Geertz, Clifford, on "thick description," I4 Geis, Deborah R., I43 Gems, Pam: Pia(, I88; Queen Christina, I86, 2I5, 2I8 Gender, as act, I96 Gender studies, 2r. See also Feminism Genet, Jean: The Balcony, 40, 128; The Screens, 8 7-8 8 Gestalt psychology, 42 Giacometti, Alberto, 62 Globe theater, 93 Glover, J. Garrett, 55n Gombrich, E. H., 62, 74 Gontarski, S. E., I33n Griffiths, Trevor: Occupations, I-2; Oi for England, 72 Gross, Roger, 6, I75n Guyon, Eliane, 6on Habermas, Jiirgen, I24n Hale, Jane Alison, 70, 79 Hall, Peter, I IO Hammond, Michael, 3n Handke, Peter, I5I-58, 230; The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, I5I; The

Innerworld of the Outerworld of the Innerworld, I57n; Kaspar, ISI, I53, 155, I 56; The Long Way Round, I 57; Offending the Audience, 99, I5I-58; The Ride across Lake Constance, I 5 I; Sprechstiicke, I 52, I 56, 157; They Are Dying Out, I 57; The Weight of the World, I52, I58n

255 INDEX Hanna, Judith Lynne, 202n Hare, David: The Bay at Nice, 61; Plenty, 103 Hays, Michael, I 5 sn Heidegger, Martin, 22, 29; on the body, 28; on ecstasis, so; and Husser!, 24, 27-28, 2I6; on modernity, 62n; on the thing, 47, I13-14, n8; on Vorhandenheit (presentness-at-hand), n3-I4; on Zuhandenheit (readiness-to-hand), 47, II3-I4 Hem, Nicholas, 153 History, 127, 175, 182, 203-5; pain and, 168n, 169, 175; phenomenology and, 8II, 23; and self-transcendence, 169, 175; as trace, 22 s-29 Holenstein, Elmar, 2on Holland, Peter, 176n, 18on Howarth, Jane, 3n Howe, Tina, 102; The Art of Dining, 39; Painting Churches, 61 Hunger. See Food and hunger Hunt, Nigel, 229n Husser!, Edmund, 2, 16; on the body, 27; Derrida's critique of, 19-20, 22-24, 13637, 229; and essences, II-I2; influence on structuralism, 2on; late writings of, 8, 23n; and phenomenological revolution, 2, 26-27; on "the thing itself" (Die Sachen selbst), 6, 26, 40; and transcendental consciousness,,21, 23, 27, 136-37. See also Eidetic reduction; Phenomenology: post-Husserlian I (first-person pronoun), 4, 19, 135-36; collective, 214; dissociation from speaker, 130-36; effacement by pain, 180; and eye, 4, 81; as performance variable, 14850; and situation of utterance, 127; and subjectivity, 76; theatricalization of, 12730, 137; and we, 129, 154; and you, 129, 154. See also Consciousness; Deixis; Subjectivity Ibsen, Henrik, 139, I41-42; A Doll House, 104, 202, 206, 207; Ghosts, 143; Hedda Gabler, 89, 91, 217; John Gabriel Barkman, 103; The Master Builder, 139; Rosmersholm, 90 Icre, Fernand, The Butchers, 98n Ideology, 9, 101, 160, 164, 165, 186 Ihde, Don, 9, 123 Illusionism, 39-44, 153-54, 165, 182; contradictions inherent in, 91-94, 101; and spectatorship, 48-49. See also Verisimilitude

Image, theatrical, p-86, 132; and color, 70-71; and ex-centricity, 75-78; and halflight, 67-70; and light, 53, 54, 65-70; and the living body, 55-63, 85-86; and position, 53, 54, 72; and shape, 63-65; and stage arrangement, 53, 72, 75-78. See also Dance: and aesthetic display; Female body: as image; Language, dramatic: relationship to stage image; Movement: and the performance image;

Tableaux vivants

Ingarden, Roman, 23, 140n Innes, Christopher, 59n Intersubjectivity, 20, 22, 46-47, 150-51, 211-14, 222, 229, 230. See also Other, the; Reverse-gaze; Subjectivity; Subject-object relationship Ionesco, Eugene: The Bald Soprano, 131; The Chairs, 103-7; Exit the King, 89 Jakobson, Roman, 122-23n Jarry, Alfred, 59 Jay, Martin, 62 Jellicoe, Ann, The Sport of My Mad Mother, 221 Johnson, Mark, I4I Joseph, Artur, 155n, 158n Joseph, Miranda, 199n Kaelin, Eugene F., 24n Kandinsky, Wassily, 55 Kantor, Tadeusz, Theater of Death, 183n Keat, Russell, 3n Kennedy, Adrienne, A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, 221 Kiesler, Friedrich, space stage, 56, 57 Kleist, Heinrich von, 59n Klinkowitz, Jerome, 154n, 157n Knowlson, James, 3 sn, 6on, 67n Knowlton, James, 154n, 157n Korper (thing body), 28, 32, so, 86, 109, n8, 165 Kott, Jan, 183n Kristeva, Julia, 195, 216n, 219, 222, 223 Kroetz, Franz Xaver: Farmyard, 121; Through the Leaves, 98n Kraker, Arthur, 23on Kroker, Marilouise, 230n Kubiak, Anthony, 168n, 182 Kubovy, Michael, 83-84 Kureishi, Hanif, Outskirts, 91 Kushner, Tony, Angels in America, 159 Lahr, John, 1nn Lamont, Rosette C., 105n

256 INDEX Lan, David, A Mouthful of Birds (with Caryl Churchill), 205 Landgrebe, Ludwig, I67n Langer, Susanne, 44 Language, dramatic, I 20-5 8; acoustical features of, 42, 8I, I36n, I 52-53, I 56, I9I; and the body, 8o-8I, 89, 94, I2024; and cultural difference, 226; and the dramatic world, I25, I32; and expression, I 3 6-3 7; as field of contest, II8-I9, I44-51; and intersubjectivity, 2I3-I4; and the material world, I3o; metadiscursive, I29-30, I3I-32, I54, I57; as mise-en-scene, 135-51, I52, 2I2; and movement, 2I2-I4; and narrative, 54, I3I-36, I38, 148; and pain, I63, I69, I74; relationship to stage image, I33-34, I38, I43-44; and self-possession, I04, I89, I9I; and semiosis, I 53; and sensory experience, II5, I40-4I, 2I2-I3; spatia-temporal structures of, I40-4I; and the spectator, I 52-58; and stage reality, 4I; and subjectivity, r35; and verbal impairment, I20-23. See also Discourse; Phenomenology: and language Language-event, as drama, I2o, I37 Laughlin, Karen, I87n Lawley, Paul, r32n, r33n, I36 Lebenswelt. See Life-world Leder, Drew, 34, 39, 50; on dysappearance, 32-33 Leger, Fernand, 55, 58, 6o Leib (lived body), 28, 32, 50, 86, ro9, II8, I 6 5. See also Body: as lived; Leiblichkeit Leiblichkeit (livedness), 9-ro, I6, 28, 37, 50 Lepage, Robert: The Dragons' Trilogy (with Theatre Repere), 225-30; Tectonic Plates (with Theatre Repere), 229n Levin, Charles, 50 Levin, David Michael, 62n Levi-Strauss, Claude, 2on, 24 Levy, Deborah, 229n Lewis, David K., I5on Life-world (Lebenswelt), 2, 23, 46, I68, 228-29; shared (Umwelt), 46 Lingis, Alphonso, 36 Lippman, Carlee, 3 5n Living statues, 6I, 85 Living Theater, 8, 230 Lyons, John, I20, I24, r27, r34-35, I37, I40 Lyotard, Jean-Fran~ois, 22 Madison, Gary Brent, I6, 30, 38 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 59

Mamet, David, ro3, r28-3o, 2r7n; American Buffalo, 72, 9r, r28-3o; Glengarry Glen Ross, I29; Speed-thePlow, I29-30 Maponya, Maishe, Gangsters, I6I Margolin, Deb, Gestation, 2r9-20 Marionette theater, 59-60 Marx, Karl, I 59, I66-67. See also Marxism Marxism, 2r, r59, I62, I63; and alienation, I66-67; and the body, I6667, I97 Materialism, 9-ro, 2I, IOI-3; biological, I77-78 Matisse, Henri, 55, 6I McCullough, Jack W., 6rn McKenzie, John R. P., I76n McMillan, Dougald, 53n Mendelson, David, I04n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on ambiguiry, 303I, 50; and Beckett, 24-38, I07, Io9; on the body, 4, 25, 30-36, 82, I07; on darkness, 4I; feminist critiques of, 2I6; and Husser!, 27-32, 38, 2I6; on language, 34, r39; and medical phenomenology, 3, 32-33; and neurological dysfunction, 33-36, 4r, 7o7rn; on objectivity, 4, I09, II5; on objects, 87, ro6; and poststructuralism, 38; on spatiality, 4, 82; on subjectivity, 25, 28, 30-37, r51; on visibility, 36. See also Sartre, Jean-Paul: Merleau-Ponry's critique of Meyerhold, Vsevold, on biomechanics, 6o Michelet, Jules, I07-8 Mickunas, David, 3n, I2n, 23n Miller, Arthur, The Crucible, 128, 203, 204n, 208 Mime, 6o, I35, I38. See also Decroux, Etienne Minstrel shows, 2I4n Mise-en-scene. See Dramatic setting; Object, theatrical; Performance field; Stage, physical Modernity, and the visual, ro, 62 Moholy-Nagy, Li.szl6, 58 Moles, Abraham A., roon Monologue, 34, r3r·-36, I42, I9I Moorjani, Angela, I3In Moscow Art Theater, 92 Moss, Donald, 34n Movement, 3 5n, r45, 226-27; cinetic, 79; and gender, I99-214, 2I5; and the performance image, 72-73, 77-78 Mrozeck, Slawomir, Tango, 89 Mtwa, Percy, Bopha!, rr5n

257 INDEX Muller, Heiner, 16o; Hamletmachine, 135, 159 Munch, Edvard, 55, 121 Music, r, 57-58, 206-7. See also Dance Nadelman, Cynthia, 54n Nagele, Rainer, 155n Naturalism, 6o, 90-94. See also Realism Neurological dysfunction, 33-36, 41, 7o7In, 120-23 Neuromimesis, 181 Nineteenth-century theater, 60-61, 87, 91, 98. See also Scenography: nineteenthcentury Norris, Christopher, 24, 38n Northoff, George, 34n Object, theatrical, 9, 63, 87-n9, r8on, 199; and the actor, 88-90, no; and the body, 87-n9, 179; discontinuity of, 9596, III-I3; and instrumentality, 89-91, 95-96, ro8, 109, n3-14, 167; intimacy with, I17-18; materiality of, 87-94, 104, 108, n1-12, 119; organic, 98-99; perceptual status of, 39-41, 46-47, 9394, no; and the phenomenal object, 43, roo; quotation of, 228; and selfauthentication, I I 5; transformations of, 227-28 Objective (scientific) attitude, 121, 163-66, 170; phenomenology and, 2, 26-27, 46, 50. See also Brechtian theory and dramaturgy: Verfremdungseffekt; Cartesianism; Subject-object relationship O'Neill, Eugene, 128n, 142; The Hairy Ape, 104; Long Day's Journey into Night, 89, 103, !28 O'Neill, John, 167n Optics, classical, 83n Osborne, John, Look Back in Anger, 90, 217 Other, the, n6-19, 197, 2I6, 221-23. See also Intersubjectivity Page, Louise, Tissue, II9, I99 Pain, r6, I8, I59-85, I92-97; and the audience, I8o-85; and the author, I8o; and bodily disengagement, I 8 3-8 5; and gender, 189, I92-95; and history, I08n; phenomenology of, I67-69, 172-75, I78-85, I88, 192; as "radical subjectivity," I79-8o; and theatrical representation, 42-43,45, I8o-85 Painting, 52-55, 67n, 71n, 83-88, 90-91, 2I4. See also Scenography: and neopictorialism

Parameters and tolerances, 6 Parham, Sidney F., 176n Pavis, Patrice, I 5 Paz, Octavio, 52, 6I, 73 Perception, 5, 9, 62-63, 2oo; embodied, I8, 28, 82, nr. See also Vision Performance art, 6; women's, I88, 189, 2I9-20 Performance field: as habitational field, 4 5p; as material field, 87-94, I76-77; as visual field, 4 5-51 Persona, I 20, I 37 Perspective, Renaissance/classical, 62, 8 384, 90-9I, I07 Phenomenology: and the body, 3-4, r6I-62, r66,199;ofdance,2o7,2I2;defined,2-5; and history, 8-n; and language, I23, I36-39, I44, 212; medical, 3, 23, 32-34, 2I5-I7; and movement, 20I-2; and the object, 43; and other disciplines, 22-23; post-Husserlian, r6, 22-24,38-39, 230; postmodern, r6, 230; of spectatorship, 154; and theater, 3, I3-I7, 18-51, I23; of vision, 82-83,85, I70. See also Eidetic reduction; Feminism: and phenomenology; Poststructuralism: and phenomenology; Realism: and phenomenology Phonocentrism, I 3 6 Picasso, Pablo, 52, 55, 7 m Pilling, John, 6on Pinter, Harold, I03, 2I7n, 230; and language, I44-51; and objects, IIO-I9 -Works: The Birthday Party, I44, 145; The Caretaker, 5, no-r9, 138, I44-48, I 56, r68, I?6; The Homecoming, 94, 114, 143, 144; "I know the place" (poem), I49n; Landscape, 145, 147; Mountain Language, n6, 145; New World Order (sketch), n6; No Man's Land, 47, I44-51, 152, 200; Old Times, 144, 150, I 51; One for the Road, n6, n8; Other Places, I49; Party Time, n6; Silence, I45, I47 Pirandello, Luigi, 88; Henry IV, 128 Plath, Sylvia, 217-I8 Platonism, I I Pliigge, Herbert, 32, 34, 50, I09, n8, I68, 2!6 Poliakoff, Steven, Breaking the Silence, 89, II9, I25-27, I37-40, I76 Political theater, post-Brechtian, r6, roi, 159-85, I86-87 Possible worlds, I 39 Postmodernism, 2I, 121, 230; and Brecht, I6o; and textuality, I3 I

258 INDEX Poststructuralism: and language, I2I-24, I36; and phenomenology, q-I7, I8-26, 29, 3 8-3 9; and presence, 4 3 Power: as self-transcendence, I 9 s-97; semiological operations of, I77-78 Pregnancy, I2, I87, I89, I99; and labor, 22I; and modern medicine, 2I8-I9; and narcissism, 2I7; and otherness, 215-I6, 22I-23; phenomenological descriptions of, 2I5-I7, 218, 222; representations of, 2I7-30; and subjectivity, 2IS-I7, 222-23 Presence, 3, 23, 43, I04, I24, I35-36; metaphysics of, II, 23; play as disruption of, 40; pre-objective, II 5; as presencing, 43; subversion of, I6o; and vanishing points, 39 Proprioception, 3 sn Props, and property, 90. See also Object, theatrical Proscenium stage, 9D-9I Proxemics, I45 Pygmalion, 8 5 Rabe, David, I4I, I6I; The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, 89, I68-69; In the Boom Boom Room, 207; Sticks and Bones, 2I7 Racine, Jean, Phedre, 90, 200 Rahman, Aishah, Unfinished Women Cry in

No Man's Land while a Bird Dies in a Gilded Cage, 218, 22I Rame, Franca, Female Parts, I88 Reader-response theory, 2 3 Readymades. See Duchamp, Marcel Realism, IO, 6o; and the body, II9, I92; domestic, 95-96; and language, I27, I4I-44; and phenomenology, IOI-3, IIo; and the spectator, I06. See also Naturalism; Scenography: realist Reichardt, ]asia, 79 Reinelt, ] anelle, I 6on, I 8 6-8 7n Representation, dramatic, 44, 49, I6o, I62; and the body, I6I, I65; and realism, IOI-2; subversion of, I6I Restoration comedy, 90 Reverse-gaze, 47-sr, II6-I7, u8, I6s-66 Rewa, Natalie, 226n Rich, Adrienne, 2Ion, 2I6n Ricoeur, Paul, 22, 24n Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 99 Rischbieter, Henning, 5 sn Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 29 Roberts, David, I63-64n Rokem, Freddie, 93n

Rose, Maggie, 6on Rosenthal, Rachel, I88 Roth, Moira, I88n Rudet, Jacqueline, Money to Live, 207 Rudkin, David, Ashes, II9 Sacks, Oliver, 3 2n, 3 sn Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22; on the body, 28n, II6; on the gaze, 47-48, II6, II8; and Husser!, 24, 27-28, 2I6; Merleau-Ponty's critique of, II8; Nausea, I 58 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 2on, 24 Saxe-Meiningen, Duke of, 92 Scarry, Elaine, 23, 32, II6, I6o-6I, I6769, I79 Scene l'italienne. See Proscenium stage Scenography: and architectural stage, 56, 60; modernist, 52, 55-6I, I02, I03; and neo-pictorialism, 5 s-s6, 6o; nineteenth-century, 9I-93; realist, 88-89, 90-95; and scene-painting, 87-88; twentieth-century, IO, II Schechter, Joel, I6on, I62n Scheler, Max, IS, 28n Schlueter, June, I57n Schneemann, Carolee, I 8 8 Schneider, Alan, 70, 78n, 82 Schuler, Catherine, I99n Scriptocentrism, 2 5, I 22 Sculpture, 54-55, 6o-6I, 73, 8s-86, 200. See also Body: as form; Decroux, Etienne Semiotics, IS, 20, 46, I64; and language, I2I, I27, I36n, I39; and objects, 89, I07; and phenomenology, IS-I6, I36n; and the reverse-gaze, 49 Serpieri, Alessandro, I 24, I 2 7, I 3 2 Setting. See Dramatic setting Shakespeare, William: As You Like It, 200; Hamlet, 6; r Henry IV, 89-90; King Lear, 6, 42-44, SI, 87, I09, I4I, I7879, 2I7; Macbeth, 4I; Othello, I37; Richard II, I39; Richard III, 93; Romeo and Juliet, 200; The Tempest, 90 Shange, Ntozake, I99, 2o8-I4, 22I-24, 230; "choreopoems," I89, 2I3; on dance, 205; on writing, 2I2 -Works: for colored girls who have

a

considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, 208-14; Spell #7, 214n, 22I-24 Shaw, George Bernard: Back to Methuselah, 2I7n; Man and Superman, 93, 95 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, 36n, I23n, 207 Shepard, Sam, 94-I03, 2I7n, 230; Action, 96, II7n; Buried Child, 43, 97-98, I43,

259 INDEX Shepard, Sam (cont.) 200; Curse of the Starving Class, 96, 97, 99, II9, I43-44; Fool for Love, 97; The Holy Ghostly, 97n; Icarus's Mother, 97n, I43; A Lie of the Mind, 96, 98n, I2I; Red Cross, I43; States of Shock, 97n; Tooth of Crime, I40-4I; True West, 97, 98, I04, II3; The Unseen Hand, 95; The War in Heaven (with Joseph Chaikin), I2I Signoret, Henri, 59 Silence, in the theater, 40, 8I, 138 Silverman, Hugh J., 3n, I6, 23, 38n Simmons, Ernest J., 92n Simulacrum, I4 Simulation, 42 Sobchak, Vivian, 36n Sokolowski, Robert, 3n, 24n Soyinka, Wole, I95; The Jiro Plays, 128; A Play of Giants, 6I Space: anthropomorphic, 63-64; naturalistic, 64; and territoriality, 98, no; theater as bodied, 4, 45-5I; virtual, 44· See also Spatiality Spatiality: and the body, 28, 34; deformation of, 34-35; theatrical, I, 4· See also Body: spatializing; Space; World constitution Spectator, theatrical, 46, I64, I75-76, I93, 230; disembodied, so, 83-85, Io6-7; displaced, 37, 82-85; embodied, 37, 8I8s, n6-I7; and the female body, I8689; and hunger, 99; and language, I52s8; and the male gaze, I86-88, I92-93, I98-99; staged, 8I-85; theatrical competence of, I39; and theatrical watching, I, 4, 36-37, 42-5I, 79-80. See also Language, dramatic: and the spectator; Pain: and the audience Speech acts, I 24n Spelman, Elizabeth V., I2 Spencer, Jenny S., I84 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 3n, 27 Sprinkle, Annie, I98-99 Stage, physical, 39, 46-47, I45, I76-77, I93· See also Object, theatrical; Proscenium stage Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 92, 128n, I 53; and "as if," 39, I53 Starobinski, Jean, 45 States, Bert 0., 3, 9, 23, 40, 44, Ios; on "binocular vision," I 5, 39 Stewart, David, 3n, I2n, 23n Stoppard, Tom, 2I7n; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 4I, 89

Straus, Erwin, 2I5 Strindberg, August, 5 s-s 6; A Dream Play, 142; The Ghost Sonata, 56, I42; Miss Julie, I42-43 Structuralism, 2on. See also Semiotics Subjection. See Subjectivity: and subjection Subjectivity, 27, 47, 2I3-14, 224, 230; and the actor, 47; African-American, 2I2; bodied, 3?-38, ns, 224; decentered, 34, 27, 76; and dispossession, 29-39, 87; as flux, 229; and gender, 2I 5-24; and pain, I66-8 5, I93-94; poststructuralist critique of, 20-2I, 24n; and the sign, 229; and subjection, I6o-68; as trace, 227-29. See also Consciousness; I (first-person pronoun); Subject-object relationship Subject-object relationship, 94, 99-IOO, I05, I8I; phenomenology and, 4, 28, so, n5-I7. See also Subjectivity Surrealism, 55, I3I Suvin, Darko, I62n, I63, I65n Symbolism, 59 Synge, John Millington, I4I-42; The Playboy of the Western World, 128, I42

Tableaux vivants, 6I, 85 Tallmer, Jerry, I2I, I22n Television, Io, 6In, 64n, 68, 220 Temporality, 20, 22, 236; and language, I47; and memory, I44, I48-49, ISO; schizophrenia and, 34; in the theater, 6o Textuality, I2I-24, I3 I Theater event, as discursive structure, I 5258 Theater of Cruelty, I03 Theater of Images, 54, 82 Theater of Pure Form. See Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Theater of the Absurd, 8; and realism, I034

Theater technology, I-2, 9I, 92n, I65, 226; lighting, IO, 57, 64, 69, 92n; projection, I, 226, 229;sound, I0,97; and subjectivity, 37· See also Image, theatrical: and light Theatre Repere. See Lepage, Robert Theatricality, 128-30 Thevenaz, Pierre, 3n, I3-I4 Thoreau, Henry David, 2-3 Time. See Temporality Toombs, S. Kay, 34n Touch, 30, II6n; in the theater, 47, 2I2

260

INDEX Townsend, Sue, Womberang, r87 Treadwell, Sophie, Machinal, 221 Trezise, Thomas, I8-24, 25n, 29, 38 Tzara, Tristan, The Gas Heart, I30-32, I34, I40 Dber-marionette. See Craig, Gordon Utterance, I2o-24; act of, I2I-24; situation of, I 2 7; and textuality, I 2 3. See also Deixis: relationship to utterance van Alphen, Ernst, 67n van den Berg, J. H., 2oon van Gogh, Vincent, I I4 van Itallie, Jean-Claude: Motel, 72; Struck Dumb (with Chaikin), 120 Vasarely, Victor, 79 Verisimilitude, 55, 9 I, I 07; and illusionism, 9I-94 Violence, I6o-85, I92-98; and Dionysiac possession, 205-6; and gender, 192-97; and sexuality, I94-95 Visibility, 36 Vision, 36; embodied, 3-4, 45, 79, 82-83; politics of, I72. See also Perception; Spectator, theatrical; Visuality Visual and plastic arts, IO, 52· See also Painting; Sculpture Visual artists, in the theater, 55 Visual field. See Image, theatrical; Performance field: as visual field Visuality, 83n, 85 Volker, Klaus, I6on Vorhandenheit. See Heidegger, Martin Wagner, Richard, 57 Wakefield Cycle, Annunciation, 217 Walton, Kendall, 89n Wandor, Michelene, I86n, I98n Wasserstein, Wendy, Uncommon Women and Others, r87 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, 2I7

Weiss, Peter, I69-76, r85; on documentary theater, I 7 5 -Works: The Investigation, 14I, 144, I69; Marat/Sade, I59, I7I-76, 193, I95, 2oo; Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, r69; Trotsky in Exile, I69-71, 172, I74n, I75-76, I83; Vietnam Discourse, I69 Wertenbaker, Timberlake: The Grace of Mary Traverse, 20o-2or; New Anatomies, I88 West, Cornel, 2o8-9n Whitelaw, Billie, 35n, 54 Whiteside, Kerry H., 2on Whitman, Robert, Light Touch, 93n Williams, Tennessee, I42; A Streetcar Named Desire, I04, 128, 200, 2I7 Wilshire, Bruce, 3, 23, 93n Wilson, Robert, 8, 37, 54, 6r, 73, 93 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw, 6o; and the Theater of Pure Form, 56, 58, 85, 88 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, I5n, I57 Women's theater, I86-224; and lived experience, I87-89, I98-224. See also Female body; Feminism: and theater World constitution, 2, 26-27, I62, I67-68, I7o, I78. See also Body: spatializing Worth, Katharine, urn Worthen, William B., 58n, I03, I06, I28n, 192n Wright, Elizabeth, I6on, I65n Writing: and embodiment, 212; revenge of, I2I; and speech, 121-24 Yeats, J. B., 62 Yeats, William Butler, 6o, 142 Young, Iris Marion, 2 3, 34n; on female comportment and motility, 20I-2, 214; on pregnancy, 2I5-r6, 218, 222 Zeifman, Hersh, 82 Zola, Emile, I02, I4I-42, I92n Zuhandenheit. See Heidegger, Martin