Dionysian Symphony of Distorted Reality: Elevator Repair Service's Eisegesis of The Sound and the Fury

Abstract

The paper explores an innovative, 2008, production of The Sound and the Fury (April Seventh, 1928) by Elevator Repair Service, an experimental theatre group headed by John Collins. By creating an arguably new theatrical form –sound drama– not only did Collins bridge the inner stasis of Faulkner's novel (presenting its Chapter 1 verbatim) with the physicality of a stage performance; he also, through a deliberately Dionysian approach, broke out of the novel's highly subjective principium individuationis to make it more accessible to the general public. By invoking Lukács's theory of transcendental homelessness, Schopenhauer's concept of an inner eye/outer ear, and Wagner's ideas of a music drama, the paper infers that the new hybrid form – dramatized symphony of the ‘world gone out of joint’ – effectively theatricalizes non-dramatic postmodern narratives putting them on stage sans textual changes, bypassing the step of a written adaptation, which has been considered necessary until now. Collins's discovery broadens the realm of theatre, expanding it to other literary forms. Faulkner's anti-narrative delivered by Benjy, a 33-year-old idiot, who can neither speak nor write, let alone chronologically, or simply logically, present the sequence of events in his life, presented, before Collins, no dramatic interest. Who could have thought that a misfit's anfractuous tale of meta-temporal phantasms that is verbalized in a dissociated stream-of-consciousness technique would result in enthusiastic applause by New York theatre critics and audiences?