Film-Philosophy 19 (2015)
The Image of a Mind-Skull: Samuel Beckett’s ...but the clouds... and Television-Philosophy -
Atene Mendelyte, Lund University (
[email protected]) Samuel Beckett’s artworks are essentially intermedial and by exploring each medium he worked with to the fullest he also becomes a media philosopher. Not only do his works belong to various genres and media (theatre plays, radio plays, television plays, and novels) or incorporate various media (i.e. are multi-media artworks) they also exemplify a deep form of intermediality: they adapt the techniques of one medium to the context of another. According to intermediality theorist Jürgen Müller, ‘a medial product becomes intermedial, when it transfers the multi-medial togetherness (Nebeneinander) of medial citations and elements to a conceptual cooperation (Miteinander)’ (Müller 1996: 83), that is to say, when the intertextual and intermedial references work together as a unified aesthetic and conceptual whole and become a singular structure, instead of tearing the structure apart by pointing back to their points of origin. This is precisely what happens in Beckett’s case as, for instance, the following discussion of the inclusion of a poem by William Butler Yeats in …but the clouds… will show. Another exemplary instance of intermedial cooperation is Eisensteinian montage: Several of Beckett’s [...] plays use the principle of inter-cutting (either auditory or visual or a mixture of both) in a variety of ways. The most striking of these is That Time, which inter-cuts three different voice tracks relating to different periods in the life history of the protagonist. Again, within the three stories, different moments from the character’s past are edited so as to balance or contrast one with another (Haynes, Knowlson 2003: 120). The principle of montage, thus, not only helps to create a contrast between separate scenes, actions, or memories – it is a way of creating connections between different sound-images. Audiotape recordings that punctuate the rhythm of Krapp’s Last Tape or the returning cut-up sound-images of Not I are other examples of the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage. Such a principle of juxtaposition is meant to perceptually reconnect the images in a different way than that allowed by the typical theatrical strategies. Montage becomes not only the cinematic
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) technique of combining the filmic images but a theatrical technique of joining memories and sound-images; it turns into the main means of constructing the theatrical character, signifying his or her experience in a subjective way – a theatrical equivalent of internal focalization in film. For example, in That Time the inter-cutting between the three voices from the protagonist’s different stages of life (young boy, young man, old man) creates more than a contrast between these stages: as the same recurring memories and symbols reappear throughout the different ages, the different voices lose their distinction, start to merge and the protagonist’s identity comes to be constituted as a rhizomatic branching bundle of roots curled around a few central nuclei. Beckett adapted various techniques and properties of music, painting, and photography in his theatre pieces not in the sense of a mere intermedial quotation or reference but in the sense of a true conversion of the specific technique of one medium to another medium. Beckett showed, throughout his career, an exceptional ability (and a readiness) to transfer ideas and techniques from one medium to another, ostensibly quite different one, rethinking them, sometimes very radically, to test and stretch the boundaries of the new medium. (Haynes, Knowlson 2003: 126) This marks the essential reflexive nature of Beckett’s intermediality as ‘it broadens the in-between spaces [Zwischenraum, interstitium] between image and text’ and ‘makes visible the invisible and the eerie, the ʽotherʼ space between the discourses, that Foucault qualified as heterotopy.’ (Roloff 1994: 4) Thus, the reflexive nature of Beckett’s intermediality may also be understood as the reflexivity inherent in his very art and aesthetics as the artist experimented with the limits of each medium he worked with redefining their relationships implicitly in his artworks. The plethora of media specific techniques Beckett adapted and synthesized in various works indicates their special status and relevance in the field of literary, theatre, film, and media studies. The pieces question the very limits of mediation and take it to another, highly reflexive level. There is a media philosophy inherent in each different kind of media he worked with and in todayʼs academic jargon one could call Beckett’s practice media philosophy through artistic research. Recently there has been made an interesting attempt to treat Beckett as a media philosopher by comparing Beckett’s use of media and Marshall McLuhan’s ideas. Linda Ben-Zvi claims that,
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) [i]n the case of Beckett, McLuhan believes that instead of engaging with the environment of his time as [James] Joyce did, trying to tease people into some perception of new media that affect their lives, he chose instead to focus on the negative and alienating effects, not the possibilities. (BenZvi 2008: 275) According to the critic, Beckett exposed the trappings, conventions, and artifice of the media he worked with. However, it is important not only to spot the media references in Beckett’s works but to see how they relate to the logic of the works, what internal signification systems they belong to, and to grasp the works as unified immanent wholes, as specific cases of intermedial Miteinander. Furthermore, it is extremely common to see Beckett’s works in terms of failure and pessimism. Therefore, Gilles Deleuze’s observation on the positivity of these works is so much more exceptional. While it ‘might seem that Beckett’s aesthetic project is essentially negative, that what lurks behind the art workʼs surface is much more a ʽnothingʼ than a ʽsomethingʼ’, what Deleuze sees in Beckett is the bringing ‘to the fore [of] the virtual plenum of forces that make actual forms possible and from which they arise’ (Bogue 2004: 132). My own reading of …but the clouds… openly aims to foreground such a Beckettian media positivity as well. Beckett and Television-Philosophy Due to the subtlety and complexity of Beckett’s approach to media one is encouraged to assume that his television plays have something essential to say about the medium of television as well. To extrapolate a television-philosophy from these plays one has to carefully examine them and this is where the Deleuzian approach comes in as it deals with the question of the medium not from a distanced (content vs. medium) point of view but deduces the signs from the thought effects in which the medium’s nature is implicit. The engagement with the television medium seems particularly challenging as, according to Deleuze, Television remains inferior [to cinema] because it clings to images in the present. Television renders everything in the present, except when it is directed by great cineasts. The concept of the image in the present only applies to mediocre or commercial images. It’s a completely ready-made and false concept [that the television image creates], a kind of fake evidence. (Deleuze 2000: 372)
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) Deleuze sees televisionʼs function as being primarily social and related to the system of surveillance and control, hence, the production of the ready-made concepts by the television-image. Because of this objection it remains to be proven how Beckett’s television plays manage to break out of this mold. This shall be my task in this article, which I will attempt to accomplish by focusing on one of Beckett’s television plays and by exploring the alternative television ontology inherent in it. For Deleuze, ‘the television image as a constant scanning of lines is fundamentally a type of time-image. As electronic image, it lends itself to digitization, and with the digital image an essential mutability emerges’ (Bogue 2003: 195). This is a definition of the medium I shall return to as Beckett in his television play gives a profound specificity and depth to it. Significantly, Deleuze does not imply that television images as such cannot provide an effect of lasting value; it is just that they tend not to. Beckett’s television plays break with this tendency and, in the words of Deleuze himself, there ‘is a specificity to [Beckett’s] works for television’ (Deleuze 1997: 159). In these pieces, the characters are like ‘supermarionettes’; the camera, as a character, has an autonomous, furtive, or dazzling movement that is antagonistic to the movement of the other characters; artificial techniques (slow motion, superimposition) are rejected as being unsuited to the movements of the mind... According to Beckett, only television is able to satisfy these demands. (Deleuze 1997: 169) Thus, one is bound to ask how television is able to satisfy these demands. In order to get to the core of the matter it is necessary to understand how Beckett uses the potentiality of the television medium and to what specific images it gives rise to, what their conceptual making and conceptual engagement with the medium is. According to Graley Herren, the medium of television is the medium of ghosts, aiming at a presentation and recreation of what is forever lost, producing an illusion of immediate presence. Therefore, ‘Under Beckett’s direction, television becomes the ideal medium for exposing false claims of presence because it is constituted entirely from absence, illusion, shadow, and echo’ (Herren 2007: 19). This identification of televisionʼs essence has certain shortcomings. While it is generally true that absence is more significant in television and presence is more tangible in theatre, it is the same kind of ghostliness that film deals with as well. In this sense, there would be no difference between television and film. Yet, in the case of Beckett, the difference is present and is of utmost significance. After all, after only one film attempt he
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) entirely turned to television where he found his perfect image machine. More importantly, what matters is not the image’s relation to the pro-filmic and the real-time media event but empirical television properties such as its small size, the graininess of the transmission and the intimate nature of the viewing experience. Beckett’s television plays make these aspects increasingly salient. All these properties work to create a presence, not of a pro-filmic reality but of a second degree reality, emerging from the television grain itself. The fact that one can touch the actors at a theatre performance but not at cinema or not while watching television has no bearing on the matter because the reality created by these plays does not reside in flesh and blood actors. The performance of these plays is created by the television signal. If it is a ghost, it is the ghost in the machine, not the ghost of a performance past. Beckett’s use of television foregrounds the essence of the medium as it is understood by video artist Nam June Paik, who states that ‘the difference between film and television resides in the fact that film concerns the image and space, whereas with television, there is no space, there is no image, but only lines, electronic lines. The essential concept, in regard to television, is time’ (Paik qtd. in Bogue 2004: 139). Television is ‘an electronic image, an interwoven image, recomposed from an extremely rapid scanning of a certain number of lines by a beam of electrons’ (Paik qtd. in Bogue 2004: 139). If in the case of film one can find proof of photorealism in the visual trace that truly exists, in television ‘there is no truth at all. And no matter what you do, there is no longer any image. Everything is pure invention, everything is produced starting from an electronic and artificial interweaving’ (Paik qtd. in Bogue 2004: 139). This is precisely what Beckettʼs television plays unleash – televisionʼs potential for creating worlds, summoning ghosts from the scanning of lines, from the primal soup of electrons that in time crystallizes into a life, into an image. Herrenʼs extensive study on Beckett’s work in television has two main, related arguments: that television medium is flawed because of its inherent absence and that Beckett’s television plays deal with failures of memory. That is to say, both the artwork and the medium are about failure. ‘One of Beckett’s most important contributions to the ʽgenealogy of memory’ then is his exploitation of television as a ʽperfectly flawedʼ medium for reenacting the failure of memory.’ (Herren 2007: 19) I am willing to contest both arguments. First, I see Beckett as creating a special kind of televisual presence in allowing a second order reality to emerge from the very materiality of the medium, which has no relation to the pro-filmic or to the aim at the ‘real-timeness’ of television because it transcends the means of its creation. Second, Beckett’s television plays are not failed but successful attempts, even if they do deal with memory: Joe in Eh Joe stills the last torturing voice, the man in Ghost Trio is transformed into music, as can be
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) witnessed from their final otherworldly smiles, and …but the clouds… is a successful conjuration of an image as an independent entity. The following reading will focus on the last of these plays and, by paying attention to the emergent logic structuring the play’s reality, show why this should be seen as the case. Intermedial Miteinander in ...but the clouds... ...but the clouds...1 deals with a restless soul. A man (M) is resting his head on a table. A voice (V) is heard (presumably his, although one never sees him speak) reminiscing about a woman (W) and his own daily routine. Sometimes he is shown coming from or leaving for work (M1). Other times he is going to his sanctum where he reminisces (M1). These spaces are differentiated simply by the means of direction and all one sees on the screen is a round spot of light surrounded by darkness2: in the west shadow are the roads; in the north shadow lies the sanctum; in the east shadow stands the closet. The woman appears in only one guise: ‘Close-up of woman’s face reduced as far as possible to eyes and mouth. Same shot throughout.’ (Beckett 1984: 257) The face manifests to the man and the spectators always when he is in his sanctum, resting on the table, vacillating between wakefulness and sleep. He describes four cases of her apparition: ‘One: she appeared and in the same breath was gone […] two: she appeared and lingered […] three: she appeared and... ʽ...clouds... but the clouds... of the sky...ʼ’ (Beckett 1984: 260–261) In this last case her lips are shown to move miming these very words so one can assume that she spoke to him. There is a fourth case or ‘case naught, as I pleased to call it, by far the commonest, in the proportion say of nine hundred and ninety-nine to one, or nine hundred and ninety-eight to two, when I begged in vain’ (Beckett 1984: 261) and the woman did not appear at all. The words that give the title to the play are borrowed from William Butler Yeats’s famous poem The Tower. The play ends with the man reciting the last stanza of the poem in full in the German version and the last quatrain in the BBC version: Now shall I make my soul, / Compelling it to study / In a learned school / Till the wreck of body, / Slow decay of blood, / Testy delirium / Or dull 1
The play was written in 1976 and first broadcast on 17 April 1977 on BBC (director: Donald McWhinnie). Beckett himself directed the piece for German television which was broadcast on the 21 October 1977 with Klaus Herm as the man and Kornelia Boje as the woman (translators Erik and Elmar Tophoven). The latter version is the point of reference in this article. 2 This round area is conceptually shared between Beckettian characters and the Baconian Figure which distinguishes ‘the isolator, the Depopulator; the series of spastics and paralytics inside the round area; the stroll of the Vigilambulator; the presence of the attendant, who still feels, sees, and speaks.’ (Deleuze 2003: 50) 330
Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) decrepitude, / Or what worse evil come – / The death of friends, or death / Of every brilliant eye / That made a catch in the breath – / Seem but the clouds of the sky / When the horizon fades; / Or a birdʼs sleepy cry / Among the deepening shades. (Yeats 2004: 11) This poem, then, forms the structural, emotional, and thematic center of the play. The arrival to its completion becomes the narrative resolution: the poem that the man tries to recall finally is spoken. It is only the last stanza that is recited but it forms a unity and completion onto itself. Beckett was initially unwilling to give a full stanza at the end of the play because while it made the quote more intelligible, it was still ‘a mistake from a formal point of view’ (Beckett qtd. in Herren 2007: 108). This hesitation is understandable because quoting a full stanza makes it more of a Yeats quote than a small fragment would and thus lessens the possibility of the intermedial Miteinander. A small fragment is far more obscure, more of an organic part of its new whole, and it reverberates with a slight déjà vu feeling instead of pointing directly to Yeats. Yet, I would argue that even the full stanza is still functioning as a fragment while adding a sense of completion to the television play. But Beckett was understandably following the less-is-more principle in a sense that the quatrain is enough to frame and give depth to the play. Yeats’s poem presents itself through a combination of absence and presence in Beckett’s play and deals with the ageing poet’s psychological state. Yeats mentions some of his poetic creations (like Crazy Jane or Red Hanrahan), alludes to his never-fulfilled love for Maud Gonne (‘Does the imagination dwell the most / Upon a woman won or woman lost?’ [Yeats 2004: 8]) and arrives at a realization that his life was nothing but clouds. There is a gloomy shadow of death hanging over the poem as the cry of birds in Yeatsian symbolism most often marks the opening of the world of the spirits, a passage into the world of shades (ghosts). For instance, in At the Hawk’s Well a girl is possessed by the spirit of the hawk, the creature of the Sidhe, as she gives a hawk cry when ‘there is no wing in sight.’ (Yeats 1921: 16) In The Only Jealousy of Emer the protagonist Cuchulain comments that ‘[t]here is a folly in the deathless Sidhe / Beyond man’s reach’ (Yeats 1921: 45), which explains that it is not truly the land of death as such but of immortality as well. Yet the encounter with such creatures will most likely lead one to a liminal existence. In the stories of Red Hanrahan, for example, Hanrahan fails to accept four sacred emblems from the woman of the Sidhe: the cauldron of pleasure, the stone of power, the spear of courage, and the sword of knowledge. Because of this failure Hanrahan is doomed to lose his mortal beloved, to desert his ordinary life and become a wondering poet, never finding a place to settle. Imagination entails a danger of ceasing to be human, of
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) turning into an art work in refining one’s experiences to the extent where aestheticism replaces humanity. The end of Beckett’s play and the recitation of the full stanza or the quatrain could mean the nearing of the Sidhe, of W, who has transfigured M into a Red Hanrahan type of figure. However, the play resists this interpretation by the simple fact that the man is surrounded by shadows throughout the entire play and the logic, as we shall see, is to make both the man and the woman equally ghostly. In other words, the man has always been in the land of shades. But what kind of a land is it? In The Only Jealousy of Emer another character Bricriu states the following: ‘A dream is body; / The dead move ever toward dreamless youth / And when they dream no more return no more; / And those mere holy shades that never lived / But visit you in dreams.’ (Yeats 1921: 40) Bricriu not only suggests that dreams are the gateway for the communication of living mortals with the dead and the immortal beings, but also mediates Yeats’s ideas about the after-life outlined in his esoteric magnum opus A Vision (1925). There, he describes the state called the dreamingback where the souls of the dead are shifting backwards through their life scenes as if in a dream and in this process of living back they come to the state of infancy and then are ready to be reborn. This dreaming is a liminal state between being dead and coming to life, which accurately describes the tonality of …but the clouds… This shared tonality is what transforms the poem’s and the play’s intermedial Nebeneinander into a conceptual cooperation of Miteinander. The tonality of liminality (between death and life, between materiality and immateriality) also relates to the television medium self-reflexivity, namely, to the crystallizing of the televisual scanning of lines into an image-ghost. The medium exorcises itself by constantly dissipating such crystallizations with others, ghosts being constantly replaced by other ghosts. The poem’s significance is inescapable and, therefore, both Herren and Ronald Bogue took the inclusion of the poem as an invitation to climb up Yeats’s tower and follow the intertextual connection. Yet they did so differently from my own reading, which focuses on the immanence of the emergent structure and the intermedial Miteinander instead of moving away from the unified whole by seeing the piece in terms of intermedial Nebeneinander. Herren provides an intertextual reading by comparing the poem and the television play thematically and seeing Beckett’s play as a rebuttal and (self-)deconstruction of Yeats. ‘M finds no basis for sharing Yeats’s professed faith in the redemptive powers of the mind. Beckett’s protagonist can only hold onto memory-images of his ʽwoman lostʼ for seconds at a time, and he can never coax a kind word or glance from her.’ (Herren 2007: 113) The working assumption here is that the aim of the protagonist is to bring back a loved one, for the act of memory to result in actual human presence. But the television play is far from being that
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) straightforward about its subjects and objects. The ghostly logic that obscures the ontological status of both M and W is at work all the time. W is not essentially a memory but an entity, finding its vessel in M. Most importantly, W is so obviously present on the screen, in all her powerful ghostliness and materiality, and more than once. The fact that V recounts the difficulties with which he is faced when he tries to conjure up W does not lead to the conclusion that it is a failure. On the contrary, it further foregrounds W as an independent entity, granting her presence rather than being summoned at will. Bogue, however, wanders a bit further away from the tower and sees, after Deleuze, …but the clouds… as a Western Noh play, genre Beckett supposedly adapted via Yeats, which requires a slightly more extensive explanation. Noh is an ancient form of extremely stylized Japanese dance theatre that fully emerged in the 14th century Japan. This Japanese tradition inspired a few Noh-like experiments by Yeats himself, most well-known being the stage play At the Hawk’s Well, which was well liked by Beckett (see Herren 2007). Bogue finds Noh character equivalents in …but the clouds… and reads W as the shite (the ghost), M as the wake (traditionally, a travelling Buddhist monk or a priest) and the ‘eventual alignment of V with the movements of the woman’s mouth marks the resurrection of the dead and, perhaps, the temporary exorcism of this ghost’ (Bogue 2004: 137). Noh theatre is essentially a sacred experience, a secular Buddhist mass where the spirits of the famous Japanese heroes retell their stories and in reliving their tragedies they purify themselves and are soothed for a period of time. Because it is the Buddhist mass, the spirits do not get an eternal salvation, they are trapped in the vicious circle of births and deaths (samsara) and they will come back again in one form or another. Character development in the Western sense loses its meaning in a Noh play since the shite, the main character of the play, who always wears a mask, ‘possesses only a few individual qualities... or is the reincarnation of a powerful emotion.’ (Keen 1973: 18) For instance, in Zeamiʼs play Aoi no e (Lady Aoi) a character dissolves into a part of scenery to the point that the sick lady Aoi (whose name the play bears) never appears on the stage in flesh and blood but, instead, is represented throughout the play by a kimono brought and folded on the stage at the beginning of the performance. A Noh play is usually the wakiʼs dream since his coming to a sacred place and his foreknowledge of the mythology surrounding it gives an important background for the content of dreams. Tired from travelling, the waki usually sits down and presumably falls asleep; the tension rising from his knowledge of the sacredness of the place and its legends causes him to dream. The slowness of the movements of the shite as he3 dances reliving the past and breaking the chain of linear time indicate the 3
Traditionally, all Noh actors are men. 333
Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) dream reality as well. Traditionally, in Noh theatre the song or the chant is more important than the dance, and the music is more important than the words. In fact, the words are made to fit the rhythmical framework of the music. However, the richness of the text does not suffer from the concentration on rhythm: ‘What we are given is a created cosmography in which float bits of Tang poetry, pieces of earlier Japanese, traditional refrains, and transient songs of the day. The language turns, convolutes, rears back upon itself’ (Richie 1965: 70). The choir comments on the actions and emotions of the characters as they are expressed through movements since after all: ‘Noh is an art which speaks through gestures’ (Nogami 1981: 78). These qualities make the comparison of …but the clouds… and Noh theatre seem sound and reasonably well-founded. However, the assumption that Beckett adopted this aesthetic via Yeats is problematic because of cultural, contextual and historical aspects. Yeats uses Noh structure quite freely led by his essential interpretation of Noh as akin to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Romantic poetry. To Yeats, both Noh and Shelley’s poetry make possible ‘a hundred lovely intricacies’ (1919: 29). Yeats deviates from the initial structure by imbuing his Noh characters with exceeding psychological complexity. He personalizes his ‘distorted’ custom-made masks that in traditional Noh are highly standardized and have a very precise symbolism (Sekine 1995: 139). Yeats stages the plays in a drawing-room instead of a conventional Noh stage and introduces his own element of scenery, a black cloth. He gives different roles to his musicians than those of the traditional Noh musicians (Sekine 1995: 139) and disregards the monodramatic, shite-based principle of dramatic action. His audience consists of friends and fellow artists in fear of ‘the wrong people’ (Yeats 1921: 86) witnessing the performance, which opposes the community oriented, egalitarian traditional Noh. Finally, by opening his play with a strange (to a Japanese Noh audience), Yeatsian invocation of the mind’s eye, i.e. of imagination, he changes the custom of traditional waki actors who nearly always begin with the description of the destination of their journey or indicate where they geographically are at the moment (for e.g. see Tomoe, Nishikigi, Hagaromo). All these deviations and losses in translation make Yeats’s Noh plays seem closer to Yeats’s own occult practices and the secret meetings of their initiates. Bogue explains, ‘What Deleuze sees in Noh drama, Yeats’s theater, and the television plays of Beckett, then, is a common ascetic sensibility whose goal is the creation of aesthetic images through the elimination of the particularizing details of conventional realism.’ (Bogue 2004: 141) Yet this de-particularizing gesture functions differently in all three incarnations of Noh; in Beckett it serves to mentalize the space-time and to expose the internal nature of the television medium, in Yeats it helps to provide an occult experience of visual poetry and
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) in the Japanese Noh it aims to create a secular religious event. These works cannot be seen as literary texts alone, in purely formalistic terms, detached from the properties of the medium and the screening/performance circumstances, all of which are of utmost importance in the creation of the respective types of theatrical and televisual realities. Yeats’s poem, thus, I argue, does not serve polemical purposes or is a pointer to a possible influence. Instead, it functions as an organic part of the play’s whole, its world, and of the television medium it engages with. Televisual Liminality Liminality, which obscures the boundary between the living and the dead, between the subject and the object, is at the very core of this play both thematically and as a posited property of the medium. The play underscores this logic in many different ways. V not only tries to remember the woman but attempts to remember his own remembering: When I thought of her it was always night. […] No, that is not right. When she appeared it was always night. I came in […] Right. Came in, having walked the roads since break of day, brought night home, stood listening. (Beckett 1984: 259) He moves from an active and clearly defined act of memory to a passive and more ghostly encounter with the woman. According to literary scholar Catharina Wolf, a ‘subjective, psychological act of concentration and memory is abandoned for a rhetoric of magical invocation and spectral appearance’ (Wolf 1994: 84). This develops in a very Yeatsian vein as the relationship ‘between obsessional memories and the apparition of ghosts, between mourning and haunting […] loom heavily throughout Yeatsʼs work’ (Wolf 1994: 84). A lot of Yeats’s plays and poems are indeed inhabited by men (poets) longing for or being seduced by the dangerous and faerie women of the Sidhe, as some examples discussed in the previous section have shown. Wolf observes the significance of Beckett’s syntactic cut: ‘the quatrain he chooses is without a grammatical subject, thus the play does not state4 what these lines are meant to describe or modify’ (Wolf 1994: 86). But whereas for Wolf it stands as a direct invitation to climb up Yeats’s tower and immerse into the intertext of the play, I would argue that the ambiguity of reference signals quite the opposite. The play’s logic is to merge the man and the woman, which goes beyond individual biography or story and aims at a philosophical abstraction. The play’s effects lie not in the intertextual play or the allegorical dimension (the 4
Emphasis in the original. 335
Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) man read as a depiction of Yeats) but in its audiovisually created immanent universe. Ghostliness is of major importance as such an immanent feature of the play and the poem simply helps to enforce this quality. The indicator of a spectral character of the woman is the man’s mention that she appeared to him ‘[w]ith those unseeing eyes I so begged when alive to look at me’ (Beckett 1984: 260). Therefore, the woman lingers between being a ghost of memory and an actual ghost of a deceased beloved. But an ambiguity remains: is the woman used to be alive or the man himself (when ‘I was alive’ or when ‘she was alive’) – the grammatical subject is yet again missing. The narrative would imply the first option but the ambiguity is not without its purpose. As the image oscillates between waking thoughts and a dream, between the world of external reality (walking the dark roads) and the psychological reality of contemplation in the sanctum so the man’s and the woman’s images merge into one another, they both become spectral. Moreover, the image of the woman has a very spectral quality in itself, which emphasizes her liminality both as a character and as an image. The grey lighting and the formal qualities of the shot (extreme close-up and the graininess of the televisual image) make it so that the face appears statuesque or as if made from clouds or mist: no hairline is visible, no darker shades on the lips, nothing disturbs this stone-like monochrome. The face gets free from the man’s and the play’s narrative and claims an autonomy for itself in its affective powers as an image, creates a lingering in the interval, the indiscernible point between perception and recognition. What is the ontological status of this image? One comes face to face with the liminality of the televisual image because this precise shot makes the emergence of the face from the mere scanning of lines most tangible, underscoring the non-existence of the pro-filmic reality. The circumstances of broadcasting also come into play because judging from the documented broadcasting times of other television plays (for Eh Joe see Gardner 2012, for Night and Dreams see Maier 1996) the preferred time was near midnight. This way the intimacy of the home environment, the small screen and the probable circumstances of watching the broadcast in the dark creates a double mirroring effect. The spectator is part of the darkness surrounding Mʼs circle of light, his/her perception casting the light on Mʼs inner sanctum. As W emerges out of the primal electronic soup, her emergence is, too, facilitated by the casting of the light by the spectator’s perception. Since the image emerges within the mind-skull and from the primal neuronal soup of scanning the brain signals of the spectator it, too, creates the highest degree of alignment, to borrow Murray Smith’s term. The spectator becomes V and the visual plane of …but the clouds… becomes the content of the spectator’s own inner sanctum.
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) The presentation of the man is visually and aurally split as there are at least three incarnations of the character present on screen. First, there is M that appears as the ‘[n]ear shot from behind of man sitting on invisible stool bowed over invisible table. Light grey robe and skullcap. Dark ground. Same shot throughout’ (Beckett 1984: 257). Then, there is M1 that is ‘M in set. Hat and greatcoat dark, robe and skullcap light.’ (Beckett 1984: 257) Finally, there is Mʼs voice (V), which is a separate entity because even though one hears him speak, Mʼs lips are never shown. The editing (a shot accompanied by the narrative voice and disintegrated by dissolves) suggests that the long shot of the man going out to walk the roads and coming back, changing his clothes, walking to the sanctum is Mʼs memory of his earlier self. The image of M, the man lying in the sanctum, is implicitly the source of V (the narrating voice) and this has proven to be a popular interpretation. For instance, media theorist Colin Gardner notices the significance of the mental in Beckett’s play and sees it in terms of ‘two separate worlds: the Physical/Corporeal/Real and the Mental/Spiritual/Possible.’ (Gardner 2012: 141) The physical side of the play consists of the lit circle, the dark roads, and the rear sanctum; the mental realm is M in his sanctum, along with W. This reading initially comes from ‘The Exhausted’ essay, where ‘Deleuze asserts as well that the east-west axis of M1 constitutes a physical dimension, whereas the north-south traces a primarily mental domain (which significantly includes the camera), M and W also belonging to that realm of mental images’ (Bogue 2004: 137). My reading of the play’s spatio-temporality contrasts with such an interpretation since my own assertion is that the play contains no physical domain at all and the entire televisual whole is one complex mental image. Therefore, I would suggest that even M should be seen as another manifestation of Vʼs memory. In this case the voice is entirely separate and irreducible to any of the incarnations of M. In fact, it would encompass W as well since when she utters (mimes) the words it is the man’s voice that one hears. The voice in this light becomes a single most powerful entity capable of conjuring up actual images. No wonder that Wolf thinks that the play ‘worships, in addition to images, words5.’ (Wolf 1994: 85) Here the disembodied voice, itself a Beckettian axiom, has no physical bodily limitations or contours; the images appearing on screen are, thus, all mental, not physical phenomena. The physical along with all the other (historical, cultural, social) outsides is lost in the dark and hidden away from perception, non-registrable as such by this very selective image with sound. So, for instance, Gardner’s description of M1 as Mʼs ‘real-world identity’ (Gardner 2012: 152) goes, in fact, against the play’s immanent logic, which is to
5
Emphasis in the original. 337
Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) make M, M1, V and W all equally ghostly and liminal. In other words, all is real and all is mental, the only unreality being associated with the physical. The Mentalscape of Memory Despite the acousmatic power of words and language, in this play Beckett made an extensive use of the televisual and cinematic effects. The single editing technique that is used ubiquitously throughout the play is fade and dissolve which blurs the limits between separate images and by doing so creates special connections between them: every other image (of the man coming and going, resting in his sanctum, of the woman appearing) seems to arise from and dissolve into another image. Therefore, the televisual image is constantly refolding. The fades and dissolves have a thematic grounding: this way Beckett turns every image into a cloud and makes them spectral – the man, the woman, life in general. ‘Deleuze considers the cinematic technique of superimposition – together with dissolves, complex camera movements, and special effects – as a reference to a ʽmetaphysics of the imaginationʼ’ (Szaloky 2010: 62). In other words, the imagination works by superimposing alike images or dissolving one image into another in a Riemannian topological manner. In mathematics, Riemannian topology entails that every other form can be turned into a certain number of different forms without making drastic changes such as cutting. This way the rectangle is already implicit in the circular shape. In Deleuzian thought Riemannian space is connected to that of a ‘smooth space’ of pure lines between points, directional vectors without clear dimensional determination, and distributional spaces without fixed allocation of the elements’ positions. On the basis of such an abstract configuration of systematically related qualities, one may then identify smooth spaces in a number of areas – quilt manufacture, musical compositions, naval tactics, fractals, fluid dynamics, labor practices, jewelry design, painting, and so on. (Bogue 2007: 118) Memory works in a similar way as it enfolds images into each other like a number of visible and invisible layers. Although the play contains a narrative flow, which takes the shape of a Proustian attempt to remember and culminates in the victory of the completion of Yeats’s poem, the image of ...but the clouds... is not a movement-image, to use Deleuzian terminology. The play does not prioritize action and presentness but drowns in some indefinite past instead. The image is permanently floating between sleeping and waking where the present is constantly dissolved into the past. There is no outside space, no external milieu that would connect the image
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) to its out-of-field. The dark roads for which the man leaves every day, the closet in which he changes his clothes and even his sanctum are all but shadows surrounding the single spot of light in which he passes from one direction to the next. The only markers of change are his clothes and the directions of his movements – diagrammatic drawing of reality. This depiction of space is a figuration of subjectivity: everything else is reduced to the visual nonimportance for the man, the play being a phenomenological CAT scan of his mind. For Herren, the bareness of the mise-en-scéne in a more realistic representational sense indicates Beckett’s ‘characters’ regressive isolation from any worldly distractions’ (Herren 2007: 14). However, I would object to seeing the settings in a physical sense since they are not material representations of dwellings; they are barren so as to allow for the emergence of a different kind of reality in a non-physical but mental sense. The time-flow of ...but the clouds... is not the time of Chronos, of presentness and linearity, which characterizes the movement-image as well as the typical television temporality. Rather, it is the time of the eternal return, of the cycles of memory. The shots of the man going home, leaving, going to his sanctum are all identical, repeating, and returning. Just like the image of the woman, just like the words from Yeats’s poem. The whole play, as it progresses, works to flow and form into a single ontologically liminal image, which resonates with Marcel Proust’s principle of creation: Proust did not want an abstract literature that was too voluntary (philosophy), any more than he wanted a figurative, illustrative, or narrative literature that merely told a story. What he was striving for, and what he wished to bring to light, was a kind of Figure, torn away from figuration and stripped of every figurative function: a Figure-in-itself, for example, the Figure-in-itself of Combray. He himself spoke of ‘truths written with the aid of figures.’ (Deleuze 2003: 56) Beckett also works to create such a figure – a televisual Image-in-itself because what finally appears is not an image of a memory or of Memory but of a mental life as memory, a life that always tries to encompass, to call into perception, to image(ine). The narrative, figurative or illustrative aspects are made less significant in this play since its primary concern is the emergence of an image. ...but the clouds... is preoccupied with the metaphysics of memory and presents its ontology. W is the nucleus around which the whole fabric of reality is built. But, most importantly, it is not at all clear whether it is a real or a false memory; the play does not differentiate between such categories. The enigmatic face is the real of this universe since the emphasis falls not on the pro-filmic or the
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) already lived and remembered but on the emergence, actualization of an image from a mere scanning of lines in the case of the televisual image and from neuronal signaling in the case of the spectator. The chores of life, the outside roads that stand for the whole of social life and the ordinary personal reality (such as changing one’s clothes) are signified by a vector without presence, by absence. Only the man’s movements towards these absent places allude to their existence. The only moment present to one’s vision is the moment of in-betweeness, of the man in the process of moving towards these places. It is a moment of becoming of which the telos is insignificant. This formal quality of the shot together with the mise-en-scène indicates the insignificance of the lived world within this mental space. The only place of importance is the sanctum where W, the element that keeps this universe together, appears. Visually, it is the same darkness in which the man sits, the difference being that the place is not alluded to processually but presents itself as an end locus. Upon reaching it the man is part of another becoming – a world of memory as conjuration. The topology of this world is established by juxtaposing the spaces through presence and absence as well as degrees of importance. In ...but the clouds... the spaces matter as much as they form the means of getting to the emergence of the image. They all contract into an infinite darkness, unlit by consciousness because M’s mental intentionality is not about the encounter with the physical, material, social, and actual world but about the encounter with the image. The materiality of the actual world is erased to give way for the actuality of the mental. The rest of the world is contracted into an all surrounding darkness and may permanently extend; it is in no way subtracted by the consciousness in question because the entity, the object that needs registering does not dwell on this level. ...but the clouds... is, then, entirely a mental space of memory. But it is not an autobiographical memory, a part of the narrative of a self or a place of reminiscence. Memory here is a conjuration of an independent entity and this independence, as discussed earlier, is as much televisual as it is mental and ontological. This status of memory is in line with Deleuzian ideas on fabulation, namely the, percept and the affect [as] autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience or have experienced them: Combray like it never was, is, or will be lived; Combray as cathedral or monument. (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 168) The memory that the character and the spectator encounter is such an autonomous and self-sufficient being. Significantly, when describing the conditions of the face’s apparition V goes from referring to it as his own act of 340
Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) remembering to the passive reception of its act: ‘When she appeared.’ (Beckett 1984: 259) This is a description of the process of fabulation, the ontological condition of the crystallization of a memory as an image. What was once (if ever) evoked by the powers of imagination now is an independent being capable of granting its presence on its own. The face, just like Combray, manifests itself as a multifaceted cathedral, as a monument and it is befitting for the image to have a stony quality. The face is the creature of the mind that is not dependent on the mind that engendered it any more than the percepts and affects of a painting are dependent on the mind of the artist. This successful erection of the monument, the Image, is, therefore, a direct refutation of the interpretation of Beckett as an artist of failure. According to Beckett’s television-philosophy implicit in …but the clouds…, television is the medium of creation and emergence – an act the play successfully accomplishes – as opposed to film’s reconfiguration of the already existing photographic trace. Coda The article treated Beckett as a television-philosopher, the philosophy being inherent and extractable from his artistic practices and, pertaining to this article, his television play. The article also contested the assumptions that ...but the clouds... is about the failure of memory and about the televisual absence. By uniting poetry, theatre and television into an intermedial conceptual unity, their Miteinander, the television play in its entirety becomes a liminal locus memoriae where memory upon its returning gains a physical form – more tangible than the real itself. The play is an image of a life permeated by this single ghostly manifestation, ghostly not in a sense of a spectral return of something lost but of an emergence of something new. The mind has become nothing but a receptacle of this creature of imagination, its place of dwelling, its habitat. The face gains corporeality while the man’s life turns into clouds. The play, then, is an imaging of the character’s mental existence as well as an exploration of the ontology of memory. Here memory is presented as a conjuration of an image, of a selfsufficient being within and out of the space of a mind-skull. This mind-skull, in a self-reflexive manner, comes to refer to both televisual-electronic as well as spectatorial-neuronal primal matter – the stuff images are made of. What this also implies is that, according to Beckett’s television-philosophy, television has a much more direct access to the spectator’s thought than other media because the barrier between the two screens (the spectator and the television set) can be easily dissolved. Television is always already an internal medium, which uncovers its power as well as its danger but not failure. To go back to Paik’s statement, the television-image is in a direct relationship to time and …but the clouds… dramatizes this process of emergence of a televisual and a memory
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015) image – only in time the primal soup of electrons and neurons crystallizes into an image.
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