What is a birth astride a grave?: 'Ohio Impromptu' as Zen Koan
John L. Kundert-Gibbs
Modern Drama
Vol.40 No.1
Spring 1997
pp.38-56
COPYRIGHT @ 1997 University of Toronto (Canada)
¡@
Seeing into Nothingness -- this is the true seeing, the eternal
seeing.
-- Shen-Hui
When, after the approximately ten minutes of static, nearly
motionless monologue which comprises Ohio Impromptu,(1) we hear R
pronounce "Nothing is left to tell," it is quite apparent that in
this, one of Samuel Beckett's last plays, the author has taken yet
another step toward the zero point of "lessness" (to use his own
term) to which he had been striving in his late works.(2) In
previous plays like Footfalls, we can see a "winding down" of motion
and interaction as May and V begin with dialogue and fairly
consistent movement, only to (d)evolve into monologue, then silence
and stillness in the final blank tableau. In Ohio Impromptu,
however, the play as a totality apparently eliminates nearly all
motion and interaction between characters. Two characters, owning
only the titles L and R, simply sit, R reading a story from a "worn
volume" of two other, implicitly related characters who eventually
sit and read from a 11 worn volume" themselves. In this quiet,
"Noh-like" play,(3) the only motion and interaction we see for most
of the play are L's knocks on the table at which they sit, which
cause R to repeat the last sentence from the book he reads.
We seem far here from the easier comprehensibility of Beckett's
earlier, more physically active and representational plays like
Waiting for Godot, yet Ohio Impromptu's internal narrative and
physical representation are each remarkably straightforward (akin to
the immediate context of, say, Catastrophe). We hear a story of a
man who tries, but fails, to escape the memory of his lost love by
moving to what seems fairly obviously to be the right bank of the
Seine river in Paris;(4) after a time, he is successfully comforted
by one sent from his Beloved, who comes to him at night and reads
him a narrative from a "worn volume." We see two men sitting at a
"white deal table" with a "Black wide-brimmed hat" resting at its
center, R reading from a book, L apparently listening (285). Why
then the frustrating strangeness of the play? Quite simply because
of slippage: slippage between what we see on stage and what we hear
in R's narrative, slippage between the categories "play" and
"fiction," slippage between past and future, and so on.
Language, for example, slips between the expected (or read) and
unexpected (or spontaneous): once, on reading the odd,
quintessentially Beckettian sentence, "After so long a lapse that as
if never been," R pauses, and then exclaims, "Yes" (286). As has
been noted, this word is almost the only qualitative match to the
title word, "impromptu," as it seems the only spontaneous event in
R's speech. It is the "sudden appearance of the unanticipated"(5)
which throws the movement of the play off to a distant point.
Moreover, even the static nature of the play itself is disrupted:
... [T]he visual image constitutes a[n apparently] stable point of
reference throughout the performance, but its essentially static
nature is
undermined, firstly by the gestures, which introduce a dynamic
element
into the stage image, and which may radically affect, even challenge
our
interpretation of it, and also by the continual modification or
[iterative]
re-view of the scenic image in light of the text.(6)
Image is effectively destabilized by action, and both are
destabilized by the repeated words and images generated by the
narrative read. Like the protagonist of the narrative who walks out
to the Isle of Swans over and over seeking "some measure of relief"
(285), the text replays words and "events," constantly affecting and
altering the "reality" we see before us. In Ohio Impromptu, as with
other of Beckett's late plays, there is no straightforward way to
assign all our sensory information into any single set of
complementary referents: Ohio Impromptu is multi-vocal (or, in
Mikhail Bakhtin's word, polyvalent); its elements are in continuous
flux, combining harmoniously and dissonantly as they rub against one
another.
The nature and unique structure of the play is crucial to the way in
which Ohio Impromptu creates and destabilizes meaning; this is
certainly a play on the edges of drama, of size, and of
comprehension, where Beckett disrupts dramatic convention through
the nearly static, minimalized actions on stage. Although we as
audience feel the multiplicity and ambiguity of who and what is
happening on stage and are thrust into a quandary about how it is
related to what we hear, the import of the singular structure and
content of this play may not be apparent immediately. To begin
delving into the effect of the play as a whole -- both for
characters and audience -- let us work from the end of the play,
beginning with the inner relationship of the characters on stage and
in the narrative.
After reading of characters matching L's and R's descriptions who
are "[B]uried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness,"
the pair on stage seems to mirror the narrative pair, as they are
also "turned to stone" in a stare which calls to mind the
death-birth image so common to Beckett's plays (288). At this point
we see in the stage characters both the advent of unconsciousness
and the possibility of a new state of consciousness (heralded in
part by the simultaneity of their "lower[ing] their right hands to
[the] table") in the final words of the "sad tale" and final tableau
of the play (288). In these "stone" stares, which both the story and
stage pair share, there is obviously an element of "mindlessness" --
an escape from conscious consciousness -- yet at the same time, some
vague notion that the characters are indeed very aware; only at a
different level than would normally constitute awareness. If there
is reason to believe that these characters disrupt the flow of our
conventional understanding of consciousness and reality, moving on
to something else, then what is this something else? What state of
mind are these pairs of characters moving toward, and where do their
minds go if they are no longer utilizing the normative mode of
consciousness where events are separated and linguistic signs
indicate unique conceptual signifiers?
Though Beckett eschewed any knowledge of Oriental mysticism, there
are striking parallels between the final moment of Ohio Impromptu
and the experience which Zen mystics call Satori or enlightenment;
and there are striking parallels between the play as a whole and the
Zen koan, a short, riddle-like device used by Zen masters in China,
Japan, and other far-eastern countries to lead their followers to
enlightenment. The koan, a brief, paradoxical, sometimes humorous
statement, often couched in a small story, which can be used to
"awaken" the struggling student, bears many similarities to the four
page "playlet" about two pairs of men who take solace in the ritual
reading of a (their?) story. Further, as Yasunari Takahashi notes,
Beckett started writing plays at the point in the history of the
Western theater where all realistic conventions of drama, including
the assumptions that the theater has nothing to do with the sacred,
broke down, and it seems to be that, in his ruthless effort to strip
the theater of everything that is not absolutely necessary, he has
arrived somewhere close to where Zeami [the founder of Noh] started
six hundred years ago. In both Zeami's and Becketts theater, nothing
happens (everything has already happened), but someone does come out
of an unknown "sacred" country that Beckett [,in] ... Ohio
Impromptu, calls the "profounds of mind." That "someone" is at once
"the other" and one's deepest self, that "country" is at once
"unknown" and half remembered.(7)
Given these encouraging similarities, let us further examine the
interplay of Ohio Impromptu and the Zen koan -- two disparate, yet
fascinatingly intertwined methods of existential inquiry -- in order
to see what new layers of Beckett's work we may uncover.
We begin by noting that the Zen koan potentiates a paradigm shift
between our common, dualistic mode of thought and a more visceral
"pre-reflective" mode of interacting with the world. If we regard
Ohio Impromptu in this light, we see that, via destabilization on a
multitude of levels, the play not only potentiates, but comes as
close to realizing this shift in thought as is probably possible on
stage. The play is, on many levels, a Zen koan read, meditated on,
and finally identified with and through. This device, used
especially by the Rinzai school to force the Great Doubt and Great
Death -- a period of crisis in which the rational mind loses its
primacy and a less reflective, more direct mode of being takes its
place -- can, if meditated on with all of one's being, produce an
intense "state of thought without thinking, of consciousness beyond
thought"(8) -- in other words "[p]rofounds of mind. Of mindlessness"
(288) -- which leads to the state of Satori, or Nirvana. Like a
koan, the brief, paradoxical, sometimes humorous narrative and stage
"frame" of meditative ritual reading which constitutes Ohio
Impromptu presents us with many seemingly contradictory concepts and
juxtapositions that cannot be systematically resolved, necessitating
the shift in vision to what T.P. Kasulis calls the
"without-causal"(9) state arising from the Great Death of the
ego[-consciousness].(10)
If the "sad tale" which R relates -- indeed the very act of
repeatedly reading the sad tale -- moves characters (and audience)
to a position in which our normal mode of rational thought is no
longer valid, then the final reading of the tale which we witness is
the culminating point. Here, a period of months or years of
practice, suffering, and the gradual build up of enlightenment are
intensified and foreshortened as the former ego-centered paradigm is
cast off in favor of the "without-context" of Satori. This quiet,
still, yet intensely suffering period is what we see before us on
stage. As with Zen practice, this critical moment is brought on by
intensity of repetition, on both large and small scales. For Zen,
repetition is the key to perfecting any act, be it zazen (sitting in
the lotus position and concentrating on Mujo -- no mind, or
no-thing), martial arts, or even breathing. Perfection comes through
repetition,(11) and only then can enlightenment come. Attempting to
achieve Mujo (or "without mind") purposefully(12) requires endless
repetitive practice, as any form of striving for, or desiring the
enlightened state will invariably call the ego (or active conscious
mind) into play, which will create a state of wanting or waiting for
"something" to happen, destroying the subject's chance of finding a
consciousness beyond consciousness.
Finally, after "revolving it all" in an endless series of ritual
mental iterations (analogous to May's physical pacing in Footfalls),
the student ceases to wait for something to happen while sitting in
zazen.
No longer sitting to be enlightened, one merely sits to sit. Feeling
almost dead in any case, no longer protecting any part of the self,
the disciple sits with abandonment, totally unconcerned with the
consequences. At this point, the Great Doubt may arise: a
still-point of terrible tension in which one gives oneself up to the
feeling of nowhere to go.(13)
At this point, scales of time and space cease to exist in a
logically connected, contiguous sense. And once this state comes to
pass, the Great Death can occur, allowing enlightenment to fill the
void. It is only through repetition of "right action," and
especially of zazen, that one can purposely attain the state of
Satori, or Nirvana. There is no great mystery, then, why Zen monks
spend their entire lives repeating the zazen meditation and
question-answer periods many hours a day: to achieve the new vision
of the world which enlightenment affords, any cost is deemed
acceptable.
As far as Ohio Impromptu is concerned, the Zen practice of ritual
repetition can help to explain the ostensibly repeated reading of
the "sad tale," as well as R's repetition of certain pieces of the
narrative on L's command: the two (or four, if we include the
narrative pair) are involved in the process of zazen; they sit in
meditative poses and ask questions of each other (via the knocks).
This iterative patterning of reading, knocks, and repeated text will
"grind text, wear down the book in the center of the deal table ...,
softening meaning - until ... [the] mind reawakens to true
mindlessness"(14) -- a re-visioning of the patterning of reality
which takes "the mind out of a rationalistic habit of thought into
true mindlessness."(15) The characters are working toward
enlightenment -- escape from the suffering of the singular "I" --
and use the repeated zazen ritual of reading and mulling over
"their" koan to achieve -- or better yet, be -- this state.
At this point, we might be inclined to try to figure out "who is
who" in Ohio Impromptu: as with many of Beckett's other plays, a
pair is present -- and in this case one exists in the narrative as
well. Is one a "Zen master," the other a student? This is not a
simple issue, as this pair of pairs is in constant flux, the
relationship(s) changing as identity shifts and recombines from
moment to moment. To simplify matters, then, we will momentarily
dissect the play into pieces, each populated by a pair of characters
or a doubled event. Though this effectively kills the organic unity
of the play, our discourse is, of necessity, still trapped within
the normative logical framework and thus a distillation of arbitrary
parts is at least momentarily necessary.(16)
If we first consider the play's internal narrative (the "sad tale")
as a koan in itself, then it follows that either of the stage
characters reading this koan -- L or R -- can be master or student.
The next logical question is, of course, which is which? Apparently
L is the student, as he listens to R's reading, yet other
possibilities are also viable: perhaps R is the student, as L forces
him to read and re-read a text which he, as Mary A. Doll puts it,
"seems at a loss to comprehend";(17) perhaps both are students,
reading the printed words of some unidentified master -- possibly
(and recursively) themselves -- in an attempt to understand it.
Within the narrative, the apparently distinct reader and
listener/protagonist are also mingled in a dynamic pairing as they
grow "to be as one" during their repeated ritual of reading (another
koan?). They, we are told, find a state of "mindlessness" together.
Reflecting this internal event, L and R apparently also come to an
understanding of the narrative's koan by the end of the piece, as
they replay what has happened within the story when they themselves
turn "to stone." Although the characters L and R, reader and
listener, are in flux, there is good evidence that their relational
pairing approaches the new vision of "without context" which is
Nirvana. As opposed to most if not all of Beckett's other drama, the
final tableau we witness is a "visual realisation of intimacy and
communion longed for, but never achieved in Berceuse [Rockaby -- or
other plays]," a "closure" which "can . . . only be achieved in the
formless state of being/non-being beyond temporal existence."(18)
The dynamic interplay of the pairs L and R, narrator and listener,
narrative and stage, as well as the destabilization of our "normal"
paradigm to make way for a new, discontinuous visioning of the
world, can be explicated to a remarkable extent by the play's
powerful image of the (Seine) river dividing about the Isle of
Swans.
From its single window he could see the downstream extremity of the
Isle
of Swans . . . . Day after day he could be seen slowly pacing the
islet.
Hour after hour. In his long black coat no matter what the weather
and old world Latin Quarter hat.
At the tip he would always pause to dwell on the receding stream.
How in joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on.
(285-6)
Apart from the nice complication of the issue of perception (who
sees whom?), we here have, metaphorically, a third element -- the
Isle of Swans -- which destabilizes the pair of arms which is the
river, forcing them into an apparent doubleness; yet here also is
the image of reunification as the river reclaims its wholeness via
the revisioning of itself on the "downstream" tip of the isle. This
same type of image is utilized by David Loy to describe Buddhism's
rejection of conceptual absolutism: "Buddhism denies that there is
any rock [or island dividing the current], asserting that there is
only a flux. The rock is a thought-construction [, a destabilizing
force,] and the sense-of-self might better be compared to a bubble
which flows like the water because it is part of the water [of
change] . . . ."(19)
Once we lock on to the implications and importance of this
analogy/identity, the dynamic flux of characters and actions takes
on a richer, more positive aspect. L and R, and the pair in the
internal narrative by association, are "[a]s alike . . . as
possible," not only "in appearance," but also in the way they sit
and their sharing of the single "[b]lack wide-brimmed hat" between
them (285). Whether these pairs are taken to represent the halves of
the divided river, left and right, two aspects of a brain (as in
Endgame), listener and reader (or speaker, as in Not I), "real" and
"projected," psychotherapist and patient, mother and child (Molloy,
Footfalls, and others), just two pairs of unrelated characters, or
all of the above and more,(20) L and R (and the narrative pair) are
twinned -- at the same time definitely two ones and a single whole.
The destabilizing "trace" of the Isle of Swans -- and the
destabilizing force of memories of the protagonist's ubiquitously
absent, potentiated Beloved -- necessitates a revisioning of the
pair in terms of their relational "without-context": they are beyond
the categorical distinctions of two or one, ". . . identity and
difference . . . ,"(21) even L or R, as they "conflow" around
distinctions and "flow united on." While the play appears to be
comprised of simple, static halves or doubles with no gray areas,
these distinctions are effectively destabilized like the river
around the Isle, signs and referents turbulently dividing and
mingling like the interpenetrating halves of the white-on-black,
black-on-white field of the Yin-Yang symbol.(22)
L and R are thus one and not-one; they are beyond the pigeon-holed
distinction of one or the other. Likewise, the relationship between
L and R and the characters in the internal narrative cannot be
categorized: L is and is not the listener in the story; R is and is
not the reader; L is and is not the reader, R is and is not the
listener. Yet what, presented in this light, seems to make Ohio
Impromptu frustratingly complex, appears much simpler if one can
achieve the enlightened state spoken of by Zen philosophers: there
is no need for any one of the possible distinctions and connections
between L and R and listener and reader to be any truer than the
others: they are all true, while at the same time none of them is
true. By making this assertion, we are taking the Buddhist "middle
way," which "means not setting up any opposition between subject
[me] and object [you]"(23) -- not making a distinction because that
would belittle, or even destroy the vastness and simplicity of the
koan that is Ohio Impromptu.
One of the reasons that L and R originally perceive themselves (or
are perceived) as different is because they have not yet found their
original faces, their (original) enlightened selves. From the
internal narrative (and assuming a congruence between what's going
on stage and in the narrative), we are told that since the
listener's separation from his Beloved (the owner of "the dear
name"), he has been subject to "his old terror of the night" (286-7)
-- he, like Vladimir, Estragon, and many another Beckettian
character, is a conscious, wanting, and waiting "I" who suffers from
desire: desire to perceive and be perceived; desire for "another
living soul"(24) With whom to interact and from whom hopefully to
find relief. This other (more exactly, the messenger of this other),
is perceived as someone separate, a distinct and therefore
unknowable other. According to Zen philosophy, however, it is only
because the listener maintains a causal, historically influenced
frame of reference that he perceives the reader as separate, or even
feels the anguish of separation and waiting/ longing for his
Beloved. The listener is both correct and incorrect when he claims
that "Nothing he had ever done alone could ever be undone. By him
alone" (286). So long as he maintains a distinction between self and
other, he is correct: nothing can be undone by him alone. If,
however, he changes his vision to that of the marginalized frame of
reference -- the without-context of Zen -- he will perceive all
around him without the need for self-reifying categories like
"alone," and will therefore be released from everything he ever did
alone (in the old frame of reference).
From the new frame of reference, what plagues the listener (and thus
L and/ or R) is not the loss of his Beloved one but the loss of his
true nature -- his prereflective consciousness beyond consciousness
-- or equally, his inability to return to the state of
without-subjectivity. However, this changes during the play: though
the listener (and L, R, and us along with him) initially regards the
messenger as a completely separate entity, as the play progresses we
are told that "[w]ith never a word exchanged they grew to be as one"
(287); through the repeated ritual of reading the story/koan, the
two lose their distinctness, slowly merging into a single "one."
What occurs at the end of the narrative, then, is a final "mindless"
union of the two into a whole -- not a whole where there are no
longer protagonist and reader (for that would be to make an absolute
distinction) but a dynamic one in which the two are
"without-separation." In other words, the two are still individual,
but their categorical individuality has been destabilized by the
koan that is the play. Via this radically decentering force, they
subsume their egos, their "I-ness," or their subjectivity; they are
able to pass beyond individual consciousness to a state which
precedes reflective consciousness, and in which the conceptual
distinction between self and other cannot be made. They are
therefore two-in-one and one-in-two.
If we next expand the study beyond the confines of the internal
narrative, the relationship of L and R to the listener and the
reader can be described in similar manner. At first, what goes on on
stage and what is taking place in the narrative appear to have
nothing in common, but as the play progresses, these two individual
entities as well conflow, growing to be as one. The narrative passes
through the present moment on stage to its future, and stage and
story achieve a dynamic, intersecting relational cohesion (though
they are never simply identical). Similarly, the L and R pair also
becomes one-in-two as they merge with the characters of the internal
narrative and with each other. What is left is both utterly complex
and "absurdly simple":(25) all the possible pairings of characters,
relationships, and actions become a moving montage which, if we drew
connecting lines between possibly linked characters, would have the
complexity of a spider's web; yet if we step back from the
perplexing picture, we can look at the "spider's web" of the play as
a simple and beautiful whole. And, to carry the web analogy one step
further, the whole is composed of indispensable and individual
parts, yet each part is nothing without the whole to give it shape
and function. Through their repeated ritual readings, the characters
have learned a new way of being themselves and their world: "When
the senses reawaken, words fill and flow, becoming so much more than
the things signified."(26) And once this "reawakening" takes place,
the world becomes "green again with wonder."(27) Without the need to
connect causally any two points of time or space, each moment falls
like the millet grains of Zeno's heap with which Hamm is so taken in
Endgame,(28) but now each grain is self-sufficient, creating a heap
of "being-time"(29) all its own.
The divided arms of distinction are radically destabilized in the
staging of the play as well. For example, the stage directions
require darkness on the bulk of the stage surrounding the white of
the deal table -- a clear case of light and/separated-from dark --
yet the Latin Quarter hat lying at the center of the table puts a
black blot at the center of the light table; similarly, the table
reflects white light inside the circle of darkness of the stage.
Light flows around the dark hat, darkness flows around the pool of
light "midstage," like islands within rivers within islands. Dark
interpenetrates light which interpenetrates dark in a
scale-invariant fashion. As with his use of white and black in Ill
Seen Ill Said, in Ohio Impromptu Beckett seems to use apparently
simple divisions only to point out the impossibility of determining
where one half stops and the other starts. In Ill Seen Ill Said,
Beckett writes, "Nothing left but black sky. White earth. Or
inversely."(30) First, we are given a simple division between black
and white; then Beckett pulls the rug out from under us, so to
speak, as he unequivocally states that the division could be just as
easily the other way around.
Additionally, the apparently static physicality of the staging is
destabilized. From first to last, there are only table, hat, book,
chairs, and two men, "[a]s alike . . . as possible"; nothing moves
much, the staging not at all. As opposed to Beckett's other late
plays, the table is even positioned "midstage," allowing an apparent
centrality that has been missing in recent works. But this
apparently stable image is in fact no such thing: the table may be
midstage, the "[b]lack, wide-brimmed hat at center of table," but L
and R are both "audience right" (285). The image, then, is weighted
to the right, and an implicit rotational motion is potentiated:
Viewed from above, the hat resting at the table's center acts as a
pivot point around which the table seems destined to rotate because
of the mass -- both physical and dramatic -- situated at the right
end of the table. Within the stasis of the staging is then a
physical and emotional decentering -- an implicit motion which
destabilizes any centrality in the staging of the play. The radical
relativity of Zen tells us that the table, like the still Isle in
the river, must of necessity be destabilized, as it is only "a
thought-construction": there can be "no rock at rest relative to the
water,"(31) since there is no causal connection to provide stability
from one moment of being-time to another. Stasis and stability (and
movement, for that matter) are results merely of our vision of what
occurs, not what necessarily is.
Apparently, then, even in the static, stable staging of Ohio
Impromptu, none of the distinctions which on first viewing seem so
clean and easy are, on a closer look, valid. Light and dark
intermingle, forming a simple whole which contains both; motion and
stillness interpenetrate. Order, distinction, and stability give way
to the richer, chaotic patternings of visceral reality. From our
causal point of view these interfering(32) images present a complex,
daunting problem. If, on the other hand, we are willing to shift our
vision to the radical relativity of Zen, we can apprehend in a
pre-reflective manner that which is before us: a moment of
experience which simply is. "The one is a predicament, the other
not."(33)
In addition, there are many more layers at work within the play,
further eroding any stable, centered meaning. The duality of past
and future are destabilized, as what occurs in the narrative being
read -- which is ostensibly the narrative of the two before us --
crosses over from relating events past to relating the impossible:
what will take place next in stage reality. Our common notions about
how past and future are divided and interrelate is fragmented by the
immediacy of the stage present. Intimately related to this is the
relationship between genres: in Ohio Impromptu, drama is fiction and
fiction drama, the two combining in a form which defies
pigeonholing, yet is compelling in its uniqueness.
Furthermore, in addition to the iterative nature of L's and R's
(re)reading, there are other ways in which the apparent linearity of
the play is destabilized, most notably, the tidal ebb and flow of
language, movement, lighting -- and of course, reading as well. Even
language itself, as a spoken, visceral element of drama, is
destabilized, approaching a level of effacement and reduction which
might carry it out to the still, silent point of "Nothing is left to
tell." "One of the important ways in which this is attempted is by a
return to the repetitive and auto-citational devices of the
fiction."(34) In other words, in deconstructive fashion, the
immediacy of the spoken word is eroded by the iterative
self-referentiality of the words being spoken. The pair on stage ".
. . quote themselves . . . ,"(35) their present linguistic moment
intermeshing with past (and future) language and reality.
If we move from these temporal and spatial dimensions to another, we
can also see that narrative, stage characters, stage set, and
lighting also function to destabilize each other. If, for example,
we look at the interplay between text and stage context, we find the
two are open to an infinite Derridean rereading of themselves in a
cyclic, creative manner.
The stage image can be seen as a metaphor for self-creation: the
creator creates himself through the narrative, or is created by it
(the self being as much a Action as the fictional self) in a process
of scissiparity (schizogenesis) presented on stage: a dramatic
concretisation of the play between creator and created . . . .(36)
Here, as well, our common ways of conception are shorted-out via the
iterative interpenetration of levels of text and con-text with one
another.
If we are not yet exhausted by the multitude of layers functioning
simultaneously in Ohio Impromptu and will allow a momentary look
outside the immediate context of the play itself, we unearth yet
more layers of information which intersect the play tangentially.
First, as H. Porter Abbott has pointed out, the play is partially a
humorous send-up of the conference that commissioned the work.
It is hard not to entertain the idea that a dramatic piece
consisting entirely of two ancient white-haired men, "As alike in
appearance as possible," poring over a text, was intended to cast
back an image, however refracted, of the audience for which it was
composed -- scholars whose professional life is spent poring over
texts and reading them to each other.(37)
Those who read and reread texts for a living, watch two who read and
reread texts for life. The cycle of refractions, which this level of
information exhibits destabilizes the distinction between audience
and stage (a relationship with which we will have further dealings
later) in a backhanded ironic manner.
Further destabilizing the distinction between fact/biography and
fiction, the Isle of Swans, which figures so prominently in the
play, is a real island in the Seine river.(38) Thus, the narrative
as told could actually take place in our reality. We could (as I
have done) walk out to the downstream tip of the Isle and, beneath a
replica of the Statue of Liberty (a further fixed-point conflation
-- this time of old and new worlds), contemplate the Seine, "How in
joyous eddies its two arms conflowed and flowed united on" (286).
Biography and reality could effectively trade places with stage, as
the narrative subsumes reality within its fictional confines. Fact
and fiction lose meaning but gain vast informational surprise in
their commingling.
The vast number of mutually intersecting and interfering layers
which constitute Ohio Impromptu are simply too difficult to
understand from a rational point of view. We must instead see the
play not as a series of distinct signs and images but as a dynamic
system of relationships which, while altering all of its double and
triple parts in a dense, impenetrable flux, is stable as a system, a
system beyond logic and causality, the system of Mu,(39) or
No-thing-ness into which L and R (etc.) apparently enter during the
play's final moment. Presence and absence, stage and narrative, and
so on, are abandoned as viable constructs, and ". . . if being or
lack of being cannot be figured, at least some shape or pattern,
however faint, can be traced against the void."(40)
If Ohio Impromptu is primarily systemic and relational, then the
images with which we have been dealing reveal that these
relationships are the "without-context" of self-reflecting and
refracting images with no stable "thing" to reflect. In other words,
the play can be described in terms of a specific koan:(41) "What do
two facing mirrors reflect?" Without a subject (or object) between
them, the mirrors can only reflect each other -- but what image
would that produce? If we choose an element of the play that most
readily reveals this vision, the final image of L and R facing each
other in "profounds of mind. Of mindlessness" must certainly jump
Out (288). These two men, "As alike in appearance as possible . . .
, raise their heads and look at each other. Unblinking.
Expressionless" (285, 288). In their "stone" stare, these two lose
subjectivity ". . . thus blindly mirroring each other"(42) across a
relational context of "without-self" This final tableau is at once
(again pairs being destabilized) the "mirror koan" and its
resolution, as the two become the koan, losing any sense of
subjectivity in their "stone" stares. Because of their subjective
absence, the myriad signifiers cycling around the empty "hole" at
the center of the play(43) tear themselves apart under their own
conceptual weight. With subjectivity and causality dispersed, all
distinctions, all dualities -- all conceptual frameworks -- die,
fading away into the "without-relationship" that exists between all
the elements within and without Ohio Impromptu, and which only can
be pre-reflective reality. Thus the characters, the set, the "sad
tale" (287) -- all the elements which we have broken apart -- no
longer exist, as the play in its entirety is "properly" born into
the "without-perception" and "without-presence" of No-thing.(44)
Though we have by now spent the bulk of our time with L and R and
the reader and listener in the narrative, we must return to the
beginnings of this inquiry once again: there is another, very
important level at which the play functions as koan: it is an
existential riddle for the playgoer as well. The ultimate forum for
Ohio Impromptu must be those who view its performance; and here as
well, the little play functions as koan. Via the fluid multiplicity
of images at work in Ohio Impromptu, Beckett skillfully pulls us
into the world and language of the characters until we ourselves
begin to feel like L and R on stage: confused and agonized,
listening intently to try to find relief from the vast levels of
signification which assault our senses in the few words and fewer
actions we observe. As noted above, our sense of logic is assaulted
on many levels, one of the most shocking of which is the temporal
destabilization of past, present, and future by the intersection of
the narrative with stage time. Here again we are frustrated in an
attempt to pile the "millet grains" of the play -- as Hamm would put
it -- into a heap of meaning; yet here again it is only our need to
connect together these self-sufficient, dynamically interacting
moments of "being-time" which creates a problem. If we allow each
moment to fall where it may, a pattern of discontinuity appears
which releases us from the logical death of the play.
As with its internal elements, the structure of the play as a whole
is similar to that of a traditional koan: a short, sometimes
humorous riddle "with no rational entrance or exit." The upshot of
these brief stories is usually a mental (and/or physical) blow which
we are told finally jars the student out of the old, causal frame of
mind and "enlightens" her (and us as well, if we devote ourselves
unreservedly to the problem the master presents). And the answer for
us to the "mirror koan" of Ohio Impromptu is the same as Joshu's
answer to the question put to him, and L's and R's answer to theirs:
Mu, or no-thing. In order to understand the answer (or answers) to a
koan, one must cease thinking in the old yes-or-no way.
In form and content, then, Ohio Impromptu destabilizes any logical,
meaningful (as opposed to informational) cohesion. "Generated out of
a friction among texts, genres, and writing processes, the work has
no center at all and no rational entrance or exit."(45) As audience
members, then, we must join the characters in the state of Great
Doubt, iterating the play over and over again in a silent "expanse
of ice"(46) as our need for, and ability to hold on to, a
categorical consciousness drops away. To solve the dilemma of
understanding, which the play causes, we must participate in the
shock of the Great Death, changing the paradigm from which we view
Ohio Impromptu, and all Beckett's plays: we must see the play
relationally instead of "meaningfully": we must become the koan
which is Beckett's drama, apprehending the mingling layers in a
state which comes before logic and distinction. Thus Ohio Impromptu
is its own riddle and its own answer:(47) in order to fully
understand it, we must cease looking into the play, trying to
"break" its code; we must look within ourselves and try to see the
play, and therefore the world, differently.
Why, then, we might ask, is the play even necessary? If we are to
look within ourselves to find the play's meaning, then why do we
need Ohio Impromptu at all? The answer is that the play, like a
koan, is "a piece of brick to knock at a gate,"(48) and just as when
L and R attain their "true nature" they no longer need the text from
which they are reading, once the audience achieves this state of
Satori, once "the gate is opened[d the brick is useless and is
thrown away."(49) The play, like the elements within it, is yet
another indicator, a signpost showing us the path (the Tao, or way)
to escape Beckett's vision of the terrifying world of ourselves.
Thus,
If we do not take perceptions as signs of named things, the most
fundamental and problematic dualism of all -- that between my
fragile sense of being and the nothingness that threatens it -- is
conflated; if we do not need to fixate ourselves, if we can "let go"
of ourselves, we unfind ourselves "in" the dreamlike world... , and
plunge into the horizontality of moving and light surfaces where
there are no objects, only an incessant shifting of masks; where
there is no security and also no need for security, because
everything that can be lost has been, including oneself. Especially
oneself.(50)
Thus the (non)actions of L. and R, listener and reader, light and
dark, birth and death -- in fact all of the destabilized dualities
of Beckett's plays -- are eventually redirected toward us, the
audience. Across the void between ourselves and the stage, it is we
who must learn to see correctly, ceasing to value those elements
conserved in the old style -- linearity, logic, division --
apprehending instead the scale-invariance and radically relational
without-context within which "we" function.
In order to succeed with the audience, Ohio Impromptu must turn
inward in us, becoming, in effect, the drama of the Great Death
within each of the audience members as the egoistic, logical,
controlling Self struggles against the impossibility of what it
perceives on stage and in the narrative, finally "shorting-out" as
recursive words, sentences, actions, and staging float beyond their
denotative space into that of a connotative flux. In the interplay
between Zen and Beckett's plays, we have discovered how both of
these systems, making use of pairs that are destabilized by a third
element, decenters the entrenched order of bipolar vision, replacing
it with a vision of reality that is not based on meaning and
concepts, but rather on experiencing each moment of reality in
holistic fashion. For both Ohio Impromptu and Zen, a progressive
movement from the old style, normative paradigm to this new one
occurs via a series of iterations of supposedly fringe elements of
reality -- the "without-context" of Mu, discontinuous yet repetitive
characters, language, and action -- which first lays bare the
paradoxical nature of the causal paradigm, then allows for a
cathartic moment -- the Great Death -- in whose potential space this
new vision of the world takes form.
In the miniature world of Ohio Impromptu, the compression of levels
of imagery, the koan-like nature of the internal narrative and the
play itself, and the "conflowing" nature of the characters
themselves allows a complete break with the old paradigm, "relief"
flowing from the erasure of subjectivity into the relational context
of Mu, or no-thing. In the final moments of the play nothing exists,
but everything is in the plenary void of self-sufficient existence.
In Ohio Impromptu, Beckett moves beyond his earlier expression of
the logical paradox of existence, presenting a koan which allows us
to join the characters in achieving a state of pre-reflective
"without-consciousness."
Once we gain the vision of this new paradigm, we are free to absorb
the information of the plays in a pre-reflective state wherein
fragments are universal and vice versa; we learn to make
"without-sense" of the plays by seeing, "not some thing different,
but in a different way."(51) Or, as Schopenhauer, who was heavily
influenced by contact with Buddhism, describes the profound,
mind-numbing experience of witnessing a great work of art,
"aesthetic pleasure in the beautiful consists ... in the fact that,
when we enter the state of pure contemplation [when logic and
linearity are destabilized and association begins], we are raised
for the moment above all willing, above all desires and cares; we
are, so to speak rid of ourselves."(52) Only when we are "rid of
ourselves," can R's final words, "Nothing is left to tell," begin to
make sense in a different way: it is only after we and the
characters (and Beckett) have struggled through the play together
and discovered Mu shin -- the state of no mind, or "consciousness
beyond thought" -- that we can understand No-thing the "positive
nothingness of nonbeing,"(53) as the path to the play's (and our)
enlightenment.
NOTES
(1) Samuel Beckett, Ohio Impromptu in Collected Shorter Plays (New
York, 1984), 288. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in
the text.
(2) For use in this term, see Samuel Beckett's short story,
"Lessnesg".
(3) Yasunari Takahashi, "The Theatre of Mind -- Samuel Beckett and
the Noh," Encounter, 58 (April, 1982), 66-73. Reprinted in Critical
Thought Series: Critical Essays on Samuel Beckett, ed. Lance St.
John Butler (Brookfield, VT, 1993), 260. Takahashi has noted that
one is reminded, by Beckett's minimization and abstraction, of
Japanese Noh theater, which reduces to essential movements and
energy states a vast range of human emotion and action. In this form
of theater, "nothing happens, everything has already happened ...
but someone emerges out of an unknown country." As with Beckett,
stillness and memory (often in third-person) are primary dramatic
"actions."
(4) See Pierre Astier, "Beckett's Ohio Impromptu: A View from the
Isle of Swans," Modern Drama, 25 (September 1982), 336-8.
(5) H. Porter Abbott, "Reading as Theatre: Understanding
Defamiliarization in Beckett's Art," Modern Drama, 34:1 (March
1991), 15.
(6) Audrey McMullan, "The Space of Play in L'Impromptu d'Ohio,"
Modern Drama, 30:1 (March 1987), 24.
(7) Yasunari Takahashi, "Qu'est-ce qui arrive? Some Structural
Comparisons of Beckett's Plays and the Noh," in Samuel Beckett:
Humanistic Perspectives, ed. Morris Beja, S.E. Gontarski, and Pierre
Astier (Columbus, 1983), 106.
(8) Taisen Deshimaru, Questions to a Zen Master (New York, 1985),
10.
(9) Kasulis very carefully lays the groundwork for this terminology
in Zen Action/ Zen Person (Honolulu, 1981). The basis of the
technical terminology, "without-x," is to avoid the trap of
dualistic conceptualization. In Kasulis's primary example, that of
thinking, there seem to be two states of mind -- thinking and
not-thinking -- yet the negative term indicates a causal relation
between itself and thinking (a denial of the state of thinking),
which requires an objectification of the term thinking, and then an
application of its opposite. Thus, these two terms, like the
illusory pairings in Ohio Impromptu, are not in reality the primary
center of thinking (or not-thinking). The state of
"without-thinking" is an a-priori, non-reflective state of being
which gives rise both to thinking and not-thinking, and thus
"without-thinking" is a true "middle way": it is the normally hidden
trunk of the thinking "tree" which gives rise to the two (apparently
bipolar) "branches" of thought and not-thought. For a more complete
treatment of this important terminology (which is beyond the scope
of this article), please see Kasulis's book, especially chapters 1,
2, and 6.
(10) Ibid., 115. An important Western parallel to this Zen
re-visioning of the universe is the Husserlian (and post-Husserlian)
theory of phenomenology. In "`Still living flesh': Beckett,
Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body," Theatre Journal 45:4
(December 1993), 443-60, Stanton Gainer has recently attempted to
revitalize the use of this "out of favor" philosophy for the study
of Beckett's drama, citing the problem of "scriptocentrism" which
generally pertains to textual (structural or deconstructive) studies
of Beckett's plays. In opposition to a linguistic study which is
based on dissecting pieces of dramatic texts to show how they fit
within a conceptual framework, "Phenomenology is the study of
givenness of the world as it is lived rather than the world as it is
objectified, abstracted, and conceptualized" (448), and this is true
whether the world is ours or the one we see on stage.
(11) Taisen Deshimaru, The Zen Way to the Martial Arts (New York,
1982), 49.
(12) One can achieve this state of enlightenment accidentally -- in
cases of a pre-reflective response to an intense aesthetic
experience, or an emergency situation, for example -- as it is "the
return to the normal human condition" (Deshimaru, The Zen Way 55).
(13) Kasulis, 113-14. See note 10.
(14) Mary Doll, Beckett and Myth: An Archetypal Approach (Syracuse,
1988), 52.
(15) Mary Doll, "Rites of Story: The Old Man at Play," in Myth and
Ritual in the Plays of Samuel Beckett, ed. Katherine H. Burkman
(Rutherford, NJ, 1987), 73. In this article, Doll notes the
similarities between the koan and Beckett's later plays.
(16) Suzuki has an appropriately metaphorical warning for such
overzealous conceptualization: "Let the intellect alone, it has its
usefulness in its proper sphere, but let it not interfere with the
flowing of the life-stream ... . The fact of flowing must under no
circumstances be arrested or meddled with; for the moment your hands
are dipped into it, its transparency is disturbed, it ceases to
reflect your image which you have had from the very beginning and
will continue to have to the end of time." Like the river in R's
narrative, we should be content to experience life's "joyous
eddies." Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism: First
Series (New York, 1949), 19.
(17) Doll, 50. See note 14.
(18) McMullan, 31. See note 6.
(19) David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (New
Haven, CT, 1988), 218.
(20) Most, if not all of these hypotheses have been circulating
throughout the critical literature for years.
(21) McMullan, 28. See note 6.
(220 The Yin-Yang, an ancient Oriental symbol, operates like the
river-Isle image: it indicates at once the duality of the universe
(the separate black and white halves of the circle) and its ultimate
unity (the white and black dots on the opposite-colored fields, and
the fact that the black and white halves are contained within a
single circle). Concepts which our western culture has taught as
distinct, separate entities, even down to simple matters like Hot
and Cold, are in reality both two and one: two in the sense that
they are not, in our usual frame of reference, conceptualized as
"the same," and from a causal framework, it is generally easier to
think of them as separate or polar opposites, and one in the sense
that it is only our mental activity -- our consciousness -- which
separates them. As Kasulis puts it, the Zen master's teachings are
usually aimed at making explicit "the relativity of all
conceptualizations -- even those which constitute the doctrines of
the Buddhist tradition itself" (Kasulis 13). Under this radical
relativity, even Buddhism's own teachings ultimately must be
secondary to immediate experience -- a point which we will find is
also important to Ohio Impromptu.
(23) Deshimaru, 4. See note 8.
(24) Samuel Beckett, Rockaby, in The Collected Shorter Plays of
Samuel Beckett (New York, 1984), 278.
(25) A Westerner, D.E. Harding, who "found" Zen through an
accidental encounter with the enlightened state, speaks in words
which sound as if they could have come from the "worn volume" when
he describes his experience: "What... happened was something
absurdly simple... . For once, words really failed me. I forgot my
name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or
mine.... It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new,
mindless, innocent of all memories" (D.E. Harding, On Having No
Head: Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious (Boston, 1986), 1-2.
In other words, he found himself free from the mental grid within
which we normally try to force the ever changing world, and became
one with everything as his "I-ness" dropped away. As Harding puts
it, he was still himself, but he was no longer himSelf. What seems a
complex paradox to the logical, conscious mind, is, as Harding says,
"absurdly simple" when the forebrain stops trying to figure it out.
The listener and the reader are two and they are one; it is that
complex -- and that simple.
(26) Doll, 50. See note 14.
(27) Houston Smith, Introduction to D.E. Harding, On Having No Head:
Zen and the Re-Discovery of the Obvious (Boston, 1986), vii.
(28) The paradox which Hamm refers to is actually a conflation of
two Greek paradoxes: one in which, logically, one can never create a
"heap" of sand grains by adding on at a time to the pile; the other,
Zeno's paradox of the millet grains, states that, as one cannot hear
one millet grain fall, then logically one cannot hear bushels of
millet grains as they fall.
(29) Loy, 222. See note 19.
(30) Samuel Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (New York, 1981), 31.
(31) Loy, Nonduality, 218.
(32) I use this term here in its technical sense: the interplay,
constructive and destructive ("positive" and "negative"), between
differing wave forms. An example would be ripples in a pond, which
can merge to create larger waves or "cancel" each other, creating
nodes of stillness.
(33) Samuel Beckett, "There Dialogues with Georges Duthuit,"
Transition 49:5 (December 1949), 102.
(34) Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (New
York, 1988), 126.
(35) Ibid., 126.
(36) McMullan, 29. See note 6.
(37) Abbott, 8. See note 5.
(38) Actually it is/was two: an older island upstream, which became
part of the Port du Gros-Caillou, and a newer, man-made Allee des
Cygnes. In this image, then, any simple linearity of past and
present is effaced (see Astier 336-7).
(39) This is the "punch-line" of the famous koan in which Joshu
responds to the question, "does a dog have Buddha-nature?" with a
strident "Mu!" For further commentary on this koan see Paul Reps,
ed. and trans., Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and
Pre-Zen Writings (Garden City, NY, 1975), 89-90.
(40) Anna McMullan, Theatre on Trial: Samuel Beckett's Later Drama
(New York, 1993), 102-3.
(41) As far as I know, this is not a canonical koan, but it
certainly destabilizes the sense of the self-in-reality, and thus
seems to me a pretty good approximation.
(42) Astier, 338. See note 4.
(43) Elizabeth Klaver, "Samuel Beckett's Ohio Impromptu, Quad, and
What Where: How it is in the Matrix of Text and Television,"
Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall 1991), 373.
(44) As an aside, we might note that this image of birth so
important to Beckett's work is refracted in the physical image of
the Isle mid-river, adding yet another level on which the play
operates. Like a child being infinitely born, the Isle is poised
forever to be set in motion down the flowing river around it.
(45) Klaver, 372. See note 43.
(46) Kasulis, 114. See note 9.
(47) Since "...there are many right answers and there are also
none... .For the koan itself is the answer." Reps, 86. See note 39.
(48) Reps, 88. See note 39.
(49) Ibid., 88. Note how this reiterates Zen's rejection of absolute
authority or dogma, as noted by Kasulis above.
(50) David Loy, "The Deconstruction of Buddhism," in Derrida and
Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward & Toby Foshay (Albany, 1992),
250.
(51) Smith, vii. See note 39.
(52) Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol.
I, trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1969), 390.
(53) Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Revised Updated
Edition (New York, 1969), 58.