Milutinovic Proofs

337

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The crisis of representation as a feature of late modernist art in general, diagnosed by T. W. Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, finds its most strik-ing expression in the field of drama in Eugne Ionescos and SamuelBecketts plays. This crisis results from the contradiction hidden in thelate modernist poetical demand to represent the unrepresentable, whichthreatens to destroy the means of representation. Drama that followsthis demand holds out, either on account of the ineradicable represen-tational capacity of language and theatrical conventions, or via its evolu-tion into metadrama. Ultimately, however, the demand to represent theunrepresentable brings drama to self-annihilation qua genre. In the firstpart of this article, I examine the unfolding of this process in Ionescosand Becketts plays, and afterwards, interpret Tom Stoppards playRosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead as an implicit answer to thecrisis of theatrical representation brought about by late modernist radi-calism. I seek not to unearth authorial intention in Stoppards play, butrather to contribute to the broader picture of twentieth-century dramahistory. In cases like this, Wolfgang Theiles warning should be remem-bered: if to say and to understand are to be applied in the field ofaesthetics, the appropriate question can never be what should havebeen said or how can it be understood, but only what could bereached in terms of poetics with this utterance and these possibilitiesof understanding?1

338 Comparative Drama

IIIII

At the very end of Ionescos The Chairs, after the Orator has left and noone remains onstage, the audience witnesses an unusual scene: For thefirst time human noises seem to be coming from the invisible crowd:snatches of laughter, whisperings, a Ssh! or two, little sarcastic coughs;these noises grow louder and louder, only to start fading away again. Allthis should last just long enough for the real and visible public to go awaywith this ending firmly fixed in their minds. The curtain falls very slowly.2The fictitious, invisible audience onstage reacts as theater audiences wouldin such a situation, when left to await the continuation of the stage ac-tion. Meanwhile, the actual audience watching Ionescos The Chairs isprobably calm and does not fidget: as far as it is concerned, something ishappening onstage. There is no one onstage, yet the attention of the ac-tual audience is riveted by what would be its own reaction in a similarsituation; its own reaction is separated from itself and broadcast fromthe stage. There is no audience on the stage, but its voices are heard. Theaudience is in the auditorium, but voiceless. The audience and its usualreaction have been split and have assumed independence. The reactionof an audience faced with an empty stage has assumed complete autonomyand is now represented to the theater audience. This emancipation is thecentral experience of Ionescos play. This is why it must last long enoughif it is to force the viewer, without recourse to rationalization and inter-pretation, to face it and to carry it from the theater as his or her finalimpression.

It corresponds structurally to the key point in The Chairs: the arrivalof the Orator and his address. There is no meaning and no importantmessage in his wordswhere we traditionally locate meaning, there isnow only a gaping emptiness. The absence of meaning in the Oratorswords, and thus in the world represented in the play, coincides with theabsence of an audience on the stage. Like meaning, the audience is awaitedand welcomed, but the actual audience sees that in fact, there is nothing,and that to await either the audience or the meaning of the Orators speechis a delusion. Whether inexpressible in itself, or inexpressible by the Ora-tor, or simply nonexistent, meaning is not located in speech. Meaning isabsent, but speech remains. The disappearance of meaning does not re-

Zoran Milutinovi 339sult in the disappearance of speech: speech is still there, it is represented,it fills the world and the play, but it is now autonomous, uncommitted toanything whatsoever, and free of all meaning.

Speech is to be understood here in two ways: first, as the wordsspoken by the characters of the play, that is, something that pertains tothe individual and to intersubjective communication, and thus expectedto correspond to the situation of which it is part; and, second, as the verybody of dramatic text, separate from and independent of reality as itsreferent. In both senses of speech present in Ionescos plays, the sameprocess of emancipation is at work.

At the end of The Bald Soprano, the Smiths and the Martins areengaged in an argument that gradually turns into a fierce fight. Found atthe very end of the play, this scene corresponds structurally to the culmi-nation of the conflict of any traditional play. The conflict between theSmiths and the Martins culminates, however, in the use of utterly uncon-nected, meaningless, and inconsequential lines. At one point, they ex-change mere sequences of consonants and vowels. The meaning of theirlines during the argument has obviously nothing to do with them orwith the situation in which the lines are spoken: the characters speechhas achieved a certain degree of autonomy and is no longer recognizableas adapted to either the charactersthat is, to their psychological con-sistency or persuasivenessor the situation in the play.3 Yet the scene isstill recognized as a kind of culmination of the dramatic conflict. Theconflict has been drained of all comprehensible meaning, although for-mally it is still there. It has been prepared by a similar series of formaldramatic elements, either devoid of content and meaning, or parodied toabsurdity. Ionesco, for instance, respects traditionally expository conven-tions, but only by parodying them: as we are about to start watching aplay about the Smithsat least it seems that way at the beginningit isnot a bad idea to let us know right from the start how many childrenthey have, where the action takes place, and what the characters namesare, but not in the manner that it happens here, where Mrs. Smith im-parts all this directly to her husband. The play continues with the Mar-tins arrival, and two further familiar conventions are parodied. First, themaid Mary ridicules a trivial plot twist common to Boulevard theater, inwhich the identities of characters are revealed and they turn out to be


blood relations, and then, the Martins parody another motif, the mutualrecognition of long-lost relatives, when the husband and wife who havejust arrived together on a visit finally recognize each other at last.

Ionescos play preserves parts of the dramatic mechanism, but theseare devoid of all meaning and mutual connection.4 Thus the mechanismrattles along toward the ending, though it is now so denuded that all itscomponents show. Chief among them is the rhythm of a good play, whattheater critics usually call the inevitability with which events proceedfrom one another and carry the play to its denouement in a logical chainof cause and effect. Here this is so obtrusively exposed to view that itmay be described as simultaneously preserved and destroyed: preservedbecause it survives all the sabotage it is exposed to in the play, yet de-stroyed because the play as a whole undermines and ridicules logicand causality. The striking of the clock at the beginning of the play;Mrs. Martins extraordinary and incredible story of a man who bendsdown in the street to tie his shoelaces; a lady described as tall, too big,small, and too thin; and the theres a ring at the door, it means theresnobody there lawall this contributes to the spectators uncertainty asto the proper way to understand the play.5 However, The Bald Sopranocontains a hermeneutical instruction: when, after the initial hesitation,the Smiths and Martins stop wondering about the meaning of the FireChief s experimental stories and start telling them themselves, the au-dience is instructed how to understand the play.6 We should not seek,behind the illogical contradictions and merry chaos of The Bald Soprano,a deeper meaning or a key that could harmonize all the contradictorysegments and flood them with the light of comprehensibility. The playdramatizes the irrevocable split between speech and meaning, in whichspeech becomes autonomous to such an extent that it can no longer beexpected to carry its referential or communicative function.

What is true of speech in the play is true of the play as speech as well.The Bald Soprano breaks all referential and communicative bonds: as awhole, it provides no meaningful story about the Smiths, or about any-thing else, for that matter. It represents neither the everyday world withwhose laws we are familiar, nor a fantastic, imaginary world whose lawsthe play itself might generate. The play is nonmimetic and consists ofcompletely autonomous speech, but it is not nonrepresentational. Ionesco

Zoran Milutinovi 341wrote that The Bald Soprano, like The Lesson, among other things at-tempts to make the mechanics of drama function in a vacuum. An ex-periment in abstract or nonrepresentational drama.7 If what we refer toas representation in a play is here revealed to be asemantic, languagegrown autonomous, then the playwhich does not disappear in thisautonomizing processcan do nothing else but represent itself. Whereall the signs show that they will not correspond to any object, their total-ity itself assumes the substantiality of objects.8 Thus, in the absence ofanything else, the play becomes the represented object. It refers now notto the dramatic in reality, nor to its analogy in a fictitious world, but toabstract dramatism itself: plotless development, unmotivated accelera-tion, empty conventions of theatrical representation, parodied exposi-tion and absurd recognition, pure conflict winding up the play. All of it isboth destroyed, by being deprived of meaning, and preserved, becausenot only does it still exist, but in an asemantic void, it becomes promi-nent, it imposes itself, exposes itself to viewin brief, because it repre-sents itself. The object of representation in The Bald Soprano is theatri-cality pure and simple, which makes the play entirely metatheatrical.

The aesthetic consequences of emancipation of speech in drama, andalso of drama as speech, are comparable to the havoc wrought by a majornatural disaster. It is like a rebellion of the theatre against itself, con-cluded J. S. Doubrovsky.9 Traditionally, a play represents the world, andwhat emerges from the representation is truth. If it is no longer, in anyway, the locus of representation of the world, it is not the locus of theemergence of truth either. And if it is neither, what is left of it once it hasdivested itself of all that had traditionally belonged to it? This is one ofthe most important experiences of literary modernism, and its traces areto be found wherever modernism became self-conscious. This experi-ence is present in The Chairs, in the reaction of the invisible stage audi-ence: the murmur of surprise and disbelief and the ironic throat-clearingthat the play itself suggests to the theater audience are unavoidably fraughtwith this question. The Orators nonreferential language; the series of mean-ingless sounds and signs; the thing reduced to its own syntaxwhat is thepurpose of it all? His speech does not represent anything, nor does it me-diate any meaning. If this is not an accidental occurrence having to dowith one particular Orator, but a poetical and aesthetic necessity with


which all future orators will have to cope, isnt it the end of both the needto appear as orator and the custom of listening to orators? In The BaldSoprano, the question is posed within the framework of the destructionof the dramatic elements and their evacuation. Although the same move-ment preserves them as such, awareness of their inappropriateness, andtherefore their redundancy, is nevertheless present in the very instant oftheir destruction. And if the play aims at the same time to destroy thewhole as a meaningful structure, it has passed a death sentence on itself,based on its own redundancy in a world to which it can no longer offeranything apart from its own anatomy.

The purpose of all of this could only be explained by a historicalstudy encompassing twentieth-century literature as a whole. Such astudy would, among other things, certainly focus on the celebrated cor-respondence between Adrian Leverkhn and his teacher Kretzschmarin Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus, and the formers claim that all themethods and conventions of art today are good for parody only.10 Shortly,we shall encounter many a motif from this correspondencethe feelingof historical decrepitude and depletion of artistic means, along with thefact that nothing remains to be said. At the present moment, the idea thatart is now only fit for parody, the inherent motivating force of Ionescosplays, demands an explanation. Writing about The Bald Soprano, theauthor says that what had happened was a kind of collapse of reality.The words had turned into sounding shells devoid of meaning.11 Thetheme of The Chairs is the ontological void, or absence, and the pur-pose of the play is [t]o express the void by means of language, gesture,acting and props. To express absence.12 Finally, the question that con-tains the essential motif of a late modernist current to which Ionescobelongs: But how does one manage to represent the nonrepresentable?How do you represent the nonrepresentational and not represent therepresentational?13 This paradoxical question encompasses the conse-quences of a progressive loss of reality in art; a growing doubt with re-gards to art and its means; a focus on the expression of pure essence,which is ultimately revealed to be a void; and the necessity of continuingto create under conditions that utterly deny the possibility of creation.The related crisis of semblance, or Schein,14 which Adorno discusses inAesthetic Theory, is merely another designation of the crisis in art and

Zoran Milutinovi 343the doubts as to its purpose, which found their supreme articulation inlate modernisms demand that the unrepresentable be represented.15 This,of course, cannot be done, and probably no one ever expected it to becarried out literally, but attempts to approach this goal reveal a lot. If anartist attempts to represent the unrepresentable, he or she will be facedwith a logical error, a deliberate impossibility inherent in the demand. Apainter, for example, must carefully avoid all the elements of his/her artto which Schein adheres, as Adorno puts it, going so far as to excludethe most basic ones: lines and colors. However hard a painter may striveto avoid this, both line and color contain the possibility of representa-tion, even if unintentional: even abstract shapes on a canvas could comeacross as representations of abstract shapes. On the other hand, there isthe demand that requires that the unrepresentable be represented, and itis hard to imagine how this could be achieved without resorting to lineand color, the basic means of representation. Since implicit within thedemand to represent the unrepresentable is the simultaneous affirma-tion and denial of the means at the artists disposal and of what ought tobe the subject of the work of art, it would seem that the only way to meetit is Malevichs white background with a barely perceptible white squareat its center. There too, representation still exists, though reduced to aminimum. However, there is no going beyond that: the next step wouldbe a completely white canvas, not even remotely distinguishable froma pristine one, untouched by the painter. This step would be the self-abolishment of art, and there can no longer be any question of meetingdemands, for we would enter an area where art ceased to exist.

Yet on the verge of the abyss into which art would plummet if it wereto make this final step, there is some leeway where an attempt to meet thisimpossible demand might be possible. By remaining on the edge of theabyss, any art that strives to fulfill the demand acquires the ambiguity ofbeing simultaneously a success and a failure. It has failed to represent theunrepresentablewhich could only have been expectedbut, by havingchosen to cease representing the representable, either in the same old wayor in a new one, it points to the locus of failure: by representing nothing,by avoiding representing something, yet still representing, itin Adorniantermsannounces the unrepresentable by negation. Thus the representableis somehow present in the painting after all, albeit only through its


absence. By not being there, by not being represented in a work of art,but also by the fact that nothing else is there in its place, theunrepresentable draws attention to its existence outside the space of rep-resentation.

If a painting can survive even though it no longer has an object, andeven though it represents neither what is representable nor what is not,what then is left of it? What is it that we can still see in it? Let us assumethat a specialist would recognize the artistic concept of the modernistdemand, and a nonspecialist would see only representationempty, ob-jectless, and pure. And both could recognize the turning point at whichart pulls itself out of nonexistence by its bootstraps: the instant in which,still without an inherent object, it comes into being as art. At this point,the way it appears and what it wants to be16 would coincide. Its objectwould be art itself, both as poetics, the presence of which can still beread, and as an awakening from sleep, a sleep of nothingness, in whichart does not exist. At the moment of awakening, the work of art does notlook around to find objects that it could use as content, but draws up aninventory of its own abilities, means, ways of being, and components,and in this inventory it is born as a work of art.

Beckett and Georges Duthuits Three Dialogues provides even bet-ter insight into the modernist demand to represent the unrepresentable.Coat, Masson, and Van Velde have upset a certain order on the plane ofthe feasible, Beckett says. This is art tired of puny exploits, weary ofpretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same oldthing, of going a little further along a dreary roada road that alwaystakes it to the aestheticizing automatism of expression. To this, it prefersthe expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which toexpress, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desireto express, but the obligation to express is still there. Beckett talks of artthat has no object, in other words, art whose object is the nonexistenceof objects. Art must express the absence of its object, that is, represent theunrepresentable. Is it not the case that in literature, since the obligation toexpress still exists, the absence of an object would best be suggested bysilence, muteness, a void from which speech has been banished, just aspainting could do it by offering a blank canvas?17 No, Beckett goes on, anartist is not expected to paint a void. That would merely be the tradition

Zoran Milutinovi 345in another garb. The artist must attempt an impossible act: turning theabsence of the object into a fresh incentive for creation.18 Thus the artistarrives at an act, but is unable to act, but is nevertheless obliged to act:therefore, he makes an expressive act, even if only of itself, of its impos-sibility, of its obligation. Let us take the example of narrative art, which,under the obligation to narrate, yet without anything to narratefor thereis no object that it would recognize as proper to itwill narrate its obli-gation and impossibility. What cannot be narrated should be passed overin silence: silence would then be the object and outcome of the narrativeact, and narration itself would be annulled. Yet, instead of giving up nar-ration altogether since there is nothing to narrate, narration will con-tinue as an objectless production of speech. With a deluge of words aboutnothing, with the exact opposite of silence, narration will fill the emptyspace that would otherwise be inhabited by silence. It will place itself ontop of silence, in its own place, aiming to suggest, by means of its owninsignificance and transparency, what it has screened off. Thus it willannounce the unrepresentable, silence, the absence of an object, by ne-gation, and represent it negatively as well. This is precisely the kind ofnarration we encounter at the end of Becketts Trilogy. Its last long sen-tence is a negative activity, which, through acting, comments on actionas well. It conceptualizes the art in question, while at the same time offer-ing an example of it. This very duality contains Becketts notion of art: inthe absence of anything else, it endlessly conceptualizes itselfits im-possibilityand thus continues to exist in the world. Perhaps it is truethat there is no way to express emptiness, that there is no word that wecould utter and thereby express silence. Were an artist to try to utter sucha word, he would have to admit defeat, and his impotence would be ob-vious to all. His word would not be able to express silence, yet, merelyby existing, it would mark the spot that silence had inhabited, manag-ing to place itself on top of it and to screen it, albeit briefly. In this way,it would isolate silence from everything else, allowing us to speak aboutit after all and to remain aware of it: it would preserve silence for us.Since the object is unrepresentable, the word/expression is not appropri-ate to the object, yet when the light of the word has faded, a glimmer willlinger, shedding light onto the place where the unnamable reststhatwhich the word was to express, but could not, yet did, after all.


Becketts plays, from Waiting for Godot onward, can be understoodas attempts at meeting the same demand. Drama is the representation ofan action, an action supposedly meaningful and important, worth repre-senting. However, from the point of view of action, waiting is empty andcan only be understood as sheer negation of drama. Vladimir andEstragons waiting is the absence of action. Dramatizing it attempts torepresent what is theatrically and dramatically unrepresentable.

Becketts characters never tire of metatheatrically pointing to thisattempt. Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, its awful, saysEstragon, pointing to the plays difference from our usual expectationsfor drama: something has to happen, many entrances and exits will takeplace, and situational change and development will occur.19 Elsewhere,after a lengthy discussion on radishes and turnips, Vladimir concludes,This is becoming really insignificant, only to be corrected by Estragon:Not enough (64). It remains unclear whether they are referring to rad-ishes and turnips or to the play they are in and the not entirely signifi-cant dialogue they were having. In other cases, however, it is obvious thatthe characters detach themselves from their roles and comment on theaction from the outside, as when Vladimir reacts to Estragons piling upof biblical allusions by saying, I begin to weary of this motif (78). Partof the waiting time is filled by an exchange of lines of no significance,and part of the time is devoted to playacting: Vladimir and Estragonpresent a quarrel that ends in reconciliation, or they represent Lucky andPozzo. Yet a third part of the time belongs to Pozzo and Lucky. At first, itseems that their arrival will provide the play with the missing action, butthis expectation fails: nothing comes of it, because the newcomers donothing but repeat the first two ways of passing the time. The arrival ofPozzo and Lucky is a play-within-a-play meant for an audience consist-ing of Vladimir and Estragon. What the latter two did in the play beforethe arrival of Pozzo and Lucky is now performed before their own eyes:Pozzo, too, produces meaningless chatter and performs for them, whileVladimir and Estragon react similarly to the baffled audience of Waitingfor Godot, that is, with incomprehension, puzzlement, and polite, feigned,and conventional approval. They try to make sense of the bizarre ap-pearance of the couple, they wonder what it could all mean, they look forconnections and meaningjust as the audience had previously tried to

Zoran Milutinovi 347understand the two of them. Pozzo is not bothered by this, and just asVladimir and Estragon never attempt to interpret themselves and makethemselves understandable, he, too, fails to do this. What he does is du-plicate the probleminstead of resolving it, which would be the usualfunction of a play-within-a-playby deciding to indulge in representa-tion himself: he demands attention, takes up a pose, explains dusk, andthen, like a vain actor, he is ready to discuss at length the impression leftby his performance. He then offers Lucky as yet another number. Thustwo more theatrical elements make their appearance in Waiting for Godot:dance and dianoia, or thought, one of the traditional elements of dramathat exists in those speeches in which the speakers demonstrate thatsomething is or is not the case or declare something universal.20 Dianoiaenters the play in a highly ironic way, not only because Beckett intro-duces it as a parodied scholarly treatise, but also because Lucky is theonly character in the play who tries hard to speak rationally and explic-itly about something constantly hinted at but never realized in Waitingfor Godot: God. His speech about God repeats the philosophical as-pect of the play. Just as the play leads the spectator by the nose, over-whelming him with allusions and hinting that this, in fact, is its subject,so Luckys thought confuses Vladimir and Estragon, and that samebaffled spectator, with snippets of philosophical and theological argu-ments that never jell into something rationally comprehensible. Vladimirand Estragon thus wait for Godot, and meanwhile, they chatter, playactand throw off allusions that ought to provide the play with a philosophi-cal dimension. Then Pozzo and Lucky arrive, and repeat the whole thingfor the benefit of the other two: Pozzo chatters and playacts, while Luckyphilosophizes about God.

Waiting for Godot is a play that represents emptiness, waiting asempty action, and that lacks a meaningful message. This ambitiontorepresent the unrepresentableleads it to the very edge of self-abolitionqua play, yet Waiting for Godot avoids this fatal outcome by being filledwith insignificant, autonomous, and empty speech, generously lardedwith allusions leading nowhere. Speech of this kind forms the body ofthe play, but does no more than emphasize the emptiness and announceit by negation. Another device used to preserve the play is representationthe very essence of all theater. Again, it is pure, insignificant, unmotivated


representation as found in the playing of games, made to yield as muchas possible by being presented as a problem: it is repeated, completewith empty speech, in the play-within-the-play. The spectator has seenempty representation, objectless and purethe representation of empti-ness in dramatic form. With a flood of words referring to nothing, with aseries of unconnected, and ultimately meaningless, trivial actions, theplay fills up emptiness and announces it by negation. At the same time,the play conceptualizes its own impossible undertaking at themetatheatrical level by repeating both its structure and its meaning, orlack thereof, within the play-within-the-play. Does it not therefore seemin fact possible to represent the unrepresentable?

In a similar manner, the characters of Endgame also comment onthe play they are in. The unclear situation in which they find themselves,the unclear relationship between them, the question what does it allmean that the spectator cannot but askall these things are ironicallycommented on by the characters:

Hamm: Were not beginning to to mean something?Clov: Mean something? You and I, mean something? (Brief laugh.)

Ah, thats a good one!21

Clov is reluctant to depart and leave Hamm alone. He asks himself whatstops him and Hamm answers, The dialogue (121). Close to the veryend, Hamm fears the introduction of an underplot, and explains toClov that the sequence he has just uttered was an aside, and claims tobe getting ready for his last soliloquy (130). When he really seems aboutto leave, Clov announces, This is what we call making an exit (132).Whatever the function of these metatheatrical segments in Becketts play,one of their side effects is to produce a feeling of unease in the spectator.If comments relating not to the world that ought to be represented in theplay but to the dramatic manner of representing the world crop up witha certain regularity, the spectator is justified in suspecting that all theother lines, as well as the play as a whole, function to the same extent ona metadramatic level. For instance, the following one: Clov: (He gets upon ladder, turns the telescope on the without.) Lets see. (He looks, mov-ing the telescope.) Zero (he looks) zero (he looks) and zero(106). On a metadramatic level, this can mean that there is nothing outsidethe stage: there is no more nature, (97), Clov says, to be represented

Zoran Milutinovi 349onstage, while drama, as autonomous Schein, is no longer tied to sup-posed, or even fantastic, reality, but survives thanks to the adherence ofrepresentational elements to language and stage convention. The char-acters of Endgame, like those of Waiting for Godot, are simply there,onstage before us, and there is nothing outside the stageno social rela-tions, no story, no meaning that they are supposed to embody. Just asHamms old and senile parents can be said to be good for nothing, andconsequently appear onstage in garbage cans, Clov makes explicit thepoetics of the drama of autonomous Schein by showing that there isnothing outside the stage, and that we should not seek to understand theplay by relating it to something external to it.

However, this is no more than the horizon that the plays poeticsprojects. Even if there is nothing to express or represent, this does notmean that representational devicesstage, characters, and languagewill really help in achieving the aim of representing nothing. Represen-tational devices cannot be easily freed from the representational elementsthat adhere to them, and they will continue to produce a semblance ofrepresentation. Language, even where it tends to be shortened to meresound, claims Adorno, cannot shake off its semantic element. It cannotbecome purely mimetic or gestural, just as forms of modern painting,liberated from referentiality cannot cast off all similarity to objects.22The characters are onstage and thus have to say or do something, how-ever meaningless or insignificant, so that the door is left open for a habit-based interpretation of what is seen. For spectators, as for Hamm, some-thing is taking its course: the lines succeed each other, and the actiongoes forward. As long as there are characters who engage in a dialogue,whatever the dialogue is about, the stagea space traditionally reservedfor representationswill impose its own laws and interpretative frame-work on them. To put it differently, it is still Malevichs white backgroundwith a barely perceptible white square at its centerstill a representa-tion of a white square.

The real break came with Play, Not I, That Time, and Footfalls. AnnaMcMullans chapter title Mimicking Mimesis points to it: these playswere not written for theater as practice of representation,23 and CharlesR. Lyons, before pointing to the progressive economy of [Becketts] writ-ing, asks, Are these works inherently dramatic, or are they essentially


works of prose fiction enclosed in a theatrical conceit?24 Mimetic val-ues of language and adherence of representation to representational de-vices had retained Waiting for Godot and Endgame within the orbit ofrecognizable dramatic form in spite of Becketts poetics. In his shorterworks, Beckett attacked precisely those elements that ensured that Wait-ing for Godot and Endgame were still plays. In Play, which Paul Lawleyreads as a parody of basic theatrical elements,25 three characters placedin urns, motionless on a darkened stage, speak in turn, cued by spot-lights. Despite its discontinuity and lack of coherence, the story of theurn-characters can be reconstructed as a narrative of adultery and jeal-ousy, whose outcome has been fatal for all three of them. However, theyare not characters in the traditional sense of the word: there is no com-munication among them, and none of them seems to be aware of theother two. There is no action, only distanced and transformed narration,which must be reconstructed from what they say. Nothing is seen apartfrom the light and impassive faces of actors, who do not even act. Al-though speech comes from the stage, it is separated and emancipatedboth from it and from the referential world. Mimetic values and the ad-herence of representation to representational devicescharacters, ac-tion, stage as space of interactionhave been successfully removed. NotI shows that the process of reduction has still not been exhausted. Thethree urns with the characters in them can be dispensed with too, leav-ing on the darkened stage not even a complete human face but merely alighted mouth and a silent and motionless human figure in a black robe,its back turned to the audience. The basic moment of adherenceascan here be established per negationemis the actor onstage. Do notrepresent! in the space traditionally reserved for representation is theparadoxical message of the plays poetics. Unlike that of Play, the story ofNot I cannot be reconstructed with any certainty. The speech is made upof syntactically and semantically incompatible elements, as though some-one erased just enough material from an intelligible text to maintain theimpression of narrative, while making it impossible to say what the storyis about. The character in question, an orphaned girl who grew up un-loved and has lived to be seventy, suddenly exchanges silence for a spateof words that do not in the least suggest what she ought to be talkingabout. Something happened, something that now induces ceaseless

Zoran Milutinovi 351speech, but speech is unable to express that something. This somethingis inexpressible, unnamable, yet it demands the production of speech inwhich it will never be present. And this demand is so persistent that, asHersh Zeifman remarks, Mouth never actually leaves the stage, but ratherthe reverse: the stage leaves the actor.26 This is the central motif ofBecketts work as a whole, and the essential germ from which his poeticsdevelops.27

When all the moments of adherence have been dispensed withcharacters, action, scenery, movement, and gestureand autonomousspeech remains alone on the stage, itself undermined from within (fornarration too is a representational device, so that speech is no longerable to shape a story), what we are left with is the essence of Beckettsnegative poetics: something unutterable, unrepresentable, unnamable,words that express something else or express nothing at all, existing onlyin order to create an illusion of expression or representation, which nei-ther expresses nor represents because its object isunrepresentable. Andalong the way, what used to be known as drama has been undone too:although the paradoxical, self-canceling nature of Becketts art focuseson his continuing attempts to write the vanishing, self-destructive text,as S. E. Gontarski put it,28 the genre has vanished in the process. Beckettslate plays may have represented the dawn of a new genre, as Enoch Braterhas demonstrated,29 but does this necessarily mean that every struc-tural less is more?30 Can less be simplyless? Drama-less-ness?

IIIIIIIIII

When the curtain rises, the audience of Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz andGuildernstern Are Dead sees a scenography even more meager than thatof Waiting for Godot. In the latter, it was sufficient to show A countryroad. A tree. Evening, for the play could take place anywhere, and theless the place was specified, the better (11). The beginning of Stoppardsplay shows only Two Elizabethans passing the time in a place withoutany visible character.31 Even that one tree on a country road is not nec-essary, because the play takes place nowhere else but onstage. Stoppardintentionally removes all signs that could tie the action onstage to anyreferent world. Ros and Guil are not in any world, but simply onstage: if


this might go unnoticed in the theater, a reader of Stoppards play wouldnot miss the emphasis: Guil spins another coin over his shoulder with-out looking at it, his attention being directed at his environment or lackof it (10). This is how from its very beginning, Stoppards play declaresits belonging to a literary-theatrical family, whose most important char-acteristic is the claim that there is nothing beyond the stage. Even whenthe offstage is not explicitly denied, drama does not want to know any-thing about it. Consequently, Ros and Guil toss coins in an airless scenicspace: their situation is, more than anything else, epochal-poetic.

It has never been contested that Rosencrantz and Guildernstern AreDead relies heavily on the theater of the absurd, and that Ros and Guilare, in fact, Vladimir and Estragon dressed in Elizabethan costumes.32Becketts poetics is quite explicitly the fundament of Stoppards play, butin spite of that, it would be difficult to claim that Stoppard is Beckettsfollower. The expressive act, even of its impossibility, of its obligation,the testimony that there is nothing to express, nothing with which toexpress, the drama about the nonexistence of dramathese are all one-off experiments. Even Beckett abstained from repeating them and choseto follow their logical and poetical consequences, which led him to thesilence and self-annihilation of drama. It is not possible to be Beckettsfollower, especially if one approaches his legacy, and his way of bringingto a close one of the main currents in modernism, with the utmost sin-cerity. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead is not a play written bya disciple, but a play that takes Becketts poetics upon itself in order tocarry drama and theater, which had shown the symptoms of an incur-able and fatal malady, safely over the river.

Nevertheless, at the very beginning of Stoppards play, this is still notobvious. The audience only sees two Elizabethans who toss coins in aplace without any visible character. Nothing is known of them, not eventheir names. The audience only sees something that contradicts experi-ence and the laws of probability. The two Elizabethans wonder what isgoing on, and this makes explicit the question implicitly present at thebeginning of every play. In what world does the play take place? In thereality I know and live in, or in a fictional world whose laws I still need tolearn and agree to? The answer to this question lies in normalization, thedramatic convention that defines the rules of the represented world:

Zoran Milutinovi 353ghosts and witches walking among us, gods interfering with our lives,the characters from an unwritten play mixing with actors who will playthemeverything is possible, provided it is presented as normal at thebeginning of a play. Stoppard makes the convention explicit and lets Roslist and dismiss several assumptions: no, the characters here are not alle-gories of psychological forces; no, this is not an avant-garde play withgarish global metaphors; no, forget divine intervention; and no, dont thinkin terms of possible worlds. These are all possibilities that come tomind, and they are all parodied and dismissed. Why, then, does the coinalways fall on the same side? There is no right answer, but Ross analysisof different motivational systems has already achieved its aim: it has di-rected the audience to consider poetics, and this is exactly what is neededfor following the play. Besides the realist and the fantastical, there is alsoa poetical motivation: the inclusion of events and development of plotcan also be justified (motivated) by the consideration of poetics, whichis just about to start in Stoppards play. The play will be about under-standing and interpreting drama and theaterand the normalizationhas been successful. Immediately thereafter, it becomes clear that the twoElizabethans onstage are two minor characters from Shakespeares mostfamous tragedy.

The Greeks wrote tragedies within a limited circle of mythical stories.The Romans followed suit, and French Classicism and even twentieth-century modernism relied on the same stories. Nevertheless, all Antigones,from Sophocles to Anouilhs, are separate worlds. Racines Phdre hasmore or less the same plot as Euripides, but it would be impossible toimagine Racines fille de Minos et de Pasipha in the Greek world.Stoppard tries neither to relate to the tradition on a hermeneutic level,nor to reinterpret Hamlet, nor to use it as a metaphor or as a fact ofculture within the world of his play. He inserts unmodified parts ofShakespeares play into his own, leaving the impression that Rosencrantzand Guildernstern Are Dead does not want to welcome into itself partsof Hamlet, but that it wants to penetrate Shakespeares play and take upresidence in it. Neil Sammells notes that Stoppard manages to act uponShakespeares original, restyling it with Becketts help.33 However wedefine the plays relationship to Hamlet, we need to modify the claimthat Becketts poetics provides the fundament for Stoppards play: it


obviously has a twofold fundament, consisting of Becketts poetics andShakespeares text.

As all the other authors branded postmodernists, Stoppard is in theposition of a theatergoer who arrives late to a premiere, only to be toldthat the show has already begun, that during the first act all the propswere destroyed, the stage burnt down, and the audience told to go home,and that there would be no revivals.34 How are plays to be written at all ifsomeone has already seriously begun the process whose first results clearlyindicate that everything will end with the conclusion that writing playsis impossible and unnecessary? This late theater enthusiast, if he wantsto continue the thing he likes, has to find adequate responses to two majorissues. First, he must address the deficit of the offstage, which causes theprocess of dramas emptying, drowning in auto-referentiality and its even-tual disappearance. The second issue relates to the late modernist de-mand for the unrepresentable to be represented, which by destroyingthe means of representation brings about the same final outcome. Thedisappearance of the offstage cannot simply be ignored, because it is alegitimate result of the process of the progressive withdrawal of realityfrom literature, which had begun long ago and in late modernism reachedfull maturity. It would be unsatisfactory to simply recommend that theyshould turn resolutely towards Nature, as Vladimir suggests in Wait-ing for Godot (60), to which Estragon replies that they have already triedit, and as a belated echo, Clov joins in in Endgame with the claim thattheres no more nature (97). That is why Stoppards answer is not nave,but sentimental: if there is no offstage anymore, one ought to find anonstage that is still beyond any doubt and has not been corroded. Theleast suspicious choice in that respect would be Shakespeares Hamlet. Ifthere is no offstage any more, the chances of making a mistake will be attheir lowest if a play chooses as its object of representation somethingwhose quality is beyond doubt and that by its nature belongs to the realmof the onstage, while at the same time being far away from the traditionof the modern and thus safe from the corrosive process that destroysthe offstage. Shakespeares drama came into being in a context differentfrom the modernist one, as a mirror up to nature, dependent on a worldstill unquestionably there and available for representation. By taking rootsin Hamlet, Stoppards play takes roots in its offstage as well. By repre-

Zoran Milutinovi 355senting the action and characters of Hamlet, Stoppards play avoids theobjection that itnavelyhas not heard of the disappearance of theoffstage, and at the same time with this maneuver it captures the forbid-den field: the offstage of Hamlet. This is how Stoppards play overcomesthe first obstacle: by becoming the mirror up to drama.

The meaning of this maneuver is easily understandable at the begin-ning of the play. Ros and Guil are trying to define the laws of the worldin which they find themselves. They fail, because they are still not in anyworld, but merely in a no mans land, on a stage that refuses to knowanything of the offstage world and that can still be either transformedinto different worlds or remain within Becketts poetics. Ros and Guilexpect to see a signa unicorn, or a mute dwarfthat would show themthe way or help them to understand where they are. Instead of thesefantastic but imaginable beings, the actors appear. They say that theybelong to the blood, love and rhetoric school, and when asked, Whatis your line? Player replies by listing a whole Shakespearean repertoireof motifs:

Tragedy, sir. Deaths and disclosures, universal and particular, dnouementsboth unexpected and inexorable, transvestite melodrama on all levels in-cluding the suggestive. We transport you into a world of intrigue and illu-sion clowns, if you like, murdererswe can do you ghosts and battles,on the skirmish level, heroes, villains, tormented loversset pieces in thepoetic vein; we can do you rapiers or rape or both, by all means, faithlesswives and ravished virginsflagrante delicto at a price, but that comesunder realism for which there are special terms. (18)

When they eventually agree upon the price, something happens thatshows that the Shakespearean actors, rather than the unicorn or the mutedwarf, are the sign that shows the way and leads into the world of drama.The performance is supposed to start, but Player is standing still. Arentyou going tocome on? Guil asks him. I am on. I start on. repliesPlayer (26). Immediately, the light onstage changes, and Ros and Guil allof a sudden find themselves in the middle of Hamlet, exactly where theyappear for the first time. At that very moment, the stage as a place with-out any visible character, without any world of drama, without an off-stage, is filled with the world of Shakespeares play as its offstage. At thesame time, Stoppards play suggests that everything that follows will be,in fact, the performance of the traveling Elizabethan actors met by Ros


and Guil: something like a play-within-a-play, in which Ros and Guilwill take part as well, in which The Murder of Gonzago will be anotherplay-within-a-play. On the simplest level, it is the usual postmodern playwith Russian dolls and mirrors with endlessly multiplying reflections.Nevertheless, on the level of poetics, this eruption of the world of Ham-let onto the empty stage that opens Stoppards play has another meaning.The traveling actors stand for the theatrical and dramatic tradition thatprecedes the theater of the autonomous Schein. The actors are under thesign of Shakespeare for more than one reason: with their repertoire andthe school to which they belong, here they represent everything that thetheater of the absurd rejects or negates. The moment at which Playerdraws Ros and Guil into his performance can be understood as a momentthat opens a dialogue between a long theatrical tradition, here repre-sented by Hamlet, and the late modernist poetics of autonomous Schein,here represented by Vladimir and Estragon disguised as Ros and Guil.

This dialogical aspect is evident throughout the play, and sometimesit is condensed into formulations whose allusive spectrum encompassesboth Shakespeare and Beckett. For instance, when Ros asks Guil, Whatare you playing at? Guil answers by citing Hamlets answer to Poloniussquestion regarding what he is reading: Words, words. Theyre all wehave to go on (31). The second part of this answer widens the spectrumof allusions in several directions. Ros and Guil are really playing withwords while killing time on their impossible mission, but here we al-ready hear Becketts leitmotiv all words, theres nothing else, you mustgo on,35 and with it a reminder of the poetics of autonomous Schein:words are all we have left; words must be uttered as long as any remain,even when they have no meaning anymore. And on a metatheatrical level,where Guil comments on Ross and his own situation as characters in theplay, this is a warning that language is the medium of drama. Only inlanguage is it possible to sustain the continuity of dramatic creation, andthe drama of autonomous Schein subverts its own fundament by de-stroying language. This brief replica repeats the same movement thatStoppards play enacts as a whole: at the same time, it recalls Shakespeare(the older tradition) and Beckett (the contemporary moment of drama)in order to force them into a dialogue.36

Zoran Milutinovi 357The question of Ros and Guils guilt, so prominent in criticism of

Stoppards play, can be answered in a different manner. The motivationof their deaths is not moralistic, but literary. In Stoppards play, Ros andGuil do not die in front of the king of England, but in the presence of thetragedians. The traveling actors, the representatives of tragic poetics, areboth the executioners and the witnesses to their deathsto put it differ-ently, they bring them their death. It does not matter whether they areguilty or not. It would be better if they are not, because the best type ofman for a tragedy is the sort who does not differ in virtue and justice,and who changes to misfortune not because of badness or wickedness,but because of some mistake.37 This brings us to the second task ofStoppards play: the demand to represent the unrepresentable. The ci-pher for the unrepresentable in Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Deadis death. The death of others can be observed, it can even be performedonstage, but no one can represent his own death, says Ros. In theater,though, we see death represented, but only as the death of others. Whenthe actors finish playing the mime, which ends with the representationof the death of spies, Guil angrily shouts: Actors! The mechanics ofcheap melodrama! That isnt death! (More quietly.) You scream and chokeand sink to your knees, but it doesnt bring death home to anyoneitdoesnt catch them unawares and start the whisper in their skulls thatsaysOne day you are going to die. . . . You cant act death. The fact of itis nothing to do with seeing it happenits not gasps and blood andfalling aboutthat isnt what makes it death (62). Even when he is givena chance to see his own death represented in the mime, Guil does notrecognize it as his own, and thus misses the opportunity to read in theactors performance the signs of his own destiny. Ones own death can-not be played out: Death is not anything. Death is not Its the ab-sence of presence, nothing more (9192). Death can be talked aboutonly negatively and in terms of absence, and consequently, it can be rep-resented only in the same manner. The theme of Ionescos The Chairs isemptiness, or absence, and the purpose of the play is [t]o express thevoid by means of language, gesture, acting, and props. To express ab-sence. In Becketts poetics, art has to express absence of its object andthus represent the unrepresentable. In Rosencrantz and GuildernsternAre Dead, the theme of the representation of death stands for the demand


to represent the unrepresentable and re-emerges several times, as a re-minder that the demand has not been forgotten. Stoppards play givesthe final answer at the very end. Ros and Guil, as the title announces,have to die. How?

There are two ways. Player dies in one way: he stands with huge,terrible eyes, clutches at the wound as the blade withdraws: he makessmall weeping sounds and falls to his knees, and then right down (90).This is what Guil had previously named the mechanics of cheap melo-drama, and it is not the genuine representation of death. It is at best thedeath of others, or what is imagined as death. However, Player comments,You see, it is the kind they do believe inits what is expected (91).After that, it is Ros and Guils turn to die. Because death is nothing-ness, the absence of presence, because death isnt, the two of themdie without the mechanics of cheap melodrama by disappearing fromthe stageand they are no more.

The melodramatic dying of Player is not the genuine representationof death: it only represents, in a caricatural way, its external signs. Playeroperates, so to say, within the domain of the visible. However, it is a rep-resentation. After his act, Player stands up, receives compliments fromhis colleagues, and the business of representing can go on, even if it hasto be in the shape of a thousand casual deaths (90). On the other hand,Ros and Guil represent dying ones own death from the internal point ofview, and by stepping out from the domain of the visible. They disappearfrom view (92), and no further representation can be expected of them.This might be the genuine representation of death, but its result is thedeath of representation. The genuine representation of the unrepresentableis possible, but Stoppards play makes obvious the logical and aestheticparadox built into the late modernist demand: representing theunrepresentable destroys the means of representation, and eventuallybecomes a self-defeating project.

Immediately thereafter, the stage lights up, but Ross and Guils bod-ies are not on it. The characters who brought the poetics of autonomousSchein to Stoppards play have disappeared without a trace and with themthe poetics of representing the unrepresentable. The final scene ofRosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead is the final scene of ShakespearesHamlet, and its last words Horatios modified promise:

Zoran Milutinovi 359 give orders that these bodies

high on a stage be placed to the view;and let me speak to the yet unknowing worldhow these things came about: so shall you hearof carnal, bloody und unnatural acts,of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,and, in this upshot, purposes mistookfallen on the inventors heads: all this can Itruly deliver. (93)

While Ros and Guil are not on a stage placed to the view, Horatioswords are the triumph of everything that the poetics of autonomousSchein rejected, and they sound as an invitation, promise, or introduc-tion to a new epoch. Despite the strong ironic accent, the end of Stoppardsplay is unambiguous in terms of poetics: the unrepresentable cannot berepresented, because it leads to the death of representation. However, thereshould be representation, and placement on a stage to the view, in thedomain of the visible, of that which can be represented.

This does not mean that Stoppards play is a nave plea for a return totradition. After the great modernist adventure, no one can pretend thatit has not happened, and that is a strong enough reason why one cannotpretend to be Shakespeares contemporary. This is why the Shakespeareancomponent enters Stoppards play in an ironic manner: with full con-sciousness that we recognize its conventions as conventions of drama,but also with an admission that those conventions have preserved anaesthetic possibility rejected by modernism. Everything that happensaround Ros and Guilthat is, Vladimir and Estragonin a place with-out any visible character has to be understood in that way: at the momentwhen all dramatic conventions are destroyed, and even the medium it-self threatens to disappear, drama reaches out into its own past and bringsto light its well-known conventions. Since they were all re-examined andrejected in modernism, they can be used only with a certain ironic dis-tance, but they can help the genre continue its existence. If the world canno longer be represented directly, it can still be represented indirectlyby quoting a traditional and conventional way of representing the world.Years after Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead had first beenperformed, Umberto Eco expressed this attitude in a very convincingmanner:


But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go nofurther, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impos-sible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern con-sists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, be-cause its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony,not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man wholoves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love youmadly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that heknows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland.Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, Ilove you madly. At this point, having avoided false innocence, havingsaid clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will never-theless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her,but he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman goes along withthis, she will have received a declaration of love all the same. Neither ofthe two speakers will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challengeof the past, of the already said, which cannot be eliminated; both willconsciously and with pleasure play the game of irony. But both willhave succeeded, once again, in speaking of love.38

The above-mentioned artistic possibility, rejected by modernism andreactivated by postmodernism, can also be understood as a general pos-sibility of dealing with the world. Peter Sloterdjk labels it Ptolemaicdisarmament, as opposed to Copernican mobilization.39 The prin-ciples and consequences of the modernist aesthetic are comparable tothe Copernican turn in astronomy. Modernism has insisted on relievingus from everything that is self-evident, obvious, or natural, from ev-erything that remains protected by routine, unquestioned, and undis-turbed until intellect strikes it with its cutting edge of reflection. In aclimate of authentic and consequent modernism, nothing is left as natu-ral or obvious. The Copernican shock demonstrated to us, writesSloterdjk, that we should not view the world for how it looks, but that weshould confront the impressions of our senses with the knowledge of theworlds reality: when the sun is coming out, the sun is not coming out.Thus Copernicus unleashed the process of modern exclusion of the ob-vious, which has spread into all realms. Kant branded his own philoso-phy the Copernican revolution. Freud performed the Copernican turnagainst the Ptolemaic illusion of self-evident consciousness. Wherever itmade its presence felt, the Copernican revolution fought illusion, dog-matic slumber, and semblance (again, Schein). Aesthetic modernism, saysSloterdjk, denies the assumption that there is a nature with which it is

Zoran Milutinovi 361possible to identify or that can be imitated. The moment we leave be-hind the Ptolemaic illusion or Schein, untouched marvelous worlds ofamimetic Copernican aesthetics open their doors to us. The Copernicanrevolution means the mobilization of the world and world-images up tothe point where everything seems possible. Sloterdjk calls this point thepoint of total giddiness. If the truth of the world cannot be found in whatwe see, hear, and feel, but has to be imagined beyond sensual evidenceand read as a ciphered ontological letter, then the core of this truth is thefact that we can think about it until we are completely overcome by ver-tigo. And when Copernicanism reaches the point of vertigo, its truthsbecome less truthful than Ptolemaic illusions. Die Moderne celebratesits greatest triumph in the absurdity of its results, claims Sloterdjk.40

The conscious retreat from the whirlpool of Copernican represen-tations into the old-new attitude of simple perception is named bySloterdjk Ptolemaic disarmament. The Ptolemaic attitude rests un-touched by the Copernican mobilization deep within us. Despite theCopernican results of micro- and macrocosmological examinations ofnature, in a mesocosmical context, listening and hearing still have thesame value for us as they had at the moment when the first man raisedhis head. This is where Sloterdjk sees the postmodern aesthetic: in amesocosmical realm, where Copernican knowledge of the aesthetics ofmobilization can be ignored and the Ptolemaic sensuous life-world isaffirmed. Stoppards answer to the epochal crisis of Schein is thusmesocosmic and Ptolemaic: despite everything, one should continue theplay of signs in the domain of the visible, audible, and representable. Inthe words of Stoppards Player: You see, it is the kind they do believeinits what is expected.

University College London

NOTES1 Wolfgang Theile, Immanente Poetik des Romans (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft, 1980), 8. The translation is mine. In the original, Will man nmlich Sagenund Verstehen auf dem Felde der sthetik anwenden, so kann die angemessene Fragestellungnie lauten, Was sollte gesagt werden? Wie konnte es verstanden werden? sondern immer nur,Was konnte und kann mit dieser Aussage und jener Verstehensmglichkeit poetisch erreichtwerden?


2 Eugne Ionesco, The Chairs, in Plays, trans. Donald Watson, vol. 1 of 12 (London: JohnCalder, 1958), 84.

3 The language of The Bald Soprano, writes Michael Holland, cannot correspond to anyhuman situation: it has severed its links with the world. Language and action thus begin to partcompany. See Holland, Ionesco, La Cantatrice Chauve; and Les Chaises (London: Grant andCutler, 2004), 23.

4 Ionesco wants to reveal the structure by sucking out the content, remarks RichardSchechner in The Bald Soprano and The Lesson: An Inquiry into Play Structure, in Ionesco: ACollection of Critical Essays, ed. Rosette C. Lamont (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973),22.

5 Ionesco, The Bald Prima Donna, in Plays, 1:98, 103.

6 Ibid., 1:108.

7 Eugne Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes; Writings on the Theatre, trans. Donald Watson(London: John Calder, 1964), 187.

8 See Hans Blumenberg, Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Mglichkeit des Romans, in Nachahmungund Illusion: Kolloquium Geien Juni 1963, Vorlagen und Verhandlungen, ed. H. R. Jau (Munich:Edios Verlag, 1964), 927.

9 J. S. Doubrovsky, Ionesco and the Comic of Absurdity, in Lamont, ed., 17.

10 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkhn,as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London: Penguin, 1971), 131.

11 Ionesco, Notes and Counter Notes, 185.

12 Ibid., 199.

13 Ibid., 226.

14 Semblance is R. Hullot-Kentors translation for Adornos Schein; see Theodor W. Adorno,Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). Fredric Jameson warnsthat Schein implies the existence of something else behind that appearance or illusion and which,besides the obvious presence of an original, may also suggest things as diverse as the true mean-ing of the work, and that representation is its poststructural variant. See Jameson, LateMarxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 165, 167.

15 Lyotard goes as far as to suggest that this is a fundamental characteristic of modern art asa whole, not just one of its currents. See Jean Franois Lyotard, Answer to the Question: What Isthe Postmodern? in The Postmodern Explained to Children: Correspondence, 19821985, trans.Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (London: Turnaround, 1992), 20.

16 Theodor W. Adorno, sthetische Theorie (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1970), 164. Thetranslation is mine. In the original, was es erscheint und was es sein will.

17 Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit, Three Dialogues, in Samuel Beckett: A Collec-tion of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 17.

18 Ibid., 20.

19 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber,1990), 41. Subsequent references to this play are cited parenthetically in the text.

Zoran Milutinovi 36320 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Kenneth Alderman Telford (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1961), 1450a.

21 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 108. Subsequent referencesto this play are cited parenthetically in the text.

22 Theodor W. Adorno, Trying to Understand Endgame, in Samuel Beckett, ed. HaroldBloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 69.

23 Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Becketts Later Drama (New York: Routledge,1993), 15.

24 Charles R. Lyons, Becketts Fundamental Theatre: The Plays from Not I to What Where,in Becketts Later Fiction and Drama: Texts for Company, ed. James Acheson and Kateryna Arthur(London: Macmillan, 1987), 80.

25 Paul Lawley, Becketts Dramatic Counterpoint: A Reading of Play, Journal of BeckettStudies 9 (1984): 2541.

26 Hersh Zeifman, The Syntax of Closure: Becketts Late Drama, in Beckett On and On ,ed. Lois Oppenheim and Marius Buning (London: Associated University Presses, 1996), 246.

27 That Time and Footfalls are variations on the same motif, performed in a very similarway. In That Time, Old Man is alone onstage, utterly motionless, and only as someone who lis-tens to speech coming from offstage. Becketts central motif recurs here again: the three voiceshint, rather than say explicitly, that there is an event, or image, or emotiona something thatnever becomes explicit, yet remains illuminated beneath the layers of speech that are not di-rectly related to it. In Footfalls, the Womans Voicealso coming from offstagetells of some-thing that happened and that seems to be the cause of Mays current condition. May takes up thestory and continues in the third person, but the continuation also fails to explain the unnamablesomething, the linchpin of both the speeches of May and the Mother, and the play as a whole.

28 S. E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Becketts Dramatic Texts (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1985), 100.

29 Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Becketts Late Style in the Theater (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987).

30 Lois Oppenheim, The Painted Word: Samuel Becketts Dialogue with Art (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 2000), 19.

31 Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber and Faber, 1988),9. Subsequent references to this play are cited parenthetically in the text.

32 See Joseph E. Duncan, Godot Comes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, ARIEL12, no. 4 (October 1981): 5770. The most comprehensive overview of both Shakespearean andBeckettian elements in Stoppards play is provided by Anja Easterling, Shakespearean Parallelsand Affinities with the Theatre of the Absurd in Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and GuildensternAre Dead (Ume : Ume Universitetsbibliotek, 1982).

33 Neil Sammells, The Early Stage Plays, in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard,ed. Katherine E. Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 112.

34 On Stoppard and postmodernism, see Michael Vanden Heuvel: Is Postmodernism?:Stoppard among/against the Postmoderns, in Kelly, ed., 21328.

35 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Three Novels by Samuel Beckett: Molloy, MaloneDies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove, 1958), 414.


36 Although Ros and Guil bring the poetics of autonomous Schein into the play, it does notmean that they are its conscious advocates. On the contrary: it is their task to parody the dra-matic form devised by Beckett. When they meet the actors in Elsinore, Ros and Guil describe forthem the worst possible punishment in the following manner:

Guil: Now mind your tongue, or well have it out and throw the rest of youaway, like a nightingale at a Roman feast.

Ros: Took the very words out of my mouth.Guil: Youd be lost for words.Ros: Youd be tongue-tied.Guil: Like a mute in a monologue.Ros: Like a nightingale at a Roman feast.Guil: Your diction will go to pieces.Ros: Your lines will be cut.Guil: To dumbshows.Ros: And dramatic pauses. (45)

If and when Ros and Guil fulfill their threats, the actors will be able to enact only theater re-duced to a text consisting of mime and dramatic pauses, and they will hopelessly search forwords like a mute in a monologue. It does remind one of Becketts Act Without Words, and evenmore of Becketts other late pieces for theater, which came after Stoppard wrote his play. Never-theless, this reads as no more than an innocent joke at Becketts expense. Stoppards play keepsits pice de rsistance for the very end.

37 Aristotle, 1453a.

38 Umberto Eco, Reflections on The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (London:Minerva, 1984), 6768.

39 Peter Sloterdjk, Kopernikanische Mobilmachung und ptolemische Abrstung (Frank-furt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), 4976.

40 Ibid., 66. The translation is mine. In the original, Ihre grten Triumphe feiert die Moderneim Widersinn ihrer Ergebnisse.

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