Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 14 Number 2, August 2013
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Raising up All that Fall: Samuel Beckett and the (Un)Holy Theatre of Phantoms
by
Introduction
This paper forms a part of a PhD thesis (provisionally entitled “Samuel Beckett: Towards a Phenomenological Ontology of Consciousness”), which revisits the “retro” philosophy of phenomenological existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, in order to examine Beckett’s works through the contemporary lens of consciousness studies. By employing Sartre’s lengthy and intricate exposition of being-for-itself, as a “model” for the human consciousness, I hope to demonstrate the ways in which Beckett’s works make visible the complexities, and the modes of being, of that very region of being we call consciousness.
Here I seek to demonstrate that despite Sartre’s atheism and Beckett’s complex and ambiguous relationship with religion, both writers could be said to be bound together by “Holiness”, if we think about this term in the manner in which Brook defines it. If the “Holy” desire is to make the invisible, in this case consciousness, visible, Beckett’s theatre, in its diverse manifestations, whilst often mocking conventional religion, or the “godly”, can be said to reach, instead, for the “Holy”, as it illustrates a sacred communication that transcends the realms of the living and the dead, the embodied and the disembodied.
In Beckett’s 1956 radio play All That Fall, it will be argued, we have the ideal example of a type of “theatre” where presence can be felt, and consciousnesses, or souls, communicated from another realm, as it were, without the aid of live, embodied, theatrical presence. As we raise the central protagonist, Maddy, from the murky depths of a liminal existence and offer her temporary accommodation in our own corporeal being, so she raises us to the level of that being that can form a totality from incomplete parts. We, as listeners, become Maddy’s “sharers”, co-creators, and unifiers, whilst “God”, in the traditional sense, is sneered at as a defunct concept. Sartre’s structures of human consciousness, or for-itself being, will be seen, here, as providing that unity between beings that is often attributed to some divine altruism and generosity, and “the beyond”, as it were, the “spiritual source”, will be identified as that which lies outside of the individual’s everyday perception, perhaps in some elevated or “pure” state of consciousness, or in the void of inexistence, or immateriality.
Consciousness creates belief, and I will suggest that, in Beckett’s world, the true divinity of the human reality is this power to create, to believe, and to imagine. The characters of All That Fall need a listener in order to exist, and so we act as the deity that gives imagined souls, figments of consciousness, life, as well as providing artistic completion. In the coming together of Beckett’s voices and the listener, a sacred whole can be formed, as the invisible is made visible, and a divine unity-consciousness links disembodied souls with beings-in-the-world.
Towards an (Un)Holy Theatre of Phantoms
It is well known that Peter Brook defined a “Holy Theatre” as “…The Theatre of the Invisible-Made-Visible…” (1990, 47); what is perhaps less well known, however, is that Jean-Paul Sartre was also driven, artistically rather than philosophically (if, indeed, we can separate the two when speaking of the man and his work), by many of the same ideas that Brook theorises under this banner. Cormac Power, in his exploration of the concept of stage presence, Presence in Play, links the two practitioners succinctly when he writes that: “Like Sartre . . . Brook has recognised that theatre should appeal to the imagination by striking a balance between the reality of the stage, and the unreality of fictional propositions” (2008, 31). The order in which Power has placed these two, as theatre practitioners, somewhat suggests that Brook emulates Sartre, and that Sartre, in some way, pre-empts what we call, in the light of Brook’s The Empty Space, “The Holy Theatre”, and there is certainly evidence of this in those instances whereby Sartre’s writes specifically about theatre itself. Power speaks of Sartre’s theatre, and that of Brook, in the same breath and under the same terms, so Sartre may well be one of the world’s best-known atheists, but we could also be forgiven for thinking that there is something of the “Holy” about him. Added to this, the juxtaposition Power makes between reality and unreality, as he places Brook and Sartre side-by-side, also allows us, quite readily, to add Samuel Beckett into this “Holy” union, particularly as the latter comes complete with his own corresponding notion of art being able to access an “ideal real”. Beckett, in his monograph on Proust, speaks of an “…experience [which] is at once imaginative and empirical, at once an evocation and a direct perception, real without being merely actual, ideal without being merely abstract, the ideal real, the essential, the extratemporal” (1970, 75). As Shimon Levy puts it:
If ‘Holy’ means a numinous attitude towards divine beings in specially consecrated times, spaces and plots (or events), Beckett’s drama is not holy. If, however, the notion of ‘Holy’ is allowed to mean an (artistic) attempt to reach essences that are neither only physical nor even mental, then Beckett’s plays come as close as possible to it (2000, 19).
Religious belief requires faith (“bad faith” it perhaps feels necessary to say in Sartre’s presence), and a “suspension of disbelief” one might also suggest in suitably theatrical terms. In religious faith, however, one is expected and required to place belief in something unseen and unknown, whereas the “Holy Theatre” seeks to make the invisible, which for the purposes of this paper will mean the higher levels of the human consciousness, visible.
If we bear in mind that consciousness is, to a great extent, an ineffable being, like the “higher being” commonly regarded as “God” amongst the conventionally-religious, and that neither “God” nor consciousness can, strictly speaking, be made subject to laws of time and space, or be made materially manifest, it becomes clear that the “Holy Theatre”, in its present interpretation, attempts something of a divine conjuring act or mediumship, as it strives to make a certain “nothingness” visible. Beckett’s is not a theatre of the “godly”, just as Sartre’s is not a philosophy of religion; the writings of both Beckett and Sartre, however, could be said to be expositions of the “Holy”, in the sense in which Brook defines it, presentations, or studies, as it were, of the innermost depths of the human experience, of the divinity of human consciousness, or even as illustrations of the “ideal real” if, by this term, we mean the abstract rendered perceivable through the concrete. “Holy”, in this context, and with its usual religious connotations, is a contentious term, as we enter the diverse theatres governed by a playwright whose religious position is under constant scrutiny, and yet remains obscure, theatres where bodiless souls, “…like so much thin air…” (Beckett 2006b, 394), seem to haunt liminal spaces, at once familiar and alien, and, moreover, theatres which see Sartre’s artistic theories contradict, in part, his phenomenological ontology.
It seems necessary to point out (in view of the above allusions to “holiness” and a Christian god), that writings on Beckett and religion abound. In the year 2000, for instance, an edition of the Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui journal was published, containing papers from the international “Beckett and Religion” conference held at Stirling University in 1999 (Buning, Engelberts and Kosters 2000); these papers form only the tip of the iceberg. What I do not seek to do here, then, is further expound Beckett’s religious, or irreligious, position as, in the words of Lance Butler (who offers a comprehensive analysis of the topic in the 1992 publication Irish Writers and Religion): “About religion Beckett is unambiguously ambiguous” (1992, 169). Something that is established by the titles of both Butler’s essay, in the aforementioned publication, “‘A Mythology with which I am Perfectly Familiar’: Samuel Beckett and the Absence of God”, and Colin Duckworth’s contribution to the 1999 “Beckett and Religion” conference and subsequent publication, namely his paper “Beckett and the Missing Sharer” (2000), is that there is something of a consensus amongst certain scholars which would suggest that there is an ominous, but again inconclusive, lack of a Christian deity in Beckett’s works, or even that the very notion of “God” amounts to a void or intangibility which, I will argue, directly reflects the nothingness of consciousness. Bearing all that has gone before in mind, then, there is little point in attempting to reinvent the wheel, by trying to shed further light on Beckett’s recurring religious references here, so, instead, this paper seeks to place an emphasis more on the universally “sacred” or, “Holy” elements of his work, and evaluate how these underlying currents speak to us of a region of being that is as mysterious and incomprehensible as, as well as being comparable with, the concept of God itself.
Despite Sartre’s atheism and Beckett’s complex relationship with religion, then, the two writers could be said to be bound together by “Holiness.” Interestingly, that sacred element which unites them, also serves to highlight areas where there might be disagreements between the ideologies of Beckett and Sartre, and, indeed, “Holy” approaches to, and theories of, theatre, betray certain contradictions that lie within Sartre’s prolific writings. As we will see, Beckett is keen to deride and find humour, often the bawdiest humour in fact, in the widely-accepted teachings of Christianity, and in the notion that any god that there may or may not be is eminently good and competent. Beckett, through his art, like Sartre, through his philosophy, topples the hierarchical regime of the religious (in the Christian sense at least) metanarrative, in favour of reinstating the “Holy” elements in theatre. Beckett, however, could be said to depart from Sartre when he seems to imply that death does not, or need not, signify and end to presence, and that presence need not be unattainable to those consciousnesses which lack a body through which to exist in the world.
There is according to Sartre, a region of concrete “being” (being-in-itself) and a region of being which is the “nothingness” of consciousness (being-for-itself), and these, rather than forming a dualism, are intrinsically linked. In Beckett’s works, however, there is also a loophole, through which liminal beings, or “phantoms” can slip, and despite Sartre’s insistence that our presence, as conscious, for-itself beings, to other conscious, for-itself beings ceases at our death (2009, 303), we may question whether or not death can actually be said to signify an end to presence in certain Beckettian worlds, where we sense, at times, a sacred communication that transcends the realms of the living and the dead, the embodied and the disembodied. The shadow of death, and what may, or may not, come after, haunts Beckett’s writings, many of which seem so far removed from the concrete reality of the normative stage world that they could almost be set in an afterlife, complete with what Levy would call, “…literal and metaphorical threshold phenomena…” (2000, 17), who collectively create “…a coherent pantheon of liminal vice-existers, as well as a ‘spiritual’ kind of dramatic syntax” (2000, 24). Sartre writes, in a predictably unholy fashion, that, “…it would be in vain to suppose that the soul can detach itself from this individualization [the body] by separating itself from the body at death or by pure thought, for the soul is the body inasmuch as the for-itself is its own individualization” (2009, 334). Outside of the body, according to Sartre, is death for consciousness, and many of Beckett’s phantoms could be said to be trapped in liminal spaces due to a lack of a fully-functioning, recognisable, dare I say “normal” body, with which they can act consciously on the world; these phantoms are, however, perceived, and they do act on the consciousness of the beholder. I will consider, then, in the absence of commonplace, bodily stage presence, how recourse to the sacred, or “Holy”, in theatre and art, seeks to access the uncanny, and reveal the hidden or even “spiritual” depths of consciousness, in the work of an artist whose fictitious, almost mythical, beings refuse clear-cut categorisation and placement into distinct regions.
In Beckett’s 1956 radio play All That Fall, we have an eminently suitable example of a type of “theatre”, where presence can be felt, and consciousnesses, or souls, communicated from another realm, as it were, without the aid of live theatrical presence. The characters of a radio drama have invariably suffered a complete disembodiment when it comes to their place in a corporeal world. The figures, or ciphers, in a radio play cannot act on the world (lacking what Sartre would call the “…permanent [bodily] structure…” (2009, 351) that enables consciousness to do so), but only on consciousness itself; they are intentional objects of consciousness. What the characters of a radio drama can do, however, and perhaps even more so than the characters of a stage or television drama, is make the literally invisible, or consciousness, visible to the mind’s eye. The world of the radio play, in that particular respect, bears a striking resemblance to the world of the novel, with one major difference; a novel, being, as it is, typed words on paper, also constitutes an in-itself object in the world, whereas a radio play (unless, of course, read directly from the script instead of encountered as performance), is a fleeting, insubstantial, for-itself event, performative, but not bodily. Voices suggest bodies, however, and voices and bodies are both vehicles of for-itself being.
The body of Maddy Rooney, the protagonist, narrator and absolute epicentre of All That Fall, is continuously alluded to, as her personal journey, and the journey of the play, are both punctuated, throughout, by the: “Sound of her dragging feet” (Beckett 2006, 172). Maddy’s body however, is also revealed as illusory, a figment of the listener’s imagination, as references to her “…shoulders and other senseless places…” hint towards the incorporeality of her mode of being, which is no more, when compared to the concrete mode of being-in-the-world, than a: “Lingering dissolution” (2006, 175). Maddy, foregrounding her own godlike immateriality and challenging her own existence, as she declares herself to be “…not half alive nor anything approaching it” (176), is the very epitome of a soul, or consciousness, that has detached itself from a body, either as a means of living beyond death, or by way of attaining pure consciousness.
As we explore the world of All That Fall, then, it may seem that we are in a world that separates us not only from the bodily world of the living but also, as a result of this disembodiment, the world of Sartre’s phenomenological ontology. This is not strictly the case, however, as Sartre’s writings in Being and Nothingness, as well as dismissing the idea of a disembodied consciousness, also posit human consciousness as its own witness, in much the same way that I will suggest that it is human consciousness that acts as witness, or “sharer”, in Maddy’s world. There cannot exist, by Sartre’s reckoning, a causal being, which is the absolute coincidence of some abstract notion, that mere mortals strive towards, with itself (perfection, as Descartes would have it, for instance), whilst simultaneously retaining that for-itself element which would also make it the supreme, all-knowing, all-seeing witness, omnipresent, omnipotent, and still internally-related to “earthly” conscious beings. Sartre’s reputation as an atheist generally precedes him, and, undoubtedly, his positing of God as an ontological impossibility has ruffled many a feather, however, his irreligious position, in reality, is a relatively insignificant aspect of his philosophy as a whole. Sartre does not overstate his lack of belief; God is not renounced as “dead”, as such, in the exposition of human consciousness that constitutes Being and Nothingness, “He” is, rather, rendered inconceivable as a contradictory concept and, what is more, and perhaps even more painfully, surplus to requirements, displaced by a being that is, by its very nature, its own foundation and witness. It is this very notion of God as surplus to requirements, redundant, and, frankly, nonsensical, even farcical, that we can hear echoing in the heart of All That Fall.
If to be is to be on stage, as a stage world does serve to give a character its material thereness, then we could suggest the characters of All That Fall, a radio play, strive towards being the very (dis)embodiment of what Beckett terms the “[d]ivine prospect” of “…never having been” (2009, 73). The characters of the radio play have never physically been, as such, but their voices carry their “word” along the wind like the ubiquitous “word of God”. Paradoxically, however, we are also presented with Maddy’s obvious feelings of entrapment in some level of material existence (she does, after all, have a voice), and her desire to fade further into invisibility, to drift, “…gently down into the higher life […] as though . . . it had never happened” (181).
The world of All That Fall is an airy world of wind, of sighs, breath, turbulence, blurred vision and dust that “…will not settle in our lifetime” (176), and there is a religious despair in Maddy’s cries for liberation from the last vestiges, the dissipating shadows or psychical matter that hold her hostage, when she would immaterialise entirely, and be of the elements, as, or with, her god:
What’s wrong with me, what’s wrong with me, never tranquil, seething out of my dirty old pelt, out of my skull, oh to be in atoms, in atoms! [Frenziedly.] ATOMS! [Silence. Cooing. Faintly.] Jesus! [Pause.] Jesus! (177)
We might bear in mind, as she makes her plea to her saviour, that Maddy has, by her own admission, been, “…destroyed with sorrow . . . and churchgoing…” (174), amongst other things, as we consider Butler’s following argument, as it is applied to Beckett’s work as a whole:
God as God, as a positive element within the universe is a devastating hope fitted to man’s needs but who, alas, is absent. […] God as the void, the other God who, for other reasons, doesn’t exist either, is another matter. Towards him we may yearn as towards the never-having-been-born (1992, 182).
Faith depends on an absence of positivity, a “suspension of disbelief”, as required by the theatre spectator. Consciousness, like a god, cannot be made physically manifest, as it finds its source in the same unreachable beyond, a “psychical world”, or a void. All That Fall demonstrates a destructive yearning towards a Christian god, which amounts to a yearning towards never having been, towards the “divine prospect”, and the normative authority of religion is undermined and made impotent, as Maddy, piously exhausted as she is, still clings on, unwillingly perhaps, to an existence, but an existence that is literally “in atoms”, as it is in and of consciousness. Furthermore, Maddy’s cries do reach a divine source, but that source has an earthly, human base, as it is the for-itself being of the human reality.
Raising Up All That Fall
There is an infectious, ferocious humour in the spirit world of All That Fall, and this is demonstrated nowhere more so than in Maddy’s utterance, to her husband Dan, of the biblical proclamation that gives the play its title:
MRS ROONEY: “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.” [Silence. They join in wild laughter. They move on. Wind and rain. Dragging feet, etc.] Hold me tighter, Dan! (198)
The “stage” directions here speak volumes; the very idea that some “deity” will raise and uphold those that are stooped low under life’s burdens is not only wildly mocked, it is also disproven immediately by the resumed struggle of the ageing pair, dragging their feet in spite of the unforgiving elements, the sonic representation of what Anna McMullan calls the “…excruciating corporeal labour…” (2012, 70) of their journey and, in the absence of any abiding faith in the ideal of a supporting being, Maddy’s plea to Dan to hold her tighter, to offer, by human companionship, that divine comfort and stability that is left lacking. McMullan expands upon the irreverence of the Rooneys as follows: “The world of Boghill is a decidedly post-lapsarian one, where the text of the next Sunday’s sermon . . . provokes raucous laughter from Maddy and Dan” (2012, 72). God isn’t annihilated by Beckett or Sartre (as he is by Nietzsche for instance), he is simply derided, as an unsophisticated, unsightly, and outdated concept; he is a dirty joke. Beckett, we might suggest, laughs at the very ineffectuality of God the upholder; Maddy is “…bowed down”, as we know from, amongst other hints, Mr Slocum’s description of her being “…bent all double” (177). If God is employed in the raising up of all that have fallen, it would seem that he has been rather lackadaisical in “His” duties. Miss Fitt (misfit), a fellow foot passenger on the ethereal journey, performs a similar function to Mr Slocum; she discloses that Maddy is “…bowed and bent” (183) and, reluctantly, lends our protagonist her arm. Miss Fitt also acts as a religious figure of ridicule, for whom God and never-having-been, seem to go hand in hand; she speaks of how she is “…distray…” when “…alone with her Maker…” (182), and how, when in church, she is “…just not really there…”, oblivious to the collection tray, naturally, and perceiving the barely-perceivable Maddy as nothing more than “…a big pale blur” (183). Here we see, or hear, then, for-itself beings, trying to raise one another up, losing themselves, literally, in hope that some greater being will condescend to assist, and we partake in the laughter that accompanies the inevitable struggles. The characters of All That Fall comment on their own (and, inadvertently, God’s), concrete inexistence, as figments of the listener’s, and Beckett’s, imagination; Maddy and company exist as phantoms of consciousness, and we, as listeners, must provide them with the biggest “lift” of all.
When Sartre speaks of theatre, and its placement amidst other art forms, he does so in the following terms: “Sculpture represents the form of the body, theater [sic] represents the act of the body” (1976, 91). Radio drama can sonically represent bodily acts, but, naturally, the physical environment of the theatre, and the corporeality of the actors, do not become a given, concrete actuality for the radio listener; this does not have to mean, however, that the characters of a radio play are incapable of attaining a certain presence to that listener. Julie Campbell considers the role of the listener in creating the world of All That Fall, suggesting that, whilst we may listen to the work in isolation (as radio drama, by its nature, lacks that communal element that is the very essence of the normative theatrical event), we are given more artistic agency within its realisation. Campbell writes that, in the case of radio drama: “The head becomes a mental theater [sic]: the listener imaginatively translates sound and silence into a visual and sensual world” (2009, 152). We go some way, here, towards being able to reconcile Sartre with Beckett’s bodiless souls, as it could be said that we, the listeners, provide the body for these phantoms, as well as providing the performance space, the “…mental theatre…”, as it were, for the enactment of their story.
The characters of All That Fall, then, become the listener, and through his/her “…visual and sensual world”, the listener gives to the characters that embodiment which they lack, whilst internalising and sharing their narrative. Maddy’s consciousness is the invisible that is made visible to the “eye of the mind” in All That Fall, and the listener experiences a complex blurring of boundaries between subject and object as s/he becomes intrinsically intertwined with the protagonist. Maddy is more than the object of our attention and her theatre transcends any mere “…act of the body”; hers is a subjectivity with which we are immediately connected, and which reveals to us, as it reveals to her, the outer-world of her play. This absolute identification with character is not something that can occur on anything like the same level for the spectator of a stage play, or even the reader of a novel, as, added to this, radio makes up, temporally, for what it lacks spatially, and makes its presence felt via a powerful and penetrating ability to enter into the “now” moment of the listener. Campbell explains that:
…Beckett takes full advantage of radio’s ability to depict characters in motion; its ability to do this in the present moment of the performance. For example, Maddy’s journey is happening in the “now” of the performance, at the same time it is a journey presented to the listener through her consciousness: this acts as a kind of internal monolog[ue], but with a difference. It is not retrospective . . . Instead listeners experience a journey with Maddy in the present (2009, 148).
There is, then, a greater, and more immersive, sense of presence unique to the form of radio drama; we can hold Maddy closer during her journey than any god, or any of her fellow travellers, can. If, as Sartre would have it, presence can be explained as consciousness, the for-itself, being present-to its object, we are in a realm of ultimate interconnectivity when the object of our consciousness is the created consciousness of another, and we are freed of all being-in-itself acting as a mitigator, as it does on the stage. There is an absolute intertwining of consciousnesses, as Maddy’s instantaneous “nows” become our own; we are truly present-with our protagonist, and the temporality of the drama, in this instance, is no longer at odds with the real-time of the audience, as it is in the theatre.
As we raise Maddy up, from the murky depths of a liminal existence and offer her temporary accommodation in our own corporeal being, so she raises us to the level of that being that can form a totality from incomplete parts. As beings that arise in the world fully aware of that lack which constitutes our mode of existence, we continually attempt to surpass our present being, towards that which we deem to be lacking. As Sartre writes: “The existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to prove that human reality is a lack” (2009, 111). If we consider, again, Campbell’s views on the role of the listener in the radio drama, we gain a sense of how we might be elevated to the rank of unifier, in a world that arises, like for-itself being, as a lack:
Sound images . . . offer . . . a part rather than the whole. These parts include insubstantiality, an aural diffuseness, and a lack of fixity, as well as a slippage inviting a creativity in the listener which is personal and unique (2009, 153).
We could conclude that the listener becomes that “missing sharer” that Duckworth refers to, as s/he is invited to play the part of that otherwise absent “…universal witness, the ultimate sharer…” (Duckworth 2000, 141), who might offer completeness to the incomplete: perfection to the imperfect. The listener is able to assume a divine position as sharer of another’s consciousness, and co-creator and unifier of phantom souls, which might make him/her forget, for a while, that lack which forms the basis of human reality. It is only through art (and All That Fall stands as an unusually accessible means of “trying on” another’s mind for size), that such a privilege, such a shift in thought, can become possible. Art gives us access to the inaccessible, and a listener, spectator, or reader can become a god, as they peer into that region of another’s being that is usually unreachable. The “other” is usually available to us primarily as a body, but Beckett makes visible the invisible, and places both fictional object and witnessing subject on the same plane, a higher plane of consciousness, where a certain unity can be formed, and what might be called a spiritual connection can perhaps be made.
By acting as a witness to Beckett’s art, one might begin to see the “Holy” in theatre, regardless of the religious beliefs, or lack of, held by either the writer or the beholder. The listener, like the theatrical spectator, possesses a human mind that is so complex, so subtle, so divided and multifunctional, that s/he is able to place the real and the imaginary side by side, create wholes from parts, and forge unions with other consciousnesses, in “higher” realms, without ever, “…losing sight of the fact that what he is being presented with . . . is something nonreal” (Sartre 1976, 141). We perform, as conscious beings, creative, unifying functions for ourselves, as well as making the invisible visible through our engagement with art. Sartre may scoff at the idea of a disembodied soul in his ontology, but in his theatre imagination is key, and fictional souls must be conjured, as: “This is the meaning of theater [sic]: its essential value is the representation of something which does not exist” (1976, 143). Drama, including radio drama, is the unification of contradictions, just as the consciousness can allow the real and the imaginary to coexist in the same space. Consciousness also creates belief, and the true divinity of the human reality is this power to create, to believe, and to imagine. The characters of All That Fall are “…dependent on the listener for a sense of life…” (Campbell 2009, 158), and so we act as the deity that gives imagined souls, figments of consciousness, life, as well as providing artistic completion. The listener, in order to forget the Sartrean chasm at the heart of existence, needs the art, just as the art needs the listener, and in the two incomplete parts coming together, a sacred whole can be formed. Graley Herren writes that: “The experience of listening to Beckett’s voices is one where the normally rigid boundaries between author, character, and audience break down and bleed into one another” (2007, 32). A “Holy” trinity is formed and fully unified by Beckett’s radio play All That Fall, then, the invisible is made visible, and a divine unity-consciousness links disembodied souls with beings-in-the-world.
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