Thinking of categories of identity as performative rather than either biological or ontological tends to qualify or modify my perception of the actor’s physical presence. When the criteria by which I distinguish the identity of the actor are themselves fluid or transitive, capable of being enacted rather than merely being, I sense that within action, performing or acting, the actor or performer–the human agent beneath the mask of character–becomes an equivocal rather than an easily apprehended presence. The problem with this recognition, or with this claim derives from the fact that those theorists, like Judith Butler, who develop the concept of the performative nature of human presence use the term performative as a metaphor that is drawn, at least in part, from the theater.
I do recognize the performative aspect of behavior, and I can make a clear distinction between my regular experience and aesthetic performance. The Shakespearean metaphor, “All the World’s a Stage,” is, after all, a metaphor; and the comparison of actual experience to the theatrical representation of experience makes sense only if there is an understood difference. The point that I make here is a kind of convolution of the metaphoric quality of the term performative. I recognize the performative nature of human behavior, or, assuming the point of view of the beholder, I recognize that I base my identification of the other on differences that the other may enact rather than embody. However, as Butler notes, even my conception of that embodiment is directed by the discursive; and I cannot deny the performativity of the materialization of something as purely `bodily’ as the sexual.
Yet, I do make a distinction in my experience between the intentionality of the performer in a theatrical situation and the less than conscious implementation of the performative in ordinary behavior. I rely upon on speech, gesture, syntax, or distinct mannerisms that signify cultural categories of difference. Even if the category I assign the other is not solely based upon a cultural system of differences, I recognize that, at the very least, I may find it difficult to distinguish between the ontological and performative, between the signs of a type of human presence and the actual embodiment of that presence, between what seems to be and what is. Because of the difficulty, in ordinary experience, to differentiate between the real and the imitated, I often find others to be enigmatic and inaccessible, and I am vulnerable to deception.
The Shakespearean text makes frequent reference to the dichotomy between being and seeming. Remember that the Duke, Vincentio, in Measure for Measure, discusses the possibility of testing the moral integrity of Angelo: “…hence shall we see,/ If power change purpose, what our seemers be (I.2/53-4).” And recall Hamlet’s response to Gertrude’s question about the apparent particularity of his grief for his father.
Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not “seems.”
‘Tis not along my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, 1/2/80
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shows of grief,
That can denote me truly: these, indeed, seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
(I.2.76-86)
The character of Hamlet makes the assumption that there is some essential center of being that can be represented in external signs but which has an existence that may surpass or exceed these signifiers. The signifiers themselves may make false reference as in seeming or playing, while the identical signifiers may also function to manifest an authentic emotional state even if the intensity of that condition exceeds the signs that represent it. Hamlet claims that his body suffers in excess of the signs that display that grief. Butler’s sense of the ways in which culture regulates the materiality of the body, would erase or diminish the being component of Shakespeare’s dichotomy, and behavior manifesting physical presence would, therefore, become as much a seeming, a playing, as a manifestation of being–although that seeming would not be intentional but performative in Butler’s sense. Seeming would not be playing in the sense of a deliberate intentional deceit but the display of signs would be an unconscious enactment of imposed systems of difference determined by the discipline and regulations of a culture.
For me, what is real is what is in question, as I play with theorists like Fredric Jameson whose ideas of postmodernism include the notion that the present moment deals primarily with the exchange and circulation of images. Performance foregrounds this circulation of images and presents the live performer as theatricalized image on the same level as the technologically produced image. To paraphrase Ms. Stein, an image is an image is an image. The performance exposes the fact I read the body of the performer as constructed image in any case, because I have been trained, through the intensely mediatized nature of cultural experience, to respond to all stimuli as though I were receiving that data through a media event. The boundaries between technologically experienced information and information received without that frame have become permeable and, to a strong degree, seamless because the mediatized operates as the real and I tend to process all information as if it were transmitted by the media.
Is it possible to free performance from the idea of the statement or the idea the discourse?
Once the originating subjectivity of the playwright/creator has been displaced or problematized, I can’t help but imagine other “agents” crashing in to claim the voice of the performance: ideology, culture, dominant or subversive interests so that even the chaotic, unprocessed sequence of acts becomes a statement or a pseudo-statement proclaiming freedom from expression, intention, convention, tradition, formal values of any kind. Roughly the non-assertive performance (or the non-discursive performance) becomes analogous to the statement: “the speaker is a liar.” And, of course, in the terms of structuralism, any definable unit seems to invoke its opposite so that this chaos before me becomes a challenge to form and, hence, an aesthetic “statement” about form.
Whether I identify the originating impulse in the unconscious or in the unconscious inscription of culture embedded in language and visual image, more often than not I view the organizational structure of a work of art as the implementation of a structure that itself implements a grammar, using the model of structuralism that searches out an “underlying” organizational pattern that is cultural but implemented unconsciously.
What Derrida calls “hermeneutic compulsion” makes me see any structure or sequence of images as an encoding of some sort and a challenge to my ability to de-crypt the implicit statement. So, if I attempt to produce a text, performance, or event that attempts to make no statement, I expect the following to be said about the result:
My very avoidance of intention and the randomness of selection of elements may make my audience even more vulnerable to operation of non-consciousness paradigmatic structures from culture or their own unconscious;
My attempt to make no statement, like the response “no comment,” makes a in my opinion a rather disingenuous statement: “I intend no statement.” As well, because modernist literature and performance contains gaps or interstices, disjunctions, audiences have become adept at bridging the illogical separations of text and performance and extrapolating a unity. Look at Wolfgang Iser’s notion of indeterminacy in The Implied Reader. His analysis of a series of texts from Tristam Shandy through Beckett’s Endgame asserts that they demand active participation by the reader who shares in the process of creation with the writer. This idea is related to Barthes distinction, “readerly” versus “writerly” texts.
–
I think I have to shift the terms of my thinking to focus upon that phenomenon of current performance that intends, at least, to play itself free of referentiality–or a referentiality that excludes self-referentiality. One of the questions here, of course, focuses upon the issue of whether or not when Marina Abromovitch “performs herself”. Does her performance constitute a character that, while it sustains direct self-reference, still functions as an aesthetically generated “figure”. The same question, of course, relates to many performance artists.
Consider this sense of biology from The Problemes of Aristotle,
a well-used Elizabethan medical guide that emphasizes male procreativity,
sub-ordinating the role of the female:
The seede [of the male] is the efficient beginning of the childe, as the builder is the efficient cause of the house, and therefore is not the materiall cause of the childe….The seedes [ie both male and female] are shut and kept in the wombe: but the seede of the man doth dispose and prepare the seede of the woman to receive the forme, perfection, or soule, the which being done, it is converted into humiditie, and is fumed and breathed out by the pores of the matrix, which is manifest, bicause onely the flowers [ie the menses] of the woman are the material cuase of the young one.
_____
Nay, but this dotage of our general’s
O’erflows the measure: those his goodly eyes,
That o’er the files and musters of the war
Have glow’d like plated Mars, now bend, now turn,
The office and devotion of their view
Upon a tawny front: his captain’s heart,
Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst
The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper,
And is become the bellows and the fan
To cool a gipsy’s lust….
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra. I.i.1-10
_____
When summer swims off, mild and pale, they have already sucked up love like sponges, and they’ve turned back into animals, childish and wicked, with fat bellies and dripping breasts, completely shapeless, and with wet, clinging arms like slimy squids. And their bodies disintegrate, and are sick unto death. And with a ghastly outcry, as if a new world were on the way, they give birth to a small piece of fruit. They spit out in torment what once they had sucked up in lust
Bertolt Brecht, Baal.
_____
Do you have a prayer book in your kerchief?
Do you have golden tresses down to your shoulders?
Do you lower your eyes quickly down to your apron?
Do you hold onto your mother’s skirts?
. . .
It is no good; were my arms as long
As pine branches or spruce limbs–
I know I could not hold her far enough away
To set her down from me unsoiled and pure.
Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt.
_____
I wanted to create that pure woman in the form in which I saw her awakening on Resurrection Day. Not astonished at anything new or unfamiliar or unimagined, but filled with a sacred joy as she discovers herself again–unchanged–she, the woman of the earth–in the higher, freer, happier regions–after the long dreamless sleep of death.
Henrik Ibsen, When We Dead Awaken.
_____
her body was all wrong, the peacock’s claws. Yes, even at that early stage, definitely all wrong. Poppata, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, ankles all fat nodules, wobbly, mammose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbubbubbub, a real button-bursting Weib, ripe. Then, perched aloft this porpoise prism, the loveliest little pale firm cameo of a birdface he ever clapped his blazing blue eyes on. By God he often thought she was the living spit of Madonna Lucrezia del Fede.
Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women.
The idea of writing as a project informs Poulet’s criticism, the concept that each text operates as one in a series of mediations of reality that, as they accrue, produce an essential strategy of accommodating the world. Poulet conceives that strategy as an essential dynamism.
Consider, for example:
…for Hugo the self is found amongst an engulfing reality. The Hugolian being comes suddenly to consciousness when the formidable mass of things breaks over him and feels everywhere its moving and multiple contact….suddenly the object is no longer an object, and the spectacle is no longer a spectacle. How can one describe this situation in which a human being appears all at once to himself, not in the sanctuary of his consciousness, not in a solitary thought that assures him of his sole existence, but in so total an envelopment and penetration by things that he cannot detach himself from the, cannot distinguish himself from them, cannot abstract himself from them? He is, but he is in things. He is athwart things, and things are athwart him. He is, but like a wrestler so tightly entwined with his adversary that the same heat and the same lock seem to animate both of them. [Interior Distance, p. 163.]
Or consider:
To love without ceasing is to be reborn without creasing; it is also `to die more than once.’ At each instant it seems that the whole of life is found again, but that it is also lost again. Time `pulls away the ladder behind us as soon as we reach a halting-place; nay it breaks under our feet, rung by rung…’ Musset’s existence would therefore appear to be doomed to being a series of systoles and diastoles, of dilations and contractions, if the absolute character of each one of these deaths and rebirths did not furnish an unseen hope. For at this point we touch on something than which there is nothing more essential for Musset, something to which he returned with the greatest insistence in his writings, and yet without ever being able to explain himself fully, since, to tell the truth, at this point one perhaps leaves the domain of the explicable.
Or, for example:
What the Mallarmean poem proposes to us…is at the same time a sacrifice and an identification. By `his death as so and so’, one arrives at being nothing other than this general being in whom the human desire is realized and typified. One becomes apt at recognizing, no longer outside of oneself but within oneself, him whose figure first outlined itself, unreal and remote, at a distance, beyond the void, in some mythical place. That doubt is abolished, that void is filled. One becomes the place in which the spiritual universe is attested and incarnated. Man, then, his authentic terrestrial sojourn, exchange a reciprocity of proofs….And so the Mallarmean poem can exist only in this `reciprocity.’ It furnishes the reader with a text which has meaning and even existence only if the reader projects his own thought into it. There is no Mallarmean poem except from the moment when there is no longer on one side the poem, and on the other a thought, with, between the two `the vacant space facing the stage.’ It is necessary that there should no longer be anything other that the one self same place, that in which one sesame being sees himself and thinks himself, in which he recognizes himself in a spectacle which is none other than the `spectacle of Self.'[Ibid., 283.]
While Poulet’s conceptualizations of the essential dynamic that drives a writer’s work are reductive, they base themselves upon a careful, detailed reading of an oeuvre that discovers this dynamic in recurrent manifestations and variations of certain images in a relational structure.
What do I find attractive in this method of reading?
First of all, it demands a slow, careful processing of a series of texts, an insightful, penetrating reading that sees the text as a rich resource to be mined. To balance the notion of penetrating the text, the process provides the illusion of one’s imagination being assimilated into the text, of opening one’s consciousness to an other, and becoming available to that other. That paradoxical appropriation of the text and assimilation by the text constitutes what Bachelard calls transsubjectivity. The process requires a slow, progressive building of an image of consciousness as reading and re-reading familiarizes you with the key images and relational dynamics of the oeuvre. The demand to see a writer’s total work as a whole requires a painstaking study of many texts and the kind of satisfaction that only a comprehensive project can bring. In other words, the interpretative project brings the pleasures of reading, the pleasures of playing with words and the virtual worlds of consciousness they establish.
The method seems to be both responsive to the text and responsible to the text.
The phenomenological reading focuses upon the text as the material of one’s immediate experience; and while one internalizes the dynamics of the text, the text as external object directs that process of incorporation. One submits to the energy of the text. As one deals with the text as a phenomenon, this method provides the satisfaction of having encountered and, in some sense, encompassed that phenomenon. While the experience of reading and study remains a private event or series of events, this critical strategy gives one the sense that you have actually engaged yourself with another consciousness, that the body of texts has allowed a transaction between the subjectivity of the writer and the subjectivity of the reader. The process of spatializing an author’s oeuvre, of perceiving the individual text as a manifestation and variation of an essential dynamic gives one the illusion of comprehending the work. As well, because the interior space that reading creates is not finite, continued re-reading expands and deepens the space in which the text plays.
The phenomenlogical readings of Georges Poulet and others depend upon a modernist notion of the subject, the sense of the unique, self-reflexive individual whose self-conscious mediations of the world constitute the primary reality, the reality of consciousness. While Poulet does not negate the presence of culture as the basis of certain forms of thinking and conventions of expression, his notion of the writer as self-reflexive subject provides an image of a transcendent subject that eludes the specific space and time of its historical origin. The virtual reality of the writer’s interiority, in which the reified objective reality plays in an ambient field, may be informed by culturally specific objective presences, but this temporal specificity loses its authority in the process of reification.
In Poulet’s sense of language the individual writer infuses language with an idiosyncratic variation and a syntax (or relational structure of images) that becomes a cultural artifact. The text is not merely the manipulation of a given vocabulary within a grammar provided by culture.
Looking back at the analyses of difficult texts performed by people such as Georges Poulet, Jean Richard, Jean Starobinski, and Roland Barthes, I can easily recognize the significance of the image of the author as a self-reflexive subject and the image of the text itself as a form of consciousness.
Phenomenological criticism assumed that the language of a text forges an idiosyncratic mediation of objective reality, that the text as logos is both this mediation and the constituting field of that reification of reality. In Poulet’s defense of phenomenological criticism in The Structuralist Controversy, he introduces a material image of reading, based upon the physical sensation of holding the actual book. He describes a situation that is essentially private in which the consciousness of the reader opens itself to the dynamics in which the texts produces or reproduces images in the reader’s consciousness.
The text functions as a complex body of stimuli that, in the process of “transsubjectivity”1 creates an interior space in the consciousness of the reader that approximates the field of consciousness in the writing itself took place. The spatial organization of this interior field determines the consciousness of the reader at the moment of reading.
Every thought…is a thought of something. It is turned invincibly toward the somewhere else, toward the outside. Issuing from itself, it appears to leap over a void, meet certain obstacles, explore certain surfaces, and envelop or invade certain objects. It describes and recounts to itself all these objects, and these accounts or these descriptions constitute the inexhaustible objective aspect of literature. But every thought is also simply a thought. It is that which exists in itself, isolatedly, mentally. Whatever it objects may be, thought can never place them, think them, except in the interior of itself. If it is necessary for it go searching through the exterior spaces for one or another of the thousands of objects which offer themselves there, it is no less necessary for it to constitute itself as a sort of interior depth which the images from outside come to populate. My thought is a space in which my thoughts take place, in which they take their place. I watch them arrive, pass on, wander aside or sink out sight, and I distinguish them at spatial and temporal distances which never cease to vary. My thought it not made of solely of my thoughts; it is made up also, even more perhaps of all the interior distance which separates me from, or draws me closer to, that which I am able to think. For all that I think is in myself who think it. The distance is not merely an interval; it is an ambient milieu, a field of union. Thus there is revealed another aspect of literature, a hidden aspect, the invisible face of the moon. Objectively, literature is made up of formal works the contours of which stand out with a greater or lesser clarity. They are poem, maxims, and novels, plays. Subjectively literature is not at all formal. It is the reality of a thought that is always particular, always anterior and posterior to any object; one which, across and beyond all objects, ceaselessly reveals the strange and natural impossibilityit finds itself, of every having an objective existence. The studies which follow…seek to bring to light that interior vacancy in which the world is redisposed.2
The first three sentences of Poulet’s introduction to The Interior Distance describes what one would call the literal function of a text, the references to an “objective reality,” what, in performance, operates as mimes. This function constitutes thinking, the turning of a mind toward objects that are external to it. Notice the verbs Poulet employs to characterize this process: meet, explore, envelop or invade.
Thought, in this sense, is a confrontation with the external world, an issuing forth from the center point of a perceiving subject toward the objects it apprehends. At the same time, however, the process of thinking constitutes a movement into an interior space or, in Poulet’s words, an interior depth. In the experience of meeting, exploring, enveloping or invading the objective world, a writer’s thought constitutes itself as interiority into which the mediated images of these objectivities are assimilated. Notice that Poulet’s idea of consciousness depends upon the presence of a spatial figure–an interior distance that separates the I from the individual thought or draws him/her toward it.
My interpretation of Poulet identifies this individual thought as a mediated image of an object perceived initially as external to consciousness. The thought is reified in the writer’s consciousness in the process of writing and the dynamics of its relationship to the subjectivity of the writer determines any distance between it and the I of the writer, and the constellation formed by it and other reified images constructs the interior space. The reader reincorporates this space in his/her own interiority. This space, in which the consciousness of the reader plays (and, thereby, constitutes itself) is produced by the reader’s incorporation of the dynamics of the text. In Poulet’s words, he “seek[s] to bring to light that interior vacancy in which the world is redisposed.”
The critical task is the revelation of the unique structure of consciousness (state of mind is too static a figure) produced by the writer’s mediation of his/her perception of the world.
1 Gaston Bachelard, “Introduction,” The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964 [originally published in France as La poˇeatique de l’espace in 1959), p. xv.
2. Georges Poulet, The Interior Distance, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959 [originally published as La distance intˇearieure in France in 1952, as the second volume of Etudes sur le temps humain]) p. vii-viii.
–
WAR OF THE WORLDS
(original script) –
MERC ANNOUNCER: The Columbia Broadcasting System and it’s affliated stations pesent Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in a
radio play by Howard Koch suggested by the H.G. Wells Novel “The War of the Worlds.”
(MUSIC: MERCURY THEATRE MUSICAL THEME)
MERC ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen: the director of the Mercury Theatre and star of these broadcasts, Orson Welles . . .
ORSON WELLES: We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater
than man’s and yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and
multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacence people went to and fro over the earth about their little affairs, serene in the
assurance of their dominion over this small spinning fragment of solar driftwood which by
chance or design man has inherited out of the dark mystery of Time and Space. Yet across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crossley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios.
ANNOUNCER: . . .for the next twenty-four hours not much change in
temperature. A slight atmospheric disturbance of undetermined origin is
reported over Nova Scotia, causing a low pressure area to move down
rather rapidly over the northeastern states, bringing a forecast of
rain, accompanied by winds of light gale force. Maximum temperature 66;
minimum 48. This weather report comes to you from the Government
Weather Bureau. . . . We now take you to the Meridian Room in the Hotel
Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the
music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.
(MUSIC: SPANISH THEME SONG [A TANGO] . . . FADES)
ANNOUNCER THREE: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. From the Meridian
Room in the Park Plaza in New York City, we bring you the music of
Ramon Raquello and his orchestra. With a touch of the Spanish. Ramon
Raquello leads off with “La Cumparsita.”
(PIECE STARTS PLAYING)
ANNOUNCER TWO: Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance
music to bring you a special bulletin from the Intercontinental Radio
News. At twenty minutes before eight, central time, Professor Farrell
of the Mount Jennings Observatory, Chicago, Illinois, reports observing2
several explosions of incandescent gas, occurring at regular intervals
on the planet Mars. The spectroscope indicates the gas to be hydrogen
and moving towards the earth with enormous velocity. Professor Pierson
of the Observatory at Princeton confirms Farrell’s observation, and
describes the phenomenon as (quote) like a jet of blue flame shot from
a gun (unquote). We now return you to the music of Ramon Raquello,
playing for you in the Meridian Room of the Park Plaza Hotel, situated
in downtown New York.
(MUSIC PLAYS FOR A FEW MOMENTS UNTIL PIECE ENDS . . . SOUND OF
APPLAUSE)
ANNOUNCER THREE: Now a tune that never loses favor, the ever-popular
“Star Dust.” Ramon Raquello and his orchestra . . .
(MUSIC)
ANNOUNCER TWO: Ladies and gentlemen, following on the news given in our
bulletin a moment ago, the Government Meteorological Bureau has
requested the large observatories of the country to keep an
astronomical watch on any further disturbances occuring on the planet
Mars. Due to the unusual nature of this occurance, we have arranged an
interview with noted astronomer. Professor Pierson, who will give us
his views on the event. in a few moments we will take you to the
Princeton Observatory at Princeton, New Jersey. We return you until
then to the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.
(MUSIC . . .)
ANNOUNCER TWO: We are now ready to take you to the Princeton
Observatory at Princeton where Carl Phillips, or commentator, will
interview Professor Richard Pierson, famous astronomer. We take you now
to Princeton, New Jersey.
(ECHO CHAMBER. FX: TICK-TOCK SOUND)
PHILLIPS: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Carl Phillips,
speaking to you from the observatory at Princeton. I am standing in a
large semi-circular room, pitch black except for an oblong split in the
ceiling. Through this opening i can see a sprinkling of stars that cast
a kind of frosty glow over the intricate mechanism of the huge
telescope. The ticking sound you hear is the vibration of the
clockwork. Professor Pierson stands directly above me on a small
platform, peering through a giant lens. I ask you to be patient, ladies
and gentlemen, during any delay that may arise during our interview.
Besides his ceaseless watch of the heavens, Professor Pierson may be
interrupted by telephone or other communications. During this period he
is in constant touch with the astronomical centers of the world . . .
Professor, may I begin our questions?
PIERSON: At any time, Mr. Phillips.
PHILLIPS: Professor, would you please tell our radio audience exactly
what you see as you observe the planet Mars through your telescope?
PIERSON: Nothing unusual at the moment, Mr. Phillips. A red disk
swimming in a blue sea. Transverse stripes across the disk. Quite
distinct now because Mars happens to be the point nearest the earth . .
. in opposition, as we call it.3
PHILLIPS: In your opinion, what do these transverse stripes signify,
Professor Pierson?
PIERSON: Not canals, I can assure you, Mr. Phillips, although that’s
the popular conjecture of those who imagine Mars to be inhabited. From
a scientific viewpoint the stripes are merely the result of atmospheric
conditions peculiar to the planet.
PHILLIPS: Then you’re quite convinced as a scientist that living
intelligence as we know it does not exist on Mars?
PIERSON: I’d say the chances against it are a thousand to one.
PHILLIPS: And yet how do you account for those gas eruptions occuring
on the surface of the planet at regular intervals?
PIERSON: Mr. Phillips, I cannot account for it.
PHILLIPS: By the way, Professor, for the benefit of our listeners, how
far is Mars from earth?
PIERSON: Approximately forty million miles.
PHILLIPS: Well, that seems a safe enough distance.
(OFF MIKE) Thank you.
(PAUSE)
PHILLIPS: Just a moment, ladies and gentlemen, someone has just handed
Professor Pierson a message. While he reads it, let me remind you that
we are speaking to you from the observatory in Princeton, New Jersey,
where we are interviewing the world- famous astronomer, Professor
Pierson . . . One moment, please. Professor Pierson has passed me a
message which he has just received . . . Professor, may I read the
message to the listening audience?
PIERSON: Certainly, Mr. Phillips
PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, I shall read you a wire addressed to
Professor Pierson from Dr. Gray of the National History Museum, New
York. “9:15 P.M. eastern standard time. Seismograph registered shock of
almost earthquake intensity occuring within a radius of twenty miles of
Princeton. Please investigate. Signed, Lloyd Gray, Chief of
Astronomical Division” . . . Professor Pierson, could this occurrence
possibly have something to do with the disturbances observed on the
planet Mars?
PIERSON: Hardly, Mr. Phillips. This is probably a meteorite of unusual
size and its arrival at this particular time is merely a coincidence.
However, we shall conduct a search, as soon as daylight permits.
PHILLIPS: Thank you, Professor. Ladies and gentlemen, for the past ten
minutes we’ve been speaking to you from the observatory at Princeton,
bringing you a special interview with Professor Pierson, noted
astronomer. This is Carl Phillips speaking. We are returning you now to
our New York studio.4
(FADE IN PIANO PLAYING)
ANNOUNCER TWO: Ladies and gentlemen, here is the latest bulletin from
the Intercontinental Radio News. Toronto, Canada: Professor Morse of
McGill University reports observing a total of three explosions on the
planet Mars, between the hours of 7:45 P.M. and 9:20 P.M., eastern
standard time. This confirms earlier reports received from American
observatories. Now, nearer home, comes a special announcement from
Trenton, New Jersey. It is reported that at 8:50 P.M. a huge, flaming
object, believed to be a meteorite, fell on a farm in the neighborhood
of Grovers Mill, New Jersey, twenty-two miles from Trenton.
The flash in the sky was visible within a radius of several hundred
miles and the noise of the impact was heard as far north as Elizabeth.
We have dispatched a special mobile unit to the scene, and will have
our commentator, Carl Phillips, give you a word desription as soon as
he can reach there from Princeton. In the meantime, we take you to the
Hotel Martinet in Brooklyn, where Bobby Millette and his orchestra are
offering a program of dance music.
(SWING BAND FOR TWENTY SECONDS . . . THEN CUT)
ANNOUNCER TWO: We take you now to Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
(CROWD NOISES . . . POLICE SIRENS)
PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, this is Carl Phillips again, at the
Wilmuth farm, Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Professor Pierson and myself
made the eleven miles from Princeton in ten minutes. Well, I . . . I
hardly know where to begin, to paint for you a word picture of the
strange scene before my eyes, like something out of a modern “Arabian
Nights.” Well, I just got here. I haven’t had a chance to look around
yet. I guess that’s it. Yes, I guess that’s the . . . thing, directly
in front of me, half buried in a vast pit. Must have struck with
terrific force. The ground is covered with splinters of a tree it must
have struck on its way down. What I can see of the . . . object itself
doesn’t look very much like a meteor, at least not the meteors I’ve
seen. It looks more like a huge cylinder. It has a diameter of . . .
what would you say, Professor Pierson?
PIERSON (OFF-MIKE): What’s that?
PHILLIPS: What would you say . . . what is the diameter?
PIERSON: About thirty yards.
PHILLIPS: About thirty yards . . . The metal on the sheath is . . .
well, I’ve never seen anything like it. The color is sort of yellowishwhite. Curious spectators now are pressing close to the object in spite
of the efforts of the police to keep them back. They’re getting in
front of my line of vision. Would you mind standing to one side,
please?
POLICEMAN: One side, there, one side.
PHILLIPS: While the policemen are pushing the crowd back, here’s Mr.
Wilmuth, owner of the farm here. He may have some interesting facts to
add . . . Mr. Wilmuth, would you please tell the radio audience as much
as you remember of this rather unusual visitor that dropped in your5
backyard? Step closer, please. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Mr.
Wilmuth.
WILMUTH: Well, I was listenin’ to the radio.
PHILLIPS: Closer and louder please.
WILMUTH: Pardon me?!
PHILLIPS: Louder, please, and closer.
WILMUTH: Yes, sir — I was listening to the radio and kinda drowsin’.
That Professor fellow was talkin’ about Mars, so I was half dozin’ and
half . . .
PHILLIPS: Yes, yes, Mr. Wilmuth. Then what happened?
WILMUTH: As I was sayin’, I was listenin’ to the radio kinda halfways .
. .
PHILLIPS: Yes, Mr. Wilmuth, and then you saw something?
WILMUTH: Not first off. I heard something.
PHILLIPS: And what did you hear?
WILMUTH: A hissing sound. Like this: SSSSSSS . . . kinda like a fourt’
of July rocket.
PHILLIPS: Yes, then what?
WILMUTH: Turned my head out the window and would have swore I was to
sleep and dreamin.’
PHILLIPS: Then what?
WILMUTH: I seen a kinda greenish streak and then zingo! Somethin’
smacked the ground. Knocked me clear out of my chair!
PHILLIPS: Well, were you frightened, Mr. Wilmuth?
WILMUTH: Well, I — I ain’t quite sure. I reckon I — I was kinda
riled.
PHILLIPS: Thank you, Mr. Wilmuth. Thank you.
WILMUTH: Want me to tell you some more?
PHILLIPS: No . . . That’s quite all right, that’s plenty.
PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve just heard Mr. Wilmuth, owner of
the farm where this thing has fallen. I wish I could convey the
atmosphere . . . the background of this . . . fantastic scene. Hundreds
of cars are parked in a field in back of us. Police are trying to rope
off the roadway leading to the farm. But it’s no use. They’re breaking
right through. Cars’ headlights throw an enormous spot on the pit where
the object’s half buried. Some of the more daring souls are now6
venturing near the edge. Their silhouettes stand out against the metal
sheen.
(FAINT HUMMING SOUND)
One man wants to touch the thing . . . he’s having an argument with a
policeman. The policeman wins. . . . Now, ladies and gentlemen, there’s
something I haven’t mentioned in all this excitement, but now it’s
becoming more distinct. Perhaps you’ve caught it already on your radio.
Listen:
(LONG PAUSE) . . .
Do you hear it? It’s a curious humming sound that seems to come from
inside the object. I’ll move the microphone nearer. (PAUSE) Now we’re
not more then twenty-five feet away. Can you hear it now? Oh, Professor
Pierson!
PIERSON: Yes, Mr. Phillips?
PHILLIPS: Can you tell us the meaning of that scraping noise inside the
thing?
PIERSON: Possibly the unequal cooling of its surface.
PHILLIPS: I see, do you still think it’s a meteor, Professor?
PIERSON: I don’t know what to think. The metal casing is definitely
extraterrestrial . . . not found on this earth. Friction with the
earth’s atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is
smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape.
PHILLIPS: Just a minute! Something’s happening! Ladies and gentlemen,
this is terrific! This end of the thing is beginning to flake off! The
top is beginning to rotate like a screw! The thing must be hollow!
VOICES: She’s movin’! Look, the darn thing’s unscrewing! Keep back,
there! Keep back, I tell you! Maybe there’s men in it trying to escape!
It’s red hot, they’ll burn to a cinder! Keep back there. Keep those
idiots back!
(SUDDENLY THE CLANKING SOUND OF A HUGE PIECE OF FALLING METAL)
VOICES: She’s off! The top’s loose! Look out there! Stand back!
PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing I
have ever witnessed . . . Wait a minute! Someone’s crawling out of the
hollow top. Someone or . . . something. I can see peering out of that
black hole two luminous disks . . are they eyes? It might be a face. It
might be . . .
(SHOUT OF AWE FROM THE CROWD)
PHILLIPS: Good heavens, something’s wriggling out of the shadow like a
gray snake. Now it’s another one, and another. They look like tentacles
to me. There, I can see the thing’s body. It’s large, large as a bear
and it glistens like wet leather. But that face, it . . . Ladies and
gentlemen, it’s indescribable. I can hardly force myself to keep
looking at it. The eyes are black and gleam like a serpent. The mouth7
is V-shaped with saliva dripping from its rimless lips that seem to
quiver and pulsate. The monster or whatever it is can hardly move. It
seems weighed down by . . . possibly gravity or something. The thing’s
raising up. The crowd falls back now. They’ve seen plenty. This is the
most extraordinary experience. I can’t find words . . . I’ll pull this
microphone with me as I talk. I’ll haveto stop the description until I
can take a new position. Hold on, will you please, I’ll be right back
in a minute.
(FADE INTO PIANO)
ANNOUNCER: We are bringing you an eyewitness account of what’s
happening on the Wilmuth farm, Grovers mill, New Jersey. (MORE PIANO)
We now return you to Carl Phillips at Grovers Mill.
PHILLIPS: Ladies and gentlemen (Am I on?). Ladies and gentlemen, here I
am, back of a stone wall that adjoins Mr. Wilmuth’s garden. From here I
get a sweep of the whole scene. I’ll give you every detail as long as I
can talk. As long as I can see. More state police have arrived They’re
drawing up a cordon in front of the pit, about thirty of them. No need
to push the crowd back now. They’re willing to keep their distance. The
captain is conferring with someone. We can’t quite see who. Oh yes, I
believe it’s Professor Pierson. Yes, it is. Now they’ve parted. The
Professor moves around one side, studying the object, while the captain
and two policemen advance with something in their hands. I can see it
now. It’s a white handkerchief tied to a pole . . . a flag of truce. If
those creatures know what that means . . . what anything means!. . .
Wait! Something’s happening!
(HISSING SOUND FOLLOWED BY A HUMMING THAT INCREASES IN INTENSITY)
PHILLIPS: A humped shape is rising out of the pit. I can make out a
small beam of light against a mirror. What’s that? There’s a jet of
flame springing from the mirror, and it leaps right at the advancing
men. It strikes them head on! Good Lord, they’re turning into flame!
(SCREAMS AND UNEARTHLY SHRIEKS)
PHILLIPS: Now the whole field’s caught fire. (EXPLOSION) The woods . .
. the barns . . . the gas tanks of automobiles . . . it’s spreading
everywhere. It’s coming this way. About twenty yards to my right . . .
(DEAD SILENCE)
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, due to circumstances beyond our
control, we are unable to continue the broadcast from Grovers Mill.8
Evidently there’s some difficulty with our field transmission. However,
we will return to that point at the earliest opportunity. In the
meantime, we have a late bulletin from San Diego, California. Professor
Indellkoffer, speaking at a dinner of the California Astronomical
Society, expressed the opinion that the explosions on Mars are
undoubtedly nothing more than severe volcanic disturbances on the
surface of the planet. We now continue with our piano interlude.
(PIANO . . . THEN CUT)
ANNOUNCER TWO: Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been handed a message
that came in from Grovers Mill by telephone. Just a moment. At least
forty people, including six state troopers lie dead in a field east of
the village of Grovers Mill, their bodies burned and distorted beyond
all possible recognition. The next voice you hear will be that of
Brigadier General Montgomery Smith, commander of the state militia at
Trenton, New Jersey.
SMITH: I have been requested by the governor of New Jersey to place the
counties of Mercer and Middlesex as far west as Princeton, and east to
Jamesburg, under martial law. No one will be permitted to enter this
area except by special pass issued by state or military authorities.
Four companies of state militia are proceeding from Trenton to Grovers
Mill, and will aid in the evacuation of homes within the range of
military operations. Thank you.
ANNOUNCER TWO: You have just been listening to General Montgomery Smith
commanding the state militia at Trenton. In the meantime, further
details of the catastrophe at Grovers Mill are coming in. The strange
creatures after unleashing their deadly assault, crawled back into
their pit and made no attempt to prevent the efforts of the firemen to
recover the bodies and extinguish the fire. Combined fire departments
of Mercer County are fighting the flames which menace the entire
countryside. We have been unable to establish any contact with our
mobile unit at Grovers Mill, but we hope to be able to return you there
at the earliest possible moment. In the meantime we take you — just
one moment please.
(LONG PAUSE)
(WHISPER) Ladies and gentlemen, I have just been informed that we have
finally established communication with an eyewitness of the tragedy.
Professor Pierson has been located at a farmhouse near Grovers Mill
where he has established an emergency observation post. As a scientist,
he will give you his explanation of the calamity. The next voice you
hear will be that of Professor Pierson, brought to you by direct wire.
Professor Pierson.
(FEEDBACK. THEN FILTERED VOICE)
PIERSON: Of the creatures in the rocket cylinder at Grovers Mill, I can
give you no authoritative information — either as to their nature,
their origin, or their purposes here on earth Of their destructive
instrument I might venture some conjectural explanation. For want of a
better term, I shall refer to the mysterious weapon as a heat ray. It’s
all too evident that these creatures have scientific knowledge far in
advance of our own. It is my guess that in some way they are able to
generate an intense heat in a chamber of practically absolute9
nonconductivity. This intense heat they project in a parallel beam
against any object they choose, by means of a polished parabolic mirror
of unknown composition, much as the mirror of a lighthouse projects a
beam of light. That is my conjecture of the origin of the heat ray…
ANNOUNCER TWO: Thank you, Professor Pierson. Ladies and gentlemen, here
is a bulletin from Trenton. It is a brief statement informing us that
the charred body of Carl Phillips has been identified in a Trenton
hospital. Now here’s another bulletin from Washington, D.C. Office of
the director of the National Red Cross reports ten units of Red Cross
emergency workers have been assigned to the headquarters of the state
militia stationed outside Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Here’s a bulletin
from state police, Princeton Junction: The fires at Grovers Mill and
vicinity are now under control. Scouts report all quiet in the pit, and
no sign of life appearing from the mouth of the cylinder . . . And now,
ladies and gentlemen, we have a special statement from Mr. Harry
McDonald, vice- president in charge of operations.
MC DONALD: We have received a request from the militia at Trenton to
place at their disposal our entire broadcasting facilities. In view of
the gravity of the situation, and believing that radio has a
responsibility to serve in the public interest at all times, we are
turning over our facilities to the state militia at Trenton.
ANNOUNCER TWO: We take you now to the field headquarters of the state
militia near Grovers Mill, New Jersey.
CAPTAIN: This is Captain Lansing of the signal corps, attatched to the
state militia now engaged in military operations in the vicinity of
Grovers Mill. Situation arising from the reported presence of certain
individuals of unidentified nature is now under complete control. The
cylindrical object which lies in a pit directly below our position is
surrounded on all sides by eight battalions of infantry. Without heavy
field pieces, but adequately armed with rifles and machine guns. All
cause for alarm, if such cause ever existed, is now entirely
unjustified. The things, whatever they are, do not even venture to poke
their heads above the pit. I can see their hiding place plainly in the
glare of the searchlights here. With all their reported resources,
these creatures can scarcely stand up against heavy machine-gun fire
Anyway, it’s an interesting outing for the troops. I can make out their
khaki uniforms, crossing back and forth in front of the lights. It
looks almost like a real war. There appears to be some slight smoke in
the woods bordering the Millstone River. Probably fire started by
campers. Well, we ought to see some action soon. One of the companies
is deploying on the left flank. An quick thrust and it will all be
over. Now wait a minute! I see something on top of the cylinder. No,
it’s nothing but a shadow. Now the troops are on the edge of the
Wilmuth farm. Seven thousand armed men closing in on an old metal tube.
Wait, that wasn’t a shadow! It’s something moving . . . solid metal . .
. kind of shieldlike affair rising up out of the cylinder . . . It’s
going higher and higher. Why, it’s standing on legs . . . actually
rearing up on a sort of metal framework. Now it’s reaching above the
trees and the searchlights are on it. Hold on!
ANNOUNCER: Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make.
Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the
evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those10
strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the
vanguard of an invading army from the planet Mars. The battle which
took place tonight at Grovers Mill has ended in one of the most
startling defeats ever suffered by any army in modern times; seven
thousand men armed with rifles and machine guns pitted against a single
fighting machine of the invaders from Mars. One hundred and twenty
known survivors. The rest strewn over the battle area from Grovers Mill
to Plainsboro, crushed and trampled to death under the metal feet of
the monster, or burned to cinders by its heat ray. The monster is now
in control of the middle section of New Jersey and has effectively cut
the state through its center. Communication lines are down from
Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean. Railroad tracks are torn and
service from New York to Philadelphia discontinued except routing some
of the trains through Allentown and Phoenixville. Highways to the
north, south, and west are clogged with frantic human traffic. Police
and army reserves are unable to control the mad flight. By morning the
fugitives will have swelled Philadelphia, Camden, and Trenton, it is
estimated, to twice their normal population. At this time martial law
prevails throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania. We take you
now to Washington for a special broadcast on the National Emergency . .
. the Secretary of the Interior . . .
SECRETARY: Citizens of the nation: I shall not try to conceal the
gravity of the situation that confronts the country, nor the concern of
your government in protecting the lives and property of its people.
However, I wish to impress upon you — private citizens and public
officials, all of you — the urgent need of calm and resourceful
action. Fortunately, this formidable enemy is still confined to a
comparatively small area, and we may place our faith in the military
forces to keep them there. In the meantime placing our faith in God we
must continue the performance of our duties each and every one of us,
so that we may confront this destructive adversary with a nation
united, courageous, and consecrated to the preservation of human
supremacy on this earth. I thank you.
ANNOUNCER: You have just heard the secretary of the Interior speaking
from Washington. Bulletins too numerous to read are piling up in the
studio here. We are informed the central portion of New Jersey is
blacked out from radio communication due to the effect of the heat ray
upon power lines and electrical equipment. Here is a special bulletin
from New York. Cables received from English, French, German scientific
bodies offering assistance. Astronomers report continued gas outbursts
at regular intervals on planet Mars. Majority voice opinion that enemy
will be reinforced by additional rocket machines. Attempts made to
locate Professor Pierson of Princeton, who has observed Martians at
close range. It is feared he was lost in recent battle. Langham field,
Virginia: Scouting planes report three Martian machines visible above
treetops, moving north towards Somerville with population fleeing ahead
of them. Heat ray not in use; although advancing at express-train
speed, invaders pick their way carefully. They seem to be making
conscious effort to avoid destruction of cities and countryside.
However, they stop to uproot power lines, bridges, and railroad tracks.
Their apparent objective is to crush resistance, paralyze
communication, and disorganize human society.
Here is a bulletin from Basking Ridge, New Jersey: Coon hunters have
stumbled on a second cylinder similar to the first embedded in the
great swamp twenty miles south of Morristown. Army fieldpieces are
proceeding from Newark to blow up second invading unit before cylinder11
can be opened and the fighting machine rigged. They are taking up
position in the — foothills of Watchung Mountains. Another bulletin
from Langham Field, Virginia: Scouting planes report enemy machines,
now three in number, increasing speed northward kicking over houses and
trees in their evident haste to form a conjunction with their allies
south of Morristown. Machines also sighted by telephone operator east
of Middlesex within ten miles of Plainfield. Here’s a bulletin from
Winston Field, Long Island: Fleet of army bombers carrying heavy
explosives flying north in pursuit of enemy. Scouting planes act as
guides. They keep speeding enemy in sight. Just a moment please. Ladies
and gentlemen, we’ve run special wires to the artillery line in
adjacent villages to give you direct reports in the zone of the
advancing enemy. First we take you to the battery of the 22nd Field
Artillery, located in the Watchtung Mountains.
OFFICER: Range, thirty-two meters.
GUNNER: Thirty-two meters.
OFFICER: Projection, thirty-nine degrees.
GUNNER: Thirty-nine degrees.
OFFICER: Fire! (BOOM OF HEAVY GUN . . . PAUSE)
OBSERVER: One hundred and forty yards to the right, sir.
OFFICER: Shift range . . . thirty-one meters.
GUNNER: Thirty-one meters
OFFICER: Projection . . . thirty-seven degrees.
GUNNER: Thirty-seven degrees.
OFFICER: Fire! (BOOM OF HEAVY GUN . . . PAUSE)
OBSERVER: A hit, sir! We got the tripod of one of them. They’ve
stopped. The others are trying to repair it.
OFFICER: Quick, get the range! Shift thirty meters.
GUNNER: Thirty meters.
OFFICER: Projection . . . twenty-seven degrees.
GUNNER: Twenty-seven degrees.
OFFICER: Fire! (BOOM OF HEAVY GUN . . . PAUSE)
OBSERVER: Can’t see the shell land, sir. They’re letting off a smoke.
OFFICER: What is it?
OBSERVER: A black smoke, sir. Moving this way. Lying close to the
ground. It’s moving fast.12
OFFICER: Put on gas masks. (PAUSE. VOICES NOW MUFFLED) Get ready to
fire. Shift twenty-four meters.
GUNNER: Twenty-four meters.
OFFICER: Projection, twenty-four degrees.
GUNNER: Twenty-four degrees.
OFFICER: Fire! (BOOM)
OBSERVER: Still can’t see, sir. The smoke’s coming nearer.
OFFICER: Get the range. (COUGHS)
OBSERVER: Twenty-three meters. (COUGHS)
OFFICER: Twenty-three meters. (COUGHS)
GUNNER: Twenty-three meters(COUGHS)
OBSERVER: Projection, twenty-two degrees. (COUGHING)
OFFICER: Twenty-two degrees (FADE-IN COUGHING) (CUT TO SOUND OF
AIRPLANE MOTOR)
COMMANDER: Army bombing plane, V-8-43, off Bayonne, New Jersey,
Lieutenant Voght, commanding eight bombers. Reporting to Commander
Fairfax, Langham Field . . . This is Voght, reporting to Commander
Fairfax, Langham Field . . . Enemy tripod machines now in sight.
Reinforced by three machines from the Morristown cylinder . . . Six
altogether. One machine already crippled. Believed hit by shell from
army gun in Watchung Mountains. Guns now appear silent. A heavy black
fog hanging close to the earth . . . of extreme density, nature
unknown. No sign of heat ray. Enemy now turns east, crossing Passaic
River into the Jersey marshes. Another straddles the Pulaski Skyway.
Evident objective is New York City. They’re pushing down a high tension
power station. The machines are close together now, and we’re ready to
attack. Planes circling, ready to strike. A thousand yards and we’ll be
over the first — eight hundred yards . . . six hundred . . . four
hundred . . . two hundred . . . There they go! The giant arm raised . .
. (SOUND OF HEAT RAY) Green flash! They’re spraying us with flame! Two
thousand feet. Engines are giving out. No chance to release bombs. Only
one thing left . . . drop on them, plane and all. We’re diving on the
first one. Now the engine’s gone! Eight . . . (PLANE GOES DOWN)
OPERATOR ONE: This is Bayonne, New Jersey, calling Langham Field . . .
This is Bayonne, New Jersey, calling Langham Field . . . Come in,
please . . .
OPERATOR TWO: This is Langham Field . . . Go ahead . . .
OPERATOR ONE: Eight army bombers in engagement with enemy tripod
machines over Jersey flats. Engines incapacitated by heat ray. All
crashed. One enemy machine destroyed. Enemy now discharging heavy black
smoke in direction of –13
OPERATOR THREE: This is Newark, New Jersey . . . This is Newark, New
Jersey . . . Warning! Poisonous black smoke pouring in from Jersey
marshes. Reaches South street. Gas masks useless. Urge population to
move into open spaces . . .automobiles use Routes 7, 23, 24 . . . Avoid
congested areas. Smoke now spreading over Raymond Boulevard . . .
OPERATOR FOUR: 2 X 2 L . . . calling C Q . . . 2 X 2 L . . . calling C
Q . . . 2 X 2 L . . . calling 8 X 3 R . . . Come in, please . . .
OPERATOR FIVE: This is 8 X 3 R . . . coming back at 2 X 2 L.
OPERATOR FOUR: How’s reception? How’s reception? K, please (PAUSE)
Where are you, 8 X 3 R? What’s the matter? Where are you?
(BELLS RINGING OVER CITY GRADUALLY DIMINISHING)
NY ANNOUNCER: I’m speaking from the roof of the Broadcasting Building,
New York City. (PAUSE, AS IF HE ISN’T SURE HE’S ON THE AIR) I’m
speaking from the roof of the Broadcasting Building, New York City. The
bells you hear are ringing to warn the people to evacuate the city as
the Martians approach. Estimated in last two hours three million people
have moved out along the roads to the north, Hutchison River Parkway
still kept open for motor traffic. Avoid bridges to Long Island . . .
hopelessly jammed. All communication with Jersey shore closed ten
minutes ago. No more defenses. Our army wiped out . . . artillery, air
force, everything wiped out. This may be the last broadcast. We’ll stay
here to the end . . . People are holding service below us . . . in the
cathedral.
(VOICES SINGING HYMN)
Now I look down the harbor. All manner of boats, overloaded with
fleeing population, pulling out from docks.
(SOUND OF BOAT WHISTLES)
Streets are all jammed. Noise in crowds like New Year’s Eve in city.
Wait a minute . . . Enemy now in sight above the Palisades. Five —
five great machines. First one is crossing river. I can see it from
here, wading the Hudson like a man wading through a brook . . . A
bulletin’s handed me . . . Martian cylinders are falling all over the
country. One outside Buffalo, one in Chicago, St. Louis . . . seem to
be timed and spaced . . . Now the first machine reaches the shore. He
stands watching, looking over the city. His steel, cowlish head is even
with the skyscrapers. He waits for the others. They rise like a line of
new towers on the city’s west side . . . Now they’re lifting their
metal hands. This is the end now. Smoke comes out . . . black smoke,
drifting over the city. People in the streets see it now. They’re
running towards the East River . . . thousands of them, dropping in
like rats. Now the smoke’s spreading faster. It’s reached Times Square.
People trying to run away from it, but it’s no use. They’re falling
like flies. Now the smoke’s crossing Sixth Avenue . . . Fifth Avenue .
. . one hundred yards away . . . it’s fifty feet . . .
(BODY FALLS)14
OPERATOR FOUR: 2 X 2 L calling C Q . . . 2 X 2 L calling C Q . . . 2 X
2 L calling C Q . . . New York Isn’t there anyone on the air? Isn’t
there anyone on the air? Isn’t there anyone . . . 2 X 2 L —
MERC ANNOUNCER: You’re listening to a CBS presentation of Orson Welles
and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in an original dramatization of “The
War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells. The performance will continue after a
brief intermission. This is the Columbia . . . Broadcasting System
MUSIC
ANNOUNCER: “The War of the Worlds,” by H.G. Wells, starring Orson
Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air.
(MUSIC UP — DRAMATIC, LONELY THEME)
PIERSON: As I set down these notes on paper, I’m obsessed by the
thought that I may be the last living man on earth. I have been hiding
in this empty house near Grovers Mill — a small island of daylight cut
off by the black smoke from the rest of the world. All that happened
before the arrival of these monstrous creatures in the world now seems
part of another life. . . a life that has no continuity with the
present, furtive existence of the lonely derelict who pencils these
words on the back of some astornomical notes bearing the signature of
Richard Pierson. I look down at my blackened hands, my torn shoes, my
tattered clothes, and I try to connect them with a professor who lives
at Princeton, and who on the night of October 30, glimpsed through his
telescope an orange splash of light on a distant planet. My wife, my
colleagues, my students, my books, my observatory, my. . . my world. .
. where are they? Did they ever exist? Am I Richard Pierson? What day
is it? Do days exist without calendars? Does time pass when there are
no human hands left to wind the clocks? . . .In writing down my daily
life I tell myself I shall preserve human history between the dark
covers of this little book that was meant to record the movements of
the stars. . . But to write I must live, and to live, I must eat . . .
I find moldy bread in the kitchen, and an orange not too spoiled to
swallow. I keep watch at the window. From time to time I catch sight of
a Martian above the black smoke. The smoke still holds the house in its
black coil. . . but at length there is a hissing sound and suddenly I
see a Martian mounted on his machine, spraying the air with a jet of
steam, as if to dissipate the smoke. I watch in a corner as his huge
metal legs nearly brush against the house. Exhausted by terror, I fall
asleep. . .it’s morning. . .
(QUIETLY) Morning! Sun streams in the window. The black cloud of gas
has lifted, and the scorched meadows to the north look as though a
black snowstorm has passed over them. I venture from the house. I make
my way to a road. No traffic. Here and there a wrecked car, baggage
overturned, a blackened skeleton. I push on north. For some reason I
feel safer trailing these monsters than running away from them. And I
keep a careful watch. I have seen the Martians. . . feed. Should one of
their machines appear over the top of trees, I am ready to fling myself
flat on the earth. I come to a chestnut tree. October chestnuts are
ripe. I fill my pockets. I must keep alive. Two days I wander in a
vague northerly direction through a desolate world. Finally I notice a
living creature. . . a small red squirrel in a beech tree. I stare at
him, and wonder. He stares back at me. I believe at that moment the
animal and I shared the same emotion. . .the joy of finding another15
living being. I push on north. I find dead cows in a brackish field.
Beyond, the charred ruins of a dairy. The silo remains standing guard
over the waste land like a lighthouse deserted by the sea. Astride the
silo perches a weathercock. The arrow points north.
Next day I came to a city vaguely familiar in its contours, yet its
buildings strangely dwarfed and leveled off, as if a giant hand sliced
off its highest towers with a capricious sweep of his hand. I reached
the outskirts. I found Newark, undemolished, but humbled by some whim
of the advancing Martians. Presently, with an odd feeling of being
watched, I caught sight of something crouching in a doorway. I made a
step towards it, and it rose up and bacame a man! — a man, armed with
a large knife.
STRANGER: (OFF MIKE) Stop. . . (CLOSER) where did you come from?
PIERSON: I come from . . . many places. A long time ago from Princeton.
STRANGER: Princeton, huh? That’s near Grovers Mill!
PIERSON: Yes.
STRANGER: Grovers Mill. . . (LAUGHS AS AT A GREAT JOKE) There’s no food
here. This is my country. . . all this end of town down to the river.
There’s only food for one. . . Which way are you going?
PIERSON: I don’t know. I guess I’m looking for — for people.
STRANGER: (NERVOUSLY) What was that? Did you hear something just then?
PIERSON: Only a bird . . . (AMAZED) A live bird!
STRANGER: You get to know that birds have shadows these days. . . Say,
we’re in the open here. Let’s crawl into this doorway and talk.
PIERSON: Have you seen any . . . Martians?
STRANGER: Naah. They’ve gone over to New York. At night the sky is
alive with their lights. Just as if people were still livin’ in it. By
daylight you can’t see them. Five days ago a couple of them carried
somethin’ big across the flats from the airport. I believe they’re
learning how to fly.
PIERSON: Fly!
STRANGER: Yeah, fly.
PIERSON: Then it’s all over with humanity. Stranger, there’s still you
and I. Two of us left.
STRANGER: They got themselves in solid; they wrecked the greatest
country in the world. Those green stars, they’re probably falling
somewhere every night. They’ve only lost one machine. There isn’t
anything to do. We’re done. We’re licked.
PIERSON: Where were you? You’re in a uniform.16
STRANGER: Yeah, what’s left of it. I was in the militia — national
guard. . . That’s good! Wasn’t any war any more than there’s war
between men and ants.
PIERSON: And we’re eat-able ants. I found that out. . . What will they
do with us?
STRANGER: I’ve thought it all out. Right now we’re caught as we’re
wanted. The Martian only has to go a few miles to get a crowd on the
run. But they won’t keep doing that. They’ll begin catching us
systematic-like — keeping the best and storing us in cages and things.
They haven’t begun on us yet!
PIERSON: Not begun!
STRANGER: Not begun! All that’s happened so far is because we don’t
have sense enough to keep quiet. . . botherin’ them with guns and such
stuff and losing our heads and rushing off in crowds. Now instead of
our rushing around blind we’ve got to fix ourselves up — fix ourselves
up according to the way things are NOW. Cities, nations, civilization,
progress. . . done.
PIERSON: But if that’s so, what is there to live for?
STRANGER: Well, there won’t be any more concerts for a million years or
so, and no nice little dinners at restaurants. If it’s amusement you’re
after, I guess the game’s up.
PIERSON: And what is there left?
STRANGER: Life. . . that’s what! I want to live. Yeah, and so do you.
We’re not going to be exterminated. And I don’t mean to be caught,
either, and tamed, and fattened, and bred, like an ox.
PIERSON: What are you going to do?
STRANGER: I’m going on. . . right under their feet. I got a plan. We
men as men are finished. We don’t know enough. We gotta learn plenty
before we’ve got a chance. And we’ve got to live and keep free while we
learn, see? I’ve thought it all out, see.
PIERSON: Tell me the rest.
STRANGER: Well, it isn’t all of us that were made for wild beasts, and
that’s what it’s got to be. That’s why I watched YOU. All these little
office workers that used to live in these houses — they’d be no good.
They haven’t any stuff to ’em. They just used to run off to work. I’ve
seen hundreds of ’em, running wild to catch their commuter train in the
morning for fear they’d get canned if they didn’t; running back at
night afraid they won’t be in time for dinner. Lives insured and a
little invested in case of accidents. And on Sundays, worried about the
hereafter. The Martians will be a godsend for those guys. Nice roomy
cages, good food, careful breeding, no worries. After a week or so
chasing about the fields on empty stomachs they’ll come and be glad to
be caught.
PIERSON: You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?17
STRANGER: You bet I have! And that isn’t all. These Martians will make
pets of some of ’em, train ’em to do tricks. Who knows? Get sentimental
over the pet boy who grew up and had to be killed. . . And some, maybe,
they’ll train to hunt us.
PIERSON: No, that’s impossible. No human being. . .
STRANGER: Yes they will. There’s men who’ll do it gladly. If one of
them ever comes after me, why. . .
PIERSON: In the meantime, you and I and others like us. . . where are
we to live when the Martians own the earth?
STRANGER: I’ve got it all figured out. We’ll live underground. I’ve
been thinking about the sewers. Under New York are miles and miles of
’em. The main ones are big enough for anybody. Then there’s cellars,
vaults, underground storerooms, railway tunnels, subways. You begin to
see, eh? And we’ll get a bunch of strong men together. No weak ones;
that rubbish — out.
PIERSON: And you meant me to go?
STRANGER: Well, I gave you a chance, didn’t I?
PIERSON: We won’t quarrel about that. Go on.
STRANGER: And we’ve got to make safe places for us to stay in, see, and
get all the books we can — science books. That’s where men like you
come in, see? We’ll raid the museums, we’ll even spy on the Martians.
It may not be so much we have to learn before — just imagine this:
four or five of their own fighting machines suddenly start off — heat
rays right and left and not a Martian in ’em. Not a Martian in ’em! But
MEN — men who have learned the way how. It may even be in our time.
Gee! Imagine having one of them lovely things with it’s heat ray wide
and free! We’d turn it on Martians, we’d turn it on men. We’d bring
everybody down to their knees.
PIERSON: That’s your plan?
STRANGER: You, and me, and a few more of us we’d own the world.
PIERSON: I see. . .
STRANGER: (FADING OUT) Say, what’s the matter? . . . Where are you
going?
PIERSON: Not to your world. . . Goodbye, stranger. . .
PIERSON: After parting with the artilleryman, I came at last to the
Holland Tunnel. I entered that silent tube anxious to know the fate of
the great city on the other side of the Hudson. Cautiously I came out
of the tunnel and made my way up Canal Street. I reached Fourteenth
Street, and there again were black powder and several bodies, and an
evil ominous smell from the gratings of the cellars of some of the
houses. I wandered up through the Thirties and Forties; I stood alone
on Times Square. I caught sight of a lean dog running down Seventh
Avenue with a piece of dark brown meat in his jaws, and a pack of
starving mongrels at his heels. He made a wide circle around me, as18
though he feared I might prove a fresh competitor. I walked up Broadway
in the direction of that strange powder — past silent shopwindows,
displaying their mute wares to empty sidewalks — past the Capitol
Theatre, silent, dark — past a shooting gallery, where a row of empty
guns faced an arrested line of wooden ducks. Near Columbus Circle I
noticed models of 1939 motorcars in the showrooms facing empty streets.
From over the top of the General Motors Building, I watched a flock of
black birds circling in the sky. I hurried on. Suddenly I caught sight
of the hood of a Martian machine, standing somewhere in Central Park,
gleaming in the late afternoon sun. An insane idea! I rushed recklessly
across Columbus Circle and into the Park. I climbed a small hill above
the pond at Sixtieth Street. From there I could see, standing in a
silent row along the mall, nineteen of those great metal Titans, their
cowls empty, their great steel arms hanging listlessly by their sides.
I looked in vain for the monsters that inhabit those machines.
Suddenly, my eyes were attracted to the immense flock of black birds
that hovered directly below me. They circled to the ground, and there
before my eyes, stark and silent, lay the Martians, with the hungry
birds pecking and tearing brown shreds of flesh from their dead bodies.
Later when their bodies were examined in the laboratories, it was found
that they were killed by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against
which their systems were unprepared. . . slain, after all man’s
defenses had failed, by the humblest thing that God in His wisdom put
upon this earth.
Before the cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through
all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our
minute sphere. Now we see further. Dim and wonderful is the vision I
have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little
seedbed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of
sidereal space. But that is a remote dream. It may be that the
destruction of the Martians is only a reprieve. To them, and not to us,
is the future ordained perhaps.
Strange it now seems to sit in my peaceful study at Princeton writing
down this last chapter of the record begun at a deserted farm in
Grovers Mill. Strange to see from my window the university spires dim
and blue through an April haze. Strange to watch children playing in
the streets. Strange to see young people strolling on the green, where
the new spring grass heals the last black scars of a bruised earth.
Strange to watch the sightseers enter the museum where the dissembled
parts of a Martian machine are kept on public view. Strange when I
recall the time when I first saw it, bright and clean-cut, hard, and
silent, under the dawn of that last great day.
(MUSIC SWELLS UP AND OUT)
Orson Welles: This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of
character to assure you that The War of The Worlds has no further
significance than as the holiday offering it was intended to be. The
Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and
jumping out of a bush and saying Boo! Starting now, we couldn’t soap
all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night. . .
so we did the best next thing. We annihiliated the world before your
very ears, and utterly destroyed the C. B. S. You will be releieved, I
hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are
still open for business. So goodbye everybody, and remember the19
terrible lesson you learned tonight. That grinning, glowing, globular
invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and
if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian. . .it’s
Hallowe’en.
(MERCURY THEATRE THEME UP FULL, THEN DOWN)
Announcer: Tonight the Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated
stations coast-to-coast have brought you “The War of the Worlds,” by
H.G. Wells, the seventeenth in its weekly series of dramatic broadcasts
featuring Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air. Next week we
present a dramatization of three famous short stories. . . . This is
the Columbia Broadcasting System.
Turner’s theory of ritual in cultural performance begins with his investigation of ritual within African villages and culminates with the application of ritual to modern day cultural performances. The term ritual is replaced by the more inclusive term social drama which encompasses more varied forms of cultural expression.
By investigating the social infrastructure of primitive societies and the representations of these societies through cultural performances, such as ritual, Turner concludes that “through the performance process itself…the depth of sociocultural life is drawn out” for “ritual is a manifestation of life itself”. (13) Within primitive African societies social dramas begin with a “social breech”, an expression of a societal antagonism made public. When the breech is not dealt with immediately this escalates into crisis. To resolve this crisis redressive actions are taken by the village through various channels such as judicial process, exorcism, sacrifice or ritual. The conclusion of this social drama, or the “last act”, is the resolution which can be either the correction of the crisis, or the agreement not to agree. In which case factions leave the main body to create their own social entity.
–
Turner draws parallels between primitive and modern social dramas. Contemporary social dramas arise with crises ranging from war and revolution, to gender and generational differences. Like its primitive counterpart, modern social dramas cut across all *subcutaneous levels of social structure”(10) and form alliances based on coalitions of ideology. But, unlike primitive cultures, modern society’s new symbols and mastery of technology enable them to cope better with crisis. And redressive action is exclusive of either political or religious influence. Therefore modern social drama calls out societies weaknesses, makes leaders accountable, and offers solutions. And like ritual and primitive social drama, is a “means for the intercultural transmission of painfully
achieved modalities of experience”.(18)
What I find painful in Beckett’s Rockaby is the same phenomenon I find painful in Krapp’s Last Tape. A listener detached from the biographic plenitude of a narrative, a narrative that grows into a rhythmic exercise with no sure relation to an “I” that can encompass it and link it to the present.
The represented decisions or mental acts I witness in a production of Beckett’s late works are part of the recorded narrative that both the figure on the stage and I as audience hear.
In Rockaby it is…
the decision to stop searching the streets for another creature like herself,
the decision to stop seeking for another creature in a window in the flats opposite,
the decision to stop seeking for the evidence of another creature in those windows that would be indicated by a raised blind,
the decision to descend the stairs and sit in the rocking chair in which the mother died,
the decision to function as another creature for herself (the ostensible impetus to the construction of the third-person, self objectifying narrative itself),
and the decision to stop the narrative process, the process of “saying to herself.”
This narrative marks the movement of a woman identified as she through three locations–the streets, an upstairs room, the space occupied by a rocking chair in a downstairs room. The text to which I and the woman in the rocking chair listen brings us from the implied past of the figure to a time perhaps approximate to the present moment, but the narrative constructs this moment as a segment of the narrative itself initiated by the final imperative “More” spoken by the figure in the rocking chair. The separation of figure and recited narrative suggests that the narrative is not being formed at the moment but is, rather, a text revolving in compulsive repetition.
The convention of stage figure and recorded text here is not identical to the technique of the voice over we grown familiar with since Olivier’s film version of Hamlet. There the words of the soliloquy “To be or not to be…” appear to be forming themselves within Hamlet’s mind at that very moment in which he stares over the parapet in apparent silence.
I reduce the communicative force of Beckett’s later drama if I interpret the juxtaposition of voice and stage figure merely as a conventional dramatic monologue enhanced with the technology of recording to allow the actor to represent both the subtle inflections of speech and the signifying responses to listening.
Conventions of live performance stimulate the spectator to inscribe the narrative onto the actor/character while the text itself (and its dislocation from the figure) work both to supply the details of that narrative and to complicate or equivocate the relationship between narrative text and stage figure. It is this conflict between the mimetic impulse and its frustration that constitutes the action of Beckett’s late dramas. These works push the conventions of performance radically to the limit and provoke a mimetic reconstruction of its physical figures only to deplete that reading of character. The established emptiness prompts me to confront more fundamental problems than either existential alienation or a stoic acceptance of death. The gap between figure and narrative works towards the recognition that the narrative past is unrecoverable and unverifiable as history, memory or invention. Simultaneously, the past is inescapable as it provides the only available material for narration even as its attenuation transforms this material into traces of its ostensibly prior form as history, memory, or invention.
Confronting the process of saying leads towards the recognition of having been said. Being not merely the agent but also the product of that speech. Being a narrative subject whose presence always recedes immediately into the phenomenon of the text, with all of the complexities and indeterminacies attendant on textuality. Framing oneself in a narrative or being framed in a narrative is as much a depletion of subjectivity as it is an assertion of subjectivity.
In Beckett’s work a particular kind of speech act recurs: a speaker/writer focuses upon a textual image of a figure in space that relates to a possible visual image, a “figment”. Then, almost immediately, that figure questions the validity, reliability, or veracity of the speech/writing that posits that image. As visual image, the figure holds no real stability but appears to come and go in the mental field the text sets up. While the textual image in which the visual is represented feels more grounded, the indeterminacy or inaccuracy of language diffuses any sense that words can adequately represent it. The principal figure on stage becomes equivocal and elusive, both as a visual image subject to the difficulties of perception and as a rhetorical construct subject to the problematics of language.
As I am dealing with the concrete, material presence of the actor (a stable visual image) the narrative becomes not a sequence of read words but an acoustic presence.
I recognize that the structure formed by the performance constitutes a confinement for the firgure yet at the same time the repetition and attenuation satisfies. To respond to these performances primarily as mimetic representations of character without attending to their disturbing questioning of the status of the voice or speech and the ways in which it complicates subjectivity both trivializes and sentimentalizes important theatrical experiments. Experiments that thirty years ago represented already failed attempts to capture the present and the presence that theatre claims as its own.
When you incorporate human figures/actors in a performance
with non-human technologies
i.e., film, video, recorded sound, holograms,
do the human figures signify
sustain reference as signs
in a differentl way
than the technological?
What happens to each of the elements
(human/non human)
in the interaction or co-presence,
if they are not interactive?
