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Empty Figure on an Empty Stage

The Theatre of Samuel Beckett and His Generation

Indiana University Press

EMPTINESS: ONTOLOGICAL, THEATRICAL, THEATRO-PSYCHIC

We do not think in a continuous manner any more than we feel in a continuous manner or live continuously. There are breaks, there is the intervention of nothingness. ... it is impossible to render an exact image of the aspect of thought if we do not take into account what is blank and what is intermittent.

— Paul Claudel

THE EXTENDED EMPTY SPACE OF LIFE

Scientists, philosophers, and even the unphilosophical have mused that the primitive wilderness is our home, that our earliest ancestors must have felt as much at home with the animals and plants as with other human beings. Why not take a giant step backward and deeper into the thought that emptiness is our most primordial home within and beyond the space of wilderness?

It is not easy to either conceptualize or articulate nothingness. Yet it is impossible to ignore it. As paradoxical, tautological, or banal as this may sound, emptiness is the essential ingredient of our material world. Consequently, it is also an essential component of our ontological consciousness of the outer world and of our spiritual awareness of our inner world. But we usually do not think about it, busy as we are with the fullness of life, content to dedicate our physical and mental energies, our activities and consciousness, to "filling the glass." The vessel of our existence is emptiness. We are concerned with the contents of the vessel and not the vessel itself. One marvels at the reminder that two-thirds of the earth's surface is covered by water, because we usually travel over water, sometimes play in it, or contemplate its vastness from the solid ground of the shore. But we do not feel we live in it or on it. On an even larger scale, we are almost totally inattentive to the "mass" of the universe, of which all but an infinitesimal part is not essentially empty, neither form nor matter. We ignore it because it is, well, "empty." However, as the vast oceans orient the land on which we live, creating continents and civilizations, it is the celestial, universal void that contains the water and earth that is our planet. Empty space orients our very consciousness: It not only creates the ultimate perspective of meaninglessness, but it also provides a psychic space within which our concrete ideas are suspended.

Thus we sporadically continue to make spiritual, aesthetic, and even cognitive "connections" with the emptiness that is all around us and deep within us. The great symbols of Western civilization operate through an appeal to this primordial connection. When we view the open, expansive ocean from the referential, oriented shore, we are seduced into empty chaos. Like the Gothic cathedral pointing to the heavens, the vertical majesty of our skyscrapers points even beyond the celestial ether. With each new generation of scientific discovery, we learn that the empty sky surrounding our world is merely a threshold to the void surrounding our galaxy. Trees and stars, which we do not readily perceive as particularly empty or ethereal in themselves, become more significant and pathetic when they are set in an empty universe or on an empty stage. What more fascinating vision in the forest than the barely visible empty sky seen through the foliage of the trees? If, that is, we take the time to look upwards. The other most mesmerizing sensation in the forest is our awareness of the infinite silence from which emerge the discrete murmurings of nature. Those sounds that proceed from total silence are especially stirring. Visual and sonoral vacuity are essential to all perceptual practices, especially to the arts with its mission to transcend the reality of the half-empty vessel we call life. The void is always there and it is always on and in our minds. It represents, first of all, the primordial chaos — not the slime — from which the universe and life forms appeared, a history that goes back to the dawn of psychic life.

"Space" and "empty" are oxymoronic terms for some philosophers and at some point of the ontological cogito argument. The idea of the void fascinates because of its unique ability to, in a sense, void the category of space and convey a sense of spatial extension, an image that perplexes the dialectical logic of the Western mindset. Foucault has observed that

The space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved, as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization. (23)

Foucault implies here ("starting with Galileo") that an ontological awareness of extension begins with Galileo. More likely, however, he is merely referring to the rupture operated by Galileo's work with respect to the medieval spiritual culture, where celestial extension was separate from worldly reality.

Galileo's science jolted Western civilization back into metaphysical contact with the universe in the place of a god, and from that point to the present, science and its humanistic avatars have refashioned the screen that obscures our awareness of essentialist empty space. For example, Foucault believed that "the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space" and that today "site" has been substituted for extension as a template (or form of "software"?) for our mindset: "Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites. ... we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another" (23). Perhaps "site" could have displaced extension, but it could not have replaced it, for extension is an obviously more primary, primordial, existential prise de conscience. "Site" is merely a representational-operational modern for our psychic hardware.

We are still entranced by creative illusions of extension. Ontologically, the awareness of extension (the continuous) can only assume metaphysical proportions and so it has stood in binary opposition to the more limited and rationalizable concept of space (the discontinuous). The philosophical semiotician À. J. Greimas argues that "all knowledge of the world begins with a projection of the discontinuous onto the continuous" (11), that is, a projection of space onto extension (étendue). While the mundane, functional variety of space offers up a discontinuous image, one constructed by a rational human being's necessarily limited point of view, the concept of extension evokes the idea of an all-encompassing, unbroken and formless, perhaps chaotic, whole, an idea that, alienating itself from language, boggles the rational mind. The concept of "infinity" stifles expression. As we ordinarily perceive it and refer to it, space is little more than a construction which, for Greimas, is an "impoverishment ... the emergence of space erases the greater part of the richness of extension" (12). In order to signify, to elaborate the world into a signifying system, the rich continuity of extension is "impoverished" because one must necessarily and selectively dismantle its absoluteness, reconstructing it to fit into some kind of conventional scheme, into a "discontinuous" ordering of space.

From the beginning of this century, phenomenologist thinkers have struggled to retain an awareness of extended emptiness by either totally rejecting or carefully qualifying our perceptual and cognitive grasp of space. Once again the idea of deep, essential awareness confronts not only representational communication, but also cognition and perception. Deep down, we are aware of more than we perceive, know, or are able to communicate. We perceive the trees in the forest and consequently we know that they are there; but the perception and the cognition do not preclude the awareness of the emptiness that the trees — as well as the forest — inhabit. Henri Bergson saw the light through the trees. For him, the absolute void stood as a background for the élan vital of human life. He rejected rationalistic and mechanistic explorations of the life force, emphasizing the categories of time and action over space. In fact, he was hostile to the ontological category of space, believing that, historically, dialectical thinkers had wrongly privileged space over time and action. Before Greimas, he had articulated a dichotomy of the continuous and the discontinuous; but unlike Greimas, he associated space with the discontinuous and only time with the continuous. Consequently, he believed our awareness of space is always form-ulated, structured, and never extended; extension is so difficult to imagine from a spatial point of view that it requires the abstractness of time. Only the category of time could truly convey to us the unformulated extension, the "emptiness" of life, of universe, and of our psyche. Connecting world to psyche, Bergson derogatorily insisted that "the representation of emptiness is always a full representation" (L'Evolution créatrice 306) and that "We spend our lives thus filling in the voids, which our intelligence conceives under the extra-intellectual influence of desire and regret, under the pressure of vital necessities" (322).

For another phenomenologist thinker, Edmund Husserl, space and time were simultaneously extensive. He was well aware of the backdrop of extension within which we function as perceptive organisms:

I am aware of a world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through sight, touch, hearing, etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corporeal things somehow spatially distributed are for me simply there, in verbal or figurative sense "present" ... (91)

Merleau-Ponty too perceived the light through the trees. He was content to deal with life and consciousness in terms of space alone: "We have said that space is existential, we might just as well have said that existence is spatial, that is, that through an inner necessity it opens to an outside, so that we can speak of a mental space" (293). In his description of the effects of mescaline, we observe extension, or "empty vastness" quite clearly as the container of conscious life:

Under mescaline ... [t]he walls of the room are 150 yards apart, and beyond the walls is merely an empty vastness. ... The subject is alone and forlorn in empty space, "he complains that all he can see clearly is the space between things, and that this space is empty." (Cited in Garner 34–35)

This hyper-awareness of emptiness could easily apply to most of the protagonists of Beckett's late plays.

Contemporary artists and scholars have continued to hold the rational order of our civilization up to the light of extension. David Grossvogel, for example, speaks of a book as a kind of rational space that opposes metaphysical extension: "A book is an ordering. ... its very being denies ... the structureless and unpronounceable chaos, the infinity of space and formlessness that extends beyond man's ability to measure and to shape" (Mystery and Its Fictions 129). Artists, not content to be ontologically aware of the void, create fictions and images that will aesthetically disclose it. At the beginning of his writing career, Beckett's prose was dedicated to this type of disclosure. Livio Dobrez, examining the "Irreducible" in Beckett's prose works, writes of the novelist's quest to get beyond the cogito and beyond the "voice of consciousness" to "that obscure origin of things which is also the operative presence beneath the cogito." Dobrez describes Beckett's desire "to touch the void, to be able to point to the intersection of silence and speech, nothingness and existence." Beckett began his career as a phenomenological artist by sketching and embedding primordial emptiness in his narrative "stories," creating characters like Malone who would both say and mean "Nothing is more real than nothing" (Malone Dies 16). But his interest soon turned toward the scenic display of emptiness available through theatrical art. As we see in chapter 3, from the empty background of Godot his theatrical work evolved into the multidimensional void of short pieces like Rockaby and Not I. To be sure, Beckett knew that, like an absolute vacuum, absolute emptiness is impossible; but, because of the conflict it presents with respect to our desire to comprehend and establish reality, he also knew that the impossibility of its representation renders it more artistically effective for the truly avant-garde dramatist. Finally, Beckett knew that it is no more impossible or unrepresentable than absolute fullness.

THEATRICAL EMPTY SPACE,THE (EMPTY) HUMAN FIGURE, AND SYMBOLISM

Perhaps the greatest contribution of twentieth-century dramatists to the historical evolution of theatre art has been the development of a new poetics of space for the text, one based on emptiness. In their determination to rid themselves of the straightjackets of naturalism and bourgeois psychology, dramatists from Chekhov to Beckett realized that they would have to create a new "spatial language" for the text, and that to accomplish this they faced two major challenges. The first was the emptying of stage space. The distinguished French theatre semiologist Anne Ubersfeld even believes that "A history of contemporary theatrical space would characterize this period as a sort of march toward the void" (L'Ecole 116). Since the revolution of realism and naturalism at the end of the nineteenth century, and despite the continuing influence of these movements throughout our own period, emptiness in theatrical space, whether evidenced by the dramatic text or witnessed on the stage, has literally come into its own. Stage sets, as well as the objects and characters occupying the sets, were no longer supposed to recreate exterior reality, but to suggest the possibility of an alternative, truly fictional, realm where the naturalistic concern for detail would be of little consequence. Symbolist-surrealist visionaries, such as Alfred Jarry in France and Gordon Craig in England, express in their theories the need to remove the veil of ideological rhetoric from the aesthetic base of theatre and let the theatre speak for itself and as itself — as a more pristine signifier rather than a dictatorial signified. Clearing away the naturalist clutter, they believed, would help to redirect all referential force inward to the theatrical medium itself and to reestablish theatre as an imaginary fiction rather than a materialist illusion. Thus the symbolic substance of the stage comes to depend on the theatre's unique potential for emptiness.

The second major challenge for dramatists of this century was the portrayal of inner life on the stage. As even a performance-oriented theorist like Richard Schechner has admitted, since the advent of modern psychology, dramatists such as Chekhov, Pirandello, Genet, Ionesco, and Beckett actually set the pace for theatre practitioners by meeting the challenge "to exteriorize the inner life transforming it into a mode of action" (194). One cannot deny that this century has seen a shift toward a new interest in the mind as a space. Thanks to Freud and the surrealists at the beginning of the century, we have begun to think of our mental space as an independent spatial field. Today, after all, when we speak of inner space we do not refer to our stomach or even to our chest cavity; the only valid reference for inner space is the subject's mind, a mind located in the head, the "container" of a space whose inner emptiness is no more fathomable than that of the twentieth-century conception of the outer cosmos. Emptiness has taken on a new meaning in this century, primarily because we equate it with both epistemological and ontological openness.

Thus it is that, in the postwar avant-garde theatre of France, two revolutionary concepts — one concerning empty space, the other, inner space — became inextricably connected, as the written text focused on the mind of the dramatic character and on how best to represent it on the three-dimensional stage. The one great virtue of theatre is that ostension can replace language. To be sure, the visual, aural, and physical display of emptiness can function linguistically as part of a semantic and syntactical code. It can also function extralinguistically to the extent that it connects "immediately" — in the full sense of the word — with the open space of our imagination, which produces an image of empty psyche that far exceeds language's ability to express it. Dramatists and directors like Beckett work from the complete emptiness of the stage toward a visual image that points to the idea of emptiness as the common denominator between the inside and the outside. The visual image that provides the link between empty stage and empty mind is the human body on the stage.

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Excerpted from Empty Figure on an Empty Stage by Les Essif. Copyright © 2001 Les Essif. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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