Deleuze and the Invention of Images: From Beckett's Television Plays to Noh Drama

Abstract

THE COHPAnATLST DELEUZE AND THE INVENTION OF IMAGES: FROM BECKETT'S TELEVISION PLAYS TO NOH DRAMA Ronald Bogue In 1992, Minuit published a volume of four of Samuel Beckett's television plays (Quad, Ghost Trio, ... but the clouds ..., and Nacht und Träume), accompanied by an essay on Beckett by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, titled "L'Epuisé" ("The Exhausted").1 In his comments on . . . but the clouds . . , Deleuze remarks briefly on the lines from Yeats's poem "The Tower" that give the play its title and then suggests a general affinity between drama and Beckett's television plays, one that Deleuze links to fascination with Japanese Noh drama, an art form that directly and significantly influenced theater. Though Beckett nowhere acknowledges any indebtedness to Noh drama in his own works, Deleuze senses a convergence of interests and sensibilities in Noh drama, theater, and Beckett's television plays, one centered on the concept of drama as a "visual poem"—a theater of the mind and spirit, limited in plot, rich in images , with puppet-like characters and spare, ascetic sets. Deleuze argues that the object of Beckett's television plays is to produce an espace quelconque in which "pure" visual and sonic "images" at the limits of language may arise, and that it is especially in the medium of television that Beckett is able to meet this object. The curious implication of this argument is that there is an essential affinity between Noh drama and television—or at least between Noh drama and television as Deleuze sees it used by Beckett. My purpose is to explore this hypothesis and in the process determine precisely the characteristics of the medium of television as Beckett exploits it and Deleuze understands it. Our story begins with Ernest Fenollosa, a pioneer in Western scholarship dedicated to Chinese and Japanese culture; following his death in 1908, his widow began seeking a writer to whom she could entrust her husband's manuscripts. She had been told that Ezra Pound would be an ideal choice, and in 1913 Pound agreed to edit the papers and develop aesthetically polished versions of Fenollosa's translations, which included renditions ofseveral Noh dramas. Thus began Pound's lifelong fascination with Chinese and Japanese literature, with the concrete fruits of his labor being the 1916 publication of Certain Noble Plays of Japan, "from the manuscripts of Ernest Fenollosa. Chosen and finished by Ezra Pound."2 When Pound began work on the Fenollosa manuscripts, he had just moved to Stone Cottage in Sussex, where he was serving as Yeats's secretary. During the three years Pound spent on the Fenollosa papers, he was in regular contact with Yeats, who was quite taken with Pound's project and with Noh drama in general. Yeats eventually wrote an introduction to Certain Noble Plays of Japan, in which he praised Noh Vol. 26 (2002): 37 DELEUZE, TELEVISION, NOHDRAMA theater and indicated the important influence that Noh was coming to have on his own dramaturgy. In 1917, Yeats staged At the Hawk's Well, the first of several of his plays to be shaped by the conventions of Noh drama.3 For some time Yeats had been seeking a theatrical mode that would be conducive to poetry and spiritual themes, and while completing At the Hawk's Well in 1916, he told Lady Gregory, "I believe I have at last found a dramatic form that suits me" (Tuohy 156). In his introduction to the Fenollosa volume, Yeats noted that "the human voice can only become louder by becoming less articulate, by discovering some new musical sort of roar or scream" (Essays 223), and in Western drama the size of the theater had tended to encourage in actors the development of such a musical roar, to the detriment of true poetry. Movement had also grown "less expressive, more declamatory" (223), and Yeats saw the only antidote to these tendencies to lie in the restoration to the theater of intimacy, "the measure of all arts' greatness" (224). To create this intimacy required distance, he argued, "firmly held against a pushing world" (224), such that "a group of figures, images, symbols, enable us to pass for a few moments into...