In Not I from 1972, a woman's mouth is isolated on the stage, locked in place with the rest of her face and body shrouded in darkness. She is identified only as "Mouth." Through a torrential stream of monologue, we discover that the woman – nearing seventy years of age, possibly even dying – has remained silent most of her life, since being thrust prematurely into the world. Her sudden flood of language is a manifestation of the "buzzing" in her head, an almost involuntary act, an autobiographical stream of babelogue with the "half the vowels wrong." Significantly, she refuses to adopt the first-person pronoun, insisting on referring to the subject of her story as "she". Like many of Beckett's characters, Mouth's hysterical need for acting out, keep talking defers the act of self-identification, the awareness of "I" that denotes accountability among the ruins of a fallen world.
Whereas Krapp's taping is accumulative and entirely self-focussed, Mouth is continually revising her narrative, the perfect or ideal form of which would omit her altogether. When her "vehement refusal to relinquish third person" suffers from a moment of confusion, she cries out, "no! . . she! . ."
Mouth becomes invested with an almost hallucinatory sense of intensity and carnality; her flickering movements the living synecdoche for an absent body. The longer we watch (and listen to) Mouth talk, laugh, and scream, the more we perceive other bodily elements as well, from the opening of the eye to the clenching of the fist. Like ghostly overtones to live music, these almost subliminal transformations arise from the interplay of material and instrument, and in Not I Beckett achieves a remarkable collusion of speech and form. Mouth is intimately connected to the words spewing forth: her very contours and motions subordinated to the demands of articulation, she provides a physical embodiment of language. To fall silent – to shut, to close up – would seem a kind of suicide, further underlining that Beckettian compulsion to break the silence with a constant stream of language, despite the futility of communicating anything meaningful.
Performing the part of Mouth is a real challenge: besides having to deliver a winding monologue whose pacing is everything, the actress must endure the physical discomfort of being literally locked in place, including a head restraint, so that only her mouth remains always visible. Body on stage becomes present through absence of the whole body, we can see and hear only the mouth. Actress’s absent body expresses lively concreteness and escapes becoming a “representable object… for the abstractive gaze” of the spectator. Hugh Kenner has suggested that Beckett may be recalling one of the unusual conditions to the license granted to Ireland's Abbey Theatre in 1904: besides being prohibited from staging exhibitions of wild beasts, the managers were not "to allow women or children to be hung from the flies or fixed in positions from which they cannot release themselves." When the play premiered in New York, Jessica Tandy was puzzled and asked Beckett whether the woman had been raped in the field. Beckett was startled: "How could you think of such a thing!" There is no need to invent external incidents to justify, as it were, Mouth's dilemma. Existence is trauma enough, and a narrative can be a consolation only in the form of disappointment.
The too many contrasting views on Beckett, on the effect and functioning of his plays in theatrical contexts, were provoked also by two burning issues that he explores in what he calls the “stage texts”: spectatorial gaze and gender issues. His plays and their theatrical interpretations still generate heated debates, especially on the grounds of their poststructuralist complexity and their feminist potential. Beckett raised difficult questions about gender relations, social conditions and dilemmas facing women, disability, age, affectivity and lack of affectivity. He never provided any answers, he didn’t give any hints how spectators should live their lives. He did not proposed political actions, policies or social measures. But these plays have a potential to inspire social change and to challenge us nowadays. Beckett’s plays bring new perspectives to feminist issues today and present contrasting views on inequality.
Adrienne Rich used the concept of re-vision to symbolize the act of looking back at old texts from new critical directions by raising fresh questions. According to her, re-vision is for feminists “more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.” Through re-vision we can look at Beckett’s texts for a way to broaden horizons, rewrite, reinterpret, criticize and restage them. Many interpretations of Beckett are put on stage everyday but Beckett’s potential is still to be rediscovered. By using the easiest strategy to relate to his characters, stage situations and his clichés nowadays we just rely on the values that we already agreed on. Each time a superficial canonized staging of Beckett is done by well-meaning actors, directors and producers another nail is hammered into his theatrical coffin. That won’t be problematic if these performances won’t overshadow outstanding elements in his plays and a strong critical voice. By seeing Beckett as a tool for social change an uncomfortable question has to be asked: is Beckett actually the finest tool for questioning inequality and patriarchy? Or would it be better to leave this task to human rights organizations, the UN, academics or feminists? Can we actually revision his characters as relevant mouthpieces for feminist slogans? Re-vision contributes to feminist epistemologies and critique of surrounding inequality; it offers a confirmation that the world around us can be changed. Re-visioning Beckett offers new types of subjectivities and new theoretical frameworks. According to Rich, re-vision is an inevitably collective action and can establish new frameworks in understanding reality.
The Mouth is not only a simple I, because she is directly and intimately related to her being as she, alongside other women into this world. There is a continuum in a not-I-but-she-centered vision of the world: her subjectivity is attached to other women. Following Braidotti and contrary to Lacan, her ex-centricity vis-à-vis the system of representation points to another logic, another way of making sense: the-she-in-I is not silent, she is part of a symbolic referential system by and of women. She is not stepping out of patriarchy, she does not escape its logic, she uses language not as a spatial structure that can be avoided or bypassed but in process within it. There is a project in Beckett’s play of defining the content of she-in-I by disengaging the traps of a constructed feminine in the sense of a dark continent or femininity as masquerade. She-not-I grows in relation to other shes, an attempt of redefining the subject. Being-she becomes an ontological precondition for a conscious becoming of the subject: getting back to Rich, one has to start with the body and the bodily roots of subjectivity, or at least with a mouth, I would add.
And this is exactly the point where feminism comes in via Braidotti: its values cannot be reduced to yet another theory – a dogma for general consumption. Feminism plays with women’s ontological desire to be women subjects: to transcend the traditional vision of subjectivity as gender-free, to inscribe the subject back into her corporeal reality which in our case starts with a mouth. Beckett’s play gets involved in the feminist theoretical project exactly at this point, as an attempt of redefining a corporeal subjectivity.
Beckett’s play rests on the same historical negation as feminist theory: disqualification and exclusion of women and their experiences. The next move after acknowledging the denigration is a discursive leap towards a redefinition of women through feminism as a movement of thought and action. But to make any sense at all of this redefinition of subjectivity and corporeality a political practice and collective acting out is required. Only at this level, re-vision can function as offering new frameworks in understanding reality. By moving it from page to stage, Beckett’s text puts into question the theatrical frame, and the body staged within it. It becomes exemplary of the critical operations of certain feminist performance practice, especially the theatrical project proposed by Helene Cixous. The reframing of Becket’s text focuses on the hysterical refusal to enter the patriarchal Oedipal discourse. Mouth’s anxiety to "get the story straight" is particularly intense because its inability to give complete and logical accounts; like a hysterical narrative it is full of gaps and blockages. Not I plays with a spiral of identifications, where the interference effect of multiple voices undermines a search for the narrative referent and announces a multitude of referents, going further to the spectator in a performing situation. This play follows Cixous’ theatrical proposal of “going beyond the confines of the stage,” in an excessive break with narrative closure. The Mouth is the paradigm of a theatrical gesture that disrupts the realist narrative and deferral the reinscription of the dominant discourse. Her desire goes beyond a realist representation which can silence her, fragmenting identification processes and coherent unified identities. The spectator is forced to face difficulty in identification with possible characters through an effort towards “the instability of the text’s point of address…insisting on performance as address” because here we have also the missing body which cannot be entirely given over to spectacle. Paradoxically, Not I is first of all a potential single gesture a la Cixous: “a single gesture is enough, but one that can transform the world.”
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