Introduction:
In the introduction Rayner explains her idea of the ghost in theatre and gives an account of the theories that she relies on. She specifically focuses on phenomenology as a discipline that, like theatre, is concerned with the invisible and unspeakable ghosts of our reality. She claims that psychoanalysis does the same in a different way. The ghost in theatre, like Artaud’s double, is not a second world or an imitation of reality similar to the ideal of psychological realism, but is an experience of “a material reality of what is not, which is to say that theatre not only “unmakes mimesis,” as in Elin Diamond’s apt title; it also unmakes the ontological presumption of is.” (xv) The ghost in theatre makes us “perceive perception” (xxi) and remember things we never saw before.
Chapter 1, Tonight at 8:00: The Missed Encounter
Rayner begins this chapter looking at the starting time of a theatre performance, which is assumed to be a specific point in time, marked by the hour on the ticket and the ‘objective’ time on the watch. However, the beginning moment, as any moment cannot be pinned down to a single point. In Offending an Audience, Peter Handke shows that “time, especially in theatre, is almost always “out of joint” and that “it is not so easy for an audience to be in the present rather than in a dreamlike state of waking up.” (2) By following this “dreamlike state of waking up” through the analysis of dreams in psychoanalytic theory (specifically Freud and Lacan), Rayner shows how the moment of waking up from a dream is in fact a gap or syncopation between perception and consciousness. This gap exists also between our perceived present and our consciousness and is, therefore, “the present that is always missed.” (11) The repetition of this structural syncopation enables both intersubjectivity and the memory of the present. “Rather than a definitive division between perceptive wakefulness and imaginary dreaming, however, the more common state of quotidian life is already “somewhere between” perception and waking habits that keep us half asleep to reality.” (19)
Along the chapter, Rayner uses various examples from plays to demonstrate her points; notably: she uses Hamlet as an example of a character whose time is suspended through the length of the play—who lives the time of Others; she shows how Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days experiences the repetition of the moment of waking up (the gap) whenever the bell rings, and the audience with her. She claims that, like these characters who experience the gap so preeminently to the point of trauma, so do we live this gap as trauma and loss. “By going to the theatre as a certain time, I enter a space in which a repetition is planned but still open to accident. I make a bargain to be present at the site of a trauma that is being resurrected in the symbolic dimension of the real. By doubling the present, theatre represents the present in its own terms in as almost self-canceling mode.” (29)
Chapter 2, All the Dead Voices: Memorial and History
In this chapter, Rayner looks at memorials and at theatre as sites for invoking history as embodied experience of loss rather than as information. She claims that contemporary memorials create experiences of loss and absence and a remembering through repetition (in contrast with the “classic” statues that mimic the actual singular presence of the dead ones). Similarly, the repetitions that occur in theatre—of texts, actions, characters, and situations—have the potential to invoke the absent voices of the dead. Repetition, moreover, “does not come as an accustomed form of a historical knowledge. Repetition, like de Certeau’s notion of historiography, implies a gap and a difference between one instance and another. But instead of creating a phantasm of the other as an object of knowledge, repetition is paradoxically an instance of singularity.” (34) Rayner follows Žižek’s exploration of repetition (using Lacan) as that which presents the experience of the impossibility of repetition, as part of the failure to know the present. (36-38)
Focusing on a production of Waiting for Godot by an Irish theatre company, she claimed that the (distinctly Irish) voices of the actors encompassed Irish identity and tradition and (the ghosts of) unwritten, somatic history that is carried in the voice, the accent, the rhythm, the attitude. “The voices carry history through the body into the world. Such history is not a matter of documentation or information but a matter of imitation and performance that embody both material specificity and the gaps that arise in the process of imitation and repetition.” (42)
“The somatic memory, whose imitation and persistence over time constitute one dimension of history, is neither a topic nor an issue for discourse, because it is unwritten. It is a performative presence registered by the body and/or the textual unconsciousness of writing. It is a question not of being “about” the famine but of sustaining the trauma of famine among the living, which, rather than a topic or an argument, is a manifestation of the unavoidable facticity of all that is lost but maintained as “all the dead voices” are heard in the speaking body, the voices that “reflect absence”.” (47) However, performance and text haunt one another, words haunt the event they invoked, and realities haunt the words that records it, “realities that reappear as the repetition of structure, which has the uncanny effect of both familiarity and strangeness. Haunted space collapses temporal linearity among past, present and future. It suggests that the apparent permanence of words, a permanence that renders events intelligible, is haunted by loss and the unitelligibility of the Real, of the unrepeatable Now that constitutes the criminality of time and the uniqueness of what Maurice Blanchot calls “the disaster”.” (57) Text, hence, incorporates losses and absences from the reality it portrays; these are the ghosts of a human body that is encrypted.
Chapter 3, Object: Lost and Found
In this chapter, Rayner follows the presence of objects onstage as both signs and phenomena, as both real and fictional. Props and objects may incorporate multiple meanings and may fall into their actual materiality. As objects that usually have no use outside of the stage, props on the prop table are in an “in-between space” that “breaks down the dualism between world and stage it what might be called an aspect of “readiness”.” (76) In addition, using phenomenology together with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Rayner shows how objects take part in the processes of establishing selfhood when “the first object is not known until it is lost.” (80) This loss differentiates between self and other while keeping the subject-object ambiguity in tact. “Ob-ject: to throw before or against and therefore, elsewhere, to oppose. The word contains the act of expulsion that is also presentation, a show or appearance, even a symptom (as in “presenting symptom”). The event of expulsion produces subject and object as reciprocal of each other: it is a point at which a subject also begins to emerge as an object.” (81)
Much like a souvenir from another place, that carries upon it tangible experiences and the facticity of that other place, props embody the presence of the fictional world. In The America Play, Suzan Lori-Parks uses objects that are suppose to have historical significance to embody the lost history of African American society. While the historical significance is clearly false, the somatic meanings of these artifacts remain. Added to that is the stage prop’s inherent doubleness: it is both not the object and not, not the object; i.e. it is both fictional and real. “The persistence of the object makes a claim to it’s sameness, resisting the narrative representation and variability and denying fantasy. Yet the materiality is also out of context, and thus the object is also alien to itself through its materiality.” (89) Thus, in the play, the objects pulled out of The Great Hole of History become elements of experiential memory rather than written history. Moreover, the object ““floats” as signifier of otherness in a space where the symbolic resides.” (93)
Rayner elaborate on Tadeusz Kantor’s use of objects in his work, claiming that by regarding objects “as folding time into their surfaces, we are able to see how objects then appeaer to shelter both past and future. They appear as dwelling places for objects between worldly use and representation.” (98) Furthermore, “distinct from history’s record of losses over the gaps of difference (between past and present, self and other, discourse and the body), theatre objects can offer yet another possibility for history as a matter of intersections and interactions that do not avoid the gaps of difference but incorporate them in a chronic emergence.” (102)
Chapter 4, Empty Chairs: the Memorial Double
In this chapter Rayner looks at chairs onstage, specifically the use of chairs by Ionesco and Kantor, and to a lesser degree of Robert Wilson, and in the Oklahoma City National Memorial. She claims that chairs are “intimately and thoroughly imbued with the specificity of human action, occupation, power, and identity, character, history, and technology.” (111) Moreover, chairs onstage are inherently doubled as both material and signification, implying the presence (or absence) of a human body, its history and memory, a cultural milieu, and can, therefore, be a site for experiencing unknowable events (such as death). Rayner’s overall aim is to show “the way that theatrical doubling is both simply the province of theatre and the model for an epistemology by which perceptual experience is transformed into knowledge of experience.” (114)
In Ionesco’s The Chairs the chairs become the substitution for the bodies of the invited guests, each with his or her own history and relationship with the Old Man and Old Woman. “The invisible occupants of the chairs are doubly representative of the process by which the longing for attachment transfers loss and absence into memorial objects.” (125) “What this play stages, in short, is the act of substitution that constitutes not only an essential element of theatricality but also its centrality both to the representation of the world and to the consequent behavior that orders the world.” (129)
In Kantor’s piece Today is My Birthday, presented a month after his death, Kantor’s own empty chair “provided the experience of loss and grief as a perceptible trauma, because it occurred in the conditions of an event. It was not simply a representation of loss; neither was it not not representation. The double negative is vital in a literal sense, which is to say it lives in the simultaneity of experience and knowing […] It is that space between the demarcation of difference through which slips the real, not as a state of being, but as a passage in which difference and sameness intersect and exchange places. The survivor knows only the undecidability of the sameness on the two sides of another’s death—before and after: a sameness that is nevertheless wholly different.” (133)
Chapter 5, Double or Nothing: Ghosts Behind the Curtain
The subject of this chapter is the curtain and its function in creating a doubling effect for both stage and backstage. The curtain is a marker/maker of spaces/worlds, both concealing and revealing. That dual function alone might be enough to undermine confidence in appearances, but as boundary markers curtains further create spatial divisions that correlate concepts of true and false, real and unreal, practical and imaginary.” (139)
Curtains in theatre divide both audience and actors as well as stage and backstage. While the front stage curtain hides and creates desire to have the world behind it revealed “the backstage is theatre’s other, internal double […] that backstage world is in some sense doubly hidden. Not simply concealed beyond the stage scene, it hides also in its obvious necessity in the creation of that scene.” (142) It is thus a real world that is hiding behind a fictional one, and whose functionality is to create the stage’s fictional world. Like the revealing of the “man behind the curtain” in the Wizard of Oz and Oedipus’ revelation about his true self, the curtain assumes a desire to know the truth that hides behind it. This truth, however, is not only revealed spatially as a static piece of information. When temporality comes together with the spatial partition of the curtains “theatre undermines the implicit ontology of spatial concepts such as that true and false lose the force of their distinction.” (145)
The curtain itself is an object of the world yet in theatre it creates worlds by the act of partition. “The curtain is not a space one can enter, yet it creates such a space as a gathering place that makes visible the fact that what is there is also hare. It materializes the function and, like Heidegger’s Da-sein, is impossible to contain in representation, because it is the presence of a difference that belongs to and emerge from the very field that it differentiates.” (148) The partition created by the curtain is, nevertheless, permeable and can therefore be broken and reveal that the dichotomies between the real and unreal, true and false “are true and false.” (151)
A hole or gap in the curtain or the space where it is assumed to have been, through which two worlds can meet, can be described as the “no-thing, the chink in the division of space, […] more akin to time than to space in its intangible but real presence.” (152) And on either side of this divide there are “appearances whose source are present in time but also derive from time, whether past or future.” (153)
Chapter 6: Ghosts onscreen: the Drama of Misrecognition
Like the blackout in theatre, that separates the parts of the narrative, marking a potential return of the spectators to their selves even while the final image of the previous scene is still hovering in front of their eyes, the play of light and darkness in film creates place of dream that is between consciousness and perception. “Film is thus as almost ideal medium for projection, misrecognition, and transference, particularly those films that wear the guise of realism. The film is supposed to be complete and therefore “know” what it is doing, what it means. It appears before our eyes as an object. But a film is not simply an object insofar as it projects outwards a subjectivity—a “subject-supposed-to know”—onto which an audience can project its own subjectivity as though it were other. In other words there is a kind of mutual misrecognition of who is doing what to whom, which is a version of the analytic transference and countertransference. (163) Rayner analyses three films to exemplify and elaborate her claims: Gaslight, The Sixth Sense and Vertigo. These films “thematically and narratively trace the ghostly aspects of visual representation through a filter of characters who misrecognize their own ghostliness and confront death through the devices of representation and its return. Though visually realistic, the narrative emerge in concert with the phenomenal and formal absences that constitute the filmic medium, which is itself ghostly.” (182)
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