Stoic Nihilism & the Beauty of Oblivion
A Meditation on Beckett’s Happy Days
by Rainer J. Hanshe
BAM, Brooklyn, NY, January 8 – February 2, 2008
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2008. Copyright © 2008 Rainer J. Hanshe and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
I have little talent for happiness.
—Samuel Beckett
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
—Emily Dickinson
. . . weak characters that have no power over themselves . . . hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned: they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
Remember too on every occasion which leads one to vexation to apply this principle: not that this is a misfortune, but that to bear it nobly is good fortune.
—Marcus Aurelius
From the extremity of his own limit, Cioran said that more than one of Beckett’s pages seemed to him like “a sort of monologue after the end of some cosmic epoch.” What they generate he elaborated is the “sensation of entering into a posthumous universe, some geography dreamed by a demon released from everything, even his own malediction.” Happy Days could be described precisely in this manner, and Cioran may have had it in mind, but whatever survives after that end apparently continues ad infinitum. World without end, Winnie announces after her opening prayer. World without end. In the midst of the loss of all sense of irony, Cioran’s vision of Beckett is the necessary antibiotic for curing those who suffer from the plague that is Winnie’s happiness, a plague that is now at rule and that has infected New York. ‘Tis one thing if Winnie be as blind to her predicament as she is ignorant of what she quotes, ‘tis another if the sight of those observing her be occluded. What to say of who directs and who incarnates her? Have they all ‘seen enough’ not to be inconvenienced by their blindness? Or have they grown so inured to nihilism and demoniacal topography that they find ‘wonderful’ even an infernal event? Or is there a refusal to countenance the event altogether?
Whether Beckett was released from malediction as a writer is arguable, and while some of the long standing interpretations of his writing are certainly ossified clichés, the abyss is there. The nihilism is incontrovertible. The dark, as Winnie the unconscious ventriloquist echoes, is eternal. For Jesus Christ sake Amen. There is no end to the black night, even in the perpetually blinding and hellish light of Happy Days. As comic as he sometimes makes the abyss, it still like the bell for Winnie gouges. Aristophanes is comic, too, but his plays sting. Whilst Beckett’s characters may provoke laughter, and whilst his plays may be humorous, the laughter let us not forget resounds in a posthumous universe where acquiring hope is as difficult as cultivating fruit from its obdurate terrain. Winnie may be optimistic, but optimism in and of itself is not positive; neither is it unequivocally admirable. “Was Epicurus” not “an optimist,” Nietzsche asked, “precisely because he was afflicted?” Even Socrates was chided for his optimism—it is unworthy of a philosopher Nietzsche thought because it is naïve. In the world of Happy Days, little to nothing grows and aside from Winnie and Willie a lone emmet is the only visible form of life, but it is ready to birth a host of other emmets that will crawl over and possibly within Winnie’s skin. That is scant cause for optimism. Formication aside, the following decade it appears will be the decade of cheery, light-hearted, and, to our misfortune, palatable Beckett. The National Theatre of Great Britain’s Happy Days, as directed by Deborah Warner and performed by Fiona Shaw, ushers in this regrettable vogue. What happened to the trouble with being born?
Warner’s and Shaw’s original intention was to stage a version of Waiting for Godot with women playing Didi and Gogo. After supposedly receiving a life sentence of exile from the Beckett Estate for their abuse of Footfalls, Warner and Shaw wanted to return not only with their impudence intact, but with even more irreverence. When still alive, Beckett consistently opposed attempts to stage Godot with women. To Estelle Parsons’ and Shelley Winters’ request, Beckett’s answer was resolute: “definitely NO.” Recently, the castle that is Beckett received a defeat. A new dawn it seems has broken in Italy, a precedent set, perhaps, for the world. With the Pontadera Theatre’s victory over the Beckett Estate, which issued a cease and desist to the theater because their performance of Godot featured women in the central roles, Warner and Shaw perhaps thought victory would be quick to come. After the Ponatadera’s triumph, one of few victories against the Beckett Estate, the theatre company’s lawyer, Maurizio Fritelli, spoke of the decision as a victory for civil liberties. “The sentence,” he said, “is valuable” for it “reiterates that men and women have equal rights.” Linda Ben-Zvi argued in Women in Beckett that “to ignore the roles of women, or of men, is to fall prey to an acceptance of the very stereotypes and limits the work reveal.” Is there not a gross confusion of categories here? Fritelli’s statement is simply baffling, for the matter has nothing to do with equal rights. If a man wanted to play Winnie or the unnamed woman and voice of Rockaby, Beckett surely would have refused, as is easily attestable his estate now would. Ben-Zvi is also royally perplexed. In refusing to permit the alteration of the gender of his characters, there is no approval of stereotypes and no acquiescence to limits. There can be no stereotypes in Beckett’s plays for they do not even contain types. In his universe, types have been obliterated. What remains is something else entirely, something like a Giacometti sculpture. There is nothing more honed. What perchance is left is the wheat of humanity. Nothing more. It is a condensation of being.
If there are limits in Beckett’s plays they are not limits in the ordinary sense; as Cioran realized, Beckett “reached the limit,” that is, he reached an extreme threshold. He begins there in fact, “at the impossible, at the exceptional, at the impasse.” It is “limit-situation as point of departure, the end as advent!” It is this Cioran explained “which accounts for the feeling that that world of his, though always tottering on the verge of death, may continue indefinitely, whereas ours will soon disappear.” Cioran’s use of the word advent is not arbitrary; Beckett’s work is a movement towards a different kind of consciousness altogether. It is the arrival of something unprecedented. Death’s dreadful advent is the mark of man, and Beckett chronicles that event poetically.
“I want,” he said, “to bring poetry into drama, a poetry which has been through the void and makes a new start in a new room-space. I think in new dimensions and basically am not very worried about whether I can be followed.”
Poetry of the void, stressed to a threshold. There are no other limits in Beckett’s work. Ben-Zvi’s viewpoint is the prototypical ‘postmodern’ one, which in the wiliest manner struggles to engineer what is a question of artistic vision into one of ethics and rights. What is at stake actually has nothing to do with either, and Beckett’s work will not suffer such politically correct tyranny. Or we should not permit it to. It is architecture that is in question; architecture and nothing less substantive. Changing the gender of a character is like changing the instrumentation of Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring. No more would it be Stravinsky’s composition. This is a matter of vision, of refusing to permit the gross deformation of an artwork. It is to respect structural design, for to alter that structure is to deform the entire building; if one intends on committing such atrocities, and that’s what they are, one should simply create one’s own work. Why abuse the masterpieces of others? What is spoken of as creative freedom is a masquerade for ineptitude. The guise is hollow; stuffed; filled with straw. Alas! Ireland is not Rome, nor is Britain, and the Beckett Estate, admirably, is not a donkey. It knows, as Zarathustra advised, how to say NO, which is a rare event in this permissible epoch where ‘nothing is true.’ Warner and Shaw’s request was swiftly rejected, no struggle ensued, and in its stead, to the horror of both Warner and Shaw, the Beckett Estate suggested they perform Happy Days. Was this not a ‘punishment’ as brutish as Winnie’s? To others, rare is the honor of performing such a consummate work. Billie Whitelaw relished the play, even with Beckett directing her with a metronome, but the stage directions made Ms. Shaw’s “blood boil.” In it would be no room for histrionics, no room for spectacle. ‘Freedom’ would be restricted. To Whitelaw, all of the elements of the play “flowed absolutely like perpetual mobile,” whereas Shaw found Beckett’s directions akin to “linguistic fascism.” In the end, Warner and Shaw of course settled on Happy Days. If Winnie could live with her predicament, they it seems, to a degree, could live with Beckett’s ‘despotism.’ It is all a matter of what one sings as one suffers, or what one chooses as an antidote to alleviate nihilism during intermission because one wishes to luxuriate in subpar antics.
If as Ben-Zvi believes there are stereotypes in Beckett’s plays, Winnie may perhaps be the prime example of one. Shaw said she was always biased against the play precisely because she felt Winnie to be “some fifties housewife,” and Warner echoed Shaw’s vision of Winnie but more critically, focusing on audience reception. “I don’t think 1950s housewives do it for us anymore. We don’t know many of them.” Yet, do that many “1950s housewives” carry handguns and quote Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Gray, and, to name one more amongst the swarm of other ghosts in Winnie’s unconscious, Sir Robert Burton? A large number of housewives clearly can’t parrot Sir Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Alone, that is a unique feat. Whatever the case, is it not permissible for Beckett to portray such a woman’s life? If anything, the prejudice seems to lie in their minds and not Beckett’s. Since according to them Winnie is so alien to “us” she was based instead on a successful London publisher, which is who Shaw said she could relate to. “She isn’t Winnie,” Shaw confessed, “but she is who Winnie would like to be.” In locating her in “the positive, it places her in the center of a universe that is much larger than just suburban Dublin.” If suburban Dublin is Winnie’s world, must it be other? Since Elsinore is alien to most, Hamlet by the same logic should be set in SoHo. All this is highly suspect. When Bruno Ganz portrayed Hitler in Downfall, he didn’t make him friendlier or locate him more in “the positive” because he couldn’t relate to him. And while 1950s housewives may be something of an anomaly, if that’s what Winnie is, does Warner, to pursue her logic further, know any princes and kings? Since most of us don’t, what to do with Hamlet and Lear? They are surely more rarefied than housewives, but only a pedestrian director would be myopic enough to search for contemporary corollaries to them. That we have such pedestrian directors doesn’t validate the decision; it only confirms the mediocrity and the limits of the compass of our artists. What is the necessity to contemporize but an obsession with one’s own epoch; a tedious desire to be perpetually up to date, and a lack of interest in everything but what one can directly relate to. What of what is alien to us? What of the untimely? And what of fidelity to an artist’s vision? Put lipstick on Hamlet, make him a transvestite, stage it in a disco; make the battle between the Montagues and the Capulets a battle between Ian Schrager and Donald Trump; turn Macbeth into the CEO of a high profile stock and bonds company. What such directors would give us is not and never Shakespeare, but the paucity of their own imaginations. Here the lack of mythic orientation in our culture is painfully evident. In the act of transposing the mythic or archetypal into the quotidian, or replacing such with quotidian realities, there is a contemporary echo of Euripides’ desacralization of tragedy, which Nietzsche diagnosed as instigating its death. Beckett, like Shakespeare, is akin to the Promethean tragic poets, but such directors want to replace what is ‘mythic’ in them with the “faithful mask of reality,” revealing what Nietzsche called ‘the deviant nature of their tendencies.’ Instead of ascending to the heights of what they engage with, they reduce what is monumental to their own circumscribed perspective, flattening it, literalizing what is figurative, making obvious what through allusion is more perpetually productive of thought. When this occurs, and it occurs all too often in this decadent era, it is only a temporary flattening, and it is under the mark of whatever fashionable director’s or actor’s name. The work is never truly flattened, only diluted momentarily, or within the sphere of a specific vision. For the height to which such work can rise is clear in the hands of real artists, of artists who justly deserve the nomenclature. Fellini was wise enough to call his Petronius Fellini’s Satyricon. Is Hamlet as inept as Ethan Hawke makes him in Almereyda’s modernization of the play? Encounter Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet in Kozintsev’s 1964 inimitable film and encounter Hamlet for what Hamlet can be and what we are persuaded Hamlet possibly is. When genius meets genius the light of the aurora borealis dawns on us, or we see the sun ascend into the sky as if for its very first time. That is awe, not imitation, and that is what Beckett demands too and what we should demand of our interpreters of Beckett.
To all of these middling directors and actors however, Beckett is constricting. If they were to perform Beethoven’s 5th, they would want to change the key of the symphony ‘just to hear what it would sound like.’ It would be ‘an interesting experiment.’ At this point, experimentation is resorted to or relied on out of lack of aesthetic muscle. Of the numerous recordings that exist of Beethoven’s late string quartets, Edward Beckett, who performs frequently as a flautist, noted that “every interpretation is different, one from the next, but they are all based on the same notes, tonalities, dynamic and tempo markings. We feel justified in asking the same measure of respect for Samuel Beckett’s plays.” For those who refuse such respect, in their desire to infect Beckett’s work with novelties or alter it according to whims not in harmony with the play, what they reveal is not the limits of his work, but the limits of their own vision and of what they become when they are confronted with boundaries. It is easy to be ‘creative’ when given every license but rarely does this result in something so singular. The true test of a creator’s abilities is in the measure against a boundary. “To ‘give style’ to one’s character,” Nietzsche says,
is a grand and a rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fashion them into an artistic plan, until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye. [. . .] In the end, when the work has been completed, it is revealed how the constraint of a single taste organized and formed everything large and small. Whether the taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
It will be the strong and imperious natures that experience the most refined joy in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own . . . It is the reverse with weak characters that have no power over themselves, and hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned: they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. . . Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is ever ready to avenge himself on that account: we others will be his victims, if only in having always to endure his ugly aspect. For the aspect of the ugly makes one bad and gloomy.
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science
The directors and actors who meet with the boundaries that Beckett demarcated in his work hardly seem to be in possession of dimensions so expansive that he truly suffocates their potentialities. With the National Gate’s production of Happy Days, what is revealed is precisely a weakness; the work is indicative of characters that lack power over themselves and “hate the constraint of style.” To Warner and Shaw, Beckett’s constraints are demeaning, and before them they become slaves, albeit rebellious ones, and we are their victims. To circumvent Beckett’s constraints, and to circumvent the abyss of Beckett’s world, Happy Days has been made into a comedy. The main quote on the BAM flyer, which is from the Daily Telegraph, is indicative of the approach to the play; the largest and boldest statement on the flyer is that the play is “wonderfully funny.” Warner’s comment that her mood after the play is “up!” and that Happy Days is “very, very funny” further reinforces their attenuation of the play through ignoring the abyss in which it occurs. It also reveals their unabashed appeal to the masses and their desire to make Beckett as inviting as Neil Simon, which most of the press has blindly seconded. Aesthetic integrity is of little importance, but comfort, entertainment, and ceaseless pleasure are the ruling lords. To this promiscuous age, Beckett’s aesthetic principles are not discernible for what they truly are—noble. To be an artist to most today means to be able to ‘do whatever one wants’; that however is not freedom, but a mode of dissipation and decadence. Granted, there are funny moments throughout Happy Days, but when it is geared in its entirety to producing them and making of Winnie’s optimism something inherently positive, the truly funny moments lose their effectiveness and the terrifying optimism is wholly emptied of its irony. The humor is there, but so is the darkness, and that, Mr. Watson, is elementary. There is a clear difference between heroism and obstinacy, tenaciousness and courage, nobility and dumb resistance. In Winnie’s optimism there is blindness and lack of perception; a naïveté that reveals an inability or refusal to confront reality. No matter how many times she polishes her spectacles, she will never be able to see, just as she can hardly read the letters on her toothbrush. Beckett emphasizes the occlusion of Winnie’s sight with real force through her oxen persistence while the blazing light in which she resides is as bright as she is blind. To leave the play happy as many say they do is to be insensate to its reality, and, in part, the problem resides in the approach to the whole production.
Originally produced in New York City and directed by Alan Schneider in 1961, Beckett’s Happy Days has received several incarnations in New York, including the 1998 Mabou Mines production directed by Robert Woodruff and featuring Ruth Maleczech. The National Gate Theatre of Great Britain production directed by Deborah Warner premiered at the Lyttelton Theatre and played from January 18 – March 1, 2007. Recently it was at the Kennedy Center in Washington and will run from January 8 – February 2, 2008 at BAM‘s Harvey Theater in Brooklyn. Aside from Fiona Shaw, it features Tim Potter as an explicitly onanistic Willie, with Potter ably conveying Willie’s enervated state. The sound score by Mel Mercier captured the tonality and temper of Beckett’s play more than any other element in the production. The initial moment is arresting, for one feels as if one has entered what Cioran called a posthumous universe. The faint scent of dirt and smoke evoke the demoniacal topography of the play, awakening one’s other senses, preparing one for its cruel reality. Yet the infernal or sublime quality Mercier’s music invokes is quickly dispelled for literalness. Beckett describes the scenario of Happy Days as an “expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound. Gentle slopes down to front and either side of stage. [. . .] Maximum of simplicity and symmetry.” A low mound with gentle slopes was far from at hand, let alone maximum simplicity and symmetry, thus eliminating the tension between the reality of the play and its landscape. In its wake, after the thin white curtain that conceals Winnie falls to the ground and is whisked away, the spectators are presented with what resembled an industrial lot broken up by an earthquake. Subtlety it was immediately clear was not to be expected for the rest of the production, and it was not.
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