Unruly bodies: death, discourse and the limits of representation

KATHY SMITH

Unruly bodies: death, discourse andthe limits of representation

A warm afternoon in early spring. People going about their weekend business, onthe roads, in the streets, in their gardens, mowing their lawns, cooking their meals,playing with their children. Light everywhere. Sunshine through patio windowsonto warm wood floors. A trace of flowers in the air. And that sound, again andagain, of breathing: the slow climb to inhale, the relief of letting it fall. White sheetson a wide hospital bed, incongruous in the place where the day seat used to be; and abody, propped heavily on pillows, gazing into nothingness. A pause in the slowrhythm, and a landfall of silence swallows up the space. Then silence. And silence.An extended moment of paralysis. The breath that doesn’t come. The spreadingstain of surety. The look between friends, questioning, knowing, numb. The silent,painful understanding. The very edge of time. And the man with the wonderfullaugh, the serenity, the playful sense of humour, the compassion was – in a singlebreath – very finally gone.

During the long illness that preceded the death, in the spring of 2003, of a closefriend, I noticed something quite peculiar. During many years of friendship, it hadbecome habit for a small group of friends to meet for late breakfast on a Sundaymorning in Dominiques, a small, family-run cafe in South Hampstead, just aroundthe corner from the Royal Free Hospital, a place where we chatted, listened to themusic, watched the world go by, caught up with each other’s stories, and enjoyedthe laziness of slow Sunday mornings. In the summer of 2002, however,Dominiques fulfilled a different role; it was the stop-off point before or afterhospital visits and, occasionally, circumstances permitting, a familiar and friendlyplace where we could retreat from the hospital with our friend, for short periods of‘normality’. During these times, his hospital clothing would be concealed by aloose-fitting tracksuit, covering the paraphernalia of illness and surgery. And it wasduring these times that I began to notice something new: a whole community whichhad, until then, been below my line of vision; other patients entering, for a shorttime, a world of ‘normality’; hospital staff whose faces had become familiar throughtheir presence in hospital lifts and corridors; friends and relatives of other patients.And although we never openly acknowledged each other, there was a mutual glanceof recognition as we passed: a little like the relationships of confidentiality set up indoctors’ surgeries, or therapy groups, there was here a set of unwritten rules. As we

moved around each other like ghosts, I realised that this ghost community was notnew, but that my perception had changed. And I wondered how many differentkinds of secret, unspoken ghost communities intersected, unseen and unacknow-ledged, except by those who had become a part of them, willingly or otherwise.

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These moments were, and are, unspeakable except in a very superficialmanner. They were moments outside of discourse, but they were momentsof very real, very conscious experience.

How do we think about such moments? How do we begin to understandthem? How can we begin to articulate them in any meaningful way? Thereare some silences within our culture which defy even description, and somethresholds of which we do not – or feel we cannot – speak. The intensity ofhuman experience can be beyond words and, often, we do not have thetools to reveal the nature or content of these moments. How can we speak ofthose human experiences which are not ‘contained’ by discourse? How canwe comprehend and make sense of the eruption of the Real? Intimacy,death, pain, maternity: these are all areas of experience and of ‘otherness’which evade discourse and are obscured in depths of silence. How can wespeak these silences?

Harold Pinter suggests that ‘the more acute the experience the lessarticulate its expression’.1 Elaine Scarry comments on the incompatibility ofpain and discourse, observing ‘the fact of pain’s inexpressibility, noting notonly the difficulty of describing pain, but its ability to destroy a sufferer’slanguage’.2 Jacques Derrida, however, suggests that ‘there is nothing outsideof the text [there is no outside-text; il n’y a pas de hors-texte]’,3 a statementwhich can be read in several ways, including ‘there is nothing outside ofdiscourse’, or ‘everything is contained within discourse’.

Liminal moments in our culture are moments where things appear to bemomentarily unlocatable in terms of this presence/absence binary; andthese moments, by challenging the legitimacy of the requirement to chooseeither one or the other, challenge the legitimacy of the structure of theSymbolic order itself. This paper works towards an account of the economyof those moments where words fail, those moments of silence, of rupture,where something is taking place, but that ‘something’ seems beyondconventional discourse.

An effort to articulate this particular kind of experience of ‘otherness’ canbe found in certain filmic and theatric representations. This paper considerstwo in particular: Japanese Story,4 an Australian film directed by Sue Brookswhich might be read in this context, as might several of Samuel Beckett’slater plays, most notably Footfalls.5 Sue Brooks explores what might be

64 Critical Quarterly, vol. 48, no. 3

described as ‘dynamic silence’, in a manner which gives positive value toemptiness; and Beckett attempts to represent absence and loss through theinevitable and unavoidable presence of the body in performance, givingaccount of a liminal and contradictory space which is ultimatelyunspeakable. Lived experience is not always easily translated into theSymbolic; and it is the troubled relationship between lived experience andthe Symbolic which is the focus of this paper.

In Lacanian thought, it is through the Symbolic that we make sense of theworld, and it is the Symbolic which constructs us as subjects. However,what happens when we become aware of something of which we cannotgive account through the Symbolic? Does that mean that this ‘something’does not exist? Or does it mean that we must look to the inadequacies of theSymbolic itself? If Derrida’s assertion is correct, then what we experienceemotionally or physically must find account within the Symbolic; but if thisis not possible, it would suggest that it is the Symbolic which is somehowimpoverished.

This raises some interesting questions in terms of the nature of theSymbolic, and its construction, questions which are difficult to addressbecause we have only the tools of the Symbolic through which to findanswers: a little like a computer programme through which we producedocuments. But if we cannot produce the documents we choose to write, byusing what appears to be the only programme available, what should wedo? In terms of this paper, how do we account for the silences which appearto be outside of the Symbolic? Central to the discussion of silences, bodilyexperience, emotional experience and states of ‘otherness’ is this question ofrepresentation, and the tools available to us. What is the relationshipbetween lived experience and the Symbolic? What happens when theSymbolic is no longer adequate? These are the questions, taking intoaccount the representations examined, that this paper will finally consider.

Speaking silence: the nature of ‘nothing’

The moment of separation and loss, the death of someone close, is beyondadequate description; it is one of those liminal moments in humanexperience which defies description. There is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’; butthe moment itself, the moment of transition, is possibly beyond discourse,and certainly not easily contained within it. It is perhaps the indescribableand incomprehensible nature of this moment that drives our culture togenerate so many attempts at representation and containment, in a futileattempt at mastery, through repetition and description.

Unruly bodies: death, discourse and the limits of representation 65

In our culture, representations of death, of ultimate silence, areubiquitous; but death is usually represented from a ‘safe distance’, whereit is regarded as ‘otherness’, contained and neutralised within the form ofthe representation. Even representations which evoke the most painfulresponses are, in some ways, mediated and ‘sanitised’ through theSymbolic, in order to make them acceptable. Elaine Scarry (1985), writingof pain, observes that pain itself is beyond description, that it defieslanguage. What the spectator observes is a description of pain. Pain itselfrequires the presence of the material body; and pain and discourse areincompatible, the latter disintegrating in the presence of the former, theformer unable to exist in discourse except through description. Scarry’swork concerns mainly physical pain; but this observation could extend alsoto psychical pain, as experienced through loss and and the processes ofbereavement.

The physical body is a pivotal site of this contradiction between presenceand absence. In our Western culture, the processes of dealing with the deathof the physical body are masked by ritual and by euphemism. How manywords and phrases do we have which obliquely allude to death?Reminders, perhaps, to a culture which tries to repress knowledge ofdeath, that it will not go away; and also that – however hard we try todelude ourselves to the contrary – it is beyond our control or legislation.

In terms of our Symbolic Order, representation, through conventionalmeans, of states of ‘otherness’ or ‘alterity’ (states not immediatelyaccommodated by this Order) is problematic; for as soon as a way is foundof representing ‘otherness’, it does to a certain extent cease to be that whichit attempts to represent. Derrida’s suggestion that there is nothing outsideof the text might here be understood as alluding to this difficulty. Lyotardspeaks of the ‘sublime’: that which is always just beyond reach, a notionakin to that of desire, always unattainable by its very nature. To touch it is tokill it.

Samuel Beckett’s Footfalls, a bleak representation resonating the processesof mourning and melancholia, might be read as an attempt to physicallyrepresent states of ‘otherness’ and to physicalise absence – a project whichattempts to articulate a fundamental contradiction which literally hauntsthe spectator. This contradiction is at the heart not only of this particularrepresentation, but of theatre and performance in general, as it constantlynegotiates the liminal spaces between presence and absence.

Japanese Story, an Australian film charting the relationship whichdevelops across the chasm between two very different people, would seemto be an attempt at exploration of ‘otherness’ on a number of levels; andwhat is interesting about the film, in my view, is the way in which the


intensity of the experience seems to increase as language subsides, to apoint where the most intense moments of ‘otherness’ defy discoursealtogether.

Japanese Story: a ‘blistering universe’

Against the background of an Australian desert landscape, so much space andso few people, Sandy, a geologist, and Hiromitsu, a Japanese businessman,play out a story of human inconsequence in the face of the blistering universe.The end of the journey leaves no-one capable of going back to where theystarted from.6

This idea, of going to a place, both physically and psychically, from whichthere is no real return, is a concept central to this particular film. A secondtheme which runs through the film is that of the meanings contained withinsilence: the silences that exist in the spaces between languages, genders andcultures. These silences resonate within the physical imagery of the film,working as it does with ‘otherness’: the otherness of alien cultural practices,and alien landscapes.

The film is clearly divided into three acts. The first, which is mostly setup,introduces the protagonists. Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) is a geologist whohas been drafted by her partner to escort Japanese businessman TachibanaHiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) around the Western Australian desert.Tachibana’s father is an investor in Sandy’s company, so she can’t refuse therequest, but she approaches the job with a surly disposition that disconcertsher passenger, who is used to docile women. Act two takes the pair into thedesert, where they become stranded when Sandy’s rental car gets boggeddown in the fine red sand. She . . . informs Tachibana that ‘people die out here’,and her words seem prophetic when dehydration and a lack of food becomeissues. The desolation is complete – there are no signs of other humans – andthe vast range of temperatures . . . proves challenging. The third act exploresthe aftermath of Sandy and Tachibana’s desert (mis)adventures and how bothare forever changed by what occurred out there.7

That which ‘occurred out there’ is twofold: firstly, it is a transgression of thecultural and gender barriers between the two characters, who – in theemptiness and otherness of the outback, transformed from dusty desert toGarden of Eden – find a way of communicating with each other bothphysically and verbally, where the boundaries of their individualsubjectivity are softened and transgressed, where the separateness of thesubject is – temporarily – repaired; secondly, it is a moment of recognition ofthe cultural impossibility (within the Symbolic) of this ‘healing’, in the


sudden death – following a moment of epiphany – of Hiromitsu,transforming this temporary paradise into a lonely nightmare, as Sandyreturns his body to ‘civilisation’.

There are several ‘pivotal moments’ within the film, the most powerfulbeing the moments leading up to and following the sudden death ofHiromitsu, and the transformation this requires of Sandy. In narrative order,these include:

(1) the moment of misrecognition towards the beginning of the film, whereSandy greets Hiromitsu for the first time, using the cultural gestureswith which she is familiar, and which are met with total lack ofunderstanding. At this point a male character steps in and is acceptedby Hiromitsu, both for his use of language and, in a more unspokenmanner, because of his gender;

(2) the death of Hiromitsu: the sequence which begins as he dives into thelake and ends as Sandy is dragging his body from the water, and

(3) the moment within the last minutes of the film, where Hiromitsu’s bodyis being repatriated: Sandy speaks in broken Japanese to Hiromitsu’swidow, but it is clear that the real communication lies in what is leftunsaid between the two women, who reach cross the cultural barrier intheir silence and pain.

The first sequence is semi-comic, relying as it does on the awkwardnesswhich arises between two sets of cultural gestures and behaviours whenthey are juxtaposed. On first meeting, Hiromitsu and Sandy challenge eachother’s cultural expectations: he impassively bows and offers her a businesscard; her response is one of bemusement – she does not know what to dowith the card; in return she shakes his hand, which clearly makes him feeluncomfortable; and then he waits for her to move his luggage, which againtransgresses a cultural expectation. This sequence foregrounds the contrastbetween the two, both in terms of physical appearance and gesture, and interms of cultural and gendered mannerisms. Hiromitsu remains impassiveand unresponsive with Sandy, and visibly relaxes only when her malecolleagues arrive, at which point they speak to him in Japanese, exchangecards, and he then responds in broken English, and smiles. Later, thisgendered and encultured environment is revisited, again semi-comically, inthe form of a karaoke bar, where the men are at ease drinking together.Sandy, too, is comfortable in this ‘male’ environment, dressed in what mightbe culturally described as a ‘masculine’ manner, and smoking and drinkingwith the men. When Hiromitsu, in a state of drunkenness, is persuaded tostand up and sing a song, as part of the karaoke entertainment, this again isa focus of humour, as he tunelessly and seriously attempts ‘Danny Boy’: a


moment where Japanese technology and Irish tradition become uncomfor-table bedfellows. Throughout the first ‘act’ of the film, the abyss of silencebetween Sandy and Hiromitsu, in terms of cultural and gender difference, isparticularly foregrounded through their inability to speak the samelanguage: although she is articulate, she cannot speak Japanese; andHiromitsu uses this fact to exclude her, both in terms of direct and indirectconversation.

The second ‘act’ of the film begins at the point where, having spent anuncomfortable night stranded in the outback, Sandy and Hiromitsu manageto mobilise their vehicle and get back ‘on the road’. The relief is palpable,and the relationship between them relaxes. During this ‘act’, both becomeincreasingly communicative on both verbal and non-verbal levels; andduring the times when they are not actually speaking, it is clear that thecommunication between them is unbroken. This ‘act’ ends at the pointwhere, having made love, Sandy dives into the lake. Hiromitsu follows, but– unfamiliar with the dangers of the outback – dives head first into theunderwater roots of trees. This is the moment where the atmosphere turnscold. Sandy, alive in the water, waits for Hiromitsu to surface. There areseveral moments when he might. There is a momentary suspicion that hemight be teasing Sandy by remaining under the surface. And then there isthe dawning realisation that something is very wrong. Suddenly, the silenceis overwhelming. Sandy begins to shout his name, but the silence hasbecome oppressive – a dead weight between the sounds she makes. Shedrags his body to the shore, and pulls him out of the water, where he lies inthe mud, pale and Christ-like.

The third ‘act’ is taken up with the silence around Sandy, as she goesthrough the unspoken ritual of bathing and dressing the body of Hiromitsubefore returning it to ‘civilisation’. Time, at this point, is represented simplyas the change of light to darkness and back again. The silence that hasdescended is unbroken, and this sense of isolation intensifies with thereintroduction of other people. Voices cannot fill the void, and in fact serveto highlight its existence. The film explores the sense of stillness and silencewithin the central character, a sense of dislocation: as the other characters goabout the conventional arrangements, rituals and practicalities of dealingwith a dead body, Sandy is in some way in a dislocated place, where wordsare meaningless, and there is little connection to what is happening. Thepoint at which meaningful connection occurs is between Sandy and thewidow of Hiromitsu: Sandy tries, hesitantly, to address her in Japanese,reading from notes she has made. There is a long moment of silencebetween the two women, as they look at one another, but this is a dynamicsilence where much is happening: a sense of silent understanding, of pain


and loss, a moment of connection and understanding outside of theSymbolic, a moment which only the two women could comprehend.Pinter’s observation, that ‘The more acute the experience, the less articulateits expression’ finds resonance here: and as Hiromitsu’s widow movesaway, Brad’s question to Sandy, ‘What the hell did you say that for?’ againforegrounds the abyss between lived experience and the Symbolic.

The role of death, and of silence, in discourse is further explored throughthe relationship between Sandy and her mother. The mother/daughterrelationship is one on which this discussion will focus in more detail whenconsidering the central characters of Beckett’s Footfalls. In Japanese Story,however, the representation of this relationship provides an interestingcontextualisation. There are only three very brief scenes between Sandy andher mother: one near the beginning of the film and two near the end,between which the central narrative takes place. In the first of these scenes,Sandy’s mother is compiling a scrapbook of obituaries of everyone sheknows, in what seems an attempt to hold on to a trace of the past; and inthis scene, she informs Sandy that the final obituary in the book will be thatof the mother. Sandy is cynical. In the second, ‘transition’ scene, Sandy’smother wants to send Hiromitsu’s widow a condolence card: Sandy ishorrified at the prospect, telling her mother that she knows nothing of thiswoman or her culture; to which her mother responds that she doesunderstand, because she too has been a wife and a widow. In the final scene,Sandy silently passes her mother an obituary for Hiromitsu, and the gluewith which to secure it, the suggestion being that – having been throughthis particular journey of loss – Sandy and her mother have finally come toan unspoken understanding, an understanding which resides outside of theSymbolic.

‘The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression’

In this film, and in the second and third ‘acts’ in particular, silencepredominates. The narrative concerns a journey. The first stage of thejourney involves man in control of the earth: there are scenes of mechanicalquarrying. The second stage of the journey involves the danger ofotherness: the earth – in the form of the Australian Outback – reminds usthat man’s control is in fact illusory. This outback might be read in terms ofa return of the repressed. Hiromitsu does not respect this climate as he isunaware of its dangers; Sandy, familiar with this terrain of otherness, isafraid but practical. The third act begins with the coming togetherphysically and emotionally of Sandy and Hiromitsu, removed from‘civilisation’, in a beautiful place. Hiromitsu acknowledges a new under-


standing of his own life, gained through his relationship with Sandy. Littleis said. The idyllic location would appear to articulate their inner psychicalstates. However, danger resides beneath the deceptive surface of tranqui-lity; and again, Sandy is aware of this, but Hiromitsu is not. This metaphoricdanger is physicalised when Hiromitsu follows Sandy into a lake, but diveshead first into shallow water. The moments of realisation of what hashappened, as Hiromitsu’s body surfaces, are chilling, as this paradisechanges to a nightmare. Interestingly, one reviewer (David N. Butterworth)disparagingly describes this as the point at which the ‘script breaks downcompletely’.8 He is right, but the breakdown is a strength, and not theweakness he suggests. The final part of the film follows Sandy as she dealswith the practicality of returning to ‘civilisation’ with a dead body in theback of her van. Few words are said: the dead do not speak – or at least, notin ways that are conventionally understood.

There is resonance of a theological metaphor in the suggestion of a returnto the Garden of Eden, represented as a dangerous desire with fatalconsequences. In psychoanalytic terms, it might be read as a warning, also,in terms of the consequences of the realisation of a desire to return to a pre-Oedipal state of otherness where there is no separation, no subjectivity. Theconsequences, played out in Japanese Story, involve the death of the subject.The significance of the identity of the dead character as masculine mightbe read as the death of the Symbolic, which cannot survive in a pre-Oedipal,semiotic state of being. Having been seduced by the embrace of the other(Woman, Westerner, or the Outback itself), the masculine (described ratherhumorously by one reviewer as an ‘Asian miner’, resonating a continent aswell as a profession) collapses, unable to sustain existence on both sides ofthe threshold between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, or between Life andDeath. Sandy is representative of otherness (allied, by her given name in theSymbolic, with a particular kind of earth which can be both seductive anddangerous) from the perspective of the Symbolic; Hiromitsu is representa-tive of otherness from the perspective of the Imaginary. The liminal space –a space of articulate silences, or of ‘play’, in Derridean terms – between thetwo cannot be successfully negotiated for long by either of them. Anattempt to prolong this space would have meant ‘insanity’ for Sandy (in aretreat into the Imaginary); for Hiromitsu – unable, both literally andmetaphorically, to follow her – the consequence would, literally andmetaphorically, be death.

The film is permeated with silences, but the nature of these silences isconstantly changing, from the awkward, resentful silence between Sandyand Hiromitsu at the opening of the film, to the frustrated silence borne ofthe inability to communicate, to the exasperated silences arising from the


stubbornness of Hiromitsu in the face of danger, to the exhausted silenceswhere words are too much effort, to the peaceful silence where words areunnecessary, to the silence of absence and loss, and to that of anunderstanding of shared pain.

In psychical terms, the character of Sandy has been somewhere fromwhich she cannot completely return. The journey has alienated her fromthose around her, with the exception of her mother; and this is a reversal ofthe patterning of relationships found at the opening of the film, whereSandy’s relationship with her mother is characterised by irritation andincomprehension. The character of the mother, introduced at the beginningas slightly eccentric, slightly outside of the ‘norm’ of the Symbolic, has – itwould seem, by the close of the film – been on this journey before; and hercollection of obituaries – Symbolic traces of the unrepresentable – wouldappear to be her way of coping with the aftermath. In the closing sequences,she passes on this book of obituaries to her daughter, with the under-standing that the last obituary in the book will be her own: a symbolicbestowal of the unspeakable knowledge of loss and absence, passedbetween mother and daughter; a symbolic acknowledgement of the processof separation which this very act of passing on, of sharing, serves tomomentarily repair. This moment could be read as an acknowledgementthrough Symbolic gesture of an Imaginary, pre-Oedipal state of unity. It isan unspoken (and unspeakable) act of understanding, outside of theSymbolic, between these two women: a liminal moment where they areseparate and not-separate, different and not-different simultaneously.

Sue Brooks, through Japanese Story, challenges the limits of representa-tion, in terms both of content and of form, attempting to representsomething which by its very nature is unrepresentable; and this notion, ofattempting to represent the unrepresentable, is central also to the work ofplaywright Samuel Beckett, and is of particular note in one of his laterplays, Footfalls, a play representing a mother/daughter relationship within aliminal space between life and death. There are, of course, significantdifferences between film and theatre as forms of representation, in terms ofthe status of the body-in-performance, and of the spectator/representationrelation; but themes of absence, dis-integration and loss permeate both.

Footfalls: ‘not quite there’

Central to the discussion of silences, bodily experience, emotionalexperience and states of ‘otherness’ is this question of representation, andthe tools available to us; and Footfalls serves to foreground the question ofthe relationship between lived experience and the Symbolic, exploring


a space where the Symbolic is not enough. As ever, however, thisexploration is contradictory in nature, as the only tools available withwhich to explore the Symbolic are the tools of the Symbolic itself; and theprocess becomes a little like following a mobius strip, going round in circles,or spirals; which, interestingly, is precisely the structuring form underlyingthis play.

Samuel Beckett wrote Footfalls in 1975 and it was first performed in 1976,with Billie Whitelaw playing the main role. During rehearsals for the play,Billie Whitelaw asked Beckett one of the few questions she had ever askedhim about any of his plays: ‘Am I dead?’ Beckett is reported to have thoughtfor a second, and then replied, ‘Well, let’s just say you’re not quite there’,9 aresponse which serves to foreground a central theme of the play. The title ofthe play indicates, also, this central theme, resonating the importance of thesound of May’s footsteps, without which she could not be assured of herown existence; and this title is itself ambiguous, the French version – Pas –translating as both ‘footprint’ and ‘not’.

Footfalls presents the spectator with a vision of a woman who, for thirtyminutes or so, paces within the imaginary boundaries of a confined space,speaking to other voices which the spectator cannot see but can hear, eitherfrom another place or from the character herself. The play is in foursections: the first is a dialogue between May and the disembodied Voice ofher mother; the second a monologue by Voice, during which May is present;the third a monologue spoken by May; the fourth a momentary glimpse ofan empty space. Each section is separated by a blackout.

As the play opens, there is the faint sound of a chime, and as the lightfades up on her feet, May is revealed pacing in the semi-darkness, a setnumber of steps on an island of floorboards before turning to repeat themovement again, and again. She has dishevelled hair, and a worn greywrap which hides her feet. There is a sense that the spectator is seeing theinside of May’s mind and that neither they nor she can know where she isreally pacing (bedroom? graveyard? asylum?). A dialogue developsbetween May and the disembodied Voice, immediately identified as May’smother. It quickly becomes apparent that the disembodied voice, or itsowner, can see May (as can the spectator), but it is unclear as to whether ornot May can see her mother. May speaks to the voice, but the body is notvisible to the spectator. The dialogue moves on to a series of questionsformulated by May, first in an effort to make her increasingly ill mothercomfortable, then in an effort to find out about herself. The series ofquestions (‘Pray with you? . . . For you?’) charts the progress of her mother’sillness, to the point of death. May and her mother mirror each other’squestions, each trying to place themselves in time. There is a sense of these


questions having been asked before, and being repeated (‘Forgive me again. . . Forgive me again’), in a never-ending cycle.

The second section is separated from the first by a slow blackout andfade-up and the sound of a chime. In this section, the disembodied Voicespeaks a monologue, in the first person, ‘I’, but begins by describing thefigure which the spectator sees, effecting separation between the visible andthe audible. The monologue begins in the present, then moves into the past,before comparing the past with the present. The voice of the mother speaksin the first person, then moves into the third person, splitting between threeidentities (narrator/Mother/May), almost as if reading a playscript, beforereturning to an implied, but impersonal first person.

The third section of the play is separated from the second by a blackoutand fade-up plus a chime. This section is May’s monologue, and it beginswith May speaking of herself in the third person. The first part of thissection is in the past, as May describes in the third person the semblancewhich is herself. This vision has been seen many times by May. There is asuggestion that May’s mind controls her body: she cannot move whenfrozen by a ‘shudder of the mind’. There is no sound, ‘none at least to beheard’, which might suggest either that she makes no sound, moving as aspectre, or that there is no one to hear the sound, in spite of the fact that theaccount itself would suggest the presence of a witness to this vision. Theclearest indications of May as a spectral body are her ability to pass throughlocked doors, to vanish, and the evocative description of the light throughher body as she passes before the candles, ‘like moon through passing rack’.

The second part of this third section moves into a description of aconversation between Mrs Winter and her daughter Amy (an anagram ofMay: the mother’s name is winter, the daughter’s possibly a monthrepresenting spring). The description, although spoken by May, is givenfrom what appears to be a shifting position, moving from participant toobserver, and manoeuvring the reader/spectator’s position in the processfrom that of spectator to that of ‘reader’, or spectator of reader of the play.May distances herself further from the text by describing the mother and thedaughter, fragmenting the speaking subject into a number of possiblepositions, and this is reflected in the rupturing of the language, and theimagery of fragmentation. Within May’s monologue, the conversationbetween mother and daughter begins with a conventional description. Thenarrator, however, becomes increasingly less articulate, and there are gapsin the language which mark a break between this style and the style of thefollowing passage where the discourse becomes one of existence, percep-tion, memory and meaning, the narrator playing the part of both motherand daughter in a structural reflection of the content of the language.


This section describes Mrs Winter’s questioning of her daughter’sexperience of Evensong, to which her daughter responds that sheexperienced nothing because she was not there. Either mother and daughterhave quite separate perceptions of ‘reality’, or Amy’s ‘I’ was not the ‘I’ atEvensong. The whole section is voiced by May, who begins by speaking ofherself in the third person, as an observer, then becomes a narrator telling astory of Amy and Mrs Winter; May then becomes Amy’s mother, callingAmy, and becomes Amy, responding, in the first person each time, butwithin the frame of the character’s name, spoken first. The final sequence isa dialogue between Amy and her mother, with no frame differentiatingeach from the other, both of which are spoken by May, who repeats part ofthe initial dialogue of the play.

Finally, there is a slow blackout, a faint chime sounds and the light fadesup to a dimmer level than before, to reveal an empty space. After fifteenseconds, the light fades to darkness.

The image of the ‘fading of the light’, here manifest in physical terms, isoften associated, in literature, with death; and if the play is ‘about’ anything,it might be read as a representation of the fading of a fragmented trace ofloss, where language tries to fill the void, and where death is the only end ofdesire. There is a sense of repetition, of revolving and of echoing, created bythe language, which resonates language earlier in the play, and gives theunstable subject a voice as she drifts and fragments. It is also echoed by thebreaks in the text where the lights are faded up and down, and where thesound of a chime is heard. The chimes evoke a sense of passing time andgive the whole play a sense of timelessness.

Time is significant: time past and either remembered and repeated, orlost; time present which is often static and interminable, spent waiting for atime future, a future event (as in Waiting for Godot) which will neverhappen. The passing of time, in Beckett’s theatre, is the journey betweenbirth and grave; and Beckett’s use of time in the structure of this play seemsto augment the sense of fragmentation of this woman’s being, alreadyechoed in the visual imagery and movement of May. Time, in Footfalls,moves in various ways. It moves through his use of tenses in the language,where the placing of events and the relationship of the spectator to them isvaried. Beckett also uses sounds to indicate the passing of time: the chimesin Footfalls evoking a gentle fading, the metallic alarm of Happy Days whichseems to slice the play into segments, the mechanically reproduced voiceseparating present from past in Krapp’s Last Tape. The relationship betweenwhat might be called thought-time and body-time is significant: there is asense in which the spectator sees only a moment of thought or feeling orimage, but this is slowed down to a comprehensible rate. This means that


the body of the representation, too, has to slow down to an equivalent rate.The spectator sees the thoughts in slow-motion, like the frames of a filmslowed during projection so that each can be seen individually although, forthe spectator, this appears as conventional time (in that the characters speakand move at a conventional speed). In Waiting for Godot, the spectatorwitnesses a representation of the futility of waiting, of boredom; in Not I thespectator is witness to the ‘meaning’ within a scream of pain or frustration;in Rockaby it is the moment of death which is represented; A Piece ofMonologue represents the feeling of loss and nostalgia for times gone; Playconcerns feelings of betrayal; Ohio Impromptu, the inevitability of loss; andFootfalls, the greyness of grief in the inability to come to terms with loss.

Footfalls might be read as a discourse of displacement, of collapsingboundaries, and of (failed) abjection. Within the text, questions of presenceand absence are always in play: where is May? Is she alive, dead, or just ‘notquite there’? If not quite ‘there’, then where? Where does Mother exist – inMay’s mind? If she exists in May’s mind, then why can’t she be seen by thespectator – the words are audible but the body is not visible, a dis-embodiedvoice? And what of the other characters created in May’s mind – MrsWinter, Amy, the reader – are they any less ‘real’ than May herself?

The daughter is part of a Symbolic order; she has a given name, as opposedto a chosen one. There is a lack, ‘not enough’, in which desire operates, andthe child speaks through the mother, in an attempt to articulate the unsuretyof her own existence, that which she is repeatedly losing, that which is in aconstant state of slippage. The Voice emanates from the body-in-silence; thebody does not appear to be the speaking subject, but moves within thelanguage, suggesting perhaps an inability to make the final move into theSymbolic from the Imaginary, a difficulty which might find its origin in theabsence of the Father, rendering the child incapable of moving from thesemiotic orbit of the mother for whom the child is the phallus; in Footfalls,the father/Father is notably absent, and the play might be read as theinability to separate from the mother/(M)other, in an irresolvable Oedipalcomplex which lacks the third term, and which – in Symbolic terms –renders the subject/child ‘sick’: incapable of entry into the Symbolic and,consequently, in Symbolic terms, psychotic.

The implication in Footfalls is that May has remained in the Imaginary,and that the spectator has joined her there, in her psychotic state, seeing andhearing only what she sees and hears. Her existence in human society isunknowable, unseeable and unseen. May, in the Imaginary, has no sense ofa separate self. The Mirror Stage (or Phase) only allows for dualrelationships; it is only through the triangulation of this structure, whenthe Father breaks the dyadic unity between mother and child, that the child


defines itself as separate and takes up its place in the Symbolic Order. TheMother, in Footfalls, is constantly on the edge of loss, not quite there, but notquite not there either: she has been, but may be gone. It is the Father who isabsent: he is missing from the representation on both a narrative level (he isnever seen or mentioned) and a structural level (in terms of the SymbolicOrder). Between loss (of the mother) and absence (of the father) lies a stateof dis-integration.

The mother/daughter relationship and the absence of the Father aresignificant elements, both in Footfalls and in Japanese Story. The Law of theFather, in Lacanian thought, is that which, in psychical terms, introduces theSymbolic into the hitherto dyadic relationship between mother and infant,and in doing so ruptures this relationship and introduces both desire andlanguage.

Julia Kristeva accounts for the process of signification in terms of theinteraction between the semiotic and the symbolic (displaced from Lacaniannotions of Imaginary and Symbolic). Toril Moi observes that the semiotic(not to be confused with semiotics, the science of signs) is linked to pre-Oedipal primary processes, and

The endless flow of pulsions [which constitute the semiotic] is gathered up inthe chora (from the Greek word for enclosed space, womb), which Plato in theTimaeus defines as ‘an invisible and formless being which receives all thingsand in some mysterious way partakes of the intelligible, and is mostincomprehensible’.10

This ‘ceaseless heterogeneity’ of the semiotic continuum must be split inorder to produce signification; and Kristeva suggests that the mirror phaseis the first step in achieving this splitting. Moi observes that

Once the subject has entered into the symbolic order, the chora will be more orless successfully repressed and can be perceived only as a pulsional pressure onor within symbolic language: as contradictions, meaninglessness, disruption,silences and absences.11

In these terms, both Japanese Story and Footfalls are constantly on the edge ofthis division, constantly subject to the pulsional pressure of the chora, frombeneath and from within, manifesting itself in the ‘contradictions, mean-inglessness, disruption, silences and absences’ within the language. Onlydeath sees an end to the effort to signify, and even then (if the narrative ofFootfalls is read as a ghost story) death is not a certainty. It is not meaningthat is missing, but the tools with which to represent/construct it. Absence,


in this sense, is of the means to signify: when faced with the task ofexpressing the sublime, words fail.

Unruly bodies: death, discourse and the limits of representation

Lived experience is not always easily translated into the Symbolic; and it isthe troubled relationship between lived experience and the Symbolic, andthe nature and placing of these experiences in relation to discourse, which isthe focus of this paper.

Both Japanese Story and Footfalls attempt to give account of relationshipswithin which the Symbolic is not enough. In Japanese Story the result of thislack is silence; in Footfalls it is fragmentation, dis-integration and repetition.In both cases, the attempts within the narrative to make the silence speakwithin Symbolic terms result in disaster: for Sandy and Hiromitsu, itresults in death; for May, a splintering of the subject, and madness. The filmand the play also attempt to give account of moments of rupture, liminalmoments in our culture where the binary structures are temporarilycompromised: moments of intimacy, moments of loss. The only relationshipwhich would appear to survive these moments is a pre-Oedipal one: thedyadic mother/infant relationship (Mother/Sandy; Mother/May); and thissurvival is dependent on an understanding which takes (its) place outsideof the Symbolic, ‘outside of the text’. Although, in cultural terms, it does notseem currently possible to sustain a ‘healthy’ existence outside of theSymbolic (and here we have, once again, the trace of a Symbolic binary:healthy/sick), the fact that it would seem possible to do so momentarilywould indicate a potential direction of investigation: in what circumstancesmight it be possible to sustain and develop a method of discourse outside ofthat which is common currency?

Simon Shepherd, in a discussion of erotic silence, observes that ‘sex isthat which takes place elsewhere – in a place beyond speaking’12 and thatthe silence ‘is also outside a binary relation with words in the sense that thesilence is an insistence on the fact of presence – the object apparentlybeyond mediation. Words, by contrast, can inhabit virtual spaces’.13

He notes that ‘the erotic silence declares itself in a space beyondwords’.14

Intimacy and loss: two areas of human experience which seem to bebeyond words. In psychoanalytic terms, our subjectivity can be understoodas the result of a moment of violence (the intervention of the third term)resulting in an irreparable lack which we, ever optimistic, spend the rest ofour lives attempting to fill and repair with language. Such is the nature ofloss and of desire.


Representing lack and absence in the theatre is problematic, as itconfronts a fundamental contradiction: in order to represent lack, there hasto be a presence. It could be argued that ‘lack’, like the sublime, isimpossible to comprehend, as in the very act of comprehending it, itbecomes what it is not: a presence (at least in the Symbolic, in language).Footfalls, in particular, foregrounds this difficulty. One possible strategyopen to us might involve exploring ways of returning to a pre-Oedipal statein order to find a different way forward, one which does not involveseparation and lack. Both Japanese Story and Footfalls hint at the possibility ofreturning, momentarily, to such a state, albeit that it has consequences interms of (the death of) the Symbolic (resulting either in physical death or inmadness). It could be argued, however, that the relationship between therepresentation (film or theatre) and the spectator can sometimes momenta-rily simulate a pre-Oedipal state, where the awareness of loss, absence anddistance are sometimes momentarily forgotten, and the choric momentarilyemerges and dominates. These moments also occur at times of extreme:moments of intimacy, moments of loss; and they might also account forthose moments of awareness of a ‘ghost community’, where shared,unspoken emotional and physical experience is recognised by those whohave touched it.

There are some silences within our culture which defy even description,and some spaces of which we do not – or cannot – speak. The fact that wecannot name these moments of experience, these silences, does not meanthat they do not exist (for our lived experience tells us otherwise). It meansthat there are areas of human experience where the Symbolic falls short. Itmeans that there are spaces outside of the text, where words fail, spaceswhich are beyond meaningful articulation. These are moments where thelimited and limiting binary structures of our Symbolic Order revealthemselves as such, and where the choice of ‘either/or’ does not cover allpossibilities; moments where feminine discourse – a semiotic, choricdiscourse – comes into play and where our ghosts become visible.

Returning to the ‘secret community’ described at the beginning of thisarticle, this other world was not the result of anything spoken, anythingpreviously existing in the Symbolic. It was something which transgressed athreshold in order to become visible; but this threshold was not somethingmaterial and external; it was something which came about as a result of achanging perspective within the observer, a psychical shift, which cameabout through physical and emotional experience, and one which facilitateda renegotiation with silence and absence.

We live with our ghosts, the absences we cannot adequately articulate.People move unseen within the structure of our dominant discourse,


brought into focus by unspoken, shared experiences, shared ‘ghosts’; butlived experience is not always easy to translate into the Symbolic. JapaneseStory and Footfalls would seem to represent attempts to bring theseexperiences into view through distortion of the tools of the Symbolic; but intimes of extremes of experience, the Symbolic seems an inadequate andclumsy tool. People die ‘outside of the text’: we experience loss, absence,bereavement, pain, intimacy, all in relative silence. These experienceschallenge our very subjectivity and expose it as a construction. They exposethe text itself as a construction with limits and boundaries.

Our bodies, however, are articulate; and in spite of lack of language, thereare occasions where our bodies speak directly to one another, unmediatedby the Symbolic. Moments such as those indicated in the opening of thispaper. Moments which are – in fact – indescribable. But these are moments,ruptures in culture, which indicate the need for a means of speaking whichis ‘outside of the text’, or at least the text currently available to us. Ourbodies are unruly: they do not remain silent.

But to understand their articulacy requires that we find ways ofrethinking the boundaries of the structures within which we currentlyoperate, of challenging the limits of representation, of embracing silence,and of reconceptualising speaking, hearing and thinking.

Notes

1 Harold Pinter, Plays One (1976; London: Faber and Faber, 1991), ix.2 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1985).3 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1976), 158.4 Japanese Story, directed by Sue Brooks; screenplay by Alison Tilson; distributed

by World Cinema Ltd; released (US) 2004.5 Samuel Beckett, Footfalls (London: Faber and Faber, 1976).6 Anonymous, hhttp://imdb.com/title/tt0304229/plotsummaryi.7 James Berardinelli, hhttp://movie-reviews.colossus.net/moview/j/japanese_story.

htmli.8 David N. Butterworth, hhttp://www.Offoffoff.comi.9 Billie Whitelaw, Billie Whitelaw . . . Who He? (London: Hodder and Stoughton,

1995), 143.10 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), 161.11 Ibid., 162.12 Simon Shepherd, ‘Erotic Silence’, in Claire MacDonald (ed.), Performance

Research: On Silence, vol. 4, no. 3 (London: Routledge, 1999), 35.13 Ibid., 36.14 Ibid., 37.


Unruly bodies: death, discourse and the limits of representation

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