Negative Theatrics: Writing the Postdramatic Stage by Julia Jarcho
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Negative Theatrics: Writing the Postdramatic Stage By Julia Jarcho A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair Professor C. D. Blanton Professor Anthony J. Cascardi Spring 2013 Copyright © 2013 by Julia Jarcho All rights reserved. Negative Theatrics: Writing the Postdramatic Stage by Julia Jarcho Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Shannon Jackson, Chair “We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of text!” Antonin Artaud’s disdain still echoes in an ongoing theoretical discussion: what role, if any, should writing be understood to play in theatrical performance? Current theater scholarship, in both German postdramatic theory and American drama studies, tends to promote a paradigm wherein actual performance inherently exceeds or surpasses any text it puts to use. Despite its great appeal, this model threatens to obscure the ways writing can, so to speak, produce its own theater: both by simulating the dimensions of theatrical experience and by constituting an alternative site that undermines the totality of performance’s here-and-now. The modernist works analyzed here construct theater as a medium whose heightened exposure to the present provokes an equally heightened contestation of that present. In these texts, theatricality becomes a negative relation to the actual. More concerned with formal experimentation than with suspenseful storytelling, these works can benefit from the “postdramatic” critical framework that has developed in theater studies during the past two decades. Yet postdramatic discourse frequently identifies the postdramatic departure from storytelling with a liberation from the “dominance” of the script. Likewise, the postdramatic is often characterized as a theater where presence supplants representation. In order to challenge these assumptions, this dissertation returns to Peter Szondi’s and Bertolt Brecht’s critiques of drama. For these earlier theorists, drama itself relentlessly affirms the present; it thus becomes possible to reconceive the postdramatic as a theater that rejects presentness. Within such a theater, text acquires a heightened, not a diminished, importance. Directing us towards an “elsewhere” of poetic composition, and hence providing an intense sense of what is not present amidst performance, experimental playwriting constitutes a vital component of the postdramatic landscape. In order to conceptualize this development, I draw on Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetic theory. Although Adorno is rarely engaged as a resource for thinking about theater, his work provides a framework for understanding the written script as a negative, critical structure that resists the real-time event of performance. The first chapter of the dissertation introduces Adorno, Brecht, and Szondi as theoretical interlocutors, situating their work in relation to postdramatic discourse and the problematic status of the theater text. Having argued for a modernist theatrical tradition that is both postdramatic and highly literary, the study then traces this tradition through a series of modernist and contemporary works. A model of theater as distraction, rather than presentness, structures both the late fiction of Henry James and the landscape plays of Gertrude Stein. In 1 Waiting for Godot, this negation of the present becomes dialectical: Samuel Beckett intensifies dramatic presence to the point of exhaustion, constructing theater as the utopian desire for that which is not yet present. In the last two chapters, I show how two contemporary American playwrights have adapted this modernist legacy. Suzan-Lori Parks finds ways to construct writing as a site of performance in its own right, alternative to the presence of the stage. Mac Wellman devises a text that consistently refuses the economy of communicative transaction, figuring a yet-unimagined mode of collectivity. Through close readings of their work, “Negative Theatrics” shows how all these writers enact a profoundly critical theatrics of the page. 2 Contents Acknowledgments ii One Introduction: Writing Postdramatic Theater 1 Defining the Postdramatic 1 The Presence of the Stage: Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and Theater 9 Drama and the Present: Peter Szondi and Bertolt Brecht 14 The “Wrong Life” of Performance: Adorno and Postdramatic Theater 18 The Theatrical Text and the Postdramatic Play 1. A Note on Methodology 23 2. Postdramatic Playwri(gh)ting 24 Two “Something stranger yet”: Theatrical Distractions in Henry James and Gertrude Stein 27 I. Henry James 31 The Beast in the Sentence: Writing Theatrical Space 32 “something… had been wanted in the picture”: Disrupted Image in The Ambassadors 41 II. Gertrude Stein 45 Beyond Antitheatricality: “Plays” 47 Negativity Beyond Contradiction: Paisieu’s Differential Landscape 53 The (Dis-)continuous Present: Four Saints in Three Acts 58 Three “Gesture towards the universe”: Theater as Utopia in Waiting for Godot 63 “What is there to recognize?”: Godot and the Dramatic Present 68 “All the dead voices”: Writing and the Real 78 Utopia in Attendance 84 Towards a New Monologue: Beckett’s “scribal act” 88 Four The Promise of “Playwrighting”: Suzan-Lori Parks 97 “Watch Me Work”: Writing as (Counter-) Performance 99 Writing the Death of the Last Black Man 104 “Grave Departures”: A Postdramatic Poetics of Mourning 109 The Burnin Page 115 “Land:/HO!”: Textual Performance and Theatrical Utopia 124 Five “Small, fierce creatures”: Mac Wellman’s Auratic Theater 131 Mouthing Off: A Murder of Crows 135 In Spite of Intimacy: Aura as Phenomenological Rebellion 150 “This will kill that”: Speculations 157 Coda: Girl Gone 160 Works Cited 167 i Acknowledgments The idea for this project came from conversations I had with Mac Wellman during a semester in which I was lucky enough to study playwriting with him at Brooklyn College. I want to thank him for those conversations, and for the plays, essays, and other devilments he continues to create. They remind me better than anything why I care about theater, and writing. I have been very fortunate in my dissertation committee. I am grateful to Anthony Cascardi for his thoughtful and challenging feedback throughout this process. C. D. Blanton has been astoundingly generous with his time and perspicacity, not only during this project, but also in supervising an exam field in modernist literature that put me on the scent of these readings. Most of all, I want to thank Shannon Jackson, who has been my advisor since I started at Berkeley. Her course in Performance Theory introduced me to many of the problematics I try to engage here; she’s the reason I know the word “postdramatic,” and her patient, deeply rigorous, but always supportive responses to my work have more than once prevented me from running off to join the circus. I am also very grateful to Felipe Gutterriez, who energetically, insightfully, and generously supervised (and accompanied) me in a year-long independent study on philosophy and theater. Robert Kaufman’s seminar on Marxian Aesthetics provided me with an approach to Adorno, and studying literary theory with Barbara Spackman gave me the confidence to embark on a literary-theoretical project of my own. Soon after beginning work on this project, I attended the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research at Harvard University, where I benefitted from a dissertation workshop led by Katherine Biers and an ingenious seminar on “Theater After Film” taught by Martin Harries. Martin has continued to be tremendously helpful and kind in responding to my work and discussing his own. The Mellon program, run by Martin Puchner, has furnished me with a kind of supplementary cohort in theater studies, and I want to thank all those who have been willing to keep talking, including Shonni Enelow, Nicole Jerr, Mimmi Woisnitza, Matt Cornish, and Jacob Gallagher-Ross. I’m also grateful for the diverse briliance of my “real” cohort in Berkeley’s Rhetoric Department, and to the Department itself for bringing together such an inspiring and, well, strange group of people. I particularly want to thank Maxine Fredericksen and Marcus Norman for their administrative support of Rhetoric’s graduate students. Work on this dissertation was funded by the Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship at Berkeley, along with financial support from the Rhetoric Department. I presented small pieces of the work in progress at the Communicating Forms conference hosted by the English and Art History Departments at the University of Chicago; Performance Studies international; the Berkeley-Stanford Graduate Conference; the Modernist Studies Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association. During my time away from Berkeley, Jenna Freedman at the Barnard College library provided me with a quiet place to read and write, where coffee and snacks are allowed. Whenever this project has threatened to become lonely work, I’ve been able to turn to Zach Samalin for fellowship, advice, feedback, and the loan of books. Finally, I want to thank my mother, Fredrica Jarcho, for bringing me to the theater in the first place; and my husband, Cody Carvel, for everything I love most about this “wrong life” of ours. ii Chapter One Introduction: Writing Postdramatic Theater ESTRAGON: [gesture towards the universe] This one is enough for you? (Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot) In his 1999 book Certain