Abstract.
Two diametrically-opposed models of memory surfaced within the confines of twentieth century drama — a modernist one, whereby to remember a past was strictly to “think about [and] reflect on” it (“remember, v.1”), and a postmodernist one, whereby to remember a past was, in turn, to misremember it in order to re-member it. Accordingly, whereas the modernist recaller relied on recourse to past events to approach the then-stable constructs of reality, identity, and consciousness, the postmodernist recaller was free to (re-)engineer them by means of creatively (re-)interpreting past in relation to present and, thence, future. How ontologically anchored were reality and knowledge to remain with the emergence of postmodernist memory? How were interlocutory power and social relations negotiated within an epistemic conjuncture that had time notionally warped and knowledge, objectivity, and the very reality beneath one’s feet thrown into an unremitting flux? What was so postmodernist about “postmodernist memory”, anyway? Taking its bearings from the two plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Old Times, this essay presents a contextualised study of memory in twentieth-century drama, considering its affinities with such philosophies as “self”, “centre”, and “history”, which were, following the end of WWII, soon complicated by the ethico-ideological dictates of postmodernism. It begins by assaying the varying ontos of dramatised memory, especially clarifying the “post-ness” of postmodernist memory. It, then, proceeds with a comparison of the distinct ethico-onto-epistemological scopes of modernist memory and postmodernist memory in order to parameterise the changing relations of convergence and divergence between the constructs of memory, power, and knowledge over the span of the century, which Eric Hosbawn has referred to as the “age of extremes”.
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The concept of memory has never been a stranger to the making of theatre. As regards the praxis of acting, on the one hand, Konstantin Stanislavsky emphasised the importance of tapping into an “affective memory” in order that an actor may inflect his own performances with a “personal dramaturgy”, whereas Jerzy Grotowski spoke of unblocking a “body memory” and, in so, a “body life” to actuate the “possibility for [actorly] luminescence” (Laster 213). More rudimentarily speaking, acting constitutes the co-delivery of memorised lines, actions, and stage directions, on the account of which the actor’s craft quite literally consists in the art of memory. As regards that of spectatorship, on the other hand, the reception of naturalist and realist theatre — perhaps, the truest of theatrical forms, according to the Aristotelian theory of mimesis — requires, for one thing, an overt recourse to one’s own impression (i.e. synthesised memories) of life or, as it were, “pictorialised” life[1], beyond which the very concept of reception rests on the Jaussian horizon of expectations. To the extent that all expectation is contingent on past experience, the Jaussian horizon of expectations really constitutes a horizon of applied memory; this is to say the Jaussian framework really designates the process by which the spectator brings to bear the memory of any past experience he might have had with theatre and with life upon his critical engagement with texts. On a more fundamental level, the critical apprehension of any performance also depends on the active remembering of key lines and actions delivered as a play progresses.
For all these reasons, that “[t]he connection between the actor’s art and the actor’s memory [should have] only intensified throughout the twentieth century” (Malcolm 3) is no surprise. The same thing can be said apropos of the fact that the connection between audience response and (applied) memory should have, as one conjectures, likewise intensified throughout the twentieth century, what with the magnified impulse towards intertextuality, palimpsesting, and pastiching in postmodernist performances. The more intriguing question, then, is this: why should memory have become significantly incorporated in the very drama of the twentieth century, where its role had once been centred in conceptually and physically transforming drama into theatre[2]?
In some sense, the cards have always been stacked in favour of its incorporation in drama. In “Time and Theatre”, Matthew Wagner wrote that he “ [had] spoken of ‘time’ (in the sense that the theatre is of ‘it’, or is ‘it’, or manifests ‘it’)” (60), in effect, making three observations — (i) that live theatre constitutes a temporal activity, (ii) that it is “en-timed” (just as it is embodied and emplaced), and (iii) that it possibly performs and, therein, thematises time. Strictly speaking, observation (iii) concerns not so much the “timed” structure of twentieth-century theatre, as it does the thematic and imagistic potentiality of twentieth-century drama. As heralded by the germination of “memory studies” in the twentieth century, such an affinity between time and drama effloresced into an entire impression of memory on the topical fabric of twentieth-century humanities. One maintains that this was achieved (at least partially) under the auspices of the obsession with histor(ocit)y (Rainey 71), if not the fierce “antihistoricism” of the Poundian “make it new”[3] agenda, that defined modernist thinking. If we should agree that “the concept of memory destabilises grand narratives of history and power, as ‘memory, remembering and recording are the very key to existence, becoming and belonging’” (Bosch 2), then the general attitudinal “incredulity toward metanarratives”, which Postmodernism initiated in the latter half of the decade (Lyotard xxiv), only served to stimulate more frequent and in-depth literary engagement with memory towards the fin de siècle. In what follows, I attempt a cartography of memory as a literary topos in the specific context of twentieth-century drama.
According to Jeanette Malkin, memory produced, within the strict confines of Modern drama, “coherent dramatic enunciations in order that a past be illuminated, and a present explained”; it was “restorative”, “explanatory”, and contingent upon the assumption that the past was “given to reconstruction” (21) by the “rooted, autonomous self, the subject-as-consciousness” (7). By asserting that the “subject-as-consciousness” was the prime impetus for remembering, Malkin meant to emphasise that memory was a subjective experience driven by the twin processes of introspection and situated interpretation. Lensing present through past, reality through history, expressions of memory enabled the individual character to take stock of a life lived and to come to terms with the faults and failures contingent upon such a life. In its capacity to unify subjective experiences of reality, memory functioned as a correlate of self-reflexivity and self-awareness — the key here being that there necessarily exists a stable or stabilisable self, an ego to whose experiences memory can recourse and (perhaps, more fundamentally) by whose materiality memory can be legitimated. This “stabilist” mechanics of memory was, however, not to maintain its grounds, with the shifting Weltanschauungen of self, reality, and being to appear at the turn of the mid-twentieth century.
Following the inception of a “metastabilist” postmodernist conception of reality that ironically “succeeded in conventionalizing subversion, turning disruption into a stabilizing principle” (Connor 226), dramatised memory evolved into a more expedient, if not more powerful, function of experience, more often than not “diffus[ing], decen[tring], [and] problemati[sing]” reality (Malkin 21) in such a way as to manufacture order, where order there was not. In particular, memory began to operate under the condition wherein to remember a past was to misremember it — in a sense, to dis(re)member a reality in order to compositionally re-member it, therein, passing off both the fictitious and the factitious as the factual. In other words, whereas in Modern drama, to remember was to know, in Postmodern drama, to remember was, often, to unknow in order to re-know. Postmodernism warranted such a re-knowing by way of its new “sourceless[ness]”, its being “without a psychological home” — that is, a specific ego from which to proceed (8). This “psychological home[lessness]” constituted, in turn, a product of the postmodernist re-conception of the self as becoming rather than being, as positionally and momentarily formalised in narrative/language rather than positively substantiated (i.e. the self as “decentred”[4], “deconstructed” and, therefore, “dead”[5]). As Malkin has it, postmodernist memory “work[ed] through [characters], but never originate[d] in them” (7; my emphasis). This new-found expediency capacitated the dramatic recaller to amass positional advantages for himself at the expense of disorder for others.
This essay is first and foremost concerned with the observation that knowledge should be variedly fathomed and constructed in relation to memory across the given traditions of twentieth-century drama. From Chekhov to Beckett, Williams to Pinter, the place, power, and, as it were, prestige of dramatised memory has clearly been subjected to the ideological vagaries of the times. In fact, even amongst the playwrights we conventionally take to be modernists and those others we take to be postmodernists, it can be very difficult to pinpoint absolute parameters for the lengths to which memory might operate without falling prey to essentialism or tokenism. As better minds have expressed, it would, perhaps, be more informed to speak of modernisms and postmodernisms than it would be to insist that there only exists one school of modernism and, likewise, one school of postmodernism. That being the case, this essay approaches the critical trajectory of memory in twentieth-century drama by comparing how memory has been variedly deployed, resisted, and/or appropriated by characters in two discrete twentieth-century dramatic traditions — namely, a Williamsian modernism and a Pinteresque postmodernism. It achieves this by way of close-reading Harold Pinter’s Old Times (1971) against the ideological conjuncture of Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)[6] in order to, then, triangulate the varied confluences of reality, knowledge, and power at which memory eventually became situated in postmodernist drama.
“Remember it New”: Memory and Reality
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
—Mark Twain
For the citizens of a modernist nation, memory tells the story of a past reality, and an individualised one at that. Being products of such a subjective process, recounted realities are rarely represented with absolute fidelity; they may be trimmed down and “nam[ed] … dirty” or, perhaps, “so damn clean” (Cat 27), as in the case of Cat, where Maggie, Big Daddy, and Brick each self-consciously proffer inflected versions of a singular reality — one concerning the suspicious relationship Brick had with Skipper. Having said that, on the account that memory is ultimately “knowledge from the past [even if] it is not necessarily knowledge about the past” (Margalit 14), memory has not the capacity to author reality (i.e. “[re-]nam[e] it”) even if it may be capacitated to alter it. As seen in Cat, if memory could reconstitute reality, the “long-distance call which [Brick] had from Skipper, in which [Skipper] made a drunken confession to [him]” (67) would not have been considered a detail left out of Brick’s recollection for it would have been altogether written out of reality. More importantly, if memory could reconstitute reality, “mendacity” would not at all — or, at least, not as prominently — have figured as a theme in the play, given that there would never have been a lie (Brick’s claim of having hung up on Skipper) for Big Daddy to “track down”; such a “lie” would have been rewritten as the new truth.
Yet, as we enter what Henry Woolf calls the “[fluid] frontiers between memory, imagination, and the ‘real’, world” of Pinterland (quoted in Ali 7), this modernist ontos of memory begins to give way to a radically more self-contained postmodernist one, according to which memory starts to infringe the ontological boundary between the real and the realised. As Pinter’s Anna, herself, proclaims,
[t]here are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place (26).
In its ironic presupposition that it is not simply the “had-happened” that can be remembered but also the “can-have-happened”, Old Times sees Pinter overtly contesting the modernist epistemology of memory. Memory becomes, in postmodernist drama, a productive force of creation; whereas it had once been referential, it was, in postmodernist drama, potentially also interventional. Put differently, postmodernist memory could — or, rather, could only, as per Malkin — construct a reality independent of any lived experience. On the account of the notional de(con)struction of the modernist subject attendant upon the postmodernist enterprise, this is to be expected. An instance of such a (de)construction of reality occurs in Anna’s revision of a recollected past only moments after she had proffered an initial vision thereof:
Pause.
No, no, I’m quite wrong … he didn’t move quickly … that’s quite wrong … he moved … very slowly, the light was bad, and stopped (27).
The enacted pauses in Anna’s so-called re-recall, conveyed both typographically and paratextually, gesture towards a calculated effort at concocting reality — one requiring considerable time-present to realise, though, apparently, not time-past to validate. Verily, it is ironic that she should have been able to go into such imagistic detail about the initially recollected reality about which she now claims to be “quite wrong”, especially when that reality proves to be so coincidentally diametrically-opposed to the newly recollected reality:
the curtains were thin, the lights from the street came in … the man came over to me, quickly, looked down at me, but I would have absolutely nothing to do with him, nothing (ibid.).
Given such an instance of recollection and re-recollection, I argue that Anna personates what Malkin identified as the postmodernist character through whom memory operates, though not in whom it originates. Many of the memories she claims as real are veritably tied to no subject and, thus, given to the volatility of her whims and fancies or — to, yet again, recourse to Connor’s wording — the “metastability” of “an absolute weightlessness, in which anything is imaginatively possible” (227). The knowledge of this memory is not simply “not … about the past”, as Margalit writes of a stabler modernist variant of memory, but also not “from the past” to even begin with. Indeed, if Baudrillardian philosophy should of any consequence, then Postmodernism not simply disclaims the concept of the human subject; it also disclaims the notion of an underlying, non-simulated reality, correlative with which there can be no past — no stable centre — to which memory can be tied down. The expression of memory stands, for Anna, as a means of narrating the self into being — one that quite literally lasts both in and for the moment; it is performative to the extent that its reality is contingent on the audienceship of Kate and Deeley. Perhaps, then, it would be more accurate to say that memory became, in Postmodernism, radically uncontained and uncontainable — owing to its being liable to cathect anything and everything imaginable with a claim to reality — rather than to say that it became radically self-contained, as I had earlier done. Freed from the person of the subject, the function of this variant of dramatised memory was, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from that of imagination.
Interestingly, such a paradigm shift in the epistemology of memory coincided with the coterminous paradigm shift in semiotic theory from a Saussurean model of semiotics to a certain Peircean-Lacanian model of post-semiotics. Much as the modernist (if not pre-postmodernist) signifier was inextricably tethered to a specific signified, each artefact of dramatised memory was, in the modernist tradition, inextricably tethered to an antecedent coordinate on the temporal plane of reality, existing only insofar as it references that coordinate. Consistent with the postmodernist agenda of de-centring, post-semiotics is, inter alia, defined in tandem with the “de-ideologizing of the signified [that had] the scales now tip in favor of the signifier, which is seen as the ontological and epistemological basis of everything else” (Posner 19–20). As with the postmodernist signifier, dramatised memory became, in the wake of Postmodernism, altogether disentangled from the so-called temporal plane of reality. It stood, in its capacity as a floating signifier — or, as Lacan had it, “a potential trigger for the production of … an endless chain of signifiers” (Posner 20) — referential only insofar as it constituted a sort of Jamesonian pastiche of the past.
Whether one understands the memory of postmodernist drama as the product of “sheer imaginative will” (Connor 227) or as the proverbial floating signifier, the same verdict will be wrought of the critical trajectory of memory within a Williamsian-Pinteresque tradition of twentieth-century drama: whereas modernist memory accords knowledge by recalling reality, postmodernist memory does so by (re-)authoring it. The stakes of this paradigm shift will become clear once I introduce the notion of power to the present lucubration of the intersecting dialectics between memory and knowledge and memory and reality.
Of Threats and Threateners, Be They Real or Realised: Memory, Knowledge, and Power
The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.
—Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night
The inevitable relationship between knowledge and power has been many-times adumbrated through the centuries. Francis Bacon says it best: “ipsa scientia potestas est” (‘knowledge itself is power’). If we agree that memory is associated with power — that is, via its association with knowledge — and that enacted memory variedly constructs knowledge across different traditions of twentieth-century drama, then modernist remembering ought, necessarily, to differ from postmodernist remembering in the extent to which it (dis)empowers. Although it is not simply in postmodernist drama that memory is liable to weaponisation, it is, to be sure, only in postmodernist drama that the weapon of memory can be re-appropriated by he against whom it was initiated. This is to say that he who was, in one instance, liable to being threatened by a past reality can very well become — given the newfound potentialities of postmodernist remembering — he who is, in the next, liable to threaten, even if no such past should exist to incriminate the ci-devant threatener.
Within the context of a traditionally conservative American South — whose heteronormative sensitivities had only been, between the 1940s and the 1950s, hyper-magnified in the wake of McCarthyist homophobic rhetoric — Skipper’s romantic confession stands, for Brick, as a potentially incriminating past. According to the ideological regimes of Cat, where to remember is simply to remember, such a past forces Brick to stare down the barrel of the gun that is memory, against which he attempts two decidedly counter-productive modes of escapism — “laws of silence” (11) and “talk[ing] around things” (59). For one thing, Brick’s pursuit of “laws of silence” does nothing to resolve his fraught relationship with a damning past, instead only cathecting its oppressive grip over him — rendering it more pernicious than ever and himself concomitantly more paranoid than ever. This much is intimated by the extended metaphor of a house fire that Maggie mobilises in her admonitions for Brick’s escapist behaviour:
When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don’t work, it’s just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn’t put it out (11).
Indeed, the condition of abject paranoia by which Brick becomes plagued only exacerbates throughout the play, leaving him high-strung and quick to provocation, even when faced with the presumably well-intentioned attempts of Maggie and Big Daddy at communication.
He is, for instance, affronted by Maggie’s innocuous observation “Why I remember when we double-dated at college, Gladys Fitzgerald and I and you and Skipper, it was more like a date between you and Skipper” (26), and wrong-headedly so, especially considering that Maggie had already prefaced these observations with an analogy that Platonises Brick and Skipper’s relationship to a “beautiful, Ideal”:
It was one of those beautiful, Ideal things they tell about In the Greek legends, It couldn’t be anything else, you being you, and that’s what made it so sad, that’s what made it so awful because it was love that never could be carried through to anything satisfying or even talked about plainly (ibid.)[7].
The fact alone that Brick should have been driven to intimidate Maggie with violence is telling of the insecurities that the memory of Skipper had unleashed in him. The fact that his threat should have failed to put Maggie in her place, instead yielding the contemptuous rhetorical response “Good lord, man, d’ you think I’d care if you did” (27), then, accentuates the state of powerlessness in which Brick had landed himself, having plunged headlong into a self-defeating attempt at avoiding an irreplaceable past.
A similar situation occurs when Big Daddy attempts to clarify his own experiences with non-heteronormativity:
I’ve knocked around in my time … I bummed, I bummed this country till I was … Slept in hobo jungles and railroad Y’s and flophouses in all cities before I — (62).
Mistaking Big Daddy’s own recall as a snide attack directed at his masculinity, Brick misguidedly springs into a slew of profane exclamatives, even going so far as to emasculate the deceased Jack Straw and Peter Ochello in whose room he now resides, in order to bolster his bruised ego. Clearly, even where no character actively weaponises the knowledge of Brick’s potential non-heteronormativity against him, the reality of such a non-heteronormativity — as is synthesisable from the memory of Skipper — is, itself, sufficient to tyrannise Brick. Indeed, it would seem that the past is not simply, à la Malkin, “given to reconstruction” by the “rooted, autonomous self, the subject-as-consciousness”. It is, rather, foisted on the autonomous self as an unshakeable presence, the careless repression of which only foments its obtrusiveness or, as Freud had it, a state of neurosis, in which “repudiated libidinal trends nevertheless succeed in getting their way by certain roundabout paths” (350). This is to say that memory not simply affords an avenue into apprehension of the self; it forces the self into reflection, exposing “faults” and “failings” where they should lie. Ironically, although the viability of memory should be contingent on there being a self in the first place, the self certainly does not rule the roost when it comes to memory and its capricious resurgences.
“[T]alk[ing] around things” proves, likewise, otiose, as is proven by Brick’s conversation with Big Daddy in act two, by the close of which Brick is characterised as “a quiet mountain [that] blew suddenly up in volcanic flames” (63), only to diminish into “a broken, ‘tragically elegant’ figure” (65). Against the crippling power of knowledge, the aggression Brick musters to masquerade his injured ego comes off as yet another self-injurious attempt at “mendacity” — a hamartia of hubris, to put in the terms of tragedy. In his so-called self-confession, Brick “tell[s] simply as much as he knows of ‘the Truth’” about his allegedly having hung up on Skipper (65). Otherwise put, he subconsciously lies about it, attempting — even if only subliminally — to create an alternative truth, which might attenuate, if not expunge, the power that formal reality wields over him. Yet, because memory is, in the modernist tradition, (almost) always referential, such a (cowardly?) attempt at re-creating reality — such a “passing [of] the buck” (67) — can only constitute an attempt at creating a mendacious reality. In its evocation of self-disgust, doing so ultimately exacerbates Brick’s internal conflict, as Big Daddy rightly diagnoses (60). In this way, we might conclude that modernist memory can, itself, lord it over the individual, insofar as it encodes inviolable knowledge of such an individual’s damning past. This constitutes the essence in which the unnerving truth of Cat should consist: such a weapon as the memory of Skipper needs no wielder to function.
Under the freer dictates of Pinterland, on the other hand, things do not present quite as restrictive given that “Old Times” that threaten can be expediently neutralised by “[New] Old Times” that flatter. Old Times begins with Anna and Deeley engaged in an agon over the “beautiful” Kate (52) with the “very beautiful smile” (54). Assuming, as I have, that Anna only begins to re-member reality after asserting that her memory knows no bounds, her monologic recollection of London as a place of “hustle and bustle” (13) might be interpreted as an invocation of referential knowledge. In this remembering, Anna attempts to undermine Kate’s married life and, thence, to arouse ennui in Kate by insinuating a certain banality about her former roommate’s present circumstances, with its “silence” being unfulfilling, as against the “hustle and bustle” of a remembered London. Here, to remember is only, as in the modernist tradition, to remember.
For all we know, Anna might have, in her recollection, attempted to ameliorate the sentimental value of this pre-existing reality, what with the impressionistic observations she appends to her more material descriptions of London:
goodness knows what excitement in store, I mean the sheer expectation of it all, the looking-forwardness of it all, and so poor, but to be poor and young, and a girl, in London then … (13).
This description of the London nightlife presents just two examples of Anna’s concerted efforts at portraying life out in the country as humdrum and dreary. Whereas her use of symploce emphasises the exhilaration of the London nightlife — in turn, framing the English countryside as bland and monotonous — her romanticisation of poverty, youth, and (as one presumes) folly in the affected pronouncement “to be poor and young, and a girl, in London then …” conjures a potent nostalgia for an idealised past. One maintains that Anna’s constant application of such interrogatives as “does it still exist I wonder? Do you know? Can you tell me?” (ibid.) works, likewise, to foster dissatisfaction in Kate by arousing an intrigue about what her life could have been, had she not been married to Deeley. Irrespective of her having installed these smoke and mirrors though, it is crucial to note that Anna does not, here, seek to author reality. In the words of Maggie the cat, she does not, here, seek to “[re-]nam[e]” reality, instead, only attempting to “nam[e] it clean(er)”. Accordingly, such an instance of recall still sees memory operating within the epistemological scope it bore in modernist drama.
Once the referential function of memory begins failing her, however, Anna readily abandons it, rather, adopting memory to intervene in reality. Soon after Kate suggests heading out to the park, a reluctant Anna dismembers the rosy image she had earlier painted of London, instead re-membering it as a proverbial Gotham City, sprawling with “all sorts of horrible people”, “men hiding behind trees and women with terrible voices”, and “shadows everywhere” (38). Whereas earlier, memory had corresponded with a pre-existing reality, here, it reshapes that reality in accordance with the needs of its recaller; memory no longer “knows” reality so much so as it “unknows” reality in order to “re-know” it. This affordance of postmodernist remembering to create new knowledge is what renders it a powerful instrument, leverageable both as a mode of offence in the active pursuit of one’s aims and as a line of defence against unwanted courses of action. Crucially, unlike Brick’s attempt to alter the reality of his not having hung up on Skipper, which is chalked up to “mendacity”, neither iteration of Anna’s recollected London is discounted as a false reality. More precisely speaking, neither iteration can be discounted as a false reality, considering that postmodernist memory does not originate in the subject — if there can even be one. In the present context, for (i) Anna merely functions as the conduit through which memory operates and (ii) there is no “stable centre” of reality to which Anna’s remembering recourses, nothing she recalls can be taken as untrue or, as it were, “unreal”. Correspondingly, both realities she constructs, the one heterotopic of the other, can and must co-exist in a sort of Heraclitean flux. In that way, postmodernist remembering does ultimately figure not so much as factual documentations of the past — unitary and absolute — than as creative interpretations or re-imaginations thereof. In fact, we might even say that in Old Times, Pinter overtly demonstrates the corollaries of a postmodernisation of dramatised memory by having Anna first remember referentially and then, arbitrarily. In the trajectory concomitantly charted, one recognises an overturn in the power differential between memory and the narrativised self. Whereas previously, the stable modernist self may have been at the mercy of past realities invoked by memory, now, the latter stands at the mercy of the readily narrativised postmodernist self.
Such an epistemological redefinition and, indeed, reduction of modernist memory only presents itself more lucidly as the play proceeds into its rising action, during which it becomes clear that Anna’s having exploited (re)fashioned knowledge in her recall does not go unnoticed by the other two characters. Beyond a momentary expression of discombobulation — as evidenced by the monolexemic interrogative “What?” (26) — Deeley exhibits no sense of having fallen behind in the memory-arms race. Perhaps, to disrupt Anna’s self-portrayal as a desirable “innocent and cultured” partner (Ayken 14), he claims to have remembered meeting her at the Wayfarers Tavern as a promiscuous “darling of the saloon bar” (43). The rose-tinted London that Anna had earlier recollected to proclaim herself the better “life partner” is now being rewritten by Deeley as a proverbial whorehouse teeming with “poets, stunt men jockeys, stand-up comedians” and “escorts” (ibid.). Unmistakably, although Anna may have initially rejected this instance of Deeley’s authorship of reality, she comes to accept it, obeying the rules of her own memory game (and, more broadly speaking, the rules of a postmodernist conception of self and reality). As a result, her remembering finds itself up against Deeley’s remembering. Unlike Brick, who has no choice but to acquiesce in his “mendacity”, Deeley is afforded the opportunity to re-member a friendlier reality, instead of simply acquiescing in his supposed undesirability. In the end, though, Kate emerges as the ultimate and most lethal recaller, managing, in one fell swoop, to reconstitute both past and present by pronouncing “I remember you dead” (65). The weapon of memory is turned against Anna, who now becomes as ontologically dubious as she had been in the initial moments of the play — standing onstage and, yet, going unacknowledged. She is granted no choice but to surrender in the war she had waged on Kate’s marriage. This much is intimated by Anna’s “walk[ing] towards the door … her back to them” (67).
Considering the panfictional preoccupations of Postmodernism, it is unsurprising that the notion of imagination should have, in Old Times, intersected with that of memory and, thence, that of reality. Indeed, in its assumption that “there are”, as Pinter writes, “no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false” (“Nobel Lecture”), Postmodernism seems to invalidate the very notion of reality. It is, thus, only to be expected that dramatised memory should cease, in Postmodernism, to be necessarily referential of so-called “reality”. In its capacity, as a floating signifier, to re-member “reality”, memory can be appropriated to fashion knowledge that empowers; it is — though to Brick, that which must be “disavowed to ‘keep face’” (61) — to Anna, Deeley, and Kate, that which can be mobilised to disavow and to re-face the very fabric of “reality”. Yet, as much as dramatised memory became, in Postmodernism, subordinate to the narrativised self, one notes that such a self should not necessarily have become all-powerful. Given the exploitability of what Malkin has identified as memory’s “psychological home[lessness]”, the postmodernist self’s claim to dominance is, for one thing, contested by those of other similarly empowered selves looking to situate new “homes” for reality. Correspondingly, then, memory seems almost to “emanat[e] from a culturally determined collective subconscious”, rather than the “security of individual control” (8) — that is, the inviolability of a “stable centre”.
Memory and the Self: To Remember or to Re-member?
In “I am Christina Rossetti”, Virginia Woolf writes:
Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures — for they are rather under life size — will begin to move and speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant (quoted in McIntire 209).
In sum, to remember was, in modernist drama, to simply watch as the pieces of one’s past organised themselves into apprehensible units of meaning; where remembering required no tempering with the past, memory brought peace and resolution to the honest self.
As a matter of fact, though memory may have tyrannised Brick for the bulk of Cat, his final submission to its inviolability salves his beaten ego. This is true of both editions of the play. In what Williams, himself, calls “Cat number one”, Brick responds thus to Maggie’s final attempt at convincing him to consummate their marriage:
Yes, I understand, Maggie. But how are you going to conceive a child by a man in love with his liquor? (90).
Importantly, Brick’s admission to alcoholism bespeaks both an admission to his having unhealthily dealt with (the memory of) his relationship with Skipper and an admission to his having “pass[ed] the buck” thereon. Though Brick should have remained, to the end, sceptical of Maggie’s intentions, questioning her declaration of unadulterated love for him, he can take comfort in the pyrrhic victory of having attained that elusive “click” of inner-peace he spoke of earlier in the play. Even more fortunately, this “click” should, as one believes, no longer constitute “a [short-lived] mechanical thing”, developed once one has had enough to drink (52). As much as the “three shots [Brick had] in quick succession” may have advanced the gestation of this “click”, that Brick should have finally come to terms with the memory of Skipper is, ultimately, what accords him a more organic and lasting peace.
Cat number two witnesses a similar and, perhaps, even more complete scene of resolution in its dénouement. There is, therein, little resistance to Maggie’s advances and even a moment of communion realised by Brick’s assertion “I admire you, Maggie” (117), which culminates in the physical intimacy of her “touch[ing] his cheeks gently” (118). As with Cat number one, Brick achieves a lasting “click” in his having accepted that he cannot physically enter the space of the Woolfian “magic tank” in which the “inhabitants [of the past are] miraculously sealed”. Once that acceptance is reached, the anxiety of his helplessness becomes amenable to attenuation.
Truthfully, then, the dramatised memory of modernism is the calm before the storm that is its postmodernist counterpart. Where “the past exists as a deepening and much-needed ‘shadow’ that shores up the ‘broken surface’ of the present” in Eliotian, Woolfian, and — as I, herein, conclude — Williamsian modernisms (McIntire 213), it exists as a pliable tabula rasa, a blank canvas on which realities can be arbitrarily drawn up in a Pinteresque postmodernism. Given this pliability, memory often catalysed further fragmentation of reality, rendering already “broken surface[s]” of the present irreparably splintered. In such a postmodernist world as Pinter’s Old Times, it appears that memory does not necessarily have to rely on the “magic tank” of the past. One can easily purchase alternative tanks at the proverbial terrarium emporium (as Anna, Kate, and Deeley had all done), should the initial tank prove unideal for one’s purposes — though over-purchasing does, as it seems, lead to its own share of problems. At the end of the play, though Kate should have successfully neutralised the threat that Anna posed to her marriage, none of the characters are freed from the emotional toll of their having been made to constantly adapt to disjunct formulated, unformulated, and reformulated pasts. At the end of the play, each character is marooned on his own divan or armchair, processing the stakes of all the realities and selves that had been narrativised into being in the same physical space, though, as I see it, not in the same headspace. At the end of the play, it seems — and I say this to intentionally mix one too many metaphors in this paragraph as the quintessential postmodernist character might also have done in the proverbial paragraph of his own recall — too many magic tanks will spoil the proverbial magical-tank broth.
The abiding question now is this: how will the Baradian ethico-onto-epistemological trajectory of dramatised memory continue to evolve in a hyper-technologised twenty-first century, wherein technology has been projected to “deaden human life, and then reach a fever pitch to the point of destroying all organic life” (Colebrook 307)? As Colebrook, interpreting Susan Greenfield, writes, “where we once worked with a synthesizing power of grammar, syntax and critique, we are now seduced by a culture of stimulus” (308). If memory is, for literate human society, effectively language-dependent and if the archetypal figure of the twenty-first-century man is, for all intents and purposes, without the linguistic prowess of “grammar, syntax and critique”, can (politically-engaged) drama even continue to accommodate the discourse of memory? On this account of the present digital age, the likelihood is that dramatised memory — or, at least, dramatised human memory — will eventually lose the established topical position into which it had formerly been installed, becoming little more than Soferian dark matter[8], if anything at all. As much as such a line of inquiry should broach interesting questions about the viability of alternative concepts including nonhuman memory, posthuman memory, and the speculative process Colebrook designates as counter-memory[9], as well as their potentialities for performance, it inevitably spells a dismal end for the variant of organic, autonomous, and biological memory that once prevailed — it seems, both in life and on stage.
Where in modernist drama, the centred human self was constituted by what he remembered, in postmodernist drama, the decentred human self became constituted by what he re-membered. If in the still-nascent post-postmodernist drama of the new age, the technologically-recentred self should, however, neither rememberer nor re-memberer be, might we, in time to come, still have a human self whereof to speak? The jury is still out on the future of human memory in drama — and, if I may, human memory in the digital anthropocene. Yet, for our sakes as digital natives on the brink of stupefaction, if not those of the post/modernist playwrights in question, whose legacies in the field of memory studies are at stake, let us hope things take a turn for the better in the remaining seven decades of the twenty-first century to come.
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Works Cited
Ali, Farah. Eroding the Language of Freedom: Identity Predicament in Selected Works of Harold Pinter. Routledge, 2018.
Ayken, Edibe. The Use of Memory in Harold Pinter’s Landscape, Silence, Night, Old Times, and No Man’s Land. 2007. Middle East Technical U, Master’s Thesis. https://open.metu.edu.tr/bitstream/handle/11511/16882/index.pdf.
Bosch, Tanja. Memory Studies, A brief concept paper. Media, Conflict and Democratisation, 2016.
Colebrook, Claire. “Losing the Self? Subjectivity in the Digital Age.” Memory in the Twenty-First Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanities, and Science, edited by Sebastian Groes, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 307–315.
Connor, Steven. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary, reprinted. Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1990.
“drama, n3.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2023, www.oed.com/view/Entry/57475. Accessed 4 July 2023.
Fischer-Liche, Erika. The Transformative Power of Performance, translated by Saskya Jain, Routledge, 2008.
Freud, Sigmund. “Lecture XXII: Some Thoughts on Development and Regression — Aetiology.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited & translated by James Strachey, vol. XVI (1916-1917), The Hogarth Press, 1955, pp. 339–357.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, nineth reprint. Princeton UP, 1990.
Heartfield, James. The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained, reprint. E-book ed., Sheffield Hallam UP, 2006.
Kvale, Steinar. Psychology and Postmodernism. SAGE Publications, 1994.
Laster, Dominika. “Embodied Memory: Body-Memory in the Perfomance Research of Jerzy Grotowski.” New Theatre Quaterly, vol. 28, no. 3, 2012, pp. 211–229. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X12000413.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester UP, 1984.
Malcolm, Devin. An Actor Remembers: Memory’s Role in the Training of the United States Actor. 2012. The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Acts and Sciences. Doctoral dissertation.
Malkin, Jeanette. Memory-Theater and Postmodern Drama. The University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory, 2rd reprint. Harvard UP, 2004.
McIntire, Gabrielle. Modernism, Memory, and Theatre: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Cambridge UP, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO0780511485176.
Pinter, Harold. “Harold Pinter — Nobel Lecture.” The Nobel Prize, 2005, www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture. Accessed 14 Apr. 2023.
---. Old Times. Faber and Faber, 2004.
Posner, Roland. “Post-modernism, Post-structuralism, Post-semiotics? Sign Theory at the Fin De Siècle.” Semiotica, vol. 2011, no. 183, 2011, pp. 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2011.002.
Rainey, Lawrence. Revising “The Waste Land”. Yale UP, 2005.
“remember, v.1.” OED Online, Oxford UP, March 2023, www.oed.com/view/Entry/162133. Accessed 13 July 2023.
Sofer, Andrew. Dark Matter: Invisibility of Drama, Theater, and Performance. University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Wagner, Matthew. “Time and Theatre.” Time and Literature, edited by Thomas Allen, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 57–71.
Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Penguin Books Ltd, 2009.
Works Consulted
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation (The Body in Theory: Histories of Cultural Materialism), translated by Sheila Glaser. University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Corr, Adrian. “Organisation Theory and Postmodern Thinking: The uncertain place of Human Agency.” Policy, Organisation & Society, vol. 13, no. 13, 1997, pp. 82–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/10349952.1997.11876660.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. “Thinking about the Origins of Theatre since the 1970s.” Dionysus since 69: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, edited by Edith Hall et al., Oxford UP, 2004, pp. 329–360.
Fleche, Anne. “When a Door is a Jar, or out in the Theatre: Tennessee Williams and Queer Space.” Theatre Journal, vol. 47, no. 2, 1995, pp. 253–267. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3208486.
Gale, Steven. “Harold Pinter, Screenwriter: An Overview.” The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter, edited by Peter Raby, Cambridge UP, 2009, pp. 88–104.
---, “Deadly Mind Games: Harold Pinter’s Old Times.” Critical Essays on Harold Pinter, edited by Steven Gale, G. K. Hall & Co., 1990, pp. 111–127.
Grmusa, Lovokra, and Biljana Oklopcic. Memory and Identity in Modern and Postmodern American Literature. Springer, 2022.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.” Modern Criticism and Theory, edited by Nigel Wood, Taylor & Francis, 2014, pp. 541–54.
Kallenbach, Ulla. “Harold Pinter’s Old Times and the Play of Indistinction: The Confluence of Memory, Imagination and the Real.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 78, no. 2, 2022, pp. 89–104. https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12357.
Marsden, Jean. “Affect and the Problem of Theater.” The Eighteenth Century, vol. 58, no. 3, 2017, pp. 297–307. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/90013400.
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Sanes, Ken. “The Deconstruction of Reality: What Modernism and Postmodernism Say About Surface and Depth.” Transparency, https://transparencynow.com/decon.htm.
Thompson, Judith. Tennessee Williams’ Plays: Memory, Myth, and Symbol. Peter Lang, 1987.
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Endnotes
[1] Northrop Frye discusses this readerly phenomenon analogically: “[a]n original painter knows, of course, that when the public demands likeness to an object, it generally wants the exact opposite, likeness to the pictorial conventions it is familiar with” (132). My point stands whether it is pictorialised life or life, in and of itself, to which the interpretation of realist and naturalist plays requires recourse. Either way, the spectator can only understand the icon or symbol actuated in an instance of performance by having it lensed against the memory of the very concepts and objects as which life manifests.
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[2] Each represents a distinct approach to the critical valuation and appreciation of plays. The former recognises — in the sense of its having been co-opted as a branch of literature (“drama, n3”) — a play as written text, as littera, whereas the latter goes beyond the assumed primacy of the play-text to appraise a play in terms of its potentiality for performance, performativity, and spectatorship or — in the words of Fischer-Lichte — in terms of its potentiality for “sight (theatron)” and “sound (auditorium)” (120).
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[3] To “make it new”, one ought to “un-make the old”. To “un-make the old”, one, in turn, ought to “know the old” — this is where memory comes in.
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[4] “Man was at the centre of the Age of Enlightenment. The science of psychology was founded on a conception of individual subjects, with internal souls and later internal psychic apparatuses. In a post-modern age, man is decentred; the individual subject is dissolved into linguistic structures and ensembles of relations” (Kvale 40).
[5] “The ubiquity of the idea of the death of the Subject leads us to ask why it is so widespread. Intellectual fashions and the history of ideas give some clues … Only later, by analogy, was the deconstruction of Marxism broadened out into a blanket dismissal of all grand narratives, by which time Marxism settles back into the series ‘the dialectic of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth’. The deconstruction of the Subject begins on the left, as a deconstruction of the historical Subject of Marxism, the working class” (Heartfield).
[6] To clarify, although Cat may not have been published (or even written) during the Modern era — which I, myself, take to have ended in 1945 (alongside the end of WWII) — its portrayal of memory is, for all intents and purposes, commensurate with that of other Modern works, at least as far as Malkin’s observations of modernist memory go. It is — though, technically, not a Modern play — a modernist play, the assessment of whose conceptual idiosyncrasies, nonetheless, lends critical insight into the enterprise of Modernism at large. In recognition of such plays as Cat, which do not necessarily fit into the set timeframes of Modernism and/or Postmodernism, I have chosen, here, to study memory in the context of modernist and postmodernist drama, where other such critics as Malkin have chosen to study memory in the context of Modern and Postmodern drama.
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[7] I acknowledge that such a reference to “the Greek legends” may ironically insinuate a likeness between the same-sex relations that were typical between men in ancient Greece and Brick and Skipper’s so-called “real, real, deep, deep friendship” (64). Yet, if Maggie’s final proclamation (in the edition of the play that Williams calls “Cat number two”), “Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you — gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of — and I can!, I’m determined to do it” (119), should be of any consequence, then her intentions for Skipper can, for all intents and purposes, be taken as good-natured. In any case, if Maggie is “determined” to stay “a cat on a hot tin roof”, any attempt at agitating Brick by way of snarky implicatures would only prove counter-productive to her ends. Taking both these facts into consideration, I suspect the irony at play here might rather be a product of Williams — who was, himself, a closeted homosexual and whose oeuvre has never shied away from exploring the nooks and crannies of his proverbial closet (see eg. In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel; Suddenly, Last Summer; “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio”, Hard Candy) — ventriloquising through Maggie.
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[8] “[D]ark matter refers to the invisible dimension of theater that escapes visual [or, for our purposes, readerly] detection, even though its effects are felt everywhere in performance. If theater necessarily traffics in corporeal stuff (bodies, fluids, gases, objects), it also incorporates the incorporeal” (Sofer 3).
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[9] “Rather than think of the future from the inscribed archive, one might imagine other archives that would, in turn, re-inscribe the present from within. We might call this counter-memory: what other presents might have been, and are present virtually, haboured in all the inscriptions outside human recognition?” (Colebrook 315).