sTP

32
( 3) pp
257- 267 I nt el l ect Li mi t ed 2012
St udi es i n Theat r e & Per f or mance
Vol ume
32
Number
3
o 2012 l nt el l ect Lt d Ar t i cl e Engl i sh l anguage doi : r o 1386/ st ap
323
257 r
DANIET SACK
The Brilliance of the Servant
wi thout qual i ti es:
Bare l i fe
and the horde offstage
ABSTRACT
KEYWORDS
In intsestigating the nature of plethora and bare sufficimcy onstage, Howard Barker Howard Barker
pursues the limit case befween the possible and the irnpossible that has haunted the offstage
theatre since the Attic tragedy This article explores the ways in which the play- catastrophe
wright makes use of the offstage space as a repository
for
the unknowable
future,
the Giorgio Agamben
spatially excluded as a site
for
the temporally excluded. I read a lesser-known work bare life
-
of Barker's, The Brilliance of the Servant, as the sacifice of bare life to unknown potentialify
potentiality, where the eponymous serrsant submits to the torture of a horde of
barbarians occupying the
ffitage
space Like the messenger of the classical tragedy,
this
figure
traoersing the border between the scene and obscme announces a new
kind of characterless character, without desire and zoithout obiectioes, but rich with
a plethora of messages.
To experiment with the nature of plethora and bare sufficienry in the thea-
tre is to experiment with the limits of what is possible onstage; it is to ask
what we may consider the capacity of the theatre as an irrevocably bounded
space. How many bodies are too many bodies, how little is too little? At either
end of this continuum waits the offstage space, a field rich with unarticulated
excess,'rvhere every,thing and nothing could lurk in the wings. As this condi-
tional qualification'could'reminds
us, these questions also make demands on
temporalify, on what futures are available to a depicted world.
x
Dani el Sack
Apprehending what events are possible onstage and how far a character
may stray from expected possibilities has been at the core of Howard Barker' s
dramatic work at least since his decision in the late 1980s to Dursue a contem
porary form of tragedy in his self-proclaimed Theatre of
-atastrophe
It ls
entirely appropriate that a theatre conversing with the tragic tradition would
pursue the extent of the minimal and the maximal. According to Aristotle's
Poetics (1967) - the most influential of many attempts to encompass a genre
that itself escapes delineation - tragedy is at its roots concerned with nego-
tiating proportionalily: what are the appropriate consequences of an action,
what is the sufficient punishment for one' s guilt and how does the one stand
in for the many? Tragedy seeks to restrain the plethora of futures opened up
by catastrophe to a bounded and manageable whole. The Greek philosopher
hails p1ot, or the organization of events into a set of plausible causai relations,
as the most important element of the genre, requiring that whatever begins
must find its suitable end. The scale of a plot that its events may be held
within the scope of a viewer' s memory - determines the complexity a p1ay' s
dramatic arc can encompass (Aristotle 1967: 30) In epic texts IIke The Bite of the
Nrghf (running
more than five hours in performance), the Ecstatic Bible (eight
hours in performance, but intended to unfold over a 24-hour period) or the
2011 Aberystwyth production of The Forfu (directed by David Ian Rabey and
as yet, unpublished), Barker presents a tragic work that cannot be contained
in a single glance, in a single remembrance As a contemporary counterpoint,
John
Barton' s ten-hour cycle of tragedies based on the Trojan War, Tantalus
(2001), also tests the limits of a spectator' s attention Yet where Barton subdi
vides his epic into smaller parts and self-contained stories to provide hand
holds for attentiory Barker's performances swell beyond summary or splinter
into fragments that cannot be encapsulated. His plays proceed by catastrophic
accumulation rather than causality
Against tragedy's attempts to establish rational proportions on irrational
forces and events, catastrophe courts the disproportionate and the incom-
mensurate. The OED defines catastrophe as ' a sudden and widespread disas-
ter', but further qualifies its application in regards to the dramatrc paradigm
as 'the point at which the circumstances overcome the central motive, intro
ducing the close or conciusion; denouement' Thus, catastrophe inhablts an
unmarked time-space of open collapse that, through its dramatlc representa-
tion, simultaneously instigates the marked beginning of an end Tragedy ls a
theatrical apparatus for processing a central catastrophic event into a socially
legible meaning or product, to set an indeterminate middle on track to a
determinate end. Without the tragic to delimit it, the catastrophe reverber-
ates through other bodies and events; the plague of Thebes in Oedipus Rex, for
example, casts its blight on crops, animals and humans alike, suspending the
future and its unborn generations. By casting Oedipus as cause of the catas
trophe, the tragedy also makes of him its cure
On a much smaller scale, the dramatic simllarly processes little catastro,
phes o{ undisciplined motion into discrete and purposeful actions complete
with names and recognizable shapes Peter Szondi places the restraint of the
catastrophic at the core of not only tragedy, but the dramatic theatre more
broadly conceived: ' The accidental enters the Drama from outside, but, by
motivating it, accident is domesticated; it is rooted in the heart of drama itself'
(1987: 10) Thls taming or domestication of accidental motion comes to us ln
the form of a named action, movement giveu an intention, name and shape.
If drama is etymologically' the art of action' , then it offers its audience figures
258
The Bri l l i ance of the Seryant w i th out o ual i ti es
and objects that can be identified in terms of actions and function (presumed
action). Its representations are based not only on what has bem done, but also
what wiII be done. Drama presupposes a network of certain bounded paths
for what may come next, a finite set of teleological projections streaming forth
from a character that we may call the possible. Since the earliest works in his
Theatre of Catastrophe, such as the fittingly titled collection of short plays
The Possibilities (1986), Barker has replaced objective-based action with the
moment of choice as the cornerstone of his art. He populates his worlds with
characters on the verge of opening out into multiple forms and attachments.
Caught in situations rife with historical and cultural upheaval, these charac-
ters explore the many proper and improper courses suddenly made available
to them in the presenf when they do choose to act they favour the profane
and egregious outskirts of these possible actions more often than acceptable
forms of behaviour. For example, when Anne Bradshaw, the heroine of Victory
(1983), encounters the great
John
Milton blind and feeble in his garden, she
does not offer him honour and acclaim, but a slap in the face. These characters
display a remarkable skill at expressing desires in langue both sophisticated
and surprising, drawing these sacrilegious intentions into the compass of an
ever-expanding human community via the dramatic form. In this manner,
Barker acknowledges the way in which the dramatic theatre inevitably incites
its audience to analyse character in terms of his or her plausible fufures, while
also staging reconnaissance missions to the outer limits of that constraint. We
are repeatedly forced to reevaluate what a character could do in light of what
she does.
And yet, there are occasional figures in Barker's elliptical plays that main-
tain or even gather an inexplicable force by adhering to the barest form of life
and refusing to give over to expression. For example, in a kind of counterpart
to the earlier collection of short plays, The Possibilities, the thirteen discon-
nected scenes that comprise 13 Objects (2003) each revolve around a series
of objects that do not behave solely according to function, but become the
nexus for ambiguous intentionality. The characters in these scenes relate to
the objects as if they, too, were live figures guarding secrets of their own: an
old camera terrorizes a young man with the unfathomable memory of all the
previous photographs it has taken. a child's rattle maintains the capacity for
speech before and beyond any individual statement. Here the bare sufficienry
of a singu.lar object opens out into the plethora of what we may call potmtial-
ity, a factity or medium that does not express an individual statement, but
instead holds its ability to express in reserve. As the example of the waiting
camera or the silent rattle tells us, it is in the bare sufficiency of an obiect or
a character that the plethora of the potential appears. Here we might follow
Aristotle rnhis Metaphysics in imagining the block of stone before the sculp-
tor's chisel has left a mark as containing within it a plethora of immanent
figures. Or we might tum to the blank page before the stroke of a pen and say
that this empty white field contains a plethora of future inscriptions. The bare
appearance of a ground or medium suspends a host of worlds before us. Any
further addition would narrow the fullness of what may come, would limit the
future to a smaller set of possibilities. But how can a human performer appear
as a medium containing a plethora of characters or messages?
One of Barker's lesser-known plays, The Brilliance of the Sercant, stages a
particularly effective version of this meeting of the minimal (bare sufficiency)
and the maximal (plethora) and it is in this direction that I would like to orient
the remainder of this article. The tragic/dramatic apparatus' corralling of
259
Dani el Sack
potentiality lnto a set of possibilities here confronts an alternative system of
theatrical production, always at work, but necessariiy excluded from the insist-
ent boundaries of the stage itself: literally an offstage machine In the theatre an
empty stage may already show too mucLg may already exceed the bare suffi-
cienry of performance (for what stage is ever truly empty?) - perhaps the
minimal ground of the theatrical medium appears at the site where nothing
can be seen: in the blackout behind the curtain, off in the wings where who
knows what \urks. The Brilliance of the Seroant figures this unseen multiplic-
ity as an encroaching horde of barbarians, holding any number of terrifiTingly
unknowable futures in reserve. The play centres upon a singular figure that
occupies a position of bare sufficiency or bare life onstage, a blank slate of a
figure that goes forth to meet the plethora of the offstage, and returns with its
inexplicable power in tow Consummated in this fashion, this liminal pres-
ence announces a kind of characterless character, without directed desire and
obj ect i ves, but repl et e wi t h pot ent i al i t y.
The Brilliance of the SelTant is set in the ruined hall of a great house as
a cataclysmic war rages on, the proverbial barbarians at the gate. As in so
many of Barker's plays, we are in the midst of revolution and political unrest,
the action centred on a time between regimes when hierarchies of power
are in disarray. Plays like Hated Nightfall, Victory, The Power of the Dog and
The Gaoler's Ache
for
the Nearly Dead return to historical moments of such
catastrophe; The Last Supper, Ursula and
Judith
look to apocalyptic transl-
tions from the myths of Christianlty; here there is not a specific historical
rupture, but the upheaval at the apex of any war, any time. As the quintes-
sential bourgeois groom-to be Taxman remarks to Camera, the lady of the
house and mother of his fianc6e, ' this war will finish off your entire class
and bring about a New morality! It is my misfortune to be straddling - like a
burglar impaled on a fence - Two eras' (Barker 2001: 92, original emphasis).
A-11 of the characters are, like Taxman, impaled on the fence of history caught
in a catastrophe without end, an event that refuses to get on with it They are
burglars, criminals transgressing the order of the past and whatever order the
future may bring.
The overarching action concerns an attempt to counter this catastrophe
by realizing a marked historical action. At the top of the p1ay, we are told
that a wedding is to take place, that in spite of the obstacles that the inva-
sion presents (no priests, no guests), the bride-to-be, Sunetra, is adamant
that her wedding continue: '\Arhen the walls of culture fall. Practise culture!'
(Barker 2001: 104). The wedding ceremon, perhaps the most commonly
utilized denouement in the annals of theatre history, also functions as the
consummate speech act confirming societ;/s continuation Every wedding
announces 'I do' not only as a promise to a partner till death do them part,
but as a promise to keep this culture and world alive, to keep this language
alive Against Sunetra's attempt to resolve this civilizing action, the dramatic
event par excellence, the encroaching barbarians present an opposing appan-
tus that threatens the amorous jockeying of the onstage characters. This alter-
native machinery is comprised of a series of intricate torture devices looming
in the offstage space, accumulating more and more terrible force as the play
progresses. Death or great pain waits in the wings, recalling classical trag
edy's frequent palring of wedding ceremony and funeral rite (as in Aeschylus'
Agamemnon and Sophocles' Antigone) The play thus stages a conflict befween
the civilizing possibilities of onstage drama and the catastrophic potentiality
of offstage obscene power
260
I he Bri l l i ance of t he Seryant wi t hout oual i t i es
As the audience to this conflict, our only access to the barbarians, machin-
ery is verbally relayed by the onstage characters or indicated by offstage sound
effects Early in the play we are told of a machine used to cut the lips off of pris-
oners as a means of negating both beauty and speech in a single, clean stroke
Invented by the barbarians to process the vast number of conquered peoples
in an efficient manner, it would produce bodies identically marked by therr
inability to enter the human world or, at the ieast, handicapped within the
realm of its dramatic counterpart where speech and appearance determine use
or value. Later, we are told how the barbarlans attach limbs to bent saplings,
allowing the force of the tree to dismember the victim - echoing the manner in
which Pentheus, the sacrificial victim in Euripides' Bacchae, is treed and then
torn to pieces by the possessed horde of women in that prototlpical tragedy.
But these inventive devices of visible disfigurement are not the one whose
journey and eventual assembly just offstage forms the primary counterpoint to
the onstage action. Instead, the barbarians have brought their most exquisite
device, their crouming achievement, to the great house for the sole purpose
of selecting a marq,r from the dramatic world. If the '1ip' machine acts as a
factory for mass-producing identically unspeakable bodies, in a sense makrng
the unspeakable equivalent in its silence, then this latter construction - a port-
able 'ca1vaq,/ according to one character - is devoted to producing the singu,
lar sacrifice. The excluded plethora and the singular bare life share a common
space offstage, marking with a brutal imagined machine the outside limit of
the human community that the drama represents Occupyrng a state of excep-
tion, included by their exclusion, they (do not) show where the representable
ends Convention assumes that the representable stands in stark opposition
to the unrepresentable; one is either included in the scene or excluded from
its premises. However, following Carl Schmidt, Giorgio Agamben has argued
that it is in the decisionbetueen inclusion and exciusion, the determinatlon of
a limit case between one and the other, that one most
powerfullv
encounters
the extent of both thought categories. Neither one nor the othea the state of
exception delimits and defines the human and the horde.
The classical tragic martyr can protest and lament his or her fate, even choose
to willingly face death, but he or she must - with a few notable excep-
tions - die offstage. As
Jean
Genet writes in The Blacks:' Greek tragedy, my
dear, decorum. The ultimate gesture is performed offstage' (1960: 84) The
workings of the machines are as inaccessible or incommunicable to the
onstage characters as they are to the audience. During his preparations for
the wedding, Taxman observes one of the barbarians' horrific acts outside,
but he cannot name the action he has seen Later, one of the servant women
describes witnessing another device offstage that looks like a cat,s cradle
suspending an oid man in its lines, evincing gruesome cries, yet its exact
manner of operation also remains a mystery: 'I can't exactly see what - why
it hurts -
[ ]
why does it hurt?' (Barker 2001: 108) Later still, when he first
introduces the arrival of the consummate sacrificial machine, the head serv-
ant Shoulder describes it as an unseen, infuitive menace: ' No one has seen
it, though many testify to its existence. It is as if its coming is announced, rts
presence experienced, through the nerves, and its materiality rather intuited
than perceived' (Barker 2001: 118) In order to resist the objective interests of
the dramatic state with its subjects, the machine must remain out of sight,
lts exact process and construction unknown, but asserting a force that pres-
sures a1l onstage, makingits presence felt through the nerves. All these machines
counter the analytic contract between the spectator and the performance,s
261,
Dani el Sack
production of meaningful possibilities discussed above. The offstage barbar-
ians carry with them an unnamed threat that can take any form in the future:
'All things that have been imagined will occur
[...]
every malicious thought
will be someone's ordeal'
@arker
2001:99). They incite not the particular-
ity of fear, with its negative relation to a certain possibility (this Ihreat, tLtat
danger), but institute a field suffused with unarticulated anxiety where dread
suffuses all surroundings spatial and temporal. At any moment, something
horrible may come from some place. They offer a plethora of tortures to the
imagination.
Expanding upon the conception of the nomadic war machine proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari, theorist Gerald Raunig writes that 'the martial dimen-
sion of the war machine consists in the power of inventiory in the capacity for
change, in the creation of other worlds' (2010: 58). The barbarian's machines are
such inventions in both senses of the word: as material/technological construc-
tions and as the machinations of deception and manipulation. The offstage
machines also recall lhe deus ex machina, the contraption offstage that would
allow the enhance of a god from above in classical theatre, or any number
of other theatrical inventions devoted to producing supemafural appearances
(the fog machines of the Italian Renaissance or the architectures of mirrors
used to project image), but remaining behind the scenes. This machinery used
in the classical theatre'to resolve all the aporia that had emerged in the course
of the play' is, in the catastrophic theatre, used to manufacture uncertainty and
disruption rather than restrain it (Raunig 2010: 38).
Coupled with the characters' panic-stricken retreat from the potentiality
of the horde is a contradictory fascination with what can only be described as
its seductive power. It is a seduction that promises to reveal the truth about
the self in all its particularity. For the prinlipal characters, to be sacrificed to
the machine is to be analysed to the core of one's being as an individual, so
that eventually each feels that the machine has come specifically to require his
or her martyndom. One may say that in tragedy the hero achieves his or her
destined meaning and individuality in becoming the chosen sacrificial subject.
Such a figure becomes the centre of the drama and acquires a peculiar power
that we will discuss below. Camer4 the head of the household and qrrrosure
of a variety of amorous intentions, attests to the deepest understanding of the
machine. She explains the device as follows:
Do you not sense its anxiety? It is as if by virtue of its design, its manu-
facture and assembly, it has acquired a will. It is self animated in some
way, and utters. The peculiar silence that follows the tightening of the
ast bolt is replete with what - desire? Lack? It's almost tangible....
(Barker
"2001
: 126 -127)
If the machine desires its victim, then surely, as the object of so many
human desires, Camera is the intended victim. She continues: 'Unlike us, tne
joumeys
of the machine are undertaken strictly in accordance with an end'
@arker
2001: 127). Contrary to her claim, this mode of single-minded pursuit is
entirely in line with the kind of future available in the dramatic world to which
Camera belongs. It thinks in terms of ends, objectives and the attachment to
a desired object. If we are to beLieve Camer4 the offstage barbarians merely
represent the epitome of the economy (in its efrmological sense as 'household
management') of desire wi*Lin which she is the queen of the castle. The machh-
ery offstage mirrors her own striving for an 'ultimate gesture', a definite end.
262
The Bri l l i ance of t he Seryant wi t hout oual i t i es
But the more we learn about Camera, the more suspect her tesn_
mony appears. Immediately after shoulder has announced the approach of
the machine that none have seery she claims contrarily that she has in fact
witnessed it, but only in pieces. In other words, she can only conceptualize
the potential in a part-by-part segmentation, as a set of posibl" pieces. As
befits her name, Camera presents herself as a woman set within a fixed pt,se,
an arrangement to be seen (she
asks her daughter:
,you
think I pose,
don,t
you? You think I say things lor effect?'
[Barker
2001: 90]). She may state that
' the consequences of things .. have never interested me..., (Barker
2001:
gg),
and soundly refuse to give apologies or hear them, but her daughter sees
through the mask of indifference. It becomes apparent that, at oddi with her
ov,n avowals, Camera is most interested in the machine as a 'concentration
of moral intelligence' that will translate her intended sacrifice into a definitive
judgement
or end. she, like all the other principal characters, desires self-
recognition through painful apotheosis. Like sunetra and Taxman, Camera
desires that the machine choose her, that it authorize her character.
As the head of a dlng household - drama's spectatorial-analytical
house -
a classical tragedy would indeed elect Camera to submit to the sacrificial act. In
Barkels world" however, it is the brilliant sewant of the play's title who ultimately
becomes the collective's substitute. \vhere Camera's indifference is a
performecl
display, intended to mask her own desire to meet this supreme endind look-
ing'to
[the
machine] for some cruel kind of solace', shoulder is the most enig-
matic of the characterg his intentionality almost entirely obscured throughout
(Barker 2001: 131) Even at the moment when he announces his
position
as
the sacrfficia-l subject, it is unclear whether this is an active choice or ihe passive
acceptance of a decision voiced from without. He seemingiy exists outiide of
personal attachment and outside the law; as he puts if it is my privilege to judge
no one'. Asked to give a speech before departin& to judge
the othery shoulder
can only offer his 'uncritical devotion'
@arker
2001: 133).
shoulder is a man without qualities, a man without a place, and therefore
the ideal vessel for the communi[/s blame. A blank slate, a tabula rasa, anyone
can write anything onto him. In other words, he is a messenger without a
message. To generalize greatry, in classical tragedy, the messenger clelivers
his or her description of the offstage event with the least diversion or inflec-
tion possible. He or she has no name, ideally, and arguably no character apart
from the content of the message; the messenger does not appear onstage prior
to this moment, nor stay beyond its calling. writing of the figure of Hermes,
the dMne messenget Michel Serres suggests that,the messenger appears ...
but he must also disappear, or rrurite himself out of the picture, in oider that
the recipient hears the words of the person who sent the message, not the
messenger' (1,997:99). The quintessential messenger is a person oino impor_
tance with no end; announcing his or her own mediality as message, he oishe
disappears into a pure means without end. The messenger takei possession
of the potentiality to do or express without giving form to an action or state-
ment vvhile most of Barker's characters pursue a desired object or other with
fanatical conviction, here the playr,wight seems to present one that pursues
desire without an object, not as a reward or end in itself, but as a way of tLrlne
suspended bei ween desi re and f ul f i t ment . some di st ant descendant of Chri sf
shoulder loves without object and without selfish interesf he gives himself
over completely in his 'uncritical devotion'. To remind us of the correlation
between these two mar$rrs, each time that Shoulder slaps Tamran across the
face during the play, the groom exclaims 'Christl, again and again.
263
Dani el Sack
As his own name suggests, Shoulder must carry the burden of the
community's
transgressions:
the sexual escapades
between Camera and
most prominent
instance in a seem_
pared
for submission
before the
,port_
hrist's crucifixion,
he perfectlv,eilir"s
fered by French theorist Ren6 Girard.
he of classical tragedy represents
the
riminal acts coliapse difference to such
a degree that it is necessary to radicaly separate u ,u..ifi.iur subject in order
to reconstitute
sociar order. This subject, the tragic hero, is heid responsi_
ble for all dispersed
negative violence and the ."rt of society reforms itself
tn opposition
to this other. His or her sacrifice removes caiastrophe from
the city, and so the subject becomes at once both the cause of uil dirr,rp_
tion and its resolution.
He or she is the pharmakon
in both senses of the
word: the poison
and the cure. This duar state - deprived and fulL of
fo*".
at once - parailels
the ambivalence
of the bare rife and sovereign. ff bare
life possesses
the most narrow of powers sufficrent to be called rive, and the
soverelgn
possesses
a plethora of capacities, one would assume that these
two stand in strict opposition
to one another. However, sharing a common
state of exception
as extraordinary
figures, a radical ambivaleice
oversees
them. we may say that both exist ouiside the norm of the human commu-
nity, so that the jurisdiction
of human ordinances
does not apply to either
category (e.g.
the death of either sovereign or bare rife wourd noiquarify as
homicide).
As Girard notes, in many cultures the king is the one who can be
sacrificed,
evenmust
be sacrificed, in order to marntain stable sociar order. It
is this structure
that the ciassical tragedy repricates. In Sophocles,
quintes-
sential tragedy
oedipus saves Thebei from tne sphinx o.,ty to becJme the
cause of its plague; as mentioned
above, his exiie cures tne city and sets him
wandering
as a kind of refugee from city to city. In Oed.ipus at totorrs, iy tt-re
time he nears his death, the cursed man has become divinely po_"rful
'_
hi,
burial site will offer a sacred bressing to its host city. Tellingiy, this curmr-
nating death takes place^offstage,
its particurar rocation uns#n'even
bythe
messenger that reports Oedipus, demise.
As soon as Shoulder
accepts his mantle as scapegoat,
the stage world
begins to
lloothly
function. according to the possibiities
of classilal trag_
edy's sacrificial
structure. when thJ servant prepares to encounter the
rine, the other characters address him
.he other seryants praise his carriage,
e with awe. This divinity has been
n Taxman,s repeated
exclamations of
other characters, but by the electron
of the world itself: here, the servant is left standing al.ne o*tug", i*_o,
bile and'suddenly,
a bright stream of light througl the missing"rooi
iltrr_
minates him. He feels it, laughs,
@arkei
2001: I01). And whei Shoulder
disappears
{rom sight to offei himself as victim, there is a sudden shift in
l l l : i ,:::On:re
onstage as the l ong-awai ted
and wi rhhetd weddi ng U"gnr,
tne preuousry
antagonistic
and despairing characters embracing in nJarry
bucolic celebration.
"-r?-l1t-
lllT""
attempts to watch Shoulder as he is greeted with propriery
::"-":-"1
krndness
by the barbarians
offstage. It becomes increasingly diificult
::r
loanan to describe the event that is taking prace beyond the trireshold of
rne staee:
264
The Br i l l i ance of t he Ser yant wi t hout qual i t i es
(straining
to see into the street) I.A4-rat,s happening. . . ?
It's hard to say exactly, my eyes are_
Can you-
Pecul i ar...
I wish my eyes were better, I_
I can't teli if he,s. . . what is he. . ..
@arker
2001:137)
He turns from the window, his attenti
aware of the offstage scene. Durinq I
enced their ow.n recognition:
Camer
daughter, not her rivaf even dressin
gor.r'n she had previously
hoped to usr
Tagedy
have finally taken place, the nuptiar rebirth and the sacrificial
death,
the recognition
and reversai.
so that as we hear machine
pu.k"J ,f u.,a
carried away, it seems that Shourder
has been processed
by the tradiional
dramatic apparatus,
that history can
reached i ts end and the possi bl e
i s rei r
Shou l der' s
t"uppeuri nc"
onstage, r
wi th an ' oversi zed
overcoat or.,orJi d
,.
'My
agony', he says,
,was
quite sirnpl!, a
the world ... like rain ... the movement
of the tides ...,
@arker 2001:140).
This is the cruel necessrlflz
that Nietzsch e's Birth of rragedy
ide"rin*
*'rn ,n"
pessimism
of a radicaily
inhuman and,incomprene"riLte
*o.ta,-rh"
pr;oru
of the Dionysian.
Crearly the machine has operateo rn manner
quite different
from Camera's expectations:
it does not provide an intentionar pag"*;;t
o.
rationalization
of its chosen victim. And, is the lady of the housJa"E
,ir"i i"
for the spectator,
when she pulls the overcoat from his back in ,"u.J-oirtr"
marks left by the machine, she discovers a surface of smooth and unmarked
skin. Facing this blank canvas of a mi
ance, Camera, the mistress of that o1d
to reassert her own dramatic
credenti
character...[...]
I am cl i ngi ng to my
emphasis).
To which Shoulder
replies,
gone, swepi downsi ream
on a fl ood ..
@arker
2001: 142).That
deluge, that catastrophe
discarding
an ends and moral
intelligence,
leaves a set of figures gatherei
on Barker,s"st"g;
],il-;;;"p
of refugees
bereft of their place and identity.
A new age begiis,
herald"ed uy
the unmarked
messiah Shourder.
\44ren the stage directions
describe
Camera
releasing 'profound
sobs, the heaving purri6', of bereaveme",;
ig"rk",
200.1:
.143)
as the lights dim, the questio-n of
,why?,or ,to
what ..,a2, ."r.,ui.,
entirely in the dark. In other words, in The Briiliance of the sentant
the tragic
sacrifice- no longer tunctions as anticipated
by Girards th;;;"i;
ir'"o,"u"
agent of cultural restitution.
This sacrificial
subject does not pro.tui--u-."tu.r.,
to a known role, to a character with knowable
quaiities.
If the spectatoriar
drama/tragedy
with its possible
futures
functions
rike
a torturing
machine, then it is one akin to that described i" ru*J" t
--tn,
Penal Colony.It
is a device of extensive
and iniricate, but urtimate$,inite
265
Dani el Sack
inscription.
The stylus that carves at its victim's flesh arrives at an end, reaves
the body.marked
by a moral and juridical
statement, the revelation
of a char_
acter to the- analytical
gaze, even-if that meaning is, as in Kafka,s parable, only
legrble to the judged
and god above. We, in the spectator,s seat, get to play
the part of-such
a god and see a character made iegibre. But Bark#s barbar-
ians from the no-man's-rand
of the offstage ,pu." i-"urr" no trace; rather they
refurn the body of the sacrificiar subject iniact and unscathed,
"o
io"g.. ,.*-
g
?_. ii:.:t
- pe.rhaps no ionger a character at all
_
and sacred oiy as the
ta,wa rasa oi a iife outside the realm of the possibre. The stage directions
describe
shoulder
watching the barbarians'
departure from the window,
,as
if taking leave
of someone profoundly
loved for whom no gesture is app.o-
priate'
@arker 200I: 140). How *orrl,C o." stage this mom"ent, p".nup', tn"
-:tt.l?*:.fuI
in the play, with its gesture that ii not a gesture? Sioulder has
established
an inimitabre
connection with the horde, tiing on their
fi",}roru
of cruelty- the full potential of a world,s unrealized
imagrnings.
No glrtu.u o
1,"_t:t]",9"{::e
this great expanse; there is no way of
"ipr"rli.,g
thJ protun_
orry oI nrs rove, nothing to show of the horror endured. ThiJnaked
back,
displayng
a shoulder
as
-one
wourd dispray the ability or potentiarita
.u.ry
a burdery is the bare sufficienry
-_the oniy sufficienry - oi
""p."rrirg
such a
magnitude
of feeling.
The classical m<
and showing
where all is told and n
crisis. Baring himself
Shoulder reveal
messenger
who could contain a
plethc
like the tragic character
he fuLfils the t
the many: not as a sacrificiar
surrogate for the many, but as a singular figure
that possesses
the capacity to be miny others.
REFERENCES
AgTl:1
Giorgro (1998),
Homo
-Sacer:
Soaereign
poz,er
and Bare Life (Irans.
D..Heller-Roazen),
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press.
- (2000),
Potentiarities:
Coilected Essays in
philosophy
(trans.
D. Heiler-
Roazen), Stanford:
Stanford Universitv
press.
Aristotle (1967),Thepoetiu
(trans.
G. Ekei, annarbor:
Universityof
Michigan
l-ress.
Butf:..
Howard (1997),
Arguments
for
a Theatre, Manchester:
Manchester
University
Press.
- (2001),
Collected
plays:
Volume 5, London:
John
Calder
press.
Blocfr, Ernst (1995),
The
principle
of Hope: Volume 1 (trans.
N.
plaice,
S.
plarce
_
and P. Knight),
Cambridge:
Uif
piess.
Genet,
]ean
(1960),
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B. Frechtman),
New
York: Grove
press.
Girard, Ren6 (1979),
Violence and the Sacred (trans.
p.
Gregory), Baltimore:
]ohns
Hopkins
University
press.
Kafl<a, Franz (1995),
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka (trans.
W. Muir and
E. Muir), New
york:
Schocken Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1967),
The-Birth
of Tmgedy and the Case of wagner (trans.
W. Kaufmann),
New
york:
Vintaee.
RaT1&_
Gerald
Q01O),
A Thousani
Machines: A Concise
philosophy
of the
Machine as a Social Moaement (trans.
A. Derieg), Cambridge:
Mfi i.;'rr.
Sen;1_Micfel (199n,
Angels: A Modern Myti
ltrans.
n.
"Cowper),
taris,
_FialruTlanon.
The Br i l l i ance of t he ser van f wi t ho ut o ual i t i es
States, Bert O. (1994), The Pleasure of the PIay, Ithaca: Cornell University
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Szondi, Peter (1987), Theory of Modem Drama
(trans. M. Hays), Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota.
SUGGESTED CITATION
Sack, D. (2012),'The Brilliance of the Seruant without qualities: Bare life and
the horde offstage', Studies in Theatre I Performance 32" 3, pp 257-267,
doi: 10.1386/stap.32.3.257
-L
CONTRI BUTOR DETAI TS
Daniel Sack is Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies at Florida State
University. Prior to this appointment he was a Five College Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow in Performance Studies at Amherst College and the
University of Massachusetts. He is currently revising his book manuscript,
The Futures of Performance: Possibility and Potentiality in Liae Art.
E-mail dsack@fsu.edu
Daniel Sack has asserted his right under the Copltighf Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.
267