PERCEIVING BODIES IN BECKETT S PLAY Katherine Weiss This essay examines Play inrelation to the modernists anxiety over technology. Walter Benjamin argued that the camera transforms the audience into an uncritical viewer because the image is mass reproduced as a commodity. Seven years earlier, Sigmund Freud asserted that while prosthetic tools perfect motor and sensory organs, they also inversely heighten the awareness of human limits. Both Benjamin and Freud fear that these prosthetic tools result in an alienation of the critical human perspective. Play does not reproduce the same critique but challenges the audience s responses as mechanised and uncritical, questioning their participation in authorial structures. In the early part of the twentieth century, innovations in technology transformed the nature of entertainment industries and led to theoretical investigations of the corresponding changes in perception. The camera became for many modernist writers and artists an example of a mechanical prosthetic eye that brings the image closer and commodifies it (Armstrong, 226; Orvell, 173-74). The use of the camera and the photographic image triggered concerns over the mass re-production and commodification of art. In his 1929 book Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud discusses technology as an attempt to enhance and perfect human motor or sensory organs. This use of technology, he found, causes human beings to become increasingly aware of their lacks and limits (43). Consequently, modern discontent is, at least partially, the result of the awareness of human failings and the need for prostheses to complete the human body. Two years later, Walter Benjamin wrote the first draft of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1969, 217-59). In this essay, Benjamin expressed his concerns over the status of works of art in the modern age and the dangers he thought would result from their mass reproduction. Howard Caygill explains that Benjamin s arguments are formed on the basis of a philosophy of experience that is vision-centred and vision-generated. The mass reproduction of photographic images troubles Benjamin because he believes that objects and surfaces lose 186
authenticity and aura through the ease of reproducibility. As his primary example of this phenomenon, Benjamin analyses the impact of film on contemporary culture and contrasts cinematography to painting and cinematic acting to theatrical performances (Caygill, 103). In his critique of film images, Benjamin argues that as culture becomes increasingly commodified, the individual s perception becomes less critical. While Freud recognised that new technology provides people with the tools to destroy fellow human beings easily along with their natural and constructed worlds, Benjamin fears that the camera makes human misery an object of consumption (1977, 96). Instead of merely reproducing the modernist critique of and anxiety over technology and the reproduction of art, Samuel Beckett in Play attaches no truth value to his critique of technology and the reproduction of the gaze. 1 Instead, he uses it to create a dialogue that awakens and revitalises the uncritical perception of his audience. Play, written shortly before Film, challenges ways of seeing in the theatre through its use of lightening. The spotlight, conventionally the actor s friend, in Beckett s play is the character s enemy through its power to mechanise the gaze and performance. This paper examines Play in light of modernist theories concerning mechanisation, particularly those of Walter Benjamin, and explores the audience s position in relation to the technology of the spotlight. It is tempting to link the spotlight directly to the eyes of the audience, yet Beckett, in his note on lighting, explains that the spotlight is distinctly separate from that of the audience in the stalls: The source of light [...] must not be situated outside the ideal space (stage) occupied by its victims (1986, 318). In addition, Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider in a letter dated 26 November 1963, The man on the light should be regarded as a fourth player and must know the text inside and out (Harmon, 145). Beckett carefully constructs the spotlight as a fourth player in order to direct the gaze of the audience as well as to give the spotlight an authorial role. As Ruby Cohn observes, the spotlight controls our view of the play (194). The spotlight becomes the active looker that directs the audience s inactive gaze. However, Beckett uses authoritative technology to direct the inactive gaze into action. The light stemming from below stage space, places the prosthetic eye in the place of the director, and, in effect, positions the inquisitive light in the role of authority, functioning much like the director in Catastrophe, who sits in an armchair downstairs audience left (457), barking out orders. 187
In Andreas Huyssen s discussion of Metropolis and cinema in After the Great Divide, he argues that the male gaze is ultimately that of the camera, of another machine, objectifying the female body (75). With this in mind, the audience connects the spotlight with the eye of the male authority on- and off-stage. Hence, the light functions to illuminate both the director dictating the way in which the play is seen and M s playing both W1 and W2. W2 says that when she questioned M whether there was anything between him and W1: Anything between us, he said, what do you take me for, a something machine? (309, emphasis mine). M is associated with the manipulative, unseeing and unthinking machine of the light. He represents the male, authoritative gaze that objectifies both W1 and W2 in a game/performance which he cannot seem to make sense ofor end even after his departure: I simply could no longer [ ] (311). The male authoritative gaze of the spotlight functions in many ways like a camera, bridging the distance between the audience and stage. Cameras, through techniques such as close-ups, panning and slow motion, help an audience to see more than they would with the naked eye. Cameras function as the spectators prosthetic eye, discovering and uncovering the nuances their human eyes cannot detect. The prosthetic eye extends the natural function of the eye and, in doing so, covers and fills in the absence of vision (Armstrong, 77-79). In Play, the spotlight becomes the prosthetic eyes and ears of the audience through its illumination of a purgatorial world not immediately visible, audible, or comprehensible to the human sensory organs. Like a camera, the spotlight works to capture the images on stage and places the audience in the framed image. In other words, the audience is transformed onto the stage as the inquisitor through the eye of the spotlight. Benjamin argues that the camera alienates the actor and the audience because [t]he audience s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera. Consequently the audience takes the position of the camera [ ] (1969, 228-29). According to Benjamin, the actor of the stage acts for a live audience while the actor of film acts for the camera. Beckett presents his theatre-going audience with an image of film-like acting. Beckett s audience is placed in the position of identifying with the light instead of the actors or as the light as a fourth actor. The privileged inquisitive gaze of the audience parallels the spotlight and, as a result, is also guilty of torturing the actors. Beckett s use of the spotlight exposes W2, M, and W1 as actors trapped into acting for the spotlight rather than for a live audience. When the spotlight shines on W1, she, like Mouth in Not I who attempts to shut out the audience s 188
eyes, says, Get off me! Get off me! (313). She addresses the prosthetic eyes of the audience that torment her, that is, the light, not the faces in the auditorium. This tormenting light functions as the authoritative gaze of a camera, alienating the actors by erasing the audience and alienating the audience by merging them with the inquisitive spotlight. 2 With the torturous staring of the light, Beckett creates the sensation in the viewers and in the actors (or so it seems to the audience) of looking into an unseeing eye. Benjamin, in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, explains Baudelaire s dislike of the daguerreotype because the object photographed must stare for a prolonged time into a camera that does not return its gaze (1969, 187-88). Similarly in Play, the spotlight functions like a camera, and the actors must stare into this mechanical eye that does not return their gaze. The actor is trapped into staring directly into the light, as Winnie is in Happy Days. For the actors, the brightness and positioning of the spotlight blackens the auditorium. All the actors see is a blinding light. Although the spotlight confronting the actors provides the audience with direct eye contact with the actors, the actors cannot see the audience. Hence, the audience stares at unperceiving bodies. The characters, acting for and seemingly gazing into the spotlight, question whether they are seen. W2, like Winnie in Happy Days, says: Are you listening to me? Is anyone listening to me? Is anyone looking at me? Is anyone bothering about me at all? (314). She begins by addressing her question to you, the specific perceiver the spotlight. By addressing the other questions to anyone, however, W2 turns her inquisitive eye towards the audience, yearning to know whether she is seen. Likewise, M says: And now, that you are... mere eye. Just looking. At my face. On and off. [...] Mere eye. No mind. Opening and shutting on me. Am I as much [Spot off M. Blackout. Three seconds. Spot on M.] Am I as much as... being seen? [...] [Closing repeat.] Am I as much as... being seen? (317) The mechanical reproducibility of the gaze results in a mechanised response to the image. The light swivels from one image to the other not hearing or seeing them. It is a precise and automated eye that authoritatively switches the voices on and off but does not see or hear the nuances 189
of the performance. The performance, likewise, performed ideally toneless and without expression, except where indicated, parodies the mechanised performance of the actor stuck in the same play for years. Responding to the spotlight has become their habit, and Beckett, years earlier, wrote that habits are paralysing (Beckett 1957, 9). The light repeatedly provokes the characters into speech that grows into a habit and consequently both erases the significance of their response and suggests a further lack of authorial control. Even though the stage suggests a purgatory where the actors must repeat their sins, it is, to the contrary, a place where even repenting does not release the figures from their agony. W1 asks, Is it that I do not tell the truth, is that it, that some day somehow I may tell the truth at last and then no more light at last, for the truth? (313). But even if she told the truth, the prosthetic eye the spotlight will not release her. Shortly after her questioning whether she is in her purgatory because she does not get the story right, she states: Penitence, yes, at a pinch, atonement, one was resigned, but no, that does not seem to be the point either (316). In an early typescript, this line read: I repent. Unfortunately that does not seem to be the point (ts. 1528/1). Repenting, an action that usually results in forgiveness, in Play, merely adds up to a heap of empty words. Modern technology, Benjamin explains in The Storyteller, results in the loss of ritual value and the silencing of the story-teller (1969, 84). Although in Play repenting, a ritual performed in order to be forgiven, no longer functions, the technology of the spotlight has not silenced the characters. They continue to tell their story even if it has become an agonising, unrelenting repetition. Beckett privileges M with the recognition of their situation as a performance. M says, I know now, all that was just... play. And all this? When will all this [...] All this, when will all this have been... just play? (313). M draws the distinction between his past life as play and his current agony. He refers to the past as a performance, yet ironically, he does not recognise his current situation as a performance which he must replay for the light. The title of this piece is also self-referential; it is a play about the agony of performing. Stage performance, the work demonstrates, is an agony because of its repetitive actions and the actor s need and agony of being seen. In the age of modern technology, the agony of performance is linked to the actors recognition that they perform for the mechanical eye of the spot or camera rather than a live audience. 190
The use of the word play also refers to theatre and performance as a game. In the fourth typescript, this sequence reads: I know now, all that was just a game. (Pause.) And all this? (Pause.) When will all this have been... just a game? (ts. 1528/3). Theatre is a game play, writes George Devine in his notes relating to the premiere of Play. The word game both refers to the performance as a harmless game as well as hurtful manipulation. The actors and audience are being messed about by the spotlight, director and theatrical conventions. While played with, the audience is directed into questioning the menace and misery they perceive and laugh at as well as the authorial structures within theatre. The change to play signifies a further reading. This word may refer to a play back a repeat. Not only is a repeat built into the play, giving the impression of an endless performance, but also Beckett s play suggests that memories have become increasingly mechanised in the modern age. Although memories by their very nature recur sometimes voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily, memories become more easily reproduced with modern technology. Technology allows one to capture more specific moments. The mechanically reproduced photographic images seen in Film and the tape-recorded voice in Krapp s Last Tape provide us with a reproduction of the past. When we look at a photographed image, it triggers our memory. Likewise, the spot prompts the three figures on stage to replay their love triangle. Mechanically reproduced memories, however, do not offer a more accurate image of the past. Although the camera promised to replicate the object photographed and the tape recorder promised to replicate the voice, both the camera and the tape-recorder failed to do so. The daguerreotype required a death-like stillness of the person photographed and even more precise cameras capture a fraction of the action. The moment viewed is always dead. Moreover, the mechanism of the camera that captures the object is a mirror. Mirrors provide only distorted reproductions. The spotlight in Play provides the audience with an image and provokes the actors into speech, but as Beckett notes, the voices are sometimes unintelligible (307) and the repeat may present an element of variation (320). The spot possibly prompts the characters into imperfect reflections of their past, and thus, the images we gaze upon in this play are distortions of the past. Constructing the spotlight as a technological tyrant, Beckett creates a work that examines the fragmented and mechanised nature of stage productions as well as exploring questions concerning the prosthetic eye and the technical reproducibility of film. In his notes about Play George 191
Devine jotted down, Audience privileged/actors tortured. The audience may appear to be privileged because the spotlight extends their vision; however, this prosthesis also hinders sight (Freud, 43). Benjamin warns that altering the gaze may give rise to a wave of absent-minded examiners (1969, 241). The privileged, prosthetic eye of the audience cannot edit together the fragments to provide understanding nor can this eye illuminate the purgatorial experience it sheds light on. W2 says, No doubt I make the same mistake as when it was the sun that shone, of looking for sense where possibly there is none (313-14). As part of a vision-centred and vision-generated culture, the audience looks where the light is shone, searching to be enlightened. However, Beckett s use of the spotlight comments on the audience s mistake in attempting to look for meaning where there may be none. The spotlight is an artificial light that, through its illumination of the image on stage, places the audience in the dark. In other words, it is a staring, technological eye that initially seems to enhance the audience s human sight, allowing them into a purgatorial world, but instead of illuminating the play, it reveals the audience s and the characters lack of insight. 3 In its illumination of the audience s lack of insight, the spotlight works to bring the audience into a position of questioning the role of authority both in the spotlight and in themselves. Beckett challenges the privileging of theatre by staging a performance that resembles film production. The light functions as a camera that traps the actors into repetitive, fragmented scenes, and traps the viewers into perceiving the actors. While the audience watches the play, they begin to recognise that they are bodies perceiving unperceiving bodies. Beckett s audience, however, is not Benjamin s absent-minded viewer. Through his use of technology and authorial structures within Play, Beckett awakens the audience and prompts them into a questioning of the reproductive and manipulative structures in the production of a play. Notes 1. In the opening directions of Film, Beckett wrote: No truth value attaches to above, regarded as of merely structural and dramatic convenience (323). Beckett steps away from asserting any truth to Bishop George Berkeley s esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) or to any of the assertions about the mechanised gaze in Film. However, this statement produces an awareness in the readers to the dramatic structure of the work. The readers, in essence, are asked to examine the work structurally and dramatically rather than emotionally. 192
2. See McMullan for a discussion of the Spotlight and judgement (17). 3. See Klaus Peter Müller for an analysis of traditional metaphors of light and dark in Play (258). Works Cited Armstrong, Tim, Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998). Beckett, Samuel, Play typescripts with manuscript corrections, ts. 1528/1, 3, 5, 9, Archive of the Beckett International Foundation (BIF), U of Reading., The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986)., Proust (New York: Grove P, 1957). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969)., The Author as Producer, in Understanding Brecht, trans. by Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1977), 85-103. Caygill, Howard, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998). Cohn, Ruby, Back to Beckett (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1973). Devine, George, Manuscript notes on Play relating to the premiere dated 1963, ms. 1581/15, BIF, Reading. Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989). Harmon, Maurice, ed., No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998). Huyssen, Andreas, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (London: Macmillan, 1988). McMullan, Anna, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett s Later Drama (London: Routledge, 1993). Müller, Klaus Peter, More Than Just Play : The Creation of Fabulous History in Beckett s Plays, in SBT/A 2, Beckett in the 1990s, ed. by Marius Buning and Lois Oppenheim (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 255-67. Orvell, Miles, Literature and the Authority of Technology, in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, ed. by Frederick Amrine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 169-76. 193