Category Archives: Critique of tragedy

A critique of tragedy 26

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The Beckettian face: Billie Whitelaw in Play

The face in the theatre. The Athenian Theatre of Dionysus held approximately 12,000 people, necessitating the use of masks that exaggerated the facial features of the performers behind them. Although very few theatre workers today have such large auditoria at their disposal, the distance between spectator and performer remains great enough that performers continue to exaggerate their expressions (hence “mugging,” the root word of which is a slang synonym for “face”). Because the spectator has his full attention on the stage in front of him, these expressions are experientially magnified. Thoughtful directors realize this even today, that the smallest change in facial expression can communicate considerable information; in productions like those of The Wooster Group or Ivo van Hove’s Misanthrope at the New York Theatre Workshop a few seasons ago, video cameras digitize the face, magnify it, and re-present it in two dimensional form, calling the spectator’s attention to just those physiognomical changes. Even in the New York Theatre Workshop’s space, which seats only about 150, the distance between face and spectator necessitates magnification if the facial features and performaces are to demonstrate a full effect.

The human face is a unique performative instrument. Not only does it contain all of the sense organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin) through which our representations of the world outside of us are created, it is also the unique object of subjectivity: that immediate object which maintains a delicate balance between subjective expression (through the mouth that speaks, the musculature of the face) and empirical perception. The face expresses and receives impressions. In such guise it is a fetish for the personality within, behind it: another mask behind which is the protean, undefinable self.

Though most auditoria are too large to fully exploit the face’s possibilities, I work in theatres of 50 seats or less, where exaggeration is neither necessary nor welcome, which offers me as a director and a writer the performer’s face as a uniquely expressive instrument. Although the body moves as well, it is the face that can contain the dramatic event, moment to moment. It is surprising to me that more directors don’t recognize this possibility of the human face, especially in these smaller theatres, where both physical and facial gestures tend to be far too large for the room: grimaces and grins, rather than moments of tender intimacy between performer and spectator.

The next exhibition at the brilliant Neue Galerie here in New York is Franz Xaver Messerschmidt 1736–1783: From Neoclassicism to Expressionism, which will be of particular interest to anyone interested in the human face. Messerschmidt’s heads and busts render three-dimensionally the remarkable range of expression possible in the face; his “character heads” led, as the title of the show indicates, to the advances of German Expressionism a century later.

Even though they have the virtue of three-dimensionality, nonetheless they are crafted and cold, unlike the mutable and warm human face itself. In the chamber theatre of a theatre minima, the face takes center stage, its features of particular power, even moreso than the human body; if the body is immediate object, the face is the conduit between the subjective and objective, the noumenal and phenomenal words. “Perhaps the fact that [my lips] move is more significant … than the words which come through them,” said Ruth in The Homecoming. The chamber theatre allows us to “read” these lips, not only for the words that come through them, but for those as well in the language of lyrical and dramatic tragedy.

And, in such a small confined space as a 50-seat theatre, to offer the face itself as sacrifice to the audience. In his discussion of the surfaces of the body, especially the face, Alphonso Lingis in The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common describes what is offered by performer and spectator in the metaphorical arena of the theatre space itself, for the face is within that metaphorical reach, can more easily cross that distance between stage and audience, the eye taking the place of the hand. I hope it is also clear that the performer caresses with her words, her movements, her face as well, and that in this tension between performer and spectator lies the possibility for tragic recognition:

The surfaces of the other, as surfaces of susceptibility and suffering, are felt in the caressing movement that troubles my exploring, manipulating, and expressive hand. For the hand that caresses is not investigating, does not gather information, is not a sense organ. It extends over a surface where the informative forms soften and sink away as it advances, where agitations of alien pleasure and pain surface to meet it and move it. The hand that caresses does not apprehend or manipulate; it is not an instrument. It extends over a surface which blocks the way to the substance while giving way everywhere; it extends over limbs which have abandoned their utility and intentions. The hand that caresses does not communicate a message. It advances repetitively, aimlessly, and indefatigably, not knowing what it wants to say, where it is going, or why it has come here. In its aimlessness it is passive, in its agitation it no longer moves itself; it is moved by the passivity, the suffering, the torments of pleasure and pain, of the other.

What recognizes the suffering of the other is a sensitivity in my hands, in my voice, and in my eyes, which finds itself no longer moved by my own imperative but by the movements of abandon and vulnerability of the other. This sensitivity extends not to order the course and heal the substance of the other, but to feel the feeling of the other. The movement of this sensitivity recognizes the surfaces of the other as a face appealing to me and putting demands on me. It recognizes the imperative that commands the other ordering me also. What recognizes the suffering of the other is a movement in one’s hand that turns one’s dexterity into tact and tenderness; a movement in one’s eyes that makes it lose sight of its objectives and turn down in a recoil of respect; and a movement in one’s voice that interrupts its coherence and its force, confuses its concepts and its reasons, and troubles it with murmurs and silence. (Lingis 31-32)

A critique of tragedy 25

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What Schopenhauer declared about individuals — that they are an expression of the blind will to existence and well-being — is at present becoming apparent with regard to social, political and racial groups in the whole world. That is one of the reasons why his doctrine appears to me as the philosophic thought that is a match for reality. Its freedom from illusions is something it shares with enlightened politics; the power of conceptual expression, with theological and philosophic tradition. There are few ideas that the world today needs more than Schopenhauer’s — ideas which in the face of utter hopelessness, because they confront it, know more than any others of hope.

Max Horkheimer (translated by Robert Kolben)
“Schopenhauer Today” (1967)

The origin of tragedy. A few years ago, in a hospice center outside of Philadelphia, I watched my father die. Although he had been suffering from emphysema for several decades, it was not this that finally led to his death. For months, he had not had the desire nor the appetite to eat, except for the occasional hard candy and, more importantly, his daily allotment of blackberry brandy. This, coupled with increasingly large doses of morphine, dulled the pain that had begun with the necrosis of his intestinal tract, which had recently begun to perish of disuse. His gastrointestinal system was the first to fail, the others followed in short stead. This man, who stood in his prime at six-feet tall, could not have weighed more than 80 pounds at his death. I sat at his bedside alone, though he’d been unconscious upon my arrival the day before (the doctors having admitted that he was no longer “really there”), and watched as the life of the body seeped out in a final few breaths.

It is hard to say whether this slow starvation was entirely voluntary; I doubt it was, but perhaps it was also in its way a slow unconscious suicide. A few months earlier, my pregnant wife and I had visited him when he was still something of his mordant, witty self, a baseball or football game, which he always enjoyed, on the television; we expressed our hope that he’d still be alive to celebrate the birth of his first grandchild, and I suppose he seconded that hope in a way; but he died a month before Goldie was born. The love he would have undoubtedly borne for his granddaughter would not have been unlike the love he undoubtedly bore for his children, his friends, even his ex-wife, but it was finally not enough, weakened body perhaps not possessing the desire to continue on.

Many years before, in the 1970s, he had divorced my mother and since then, I believe, he had foregone the pleasures of romantic and sexual love, not unlike Beckett’s Krapp, and instead faced a series of darknesses, greatly alleviated by affection, pride in his children and certain other pleasures, but darkness was at the center of his days. The marriage had obviously not been a happy one, with the exception of the pleasure he took in my brother and myself; my mother suffered from alcoholism, clinical depression and other severe mental illnesses from about 1962 on, and she suffers so to this day. Even then he had difficulty finding the appetite to eat, to fuel the beast of his body. He found a great deal of succor in music, in art, and in history as well, though his professional education was in electrical engineering and his parents’ background was stoutly working-class — his father was a self-employed electrician, his mother (who once tried to commit suicide) a cleaning woman at a local school, his step-brother mentally challenged (“retarded,” the medical community at the time would have it) who was in and out of institutions before an early death in his 20s. He also during the last ten years of his life enjoyed bringing his experience to the classroom, teaching at the undergraduate electrical engineering lab at the University of Pennsylvania and enjoying the company of teachers and students considerably younger than himself. In all this, he was a peaceful man, despising violence and conflict, even anger, as futile and invariably destructive and vicious qualities.

The tragic consciousness is borne in experience, and this is merely a small part of my own. It should be said too that the origin of my own tragic consciousness is here, in my experience. True, it is fed by the great tragic thinkers and writers of the centuries, whom I often quote on Superfluities Redux; but they merely confirm and further inform my personal experience, and do not dictate it. All true philosophy, Schopenhauer noted, is rooted in the personal, as it must be.

The same is true of the tragic aesthetic. In a sense, I value and hope to create the art which would lend my father (and others like him, for being human he was not alone) comfort in his darkness, to somehow render the contemplation of it a valuable rather than a valueless knowledge. I do not fool myself that this has any particular meaning for politics or appeals to those who seek self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement through their work or merely desire to entertain and be entertained. My father was also a participant in culture, in society, as aware in his own way, I think, of the torsions of culture and its effect on him as Schopenhauer’s or Adorno’s awareness was meaningful to themselves, even if he may have found these philosophers beyond his ken (though Beckett and O’Neill, I know from personal experience, were both great pleasures to  him).

Simplistic and pious hope to him was puerile; his experience taught him that it was foolish. Love and desire, he also knew, were fraught with both ecstasy and the greatest suffering. He was a deeply cynical and pessimistic man, but this cynicism and pessimism were based in his own life. He held no hope for progressive politics , the revelations of Hiroshima and Auschwitz fresh in his mind — John Hersey’s book on the former had a prominent place on his bookshelf; these two events are still within living memory, if not for much longer, but for Americans all history is ancient, and increasingly irrelevant, history — despite having voted for Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace in 1948, for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956, and finally John F. Kennedy in 1960, after which he did not participate in elections. His only hope lay in his children, I believe, of whom he was quite proud.

Not a day goes by since his death that I do not think of him in that last room, on that last bed, but not only there; I also think of him as time extends into the past from that last room, to his experience which is so much a part of my own. With the exploration of my own tragic consciousness, informed by experience, I hope to do some honor to his memory, and to those who may share some of that same consciousness (for as I said before, my father being human was not alone). I don’t imagine that many dramatists or artists care to speak to people like him, to acknowledge his recognitions, which is why you would rarely find him in the theatre. So be it. The work of Schopenhauer, Adorno, Bataille, Beckett, Barker, Kane and so many others radiate toward, rather than away from, that personal experience, not only my own but also that of my father. I am fully cognizant that I am a mere conduit between one generation and another. I am also selfish; I shamelessly use them all to contemplate his life as well as that of my own, fuelling my writing with my father’s memory, finding hope in what he may have recognized as the utter hopelessness that Max Horkheimer describes above. It is inescapable, for I see him always in the love of my wife’s and daughters’ eyes.

A critique of tragedy 24

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Schopenhauer in love. Eight years after the publication of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote the following in his private notebooks:

When I am asked where then is to be found the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing-in-itself which I have called the will-to-live; or where is one most clearly aware of that essence; or where does it attain the most positive revelation of itself, — then I must point to voluptuousness in the act of copulation. This is it! This is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence. Therefore it is also for living beings subjectively the aim of all their actions, their highest gain; and objectively it is that which keeps the world going, for the inorganic world is attached to the organic through knowledge. Hence the worship of the lingam and of the phallus.

And what is that precisely for us? Shakespeare’s 129th sonnet tells us.

Over the door of the brothel at Pompeii under the phallus were the words hic habitat felicitas; this inscription is now to be found in the Studio a Napoli.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Quartant, January 1826
In Manuscript Remains III, p. 262-263

“Voluptuousness” is E.F.J. Payne’s translation; other translators render this word as “ecstasy.”

In Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus,” Nussbaum asserts that “Schopenhauer’s writings on women and sexuality suggest just how peculiar, and indeed profoundly disgusting, he took [sexual intercourse] to be.” Ambivalent perhaps, given his reference to the Shakespeare sonnet; perhaps even peculiar; but “disgusting” is wildly overstating the case.

In point of fact, Schopenhauer’s language and rhetoric here come remarkably close to the descriptions of his conceptions of aesthetic experience and saintly renunciation, the two avenues through which the philosopher suggests that the thing-in-itself can be experienced. It is notable too that this knowledge is attained through individual bodies in jointure. Schopenhauer wrote this passage as he was engaged in an affair with the actress Caroline Richter. The affair lasted for ten years and must be counted as perhaps the central romantic and sexual liaison of Schopenhauer’s life. It could have been that this bodied experience (and this bodied experience constituted, as we know, the only basis of validity for any given philosophical concept for Schopenhauer) demonstrated a “third way” — sexuality to be added to aesthetics and renunciation — to the sublime redemption provided by a contemplative confrontation with the will.

Schopenhauer’s affair with Richter did not end well, and this, along with his relations with his mother and sister, most undoubtedly affected his thinking regarding sexuality and sensuality, but it does not fully invalidate this momentary sense that voluptuousness in the act of copulation (or ecstasy, or orgasm) constituted a sublime moment of denial in which time, space and identity are eradicated for the duration of even a brief few seconds in phenomenal time (perhaps an eternity in the noumenal).

If within the body this willing acts most phenomenally in the experience of sexual desire, then it is central to Schopenhauer’s construct of tragedy as itself a demonstration and investigation of Eros. Nussbaum writes: “Schopenhauer holds that the sufferings of tragedy are the sufferings of humanity, insofar as it lives the life of desire.” It is not a quality of tragedy itself that it provides either redemption or comfort. Tragedy demonstrates those sufferings not to provide comfort, but to offer a representation of the desirous body caught between the eternity of ecstasy and the prison of the phenomenal world. No wonder, then, that sexual transgression takes center stage as the nexus of a dramatist like Howard Barker: it is there that the noumenal can be most deeply experienced, even in the suffering that arises from being caught between the one world and the other.

Marginalia to critique 23

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The theatre was necessarily desexualized (Beckett) before it could be resexualized again (Barker).

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The thing-in-itself is as unknowable in the theatre as it is unknowable in the phenomenal world. At best its contours can be described; the thing-in-itself cannot. As the test site for the limits of empirical knowledge, the theatre’s stress and tension lie in the use of the limits of empirical knowledge, of theatre itself, to describe these contours. The project must be to attempt to cross this uncrossable boundary for the slim additional knowledge it permits. Because the theatre is a metaphor for the limits of this empirical knowledge through the body, a metaphor for the phenomenal world itself, extremity is necessary: it is the edge that may pierce the veil of Maya.

A critique of tragedy 23

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At first glance, the plays of Howard Barker and Samuel Beckett have precious little in common. Barker’s anti-Histories, recent concern with plethora and excess and the aristrocratic lyricism found in the dialogue of his characters sit uneasily with Beckett’s abstract minimalism and self-erasing language. But a few minutes’ thought reveals surprising parallels, especially when it comes to the later work of both dramatists. The spare theatrics and four-woman cast of Barker’s Slowly, produced this year, reveal at least scenographic common traits with Beckett’s three-woman Come and Go; Hurts Given and Received, also produced this year, is an essay on the cost of aesthetic creation also at the center of Catastrophe; and, reaching a little further back, the master/servant relationship of Toonelhuis and Lobe in last year’s Found in the Ground, as well as a decimated landscape, is surprisingly reminiscent of Hamm and Clov in Beckett’s Endgame (even to the extent that both Toonelhuis and Hamm are confined entirely to wheelchairs; justice is also a theme in both plays as well). At least in these limited comparisons, there appears to be considerable aesthetic companionship, and no doubt another few minutes’ thought would produce other parallels.

The later perspectives of both dramatists is also usefully considered through the prism of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, in all four of its central facets (epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics). For the theatreworker, even Schopenhauer’s epistemology echoes through the basic construct of the aesthetic form of theatre. In the first book of The World as Will and Representation, as well as in Schopenhauer’s doctoral thesis On the Fourfold Root, the philosopher lays out an epistemology that will not surprise either dramatist or director. The necessary forms of consciousness — those which exist a priori and without which knowledge and consciousness, and therefore the empirical world, is not possible — are there described as Time, Space and Causality, this last entry divisible into various forms (four altogether) of cause-and-effect. Turning to the first page of any conventional drama, one finds these a priori forms stated as givens of the drama to follow. Time (today, the next day, yesterday, the 16th century); place (a crossroads marked by a tree, a bunker, Vienna); and finally a list of characters, demonstrating the forms of human motival relationships possible within the confines of the play, the narrative for which itself is based in the cause-and-effect relationships of the physical world (in movement) and conceptual world (in language). Any and all theatre is constructed of these a priori forms, without which something presented on a stage can’t be said to be theatre qua theatre, any more than, without these, the empirical world can’t be represented as the empirical world.

Since the ur-Modernist Schopenhauer, whose most pessimistic assessments about the world and the will were more than borne out in the history of the 20th century, Modernists have been investigating and stressing these a priori concepts in their own art as well, seeking through this stress an inference of the thing-in-itself that lies beneath the empirical world; theatre as the most phenomenal of these forms is where those stresses have been most tortuous. In the later plays of both Beckett and Barker, there has been less certainty about a definable time, space and causality as expressed in character and narrative, until in the work of both writers the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that this work is taking place here, in this space; now, at this time; and through the individuals we see on stage: the immediacy of the theatrical experience is nowhere more explicit than in the plays of these dramatists now. The stress and intensity of the work, as well as its seeming difficulty and obtuseness, is an effect ultimately of both dramatists’ projects to find through their work an inference of the thing-in-itself that lies beyond the empirical world: ultimately unknowable, but somehow demonstrable. It is reminiscent of Beckett’s early statement to a correspondent that his work exists to “To bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it — be it something or nothing — begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.” While this may best describe Beckett’s consideration of prose fiction at the time, it is just as applicable to his art of drama, once space, time, character and narrative are also seen as those empirical forms which must be compromised to reach a gleam of the thing-in-itself as contemplative or meditative state.

Barker’s language differs from Beckett’s in that his characters pour out character and motivation, and the director and designers fill the stage with painterly and precise excess, expressively — so expressively that the language overwhelms, the power of aristocratic eloquence to turn in upon itself and, like Beckett’s minimal speech, bore similar holes through a priori experience, utterly destroying the “either/or” dichotomy that most contemporary drama and theatre offer, per David Ian Rabey, for a “both/and” status of the theatrical experience.

The work of both dramatists also bears examination through the prisms of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics: this last an ethics not of pity, and especially self-pity, but compassion, which are poles apart. Beckett asks not for pity of the fallen condition even of the Pozzos and Hamms of his world, but of an understanding compassion which is their due, as is Barker’s Katrin, Galactia and several other characters, from those populating The Castle and Victory to Gertrude — The Cry and Found in the Ground. The road to this compassion is severe and calls into question the accepted forms of the empirical world to search further, for an aesthetic experience that will make that compassion possible for the spectator. But this is to get to Schopenhauer’s fourth book already, and there are further paths to be cleared before it emerges clearly. It is here that the parallels between these great dramatists, who may well emerge as the Shakespeares of the 20th and 21st century, may demonstrate the possibility of a theatre in the wake of catastrophe.