"Still Living Flesh": Beckett, Merleau-Ponty, and the Phenomenological Body

Author(s): Stanton B. Garner, Jr.

Source: Theatre Journal, Vol. 45, No. 4, Disciplinary Disruptions (Dec., 1993), pp. 443-460
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3209015 .
Accessed: 04/04/2011 08:35
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Theatre Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

"Still living flesh": Beckett, Merleau-Ponty,

and the Phenomenological Body
Stanton B. Garner, Jr.
Under mescaline it happens that approaching objects appear to grow smaller. A limb or
other part of the body, the hand, mouth or tongue seems enormous, and the rest of the
body is felt as a mere appendage to it. The walls of the room are 150 yards apart, and
beyond the walls is merely an empty vastness [. .. .] Sometimes motion is no longer
seen, and people seem to be transported magically from one place to another. The subject
is alone and forlorn in empty space, "he complains that all he can see clearly is the space
between things, and that this space is empty. Objects are in a way still there, but not as
one would expect .. ." Men are like puppets and their movements are performed in a
dreamlike slow-motion.
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenologyof Perception'
Within a year of Samuel Beckett's death (in 1989), a critical movement was already
well underway to reassess the relationship of his career to its twentieth-century
philosophical and aesthetic contexts. Rejecting the traditional placement of Beckett's
work within the "theater of the absurd," such books as Steven Connor's Samuel
Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (1988), the collection Rethinking Beckett: A Collection
of Critical Essays (1990), and Thomas Trezise's study of Beckett's prose Into the Breach:
Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (1990) have attempted to resituate Beckett's
literary and dramatic canon within the theoretical milieu of poststructuralism and to
find within his art an epistemological and linguistic critique closer to Derrida and
Deleuze than to Sartre and Heidegger. As a result of this critical movement, what
we might call the phenomenological/existentialist
Beckett has been increasingly displaced by the account of a more radically contemporary, deconstructive artist.2

Stanton B. Garner,Jr. is AssociateProfessorof English at the Universityof Tennessee,Knoxville.

He is the author of The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (1989)
and has recentlycompleteda bookentitled Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance
in Contemporary Drama.

1Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenologyof Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1962), 281-82. Merleau-Ponty quotes from F. Fischer's Zeitstruktur und Schizophrenie
(1929).
2 Steven Connor, SamuelBeckett:
Repetition,Theoryand Text(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Rethinking
Beckett:A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lance St. John Butler and Robin J. Davis (New York: St.
Martin's, 1990); Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach:Samuel Beckettand the Ends of Literature(Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1990). Although its emphasis is more strictly psychoanalytic, one might
also include the recent collection of essays The Worldof Samuel Beckett,ed. Joseph H. Smith (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
TheatreJournal45 (1993) 443-460 o 1993 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

444

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

Among these recent studies, Into the Breachoffers perhaps the most conscious
theoretical attempt to reread Beckett from this perspective, and its particular targets
make clear the extent to which this critical revisionism has set itself, explicitly or
implicitly, against phenomenological modes of reading. Discussing the shift from
third- to first-person narration in Beckett's fiction, Trezise writes:
[The] adoption of the first person bespoke ... an extraordinaryintensification of Beckett's
concern with the problem of subjectivity, and furthermore, came at the very moment
when French intellectual life experienced the overwhelming influence of existential phenomenology, especially in its Sartriantendencies. While the historical coincidence of these
two developments may not have fostered a distinct phenomenological school of Beckett
criticism, it certainly favored the pervasive association of Beckett's work with the ideology
of existential humanism. And since this ideology derives from a phenomenological understanding of the human subject, any interpretation taking issue with it must ask the
basic and long-neglected question whether his explicit preoccupation with the status of
the subject necessarily makes of Beckett a phenomenologist, and hence whether his mature
prose genuinely lends itself to a phenomenological reading. The present study was born
of the question, or more precisely, of the conviction that the phenomenological approach
gains whatever insight it may afford from a conspicuous blindness to the dimension of
Beckett's prose that signals the exhaustion or failure of phenomenology itself.... (4-5)

Trezise tracks this phenomenology to its historical origins in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, and he critiques its supposed assumptions through strategies deliberately modeled on Derrida's deconstructive reading of Husserlian phenomenology
in Speechand Phenomena(1967) and other texts of the 1960s.3His reading of Beckett's
prose seeks to establish the Beckettian "exhaustion" in these terms: that the unitary
subject within Beckett's fiction is caught up in "the immemorial dispossession of
subjectivity itself" (33), through which such principles as origin, identity, and interiority are subject to deferral and felure,or "breach."Beckettian subjectivity, Trezise
argues, is never given to itself as something distinct, unvarying, present; rather, it
is displaced by the "already" of temporality and signification, invaded by an intersubjectivity and by "the pre-originary impersonality of the first person itself" (66).
Beckett's oeuvre-and "the subject of literature" as it is posited therein-must be
understood in terms of "a general economy of signification that conditions and
exceeds the universe of phenomenology" (160).
This particularform of theoretical revisionism, with its attack on phenomenological
models of subjectivity and perception, is, of course, a familiarfeature of the theoretical
landscape. Although the phenomenological revolution inaugurated by Edmund Husserl continues to make profound methodological contributions to philosophy and
other disciplines, its application to the fields of literary and performance studies has
been challenged-and, with some notable exceptions, largely precluded-by a number of interlocking theoretical assaults. Semiotics has shifted "meaning" from the
intending consciousness to signifying systems, relocating the perceptual object within
the codified boundaries of the sign. Challenging "the metaphysics of presence,"

3Derrida'sprincipaldiscussions of Husserl can be found in the following texts: EdmundHusserl's

An Introduction,trans. John P. Leavy, Jr. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicholas Hays,
Originof Geometry:
and
1978); Writing
Difference,trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978);and

Speechand Phenomenaand Other Essays on Husserl's Theoryof Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston:

NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1973).

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL
BODY /

445

deconstruction has attacked the notions of constituting subjectivity and self-presence,

as well as such binary categories as subject and object, inside and outside, the essential
and the sensory, upon which (so it is claimed) phenomenology hinges. Marxism,
gender and cultural studies, and other modes of materialist analysis have furthered
the "depersonalizing" of experience by proposing that subjectivity is discursively
constituted, a function of cultural, political, and socio-economic operations. On the
artistic front, certain currents of postmodernism have extended this subversion of
the subject through an aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) of decentering and fragmentation.
Perhaps nothing links the diverse movements of contemporary literary and performance theory more completely than this theoretical shift in which the subject as experiencing agent is recast in terms of "subject positions" and consciousness is dispersed within the field of the externally constituted.
It is not my intent here to challenge poststructuralism as a body of criticalpractices,
or to dispute the deconstructive reading of Beckett's canon, a reading which is clearly
overdue and which has often brilliantly illuminated the play of Beckett's language
and such signature Beckettian principles as deferral, dispossession, repetition, and
absence. Rather, what I would like to do is to question the repudiation of phenomenology upon which this poststructuralist/deconstructionist revisionism so frequently
depends. For this purpose, Trezise's argument is particularlyuseful, since it renders
explicit a set of methodological assumptions and procedures prevalent in contemporary applications of Derridean theory. I would like to pause over its central theoretical strategy-the rehearsing of Derrida reading Husserl-in order to forestall,
in two areas at least, the closure implied in its dismissal of phenomenology. The first
area has to do with what is admitted under the term "phenomenology." Through
his almost exclusive focus on the Husserlian formulation of phenomenology, Trezise
(like Derrida)fixes this tradition in its opening, most preliminaryarticulations, robbing
it of its developments and internal revisions-in short, of its historical contingency,
its literal status as "movement." Husserl himself stated that the phenomenological
project was developmental: "We have expounded phenomenology as a science in its
beginnings."4The subsequent history of phenomenology has confirmed this assessment, as philosophers and theorists in a number of fields have subjected the models
and methodologies of phenomenological investigation to recurrent internal critique,
reinterpreting and often abandoning such aspects of Husserlian phenomenology as
transcendental subjectivity and the "bracketing"of the empirical, pressing this analysis toward fuller engagement with what Derrida considered the "torments" of phenomenology, temporality and intersubjectivity.5
When we consider the theoretical richness of the phenomenological tradition-the
ontological problematics of Heidegger and Sartre;Paul Ricoeur's phenomenological
hermeneutics; Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space"; phenomenological explorations
of the body by Elaine Scarry and medical philosophers; feminist appropriations of
phenomenology by Judith Butler, Iris Young, and Sandra Bartky; the emergence of
"life-world" issues in history, sociology, and the theory of technology; the aesthetic

4 Edmund

Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson

(1913; New York: Macmillan, 1931), 259.
Derrida, Speechand Phenomena, 6.

446

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

theories of Mikel Dufrenne, Roman Ingarden, and recent reader-response theorists;

other applications of phenomenological models and insights to the study of literature,
film, and (in the recent work of Bruce Wilshire and Bert States) to drama itself6-it
is hard to escape the conclusion that the phenomenology repudiated by Trezise is,
in very large part, a polemical construction, narrowly derived from a single reading
of historically limited texts. The phenomenological subject as theorized within Husserlian thought-a subject present to itself in transcendental ideality-is clearly in
retreat in the writings of Beckett, but this retreat actually began much earlier, through
the critiques of a phenomenological tradition that the Husserlian revolution had in
fact inspired. As Hugh J. Silverman and others have emphasized, revisionism has
characterized this tradition from the start.7
The second area where one might question Trezise's repudiation of phenomenology
has to do with the theoretical relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction, and the place of this critique within Derrida's thought as a whole. Derrida by
no means intended a blanket dismissal of phenomenology; while challenging the
"metaphysical" direction of Husserlian idealism and its methodological commitment
to the subject's selfgivenness, the Derridean critique presupposes a role for such
concepts as presence and subjectivity, if radically revised and purged of their privileged, transcendent ideality. As Derrida writes in Of Grammatology,using language
that bears more than a faint echo of the Husserlian project, "[W]e must ... exhaust
the resources of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to attain, by
deconstruction, its ultimate foundation."8 Deconstruction, Christopher Norris suggests, is "an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their
own partial complicity with what they denounce,"9 and in light of Derrida's obvious
and repeated admiration for aspects of Husserlian philosophy, it is possible to read
a text like Speechand Phenomenaas more deeply implicated in the tradition of phenomenological debate than Trezise and others acknowledge. As with Derrida's critique of the structuralism of Saussure and Levi-Strauss, we must be careful not to
Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatreas Metaphor(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982); Bert O. States, GreatReckoningsin Little Rooms:On the Phenomenologyof Theater
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985). Space does not permit broader
citation of the texts that constitute the interdisciplinary field of theoretical and applied phenomenology; a useful (though selective) introduction to phenomenology and its tradition can be found
in David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology:A Guide to the Field and Its Literature,
2nd ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990).
7 Silverman claims that
phenomenology today is in its "fifth wave," as contemporary phenomenologists reexamine the discipline's achievements and assess its opportunities and limitations in the
light of recent theoretical currents; see Hugh J. Silverman, "Phenomenology," Social Research 47
(1980): 704-20. Husserl's own career, it should be pointed out, was itself subject to development
and self-revision. Anticipating later directions in phenomenology, Husserl turned in the works of
his final years (notably The Crisis of EuropeanSciencesand TranscendentalPhenomenology[written 193437; published 1954]) from transcendental consciousness to the more experientially grounded "lifeworld" [Lebenswelt],a concept that would prove central to subsequent phenomenology.
8
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology,trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1974), 60. Compare Derrida's words with those of Paul Ricoeur: "Subjectivity must
be lost as radical origin, if it is to be recovered in a more modest role." See "Phenomenology and
Hermeneutics," in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 113.
9 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction:Theoryand Practice (London and New York: Methuen, 1982),
48.
6

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BODY

447

underestimate the links that bind heresy to the very orthodoxy against which it
rebels.10
Farfrom signaling the "exhaustion" of a phenomenology restricted to its Husserlian
prototype, I will argue, Beckett's drama falls squarely within a set of ontological and
epistemological problems that constitute the heart of phenomenology as it has continued to be revised and rearticulated. This is not the place to explore the intricate
relationship of Beckett's literature to the post-Husserlian philosophy of Heidegger
and Sartre;such explorations have been ably conducted by others.1 Rather, I would
like to set Beckett in a different philosophical context: that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
a less often considered "second generation" phenomenology whose writings-including his most widely known work, ThePhenomenologyof Perception(1945)-center
on corporeality and the "embodiedness" of consciousness. This concern with the
body, in its problematic facticity, led Merleau-Ponty (between the 1930s and his death
in 1961) to an understanding of subjectivity that resonates powerfully in terms of
Beckett's work. I propose to read Beckett in the light of Merleau-Ponty (and MerleauPonty in the light of Beckett) in order to suggest that Beckett's drama explores and
radicalizes an approach to the body similar to that of his philosophical contemporary,
and that these concerns informed and structured his texts throughout his career.
Like the history of phenomenology itself, Beckett's work represents an evolving and
increasingly complex response to a set of essentially phenomenological questions
concerning subjectivity, embodiedness, and perception.
By foregrounding the body as the ambiguous site of subjectivity, the tradition of
post-Husserlian phenomenology inaugurated by Merleau-Ponty presents the critic
of Beckett's plays with a corporeal problematics different from (though complementary to) the more familiar linguistic/textual problematics of poststructuralism. That
ThePhenomenologyof Perception,like Merleau-Ponty's other writings, is characterized
by a striking number of theatrical metaphors suggests the specific relevance of these
questions to that staging of embodiment we call "theatre." To think in these terms
is to confront, by contrast, the marginalization of the theatre within those studies
of Beckett that seek to replace phenomenological with deconstructive models of
reading.12The frequent neglect of the drama evident in these studies suggests a latent

' "Derrida is as far from 'rejecting' Husserl as he is from simply dismissing the linguistics of
Saussure or the structuralist anthropology of Levi-Strauss" (Norris, Deconstruction:Theoryand Practice,
48). Robert Sokolowski argues that Derrida's own use of language presupposes the phenomenological
categories he challenges, and that the mutual inherence of absence and presence in Husserl's theory
of perception anticipates in some ways Derrida's attack on the notion of presence as pure givenness.
See "The Theory of Phenomenological Description," in Descriptions, ed. Don Ihde and Hugh J.
Silverman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985): 14-24.
1See, for instance, David H. Hesla, The Shapeof Chaos:An Interpretationof the Art of Samuel Beckett
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), especially pp. 167-207; Eugene F. Kaelin, The
Unhappy Consciousness:The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981); and Lance St.
James Butler, SamuelBeckettand the Meaning of Being:A Study of OntologicalParable(London: Macmillan,
1984).
12
Into the Breach restricts itself to the prose, with Beckett's drama receiving only brief mention
within the footnotes, while Rethinking Beckettoffers only two essays (out of eleven) on the playsone of which is Stephen Barker's essay "Conspicuous Absence: Traceand Power in Beckett's Drama,"
the other a condensed version of Connor's discussion of the drama (two chapters out of eight) in
Samuel Beckett:Repetition, Theoryand Text.

448

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

bias of the deconstructive approach with important consequences for drama and
performance studies-a scriptocentrism that, deriving from deconstruction's linguistic and textual interests, may also condition (and limit) its field of inquiry. Reopening phenomenological lines of investigation allows us to redress the current of
antitheatricality that runs through much poststructuralist criticism, an attitude symptomatic (like all antitheatricality) of a deeper uneasiness with the body -in this case,
with the body as a site of corporeal and subjective elements that always resist reduction to the merely textual.
By reclaiming the body for philosophy, in other words, phenomenology has relevance, not only for Beckett's plays, but for non-Beckettian dramatic texts and for
the discourse
theatre studies in general. Phenomenology offers a way of re-embodying
it
has
a place.13
where
found
within
the other disciplines
of theatre, as it has done
*

Phenomenology is the study of givenness (the Greek phainomenonderives from

phainein,to show), of the world as it is lived rather than the world as it is objectified,
abstracted, and conceptualized. By calling for a return to "the things themselves"
(dieSachenselbst),Husserl sought to ground logic, the sciences, and philosophy itself
within the structures of experience from which these disciplines had abstracted their
fields of observation. The phenomenological revolution, in essence, involved a shift
in positionality, whereby the descriptions of a detached observer "posited" in front
of its object would yield ground to an account of consciousness and its objects as
these exist within a field of mutual inherence. Such a shift entails profound reconceptualizations; the essentially analytic space of Euclidian geometry, Cartesian philosophy, or Newtonian physics is very different, for instance, from lived, or inhabited,
spatiality, with its perceptual contours and structures of orientation.
Husserl's own methodological procedures carried this revolution in a direction
that subsequent phenomenologists have often strongly resisted. Husserl defined
consciousness as intentional ("Allconsciousness is consciousness of something") and
thus situated subjectivity inextricably in relation to the world. At the same time, his
pursuit of phenomenological "essences" led him to employ the phenomenological
epoche(or "reduction") to bracket off the empirical world, with the result that Husserlian consciousness tends toward a privileged, transcendental ideality. Among
those elements of the empirical world "bracketed"from consideration by Husserl is
the human body in all its material facticity. Merleau-Ponty's revision of Husserlian
idealism involved returning the body to the field of subjectivity. Whereas Husserl's
phenomenology suspends the materiality of an "outside" that includes the body for
the sake of ideal self-presence, Merleau-Ponty posited a consciousness caught up in
the ambiguity of corporeality, directed toward a world of which it is inextricably and
materially a part. "To perceive is to render oneself present to something through the
body," he wrote; "Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the interme-

13
For a phenomenological approach to contemporary political theater, see Stanton B. Garner, Jr.,
"Post-Brechtian Anatomies: Weiss, Bond, and the Politics of Embodiment," TheatreJournal42 (1990):
145-64.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BODY

449

diary of the body."14Like Heidegger and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty existentialized the

phenomenological project, and he accomplished this through a radical corporealism.
Rather than discounting the body as an accidental feature of the subject-object relationship, he considered the body "our general medium for having a world" (146)
and defined the task of philosophy as follows: "to ... restore to things their concrete
physiognomy, to organisms their individual ways of dealing with the world, and to
subjectivity its inherence in history" (57). The Phenomenologyof Perceptionexplores
this phenomenology at its fundamental level: the embodied subject's opening,
through perception, upon the world, others, and itself.15
Using terminology introduced earlier in the phenomenological tradition, we might
say that Merleau-Ponty replaced Kdrper(the body as it is given to external observation,
the "thing body") by Leib(the body as it is experienced, the "lived body"), and that
he turned the attention of phenomenology to Leiblichkeit,or "lived bodiliness."16In
so doing, he opened a field of investigation with obvious pertinence to Beckett's
theatre. Pierre Chabert has described this theatre in terms evocative of MerleauPonty:
[O]nemust understand[Beckett'stheatre]as a deliberateand intense effortto makethe
body cometo light, to give the body its full weight, dimension,and its physicalpresence
. . to constructa physicaland sensory space, filled with the presenceof the body, to
affirm ...

a space invested by the

body.17

Beckett's is an intensely embodied theatre, both in the traditional sense that its
characters are bodied forth by actors for spectatorial consumption and in a more
deeply phenomenological sense in which Beckett foregrounds the corporeality of
actor and character within his stage's exacting field. Didi and Gogo explore the
boundaries of their stage environment (as do Hamm and Clov); they gnaw turnips,
carrots, and chicken bones; they urinate, register each other's smells, yield to fatigue
in sleep. Specimens of Homo erectus, they contemplate erections ("[w]ith all that
follows")18 yet struggle to maintain a standing posture against gravity's downward

draw. Waitingfor Godotcombines the physicality of slapstick with metaphysical reflection, yet even the latter is drawn toward bodily metaphor: crucifixion, blindness,
the pains of childbirth.
In "Samuel Beckett, or 'Presence' in the Theatre," an essay frequently cited in
traditional accounts of the "existentialist Beckett," Alain Robbe-Grillet discusses the
unprecedented quality of "being there"in Beckett's theatre, and it would be possible

14 MauriceMerleau-Ponty,"The Primacyof Perception,"trans. James M. Edie, in ThePrimacy

of
and OtherEssayson Phenomenological
Perception
Psychology,thePhilosophyof Art, History,andPolitics,
ed. James M. Edie (Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1964), 42; ThePhenomenology
of Perwill be indicated in the text.
ception,138-39. Subsequentreferencesto ThePhenomenology
15The body also plays an important role in the philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre. See, for
example, Sartre'sdiscussion of the body in BeingandNothingness,trans. Hazel E. Barnes(New York:
Pocket Books, 1956):401-70.
16
Max Scheler, Formalismin Ethicsand Non-FormalEthicsof Value,trans. Manfred S. Frings and
RogerL. Funk (1916;Evanston:NorthwesternUniversity Press, 1973), 398-99.
7 PierreChabert,"The Body in Beckett'sTheatre,"Journal
of BeckettStudies8 (Autumn 1982):24.
18
Samuel Beckett, Waitingfor Godot(New York:Grove, 1954), 12a.

450

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

merely to supplement this reading by focusing on the simple (and obvious) fact of
bodily sentience within Beckett's dramatic world.19Yet merely to note that the body
constitutes a unique "presence" within Beckett's theatre is to ignore the problematic
status of this term as it has been disclosed by poststructuralism and to reopen the
phenomenological approach to the critique mounted by Trezise and others. Such an
attempt would also force one to ignore the radical complications of corporeal selfpresence that characterize Beckett's staging of the body, complications that were well
underway by the time of Robbe-Grillet's essay (1963) and that continued to multiply
and deepen throughout the playwright's dramatic career. Already in Happy Days,
the body has succumbed to the fragmentation that will characterize the late plays:
the play's staging reduces character to body region and body part (Winnie's upper
torso, then head; Willie's head, arm), and Beckett's directions underscore this dismemberment through language that subverts the impression of bodily unity and
corporeal agency: "Happy expression off," "Head up," "Impatience of fingers."20 In Play,

sensory environment has given way to an indeterminate, quasi-abstract space activated by stage lighting, though this radical dephysicalization is already anticipated
by the nearly bare playing area of Godotand the disembodied space that Beckett had
begun exploring in the medium of radio. In one of those literalized metaphors of
which Beckett was so fond, the image of Winnie buried in a mound in HappyDays
parodies the very idea of the body "grounded" in its world. By the time of such late
works as Not I, Footfalls,and What Where,the body has become almost a ghost of
itself, reduced and decentered within the minimal space it has left, doubled by words
that both address and disown it. Invaded on all sides by an irremediable absence,
its very presence to itself is no longer secure. In Connor's words, "Beckett's plays
resist the notion of the innocent self-evidence of the body and its language."21As
Hamm says, both contemplating and anticipating this scene of non-presence, "I was
never there."22
Yet one need not move beyond Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body to find
similar questioning of unitary presence and innocent self-evidence, or to locate the
corporeal problematics that Beckettian theatre puts into play. A passage from The
Phenomenologyreflects both Merleau-Ponty's debt to the Husserlian project and the
profound distance between Husserl's idealism and his own philosophy of corporeal
immersion:

In so far as we believe in the world's past, in the physicalworld, in "stimuli,"in the

organismas our books depictit, it is firstof all becausewe have presentat this moment
to us a perceptualfield, a surfacein contactwith the world, a permanentrootednessin
it, and becausethe world ceaselesslyassailsand beleaguerssubjectivityas waves wash
arounda wreckon the shore. (207)
The metaphoric content of this passage reflects the epistemological/ontological paradox that animates Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of bodied subjectivity. On the

19Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Samuel Beckett, or 'Presence' in the Theatre," trans. Barbara Bray, in
Samuel Beckett:A Collectionof Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1965), 108-16.
20
These references are from Samuel Beckett, Happy Days (New York: Grove, 1961).
21
Connor, SamuelBeckett:
Repetition,Theoryand Text,168.
22Samuel Beckett,
Endgame (New York: Grove, 1958), 74.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL
BODY /

451

one hand, the embodied subject "rooted" in its world consciously extends the Husserlian notion of Fundierung("grounding" or "foundation"). But this material grounding also works, as the passage makes clear, to "assail" or dispossess the subjectivity
thereby embodied. Since the body is both subject and object-as I can verify (to
employ a Merleau-Pontean example) by touching one hand with the other-the
subject's experience is caught up in ambiguity, in the impossibility of transcendental
self-possession: the body I touch never coincides with the body that touches. As
Gary Brent Madison expresses it: "Even though the body can turn back on itself,
take itself for its own proper object and in this way accomplish a kind of reflection,
it never succeeds in coincidingwith itself. This circularitynever results in an identity."23
As a corollary to this noncoincidence, perception is also characterized by a presubjective level of involvement with the world of things, an entanglement with the
"non-self" which subjectivity presupposes and upon which it is contingent. "[T]here
is always some degree of depersonalization at the heart of consciousness" (137):
rooted in a body which it both is and is not, subjectivity confronts a presubjective
field in which it is grounded but which both eludes and invades it. "The perceiving
subject," as Merleau-Ponty says (in an uncanny anticipation of HappyDays), is "the
anonymous one [that is] buried in the world, and that has not yet traced its path."24
In ThePhenomenology
of Perceptionhe writes: "What enables us to center our existence
is also what prevents us from centering it completely, and the anonymity of the body
is inseparably both freedom and servitude" (85). Pressured by this experiential ambiguite, Merleau-Ponty's language oscillates between a discourse of belonging and
an equally pronounced discourse of subversion and contingency, whereby subjectivity becomes both that point from which the world arises into meaning and the
seat of non-coincidence, "that gap which we ourselves are" (207).
If the term "gap" evokes a play like Not I, with its "god-forsaken hole" that speaks
its fragments of a life from a void of quasi-embodiment, this is because MerleauPonty's analysis outlines a corporeal paradox that Beckett's Mouth carries to its
extremes. From the physical harshness of Godot,with its hunger, its bodily smells,
its uncomfortable boots, and its irresistible gravity; through Happy Days, with its
corporeal imprisonment and its failures of what Bachelard calls "nesting"25to the
simultaneously bodied and disembodied spaces of the late plays-Beckett's drama
explores the instability between a profound material inherence in the physical body
and a corresponding alienation, and it dramatizes the subject's futile pursuit of any
means for overcoming its own non-coincidence. The diminished figures of late Beckett
(like Mouth), seemingly abstracted from the conditions of materiality and embodiment, continue to play out this fearful ambiguity of corporeal self-presence, the urgent
flight from a subjectivity that represents the impossibility of its own identity. The
fact that the body seems to recede in plays like Not I and That Time-that it is
fragmented, decentered, often deanimated, and that many of its regions are characterized by absence-does not obscure its place in the play of ambiguity and dispossession. "Whole body like gone," Mouth intones, in a stream of discourse that
23

25.
24

Gary Brent Madison, The Phenomenologyof Merleau-Ponty (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981),

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 201.
25 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon,
1964), 90-104.

452

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

seems to come less from individual vocal cords than from the darkness that surrounds
it and onto which it opens.26Yet while the body may seem to approach its vanishing
point within a realm of the purely verbal, the qualified "like gone" precludes this
disappearance. Lips continue to move in tandem with the words of Mouth's monologue, and these words are themselves charged with corporeal references. Like the
unspoken "I," which makes itself felt in the very energy with which it is avoided,
the body asserts itself as a primary field for the play of phenomenological presence
and absence and the endlessly deferred moment of self-coincidence. The opening
words of Beckett's tribute to Avigdor Arikha echo the dilemmas of embodiment that
characters like Mouth share with the Merleau-Pontean subject: "Siege laid again to
the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself."27
If Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology calls into focus a specifically corporeal dynamic
at work in Beckett's handling of subjectivity, it is equally true that Beckett's late
of Perception,
plays suggest the radicalimplications of this dynamic. ThePhenomenology
as I have suggested, hinges on a paradox of grounding and dispossession, managing
to bridge both the Husserlian foundations it recalls and the even more deeply nonHusserlian directions it anticipates. Beckett's drama pursues these directions, in ways
that parallel the work of more recent phenomenologists of the body who have revised
the philosophy of corporeality inherited from Merleau-Ponty. Herbert Pliigge, for
example, has reconsidered the phenomenological distinction between Leiband Kirper
in light of the experience of illness. Anticipating Scarry's study of the body in pain,28
Pliigge argues that, in illness and other forms of bodily duress, the "thing body"
intrudes within the experience of live bodiliness as a quasi-alien facticity-a husk,
burden, or weight that no longer "belongs" to the experiencing subject. Although
this emergence of a corporeality no longer felt as one's own becomes acute in pathological situations, Pliigge notes, the dispossession revealed in such situations discloses a more fundamental self-estrangement, the presence of something "thinglike
and objectal" at the heart of subjectivity itself.29Clearly, this insistent materiality of
a body experienced as resistant and alien registers for all of Beckett's characters,
from Estragon, who struggles to remove the boot from his foot, to Mouth's more
profound corporeal alienation: "the machine . . . more likely the machine . . . so
disconnected ... never got the message ... or powerless to respond ... like numbed"
(218).
Drew Leder has coined the term "dys-appearance" for this "alien presencing" of
the body in pain and disease,30though the main contribution of his own, more recent
study The Absent Body is to revise Merleau-Ponty's notion of the lived body in the
opposite direction. With a different Beckettian twist, Leder explores the phenomenal

Samuel Beckett, Not I, in CollectedShorterPlays (New York: Grove, 1984), 221.

Miscellaneous
Samuel Beckett, "For Avigdor Arikha," in Disjecta:
Writingsanda DramaticFragment,
ed. Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove, 1984), 152.
28Elaine
Scarry, TheBodyin Pain: TheMakingand Unmakingof the World(New York: Oxford University
Press, 1985).
29 Herbert
Pligge, "Man and His Body," trans. Erling Eng, in The Philosophyof the Body: Rejections
of Cartesian Dualism, ed. Stuart F. Spicker (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), 298. For a more personal
account of this phenomenon, see Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (New York: Harper and Row,
1984).
30 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 82-83.
26
27

BODY /
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL

453

body in terms of its absences, its points and regions of perceptual invisibility. As the
impossibility of ever seeing one's internal organs and the back of one's head attests,
the lived body is characterized by zones of inaccessibility or "disappearance." The
eye, for instance, can never see itself seeing; as a consequence, "[p]recisely as the
center point from which the perpetual field radiates, the perceptual organ remains
an absence or nullity in the midst of the perceived" (13). Leder advocates a "phenomenological anatomy" (29), which would trace the regions of disappearance that
(we might say) "ghost" the availability-to-perception of lived embodiedness: "My
self-presencing in consciousness will thus be lined by a multiplicity of absences.
. . .The phenomenologist of the body is already, and necessarily, a hermeneut"
(37).
To enter the experiential field of the lived body as this has been described and
elaborated by contemporary phenomenology is thus to discover a landscape whose
contours powerfully resemble those of Beckett's theatre. Like its philosophical analogues, the body in Beckett's drama constitutes a field that is simultaneously Other
and troue, in which any presence-to-itself is doubly foreclosed by principles of estrangement and absence (not I, not here) that lie at the heart of embodiment. This
conception of the body represents a deepening of the ambigiiitethat rules MerleauPonty's analysis of embodied subjectivity-a drawing out of what one might think
of as the deconstructive possibilities inherent in the phenomenological stance itself.
Particularlyin the late plays, the Beckettian body radicalizes the phenomenological
enterprise of ThePhenomenologyof Perception;indeed, this body is already present, in
a sense, in the margins and footnotes-the liminal regions-of Merleau-Ponty's text.
In their dismemberment and perceptual disfigurements, their problematic corporeality, Beckett's characters call attention to those figures, mostly clinical cases, whose
stories of perceptual/corporeal dysfunction are heard throughout ThePhenomenology:
schizophrenics, neuraesthenics, aphasiacs, patients afflicted with hallucinations,
drug-induced symptoms, phantom limbs, and other disturbances of body image or
"bodily spatiality" ("the way the body comes into being as a body," according to
Merleau-Ponty [149]). Like earlier and later phenomenologists of the body (Plugge
and Leder are both medical philosophers), Merleau-Ponty is drawn to dysfunction particularly neurological disorder-with its various forms of perceptual aberrancy.
His accounts of breakdown in the subject-body-world relationship read like a commentary on the Beckettian world, its peculiar perceptual topography, and its modes
of disclosure and non-disclosure to the characters who inhabit it. Speaking of hallucination, for instance, Merleau-Ponty evokes the decentered, monologic world of
the late plays: "The patient's existence is displaced from center, being no longer
enacted through dealings with a harsh, resistant and intractable world which has no
knowledge of us, but expending its substance in isolation creating a fictitious setting
for itself" (342).31 His discussions of schizophrenia offer similar glosses on time and
repetition in Beckett's plays, as in this account by a patient:

31

Merleau-Ponty's remarks on verbal hallucination (in a later lecture) offer a fascinating gloss on

the depersonalized speech of Not I: "The subject no longer has the impression that he coincides
with his own speech"; see Consciousness
and the Acquisitionof Language,trans. Hugh J. Silverman
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 66-67.

454

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

The branches sway on the trees, other people come and go in the room, but for me time
no longer passes .... Thinking has changed, and there is no longer any style .... What
is the future? It can no longer be reached ... Everything is in suspense ... Everything
is monotonous, morning, noon, evening, past, present and future. Everything is always
beginning all over again. (281)

Finally, in Merleau-Ponty's description of the effects of mescaline (cited as epigraph

to this essay), we can recognize the familiar Beckettian deformations of space and
body: magnification of body parts, the simultaneous elongation and collapse of spatiality, the reduction of others into puppets who move in "dreamlike slow-motion."32
I do not mean to propose that Beckett's characters be reduced to clinical cases, or
the contours of his dramatic worlds to neurological symptoms -though the allusions
to his mother's affliction with Parkinson's disease that Hugh Culik has noted in
Beckett's work reinforces the sense that clinical pathology constitutes an operative
level of reference within Beckett's portraits of aberrancy.33To whatever extent these
portraits are grounded within particularforms of clinical dysfunction, the metaphoric
versions of perceptual and corporeal distortion evident in Beckett's plays are clearly
designed to reflect features and principles of normal corporeal subjectivity, the dispossessions at the heart of self-possession. As such, characters like Mouth or W (in
Rockaby)occupy a phenomenological territory that The Phenomenologyof Perception
both explores and seeks to contain. While Merleau-Ponty tends to restrict pathology
to a departure from the "normal" experience of embodiment-betraying his attachment to what Alphonso Lingis calls "the imperative figure of an agent that holds on
to things that are objectives and that maintains himself in the world"34-Beckett's
theatre suggests that these perceptual conditions constitute a more fundamental
potentiality and that they derive both from the structures of bodily experience and

32
CompareBillieWhitelaw'srecollectionof performingin Not I to the above accountsof corporeal
dislocation:"[F]orthe first couple of rehearsalperformances,when the blindfoldwent on and I was
stuck half-way up the stage, I think I had sensory deprivation.The very first time I did it, I went
to pieces. I felt I had no body; I could not relate to where I was; and, going at that speed, I was
becomingvery dizzy and felt like an astronauttumblinginto space ... I swore to God I was falling,

falling . . ."; see James Knowlson, "Extracts from an Unscripted Interview with Billie Whitelaw,"

Journalof BeckettStudies3 (Summer1978):87 [ellipses within the text]. This descriptionsuggests the
extentto which Beckett'sactorsare subjectto permutationsof perceptual/corporeal
experiencesimilar
to those undergone by Beckett's characters.W. B. Worthen discusses the corporealsubjectionof
Beckett's actors in "Beckett'sActor," ModernDrama26 (1983):415-24, and ModernDramaand the
Rhetoricof Theater(Berkeley:University of CaliforniaPress, 1992), 131-42.
33
Hugh Culik, "NeurologicalDisorder and the Evolution of Beckett'sMaternalImages," Mosaic
22:1 (Winter1989):41-53. Culik argues, for instance, that May (in Footfalls)displays the acathisia
(restlesspacingalternatingwith difficultyin initiatingmovement)symptomaticof Parkinson'sdisease
(48-50). "May,"of course, was also the name of Beckett'smother.
34Alphonso Lingis, "Imperatives,"in Merleau-Ponty
Vivant,ed. M. C. Dillon (Albany:SUNYPress,
1991), 114. Lingis questions this privilegingof grounded perception:"Wewant to propose that the
world itself, in Merleau-Ponty'ssense, is set in depths, in unchartedabysses, where therearevortices
in which the body that lets loose its hold on the levels of the world, the dreaming, the visionary,
the hallucinating,the lasciviousbody, gets drawnand dragswith it not things, but those appearances
without anything appearing,those phantoms, caricatures,and doubles that even in the high noon
of the world float and scintillateover the contours of things and the planes of the world" (114). As
I have suggested, this non-grounded world exists in what we might call the "clinicalmargins"of
Merleau-Ponty'sphenomenology.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BODY

455

from what Merleau-Ponty's own analysis, anticipating this direction, calls the "gaping
wound" in subjectivity itself.35

"What remains for the eye exposed to such conditions? To such vicissitude of
hardly there and wholly gone."36No account of the phenomenological body in Beckett's theatre is complete without mention of the audience-the individual/collective
"third body" (along with character and actor) of the stage's intercorporeal field. Full
phenomenological description of Beckettian spectatorship would require a study in
its own right, but certain features that would no doubt characterize such description
are relevant to our discussion of the body's intricate, conflicting modes of presencing
in Beckett's drama. For Beckett's spectator is staged as deliberately as his characters
and actors, and with a similar phenomenological emphasis: not as the disembodied
eye/I of traditional realist spectatorship but as a body situated with its own positionality and material presence. In addition to direct references to the audience's
presence ("I see . . . a multitude . . . in transports . . . of joy" [Endgame, 29]), this

embodiedness is indirectly foregrounded, from the early plays on, by some the most
familiar elements of Beckett's dramaturgy. Narrative gaps and indeterminacies resist
the construction of diegetic "elsewheres"; silences effect a disclosure of the theatrical
present in its physiological actuality, a disclosure heightened by the formalizing of
movement and gesture; and a concern with the sound of words (Krapp's savoring
of "Spooool" and "viduity," for instance) draws attention to the sensory body of
dramatic speech as it is produced and perceived within the theatre. But as with the
characters, merely to note the heightened therenessof Beckett's audience is to neglect
the deepening ways in which this presencing becomes subject, in Beckett's career,
to phenomenological complication. Just as the later plays reveal an increasing dispossession within bodied subjectivity on the part of Beckett's characters, so these
plays also involve the audience in a phenomenological displacement, disclosing the
body that underlies and sustains theatrical seeing at the very moment that they
subject this body to a marked perceptual decentering.
Elsewhere, I have analyzed the "visual poetics" of Beckett's late plays, the specific
compositional techniques by which Beckett establishes a perceptual field characterized
by latency and discord: the use of half-light, failed symmetries, indeterminate spatial
depth, off-centered positioning of characters and objects, deformations of color and
shape, modulations of the traditional relationship between movement and stillness.37
The theatrical images of these late plays feel tense, jarring, precisely because they
violate specific norms of visual perception, expectations that reflect the perceiving

Continuing his discussion of hallucination, Merleau-Ponty writes: "[Tlhisfiction can have the value
of reality only because in the normal subject reality itself suffers through an analogous process. In so far as
he too has sensory fields and a body, the normal person is equally afflicted with this gaping wound
through which illusion can make its way in" (342). Despite its tendency to present dysfunction as
departure and accident, in other words, The Phenomenologyalso conceives aberrancy as a modality
of the normal. Merleau-Ponty clarifies this understanding of pathology in Consciousness and the
Acquisition of Language, 63-69.
36 Samuel
Beckett, Ill Seen Ill Said (New York: Grove, 1981), 37-38.
37 Stanton B. Garner, Jr., "Visual Field in Beckett's Late Plays," ComparativeDrama 21 (1987-88):
349-73.
35

456

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

subject's attempt to orient itself toward the perceptual object. In so doing, they
engage the physiology of vision, the corporeal field within which the seeing eye is
"embodied" as vision. Merleau-Ponty writes: "[T]here is an immediate equivalence
between the orientation of the visual field and the awareness of one's own body as
the potentiality of that field, so that any upheaval experimentally brought about can
appear indifferently either as the inversion of phenomenal objects or as a redistribution of sensory functions in the body" (206). Perception, in other words, is inescapably reflexive, and this is particularly evident when perceptual stimuli (an excess
or deficiency of light, for instance) draw normally invisible perceptual operations to
attention. The very resistance of Beckett's imagism to visual equilibrium embodies
the audience within its own seeing and establishes a perceptual tension inimicable
to the passive "self-forgetting" of equilibrated vision: to see with difficulty is (phenomenologically speaking) to become that difficulty, its intransigence internalized
as physiological resistance. Reinforced by the myriad references to sight within the
texts themselves-as when the Director in Catastrophestages the mise-en-scene in
terms of lighting and sight lines-the visual instabilities of Beckett's late plays engage
a distinctly metaperceptual spectatorial field, one characterized by a marked refusal
of self-transcending invisibility.
The theatrical positioning of the audience itself also becomes a source of tension
and of the peculiarly "displaced" self-experience of the spectator within Beckett's
complex play of vision. Through the reflexivity discussed above, the various principles
of arrangement within the late plays condition the experiential orientations of audience to stage. The principle of ex-centricity evident in the staging of virtually all
of Beckett's late characters-the positioning of characters and objects "slightly off
center"-can serve as an example. As anyone who has viewed Beckett's late plays
will attest, these plays render every spectator-position, like the stage images themselves, "slightly off." A historical analogy drawn from the visual arts may help clarify
the phenomenological decentering effected by this departure from a perceptual norm.
In his study of Renaissance perspective, Michael Kubovy discusses the geometric
laws structuring pictorial space in relation to a viewing point outside the painting,
the "center of projection" that counterpoints the vanishing point in the painting's
architecture of line and convergence. As a formal construct of perspectival composition, viewer position, in short, represents an ideal function of the artwork itself.
"Ideal" in a strict sense: for Kubovy suggests that this virtual center can fail to
correspond to the actual point of viewing, and that certain perspectival paintings
manipulate this discrepancy in order to complicate the viewer's experience of bodily
location. Through specific techniques of composition and mounting-the painting
of Da Vinci's The Last Supper,for instance, at a height where its projective center
stands over fifteen feet above the floor-painters could effect a displacement of the
viewer's perceptual "egocenter," a dissonance between actual and virtual position:
"these effects," Kubovy writes, "achieve the goal of divorcing the viewer's felt point
of view in relation to the scene represented in the painting from the viewer's felt
position in relation to the room in which he or she is standing."38Perceptual displacement of this kind charges the act of seeing with a simultaneous embodiedness

Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspectiveand RenaissanceArt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 159. Kubovy discusses the concept of egocenteron pp. 150-61.
38

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL
BODY /

457

and disembodiedness, as the viewer stands somewhat awkwardly in the wrong spot
and imaginatively elsewhere in the correct one.
The implications of this argument for theatre and its "staging" of the audience are
intriguing. After perspective was abandoned as an aesthetic governing scenographic
construction, the proscenium stage lost the precise "centers of projection" that it had
borrowed from perspectival painting and that were intrinsic to its illusionistic architecture. But like much post-perspective painting, the proscenium stage continues
to project optimal viewing positions as insistently as it establishes visual centers for
its scenic arrangement: reinforced by the stage's rectangular framing, and the audience's perceptual disposition toward symmetrical, balanced point of view, this
theatre tends to privilege viewing positions extending on an axis perpendicular to
stage center. Ideal centrality in the auditorium mirrors ideal centrality on stage.
To the extent that Beckett's late plays violate centrality in their scenic arrangement,
even fifth-row center becomes ex-centric, visually off-balance, in relation to the performance image. Oriented in terms of an emptiness, facing a center point felt only
in its material absence, every seat becomes subject to the angular and the unbalanced.
Beckett's audience, in other words, finds itself both disembodied toward nonexistent
viewing points and uncomfortably embodied within the seats they cannot escape,
"clawed" by the perceptual dissonance of Beckett's stage which preclude the satisfaction of spectatorial centrality.39Like the playwright's characters, the audience of
plays like Rockabyand What Wherefind themselves tangentialized, situated uncomfortably between the places they cannot occupy and those they must.
Deploying other strategies of visual (dis)arrangement, individual plays compound
this dissonance of placement and displacement as it afflicts spectators seeking to
orient themselves toward the field of performance. By locating Mouth eight feet
above stage level, and Auditor at a height of four feet, for instance, Beckett creates
an upward perceptual and physiological tension, in which the action of Not I seems
addressed to an audience seated several feet above itself. And by staging the Speaker
in ThatTimewith "longflaringwhitehairas if seenfromaboveoutspread,"40
Beckett stages
his audience looking down from "above" the play's action, forcing yet another perceptual conflict between ideal and actual audience positions. If Beckett's late characters are haunted by self-division-displaced in relation to a body that nonetheless
constitutes an inescapable facticity-the spectators of Beckett's late plays are haunted
by a similar division and displacement, unstably re-embodied as they attempt the
self-transcendence of unimpeded watching. This phenomenological play of the "here"
and the "not-here" that Beckett's audience shares with his characters is only intensified by the dramatic speech of the late plays, which (as critics have noted)41both
does and does not allude to actual performance conditions, ambiguously doubling

39In reference to Endgame,Becketthas

spoken of "the power of the text to claw":Letterto Alan
Schneider, 21 June 1956, excerpted in "Beckett'sLetterson Endgame:Extractsfrom his Correspondence with DirectorAlan Schneider,"in TheVillageVoiceReader,ed. Daniel Wolfand Edwin Fancher
(GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962), 183.
40 Samuel
Beckett, ThatTime,in CollectedShorterPlays,228.
41
See, for example, Paul Lawley, "Counterpoint,Absence and the Medium in Beckett'sNot I,"
ModernDrama26 (1983):407-14; S. E. Gontarski,TheIntentof Undoingin SamuelBeckett'sDramatic
Texts(Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press, 1985), 175;and Garner,"VisualField,"367-70.

458

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

the stage present with indexical references that point directly neither to what we see
nor to something

else. "[A]ll the time the buzzing . . . dull roar like falls . . . and

the beam... flickering on and off" (Not I, 221):these details from Mouth's monologue
recall the image we see before us, but the sound of Mouth's verbal stream is not
exactly a "buzz" or "dull roar,"and never does the spotlight that brings this speaking
orifice to view "flicker on and off." As with all aspects of Beckett's dramaturgy and
stagecraft, the present moment is both actual and deferred, caught up in an oscillation
between the physically here and the elsewhere, displayed for an audience that is
drawn into its instabilities.

Beckett, who (like Merleau-Ponty) was fascinated with the medium of painting,
praised Arikha's art for pursuing "the marks of what it is to be and be in face of."42

In their increasingly pictorial use of performance space, the late plays reveal a deepening interest not only in the absent presence of the body as staged, but also in the
dynamics of vision, an interest that recalls Merleau-Ponty's concern at the end of
his career (in The Visibleand the Invisibleand other late writings) with the phenomenology of visibility.43Rather than signaling the exhaustion of phenomenology, then,
these plays constitute an expansion of its field, to the point where the mise-en-scene
itself becomes phenomenological and where its various elements (light, darkness,
objects, sound) acquire a quality of consciousness that-even more thoroughly than
the overtly phenomenological theatre of RobertWilson-layers the technological with
the perceptual contours of the subjective.44For characters and audience alike, the
subjectivity put into play bears little resemblance to the unitary self-presence of which
phenomenology is so regularly accused: like the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Beckett's late plays work toward a similar expansion and contraction of subjectivity,
toward a dispersal of its centers and points of reference. Whether in the spheres of
"being" or "being in face of," the subjectivity set into motion within these plays is
less an origin than a space, less a stabilizing orientation than "the phantom of [a]
center."45

At the same time, this subjectivity remains oriented toward that grounding from
which it can never quite free itself in Beckett's work, that facticity within which it
arises and from which it is ambiguously derived: what Molloy calls "that unstable

Beckett, "For Avigdor Arikha," 152.

For a recent application of Merleau-Pontean philosophy to issues of visibility and embodiment
within film theory, see Vivian Sobchak, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenologyof Film Experience
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
44Compare the movement toward the monochromatic in the "coloring" of Beckett's performance
world with this description (an account of neurological damage) from The Phenomenology:"The
destruction of sight, whatever the injuries be sustained, follows the same law: all colors are affected
in the first place, and lose their saturation. Then the spectrum is simplified, being reduced to four
and soon to two colors; finally a grey monochrome stage is reached . . ." (9).
45 The
phrase is Derrida's (Writing and Difference, 297). Michel Benamou gives Derrida's original
wording ("le fantome du centre") further Beckettian resonance by translating it as "ghostly center"
("Presence and Play," in Performancein PostmodernCulture, ed. Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello (Madison: Coda, 1977), 5.
42
43

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL BODY

459

fugitive thing, still living flesh."46Fragmented, dehumanized by shapeless cloaks

and robes, spatially restricted, the Beckettian body is drawn toward invisibility and
statuary immobility. Yet together these poles represent-like the idea of endingone of the "not quite" points of Beckett's world: that freedom from the body of which
consciousness yearns but which it never attains. On the threshold of the body's
disappearance into nothingness or its reversion to pure matter, there are stirrings
still. Beckett's drama (and his prose, for that matter) maintain their inherence in the
an inherence that only intensifies with each representation
problematics of Leiblichkeit,
of embodiment: as Beckett's middle and late works gradually abandon the naturalistic
body, with its physiological integrity and recognizably anthropomorphic environment, they more directly confront the phenomenological body, with its decentered
field of subjectivity and its ambiguous modes of absence and presence.
This reading of Beckett's drama of embodiment returns us to poststructuralism
and its traditional argument with phenomenology. Though such concepts as "decentering" and "absence"have been appropriated within the poststructuralist critique
of language, these concepts (as I have suggested) have equally powerful roots in the
phenomenological tradition, especially as this tradition has sought to move beyond
the originary, transcendental ego and the notion of presence as pure self-givenness.
As Madison suggests, "The history of the phenomenological movement is the history
of the progressive attempt to eradicate the traces still present within it of the very
resilient metaphysics of presence, to exorcise the metaphysical ghosts that continue
to haunt our discourse."47A reading of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body
makes it clear that the problematic subjectivity that Trezise correctly finds in Beckett's
work-the "breach" or felure at the heart of self-presence-was the province of the
post-Husserlian phenomenology articulated by Beckett's contemporaries as it would
be for the poststructuralist analysis that followed. I do not mean to cast MerleauPonty as a proto-Derridean, or to suggest that phenomenology and deconstruction
are destined to merge at the same point from different directions.48If phenomenology
and poststructuralism arrive at similar principles in their models of subjectivity, they
do so along parallel, not converging, lines of inquiry. While Derridean analysis allows
us to approach this breach in self-presence through the play of differance(or deferral)
intrinsic to signification and textuality, the tradition within post-Husserlian phenomenology inaugurated by Merleau-Ponty (like that of Heidegger and Sartre)approaches

46
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, in ThreeNovels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, trans. Patrick
Bowles (New York: Grove, 1955), 11.
47 Gary Brent Madison, The Hermeneuticsof Postmodernity(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1988), xiii. Madison calls for a "poststructuralist phenomenology," "a phenomenology which will have made profitable use of the many pertinent criticisms that poststructuralism
has addressed not only to the Tradition but also to phenomenology itself" (xiii-xiv).
48 The parallels and
divergences between Merleau-Ponty's philosophy and poststructuralism are
the subject of several recent essays: Gary Brent Madison, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity," in
The Hermeneuticsof Postmodernity,57-81, and "Merleau-Ponty's Deconstruction of Logocentrism," in
Merleau-Ponty Vivant, 117-52; M. C. Dillon, "Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity," in ibid., ix-xxxv;
and Hugh J. Silverman, "Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Writing on Writing," in Ontology and Alterity
in Merleau-Ponty, ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1990), 130-41. Norris discusses the affinities of Derridean thought to the latter writings of
Merleau-Ponty in Deconstruction:Theoryand Practice, 52-54.

460

Stanton B. Garner,Jr.

this breach through the ambiguities and dispossessions-the troue-of subjectivity

itself. Each approach posits questions that it is uniquely able to address, and each
is characterized by gaps, horizons, vanishing points-by the blind spots (to recall
Leder) that necessarily constitute any field of vision.
These blind spots are, of course, usefully symmetrical, and the two approaches
balance each other in their separate pursuits. The dialectic of overlap and divergence
that characterizes poststructuralist and phenomenological modes of analysis presents
an opportunity for drama and performance theory: the opportunity to cultivate a
"binocular"approach to performance that would pursue both the signs in phenomena
and the phenomena in signs.49 From such a perspective, phenomenology ceases to
play its now-cliched role within a ritual of repudiation; rather, it claims its place as
the necessary other term of a fundamental complementarity. Offering an emphasis
with particular relevance to theatre-that most bodied of all mediums-phenomenology complements the "always already" of signification with the "always also" of
the subject's corporeal fields.
49States
speaks of phenomenology and semioticsas constituting"a kind of binocularvision" (Great
Reckonings, 8).