(Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society) John Orr (Auth.) - Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture - Play and Performance From Beckett To Shepard-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1991)
(Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society) John Orr (Auth.) - Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture - Play and Performance From Beckett To Shepard-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1991)
(Edinburgh Studies in Culture and Society) John Orr (Auth.) - Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture - Play and Performance From Beckett To Shepard-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1991)
CULTURE
EDINBURGH STUDIES IN CULTURE AND SOCIETY
M
MACMILLAN
©John Orr 1991
Published by
MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
Notes 158
Bibliography 162
Index 166
v
Acknowledgemen ts
I would like to thank Ruby Cohn, Dragan Klaic, Dan Gerould,
Randall Stevenson and Olga Taxidou for their many helpful
comments and suggestions during the writing of this book. For
better or worse, the finished product is entirely mine.
Edinburgh JOHN ORR
v:
1
Modernism and
Tragicomedy
This book is concerned with tragicomedy as part of the modernist
turn in the twentieth century. The word 'tragicomedy' is used
consciously and deliberately by Beckett as a description of Waiting
for Godot. But definition of it is elusive. In its modern context it
signals the final breakdown of the classical separation of high and
low styles. In Godot the comic waiting of Didi and Gogo is just as
important as Pozzo's tragic reversal of fortune. Equally tragi-
comedy is a departure from the realist dramas of bourgeois
conscience. It is, by contrast, a drama which is short, frail,
explosive and bewildering. It balances comic repetition against
tragic downfall. It demonstrates the coexistence of amusement and
pity, terror and laughter. But it also delineates a new dramatic form
which, from Pirandello onwards, calls into question the conven-
tions of the theatre itself. The modernist turn and the admixture of
tragic and comic elements, the sudden switch from darkness to
laughter, or vice versa, come together in a twofold challenge. We
are confronted with a world in which there appears to be little
continuity of character or of action. We are never sure whether
people or events referred to in dramatic speech have any objective
validity. We never know as an audience how we are meant to
identify physical landmarks or characters with peremptory names.
Things just happen. Other things may never have happened at all.
This book argues that there is a structure to this apparent
confusion, a historical development which starts with Pirandello
and moves through Beckett and Genet to the plays of Pinter and
Shepard. It entails a complex transformation in, to use Raymond
Williams's term, structures of feeling.l Above all, it is a movement
away from a sense of social experience anchored in tangible issues
of moral right, of the good and the just and of their betrayal.
Initially it is part of a general response to the crisis in value and the
collapse of order in European society from 1910 to 1925 through
war, revolution and economic catastrophe. Modernism, that elu-
1
2 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
10
Play and Performative Culture 11
the decentred subject can aspire to become. But this tangible goal is
itself an illusion. The coveted Other is just as elusive as the
dissolving self. It is only the image of the Other's self which can be
appropriated. The desire for the Other is thus utopian, and merely
masks self-negation. The rupture remains.
In the aesthetic history of shock, tragicomedy extends the earlier
patterns of dissonance and subversion in Schoenberg, Picasso and
Kafka. For Adorno, the latter are the chief exemplars of an art
which defies the commodifications of administered culture. But
the dramaturgy of shock is something about which he is never
specific. Reduced by other critics to the fetishistic concept of 'the
absurd', it is then vulgarised into a notion of all human experience
as absurd. Our starting-point must surely lie in the new structures
of feeling which Pirandello made possible through his unique
fusion of rupture and shock, where the self appears to the
audience as an image in a shattered mirror. It is this fusion which is
developed in Genet's role-reversals where the illusory embrace of
otherness creates new forms of self-negation, and in Beckett's
vacant landscapes where human play confronts a universal void.
The dominant structures of feeling here stress two kinds of
experience, playfulness and the breakdown of perception. These
we can call play and disrecognition.
Disrecognitions are forms of forgetting, failures or refusals to
recognise the objects of one's surroundings. We can see them as a
modernist shattering of forms of perceptual recognition. Bergson
had suggested two basic forms of recognition, habitual and attentive
recognition.lO The first involves a sensory-motor reaction to a
familiar object but the second involves a more selective and
abstract description of the thing recognised which depends, to a
large extent, on recollection. Forms of disrecognising in tragi-
comedy seem to move in the opposite direction.' Failures of
recollection initially destroy the powers of attentive recognition
and then proceed to damage the habitual recognition of familiar
objects. This is in no sense a rational dismantling of ordinary
perception. On the contrary it entails the use of dramatic shocks to
dismember ordinary seeing and create new structures of feeling.
Disrecognitions are both shock-effects and ways of seeing, historic
equivalents of the metonymic symbols of Ibsen and Chekhov, the
claustrophobic estrangements of O'Neill, the V-effects of Brecht. In
their classic form, in Codot and Endgame, comedies of error are
mixed with deeper tragic refusals of non-recognition. Together
18 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
endless arguments about who shall play Creon and who Antigone
echo the play-ful role-reversals of Genet which are amusing but
deadly serious. Thus the two convicts play at the conception of
their play, sometimes comically, sometimes with pathos, as if
playing competitively in a game of chance whose outcome they
cannot know. In Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, a play about the
rock culture of the late sixties, the showdown between the compet-
ing stars is part boxing match, part street-car race, part Western
gunfight, part DJ rapping contest. The game is deadly serious, a
matter of life and death. But it is scarcely lifelike. It is a mythic
hybrid ritual embracing so many things all at once in the junk
culture from which it is lifted that its compression into a single
encounter seems nothing less than a dramatic miracle. It is
theatrically compelling because it is a game of fragments, a ritual
without a code. The showdown works because it seems to contain
all of American culture yet cannot be pinned down. It finally
eludes definition.
From Beckett we also know that play accelerates the passing of
time. Didi and Gogo make up games to assuage the boredom of
waiting for Godot, encouraging Pozzo and Lucky to 'perform' in
turn for them. George and Martha, cheery campus hosts of VVho's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, invent malicious party games such as
'Humping the Hostess' and 'Getting the Guests' to abase them-
selves in front of their naive young visitors who they then
humiliate. In Edward Bond's Saved the killing of Pam's baby starts
off as a lark with a pram in the park, a recognisable way that
Cockney lads create of 'having a laugh'. But it ends barbarically
with the stoning of the defenceless child. At times the characters of
the tragicomic seem to be staging their own psychodramas, a
multitude of 'plays' which reflexively gloss the playwright's inven-
tion of the play in which they are taking part. On the surface this
might appear to parallel the device of authorial signature in what is
called 'post-modernist' fiction. But it is rather different. The deadly
seriousness of the game, its existential desperation and power to
shock make it a party to modernist terror. Not only are the
temptations of a blank 'post-modern' pastiche refused. 14 They are
also meaningless. However bewildering, the game is still fate. The
play of the ludic character is too serious to be the play of the
manipulative author.
Further contrast between drama and fiction can be seen in the
contrasting use of names. In the fiction of Gaddis, Pynchon and
Play and Performative Culture 21
certain world and shown us there may be deeper reasons too for
the performative impulse and its desperations.
Play in tragicomedy is indeed inseparable from the increasing
role of performance in Western culture. Moreover, our idea of
performance has taken on a new meaning since the theories of
Erving Goffman. His astounding work has been a two-edged
sword. Astoundingly prophetic of the new performative cultures
of Western societies, it embodies still a nominalism which finally
destroys its own insights. Goffman's dramaturgical metaphors
have, from the start, a very myopic view of personality. The way in
which people express themselves is part of their nature. Between
the self and performance there are no clear boundaries. Goffman's
division of a primary, opaque world of selfhood beneath the 'mask'
and a secondary world of social selfhood which entails 'perform-
ance' and 'impression management' is at best tenuous and never
absolute. Despite our doubts and uncertainties, how we express
ourselves is part of what we are. Goffman's insight is to show that
the fracturing of modern self entails performances which can
contradict one another, which often induce concealment, hypoc-
risy, duplicity and the suspension of disbelief for that very reason.
The integral self which does not perform is, however, a pure myth.
Moreover, Goffrnan's unfortunate nominalist conceits detract from
his historical insight, namely that Western societies have recently
become very performative. Here we have to add to the impression-
management of persons as sellers and producers the increasingly
rich and varied performances of persons as consumers. Goffman's
analysis of the performative forms of life made sense not sub specie
aeternitas as he imagined, but in the cultural context of his own
world and particularly his own country.
There is an uncanny parallel here between Goffman's first book
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Codot, Beckett's first
major play. Beckett's play is remote and rural yet somehow fixes
the tragicomedy of the modern city which follows it. Many of
Goffrnan's case studies of self-presentation carne from tourism in
the Shetlands but his remote hotels of the 1940s point forward to
the performing consumer cultures of the metropolitan heartland.
What Goffman indicates is not just the greater rewards accorded to
good impression-management but to the increasing replacement of
myth and ritual by performance in modern culture. The irony is
that his anthropological training had directed him to those forms of
ritual in modern life he felt to be wrongly neglected by sociology.
28 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
But in fact they are often not forms of ritual at all. They are
existential conventions, unwritten ground rules invented for often
fleeting contacts, a paradox which he makes central through his
dramaturgical metaphors of performance. The ability to perform
increasingly carries off the fleeting encounter. More and more it
has a surplus value in the affairs of daily life.
This leads us to an unappetising truth about the theatre. Its
theatricality is no longer as distinct from rite or spectacle as
previously imagined. The decline of rite and spectacle in the
modern world has been offset, culturally, by an increase in
everyday theatricality, in the importance of a theatrical ability to
perform in daily life. Performance has exploded in cultural forms
outside the theatre, in forms which have rivalled it and then
passed it by. For despite the theatre's undoubted expansion,
despite its greater variations in style and staging, its flair for taking
itself out into the streets, it has been swamped since mid-century
by the spectacular growth of an electronic culture. Electronic music
stages its own spectaculars in open arenas. Film, radio and
television enable us to hear and see 'live' events and 'live'
performances. Even their documentary coverage is a 'staging' of
events with its own evolving forms of theatricality. In an audio-
visual culture of this kind, participants are encouraged to perform
by the spectacularity of performers, the performers they in fact
'consume', like rock fans at heavy metal concerts of the seventies
simultaneously performing the tune they are witnessing on card-
board guitars. Moreover, with the ubiquitous presence of sound
systems, microphones and cameras, spectators are encouraged to
perform in 'like' contexts elsewhere. Without media attention, they
can imitate the theatrical display of emotion witnessed through
one electronic medium or another. Here the exaggerated theatrica-
lities of daily life become similar to that of performing in front of a
near-empty auditorium. For we are now living, as Williams has
noted, in a dramatised society.22 Yet the new forms which allow us
and encourage us to perform do not simultaneously structure our
actions in the way of ritual or myth. In the manufactured melodra-
mas of televised sport or broadcast news, ceremonies of perform-
ance are existential, not religious. As the surplus value of the event
or the game, they are the icing on the cake.
The paradox is often grotesque. Vast electronic means are at our
disposal but the rationale for their use is seldom clear. Nonetheless
our experience of spectacle is more intense than ever, and the
Play and Performative Culture 29
33
34 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
world - in making us aware all that was solid appeared to melt into
air.6 At the same time as it attempted to parallel the bewildering
experience of modernity, however, it also attempted to transcend
modernity through a unified aesthetic of myth, time, future and
memory. In the tragicomic, this unity breaks down. Indeed it is
never even attempted.
In the second wave of modernism, tragicomedy is as integral to
film as it is to drama. As early as 1940 Renoir had suggested its
possibilities in La Regie du Jeu with its sudden breathtaking changes
of mood, from joy to melancholy, elegance to awkwardness, from
sordid farce to violent death. He breaches the classic 'rules of the
game' in which masters and servants interact but have separate
destinies not only by lyrically interweaving them but by giving
them a tragic destiny. He also proved that it was entirely cinematic
to alter mood within the single shot or sequence. The emergence of
the long take and the mobile camera were essential aids to such
lyric transitions of mood, to the coexistence of tragic and comic
forms. This was to prove equally true of Welles' Touch of Evil,
Godard's Breathless, Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Raffelson's Five Easy
Pieces, Wenders' Kings of the Road and Terence Malick's Badlands.
The long take, the tracking shot, the jump cut and the voice-over
are lyrical alienation-effects, distancing mechanisms which efface
empathy and diminish character. Welles's grotesque Hank Quin-
lan suggests the inflated ruling effigies of Genet's Balcony, all
impotent patriarchs. The Belmondo persona Godard creates in
Breathless and Pierrot Ie Fou is a tragedian of the cartoon strip, a
hyperactive outlaw devoid of certainty or values, vainly searching
for passion and communication and finding only a numb destruc-
tion. The one certainty in a world of male grotesques and women
he can only talk past rather than to is death. In Pierrot and in Jules
and Jim suicide is a tragic instant, a sudden change of mood, but
not, in essence, a tragic act. In Badlands Malick's hero-villain is the
spitting image of James Dean in a memory-film which poisons
American nostalgia. Moreover, he is a polite but chilling psycho-
path. Like many of Shepard's Western heroes, but more extreme,
he craves celebrity as a path out of anonymity, a cartoon figure
incapable of judging the consequences of his own actions. In
Malick's skilful dislocation of sound and image the naive voice-
over of the romantic teenage girlfriend turns the violent mayhem
into tragicomic farce.
In all these instances the heroic is not an agonising of conscience
The Resistance of Commodities 45
47
48 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
ters who double the split self. Here the balanced and symmetrical
ciphers of dialogue are the offspring of vaudeville clowns and the
great comics of the silent cinema. Yet their voices clearly speak a
language of dark times amidst hilarity and confusion. Their failures
of knowing and remembering are now classic features of the
modernist idiom. But this kind of amnesia is also an Irish amnesia,
a forgetting firmly rooted in a remembered tradition, that of the
Irish theatre without which it would never have been possible.
Beckett's plays are both an extension and a rejection of his
Protestant Irish predecessors. 2 His minimal language is a devastat-
ing riposte to the romantic superabundance of Yeats and Synge, to
the high nobility of the former's verse drama and the poetic
hyperbole in the speech of the latter's Irish peasants. Yet his spare
dialogues also contain much of their succinctness and their sense
of tragic loss, of catastrophe as something beyond remedy and
understanding. At times, Godot and Endgame suggest variations out
of On Baile's Strand. In Godot the blind man and the Fool become
Didi and Gogo without the noble presence of Cuchulain - Godot
never appears. Yet Pozzo, the pathetic emanation of authority
without nobility who becomes blind, suggests Cuchulain's de-
generate scion. Endgame, by contrast, has Hamm as both blind man
and degenerate scion and Clov as the Fool living in a world where
all nobility is extinct. With Synge's The Well of the Saints, the echoes
of Irish drama become more pressing. Godot can be seen as a
version of Synge's saint who never comes and, anyway, cannot
dispense miracles. In Synge, the saint restores Martin Doul's sight,
the gift of seeing which proves more painful than the affliction of
blindness. In a form of disrecognising later made more familiar by
Beckett, Doul's immediate error in regaining his sight is to mistake
the pretty Molly Byrne for Mary, his ugly deformed wife. Blindness
as necessary pathos, by which Beckett fuses the loss of the eyes
with the loss of the soul, is firmly echoed in the pathos of his
predecessors.
The resurrection of the 'noble' that Yeats and Synge had
discovered in the Irish folk-tales of the Kings of Ulster and
mythically endorsed in their own drama becomes in Beckett a lost
universe. Its redemptive power as a myth of national awakening is
reduced in his writing to a dim hope, a distant trace of the possible.
Yet Godot's dramatic space simultaneously opens out its theatrical
legacy. In The Well of the Saints, for instance, there is the open,
sparsely cultivated countryside, the comic presencing of the
50 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
long delay out on the line but his blindness prevents him from
knowing the location. He agonises over whether the 'hinney'
which Christ rode into Jerusalem was barren or procreative. He
then discovers from his wife that the text for the new preacher's
Sunday service is 'The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up
all those that be bowed down.' The shock ending plays on the
ironic juxtaposition of salvation and childlessness, barrenness and
procreation. Jerry the boy catches them up in the rain to give back
to Rooney an unexplained object he has dropped. At that point,
with the final words of the play, he tells Mrs Rooney the reason for
the train's delay which her husband had been unable to give her. A
little child had fallen out of the carriage, onto the line, and under
the wheels.
The Lord has failed to uphold the child that has fallen. The
child's tragic death, about which Rooney seems not to have
known, though that is ambiguous, echoes the failure of the child
they have never had to be born. The couple have ironically missed
out on the death of childhood just as they have missed out on its
birth. In both cases progeny is destroyed. There is no one to
succeed them into the future and no Christian miracle to ensure
survival, let alone salvation. It is personal tragedy as well as the
Death of God, a combination which suggests, however obliquely,
the end of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Theirs is a dying race
devastated by the tragic accidents their God is powerless or
unwilling to prevent. Here Beckett, it should be noted, naturalises
the more muted Christian themes of Godot and Endgame. The play
briefly goes against the trend towards greater minimalism and
abstraction in the drama after Happy Days. It gives us in the
struggle home of the Rooneys through the June tempest a natural-
ised image of the blind Pozzo and the bound Lucky in the second
act of Godot. The boy, too, with his brief double appearance,
repeats the double appearance of the boy in Godot who brings no
glad tidings. The question of progeny also echoes Hamm's chroni-
cle in Endgame where the child of whom he speaks arriving at the
doorstep on Christmas could well be Clov, to whom he has just
been speaking. In All That Fall, the child who dies and Jerry who
brings the news of it are both versions of the child the couple have
never had, the child who could continue the line.
All That Fall materialises the vision of the previous plays, albeit
through a radio work for voices. It places the themes and shows us
why in their particularity of time and place they do and do not
52 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
dom with the waiting of unvalued labour and the regress of play.
The ways of killing time which have made the play so compelling
also strike a raw nerve with long-term prisoners in our own
culture, as Rick Ouchey's productions have shown. The linlc with
Genet, a real-life prisoner, becomes even dearer. But Bedcett's
plays go deeper. They make waiting the cwse of wanting one's
valueless world to be valued, an impossible wish. The final way to
kill time is to kill oneself, and hope the gesture of seIf-crucifixion
leads when an else has failed to being redeemed. Of course it does
not. But the legacy of Christian yearning goes against the grain of
waiting. A stifled Messsianic yearning becomes a futile and incom-
plete protest against being put permanentIy'on hold'. This dash
between impulse and predicament is deep-rooted. But it is also
unresolved. We know that for an thetr botched parables, religion is
never going to become the opium of Didi and Gogo. At the end,
when the last option of hanging themselves with Estragon's belt is
rejected, waiting becomes the only possible salvation. They can
neither go to their death or move from the stage. The absent Godot
is not absent because he has not come, but because he would not
be recognised even if he did. And in his absence which can never
be turned into presence, the stage is the place where nothing really
happens, where performance is the be-an and the end-all of
passing the time, of swallowing up the void.
H Godot's Irish genealogy recalls Tht! Well of the Saints, then Endgtnne
comes just as strongly out of Yeats's Purgtdory. The poel's late
verse play is like a flash of lightning. sudden. illuminating and over
almost as soon as it has begun. But the movement is perhaps more
significant than the movement from Synge. In that case Beckett had
extended the tragicomic. In this case the tragicomic takes the place
of tragedy. In Purglllory an Old Man chronicles the stmy of his birth
to a noble lady and a stable groom. It turns out he has killed his
father in revenge and now proceeds to kill with the same jadt-lmife
the very son to whom he has just told the story of his birth outside
the ruin of his mother's ancestral home. Before killing the hapless
son to whom he explains the genealogy, he sees the purgatorial
figure of his mother under a light in the house, a hallucination of
her as a young girl awaiting the groom who is to be his father. Like
Hamm in Endgtmre the Old Man tyrannises those who come before
him and those who come after, tmmented by inheritance. ~
tory repeats the past through the ritual mmder of the son which
62 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
echoes the ritual murder of the father. But the second murder fails
to exorcise the haunting memory of the hoofbeats bringing the
groom to his mother, or break the haunting of the house by the
dream of his mother's purgatorial soul. The play ends with the Old
Man's vain plea to God to appease the misery of the living and the
remorse of the dead. The brevity of the play is breathtaking. It
seems to contain at source all the anguished play on genealogy
which later reverberates through Endgame, The Homecoming, Buried
Child and Fool for Love.
What Yeats lacks, however, is a form of theatre to realise his
rituals and his images. Only the light from the haunted ruin of the
house illuminates the darkness of the Boy and the Old Man.
Beckett, by contrast, tries to trap genealogy in the enclosed room
that could be the inside of a nuclear bunker or equally the inside of
a human skull. His room is a mockery of a room with a view. For its
'view' can never properly be described. The exterior darkness of
Purgatory is replaced here by an unseen greyness. The stage is
practically bare but the play still contrives to be about the clutter of
objects. Possessing one character who cannot sit down or stand
still, it has a petrifying stasis. In Purgatory the dead father and
purgatorial mother at the window are brief haunting images of the
imagination. In Endgame the mother and father are dumped in
dustbins with closed lids, invisible save for the occasional surge
upward, wasting away to death in the presence of their merciless
offspring.
The vital shift, tragic to tragicomic, becomes clearer. Yeats's
noble Irish ruin is a nostalgic echo of an aristocratic age. But
Hamm's stockade is the surviving relic of a perished humanity.
What is left is patently ignoble. Compared to Hamm's cruel
defensive bluster, Yeatsian parricide seems an honourable though
desperate act. Trapped and sedentary, Hamm is a travesty of a
tragic monarch, a chess king moving one space at a time in the
wrong direction. Stuck in a decrepit sofa with castors that stands in
for a movable throne, the blind Hamm who is no Hamlet hams his
own nemesis. He is the vestige of a tragic hero, too mean and
limited to incite catharsis. Behind his tetchy despair, his author's
comic derision looms large. For Beckett, all authority is ignoble and
impotent. The play is darker than Godot. The compassionate play
which binds Didi and Gogo into an intermittent tenderness has no
equivalent here. It is a feature of play among equals and here there
is none. Even the pity engendered by the fall of the blind Pozzo
Samuel Beckett: Imprisoned Persona and Irish Amnesia 63
finds little echo in the seated Hamm. The fitful and painful
attempts of Nagg and Nell to make contact are so pitiful they
barely connote play at all. If, to invoke Bakhtin and Barthes in a
single phrase, Didi and Gogo offer us a dialogic consciousness
degree zero, then Hamm and Clov offer us no dialogue at all. Their
words are separate, apart. They never flow into each other. And
yet as it goes on, their dialogue has all the air of a repartee, an
elaborate preconceived game.
When Hamm says right at the beginning, 'Me ... to play', the
moves he makes are not part of any recognisable game. They have
no apparent structure and little context. Moreover, they seem to
have no meaning. His excursions along the chessboard stage are a
travesty of the doomed king of Renaissance tragedy resolving, as
Richard II does, to defend his kingdom when it is too late.
Although it is too late there is little sense of loss, no last defiance.
Comically he goes through the motions. His 'moves' are plays with
no strategy, his opponents invisible. The 'endgame' is a known
routine. It is a move towards closure, but not closure itself. Hamm
is playing at apocalypse and if the end does not come we sense that
he can play the routine all over again. His waiting for the end and
the end itself have no guaranteed convergence. But their possible
convergence is what creates the play's dramatic suspense.
This structure without obvious structures is perhaps the hardest
image of indeterminacy Beckett has ever mustered. But it is an
appropriate image for the century of total war. In an earlier draft
of the play Beckett had situated Hamm's shelter in a ruined
landscape in France between 1914 and 1918. It is right, however,
that finally it has no focus of time or place because it can equally
serve as a shelter - and a hopeless one at that - from the threat of
nuclear attack. Indeed the latter is perhaps more apt for one good
reason - the constant deferring of an attack which could only be
final. The 'end' in this sense would signify not merely the end of
Hamm and Clov but the end of everything. Yet the deferring
through 'deterrence' merely puts off into the near future the likely
end that is feared by so many, including Hamm. But while others,
presumably, live out their daily lives, Hamm has retreated into the
shelter. In that sense he is rehearsing for the end every day in the
expectation that one day the rehearsal will become the real thing.
Going through the motions of Armageddon, which has not yet
come, is still founded on the possibility that it will come, suddenly
and without warning. Yet there is no final certainty one way or the
Tragicom£tly tmd Contemporary Culture
already night, Clov looks again through his telescope, then repeats
the word 'grey', getting down from the ladder and finally bellow-
ing the word in Hamm's ear. Hamm's 'Grey! Did I hear you say
grey?' is almost a cue for a blind man's vision of the absence of
colour in the world to be confirmed. Clov's reply 'Light black. From
pole to pole', reinstates the element of darkness. 12 There is a subtle
alternation between the sense of a landscape which is colourless,
and one in which there has been a perceptible darkening. Moreov-
er, we do not know if the 'light dark' Clov sees is the darkness of a
particular night or a permanent predicament. Hamm is kept in
suspense, which is how, perhaps, he wants it to be.
The grey zero Clov fails to describe still evokes a world in which
land and sea have merged. It evokes every cataclysm from the
biblical Flood to the nuclear winter of an unthinkable future. But
there is no objective vision and no sense of place. Hamm's protest
that his servant exaggerates can be played as genuine anxiety or
ritual scepticism. Expecting the shock the decaying tyrant can
dismiss it as a charade. Almost, but never quite. For he can never
be sure, any more than Beckett's audience can be about what lies
outside the two tiny windows. In truth of course nothing lies
outside them except at most a blank backdrop which the stage
directions do not even call for. When Hamm later tells the story of
the mad painter who sees from his window nothing but ashes
instead of the rising com and the sails of the herring fleet, he is
echoing and demythologising Clov's account of universal grey-
ness. But that account may be precisely what he wants to hear and
Hamm may well be the Emperor without his clothes. The vision of
desolation could exist purely in Clov's imagination or it could be
the malicious lie of a weary servant. But it could also be the
desolate vision of the blind master which the servant routinely
feeds back to him with a sense of duty that has decayed into
cynicism. Whatever the case, each of these different interpretations
leads towards the same conclusion. For Beckett, there is not even
the certainty of recognising final desolation when it comes. The
apocalypse will go unrecognised. It may only be the purgatorial
vision inside a madman's skull or it may be so immense and
horrifying that it cannot be envisaged in advance, no matter how
many times it has been rehearsed. One thing alone is certain.
Humanity cannot go out in that blaze of glory called revelation.
The use of play becomes bolder yet also more problematic in
Krapp's Last Tape. Play becomes a relationship within the split self
Samuel Beckett: Imprisoned Persona and Irish Amnesia 67
between the earlier and the later Krapp, the old man listening to
the tape of his middle-aged voice commenting, among other
things, on the events of his youth. It is in effect a triangular
relationship where the Young Krapp has no presence, the Middle-
Aged Krapp is a disembodied voice eloquent but in fragments and
the Old Krapp is a decrepit presence with little voice and no
eloquence. Disrecognition is equally strong in the reaction of the
seventy-nine year old to the thirty-nine year old voice, failing at
times to agree, or to understand, or to identify with his earlier self.
The play goes against the grain of Proust's 'involuntary memory',
the sudden and magic form of redemption by which the past
surges into the present through the chance connections of sense-
impression. The spool and the recorder are mechanical devices
which bring back the past more easily but with little variation.
Krapp's dilatory tampering with the machine brings a remembr-
ance of some passages, a complete blankness at others. In Proust
the unexpected becomes suddenly familiar. In Beckett the familiar
- because mechanically repeated - becomes suddenly disrecog-
nised. The record of what a spool contains in Krapp's ledger can
mean at times nothing to him. The word 'viduity' used on tape by
the thirty-nine year old sends the seventy-nine year old rushing to
the dictionary.
The playing of and with spools is an unreliable play on memory
and the past, a playing with former selves, technology made inept.
As he switches on and off, changes spools, locks and unlocks
drawers, Krapp eats the banana on whose discarded skin he will
predictably slip. The 'tape-recording' is an extension of a music-
hall routine. But it goes to the limits of the ludic theatre. Play with
the Other becomes play with the absent Other, present not so
much in spirit as in voice. And the voice of the absent Other is the
voice of the forgotten self. As pure voice it is both signifier and
signified. It is the raw datum of the thirty-nine year old, the only
'evidence' of that time. Yet the voice is also an unreliable commen-
tary on an even earlier self, a dubious mediator. In all events, play
is disembodied and disrecognition becomes both easier and more
difficult. The material has been played before to spur some kind of
recognition yet the more distant in time the recording becomes, the
more its meaning fades from the ageing player of the machine.
The play hangs on one, unique epiphanous moment the Older
Krapp will finally refuse to recognise. It is the tape-voice's descrip-
tion of love-making in the drifting punt, unusually ordered and
68 Tragicumetly and Contemporary Culture
72
Ang~TTagic: Pinter and the English TTadition 73
gain some report of what has happened. But Gus and Ben simply
have no due as to what is going on. The boss is like the unseen
director of the play itself orchestrating the final encounter on-stage
where Gus wiD rush back into the room, stripped of jacket,
waistcoat, tie, holster and revolver and present himself unwittingly
as the victim. While the hapless pair cannot see beyond the room
which has no windows, Wilson appears to have X-ray eyes,
tracking their every movement through brick waDs, appearing to
possess an omniscient and unseen gaze. The proximity of his
brooding unseen presence contrasts starkly with the void of the
absent Godot. The pair thus pay the price of terrorist secrecy and
become its victims. Its implosive power separates out the assassin
from his accomplice. One remains the terrorist, the other becomes
the victim. This is terrorism without spectacle, its seedy under-
belly, its slapstick combination of fear and farce.
The play follows the example of The BirthdIly PIlIfy. Circumstance
and motive are minimal. Terror and the resistance to terror come
through the ritual menace of play, where the ritual is invented by
the persecutors. The dumb waiter is a metonym for unanticipated
terror. It represents our fear of unpredictable terror by presenting it
on-stage as a mute object terrorising living beings. While the goal
of terror is serious its means are hilarious. It is a superb example of
]udism in which extreme formalism is balanced by existential play.
By contrast, the interrogation in One for the Road shows Pinter's
formalism nmning into difficulties when it gives up humour
because of the thematic seriousness of its topic. The playfulness of
the unrelenting and sadistic interrogator is too one-sided. There is
no dialogic relationship of victim and victimiser as in Christopher
Hampton's Sauages. The form of the play is narrowly naturalistic,
the victims so far abused that they are by now mute and unresist-
ing. With the tongue of the father already cut out, terror is reduced
to the terrorist's power of speech in the certainty of the victim's
silence.
Oearly influenced by Odostrophe, Pinter wanted to politicise
Beckett's vision,. to take the victim off a plinth on a stage and place
him on a chair in a police cell. But lacking the ludic power of his
earlier plays, Onefor the Road becomes leaden and oppressive in its
pessimism. Pinter wants to take us straight into that hanowing
moment when the resistance of the just has been broken by agents
of state terror. The victims are respectable, not a terrorist cell, but a
decent bourgeois family, a nudear family being denudearised. The
82 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
treatment of his alter ego the treatment which has already been
afforded him by the state. Certainly we cannot place Aston in the
way we are invited to place Davies with his comic non-sequiturs
and self-contradictions. At best it seems that Aston wants to save
and punish a kindred soul, and that good and evil both work
through in ways he cannot understand. Goodness is the desire not
to see his experience of suffering repeated in others. Evil is the
desire to see that it is. In his damaged persona, both coexist. And
both are social constructs. The desire to do good is a social
extension of the desire for self-preservation. The desire to commit
evil emerges from the vicious circle of a revenge culture in which
the memory of personal pain can only be exorcised by witnessing
its effect in others.
Aston is the victim who seems to act without malicious intent
while the central power struggle appears to exist in the contest
between Mick and Davies for Aston's loyalty. A stronger reading of
the play, however, comes from seeing Mick and Aston as terroris-
ing Davies through alternate means, one through sarcasm and
aggression, the other through attention and compassion. Aston's
revenge is to 'care' for his double in the way that he says he has
been 'cared' for himself. Just as Gus is a terrorist who eventually
becomes a victim, Aston is a victim who eventually becomes a
terrorist. The gas stove which does not work but whose taps
Davies is scared of knocking on in his sleep, the open window
which gives him a constant draught while sleeping, the sleep
'starvation' caused by Aston's rude awakenings are trivial versions
of the terror Aston himself claims to have suffered in the asylum.
But they blend with the more obvious game of terror which Mick is
playing, moving from threat to promise and back more to threat
again. Thus the alternate games of terror - Mick's terror as naked
threat, Aston's terror as muddled compassion - act like a pincer
movement to exclude the outcast who entertains illusions of
inclusion as a caretaker. Hence the superb dramatic irony of
Aston's version of what a 'care-taker' actually is.
Aston is thus like a child resembling a doll who is playing with a
doll, playing at the role of parent yet stranded between affection
and abuse. It is the innocent performance of terror through
imitation by terror's victim, the guinea-pig of the asylum going
through the motions of surveillance over his victim/guest in a room
full of junk that can never be a home. As the victim of that terror
plus the more explicit terror of his brother, Davies himself is no
innocent victim, but rather a guilty one. Victim of a system which
Anglo-Tragic: Pinter and the English Tradition 87
gives him one name and tempts him to use another, he combats
injustice with inertia and self-righteousness. He in turn is guilty of
the contempt of other victims of the system, of women, starting
with his discarded wife, of Blacks, Poles and Jews whom he hates
with a relentless paranoia. Pinter has called the theme of the play
'love'. But if anything it is about the extirpation of evil by evil.
There is no beginning or end to evil, either as an individual
propensity or as a social construct. In truth, the two cannot finally
be distinguished. Evil, both social and personal, becomes a set of
infinitely reflecting mirrors. Mick and Davies mirror each other in
the rhetoric of abuse, Aston and Davies in the rhetoric of victimisa-
tion, Mick and Aston in the secret bond of terror, without obvious
collusion, against the outsider become intruder.
The element of play is understated but reverberates throughout
the dramatic action. Its superb moment is the bag-passing scene in
which Aston has retrieved Davies's bag only for Mick to snatch it
away. It is the one major scene in which Mick and Aston are
together but barely a word passes between them. As the bag
whizzes back and forth grabbed by Mick, retrieved by Aston, given
to Davies, Pinter suddenly changes the order, like pass-the-parcel
in reverse. Aston finally imposes his will by giving the bag back to
Mick, not to Davies and forcing Mick to give it to the tramp. The
action is a comic tour de force. But it is also a reminder of Aston's
compassionate game-playing. This in turn should remind us that
not even his account of his madness can be taken completely for
granted. As we go deeper into the play we are invited tantalisingly
to speculate on how far his memory is accurate, how far his
madness is real and how far it is performed. We are given no clear
answer.
Yet in terms of certainty the play progresses beyond the night-
mare fables of The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter. It locates its
characters. It naturalises nightmare. Aston and Davies both live
out an enduring horror by masking and distorting it, ignoring and
exaggerating it. If nothing is absolutely certain, nothing can be
absolutely concealed. The Homecoming takes this one stage further.
It dissects the horror of normality without resorting to extremes.
There are no wandering vagrants who fail to make sense of their
lives. There are no memories of shock-treatment, real or imagined.
Of course, there remains the unreliable chronicle, but this serves to
horrify in a matter-of-fact way. Here Pinter's work takes a new
turn. What interests him now is the violation of normality by those
who are normal.
6
Pinter: The Game of the
Shared Experience
The terror of the normal is widely seen as the key to Pinter's
modernist power.; of invention. The other feature crucial to his
tragicomedy but more often ignored is its vast seamless play on
sexual sharing. In his diaries Joe Orton claimed that the sexual
sharing in The lfom«oming was :inspired by Enterlilining MT Slotme
but that its explicit use was inapplOpriate for someone whose
personal life was as orthodox as Pinter'S.l To suggest experience as
a necessary basis for drama was, of course, part of Orton's
promiscuous bravado. But it is misleading here on two obvious
counts. There is no proof that 'experience' in Orton's positivistic
sense explains anything. Moreover, the theme of sharing begins in
Pinter's work well before EnfeTtIlining Mr Slotme. It starts with the
'sharing' of Lulu in The BirthdIIy PIlTfy, and continues with the
'sharing' of Stella in The Col1«tion and the 'sharing' of James Fox by
Dirk BoganIe and Sarah Miles in Losey's The Suutmt. It takes more
oblique forms in A Night Out where the hero is shared in spirit
though not in flesh by mother and prostitute, while in The LoDer
each of the two spouses is shared between the other and the
other's lusting IlItn ego suitably dn!ssed for the occasion. In this
world of split identities, Freud's bisexual maxim that in any sex act
four people are involved is contained by Pinter with superb
dramatic tightness in a heterosexual frame.
H marriage and adultery allow The LoDer to create a perfect
8m.
quartet out of two people, it is important also to recognise
elsewhere the bisexual dimension of Pinter's sharing. The sharing
of the other with the other is a gloss on the same and the different.
In the dramatic fOIre of the husband's recognition that he
has been sharing his wife with his best friend propels the audience
forward into the meaning of 'best friendship'. Betrayal is thus a
tw(}-e(fged sword. H Emma has betrayed Robert with Jerry, then
Jerry has betrayed Robert through her. The oblique sharing in The
Servrmt glosses the shifting active and passive conceptions of the
88
Pinter: The Game of the SIuued E.rpniena 89
she will neither confirm nor deny.3 The truth is as elusive as the
truth of the world outside Hamm's room in Endgame. But just
talking about it suggests the right sense of distance from the act,
for 'just talking' is something that can be contained. It is a form of
partial expression, of desire as speech but not yet action, action not
yet realised and therefore manageable, nipped in the bud. It also
legitimates the sexual status quo, where acceptable transgression
would be the conversion of the thought into the spoken word but
not into the deed.
It is the bourgeois stand-off which recognises marriage and
'marriage', the coexistence of couples as social doubles, as dress-
designers who never can assume a full sexual likeness since one
couple remains straight, the other gay. From either side any
crossover is a threat. But it can only be a threat if it is already a
temptation. The moment in the play when James and Bill stand
side by side in front of a mirror looking at their adjacent images
visually illustrates both threat and temptation. But the middle-class
control of its emancipated sexuality cancels out both by eventually
refusing transgression the status of an event. If nothing is to
happen in the future then nothing can have 'happened' in the past.
Pinter's stage with its two peninsulas and a promontory, the
separate and distinct homes that are so near and yet so far, divided
by the phone box which is the source of rumour and threat, is a
perfect complement to the conceit of contained sexual play in
which no one is fully truthful. Here conceit is deceit. No one tells
the truth. Dramatised here in miniature as a studio piece,
bourgeois society is, as Nietzsche had prophesied, lived out as a
lie.
We can see how Pinter gives us a dramatic resolution, a modernist
resolution of the Freudian problematic posed by Strange Interlude. If
bourgeois social order is to be maintained then its sexuality must
be contained. Contained but not repressed. Instead of O'Neill's
thoughtspeech where truths which cannot be spoken to other
characters are revealed to the audience, Pinter's truths remain
withheld, oblique, a spider's web of possibilities. Intimacy is the
central region in which the unspoken truth occurs. Just as lovers
intimate their actions only to those who are present, that is
themselves, so both audience and outsiders are excluded. Pinter's
writing thus gives us the play of exclusion which makes truth so
elusive to all, where no couple will ever fully know what one of
them has done in conjunction with someone else. Neither will the
Pinter: The Game of the Shared Experience 93
the defamation of the absent other. While the wife calls her 'lover'
a lover, the husband calls his 'mistress' a whore, echoing the sexual
double-standard of adultery which inheres in their class culture.
The power to wound is measured, as in much of Pinter, by the
success of the partner who flinches less, who gives no sign of the
hurt. In one sense winning is a Pyrrhic victory. To win is to repress.
It is also knowing what hurts, and how good timing puts the other
lover off guard. In The Lover the variations on game-playing have a
logic of association. The first lover to vary the game, to carry it into
a new dimension and to sustain its conceit, is the winner.
There is also in this sophisticated game-playing a sense of
cruelty and desperation. Once the transfer has been made from
spouse to lover, the lack of an enshrined relationship means the
'lover' has not one persona, not one identity but several, identities
which can be invented, if need be, to infinity. Richard and Sarah
find themselves caught in a Faustian trap by their own powers of
invention. The temptation of re-inventing themselves as lovers
knows no limit. The entry of Richard as Max can be seen as a
play-within-a-play, theatrically staged through the atavistic ritual
of the drum. But 'Max' is a fragmented invention, a lover who
becomes a potential rapist who then saves the besieged wife, as a
passing park-keeper with whom Sarah falls instantly in love. In
this comedy of enforced errors each lover in turn rejects the other
by changing their persona. The cumulative effect of such rejection
is to stir the lovers to transgressing desire which is consummated
behind the overhanging velvet cloth of the living-room table. But
the games which provoke take their toll. When desire explodes it is
no longer clear who is making love. The 'lovers' dissolve in the
instant of consummation.
The price of marital containment through limitless fantasy is
high. Always it is the other self-as-Iover through which talk about
the spouse is channelled. Pinter here plays ironically on the marital
construction of reality. Marriage is often strengthened by the
intimate criticism of excluded others, but adultery can turn the
weapon of marriage back on itself. If Sarah confides in her lover,
then Richard has the right to confide in his mistress. In their
fantasy world, hostility is mediated through the other self, painful
for them but amusing for us: 4
The 'children' are the next game, the biggest cliche, as Pinter
realises, in cliched tug-of-war love triangles. They mayor may not
exist, but whichever they are they are still invented at a crucial
point in the couple's ludic play, improvised into existence by one
lover to catch out the other in a charade where invention and
injury become inseparable.
The Lover and The Collection pave the way for Pinter's greatest
dramatic achievement, The Homecoming, where he finds a perfect
unity of play, sexuality and exclusion. The tragic and comic derive
here from the same source, the limits of the will, the delusions of
freedom which end in constraint. The disrecognitions which
permeate his work are at their sharpest. Pinter, like Shepard, uses
the family, the blood-related familiar, as the source of the unfamil-
iar. Disrecognition is part of that contempt proverbially bred by
familiarity. But only because it is, at the same time, its opposite. It
is the refusal to recognise, a perversity which is a source of pain for
those who refuse recognition as well as those who are refused it. It
is the perverse antibody which rejects Forster's blithely unreal
'only connect'. Disrecognition is part of a vicious circle of injury
and anguish which ostensibly denies both. Injury is its cause and
anguish its consequence. But the injury and the anguish are largely
hidden. For this reason the audience experiences it as comedy. It
provokes short spurts of laughter cut dead by an ever tightening
dialogue, by Pinter's ability to twist the knife in even deeper. It is
the laughter of unease, not of relaxation.
Pinter shares here a concern with family with other Jewish
playwrights - Odets, Miller, Wesker. But his techniques of shock
differ considerably. In A View from the Bridge Eddie Carbone's
double kiss is a key dramatic moment. He embraces his step-
daughter and then her immigrant boyfriend almost in the same
action, involuntarily linking incest and homosexuality in a way
which reflects upon his painful ambivalence. Carbone's language
is full of rationalisations embedded in the concerns of motive, guilt
and moral conscience. In Pinter's characters, on the other hand,
Pinter: The Game of the Shared Experience 97
say the least. When the couple arrive late, Teddy goes to bed
without waking his hosts while Ruth, unnervingly, goes out alone
for a breath of night air. Teddy disturbs Lenny but tells him
nothing of Ruth. When Ruth returns she meets Lenny alone before
Teddy has met the rest of the family. The filter of formal introduc-
tions is lost. She is 'there' in the house, unprotected.
Lenny's casual greeting is fake recognition of an unknown
woman. It changes into fake disrecognition when Ruth tells him
she is Teddy's wife. Her person, her figure, her body is 'recog-
nised' before her status is known but her status goes unrecognised
once it is revealed. She is thus Teddy's 'woman' and by contemp-
tuous inference, just about anybody's woman, which is why, out of
the blue, amidst all his verbiage about Venice, Lenny asks to hold
her hand. Pinter plays on the courtesy of first meetings which
politely allow name and status to have a spatial reserve that should
not be infringed. The social convention of first meeting is clear.
Relationships which may deteriorate in the course of time start off
from the premiss of dignity and mutual recognition. Here there is
neither. But if Lenny can play games of reversal so can Ruth. The
tension in the dialogue which follows is as electrifying as anything
Pinter has ever written.
Before we look at this more closely we have to see why Pinter is
so effective here. If he is reversing social conventions, he is also
reversing dramatic ones. By tradition, stage melodramas often
'introduce' us to innocent characters who turn out to be villains.
Thrillers make us at home with those who are murderers. At its
best in, say, O'Neill, modernist melodrama presents us with the
'front' which has to be exposed, the revelation of moral blemish
which is at first concealed. In Pinter it is the other way around.
Lenny, and then Max first thing next morning, both make clear
they think Ruth is up for grabs, that she is anybody's, a 'smelly
scrubber', a 'stinking pox-ridden slut'. Later they come to 'accept'
her as Teddy's wife. The insults are calculated and vicious, the
response cool and poised. Ruth refuses to rise to the bait. She treats
them as if they had never been uttered. Her silence shows a
forbidding unconcern. The way is clear for the abuse to be
forgotten.
In the encounter with Lenny, she shows she can beat them at
their own game. The story Lenny tells, like Hamm's story of the
Christmas child in Endgame, may well present a 'version' of the
listener as its central figure. The 'pox-ridden' woman Lenny claims
Pinter: The Game of the Shared Experience 99
Later, alone with Lenny, she mentions her life as a 'model for the
body', by implication for pornographic photographs. The state-
ment is taut and oblique, a sparse account of the journey to the
house and lake at which the pictures were taken. As Teddy comes
down with their suitcases for departure, he demands to know
what Lenny has been telling Ruth. To the audience, the irony is
clear. The husband expects the brother to be making a play for his
wife. He does not expect Ruth to be the one who is speaking, who
is enticing Lenny with an evasive truth. The spaced disrecogni-
tions which Pinter has orchestrated up to that point are suddenly
brought to a climax. Instead of leaving with Teddy, Ruth stays for a
'last dance' with Lenny. As they start to embrace, Joey and Max
return in one of Pinter's well-timed entrances. 'She's wide open',
Joey exclaims. He takes his turn with Lenny's consent. As she lies
beneath him on the sofa, Ruth seems literally to have become
family property, just like the sofa itself. She is an object to be
shared by all.
Max's speech to Teddy as Ruth lies beneath Joey, a mute object,
a still life, is another piece of superb irony. He shows Teddy the
courtesy and enthusiasm we equate with homecomings, but only
as Teddy is about to leave. He at last compliments Teddy on his
wife but only as she is now shared sexual property and will not be
going with him. While he refers to Ruth as a woman of quality and
feeling, she and Joey roll off the sofa onto the floor. The scene is a
tragicomic rendering of scopophilia. The resurgent sexual power of
Lenny and Max come from seeing Joey making love to a woman
who seems nothing better than a corpse. It is to watch and talk as if
nothing were happening. Later, it is to imagine a future for her as if
she were nothing more than an object to be disposed of at will. At
the same time the thrill involves open friendliness towards Teddy
while he secretly and helplessly watches the loss of the womaTh~e
loves, to invite him to stay with the family as if it were a cosy and
natural thing to do, knowing that staying for him and watching his
wife as shared object would be the worst humiliation of all. In the
play's most amusing episode, Teddy gains ritual revenge by eating
Lenny's cheese roll in exchange for his wife
The cheese roll is little in itself, basic and unappetising. But it
becomes a shock commodity. It exchanges for a cherished human
body. Teddy's casual insolence in eating something his brother has
carefully made to eat himself mimics the family'S casual seizure of
the woman Teddy has ceremonially taken as his own. The comic
102 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
imitates the unspoken. For Teddy has moulded Ruth just as Lenny
has made his cheese roll and just as Teddy has deliberately eaten
the roll so Lenny has 'devoured' his wife. We see here the depth of
the suppression of emotion in Pinter's work. Lenny derides his
brother as 'a bit inner', knowing that for Teddy openly to plead for
her would be a sign of weakness. Because Ruth has made the
decision, he cannot take her back without force. But he cannot take
her back that way at all since his married life with her has been
based on escape from the very culture which condones violent
revenge and force. It is not that he is scared to break the rules of the
game, but the games he now plays have different rules. To fight
physically for Ruth is to play a different kind of game which
involves possibly sacrificing the position he has fought for in an
academic world. To fight would be to break with his own game
and, moreover, probably not win. To plead emotionally or rational-
ly is to belong to a different world. He is in a situation where his
powers of philosophy cannot apply. He cannot turn back.
Although he has come home, there can be no homecoming.
It is Ruth for whom there is a genuine homecoming, a coming
home to family which is not her own, whom she has never seen
before in her life. This is something the watching Teddy himself
senses. Here Pinter effectively mixes the uncanny with disrecogni-
tion. She is doing what he fails to do, and doing it by proxy.
Teddy's 'home' is familiar to her as part of the locale in which she
grew up. She is attracted back by the challenge of a struggle for
sexual power which makes no concessions to respectability. Mar-
riage, campus and family life in America have become sterile,
echoed in her description of the country as all rock and sand. The
first scene with Teddy slots into place not as the kind of unpleasant
encounter she wishes to forget, but the kind of challenge she
wishes to re-Iearn. Pinter, here, offends bourgeois sensibility.
Unfortunately for the playwright's detractors he never reduces
Ruth to the stereotype of the 'tart' she threatens to become. Her
choice is between a life which is comfortable but sterile, and one
which is dangerous but challenging, which is more familiar. In the
latter the struggle for power is more urgent and more alive.
That struggle already exists in front of us. The men begin to
elaborate on the casual offer in which Ruth is to be pimped as a
prostitute and turned into a household slave to satisfy sexual and
domestic needs. But she drives a hard bargain and preys on their
uncertainties. The 'homecoming' will only work on her terms,
Pinter: The Game of the Shared Experience 103
which her would-be keepers are too weak and uncertain to refuse.
Her willing return to the underlife of the city shocks even those
who make the offer. The tableau of the last scene with Max
collapsed and kneeling before her, Joey's head on her lap, and
Lenny at a distance watching suggests her as an authority figure, a
matriarchal centre of power. Her role, though, is a travesty of the
traditional matriarch. She is erotic, sensual, ruthless, distant and
cool. She can 'be' any of the things she wants to be. The role she
creates for herself is to enact roles. She may have replaced Jessie,
but she has also scrambled the roles of kinship into total confusion.
The husband and two brothers all desire her and yet she has
outmanoeuvred them all. She is Pinter's one intruder who will
come to take over, but only because her intrusion is a 'home-
coming'.
Old Times and No Man's Land are chamber pieces which retain the
complexity of the earlier plays but lack their vitality. The Homecoming
remains Pinter's most powerful play because it ends on a note of
unexpected transformation, neither restoring the status quo nor
destroying it in a predictable way. It can be compared, as Orton
did, to Entertaining Mr Sloane which also ends with outrageous
sharing. But English tragicomedy becomes stabilised in the seven-
ties by reference to its bourgeois identity. Middle-class loss is
discreet, stifled and comic. It is never total and it is playful in a
diminished sense. The Philanthropist, Old Times and No Man's Land
are all chamber pieces, modulated renditions of offbeat perform-
ance. Nonetheless there are important elements of shock in them
which suggest a new kind of attack on middle-class convention.
The sexual politics of Pinter's work is never didactic, but it still
shatters all complacencies. He broadens the bisexual themes of the
earlier work by using memory, and the invention of memories, as a
power-resource, a weapon in the struggle for possession.
Old Times shows us a sparer style than the work of the previous
decade. The exchanges of dialogue are spare and tense. The longer
speeches of Deeley and Anna are memory-speeches, studied
recollections which mayor may not be true. Each speech contests
the memory of the other. The past becomes the key to the present
just as memory, and the inventions of memory, become the key to
sexual possession. Deeley's desire to protect his wife is flawed by
his anxiety that Anna has been his wife's lover. Moreover, she has
the more impressive power of recall. His powers of invention
104 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
never match hers. The more he tries to turn the tables by inventing
a past in which Anna has already met and wanted him, the more
he is drawn towards defeat. Memory is a contest, a static game for
possession in which territory occupies time rather than space.
Anna, who appears at first as a joint hallucination of the couple,
soon becomes as real as either of them. Yet because there is no
certainty about the past, because neither Anna or Deeley can
reclaim it triumphantly at the expense of the other, it is a game
neither can win. Pinter's achievement is not merely to undermine
male heterosexual confidence with the revelation of the affair, but
to undermine all confidence in sexuality and any kind of truth
about the past.
In No Man's Land the contest over the past is also a contest over
women, but no women appear in the play. In the homosexual
ambience of Hirst's Hampstead home, they are its crucial absence.
The shock effect is the contrast between the two, but also the link.
Spooner, the outsider, and Hirst, the owner, joust for sexual
reputation among men by their memory-accounts of women,
whom they both desire and fear. Pinter links the theme of
outsider/insider with its intimations of physical violence so marked
in The Caretaker to the ludic memory-contest of Old Times. But the
second act seems curiously static as if the protagonists are duellists
standing their ground and refusing to budge. There is a loss of
dramatic movement and happening in both these plays for which
the repertoires of memory, however amusing, however chilling, do
not fully compensate. One feels too there is a cushioning effect in
these two plays, as if survival was not a matter of desperation, as if
the insult to sexuality, though powerful, would never destroy any
of the offended characters. Certainly pain and suffering are still
there, especially at the end of Old Times. But its turbulence has
lessened, so that Pinter's ability to explore the extreme ranges of
tragicomedy suffers as a result. There are no real outsiders.
Everyone, even the seedy Spencer, seems included, and Pinter's
dramatic tension occasionally loses its edge or ends up as self-
parody.
In the cinema, Pinter's collaboration with Losey shows a similar
predicament. The class antagonisms of The Servant are much
stronger than those of Accident. While both are major British films
of the sixties the former is the greater achievement. In The Servant
the linking of class and sexual power is illuminated by a probing
sinuous camera which devours the studio space between its
Pinter: The Game of the Shared Experience 105
109
110 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
poses the myth of the West against the myth of outer space amidst
the junk car culture of an 'accidental town' in Southern California. 2
What we have instead of reverence, however, is a 'making strange'
of myth, a series of alienation-effects which wrench it out of its
nostalgic niche in the collective consciousness. Nowhere is this
clearer than in Operation Sidewinder where Shepard repudiates the
arcadian separation of technology and nature and forges new
myths out of their hybrids. The main hybrid in this case is an Air
Force computer built as a rattlesnake which has been programed to
track UFO's, and has now escaped into the desert. Micky Free, the
Indian, is a human hybrid, the betrayer of his people whose lands
he has sold to the Air Force but who is now engaged in rebellion
against those with whom he has collaborated. Black and white
militants aim to lace the local reservoir with dope and entice stoned
fighter pilots to desert with their planes to an obscure Caribbean
island. The element of self-parody is deliberate as Shepard in-
dulges in cartoon apocalypse.
At the end the element of melodrama is even stronger than
parody. As the Indians reclaim the sidewinder for their snake-
dance, changing it from a symbol of destruction into a symbol of
rebirth, they are invaded by the military hoping to recapture their
escaped icon. The confrontation is one of good against evil with
Micky, Honey and the Young Man now ranging themselves on the
side of mystic purity against military evil. It is a sign of Shepard's
imagination and of its limits. Many of his good plays, Geography of a
Horse Dreamer, Seduc'd, Angel City and here Operation Sidewinder,
end in climactic excess as alienation-effects give way to dramatic
overkill. It is part of Shepard's dramatic heritage, here honed down
to the savage shoot-out which is all performance, in which we
cannot tell if anyone actually dies. The machine-gun bullets of the
Desert Tactical Troops fail to stop the Indians. The Troops appear
to have poisoned themselves by seizing the snake's head while the
Indians continue to chant in ecstasy. The sky goes blinding white
and then black, an Apocalypse with No Name.
With his send-ups of Neanderthal militaries like Captain Bovine
and of the CIA Shepard is indulging in obvious and at times facile
parody. With the conversion of the rebels to the mystic purity of
the Indians, he gives us a version of easy utopia he elsewhere
mocks, and which certainly lacks the resonance of Kopit's historic-
al drama. In a sense the play is too political, too close to the
contemporary stereotypes of Chicago in 1968, fleshing out cartoon
112 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
Hoss: ... Are we playin' to a packed house like the keepers all
say?
CROW: (he cackles): Image shots are blown, man. No fuse to match
the hole. Only power forces weigh the points in our match.
Hoss: You mean we're just ignored? Nobody's payin' attention?
CROW: We catch debris beams from your set. We scope it to our
action then send it back to garbage game ...
Its subject, the urgent saving of a Hollywood film which looks like
a commercial disaster, is a melodramatic plot about a melodramatic
culture. To that extent, it is comically reflexive. The film-makers
behave in the play with the self-indulgent excess of characters in a
lurid Hollywood thriller. Yet Shepard traps them into the stage.
They are not stars of the silver screen but practitioners of fantasy
who exist on the wrong side of the cameras and despair even
before the cameras have begun to roll. By playing on the idea of a
'disaster' movie which has become a financial disaster, Shepard
probes a sudden and transient genre of the seventies. 'Disaster' is
the sub-genre within the genre of melodrama. Yet Shepard wishes
to make it clear in this that Los Angeles, the 'angel city', is the
centre of the disaster, a city which is doomed to destruction.
Where Endgame had conjured the performance of apocalypse,
Shepard's play spells out the commodification of disaster. The
imminent fate of the American West is to be turned into a safe and
saleable object. In the city under threat, there is always someone
wanting to make a movie about a city under threat, and the
humans attempting to save a movie about humans under threat,
themselves behave as if they are under threat. And of course they
are. For in their 'industry' they are only as good - meaning
successful - as their next picture. To make this one sell is to
survive. To fail to make it sell is to go under.
As Wheeler edges out Lanx and oozes green slime, he employs
Rabbit and his Indian medicine bundles to work some shamanistic
magic on his derailed megabuck technology. But in his frenzied
urge to justify his own grand ambition he is driven to the same
urgent rationalisations as a novice scriptwriter trying to defend his
untried project. Rabbit the real novice, takes full advantage and
usurps his place, treating him as the novice and taking over as well
the facial horror of his green slime. Rabbit, the outsider, displaces
Wheeler, the insider, only to become, literally, bundled into the
system. For the system devours the Other as well as its own. On
the verge of disaster it is omnipotent. Its leaders and minions alike
are equally its victims.
Shepard's gang of film-makers, the dreamy secretary, the drum-
mer brought in to find elusive magic rhythms, the deranged
competing producers, the shamanistic outsider, never suggest
fixed roles with fixed forms of authority. Authority seems invented
as it might be by players acting on a stage. Shepard here is both
existential and reflexive. The disaster movie is being made up as it
Shepard I: The Rise of Myth/The Fall of Community 129
130
Shepard II: The Shock of the Normal 131
with the act of opening the fridge to find food in it. Nobody knows
who has put what in or when. Chaos and solipsism produce the
illusion of fate. Such fate is Shepard's comic travesty of the
American dream in the age of mass consumption. 'We're not part
of the starving class!' Emma insists, but for all the food which is in
their fridge they might just as well be.
Emma's talking to the fridge is play-ful in nature, and takes play
to the point of complete eccentricity. Shepard makes this clear by
having the lawyer silently witness the act, too obviously filtering
the gaze of the audience. It works as a kind of escape-clause one
never finds in Beckett. But Emma's talk is a vital kind of inventive-
ness, a vivid form of extern pori sing, and not really eccentric at all.
Her seeing the fridge as something other than what it is, is a form
of disrecognising, of playful misidentification. So, more conven-
tionally, is Taylor's gaze from the doorway. The 'play' becomes
serious when she remembers the fate of her chicken. Yet it remains
play. In conventional melodrama she would have to shout the
word 'Mother!' and clench her fists in fury. Instead she calls the
fridge a motherfucker. The choice of the epithet is not altogether
arbitrary as her mother's lover is standing in the doorway and is
the person with whom she comes face to face as she turns round.
The second incident, soon after, illustrates the importance of
repetition in tragicomedy. We can recall the way that Godot
simultaneously repeats and changes the events of Act 1 in Act 2.
Here the father repeats the daughter's assault on the fridge
but with a difference. First of all he has to contend with the sick
lamb Wesley has brought into the warm of the kitchen. As Weston
finally confronts the fridge, Shepard again uses the device of the
unseen bystander. This time it is Wesley who looks on as his father
rants and raves, as he speaks to the lamb and the fridge then
shouts at the house in general. By the use of large capitals in the
text for Weston's tantrum, Shepard knowingly mocks the melodra-
ma he creates. And the scene also needs the challenge of Wesley at
the end - 'What you're yelling for? There's nobody here: 3 - to
deflate Weston's histrionic rage. But the key source of humour is
the encounter with the lamb: 4
WESTON: (to lamb): What in hell are you doin' in here? (He looks
around the space, to himself) Is this inside or outside? This is
inside, right. This is the inside of the house. Even with the
door out it's still the inside. (to lamb) So what the hell are you
doing in here if this is the inside?
136 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
Weston literally does not know where he is. The kitchen has no
door because he has kicked it down in a drunken fit the previous
night and cannot remember doing it. The lamb is on the inside
when it should be on the outside and Weston demands of the mute
animal that it rescue him from his confusion. This double lack of
recognition ironises a central convention of the naturalist stage.
The three-walled room assumes an inside and an outside. It also
assumes one can be distinguished from the other. The dramatic
suspense of Pinter, as noted, comes from the unexpected opening
and closing of doors. Here there is no door to open or close. It has
been battered down the previous night, and Weston is responsible
for his own bafflement. The lamb completes the bewildering
picture. Seeing the poor animal, he thinks for a moment he is
leaving the house when he is in fact entering it. As near-
hallucination, disrecognising fazes him out. This is just more than
play on stage convention. It plays just as much on the domestic
convention of entering one's own home as the most familiar of
places. The family home, like the family itself, has become unfamil-
iar. The detailed stage directions give a further clue. Weston,
family head and self-styled provider, is dressed like a drunken
tramp, a passing vagrant who has spotted an empty door-frame.
Even the homecoming of the prodigal father is disguised by
appearance. Returning home and entering his kitchen, he looks
like a homeless person. Appearances complement his failure to
recognise his own kitchen. His subsequent complaint - that he is
'MR SLAVE LABOUR COME HOME TO REPLENISH THE LAR-
DER' - establishes him in his normal role, but does so by showing
him as travesty of that role. If this is the ritual return of the male
breadwinner to feed his starving family, no one wants to eat his
dubious produce.
Weston is typical of the weak, collapsing patriarchs of tragi-
comedy, the grotesque buffoons of Genet or Soyinka trapped by
popular uprising, or Beckett's anti-heroes trapped by disability.
They are enmeshed in a game whose moves they cannot control.
While Hamm and Pozzo thunder despairingly at an unrecognis-
able world, Shepard domesticates the convention of impotence.
The 'breadwinner' enters his own home, which is in the process of
being sold behind his back, and has no discernible impact. When
he starts shrieking, nobody is listening, not even Wesley who can
hear him. Shepard thus undermines the coexistence of entrance
and presence which is so crucial for naturalist drama. Weston
Shepard II: The Shock of the Normal 137
makes his entrance in a comic void. The only other object to greet
him is the lamb in the pen, but that 'meeting' is somewhat
arbitrary. Using animals in stage production is risky enough
because they are so unpredictable. But perhaps that is what
Shepard had in mind. In the one production of the play, the lamb -
played by a full grown ewe - rushed to greet Weston as he entered
the kitchen, but when he started shrieking, took no notice of him at
all.
The monologues of Emma and Weston are both comic examples
of Shepardian obsession. His characters are not moral beings
unbaring their souls, but characters who perform like deranged
actors. The obsessive monologue does not wait upon its audience.
Impulsive and often desperate, it is acted out as if an animal or
household object is equivalent to human presence. We have more
than an echo here of that unseen presence, narcotics, which
resonates through Shepard's work. We are once more in the arena
of psychic wipe-outs, trance, paranoia and phobic obsession.
Shepard merely contrives to make them more homely and familiar.
But the story Wesley tells his mother at the end, the parable about
the eagle and the tom cat he has inherited from his father, reasserts
the primal horror of the American home. The eagle swoops down
on his prey but in mid-air the tomcat fights back. The eagle then
tries to free himself but the tomcat refuses to let go, knowing that if
he does, he will fall. It is a graphic cartoon of destructive clinging
which brings down the victimiser and victim. As Ella concludes,
'Both of them come crashing down. Like one whole thing.'s
Shepard works within a national tradition of melodrama which
overwhelms and simplifies, which gives us full-blown feeling
rather than its fine tuning, which strives for instantaneous effect
rather than moral complexity. But he harnesses that melodrama to
modernist ends. Excessive self-expression - an American curse -
becomes an instrument of shock. He also overturns the optimistic
and idealising strain in melodrama. His characters are not only
victims of evil conspiracy. They are equally victims of their own
confusion, their failures to perceive. Too diminished ever to attain
a recognition of their fallen circumstance, they remain unwitting
victims. Emma's sudden change of voice as she talks to the fridge,
the switch from cloying concern to abuse, is a typical switch of
posture. It mirrors the pattern of her general switch in the play
from high-school girl concerned with her cookery class to rampag-
ing juvie, a juvenile delinquent who glowingly chooses a life of
138 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
crime. The shock of course is that we expect this from the male, not
the female, the brother, not the sister. Yet her escape from the
collapsing family is not a noble release into a better world, as it
might be with a traditional heroine. Shepard mocks that tradition
by making her trade one doomed, impossible warld for another.
His dramatic imagination shows naturalist virtues which have
often been maligned. If his family is a farming family then the
placing of the lamb in a sheep-pen in the kitchen lets us know it.
The macabre humour links the production of food to its haphazard
consumption. We see the maggot-ridden lamb too close to the
fridge for comfort and our ideas of hygiene are accordingly tested -
though it is not something which bothers Wesley or Weston. We
notice what they ignore. Yet propinquity of beast and object also
insinuates in our mind the fact that one could be destined for the
other. The fridge is where the lamb could end up after being
slaughtered and in sheltering it from the cold, Wesley has merely
brought it nearer to its doom. Later when he kills the lamb to eat it,
he does so because he mistakenly thinks there is no food in the
fridge. He cannot imagine his mother would fill it with groceries or
that his father would be using them to cook breakfast. Misunder-
standing leads to ritual sacrifice. The slaughter of the innocent
animal complements the start of Emma's menstruation and the
dressing up of Wesley in the old clothes his father has discarded in
the garbage can. The latter are classic portents of doom. But they
are also founded in the everyday world. This constant play on the
ordinary challenges our sense of the ordinary and lays bare the
various devices of its dramatic staging. They are a tribute to the
triumph of Shepard's dramatic form.
are laden with fresh ears of corn. Dodge immediately accuses him
of stealing it since corn, he claims, has not grown at the back of the
house since 1935. The corn is a deranged miracle which seems to
make nonsense of normal history, and Tilden reveres it in child-
like wonder. As he begins to husk it, he does so like a boy at play,
and when his parents accuse him of stealing he weeps like an
overgrown child. The simple gestures of the bringing and husking
of the corn combine natural wonder and childish regression. For
the audience there is a genuine horror embedded in Tilden's
impossible innocence, as if they see on stage the cruellest possible
travesty of one of their strongest yearnings.
There are further shock-effects. When Dodge talks himself to
sleep on the sofa with his whisky bottle, Tilden lovingly covers his
body with husks of corn. After Tilden has gone, Bradley, his
younger brother, enters to cut his father's hair with electric
clippers. As the first act ends we see him violently knock away
Dodge's baseball cap and the husks of corn covering Dodge's face.
As the second act begins, Bradley has gone but as Vince and
Shelley enter the house, we see Dodge still sleeping on the sofa, his
head cut and bleeding as if he had been half scalped. As in Beckett
the central sequence is repeated in the next act. Once again the
idiocy of Tilden is followed by the cruelty of Bradley. Tilden comes
in to confront Vince and Shelley, cradling carrots in his arms just as
he had previously cradled corn. In a reflex act of domesticity
Shelley is persuaded to take them from his arms and peel them. It
is a parody of the sexual division of labour one might expect down
on the farm. The man gathers and the woman prepares. But the
infantile idiocy of Tilden's gesture which appears to be without
conscious purpose is made into a chilling dramatic sequence. As in
the first act idiocy is followed by violation. The disabled Bradley
with over-muscular torso hobbles in on his wooden leg after his
brother has left. At their first encounter, he forces Shelley to open
her mouth and penetrates it with his finger in an act of symbolic
rape, an assault which closes the second act when he goes to stand
over the sleeping Dodge, covering his father's face with his coat.
As his hands remain still in the position of holding the coat, he
turns to Shelley and smiles.
In the final act fortunes are reversed when Shelley kidnaps
Bradley's wooden leg and leaves him threshing helplessly on the
sofa. Bradley is seen to be as impotent as his brother is idiotic.
Dodge, the dying patriarch, is flanked by inept, incompetent sons
Shepard II: The Shock of the Normal 141
dramatic mayhem. We never know the true story of the child and
one of the reasons is the chaos of conflicting actions which fly
through the last act. Shelley steals Bradley's leg, Vince smashes
broken bottles against the porch and uses a knife to cut up the door
screen while Hailie exhorts her ineffectual priest to prevent pande-
monium. Here Shepard is carried away by his own excess. Dodge's
last will and testament, his sudden unnoticed death and Vince's
unlikely assumption of his inheritance as Shelley flees, mock the
denouement of popular melodrama but cannot escape it. It re-
quires something else, something more chilling to overcome its
predilection for chaos. In the final dramatic gest, Shepard rescues
and redeems the play with an ultimate revelation. Tilden enters,
cradling in his arms the muddied corpse of a buried child. It seems
to be the child of middle age Hailie has rejected. But Tilden's
cherishing of it takes on a more chilling and poignant meaning.
Though we shall never know for sure, it seems to be the misbegot-
ten fruit of an Oedipal union between mother and son. Vince's
father cradles it with the same fond idiocy that he had previously
cradled the corn and the carrots. The corpse now has that same
vegetable quality, looking for all the world like an armful of dead
crop. It is akin to the corpse in the second section of Eliot's The
Waste Land which sprouts back up through the earth from whence
it has come. It can also be seen as Vince's dead brother, or a version
of Vince himself. As Vince reclines on the sofa, in exactly the same
posture as his deceased grandfather, now lying on the floor, the
other 'homecoming' unexpectedly takes place, the entry of the
long deceased 'brother/uncle'. The corpse is Vince's alter ego, his
dead shadow, whose appearance stresses that the unlikely inheri-
tance is not the rescuing of the family line, but part of the
genealogy of death.
When Vince dons the mantle of family inheritance, he cloaks
himself in a living death. He is as dead as the buried child is 'alive'
to his father. And we also have a further possibility, that Vince
himself is the child in Hailie's picture. For Vince's 'absent mother'
is never explained. At no point does he, or anyone else, even
mention her. The various refusals to recognise may therefore work
on two planes, the first the obvious one of rural idiocy, but the
second the evasion of an awful truth no one wishes to contem-
plate. If it is possible Tilden is the father of the buried child, it is
equally possible that Vince is the real child of middle age for Dodge
and Hailie and that Tilden, posing as Vince's father, is an older
Shepard II: The Shock of the Normal 143
brother. Thus Vince can be seen as the uncle or the brother or the
unclelbrother of the buried child. Hailie - whom he spontaneously
calls 'grandma' - would then be his unacknowledged mother.
Who, one might indeed ask, is the real 'buried child'? The play's
subtext, whose sense of the uncanny dissolves most of the over-
wrought melodrama, reverberates with unanswered questions.
Disrecognising may be the malaise of an ingrown and isolated
rural existence. It may on the other hand be a calculated evasion of
another kind of ingrown existence - incest. As tragicomedy the
play moves between the two, between opposite ends of its
structure of feeling, between hilarity and horror, between a com-
edy of errors and tragic desperation.
The experience of the play defies any schematic solution. As in
Endgame we have the experience of interpretations floating on a sea
of uncertainty. Re-reading the play offers different meanings.
Specific exchanges can take on a different hue. When Dodge
refuses Vince's title of 'grandpa' it could be just a crotchety
rejection of the family line. But equally it could be that Vince is his
son or that Tilden is not his son. Such speculation might be called
idle since it challenges the explicit stage directions Shepard gives
us, the fixing of the relationship of Dodge to Tilden and Tilden to
Vince. Yet the play itself does not fix them, and in many instances
the dialogue contradicts them. The flux of disrecognising encour-
ages the de constructing of relationships. It sets in motion an urge
to detect a truth which, as in Endgame, is always elusive and never
final. We discover a secret buried child, but never its secret. The
family as the most familiar of entities is also a repository of secrets
it does not wish to reveal, even to its own kind. Supposed to
provide the fix of certain genealogy in a fraught world, it turns out
to be even more uncertain than the world beyond kin, the hostile,
impersonal world 'out there'.
In the last scene the twin corpses of youth and age, child and old
man, flanking the unlikely inheritor, signify the spiritual death of
his inheritance. Vince may have displaced his burnt-out father and
his disabled uncle but they will live on to plague him. He has lost
his girl and inherited a mausoleum. As Tilden cradles the corpse of
the child, Hailie's voice echoes from afar the miracle of rain and
new crops in a changed land. Like Oswald's final despairing plea
in Ghosts she invokes the miracle of the sun. But the play's tragic
victims have burnt themselves out and failed to learn from the
mistakes of others. The inheritance fails to bring forth knowledge.
144 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
145
146 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
preceded the final disintegration of Sitting Bull's tribe and the tragic
slaughter of their chief. His play appeared in the late sixties at a
period of the critical examination of American legend, of disen-
chantment with the cheap myths of the Hollywood Western and
renewed concern with the historical plight of the Indians and the
acquisition of their land. For Kopit, Cody and Sitting Bull both
become commodified figures of popular spectacle before the actual
historical fate of the Indian has been decided. Here myth is not a
retrospective imposition upon a history which has run its course.
Myth itself is history in the making. The Wild West Show is as
much a part of American history as the battIe at Little Big Horn.
Buffalo Bill, the legend manufactured with the aid of the dime
novelist, Ned Buntline, is as much a part of history as William
Cody.
In a particularly amusing scene in the play - which links the
politics of theatricality to the theatricality of politics - Buffalo Bill's
team of Western troupers lose their souls to their stage personas in
a performance for the President and the First Lady. Kopit is aware
of the theatrical nature of politics in his own epoch, and his play is
to some extent anachronistic. It reads back into the nineteenth
century the performative culture of the electronic age. The special
audience in the White House ballroom welcome the performers
onstage as kindred spirits. The Indians are played by Germans or
Italians from Brooklyn while Cody, Hickok and the rest become
travesties of themselves. They are like Shepard's rock stars but in
an earlier epoch, frozen in their own image, here taking their cues
from Buntline who prompts them from offstage. When Hickok,
tired of having to play himself onstage, breaks the frame by
stabbing Buntline and trying to make off with the Indian squaw, he
merely draws even more rapturous applause from the First Lady.
Kopit's style is that of a self-conscious melodramatic exaggeration.
But it works. Cody and Hickock have boxed themselves into a
corner. The performance of self has become a trap.
Kopit juxtaposes the theatrical shenanigans of the Wild West
Show to the political inveigling over treaties between the govern-
ment and the Sioux Indians, which ends in the murder of Sitting
Bull. There is a real history, perhaps too solemn and formal in its
treatment here, which runs parallel to the circus of games. In the
end Cody is unable to control either. The most telling moment in
the play occurs towards the end when Hickok, now a fully-fledged
cultural hustler offers the scared and conscience-stricken Cody no
Shepard III: Re-Enacting the Myth of Origin 147
support for the plight of the Sioux but instead a new recipe for
fame. It is 'simultaneous presence'. A group of Buffalo Bills enters
with the same florid buckskins as Cody, all wearing Cody masks.
Hickok wishes to export the image all over the American continent.
'We could go on like this', Hickok exclaims, '!orever!1l Cody tries to
blast his stand-ins out of existence. They fall, rise again and
disappear. In the age of cinema, which the scene prefigures, he
would be even more helpless to prevent the perpetual presentation
of his own image in which his diminishing self has been buried
alive. The affliction is Cody's tragicomic horror, the moment where
organised farce comes back to plunge him into perpetual
torment.
Like Hoss, Cody is tormented by the mythic self which has run
out of control at the very moment when the vestiges of the
authentic self seem to have vanished. Lee in True West and Eddie
in Fool for Love are contemporary versions, and very different ones,
of the same mythic predicament. They are so at several stages
removed. Kopit uses a real historical figure as a mythic embodi-
ment of a mythical predicament. In his muddling failure to prevent
the oppression of the Indians and the seizure of their lands he is a
humanitarian version of the failed patriarch of tragicomedy. But
Lee and Eddie are nobodies in the inheritance stakes of the true
west, marginal drifters, unlikely hangers-on, impossible imitations
of celebrity. They are, however, more powerful creations than the
more obvious cowboys of Shepard's middle period, the captured
cowboy rock star of Cowboy Mouth, the unlikely Wyoming saviours
at the end of Geography of a Horse Dreamer, the mythic reincarna-
tions of The Unseen Hand or The Holy Ghostly. One must also add
that the Eddie in the dramatic text of Fool for Love is far more
compelling than Shepard's screen performance of his hero in the
version he scripted for Robert Altman. Altman's flawed film makes
us only too aware of the implosive power of the play's naturalistic
space, and equally of Shepard's failure to be a good movie actor.
For Kopit the commodification of Cody's image as a major
celebrity is vital to the establishment of Western myth. By contrast,
Lee and Eddie are desperately thrashing life out of that myth in its
age of decline. They are literally flogging a dead horse. As modern
men of the West they have few mythical qualities, nor can they
renew the myth which others have forged. Yet True West and Fool
for Love are vitally important works because they have such a
strong and enduring sense of contemporary America. They also
148 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
celluloid screen. But the words and the themes have been so
worked over that they are all cliches. And the brothers are still at
cross purposes. Lee is entranced by the mythical fix of the West he
has lived through, Austin by the lure of the actual life his brother
has lived. The crossover creates a stalemate to be resolved only
through violence. But the attack by Austin on Lee, inverting the
earlier fear that Austin has of being attacked, solves nothing. Their
mother treats it as the horseplay of over-excited boys rather than a
fight to the death. Her wish that they fight outside when the house
is already a scrapheap has its own comic irony. For her, it is
over-exuberant play, whose seriousness she fails to recognise.
More importantly she does not recognise the results of their
previous over-exuberant play, the wreck that is her own house.
Her return confounds all American assumptions of 'home as
found'. Home is wrecked. She fails to recognise it, and leaves. But
her comic appearance, and confounding of all conventions of
'motherhood', is topped by her notorious assertion that 'Picasso's
in town.' The humour comes not only because Picasso is dead and
Southern California is, anyway, the last place one would expect to
see him even when alive. 'Picasso' is, subliminally, a throw-away
version of celebrity towards which her two sons are aspiring and
which they will never attain. They will remain unknowns, for their
haphazard trading in myth will never give them a public name.
Their names indeed will never be named by someone totally
ignorant of what they have actually done, as their mother is of
Picasso. His name, however, does serve once more to remind us of
the difference between the two brothers. Austin knows of him and
knows he is dead. Lee has never heard of him. Yet mother insists
on them accompanying her to see the great man in the local
museum. Her chasing of celebrity mocks and echoes theirs. In the
end Lee can give up on his 'dumb story' about 'two lamebrains
chasin' each other across Texas' and head back for the desert alone.
But Austin is in no man's land, wanting both the story and the
great adventure, and ending up with neither.
The parable of Christ-like crucifixion which Albee dramatises in
The Zoo Story is inappropriate here. Because the two brothers trade
roles, one cannot end up, suddenly and dramatically, as the
crucifier and the other as the crucified. If Austin had actually
strangled Lee with the telephone cord, the ending would be
unconvincing. For the two brothers have taken equal turns at being
victimiser and victim. The absence of violent death, though not of
152 Tragicomedy and Contemporary Culture
The love relationships in Fool for Love and A Lie of the Mind
represent a significant turn very late in Shepard's work to date.
There is a vague prefiguring of the sex war in works like Cowboy
Mouth and La Turista but really nothing much to go on. The new
interest in heterosexual combat was, in a sense, overdue, and
necessary if one is to make a full claim for Shepard's greatness. Fool
for Love, in particular, is a vital work. To acclaim or reject it, though,
purely for reasons of content would be short-sighted. Its form in
general is a big advance, a landmark in Shepard's development as
a playwright. Indeed the fate of the love affair cannot be separated
from the changes that Shepard rings in the naturalist form, the
many layerings and forms of 'double seeing' that make it realistic,
Brechtian and hallucinatory all at the same time. The play is a
single act with no separate scenes, straight and continuous.
According to Shepard's stage directions the action should be
'relentless and without a break'. May's cheap motel room with its
faded door, walls and bedspread is a masterpiece of natural
observation, the perfect setting for a lover's quarrel of visceral
intensity. Yet it is framed by the mysterious figure of the Old Man
who sits down-stage in a rocking chair, on a raised platform
outside of the stage and closer to the audience, commenting on the
quarrels and the claims to truth. The relentless banter is blown up
in taut expressionist fashion by the amplified sound of slamming
doors as Eddie walks outside in disgust or May walks off into the
bathroom in rage. The exits turn into entrances as they both always
return to the sound of further slamming. Down-stage the Old Man
will eventually leave his rocking chair and intrude on the action,
thus breaking the naturalistic frame.
Penned in on all sides, Eddie and May occasionally leave the
room but never the stage. They are always part of the action or
Shepard III: Re-Enacting the Myth of Origin 153
past to make it scorch them with pain, to make it brand them with
its mark in order to give the present meaning.
The dramatic device of the Old Man echoes the first appearance
of Anna in that other memory-play, Old Times, where she seems at
first to be a joint hallucination on the part of Kate and Deeley. By
contrast, the Other Woman in Shepard's play never appears
on-stage. The Countess is more of an apparition than the Old Man,
a shadowy force of insane jealousy raining gunshots on the motel
room in a fierce cameo of the revenger's tragicomedy. Yet the
gunshots are real and we accept the couple's account of her black
Mercedes as real in a way that we cannot accept the Old Man as
real. On the other hand, the Old Man cannot be wished away as a
hallucination. In a note on the characters in his stage directions,
Shepard suggests the Old Man exists only in the minds of Eddie
and May despite his physical presence. Yet he is much more than
the ghost of Hamlet's father. The play has brought him to life. He
indubitably is. But what he is we shall never know. Ambiguity
attends him as the 'buried father' as it attends the muddied corpse
of the 'buried child' in Shepard's earlier play of the same name. In
both plays literal description in the stage directions is undermined
by the ambiguities of a lineage which cannot be deciphered. Just as
myth has to be given an origin, so origin has to be given a myth.
We are trapped in a circle from which there is no way out.
There is no way out and therefore no catastrophic endings, and
in tragicomedy there is no tragic death to create such ends.
Tragicomedy is the genre of heroes who will not die, who will
spring back to life as Lee springs out of the cord that Austin has
tightened around his neck. Diminished they live and diminished
they survive. Death has little it can take away from them that life
has not already. They may have taken a tumble but not a fall. There
is no absolute loss for themselves or for anyone else. They must
survive, and their efforts to survive amuse us. If our laughter at
times drowns the pain, we should not worry. That it is how it is
meant to be. But the pain will go on. That, too, is how it is meant
to be.
Notes
Chapter 1: Modernism and Tragicomedy
1. See The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 64-88;
also Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977),
pp.128-35.
2. Peter Szondi, Theory of the Modern Drama (trans. Michael Hays)
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987) p. 63.
3. Just Play: Beckett's Theater (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980), p. 13.
4. Noten zur Literatur, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: SUhrkampf, 1965), p. 54 ff.
5. See W. E. Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality
and Advertising in Capitalist Society (trans. Robert Bock) (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1986), p. 57 f. For a study which advocates the post-
modem embrace of performative culture and tries to find an
inconocIastic role for the now-commodified subject, see Peter
Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. Michael Eldred) (London:
Verso, 1988). Drawing on Bakhtin, Sloterdijk puts forward
carnivalisation as a conscious alternative to Adorno's 'melancholy
science'.
158
Notes 159
9. Aesthetic Theory (trans. C. Lenhardt) (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984), pp. 34 f, 262 f.
10. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (trans. N. M. Paul and W. S.
Palmer) (London: Macmillan, 1911), pp.126--9. Significantly Gilles
Deleuze uses Bergson's theory of recognitions to construct a model
of time-images in the modernist film, consciously moving away
from the semiology of his French predecessors to a perceptual
theory of the cinematic form. See Cinema 2: The Time Image (trans.
Hugh Tomlinson) (London: Athlone Press, 1989), pp. 45-9.
11. Roger Callois Man, Play and Games (trans. Meyer Barash) (New York:
Free Press, 1961), pp. 11-37.
12. 'Homo Ludens Revisited', in Jacques Ehrmann (ed.), Game, Play and
Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 55.
13. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1949), Chapter 1.
14. See Fredric Jameson, 'Postrnodernism and Consumer Society', in
Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1985),
p. 111 f.
15. Role-Playing and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1982), p. 38 f.
16. Ibid., p. 59.
17. It should also be remembered that Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman
and Andrej Wajda have been three of the most gifted theatre
directors of the modern period. In his recent autobiography, Berg-
man acknowledges his debt as a film-maker to Scandinavian drama,
and particularly Strindberg. See Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern
(trans. Joan Tate) (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1988).
18. Kermode, op. cit., p. 71.
19. One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), p. 49 f.
20. See Martin Walker, 'How Los Angeles was Lost', in Guardian, 2
September 1989; see also E. P. Thompson, 'Notes on Exterminism:
The Last Stage of Civilisation', New Left Review, 121 (1980), pp. 3-27.
On the visual derealisation effects of the new ballistic weapons
systems see Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception
(trans. Patrick Camiller) (London: Verso, 1989), p. 84 f.
21. See the surveys analysed in Joe Bailey, Pessimism (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), p. 40 ff.
22. Writing and Society (London: Verso, 1983), p. 17 f.
23. The Culture of Narcissism (London: Abacus, 1980), p. 71 ff.
24. Ibid., p. 125.
5. Ibid., p. 183.
6. 'The Homecoming', in Plays: Three (London: Methuen, 1978), pp. 49-
50.
7. Ibid., p. 65.
8. Ibid., p. 63.
9. Ibid., p. 69.
162
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Index
166
Index 167
Sweet Bird of Youth, 24; Streetcar Yeats, W.B., 9, 49, 50, 61-3, 70; On
Named Desire, 39 Baile's Strand, 49; Purgatory, 61-3,
Wilshire, Bruce, 21 70
Woolf, Virginia, 12,45; To the
Lighthouse, 15