Liam Harrison, University of Birmingham
From November 22nd– 23rd 2018 the University of Reading held a conference exploring Modernist Archives, supported by the Samuel Beckett Research Centre. The conference was split into two days – the first exploring periodicals, the second exploring performances – both engaging with how the ‘archival turn’ has enabled new understandings of Modernism as a cultural and historical phenomenon. Here Liam Harrison (University of Birmingham) gives an overview of the conference.
A major theme across the Modernist Archives in Context conference was the relationship between interiority and exteriority. With the spotlight on periodicals and performances – this relationship did not always take the path expected. The expansive range of research covered the complexity of various forms and thespaces in which they function, from the interiority of new theatrete chnologies, to the transnational reach of 20th century periodicals.
The first day focused on periodicals, delving into the minutiae of publishing histories, questioning how the original contexts of publication can disrupt our monolithic portrayals of writers and their works as a singular body.
Danielle Gilman (University ofGeorgia) kicked the conference off by engaging with Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, through a particularly condescending review, which was written anonymously in the not-exactly-literary Country Life magazine. Gilman quoted Woolf’s own pithy putdown from ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, where Woolf damningly claims the reviewer’s work is the ‘desiccation of living tissues of literature into a network of little bones’.[i] Gilman’s own paper, however, fleshed out our understanding of what contemporaries perceived the ‘common reader’ to be.
Gilman’s engagement with Woolf and middlebrow criticism intertwined nicely with a paper from Gareth Mills (University ofReading) on Wyndham Lewis’ engagementwith the commercial literary marketplace, specifically in Time and Tide magazine. Lewis is shown to have assumed contradictory positions and performances in his writing, which spanned topics as diverse as universal suffrage and Adolf Hitler. Mills drew on sales figures which revealed that Lewis’ most controversial writings managed to find new ways of engagement with ‘ordinary readers’. In the typical moment of technology failure which plagues every conference, Mills demonstrated the resourcefulness of print cultures, by printing off his Powerpoint presentation and holding aloft A4 printouts revealing Lewis’s circulation figures.
The complications of publication histories were further delved into by Sam Whybrow (University of Reading) and Dr James Baxter (University of Reading). Whybrow traced the overlaps in periodical publications of Beckett and Kafka, whilst Baxter detailed Beckett’s American reception in Barney Rosset’s Evergreen Review. Initially, Beckett was published alongside the likes of Karl Jaspers and Jean-Paul Sartre in Evergreen, but an editorial shift saw a more erotic and misogynistic aesthetic take over, leading to the surreal juxtaposition of Beckett’s writing advertised alongside Barbarella.
Professor Andrew Thacker’s (Nottingham Trent University) keynote drew on his extensive experience editing the three volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (2009-13), taking a long view of the modernist magazine across different plains of geography and periodization. The transnational quality of periodicals was emphatically demonstrated by two journals of the same name transition and Transition, the former published in Paris (1927-38), the latter in Kampala, Uganda (1961-68) and Accra, Ghana (1971-76). Thacker raised the question of how earlier European avant-garde periodicals may have influenced post-colonial magazines which emerged in the second half of the century, whils talso acknowledging the need for more work on nuancing and decolonialising this relationship. Conference attendees had a chance to deconstruct this narrative first-hand in Dr Adam Guy’s (University of Oxford) workshop, where articles from both renditions of transition/Transition were compared, and more often contrasted.
Guest speaker Dr Jonathan Heron’s (University of Warwick) paper on failure, and the potential of performance as research practise, provided a segue between the two days of the conference. Heron asked pertinent questions for academic practise, calling for a ‘transdisciplinary pedagogy’ – using failure as a critical basis for exploring Samuel Beckett and queer performance, and arguing how re-evaluation of failure possesses a productive capacity to change our conceptions of assessment and education more broadly.
Day two opened with challenges to singular conceptions of performances and authorial autonomy. Ros Maprayil (University of Reading) underlined how Beckett’s unperformed play Eleutheria (written in 1947) was crucial to the eventual composition of Waiting for Godot. Dr Sophie Jump (UAL & National Theatre) paid homage to theatre designers as the unacknowledged legislators of the theatre. Drawing on the Jocelyn Herbert Archive, Jump explored the creative role that designers take on, not just in a play’s performance, but also in its formation – succinctly demonstrated in letters between Herbert and Beckett, where they agree to change the sky’s colour in Happy Days from a cold azure to an oppressive orange.
Jocelyn Herbert’s set design for Happy Days, ©V&A Theatre &Performance Collection
The panel on audiences,with Chloe Duane (University of Reading) and John Whitney (University ofReading), acutely demonstrated an overarching theme of the conference – investigating the liminal spaces between interiority and exteriority. Duane’s paper explored the questions that new technologies pose tothe dramaturgy of Beckett – examining a virtual reality production of the purgatorial Play as a case study. The ethical and aesthetic challenges of virtual reality were counterpointed by Whitney’s performance-as-practise work into immersive theatre, which looked atthe ways playable performances engage with ideas of agency, authorship and coercion. The disruption to conventional theatre spaces that these papers raised, prompted a lively discussion, with the room split between purists defending the fixed integrity of the theatre, and those happy to challenge the conventional theatrical configurations of space and place. Emeritus Professor James Knowlson in attendance, quoted Beckett, who had once resorted to the line: “stop fucking up my plays”.
Representation of thespace from Virtual Play. ©NeillO’Dwyer & Nicholas Johnson
Calum Weir’s (University of Glasgow) comprehensive paper on Beckett and music resonated witha fascinating workshop led by Dr Matthew McFrederick (University of Reading& UAL), which included scrutinising the annotated play scripts from Billie Whitelaw’s iconic performances of Footfalls and Not I. The attention to musicality and rhythm which Whitelaw and Beckett scribbled in the margins of the scripts echoed many of the themes of Weir’s paper, especially the contrapuntal aesthetic which Beckett developed throughout his later plays. McFrederick also gave an overview of the expansive resources available to performance researchers (which was especially useful for PhDs and early career researchers), information given in the general spirit of the conference – which was research as a collaborative, generous, and sharing process.
Finally the conference closed with the mighty Judy Hegarty-Lovett (University of Reading), director ofsixteen Beckett performances with Gare St Lazare. She spoke of the immense challenges of transposing the notoriously complex prose work How It Is to the stage, where it was developed and performed at the Everyman Theatre in Cork earlier in 2018, before playing in London. Hegarty-Lovett’s work on deconstructing the space between audience and performance, and testing the constraints of critical engagement, led us back to many of the questions which began the conference, especially those of critical reception. The conference showed ample evidence of meeting Woolf’s challenge to the critic, from the end of ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, beckoning them to ‘scan the horizon, see the past in relation tothe future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come.’[ii]
Still from Gare St Lazare’s How It Is whilst work-in-progress, filmed by Grant Gee. © Gare StLazare
Sources
[i] Virginia Woolf, ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, Selected Essays. Ed. David Bradshaw. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. p.25
[ii] Ibid p.31
The Modernist Review 