Category Archives: Critique of tragedy

A critique of tragedy 22

Posted on by

Notes on Howard Barker’s “The Sunless Garden of the Unconsoled.” In Barker’s recent essay on the metaphysics of theatre and tragedy, the reader is left with a sense of melancholy: not in the sense of the sentimental, pitiable, melodramatic or merely “sad,” these superficial remnants of traditional  tragedy which, even though they too are fading from the stage, are the mere dying fragments of a form. Melancholy is a hard, brittle thing. It is a lens through which the impossibility of a meaningful human existence is recognized, and the proper response is not applause but silence. The self-determination of Barker’s final paragraph is the ongoing project of self-knowledge, possible only with catastrophic self-alienation and acts of the will against itself within the phenomenal context, whether politics or personal morality. It is a response to impossibility: a form which also “spurns both punishment or reward,” whether for dramatist, performer or spectator; punishment and reward are the products of the Culture Industry, a conception of drama that it is “good for you,” like skim milk.

“In the Catastrophic play the invocation of Sacrifice renders the binary ethic of criminal/victim redundant,” Barker writes, a nod to Bataille (unconscious perhaps), and suggests that Sacrifice as an excess of energy in a culture of material plenty — as plethora — is at the center of drama: theatrical event as a necessary sacrifice. Sacrifice is accompanied by melancholy for what has been left behind, but not for that reason an invalid means to the road to the autonomy of the individual. Barker goes on:

The culture of Liberal-Humanism finds Sacrifice comprehensible only in very constrained circumstances. Unwillingly it palliates the death of soldiers by attaching the word to the memorial, but both the rhetoric and the architecture are copied from Thermopylae and the pagan Spartans, and Christ himself, the most self-conscious of all the sacrificed, knew it as a destiny in his God-character, but a nightmare in the man. His desperate pleading to be excused the very ordeal for which he was created is touchingly human and might be seen as the first expression in Western culture of the individual asserting his reluctance to perish for the collective, in other words, to be a victim. Liberal Humanism’s obsessive desire to identify and eliminate the victim is an inevitable consequence of the doctrine of equality, and indeed might be regarded as its ideological justification. Victims are, of course, abundant in tragedy, and constitute the source of the dismay which initiates it, but unless one were whimsical and dared to suggest that the humiliation and death of Cordelia was a sacrifice to the eventual civilizing of King Lear, the category of victim is strictly reserved.

Crime and punishment in tragedy are no longer inextricably linked: the Culture Industry too has decimated the concept of guilt to the rather unedifying condition of having a bad conscience; perhaps this is the way that the human explains to himself his own role as microcosm of the race in Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and a bad conscience fades in a manner unavailable to guilt. But the ideas of “punishment without crime” as well as “crime without punishment” should be recognizable in phenomenal form in the 21st century. Theatre has no responsibility to either ameliorate or revolt against these phenomenal truths: but to speculate on a third way. That third way is the autonomous imagination:

As in Gertrude, Wonder and Worship in the Dying Ward describes the terrible phenomenon of crime without punishment, and more terrible still, punishment without crime, for both Hamlet and the broken daughter of Ostend have sinned against nothing we recognize, nor are those responsible for their injury ever driven to crave forgiveness, seek reconciliation, nor even, by their own fall, raise a quivering finger to point in the direction of a juster world. Furthermore, somewhere in this sunless garden stands a character who, like the two identified, is equally unconsoled for a savage destiny but in a further repudiation of Humanist ethics, discovers the wherewithal to applaud the arbitrary character of it. The wrecked musical prodigy Wardrobe senses the appalling significance of loss, the beauty of the unfulfilled, not for himself, but for others. Is he mad?

A critique of tragedy 21

Posted on by

The performance of this drama, whose scope of time by earthly measure would comprise about ten evenings, is intended for a theater on Mars. Theatergoers in this world would not be able to endure it. For it is blood of their blood, and its contents are from those unreal, inconceivable years, those years that no waking consciousness can apprehend, that are inaccessible to any memory and preserved only in a gory dream, those years in which operetta figures enacted the tragedy of mankind.

Karl Kraus
Preface
The Last Days of Mankind (1922)

Word made flesh: A dream of a theatre. Collectively, the entries here are not a manifesto nor a theory. What destruction is sought is a destruction of received consciousness, not a bomb thrown into a building or a classroom, and the feelings expressed are far too self-contradictory to constitute a theory that can be of any practical use to anyone, least of all its author. They describe a theatre that does not exist, that may never exist except as an imaginative possibility in the mind of the dreamer.

And if there is any urban locus here, it is a curious one. The philosophy and work under consideration are not fictive, but they are fragmented, the individual examples distant from each other in both space and time. Perhaps their work is best considered as the dim candlelight that shines through the window of a monastery, perceived from a distance in the night, and as in the Middle Ages examples of a work and toil that goes on in the dark. And they do manage to leave their mark on the night, as the ascetics of the Middle Ages left their mark on history through their manuscripts and translation, coming down to us from another era, even another world. Seen from above the world, these dim lights are just visible here and there, loose constellations on a dark continent beneath. Perhaps these ascetics work ignorant of each other, but during the day they may conduct travels, pilgrimages, and return with a new knowledge and a faith that, in their work, they are not alone in the world, however dark the night, however great the intervening physical distance. They are community in thought, if impossible in body.

At the same time, they leap across genre. Like the pre-Socratic philosophers, whose work took the form of fragment, aphorism and poem, one can’t say that a single text is drama, this poetry, this philosophy.  The lyrical beauty that courses through the pre-Socratics is the same as the beauty that courses through Beckett and Celan. So, too, it would be wrong to limit this ascetic hallucination to writers alone. Actresses and actors, designers, directors may constitute additional points in these constellations.

They constitute the quotidian fragments of which a dream of the theatre can be built. For it is a fever-dream within the skull (like the black-box theatre itself), fed like any dream by shards of the non-dreaming experience. From these dreams are constructed cathedrals, stone by experiential stone. These would eventually hold and store the manuscripts and performances, wrought with obsessional intent and discipline, for which the cities and culture does not necessarily care. The women and men of the monastery, not seeking fame or recognition, necessarily living hand-to-mouth, expecting neither payment, approval nor gratitude, have the sole desire to keep the dreams of the imagination alive, in a culture which would gladly have them criminalized or killed as a means of keeping the ideological and religious peace.

In the night air one might hear from these monestaries the catch in the throat of a woman’s orgasmic cry, smell the sweat of the male body, experienced then inscribed within the dramatic text and by the dramatic body — both of which arise from the bodies and imaginations which the words of the manuscript render viable, visible as the performed drama. It is a dream of theatre that we will not see in our lifetime, that our sons and daughters will likely not see in theirs, given the direction in which history seems to be moving: deeper into industry, administration, puritanism and materialism, producing the real, bright exposure of the catastrophes that have introduced a post-human age.

To put the names of individual artists to the candlelights would be presumptive here, not only because they may be inferred by the material already presented, but also because the list would be incomplete: they define themselves in their work and intent, and they may desire to remain in the night, the more easily to conduct their work. Dreamwork is private and secret, even the description of the dream is intimate, shared only among those whom one feels secure and safe in communicating — there are dire risks involved, revelations and intimacies. But the description of the dream in drama remains necessary. Among the most important legacies that parents can leave to their children is the continuation of that dream, that such investigations are of enormous value in the dark world: a dream is a parent’s gift of love to a child, who may, after all, make further careful, personal steps to its realization.

Perspectives: The spoken body

Posted on by

Let us now address the subject of the body, once a secret and no longer one. Let us observe the process of the decay of the body in Utopian society, its disappearance through the process of revelation, and remark the paradox that the unrelenting gaze results in the decomposition of the subject, and let us admit this process is paradigmatical for all that is hidden in Utopia, a despotism which, because it is humanist, exercises its violence in the name of liberty and love. Let us assert without fear of contradiction, that the body has forfeited its authority on-stage and off, and that the spiritual injury of nakedness can be restored by one thing only — the quality of the spoken word applied to it, for a public immune now even to the most exotic manifestations of the flesh can be lent the privilege of anxiety only by an attitude to nakedness and not nakedness itself. …

… [In] order to seize back the injury of nakedness from the benign and supervisory Utopian regard, we recognize the body must be mediated through the distinctly theatrical mechanism of characterization. The anxiety created by the actor naked – in contradistinction to the bathos of the actor undressed – is substantially the creation of text delivered by performers with whom she shares the stage, a condition shaped by longing, contempt, the entire repertoire of erotic disorder, a condition which serve to disobjectify the flesh such that beauty or its converse is ascribable from the application of speech to the surface of the body and not discernible in the body itself. The Utopian gaze, annihilating from principle the possibility of shame, renders flesh transparent, a hygienic substance, neither hierarchical nor individualized, in essence no more than a mobile accumulation of the facts. The tragic text restores to its public the privilege of suffering the opacity of the flesh, its impenetrability, the focus of an ecstatic ignorance. The war fought over the meaning of the body in contemporary theatre is no less desperate than the battles waged in Homer over the hero’s corpse. Dead or alive, the body drives us mad, and — without straining the paradox remarked upon above — only the word can shield our gaze from Utopia’s dazzling and obliterating light.

Howard Barker
“The Spoken Body and the Utopian Regard”
Gramma: The Text Strikes Back: The Dynamics of Performativity, 2009

A critique of tragedy 20

Posted on by

If the sole function of the word in the theatre is to dramatize the linguistic inarticulacy of the inarticulate — or to pay popular culture the tribute of validating it as individual autonomous discourse even as popular culture co-opts the autonomous individual — then theatre is best left as a poor ghostly cousin of the reproduced digital image; nobody in the theatre, spectator or practitioner, cares for it otherwise. The best argument that can be made for the reproduction of everyday speech on stage is that it claims to democratically attempt to locate communication and locution within these vocabularies and discourses, vocabularies and discourses that had been absent from the stage until then (for example, the emergence of working-class dialogue in post-1956 British drama in plays such as Edward Bond’s early Saved and The Pope’s Wedding and the plays of Arnold Wesker).

Is this a dead end, and have we hit it yet? Whatever the answer for theatrical culture and playwrights at large, both Bond and Wesker abandoned this naturalism to an extent in search of more imaginative language, and it should be remembered that John Osborne himself in Look Back in Anger did not hold himself prisoner to the naturalistic grumblings of generic Jimmy Porters, but endowed his character with a kind of speech that transcended the quotidian (calling Porter’s long speeches “arias”). Even then, this argues that the stage is a place for identity-politics parity — an entirely justifiable approach to social policy, but to theatrical aesthetics?

The absorption of the linguistic tropes of the entertainment industry, of popular culture, is drama’s attempt to instill community among spectator, performer and playwright through recognition of images possessed in common; here, the rationale offered by some playwrights is that this absorption constitutes subversion. But is this merely lip-service to the self, an attempt to dismiss just how far the idea of the autonomous individual has itself been absorbed into the worldview of the corporate media industry? In many cases it constitutes burial: a deeper burial of the drama and the spectator in the detritus of corporate and commercial discourse, a discourse which, this far along into its evolution, absorbs (through a facile irony) even subversion within its own vocabulary and imagery.

From an American perspective, it is interesting to read Alan Ackerman’s review of Marc Robinson’s The American Play in the most recent issue of Yale Theater:

Although he acknowledges that O’Neill is a pedestrian writer, Robinson suggests that “one can recuperate O’Neill, [by] aligning his work with other strains of American modernism” and discovers “an O’Neill whom his fellow modernists might embrace.” Ultimately this conservative project begs a vew crucial questions. To begin with, why exactly is it so important to recuperate O’Neill? More broadly, what conditions of American culture made specific forms of realism so damn popular?

The latter question is quite excellent; it almost eliminates the irritable dismissal that attaches to the former. As recent productions of plays such as The Emperor Jones (by The Wooster Group) and More Stately Mansions (by Ivo van Hove) have demonstrated, there’s life in the old man yet, and these productions are far from conservative projects.

More to the point, O’Neill is the sole American playwright who attempted to define the tragic genre for the specifically American theatre; in this alone there is reason to recuperate O’Neill in the bath of melodrama and mawkish sentimentality represented by much postwar American drama (not least in Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller). In fact, both of these productions demonstrate that much of O’Neill’s power lies in his so-called “pedestrian language” — a heightened discourse far from prose (even farther from popular culture) and closer to poetry. He also recognized that dramatic form was a language as well — it is hard to gainsay O’Neill’s profound sense of the need for formal experimentation in plays as far back as The Hairy Ape, as late as The Iceman Cometh or Hughie (not to mention The Great God Brown, Marco Millions or Dynamo).

It is true, O’Neill’s language on the page can be challenging, but perhaps Robinson is onto something in suggesting that O’Neill’s dramas be approached as Modernist texts — that in this approach there lies a liberation for O’Neill’s language as one example of a linguistic aesthetic for a genuine American tragedy.