Category Archives: David Ian Rabey

From the archives: New Expressionism

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As I continue to write Erlkönig I’ll be republishing several entries to keep the fire here going.

Originally posted on 18 October 2010.

In Schopenhauer’s conception of knowledge and the world, mankind is phenomenon par excellence, the object through which subjectivity can be known and the will as thing-in-itself recognized, if not described or describable in the symbol-system of language available to the individual. The will itself, because it is not describable, can’t be characterized as tragic, but this locution is available to describe the phenomenal world in relation to that will. Only that which can be directly experienced by the individual can be said to exist: it is far preferable to the abstract concept as a valid recognition, as a valid object of knowledge. Just as color cannot be described to the blind, or music to the deaf (for the vibrations under foot and hand at the concert hall are not in essence dissimilar to the vibrations of the subway or the earth), one who does not experience an extreme or a quality cannot recognize it as something known. The individual body through which the will can be recognized, and the words with which it can be explored, become the instrument of exploration and experience.

This places particular weight on the theatre and drama as aesthetic means of this exploration of the phenomenon; it is a quality of the art which most theatre practitioners (dramatists, directors, producers and critics alike) and audiences today are loathe to admit. It makes of the art a far more urgent discipline than they’re comfortable with, in that it renders the entertainment, amusement and business that attaches to the form irrelevant, especially in the forms of mimetic social realism or ironic post-modernist distance that attach to its practice even today. Obviously, in this conception, theatre and drama are the truly experiential arts, for the mediation is through the body, not the page or canvas, and it is the body that is the primary vehicle for experience. Apart from music, tragic drama is at the apex of the aesthetic imagination as conceived by Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer was prophetic in more senses than one, inspiring many of the artists, writers and composers of the Expressionist school that arose in Austria and Germany beginning in the late 19th century. But there is a New Expressionism as well, and one which has its philosophical roots in the old. David Ian Rabey in his English Drama Since 1940 identifies a stream of post-war drama which he names a “New Expressionism,” which predated In-Yer-Face theatre, an off-shoot of this New Expressionism, by several decades, citing the work of David Rudkin, Heathcote Williams and other dramatists. “This involves a consciously heightened form of presentation which is unapologetic about its anti-conventional strageness, in which often ‘exterior facts are continually being transformed into interior elements and psychic events are exteriorized,’ in a passionate expression of, and search for, individual regeneration. … This form of renewal is prioritised as preliminary to epic theatre’s foregrounding of social relations to address the political collective. [Emphasis mine] … Unlike Absurdism, which may reflect a loss of faith in language, reference, action and consequence, Expressionism recreates an unconventional faith in consequence: the power of individual defiance to trigger wider seismic upheavals of power, countering ‘information’ and passivity with a demonstrative capacity for active transformation.” (Rabey 128) [1]

Rabey’s description takes in a broad swathe of post-1970 drama in his book, but it is also a useful corrective to the characterization of a dramatist like Samuel Beckett as “absurdist,” especially when it comes to Beckett’s prose and drama after 1960, when the novel How It Is and the play Play marked a division between his early work and his later; especially in the late plays Catastrophe and What Where, political and ideological considerations are secondary and founded upon a metaphysical ground. What’s more, all of this later work, especially pieces like Not I, are experiential rather than discursive, and the subjective psychic events are those which provide the necessary sensation. Because they also exhibit “a demonstrative capacity for active transformation,” they are immediately relevant to a consideration of the plays of Howard Barker, David Rudkin and Sarah Kane.

The later work of Beckett and the plays of Barker, Rudkin and Kane are beyond considerations of optimistic and pessimistic. Or, more accurately, they may be both. A capacity may exist, but it may or may not be fulfilled, and possibility may or may not become probability or ever realized: it is these that are demonstrated in the theatre; it remains to the individual spectator to fulfill or realize these capacities and possibilities in their own lives, having first recognized them through the aesthetic experience. But it is this capacity and possibility that is demonstrated in the theatre, and because it is beyond the currently fashionable Procrustean formal beds of social realism or post-modern irony, it remains marginalized, however awesome may be its power to transform both the art of theatre and the experience of those who attend it.

The “In-Yer-Face theatre” that emerged in the 1990s, and of whom Sarah Kane is a common (if inappropriate) exemplar, is described by Aleks Sierz; it is interesting to note in this context, since it too is a theatre founded in experience:

[In Yer Face theatre] is any drama that takes the audience by the scruff of the neck and shakes it until it gets the message. It is a theatre of sensation. … Questioning moral norms, it affronts the ruling ideas of what can or should be shown onstage; it also taps into more primitive feelings, smashing taboos, mentioning the forbidden, creating discomfort. Crucially, it tells us more about who we really are. Unlike the type of theatre that allows us to sit back and contemplate what we see in detachment, the best in-yer-face theatre takes us on an emotional journey, getting under our skin. In other words, it is experiential, not speculative. [Emphasis mine] (Sierz 4)

This is correct in so far as it goes, but I would insist that it is this theatrical experience itself that becomes the object of speculation; it must do so, if it is not to remain a solipsistic sensual experience which ends at the theatre door. Howard Barker’s conception of theatre as a crucible for moral speculation certainly does not obviate the practice of extreme and excessive stage activity and dramatic language. Indeed, speculation and experience revolve and feed upon each other on the New Expressionist stage. The theatre remains an arena of contemplation and speculation, even as this is generated by the experiential events that take place between performer and spectator, mediated by the symbol-system of dramatic language.

It is my hope in this series of posts to explore this conception of New Expressionism as described by Rabey and Gritzner, and trace its development back through the original Expressionist movement to its philosophical origins in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and aesthetics. This is not to say that Beckett, Barker, Rudkin and Kane share much beyond these bare outlines. Beckett’s constricted, de-eroticized landscape is a far cry from Barker’s expansive, even excessive, re-eroticized imagination, and they are barely recognizable, perhaps, as exemplars of the same school. But it seems to me that their emphasis on the subjective experience, their deliberate intent to operate as far outside the Culture Industry as it may be possible to do, is a critique of the same metaphysical, moral and aesthetic stance in which that Industry stands as was Schopenhauer’s opposition to the ameliorist Enlightenment of his time.

All four dramatists begin with dislocation: dislocations of narrative and character. These dislocations are similar, if not identical, to the freeing of dissonance — that is, the thing-in-itself allowed liberty to express itself phenomenally — that defines the work of Arnold Schoenberg, that twentieth-century composer who provided the underscore to the Expressionist movements of the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Footnotes
  1. Rabey’s discussion is the basis of Karoline Gritzner’s 2008 essay “(Post)Modern Subjectivity and the New Expressionism: Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Forced Entertainment,” which is crucial to the start of any discussion of this dramatic and theatrical mode. It was published in Contemporary Theatre Review: 18:3. [↩]

Archives: David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker

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In celebration of the opening this week at the National Theatre of Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution, I republish below my 2009 review of two books about the dramatist by David Ian Rabey.

David Ian Rabey, Howard Barker: Politics and Desire. An expository study of his drama and poetry, 1969-87. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 302 pages. (Reprint of first 1989 edition, with new foreword.) Available from amazon.com.

David Ian Rabey, Howard Barker: Ecstasy and Death. An expository study of his drama, theory and production work, 1988-2008. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 289 pages. Available from amazon.com.

On 21 October, in celebration of the 21st anniversary of the founding of The Wrestling School, the 21 for 21 Festival will take place, an international event focusing on the lifework of dramatist Howard Barker. As part of the project, Barker’s work will return to the Royal Shakespeare Company, where several of his early plays had their debuts; in addition, productions are scheduled for Belgrade, Serbia; Guanajuato, Mexico; Cape Town, South Africa; Lisbon, Portugal; Tel Aviv, Israel; Perth, Australia; and even online at Second Life. There are productions of Barker’s work scheduled also for Boston; Portland, OR; Seattle; and New York (a production of Und from the Potomac Theatre Project, details on this to follow later this week). It is a unique, extraordinary project (along with the new uniform edition of Barker’s plays from Oberon Books, an effort that has now reached five volumes, with more to come) that throws a global spotlight on the 63-year-old theorist, director and playwright; though Barker puckishly considers his existence in the United States a mere “rumour,” it seems likely that the event will draw new attention to his work, an attention long overdue.

And there are conferences and books. The two volumes reviewed here are unique examinations of a body of work of a living dramatist by an individual voice: nearly 600 closely-printed pages devoted by David Ian Rabey, a professor of drama and theatre studies at Aberystwyth University, the artistic director of the Lurking Truth (Gwir sy’n Llechu) Theatre Company, and a playwright, director and actor himself, to the life output to date of Barker, who has been called “England’s greatest living dramatist” in the UK Times (perhaps before its purchase by Rupert Murdoch in 1981) and “the Shakespeare of our age” by Sarah Kane. While single-author examinations of individual contemporary playwrights have not been lacking, few have been as broad and informed by a sense of theatrical praxis itself (especially since Rabey has also had a long career of both directing Barker’s plays and performing in them under Barker’s direction). So, unlike Ruby Cohn’s lifelong critical dedication to the work of Samuel Beckett in several books and Jan Kott’s lyrical examination of Shakespeare’s plays in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (perhaps the two examples of criticism that most closely resemble Rabey’s), the two volumes are informed by a practical knowledge of how the plays work on the stage: Rabey can touch on both Barker’s drama and theory in a full, bodied recognition of the real effects they have on audiences and performers. (Also on Rabey’s resume are two volumes of his own plays, so here, dramatist also meets dramatist.)

Barker’s plays and polemics themselves are the best introductions to his drama and theory, and those seeking a more encapsulated overview to Barker’s work might better turn to Charles Lamb’s The Theatre of Howard Barker, for both of Rabey’s books proclaim to be more than a conventional chronological play-by-play canvassing of Howard Barker’s work (though this it does provide, at breezy length with the speed of a bullet train: Barker has written more than a hundred plays, seven books of poetry, three books of theory and several screenplays). For Rabey there is more at stake. In the new introduction to the paperback reprint of Politics and Desire, Rabey lays his project out clearly: “As you will discover from its first chapter,” he writes, “it is not only an exposition of dramatic literature and poetry. It is informed by personal theatrical practice. … It is also an existentialist manifesto championing what it calls ‘personal reformulation for one’s own needs,’ rather than for those of an externally (and varioiusly forcibly) imposed programme of social engineering.”

Rabey is modest; it is not only “also” this manifesto, it is primarily that. For Rabey, these two volumes are simultaneously a lens into a dramatist’s work and, as Barker’s plays themselves should be for the individual spectator, a mirror in which the reader himself is revealed and implicated, provided one has the eyes to see and the ears to hear. As such, the books become more of a personal journey conducted through the guise of a literary and theatrical criticism, a journey on which Rabey invites the reader to come along. It is an undertaking as creative (it might be more appropriate to say “self-creative”) as the plays themselves.

And it is a long undertaking. Rabey’s critical work in the past has included Sacred Disobedience, a much shorter examination of the plays and screenplays of David Rudkin, and for the “Longman Literature in English” series English Drama Since 1940, this latter a survey that reaches back to the work of John Whiting to cover a field demarcated by the plays of Samuel Beckett and John Osborne in the 1950s. But with his books on Barker, Rabey reinvents the genre of dramatic criticism as Barker’s plays reinvent drama.

Looking beyond the books as “existentialist manifestoes,” their critical approach is a useful map of Barker’s career. In Ecstasy and Death, Rabey suggests that Barker’s dramatic work can be divided into three distinct genres: “a series of highly original and well-plotted stories [The Love of a Good Man, I Saw Myself, and A Hard Heart],” “Shakespearean ‘subversions,’ in which events and characters depart startingly from familiar narrative sources, to question the morality with which the original versions are associated [Shakespeare's King Lear and Hamlet, Middleton's Women Beware Women, Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm],” and “more ‘musical’ plays in which elements of expressionism and surrealism contribute to linguistically and pictorially poetic forms [Ten Dilemmas, the marionette play The Swing at Night and this year's Wrestling School production Found in the Ground, which owes a profound debt to the late string quartets of Bela Bartok]. … In all cases, Barker offers a speculative drama, which is distinguished, both theatrically and philosophically, be estrangement and surprising reversal.”

While Rabey does not explicitly make the case for Barker as a philosopher who works within the form of drama rather than expository prose, his relation of Barker’s work to contemporary philosophers such as Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Giorgio Agamben and Alphonso Lingis provides the basis for such a consideration. Common to all these philosophers (with perhaps the exception of Lacan) is an explicit examination of the status of the individual identity, embodied in flesh and blood, as it circulates through a post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima and now post-capitalist landscape, marrying the totalizing violent forces available to corporate governments (which pretend, in the co-optation of more benign socialistic strategies, to more ameliorist social policies) to a culture industry which decimates art in a mission to valorize distraction from the self, a self which poses a threat to those totalizing forces.

This sets a much higher value on theatre (especially when entertainment, a word dirtied by culture-industrial grime, is set upon a pedestal), a theatre also examines the status of the speaking individual embodied in flesh and blood, than many of its practitioners would wish to acknowledge. Rabey’s exposition of Barker’s work also makes room for criticism of extreme performance that ironically trivializes rather than engages the body. Discussing Barker’s 1999 play A Rich Woman’s Poetry (so far unproduced and unperformed, as so many of Barker’s plays are, perhaps the inevitable fate of drama written for a theatre that does not exist), Rabey notes “the modern vogue for Explicit Body Performance … which proclaims and indulges ideological and moral superiority whilst simultaneously purporting … ‘to take refuge in an aesthetic beyond the moral beyond the ethical beyond beyond the parameters of pity.’ Crucially, Barker’s theatre and its terms of enquiry are actively and complexly moral and ethical … rather than self-righteously and fetishistically re-presentative of postures of victimization.” The passage is both witty and precise: Apart from the observation, the language Rabey uses here concisely identifies the weaknesses of this strand of contemporary performance.

Rabey is at his best in Ecstasy and Death when he is able to draw upon theatrical experience and practice to assess individual plays. His study of The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo is based not only on a close reading of the two-character play but also his work with Barker-as-director when he played the title role of the play in 2001 opposite Antoinette Walsh. Rabey is able from this unique perspective to offer observations on Barker’s directorial practice as well as study carefully the role of his own body in the exploitation of Barker’s language for the stage. Here Barker emerges as, like Brecht, a theorist who meets himself as dramatist and director in an uneasy truce of the self.

Ecstasy and Death takes up where the earlier volume left off, proceeding from Barker’s work from 1988: an annus milabilis of sorts of Barker, a year which saw the publication of his classic anthology of essays Arguments for a Theatre and the establishment of The Wrestling School, founded solely to produce Barker’s plays (and it should be noted that the ensemble was created with Barker’s support, not at his instigation, though a few years later Barker would take the reins of the organization — or, perhaps, disorganization, judging from some of the history propounded both in this book and in Barker’s recent memoir A Style and Its Origins, which I wrote about here). Ecstasy and Death is bookended by theory: Arguments for a Theatre in the first chapter, A Style and Its Origins in the last.

There are lacks and weaknesses; sometimes, in his attempt to get it all in, Rabey provides too little description of plays (especially unpublished plays to which this reader, and few others, have access) that appear central to Barker’s career (A Rich Woman’s Poetry, for one, though Rabey’s brief description tantalizes rather than frustrates). As he notes in the preface, Rabey is also unable for space reasons to consider Barker’s poetry: seven volumes at the time of this writing, all but one of which are out of print; particularly unfortunate given Barker’s self-description as a poet. (We may perhaps dream that his current publisher, Oberon Books, will provide a Collected Poems in the near future.) Given Rabey’s attention to Barker’s directorial and design scenography, it’s unfortunate that the book comes without photos (though this may perhaps be the result of the publisher’s budget than Rabey’s oversight); but each volume concludes with a series of statements from actors and actresses familiar with Barker’s work, which goes some way to make up for this lack, and provides welcome alternative voices as well.

No doubt Ecstasy and Death and the republication of its predecessor will infuriate and frustrate; one may expect to hear echoes of John Bull’s criticism of Politics and Desire in Theatre Research International on the publication of the 1989 book: “a book for disciples,” Bull wrote, “written by an acolyte.” (Rabey’s response: “I decided to accept as a profound compliment that which might have been intended as a rebuke.”) But then, perhaps they should. These books themselves constitute a passionate rebuke to a theatre in crisis (the energy of theatrical activity — hundreds of productions through a given year in London and New York, through fringe festivals and in basements — is no indication of a form’s health or status; parasites reproduce at an exponential speed upon rotting flesh), and those responsible for that theatre can’t be expected to welcome them.

Rabey’s writing here, like Barker’s drama, is more than just another addition to the critical shelf or the theatre anthology. Politics and Desire and especially Ecstasy and Death constitute a vision for theatre that re-animates and re-vivifies a form that once spoke uniquely to the very heart and blood of human experience: they do so concisely, precisely, bringing into the theatre space what has for too long been confined to the academy or the pages of theory (which is not to discredit these in the least). As Rabey notes in his summary of Barker’s project:

Barker’s work dramatizes and demonstrates life’s brevity and intensity, and the mercilessness of self and others (theatrical, even when occurring outside the theatre) which is often required to create a moment of life at its fullest pitch, through reorganization of time, in which people are brought together, to make something happen, through the precise manipulation of expectation, interest, unusually heightened inter-/personal awareness, pressure, friction, which generates ecstasy: a momentary revelation of self and others which constitutes an intensely personal pitch of experience and knowledge (“in the midst of” but) beyond the received terms of history …

In comparison, much contemporary theatre pales: we have easy charm and enchantment, rather than beauty or sublimity; celebrations of banality and mediocrity which manage to comprise both frenetic activity and powerless resignation simultaneously; pop-culture tropes, rather than words from the blood; product, not self-invention and existential, metaphysical speculation upon which it is impossible to put a price. One of Rabey’s implications here is that life is short, options and resources limited: if this theatre can recapture the form’s original spiritual and intellectual power, why waste time with any other? Even those unfamiliar with Barker’s work will find much to wrestle with here (though they will no doubt seek his work out as well), much to inspire, much to provide courage. “It is never too late to forestall the death of Europe,” Barker wrote at the end of “Fortynine asides for a tragic theatre” in 1986. Nor is it ever too late, Rabey insists, to forestall the deaths of the theatre, or the self.

From the archives: Politics and a critique of tragedy

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In response to Karen Malpede’s essay “On Being a So-Called Political Playwright” which appeared at Howlround on 29 February, I repost the below brief entry, originally published on 3 March 2010.

An audience for a theatre that does not yet go to the theatre. Perhaps the worst advice ever offered in creative writing classes is: “Write what you know.” All too often, this leads to a paralysis of imagination — that it is the immediate cultural world, the class, the biographical anecdote that should be the inspiration for the dramatic work. It values the knowledge of immediate personal experience over that of the imagination; the knowledge won by a deep penetration of imaginative experience is the knowledge proper to the theatre; the knowledge of immediate personal experience, the anecdote, proper to the barroom conversation. Perhaps this is an American trope; perhaps too this is a reason for the paucity of imaginative political theatre on U.S. stages. The denial of the knowledge provided by individual imagination keeps the theatre in the immediate neighborhood. It does not create a larger world.

Sarah Kane’s statement “I am quite happy to aim at the smallest audience possible, which is myself, because I am the only person who is definitely going to see this play anyway. That’s why I try to please myself” is not a motto of artistic arrogance but more a motto of humility. It speaks instead to common humanity, not an aristocratic conception of imagination or the aesthetic project. If a British woman in her 20s with a fairly conventional education and upbringing can draw parallels between a middle-aged man and a developmentally-disabled woman in a Leeds hotel room and a battle in a Bosnian city, her statement implies, anyone, any audience, may be able to draw these same parallels. They are available through the same imaginative power of the individual audience member, should they be open to it and despite the efforts of the Culture Industry to kill the individual imagination itself. But these parallels are won not through personal experience but through an individual imaginative reach inwards towards the core of their humanity and outwards towards the world beyond the self. The resulting drama is an offering of this personal imaginative experience to the audience, not an imposition of a perspective that seeks to tie up loose ends — to teach or to entertain. The Culture Industry’s corporations through the media (its music, its newspapers, its television channels, its plays and its films) increasingly suffocate the individual imagination through this so-called education and entertainment to provide the kind of puling, paralyzing resignation (room for the natural disasters of Haiti and Chile, none for the genocides of Rwanda and Bosnia) that is a far cry from Schopenhauer’s conception of the word. And yet, the products of this industry are what contemporary American dramatists apparently “know” best.

David Ian Rabey on Howard Barker, although his comments offer a perspective for other dramatists and theatre practitioners as well, rather than being limited to Barker’s individual body of work:

Barker aims to create an authentically theatrical art, different in style and objectives from film and television; he sees no point in the theatre trying to compete with these other media, or seek a reflected glamour by what must inevitably remain a second-hand association with their style and effects. He aims to move theatre onto a different ground. He repudiates both entertainment and pedagogic enlightenment (which both offer to answer all questions and resolve all contradictions) as ultimate objectives of the theatrical experience. Rather, he creates a theatre which offers a deeper imaginative opposition to society through speculations involving a questioning relief from prevalent social ideals. This theatre becomes a space which is resistant to social pressures and necessities; and the suspension of these forces and promises entails anxiety, rather than more conventional forms of pleasure. Here the actor, through his/her diction, rhythm and movement, has to mesmerise and fascinate the audience to continue and extend their considerations of possibilities. It may be that the audience for this theatre does not yet go to the theatre. But it might, if it encountered a theatre … which offered something more than what is currently conventionally associated with “theatre.” This is a theatre that proposes that nothing is impossible.

“Raising Hell: Introduction”
Theatre of Catastrophe: New Essays on Howard Barker (13-14)
Emphasis my own.

The ascetic aesthetic

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Where philosophy ends, art begins. In a sense, after Schopenhauer’s “Nothing,” the word which concludes The World as Will and Representation, there is the emergence of the chord that opens Tristan und Isolde. It is not therefore a philologist who properly “corrects,” if that is the appropriate word, a philosophy which reaches its furthermost end, but a musician.

In this, the most Schopenhauerian of operas, Wagner repurposes eros as a means to renunciation and repudiation of the world as a means to experience the thing-in-itself, that which lies beyond the world. Below, a post from last June, in which I discuss a few associated issues. It has been slightly revised.

At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes:

Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will [in] no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity. [1]

I was reminded of this passage as I reached the midpoint of the new Cambridge University Press translation of The World as Will and Representation this weekend. If Beckett’s work might be seen as a philosophy wrapped in the guise of art (imaginative prose and drama), then Schopenhauer’s might be seen as a work of art wrapped in the guise of a philosophy (expository prose). This perspective may provide one explanation for Beckett’s continuing appeal to philosophers, and Schopenhauer’s to artists. As Calder suggests, the generic form of this content partakes of a certain oscillation of any given work among various forms, in this case the imaginative and the expository. Schopenhauer’s work has its longeurs and repetitions, like Beckett’s, like that of any artist who works in forms that express a problematic relation to time. The title of Ulrich Pothast’s book on Beckett and Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision, points to the same kind of oscillation. There is metaphysics and there is art: and they may be separate or fused.

I have written before of the architectonic structure of Schopenhauer’s main work (not dissimilar to that, in its power and sublimity, to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony), and he is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished prose stylists of 19th-century Germany in whatever form. It is also relevant to note Schopenhauer’s valuation of aesthetic work as a means to renunciation and resignation as superior to that of the philosophical treatise, the genre in which he pursued his project. The pursuit of philosophical ends through aesthetics, as Calder conceived Beckett’s enduring reputation, is mirrored by that of the pursuit of aesthetic ends through philosophy, which permits both Beckett and Schopenhauer to maintain significant footings in both genres. As Pothast notes, it’s not as if Beckett conceived of his project as putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy on stage or in the novel, and Pothast argues that as Beckett’s career went on it resembled Schopenhauer’s metaphysics less and less. I think the first part of his note is quite true but the second is not necessarily true, but even if it were, it only indicates that the work of no philosopher or artist constitutes a final end, but only a dynamic of concerns that evolve and change through an artist’s work.

That some philosophers and artists have elective affinities with each other is a lesson that Schopenhauer’s enduring influence on artists, and Beckett’s enduring appeal to critics and philosophers, demonstrates perhaps better than any other philosopher. Any mental or creative dialogue that an artist or a philosopher maintains through a lifetime must include a dialogue with the dead, and the communication of these affinities within groups of like-minded writers and artists permits of revision and reconsideration. Schopenhauer famously refuted what he considered Kant’s missteps in an extended appendix to WWR, but there’s no reason why an artist may not also participate in this revision and consideration as well.

To take one example particularly relevant to my own project, Richard Wagner was the first major artist to have his life’s work stopped and radically revised in the middle of his career as a result of a reading of The World as Will and Representation. It was through Schopenhauer’s work that this reconsideration occurred, but Wagner also revised his mentor. In his important new book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, Laurence Dreyfus cites an 1858 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck in which Wagner, then at work on Tristan und Isolde, does just this:

It is really a matter of proving — something no philosopher has done, not even Schopenhauer — that the recognized redemptive path to the complete pacification of the Will is through Love, and in fact not an abstract human love but rather by means of sexual love, that is, a love germinating in the attraction between man and woman. [2]

It is also important to note here Dreyfus’ gloss on Wagner’s letter:

Far from being doomed to failure and eternal disappointment as in Schopenhauer’s clear exposition, Wagner’s notion of sexual love becomes a means to assuage the gnawing desires of the Will-to-live. Even Schopenhauer admitted in his second volume that there is a difference between understanding renunciation as a philosopher and practicing it as an ascetic mystic, a statement that undercuts the effect of his philosophical conclusions … . Perhaps Wagner intended to air a legitimate criticism of Schopenhauer’s unconvincing pseudo-Buddhist account of renunciation. But as soon as one examines the composer’s assertion about sexual love, its logical inconsistency becomes glaring. For if sexual desire (according to Schopenhauer) embodies the essence of the Will-to-live, it is nonsense to allow sexual love to pacify the Will. It is like giving whiskey to cure an alcoholic, or pornography to treat a sexual obsessive. [3]

True enough, and Dreyfus here has stumbled upon a central paradox of Schopenhauer’s conclusion — that is, how can the will be turned by a helpless vehicle of that will, the human individual, against itself? The paradox is insoluble except through an appeal to mystery and mysticism — but it is this mystery and mysticism itself which constitute the possibility of any kind of true, redemptive aesthetic experience as well. That it is logically inconsistent, as Dreyfus notes, perhaps makes The World as Will and Representation poor philosophy (though only if philosophy must abjure any appeals to a mysticism and mystery — and this does not necessarily mean God or purposiveness — which is beyond human understanding). But that does not make it bad art — indeed, in its openness to aesthetic and imaginative possibility, it makes it very good art indeed. And it confirms that Kant, Schopenhauer and Wagner can all ascertain new forms and understandings of experience from each other’s work without ignoring the weaknesses and mistakes of each.

It is instructive to note that great philosophy that aspires to the condition of art has similar effects in the best critics and expositors of that philosophy. Bryan Magee concludes his magisterial The Philosophy of Schopenhauer not with a summation chapter, but with a poem — as if expository prose could not contain the enduring value and appeal of Schopenhauer’s work to that writer. More recently, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume survey of Howard Barker’s career is as much philosophy and art as it is literary criticism, as James Balestrieri noted upon the publication of the first volume: “Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker’s lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry. …  At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.” All of this argues for the possibility, indeed the value and the necessity, of an art which strains towards philosophy, and a philosophy which strains towards art.

Footnotes
  1. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 1. [↩]
  2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 71. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

Video: Blok/Eko

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Howard Barker’s Blok/Eko, produced last summer by the Wrestling School at the Exeter Northcott Theatre and directed by the author, “is a large-scale drama about death and its status in the world.” The story:

Eko, an aging despot, seemingly on a whim, liquidates the entire medical profession, asserting that consolation — in the form of song — is a better way with sickness than drugs or surgery. A connoisseur herself, she knows great song is itself the distillation of suffering and so deliberately exposes her greatest poet Tot to a life of crime, poverty and humiliation in order to extract from him his finest work.

Below is a short sample of the production’s visual and linguistic imagination. The text itself is available from Oberon Books here; the Wrestling School’s archival page for the production is available here. You can also read my review of Barker’s memoir A Style and Its Origins, as well as an overview of Barker’s career as seen through the perspective of critic David Ian Rabey.