gooseberries

(a writer on his 69th birthday,
listens to a tape-recording he had made on his 39th birthday)

-- upper lake, with the punt, bathed off the bank, then pushed out into the stream and drifted. She lay streched out on the floorboards with her hands under her head and her eyes closed. Sun blazing down, bit of a breeze, water nice and lively. I noticed a scratch on her thigh and asked her how she came by it. Picking goose- berries, she said. I said again I thought it was hopeless and no good going on, and she agreed, without opening her eyes.

(Pause.)

I asked her to look at me and after a few moments -- (pause) -- after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare. I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low.) Let me in. (Pause.) We drifted in among the flags and stuck. The way they went down, sighing, before the stem! (Pause.) I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.

Pause.

Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth.......

from Krapp's Last Tape © 1958 Samuel Beckett 1

The late Takahashi Yasunari, who initiated Beckett studies in Japan, described affinities between Beckett’s drama and classical Noh theatre. Noh crosses borders between reality and dream, between life and death. Beckett’s art too undermines dualistic thinking and transgresses various borders. 2

Noh is closely connected with the ancient Japanese belief in the unpacified spirit of the dead. The unquenched passion of love, grief, or hatred endows the dead with a sort of immortality, and the ghost is compelled from time to time to emerge out of the Buddhist purgatory in a corporeal form that was his or hers in life and visit the world of the living in order to gain a partial relief from present torments by telling someone the story of his or her agony. 3

clearly, though, this is not singularly japanese. in hamlet too, for example, the living are asked to complete tasks for the dead.

in addition to the pivotal addition of ghosts (the personages of the past), the accoutrements of japanese theater had an influence on beckett as well.

"Beckett keeps approaching with ever increasing seriousness an austere theater, both in its skeletal bareness of structure and in its thematic obsession with past and memory ... It is a triumph of Beckett's art that he has successfully incorporated the very structure of the split soul of the modern man ... And Krapp is of course utterly incapable of exorcising or pacifying his former self.

Beckett started writing plays at the point in the history of the Western theater where all the realistic conventions of drama, including the assumption that the theater has nothing to do with the sacred, broke down, and it seems to be that, in his ruthless effort to strip the theater of everything that is not absolutely necessary, he has arrived somewhere close to where [the Japanese] started six hundred years ago.

Yeats had a significant influence on the history of world theatre in the 20th century, principally because he incorporated into his later plays, theatre techniques from the Japanese Noh to create a minimalist "theatre of the mind." Many theatre artists, including Samuel Beckett, are in his debt. 4

Noh is Japan’s “most classical” form of drama akin to Greek tragedy. Its roots lie in religious ritual, where the miraculous appearance of old gods, releases the players from the rigours of earthly life into the purity and clarity of the spirit world. The purpose of Noh is neither narrative nor moral, but is simply an attempt to express beauty -- the essence of Noh is that true art is felt, not understood.

This may seem a little removed from Beckett’s tramps, dustbins and reel-to-real replays. However the spaces, the purity and clarity are there. In Noh the drama strives to reveal its own essence. In Beckett, all we (we all) face is situation, just situation. The essence never arrives, except that the non-arrival itself, may be the essence. Just as Noh flows between reality and dream, life and afterlife; Beckett challenges dualistic thinking and crosses borders of language, genre, culture, bringing the ultimate questions into the commonplace -- and then asking if the questions matter. 5

enigmas of kabuki

it should come as no surprise that the prints from the japanese closest in execution to the german and american poster designs we have been discussing are those of figures in show business. with their powerful simplicity, graphic purity, and eye-catching colors and outlines, these prints of actors (the up-on-young-girls'-walls posters of the edo era) accomplished just what the madalena ones did: they got your attention and they got remembered.

of course, these prints were all portraits of men. even when they are playing a princess their jaw-lines give them away. why is it all grown men?



Kabuki perform- ers during the earliest years of the genre were primarily women. Kabuki is thought to have originated in the dances and light theater first performed in Kyoto in 1603 by Okuni, a female attendant at the Izumo shrine. The word kabuki had connotations of the shocking, unorthodox, and fashionable, and it came to be applied to the performances of Okuni's popular troupe and its imitators. Because an important side business of the onna (women's) kabuki troupes was prostitution, the Tokugawa shogunate disapproved, banning the troupes in 1629 and making it illegal for women to appear on stage. Wakashu (young men's) kabuki then became popular, but in 1652 it was also banned because of the adverse effect on public morals of the prostitution activities of the adolescent male actors.

With both women and boys banned, kabuki became a thea- ter of mature male performers, although before yaro (men's) kabuki was permitted to continue performing, the government required that the actors avoid sensual displays and follow the more realistic conventions of the kyogen theater. 1

i could post a handful of images of these actors every day for years and not run out of images with exquisite lines, and bold prints and color. the costumes these men wore displayed design, art, and craftsmanship rarely seen even in the many many prints we have looked at up to now. and, in part, it is due to the powerful simplicity of the images. perhaps the most controversial ukiyo-e artist featuring actors was sharaku.

sharaku's work was considered quite controversial for the time. while all of the portraits are stylized (as are the ones they inspired in the west), his were considered to have "gone too far." they were the most "grotesque," the most extreme, and the most accurate. these actors were heros, and audiences felt sharaku did not honor them sufficiently. after only ten months and 140 prints, he disappeared.

in fact he may never have existed at all; his existence is still a matter of conjecture and specu- lation. it has been thought that "he" may have been a satirically-minded group of artists working together. a recent theory is that sharaku was actually hokusai, who himself disappeared from the art world for several years which just happened to coincide with sharaku's appearance. in any case, this was the 1700s, and sharaku is now, in retrospect, seen by many collectors as the world's first modern artist. 2

viewing these portraits you will quickly note the exaggerated poses and, even more evident, the crossed eyes! there is a reason for them:

crossed eyes demonstrate an emotional aspect of the kabuki actor’s repertoire on the stage. In kabuki there are what are called "mie" ("displays"), numerous types of expressive static poses taken at climactic moments in plays. Most if not all of the mie have unique names, and there are many. Some are quite dramatic, as in "aragoto" ("wild business") plays, which typically involve tales of bravado and heroism. In these plays, more closely associated with (but not exclusive to) the great Edo (old Tokyo) stage, the actor might, for example, snap his head abruptly into a static position, strike a glaring expression, and cross his eyes. 3 (often to wild applause)

and again a remin- der of what de- sign, fash- ion, advertising, art, looked like in the west only two years before trading began with japan. through enormous detail truth is easily obscured. through simplicity so much is revealed.