Sozita Goudouna’s Beckett’s Breath: ­Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts review by William Hutchings

Sozita Goudouna. Beckett’s Breath: ­Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts

By William Hutchings p183

Malarcher, Jay (editor), The Comparative Drama Conference Series #15, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2018. ISBN-13: 9781476670379

Floccinaucinihilipilification — the longest non-technical/ non-medical word in the original edition of the Oxford English Dictionary — is the act of deeming something as worthless, usually because it is small, slight, short in duration, or seems insignificant. Though coined in 1741, its most specific application ever occurs in discussions of Samuel Beckett’s “dramaticule” titled Breath, which is not only the world’s shortest play but also the culmination of Beckett’s long list of remarkable literary excisions, each a substraction of seemingly indispensable elements of a “well-made” play or novel.

Breath, however, surpasses all other Beckett works in the radicaleness of its substractions: the play (or “dramaticule”) lasts a mere but precisely timed thirty-five seconds on the stage. The entire text consists of only 120 words and numerals on the final page of First Love and Other Shorts; fifty of the words are stage directions. The curtain rises onto a silent, dimply lit stage that is strewn with rubbish, non of which is vertical. Given modern computer technology, the play could even run itself with no human involvement at all once it is properly programmed (light! soundtrack! curtain!) and automatically begin at starting time. After an initial pause lasting about five seconds, the audience hears the following sequence of recorded sounds: a newborn baby’s first cry, followed immediately by someone taking in a deep breath for ten seconds, then there is a five second pause, followed by ten seconds of exhalation and the baby’s cry again; then the silence is repeated for about five seconds, after which the curtain closes. The only visual effect is that the light starts at a three on a ten-point scale, rises with the inhalation and pause to a six, and then returns to a three during the exhalation. Curtain. The end. At its French premiere, covered by “Dateline” on NBC News the play was repeated twice more at five-minute intervals, for those who wanted to relive the experience or who perhaps came late.

So, you may well ask, how exactly did Sozita Goudouna manage to write Beckett’s Breath: Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts, a 218-page book with a somewhat small type font? Surely this is the most ever said about the least in the entire history of literary criticism. Quite lucidly, the author’s thesis positions Breath exactly within the traditions of stagecraft, eloquently asserting its uniqueness as a performance:

Breath is intrinsically intermedial given that it operates in-between realities (art and body/biology/life/non-art), in-between the boundaries of artistic media (theatre and visual arts/installation art), the verbal and the visual, the audible and the scenic (sound as stage presence), in-between visibility and invisibility (light and darkness), in-between presence and absence/emptiness, embodiment and ambiguity of corporeal experience, in-between life and death (movement and stasis) and in-between an inhalation and an exhalation (silence and sound). These different aspects of intermediality are unravelled through- out this survey, and the term (intermediality) is analysed in the context of the quasi-generic and intergeneric features of Beckett’s late style in the theatre, in conjunction with the decentred field of subjectivity and its polysemous modes of absence and presence. [13]

Nevertheless, Breath has a suprisingly intricate stage history, thoroughly documented here, as a result of the unwillingness of suprisingly many prominent theatrical practitioners to leave little enough alone. Beckett send the original text on a postcard (another first in theater history) to Kenneth Tynan, the devisor of Oh! Calcutta!, “an evening of elegant erotica” that became New York’s longest running revue. Used as a prologue in Oh! Calcutta!, Breath included several nude bodies that had been places amid the on-stage trash that comprises the set. When Beckett vigorously objected to the alteration of his work, Tynan claimed that the change had been “due to others” who remained unnamed. The unaltered premiere occurred in Paris, minus nude bodies.

Alongside clamor over the altered text, another controversy arose: whether Beckett had finally “gone too far.” Some, of course, contended that it was all a hoax. Drama critic John Simon, for example, complained about Beckett’s Not I that “such minimalism is not, I believe, to be countenanced from anyone, not even from Beckett. Up to a point, less may be more, but beyond that point less is nothing.” His ire against Breath would no doubt have been even more acerbic. Regarding the text as next- to — nothing, various more “creative adaptations ensued, some of which managed to get every specification of Beckett’s script wrong. One such rendition, by the artist Damien Hirst, took place on a floating metallic island cruising through outer space and covered in discarded hospital equipment; it had more in common with the opening sequence of The Muppet Show’s “Pigs in Space” skits than with anything Beckett ever wrote. Incongruously, Hirst’s version was included in the officially authorized set of DVD productions of all of Beckett’s works. Goudouna’s eloquent commentary on this and so many other alterations deserves to be quoted in full:

In view of the increasing dispossession within bodied subjectivity and the eradication of the body in Breath, it is inexplicable that stagings of the playlet overlook or intentionally disregard Beckett’s central premise, namely, the absence of the subject. Thus, the artists and directors do not acknowledge the writer’s aesthetic decision to stress the significance of the lack of the human figure and character. Rather than highlighting this fundamental emptiness, the artists aim to unveil an essential subjectivity by adding the human figure in various forms, thus associating Breath with the human body, despite Beckett’s manifest desire to distinguish the two. [132]

(My sole objection to the above manifesto is the presence of the annoyingly condescending word “playlet,” which gets repeated throughout Goudouna’s book. Just as a haiku not deemed a “poem let,” Breath is not a “playlet” — and especially not since Beckett’s own term for his short work is “dramaticule,” i.e., a complete and eloquent creation regardless of the non-issue and non relevance of mere duration.)

Part I of Goudouna’s book, entitled “Respiration, Discourse and the Question of Medium Specificity,” introduced the concept of “Deeptime: Breath and the Look of Non-Art” to examine the effects of Beckett’s “decision to eradicate the text and the human figure and the ways this decision is effected by Beckett’s ‘aesthetics of failure’ “(19). The “intrinsically intermediate” aspects of Breath are duly emphasized: the ways that Beckett’s works increasingly combine theatrical performance and purely visual representation, often in a background of seemingly infinite total darkness. The dramaticules in particular are stark, astonishing, brief, almost motionless images, oddly picturesque in their own ways (Mouth in Not I, the prematurely old woman in Rockaby, Listener and Reader in Ohio Impromptu, and ultimately the trash-heap of Breath). Chapter 2, “The Durational Turn: Absorption and the Specificity of Temporality,” critiques at length the theories of art critic Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1968, revised 1998) and included accounts of performance art works and other avant garde theatrical stagings that are united primarily by the presence of the word “Breath” in their titles, One exception to this rule, however, is

Chris Burden’s Velvet Water (1974), a performance that shows the artist repeatedly dunking his head in a sink filled with water, doing so again and again, trying to inhale the oxygen-rich water, until he collapses on the floor, chocking, spluttering and gasping for breath. The entire time, there is a camera fixed on him, relaying a live video feed of the action to an audience sitting in adjoining space, until the monitor goes dark. At the start of the piece, Burden addresses the cameras, announcing to the audience, ‘Today I am going to breathe water, which is the opposite of drowning, because when you breathe water, you believe water to be a richer, thicker oxygen capable of sustaining life.’ [96]

What exactly this presentation and a number of others have to do with Beckett’s writings — and, indeed, what Beckett would have thought of such performances — must, alas, remain a matter of conjecture.

In Part II, “(Re)Presenting Breath,” readers will find a remarkably thorough overview of the diverse interpretations and scholarly assessments of such a seemingly simple play. Chapter 3, “Shortness of Breath: Beckett’s Breath in Context” surveys both the major scholarship on the play and its suprisingly diverse stagings; as in every other chapter, Goudouna’s notes are numerous, detailed and comprehensive. Newcomers to the play should start here — and will be amazed. Chapter 4, “Emptied of Theatre: Breath and the Phenomenology of Disembodiment,” addresses that

The [stage] space is emptied of the presence of the body, and presence is generated despite the fact that the referent is materially absent. The human icon and body are emptied and the figure is placed beyond the visual spectrum even though respiration is a bodily product that entails presence. [25; italics mine].

As a result, “the aesthetic union and dialectic between theatrical space and human body on stage is simultaneously ruptured and established” (123). This is why the insertion of bodies on the stage drastically violates the central achievement of the play — and why Beckett so adamantly opposed alterations or alleged enhancements with such vehemence (not least those in Oh! Calcutta!).

Part III, appropriately titled “The Exhaled Field,” justifies the book’s subtitle, “Anti-Theatricality and the Visual Arts.” Chapter 5, “Waste of Breath: The Readymade as a Stage Set,” emphasizes the tendency of numerous productions to use forms of detritus as a stage setting (hence Beckett’s own trash-strewn stage floor with nothing vertical conjoins with Hirst’s medical supplies on a flying saucer as it careens through deep space). Goudouna even contends that the rubbish “becomes the protagonist on Breath’s set” (a contention with which I disagree, believing that the unseen breath itself deserves that designation). However, her discussion of “Apnoeic Detritus: The Exhausted Project of Modernity” resonates far beyond the stage. Chapter 6 and 7 (“Intermedial Breath: Defying the Boundaries between Displaying and Staging” and “Investigating the Materiality of Respiration in Different Media” respectively) provide an abundance of postmodernist art and performance, focusing primarily on issues of the body. As with the description above of Burden’s Velvet Water, the connections to Beckett’s Breath and his other works may be in the eye of the beholder (itself a premise of much postmodern work).

Astonishingly (or perhaps not), the thought that became Breath was originally Shakespeare’s. In Measure for Measure, as Claudio languishes in prison for having committed the sin of fornication, the Duke (disguised as a friar) counsels the condemned man to “reason thus with life”:

a breath thou art,

Servile to all the skyey influences

That do this habitation, where thou keep’st,

Hourly afflict [_] [III.i.8–11].

The genius of Beckett’s wordless reiteration ( a deliberate oxymoron) is that this Shakespearean thought gets re-expressed on stage motionlessly, characterlessly, actorlessly, dramatically, even eloquently, in a mere thirty-five seconds, yet it manages to convey an existential truth — the ultimate reduction ab absurdo of the life cycle — that is applicable to every mortal who ever lived, regardless of creed, regardless of ideology. That Sozita Goudouna has turned the analysis of Beckett’s one-page work into a 200-plus paged study is remarkable, not least for tis cogent and well documented antifloccinaucinihilipilificationistical view.

William Hutchings

University of Alabama Birmingham