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Home > Organum > Quotes
Wednesday, 08 October 2008
Quotes: Herbert Blau
When the theatre is distinguished from the other arts, we usually hear
of "living theatre," or the interplay of actor and audience, but these
undeniable banalities tend to disguise the one inalienable and arcane
truth of theatre, that the living person performing there may die in front
of your eyes, and is in fact doing so. The other perversity of theatre is
that somehow we want to watch it happening, or the imitation that seems to
conceal it. ...
Herbert Blau
Blooded Thought (1982)
Posted at 8.24 am in /Organum/Quotes
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Home > Organum > Quotes
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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