Ways of Seeing as Ways of Being: Perception as Affect in Modernist-Influenced Theatre
By some accounts, the aim of all good theatre – and all good art in general – ought to be the reflection of reality as it really is, or at least as close an approximation of reality as can be achieved in the realm of fiction. Practitioners of surrealism, fantasy, science-fiction, and absurdist theatre would surely disagree. Though even when adopting a distinctly anti-realist form of storytelling, one can’t help but come close to some kind of reality, as surreal and fantastic happenings or imaginings are just as much a part of lived human experience as conventional realist drama. In terms of how an audience is made to perceive the mini-world of the play, an “unreal” drama may feel more true-to-life than a typical example of the realist genre.
The first thing any playwright must start with, whether their aim is realism or not, is the nature of the reality they are attempting to depict on stage. We live, and have lived for most of civilisation’s history, in societies which can safely be described as hierarchical in their social structures. Hierarchical in relations of class, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability versus disability, among countless others.
In most plays, from Aristophanes to Shakespeare to Chekov, certain hierarchies are deemed to not only be natural, but positive. Other forms of hierarchy are challenged with a view to replacing them with more legitimate forms of rulership – like MacDuff’s defeat of MacBeth’s cruel Kingship and its replacement by his own presumably righteous reign. It’s only really when we get to the naturalist and Modernist eras of drama that we begin to see hierarchy as such challenged as a concept, with no form of authority being sacred and unfit for scrutiny. (1)
Hierarchies, of course, are all about power. Their forms are dependent upon who wields the most power and over whom – men (as a group) over women, whites over non-whites, heteronormative lives over LGBT+ lives, and so on. So in that sense we can divide hierarchies into the empowered group on top and the disempowered group on the bottom. Though hierarchies are never entirely one-way relationships in which the empowered has everything and the disempowered has nothing. As GWF Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic illustrates, being the empowered party in a hierarchy also involves a certain passivity, while the disempowered has a sort of agency and self-directedness which comes from having someone else dependent on their works. (2)
While examining the landscapes of power depicted in theatrical plays is a fascinating method of analysis in itself, in this essay I’d like to try viewing drama from a related, albeit distinct, point of view.
Anthropologist David Graeber puts a spin on the Hegelian master-slave dialectic by proposing an alternative “bully-victim dialectic” as a foundational structure of domination. Unlike the master-slave dialectic, the relation between bully and victim has three components instead of two: the bully, the victim, and an audience. The “audience” may be a literal audience (as is the case in much schoolyard bullying), a deity one or both of them believe in, a conception of moral right, or even just the norms of society as internalised by both parties. Both bully and victim compete for legitimacy and sympathy from their real or abstracted “audience” as well as from each other. (3)
In the context of watching a play, this takes the form of a literal audience, who watch various characters and forces compete with each other for our sympathy. As the following three Modernist or Modernist-inspired plays – Waiting for Godot, The Homecoming, Blasted – all entail various forms of bullying and critiques of established hierarchies, they make interesting subjects to examine using this bully-victim dialectic as a hermeneutic (method of seeing and interpreting).
All three plays start out as more-or-less realistic, before gradually evolving into surrealism; or, at the very least, they get very “weird”. All three plays also explore, in various ways, the trappings of what in feminist thought is called toxic masculinity.
For those reasons, this essay will seek to explore different ways of seeing as they are presented to the audience in terms of how we are made to view hierarchies, masculinity, and the dynamics of bullying and victimisation as means of relating to the world.
Getting an audience to view their reality in a different way is not just an offer of an alternative worldview, it is a provocation to see and act upon the world in an alternative fashion from whatever is proscribed by the dominant ideas, mores, and conventions of the society the play is written in. In this respect, the Modernist legacy is less a way of seeing in itself, and more a catalyst for generating different ways of seeing in the prospective audience.
Waiting for Godot
The archetypal form of a story-with-a-moral is the classic Aesop’s Fable. Each one of these short tales was constructed so as to impart a specific message to the audience. Each one is also an excellent example of narrative and story-construction boiled down to their most essential components, including nothing except what is necessary to (a) establish/develop the characters and describe the story, and (b) set up and impart the specific moral.
Everything about Modernist theatre is set up as a negation of the Aesop form of storytelling. Narrative minimalism is traded for aesthetic minimalism, clearly-defined characters for ambiguous ones, and obvious morals with moral ambiguity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The play involves two men, usually portrayed as tramps, waiting in a barren location for a man named Godot, who never arrives. Throughout the course of the story, its main characters, the philosophical Vladimir and world-weary Estragon, ramble to each other about various topics, perform a few vaudeville-style comedy routines, encounter the pompous gentleman Pozzo and his slave Lucky, and are visited by two boys (or perhaps the same boy twice) who informs them that while Godot isn’t coming today, he will surely come tomorrow.
Aside from that, not much actually happens. Yet so much has been inferred from Godot that it has literally filled volumes.
In terms of the bully-victim dialectic, it is clearly visible in the way Pozzo treats his slave Lucky. He behaves appallingly towards him, constantly lambasting him with physical and psychological abuse. Lucky tries to be a good slave in the hope Pozzo won’t sell him at the market (or so Pozzo claims), the very picture of submissiveness. Yet Pozzo in turn claims that he got all of his intelligence and learning from Lucky as a young man. This, along with Lucky’s verbose speech and the suffering it inflicts on his master, indicates that Lucky still has a sort of power over Pozzo. And in the second act, when Pozzo goes blind and is rendered helpless, it is (still unsold) Lucky who is arguably the more empowered party in the relationship.
Beckett is regarded as the Modernist playwright par excellence, reshaping the dramatic form so as to fit different kinds of content within its bounds. In contrast to political playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht, who used the convention-busting tools of minimalism and the absurd to get audiences to contemplate more about what was happening on stage – as opposed to experiencing the drama on a purely emotional level – Beckett, although of the same ilk as Brecht and using many of he same tropes, appears to be doing the opposite in Godot. He seems to want his audience to think less and just go with whatever happens to manifest itself on the stage.
While Brecht, being a committed Marxist, obviously had a certain political agenda when writing his plays, he doesn’t want his audience to be spoonfed Marxist beliefs and have the need for full communism be the moral at the end of each story. Though he quite clearly hoped they would end up coming to conclusions close to his own through their own efforts of interpretation.
Beckett however makes us think in the same way as a Brecht play like Mother Courage or The Caucasian Chalk Circle, but without any kind of interpretive trajectory. We are made to see the world of the play in an almost Zen-like manner, letting go of deep analysis and going with the flow of the action wherever it may take us.
While much analysis has been done on Godot and many questions asked of it – Who is Godot? Why are Didi and Gogo waiting for him? Why does Potzo go blind? Where are they? – Beckett himself resisted analysis and seemed to regard it as an imposition upon the play’s text rather than an attempt to discover what lay hidden within it.
For example, a popular interpretation of Godot is that the play is about various souls wandering around purgatory, stuck in spatial and temporal limbo, with Godot himself being God.
It’s worth pointing out that Beckett himself denied that Godot was meant to be God, though an author’s own word need not be taken as the final word on any given text’s meaning. Even then, however, viewing the slipstream world of Godot simply as purgatory is somewhat limiting. Viewing the play with purgatory in mind is interesting, but almost makes it too easy. So many things suddenly fit into place and make sense when they’re not supposed to fit into place or make sense.
Power can be roughly defined as placing constraints of some kind on lived reality – whether over things, over other people, or on ourselves – in which case, the play resists having our power exerted over it, constraining its meaning, while its mystique and interpretative difficultly gives it a certain power over its audience, constraining our expectations of what a play ought to do with itself. It does however get its audience to contemplate power through the exchanges between Pozzo and Lucky, and arguably between the illusive Godot and those subject to his unseen influence – the boy and our two leads. We are made to see the salience of power as both direct abuse, and as an unseen force swaying our actions.
The Homecoming
While Waiting for Godot deals with issues of power through an obvious bully and victim – Pozzo and Lucky – and a less obvious bully and victim – Godot and the main characters – Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming deals with bully/victim relations in a far more complex and deliberately ambiguous way.
The story concerns the home visit of an English man and English woman who return to the former’s family and the various disturbed happenings which occur under their roof. While, unlike Godot, the play at least has a clear spatial and temporal rootedness in North London during the 1960s, in many ways it is even more disjointed and unsettling in the activities it depicts.
Everyone speaks in ways which suggest that more is going on between the characters, in terms of their histories and secrets, than is revealed to the audience, yet we are only left to guess what may truly be going on to motivate the family members to act so contemptuously towards each other and to lead Ruth, the story’s central figure, to take the surprising decision of leaving her husband and family in America to become a prostitute in London.
There are hints of possible sexual abuse by Max upon his children, or at least Lenny, who goads Max about loving tucking in his children and giving them baths, before eventually confronting him about “that particular night. The night that you had me”; though still, nothing is ever given to us at face value.
Pinter depicts a world of men all incessantly bullying each other yet rarely conceding to being victims. Lenny’s passive-aggressive interactions with his father Max, and Max’s openly aggressive relationship with his brother Sam, are all tinged with hostility. This underpins what, on the surface, appears to be a perfectly respectable upper-working-class or lower-middle-class environment. Throughout the play’s narrative, that respectability is gradually stripped away and gives way to unexplained weirdness, leading many viewers to wonder what on Earth could be going on when Max’s sons begin having sex with Ruth right in front of her husband Teddy’s eyes.
Lenny’s initial attempts at covertly bullying Ruth during their first encounter abruptly shifts midway through, as Ruth unsettles the (implied pimp) Lenny, showing that she is the one who truly wields power in the relationship. This remains the case throughout the play, leading us to ask towards the conclusion: Is the ending of Homecoming a case of Ruth succumbing to male power, or triumphing over it? She is clearly unhappy and feels unfree with Teddy and traditional family life in America. Does she now have more power and agency as a person after becoming a literal prostitute in London?
Everything about these plays seems almost deliberately designed to annoy the viewer. They invoke the audience to try to interpret what’s going on while at the same time resisting interpretation. You could almost compare the experience of watching to a Chinese finger trap, where tugging harder (interpreting) only makes it tighter.
The Homecoming in particular gets us to see the dynamics of gender relations and traditional family structures as being a mess of contradictions and occluded power relations, usually containing a dark undercurrent just under a respectable surface.
Blasted
The late Sarah Kane’s Blasted restores the spatial-temporal ambiguity of abstract Modernist works like Beckett’s Godot, but with the element of social critique found in work’s like Pinter’s. When first released, it was lambasted as trashy and setting out to shock audiences for the sake of shock. It was only as time went on that critics realised the play’s shock-value was not an end-in-itself, like many entries in the “torture porn” subgenre of horror movies (from the Saw franchise to Tokyo Gore Police), but a means-to-an end: getting a disaffected 1990s audience to wake up to the ignored macro-level world of war, and to its roots in the micro-level world of gendered, racialised, and sexualised oppression.
The play takes place in a hotel room in an unspecified location (possibly the Balkans during ethnic cleansing) where a journalist named Ian repeatedly abuses and rapes a child-like woman called Cate, spouting all kinds of violent, misogynistic, racist, and homophobic bile. Later, a bomb partially destroys the room, turning the set into a landscape of wreckage, followed by an unnamed soldier entering and verbally torturing Ian before anally raping him and sucking his eyes out.
While Kane does include extreme imagery and actions which defy just about every standard of theatrical good taste – rape, murder, race-hatred, misogyny, and, finally, baby-eating – all of these serve a purpose. They try to “wake up” the viewer to the connections that exist between the small-scale bullying and victimisation that exists between people and the larger scale bullying of entire states and nations towards others.
Ian’s bullying of Clare is flipped on its head as he becomes the victim of bullying by the unnamed Balkan soldier in a later sequence. At the beginning of the play, Ian seems like an archetypal alpha male; even a stereotypical alpha male – violent, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and a rapist. Ian is placed in Cate’s position as a woman – the archetypal figure of sexual abuse – because, being raped by another man, he knows personally what it’s like to be in the erotic presence of a figure with the physical capability to overpower him.
Looking at the unities which link all three of these plays, they each use unconventional techniques of dramaturgy, narrative, and subject matter to detach their audiences from reigning conceptions of how the world works and get them to see the power relations which structure the world’s operations under the surface. Though they each set about accomplishing this aim in different ways. Beckett achieves detachment through abstraction, Pinter through unsettling, and Kane’s in-yer-face theatre through shocking the audience into asking uncomfortable questions.
Why is it that killing people makes you more of a man, but loving people makes you less of a man? Actions involving care, compassion, and kindness are coded as feminine in almost all world cultures. Even expressing a variety of emotions, from sadness to exuberant joy, carries feminine connotations. Just about the only emotion universally coded as masculine is anger, especially violent anger. Ian comes across almost like a parody of toxic masculinity, Cate a parody of weak femininity, and the soldier as the embodiment of everything that defines Ian, as a man, taken to absurd extremes. The soldier almost seems like Ian’s own destructive psyche made flesh and then turned in on itself. He is so driven by stereotypically masculine concerns as vengeance, violence, and domination that he becomes utterly dehumanised.
Certainly wars have a history of being depicted as glorious and heroic. Tales of daring and of overcoming adversity for a presumably just cause. Though often the cause itself seems immaterial. The war spirit itself is what’s venerated rather than it being depicted as a positive means to a greater end – the just cause. Everything glorious about war is inverted and subverted in Blasted. All we see is the destructive and dehumanising aspects of conflict.
While Godot gives us bullying as an unseen force shaping human actions, and Homecoming as the occluded matrix of traditional family relations, Blasted makes us see the bully-victim dialectic as the primordial form of human interaction, and especially as the root of hierarchical gender relations. It also seems to impel the audience towards an eerie conclusion: Is war the logical (macro-level) extension of everything that defines masculinity?
Conclusion
Changing one’s perception of the world is not enough to change the world itself. Brecht, being a Marxist, would likely agree, contrasting perceptions alone as “superstructural” relative to the real forces of change in society’s economic and material “base”. Though as other Marxists, and perhaps Brecht himself by some accounts, might have it, ideas and affects themselves have a material force to change the world in a variety of ways, by changing the ways in which people relate to, and act upon, social reality. (4) In some iterations of historical materialism, the material base itself is not defined narrowly as “technology + economics”, but as everything human beings do to produce and reproduce the social realm around them.
And if power (-to as well as -over) is defined as the ability to place constraints upon something and affect the subject of constraint, then ways of seeing are certainly a power in the hands of both the playwright trying to make the audience see in a particular way, as well as in the hands of the audience themselves in terms of how they respond to that provocation.
Each play provides a brief look into the author’s way of seeing the world, which then clashes with the ways of seeing the audience bring to the theatre, with the result being a synthesis of the author’s and viewer’s personal imaginaries; a new way of seeing emerges from the tension between message and interpretation, in the interplay between “text” and “reader”. (5)
In seeking to change people’s perceptions of the world, Modernist theatre and its legacy largely succeeded in uprooting many of the more conventional ways of responding to theatre as well as the social reality theatre wishes to reflect on. Beckett, Pinter, and Kane understood that changing the form also means changing the content.
Which isn’t necessarily to say that they managed to depict reality in a more “real” sense than the theatrical traditions which came before it. On the contrary, as can be seen from these three plays alone, surrealism is as salient a feature as realism. Dialogue that sounds lifted off the streets shares the same stage as bizarre character actions, absurdly ambiguous feelings of time and place, and an overall distorted picture of the world.
However, a case could be made that all of the above are just a different kind of realism which the author’s force us to engage with. If realism means complete sentences, unambiguous motivations and behaviour, and coherent flowing narratives, then most of real life is decidedly unrealistic. As Brecht claimed in defence of his minimalist staging and unconventional dramaturgy, if we tried to be realists in the 19th century sense, we wouldn’t be realists for the here and now. He felt the distorted happenings of his plays were a more accurate picture of the increasingly distorted present of the early to mid 20th century.
Perhaps depicting reality in any fictional medium is impossible. In filmmaking, Stanley Kubrick once claimed that cinema didn’t involve photographing reality, but photographing the photograph of reality.
Though as Herbert Read argued, there is no one right way of doing art, only different methods for achieving different kinds of affects in one’s audience. (6) The same may be true of Modernist theatre. The difference in its unsettling approach is that it enables us to see the networks of power which permeate everyday existence, and perhaps how to better respond to them.
References
1. Eagleton, Terry – Ideology of the Aesthetic, Routledge, 1990
2. Singer, Peter – Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2001
3. Graeber, David – The Bully’s Pulpit, The Baffler, 2015 http://thebaffler.com/salvos/bullys-pulpit
4. Althusser, Louis – On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Verso, 2014
5. Cohn, Jesse – Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, digital edition, 2006 https://www.academia.edu/233029/Anarchism_and_the_Crisis_of_Representation_Hermeneutics_Aesthetics_Politics
6. Read, Herbert – To Hell With Culture, Routledge, 1963