Superfluities Redux

On culture and theatre, by George Hunka

On Samuel Beckett
2003-2008

Quadruple Feature

Some intriguing visual and aesthetic parallels in the first two YouTube videos below.

First, David Tudor performs John Cage's 4'33". The crawl at the bottom of the screen reads: "You are invited to turn down the volume of your TV set, and listen to the ambient sounds present wherever this program is performed."

Tudor relates an amusing anecdote at the end of the performance; you should, of course, turn your volume back up for that.

Second, Jeremy Irons performs Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu:

Quiet meditative works for a quiet meditative moment.

Third, there's this, very very rare video footage of Samuel Beckett himself, speaking about a television adaptation of his play What Where and his interest in "getting rid of every superfluity" from the original theatrical text. Although both the video and audio quality aren't quite pristine, it is nonetheless a brief (only 38-second-long) glimpse at this interview-shy writer. It was shot in Paris in 1987, two years before his death:

This brings back more than a few memories; What Where was one of the first Beckett plays I saw onstage, during its 1983 New York premiere directed by Alan Schneider (the New York premiere of Ohio Impromptu was a part of the same evening). Such is the way the stages of our lives are set. There's more on What Where, including information on the 1985 Stuttgart television adaptation to which Beckett refers, at the Wikipedia page devoted to the play.

Beckett's Catastrophe was the third play to round out that 1983 evening. A version of that play, directed by David Mamet and featuring Harold Pinter, John Gielgud and Rebecca Pidgeon, rounds out this quartet below:

From the Organum

Time and history drive their nails, their fangs, deep into the present body: Krapp's vision and his dream of the punt, mother and daughter of Footfalls, inescapable trauma of Not I; the whirlwind of the past that undoes the family of The Homecoming, the old men of No Man's Land, the trio of Old Times. The theatrical past is the personal past for the dramatist, he draws all through his words and unsuccessfully attempts to pin them down, again and again, with the failure of his antecedents in living memory, in some kind of ephemeral present. (All touch and pain memory of touch and pain; receding, left with desire, that same desire for sensation and the feel of the breath on the skin. This is the dynamic of the theatrical moment, the catastrophe of recognition, the knowledge that all falls dark again at the end of the play, a light which does not call attention to itself remains invisible; a light thrown on the stage is that Apollonian consciousness, it pierces, and only pierces when surrounded by the passive dark.) So then theatre takes on a Proustian significance: recapturing in present moment that which is ever disappeared, ever past. Because unrealisable in quotidian life, only realisable between the covers of a book, or between the curtain that rises, then falls.

Light and dark are the simple antitheses of theatre, along with sound and silence, present and past, the end is ever near and scripted, rehearsed over and over for a useless moment of performance. Revolution lies in the deliberate shaft of light and the deliberate word, sculpted by the dark and silence surrounding them. The light falls on a tortuous moment, the word is dragged from the body in its beatific expression of the spirit that lies within the self. The word, like the light, nestles in the dark and silence for only its so brief moment, before it dissipates.

So simple words, for all. So simple light, for all. Bodied speech and presence are impressions on the mute and empty silence. The project and discipline is to suggest these impressions, in some unfinished (because unfinishable) manner, upon the spectator and the auditor. To express a universality, one returns to these basics: instead of inventing new languages (a heinous project, we're all trapped in our languages), one strips one's language and gesture down to the simplest, most elemental traces. Always le mot juste, of course, in its multisyllabic splendor our dictionary is as much a gold mine as our omnidimensional history. But art is a contraction, a laser, not an expansion, a floodlight. The laser cuts in its hot precision. The floodlight cools and comforts, and pretends not to recognize night.

Not I [Excerpt]

Billie Whitelaw performs Samuel Beckett's Not I (1972), courtesy YouTube:

Enoch Brater on the film in Beyond Minimalism: "The filming of Not I for television validates, not surprisingly, the appeal of this piece as a work for live theater. When, in 1976, the BBC received Beckett's permission to screen the play for home viewing, the technical problems of television adaptation were quickly apparent. The small screen simply could not accommodate the expanses of darkness integral to proscenium effect. In the first run-through, Mouth and Auditor were reduced and cramped on the television screen; it was obvious that this approach was not going to work at all. A more effective adaptation, one more in tune with the limits and possibilities of a quite different visual medium, was clearly needed. The BBC asked Beckett if it would be possible for the camera to zero in on Mouth alone, omitting any picture of Auditor. Intrigued by the idea of a close-up, the playwright, always open to the adventure of exploring what a given medium can be made to do, agreed. What resulted from this decision was a stunning performance by Billie Whitelaw in what emerged as an entirely different play. On screen the actress' teeth, as in T. S. Eliot's 'Hysteria,' 'were only accidental stars with a talent for squad drill.' Like the persona of the same prose-poem, the viewer is inevitably 'drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles.' In close-up color Beckett's protagonist looked more like a vagina than a mouth. So obscene and frightening was the visual image, so horrifying and insistent was the verbal onslaught, that the play, originally shot in color, had to be neutralized by broadcast in black and white. Even then, Not I as a television play is so entirely shocking, so sensational in its effect on the viewer, that its merits as a work of dramatic literature seem to pass its audience by completely. On television Not I is, nevertheless, spectacular, though reports that Beckett prefers this version to the original have been largely exaggerated." (p. 35)

Shakespeare, Beckett, Pinter

Lear standing alone on the heath is a universal figure of tragic human consciousness -- shorn of the trappings of royalty, of the community, he recognizes the horrifying mockery of the essence of humanity that royalty and community constitute. His enemies are his offspring: love rendered meaningless by death, treachery, his own illusions. Only a small, seemingly insignificant gesture here and there, such as the loosening of a shirt's button that seems to constrain the final throes of death, offers compassionate respite. So Lear, so Hamm -- the reluctant ministrations of his manservant (his son?) Clov still keep them together, alone against an empty world; it isn't Hamm who shunts his own parents aside, but time and aging and the decay of the body, the vehicle of humanity; an ashcan is his own next stop. Pinter's own characters (even to the point of parents and children; procreation is no relief, not when the children are Lenny, Teddy and Joey of The Homecoming, the psychotic brothers Aston and Mick of The Caretaker, or the surrogate sons Foster and Briggs of the playacted marriage of Hirst and Spooner in No Man's Land) are not at all dissimilar. His torturers and victims exist in unnamed countries; this lack of names renders them universal. His simple tables, chairs and bare rooms parallel the bare heath of Lear, the sparsely furnished bunker in which Hamm and Clov spend the last days of life on earth.

What Pinter shares with Shakespeare and Beckett is an increasingly uncomfortable truth in a consumerist age: that all the money, all the success, all the nationalistic or racial pride, all the conviction in our own victimhood, all the conviction in the unerring rightness of our own cause, all the possessions we can collect, all the children we can produce, cannot possibly fill the abyss we pretend to ignore every day. To come face to face with the terrorism of the world, be it a sudden war in Iraq or the plunging of a jet plane into a tall building, the last thing we should do is to pretend that we couldn't do the same thing ourselves, in the most geopolitical or the most intimate contexts. The most radical, the most revolutionary act that Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter suggest is to recognize and accept this abyss, and that, to do so, we needn't do more than glance into the nearest mirror.

This is, to judge from other recent reactions to the Nobel announcement today, something of a minority report. Says the apparently Europe-based "thewebloge" in the comments section of Garrett Eisler's Playgoer,"Interesting that you seem to be much more excited about this in NY than we are over here"; a second anonymous comment notes, "Always great when a playwright wins. But I have to confess, Pinter's work has always left me unmoved. Typical straight guy sadism, emptiness, hollowness of life. Paved the way for idiots like McDonagh. Beckett's legacy deserved better." For sheer name-calling and ideology-blinkered reductionism of the man's career, however, the winner is Roger Kimball's grotesque comment at Armavirumque, which makes me glad I removed this blog from my roll recently. "Politically correct sermonizing?" Physician, heal thyself.

Pinter's Nobel acceptance speech, "Art, Truth and Politics," can be viewed here.

The Class that Possesses

It's an interesting linguistic trope, this: that Shakespeare's work or any expression can be said to properly belong to any group of people (be they theatre practitioners, or academicians, or critics); or that one can lay siege to an expression, grasp it with both hands, and wrest it from the experience of those who also may lay claim to it. Those who utilize the trope may rationalize or excuse this position by explaining that it's merely a rhetorical device, evidence of stridency, but the choice of rhetorical device reveals the unconscious, unexamined ideology of those who opt to utilize that device in defense of that possession: they are making a property claim: they are capitalists, through and through, who own, and use the property they own as they see fit, belittling the claims of others who would like to examine that possession. In possession there is moral right and authority.

The ideology underlying this vocabulary is that of a possessory class, a class that can say an expression is "mine" or "ours": experience as property. It delineates the worldview of those who use such words. And within that trope of possession lies moral, ethical, and value judgements. A Beckett text belongs not properly to the page but to the stage, the argument may run, and stage practitioners should be allowed to utilize or contextualize this text in some romantic notion that in restaging Beckett's words through our own "talent" (if that's what we choose to call it) we are serving the play much more than Beckett himself, or his estate, would have us do. We, as theatre practitioners, are right. Beckett and his estate are wrong. We seize the text and Beckett himself be damned. No longer "his," we call it "ours." We impose that interpretation of Beckett on our audiences: the class that rules over interpretation; the audience our peons, who consume what we tell them is true.

Beckett was as much of a man of the theatre as was Shakespeare; he knew what he was doing, and he knew what he was doing when he included his sparse stage directions as part of the dramatic text: the reader of a play directs this play himself, hears it, sees it, in his own imagination. Dramatists allow their plays to be published so that each individual reader can be his own interpretive artist. Read as literature or staged as literature, the play belongs to no one but the individual who experiences it: not to directors or actors, nor to playwrights alone. But the playwright, as he who arranges the words, is first. Not I is not possible as a play until Beckett writes it; King Lear not possible as theatre until Shakespeare offers the expression built in words. As the aesthetic experience inheres in the individual auditor or reader, that is where meaning eventually lies, to whom the experience properly "belongs": not the professors, nor the denizens of the rehearsal room, but the individual alone in the study or alone, even when sitting with others, in the dark of a theatre.

Samuel Beckett: Literary Revolutionary

Samuel Beckett's posthumous reputation and deification as literary icon have been based on a misreading of his work by humanist artists and critics, according to Pascale Casanova, an associate researcher at the Centre for Research in Arts and Language and a French literary critic. "Beckett has only ever been read as the messenger or oracle of the truth of 'being,'" she writes in her book Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, first published in Paris in 1997 but only this month published in Gregory Elliott's English translation by Verso Books. "This heroic imagery has proved one of the surest ways to obscure the specificity of literary form, to refuse Beckett any aesthetic impulse, the search for a form therewith being reduced to an artifice unworthy of the quest for 'authenticity.'"

Instead, Casanova argues, Beckett's literary project, especially after the 1958 Krapp's Last Tape, had been to seek an abstraction of literary form and meaning. This abstraction, however, is not without its Adornonian qualities: the origins of Beckett's revolutionary impulse, Casanova writes, were in (historically) the Irish Literary Revival, (philosophically) the work of Berkeley and Geulincx, and (aesthetically) the paintings of Beckett's favorite modern painter, his close friend Bram van Velde: Casanova insists (as she does in her highly regarded The World Republic of Letters, which corrects and extends the cultural project of critics like Edward Said) that, indeed, the composition of these works, far from being sui generis, are in fact consciously rooted in their historical and aesthetic periods: that they are, far from being apart from the world, generated from within it. In so arguing, Casanova provides a convincing avenue into the seemingly more hermetic post-Krapp plays and novels, and thankfully divorces the aesthetic and cultural significance of Beckett's work from the worship of his ragged, graven image as contemporary artist.

Not only that, but finally, the full significance of these later works, especially the forbiddingly abstract Worstward Ho! and the gemlike later texts and plays, receive their full integration into 20th century literary history and represent Beckett as one of the most important theorists of a 21st century theatre and prose, even if that theory is contained in the texts themselves (and it quite explicitly is, Casanova argues).

Casanova sees Beckett as an abstract artist obsessed by questions not of existence itself but of a form in which this tragic existence might be elucidated; hence these texts' formal resemblance to the formal structures of contemporary music and painting. "The writings preceding 'the siege in the room' held hardly any interest for him from the 1950s onwards, since they fell short of solving (even in part) his equation," Casanova writes. "We know of Beckett's reservations about his first play, Waiting for Godot, and his irritation at the recognition it received throughout the world. He stated on several occasions that Godot was a 'bad play,' as if it was in some way 'obsolete' for him and its recognition simply the result of a misunderstanding that obscured his real literary enterprise." Casanova goes on to describe, quite concisely, this enterprise as it became clear to him over the decade following Krapp:

The suffering, despair or cruelty that are often regarded as constitutive of Beckett's writing fade once we understand their origin and logic. Furthermore, as Beckett seeks to put an end to the illusion of identification and psychological presuppositions that ground literary attachment, these moral catagories, which readers invest in the text solely on account of the psychologizing habits instilled by the usual cult of literature, tend to disappear in favour of the aesthetic pleasure afforded by a formal exercise at once virtuoso and completely consistent. His famous quarrels with actors or directors of his plays derived from this radical wish to eradicate the pathos of the theatrical mechanism. The systematic, avowed "de-psychologization" of instances of dialogue, which Beckett wanted to render rhythmical and musical, was obviously opposed to any species of empathic "interpretation" and "identification" by the actor with the character. [Emphasis mine -- GH]

Beckett's notebooks for his post-1958 productions of Godot underscore his obsession, as director, with the form of Godot's musical and visual possibilities; you'll find very little psychologizing or table work in these sketches and notes, which have more to do with time, duration, movement, timbre, color, costume, and light, than with a significating meaning or sympathy with any of the characters. That Beckett's productions of Godot have been emotionally affecting underscores the power of these aesthetic abstractions: the form of an arithmetical order in chaos as that form which dictates music, Casanova concludes, is the key to not only his later work but for a new culturally relevant interpretation of the early plays and texts as well.

Casanova's book provides instructive interpretations of such seemingly autobiographical early poems as "Home Olga" (I'm convinced, anyway, of Casanova's explication of its political and cultural originating impulse, as well as its biographical significance, that the poem doesn't open fully without its politics and culture and that it remains meaningful therefore without a biographical critical structure) and later texts; Casanova also helpfully locates the theory within and beyond Beckett's dramatic and "fictional" texts in the service of clarifying Beckett's mission to render a literature as abstract but affecting as the music and painting of the late 20th century. It's unlikely, I think, that Casanova's intepretation will find much ground among those playwrights and theatre artists who pay mere misunderstanding, self-serving lip service to Beckett's "genius," his "compassion," as brilliant and compassionate as he certainly is. But Casanova demonstrates that Beckett's true descendants aren't those who so rudely claim him for their own (as so many did in the centenary of his birth last year), but those who rather explicitly don't: in their formal, anti-ideological, anti-academic, anti-market projects, Barker, Foreman, Kane, and Crimp demonstrate far more of the qualities that drive Beckett's true mission, that render him a profoundly revolutionary artist. Political progressiveness and radicalism are meaningless, with profoundly shallow roots, without the metaphysical radicalism and abstraction that Beckett saw as his true accomplishment.

With any luck, Casanova's pioneering work will stake out a new ground for 21st century Beckett studies (as well as, one can hope, a 21st century theatre and dramatic practice to which he has been one of the leading lights), wresting his oeuvre from the traditional canonizers and rendering him a generative rather than a sui generis artist for a theatre and prose fallen into post-capitalist, academic, and professional desiccation. At least, until Casanova's own work and conclusions are co-opted by the post-capitalist academic and professional community; but then (as the ever-prophetic Adorno would indicate), isn't that what post-capitalism is all about?

Beckett at 100

Edward Albee had it right when he described some of the things that Samuel Beckett, who would have been 100 years old today, taught him: "I have learned that simplicity based on clarity and precision is essential to permitting complexity of thought without obfuscation. I have learned that a playwright must 'see' and 'hear' what is actually happening ... for in no other way will the audience be able to share the experience." But that's not all.

Central to Beckett's example, for me, is that he demonstrated that the personal interior landscape of consciousness is not only a worthy subject of theater, but a communicable and practical subject. Fortunately for all of us, he also demonstrated profound rigor and an absolute refusal to compromise, not only with his audiences and his collaborators, but with himself, asking no more of them than he did of his own talent. (Even here, he could forgive, he could accept that he often made missteps and corrected them.) In accepting that the delineation of the darkness of his own soul was inevitable, he made that expression meaningful, and gave all of us who have had the same misgivings about the wisdom and goodness of the cosmos and the race a comfort (though certainly not a relief) in his often garrulous Irish company.

Unfortunately it hasn't been Beckett's example that has been imitated by many of his disciples, but his novels and plays: bowler-hatted gentlemen, howling women, a parade of figures from his own life and his Irish youth. His figures are not ours, his consciousness is not ours, neither yours nor mine. Many of us have tried to imitate his cadences, his characters, his imagery, only to find to our regret that these cadences, characters and imagery are uniquely his own. But that would be the easy part; much easier to imitate the man's voice than to try to follow his uncompromising, painful example, which has no truck with the marketplace. Much easier than to construct our own figures and mythologies, cadences and characters and imagery, from our dreams and our pain and our past. And it takes years, because the ability to externalize the consciousness comes only with the experience of extended time, and a growing familiarity with the increasing presence of death and suffering, and its inevitability. You can't sell this, and you can't learn it; not all the reading in the world, nor any MFA program, can give you that.

Beckett hated America, its crowds and its noise and its business, all of the things that Americans like to believe make their country so wonderful and colorful; when he visited New York in the mid-1960s for the shooting of Film he couldn't wait to leave it again, enjoying few things about the experience other than, apparently, a baseball game, which fascinated him. No wonder that his most important followers here, Albee and Mark Rothko and John Cage and Morton Feldman and Richard Foreman, are obsessed with a silence and stillness that cut against the grain of the needless and endlessly distracting (for we endlessly crave to be distracted from ourselves) cacaphony of modern commercial culture. Since then it's only gotten worse.

Of all the secondary literature that's been produced about Beckett and his work it's a slim volume of curiosa that sits beside me this morning, a monograph-cum-memoir by Beckett's British publisher John Calder entitled The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. Calder was a close friend and knew Beckett very well, I leave the last words to him:

One of the great errors by which we live, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, is that the purpose of life is happiness. ... We are born, we live, and we die. In all this is the Will of nature, the Omni-Omni as the Unnamable calls it, and nature passes on that Will to all living things. Our purpose seems to be nothing more than to become a link in the chain whereby the creative impulse, or our DNA as we now know it to be chemically, is passed on to future life. ... We live, as Vladimir says, until we die and are forgotten. If there is an answer to life, it must be in caritas, a human willingness to share, to comfort, to be a good companion.

And of course we need two other things, and we find them both in Beckett: the courage of the stoics, who trained themselves to face without flinching that which is inevitable; and secondly, the wisdom to discard, not only the vanities of the world and the love of possessions, but our own sense of personal value. We can be grateful, because it is a panacea ... for the things we have recognized as interesting, beautiful and life-enhancing, that have made the burden a little easier, but they have no ultimate value in the immensity of time and space, and neither have any of us. Sadly, that even applies to Beckett himself, the producer of great aesthetic pleasure that has been a catharsis to his admirers everywhere.

Beckett's most important work shows us how to face and accept the inevitable and the importance of doing it with dignity. Seneca told Lucilius that the best way to avoid the fear of death was never to stop thinking about it. We know that we shall be nothing in the future, just as we were nothing in the past. We must also accept that we are nothing in the present, looked at by the eye of time, but that does not stop us from doing something, which may help others to endure their existence a little better and through the realization of their own nothingness, go on to help others in the same way. Only when that realization sinks in can we finally re-enter the void from which we came where there is "nohow on".

In His Own (and Others') Words

As a playwright, whenever I find myself discouraged, uninspired or otherwise down one of those personal cul-de-sacs that seem to be part of my psychic perambulations, I turn to Samuel Beckett. Not necessarily his work, which is sui generis and inimitable, though many have tried to prove otherwise, but to his life, which demonstrates the courage a writer might have in her or his uncompromising vision and the discipline with which one might pursue it. I've got my own personal reasons for reading Beckett's work (and it is to his work that I always turn first, again and again), quite another set of personal reasons for reminding myself of the life.

Beckett's biographer James Knowlson, working with his wife Elizabeth, has just compiled a volume of memoirs, Beckett Remembering/Remembering Beckett, published in celebration of Beckett's upcoming hundredth birthday and a companion volume to the definitive biography. In addition to the usual reminiscences by friends, family and colleagues, the book also includes valuable transcripts of interviews with Beckett conducted in the course of writing the biography, allowing Beckett to speak by himself, about himself, in his own words. Most of these transcripts relate to Beckett's life before 1945: his youth, his time at Trinity College Dublin, his European travels in the 1930s and finally his experience in the French Resistance during the Second World War.

The Beckett reflected in these pages is a thoughtful, compassionate if deeply imperfect man, tormented by a sense of guilt towards his family and the memory of a somewhat sterile and arrogant young manhood. Never entirely comfortable in the world (we have here again Beckett's unease in large groups and public situations), he nonetheless found a social home in that most communitarian of art forms, the theater, and the reader senses once again Beckett's profound distrust of academics and love of other artists, actors and actresses. Those who found him distant seem to be those who annoyed him most, those who felt (for the most superficial of reasons) that they had some kind of close personal sympatico with the man and his work, pestering him with questions and uninvited attentions, trying his patience and generosity; the others testify to his warmth, his wit, and his deeply personal concern for the travails of his friends, while also confessing that he could at times be demanding and opaque.

There is much valuable material here: Beckett's work with Rick Cluchey's prison theater program and his German theater collaborators is described first-hand by designers, directors and performers. Beckett can be heard discussing aesthetics with his translators Richard Seaver and Patrick Bowles, and there are valuable notes from the lectures he delivered on Racine at Trinity College in the early 1930s. There are, too, obviously gaps and omissions. Nothing, for example, from Beckett's long-time companion and wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, about whom Beckett once said, "I owe her everything," although the relationship suffered from about the 1960s onward; nothing, also, from any of his many other lovers over the years, including Barbara Bray, perhaps the great, most understanding love of the second half of his life.

Beckett was no saint; nor are any of us; fortunately for most of us, our imperfections and struggles won't be documented in tribute volumes published after our death. Beckett's life still stands as the story of a man who would not compromise his profound tragic sense, nor his life, faced with a world that held no meaning, though the experience and expression of this meaninglessness carried meaning enough for him. As he sat alone watching his plays in an empty theater (he rarely attended public performances of his own plays), he nonetheless reshaped and recrafted his vision: finessing the rougher outlines of his expression, these words and images appealed to him alone, make sense who will. And because Beckett was human, his concerns in some sense are those of all of us, his work continues to appeal and speak to those of us who have the patience to listen and watch. To look into the self, you must open your eyes wide and learn to see those things you might be more comfortable ignoring. The Knowlsons' book gives us the portrait of that artist, looking at himself.

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