Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art

Reading as Theatre: Understanding Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art . H. PORTER ABBOTT "The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another." (Proust') To borrow an understatement from Charles R. Lyons, " the recited discourses in Beckett's late stage plays overpower the dramatised action." Expecting to see a play, we hear fragments of a story. The inversion of genre expectations is so insistent that part of the experience one undergoes is a genre question: Is this theatre or is it (again to use Lyons's words), "prose fiction enclosed in a theatrical conceit?'" One object of this essay is to make the case that this development in Beckett's work for the stage rests on the insight that reading itself is theatrical. But my principal object is to enlarge our understanding of what motivates Beckett's way of making strange - of which the reading /theatre fusion of the late plays is a highly characteristic example - and to suggest terms in which to frame that understanding. I shall focus on Beckett's play about reading, Ohio Impromptu. I A LITERARY CONVENTION TURNS INSIDE OUT In the nineteenth-century novel, the use of an evening at the theatre as an occasion for mapping social relations received its richest development. From Balzac to Proust, novelists repeatedly bring us to a theatre and there direct our attention not so much to what is happening on stage as to what is happening in the audience. The device had great utility. As a visual representation of society. the theatre scene exceeded most novelistic venues (weddings, funerals, banquets, balls, salons, Sunday promenades) in its capacity to gather representative types into a single place, sufficiently compact 6 H. PORTER ABBOTT to be commanded by the eye. In the theatre of the nineteenth-century audience, one could observe both the comparative elevation of these types and the chemistry of their interchange. In Balzac's Pere Goriot, when Eugene de Rastignac escorts Mme de Beauseant to Les ftaliens, the reader can join him in observing the sociology of love and money as the Count d'Ajuda Pinto momentarily abandons the box of the wealthy Rochefides for that of his old lover. At the same time, the reader can observe the obscure Rastignac insert himself into the devolving drama of a banker's wife and the Count de Marsay. The device worked well in rendering a society for which identity was conceived in terms of visual spectacle - in theatrical terms of place, role, costume and convention - while its value was proportionally heightened when the nature and meaning of those terms were placed under exceptional pressure, as they were throughout the nineteenth century. It was the fluidity and loopholes and general slippage of the social terms of place, role, and convention that gave the keenest fascination to what was going on in the theatre audience. For the readership, a great deal was at stake in this slippage. It is not surprising, then, that the finest and most elaborate example of this device - the twenty-five pages Proust devotes to an evening at the Opera that opens the third volume of A La recherche du temps perdu - appeared in a work devoted to the waning years of the society that made it possible. Proust's brilliant scene anticipates and counterbalances the chaotic postwar milieu that Marcel observeS many years later in the Guermantes's drawing room during the closing pages of A La recherche. In his autobiography, Sartre drew on the same topological tradition to express his own understanding of the gulf between pre- and post-war social self-awareness when he juxtaposed two theatre audiences: that of nineteenth-century drama and that of twentiethcentury cinema. Where the nineteenth-century bourgeois turned from the stage to see what he could take to be a coherent and reassuring image of society, the twentieth-century movie-goer awoke from the film to a world without form: Where was I? In a school? In an official building? Not the slightest ornament: rows of flap-seats beneath which could be seen their springs, walls smeared...