The evolution of Existentialism into
modernity in theatre.
The Other and its theatrical expressions in Jean-Paul Sartre’s À huis clos
(1944) and debbie tucker green’s dirty butterfly (2003)
Oriol Matamales Porta
MA CRIC – Literature, Ethics and Globalization
2018-2019
Abstract
This essay intends to build a conceptual bridge between Huis Close and dirty butterfly,
two theatrical play by Jean-Paul Sartre and debbie tucker green. In order to build such
bridge, the research will call forth ethical thought on philosophy and its possible
interpretation in each one of the plays, while taking profit of both plays similar characters
and symbolism. This will point out how both theatrical evolution and philosophical
progress, more concretely Levinasian ethics, have developed in parallel, as well as
constructing a layout in which comprehension of the concepts comes accompanied by
artistical expressions as a means of illustration.
Keywords: Other, vulnerability, verticality, community
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Introduction
The narrative function is losing its functors, its great hero, its great
dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds
of narrative language elements – narrative, but also denotative,
prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within each cloud are
pragmatic valencies specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the
intersection of many of these. However, we do not necessarily establish
stable language combinations, and the properties of the ones we do
establish are not necessarily communicable. […] There are many
different language games – a hetereogeneity of elements. They only
give rise to institutions in patches – local determinism. (1979: xxiv)
These lines consolidated what philosophy had been feeling but trying to reject for a
century and a half: the rise of postmodernity. Dispersion of narratives, hybridity of
disciplines, and the necessity to re-read previous cultural productions using a new scope
become unavoidable elements of the new paradigm. These premises set the grounds for
a previously disregarded discipline, comparative critique, as a means to build
comprehensive nexus amongst various literary productions, as a newly found way to
make sense of an overdose of images and significances.
This will be the main focus of this project. Taking two apparently distant —at least in
time— proposals, both theatrical and philosophical, and showing not so much what has
changed but what is still there in both of them to be said, and how they can be used to
portray philosophical and ethical complex concepts. Postmodernity gives a margin in
which remnants of the past can still be traced in present cultural productions, and calls
for an exegesis of the texts to reveal what’s hidden surreptitiously.
The first bodies to be analyzed will be Huis Clos, first published in 1944, and its
characters, Garcin, Inés and Estelle. The second group of bodies will be dirty butterfly by
debbie tucker green, first published and performed in 2003, and its characters Amanda,
Jo and Jason.
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1. The plays. Summary, characters and staging coincidences.
Huis Clos (1944)
Huis Clos portrays, in its simplest resume, hell and its inhabitants. The whole action
takes place in an isolated room containing three canapés for our three condemned to lay
on, a chimney and a tiny marble statue on its ledge, as well as a tiny doorbell which
doesn’t always work. The door is closed —as the title suggests—, there are no windows
and no mirrors either. This will become relevant later on.
The characters arrive into the room separately, first Garcin, later Inés, and last Estelle.
Let’s begin with their description in order of arrival:
Garcin is a Brasilian journalist and pacifist, presumably executed during a military
uprising. Inès origin remains unknown for the entirety of the play. Used to work in a post
office, stating with this her social class. It is noteworthy that she’s the first character to
realize how each one of the characters is each other’s executioner. Estelle is French,
bourgeoise, young and beautiful. She’s the most reluctant to confess her sins and initially
the one who seems more tortured by them.
The whole plot revolves around how these three characters try to get along in a shared
eternity. The first attempt to this is trying to discover why they have wound up together,
whether they had any kind of connection in their previous life, or, as Garcin points out
initially, they have been randomly put there, as if it were in order of arrival. Romance,
isolation, violence and renounce to their previous lives are some of the ways filiation will
attempt to take its place, undeniably failing.
dirty butterfly (2003)
Staging in tucker green’s play is much more open to interpretation than Sartre’s. The
only staging note that should be taken into account according to the author is how the
audience should surround the actors. The claustrophobic aura of the play can, in this
sense, be related with Huis Clos isolated and shut room. The audience being redistributed
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responds both to a revolt against traditional theatre’s form already consolidated in 2003,
but which was still being fought for in 1944, and to a powerful signification of
claustrophobia and vertical building. The play has been brought to life in three relevant
key minimalist scenarios: one in which the characters are distributed on a steep surface
at different heights, another one simulating a room with a toilet and a fan in which the
characters remain close to the walls in its own spot, and another even more abstract one
in which a folded wall served to limit the boundaries of each character.
Due to the epilogue’s scenario, a café, and the fact that the characters are revealed as
neighbors, we can imagine how the whole play takes place in an urban environment. The
main superficial topic, which was the portrayal of hell in Huis Clos, will in this case be
urban human relationships, or urban drama.
The three protagonists and only characters in the play are Jo, Jason and Amelia,
always onstage prior to the epilogue according to author’s directions. The focus on the
analysis of the play comes from the characters’ own performances, from the ways in
which the characters stablish their relations. In this sense, it takes a concept parallel to
Sartre’s proposal, but keeps it minimal and way more on point: human relations brought
to visages which can’t escape the scenario’s fourth-walled four walls.
For the sake of definition, though, let us very briefly define the three character’s
situation.
All three of them are neighbors. Amelia and Jason are flat mates, and Jo’s her
neighbor. Jo’s husband submits her through violence, and his acts can be heard from the
neighbors’ home. Jason has become a voyeur —but with his ears, through the wall— of
these situations, and Amelia works as a cleaner in a café. The whole play revolves around
Jo’s cry for help towards Jason and Amelia being either unanswered or unheard, the
willfulness of such inaction will be discussed later on.
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2. Existentialism in Huis Clos. The Other coming into play and the Face.
It is mandatory before we follow on these lines to define what is to be understood as
the Other. But this kind of definitions fall into those which are delimited more by what
they are not than by what they actually are. In this case, the Other should be taken not as
an absolute isolated Other, as in ‘another subject’ which I perceive. In Levinasian terms,
trying to possess the Other would be what’s being portrayed in Huis Clos.
The main issue with Levinas’s Other is it escapes any characterization. «The alterity
of the Other does not depend on any quality that would distinguish him from me, for a
distinction of this nature would precisely imply between us that community of genus
which already nullifies alternity» (1961: 194). The Other’s theme holds him just for a
second, in his own words. What’s derived from it and our way of understanding and
grasping its experience is what’s of interest in this case. One of the main concepts of his
works is the visage or Face. Quoting him:
The face resists possession, resists my powers […] The expression the
face introduces into the world does not defy the feebleness of my
powers, but my ability for power. The face, still a thing among things,
breaks through the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means
concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation
incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or
knowledge. (1961: 198)
Enjoyment or knowledge. Either pleasure or wisdom. If we try to transpose this
definition to Huis Clos we’ll be hoping into a huge amount of references to visibility of
Other’s and (other-in-the-) self faces.
Inés’ first appearance points out, annoyed by it, to the frightened look in Garcin’s
face. Estelle’s first appearance comes with an immediate fearful rejection to watch
Garcin’s face as well. Inés and Estelle also share an attempt to recognize each other’s
through their own eyes’ reflection. And when attempting to ignore his roommates, Garcin
buries his face in his hands.
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Their existence, though, does not vanish. Ultimately their existence is revealed as
incommensurate to each other’s comprehension, leading to the play’s leitmotif ‘Hell is
other people’. Hell becomes, in turn, the result of each and every attempt to negate the
Other by Sartre’s characters.
Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the
value of it is nothing else but the sense that you choose. Therefore, you
can see that there is a possibility of creating a human community. […]
Man is all the time outside of himself: it is in projecting and losing
himself beyond himself that he makes man to exist. (1946).
The characters in the play attempt continuously to build themselves in contingence,
by reflecting upon themselves, an attempt shown impossible by the lack of reflections in
the room and by the fading out of the characters perception of their previous life. This is
the Hell that Sartre portrays, one where projecting oneself on others doesn’t even come
as a desirable option, where all attempts to do so provoke a hostile reaction.
This reading of the play builds a scenario for comprehension and materialization of
abstract concepts such as the Other. An exegesis on these lines opens the possibility to
continue attributing meanings to the symbols of the play, relating the dependence between
the Self and the Other, and how they interact. The next play, dirty butterfly, despite its
much more abstract formal display, poses as a nexus between ethics and politics, turning
the debate towards ideas of real, factual community.
3. Community, verticality and vulnerability in dirty butterfly.
The considerations of the Other exposed in the previous chapter are a prelude to
what’s going to be built in this one: a condensed lecture and a theatrical re-enactment of
the Other’s ethical consequences in philosophy. I will bring forth arguments by Adriana
Cavarero’s and Judith Butler’s readings of Lévinas in their construction of the concepts
of community and vulnerability.
The way in which the Other relates to us (and us to it) is in a relational model which
roots on vulnerability itself. We are dependent on what’s otherly from us to define
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ourselves, subjectivity is built in this relation and with it any kind of a posteriori premise
which we might apply to our daily basis. The question that dirty butterfly raises is similar
to the one Butler asks to herself in Precarious Life:
Is there a way that we might struggle for autonomy in many spheres,
yet also consider the demands that are imposed upon us by living in a
world of beings who are, by definition, physically dependent on one
another, physically vulnerable to one another? (2004: 27)
Is there a way for Amelia or Jason to maintain their verticality and isolation while Jo’s
cry for help, her Face, tries to reach them? Is there a possible “action invested with the
power to restore the loss or return the world to a former order” (2004: 30) for them?
Jason’s passivity and Amelia’s negation are understood as an attempt to perform this kind
of action, just as much as Garcin burying his face in his hands was a way to avoid the
Other. These actions by omission lead us to more questions posed by Butler:
Is what is happening so close to me that I cannot bear having to take
responsibility for it? If I myself did not make this suffering, am I still
in some other sense responsible to it? (2012: 135)
Despite the obvious proximity between the characters, who are able to hear each other
through walls, community, empathy and responsibility aren’t forged immediately. There
seems to be a barrier surrounding each one of the characters, isolating their sense of
belonging to their own bodies and routines, and pushing them to blame any interruption
or conditioning coming from the outside as a negation of the relation to the Other. This
negation also goes in the lines of negating self-vulnerability. Once vulnerability is
assumed as a common shared threshold, the question ‘who am I?’ or ‘what defines me?’
turns outwards, to ‘who are you?’ or ‘what’s my relation to your condition?’. Trying to
build oneself from a forbidden to cross barrier is precisely what verticality is all about,
one of the main topics of both plays. Liberal politics, entrepreneurship, and shared fake
living prospects such as “make a man out of yourself” reinforce this perspective.
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Cavarero writes:
In the theater of modern philosophy, center stage is occupied by an I
whose position is straight and vertical. […] The “upright man” of which
the tradition speaks, more than an abused metaphor, is literally a subject
who conforms to a vertical axis. (2014: 6)
The only escape to this verticality, according to Cavarero, and the way in which the
self should take responsibility for the Other is enacting an inclination. While trying to
avoid abandoning or eliminating it (which would be the case of Sartre’s characters, who
eventually lose their contact to their previous life), one would have to bend the “vertical
axis, giving it a different posture” (2014: 11). Opening the subject to relational
subjectivity would aim “at countering the violence of the egocentric subject” (2014: 12).
The option to resist such bending results in the events portrayed in the play. The
reason behind it is discussed by Butler regarding distance of witnessing towards suffering.
The characters isolation would respond to an attempt to “secure the distance that allows
them to entertain ethical feeling and even feel themselves to be ethical” (2012: 138).
4. Conclusions
Hoping that the associations made until this point between text and intertext, between
philosophical ethics and theatrical work, result in some illustrative scenario for
understanding, a couple pending issues shall be solved for a closure.
The first one as a reflection on the progress between theatre and philosophy. In the
same way that ethics have come a long way since Levinas, seeing how both Butler and
Cavarero have delved into his ideas on their works, theatre has progressed similarly. Even
though its content might be a result of reflecting the author’s own epoch in the fiction,
there is an undisputed progress in terms of form. Sartre posed a question and an
interpretation of the other in terms of content. tucker green not only posed the question
in its content, where gender and urban scenarios are obvious: she also played with form.
That’s the ultimate triumph of contemporary theatre in this sense. Turning the audience
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around, reinventing the sacred ideas of theatre, in order to support the ideas which were
previously only expected to be discussed through dialogue or tiny scenography details.
Even though they haven’t been quoted here, both Cavarero and Butler come from a
close reading and interpretation of Levinas’ work. While philosophy is trying to abandon
abstraction in order to become useful and practical, somehow material and discussing
present issues, theatre has worked the other way. Disrupting form and content give in to
a much more abstract, conceptual line-up of plays. Abstraction in art, though, turns out
to be many times the only way to express certain ideas. Once the material dispute is clear
(such as the problematic surrounding gender), what’s left is to transcend it, to condense
it in something as simple as a light on stage, a new disposition of the audience, or how
Artaud would put it, “the substitution of poetry in language for poetry in space” (1938:
48).
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The plays
Sartre, Jean-Paul 2004 (1944): A puerta cerrada. La puta respetuosa. Las manos sucias.
Buenos Aires: Losada.
tucker green, debbie (2003): dirty butterfly. London: Nick Hern Books.
Works cited
Artaud, Antonin 2011 (1938): El teatro y su doble. Barcelona: Edhasa.
Butler, Judith (2004): Precarious Life. The powers of mourning and violence. New
York: Verso.
Butler, Judith (2012): “Precarious Life, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Cohabitation”.
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 26.2: 134-151.
Cavarero, Adriana 2016 (2014): Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude. Stanford:
Stanford UP.
Lévinas, Emmanuel 1969 (1961): Totality and Infinity: an Essay on Exteriority. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Lyotard, Jean-François (1979): The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Manchester: Manchester UP.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1946): Existentialism is a Humanism. Conference transcript and
translation found on-line:
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm
Other useful bibliography
Lévinas, Emmanuel 1987 (1978): De otro modo que ser o más allá de la esencia.
Salamanca: Sígueme.
Mèlich, Joan Carles 2015: “La condición vulnerable (Una lectura de Emmanuel
Lévinas, Judith Butler y Adriana Cavarero)”. Ars Brevis 2014.
Sáez Tajafuerce, Begonya, ed. 2014: Cuerpo, Memoria y Representación. Adriana
Cavarero y Judith Butler en diálogo. Barcelona: Icaria.
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