The Indifferent Spectator

Abstract

This chapter reads Beckett’s first completed postwar playscript Eleutheria (1947, published 1995) alongside Albert Camus’s plays Caligula (1944), Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding, 1944), and L’État de siège (State of Siege, 1948). These plays present characters who respond with cold indifference to the pain of others, from passive spectatorship to active torture, proffering a bleak vision of an endemic lack of empathy in wartime and postwar France following extreme mass suffering. Beckett’s Eleutheria and Camus’s Le Malentendu, Caligula, and L’État de siège all stage physical suffering, but they also still more unnervingly stage the spectacle of human beings left unmoved by the encounter with the suffering of others. Implicating their own imagined audiences in moments of metatheatrical accusation, Beckett and Camus trace how an unfeeling detachment from another’s pain can enable a voyeuristic spectator’s complicity in scenes of witnessed suffering. Each script pays careful attention to the intercorporeal dynamics of its intended staging, manipulating the boundaries between stage and auditorium to extend its charge of complicity to its own projected audience members, gathered in the theatre to watch a play replete with intense suffering. Eleutheria in particular offers an early index of many of the dramaturgical issues which Beckett would explore throughout his career, particularly the deliberate discomfiting of an audience regarding their own spectatorial role in the face of another’s suffering.