{"id":93,"date":"2016-04-06T14:47:26","date_gmt":"2016-04-06T14:47:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/10\/?p=93"},"modified":"2023-03-23T15:44:20","modified_gmt":"2023-03-23T15:44:20","slug":"mise-en-scene-becketts-field-of-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/10\/mise-en-scene-becketts-field-of-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Mise en sc\u00e8ne: Beckett\u2019s \u201cField of Memory\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mischa Twitchin<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n

\"twitchin-LSG_1241-8x6\"<\/p>\n

R\u00e9sum\u00e9 :<\/strong><\/p>\n

S\u2019appuyant sur la derni\u00e8re pi\u00e8ce de Beckett, Quoi o\u00f9, cet essai \u00e9tudie l\u2019id\u00e9e de mise en sc\u00e8ne sous l\u2019angle de l\u2019esth\u00e9tique ouvertement moderniste de la sp\u00e9cificit\u00e9 du m\u00e9dium. Consid\u00e9rant la pratique performative \u00e9voqu\u00e9e par Beckett dans son \u00ab champ de m\u00e9moire \u00bb, cette esth\u00e9tique peut \u00eatre entendue \u00e0 la fois comme po\u00e9tique et politique, ce qui permet d\u2019offrir une critique de plusieurs productions, en fonction de leur mise en sc\u00e8ne.<\/p>\n

Abstract:<\/strong><\/p>\n

In conversation with Stanley Gontarski, Beckett observed that, while his last play What Where<\/i>, \u201cwas written for the theatre\u2026 it\u2019s much more a television play than a theatre piece.\u201d Rather than detail the textual differences between the play as written (or, indeed, rewritten) for theatre or television, the following discussion looks at examples of the play\u2019s mise en sc\u00e8ne (including Beckett\u2019s own) to try to make sense of writing for one medium when read in the light of another.[1]<\/sup><\/a> How does an idea of mise en sc\u00e8ne come into question through one medium (writing, stage or screen), when this medium is itself put into question by another (instead of being simply subsumed by it, as McLuhan famously observed)? This question is distinct from a simple \u201cadaptation\u201d (in which the conventions of one medium are presupposed by the possibilities of another). Rather, it concerns how the play\u2019s aesthetic resistance to such conventions in one medium (manifested in its mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i>) insists or returns in those of another. With respect to the Dublin film version of What Where<\/i>, the discussion engages the concept of mise en sc\u00e8ne with the aesthetic politics of a now neglected sense of \u201cmedium\u201d within modernist art practices, which is itself more or less contemporary with the epistemologically distinct (and also often neglected) sense of mise en sc\u00e8ne (analysed particularly by Patrice Pavis [2013]). This is to recall issues that seem forgotten in a \u201cpost-medium\u201d culture, addressing what Beckett called the play\u2019s \u201cField of Memory.\u201d Evoking the actors\u2019 playing space with this term, Beckett marks the question of mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i> as belonging specifically to the word play of What Where<\/i>.<\/p>\n

I.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Caught briefly on camera, Beckett can be heard observing to Stanley Gontarski that his last play, What Where<\/i>, although \u201cwritten for the theatre,\u201d was \u201cmuch more a television play than a theatre piece.\u201d How does this difference, with respect to the medium of performance, make sense of and for an understanding of mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i>? How do examples of this writing \u201cfor\u201d performance in one medium or another come into question through their differences, as distinct from being subsumed as analogies of a supposed, \u201coriginal\u201d intention, one which would not be specific to either medium? This question is vital to begin with if one is to avoid treating Beckett\u2019s own reading of his play text (as a director) in terms of an interpretative teleology retrospectively supposed of the work\u2019s very inception. How might the concept of mise en sc\u00e8ne allow for reflection on examples of the play in performance, and how do the particular examples themselves allow for reflection on the concept of mise en sc\u00e8ne? How does one avoid simply offering another supplementary interpretation of the play, and engage with what makes Beckett\u2019s example specific? Not to get caught up in the familiar contradictions of appeal to an original, authorial meaning, it is important to keep in mind that Beckett changed the play text in the light of his own directorial experience, so that a reading in one medium became a rewriting in another. This undoes assumptions concerning what is primary (text) and secondary (performance) in the interpretative work of mise en sc\u00e8ne. As Steven Connor notes (citing Enoch Brater\u2019s remarks on the earlier example of Quad<\/i>):<\/p>\n

In one sense the performance\u2026 is its own text, and has, if anything, a higher status than the actual written form, which in some ways it modifies and supercedes. But if this written form comes beforeand after <\/i>the performance, then both text and performance repeat and perhaps displace each other, the text being one \u2018original\u2019 for the production, just as the production is another \u2018original\u2019 for the text. (Connor 166)<\/strong><\/p>\n

What then can be learnt from the different examples of the play on screen specifically; not least, as these fracture the traditional question of precedence between play text and mise en sc\u00e8ne (or between writer and director) in claims to the \u201cauthorship\u201d of a production? Rather than simply rehearsing a familiar debate as to the relative authority of play and performance texts, what is staged by the question of medium specifically? How does the question of textual differences record the aesthetic resistance to expectations of what is performable in the play, as this raises its own question of performance medium in a discussion of mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i>? How does this engagement of mise en sc\u00e8ne with the aesthetic politics of the now neglected concern with medium specificity allow us to make sense of the Dublin film version of the play, directed by Damien O\u2019Donnell, as compared with Beckett\u2019s own version made for German television in Stuttgart? (Curiously enough, the amendments to the play text made by Beckett, and adopted in the subsequent stage production directed by Pierre Chabert, were not followed by O\u2019Donnell \u2013 in the name of a textual \u201cfidelity\u201d to the original publication, which was apparently demanded by the Beckett estate.) Comparison between the two films allows us to address issues that appear forgotten in a so-called post-medium culture, reflecting on the play\u2019s action through examples of mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/i>, where its playing area (whether on stage or screen) was characterized by Beckett as a \u201cField of Memory.\u201d This also resonates, in a broader critical context, with Rosalind Krauss\u2019s sense (in the concluding paragraph, below) that \u201cthe medium is the memory.\u201d[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

II.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although it is the singular term \u201cmedium\u201d that is invoked here (as indicating questions of aesthetics, distinct from the ubiquitous \u201cmedia\u201d of cultural studies or sociology), performance on both stage and screen works, of course, through a hybrid of audio-vision. Despite the fact that we habitually refer to watching television, and of going to see a play or a film, these performances are as much heard as seen, and it is the relation between these \u2013 seeing what we hear, hearing what we see \u2013 that, indeed, constitutes the theatre<\/i> of Beckett\u2019s late plays. This is a theatre in which questions of space and time, sound and sight, constitute the drama (like a musical score, in Beckett\u2019s preferred analogy), rather than the identity of characters and settings with which interpretative mise en sc\u00e8ne is traditionally concerned.<\/p>\n

The elements of audio-vision are conventionally identified with each other (indeed, synchronised) in both the mediums of stage and screen, distinct from their being treated separately, where their juxtaposition allows for exploration of the very conditions of performance in either medium. Space and time (as the material of the play, imagined in words before appearing as embodied) are, however, distinct in each medium: necessarily continuous in stage performance and necessarily discontinuous in screen performance (exemplified by the technique of close-ups). How writing appears in each medium \u2013 as writing for <\/i>one or the other \u2013 becomes discernible through the differences afforded by examples of mise en sc\u00e8ne, as writing (text) in <\/i>performance (evidenced here in the literally repeatable What Where<\/i>productions for the screen).<\/p>\n

The specific questions of medium posed by the play are not simply formalistic \u2013 to which the dead hand of its reproducibility (rather than its singularity) would reduce it, defining mise en sc\u00e8ne by appeal to a \u201cfidelity\u201d to the \u201coriginal\u201d text (the contradictions of which are clear in the Dublin production\u2019s claim to intelligibility through \u201ccontext\u201d). Indeed, mistaking the question of medium specifically for that of authorial definition was addressed in practice by Beckett himself, reflecting on what he called the \u201cinteresting failure\u201d of his film, Film<\/i>. In a letter to Alan Schneider, Beckett observes, with respect to the production as that of its medium, that the film, \u201cdoes I suppose in a sense fail with reference to a purely intellectual schema\u2026 but in doing so has acquired a dimension and validity of its own that are worth far more than any merely efficient translation of intention\u201d (Harmon 166).<\/p>\n

It is with this \u201cdimension and validity of its own,\u201d revealed in the mise en sc\u00e8ne of the written work through its realisation in a specific medium, that the aesthetic question of writing for <\/i>that medium is posed. Rather than any \u201cmerely efficient translation,\u201d then, the issue is one of trying to understand the aesthetic question at work in the mise en sc\u00e8ne, distinct from supposing an answer that would have it conform to a \u201cpurely intellectual schema\u201d in the text. With this in mind it is hard to know what purpose the possessive apostrophe in the Dublin film\u2019s opening title, \u201cSamuel Beckett\u2019s What Where<\/i>,\u201d is meant to serve \u2013 as if there were other versions threatening to challenge the film\u2019s claim to a unique legitimacy. Beyond its attempt to assimilate authority (and, no doubt, authenticity), the title also foregrounds an anxiety about authorship. For, as we shall see, even as its mise en sc\u00e8ne fails to engage with the textual variants, it also departs from its source text in pursuit of what it calls \u201ccontext.\u201d It as if the play was read as simply a transferable set of medium-independent characters and dialogues, rather than precisely an attempt to address the very medium of its potential performance.<\/p>\n

III.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Enter Levett<\/i>\u2026<\/p>\n

Mrs W.: Words fail us.\/ Mrs D.: Now this is where a writer for the stage would have us speak no doubt.\/ Mrs W.: He would have us explain Levett.\/ Mrs D.: To the public. (Beckett 160)<\/p>\n

Writing for the stage (and, by extension, for the screen) involves having characters speak in place of the author, to explain for themselves what they are doing outside of anyone\u2019s imagination. In the last lines of What Where<\/i> the public is invited to, \u201cmake sense who may\u201d of the appearance of its characters. However, the work of interpretation rarely admits that words (or words alone) may fail to make sense of, or indeed (as Mrs W. would have it) \u201cexplain,\u201d such appearances. The gap between any particular instance of performance and the play\u2019s proposals concerning the what, where, and even the who, of its drama constitutes the very possibility of \u201cmaking sense\u201d that is addressed by its mise en sc\u00e8ne. Here we are invited by this \u201cwriter for the stage\u201d to ask the question: how <\/i>might one make sense of what where? (Or, even, fail to make sense of it.) Between the writing and a performance \u2013 and also between stage and screen \u2013 how does the question of medium specify this making sense, in the play\u2019s possible mise en sc\u00e8ne? In Beckett\u2019s modernist aesthetic, how might the question of mise en sc\u00e8ne make sense of what is medium-specific in the particular example of its performance?<\/p>\n

Given that What Where <\/i>is contemporary with what Rosalind Krauss called a \u201cpost-medium condition\u201d in the arts, however, why specify medium for making sense of the play\u2019s potential mise en sc\u00e8ne? How is Beckett\u2019s modernist example still contemporary, in the sense that the play already makes of that particular mode of attention called an audience (or, as Mrs. D. calls it, \u201cthe public\u201d)? Why is resistance to the post-modern claim that the question of medium no longer makes sense important for a question of mise en sc\u00e8ne (at least in this case)? The apparently anachronistic modernist context of this question can be referred back to one of Beckett\u2019s most profound readers, Theodor Adorno.[3]<\/sup><\/a> As Jay Bernstein observes:<\/p>\n

[T]he bald and obvious thought governing Adorno\u2019s aesthetic theory that aesthetics without art (history and criticism) is empty, and art without aesthetics is blind depends on construing one stretch of the history of art, modernism, as the constitutive condition for art history and aesthetics alike. For Adorno, to imagine going beyond modernism would mean simply either going beyond the point where art continued to matter to culture at all (which is what the culture industry keeps attempting to make happen to art) or that its promise was realised (which is what society keeps telling culture has happened so it can relax)\u2026 (Bernstein 250-51)<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is contemporary \u2013 and, precisely, still modernist \u2013 refers to the potential of and for an aesthetic resistance to the sense to be made of \u2013 and by \u2013 a medium (not least through the work of mise en sc\u00e8ne). This resistance is opposed to defining a medium (through its technology) in terms of its potential audience (as, of course, advertising demands of it), which has always been a condition of the culture industry. The attempt to identify an audience (or a public) by and for a medium \u2013 as if to write for a medium was the same as to write for a specific audience \u2013 is one of the more pernicious corruptions of aesthetic practice, where the medium is understood as a means to an end (as if merely conveying content or the proverbial \u2018message\u2019). If there is, in Beckett\u2019s example, something anachronistic in an appeal to the sense of medium, this is nonetheless to insist (in its own terms) on the potential of resistance<\/i> to examples of mise en sc\u00e8ne that could be characterized as pastiche, parody, or kitsch.<\/p>\n

It is, precisely, in this critical, modernist sense of medium \u2013 as referring to the specifically aesthetic conditions for an understanding of art, addressed by the work itself in the very material or technical conditions of and for its concept \u2013 that Beckett\u2019s own mise en sc\u00e8ne of What Where<\/i>, indeed, <\/i>\u2018makes sense.\u2019 As Rosalind Krauss, one of the few critics who still invokes questions of medium specificity, observes: \u201c[I]n order to sustain artistic practice, a medium must be a supporting structure, generative of a set of conventions, some of which, in assuming the medium itself as their subject, will be wholly \u2018specific\u2019 to it, thus producing an experience of their own necessity\u201d (Krauss 1999, 26). Although this criterion of \u201cnecessity\u201d may appear not only anachronistic but also, in the eyes of many, conservative (or even reactionary),[4]<\/sup><\/a> it lies at the heart of what makes Beckett\u2019s work still challenging. My claim here, then, is that not all that may be thought of after modernism is necessarily post-modernist; given that the post-modern is characterised by an omnivorous \u201cmixing of genres\u201d of which Beckett despaired.<\/p>\n

This claim can be related, for example, to an essay by Beckett on the poet Denis Devlin where he writes, with a merciless historical irony, that: \u201cArt has always been this \u2013 pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric \u2013 whatever else it may have been obliged by the \u2018social reality\u2019 to appear, but never more freely so than now, when social reality (pace <\/i>ex-comrade Radek) has severed the connection\u201d (Beckett 91). It is worth recalling, from amongst his more pithy insights addressing the cultural politics of \u201csocial reality\u201d (severing itself from art), before he too fell victim to Stalin\u2019s show trials, Radek\u2019s suggestion that Joyce\u2019s novel Ulysses<\/i> offered the reader \u201ca heap of dung, crawling with worms, photographed by a cinema apparatus through a microscope\u201d (Radek 153). For the sense to be made of the literary medium is identified here precisely with its modernist specificity \u2013 the \u201ccinema apparatus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although the appearance of \u201csocial reality\u201d is regularly invoked with respect to the drama of What Where<\/i>(together with Catastrophe <\/i>and Rough for Radio 2<\/i>), the key word in Beckett\u2019s reflection on Devlin \u2013 as for any modernist aesthetics \u2013 is \u201cless,\u201d as it points to a reality that is specific to art, as pure<\/i>interrogation, as that which is itself in question through its medium. As Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider about his stage characters (in this case Mouth in Not I<\/i>): \u201cAll I know is in the text. [The character] is purely a stage entity, part of a stage image and purveyor of a stage text. The rest is Ibsen\u201d (Harmon 283). Indeed, if there is one word that characterises Beckett\u2019s sense of the rhetoric of aesthetic autonomy it is \u2013 to say the least \u2013 \u201cless\u201d; or perhaps, more expansively, \u201clessness.\u201d (Beckett\u2019s opposition to \u201cIbsen\u201d here would allow for a rich discussion of modernist aesthetic ideas in relation to historical concepts of mise en sc\u00e8ne.) The question of mise en sc\u00e8ne (as that of medium) is not one of \u201cmore or<\/i>less,\u201d but rather of that modernist mantra that \u201cless is<\/i> more.\u201d Beckett refers precisely to \u201cthe principle that less is more\u201d (which is usually credited to Mies van der Rohe) in the writing of That Time<\/i>, anticipating objections that its proposed relation between image and word (in any possible mise en sc\u00e8ne) would be thought insufficiently \u201ctheatrical.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a> Indeed, of his own making sense (or mise en sc\u00e8ne) of What Where<\/i>, Beckett referred \u2013 with respect to the work in Stuttgart \u2013 to a \u201cprocess of elimination\u201d (Gontarski 1999, 431).<\/p>\n

IV.<\/strong><\/p>\n

How, then, does this work of elimination relate to Beckett\u2019s suggestion, concerning the play\u2019s potential mise en sc\u00e8ne, that What Where<\/i> \u201cis much more of a television play than a theatre piece\u201d? How does a \u201cpure interrogation\u201d of the what and the where of a performance emerge in Beckett\u2019s own making sense of the play for television \u2013 as an instance of resisting the reduction of one medium (the stage) to simply the content of another (the screen), not least in the aesthetic cause of what is \u201cless\u201d? After all, the interrogations and confessions in the play lack any apparent \u201csocial reality\u201d: where<\/i> the characters don\u2019t say what<\/i> remains as elusive as the play\u2019s opening and closing suggestion that its repeated interrogations occur \u201cin the present\u201d \u2013 \u201cas were we still.\u201d These potentials of time and space simultaneously associate both film and television with theatre and yet distinguish them from it; especially as the screen offers no intrinsic clues as to the embodied \u201cpresent\u201d sources of either sound or image, given that their reception in this medium is discontinuous from their production.<\/p>\n

Here the image of television (as an abstraction of its medium) is itself staged by Beckett\u2019s mise en sc\u00e8ne of his own play: that is, as questioning the enactment, or performance, of embodied experience, located in time and space. Evoked as a \u201cField of Memory\u201d (Gontarski 1999, 415 & 450), Beckett renders the question of his characters\u2019 appearances specific to the play\u2019s concept of making sense in and of a performance medium (whether the stage or the two-dimensional space of the screen). By contrast, the opening of O\u2019Donnell\u2019s Dublin film forestalls the play\u2019s own questions (of what where) by providing an overwhelming setting, distinct from that of the screen medium itself. Indeed, the huge, cinematographic stage excludes any specific question of mise en sc\u00e8ne, treating film as merely a narrative means rather than an aesthetic medium. In a revealing interview, Alan Moloney (the producer of the Dublin film project) declares that: \u201cIn the making of a film, you need to do certain things. You need to contextualise things, and create an environment that \u2013 in its purest form \u2013 Beckett\u2019s writing doesn\u2019t require\u201d (Herren 192).<\/p>\n

This unrequired requirement of contextualisation<\/i> \u2013 where the potential of mise en sc\u00e8ne is simply applied to the text rather than derived from it \u2013 is further elaborated by O\u2019Donnell, who remarks concerning the playing space in \u201cthe original play\u201d that \u201cthere is no set.\u201d While insisting that he \u201cwasn\u2019t allowed to change the text, or the staging,\u201d O\u2019Donnell here acknowledges the question of medium (as putting \u2013 or locating \u2013 the play on stage or screen) only by its negation. Paradoxically, the possibilities of time and space (as of the medium of performance) is not the least of What Where<\/i> is \u2018about\u2019 \u2013 making sense with (and of) its play between light and dark, voice and vision, memory and image \u2013 even in the possibility of and for the \u201cabuse of power\u201d (or its \u201csocial reality\u201d), for which O\u2019Donnell sees his \u201clibrary set as a metaphor\u201d (Sierz 52-3). O\u2019Donnell\u2019s anti-modernist aesthetic remains focused on an associative message or content, as though the dramaturgy inscribed in the very concept of the play was insufficient. The Dublin claim for context displaces the play\u2019s specific drama, exposing the contradictions of \u201cmaking sense\u201d through its claims to textual \u201cfidelity.\u201d (Here the question of mise en sc\u00e8ne is regulated through the extraneous demands of the Beckett estate, rather than through an engagement with the critical experiments with medium that the play proposes.) This difference is pertinently expressed by Eckhart Voigts-Virchow, for instance, when he observes that: \u201cThe real alternative that Beckett\u2019s minimalist, abstract TV vision has to offer contemporary media culture is its definition of space as a void and an absence \u2013 the denial of vision and spectacle\u201d (Voigts-Virchow 121). The pre-McLuhan view of medium \u2013 that \u201cthe message, it seemed, was the \u2018content,\u2019 as people used to ask what a painting was about<\/i>\u201d (McLuhan 14) \u2013 does not engage with the specifically aesthetic questions of resistance (in the play of its medium), which would address the very possibility of What Where<\/i>\u2019s mise en sc\u00e8ne (and, indeed, for making sense of the film version).<\/p>\n

This is particularly brought into focus, so to speak, by the way that O\u2019Donnell\u2019s film locates the voice. Paradoxically, the megaphone \u2013 which was cut in Beckett\u2019s small screen production and in the subsequent Paris stage performance (directed by Pierre Chabert, under Beckett\u2019s supervision) \u2013 becomes an index of the \u2018filmed theatre\u2019 that the Dublin project supposedly wished to avoid (which Beckett and Marin Karmitz successfully did in their collaboration on a film version of Play<\/i>). A curiously antique anomaly in an otherwise futuristic, automated environment, the suggested constant visual presence of the megaphone anchors the otherwise ambiguous coming and going, appearance and disappearance, of the characters. Here, precisely, the unasked question of medium \u2013 \u201cwe wanted to create a cinematic feel, rather than just filmed plays\u201d (as Moloney put it) \u2013 returns on an epic scale, repressing any thought of aesthetic resistance, assimilating the mise en sc\u00e8ne to the generic conventions of this \u201ccinematic feel.\u201d Any possibility of dramatic lessness is overwhelmed by adding more and more by way of the supposedly missing \u201ccontextualization\u201d (Moloney). It is as if O\u2019Donnell\u2019s understanding of the film language with which to adapt this \u201cField of Memory\u201d was learnt from James Cameron rather than Beckett himself (or still less, as I would suggest in Beckett\u2019s own case, from Wilhelm R\u00f6ntgen). In fact, Beckett\u2019s sense of the cinematic \u2013 long before he articulated this through his own adaptations \u2013 was oriented by the modernist, anti-realist montage of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, as opposed to the principles of what, in a letter to his friend Thomas McGreevy, he disparaged as \u201cindustrial film\u201d (Fehsenfeld and Overbeck 312). Where Beckett\u2019s version manifests its medium-artificiality, O\u2019Donnell\u2019s \u201cnaturalises\u201d its effects by resort to the medium\u2019s established conventions. This is the usual sleight-of-hand in which a play is presented as if making sense of the mise en sc\u00e8ne, treating the latter as simply a means (rather than a medium) for making sense of the former.<\/p>\n

V.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beckett\u2019s own mise en sc\u00e8ne, as director, of his play for the television screen, installs an ambiguity in place of the expected synchronicity of word \u2013 or rather voice \u2013 and image. This exploration of the medium specific potential of the actors\u2019 performances (in terms of the adaptability of the play from stage to screen, where the actors are not corporeally present for the audience) is undone, in principle, by O\u2019Donnell\u2019s resort to the convention of shot\/counter-shot to visually narrate the \u2018play\u2019 (or \u2018interrogation\u2019) between the different voices in his own mise en sc\u00e8ne for camera. By identifying what<\/i>and where<\/i> with an unquestioned expectation of narrative cinema editing \u2013 where dialogue is presumed to be inter, rather than intra, subjective (let alone, as it were, intra-medial) \u2013 the play is subsumed by the supposed intelligibility of the new medium. This occludes the possibility of an audience making their own sense of it, since the play has already been made sense of in terms of industrial conventions, emblematized from the start by an all too standard opening \u2018top shot.\u2019 With this typical cinematic scene setting, the question <\/i>of space (as that of memory) in the performance medium is answered before the characters can even pose it. This is a classic example of reductive mise en sc\u00e8ne, in which whatever might have been discovered by the audience at end of the play has been preempted from the beginning.<\/p>\n

Beckett\u2019s ambiguity, in the play of identity and repetition, as to whether the voices speak as, or about, the \u201cI\u201d who hears them (and who might, thereby, imagine himself to be no longer alone) is lost in the Dublin version by eliding voice and vision, memory and speech, the mental and material image, in the \u201ccontextualized\u201d presence of the actors. This becomes not so much an evocation of a \u201cField of Memory\u201d as an audition for yet another blockbuster episode in the Star Trek<\/i> franchise. The voice, being heard, is no longer the promise of an image that may or may not be seen, but, rather, the index of a narrative visibility that refuses, precisely, to adapt its potential mise en sc\u00e8ne to the particular drama in question. This is the reversal of everything that Beckett\u2019s writing for theatre tries to resist. As Martin Puchner has observed:<\/p>\n

The sequential arrangement of gestures and speech \u2013 stage direction and direct speech \u2013 is not just an accidental feature of one text but a structuring principle of many of Beckett\u2019s plays\u2026 Beckett\u2019s technique of interruption\u2026 [is] thus directed against what since Aristotle had become the purpose of drama: the representation of action. It is a strategy that uses the dramatic text against the theatre and stage directions against the integrity of actors. (Puchner 168 & 169)<\/strong><\/p>\n

This opens up the aesthetic question of what is \u2013 or is not \u2013 at stake in the example of mise en sc\u00e8ne here, as offering the paradox of the play\u2019s resistance to its potential performance, specific to a medium, in its writing for <\/i>that medium.<\/p>\n

What O\u2019Donnell describes as the \u201crestrictions\u201d of the text (Sierz 52) \u2013 upon the language of film, as a medium of and for the play\u2019s mise en sc\u00e8ne for camera \u2013 are precisely the potentials of and for its resistance to the medium of its performance that make it this<\/i> play and not simply a generic, filmable drama. In terms of a modernist critical judgment, this is what makes of Beckett\u2019s What Where<\/i> art and O\u2019Donnell\u2019s sensational and spectacular version kitsch. For between these two examples, the question of mise en sc\u00e8ne involves an aesthetic politics, in which a position needs to be taken. As Rosalind Krauss writes:<\/p>\n

If [certain examples] are not instinctively felt to be meretricious, arbitrary, and thus the simulacrum of art rather than the real thing, this is because kitsch has become the polluted atmosphere of the very culture we breathe. Their identity as kitsch derives from their feckless indifference to the idea of a medium, so long ago condemned by Greenberg\u2019s admonishment inAvant-Garde and Kitsch<\/i>. Kitsch he defines as the corruption of taste by the substitution of simulated effects for that recursive testing of the work of art against the logic of its specific conditions, a testing he named \u2018self-criticism\u2019 (Krauss 2011, 68-69)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beckett, reflecting on his last play, called this a \u201cprocess of elimination.\u201d<\/p>\n

VI.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is in terms of what Krauss identifies as \u201cboth projective and mnemonic\u201d (Krauss 1999b, 206) that the question of medium provides for an aesthetic resistance from within to the sort of mise en sc\u00e8ne produced by the corporate recycling of media that displaces the work <\/i>of both modernist cultural memory and its politics. It is precisely in this context that Thierry de Duve\u2019s acknowledgment of Greenberg (widely dismissed as \u2018outmoded\u2019; as if the concept of history that permits such a judgment were not itself in question) is significant: \u201cWhile everyone else was crying from the rooftops that the avant-garde was an anti-tradition, Greenberg saw it as the sole authentic defense of the tradition before the erosive force of kitsch\u201d (de Duve 8).[6]<\/sup><\/a> The conjunction of \u201cindustrial\u201d (pace <\/i>Beckett) with \u201ccultural\u201d (pace<\/i>Adorno) occludes the possibility of that aesthetic \u2018failure\u2019 which is a touchstone for both writers. Film, which was once emblematic of the culture industry (before the rise of digital gaming), pioneered the use of audience previews for making a \u201cfinal cut,\u201d ostensibly to protect the producer\u2019s investment from the director\u2019s vision (eloquently satirised in Godard\u2019s Le M\u00e9pris<\/i>). The model of what has already been made (and successfully sold) now feeds the cannibalism of cinema in pursuit of \u201cremakes.\u201d What Friedrich Kittler calls \u201cMcLuhan\u2019s law\u201d \u2013 \u201caccording to which the content of a medium is always another medium\u201d (Kittler 115) \u2013 becomes the means by which resistance in and to a medium (in this case Beckett\u2019s \u201cField of Memory\u201d) is not only co-opted by its adaptation to another, but even within the one medium itself. Here the relation between the \u201cprojective and mnemonic\u201d is reduced to a regressive will to forget, in which the possibility of and for cultural memory is simultaneously de-aestheticised and de-politicised in the production (and promotion) of kitsch.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, given that the power of Beckett\u2019s writing is so much bound up with its testimony to the fractured possibilities of memory within modernism (whether psychical, in the Copernican revolution against the ego, or cultural, in the contested relation to tradition), it is perhaps worth quoting another of Rosalind Krauss\u2019 appeals to the critical value of the concept of medium, as this poses both the problem and the possibility of mise en sc\u00e8ne in these examples of What Where<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The aphorism\u2026 the medium is the memory<\/i>\u2026 specifically opposes Marshall McLuhan\u2019s aphorism \u2018the medium is the message.\u2019 McLuhan exalts in the non<\/i>-specificity of the medium, its \u2018message\u2019 always referring to another, earlier medium\u2026 \u2018The medium is the memory\u2019 insists, instead, on the power of the medium to hold the efforts of the forebears of a specific genre in reserve for the present. Forgetting this reserve is the antagonist of memory\u2026 The paradigm of the medium could thus be mapped as memory versus forgetting<\/i> (Krauss 2011, 127-28).<\/strong><\/p>\n

Endnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>[1] The variant texts are available in volume IV of The Theatrical Notebooks<\/i>, a key part of what the editor, Gontarski [2006], calls \u201cgreying the [Beckett] canon\u201d through the shades of its paratexts.
\n<\/a>[2] It would be as well if the concluding paragraph from Krauss were read both at the beginning of this essay and again at the end. The Dublin film version of What Where has been widely seen at festivals and is accessible on Youtube: http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0DJp93G9TIg<\/a>, as well as on DVD. Beckett\u2019s German version is also available on a Suhrkamp DVD of his films for German television, as well as on Ubuweb: http:\/\/www.ubu.com\/film\/beckett_what.html<\/a>. (An instance of \u2018practice-as-research\u2019 that accompanies this essay can be found on Vimeo, with three versions of my own film, called Field of Memory: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/60040714<\/a>.) [All last accessed, 25.03.14.]
\n<\/a>[3] The anachronisms of Adorno\u2019s own reading of the value of autonomy and labour in conditions of late capitalism are explored, for instance, in Kerstin Stakemeier\u2019s discussion of Adorno\u2019s term \u201cdeartification\u201d (preferred to the standard translation of \u201cdeaestheticisation\u201d) (Stakemeier, 2013).
\n<\/a>[4] This is typically the case where the question of medium is reduced to one of \u2018formalism,\u2019 as (for instance) in Peter Osborne\u2019s account of the October group and of Krauss in particular (Osborne, 2013).
\n<\/a>[5] cf. Beckett\u2019s note concerning \u201cthe very edge of what was possible in the theatre,\u201d quoted by James Knowlson (Knowlson and Pilling, 219).
\n<\/a>[6] De Duve later makes an apposite comparison with Adorno (43-44) on precisely this point concerning a tradition that is a process of \u201cmore or less constant innovation\u201d (112).<\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beckett, Samuel. Disjecta<\/i>. London: Calder, 2001.<\/p>\n

Bernstein, Jay. \u201cModernism as Aesthetics and Art History.\u201d James Elkins, ed. Art History Versus Aesthetics<\/i>. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.<\/p>\n

Connor, Steven. Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text<\/i>. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988.<\/p>\n

De Duve, Thierry. Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines<\/i>. Trans. Brian Holmes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.<\/p>\n

Fehsenfeld, Martha and Lois Overbeck, eds. The <\/i>Letters of Samuel Beckett<\/i>, vol. 1 (1929-1940). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.<\/p>\n

Gontarski, Stanley. \u201cGreying the Canon: Beckett in Performance.\u201d Stanley Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann, eds. Beckett after Beckett<\/i>, Gainesville, Fl.: University of Florida Press, 2006.<\/p>\n

Gontarski, Stanley, ed. The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett<\/i>, IV (\u201cThe Shorter Plays\u201d). London: Faber and Faber, 1999.<\/p>\n

Harmon, Maurice, ed. No author better served: the correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider<\/i>. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998.<\/p>\n

Herren, Graley. Samuel Beckett\u2019s Plays on Film and Television<\/i>. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.<\/p>\n

Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800\/1900<\/i>. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.<\/p>\n

Knowlson, James and John Pilling. Frescoes of the Skull<\/i>. London: John Calder, 1979.<\/p>\n

Krauss, <\/i>Rosalind. \u201cA Voyage on the North Sea\u201d: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition<\/i>. London: Thames & Hudson, 1999.<\/p>\n

Krauss, Rosalind. \u201cReinventing the Medium.\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/i>, 25.2 (Winter 1999): 289-305.<\/p>\n

Krauss, Rosalind. Under Blue Cup<\/i>, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2011.<\/p>\n

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media<\/i>, London: Routledge, 2001 [1964].<\/p>\n

Osborne, Peter. \u201cOctober <\/i>and the Problem of Formalism.\u201d Ana\u00ebl Lejeune, et al<\/i>., eds. French Theory and American Art<\/i>, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013.<\/p>\n

Pavis, Patrice. Contemporary Mise-en-sc\u00e8ne<\/i>. Trans. Joel Anderson. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013.<\/p>\n

Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright<\/i>. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2011.<\/p>\n

Radek, Karl. \u201cContemporary World Literature and the tasks of Proletarian Art.\u201d H.G. Scott, ed. Soviet Writers\u2019 Congress, 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism<\/i>, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977 [1935]: 73-163.<\/p>\n

Sierz, Aleks, ed. Beckett on film<\/i>. London: Channel 4, 2001.<\/p>\n

Stakemeier, Kerstin, \u201cDeartification this side of art.\u201d Warren Carter, Barnaby Haran, Frederic Schwartz, eds. Renew Marxist Art History<\/i>. London: Art Books, 2013: 494-504.<\/p>\n

Voigts-Virchow, Eckhart. \u201cFace values: Beckett Inc., the camera plays and cultural liminality.\u201d Journal of Beckett Studies<\/i>, 10, 2001: 119-136.<\/p>\n

\n

\"twitchin-LSG_1241-8x6\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>*Mischa Twitchin<\/strong> is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Drama Dept., Queen Mary, University of London. His book, The Theatre of Death: the Uncanny in Mimesis<\/i>, will be published in the Performance Philosophy series by Palgrave Macmillan (2015); and examples of his own performance making can be found on Vimeo: https:\/\/vimeo.com\/user13124826\/videos<\/a>; and on his website: http:\/\/shunt.co.uk\/OLD\/mischa_twitchin\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2014 Mischa Twitchin
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
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