Category Archives: theatre minima

Celan and Beckett

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Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett.

Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett.

According to John Felstiner, Theodor Adorno considered Paul Celan “the only authentic postwar writer to stand with Samuel Beckett.” [1] (Adorno, Beckett, Celan: there’s the beginning of an alphabestiary to contend with.) Along with Adorno’s high regard, Beckett and Celan also shared Paris as their home for most of their adult lives, but surprisingly their paths never crossed. In the 2004 essay “Paul Celan Meets Samuel Beckett,” Felstiner describes the writers’ shared concerns, which become even more obvious as the years go by:

Living alone in March 1970 (with never-healing wounds) on Avenue Émile Zola just across from Pont Mirabeau, apart from his wife Gisèle and son Eric, this “true-stammered mouth,” survivor of “the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech,” has recently returned from a fortnight in Israel, his first visit, elated and drawn to move there but fearful of yet again losing his German mother tongue, his beloved mother’s tongue seized as if overnight by her murderers. Franz Wurm, a poet-friend in Paris, invites him one afternoon to come along and meet Beckett, but Celan says No — to go unannounced at the last minute isn’t right. That evening, given greetings from Beckett, he says: That’s probably the only man here I could have had an understanding with.

But hadn’t there already been an understanding, hadn’t they been meeting all along, those years in Paris — the older man a more-or-less voluntary Irish exile to France and French, the younger man, orphaned, homelandless, reaching Paris but cleaving to German: Beckett chipping away at silence with “this dust of words,” Celan with his “gasping words,” with the “prayer-sharp knives / of my / silence”? During the 1953 opening run of En attendant Godot, where Didi and Gogo go on “blathering about nothing in particular,” Celan composed “The Vintagers,” in which “bent toward blindness and lamed,” a “latemouth” thirsts for wine, a “crookstick speaks into / the silence of answers.” …

April 16 [1970]: He tells his 14-year-old son Eric he can’t after all take him the next day, as planned, to a performance of Godot. Two tickets are later found in his wallet.

May 1 [1970]: Seven miles downstream a fisherman comes on Celan’s body caught in a filter of the river. Beckett’s longtime German translator, Elmar Tophoven, succeeds Celan as Reader in German at the École Normale Supérieure.

Celan me dépasse, Samuel Beckett will later confide to a friend, “Celan leaves me behind.” But can that be so? Beckett, whom everywhere you go in our mind you meet on his way back? Beckett’s trilogy opens with a mother’s death and ends with The Unnamable‘s last words: “in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Interestingly there appears to be no mention of Paul Celan in James Knowlson’s magisterial biography of Beckett; his name does not appear in the index. For me, as I write and think about another kind of theatre minima, Beckett and Celan remain enduring exemplars for the writer, and the writing, of their and my own time.

The full text of Felstiner’s essay can be found here.

Footnotes
  1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995, p. 107. [↩]

Theatre as sanctuary

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UPDATE: Rob Weinert-Kendt, associate editor of American Theatre and freelance critic himself, responds as part of the loyal opposition in “The Sweat and Spit of Life” at his blog The Wicked Stage.

In the urban community of the 21st century, the one space reserved for silence and contemplation is the church. Only here do electronic screens, noise, large gestures and conversation seem to be prohibited through common consent. On sabbath days it is necessary to perform some kind of ceremony  in most religions, but at other times the nave remains silent and abandoned, for the most part, to the meditations of the individual. Even the performance of the liturgy on sabbath days is often restrained, the mysteries (such as transubstantiation) quietly muttered, and the call-and-response are formalized as communication between the celebrant and the congregation.

A sanctuary is a consecrated space, a refuge and protection from the world outside the building’s walls, a place of privacy and secrecy. For those of little or no faith, of course, this consecration is meaningless, and a church is as much a simple building as a shopping mall. But its loss as that consecrated space is the loss of the final refuge from the earthly world — from urban culture, whether from the cities of the 14th century or the cities of the 21st. The long and often tormented relationship between theatre, drama and church stretches back to the ancient Greeks; aesthetics and religion partook freely of each other’s qualities; faith was tested, rewarded or found wanting.

Some artists have keenly felt this loss of the consecrated space to the broader culture; some have mourned it, others thought this loss unimportant if not cause for celebration, still others have tried to redefine the consecration of aesthetic space for the urban world. Since I wrote “Rothko Chapel,” which considered this over two years ago, theatre has voluntarily continued to abandon its status as a space consecrated to aesthetic experience, more and more integrating itself with the popular culture outside of the theatre’s walls, welcoming those very electronic screens, noise, large gestures and conversation once as prohibited there as in the church.

The theatre is a church for the faithless, but it continues to require the clearing of the popular culture from the performance space. The precise concentration required of the aesthetic experience as preparation for metaphysical contemplation necessitates the provision of silence and darkness in the broader communal arena of the nave that was the usual possession of the church. Clear of the distractions of the outside world, the inner world becomes more alive, is prepared for the metaphysical experience that drama provides. For this very reason both concert halls and galleries share in some of this sense of the space consecrated to art. It will be argued that there are many sects which bring qualities of the outside world into the sanctuary, and this is quite true. But it does not follow that all sects must necessarily do so. If I do not deny that some of these qualities may engender just as spiritual an experience as those of an ascetic practice, it would be poor form to deny that the other qualities that I describe above do so as well.

For theatre to be considered as a sanctuary for metaphysical speculation, it is necessary to repudiate that outside world once again, and this time, because the Culture Industry has infested nearly every aspect of our lives, with keen uncompromising energy. Theatre then becomes a spiritual exercise and not a form of entertainment as defined by that Industry. This will be difficult — every element of the theatrical economy, from playwright to producer to reviewer to spectator, conspires against such an approach to drama and theatre. It is not “fun.” No, it is not. And theatre should make no apology for that. Some things should  not be fun — and this is a statement that, in this urban culture, trespasses into the terrain of the criminal. Fun can always be sought elsewhere; there are outlets enough for it.

In terms of practical matters, theatre as sanctuary would do well to turn to the performance of the liturgy of the church. There is no place in which words could conceivably have more spiritual and metaphysical power than in the spoken text of the liturgy (which is why, over the generations, changes in liturgies have been difficult, controversial and painstaking — words truly mean, and changes in the liturgy have sublime consequences). Concessions to the place of tragedy and theatre in popular culture also require a variety of practical considerations; a church as sanctuary would:

  • Be small, more in the nature of a chapel than a cathedral; perhaps no more than 30 seats
  • Be open to anyone who desires to attend, which requires a low cost of admission
  • In performance, be as precise and focused as the performance of the liturgy
  • Through sound and light design, provide a ground for contemplation
  • Tirelessly reject the inessential in design, costume, performance and text
  • Because concentrated, and demanding harsh discipline from both performer and spectator, performances should extend in duration for no more than an hour
  • Critics and reviewers, because they have no place in a church, have no place in a theatrical sanctuary either, and should be driven like moneychangers from the temple

There will be many — perhaps most — who won’t want to participate in a theatrical experience like this; though they would be welcomed, as visitors are to church services, they can go elsewhere, for this theatre does not exist for them. It exists for those who believe that theatre and drama can provide a place and form for communal metaphysical contemplation and speculation: it is theatre as an essential element of life, not as amusement for a rainy day, for the bored straggler with money burning a hole in his pocket. It is the only remaining sancutary for the exploration of secrets and mysteries beyond the pale of Culture Industry — indeed, the very secrets and mysteries which that Culture Industry reviles and seeks to drown.

Striking the set and restoring the plot

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The close of a play is always a melancholy affair, and yesterday What She Knew‘s set and lights came down. It was a remarkable journey in so many ways, and certainly the best and most rewarding experience of my artistic life, not least because of the extraordinary collaboration of the artists who surrounded me, especially Gabriele Schafer and Nick Fracaro. I would do the same thing again tomorrow. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank those who joined me on this journey (the culmination of four years of work on my part), and I know I speak for Gabriele as well when I thank those who came out on these chilly winter nights to join us for the exploration, and to those who stopped after the show or wrote to us personally to tell us how much the play affected them. Ultimately, this play like any experience ends up in the possession of the spectator. And so it dissipates into the past.

For the record, we ended up with two reviews, in the New York Times and Time Out New York, and though we would have liked to see better ones I do not write to satisfy the tastes of any critic or reviewer, and so there we are. To say any more about these reviews in particular would be to  invite comparison with the fox who complained about sour grapes, and I certainly don’t want to do that. But if Percy Bysshe Shelley is right that poets (and performers and designers) are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, critics and reviewers are the unacknowledged judiciary, and it’s their job, most of them anyway, to unquestioningly internalize the presumptions of their editors, their aesthetics and their culture enough to make their own work salable and palatable (and they do not write to satisfy me any more than I write to satisfy them) and to render judgment in the marketplace.

On the other hand, a critic is never as responsible for the expansion and exploration of aesthetic possibility as the artist, on whose work the critic feeds. I was reminded during all this of Arnold Schoenberg’s 1918 establishment of his Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna. His intention, according to the Wikipedia page for the society, was to make “carefully rehearsed and comprehensible performances of modern music available to genuinely interested members of the musical public” on a subscription basis. The life of the society only lasted until 1921, when economics made it impossible for the society to continue, but there is this rather amusing note on the organization:

Only those who had joined the organisation were admitted to the events: the intention was to exclude “sensation-seeking” members of the Viennese public (who would often attend concerts with the express intention of whistling derisively at “modern” works by blowing across their house-keys) as well as keep out hostile critics who would attack such music in their publications: a sign displayed on the door — in the manner of a police notice — would state that Kritikern ist der Eintritt verboten (“Critics are forbidden entry”).

Adorno on Nietzsche and amorality

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The cause of amorality has been espoused by the same Darwinists whom Nietzsche despised, and who proclaim as their maxim the barbaric struggle for existence with such vehemence, just because it is no longer needed. True distinction has long ceased to consist in taking the best for oneself, and has become instead a satiety with taking, that practices in reality the virtue of giving, which in Nietzsche occurs only in the mind. Ascetic ideals constitute today a more solid bulwark against the madness of the profit-economy than did the hedonistic life sixty years ago against liberal repression. The amoralist may now at last permit himself to be as kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche already was then. As a guarantee of his undiminished resistance, he is still as alone in this as in the days when he turned the mask of evil upon the normal world, to teach the norm to fear its own perversity.

Theodor Adorno
Minima Moralia (97)

The final four performances of theatre minima’s own ascetic resistance against madness and the profit-economy, What She Knew, run tonight through Saturday at 8.00pm at manhattan theatre source, 177 Macdougal Street. Tickets are available here.