Chapter One
The Otherness in Beckett’s theatre:
The Physical Theatricality in Endgame
In this chapter, the stress lies in the level of performance, mainly in the physical theatricality from two aspects: the function of darkness as well as the role of actor. I hope to testify the fact that Beckett redefines the notion of subjectivity by reexamining the subjective freedom of the director, the actor and the spectator in the performance. In his theatrical performance the subjective freedom lies in the subject’s being captive to the unknowable. In the performance with relation to the infinite, Beckett resuscitates his creative power and the actor/spectator obtains afresh his new birth in the playing/viewing process. First, I would put Beckett’s theatre in comparison with the conventional theatre in order to make explicit Beckett’s uniqueness in the stage design and in the actor’s performance. Second, the dilemma for Beckett between the roles as a playwright and as a director will be illustrated to further discuss the predicament that baffles his actors while they play the roles. Third, I would focus my discussion on the kind of interaction between the actor and the spectator.
Beckett, Brecht and the Conventional Theatre
As Christopher Innes points out: “The nature and function of theatre has been questioned, dismantled, redefined in a process of continual revolution…” (Innes 2), we see that the subject matters of theatre, which are often decided by their function, must undergo various changes. Herein, I do not intend to draw a whole picture of the evolving process of the theatrical history. My emphasis is mainly on Beckett’s position in the theatrical development that unfurls from realism to anti-realism which is a changing process based on the different functions of the theatre. In the legacy of Aristotelian mimesis, art is to imitate nature. In Aristotelian theatre, the theatre is a place representing the reality (Barranger 56).
The theatre of realism believes in the reproduction of the reality in the theatrical performance.
Its main issues concern with the contemporary world, especially on the social and political aspects in the hope of “addressing questions of justice or calling for revolution” (Inns 5). The authorial intention with an ideological consciousness, which is inserted in the play, has an enormous influence on the audiences’ judgment. The actors have to identify with the characters in order to become a definable subject on the stage.
Nevertheless, other genres refute the validity of full representation of the reality in theatre. Amongst them, the epic theatre is prominent because of its great impact on the contemporary theater. The epic theatre is characteristic of its replacement of the
“cause-and-effect plot with montage structure” (Innes 5), of exposing the stage illusion1 by separating actor from character,2 and of the intention to alienate the audience from their empathy with the play. Yet, these theatrical forms are not really in opposition to those of realism, but rather lead to an alternative mode of depicting the society with an acute political attention. In addition, the strategies such as “interjected songs,” “verse dialogue,” or the insertion of historical figures can immediately evoke the “social relevance” for their being tinted with political interests (ibid.).
Laying claim on the spectator’s intellectual judgment, Bertolt Brecht, the founder of the epic theatre, alienates the actor from the character, prevents the effect of empathy with which the spectator submit to uncritical emotional affinity, and reorients the spectator’s thought to the viewing process itself. That is, in the viewing process the spectator is “put through a
1 The stage illusion refers to the notion that the spectators “are looking into the actual lives and situations of others, usually people like ourselves,” so the stage illusion is a kind of “stage realism” that reflects “the times, its people, and universal truths” (UP 442-43). In this way, the stage becomes a place that various human experiences are delivered, i.e., the theatre becomes a mirror of the universe.
2 Martin Esslin provides a clear explanation: “They [Brechtian actors] must be supplemented by acute and fully rational observations; by implied comment on the character’s actions so that the audience can see the actor’s approval or disapproval, his pity, or contempt for the character” (122). Herein, the alienation between the actor and character is to evoke the spectator’s objective intellect, and the effect is often achieved by the actor’s self-refraining attitude from “goring over wholly into their role.” That is, in Bertolt Brecht’s way of speaking—the actor remains “detached from the character” and thus “[invites] criticism of him [the character that the actor is playing]” (UP 725)
process of alienation” (UP 725), rather than indulges himself in the development of the plot, or in the mental condition of the character. Ideally, the actor intends to identify with the character whereby he knows the way to perform on the stage space by citing the character’s language to confirm the act of playing, or by imitating the character’s gesture to achieve their mutual identification. Given this, the character is incarnated by the actor as a subject on the stage. The Brechtian actor alienates himself from the character and does not identify with the latter (Kalb 247). Although the actor does not imitate the character, as Michael Goldman observes, there is already a “privileged truth” that “lies in the actor’s commitment to the social interpretation of the character” (qtd. in Kalb 38), and consequently the predestined context adumbrates the purpose of the actor’s performance and conveys specific bits of information through performance (ibid.). So, Brecht remarks that his performance is a representation that alienation “is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem ‘unfamiliar’” by using some applications, such as songs or placards (qtd.
in Kalb 46). Hence, the strong authorial intention can still communicate with the audience through performance though in an unfamiliar way. The spectator needs to find out what kind of message is conveyed through the performance.
However, Goldman continues to argue, the confident attitude that “I [the spectator] can get behind these appearances” does not take place in Beckett’s theatre (qtd. in Kalb 38).
Beckett’s plays are not didactic,3 and have no pedagogical implications. In Beckettian theatre, although there also exists the alienation of the actor from the character, the effect of alienation functions in a way that differs from Brecht’s style. Whereas Brecht’s notion of alienation is to prevent the emotional empathy of the spectator with the character in order to stir the spectator’s objective judgment and social concern, Beckett does not use alienation to
3 Martin Esslin indicates that Bertolt Brecht in the early age proclaims that the theatre should be didactic and that his task is to offer some “teaching aids” that serve for the community by “teaching it [the community] how to live;” in this sense Brecht regards the function of the stage as something based on the “social usefulness” (105, 116).
call for the spectator’s political or social judgment. In contrast to Brechtian actor, Beckett’s actor is not allowed to use language to convey political issues, and is not presented as “a palpable subject” (Kalb 46-47). There is a confusion aroused in the actor and the spectator whose subjectivities are in an uncertain state due to the lack of an identifiable subject on the stage. Since the dilemma of the actor and the spectator will be accounted for in the latter section, at this point I’d like to continue discussing Beckett’s insights of performance.
Although Beckett addresses the issue of the unstable and fragmentary subjectivity, what he concerns more is to express the subject’s existence beyond the universal rules and to address the relation that gets involved with the unknowable. As Judith Dearlove observes that Beckett tells us not “the uncertainty of universe or individual,” but rather “the incoercible absence of relation” (5). In Dearlove’s viewpoint, Beckett as an artist sets a relation to the unknowable in a way that is both relating and departing in order to question “the metaphysical traditions which assert that there is a rational and harmonious system but also that it is knowable and imitable” (ibid.). Being an artist, in this case, a playwright as well as a director, he seeks to transcend the established judgment by relating his creation to the unknowable realm.
The alienation between the actor and the character leads to a performance that is put in opposition to that of the conventional theatre and the Brechtian one. Since in Beckett’s performance the notion of a palpable subject or a secure identity is invalid, it is necessary for us to reconsider how Beckett reshapes the notion of subjectivity in order not to misunderstand the impalpable subject as a negation of subjectivity.4 Hence in the following sections, I would like to account for Beckett’s notion of subjectivity via the examination of the
4 Levinas states that his theory of the Other aims to defend the notion of subjectivity against that in the traditional Western philosophy as a subjectivity of self-economy (TI xiv, 25). In the following sections, I would like to draw on Levinas’s theory of the self and the Other to make a defense for Beckett against the interpretation ascribed to the vein of poststructuralism that deconstructs the subjectivity in Beckett’s play, and also against the interpretation pertaining to the vein of essentialism that celebrates the human existence based on the virility or heroism of the human will.
subjective freedom ascribed to the three kinds of people that are involved in the performance:
the director, the actor, and the spectator. The examination is of threefold: first, Beckett’s aesthetic attitude; second, the actor’s performance; and third, the interaction between the actor and the spectator.
Beckett’s Dilemma: As a Playwright and as a Director
Dramaturge, by Kalb’s definition, is “primarily interested in how plays generate meaning in performance” (2). That is, there are some techniques applied to transforming the script to the performance with the purpose of creating meaning in the viewing process of performance. As noted, alienation between the actor and the character is characteristic of Beckett’s performance, and the question that is worth thinking is why alienation is requisite for expressing Beckett’s view of performance. There are at least two possible answers from two different perspectives. First, Beckettian characters’ mental conditions and behaviors are unintelligible, so it is impossible for the actors to imitate or identify with the roles. The uncertainty and equivocation of Beckett’s performance result from the unique interaction between the actor and the character. The actor should not seek to enact the character with recourse to the analysis of the latter’s fragmentary subjectivity; instead he is required to ask
“how” to play, rather than “what” to play. Second, in answering the inquiry about the way of playing, Beckett, as a director, tells his actor not to play when he enacts the character, and forces the former to keep a distance from the latter.
With regard to the first answer, Charles Lyons observes that in Beckett’s play the character’s life episodes are like “temporal units” that build an “equivocal” relation with the larger narrative structure of the whole play (306). That is, the episodes are dispersed loosely and fragmentarily in the character’s narrative stories, rather than in a consistent way therewith we can constitute a verified “narrative whole” of the character (ibid.). Hence, the
whole narrative does not consist of a series of constant events and thus it renders more about its unreliability. The character is, in this case, unable to be called a unified subject in the traditional sense that defines the subject’s life experiences in a continual temporality of which each episode is positioned in order. Lyon is insightful to discover the discontinuity or contradiction in the characters’ narratives, but we can further look into the disruption between the word and gesture performed by the actor in order to investigate the disconcerting sense stirred by such alienation. Beckett, in his directing Endgame,5 asks his actors to make a disjunction between gesture and word: they have to “assume an attitude” and then speak words. The effect of the discontinuity is “disturbing” and the actors are regarded as people who are unable to move and speak simultaneously.6 This disruption in word and gesture also makes the character unconvinced. The gesture goes first and makes words like an adding footnote to the action. This discontinuity signals Beckett’s stress on the physicalness because the gesture draws the spectator’s attention and reduces the validity of the spoken language which originally should be emphasized with the assistance of the bodily gesture. The gesture does not enact like a sign associated to the word. It absolves the definition (or meaning) from words, and becomes a manifestation of itself. Speaking in this case becomes a recommenced action that is to clarify the meaning of the previous bodily gesture. Hence this kind of discontinuity resists the definitive specification. As a result, words incessantly try to interpret the gesture but the effort is constantly interrupted for gestures do not completely corresponds to the words. Each interpretation is consequently invalid in the discontinuity. In addition, for Beckett claims that Endgame is a play of “a matter of fundamental sounds” (Disjecta 109)—the sounds may refer to those of Clov’s tramping steps or the impressive scenes of
5 This refers to Beckett’s directorial experience of Endgame in Berlin in 1967 (Ruby Cohn 235-45).
6 See Ruby Cohn, Just Play (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980), 243. The quoted remarks are derived from Cohn’s description of Beckett. Anna McMullan also points out that “the separation of speech and movement” is one of Beckett’s directorial principles (197).
pause7 (which is resonant with the silence), it is the body language that becomes the concrete language on the stage (Steven Connor 1988, 157). This discontinuity disables “the speaking subject” from taking possession of its body and thus calls into question the full presence of the subject. From Lyon’s and Cohn’s observations, we see that Beckett as a playwright, invents his characters in a memory fallacy, and as a director he guides his actors to distort the harmonious relation between speaking and acting. From the two cases, Beckett’s characters are not verified as a real figure or an actualized subject on the stage.
With respect to the second answer, that Beckett’s inhibition of “playing” leads to the effect of alienation serves to maintain the distance between actor/character, and actor/spectator. As a director, Beckett refuses to analyze the character’s personalities to endow him with a psychological realism, and forbids the actors to identify with the characters.
This attitude seems to neglect the significance of interpreting the script and to seek a kind of performance that departs from the script. Yet on the other hand, he is demanding that the stage design should be exactly faithful to his stage directions. In the former case, Beckett’s characters in the script are not definable subjects (they are inimitable), whereas in the latter, the stage directions about the stage space are required to be followed and thus the stage space described in the script can be represented to the most degree. Obviously, Beckett, as a director, takes different attitudes toward his script, which is regarded as a source and the only model.
On the one hand, he discounts the script by preventing his actor from identifying with the role.
On the other, he pays great attention to the authorial sovereignty by obeying the stage directions in the script. Thus Beckett’s performance at the same time renders a tendency to be faithful to the script and subverts the conventional theatrical style which emphasizes the realistic representation of the script in performance. The dilemma in this case implies the fact that Beckett calls into question the way that regards the performance as the body of the script,
7 Beckett requires Clov to act in a rapid and repeatable speed, which puts the scene of pause into a sharp contrast to the sounds of the rapidly tramping steps for the actor/spectator.
which is based on “Cartesian psychological frames and quantified sense of time, space, and perspective, as well as its dependence on causality” (Michael Heuval 73). Performance is not to represent the reality of the script envisioned by the playwright, but rather, it is the locus in which the sovereignty of the playwright confronts that of the director.
Beckett’s performance simultaneously returns to and frees itself from the script. Why is Beckett’s attitude to his script different from these two aspects, namely, the stage design and the actor? According to Gontarski, Beckett’s insistence on the stage directions is “due in part to Beckett’s continued work on the central visual imagery” of his play (142). What kind of imagery does Beckett picture in his mind? In the following section, we will examine Beckett’s aesthetic idea with which he envisages the design of the stage space that presents his physical theatricality.
An Expression of “There Is Nothing to Express”
If for Beckett theatre is a place where he can control a small group of people on the stage under a certain light, the theatrical space functions as a limitation or a finite that makes the matter of representation easier in his creative realm. From prose to play, Beckett escapes from the torment of the non-expressible abstract idea (the prose writing as a process of self-cancellation towards the state of no “I,” no “have,” even no “being” [Brater 1989, 55] ) as he is committed to the domain of performance. It seems that “the finite boundaries of a stage” (Enoch Brater 85) functions as an alternative medium for expression and enables Beckett to win a temporary reprieve from the exhaustion of his creative power.
What does Beckett discover in the performance that revivifies his creative energy? In the performance there lie the possibilities for Beckett to concretize his mental landscape and that at the same time sustains the sense of subjectivity in the process of creation. Hence the fact that he insists on the stage directions shows his intention to express something that is unable
to be represented (in the prose writing). That is, Beckett’s expression in performance already presupposes that there is nothing to express, or precisely speaking, there is nothing able to be represented. Thus what Beckett says of his aesthetic expression is worthy of the citation as follows,
The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. (qtd. in Gerry McCarthy 253)
As cited above, the “nothing”8 predestines Beckett’s idea of expression. Beckett has no power to express because nothing exceeds his knowledge. He has no desire to express because what he desires is not a lack that needs to be fulfilled, so the desired disables him from obtaining a sense of satisfaction from which the wish of desire and the desired correspondingly fit into each other. Since the desiring subject does not feel satiated with the desired, what is the relation between the desiring and the desired? From Beckett’s perspective, it is the relation of “obligation” that binds him and nothing.
The obligatory relation can be accounted for from two aspects. On the one hand, in the grammatical statement, nothing is something with which and from which Beckett expresses.
In other words, nothing serves as a creative source of Beckett’s artistic expression. And it is via the expression of nothing that Beckett carries out an experiment on the theatrical performance. As a desiring subject, Beckett desires nothing that is the irrepresentable desired.
On the other hand, because nothing overpowers the desiring subject’s intentionality, it takes command of the subject and calls for his response. Hence in performance Beckett is obligated to respond to the nothing, or the Other (in Levinas’s sense, it refers to the desired that is invisible and non-conceptual), and is immersed in the relation that the desiring subject is
8 Hereafter in this chapter, nothing in italics refers to the “nothing” mentioned in the citation above.
suffering and even dying for the Other.9
In addition, we must go further to discuss another aspect of nothing. That is, nothing not only serves as the Other desired by Beckett, but also functions as a threat imposed on him.
What kind of threat is aroused by nothing? When Beckett turns to commit himself to the theatre, it is the stage space that, as a finite terrain, attracts his attention and prevents him from the solipsism of self-centered identification (and thus of self-destruction10) in the process of prose writing. He admits that in the theatre the concrete space and the tactile people, both granting him a sense of “undeniable presence” (Steven Connor 1992, 7), relieve him from the incapability of self-expression11. Hence we see that the paralyzed creativity that results in Beckett’s self-abnegation makes nothing horrible because it is the sense of “being buried alive” symbolically (qtd. in Didier Franck 17) that nothing brings forth. In this case, nothing does not only enact like non-being (which may revoke the subject’s anguish of being a dead will by the possibility of total annihilation), but points to a state that each individual is leveled down to be a dead will so that it is impossible for the subject to express himself. In order to explicate the horror of nothing, it is useful to turn to Levinas’s notion of the “there is,” which gives an insight for us to envisage the force of totality more deeply.
In Levinas’s viewpoint, the “there is” is that which is impersonal as well as anonymous, in which things and persons return to the state of nothingness. Since the “there is” is a nocturnal space over which the darkness prevails, things or persons are dissolved into the darkness and are negated to be a density of structure-less-ness without direction or meaning.
Hence in the “there is,” the nothingness is not pure nothingness, but a plenum full of
9 Gontarski observes that Beckett as a director makes efforts “to collaborate with the author of the texts [his published plays]” and regards the directorial self as “his ‘other’” in the process of doing a performance. Because Beckett finds that the production on the stage is not anything like a “‘definitive’ text,” he can never accomplish his creative process until his physical death (135, 144). In his creative process Beckett is always desiring and dying for the performance which is in relation to the infinite, namely, the Other.
10 From Levinas’s point of view, the self identification is an announcement of the self as a dead will.
11 Beckett says that The Unnamable (one of his novels) has finished him or expressed his finishedness (Brater 55).
indeterminateness, senselessness and thus terrifying chaos (Alphonso Lingis 222-23). In other words, in the darkness there are points everywhere which divert and disconcert the self’s intentionality. Thus it seems that the darkness watches the self and submerges its individual will. Most prominently, since the self is unable to apply its intentionality to comprehend things around (actually the self is “steeped in” the “there is” [LR 29]), it is impossible for the self to draw up a separate line between it and the other. In this way, the self loses his identity and sovereignty. To sum up, the “there is” is a kind of existence without existent, and thus is also named as Being, which refers to “being in general” that negates the individuality of each being. Hence the “there is” is a kind of totality in which each individual is leveled down and in a sense is dead. Although there are things or persons in the darkness, it is too opaque to see them appear. The “there is” is therefore a presence of nothingness, not because there is nothing but because nothing could be brought to light.
The self has to separate from itself in order to reserve a distance from the other things, so that it can enjoy the other things by objectifying or representing them. Vision (together with the notion of light that gives luminosity of things in the darkness) and touch are the most significant human senses because via their contacts with the world can most of the self’s experiences be constituted. Yet Levinas points out that this kind of self-enjoyment does not break with the totalizing system in which the self exists. Because the self views, comprehends, and handles the other things as parts of the worldly universal panorama, he cannot transcend the horizon of the mundane world, namely, the function of the totalizing system (Peperzak 163). That is, the self is confined to itself in the enjoyment and thus cannot set himself off against the totality. In this sense, the enjoyment contributes to a self-illusion, a self-consciousness of abstraction that constitutes a “subordinate reality” (Peperzak 166) by objectification or representation. This kind of self lays claim on its autonomous freedom, and appropriates the worldly things in a self-sufficient way. In this case, the relation between the
self and the other is a correlation that the self absorbs the other into its horizon of knowledge and integrates the other to be part of his whole (identity). Thus the self is left alone with itself.
It is determined by being “immersed in the empirical world” (TO 74). And“[t]hrough its identification the existent is already closed up upon itself; it is […] a solitude” (TO 52). That is, by self-identification the self is enchained to itself and is alone as well as definitive.
Even though the enjoyment is “the beginning of meaning” (through vision and grasping the meaning reveals itself, i.e., through them the self acquires the knowledge that makes the others representational and sensible), it does not “abolish […] the quasi-nothingness [the
“there is”] that is the condition of all thingness” (Peperzak 163). In enjoying things the self embarks on a process of self-identification. Each self, as being produced in the self-separation from Being, is “the lag behind itself [the self] recaptured by itself” (Franck 22). The I in its self-identification reasserts the return to, as Levinas says, “the I [which is]
already bound to itself, already folded back onto a self” (qtd. in Franck 22). As a result, the self cannot completely sever itself from Being because it is from its charge over Being that the self is initiated and is constituted. Consequently the self is still definitive though it refuses to be. The self in enjoying things is reabsorbed by the totality (the state of Being). The relation between the self and the other is formulated through the worldly principles and thus is reduced to a finite and symmetrical correlation.
So“[w]hat is denied is the independence [the self-enjoyment] of the existents”
(Theodore De Boer 90) because the dependence (the self is at any time, even in enjoyment, threatened to be subsumed by Being, or totality) is always required. At this point, Levinas argues that the body that inhabits the empirical world and enjoys the worldly things serves as base for the emergence of the self. Then he continues to argue that the body does not only serve as the incarnation of thought or the fulfillment of the self’s appropriation of the other things, but also serves as the possibility of being corrupted or enslaved. Thus the
self-enjoyment does not prove to be a radical liberation from the encompassing power of the
“there is.” Or to speak specifically, being detached from the “there is,’ the existent (the self) is enchained to himself, and thus definitely alone. The freedom obtained by being detached from the other things, namely, by being able to enjoy things, is a “conditioned freedom”
(Franck 23).
As a result, nothing includes the domain of the “there is” and that of the Other. The obligation to nothing opens Beckett’s artistic expression onto the infinity in desire and at the same time threatens to subdue Beckett to a dead will. The horror of nothing furthermore forces Beckett to turn from the solipsistic illusion of prose writing to the physicalness of the theatrical performance. The transition from prose to play parallels the departure from Being (wherein nothingness negates the individuality) to being (which is a state that the self, through the body as a sentient, takes part in the empirical world). To take the departure the first step is to enjoy the others through the body, a visible and tactile entity. Similarly, it is necessary for Beckett to search for a practical and concrete medium through which he can express himself. Moreover, in Levinas’s viewpoint, the body simultaneously appropriates the others and is expropriated, and thus the body manifests itself as a mode of existence which goes beyond the thematization of intentionality. Likewise, for Beckett refutes the conventional theatre that treats the relation between the script and the performance as the soul/body binary, his performance is not only the incarnation or body of the script. Given Levinas’s notion of body, Beckett’s performance is a “body” that simultaneously serves to fulfill his intention of expressing nothing and to frustrate his intention. The performance might be a frustrating failure because there are possibilities that the performance falls enslaved or manipulated by nothing that is beyond comprehension and thus beyond control.
Therefore while Beckett reserves a distance from the prose writing, he gets a temporary reprieve from self-abnegation and has a resurrection of his selfhood. In order to avoid the
dead-end of the self-identification (he does not want to write prose then), he commits himself to the theatre. The commitment to the theatre unfurls the possibility for him to desire the Other and his self can be unremittingly reborn, shunning the destine to become a dead will.
Yet at the same time the theatre (or the performance) serves as the Other that might overpower Beckett’s subjectivity and thus might frustrate him again. For “the infinite overflows the thought that thinks it,” “the idea of infinite is not a concept, and the infinite is not an object” (Theodore De Boer 94). According to Levinas, that the Other resists the self’s comprehending capability indicates that he calls into question the self’s freedom in the joyous existence. In this sense Beckett’s turning from being a novelist to a playwright is an arduous attempt that he ventures into placing his subjective sovereignty into a different experiment.
Likewise his turning from being a playwright to a director is also an adventure that, being analogous to the relation stated in the above case, challenges his subjective freedom of self-complacency.
Therefore for Beckett the performance is not only a medium of artistic expression. The relation between Beckett and his performance should be considered an encounter of the self and the Other in theatre as well as in life. Given this perspective, Beckett’s refusal to give interpretation or to be interpreted12 can be accounted for as a “refusal of the definitive”
(Franck 23). Any hermeneutical approach, no matter it is a moral, social or political way, runs the risk of reducing the otherness of his performance. Hence every encapsulating interpretation is the reduction to the totality. For Beckett each performance deserves a new birth. For the director, the actor, and the spectator the performance offers a possibility for them to be in relation to the Other and thus to avoid the self-identification. In Beckett’s performance the director/actor/spectator is bereft of his self-claim, i.e., his subjectivity
12 In a letter to Alan Schnider he writes: “[…]when it [the performance of Endgame] comes to journalists I feel the only line is to refuse to be involved in exegesis of any kind. And to insist on the extreme simplicity of dramatic situation and issue. If that’s not enough for them, and it obviously isn’t, it’s plenty for us, and we have no elucidations to offer of mysteries that are all of their making” (Disjecta 109).
grounded on the self-enjoyment as an absolute freedom, either that in the empirical world (the totality) or that in the “remembrance,” the memory. This kind of subjectivity is put into question. The director/actor/spectator cannot accumulate the performing experiences with which he can become experienced, because the Other he encounters is not in a quantitative sense; rather, the more times he gets involved in the performance the more insatiable he feels about it. Like Levinas, Beckett also “nourishes the self by its own hunger” (Boer 93). In this way each performance is individualized and unique.
Furthermore, as noted, the self takes charge of Being and always faces the destiny of death when he feels satisfied with the enjoyment or refutes the calling from the Other. By encountering the Other the self henceforth departs from his obsolete self without return and thus in the meantime announces his own death and celebrates his resurrection. For the director, the actor and the spectator each performance simultaneously mourns for the past one and welcomes the present even the future one. In each performance they are inhibited to appropriate or remember the previous performing experience in order not to fall victim to the totalizing system. Just like Levinas says: “The absolutely new is the Other” (TI 219). As a result, each performance serves as a discontinuity from the others and provides a renewed experience. Thus what Beckett shows in his aesthetic attitude is not a self-centered love that satisfies himself with an aesthetic ecstasy13 but rather a commitment with a gratuitous desire to the Other, the infinity.
Beckett’s Theatrical Reality: the Stage Design and the Darkness
In this section I continue to argue that Beckett presents a reality in the theatre that is not the reality of Being (the totality, the universal rules, the convention, etc.). Rather he presents
13 According to Levinas, he says that “in ecstasies the subject is absorbed in the object and recovers itself in its unity” (TO 41). In this way the otherness of each other disappears, no matter it is the otherness of the subject or that of the other (ibid.).From this perspective, Levinas does not regard the subject in ecstasy as a transcendence from itself. The relation between the self and the other should be inassimilable and asymmetrical.
the reality of the theatrical experience that is based on the relation of the self and the Other, or
“the totality and the infinity” (which is the name of one of Levinas’s works). I will account for my argument by examining the relation between the stage design and the darkness, and that between the darkness and the actor/spectator in Beckett’s theatre. In addition, some references to Endgame will serve as more clarifying instances.
As noted, the “there is” is a nocturnal space wherein nothingness subdues the individuality and reduces the otherness of the existent. The “there is” is tantamount to the totality, or Presence. The self is produced in its self-separation, with which the self takes part in the empirical world through its body. By means of enjoying the other things, the self is independent from the other things since it can detach itself from them. This independence contributes not only to a self-autonomy but also to a self-illusion. This kind of self is
“non-recognized,” just “the very myth of the I” (TI 61). The independence brings forth a freedom that is conditioned by its taking charge of the “there is.” Therefore the self-complacency only leads to an evanescent severance from Being because for the self, as Levinas says, “the point of departure” is “the point of arrival” (qtd. in Franck 22). The self is definitive since it is the captive of itself. Yet, the independence of the self serves as base for the encounter of the Other, or the infinite. The self does not “rest on the other in complete security” (TI 60). That is, there is not a union between the self and the Other because their relation “does not issue in totality” (ibid.). Hence the Other does not annul the independence of the self, but maintains it and in the meantime questions, criticizes and judges it. Since the Other is beyond the power of totalitarianism and is incalculable as well as unpredictable, the relation between the totality and the Other is of an asymmetrical structure. That is, there is a disproportion between the infinite (the desired) and the conceptualization of the infinite (which is what the desiring subject cannot help but do). According to Levinas, this relation of the self to the Other based on the asymmetrical structure contributes to the primary reality
between humans that the otherness of one another will not be reduced. He remarks: “All knowing qua intentionality already presupposes the idea of infinity, which is preeminently nonadequation” (TI 27). To put it in another way, the primary reality indicates that the inadequate relation of the self to the absolute otherness is presupposed for the objectifying actions such as representation, thematization, or conceptualization. Given this perspective, the reality of our daily life is only a “subordinate reality” that comes into being in the second place and is constituted by intentionality as a self-illusion (Peperzak 166). If we follow Levinas’s theoretical route, perhaps we are able to have a primary relation with the other that goes back to the very beginning: a relation of desire, not of need or satisfaction.
As observed, what Beckett concerns is not doing violence on the actor, the spectator, even himself as a creator, with aesthetic ecstasy. His performance serves to free him from the
“there is.” But since his performance presupposes nothing, it is conditioned by taking charge of Being. We have noted that nothing for Beckett functions in two ways: the calling of the infinite and the terror of Being. While transporting Beckett’s artistic idea to the level of his stage design in the theatre, we can see that the stage design is attuned to his “central visual image”—a mind-reflecting image of nothing itself. On the one hand, he presents nothing on the stage by creating a nebulous environment. Nothing is not pure nothingness. It is a state that something is there but is not allowed to appear or is merely allowed to appear vaguely.
Things are threatened to be devoured. In the ambience of totalitarianism, the self emerges to have consciousness in order to avoid the darkness, “the empire of sameness” (Colin Davis 40). On the other hand, nothing is invisible as well as intangible and can only be accounted for as the Other. Nothing entails the preservation of both the self and the Other—a mode of being that the subject exists by having charge of Being and in relation to the Other. That is, nothing is the relation of the self and the Other, the primary and fundamental relation between humans.
Inasmuch as nothing is the thing that Beckett is obligated to express, he desires to show the primary reality based on the primary relation. Since nothing includes the desire for the Other and the terror of Being, i.e., the self is unable to have a self-complacency or an absolute independence but must encounter with the Other, how does he present the “primary reality” in practice? We should first pay attention to the characteristics of his stage design in order to obtain a concrete exemplar. Herein I draw on the stage design of Endgame as an instance for its style most accords to Beckett’s visualized expression of his mind vision of the stage space.14 Grounded on the “intense visualization,” says Beckett, that he is “trying to see” (qtd. in Cohn 234), we can further explore the relation between the actor/character and the actor/spectator in the hope to see to what extent Beckett’s performance implements the primary reality in the theatre.
Beckett once said that “Any production of Endgame which ignores my stage direction is completely unacceptable to me. My play requires an empty room and two small windows”
(qtd. in Kalb 79). In another case, he indicates that Endgame is as “dark as ink” (Worth 43).
Here we see two characteristics of Beckett’s stage design. One tells about that the stage space is almost laid bare, and the other indicates Beckett’s emphasis on the image of darkness as an elemental phenomenon of the stage space. His world is unique for its nearly bare stage space under the dim light in the dark.
Endgame is characteristic of the darkness as an important element in performance. Since darkness is emblematic of the theatre,15 in many performances (even not directed by Beckett in person) the directors are alert to use the weak light which is rigidly restricted and not leisurely dispersed on the stage. For instance, in Herbert Blau’s performance, the light is only dropped on three spots on the stage space: one is on the wheelchair, in which Hamm has a
14 Endgame is the one that Beckett “dislike[s] the least” in his plays. As Brater says: “For in this work the mise-en-scene is more strictly determined to take command of ‘the greater smallness’ that has always been a playwright’s interpretive space, the finite boundaries of a stage” (85).
15 Beckett says that theatre is “its own darkness” (qtd in Gussow 32).
seat, another is on Clov who initially stands on the verge of the stage before the play starts, and still another is on the trash bins—the rest of the stage space is immersed in darkness.
In this way, darkness is not only a “theatrical blackout,” but also “the most important single element of the image;” thus the actor and the spectator are put in the “floating yet fixed” blackness, which is “present in a manner of…nightmares” (Xerxes Mehta 170). Hence darkness becomes a form of disillusion, deprives the actor and the spectator of their consciousness and “cancel[s] the group existence of theatre” (Mehta 170). Each individual is positioned alone from one another. This scenic image thus imposes the threat upon the actor as well as the spectator and makes them in the condition of being mentally solitary.
In such a nebulous phenomenon everything is indefinable and indeterminate (both for the actor and the spectator). Beckett constantly avoids being a spokesman of any stabilized social rules. Enhancing the position of darkness to the level of becoming the most prominent image on the stage, he seeks to make invalid the signifying system or a clear inference to the external world. The expression of darkness is accompanied with Beckett’s theatrical technique of minimalism that is to make the stage decors as sparse as possible. But only sparseness and darkness are insufficient to express Beckett’s idea of nothing, the stage space has to be inconceivable and non-conceptualized lest it should be simply reduced to a certain meaning for the self-centered domain. Thus Beckett avoids “references to time and place”
and lets go of the “authorial power and interpretive omnipotence over a solid, given reality”16
16 Heuval points out that because Beckett refutes the “classic realism” (3) and thus he draws on the expression of a bare and dark stage space. The classic realism emphasizes its illusionism, which is constructed by the universal reality and is in conformity to “prevailing discourses and reading strategies” (ibid.). The specific dominant discourse in the classic realism often diverts the spectators’ viewpoints from differences to consensus, to which men live a re-made existence. The signifying system is so overarching that each individual would be represented in the impersonal “Presence” (4-5).
In addition, Michael Worton also observes that Beckett dares to question the conventional structure and reasserts that the play is to “offer a mimesis or representation of reality that recognizes and inscribes the formlessness of existence without attempting to make it ‘fit’ any model” (74). This indicates that the style of representation that acknowledges the “formlessness” in reality is a mode named as “new realism” (Heuval 16), in which various realities are accommodated. Heuval thinks that diverse realities in form of “expressionism” or
“self-conscious theatricality” can help to present the sense of contradiction “that informs contemporary experience” (ibid.). New realism, in a sense, becomes a mode of performance that strides between modernism
(Heuval 81). By doing this he creates the non-identifiable stage space, which is of help for him to transcend the judgment of the established convention. In other words, since a realistic stage design conditions the performance to a conterminous event, Beckett devalues the straightforwardness of full representation in the theatre in order to search for a “new mode of reality” (Cohn 3). Any chronological structure is deconstructed in the primitive scene of darkness.
Beckett puts the actor and the spectator in the primitive scene of darkness that exists before consciousness17 (the actor and spectator are deprived of consciousness). In the stage space the reality is not the “subordinate reality” constituted by intentional objectification of things. On the contrary, the stage space is the “primary reality” that is presupposed for the
“subordinate reality.” For Beckett the theatrical reality is the primary reality constituted by the primary relation of the self and the Other. I will further account for the primary reality by examining the function of the stage decors. Then we can look into the theatricality (which is disclosed through the design of the stage space) in the theatre in order to see the interaction between the primary reality and the subordinate one.
The number of décors on stage is sparse and must be designed to the most specific degree. They are designed in a non-referential realm. Thus they don’t provide any clue for the actor or the spectator to apprehend “what’s happening” (E 17) on the stage, but are embedded in the darkness to confuse people’s consciousness. The decors render their effect without recourse to their ordinary use. For instance, in Endgame, the wheels of the chair are not movable, even after they are oiled (the action of oiling proves to be just an unnecessary trifle);
the telescope is used for watching “nothing” outside; Hamm’s glasses are a redundant for a blind man; the sand for the couple’s torsos is of no matter; the only exit on the stage,
and postmodernism, because it blends “the qualities of [classic] realism with more adventurous styles” (ibid.).
By doing this, Beckett’s play is flexible and able to “voice …uncertainty, and alienation” (Heuval 15). Both Worton and Heuval regard Beckett’s play as a mode that can “accommodate the mess” (this is Beckett’s wordings, qtd. in Heuval 15), or in Dearlove’s phrase, “accommodate the chaos” (9).
17 See Katharine Worth, Samuel Beckett’s Theatre: Life Journeys (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 33, 34, 37.
according to Beckett, is the only one door for Clov to head for his kitchen, and therefore functions not as an exit but as an entry into another “room,” “cage” or “cell”—these spaces are by definition similar in their connotation of confinement. The fake dog is reified as a paralyzed listener, confounded and dumb, unable to make any response. In this kind of theatre, there are shapes of the objects without internal meanings (because each object is disjunctive from the established and definite interpretation) for the actor and the spectator who are deprived of their intentionality in the dark.
In addition, most of the time the decors are dissolved into the darkness, so their disappearance or vague appearance disables the actor and the spectator from seeing clearly. It is as if the actor/spectator were viewing nothing. Therefore the most impressive image of the stage space is the darkness, the emptiness, and the nothingness. The performance is almost the one that makes the absence presentable. The actor/spectator receives nothing, possesses nothing, and even the luminosity of the actor on the stage is compressed by the darkness into the nothingness, the totality.
The sense of void on the stage space makes the actor and the spectator unconsciously focus their attention on the stage as such18.Since Beckett’s stage design does not refer to any representational epoch, it should not be considered a mirror that reflects life. So the stage space is almost a well-nigh presentation of itself. For Beckett, this kind of (re)presentation of the stage space, which tends to reach the proximity of the actual stage space, pinpoints the fake reality of the theatre (that advocates the function of theatre to represent the reality). By
18 Here Endgame is taken as example for the analysis of the theatricality of the stage space. Hugh Kenner suggests that the stage space of Endgame is the set as the actual stage space before the spectator, and “the set does not represent” (Kenner 121). Steven Connor further asserts that although the stage space is almost a presentation itself, it “still requires representation of some kind” because it is an imaginary space different from the actual stage space in reality that people rehearse (Connor 142). According to Connor, the stage space is irreducible only if it ceases to be itself. At this point, Jonathan Kalb also comments that Beckett “really represents a third category…because of the way he renders the presentational and representational indistinguishable” (Kalb 38).
doing this the performance emphasizes the interaction19 between the actor and the spectator instead of appealing to the emotional charge of the actor/spectator. In this way Beckett intends to blur the line that separates the reality/the theatre20, and life/performance. As noted in my previous section, Beckett revivifies his creative energy as he is committed to performance because the performance is the infinity to which the self searches for a new birth.
Since the boundary of the reality and the theatre is obscure, the primary reality, i.e., the relation of the self and the Other shown in the stage space, can be transported to the domain of the reality. In this way, the primary reality in Beckett’s theatre places an opposition to our reality (which is “subordinate reality” constituted by objectification), and awakens the actor and the spectator to recognize the primary relation. Furthermore, because the primary reality is not based on the intentional thematization or objectification, Beckett does not intend to build up another self-centered territory in order to subvert the subordinate reality. His performance is to open the dimension of the infinity which gives the finite reality a transworldly perspective.
For Beckett, performance that is a “theatrical event” (Xerxes Mehta 182) takes place as it departs from the finite reality to the infinite performing domain. Beckett extends the function of the stage space to be an irreducible medium by relating it to the finite reality as well as to the infinite performance. In this sense, the stage reality is the primary reality and the stage time is the time in relation to the infinity, the Other. Hence in each performance the director, the actor and the spectator are obligated to respond to the Other in order to reconfirm their subjectivity, in this case, not the one of self-reliance. To explicate further, while being involved in the performance, the subject in the theatre claims its existence first by feeling that
19 Since things are almost dissolved in the darkness, the spectator sees nothing on the stage space, but the nothingness is not pure nothing. This is the primordial phenomenon of the reality of the stage space which Beckett wants to introduce to the audience, instead of showing them the light. In the darkness the dim light appears not for the audience to view the performance comfortably, but to remind them that they should be alert to the perilous condition of the actor’s existence on the stage space, because the darkness prevailing over the stage space seems to be devouring the actor at any time.
20 The reality mentioned in this paragraph refers to our daily life.
he is there alone and exposed. He feels a sense of horror aroused from the darkness that seems to be devouring him. This kind of existence, though being alone, frees the subject from the chaotic disorientations of the darkness. However, the sense of self-boredom also frightens him. Only when he encounters the Other can he obtain the meaning of existence and reclaim his subjectivity that depends on the Other. Although the encounter with the Other does not guarantee a pleasurable outcome, it is the ultimate authority that the self can rely on.
Furthermore, for the Other does not exist in the horizon of the self’s knowledge, it is unaccountable in the self’s whole life. In this sense, the Other and death are located in the same dimension. Is not the desire for the Other analogous to the desire for death? “Yes” could be Beckett’s answer. It is a death wish for rebirth, rather. We have seen in Beckett the fervent penchant for the unknowable desired. Likewise, in his performance the actor and the spectator are obligated to face the nothing—in the stage time they are dying for the Other.
The nebulous phenomenon is the “infinite emptiness” (E 28), the “nightmare” (Mehta 171), or “a kind of lumpish materiality of nonobjective forms” (Herbert Blau 61) that makes the actors and the decors indiscernible and creates a sense of indeterminacy.21 Because in the indeterminacy the actor/spectator makes himself present in front of the Other, he is not free to refute the imposition of the Other. The Other always outwits the actor/spectator, so that it cannot be absorbed into “the empire of sameness” (Davis 40). Even though the Other exists prior to the self’s consciousness, already grounding a relation to the self, he ‘invites” (TI 218) the self rather than coerces him into making a response. The Other is not a totalizing violence that assimilates the self into his domain in the hope of “offsetting the shock the alterity
21 About the indeterminacy of the darkness, James Knowlson and Katharine Worth provide their insightful observations. Knowlson states: “[A]ll Beckett’s people [Beckett himself included?] are in the most profound sense, exiles, excluded from some inner reality of the self, which, if it exists at all…that it should, would lie outside the dimensions of time and space…Darkness is then understandably to be feared as well as earnestly desired” (qtd. in David Pattie 142, italics added). Or like Worth suggests: “The enveloping dark […] is a disturbing force in Beckett’s theatre, though there are many hints that it could be the source of a relief or creative renewal so deep that it would constitute a new dimension” (44). From their observations, the darkness serves as an enigmatic source that not only brings forth desire but also evokes dread.
[otherness]” (Davis 40). So the actor/self dislodges from the fixated position with himself, but does not become only a flowing object immersed in the darkness. That is, the Other exists and props up the self’s subjectivity by offering an account for the self (who is in the independent existence) that he has been involved in the primary relation. Thus the sense of indeterminacy, though it calls forth terror, also confirms the “unicity” (TI 219) of the self-separation from Being (totality), sustaining the self’s subjectivity.
Hence in performing the darkness, Beckett, with desire as much as with terror, puts the actor, the spectator, or even himself into the experiment. Such an experiment is a terrifying journey that the actor, the spectator, and Beckett himself are not absolutely free in self-enjoyment, but are relevantly free to respond to the Other, no matter to what extent. In opposition to the absolute freedom, the freedom that depends on the Other can absolve the self from itself, and thus enable him to be a free agent as such. In this sense, Beckett’s performance grants the actor/spectator the subjective freedom that is not limited by the physical resistance22 or by the intellectual limit (which might happen to the actor/spectator;
for instance, they are perplexed by the enigmatic character or the unintelligible language), but frees the self radically from Being.
To speak further, that the self independence is produced in the self-separation is possible only because the Other is there. Since the Other is irreconcilable to the self-centered terrain, the relation between the self and the Other emerges as a disruption that cannot be eliminated or it causes a disproportion that cannot be offset, and thus makes possible the self-separation.
Although the freedom of enjoying things comes into being as the self-separation occurs, it is made possible only if the Other also exists and serves as the impossibility of being mastered by the self so that the freedom can be free (from Being). Hence the subjective freedom is
22 The physical limitation always happens to Beckettian actors. For example, in Endgame the actors have to play by being handicapped, by making mechanical action, or by being restricted in the trash can. As observed, the physical restriction is not to limit the actor’s freedom (I will later expound the actor’s freedom in the following sections).
