Catastrophe in the Context of Dramatic Form and Theory

ENDS AND MEANS: Catastrophe in the Context of Dramatic Form and Theory Criticism on Beckett's play, Catastrophe, has often taken note of the dramatic associations of the title. Several critics - Zeifman and McMillan, for example - have highlighted the connection between the etymological connotations of catastrophe and its theatrical associations. 1 "The Director is using the word 'catastrophe, '" writes McMillan, "partly in the every day sense of 'disaster' ( ... ). But he is also using the word in its more technical, theatrical sense, derived from its Greek roots, kata, (down), strophien (turn), to allude to the scene of classical tragedy depicting the downward turn of the protagonist's fortunes" (98). Other critics, including Libera, States, Brater, Sandberg, and Lyons, have referred at some point in their reading of the play to the theatrical connotations of catastrophe. 2 Lyons has perhaps gone furthest in reading the play in relation to the legacy of dramatic catastrophe: "The term 'catastrophe'," Lyons asserts, "has come to signify a structural part of tragedy, that dramatized moment in which the hero suffers the ultimate reversal. The literal meaning of the Greek noun, a turning up and down, held a more encompassing and less technical significance in the language of the tragic poets" (91). Though as Lyons notes, the Greek tragic poets used the term catastrophe in a variety of telling ways, Aristotle, contrary to popular opinion, did not use the term "catastrophe" in The Poetics. 3 Rather did the term enter the parlance of European drama and dramatic criticism by way of Donatus, the fourth century C.E. Roman critic, who dealt with the term both in his influential essays on drama and in his commentary on the plays of Terence. 4 Donatus outlines the four complementing divisions of a drama as folIows: The Prologue is the first speech, so called from Greek protos logos [first word or first speech] preceding the complication of the plot proper ( ... ) Protasis is the first action of the drama, where part of the story is explained, part held back to arouse suspense among the audlence. Epitasis is complication of the story, by excellence of which its elements are intertwmed. Catastrophe is the unravelling of the story, through which the outcome is demonstrated. 5 Renaissance dramatists and critics, anxious to aid the revival of drama through the ancients' sense of proper form, appropriated Donatus' notion of dramatic catastrophe. The neo-classicists did similarly. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, transmitting tradition to modern sensibility, continued to define catastrophe informed by and according to the Donatusian precepts: "The change or revolution, which produces the conclusion or final event of a dramatick piece.,,6 The opening dialogue of Beckett's play suggests that this classical notion of catastrophe, heralded by the play's title, has been significantly altered: "D: Why the plinth? A: To let the stalls see the feet. D: Why the hat? A: To help hide the face" (297).7 First feet, then face. The end of the human body, as it were, comes first, signaling areversal of ends and beginnings. Indeed, the conclusion of the play, with the "light on the head alone" (301), completes the portended reversal. But, while such an implied reversal is unsettling, Beckett's play more audaciously alters the conventional catastrophe, transforming Donatus' articulated and narrativized whole into a fragmented part. The nature of this alteration can be appreciated when contrasted with Shakespeare's similariy audacious experiment with the conventions of catastrophe in King Lear. King Lear also shifts the catastrophe from the end of the play to the beginning; by the end of Act 1, Lear recognizes he has wronged Cordelia. In shifting the catastrophe from end to beginning, Shakespeare compels his hero to endure four acts in the aftermath of the catastrophe. In essence, Shakespeare subverts the Donatusian structure, making the play one long catastrophe. 8 In his play Catastrophe, Beckett, using an inverse strategy, achieves a similar adumbration of dramatic form. As in King Lear, Beckett's play subverts the conventions of dramatic form. But while Shakespeare offers a new view of heroic suffering by inaugurating the catastrophe earlier and distending it to uncommon length, Beckett characteristically lops off the other parts of the play, leaving only the catastrophe. Both Shakespeare and Beckett in their respective plays compel the audience to face the catastrophe bereft of elements which soften the plight of the hero's suffering. Where Shakespeare's innovation is by means of expansion, however, Beckett's is by me ans of reduction. Indeed, this process of reducing a once aesthetic whole to a fragmented, rudimentary part is paralleled in Winnie's sighs in Happy Days: "One loses one's classics. (Pause.) Oh not all. (Pause.) A part. (Pause.) Apart remains. (Pause.) That is what I find so wonderful, apart remains, of one's classics, to help one through the day."9 Since the catastrophe, then, can be regarded as a part of what once was whole, one can try, as several critics have done, to retrieve the larger whole into which the part can be inserted. 10 Or one can accept that, at this point in theatrical and human history , it is only the part, the fragment itself, the unencumbered catastrophe, which is vital. While critical concern with the notion of catastrophe in the play Catastrophe has focused on the relevance to dramatic form, the term 328 .

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