Abstract
The stage is an almost unique meeting point for text and matter. While textual prescriptions or proscriptions abound in human life, from religious tracts to legal pronouncements to self-help books and so on, the stage provides a unique space in which the relationship between the static, two-dimensional page and the kinetic, material world that it is created for is made visible. It is a truism to remark that barring perhaps the genre of closet drama, which, as Martin Puchner suggests, attempts to solve the “problem” of the unpredictable theater space and the living actor by writing dialogic texts for reading rather than performance, 1 the play text is intended to find its completion and fulfillment in the physicality of performance. In simple terms, it governs the words spoken by the actor and offers directions for movement; in other words, it functions as an organizing entity, arranging speech, movement, and spatiality, all of which will convey emotion, narrative, and so on. While chapter 2 was concerned with the relationship between language and body and between the art image and the poetic word, this chapter will be concerned with how theater offers a meeting point between text and the materiality of the stage space. This is brought to the fore by an author such as Beckett who deliberately stages this meeting point through various strategies, such as, for example, the act of writing in Catastrophe and the act of reading in Ohio Impromptu, Quad and What Where stage also the violence and restrictiveness that the text holds for the dramatic figure.
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Notes
Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-theatricality and Drama ( Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 ), 15.
Kurt Taroff, “Screens, Closets, and Echo Chambers of the Mind: The Struggle to Represent the Inner life on Stage,” Forum Modernes Theater 25 /2 (2010): 181.
For images that demonstrate this, see Cathy Courtney, Jocelyn Herbert: A Theater Workbook (USA: Applause, 1997 ), 89.
William Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 ), 160.
Shane Weller, Beckett, Literature and the Ethics of Alterity ( Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 ), 22.
Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith ( London: Continuum, 2002 ), 155.
Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett’s Later Drama ( London: Routledge, 1993 ), 26.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smyth (London: Routledge, 2002 ), 360–361.
Jim Hansen, “Samuel Beckett’s Catastrophe and the Theater of Pure Means,” Contemporary Literature 49 (2008): 666.
Anna McMullan, Performing Embodiment in Samuel Beckett’s Drama ( New York: Routledge, 2010 ), 115.
Jennifer Jeffers, Uncharted Space: The End of Narrative ( New York: Peter Lang, 2001 ), 203.
Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus , trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11. emphasis in original.
Martta Heikkilä, At the Limits of Presentation: Coming-into-Presence and its Aesthetic Relevance in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Philosophy ( Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008 ), 255.
Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 ), 158.
Elaine Scarry, Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985 ), 19–20.
S. E. Gontarski, ed., Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett: The Shorter Plays (London: Faber, 1992 ), 418–419.
Gontarski, “Revising Himself: Performance as Text in Samuel Beckett’s Theater,” Journal of Modern Literature 22 (Fall 1998): 142.
Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, Text ( USA: Davies Group, 2007 ), 160.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1999 ), 143.
Rebecca Schneider, “On Taking the Blind in Hand,” in The Body in Performance, ed. Patrick Campbell (London: Routledge, 2001 ), 29.
Karen Laughlin, “‘Dreaming of [… ] Love’: The Making of the (Post)Modern Subject,” SBTA 11 (2000): 206.
Gilles Deleuze, “The Exhausted,” trans. Christian Kerslake, Parallax 3 (1996): 123.
S. E. Gontarski, “The Body in the Body of Beckett’s Theatre,” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11 (2000): 176.
Eckhart Voigts-Virchow, “Quad I and Teletubbies or ‘Aisthetic’ Panopticism versus Reading Beckett,” SBTA 11 (2000): 211.
Anna McMullan, “Virtual Subjects: Performance, Technology and the Body in Beckett’s Late Theater,” Journal of Beckett Studies 10 (2002): 168.
Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance ( London: Routledge, 1993 ), 1.
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© 2013 Trish McTighe
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McTighe, T. (2013). On the One Hand … (The One That Writes the Body). In: The Haptic Aesthetic in Samuel Beckett’s Drama. New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137275332_6
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