Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Thursday, 24 January 2008
Suggested Reading: Samuel Beckett
The Deborah Warner/Fiona Shaw
production of Happy Days, running at BAM through 2 February,
has given rise to many positive reviews -- but is it Beckett? Rainer
Hanshe, in his essay "Stoic Nihilism and the Beauty of Oblivion" for the
online journal Hyperion, uses the occasion to offer extended
thoughts on Beckett's contemporary reputation in American culture. After
considering this production and the American canonisation of Beckett as
some kind of aesthetic saint (and highbrow Dr. Phil) since Beckett's death
in 1989, Hanshe turns to the urge of performers and directors to
"reinterpret," counter to Beckett's wishes, his theatrical work:
To all of these middling directors and actors, however, Beckett is constricting. If they were to perform Beethoven's 5th, they would want to change the key of the symphony "just to hear what it would sound like." It would be "an interesting experiment." At this point, experimentation is resorted to or relied on out of lack of aesthetic muscle. Of the numerous recordings that exist of Beethoven's late string quartets, Edward Beckett, who performs frequently as a flautist, noted that "every interpretation is different, one from the next, but they are all based on the same notes, tonalities, dynamic and tempo markings. We feel justified in asking the same measure of respect for Samuel Beckett's plays." For those who refuse such respect, in their desire to infect Beckett's work with novelties or alter it according to whims not in harmony with the play, what they reveal is not the limits of his work, but the limits of their own vision and of what they become when they are confronted with boundaries. It is easy to be "creative" when given every license but rarely does this result in something so singular. The true test of a creator’s abilities is in the measure against a boundary.
But this is only part of a much longer meditation on Beckett, Nietzsche's vision of art and the role that literature itself plays in the character of Happy Days' Winnie. As an antidote to a current common conception of Beckett as some kind of hope-dealer, it's worthwhile to examine once more one of the most oft-quoted passages of Beckett's work, from the last page of his 1950 novel The Unnamable:
I'll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Hanshe's essay reminds us that those final seven words can be read in a variety of ways, only one of them an assertion of courage. They are also, in the musical decrescendo cadence of this passage, a dying of the light, a tortured expression of inevitable painful existence towards an inevitable death. And, too, a third perspective: that the narrator does, indeed, "go on," but as a being-in-words, as a linguistic memoir of suffering and pain -- as the "stain upon the silence" that Beckett wished to leave as his legacy. It is in this last sense that the imposition of directorial arrogance upon Beckett's work most desecrates the work itself. As the writer's nephew points out, Beckett's dramatic texts (and texts like it) are unique in that each word, even the words of the stage directions, counts. Unlike most plays, you can't just go through the texts with a black marker, eradicating the stage directions (to provide room for directorial and interpretive "creativity"); in many cases you'd have little play left. If one respects Beckett (at least, if one asserts that one respects Beckett), one must also respect that being-in-words that his dramatic texts represent as well. If this is too much of a constraint for those "middling directors and actors" whom Hanshe castigates, well, there's nothing stopping them from writing and devising their own new texts and productions -- writing and staging their own poetic visions. And more power to them. But they don't need Beckett for that; paper and pens are available at most local corner stores. And Beckett doesn't need them.
Hanshe's rich and thoughtful essay is available in full here.
Posted at 8.33 am in /Drama
Permanent link to this story
