Garner, Stanton B.

Garner, Stanton B. Jr. Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1994.

Introduction

In the introduction Gardner explains his approach that relies heavily on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. He explains his choice to follow a variety of plays from different moments in the 20^th century as meant to demonstrate different facets in the phenomenology of theatre and, by rooting the discussion in particular historic-artistic moments, to show that the questions phenomenology asks are relevant to a variety of such moment and to their experiential specificity. He defends post Husserlian phenomenology from accusations of essentialism, claiming that phenomenological investigations “are designed to indicate the field of variables that constitute the very possibility of difference and individual manifestation.” (12) He goes on to claim that even Derrida can, and should, be used alongside phenomenology and proposes a dialogue of phenomenological investigation with semiotics as well as poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories.

Chapter 1: Phenomenology and Performance

In the first part of the chapter Garner shows how Beckett’s drama, particularly his late plays, is emphatically phenomenological. That is, in Beckett’s plays, as in phenomenology, the body is put forth as that through which the subject exists in the world. The body’s existence, however, is fraught with ambiguity--experiences of absence, estrangement, disappearance and fragmentation. Thus Beckett mirrors phenomenology’s concern with the body’s thing-ness. “As Beckett’s middle and late work gradually abandon the naturalistic body, with its physiological integrity and recognizably anthropomorphic environment, they more directly confront the phenomenological body, with its decentered field of subjectivity and its ambiguous modes of absence and presence.” (38)

In the second part of the chapter Garner claims that theatre’s as-if-ness pervades the entire experience of being in the theatre. Full darkness, for example, rarely occurs in the theatre yet it can be experienced, and it can even be created, in fact, through spoken text, as in Shakespeare’s plays. Theatre’s imagined reality, therefore, pervades actuality. Moreover, “the theatrical field offers itself in terms of an irreducible oscillation between perceptual levels, and though spectatorial vision is thus bifurcated, the theatrical mode of this presence, or givenness, is oriented in terms of an experiential actuality that transgresses (while never fully erasing) the boundaries between the “is” and the “as if”.” (42) Theatrical presence exists through this play of actuality. In addition, the phenomenal presence of objects on stage change the moment an actor goes onstage, from being merely an observable they become an object for the actor. Their presence become presencing. In addition, due to its livedness, the actor’s body on stage both embodies the dualities of reality/illusion, sign/referent and threatens to break these dualities back into the “real” real. In addition the spectator’s body in its particular orientation and positionality, is invisible for the actor’s virtual gaze yet visible for the actor’s actual gaze. The actor’s ability to gaze back onto the audience makes theatre experience different from most other arts, including (notably) cinema. All these variables of presence and absence show that “embodiedness is subject to modification and transformation. Multiple and varying modes of disclosure, and that the forms of ambiguity that characterize the phenomenal realm represent experience in flux, oscillating within and between modes of perceptual orientation.” (51)

Chapter 2: (Dis)figuring Space:Visual fields in Beckett’s Late Plays

Garner show how Beckett’s plays from the 1970s and 80s focus mostly around the stage image as relationships between the body and all other elements of theatre: movement, space, objects, light, text etc. Garner initially contextualizes Beckett’s concerns within the modernist tradition of scenographic artists—most notably, Adolph Apia and E.G Craig—who had an ambivalent approach to the body on stage. On the one hand, the presence of the body was necessary to create live space around it; and, on the other hand, “the actor’s body threatens the stages formal autonomy through its non aesthetic physiology, its independent sentience, the various ways in which it registers its living presence.” (57) Beckett’s late plays further complicate this tension between artistic formalism of pure image and the live, unstable corporeality it creates. Thus Beckett exposes “the perceptual dynamism of the theatrical image as it reflects and (dis)embodies the seeing eye; the dialectic of living body and aesthetic form; and the problematic status of perceptual (or any other) formalism within the theater’s bodied space.” (63)

Garner goes on to show how the image in Beckett’s late plays “reveals conflicting perceptual inclinations; it is an image in flight, caught between a theatre of human bodies and the depersonalizing outlines of abstract shape.” (64) Particularly, through the play of light and darkness, that keeps the illumination level low and leaves parts of the actor’s body in (full or half) darkness marks the body as belonging to both light and darkness, makes it “a kind of visual “ghost,” caught in its emergence from one perceptual world to another.” (69) It also creates an almost black-and-white world on stage, leaving only faded colors. “As with so much else in these late plays, the color represented by these isolated appearances is of a certain order, inhabiting the in-betwenness of imperfect articulation. Beckett’s performance field may reach toward black and whit while recalling a world of reds, greens, and blues, but it falls short of both, and the promises of color and its absence that reach out so teasingly further, consign the performance image to its flight from visual stability to the no-man’s land of “not quite”.”

When analyzing movement, Garner claims that locations rather than the movement itself become the focal points in Beckett’s late plays. This focus on fixing the characters in particular points onstage gives movement a more formalized sense while endowing it with dramatic tension. The image, thus, “involves a motion within stillness, confirming in its relative fixity the spatial geometry of the broader performance image.” (73) Furthermore, in these plays Becket’’ creates depth that is ambiguous and “indeterminate—both itself and not itself.” (74) He thus focuses on the frontality of the image (like that of a picture) and highlights “the positioning of the character and object off-center in relation to the invisible vertical line bisecting the stage.” (75) This “ex-centering” of Beckett’s dramatic characters create an experiential affect, making the audience perceive (even if they do not conceptualize) these characters’ eccentricity and imbalance.

Through all of these elements, however, “the locus of Beckett’s theater of the image remains the audience [...] Beckett foregrounds his spectator not as the disembodied eye/I of a theatrical voyeurism, but as a body situated with its own positionality and material presence.” (81) As a result, “Beckett’s audience finds itself both disembodied towards nonexistent viewing points and uncomfortably embodied in the seats they cannot escape, “clawed” by the perceptual dissonances of Beckett’s stage which preclude the satisfaction of spectatorial centrality.” (84)

Chapter 3: Object, Objectivity, and the Phenomenal Body

In this chapter Garner analyses the way subject/object duality of the body of the actor on stage is exposed and treated in relation to the world of objects that surrounds it. The phenomenal body’s inherent duality is further problematized in modern drama by the way objects are written onto the stage as the body’s environment and extensions. Prior to the realism/naturalism revolution of stage image, objects on stage belonged to the character – as an extension of their action in and upon the world or as part of their characterization. Naturalism’s “verisimilitude inaugurated a new conception of the stage world as material field, replicating the external world in its visual and tactile particularity, and it made possible a liberation of the “thing”, as prop joined setting in a new “objectness”, a materiality increasingly freed from the illustrative and the instrumental. As stage objects proliferated and asserted an increasing density, manipulatability gave way to an independence from—and eventually, an antagonism toward—the human subject’s attempt to appropriate and humanize its spatial surroundings.” (91)

The materiality of the world of objects as things in themselves, juxtaposed to the actor’s body, is most apparent in naturalism and most notably commented by Brecht. Nevertheless, by observing the work of later playwrights, such as Sam Shepard, Beckett, Ionesco and Pinter, Garner shows how this use of the object became one of the main phenomenal themes in 20^th century drama.

Shepard’s plays often present a world cluttered with objects, many of them never utilized or broken. This overabundance of uselessness deconstructs and defamiliarizes the objects and, at the same time, it is meant to “reinstate the human within its field, an arena now stripped of its functional objectivity and available to more primitive, physiological modes of habitation.” (98) In Beckett’s Happy Days and Ionesco’s The Chairs the objects are pushed even further into a particular realm of “objectness,” wherein the actor’s body is either incapable of manipulating them (as in Happy Days) or overcome by the objects’ taking of space and “erasing” the character’s subjectness (as in The Chairs). Objects, thus, “abandon their humanizing instrumentality” and “the body itself reverts to the status of quasi object within its field of awareness.” (108) In Pinter’s The Caretaker, the focus of the main character on the world of objects and his failed attempt to make sense of their un-usefulness creates “an environment that asserts itself not as a functional system, but as phenomenal field, foregrounding—even heightening—the entanglement of the subject in its perceptual world.” (114) In addition to that, the constant gaze that follows the main character contributes to his objectification.