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Sunday, 17 August 2008
Quotes: Schopenhauer on Stage
In her biography of Austrian dramatist and novelist Thomas Bernhard,
Gitta Honegger discusses Bernhard's theatrical practice:
Schopenhauer, in his World as Will and Representation [WWR],
offers
the conceptual tool for Bernhard's poetics of comedy:
The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and
when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a
tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For
the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment,
the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all
brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick;
they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. The never-fulfilled
wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate,
the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and
death at the end, always gives us a tragedy. Thus, as if fate wished to
add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the
woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic
characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish
characters of a comedy. [WWR 1:322]
In Bernhard's dramatrugy the serious seeps through the cracks in his
split-screen comedian's routine. The narrator sees himself in action
or rather in the action of being inactive, which captures the underlying
action of his on-going battle with a terminal illness. Between what
he does and what he wants to do and what lies behind what he doesn't do
and what he will end up doing, which is writing a text about not writing a
text, lies the abyss, or, as Schopenhauer sees it, "a very great
incongruity between our concepts and objective reality." [WWR 2:99] It
rings
with the mocking laughter of those who watch what we are doing, which
Bernhard anticipates as his most merciless scourge.
Most important, The World as Will and Representation provides
the radical dramaturgical model for Bernhard's revisionist view of the
Shakespearean world as a stage conceived, perceived, and manipulated
from within the individual's skull as playwright, director, and
audience. Schopenhauer's concept of Vorstellung, as the
representation of an all-pervasive will, provides Bernhard with a
paradigm that he continues to mine for all its signifying potential from
idea to representation to performance. While the English term
"representation" has a performative aspect, the German Vorstellung
refers directly to a theatrical performance. Bernhard, obsessed by
the histrionics of existence, makes Schopenhauer the butt of his own
philosophy, as it were. Bernhard's world is a Vorstellung in every
respect. It is based on the philosopher's vision of the world as a
representation of the thinking subject, who simultaneously projects
himself into his imagined world, where he performs and watches himself in
performance perched in the private box of his mind. Pathetic enough to
believe that it is he who masterminded the whole spectacle in fulfillment
of his desires, he is in fact nothing but a puppet manipulated by a
Schopenhauerian will: " ... for the will performs the great tragedy and
comedy at its own expense, and is also its own spectator." [WWR 1:331]
[Emphasis added]
And, nota bene, the title of this study of Beckett's late plays and prose.
Posted at 2.20 pm in /Organum/Quotes
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Sunday, 17 August 2008
Organum
Nightlanguage; nightwork. A common trope of near-death
experiences is the invitation of the dying by the dead, by heaven, into the light – a not inappropriate trope for
the contemporary American theatre, which similarly draws its audience into
a death of imagination through the light of its entertainment.
As the illumination of the electric light has more and more thrust
theatre into its status as a primarily night-time art (both the
Greeks and Shakespeare wrote their plays for a daytime theatre structure),
the contemporary theatre, through its fear of the dark and the night, has
become brighter, despite the fact that the art of theatre is now properly
an art of the dark, its proper language a Joycean "nightlanguage." David
Ian Rabey in a 2006 interview with Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe draws
dramatic language and dramatic work together:
... I favor drama which works in terms of what Brendan Kennelly terms
nightenglish which reaches beyond reason in its surprising and speculative
interrogative presences, rather than the dayenglish of rational
communication and explanation which is usually predicated on some
utilitarian terms, beyond those of the theatre itself. ...
The demands of what might, appropriately in this context, be termed my
"day job" inevitably tend to take precedence: the busyness of exposition
and explanation in teaching students, the placating of bureaucratic
demands which are ... all I suppose in the service of the (sometimes
heartwarmingly) ludicrous attempt to make a living and raise a family.
But then there is the nightwork, in individual imaginings or
interpersonal encounters and rehearsal, which yields its own promptings,
and becomes resentful if denied for too long. ... [Emphasis
added]
What the dark of the night (and the dark of the theatre) requests is an
experience beyond the merely visual, the object distanced from us but
recognisable; in the dark, in the night, denied our daytime eyes, the
touch of our flesh is hyper-sensitised; what is it that we are
feeling, what impinges upon our bodies unrecognisable and unseen? A
language and perspective which underscores that fleshed status: that
provokes our imagination to unexpected because unseen sites of
experience.
The light of entertainment is perverse because it means the death of
the individual imagination and possibility; it may be that we are so
passionately in love with the flickering pixel, with the light that
pretends to show us truth (though a corporately-constructed truth out
of the culture factories of mass media and capitalism), that we can no
longer feel a touch on our own flesh. The entirely visual field of the
hysterically kinetic and hyperdestructive videogame and film, subsumed
in lighted death.
The trope is corrupted but ecstatically so. Now, night and darkness are
life and possibility: the theatre as a night-time art is in its
proper place. The speaking flesh in the dark seduces. We can't see its
source; is it speaking to us? Is that the speaker's cool hand we feel on
our forearm? Of course death and pessimism still play around the dark
night, as they must, and it is the dark perhaps that we daytime beings
fear the most. We are most at risk there. And there is something to this,
that the dark night too is the refuge of death as well as life. But we
must resist the urge to moralise and cut off the possibility of a more
ecstatic existence.
Can a word emerging from the dark seduce and excite us, even when the
speaking body is distant? Most emphatically, yes, though no one can answer
in the positive without having experienced that himself. In this
recognition we realise the power of language, for ourselves and in
others.
Instead of inviting the audience into the light of the stage, the art
of theatre invites them into the nightworld surrounding it, defining
that nightworld with its negative illuminatory space.
It is this sublime ecstasy that Schopenhauer experiences in aesthetic,
musical and theatrical epiphany, an epiphany verging on the mystical. It
is a nighttime ecstasy, fully charged with the consciousless will, and
containing within it the deepest wounds and most ecstatic caresses of the
fleshed word. This is, perhaps, what those who condemn these
so-called philosophical pessimists refuse to see, whether it's from
sloppy reading, or from only a glancing familiarity with the primary text
itself, or from judging these "pessimists" (including Beckett and
Bernhard) having read only a paragraph in the secondary literature here or
a bookjacket there. They misread deliberately, or dismiss superficially,
for many of these are cold and impatient wonders. They fear the
possibilities of the life of the night. Whereas even Schopenhauer, giving
life, fathered a daughter ...
Posted at 2.01 pm in /Organum
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