Modern Drama and the Rhetoric of Theater by Worthen W. B.;

Author:Worthen, W. B.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History and Drama
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2015-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

THE DISCIPLINE OF THE TEXT: BECKETT’S THEATER

“The text is the text.”

—Rick Cluchey, reporting Beckett’s refusal to incorporate production changes into the published text of Waiting for Godot (qtd. in Duckworth 185)

To begin a discussion of Beckett’s relation to the rhetoric of “poetic theater,” we might reflect for a moment on a relatively unpoetic play, Catastrophe (1982). Catastrophe is hardly “poetic” in any conventional sense; the verbal texture of the play is, if anything, rather less rich than that of plays like Waiting for Godot (1953) or Rockaby (1981). Catastrophe, it seems, has more to do with the ideology of the image than with that of the word, to concern the systems of authority—textual, theatrical, and political authority—that operate in and on the body of performance. In his efforts to bare, whiten, and sculpt the body of the Protagonist, the Director produces a spectacle for us, inscribing the body of the performer with an unspoken code, the code within which we recognize “our catastrophe” (300). As Pierre Chabert suggests, the body of the Protagonist—both actor and character—becomes emblematic of the role that the body performs in much of Beckett’s theater: “It is worked, violated even, much like the raw materials of the painter or sculptor, in the service of a systematic exploration of all possible relationships between the body and movement, the body and space, the body and objects, the body and light and the body and words” (“The body” 23). It is this final “working” of the body of the Protagonist that most interests me here, how the body’s subjection to textual authority reveals the rhetoric of Beckett’s theater.

Beckett’s most punishing plays tend toward an abstract visual composition at the expense of realistic mimesis: to reduce the lively movement of the body to a grim geometry, to efface character and abandon action. In this and in other respects, Beckett’s theater puts the conception of the “poetic” stage that I have been developing to the test. Of course, Beckett’s plays do not appear in verse form on the page. Yet insofar as the understanding of poetic theater I have developed here emphasizes the text’s function in the stage production, this aspect of the text’s appearance may not be critical. Many of Beckett’s plays have the densely imagistic texture we associate with “poetic” drama. More important, stylistic features of the texts govern the plays’ physical articulation on the stage, as the actors and the entire mise-en-scène are used—as in the poetic theater—to present the drama as a poetic “object.” The antiphonal quality of dialogue in Waiting for Godot, the interspersed voices in That Time (1976), the interaction of speech and music in Cascando (1963), the poised periods of Rockaby: many of Beckett’s plays articulate the text in performance in ways that are indistinguishable from the practice of poetic theater. And when Beckett claims that the “best possible play is one in which there are no actors, only the text” (Bair 513), he seems most the inheritor of Maeterlinck, Craig, Yeats, and of the symboliste theater of which they are a part.

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