Under Fire: Sontag, Godot, Sarajevo

In August, 1993 Susan Sontag directed local actors in a staging of Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theatre in Sarajevo. At the time of the production, the city was under siege by Serb forces and subject to daily shelling and sniper fire; the lobby area of the Youth Theatre itself was a shambles, cluttered with debris from an earlier mortar attack. Erika Munk, who has provided some valuable documentation as an observer of the Sarajevo performance, eloquently encapsulated the conditions of this theatre: ‘The tickets are free; everything else comes at great cost.’¹

Of necessity, Sontag’s stage was lit by candles; sandbags, polyethylene sheeting and humanitarian aid supply crates employed in the setting served to blur the boundary between the performance space and the streets surrounding the theatre. In her casting, Sontag chose to triple the parts of Vladimir and Estragon - a male pair, a female pair and a mixed pair. At the beginning of the performance the three pairs took dialogue in turns, in isolation from each other; by the end they were aware of each other and functioning as a chorus, as a ‘hungry, rebellious population.’²

Munk, who in her writing about the production seemed somewhat resistant to the director’s tendency to ‘[feed] the audience’s impulses to localize the play’s meaning’, nevertheless acknowledged that ‘Sontag completely reinvented the play’ and that, ultimately, this Godot ‘wasn’t about life or god or absurdity, it was about this particular siege: a single carrot to eat, shoes that hurt, helpless waiting.’³ It is on this final point that my discussion will turn - the relationship between Sontag’s Godot and the experience of Sarajevo, especially as the director herself has understood it and talked about it. As we shall see, Munk’s assessment would appear to validate Sontag’s own view that Godot is ‘about’ Sarajevo, and that Sarajevo (in turn) participates in Godot. It would be difficult to establish the degree to which the audience of Sontag’s Godot shared her perceptions - such analysis is problematical enough under the most opportune circumstances; in this case anxiety, hunger and exhaustion were inevitable complicating factors in the audience’s response. What we do know from Munk’s report is that this was one Godot that did not elicit much laughter from its spectators.

What interests me in particular is that Sontag, who has demonstrated in her writing that she is fully conversant with the crisis of representation that has been a defining point of Postexpressionist theatre, would have arrived at an idea of the relationship between the theatre and the rest of empirical reality that appears to either ignore the crisis, or silently presumes to have transcended it. In either case, Sontag’s Godot has implications for our understanding of how the theatre accomplishes meaning through its relationship with the rest of our experience.

Sontag’s was not the first Godot to be staged for an audience that was literally captive. Martin Esslin began The Theatre of the Absurd with an account of a 1957 performance at San Quentin prison. Esslin’s book has by now suffered virtual dismemberment at the hands of more recent writers on the theory of drama, most of whom consider the book grossly reductive. What has sometimes been lost sight of in these dismissals is Esslin’s insistence that the theatre he describes is not constituted of ‘nonsense and mystification’ - that it is not theatre itself but our condition in the world that is absurd.⁴ This is, in fact, one reason why I believe that Esslin’s account of San Quentin can help to frame our approach to Sontag’s Godot.

It is fascinating enough that the director of the San Quentin performance was none other than Herbert Blau, whose more recent interest in how the ‘history’ of the audience informs the realization of meaning in the theatre was foreshadowed by the comments he made to the prison audience prior to the performance. Blau suggested to the inmates that the play could be compared to a subjective experience of jazz music - that ‘one must listen for whatever one may find in it.’ As audience-centered as this suggestion may appear, it incorporates an assumption that there is located within the performance some kind of referential meaning that is capable of being discovered or recognized. And it is this assumption that appears to have provided Esslin with the basis for his contention that Godot is ultimately comprehensible - comprehensible specifically because ‘it confronted [the prison audience] with a situation in some ways analogous to their own.’ To support this contention, Esslin quoted the reaction of one of the teachers at the prison to the inmates’ enthusiasm for the performance: ‘They know what is meant by waiting [...] and they knew if Godot finally came, he would only be a disappointment.’⁵

In a 1993 interview on the syndicated American Public Radio program Fresh Air, Sontag made much the same point, with some additional specificity and elaboration:

As was the case with both Esslin and the teacher at San Quentin, Sontag’s expressed understanding of how meaning may be realized in the performance of Godot is based on the notion that there is a correspondence between the play and the audience’s experience of reality. In this same regard, Sontag was categorical when asked if the Sarajevo audience would find Godot ‘depressing’: ‘I said, on the contrary, people are enthralled by something that mirrors life.’⁷ Sontag’s statement here is predicated on a analogical model of theatre that persisted into the mid-twentieth century since at least the Early Modern dramaturgy of Hamlet’s ‘mirror up to nature’ and John Webster’s ‘true imitation of life.’

This essentially humanist model of theatre is grounded in a mimetic assumption that has been under vigorous challenge since the influence of Artaud’s The Theater and its Double began to be manifest in our understanding of what drama is and how it works. A climax of sorts appeared to be reached in the 1960s when Derrida, who asserted that ‘it is metaphor that Artaud wants to destroy’, discovered in his texts a virtual ‘closure of representation.’⁸ By the 1980s, Wolfgang Iser could argue with confidence that the performative quality of any representation might be liberated to our understanding, if we could only liberate the act of representation itself from its ‘mimetic connotations.’⁹ Writing at the same time, Robert Weimann declared that mimetic representation had been ‘proscribed almost out of existence’ by ‘the anti-representational dogma of the autonomy of the signifier.’¹⁰ ‘Dogma’ is a key word here; Weimann offered his own effective critique of the Poststructuralist position. Still, within the past decade or so even more challenges have been raised as Marco De Marinis, Bruce Wilshire and other theorists have given us new ideas of audience response, performance textuality and the phenomenology of theatre. Each of these developments has served in its own way to compromise the Aristotelian ‘imitation of an action’ - the mimetic assumption that is the foundation for meaning based on analogous correspondence.

There is still another (perhaps less obvious) way in which the mimetic assumption has been undermined. This is by the notion of metatheatre - the idea that plays have a decided tendency to betray an awareness of themselves as a performative realm, even as they simultaneously present us with representations that are ostensibly intended to convince us of their mimetic veracity. Godot itself is decidedly metatheatrical; I will simply offer one passage from the first act as evidence of this:

Writing a few years after the San Quentin production, Blau recognized the tendency of Beckett’s plays to ‘look in on themselves’ - to exhibit the reflexive self-awareness that is characteristic of metatheatre.¹² In this particular instance the necessary foregrounding is accomplished by Vladimir’s trip to the off-stage toilet.

As Judd Hubert has pointed out, a problem arises when we consider the persistence with which theatre subverts the credibility of its own fables for the sake of directing our attention to its generic operations. Hubert defines the question in this way: ‘How can theatre in the very act of proclaiming itself an illusion - of denying any claim to reality - move an audience?’¹³ We might very well extend the question to ask how a play can accomplish meaning while it continuously exposes its qualities of enactment and imposture.

As a reader of Beckett - and a reader of Sontag - I am struck at this point by an apparent incongruity. Let us remember that Sontag is, among many other things, one of our most astute Anglophone readers of Artaud. Writing in the 1970s, Sontag understood that Artaud’s project would ‘commit the stage to an extreme austerity - to the point of excluding anything that stands for something else.’¹⁴ And in another text on the Postexpressionist theatre, Sontag argued against the rigid generic boundaries between theatre and film enforced by Erwin Panofsky, calling our attention instead to ‘the possibilities for theatre that lie in going beyond psychological realism, thereby achieving greater abstractness.’¹⁵ This contention, in turn, appears to be informed by her earlier effort to clarify Lionel Abel’s audacious (but somewhat muddled) discussion of metatheatre: ‘The diagnosis presupposed in Metatheatre [is] that modern man lives with an increasing burden of subjectivity, at the expense of his sense of the reality of the world.’¹⁶

This is not, of course, to suggest that Sontag must be expected to endorse or assimilate any particular theory to which she has devoted her critical attention. Nevertheless, it is somewhat surprising that a woman who has shown for many years a rather extraordinary depth of familiarity with the crisis of representation that has persisted in the postwar theatre would refer to Godot in a recent article in Performing Arts Journal as ‘a supremely realistic play’ (emphasis mine), a play that is peopled by characters who are ‘representative, even allegorical figures.’¹⁷ I should clarify at this point that I do not believe that Sontag means ‘realistic’ in a technical sense here - she is not talking about ‘realism’ as it refers to a style of performance characterized by verisimilitude of setting and prosaic dialogue. Rather than style, her repeated use of ‘realistic’, ‘real’ and ‘reality’ in her discussions of Godot and Sarajevo make reference to the empirical reality of the city beyond the bombed-out theatre lobby - the second half of the dialectic that Weimann has called ‘the relations between the text and the world.’¹⁸ In this context, Godot is ‘realistic’ to the extent that it is somehow like Sarajevo. At least in the case of Sarajevo, Sontag has deliberately embraced the notion that theatre works by analogy to the audience’s own experience of reality. She has chosen to view her Sarajevo Godot through the lens provided by the mimetic assumption - in spite of the fact that she has, in her own writings, articulated many of the ways in which mimesis has been rigorously challenged as an operative premise for drama.

As I have just suggested, the word ‘real’ and its variants figure large in Sontag’s account of Sarajevo. Perhaps the genocidal horror of Bosnia fractures dreams and illusions as brutally as it does bodies. This is Sontag on the reality of the war:

A place, in other words, that is intensely and immediately real to a sympathetic visitor - and, simultaneously, hideously unreal to the people who must stay and suffer. It does not diminish the experience of either to acknowledge that a question still remains: in what specific sense can Godot - a play that is so clearly metatheatrical, and so profoundly shaped by Beckett’s technique of ‘vauguening’ - be characterized by Sontag’s phrase ‘supremely realistic’?

What I will propose here is that an answer may be found in Sontag’s essentially modernist conception of how art works. In this specific instance I refer to the idea that form is meaning - or as Denise Levertov put it, that ‘form is never more than a revelation of content.’²⁰ Sontag made much the same point in a review of Ionesco’s Notes and Counter Notes, asserting that in modern drama ‘the subject-matter is the technique.’²¹ And it is in this context that I want to return to Sontag’s statement that the horror and unreality of Sarajevo is because the war is ‘both so appalling and apparently so unstoppable.’ Her emphasis on the ‘unstoppable’ quality of the Bosnian agony recalls for me her earlier characterization of the world that we encounter in the metaplays of Beckett and Genet as ‘a nightmare of repetition, stalled action, exhausted feeling.’²² As in The Balcony, the structure of Waiting for Godot is predicated on a da capo ending that gives the play its atmosphere of menace and unrelieved anxiety. Our sense is that, if there were an Act three to this play, it would repeat Act two in much the same way as Act two repeats Act one. In fact, Sontag presented only Act one in her Sarajevo performances; she explained,

But as she must acknowledge, Act two is a ‘replay’ of Act one, except that ‘everything is worse.’²⁴ She put it another way in her interview with Erika Munk: ‘The second act is formally - though not substantively - identical with the first act.’²⁵

Bert States has written about the way in which ‘representation’ in the theatre is also and inevitably ‘re-presentation.’²⁶ And here the sense of endless re-presentation is pushed to limits of what we fear will surpass our capacity for endurance, as members (via empathy) of the Sarajevo audience of Godot and as audience ourselves (via satellite) of the brutal, genocidal war. In final terms, then, it is the form of Godot that provides a mirror for the experience of Sarajevo, and it does so because the structure of the play expresses so perfectly the ‘nightmare of repetition, stalled action, exhausted feeling.’ Gogo and Didi may be seen as ‘representative’ in that they can no more escape the structure of the play that the inhabitants of the city could escape their experience. In this case, it appears that the play actually establishes (rather than subverts) its mimetic veracity by foregrounding its performativity and, thereby, calling our attention to its structure - a structure predicated on ‘stalled action’ and an unrelieved, ‘unstoppable’ cycle of re-presentation. Perhaps it is in this way that Godot can best be understood to be ‘supremely realistic.’

I will close with the observation that Sohnya Sayers is quite correct to discover in Sontag - and I think this extends to an entire generation that was politically active in the 1960s - a ‘very grave sense of history, a very strange sense of flourishing in the midst of enormity.’²⁷ Still, there are unexpected moments of relief from our prevailing historicism of anxiety - as there are also unexpected moments of insight into the relationship between theatre and the rest of our conscious experience of the world. One such moment has been provided by Ruby Cohn, who reminds us that in Sweden, in 1986, a cast of prisoners escaped dua performance of Godot.

9. Wolfgang Iser, ‘Representation: A Performative Act’, The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History. Ed. Murray Krieger. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993; 217.

10. Robert Weimann, ‘History, Appropriation and the Uses of Representation in Modern Narrative’, The Aims of Representation: Subject/Text/History, 175-76.

17. Susan Sontag, ‘Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo’, Performing Arts Journal, 16, 2, 1994; 91 & 99. A shorter version of Sontag’s article appeared in The New York Review of Books, 21 Oct. 1993; 52-59.

20. Denise Levertov, ‘Some Notes on Organic Form’, The Poetics of the New American Poetry. Ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman. New York: Grove Press, 1973; 317.