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Monday, 18 August 2008

Organum

Nightlanguage; nightwork. A common trope of near-death experiences is the invitation of the dying by the dead, by heaven, into the light – a not inappropriate trope for the contemporary American theatre, which similarly draws its audience into a death of imagination through the light of its entertainment.

As the illumination of the electric light has more and more thrust theatre into its status as a primarily night-time art (both the Greeks and Shakespeare wrote their plays for a daytime theatre structure), the contemporary theatre, through its fear of the dark and the night, has become brighter, despite the fact that the art of theatre is now properly an art of the dark, its proper language a Joycean "nightlanguage." David Ian Rabey in a 2006 interview with Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe draws dramatic language and dramatic work together:

... I favor drama which works in terms of what Brendan Kennelly terms nightenglish which reaches beyond reason in its surprising and speculative interrogative presences, rather than the dayenglish of rational communication and explanation which is usually predicated on some utilitarian terms, beyond those of the theatre itself. ...

The demands of what might, appropriately in this context, be termed my "day job" inevitably tend to take precedence: the busyness of exposition and explanation in teaching students, the placating of bureaucratic demands which are ... all I suppose in the service of the (sometimes heartwarmingly) ludicrous attempt to make a living and raise a family. But then there is the nightwork, in individual imaginings or interpersonal encounters and rehearsal, which yields its own promptings, and becomes resentful if denied for too long. ... [Emphasis added]

What the dark of the night (and the dark of the theatre) requests is an experience beyond the merely visual, the object distanced from us but recognisable; in the dark, in the night, denied our daytime eyes, the touch of our flesh is hyper-sensitised; what is it that we are feeling, what impinges upon our bodies unrecognisably and unseen? A language and perspective which underscores that fleshed status: that provokes our imagination to unexpected because unseen sites of experience.

The light of entertainment is perverse because it means the death of the individual imagination and possibility; it may be that we are so passionately in love with the flickering pixel, with the light that pretends to show us truth (though a corporately-constructed truth out of the culture factories of mass media and capitalism), that we can no longer feel a touch on our own flesh. The entirely visual field of the hysterically kinetic and hyperdestructive videogame and film, subsumed in lighted death.

The trope is corrupted but ecstatically so. Now, night and darkness are life and possibility: the theatre as a night-time art is in its proper place. The speaking flesh in the dark seduces. We can't see its source; is it speaking to us? Is that the speaker's cool hand we feel on our forearm? Of course death and pessimism still play around the dark night, as they must, for it is the dark perhaps that we daytime beings fear the most. We are most at risk there. And there is something to this, that the dark night too is the refuge of death as well as life. But we must resist the urge to moralise and cut off the possibility of a more ecstatic existence.

Can a word emerging from the dark seduce and excite us, even when the speaking body is distant? Most emphatically, yes, though no one can answer in the positive without having experienced that himself. In this recognition we realise the power of language, for ourselves and in others.

Instead of inviting the audience into the light of the stage, the art of theatre invites them into the nightworld surrounding it, defining that nightworld with its negative illuminatory space.

It is this sublime ecstasy that Schopenhauer experiences in aesthetic, musical and theatrical epiphany, an epiphany verging on the mystical. It is a nighttime ecstasy, fully charged with the consciousless will, and containing within it the deepest wounds and most ecstatic caresses of the fleshed word. This is, perhaps, what those who condemn these so-called philosophical pessimists refuse to see, whether it's from sloppy reading, or from only a glancing familiarity with the primary text itself, or from judging these "pessimists" (including Beckett and Bernhard) having read only a paragraph in the secondary literature here or a bookjacket there. They misread deliberately, or dismiss superficially, for many of these are cold and impatient wonders. They fear the possibilities of the life of the night. Whereas even Schopenhauer, giving life, fathered a daughter ...

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Quotes: Schopenhauer on Stage

In her biography of Austrian dramatist and novelist Thomas Bernhard, Gitta Honegger discusses Bernhard's theatrical practice:

Schopenhauer, in his World as Will and Representation, offers the conceptual tool for Bernhard's poetics of comedy:

The life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy. For the doings and worries of the day, the restless mockeries of the moment, the desires and fears of the week, the mishaps of every hour, are all brought about by chance that is always bent on some mischievous trick; they are nothing but scenes from a comedy. The never-fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end, always gives us a tragedy. Thus, as if fate wished to add mockery to the misery of our existence, our life must contain all the woes of tragedy, and yet we cannot even assert the dignity of tragic characters, but, in the broad detail of life, are inevitably the foolish characters of a comedy. [1:322]

In Bernhard's dramatrugy the serious seeps through the cracks in his split-screen comedian's routine. The narrator sees himself in action or rather in the action of being inactive, which captures the underlying action of his on-going battle with a terminal illness. Between what he does and what he wants to do and what lies behind what he doesn't do and what he will end up doing, which is writing a text about not writing a text, lies the abyss, or, as Schopenhauer sees it, "a very great incongruity between our concepts and objective reality." [2:99] It rings with the mocking laughter of those who watch what we are doing, which Bernhard anticipates as his most merciless scourge.

Most important, The World as Will and Representation provides the radical dramaturgical model for Bernhard's revisionist view of the Shakespearean world as a stage conceived, perceived, and manipulated from within the individual's skull as playwright, director, and audience. Schopenhauer's concept for Vorstellung, as the representation of an all-pervasive will, provides Bernhard with a paradigm that he continues to mine for all its signifying potential from idea to representation to performance. While the English term "representation" has a performative aspect, the German Vorstellung refers directly to a theatrical performance. Bernhard, obsessed by the histrionics of existence, makes Schopenhauer the butt of his own philosophy, as it were. Bernhard's world is a Vorstellung in every respect. It is based on the philosopher's vision of the world as a representation of the thinking subject, who simultaneously projects himself into his imagined world, where he performs and watches himself in performance perched in the private box of his mind. Pathetic enough to believe that it is he who masterminded the whole spectacle in fulfillment of his desires, he is in fact nothing but a puppet manipulated by a Schopenhauerian will: " ... for the will performs the great tragedy and comedy at its own expense, and is also its own spectator." [1:331; emphasis added]

And, nota bene, the title of this study of Beckett's late plays and prose.

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