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“A Different Kind of Failure”: Rupture, Transfiguration and
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“A DIFFERENT KIND OF FAILURE”:
RUPTURE, TRANSFIGURATION AND THE FUTURE OF INDETERMINACY IN
MODERN DRAMA
By

Lance Norman

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2007

ABSTRACT
“A DIFFERENT KING OF FAILURE”:
RUPTURE, TRANSFIGURATION AND THE FUTURE OF INDETERMINACY IN
MODERN DRAMA
By
Lance Norman

“’A Different Kind of Failure’: Rupture, Transfiguration, and the Future of
Indeterminacy in Modern Drama” reconceptualizes the direction and stakes of an
evolving twentieth-century dramatic practice. A productive interplay occurs between
what I characterize as the theatre of rupture, and the conservative function of dramatic
theory and criticism, which I name the theatrical meaning matrix. This theatre of rupture
locates dramatic performance in the breakdown of dramatic signifying systems, and
thereby conceptualizes dramatic innovation in the failure of seeing, and the failure of
linear causality. Such a conception, which embraces the dramatic potential of
dismemberment, incorporates the seemingly divergent theatres of Henrik Ibsen, Harold
Pinter, Sarah Kane, Sam Shepard, Eugene O’Neill and Eugene Ionesco. Focusing on off-
stage objects, the paradoxical proliferation of the dead child as dramatic emblem, and
invisible objects, this project analyzes the dematerializing, dehistoricizing, and
decontextualizing function of modern drama. Comprised of dramatic theory and
dramatic criticism, the theatrical meaning matrix encompasses attempts to resist rupture
by contextualizing the dramatic text and the theatrical event. Taken together, the theatre
of rupture and efforts to interpret it enact a traumatic model. Traumatic in that despite

the dismembering and decontextualizing structure of the theatre of rupture, the matrix

attempts to overcome this indeterminacy by placing the drama in an understandable

historical and material context. This compulsion to contextualize is explicit in the
semiotic approaches to the theatre characterized by Keir Elam, and the phenemonological
approaches by such theorists as Richard Roach and Andrew Sofer. In the efforts to shield
theatrical performance from the trauma of rupture, the theatrical meaning matrix ignores

what it means not to see.

Copyright by
Lance Norman
2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I: “Philology Leads to Calamity!” ............................................................ 1
Introduction: Perverse Possibilities Plaguing Modern Drama ........................ 1
Chapter One: Ibsen, Suicide, and Secrets Gone A—Fowl: The Failure of
Transfiguration and the Rupture of Cruelty in Modern Drama ..................... 15

I Mimetic Theatre and the Transfiguring Ideal ............................... 15
II The Wild Duck and the Failure of Transfiguration ........................ 25
III The Theatre of Rupture and Critical Contextualization .................. 32
IV A Chip Off the Old Block: The Return of Transfiguration and the Dead
Child as Signifying Rupture ..................................................... 38

Part II: From Ibsen to Kane: Baby Steps Toward A Theory of Modern Drama as a

Theatre of Rupture ................................................................................. 46
Prelude: Modern Drama’s Dead Children ............................................. 46
Chapter Two:

Socializing Texts, Scandalous Words and Burning Babies in Hedda Gabler 62
Chapter Three:
A Dead Baby and the Sound of Traumatic Fantasy in Ashes to Ashes. . . . . . . 83
Chapter F our: “DO YOU SEE ME?”: Digesting Representations of Dead
Children in Shepard and Kane ......................................................... 118
Part 111:
“It Pierces Too Sharp”: Historical Contextualization and Performative Futures ........ 159

Prelude: Perdition, The Traumatic Theatrical Matrix and Historical Context 1 59
Chapter Five: “This Story Has More Other Hands than a Hindu God”:

Mathematical Theatre and the Subversion of Indeterminate History ............ 167
I Joan and the Mathematical Theatre ........................................ 169
II Canonizing the Electron .................................................... 176
III Performing the Emperor ................................................... 196
IV Converging Temporalities and the Scientific Theatre 214
Chapter Six:“Words Drop Like Stones or Dead Bodies”: Performative Futures
and Anti-Theatre ........................................................................ 219
I We Have No Bananas Today, But What About Tomorrow? ........... 219
II “I would make you go down on your knees”: Prophesy, Performative
Possibility and the Oedipal Ever-Present ................................... 229
111 “Or Possibly There is No Killer At All”: Subjecting the Future of
Indeterminacy .................................................................. 240
Endnotes .......................................................................................... 257
Works Cited ....................................................................................... 266

Part I:

“Philology Leads To Calamity!” I

Introduction: Perverse Possibilities Plaguing Modern Drama

If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious,
but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the
exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the
perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people are
localized. (Antonin Artaud 30)

A dear friend of mine wrote to me that Virginia Woolf gnawed at her, and
that such a play must have something to it — that it could not be ignored.
That ’s right — there is no way in which we can ignore danger or disease.
But it is not right therefore to welcome the plague into our midst. We must
not ignore what Albee represents and portends, either for our theatre or
for our society. The lie of his work is the lie of our theatre and the lie of
America. The lie of decadence must be fought. It is no accident that the
other side of the coin — the lie of painless goodness — also had a fine run
on Broadway as it was portrayed in Robert Bolt ’s comforting paean to
nostalgia, A Man for All Seasons. We must fight both lies. But Albee ’s is
more dangerous — for it is a lie in current usage these days, and one which
is likely to have an infective and corrosive influence on our theatre.
(Richard Schechner, “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?” 10)

In his first editorial after taking control of The Tulane Drama Review in 1962, Richard
Schechner proposed a new direction for the journal and for the American theatre. He
suggested the journal’s editorial section would provide leadership, and work to transform
the theatre from “the call girl of money and ambition” by restoring “virginity to the
theatre” (8).2

Schechner’s revirginization project would begin to clarify in the following issue’s
editorial. Titled “Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?,” Schechner’s commentary holds

Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? up to ridicule, and in the process seems to

proffer it as an example of the theatrical prostitution referenced in the previous issue.
Schechner replaces sexual metaphors with metaphors of contagion as a means to
differentiate good theatre from bad. Albee’s play is not just a poor example of theatrical
practice, its performance puts the entire body of American theatre and society in peril.
Schechner describes Virginia Woolf as a “disease,” as “infective,” as “corrosive,” and
most strikingly, as a “plague.” Comparing theatre to the plague - especially when such a
characterization occurs in the drama journal’s editorial — recalls Antonin Artaud’s
formulation of theTheatre of Cruelty, in which “[t]he theatre like the plague is a crisis
which is resolved by death or cure” (31).

Artaud’s plague is also a sign of theatrical revitalization. By exteriorizing “ all
the perverse possibilities of the mind,” the plague will transfigure the world: “the action
of theater, like that of plague, is beneficial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they
are, it causes the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of
our world” (31). Rather than a thing apart, the Theatre of Cruelty is part of the world,
transforming things for the better by revealing truth. Schechner is sympathetic with such
an ideal. Schechner’s editorial marks an early step in his search for an authentic theatre
that would culminate with his anthropological vision of performance studies, and the
transformation of TDR from a drama journal to a journal of performance studies.

If, as Schechner suggests, Virginia Woolf is symptomatic of the plague, then
Schechner’s plague is the bane of the modern theatre, not its salvation. The plague never
achieves the effect Artaud promises. Far from establishing the interconnection between

theatre, the world, and truth, the American theatre and its representative carrier reinforce

what is plaguing the theatre: theatre’s artifice which Schechner understands as the

seemingly insurmountable distance between the world and theatre:
Albee’s characters, like the playwright himself, suffer from arrested
development. They play the game of decadence, just as he plays the game
of creativity. There is no real, hard bedrock of suffering in Virginia Woolf
— it is all illusory, depending upon a “child” who was never born: a
gimmick, a trick, a trap. And there is no solid creative suffering in the
writer who meanders through a scene stopping here and there for the sake
of a joke or an easy allusion that almost fits. (8)

Albee’s characters may be playing the game of decadence, and their author may
be playing the game of creativity, but what games are Artaud and Schechner playing?
Artaud asserts: “If confusion is the sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a
rupture between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs that are their
representations” (7). Beginning with this assumption, Artaud suggests that his Theatre of
Cruelty can overcome the fundamental rupture between culture and life which modern
civilization perpetuates. Theatre purifies by revealing the authentic beneath the artificial,
thereby suturing the rupture between things and words, ideas, and signs.

Schechner implies that if there is a Theatre of Cruelty, it is vastly different than
the cleansing plague envisioned by Artaud. As plague symptom, Virginia Woolf fails to
purify. Albee’s play embraces the theatricality of the mask, instead of allowing the mask
to fall and reveal what was previously obscured. Rather than a means to transcend the
rupture between things and ideas, Albee’s play plagues Schechner with the possibility

that theatre can be an end in itself. If the plague is a futile means to overcome rupture,

Schechner must find some other means to reconnect theatre to life because the plague that
is Virginia Woolf reinforces the very same rupture between things and ideas that Artaud
imagined ending in a death or cure.

Underpinning both Schechner and Artaud’s understanding of a theatre that must
reconnect with life is a conflict over the issue of context. Artaud embraces his Theatre of
Cruelty as a mechanism for seeing beneath the world’s metaphorical mask, and
Schechner critiques Albee’s imaginary child because it is a mask — a theatrical function -
that reveals only absence underneath. In an essential irony, Classical Greek Drama is
also founded on the use of the mask. In theatre the mask’s obscuring function is
inextricable from its revealing function. Artaud and Schechner’s theatres of
transformation - along with the theatrical visions of many other modern theorists
including Brecht, Meyerhold and Grotowski — try to transform the theatre by rejecting the
mask. Artaud and Schechner obscure the still-present obscuring function of the work that
is intrinsic to drama.

Confusing the mask with the object it hides underneath, or the object that the
reader wants to be hidden underneath, ignores the rupture essential to theatre, between
representation and the object being represented. Artaud and Schechner both exhibit a
compulsion to contextualize this rupture by equating theatrical meaning with objects that
are seen and which have a physical presence. In essence, Artaud and Schechner
contextualize thereby enabling them to read dramatic signifiers as synonymous with
drama’s meaning. Artaud and Schechner’s ideas thus both are symptoms of the
compulsion to contextualize, and hence resolve dramatic rupture in Modern and

Contemporary Drama. Tracing this conflict from Ibsen to the present, this dissertation

explores the inherent rupture occurring in theatre between objects and their
corresponding ideas. It also examines Modern Drama’s efforts to overcome this rupture
in its every manifestation in drama, performance, dramatic theory, and dramatic criticism,
materially and historically recuperating ruptures by contextualizing them.

Neither Artaud nor Schechner can accept the rupture between performance and
meaning as an aspect of theatricality. Rupture, thus, must be evidence of a theatrical
flaw, a shortcoming to be overcome. Artaud and Schechner, thus, ignore the character of
Virginia Woolf ’s theatrical revelations. Despite all efforts to conceive of Albee’s play as
an aberrant example of bad drama, Virginia Woolf envisions the working of drama as the
rifi between things and ideas and the failure of dramatic transfiguration. Artaud and
Schechner’s idealization of real world effect, gloss over how it is difficult to demarcate
theatre from any other representational system when theatre is envisioned as akin to the
world at large. Only by focusing on the signifying system of Modern Drama and the way
this system calls attention to itself does drama differentiate itself as a system of
signification. One clear way to maintain such a focus is to perpetuate the very rupture
between things and ideas Artaud and Schechner marginalize in their privileging of a
mimetic theatre.

Primary among Schechner’s problems with Virginia Woolf is the play’s imaginary
child. Schechner’s anger at being tricked and trapped by a child who was never born is a
peculiar critique. Not to be overly glib, but George, Martha, Nick, and Honey - like
Macduff - were of woman never born. The fake child disrupts Schechner’s
understanding of theatrical signification. Where he expects to find a mimetic theatre, a

play that embraces its own narrative constructs, and one in which signifier = signified, he

finds instead that signification is tenuous. The play reveals that signifiers that are taken
for granted are empty of all phenomenological content.3 Further, this process of
signifying absence is inherently theatrical.

George and Martha are both aware that the imaginary child represents nothing so
much as the gap between the sign and its anticipated referent. A metatheatrical
constellation of performative enactment, the play is George and Martha’s continuous
performance. George and Martha model a non-mimetic theatre for Nick and Honey. In
the second act, Nick and George could be almost engaged in a metatheatrical exchange
questioning the structure of a non-mimetic
theatre:

Nick: I’ll play the charades like you’ve got ‘em set up . . . I’ll play in your

language . . . I’ll be what you say I am.

George: You are already . . . you just don’t know it.

Nick (Shaking within): No . . . no. Not really. But I’ll be it mister . . . I’ll

show you something come to life you’ll wish you hadn’t set up.

George: Go clean up the mess. (255-6)
Metatheatrically speaking, Nick glimpses the semiotic gap, but still believes in mimesis.
Playing in George’s language involves understanding theatrical performance as the play
of signifiers unmoored from their anticipated signifieds. Perhaps most significantly, the
non-mimetic theatre calls attention to a long standing phenomenon. Nick recognizes the
non-mimetic theatre as a future endeavor and as something he will become. Nick needs

to understand that as a character he has always been playing in such a performative field.

He has simply refused to see it. It is impossible to do anything other than play in
George’s language.

George and Martha also exploit and critique the way audiences read theatrical
signs. Nick, Honey, Schechner, and the audience at large believe in transparent
signification — that things are what they seem, that all signifiers have signifieds, and
refuse to acknowledge a non-mimetic theatre. If George tells a story about a school
friend who kills his mother and father, then such a story adds information about the
narrative world of the play (217). Similarly, if Martha reveals that the school friend is
really George himself, then such a disclosure gives access to George’s past (244). If
Martha refers to her child, mimetic logic assumes she must have a child. As the
metatheatrical audience, both Nick and Honey presume that uttering a sign creates a
mimetic bond — saying there is a baby means there is a baby. In such an economy, even
if the object is obscured from view an audience still reads the narrative signifier as part of
a successful chain of signification.

Signifiers can short circuit and never connect to the referent anticipated by an
audience. Of course, this is the revelation Virginia Woolf prepares its audience for from
Martha’s citation of Beyond the Forest (I949) which begins the play. Martha knows who
starred in the film, she can relate the plot, but the title remains frustratingly out of her
grasp. Similarly, pronouns prove to be slippery things. When Nick refers to Honey,
George thinks he is talking about Martha (213). Every utterance is a signifier that may
have no exterior veracity, and no referent:

Nick: Hell, I don’t know when you people are lying, or what.

Martha: You’re damned right!

George: You’re not supposed to.
Martha: Right! (283)

Albee’s play, George and Martha’s metatheatrical performance, Schechner’s plague, and
Artaud’s rupture between things and ideas are all founded on the essential unbridgeable
gap in theatrical signification. A theatrical performance contains the possibility of
unmoored signifiers run amok.4 Unlike Chekhov’s famous assertion that a gun visible in
Act One should go off by the end of the play, Albee’s signifying gun never shoots to
Schechner’s satisfaction. Signs are always understood in a theatrical frames

At the moment the child is revealed as imaginary, the audience confronts the
possibility of a non-mimetic theatre in its most pronounced form. A stand-in for the
perceptions of the audience, Nick violently announces: “JESUS CHRIST I THINK I
UNDERSTAND THIS!” (307). Nick’s reaction comes on the heels of George’s
ritualized murder of the child and administering of last rites. Only after being presented
with the representation of imaginary child as dead child can Nick see through the
signifying web by which theatrical meanings accumulate. Far from the gimmick which
Schechner dismisses it as, the dead child reveals Schechner’s compulsion to contextualize
and to believe in theatrical materiality.6 Schechner is not alone. The non-image of the
dead child which reveals a theatrical signifying absence becomes a repeating emblem in
Modern and Contemporary Drama. Not only is there no there there — no object to receive
the signifier — the dead child calls attention to this fundamental absence and announces
that rupture is intrinsic to theatrical performance.

Schechner and Artaud’s struggle for a theatre that transforms the world and makes

it better is certainly a noble ideal. However, focusing solely on the mimetic workings of

theatrical representation obscures the plague infesting the modern and contemporary
theatre. Believing in a mimetic theatre to the detriment of any other vision of theatre is to
risk falling into the same traps as Nick and Honey. The modern and contemporary theatre
is a complex interplay between signifiers and objects. Schechner’s critique of Virginia
Woolf, and Hugh Kenner’s characterization of Waiting for Godot as “a quite realistic way
of looking at” the French Resistance transforms theatrical working to theatrical meaning
by reading divergence and mimetic failure as unification.

Even when dramatic theory and criticism knows better than to replicate the Nick
and Honey technique of understanding signifiers as synonymous with signifieds, there
seems to be a level of uncertainty over what to do with freely roaming signifiers, such as
Andrew Sofer exhibits in his excellent phenomenological study The Stage Life of Props.
In an early endnote, Sofer confesses: “I thus exclude from my definition of the prop all
invisible, mimed and imaginary objects, since such borderline cases raise almost
insurmountable verification problems” (208). Since the non-object cannot be verified, it
must be excluded from Sofer’s study.

The object not there is a symptom of the workings of modern drama, and Sofer’s
“[i]nsurmountable verification problems” are a sign of the compulsion to ignore the
symptom. The object not there certainly complicates efforts to understand the prop.
However, simply dismissing such theatrical effects from a dramatic study creates the
illusion that insurmountable verification problems do not exist. Theatre is about the
unseen as much as the seen. By only focusing on the visible, theatrical theories and
criticism contextualize understanding by dismissing the indeterminate and embracing the

material and the known.

In this dissertation, I focus on the indeterminacy that a mimetic theatre must read
as a failure. I work to see the blind spots in dramatic texts that theatrical performances
perpetuate. Certainly reliance on the non-object is not new to dramatic practice. From
Laius’s off-stage evocation in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the invisible objects that
pervade the Early Modern Stage, the non-object proves to be more an aspect of
theatricality than modern theatricality. However, from Ibsen to the present dramatic texts
question the position and function of the non-object, instead of merely accepting it as a
theatrical component. Beginning in the late-nineteenth century with the emergence of
Ibsen on the international stage, drama and theatre not only evoke what escapes
phenomenological presence, but dramatic texts interrogate the dramatic import of
disentangling signifiers from objects.

Contemporaneous to dramatizing absence, the dead child emerges as a
surprisingly frequent metatheatrical emblem. Similar to its effect on Nick and the
audience of Virginia Woolf, the dead child in its various manifestations illuminates the
conflict of contextualization proliferating in Modern and Contemporary Drama. The
dead child both allows an audience to envision the indeterminacy that so many modern
plays cultivate, and marks the seemingly overwhelming compulsion to bury the
indeterminate sign in a system of materiality and causality.

The following six chapters are grouped into three parts. Much like the conflicts I
outline, each part begins with an introductory section which highlights a different facet of
rupture: metatheatrical, material, and temporal. However, while the majority of
contemporary dramatic theory and criticism exhibits a substantiated effort to overcome

theatrical rupture and the indeterminacy which accompanies it, my prefatory material

10

reinforces the ruptures intrinsic to dramatic form and postulates that these gaps are
central to dramatic practice.

Encompassing this introduction and Chapter One, Part I frames a theatre of
rupture as an alternative to an illusive, and perhaps illusory transfiguring theatre.
Symbolist theatre, realist theatre, classical theatre, and performance art diverge widely in
their understanding of theatrical presentation, but they all share a similar vision of a
theatre that matters to the extent it can become a part of, and can transform the world.

’ Signifiers may vary, but these diverse theatrical systems strive to achieve the same
signified. In this context, mimesis is always a failure. To the degree that theatre
represents the world instead of being part of the world theatre is insufficient. However,
Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck conceives theatricality in radically different terms. The
duck is an object that is perpetually referenced but never seen over the course of the play.
There is no duck. Like Albee’s child, the gap between the duck as signifier, and the duck
as object creates a representational gap — a rupture between sign and referent. Ibsen’s
characters try and fail to conceptualize the duck as a component of various transfiguring
theatres such as realism and symbolism. The play ultimately privileges the sign that has
no object and cannot be transformed as part of a metatheatrical space. Such a process
idealizes a theatre of rupture as a legitimate alternative to transfiguration.

Part II, continues the exploration of a theatre of rupture glimpsed in The Wild
Duck through the lens of the dead child as a metatheatrical emblem of rupture’s
functions. In Oedipus Rex Western Drama embraces narrative causality over
indeterminacy, and living child over the emblem of the dead child. However, Modern

Drama exhibits an abiding interest in the dead child beginning with Ibsen’s move toward

11

symbolism and continuing to the present. The dead child appears in plays seemingly
regardless of country of origin, or dramatic style. At root paradoxical, the dead child is
the dramatic ideal striven for, and never realized. In Oedipus Rex, because of the steps
taken by Jocasta and Lauis, Oedipus should die as a child. However, fate dictates that he
cannot. In order for the play to institute a causal frame, it must resist the dead child by
improbably ignoring probability. Traversing the Oedipal path not taken, Modern Drama
confronts this intuitive causality that can never come to pass. Frequently referenced, but
seldom entering staged representation, the dead child perpetuates a conflict of
contextualization as it disrupts causal structures and resists narrative and
phenomenological foreclosure.

Chapter Two returns to the work of Ibsen and considers the dead child as
metaphor in Hedda Gabler. As a character, Hedda Gabler wants to be free, but other
characters work to contextualize and control her. Hedda resists such efforts to
encapsulate her by dismembering historical and textual representational structures.
Metaphorizing the historical text as a child, Hedda ritually murders it in the hope of
achieving the liberation that has been denied her. This is only a temporary victory. The
metaphorical dead child only offers a glimpse of the freedom intrinsic to theatrical
rupture. Before long, the historical text - and by corollary the dramatic text — uncannily
begins to reassemble itself, and entrap Hedda in its contextual wake.

Focusing on the dead child as a traumatic utterance, Chapter Three reduces the
distance intrinsic to metaphor. In Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, the dead child erupts as
a metonymic bond representing the unrepresentable nature of dramatic rupture and

indeterminacy. A sign of Rebecca’s power as well as the power of dead child as

12

utterance, Rebecca’s words cannot be located in a mimetic frame without deforming their
import. Although as her would-be oppressor, both Devlin and critics of the play try to
contextualize Rebecca’s evocation of the dead baby by placing it in the recognizable
historical context of Rebecca’s past and World War 11, such efforts highlight the failings
of historical causality as an all-encompassing interpretive strategy. The vision of theatre
evoked by the dead child utterance cannot be mimetically bound.

Chapter Four culminates the discussion of the dead child. In Sarah Kane’s
Blasted and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, the dead child as narrative signifier connects to
its phenomenological object. However, entering visual representation does not provide a
means for the emblem to become determinate and overcome rupture. Kane and
Shepard’s dead children perpetuate theatrical rupture through an excess of representation.
In Buried Child, the child moves from off-stage non-object to on-stage object only after
Vince is himself introduced as a dead baby substitute. The play ends with Vince as the
dead child who will not stay dead sharing the stage with the dead child. The dead child is
only staged after it can be viewed as both alive and dead. In Blasted, the dead child is the
ideal that remains inaccessible. Ian wants to become the dead child, but despite his best
efforts, he cannot make the transformation. In both plays, the dead child as visual object
cannot contain the fullness of dead child as sign. An indeterminate living double
encapsulates the dead child’s representational excess.

While parts I and II are primarily interested in a material rupture, Part III
highlights temporal indeterminacy and contextualization. Chapter Five considers
historical representation as a suturing force, and the compulsion to view drama and

history as twin constructs. G. B. Shaw’s Saint Joan, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and

13

Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones envision a drama that tries to overcome rupture.
History becomes a rigid construct which struggles to absorb an indeterminate present.
However, unlike Hedda Gabler and Ashes to Ashes, efforts to contextualize Saint Joan,
Copenhagen, and The Emperor Jones do not stop with the plays themselves. Elaborate
paratexts attempt to contextualize the plays historically in the same way the plays
struggle to contextualize their protagonists historically. Textual and performative
paratexts work to contextualize indeterminate texts by placing the plays in determinate
frames.

Chapter Six concludes this project by locating the future as a source of temporal
indeterminacy. The antithesis of the history play’s belief in dramatic causality, the
theatrical future embraces the possibility intrinsic to rupture. Samuel Beckett’s Krapp ’s
Last Tape, Jean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine, and Eugene Ionesco’s The Killer evoke
a future. By outlining a temporal moment that has yet to occur, all three plays create an
idea of performance. This performative future is only an idea because once it is enacted
future performance ceases to exist. Performance becomes present. This perpetually
deferred future is a site of possibility and a paradoxical realization of the theatre of

rupture.

14

Chapter One:

Ibsen, Suicide, and Secrets Gone A-Fowl: The Failure of Transfiguration and the Rupture
of Cruelty in Modern Drama
Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is admirable, complete and
possesses magnitude,“ in language made pleasurable, each of its species
separated in different parts; performed by actors, not through narration;
effecting through pity and fear the purification of such emotions (Aristotle
10).
Hedvig: No. The hens have got friends they used to be chicks with; but
she’s been separated from all her family. And there ’3 so much that’s
strange about the wild duck. No one knows her. And no one knows where
she came from (Ibsen 72).
Besides theatre is not life, any more than a wheel is a leg (Apollinaire
157)
I Mimetic Theatre and the Transfiguring Ideal
In Act Two of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, Gregers, in a moment of condescension,
offers to take Ekdal with him when he returns to the mill. Unlike the city in which Ekdal
lives, the mill offers access to a thinned out but still viable forest. Gregers views Ekdal
as a thing of nature who has been confined to a meaningless existence within a
metropolitan prison. He cannot understand why Ekdal would consent to live in the attic
turned studio which serves as the Ekdal home, knowing that the natural world is still out
there: “But what about the cool, sweeping breezes, the free life in the forest, and up on

the wide, open spaces among animals and birds? These things which have become a part

of you?” (55). For Gregers, Ekdal’s life in the loft has led to a essential loss of self as

15

well as a loss of freedom. Ekdal can only prosper as part of the natural world of the
forest.

In reply to Gregers’s magnanimous offer, Ekdal offers to open the eyes of
Gregers, and the audience. In a moment of passion, Ekdal strikes the table and
pronounces that Gregers “shall see it!” (56). Rather than debate the relative merits of the
studio compared to the thinning forest around Hoydal, Ekdal will show Gregers the
attic’s benefits. As language fails to illuminate the interconnection between the loft and
freedom, Ekdal turns to perception. If Gregers will just look, he will see a world he was
not aware existed. Gregers will see a world in which a man of nature can be content in
the city. Beyond the loft door he will see chickens, pigeons, rabbits, and, the crowning
achievement of the loft, a wild duck.

The wild duck does not convert Gregers as easily as Ekdal may have hoped. Even
upon seeing the wild duck, Gregers does not recognize the duck for what it is. He first
classifies the pride of the Ekdal menagerie as a bird, and even after he revises his initial
perception to the more specific duck, Gregers is unable to recognize the wildness when
left to his own devices. Ekdal must tell Gregers that it is a wild duck and even after this
telling, Gregers is unable to appreciate the duck in the same manner as Ekdal. Ekdal
offers the duck as an explanation, but if it explains anything to Gregers it certainly does
not reveal Ekdal’s satisfaction with the studio.

The duck illuminates a gap between the Ekdals and Gregers’s world view. In a
decidedly Platonic turn, for Gregers an imitation must be an insubstantial shadow of the
actual object. The actual forest is privileged over and above the loft which represents it.

The mimetic milieu behind the loft door may offer more satisfaction than a loft without

16

any conception of a forest, but an imitation of a forest is a poor substitute for a “real”
forest.7 This emphasis on the “real” and the “authentic” as the ideal behind
representation bears a distinct resemblance to the evolutionary progression toward reality
offered by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature. Auerbach suggests that mimesis served “as a basis on which the world could
be ordered, interpreted, and represented as a reality and as a whole” (231). In Auerbach’s
terms, mimetic success occurs as the representation approaches the object being
represented.

Opposing this view, Ekdal baffles Gregers’s Auerbach-like understanding of
signification. The studio offers more satisfaction than the forest. The imitation or the
representation is an end in and of itself. In Aristotelian terms, “we take delight in
viewing the most accurate possible images of objects which in themselves cause distress
when we see them” (6). Seemingly, the pleasure Ekdal derives from experiencing the
imitation as an imitation has little to do with the desire to access, understand and organize
some traditional conception of authenticity. As imitation of the forest near Hoydal, the
loft offers pleasure in the recognition that it is an imitation. In Ekdal’s understanding,
mimesis emerges as a representation of an action. After acting as the causal force by
which an imitation emerges, the exterior action becomes irrelevant. Mimetic pleasure
contains an awareness of the relationship between the imitation and some conception of
an authentic action, but the pleasure does not derive from a metaphoric relationship
between the two. Instead, pleasure derives from a sense of self-sufficiency. Pleasure
emerges to the degree that the imitation transcends the authentic object, and the imitation

becomes something unique and independent. The loft gives Ekdal pleasure through

17

itself, and not through its connection to the object it represents. As an imitation, the loft
contains an attribute that the actual forest lacks. Paradoxically, the very recognition of
the loft as an imitation forges its own independent authenticity.8

The Wild Duck ’5 two opposing conceptions of the imitative loft space’s utility
envisage drama itself as a thing in flux. The metatheatrical nature of the loft and the play
is outlined by Matthew Wilson Smith in “The Wild Duck: A Play of Play:”

The Werle curtains mark off the music room as a play space for the
bourgeoisie, a well-lit space with the air of genteel play about it: music
and parlor games. The Ekdal curtain, on the other hand, marks the loft as
a ramshackle, penny-pinch play space but one also more suggestive of the
imagination. (I 3).9
For Smith, the metatheatrical nature of the loft space gives the Ekdals access to a child-
like playfulness, and “the loft evokes Ibsen’s own childhood fantasies” (12). In this
argument, as the adult figure Gregers is “a personification of what lonas Barish has
termed the ‘antitheatrical prejudice,’ and exhibits a consistently negative attitude toward
play throughout the drama” (16).

Ibsen’s metatheatricality is not about the loss of play, but instead, it concerns the
way to play. Gregers has not lost the ability to play as he has developmentally
progressed beyond childhood. He has not yet learned how to view play with the modern
sophistication of the Ekdals. Far from an anti-theatrical bias, Gregers is still rooted in a
traditional conception of the theatre. Insisting on bringing all illusions to the surface,
Gregers harkens back to the mimetic conception uttered by the Chorus in the Prologue to

Shakespeare’s Henry V:

18

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:

Into a thousand parts divide one man,

And make imaginary puissance.

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,
Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth;

For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times,

Turning th’ accomplishment of many years

Into an hourglass — for the which supply,

Admit me Chorus to this history, (23-32)
The Chorus announces its mission as an attempt to represent historical events, but this is
a task doomed to failure from the start because the representation cannot become the
object represented. However, this failure is precisely the point. The Chorus does not
envision theatrical representation as an idealized minimizing of the gap between
theatrical signifiers and exterior signifieds. Such a distance is intrinsic to theatrical
representation. An audience must imagine such a divide does not exist by purposefully
misreading signifiers as signifieds.

Unlike this self-reflexive acknowledgement of the enduring separation between
representation and what is being represented, Ekdal distinguishes a modern drama that is
more performative than mimetic. Instead of merely representing something the Ekdal
play space does something. It brings a version of satisfaction that cannot be equaled by
the object which the loft supposedly represents. The performative metatheatrical space

envisioned by Ekdal has nothing to do with illusion.

19

Gregers strives to make the Ekdals understand theatre as an illusory
representation of the world instead of a space for exceeding representation.l0 By
establishing illusion as a category which most be overcome, Gregers reconstitutes the
mimetic relationship between theatre and the object represented. The real becomes a
referential focal point by asserting that the loft is not the same as Hoydal, and that Gina
and Hjalmar are not experiencing the joys of a true marriage,. The Ekdals have lost their
way from the moment they stopped recognizing their space as the representation of the
real, and, instead, perceived the loft on its own terms. The loft cannot be understood as
authentic, but must be seen as an illusory representation of the authentic. In traditional
mimetic conceptions ambiguity is resolved, and the world can again be understood in
terms of representation without the confusion that seems to accompany the performative.

The Wild Duck raises the question of what else drama does besides represent, and
asks why does this besides offer satisfaction? This dilemma exceeds the boundary of
Ibsen’s play and becomes a fundamental question for Modern Drama. As August
Strindberg notes in his introduction to Miss Julie:

Again in other countries people have believed in the possibility of creating
a new drama by filling the old forms with new contents; but this approach
has failed [ . . . ] partly because we have not found the new form for the
new content, and the new wine has burst the old bottles. (56)

Strindberg’s wine metaphor elucidates a rift between the ideals of Modern Drama
and its enactment. Realism is the new style that manifests in the early prose dramas of
Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekov. In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Bert 0. States

defines realism as “an attempt to put the human drama into the visible real world of

20

everyday social interaction and to reveal, above all else, how that world was the primary
causal factor in experience” (66).ll Realism is more equipped at fulfilling a Gregers-like
desire to shatter illusion than the melodrama and poetic epics which dominated the stage
when Strindberg and Ibsen first began writing. Unlike the Chorus of Henry V, the
creators of the new content seem to hold an intrinsic belief that there will be no need for
the audience to “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts.” A drama which
critiques the world as it really is, and a stage populated with real objects that present the
world as it exists will break down the barrier between representation and the actions
represented until such a distinction becomes meaningless.‘2 In addition to representing
the world outside of the theatre, the new content will bridge the gap of imitation and.
ideally become a functioning interactive part of the world.

The realist theatre marginalizes the difference between signifier and signified.
Theatrical space can connect with exterior space by depicting things as they really are
instead of presenting a metaphor or analogy of the exterior world. Theatrical speech
should be indistinguishable from speech outside of the theatre. Settings need to engage
current society instead of embracing a distant historical moment. If nothing is left to the
imagination, if theatrical presentation contains all the details and nuance of actual
experience, then such a representation will cease to be merely representational. Instead
of being like the action represented, realism will be the object represented. It will be on
par with the exterior world. In essence, realism strives to eliminate the difference
between performative and exterior space. In this vision, mimesis becomes a pejorative
term. Theatre that imitates is inferior. A superior form of theatre would be a theatre that

actually becomes the real.'3

21

Transcending mimesis by achieving some level of absolute correspondence with
exterior action subverts the sustained rift between representation and referent intrinsic to
theatrical space or language.'4 Ironically, the realist project is incapable of creating a
theatrical space synonymous with the real. While realism creates a more accurate
representation of exterior actions, the very placement of this representation in theatrical
space precludes any bridging of the gap between theatrical space and exterior space. In a
similar fashion to J. L. Austin’s acknowledgement in How to Do Things with Words that
the performative speech act cannot function theatrically due to the inherent artificiality of
theatrical space, theatrical realism can never be authentic enough to escape metaphor and
transform itself from signifier to signified. By acknowledging itself as imitation, the
Chorus of Henry V presents a more self- aware vision of theatrical space that is closer to
the goals of realism. In banishing transfiguration from theatrical space to an audience’s
imagination, the Chorus offers a realist view of the theatrical mechanism.15

In this context, Strindberg’s embrace of symbolist drama after his return to the
theatre in 1898 is the natural result of realism’s inability to transcend metaphor.
Strindberg’s symbolist drama is not a movement toward the new form that he
acknowledges has yet to be found; rather, it is the continuation of his effort “to modernize
the form according to what I believe are the demands a contemporary audience would
make of this art” (56). If realism is unable to escape metaphor, then the modernization of
the form engages drama as metaphor. Rather than continuing a futile effort to escape a
metaphorical relationship through greater efforts at verisimilitude, Strindberg’s later
drama understands the difference between theatrical and exterior space and exploits the

symbol that is inherent in theatre as metaphor.

22

In its early development, Modern Drama contains two interrelated forces: the
idealized hope that realism can transcend metaphor thereby interconnecting theatrical
space with exterior space, and the symbolist cynical self-awareness that metaphorical
relationships are the fundamental essence of theatre. This symbolist self-awareness
appears to be a return to the Chorus of Henry V. However, like Ekdal’s privileging of the
loft space over exterior space, the signifier in symbolist drama does more than imitate the
signified. In “Ibsen and the twentieth-century stage,” Frederick J. Marker and Lisa-Lone
Marker write of Ingmar Bergman’s symbolist production of Hedda Gabler: “Bergman’s
various technical strategies were all means to a single end, which was the close-up
exposure of the inner essence of Hedda’s situation” (191). Whereas exterior space can
only show what is apparent to ordinary vision, the metaphorical possibilities of theatrical
space plumb the depths of interiority and offer a surface metaphorical representation of
depth.16

While the world may only access psychology through individual speech and
action, theatrical space does not accept any such limitations. The metaphorical
possibilities of the stage represent psychology in symbol. There no longer has to be a
hidden interior. Bergman moves Hedda’s private room onto his symbolist stage, thereby
transforming her suicide into the most public of acts. Symbolist drama revitalizes
mimetic relationships by refiguring signification. Instead of the realist embrace of
physical objects as a bridge between theatrical space and exterior space, symbolist drama
conceives of exterior space and authentic objects as distraction. Mimesis is not the
imitation of an object so much as the imitation of an interior, of an essence. Artaud notes

that the plague is “the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty” (30).

23

The symbolist signified is an interior essence that can only be represented on
stage through an exterior representation. If this representation is successful, an audience
grasps the authentic interior essence. The valence of mimesis in symbolist drama relies
on the transfiguring of known exterior space. Whereas realist theatrical space eliminates
artificiality, symbolist drama needs the seemingly artificial convention of theatrical space
to reveal the metaphysical resonance of an object and the world.

Ideally, the dramatic scene should allow an audience to see both the typical
function of object as distraction, and the symbolic revelation. In the symbolist theatre all
objects can be signifiers but no object can be a signified. Similar to the Theatre of
Cruelty’s exteriorization and bringing forth, theatrical signifiers allow an audience to
engage in metaphysical communion with the unseen signified:

It [theatrical language] ultimately breaks away from the intellectual
subjugation of the language, by conveying the sense of a new and deeper
intellectuality which hides itself beneath the gestures and signs, raised to
the dignity of particular exorcisms. (Artaud 91)
The theatrical performance mimetically accesses the authentic which lies underneath the
artificial surface. However, if the visible objects succeed in their function of representing
the unseen, then mimesis has been exceeded by transfiguration. In the symbolist project
the performance event should reveal a symbol rather than merely representing it. If a
symbolist theatre is mimetic, if the theatre merely imitates, then the event has failed. The
symbol has not been brought forth. Interior essence cannot be imitated, either it has been

revealed or the symbol is unsuccessful.

24

Both symbolism and realism understand the quintessential theatre as more than
mimetic. In realism, mimesis creates an artificial theatre in which a performance fails to
illuminate the world as it exists in order to transform it. In symbolism, a mimetic
theatrical event fails to communicate the metaphysical essence of symbols. A theatrical
event that is exclusively mimetic is conceptualized as failure. A mimetic theatre is a

theatre indicted for imitation when theatre needs to transfigure.

II The Wild Duck, and the Failure of Transfiguration

Far from initiating a dramatic modernism, symbolism and realism are essential
components to Gregers’s traditional theatre that work toward establishing illusion as a
theatrical category in The Wild Duck. Gregers’s project institutes a cornucopia of
confusion masquerading as a coherent theory of the theatre. Due to the logic of realism
Ekdal should reject the loft, because, after all, the loft is not Hoydal. In essence, Gregers
asserts that the loft is functioning mimetically. Since Gregers is aware of the loft as
imitation, the loft is an inferior imitation, and a theatrical failure.

In a similar fashion, the marriage of Hjalmar and Gina works mimetically and not
symbolically. The marriage may imitate a true marriage, but the inner essence of
marriage cannot be viewed through its physical representation. Gregers envisions a
transcendent experience in which the marriage as ideal is laid bare before him. His
language is even more symbolist than my hyperbolic description of it:

I felt so sure, that when I walked through that door you would be standing
there transfigured, and that my eyes would be dazzled by the light. And

instead, I see nothing but this dull heaviness and misery — (96).

25

Again, Gregers envisions being able to overcome the new theatricality of the Ekdals with
a transcendent theatre. He tries to see beyond the loft to its metaphysical essence, but
like his foray into realism, this collapses into a mimetic action. Seemingly, each effort to
escape the loft’s mimetic configuration reinforces a purely mimetic theatre. The loft
cannot connect to exterior space.

However, Gregers has one more theatrical trick up his sleeve. He uses symbolist
strategies to evoke a classical model. Looking backward in time from the secularized
theatre of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century to the classical theatre, the latter
seems to offer a ritual of cleansing, reaffirming and reestablishing the virtues of an
idealized community. In The Idea of a Theater, Francis F ergusson analyzes the ritual
significance of Oedipus Rex:

When one considers the ritual form of the whole play, it becomes evident
that it presents the tragic but perennial, even normal, quest of the whole
City for its well-being. (28)
Whether such a ritual renewal actually occurs, Gregers believes that classical theatre can
transform mimetic space. He enlists the aid of Hedvig to banish Ekdal’s mimetic theatre.
Hedvig seems to fill the Oedipal archetype. Early in Act Two, Hjalmar confirms as much
when he warns Gregers and the audience that she is going blind. Cast as Gregers’s tragic
hero, Hedvig is asked to sacrifice the duck.

Numerous critics have traced the fecund symbolic associations of the duck which
culminates in Gregers’s sacrificial demand. In “The Lacanian Imaginary in Ibsen’s
Pillars of Society and The Wild Duck,” Oliver W. Gerland III emphasizes the multivalent

nature of the duck as symbol:

26

The sign ‘the wild duck’ is highly mobile with a wide range of referents,
designating at various times various members of the Ekdal family and, of
course, the actual duck nesting out of sight in the Ekdal’s garret. The
reader’s attempt to pin down the meaning of the wild duck to any
particular referent or concept is, therefore, doomed to misrepresentation
and frustration. Given that ‘the wild duck’ is an unstable signifier, the
narrative structure in which it appears is also unstable. (356)l7
Conceptualizing the duck referred to in the dramatic text as a “highly mobile” sign is
vastly different from recognizing that various characters view the duck as a mobile sign.
Focusing on the latter for the moment, Gregers’s understanding of the duck as sign is
inseparable from his efforts to establish a classical theatre that will transfigure through
ritual sacrifice. However, this is far from a unanimous view. The Ekdals are more
inclined to interpret the duck as a physical animal. Gregers tries to transform the
dialectic over how the duck signifies into a univocal interpretive schematic. He does not
just want the Ekdals to see the duck as sign, he wants them to see the duck as a symbol
for Hjalmar. Every time Gregers characterizes the duck as symbol, it is a symbol for
Hjalmar.

Despite this very specific symbolic association, critics tend to read Hedvig’s
suicide as a result of her absorption within Gregers’s symbolic language. In “’It was as if
he meant something different from what he said — all the time’; Language, Metaphysics,
and the Everyday in The Wild Duck,” Toril Moi writes:

By depriving Hedvig of criteria, Gregers leaves her with no way to tell the

difference between metaphorical and literal ways of speaking. How will

27

she now be able to tell whether a loft is a loft? Or whether a wild duck is
a wild duck? If Gregers thinks he can become a dog, is it not possible that
she could become a wild duck? In this fatal conversation Gregers shows
Hedvig the way out of the ordinary, and so lays the foundation for her
ultimate suicide. (671).
Such an analysis seems based on the assumption that Hedvig is victimized by metaphor’s
innate deforming power because she follows Gregers’s instructions to the end.‘8
However, viewing language as dangerous necessitates a rift between signifier and
signified as well as a blurring between authentic and metaphorical language. Hedvig not
only has to view the duck as symbol, she has to view the duck as possessing a different
referent from the one proclaimed by Gregers. For Gregers is nothing if he is not
consistent. In his evocation of symbolic language symbols always maintain the same
referent: Gregers is always the dog, Hjalmar is always the duck, and the loft is always the
deep blue sea.

Hedvig is initially shocked by Gregers’ acceptance of her characterization of the
loft as the deep blue sea. Once Hedvig reveals a symbolic association for the loft,
Gregers recognizes the very same association. Symbolic language does not free the
world from meaning. Metaphor merely establishes a second set of meanings. Anyone
perceptive enough to bypass the world of everyday objects and confront the world of
symbols must acknowledge the absolute symbol Hedvig has forged. Rather than a
dangerous opening of meaning, Gregers’s symbolic language forecloses meaning. If

Hjalmar is the duck, than the symbolic meaning of the duck has been understood. There

28

is no reason to expect Hedvig to appropriate Gregers’s symbolic world view while
dismissing his specific interpretations.

Gregers’s symbolic evocation of a classical theatre projects Hedvig into a role
closer to Orestes then Oedipus. Gregers wants Hedvig to endorse an act of aggression
couched in terms of sacrifice. He tells Hedvig that the only way to transform the attic
into its proper form is for her to commit symbolic patricide. The Hjalmar who has grown
comfortable in the attic must be destroyed in order for Gregers’s idealized conception of
Hjalmar to emerge.

Classical theatre will transform the loft space from a new mimetic drama into a
more traditional symbolic drama by orchestrating the destruction of the symbol. Trying
to eliminate the duck, however, exposes the explicit contradictions in Gregers’s theatrical
potpourri. While a theatre of transfiguration promises an escape from the new realist
theatre’s resistance to symbolic interpolations, Gregers cannot help characterizing the
new theatre in older symbolic terms. He characterizes the loft space as unique because of
the wild duck and the fashion in which the Ekdals view it. Although Gregers describes
the murder of the duck in sacrificial terms, establishing a transfiguring drama is more
coup than sacrifice. As the symbolic root of the trouble in the loft, the death of the duck
should be celebrated, not mourned.

Gregers orchestrates a multi-layered theatrical event. The performance functions
sacrificially for the Ekdals who lose something of value, yet it is a symbolic purging for
its single audience member / director. Because the Ekdals seem unable to embrace a
transfiguring symbolic theatre, it will only remain in symbolic form. Such a doubling

ultimately deforms the ideals of Gregers’s symbolist theatre. Gregers imagines the

29

symbol as a means of obscuring instead of revealing. He tries to represent a Dionysian
act as explicitly Apollonian.

Despite Gregers’s careful direction, Hedvig refuses to perform her part in the
symbolic / classical theatrical amalgamation. Rather than sacrifice the duck, Hedvig
commits suicide. By turning away from the symbolic / classical conception of Gregers,
Hedivg evokes the Oedipal model of tragedy which she seems destined to fulfill. Faced
with a community that has broken down, Hedvig turns away from symbolic sacrifice and
toward some sense of “authentic” sacrifice. Naturally, Hedvig is a victim of
circumstance, but that does not necessarily equate to being victimized by metaphorical
language. Her suicide defiantly rejects Gregers’s symbolist theatre. Hedvig forces
Gregers to confront an actual sacrifice, thereby revealing the impotence of symbolist
theatre. Hedvig is a realist who believes an interconnected theatre of transfiguration is
achieved by offering a body for scarring in order to heal the community. An authentic
foundation is necessary for symbolic resonance.

In classical terms, Hedvig’s material sacrifice is every bit as impotent as
Gregers’s elaborate symbolism. Verna A. Foster assets that Hedvig’s suicide is not tragic
because it

takes place off stage, there is a delay before it is discovered and what the

audience is primarily called upon to respond to is not the death itself but

the reaction of the other characters to it, and especially Hjalmars” (291).]9
Foster’s rationale for viewing Hedvig’s death untragically is curious because her anti-
tragedy resembles a laundry list of classical tragedy’s tendencies. A classical death

always takes place off-stage. If the death transfigures, if it serves as a ritualized purging

30

for the entire community as Fergusson suggests, the reactions of the other characters are
essential to transform the sacrifice from an individual act into a larger context. Foster
goes on to write that “what we are left with is something harsher than tragedy because
there is no justification of a moral order, no resolution, no closure” (291).

Tragedy without closure seems to be the basis for Foster’s assertion that The Wild
Duck inaugurates a modern theatre in which tragedy is impossible and tragi-comedy
becomes the dominant dramatic form. For in Hedvig’s suicide, The Wild Duck
dramatizes tragedy without catharsis. Hedvig follows all of the rules, but her suicide is a
ritual emptied of all significance. Hedvig’s body is dragged upon the stage as a visual
demonstration that the only thing the ritual has transfigured is life. Living child has been
transformed into dead child. Without catharsis - without a demonstration of a connection
between the tragic act and the world which contains it - drama fulfills an anti-ritual
function.

Instead of demonstrating a cause /effect structure to the world, Hedvig’s suicide
illuminates a fundamental disconnect between an abstract world of rules and the
individuals who inhabit it. Instead of an act of penance her suicide simply has the
resonance of the actual act committed. Hedvig’s death serves as another demonstration
of the play’s vision of a new mimetic drama. Meaning can never exceed the act. It is a
futile to attempt to locate a signified beyond a signifier. In a sense, the tragedy of Ibsen’s
drama is the impossibility for a tragic act to be viewed tragically. The new drama
transforms sacrifice from a ritual conducted by a person with complete understanding of

the necessity of the sacrifice into a child performing the firtility of dramatic ritual.

31

lll

next
rad.

COD;

“it

III The Theatre of Rupture and Critical Contextualization

At The Wild Duck ’s conclusion, this new drama which locates theatricality in the distance
between signifier and signified is the only vision of drama left on the stage.
Systematically, the play enacts Strindberg’s wine metaphor: old forms cannot contain the
new content. The bottles of realism, symbolism, and classical theatre attempt to contain
Ibsen’s new theatre, and in each case, the bottle explodes from the inside. Ibsen’s efforts
to unhinge traditional mimetic structures radically breaks from the seemingly more
formally experimental Strindberg.

Strindberg’s metaphor characterizes the relationship between new dramatic
content and old dramatic form as violent, but ultimately sterile. The violence is an act
perpetuated against an innocuous carrier, and no new container remains to take the place
of what has become insufficient. Strindberg’s linguistic form replicates this inability to
find a new dramatic structure. For while Strindberg declares the necessity of creating a
new configuration of form and content, he does so through the use of metaphor. The
traditional mimetic structure of metaphor reinforces the idea that a new form cannot be
conceived, and therefore a new content is insufficient. The hope for the new can only be
expressed in a traditional framework.

In a September 2, 1884 letter to Frederik Hegel, Ibsen refuses to be bound by
linguistic structure in describing The Wild Duck:

In some ways this new play occupies a position by itself among my
dramatic works, its plan and method differing in several respects from my
former ones. I shall say no more on this subject at present. I hope that my

critics will discover the points alluded to. At any rate, they will find

32

several things to squabble about and several things to interpret.20 I also
think that The Wild Duck may perhaps entice some of our young
dramatists into new paths, which I think is desirable. (237)
Ibsen conceives of the play as new for him, and as a forerunner for a new dramatic
movement. Reliance on the idea of newness: new plans, new methods, and new paths,
suggests that unlike Strindberg, Ibsen believes a new drama has been founded.

Where Strindberg’s metaphor replicates the structure that would become the
defining feature of his symbolist theatre, Ibsen’s description of The Wild Duck as the
vanguard for the new drama formally represents the very technique of this new theatre.
Ibsen not only declares the uniqueness of the play among his work, he overtly refuses to
outline this new plan and method. By deferring all explanation, the referent is pushed out
of view. Like the loft space itself, the evocation of newness in the play and the new
drama are effective and become something new precisely to the extent they are
encapsulated. The new drama must move away from representing the exterior world
even if this means creating a gap in comprehension.

The Wild Duck dramatizes the nature and limits of dramatic performance. Like the
characters it depicts, the dramatic text never resolves whether the duck should be
classified within a symbolist or a realist rubric. The duck is an indecipherable symbol,
or, perhaps, a symbol with too many meanings. The futility of knowing what the duck is
corresponds with a desire to classify the uncontextualizable sign. A survey of the critical
output surrounding the play reveals that Gregers’s need to establish an absolute meaning
for the duck is shared by readers of Ibsen’s dramatic text. After outlining various critics

who have despaired over the inability to attribute meaning to the duck, Toril Moi asserts:

33

The most important question in The Wild Duck is not at all what the
eponymous wild duck means (and certainly not what it ‘means’ in a deep
sense), but whether it is possible to hang onto meaning at all in world full
of cynics, skeptics, and narcissists, who all do their best to empty words of
meaning. (657)
Rather than dealing with what the duck means as a sign, Moi explores what a sign which
perpetually escapes foreclosure signifies about the tenuous nature of meaning.

However, in Ibsen’s text words cannot be emptied of meaning, or, at the very
least, words cannot empty themselves of meaning. Critics and characters alike believe
that the duck can be defined because language has an intrinsic power. Gregers theorizes
mimesis as a reframing of the world within the representational and metaphoric logic of
language. He can change the way the duck is viewed by linguistically forging new
representational connections. Language bonds various divergent objects and ideas. A
forrnless connector, words transparently illuminate.

In the very act of textual signification, a representation achieves presence. To
evoke a character or an object produces and evokes the representation of the character or
object. The dramatic text represents the duck as similar to Hedvig, or any of the other
characters because characters look at the duck and interact with it. However, in
performance the duck loses all presence. Unlike the characters who appear on stage,
interaction with the duck always occurs off-stage. Like many non-perforrnative
conceptions of language, Ibsen’s dramatic text represents through metaphor. There is
always a distance between signifier and signified. A mimetic evaporation of signifying

distance, performance imitates by presenting the object. The characters who appear on

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stage represent as fully in performance as in the dramatic text. The duck becomes
superfluous in performance, transforming from the animal in the other room to something
unnecessary for the play’s performance.

Ibsen’s play rejects a unitary conception of mimesis as the duck shifts from a
typical textual representation to a sign that performs its own absence. A continuum from
text to performance reveals the disparate logics underlying the mimesis of language and
the mimesis of performance. The mimesis of performance is at the root of Ibsen’s
metatheatricality and continues to cause so much frustration from audience members,
some of whom, “showed their displeasure by quacking like ducks” at the play’s Paris
premiere (Meyer 9). The audience’s participation supplies what the play lacks.

Audience members still do the same thing. Gerland is just one of numerous
critics who reference “the actual duck nesting out of sight in the Ekdal’s garret” (356).
While a fairly innocuous comment, and an idea which I have expressed in some variation
several times, Gerland’s reference to “the actual duck” is symptomatic of the compulsion
to translate the mimesis of performance into the much more familiar mimesis of
language. A quacking audience as well as a critic who refers to an actual duck attempt to
suture a performative rupture within the play. Gerland, the Paris audience, and anyone
else who refers to the duck as a physical entity continue Gregers’s project. However,
while Gregers fails to colonize the duck, critics have succeeded. Critics have
reconnected signifier to signified by charting the dialectic between the idealized authentic
and the dangers inherent in the theatrical / metaphorical. The new drama has been

translated into the mimetic language of traditional theatricality.

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So long as the metaphorical connection between signifier and signified remain
intact there appears to be no difference between representation in language and
performance. Considered solely in its own terms, language offers a seemingly infinite
continuum for representation in which anything that is written, represents. Performance
restricts such a field by replacing language with vision and space. If an object is not
seen, if an object does not occupy space, than the object does not exist within the
performance. By repeatedly referencing a non-existent object, a dramatic text’s
enactment calls attention to the short circuiting of textual signification.
An overlapping of mimetic frames, the duck is a textual signifier that never
appears onstage, so never connects to its performative signified. In Between Theater and
Anthropology, Richard Schechner recognizes converging fields of signification in the
deer dance of the Arizona Yaqui:
The kitchen pot is analogous to the dancer and the singers: the pot does
not stop being itself even as it serves to evoke the flower world of the deer
songs. Both pot and performers are ‘not themselves’ and ‘not not
themselves.’ Pot and performers link two realms of experience, the only
two realms performance ever deals with: the world of contingent existence
as ordinary objects and persons and the world of transcendent existence as
magical implements, gods, demons, characters. It isn’t that a performer
stops being himself or herself when he or she becomes another — multiple
selves coexist in an unresolved dialectical tension. (6)

Whether conceptualized in terms of contingent and transcendent existence,

phenomenological objects and semiotics, or the mimesis of performance and language,

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Schechner’s dialectic abounds in theories of the theatre. The world of contingent
existence expands performance beyond a transparent genre for content.

Performance and language both contain a transcendent existence, but unlike
performance, language is indivisible from the transcendent. In Schechner’s example, the
words “flower world,” always represent the idea of a flower world, and never represent
anything other than the flower world. However, in performance, the cooking pot is both
the transcendent flower world and the contingent cooking pot which represents a part of
the flower world. Outside the context of the deer dance it is simply a cooking pot. It
ceases to have a transcendent existence. In language, the words “flower world” are the
medium which allow representation to take place. These words cannot be severed from
their representative (transcendent) function. Words possess a contingent function, but
this contingency is inseparable from transcendence. The word can never cease
representing.

Schechner imagines an irresolvable dialectic between the continuous identity of
the object and the temporary transcendent identity the object assumes while in a
performance space. Such a model illuminates the commingling of the mimesis of
performance and language. The pot is not a pot due to its semiotic function. At the same
time, the pot is not not a pot because the signified never obscures the presence of the
phenomenological signifier.

Schechner emphasizes a one to one correspondence between the person or object
in the performance space, and what is being performed. Theatrical meaning is
understood as the mutual dependence between semiotic sign and the phenomenological

object. By confronting the object’s presence, Schechner offers a more complex theatrical

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model than The Wild Duck ’s critics who remain captivated by the sign. However,
Schechner’s dialectic is only irresolvable so long as the mimesis of language and the
mimesis of performance are viewed within the same continuum. Language cannot
signify outside the visual field.21

The Wild Duck explores the dissidence between textual and performative
representation. Ibsen’s play identifies performance as loss. Starting with the title, The
Wild Duck focuses an audience or reader’s attention on the signifier that loses its
signified by transitioning from dramatic text to theatrical event. Gregers’s evocation of a
traditional theatre which relies on the mimesis of language is an effort to believe in the
all-consuming power of words. If he can just utter the correct words, signifier will
reconnect to signified. Gregers will be able to prove once and for all that theatricality is
based on an analogous model to the mimesis of language. A performance of Ibsen’s play
reconceptualizes Schechner’s dialectic by showing that Schechner overstated matters in
asserting that contingency and transcendence are “the only two realms performance ever
deals with.” There is also absence. If a pot is both a pot and the thing which the pot
represents, than a duck that is not there is both the duck that is uttered and the empty
space that is narrativized. Just because something is narrativized in language does not

mean the object has to be performed.

IV A Chip Off the Old Block: The Return of Transfiguration and the Dead Child as
Signifying Rupture
Schechner’s dialectic takes the ideal of a harmonious performance for granted.

Performance and language work together in creating a mimetic experience. This

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confluence of vision and metaphor makes doubling, or liminality, intrinsic to the
theatrical. While Schechner envisions a unifying dialectic, he recognizes that
performance and text do not always work in such a fashion: “there really is a difference
between ‘literariness’ and ‘theatricality.’ They can serve each other or hinder; relate or
pull in opposite directions” (284).22 Schechner is referring to texts and the manner in
which some less literary texts lend themselves to effective performances, and some more
literary texts can fail in the performative transition. A successful performance is defined
in terms of synthesis. Unification between text and performance, and amalgamation
between actor and text create liminality and flow. When theatrical elements pull in
opposite directions the performance fails to be successful, and no flow is achieved.
Schechner recognizes the potential dissonance in language and performance, but such
aberrance must be overcome in his idea of a good performance.

At numerous points in Between Theater and Anthropology, Schechner asserts that
the world performances he analyzes are far removed from realist performances. Perhaps
Schechner’s performances are not realist per se, but they fit alongside realism in adhering
to a mimesis of language, and delineating theatre as a site for transfiguration. Schechner
describes performance in a univocal and decidedly Stanislavskian vein of absorption by
fixating on flow, unity, and liminality. Absorption is reconfigured from a method of
performance to the working of performance.

Schechner can have the best of both worlds by locating realism as a western
phenomena, and delineating the Stanislavskian method as one performer playing one
role. The world rituals he studies, and the absorption he privileges, are both a necessary

element of a good performance, and, as something different, they can be the solution to a

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non-transfiguring western theatre. The emergence of performance studies in general -
and the emergence of the Schechner / Turner anthropological school in particular -
appears related to the failure of a theatre of transfiguration.

The majority of twentieth-century western theatre is based on a mimetic and non
—transformative realism. Instead of moving beyond a metaphoric connection, theatre
merely offers a photographic representation of the world. These practitioners
institutionalize the formal limitations of a metaphoric theatre and reject all hope for a
transfiguring theatre. As a result, the majority of drama is uncritically accepted as
nothing more than photographic representation. Drama which shows critical self
awareness of its own form falls into the mold of Ibsen’s theatre of disruption.
Performance studies institutionalizes the lost hope for transfiguration, unification, and
absorption, and offers an escape from the modern theatre’s uncritical failure and overly
formal self—awareness.23

In renaming the terms of inquiry from theatre to performance and from realism to
ritual, the ideals of Stanislavskian absorption are insulated from the corruption of rupture.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Schechner’s analysis of the Noh:

A great work, when it occurs, is what happens when all training drops
away in an unrevised meeting of artist and medium. I . . . j Hana [the root
metaphor of Noh] exists between performers and spectators; when it is
there both performers and spectators are transported. (143-4)
While Schechner pays lip service to the similarity between Brechtian theory and various
rituals, it is difficult to conceive a less Brechtian analysis of the Noh. Unlike the

Verfremdungseffekt Brecht saw in his adaptation of Taniko, Schechner’s Noh is “an

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unrevised meeting of artist and medium,” and has the effect of transportation. A theatrical
inspiration for alienation transforms into a performance of absorption. The disruption
between audience and performer, actor and role, and between scenes that is necessary to
create a gestus is absent in Schechner’s retelling.

Couched in terms of ritual, Schechner offers a return to the ideals of realism.
Schechner’s extra-theatrical hyper-realism envisions performance to be a real world
event with real world consequences. Finally, a form of realism can be envisioned that
will transfigure. Ritual becomes the ultimate form of realism as audiences are
transformed, even if the change is only temporary.

The transfiguring potential of performance becomes undeniable in the masochistic
body art performances of Chris Burden and the plastic surgery performances of Beth
Orlan. When Burden is shot on stage, or when Orlan videotapes her elective procedures,
both change as a result of performance. Karen Finley’s reading of her father’s suicide
note on stage similarly engages an ultimate form of realism which overcomes the
artificiality of the theatrical event. According to Finley, “I was trying to express the
absurdity of the idea that the theater can truly represent emotional pain, that it can cause
the audience to experience emotions that are ‘real.’ It was my response to the concept of
method acting” (61). However, Finley’s performance and her description also question
any performative authenticity. From a perforrner’s perspective, reading a suicide note,
getting shot, or being operated on transcends imitation. On the other hand, such
“authentic” performances raise some of the same questions as their theatrical forbearers.

Namely, can the ideal of performative authenticity represent beyond the individual who

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performs, or is seeing Burden shot ultimately not very different from seeing Hamlet
stabbed?

These performance artists try to suture Ibsen’s theatrical rupture while critiquing
the artificiality of theatrical realism. The mimesis of language and performance are again
depicted as one. What is represented in language is contemporaneous to what the visual
field represents spatially. This correspondence is further solidified by minimizing the
distance between signifier and signified. Not only are the individual acts (the acts of
shooting, reading the suicide note, and getting plastic surgery) real acts, but the actions
are committed by individuals, and not characters, or the individual is the site where the
action manifests.24 Real acts are committed by real individuals who choose to commit
such acts on a stage.

Far from the critiques of Schechner and Finley, the opposition between
literariness and theatricality is not a detriment to a performance of The Wild Duck. The
play depends on such an Opposition. In The Theatre and its Double, Antonin Artaud
writes: “If confusion is a sign of the times, I see at the root of this confusion a rupture
between things and words, between things and the ideas and signs of their representation”
(7). Yet, while Artaud offers his Theatre of Cruelty as a solution to this rupture, Ibsen’s
play performs it.

Returning to Ekdal’s attempt to explain the new drama to Gregers with which I
began, Ekdal’s pronouncement that Gregers “shall see it!” takes on new implications.
Gregers shall see the same thing that Ekdal has seen, and which the theatrical audience is
in the process of seeing. The new drama’s performance is based on a rupture between

things and ideas. This is further emphasized in the final moments of the play. After

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briefly viewing Hedvig’s corpse, Ekdal retreats off-stage to once again experience the
rupture. In doing so, The Wild Duck prefigures Vladimir and Estragon’s wait for Godot,
Ben and Gus’s give and take with the upper level in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter,
and the invisible objects which pervade the stage in the drama of Eugene Ionesco. Drama
exposes the working of the system of theatrical performance by focusing on the non-
object that never becomes an object

Gregers has a vested interest in conceptualizing drama as the connection between
physical objects and physical ideas. He is determined not to see what Ekdal and a
performance of the play demand of him. Ibsen’s new drama is not only self-referential,
but severs the very idea of exteriority. If Gregers sees the theatre of rupture on Ekdal’s
terms, he will see that absence can be as fascinating as transfiguration. Ibsen’s characters
are neither able to understand the rupture nor their fascination with it. Yet, the attraction
between rupture and character is indisputable. Either in lieu of a linear narrative - or in
the case of The Wild Duck - despite the pulls of a linear narrative, characters
compulsively rotate around the rupture perpetually signifying what is not there. They
move closer and farther away, never able to stay away for long, until the performance
concludes. 25

Hedvig’s suicide gives the sterile, neutral metaphor of the new dramatic content
bursting the old form’s bottles a human resonance. Gregers’s determination to transform
Hedvig into a ritual figure of transfiguration is an impossible task. Gregers’s mission can
only be accomplished when the mimesis of performance and language are identical. Her

failure accentuates the difference between text and performance.

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Hedvig becomes an emblem for the new drama. In The Theory of the Avant-
Garde, Renato Poggioli defines an emblem as a modern metaphor: “The modern
metaphor tends to divorce the idea and the figure, to annul in the last-mentioned any
reference to a reality other than its own self” (197). Hedvig’s suicide liberates the play
from linear temporality’s interpretive constrictions. The present can be evaluated
independently, rather than through the lens of history or future. Hedvig’s body marks a
dramatic present as a thing apart, and diverges from a long dramatic tradition. From
Oedipus Rex to A Doll ’s House history and memory prove necessary to apprehend the
present’s complete import. Oedipus must discover his past to heal the plague currently
ravaging Thebes. In A Doll ’3 House, Nora’s past actions must be brought to light for her
to appraise the environment in which she lives. Hjalmar appears to be replicating
Oedipus and Nora’s trajectory.

Previous to Hedvig’s suicide, Hjalmar has interpreted the present through the
past, thereby transforming the present. Based on his new historical insight, Hjalmar
believes Hedvig to be illegitimate. Such an reevaluation of the present is not made
possible by the past alone. The present is part of a continuum which culminates with a
determinate future. The present shifts into something new after Hjalmar learns of a
future in which Hedvig will receive a future annuity from Werle, and Hedvig and Werle
are both going blind.

Hedvig’s suicide divorces the present from the determinate future and its
revelations. The suicide institutionalizes the present as more than the culmination of its
temporal antecedents. The issues surrounding Hedvig’s legitimacy become irrelevant

once her corpse is carried onto the stage. In death, Hedvig no longer belongs to Werle.

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Instead, she is Hjalmar’s daughter once more. The death returns the loft as closely as
possible to the near ahistorical nature which it possessed previous to Gregers’s intrusion
in Act Two.

Hedvig’s body underscores the rupture in mimetic language as well as the escape
from a temporal continuum. After Gregers’s attempts at linguistic reconnection are
unsuccessful, he sends Hedvig to suture the rupture sacrificially. However, the rupture
between things and ideas cannot be remedied in such a manner. Hedvig’s death
demonstrates that drama does not have to be about constructing history and creating
seamless interconnections. The Drama of Rupture elucidates a rupture intrinsic to
performance. Spatial rupture cannot be revealed in text, but performance can call
attention to mimetic language’s gaps. Hedvig’s corpse enacts a spatial and temporal
rupture and is an emblem that transcends Ibsen’s play. The dead child becomes a
dominant emblem in Modern Drama appearing again and again in plays from the late-
nineteenth century to the present. Although these plays seem to have little in common
aside from the presence of the dead child in each case, in its breadth, the emblem of the
dead child dramatizes the futile effort to overcome the rupture between things and ideas
as central to theatricality. Part II, continues a discussion of the Theatre of Rupture and its

seemingly intrinsic interconnection with Modern Drama’s dead children.

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Part Two:
From Ibsen to Kane: Baby Steps Toward a Theory of Modern Drama as a Theatre

of Rupture

Prelude: Modern Drama’s Dead Children

Tupolski: Ariel ’5 getting a bit aggrieved because ‘We can draw our own
conclusions’ is sort of our [0b. (Pause. ) And the first conclusion we are
drawing is exactly how many stories have you got ‘a little girl is treated
badly’, or ‘a little boy is treated badly ’?

Katurian: A few. A few.

Ariel: ‘A few. ’ I '11 say a fucking few. The first fucking twenty we picked
up was ‘a little girl is fucked over in this way, or a little boy is fucked over

in this way. . . ’.’
Katurian: But that isn’t saying anything, I’m not trying to say
anything. . .

Ariel: You ’re not what?

Katurian: What?

Ariel: Not What?

Katurian: What, are you trying to say that I’m trying to say that the

children represent something? (McDonagh 11-12)
At the conclusion of the previous chapter, I sounded much like Ariel from Martin
McDonagh’s The Pillowman in suggesting that with Hedvig’s suicide, The Wild Duck
emblematizes the dead child as a dominant trope for Modern Drama. I cannot help
but notice that when added up, drama’s dead children amount to more than a few.
However, whereas Tupolski and Ariel believe in a mimetic bond connecting
Katurian’s proliferation of dead children stories to their real world manifestations, I
am less interested in what dead children represent than in how they represent.

The dead child is the focal point in a representational conflict. Tupolski and

Ariel are policemen investigating the murders of children. Katurian has written

stories which bear an uncanny resemblance to the crimes. Tupolski and Ariel’s

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conclusion that text is linked to real world action seems like the correct interpretation.
Despite the obvious reasons for reading the stories mimetically, Katurian’s
questioning whether the dead children “represent something” rejects an Ariel-like
interpretation. More than a transparent representation and explanation of real world
events, Katurian’s surprise suggests that he understands the dead child as textual
signifier apart from its signified. Over the next three chapters, Katurian will be the
model for analyzing dead child signifiers that do not “represent something.” If
anything, the dead child represents the very limits of representation.

A metatheatrical emblem, the dead child dramatizes the workings of mimesis
by illustrating the failure of transfiguration. The dead child confronts the theatrical
systems of textuality, historicity, and materiality and finds such visions inadequate.
Efforts to contextualize the emblem in a determinate theatrical frame prove to be
unsuccessful and reveal the gaps in transfiguring systems. Attempts to colonize the
import of the dead child by establishing its meaning have the inverse effect. Rather
than a sign illustrating a circumscribed referent, the dead child self-reflexively calls
attention to itself as a sign, and discloses the indeterminacy intrinsic to theatrical
systems.

The crux of traditional dramatic narrative often involves the compulsion of
various characters to place present events in a determinate historical context. The
protagonists of Oedipus, Moliere’s The Miser, Hamlet, and Arthur Miller’s All My
Sons all try to understand how past events influence their present. These

representative examples suggest that dramatic resolution involves a present

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reinterpretation of the past. Summarizing the dramatic theory of Jackson Barry,
Marvin Carlson notes:
All dramatic structure reflects tension between two basic patterns of
time: the improvisational, or Heraclitean, which sees time as a
specious present moving constantly “step by step into an unknown
future,” and the retrospective, which sees a completed portion of time
with a definite shape. (Theories of the Theatre 485)
Barry’s dialectic might very well be characterized as Oedipal temporality.
Retrospective time absorbs or destroys an inferior improvisational time by
transforming a shapeless present into part of a temporal continuum.26 The dead child
resists this historicization and suggests that improvisational time is not necessarily
specious. Dead child dramas rupture the linear continuum, and replace retrospective
time with a more fragmentary and less comprehensible dramatic form.
Oedipal temporality involves past events coming to light. 27 These events
transform the way the present is understood, and bring about an Aristotelian
recognition and reversal which concludes the play. In Freudian terms, this reversal
and recognition can be characterized as uncanny:
Taking another class of things, it is easy to see that here too, it is only this
factor of involuntary repetition which surrounds with an uncanny
atmosphere what would otherwise be innocent enough, and forces upon us
the idea of something fateful and unescapable where otherwise we should

have spoken of ‘chance’ only. (390)

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Oedipus Rex dramatizes the attempt to escape the future, as Oedipus leaves his parents,
and Jocasta and Laius abandon their child to die. However, the future shows itself
“fateful and unescapable.” All steps taken to resist the dictates of fate uncannily ensure
repetition. No matter how far Oedipus travels, his flight merely ensures his return home.

Oedipus Rex ’s recognition and reversal originates with the baby who was
supposed to die but improbably survives. Oedipus must learn that it is too late for him to
escape his future. And, of course, he can only recognize this by learning about the past.
Freud suggests that infantile factors account for many feelings of uncanniness, and such
an understanding interconnects the uncanny and retrospective time in Sophocles’s play
(385). Oedipal drama emerges from a baby who will not die, and who, through living,
validates the return of the repressed as the privileged form of dramatic narrative.
Oedipus Rex rejects the dead baby who is never actualized, and the potential dead baby
who is never realized. The almost dead child becomes the foundation for a cause / effect
narrative system which privileges retrospective time.

A counterpart to the Oedipal dramatic narrative, Aeschylus’s The Oresteia
mythologizes the founding of law. The Oresteia is performed over the corpse of a dead
child. The trilogy begins with Agememnon’s return home from the Trojan War. His
involvement in the war was made possible by his sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigeneia.
Agememnon’s sacrifice inaugurates a cycle of revenge that only ends with the founding
of law and order at the trilogy’s conclusion. Revenge becomes an endless signifying
chain traveling from Iphigeneia to Agememnon to Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus to
Orestes. Rather than a one-to-one correspondence from cause to effect, effects inevitably

spill over transforming into the next cause. The founding of law binds the signifying

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chain inaugurated by the dead child. Drama finds a determinate ending by overcoming
the entropy of Iphigeneia’s unseen corpse.28

The dramatic innovation of Aeschylus and Sophocles cannot be overstated.
Aeschylus is widely credited with bringing a second actor onto the stage thereby making
dialogue possible. Sophocles brings a third actor on the stage, and exponentially
increases the number of potential stage actions. Coextensive with drama becoming a
medium based on dialogue, the genre rejects the emblem of the dead child. Instead of the
dead baby, dramatic form will privilege the return of the repressed and determinate
endings made possible by the causality of law.29

In a modern reimagining of classical determinism, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance
of Being Earnest (1895) transforms the Oedipal narrative of the almost dead baby from
tragic to comic archetype. The return of an impossibly surviving baby forces characters
to face retrospective time. Jack must read the present import of his past survival.
Wilde’s living child is closer to farce than the uncanny. Prism places the infantile Jack in
her handbag because in her absentrnindedness, she confuses him and “the manuscript of a
three-volume novel of more than usual revolting sentimentality” (427). Unlike Jocasta’s
abandoning of Oedipus to escape a preordained future, the infant Jack is misplaced.
Prism creates a metonymic understanding of text as baby by carelessly placing her novel
in the perambulator.

In confessing that she lost the baby, Prism makes retrospective time possible.
Text and baby align creating rigid dramatic deterrninacy. The baby / text identificatory

chain lets Jack assume the role of Algy’s older brother. Textual representation becomes

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fundamental to actualizing retrospective time. Jack must consult the army list to discover
that his birth name is Earnest.

The congruence of baby and text systematically banishes attempts to narrate
death. In the first act, Jack announces his intention to kill Earnest. Earnest is a persona
Jack created for his city visits. As an imaginary construction, Jack should be able to kill
Earnest simply by uttering his death. However, Algy takes on the persona of Earnest
before Jack can commit linguistic homicide. Jack’s speech act fails because it contains a
verifiable content that is clearly in error. Earnest cannot be dead because Algy / Earnest
has a physical presence. By adopting the persona of Earnest, Algy transforms Jack’s
performative speech into representational speech. Jack can no longer kill by simply
uttering the words. Words must have independent veracity.

Wilde’s play adds a healthy dose of skepticism to the Oedipal archetype. In
Oedipus Rex a vocal utterance brings about retrospective time’s victory. Speech contains
an intrinsic truth function. Despite Oedipus’s protests, Teiresias’s narration of the baby
that impossibly survives inevitably leads to historical recognition. The voice contains a
transformative power that cannot be resisted.

The Importance of Being Earnest domesticates the voice. Where Teiresias’s
voice saves Thebes from the perils of indeterminacy which plague it, Jack needs an army
list and the memory of Prism’s novel to achieve an analogous result. Jack utters two
felicitous acts which he thinks are divorced from truth: his name is Earnest, and he has a
brother. As text, the army list transforms these utterances from simply felicitous to
truthful and felicitous. Jack cannot commit suicide by killing Earnest, but the text can

demonstrate Earnest is living, thereby establishing retrospective time.

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Unlike Jack’s speech acts that fail without textual support and historical
verification, Algy successfully mines the performative utterance’s potential. Algy’s
» imaginary and often ill friend Bunbury remains an imaginary construction. The
imaginary Bunbury suffers the same death sentence by speech act that Jack was incapable
of imposing on Earnest. The contrast between Jack and Algy, Earnest and Bunbury, and
written text and speech act underscores two competing dramatic systems. There is a
compulsion to make drama as material and determinate as possible, yet like Bunbury, the
dead child can never be completely contained in the signifying net of deterrninacy.

Apparently, Earnest ’s critics do not relish the thought of Bunbury escaping the
text / baby / history contextualizing network. Many critics have attempted to find a
historical antecedent for Algy’s sick friend. If successful, such a project would transform
Bunbury from imaginary construct to a mimetic representation of a material reality. In
“Oscar Wilde and the Bunburys,” William Green suggests that Henry Shirley Bunbury is
a primary model for Wilde’s Bunbury and Edward Herbert Bunbury is a secondary
model. Arguing against Bunbury as homage to a Cheshire village bearing the same
name, or Bunbury as amalgamation of Henry Shirley and Edward Herbert, in “Bunbury
Pure and Simple,” W. Craven Mackie posits that Bunbury emerges as a result of the three
Bunburys who appeared in the Morning Post obituaries between July 23, 1894 and July
31, 1894.

More important for my analysis than which Bunbury Wilde may have based his
imaginative construct on, is why transform a non-character into a historical reality?
Green acknowledges the pointlessness of such a project for all but Wilde biographers in

his confession that “[in] the long run, identification of Bunbury neither enhances nor

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detracts from the charm and wit that have made The Importance of Being Earnest the
masterpiece it is” (75). The historicizing project of realizing Bunbury is an extension of
an analogous movement in Wilde’s play. Despite the apparent victory of Oedipal
determinism, the death of the imaginary Bunbury is an indeterminate remainder
performing the signifying chain’s failure to find textual, historical and material
completion.

Green and Mackie overcome Wilde’s indeterminate excess by historicizing
Bunbury. They transform the imaginative felicitous utterance from a sign of dramatic
rupture to a mimetic signifier that neatly bonds to an historical signified. Like Ibsen’s
duck or Albee’s child, Wilde’s Bunbury is a focal point dramatizing a theatrical rupture
between material objects and semiotic signs. Green and Mackie attempt to impose
historical recognition on Wilde’s non-object. The critical compulsion to institute
Oedipal structure on all which eludes historical recognition is not an isolated anomaly,
but, on the contrary, often appears in criticism of late nineteenth and twentieth-century
drama and performance.

Like Bunbury, the dead baby emblematizes a rupture in signification. However,
the critical canon surrounding these dead baby plays contextualizes the loose threads of
performative signification by imposing a determinate and material structure on a dramatic
signifier that seems to escape such a configuration. The desire to envision Bunbury
within a theatrical matrix where dramatic signification always finds completion
culminates with Tom J acobson’s Bunbury: A Serious Play for Trivial People. Performed
July 12-16, 2006 at the Skirball Cultural Center, Bunbury features a materialized

Bunbury as well as a materialized Rosalind from Romeo and Juliet. The two former non-

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characters team up to invade other dramatic works (Hernandez). Jacobson’s
materialization of the character who never existed works alongside the criticism that tries
to suture the rupture of dramatic form so important to understanding the emblem of the
dead baby. 3"

Bunbury, and the dead children are verbal utterances divorced from a material
presence. The utterance works analogously to the Austinian performative speech act
where saying equates to doing. Vocalizing a dead baby performs a rupture in dramatic
signification. Rather than a true or false representation, the dead baby is a representation
of the failure of semiotics and phenomenology to encapsulate the entirety of dramatic
performance. Unitary conceptions of theatrical performance which equate semiotics with
material objects marginalize the gap between the two systems. The dead child
acknowledges the rupture by emblematizing what escapes representation.

Contemporaneous with Ibsen’s turn to prose, Ibsen and drama become
consumed with the image of the dead child. In “Kindermord and Will in Little Eyolf’
James E. Kerans suggests:

Kindermord is vaguely discernible in Ibsen’s early work, but beginning
with Brand (1865) it unmistakably finds its place in the larger imaginative
order of the play, and in every subsequent play it is fundamental to the
dramatic action (192).
Perhaps Kerans overstates matters in suggesting that the dead child is fundamental to all
post-Brand Ibsen drama. The potential for a dead child affects the action of Pillars of
Society and Ghosts; however, both plays fall short of the image’s realization. In the

former, Olaf is a stowaway on an unseaworthy ship that never departs, and the latter play

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concludes before Mrs. Alving fulfills her son’s request to kill him. These are the clearest
examples of child death in the early plays of Ibsen’s prose cycle. In A Doll’s House and
Enemy of the People child death is further removed from the action. Only with The Wild
Duck does child death become a dominant trope in Ibsen’s work. Starting with Hedvig’s
suicide, four out of Ibsen’s next five plays involve dead children.

Ibsen is merely the starting point for the dead child in modern drama. The
frequency of the (non-) image is Modern Drama’s own version of the return of the
repressed. The dead child returns drama to its beginnings and illuminates the
dramatic import of the form not taken. Three years before Ibsen turns to prose,
Nietzsche metaphorizes tragedy as a child who has died in The Birth of Tragedy
(1872)

American drama has also proved a fertile breeding ground for images of dead
children. In Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty,

Anthony Kubiak suggests that the dead child illuminates American subjectivity:

[T]he imaginary child — the literal concept of reproduction — operates as a
fulcrum in the struggle for apprehension. This struggle ends, in each case,
in the death / disappearance of the infant, as in O’Neill’s Desire Under the
Elms and Edward Albee’s Who ’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and with the
grim resurrection of the repressed in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. The
enfants terrible represent, in each case, a space of theatrical terror — the
terror of contingencies, certainly, but also the terror of huit c1053 I , no
escape from the demands of selfhood into the safe confinement of a

“subject position” (134-5). 32

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Kubiak privileges semiotics over phenomenology. The struggle to apprehend Albee and
O’Neill’s dead children as material objects is doomed from the beginning. These dead
children can never disappear because there is nothing to disappear - they never enter the
realm of visual representation. Kubiak privileges the signified at the expense of the
object /sign. By focusing on what the dead baby signifies, Kubiak shows a lack of
interest in how the dead baby who does the signifying is represented.

Kubiak’s focus on the dead child as a representation of American subjectivity
minimizes the importance of drama as representational site. I wish to take a more
macroscopic view on the phenomenon of the dead child in Modern Drama. The dead
child is a metatheatrical image, appearing in Ibsen, American drama, and beyond. From
Ibsen forward, the modern stage is littered with the signs of dead children if not their
actual representations. As a signifier, the dead child is a functioning component in a
dramatic representational economy.

A cursory and by no means all-inclusive listing of dead children drama is
suggestive for its lack of suggestiveness. While well represented, American Drama does
not show more proclivity for dead children than British Drama. Representations of dead
children are common in multiple dramatic styles: from realism to symbolism, and from
Absurdism, to the so-called Theatre of Extremes. Modern Drama keeps returning to the
emblem of the dead child, and the dead child continues to elicit both critical and audience
furor.

Ibsen’s dead children include Hedvig’s suicide in The Wild Duck (1884), the
death of Ellida and Wangel’s son, a son who possessed the same eyes as those of the

Stranger in The Lady from the Sea (1888), Hedda’s burning of Eilert Lavborg’s

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metaphoric child in Hedda Gabler (1890), the death of Solness and Aline’s children due
to the illness that Aline passed on to the children while nursing in The Master Builder
(1892), and Eyolf’s drowning in Little Eyolf(1 894). In other late nineteenth and early
twentieth-century drama, Jean smothers her physically deformed child in Elizabeth
Robins and Florence Bell’s Alan ’s Wife (1893), a drowning concludes Luigi Pirandello’s
Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), and Abbie suffocates her baby in Eugene
O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms (1924). Post World War 11 examples include Estelle’s
remembrance of the murder of her baby in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1956), the death of
baby Eugene in O’Neill’s Long Day ’s Journey Into Night (1956), the miscarriage which
facilitates the reunion of Jimmy and Alison in John Osbome’s Look Back in Anger
(1956), and the revelation that it was a dead child that delayed the train in Samuel
Beckett’s All That Fall (1957). Dead children in dramas from the 19605 and I97OS
include the ritualistic murder of the child who never existed in Edward Albee’s Who ’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(1961-2), the murder and return of the bumble in Albee’s The
American Dream (1961), the stoning of the baby in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965), the
baby which dies in the fire at the conclusion of Caryl Churchill’s Owners (1972), and the
exhuming of the baby who was murdered years earlier in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child
(1978, revised in 1995). Contemporary examples of dead children in drama include Pope
Joan’s narration of her murder and the murder of her newly born baby in Churchill’s Top
Girls (1982), the murder of Nicky at the hands of politically motivated torturers in Harold
Pinter’s One for the Road (1984), the burying, exhuming and eating of the dead baby in
Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995), Rebecca’s remembrance of giving the bundle up to be

killed in Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (1996), the death of the baby and the burning of the

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corpse with cigarettes in Mark Ravenhill’s Oscar Wilde homage, Handbag (1998), and
the child murder stories and their real world manifestations in Martin McDonagh’s The
Pillowman (2003).33
In these plays, dramatic performance becomes a network of signifying systems

that can never completely converge. Such a vision of performative multiplicity recalls
Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. For Artaud, a bad theatre focuses on linguistic
representation, while a good theatre creates a network of interpretive possibilities:

To cause spoken language or expression by words to dominate on the

stage the objective expression of gestures and of everything which affects

the mind by sensuous and spatial means is to turn one’s back on the

physical necessity of the stage and to rebel against its possibilities (71).
Artaud does not so much dismiss language as reduce language to its proper sphere.
Language is just one among many theatrical signifying systems. Other systems include:
non-linguistic sounds such as screams, other sounds, light, darkness, and gesture.
“[E]verything which affects the mind by sensuous and spatial means,” Artaud’s network
is a corrective of Ibsenism and its theatrical descendents who conceptualize the dramatic
text as the root of theatrical innovation.34

Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and dead baby dramas both react against the

dominance of realism and language in drama. Language and realism cannot offer a
complete theatrical experience. However, Artaud suggests that transfiguration is possible
by replacing a unitary theatrical experience with the Theatre of Cruelty’s multifaceted
stage: “[t]o break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the

theater” (13). Theatre has ceased to be valuable because theatre has been reduced to the

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artificiality of language. Such a process has taken the essence out of the theatre - the
theatre cannot connect with life.

Like Artaud’s plethora of signifying systems, theidead child critiques a unitary
vision of dramatic representation. However, the dead child does not offer an alternative
transfiguring system. The emblem underscores the intrinsic theatricality of transfiguring
failure, and reveals mimesis as a site for representing and not for representation. Some
things cannot be understood, some signification is doomed to failure, and determinate
disruption is a normative dramatic function.

Modern Drama’s dead children undercut retrospective time, the fecundity of
signification, and the long literary tradition which equates texts to children. 35 A child is
a sign of successful proliferation, and evidence of genes living beyond a single
generation. A child creates a temporal bridge connecting the past to the future. The dead
child becomes a prime illustration of signifying failure. Once dead, the sign has
transitioned from subject to object, thereby eliminating infinite possibilities including the
potential for language. Never quite a dramatic subject, the dead child signifies the lost
potential for dramatic subjectivity. It will never get to speak, and become anything more
than object. In the discussion that follows, the children are enmeshed in their own
objecthood. Language fails as a dramatic signifying system.

Ibsen’s dead children are both historically and structurally significant to the
development of Modern Drama. Ibsen is considered a forerunner of twentieth-century
dramatic innovation primarily due to his realism. However, such an assessment fails to

acknowledge that only the early plays in Ibsen’s prose cycle are unproblematically

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realist. In Hedda Gabler: Revisiting Style and Substance,” Rhonda Blair understands
Hedda Gabler as the beginning of a new phase in Ibsen’s dramaturgy:
Hedda Gabler written in 1889, occupies a transitional position. Though it
has elements of earlier, more conventionally realistic domestic plays such
as A Doll’s House (I 879) and Ghosts (1881), it marks a move toward the
mystical and symbolist plays of Ibsen’s final phase, embodied in works
such as The Master Builder (1892) and When We Dead Awaken (1 899)
(144).
Dead children dramas attempt to resolve the tension of signification. The drama either
reasserts a traditional structure, a new dramatic structure asserts itself, or dramatic rupture
emerges. In the case of dramatic rupture, the old structure dissipates with no coherent
organizing principle left to replace it. Hedda Gabler ’s metaphorical dead baby signals
the transition from realism to symbolism. Child murder in Ibsen’s middle prose plays
emblematize the desire to see beyond realism as a unitary signifying system.36 Before
realism can be abandoned and symbolism accessed, realism must be burned in effigy.
Hedda Gabler ’s metaphorical dead child represents Ibsen’s greatest challenge to
realism while working within the system. After Hedda Gabler, Ibsen moves on to the
overt symbolism which would be the defining feature of his final plays. Hedda believes
a metaphorical dead child can disrupt the signifying potential of language. Hedda’s
efforts are ultimately thwarted in the play; however, this desire would point the way for
other dramatic dead children to disrupt other signifying systems. In “Hedda’s Children:

Simon Gray’s Anti-Heroes,” Katherine H. Burkman suggests:

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Paradoxically, the fecundity of Hedda as a character, who aborts both her
own life and that of her child, lies in the proliferation of characters created
by other modern playwrights who have been deeply influenced in their
drawing by Ibsen’s heroine, by other characters in the play, and by Ibsen’s
point of view (107).
Burkman’s title suggests not only the fecundity of Modern Drama as Hedda’s children,
but also, the proliferation of Hedda’s children in Modern Drama. The fecundity of
Hedda’s children is the paradoxical proliferation of the dead, in which the iterating sign

of the dead child evokes competing mimetic visions.

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Chapter Two:
Socializing Texts, Scandalous Words and Burning Babies in Hedda Gabler
In Ibsen and the Actress, Elizabeth Robins, the first English actress to play Hedda Gabler,
a translator of Ibsen, and co-author of A [an ’s Wife, her own dead baby play, relates an
anecdote that would often be repeated in contemporary criticism of the play. According
to Robins, “[o]ne lady of our acquaintance, married and not noticeable unhappy, said

9”

laughing, ‘Hedda is all of us (18). In a similar vein of identification, in his introduction
to the play Michael Meyer suggests that “[t]he play might, indeed, be subtitled Portrait of
the Dramatist as a Young Woman (135).37 Despite these noteworthy examples of realist
signification, Hedda as a comprehensible representation for all women in the former, and
Hedda as a cross dressing Ibsen in the latter, the opposite reaction is a more typical
response to the play. As Joan Templeton has noted, “the word that appears most often in
the early reviews of Hedda Gabler is ‘incomprehensible’” (204).38

The critique of the play as incomprehensible extends well beyond early reviews to
current critical examinations of Ibsen. Hedda Gabler is often deemed incomprehensible
as a result of the social contexts in which the play is situated. Robins blames the
perceived incomprehensible nature of the play as an offshoot of gender relationships:
“how should men understand Hedda on the stage when they didn’t understand her in the
persons of their wives, their daughters, their woman friends” (18). For Michael
Connolly, the incomprehensibility is an historical phenomena. In “Mapping Desire:

Couching Hedda and Eilert’s Conversation in Act II of Hedda Gabler,” Connolly

wonders, “[a]re [Ibsen’s] plays encoded in a manner peculiar to Victorian culture and can

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no dint of translation, short of adaptation, render Ibsen’s vocabulary compelling for us?”
(163). In “Negotiating Between Then and Now: Directing Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler,” John
Staniunas adds the confusion of national context. Staniunas takes a trip to Oslo because
the influence of nationality must be understood before he can mount a production of
Hedda Gabler: “I searched everywhere for the characters in the play . . . in the faces of
the people, in their mannerisms, way of behaving, in the beauty of the land and the
history of the time” (158). Staniunas’ time in Oslo does not seem to help in clarifying the
play, a discussion following an open rehearsal: “erupted into a passionate yet polite
shouting match about how Hedda should be played” (157).

In each of the above characterizations of the play, an exegetic solution of
signification is proposed as a means to remove the incomprehensible nature of the play.
In essence, the play is incomprehensible for men because men cannot understand women,
the play is incomprehensible for modern audiences because they cannot understand
Victorian codes of conduct and repression, the play is incomprehensible for Americans
because people outside of Norway are unfamiliar with the Norwegian heritage of Ibsen.

All these efforts to eliminate incomprehensibility in the drama center on the
character of Hedda. The incomprehensibility of the character becomes synonymous with
the incomprehensibility of the play. Criticism from the play’s initial performance
forward implicitly suggests that all other characters within the drama are understandable.
Only Hedda cannot be understood. The inability to understand social contexts obscure an
understanding of the protagonist. If these large mystery-making structures can be
demystified, the character will become comprehensible and the play will be

understandable.

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In a sense, critics of the play validate the assertion of Elizabeth Robins’
acquaintance that Hedda is all of us. For when critics attempt to illuminate the social
contexts which encompass Hedda to understand her, the oppressive social structure is
replicated in a critical context. Hedda wants freedom from social structures but is unable
to achieve it other than through futile incomprehensible actions. Like Hedda’s
oppression within the social structures of the play, the critical tradition seems oppressed
by the manner in which cultural and social differentiation make Hedda and the play
incomprehensible. If these structures can be clearly outlined, incomprehensibility will
transform into the comprehensible. However, like Hedda’s inability to escape the
oppressive social structures, the critical tradition is unable to find that comprehensibility
which will offer liberation from the confusion which binds all efforts at understanding the
character and the play. The assertion of Hedda being all of us does not necessarily
contradict the incomprehensible nature of the play. We are like Hedda when we
approach the play. Despite all efforts to escape the cultural forces which make the
character and the play incomprehensible, these efforts ultimately fail to offer the glimmer
of clarity. Like Hedda, critics are forced to confront a structure they cannot hope to
overcome.

In their efforts to overcome a structure as noted above, the critical canon tends to
equate structure with realist structure. This overlooks that as a play, Hedda Gabler
intervenes in numerous dramatic discourses in addition to realism. The play also engages
in symbolic ritual, and the metatheatrical emblem of proliferation personified in the

image of the dead baby. In “Mythic Structure in Hedda Gabler: The Mask Behind the

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Face” Elinor Fuchs suggests that the inability to deal with incomprehensibility in the play
is related to the mistake of viewing the play through a realist lens:
At the end of Act III, Hedda Gabler performs two shocking actions: she
hands Lovborg a pistol to use as a suicide weapon, and she burns his
manuscript. The play-things and figures of speech of Act I have taken
over the action of the play. No matter how sympathetic the imaginative
leap we make, we cannot ‘justify’ these actions in the motivational terms
of realistic drama. Ibsen deliberately frustrated such an effort by
destroying bridges between wish and action. (210)39
Fuchs goes on to offer a theory of the play in which Hedda’s acts must be understood as
part of a Dionysian ritual. As the above citation makes apparent, such an interpretation
reads the end of the third act as center in that the end of the third act disrupts all efforts to
view the play within a realist schematic. By burning the manuscript without a justifiable
motivation, Hedda’s actions gesture towards a dramatic enterprise distanced from
psychological realism. Viewing the burning of the manuscript as a ritual instead of an act
in itself, viewing the burning as a symbolic signifier instead of a realist signified offers an
Opening to conceptualize the act as a rupture of a realist causal dynamic. Rather than a
culminating act of logical coherence, the ritual burning of the manuscript violates the
precepts of logical coherence.
When it is viewed as ritual, the burning struggles against the precepts of realism
and the progression of the play, rather than simply offering a continuation of the realist
structure. The burning is meant to be an act of transfiguration, an act that connects to

something beyond its own significance. Yet, when critics suggest that Hedda burns the

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manuscript out of jealousy, when Hedda tells Tesman she burned the manuscript for his
sake, or even when the manuscript is considered solely as a manuscript, the realist frame
reasserts its dominance obscuring the ritualistic resonance of the act.

Hedda is a character who understands and tries to perform ritual acts. Despite
these efforts, Hedda is trapped in a realist structure. As center for a ritualized view of
structure within the play, burning the manuscript offers a means to understand the
discordant elements earlier in the play which escape realist interpretations. Hedda’s
visions of a returning Lovborg “with vine leaves in his hair,” and her threats to burn
Thea’s hair are typically met with reactions ranging from mystification to scorn from
theatre goers and critics alike because there is no room for understanding Hedda’s
ritualistic speech acts within the play’s realist frame.40

The manuscript Hedda burns is Levborg’s academic discourse on the forces
shaping civilization and the direction civilization may develop (197). Evert Sprinchom
suggests that in the act of writing about the future, Lovborg’s “work on the history of
social and cultural forces and what they portend sounds very much like Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil, which has the subtitle ‘Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future’”
(362). As a corollary to this interpretation, Sprinchom reads the burning of the
manuscript as motivated “out of resentment, the most un-Nietzschean and un-Dionysian
of sentiments” (364).

However, rather than “un-Nietzschean and un-Dionysian,” the burning of the
metaphorical child is very Nietzschean. It is simply derived from the earliest vision of
Nietzschean thought. The content of Lovborg’s manuscript may evoke the future

motivated conceptions contained within Beyond Good and Evil, but the obsessive way

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the manuscript is conceived of as a child evokes The Birth of T ragedy." Nietzsche’s first
book compulsively metaphorizes tragedy in images of birth and sexual procreation.
Trying to illuminate the way the Apollonian and the Dionysian combine to from tragedy,
Nietzsche suggests that the process operates “just as procreation depends on the duality
of the sexes, involving perpetual strife with only periodically intervening reconciliations”
(33). Similarly, he writes that the two forces “continually incite each other to new and
more powerful births” (33). In just one more early example from Nietzsche’s text, he
argues that the two forces reach “consummation in this child [tragedy]” (47).

Despite the title of Nietzsche’s text and the numerous examples which
metaphorize the emergence of the child called tragedy, the text only offers the birth of
tragedy as a prelude to its death:

Greek tragedy met an end different from that of her older sister-arts: she

died by suicide: in consequence of an irreconcilable conflict; she died

tragically, while all the others passed away calmly and beautifully. (76)

Meta-tragedy serves a distinct rhetorical function in Nietzsche’s analysis, as the suicide

of tragedy represents the last tragic act. Tragedy is about birth; it is the fecundity of
Apollonian and Dionysian copulation. In its last act, tragedy pulls the structure down
around it. Attempts to reach the tragic are left with the child corpse who was tragedy.
This corpse has its own message to tell: “But when Greek tragedy died, there rose
everywhere the deep sense of an immense void” (76). In this phrase, as it reaches for the
tragic, Modern Drama is left with only the remains of the tragic, the dead child.

It is worth repeating that Nietzsche’s reproductive metaphor of tragedy’s birth

was originally published in 1872, three years before Ibsen’s transition to prose drama

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with Pillars of Society. The historical congruence between Nietzsche’s illumination of
the dead child of tragedy and lbsen’s emergence on the international stage, which, as
stated above, is commonly referred to as the beginning of Modern Drama, are undeniable.
As Modern Drama begins, Nietzsche recognizes the dead child, which leaves in its wake
“the deep sense of an immense void.” This “immense void” - this rupture - accompanies
Modern Drama to the present through the metaphor of the dead child, working in the
same way Nietzsche envisioned the dead child of tragedy. In each instance this
metatheatrical emblem points to the void that is left in the wake of the destruction of the
Dionysian force.
Writing at the cusp of what can only be described as a proliferation of dramatic
dead children, Nietzsche refuses to acknowledge the modern essence of the tragic corpse.
The dead child is only temporary, tragedy can be resurrected:
Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and the rebirth of
tragedy. The age of the Socratic man is over; put on wreaths of ivy, put
the thyrsus into your hand, and do not be surprised when tigers and
panthers lie down, fawning, at your feet (124).

In extolling the possibility of the tragic child coming back to life, Nietzsche presents the

6‘

same image that Hedda imagines in a returning Lovborg. Nietzsche’s wreaths of ivy”
have been generalized to the less specific vine leaves of Hedda’s vision, but the image is
the same. Like Hedda’s conception of Lovborg with vine leaves in his hair, Nietzsche

uses the image of a wreath of ivy to suggest that the void can be overcome, that the

Dionysian can again become an essential force, that drama can transfigure.

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This optimism surrounding the resurrection of the child and the overcoming of the
void is ultimately considered a rash and immature act. As Walter Kaufmann notes in the
translators preface:

Unfortunately, The Birth of Tragedy does not end with Section 15, as an
early draft did and as the book clearly ought to. Another ten sections
follow that weaken the whole book immeasurably. (13)
Kaufrnann’s critique of the text coincides with Nietzsche’s movement from concluding
his discussion of the death of tragedy in Section 15 to the beginnings of his attempts to
resurrect tragedy in Section 16. If only Nietzsche would have ended the book at its
strongest point he would have ended it with the death of the child called tragedy.

Kaufrnann’s regret with the text that went on too long - the text that wasn’t
content with the image of a dead child but had to try to resurrect the dead child - is only a
repetition of Nietzsche’s own view of his first book. In I886, a new edition of The Birth
of Tragedy was issued which included Nietzsche’s “Attempt at a Self-Criticism.” Among
the objects the older Nietzsche deems worthy of critique is the realization:

I spoiled the grandiose Greek problem, as it had arisen before my eyes, by
introducing the most modern problems! That I appended hopes where
there was no ground for hope, where everything pointed all to plainly to an
end! (24)
Both Nietzsche and Kaufmann assert that Nietzsche should have left the dead child where
it was lying.42 The child of tragedy has no business in the modern world. Attempts to

place tragedy in the context of the modern, damages the text and sidetracks the author’s

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vision. Instead of embracing the metaphor of the dead child as a means of staring into the

void, Nietzsche’s view is distracted.
While a young Nietzsche can only look at the void momentarily before he must

look away, Hedda has no qualms about taking a deeper and longer look into the void:

Hedda throwing one of the pages into the stove and whispers to

herself I’m burning your child, Thea! You, with your beautiful wavy

hair!

She throws a few more pages into the stove.

The child Eliert Lovborg gave you.

Throws the rest of the manuscript in.

I’m burning it! I’m burning your child! (229).

Hedda’s burning of the metaphorical child carries the vocal utterance to completion. In
the aftermath of Lovborg’s night out with Tesman and Judge Brack, a night out in which
Lovborg has lost his manuscript, Hedda convinces Tesman to let her hang on to the book.
Lovborg, not knowing what has happened to the book, tells Thea he has “torn it up”
(226). Following in the wake of Thea’s reaction to the imaginative utterance of the
book’s destruction, in a ritualized act of signification, Lovborg and Hedda inaugurate the
metaphor of manuscript as dead child:

Mrs. Elvsted. Do you know, Eilert, - this book — all my life I shall feel as
though you’d killed a little child?

Lovborg. You’re right. It was like killing a child.

Mrs. Elvsted. But how could you? It was my child too!

Hedda (almost inaudibly). Oh - the child — (227).

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Unlike Nietzsche’s metaphorizing tragedy as a child, and the typical manner in which
texts are characterized as children to emphasize their proliferation, Lovborg’s manuscript
never is seen as a living child. The manuscript only becomes a child in its death. Of
course, this is an imaginative death. Hedda has the manuscript in her writing desk.
Lovborg only kills the written manuscript by speaking its death so he will not have to
admit to Thea that he lost it. Particularly striking is the manner in which Lovborg and
Hedda latch on to the metaphor, even though both characters know that Lovborg has not
destroyed the manuscript.43 As one character after the other acknowledges the
imaginatively destroyed manuscript as dead child the metaphor is transformed from
Thea’s melodramatic act of fancy to a firm connotative link. Destroyed manuscript as
dead child takes on a resonance that cannot be denied.

At the same time that the play remains focused on the metaphor of the dead child,
it only does this by envisioning the dead child as metaphor. This functions as a sort of
distancing mechanism. The dead child as a metatheatrical emblem is not evoked directly.
The metaphor of book as child is established more directly than in The Importance of
Being Earnest. Wilde’s play creates a metonymic link between baby and text, but it is a
link the characters try to deny. It is a mistake that Prism mixed up book and child, and
such an error in judgment should not be made. In contradistinction, Hedda Gabler uses
ritual to forge the very link Wilde presents as ridiculous. In addition, while Wilde’s play
leaves the connection as an unspoken metonymic link, Ibsen’s play verbalizes the link.
The verbalization may make the link between text and baby more explicit but at the same
time the play pronounces it as an artificial link. According to Thea, in destroying the text

it is “as though” Lovborg killed a child. The ritualized verbal repetition works to

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transcend the artificiality of the verbal metaphor. It works to traverse Thea’s utterance of
“as though” and eliminate the distance between destroyed text and uttered dead child.

The ritualized utterance of the dead child tries to overcome the understanding that
as a metaphor, the description of the book is twice removed from the signification of the
dead child. Theatrical representation always bears a metaphorical connection to the
object it is signifying.” Keir Elam economically summarizes such a view when he
suggests that “[t]he very fact of their appearance on stage suppresses the practical
function of phenomena in favour of a symbolic or signifying role, allowing them to
participate in dramatic representation” (6).

In the context of this discussion of Modern Drama’s dead children, the dead child
is always a metaphor. By characterizing the book as a dead child, Hedda Gabler is
offering a metaphor of a metaphor. This metaphoric doubling contains and displaces the
complete resonance of the dead child onto Lovborg’s text. Such a displacement echoes
the relationship between dramatic text and ideal performance event elaborated within The
Wild Duck. Similar to the manner that the earlier play contains the disruption of its own
textual signification within each potential performance, in Hedda Gabler the modern
dramatic metaphor of the dead child and the view it offers of the void as a replacement
for tragedy emerges with the idea of the destruction of the text. The dead child as a
metatheatrical emblem presents itself and the void which it illuminates as an anti-textual
representation. The dead child emerges from a performance rupture contained within the
text thereby suggesting that each dramatic text contains the performative seeds of its own

signifying death.

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In Hedda Gabler the dead child is evoked through a sort of performative speech
act. The ritualized utterances which interconnect the vision of dead child and the
destroyed manuscript demonstrate the power of spoken language within the play. For in
telling Thea that he has destroyed the manuscript, Lovborg uses the power of the spoken
word against the written word. In doing so, Lovborg explicitly calls attention to two ‘
functions of language. While the spoken word contains the potential for transgression,
the written word is used as a means of domestication and socialization, or, to put it in
terms analogous to those used above, the written word is an essential component of the
oppressive structure of realism.

The domesticating and socializing function of the written word is explicit in the
play in the manner the written word is connected with linear temporality. In marrying
Tesman, Hedda demonstrates her willingness to submit to the written word. She explains
to Judge Brack that she married Tesman because “there’s nothing exactly ridiculous
about him” and “I felt my time was up” (187). As an aspiring academic researching the
history of civilization, Tesman emerges as a particularly revealing means for Hedda to
achieve social respectability. For when Hedda feels her time is up, she refers to an
individualized sense of time that appears very different from Tesman’s historical time.
While Tesman’s historical judgments about civilization require him to analyze time
through archival research, Hedda’s individual time of freedom comes to an end based on
nothing more than a feeling. Hedda finds respectability by marrying someone who
professionalizes the linear progression of time. Respectability, as well as the unfortunate
side effect of boredom, is achieved by connecting herself to the project of written

temporal causality.

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Hedda’s absorption into a social frame, based on a model of temporal causality
seems to be the overarching mechanism suppressing Hedda’s unfeminine impulses.
While Hedda wants to be outside the frame, this is an impulse that is unattainable because
Hedda, like the victim of the Panoptican’s gaze is imprisoned by the values of the society
in which she lives. Although she may threaten to shoot Eliert Lovborg, she will not
follow through on such a threat because she is afraid of the scandal (204). According to
Hedda, it is this fear of scandal which prevents her from having an affair with either
Brack or Lovborg. Yet, both Brack and Lovborg view Hedda’s reluctance as a
manifestation of social norms. Instead of seeing Hedda as she sees herself, that is, as
someone who wants to transgress but is afraid, both men try to conceive of Hedda as a
vehicle of conformity. In their initial interpretations of Hedda’s refusal, they think she
will not have an affair because she loves Tesman. Similarly, Lovborg wants to view
Hedvig as a figure of social conformity who previously wanted to hear his stories of
debauchery because she loves him. In Lovborg’s eyes, Hedda listens because of her
desire to reform the sinner. Hedda needs to correct his perception of their relationship.
She does not love him, she wants to be him. His stories are a way for Hedda to recognize
that escape is possible. Lovborg’s narratives are a way for Hedda to imaginatively
elevate herself to the level of Brack. She can view freedom while not exposing herself to
the horror of public scandal. Lovborg’s confessions to Hedda open up a social space in
which Hedda can transgress while remaining safe from the punishment associated with
transgressing social mores.

As the play opens, Hedda and Tesman have just returned from their honeymoon.

Having returned to a city with no Eilert Lovborg and his stories of freedom, Hedda must

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resort to what has been characterized as her hysterical behavior.45 In her moments of
seemingly irrational aggression such as when she ridicules Aunt Julie’s new hat, and
when she fires one of General Gabler’s pistols over Judge Brack’s head, Hedda disrupts
the logic of the system. In firing her father’s pistol, Hedda demonstrates a frustration
with her choices. She is neither the dutiful wife content with her role in society nor is she
willing to submit to the possibility of a scandalous relationship with Judge Brack. Both
options place Hedda in the passive role. Rather than acting, these choices only provide
the opportunity to react.

Random acts of aggression allow Hedda to become primary actor. She can set her
own agenda, and the agenda that she sets cannot be understood within the intelligible
social realms of propriety or scandal. It seems only natural that Hedda’s aggressive acts
should manifest against both groups since there is not necessarily a difference between
the two. The only difference between Judge Brack and Eilert Lovborg is that Brack
knows how to play the game. He recognizes that there is an invisible eye always
watching. Actually, in many cases, he is the not so invisible eye watching.

This understanding that Brack and Lovborg commit the same acts, but that Brack
is the representative for justice while Lovborg is punished for his sins suggests that
scandal is only scandal if it is carried out openly and defiantly. Scandal only becomes
scandal if secret behavior is revealed. In this context, the appeal of Lovborg’s
confessions of his illicit acts have nothing to do with the acts themselves. The appeal of
the confession is that the confession is the scandal rather than the crime. For in the act of
confessing, Lovborg demonstrates that the regulating eye of social propriety has no

control over him. Hedda’s attraction to Lovborg and his narrative of illicit acts is

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fundamentally interconnected to the scandalous process of language. In The Scandal of
the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages,
Shoshana Felman writes:
Just as seductive discourse exploits the capacity of language to reflect
itself, by means of the self-referentiality of performative verbs, it also
exploits in parallel fashion the self-referentiality of the interlocutor’s
narcissistic desire, and his (or her) capacity to produce in turn a reflexive,
specular illusion: the seducer holds out to women the narcissistic mirror of
their own desire of themselves. (17)
The scandal contained in Lovborg’s seductive confession of transgression works in
almost complete opposition to Felman’s characterization of Don Juan’s performative
speech acts. Listening to Lovborg, Hedda enacts a sort of performative listening act. She
fulfills her desire for the scandal of a verbal confession while at the same time remaining
hidden. When she hears Lovborg’s confession she proffers Levborg “the narcissistic
mirror of [his] own desire of [himself].” Hedda luxuriates in the illicit actualization of
scandalous verbal discourse while Lovborg creates his narcissistic vision of Hedda as the
paragon of society who wants to reform the fallen sinner. As listener, Hedda can see
beyond the normative while keeping Lovborg’s vision of her as normative intact.
Like Hedda’s futile attempts to access Nietzsche’s Dionysian, the opening
moments of the play offer a social structure with no points of access for scandalous
verbal discourse. Both the Dionysian and scandalous verbal discourse are relegated to

historical status, sentimental indicators of a better time. Even the structure of the play

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emphasizes this loss, as Ibsen’s play cannot perform the same scandal as Lovborg’s
confessions to Hedda. Lovborg tells Hedda:
I regarded you as a kind of confessor. Told you things about myself
which no else knew about — then. Those days and nights of drinking and —
Oh, Hedda, what power did you have to make me confess such things?
(203)
The actual narrative of Lovborg’s scandal as an act has been exorcised from the text by
performing the illicit behavior as a gap in the text. Whatever confessing power Hedda
once possessed now seems to be gone. According to Michael Connolly “the hyphen, and
the pauses and changes of motion inherent in them, signal that characters are in the
process of revealing their hidden selves, their, in this case sexual selves” (168). While
sex may have been part of the unutterable sin, sex in and of itself does not encompass
textual rupture. Scandal exceeds textual representation as it can only be represented by a
hyphen. In Lovborg’s acknowledgment of his previous confession, the scandal language
previously possessed becomes explicit. Lovborg’s previous behavior is no longer secret
and society seems to have forgiven him as he has published a book and he is in position
to compete with Tesman for a job at the university. Despite the transgression being
public knowledge, Lovborg does not repeat the already known scandal. He will not re-
utter the scandal, he will not reinstate Hedda as confessor, and, most significantly, he will
not re—inscribe language as disruption.
Instead, scandal will be regulated to the gaps in language, to the hyphens, to the
representations which cannot be contained in the regulating structures of speech.

Language has become a regulating mechanism for Lovborg. His new book on the history

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of civilization is the means by which he is able to recuperate his reputation and become a
functioning member of society. The words on the page which have “created a
tremendous stir” demonstrate Levborg’s new understanding of language. Where he
previously used language to transgress the mores of society through private confession,
he now reaffirrns these norms by using language to enter into a public discourse. While
he may be a more creative and intelligent scholar than Tesman, the difference between
the two men is one of degree and not of type. Both men are historians who use language
to construct narratives of the past. The loss of the transgressive potential and the loss of
Levborg as Hedda’s confidant become synonymous as Lovborg expresses a desire to
share his work with Tesman. Lovborg has already written the sequel to his recently
published book. According to Lovborg, “this is my real book. The one in which I have
spoken with my own voice” (197). The first book is only the primer to get Lovborg the
legitimacy he needs to announce his real message to the world. He tells Tesman that he
wants “to defeat you in the eyes of the world” (199).

Whereas Lovborg’s first book relates the history of civilization up to the present,
the sequel is about the future. Lovborg casts himself as the ultimate rebel whose role is
to transform society, or at least show society its shortcomings. His new book on the
future is broken up into two parts: the first part, “deals with the forces that will shape our
civilization,” and the second part, “indicates the direction in which that civilization may
develop” (197). He seems to believe that this new book allows him to regain his role as
scandal creator, but in the process of writing, scandal will be directed in a more fruitful
direction. The scandal of the new book will be the manner in which it opens new

possibilities for language.

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Lovborg sees his future speculations as the antithesis of Tesman’s. Like
Lovborg’s own first book which he writes in a voice not his own, Tesman’s work fails to
take present society into account and in the process, present society becomes the
absolute. Tesman writes with the hope of furthering his position in the present by
receiving an appointment for an academic post. Tesman’s writing is intimately
connected with his marriage to Hedda. His research into the past is designed to give him
the means of establishing himself in the present. Through writing about history, he will
develop a reputation and be able to start a family. Writing about history gives Tesman
the hope of being absorbed within the status quo of the present.

In contrast, while Lovborg’s initial book puts him in a position to compete with
Tesman for the university appointment, Lovborg announces that he has no intention to
compete for such an appointment. Unlike Tesman, Levborg has no interest in using
language to further his present position. Instead, the present becomes a means for
historicization just like the past. In transforming the object of academic language from
the past to the present, the present opens itself to critique. Lovborg’s focus on the future
creates a satisfying outlet for language and his own voice. He can use his new text to
attack present society by using language in a way condoned by society.

While Lovborg sees this work as the antithesis of Tesman, as far as Hedda is
concerned they have become the same man. In writing history, Lovborg has forged a
compromise with society. Lovborg may characterize the book on the future as a vocal
utterance in an effort to envision himself as the rebel he used to be, but both men embrace
the domesticating function of language. The difference between them is a matter of

focus. Tesman may focus on the past and Lovborg the future but both men wish to

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illuminate the processes of civilization. Whereas Lovborg’s previous reliance on
confession presented the potential for language to emerge as an antithesis to the
functioning of society, his new speculation on the future of society allies him with society
as a concept. It is this idea of Lovborg, a Lovborg who uses language as an aid to
civilization and as a means of understanding civilization instead of as a means of
disrupting society which dismays Hedda.

Hedda looks for a means to return to the freedom of the scandal. Since her
primary scandal maker is incapable of producing scandal through language, Hedda must
find a means to experience the gap in language, the hyphen where Lovborg has regulated
scandal. In the process of looking for the freedom of scandal, Hedda takes on language
as a regulating mechanism. By attacking language directly, Hedda hopes to find the gap
in language, in representation, where scandal exists. Hedda does this by separating
Lovborg from his book and, together, Thea, Lovborg, and Hedda demonstrate that
Lovborg could not have written the book in his own voice. Reformed by Thea, Lovborg
wants to believe in an interconnective system in which his own voice, the written text,
and history all combine in an effort to transform society to the better. Voice and text
become the same thing.

The ritual utterance in which text is metaphorized as dead child demonstrates that
once voice is used to its optimal potential, the voice is the antithesis of the written word.
However, the scandal of the voice is not the same as Hedda’s nostalgic reminiscences.
Rather than a pocket of confession - a pocket of resistance to the written word of
historical socialization - the dead child vocalized offers a means to oppose the written

word, destroy its hold, and demonstrate the shortcomings of written signification. In such

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a context, the actual burning of the manuscript is anti-climatic. Once Thea, Lovborg, and
Hedda ritualize the performative utterance which transforms hidden manuscript to dead
child, the signifying power of the written word is overcome. Lovborg has been separated
from the text and if his future does not enact the rebirth of the Dionysian in the modern
world, at least it opposes the vision of Lovborg as Socratic man.

At least it opposes the vision of Lovborg as Socratic man for a time. The rupture
of signification and the triumph of transforming the written text into a dead child is only
temporary. As Templeton suggests, Thea will not let the book Lovborg wrote in his own
voice remain a dead child: “The hyper-motherly secretary miraculously gives birth to a
new child out of her pockets as she produces Lovborg’s notes” (227). Unlike Nietzsche
who turns away from the void of the dead child to embrace the idea of a living child
called tragedy, Hedda is willing to continue staring into the void but the child will not
stay dead for her. She is forced to watch the beginning moments of its resurrection, as
Thea and Tesman begin the reconstruction of the text. History will not stay fragmented.
The logic of a temporal continuum will be extended as the written text of the future is
reborn.

The miraculous resurrection of the text from dead child that will not stay dead,
offers a counterpoint to the impossibly surviving Oedipus and Jack Worthing. Yet,
instead of embracing the child that is in the process of being resurrected, Hedda raises the
stakes in her attempts to destabilize the Oedipal structure by moving from the book as
emblem of a dead child to a stage representation of a dead child. Hedda’s suicide
attempts to transcend the metaphorization of a metatheatrical metaphor. Because the

book as dead baby will not stay dead, Hedda attempts to come closer to the void by

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replacing the metaphorized text as dead baby with a dead baby. In response to the book
of the future that is being reassembled before her eyes a pregnant Hedda will kill the baby
of the future by taking her own life.

However, the historical text is too potent a means of signification. The suicide of
the pregnant Hedda is relegated to an off-stage occurrence and the actual pregnancy is
never overtly confirmed in the play. Similar to attempts to destroy the text by uttering its
destruction and physically burning Levborg’s book, it seems likely that Hedda’s suicide
only has the power to halt the reassembly of the text temporarily. The play ends with the
inevitability of the written text as historical event overcoming the performative utterance
and the performance event. While Hedda Gabler ends with the temporal determinism of
history marginalizing the rupture intrinsic in the emblem of the dead baby, Ibsen’s play is
not the last word. In Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes, the imaginary dead baby becomes a

means of disrupting the temporal causality of history.

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Chapter Three:

A Dead Baby and the Sound of Traumatic Fantasy in Ashes to Ashes

The logic of the dead child as theatrical sign leads from the late nineteenth-century
metaphor of a metaphor evoked by Hedda Gabler to the traumatic narrative Rebbeca
relates to Devlin in Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes (1996). Pinter’s play is separated in
time from Ibsen’s by over a century, but it follows Ibsen as it moves a step closer to a
staged representation of the dead baby. By metaphorizing Levborg’s book as a dead
child, Hedda is able to glimpse the rupture of dramatic signification, but such a glimpse is
only temporary.

Hedda’s view of the rupture is made possible because she fastens an artificial
facade on the book. Imagining the book as something that it is not allows I-ledda access
to the void. In the play, the process of metaphor is analogous to the emergence of the
dead child. Overlaying the metaphor of the dead child on the book becomes the means of
accessing the rupture. Metaphorization is merely a form of fantasy.46 In his letter to
Wilhelm Fliess from May 25, 1897; Freud included a description of fantasy as part of
Draft M:

Phantasies are constructed by a process of amalgamation and distortion
analogous to the decomposition of a chemical body which is compounded
with another one. For the first sort of distortion consists of a falsification
of memory by a process of fragmentation in which chronological relations
in particular are neglected. (Chronological corrections seem precisely to

depend on the activity of the system of conciousness.) A fragment of the

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visual scene is then joined up with a fragment of the auditory one and
made into the phantasy, while the fragment left over is linked up with
something else. In this way it is made impossible to trace an earlier
connection. (252)
In a very Freudian manner, the ritualized utterance of Thea, Lovborg and Hedda merges
with Lavborg’s text to combine the auditory and the visual into fantasy. Fantasy, because
the book has not been lost or destroyed but is simply hidden in Hedda’s desk. The very
essence of this fantasy is to enact “a fragmentation in which chronological relations in
particular are neglected.” The fantasy of destroying the book is literally a fantasy of
destroying the causal connections that the book forges between present and future.

The victory of fantasy metaphorized in the dead child seems a temporary victory,
as before long, Thea and Tesman work toward reconstructing the metaphorized child, and
suturing the dramatic gap. Yet, the resurrection of the metaphorized dead child equates
with Hedda’s unwillingness to imagine the dead child as fantasy. It is not enough to
acknowledge the dead child imaginatively, the manuscript must be ritually burned.
Connecting the fantasy to a material act allows the suturing of the void. While Hedda’s
material performing of the ritual utterance of the dead child transforms fantasy to
materiality, this very lapsing into materiality sutures the performative rupture. Hedda has
complete control over the dead child of fantasy, but she must submit to the independent
veracity of the material representation. Just as the metaphor can be burned, it can be
resurrected through an act which gives Hedda no control.

In Ashes to Ashes, the metaphorized child is reconfigured, as the performative

utterance is divorced from any material link. Where Nietzsche momentarily glimpsed the

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dramatic rupture evoked by the dead child, and where Hedda, entranced by the lure of
materiality, was forced to turn away by the attempts of others to resurrect the child,
Rebecca is able to maintain her focus on the rupture. Like Tesman and Thea in Hedda
Gabler, Devlin serves as a suturing force in Ashes to Ashes. His goal is to pull Rebecca
away from the gap by replacing indeterminacy with historical and material context. This
process can be understood as suturing in that it tries to thread connections between
Rebecca’s dangling signifiers, and material and historical signifieds. Devlin works to
reestablish a cause and effect narrative, thereby denying the possibility of indeterminacy.
Yet where Tesman and Thea appear to succeed in covering over the rupture, Devlin fails.
Much in the way that the primary conflict in an Ibsen play or Freudian
psychoanalysis is resolved by understanding the impact of history or of memory on the
present, the character of Devlin in Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes struggles to understand
how Rebecca’s narrative, seemingly involving her past, relates to his present. The play
opens with a seated Rebecca apparently answering Devlin’s questions about her personal
history with an abusive former lover. However, rather than provide any answers about
the present and about his relationship with Rebecca, the questions merely whet Devlin’s
desire for knowledge that can never be satiated:
Devlin: You understand why I’m asking you these questions. Don’t you?
Put yourself in my place. I’m compelled to ask you questions. There are
so many things I don’t know. I know nothing . . . about any of this.
Nothing. I’m in the dark. I need light. Or do you think my questions are

illegitimate? (1 l)

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In the process of Rebecca’s maintaining contact with the rupture evoked by the narrative
of the baby, Pinter’s drama represents as a decontextualized permanent rupture the fairly
ambiguous rupture enacted in Hedda Gabler and suggested by Nietzsche. Devlin’s
frustration evokes an incapacity to understand the very concept of fantasy. According to
Freud, through the fragmentation of fantasy “it is made impossible to trace an earlier
connection.” Yet, this connection is precisely what Devlin strives for.

The struggle of Ashes to Ashes can be characterized by Devlin’s effort to contain
Rebecca’s fantasy in an Oedipal narrative. This proves to be no easy task. In an Oedipal
frame, an utterance like Rebecca’s that represents itself as a memory of the past, should
be able to be incorporated into the present, as a way to transform it. Rebecca’s fantasy
opposes an Oedipal narrative. Her utterance comes to resemble trauma in both content
and form. No matter how many times Rebecca narrates violent acts, repetition never
leads to mastery. Repetition never gives Devlin an understanding of the man in
Rebecca’s vision. Whereas Oedipus presents the scarred body for view, in service of the
narrative causality of a healed social body, the violence of Rebecca’s utterance offers no
such linear binding.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud defines as traumatic, “any excitations
from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield” (3 3).
Ashes to Ashes presents the Oedipal narrative as a protective shield. Devlin tries to verify
the validity of the Oedipal narrative by placing Rebecca’s utterance in a historical
contextual frame of reference. Rebecca’s narrative is traumatic to Devlin and to the

structure of the play, because it does not make Oedipal sense.

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Despite Devlin’s belief in Oedipal narrative, his efforts to incorporate Rebecca’s
utterances into a chronological structure fail. Devlin embraces repetition as a means to
gain control over the traumatic utterance. Yet, the utterance proves itself to be traumatic,
it proves itself fantasy precisely in the manner that the utterance resists Devlin’s efforts at
mastery. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Cathy Caruth writes
that “[w]hat causes, trauma, then, is a shock that appears to work very much like bodily
threat but is in fact a break in the mind’s experience of time” (61).47

Devlin believes that if he can just ask the right questions, the relationship between
Rebecca and the man will become comprehensible. If he can just ask the right questions,
he will be able to contextualize the historical relationship between Rebecca and the man.
For Devlin not knowing anything “about any of this” equates to not knowing the “when”
of Rebecca’s narrative. Understanding the when is tantamount to understanding how the
relationship between Rebecca and the man relates to him.

Critics of the play tend to answer Devlin’s questioning of his own legitimacy by
suggesting that his questions are indeed illegitimate. Devlin’s illegitimacy is established
by equating his project for knowledge with the systematic oppression and abuse of
Rebecca. In “’You Brought it Upon Yourself : Subjectivity and Culpability in Ashes to
Ashes,” Jessica Prinz writes that “It becomes very clear that Devlin’s questioning of
Rebecca is another form of violence in the play” (101). Similarly, in “Shaping
Ambiguity: The Chemistry Between Silence, Ghosting, and Framing Devices within a
Production of Harold Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes,” Christy Stanlake equates Devlin with

“outsider oppression” (144).

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Clearly, it is tempting to read Devlin’s physical violence toward Rebecca as a
continuation of the Opening line of the play in which Rebecca is seemingly answering a
question of Devlin’s by describing a past relationship of physical violence. Numerous
critics have suggested that, at the end of the play, Devlin attempts to enact the role of the
man in Rebecca’s memory. By committing the same acts as the man, Devlin will realize
Rebecca’s memory. The event that has been relegated into the past, the traumatic
utterance, will become an act performed in the present. Yet, is Devlin’s questioning of
Rebecca in general, and his questioning of Rebecca about her relationship with the man
of her memory in particular, only “violent,” and only an act of “Oppression,” to use the
language of Prinz and Stanlake, if it is looked from Devlin’s culminating act of putting
his hand around Rebecca’s throat? If Devlin’s interrogation of Rebecca performs an act
of violence in and of itself, then we must indict Prinz and Stanlake as oppressors and
perpetuators of violence along with Devlin.

Devlin’s questioning of Rebecca is violent in that it is an effort to exert control
and contextualize Rebecca’s memory. Devlin wants to take control of the memory in
order to make it historically and personally contextualizable. By connecting the memory
to specifics, including time and place, Devlin tries to commit the violent act Of
transforming something that belongs exclusively to Rebecca into something that belongs
to him. Devlin wants to gain possession by transforming the inaccessible utterance into
the comprehensible realm that contains explicit context. He will own the memory by
connecting it to other events within his realm of experience.

Understanding Devlin‘s questions as violent, illuminates Prinz and Stanlake’s

project as analogous to Devlin’s. At the same time these critics demonstrate a reluctance

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to support Devlin’s project of historical appropriation on political grounds of empathy for
Rebecca and victimization in general, the same critics work to complete the project. 48
For Prinz, “[c]learly, the first subject-position that Rebecca occupies is as the lover of a
Nazi” (99). Connecting Rebecca’s lover to a specific point in history and a specific
region of the world Offers a fairly specific answer to the ambiguous position of the lover
that Devlin is unable to resolve. Prinz complicates this by acknowledging that Rebecca
could not even have been born during World War 11 because the play is set “now,” the
play first was performed in 1996, and Rebecca is described as being in her 40’s. This
temporal incongruity leads to Prinz’s concession: “Of course, the ambiguous nature of
Pinter’s play suggests that he is talking about all kinds of atrocities, not just the
Holocaust” (100). Despite this acknowledgement, the Holocaust still remains the
privileged temporal marker in Prinz’s analysis. Rather than destabilizing the specific
atrocity of the Holocaust to the more general plethora of possible atrocities, the specific
Holocaust remains an identificatory marker of contextual reference. Rebecca’s memory
has been given a historical marker despite the lack of any specific reference to World
War II anywhere in the play.

Reflecting upon playing the role of Rebecca, Stanlake describes a process by
which this Devlinization of the play is taken to further extremes. According to Stanlake,
one of the efforts of her production was to “prepare the audience to grasp the
production’s interpretation” (148).49 This effort at guiding interpretation included
conscious manipulation of audience expectations before they enter the theatre through
photographs and publicity materials and holding the production at Hillel, The Ohio State

University’s Jewish student center. In this way, the production attempted to transform

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the audience into a crowd of Devlins before they even entered the theatre. From
Rebecca’s opening utterance relating how the man clenched his fist, the audience had
been trained exactly where and when to historicize the memory. 50 Despite the content of
her fantasy, since she cannot be a World War II survivor, Rebecca is neither witness nor
victim. Underlying the very attempt to connect Rebecca’s utterance to a historical
atrocity involves the ignoring of the impossibility and the fragmentary nature of her
utterance.

Ashes to Ashes cannot be historicized in any fashion. It might evoke the
Holocaust but this is a nonsensical connection. The play refuses to provide any answers.
As Pinter asserted in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

Ashes to Ashes, on the other hand, seems to me to be taking place under
water. A drowning woman, her hand reaching up through the waves,
dropping down out of sight, reaching for others, but finding nobody there,
either above or under the water, finding only shadows, reflections,
floating; the woman, a lost figure in a drowning landscape, a woman
unable to escape the doom that seemed to belong only to others.
Characterizing Ashes to Ashes as a Holocaust play is tantamount to replacing the
insubstantiality of Pinter’s waves, shadows, and reflections with solid ground underneath
Rebecca’s feet. The temporal setting of the play as occurring “now” is a small indicator
Of the importance of these waves. The play must be conceptualized as fluid. The “now”
of the setting is the only historical context which the play provides. This “now” gives the
play a current social relevance whenever the play is performed. Through its temporal

setting, the play demonstrates its social significance as the same in 2006 as in 1996.

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The dialogue between Devlin and Rebecca is always occurring now, but the
memory Rebecca talks about can never be contextualized. To try to contextualize as
Devlin does and as critics who evoke the Holocaust do is to commit violence, while to
explore Rebecca’s memory devoid of such context is to diffuse Devlin’s questioning.
Like critics taking up Gregers’s efforts to pin down the meaning of the wild duck as
characterized in Chapter One, the problem here is that critics are better oppressors than
Devlin. Where Devlin only experiences failure in his attempt to contextualize Rebecca,
critics succeed. In their efforts to validate the significance of her memory, they transform
her utterance beyond recognition.

While critics and audience members may commit the violence of historical
context against Rebecca, they can hardly be blamed for such a reaction as to some extent
it is encouraged by the play. In “The Unheimlich Maneuver: Ashes to Ashes and the
Structure of Repression,” Craig N. Owens recognizes this compulsion toward historical
contextualization as a facet of the play’s dramatic affect and an audience’s desire to
connect the play to what they know about the world and dramatic narrative:

Like Devlin, we become invested in understanding Rebecca’s personal
history, in the hope that the events of her past will shed light on the
present situation. In other words, in identifying with a character who
appears to be the protagonist, we become the usual playgoers and the
usual critics making sense of the dramatic surface by trying to piece
together an exposition that will explain the reality beneath that surface.

(80)

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Owens goes on to suggest that Ashes to Ashes evokes the expectations of a surface / depth
model to subvert the expectations associated with such a model. In his evocation Of
“usual,” Owens places Ashes to Ashes within an established dramatic tradition. Critics
and playgoers engage in the project of Devlin because the structure of the play to some
extent encourages them to do so.

This project embraces the positive correlation between dramatic realism and
psychoanalysis that has been suggested by Elin Diamond. In Unmaking Mimesis,
Diamond asserts that

Realism and psychoanalysis celebrate precisely what melodrama and

farce, and uterine-theory physicians had ignored; motivation arising from

the complications Of an ‘individual’ shaped by inherent traits, social

contexts, and forgotten traumas. (15)
Ashes to Ashes encourages the audience and critics to contextualize it, to treat it as a
realist endeavor by means of the question and answer format that provides the structure
for the play. The opening moment of the play presents Devlin as an analyst in search of a
secret that will demonstrate his mastery and heal his patient. Realist convention suggests
that this will form the conflict of the play. Devlin must bring the secret to light either to
heal Rebecca or the social body itself. The setting of the play also encourages the
audience to read the drama in the long tradition of a surface / depth model. The
arrnchairs of a ground floor room evoke the archetypal living rooms of Ibsen and the
problem play where memories of the past always come back to influence the present.

In a similar vein, the manner by which the play evokes the efforts of Devlin and

the audience to colonize Rebecca’s memory can be read as a metaphor for the

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relationship between the text and the act of performance. One of the distinctive features
of Pinter’s play is the lack of stage directions. After the Opening stage direction of
“Devlin standing with drink. Rebecca sitting” there are only the few isolated stage
directions of “Rebecca smiling” (I 1), and instructions for Rebecca to stare and look at
Devlin (55), until the climatic act of Devlin attempting to reenact Rebecca’s memory by
putting his hand around her throat.5 I By means of the scarcity of direction the dialogue is
to large degree decontextualized as the spatial relationship between the bodies, and the
tone of speech is inaccessible within the text. A performance of the play works to
inscribe the utterances of Devlin and Rebecca within space, time, and tone. Or, to put it
in terms of Devlin’s efforts to understand Rebecca’s memories, a performance works to
realize the dramatic text.

Devlin’s efforts at violence cannot be conceptualized as an isolated exterior
violence. Instead, this desire perpetuates as a function of the play, through acts of
interpretation, institutionalized dramatic structures, and the very act of performance.
Interpretation, dramatic structure, and performance all allude to a unitary form and
content that is rigid, stable, and intelligible. This effort at contextualization involves the
attempt to grasp the knowledge of Rebecca’s traumatic address while refusing to
understand the core performative nature of the utterance. The compulsion to rip the
content of her address away from the confusion of her utterance is a fundamental
compulsion that is encouraged by the structure of the play itself.

While this compulsion to deform Rebecca’s utterance by knowing it is part of the
drama’s structure, the structure of the play also places Rebecca in a role of dominance

through the very form of her utterance. The power of Rebecca’s speech is interconnected

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with the very nature Of her traumatic utterance. In her analysis of Marguerite Duras and
Alain Resnais’s film Hiroshima mon amour, Caruth asserts:
What we see and hear in Hiroshima mon amour; resonates beyond what
we can know and understand; but it is in the event of this incomprehension
and in our departure from sense and understanding that our own
witnessing may indeed begin to take place. (56)
For Caruth, trauma is not just an abnormal disruption of an individual or a historical
narrative but trauma to some extent provides an opportunity for communicating the sheer
incomprehensibility of events. Knowing the event is to some extent to lose its essence
and magnitude. Paradoxically, to understand the event is to not understand its true power
and essence, while to depart from sense and understanding is, in some sense, to really
know the impact of the event.

The event of incomprehension is precisely what is uttered by Rebecca. While
seemingly in a position of subservience in everything from her bodily position - Rebecca
is always seated while Devlin stands - to her passive role of answering the questions that
are asked of her, to her narratives of victimization; these modes of subservience actually
establish Rebecca’s dominance. Every effort Devlin makes to contextualize Rebecca’s
memory, and by this contextualization inscribe his own power, fails. In trying to know
the events that Rebecca owns by decontextualization, Devlin demonstrates his own
outsider status. He continues to emphasize the impossibility of his own understanding
and his need to understand:

Devlin: I want a concrete image Of him, you see . . . an image I can carry

about with me. I mean, all you can talk of are his hands, one hand over

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your face, the other on the back of your neck, then the first one on your

throat. There must be more to him than hands. What about eyes? Did he

have any eyes? (13)
In Devlin’s elaboration of his own desire he enacts the worst stereotypical elements of
Freudian psychoanalysis. Similar to Freud’s complaint that when Dora broke off her
analysis it “[d]eprived me of satisfaction,” Devlin characterizes his questions about the
man as more voyeuristic than therapeutic (112). The questions are revealed as being
about what Devlin needs. He needs to be able to form something visual from Rebecca’s
answers and this vision is a reconstruction. In a striking evocation of Tesman and Thea’s
attempt to reconstruct Lovborg’s dead baby / book from its constituent parts and thereby
suture the void in the final scene of Hedda Gabler, Devlin needs to escape the void he is
seemingly confronted with but cannot access by putting the man back together, when he
has been given nothing more than a pair of hands to work with.

In her analysis of Hiroshima mon amour, Caruth explicitly characterizes vision,
history and the composite body as opposed to dismemberment, sightlessness and trauma.
In another similarity between Pinter’s play and Caruth’s interpretation of Duras and
Resnais’s text, Caruth emphasizes the role of the hands in the trauma experienced by the
woman in the film:

Her refusal is thus carried out in the body’s fragmentation, in the
separation of her hands from the rest of her corporeal self and in the
communion with her lover’s death through the sucking of her own blood.

It is thus utterly deprived of sight and understanding, and only as a

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fragment, that the body can become, for the woman, the faithful
monument to a death. (31)
For both Caruth and Devlin dismembered hands emblematize the process of
decontextualization. Rather than an illumination Of materiality, the hands demonstrate
the failure Of materiality. The hands serve as an indicator of fragmentation overcoming
all efforts Of imaginative wholeness.

At this point in her analysis, Caruth focuses on the way the woman describes her
own trauma, instead of on the manner the film visually represents the trauma through the
use of analepsis. Caruth must retreat from the temporal structure of Duras and Resnais’s
film to the perspective of a character, in effect offering a decontextualization of the
woman’s utterance as a means of advancing her conception of trauma. In her own way, in
the very act of elaborating the power of the traumatic, Caruth engages in her own project
of Devlinization.

Caruth begins her analysis of Hiroshima Mon Amour focusing on the visual
image, focusing on the “two alternating shots we do not fully comprehend” (25). Caruth
focuses on the narrative as a film. The form of representation takes opening stage in her
analysis over the narrative content. Caruth emphasizes the opening shots of the film as a
representation of the escape from full comprehension. In so doing, she tries to
demonstrate how the opening shots fiilly represent a Freudian conception of trauma. The
film begins with the literal representation of the unrepresentable. The film uses its
medium to demonstrate the essence of trauma to its audience by presenting to its

audience something that, at least for a moment, escapes comprehension.

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In contrast to Caruth’s introduction into the film which offers a reading of the
visuality of the film, in her analysis of the origins of the woman’s trauma Caruth shifts
from a mimesis of performance to a textual mimesis. The analysis shifts from the way
the film represents to the narrative provided by the woman. The character of the woman
offers a narrative of sightlessness, as sightlessness and fragmentation are represented in
the dialogue. However, the film offers a more complex vision of trauma then that
provided by the character. Through the use of analepsis, the film Offers a vision of
trauma. In essence, the film engages with trauma differently then the literal manner with
which Caruth suggests in her opening analysis. As such, Caruth retreats from the visual,
from engaging with the film as film, and decontextualizes the utterance of the woman
apart from the visual images provided by the film.

In the effort to read the dialogue of the woman independent of the images of the
film, the woman’s utterance is ripped out of the context of the visual representation the
film provides. The woman becomes a Rebecca in that the only access to her trauma is
through the utterance. In addition to the manner with which such a shift enacts the very
struggle between Rebecca and Devlin in the formation of a trauma theory, the retreat to
the character’s psychology demonstrates a desire to read the film as possessing the very
structure of Ashes to Ashes. Both Caruth’s theoretical retreat and Pinter’s play locate a
power within trauma that is explicitly contained in the traumatic utterance. The traumatic
utterance demonstrates the potential for words to transcend an exclusively
representational function. The utterance fragments the very body which it Opens to

discourse.

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Faced with the fragmentary hands of the man, a dismembered vision that evokes
the essence of trauma, Devlin’s relationship to Rebecca’s trauma and the relationship
between trauma and historical contextualization in Pinter’s play emerges. While Rebecca
owns the memory, and by owning it exists in a sort of traumatic void, Devlin exists in a
liminal space that is neither traumatic nor historical. Or, at least, his relationship to the
memory neither places him permanently on the solid ground of historical
contextualization, nor the waves of trauma. Devlin suggests as much when he tells
Rebecca that “I’m in the dark. I need light.” While the act of questioning tends to be
viewed as an act of empowerment, so many of Devlin’s questions reveal his
insufficiency. The compulsion to satiate his own desire dominates his questions

,9 6‘

throughout the play. In addition to the frequency of the words “want, need,” and
“compelled,” the failure of the questions to reach a satisfying resolution characterizes
Rebecca’s decontextualized fantasy as an empowered utterance through her sheer ability
to withhold what Devlin needs.

In this sense, Devlin’s relationship to Rebecca’s traumatic utterance is not very
different from the position maintained by Rebecca. Like Rebecca, Devlin faces a
decontextualized event. Needing to establish the verifiable temporal context of the event
to satiate his own desire, Devlin is seduced by the traumatic utterance. Nowhere is this
more apparent than in the Opening moments of the play during Rebecca’s initial
description of the man putting his hand around her throat:

Rebecca: Well . . . for example . . . he would stand over me and clench his

fist. And then he’d put his other hand on my neck and grip it and bring

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my head towards him. His fist . . . grazed my mouth. And he’d say, ‘Kiss
my fist.’

Devlin: And did you?

Rebecca: Oh yes. I kissed his fist. The knuckles. And then he’d open his
hand and give me the palm of his hand . . . to kiss . . . which I kissed.
Pause

And then I would speak.

Devlin: What did you say? You said what? What did you say?

Pause.

Rebecca: I said, ‘Put your hand round my throat.’ I murmured it through
his hand, as I was kissing it, but he heard my voice, he heard it through his
hand, he felt my voice in his hand, he heard it there.

Silence.

Devlin: And did he? Did he put his hand round your throat?

Rebecca: Oh yes. He did. He did. And he held it there, very gently, very
gently, so gently. He adored me, you see.

Devlin: He adored you?

Pause.

What do you mean he adored you? What do you mean?

Pause.

Are you saying he put no pressure on your throat? Is that what you’re
saying?

Rebecca: No.

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Devlin: What then? What are you saying? (3-5)
Rebecca’s dominance in the question and answer session is suggested from the Opening
moment of the play. As the play begins, Rebecca has the first line, and this first line
leads to Devlin’s first question. Devlin’s question “And did you?” forms as a result of
Rebecca’s narrative of the man asking her to kiss his fist. Devlin’s initial questions
emerge as a result of Rebecca’s utterances until she tells him that the man put pressure on
her throat causing her head to go back (7).

At this point, Devlin’s questions gain some measure of independence from
Rebecca’s lead. Led by his own desire, his own fantasy over the strict content of her
utterance, Devlin wants tO know what her body was doing when her head “started to go
back:”

Devlin: And your body? Where did your body go?

Rebecca: My body went back, slowly but truly.

Devlin: SO your legs were opening?

Rebecca: Yes.

Pause.

Devlin: Your legs were opening?

Rebecca: Yes.

Silence. (7)
In addition to the manner with which Devlin takes his questions explicitly from the
content of Rebecca’s utterances, Devlin’s desire manifests from the opening of the play
through the repetition of his questions. With the exception of Devlin’s Opening question,

all of his questions are repeated two or three times before Rebecca answers them. As

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Devlin takes the initiative by extending his questions beyond Rebecca’s utterance to
question Rebecca about the movement of her body, this repetition takes a more
pronounced form. Rather than asking a question multiple times before Rebecca can
answer it, here, Devlin luxuriates in the answer she gives. He asks a question about
Rebecca’s legs opening which Rebecca answers but rather than moving on to another
question, he asks the same question again, thereby giving himself the maximum amount
of time to focus on the utterance of Rebecca’s body.

Devlin explicitly connects his questions and his attempt to understand the
traumatic memory to his voyeuristic desire. Almost an acknowledgement of the position
of weakness and dependence his lack of knowledge and his desire connotes, Devlin tries
to ignore the evidence of the makeshift therapy session by equating his questioning with
empowerment. Immediately following this repetition of Rebecca’s legs opening, Devlin
tries to assert some illusion of dominance over Rebecca by rejecting the manner in which
her traumatic narrative has absorbed him. Devlin suggests that she is the captivated one:

Devlin: Do you feel you’re being hypnotized?
Rebbeca: When?

Devlin: Now.

Rebecca: No.

Devlin: Really?

Rebecca: NO.

Devlin: Why not?

Rebecca: Who by?

Devlin: By me.

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Rebecca: You?

Devlin: What do you think?

Rebecca: I think you’re a fuckpig. (7-9)
Fantasy proves to be contagious as Devlin is led by the implications of Rebecca’s
answers to his imaginative constructions of erotics and power. It is tempting to read
Devlin’s question of “[d]o you feel you’re being hypnotized” as “[d]o you feel you’re
being hypnotized the same way I feel I’m being hypnotized?” Devlin’s question both
serves as an attempt to demonstrate he is empowered and Rebecca is passive, and a plea
or a hope that Rebecca is as enthralled by his questions as he is by her answers.

Even previous to her denouncing Devlin as a fuckpig, Devlin’s desire for Rebecca
to confirm his dominance is demonstrated as illusory in his difficulty in explaining to
Rebecca his frame of reference. Devlin takes for granted that he is the one asking the
questions and that “now” is the when the question are being asked. However, for
Rebecca, the man and the ambiguous setting of her traumatic memory provide as clear a
frame of reference as the “now” of the telling. In essence, Rebecca demonstrates her
control over Devlin by emphasizing his irrelevance. Like Devlin, she is captivated (and
perhaps hypnotized) by her own fantasy and not by his questioning in the here and the
now.

The dominance of Rebecca’s traumatic fantasy, and Devlin’s vain attempts to
control it make critical characterizations of Devlin so intriguing. In “Harold Pinter’s
Ashes to Ashes: Rebecca and Devlin as Albert Speer,” Katherine H. Burkman suggests
that “[a]s Devlin becomes increasingly like the fascist lover Rebecca recalls, she, despite

her final denial of what she considers her crime, has faced and faced down the monsters

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who had held her in thrall” (93). Similarly, in “History as a Single Act; Pinter’s Ashes to
Ashes,” Francis Gillen analyzes the culminating act of Devlin putting his hands around
Rebecca’s throat as the ultimate act of identification: “And Devlin too, is both himself
and the killer of children. Making a fist, he demands she kiss it. No longer simply
victim, though, Rebecca refuses” (95). Both Burkman and Gillen suggest a
transformation in power relations as the play progresses. Devlin’s personifying of the
man within the memory allows Rebecca to achieve an empowerment within the present
that she is unable to achieve in her traumatic utterance.

Burkman and Gillen’s attempt to demonstrate an empowered Rebecca inscribes a
victimized Rebecca. In order to read the end Of the play as a liberating assertion of
power, Rebecca must be understood as beginning the play under the domination of
Devlin. In addition to reversing the initial conception the play presents of Devlin as a
man unable to satisfy his desires, both readings of the play equate a freeing of Rebecca
with the freeing of the traumatic utterance. The utterance is freed from the
decontextualized utterance of Rebecca’s memory and placed in the now by means Of
equating Devlin with the man. Analogizing Devlin to the man supplants fantasy with
reality, and such an identificatory practice also constructs the inaccessible “when” of
Rebecca’s vision within the intelligible “now.” Such an identification confuses Devlin’s
desire with his action. Devlin wants to know the man, he wants to be the man, he wants
to hypnotize Rebecca, but from the opening moment of the play he is caught in a
frustrated loop in which his desire can never be satiated. Rather than conceptualizing
Devlin as the actualization of the imposing figure from her memory, Rebecca perceives

Devlin, when her attention can be drawn to the now, as nothing more than a fuckpi g.

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Interpretations that equate Devlin with the man from the memory dismantle
Rebecca’s power based on fantasy by giving in to Devlin’s desire. Rebecca’s power is
intimately connected with the understanding that as fantasy, the origin of the traumatic
utterance is inaccessible. Attempts to “realize” the fantasy merely perpetuate the essence
of fantasy in a different form. The very nature of the traumatic utterance derives from the
manner in which fantasy whets a desire in Devlin that can never be satisfied, thereby
establishing a power dynamic that places Devlin as subservient. Ironically, it is the
traumatic narrative of the man who holds Rebecca in thrall that allows her to hold Devlin
in thrall.

Rebecca uses Devlin’s desire to pull a sort of metonymic bait and switch. The
first third of the play deals exclusively with the questions and answers regarding the man,
which never seem to get Devlin any closer to understanding either the man or Rebecca.
In the process of describing him, Rebecca offers a description which destabilizes the
entire format of their question and answer session:

Rebecca: He did work for a travel agency. He was a guide. He used to
go to the local railway station and walk down the platform and tear all the
babies from the arms of their screaming mothers. (27)
At this moment, Rebecca’s utterance shifts from the decontextualized personal memory
Of her relationship with the man to the large cultural resonance of the man’s actions, as
the screaming mothers become part of the narrative. The image of babies being ripped
from their mother’s arms disrupts the personal narrative and the decontextualized

narrative of Rebecca and the man.

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The image of the babies functions as a sort of rupture. Up to this point, Devlin
has been working to reassemble the memory of the man, to transform the hands into a
comprehensible whole, and to connect knowledge to the idea of vision by embracing light
over darkness. Rebecca’s traumatic utterance has served the dual purpose of initiating
Devlin’s desire and frustrating its satisfaction, keeping him in a sort of limbo. The
metonymic turn from the man to the larger social actions of the man’s ripping the babies
from their mothers distances Devlin from the very man he is trying so unsuccessfully to
reassemble. In turning from the man to this particular action, Rebecca’s narrative shifts
from a fantasy of personal abuse to larger cultural catastrophe. In the process, she ceases
to narrate about the man in any substantive fashion for the rest of the play.

The struggle between Rebecca and Devlin shifts from conflicts over the
possession of the memory of the man and over whether the memory is a traumatic or
historical utterance into a conflict over whether the essence of the memory is man or
baby. SO long as Rebecca’s utterance takes the form of describing the man, it exhibits the
construction of a trauma that can be contained through historical contextualization. The
connotation of sex and violence in the traumatic utterance of the man presents a form of
trauma that contains the potential possibility for Devlin’s ownership.

The metonymic move from the man to the baby shifts the conception of trauma
from an erotic trauma to a maternal trauma. The trauma enacted on Rebecca’s body by
the man could be understood because it mapped on a body Devlin can see before him, it
is a body he knows, a body which has a recognizable historical span. In opening up a
catastrophic occurrence with no explicit historical referent, the baby has no connection to

the present, nothing Devlin can latch on to. Devlin’s only recourse is to try to return

105

 

Rebecca’s utterance to the man, or when this fails, to at least try to distract or bully her
from evoking the baby and the larger inaccessible culture resonances. 52 In Rebecca’s
utterance of the baby, Devlin loses all hope for historical connection.

Despite Devlin’s best efforts, the decontextualizable maternal trauma of the baby
dominates the final section of the play as he is unable to guide the conversation back to
the potential knowability of the man. Paradoxically, Rebecca possesses the very
uncontextualizable trauma of the baby, as the ripping of the babies from the arms of the
mothers evolves from a memory of witnessing to something personally experienced:

Rebecca: She stood still. She kissed her baby. The baby was a girl.

Pause.

She kissed her.

Pause.

She listened to the baby’s heartbeat. The baby’s heart was beating.

The light in the room has darkened the lamps are very bright.

Rebecca sits very still.

The baby was breathing.

Pause.

I held her to me. She was breathing. Her heart was beating. (73)
As the “she” who was holding the baby becomes an “I”, the baby becomes the focal point
of the utterance. Previously, the man was the connective thread between Rebecca and the
baby. She had the personal relationship with the man, and she saw the man tear the
babies from the arms of their mothers. In this reconception, the baby is the connective

thread. Rebecca is trying to hide the baby and the baby’s cry forces her to hand the baby

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to the man. The baby becomes a unit of exchange between Rebecca and the man. In
taking the baby, the final image of the man no longer offers a point of access for Devlin’s
fantasy. Devlin is left listening to a traumatic utterance which offers no hope of access.
The trauma evoked by the narrative of the baby is a trauma which Devlin has no
possibility of molding.
Rebecca’s transformation of the “she” who is holding a baby to an “I” forces

Devlin to recognize that since the utterance cannot be controlled to fulfill his voyeuristic
desire - because he cannot contextualize language - he must transcend language in a final
effort to reassemble the man. Devlin must use more than language as he attempts to
connect language and action to reenact the actions of the man whom Rebecca describes at
the play’s beginning:

Devlin goes to her. He stands over her and looks down at her.

He clenches his fist and holds it in front of her face. He puts his left hand

behind her neck and grips it. He brings her head toward his fist. His fist

touches her mouth.

Devlin: Kiss my fist.

She does not move.

He opens his hand and places the palm of his hand on her mouth. .

Devlin: Speak. Say it. Say ‘Put your hand round my throat.’

She does not speak.

Ask me to put my hand round your throat.

She does not speak or move.

He puts his hand on her throat. He presses gently. Her head goes back.

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They are still.

She speaks. There is an echo. His grip loosens.

Rebecca: They took us to the trains.

Echo: the trains.

He takes his hand from her throat.
As the baby has dominated the traumatic utterance, and, as the traumatic utterance has
marginalized the man, Devlin is unable to rely on speech as an effective mechanism to
satiate his desire. By replacing speech with performance he will attempt to move the
narrative of the man from the margins back to center stage. Forced to confront the failure
of his own speech to colonize the traumatic utterance, Devlin embraces the power of
repetition intrinsic in performance. In playing the role of the man, Devlin will know
what the man looks like for he is the man. In playing the man, Devlin will know when it
happened, for it happens now.

Despite his best efforts, this effort for repetitious performative mastery produces
Devlin’s ultimate failure and the failure of a conception of performance based on action
and sight. For in Devlin’s final effort to own the traumatic utterance, he discovers that
the baby is more powerful than the man, that the utterance will not be contextualized.
Performance offers no such conception as repetition, everything is iteration. In Devlin’s
efforts to reassemble the man, to illuminate the man in a form Devlin can know, Devlin
completes the project of dismemberrnent. By trying to realize the fantasy, he sees the
fantasy fall apart in front of his very eyes. Present performance is unable to materialize

the utterance.

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The performance must fall short of the utterance, because to try to place the
utterance in the realm of history, action, knowledge, and sight is to deform it by
conceiving of performance where it cannot belong. This othering of visual performance
in the baby utterance is demonstrated by the stage directions. Rebecca’s lack of speech
and movement are also emphasized in the stage directions. In the context of the play, this
apparent passivity manifests as an empowering gesture. While Devlin is trying to control
the utterance and place it in the present, Rebecca’s silence and lack of movement become
a means of resistance. Silence thwarts the efforts at repetition, the efforts to return the
play to where it began.

The performative power of silence to dismember a performance of vision should
come as no surprise, as the end of vision is established previous to Devlin enacting the
violence of the man. Immediately preceding Rebecca’s owning of the baby utterance
through transforming the she to an I, the lights in the room darken and the lamplight
intensifies. The lamplight is not supposed to illuminate the room. This lack of
illumination performs the failure Of Devlin’s metaphorical plea early in the play that he
needs light. He will not get the light he needs. The actualization of this failure, the
performing of the failure to see, or to put it in slightly different terms, the ability of the
audience to see the failure of seeing, introduces Rebecca’s owning of the baby utterance.

66199

The “she” becomes an in the aftermath of the failure to see. Devlin’s performance of
violence, and Devlin’s performance of seeing is an effort to stop the baby utterance, to

resist the failure of sight and, in the process, affirm a traditional conception of

performance in which Devlin needs to play off of Rebecca.

109

As Rebecca starts to speak again, her utterance resists all of these conceptions.
The power of her speech has captivated Devlin from the beginning of the play. Devlin
tries to enact the fantasy by telling Rebecca to speak, by putting her voice in the service
of his. This is a deformation of the fantasy, for according to Rebecca’s utterance,
Rebecca’s voice contains power. She instructs the man what to do, and her voice
contains an irresistible intelligibility. The murrnurings of the voice are understood and
obeyed by the man, even with a hand covering her mouth.

Starting to speak in the aftermath of Devlin’s performative failure, her question
and answer exchange with Devlin is replaced by an echo which repeats the last couple of
words in each of her lines. The echo resembles the filmic voiceover in that both echo and
voiceover establish a voice disembodied from pronouncement. In The Acoustic Mirror,
Kaja Silverrnan asserts that in classic cinema “the voice over is privileged to the degree
that it transcends the body” (49). In a radically different context, Pinter’s play also
shows the power of the disembodied voice. The disembodied voice as echo acts as
marker, performing the dominance of Rebecca’s fantasy over that elucidated by Devlin.
Taking his hand away from her throat, Devlin simultaneously acknowledges that he
cannot perform the role of the man, and he cannot silence the dead baby utterance, as, by
its echo, the utterance resonates beyond Rebecca’s body.

The stage direction before the first line accompanied by the echo instructs Devlin
to loosen his grip on Rebecca, while the stage direction after the initial sound of the echo
has his hand being taken away from Rebecca’s throat. The dismemberment begun by her
silence is completed with the echo. In addition to the way the utterance with echo

completes the defeat of sight and action begun by the darkening of the lights, and the

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transformation of the she to an I, Devlin does not speak for the rest of the play. In
contradistinction to Rebecca’s performative empowering silence which dismisses the
narrative of the man, Devlin’s silence inaugurates the free reign of a drama of the voice
which is also the utterance of the baby over a performance of sight.

The drama Of Rebecca’s voice - her drama of sound - emerges as the natural form
for her fantasies. By emphasizing the aural resonance of fantasy and drama, Ashes to
Ashes continues in a Freudian vein despite Devlin’s marginalization. In his May 2, 1897
letter to Fliess, Freud included Draft L in which he suggests that fantasies “are made up
from things that are heard, and made use of subsequently; thus they combine things that
have been experienced and things that have been heard” (248). Understanding fantasies
as things heard suggests the manner in which the dead baby as traumatic utterance
inaugurates a doing which transcends a more representative function. The opposite of
atypical, the verbal spreading of the fantasy from Rebecca to Devlin demonstrates the
manner in which fantasy functions. Devlin is seemingly unable to merely carry and
spread the fantasy. Like Hedda, he needs to materialize the fantasy which is tantamount
to losing it. Rebecca’s monologue which closes the play, suggests further spreading Of
the fantasy in the act of performance. As something heard, the fantasy of the dead baby
has the possibility of creating an endless proliferation of future fantasies and future
ruptures of contextualization.

The connotation of the utterance of a vocal drama which transcends sight with the
emergence of the echo is explicit in the play. Not only does the baby utterance dominate
the final moments of the play, but the word baby dominates the echo:

Rebecca: And she said what happened to your baby

11]

Echo: your baby

Rebecca: Where is your baby
Echo: your baby

Rebecca: And I said what baby
Echo: what baby

Rebecca: I don’t have a baby
Echo: a baby

Rebecca: I don’t know of any baby
Echo: of any baby

Pause.

Rebecca: I don’t know of any baby
Long silence.

BLACKOUT

The last five echoes all repeat the word baby from Rebecca’s previous line. So, in a very
“real” sense, the play ends with the echoing of babies and this echoing inaugurates the
mastery through repetition which has eluded Devlin. Rebecca’s concluding lines serve as
a denial of her handing the baby over to the man at the trains as she denies even having or
knowing of any baby. The echo transforms denial into ambivalence as the play ends with
the word “baby” returning back to Rebecca, Devlin, and the audience.

The ambivalent vocalization of the baby through its denial and its affirmation in
the echo demonstrates the impact of the image of the dead child for dramatic form. To
transcend the dramatic valence of the dead child for a moment, the dead child is an

emblematic figure for trauma. Caruth dedicates the final chapter of Unclaimed

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Experience to an exploration of Freud’s analysis of a father who has fallen asleep after
the death of his son. While he is sleeping, a candle has overturned starting to burn the
corpse of the child. Rather than immediately wake up, the father dreams of the child. In
the dream, the child asks him, “Father, don ’t you see I ’m burning?” (Interpretation of
Dreams 547-8).
By privileging this dream, Caruth echoes the importance placed on the dream by

Freud himself:

Among the dreams which have been reported to me by other people, there

is one which has special claims upon our attention at this point. It was

told to me by a woman patient who had herself heard it in a lecture on

dreams: the actual source is still unknown to me. Its content made an

impression on the lady, however, and she proceeded to ‘re-dream’ it, that

is, to repeat some of its elements in a dream of her own (547).
At the point in which Freud’s attention shifts from the functions of dreams, to the manner
dreams illuminate the functioning of the psychological processes, Freud places particular
importance on the resurrection of the dead child. Whereas Nietzsche’s metaphorization
of tragedy as a dead baby irresistibly resurrected in The Birth of Tragedy prefaces Ibsen’s
proliferation of dead children, Freud’s burning child serves as the last chapter. Originally
published in 1900, The Interpretation of Dreams comes out year after When We Dead
Awaken, Ibsen’s final play, is first performed. Instead of an irresistible resurrection,
Freud characterizes resurrection as wish-fulfillment. Eventually the inevitability of the
dead child will return and with it the danger that incompleteness may overwhelm all

efforts to construct an interconnected system of psychical knowledge.

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Corresponding to the dream of child resurrection, the final chapter of Freud’s text
expands the import of the dream project. If interpreted correctly and closely, dreams hold
a triple representational function. Individual dreams contain the representation of the last
twenty-four hours, they contain representations of the unconscious, and when held up to a
macroscopic view, dreams offer a representation of the entire psychical processes. The
resurrection dream seems to usher in the triumph of determinacy and comprehension.
Like Devlin and the Ashes to Ashes critics, interpretation becomes the process of tracing
Obscure signifiers to clearly marked signifieds. Interpretation is understood as the ability
to contextualize what appears to be uncontextualizable.

Despite the process of wish-fulfillments in dreams, the burning child is only
resurrected temporarily. The dream of the burning child dramatizes a representation that
is closer to Pinter’s play than either Ibsen or Nietzsche. Whereas Ibsen and Nietzsche
accept the resurrection of the dead child, in Freud’s telling the dreamer awakens and
death overcomes all desire for resurrection. In a structure which Ashes to Ashes would
duplicate, Freud’s narrative of the dream begins with a divorce from origins. Any
historical contextualization is deferred as the dream comes to Freud from a woman who
heard it in a lecture. Freud confesses that “the actual source [of the dream] is still
unknown to me.”

Functioning analogous to the proliferation of dead children in late nineteenth-
century drama, Freud’s child is not a single dream but carries the possibility of further
multiplications. Through the process of hearing the dream from a lecturer, the woman re-
dreams it. Working as a sort of psychical dead child contagion, the very incompleteness

evoked by the burning child dream threatens to spiral outward and out of control, as the

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woman who hears the dream replicates it. As in the case of Oedipus and Devlin, the cure
for the contagious emblem of the dead child which opens the path to incomplete
understanding and uncertain origins is knowledge and contextualization.

The lack of origins for the dream introduces a moment of indeterminacy into the
entire project that resembles the impact of dramatic dead children. Freud cautions against
the tenuousness of contextualization in warning that “[e]ven if we make no false
inferences and take all the logical possibilities into account, the probable incompleteness
of our premises threatens to bring our calculation to an complete miscarriage” (549).
Like Devlin, Freud equates light with knowledge at the very moment indeterminacy
threatens to overcome the project of comprehension:

Hitherto, unless I am greatly mistaken, all the paths along which we have
travelled have led us toward the light — towards elucidation and fuller
understanding. But as soon as we endeavor to penetrate more deeply into
the mental process involved in dreaming, every path will end in darkness.
(549)
The dead child who will not stay resurrected, and whose origin must remain
decontextualized, illuminates the potential peril that dream interpretation, which has led
to the contextualization of fragmentary information, may only lead into darkness after all.

In her examination of the traumatic resonance of the dream, Caruth emphasizes
the importance vision plays in Freud’s analysis:

To awaken is thus to bear the imperative to survive: to survive no longer

simply as the father of a child, but as the one who must tell what it means

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not to see, which is also what it means to hear the unthinkable words of

the dying child. (105)
The figure of the dead child becomes a representative figure in the analysis of trauma and
an emblem of rupture in drama. Like Caruth’s interpretation of the dream, Ashes to
Ashes is about the telling of what it means not to see. However, it is not simply as some
stand-in for the mother of the child that Rebecca demonstrates this failure. Silverman
suggests that “[t]he sounds the voice makes always exceed signification to some degree
both before the entry into language and after” (44).

Ashes to Ashes performs this excess inaugurated by the emblem of the dead baby.
As her final denial of the baby which concludes the play is heard alongside the five time
affirmation of the baby in the echo, Rebecca’s denial transcends denial as it becomes part
of a dramatic chorus. The cohesion of Rebecca’s lines accompanied by the echo is
emphasized by the linguistic structure of the final movement of the play. The
combination of Rebecca’s lines and the echo make an open- ended utterance as there are
no periods even as the play concludes. This chorus places its importance on the
declamation which performs what it means not to see and what it means not to know as a
function of dramatic narrative.

Presenting a dead baby drama that is based on the self-referentiality of a
performative utterance, Pinter’s play introduces a drama of trauma. Rather than thinking
of trauma solely in terms of characters also results in the possibility for the trauma of
dramatic form. Ashes to Ashes performs a formalized trauma by uncovering the
dramatic wound and emblematizes the wound as the utterance of a dead baby. In the

efforts Of Devlin, the play presents this wound as something that cannot be healed.

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Instead, the wound is a matter Of dramatic possibility, offering a model for proliferating
fantasy and sound, both of which emanate from the traumatic utterance. In the next

chapter I will explore what results from visualizing a wound that, as expressed in Ashes
to Ashes, cannot be visualized. What happens when this failure of dramatic materiality

leading to dramatic possibility is represented on stage?

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Chapter Four:
“DO YOU SEE ME?”: Digesting Representations of Dead Babies in Kane and

Shepard

What I ’m trying to get at here is that the real quest of the writer is to penetrate into
another world. A world behind the form. The contradiction is that as soon as that world
opens up, I tend to run the other way. It ’s scary because I can ’t answer to it from what I
know. — Sam Shepard

All good art is subversive inform or content. And the best art is subversive inform and
content. And often, the element that most outrages those who seek to impose censorship
is form . . . I suspect that if Bla_ster_l had been a piece of social realism it wouldn ’t have
been so harshly received. - Sarah Kane53

The critical furor over the debut of Sarah Kane’s Blasted is by now well- worn ground.
Jack Tinker’s review for the Daily Mail proves a representative example of reviewer
hostility. More than a sensational summation of reviewer reaction, Tinker’s proliferation
by way Of citation in nearly all Blasted criticism seems to irreducibly connect it to the
play. Tinker moved from his evaluation that “[a]s a piece of drama, it is entirely without
merit” to his personal attack on Kane in which he suggests that rather than being given a
grant for the play “[s]ome will undoubtedly say the money might have been better spent
on a course of remedial therapy” (5).54 Kane’s suspicion that dramatic form and not
content is the root of such critical hostility seems surprising in a play that contains
graphic representations of sex, rape, dismemberment, suicide and cannibalism. Just as it
is a reductive form of analysis to analyze content apart from form, the inverse should also

be understood. Addressing the form of Blasted apart from the content whether it is

performed by a critic or the playwright herself is an act Of sanitizing or colonizing the

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play. The extreme content of Blasted in general, and its representation of the dead baby
in particular, is interconnected with the play’s formal experimentation. In Kane’s Blasted
and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child the emblem of the dead baby dramatizes the limits of
dramatic form in the staging of dramatic content.

Hedda Gabler dramatizes the dead child as the metaphorization of a performative
void emerging upon the ashes of the literary text, which thereby becomes the textual
other. Ashes to Ashes depicts the dead baby as the traumatic utterance that displaces sight
and context as a locus for dramatic possibility in the breakdown of signification. Both
plays evoke the dead child as the image that cannot be reached, and as the meaning that
cannot be understood. In so doing, Pinter and Ibsen’s dramas envision the very limits of
dramatic form. The emblem of the dead baby provides a marker where drama cannot go.
Embracing its own failure and acknowledging its own limits, dramatic performance
paradoxically finds drama in the very understanding that there are some limits to what
can be performed.

Enacting the limits of dramatic form to some extent involves never letting the
dead child enter visual representation. The content of the dead child fails in that the
image might be better described as a non—image. The dead child tends to be uttered but
not seen. Even when it is seen, the dead child’s position as image critiques its own
representational import. The dead child marks the limits of dramatic form by becoming
the other of staged representation. As other, the dead child gestures toward and becomes
the void and the rupture in theatrical representation. In Hedda Gabler the dead baby
gestures toward rupture but remains distant as the dead child is only visualized as

metaphorized manuscript. In Ashes to Ashes the dead child manifests as a

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decontextualized narrative utterance. Edward Bond’s Saved and Eugene O’Neill’s
Desire Under the Elms kill the baby on stage but it is killed in such a manner that the
actual violence done to the child’s body is obscured. Even in Luigi Pirandello’s Six
Characters in Search of an Author, the child’s death is displaced through the emphasis on
the child as character.

The limits of dramatic form evoked by means of an absent dead child - a dead
child which the audience never sees - is transcended in Edward Albee’s The American
Dream. The materialization of the child in Albee demonstrates the final stage of the
emblem’s metatheatrical critique. Oedipus Rex is a drama based on the power of speech.
Speech acts as uncanny analepsis. The utterance of the dead baby who impossibly
survives illuminates the reversal and recognition of the historical contextualization of the
present. The Importance of Being Earnest enacts a drama in which speech has broken
away from historical causality. Utterance does not contextualize the present. The power
of recognition and reversal which have been reconceptualized as more farcical than
uncanny resides in the written text. Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler envisions a more radical
transformation for speech. Instead of an act that has lost its power but sill achieves a
Wildean resonance through connection to the written word, speech in Hedda Gabler is
the antithesis of the written word. The written word is conceptualized as containing all of
the power of historical contextualization. An example of what I am dubbing “fracturing
speech,” the dead child offers access to a drama of decontextualization. Yet, the drama
of the decontextualized utterance easily gets absorbed into the determinate text. The
utterance only Offers a glimpse of indeterminacy for the text will not stay dead but

uncannily resurrects itself by the very power of its materiality. Only with Pinter’s Ashes

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to Ashes is a dead baby as fracturing speech envisioned through the shifting of focus
away from vision. Rebecca’s fracturing speech enacts a drama Of indeterminacy, which
escapes historical contextualization.

The American Dream follows the pattern established by Hedda Gabler in
transforming the Oedipal model of the impossibly surviving child to an impossibly
resurrected child. However, unlike the dead child as metaphorized book or the dead baby
as fantasy, in presenting the American Dream as a material figure, Albee’s play seems to
perform the triumph of determinate representation over the dead baby as fracturing
speech. The impossible doubling appears to overcome dismemberment and
indeterminacy in The American Dream, as Grandma offers to give Mrs. Barker a hint of
why Mommy and Daddy “asked us to come” (96).

Grandma’s hint is a story about a man very much like Daddy and a woman very
much like Mommy, who visit a woman very much like Mrs. Barker in order to buy “a
bumble of joy.” They buy the bumble, take it home but are disappointed by its behavior.
They dismember the bumble by gouging out its eyes, cutting off its you-know-what,
cutting off its hands at the wrists, and cutting out its tongue. The bumble gets bigger and
eventually dies. They call up the lady who sold them the bumble and ask her to come
over. The hint proves to be too obscure for Mrs. Barker to draw any firm conclusions as
“while I can remember Mommy and Daddy coming to see me, oh, about twenty years
ago, about buying a bumble I can’t quite remember anyone very much like Mommy and
Daddy coming to see me about buying a bumble” (105).

Grandma’s utterance is a parody Of indeterminacy as “very much like” is

interpreted as an overdeterrnined signifier. “[V]ery much like” functions similar to

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conceptions of mimesis as elaborated in Chapter One which emphasized the distance
between theatrical signifiers and exterior signifieds as a shortcoming that the theatre
needs to overcome. In the process of connoting similitude, “very much like” calls
attention to a gap between signifier and signified which prevents the fullness and
certainty of historical contextualization. Despite Grandma’s best efforts, Mrs. Barker can
only focus on the difference inherent to similarity. In a gesture that is reminiscent of
Jacques Derrida’s analysis of the performative speech act in Limited Inc., Mrs. Barker is
incapable of conceiving of the most explicit similarity as anything but a demonstration of
decontextualization.

Grandma’s utterance interconnects sparagmos to the indeterminate utterance, just
as the act of dismemberment takes the place of the more commonplace child deaths
outlined above. Characterizing dismemberment as an act in The American Dream is
deceptive because dismemberment does not exist apart from vocal utterance.
Dismemberment occurs in the form as well as the content Of Grandma’s speech. The
inability of Mrs. Barker to give the fracturing speech an explicit material context is also
an act of dismemberment. While the dismemberrnent’s content is described as more
convenience than ritual (The bumble’s eyes were gouged out because it only had eyes for
Daddy), the utterance takes on the role of ritual much like the utterance of the book as

baby in Hedda Gabler. Mrs. Barker repeatedly acknowledges her approval to Grandma’s

39 cc ,9 u
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narrative as she notes “[h]ow fascinating [h]ow enthralling [h]ow spellbindingl,”
“[h]ow engrossingl,” and “how gripping!” the utterance is (96-98). In Mrs. Barker’s
exclamations The American Dream, like Hedda Gabler, demonstrates that a modern

dramatic ritual exists in the telling over the doing. Modern dramatic ritual manifests as

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speech narrates the interconnection of sparagmos and indeterminacy. Grandma’s
utterance is engrossing in the very efforts to portray it as indeterminate, not in spite of the
indeterminacy.

The material manifestation of the American Dream physically represents the
ritualized utterance of Grandma. A double for the bumble of joy, the American Dream
tells Grandma his own narrative. He and his twin were torn apart when he was young.
His narrative is one Of extreme identification as over the years he has “suffered losses . . .
that I can’t explain” (114). The dismemberment of the bumble has, piece by piece,
corresponded to a emotive loss on the part of the American Dream:

How can I put it to you? All right; like this: Once . . . it was as if all at
once my heart . . . became numb . . .almost as though I . . . almost as
though . . . just like that. . . it had been wrenched from my body . . . and
from that time . . . Ihave been unable to love. Once . . . I was

asleep at the time . . . I awoke, and my eyes were burning. And since that
time I have been unable to see anything, anything, with pity, with
affection . . . with anything but. . . cool disinterest. And my groin . . . even
there . . . since one time . . . one specific agony . . . since then I

have not been able to love anyone with my body. And even my hands . . .
I cannot touch another person and feel love. And there is more . . . there
are more losses, but it all comes down to this: I no longer have the
capacity to feel anything. I have no emotions. I have been drained, torn

asunder . . . disembowled. I have, now, only my person . . . my body, my

face. (114-5)

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The materialized double of the narrative utterance appears to align itself with the written
text in banishing the dead baby as indeterminate speech in favor of Oedipal narrative.
Even more so than the book, the visually represented body offers a promise of
recognition. More than historical contextualization, the American Dream as twin Offers a
material contextualization. The very physicality of the body and the location of the body
as a site of pain and loss maps Grandma’s ritualized utterance as a place in addition to
giving the utterance historical veracity. The material marking offers the hope that the
“very much like” of Grandma’s utterance can be traversed offering a determinate vision
of dramatic performance.

While the presence of the material body and the recognition of body as double for
fracturing speech may Offer the hope of traversing the gap between similitude and
determinacy, in the very process of forging a connection with fracturing speech, the
American Dream moves the materialized double closer to indeterminacy rather than the
inverse. The American Dream’s narrative of loss can be understood as the failure of
materiality. He still has a complete body and face, but his body cannot represent his loss.
The body is an incomplete means to measure such things. Instead, the dismemberment of
the bumble moves from the visually representable dismemberment of the body to the
invisible dismemberment of emotions and feelings. As the physical dismemberment of
the bumble is narrated, physical and emotional dismemberment escapes vision.

The American Dream takes the indeterminacy of his fracturing speech to further
extremes when he suggests that even his elaboration of the failure of the material body to
encompass representation must be looked at skeptically. He tells Grandma, “Be careful;

be very careful. What I have told you may not be true” (115). The American Dream’s

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utterance may be true, in which case fracturing speech illuminates the failure of a theatre
of materiality. Or he may be wrong, suggesting that his representation is more important
than his utterance. In questioning the legitimacy of his own utterance, The American
Dream frames his entire narrative with indeterminacy. The relationship between the
material double of the dead baby and the dead baby as fracturing speech remains
ambiguously unresolved.

Unlike Hedda Gabler, which through the resurrected text demonstrates the
victory of historical contextualizaton, The American Dream ’5 materialized resurrection
proves to be futile. In his very materiality, the American Dream evokes an image of
dramatic form consumed with materiality, historical contextualization, and textualization
that despite all this determinism is still impossibly incomplete, and shows the
unreliability of language and meaning. Blasted and Buried Child attempt to finish the
process of materialization. Rather than relegate materiality to a double, both plays offer a
material stage representation of the dead baby. Ian exhumes and eats the baby’s corpse in
Kane’s play, and Shepard’s play concludes with Tilden’s entrance from the backyard
with the exhumed baby in his arms.

Despite the visually represented dead baby, both Blasted and Buried Child contain
a materialized double for the dead baby. The resurrected double in Kane and Shepard fits
well within the dead baby tradition from Hedda Gabler to Nietzsche’s The Birth of
Tragedy to The American Dream. Whereas in older dead children dramas the
resurrection is clearly about the effort to move away from the rupture of signification,

why is there a compulsion for such a material double in drama where the dead baby is

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already materialized? Kane and Shepard’s dead babies emblematize the struggle to
overcome limits of dramatic signification and dramatic form.55
Kane acknowledges the limitless nature Of dramatic signification in her
description of the impact reading Edward Bond’s Saved had on her:
When I read Saved, I was shocked by the baby being stoned. But then I
thought, there isn’t anything you can’t represent on stage. If you are
saying you can’t represent something, you are saying you can’t talk about
it, you are denying its existence, and that’s an extraordinarily ignorant
thing to do. (qtd in Saunders 24)
For Kane, Bond’s play evokes the endless possibility of performative signification and
explicitly connects this endless representative potential to the image Of a baby being

killed on stage.56

However, in Bond’s play, the dead baby is the one thing that escapes
visual representation. Bond’s baby remains in its pram throughout the hair pulling,
pinching, punching and the ultimate throwing of rocks. This is emphasized as Pam
returns to take the baby home. She pushes the pram home without looking directly into it
(76-82). Kane lauds the representation of a dead baby that the stage directions keep
unrepresented. Kane imaginatively fills in the gaps of the unrepresented and reads this as
a validation of the limitless potential for visual stage representation.

The limitless stage representation deriving from a dead baby that remains
unrepresented comes from the reading of a text, and not being an audience member at a
performance. Visuality has nothing to do with Kane’s shock at the stoning of the baby.

Instead, she describes a feeling of shock arising from her reading of Saved. Kane finds

the textual representation of a murdered baby shocking as it allows her to imagine further

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possibilities of theatrical representation. Text shocks as it presents the performative
potential for the theatre to represent the same thing as Bond’s printed text. Shock resides
in the imaginative construction of the theatrical sight of a murdered baby. The potential
for vision to fully represent a dead baby makes it possible to transcend the limits of
dramatic form. Language becomes shocking in the very manner that it may contain a
limitless potential for performance.

The horror of Kane’s play and the horror of the dead baby as a dramatic emblem
are to a large extent the contradictory forces of the realization of language and the
understanding that performance can never realize language fully. Reflecting not only on
the negative reaction but on the magnitude of the reaction to Blasted, Kane asserts that
“[t]he thing that shocks me most is that the media seem to have been more upset by the
representation of violence than by violence itself” (qtd in Sierz 97).57 Shock is the same
word Kane uses to describe her reaction to the media’s interest in representations of
violence over real violence and her reaction to reading the stoning of Pam’s baby in
Saved. Kane’s shock in reading Bond’s play is a shock contained in the potential for
visual representation to become analogous to textual representation. For the critics who
review Blasted, the visual representation of some actions must be condemned, and this
effort to save the theatre from some textual representations is an effort to save theatre
from the shocking.

In such a context, the reviews of Blasted differentiate themselves from the
criticism of the other plays described above. The criticism of Wilde, Ibsen, and Pinter

functioned alongside the play in forging a network of historical and material

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contextualization. Where the play performs a rupture of signification, the criticism works
to minimize such a void by solidifying any material connections that the play challenges.

This material contextualizing facet of dramatic and performance criticism takes
what may be its most explicit form in Nicholas F. Radel’s phenomenological analysis of
Buried Child. In “[w]hat’s the meaning of this corn Tilden! Mimesis in Sam Shepard’s
Buried Child,” Radel reads Tilden’s entrance early in the play with an arrnful of corn as a
problem of representation. This is a problem in that Tilden claims he has just picked it
out back but both Dodge and Halie claim there is no corn there. According to Radel:

In the theatre, an Object can be distinguished as the thing itself, an object
of the real world that does not participate in the illusion of the stage but
that demonstrates instead how the theatre invades reality and makes it
participate in the staged world (180).
Radel goes on to claim that “the vegetable suggests the importance of our own mythic
understanding of America” (181).58 While I will leave the exploration of vegetable
mythology to Radel, his conception of the corn as phenomenological sign invites further
exploration.

In essence, Radel’s claim about the corn comes down to an understanding of the
corn as a sign that is too real for the realist stage. The com’s “conscious staginess begs to
be interpreted as a symbol of an idea external to the action, not passively accepted as a
sign that represents an object within the fictional world” (180). Since the fictional
signified cannot be agreed upon, the signifier must transcend the fiction to exist in its
objectness. In a process that seems analogous to Brecht’s alienation effect applied to an

object, the reality of the object pierces efforts to represent the object as part of the

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network of theatrical signification. However as such theatre semioticians as Keir Elam
have pointed out, an Object on stage is never merely an object. Just because the corn does
not easily fit within a network of realist signification does not free the corn from the
network.

Radel’s phenomenological analysis evokes the repetitious reading of mimetic
codes as a theatrical failure as described in Chapter One and Devlin’s compulsion for
contextualization as described in Ashes to Ashes. While there may be competing
arguments for most Of the play about where the corn comes from, it cannot be refuted that
the corn (and later the carrots and the dead baby) enter visual representation. Yet, rather
than leaving this as an Object that does not connect to Oedipal narrative causality for most
of the play, the corn must escape fictional realism to connect to the world outside the
theatre. Instead of leaving the corn as a narrative emblem that works to destabilize realist
signification within the narrative, Radel must find a signified - find a context outside the
referential world of Shepard’s dramatic narrative - for the corn.

Ultimately, Radel’s analysis tries to recover the conception Of theatre as meaning
matrix that is encouraged by theorists as varied as Elam, Richard Schechner, and Richard
Roach. Since the corn cannot be explained within a realist frame, the corn becomes
symbolic, attaching itself to mythic connotations of com in America. We find the com’s
meaning in establishing these mythic connections. If the realist register will not provide
meaning then the interpreter must seek out the symbolic register. Radel goes on to
suggest that “[we] do not believe that com appears magically overnight, and the play

validates our skepticism” (179). However, there is no reason not to believe that the com

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has emerged overnight other than the desire to distance the corn from the narrative fiction
and the compulsion to read the play as realist.

Over the course of Radel’s analysis the symbolic becomes a means to restore
realist cohesion with the play. Early in the second Act Vince and Shelly enter the
narrative. Vince claims to be Tilden’s son yet none of the characters recognize him.
Shelley is the one outsider to the farmhouse and as standard realist convention would
have it, it is through the outsider that the secret will be revealed. Shepard’s play follows
this convention loyally. Although the child buried in the backyard is referred to in the
first act, Dodge’s confession that he killed the product Of Tilden and Halie’s incest occurs
after Shelly’s arrival. No one knows where Dodge hid the “secret buried treasure” (48).
The difficulty with understanding the dead baby in a realist dynamic involves the
seeming inverse relationship between Vince and the dead baby, both fathered by Tilden.
The dead baby is the secret everybody knows but nobody wants to talk about, while, for
the majority of the play, no one knows Vince and wants to know who he is and what he is
doing there.

Radel tries to solve the problem of the inverse double by giving Vince primacy.
Radel reduces the dead baby to a symbol. Symbolizing the baby distances it from the
narrative fiction, thereby saving the realist narrative from less intelligible elements. In
such a conception, to be a symbol is in some sense to be less real:

[Since] there is at least some question as to whether or not the child exists,
we are forced to entertain the possibility that the child appears only as a
symbol, one that bodies forth on stage what Vince himself has become in

his decision to take over the farm: a dead baby. (185)

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Puzzlingly, in such a conception, a symbolic image in the theatre seems to evince less
authenticity than other elements Of the narrative. Existence becomes coextensive with a
realist narrative. Instead of being understood as what is represented on stage, existence is
understood as what signifies within the narrative in an intelligible way. Instead of being
an integrated part of the narrative, a symbol becomes an element which possesses the
exclusive function Of interpreting the narrative. This redefinition Of symbol tries to deny
that as something brought onto stage, the dead baby has every bit as much theatrical
existence as Vince. SO, in this sense, the dead baby is no more or no less of a symbol
than Vince.

Radel’s attempt to redefine the dead baby as symbol and in so doing
conceptualize the dead baby as interpretive and not as narrative is symptomatic of the
larger field of dead children drama. By privileging the living Vince over the dead baby,
and relegating the dead baby to an artificial construct meant to help us understand Vince,
Radel represses the materiality of the corpse. In so doing, the dead baby is relegated to
an antithetical position to the corn and the carrots. Where the realness of the latter cause
the vegetables to emerge as phenomenological signs, the dead baby is less real - less
material - and is thereby diminished to a symbolic fiinction. To see the dead baby as
something that doesn’t exist, and Vince as something that does, is to act like Nietzsche
attempting to resurrect the corpse of tragedy. The privileging of Vince is tantamount to
Tesman and Thea’s reconstructing Lovborg’s book in Hedda Gabler.

In contrast to the historical and material chains of signification forged by such
criticism in an effort to minimize the import of the dead baby, the reviews of Blasted

create an alternative model. Instead of a materialist network, reviews of Kane’s play

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impose limits on the materialist network. In so doing, the reviews of Blasted suggest that
sometimes the emblem of the dead baby cannot be minimized, it simply has to be
resisted.

Criticism serves the dual function of suturing the underdeterrnined theatrical
rupture by contextualizing, and resisting the overdetermination of a theatrical event that
is too material. The critic, as dead baby audience member, must confront the violence,
the potential for obscenity incubating in all language. How can a critic write about the
manner in which Kane’s play performs the shock, her belief that anything can be
represented, without transgressing representational mores in the same manner as Blasted?
In the very process of printing a review for what they want to categorize as an offensive
play, critics must use language to describe a performance they have witnessed. In so
doing, the written word itself still seems to carry the residue of visually represented
graphic violence. In the very act of describing, language still contains the residue of
staged contamination.

Michael Coveney’s review of Cleansed, Kane’s follow-up to Blasted, illustrates
the difficulty of distancing textual representation from the contamination of visual
representation. While not a completely negative review, Coveney begins by warning his
readers that “[those] of a nervous disposition should stop reading now” (7). Similarly, in
his review of the 1995 production of Blasted, Michael Billington cautions that “[readers]
of a sensitive nature are warned that the following review may concern words likely to
disturb” (22). Billington describes the plot of the play; and after narrating Ian’s eating of
the dead baby, Billington reminds potential readers who may not have heeded his

cautionary label that he did warn us. The shock of Blasted proliferates beyond its

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audience. Even attempts to warn audience members away by performing the Good
Samaritan function of describing the play must struggle with the culpability of the written
word. The very words “devour a dead baby” as printed in Billington’s review contain a
textual horror that can only be resisted by refusing to utter, write or perform them.59

The attempt to represent the dead baby on stage is an effort to connect the
mimesis of language to the mimesis of performance. To some extent, the manner in
which language represents without offering the possibility of connoting to the visual is a
loss in Kane’s drama. Textually representing the dead baby serves as a reminder that too
much is escaping performative representation. In the same manner reading Saved
indicates that saying something cannot be represented on stage is tantamount to obscuring
truth, Blasted ’s materialized dead baby brings theatrical truth to the surface. An
authentic theatre embraces visual representation of the material object above all else. An
artificial theatrical event submits to convention in submitting to the propriety of the lie of
selective representation.

The utterance Of the dead baby tends to threaten the safety of selective
representation whether or not the baby appears on stage. Like Kane’s material reading of
Bond’s baby, Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell’s Alan ’s Wife (1893) offers an example
of the compulsion to read dead babies materially, even in cases of their theatrical
absence. In “Staging Infanticide: The Ritual of Representation in Elizabeth Robins’s
Alan’s Wife,” Catherine Wiley emphasizes reviewer A. B. Walkley’s ability to falsely
remember material representations in Alan’s Wife:

Alan’s bloody corpse borne on a stretcher and the murdered infant are

indicated in the script, but neither was represented on stage. The action of

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the play must have ‘aggravated’ the critic into seeing what he could not

have seen, what he considered artistically unrepresentable, what might be

called today an excess Of representation. (432)
Walkley’s imagining of a material representation he never actually sees and the hostility
and the Obsession Of the media toward Kane’s represented violence, both evidence a
repulsion for theatrical materiality. There should be a difference between text and stage.
Some representations should not enter the realm of vision. The utterance of a dead baby,
not to mention the material representation of the same, threatens selective representation.

Blasted ’s critical reviews continue the same shock Of reading Bond’s play in that
they seem to relish narrating Kane’s content. The very vehemence in which the reviews
conceptualize themselves as protectors for the London theatre scene enacts a shock model
between performance and review. Kane uses the term shock to describe both the
glorification of, and the extreme reaction against violent representations on stage. This
double evocation of shock provides the very idea Of shock as a model for understanding
the relationship between textual representation and extreme visual representations. Or, to
put it in slightly different terms, Kane’s reviewers perform the very nature of
representational shock and its after effects, and in so doing, illuminate a traumatic model
and show the manner traumatic performance proliferates beyond a given narrative.
The double evocation of shock resonates with Freud’s definition of trauma in

Beyond the Pleasure Principle:

We define as ‘traumatic’ any excitations from outside which are powerful

enough to break through the protective shield. [ . . . ] It will be seen, then,

that preparedness for anxiety and the hypercathexis of the receptive

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systems constitute the last line of defense of the shield against stimuli. In
the case of quite a number of traumas, the difference between systems that
are unprepared and systems that are well prepared through being
hypercathected may be a decisive factor in determining the outcome (33,
36).
For Kane, reading Saved provides a shock; that is to say, it is a traumatic dramatic text
not just because it offers the potential for limitless performative signification but because
this limitless performative signification is surprising.’0 Saved is traumatic because it
imaginatively fills in the performative gap by revealing a gap the reader may not have
known even existed. In place of the rupture of signification provided by dead babies who
are visually unrepresented, Saved provides access to an imaginative construction of a
completely visualized performance. In Kane’s reading of Bond’s play, imaginative
projection of a potential performance becomes traumatic because it offers the surprise of
vision occurring where the reader expects to find a blind spot. In the logic of
representation, the dead baby in Kane’s play works as a traumatic performance in much
the same way that Bond’s play works as a traumatic dramatic text. Yet, whereas Kane
sees the traumatic surprise that accompanies imaginatively filling in the blind spot as an
infinite Opening of representative possibility, critics reviewing Blasted literally see the
traumatic theatrical representation of a dead baby and read it as an attack on the theatre.
Kane may be shocked by the attention focused on the visual representation of
violence over real violence but perhaps she shouldn’t be. She offers a model of traumatic
possibilities for performance while the reviews build a shield to protect theatre from

Kane’s brand of traumatic visual representation. Kane, like much criticism of the play,

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may be dismissive of a laundry list of a play’s events being a review, but here a listing of

events has a very specific shielding function.“

Listing violent events represented on
stage shields a potential audience from the shock. Instead of the excess or the gap in
performative representation piercing the shield of representation by the shock Of its very
visual appearance, a listing of violent events prepares an audience - it allows the shield to
hold. In so doing, the dead baby appearing and being eaten becomes an aberrant staged
event that is prepared for and resisted, instead of an emblem that in its very shock opens
up the potential for limitless stage representation. By taking the shock away from the
representation of the dead baby on stage, the dead baby continues to be grotesque but
cannot function fully in an economy of performative representation. The more self-aware
reviewers such as Michael Billington and Michael Coveney seem to understand this. In
the very act of diffusing the potential of a dramatic performance they must be careful not
to perform the potential of a traumatic theatre themselves. By warning readers before
describing the violence, Billington and Coveney’s reviews work toward creating a shield
to protect potential readers from the trauma contained in their own writing.

Ultimately, Kane locates traumatic potential in the text. She comes to understand
that her belief that “there isn’t anything you can’t represent on stage” is unrealizable. She
confronts the difference between textual representation and performance in her discussion
of Ian eating the baby:

Reading Blasted is much harder work than watching it, because when you
read it, it’s literally he eats the baby. When you see it he’s clearly not
eating the baby. It’s absolutely fucking obvious. This is a theatrical

image. He’s not doing it at all. So in a way it’s more demanding because

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it throws you back on your own imagination. But somehow, I don’t know

— it’s more realistic when you read the scene because you get simply the

act. (qtd in Saunders 66)
In such a view, even the most material of events can never be as material as textual
representation. Reading the stoning of the baby in Saved opens up the possibility of
infinite representational possibilities - “there isn’t anything you can’t represent on stage.”
However, bringing the dead baby onto the stage hopelessly distances the signifier from
the signified. Reading a dead baby is to evoke a dead baby, but to perform a dead baby
being eaten is to fall short of realizing the image - “He’s not doing it at all.”

The tension of Kane’s stage representations manifest here between the process of
reading and understanding that anything should be able to be represented, and a
performance in which the error in such a conception is revealed. Whereas Ibsen
metaphorizes, Pinter decontextualizes, Pirandello metatheatricalizes and Bond and
O’Neill perform the absence, both Shepard and Kane perform the failure by materially
staging the dead baby as an object of visual representation.

Kane’s description of the eating of the child is much indebted to realism. When
the dead baby is said to work as a theatrical image and not literally, it is hard not to read
such a statement as a failure of realist visual representation. Reading the play makes the
dead baby function as a realist sign, while performing the play causes a rift in the realist
network of signification. The emphasis on the play as needing to possess a realism that
exceeds text and enters performance is demonstrated in Kane’s apparent dissatisfaction

with the ability of productions she has seen to realize her vision:

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Directors frequently think the second half of Blasted is a metaphor, dream,
nightmare (that’s the word Cate uses), and that it’s somehow more abstract
then the first half. In a production that works well, I think the first half
should seem incredibly real and the second half even more real. Probably,
by the end, we should be wondering if the first half was a dream. (qtd in
Sierz 106).
Kane’s description Of the second half of the play evokes her description of the eating of
the baby. Both the emblem and the second half of the play are expected to demonstrate
theatrical authenticity. Despite expectations, performative practice falls short. The
image does not realize the text and the second half tends to be less material than the first.
Upon being visualized in performance, the material image of the dead baby and the half
of the play are realist and materialist failures.

Echoing the distinction Kane makes between the realism of the dead baby when
reading Blasted, and the nature of a theatrical image as non-realist, phenomenologist
Radel describes Buried Child ’s dead baby as a “theatrical symbol” (180). There is a
sense in which both Kane and Radel envision the theatrical image/symbol as strategy for
calling attention to the limits of theatrical representation. A dead baby is a theatrical
image/symbol in that it cannot represent without signifying its own theatricality. For
Kane this theatricality emerges as a non-textual, non-realist signification that throws
viewers back on their imagination. For Radel, the theatrical symbol interprets the play’s
narrative events. As an object / event that cannot be realistically portrayed on stage, the

image / symbol cannot be contained in theatrical narrative.

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To keep the dead baby metaphorized, or out of visual representation, is to some
extent to contain the theatrical. Narratively, Lovborg’s book or Abbie and Eben’s child
from Desire Under the Elms, in the very manner that it escapes realization on stage, can
remain firmly contained in the dramatic narrative. The very void - the very manner in
which the baby refuses to be seen - allows the narrative to gloss over the traumatic wound
thereby allowing the conflict between narrative and visual representation to be mediated.

The consistent effort at resurrection is an effort to make the negotiation over the
void irrelevant by filling the void with a visual representation. Seemingly, the rupture
cannot be filled with its own signified. To fill in the gap visually, the dead baby must be
denied through its own resurrection. Only by being alive can the dead baby complete the
network of visual signification in a comprehensible fashion. If the baby can be brought
back to life, then theatrical narrative does not have to contain a void to function. For if
the baby can come back, then Devlin’s project can be victorious. To theatricalize can be
understood as knowing and seeing, theatrical representation can be analogous to
theatrical narrative, and theatrical representation can be distanced from the traumatic.

In materializing the void Shepard demonstrates the necessity for keeping the dead
baby unseen, for to see the baby is to frustrate realist signification. The very recognition
of how a theatrical sign differentiates itself from a realist narrative transforms the rupture
from an unrealized potential for difference to its actualization. In “Character Behavior
and the Fantastic in Sam Shepard’s Buried Child,” Bruce J. Mann recognizes this
actualization through a model of what he terms “the fantastic.” Unlike the distancing

mechanism of Radel’s symbols which present the non-realist dimensions of Shepard’s

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work as objects to be interpreted and not narrated, Mann’s “fantastic” acknowledges that
there are parts of Shepard’s play which disrupt the narrative from within:
True to the rules of the fantastic mode, the antinomy between the play’s
everyday and supernatural worlds is not resolved. We are left with an
illogical situation. Are Vince and the buried child the same? If so, how
can both be seen onstage simultaneously? (89)
The answer to Mann’s questions should be explicit in the discussion of dead babies above
as well as in the Shepard epigram which began this chapter. In the epigram, Shepard
suggests that the work Of a writer is to access another world, “[a] world behind the form.
The contradiction is that as soon as that world opens up, I tend to run the other way.”
The dead baby evokes this other world behind the form. This other world is a world
beyond the language of text and vocal utterance.

SO many of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century dead baby dramas are a rupture
of textual and vocal representation. There seems to be a self-conscious realization that
traumatic drama emerges from language. While Hedda Gabler ’s depiction of the dead
baby emerging from the vocalization of the destroyed text is the clearest example, it is
not the only one. Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The American Dream,
like Ashes to Ashes, envision the dead baby as emblem for the traumatic drama emerging
from within the very form of representation it seems to disrupt. In this context, Pinter’s
play becomes the most vivid example of the potential for the traumatic utterance not only
because the content of Rebecca’s utterance of cultural catastrophe is a dead baby

utterance that can be clinically defined as traumatic, but also because her very

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decontextualization project demonstrates the dead baby as a function of narrative
construction.

The dead baby as a theatrical emblem should be understood in terms of felicity
and infelicity, not in terms of truth or falsehood.62 Pinter and Albee’s dead babies
perform felicitously precisely because of their impossibility. A dead baby works
felicitously through the very manner it evokes a fantasy. To reemphasize an earlier
example, in metaphorizing a text that has not really been lost but will soon be burnt as a
dead child in Hedda Gabler, a dead child is imaginatively projected as the emblem which
disrupts realist textual signification. The dead baby as an emblem for traumatic drama
demonstrates the imaginative potential of dramatic performance to make the holes in
signification visible.

Shepard’s epigram clearly demonstrates the manner in which the dead baby works
within Buried Child. Uttering what is buried out back opens the new world, or at least
ruptures the signification of the Old one. In the first act, Halie and Dodge argue about the
way Dodge describes their second oldest son, Bradley:

Halie. You sit here day and night, festering away! Decomposing!
Smelling up the house with your putrid body! Hacking your head off to
all hours of the morning! thinking up mean, evil, stupid things to say about
your own flesh and blood!

Dodge. He’s not my flesh and blood! My flesh and blood’s out there in
the backyard! (They freeze. Long pause. The men stare at her.)

Halie (Quietly). That’s enough Dodge. That’s quite enough. You’ve

become confused. I’m going out now. I’m going to have lunch with

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Father Dewis. I’m going to ask him about a monument for Ansel. A

statue. At least a plaque.
While the evocation of the dead baby seems to work as a sort of return Of the repressed,
the dead baby utterance is much too self-conscious to be understood in such a light. So
much classical and realist drama from Oedipus’s murder of his father and marriage to his
mother in Oedipus Rex, to Mrs. Alving’s understanding that she is the means by which
her husband passed on syphilis to their son in Ibsen’s Ghosts is based on the return of the
repressed. In dead baby drama, the secret has nothing to do with repression. The dead
baby is hardly a secret at all. In Buried Child, everyone already knows about the dead
child except Vince and Shelly. As the resurrected child, Vince hardly fits into the
equation. Shelly may learn the secret, but very little uncovering accompanies her role as
psychoanalytic detective. Instead, with very little prompting, Tilden tells Shelly the story
of the baby buried out back.

The manner in which the dead baby works as fracturing speech and not as
repressed secret is further emphasized in the original version Of the play (I 978). When
Tilden starts to tell Shelly about the baby, she interrupts Tilden’s narrative to ask him not
to tell her (103). Requests from both Shelly and Dodge go unanswered, and in his only
moment of clear assertiveness in either the original or the revision, Tilden pushes Shelly
back in her chair, thereby forcing her to listen to his story of infanticide. In the final act,
when Dodge decides to tell Shelly the family secret (a secret that in the context of the

6‘

play is really not much of a secret at all) Shelly tells Dodge that she’s not so sure [she]

wants to find out now” (123).

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The narrative of the dead child is compulsively labeled a secret despite the
inability of anyone to stop talking about it. In an exchange that appears intact in both
versions of the play, Tilden tries to tell Shelly about the child and she initially resists his
compulsion to tell:

Shelly. Well, you can tell me anything you want to.

Tilden. I can?

Shelly. Sure.

Tilden. It might not be very nice.

Shelly. That’s all right. I’ve been around.

Tilden. It might be awful.

Shelly. Well, can’t you tell me anything nice? (T ilden stops in front of

her and stares at her coat. Shelly looks back at him. Long pause.)
Similar to Dodge’s uttering what is buried out back to Halie, Shelly’s refusal to hear the
awful leads to a long pause. Tilden wants Shelly to resist his telling. If he can tell her
anything, he intends to tell her about what is buried in the backyard, because the
compulsion to perform the telling is irresistible. The compulsion may be irresistible, but
it is also undesirable. This is emphasized by the manner Tilden broaches the subject. He
initially cautions Shelly that the anything he wants to tell “might not be very nice.” The
idea of it not being nice is not enough to deter Shelly from hearing what he has the
compulsion to tell, so Tilden raises the stakes from not nice to awful. In so doing,
fracturing speech is rejected. Since Tilden no longer has a receptive audience, he can let
the dead baby that he and Dodge have such a compulsion to evoke lie dormant for the

moment.

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Dodge’s evocation of his flesh and blood being buried out back functions
similarly. The early part of the play is obsessed with the materiality of bodies and the
congruence between Dodge and a corpse. In addition to Halie’s characterization of a
decomposing Dodge smelling up the house with his putrid body, Dodge refers to himself
as a corpse (11).63 Dodge’s metaphorical burial beneath comhusks at the end of the first
act, and beneath a blanket at the end of the second act, provides an obvious metonymic
rationale for his utterance of the dead baby. Halie’s emphasis on Dodge’s decomposing
body creates another version of the compulsion to utter the dead baby that cannot be
resisted. Yet, the very utterance of the dead baby, like the frustration of Tilden’s
compulsion to utter the dead baby, creates a narrative void in the pause. The utterance of
the dead baby as well as its frustration point to a break in dialogue. When the dialogue
starts up after these long pauses it emphasizes the fracturing utterance of the dead baby
which is the content within the pause. This initial evocation of what is buried out back
demonstrates a tension between the dead baby as void, and the dead baby as material
object. For while the utterance itself works to create a rupture, and the utterance creates a
pause that forces dialogue in a different direction, this rupture only manifests through its
metonymic connection with materiality.

This paradox between materiality and the void is the essence of the long pause
and the means to understand Halie’s restarting of the dialogue. Halie restarts the
dialogue by moving the conversation away from the organic materiality of decaying
corpses as she evokes the possibility of a statue for Ansel. Ansel, apparently a third son
of Halie and Dodge, is dead. As an idea to be memorialized over and above the

physicality of his body, the move to Ansel shifts to conversation away from the

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materiality of Dodge’s corpse-like body as well as the corpse out back. In evoking the
memory of Ansel, Halie’s utterance moves away from the physical reality of a rotting
body, and connotes the dead son with an unchanging memorial of a living body, rather
than the actual body itself. This functions as a distancing mechanism, as the memorial
works to resurrect Ansel, rather than focusing on the materiality of death.

Halie’s effort to conceptualize a resurrected Ansel through memorializing a
historical figure at a time when he was alive works different from Nietzsche’s
resurrection of tragedy, or Tesman’s resurrection of Lovborg’s book in Hedda Gabler. A
memorialized Ansel functions in a way much closer to Rebecca’s traumatic utterance
from Ashes to Ashes. The memorialization decontextualizes as it dematerializes. Halie is
insistent on Ansel being a hero, but Tilden doesn’t remember him as a hero (1 8). Halie
wants a bronze statue of Ansel with a basketball in one hand, but, according to Bradley,
“[he] never played basketball” (59). Like Devlin’s effort to contextualize Rebecca’s
utterance of her lover, the statue of Ansel offers a hope to solidify an idea Of Ansel that
will never be reached.

Halie interrupts Dodge’s evocation of the dead baby - an evocation that is
encouraged by her emphasis on the materiality of Dodge’s dead body - with the
decontextualized fantasy of Ansel. Halie’s fantasy of a decontextualized Ansel
overcomes the fracturing speech of a dead baby, and dialogue resumes. In turning to
Ansel’s statue, Halie tries to resist the knowledge that the seed for the decontextualized
utterance lies within the very understanding of materiality. The turn to Ansel’s statue is

an attempt to embrace the decontextualized rupture of the dead baby as fracturing speech

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without acknowledging an exterior materiality that allows the emergence of such a
rupture.

The turn to the decontextualized utterance that lies behind Halie’s desire to
memorialize Ansel with a statue is also explicit in the utterance of the dead baby. When
Tilden first tries to tell Shelly about the dead baby, and she rebuffs his compulsion to tell
by asking him if he can’t tell her anything nice, he broaches the subject through
indeterminate language - namely, through the use of the word “might.” Like memories
of Ansel, Tilden does not simply threaten to tell Shelly something not nice and awful. He
“might” tell her such things and in prefacing his compulsion to tell with “might,” Tilden
foregrounds the indeterminate nature of the baby as fracturing speech. When Shelly
rejects his telling by requesting he tell her something nice she not only resists his
horrifying confession, she resists an indeterminate confession. Unlike his “might,”
Shelly’s request to hear something nice moves toward taking the interpretive potential out
of Tilden’s utterance.

The indeterminacy associated with the utterance of the dead baby underlies
perhaps the most significant difference between the original version of the play and
Shepard’s revision. In the original, Shelly, trying to understand why nobody recognizes
Vince, questions Tilden:

Shelly: (pointing to Vince) This is supposed to be your son? Is he your
son? Do you recognize him? I’m just along for the ride here. I thought
everybody knew each other!

(Tilden stares at Vince. Dodge wraps himself up in the blanket and stares

at the floor.)

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Tilden: I had a son once but we buried him.

(Dodge quickly looks at Tilden. Shelly looks to Vince.)

Dodge: You shut up about that! You don’t know anything about that!

Vince: Dad, I thought you were in New Mexico. We were going to drive

down there and see you.

Tilden: Long way to drive.

Dodge: (to Tilden) You don’t know anything about that! That happened

before you were born! Long before! (Seven Plays 92)
Taken together, Dodge and Tilden’s contradictory claims work to decontextualize the
event temporally. Tilden claims it was his baby, but, according to Dodge, it occurred
before Tilden was born. In exorcising Dodge’s claim that the child died before Tilden
was born from his revision, Shepard removes a great deal of the indeterminacy from the
dead baby narrative. This is further reinforced in a line that is added to the revision.
When Vince arrives and announces that he is Tilden’s son, Dodge tells Vince that Tilden
“had two [sons], I guess” (32). While the original suggests that the baby might be the
result of Halie and Tilden’s incestuous relationship, the rewrite attempts to minimize
Dodge’s alternative utterances about the baby’s origin, and thereby limit a great deal of
the dissent and the play’s ambiguity.

The revised version of Buried Child undergoes an alteration in the status of the
dead baby that is suggestive as to the relationship between text, materiality, and dead
baby plays. I have argued in numerous contexts that the dead baby functions as a
dematerializing and a decontextualizing utterance. As the utterance of the dead baby

calls attention to the transcendence of a dramatic text and embraces a performative

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rupture, the materiality of vision and phenomenology is resisted. Like Kane, Shepard’s
play refuses to acknowledge that there is a rupture in the very conception of materiality.
In essence, Shepard’s play refuses to emblematize the dead baby as an utterance that
works as the inverse Of vision and the dramatic text.

Shepard’s revised play places the dramatic text in the service of materiality. In
the process of revision - by signifying the origins of the baby more explicitly in the text -
the void can be overcome. The dead baby can become an extension of textual
signification instead of a recognition of the limits of textual signification. Textual
signification can be seamlessly represented in performance by materializing the dead
baby and offering a context for it. Rather than a challenge to the interconnection of
semiotics and phenemonology, the dead baby can illustrate the unity of textual and
performative representation. The text must be closed off from the challenge of the
utterance, to incorporate the utterance as part of the potential materiality of the dramatic
text.

To understand Shelly as detective is to understand the manner in which Buried
Child tries to reassert materiality over decontextualization, and the dramatic text over
performative utterance. Shelly is told about the baby through no detective work, and
indeed, seemingly no action of her own. However, her detective work involves
understanding the materiality of the utterance. In the original version, she asks Dodge,
“Was [Tilden] telling the truth about the baby?” (112). Such a question redefines the
mystery. Rather than a secret to be uncovered, the mystery involves the reliability and
the context of the utterance. Shelly’s work as detective involves establishing an external

referent for the utterance. Instead of understanding the utterance as an utterance that is

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felicitous precisely because of its indeterminacy, Shelly must understand it as something
that is true, something that can be contextualized beyond fracturing speech. Shelly wants
to prove the utterance has an independent material existence.

The third act seems to conclude with the transformation from indeterminate
speech act to contextualized exterior truth through the process of repetition. The
metonymic connection from dead baby to Ansel is taken one step further as Vince is fully
incorporated into the chain:

Dodge. I killed it. I drowned it. Just like the runt of the litter. Just
drowned it. There was no struggle. No noise. Life just left it. (Halie
moves toward Bradley.)
Halie. (T 0 Bradley.) Ansel would’ve stopped him! Ansel would’ve
stopped him from telling those lies! He was a hero! A man! A whole
man! What’s happened to the men in this family! Where are the men!
(Suddenly Vince comes crashing through the screen porch U.L.
Tearing it off its hinges.)
Many critics have suggested that Vince’s appearance serves as a very literal answer to
Halie’s plea. In addition to any possible hope his reappearance may provide, the
reappearance of Vince provides an end to the metonymic chain of dead children and has
implications for the struggle going on throughout the play between the truth, the
materiality of the dead baby emblem, and the manner in which the dead baby as utterance

serves a function of decontextulization - of indeterminacy.

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The manner in which Vince’s appearance at the end equates him with the dead
baby is clearly demonstrated by Mann. Writing of the manner in which, shortly after his
appearance, Vince enters the living room, Mann notes:

Vince cuts a hole in the porch’s screen and dives through it into the living
room, a stage emblem of birth, as if he were the buried child itself being
reborn in order to take over control from Dodge. (88)

More than serving as an emblem of the buried child being reborn, Vince serves as an
emblem of the dead baby being materialized and contextualized. In the context of the
play, and indeed, in the context of the dead baby tradition as outlined over the course of
Part Two, Vince as the reborn dead baby fits firmly among the dead baby tradition.
Vince’s material appearance is an effort at resistance, an effort to suture the gap, the
indeterminacy, within the dramatic text that allows the dead baby to emerge.

Despite the materiality of Vince’s appearance, the resurrection is not the end. The
play ends with Tilden’s entrance onto the stage with the dead baby in his arms. In this
moment both Vince as the resurrected dead baby, and the material dead baby appear on
stage. The material doubling of the baby in its dead and resurrected forms - characterized
by Mann as the illogic of the fantastic - Offers an alternative to dead babies and
resurrection as dichotomy. As a simultaneous occurrence death and resurrection are both
Open to vision, and in the process, the ideal of resurrection, the ideal of materiality is
overcome. The excess of materiality that allows death and resurrection to enter the stage
simultaneously creates a sort of indeterminacy within its very materiality. The ideal
behind dead baby resurrection involves a suturing of the rupture, a belief that a

fragmented text can be reassembled, that signifiers can comprehensibly connect to

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signifieds, creating clear networks of dramatic meaning. In its doubling and its focus on
materiality, Buried Child suggests that resurrection as difference, - resurrection as
contextualization - is only an illusion. In the same way a dramatic rupture like Ashes to
Ashes offers no hope Of clear signification because the emblem of the dead baby cannot
be understood as more than fantasy, the excess materiality of the resurrection in Buried
Child suggests that filling in the textual gap is the same thing as embracing the rupture.
A resurrected Vince is the same thing as the dead baby in so far as both lead down the
road of indeterminacy. The compulsion toward escaping the indeterminate repetition of
the dead baby by resurrecting it, and thereby placing it in a clear context is repetition
under the guise of escape.

The dead baby in Blasted functions as dramatic emblem in a remarkably similar
fashion. However, whereas Buried Child presents a dialectic between dead baby as
indeterminate utterance and dead baby as material object before reconciling the dead
baby and the resurrection as indeterminate material emblem, Blasted focuses on the dead
baby as doubled material object. Despite the lack of a dead baby as an indeterminate
utterance, the conflict between materiality and indeterminacy is in the forefront in Kane’s
play.

Like Buried Child, Blasted uses the very materiality of the corpse - the very
manner in which the baby becomes an object open to sight - as a means to reject
resurrection as an escape from the import of the dead baby. Like the equation of the baby
with Vince, Blasted creates a metonymic connection between the baby and Ian. This
connection is repeated almost obsessively from Cate’s reappearance with the baby,

beginning with Ian’s attempted suicide:

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He puts the gun back in his mouth. He pulls the trigger. The gun clicks,

empty. He shoots again. And again and again and again.

He takes the gun out of his mouth.

Ian Fuck.

Cate Fate, see. You’re not meant to do it. God —

Ian The cunt.

(He throws the gun away in despair.)

Cate (Rocks the baby and looks down at it.)

OhnO

Ian What.

Cate It’s dead.

Ian Lucky bastard. (56-7)
Following so close on Ian’s attempted suicide, it is difficult not to read the baby’s death
as a success where Ian has failed. Unlike the doubling in Buried Child between Vince
and the dead baby, or even the doubling in The American Dream, where the doubling
provides an interconnection between material figure and dead baby, in Blasted, the
double remains perpetually out of reach. The dead baby as a material object serves as a
sort of ideal for Ian. Where all he has been able to do is impotently fire an empty gun
into his mouth, the baby is able to die and to be recognized as dead, a task Ian will strive
to actualize for the rest of the play. He struggles to become the double, but he can never
quite reach the level of a performative double for the material dead baby.

Ian’s failure in doubling the baby, and in so doing embracing his own death is

another example of the manner in which performative repetition always manifests as

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iteration. As the play fragments into montage, Ian, like Mrs. Barker from The American
Dream, demonstrates the difference intrinsic in similarity. No matter what Ian does, he
cannot traverse the gap between “like” and double:

Darkness.

Light.

Ian cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt cunt

Darkness.

Light.

Ian strangling himself with his bare hands.

Darkness.

Light.

Ian shitting.

And then trying to clean it up with newspaper.

Darkness.

Light.

Ian laughing hysterically.

Darkness.

Light.

Ian having a nightmare.

Darkness.

Light.

Ian crying, huge bloody tears.

He is hugging the Soldier ’s body for comfort.

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Darkness.

Light.

Ian lying very still, weak with hunger.

Darkness.

Light.

Ian tears the cross out of the ground, rips up the floor and lifts the baby’s

body out.

He eats the baby.

He puts the remains back in the baby’s blanket and puts the bundle back

in the hole.

A beat then he climbs in after it and lies down, head poking out of the

floor.

He dies with relief

It starts to rain on him, coming through the roof.

Eventually.

Ian Shit.
In this montage surrounding the controversial image of Ian eating the baby, the play is at
its most material. The play focuses on images over words as Ian, in part, dedicates
himself to modeling the behaviors of a baby. In his introduction to Kane’s Complete
Plays, David Greig suggests that this montage presents the viewer with “images of Ian,
all the structures Of his life destroyed, reduced to its base essence — a human being,
weeping, shitting, lonely, broken, dying and, in the play’s final moments, comforted” (x).

While Ian is reduced, he has also been regressed. His behaviors during the montage echo

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his answer to Cate’s earlier question of what he knows about babies. Ian tells Cate that
“[they] shit and cry. Hopeless” (52). This is a significant part of the behavior Ian
models during the montage as he starts to identify himself as the baby’s double.

The eating of the baby underscores the continuation of this pattern of material
identification. In an explicit echo of the identification through cannibalism in Arrabal’s
The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria, Ian will try to become the baby’s double by
eating the baby and sharing the baby’s burial site. In some measure, this elaborate
struggle to make Ian into the double of the dead baby as material object finally succeeds.
Kane’s play takes the doubling further than Shepard. For Shepard, the resurrected
double, in that it appears alongside the dead baby, is a verification of the failure of
materiality - of resurrection - to overcome indeterminacy. Despite efforts to revise
Buried Child in order to make the dramatic text fend off rupture, materiality merely
inaugurates indeterminacy. In the character of Ian, Blasted acknowledges that a
resurrected double is not enough. The double has to double the baby’s death.

According to the stage directions, Ian achieves the material doubling for a
moment. He does die, and shares the burial space with the baby. Despite this apparent
success, Ian appears to be mistaken when he tells Cate, “When you die it’s the end” (56).
Ian may die, but he keeps going. Ian’s death becomes another artificial barrier for the
play to discard similar to representations of stage violence. Reading the text, Ian’s death
is clearly represented in the stage directions. However, a death that is not the end is
precisely the thing that escapes visual representation. In the realm of performance it is

too easy to think like Ian. A representation of death must be the end, so if Ian is not at

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the end he must not be dead. The text provides a moment where Ian fulfills the doubling
of the dead baby but this moment escapes performance.

Blasted provides a representation of a dead baby whose very materiality cannot be
repeated in visual performance no matter how much Ian strives for material
verisimilitude. Ian can equal the corpse’s deadness through textual representation but
visual representation presents the corpse as something that is always out of reach.
Despite Ian’s efforts to double the dead baby, performance can only represent Ian
doubling the corpse in a resurrected form. He may have lost his own eyes, but vision still
betrays Ian as he can only fill an identical role to Vince. Ian’s very effort to double the
dead baby emerges alongside the transformation of the dramatic form itself, as the play
transforms from a relatively linear narrative to a series of loosely connected fragments.
Only after it becomes clear in the realm of visual performance Ian will always fall short
of the dead baby because his death escapes the realm of visual representation, does
language reenter the play and fragmentation give way to linearity at the play’s
conclusion.

The effort to double the material image of the dead baby as a doubling that always
fails short of its object of representation, offers a means to understand Kane’s
acknowledgement of the performance of the cannibalized dead baby as a theatrical
image. The eating is the scene that in performance is supposed to equate Ian and baby
and offer a demonstration of the power of materiality in the theatre. However, Ian can
never fully actualize the image of the dead baby in performance. As the narrative
devolves into montage, the materiality of the dead baby cannot fulfill its function as an

emblem for the possibility, and the expansive potential of theatrical materiality. Attempts

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to show an expanding network of material signification emanating from the baby in
performance becomes a staged failure. In this sense, the dead baby is understood as a
theatrical image because it demonstrates what the text can do and performance lacks.
Text allows a fantasy of transcending materiality. In contradistinction, the material
image of a dead baby eaten becomes a theatrical image precisely in the manner that it
demonstrates that performance cannot place the dead baby as a fulfilled mechanism of
signification. The performed dead baby cannot be a material object that fully resonates
outward.

Ultimately, Blasted demonstrates that the most material theatre can never fully
materialize its object of representation. In the effort to move beyond a theatrical image
and perform shock, Kane’s play reaches toward Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty:

The theater will never find itself again — i.e., constitute a means of true
illusion — except by furnishing the spectator with the truthful precipitates
of dreams, in which his taste for crime, his erotic obsessions, his savagery,
his chimeras, his utopian sense of life and matter, even his cannibalism,
pour out, on a level not counterfeit and illusory, but interior. (92)
Kane’s theatre is certainly a cruel one, as it engages in the cannibalism, savagery, and
dismembering of bodies Artaud outlines. Even more than this, the import of Artaud’s
title, The Theatre and its Double should not be overlooked. The Theatre of Cruelty does
not engage in violence for its own sake, but is cruel in an effort to transcend the
artificialin that characterizes contemporary theatre. Only through glimpsing its truthful
double will the theatre really matter. In this sense, Vince and Ian are not the doubles of

the dead baby, but the dead baby is the double of the theatre that remains out of reach.

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As material as the cruelty mapped onto Ian’s body is, the materiality of Kane’s theatre
never attains the ideal material cruelty of the dead baby as double. Materiality always
falls short.

This inability to fully materialize Kane and Shepard’s material theatres other than
through the double that works against determinism is the theatrical space of the dead
baby. A metatheatrical sign that is a reminder of the lack and excess that illuminates the
space of performance and suggests that performance occurs as theatrical networks of

signification break apart and not just through interconnection.

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Part 111:

“It Pierces Too Sharp”64: Historical Contextualization and Performative Futures

Prelude: Perdition, the Traumatic Theatrical Matrix and Historical Context
On January 20, 1987 Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Royal Court Theatre
pulled Perdition amid a swirl of controversy two days before the play was scheduled to
Open. Written by Jim Allen, Perdition was based on the libel trial Of Rudolf Kastner. In
a published pamphlet, Kastner — a Hungarian Zionist leader during World War II — was
accused of collaborating with Eichmann and the Nazis by not warning the Hungarian
community about the Holocaust.65 The pamphlet argued that Kastner’s silence facilitated
the transport of trains to Auschwitz. For this consideration, Eichmann “allowed a special
train to take nearly 1,700 Zionist and other ‘prominents’ out of Hungary to safety in
Switzerland” (Rose 118). On behalf of Kastner the Israeli government sued Malkiel
Grunwald — the writer of the pamphlet — for libel. The 1954 trial quickly became a
platform to renew the accusations against Kastner: “The judge found most of Grunwald’s
allegations to be justified awarding token damages of one Israeli pound” (Rose 118).66

Perdition is a court room drama set in 1967 after the Six Day War. The fictional

Dr. Miklos Yaron brings a libel suit against Ruth Kaplan for publishing a pamphlet
accusing him of Nazi collaboration during World War II. Allen’s play both dramatizes
the Kastner case and shows its proliferation. Like Kastner, Yaron is a Hungarian Zionist
leader accused of keeping silent about the Holocaust, thereby facilitating the work of the
concentration camps. While this makes Yaron a stand-in for Kastner, they are comrades

and not the same person. Kastner’s war actions are used by Kaplan’s lawyer Alec Scott

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against Yaron: “It is clear Doctor Yaron, isn’t it? That you, Kastner, and other members
of the Committee collaborated with the Nazis” (64). Kastner was not alone to blame.
Other leaders in Hungary were guilty. In Allen’s drama, collaboration expands beyond
the borders of Hungary encompassing Zionist leaders in other Allied countries. Stanley
Karpin — a former Executive for the World Zionist Organization — confesses during
Scott’s cross-examination that his organization opposed British aid for European Jews:
Karpin: At the time our main priority was in building a Jewish homeland
in Palestine.
Scott: What did that have to do with it? Here were people in fear of their
lives.
Karpin: Yes, but the feeling was that had these refugees found sanctuary
in countries other than Palestine, there would have been no Jewish state.
Scott: Then what you are saying is that the holocaust Jews who were
being daily massacred were expendable. (30)
In one of Perdition ’s most controversial elements, the play moves beyond suggesting
betrayal by some of Hungary’s leaders and claims a vast Zionist conspiracy. Rather than
save Jews in any way they can, these leaders - both in Hungary and outside of it - use the
horror of the Holocaust to found Israel.67
Despite the radical difference in the mise en scene, Perdition shares much in
common with Blasted and the critical controversy that would surround Kane’s play eight
years later. Allen’s courtroom drama searches for truth and blame, and in so doing
contains and sanitizes the materialized violence that is Blasted ’s content. Perdition was

scheduled to be staged at the same theatre that would house Blasted. Perhaps the most

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significant link between the two plays is how play interconnects with critical response
forging a traumatic theatrical matrix of meaning. The public furor which kept Perdition
in the newspapers for almost two months after its cancellation shielded the theatre going
public from the trauma of the play’s performance. However, where Blasted ’s theatrical
matrix protected its audience from too much materiality, Perdition ’s theatrical matrix
insulated from Allen’s understanding of history.

Advance copies of Perdition were sent to the press. Diverging from the more
self-aware reviews of Blasted which cautioned readers about the trauma contained in the
very review that warns, the Royal Court Theatre was seemingly unaware that text can
traurnatize in its own right. In preparing reviewers for the trauma of Perdition by
creating a textual shield, the Royal Court shocked through the written word and merely
replaced the performative rupture the theatre was aiming to subvert with a textual variety.

Amidst the accusations that Perdition was anti-Semitic, bad history, and bad
drama, Perdition ’s trauma arose due to the perception that the play was history. Previous
to the play’s cancellation, Director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, Stephen Roth met
with Stafford-Clark among others and requested a statement in the program classifying
the play as fiction.68 Contextualizing the play as fiction dissociates the play from history
and provides enough protection for a performance to occur. There must be a perceived
distance between Perdition and history for a non-traumatic performance to emanate.
There must be a distance between Allen’s play and Kastner’s trial. Such a distance
ensures a gap between dramatic signifier and historical signified.

Apparently the difference between the bad history of Perdition that should not be

performed, and a perforrnable good history is that bad history warps contextualization

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and must be resisted, while good history contextualizes appropriately. The back and
forth public debate over the play questioned who is the purveyor of historical
authenticity, and who merely perpetuates falsehood. Historian David Cesarani was
commissioned by the Royal Court to write a report regarding the play’s historical
accuracy. In a letter appearing in the January 21, 1987 Guardian, Cesarani notes that his
objections were never substantively addressed: “The unhistorical and grotesque thesis of
the play remains unaltered, supported by quotations taken out of context and facts that are
frequently invented” (122). Similarly, Stafford-Clark suggests that his decision to pull
the play was facilitated by a selective use of history: “I saw the possibility that Perdition
was a dishonest piece of writing: both because it was so half-hearted in including any
mitigating factors, and because its passionate conviction led it to a picture of these
horrifying events that seemed less and less authentic” (141).

Opposing such a perspective, Andrew Homung and the play’s would be director
Ken Loach take aim at one of the play’s critics. The play and not history is being taken
out of context: “Victoria Radin’s ‘review’ of Jim Allen’s banned play Perdition is an
extraordinary mixture of distortion and misrepresentation” (136 ). Loach and Homung
go on to suggest that the context of the play has been “presented through the distorting
lens of a hostile press” (136).69 For Cesarani and Stafford-Clark, an authentic
contexualized history comes to the rescue and stops a distortion being performed, while
for Homung and Loach distorting influences stop the authentic from its performative
emergence.

Loach and Homung wonder what all the fuss is about. Perdition was pulled and

is being attacked in the press for repeating an argument that has been made in other

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forms. Most if not all of the charges made in the play can be attributed to various
historical documents and texts:
The analysis is supported in the play by reference to events, speeches,
documents, and first-hand accounts of what happened. It has widespread
support among published historians, and British and Israeli Jews. If you
can read it in books, why can you not see it on stage? (136)
By recognizing a difference between textual and performative representation, Loach and
Homung replicate a question that has been broached in various contexts over the course
of this dissertation. At heart they consider: Why does performative representation create
a trauma that must be shielded and defused while textual representation freely enters
public discourse?
The January 23, 1987 leader for The Guardian answers Loach and Hornung’s
question:
The Royal Court would not entertain a play which put the blame for the
slave trade on the Yoruba chiefs of West Africa, however much alleged
historical justification an author might say he had found. Sorry, but it
categorises people, it pierces too sharp, and, which is what drama should
not do, it peddles certitudes. (125)
While bad history takes specific events and writing of the past and places them in an
inappropriate context, bad drama creates certitude where there should be indeterminacy.
In a strange transposition of terms, Ashes to Ashes is traumatic precisely because its
indeterminate narrative resists contextual and historical foreclosure, but for the lead

writer at The Guardian indeterminacy creates a non-traumatic play. A drama is traumatic

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to the degree to which it pierces the shield of critics and audience. Good plays do not
challenge the shield, and bad plays pierce the shield either by Blasted-like excess
materiality, or Perdition-like manifest historical certitude.
Much like Kane’s epiphany that there isn’t anything you can’t represent on stage
occurs after she reads Saved, Allen’s dramatic text contains the idea of a performance. In
contrast to this potential which resides in all dramatic texts, the sources he culls for his
historical evidence contain no such imaginative future event. As text, Perdition contains
the kernel of a different and more visual signification while the sources the play draws
upon are limited as texts. They will never represent in any other register.
The published version of Perdition - produced by Ithaca Press —- continues the
struggle to contextualize the play “appropriately.” In addition to the play, the edition
contains excerpts from two of Allen’s sources, a representative sample of public and
newspaper commentary, and a note by Cesarani outlining the differences between the
published version, the initial version he reviewed for historical accuracy, the version sent
to the press, and the version that was supposed to be performed. According to Cesarani:
The extent of the current revision is such that it renders a good deal of the
commentary at the time of the ‘Perdition affair’ almost irrelevant: much of
the detailed critical comment has been deflected in the editorial process.
Yet these changes have themselves become an important dimension for
any assessment of the play. (111)

For Cesarani, the changes validate his claim that the play was not historically accurate,

despite Allen’s assertions to the contrary. This is not to say that the current version has

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completely rectified earlier mistakes. Cesarani makes it clear that the play still does not
represent “anything approaching a truthful representation of the past” (111).

From the perspective of a theatrical matrix, the published edition successfully
binds the traumatic dramatic text and the idea of performance it contains. Cesarani’s note
emphasizes that far from perpetuating the trauma of the “Perdition affair,” the published
version of the play is a memorial to an absent text, and a reminder of a missed trauma.

Of course, trauma can never be anything other than the missed event. The text embodies
a very literal reminder of this missing. In a reflection Of how life can imitate art that is
already imitating life, Allen was sued for libel by Nathan Dror for referring to him in the
play. Dror may sue Allen, but he ignores Allen’s sources. The idea of performance
contained in the dramatic text represents more traumatically than historical text. Dror’s
name becomes a textual rupture and a missing, as the published text excises all references
to Dror and replaces these passages with a blank space that serves as reminder for what is
lost.

Perhaps most striking is how the published version of Perdition contextualizes the
textual missing that is the dramatic text as a monument to an extra-textual missed event.
At the beginning of the play, the text lists a cast who would never perform the play and
underneath informs a reader: “This is the revised text of the play not first performed at
the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs on 22nd January 1987.” The published version marks
the lack of a performance as historical occurrence, and in so doing the text contains both
the idea of a performance of the current text and an idea of a performance that seemingly

will never occur. It is too late.

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The final part of this project begins with an emphasis on the similarity between
the material and historical traumatic theatrical matrixes because in Part III I turn my main
focus to temporality. As the discussion of Perdition should make explicit, this is not a
departure. Exploring temporal significations and contextualizations shows that
materiality and temporality are twin constructs in Modern Drama. The struggle between
indeterminacy and certitude is both a material and temporal struggle over how dramatic

meanings accumulate.

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Chapter Five:
“This Story Has More Other Hands than a Hindu God”70: Mathematical Theatre and the
Subversion of Indeterminate History
Where a work of fiction features historical characters and historical events it’s
reasonable to want to know how much of it is fiction and how much of it is history. So let
me make it as clear as I can in regard to this play. - Michael F rayn
Joan in a nineteenth-twentieth century environment is as incongruous a figure as she
would appear were she to walk down Piccadilly today in her fifteenth century armor. To
see her in her proper perspective you must understand Christendom and the Catholic
Church, the Holy Roman Empire and the Feudal System as they existed and were
understood in the Middle Ages. — G. B. Shaw71
Why does Perdition pierce too sharply? If we believe the Frayn and Shaw epigraphs
which begin this chapter are believed, combining history and drama creates a blunt
instrument, rather than the inverse. For F rayn, a history play can never be simply an
historical representation. Contrary to public outcry that, if performed, Perdition would
be understood as historically authentic, Frayn distinguishes a perpetual gap between
drama and history. Dramatizing history makes history indeterminate. A history play
leaves an audience uncertain of the veracity of what they have just witnessed. Was it
truth or merely a play? Similarly, Shaw advocates knowing large societal structures in
their historical context to avoid dramatic deformation.
Seemingly in an effort to bridge the mimetic gap between dramatic signifier and
historical signified, Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) and Shaw’s Saint Joan (1923) include
massive paratexts. Frayn’s postscript promises to resolve the ambiguity between history

and fiction which his drama perpetuates, and Shaw’s preface familiarizes his readers with

the large historical structures which must be understood to place Joan in an appropriate

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context. Frayn and Shaw’s paratexts are yet another functioning component of the
theatrical matrix, analogous to dramatic criticism, theatrical reviews, and playwright’s
reflections on their own plays, working to create a material and determinate
understanding of dramatic performance.

Frayn and Shaw’s paratexts illustrate the difficulty in establishing a mimetic
theatre. The marked opposite of The Wild Duck which embraced the dramatic potential
of theatrical rupture, Shaw and F rayn return to the history play in the hope of
reconnecting things to ideas. If the play cannot make such a connection, then the paratext
must. By doing the critics’ work for them, these paratexts work to contextualize the
historically indeterminate before it is recognized as indeterminate. The paratext is both
the optimistic hope that the author can create a mimetic theatrical event by including
enough historical background, and the pessimistic realization that if the play cannot self-
contextualize, the dramatic text needs a theoretical appendage.

In Copenhagen and Saint Joan, a mimetic theatre becomes a scientific theatre, as
both plays incorporate quantum mechanics into their suturing project. Shaw discusses
the electron in his preface, and Frayn’s play is the dramatization of a meeting between
Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Quantum mechanics constitutes an ideal metaphor
for the optimistic / pessimistic understanding of historical foreclosure within the paratexts
because both plays try to conceptualize drama as akin to traditional science. Drama
should fill all the gaps, be a vehicle for causality, and demonstrate that the world makes
sense. However, atomic theory posits uncertainty as guiding scientific principle. By

evoking the potential of the electron, the paratexts face the dilemma of mimetic

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indeterminacy. What happens when drama — like science — ceases to Offer even the hope
of firm semiotic links?

Taking indeterminacy as their subject matter, Copenhagen and Saint Joan strive
to regain a measure of historical mimetic foreclosure, and out-science science. In
addition to dramatizing the desire to contextualize historical indeterminacy, Copenhagen,
and Saint Joan, take part in this desire. In so doing, these plays illuminate a compulsion
to view dramatic form as historical determinacy. By dramatizing two key moments of
19203 indeterminacy — the efforts to understand Joan’s heresy as a perpetuation of
Catholic faith and not a challenge to it, and the movement of science beyond causality —
these plays position drama as antithetical to indeterminacy. By suturing contextualization
and embracing historical causality drama can de-liminalize thereby creating

comprehensible narratives.

I Joan and the Mathematical Theatre

On May 16, 1920 Joan Of Arc was canonized as a Saint. This event marked the end of a
nearly five-hundred-year rehabilitation process. After being burning as a heretic in 1431,
Joan’s heresy was expunged by way of official inquiry in 1456, she became Venerable in
1904, and Blessed in 1908. Joan as historical figure presents an historical signifier whose
very liminality exceeds all efforts to contextualize her within an historical signified. In
excess of any political or religious reasons for Joan’s canonization, the canonization is
the ultimate act of contextualization. Her meaning surpasses definition. Or, at least, her
meaning exceeds twentieth-century definition. The effort to categorize Joan in the early

twentieth-century never encompasses what she is, or how the Catholic Church wants to

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define her. Like the emblem of the dead child or trauma, as historical figure Joan
illuminates the shortcomings of understanding and representation. Saint becomes the
latest effort to fill in a gap that Venerable and Blessed left Open.

Three and a half years after Joan’s canonization, Bernard Shaw picked up where
the Catholic Church left off with Saint Joan. In his preface to the play, Shaw argues that
Joan matters to current society, but in our efforts to paint a romantic picture of her we fail
to understand her and her relevance to us. 72 Joan’s resonance was intertwined with her
historical reality. We must put her in the proper historical context. Unsurprisingly for
Shaw this means appropriating the Catholic Saint as a Protestant hero. However, this is
not a simple vilification of Catholic oppression. Joan’s voices are an early Protestant
challenge to Catholic authority, and her trial is a more tolerant means of carrying out
justice than most contemporary examples. Placing Joan’s tragedy in its appropriate
historical context reveals that a universal human trait and not the superstitious Middle
Ages led to Joan’s fate:

Thousands of women, each of them a thousand times less dangerous and
terrifying to our Governments than Joan was to the Government of her
day, have within the last ten years been slaughtered, starved to death,
burnt out of house and home, and what not that Persecution and Terror
could do to them, in the course of Crusades far more tyrannically
pretentious than the medieval Crusades which proposed nothing more
hyperbolical than the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens. (36)
Historical knowledge becomes a double gesture for Shaw — history is important because

it reveals both past and present. The liminality and indefinability of Joan as historical

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figure can be overcome, and simultaneous to such a contextualization, the present can be
understood more clearly.
This twin temporal conceptualization is actualized through the dramatic text.
Drama as a conduit for the contextualization of history that transforms understanding of
the present is nothing new in dramatic plots: placing history in its appropriate context
forces Oedipus to acknowledge his role in the plague that ravages Thebes; it constructs
Mrs. Alving’s understanding of history’s biological legacy in Ibsen’s Ghosts; and the
parallel inability to separate history from the present defines the action in Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman, and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie.
Shaw’s Saint Joan differentiates itself from these other examples. The prologue
defines the play as more than the representation of historical contextualization and its
redefinition of the present. Dramatic form fulfills the role that its content represents:
All I claim is that by this inevitable sacrifice of verisimilitude I have
secured in the only possible way sufficient veracity to justify me in
claiming that as far as I can gather from available documentation, and
from such powers of divination as I possess, the things I represent these
three [Cauchon, Lemaitre, and Warwick] exponents of the drama as saying
are the things they actually would have said if they had known what they
were really doing. And beyond this neither drama nor history can go in
my hands. (44)

Drama moves beyond history by combining it and divination, thereby uncovering root

causes and motivations unknown even to the actual participants. The dramatic text

refigures an indeterminate Joan within a firmly understood historical context. In so

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doing, Shaw’s prologue suggests that his play succeeds where previous aesthetic
representations of Joan and canonization have failed. By creating a dramatic text that
reconnects to history, Shaw has forced the indeterminate historical figure into a dramatic
form.

In the process Of demonstrating how drama can contextualize Joan’s
indeterminacy, Shaw explicitly connects religious faith to the disparate indeterminacy
manifest in quantum mechanics:

Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations
or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a
warning to me against such heresy. But why the men who believe in
electrons should regard themselves as less credulous then the men who
believed in angels is not apparent to me. If they refuse to believe, with the
Rouen assessors of 1431, that loan was a witch, it is not because the
explanation is too marvellous, but because it is not marvellous enough.
(41)
Like religion, science has become a matter of faith. People consistently believe in things
that are not seen, and for no better reason than that scientists claim it is true. Is it any
more Of a leap of faith to believe in God than to believe an electron exists? Faith has
transformed over the years, not lessened. People may scoff at Joan’s accusers, but it
would be something very different if the very precepts of Science were challenged like
Joan challenged Catholicism.
Where canonization tries to reconcile the difference between Joan and the

Catholic faith, drama places Joan in her proper context by revealing the stress points that

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canonization tries to gloss over. In the play Cauchon reflects on the nature of Joan’s
crimes:
To her the French-speaking people are what the Holy Scriptures describe
as a nation. Call this side of her heresy Nationalism if you will: I can find
you no better name for it. I can only tell you that it is essentially anti-
Catholic and anti-Christian; for the Catholic Church knows only one
realm, and that is the realm of Christ’s kingdom (99).
Joan’s secularism challenges the mission of the Catholic Church, and her nationalism
challenges the Feudal social structure. She must either be converted or her challenge
must be marginalized. Far from being unfair, when Joan’s accusers fail in the former,
they must resort to the latter. Canonization tries to consume uncertainty within a
structure of belief, but the drama suggests that placing events in appropriate context
illuminates the uncertainty that faith must resist at all cost.

Appropriate historical context envisages drama as a deconstructive force. By
insisting on the potential of drama to contextualize Joan as determinate figure, and in so
doing understand her capacity to dismember the Catholic Church, Shaw curiously
characterizes himself with the new breed of faith — science. The theatre - like faith itself -
is transitioning from the failing faith of religion to the new faith of science. While there
are still those who attend the theatre like they attend church, to a large degree a religious
theatre becomes a bankrupt activity: “For in London the critics are reinforced by a
considerable body of persons who go to theatre as many others go to church, to display

their best clothes and compare them with other peoples” (46). In the midst of his

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scathing critique of theatre critics, Shaw offers hope for a theatre audience more closely
associated with the faith of science:
But I can take no more notice of it than Einstein of the people who are
incapable of mathematics. I write in the classical manner for those who
pay for admission to a theatre because they like the classical comedy and
tragedy for its own sake (46)
Shaw imaginatively constructs himself as the theatre’s Einstein. Critiques of Saint Joan
based on its length, or the epilogue’s lack of verisimilitude are a result of
misunderstanding the language of Shaw’s theatre. Where previously atomic theory was
equated to religion in that both are a result of faith, by becoming Einstein Shaw takes
faith out of the equation. An audience either understands the mathematics that is Shaw’s
incontrovertible theatrical truth, or an audience does not matter because they cannot
understand the math.

Shaw’s metaphor transforms science to a retrograde activity. The scientific
theatre is a return to the tried and true form of classical theatre. More than the deforming
of Einstein’s science, Shaw’s version of relativity equates Einstein with theatrical return
and envisions scientific innovation as historical understanding. In the same way
understanding Joan allows a new understanding of the present, understanding theatrical
performance as atomic theory brings the ideals of the theatrical past to the present. As
belief systems, science and religion both metaphorize the interconnection between
historical contextualization and present revelation that is integral to the Shavian Theatre.

Shaw critiques religion for the impossibility of blind belief. Once the church

becomes more about being seen than religious Observation, the ideal of theatre as religion

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is bankrupt and theatre as science emerges. Shaw may assert that the existence of
electrons must be accepted with a religious-like faith because they cannot be seen, but the
faith that is necessary for science is supplemented by the math. In this sense science one-
ups religion. Religion is strictly a matter of belief or doubt. In science — if you can
understand the math - and in theatre — if you can understand the intrinsic virtue of
classical theatrical structure — there is a guide to help foster belief in the unseen.
Quantum theory offers theatre the seductive promise of a piercing exactitude exhibited by
“the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimeter every movement
and position in the dance of the electrons” (41).

Heisenberg’s 1927 theorization of uncertainty shatters this faith in the exactitude
of science. Where Joan’s trial shows dramatic form overcoming indeterminacy by
placing a liminal figure in her appropriate historical context, scientific uncertainty offers
no such analogy. Heisenberg suggests that the more accurately the position of an atomic
particle is known the less accurately its velocity can be known. Such an assertion
eliminates Shaw’s absolute perception of science in which the scientist has determined
“every movement and position in the dance of the electron.” In the world of uncertainty,
science fails to be an effective metaphor for dramatic representation. Or, at least, science
is an inefficient means of analogizing Shaw’s structural theatre of exactitude. A precise
theatre based on science becomes a bankrupt proposition. Metaphorically, science
becomes inferior to religion. Religion may not have a foundation to support its faith in
determinacy, but at least religion does not transform into a faith based on the guiding
principle of indeterminacy. A theatre based on science becomes a theatre displaced from

the clarity of context.

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II Canonizing the Electron

More than seventy years after Heisenberg conceptualized uncertainty, Michael Frayn’s
Copenhagen premiered. In taking Heisenberg and uncertainty as its subject matter,
Copenhagen struggled to overcome indeterminacy in a fashion remarkably similar to
Saint Joan. Like Shaw’s Joan, Frayn’s Heisenberg is a liminal figure indeterminate in
the face of history. Echoing the scientific discoveries that made him famous, Heisenberg
remains resistant to a causal narrative despite the desire to contextualize him within the
larger historical structures of World War II and quantum mechanics.73 If Heisenberg
himself can be contextualized, Frayn’s play can validate the mathematical theatre which
the uncertainty principle destabilizes.

Why did Werner Heisenberg go to Copenhagen to visit Niels Bohr in 1941? This
trip is the historical “fact” that drives the action of the play. Rather than failing to
provide any answer to this question, the play provides too many answers. Bohr
understands the visit as Heisenberg’s effort to ply his former mentor for information on
the progress of the Allied nuclear program, Bohr’s wife Margrethe thinks Heisenberg
came to show off his position as a leading Nazi scientist, whereas Heisenberg suggests
that the trip was about Nazi and Allied scientists both discouraging their governments
from pursuing a nuclear program.

Ostensibly, the play is a sort of dramatic experiment. The uncertainty - the core
unknowability - of Heisenberg’s 1941 visit is meant to echo the theoretical precepts of

Hesienberg’s uncertainty principle. In his postscript to the play, Frayn suggests an

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analogy not only between Heisenberg’s visit and the uncertainty principle, but between
the principle and all motives:
What people say about their own motives and intentions, even when they
are not caught in the traps that entangled Heisenberg, is always subject to
question - as subject to question as what anybody else says about them.
Thoughts and intentions, even one’s own - perhaps one’s own most of all -
remains shifting and elusive. (99)
F rayn’s success in transfiguring Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle to human
motivations, and an understanding of such a transfiguration as a dramatic experiment is
explicit in the enthusiastic critical response to the play. In “’Disturbing the Spirits Of the
Past’: The Uncertainty Principle in Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen,” Donna Soto-Morettini
suggests that Frayn:
structures his play like a controlled-observation experiment: conditions
surrounding the eve of Heisenberg’s visit are carefully set up and played
out a number of times, then behaviors and reactions are carefully recorded.
Each time, data is analysed, questioned, and the characters become more
detached, and more observant of themselves. But their scientific method
is not adequate to the task of answering the fundamental question: why did
Heisenberg come? What was it he had to say? (71)
Thoughts and intentions remaining “shifting and elusive,” just like characters becoming
more detached and observant of themselves is certainly not new to dramatic practice.
Again to return to the above examples of contextualizing history in order to understand

the present: Oedipus must become more detached and observant of himself to understand

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his role in the plague; both Reverend Manners and Mrs. Alving must become more
observant of themselves to understand their roles in community hypocrisy; and
detachment and observation of the self is the very structure of The Glass Menagerie.
Further, in A Doll ’s House, Nora must become more observant of herself in order to
understand her need to develop as a person; all the characters go through such a process
in O’Neill’s Long Day ’s Journey Into Night; self-observation is the essence of the
obsessive labeling and listening to the past self that might be a present self in Beckett’s
Krapp ’s Last Tape; and such detachment is the foundation of Brecht’s alienation effect.
Despite the scientific pedigree of his characters there is nothing terribly
experimental in Copenhagen ’s detachment, observation, analysis, and recording of
events. Repeatedly going over the past in an effort to try to understand what the past
means seems to go back as far as drama itself. This historical contextualizing compulsion
has become an obsessive concern with the emergence of the well-made play and the
transition from the well-made play to the modern play in the work of Ibsen. In The
Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw suggests that “Now an interesting play cannot in the
nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of
personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed” (137). The
experimental method of Copenhagen — like Shaw’s evocation of quantum mechanics as a
harkening back to classical theatrical practice — is the theatrical method of Ibsen and
Shaw in which problems are obsessively discussed and approached from numerous
different angles. To paraphrase Strindberg’s introduction to Miss Julie, where Strindberg
suggests that “the new wine has burst the old bottles,” in Frayn’s play the old bottles are

still quite serviceable.

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Questioning why Heisenberg went to Copenhagen presupposes a classical mode
of understanding remarkably similar to Shaw’s pre-uncertainty view of science. Asking
such a question, and celebrating the inability to derive an answer as a puzzle implies a
unitary sense of motive. The play creates an illusory historical shell game, presenting
Heisenberg’s, Bohr’s, and Margrethe’s understanding of Heisenberg’s motives as
alternatives. The play creates indeterminacy by understanding possible motives as
mutually exclusive, ignoring the possibility of multiple motives. Heisenberg may have
simultaneously wanted to impress Bohr, been curious about the progress of the Allied
nuclear program, and been nervous about its potential implications. But even this
rejection of multiplicity is beside the point. Frayn’s play compulsively fills historical
indeterminacy with answers, looking for the answer that will satisfy the demands of the
unanswerable question. Put in slightly different terms, there is a true motive - a secret
answer - to the uncertainty intrinsic to questioning that keeps escaping the characters
grasp.

This certainty that uncertainty is dictated by a secret determinate answer that
keeps escaping revelation differentiates Copenhagen from more explicit dramatic
indeterminacy. Copenhagen never reaches the indeterminacy of Ashes to Ashes. While
Devlin shares Bohr, Margrethe, and Heisenberg’s desire to know the exact details of the
past, Copenhagen transforms Devlin’s impotent desire for contextualization into an
explicit truth that just cannot be revealed. Even the motives of a character like Hedda
Gabler — despite the desire of the critics — are not contained in an explicit but unrevealed
explanation. So, Frayn’s dramatization of uncertainty and his equation of uncertainty

with motive does not seem to bring new perceptions to dramatic practice. Frayn’s play

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does the inverse, contextualizing Heisenberg’s uncertainty as something very determinate
but secret. Understanding uncertainty in such a fashion seems to react against
uncertainty. By colonizing uncertainty as an unknowable secret, uncertainty is used
against dramatic indeterminacy. The idea of indeterminacy as something that has no
answer - be it a scientific principle or a dramatic structure - is rejected.
The inherent dramatic nature of uncertainty - and of science itself - is emphasized
in Frayn’s postscript as he evokes Heisenberg to make his case:
The actual words spoken by my characters are of course entirely their
own. If this needs any justification then I can only appeal to Heisenberg
himself. In his memoirs dialogue plays an important part, he says,
because he hopes ‘to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations.’
But, as he explains, conversations even real conversations, cannot be
reconstructed literally several decades later. So he freely reinvents them,
and appeals in his turn to Thucydides. (97)
Shaw justified writing drama in the classical style by anachronistically metaphorizing
himself as Einstein. Outlining the historical link between Heisenberg and Thucydides,
Frayn follows in Shaw’s footsteps. Rather than the endgame, Heisenberg’s text is a
bridge filling in the history play’s gaps. In the same way the inclusion of Shaw and
Frayn’s paratexts imply that the dramatic text cannot approach history without the aid of
a textual appendage, Frayn’s paratext exhibits a similar shortcoming. The fictitious
element of dramatic dialogue is a gap that the paratext cannot suture. This is a marked
contrast to Shaw’s paratextual justification of the gap between what historical figures said

and the lines his characters speak as the role of the history play and historical analysis.

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To overcome the failure of the paratext, F rayn establishes Heisenberg’s biography
as a paratext of the second degree. In Heisenberg’s biography F rayn finds a perfect
justification for the historical liberties inherent in the history play and the way to
transform dramatic dialogue from fiction to a more Shaw-like historical analysis.
Heisenberg creates dialogue in his own biography and substantiates such an act by
evoking a paratext. A mathematical inverse of Shaw’s valorization of classical writing
by turning to modern science, Heisenberg rationalizes dramatizing his scientific
discoveries by evoking the classical historian Thucydides. The gap between historical
“truth” and dramatic history play never completely closes. In a nesting doll of
contextualization, the distance between history and fiction in dramatic dialogue is
ultimately dismissed as insignificant because such a process receives a classical
historian’s stamp of approval.

“Rooted in conversations,” science is an inherently dramatic act. As a non-
recorded dramatic performance, the dramatic record that is the origin of uncertainty is
lost. In essence, the origins of uncertainty are indeterminate. In just one of the many
ironies of Modern Drama’s need to contextualize, Heisenberg attempts to suture the
indeterminate gap in the historical origin of uncertainty by becoming a dramatist.
Heisenberg’s memoirs engage dramatic form to represent what history has left
unrepresented. In a repetition of Aristotle’s assertion in The Poetics that probability and
necessity define poetry whereas history is what has happened, Heisenberg uses dramatic
form to present the necessity underlying determinate past events (16). Seemingly, the

dramatic structure of scientific process is more important than the exact give and take

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within that process. Authentic and created dialogue can merge so long as the dramatic
form survives.

Drama becomes both a mark of the content that has been lost in the recording of
history, and an authentic return to the form of scientific inquiry. Placing his play in the
tradition of Heisenberg and Thucydides, Frayn characterizes drama and history as
working in concert. Evoking Heisenberg as dramatist emphasizes there is nothing
untoward in using drama to suture the historical gap. Drama as determinate gesture is
demonstrated by the author of the uncertainty principle. In the second manifest irony,
Frayn justifies the historical validity of a dramatic text in the postscript of a play based on
the uncertainty principle.

The postscript attempts to banish and minimize indeterminacy as much as
possible. Frayn compulsively justifies his play based on uncertainty by demonstrating
the bond between dramatic text and historical event. In the first words to his postscript -
which in the form of epigraph are also the first words to this chapter - Frayn banishes as
much historical indeterminacy from this play as possible. Imaginatively transforming
from author to reader, Frayn establishes the function of readerly desire in reading a work
of fiction based on historical truth. A reader wants the history separated from the fiction.
If there are any historical gaps, the reader deserves to know.

Apparently, the questions that an audience needs to know after reading
Copenhagen include: Did Heisenberg really not “understand the crucial difference
between a reactor and a bomb?” (80) Did Heisenberg really not do the diffusion equation
establishing how much Plutonium he would need to create a chain reaction? (81) And,

of course, could Heisenberg really have been intentionally delaying the German atomic

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weapons program? Dealing with the key debates among Heisenberg researchers, as well
as the historical “facts,” Frayn eliminates as much indeterminacy within his play as he
can by establishing clear mimetic links between the arguments made by his characters
and the verifiable historical evidence.74
Perhaps Frayn is right, and his audience really does want historical context
authorizing the dramatic text’s authenticity. After all, does an audience ever want
indeterminacy? Again in the postscript, Frayn alludes to the manner Heisenberg’s
scientific audience may not have been thrilled with the implications of uncertainty and in
so doing, creates another link between himself and Shaw: “Einstein never accepted it,
though he could never find a way around it” (101). For Frayn, Einstein validates a desire
to escape uncertainty, while Shaw’s rhetorical ownership of Einstein establishes the
scientific cachet which equates classical theatrical practice as cutting edge. Wanting to
escape uncertainty does not have to be bad science. In the same way Einstein wants, but
can never find a way around uncertainty, Frayn imaginatively projects himself as the
reader of his play and takes it as a certainty that the reading public wants history
separated from fiction. Like Einstein this imaginary public wants to banish uncertainty,
whether it is scientific or historical. Shaw and F rayn put an experimental gloss on an
essentially conservative conception of the interaction between audience and theatrical
performance. Historical context and the desire to escape uncertainty is both what the
audience wants, and such contextualization possesses the Einsteinian stamp of approval.

Despite the work of the postscript to reduce indeterminacy by historical certitude,

the postscript -like Einstein - can “never find a way aroun ” history as indeterminacy as

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it relates to the core uncertainty of the play, why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen in
1941?:
He [Heisenberg] almost certainly went to dinner at the Bohrs’ house, and
the two men almost certainly went for a walk to escape from any possible
microphones, though there is some dispute about even these simple
matters. The question of what they actually said to each other has been
even more disputed, and where there’s ambiguity in the play about what
happened, it’s because there is in the recollection of the participants. (95)
The postscript never reaches historical certainty. However, much like Thucydides’
endorsing the blurring between historical event and historical enactment as a legitimate
historical project, the postscript relies on the repeated “almost certainly.” Some
likelihoods must be taken as absolute occurrences in order to write a history play about
uncertainty. Heisenberg and Bohr must be understand as performing certain actions, and
only then does uncertainty emerge as the uncontainable residue. Uncertainty is the
fluctuating variable within the rigid determinate structure, and not the controlling
principle.

The suturing function in the postscript substantively differentiates reading the
play from seeing it performed. Again in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw suggests
that one of Ibsen’s primary theatrical innovations was replacing a drama of action with a
drama of discussion:

The discussion conquered Europe in Ibsen’s Doll ’s House; and now the
serious playwright recognizes in the discussion not only the main test of

his highest powers, but also the real center of his play’s interest. (135)

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A discussion play is a drama “in which problems of conduct and character of personal
importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.” The entirety of the
performed Copenhagen resembles an unsuccessful unraveling — to use Shaw’s
vernacular — more than a discussion play. By exploring the possible reasons for
Heisenberg’s trip to Copenhagen the two-act play interrogates a gap in historical
knowledge that is of interest to World War II historians and physicists. Heisenberg and
Bohr’s historical uncertainty fails to reach the requirement set by Shaw in which the
discussion covers “problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the
audience.” It is less than clear how the uncertainty behind Heisenberg’s visit matters to
the viewing / reading public.

The postscript and its suturing establishes the importance of the first two acts to
the audience. The postscript creates mimetic links between the narrative of the play and
larger meaning-making structures, and thereby transforms the unraveling into a
discussion. Paratext elevates the uncertainty at the heart of Heisenberg’s visit from the
particular to the universal in suggesting that uncertainty is at the heart of all human
motives. The play matters to its audience to the degree it contextualizes. This
contextualizing function of the postscript as well as its size and location suggest that it be
read as the third act of a discussion play. The individualized conflicts of the first two acts
are illuminated in ways that matter to an audience.

Performing Copenhagen leaves the discussion unfilled and the Shavian thesis
unresolved. Heisenberg as character simultaneously celebrates uncertainty and

acknowledges the inability to overcome it in the play’s conclusion:

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Our children and our children’s children. Preserved, just possibly, by that
one short moment in Copenhagen. By some event that will never quite be
located or defined. By that final core of uncertainty at the heart of all
things. (94)
Where a performance concludes with the possibility that the “uncertainty at the heart of
all things” may be the saving grace that kept nuclear weapons from the Germans, in its
published version the postscript as third act attempts to complete the discussion through
historical contextualization. The gaps in a performance can be filled by writing. What
performance threatens to disrupt textual historical discussion smoothes over.

This third act recontextualizes the mimetic valence of the play proper. While the
written version of the play in general, and the postscript in particular, facilitate the
contextualization of the play within larger registers of dramatic and historical
representation, this is a contextualization that has no end and perpetually falls short. In
the postscript, Frayn notes that “[s]o much new material has come to hand, in one way or
another, that I have extensively overhauled and extended the Postscript to coincide with
the production of the play in New Yor ” (126). New material gives Frayn an opportunity
to add more almost certainties to the list he has compiled. Text becomes the balm for
dramatic indeterminacy. Adding more information to the postscript will enable text to
complete the discussion comprehensibly and overcome performative uncertainty.
However, no matter how long the postscript gets, no matter how many sources it cites,
text cannot transform the uncertainty of Heisenberg’s visit into certitude. The best text
can do is be satisfied with “almost certainly,” and ignore the loss that can never be filled

by asserting that the form of historical models is more important than the specifics such

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models may contain. Frayn can only look for the next place for textual expansion that
may finally complete the transformation from “almost certainly” to certitude.

A compulsive belief that textual representation can overcome the very dramatic
indeterminacy emblematized in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle proliferates beyond
Copenhagen. Frayn and David Burke — the actor who played Bohr in the original run of
Copenhagen — co-wrote The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue (2000). Set during the
initial run of Copenhagen, the short novel plays with the conventions of non-fiction, and
encourages its readers to categorize it as another Copenhagen paratext. The book is
structured as alternating chapters by Burke and F rayn in which Burke tricks Frayn into
believing that German instructions for setting up a table tennis table may reveal
Heisenberg’s secrets. The book perpetuates the desire to textually foster historical
certitude that is so explicit in Copenhagen 's postscript, as the narrativized Frayn is easily
made Burke’s dupe. The Copenhagen Papers reveals that Frayn’s character mistakenly
places his faith in textual representation. Text will not suture the gap, solve the secret,
and reveal an “authentic” lost history.

Over the course of the narrative Heisenberg continually serves as a sign of textual
representation and certainty. If Frayn is unable to glean the secrets contained in the text
Burke supplies him with then he must be mistranslating and misinterpreting the text, or,
alternately, the text must be in code. The text contains answers. Ironically, Frayn
eventually learns he is being duped as Matthew Marsh - the actor who plays Heisenberg -
explains the truth to him. Marsh as Heisenberg provides certainty thereby creating a lens
for Frayn to interpret Burke’s forged texts. Rather than the text providing determinacy,

the text —— like any other mimetic structure — must be contextualized in a determinate

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fashion. As the one who enlightens Frayn, Heisenberg undergoes a substantive
transformation from Copenhagen to The Copenhagen Papers. In the play, Heisenberg
emblematized indeterminacy which the play and the prologue strove to contextualize. In
the book, Heisenberg / Marsh becomes the voice of causality explaining how texts
signify.
Performance illuminates appropriate textual signification. The actor who plays
Heisenberg can explain how texts mean because uncertainty is simply a role to be
assumed and discarded. More than refiguring what Heisenberg signifies, Marsh’s
explanation to F rayn suggests that performance can overcome indeterminacy. The
performer contextualizes the text and shows the author how the text means. The man
who plays Heisenberg proffers escape from the convoluted muddle of textual
representation. The determinacy of Marsh as actor can overcome the indeterminacy of
Heisenberg as character. Marsh’s determinate project signifies backward to Copenhagen
and provides another example of paratext attempting to contextualize indeterminacy:
Matthew Marsh, it occurred to me, had been put in rather the same
position as his character. Like Heisenberg, he had found himself torn
between keeping a secret and revealing it - between the demands of
loyalty and those of common humanity. Like Heisenberg (if we are to
believe his own account of his actions), he had preferred the latter. Like
Heisenberg again, he understandably didn’t wish to advertise his choice.
(80)

Marsh is not simply an actor playing a role. He experiences the same conflict and

resolves it by making the same decision. However, the actor who plays the role and

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resolves a similar conflict in a similar way provides answers where previously there was
uncertainty.

As character, F rayn is looking for text to contextualize indeterminacy, but there is
no indeterminacy to be found. Frayn’s view of reality becomes destabilized because he
believes in causal relationships. He believes Burke’s mysterious pages connect to larger
structures. The pages must contain more than is initially apparent. These pages cannot
simply be a bad (and sometimes incomprehensible) set of instructions for constructing a
table tennis set:

Could there be some other message buried in all that humorousness?
Could this table-tennis table just possibly be something more than a table-
tennis table? Further down the page I could see a thumbnail sketch: [ . . .]
Whatever this represented, it didn’t seem to be a table-tennis table
or any part of one. (14)75
The instructions might contain a code that if cracked would reveal unknown information
about the German scientists held prisoner by the British at Farm Hill. Frayn’s
understanding of the infinite potential of mimesis is shattered as Heisenberg / Marsh
informs him that textual representation can be transparent. Sometimes a bad translation
of how to set up a ping pong table is simply a bad translation for how to set up a ping
pong table. Burke’s desire to play a practical joke is the only excess representational
residue the pages contain.

In the same fashion that Copenhagen ’s postscript becomes a makeshift third act

for the printed play, F rayn encourages the readers of The Copenhagen Papers to read it as

if it too, were a play:

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So here it is, laid out rather like the dialogue in a play. MF speaks first;
DB speaks second; and we shall both have a lot more to say to each
otherbefore we are through. It’s a bit like a play in other ways as well: the
story falls neatly into two acts, each neatly rounded off by a celebratory
dinner, and there will be plenty of dramatic conflict between the two of us
before we reach the resolution and reconciliation over the final dinner at
the end of Act Two. (5)
Frayn underestimates the play-like qualities of the text when he claims that it is “rather
like the dialogue in a play.” The text is structured as a play aside from the inclusion of a
prologue and an epilogue. Both Saint Joan and Copenhagen illustrate the contextualizing
value of appending prefatory and concluding appendages to a dramatic text. My earlier
characterization of The Copenhagen Papers as alternating chapters by Frayn and Burke
was inaccurate, an attempt to ignore the text’s dramatic structure and impose novelistic
conventions upon it. Breaks in the text are marked by a shift in speaker. There is no
reason to apprehend each attribution of a new speaker as a new chapter other than a
desire to ignore the dramatic structure of the text by conceptualizing play as novel.

In Frayn’s assertion that the text is “a bit like a play” the text plays with genre
distinctions. Despite being broken into acts, and almost completely made up of dialogue,
the text is not a play — it is something else that merely gestures toward a play. Frayn’s
understanding of the text as something that is influenced by dramatic form while
remaining fundamentally apart leads to his vision of a textual structure that is Aristotelian
and symmetrical. Dramatic conflict between characters finds completion in a scene of

resolution and reconciliation. Neatness is emphasized as there will be two acts each

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completed by a dinner. Text as play is a play structured by logic and causality. As book
approaches play (or possibly as play almost escapes conceptualization as play) a vision of
classical dramatic structure — and dramatic causality - develops. Dramatic causality
emerges as text ceases to be dramatic.

Causality is explicitly performed in the text’s content. Frayn becomes most
uncertain after he learns the truth, after Marsh demonstrates an appropriate context that
the reader has known from the beginning. Knowing about Burke’s joke forces F rayn to
realize that “the ground had shaken - and went on shaking” (81). However, this shaking
does not result from uncertainty of events. The ground of reality shakes because F rayn —
despite the evidence — cannot believe he has bridged the gap between fiction and
“truth.”76 A reader may be given direct causal links, but despite such a structure F rayn as
character cannot help but question the veracity of determinate bonds. Frayn redefines
uncertainty as his inability to believe in the guiding principles of causality and
authenticity regardless of what he sees before him.

Frayn needs Marsh to see the uncertainty amid what appears to be a determinate
network. F rayn tries to fulfill the role of Marsh for the reading audience. No matter how
rigid and how textual the reimagining of dramatic texts becomes, the ghost of Heisenberg
and uncertainty influences the text and will not be tamed. Early in the second act Frayn
exults in the book’s inability to mean in the same way as the documents he is tricked by:

At this point, possibly, even you — yes, you reading this, who are far too
shrewd to be taken in by stunts like the one I fell for, who have never been
hoaxed in all your life — perhaps even you begin to feel a faint shadow of

unease. Up to now you have assumed that I, at any rate, was telling the

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truth, and that this was a factual account. You have felt as superior to my
ridiculous na‘r'veté as I did to Mrs. Rhys-Evans’s. What you’re thinking
now is that I have been at some pains to remind you of the kind of writing
I usually do, which is fiction. [ . . .] Is this all a fiction as well?

And this “David Burke” who has apparently been making such a
fool of me, and who is now allegedly writing the account of it with me —
is even he an artfully suggested fiction, my own private version of the real
David Burke, just as my Niels Bohr is of the real Niels Bohr?

[ . . .] You believed that a grown man who writes plays about
quantum mechanics was taken in by such childishness! That is the most
ludicrous implausibility so far! And yet you managed to believe it! The
joke was on you all the time!

No, of course not. I was telling the truth before. It’s all fact. Up
to the last paragraph. And now it’s fact again. It is! I assure you!

Honestly! Believe me! (82-3)

The narrativized Frayn like the Frayn who wrote the Copenhagen postscript

imaginatively constructs an audience that interprets Burke’s joke on Frayn and its

aftermath as a biographical narrative detailing backstage hijinks. Whereas the

Copenhagen postscript begins with the assumption that the reading audience wants to

know truth from fiction, the joke played on F rayn as well as the possibility of the joke

finally being on the audience relies on the audience not being able to determine the

difference between truth and fiction. Frayn’s imaginary audiences are filtering

mechanisms placing the texts in the service of determinacy. Displacing determinacy

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from the texts to their reception, determinacy becomes a sort of litmus test. Does the
audience get what they want from the text, or is the joke ultimately on the audience?

The evocation of both imaginary audiences allows the delineation of a text that
pleases an audience as a text that establishes firm mimetic links. In contrast, in a text that
leaves an audience open to humiliation uncertainty becomes an historical and mimetic
disjunction that an audience is unable to reconcile. Such a process defines uncertainty as
a failure of mimetic understanding and historical relationships. The Copenhagen Papers
evokes uncertainty because the audience cannot establish firm connotative links between
text and signified. The reading audience has no answer to whether the dialogue attributed
to David Burke is written by David Burke. In the absence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty
revealing itself to be a mask for Matthew Marsh’s contextualization, texts provide no
answers. The imaginary audience’s desire for mimetic certitude must go unanswered.

Both Shaw’s introduction to Saint Joan and the content, structure, and postscript
of Frayn’s Copenhagen, and The Copenhagen Papers envision the dramatic text as
mathematical equation. This retrograde conception of mathematics — this determinate
mathematics — creates a bond between dramatic structure, mathematical equation, and
historical causality. Contemporaneous to the initial performance of Copenhagen, and the
publishing of The Copenhagen Papers, David Auburn’s Proof (2000) presents drama as
certitude. The play forges clear mimetic links between mathematical certainty and
historical causality that perpetually eludes Frayn’s imaginary audiences.

The play opens after the death of renowned mathematician Robert. Due to a
mental breakdown, Robert has spent the last several years of his life writing gibberish in

notebooks and being cared for by his daughter Catherine. The first act culminates with a

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crisis of mimetic uncertainty. Catherine presents one of her father’s notebooks to
Robert’s prote’gée Hal containing a new mathematical proof. Hal assumes that Robert
must have regained his faculties and created the mathematical proof. However, Catherine
claims to have written it. In so doing, the narrative creates the very rift that distresses
Frayn’s imaginary audience. Mathematical certitude separates from historical certitude.
Mathematics promises order and understanding, but fosters indeterminacy in the wake of
its logical structure and illumination of causality. Who wrote the proof emerges as
another version of the question: “Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen?”

Similar to the way each character in Copenhagen has a theory for why Heisenberg
came, toward the end of Proof Hal believes he has proved Catherine’s authorship by
interpreting the proofs mimetic signs. While the handwriting looks like Robert’s,
“[p]arents and children sometimes have similar handwriting , especially if they’ve spent a
lot of time together” (80). For Hal, far more revealing than the handwriting is the math.
More than mathematical causality, the math offers proof of mimetic causality. The proof
uses newer math, math developed over the last decade. Hal dismisses the argument that
if Robert was well enough to write the proof he may have been well enough to learn the
new math. The style of the math — the math signature — is more revealing than the
handwriting. Hal argues for absence as further evidence of a mimetic signature. Since
Robert always dated his writings and the proof is not dated, Robert did not write the
proof.

Despite Hal’s mathematical detective work, Catherine suggests that mimetic links
cannot be forged from absence and mathematical style. She suggests that -— mimetically

speaking — the proof does not prove anything:

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Hal: Come on, Catherine. I’m trying to correct things.
Catherine: You can’t. Do you hear me?

You think you’ve figured something out? You run over here so
pleased with yourself because you’ve changed your mind. Now you’re
certain. You’re so . . . sloppy. You don’t know anything.

The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you
decided with your buddies, it’s just evidence. It doesn’t finish the job. It
doesn’t prove anything.

Hal: Okay, what would?
Catherine: Nothing.

You should have trusted me. (80-1)

The question of who wrote the proof is too large a signifier to be contextualized by the
discussion in the play and the evidence procured by the mathematical detective.

While Catherine suggests the proofs mimetic signature can only lead to
uncertainty, the play takes a very different route. By the time Hal attributes ownership of
the proof to Catherine, the audience already knows that this is the correct interpretation.
The Second Act of Proof transforms the mimetic indeterminacy of who wrote the proof
into mimetic certitude by historical enactment. Mimetic understanding transfigures from
“just evidence” that “doesn’t prove anything” to objective knowledge. This
transfiguration occurs as a result of the convergence of temporalities. Rather than
conceptualizing the past as an uncertain event open to interpretation, in Auburn’s play the
past is performed. By performing the past on the stage, the audience sees Robert’s effort

to start working again. Robert thinks he is writing a revolutionary proof, but when

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Catherine reads it aloud it is clear that Robert is producing nonsense. He couldn’t have
written the proof. The performed analepsis provides all the proof needed.

Performing the past -bonding history and vision —— creates firm mimetic links
between past and present and banishes uncertainty. Following in the footsteps of
Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones,
Proof alluringly presents an objective and intelligible past that would satisfy the mimetic
desires of any imaginary audience. However, such a vision of history as visual analepsis
deforms the historical. Presenting the past as visually determinate requires a confluence
of temporalities. Past becomes something it previously was not. Past becomes present.

Dramatic time provides determinacy as it contains the possibility for temporal blurring.

III Performing the Emperor

I created the role of the Emperor. That role belongs to me. That Irishman, he just wrote
the play. — Charles s. Gilpin77

Because the play has been explicitly and tacitly deemed a significant object of US.
cultural history and a narrative meriting preservation, analysis of The Emperor Jones
must be ethical, focusing on the reasons for the ‘distance between what is and what ought
to be. ’— Ann Folino-White78

 

 

 

In The Copenhagen Papers, phenomenology differentiates Burke’s tricking of Frayn,
from Frayn’s possible duping of an imaginary audience. For Frayn, the body of the
actor who plays Heisenberg substitutes a determinate textual interpretation for a signifier
that cannot reconnect to a signified.79 The reading audience has no such recourse to
grounding the narrative signifier with the phenomenological performer. The novel as

dramatic text perpetuates uncertainty by being empty of all material content.

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Frayn’s text embraces the actor’s body as a site of contextualization. However,
like any other paratext, the phenomenological performance can either be a resource for
contextualizing the dramatic text or a means to foster its indeterminacy. Eugene
O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones is an ideal site to explore the conflicting possibilities of
performance as paratext because the dramatic text as well as the play’s production
history performs the struggle between historical indeterminacy and historical
contextualization as a conflict of performance.

Sometimes characterized as the play that made Eugene O’Neill famous, The
Emperor Jones was a hit by any standard, running for two-hundred-four performances in
its initial Broadway run (Schaeffer 36).80 Even more significant than the play's impact on
O'Neill's career, the play provided a first in American theatrical representations of race.
In playing Jones in the original production, Charles S. Gilpin became “the first Negro
ever cast by a white American company for a major role” (Schaeffer 32).81 While Aoife
Monks may be overstating matters in asserting that by the casting of Gilpin, “O'Neill's
place in the history books as an important figure in the history of African-American
emancipation seemed a sure thing,” Gilpin’s performance did appear to be a watershed
moment of the Harlem Renaissance. Montgomery Gregory, the director of the Howard
Players l919-1924, asserted that “[i]n any further development of Negro drama, The
Emperor Jones, written by O'Neill, interpreted by Gilpin, and produced by the
Provincetown Players, will tower a beacon-light of inspiration” (157).

Underlying such characterizations of The Emperor Jones as an early century
“progressive masterpiece” is a faith in the political power of representation (Monks 541).

As Peggy Phelan has noted in Unmarked, there is a common belief “that greater visibility

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of the hitherto under-represented leads to enhanced political power” (2). The Emperor
Jones is progressive by Gilpin's act of playing the role. However, increased visibility is
not always inscribed as an empowering gesture. In playing the role of Brutus Jones,
Gilpin’s increased racial visibility was used to give a theatrical representation of a black
man as oppressive colonizer. As the play progresses, Jones is revealed as a ruthless
plunderer of native resources, a murderer, and perhaps most unforgivably, a coward. In
addition, in a play that is almost exclusively made up of a Jones monologue, a modern
reader seemingly cannot help but read Jones’s dialogue as anything more than an
offensive racial caricature. According to Caswell Crews, in the very playing of the
offensive traits that make up the character of Jones, Gilpin betrays his race: “We imagine
that if Mr. Gilpin is an intelligent and loyal Negro his heart must ache and rebel within
him as he is forced to belie his race” (qtd in Krasner 486).

The ambiguity over how to read representations of race in the play can manifest in
the same interpreter. W. E. B. DuBois both lauded O’Neill as one of “our great
benefactors — forerunners of artists who will yet arise in Ethopia of the Outstretched
Arm” (qtd in Manuel 4), and, five years later, suggested “that blacks are ‘still
handicapped and put forth with much hesitation as in the case of ‘The Nigger,’ ‘Lulu

3,”

Belle,’ and ‘The Emperor Jones (qtd in Krasner 487). Similarly, Langston Hughes

lauded Gilpin as representational figure in “When the Negro was in Vogue,” but wonders

’9 66

in “Shows, who wanted The Emperor Jones running through the jungles? Not
Harlem!” (223, 259).82

The ambiguity associated with mimetic representations of race - this tension

between whether an audience member privileges the reading of Gilpin’s racially marked

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body or the mimetic actions undertaken by that body in performing the role of Brutus
Jones - underscores the effort at destabilization that is at the core of The Emperor Jones ’s
structure and action. Gilpin’s body is placed in the service of the play. The Emperor
Jones succeeds in decontextualizing mimetic understanding, as Gilpin as Jones
perpetually defers what race means in the play. Gilpin / Jones succeeds in escaping from
origins where Jones, as a character, fails.

The theatrical representation of race in The Emperor Jones remains an object of
performative exploration to this day. In the same manner that Gilpin's body became an
overdetermined racial signifier by calling attention to the performing body that does the
signifying, the Wooster Group's revival of the play brought racial representation back to
the forefront. Starring as the Afiican-American protagonist, Kate Valk played Brutus
Jones in blackface for the Wooster Group production.

The Emperor Jones was not the first time the Wooster Group used blackface in
their staging of a canonical text. The group had used the technique in their 1981 staging
of Route 1 & 9 — a liberal restaging of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. However, where
Route 1 & 9 was controversial and eventually led to a loss of funding, the use of
blackface in The Emperor Jones was met with nearly universal acclaim.” For example,
in his New York Times review of the 2006 Wooster Group revival of their earlier
production of the play Charles Isherwood lauds Kate Valk’s “riveting, haunting, [and]
altogether astonishing” performance as Brutus Jones. Isherwood evokes the theatrical
ghosts of Sarah Bernhardt, Laurette Taylor, and Maria Callas to celebrates the theatrical
fashioning of Valk’s performance as he contrasts the “thick, oily black makeup covering

her entire face” to “[t]he petite, Caucasian, obviously female Ms. Valk” underneath the

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blackface. The language used in such an enthusiastic review underscores the tension
between the theatrical avant-garde and the canonical. Isherwood uses the terms of
postmodernism to describe how Valk in blackface presents “a simulacrurn of a
stereotype,” but the results of this postmodern theatrical triumph is to institutionalize (and
perhaps sanitize) Valk alongside Bernhardt.84

Conflating the postmodern with traditional theatricality is explicit in the Wooster
Group’s decision to stage The Emperor Jones. Aoife Monks notes that due to “their
radical fragmentation of canonical texts, the Wooster Group have established an
international reputation for their deconstructive approach to theatrical performance”
(561). Despite such a reputation, the Wooster Group’s production of The Emperor Jones
was not so much a deconstruction of the play as a re-deconstruction. In staging O’Neill’s
play the Wooster Group not only presents a revival of a text written in 1920, but also
performs a revival of their own 1993 staging of the play. By re-playing the role of Brutus
Jones thirteen years later, Valk transforms a deconstructive performance into a canonical
performance. Where the 1993 production by the Wooster Group may have subverted
expectations for O’Neill’s play, the 2006 revival institutionalizes the earlier production as
a performance event worthy of reproduction. Both Isherwood and the Wooster Group
engage in a complex process of colonizing the postmodern potential of a deconstructive
staging by inscribing it as a normative stage practice - Valk in blackface is categorized as
analogous to Bernhardt playing Marguerite Gautier - and Valk, in replaying the role,
evokes a remembrance of the novelty of the first time she played the role.

Gilpin and The Wooster Group do not merely perform the play, their

performances enact the play’s structure and conflict. Like Saint Joan and Copenhagen,

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The Emperor Jones is a history play. Initially performed less than six months after Joan’s
canonization, Brutus Jones joins Joan and Heisenberg as a liminal and indeterminate
figure. Similar to the questions of “Why did Heisenberg go to Copenhagen?”, and “What
was Joan’s relationship to God?” O’Neill’s play asks “Who is Brutus Jones?”

As a character, Brutus Jones believes in individual identity as a thing apart from
personal and collective history. To a large degree, the unfolding of the action is an
explicit demonstration that Jones is gravely mistaken. Jones’s non-normative view of
history will be repressed by a linear conception of temporality that privileges the
importance of the historical upon the present. However, by privileging the importance of
history to J ones's identity, The Emperor Jones performs its own counter historical
discourse. In Romancing the Postmodern, Diane Elam suggests that “[p]ostmodemism
is not a perspectival view on history; it is the rethinking of history as an ironic
coexistence of temporalities” (3). “[A]n ironic coexistence of temporalities” is precisely
the means by which the play demonstrates history as something meaningful for Jones.
The historical becomes relevant as Jones is forced to confront phantoms from his past. A
counter-historical discourse of coexisting temporalities must be used to rescue the
relevance of the historical from a protagonist who believes in his ability to self-fashion an
ahistorical identity in the present.

In this sense, the play presents perforrnativity and history as opposing sides of a
dialectic. A performative Jones is a Jones who can live entirely in an indeterminate
present. The play enacts the power of the historical - and with it the relevance of
dramatic certitude — by enacting history’s destruction of the performative. However, in

creating the historical as an anti-indeterminate and anti-performative gesture of certitude,

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the play follows the same pattern that would be used in Proof over eighty years later.
O’Neill’s play literally presents history. History is a visual analepsis enacted on stage.
This creates a determinate past that only becomes determinate by failing to be past. Past
only becomes certitude as the past becomes more firmly integrated into the present.
History connotes certitude by enacting and by its visual presence becoming something
else. Isherwood's comparing Valk's performance to Bemhardt's performing of the
classics, and the Wooster Group's making the avant-garde canonical by repetition,
explicitly echo the action of the play by transforming a present performance into a
determinate historical context and offering an alternative to the ambiguity inaugurated by
Gilpin’s performing body.
Gilpin puts the onus for dramatic creation in the moment of performance when he
asserts: “I created the role of the Emperor. That role belongs to me. That Irishman, he
just wrote the play.” O'Neill has not created the role of Emperor in his writing of the
play, but has simply given Gilpin what he needs to create the character. The manner in
which Gilpin performed the role verifies his belief in ownership. In what Krasner
describes as Gilpin's postmodern approach to performing the play, the actor incorporated
“unpredictability on stage” in part by refusing to perform the play as written:
He balked at what appeared to him to be an excessive and repetitive use of
the term nigger, preferring instead to use the less offensive terms black-
baby, Negro, or colored man. (484)

By changing the language of the play, Gilpin presents performance as subversion. For in

the staging of a play the largest historical resonance derives from the dramatic text. This

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is especially true in playing a role that has never been staged before. Gilpin comes to a
character that is only a character due to the language on the page.

Gilpin's postmodern performance rejects the staging of the play as a historical
appropriation. The changing of language demonstrates a fluid vision of theatrical
representation. Theatrical representation is not a static attempt to actualize textual
representation. As a consequence, performative representation places primacy in the
present. The historical text can be used or discarded at Gilpin's discretion as he
represents Brutus Jones. Brutus Jones is nothing more or less than the sum total of
Gilpin's actions and utterances within a specific performance.

This creation of Jones in a performative present and not in a historical text offers
a productive link between Gilpin's performance of Jones and Jones’s performance of self
within the narrative of the play. For in his implication that theatrical representation
occurs in the performative present and that the historical text is relatively superfluous,
Gilpin replicates Brutus Jones belief in the ability to self—fashion identity.

The Jones who opens the play is nothing if not a personification of the American
Dream. Solely by his own hard work, and the tireless oppressing of those who have
resources waiting to be exploited, Jones has progressed “[f]rom stowaway to Emperor in
two years!” (118). Despite Jones’s pride in his fulfilling the role of self-made man, this is
possibly the only unfettered glimpse Jones gives of his relationship to the past over the
course of the opening scene. The play opens in Jones's nearly deserted audience chamber.
Nearly deserted, as the indigenous population have gathered to plan Jones's overthrow.
Smithers, a white trader who shares a history of oppressing the natives with Jones,

reminds Jones of their past and how their roles used to be reversed, as formerly Jones was

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Smithers’ subordinate. In response, Jones tells Smithers: “What I was den is one thing.
What I is now's another” (117). Jones's division between then and now begins to
illuminate his conception of identity. The now has nothing to do with then. Who I am
has nothing to do with who I was.
As the scene progresses, Smithers continues to interrogate Jones about his history.
The relationship between the history Jones professes and some independent historical
truth is convoluted, to say the least. Smithers confronts Jones with his belief that Jones
escaped from jail in the United States, but according to Jones “Dat's all talk” (121).
Smithers brings up “'0' the bloody lies you told the blacks 'ere about killin' white men in
the States,” but Jones wants to know “How come dey're lies?” (121). What Smithers
believes to be historical truth transfoms to lies, and what Smithers thinks are lies become
truth in Jones's revisions. As Smithers attempts to place Jones in a historical context of
past actions, historical truth keeps slipping through his fingers. In the midst of Smithers
continued attempts to question Jones about his history, Jones offers a clarification:
Jones (in the same tone — slightly boastful): Maybe I goes to jail dere for
getting’ in an argument wid razors ovah a crap game. Maybe I gits twenty
years when dat colored man die. Maybe I gits in ‘nother argument wid de
prison guard was overseer ovah us when we’re wurkin’ de road. Maybe
he hits me wid a whip and I splits his head wid a shovel and runs away
and files de chain off my leg and gits away safe. Maybe I does all dat an’
maybe I don’t. It’s a story I tells you so’s you knows I’se de kind of man
dat if you evah repeats one word of it , I ends you’ stealin’ on dis yearth

mighty damn quick! (122)

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This narrative clarifies Jones’s understanding of history more than Jones’s history. By
the time Jones devolves into threats there is very little for him to worry about. He need
not fear Smithers revealing his past because Smithers - like the audience - cannot be sure
of J ones’s past. While Jones’s historical narrative presents a logical progression and a
progression that is not surprising to Smithers - from murder to prison to murder to escape
— the obsessive use of “maybe” resists any such determinate historical foreclosure.
Jones’s maybes are a marked contrast to F rayn’s use of “almost certainly” in an effort to
get at historical truth in the Copenhagen postscript. Like Gilpin’s understanding of the
playtext as something fluid that can be molded as necessary for each present performance
of Jones, Jones evokes the historical as indeterminate -— Jones controls history, not the
inverse. By using “maybe” as indeterminate marker, Jones can invoke the historical as a
means of threatening Smithers. Jones is a dangerous man. Since he might have killed, he
might kill again. At the same time, Jones’s refuses to own the historical narrative as an
absolute definition of individual identity (“Maybe I does all dat an’ maybe I don’t”).
Like Gilpin, Jones exploits the exterior historical event while refusing to be bound by it.

In contrast to an historical definition of identity, Jones offers a conception of self
based on perforrnativity. Like an Austinian speech act, to say is to do: “Ain’t a man’s
talkin’ big what makes him big - long as he makes folks believe it?” (120). Jones
believes he can construct the self solely by his ability to utter the self in a persuasive
enough fashion to foster belief. More than being smarter, stronger or — as Smithers
would have it — luckier, Jones becomes Emperor by the speech act of persuasively

proclaiming himself as such. Or, more precisely, in his performance of an ahistorical

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identity, Jones evokes the conception of a performative identity Judith Butler would later
apply to gender85 :
Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were,
which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests
a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. (177)
I am less concerned with the racial implications of Jones’s performative distancing
himself from history so he can create an empowered Jones of the present than in
highlighting the nature of such a constructive practice.86 Jones’s use of self-fashioning to
perform a present by saying and doing while destabilizing the historical by presenting it
as indeterminate is the process Jones uses to become Emperor.

This is a vision of identity the rest of the play demonstrates as insufficient. The
narrative of the play, from the second scene forward, illuminates the failure of Jones’s
perforrnativity. By showing the continued relevance of the historical, a self-fashioning
based on the present becomes a less and less tenable means of constructing identity.
Jones will be destroyed because of his inability to integrate his performative identity in
which he is what he says with a more traditional conception in which he is what he has
done. As Jones himself notes, “Dat Emperor job is sho’ hard to shake” (138).

The performative Jones will not go down without a fight. For while the plot to
depose Jones may have developed earlier than he thought; he has a contingency plan for
escape. Jones planned an escape route for just such an occasion, and he had the foresight
to bury food along the path. All Jones has to do is make it through the forest by a path he
knows well and he can escape the island and live the good life off the spoils of the

natives. Despite the native revolution, Jones’s world view has not changed. He may

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have to run for his life, but he is still the Emperor. That is to say, Jones still believes in
the power of speaking and acting to keep historical truth at bay, which determines a self
based in the present.

However, upon entering the forest it becomes impossible to perform identity.
History becomes an absolute and demonstrates that regardless of what Jones would like
to be, history determines who he is. In his explication of his past to Smithers, Jones was
able to use history to threaten Smithers while keeping the past at bay by the interjection
of the indeterminate “maybe.” Once Jones is in the forest, he as well as the audience see
Jones’s past acted out in front of them. History becomes personal, as memories from
Jones’s past torment him and hinder his escape. The first of these visualized memories is
Jeff, Jones’s first murder victim. “[M]aybe” is exorcised from the equation as Jones, upon
seeing Jeff shooting craps, tells the apparition: “Nigger, I kills you dead once. Has I got
to kill you ag‘in?” (136). Similarly, Jones confesses to killing the guard in his escape
from the chain gang: “1 kills you, you white debil, if it‘s de last thing I evah does! Ghost
or debil, I kill you again!” (140).

Jones wants to reject history in favor of the performative. Despite this desire,
upon being confronted with his history Jones tries to escape it by replicating it. Upon
seeing the “maybe” given independent veracity - in the visions of Jeff shooting craps and
the guard of the chain gang - Jones tries to dispel this independent historical truth by
continuing down the road of history. Jones tries to return to the performative by
completing the historical narrative - by becoming involved in the historical events which
unfold before his eyes. He will escape the power of these historical events by killing the

specters from his past, just like he did the first time.

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Escaping the eruption of past into present becomes an impossible task. Trying to
escape history, Jones gets further enmeshed in a historical trajectory. This compulsion to
escape the memory by enacting the memory and thereby illuminating the interconnection
between Jones and history is what causes Jones to flee from the site of each memory in
an effort to maintain his performative self.

All Jones needs is to be able to find the other side of the forest and he will be able
to continue the performative present that is the persona of the Emperor. To make it
through the forest is to demonstrate that what Jones does and what he says is who he is,
not what he has done. However, Jones gets lost in the forest. Trapped in the forest and
distracted by his own memories, Jones must confront the impossibility of forging an
identity divorced from what he has done. Even more horrific from Jones‘s perspective,
the memories of the forest illuminate a vision of identity that transcends individual
history to encompass collective history. Jones is forced to confront the African American
collective experience of being sold as a slave, of coming to the United States on a slave
ship, and an even earlier primitivist history involving a witch doctor and a crocodile god.

As Philip J. Hanson has suggested in “The Emperor Jones : Naturalistic Tragedy
in Hemispheric Perspective“, “the play argues his [Jones’s] crimes cannot be separated
from his racially based experience - and his race’s history - in America” (135). Jones’s
crimes also cannot be separated from his identity. This is what Jones can never accept.
Having experienced the freedom and the empowerment of being able to live entirely in
the present by his evocation of the past as indeterminate and his performing whatever role
he wants to currently perform, Jones cannot accept the helplessness of a self that cannot

be refashioned to suit the needs of the present, let alone a self that may be fashioned by

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large cultural forces before its birth. O’Neill’s play metaphorizes as much in the final
scene. A gunshot is heard and the natives carry Jones’s body onto stage at the almost
identical spot Jones entered the forest. The death of Jones seems to suggest that if only
Jones could have accepted the forces of history as part of his self he may have been able
to traverse the forest with a better understanding of himself. Without such an
understanding Jones can run through the forest all night and literally not go anywhere.
As Hanson’s emphasis on historical determinacy would suggest, it is possible for
a performer to minimize and marginalize the importance of the first scene’s performative
Jones. Not everyone playing Jones brings the same performative self-fashioning to the
role as Gilpin. Langston Hughes describes a Harlem performance of the play with Jules
Bledsoe playing Jones. Hughes’s summary of Bledsoe offers a vision of a performer
much more willing to accept the forces of history than either Gilpin or Jones:
He [Jules Bledsoe] appeared in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones at
the old Lincoln Theater on 135th Street, a theater that had, for all its noble
name, been devoted largely to ribald, but highly entertaining Vaudeville of
the “Butterbeans and Susie” type. The audience didn’t know what to
make of The Emperor Jones on a stage where ‘Shake That Thing’ was
formerly the rage. And when the Emperor started running naked through
the forest, hearing the Little Frightened Fears, naturally, they howled with
laughter.
“Them ain’t no ghosts, fool! The spectators cried from the
orchestra. “Why don’t you come out o’ that jungle - back to Harlem

where you belong?”

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In the manner of Stokowski hearing a cough at the Academy of
Music, Jules Bledsoe stopped dead in his tracks, advanced to the
footlights, and proceeded to lecture his audience on manners in the theater.
But the audience wanted none of The Emperor Jones. And their manners
had been all right at all the other shows at the Lincoln, where they took
part in the performances at will. So when Brutus continued his flight, the
audience again howled with laughter. And that was the end of The
Emperor Jones on 135‘'1 Street. (258-9)
Hughes’s description is often evoked in criticism of the play as a demonstration of
dissatisfaction with the play within the African-American community. While Hughes
certainly demonstrates this, his description also alludes to the inadequacy of traditional
fourth-wall theatrical representation. Like Jones’s unwillingness to be a passive
receptacle for history and like Gilpin‘s unwillingness to simply pronounce O‘Neill‘s
words, the Harlem audience is unwilling to watch a performance simply unfold. Similar
to the vaudeville shows the audience was used to seeing, the audience expected The
Emperor Jones to provide an opportunity for it to “take part in the performances at will.”
So, it is not only that the play, due to some inherent quality, displeases the Harlem
audience, but the Harlem audience is subjected to an inferior production. Rather than
performing the ideals of Jones, Bledsoe is content to utter O’Neill’s words.
Correspondingly, he expects his audience to submit to the conventions of the theatrical
event. By the subversion of Bledsoe’s traditional theatrical event, the audience shares a

Jones-like world view.

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Hughes’s description of the Harlem audience’s rejection of Bledsoe’s well
meaning but traditional performance in favor of taking part in the performance at will
offers a more far-reaching evocation of Jones. Unlike his performativity outside the
forest, inside the forest and confronted by his memories, Jones faces an antithetical
version of performance. Upon seeing Jeff shooting craps, Jones “stares fascinatingly”
(135). Jones has made a transition from performativity to watching a traditional
performance. Reminiscent of Brecht’s critique of the theatre, and what Bledsoe expects
from the Harlem audience, the horror of seeing a past from which Jones cannot escape
commingles with the horror of being an audience member who must submit to the
performance occurring before him. Jones has no control. By shooting Jeff and forcing the
memory to dissipate Jones reasserts control. Action replaces passive spectatorship.

J ones’s next enacted memory raises the stakes. Rather than simply being forced to
be an audience member, the prison guard of the chain gang forces Jones to become an
active performer in the scene: “The prison guard points sternly at Jones with his whip,
motions him to take his place among the other shovelers. Jones gets to his feet in a
hypnotized stupor” (139). As fascination with the previous memory becomes a
“hypnotized stupor,” the guard strikes Jones with his whip. Jones has been absorbed
within the memory, as he feels the pain of the blow. However, in his effort to replicate
history in order to escape the memory, Jones realizes that unlike the guard’s whip, his
shovel is not real. He has to assert control outside of memory to banish the historical
performance. Jones must reassert linear temporality by reentering the present and

banishing the past into the past. Unable to hit the guard with his shovel, Jones shoots him

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with his gun and thereby reasserts control and reaffirms the distance between performer
and audience member, and between past and present.

As each scene progresses, Jones finds it more difficult to escape the converging
temporalities, and finds his bullet supply diminishing. In the next scene, the performances
become cultural. Part of a slave auction, Jones becomes paralyzed with horror. On a slave
ship, Jones’s “voice, as if under some uncanny compulsion” joins in a collective wail
(146). In the final scene before the natives murder Jones, “he moves with a strange
deliberation like a sleep-walker or one in a trance” and later, he “has become completely
hypnotized” (147, 148). O’Neill’s text dramatizes the victory of history over
performativity as it grapples with the nature of performance. Jones is forced to crumble
before an irresistible power which the Harlem audience rejected. The text overcomes the
performativity of the present by reasserting a historical theatricality in which past
becomes present. The text narrativizes the failure of an individual to control a
performance. The historical antecedents are too strong, and the individual - whether Jones
or Gilpin - must be absorbed within the historical theatrical matrix of meaning.

The parallel between Jones’s performance of self and Gilpin’s performance of
Jones do not stop with the belief of the present overcoming the historical. Like Jones,
Gilpin’s performance of the present relies on indeterminacy. In his discussion of Gilpin’s
revision of the playtext in performance, Krasner confesses:

Admittedly it is difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly where, how
often, and in which of the over 1,500 performances Gilpin changed the

text. I am not necessarily concerned with the date of such changes

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(something we will probably never know anyway). In all likelihood Gilpin

altered the text differently on different occasions. (489)
Krasner’s relegating Gilpin’s transformation of the dramatic text to the realm of the
unknowable could be characterized as the inherent “maybe” of theatrical performance.
While Folino-White asserts that the play is “a significant object of US. cultural history
and a narrative meriting preservation,” the play can only be such an object by equating
the dramatic text with the play. Understanding the play as Gilpin’s performances of the
play involves a recognition of the gaps in the archive of US. cultural history. Ephemeral
in its very nature, Gilpin’s revision of O’Neill - like Jones’s efforts to destabilize the
historical event - challenge the primacy of the preexisting historical event while
simultaneously resisting the specifics necessary to institutionalize performance as artifact.

Gilpin’s theatrical “maybe” transcends the intrinsic impossibility of archiving a

performance to include the relationship between O’Neill and Gilpin. Schaeffer notes that
“O'Neill threatened to have him fired but finally vented his feelings by telling him, 'If you

'0”

change the lines again, I'll beat the hell out of you (3 5). However, according to Gilpin,
as quoted in The Cincinatti Star Times: “My understanding of the character has
developed as I have worked with it and new meanings are constantly unfolding. Mr.
O’Neill has been very kind in this respect, giving me the liberty of changing the lines to
suit the characterization” (qtd in Krasner 484). To complicate matters even further, while
in one letter O’Neill characterized Gilpin “all ham and yard wide” (qtd in Krasner 484),
in 1946 O’Neill said: “As I look back now on all my work, I can honestly say there was

only one actor who carried out every notion of a character I had in mind. That actor was

Charles Gilpin” (Schaeffer 37). Or, to put the liminality and the ambiguity of Gilpin’s

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acting body in terms analogous to those used by Jones: maybe The Emperor Jones is a
US. cultural artifact or maybe Gilpin’s changing of the dialogue makes the play too fluid
to be conceptualized in such a determinate fashion; maybe Gilpin’s changing of the
dialogue creates a division between text and performance event and resulted in
antagonism between O’Neill and the actor, or maybe it was a collaborative process
between the two men and they understood the nature of theatrical performance as such,
and maybe the potential for subversion inherent in indeterminacy demonstrated by Jones
as a character is replicated in the theatrical representation of Jones and the relationship

between the actor who played Jones and the playwright who wrote the text.

IV Converging Temporalities and the Scientific Theatre

In his introduction to Saint Joan, Shaw promises a mathematical theatre and a classical
theatre that will place Joan in a recognizeable and understandable historical context. The
indeterminate will be placed in the realm of intelligibility and certitude. Simultaneously,
the introduction serves as a confession that Joan can never be anything but indeterminate
and drama cannot bring absolute understanding to such a liminal figure. For while Shaw
claims in the introduction that the play “contains all that need be known about her,” if
this were true why include the introduction? The very presence of the massive
introduction questions such assertions. The introduction strives to add context and solve
the indeterminacies that the drama leaves uncertain.

One of these primary indeterminacies is Joan’s voices. The introduction asserts:

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Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation.
They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and
imposter, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally
that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety
of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians
know about other people’s minds, or even about their own. (13)
Shaw’s characterization of how historians are ignorant about their own mind as well as
other peoples, is perhaps the most explicit echo between the introduction to Saint Joan
and the postscript to Copenhagen. There is little difference between such a suggestion
and F rayn’s assertion that “[t][houghts and intentions, even one’s own - perhaps one’s
own most of all - remains shifting and elusive (99). Shaw’s introduction encapsulates the
indeterminacy of history and the indeterminacy of thought in the inability to
appropriately contextualize Joan’s voices.

For Shaw, by recognizing a Frayn-like uncertainty of intention we are asking the
wrong questions and focusing on the irrelevant. In a startling reversal for a play and
introduction in which historical context and certitude is so important, Shaw dismisses
cause and focuses on effect. All that matters is that the voices gave Joan good advice:
“The test of sanity is not the normality of the method but the reasonableness of the
discovery” (1 3). Further, “[t]he soundness of the order proves that she was unusually
sane; but its form proves that her dramatic imagination played tricks with her senses”
(14). Shaw marginalizes the indeterminacy of the voice by emphasizing the logic
contained within the voice’s content is the important thing and not the form the sound

advice takes. Simultaneously he —like the other historians — cannot resist the urge to

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contextualize the voices. The voices are merely imaginative. By such a double
interpretive gesture, Shaw marginalizes and contains the indeterminacy intrinsic in
intention. The voices are not an indicator of anything and should be disregarded, and
even if we must focus on the voices they are certainly not an indicator of anything more
than imagination and sound judgment.

Such an effort to contextualize and marginalize Joan’s voices is necessary
because in the play Joan’s actions serve as an antithesis to Shaw’s effort at
contextualization. The introduction replicates the desires of the trial in the play. Joan’s
accusers will not have to burn Joan if they can get her to sign a recantation. The written
word will silence the uncertainty of the voice. However, despite the belief that the
written word can contextualize the voice, during her trial Joan suggests otherwise:

Joan: You say this to me every time. I have said again and again that I
will tell you all that concerns this trial. But I cannot tell you the whole
truth: God does not allow the whole truth to be told. You do not
understand it when I tell it. (126)
Despite the belief of Joan’s accusers that the writing of a confession is the whole truth, or
the desire of Shaw that a written introduction can contextualize Joan’s liminality, the
truth of Joan’s voices exceed representation. Shaw’s play betrays his introduction as the
source of the interior voice matters. More than what the voices tell Joan to do, the
interior voices contain an untranslatable essence. The triumph of the voice resonates at
the trial’s conclusion. Joan’s accusers believe they have satisfactorily contextualized the
voices within textual representations as Joan — after Ladvenu shows her how to spell her

name — signs a recantation. However, reminiscent of Hedda Gabler Joan rips up her

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confession upon learning that she will be imprisoned for the rest of her life. On the heels
of the triumph of the voices over the text Joan’s accusers burn her as a heretic.

Like the failure of textual representation to overcome Joan’s voices, the
destruction of her material body proves equally ineffective, as canonization tries to
succeed where the text and the dematerialization of the body fails. Similarly, Shaw adds
an epilogue to his play seemingly in a final effort to contextualize Joan in a manner the
introduction and the play proper fails. In the introduction, Shaw explains his need for an
epilogue:

As to the epilogue, I could hardly be expected to stultify myself by
implying that Joan’s history in the world ended unhappily with her
execution, instead of beginning there. It was necessary by hook or crook
to shew the canonized Joan as well as the incinerated one; for many a
woman has gotten herself burnt by carelessly whisking a muslin skirt into
the drawing room fireplace, but getting canonized is a different matter,
and a more important one. So I am afraid the epilogue must stand.
The epilogue which “must stand” is a mesh of conflicting temporalities. The epilogue
takes place twenty-five years after Joan’s burning on the night of the inquiry which
reversals the ruling of the trial. King Charles has a series of visitors to his bedchamber,
including Joan, a soldier from hell, and a clerical looking gentleman in 1920 dress who
announces the canonization of Joan.

Similar in technique to the contextualization by performed analepsis of The

Emperor Jones and Proof, Saint Joan performs the future of the play, a future analogous

to the present of its viewing audience. Converging 1456 and 1920 in the same scene,

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Shaw’s epilogue resorts to the same contextualization as the Catholic Church. If textual
representation does not offer any contextualization for the indeterminacy of the interior
voices, canonization is all that is left. However, canonization only becomes a resource of
the dramatic text through the potential of dramatic representation to converge various
temporalities — to present the past and the future. Such a convergence of temporalities
undercuts the ideals of the scientific theatre presented in Shaw’s introduction. In the
introduction Shaw presents his scientific theatre as a classical theatre. The converging
temporalities within an epilogue that “must stand” is tantamount to an admission that the
scientific theatre and the classical theatre are different entities. In the very efforts to
contextualize the theatre, to make history and mimesis knowable in Proof, The Emperor
Jones, and Saint Joan, to present a drama that contains the radical uncertainties of

science, the convergence of temporalities emerges as a scientific theatre.87

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Chapter Six
“Words Drop Like Stones or Dead Bodies”88: Performative Futures and Anti-Theatre

A real play for me is more likely to be about formal structure than a story
— Eugene Ionesco

If a building constructed for the faithful has no need of the faithful to be a
building just the same, if it does not need a congregation — neither does a
play need an audience to be a play.

And yet a play has been written for a public, for the public of its
own time; it cannot be conceived without reference to the audience it is
aimed at. — Eugene Ionesco”

I We Have No Bananas Today, But What About Tomorrow?
October 12-21, 2006 saw a rare emphasis on theatrical event as event as Harold Pinter
starred in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp ’s Last Tape at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.
Critics worked themselves into a lather from the moment this pairing of British drama‘s
two twentieth-century luminaries - with all due respect to G. B. Shaw - was announced.
Writing on October 12, before he had seen the production, Paul Taylor asserted: “Harold
Pinter in Krapp's Last Tape is the major mouth-watering event of the Beckett centenary
celebrations.” The play’s run was reported to have sold out in sixteen minutes (Shenton),
and the tickets were reputedly being offered for seven times their $45 cover price on
eBay (Cowell). Michael Billiington wrote that “[i]t is easier to get a cup final ticket than
one for Harold Pinter’s performance in the Theatre Upstairs.”

More so than Shaw’s introduction to Saint Joan, or F rayn’s postscript to
Copenhagen, Pinter’s performance of Beckett becomes the ultimate contextualization of
dramatic performance. Alan Cowell’s review of the production for The New York Times

was titled “Life Meets Art: Pinter’s Last Stand,” and few critics could resist drawing

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parallels between Pinter’s health and Beckett’s protagonist. In a very real sense, the play
became Pinter ’s Last Tape. Holding out Pinter’s ability to complete a performance as an
accomplishment in itself, Billington wrote that “although the event has stimulated its own
extra-theatrical curiosity, the fact is that Pinter not only gets through it well but also
offers the harshest, least sentimental reading of Beckett’s play I can recall.” Billington
went on to suggest that “it is impossible to dissociate Pinter’s own recent encounters with
mortality from that of the character.” Gillian Hanna - an actress lucky enough to get a
ticket - suggested that “It is beyond acting,” and “[t]here is something about the coming
together of this particular piece and this performance that took me somewhere else”
(Cowell).

In Pinter’s performance, beyond acting becomes a sort of non-acting, as Pinter’s
phenomenological body is said to overwhelm Beckett’s text with a more authentic vision
of realism. Ironically, it is in this convergence of Theatre of the Absurd icons that the
audience is witness to the possibility of a theatre of transfiguration. Pinter as Krapp
seems to suggest that the hope for a theatre of context, a theatre that creates links between
the world of theatrical representation and the world outside the theatre does not have to
be understood in terms of mimetic failure. Pinter’s recent struggles with cancer, and his
playing the role entirely from a wheelchair seduces the audience into believing that they
are seeing an authentic Pinter. Mimetically speaking, Krapp is neither an everyman nor
an indeterminate character. The reviewers cannot resist understanding Pinter’s recitation
of Beckett’s lines to the audience, at least in part, as an unfettered view of the actor.
Krapp is more than character. Krapp is Pinter. Pinter’s Krapp commodifies

contextualization itself. More than a Beckett play, and more than a Pinter performance,

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the run is noteworthy for the links it forges between the two. Mimesis becomes dramatic
subject as well as dramatic affect.

The site of performance intensifies this commodification of mimesis. Staging
Krapp ’s Last Tape in the eighty seat Theatre Upstairs guaranteed there would be
insatiable demand for the run. Pinter’s health may have necessitated the small theatrical
venue. However, in housing Pinter’s Krapp the Theatre Upstairs —— a theatrical space
designed for experimental work and emerging artists — housed a double entrenchment of
the canon. Writing for The Guardian in 1971, Nicholas De Jongh described the theatre
as “a fine place for writers whose reputation is not as secure or even conceived” (qtd in
Roberts 139). Lindsay Anderson, co-Artistic Director of the Royal Court 1969-72,
characterized the Theatre Upstairs in more pejorative, but similar terms: It “was always to
me fringe and I’ve never approved of an alternative society . . . a bit of a self-glorifying
ghetto” (qtd in Roberts 137).

Pinter’s performance transforms theatre as fringe into a theatrical elite. The
audience for Krapp ’5 Last Tape resembles a who’s who of the London theatre scene: “the
rest of the tiny audience were mostly well known faces, from Peter Hall and Kristin Scott
Thomas to Samuel West, accompanied by playwright Laura Wade, as well as Mark
Rylance and Bill Paterson (whose wife Hildegard Bechtler designed the production)”
(Shenton). The celebrity audience evokes Shaw’s critique in the introduction to Saint
Joan of many theatre patrons as “a considerable body of persons who go to theatre as
many others go to church, to display their best clothes and compare them with other
peoples” (46). The theatre itself transforms from a theatre laboratory dedicated to

performing the new into a retrograde theatre apart, as noteworthy for who does the seeing

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- for the seeing as event - as for what is seen.

Pinter’s performance departs from Beckett’s written text. Pinter replaces Krapp’s
“laborious walk” (221), with a static performance in which “Pinter sits behind a desk in a
motorised wheelchair” (Billington). “He doesn’t sing. He doesn’t try to fake the Irish
accent the text invites” (Nightingale). Perhaps most significantly, Pinter eliminates
Krapp’s banana fixation, as the two bananas he eats over the course of the play are
stricken from the performance. Bearing this in mind, it is not surprising that Pinter offers
“the harshest, least sentimental reading of Beckett’s play [Billiington] can recall.” A
banana-less Krapp ’s Last Tape is a harsher and more humorless play. The bananas help
set the tone for the play, as Krapp plays with and devours the fruit before he speaks a
word or plays a reel from his collection: Krapp unlocks a drawer, pulls a banana out,
locks the drawer, strokes the banana, peels it, holds it in his mouth, eats it, and slips on
the banana peel, before returning to the drawer and beginning the cycle again (222).
Krapp’s banana addiction almost starts the play with a foray into slapstick from a
Bergsonian blueprint.

While it is certainly debatable how much or how little a fruitless Krapp
transforms the play as a whole, the ability of the Pinter production to install these changes
is surprising. During his life Samuel Beckett was adamant that his plays be produced as
written. Beckett had been known to go so far as to institute legal action to shut down
productions that were taking liberties with his text. In 1988, Beckett sued a Dutch theatre
company for mounting a production of Waiting for Godot with an all-woman cast.
Continuing the tradition after his death, the Beckett estate sued a French production in

1992, and an Italian production in 2006 for similar reasons. In 2003, the estate sued an

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Australian production for using music.9| These examples of Beckett and his estate’s
attempts to limit improper productions focus on extra-textual discordance. Rather than
taking liberties with the text itself, the text is placed in a deforming context.

In contrast, Pinter controverts the primacy of the written text (much like Gilpin’s
changing of Jones’s dialogue) by omitting written stage directions. Unlike the court
battles that ensued from inappropriately contextualizing Beckett’s text, Pinter’s Krapp
sans bananas proceeded without the slightest hint of public protest from Beckett’s
estate.92 Pinter’s Krapp subverts understanding of where the “authentic” Beckett lies.
The Beckett estate can perform the role of impartial guardian of Beckett’s artistic
integrity against manifest productions that contextualize the text in such a fashion that an
“inauthentic” Beckett play emerges. However, playwriting proves to be thicker than
blood. Pinter as Beckett’s theatrical heir and friend becomes a more reliable source for
appropriate actualization of the theatrical text in performance than Beckett’s nephew
Edward. In Pinter’s hands, performance can diverge from textual fidelity and still

maintain its position as an authentic representation of Beckett’s play.

The authority of Pinter is buttressed by the evocation of Beckett himself. Ian
Rickson — the director of Krapp ’s Last Tape, and Artistic Director for the Royal Court at
the time - playfully entrenches Pinter’s authority as a legacy granted by Beckett: “Mr.
Rickson asked rhetorically, ‘Were we serving Sam by taking the bananas out?’ He then
offered a wry answer: ‘Harold said he had a conversation with Sam, and Sam said it was
O.K.’” (Cowell). Obviously, the two playwrights discussing the importance of the
bananas in performance previous to Beckett’s death in 1989 is meant to be taken less than

seriously. More serious is Pinter’s appropriation of the authorial voice. Speaking for

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Beckett beyond the grave, Pinter becomes Krapp’s caretaker, effectively silencing the
Beckett estate and their interest is maintaining Beckett’s textual purity. In Rickson’s
banana justification, Beckett’s voice disrupts the continuity of his text in a way that

would delight the victims of the estate’s bid for historical fidelity.

Pinter’s selective use of stage directions and the attribution of Beckett’s consent
to such a decision highlights the conflict over the Beckett aesthetic object, and how it
functions. Neil Armfield, the director of the Australian production Edward Beckett
threatened to shut down for adding music to Waiting for Godot, charges that the Estate is
the one damaging the playwright’s work: "If there is something to hope for at this
watershed 50th anniversary of the play it is that Edward gives his uncle's work back to
artists to work with it. Let it go. Because if he doesn't, he's consigning it to a slow death
by a thousand hacks“ (qtd. in Verghis). Much in the spirit of Pinter’s Krapp, Armfield
views the aesthetic object in the moment of performance. A living performance is a
performance that interacts with the text, and murder via hacks is the inevitable fate
awaiting the Beckettin aesthetic object that is actualized in production after production

that merely enacts the words on the page.

Annfield’s challenge to the Beckett Estate assumes that the dramatic text is
incomplete, only a component of the collaboration intrinsic to performance.93 However,
what if the dramatic text is a complete aesthetic object in itself? In such a scenario, all
performances are adaptation. No performance or lineage of performances can kill the
aesthetic object, because as a dramatic text the aesthetic object exists independently of its

performance. In such a light, the guiding principle of judging performance is whether the

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performance is a “correct” adaptation or an “incorrect” one. In addition to doing
everything the dramatic text dictates, the performance must not engage in actions not
dictated by the text.

Like Beckett and his Estate, Eugene Ionesco tried to protect his plays from the
contextualizing distortions of performance. Although Ionesco never sued to stop an
improper production, he made it very clear that a good performance does neither more
nor less than enact the dramatic text. After seeing an American version of Rhinoceros
that particularly displeased him, Ionesco wrote:

I am not writing literature. I am doing something quite different: I am
writing drama. I mean that my text is not just dialogue, but also ‘stage
directions.’ These should be respected as much as the text, they are
essential, they are also sufficient. If I gave no indication that Berenger
and Jean should come to blows on the stage and pull each other’s noses, it
is because I had no desire for them to do so. (208)94
Ionesco’s assertion that stage directions are essential and sufficient is above all a desire to
maintain contextual fidelity. As author, Ionesco must protect his plays from the
deforming influence of directors and reviewers. Writing to the first director of The
Chairs (1952), Ionesco claims that a director “should not want something from the play,
he should efface himself, he should be the perfect receptacle. A conceited director who
wishes to impose his own personality does not have a director’s vocation” (187).95
Critics must not measure a play against an outside system or ideology, but should judge
in a Platonic sense “whether [the play] is true to its own nature” (93).96 A good director

or critic knows that a play is self-contained, and reveals its own context. Subjecting the

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play to outside influences exposes it to the contagion of the non-dramatic, and thereby
makes the play less of a play. Intuitively paradoxical, performance can disrupt the
essential nature of the dramatic contained in the written text.

Critics often characterize Ionesco’s plays as an explicit demonstration of anti-
theatre. To some degree Ionesco encouraged this label by subtitling The Bald Soprano
(1950) - his first play — “Anti-play.” According to Ionesco, The Bald Soprano was an
anti-play in that it was “in fact a criticism of the commonplace, a parody of a kind of
theatre that was no longer ‘theatre.”’ (130).97 The play offers no plot, nothing resembling
character motivation, and language itself devolves to characters’ shouting letters at each
other. The Bald Soprano stops more than ends. The curtain falls with the main

characters switching roles and beginning again.98

Anti-theatre becomes theatre by
parodying tired realist conventions that no longer contain the essence of the theatrical.

More than the structure of the play itself, both Ionesco and the Beckett estate —— in
theory and practice — outline a relationship of anti-theatre between dramatic text and
performance event. The play exists on the printed page completely independent of the
theatrical event. The dramatic text needs to be protected from deforming performances
and the critical resonances such performances may elicit.99 Anti-theatrically speaking, a
theatrical performance can do no more than replicate the dramatic text’s essence.

Ionesco makes this vision of anti-theatre — of dramatic text as complete in itself —
clear by including audience members among his list of theatrical superfluities. In one of
the epigraphs which begins this chapter, Ionesco asserts: “If a building constructed for the

faithful has no need of the faithful to be a building just the same, if it does not need a

congregation — neither does a play need an audience to be a play.” Separating play from

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performance event, Ionesco rejects the fundamental precepts of Richard Schechner, Peter
Brook and Marvin Carleson, among others. Brook asserts in his well-known opening to
The Empty Space: “1 can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks
across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed
for the act of theatre to be engaged” (9). The minimum requirement for something to be
considered theatrical is an audience watching an action. In such a practical understanding
of theatrical event, Ionesco’s conception of the self-sufficient dramatic text is always
anti-theatrical because the theatrical performance is unnecessary. '00

Viewed from an Ionescoian lens of anti-theatre, Pinter’s Krapp dramatizes the
deforming potential of the theatrical event. It might be argued that Pinter’s ignoring of
stage directions is appropriate because —unlike Ionesco’s understanding of his own stage
directions — the banana related stage directions are not essential. However, less debatable
is that the demand for tickets is driven much more by the context in which Beckett’s play
is situated than by the play itself. Pinter and the audience become co-conspirators in
colonizing the play. Materiality overwhelms content as the play transforms from a means
to explore theatrical form as event into a means to explore Pinter as event.

Despite the risk of performative contamination, Ionesco’s theory of a play not
needing an audience does not free anti-theatre from the idea of audience reception: “And
yet a play has been written for a public, for the public of its own time; it cannot be
conceived without reference to the audience it is aimed at.” ’0' Not quite paradoxical,
Ionesco’s understanding of an unnecessary audience that must be conceived suggests a

radically different conception of dramatic temporality for anti-theatre.

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The performance event’s temporality is often considered (and has been considered
by me over the course of this dissertation ) as the always present. To a large degree what
makes performance distinct is the understanding of performance as unrepeatable
ephemeral event. Instead of understanding the theatrical performance as the present, anti-
theatre understands the dramatic text as the present. In the previous chapter, I argued for
Gilpin’s understanding of The Emperor Jones as such an ephemeral present and O’Neill’s
text as a historical marker. However, taken from the temporal point in which O’Neill
wrote his play, Gilpin’s performance has yet to happen. Gilpin represents a future
performance event in which audience and performer converge to banish the literary text
into the past. Such a system allows for an understanding of a play that does not need an
audience as the textual present contains the essence of the theatre. Still, this present —
this theatrical essence or dramatic form - cannot exist without conceiving the possibility
of a future performance. The future performance contains the simultaneous potential and
necessity of a conceived audience. To write a play is to imagine a future adaptation in
which the text is enacted and the play is witnessed by an imagined audience.

This understanding of dramatic text as anti-theatrical present event containing the
complete essence of the theatrical emerges in the opening stage direction for Krapp ’s
Last Tape. The play is set: “A late evening in the fixture” (221). In Ionesco’s terms this is
an essential stage direction. A marker of temporal fluidity, the Krapp who does the
listening is more accurately characterized as a Krapp who will do the listening. From a
reader’s perspective, Krapp’s recorded self may be a past, present, or future. Krapp may
be waxing nostalgic, and mourning over events that have yet to occur or are currently

occurring.

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However, in the act of performing the play temporal fluidity is minimized and
contextualized. Whereas Pinter’s stage directions for Ashes to Ashes sets the play “now”
thereby establishing cohesion between the dramatic text and the performance event,
Beckett’s stage directions create a temporal disruption. To perform the play is to deform.
Without any spoken temporal marker within the play, the play’s textual future becomes a
performing present. The temporal ambiguity of Krapp’s tapes are relegated to sounds
emanating from and recorded in the past. This seems to be firrther emphasized in Pinter’s
production of the play. The mimetic links between Pinter and Krapp serve as a
biographical marker giving the audience more cues than it needs to understand
performance as present. Temporally indeterminate recorded testimony becomes
historical testimony that explicitly shapes the content of the performative present. Anti-
theatre as temporal indeterminacy is eliminated under the weight of a performed present.
Movement from an imaginative audience that is conceived to an actual audience that
views a performance reduces theatrical possibility. Future always becomes present in a
performance of the play. The inevitable deforming process of performative
contextualization simply becomes more overt through Pinter’s omission Of bananas and

the production’s commodification of Pinter as Krapp.

II “I would make you go down on your knees”: Prophesy, Performative Possibility
and the Oedipal Ever-Present
Krapp ’s Last Tape ’s temporal setting highlights a conflict of contextualization. The
dramatic text is set in the future, but a theatrical performance transforms this future

setting into the ever-present of performance. These divergent temporalities evoke an

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Ionescoian understanding Of anti-theatre in which the performative paratext disrupts the
dramatic text’s temporality. The play only remains set in the future by perpetually
deferring its performative enactment. Much like the future Krapp who listens to tapes he
has recorded in his past, theatrical performance must remain in the future. The dramatic
text forges a sort of privileged temporal present. This present is textually marked as a
present by the kernel of a future potential performance.

Similar to the material deformations and dismembered body parts that are
Beckett’s characters, the materialization of the performance event transforms and
deforms Krapp ’s Last Tape. The dramatic text no longer enacts its stage directions by
maintaining its distance from the future material performance. Temporally speaking, the
melding of narrative signifier and phenomenological event creates a dramatic monstrosity
analogous to Play ’s jarred inhabitants or Endgame’s failing bodies. Future as temporal
signifier cannot find its signified, and is warped by the irresistible contextualizing
presence of the performance event. In the wake of material performance — as
performance shifts from potential to actualization — performance event becomes the
present. From the perspective of the performance event - in a sort of temporal
performative ripple effect - the dramatic text becomes the past. Theatrical performance
marginalizes and sublimates “[a] late evening in the future” within the ever-present of
performance.

By textually producing a temporal future, Krapp ’s Last Tape continues the
conflict between indeterminacy and contextualization in plays like Pinter’s Ashes to

Ashes. However, where Pinter’s play and the critical reception to it portrayed a desire to

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historicize and materialize to make the traumatic knowable, the temporal future within
Beckett’s play suggests that such a process is a facet of dramatic performance.

An indeterminate future made possible by the idea of performance perpetuates
beyond the stage directions in lean Cocteau’s The Infernal Machine (1934). Cocteau’s
play dramatizes the subsuming of an indeterminate future within an ever-present
performance event and an historical past. The Infernal Machine - Cocteau’s liberal
rewriting of Sophocles’ Oedipus - proves to be an ideal site for such an exploration, as in
addition to being Aristotle’s ideal of dramatic form in The Poetics, Oedipus rejects an
indeterminate future. Perhaps Aristotle’s idealization of Oedipus is a facet of its
representation of dramatic temporality and contextualization. Over the course of this
dissertation, I have been periodically using Oedipus as determinate dramatic ideal that
Modern Drama perpetually works to deconstruct or simply falls short of realizing. From
the play’s rejection of the dead baby emblem, to the belief that the present needs to, and
can be understood if put in an appropriate historical context, Oedipus establishes causal
links and banishes indeterminacy.

Oedipal determinism is grounded in a convergence of temporalities. The tragedy
of Oedipus can be characterized as a recognition of indeterrninacy’s illusory nature.
Despite all the efforts of Oedipus, Jocasta, and Laius, the future is rigid and unavoidable.
To put the Sophoclean determinate future in slightly different terms, the future is
recognized as determinate — the future becomes determinate — only at the point the future
has become a fixed past. The opening of Sophocles’ play introduces an Oedipus whose
transgression transpired long ago. Oedipus narrativizes the ever-present of performance

as the realization that the temporal collapsing of the indeterminate future into the

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determinate past has occurred. The moment where future becomes present has already
been missed. However, the present’s missing of the event is merely a temporary
phenomenon. Oedipal narrative is the recognition of what the present originally missed.
As a present effect, the plague announces that the missed determinate occurrence finally
occupies the temporal space that has long been denied it. Oedipus succeeds in creating a
determinate future. Such recognition occurs only after the present absorbs the future as
past. Oedipus is the narrative of an all-consuming present. Past and firture as distinct
temporal constructs become illusory.

Unlike Oedipus, The Infernal Machine opens with a clear distinction between
past, present, and future. Cocteau’s play both restages Oedipus and serves as a prelude to
its Sophoclean precursor. The first three acts occupy the twenty-four hour period which
culminates in the wedding night of Jocasta and Oedipus. The fourth act jumps ahead
seventeen years and is a fairly faithful but abbreviated retelling of Sophocles’ narrative.
By dramatizing a Sophoclean analepsis, Cocteau’s play enacts the Oedipal missing. The
audience sees Oedipus miss the determinate firture as it passes through the present to
become past event. Cocteau’s play enacts what Oedipus relegated to a past event which
must be narrated. In so doing, The Infernal Machine questions the all-encompassing
nature of Sophoclean determinism, what gaps manifest within such determinate dramatic
structure, and what alternative to such a rigid causal structure is possible.

For Cocteau’s retelling something characterized simply as the Voice serves as the
Chorus and introduces each act. Both descriptive and imperative, when the Voice begins
the play by proclaiming: “He shall slay his father. He shall marry his mother.” the play

creates a determinate future — a prophesy that has yet to be fulfilled. The Voice explicitly

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contextualizes the prophesy by narrating the events of Sophocles’ Oedipus. However,
rather than relate it in an Oedipal fashion — rather than narrate an ever-present that
interconnects to past and future by consuming them —- the Voice narrates chronologically:
prophesy, Jocasta disposes of Oedipus, Merope and Polybus adopt Oedipus, Oedipus
finds out about the prophesy, Oedipus leaves Corinth and kills Laius in a road dispute,
Oedipus conquers the Sphinx and marries Jocasta, a plague breaks out, the truth is
revealed, Jocasta commits suicide and Oedipus blinds himself. In the Voice’s
pronouncement, narrativized analepsis achieves a type of agency as it attains the same
primacy as the enacted present. The unifying temporal presence of Sophocles’ play is
relegated to a single paragraph late in the Voice’s Act One prologue, thereby
transforming from an ever-present to a single time within a linear temporal continuum.
As such, the setting of Sophocles’ Oedipus becomes neither more nor less significant —
neither more nor less present - than the narrativized analepsis of Oedipus’ adoption and
decision to leave Corinth.’02

The Infernal Machine works against the Oedipal model of the ever-present by
returning to Sophocles’ narrative, destabilizing the temporal structure, and relegating
Oedipus to the future but determinate fourth act. By postponing fate catching up with
Oedipus, the play creates a dramatic model based on a temporal future. Of course, by
including Sophocles’ content in his play, Cocteau’s future is not only a determinate future
but a future that can only temporarily remain a future. The future will become the
present. This is both what binds Cocteau’s play, and what it, paradoxically, perpetually

offers alternatives for. It simultaneously enacts the determinate ever-present structure of

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Sophoclean drama while exploring the limits of such a structure by illuminating the
infinite possibilities for indeterminacy in such a causal text.

The Voice includes very little information on Cocteau’s first three acts during its
determinate retelling of Oedipus. This narrative freedom becomes a space for
reimagining origins. So long as Oedipus defeats the Sphinx, Cocteau can narrate the
encounter however he sees fit, and, similarly, so long as Oedipus marries Jocasta,
practically anything can occur during their wedding night. The temporal distance
between the death of Laius and Act Four’s restaging of Oedipus becomes the site of
indeterminacy for the first three acts. Acts One, Two, and Three are sites of unknown
spaces between rigid determinism. These opening acts suggest that even in Oedipus
hinges of dramatic indeterminacy must be glossed over to demonstrate a determinate
future’s causal relationships. However, the indeterminacy between the rigid barometers
of past and future are temporary. Eventually the future will be understood as past at the
moment it converges with the present. The indeterminate ever-present of Cocteau’s play
must become the determinate ever-present of Oedipus. The space and time of in-between
indeterminacy only offers a temporary nodal point to conceptualize an alternative to
Oedipal causality. The temporal space between Lauis death and Oedipus and Jocasta
understanding their determinate future has already become past is explicitly finite.'03

Between the First and Second Act the Voice announces that the Second Act takes
place simultaneously with the First: “Spectators let us imagine that we can wind back the
last few minutes and relive them elsewhere” (3 3). The coextensive temporality of the
first two acts resists closure within future determinacy — they resist the future becoming

past. In so doing Acts 1, II, and III perform the moment where the Sophoclean future

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prophesy of marrying the mother becomes present, and emphasize what the characters
missed in Oedipus. In the first act, the ghost of Laius tries to warn Jocasta, but she can
neither see nor hear him. In Act 111, during Jocasta and Oedipus’ wedding night, Oedipus
calls Jocasta mother, Jocasta makes references to Oedipus being her child, and Jocasta
notices the scars on Oedipus’s feet. After Oedipus tells Jocasta that the scars were the
result of an attack by a wild boar, Jocasta confesses “they remind me of something I am
always trying to forget” (79).

Both Oedipus and Jocasta seem to be almost trying to miss the import of each
other’s address. When Oedipus explains to Tiresias that “I am going to say that I have
always dreamed of that kind of love . . . a love — almost maternal,” he is unwilling or
unable to see his own desire as evidence of determinate foreclosure (67).
Conceptualizing Jocasta’s maternal love as “almost maternal” enables Oedipus and
Jocasta to miss the future as it becomes the present. Such an elaborate and comedic
missing of the future becomes necessary to establish Oedipal determinism. In Cocteau’s
telling, to understand a determinate future too soon — to know the future as it becomes
present — short-circuits causality. Missing the determinate future becoming present
ensures that a determinate present and an ever-present will not be missed. The Infernal
Machine dramatizes Oedipal determinism as more choice than inevitability. For Oedipus
and Jocasta, determinism is reduced to a strategy for reading signs, and avoiding the
sign’s narrative import as future prophesy enters present knowability.

In Cocteau’s second act, the Sphinx outlines a performance-based indeterminate
future as an alternative to an Oedipal determinate future. The Voice emphasizes the

divergent potential of Oedipus’s confrontation with the Sphinx during its opening

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monologue: “Then the encounter takes place. What is the nature of this encounter?
Mystery. All that is known is: young Oedipus enters Thebes as a conqueror and marries
the queen” (6). The Voice marks the Second Act as the site of indeterminacy by
narrating the gap in its own understanding.

Temporal repetition establishes the Second Act’s difference. The other acts
follow a chronological structure, but Act Two co-occupies the temporal register of Act
One. Like its confession that the encounter with the Sphinx is a mystery, the Voice
notifies the audience of the temporal doubling. The Voice narrativizes Act Two’s double
disruption of a rigid chronological structure. Both on the grounds of indeterminacy and
temporality Act Two demarcates itself from the other acts in Cocteau’s retelling of
Oedipus.

The Sphinx’s indeterminate performance is another evocation of the “late evening
in the future” glimmered in the dramatic text of Krapp ’s Last Tape:

Sphinx. And now, I shall give you a demonstration. I shall show you
what would happen if you were some ordinary good looking boy from
Thebes and not Oedipus, who has the privilege of pleasing me.
Oedipus. I know how far I can trust your privileges.

Sphinx. Don’t resist. Don’t make it more difficult for me — I may hurt
you.

Oedipus. I will resist!

He shuts his eyes and turns his head.

Sphinx. In vain you close your eyes or turn your head I do not charm

through my voice or sight. [ . . . ]

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Oedipus, weakly. Let me go! Mercy!

Sphinx. And you would cry for mercy and you would not be the first. I
have heard prouder men than you cry for their mothers; and seen more
arrogant men in tears.

Oedipus. Merope . . . Mother!

Sphinx. Then I would order you to come a little nearer: I would untighten
your limbs.

He crawls forward further.

So! I would question you. I would ask you, for example, which animal
walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the
evening? And you would comb your mind till you could think of nothing
but some tiny medal you won as a child. Or you would mumble a number
or count the stars between these broken columns. And then I would reveal
the answer to the riddle. The animal is man. He crawls on all fours as an
infant; he walks on two legs when he is grown up; and when he is old, he
leans on a stick for a third leg.

Oedipus. Of course! How simple!

Sphinx. You would shout: ‘Of course — How simple!’ . . . as everybody
else does. Then . . . then, I would call my helper, Anubis. Anubis!
Anubis appears and stands on the right of the pedestal with his head
turned to the side.

Oedipus. No! NO! Please, Sphinx! Please don’t. No!

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Sphinx. I would make you go down to your knees. Down, down, further!
That’s right. You would bend your head . . . and Anubis would spring and
open his wolf jaws . . .

Oedipus. A-a-ah!

Sphinx, calmly. I said “Would.” I said, “would bend,” “would spring,”
“would open.” Don’t be terrified. It was all a performance, Oedipus, a
mere performance. You are free. (50-2)

Oedipus and the Sphinx’s conflict — an indeterminate conflict that is enacted
within a repeating temporal frame — is a conflict over how to interpret temporality. The
Sphinx’s “would” functions analogous to Brutus Jones’s “maybe.” Whereas Jones used
“maybe” to create an indeterminate present, for the Sphinx, “would” creates a future that
is indeterminate because it is conditional. Dramatizing without actualizing, “would” both
shows Oedipus what the Sphinx would do to him were he foolish enough to challenge
her, and allows him to keep his head. By classifying the potential future as a
performance, the Sphinx gestures toward the idea of performance more than performance
as ever-present act. Closer to anti-theatre than theatre, the Sphinx’s performance is a
future that maintains its temporal distance from the present.

Oedipus finds this idea of a perpetually delayed performative future unintelligible.
He reads the Sphinx’s future as present, and her “would” as “is.” An Oedipal frame fails
to make such fine distinctions. If the future is determinate, and if there is no avoiding
prophesy, then the Sphinx’s performance in which “Anubis would spring and open his
wolf jaws” is all too similar to Anubis springing and opening his wolf jaws. While

Anubis may not be currently springing and opening, it is only a matter of time before he

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does so. There is no escape. The Sphinx’s pronouncement that Oedipus is free is
antithetical to the very understanding of Oedipus ’s temporal structure. Without an
indeterminate future performance there is no such thing as free.

Oedipus’s misunderstanding of indeterminate future performance is echoed in
Anubis’s dissatisfaction. Immediately following the performance, Anubis says: “Sphinx,
he is not allowed to leave; he has not answered the riddle” (52). Oedipus had good cause
to be concerned as Anubis forces the Sphinx to strip the future of its indeterminacy. The
future must transform into the determinate present. The Sphinx shows herself vulnerable
to the same determinate future via prophesy as Oedipus when she asks Oedipus the same
riddle, and guided by the trial run of what would happen were he to challenge the Sphinx,
Oedipus is victorious. The Sphinx is defeated as the indeterminate future becomes
determinate, and the distinction between present and future dissipates. The second act
both evokes the performative future and enacts the ever-present performance event’s
overcoming of the idea of performance. The indeterminate marker “would” loses all
power.

The Second Act of The Infernal Machine is a microscopic performance of the
determinism of the play as a whole and the temporal structure of Oedipal dramatic
narrative. Like the Sphinx’s use of “would,” the Second Act briefly signifies the
indeterminacy the Voice categorizes as a mystery. In performing the second act — an act
which dramatizes an indeterminate future idea of performance being subsumed into the
determinate present of performance - the mystery is solved. Similarly, Sophocles’

narrative eventually comes to pass in Cocteau’s retelling. The spaces for indeterminacy

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intrinsic to Oedipal form are subsumed within the overriding structure of dramatic

determinism.

111 “Or Possibly There is No Killer At All”: Subjecting the Future of Indeterminacy
Krapp ’s Last Tape engenders a textual performative future while a performance of the
play —and the equation of actor as protagonist in Pinter’s production in particular-
subsumes “A late evening in the future.” into the ever-present. The Infernal Machine
dramatizes the ever-present performance event’s consuming of a performative future. By
emphasizing these conflicts in Oedipus — possibly the most determinate and influential
Western dramatic text — Cocteau’s play conjectures that such a conflict is essential to
dramatic narrative. Where Beckett’s play offers a glimpse of the fundamental disparity
between a dramatic text and a performance event, and where Cocteau’s play suggests that
the performative future is a potential (although momentary) freeing gesture for Oedipus
who rejects it in favor of dramatic determinism, the performative future in Ionesco’s The
Killer (1959) and The Lesson interrogates the interconnection between the
phenomenological object and the narrative signifier.
The form of The Killer is a sort of thesis / antithesis in the Shavian tradition.

Much like The Wild Duck, or a performance of Our Town, the first act of the play calls
attention to an Artaudian gap between things and ideas. The opening stage directions
read, in part:

No décor. An empty stage when the curtain rises. Later there will only

be, on the left of the stage, two garden chairs and a table, which the

Architect will bring on himself They should be near at hand in the wings.

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The Atmosphere of Act I will be created by lighting only.[ . . . ] The blue,

the white, the silence and the empty stage should give a strange

impression of peace. Not until a full minute has passed should the

characters appear on the scene. (9)
This full minute of peace is only the first indication of absence as ideal. Upon entering,
the Architect shows Berenger around a construction project. Berenger bubbles over with
enthusiasm during his tour of the “radiant city,” and, in the process, he repeatedly
gestures toward a gap between the narrative signifier and the phenomenological object.

Seemingly an appropriate title for a city staged solely by the effect of light,

Berenger lauds the materiality of objects in this radiant city by admiring lawns,
flowerbeds, vegetables, and the styles of houses. Analogous to the Early Modern setting
of the scene, the verbal significations center the audience within the narrative. However,
the material objects that pervade the stage in Acts 11 and III force a retroactive
recontextualization. Once verbal signifiers connect to phenomenological objects,
objectless signification becomes indeterminate. More of a parody of objectless
signification than homage, the First Act calls attention to the artificiality of such a
system. In the utter extremity of his descriptions, Berenger emphasizes the emptiness of
the stage:

And yet, here I am. Your radiant city is real. No doubt of that. You can

touch it with your fingers. The blue brilliance of it looks absolutely

natural . . . blue and green . . . oh, that grass, those rose—pink flowers . . .

(12)

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Underscoring a romantic willing suspension of disbelief, Berenger himself has difficulty
believing in the radiant city’s reality. He consistently falls back on multiple senses to
validate the city’s materiality. The inverse of verification, this continually underscores
the artificiality of the Architect’s radiant city. The more Berenger describes and touches,
the more the gap between things and ideas is reinforced. The staging of Berenger’s ideal
acknowledges that there is no ideal city. The radiant city is merely a stage with lights.
The first act resists mimetic foreclosure by continually emphasizing the artificiality of the
process by which dramatic texts signify.

Act l’s emphasis on dramatic rupture provides an alternative to textual
foreclosure. The Killer is Ionesco’s adaptation of his own short story, “The Colonel’s
Photograph.” Things firmly connect to ideas from the opening moment of the short
story:

I had gone to visit the fine new district, with its white houses surrounded
by bright little flower gardens. Trees lined the broad streets. New,
gleaming cars stood in front of the gates and in the garden drives. The sky
was cloudless the light was blue. (23)
Text stages material objects rather than performing their absence. The movement from
text to its performative adaptation is reminiscent of The Wild Duck’s textual suturing
and performative rupture, or Kane’s suggestion that reading Blasted is more authentic
than seeing it performed.

In “The Colonel’s Photograph”, the Architect compares the city to an oasis, and

the narrator ostensibly agrees: “’Yes, that’s true. You mean those cities that are also

known as mirages,’ I said to show I was not completely ignorant” (24). The narrator

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either acknowledges the very ignorance he is trying to deny or suggests that the Architect
is the ignorant one. Regardless, the Architect and the narrator work on different registers
in this exchange. By conceptualizing the city as oasis, the Architect feeds into the
narrator’s reaction to the “fine new district” as refuge from the hard, cold surrounding
metropolis. However, in collapsing oasis into mirage, the narrator’s response suggests
that an ideal refuge is always illusory. The story enacts this conception, as one by one
the ideal city’s inhabitants fall victim to the machinations of the Killer:
it’s right there at the tram stop that he functions. As the passengers alight
to go to their homes, he comes up to them, dressed as a beggar. He
whimpers, begs for alms, tries to arouse their pity. It’s the old story: he’s
just out of hospital, he has no job, he’s looking for work, he has nowhere
to spend the night. That’s not what does the trick. It’s just an opening
gambit. He sniffs around and picks on some kind soul. He starts up a
conversation, clings to his victim like a limpet, tries to sell them bits and
pieces which he produces from a basket — artificial flowers, scissors, dirty
pictures, all sorts of things. Generally his offers are turned down, the
victim hasn’t time, is in a hurry. He goes on bargaining until they are
close to the pool which you saw. Then, straight away, he plays his trump
card. He offers to show his victim the Colonel’s photograph. There is no
resisting this. As the light, by now, is poor, the kind soul bends down to
see better, and that seals his doom. While he’s absorbed in gazing at the

picture, the murderer gives him a push, and he falls in the pool and is

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drowned. The job is done. The murderer merely has to look for his next

victim. (29-30)
A city whose inhabitants consistently meet such a fate is a far cry from ideal. The oasis /
mirage exchange is carried over into the dramatic text. The play’s characterization of the
radiant city as mirage has the added relevance that from an audience’s perspective the
radiant city is Berenger’s mirage. The audience only witnesses an empty stage. They
witness the delusion, but are unaffected by it. Unlike the story’s lauding of the radiant
city in mimetic terms, the play idealizes the potential rupture inherent in the
phenomenology / narrative divide of performative representation. Berenger’s awe for the
new district is inseparable from the knowledge that performance exists between oasis and
mirage.

In the play, the Architect describes viewing the Colonel’s photo as “a disturbing
experience” (40). This added detail suggests that the photo disturbs in the play in a way
it fails to do in the story. In the story, the Killer and the violence he personifies
transforms oasis into mirage. The Killer demonstrates that there is no safe haven.
However, in the play, more than the collapsing of a safe haven, the Killer’s rampage
becomes the center of a competing signifying system. An oasis / mirage, the radiant city
differentiates itself from the surrounding metropolis by rupturing things from ideas.
Berenger lives in the surrounding metropolis which can never be dissociated from its
materiality — its phenomenological objectness.

The Killer shows his soon-to-be victims objects that are specific and material.
They belong outside the walls of the radiant city. As such, the radiant city’s inhabitants

are uninterested in the Killer’s bric—a-brac. The Colonel’s photograph disturbs where

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other material objects can be ignored because it exists in an interstice between the
materiality of the city proper and the rupture of the radiant city. The photograph contains
an independent materiality of its own, and presumably also represents a Colonel who had
a material existence at some time in the past. However, since the Colonel only exists as
photographic representation, the photo also gestures to a rupture in signification, a
signifier that remains fundamentally disconnected from its signified. Like The Winter
Garden Photograph in Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the Colonel’s Photograph functions as a
narrative wound. It pierces the boundaries between the exterior city and the new district
— it disturbs — because it is at root a signifying absence. Like Barthes’ photo, the
Colonel’s Photograph is perpetually described but never seen by an audience and
therefore can serve the narrative function of a pure carrier of affect.

Perhaps this simultaneous materiality and absence contributes to the photo’s
disturbing nature. To some extent, the radiant city is shielded from materiality. The
photo represents something that is not there and can pierce the borders of the radiant city
because it evokes a representational rupture analogous to the Architect’s development.
While similar, the photo still does not belong. The photograph also possesses a
materiality that opens radiant city inhabitants to the outside influence of the Killer and the
objectness of the exterior city at large. The photograph functions in both representational
economies and thereby influences the radiant city and its residents.

The Shavian antithesis of the play is marked by the Killer’s material objects and
his use of the Colonel’s Photo. The second and third acts leave the invisible radiant city,
as the action is set amid the object laden surrounding metropolis. During the description

of Berenger’s apartment — the setting for Act II — The Killer makes the material

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difference of the two settings explicit: “T he decor of Act II is very much constructed,
heavy, realistic and ugly; it contrasts strongly with the lack of décor and the simple
lighting effects of Act 1” (43). Where the first act exhibited a Wild Duck-like rupture
between things and ideas, the second act illustrates a Blasted-like rupture of excess
materiality. The Killer’s material rupture fundamentally interconnects with the realness,
heaviness, and ugliness of the phenomenological object itself.
Contrasting the silence which begins the first act, the sheer noise of the second
establishes the city as a character:
there are sounds of hammering from the floor above, a radio blaring and
trucks and motorcycles approaching and aying away; at one point too the
shouts of children in the schoolyard during recreation: all this must be
slightly distorted, caricatured, so the cries of the schoolchildren sound like
dogs yapping (44).
The noises and the figures seen passing by Berenger’s window on the street make up the
first half of the second act. During this material cacophony, there is no movement and no
action occurring inside the room. Ionesco’s stage directions emphasize the metatheatrical
nature of the stage space: “In the second act it is also better to have the greatest possible
number of figures appearing in silhouette the other side of the window, as on a stage
behind the stage” (8). Berenger’s window frames a traditional proscenium performing
space as the street action is visible because “[t]he curtains are not drawn” (42). The first
two acts establish competing registers of phenomenological rupture and material presence

as two contrasting visions of theatricality.

246

In Notes and Counter Notes, Ionesco suggests that these theatrical alternatives are

fundamental to his drama as a whole:
All my plays have their origin in two firndamental states of consciousness:
now the one, now the other is predominant, and sometimes they are
combined. These basic states of consciousness are an awareness of
evanescence and of solidity, of emptiness and of too much presence, of the
unreal transparency of the world and its opacity, of light and of thick
darkness. (162)
Ionesco’s materiality / evanescence dialectic inverts the usual understanding of theatrical
representation. Materiality in any form becomes overdeterrnined, and oppressive. The
radiant city’s rupture in signification is held up as an ideal, but it is a tenuous ideal that
can never be anything but a mirage.

The sheer accumulation of objects, and the way these objects signify,
differentiates The Killer from Oedipus and Proof Whereas in The Infernal Machine
determinism seems to be more choice than inevitability, in The Killer there is no such
thing as determinism. Proof becomes nothing more than the rather pointless
accumulation of objects. The overwhelming nature of materiality enters Berenger’s
apartment as Edouard’s “bulging black briefcase” opens amid his attempts to explain to
Berenger that the Killer’s rampage in the radiant city is old news. The Colonel’s
photograph falls out of the briefcase, and this convinces Berenger to get a closer look:

Berenger [with authority] Let me see! [He dives into the briefcase, pulls
out more photos and looks at one :] Quite a nice face. With the kind of

expression that makes you feel sorry for him. [He takes out more photos.

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Edouard mops his brow] What is all this? Why, it’s the photo, the
famous photo of the Colonel! You had it in there . . . you never told me!
Edouard: I’m not always looking inside my briefcase!

Berenger: But it is your briefcase all right, you’re never without it.
Edouard: That’s no reason . . .

Berenger: Oh well . . . We’ll take the opportunity, while we’re at it, of
having another look!

[Berenger sticks his hand into the huge black briefcase. Edouard does the
same with his own too-white hand, whose twisted fingers are now very
clearly visible]

More photos of the Colonel . . . and more . . . and more . . . [To Edouard,
who is now taking things out of the briefcase too, and looking astonished]
What are these?

Edouard: You can see, they’re artificial flowers.

Berenger: There are masses of them! . . . And these . . . Look, dirty
pictures . . . [He inspects them while Edouard goes and looks over his
shoulder: ] Nasty! [ . . .]

Berenger: [still taking from the briefcase which is like a conjurer ’s
bottomless bag, an amazing quality of all types of objects, which cover the
whole surface of the table and even fall on the floor] . . . pins . . . and

more pins . . . pen-holders . . . and these . . . and these . . . what’s that?

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[Much should be made of this scene: some of the objects can fly away on
their own, others can be thrown by Berenger to the four corners of the
stage] (66-7)

The sheer quantity of objects pulled from Edouard’s briefcase seems to reach the
level of proof. In addition to photographs of the Colonel, and the objects that fail to
tempt the Killer’s victims, they find visiting cards with the Killer’s name and address,
and an identity card with a photo of him. In his pocket Edouard finds the Killer’s private
diary which contains his future projects, including a map marked with the exact times and
places he plans to strike. Like Edouard’s briefcase, the material objects that serve as
evidence of the Killer’s crimes are bursting at the seams. The stage directions repeatedly
fall back on the metaphor of conjuration to describe the objects’ appearance. There is an
impossible amount of objects pulled from the briefcase which is like a conjurer’s
bottomless bag, the box that contains the Killer’s visiting cards opens “in the style of a
conjuring trick,” and in producing the final box containing the Killer’s journal, the stage
directions suggest that Edouard “could take it from his pocket or one of his sleeves, like a
conjuror, a folding box perhaps, which he flicks into shape as he shows it” (67. 69).

The stage directions instruct that much should be made of the proliferation of
material objects. The sheer quantity of things visually entering the performance space
ruptures the realistic set of Act Two. There is always room for further materialistic
gestures. Just as the material connections between objects and the Killer seem complete
further bonds are established. Material proof is everywhere. However, objective
evidence only enters staged representation in the guise of a magic trick. Material objects

identifying the Killer and connecting him to his crimes emerge in an illusory context.

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Similar to Catherine’s assertion near the end of Proof that evidence does not mean
anything — it is not the same thing as proof — the objects in Edouard’s briefcase do not
prove anything. Despite overwhelming signs to the contrary, the play does not connect
Edouard to the killings. He may very well be telling the truth when he explains: “The
criminal sent me his private diary, his notes and index cards a very long time ago, asking
me to publish them in a literary journal. That was before the murders were committed”
(71). Like Oedipus and Jocasta’s determined missing on their wedding night, Edouard

never connects the material objects in his possession to the murders that occur. He takes

 

the potent material proof “for idle dreams of no importance” (71).

 

Unlike Edouard, Berenger interprets the briefcase’s contents as evidence. Such a
belief in a material theatre’s objects replicates the Killer’s assault on the residents of the
radiant city. In the same way the Killer uses material objects as a means of perpetuating
his killing spree, Berenger believes that material objects as evidence will subdue the
Killer. If Berenger delivers the briefcase to the Architect (who is also the Police
Superintendent) the Killer will be arrested. The Killer is an indeterminate figure whom
the police cannot stop because he is too immaterial. The Killer can be visualized,
recognized, and eliminated with the contextualizing aide of the objects in Edouard’s
briefcase

Berenger quickly learns that transforming material objects from evidence into
proof is not as easy as it seems. He and Edouard rush off to the Superintendent’s, but in
their hurry Edouard forgets his briefcase. An elaborate shell game of briefcases ensues.
Berenger runs after various briefcases carried by a drunk, an old man, and Mother Peep

only to be continually disappointed. One briefcase is empty, another contains the wrong

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boxes and the third contains bottles of wine. These briefcases enact the other side of the
conjurer’s trick from Act Two. A conjurer can make material evidence disappear as
easily as appear. '04 Material evidence, and the hope that material evidence contextualizes
can be as transient as the radiant city itself.

Eventually, the Old Man suggests that Edouard must have forgotten his briefcase
at home. Edouard is sent home to retrieve the evidence, but Berenger never reconnects
with the material objects. The desire for material objects to suture firm connotive and
contextual links goes unfulfilled. Berenger decides to go the Superintendent to let him
know that the evidence is coming. However, material objects literally turn against
Berenger and cut off his attempts to move toward the Superintendent. Military trucks are
driven onto both sides of the stage with only enough room between them for Policemen
to stand. Ironically, Berenger has been entrapped by material forces in a way very
similar to his efforts to contextualize the Killer.

The first act’s rupture between things and ideas served as an unrealizable ideal — a
mirage. In contrast to such a rupture, material objects are ugly, oppressive and
dangerous. The phenomenological object is the very reason the radiant city is illusory.
The introduction of a narrative of material Objects via the Colonel’s Photograph suggests
what an audience’s eyes already have told them. The ideal is illusory. Material objects
cannot contextualize the Killer, and a material theatre proves unable to suture the
indeterminate within material structures. The phenomenological object is never material
enough. Berenger’s attempts to bind the indeterminate within a materialist network
results in the object escaping Berenger’s control. Or, put in slightly different terms,

conceptualizing theatrical representation solely through the trope of material

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contextualization is nothing but a conjurer’s trick. Both the thesis of a rupture within
theatrical representation, and the antithesis of a material theatre of contextualization
create incomplete visions of theatrical signification.

The second half of the third act offers a possible reconciliation for these disparate
forms of dramatic representation. Berenger escapes the material forces that restrict him
and confronts the Killer. The opening stage directions describe the encounter as “one
short act in itself” (9). This short act is inaugurated by a material rupture: “As though by
magic the trucks move back; the whole set at the back of the stage is moveable and so
comes apart” (93). Like the earlier conj urer’s tricks which can make the objects in a
bulging briefcase disappear, the material set magically breaks apart transforming the
stage into a much emptier space. The set returns to the emptiness of Act One as
characters simply vanish. Rather than announcing a traditional exit, the stage directions
instruct the belligerent policemen to disappear. The second policeman’s disappearance is
described as sudden. The first even more so: “T he first policeman has disappeared with
the back wall and the trucks” (93). The moment the policeman disappears is missed.
The policeman’s disappearance is so sudden that it can only be recognized in the past
tense. The disappearance of the policeman is only recognized upon reflection that there
is an empty space where his body used to be.

Berenger and the Killer’s confrontation depends upon an essential absence
emerging from within materiality. This absence is emphasized at the moment Berenger
first sees the Killer:

The set has of course, stopped changing. In fact there is practically no

scenery. All there is is a wall and a bench. The empty waste of a plain

252

and a slight glow on the horizon. The two characters are picked out in a
pale light, while the rest is in semi-darkness. Derisive laugh fiom the
Killer: he is very small and puny, ill-shaven, with a torn hat on his head
and a shabby old gabardine; he has only one eye, which shines with a
steely glitter, and a set expression on his still face; his toes are peeping
out of the holes in his old shoes. When the Killer appears, laughing
derisively, he should be standing on the bench or perhaps somewhere on
the wall: he calmly jumps down and approaches Berenger, chuckling
unpleasantly, and it is at this moment that one notices how small he is. Or
possibly there is no Killer at all. Berenger could be talking to himself
alone in the half-light (97-8).
At the moment Berenger sees the Killer, the stage directions focus on scenic absence.
Absence becomes scenery. Rather than a rupture which emphasizes a distance between
objects narrativized and a phenomenological absence, here there is an unity of absence.
Absence is recognized for what it is (not) instead of used to create a rift between
phenomenological emptiness and narrative signification.
The Killer’s material presence appears to oppose the phenomenological absence.
The stage directions focus on the Killer’s size, the shabbiness of his dress, the shine in his
eye and the expression on his face. He is described in greater detail than any character in
the play. By way of contrast, Berenger is physically described as an “average, middle-
aged citizen,” and The Architect is said to be of an “ageless, bureaucratic age,” Dany —the
Architect’s typist, one of the Killer’s victims and someone who infatuates Berenger — is

described as a “conventional pin-up” (7). Resorting to generalities, average, ageless, and

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conventional modify the descriptions of these characters. Unlike the characters whose
appearance remains ambiguous, the Killer is the most material character in the play.

The Killer is also the least material character in the play. Ionesco reverses the
phenomenological presence after he describes the Killer: Or possibly there is no Killer at
all. Berenger could be talking to himself alone in the half-light.” The final act in itself
between Berenger and the Killer is a Berenger monologue. The stage directions
emphasize the possibility of there being no Killer in the choice of font for the stage
directions. Typically stage directions are given in italics. The description of the Killer
follows this convention until it raises the possibility of there being “no Killer at all.”
These words return to regular type. Much like the possibility of there being no Killer
arises amid the character’s vivid material presence, the stage directions emphasize the
possibility of no Killer by omitting emphasis.

The play’s direction that the Killer is either a very material presence or a
fundamental absence is not the first time Ionesco uses such an ambiguous stage direction.
At the conclusion of The Lesson the Professor stabs the Pupil with a knife that, according
to the stage directions, is “a big knife that is invisible or real according to the preference
of the director” (73). The possibility of the Killer and the knife’s presence or absence
gives a performance of either play some leeway within Ionesco’s assertion that stage
directions “should be respected as much as the text, they are essential, they are also
sufficient.”

Ionesco’s stage directions enact a performative future analogous to Krapp ’s Last
Tape and The Infernal Machine. The Killer and The Lesson contain an essential plurality

as texts that any performance of the play must reduce and contextualize. The dramatic

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texts evoke the potential of stage direction as deferral -— the choice not made. A
performance of either play must make a choice in performing the play, whether to
privilege the material presence of the object or its phenomenological absence. The stage
directions represent the decision between presence and absence as a choice that must be
made in the future. As such, in the dramatic text the Killer and the knife are
simultaneously both present and absent. A decision that has yet to be made, the potential
of a performative future interconnects material presence and phenomenological absence.
The ever-present performance event must contextualize the indeterminacy of a dramatic
text. An actual performance must make a decision, thereby transforming the multi-
valence of the idea of a performance yet to occur into a determinate performance event.

The future of indeterminacy in Ionesco’s performative futures here becomes
apparent. By envisioning the idea of a performance yet to occur, the performative future
creates a text that represents via an indeterminate plurality. Moving beyond the realist
textual suturing of Ibsen, Kane, Shepard, and F rayn, the idea of a performance deferred
into the future gives the dramatic text room to play. Understanding performance as a
future that has yet to occur envisions theatrical materiality neither as a rupture between
things and ideas, nor a material contextualization because it is both. Reconceptualizing
dramatic temporality as a performative future gives a new outlet for approaching
theatrical materiality.

The performative future enters the dramas’ content as violence. The Killer
connects presence to absence as Berenger makes it clear over the course of his
monologue that he is incapable of understanding why the Killer does what he does. The

Professor murdering the Pupil with the knife that is both there and not there is the

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culmination of the Professor’s voice inflicting pain on the Pupil’s body. Even the
Sphinx’s performative future culminates with the threat of Anubis devouring Oedipus.
The performative future enacts its own violence on a temporal register. At the moment
that these plays dramatize a gap between the performative future and the ever-present
performance event violence enters the dramatic content. Using the same word that would
later be used by The Guardian’s leader writer in their critique of Perdition, the Pupil tells

'99

the Professor that “It’s so piercing (73). However, where the Guardian understood
piercing as the antithesis of drama, Ionesco envisions piercing as the essence of drama.
Asking, does it pierce?, almost becomes a litmus test which reveals a text as dramatic.
This is a piercing that a performance of the play sutures over. Much like the determinism

that silences the Sphinx, the performative future cannot survive any dramatic theory that

refuses to see the interplay between text and performance event.

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Endnotes

 

' Marie’s warning to the Professor in Eugene lonesco’s The Lesson (60).
2 For a revealing discussion of the misoginist and homophobic rhetoric emerging from Schechner’s school
of performance studies see Stephen J. Bottom’s “The Efficacy / Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the
Performance Studies / Theatre Studies Dichotomy.”
3 Over the course of this project I use the term phenomenological in its theatrical sense of calling attention
to the material existence of the object rather than broader philosophical connotations. In doing so, I follow
in the footsteps of Bert O. States. In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, States cites Max Scheler’s
understanding of the phenomenological object, and thereby offers a theatrical vision of phenomenology:
“As the phenomenologist would say, the object becomes ‘self-given,’ and ‘something can
be self-given only if it is no longer given merely through any sort of symbol; in other
words, only if it is not ‘meant’ as the mere ‘fulfillment of a sign which is previously
defined in some way or other. In this sense, phenomenological philosophy is a continual
desymbolization of the world’ ” (23).
4 In Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, Katurian recognizes the potential for mimetic disruption between
narrative signifiers and signifieds as a rule of storytelling:
Katurian: This is just like story telling.
Michal: I know.
Katurian: A man comes into a room, says, ‘Your mother’s dead,’
yeah?
Michal: I know my mother’s dead.
Katurian: No, I know, but in a story. A man comes into a room, says to another man,
‘Your mother’s dead.’ What do we know? Do we know that the second man’s mother is
dead?
Michal: Yes.
Katurian: No, we don’t.
Michal: No we don’t.
Katurian: All we know is that a man has come into a room and said
to another man, ‘Your mother is dead.’ That is all we know. First
rule of storytelling. “Don’t believe everything you read in the
papers. (39-40)
5 The effort to subvert Chekhov’s gun is literalized in the First Act as George shoots Martha with a
shotgun. Not only does the gun go off too soon, instead of bullets “a large red and yellow Chinese
parasol” pops from the barrel (192).
6 Although materiality often takes on a Marxist connotation, over the course of this dissertation my use of
materiality simply refers to the presence of the material object.
7 I use “real” here in an attempt to elucidate Gregers’s idealized conception of the world. Below I consider
the larger mimetic frame of any performance of the play which must encompass both forest and loft.
8 Ekdal’s privileging of the imitation over what is being imitated is analogous to Vivian’s third doctrine of
new aesthetics in Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lyingz” “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”
(254). While Ekdal does not go so far as to put the forest subservient to the imitation, both Ekdal and
Vivian conceptualize the imitation as possessing greater significance than the exterior society which
contains the imitation. Written in 1889, Vivian’s new aesthetics appear five years after the first
erformance of The Wild Duck.
Smith is just one among a wealth of critics to emphasize metatheatricaliy in The Wild Duck. In Theatrical
and Narrative Space: Studies in Ibsen, Strindberg, and J. P. Jacobson, Erik Osterud locates this

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metatheatricality within Hjalmar’s melodramatic speech. Analyzing the distance between Hjalmar’s
evening at the Werles and his description of the same, Osterud writes:
The theatrical qualities of the situation have a value of their own. The content (the
humiliation) disappears completely behind the expression (the theatrical ‘performance’).
As a consequence it is more Hjalmar’s present performance that his audience is
applauding than his confident behavior in the social arena. (27-8)
Hjalmar’s metatheatricality has consequences in this reading, as Hedvig, the only authentic character,
becomes a victim of her father’s melodramatic speech. While the signifier (Hjalmar’s performance) may
not have the signified (Hjalmair’s “confident behavior in the social arena”) which Hjalmar intends this
seems very different from a disappearing content. More in line with Osterud’s overall argument, I would
suggest that Hjalmar’s melodramatic performance has a content, but it is a wandering signified that may
have a different meaning for Hjalmar than it does for Hjalmar’s audience. For an earlier discussion of
Hjalmar’s melodramatic speech see Daniel Haadonsen’s “The Play-within-the-Play in Ibsen’s Realistic
Drama.” While I do not dispute Hjalmar’s melodramatic language, I wish to suggest that such a
retrogressive theatrical form is ill equipped to explain the vision of metatheatricaliy lbsen’s play evokes
within the Ekdal’s nature preserve.
'0 The traditional/modem theatrical dialectic elaborated within The Wild Duck breaks down in class terms
strikingly similar to those that would later be proposed by Brecht. The working class, characterized by
Ekdal’s disgrace, Gina’s malapropisms, and Hjalmar’s Hjalmamess is the class that embraces the modern
theatre, while Gregers, with his upper class pedigree, desires a traditional theatre of illusion.
" I use dramatic realism and dramatic naturalism as analogous terms. States also seems to use the terms
interchangeably. For coherence I use the term realism exclusively. While such a generalization effectively
describes the late nineteenth-century movement toward an accurate social representation within drama such
a confluence of terms is more problematic in other genres. In The Concept of Modernism, Astradur
Eysteinsson points out the distinction between modernism and naturalism made by Lukacs. According to
Eysteinsson, Lukacs “saw the naturalist emphasis on the various details of social life initiating the
modernist tearing of details out of the unified fabric of the realist text” (194).
'2 See the current proliferation of theatrical studies that interrogate the social impact of the staged
phenomenological object including the aforementioned The Stage Life of Props by Andrew Sofer, and Bert
States’ Great Reckonings in Little Rooms.
'3 This heritage of realism can be seen as a strong influence on the work of anthropologist and performance
studies pioneer Victor Turner. In Theatre and Ritual, Turner evokes Richard Schechner’s model of an
infinity loop as a means for understanding the relationship between theatre and the exterior society which
contains the theatre. According to Turner, society unconsciously influences the theatre and changes its
content. As a result of this, the transformed theatre unconsciously influences society. Thus, theatre and
society are each constantly being influenced and influencing the other. This loop of mutual influence relies
on a conceptual frame in which spatial difference is replaced by a conception in which theatrical space and
exterior space are both parts of an interactive organism. This connection between theatre and society is
further reinforced through Tumer’s suggestion that society can be understood as a series of social dramas
(61-89).
'4 Chris Burden’s performance of Shoot in which he is shot in the shoulder in front of an audience is a more
current example (1971) of this desire to view classical conceptions of mimesis in a pejorative light. For
Burden, violence becomes the means of escaping metaphor that is engrained within the theatrical event.
While Burden’s success in escaping metaphorical space and transfiguring performance space into an
exterior space is open to debate, his desire to do so is much more explicit. Burden asserts that “Getting
shot is for real . . . there’s no element of pretense or make-believe in it” (Carlson 103).
'5 One of the more overt expressions of this idea occurs at the end of Jean Genet’s The Balcony. Irma
informs the theatrical audience: “you must now go home, where everything — you can be quite sure — will
be falser than here” (96).
'6 In The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Arthur Symons makes the difference between a realist art
which merely imitates the structure of the world and a symbolist art which elucidates the essence of
humanity explicit: “Here, then, in this revolt against exteriority, against rhetoric, against a materialistic
tradition; in this endeavor to disengage the ultimate essence, the soul, of whatever exists and can be
realized by the consciousness; in this dutiful waiting upon every symbol by which the soul of things can be

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made visible; literature bowed down by so many burdens, may at last attain liberty, and its authentic
speech” (5).

' Also see Verna A. Foster’s “Ibsen’s Tragi-Comedy: The Wild Duck.” Foster asserts that “[c]ritics have
noted in particular Ibsen’s use of a central pervasive symbol that implicates the metaphysical in the
mundane: the endlessly suggestive wild duck is metaphorically related to all of the major characters, while
the loft full of junk that is like the ‘depths of the sea’ evokes the recesses of the mind” (292).

'8 For another elucidation of Hedvig’s victimization by those around her see Joan Templeton’s Ibsen ’s
Women. According to Templeton: “Daddy’s girl with a vengeance, Hedvig alone performs the ‘little
celebration out in the loft’ that ‘dear, dear Daddy’ promised for her birthday. Hedvig’s death, her gift of
love, is her birthday present from her father” (175).

'9 Also see Osterud. Osterud refuses to see Hedvig’s death as tragic because she acquires no insight and
she is totally without blame. According to Osterud, tragedy cannot be blamed on misunderstandings (40).
2° Ibsen’s vision of critics squabbling and interpreting the play echoes Gregers’s effort to understand the
duck in the play.

2' This desire to conceive of the mimesis of language as synonymous with the mimesis of performance
thereby conceiving of performance within the mimesis of language is made explicit by Schechner as he
uses a metaphor in describing the performances of the Gahuku men. Schechner writes that “The system is
analogous to a printing press, where information is imprinted upon a piece of paper as it is fed through”
(130).

22 This idea that the doubleness which always exists within performance can either help or hinder the
mimesis of language is futher emphasized by the name he gives the phenomea. In titling this theory double
negativity, Schechner presents a theory that is based on the working of metaphor yet is titled after a
subversion of language convention.

2’ For a related characterization of the emergence of the Schechner school of performance studies see
Stephen J. Bottom’s “The Efficacy / Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the Performance Studies / Theatre
Studies Dichotomy.” Bottoms argues that theatre is represented as being impotent while performance is
characterized as able to achieve real world results.

2“ Anyone familiar with Erving Goffman’s The Presentation ofSelfin Everyday Life will recognize that at
least as far as Finley’s performance is concerned this should be looked at as merely presenting a layer to
her performance. While on stage Karen Finley is performing the role of Karen Finley which is far different
from the Finley while not upon the stage. Yet here I am interested in the ideal of trying to discard the
concept of a role.

25 This is not to marginalize perpetually off-stage objects previous to The Wild Duck. In just a few well
known examples, Lauis is never seen in Sophocles’ Oedipus, and Alving is never seen in Ibsen’s Ghosts.
However, where The Wild Duck consistently calls attention to the absent object and shows the difficulty of
interpretation, Oedipus and Ghosts fail to thoroughly question what it means for a staged object to be
absent. Actually, Ghosts and Oedipus announce the death of the absent character thereby minimizing the
distance between linguistic and performative signifiers. In Early Modern Drama’s theatrical practice of
staging non-objects, the way to interpret such objects is never critically questioned.

2" J .L. Styan develops a similar conception to Barry’s retrospective time in his effort to understand the
theatrical event. Carlson notes: “Theatre theorists must therefore consider the historical conditions of
performance: the attitudes of audiences in different periods to the physical configuration of the stage, to
improvisation and the actors’ belief, to such matters as asides and prologues” (488). The significance
behind critical efforts to institute a theatre of transfiguration by historically contextualizing the theatrical
event in a replication of characters’ efforts to do the same will be elaborated below.

27 While Oedipal often tends to reference the Freudian concept, my use of the term should be understood as
an alluion to Sophocles’s play unless stated otherwise in the text.

2" While Classical Greek Tragedy leaves the violent act offstage the effects of violence are staged. Murder
escapes visual representation but corpses are clearly represented. This will be a significant counterpoint to
my discussion of Sarah Kane below.

29 In The Poetics, Aristotle critiques Medea for Medea’s escape at the ending which is too much a deux ex
machina convention. It is worth noting that this happens on the heels of her murder of her children.

3° Mark Ravenhill’s Earnest homage Handbag takes the opposite approach to Bunbury. Instead of a
materialized Bunbury, Ravenhill’s play culminates with the death of a baby named Jack. In so doing,
Ravenhill’s play rejects the Oedipal narrative of historical recognition and embraces the dead child.

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However, Ravenhill offers what seems to be a different conception of the dead baby. Whereas up to this
point the dead baby has been conceptualized as an indeterminate speech act that counteracts determinism
and materiality, Ravenhill’s physical representation of the dead baby offers dead baby as material object
instead of dead baby as alternative to material object. As such, Ravenhill’s material dead baby functions
analogous to that evoked in Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Sam Shepard’s Buried Child. The materialized dead
baby of Kane and Shepard are discussed at length in Chapter Four below.
3 ' While purely speculative, it is hard to resist reading huit clos a phrase that is difficult to make sense of, as
a misspelling of hats clos, the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential drama. Interestingly, in a chapter
focusing on a psychoanalytic interpretation of dead children in American drama, Kubiak’s text never
references Sartre or the narrative of the dead child in his play. In essence, the text represses the dramatic
connection to dead children outside of American drama by replacing the s with a t.

32 For a less psychoanalytic analysis of the dead child as a definitely American dramatic image see Peter
L.Hays’s “Child Murder and Incest in American Drama.” Hays writes that child murder demonstrates
how “our selfish values are destroying our country and the lives of the people within it” (446).

33 Not only is there a starting number of canonical modern plays that contain dead children, but, in addition,
the plays that do contain a dead baby often allude to more than one. In Desire Under the Elms, Abbie tells
Eben upon meeting him that she had a baby who died (23). In Who ’s Aftraid of Virginia Woolf?, Honey
serves as a foil to Martha by apparently terminating at least one real pregnancy that she claimed was
imaginary (176-7). In Six Characters in Search of an Author, both children die within the culminating
memory (687). The plays seem to suggest that the culminating dead baby image is not a new development is
but rather the continuation of a pattern within a text as well as between texts. The significance of this
proliferating pattern will be considered below.

4 I do not mean to suggest that Ibsen was the originator of either the prose play or the problem play both

of which emerged in France well before Ibsen’s turn to prose. For a brief overview of the French realist

and problem play tradition, see Maurice Valency’s, The Flower and the Castle: An Introduction to
Modern Drama (58-1 17). .

Despite the French origin of realism and the problem play, both phenomena became synonymous

internationally with the work of Ibsen. Following in the footsteps of Kenneth Muir, John Fletcher and
James McFarlane, suggest in “Modernist Drama: Origins and Patterns:” “‘The most important event in the |
history of modern drama,’ it has been confidently (and in approximate phrases, repeatedly) claimed ‘was i
Ibsen’s abandonment of verse after Peer Gynt in order to write prose plays about contemporary problems.’”
For a more historical based example of this cultural furor upon the performance of Ibsen in England see G.
B. Shaw’s The Quintessence of Ibsenism. Shaw takes delight in the negative reaction Ghosts received upon
first being performed, taking it as a sign that “the destroyer of ideals, though denounced as an enemy of
society, is in fact sweeping the world clear of lies” (40). Shaw cites an early review of the play which is
strikingly similar to the reaction Kane’s Blasted would receive a century later: “If any repetition of this
outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy” (71). Furthermore, In his
introduction to the 1922 third edition Shaw goes so far as to suggest that Ibsen’s content is a manner of life
and death:

 

 

Since the last edition of this book was printed, war, pestilence and famine have wrecked
civilization and killed a number of people of whom the first batch is calculated as not less
than fifteen millions. Had the gospel of Ibsen been understood and heeded, these fifteen
millions might have been alive now; for the war was a war of ideals (3).
3’ One of the most famous examples of this being the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, in
which Mary Shelly offers to “give a general answer to the question, so very frequently asked me — ‘How I,
then a young girl, came to think of, to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea? [ . . . ] And now, once again, I
bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (169-173).
36 The manner in which Hedda Gabler serves as a continuation of the transition which is begun in The
Wild Duck is emphasized by the similar names of the heroines. In “The Unspoken Text in Hedda Gabler,”
Evert Sprinchom suggests that “Hedda, [is] a form of Hedvig, meaning battle” (3 56).
3' See Susan Torrey Barstow’s “’Hedda is All of Us’: Late-Victorian Women at the Matinee” for a further
discussion of the identification potential of Hedda Gabler as a performance event. Barstow asserts, “it is
clear that the [British] Ibsen matinees of the 18905 contributed to the creation of turn-of—the century

 

260

 

feminism, a feminism that would later realize itself in the theatricalized struggles of the Edwardian
suffragette movement” (3 86-7).

’8 For an example see The Times April 21, 1898 review of the play collected in Ibsen: The Critical
Heritage. According to this unsigned notice, “[t]here is no reasoning as to a lunatic’s behavior; and Hedda
Gabler is manifestly a lunatic of the epileptic class” (Egan 219).

’9 Similar to Fuchs attempt to find comprehensibility outside of realism, Rhonda Blair suggests that “our
reading of Hedda is incomplete if we try to fit it into a neat, rational cause-and-effect explanation of
behavior or a sociological or psychological paradigm that doesn’t encompass the full dimensions of the
work. We miss the dark core of the play” (144).

’0 My interpretation of Hedda’s threat to burn Thea’s hair as a continuation of the ritual themes within the
play is indebted to Fuchs’s analysis.

4‘ In addition to Fuchs, see Mary Kay Norseng’s “Suicide and Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler” for a reading which
privileges Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy and the Dionysian. While Fuchs writes that “Hedda Gabler may
be taken as representative of his [Ibsen’s] own view of civilization’s diminished spirit” (219), both Fuchs
and Norseng seem to view the Dionysian as still functioning within the play. Although the society
dramatized in Hedda Gabler may diminish the results of the Dionysian spirit, the Dionysian is still a very
real force. Below I question the viability of the Dionysian spirit as a modern construct and consider the
dead baby as an emblem of a post-Dionysian dramatic force.

42 Viewed in strictly historical terms, while Nietzsche initially publishes The Birth of Tragedy three years
before Ibsen’s turn to prose in Pillars of Society, the attempt at self-criticism is published in the midst of
Ibsen’s plays which involve dead children. Published in 1886, Nietzsche’s regret of not leaving the dead
child alone occurs well after the first performance of The Wild Duck but well before the first performance
of The Lady From The Sea.

’3 At least in Hedda’s case there is the added link between the metaphorical child and her unwanted
pregnancy.

4" While this is a continuation of the definition of mimesis I outline in Chapter One, phenomenologists will
no doubt take issue to this assertion. In Great Reckoning in Little Rooms, Bert 0. States uses animals on
stage as an example of a phenomenological object that can escape the semiotic web of signification. This is
also the effort of body performance artists such as Chris Burden. Yet, as should be clear I am much more
skeptical of the potential for the visual to escape a semiotic network of signification.

’5 In “Ibsen and Feminism,” Gail Finney describes how “unlike Nora [from A Doll’s House], Hedda is still
too much the victim of traditional thinking to move from hysteria to feminism” (100).

4" Although I use the conventional spelling for fantasy, my definition of fantasy is indebted to the Freudian
concept. This choice is made for regularity, with the exception of citing Freud directly.

’7 It is interesting to note that Caruth’s book is published in the same year that Pinter’s play is first
performed. This focus on trauma as a break in time is also emphasized in Felman and Laub’s Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History. According to Laub, knowledge of a
trauma “dissolves all barriers, breaks all boundaries of time and place of self and subjectivity” (58).

4” Prinz is much more ambiguous in her characterization of Rebecca as victim (or as just victim) than
Stanlake as she wonders: “How can the same character be a perpetuator of atrocity or at the very least an
indifferent bystander, a witness, and a victim all at the same time?” (100). The short answer would be that
Rebecca can’t. While for Prinz, Rebecca is more than just victim the overall point of privileging Rebecca’s
utterance as history over fantasy is clear in Prinz’s analysis.

’9 Stanlake played Rebecca in the Women at Play production in Columbus Ohio October 21-31 1999. The
production was directed by Katherine Burkman.

0 While Prinz and Stanlake are being used as representative examples they are meant to illustrate a larger
trend in Ashes to Ashes criticism. The majority of criticism on the play could be indicted along with
Devlin. See, for example, Robert Conklin’s “Political and Personal Worlds of Play: Women at Play
Perform Pinter’s Ashes to Ashes.” Conklin characterizes Rebecca as taking “her place in a history of the
Holocaust that she cannot have lived” (135). Conklin’s interpretation derives from the production starring
Stanlake. Also see Hanna Scolnicov’s “Ashes to Ashes; Pinter’s Holocaust Play.”

5 ' Naturally this excludes the typical plethora of silences and pregnant pauses found in a Pinter play.
’2 This idea of Devlin trying to distract or bully Rebecca from evoking the baby and from larger cultural
utterances is indebted to Owens. According to Owens, “[i]nstead of investigating why Rebecca might have

261

 

so uncannily mentioned the unexplained ‘bundle,’ Devlin deflects conversation away from her Freudian
slip, first by asking two intimidating, stifling rhetorical questions, and then by suggesting a quintessentially
escapist escape from the conversation: ‘a movie” (91 ). However, whereas Owens suggests that “Devlin
acts as a repressive force, systematically thwarting Rebecca’s attempts to work through her own neuroses
and thereby to establish subjective unity,” I wish to suggest Devlin’s project is much more context specific
depending on his potential for owning the individual traumatic utterance (90).

’3 The Shepard epigram is from his essay “Visualization, Language and the Inner Library” (55). The Kane
epigram is taken from her interview with Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge published in their book,
Rage and Reason: Women Playwrights on Playwriting (130).

5" Tinker’s review was famously entitled “THE DISGUSTING FEAST OF FILTH.” Tinker’s attack did
not go unanswered by Kane as she named the torturer in Cleansed Tinker. For another example of the
hostile critical reaction to Blasted see Bick Curtis’s review for the Evening Standard. According to Curtis
“Blasted is a powerful experience in the same way being mugged is a powerful experience” (46).

5’ While I wish to suggest that the staged dead baby is a definitive image in the effort to stage the
unrepresentable, the staged violence of Blasted works similarly. In “’In Better Places’: Space, Identity and
Alienation in Sarah Kane’s Blasted,” Christopher Wixson suggests that being “[c]ommitted to the
repressed, Kane in Blasted strives to represent onstage what is often only implied or relegated offstage,
moving the margins to the center”

5" Saved was the last play prosecuted by the Lord Chamberlain. Perhaps it is not so surprising that it was
Bond and Pinter, two dead baby dramatists, who wrote editorials in support of Blasted. Bond’s editiorial
published in The Guardian under the title of “A BLAST AT OUR SMUG THEATRE” characterized
Blasted as “the most important play on in London” (22). Blasted was originally performed in 1995, the
year before Ashes to Ashes. Michael Billington recognized connections between the two plays in his
review of the 2001 revival of Blasted. In another connection between the two dramatists, Kane was
planning on reviewing Ashes to Ashes for the Observer: “I was really keen to do it, and then they phoned
me up and said: ‘If you don’t like it, that would be great’, and I thought: ‘This is a set-up, so I didn’t do it
(qtd in Sierz 121).

57 In this context, it is worth returning to Curtis’s comparison between seeing Blasted and being mugged.
In such a characterization, Curtis collapses the distinction between violence and representations and
violence

’8 For Radel, to a large degree, phenomenology is the point of the play: “The complex of ideas associated
with com in America enriches the texture of the work, ensuring that Dodge’s house is seen as something
more than a single family unit” (181).

’9 Kane’s stage directions read that Ian “eats the baby” (60). It is suggestive that in transforming eating to
devouring Billington’s review may make the image more horrifying than Kane’s dramatic text.

60 Similarly, in “Mythic Structure in Hedda Gabler: The Mask Behind the Face,” Elinor Fuchs describes
Hedda’s burning of Lovborg’s book and Hedda’s handing Levborg one of her pistol’s as shocking.

6' According to Kane, “A list of a play’s contents is not a review. So, inevitably, a list of what happens in
Blasted — middle aged male jumo rapes his girlfriend and gets buggered by a soldier who sucks his eyes out
— isn’t going to enamour me to your average middle-aged male theatre critic” (qtd in Sierz 98).

62 Such a distinction is indebted to J. L Austin’s use of the terms in his analysis of the performative speech
act.

6’ Blasted provides an echo of this as Ian is very concerned with his own stinking body and the stinking
city.

6" “Paths to Perdition.” The Guardian. January 23, 1987. Leader. (qtd in Perdition 125).

6’ For sake of regularity I use Allen’s spelling of Kastner throughout.

6" Three years later, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the verdict. Kastner did not live to see his
exoneration. He was murdered in 1957.

6' Allen says that the play is “the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written” (qtd in Cesarani 118).

68 Perhaps this is a bit of an exaggeration. According to Roth, he asked that the program include “a brief
statement that the historical facts as presented in the play are according to the author’s personal perception
and that many historians and eyewitnesses — of whom I happen to be one — strongly differ from it, and that
the same applies to the definition of Zionism in the play” (142). Regardless, the point is the same. By

3”

262

 

contextualizing the play as Allen’s perceptions the program tries to create a barrier between performance
and historical foreclosure.

’9 Even the suggestion that Perdition had been banned is contentious. Cesarani and Stafford-Clark
emphasize that the decision of the Royal Court to pull the play is not analogous to the play being banned.
However, Allen and Loach suggest that threats of reprisal to any theatre that decided to produce the play
amounts to a banning for all practical purposes if not in fact.

'0 Postscript to Copenhagen (1 15).

7' The Frayn epigram is taken from the Copenhagen postscript (95), and the Shaw from the preface to Saint
Joan (25).

'2 Among the egregious ahistorical loans in literature Shaw holds up Schiller’s romantic Joan for possibly
the most scorn: “There is really nothing to be said of his play but that it is not about Joan at all, and can
hardly be said to pretend to be” (23).

73 In his postscript to Copenhagen, Frayn acknowledges that he “can’t claim to be the first person to notice
the parallels between Heisenberg’s science and his life” (97). David Cassidy named his Heisenberg
biography Uncertainty, and in Heisenberg ’s War Thomas Powers describes how Heisenberg’s work on the
German atomic programme contained “an element of irreducible uncertainty” (qtd in Frayn 98).

7’ Early in the postscript Frayn assets that “the account of the German and American bomb programmes,
and of the two physicists’ participation in them, is taken from the historical record; so is the fate of Danish
Jewry; Heisenberg’s experiences in Germany before and during the war, his subsequent internment, and the
depression that clouded his later years” (96).

7’ In this citation I have omitted a photograph of the section of the instructions which included the sketch
that interests Frayn.

'6 This becomes explicit as Frayn gets “a phone call from someone I didn’t know but who claimed
implausibly, as it seemed to me, to be the son of a friend; it’s David Burke, I thought at once” (81).

7' Schaeffer (37).

'8 Folino-White (99). Folino-White is citing de Certeau.

'9 Of course this is all a matter of signification. I do not mean to suggest that Marsh’s “authentic” body in
any sense pervades the text. Merely that within The Copenhagen Paper ’s representational economy, the
text embraces the idea of the actor’s phenomenological body as a site of certainty.

8° Folino-White writes that “The Emperor Jones ’s level of success is legendary. In the first week alone
more than one thousand subscriptions were sold and the uniqueness of the production catapulted it to
Broadway. The play also transformed Eugene O’Neill, largely an unknown, into the great American
playwright” (98).

' For a more detailed examination of Gilpin's performance see David Krasner's “Whose Role is it
Anyway?: Charles Gilpin and the Harlem Renaissance.” The importance of The Emperor Jones in
American performative representations transcends the stage. In “'The Eighth 0' Style': Black Nationalism,
The New Deal, and The Emperor Jones,” Anna Siomopoulos relates how “the movie [adapted from
O'Neill's play] was noted as one of the first race films with a white actor — Dudley Digges as Smithers — in
a second billed role” (76). Paul Robeson played Jones in the film.

82 Hughes's reaction to The Emperor Jones is a complex one. In “When the Negro was in Vogue,” he
includes “Charles Gilpin, and the tom-toms at the Provincetown” as one of his representative examples of
Manhattan's black Renaissance which open the essay alongside Shuflle Along and Running Wild. However,
he distances O'Neill's play from the other examples by writing that “Perhaps some people would say even
with The Emperor Jones,” thereby distancing himself from one of these “some people.” For more on
Hughes’s reaction to the play see below.

8’ See David Savran's Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group and Aoife Monks's “'Genuine Negroes and
Real Bloodhounds."’

8" The institutionalization of the performance which occurs alongside the celebration of its postmodern
aspects transcends the grouping of Valk alongside renowned actresses to include Isherwood’s fetishization
of the whiteness and the gender of the actress beneath the blackface.

8’ 1 do not mean to suggest that Jones’s vision of identity is the same of Butler’s understanding of the
performativity of gender. More like a naive version of Butler, Jones believes that solely by the power of
the utterance and the act he can perform an empowering present and keep history at bay.

8" Several previous critics have provided fine analysis of the racial implications of Jones’s self-
construction. Rather than viewing Jones in terms of self-fashioning, Manuel suggests that “Jones’s journey

263

 

from the whiteness that wraps him up in his palace into the darkness of his psyche becomes an act of

cathartic unmasking.” Similarly, Phillip J. Hanson argues that Jones “has absorbed the ethics of the

oppressors of his ancestors, and for this, in the terms of the play, he must be sacrificed” (139).

8 Thornton Wilder’s Our Town ( 193 8) recognizes the difference of converging temporalities and

characterizes this difference in terms similar to Shaw and Frayn. The Stage Manager tries to warn the dead

Emily against reliving a day because “as you watch it [the day], you see the thing that they — down there -

never know. You see the future. You know what’s going to happen afterwards” (101). Unlike the

uncertainty of motives that haunts F rayn’s ghosts, repetition provides too much understanding for Emily.

88 “My Plays and 1.” Notes and Counter Notes: Writings on the Theatre (163).

89 “interview with Edith Mora.” Ibid (122).

90 “An Address Delivered To A Gathering OF French And German Writers.” Ibid (146).

9' See Barbara McMahon’s “Beckett estate fails to stop women waiting for Godot”

and Matthew Rimmer’s “Damned to fame: the moral rights of the Beckett estate.”

’2 Reviewers reaction to the omission of the bananas varies, to put it mildly. In his review for The

Independent Paul Taylor assets: “They have junked all the feeble business with the banana, thank God

(Samuel Beckett had few faults as a dramatist, but a weakness for slapstick was one of them),” while,

according to Nightingale, Pinter “ignores the stage direction that requires him to gorge bananas: which is

unfortunate, because that’s one way in which Beckett brings out the crude, animal side of this disappointed,

disillusioned old man. ”

9’ Joy Zinoman directed a production of Waiting for Godot that “foregrounded race as an inflection of the

social and theistic relations of Beckett's characters (Klein 192). Amid threats of litigation by the Beckett

estate, “Zinoman has argued that her production ‘is the text’” (Klein 193).

94 “About Rhinoceros in the United States.” Notes and Counter Notes

9’ “A letter to the First Director.” Ibid.

96 “The playwright’s Role.” Ibid.

9' “In The Long Run 1 Am For Classicism.” Ibid.

98 Donald M. Allen notes in his translation of The Bald Soprano that ending the play with the switching of

character roles was not adopted “until after the hundredth performance” (42).

99 In “In The Long Run I Am For Classicism,” Ionesco asserts that “In the end I realized I did not really

want to write ‘anti-theatre’ but ‘theatre.’ I hope I have rediscovered intuitively in my own mind the

permanent basic outlines of drama” (131). However, this version of theatre is a theatre that is in constant

danger from critics and performers overstepping their bounds and making the play less theatrical. These

permanent basic outlines of drama” have nothing to do with the present performance event. As such

lonesco’s theatrical text is anti-theatre by any traditional conception.

'00 Beckett’s Breath questions Brook’s opening precept in a different register. Beckett writes a play

without any human characters and in so doing suggests that the man walking across the stage may be

superfluous.

'0' This conception of an audience that is distant from theatrical essence and yet still must be conceived,

helps explain Ionesco’s claim in “The Birth of the Bald Soprano” that he originally had “imagined a more

shattering ending” (Notes and Counter Notes 184) This other ending offers a radically different conception

of the relationship between play and audience than the harmonious interconnection of actors planted in the

audience asking questions and thereby demonstrating a unified performance event in Thornton Wilder’s

Our Town:
As soon as it [the stage] is empty, two or three accomplices in the audience start catcalling, kick
up a row, shout protests and invade the stage. This brings on the manager of the theatre, followed
by the Superintendent of Police and his men, who open fire at the rebellious audience, (to make an
example of them); then, while the manager and the superintendent congratulate each other on
teaching the public a good lesson, the gendarmes, gun in hand, stand threateningly in front of the
curtain and order the theatre to be cleared. [ . . . ]

Too expensive. So I had written a second ending, easier to put over. . . . At the height of
the Smith-Martin quarrel the maid arrives and announces the author in ringing tones.

The actors than respectfully make way, line up to the right and left of the stage and
applaud the author, who comes quickly forward to face the public; then, shaking his fist at the
audience, he cries: ‘You bastards, I’ll skin you alive!’ The curtain would then fall very rapidly”
(184-5)

264

 

Cathartic manifestations of violence toward an audience that is not necessary for a play and yet cannot be
dismissed, Ionesco’s unstaged endings never even make it into a theatre. By the time the play has been
staged, it is too late.

'02 In The Quintessence of Ibsenism Shaw describes Ibsen’s plots similarly. Rather than describe the plots
as they occur — rather than describe the plots as the present narration of past events - the Voice and Shaw
deform the plots of Sophocles and Ibsen by giving the narrated event as much primacy as what is enacted
on stage. The Voice and Shaw’s descriptions demonstrate the contextualizing power of the ever-present by
minimizing all distinctions between past and present, and between narrating and enacting.

'03 This is the vision of indeterminacy echoed in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
Like Oedipus and Jocasta, Stoppard’s protagonists have a finite temporal space for play before being
absorbed in the rigid causal frame of Hamlet. Both Stoppard and Cocteau use explicit metatheatrical
structures to outline the indeterminacy in-between and rigid dramatic form’s overcoming of this
indeterminacy.

'04 The stage directions instruct that in Act I the Architect carries a briefcase like Edouard’s.

265

 

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