Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence : The Author Dies Hard [1st ed.] 9783030432898, 9783030432904

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ADAPTATION IN THEATRE AND PERFORMANCE

Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence The Author Dies Hard Silvija Jestrovic

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance

Series Editors Vicky Angelaki Mid Sweden University Sundsvall, Sweden Kara Reilly Department of Drama University of Exeter Exeter, UK

The series addresses the various ways in which adaptation boldly takes on the contemporary context, working to rationalise it in dialogue with the past and involving the audience in a shared discourse with narratives that form part of our artistic and literary but also social and historical constitution. We approach this form of representation as a way of responding and adapting to the conditions, challenges, aspirations and points of reference at a particular historical moment, fostering a bond between theatre and society.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14373

Silvija Jestrovic

Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence The Author Dies Hard

Silvija Jestrovic Leamington Spa, UK

Adaptation in Theatre and Performance ISBN 978-3-030-43289-8 ISBN 978-3-030-43290-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: saul landell/mex, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written without support and friendship of many people. Most notably, my series editors Vicky Angelaki and Kara Reilly, whose encouragement and enthusiasm made this book happen. I am deeply grateful to the in-house editors at Palgrave, Eileen Srebernik and Jack Heeney, and their team, for their great professionalism and for their patience. This book would not be what it is now without my language-fairies: the superbly talented Mihaila Petriˇci´c, whose generous help on the first chapter was indispensible; any my brilliant friend Joanne Mackay Bennett, who has worked round the clock with me on this manuscript. I cannot imagine ever writing a book without her on my side (and this is our third). Veronika Ambros, once my mentor, always my mentor, answered any questions about Structuralism and Russian Formalism I could possible have in most precise detail and with most in-depth knowledge. I am grateful to Tim Crouch and the Dead Centre for their amazing and thought-provoking theatre; and to the photographers Adam Trigg and Jose Miguel Jimenez, for allowing me to share their theatre photography. My colleagues in Theatre and Performance Studies at the Warwick University have been supportive and generous as ever and I am grateful for their gentle nudges too: Nadine Holdsworth, Andy Lavender, Nicolas Whybrow, Tim White, Jim Davis, Yvette Hutchison, David Coates,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Bobby Smith, Margaret Shewring. Special thanks have my book-writingbuddies—Susan Haedicke, who took the time from writing her book to read drafts of mine; and Milija Gluhovi´c for reading drafts, finding things I needed to read, and supplying me with bread from our neighbourhood bakery. One sunny summer’s day in Oxford, Domenico and Laura Pietropaolo discussed Barthes with me over lunch at the rooftop terrace of the Ashmolean Museum. On a rainy afternoon in Paris, Yana Meerzon and I carried a debate on the responsibility of the author from one bistro to the next. This was brainstorming The Author Dies Hard at its most glamorous. I would have never written this book if it hasn’t been for the cocoon my family has been weaving all this time—they have been my room with a view: I am grateful to my parents for their vitality and warmth, to Dragan for the coffees, the conversations and the long car trips, and to my Ana— for everything.

Contents

1

The Paradox of the Author’s Death: An Introduction

Part I

1

Birth(s)

2

Author as a Heteroglossic Figure

39

3

Embodiment and Textualization

57

4

Performing the Self

77

Part II Resurrections 5

Resurrection as Adaptation: (Re)Makes, Deconstructions and the Gun

111

6

The Author Is Present

139

7

The Artist Is (Meaningfully) Absent

165

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CONTENTS

Part III 8

Conclusion

Coda: In Other Deaths

Index

199 205

List of Images

Image 5.1 Image 5.2 Image 5.3 Image 5.4

Adler & Gibb—Denise Gough as Louise (Photo by Johan Persson/ArenaPAL) Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Adam Trigg [Courtesy of www.naturaltheatre.photos]) Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Jose Miguel Jimenez) Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Adam Trigg [Courtesy of www.naturaltheatre.photos])

120 132 133 135

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CHAPTER 1

The Paradox of the Author’s Death: An Introduction

In 1968, the year of the revolt in France and around the world, theorist Roland Barthes famously proclaimed the ‘Death of the Author’, putting to rest the notion of the author as the originator/God and placing the reader centre stage. To be more precise, his essay was written a year earlier and first appeared in English translation in an American journal. Anthologized only ten years later (in 1977 in Image-Music-Text and then in The Rustle of Language in 1984), it had been photocopied and distributed as samizdat on campuses all over the world, which only enhanced its subversive appeal. The provocation of the death of the hegemonic authorial figure, however, spoke to the revolutionary atmosphere of 1968. Barthes and his circle, including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, to mention a few, were considered to be at the forefront of an intellectual revolution. Reviewing Barthes’s essay for The Guardian book review, Andrew Gallix describes le nouvelle critique as the ‘flavour of the month, much like its culinary counterpoint, nouvelle cuisine, albeit more of a mouthful’: Their works often became bestsellers in spite of their demanding and iconoclastic nature. […] The whole movement seemed as provocative, and indeed exciting, as Brigitte Bardot in her slink, sex kitten heyday. Its defining moment was the publication of the racy little number called The Death of the Author. (Gallix 2010, n.p.)

© The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_1

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Nevertheless, with the proclamation of the death of the author, the author was everywhere, even when it was difficult to separate individual voices and gestures from the collective. During the events of 1968 in France, a collective voice emerged that began with committees formed to solve practical problems. Soon, however, collectivity became a mode of cultural production, from the anonymous authorship of the graffiti adorning the facades of Paris to experimentation with collective creation in the theatre of Ariane Mnouchkine and Jean Vilar. The occupation of the Odeon Theatre marked the protesters’ antagonistic relationship with institutional and bourgeois culture. The graffiti ‘Art is dead. Let us create our daily life’ sounded like an echo from both Barthes and Artaud. Like Barthes’s proposition, of the death of the author the death of art was also provisional. The other part of the inscription that called for ‘creating daily life’ was really about a different way of making art: collective, embodied in the everyday, with the barrier between creator and audience erased. In Barthes’s radical proposition, the shifting of roles in the relationship between the author and the reader (spectator, participant) is shaped along similar lines—the reader is no longer a consumer of the work; he or she is an active participant and, moreover, he or she is the focal point into which the work streams. In other words, the reader completes the meaning. Hence, the line between originator and recipient is blurred and the meaning and shape of the work are determined through a communication process. As summarized in Alfred Willner’s assertion that the ‘division between those who create culture, in the artistic sense, and those who consume it’ (Willner 1970, p. 33) has been rejected, the cultural revolution of May 1968 played out—in the streets and within occupied state institutions—a radical proposition similar to the one Barthes had written about a year earlier when proclaiming the death of the author and the rebirth of the reader. In both cases, the lines between passivity and activity were blurred. Theatre director Jean-Louis Barrault and one of the protagonists of the 1968 protests described the atmosphere in front of the Odeon in Paris in its full collective theatricality: ‘The square outside had become a regular fairground: a man with a monkey, a man with a bear, guitarists, rubbernecks and more or less camouflaged ambulances. Slogans all over the walls’ (Barrault 1974, p. 316). One of the leaders of the revolt, the German student Daniel Cohn-Bendit, commented: ‘[…] the barricades were no longer simply a means of self-defence, they became a symbol of individual liberty’ (Cohn-Bandit and Cohn-Bandit

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1968, p. 63). The barricade became a space, a stage, where collective improvisation in direct democracy could be performed. That year, the Cannes Film Festival also turned into a stage for political action when, instead of showing their films, authors of the French New Wave—François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch, Roman Polanski—stood in front of the blank projection screen of the small Jean Cocteau theatre at the old Palais Croisette and called for the closure of the festival in solidarity with the protesting students and workers. Truffaut, who coined the term auteur 1 cinema and foregrounded the role of the director as the absolute author of the film—author with a capital ‘A’—was the most outspoken of the collective voices. He read the Cinémathèque Defence Committee’s proclamation calling a press conference to ask film-makers, artists, technicians, journalists and the festival jury to stand against the continuation of the festival to protest police oppression, the French government and the structures within the film industry. Directors Miloš Forman and Lelouch were the first to go onstage to announce that they had withdrawn their films from the festival; others followed suit. Truffaut’s words, captured in the documentary film footage of the day, further electrified the atmosphere in the theatre: ‘The radio announces by the hour that factories are occupied and closed, the trains have stopped running and the metro and buses will be next. So to announce every hour that the festival continues is just ridiculous’ (Cannes Film Festival, May 18, 1968). As more people were gathering, the film-makers decided to occupy the main theatre and it was there that Godard addressed ethical questions of art, political engagement and the auteur: ‘There isn’t one film showing the problems going on today among workers and students. Not one, whether by Forman, myself, Polanski, François. There are none, we are behind the times’ (Cannes Film Festival, May 18, 1968). Godard’s words called for the artist’s political and ethical responsibility and for critically engaged work that would speak to it. The auteurs of the French New Wave had according to Godard, failed in making films that would answer to the political demands of their time. Yet, to mitigate these failings, the auteurs appeared in person instead of their films to assert an urgent political message that their creative outputs were too slow to articulate. These gestures of solidarity foregrounded the idea of the author as a political and ethical figure. The director of the festival had no other choice but to join the auteurs onstage and proclaim the Cannes Film Festival closed. The spectators did not get to see the films, but they did

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enter into direct dialogue with their auteurs and joined in the collective revolt. The auteur was no longer a hidden artistic force behind a film, but an embodied presence. The film directors appeared in the flesh to talk about politics, yet not to represent the films that they had withdrawn, but the films they should have made (but failed to) in order to respond to the political and social reality of the time. The auteur himself—as an engaged intellectual—replaced the art. The paradox is in the proclamation of the death of the author. On the one hand, this became part of the revolutionary anti-hegemonic tactics of 1968. On the other, the events of 1968 found their immediate political and cultural articulation in the increased presence of artists, directors, performers, authors and auteurs who took centre stage as socially engaged intellectuals of the revolt. The death of the author fed into the cultural revolution of 1968, yet the author was more alive and present than ever—be it Jean-Paul Sartre standing on a box outside the Renault factory telling the workers about the student-worker-intellectual paradise to come, the auteurs of the French New Wave closing the Cannes Film Festival in solidarity with workers and students, the artists and writers who took the stage of the eighteenth-century Odeon Theatre in Paris to participate in debates, Simone de Beauvoir and Marguerite Duras leading the takeover of the offices of the Writers’ Union and declaring that ‘the practice of literature is indissolubly linked with the present revolutionary process’ (in Holmes 1996, p. 198), or, indeed, the stars of le nouvelle critique proclaiming the death of the author. In his apparent demise, the author emerged as a performative figure at times serious in his/her commitment, at other times playful and parodic, mocking the solemnity of authority (including their own). The performativity of the author, which emerged in the annunciation of his death, opened the door to a playfulness that matched both the theatricality and presence of authorial voices in the streets, university lecture halls and theatres in the Paris of the 1968 revolt. The author, through his death and almost immediate resurrection, was not unlike the Groucho Marx figure of May 1968, conjured in the famous slogan: ‘I’m a Marxist with Groucho tendencies’.2 This figure, which combines the philosopher’s leftist thinking with the famous comedian’s bushy eyebrows and moustache, has epitomized the playful, theatrical rebellion against the symbolic violence of rigid hierarchical and ideological structures. What emerges out of these revolutionary tendencies in both political life and critical thinking—even if inadvertently—is the proclamation of the author’s death as an essentially theatrical gesture.

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Through this proclamation of demise, the godlike authorial figure is deconstructed, but also almost immediately reassembled, sometimes as an intertextual reference, sometimes as a ludic, performative figure—a Marx with Groucho eyebrows.

Two Deaths of Roland Barthes The death of Roland Barthes reads like a scene from an absurdist story in the style of Daniel Harms: The famous theorist has lunch with the soon-tobecome president of France, François Mitterrand. It is February 25, 1980. On his way home, crossing Rue des Écoles, a laundry van hits him. A month later, the theorist dies of his injuries. In Laurent Binet’s novel The 7th Function of Language (2017), Barthes dies again in the same manner, however, this time his death is not an accident, but a murder mystery. Like this subchapter, Binet’s novel opens with Barthes’s death. While the circumstances surrounding it remain seemingly the same as previously described, the texts are inevitably different: ‘Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so. Roland Barthes walks up Rue de Bièvre’ (Binet 2017, p. 3). In this chronotope—the final space/time stretch of Barthes’s walk from Rue de Bièvre to Rue des Écoles towards the van that will hit him— Binet imagines what might have been the theorist’s thoughts and anxieties in that moment. These thoughts and anxieties, as Binet states, ‘are all well known’: they include his dead mother, his inability to write a novel, and his increasing ‘loss of appetite for boys’ (ibid., p. 4), but there is also an excitement specific to the day on which the theorist’s death will become imminent. The excitement, as we will learn later, had to do with Binet’s plot device—the invention of the seventh function of language. Nevertheless, in the opening scene of the novel, Barthes, who is just about to suffer his deadly injuries, is brought to life. The famous theorist, the author of ‘The Death of the Author,’ emerges as a performative figure, not only as a textual entity in Binet’s novel, but as an intersection of text and embodiment. This two-dimensional Barthes that exists between the covers of the book is created out of verbal imageries and Binet’s playful imagination, but remains an embodiment of the author nonetheless. When the van hits him, ‘his body makes the familiar, sickening, dull thudding sound of flesh meeting metal, and it rolls over the tarmac like a rag doll’ (5). Even though it is conjured through the text, the body of Barthes the author becomes a mortal body; it bleeds, its bones break, it feels pain.

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In the preface to his autobiography Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, the author writes: The Text can recount nothing: it takes my body elsewhere, far from my imaginary person, towards a kind of memoryless speech which is already the speech of the People, of the non-subjective mass (or of the generalized subject), even if I am still separated from it by my way of writing. (Barthes 1977a, p. 4)

The very title of the book implies a duality, a separation, between the writer and the subject of his writing, even if they, the writer and the subject, originate from the same selfhood and share the same semiotic codes. Even though it is an autobiography, Barthes’s subjectivity is split—the I is at the same time a not I (to echo Beckett). Barthes foregrounds this point by often referring to himself in the third person. The figure of Barthes, who appears in Binet’s novel, confirms some of these points and even takes them a stretch further. Between the covers of Binet’s book, Roland Barthes is no longer autobiographical, but biographical material—hence, twice removed from his original or, rather, extra-textual subjectivity. The voice that tells/writes the story is already ‘non-subjective’, drawing from the notion of Roland Barthes as ‘the generalized subject’. Yet Barthes’s introduction to his autobiography emphasizes the separation of text and body, whereby the textualized self becomes inevitably disembodied. The text is all there is, ‘it can recount nothing,’ let alone embody something. Nevertheless, the text, that of Binet’s novel, is a starting point, as is the case with all literary works. It is the sine qua non of Barthes’s existence as a fictional character. However, the text is not all there is. I argue that, in Barthes’s transformation from the author into the character of the novel, a performative dimension emerges. It spills over into the text to conjure images, to embody and to make sensations of anxiety, excitement and pain palpable for the reader/beholder. The author, who makes an appearance in the text even if only to die a few pages later, is not only a semantic entity, not only a linguistic construct, but also an embodied presence, even if language is the only basis of his appearance. The intersection of text and embodiment is a fleeting one, established in the communication process, in the relationship between the work and the reader/beholder. The relationship between text and embodiment is akin to the relationship between theatricality and performativity. Theatricality points to the

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artifice, artificiality, constructedness and, in a broader sense, to how the material has been shaped, en-plotted, to the conventions of its making. Applying it to Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes and Binet’s 7th Function of Language, it is the process, the strategies, the devices, the choices through which the author turns into a textual entity, into a fictional character and into a literary persona. Texts, however, don’t only conjure images and bodies; they also witness, testify, incite, question and persuade. They canonize and marginalize authors; they celebrate and ridicule them. They are performative in an Austinian sense in the ways they affect reality and create and shape imaginaries, including the figure of the author as both the interlocutor, the initiator of a communication process, and indeed as the character, the protagonist. The subjectivity of the author might disappear at one end of the textual machine (de Man 1984; Derrida 1976), but the author re-emerges at the other end as a performative figure. This performativity is what enables the intersection of text and embodiment, creating a space within which to understand ‘the death of the author’ as an interplay of presence and absence. Binet’s novel is an intertextual coup de théâtre where the stars of twentieth-century critical theory romp through Paris, Venice, Upstate New York, Bologna and Naples in search of the ‘seventh function of language’, of which Barthes was allegedly in possession while lunching with Mitterrand. The case has landed on the table of Detective Bayard, who in the course of his investigation encounters the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, Judith Butler, Roman Jakobson and others for the first time. To better navigate this world, he seeks help from the figure of Simon, a postgraduate student at Vincennes University. Aiding the investigation, Simon brings the detective up to speed on relevant critical theories. While detective Bayard and the young scholar Simon mediate the intertextuality of the novel and guide the unsuspecting reader through the zany investigation that Barthes’s death has set in motion, the nerdy academic indulges in the game of recognition and difference as the factual gets intertwined with the fictional and quotations from actual works of the aforementioned authors mix with fiction. And how would the lay reader enjoy this satire if most of the names in the novel are new to them? wonders the academic reader as she meets Foucault in a gay sauna, eavesdrops on Kristeva’s dinner party and spies on Butler having a threesome with Detective Bayard and Hélène Cixous, while simultaneously lecturing the detective on performativity: ‘Now you feel my performative, don’t you?’ (Binet 2017, p. 284). As for

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Barthes, not only does he die at least two deaths, but he is also a different kind of figure depending on the reader, that is, the academic or the lay reader. The former cannot help but indulge in the playful tautology of the death of Barthes the author and the ‘Death of the Author’. Neither can she fully shake the duality between, on the one hand, the writer of A Lover’s Discourse, Camera Lucida, Writing Degree Zero—that is, the name in parentheses following citations in essays that she reads and the reference in her own works cited—and, on the other hand, the fictional Barthes of Binet’s novel, whose death is at the heart of a murder investigation. For the layperson, however, Binet’s Barthes is less of a double agent (author/character) than a fictional figure and a device that sets the action in motion. The author, be it the one who writes or is written about, disappears into the text; the duality between the real and the fictional is an illusion. Hence, it is the lay reader rather than the nerdy one who is indeed closer to Barthes’s theory, closer to being an ideal recipient. The relationship between the reader and the text here also resembles the contract of suspension of disbelief between the performance and the audience in some forms of theatre. The spectator’s pleasure (at least in a Stanislavskyian kind of theatre) comes from accepting the stage convention dictating that the sound of crickets coming from backstage should be perceived as part of the environment of the onstage reality rather than as the sound technicians’ and folio artist’s behind-the-scenes labour. We enjoy the drama and passion of Carmen while keeping at bay the spoiler question: Why are the characters singing their lines instead of speaking as we normally do? This notion of a ‘textual machine’ (Burke 1992, p. 2), where bodies, objects, documents, evidence, and the author himself disappear and turn into fiction, is in a way an inversion of the suspension of disbelief; it is a call for a suspension of belief that a certain authenticity or authorial personhood could be found in the text he/she is writing or has been written into. This approach resembles Brecht’s distancing method of ‘not, but…’—not the author as a person, but the author as a fictional character. Yet, the suspension of belief with regard to Barthes is not entirely different from the suspension of disbelief in some forms of theatrical performance, as it is a way into the text/performance and not necessarily a distancing device. However, suspension of disbelief entails a theatrical pleasure in indulging in stage fiction as if it were reality, while in the world of Barthes’s theory, brought to extremes in Binet’s novel, reality becomes fiction. If the main way to formulate the experience of reality is through discourse, then the only way reality and subjectivity can

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be textualized is indeed through the structuring devices of fiction. This, however, does not make the reader’s, spectator’s, or semi-participant’s task of completing the meaning any easier. Binet presents us with the difficulty of this task from the very first lines of his novel: ‘Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so’ (3). These two sentences are an intertextual reference, a quotation from the aforementioned autobiography, Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes. And who is the you? Who is the addressee in the second sentence? The reader or the Barthes who is to get killed a few pages later? Towards the end of the novel, the preamble ‘Life is not a novel’ is put into question through a set of thoughts first attributed to the postgraduate student turned co-investigator, Simon. They then blend into the voice of the omnipresent narrator, possibly that of the novel’s author, Binet: […] Simon thinks: in the hypothesis where he is truly a character from a novel […], what would he really risk? A novel is not a dream: you can die in a novel. Then again, the central character is not normally killed. Except, perhaps, at the end of the story. But if it was the end of the story, how would he know? How would he know what page of his life he is on? How can any of us know when we have reached our last page? And what if he wasn’t the central character? Doesn’t everyone believe himself the hero of his own existence? (Binet 2017, pp. 309–310)

Hence, technically, within a text (any kind of text, including a performance text) we can only speak about the death of the subject, of the protagonist, of the character, and not of the author, as the author is already dead; he dies with the first gesture of writing or embodying he makes. However, as shown later, this is not such a simple equation. Matters of life and death—unfolding between embodiment and textualization—are complicated. The quote above is not just a metaphor or a parody of the life is a dream trope, but a provocation to the reader/beholder. If I , the reader/beholder, complete the meaning, who is at the other end of the process? With whom am I confabulating, debating, quarrelling, co-creating this idea that life is (not) a novel? With Binet, the author of the novel, or with Barthes, the actual author of the opening lines? Or, indeed, with Simon, the fictional character who questions these lines a couple of hundred pages later? And who am I to trust, since

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even the most seemingly consistent narrator is essentially unreliable and even a very raw performance of self on some level is mediated? Still, the reader’s/beholder’s/semi-participant’s freedom is not unlimited; rather it occupies a small space between choice and conditioning, between the individual, collective and contextual baggage that I bring into the contract at one end and what they, who invite me to participate, have offered from the other end. In Binet’s critical theory-based thriller, the main quest, and the reason for Barthes’s demise, is the alleged discovery of the seventh function of language. The invention of the seventh function of language is based on the linguistic theory of Russian Formalist scholar Roman Jakobson, who indeed identified six functions of language. The quest for a piece of writing that formulates the seventh function of language, at times becoming a matter of life and death, is a plotting premise similar to Umberto Eco’s presupposition that there is a lost part of Aristotle’s Poetics that talks about comedy on which he based his scholarly thriller The Name of the Rose. The seventh function of language is an intellectual hypothesis of a similar kind, theoretically possible, but empirically not achievable outside Binet’s novel. Moreover, both Eco and Jakobson, to whom Binet has ascribed the invention of the seventh function of language, appear in the novel. Jakobson’s actual theory is centred around a communication model that consists of the following: (1) the addresser (speaker, encoder, emitter, poet, author, narrator, performer); (2) the addressee (decoder, hearer, listener, viewer, reader, interpreter); (3) the code (system, langue); (4) the message (the given discourse, text, artwork, performance); (5) the context (referent); (6) the contact (a physical channel, a psychological and social connection between the author, the speaker or the performer).3 Jakobson identifies six functions of language that correspond to the six elements of his communication model: (1) emotive (expressive); (2) conative (appellative); (3) metalingual (metalinguistic, ‘glossing’); (4) referential (cognitive, denotative, ideational); (5) phatic; (6) poetic (aesthetic). The latter is related to the question of what makes a novel a novel, a play a play, a work of art a work of art.4 To his fictional Jakobson, Binet ascribes a secret seventh function of language, which could be described as persuasive. It evolves along the lines of Austinian performatives, according to which words are actions; they do things or make those involved in the communication process do things. Words change physical reality. The seventh function of language stretches this performative possibility even

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further. Some of the characters in the novel are willing to risk their lives to protect it; such is the case in Binet’s novel with Derrida, who dies a cruel, violent death. The seventh function of language implies that language not only persuades—that is, that words shape actions and realities—but that it can always affect the addressee in the exact way the addresser has intended (provided the addresser knows how to use the seventh function of language). The one who has mastered the seventh function of language controls the communication process and, thus, any actions arising from it. If the seventh function of language existed as authorial property, then the author would be in complete command of his/her semantic gestures. Barthes would have died only one death and it would have been a fictional one and always the same with every utterance. The academic and the lay reader would have exactly the same reading of Binet’s novel and the former would not be led to believe that her ‘pleasure of the text’ comes from her superior knowledge. The epigraph to Barthes’s autobiography— ‘It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel’ (Barthes 1977a, p. 4)—would have been unnecessary. This is because the reader would be under full control of the author’s semantic gesture and would not have transgressed, despite the author’s warning, into constructing dualities of the author’s public and private persona, for instance. The author would indeed become God and the theory of the death of the author would collapse.

In Search of the Author The basic definition of the term ‘author’ is the ‘originator of the work’ or, if written with a capital ‘A’, God. While the ‘originator’ may have a modest role in the unfolding of the reception process—a mere enabler, facilitator, a subjectivity who starts a communication process that then takes on a life of its own—the other related meaning implies an ontological dimension whereby the anxious Pirandellian ‘search of the author’ becomes almost interchangeable with the ironic modernist quest for a lost God. Whether a humble originator or a mighty God, the notion of an author implies fixity—a stable source from whom it all began and to whom there has been a longing to return in the quest for ‘true’ meaning—the ‘authentic’ intention. This is also the quest of the protagonists of Pirandello’s play, yet they do not quite find what they are looking for. The search is set in a theatre where the six characters—the Father,

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the Mother, the Son, the Stepdaughter, the little Boy and the little Girl— interrupt a rehearsal of a play titled The Rules of the Game (also written by Luigi Pirandello), requesting to re-enact their unfortunate destinies themselves. They are led by the Father, who explains that their author has abandoned them. As a result, they have remained underdeveloped. The six characters are searching for closure, which they believe can only come from finding their author. Intrigued, the director takes on the authorial task of completing their stories. Nevertheless, all they get in the end is a mimetic performance of their tragic destiny by the actors; this satisfies neither the lost characters nor the director. Once the lines between reenactment and reality become too blurred, the director stops the rehearsal and dismisses everyone, without fulfilling his authorial promise. Who is the author here? Or rather, what kind of questions does the notion of authorship in the play open? The authorial figure is first doubled and then tripled. Luigi Pirandello is the author of the play within the play, The Rules of the Game, as well as the author of The Six Characters in Search of an Author. Are the two Pirandellos one and the same, that is, the author that the characters have been searching for? The Rules of the Game was never really written and only exists within the universe of Pirandello’s famous play. Everyone knows Pirandello as the author of The Six Characters in Search of an Author, but these characters fail to find their author. If one Pirandello is the author and the other a mere intertextual reference, do we immediately know which Pirandello we are to trust? Pirandello the historical figure might be the obvious choice, but given that he became a member of the National Fascist Party of Italy in 1923, would it be less uncomfortable to go with Pirandello the intertextual reference?5 Does the search for the ‘author’ change in any way with this fact and if so, does it change yet again in light of knowing that four years after joining the fascists and befriending Mussolini, Pirandello regretted his choice and tore his membership card to pieces? And what to make of the director who attempts to fulfil his authorial task and fails? Does he emerge as a surrogate author? What about the actors who attempt, albeit in vain, to help with this task through embodiment and mimesis? In the end, is the sought author a singularity or a collective? The work of the author—whether individual or collective—remains incomplete. He is forever in search of closure, unable to fulfil his promise. If, instead, the completion of the task depends not on the author but on the reader or spectator, the promise of closure is always in the eye of the beholder. Yet, the beholder’s gaze is also unstable, impermanent;

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it consistently changes positions, angles and perspectives. Hence, this author, whether individual or collective, does not complete the work. He does the exact opposite: inevitably fails to bring it to completion. In this sense, the quest for the author in the play foreshadows the Beckettian notion of accomplishment, whereby success means ‘to fail better’. Yet, as the questions that Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author have provoked suggest, ‘to fail better’ is not just an aesthetic matter concerning the communication process in art, but an ethical and political dimension of the work that is shaped on both sides of the creation and reception process and its context(s). The paradox of the author is solipsistic, and we could play with the questions it inspires almost endlessly (we will indeed revisit some of them in the course of this book). Nevertheless, the questions that Pirandello’s play posits broadly concern three complex and important aspects: (1) an existential and philosophical dimension where the notion of the author verges on a metaphor; (2) the context of theatre and performance, which by its very nature foregrounds fluidity, allusiveness and the performativity of the aesthetics and politics of the authorial figure; (3) and, finally, the ethical and political implications of authorial presence and absence. One point is clear, though: the author appears as a fluid, slippery category, easy perhaps to kill off, but impossible to put to rest once and for all.

Nobody/Somebody Dialectics Barthes pointed out that ‘the author’ was only a modern invention, emerging in the late Middle Ages to replace the figure of the storyteller, narrator and shaman, and gradually replacing the concept of mediation with what would become the capitalist concept of ownership and authorship. The dynamic, active and performative figure of the mediator gave way to the more static notion of the author, the Author as originator/God with a capital ‘A’, foregrounding individuality, authenticity, and originality as its main traits. We might add that text, and performance to an even greater extent, consist of multiple writings and potential embodiments ‘drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is the one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader’ (Barthes 1977b, p. 148). In theatre, however, these matters are complicated even further, through images, bodies, gestural repertoires, sounds, as well as through both the creation of the work and its reception.

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Literary theorist Andrew Bennett opens his account on the concept of authorship with Tom Stoppard’s famous lines written for John Madden’s film Shakespeare in Love. During rehearsals of The Twelfth Night, a patron, referring to Shakespeare, asks the theatre manager: ‘Who is this?’; the response he gets is: ‘Nobody, he is the author’ (Bennett 2005, p. 1). Through this opening cue, Bennett reminds us, much like Barthes, that the notion of the author, as we know it, has been a relatively recent concept. At the opening of The Twelfth Night (even the fictional one in the film), Shakespeare was just the theatre maker and not yet the bard. Moreover, the term author appears only twice in his entire opus. Bennett writes: Shakespeare in Love is […] as much about our own love affair with the figure or the idea of the author as it is about the poet, playwright, and actor William Shakespeare, and it tells us as much about our own obsession with authorship as it does about Shakespeare himself or about his poems and plays. (Bennett 2005, p. 2)

Bennett asks who this ‘nobody’ is that ‘holds such fascination’ (ibid.). In a sense, whether somebody or nobody, the author is in the eye of the beholder. Yet this particular ‘nobody’ is described as ‘the poet, playwright, and actor’. Arguably, there is a philosophical dimension to Shakespeare’s multitasking and to the nobody/somebody dialectic that casts the author as an essentially theatrical figure, closer in nature to a performer than to God. Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Everything and Nothing’ sublimates this point with great precision. The main protagonist of the story is none other than the bard himself, depicted as someone with a relentless identity crisis. The story opens with the lines: ‘There was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one’ (Borges 1964, p. 248). At first, Shakespeare thinks that everybody shares this feeling of nothingness and alienation, only to realize that this is not the case. He looks for a remedy in writing and language (his own and that of others), in everyday activities, and mostly in performance, filling the emptiness by embodying a range of characters onstage: ‘Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so the others would not discover his condition as a no one’ (Borges 1964,

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p. 248). Yet the remedy and the feeling of being somebody is only temporary until the emptiness returns and the author is an existential nobody again. Borges’s work is very much in dialogue with notions of the death of the author, and one might argue that it poetically foreshadows ideas about the author’s disembodiment and disappearance that would appear a few years later in French Structuralist critical theory. The opening lines of ‘Everything and Nothing’ suggest that Shakespeare is more concept and idea than person. He is conjured through his ‘copious, fantastic and stormy’ words and appears as a two-dimensional portrait of dubious quality. However, this story does not only imply that asking ‘What is an author?’ (Foucault) is more appropriate than ‘Who is the author?’, but also that the authorial figure is, by nature, performative. Shakespeare comes to being through performances of language (in his own words and that of others, Borges’s in this case). He is also embodied in a range of performances, sometimes by characters he writes, at other times by the performance of the authorial persona in everyday life. The performance of the author unfolds through the somebody/nobody, everything/nothing dialectic. According to Borges, Shakespeare leaves clues of his identity crisis, too: No one has ever been so many men as this man, who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality. At times he would leave a confession hidden away in some corner of his work, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his person he plays the part of many and Iago claims with curious words ‘I am not what I am.’ (Borges 1964, p. 249)

Pirandello and Binet were right: the author is a search, a process of finding clues in the meta layers of narrative and theatricality. In short, detective work. The notion of disguise, in a theatrical sense, is at the heart of this search. The author’s presence and elusiveness both depend on it, be it through hints planted and hidden in his characters’ lines, through theatrical costumes and impersonations, or through the idea of a mask that the somewhat generic expression in his portraits suggests. In Death in Quotation Marks, Svetlana Boym studies poets, turning to theatrical metaphors to understand the dynamics between real life and the authorial persona. She finds that both the real-life self and the authorial self are etymologically related to the Latin word persona,

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meaning ‘theatrical mask’: ‘Perhaps, person, persona, personage, and personality are only different kinds of masks that suggest various degrees of self-dramatization. In French personne also signifies “nobody,” while in English “person” means precisely the opposite –“somebody”’ (Boym 1991, p. 30). The word persona encompasses different kinds of disguises as it dramatizes the somebody/nobody dialectic both etymologically and performatively. Boym further emphasizes the relationship between the performer and the mask with the example of the Kabuki actor, who would study himself wearing a mask in front of the mirror, and Greek and Roman actors, who would have long silent conversations with their masks before putting them on. Moreover, commedia dell’arte relies on typified features that go beyond individual characteristics, often creating comedic effects by hiding the individual while at the same time revealing traits that the protagonist is trying to disguise. As Boym points out, the mask both hides and reveals: While they seem like objects behind which one can physically hide and ‘characterizations’ that mask one’s emotions, they reveal crucial human features which go beyond individual character traits. Thus, in ancient rituals, as well as in the twentieth-century avant-garde theatre of Artaud, Meyerhold, and others, the mask is often regarded as a typified image, closer to the intersubjective ‘self’ than an actual face. (Boym 1991, p. 30)

In ‘Everything and Nothing’, Shakespeare is exactly that—a mask and a performer. He is at the same time the maker of his work, including his authorial self, and the beholder of his creations and those of others. This is further complicated by the fact that he is clearly not alone in the process of making and beholding; there is also Borges, who has conjured the persona of Shakespeare—the mask that both hides and reveals the author’s somebody/nobody dialectical drama. In the final paragraph of the story, Shakespeare is on his deathbed when he encounters God. We get the sense that Shakespeare is beholding his own life and looking back at his failure to fully realize his personhood when he requests: ‘I who have been so many men in vein want to be one and myself.’ The voice from the Lord answers from the whirlwind: ‘Neither am I anyone; I have dreamt the world as you dreamt your work, my Shakespeare, and among the forms in my dream are you, who like myself are many and no one. (Borges 1964, p. 250)

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Borges equates the author with God; the Lord is just like Shakespeare and the author is therefore a form of God. Yet the Lord appears to be nothing more than what could be authored in the eye of the beholder. Thus, even God, the ultimate Author, might be, as some have suspected all along, just ‘a nobody who holds such fascination’ (Bennett)—a figment of our desire to know who the interlocutor is at the far end of the communication channel.

Somebody, Nobody, or Everybody The description of Shakespeare as ‘the poet, playwright, and actor’ is more than a biographical account of his artistic skills. In theatre and performance, for his work to come to life and to be fully formed in the eye of the beholder, a collective effort, as well as presence and embodiment, are required. The author is a ‘nobody’ not only because the concept has not yet taken hold (Shakespeare is still only a humble maker of plays and not yet the bard), but because nearly everybody involved in the stage labour of putting The Twelfth Night on its feet is the author. In other words, the author in theatre is ‘nobody’ and potentially everybody, because the authorial spotlight could fall on any of the several key makers involved in the process. Arguably, the fluidity of authorship is more visible in theatre and performance than in other media. In theatre, the sense of the author as a driving force of the performance can appear on various levels. At times, it is the playwright that gets identified as the author of the work, at other times it is the director or even the actor. We often say Brecht’s Mother Courage, Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Heiner Müller’s Hamletmachine, unless it is directed by Robert Wilson, in which case it becomes Robert Wilson’s Hamletmachine. Hamlet is Shakespeare’s, yet in TeatrnaTaganke’s 1976 production, directed by Yuri Lyubimov, Hamlet mostly belongs to Vladimir Vysotsky. The same goes for a recent production at London’s Almeida theatre (2018), which gave us Robert Icke’s and Andrew Scott’s Hamlet. Theatre and performance have the capacity to put various levels of authorship in dialogue and even in contestation with one another. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author depicts the tensions behind having various authorial presences and potentials; the playwright, the director, and the actors all try to author the six characters in search of their author, and in a one way or another they all fail.6

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Moreover, theatre and performance render the idea of the recipient (spectator, audience, beholder, reader, semi-participant) not only palpable, but inevitably an embodied presence. In the context of theatre and performance practice and scholarship, the idea that the audience responds, makes meaning, co-creates and participates is, however, not at all new.7 From the beginning, the theatre recipient/participant has been part of the theatrical event and has even been written into the performance script in some instances. After all, direct addresses to the audience and other epic devices such as asides and commentary of the chorus are among the strategies that acknowledge and directly involve the audience in the unfolding of the performance. Choruses from the Greeks onwards functioned as internal audiences, deliberately building in the recipient’s presence; they mirror and, at times, even confront the actual audience. Arguably, large-scale Ancient Greek festivals were as much about staging tragedies and comedies as they were about the presence and performance of the community. Elizabethan audiences were on full display, seated on the stage, showcasing the latest fashion and ready to break into chatting and booing if the performance failed to grab them. Chapters of theatre history in which the recipient was considered passive and relegated to sitting silently in the dark auditorium, merely looking onto the unfolding reality on stage, have been relatively short and mostly linked to middle-class Western traditions and experiences of theatre and performance.8 No sooner had Stanislavsky introduced the notion of the invisible fourth wall separating the stage from the auditorium in theatre than Meyerhold called for removing footlights and displaying behind-thescenes labour in full view of the audience. As soon as Stanislavsky came up with his closed, triangular director, actor and writer model (with the writer on top) to depict theatrical performance graphically, Meyerhold responded with his theatre of the straight line and its four key elements: writer, director, actor and audience. Meyerhold’s model has the spectator built in. At least when graphically depicted, it places the different subjects of the theatrical creation and reception process on an equal footing. Moreover, by activating the recipient, Meyerhold’s model in a way prefigures Barthes’s rebirth of the reader, albeit in another medium. Shortly after Meyerhold, Brecht pointed out that the relationship between the author(s), the work, and the recipient is above all political. His notes on epic theatre focus predominantly on the effect that dramatic and performance structures have on the audience. In a way, his quest foreshadowed

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Rancière’s concept of ‘the emancipated spectator’, intellectually, physically and politically energized and activated through the performance event. Yet, it was also an attempt to construct the ideal spectator, or in other words, to control the reception process and make sure that the message, along with its political meaning, is fully transmitted. In this sense, the politics and poetics of Brecht’s theatre could also be read as a quest for the seventh function of (theatrical) language, for constructing an audience in the image of Brecht’s politics.9 The avant-garde practices of the 1960s Living Theatre and the work of Jerzy Grotowski experimented with audience participation. In more recent years, participation has been at the heart of immersive theatre, like in the work of the much written about UK-based company, Punchdrunk.10 The work of the playwright and performer Tim Crouch, which will be discussed later, not only involves audience participation, but in many ways holds the audience to account while at the same time controlling the unfolding of the performance. A variety of performative works in recent decades have played with blurring the lines between the author, the performer and the participant: from the relational aesthetics of Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cooking installations and Carmen Wong’s food and community performances, including Breakfast Elsewhere, to the delegated performance of Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra and Artur Zmijewski. These performative practices have at least two things in common—a strong sense of the socio-political dimension of art and, intermittently, the tendency to destabilize the artistic and at times even ethical and political centrality of the authorial position. This tendency is complex since no matter how delegated, participatory, or unpredictable, performances still unfold within the contours of the scenario its author(s) premeditated.11 Nevertheless, Shannon Jackson describes these participatory works in terms of an understanding of art as ‘social practice’ that ‘combines aesthetic and politics’ in artistic forms that are ‘inter-relational, embodied, and durational’ (Jackson 2011, p. 12). They also deliberately foreground the processes of creation, performance and reception as social practices by blurring the roles and hierarchies of their different agents. Unscripted and uninvited audience participation is also specific to the here and now of theatre and performance. It emphasizes, in Barthes’s words, the ‘rebirth’ and the agency of the recipient. Victor Hugo’s play Hernani is arguably best remembered for the riots it caused at its Comédie Française premiere in 1830; in the spirit of Romanticism, the

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author turned a commoner into the hero of the play and used vernacular language. This was seen as a provocation by audiences who preferred the status quo. The Abby Theatre’s 1907 production of Synge’s Playboy of the Western World is also known as the ‘Playboy Riots’ because of the nationalist Dublin audience that held singing contests, threw coughing fits, and blew whistles to subvert the performance. They viewed Synge’s play as an insult against Ireland and an offence to public morals. Marina Abramovi´c’s first performance of the Lips of Thomas in a gallery in Innsbruck, Austria in 1975 was cut short because the audience intervened fearing that the performer, who had cut a red star into her stomach, might bleed to death. Croatian director Oliver Frlji´c’s productions are wellknown across Europe for tackling difficult and contested topics that often provoke a range of audience reactions, including accusations of blasphemy and even death threats against the author/director. For instance, audience members of different political views confronted each other through song at the performance of his show Our Violence, Your Violence in Split, Croatia in 2015. The show thus unfolded in the auditorium as much as it did onstage.12 As Caroline Heim points out in her book Audience as Performer, ‘[A]udience responses actually contribute to, inform and alter the onstage performance’ (Heim 2016, p. 2). The audience also embodies the impossibility of Binet’s seventh function of language—the ability of the author to have absolute control of his/her semantic gesture. Moreover, the audience, the reader and the recipient make and unmake the author. The two characters in Shakespeare in Love involved in the ‘Who is this?’/‘Nobody, he is the author’ (Bennett 2005, p. 1) exchange are the theatre manager and the patron; they came to observe the rehearsal. Even though they are invested in the production of the play, they effectively became the internal audience. The audience makes the bard. The beholder determines if the author is somebody or nobody, a national treasure or a traitor, deserving of accolades or (albeit in extreme instances) of death threats. The construction of the author in theatre and performance is essentially no different to other media, at least not when it comes to needing to find an authorial figure at the other end of the communication process (whether to worship or deconstruct, agree or quarrel with). Yet the collective nature of theatre and performance stresses the complexity (aesthetic, political, social, philosophical) and unstable character of authorial presence and absence in the work. Moreover, in light of the author’s death and the recipient’s rebirth, we are able to observe

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the process of co-creation more closely, and witness the multiple ways of completing the meaning—both its radical political potential and its ambiguities and limitations.

The Case for Resurrection In his essay, ‘Exit the Author’ (2013), Dan Rebellato asserts that Barthes’s and Foucault’s notion of authorial unintentionality has been interpreted at face value. He turns to Foucault’s essay ‘What is an Author?’ to offer a different reading of the authorial absence: ‘Foucault’s project is to ask, given the author’s absence, what was at stake in his or her presence, what social and cultural procedures were in place to constitute and separate out the author?’ (22) The question Foucault poses as the title of his essay, ‘What is an Author?’, should be reversed or at least expanded on: Who is the author and who is the audience? Foucault’s use of ‘What’ instead of ‘Who’ was meant to unmask the hegemony the term author implies. Coming back to ‘Who?’, however, would mean understanding the multiple possibilities and limitations of the term with regard to gender, ethnicity, class and politics. It would not be about authorship as much as it would be about the author as an accountable figure that is both self-fashioned and shaped through public imagination. Moreover, when Foucault, following Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author, replaced the question who is the author? with ‘What is an Author?’ to point out that the notion of the author is a construct, the recipient remained ignored. The common questions in theatre and performance analysis are who, what, where, and for whom? Often, volumes of writing are required to answer these four simple questions. In her critique of the Structuralist death of the author, feminist literary theorist Nancy Miller emphasizes the need to ask who the recipient is. Her question is a somewhat revised version of the performance analysis question, ‘for whom?’. However, Miller is not so much concerned with the intended audience with whom the author wishes to communicate as much as she is with the question of how different readers, viewers, audiences, and participants engage with the work and, in a way, with the author. Miller argues that removing the author has not led to a radical revision of the concept of authorship. The text has become disembodied, in the sense that it no longer matters who generates the text, the performance, or the interaction as the work formulates itself in the eye of the beholder. But who is the beholder, the reader, the spectator, the participant? Miller writes that the

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‘reader is a space and a process’, but according to Barthes and Foucault, she/he is ‘without history, biography, psychology’ (Miller 1993, p. 21). Hence, Miller concludes that the ‘reader is “someone” written on’ (ibid.). In her essay ‘Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader’, Miller points out: It is, after all, the author anthologized and institutionalized who by his (canonical) presence excludes the less known works of women and minority writers and who by his authority justifies the exclusion. By the same token, feminist criticism’s insistence on the importance of the reader – on positing the hypothesis of her existence – might have found affinities with a position that understands the Birth of the Reader as the necessary counterpoint to the Death of the Author. (Miller 1993, p. 21)

The radical potential of authorial death has not been fulfilled as the recipient has remained generic, unknown, and as anonymous (if not more so) as the authorial figure she was replacing. This brings us back to the need to foreground the question who? at both ends of the communication spectrum in literature, art, theatre, performance, and beyond. Who is the author and who is the recipient (though not necessarily always in the same linear and chronological order)? Who the recipient is determines whether the work is preaching to the converted or provoking new, if at times uncomfortable, insights. As our brief examples of uninvited audience participation have shown, the question of who the recipient is shaped the political dimensions and impact of the performance, whether it be Hugo destabilizing the class stratification in nineteenth-century Paris, Synge challenging nationalist sentiments in early twentieth-century Dublin, or Frlji´c’s in-yer-face treatment of religion, capitalism and nationalism in twenty-first-century Split. In participatory and delegated performance, this question—who is the recipient?—is crucial in shaping the ethical dimensions of the engagement, which allows us to distinguish between a participant’s instrumentalization and agency. The question who is the author?, however, allows us to conduct an investigation into the cultural and political implications of her/his death (yet in a somewhat different way than in Binet’s aforementioned murder mystery featuring Roland Barthes). This investigation is at least twofold. Firstly, it concerns the ethical and political responsibility of the author. It

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implies that artists have a role in society and that their political engagement has potential, as we have seen in the case of the auteurs of the French New Wave closing the Cannes Film Festival in 1968 in solidarity with rioting students and workers. In other words, it calls for the author(s) to acknowledge their political responsibility, make a moral choice and answer to the socio-political and ethical demands of her/his time. It calls for them to challenge, to provoke, to shake up the status quo, to socially engage with the world, to unmask reality and make us see better. Secondly, asking who is the author? allows us to probe further into the question of authorial death, starting with the fact that not all authors are born equal. If not all authors are born equal, can they then all die the same death? Miller, for example, points out that the notion of the death of the author does not work in the same way for women as it does for men, since their histories and relationships to institutions, canons, and selves have been different. Hence, the question should be, what does the death of the author mean for the subject ‘who has juridically been excluded from the polis, hence decentred, ‘disoriginated’, deinstitutionalised (Miller 1993, p. 23)?’ How does the ‘Death of the Author’ decentre those subjects that have never occupied the centre? How do authors from the margin die? As cultural theorist Boym wrote in her book Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths and the Modern Poet: It is not accidental that the first criticism of Structuralist resistance to biography came from feminist critics and from scholars from non-Western cultures, or countries with totalitarian regimes, who refute a single model of modernism emphasizing cultural, gender and historical differences. (Boym 1991, p. 24)

In this book, I make a case, metaphorically speaking, for revisiting the gravesite of the author(s), where the investigation into his death needs to be reopened in the light of her resurrection. Finally, thinking about the death of the author alongside her/his resurrection highlights the accountability of the authorial figure and challenges the radical gesture of her/his disembodiment. The autobiography Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes epitomizes and marks the first instance of this disembodiment; as soon as it becomes framed through a narrative or some other artistic form it ceases to be a fact and becomes fiction. Following on that, reading the work through the author’s life appears naïve and

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unsophisticated. For the Belgian theorist Paul de Man, an author has no biography. In his essay ‘Autobiography as De-facement,’ de Man provides a radical critique of the Romantic notion of the relationship between art and life: We assume that life produces autobiography as an act produces consequences, but can we not suggest with equal justice that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of the selfportraiture, and thus determined in all its aspects by the resources of its medium? (de Man 1984, p. 69)

In this approach, there is no performativity between text and body, no relationship between the language with which Binet, for instance, described the moment Barthes was hit by the van and the actual blood, pain, and broken bones due to which the life of the famous theorist would end. ‘Who is the author?’ is not only an irrelevant but also an impossible question to ask according to de Man. For him, ‘Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it itself is a cause’ (ibid., p. 81). We can stretch this line of thought further to say that if the author cannot be known, then he cannot be held accountable either. All we have is the work; there is no authorial personhood of any relevance beyond the work itself. Ironically, de Man’s own biography presented a challenge to his theories when in 1987 the New York Times published an article entitled ‘Yale Scholar’s Articles Found in Nazi Paper’. It turned out that between 1940 and 1942, young de Man published 170 articles in the collaborationist Belgian newspaper Le Soir some of which expressed open anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments. Even though de Man took no other part in the crimes of the World War II aside of his collaborationist journalism, this discovery brought a different perspective not only on the beloved and respected Yale professor, but also on his work. With these revelations in mind, we can no longer engage with the work of the critic Paul de Man without considering his biography. In other words, we can no longer consider what is written under the name Paul de Man without returning to the question of who Paul de Man was. His own life posits a dialectical and ethical challenge to his theory of authorial defacement. As Sean Burke, the author of The Death & Return of the Author, points out:

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[…] since his Le Soir articles have come to light, many commentators have seen factors beyond those of textual epistemology urging this flight from self. De Man’s denial of biography, his idea of autobiography as defacement, have come to be seen not as disinterested theoretical statements, but as sinister and meticulous acts of self protection, by which he sought to (a)void his historical self. The attempt to efface and deface the writer in the theoretical prose is seen as a way of detaching the Paul de Man of Yale who wrote Blindness and Insight and Allegories of Misreading from the Paul de Man of occupied Belgium who also put his name to a number of collaborationist articles. (Burke 1992, p. 2)

The author’s biography emerges here as a form of palimpsest that creeps through the work whether or not it was invited. In a biography, the cultural text of the author’s persona and her/his work is often filled with contradictions and discrepancies that pose ethical difficulties for the beholder. Even a brief glimpses into de Man’s and Pirandello’s biographies have given us a taste of this dilemma. We are not only concerned with Pirandello’s Fascist Party membership card and whether or not he has redeemed himself by tearing it to pieces, but also with how his work is shaped by our beholding gaze into his biographical background. Knowing the author’s biography might also turn Six Characters in Search of an Author into a somewhat different play: an indulgent, self-referential, metatheatrical mind game, an escapist work that looks elsewhere while the fascists take over. And what would be more convenient than to dramatize the mechanisms and metaphors of theatrical illusions? In this reading through the author’s biography, Pirandello’s play becomes a work of dangerous escapism in dark times. In the case of Paul de Man, even critical theory of the death of the author, his disappearance in the text, emerges as a cover-up. These two historical cases speak very pertinently to some of the recent issues and ethical dilemmas arising from the discord between life and art that have, for instance, resurfaced through the Me Too Movement when a number of highly respected cultural figures including theatre and film-makers were accused of sexual misconduct. Do we owe it to the significance of the work to separate art from the messiness of the author’s life? Or is the work irrevocably tainted by the ethically dubious or disgraceful life of the author? In the process of navigating these dilemmas, what is the responsibility of the beholder? In other words, is the beholder also potentially a culprit be it by turning a blind eye to the author’s life in order to enjoy the art or conversely, by letting go, in indignation, of both

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the disgraced author and his work, no matter how significant the latter might be? Tim Crouch’s provocative play The Author that premiered in 2009 at the London’s Royal Court Theatre could be interpreted as dramatization of the ethical dilemmas of Barthes’s concept of the death of the author. The relationship between disembodiment (Barthes) and defacement (deMan) on the one hand, and the author’s biography, on the other, emerges in the play through doubling and blurring of lines between art and reality. The main protagonist of the play is called Tim Crouch, just like the play’s author, and he is also a writer. Like The Author, the play the fictional Tim Crouch has written is also performed in the Royal Court. Moreover, Tim Crouch, the dramatic character, is performed by his writer, the actual Tim Crouch. When the character Tim Crouch says: ‘I’m Tim Crouch, I tell her, the author. She looks blank. She hasn’t heard of me’ (Crouch 2009, p. 9), it echoes the nobody/somebody dialectics of the authorial persona. Yet, it also emphasizes the beholder in the process of acknowledging the author. As one enters the Royal Court’s Jarwood space (where the performance I saw took place) there is no stage, only two banks of seats facing each other. The audience is, thus, no longer an amorphous collective body, there is no hiding in the dark, and the spotlight is on the audience as much as on the performers. As Stephen Bottoms observes, ‘The Author undermines the unwritten ideological contract of most theatre production, in which the audience is assumed to be unified, anonymous body who will follow the play together, laugh together, perhaps cry together, and applaud together at the end’ (Bottoms 2011, p. 452). The actors are planted among the audience members and they invite the audience to confabulate. Nothing has been represented for the audience to see, rather we are given the story, its verbal imagery that is, to conjure the event in our minds-eye. Of the four protagonists of the play (who all have the same names as the actors who perform them) one, Adrian, is in the role of an audience member—a great admirer of the work of the fictional Tim Crouch. At the beginning of the play, there is a hint of participatory conviviality when Adrian says: ‘Oh, we are gorgeous! But I often think I think – I think that the most fantastical – the most made up thing is us! Don’t you _____?’ (Crouch 2009, p. 8).

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The audience is eased into the performance with simple, non-intrusive questions and at first it is not too difficult to elicit participation. Seemingly, this set up could be an almost ideal example of audience’s confabulation, if only the story was not the story of violent abuse and if at the end of the play we were not privy to the details of the author watching on-line pornographic footage of a baby being abused. Placing the crux of the play within the everlasting debate of what is more powerful in theatre, words or imagery, Dan Rebellato, offers his own account of the play’s final scene: As Crouch delivers this long and horrifying speech, the lights slowly go down, placing us in the dark. It could not be further from graphic representation of violence: we literally see nothing. At the same time, though, we are left alone with our mental images and this made those among the most testing and upsetting few minutes I’ve spent in the theatre this century. (Rebellato 2017, p. 4)

Soon after the audience easies into their participatory role, the material gets darker and the relationship to the author(s) and the characters becomes more complicated. Spectators are prompted to respond throughout the play, although as the play progresses some are also compelled to walkout (which happened numerous times in the performance history of The Author). The violence is introduced gradually, yet somewhat unexpectedly. First, it is the author of the fictional play, Tim, who describing a visit to a floatation tank facility, reveals an inappropriate private sexual fantasy. The monologue is addressed to the audience the entire time. The audience is made further implicated into the delivery as Tim, the fictional author, interjects his monologue with questions such as: ‘Is this okay? Is it okay if I carry on?’ (Crouch 2009, p. 9). The audience’s uneasiness with participation and involvement in the play grows when Esther, the actress who performed in Tim’s play, starts to recount her experience of the creative process. She played Karen, a victim of horrific sexual abuse, who she had interviewed when researching for the role. Esther starts to recount her experience as the abuse victim Karen, while the fictional author/director, Tim, insists that she shares the graphic details of her abuse. When Karen/Esther asks him if they could stop, Tim responds: ‘Would anyone else like to ask Karen any questions? You are happy to improvise, aren’t you Esther?’ (Crouch 2009, p. 19). While the play gains additional currency in the era of the ‘Me Too Movement’, it

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not only brings up the question of how the author—his creative process and his personal conduct—should be considered in the reception of his work, it also challenges the role of the audience in the reception process. Bottoms recounts his experience of seeing the performance: Even for those of us who remain silent through this sequence, there is a palpable sense that we are in some way responsible for its taking place: it has been researched and rehearsed from our benefit as spectators of ‘socially serious’ drama. (Bottoms 2011, p. 456)

This play and its performances have inspired a range of discussions concerning participation and provocation in theatre, relationship between verbal and visual imagery in performance, and blurring of lines between art and reality.13 However, I would like to emphasize the play’s dialogue with Barthes’s proposition of the death of the author. Its title is already a subtle allusion to Barthes’s work, while the ending makes the intertextual provocation of The Author to The Death of the Author unambiguous: Tim: Nobody was hurt. Anyway. I apologise. Anyway. I continue. The writing is leaving the writer. The death of the author. Tim leaves the auditorium. (27)

‘The writing is leaving the writer’—sublimates the notion of disembodiment of Barthes and the concept of defacement proposed by de Man, yet in the light of the play, both concepts elicit an ethical discomfort. Crouch pushes the question of the relationship between the personality of the author and his work to extremes to probe ethics and politics of both creation and reception. Accountability is, I argue, one of the central themes of the play and not just of the author, but also of the recipient (the reader of the play and even more so of the participating audience). ‘The death of the author’—which at the end of the play turns into a stage direction—suggests the performativity of the author that inevitably destabilizes the lines between life and art and at times does so in very disturbing ways. Here the death of the author is a metaphorical stage death that, against the backdrop of the play’s extreme content, feels like

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a cop-out. It emerges as a moral necessity that the death of the author ought to be only provisional. Responsibility and accountability are reciprocal in the author-recipient relationship. The author is responsible for the forms and creative processes they choose and the ideological frames they propose through these forms. They are responsible for shaping the aesthetics and politics of the initial scenario, which then gets further shaped, confirmed, negotiated, or contested in the reception process. The recipient is responsible for the interpretation, not just of the work, but of authorial presence and absence within this work and beyond. The recipient is responsible for continuously probing the death and the resurrection of the author and needs to ask the question of who is speaking, or who we think is speaking, and for whom. With the accountability of the author (individual and collective), comes the responsibility of the reader, beholder, or participant to ask, who is this author? A brave, socially engaged artist that pushes against the grain, or an opportunist that prefers the perks that come with not disturbing the structures of power? A bard with a room of his own or a nobody writing at her kitchen table between cooking meals and attending to the children? And at times and in contexts where authors have been silenced, censored, and even made to disappear, it is crucial to ask where the author is (and not just within the aesthetic structure of the text, performance, or painting). It is the moral responsibility of the recipient to know the author, even if she/he is a construct, an already semi-fictional, theatricalized figure that is all one could ever know.

The Author Dies Hard Authorial presence/absence has emerged in a variety of media as a selfreflective and communicational aesthetic device, as an ethical, conceptual choice and as a political strategy in different modes. This paradox of presence and absence—or rather, the duality of death and resurrection—poses a question for us: What/who emerges through this duality? And what does this deconstructed, reassembled, mutilated, modified, enhanced and diminished authorial figure mean? Is he or she (though as indicated above, she merits a separate discussion that will soon follow) killed over and over again with every act of annunciation, with every act of reading a book, listening to a musical composition, watching a theatre show, viewing a film, participating in a performance? Or is she/he variably resurrected and modified in and through the process of reception? The death of the

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author, Barthes claims, is the rebirth of the reader, but above all it is an opportunity for the author with a small ‘a’ to appear. Like a stage actor, this author with a small ‘a’ dies a stage death—over and over again with every new performance, in every new act of reading, watching and listening. The death is seemingly always the same, but like in theatre, it is also always slightly different as it unfolds in the eye of the beholder and in the mind of the reader. Like all stage deaths, this one is also never completed. Resurrections are another matter. They come in various shapes and forms, through various methods of conjuring, inscribing, ghosting, erasing and through writing/performing the self. The spectre ranges from the cult of the author to the author as a postmodern pastiche— somewhat like Karl Marx with Groucho Marx’s bushy eyebrows. Miller sees in the ‘Death of the Author’ a strategy where, on the one hand, the subject is dispersed, while on the other, the text is fragmented and repackaged ‘for another mode of circulation and reception’ (Miller 1993, p. 29). Barthes’s proposition of the ‘Death of the Author’ could be read in terms of a dismantling of one kind of authorial subject (e.g. white, male, Western, godlike) and a potential for construction of an alternative authorial subject—the author with a small ‘a’. This opens up the possibility for us to acknowledge multiple versions of authorial subjectivity rooted in different histories and socio-political positionalities, as well as in different categories of class, gender, race and ethnicity. In the death of the canonical author, the other author—the historically marginalized, decentred and deinstitutionalized one becomes reconstituted. There are numerous artistic strategies through which we can investigate the death of the author, and they include, but are not limited to adapting, borrowing, overwriting, ghosting, parodying and re-performing. Most of them could, however, fall under Miller’s term political intertextuality (to which we might add political interperformativity), which she defines as forms of ‘negotiation within the dominant social text’ (Miller 1993, p. 29). This links back to a fundamental question: Why is the death (and resurrection) of the author happening here and now? Why is Barthes coming up again? In his preface to Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Barthes comments on the social responsibility of the text in the world where: […] there is no language site outside bourgeois ideology: our language comes from it, returns to it, remains closed up. The only possible rejoinder is neither confrontation nor destruction, but only theft: fragment the old

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text of culture, science, literature, and change its features according to formulae of disguise, as one disguises stolen goods. (Barthes 1971, p. 10)

Although these words were written nearly fifty years ago, strangely, they resonate today. Moreover, today it seems worthwhile to return to the notion of the disembodied author and to exhume her/his body. For in the age of post-truth, it is of crucial importance to know who has been speaking, in the past and in the present, and how and why we have constructed them. In this book, I argue for the resurrection of the author with a small ‘a’—the author as a performative figure—from an aesthetic, political and ethical perspective. I look into the repertoires of authorial death and resurrection through various modes of ‘political intertextuality’ and interperformativtiy.14 However, before embarking on a journey from intertextuality and autobiography to absences, erasures, ars moriendi— and before directing my attention to death and resurrection—I will first address the topic of Birth(s). The following section—Part I, Birth(s) looks at how the authorial figure has been shaped through history and cultural imagination and how each new construction of the authorial presence is predicated on some form of absence. Birth(s ) reflect on the authorial figure synchronically and diachronically—on the terms, modes and consequences of his construction—taking us from antiquity to the affirmation of the term author in Romanticism. In this section, the author is viewed as a heteroglossic figure, as a colonizer, and as a self -fashioning performative figure. The final section of the book (Part II) examines authorial Deaths and Resurrections as intertextual/conceptual, ontological and political category. Focusing on a range of works where Chekhov has been resurrected as a character, in the chapter Author as Intertextual Reference, I investigate the poetics and politics of the intertextual strategies of rewriting that turn the author into a fictional figure within a performative act that brings authorial presence and absence to the forefront. In The Author is Present, I examine self-evocations of the figure of the artist, highlighting the relationship and transformability between life and lifelessness in performances of the authorial self, memory and ars moriendi. Focusing on the performance art and theatricality of Marina Abramovi´c, I address the duality between the presence and absence of the authorial figure through memory, re-performance, celebrity and rehearsal of one’s own

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death. In The Artist is (Meaningfully) Absent, I examine political censorship and ways in which it, somewhat paradoxically, absents (and even in some cases, erases) the author, while at the same time reasserting the presence of the subversive artist. While reflecting on a variety of cases of authorial absence/presence in the context of censorship—including the attempted erasure of Meyerhold from Soviet Theatre history, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the tragic destiny of the poet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, and the global stardom of the artist Ai Weiwei— I explore the mechanism of censoring and silencing authors/artists as another form of authorial absence and death. The authors and artists featured here can only be indicative case studies. Each choice of illustrative example made could have been supplemented with an alternative, and each would have made a variation to the performance of authorial presence and absence and to the claim that the author ‘dies hard’.

Notes 1. The term auteur privileges the director as a film’s ‘author’. It comes as a resistance to the formulaic approaches to filmmaking in the Hollywood film industry of the 1940s and 1950s with the aim of elevating the status of film to that of other arts as opposed to subordinating it to the written word. Jean Epstein used the term for the first time in 1923 to describe a director’s work and role. However, the notion of the auteur and auteurism was formulated in the writings of Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, and others who published in the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Yet it was Truffaut’s essay ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’ (1954) and André Bazin’s ‘La Politique des auteurs’ (1957) that have been seminal to the theory of the auteur. 2. Groucho Marx was a famous US comedian and part of the comic trio The Marx Brothers. He shares his family name with the philosopher Karl Marx and is instantly recognized by his bushy eyebrows and black moustache. Marxism with Groucho tendencies suggests a playful twist to the seriousness of ideology. It also exemplifies the playful, theatrical tactics of the struggle that marked the revolt of 1968 in France. 3. Jakobson’s model is an extension of a model proposed by Karl Bühler in 1934, which included: the sender (psychophysical system a), the receiver (psychophysical system b), the sign; things and factual situations. I have added categories that related to theatre, performance, and visual art to my explanations of Jakobson’s categories.

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4. For more on Jakobson’s six functions of language, see Roman Jakobson, ‘Linguistics and Poetics,’ in Style in Language, ed. T. Sebeok, 350–377, Cambridge, MA, 1960. 5. Like a number of his fellow intellectuals (Curzio Malaparte, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ugo Ojetti, and others), Pirandello could not resist the allure of fascism. In 1925, with Mussolini’s help, he became the artistic director of the Teatrod’Arte di Roma. He would, however, clash with the fascist leader and after a four-year stint in the Italian Fascist Party, he would tear up his fascist membership card to pieces in front of the Party’s secretary general. Following this incident, Pirandello was placed under surveillance by the fascist secret police. He claimed to be apolitical and received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1934 (see LetiziaArgenteri, ‘Pirandello and Fascism,’ Mediterranean Studies, 6 (1996): 129–136). 6. As a modernist like Gordon Creig, Pirandello saw the actor as a necessary evil, echoing Plato’s views on mimesis as twice removed from the original. For Pirandello, the actor is the necessary but imperfect mediator between the author and his creation—always failing to fully embody the authorial vision. Despite the presumption that realizing the author’s original intent would hail the most perfect representation—an ideal akin to the unattainable seventh function of language—Pirandello acknowledges presence, embodiment, and the impossibility of singular authorship in theatre: ‘Unfortunately, there always has to be a third, unavoidable element that intrudes between the dramatic author and his creation in the material being of the performance: the actor. As is well known, this is an unavoidable limitation of dramatic art. Just as the author has to merge with his character in order to make it live, to the point of feeling as it feels, desiring as it desires, so also to no less degree, if that can be accomplished must the actor’. (Pirandello, ‘Illustrators, Actors and Translators,’ in Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author, ed. Jeniffer Lorch, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 8). 7. Numerous works in theatre scholarship have addressed the role of the audience in the unfolding of the theatrical performance, including Susan Bennett’s Theatre Audience, Theatre and Audience (1997) and Caroline Heim’s Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre: Audiences in the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, 2016, to mention a few. 8. The separation of performers/makers and onlookers dates back to the private performances of the eighteenth century; a change in theatre architecture occurred in 1850 when stalls were introduced, rendering the demarcation between the stage and the audience sharper. The sense of the audience as being invisible and peeking into the lives of others followed in the naturalist theatre of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. 9. I engage in more detail with the aesthetic, political, and communication processes in both Meyerhold’s and Brecht’s theatre in my book Theatre of

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10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. See Gareth White, Audience Participation in Theatre, New York: Palgrave, 2013. For more on this topic see Claire Bishop, Participation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006 and Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics, New York and London: Routledge, 2011. For more on audience participation, including through disruption, see Sruti Bala, The Gestures of Participatory Art, Ann Arbor, Manchester University Press, 2018. A symposium was held at the University of Leeds in 2010 inspired by Crouch’s work and convened by Stephen Bottoms, entitled ‘The Author and the Audience’. In 2011, Contemporary Theatre Review has published selected proceeding Forum: Tim Crouch, The Author, and the Audience. For more on the aesthetics and politics of interperformativity and intertheatricality, see S. Jestrovi´c, Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology.

Works Cited Argenteri, Letizia. 1996. Pirandello and Fascism. Mediterranean Studies 6: 129– 136. Bala, Sruti. 2018. The Gestures of Participatory Art. Ann Arbor: Manchester University Press. Barralut, Jean Louis. 1974. Memories for Tomorrow. New York: E.P. Dutton. Barthes, Roland. 1971/1976. Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland. 1977a. Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes, trans. R. Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Barthes, Roland. 1977b. The Death of the Author. In Image—Music—Text, trans. S. Heath, 142–149. London: Fontana Press. Bennett, Andrew. 2005. The Author. London: Routledge. Bennett, Susan. 1997. Theatre Audience, Theatre and Audience. London: Routledge. Binet, Laurent. 2017. The 7th Function of Language, trans. S. Taylor. London: Harvill Secker. Bishop, Claire. 2006. Participation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. Everything and Nothing. In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, trans. Jorge Luis Borges. New York: A New Directions Book.

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Bottoms, Stephen. 2011. Materialising the Audience: Tim Crouch’s Sight Specifics in ENGLAND and The Author. Contemporary Theatre Review 21 (4): 445–463. Boym, Svetlana. 1991. Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of Modern Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burke, Sean. 1992. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cohn-Bandit, Daniel, and Gabriel Cohn-Bandit. 1968. Obsolete Communism: The Left Wing Alternative. New York: McGraw Hill. Crouch, Tim. 2009. The Author. London: The Royal Court. de Man, Paul. 1984. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Colombia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology, trans. Gaytri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimor: John Hopkins UP. Foucault, Michel. 1977. What Is an Authro? In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. D.F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gallix, Andrew. 2010. In Theory: The Death of the Author. The Guardian, January 13. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/ 2010/jan/13/death-of-the-author. Heim, Caroline. 2016. Audience as Performer: The Changing Role of Theatre: Audiences in the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge. Holmes, Diana. 1996. French Women’s Writing 1848–1994. London: The Anhlone Press. Jackson, Shannon. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York and London: Routledge. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. Linguistics and Poetics. In Style in Language, ed. T. Seboek, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jestrovic, Silvija. 2006. Theatre of Estrangement: Theory, Practice, Ideology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Lorch, Jeniffer. 2005. Pirandello: Six Characters in Search of an Author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, Nancy. 1993. Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writer and the Reader. In What Is an Author? ed. M. Biriotti and Nicola Miller, 19–42. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Rebellato, Dan. 2013. Exit the Author. In Contemporary British Theatre, ed. Vicky Angelaki, 9–31. London: Palgrave. Rebellato, Dan. 2017. Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Theatre: British Drama, Violence and Writing. Sillages Critiquesvol 22: 2–15. Willner, Alfred. 1970. The Action Image of Society: On Cultural Politization. London: Tavistock Publications. White, Gareth. 2013. Audience Participation in Theatre. New York: Palgrave.

PART I

Birth(s)

CHAPTER 2

Author as a Heteroglossic Figure

In this brief historical overview, the aim is to show that the theatricality and performativity of the author did not first become apparent with the proclamation of the author’s death but instead, would have been present from birth. In other words, theatricality and performativity are part of the author’s genetic code. In what follows, given that the concept of the author in the modern sense of the word only began to appear in Romanticism, the term author will inevitably emerge as an anachronism. Here, I position the term ‘author’ as a deliberate anachronism through which to see the variations of the concept dialectically and through different modes of theatricality and performativity. The performativity of the authorial figure foregrounds the notion of the author as maker and at times literally, as performer. The author, broadly speaking, emerges as the entity that embodies the work, establishing a semantic identity through which the work takes its place within a wider cultural context. This performativity of the authorial figure highlights, from its very beginnings, the tensions between the author’s presence and absence, between fame and anonymity. Inherent in the performativity of the elusive authorial figure, these tensions play out variously through the Western history of authorship. They concern the relationship between the individual and the collective (Ancient Greece), anonymity and authority (Middle Ages), embodiment and textualization (Renaissance, see Chapter 3) and the performing self (Romanticism, see © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_2

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Chapter 4). In this chapter, the birth of the author will be viewed in the context of pre-print culture, of Ancient Greece and Middle Ages, where the author variously emerges as a heteroglossic (Bakhtin) figure through a multiplicity of voices and performance modes, and through language politics.

The Individual and the Collective ‘What is meant by the name Homer?’ is a question asked in the preface of one of the translations of his works (Walsh and Merrill 2002). Scholarship on Homer—arguably, one of the first ‘authors’ in the Western tradition, albeit not in the modern sense of the term—proposes that he is ‘simply a figure of speech’ (Griffin 2000, p. xv). Accordingly, Homer should be understood as an oral tradition rather than as the individual creator of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Precisely because works of oral tradition, such as his, were perfected through generations, ‘it is impossible to retrace the work of generation of singers to that moment when some singer first sang a particular song’ (Lord 1960, p. 100). Albert B. Lord, who studied Homer’s composition in comparison with the preserved oral tradition of the former Yugoslavia, points to the ‘fluidity’ of the authorial figure of the oral poet (ibid.) whereby, as Bennett adds, ‘every new performance in the oral epic tradition constitutes a new composition, every performance is unique, and at the same time every performance is also embodied within the tradition’ (Bennett 2005, p. 32). In this performance situation, the ‘author is present’, so to speak, but is also already an unstable and a rather relative category. His voice has been shaped not only through his own original traits but also through the voices of his predecessors and successors. Hence, the Ancient Greek poietes is an author who does not so much create the work, as channel it and mediate it, so that the work comes into being via a process of repetitive echoing of previous iterations in the here and now of the oral performance. The Ancient Greek word poietes means singer, but it also means maker, while the term rhapsode translates as the weaver of songs—someone who stitches the verses, strings the lines together, in an act that takes place in front of an audience. The key figure that enables this transmission is the rhapsode, the performer of the song, whose work is described metaphorically as weaving—as stitching together many different patterns of the song into a new, unified pattern. In the sense of the craftsmanship metaphor of

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weaving, the poet/author is the ultimate performer embodying both the process of making and the creation that unfolds from it. In early versions, the author emerges as a performer in the process of repetitions and variations similar to those of theatre-making, not only through his own voice, but also through the voices of those who came after him. Inherent in these processes is the inevitable conversation that accompanies making art of any kind. In his work on Homer, scholar Gregory Nagy points to the multiplicity of voices as a form of coauthorship, akin to the collaborative work and the development process that is typically found in theatre and performance. This could also be seen as a version of Bakhtin’s notion of heteroglossia and dialogism, whereby the work is not dominated by a single consciousness but rather is shaped through the multiplicity of voices.1 Bakhtin, however, coins these terms to describe the voices within the work—the narrative voice(s) and those of the characters—rather than the voice of the authorial persona. The multiplicity of voices that Nagy describes in the case of Homer not only makes the work dialogic, it also makes the author a heteroglossic figure. Bennett further points out that ‘each performer of the song is in some sense its co-author, developing and changing the song in his or her own way’ (Bennett 2005, p. 34). Nagy highlights the construction of the author as a retrospective imaginary that occurs at the point when the text becomes more fixed. He recognizes this as a process of mythologization whereby a performer, in this case Homer, ‘is retrojected as the original genius of the heroic song, the proto-poet whose poetry is reproduced by a continuous succession of performers’ (Nagy 1996a, p. 92). Bennett adds that ‘In Homer’s case, in fact, the rhapsodes have a name, the ‘tribe of Homer’ or the ‘sons of Homer’ or Homeridai, poets or performers whose task it was to preserve Homer’s work for posterity in their own performances’ (Bennett 2005, p. 34). Thus, the authorial figure was established in and through performance and as part of a collective process fulfilled by Homeridai. In this process, the audience also played a crucial part. According to Nagy, ‘the transmitter as performer must also be authorized by his audience who are presumed to be authoritative members of the song culture’ (Nagy 1996b, p. 19). He argues that the elusive word mimesis, generally translated as ‘imitation’, can also have the more complex sense of ‘re-enactment’. Nagy points out that one of the original meanings of the word mimesis was not only to represent the story and the speech of the characters within it, but also to represent the early poet—the author.

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In other words, Homeridai were not only the tellers of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, they were also the ‘tellers’ of Homer as the authorial figure. The rhapsodes can be seen as ‘acting both the words and the persona of Homer himself’ (Nagy 2003, p. 37)—performing both the story and the storyteller: My argument is that the rhapsode is re-enacting Homer by performing Homer, that he is Homer so long as the mimesis stays in effect, so long as the performance lasts. In the words of T.S Eliot (The Dry Salvages, 1941), “you are the music/While the music lasts.” From the standpoint of mimesis, the rhapsode is a recomposed performer: he becomes recomposed into Homer every time he performs Homer. (Nagy 1996b, p. 61)

Hence, these first traces of the author suggest that the author was born through re-performances and through multiple voices (each reiterating their unique variation of both the story and the authorial persona). In other words, this authorial presence was not so much a figure or an entity, but a performance—a collective, communal voice/body reiterated over time with slight differences in each new re-performance. In terms of contemporary terms, Homeridai could be described as a collective, collaborative performance and also as a form of participatory performance, delegated (and unfolding over time) from one generation to the next. Moreover, it is not Homer, then, who brought The Iliad and The Odyssey to us, but Homeridai—not the author/creator but the author(s)/performer(s). If we were to retrace the steps back far enough, we would find the author’s origins in religious, ritualistic, oral and communal performances rather than in the solitary act of stringing the words together. The author, thus, comes into being from a performative situation where the distance between the performer/author and the audience is also fluid. Homer, the author, emerges in a collective body sustained and renewed through performance over a long period of time. Here, the author is both conceptually and literally a heteroglossic figure. The heteroglossia of this early authorial figure already comprises more than just words and sounds; it also carries a repertoire of movements, gestures and feelings. More specifically, it does not only utter the poem of the poet named Homer, it performs both the poem and the poet—and both are reshaped over time.

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Penelopiad Versus Homeridai Homeridai perform the dialectics of authorial presence and absence in the text and performance which are, in attitude, not far removed from forms of echoing and ghosting found in the contemporary examples this book will explore. Bennett points out that even though the understanding of authorship in Homer’s time was very different from the modern one, an examination of how Homer the author has been constructed can clarify the author-making process in more recent history. In other words, it helps us see how ‘we make the author in the image of a desire for a transcendent originatory unity’ (Bennett 2005, p. 35) as well as a reflection of the social desires of a given time. Margaret Atwood’s 2005 novella, Penelopiad, adds a layer to the questions of presence and absence when it comes to the notion of the author as a collective performance and to the idea of the author as a reflection of the social desires of a given time. Her novella is a reworking of the Odysseus myth from the perspective of Penelope in a structure similar to classical Greek drama that alternates between Penelope’s narrative passages and the choral commentary of her twelve maids. Atwood foregrounds the sense of heteroglossia by starting the chorus narratives in a jump-rope rhythm and ending in a 17-line iambic dimeter poem. She also includes a variety of other styles including a lament, a folk song, an idyll, a sea shanty, a ballad, a drama, an anthropology lecture, a court trial and a love song. This approach highlights the parallels between Homeridai and the Penelopiad—both emerge through a multiplicity of voices and styles. In the Penelopiad, mixing different styles both synchronically and diachronically further establishes the journey of the myth from Homer’s epic to Atwood’s twenty-first-century feminist reworking of the story. This mixing, weaving, making and unmaking, then re-stitching to show other, hidden patterns of the famous story and its transmission unfolded first through generations of rhapsodes and, subsequently, through numerous intertextual renderings. Atwood’s title clearly alludes to the process of transmission and the performance of the Odyssey through Homeridai. Here, the title, Penelopiad, makes that link to the tradition, but immediately suggests a break from it. Penelopiad—being neither the voice of the authorial figure of Homer, performed and transmitted through others, nor of the famous hero, Odysseus—foregrounds the voice of the female protagonist, the character who does not go on an heroic journey, but waits at home for

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the journey to end. Moreover, in Atwood’s novel, the narrative of Penelope and the choral voices are further enhanced through the narratives of two maids telling their life stories. Atwood’s novella is not only a reconfiguration of the hero’s centrality, but also of the authorial lineage. The title, Penelopiad, asserts a parallel trajectory of authorship—a heteroglossia of the Other—that liberates the female protagonists from the myth of their patrilineage. This heteroglossia is political in its foregrounding of the author(s) not as the ‘sons of Homer’, but as the ‘daughters of Penelope’. In that sense, we might argue that Atwood, as the author, also places herself within this lineage of the Penelopiad and in opposition to the patrilineage of Homeridai. Her gesture of writing the Penelopiad offers an alternative re-enactment of both the story and the storyteller (as outlined in Nagy’s understanding of mimesis ). The ancestral figure of the author emerging from Atwood’s re-enactment, that is the Penelopiad, is not the one who has been canonized through a long history of re-enactments and subsequent textualizations, translations and scholarship. Rather, she is the one who could have been the original authorial figure, but instead has been historically cast as a background character in the story. In this way, Atwood’s Penelopiad charts an alternative vision of authorship and its origins. The trajectory from Homeridai to Penelopiad maps a reconfiguration of the authorial figure—a journey from Homer to Atwood—creating a parallel narrative of the epic and of the patriarchal history of authorship. This becomes especially pertinent in the light of Nagy’s argument positing that Homer was viewed not just as a creator of the famous heroic song, but also as its cultural hero: Ancient Greek institutions tend to be traditionally retrojected, by the Greeks themselves, each through a proto-creator, a culture hero who gets credited with the sum total of the given cultural institution. It was a common practice to attribute any major achievement of society, even if these achievements may have been realized only through a lengthy period of social evolution, to the episodic and personal accomplishment of a culture hero who is pictured as having made his monumental contribution in an earlier era of the given society. (Nagy 1996b, p. 76)

Homer is thus a metonymic figure—an individual who stands for the collective. In that light, we might read Atwood’s foregrounding of Penelope, in opposition to both Homer and Odysseus, as the retrojection of Penelope as an unsung culture hero of an alternative collective identity.

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Penelopiad, as a concept in opposition to Homeridai, asks what/who was the collective body of Homer, and immediately juxtaposes to that collective body another collective body—that of a female lineage—which hitherto had been excluded from the collaborative performance of making the authorial figure. The juxtaposition of Penelopiad and Homeridai suggests looking at the figure of Homer as the author and at Penelope as the mythological character. By way of a somewhat meandering route, this takes us back to the earlier reference to oral tradition scholarship that asserts that Homer is nothing more than a textual construct, a figure of speech. We might also say that Homer of Homeridai is no less fictitious than his somewhat side-lined female protagonist, Penelope. The lineage that connects the mythical protagonist, the poet and the rhapsode on the heroic journey through both mythology and literary tradition is contested by an alternative plot. The drama of that plot unfolds in a domestic setting, the mythical hero is female, and the suspense lies in how she plays the waiting game. Yet, her waiting requires as much courage and resilience (if not more) as Odysseus needed to fight the Cyclops. Different constructions of the authorial figure in Homerid and Penelopiad reflect different social desires along the very long path from Homer to Atwood. Along this path, heteroglossia, inherent in the making and unmaking of the author, becomes political intertextuality (Miller).

The Resurrection In late fourth century BC, the Athenian State Theatre underwent reforms—among which was the professionalization of the chorus—the collective body of Greek drama. Homeric performance traditions were reformed in a similar vein. Moreover, the idea of change, variation and improvisation inherent in the performances of both Homeric epic poetry and in the theatre were replaced with the quest for the correct versions of the epic and dramatic texts. The professionalization of actors and rhapsodes was in direct proportion with the decrease of flexibility with the texts. This quest for the ultimate, original version of the text also marked the shift of the author from a collective identity, channelled through the voices of the poet(s), to the author as a singular, culture hero. A passage in Plutarch’s Lives of the Ten Orators 841f (Nagy 1996b, pp. 174– 175) indicates that a reform was introduced legislating an official ‘State Script’ for the tragedies of the three tragic poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles

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and Euripides. Accordingly, a law was introduced requiring that Athenians erect bronze statues of each of the three poets. This occurred four centuries after Homer and nearly two centuries after Aeschylus started out as a tragic poet. The tragedians were long dead when Aristotle canonized them in his Poetics, giving primacy to Sophocles’s dramatic craft as the most perfect of the three dramatists. Aristotle further singled out the dramatic text as the only fixed and most important element of the transmission. Hence, in the Poetics, the performance elements were reduced to mere decorative function. For Aristotle, the engagement with great tragedians and their works no longer necessitated performance since reading them could do just as well. However, while the Poetics canonized the plays of the great tragedians for posterity, it was the performance, rather than the plays as written texts, that made the tragic poets cultural icons in their own time. With the appearance of the tragic poets, the dramatic performance, born out of ritual, took prominence over the performance poetry of the rhapsodes. Martin Revermann describes how tragedy became a major cultural force with pan-Hellenic appeal: By the end of the fourth century, there are dramatic performances in theatres, some of them seating far more than 10000 people, all over the Greek world and beyond (as far away as modern Afghanistan) […]; wellpaid star actors are highly mobile celebrities, while the majority of tragic playwrights no longer hail from Athens but from all over Greece (even if Athens retains the role of the epicentre of the art); tragedies have become not one but the vehicle for telling traditional tales (replacing, though certainly not obliterating, epic poetry), with its stories and performances inspiring visual artists […]; and some of the most celebrated intellectuals of the period engage with the tragedy as an important object of reflection. (Revermann 2016, p. 14)

Even though the heteroglossia in the performances of Homer as the authorial figure had shifted, this shift was by no means a full departure from the collective towards the individual. Rather, it signalled a different version of constructing the author through another form of collectivity. This form of collectivity is specific to theatre and it establishes itself through two key factors: the audience and the various makers involved in putting a performance on its feet. The audiences of Ancient Greek theatre were far larger than those of subsequent eras including the current one. As an integral part of the communal event of theatre,

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the audience formed a critical mass that equalled political events through which democratic processes of the polis unfolded. Greek tragedians were thus constructed as authorial figures and cultural icons through a mass communal process that was in its essence deeply participatory. In other words, it was the audience who established and validated its cultural icons. This communal body was indeed reflected in the role of the chorus in both tragedies and comedies—the element of the dramatic structure that not only provided commentary to the action, but also performed the role of the internal audience. The chorus configured the dynamics between the individual and the collective and between the author and the audience. Even though the ancient tragic poet was not performed so much through a variety of voices—as was the case with the epic performances of the rhapsodes—voices, bodies, gestures, costumes and masks of the actors added layers of heteroglossia to the concept of the author and authorship. This was no longer achieved through different voices of the rhapsodes merging seamlessly together into Homeridai in the process of constructing that monolithic cultural icon that became Homer. Rather, the authorial figure(s) that marked the theatrical performance became more multifaceted—establishing the collective identity through collaboration and performances of distinct authorial attributes such as the cultural gravitas of the tragedian and the ‘it factor’ (Roach) of the celebrity actor. The tragic poets emerged as major cultural icons of the time; their works were celebrated communally and their deaths were mourned collectively. And even though bronze statues were erected in their image, it was only through performance that the dead dramatists could be brought back to life. Aristophanes’s comedy, Frogs, serves as a case in point; arguably, it provides us with evidence of the first case of actual authors being resurrected as dramatic figures. Frogs was performed in 405 BC in response to the death of Euripides, which, given his status as a cultural icon, was experienced as a traumatic event in the community. Revermann observes that it is not surprising that a comedy should extensively interact with tragedy but is, in fact, ‘rather an important feature of the genre’ (Revermann 2016, p. 14). The appearance of the recently-deceased Euripides as a character in Aristophanes’s comedy could be read as a homage to the tragic poet and a continuation of Euripides’s existence from beyond the grave through the imagination of a fellow dramatist. It could also be read as a parodic performance of resurrection and comic relief from the collective sense of pain and loss due to the beloved poet’s passing. The motivation to resurrect Euripides was Aristophanes’s quest

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for a ‘decent poet’, who could save the city of Athens from a constant state of military crises and the threat from Sparta. Albeit in a comic mode, the tragic poet is seen not only as a figure of cultural significance, but also as someone who wields political and moral clout. Even though we might view the tragic poet as a collective construction of a cultural icon, his identity is no small matter for it is closely linked to how a community sees itself and conducts its politics. Revermann points out that even though it was not unusual for comedy to parody the tragic idiom, Frogs is unique ‘both in terms of the extent and the depth of comedy’s engagement with tragedy’ and for the ‘(meta)poetic dimension that pervades the play from start to finish’ (ibid.). In Frogs, Aristophanes deploys Dionysius, the god of theatre, to bring back Aeschylus and Euripides from beyond the grave, engaging them in a substantial debate (agon) on poetic value and matters of dramatic craft (techne). The contest between the tragic poets spans more than half of the play as each one quotes from his own texts and scrutinizes the work of his opponent. The metatheatricality of the debate is in no way hidden as the two tragic poets argue about versification, characterization and dramatic structure in ways that are both serious and hilarious. Nevertheless, grasping both the parodic and the intellectual aspects of this agon requires sophisticated knowledge on the part of the audience. Aristophanes therefore fully utilizes the chorus function to mediate between the specialized knowledge of the poets and varying degrees of audience competency, not entirely dissimilar to the way the novelist, Binet, mentioned in the previous chapter, uses the figure of a detective and his assistant, the young academic, to navigate the metanarrative of The 7th Function of Language in his resurrection of some of the major critical theorists of the twentieth century. In Aristophanes’s play, Euripides is depicted as arrogant and unpleasant but able to quickly challenge Aeschylus’s position as the leading tragic poet in the underworld. This resurrection of the author as dramatic character foregrounds the duality and, at times, discrepancy between the author as a cultural icon who carries artistic, political and moral significance for the community, and the author as a singular, private individual. In the end, Dionysus picks the winner according to ethical rather than aesthetic criteria: […] namely the tragedian’s power to save the polis (Frogs 1418-1421). This is why “Aeschylus” is preferred in the end (bearing in mind, of course, that the ultimate saviour of the city is Aristophanic comedy: after all, it

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takes comedy to bring back “Aeschylus” in the first place. (Revermann 2016, p. 16)

The author again emerges as performative figure—a tragic poet(s) resurrected in comedy and through metatheatrical references—celebrated and parodied at the same time. Yet, the chorus, the voice and body of the collective, is key in mediating the reception process, negotiating the identity and value of the author, and, above all, making the authorial figure in the image of the communal cultural imagination.

Anonymity and Authority In the Middle Ages, terms to denote the authorial role originated from the Latin word augere, which, like the Ancient Greek word, poietes , contained within it the sense of making. Unlike the ancient poietes, this medieval maker was not a singer but a maker of books. Although the contexts and the labour are very different, the terms making and maker are used in contemporary Western theatre to refer to theatrical creation and a range of practitioners who participate in the conceptualization and execution of the stage work. In the theatre, linguistic distinctions between director, actor, playwright and other job designations provide a way to acknowledge the different tasks that a maker might undertake in creating a theatrical performance. The term ‘theatre maker’ foregrounds the labour involved in theatrical creation, as well as those kinds of labours that are indispensable but confined to backstage work and rarely get recognition. By default, the medieval maker was not a prestigious profession. Similarly, the term maker in the context of contemporary theatre suggests a move away from the categories of a highbrow, elitist understanding of art stressing instead the idea of art as a product of the labour of a number of makers—a process of authoring. The respectability of the medieval maker in return was measured by his knowledge of God and modes of expressing this knowledge. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, augere, the root word for the medieval words for author, means ‘to make, to grow, to originate, to promote, to increase’ (OED). In the medieval period, the word was modified to auctor and auctoritas —meaning someone who validates an argument, an authority figure. The etymology shows how the concept travelled from a verb to a noun, from an action to a figure not only performing the action, but also validating it; from doing to being; and from process

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to authority. The dictionary also lists the following meaning: ‘one who begets; a father, an ancestor’—hence, if we were to interpret the term through a contemporary critical lens, a literary, artistic predecessor. The thirteenth-century Franciscan monk, Saint Bonaventure, identified four types of ‘makers’ in the making of books: (1) the scriptor or scribe, who merely copied, (2) the compilator or compiler, who put together passages from texts not his own, (3) the commentator, who added his own commentary to the words of others and (4) the auctor, who wrote both in his own words and in the words of others, yet the words of others were there mostly to support his own words that take prominence in the text (in Burrow 1982, pp. 29–30). Still, as Bennett points out, the writer as auctor was viewed as someone ‘who writes the words of others as well as his own’ (Bennett 2005, p. 39). This has been true in a way for both the medieval auctor and the modern author if we adopt the premise that because art is never made ex nihilo, then each artistic work is a palimpsest (Genette, Kristeva, Barthes and others). In the process of writing (and here we might add, making), there is always a sense of writing (making)over with every new work underlaid by previous work. Every new work, one could say, establishes some kind of dialogue or relationship with the history of making other works. The term itself—palimpsest —borrowed from Latin palimpsestus, literally means scraped clean and ready to use again. But in the Middle Ages, when writing on parchment made of animal hides was scraped with milk and oat bran to make the surface pristine again for new writing, the blank surface was never as clean as it had been. As time passed, faint remnants of underwriting became visible, interfering and competing with the new inscriptions, and in some tangential way, even completing the new script. On the palimpsest , the presence of the other scribe/maker/author is not only symbolic, but it acquires a physical form. Moreover, the labour of editing—and even more, the process of making dramatic (and post-dramatic) texts in a range of modes, from Heiner Müller’s dramaturgy of synthetic fragments in Hamletmachine, where every line is borrowed from other texts, to documentary and verbatim plays, including the ‘found play’ as a dramaturgical concept pioneered by the Royal Court (UK)—becomes a form of authoring. Here, too, the author is a compilator, while the layers of the palimpsest are not always vertical and faint, but often deliberately exposed and levelled. While Bennett writes that these different functions—scribe, compilator, commentator, auctor—‘may seem fundamentally different to

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us, Bonaventure argues that there is no clear break between one and the other’ (Bennett 2005, p. 39). Nonetheless, the difference in understanding these authorial roles might not be so fundamental if we were to look at modernist avant-garde works, the Dadaists’s ready-made art, for instance, or the more recent works of the neo-avant-garde and the abovementioned dramaturgy of quotations in theatre, verbatim projects and the notion of post-dramatic (theatre). The experiments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in theatre, performance, visual art, literature and music have continued to blur the lines between different modes of authoring—between the compilator, commentator and auctor. Indeed, more often than not, all four categories are present in the process of making work and the author is neither one nor another of these categories but variously an amalgam of all the roles. There is, however, one crucial ideological distinction to be made: the words of others that the compilator wove together and those that the auctor combined with his own inevitably involved theology—a relationship to the words from God. According to A. J. Minnis’s Medieval Theory of Authorship, the word auctor was also used to describe a very highly specialized knowledge that not only gave the auctor’s script authority, it endowed it with the privileged knowledge and ‘authority’ of God. Minnis writes: According to medieval grammarians, the term derived its meaning from four main sources: auctor was supposed to be related to the Latin verbs agree ‘to act, to perform,’ augure ‘to grow’, and auieo ‘to tie,’ and to the Greek noun autenitum ‘authority.’ An auctor ‘performed’ the act of writing. He brought something into being, caused it to ‘grow. […] To the idea of achievement and growth was easily assimilated the idea of authenticity and ‘authoritativeness’. (Minnis 1984, p. 10)

In this sense of ‘doing’, ‘acting’, ‘performing’ a task and making something grow, performance has been understood to be part of the auctor’s work. Thus, the notion of performance emerges as an inherent aspect of the author, of the author’s job, and we might argue subsequently, not only in respect to the immediate creative process, but also to the kind of authority this figure performs in the imagination of the recipient. Moreover, the medieval auctor, regarded as a source of knowledge and authority deserving of respect, was more a scholar than an artist, more Barthes than Binet (see Chapter 1). The difference, however, was

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less in the subject matter, genre or medium than in the language. The auctor wrote in Latin—in the language of the learned and in a language that was dead. Bennett reflects on this when he writes: ‘In this sense, authors really are dead, they even used the ‘dead’ language of Greek and Latin, and the task of the vernacular writers was to understand, to interpret and elaborate rather than to compete with such authorities’ (Bennett 2005, p. 40). That authority, however, was not left unchallenged especially when the forms involved performance. These included the medieval macaronic poetry that minstrels and storytellers performed in the streets and marketplaces, deliberately and freely combining Latin with the vernacular, mixing words and switching codes, often with satirical intent. In the evolution of medieval drama, liturgical plays, staged exclusively in Latin in churches, gradually introduced secular elements especially as they moved outside the church. Medievalist Janette Dillon has argued that in the cycle dramas, especially in the N -Town cycle, Latin represented the language of authority, tradition, religious and philosophical insight, ‘the bright light of God’s presence’ (Dillon 1998, p. 37). The ultimate authority, God, was performed in and through language. In his study, Speaking in Tongues, Marvin Carlson adds that ‘the most common and important use of Latin in the cycle plays is to serve the function almost identical to ‘speaking the past’’ (Carlson 2009, p. 29). In this context, we might argue, God emerges as an auctor, too, more pointedly, the auctor of the highest order. Auctor/ God appears in the words and voice of authority that owns the knowledge and insight into the past. It was the use of the vernacular of the audience/participants that provided the means for the past and present to intersect. The audience of street peddlers and dwellers did not understand Latin; hence, the only way to somewhat decode the language of God, the ultimate author and the story of the past, was through the physical language of the delivery—through the embodied translation unfolding in the performance.

The Politics of Language Even though various forms of macaroni became prominent in the late Middle Ages, Latin was still the language of the learned, the clergy and the university—the language of authority. Macaronic verse was not just an entertaining form for the common folk, it was also a subversive performance that poked fun at authorities and brought an art form to pedlars and vendors in the market square. Matthew Boyd Goldie argues

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that the use of macaroni in drama and in street performance could be understood through the lens of postcolonial theory. According to Goldie, the fifteenth-century author made a deliberate choice to write in Latin, which was akin to the postcolonial author writing in the ‘language of the colonising centre’ to ‘appropriate and mimic its discourse’ (Goldie 2002, p. 191) while interjecting indigenous perspectives, languages and forms of expression. In the case of the medieval author, the subversive strategy emerges through mixing, remixing and code-switching from the language of power (Latin) to the language of the street (vernacular), mediated by embodied codes of delivery. Commedia dell’ arte, a street theatre form that took prominence on the cusp of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, further radicalized linguistic and other strategies that subverted hierarchies of knowledge and power by using a form of nonsense language, a combination of gibberish and emulate language, called grammelot . Approaching commedia as a literaryoral form, rather than as an anti-literary form as it had been commonly regarded, theatre scholar Erith Jaffe-Berg argued that ‘the beauty of grammelot lay in its inclusiveness’: Because no prior knowledge of a given language was required, it effectively gave touring companies the means for transnational communication. […] grammelot broached language through non-language and in that sense provided a meta-performative commentary. It allowed actors to dissemble ‘losing themselves’ in the buffoonish performance, while maintaining a critical distance through their linguistic mastery of an imaginary language. Primarily, though, grammelot attacked the idea of language as restrictively nationalistic, and mocked language as a project of civilization by endeavouring to reduce the speaker to a mere sound-spewing mechanism or an animal. (Jaffe-Berg 2008, p. 205)

We might also add that grammelot not only emerged as a fantasy language and a source of comedy, it also served as a linguistic counterpart to Latin—as a form of anti-Latin, even. Juxtaposing a vernacular expression to the highbrow cultural production in Latin, grammelot laid bare the construction of language (almost as a remote and comic anticipation of Wittgenstein). At a stroke, it exposed the arbitrariness of language—both the vernacular of the plebs gossiping in the market square and the Latin of the learned through which the words of God were spoken. Commedia dell’ arte, in its use of grammelot and macaroni, also deployed various Italian dialects and physical language as media of translation. The form

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thus juxtaposed direct, physical and performative translation to the more fixed and authoritarian linguistic translation through which knowledge was transmitted and filtered from Latin to the vernacular. The former is an open and horizontal transmission of the story that favours performance; the latter is a closed and vertical transmission that carries the voice of authority. And even if in both cases the authorial figures are anonymous, they suggest two very different concepts of the author: the former, ludic and theatrical; the latter, solemn and authoritarian.

Dottore’s Revenge Commedia features a prominent figure and a frequent source of comic laughter that we could, I argue, trace back to the dignified figure of the medieval auctor. The stock figure of commedia in question is the famous Dottore from Bologna—the city associated with one of the oldest and most respected universities in Europe. Dottore peppers his Bolognese accent with Latin phrases, incomprehensible to common audiences as commedia performers travelled throughout different Italian regions and across Europe. More often than not, his haughty Latin phrases turn out to be gobbledygook. Pompous and smug, wearing long black robes and a mask that covers only his eyes and nose, with rosy cheeks to indicate his fondness for drink, Dottore is, of course, a parody of a scholar—a parody of the auctor as a source of knowledge and authority. Intellectual authority embodied in the notion of auctor, once affiliated with God, has been desacralized and vernacularized through the language of commedia. In performances, the author/auctor is present in Dottore, not as the author of the scenario but as a player—a performative figure. His presence is embodied through parodic gesture. This authorial figure is neither a unique psychological nor a symbolic entity, but a type, a stock figure that is immediately recognizable not through his distinct voice and wise words, but through his unique third-mask, black robes, rosy cheeks and protruding belly. Even though he is shaped through macaronic language, Dottore, as the authorial figure, is first and foremost embodied in this image. We identify him through his mask, costume, body, movement— hence, through performance, rather than through the word. In the notion of the auctor as God and as Dottore, there is an unexpected common denominator for if we posit that God could be understood as the auctor of the highest order, then Dottore could be understood as the auctor of the lowest order.

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Dottore also contains the paradox of authorial presence in commedia, a figure of knowledge and authority—an auctor of sorts—in a performance/scenario that in most cases, like macaronic minstrel poetry, has no known originator. Arguably, in a form that is shaped collectively, collaboratively and through improvisation, the authorial figure as a singular voice of knowledge and authority could only emerge as, and through, parody. The other factor that has contributed to the obscurity of the author(s) in these cases has to do with the cultural stratifications of authorship— namely, the vernacular author was considered to be neither auctor nor a source of knowledge, neither the word of authority nor in close proximity to God. The vernacular author was irrelevant and, according to Bennett, regarded to be of little more significance ‘than a scribe’ (Bennett 2005, p. 41). In that light, commedia’s Dottore is the vernacular author’s revenge on the auctor.

Note 1. See M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Works Cited Bennett, Andrew. 2005. The Author. London: Routledge. Burrow, J.A. 1982. Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and its Background, 1100–1500. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlson, Marvin. 2009. Speaking in Tongues: Language at Play in Theatre. Ann Arbour: Michigan University Press. Dillon, Janette. 1998. Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldie, Boyd Matthew. 2002. Traditions and Transformations in Late Medieval England, ed. Douglas Biggs, Sharon D. Michalove, and Compton Reeves, 177–217. Leiden. Brill. Griffin, Jasper. 2000. Introduction. In Homer, The Odyssey, trans. M. Hammond, xiii–xxvi. London: Duckworth. Jaffe-Berg, Erith. 2008. New Perspectives on Language, Oral Transmission, and Multilingualism in Commedia dell’ Arte. Early Theatre 11 (2): 198–211. Lord, Albert B. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. Minnis, A.J. 1984. Medieval Theory of Authorship. Aldershot: Scholar.

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Nagy, Gregory. 1996a. Homeric Question. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nagy, Gregory. 1996b. Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagy, Gregory. 2003. Homeric Responses. Austin: University of Texas Press. Revermann, Martin. 2016. The Reception of Greek Tragedy. In A Handbook of Reception of Greek Drama, ed. Betine van Zyl Smit, 11–28. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Walsh, Thomas, and Rodney Merrill. 2002. The Odyssey: The Tradition, the Singer, the Performance. In Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Rodney Merrill, 1–53. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

CHAPTER 3

Embodiment and Textualization

Print culture brought a sharper distinction between text and more immediate performative forms in the sense in which both their structure and authorship began to stabilize. Prior to that manuscript transmission, not unlike ancient Homeridai and the commedia dell’arte performances, authoring was a collective rather than an individual process. Like performance that is always slightly different with each utterance and set of audiences, each new manuscript copy included not only the signature of the ‘original’ author, but also the handwriting of the scribe responsible for its transmission. These multiple signatures and handwritings could be read as literal and metaphorically indicators of authorial presence and absence: it was not uncommon for the original author to be lost in transmission and for the name of the scribe to be preserved in the text. Arthur Marotti explains: In the system of manuscript transmission, it was normal for lyrics to elicit revisions, corrections, supplements, and answers, for they were part of an ongoing social discourse. In this environment texts were inherently malleable, escaping authorial control to enter a social world in which recipients both consciously and unconsciously altered what they received. (Marotti 1995, p. 135)

The distinctions between writing a play and performing it, composing a poem and reciting it, writing a manuscript and transcribing it were © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_3

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blurred. Print culture fixed the words and the names of those who put the words together. The words became less malleable and the figure of the author less fluid and interchangeable. The connection between the written work and the authorial presence (whether that of a lowly scribe or a highly regarded auctor) was physical not only in the process of making, but also in the process of transmission. In other words, each instance of transmission involved the labour of writing over and over again. The emergence of print culture resulted in the separation between the embodied and the textual, marking a turning point in the process of fixing the author. Moreover, the change was not only in the culture of authorship, but also in the legal relationship between the author and the work. The emergence of copyright further stabilized the authorial identity and claim. While the invention of print also enabled faster reproduction and transmission of the work (including texts for performances that now could be read and be performed more widely), the printed copies severed the physical relationship between the author and the work. Even if names of individual authors were often lost in the transmission process, the handwriting remained a testament to the individuality of the person performing the writing. As Lewis Mumford writes in his essay, ‘The Invention of Print,’ handwriting ‘is the key to human personality’ so much so that ‘when one wants to refer to the highest type of individuation in art, we refer to the artist’s signature’ (Mumford 2010, p. 86). The metaphor of the artist’s signature is somewhat paradoxical given that on the one hand, the persona of the Medieval artist was usually little known or even entirely anonymous. On the other hand, the material fact of the author’s handwriting is also an inscription of the authorial presence. His unique cursive and fingerprints were ingrained in the texture of the work, even if the artist himself had been lost and forgotten in the transmission process. Hence, graphology often remains as an insight into the author’s persona, even if all other elements of his subjectivity have vanished. With the invention of print, this material presence of the author within the work has been erased. The disembodiment of the authorial self from the text that Barthes writes about could almost be understood at face value as the juncture between embodiment and textualization. The disappearance of the authorial self is of a different order from that of the pre-print author who amalgamated with voices, rhythms, gestures, handwritings of others who were part of the ongoing transmission process. This author disappeared through labour and performance, both his own and that of

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others, into the transmission process, which was not yet the transmission machine. Even though the transmission machine is a metaphor that also includes intertextual dialogues and interperformative references, criticism and scholarship, the invention of the actual physical object—the printing press—increased the possibilities of transmission. With its roots in art print-making, printing swept the world in less than a century, travelling from China and Korea where the first movable type was invented, to Europe in the German town of Mainz, where in 1455 Johannes Gutenberg printed the first book. The Latin Bible, also known as the Gutenberg Bible, was the first book printed from a movable type printing press. Mumford argues that before the new methods of transmission took hold, the new technical invention necessitated a new social medium: ‘a community that abandoned slavery and was ready, indeed eager, to equalize cultural advantages once reserved for the ruling casts’ (Mumford 2010, p. 85). We will return to the complexities of this democratization of the social medium later. For now, we can say that the invention of print opened the possibility for art and culture to have a wider reach both directly and consequentially, to move more freely across boundaries of class and culture, and for the author to eventually find a more stable place in his (and to a lesser extent her) own time and, eventually, in posterity. Even though the letters emerged in standardized print format, rather than in the idiosyncratic cursives, the author in print culture (it does not necessarily need to be the author who primarily works with words) became part of the work’s semiotic system more strongly than ever before. The artistic object stands for itself and for its author—it represents semantically the authorial presence, while making the physical relationship between the author and the work obsolete. This comes with the exception of theatre and performance where embodiment can never become fully obsolete, though it can reconfigure the notion of authorial presence and absence in divergent ways. This separation gave rise to new forms of inscribing, embodying and constructing the author within the work and beyond. Chaucer, the fourteenth-century poet, is often considered the ‘father’ of modern authorship (Trigg 2002; Minnis 1988; Bennett 2005)—a selfconscious author who in his famous The Canterbury Tales (1380) uses digressions, asides, allusions and irony to mark the distinction between the author and the text—between the tales and the storyteller. He constructs the figure of the omnipresent narrator as an authorial figure, a voice that tells the story and functions similarly to a dramatic figure in direct addresses to the audience. This author/narrator has one foot

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in the story and the other in the auditorium, emerging, intermittently, as both the witness to the stories offering first-hand accounts and, as the narrator, giving his own rendition of the stories that have already been in circulation. Hence, Chaucer’s authorial presence is palpable in the text and his mediating function is overt. In the prologue to the Tales, he identifies himself as the author, albeit in a humble way. He says that he is a mere compilatio, a mere compiler of stories, where words of respectable auctor(s), who came before him, and those of his own unreliable character, come together. He, Chaucer, the compiler of words, is positioned somewhere in the middle between the authority of the auctor/predecessor and the unreliability of his own position as the omnipresent narrator. Even while identifying himself as an author, Chaucer consciously asserts the persona of the author not so much as the sole creator of the work, but as the one through whom the Tales have been shaped, structured and channelled. Moreover, he is not only the maker of the Tales, he is also the figure who performs the action of telling the Tales —as he is both the author and the protagonist. In The Canterbury Tales, the compilation is no longer hiding under the layers of the palimpsest, but rather it is shaped through the distinct voice and presence of the author in the story. Chaucer, a self-described compilatio, inscribed his authorial persona into the text but was not yet a professional author. About a century and a half later, Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe will make a living from their writing. But back then, of course, Shakespeare was not immediately the bard nor was Marlowe a canonical author. First and foremost, they were makers, part of the process of theatrical labour, with their fame and fortune arriving later. Shakespeare, however, accumulated considerable wealth during his lifetime, and to some degree, he constituted the prototype for the emergence of the bourgeois author, the one whose wealth was derived from what Marx termed ‘non-productive’—‘creative’—labour. Marlowe and Shakespeare are credited as the creators of two iconic dramatic characters—Doctor Faustus and Prospero, respectively—subjects still of many readings, performances and interpretations. I propose here to read these two dramatic figures as epitomes of different concepts of authorial presence in the text and beyond. Through these dramatic characters more is revealed about the notion of the author and authorial presence than through biographical remains of the men who created them. The shift in the concept of the authorial figure was coincident

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with the invention of print that gave rise to professionalization and copyright laws, as well as with the change in the author’s relationship to God, authority and power. Half a century before Chaucer, enter one Dante Alighieri who in his monumental poem, La Divina Comedia (The Divine Comedy), written between 1308 and 1320 during his exile, appeared as himself—a lost poet in search of spiritual guidance. This self-referential gesture is the through line of the poem as we follow the author/protagonist on a journey through hell and heaven. Not only does Dante appear as the protagonist of his own work, he also meets a pantheon of authors from antiquity. The poet encounters them in hell, albeit in limbo, the less harrowing part of it. Plato, Aristotle, Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan are all there in the first circle of hell. The poet, Virgil, himself a denizen of limbo, explains that the reason all these distinguished authors ended up in the upper circles of hell has to do with God—their only fault being that they were all born before Christ, hence unbaptized and ungodly: ‘For this failure and for no other fault/ Here we are lost/ and our sole punishment/ is without hope to live on in desire’ (Dante 1320 [2012], IV, pp. 40–42). This damnation asserts the author’s position in the medieval context—the author is unconditionally subjected to the authority of God. Therefore, all the authors of antiquity roaming through limbo could be regarded as tragic heroes fitting the description Aristotle gives us in the Poetics, according to which the tragic hero is one who unknowingly commits an error of a magnitude beyond repair. Their error was in authoring oblivious of the authority of God. Help and guidance on the perilous journey through the underworld came to Dante from a fellow poet—Virgil, an author who in his lifetime did not know God (at least not in the sense of the divine force to whose complex structures of punishment and reward Dante was privy). Hence, we might extend this argument to say that Dante’s guidance did not so much come from God and religion, but by way of intertextuality— in dialogue with the author/predecessor who accompanied him through hell and back.

Faustian Authoring In Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, too, the protagonist encounters historical figures from the past and gets to see hell from up close. The relationship to God and religion unfolds in a far more complicated and even radical

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manner, albeit under the guise of a cautionary tale. In his divorce from God, Doctor Faustus brings forward a version of a Renaissance author that is both transgressive and parodic. These aspects are also present in the archetypal figure of Faustus, a character with ‘all the elements of Western hubris and thus something of a modern Western Everyman, who believes himself to have all the answers and often displays a coquettish attitude towards self-destruction—something that can also be sold to the modern consumer, from Mephisto footwear to Faust wine and Magic Cards’ (Werres 2011, p. 2). We might add to this that, in our reading of Faustus as an authorial figure (or at least a metaphor thereof), he is also shaped, vanquished and eventually, resurrected through various workings of the commodification machine. Even if the protagonist, Faustus, was not, strictly speaking, an author, it can still be argued that in his desire to conjure, to make and unmake worlds, to seek power and to show off his intellectual authority, there is an authorial aspect to his desire. Benjamin Bennett sees Faustus as a reader/author: Once his attention is drawn to the magical books he speaks of, Faustus can proceed in one of the two directions. He can insist, as a reader of art, on understanding this books in such a way as to become himself in effect their author; or he can remain something more like a consumer of this magic than a producer, satisfied with a power in a form that is still servility, with knowledge in a form that is still ignorance. His choice is between being a magician and having the experience of being a magician, which turns out not to be the same thing at all. (Bennett 2008, p. 195)

Faustus’s journey in the play is similar to the movement from reader to author—from a passive role of the recipient of knowledge to the one who understands the performativity of that knowledge. In his performance of knowledge—in action/doing—Faustus becomes a maker of worlds. Out of the struggle between humility and ego—between the humble compilator of knowledge and the almighty authority—emerge both the transgressive and parodic dimensions of Faustus as authorial figure. The medieval humilitas that is present in the relative anonymity of the denunciation by scribes, compilators , and even the auctors of any attempt towards originality (since the words he writes are rooted in the words of God), show signs of ceding to a self-conscious author. Faustus reveals hidden desires behind the humble veneer of the compilator such as his

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hunger for secret knowledge that gives power to the one who possesses it, which is not unlike the quest for the seventh function of language that Binet imagines in his novel (Chapter 1). Furthermore, Faustus epitomizes Terry Eagleton’s notion of the selfauthoring subject and its tragedy: It knows only two ways of coping with external reality – either to thrust it into the limbo of absolute alterity, as that which is not and never can be subjective, or to devour and introject such recalcitrant objectivity, absorb it into the structure of self. But in doing that it simultaneously cuts from beneath its own feet any objective grounds by which its own privilege might be validated. (Eagleton 1993, p. 45)

While the poietes , rhapsodes , scribes and compilators embrace the ‘limbo of absolute alterity,’ the figure emerging through Faustus finds itself bereft and desolate ‘at the very acme of its exuberant powers’ (ibid.). The author emerging here is the prefiguration of the bourgeois subject that in order to confirm that his powers are not mere hallucination, is always in need of some Other ‘to lord it over, yet his or hers presence offer instantly to underdo one’s mastery’, hence the subject can figure only negatively ‘condemned to self-blindness at the very peak of his powers’ (ibid.). Faustus is a tragically self-authoring and, at the same time, self-undoing subject. Both Faustus and Prospero are lonely humanist subjects—and in both instances, the conjuring, the making of magic, can be read as a theatrical metaphor. In Faustus’s words, ‘This night I’ll conjure though I die therefor!’ (Marlowe 1604 [1969] I.i., 160, p. 29), the author/god position is established and immediately mocked and subjected to the punishments of hell. However, Faustus, through the powers lent to him, stages a number of performances. He summons the devils to ascend from hell and to entertain (in direct opposition to the sinners descending to hell, and of Jesus’ metaphorical descent to hell after he takes on the sins of the humankind to confront Satan), while Lucifer is made to lead a delightful metatheatrical pageant of the seven deadly sins. Faustus further appears in the role of authoring the performance when he concludes that Mephistopheles needs a more effective stage presence charging the devil to ‘return and change thy shape./ Thou art too ugly to attend me./ Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;/ That holy shape becomes the devil best’ (I.iii. 25-8, p. 32). While these lines clearly foreground the

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contextual dimensions of the play as a critique of Catholicism and of religion in general, they can also be read theatrically. When, to amuse his students spectating the magic in the making, Faustus conjures Alexander the Great to appear in front of the Roman Emperor and Helen of Troy, he admits: ‘it is not in my ability to present before your eyes the true substantial bodies of those two deceased princes, which long since are consumed to dust’ (IV.i., 45-8, p. 69). These lines could be read in the light of Faustus’s limitations as a fallen man, but also, more metatheatrically, as an admission not so much of his own shortcomings, but of the limits of theatrical representation. Moreover, this moment in the play might also be interpreted as a call for theatre to be more immediately political, as Marlowe was in his provocative critique of religion underlying the play. In spite of Mephistopheles’s warning, Faustus’s reckoning with his own shortcomings and that of the medium within which he operates are only ephemeral. In the acts of conjuring, he becomes the author and the authority: ‘I see there is virtue in my heavenly words… such is the force of magic and my spells’ (I.iii., 27-33, p. 33). In that context, Faustus authors a world into being, like a demi-god, or at the very least, like a theatre director. He also authors himself in the process, wherein he becomes, if fleetingly, maker and authority. Faustus is of course doomed to fail in his role as maker and authority. In the structure of his imminent demise emerge both the patterns of a medieval morality play and the condition that anticipates the self-authored subject that ‘ends up exercising its capacity in empty space’ (Eagleton 1993, p. 45). This empty space within which Doctor Faustus operates could be understood both as a void (according to Eagleton) and ‘as any space in which theatre takes place’ (Brook). This is the void where anything can happen and where the only silver lining is ‘to fail better’ (Beckett). Therein the figure of Faustus is both tragic and self-parodying. In a more optimistic and metatheatrical reading of Doctor Faustus, the protagonist is grappling with being/becoming a new form of authorial figure on the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (and beyond). As with his knowledge of magic, he might also share the predicament of theatre makers and authors (other conjurors of worlds) famously expressed in the lines of Beckett’s novella ‘WorstwardHo’ (1983): ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (7). This ‘try again/fail again’ emerges on many levels, the most literal being in the re-performances of the play Doctor Faustus, but even more notably in numerous intertextual renderings of the German sixteenth-century folk

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tale to which Marlowe’s play also belongs. Needless to say, the transmission that enabled such sustained synchronic intertextuality would be impossible to imagine without the technologies of textualization. Although in the original story Faustus meets death and eternal condemnation, this character holds such fascination that its various dramatic, literary and film versions redeem the finality of his failure. Doctor Faustus has been brought back numerous times to ‘fail better’ and in attempting to do so, to fail differently. In some of the twentiethcentury versions of the tale, Faustus not only offers the potential to be read as a metaphor of the authorial figure, but actually becomes resurrected as an author and as an artist. In Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, set in Germany in the wake of Nazism, Faustus is the composer Adrian Leverkühn who voluntarily infects himself with syphilis as a means to be reborn as a brilliant composer rather than a mediocre one before succumbing to madness. He succeeds in composing some truly original scores, until he fails. In Mann’s passages, the music Adrian/Faustus composes echoes Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of the atonal scale, while in his madness there are glimpses of Nietzsche’s brilliance and deterioration. Adrian/Faustus, thus, has the traits of the most avant-garde artists and authors, but his brilliance is contractually limited to 24 years. Thereafter, all his excellence is consumed by illness and its debilitating impact reduces him to a child-like state which he must endure for another decade. In Mann’s novel, artistic success comes with a price and that is the authorial Faustian moment of sacrifice.1 In Mikhail Bulgakov’s Faustian masterpiece, The Master and Margarita, Faust/Master is a writer who in Stalinist Russia writes a historical novel about Jesus Christ and Pontius Pilate. Bulgakov’s novel, written between 1928 and 1940, was censored, first appearing posthumously in 1967. The novel that Master/Faust writes undergoes a similar fate: the manuscript is rejected, while the fictional author is confined to an insane asylum. Master’s work set in Palestine, where Pilate suffers from migraines and Jesus is a simpleton with healing powers, appears as a novel-within-the-novel which Bulgakov sets in present-day Moscow. In this surreal satirical work, the Biblical story and the figure of the author as the Faustian Master become allegories of artistic freedom. Mephisto, appearing here as the magician Woland, accompanied by the shape-shifting cat, Behemoth, performs his acts of magic to the astonishment of the audience in a variety theatre, exposing the greed, hypocrisy and stupidity of the cultural elites. In Bulgakov’s

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satire of totalitarian society, good and evil are not what they seem, and, accordingly, it is the devil who turns out to be the truth-teller. In Klaus Mann’s novel (1956), Mephisto: A Novel of a Career, and in the play, Croatian Faust (1980) by dramatist Slobodan Šnajder, the Faustian character is an actor. Moreover, in both cases the main characters are based on historical figures with an additional metafictional/metatheatrical element since the actors in question are cast in productions of Goethe’s Faustus. Mann, who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933, based the protagonist of his Faustian novel, Hendrik Höfgen, on the German actor Gustav Gründgens who rose to nationwide fame when he abandoned his communist past and ingratiated himself with the Nazis. In Istvan Sabo’s Academy Award winning adaptation of the novel (1981), Hendrik Höfgen, played by the brilliant Klaus Maria Brandauer, is heavily involved with the Left and is even one of the founders of a Bolshevik Theatre. With the rise of the Nazis, he (like his author, Mann) is threatened with persecution, but unlike the author of the novel, its protagonist chooses to compromise with the ruling regime. This elevates the talented actor from his humble beginnings in Hamburger Künstlertheater to a level of celebrity that he could have not foreseen. His crowning moment is in the role of Mephisto in Part One of Goethe’s Faust. Höfgen delivers the performance of a lifetime but with it comes the full realization of the magnitude of his sell out—in the end, the actor knows that he, too, has signed a contract with the devil, in the form of the Nazis. Šnajder’s Croatian Faust premiered in 1982 in both Croatia and Serbia, including its landmark staging by the Macedonian director, Slobodan Unkovski, at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade.2 The protagonist of the play, Vjekoslav Afri´c, is based on the biography of an actual actor, cast as Faust in the HNK’s (Hrvatsko narodno kazalište/Croatian National Theatre) 1942 production of Goethe’s play. At the time, this show ‘was hailed as the most important Croatian production of all time’ and ‘intended as the expression of Croatian Ustasha authorities’ allegiance to the Third Reich’ (Radosavljevi´c 2009, p. 435). The play, non-linear and anti-naturalistic, blurs the metatheatrical lines between Afri´c/Actor/Faust. Faust’s temptation performed in the play-within-a-play is mirrored with a simultaneous scene in the dressing room during the 1942 premier of Faust in HNK. There, in Šnajder’s rendering of the Faustian allegory, Faust (Afri´c) is tempted by Mephisto (played by Janko Rakuša—another historic personality) to join the partisans. Faust gives in easily and with the line ‘Death

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to Faust!’ and Mephisto’s reply: ‘Freedom to people!’ (Šnajder 1981, p. 64) their deal is sealed in a paraphrase of the famous communist slogan ‘Death to Fascism, Freedom to People’. Indeed, Šnajder’s metatheatrical play is based on historical facts; on the third night of the performance of Goethe’s Faust in Zagreb—the performance that Faust/Afri´c and Mephisto/Rakuša identify as a cultural expression of the fascist regime— seven actors clandestinely left the theatre (HNK) to join the partisans. Both Faust and Mephisto were among them—Vjekoslav Afri´c survived the war, Janko Rakuša was captured and killed in 1944—in Šnajder’s play, the latter (Rakuša/Mephisto) is given a Christ-like execution. In this version, Faust is initially played by the Actor/Afri´c, but when he leaves the production to join the partisans, the leading role multiplies and is played by Ustasha (Croatian fascist) representatives. Hence, the figure of Faust here does not stand for one individual’s ethical choices, but for a multiplicity of conflicting ideological and ethical positions. Croatian Faust emerged just as Serbian and Croatian jingoism was beginning to raise its ugly head and only a decade before the downfall of Yugoslavia in the bloodbath of secessionist wars. The ‘metatheatrical political examination’ (Radosavljevi´c 2009, p. 434) of Croatian Faust offered an uncomfortable reckoning with both the past and the future. As Duška Radosavljevi´c points out: […] Yugoslav audiences at the time would have been confronted by a daring play that not only explicitly dealt with historical taboos, but — in Unkovski’s production— also placed another illusion-seduced and blindly nazified theatre audience squarely in front of them. It is almost as though Šnajder and Unkovski were envisaging their own Faustian contract with their prospective audiences —potential self-knowledge in exchange for a confrontation of the ugly truths. (Radosavljevi´c 2009, p. 439)

As in the case of all the Manns (Thomas, Heinrich and Klaus), Šnajder also faced a moral choice and the predicament of exile. Anti-nationalist, pro-Yugoslav and unsparingly critical of the regime, Šnajder soon became persona non grata in the newly-formed Croatian state in the early 1990s. Exile became his ethical choice, too. These various versions of Faustus as artist/author and some of the anecdotes from the lives of people who authored them confirm that the author(s) is not only a maker, a creative force, a conjuror of words, worlds, shapes and sounds, but also an ethical figure. Author/Faust is the one

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who makes, or fails to make, a moral choice. This choice always comes with a price and the predicament of failure of one kind or another, yet the nature of that choice varies: for some, it is shaped by moral weakness, for others it is an act of courage that, for better or for worse, cannot be helped. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, arguably, belongs to the former. His is an ethical failure: ‘I’ll burn my books; ah Mephistopheles’—says the panic-striken Faustus, shifting the responsibility from himself to the books that allegedly seduced him. Faustus, taken as a metaphor of the author, emerges here as a failed, yet more autonomous figure than his medieval predecessors. He is no longer under the full authority of God, no longer only the transmitter of knowledge from the Author, but also a figure responsible for his own words and deeds—hence, the author, with the small ‘a’ starts to emerge more boldly. Even at the cost of great punishment, he (and eventually she) is free to fail.

Shakespeare the Colonizer While to save his skin, Faustus offers his books as a sacrifice to Mephistopheles, Shakespeare’s Prospero decides to let go of his books— the single source of his knowledge and unbound power—on his own free will: ‘Now my charms are all o’erthrown, /And what strength I have’s mine own,/Which is most faint/ Now ‘tis true/ I must be here confin’d by you’ (Act V, Epilogue 5 p. 350). Faustus and Prospero, both tampering with magic powers and both offering allegories of the author/artist/theatre maker, could be read in juxtaposition: the former at the end, denounces personal responsibility—the books alone can take the blame, while he, Faustus, might still be saved if only he could disappear into the textual machine. In The Tempest, Prospero is the complete author of the revenge and forgiveness plot that unfolds. With the assistance of his side-kick/lackey, Ariel, he stages its every aspect, from the shipwreck and twists and turns of fortune, to the theatre-within-the theatre scene—the spectacular masque to celebrate the engagement of his daughter Miranda and her betrothed, Ferdinand. Every unpredictability, normally at the heart of performance, such as the episodes with the drunken clowns that Caliban mistakes for gods, is dealt with immediately and put under control. The events that Prospero conjures unfold as absolutely flawless immersive theatre and at the end there is a lesson to be learnt by all of the participants. This performance he authors also epitomizes the workings of the seventh function of language—around which Binet weaves

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his crime metafiction discussed in Chapter 1. Prospero demonstrates complete control not only of his utterance and its impact, but also of the performativity of language that is both verbal and embodied. There is no escape from this performativity as every transgression, linguistic, or physical is quickly put under the control of an overall structure that Prospero guards with ease. It is not surprising at all that Binet’s characters—from philosophers and theorists to secret police and politicians—fought each other tooth and nail in various overt and clandestine ways to possess such power. In the gesture of renouncing his powers, Prospero thus demonstrates incredible restraint, humility and above all ethical capacity—a full awareness of the author’s responsibility within and beyond the work that he has authored. Nevertheless, postcolonial writing, performance and scholarship posit a challenge to the Faust/Prospero juxtaposition along the simple lines of the author’s moral weakness, on the one hand, and ethical rigour, on the other. As briefly seen in aforementioned examples, various incarnations of Faust—as conjuror, failed maker, agent provocateur, author, artist— point to the playful and tragic ambiguity of Faustus as an authorial figure who pushes the limits of both weakness and courage. More contextual readings of The Tempest (1611) have, however, revealed a more sinister side of Prospero.3 The wider context and its resonances in the play are well-known, hence just a brief reiteration here: by the time Shakespeare writes his penultimate play, England has already caught up with the Spanish and the Portuguese on sea voyages, discoveries and the slave trade between West Africa and the New World; Sir Francis Drake has completed his voyage around the world (1577–1580); the term ‘noble savage’ has entered the language; the beings the eponymous term designated were placed at the very bottom of the Elizabethan Great Chain of Being; sugar and molasses arrived from Guyana; and the East India Company was formed just a decade before The Tempest was completed. Shakespeare was an avid reader of explorer William Strachey’s report of being marooned on the shore of Bermuda and of Montaigne’s New World essay ‘Of Cannibals,’—the title that famously inspired Caliban’s name. He might have also read Pigafetta’s Voyages that offered an account of Magellan’s journey around the world, where descriptions of Patagonians were reminiscent of Shakespeare’s construction of Caliban. The seemingly, fantastic creatures of Caliban, Ariel and Caliban’s witch mother, Sycorax, whom Prospero imprisoned in a tree trunk for eternity, were indeed not only the figments

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of the playwright’s imagination, but also embodiments of how the collective cultural imagination of the time constructed the Other from far away African and Caribbean shores. Prospero—the author of the immersive performance and the morality play that features a great shipwreck, a love story, a revenge tale, a noble savage, airborne acts and more—is also the colonizer. With the colonial conquests, the author becomes more distinctly white, male and of European origin than before. Textualization validates authorship in a new way, whereby performances of the author of the oral traditions, for instance, were more often than not lost in translation. The author not only made a living from his craft, but played his part in cultural conquests. Colonial violence could thus also be described as an imposition of text over other ways of authoring and transmitting culture—of imposing a language that dictates socio-communal structures that differ from the local ones. By the time Prospero denounces his power, frees his obedient servant, Ariel, and returns the island to its rightful owner—according to the final scene of the play, a repentant and more ‘civilized’ Caliban—and heads back to where he had originally come from, irrevocable damage has already been done. Helen Tiffin links textualization and the subsequent canonization of Shakespeare with colonial violence when she writes: ‘The circulation of ‘Shakespeare’s Books’ within educational and cultural spheres has been a powerful hegemonic force throughout the history of the British Empire and it is one which continues to operate in virtually all former colonies’ (Tiffin 1987, p. 19). The book, the text, and the language have proven to be a powerful weapon of colonial violence. Tiffin further argues that Shakespeare is used to discipline the body of the colonial subject: The ‘local’ body was erased not just by script and performance, but by the necessary assumption on the part of both audience and performer that speakers and listeners were themselves ‘English’. Recitation performance is thus itself metonymic of the wider processes of colonial interpellation, in the reproduction at the colonial site, of the locally embodied yet paradoxically disembodied imperial ‘voice’, in a classic act of obedience. (Tiffin 1993, p. 914)

As Derrida puts it, the imposition of language ‘is the first act of violence’ (Derrida 2000, p. 15). In his adaptation of Shakespeare’s play entitled A Tempest (1969), Aimé Césaire, the famous Martinican playwright and poet of negritude, brings the dispossessed centre stage and foregrounds

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the violent performativity of language already inherent in the original play. For instance, when Caliban greets Prospero in his mother tongue and Prospero snaps ‘Mumbling your native language again!’ (Césaire 2004, Act I, scene ii, p. 1385)—native language becomes the forbidden language. Still, Caliban reads through the strategies of suppressing colonial subjects with great accuracy when he confronts Prospero, saying: ‘You didn’t teach me a thing! Except to jabber in your own language so that I could understand your orders’ (ibid.). When Prospero says to Caliban ‘[b]eating is the only language you really understand. So much the worse for you: I’ll speak it loud and clear’ (ibid.), a direct correlation between the violence of language and physical violence has been established. Indeed, this violent performativity of language is already present in the text of the bard through the words of Prospero describing the punishment disobedient Caliban is to suffer: ‘For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps,/ Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins/ Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,/ All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch’d/ As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging/ Than bees that made ‘em’ (Shakespeare 2004, Act I, scene 2-330, p. 329). These words create vivid visual images of torture as they become physicalized onto the body disciplined into obedience. For George Lamming, the link between body, corporal punishment and obedience of the colonial subject in the play becomes palpable and literal in the context of colonial history. In The Pleasure of Exile, Lamming draws direct parallels between documentary accounts of the torture of slaves in Haiti that was used to ‘persuade’ them to work and the words in the play. Some are indeed remarkably similar to Prospero’s repertoire of punishments: ‘they were fastened to nests of wasps,’ and ‘buried alive up to the neck, their heads smeared with sugar that files might devour them’ (Lamming 1992, p. 98). The author is, thus, not only the maker, the conjuror, the creative force, but also the authority—whose authoring is that of the text and of the performance, as well as of the violence of both; as indeed violence first emerges in language/logos before it translates onto bodies. This casts a long, dark shadow on Mumford’s optimistic comment mentioned earlier when he identified a new and more progressive social consciousness as a prerequisite to the invention of print. Despite transgressions of class and authority and various re-negotiations of the relationship to God in the European context of the time, the newly constructed author was still in need of some Other ‘to lord it over’ (Eagleton). The printing press became the textual machine in many ways—it democratized art,

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knowledge and ways of being an author/maker; it also instrumentalized language, text and their transmission in hitherto unprecedented ways. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the figure of Sycorax emerges as the Other to the author, as well as potentially, the Other author—marginalized, silenced, confined to the tree trunk, hidden from the public eye and excluded from the transmission process. This author is neither male nor white. English is not her language either. In The Tempest she is referred to only sporadically as ‘one so strong/That could control moon, make flows and ebbs’ (Act I, scene 2-268-9, p. 329). The authorial figure of Sycorax is positioned as a Manichean double to Prospero; her abilities judged inferior, her powers dark, her magic unethical, her deeds unlawful, her offspring vile and incompetent, as arguments to legitimize Prospero’s ruling of the island. Ania Loomba, too, identifies Sycorax as Prospero’s Other, asking that Caliban’s invocation of the past ‘should include the re-telling of Sycorax’s story’ (Loomba 1989, p. 152). Taking the cue from Loomba, playwright and performer Chin Woon Ping in her play, Psycho Wracks (2001), rewrites the figure of Sycorax as a parodic pastiche, ‘[m]ulling over the implication of her “difference” and her history (or lack thereof)’ to ‘imagine the possibility of speaking through and for her in performance’ (Ping 2003, p. 94). Ping imagines a performance Sycorax might author asking ‘what would she say, were she to stage a return?’ (ibid.). In the production of Cuban Teatro Buendia, Otra Tempestad 4 (1997), the script of the canonical author—the bard, and the colonizer—has not only been dismantled and re-written, it has also been subverted to assert a counter-performance in which Sycorax plays one of the pivotal roles. In Otra Tempestad (Another Tempest ), the Other author is given a genealogy as she emerges accompanied with her three daughters—the Yoruban orishas Oshún, Oyá and Eleggua. Here, it is Sycorax, not Prospero, who authors the performance. While her daughters play the witches of Macbeth, Sycorax conjures up a storm to sink the ship transporting Prospero and the other characters to the island. Sycorax and her collaborators also break the dominant linguistic idiom in favour of more embodied ways to tell the story. Through a spectacle of live music, they create various sounds of the island, while their movements and body language are drawn from the trance-inducing AfroCuban dances of Santería—characterized by its syncretism of African and Christian deities. The oppressive dominance of the text, the word of the bard, has been shaken and replaced with other forms of telling/doing that are visual, aural, embodied and more fleeting. The theatricality and

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performativity of the embodied storytelling that Sycorax stages stand as a mode of resistance to the authorship for which the figure of Prospero stands. As Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins assert in Post-colonial Drama, ‘The Tempest remains the most widely chosen play for counter-discursive interrogations of the Shakespearian canon’ (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996, p. 25). In his seminal essay, ‘Caliban’ (1974), Cuban poet and philologist Roberto Fernández Retamar quotes from The Tempest, naming Caliban as the counter-hegemonic voice of the mestizo: Right now, as we are discussing, as I am discussing with those colonizers, how else can I do it except in one of their languages, which is now also our language, and with so many of their conceptual tools, which are now also our conceptual tools? This is precisely the extraordinary outcry that we read in a work by perhaps the most extraordinary writer of fiction who ever existed. In The Tempest … the deformed Caliban–enslaved, robbed of his island, and trained to speak by Prospero–rebukes Prospero thus: ‘You taught me language, and my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language’. (Retamar 1989, pp. 5–6)

And powerful curses indeed emerged out of that language, howled variously by the likes of Césaire’s Caliban and through the subversive mockery of Ping’s Sycorax, until a new language emerged in the frenetic dances of Sycorax and her daughters of Otra Tempestad. Tiffin uses the term ‘canonical counter-discourse’ (Tiffin 1987, p. 22) whereby the postcolonial author develops a countertext that both preserves aspects of the original and dismantles its structural elements. Gilbert and Tompkins posit that ‘[c]ounter- discourse seeks to deconstruct significations of authority and power exercised in the canonical text, to release its stranglehold on representation and, by implication, to intervene in social conditioning’ (Gilbert and Tompkins 1996, p. 16). And in one such counter-discourse, Derek Walcott’s play, Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), Shakespeare is put on trial for crimes against humanity. Making an inventory of history, the play’s protagonist, Basil, recites a long list of the accused: Basil: They are Noah, but not his son Ham, Aristotle, I’m skipping a bit, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander of Macedon, Shakespeare, I can cite relevant texts, Plato, Copernicus, Galileo, and perhaps Ptolemy, Christopher Marlowe, Robert E. Lee, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Francis Drake, the

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Phantom, Mandrake the Magician. […] Some are dead and cannot speak for themselves, but a drop of milk is enough to condemn them, to banish them from the archives of the bo-leaf and the papyrus, from the waxen tablet and the tribal stone.’ (312)

Both Shakespeare and Marlowe make a list of condemned authors and other historical figures not unlike those that Dante had carefully ordered in his structures of limbo. The Tempest is also famously regarded as Shakespeare’s farewell play with his protagonist, Prospero, standing in as the author’s alter-ego. When he utters ‘Now I want /Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,/And my ending is despair’ (Act V, Epilogue 15, p. 350) he is neither the conjuror nor the bard, nor the colonizer, but a mere mortal—the author/the nobody. So, how does this nobody go on such an extraordinary journey of transformation from a nobody to the celebrated bard, then to the accused at the tribunal of crimes against humanity? The textual machine not only has the potential to disappear the author but to enable the emergence of different scripts of the authorial persona. It has the capacity to resurrect the authorial figure in unpredictable and at times, contradictory, critical and politically charged ways. Simply put: somewhere in Europe, as the first folio emerged hot of the press, Shakespeare enters the textual machine as a ‘nobody’ (‘Who is he?/Nobody, he is the author’, see Chapter 1) and emerges at the other end as the bard—the Author— glorified, hailed, beloved, endlessly performed worldwide, unsurpassed. Meanwhile, elsewhere, the bard enters the textual machine and emerges on the distant shores of Africa, West Indies and the Caribbean, in India and further afield as the colonizer—the author whose words shaped the colonial bodies with as much force as the cracking whip of slave masters. Both, the words and the whip, left permanent marks. Exit the wise, benevolent Prospero, the ageing bard’s alter-ego, and enter the raging slave-master of Césaire, proclaiming ‘[t]his is how power is measured. I’m power’ (Act II, scene ii, p. 1388). Eventually, the author/colonizer enters the textual machine and emerges at the other end not as himself but as the Other whom he tried to dominate the entire time. Or more precisely, as a multitude of Others—writers, poets, theorists, performers: he is Césaire and Lamming, Woon Ping Chin and Loomba, Tiffin and Walcott, Retamar and the makers from Teatro Buendía—the list goes on. In this process, the author also becomes a social agent (whether in dialogue or in conflict with a predecessor), which is ‘about the shattering

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of identities as much as the construction of them’ (Eagleton 1993, p. 48). Through these others, the author with a capital ‘A’, the bard and the colonizer, is deconstructed and reassembled in his own words and in the words, languages and gestures of the Other(s). Periodically, he could even become himself again—a nobody and potentially, everybody. The textual machine is a wondrous rabbit hole—equally precarious and enchanting.

Notes 1. In the character of the composer, especially in his suffering and sacrifice, traces of the destiny of another composer could be found—Gustav Mahler. Mahler lost his child a few years after the completion of one of his masterpieces Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). His wife, Alma, blamed her husband’s artistic project that tampered with death of children for inviting their own personal tragedy. 2. For more on the production history, context and analysis of the play see Duška Radosavljevi´c’s essay ‘The Alchemy of Power and Freedom— Contextualisation of Slobodan Šnajder’s Hrvatski Faust (Croatian Faust ),’ Contemporary Theatre Review 19 (4): 428–447. 3. Some of the seminal works on this subject include R.F. Retamar’s Caliban and Other Essays, Ania Loomba’s Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile, Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins’ Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics, to name only a few. 4. Otra Tempestad was created by Lauten and Raquel Carrió and performed in London at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in 1998, in their Globe-to-Globe International Theatre Season program.

Works Cited Beckett, Samuel. 1983. Worstward Ho. London: John Calder. Bennett, Andrew. 2005. The Author. London: Routledge. Bennett, Benjamin. 2008. The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read. New York: Fordham University Press. Césaire, Aimé. 2004. A Tempest, trans. Richard Miller. In The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 3rd ed., ed. W.B. Worthen. Boston: Wadsworth and Thomson. Dante. 1320 [2012]. The Divine Comedy. Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality, ed. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. Rachel Bowlby. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

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Eagleton, Terry. 1993. Self-Authoring Subjects. In What Is an Author? ed. M. Biriotti and Nicola Miller. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gilbert, Helen, and Joanne Tompkins. 1996. Post-colonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Lamming, George. 1992. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Loomba, Ania. 1989. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Manchester and New York: University of Manchester Press. Marlowe, Christopher. 1604 [1969]. Doctor Faustus. New York: Penguin. Marotti, Arthur. 1995. Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Minnis, A.J. 1988. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitude in the Late Middle Ages. London: Scolar Press. Mumford, Lewis. 2010. The Invention of Print. In Communication in History: Technology, Culture, Society, ed. D. Crowely and P. Heyer, 85–88. New York: Routledge. Ping, Woon Chin. 2003. Sycorax Revisited: Exile and Absence in Performance. Modern Drama, XLVI (1, Spring 2013). Radosavljevi´c, Duška. 2009. The Alchemy of Power and Freedom—Contextualisation of Slobodan Šnajder’s Hrvatski Faust (Croatian Faust ). Contemporary Theatre Review 19 (4): 428–447. Retamar, R.F. 1989. Caliban and Other Essays, trans. E. Backer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shakespeare, W. 2004. The Tempest: The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama, 4th ed., ed. W.B. Worthen. Boston: Wadsworth and Thomson. Šnajder, Slobodan. 1981. Hrvatski Faust [Croatian Faust]. Zagreb: Cekade. Tiffin, Helen. 1987. Post-colonial Literatures and Coutner-Discours. Kunapipi 9: 17–34. Tiffin, Helen. 1993. “Cold Hearts and (Foreign) Tongues”: Recreation and the Reclamation of Female Body of Erna Brodber and Jamaica Kincaid. Callaloo 16: 909–921. Trigg, Stephanie. 2002. Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Walcott, Derek. 1970. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Werres, Peter. 2011. Introduction: The Changing Faces of Doctor Faustus. In Lives of Faustus: The Faust Theme in Literature and Music, ed. L. Fitzsimmons, 1–18. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.

CHAPTER 4

Performing the Self

Barthes and Foucault identify the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries as the period when the notion of authorship in the modern sense of the word was articulated. Terms such as ‘authorial’, ‘authoring’, ‘authorism’, ‘authorly’ (‘proper to authors’) and ‘authorship’ (‘occupation or career as a writer of books’) all took hold in the eighteenth century. In these idioms, the modern sense of the author has been shaped, suggesting that the authorial figure has both a certain authority and ownership over the work. Around the same time, another kind of authorial figure emerged in theatre, one that powerfully matched the conjuring powers of Prospero—the theatre director. With the inspired vision of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen in Germany and Henry Irving in London, the notion of authorship in Western theatre acquired a directorial signature. The playwright and the director were no longer hidden behind the role of actor-manager as humble facilitators of theatrical entertainment, but began to emerge as strong authorial and authoritative figures. Henry Irving, the director and artistic composer of the shows at London’s Lyceum Theatre (in 1880s and 1890s), was well known for demanding complete control over every aspect of his productions. Earlier, in the 1760s, David Garrick, owner and manager of London’s Drury Lane, celebrated adaptor of Shakespeare’s plays and a charismatic actor praised for his natural acting style, had emerged as a version of a complete © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_4

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author. Extremely influential as artist/maker, Garrick was not only the authorial figure that shaped the theatrical repertoire of the period, but also a true celebrity. As Leslie Ritchie points out, ‘[h]is image was omnipresent: Garrick was artistically represented more times than the King, and amateur actors in London’s ‘sporting clubs’ energetically aped his gestures and delivery’ (Ritchie 2019, p. 2). This was also the period when Shakespeare’s position as the bard solidified both in the English language (his words often reborn in Garrick’s adaptations and deliveries) and within the context of the European Romantic imagination. The Bard, not unlike his own creation—the ghost of Hamlet’s father—began to haunt the stage as the ultimate father figure of dramatic literature. As theatre historian Christopher Bough observes: Shakespeare could satisfy the romantic desire for history, nature, horror and supernatural mystery, set alongside the deeper penetration and understanding of the human soul. The cultural and political values of Shakespeare could appeal powerfully to the romantic and the revolutionary. Furthermore, his plays represented longevity and stature and were believed to have emerged from the pen of ‘a man of the people’. (Bough 2013, pp. 49–50)

Be it in the packed auditorium of Drury Lane or across European lands that had been experiencing national awakenings, Shakespeare served as an inspiration that spoke eloquently to the Romantic and revolutionary spirit of the time—from the works of Goethe, Schiller, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, to the operas of Giuseppe Verdi. The author was definitely no longer a nobody. The ghost of Shakespeare fuelled the notion that new encounters could be forged by dead authors. The Romantic author is viewed as highly individual, original and expressive. A unique genius is a trait that defines the author of the time, as well as, the way he constructs his predecessors. In Conjunctions of Original Composition (1759), Edward Young offers a definition of the Romantic author that makes distinctions between originality and imitation: Learning we think, genius we revere; that gives us pleasure, this gives us rapture; that informs, this inspires: and is itself inspired; for genius is from heaven, learning from man: this sets us above the low and the illiterate; that, above the learned and polite. Learning is borrowed knowledge; genius is knowledge innate, and quite our own. (Young 1918, p. 17)

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To understand this uniqueness, the author’s own story became important and his/her work unfolded as in a hall of mirrors—with reflections bouncing off each other. The genius is not to be found in the work alone, but rather is located in the subjectivity of the author. This does not necessarily call for a psychological approach to interpretation but it does involve a closer consideration of the author’s life. The biography of the author is the backstory, in some cases even the subplot to the work he/she has created. Genius is mysterious—at one and the same time, it resides outside the author while being deeply embedded in authorial subjectivity. Svetlana Boym writes that the Romantic author: …has to love tragically and sentimentally, like Werther, and die tragically and heroically, like Shelley, Byron, Lermontov, or Pushkin. He can be a solitary figure, like Vigny or Keats, but he is preferably a public persona, a distinguished politician and revolutionary, like Hugo or the Russian poets —Decembrists who spoke in verse with their wives and beloveds who followed them to Siberia or to the place of their execution. (Boym 1991, pp. 4–5)

That the concept of the author gets projected and retrojected in the shape of the cultural desires of the time is nothing new. Yet, the Romantic author is unique for playing a crucial role in this process—for his/her active involvement in the self-fashioning of the authorial persona. The Romantic author cultivated a heightened self-awareness that revolved around three things: (a) their relationship to the other artist(s) whether it be a contemporary or a predecessor such as the Bard; (b) their own subjectivity and public presence; and (c) their own disappearance and death. William Wordsworth’s famous poem, The Prelude (1799), an intellectual autobiography, is addressed to his friend, mentor and fellow author, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This work is not only self-referential by nature of its autobiographical genre, but also by its evocation of another author in the text. In return, Coleridge searches for the answer to the question ‘What is poetry?’ by closely observing the daily life of his friend Wordsworth. Coleridge believed that the answer to the question lay not solely in the poet’s work but also in his individuality. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge asserts that the power of the artist lies ‘in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities of sameness, with difference; of the general with the concrete; the idea, with the image;

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the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects’ (Coleridge 1983, pp. 2.15–2.17). Hence, a true genius with innate knowledge of his/her own and the power of artistic synthesis is, by default, ahead of his (her) time. The Romantic author was not only avant-garde but much like contemporary authors, someone whose keen awareness of dialogue with his/her fellow author(s) past and present could seemingly bend time. According to Coleridge and Wordsworth, the author is the one who makes the familiar strange and this special individual talent becomes the connecting thread that links the Romantic genius to those who came before him (and at times, her), the Bard included. The Romantic author (generally speaking, male) was more often than not a charismatic free spirit, destined to become an author, troubled in one way or another; he/she was also a lover of nature and justice and often revolutionary in his/her socio-political worldviews. Some of these attributes were projected (or rather retrojected) onto predecessors as well. The Romantic author and his/her predecessor became, as it were, kindred intellectual spirits across time. In other words, Shakespeare, in the cultural imagination from Garrick to Goethe and beyond, was not only the bard, but the Romantic bard.

The Shape of the Author With the advent of the Romantic author, the ties between private, artistic and political worlds became more tightly interwoven both as interpretative strategies and as ways of being an author in the world. In that sense, the author/artist becomes a synthetic cultural and, at times, political figure, whose influence, as we will see later in the case of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is cast from beyond the grave, often evoking a range of contradictory interpretative responses. The Montenegrin bard, Petar II Petrovi´c Njegoš (1813–1851), celebrated in the regions of the South-West Balkans but otherwise relatively unknown (save for Slavic Studies Departments), is another case in point. Njegoš was a prince, a bishop, a philosopher and a poet-dramatist. He played a crucial role in reinforcing the national awakening in the region, battling the Ottoman Empire and unifying various Montenegrin tribes into a modern, centralized, nation state. Njegoš was also at the forefront of the emerging idea of a South-Slav unity that would lead to the formation of the Yugoslav Kingdom after World War I and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II. His writing,

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most notably the dramatic poem Gorski Vijenac (The Mountain Wreath), lay at the heart of the linguistic and cultural identity of the region. In fact, his literary and philosophical output were so renowned that it redeemed his extremely unpopular imposition of state taxation. Njegoš is known for his good looks almost as much as for his poetry—his numerous portraits depict a man with elegant features, a thoughtful expression, a meticulously groomed beard and dark, deep-set, eyes. ‘Biographical legend’ has it that on his travels to Vienna and Venice, the Montenegrin prince/poet made the hearts of the finest European ladies beat faster. And the archbishop, although sworn to celibacy, was allegedly not immune to romantic passions. While there is no concrete evidence of the archbishop/poet ever having broken his oath of celibacy to the Orthodox Church, the prince/poet seemed to channel his emotions into verse, some of which verge on eroticism. He died of consumption, an illness often linked to the fate of local Romantic poets of the time. Nevertheless, the role that this prince/poet/archbishop played in shaping the new public sphere of his time and even more, of the ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson) of the emerging nation states of the South-West Balkans under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire, is undeniable. Authorial figures like Njegoš, Rousseau or the Bard have remained beyond the grave in the public sphere in subsequent cultural narratives, iconographies and imaginations. That their ghostly presence and authorial immortality cannot be entirely explained by the cultural value of their works rests on the influential role that different interpretations, narrative variations and the shifting embodiments of both the authorial persona and their artistic and intellectual legacy have played over time. Njegoš’s status as an author was literally made concrete by the impressive mausoleum designed by Croatian sculptor, Ivan Meštrovi´c. In 1974, on the mountain of Lov´cen, the government of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia erected a monumental gravesite all but ensuring that the remains of the Montenegrin bard would be as close to the actual stars as it gets. Over four hundred steps lead to the gravesite carved in the finest marble where, perched on the mountaintop, it rewards visitors with an impressive vista after their laborious climb. A visit to the mausoleum, surrounded as it is by mountain tops and seemingly touching the sky, makes the trek very much like a pilgrimage. Njegoš has often been dubbed the Montenegrin Shakespeare not only for the artistic and intellectual powers of his work, but also for his impact on the vernacular language and culture. Lines from his dramatic poems have indeed turned

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into well-known and often-repeated proverbs, while staged adaptations of his work have been performed with enduring regularity. Montenegrins often take pleasure in pitting their bard against Shakespeare claiming that illiterate peasants across Montenegrin villages can recite page after page of The Maintain Wreath. Their prowess is not entirely based on folkloric legend; the Montenegrin tradition of performing oral epic poetry often accompanied by a gusle, a musical instrument that remains a national symbol, is very much alive. Echoing the ancient Homeric rhapsodes, Montenegrin guslars, dressed in the same traditional national attire that their bard wore in his portraits, keep both the poetry and the authorial legend alive. Unlike Shakespeare, however, Njegoš—as is common with bards of smaller nations and minority languages—did not become a colonizer. Still, his words and ‘biographical legend’ inspired various imaginaries, one of the most dangerous being that of nationalism. His words, initially aimed at the Ottoman Empire that had occupied the Balkans for 400 years, were taken out of their original context to fuel warmongering sentiments against the Muslim population during the Yugoslav separatist wars of the 1990s. While the Montenegrin Shakespeare did not turn into a colonizer, he did emerge, at the other end of the textual machine, as an ardent nationalist. Numerous studies have been written about Njegoš. Among the most notable being To Njegoš, a Book of Deep Adherence (Njegošu, knjiga duboke odanosti, 1951), by Isidora Sekuli´c, one of the first and most influential female authorial voices in Serbian and Yugoslavian literature and culture. This illuminating study written to commemorate the centenary of Njegoš’s death sparked a sharp, public polemic concerning no less than the bard’s looks. In one of her essays, Sekuli´c criticized the bust of the poet made by the aforementioned sculptor, Ivan Meštrovi´c. In Sekuli´c’s view, this much-reproduced figure represented a retouched and modified version of the poet’s features that made him look more aristocratic, intellectual and European. She criticized Meštrovi´c for replacing the authentic harmony of the poet’s unique Montenegrin features with a kind of stock representation of a European intellectual. This criticism was met with a harsh rebuttal, not the first in Sekuli´c’s career. Despite being the first woman to be accepted into the prestigious Academy of Arts and Sciences, Sekuli´c was often the recipient of criticism that was fuelled by misogynist rhetoric from prominent cultural figures of her time. The polemic over Njegoš was no exception. Leading that critique was Milovan Djilas, a highly-regarded and influential political figure.

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Djilas, who was a partisan fighter, communist, politician, theorist and author, accused Sekuli´c of reactionary idealism, attempting to discredit her as an author and cultural figure. Fearing persecution, Sekuli´c allegedly burned the sequel to her study on Njegoš. A few years later, Djilas’s criticisms of Sekuli´c were aborted when he fell out of political grace and went on to write his own book, The Book about Njegoš , while serving a prison sentence. Ironically, the two books—Sekuli´c’s and Djilas’s—are often credited as being the two most notable studies of the Montenegrin prince/poet. These different views of Njegoš that formed the basis of an ideological battle between Sekuli´c and Djilas could be viewed as a conflict between two constructions of the author—both holding onto their authenticity claim, which in fact was nothing more (or less) than a conflict between two ‘biographical legends’—‘a literary conception of the author’s life’ (Tomashevsky 1978, p. 51).1 While Tomashevsky, who coined the term, finds the notion of ‘biographical legend’ mainly formulated through language and text, the Sekuli´c/Djilas polemic was sparked by the response to the visual representation of the Montenegrin bard. This visual image in which the author becomes variously embodied resembles a theatrical tableau vivant. Sekuli´c objects to the facial expression and the way Njegoš has his head lowered in Meštrovi´c’s bust, that is, to the movement and gestural aspects of the sculpture that affect not so much how we read Njegoš’s work, nor even how we read his biography, but how we see the prince/poet in our mind’s eye. Hence, the notion of ‘biographical legend’ does not only involve the textual construction of the author, but rather concerns how he/she has been embodied and, potentially, how subsequent embodiments might undo his/her previously constructed ‘biographical legend’. In Javier Marias’s book, Written Lives, a collection of short biographies of various dead authors accompanied with their photos, the Spanish writer offers a literal juxtaposition to the idea of ‘de-facement’ (de Man): It is as if the books we still read felt more alien and incomprehensible without some image of the heads that composed them; it is as if our age, in which everything has its corresponding image, felt uncomfortable with something whose authorship cannot be attributed to a face; it is almost as if a writer’s features formed parts of his or her work. (Marias 2007, p. 173)

It might not be only our age, as Marias claims, that has a need to see the author and to give specific features, body, gestures, movement and

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clothing to the maker of the work. For the author to transform from a nobody to a somebody, he/she needs a body and a face—or at least a mask. The bust of Njegoš, the sophisticated features depicted in his portraits, like the faces of authors/artists captured in the artworks on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London all appear simultaneously as death masks and as theatrical masks—the former confirming the imminence of death even of the most illustrious of bards; the latter playfully promising the possibility of a return in the cultural imagination of posterity. What the mask looks like and what it reveals might, however, become a matter of irreconcilable aesthetic and ideological debates.

The Public Sphere The Romantic author is not without his own paradoxes emerging through the discourse of individuality and originality, he was rebelling against a kind of authority that was hierarchical and imposed from above. The author was no longer an auctor whose authority came from his proximity to God, but rather it came from his unique self—from the refusal to take any kind of authority for granted. In that sense, the Romantic authorial figure was almost a revolutionary. It is important to note that this revolutionary aspect was more than metaphorical since the author/artist was often involved in socio-political upheavals in Europe at the time, not entirely alien to the revolutionary mood of the late 1960s when the death of the author was proclaimed. These changes have influenced and politicized the notion of the author in various ways. The author/artist became a prominent figure of the emerging new public sphere in the literary salons and coffee houses of Paris and London of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to Jürgen Habermas, the new public sphere lies at the heart of democratic association, cutting through binaries that separated the private realm from that of public authority. Although the new public sphere emerged from within the private realm—that is, in the salons of eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—its impact on the cultural and political developments of the time was profound. The fact that a salon took place in the privacy of one’s personal abode meant that it could be both a personal space and a kind of public platform. In the making of this private/public space, the figure of author/artist was indispensable. In fact, without him (and at times her) to hold forth, the new public sphere that Habermas famously theorized might never have come into being. For in spite of the indispensable role that women played as

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inspired and formidable hostesses of the salons, it was the author, in the broad sense of the term, who was the main feature of the new public sphere. Arguably, the Romantic author had a better understanding of his/her public role than his predecessors coupled with a heightened awareness of the cultural and political influence that his/her authority could affect. Garrick, for instance, played a crucial role in shaping the theatrical public sphere of London, Lord Byron turned his political poems into action when he joined the Greek War of Independence, and Rousseau influenced the French Revolution from beyond the grave. Theatre historian, Leslie Ritchie, argues that Garrick’s fame was rooted as much in his understanding of the new cultural public sphere as it was in his exceptional acting. He published advertisements, theatre pamphlets, letters, essays and poems that promoted his acting and his theatre and was a proprietor of several newspapers. As Ritchie writes, this was a man who understood the pivotal role of marketing and media forces in shaping the public image of the artist: ‘It was entirely possible for a theatre-goer in the 1760s to attend Drury Lane Theatre (partly owned and managed by Garrick) to see a play which Garrick had written or adapted, featuring a prologue or epilogue written by Garrick, in which Garrick himself was acting. That playgoer had likely been enticed to go to the play by an advertisement, puff or review written by Garrick, placed in a newspaper partly owned by Garrick. David Garrick possessed an almost inconceivable level of cultural power’ (Ritchie 2019, p. 2). Garrick approached theatre as part of a wider cultural playing field and a platform through which this playing field could be shaped. The role of the author/artist in the public sphere goes beyond cultural influence because the cultural sphere is never isolated. As a site of production of critical discourse that might contravene state authority, the birth of the public sphere gave the Romantic author a political voice. The figure of Lord Byron famously epitomizes this intersection of art, life and direct political action. Not only was his life bohemian, nomadic and riddled with romance (some of it scandalous), he was also deeply politically-engaged. This engagement was multifaceted—his political poems fuelled a radical, revolutionary imagination in both art and life. His writing, Turkish Tales especially, provided him with a script for direct political activism when he joined the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821–1832). There, in the Greek town of Missolonghi, the iconic

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Romantic poet met his untimely death just as his writing had foreshadowed. But unlike his premonitions, he did not die on the battlefield as he had hoped, but in malaria-contaminated swampy trenches. Life tends to add a touch of banality even to the most poetic scripts. Even so, these fragments of both poetry and biography have contributed to the construction of the figure of the Romantic poet as a ‘biographical legend’—‘a fiction co-authored by the poet and the literary period’ (Boym 1991, pp. 23–24)—unfolding as a theatrical tableau vivant. The author holding forth in salons became a public intellectual— a figure whose critical gaze was able to pierce the political and moral fabric of society by challenging pre-existing notions and imagining alternative possibilities. As a public figure, the author/artist carried a high degree of responsibility; it also required a degree of courage. Eighteenthcentury authors/artists such as Voltaire and Rousseau in France, Byron in England, Pushkin in Russia and Njegoš in Montenegro were public figures whose persona was as prominent as their works (and in some cases, the ‘biographical legend’ surpassed the work). The author’s work and life often became inseparably linked, so much so that the admirers of an author’s work were also ‘the worshipers of his personality’, while the adversaries of his writing were also his personal enemies’ (Tomashevsky 1978, p. 48). Rousseau, a star of the eminent salons of the day, famously embodies such a figure—his political writing, most notably the Social Contract (1762), influenced the French Revolution, his literary work, Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761), infused the Romantic cultural and literary Zeitgeist, while his Confessions (1782–1789) paved the way to modern autobiography. The Social Contract prompted the leaders of the Corsican protest against foreign rule (much supported in European progressive circles of the time) to seek advice from the author about legislating their affairs of state. The birth of the new public sphere played a central role in a new public awareness of the author’s social role and impact. It also alerted authorities to the power of performative words: how ideas can turn into acts, how art can prefigure reality, and, importantly, how dangerous this might be for the maintenance of the status quo. It will not come as a surprise, then, to learn that Rousseau’s books were banned and burned in Paris and Geneva and that religious authorities and even Voltaire, the father of Enlightenment, found Rousseau’s didactic novel, Emile, or on Education (1762), highly problematic. As a consequence, the French Parliament issued a warrant for Rousseau’s

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arrest, forcing the author to flee France and live a refugee-like existence often struggling to secure the right to remain even in his native Switzerland. Predictably, when Rousseau was granted permission to pass through Paris in 1766, en route to England—his next place of refuge—he was greeted as an iconic figure and a celebrity. His celebratory status, as might be surmised, did not diminish with his death; a small house in the park at Ermenonville, which the Marquis de Girardin had placed at his disposal, was turned into a parc du souvenir and a site of pilgrimage. And, little more than a decade after Rousseau’s death, his Emiel, or on Education, became the catalyst for educational reform during the French Revolution. Rousseau was evoked yet again in a spectacular, performative manner when on 9th of October 1794, his remains were transferred from Ermenonville on the Isle of Poplars to the Pantheon. In A Place in the Country, W. G. Sebald’s psychogeographical meditations on various sites ghosted by dead authors, the author offers a description of this event: ‘On this memorable day, a group of musicians performed Rousseau’s opera, Le Devin du village […]. In all the villages along the route, the people lined the streets calling, “Vive la République! Vive la mémoire de JeanJacques Rousseau!”’ (Sebald 2013, p. 64). The author was resurrected in the performance mode and became a cultural symbol of the new state.

The Paradox of Rousseau’s Tears The Romantic author/artist is often found to be as fascinating, if not more so, than the work he/she created (a state of affairs not limited, of course, to the Romantic era). As a result, the lines between the work and the authorial persona are often blurred in a manner that is essentially theatrical. In his essay on ‘Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting’ (1990), Michael Quinn describes a tripartite structure consisting of actor, stage figure and character, with the middle position of stage figure being a mixture of the actor’s I and the fictional character. This concept of the stage figure is akin to the authorial persona (in theatre and/or other artistic disciplines). And, just like the authorial persona, the stage figure is constructed by both the creativity of the actor and the eye of the beholder. Quinn explains that an actor’s celebrity status works to prevent the stage figure from being submerged in the embodiment of the fictional character. Rather, Quinn states, the actor’s celebrity remains foregrounded throughout the performance ‘as the personal qualities of the individual actor dominate the perception of the actor’s references to the fictional

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events’ (Quinn 1990, p. 155). Thus, watching the Garrick Theatre’s production of Bitter Wheat (2019), for example, although we follow the protagonist of David Mamet’s play, we never entirely lose sight of the fact that he is portrayed by John Malkovich. Watching Garrick might have had a similar effect on the theatregoer in eighteenth-century London. No matter how successfully the celebrity actor might embody a given fictional character, the stage figure rather than the fictional character remains in the foreground. The foregrounding of the stage figure contributes enormously to the pleasure of the audience. Like the stage figure, the Romantic author is constructed through a similar lens. The plot lines of the artist’s own life and that of the character may or may not have parallels and intersections, but the recipient still remains aware of the artist’s persona through the reception process. In other words, the author/artist (or at least the construction thereof) never entirely disappears into the character and/or the creation itself. Yet, not all is in the eye of the beholder. There is also something in the performance of the author as a public figure—in his/her self-fashioned theatricality—that directs the gaze. Arguably, that is how Rousseau stole the show at Garrick’s Drury Lane during his brief exilic sojourn in England. Garrick invited the celebrity author/philosopher Rousseau and his host, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, to an evening of theatre. Celebrity that he was, Rousseau’s visit to theatre sparked mass hysteria in front of the playhouse and according to one newspaper ‘[t]he crowd was so great getting into the Theatre that a great number of Gentlemen lost their hats and wigs, and Ladies their cloaks, bonnets...’, c’ (Zaretsky and Scott 2006, p. 29). Once inside the theatre, Rousseau sat across from the royal box where, reportedly, King George III and Queen Charlotte spent more time pointing their opera glasses at the philosopher than at the stage. Nestled between Hume and Garrick’s wife and dressed in his Armenian kaftan and an outlandish fur hat, Rousseau did not disappoint: the tragic parts of the performance brought him to tears and the comic parts made him laugh. As a result, the emotional intensity in Rousseau’s box may have matched Garrick’s performance. The author/philosopher was so engrossed in the theatrical event that there was a point when, leaning intently on the ledge, it appeared as though he might accidentally leap into the orchestra. To prevent a mishap, Mrs. Garrick kept her hand on the sleeve of Rousseau’s kaftan. Afterwards, Rousseau enthusiastically congratulated Garrick confessing that the performance brought

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tears to his eyes and a smile to his lips, even though he scarcely understood a word of English. In their essay, ‘Philosophy Leads to Sorrow: An Evening at the Theatre with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume’, Robert Zaretsky and John Scott ask how it was that Rousseau enjoyed his theatrical outing to such a great extent. Not only was the performance spoken in a language that he barely understood, the performance that held Rousseau in thrall was from the English translation of Zaire, the tragedy written by Rousseau’s nemesis, Voltaire. Moreover, Rousseau had previously expressed open disdain for theatre in general and tragedy in particular as a genre that exacerbates vices and excites passions. Voltaire’s Zaire was Rousseau’s favourite example. Zaretsky and Scott turn to his Essay on the Origin of Language in search of the answer. Basing their argument on Rousseau’s claim that ‘the expression of pure emotion can be reached only when semantic meaning gives way to melodic meaning’, Zaretsky and Scott speculate that this might very well have been what Rousseau actually experienced that night in the theatre through ‘the sonority of Garrick’s voice, the inflations of his words, the tragic cadence of his speech, combined with his broad, powerful gestures’ (Zaretsky and Scott 2006, p. 53). They go on to suggest, though, that there might be another explanation for Rousseau’s antics at Drury Lane. Aware of his public persona and the gazes cast upon him through opera glasses nearly as intently as upon Garrick himself, the author/philosopher might have been performing too. Apparently, both his enemies and allies agreed that Rousseau’s behaviour in the theatre was rooted in his ‘extreme desire to be seen’ (Zaretsky and Scott 2006, p. 54). Tomashevsky argues that both Rousseau and Voltaire were very much aware of the role their personalities and biographies played in the reception of their work and in the positioning of their public persona, so much so that they dramatized certain motifs in their own lives ‘to create for themselves an artificial, legendary biography composed of intentionally selected real and imaginary events’ (Tomashevsky 1978, p. 49). Despite his hostility towards theatre, Rousseau did not entirely dismiss the potential of performance when he wrote: ‘Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves, make them actors themselves, do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others so that all will be better united’ (in Zaretsky and Scott 2006, p. 51). Yet, this might not be taken as mere exhibitionism, but rather as a mode of performing the self in everyday life whereby the author as a public figure is both the spectator and the actor, both the observer and the participant. Theatricality emerges as the key device in

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this performance not only as a means of embodying the events on stage, but also as a way of performing the audience—especially when a famous author ‘is present’ in the auditorium. In his seminal study, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953), M. N. Abrams observes that the artist no longer holds the mirror up to nature but turns it towards him/herself—art becomes a reflection of the author’s soul. We might add that there are multiple reflections through which the Romantic author has been shaped—both self-referential and external. Theatricality appears as the dominant mode through which this notion of authorial persona is constructed. Critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman have identified Romanticism as the era in which ‘the point is not to surpass others in art, but to surpass art itself’ (Bakhtin 1990, p. 202). The relationship between art and life was no longer a binary, but rather a more interwoven notion of art in life where the author/artist becomes the main protagonist. Tomashevsky writes that in this period the author becomes ‘a witness and a living participant’ in his own work. A double transformation takes place, he argues, where ‘heroes are taken for living personage, and poets become living heroes—their biographies become poems’ (Tomashevsky 1978, p. 50). The author is no longer a nobody, a canvas onto which cultural desires and constructs are projected, but an active subject who provides a blueprint for the public to imagine and further embellish the authorial persona. In other words, the public imagination through which the artistic persona is constructed is not entirely without the author’s input. The German art collective known as Sturm und Drang (1770) advocated that art should be an expression of the artist’s inner feelings. Goethe’s portrayal of an anguished, alienated and sensitive hero in The Sorrow of Young Werther (1774) mirrored the emerging figure of the Romantic author. In his autobiographical work, Confessions (1770), Rousseau clearly states that he is the subject of his own writing: ‘Simply myself. I know my own heart and understand my fellow man. But I am made unlike anyone I have met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different’ (Rousseau 1770 [1953], p. 17).2 The title of Rousseau’s work echoes St. Augustine’s autobiography but in this Romantic confessional rendition, God has been marginalized and the spotlight shines squarely on the individual author. Even though permission had been granted for Confessions to be published posthumously (between 1781 and 1789) based on Rousseau’s promise that he would not write anything political upon his return from exile, he was known to have read passages from

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it for hours in French salons—almost foreshadowing the genre of the autobiographical solo performance. Indeed, this self-reflexivity requires a methodological approach closer to theatre than to literature—a kind of self-theatricalization that prefigures both the Stanislavskian actor’s inward gaze in search of emotional memory and Brechtian distancing. The latter requires the actor to look at oneself as if from a distance in a manner that resembles the way in which the Brechtian actor studies his/her character. Denis Diderot’s ‘Paradox of the Actor’, completed in 1773 but not published until 1830, posited the theory that great actors fashion their characters through intelligence rather than through emotions. The actor’s tears come from the brain, asserts Rousseau’s friend and fellow public intellectual, Diderot. However, he does allow for the occasional possibility when emotions can play a part as well. Such was the case of his favourite actress, Mademoiselle Clairon, who might have experienced emotions when playing a character for the first time, he allowed, but was always able to keep her feelings under the control of her intellect. Diderot’s ‘The Paradox of the Actor’ could easily become the paradox of the Romantic author when it comes to the relationship between art and life, and between the mystery of the author’s talent and artistic craftsmanship. In this case, artistic devices become a way of structuring the author’s selfhood—with all its delights, torments and inspirations—into a meaningful expression of both art and life. And while the Romantic author often appears as affectionate and affective, the emotions, even if not entirely subordinated to intellect, become moulded into artistic forms. In other words, the tears of the great Romantic author ought to eventually also come from the brain. As for Rousseau’s tears during Garrick’s theatrical performance, it remains impossible to determine if they came from the brain or from some less cerebral place. Clearly, though, it was an evening of theatre where both the thespian and the philosopher gave powerful performances.

Theatricality Lotman identifies theatricality as a manifestation of the eighteenthcentury and nineteenth-century Zeitgeist, at least in the context of Russian culture, when he writes: ‘it is precisely because the life of theatre differs from everyday existence that the view of life as spectacle gave man new possibilities for behaviour’ (Lotman 1976, p. 56). For Lotman, Romanticism is not just a literary and artistic style but also

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a lifestyle. He recognizes three ways in which art and life are interrelated (a) ‘Art and extra-artistic reality are regarded as realms between which the difference is so great and fundamentally inseparable that even comparing them is impossible’; (b) ‘Active influence is directed from the realm of art to the region of extra-artistic reality’; (c) ‘Life serves as the region of modeling activity—it creates the examples that art imitates’ (Lotman 1976, pp. 34–35). Lotman relates the first case to Classicism, the second to Romanticism and the third to Realism. Romantic theatricality is grounded in the premise that not only does the actor undergo a transformation on stage, but the whole world becomes theatricalized. For nineteenth-century Russian culture and its Romantic gentry, as Lotman explains, theatre was a source of revolutionary consciousness that transformed a person into a character liberating him/her from customs and norms: Theatrical life represented a chain of events. A man was not a passive participant in an inchoate passage of time: liberated from everyday life, he led the existence of a historical personage—he himself chose his type of behaviour, actively influencing the world around him, perished or achieved success. (56)

Lotman describes everyday behaviour as semiotic phenomena that can be experienced aesthetically. This means that it is not just art that can be interpreted through an author’s life, but life itself could be analysed as aesthetic phenomena. For instance, Lotman demonstrates how Pushkin’s plays involved a plurality of styles, as did Pushkin’s life. Even Pushkin’s death as the result of a duel took place within a highly choreographed scenario that first appeared in his writing, before it turned into the author’s own predicament. In 1837, Pushkin was fatally wounded in a duel over his wife, Natalia. Only five years earlier, Pushkin finished his famous novel in verse, Evgenie Onegin, in which the poet Larinov dies in a duel with the eponymous hero, following the two best friends’ fallout over Larinov’s fiancée, Olga. The death of the character prefigured the death of its author. Here, the author’s life and art are not just interwoven, but appear to offer a mysterious and eerie mirroring of art in death. In the ‘Poetics of Everyday Behaviour’, Lotman writes about the theatricalization of everyday life of Russian nobility: ‘Play-acting at everyday life, the feeling of being forever on stage, is extremely characteristic of Russian gentry life in the 18th century. The common people were

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inclined to view the gentry as masqueraders; they observed their life as watching a play’ (Lotman in Nakhimovsky and Stone Nakhimovsky 1985, p. 70). Arguably, the Romantic author was constructed in a similar fashion through public imagination. The following observation further highlights the theatricality of the authorial figure as a role model or as someone who models his own behaviour according to specific dramaturgical patterns: A poetics of behaviour developed further with the appearance of the stock character. Like the theatrical stock character, this was one of a number of invariants with a group of typical roles. The eighteenth-century man would select a particular type of behaviour for himself, which simplified and elevated his everyday existence according to some ideal. As a rule, he chose to model himself on a particular historical personage, a literary or a government figure, or a character from a poem or a tragedy. […] Patterning oneself after this figure became a program of behaviour, and names such as “the Russian Pindar,” “Voltaire of the North,” “our La Fontaine,” “the new Stern,” […] were used in addition to real names. (Lotman in Nakhimovsky and Stone Nakhimovsky 1985, pp. 81–82)

Here, the author appears as a repertoire of behaviours—a kind of miseen-scène of the everyday life of the artist. And he is always a foreigner, an authorial figure of another culture, demonstrating a spiritual and intellectual kinship across national borders—similar to the Montenegrin Shakespeare, Njegoš, sculpted in the shape of a European intellectual. Whether tragic, heroic, sentimental, solitary or ironic, the authorial persona is constructed like a protagonist of a play or a novel. Therefore, we might argue that deep down, at the very core of the inimitable authorial persona of the Romantic author, there hides a stock character. On some level though, the Romantic author might not have been entirely unaware of this paradox and its ironies. The self-fashioning of the Romantic author does not only appear in the intersection of the author’s biography and public image, on the one hand, and the artistic work, on the other, but it also emerges as one of the key aesthetic features of the Romantic period. The aesthetic device in question is, of course, Romantic irony—a metafictional/metatheatrical element that emerges when the author inscribes him/herself in the text, often in a self-mocking fashion that comments on his/her own process of writing/making within the work itself. While we find Romantic irony across a wide historical spectrum—Chaucer, Pirandello and Binet were adept at using the technique—it is the Romantic author, most notably Byron in Don Juan

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and Sterne in Tristram Shandy, who championed this self-referentiality with an ironic twinkle in their eyes. It presupposes the understanding of authorial subjectivity as playful and self-reflexivity as innately theatrical. Romantic irony not only turned the author’s self-reflexivity into an artistic strategy, but, contrary to various romantic depictions of the Romantic author, it also suggested the Romantic author did not take him/herself all that seriously.

The Other Romantic Author The Romantic author, whether in seriousness or in jest, is, as Boym explains, ‘transformed into a spectacular figure, his own romantic hero’: Romantics conscientiously worked on self-stylization, cultivating a limited repertoire of stock characters – from a demonic Byronesque type to a melancholic “sensitive man.” Thus, Romanticism creates a new iconography, a new repertoire of images, the indispensable element of which is the connection between art and life—making life poetic while making art autobiographical. (Boym 1991, p. 4)

Yet, the Romantic frame, within which life becomes poetic and art autobiographical, escapes the stock representations only when the Other author takes the stage. Between the larger-than-life, charismatic Lord Byron, who wrote poems and fought in liberation wars, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, doomed to drown at sea in Italy, stands Mary Shelley. She does not quite fit the frame within which the Romantic author becomes his own tragic and, at times, ironic hero. She neither toys with Romantic irony nor inscribes her melancholic reflection into her masterpiece, Frankenstein (1818). If the persona/stage figure of the Romantic author foregrounds the self-reflexive I , Mary Shelley’s Romantic self-reflexivity is an alterity, a not I . Not because her gothic novel Frankenstein escapes biographical interpretations; rather, the figure of the eponymous protagonist—the scientist who assembles body parts of the dead to bring a lab creature to life—could be easily traced to Mary Shelley’s interest in science and the experiments in galvanization, the attempts to resurrect the dead using electricity, that fascinated the public at the time. The preoccupation with death, birth (albeit of a monster in a lab) and resurrection (of the fragmented dead into a new being) links almost too easily to autobiography—the passing of Shelley’s mother, the early feminist author, Mary

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Wollstonecraft, who died shortly after giving birth to her daughter. The occasion that sparked the writing of Frankenstein has been often reiterated in various narrative and dramatic variations. As the story goes, the moment of Frankenstein’s conception took place during a sojourn to Switzerland by Byron, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont (Mary’s stepsister and Byron’s lover). It rained relentlessly, providing the group with plenty of time for wine, sex and boredom. Byron famously proposed that everyone write a ghost story. If Mary Shelley’s ghost story offers a selfreflective gaze at all, it is through a broken mirror—the image it reflects back is neither flattering nor ironic, but that of the unsettling not I . Linda Anderson offers a reading of the monster’s ‘fragmented body pieced together into the semblance of wholeness as a pervasive figure of autobiography, for what it means to create life in one’s own image’ (Anderson 2011, p. 55). Frankenstein could indeed be interpreted as a metaphor of autobiographical writing, foregrounding the authorial persona/stage figure as a kind of anti-hero, and ostensibly, as an anti-author, asserting that the self-reflection of the Romantic author could only emerge in the monstrous shape of, as Anderson puts it, ‘yearning and unfulfilment’ (ibid.). In a way, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the embodiment of the relationship between life and art, the author and the protagonist—fragmented, monstrous, deadly—stripped of Romantic glamour and glory. Between the lines of Frankenstein is a perverse form of Romantic authorial self-reflexivity that asks what it means to make art in one’s own image. In this crooked-mirror where the ‘biographical legend’, in both words and image, appears as a fragmented and patched up body, the monster becomes its maker’s/author’s uncanny double. The National Theatre’s 2011 production of Frankenstein, adapted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle, foregrounds this duality as it depicts the story from the perspective of the monster—making the monster, rather than his creator, the story’s originator. The notion of the monster as the creator’s uncanny double is further positioned in a dialectic relationship between the two actors, Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch, who alternate the roles of the monster and his maker. Witnessing two consecutive performances, one can see how this monster/maker dialectics becomes embodied as traces of Cumberbatch’s scientist begin to emerge in Miller’s monster, and vice versa. The opening is a scene of spectacular birth—a body emerging from a gigantic, translucent cocoon—a disembodied womb. The figure who comes to life is

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childlike as he takes his first teetering steps and utters endearing expressions of amazement at the world. This makes the scientist’s disgust and rejection of his creation (his child of sorts) almost heartbreaking and the subsequent cruelty of the monster more explicable, ambiguous and painful. The father-son connection between the maker and the monster, the author and his ‘hideous progeny’, becomes palpable. In the documentary, Frankenstein: The Modern Myth (Channel 4, 2012), director Boyle points out that although the image of the monster does not resemble his maker and even disgusts him, Dr. Frankenstein and his ‘hideous progeny’ share the same mind. This uncanny duality of the maker/monster could be further read as the metaphor of the author. In the father-son relationship, there is not only the patrilineage of the monstrous human, but also of the concept and tradition of authorship. The authorial patrilineage embodied in the maker/monster appears as riddled with arrogance, self-loathing and abandonment. The monster, desperate in his loneliness, asks Dr. Frankenstein to make a woman so he might have a companion. His maker refuses—in the patrilineal tradition of authorship, women do not merit a place, not even as ‘hideous progenies’. The tropes of patricide, infanticide and the absence of a mother figure—the female as the originating principle—reveal a ‘monstrosity’ in the notion of the author as a father figure that ‘biographical legends’ often conceal. Finally, if the maker/monster duality in Frankenstein reads as a metaphor of the author, it sublimates all the key aspects of the idea that the author dies hard: death (both in broken self-reflexivity of creating in one’s own image and in the actual act of the monster murdering his maker), birth (of the monster/maker) and resurrection (from the maker’s galvanization of the monster to the numerous adaptations and intertextual toying with both the Frankenstein story and the biography of its author, Mary Shelley). In his reflections on Rousseau, Sebald writes about Rousseau’s fascination with Johann Joachim Becher, a seventeenth-century alchemist and polymath who explored the mysterious phenomenon of vitrification. Quoting Rousseau’s writing on Becher, Sebald finds in this metamorphic process a metaphor for writing: Using procedures that he keeps shrouded in mystery, he [Becher] has carried out experiments that have convinced him that man, like all animals, is glass and can return to glass. This leads him to the most entertaining reflections on the trouble that the ancients took to burn or embalm the dead, and on ways in which one might preserve the ashes of one’s ancestors

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by means of a few hours’ work, replacing hideous and disgusting cadavers with clean, shining vases of beautiful, transparent glass, tinted not with the characteristic green of glass made from plants but with a milky white colour heightened by a slight tinge of narcissus. (Rousseau Institutions chimiques in Sebald 2013, pp. 57–58)

For Sebald, vitrification is a metaphor of the relationship between art and life, whereby the artistic process transforms the banality of life and death into a form that has meaning, and even beauty. We might add that the process of constructing the author—the making of the biographical legend through narratives, images and embodiments—is similar to this metamorphosis. When the body of Mary Shelley’s husband washed ashore, ten days after his boat sank in the Gulf of Spezia in July 1822, the flesh on his face and hands had been half-eaten by salt and fish. A book of Keats’s poems still stuck in his pocket provided the only proof that the ‘hideous and disgusting cadaver’ was indeed the dashing Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Louis Edouard Fournier’s famous painting, The Funeral of Shelley, the body of the dead poet prostrated on the funeral pyre becomes fully restored. In her autobiographical novel, Memories of the Future (2019), described by its author, Siri Hustvedt, as a ‘portrait of the artist as a young woman’, there is a brief, but insightful reflection on Fournier’s painting: In Louis Edouard Fournier’s painting of the seaside funeral, the dashing Lord Byron stands in the foreground with Leigh Hunt and Edward John Trelawney. The dead poet, untouched by fish and salt and sea, the dead poet, not disfigured at all, lies on the smoking bier, his beautiful face turned heavenward, a young hero-god preparing for his posthumous resurrection in our collective mind. If you look far to your left, you will see her in the background: the minor character, the wife. She is on her knees humbly praying for God knows what. One story becomes another. (Hustvedt 2019, p. 307)

Two points emerge from both Fournier’s painting and Hustvedt’s comments: the first point concerns the metamorphosis through which the dead author becomes ‘resurrected in our collective minds’ which is indeed akin (at least metaphorically) to the mysterious vitrification process that fascinated Rousseau. Through the work of another artist, and through the workings of the collective imagination, the mortal disfigured body of the

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author is not only made whole again, it is made more perfect and somewhat less prone to decay. The death of the Romantic author becomes as glamorous as his life. The ashes—the key material ingredient needed to turn ‘hideous cadavers’ into shining vases of beautiful, translucent glass— are also implied in the materiality of the poet’s dead body and in the smoking bier that is about to consume it. Yet, in the painting, the body of the poet is suspended in time, where neither the sea nor the flames could damage his ‘beautiful face’. And ‘the tinge of narcissus’ is there too, in the notion of authorial/artistic self-reflexivity—how one author/artist sees himself in another. The second point concerns the ‘minor character’—the figure in the background of the painting towards whom Hustvedt directs our gaze. Fournier is not interested in Mary Shelley. She is not depicted as a fellow Romantic author/artist here, even though at the time the painting was made, there were plenty of ingredients to construct Mary Shelley’s own ‘biographical legend’—loss, love, rebellion, the novel that quickly gained extreme popularity and more loss. Her lifestyle, too, fits the stock character of the Romantic author/rebel—eloping with Shelley at age sixteen, refusing the constraints of conventional marriage and harbouring radical atheist views. Moreover, nothing spells out genius (one of the keywords in the Romantic notion of the author) more than writing what would become one of the most influential novels of nineteenth-century European literature at the tender age of nineteen. Despite this, all Fournier sees is Mary Shelley the distraught wife of the great poet—a stock character traditionally relegated to the background. Notwithstanding Fournier’s painting, Mary Shelley’s novel and her ‘biographical legend’ have long since moved from the background to centre stage. As a result of the vast amount of scholarship on Mary Shelley’s work—biographies, documentaries, stage and screen adaptations of both Frankenstein and her own life—one story has indeed ‘become another’. Unquestionably, Mary Shelley has achieved canonical status as an author that equals that of her companions, Shelley and Byron. The question here is not so much how to reinsert Mary Shelley in her rightful place since she has been long ‘resurrected in the collective mind’, but what to make of the narrative that emerges from her marginal perspective in that painting? How does the figure in the background narrate the story of the Romantic author—is it his or her self-reflexivity, his or her theatricality and his or her death? This is where Dr. Frankenstein and his progeny, the author and the character, the maker and his reflection, come

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into play. To answer simply, Mary Shelley does not beautify the cadaver, albeit the monster she writes is a form of galvanization, a form of resurrection. The Frankenstein metaphor reveals a cracked mirror of authorial self-reflexivity where ‘the tinge of narcissus’ is coupled with monstrosity. Reflected there, the melancholic, revolutionary poet, Byron, is also the man who takes his infant daughter away from her mother, Claire Clermont, only to abandon the child to die in a convent. Percy Bysshe Shelley, too, abandoned his child and pregnant wife (who later committed suicide) when he fell in love with Mary Shelley. And what about Rousseau, the public intellectual, Romantic author, political exile, and philosopher of the new social contract? He took his working-class lover and her mother as his servants and, despite writing the most progressive work at the time on child-rearing, abandoned their five children to foundling home. It was Mary Shelley’s mother, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who criticized the political writings of the iconic Rousseau for confining women to the domestic sphere. The point of these biographical snippets from the lives of authors is neither to moralize nor to devalue their work nor to call for an explicitly biographical reading. Rather, here the biographical aspects are better understood as aspects of what Russian Formalist Yury Tynyanov refers to as the cultural poetics of the author’s life. As Tynyanov points out, the life of an author can turn into ‘literary fact’. More specifically, it can itself become part of the art, an artefact in its own right as authorial subjectivity is shaped by a given cultural context. Tynyanov writes: ‘The author’s subjectivity is not a static system; the literary personality is as dynamic as the literary period that shapes it. This is not a closed trajectory that impersonates something or reveals something. Rather, it is a broken line…’ (Tynyanov 1977, p. 259). Hence, it takes ‘one story to become another’ in order to disturb the frame and its foreground/background configurations, to make visible the maker/monster duality that lurks behind the intersection of art and the artist’s biography. She, the Other author, destabilizes the system and refocuses the frame, making the familiar stock character of the Romantic author strange: neither a hideous cadaver nor an immaculate vase—but both at the same time, in the same act of metamorphosis.

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Death of the (Romantic) Author The Romantic concept of the author and his legacy lies at the heart of Barthes’s and Foucault’s critique of authorship. As Andrew Bennett argues, out of this Romantic sense of the author emerged the fallacy of authorship as ‘an implicit assumption that the author of a work is in control of that work, knows what it means and intends something by it, that she delimits and defines its interpretations’ (Bennett 2005, pp. 7–8). Even though the Romantic notion of the author/artist as original genius has been dismissed and the Romantic author proclaimed dead, the author that this period galvanized cannot be easily put to rest. Bennett points to the paradox of authorial presence and absence in this context: This paradox is only intensified in the late nineteen and early twentieth century concentrations on the ‘impersonality’ of the artist or author. If Romanticism’s insistence on the subjectivity of the authorial self also necessarily involves an articulation of an absence or disappearance of the self, the modernists’ insistence on impersonality can easily be read in terms of its own subversion, in terms of the return, within authorial impersonality, of the self, the subjectivity of the individual author. An insistence on impersonality, then, also necessarily locks personality securely if paradoxically in place. (Bennett 2005, p. 66)

Modernists ridiculed the stock characters of the Romantic authorial personae, yet performativity and the theatricalization of everyday life have been an important part of the modernist avant-garde too. The idea of the theatricality of everyday life that Rousseau so memorably demonstrated when he went to the theatre to see Garrick perform repeatedly re-emerged with Dadaists, Russian Futurists and artists like Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol and Marina Abramovi´c. The self-styled theatricality of the author/artist emerging at the intersection of art and the authorial persona spills over into everyday life. It is in this intersection, where the artistic persona is constructed, that authorial subjectivity emerges as a stage figure (Quinn), as an artist with the ‘It factor’ (Roach), and even as a celebrity. Traces of Romantic self-reflexivity, as well as irony in performances of self from literary salons to textualizations, have reappeared in a wide range of contemporary forms that vary from extreme autobiographical writing, such as that of the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, to the genre of autobiographical performance, such as Spalding Grey’s Swimming to Cambodia (1987). Grey’s confessional is structured through

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Romantic irony, as the performer recounts, in a mode of musical solo performance, his experience of filming the Killing Fields (1984). In his controversial, multivolume with the self-ironic title, My Struggle, Knausgaard describes his day-to-day life in minute detail yet this approach is not entirely divorced from aesthetic and ostensibly, political subversion. Deirdre Heddon points to the socio-political dimensions of autobiographical performance as it often ‘capitalises on the theatre’s unique temporality, its here and nowness’ to ‘engage with the pressing matters of the present which relate to equality, to justice, to citizenship, to human rights’ (Haddon 2008, p. 2). The notion of politically engaged art/artist, the idea that artistic activity and even the life of an author/artist should impact socio-political reality, leads us back to the Romantic author as a public intellectual, the maker of the cultural public sphere and/or the poetic voice of the people. Hence, while some aspects of the Romantic author are well worth putting to rest, as per Barthes’s and Foucault’s propositions, others are worth resurrecting and keeping alive. Barthes’s radical proclamation of the author’s death had been foretold by Russian Formalist scholars, yet their version of the death of the author has often been misunderstood.3 Their theories of literature, language and film were closely linked to the Russian avant-garde tendencies and movements of the period and were often perceived as radical. They came as a reaction to the dominant nineteenth-century Romantic and Realist critical tendencies to interpret works through the psychology of the author. The aforementioned Roman Jakobson, whom Binet resurrected in his novel as the inventor of the seventh function of language, wrote in his work, ‘The Newest Russian Poetry’, that to superimpose on the author the thoughts expressed in his work and to ‘incriminate the poet with ideas and emotions is as absurd as the behaviour of the medieval audience that beats the actor who played Judas’ (Jakobson in Brown 1973, p. 66). Another Formalist, Osip Brik, proclaimed that even ‘if Pushkin had never existed, Evgenie Onegin would still be written’ (Brik in Harrison and Wood 2002, p. 323). He stresses the immanence of the evolution of artistic and literary forms regardless of the particular individuals who authored them. Yet, neither Barthes’s proclamation of the death of the author nor the Russian Formalists’ provocations would have shocked the Romantic author. The Romantic author was already contemplating, conceptualizing and more often than not performing his own death. In that sense, she was indeed ahead of her time.

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Theorist Sean Burke supports this view when he states that ‘romantic revolutions and the eighteenth-century philosophy and aesthetic’ brought the ‘crucial historical change in the concept of authorship’ (Burke 1995, p. xix). He also argues that this was the period when the metaphorical death of the author was theorized. The death of the Romantic author came in many forms, including the conceptual/philosophical notion of death as a disappearance of self, neither solely nor necessarily in the text but in the idea that the author’s mysterious gift of genius is both an internal part of the authorial selfhood and external to it. Diderot highlights the artist’s ignorance of the origins of his/her ideas, when he writes that the creative process ‘supposes an exaltation of the brain that comes, one could almost say, from divine inspiration’ (Diderot in Bénichou 1999, p. 31). Percy Bysshe Shelley shares a similar view in ‘A Defence of Poetry’ (1820) when he writes: A man cannot say, ‘I will compose poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it: for the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness: this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our nature are unprophetic either of its approach or of its departure. (Shelley in Burke 2006, p. 45)

In a letter written in 1818, John Keats describes the author/poet as a not I and the authorial personhood as ‘not itself—it has no self—it is everything and nothing: It has no character’ (Keats 1958, p. 1.387). When it comes to the actual, physical death of the author, it, too, comes infused with meaning—tragic or heroic—but never ordinary. The author’s death is itself a story, possessing its own theatricality and potential to inspire. As Tomashevsky observes, not only did the life of the Romantic author become art, which led to the development of ‘a canonical set of actions to be carried out by the poet’, but by the end of the eighteenth century it had broadened to include the stereotype of the young, ‘dying poet’ (Tomashevsky 1978, p. 49). Hence, Byron and Shelley make the canonical scripts of life and death of the Romanic author; the biography of the Montenegrin bard, Njegoš, also offers the recurring version of the ‘dying poet’. Finally, there is the posthumous glory that follows. Sometimes, an author achieves greater status after death particularly when the author was misunderstood and underappreciated in his/her own lifetime. Bennett,

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however, suggests that the notion of the death of the author might be nothing more than an endless process of ghosting, a shadow-play: The Romantic author is, in a sense, a fiction of subsequent critical reception, a fantasy, a back-formation or ‘retrojection’ produced through a partial reading of Romantic poetics since in fact Romantic thinking around authorship is precisely constituted in and by conflict, paradox, instability. In this regard, in as much as the whole project of contemporary literary theory is often thought to be promulgated on the proposition of the ‘death’ of the (Romantic) author, it may be said to be chasing shadows, and may itself be a will-o’-the-wisp, a chimera. (Bennett 2005, p. 71)

The death, just like the birth, of the Romantic author is the beginning of a new script, one that will be completed by the reader and be embellished by public imagination. It is the script within which the paradox of authorial presence and absence becomes embodied and acquires theatrical and performative dimensions. The death mask of William Blake offers a metaphorical reiteration of this point. Displayed in the National Portrait Gallery in London, the mask of Blake stands out among the portraits of other artists in the room. In one way or another, all try to capture the authorial figure for posterity as in a tableau vivant—as if, at any moment, the figures depicted could come to life, shifting and changing their posture. This is not the case with Blake as the mask does not offer such a possibility—the tightly shut eyes of the mask do not promise the illusion of coming to life. Even in performance, the mask fixes the expression, the attitude and the stage figure. The tension in performance arises from the contrast between the dynamics of the body, voice and gestures and the stasis of the mask. In other words, when masks are involved on stage, the amalgamation of body and object is heightened and the dialectics of living and lifeless becomes palpable. A closer look at Blake’s death mask reveals a similar performative dialectic; the label underneath says, ‘Plaster-cast from life-mask, 1823’. The death mask was made four years before Blake actually died, hence ‘not from his corpse, but from life’ (Marias 2007, p. 192). Marias writes: ‘Blake pretends to be dead while alive, and now that he is really dead, he can still deceive us: he is a man in control of his posterity. He is a mixture of the living and the dead, which is why his portrait is that of a perfect artist’ (Marias 2007, p. 193). He is a man, we might add, who not only deeply understood the paradox of authorial presence and absence, but

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also the intrinsic performativity of this dialectics whereby the authorial Not I turns into I (and vice versa) almost simultaneously. At the end of Part I of this book that has focused on the ‘Birth(s)’ of the author, we return to where we first started to evidence the proclamation of the death of the author, its performative manifestations and its paradoxes. That is, we are returning to the streets of Paris, but this time with the chronotope (Bakhtin), of the Paris Commune (1871) rather than that of 1968. It was there on the barricades that two brief stories of birth and death of the author(s) took place, acquiring new political dimensions and new forms of performing the authorial presence and disappearance. One concerns a shoemaker, Napoléon Gaillard, who became an author; the other concerns the iconic poet of the Paris Commune, Arthur Rimbaud, who renounced his authorial identity and claim. Gaillard was a member of the International. In 1871, during the period of the Paris Commune, Gaillard stopped making shoes to become the chief barricade builder. Proud of his creation, he asked to be photographed on the barricade in a gesture of claiming authorship, which Kristin Ross understands as ‘demanding and appropriating for himself the status of author that was denied him’ (Ross 2008, p. 18). Gaillard’s gesture of authoring is deemed transgressive because he ‘does not choose to celebrate his status as worker’, but challenges ‘the most time-honoured and inflexible of barriers: the one separating those who carry on useful labour from those who ponder aesthetics’ (ibid.). This gesture both proclaims the death of the author and announces the birth of the Other author (whether it be of different class, ethnicity, gender or political conviction). The prodigal author, Arthur Rimbaud, whose political poetry synthesized the ideals of the Commune, makes a similar point to Gaillard’s gesture of ‘authoring’ the barricades, when in his ‘Lettres du voyant’ (‘Seer Letters’) of 1871, he argues against the privileged place intellectual and artistic labour has over other kinds of work: ‘I will be a worker: that is the idea that holds me back when mad rage drives me towards the battle of Paris—where so many workers are dying as I write to you’ (Rimbaud in Ross 2008, p. 45). Rimbaud sees in the ephemerality of self, in his transformation from a poet to a worker, an emancipatory process. Moreover, his words sharply stress one of the key questions related to socially engaged intellectual and artistic labour: How to bridge the gap (that often separates) progressive thought from concrete action? He, too, foregrounds the marginalization and liberating potential of the Other author, embodied not just in the figure of the authoring worker, but

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also in the idea of a woman/author, as he writes: ‘When the unending servitude of woman is broken, when she lives by and for herself, when man — until now abominable — has given her freedom, she too will be a poet!’ (ibid.). Rimbaud sees denouncing the authorial privilege, the act of his own disappearance, as part of the revolutionary process that includes the death of the author thus ushering in a new social and cultural space where the Other author could take his/her rightful place. There are two aspects to Rimbaud’s authorial presence and absence. One concerns his much-debated physical presence/absence at the barricades in Paris in 1871 and the strong public resonance of his politicallyengaged poetry. Ross argues that it is irrelevant whether or not the poet was an active participant in the insurrection, as his physical presence or absence from the event would make no difference to the socio-political repercussions of his work. In her view, the question of the author’s physical presence in the event diffuses the political dimension of his work and its impact on shaping a new public sphere and the ways in which Rimbaud figures or prefigures ‘a social space adjacent—side by side rather than analogous—to the one activated by the insurgents in the heart of Paris’ (Ross 2008, p. 32). Rimbaud’s poetry had shaped the new socio-political public sphere emerging in Paris (even from the distance of his provincial town, Charleville), as much as the political writings of Rousseau shaped the ideology of the Commune from beyond the grave. Clearly, there are various ways in which the authorial figure can perform his/her presence and absence; with each variation, the figure is slightly altered or, at times, constructed anew. The other aspect of Rimbaud’s disappearance concerns his famous gesture of renouncing poetry and leaving Paris for Africa where he will work in various low paying jobs. With this gesture, he became what he had prophesied in ‘Lettres du voyant’—‘I will be a worker’—which proved not to be mere poetic speech but a perlocutionary act. The ‘biographical legend’ in which Rimbaud appears as the prodigy who writes ‘Une Saison en Enfer’ (‘A Season in Hell’) at the age of 16, the unruly bohemian poet, the protagonist of the passionate and tempestuous relationship with the fellow poet, Paul Verlaine, the adventurer and the nomad, has obscured the political dimensions of his transformation and subsequent disappearance.4 Rimbaud’s annihilation of self-as-poet is not an empty conceptual, philosophical gesture. Rather, as Ross argues in her illuminating study, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, it is a radical, political act of self-transformation that opposes

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the ‘Romantic commonplace of poetic predestination’ (Ross 2008, p. 45). Rimbaud calls for a rethinking of the existing artistic practices and the role of the authorial figure in favour of artistic work as social and collective practice, thereby making artistic and intellectual work part of a nonalienated labour. As Ross comments, for Rimbaud, transforming the notion of artistic work and the figure of the artist is part of the revolutionary process akin to ‘the abolition of state’ (ibid.). Hence, his oft-quoted proclamation, ‘Je est un autre’ (‘I is someone else’) is not merely a poetic expression of the authorial disappearance; it is a political gesture. In this dialectics, whereby the worker/maker of shoes and barricades becomes an author and the author/maker of poems renounces his authorial status leaving both poetry and Paris for Africa and anonymity, lies the emancipatory potential of authorial performativity.

Notes 1. Writing about the ‘biographical legend’, Tomashevsky highlights the role of the reader/audience in its construction: ‘The readers cried: “Author! Author!” — but they were actually calling for the slender youth in a cloak, with a lyre in his hands and an enigmatic expression on his face. This demand for a potentially existing author, whether real or not, gave rise to a special kind of anonymous literature: literature with an invented author, whose biography was appended to the work’ (Tomashevsky 1978, 51). 2. In Dialogues and Reveries of the Solitary Walker (first published in 1782), Rousseau plays a central part. Derrida dedicates a large portion of the second part of his seminal work, Of Grammatology, to a deconstructive reading of Rousseau, especially the Confessions and the essay, ‘The Origin of Language’. Discussing Rousseau’s treatment of the written sign as an external supplement to the vocal sign, Derrida formulates the ‘metaphysics of presence’, which relies on metaphors of self-presence and voice. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. 3. The Russian Formalist Circle was an avant-garde school of literary criticism active from 1914 to the late 1920s. Russian Formalist scholars were very close to the avant-garde; they dealt with issues of poetic language, literary and film theory. The term Russian Formalism refers to literary scholars who were affiliated with two groups: the Moscow Linguistic Circle, with talented young thinkers such as Pëtr Bogatyrëv and Roman Jakobson, and the Petersburg OPOJAZ, which included Boris Ejxenbaum, Viktor Shklovsky and Jurij Tynjanov. In Stalinist Russia, the term Formalism became a label, or rather a stigma, for a large number of avant-garde artists

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and theorists whose experiments and approaches did not comply with the officially promulgated aesthetics of socialist realism. 4. For more on Rimbaud’s life, see Enid Starkie’s biography Arthur Rimbaud. New York: New Directions, 1961.

Works Cited Anderson, Linda. 2011. Autobiography. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M.M. 1990. Art and Answerability, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov and trans. Vadim Liapunov and Kenneth Brostrom. Austin: University of Texas Press. Benichou, Paul. 1999. The Consecration of the Writer 1780–1830, trans. M.K. Jensen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Bennett, Andrew. 2005. The Author. London: Routledge. Bough, Christopher. 2013. Baroque to Romantic Theatre. In Cambridge Companion to Theatre History, ed. D. Wiles and C. Dymkowski, 33–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 1991. Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of Modern Poets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Edward J. 1973. Major Soviet Writers. New York: Oxford University Press. Burke, Sean. 1995. Authorship from Plato to the Postmodern: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1983. Biographia Literatura, ed. J. Engell and W. Jackson Bate. London: Routledge. Haddon, Deirdre. 2008. Autobiography and Performance. London: Palgrave. Harrison, Charles, and Paul Wood (eds.). 2002. Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. London: Blackwell. Hustvedt, Siri. 2019. Memories of the Future. London: Sceptre. Keats, John. 1958. The Letter of John Keats, ed. H.E. Rollins. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lotman, Yuri. 1976. Theatre and Theatricality in the Order of Early Nineteenth Century Culture. In Semiotics and Structuralism: Reading from the Soviet Union, ed. H. Baran, 33–57 and trans. W. Mandel, H. Baran, and A.J. Hollander. White Plains, NY: International Arts and Science Press. Marias, Javier. 2007 Written Lives, trans. Margaret Jull Costa. London: Penguin Books. Nakhimovsky, A., and A. Stone Nakhimovsky (eds.). 1985. The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History. Cornell, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Quinn, Michael. 1990. Celebrity and the Semiotics of Acting. New Theatre Quarterly 6 (22): 154–161.

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Ritchie, Leslie. 2019. David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ross, Kristin. 2008. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. London: Verso. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953. The Confessions of Jean Jacque Rousseau, trans. J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Sebald, W.G. 2013. A Place in the Country, trans. J. Catling. London: Penguin Books. Tomashevskij, Boris. 1978. Literature and Biography. In Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. L. Matejka and K. Pomorska, 47–56. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tynanov, Yury. 1977. Poetika, Istoria literatury, Kino [Poetics, History of Literature, Film]. Moscow: Nauka. Young, Edward. 1918. Conjectures on Original Composition, ed. E.J. Morley. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Zaretsky, Robert, and T. John, Scott. 2006. Philosophy Leads to Sorrow: An Evening at the Theatre with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. Southwest Review 91: 36–55.

PART II

Resurrections

CHAPTER 5

Resurrection as Adaptation: (Re)Makes, Deconstructions and the Gun

In Aleksandr Sokurov’s film, The Stone (1992), Anton Chekhov makes a mysterious return from the dead to his family home—now turned into a heritage house and a museum near Yalta. The caretaker discovers an old man bathing himself in the house. As the stranger examines his own body with amazement and curiosity, he then claims that everything in the house looks familiar. In turn, as the old man puts on his garments and faces the camera, his signature beard and monocle begin to look familiar to the viewer—suggesting that this might indeed be Chekhov who has returned to his home. Even though this meditative film has had other interpretations, it could be understood as Sokurov’s investigation of the resurrection of the author and the terms of his return. After the author and the caretaker spend a night and a day together in the house and walking around the deserted streets of the village, Chekhov walks away as mysteriously as he had appeared. The author emerges at night time, as ghosts do, roaming through the spaces he once owned. The presence of Chekhov/ghost is mediated through the gaze of the caretaker, who accompanies him throughout the film. The re-emergence of the author from the dead has been filtered through an encounter with the living—the caretaker, who never leaves Chekhov’s side. The mysterious appearance of the old man, who might be Chekhov or rather his ghost, puzzles the caretaker, but he also compliantly follows the ghost, forgoes his own dinner to feed the author instead and as any good host, generally busies himself © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_5

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by taking care of the visitor. The caretaker thus becomes the one who not only looks after the physical space—the author’s house—but also takes care of the ghostly presence of the author who occupies it. This, however, creates a paradoxical guest/host dynamic. A ghost is always a guest—a temporary presence in the world of the living, even if this ghost is no other than the Russian bard returning to his own house. The trope of the appearance of a ghost is usually related to unfinished business that the dead have in the world of the living. The resurrection of the author in a way emulates this trope and I would argue, also somewhat reverses it. When they go for a walk through the deserted streets of the village and towards the seashore, the caretaker metaphorically and almost literally walks in the very footsteps of the dead author, not unlike the literary pilgrims who roam Yorkshire Dales in the footsteps of the Bronte Sisters, for example. Moreover, the appearance of the dead author is mediated through the gaze and presence of the young caretaker. In the entire film, there is only a brief moment when another figure passes the pair as they walk down the street. For that matter, then, the presence of the dead author could have been nothing but a figment of the young man’s imagination. The only witness to the encounter is the man who passed by, but we never learn what/who the passer-by actually saw. This leaves only the viewer of the film as the witness of the entire resurrection of the author that clearly has turned out to involve two protagonists—the alleged ghostly presence of Chekhov—and the other, the young caretaker. Hence, the only way for Chekhov to make this fleeting visitation to his old home from beyond the grave is through, and as an encounter with, the other—with the caretaker of his memory. We might ask would the ghost of the dead author appear differently through someone else’s gaze? Has the ghost of the author past been shaped through the gaze and presence of the young caretaker? I argue that it is possible to read this curious encounter metaphorically as a relationship between the author and his successor. The young man is the caretaker of the heritage house; he is the custodian not only of the space, but also of the dead author who inhabited it. He makes sure all is in place in the heritage house so that the author, when he pays his visitation from beyond, can easily find his way back. The entire time we see Chekhov, however, he is not seen on his own. Rather, he is seen through this encounter with the other, through whose perspective this fleeting return of the author has been mediated and on some level, shaped.

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These two figures, the author and the caretaker of the author’s house, create a chronotope (Bakhtin) as an intersection of space with two different time frames that each figure inserts through their presence. Once the pair is outside in the street, by the sea, in the woodland, the viewer may not be entirely sure from which temporal vantage point we are looking at the landscape—is it the past of Chekhov or the present of the caretaker? However, even if we are seeing the landscape through Chekhov’s eyes, when the camera guides our gaze towards the author, it becomes unambiguous that we are following Chekhov/ghost from the perspective of the caretaker. Similar chronotopic constellations can indeed be found in intertextual resurrections of the authorial figure by his/her successor in other media and genres, including some of the examples that will be discussed later in this chapter. If Chekhov and the caretaker can be read as a metaphor of the author and his successor, then the latter emerges as both the custodian of the author’s presence and memory, as well as a mediating figure through whose gaze the authorial presence is constructed, shaped and conjured into embodiment. The successor might be a gentle and generous custodian like the caretaker in Sokurov’s film, or it might assume a more iconoclastic form. In the case studies that follow later in this chapter, we will encounter both types. One way or another, the resurrection of the author through the gaze of the successor is a process of adaptation. Or, to return to the ghost trope, the resurrection of the author is a ghostly encounter shaped through the successor’s gaze— not the one where the dead have unfinished business with the living, but rather its reversal: where the living are not yet done with the dead. The death and transcendence of the author is an intertextual and interperformative activity, unfolding in the processes of mutation and transformation. In their collection, Adapting Chekhov: Text and Its Mutation, Yana Meerzon and Douglas Clayton make a similar argument when stating that ‘adaptation serves not only as a marker of the stylistic and genre shifts in literature, theatre, and film; it also declares the return and rebirth of the author’: Adaptation often includes the figure of the author/adaptor both as the work’s semantic concern and its structural device, and it can be shaped on a wide scale of textual and performative transformations, can vary from adaptations as calques of original on the one side of the spectrum to adaptation as fully independent artwork. Hence, adaptation today—the process of historical and artistic concretization — is conditioned not only by the

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obvious formal differences between media, but most importantly by subjectivity of a particular adaptor, his/her own view of the material. (Clayton and Meerzon 2012, p. 7)

Resurrection of the author in text and performance is only possible as and through adaptation. This process confronts the author as a historical figure with the author as a fictional figure; it necessitates the transformation of the authorial figure from artistic predecessor to artistic material. I would argue that at times, adaptation is neither about the subjectivity of the author predecessor nor solely about the successor’s take on the biographical legend, but rather it is a relational process. The question is: How does the successor shape the conditions of the author’s return? And even though adaptation as layering, negotiation, mutation and transformation of the source material—in this case of the authorial figure as material—is most obvious in textual forms, this relationship between the predecessor and the successor can also unfold in a variety of modes: visual, gestural, embodied and ultimately theatrical. The return of the author in the process of adaptation not only includes finding or reinventing the voice of the author predecessor, but also involves locating, and eventually galvanizing, his/her body. The author can only be resurrected as a metafictional figure. According to Linda Hutcheon, metafiction has two major focuses: ‘the first is on its linguistic and narrative structures, and the second is on the role of the reader’ (Hutcheon 2006, p. 6). The latter, however, should be understood as a dual figure—the recipient and the author/successor. In theatre and performance though (as in film), there is immediately an obvious third focus, that of embodiment—the body of the actor through which the relationship between the author predecessor and the author successor is often mediated. The process of adaptation, especially where the predecessor has been openly evoked and even resurrected, includes not just a reworking of the text in which the biographical legend is formulated, but a reworking of the idea of the authorial personae (past and present). The latter requires a degree of embodiment that is conceptual, regardless of how and if the authorial figure is shaped into some form of physical presence. Viewed through instances of authorial presence and absence, adaptation becomes a process of (at least) dual inscription of the author past and the author present, that is, of the dead author resurrected and the one not yet dead. In these instances of authorial return, it is not surprising that death often precedes life.

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The text does not need to be performed to include the imaginative potential of embodiment; neither does a performed piece need a text to have some form of linguistic or narrative structure within which the author could appear. Theatricalization is what comes to being through embodiment. It may or may not have a physical body, often a suggestion or a notional embodiment can do the job. The death and resurrection of the author, therefore, unfold through these focal points, extending the parameters of metafiction (and we might add metaperformance) outlined by Hutcheon into a tripartite model: the narrative, the embodiment and the recipient. In the case of authorial resurrection as metafiction or metaperformance, these three focal points may not always be strictly delineated or appear in the same order. Embodiment as defined here is crucial to any kind of meta-form be it a story, a play, a painting or a performance. Concretization (Ingarden, Vodicko, Pavis) plays a key role in this process whereby the author as material appears with his own points of indeterminacies , which can be ontological, biographical, conceptual, ideological, linguistic, visual and gestural. Yet, while the literary theorists who coined the term concretization wrote with written text and/or theatre as performance text in mind, the various authorial resurrections have at times taken a sharper performative turn through the tension between text and body, between narration and embodiment, but also in ways in which they relate, both synchronically and diachronically, to various cultural and socio-political spheres. Hence, the performative turn in resurrecting the author is not only about how the authorial figure becomes theatricalized, dramatized and fictionalized through concretization, but also what aspects of it escape this process in the dialectic tension between text and body, self and other, presence and absence. What—in cutting through these binaries—emanates its own performativity? This does not imply either that the author as text precedes the author as performative figure—the chronology is not fixed, there is porosity rather than a binary between the author as textual inscription and the author as a performative figure with one having the possibility of renegotiating and altering the other. Writing about the experience of newness in the arts, Julia Kristeva points out that the work ‘is slated to become the laboratory of a new discourse (and of a new subject), thus bringing about a mutation’ (Kristeva 1980, pp. 92–93). In the works that will be considered here, the authorial figure is at the centre of a new discourse, and the mutation refers not only to the text, but also to the biographical legend and of

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the authorial persona. This mutation of the author within the text (or in some instances within the performance) is complex: (1) there is a whole range of mutations within which the author reappears—from that of a dramatic character and protagonist to a mere intertextual reference, that is, from imaginative reconstruction to imaginative deconstruction; (2) the mutation of the author is closer to a mise-en-scène than to a textual/biographical variation; and (3) finally, the author is not alone as there is a strong sense of presence of the other author, the one who has resurrected the predecessor. Meerzon and Clayton point out that particular adaptations reveal the subjectivity of the author/adaptor in various degrees too ‘as the filtering, selecting, and communicating agent of the target text’ (Clayton and Meerzon 2012, p. 7). This presence also ranges from a discrete suggestion of the successor to instances where the other author deliberately overpowers his/her predecessor. At times, the successor offers a mere glimpse of herself, shyly standing in the wings; at other times, he/she takes centre stage. The successor emerges in various forms, from a custodian to an iconoclastic figure, setting the terms of the authorial resurrection accordingly. Here, I will focus on two types of adaptations/resurrections—(i) those that are centred on (re)making of the authorial figure and (ii) those that engage with his/her deconstruction. The first type necessitates the presence of a well-established biographical legend and the possibility of a biographical or quasi-biographical re-enactment of the author’s life and death; the second focuses on the author’s death, both physical and conceptual, and on the myriad possibilities this demise opens for the author successor. The first type of adaptation/resurrection is restorative, affirms the biographical legend (at times even canonizing the author predecessor) and is concerned with who and how of the author. The second type is deconstructive, interested in the artistic and ideological gestures of desacralization of the authorial figure, and is closer to echoing Foucault’s ‘what is the author?’ Adding, perhaps, ‘and what can I, as the other author, do to him?’ As we will see, these questions might overlap in both the cases of remaking and of deconstruction. I will explore (re)making and deconstruction of the author mostly through works in which Chekhov appears in various forms—from protagonist to mere intertextual and interperformative reference—including Marina Carr’s biographical play about Chekhov, Sixteen Possible Glimpses, Raymond Carver’s short story, Running Errands, that focuses on the moments of Chekhov’s death, as well as Howard Barker’s deconstruction, (Uncle)

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Vanya, and Dead Centre’s iconoclastic performance, Chekhov’s First Play. Tim Crouch’s quasi-biographical play about a pair of American artists, Adler & Gibb, does not feature Chekhov in any shape or form, but it dramatizes the mechanisms and processes underling the construction of the authorial figure through the devices of narrative, embodiment, enactment and theatrical semiotics. It does, however, have one iconic element in common with Chekhov’s plays—a gun.

(Re)Making the Author Why choose Chekhov to discuss the notion of the author as intertextual material and not some other authorial figure? I argue that there are several reasons that make Chekhov especially interesting for the discussion of the author as a metatextual/theatrical figure, including his canonical status, the style of his playwriting and the relationship between the authorial figure and the dramatic characters in his plays. Collecting a wide range of essays on adapting Chekhov from around the world—from Russia and Europe to India and Argentina—Clayton and Meerzon point out that ‘a post-Chekhovian dramatic canon’ is ‘analogous to the post-Shakespearean dramatic corpus’ (7). Arguably, to examine the appearance and disappearance of the author as adaptation and as a form of intertextuality necessitates a focus on an author that is on some level ‘canonical’ or quasi-canonical. By this, I mean not only authors who come with the stamp of approved cultural value (itself a problematic category), whose works appear in school syllabi, and who have been dubbed bards and national treasures, but also those who have acquired a certain fame in cultural vernaculars. This implies that the given author might be known even to those publics that have never read or seen any of the treasured author’s work in its entirety. The canonical figure of the author is a curious celebrity, as in the reception process it is at times unclear if the work precedes the author or rather, the author’s biographical legend (see Chapter 4) precedes the work. This canonical figure is an amalgamation of the work and the authorial persona and, at times, it becomes almost impossible to determine where one begins and the other ends. The key in this process is not the material existence of the author, but his/her biographical legend and above all its framing through various discursive, theatrical and performative cultural practices. In that sense, things can be pushed to extremes to assert that it is almost irrelevant if the author in question has actually lived as long as they acquire a place in the

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collective cultural imagination. What matters is the persuasiveness of the story of authorial presence and absence, the dramatization of their life and death. Authors invented by other authors offer a case in point. Roberto Bolaño’s mysterious German writer, who goes by the pseudonym, Benno von Archimboldi, is so believable that he has earned a biographical entry on Wikipedia. Similarly, Tim Crouch’s Adler & Gibb is a biographical play about two artists who never existed. The author, Crouch, explains: I have made up the “real” lives of two fictional artists: Janet Adler and Margaret Gibb. Their biographies are written in fastidious detail around the walls of our rehearsal room. I know when they were born, when they died, where they lived and what they thought. I have recorded a detailed body of work for them, none of which exists. (I’ve even given them a website: adlerandgibb.com). I want you to believe that they might have existed, but they are real in as much as they are an idea of something real containing in something else. (Crouch 2014a)

Both Bolaño’s invented author Archimboldi and Crouch’s allegedly neglected pair of American artists, Adler and Gibb, unmask the construction of the biographical legend of the author and show the process of his/her canonization. Bolaño invents an international community of scholars, a body of academic work and numerous international conferences dedicated to the mysterious German author. Crouch, too, presents us with a body of work of the artistic pair and scholarship to boot by the likes of Julia Kristeva, whose concept of abjection, for example, turns out to be particularly suitable in the analysis of the art and life of Adler and Gibb. In part, the play unfolds as a research presentation on Adler and Gibb’s work, complete with slides and academic lingo. Crouch goes even a step further than Bolaño to claim the performative and theatrical nature of the authorial figure. He uses the character of an actress, cast in the role of Janet Adler, for a biopic about the famous artistic pair. In the course of the play, the actress, Louise, is handed costumes and props that she puts on and gradually turns into the late artist Janet Adler—suggesting that the embodied figure of the author/artist, the one enacted, imagined, performed, is all there is in the end. In the process of making the artist, from constructing her biography to formulating an alleged body of scholarship about her work and plotting the play around the figure of an actress preparing, and eventually,

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embodying the artist for the Adler and Gibb biopic, Crouch also demonstrates how artists and authors become aesthetic and cultural currencies. ‘It is the responsibility of future generations to keep the memory of Adler’s output alive so that her influence can be understood and her symbolic importance preserved’ (Adler & Gibb, Act II 2014), says the Student in Adler and Gibb while delivering an academic presentation about the artists’ work and legacy. It is not only the author’s biographical legend that has cultural currency, her death does too, perhaps even more so. In the play, the Student asserts the following while delivering a presentation on Adler: In one real sense, we could read the death of Janet Adler — her nonexistence — as her last work of art —her instance of non-temporality. Even though the original media of the work (the artist herself) has become obsolete (dead), processes of emulation and reproduction can support our understanding of the work using the metaphoric value of the outdated medium (the artist!) —even if that medium no longer exists. (Adler & Gibb, Act II 2014)

The point is not so much to show the fictionality of the author resurrected in the works of the other author, but more to point to the production of the author, the carving of her place within a culture and eventually, the process of her canonization (Image 5.1). ‘What do they say – you die twice – once when you die and again the last time your name is ever mentioned. We are the resurrection. We’re bringing them back to life. We are the best thing that’s ever happened to them’ (Adler & Gibb, Act II 2014), says Louise of the artist she is about to play. The performance, the enactment, is what conjures the dead artist. There is a double edge here too. Prior to the actress playing the part of the artist, Adler existed solely in the language of the other characters and in the scholarly discourse about her work that the playwright had constructed. It is only in enactment that the name Janet Adler, signifying a figure of an author/artist, acquires a third dimension—the body. In the case of an entirely invented artist/author, her resurrection is at the same time her birth. The terms of her appearance are purely semiotic—first in language and then through theatrical signs. Crouch’s play could be interpreted as an investigation of the resurrection, or rather construction, of the author through theatrical semiotics. Gibb, the surviving half of the artistic duo, is a recluse who greets the

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Image 5.1 Adler & Gibb—Denise Gough as Louise (Photo by Johan Persson/ArenaPAL)

actress and her acting coach with a pointed gun. Intermittently, Gibb keeps pointing the gun at her visitors throughout the play, but the object she holds keeps changing, from the actual theatre prop—a fake gun—to random objects and plastic toys. With this seemingly absurdist dramaturgical choice, Crouch points to the transformability of theatrical signs, which, unlike the signs in real life that are more fixed, have a greater flexibility when placed on stage, where almost anything can stand for anything else. The meaning of an object on stage is determined by the way actors interact with it (Zich, Honzl). Likewise, with the actress, Louise, we see the process of the transformability of theatrical signs as she becomes the character—Adler. In this case though, almost with a nod to Brecht, we also see a double figure as we witness the process of Louise putting on Adler’s clothes and shaping what she imagines would be Adler’s body, language and voice. As at times we simultaneously see both the actor playing an actor and the actor playing the character of an artist, we become aware of the ephemerality of theatrical semiotics in which the allegedly historical figure of Adler has been conjured. A different actor would give us an entirely different Adler. Crouch consciously explores this semiotic process and in his reflection on Adler and Gibb, quotes Peter

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Handke who says that in theatre: ‘Light is brightness pretending to be other brightness; a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair’ (Crouch 2014a). In theatre, both the birth and the death of the artist/author turn out to be mostly a semiotic affair. Regardless of whether the author was an actual historical figure or a figment of another author’s imagination, an author/artist on stage always stands for another. On stage, her own presence, even if unmediated, becomes an alterity.

Biographical Intertextuality In the introduction to their collection, Adapting Chekhov, Meerzon and Clayton continue to ask why Chekhov? They argue that the reason for choosing Chekhov’s work as a prime case study in a collection on textual adaptations and mutations is ‘its liminal position between realism and modernism, and in the hermeticism of his works’ (3) which does not allow for easy interpretations (as might be the case with Ibsen, for example). However, the prime reason for choosing Chekhov, the editors state, is that ‘many established and emerging playwrights find it a pleasure and a challenge to attempt to apply their dramaturgical skills to Chekhov’s plays, either by producing new ‘translations’ or by adapting and rewriting them’ (4). They also point out that what makes Chekhov’s work so inspiring for various mutations might be its language, as well as some of its existentialist dimensions. Here, the question is why a chapter on Chekhov needs to be slightly refined as in this case the interest is not so much in various mutations and adaptations of his work, but in the resurrection of the authorial figure within them. On the one hand, there are authorial biographies past and present that are more adventurous, alluring, controversial and contested than Chekhov’s. On the other hand, the mixed reactions at the openings of his plays, his double life as a medical doctor and an author, his actress wife, his friendship with Stanislavsky and hanging out at the Moscow Art Theatre, his dining with Tolstoy, etc., are very interesting, but do these details offer enough plot twists and turns to turn this author into a dramatic character? Arguably, there is just about enough material here for a fine biopic, but hardly for all the various appearances Chekhov has made so far in texts and performances ranging from the role of the protagonist to a mere intertextual reference. I would argue that the reason for such proclivity in literature, drama and performance towards resurrecting Chekhov as authorial figure is not entirely due to his biography, nor even his ‘biographical legend’, but due to the following

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two distinct aspects: (1) the nature of realism in his writing that foreshadows existentialist and absurdist tendencies; and most notably, (2) the closeness between the author and some of his characters. The first argument regarding the susceptibility of Chekhov to be resurrected in adaptations of his work might be due to the porosity of his brand of realism. Clayton finds premises of Impressionism in his work (18) and I have written elsewhere that Chekhov’s work is less an example of modern realism than a precursor to what Martin Esslin has labelled, perhaps too broadly, the theatre of the absurd.1 Numerous directorial takes and productions of his plays from Vakhtangov’s imaginative realism and Meyerhold’s vaudeville to the Wooster Group’s postmodern deconstruction have also revealed a wide spectrum of staging styles reaching far beyond Stanislavsky’s Naturalism. The structure of Chekhov’s plays is not entirely a closed realist structure, but rather a closed absurdist one. The latter is a porous closed structure that easily erodes devices of cause and effect. There is also a degree of lethargy in his characters that at times renders motivation, causality and action almost pointless. Marina Carr’s biographical play about Chekhov, 16 Possible Glimpses, captures both the author/protagonist’s social consciousness and his womanizing with this deliberate weakening of action and causality dramatized in the encounter between Chekhov and Tolstoy following the not so positive reception at the opening of Three Sisters 2 : Tolstoy: Stick to the stories. You are Pushkin in prose, at times even better than Pushkin, and that’s saying something, but your plays Anton Pavlovich, your plays, I’m sorry but they are woeful. Anton: This one is particularly bad, the censor cut it to ribbons. Tolstoy: Censor aside, where’s the drama is what I want to know? Nothing happens, where do your characters take you? Anton: I’ve no idea and I care less. Tolstoy: I’ll tell you where, from the sofa to the spare room and back again. Anton: Isn’t that a journey of sorts? (Carr 2011, Act II, Scene 3)

In depicting the character’s journey ‘from the sofa to the spare room’, Chekhov’s realism is closer to Beckett than to a fellow modern realist such as Ibsen. This porosity lends itself to a range of textual mutations, adaptations and staging styles. It also leaves the stage door ajar for the author to enter and trapdoors for the author to eventually exit the world of his plays (no matter how fateful or distorted these become in the process).

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It is in his own texts that particular ‘points of indeterminacy’ have been left wherein the author could be inscribed and resurrected. It is not only the new text, the adaptation or the mutation of the source text that is to be regarded as the palimpsest, but the authorial persona too becomes a body/text that in the process of over-writing lays bare the ‘hidden doubleness’ (Hutcheon 2009, p. 5) of the authorial presence(s) within the work. The author, thus, emerges rewritten and potentially reperformed ‘torn between the desire to return to the known pattern—the figure of the canonical author and its tropes—and to escape it by a new variation’ (Hutcheon 2006, p. 173). However, in the case of Chekhov, the inscription and resurrection of the authorial figure bring an additional dimension of doubling, not only between the two authors—the successor and the predecessor—but also between the author and the recurring features of his characters. Chekhov could easily be the doctor in Platonov, for example. To put it simply, Chekhov is too similar to some of his characters and this similarity does not so much stem from autobiographical inscriptions (even though links between the protagonists of the plays and the author’s life could and have been made). Rather, the closeness between the author and some of his characters is in their shared theatricality—a kind of theatricality that is intersectional between the story (or the imaginaries) of the author’s life and his dramatic personage. Chekhov’s brand of theatricality precedes both his biographical legend and that of his landmark characters. There is the famous gun on the wall in the first act, that ought to fire in the third (even if at times it misses the mark), the subtext and the emotional tensions that emerge between the lines: when Sonya in Uncle Vanya says ‘I’m happy’ or Trofimov in Cherry Orchard promises ‘we shall be happy’, we know that rather the opposite is the case. There are also the lines from Three Sisters, ‘Moscow, Moscow!’ that have become widely-recognized code words for melancholy and lives already fading. There is the somewhat less-foregrounded political stanza too, the dream of socialism enveloped in despair and the said melancholy. In her play, 16 Possible Glimpses, Carr amalgamates fragments of Chekhov’s biography, some of which are found in his diary notes, with the style and tone of his own plays. There is a scene in Carr’s play where Masha, Chekhov’s sister, and his wife, the actress Olga Knipper, talk and smoke in the garden, while Chekhov is in the house sleeping. Olga says: ‘The crickets just like in Vanya. All we need is a guitar’. Masha replies: ‘And a gun’ (Carr 2011, Act II, Scene 4). In addition, there is a marriage opportunity that Masha rejects in the end remaining devoted to

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her brother and there is a steadfastness to Olga in Carr’s play that somewhat parallels Masha and Olga in Three Sisters. The character of Olga Knipper in Carr’s rendition also has some of the larger-than-life dramatic flair of Ranevskaya in The Seagull. Leika, the misfortunate opera singer and Chekhov’s lover, could have easily come from the same play, echoing the tragedy of the aspiring provincial actress, Nina. The aforementioned scene with Tolstoy where the author/protagonist reflects on the lack of plot twists in his own work is an example of this amalgamation that inevitably renders itself metatheatrical. However, possible glimpses from Chekhov’s life that Carr dramatizes are not so much about demonstrating parallels between the life of the author and his character, but rather to resurrect the author as an amalgamation between biography and intertextuality. In Carr’s play, fictional characters from Chekhov’s plays serve as models for the dramatization of the historical personage. In that sense, the dramaturgy of Carr’s biographical play places the author/protagonist in the world that borrows the theatricality of Chekhov’s plays in as much as it re-imagines glimpses of his life. The author/protagonist appears here in a mise en abyme between biography and intertextuality, whereby in this mirroring the author could almost, but not entirely, be like one of his characters. Intertextual furnishing of biography enables the resurrected author/protagonist to settle into the world of the author/successor’s play almost as if into his own. Like the young man in Sokurov’s film, Carr also emerges here as a custodian of the author’s house as a house of memory. Only in Carr’s case, the house is less a physical space and more a metaphor of intertextuality. In her study, the Narcissistic Narrative, Hutcheon argues that through metafictionality, and ostensibly, one might add, metatheatricality, the vital link between art and life is ‘reforged, on a new level – on that of the imaginative process (of storytelling), instead of on that of the product (the story told)’ (Hutcheon 2013, p. 4). In this process of storytelling, the author/protagonist is on a similar dramaturgical journey to that of his characters—‘from the sofa to the spare room and back’. And we find this journey to be as fraught, glorious and heartbreaking as any. Metatheatrical resurrections of Chekhov are more often than not in close proximity to the author/protagonist’s death. Carr’s play opens with the visitation of the Black Monk, a figure of death, who visits the author/protagonist regularly during the course of the play. Chekhov is comfortable in his presence, so much so that he both snaps at and confides in the Black Monk when he says: ‘… I can’t live in the eternal scheme,

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I have to live here. I have to do it here. I have to do it here… And they laughed, booed, hissed my beautiful Seagull out of Petersburg’ (Carr 2011, Act I, Scene 6). The Black Monk is a reminder of Chekhov’s close acquaintance with death as a doctor tending to the gravely ill and as an ailing man whose end is near. Chekhov’s irritation is a comment both on the physical death and on the conceptual after life of the author— which, as we will see, continuously perpetuates the trope of death and resurrection. When Olga reports on Chekhov’s death to his sister, Carr emphasizes the frail, mortal body of the author: ‘Of course he suffered. You think it’s easy to die? It’s not like on stage when they take their last breath. It’s awful. Awful. The panic in his face, minutes going by, thinking it’s over and then this terrible sound’ (Act I, Scene 2). In the scene of the encounter between Chekhov and Tolstoy, the conversation quickly turns to the topic of death and the fragility of the mortal body: Tolstoy: You’re too thin. You heard I’m sick too? Course you did, front page of the newspaper, all polishing their obituaries, and did you hear I was excommunicated? Anton: I did. Congratulations. Tolstoy: Can’t be buried in consecrated ground. Anton: Do you want to be? Tolstoy: Don’t want to be buried at all. Come, sit, we’ll have some tea. (Rings bell.) Are you hungry? Anton: Always, but I can keep nothing down, better if I don’t try. (Act II, Scene 2)

There is a distinction between the mortal body of the author and body of the author as a literary fact. Carr here conveys a certain liminality of the authorial figure and his resurrection. On the one hand, the author emerges as someone who was once a mortal body with aches, pains, indigestions and headaches, and who once went through the excruciating labour of taking his last breath. On the other hand, there is the body of the author as a biographical legend and as a literary fact, where aches, pains, indigestion, haemorrhages, headaches and the excruciating labour of taking one’s last breath unfold in a repertoire of gestures and images— they are turned into theatrical signs, they give the illusion of bodily pain and discomfort, but they no longer hurt. The last glimpse of the 16 Possible Glimpses is inevitably the scene of Chekhov dying in a hotel room in Badenweiler, Germany. Chekhov’s

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painful breaths are loud and there is a heat-wave. Dr Schwörer arrives and immediately orders the bellboy, Kolya, to bring champagne—a cue that the exit is near: Dr Schwörer: It’s a doctor thing, we order champagne for one another when… Anton: When it is hopeless. (Carr 2011, Act II, Scene 8)

Resurrecting the author as the protagonist of his own life story is always laced with the presence of death and more often than not with the duality between the mortal body and the body of the author as a literary fact. Raymond Carver, in his short story Errand, also uses biographical material, but focuses entirely on Chekhov’s final moments unfolding in early July 1904 in that hotel room in Germany. Like Carr in the last scene of her play, Carver uses the biographical legend of Chekhov’s death. The author/protagonist is gasping for air and spitting blood—he is moribund, teetering between delirium and lucidity. Olga, his wife, calls for the doctor, who, realizing that nothing more could be done for Chekhov, orders a bottle of champagne to be brought to the room as quickly as possible. He pours the champagne, Chekhov takes his glass, drinks up, sighs, turns around and dies. There is an intriguing duality in Carver’s depiction of Chekhov’s death. This is the story about death, a tableau almost, mediated through the reactions of the onlookers—the wife, the doctor and the bellboy who brings the champagne. On the one hand, death makes the identity of the dying person irrelevant. On the other hand, Carver highlights that this is indeed not an ordinary death, but the death of Chekhov—the playwright, the bard, the author. The story opens, with a one-word sentence: ‘Chekhov’. When Chekhov’s wife tells the bellboy to summon the mortician, she feels the need to reiterate: ‘Herr Chekhov was dead you see? Comprenez-vous? Young man? Herr Anton Chekhov was dead’ (Carver 1993, p. 429). And later on in a flashforward, when the bellboy reaches the mortician’s house, Carver writes: ‘But the one time the young man mentions the name of the deceased, the mortician’s eyebrows rise just a little. Chekhov you say? Just a minute, I’ll be with you’ (430). The gist of the dichotomy is between two words: deceased and Chekhov. The word ‘deceased’ refers to the finality of death and the word ‘Chekhov’ refers to the public person, the canonical writer, the author—it belongs to the deceased person, but it is also in the realm

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of the conceptual, of the symbolic, in the structure of the text and in the modes of its reading and/or performing. Hence, even though the story is quite literarily about the death of the author, this death is never final. Carver depicts Chekhov’s final moments through multiple perspectives or multiple readings/viewings of the deathbed scene. The most interesting perhaps is the gaze of the bellboy, who first appears bringing the champagne. In Carr’s play, Kolya, the bellboy, is also present, but he serves more as a stagehand—although he is the silent witness of the unfolding scene of dying, we never see the scene from his perspective. In Carver’s version of the deathbed scene, the bellboy’s gaze shapes the story—frames the death of the author. When the bellboy first appears and is ordered to bring the champagne, Chekhov is not yet dead. In the close up of the bellboy’s gaze are the entrance room and the doctor— from the background, Chekhov’s raspy breathing. The bellboy takes one brief glimpse of the dying bard from a distance. When the bellboy returns to the room, it is already morning and Chekov is dead. In the close up of the bellboy’s vision are the entrance room and Chekhov’s wife who remains silent for the first part of the scene. In the background, through the eyes of the bellboy, we catch the image of a perfectly peaceful, motionless body—that of the dead author. Even though Carver’s story uses biographical material, its dual perspective through which the story has been structured suggests that it is not so much about the bard per se, but about the relationship to him/or rather the concept of him. It is about the relationship between intimacy and distance, between the actual author (Carver) and his predecessor (Chekhov), and between the death of the author and its multiple readings. The gaze of the bellboy contains an intertextual dialogue between the author, Carver and the author predecessor, Chekhov—both considered masters of the short story. We might very well ask if the gaze of the bellboy is a reflection of Carver’s perspective—is it Carver in disguise as the bellboy peeking into the death of the author, his predecessor?

Deconstructions Howard Barker’s (Uncle) Vanya and Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play take sharper postmodern, deconstructionist and parodic approaches to authorial resurrections. In Barker’s (Uncle) Vanya, Serebryakov, in the presence of the resurrected Chekhov, reiterates the fundamental metatheatrical question, echoing Foucault and Barthes: ‘We know what a play is,

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but what is an author?’ (Barker 1993, p. 326). While Carr and Carver use elements of the writer’s biography as points of departure, in Barker’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the author/protagonist is stripped from any biographical and potentially psychological elements—rather, the author appears as a linguistic and conceptual entity. In this adaptation, the author does not feature as a complex full-blown character, but as a two-dimensional sketch made of ideas generated through his work. The bracketed word (Uncle) in the title of Barker’s play already suggests the intervention whereby the canonical play (and ostensibly its author) should be taken with a caveat. Barker’s resurrection of Chekhov, indeed, arises from his antipathy for the Russian bard to which he has openly confessed in the essay ‘Disputing Vanya’3 and elsewhere. Charles Lamb argues though that in (Uncle) Vanya, Barker is in the first place disputing the kind of canonization of Chekhov on the British stage, which focuses on the melancholy, rather than on the political dimensions in Chekhov’s work.4 Barker rewrites Uncle Vanya as (Uncle) Vanya to change the dynamics between the characters from passivity to activity, transforming subtextual elements into performative utterances (often quite literally in the Austinian sense) causing a dramaturgical and structural mutiny led by the title character. Vanya is in a way Barker’s weapon of choice for his fight with Chekhov—a dramaturgical agent provocateur—who sets things in motion and in opposite direction from the source text. This rebellion ranges from small subversions, such as Vanya’s refusal to be called by the diminutive nickname and insisting instead on his full name Ivan, to firing the gun and seducing Helena, professor Serebryakov’s young and beautiful wife. The other characters follow suit and in this version do things they have desired but have never acted on (or at least have not been successful in accomplishing) in the source text. The gun is one of the crucial elements in both Chekhov’s play and in Barker’s subversion of the play. If we evoke Chekhov’s famous point that if there is a gun on the wall in the first act, it has to fire in the third, we can see the clear trajectory between the source text and its transformation. In Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the gun is indeed used, but it misfires, adding to the absurdist dimension of the play. In Barker’s version, the rule of cause and effect, and the strategy of planting a device that will pay off later in the play—the gun—fires as well, but it does not miss. It hits Serebryakov straight in the face. Vanya becomes a murderer, while dead Serebryakov transforms into a kind of choral voice, commenting on the play’s action from beyond the grave. Through this intertextual playing,

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Barker establishes a different, more radical kind of absurdism compared to the one hinted at in Chekhov’s plays. Even though the characters carry on their betrayal of the source text, they fear Chekhov. In Act II, when he first appears, the entire cast is standing still to be inspected by the bard. It turns out, Chekhov does not mind the mutiny and he says to Vanya: Chekhov: I almost could/ Embrace you/Vanya of you I’m particularly fond. Vanya: I am not fond of you. Chekhov: You fill me with laughter. Vanya: Do I. Chekhov: A laughter which is without malice or contempt, a laughter such as the moon might laugh at the homeward journey of a drunken man… Vanya: I would rather kill myself… (328)

If we go with the point that Vanya is in a way acting on behalf of the playwright, Barker, then the main conflict in this play (even in the traditional sense of dramatic conflict), is the one between the author (Barker) and his predecessor (Chekhov). In his work, On Grammatology, written in the same year as the ‘Death of the Author’, Derrida, like Barthes, focuses on the reader and foregrounds the relational aspects of the reception process suggesting that reading ‘must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he doesn’t command of the patterns of the language that he uses. This relationship is the signifying structure that critical reading should produce’ (Derrida 1997, p. xlix). In this light, we might also say that the core of the play is actually the relationship between the figure of the author (Chekhov) and the figure of the reader, who is at the same time the author successor (Barker), while Vanya, the dramatic character, is the proxy through which this relationship gets mediated. Hence, the main tension lays between the source text and its interpretation/adaptation/mutation—that is Barker’s ‘critical reading’ of Chekhov. Just as in Carver’s story and Carr’s play, this resurrection of Chekhov, too, is close to death. In Barker’s play, Chekhov is brought back from the dead only to be killed off again. He dies reaching out to his now antagonist Vanya: Chekhov: […]In discarding all that was arguably, the best in me. I found a peace of sorts. We are entirely untransferable. So hold my hand… Ivan… (Vanya extends his hand to Chekhov, who holds it. Chekov dies). (334)

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Lamb interprets this scene as a point of Barker’s reconciliation with Chekov. I would like to propose that we look at this death scene as a metaphor not so much of reconciliation, but of co-dependence between protagonist and antagonist, writer and predecessor, author and reader, performance and audience. In this instance, the co-dependence in the metaphor of death of the author and the birth of the reader/author successor shows the circularity of intertextual deaths and resurrections and the range of variations that come with them. While Carr and Carver re-perform the biographical legend of Chekhov’s death exploring the relationship between the mortal body and the biographical legend, Barker is interested in the semantic and ideological death of the author. How does an author die as an aesthetic and cultural construct? How does an author die as a stylistic and ideological entity? While Carr and Carver are custodians of the author’s house, preserving not only the memory, but the aesthetics within which the dead author could be resurrected, Barker demolishes the house of the author. Even though the characters stand in a row, meek and disciplined for their ‘original’ author to inspect them, this obedience is short-lived as they have already metaphorically trashed the heritage home. The resurrection is not of the mortal, biographical persona of the author, but rather of an aesthetic and ideological concept that in Barker’s view is already worn out and decaying. The resurrected author is less of a ghost whose fine spirit haunts the stage and the page, and more of a zombie—a body already half-decomposed when brought back to life. In Barker’s case, the author predecessor is resurrected in order to be turned into an empty signifier—hence the non-transferability claim that Chekhov makes in his deathbed speech. Here, the successor does not grow out of certain artistic lineage that the predecessor had carved out, but emerges only after nearly trashing the path that links them. Nevertheless, if we are to return to Serebryakov’s question: ‘We know what a play is, but what is an author?’, the connection to the dead author is far from entirely tarnished. The dead author and his successor(s) operate under the contract akin to the one of theatre as articulated in Barker’s metatheatrical rendering of Chekhov’s characters: Astrov: The theatre is a contract. Serebryakov: Between the living and the dead. Astrov: The dead inform the living of their fate. Serebryakov: A requirement. Astrov: A necessity. Astrov/Serebryakov: Chekov/ How/ Tolerant/ You/ Are. (329)

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The act of demolition becomes literal in the case of Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play, yet we might argue the author still endures. In Dead Centre’s production, the author, as the name of the company might suggest, is irrevocably dead. Here, the dead author is replaced by the surrogate authorial figure—the theatre director. However, behind Chekhov’s First Play are two makers, Bush Moukarzel, who plays the director, and Ben Kidd. The production is created through a devising process and the authorship is identified as belonging to a collective entity—Dead Centre. The play (performed in London’s Battersea Arts Centre, among other venues) opens with the director holding a gun and asking the audience to put headphones on because ‘Chekhov’s first play is really complicated and messy’ therefore he ‘set up a director’s commentary to explain what’s going on’ (Dead Centre 2016, p. 11). He then continues in a manner of a somewhat insecure MC explaining the presence of the gun as one of Chekhov’s key tropes: ‘This gun, for example. This gun is very important. I don’t know if you heard of the idea of ‘Chekhov’s gun’ — it is the idea if you have a gun in a play… if you…if there is gun you fire it…erm… actually I’ll explain this later…erm…’ (11–12). We learn that the main protagonist Platonov is a disillusioned nineteenth-century schoolmaster and that the play is untitled but often goes after the protagonist’s name. Chekhov wrote it when he was only eighteen years old and its integral version comprises twenty characters, eighty-three scenes, four women competing for Platonov’s affections and numerous suicide attempts. Numerous versions and adaptations have been staged, but the integral version has indeed been considered unstageable. Even though the lines of the director’s commentary also have Chekhovian echoes and some parts have been adapted from his letters and notebooks, the dead author can only be present through, and as a metatheatrical reference. As in the case of Barker’s play, here, too, the surrogate author/the director is antagonistic and almost volatile towards the dead bard (Image 5.2). Nevertheless, when the director retreats into the background, the curtain opens onto the familiar Chekhovian setting: the set is adorned with white lace and linen; a samovar is featured on a long banquet table; the characters are dressed in period costumes. The world that opens to us is rustic and bourgeois, emanating with the expected Chekhovian atmosphere of melancholy and decay. If the author, Chekhov, were to be resurrected at the moment the curtain opens to this world, he would have found his way back into it easily, just as in Sokurov’s film. The first part

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Image 5.2 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Adam Trigg [Courtesy of www.naturaltheatre.photos])

of the play features some of the tropes that have re-emerged in his more famous plays. There is the widow Anna Petrovna who is struggling to keep her big house and estate, a benefactor who tries to seduce her, and a man she loves, who is married to someone else. The first part of the show appears to be almost a straightforward staging of the play, save for the director’s running commentary. The protagonists are waiting for a guest to arrive, when Platonov appears in the second half of the performance all the ladies want to flirt with him, while the male personage is jealous. As the play unfolds though, and the director keeps whispering into our headphones to highlight themes and main points of the play like a museum audio-guide, he also gradually becomes agitated over missed cues and begins to share gossip about the alleged personal life of the cast members. The backstage reality invades the stage world—the stage manager joins the personages of Chekhov’s First Play, Chekhovian language is broken down and Chinese takeaway food is biked onto the stage. With the disintegration of language, the author can no longer be reconstructed through the linguistic world of his play(s). Once the linguistic fourth wall is broken, there is nothing to prevent the delivery of Chinese takeaway food from bursting in on a motorbike. Thereafter, everything becomes possible. And when the stage setting, associated with

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the world of Chekhov’s plays and ostensibly his own biographical legend, is wrecked in a homage to Miley Cyrus’s infamous Wrecking Ball, there is almost a sense of delight in the audience. The house of memory, the authorial heritage house, has been demolished. The author(s) successor has refused to be the custodian. It is through the deconstruction of the Chekhovian world that Chekhov, the author becomes resurrected in the mode of absurdity that has lain dormant both in his plays and in some of his autobiographical notes. The Wrecking Ball thus is not aimed entirely at the metaphorical heritage house of the author, but at the ways in which it has been curated and encrusted through cultural imaginaries of the Chekhovian world. The spirit of the author is no longer neatly embodied in some mimetic variation complete with the monocle, beard and period costume, but rather blasts in through the fragments scattered across unmarked junctions of art and life—through broken pieces of language and imagery, chaotic and incomplete just like Chekhov’s unstageable first play (Image 5.3). We must not forget the gun though. The gun fulfils the dramaturgical promise made at the start of the play. At the very end, the characters play Russian roulette. The surrogate author, the director, enters and talks into the microphone attempting to stage an intervention and to convince

Image 5.3 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Jose Miguel Jimenez)

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Platonov that, even though he mostly dies in the various renderings of Chekhov’s first play, this time he does not have to: This gun. At least let me explain one thing right. Chekhov’s first play had a gun in it and his second, and all the rest had guns in them in one way or another, until in his last play… it was gone. It’s like he got over it. He wrote away the gun. He realised his characters have to do something even harder than dying. They have to go on living. (Dead Centre 2016, p. 54)

Platonov hands the gun to the director. The director shoots himself. The curtain comes down with Platonov standing in front of it, just as the director did at the start of the performance. Platonov looks at the audience, wonders if the voiceover will ever stop—‘[T]his commentary commenting on everything. Will it ever go away?’ (ibid., 55). Then, he speaks into the microphone pronouncing the last word of the play: ‘Hallo’. The performance has come full circle—at the start the author Chekhov is already long dead; at the end the surrogate author/the director has just killed himself. The character, Platonov, is left alone on stage to author the performance. With both the author and the director dead, Chekhov’s First Play enables a reversal of the characters’ quest from Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of the Author. The character is seemingly liberated from his author(s). Platonov here emerges as a kind of Fortinbras of theatrical intertextuality, whereby the end is potentially a new beginning, while the story could go anywhere and potentially nowhere. Nevertheless, with the demise of all the authorial figures in the play, Platonov’s address to the audience at the very end of the play is closer than ever to Chekhov. Paradoxically, this is how the dead author actually both endures and appears in text and performance—as a character of one’s own making, even if changed through numerous adaptations (Image 5.4).

Chekhov as Heteronym Chekhov writes in his notebook entry of 13 July 1896: ‘Braz [painter] does my portrait (for the Tretyakov Gallery). Two sittings a day’ (Chekhov, 14). The famous portrait finished in 1898 depicts Chekhov sitting in armchair, in a black three-piece suit, left arm resting on his cheek, gazing back at the onlooker through his monocle. His hair is

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Image 5.4 Dead Centre, Chekhov’s First Play (Photo by Adam Trigg [Courtesy of www.naturaltheatre.photos])

brown, his beard neatly styled, his eyes dark and thoughtful. This could easily have been the look of Platonov in full costume, hair and make-up from one of the many adaptations of Chekhov’s first play, including Dead Centre’s iconoclastic version. One could easily imagine Chekhov stepping out of the frame of the portrait and entering the stage for the performance of one of his plays. Here, the performativity of the author is in a triangular relationship between the authorial image, biographical glimpses, and the dramatic characters he has created. In that sense, the theatricality and performativity of Chekhov are similar to that of the Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa, who created no less than 72 different pen names with which to sign his prolific literary outpouring. However, these were not typical pseudonyms. In fact, Pessoa even refused that term and instead conjured different authorial personae to match different styles and forms of his writing. Pessoa invented the term heteronym to describe these authorial constructions that were not just mere disguises of the actual author but had distinct biographies and even physiognomies, each connected to a specific work of prose, poetry, drama or translation. They were imaginary constructions in the same vein as Bolaño’s Archimboldi and Crouch’s Adler and Gibb, except that they were authored by the author of the actual work assigned to them. These heteronyms emerge

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almost as stage characters and a kind of proxy between the actor/author and the work. It is as if the author, Pessoa, like an actor, needed to take on a role in order to enter a specific fictional or dramatic world. These heteronyms could be viewed as conceptual performances of the authorial persona—its construction, ephemerality, paradox, but also its different realities. Likewise, the various resurrections of Chekhov could be understood as a kind of heteronymity—albeit not created by Chekhov himself but by his numerous successors in an intertextual dialogue ranging from biography and homage to parody and deconstruction. These resurrections of Chekhov are heteronymic not because they invent different biographies of the author, but because they bring forward different authorial figures of Chekhov from biographical and realist to fragmented and stylized. Like Chekhov, Pessoa is immediately associated with a visual image—hat, beard, glasses and raincoat—and even some of his heteronyms share variations of the same costume. Reflecting on his production of Adler & Gibb, Crouch writes: ‘Theatre can’t do real. As soon as you put something real on stage, it stops the theatre — or, more likely, the thing itself stops being real’ (Crouch 2014a). As far as cultural imaginaries go, the figure of the actual man, Chekhov, the doctor/writer who lived and died, is, to echo Crouch, not too real. In other words, he is ‘real’ just enough to be imagined theatricality. He is the author in costume, ready to step back into the world he created—as himself or in other disguises. Chekhov died six years after Braz’s portrait was hung on the wall of the Tretyakov Gallery. At the time of his death, he was 44 years old— hardly a middle-aged man. Yet, in some of his numerous heteronymic appearances, Chekhov is depicted as a very old man—in Sokurov’s film, for example, his hair, his beard and even his three-piece suit are white. While Chekhov, the mortal man, died relatively young, Chekhov, the heteronymic performative figure, has lived long enough to grow old. The heteronymic possibilities of the author as artistic material, surpassing the mortal figure from whom they have originated, are almost endless.

Notes 1. See S. Jestrovic, 2003. Uncle Vanya After the Theatre of the Absurd, Toronto Slavic Quarterly, no. 4, Spring. Available: http://sites.utoronto. ca/tsq/04/jestrovic04.shtml.

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2. Chekhov also makes a note about the opening night of Three Sisters in Anton Chekhov, 2006. Notebook. Trans. S.S. Koteliansky and L. Woolf, Dodo Press. 3. See Barker, 1997. Disputing Vanya. In Arguments for a Theatre, 3rd ed., 168–170. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 4. See Charles Lamb, 2004. The Theatre of Howard Barker. Oxford: Routledge.

Works Cited Barker, Howard. 1993. Uncle Vanya. In Collected Plays, vol. 2, 291–343. London and New York: Riverrun Press. Carr, Marina. 2011. 16 Possible Glimpses. The Gallery Press (kindle edition). Carver, Raymond. 1993. Errand. In Where I’m Calling from: Selected Stories, 419–431. London: The Harvill Press. Chekhov, A.P. 2006. Notebook, trans. S.S. Koteliansky and L. Woolf. Dodo Press (kindle edition). Clayton, J. Douglas, and Yana Meerzon. 2012. Adapting Chekhov: The Text and Its Mutations. New York: Routledge. Crouch, Tim. 2014a. Adler & Gibb. London: Oberon Books (kindle edition). Crouch, Tim. 2014b. The Theatre of Reality… and Avoiding the Stage Kiss of Death. The Guardian, June 18. Available: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/jun/18/theatre-reality-adler-and-gibb-timcrouch-playwright. Dead Centre. 2016. Chekhov’s First Play: After Anton Chekhov. London: Oberon Books. Derrida, Jaques. 1997. Of Grammatology, trans. G.S. Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Hutcheon, Linda. 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, Linda. 2009. The Art of Repeating Stories. In Performing Adaptations: Essays and Conversations on the Theory and Practice of Adaptation, ed. Michelle MacArthur, Lydia Wilkinson, and Keren Zaiontz, 1–9. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Hutcheon, Linda. 2013. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. How Does One Speak? In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. T. Gora, A. Jardine, L.S. Roudiez, ed. L.S. Roudiez, 92–123. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 6

The Author Is Present

The title of this chapter is an overt allusion to Marina Abramovi´c’s seminal 2010 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA, New York)— The Artist Is Present. While I have often used the terms author and artist interchangeably, depending on the medium in which one creates, my use of the word ‘author’ rather than ‘artist’ in the chapter’s title, implies both the presence of the authorial figure and the process of authoring it. Here, the interest is in the process of curating the dialectics of authorial presence and absence which emerges in Abramovi´c’s work in different forms and on different levels. The Artist Is Present, is an almost direct execution of the Austinian performative—the claim the title makes is exactly what takes place. The tableaux within which the artist is doing-being-present has already become iconic. For 90 days, Abramovi´c sat motionless in a chair at a small table gazing into the eyes of a visitor/stranger across from her who, along with throngs of others, had queued for hours in front MOMA in anticipation of an audience with the artist. Abramovi´c’s striking dresses—red, white and dark blue—were the only overtly theatrical elements. The minimalism of the performance scenario enabled the experience of immediacy of authorial presence and of an unmediated encounter. Initially, The Artist Is Present was a re-staging of Abramovi´c and Ulay’s work from the 1980s, The Night Sea Crossing, where the artists sat across from each other with a table in between them, trying their very best to do nothing except concentrate on being present. © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_6

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The reference to this earlier piece was somewhat reinforced in The Artist Is Present when Ulay, Abramovi´c’s former partner in art and life, sat down across from her. That moment has often been interpreted as the sublimation of their love story. It played into the audience’s familiarity with the performer’s personal history more than into the interperformative link with The Night Sea Crossing. Abramovi´c’s eyes filled with tears as they smiled at one another and she leaned forward reaching for Ulay’s hands. After holding hands for a few seconds (a gesture that would have been impossible to perform in the format of their original durational performance of The Night Sea Crossing because of the size of the table between them), Ulay left, just as he had in The Nigh Seat Crossing (albeit this time after only a few minutes). That moment in The Artist Is Present, when Ulay sits down with Marina, became one of the most iconic moments of the show. Often, it has been framed through a reference to yet another piece, The Lovers (1988). As it turned out, The Lovers, a performance where the artists famously walked the length of the Great Wall of China in opposite directions, mark the end of their relationship. The moment when Ulay came to sit with Marina in The Artist Is Present, became associated with The Lovers not so much through performance quotations as through their biographical narratives—through intertextual links. In the course of the performance, the table was removed to increase the directness of the encounter with the artist eliminating the object-barrier between the two. But even with the removal of the table, presence, as this brief intertextual/interperformative moment showed, could not entirely avoid being mediated by the narrative imposition of the past. In parts of the retrospective, the artist was present, yet she was also absent. The space where she actually sat, encircled by onlookers, felt like the epicentre of the intended presentness, where a kind of dialectics of presence and absence—a durational but not always linear ‘ground zero’, was emanated. The artist was present in the photographs taken at different phases of her life and art that adorned the walls. Ostensibly, Abramovi´cs’s and Ulay’s ghostly presence was also felt by the campervan where they once lived that was installed in the gallery as part of the retrospective. Most overtly, however, the artist is both present and absent in the reperformances of her iconic works that were delegated to other performers in the MOMA retrospective (and in numerous other subsequent exhibitions). In her essay, ‘The Artist Is Present’, Amelia Jones points to this paradox of presence and absence that the show foregrounded, perhaps unintentionally, in its quest to capture the experience of bare presence

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that the artist claimed and to which visitors on the museum’s website attested: “Presence” as commonly understood is a state that entails the unmediated co-extensivity in time and place of what I perceive and myself; it promises a transparency to an observer of what “is” at the very moment at which it takes place. But the event, the performance, by combining materiality and durationality (its enacting of the body as always already escaping into past) points to the fact that there is “no presence” as such. (Jones 2011, p. 18)

In all aspects of The Artist Is Present, the artist was and was not present. The immediacy of her presence, already variously riddled with forms of surrogation, could not occur before a void had been created. Joseph Roach defines surrogation as a process of making links between memory, performance and substitution, by inserting substitutes ‘into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure’ (Roach 1996, p. 2). Even though Roach examined collective cultural performance in the circum-Atlantic region, the understanding of the term surrogation that emerged from his work has been re-negotiated in a variety of contexts. Delegated re-performances, for example, could be understood as acts of surrogation of the author/artist as they are also premised on some form of departure. In these cases, surrogation fills the void in space/time in various modes of replacements of the absent artist—from photos and objects linked to the author, to surrogate performers and even holograms. Another performance in Abramovi´c’s retrospective, The Cleaner, alluded to the process of emptying spaces of memory and displaying their contents. Trace elements of The Artist Is Present featured there too, mainly in and as the absence of the author. After a European tour, The Cleaner came to the artist’s native city of Belgrade in September 2019. Abramovi´c was prominently featured in the local media but at first the two chairs from The Artist Is Present were mostly vacant. An array of artefacts, performance videos, and photographs, culled from more than 50 years of the artist’s prolific career and displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade—made for a ghostly gallery display. On the wall behind the set of the chairs and the table, video footage was projected from the actual performance where the artist was present. The recorded images of Abramovi´c performing The Artist Is Present appeared as a surrogation for her actual presence. When Abramovi´c sat at the table posing for a photo at the opening in Belgrade, the installation resembled

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a performance memento—the setting of a souvenir photo. The audience, however, began to slowly fill the tableau left vacant by the absence of its author. Visitors performed acts of surrogation of the author, reperforming the physical constellations of The Artist Is Presence and at times recovering some of its affective registers. Widely-circulated images of people experiencing cathartic moments while locking eyes with the artist, tears rolling down their cheeks, embedded a certain expectation in the gallery’s visitors.1 From time to time, strangers would sit across from one another looking into each others’ eyes and, in this spontaneous act of surrogation, some even shed a tear. If this was indeed an experience of immediate presence and energy exchange as advertised in The Artist Is Present at MOMA, it was inevitably shaped by the past—originating from a constructed emotional memory and from the void that every presence, no matter how concentrated, eventually creates. It the performance piece The Life (2019), at the London Serpentine Gallery, the paradox of presence and absence was pushed even further when—Abramovi´c appeared as a hologram. Virtual reality (VR) technology and mixed media were deployed to conjure the artist’s presence. The VR goggles gave the visitor an immersive experience of simulated reality, the hologram became the artist—a surrogate performer pushing the dichotomies of authorial presence and absence to their paradoxical limits. With the aid of VR technology, the audience virtually conjured the absent artist into presence—the author once again emerged as a collective creation. To avoid any confusion, however, the gallery posted a disclaimer on its website: ‘Please note this is a digital experience in Mixed Reality. The artist is not present’. Nevertheless, if the artist cannot be present without being in some ways already absent, then surely the same logic ought to work the other way around. In other words, the artist cannot be absent without being in some ways also present. Nothing performs this paradox better than when the author appears as a hologram. Referencing Abramovi´c’s performance, The Artist Is Present, foregrounds not only the process of authoring the work and the author, but also the ontological aspects of performing presence and absence. Abramovi´c’s work is a particularly relevant example for this discussion as it involves the notion of death of the author/artist on several levels—from conceptual departures to performances where she risked her life while putting her body in extreme circumstances. In what follows, I will look at Abramovi´c’s authoring of presence and the curation of subjectivity to explore the concept of the death of the author in performance art—a form

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that lays claim to authenticity and immediacy far more than other artistic forms. The various layers of Abramovi´c’s work, as well as her biographical narratives and her stardom, allow us not only to look into the performance of authorial presence and absence within a somewhat different frame, but to examine the theatricality and performativity of the authorial figure in a medium that claims non-representationality and immediacy— where acting is counter-acted with being and where mimesis is confronted with real blood. We might ask, then, is the performance artist a kind of authorial figure that cannot die a stage death?

Re-performance and the Ephemerality of the Author For performance theorist Peggy Phelan, the author of the seminal book, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, the ontology of performance art is ‘defined by its ephemeral nature’ as ‘a representation without reproduction’ and ‘as a means of resisting the reproductive ideology of visible representations’ (Phelan 1993, p. 31). Phelan further claims that those ‘artists who have dedicated themselves to performance continually disappear and leave ‘not a rack behind’ (ibid.). If we continue this train of thought, then the death of the author as performance artist takes place in the very act of performing. Yet, not unlike a stage death, it takes place over and over again from one performance piece to the next. The notion of performance art as disappearance and as authenticity (of the real knife, the real blood, the real emotion) asserts ephemerality as performance art’s key aesthetic, political, and, above all, ontological principle. However, this ephemerality is but an ideal, a utopian vision of performance artists and theorists alike, for paradoxically, even ephemerality gets re-performed. The ideal of absolute performativity, the authenticity of the unrehearsed, can only happen in the here and now of the performance, liberated from the artifice of theatricality and the limits of the stage. That is, arguably, a near-impossible requirement. The notion of ephemerality actually captures the paradox of presence. If presence is immanently ephemeral, and absence is perhaps ontologically ephemeral, the experience of presence in performance, stripped of a mediating device and its contradiction, ought to somehow be captured through intense concentration and have a certain duration. In other words, to claim being as presence is to work against the quicksand force of this ephemerality.

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Phelan believes that performance art ‘is the least marked of all texts’— the most resistant to framing, whereby ‘contemporary culture finds a way to arrest and fix the image of the other’ (Phelan 1993, p. 2). Hence, if performance art is always and inevitably in a process of its own disappearance, if there are no bodies or objects to fix, to permanently display, to reproduce, to own, then it is most likely to resist turning into a commodity. To believe in the ephemerality of performance art is to believe that it has a chance of surviving outside the grip of the economy of the art market through the process of its own disappearance. What happens, then, to the ephemeral and to the real in performance art when it is reperformed, recorded, written about? Does re-performance not involve a certain degree of theatricality—an artifice engrained in the process of repetition—even when real blood is spilled all over again? Phelan is aware of the paradox of ephemerality and of the paradox of the real through her reading of Lacan—‘the real-impossible toward which we aspire and whose failure to realize is utterly assured’ (p. 3). She points out that ‘it becomes increasingly imperative to find a way to remember undocumentable, unreproducible art’ when she writes: ‘The paradox is that in writing a testimony to the power of the undocumentable and nonreproductive I engage the document of the written reproducible text itself’ (ibid.). In her introduction to the collection Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History, edited with Adrian Heathfield, Amelia Jones points out that re-enactments ‘like the live in general, might seem to promise an escape from commodification, but re-enactment often (if not always) ends up congealing into structures of capital—often via its own documentary trace’ (Jones and Heathfield 2012, p. 18). Ambramovi´c has been preoccupied with documenting the ‘undocumentable’, and with re-performing the ‘unreproducible’ both in The Artist Is Present and Seven Easy Pieces (2005), where she re-performed seminal performance art pieces of the 1960 and 1970s. She compares her process to the work of an archaeologist, building an archive of performance art and attempting transcriptions of her work that would be akin to a musical score as means of enabling further re-performances. Reperformance emerges as a possibility to access and encounter that which has disappeared—a unique form of documenting, of making archives of the ephemeral, through a form of ephemerality itself. Re-performance also reveals the inherent paradox of performance ontology from Artaud to Phelan—that the ephemeral of performance art, its unique disappearance act, is never complete. Theorist Adrian Heathfield recognizes this as a

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temporal paradox of performance: ‘it exists both now and then, it leaves and lasts; its tendencies towards disappearance and dematerialisation are countered by its capacities to adhere, mark and trace itself otherwise’ (Jones and Heathfield 2012, p. 27). He further points to the epistemological importance and validity of performance traces and remains, even if they come at the price of entering wider signification systems: Whilst these remains [of performance] are different from the events they register, they reiterate, extend, and transform the “life of performance”, securing its relations to the visible and the legible. Aside from the powers of the witnessed performance to bring its objects into question, the traces of performance prompt further questions and proliferate discourses around what exactly was done, seen, and understood. (ibid.)

In his biography of the artist, When Marina Abramovi´c Dies, James Westcott sees the re-performances almost along the lines of Barthes’s Death of the Author as an act of liberating the work from the author, giving it to others to own: In re-creating classical performance art pieces, Abramovi´c wanted to ask an iconoclastic question: Can performance art be treated like performing arts—something that could be repeated and reinterpreted by anyone with adequate experience, skill and conviction, like a script of the play or a musical score? Abramovi´c believed so — that the extremely personal, expressive and transformative acts of performance art could be liberated from their author. This approach grated somewhat with the fact that her own performances had always been based on her unique, unmatchable physical presence and will power, and on the fact that no one would be able to do these performances, or do them as well, as Abramovi´c herself. (Westcott 2010, pp. 289–291)

In this sense, it is not only the performance that has the tendency to disappear, but the artist, too, is ephemeral, and moreover, disposable and replaceable. Hence, nearly everyone can be coached into mastering the ‘unmatchable physical presence and will power’ of the artist. While in a way the artist opens the space for others, within which she herself could potentially disappear, this project could be viewed from another angle as well—rather than releasing the work from the grip of the author, re-performance (even through variations and adaptations) further foregrounds the absent author by quoting their work in a surrogate body.

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Moreover, from the standpoint of authors’ rights, the liberation of the work, even in the actual event of re-performance, is, only symbolic as the question of rights, permissions and royalties remain in place. Thus, the process of re-performance is akin to the process of canonization of the author, whereby the legacy is kept alive (present) in various reperformative modes—from re-creation to adaptation and from homage to parody.

The Real and the Fake: Theatricality of Re-performance The anti-mimetic claim—performance is, theatre pretends to be—and the resistance to semiotics (performance art strives to remain ‘unmarked’) are some of the key claims in distinguishing performance art from theatre. Here are two definitions—one on theatre by Prague Structuralist, Jindrich Honzl, the other on performance by Abramovi´c herself. Honzl writes: Everything that makes up reality on stage—the playwright’s text, the actor’s acting, the stage lighting —all these things in every case stand for other things. In other words, dramatic performance is a set of signs. (Honzl 1976, p. 76)

The specificity of the theatrical sign, notes Honzl, lies in the potential of any stage vehicle to stand for any signified class of phenomena; accordingly, there are no fixed representational relations. This transformability of theatrical signs enables the free play of theatrical signifiers which also forms the core of Veltruský’s dialectic antinomy between person and object—on stage an object can come to life, while a living being can turn into a thing completely without will. Honzl describes the set used in Meyerhold’s staging of The Death of Tarelkin as a cylindrical construction that looks like a meat grinder: ‘It is only when we see the actor pacing back and forth in the cylindrical structure like a prisoner and clutching its slats like bars that we realize the function of this prop: it is a cell’ (Honzl 1976, p. 78). He uses this example to demonstrate that the way we know for certain what the props in a theatrical production signify is only through the ways the actors use them. By the same token, we do not know if something is alive or lifeless, an active subject or an object without will, until it is utilized through performance—until it interacts (or fails to interact) with other elements in the performance space. In theatre,

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presence cannot take place without relationality and mediation. To establish what/who is present on stage involves a didactic process—to know what something is, involves deducing what it is not. More precisely, what is perceived as presence is inevitably shaped through its other which has remained absent or unused. While the dialectics of presence and absence in theatre is relational, in performance art it is durational (not necessarily within the parameters of linear time). Both theatre and performance art reach their distinct points of ephemerality, albeit by different means and both can be partially recovered through repetitions and re-performances. In her definition of performance art, Abramovi´c draws a sharp demarcation between theatre and performance along the lines of performance art’s resistance to semiotization. In her 2010 interview for The Guardian, following the success of The Artist Is Present, she defined performance in opposition to theatre: Theatre is fake: there is a black box, you pay for the ticket, you sit in the dark and you see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. (Abramovi´c in O’ Hagan 2010)

The knife, or rather the razor blade in her performance Lips of Thomas, was indeed real. So was the blood that it drew. Lips of Thomas was first performed in a gallery in Innsbruck, Austria in 1975. It was re-performed in 1993 and in 2005, both times at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the Seven Easy Pieces project. In the performance, one that contains elements of religious sacrifice, Abramovi´c pushes her body to the limits. She eats a kilo of honey, drinks a litre of red wine and flogs herself violently. As the performance progresses, her acts grow increasingly selfharming including the now-iconic moment when she carves a star onto her belly with a razor blade. She then lies on a cross made of blocks of ice while a heater on the ceiling is directed at her star-shaped wound to make it bleed more. Even at its most ‘authentic’, Lips of Thomas, is not without its theatricality. The artifice, that Abramovi´c reduces to mere fakeness, creeps in through the props, the setting, and the symbolism it generates. Abramovi´c also reiterates and adapts images that have been performed, theatricalized and instrumentalized in art, religion and politics many times—the cross and the star, the religious acts of self-sacrifice and

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the symbolic meanings of wine and honey. Once framed within the performance space—or through the performer’s own ‘charismatic space’ (as in the film, The Artist Is Present, Abramovi´c offers her surrogate performers advice: ‘You have to find your own charismatic space.’)—these elements start to act theatrically not only for what they are, but also as signs for something else. The visceral experience of pain—its ultimate performativity—unfolds in a setting and through a set of actions that inevitably produce their own semiotics. Arguably, these render the act theatrical on some level despite the performer’s best efforts to separate theatre semiotics from those of performance art. Moreover, the signs—the cross and the red star—read differently in different temporal frameworks within which the piece has been reperformed. At its first performance in Innsbruck, Abramovi´c was a little-known, young artist from socialist Yugoslavia. The red star carved into her belly was the symbol on the uniform of Yugoslav partisans and on the country’s flag—a symbol of an ideal, and an ideology and of a political dream and a disillusionment. In the Yugoslavia of 1975, religion was a semi-kept secret that no progressive, red star-wearing comrade, such as the artist’s parents (as we will learn much later when she becomes a celebrity), would be caught practising. The cross (as a sign of suppressed religion) was a challenge to the bleeding red star—a critique of communism. So, when a young artist from Tito’s Yugoslavia cuts a red star into her flesh and lies on a cross of melting ice in 1975, it is not only a disconcerting and provocative avant-garde performance that tests the boundaries of art and life, it is also a political statement. When Lips of Thomas was re-performed in 1993, the star cut into flesh bled even more profusely, not literally, but symbolically and theatrically. As the audience watched Abramovi´c’s body in pain in the Guggenheim Museum, the country formerly known as Yugoslavia was a writhing, suffering, bleeding body. Wars in Croatia and Bosnia were raging, Sarajevo was under siege, Tito’s Yugoslavia was a blood bath—the entire country turned into an enormous, bleeding, red star cut into its skin— and, as is now well known, the county bled to death. As for religion, it played a different role this time. No longer a semi-secret practice through which to formulate a critique of the communist dogma and to search for lost spirituality, religion became a marker of ethnic belonging or not belonging, an instrument of war—the symbolism of Christian wine and honey turned poisonous. So it was that in the re-performance of Lips of Thomas in 1993, the body of the performer prostrated on the ice

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cross with the bleeding star cut onto her belly—colouring the shape of the wound in red—suddenly took on different connotations. The tragedy of the religious and ethnic wars that marked the downfall of Yugoslavia became inscribed on the suffering body of the artist—and neither the artist nor the performance could continue their earnest striving to remain ‘unmarked’. The final re-performance in 2003 was a major showcase of Abramovi´c as a superstar of the performance art world. It was the occasion of yet another reading of Lips of Thomas —more autobiographical this time, as the red star and the props began to be framed and perceived in relation to her personal story. Abramovi´c altered the original scenario of Lips of Thomas, playing its sequences in a loop and adding more personal paraphernalia, including her mother’s partisan cap adorned with the red star and the boots in which she walked the length of the Great Wall of China in The Lovers. These elements, just as Ulay’s guest appearance in The Artist Is Present, made intertextual links to a narrative structure—the artist’s biography. It was the performance artist performing self. The form of re-performance, somewhat antithetical to the claim of the immediacy and ephemerality of performance art, could also be read as the artist’s attempt to secure her legacy, a process of canonization of her opus and other seminal performance artworks that she had re-created as part of this project. Semiotization—or in Honzl’s terms, ‘things standing for other things’—emerges here too, despite the authenticity of the blood and the pain. The semiotic process enhances the piece with layers of meaning while also making evident the transformability of signs in different performance contexts. As it turned out, not even the knife/razor blade nor the real blood could stop this meaning-making process. But what about the elements that do resist semiotization? What are the limits of semiotics of the author’s real blood and pain? The final part of Lips of Thomas is a tableau: Abramovi´c lies on the cross made of ice. The status of the live body on stage changes from one of activity to one of passivity—in terms of willpower the difference between the body and the object is marginal. The body of the performer with a bleeding star carved onto her belly joins other symbolic objects utilized on stage to make the final poignant display. The gradual change of the display comes from the energy transfer that the heater installed on the ceiling provides—the ice begins to melt and the star-shaped wound bleeds more intensely. The live body, just like the inanimate cross made of ice, has no capacity to stop

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this process. The artist placed herself in close proximity to death and was supposed to remain on the ice cross until it melted. While the conceptual death of the author is endlessly thought-provoking and while stage deaths are not outside the realm of spectatorial pleasure, the possibility of an actual death (in both theatre and performance art) becomes impossible to bear. The real death of the author happens elsewhere, not on stage and not in a gallery. So, the spectators intervened. The first performance of Lips of Thomas was cut short as they took the artist away from the cross before it melted and before she bled to death. In her book, Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual, Erica Fischer-Lichte describes the 1975 performance of Lips of Thomas as a means to engage with the question of the crisis of spectatorship and the dismemberment of ritual: Which rule applied for the spectator of Abramovic’s performance? Obviously, the artist did actually hurt herself and was willing to continue the self-torture. If she had done so in another public space in the city, no spectator would have hesitated to intervene. But here? Did respect for the artist demand that she should carry out what seemed to be her plan and artistic intention? […] (Fischer-Lichte 2005, pp. 216–217)

Fischer-Lichte registers the discomfort of the spectator in a situation where the contract between performance and reality—between artistic expression and real pain—is pushed to its limits. The transformation from body to object, from alive to lifeless, has almost exhausted its semiotic potential. The immediate dilemma of where the performance ends, and what the limits of watching are, takes over. Clearly, this anecdote opens many more questions about the role of the recipient, their participation and their complicity. It might also be deployed to say that the theatrical transformability of signs stops once real blood has been drawn. Hence, theatre theories (e.g. of Honzl and others) cannot really work in the context of performance art. To that point, I would like to propose a counter-argument: namely, that this example, including the audience’s intervention, created an additional dialectical level about the concept of the authorial presence and absence, as well as about the artist’s aliveness and lifelessness in performance. The close proximity between stage death and real death added ontological and ethical dimensions to the performance semiotics.

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This, however, does not make the artist’s acts of self-harming and suffering in performance any less overwhelming, less painful, or less uncomfortable to witness. Even watching the video invokes a visceral identification with the pain and reiterates the question of spectatorship. How do we watch Lips of Thomas ? And how to be there in the same room with the performer who inflicts upon herself such extreme suffering? Fischer-Lichte observes that ‘Abramovi´c avoided any kind of bodily sign which an actor might show in order to express the pain of a dramatic figure’ (216). She indeed deliberately tries to avoid the semiotics of pain. To not show the signs of pain requires an incredible self-control as opposed to the spontaneous, authentic reaction to the actual pain that has been inflicted. This ability to control the body and the signs it displays, or refuses to produce is, paradoxically, closer to theatre than to an unmediated experience—it is Diderot’s ‘Paradox of the Actor’ pushed to its limits. The control mechanism involved is similar to Diderot’s observation that the performer’s tears should come from the brain. While in 1975, the performance of Lips of Thomas induced a shocking identity crisis in the audience, the re-performances in 1993 and 2005 were neither interrupted nor cut short. Why did the spectators fear the death of the author less in the subsequent iterations? In 1975, Marina Abramovi´c was a young, relatively-unknown performance artist from Yugoslavia, and the kind of work that she was making belonged to new territory too. The self-harming and the reality of the artist’s actual pain were a radical subversion of the audience’s expectations and a shocking violation of convention. Some thirty years later, the audience at the Guggenheim expects the self-harming and the real pain to take place. Abramovi´c is the iconic performance artist, the celebrity, often dubbed the ‘high priestess of performance art’—and pain and blood come with her territory. The body performing Lips of Thomas, the body in real pain, is also the body of Marina Abramovi´c—star of the performance art world, featured in Vogue and advertised on billboards in Times Square. The body in pain becomes a stage figure and a somewhat theatricalized presence. The blade is real, the blood is real, the pain is real, but the repetition, and the re-performance, functions as a kind of re-assurance that the artist will not die—she has done it before and she is famous for it. The actual near-death experience in performance art has become a stage death—tentative and reversible. The ‘real’ becomes subjected to the process of stage semiotics—even the real knife and the real blood turned into performance conventions.

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In the immediacy of the here and now of the performance, especially in its first rendering, the performativity of pain is so overwhelming that it overshadows everything else. Repetitions, re-performances, performance adaptations—even with their subtle but present theatricalities— have enabled ways of seeing and ways of experiencing the performance as both past and present; to understand how it reverberates within and beyond the here and now. Paradoxically, Abramovi´c’s re-performative strategies have substantially contributed to both the experience and the critical response to Lips of Thomas. As a catalyst of rich debate about the very notion of authorial presence, Abramovi´c’s Lips of Thomas achieved more than what an unmediated presence could have transcended in its purity and ephemerality, even if it was fully attainable.

Re-performance as Biographical Legend In the quasi-biopic Balkan Baroque (1999), directed by Pierre Coulibeuf, the theatrical performance Biography Remix (2005), directed by Michael Laub, and the Life and Death of Marina Abramovic (2011), directed by Robert Wilson, Abramovi´c plays herself. She re-performs iconic elements of her work as citations, at times on her own, at other times, through surrogation and parody. Each of the afore-mentioned works features the same monologue recited in different variations: ‘Bye, bye Tibetans, bye, bye solitude, bye, bye unhappiness, bye, bye tears, bye, bye jealousy, bye, bye Ulay, bye, bye extremes, bye, bye purity…’ In Balkan Baroque, the artist wears a red dress, smiles and waves at the camera as she utters these words. In Biography Remix, the artist has two doubles by her side; all three Marinas are solemn and mechanical in their choral delivery of the lines. These somewhat self-parodying scenes signal a departure into a new phase of Abramovi´c’s artistic and presumably personal life, a farewell to the minimalism and the asceticism that had characterized her earlier work and the pieces performed with Ulay. Even when she subsequently returned to minimalism, as she did in the concept of The Artist Is Present, the context of her performance had already become spectacular, and the performance artist, now having attained the status of authorial persona, became larger than the performance itself. The scene where the author performs herself, not as an unmediated presence but as one that has been enhanced by the full theatricality of a stage figure(s), is indeed a moment (albeit variously repeated) of departure. It is a departure from the orthodoxy of the real and of presence, although the claim to here and now still

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remains prevalent in the artist’s narrative of her work. She even ends her biopic with the words ‘we are here and now’ as if entirely oblivious of the experience of film as a medium. What is the here and now in a film? How many here(s) and now(s) are there when we watch Abramovi´c on screen performing herself? And is this ‘we’ referring to spectatorship or to a broader, more philosophical conception of being there? Is the ‘here and now’ of a live artist playing herself in front of the camera inevitably a parody of presence as the imminent category of performance art? In her announcement of departure, Abramovi´c alludes to her earlier work where performance semiotics was for the most part denied or minimized, where the body tried its hardest to remain ‘unmarked’ and where the artist’s biography was not at all prevalent in the reception process—in the here and now of the performance. The scene of departure also launches the artist’s newfound celebrity and her rise to world stardom along with the concomitant criticism for having commercialized her art. Yet there is continuation in that departure—the blurring of the boundaries of art and reality still remains but in a different key. The demarcation lines are still blurred but by different means allowing the real to be tainted with the fake, presence can become representation, and ephemerality can no longer save the performance artist from commodification. The ‘unmarked’ body of the young ascetic artist from the 1970s becomes the overly and deliberately theatricalized authorial persona, walking along a canal in Amsterdam wearing large, dark sunglasses, the star of her own biopic. In the scene of her departure from ‘unmarked’ body to authorial persona, Abramovi´c has much in common with the Romantic author (see Chapter 4). Three qualities typify this unlikely pairing: the performance of self in both art and everyday life, the biographical legend and Romantic irony. Notably, Romantic irony might be considered as a redeeming quality of the Romantic author (or any author for that matter), simply because it implies that the author does not take herself too seriously. In waving goodbye to her driven, haunting, compelling, but often humourless early work, the artist’s performance becomes an act of Romantic irony. As far as biographical legends go, they are shaped both through the artists performances of self in art and in everyday life and through the eye of the beholder. The Biography, the self-reflective project created with Charles Atlas in 1993, marks the starting point of Abramovi´c’s curation of the artist as a public persona. In it, following her separation from Ulay, Abramovi´c recounts her life and work from birth until the performance piece in Berlin in 1993. It is there that she crosses the line from

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performance art into theatre of self and from the artist as ‘unmarked’ body to the artist as biographical legend. The previously-mentioned film and the two theatrical performances all return to The Biography in their various references, recreations and adaptations of the artist’s biographical narrative, making it an ongoing project that infiltrates Abramovi´c’s work and its reception. Personal stories, interviews of her parents, the form of auto-ethnography, the artist’s public appearances, and her memoir, Walking Through Walls (2016)—are all instances of artistic self-curation. Not to mention the discourse—several biographies, numerous academic studies, doctoral dissertations, criticism, journalistic and media narratives—through which the public persona of the artist continues to be curated. As we have seen with the Romantic author, it does not come as a surprise that the prevailing reception of her later work is through the lens of the biographical legend that she has become. Abramovi´c, however, appears to be well aware of the innate theatricality of the biographical legend. Her performances of self in art and life have often become intertwined with folktales, jokes, fiction, unreliable memories and self-parody. Biography, after all, in one form or another, can only be told in a mode of re-performance whereby what is absent, left out or forgotten in one’s actual life needs to be substituted with the fictional.

The Other Artist Is Present: Re-performance as Parody In her native Belgrade, Abramovi´c’s retrospective, The Cleaner, turned into a homecoming for a prodigal artist.2 The event electrified the cultural public sphere and politicized the exhibition in a very context-specific way: it became entangled in the highly polarized political climate in Serbia where lines had been drawn between factions of those who were loyal to the current populist right-leaning government and those who fiercely supported its opposition. Given that Abramovi´c had been personally invited to Belgrade by the Serbian Premier, Ana Brnabi´c, and The Cleaner was being sponsored by the government, some saw the event as the instrumentalization of culture by politics. Others complained that the retrospective was too costly and that the money could have instead been spent to support a number of local emerging or established artists. Those art critics and historians who had followed Abramovi´c’s career from her student days in Belgrade, praised her early works but condemned her

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departure into theatricality and spectacle. Others defended the retrospective, seeing it as a seminal cultural event even if it had been curated by the despicable regime in power. The wider public joined in the debate through social media—for some, the exhibit was an exhilarating cultural experience, for others, it was all a gimmick and the artist nothing but a fraud. Debates ensued about performance art and the artist in a broad range of media. For oppositional political publics, the cultural event was seen as a political ploy and evidence of government officials’ ignorance and recklessness. A highly esteemed political caricaturist, Corex, drew a caricature of Abramovi´c parodying her video artwork, Confessions, where she is filmed staring at a donkey. In the caricature, the donkey wears a Serbian national cap. The caricature is a play on both her video art and on the local saying ‘to make someone a donkey’ meaning ‘to take someone for a ride’. Drawing the donkey with a Serbian cap, the caricaturist underscored the idea that both Abramovi´c and the government were treating the Serbian public as fools. Although Abramovi´c was interviewed and made several public appearances with packed houses for talks, workshops and master classes, she rarely commented on these attacks. She did, however, play along with the satire. With a local satirist and TV personality, Zoran Kesi´c, she recorded a TV spoof of her retrospective, called Dinner with Marina Abramovi´c. Abramovi´c and Kesi´c were seated at opposites ends of a long table, somewhat resembling the constellation of The Night Sea Crossing. Only this time, the table was set for a fancy dinner and both guests were elegantly dressed in black. Kesi´c played a naïve spectator pretending to try to understand what exactly performance art is. He attempted to become a performance artist by burning his hand with a lighter and wondered if he bought one of the artist’s performance pieces if he would be able to have Abramovi´c occasionally perform at his home. The dishes that were served alluded to Abramovi´c’s performances. The soup had her hair in it, for instance, and was served while the waiter repeated: ‘Art must be beautiful, the artist must be beautiful’. The main course consisted of cow bones, a reference to her piece, Balkan Baroque, and came complete with brushes to scrub them. The dinner ended with Kesi´c being handed a hefty bill while the celebrity artist sat back refusing to chip in. Abramovi´c played the persona of the esteemed artist in dead pan and was fully engaged in self-parody. This gesture of parody and Romantic irony responded to the ‘buzz’ that was taking place in the cultural public sphere, allowing her

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supporters to laugh along and suggesting that her critics relax and take it all a bit less seriously. Abramovi´c’s piece The House with the Ocean View (2002, New York), where she lived in the gallery space for nine days on water only, provides an even more interesting case of interperformativity, re-performance and parody. Abramovi´c inhabited an elevated space of the gallery, partitioned into small rooms with no doors, such that her simple, everyday actions were constantly on display. The only way for her to leave the space was via a ladder made of knives with the blades turned upwards. The performance was inspired by, and in dialogue with, Chris Burden’s work (1975, New York) where earlier he, too, had confined himself in a closed space and lived solely on water for 21 days. One of the most surprising instances of the interperformativity of Abramovi´c’s work was an episode in the hit TV series, Sex and the City, that was inspired by The House with the Ocean View. In it, an exact replica of the House with the Ocean View, complete with an actress who physically resembled Marina Abramovi´c, provided the set for a romantic encounter between the heroine, Carrie Bradshaw and a handsome Russian artist, played by none other than Mikhail Baryshnikov. In the contrast between Abramovi´c’s adaption of White Light White Heat and Sex and the City’ s performative citation of Abramovi´c, her definition of performance art—as reality against the backdrop of theatrical artifice comes full circle. Her point that in performance art, unlike theatre, the ‘knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotion is real’ is certainly applicable here. In Sex and the City’s reiteration of The House with the Ocean View nobody can get hurt—everything is fake from the blades of the knives to the broken hearts of the protagonists. The reference to The House with the Ocean View in Sex and the City is an example of the commodification of Abramovi´c but it is also a parody of spectatorship and the gaze, making, for what it’s worth, a thought-provoking dialectics between art, the artist and popular culture. During the Artist Is Present event, Iranian-born Canadian resident, Amir Baradaran, staged a performance intervention entitled The Other Artist is Present. It was comprised of four parts: Bodies & Wedding, Behind the Canvas, Other Trance, and Reflections. During this performance-within-a -performance, the ‘Other Artist’ danced for Abramovi´c, uttered a few words of worship, asked her to marry him and made her laugh. Each part included strong cultural references that provoked, challenged and entertained Abramovi´c, museum visitors and cameras. Replicating her manner of dress, Baradaran approached

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Abramovi´c in the first scene and proposed marriage ‘to your body and to your body of work’, and said: ‘I love you, Marina’. In the second act, he appeared with a series of three canvases hiding his face to reveal messages, such as ‘In/Out’—an allusion to borders—and ‘non-resident alien’. Then he took out an inkpad and fingerprinted himself imitating a security checkpoint detainee. In the third act, entitled Other Trance, Baradaran spoke in Arabic, rocking and swaying in deep contrast to Abramovi´c’s stillness. This parodic intervention brought different performance ontologies to the table and different political dimensions—the Other Artist was both a cultural Other and an immigrant Other. The presence of the Artist was defamiliarized through the presence/absence duality of the Other. Parody, in its innate intertextuality (interperformativity) of the Other Artist, echoes the dialectics of presence and absence, not as the inevitability of disappearance but rather by making the disappearance difficult.

Two Balkan Baroques There are two works entitled Balkan Baroque and both use elements of biographical legend—one won the Golden Lion for the Best Artist at the Venice Biennale in 1997 where Abramovi´c represented the Yugoslav Pavilion. The other one is the aforementioned film directed by Coulibeuf with the artist in the main role—as herself. The film opens with Abramovi´c reciting words in her native Serbian—everyday words, swear words, words associated with war and violence, funny words. She also narrates the film in her somewhat halting and heavily-accented English. Similar to the stage performance of The Biography, she takes the viewer on a linear journey of her life from her birth to the point of making the film. Biographical fragments are at times descriptive, at other times associative and are interspersed with quasi-ethnographic stories, beliefs and legends. The narration is remixed with citations from her seminal performances. Most of them are performed by the artist herself—the blood is real the pain is real. Even though filmed close-ups of the artist carving the star on her belly or poking her eye with a thin needle are unnerving to watch, there is also a strong sense of stylization. The performance citations are mixed with staged sequences—the artist in a partisan uniform with a red star on her cap, stands on a bridge looking decisively towards the horizon; the artist wearing a short dress and dark glasses being driven around; the artist dancing. These staged sequences are parodic enhanced through

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contrapuntal montage, juxtaposing the theatricality of the enacted script and the performativity of pain and blood in the re-performed sequences. In the final part of the film, immediately after Abramovi´c announces that she has won the Golden Lion in Venice for her Balkan Baroque piece, the artist emerges as a cabaret dancer. Looking seductively into the camera, she performs a semi-striptease that could be read as an ironic commentary on her own stardom. Abramovi´c performed the other Balkan Baroque piece that won the Golden Lion in 1997 a couple of years after the war in Bosnia had ended. In this durational performance, she sat in the centre of the gallery relentlessly washing 1.5000 cow bones. On the wall, a triptych was projected—interview footage of her mother and father on each side, Abramovi´c in the middle, first dressed as a doctor telling a story about a rat catcher, then as tavern entertainer, dancing to the strains of czárdás, a variety of Hungarian folk music. Once again, biographical material is used framing the tale of the rat catcher and the czárdás-accompanied dance. In talking about Balkan Baroque, Abramovi´c recalls (on the MOMA website) how over the course of the performance in the warm Venice air, an unbearable noxious smell began to ooze from the performance space as the bones began to rot and worms started crawling out of the bones. The metaphor of death and destruction and the ritual of mourning literally became a performance of stage life and death. Abramovi´c’s preoccupation with the death of the artist/author, set against the backdrop of the civil war in the Balkans, acquired collective and political dimensions; it became a different kind of death—the death of mass graves performed onto the body of the artist. The tableau associatively links with a scene from her work, Balkan Erotic Epic, where Abramovi´c played with the familiar duality of Eros and Thanatos through the projection of mostly comic skits on the gallery’s walls. One piece stood out though; barechested and with her long black hair covering her face, Abramovi´c held a skull in her hands. At first, she slowly whacks the skull on her stomach. Then, increasing the tempo, she frenetically beats herself with it. In the disturbing repetition of this sequence, there is a kind of anguish that goes beyond the individual and the existential—reading instead rather like the embodiment of a collective trauma. The relationship between biographical legend and the broader context of the artist’s home country and its demise becomes performed as Freud’s notion of the uncanny, where the familiar is made strange through something un-homely being revealed underneath the comfort of familiarity.

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The emergence of this uncanny strangeness is disturbing as it creeps out and takes over the space like the worms crawling out of the cow bones. Homi Bhabha expands on Freud’s concept explaining how the uncanny unsettles the boundaries between private and public, and, we might add, between the artist’s personal history and collective history. He writes: ‘The unhomely moment relates the traumatic ambivalence of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (Bhabha 1994, p. 11). Here the uncanny resurfaces through the performing body at times echoing the form of tragedy, relying on the performativity of actual blood and pain symbolized by the rotting animal bones; at other times, through parody and irony, playfully emerging in a czárdás dance (Balkan Baroque the performance) or a burlesque striptease act (Balkan Baroque the film). Both forms, often intertwined, have at times proven equally disturbing.

Ars Moriendi The death of the artist features in a number of Abramovi´c’s works from her near-death performances where she tested the limits of endurance, to more conceptual and theatrical reflections on the theme. In the Lips of Thomas (1975), as we have seen, she nearly bled to death. In her Dragon Head video series (1990–1994), she sits motionless while a snake slithers all over her body. In one of the videos, the contractions of the snake’s muscles are visible as it encircles the artist’s neck and the imminent danger the artist is in becomes obvious. In one of her earliest works, Rhythm 0 (1974), 72 objects, including a rose, a knife, some feathers, a pair of scissors, a pistol, and a bullet were placed on the table, and the artist declared that for the duration of the performance she, too, was an object. She issued a disclaimer that the visitors could do to her whatever they wanted; they would be exonerated of any responsibility, regardless of what happened to her in the performance. In the first hours, nothing much happened in Naples’s Studio Morra gallery where the performance took place. Visitors seemed unsure of how to respond to the artist’s invitation to cross the spectator/performer boundary. When they eventually did, the artist truly became an object. The actions of the visitors/participants grew increasingly violent: they cut her clothes and made cuts on her neck, carried her, put her on a table, spread her legs and put objects between her legs. The performance culminated when one of the visitors took the gun and put the bullet in.

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He then held her at gunpoint, while she remained motionless the entire time. The artist and the visitor were locked in this dramatic moment, until another participant grabbed the gun and threw it away. The artist’s suspension of will was, however, more than turning a solo performance into a participatory work, it was granting the author’s license to random visitors. In the light of the author’s self-objectification on which the performance was premised, this could be viewed as a mode of authorial death. As a conceptual gesture, it is not dissimilar to Barthes’s birth of the Reader—there, too, the audience/participant becomes the focal force that defines the work (even making life and death decisions). The question of who this audience/reader/participant is, as the critiques of Barthes’s concept mentioned earlier, emerges here too. The artist’s self-imposed objectification and the fact that the authoring license had been handed to the visitors set the performance outside the boundaries of the real as a socially-constructed and regulated reality—that is, outside moral boundaries. As soon as the performance ended and the artist started to move, the audience-performer boundary was restored. People who minutes ago had been engaged in a collective torturing of the artist, returned to being courteous gallery visitors. Paradoxically, visitors at the first performance of the Lips of Thomas proved their humanity by intervening to save the artist but ruined the performance. The participants in the Naples gallery, on the other hand, effectively made, the performance a success by displaying a somewhat shocking cruelty. In retrospect, both situations read like social experiments within which the question of who the recipient/participant is becomes very complicated. In the first instance, the visitors were outside the performance space when their act of voyeurism became unbearable to them; in the second case, they were participants within the parameters of the performance space/time, not accountable to any rules outside these parameters. To some extent, this might explain why they performed in such contrasting ways. To the question of who the recipients/participants were in the latter performance, there is a simple direct answer: they were all men. The male visitors were confronted by a young, female performer, who offered herself as an object without will, except the will to persevere in that state for the length of the performance, no matter what. On the one hand, the performer offered what is a norm of the patriarchal matrix—objectification and even self-objectification of the female body, premised on a denial of will and agency. On the other hand, her perseverance was evidence of an iron will, a force, which the patriarchal

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matrix has been conditioned to squelch. Hence, the dynamics within the performance were not far removed from those of the patriarchal social matrix. Except, that in the performance, the artist has confronted her male audience with a paradox of the objectified female body emanating an iron will. In that sense, in both performances, Lips of Thomas and Rhythm 0, the recipients reacted to something that was unbearable to them—in the first performance to being mere onlookers to suffering; in the second, to being subjected to a paradoxical performance of a self-objectified female body exhibiting an incredible force of will which within the patriarchal matrix creates unbearable frustration. The question is, would the recipient/participant have been/acted in the same way had the self-objectified body been differently marked? In the language of Barthes’s conceptual paradigm, we repeatedly hit the same rhetorical question in different variations: within the conceptual paradigm of the death of the author, does the death of a female artist birth the same Reader (spectator/participant) as the death of a male one? One thing emerges clearly from these examples, how the author/ artist dies (and I am speaking conceptually here) is to a great degree also the responsibility of the Reader (spectator/participant). Another paradox surfaces with the near-death performances of Abramovi´c—the closer the artist is to death, the stronger the will power to persevere emerges. The performances are rather like death-defying acts that form an ars moriendi. Conversely, the more theatrical and artificial forms of engaging with the death of the artist (both physical and conceptual), the more they seem to perform the dialectics of presence and absence. The Biography, as well as numerous other variations of performing and reconstituting the artist’s subjectivity by recounting her life events, becomes a form of memory theatre. Abramovi´c’s retrospective, The Cleaner, provides a case in point. If The Cleaner is an act of authoring the cleaning of the house of memory and externalizing the past, it is also a form of departure. Re-performances in their inherent interplay of presence and absence are premised on a post festum condition; they can happen only after the event has already taken place and has been reconstituted from memory. They are, effectively, a form of life after death. Abramovi´c’s most explicitly theatrical performance of the death of the artist is The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi´c (2011, Manchester International Festival). It was a spectacular, parodic and surreal rehearsal of the artist’s own departure and funeral, directed by Robert

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Wilson. In this music-theatre piece, the artist performers herself. Musician Anthony (from the Anthony and the Johnsons ), dressed in black velvet and subtly referencing Abramovi´c’s style and persona, delivers her eulogy. Willem Dafoe—emerging as a somewhat menacing Joker-like figure in white make-up with red hair and lipstick—sings about the artist’s pain and provides narrative commentary throughout the show. Images and props referencing her performances are featured, merging into a different poetics, that of Wilson’s theatre of images. A brief clip from Abramovi´c’s Nude With the Skeleton, another meditation on death, is projected on the screen above. The performance opens with the striking image of the death of the artist: three coffins are elevated on the stage in each one thee lies a Marina Abramovi´c dressed in black, wearing white make-up. One of them is the artist herself, the other two, her doubles. The artist’s biography is performed through narrative passages with the actors miming formative episodes from her life through the use of images, songs, parody and theatricality. While there are moments in the show when Abramovi´c actively performs herself and other figures, for the most part she is a silent observer of her life rather than being part of the action. As if, in this re-performance of the artist’s biography, she has already handed over the story of her life to surrogate performers. The artist observing her life unfolding in a series of tableaux-vivants is reminiscent of the work of Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, who in the last decade of his life, made a famous trilogy entitled Theatre of Death. In the instalment, Let the Artist Die, Kantor imagines his own death deploying a group of doubles and surrogate figures to represent different stages of his life: Kantor-remembered (I-when I was Six); Kantor-himself, in the present time of the performance, who sits at the side of the room (I-the Real Me); Kantor-imagined, just before his moment of death (I-Dying); and I-Dying’s Author (who shows up as the Doppelganger of I-Dying), who describes, through him, his own death. Like Abramovi´c—Kantor is also present on stage witnessing and at times re-creating the performance of his life. The performance of death and the rehearsal for the artist’s actual death, as in some of Abramovi´c’s work, combines the historical, literary, ideological as well as personal memory. Milija Gluhovi´c finds in Kantor’s artistic procedure of summoning childhood memories principles that strongly resemble ancient mnemonic techniques, where the memory artist remembers or imagines a space like a house or a theatre: ‘Within this space he distributed at regular intervals images that would serve as

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prompts to memory. Later, when the user wished to remember something, he would, in an act of literal recollection, mentality retrieve the images in any order he desired’ (Gluhovic 2013, p. 110). Both Kantor and Abramovi´c are memory artists. They operate in different houses of memory but along similar principles of theatricality. In the Life and Death of Marina Abramovi´c, the mnemonic device—the surreal, dreamlike vision of a house of memory is at times, both a funhouse and a house of horrors. In both, ars moriendi and ars memoria are never far apart. In her own arts moriendi/ arsmemoria mechanisms, the artist has structured a scenario of an overtly theatrical death, which she has been rehearsing in various forms. James Westcott’s biography of Abramovi´c When Marina Abramovi´c Dies begins by quoting her funeral scenario, which had a lavish rehearsal in Wilson’s production: In case of my death I would like to have this following memorial ceremony: Three coffins. The first coffin with my real body. The second coffin with an imitation body. The third coffin with an imitation body. I would like to appoint that three persons would take care of the distribution of the three coffins in three different places of the world. (America, Europa, Asia). […] The ceremony should be a celebration of life and death combined. After the ceremony there will be a feast with a large cake made out of marzipan in the shape and looks of my body. I want the cake to be distributed between the present people. (Westcott 2010, p. xii)

This is a very theatrical death and there is a rehearsal performance to prove it. An artist who has so often come near physical death in her quest for the real and the authentic in performance has chosen a very theatrical death, so much so that even the dead body will have its surrogate doubles to be placed in two additional coffins, and will re-appear as parody in the form of a funeral cake shaped in the image of the artist’s body. The death of the artist as actual death will immediately be surrogated in the theatrical death of her doubles. And it will emerge as parody in the ceremony of the audience devouring the artist in her final incarnation as a marzipan cake. This should not be so surprising though, as an artist who often came close to the actual death, Abramovi´c knows all too well that real death does not work on stage, not even in the performance space where

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nearly everything else is real including the knife, the blood and the pain. Even when she was held at gunpoint in Rhythm 0, the gun did not fire, it was thrown away, despite all the violence inflicted previously on the artist, in ontological panic as performance (whether on stage or within the performer’s own charismatic space) cannot handle real physical death. The dramaturgy of the real gun in performance art is different from Chekhov’s gun in theatre; the former should not be fired in the final act.3 Even the death of the performance artist can only be performed conceptually, that is, as a stage death.

Notes 1. In her essay, ‘The Artist Is Present ’, Jones recounts a different experience of siting with the artist. Instead of experiencing immediate presence at the event, she was left feeling detached and self-conscious because of all the other visitors looking at them. 2. For more on Abramovi´c artistic beginnings in Belgrade, see Branisav Jakovljevi´c, Alienation Effects: Performance and Self -Management in Yugoslavia 1945–1991. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 3. Chris Burdon’s piece Shoot (1971) is a notable exception but even then it was only the artist’s arm that was wounded.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Fischer-Lichte, Erica. 2005. Theatre, Sacrifice, Ritual. London: Routledge. Gluhovi´c, Milija. 2013. Performing European Memories. London: Palgrave. Honzl, Jindˇrich. 1976. Dynamics of Sign in the Theater. In: Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik, 75– 94. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jones, Amelia. 2011. “The Artist Is Present”: Artistic Re-enactments and the Impossibility of Presence. TDR 55 (1): 16–45. Jones, Amelia, and Adrian Heathfield. 2012. Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art History. Bristol: Intellect. O’Hagan, Sean. 2010. Interview: Marina Abramovi´c. The Guardian, October 3. Available https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/interv iew-marina-abramovic-performance-artist. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press. Westcott, James. 2010. When Marina Abramovi´c Dies: A Biography. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

CHAPTER 7

The Artist Is (Meaningfully) Absent

Roger Babb, a lecturer at Princeton University, unearthed two seemingly identical photos and sent them to The Drama Review (TDR) for publication. They are the 1899 photos of Anton Chekhov reading The Seagull at the Moscow Art Theatre. The two photos, placed underneath one another in the 1996 issue of TDR, appear as a game of spot-thedifference. At first glance, the two photos are identical—in the middle, Chekhov is reading, surrounded by a group of over a dozen people. Stanislavsky sits on Chekhov’s right, Nemirovich-Dancheko on his far right. In both photos, the composition, body postures and facial expressions of those featured are identical. As the eye moves first from Chekhov in the centre to the right and then to the far left, there it is—the difference spotted. In the first photo there is an additional figure—a man leaning back in his chair, arms folded, a thoughtful expression on his face. In the second photo, the space where the figure of the man in the chair was seated is empty. The figure in question is the iconic director of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold. His erasure from the photo has been made seamless—bits of the carpet and the long black skirt of the woman next to him, once obscured by Meyerhold’s presence, have been added to fill the void. The retouching was masterful, everything neatly covered with all traces of Meyerhold gone. The erasure from the photo was such that it did not disturb the balance in the constellation of the figures present at Chekhov’s reading. If it were not for the other © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_7

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photo, the photo without Meyerhold would appear to be perfectly viable evidence documenting an event in the life of the Moscow Art Theatre. The original, with Meyerhold present, changed the story this tableau seemed to be telling—it was no longer a testament to the talent and creativity of the Moscow Art Theatre, but became evidence of a violent act. Babb found the photos in two different publications that came out in 1991. The first photo, where Meyerhold is present, appeared in Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese’s edition of A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of The Performer (Routledge); the second one, in which Meyerhold has been erased, illustrates a chapter in the edition of the Concise History of the Theatre by Phyllis Hartnoll (Themes and Hudson). These two seemingly identical photos when placed together open a range of questions concerning the politics of presence and absence of the author/artist. Some of these questions go beyond the scope of this book, but are still worth asking, even if only rhetorically: How does the idea of a particular period of theatre and performance history differ depending which of these two pictures we come across? And how, by looking at both of them in juxtaposition, do different aspects of the history of Russian theatrical modernism and the avant-garde become foregrounded? How do different archives curate the death of the author? Other questions that the unearthing of these two photos provoke are directly relevant for our quest to understand the theatricality and performativity of authorial death: How does the discrepancy between these photos bear witness to the trauma of erasure differently from other wellknown accounts of persecutions in Stalinist Russia? How do the two photos shift the political radicalism of Barthes’s notion of the death of the author towards a different kind of political edge? Finally, in regard to the reader (viewer) on whom Barthes places the spotlight—what is her role in engaging with the concept of the death of the author, in cases when this disappearance hides a violent crime? How does the absence of the author speak? In the space between these two photos, a destiny of the artist (author), both glorious and horrific, unfolds. Meyerhold’s is indeed a well-known story of authorial presence, stardom, absence and violent death. Meyerhold, who broke off with Stanislavsky’s realism in search of more experimental theatrical forms, drew from both the fairground booth and Japanese Noh theatre, experimented with grotesque, conventionality and stylization on stage. He collaborated with artists Liubov Popova and Kazimir Malevich, composer Igor Stravinsky, and introduced

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constructivism to theatre—as a new progressive aesthetic fitting for the emerging new world post-1917 Revolution. And yet, being the innovator of Russian modernist theatre, one of the key figures of the historical avant-garde, as well as the star theatre director of the Revolution, was still not enough to protect Meyerhold from what was to come. When Andrei Zhdanov—Stalin’s main authority on culture—imposed the cultural politics of Socialist Realism on Russian literature, theatre, art and music, leading writers, directors, composers and visual artists became vulnerable to political attack. Meyerhold’s star, too, was slowly fading into political disgrace. In 1936, the Party’s campaign against ‘formalism’ in art—including all the various experimentations that turned Meyerhold into the leading figure of Russian and Soviet theatre—became more ferocious. Numerous artists denounced aesthetic experimentations and claimed to have embraced Socialist Realism. Meyerhold gave a speech in Leningrad entitled ‘Meyerhold against Meyerholditis’1 where instead of repenting for his avant-garde sins, he defended the avant-garde composer Dmitri Shostakovich in the face of the attacks levelled against him in Pravda, and affirmed the right of all artists to creative freedom and experimentation. A few days after the speech, when he was himself viciously attacked in Pravda, Meyerhold’s reply, a bold critique of Socialist Realism, sealed his fate. In January 1938, Meyerhold’s theatre company gave its final performance, The Lady of the Camellias, with Meyerhold’s wife, celebrated actress, Zinaida Reich, in the title role. Among Meyerhold’s friends who offered support were poet, Boris Pasternak, film director, Sergei Eisenstein (who suffered similar political disgrace after his movie Bezhin Meadow was banned), and Meyerhold’s artistic rival, Konstantin Stanislavsky, who offered him a job at the Opera Theatre. For a short time, Meyerhold was partially rehabilitated and allowed to work again. Then, in 1939, he gave a speech at the Writers’ Union congress where he again openly criticized iron-handed cultural policies. In his book, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre, Edward Braun describes the content of this seemingly politically-neutral address, which turned out to be Meyerhold’s point of no return: Citing the inspiring example of Dovzheko’s latest film Shchors, he called for a new popular heroic theatre that would burst the bounds of the ‘boxstage’ and free actors from the drudgery of ‘rummaging around in narrow, everyday subject-matter.’ (Braun 1979, p. 294)2

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Meyerhold believed that his political and artistic prospects had been recuperated and that he would soon choose between a position at Stanislavsky’s Opera Theatre in Moscow and one at Pushkin Theatre in Leningrad. Instead, his last performance, one in which the director unwittingly collaborated, was his own show-trial. Meyerhold was arrested in June of 1939; it is believed that the order for his arrest came directly from Stalin. Allegedly, an image, a photo, was at the root of Meyerhold’s downfall. It was the image in Liubov Popova’s constructivist set design for the show, Earth in Turmoil (1923), directed by Meyerhold and dedicated to Trotsky and the Red Army. Popova’s artwork that formed the background of the set, used collage techniques to combine objects, images and photographs associated with the turmoil and promise of the Revolution. One of the photographs featured in the set design was of Leon Trotsky. Once the pillar of the Soviet Revolution, Trotsky soon became Stalin’s great opponent. Hence in 1935, he was officially proclaimed the enemy of the people and of the communist party, his texts were banned and entire chapters of his writing ripped out of books. Even though Meyerhold’s show opened more than a decade before Trotsky was officially pronounced persona non grata in Stalinist Russia and was still a high functionary of the state, having just begun to voice his opposition to Stalin, this performance featuring Trotsky’s photo as a detail of the set design became evidence of the director’s Trotskyism and anti-state activities. After a long ordeal involving psychological pressure, physical torture and numerous performative acts where Meyerhold had to ‘repent’ for crimes he did not commit by signing fabricated confessions, the leading director of the Russian avant-garde and the former star of the Soviet Revolutionary theatre was sentenced to death. The final indictment stated, ‘In 1930 Meyerhold was the head of the anti-Soviet Trotskyite group ‘Left Front,’ which coordinated all anti-Soviet elements in the field of the arts’ (Braun 1979, p. 303). Among the ‘anti-Soviet elements’ were also writers Ilja Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak and Yury Olesha. In the fall of 1940, in a totalitarian theatricalization of politics, Meyerhold was executed. Soon after Meyerhold’s arrest, his wife Zinaida Reich was found stabbed to death in their flat; her assassins were never caught. The difference between the two photos, the presence of the artist in the one, and his absence, in the other, indeed speaks volumes. The question it brings forward is neither who, nor what is an author (artist), but

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rather where is she/he? What are the circumstances of his/her disappearance? These questions, as we have seen in Meyerhold’s story, speak about the death of the author in a different key from the interrogations put forward by French Structuralism. They call attention to the causality of authorial presence and absence, far more sinister than the joyous birth of the Reader, which Barthes had announced so iconoclastically—namely, censorship, violence and erasure from history. Stalin’s strategies of erasure in eliminating political opponents are well known. David King’s pictorial collection, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalinist Russia (1997), is a testament of ‘visual violence’ (King 1997, p. 10). Following arrests, the weapons of social eradication that were used to make the oncefamous vanish from political and cultural history were show trials and punishments, airbrush and scalpel. Pictures of those who no longer took place in the historical narrative of the state, but that could not be fully erased were banished to hidden corners of archives together with the books of other disgraced authors. Even school children were ‘actively engaged by their teachers in the ‘creative’ removal of the denounced from their textbooks’ (10). King’s collection offers a fascinating visual account, featuring photo after photo where a person has been made to disappear from the historical documents—sometimes masterfully retouched, other times just violently scratched out or ink-smudged into disappearance. In other instances, botched erasures would leave small traces of the absented creeping through the eerie palimpsest. Meyerhold was completely erased from Russian and Soviet history until Nikita Khrushchev’s somewhat less totalitarian rule in the late 1950s and even then, only after Stalin’s death. The original copies of the retouched photos slowly began to see the light of day as evidence of an unresolved crime. Hence, the question, how does absence speak, perhaps needs to be rephrased as: under what condition is absence made visible and allowed to speak? What is the role of the reader/viewer/listener in performing the violent dialectics of authorial presence and absence? In what follows, I will look at some iconic examples of the censorship and attempted erasure of the author/artist in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I will address how the dialectics of presence and absence speak not only through oppression, but also through acts of radical citizenship and personal courage. Two main contexts will be considered: (1) state oppression, as previously outlined in Meyerhold’s case. This time, two contemporary Chinese dissidents, author and activist Liu Xiaobo and global star of politically-engaged art,

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Ai Weiwei, will be central to my discussion; and (2) religious fundamentalism, where the case of Salman Rushdie certainly emerges as the most iconic example of the (near) death of the author in our times. This latter case study will foreground the other side of the equation of the death of the author—the role of the Reader.

Meaningful Absence and Political Courage In 2010, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Chinese writer, poet and political activist, Liu Xiaobo. The laureate first caught the eye of the West when he took part in the student protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 and was sentenced to two years in prison. Later, he served a threeyear sentence in a labour camp for criticizing the country’s one-party system. At the time of the Nobel Prize ceremony, Xiaobo was serving an eleven-year jail sentence for demanding an end to one-party rule in China and for co-authoring Charter 08. The 2008 declaration, inspired by Charter 77, published by Czechoslovakian dissidents in 1977, advocated a gradual shifting of China’s legal and political system towards democracy. At the award ceremony, an empty chair represented the laureate. The empty chair has been a continuous feature at meetings and events of PEN International (Liu himself was president of Independent Chinese PEN) to symbolically foreground the absence of authors and activists who have been censored, silenced and persecuted. The empty chair is, however, not conjuring or surrogating (to use Joseph Roach’s term) the absented author(s), but rather making the violence of their absence palpable. The empty chair and the protests in Oslo, using projections of Liu’s face on the city’s buildings as paradoxical performative gestures, manifested the absurdity and the violence of Liu’s position. They embodied what I will call here a meaningful absence. Russian cultural theorist, Yuri Lotman, coined the term minus device to describe the way an expected, but excluded element, resurfaces as a meaningful absence—making the minus device ‘a wholly real, and measurable quantity’ (Lotman 1977, p. 51) in the meaning-making process. While Lotman’s minus device was formulated in relation to dramatic and literary structures, the aim here is to renegotiate this notion in the context of socio-political performances of censorship and erasure from history. I will argue that instances of censorship and attempts at erasure from history operate as social scenarios akin to Lotman’s minus devices , making the

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absence of those deliberately silenced or left out of the cultural narrative, more palpable. The empty chair and the projections of Liu’s image emerge as performances of minus device precisely by highlighting the divergence from the usual conventions of the well-known scenario of the award ceremony. The formal divergence from the scenario, however, reveals a much more serious violation—that of the author’s freedom and human rights. Even though the author in this case had no other choice but to remain silent, the attempt of his erasure from the Chinese cultural and political landscape was met by a strong sense of the author’s meaningful absence both internationally and in his home country. Following the award of the Nobel Peace Prize, oppositional voices in China saw it as a symbolic collective victory of all the citizens who shared Liu’s views. Such instances of censorship and erasure not only make the absence of the artist visible and politically meaningful, but also shape the absented artist against the backdrop of censorship into the figure of radical citizenship. As it is variously embodied through the interplay between presence and absence of the dissident author, the relationship between censorship and radical or dissident citizenship becomes established. The notion of radical citizenship is understood here along the lines of Engin Isin and Patricia Wood’s work in Citizenship and Identity as ‘maintaining the right to have rights, the ability to make promises and commitments’ (Isin and Wood 1999, p. 161), but also encompassing Holloway Sparks’s definition of dissident citizenship: […] as a public contestation of prevailing arrangements of power by marginalised citizens through oppositional, democratic, noninstitutionalized practices that augment or replace institutional channels of democratic opposition when those channels are inadequate or unavailable. (Sparks 1997, p. 83)

Looking at the notion of radical citizenship in the context of political censorship and its effect on dissident authors, some negotiation of the term itself might be needed. To begin with, in some contexts radical citizenship is not yet about ‘maintaining’, but rather about still acquiring ‘the rights to have rights’. Performance, subversion and personal courage seem particularly relevant in exploring how dissident acts emerge under censorship. In her work on citizenship and women in the French Revolution, Joan B. Landes (1988) distinguishes between the discourse and performance of citizenship as something that is both scripted by discourse and

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yet enacted (and sometimes re-scripted) by historically situated agents. Within the framework of political censorship, voices and acts of dissent shape alternative publics, or subaltern counterpublics (as Nancy Fraser calls them) to formulate ‘oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (Fraser 1992, p. 123), with an emancipatory potential. But they also often enter into an openly confrontational relationship within systems where the public sphere is hegemonic and controlled. In such cases, acts of dissent become political subversions, where confrontation, rather than assertion of plurality, is dominant. Even if the modes of dissent are peaceful and artistic in nature, rather than militant, their radicality is as much in the form of the act as it is in the content’s potential to trigger repressive and even violent repercussions. This brings us to the third element of radical citizenship—political courage. Hannah Arendt has written that ‘courage and even boldness are already present in leaving one’s private hiding place, and showing who one is, in disclosing and exposing one’s self’ (Arendt 1958, p. 186). Political scientist Susan Bickford, turns to the classical thought of Aristotle and Plato, as well as to Arendt, to suggest that courage is a central component of participatory citizenship. She points out that ‘the quality essential for politics (beyond the shared capacity to start anew) is courage. Many examples remind us that physical courage is necessary to disclose one’s self in public’ (Bickford 1996, p. 68). Courage is not simply the absence of fear, but knowing what one should fear and acting anyway. Sparks also highlights the performative aspects of political courage as ‘simultaneously a principle that guides and enables action in the presence of fear, and a practice that is displayed, performed, and given life in action’ (Sparks 1997, p. 94). Meaningful absence, thus, as epitomized in the example of Xiaobo’s political destiny and also in the performativity of the empty chair at the Nobel ceremony, should be understood through these key aspects—subversion, courage and performance of radical dissident citizenship. In other words, a meaningful absence of the author is a manifestation and/or consequence of radical political citizenship in extremis. In her article, ‘Limits of Censorship’, Janelle Reinelt goes back to the term itself to explore various categories and ambiguities of censorship practices: A ‘censor’ was a Roman official who had two tasks: to count the population and to regulate the morals of the population. Thus, the notion of the census, of counting the citizens, belongs to this term’s Western origin, as

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well as to the notion of regulating citizens’ expressions. Membership in an identifiable group was established by the same agency that attempted to police it. A count of the citizens (shall they stand up and be counted?) is a calling-to-action (who is responsible?) on the part of the governing apparatus that may well have cause to calculate the numbers (shall we protect, discipline and punish, or ignore the numbers identified?). These formulations of the role of the ‘censor’ and the role of those to whom the act is carried out indicate some of the ambiguities inherent in this concept through centuries. (Reinelt 2007, p. 3)

To build on this ambiguity, I would like to think about how those individuals (or groups) who do not fit into the ‘regulations’ that the censor protects, have been symbolically included or excluded from the ‘census’? How are they counted—or are they counted at all? How are they included, if they are, and how are they ostracized through methods of disciplining or punishment? A census is basically a way of verifying a physical presence in the state. Censorship (and here I am of course focusing on the category of the political censorship of the author/artist) verifies or destabilizes the presence of a citizen as a political being, who acts outside or against the regulations, both symbolically and through physical forms (i.e. silencing, incarceration, and in more extreme, yet not infrequent cases, the elimination of the body or bodies that disrupt the system). Hence, political censorship is a game of presence and absence that emerges in various gazes and forms in different historical and geographical contexts—sometimes disguised and discreet, even self-imposed, other times visible, forceful, often spectacular, and potentially deadly (i.e. from book burning and the destruction of Expressionist art in Nazi Germany, to the show trials in Stalinist Russia, to the most recent public lashings of poets, artists and activist in Iran and Saudi Arabia, for instance). In every instance, however, political censorship involves the physical presence of a body—to be included or excluded. Body, voice and gestures play a crucial role in the performance of censorship and resistance. Of course, when we think of censorship and its repercussions, we usually think of bans, political pressurising, various forms of punishment and other bullying tactics of the state to silence the ‘offenders’. Talking about authors and artists in the Arab world, the poet Adonis points out: ‘I wonder why Arab prisons are not full of writers. I wonder why, because it means that Arab writers are not doing their jobs. They are not criticizing. They are not engaging with deep issues’ (Adonis in Guyer 2016). In other

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historical contexts as well (i.e. the former Eastern Bloc, for instance), censorship and the persecution of politically critical artists, activists, and other citizens, was almost seen as a measure of their cultural currency, especially from the Western point of view, where censorship often emerges in less demonstrative forms. I recall a conversation with a Canadian writer who told me how exciting it must have been to be an East European author behind the Iron Curtain, where art mattered politically so much and was taken so seriously in its capacity to challenge power that one could be prosecuted for writing a poem or staging a play. Even if the price to pay was high, she would willingly trade places with an East European author of that era. Both the poet Adonis and my Canadian writer, see in repressive practices of censorship and traumatic political experiences of artists and activists, the potential for authorial meaningful absence to assert a kind of subaltern counterpublic (Fraser)—for silenced voices to speak to power. In Tito’s Yugoslavia, even though there were instances of prosecuted artists, banned performances and books, another tactic was at work as well—subversive works, even though they were not endorsed, gradually became allowed. In 2018, on my visit to Belgrade (Serbia), I went to see a revival of the play Mreš´cenje Šarana (Spawning of the Carp) at the theatre Atelje 212 by Aleksandar Popovi´c, a prominent Serbian political playwright from the Tito era who was well-known for challenging the regime. Even though I had a vague memory of its earlier production in the 1980s, watching the revival, I was struck by how unsparingly critical it had been for its time, dealing with the traumatic historical moment of 1948, when Tito rejected Stalin’s politics, and when persecutions and repression of those suspected of still supporting the Soviet Union ensued. The author, Popovi´c, had first-hand experience of Goli Otok, the labour camp where those accused of the ideological crime of being pro-Stalinist were sent.3 Popovi´c ended up there for his critique of the communist regime. After he served his sentence, he gradually rose to prominence to become one of the leading political playwrights of the time. Even though the style of Mreš´cenje Šarana has dimensions of absurd realism and comedy, the critique was harsh and unambiguous—the society was depicted as lacking in any sense of moral grounding. The play first premiered 1984 in the provincial Serbian town of Pirot at the local National Theatre and had its Belgrade opening in Zvezdara Teatar a few months later, with a star-studded cast and under the direction

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of Dejan Mijaˇc—one of Serbia’s most respected theatre directors. When it first premiered in Belgrade, the play sparked debates but it was kept on the repertoire for a number of years and performed to full houses. At the National Theatre in Pirot, however, the theatre makers were put under pressure. After the opening night, local authorities deemed the play too subversive and requested that the show be stricken from the theatre’s repertoire. The National Theatre in Pirot refused and the case was taken to a judge who found no grounds on which to ban the play. As a result, the production remained part of the repertoire with the opening in the capital ensuing shortly thereafter. This is a clear example of political criticism subversive performance, and above all courage on the part of everyone involved from the playwright and the cast and crew of the National Theatre in Pirot, to the judge who refused to ban the performance. This might even be seen as an example of what Bickford calls ‘path building’—a coming together of citizens, where political courage is key in the effort to understanding each other (Bickford 1996, pp. 148–153). That politically subversive performance was allowed to go on in socialist Yugoslavia of the 1980s was not entirely surprising. As it happened, 1984, the year when Mreš´cenje Šarana first premiered, was also the year that Tito died. Unbeknownst to both the makers of the show and their would-be censors, his death announced the end of an era. There was a velvet glove approach to censorship in Tito’s Yugoslavia, especially from the 1970s onwards (not to say that there were no scapegoated authors targeted to demonstrate that the regime could be more heavy-handed if it so chose). The late 70s and the 80s saw even more openness to criticism in various spheres of art and culture, as well as a tolerance of experimentation and avant-garde performances. This was, after all, the golden decade of Yugoslav rock-’n-roll, which included some unsparingly critical and progressive voices. The government’s velvet glove approach was based on a keen understanding of the power of meaningful absence. Through a carefully cultivated strategy, a degree of permissiveness was deliberately sewn as a means to remove some of the subversive edge from the critically-minded artist. If we apply Lotman’s notion of minus device to this example, we could say that the regime was well aware of the radical potential of the artist/author’s meaningful absence and its capacity to foreground the political potential of dissident citizenship. Thus, to reluctantly permit subversive work and tolerate critical artists and authors was a way to calm their radicality—to allow critical presence to run its course rather than

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risk the potentially inflammatory consequences of meaningful absence and of the symbolic power with which the figure of a courageous, dissident artist might imbue the collective political imagination. In no way does this undermine the courage nor the ‘path building’ actions of those involved in various forms of performing radical citizenship by making theatre and art, but it does point to the ways in which individual and collective courage can become manipulated and controlled. In the case of Popovi´c, for example, the authorities understood early on that were they to send him to a penal colony, they risked inciting a meaningful absence that would be far more politically dangerous than his controlled (openly critical) presence in the public sphere. Agreeing to allow the performance of Popovi´c’s play to continue in the 1980s was part of the same logic. Meaningful absence is not in any acts it performs (as absences and erasures eliminate the possibility of action), but in the symbolic significance that often grows out of it and becomes part of the oppositional political mythology, which potentially can act as a strong force for mobilizing dissent. The question is how can political courage be equally strategic in standing up to both the censorship and oppression tactics (as it has done throughout history) and turn strategies of selective permissiveness to its own advantage?

Meaningful Absence and Excessive Presence Even though Xiaobo’s activism and courage were rewarded with the Nobel Prize, international recognition neither spared him a jail sentence nor his defacement into the matrix of meaningful absence. Still better known than the Nobel laureate, is Ai Weiwei—the global star of radical dissident citizenship from China. As an artist, Weiwei is best known for his co-design of the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing (2007), his Sunflower Seeds installation in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall (2010– 2011), his dispute with Lego over using their products in an artwork, and more recently, for his various responses to refugee crises—from his controversial recreation of the image of the Syrian toddler’s body washed ashore on a Greek beach to the critically acclaimed socially-engaged film, Human Flow (2017). A long list of monographs featuring Weiwei’s work, films, and journalistic reports document his artistic and political activities, interviews, as well as his own prolific output from his artworks to his daily tweets. Both Xiaobo and Weiwei as authorial/artistic figures have displayed personal courage in their acts of dissident citizenship but they

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have done so by different means. Xiaobo spoke powerfully through his own absence even when all the outlets for his voice to be actually heard were cut off. He has become a symbolic political presence of the kind that could only grow from the political violence of meaningful absence. This meaningful absence of the author resonates an empty space that is deadly, long before the author’s actual death. Weiwei speaks directly (through his Twitter account, interviews and other forms of media presence), makes art that openly criticizes power, his dissident citizenship does not manifest so much through meaningful absence (even though there were instances of his incarceration and disappearances), but through a kind of liveness (to borrow Auslander’s term) that whether direct or mediated speaks through an excessive presence of authorial subjectivity. This is not a symbolic presence that the violence of meaningful absence births, but an almost palpable presence—direct, embodied and performative. In her film, Never Sorry, journalist and film-maker Alison Klayman follows Weiwei’s art projects, activism and public clashes with the Chinese government during the years 2008–2011 when the artist was still based in Beijing. Weiwei is depicted as an uncompromising figure picking fights with the Chinese government and battling with censorship issues on various levels. He particularly enraged the authorities following the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan where over 5000 people (almost all school children) were killed due to the shoddy construction of school buildings. When the government underplayed the negligence issue and refused to release figures of the death toll, Weiwei responded by launching a project called Citizen Intervention that used the Internet to mobilize people in the process of gathering and sharing information about the tragedy. After a year of painstaking investigation, the names of the dead were collected and put on display in a simple and most poignant way—a wall was plastered with column after column of what appeared to be an endless list of names. His installation composed of 9000 school backpack in memory of the dead children, pointed a finger at the government’s responsibility for the deaths caused by what Weiwei described as ‘tofu constructions’ that quickly became death-traps. Here the artist performs radical acts of citizenship not entirely on his own, but through his ability to mobilize others whereby an individual act becomes a collective act of citizenship intervention. However, Weiwei remains the author of the project, the person with whom this act of dissident citizenship is primarily associated— both as its celebrity and its perpetrator. Other activists involved with the project suffered too but they received far less scrutiny. Following these

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events, the government undertook a massive retaliation: Weiwei’s blog was removed, he was beaten and hospitalized for a head injury, and his studio in Shanghai was demolished for allegedly being built without a permit. Even more, in 2011, Weiwei was detained for over 80 days on charges of pornography, bigamy and tax evasion and was forbidden to have any contact with his family and the outside world. Even though he was not convicted of a crime, his passport was retained and he could not leave the country for some time. Subsequently, when he got his passport back, Weiwei emigrated to Berlin, but was free, for the time being, to visit China whenever he wanted. Notably, even while he was stuck in China without permission to travel, his work was showcased in galleries and museums worldwide and his global stardom continued to grow in his meaningful absence. The film Never Sorry depicts Weiwei’s battles with the government from the Citizen Intervention project to his detention and disappearance in 2011. In the film, the other major dissident, Liu Xiaobo, is featured briefly on two occasions—in a TV broadcast from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stating that their treatment of Xiaobo was justified rather than an act of censorship and state violence and at the announcement of Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize. At that moment, Weiwei was in London mounting his Sunflower Seeds exhibition at the Tate Modern. The camera zooms on Weiwei grinning as he watched the Nobel Prize announcement, undoubtedly elated at hearing the news. Weiwei then talks briefly about the opportunity he has to speak for others who are no longer here and who have no chance to speak. He also says at one point in the film that his own position could change any time, hinting that he too might end up in Xiaobo’s shoes. Not long after, that moment comes—in 2011 Weiwei was detained at an undisclosed location on allegations of tax evasion. Even though the scenario may have looked similar at first, Weiwei did not end up in Xiaobo’s shoes. His disappearance was followed by a public outcry both in China and across the globe. The public demanded to know the whereabouts of the artist, insisting, through various forms of protests and pressures, that his presence be restored. Weiwei was released on bail after 81 days of incarceration. How does Weiwei’s meaningful absence differ from Xiaobo’s? Most obviously, Weiwei was released after two and a half months, while Xiaobo died of liver failure in 2017, after years of house arrest, hidden from the public eye, never to see the day of his release. I would argue that a somewhat less obvious difference is in the way their meaningful absences

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resonated. In Xiaobo’s case, the author became a symbolic figure, a martyr of dissident citizenship, in his quasi-disembodied, silent presence. Unlike Xiaobo, Weiwei’s excessive presence, prior to his detention, made the crime of his disappearance overt and palpable. This was no longer a case of disappearing into the Kafkaesque machinery of state oppression whose violence permeates every aspect of the society, but rather a blatant, even banal crime—a street fight with the state that could be fought and even won. The political drama ended with Weiwei being fined 2.5 million US dollars for the alleged tax evasion. In solidarity, supporters in China and worldwide voluntarily pledged their contributions to help the artist. This moving act of spontaneous communal and global solidarity was perhaps more evidence that Weiwei’s excessive presence, no matter how politically challenging to the authorities, was still less powerful than the mobilizing potential his meaningful absence could have attained in the mythology of anti-government resistance. In the documentary, Never Sorry, Weiwei talks about political courage, asserting: ‘if you don’t act, the danger becomes stronger’. Clearly, Weiwei’s words relate to the discourse on courage that implies acting despite danger and fear. But there is a more strategic point in his statement—without performing acts of dissident citizenship, without making one’s presence big and loud, it is not only fear that grows, but the pull of meaningful absence that swallowed Xiaobo, and others before him. Nearly every experience of censorship and oppression that Weiwei has suffered, he has documented and often turned into art, including: the elevator selfie of his own arrest in 2009; the ceramic sculptures modelled on surveillance cameras that the authorities placed outside his home; the exhibition of Xrays of his skull titled Brain Inflation—evidence of police brutality during his arrest—and an astounding social media outreach via his blog and his Twitter account that connects with massive publics in China and across the globe. In a Guardian interview from 2015, Ai Weiwei’s work was described this way: Ai’s enduring relationship with the world beyond China’s boarders stretches all the way back to 1982 when he moved to New York as a young artist. Partially the result of his fraught relationship with the Chinese government, much of his work, certainly his biggest exhibitions, have been held at international galleries. It has led some to question whether his pieces are even made for a Chinese audience in mind, or do they pander

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to long-held and oversimplified western assumptions about China and its shortfalls? (in Tan 2015)

Weiwei dismissed this criticism, yet in another interview published on the eve of his grand retrospective in London’s Royal Academy of Arts, he recounted the following: The police asked, very sincerely: ‘Do we make you very famous in the world? It is hard for them to ask this sort of question. I answered: ‘Yes. Five years ago when I did Sunflower Seeds, if I walked in a London street nobody knew who Ai Weiwei was. Today, every day, people jump off their bicycles, little kids ask are you Ai Weiwei? I have become some sort of myth.’ So, I told the police: ‘Without you, I would never have become so noticeable as an artist. (in Prodger 2015)

In the film, Never Sorry, when asked to describe himself, Weiwei takes a short pause and then says: ‘I’m a chess player, my opponent makes a move, I make a move’. In the film, Lao Ma Ti Hua (2009), Weiwei documents his travels to Chengdu to attend the trial of the civil advocate, Tan Zouren,4 who was also involved in the project of identifying the students who died in the Sichuan earthquake. In order to prevent his testimony at the trial, Weiwei was detained and hit by a policeman, causing swelling in his brain which led to his needing an operation while he was in the midst of preparing an exhibition in Munich, Germany. Weiwei fully documents this process from the images of his arrest, to the famous elevator selfie with the policemen who detained him, to his operation. Upon his return to China, he files a lawsuit against the police. The whole process—including the return to Chengdu, the trip to the court to file his complaint, and finally, the al fresco dinner at his favourite eatery—is filmed, photographed, documented and tweeted. At the end of the day, while Weiwei is dining with his collaborators in Chengdu, random members of the public begin to approach him, offering words of support. The police, gather too and, unsurprisingly, are not very keen about the commotion and the spontaneous expressions of support. They want Weiwei and his party to finish their dinner inside but when he refuses, the police start filming the dinner party group and those who have gathered around them. Weiwei takes out his mobile phone and, in a check-mate move, films the police filming him. This game of chess has continued in different contexts and with different gestures.

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The scenario of Xiaobo’s political courage, oppression and the international support he received are part of the twentieth-century lineage of political dissidents. His acts of dissidence are somewhat reminiscent of those of Czech dissident figure, Vaclav Havel. Both Xiaobo and Havel were writers and both were imprisoned for their political engagement. Furthermore, Charter 08 that Xiaobo co-authored deliberately referenced Charter 77, the petition that got Havel into trouble with the authorities for its demands that the government implement human rights provisions. Both men were recognized as heroes of struggles for democracy in their respective countries, both were supported by fellow writers across the Western world, and both endowed with prizes in recognition of their struggles for freedom (Havel never received a Nobel Prize but was nominated in 1991). As a way of marking their meaningful absences during their time of political persecution, PEN international left empty chairs at their meetings for both men. At the start of the Tiananmen prodemocratic, student-led demonstrations (1898), Xiaobo was living and teaching in New York. He returned to China to take part in the protest, went on a hunger strike and got arrested for the first time. Following his arrest, the publication of his work was banned in China and he was barred from public speaking. Likewise, Havel was jailed several times, his work was banned from public performance and he was put under surveillance. With no public outlets available, he was forced to work in a factory. During that time, Havel assumed a dramatic alter-ego, Ferdinand Vanek. As it happened, the real Vanek was also a dissident playwright whose works were banned from public performances forcing him to work in a brewery. Havel wrote a series of short plays that have been popularly known as The Vanek Plays. In the first of them—the two-hander entitled Audience (1975)—Vanek works in a brewery where his foreman turns out to be a spy instructed to keep an eye on the author. The following dialogue takes place as the Foreman tries to extract information from Vanek that might be worth reporting: Foreman: Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking…? Come on, tell me… Vanek: I wasn’t thinking anything. Foreman: Come off it, I know what you are thinking. What you don’t know is that if I hadn’t promised to do it, they’d had found someone else, and that would be worse because he’d hardly be as decent about it as I’ve been[…] Vanek: I appreciate your frankness… Foreman: Have you any idea what risk I’m taking by being so decent to you? What happens if you rat on me?

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Vanek: I’m not going to tell anybody… Foremen: So you write about it. Put it in one of those plays of yours…they’ll confiscate it and I’ll be ruined… (Havel 1992, pp. 201– 202).

With Vanek, his dramatic double, Havel was in a way writing himself back from meaningful absence into the present. The exchange in the scene also depicts how the game of censorship and surveillance was played out. It provides a succinct description of how the state mechanism permeated the entire society, and also how the author emerges as a politically subversive, potentially dangerous, figure in the eyes of this mechanism that is very aware of the performative power of words. Samizdat culture— the underground publishing which has existed in China in a similar form called dazibao—and private theatrical performances taking place in people’s apartments sustained the dissident ‘subaltern counterpublic’ and its authors in Czechoslovakia. This counterpublic carved semi-clandestine spaces (Havel’s Foreman was a very real part of everyday life) within which a Vanek, in one form or another, could make an appearance to perform the authorial figure as a witness of his own silencing. The example of Havel offers a blueprint of censorship, resistance and the author as a dissident figure in the pre-Internet and social media era. Even though Xiaobo used some international Web portals to publish his political writings, once he was put under house arrest all these forms of communication became unavailable to him. Consequently, his dissident status played out in a similar scenario to those of pre-social media times. The discussion of censorship is not possible without categorizing the notion of freedom. For Hannah Arendt, the space of freedom is neither in the human psyche nor in the domain of the will, but in human action on the public stage—where ‘care of the common world becomes a measure and limit of such freedom’. Svetlana Boym asserts that the ‘expression of freedom is akin to theatrical performance that uses conventions, public memory, and a common stage but also allows for the possibility of the unpredictable and particular’ (Boym 2010, p. 4). The stage metaphor, however, acquires new dimensions in the era of modern media, Internet, and social media platforms, all of which foreground the issue of the global spotlight—who is featured under its beam, and who remains in the dimly lit wings? Xiaobo’s views that cost him his freedom, and ostensibly his life, were mostly expressed in the form of oral and written language—hence, in not

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very ‘instagrammable’ forms. As in the case of Havel, the authorities were very well aware of the political performativity of Xiaobo’s words, hence to absent the author from the public eye and make his words hard to access, was the logical step and something they could go by with. Without a doubt, Xiaobo, published by Penguin, a Nobel laureate, was a worldfamous dissident whose treatment provoked public outcry in Western media. But his style of dissident performance did not generate the kind of excessive presence that when needed, could become protective armour. Weiwei marks a shift in the scenarios of dissident citizenship whereby meaningful absence is no longer the paradigm through which a censored artist speaks to power. His tactics of social media usage make the censorship game of presence and absence exposed, visible, even entertaining—hence, meaningful absence turns into its opposite—a scenario of hypervisibility or what might be described as excessive presence. In his essay, ‘Otobiographies’, Derrida conceptualizes the notion of excessive presence of the author, reflecting on Nietzsche’s presence in Ecce Homo, who: puts his body and his name out front even though he advances behind masks and pseudonyms without proper names. He advances behind a plurality of masks or names that, like any mask and even any theory of the simulacrum, can propose and produce themselves only by returning a constant yield of protection, a surplus value in which one may still recognize a ruse of life. However, the ruse starts incurring losses as soon as the surplus value does not return again to the living but to and in the name of names, the community of masks. (Derrida 1988, p. 7)

In the case of Ai Weiwei, the surplus still yields protection, even if loss is the inevitable ontological outcome and ‘the community of masks’ the final destination. On the one hand, excessive presence is a protective armour and a means to expose injustices and violations of human rights. On the other hand, there is a danger that it could be manipulated to serve as a kind of smokescreen. Much as we relish the courage, arrogance and playfulness of Weiwei’s middle finger jutting out against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square, an icon of politically subversive art,5 there are still numerous absented others who, despite all the voices of international outrage, still cannot be protected by the global spotlight. This is not to blame Weiwei

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since for the most part he played the game of excessive presence efficaciously. Xiaobo did not orchestrate his own political martyrdom either. Excessive presence, as well as meaningful absence, are conjured into reality through processes of seeing and listening—and the game is dependent on who does it, how, and to what end.

Performativity of the Reader The afore-mentioned notion of ‘otobiography’ emerging from Derrida’s writing on autobiography and Nietzsche is a play on words replacing the prefix ‘auto’ with oto meaning ear in Ancient Greek. In his book, The Ear of the Other, Derrida introduces this neologism to investigate the limits of autobiography. The notion of otobiography implies that in writing/performing self, I cannot be distanced from the other—the ear is the organ through which I gets the sense of the other and vice versa. We might say that ‘the ear of the other’ is at the same time, the ear of the author and the ear of the audience. This activation of the other in the process of authoring does not come from the removal of the author, but rather from its opposite—the excess of authorial presence. Barthes has foregrounded the reader as the focal point in which the work comes together and, as discussed earlier, the authorial figure becomes constructed often through a combination of theatricality and performativity to take full shape in the eye of the beholder. Derrida speaks about the ear as the main organ through which the intrinsic connection between authorial self and the other is made. The question is what and how does the ear of the other hear? The famous ‘Rushdie Affair’ foregrounds the performativity of the audience in the paradox of authorial excessive presence through enforced absence. More than thirty years ago, on 14 February 1989, Salman Rushdie learned that a fatwa calling for his execution for writing the novel, The Satanic Verses, had been issued by the Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. In India, the book was quickly banned on 26th of September, 1988, barely a week after its publication, as Rajiv Gandhi’s government succumbed to the pressure of the Janata party. In Britain, small groups responded with protests on the streets of Bradford and other towns with book-burning demonstrations. Ironically, the book was not immediately banned in Iran. Moreover, it had even been reviewed in a newspaper. Then a group of mullahs brought the book to the attention of the dying Ayatollah, reading him passages that featured Mohammad in oneiric

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sequences of magic realism and a satirical portrayal of a mad Imam. This was enough for Khomeini to issue the fatwa, calling not only for the death of the author but also for the execution of everyone involved in publishing, translating, or distributing the book. Following the fatwa, the book’s publisher, Penguin, erected barricades in front of its office building, London bookshops selling Satanic Verses were firebombed, the Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death, the Italian translator was seriously injured, and Rushdie supporters donned pins proclaiming ‘I am Salman Rushdie.’ Commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rushdie Affair for the Observer, Andrew Anthony recalls the situation shortly after the fatwa was announced: The headline of the London evening paper read: EXECUTE RUSHDIE, ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH. “Salman had disappeared into the world of block caps,” wrote Amis. “He had vanished into the front page.” In fact, he had moved with a Special Branch protection team to the Lygon Arms hotel in the Cotswolds. (Anthony 2009)

The quoted words of writer, Marin Amis, read like a description of authorial disappearance—the disembodiment of meaningful absence. Rushdie indeed spent years in hiding and under police protection. His friends recall meeting him in secret and in the company of security officers. The fatwa did not kill him but it became a form of imprisonment. Rushdie’s meaningful absence resonated in the cases of both Xiaobo and Weiwei. But there were differences. In Rushdie’s case, the issuing of the fatwa and the almost immediate generation of the excessive presence of the author, emerged through the acts and the relationships of others; in Weiwei’s case, excessive presence, was largely self-curated. Acts of reception, reading (or partial-reading) and even rumour—the filtering through the ear of the other, to paraphrase Derrida, shaped the excessive presence of the author in wide-ranging ways. At one end of the fatwa, there was the Ayatollah, the mullahs, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Janata party; at the other end, were angry, mostly underprivileged, Muslim communities, like the Bradford protesters who seemingly were united in the same death wish. In reality, however, the former fought for prestige in the Muslim world and beyond, while the latter were UK’s migrant and minority communities with issues of class inequality at the root of their anger. Though Muslim critics of Rushdie’s book were particularly vociferous, Christian authors and scholars, too (Shabbir

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Akhtar, Peter Mullen, for instance), agreed that the book was insulting. Some believed that the book was poorly written but like the Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, they did not endorse the fatwa believing that the murder of a writer would be more damaging for Islam than any blasphemy. Others, secular UK authors among them, refused to sign the petition in support of Rushdie as first and foremost they believed that Rushdie had the moral responsibility not to put others in danger because of his work. However, the majority in the literary world in the UK and in the West, as well as in the wider public, expressed support and solidarity with Rushdie—they signed the petition against the fatwa and protested in solidarity with the author. A body of work and documentation emerged from the affair including Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland’s comprehensive The Rushdie File (1989). In it, the authors provided a chronology of events and a collection of responses from all sides of the debate and from different contexts—from India, Britain and Iran to the United States and Western Europe. Dan Cohn-Sherbok’s collected essays approached the affair from different religious perspectives in his The Salman Rushdie Controversy in Interreligious Perspective (1990). And in From Fatwa to Jihad: How the World Changed From Satanic Verses to Charlie Hebdo (2009), Kenan Malik looked at the reverberations of personal, political and polemical dimensions of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ as a backdrop against which contemporary transformation of both multiculturalism and fundamentalism could be viewed. The ‘Rushdie Affair’ served both as backdrop and catalyst for groups such as Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) that emerged in 1989 in London. The editors of the inaugural issue of the journal, Feminist Dissent, who claim WAF as their intellectual origin, explain the group’s position in the wake of the ‘Rushdie Affair’: In defence of Rushdie’s right to write, members of WAF asserted their own right to speak for themselves, to gender equality within communities, to diversity in religious practices and interpretations, to syncretism over purity, and to the right to question religious authority. For the Rushdie affair had brought to the fore an array of so-called community-leaders, almost all male and many with dubious pasts in the Indian subcontinent, who used the moment to carve out radical presence within the public sphere in Britain. They posed as representatives of minority immigrant communities, Britain’s racialised others who were under attack in Thatcher’s Britain. (Varma et al. 2016, p. 2)

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In its support of the author, WAF foregrounded a context that was less prominent compared to the outpouring of support and solidarity for Rushdie that was prevalent among London’s literary circles at the time. It was WAF that brought to the fore implications of gender and fundamentalism as well as issues of class and race in migrant and minority communities as the undercurrents of the spectacular affair. We might argue that in WAF’s defence of Rushdie there was identification, but also a suggestion of difference. Ostensibly, our previous examples of the violence of meaningful absence offer analogies of this difference: there, the murder of Zinaida Reich is just a footnote to the main story of Meyerhold’s killing and attempted erasure from history. Similarly, Xiaobo’s wife, poet, painter and photographer, Liu Xia, who remained under house arrest until 2018, has usually been cast as an episodic character in the dissident narrative of the Nobel laureate. In its response to Rushdie’s case and the activism that ensued, WAF has foregrounded the gendered aspect underpinning religious fundamentalism but also dominating the narratives of its resistance. These are just some of many polemical and activist reverberations that have emerged in the political and cultural public sphere following the fatwa. In the case of Weiwei, we have the individual author, who as a metonymic figure stands for a larger societal struggle for democracy. And even though his dissident celebrity is not without its ironies and paradoxes, as we have seen, the fault lines of censorship are clear—the antagonist, the Chinese Government, is local. In Rushdie’s case, there are no strict geographical boundaries as to where the censorship stops and freedom begins and the ambiguities are more complex. The political and cultural public sphere that the ‘Rushdie Affair’ and its accumulation of excessive authorial presence opened, posited an array of complicated questions that pushed the obvious binaries between religion and secularism, integrity and safety, and between those who read and those who do not. The structure of The Satanic Verses follows three parallel plots: the dominant plot follows the migrant journey of two, present-day Indians, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, as they move between Bombay and London. The second plot line is the Koranic story about the origin of Islam with Mahound (Mohammed) as the central protagonist. He grapples with the unknowability of good and evil, wondering who put the verses in his head—God or the devil. The Mahound subplot is depicted as a dream of one of the main protagonists, Gibreel Farishta, that he then

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develops into a bad movie casting himself in the role of the angel. The third subplot features Ayesha, a fanatical girl who leads the villagers across the Arabian sea in the belief that, with the power of their faith, the waters will part and they will reach Mecca (Spoiler alert: they drown). On the whole, The Satanic Verses is a migrant story of Chamcha and Farishta, who mirror an ambiguous devil/angel dichotomy, as they are caught in between India and Europe—their roots and their uprootedness. The two subplots, that feature the allegedly blasphemous passages, actually function in the novel to further deepen the existential rift that its migrant protagonists are experiencing. Most of the time, I have used reading, seeing and listening as almost interchangeable transactional activities depending of the medium and/or circumstances of transmission. In the specific case of the ‘Rushdie Affair,’ it is vital to distinguished how the meaning of the book has been constructed—that is, which of the given transactional acts have been mobilized in the process. Equally vital is the question of who (as both an individual and a communal entity) is reading, watching and listening? In other words, the question here is less about the author, and more about the reader: How has the reader been constructed in the ‘Rushdie Affair’? Did the reader even deem it necessary to read The Satanic Verses ? In his book, Testaments Betrayed, author Milan Kundera claims that the answer to the latter question has often been no—among those burning the book or those signing the petition, many had not actually read the book. Even the Ayatollah, apparently, had not ploughed through the entirety of the hefty volume of The Satanic Verses, basing his vociferous condemnation of the author on the passages that the mullahs had read to him. Kundera writes: ‘Of course, no one any longer doubted that Rushdie actually had attacked Islam, but only the accusation was real; the text of the book no longer mattered, no longer existed’ (Kundera 1996, p. 25). Gayatri Spivak makes a similar argument in her essay, ‘Reading the Satanic Verses,’ when she writes that the text of the novel ‘is taken as evidence as talked about rather than read’ (Spivak 1993, p. 116). Both Kundera and Spivak make a political point by starting their essays with a critical analysis of the book, as a literary work—with their own act of reading The Satanic Verses —before they reflect on the resonances of the ‘Rushdie Affair’. Kundera goes on to suggest that the issue from which it all began is not a problem of writing, but of reading:

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[…] Everywhere except in the English-language world, the scandal arrived before the book. In France, the press immediately printed excerpts from the still unpublished novel to show the reasons for the condemnation. Completely normal behaviour, but fatal for the novel. Represented exclusively by its incriminating passages, it was, from the beginning, transformed from a work of art into a simple corpus delicti.’ (Kundera, 1996, pp. 23–24)

Spivak, too, asserts that in the case of The Satanic Verses, ‘a realist reading of magical realism, makes visible the violent consequences’ (Spivak 1993, p. 122). We might also add that the ‘Rushdie Affair’ is not just a case of misreading, but a conflict of different readings, which starts with Rushdie’s own reading of the Koranic story. For it to become a dream and then a film of one of the protagonists, a secular reading was required. For a secular reader/writer, the Koran, like the Bible, or any other religious story, is a narrative and potentially an intertext, rather than a sacred text. In such texts, Mohammad is an iconic figure, but he can also potentially turn into a character of a novel, a film script or a play—and he can easily appear in another character’s dream as Mahound. In secular readings, canonical religious texts also enter the textual machine and emerge at the other end as something else—as magic realism, as humour, as satire. In secular readings, Mohammad and Shakespeare are equally iconic and could equally be the subject of iconoclasm. Conversely, in religious readings they are very different kinds of iconic figures and even equating them in this way verges on insult. Hence, the conflict could be read as one that claims legitimacy depending on whether it is interpreted as a secular reading of a sacred text (Rushdie’s of the Koran) or a clerical reading of a profane one (Ayatollah et al. reading The Satanic Verses ). As Spivak argues, the religious mode of reading became: […]counter-narrative within a generalised subject focused on the moment when, within the colonial rather than the postcolonial context, religious discursivity changed to militancy, gossip changed to rumour as the vehicle of subaltern insurgency.[…] Upon the wings of that rumour, the metropolitan migrant subaltern (rather different from the subaltern in the colony, though we tend to forget this) forged a collectivity which they could stage as a strike for the Imam against the West. The narrative of the state and the narrative of religion overdetermined the rumoured book into a general mobilising signifier of crises. (Spivak 1993, p. 116)

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Spivak examines how the ‘Rushdie Affair’ operated not through the construction of the author, but through the construction of its readership/audience. There are indeed numerous competing and contesting audiences/readerships (including those who have not read the book, but were instrumental in shaping the public sphere one way or another): the Ayatollah, his mullahs and militants, Muslim communities in the UK and in India, metropolitan literary circles, activist groups such as WAF, and so on. There have been ears listening and eyes beholding in abundance on all sides of the affair. The only figure missing in this abundance of voices was perhaps the literary critic to provide mediation and analysis. Reflecting on this affair, Kundera writes: ‘Nothing is worse for a writer than to come up against absence’ (Kundera 1996, p 24). In this context, it becomes crucial to ask who the reader/audience/spectator is and how they are constructed. Barthes’s Reader, a generic figure who performs the completion point of the work, even if in a range of interpretative possibilities, appears limited and short-sighted. Spivak offers a critique of Barthes’s birth of the reader as ‘someone that is conditional upon the death of the Author’ and of its seemingly liberating potential: When Barthes writes that ‘the reader is without history, biography, psychology’, I believe he means there is no specific set of history, biography, psychology, belonging to the writer-as-privileged reader or the ideal reader implied in the text, that gives us the Reader as such. When the writer and reader are born again and again together, the Author(ity) function is dead, the critic is not mentioned. There is the pleasure of the text. (Spivak 1993, p. 105)

Spivak argues that in Barthes’s proclamation of the birth of the reader as someone in whose vision the text and all the elements by which it has been constructed come together, the reader acquires an authoring role, while the writer emerges as ‘a reader in performance of writing’ (ibid.). In her reading of the events, Spivak sees Khomeini as the Author and Rushdie as the ‘writer-as-performer’. We might add that Khomeini authors a specific mode of the reading and by doing so becomes the Author of a much larger narrative—the ‘Rushdie Affair’. He is also still a reader though, one who most likely never read the entire book. There are, however, other versions of reading/authoring in various degrees of performativity in shaping different acts and instances of censorship.

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Echoes of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ continue to appear in various forms from the cancellation of the performance of Mozart’s opera Idomeneo at the Deutsche Oper because it depicted Mohammad (2006) to the Danish cartoon controversy that featured the prophet Mohammad, whose artists had to go into hiding amidst death threats, to the carnage that was Charlie Hebdo (2015). These incidents are not reserved to Muslim fundamentalism either.6 One example from the cultural public sphere is certainly the 2004 performance of Behzti (Dishonour) where a riot and threats by Sikh protesters forced its cancellation at Birmingham Repertory Theatre on opening night. The author of the play, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, was the target of threats of violence and was placed under police protection. The dichotomy of author/reader was performed almost literally at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2012, leading William Darlymple, writer and founder of the festival, to, describe it ‘as the final death-twitch of the Satanic Verses affair’ (Darlymple 2012). Rushdie was due to appear at the festival but as soon as this was announced, a series of death threats ensued along with nationwide protests by Muslim groups who had been encouraged by their political leaders in the wake of the forthcoming elections. According to Darlymple, the protesters began converging on Jaipur from all over India promising that ‘rivers of blood will flow’ if the festival were to feature Rushdie. Even though at that point Rushdie had already decided not to travel to the festival, he agreed to appear in a live interview via video link. While the interview was recorded and broadcast on television, it was not presented live to the festival audience. Darlymple expresses the ethical dilemma this posed for the organizers: ‘what is the point of having a literary festival, a celebration of words and ideas, if you censor yourself and suppress an author’s voice? But equally, can you justify going ahead with a literary event, however important, if you know you will thereby be putting at risk the lives of everyone who attends, knowingly igniting a major religious riot?’ (ibid.). The meaningful absence of the author, Rushdie, that this chain of events forced, triggered a counteraction in the form of a performative intervention staged by novelists Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar. In the slot reserved for them to promote their own work, the two authors decided instead to read The Satanic Verses. Kunzru recounts their intervention and its effects: The writer Amitava Kumar and I decided to make a protest. The Satanic Verses is not banned in India (which does ban a lot of other books), it’s

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illegal to import a copy. We downloaded the short passages off the internet and read them to an audience who applauded and shouted support. […] By the time we came off stage, all hell had broken loose. The 24-hour rolling news channels were all running the story, various threats and expressions of outrage had been received. (Kunzru 2012)7

Even though this happened many years after the fatwa was officially withdrawn in 1999, it was somewhat reminiscent of earlier days when, in 1990, Harold Pinter delivered the Herbert Read memorial lecture at the ICA in London titled ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’ The lecture had been written by Rushdie, who was then in hiding. In both cases, Rushdie, the author, was performed into presence by other authors and in acts of performative readings. These acts of reading and reception as authoring open up to a cultural and political public sphere—which is not always joyfully plural and cacophonic, but at times can also be contested and divided by insurmountable binaries. There is the excess of authorial presence here too, a kind of Derridian otobiography, even if the author must hide and cannot be seen. He emerges as both hero and villain (depending on who is listening, watching or reading), as a looming presence (even in absentia), of what is often called the biggest literary controversy of the twentieth century. In the act of reception-as-authoring, it is not only the text that becomes shaped, but also the context. In this process of authoring, some ultimate version of the work and of the author is of course an illusion, and to say that numerous interpretations and contestations come into play would be stating the obvious. Yet it might still be worth foregrounding that this notion of reception-as-authoring presents us not just with different constructions of the author, but with a range of ethical and political dilemmas. The question is not only how to read the Satanic Verses, but how to read various readings and misreadings of this book and to understand what kind of political, religious and cultural identifications and performances they have facilitated. At the start of this book, we stressed the importance of asking two questions: who is the author?, and where is the author? (As the cases in this chapter show, at times these questions are to be taken literally). Nearing the end of this book, we are clearly urged to also ask who is the reader and who is the audience? The figure of the recipient holds the power that had been there long before Barthes had announced the birth of the reader at the cost of the death of the author. It is in a way correct that the reader is the focal point—but how

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does the reader read, how does she/he listen, and what does he/she see (and not see)—is not only a conceptual, theoretical question about the construction of the Reader. The recipient is a performative figure— an authoring presence in the final instance. The performativity of the recipient—in extreme scenarios, such as the ‘Rushdie Affair,’ the political destiny of Xiaobo, the dissident celebrity of Weiwei and the murder of Meyerhold—might become a matter of life and death.

Notes 1. ‘Meyerhold against Meyerholditis’ was translated by Edward Brown and published in his collection Meyerhold on Theatre (Methuen, 1969). 2. The film is about the historical figure, Red Army commander, Nykolai Shchors during the Bolshevik Revolution. 3. Goli Otok is a painful chapter of Yugoslav post-World War II history. Tito’s ‘no’ to Stalin in 1948 was in a way a ground-breaking moment of Yugoslavia’s distancing from the Eastern Bloc and affirming its position as a more open communist/socialist country uniquely positioned both geographically and politically between the East and the West. At the time of that historical ‘no’, also known as the Resolution of the Informbiro, Tito and the Yugoslav government were in a state of heighted anxiety and paranoia fearing Stalin’s retribution. As a result, all pro-Stalinist voices had to be eliminated. It should be kept in mind though that at the time Stalin’s atrocities towards his own citizens were not widely known and the breakup with Stalin was perceived as a break-up with Russia, that up until then had been hailed as Yugoslavia’s best friend and staunchest ally. The repercussions for those still faithful to Stalin were manipulated more widely to eliminate political criticism of other kinds as well. Goli Otok was taboo for some time but as the truth about it started to emerge, it went down in history as one of the most brutal repressions of Tito’s regime. 4. Tan Zouren was sentenced to five years in prison for his activism. 5. This is part of a series of photographs, entitled ‘Study of Perspective’ (1995–2017), where Weiwei puts up his middle finger against landmark buildings, including most recently, the White House and Trump Tower. 6. Examples of Christian fundamentalism are particularly evident around questions of women’s abortion rights. 7. According to the festival organizers, the performance the two authors staged broke the law and the festival itself was considered liable for their actions. Kunzru received legal advice that he might be arrested and took the first available flight out of India. Court cases, seven of them in total, were brought against Kunzru, Kumar and the festival organizers.

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Works Cited Anthony, Andrew. 2009. How One Book Ignited a Culture War. The Guardian, January 11. Available https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/ salman-rushdie-satanic-verses. Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bickford, Susan. 1996. The Dissonance of Democracy: Listening, Conflict and Citizenship. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Boym, Svetlana. 2010. Another Freedom. Chichago: University of Chicago Press. Braun, Edward. 1979. Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen. Darlymple, William. 2012. Looking Back at Salam Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The Guardian, September 14. Available https://www.theguardian. com/books/2012/sep/14/looking-at-salman-rushdies-satanic-verses. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Avital Ronell and Peggy Kamuf. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Fraser, Nancy. 1992. Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of the Actually Existing Democracy. In Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 109–143. Cambridge: MIT Press. Guyer, Jonathan. 2016. Now the Writing Starts: An Interview with Adonis. The New York Review of Books, April 17. Available https://www.nybooks.com/ daily/2016/04/16/syria-now-writing-starts-interview-adonis/. Havel, Vaclav. 1992. Audience. In Selected Plays 1963–83, trans. George Theiner. London: Faber and Faber. Isin, Engin, and Patricia Wood. 1999. Citizenship and Identity. London and New Delhi: Sage. King, David. 1997. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalinist Russia. London: Tate Publishing. Kundera, Milan. 1996. Testament Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins. Kunzru, Hari. 2012. Looking Back at Salam Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The Guardian, September 14. Available https://www.theguardian.com/books/ 2012/sep/14/looking-at-salman-rushdies-satanic-verses. Landes, Joanne B. 1988. Women in the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lotman, Yuri. 1977. The Structure of Dramatic Text, trans. Ronald Vroon. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Prodger, Michale. 2015. Weiwei: ‘From Criminal to Art-world Superstar’. The Guardian, September 12. Available https://www.theguardian.com/artand design/2015/sep/12/ai-weiwei-exhibition-royal-academy-from-criminal-toart-world-superstar. Reinelt, Janelle. 2007. The Limits of Censorship. TRI 32 (1): 3–15.

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Sparks, Holloway. 1997. Dissident Citizenship: Democracy, Theory, Political Courage. Hypathia 12 (4): 79–110. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1993. Reading the Satanic Verses. In What Is an Author? ed. Maurice Biriotti and Nicola Miller, 103–137. Manchestre: Mamchester University Press. Tan, Monica. 2015. Weiwei Interview: ‘In Human History, There’s Never Been a Moment Like This’. The Guardian, December 10. Available https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/dec/10/ai-weiweiinterview-in-human-history-theres-never-been-a-moment-like-this. Varma, Rashmi, Sukhwant Dhaliwal, and Chitra Nagajan. 2016. Why Feminist Dissent? Feminist Dissent 1: 1–32.

PART III

Conclusion

CHAPTER 8

Coda: In Other Deaths

The title of this final reflection is a paraphrase of the obituary section in The Guardian newspaper, entitled ‘In Other Lives’. These are shorter notices about honourable individuals who have passed away, but did not make the main spread. In this book, we have started backwards and continued sideways—from Death to Birth, leaving Resurrection for the final part as a point of synthesis. The word ‘Other’ implies both brief additional cases with which to conclude this study and the assertion that the ‘death of the author’ always implies some form of alterity. The first part of the book took Barthes’s famous proclamation of the Death of the Author as conceptual and rhetorical point of departure, to propose the main arguments—(1) the author as construct that possesses a certain theatricality, (2) the author as performative figure and (3) the rationale for her/his resurrection. The second part considered Births as a brief history of the Western conception of the author. It has explored the tensions of authorial presence and absence in the relationship between the individual and the collective (Ancient Greece), anonymity and authority (Middle Ages), embodiment and textualization (Renaissance) and the performing self (Romanticism). This historical contextualization of the Western concept of authorship has shown that with every assertion of the authorial presence there is an alterity—the Other author—be it a woman, a lower-class citizen, or a colonial subject. The final part has examined three key aspects of authorial presence and © The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4_8

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absence: the aesthetic/intertextual, where the author appeared as a stage character; the existential/ontological where the conceptual dimensions of the authorial death have been viewed within the paradoxical relationship of the real and the theatrical; and the politico/ethical that considered the dialectics of authorial presence and absence in various contexts of censorship and erasure from history. We have asked, Who is the Author? to call him to accountability, but also to locate the Other Author. We have at times also asked: Who is the Reader/Audience and what is their responsibility? Further variations of these questions are almost inexhaustible and I can only hope that this would be an invitation to further journeys to places that this book has not reached. As for this part of the journey, it ends with Patti Smith’s intertextual rituals and gravesite visitations. Smith, the punk-rock legend and author has devised very special personal rituals of dialoguing with dead authors that appear as characters and intertextual references in her books. Her memoir, M Train, is an intellectual autobiography, where dead authors appear alongside her dearly departed friends and family members. At times, they are conjured in her neighbourhood Café ‘Ino, where she likes to write and read, while drinking coffee and eating toast. At other times, dead authors appear on her many travels to Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Germany and England. And sometimes she actively seeks them out while visiting heritage homes and gravesites. The text is interspersed with photos—some of her and her family, others of objects—evoking the transient nature of people and things. There is a photo of a table and chair in Smith’s favourite corner at the Café ‘Ino in New York. A few pages later, as if in a ghostly dialogue, there is a snapshot of the chair that once belonged to the Chilean writer, Roberto Bolaño. In another photo, there is a coffee cup and next to it, a Murakami book Smith has been reading. A passage follows where she claims that Bolaño never read Murakami. Smith, while sitting in a small New York coffeehouse, becomes a medium of their posthumous encounter. Here, intertextual dialogue with the dead is not always confined to the page, nor to the stage, or to any particular artistic object. It unfolds as an everyday life practice, part of her morning ritual of coffee and toast dipped in olive oil. On Smith’s travels, as she visits graveyards to engage with the dead, there is always a ritualistic element and some improvisation. She snapped a photo of the Guardian angel at the Dorotheenstadt Cemetery in Berlin, sat by Bertolt Brecht gravesite:

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I sat before Brecht’s grave and hummed the lullaby Mother Courage sings over the body of her daughter. I sat as the snow fell, imagining Brecht writing his play. Man gives us war. A mother profits from it and pays with her children; they fall one by one like wooden pins at the end of a bowling alley. (Smith 2015, p. 56)

She has been to Sylvia Plath’s grave several times, once she took a blurry polaroid of the moody ruins of Saint Thomas Becket Churchyard covered in snow: ‘—I have come back, Sylvia, I whispered, as if she’d been waiting’ (p. 199). She describes how she stood by the gravesite, numb with the cold, but unable to leave, thinking: ‘Why had her husband buried her here? […] Why not New England by the sea, where she was born, where salt winds could spiral over the name PLATH etched in the native stone?’ (pp. 199–200). There is a photo of Smith herself sitting by Jean Genet’s grave at Larache Christian Cemetery in Morocco. She describes how she visited the site guided by a local boy, who watched intently as she cleared the debris from the gravesite and washed the headstone with bottled water. The photo works as a kind of visual palimpsest, connecting the scene of cleaning Genet’s grave and a trip she took to Devil’s Island in French Guiana with her late husband, musician Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith. The purpose of the journey was to visit the former penal colony where Genet wrote a book of autobiographical fiction, The Thief Journal (1949), while serving his prison sentence. As an authorial figure, Genet is famously transgressive—a writer, a criminal, a dramatist, a son of prostitute, a homosexual, a prisoner, a celebrated author and a political activist who participated in the protest events of 1968 in Paris in support of immigrant workers and an advocate for the plight of Palestinians. On her visit to the penal colony, Smith takes a few photos and collects three stones to give to Genet if she were ever to meet him. Soon after the trip, her husband dies suddenly, while the stones from Devil’s Island remain confined in Fred Smith’s Gitane matchbox for years. Smith never met Genet, but on the visit to his grave, she brought the matchbox with the stones and buried them in the memorial grounds. In the image of Smith sitting at Genet’s gravesite and in the act of washing his tombstone, the dialogue with the dead author becomes a very particular performative act of intertextuality, drawing from Genet’s autobiography and from her own. In this process, two heterotopic spaces emerge—the penal colony and the gravesite—and in

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Smith’s act of mourning and reflection, the two deaths come together— her husband’s and the author’s. ‘Genet was dead and belonged to no one’ (p. 227)—she wrote. Smith’s physicalized intertextual dialogues are a form of psychogeography. Each gravesite visitation initiates an impromptu performance, a photographic juxtaposition to another object, site or body, and subsequently, a narrative passage. In this psychogeographical intertextuality, even very personal and poetic encounters with dead authors are not without their collective association to war (Brecht) and the evocation of the eternal loneliness of the Other Author at her snow-covered gravesite (Plath), while the question of to whom the author belongs (and how) has proven to be much more than a poetic matter. Patti Smith’s autobiographical writing creates an intertextual mental space. There, the reader feels like as if she is inside the mind of the author. It is a mental performance of biographical memories, images, books, objects associations, and most of all, a dream party with fascinating authors and artists in attendance. Tadeusz Kantor wrote and staged what he called the ‘PHOTO-NEGATIVES OF MEMORY’—they are ‘near regions of/DEATH/they can be easily found in a CEMETERY STOREROOM’ (in Gluhovi´c 2013, p. 229). Smith’s now-famous polaroids capture remains—the empty chair that belonged to Bolaño, Frida Kahlo’s crutches and their shadow on display in her heritage home, Casa Azul, in Mexico, Herman Hesse’s typewriter, Smith’s own devastated beach house after it had been hit by a hurricane, and her half-finished cups of coffee. Even though they, too, are ‘near region of death’, the polaroids are not entirely memory metaphors. They do not play out as a protophotographic strip of memory said to go through the heads of the dying as theatricalized by Kantor in his Theatre of the Dead and in the autobiographical tableaux vivants of Marina Abramovi´c. Smith’s polaroids are metonymic objects at times related to personal memories, at other times, they are attempts at making connections outside linear time/space—such as conjuring the dead in the imagination and in the authorial presence of Smith herself. In her farewell film, Varda by Agnes (2019), the director Agnes Varda, charts her personal and artistic biography in words, photos, film excerpts and theatre. Varda by Agnes unfolds as a playful proto-memory of the dying artist, but it also does what Varda claims in her comment about her installation made of cans and old films: ‘Nothing is lost. Everything transforms through imagination, through creation’. It often takes the

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Other Author (and the Other Reader) to perform these acts of transformation and, we might add, critical imagination. Smith complements and sublimates this point, when thinking of the author Bruno Shulz trapped in the Jewish ghetto in Poland working on his final project, The Messiah, racing against time to submit the manuscript before Nazi bullets already launched in his direction would reach him: ‘Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words rumble in helpless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen’ (p. 161). Shulz’s final manuscript has never been found. The act of listening is also a form of ‘otobiography’—it is Derrida’s proposition to write with ‘the ear of the other.’ To recover lost things is the strategy (and perhaps even a duty) of the Other Author (and of the Other Reader).

Works Cited Gluhovi´c, Milija. 2013. Performing European Memories. London: Palgrave. Smith, Patti. 2015. M Train. London: Bloomsbury.

Index

A Abramovi´c, Marina, 20, 31, 100, 139–143, 145–149, 151–159, 161–164, 202 Abrams, M.N., 90 Adonis, 173, 174 Aeschylus, 45, 46, 48, 49 Alighieri, Dante, 61, 74 alterity, 63, 94, 121, 199 Anderson, Linda, 81, 95 Archimboldi, Benno von, 118, 135 Arendt, Hannah, 172, 182 Argenteri, Letizia, 33 Aristophanes’, 47, 48 Aristotle, 10, 46, 61, 73, 172 Arsmemoria, 163 Arsmoriendi, 31, 159, 161, 163 Atlas, Charles, 153 Atwood, Margaret, 43–45 auctor, 49–52, 54, 58, 60, 62, 84

B Babb, Roger, 165, 166

Bakhtin, M.M., 40, 41, 55, 90, 104, 113 chronotope, 104, 113 Bala, Sruti, 34 Baradaran, Amir, 156, 157 Barker, Howard, 116, 127–131, 137 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 2 Barthes, Roland, 1, 2, 5–11, 13, 14, 18, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30, 31, 50, 51, 58, 77, 100, 101, 127, 129, 145, 160, 161, 166, 169, 184, 190, 192, 199 Becher, Johann Joachim, 96 vitrification, 96, 97 Beckett, Samuel, 6, 64, 122 Bénichou, Paul, 102 Bennett, Andrew, 14, 20, 40, 41, 43, 50–52, 55, 59, 100, 103 Bennett, Benjamin, 62 Bennett, Susan, 33 Bhabha, Homi, 159 Bickford, Susan, 172, 175 Binet, Laurent, 5–11, 15, 20, 22, 24, 48, 51, 63, 68, 69, 93, 101

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 S. Jestrovic, Performances of Authorial Presence and Absence, Adaptation in Theatre and Performance, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43290-4

205

206

INDEX

Bishop, Claire, 34 Bolaño, Roberto, 118, 135, 200, 202 Borges, Jorge Luis, 14–17 Bottoms, Stephen, 26, 28, 34 Bough, Christopher, 78 Boyle, Danny, 95, 96 Boym, Svetlana, 15, 16, 23, 79, 86, 94, 182 Braun, Edward, 167, 168 Brecht, Bertolt, 8, 17–19, 33, 120, 200–202 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 65 Burden, Chris, 156 Burke, Sean, 8, 24, 25, 102 Burrow, J.A., 50 Byron, Lord, 79, 85, 86, 93–95, 97–99, 102 C Carlson, Marvin, 52 Carr, Marina, 116, 122–130 Carver, Raymond, 116, 126, 127, 129, 130 Censorship, 32, 169–179, 182, 183, 187, 190, 200 Césaire, Aimé, 70, 71, 74 Chaucer, J., 59–61, 93 Chekhov, A.P., 31, 111–113, 116, 117, 121–131, 133–137, 164, 165 Chin, Woon Ping, 72, 74 Clayton, J. Douglas, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121, 122 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 2 Cohn-Bendit, Gabriel, 2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 79, 80 Commedia dell’ arte, 53 compilator, 50, 51, 62, 63 Concretization, 113, 115 Coulibeuf, Pierre, 152, 157 Crouch, Tim, 19, 26–28, 34, 117–121, 135, 136

D Dafoe, Willem, 162 Darlymple, William, 191 Dead Centre, 117, 127, 131, 134, 135 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 11, 70, 106, 129, 183–185, 203 otobiography, 184, 192, 203 Dhaliwal, Sukhwant, 186 Diderot, Denis, 91, 102, 151 Dillon, Janette, 52 Djilas, Milovan, 82, 83

E Eliot, T.S., 42 Ephemerality, 104, 120, 136, 143, 144, 147, 149, 152, 153 Euripides, 46–48

F Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 150, 151 Forman, Miloš, 3 Foucault, Michel, 1, 7, 15, 21, 22, 77, 100, 101, 116, 127 Fournier, Louis Edouard, 97, 98 Fraser, Nancy, 172, 174 subaltern counterpublic, 172, 174 Frlji´c, Oliver, 20, 22

G Gaillard, Napoléon, 104 Gallix, Andrew, 1 Garrick, David, 77, 78, 80, 85, 88, 89, 91, 100 Gilbert, Helen, 73, 75 Gluhovi´c, Milija, 162, 202 Godard, Jean-Luc, 3, 32 Goethe, 66, 67, 78, 80, 90 Goldie, Boyd Matthew, 52, 53 Grammelot , 53

INDEX

Grey, Spalding, 100 Griffin, Jasper, 40 Gutenberg, Johannes, 59

H Habermas, Jürgen, 84 public sphere, 81, 84, 187 Havel, Vaclav, 181–183 Heathfield, Adrian, 144, 145 Heddon, Deirdre, 101 Heim, Caroline, 20, 33 Holmes, Diana, 4 Homer, 40–47, 61 Homeridai, 41–45, 47, 57 Honzl, Jindrich, 120, 146, 149, 150 Hugo, Victor, 19, 22, 78, 79 Hustvedt, Siri, 97, 98 Hutcheon, Linda, 114, 115, 123, 124

I Interperformativity, 34, 111, 156, 157 Intertextuality, 7, 31, 61, 65, 117, 124, 134, 157, 201, 202 Irving, Henry, 77 Isin, Engin, 171

J Jackson, Shannon, 19, 34 Jaffe-Berg, Erith, 53 Jakobson, Roman, 7, 10, 32, 33, 101, 106 Jakovljevi´c, Branisav, 164 Jones, Amelia, 140, 141, 144, 145, 164

K Kantor, Tadeusz, 162, 163, 202 Kaur Bhatti, Gurpreet, 191 Keats, John, 79, 97, 102

207

Kesi´c, Zoran, 155 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 184, 185, 188–190 King, David, 169 Klayman, Alison, 177 Knausgaard, Karl Ove, 100, 101 Kristeva, Julia, 1, 7, 50, 115, 118 Kumar, Amitava, 191, 193 Kundera, Milan, 188–190 Kunzru, Hari, 191–193 L Lamming, George, 71, 74, 75 Laub, Michael, 152 Lelouch, Claude, 3 Loomba, Ania, 72, 74, 75 Lorch, Jeniffer, 33 Lord, Albert B., 40 Lotman, Yuri, 90–93, 170, 175 meaningful absence, 170–172, 175 minus device, 170, 171, 175 theatricality, 2, 90–93 M Mann, Klaus, 66 Mann, Thomas, 65 Man, Paul de, 7, 24, 25, 28, 83 de-facement, 24, 25, 83 Marias, Javier, 83, 103 Marlowe, Christopher, 60, 61, 64, 65, 68, 73, 74 Marotti, Arthur, 57 Meerzon, Yana, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121 Meštrovi´c, Ivan, 81–83 metafiction, 69, 114, 115 metaperformance, 115 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 16, 18, 32, 33, 122, 146, 165–169, 187, 193 Miller, Nancy, 21–23, 30 political intertextuality, 30, 45

208

INDEX

Minnis, A.J., 51, 59 Mumford, Lewis, 58, 59, 71 mutation, 113–116, 121–123, 129

N Nagarajan, Chitra, 186 Nagy, Gregory, 41, 42, 44, 45 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65, 183, 184 Njegoš, Petar II Petrovi´c, 80–84, 86, 93

P Palimpsest , 50 parody, 9, 13, 48, 54, 55, 136, 146, 152, 153, 155–157, 159, 162, 163 Pessoa, Fernando, 135, 136 Heteronym, 135 Phelan, Peggy, 143, 144 Pinter, Harold, 192 Pirandello, Luigi, 11–13, 15, 17, 25, 33, 93, 134 poietes , 40, 49, 63 points of indeterminacies , 115 Polanski, Roman, 3 Popova, Liubov, 166, 168 Popovi´c, Aleksandar, 174, 176 Psychogeography, 202 Pushkin, 79, 86, 92, 101, 168

Q Quinn, Michael, 87, 88, 100

R Radosavljevi´c, Duška, 66, 67, 75 Rancière, Jaques, 19 Rebellato, Dan, 21, 27 Reich, Zinaida, 66, 167, 168, 187 Reinelt, Janelle, 172, 173

Re-performance, 31, 42, 64, 140, 141, 144–149, 151, 152, 154, 156, 161, 162 Retamar, R.F., 73–75 Revermann, Martin, 46–49 rhapsode, 40–42, 63 Rimbaud, Arthur, 104–107 Ritchie, Leslie, 78, 85 Roach, Joseph, 141, 170 Surrogation, 141, 142 Romantic author, 78–80, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 93–95, 98–103, 153, 154 Romantic Irony, 93, 94, 101, 153, 155 Ross, Kristin, 104–106 Rushdie, Salman, 32, 170, 184–187, 189, 191, 192

S Saint Bonaventure, 50 Scott, T. John, 89 scribe, 50, 57, 58 Sebald, W.G., 87, 96, 97 Sekuli´c, Isidora, 82, 83 Shakespeare, W., 14–17, 60, 68–75, 77, 78, 80–82, 93, 189 Shelley, Mary, 94–99 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 79, 94, 97, 99, 102 Smith, Patti, 200–203 Šnajder, Slobodan, 66, 67, 75 Sokurov, Aleksandr, 111, 113, 124, 131, 136 Sophocles, 45, 46 Sparks, Holloway, 171, 172 Spivak, Gayatri C., 106, 188–190 Stalin, 167–169, 174, 193 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 18, 121, 122, 165–168 Synge, J.M., 20, 22

INDEX

T TeatroBuendía, 74 Textualization, 9, 39, 44, 58, 65, 70, 100, 199 Tiffin, Helen, 70, 73, 74 Tito, 148, 174, 175, 193 Tomashevskij, Boris, 83, 86, 89, 90, 102, 106 Biographical legend, 81–83 Tompkins, Joanne, 73, 75 Trotsky, Leo, 168 Truffaut, François, 3, 32 auteur, 3 Tynyanov, Yury, 99, 106 Literary fact, 99, 125

U Ulay, 139, 140, 149, 152, 153

V Varma, Rashmi, 186 Virgil, 61 Voltaire, 86, 89

209

W Walcott, Derek, 73, 74 Weiwei, Ai, 32, 170, 176–180, 183, 185, 187 Werres, Peter, 62 Westcott, James, 145, 163 White, Gareth, 34 Willner, Alfred, 2 Wilson, Robert, 17, 152, 162, 163 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 95, 99 Wood, Patricia, 101, 171 Wordsworth, W., 79, 80 X Xia, Liu, 187 Xiaobo, Liu, 32, 169, 170, 176–179, 181–185, 187, 193 Y Young, Edward, 78 originality, 78 Z Zaretsky, Robert, 89 Zouren, Tan, 180, 193