Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia: A Performance Gesture
[In the following essay, Prinz examines Gray's attempt to communicate and understand "the fantastic and seemingly impossible facts of history" in Swimming to Cambodia.]
Laughter today—and this helps to explain why it often has a hollow sound and why so much contemporary humor takes the form of parody and self-parody—comes from people who are all too well aware of the bad news but have nevertheless made a determined effort to keep smiling.
—Christopher Lasch
Spalding Gray walks onstage at the Performing Garage in Soho. He sits down at a simple wooden table, takes a small sip of water, and begins to talk. He talks about his role in the making of The Killing Fields; he talks about Thailand, Cambodia, New York, and mostly he talks about Spalding Gray. Richard Schechner defines Gray as a pioneer in the new experimental theater of the 1980s, with its tendency toward the personal, the private, the monological, and the narcissistic. "By the 1980's," Schechner says, "the definitive mark of experimental theatre was one person alone in a small space." Neither classic theater, film, or literature, Swimming to Cambodia is nevertheless available to us in all of these forms—as drama, film, and text. Certainly we can read the book Swimming to Cambodia, but we would miss the essence of Gray's performance: his presence, his intonations, his facial expressions, vocal inflections, dialects, and gestures. These are indispensible elements of the new performance mode that Gray is helping to generate.
In Swimming to Cambodia Gray explores what it means to confront the fantastic but nevertheless true and tragic history of Cambodia. Within the performance, the simple set and staging, the minimal props, and quotidian talk are all, I will argue, a reaction to or defense mechanism against the fantastic and seemingly impossible facts of history. Tzvetan Todorov's definition of the fantastic is the most pertinent here: the fantastic causes the spectator to hesitate between supernatural and natural explanations of an event. "The fantastic," he says, "confronts us with a dilemma: to believe or not to believe." If in the "uncanny," supernatural events are explained as natural, in the "marvelous," supernatural events are accepted as such. But the fantastic hesitates between these two poles. While Swimming to Cambodia does not treat the supernatural, per se, it does describe and produce an epistemological hesitation of this kind. Gray is uncertain about where to locate "reality." The real history of Cambodia is impossible to understand and "much too far to swim to." The discussion of these issues will begin with an analysis of that quintessentially dramatic element: gesture.
As a concept addressed by psychologists, anthropologists, semioticians, and theoreticians of the theater, gesture is an interdisciplinary concept especially suited for an analysis of Gray's intermedial art. Interestingly enough, theorists in all of these disciplines strive in varied ways to separate gesture from language. Motivated by objectives defined by their own fields, they nevertheless almost univocally and universally dissociate the verbal from the gestural.
Antonin Artaud, Bertolt Brecht, and Jerzy Grotowsky, despite their differences, all celebrate a drama that is primarily gestural and only secondarily linguistic. Artaud, for instance, is opposed to the dominance, indeed tyranny, of speech in the theater and argues that theater is poetry in space, not in language. Brecht's A-Effect, or alienation effect, calls for a heightened self-consciousness to gesture, as in Chinese acting, where the actor is seen to observe his own gestures, or through purposeful contradiction between gestures and speech. Thus in his study of Brecht, Benjamin repeats: "Epic theatre is gestural…. The gesture is its raw material." For Grotowski, too, theatrical gesture is not subordinate to a language that it illustrates. Gesturality is supposed to free itself from discourse and form an autonomous semiotics for itself. According to Grotowski, it is only the "hypersensitive professor" who expects the theater to be a realization of a text.
Ray L. Birdwhistell is an anthropologist who has founded the science of gesture, kinesics. Although his work continuously draws analogies between gestures and language, Birdwhistell emphasizes repeatedly that gesture is an extralexical activity. In a 1968 essay on gesture, Julia Kristeva even more emphatically argues for a nonlinguistic model of gesture. For her it is important to see gesture as nonrepresentational; it is, she says, indicative but not signifying. This nonlinguistic and nonrepresentational concept of gesture allows her to create a semiotics that does not privilege language.
Finally, if we turn to the analysis of gesture by psychiatrists and psychologists, the conclusions are surprisingly similar. John P. Spiegel and Pavel Machotka begin their book Messages of the Body with this assertion: "To say that the communication system of the body is not like a linguistic system is not to deny that it is a set of coded messages; but its code and the program of encoding and decoding its messages probably bears a closer resemblance to music, drama, and the plastic arts than to words and language."
What these various theories do is help to foreground the surprisingly linguistic quality of Gray's acting in Swimming to Cambodia. In this performance piece, Gray's gestures mirror and reinforce the spoken text. Using the ordinary language of everyday talk, including its slang and sometimes profanity, Gray's facial expressions and gestures almost always translate the verbal into a visual and gestural code. This code switching merely produces a semantic redundancy.
There is a consistent reciprocity of gesture and text in Gray's work. Why, we might ask, does such a contemporary, even avant-garde artist, use gesture in such a traditional way? Why is gesture here an accessory to speech?
In her essay "Redundancy and the 'Readable' Text," Susan Rubin Suleiman reminds us that, despite the negative connotation redundancy has in ordinary speech, linguists and information theorists view redundancy as a positive term, for without some redundancy communication is impossible. Clearly, Gray is determined to communicate with his audience, and as many theorists have noted, the postmodern audience is a wide one. Unlike the modern avant-garde, which was determined to antagonize, provoke, and even cancel its relation to the audience, along with other contemporary performance artists, Gray is determined to engage and communicate with it. Scholars as different as Harold Rosenberg, Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, and Umberto Eco have all noted this shift in postmodernism—the merging of high art and popular culture, fine art and mass media techniques, a shift in the relation to the audience so that the purpose is, as Eco says, to "reach … a vast audience."
The intermedial redundancy of Swimming to Cambodia ensures coherence and disambiguation, effecting greater communication between the performer and his audience. Yet the performance itself outlines numerous parables of failed communication. What does it mean to live in Manhattan, where people do not have a common language? The implications, for Gray, are finally political.
But I say … how … how does a country like America, or rather how does America because certainly there is no country like it, begin to find the language to negotiate or talk with a country like Russia … if I can't even begin to get it with my people on the corner of Broadway and John Street?
(Swimming, film version)
Acutely aware of the problematics of communication, Gray devises a performance mode that will establish communication with his own audience as effectively as possible.
The gestures within Swimming to Cambodia, like all gestures in the theater, help to extend Gray himself as an actor. In an excellent analysis of gesture, Patrice Pavis writes:
The essential function of gesture is its capacity to designate the situation of the utterance, its being deictic, [or] a sign which refers to the presence of the stage and the actor…. Gesture is not dissociable from the actor who produces it … the actor is always anchored on the stage of innumerable corporal deictics, beginning with attitude, glance and mere physical presence.
Hence a primary function of gesture in Swimming to Cambodia is deictic, pointing to Gray's central presence in the action. In keeping with the narcissism built into the monological and autoperformative mode, many of Gray's gestures are self-directed. The focus of the performance is Gray himself as performer, character, and actor. Not only is he at the center of the narrative but symmetrical gestures often locate him at the center of a visual field.
Paradoxically, despite all this signaling of the self, Gray is presented in a way that also calls presence into question. Both Richard Schechner and Philip Auslander have noted that Gray enacts various Gray personae, creating a scene for his multiple selves. James Leverett writes, "It has gradually become Gray's chosen lot simultaneously to live his life and to play the role of Spalding Gray living his life, and to observe said Gray living his life in order to report on it in the next monologue." This self-diffraction is most pointedly expressed when Gray describes his excitement at the beach at Phuket, where he goes swimming with his friend Ivan: "I'd run down the beach and look back to try to see us there in the surf and each time I'd miss myself and then run back to try to be in it all again. Then down the beach and back and down the beach and back…." (Swimming, film version)
Gray's performance is self-reflexive at a variety of levels and in many ways concerns its own involution. The narrative offers a metaphor for its own self-reflexivencss, as Gray describes a teak table he saw at the Vietnamese embassy:
This table was exquisite…. On the surface there was a hand-carved, three-dimensional relief of elephants tearing down teak trees with their trunks in order to make the table—so you see, it was a reflective table—it told a story about itself. In fact, it was doubly reflective, even reflexive, because it had a piece of glass over it and every so often I would catch a reflection of myself in the glass.
Like the teak table, Gray's narrative is about itself, and it is also about his trying to catch glimpses of himself within it.
Swimming to Cambodia is a film about a film, a performance about performing, and a dramatic event that analyzes and describes acting. The Stanislavski "method" is satirized throughout the monologue, especially in Gray's description of Ira Wheeler trying to do an emotional memory and being on the verge of tears and in a deep funk all day, while the car in which they sit systematically falls to pieces. When Gray starts talking to the driver, Wheeler gets outraged and yells, "Will you stop talking…. I'm trying to have an emotional memory." Gray responds, "This man is about to get killed by an elephant. Try that one." "You would be amazed at what some people went through to get into character for this film," says Gray. The spoofs on Stanislavski accomplish at least two things in the narrative.
First, they emphasize how nonnaturalistic Gray's own acting style is. We never for a moment forget that his gestures in Swimming to Cambodia are the artificial products of a staged body. While his gestures are surprisingly linguistic, they are not therefore naturalistic or realistic (in the Stanislavsky mode). Rather the impetus of Gray's acting style is to undercut and resist realism in the way that many theorists of the theater advocate (Artaud, Brecht, Meyerhold, Witkeiwicz). In the performance piece The Terrors of Pleasure, Gray talks about the desire to find a piece of property with streams and rivers and describes how he became obsessed with water; then he pauses and takes a sip of water from a glass. The heightened literalism does not serve realism but undercuts it.
Second, and more important, the Stanislavsky method does not work in a situation, like that described by Gray, in which the boundaries between the illusory and the real have disintegrated:
You don't have to Method-act. When those helicopter blades are whirring overhead, you shout to be heard. You don't have to Method-act when you look down and see a Thai peasant covered with chicken giblets and fake blood in 110-degree weather for fifteen hours a day for five dollars a day. (If they're real amputees they get seven-fifty.) It's just like the real event!
Where does acting leave off and reality begin? For Gray, life is an arena in which everyone acts for others. The Thai prostitutes deserve Academy Awards for their performances—they are so apparently happy. When Athol Fugard advises Gray to go home (saying there's no difference between Thailand and Krumville), Gray wonders with whom Fugard has been studying acting. "I wanted to say goodbye like a man," says Gray, "and if I couldn't be one, I was going to act like one…. And I went around to each person and acted as though I'd made up my mind." People don't have to act naturalistically. Gray seems to be implying, because they always are acting naturally already.
But the confusion of illusion and reality is even more pervasive and profound than this in Swimming to Cambodia, and it is this confusion that produces the "fantastic" within it. Here the distinction between the real and the simulated has dangerously dissolved. Gray gets into a helicopter and says, "I felt like I was in a movie, like I was in Apocalypse Now, and then I realized that I was in a movie!" The beautiful beach at Phuket is like "one big piece of calendar art" and Gray goes swimming on "a perfect Kodachrome day." Walking into a bar with Pat Pong is like stepping into a scene in The Deer Hunter. The producers of The Killing Fields build a real swimming pool and tennis court at a hotel in Wahen in order to better simulate the Hotel Phnom Phen. Spalding Gray points to a map of Cambodia, duplicating an image from The Killing Fields; it appears when Sidney Shanberg watches a video that shows Richard Nixon on television pointing to a map of Cambodia. "Are those burning villages or burning tires set out by the special effects crew?" asks Leverett; "Is this history or just another take?" (Swimming, film version). Certainly we are in the realm of Jean Baudrillard's "Precession of Simulacra," where the mass media neutralize reality and the hyper-real and simulation supplant it.
Postmodern works like Swimming to Cambodia enact and describe the simulation process that Baudrillard describes. Throughout Swimming to Cambodia Gray struggles with the relation between reality and its replica, more specifically between the real history of Cambodia and its simulation in The Killing Fields. One might say that his monologue is an effort to kill the field of simulation produced by The Killing Fields in order to apprehend the "reality" behind it. In this sense it is an effort to "real"ize the fantastic, to make it real, to achieve a sense of reality. But that reality threatens to slip from Gray's grasp—and ours—intertwined as it is with the media and mediated images.
In his fascinating account of contemporary culture entitled The Minimal Self, Christopher Lasch maintains that the confusion of illusion and reality in contemporary media culture contributes to the narcissism of the 1980s. Epitomizing this wide cultural phenomenon, Swimming to Cambodia is narcissistic in both its form and content. Gray tells us that John Swain was the most narcissistic of the reporters, because he had come to watch himself being played in The Killing Fields. Then how much more narcissistic is Gray himself who creates a two-hour monologue concerning his own bit part in the film? The first scene in Swimming to Cambodia describes a hotel that Gray calls "the pleasure prison," where the crew is indulging in what the Thais call sanug, or pleasure. Gray's search for a perfect moment is a narcissistic urge to merge with the environment. At one point he says it is "like falling in love … with yourself." One form of self-indulgence is replaced by another, but pervading all is irony and self-parody: "What am I doing lying on the beach like an old hippie at forty-two years old, trying to have Perfect Moments in Thailand? What am I doing searching for Cosmic Consciousness?… Go directly to Hollywood and get an agent! Go! Get an agent!" Exhausted from this "epiphany," Gray falls asleep only to be awakened by the words "Boat people! Boat people" which someone is shouting on the shore. Thus the search for self-fulfillment and self-gratification is both presented and ironized as Gray questions what it means to pursue pleasure in the context of suffering.
Lasch's book is especially helpful, for it allows us to see contemporary narcissism not as an idle, meaningless self-absorption but as an understandable and justifiable survival or coping mechanism in the face of historical barbarism. The narcissistic age is beset by fears that develop not only from its historical awareness but also from the realization that the holocausts of the past may prefigure even more radical atrocities, including the annihilation of humanity itself.
Thus Gray's character, Jack Daniels, who is chained in a waterproof chamber, high on coffee and blue-flake cocaine anxiously awaiting the moment when he can finally fire his nuclear missile at the Russians, allows Gray to voice his own anxiety about nuclear war. Gray is directing his satire not at the U.S. Navy, or patriotism, or the military, but at a casual, irresponsible desire to use atomic weapons. "I can tell you I thought I was looking my death in the face," he says. The threat of nuclear war, the memory of holocausts in Germany and Cambodia, the fear of ecological disasters create a climate of crises in which narcissism itself, according to Lasch, becomes a form of survivalism. Gray's perfect moment is not a romantic transcendence but a brief instant freed from "phobias," anxieties, and fears; when it is over, he is back in "fearful time" again.
Swimming to Cambodia negotiates the relation of the political and the personal, the historical and the biographical. The double-layered backdrop of the performance captures this tension between personal, even narcissistic, experience (in the blue sky) and historical/political awareness (in the maps).
The central activity of Swimming to Cambodia is memory—both personal and collective. Our way of coming to know and understand history is entirely problematic ("We don't know what went on," he says). "I titled this work Swimming to Cambodia," he explains, "when I realized that to try to imagine what went on in that country during the gruesome period from 1966 to the present would be a task equal to swimming there from New York." The truth is beyond our imagination. Hence history is portrayed in a curiously mediated way. Facts are presented as reported discourse, information is gleaned from eyewitness reports, and even American history is conveyed by an outsider. Swimming to Cambodia does not deny the existence of the past; it does question whether we can ever know that past in any other than a mediated way—like the forms of mediation (books, videos, films) through which Gray's own performance may very well come to us.
How does one comprehend the history of the twentieth century, with its holocausts in Germany and Cambodia? As Lasch observes, the only art appropriate to such atrocity is a minimal art, an art stripped bare and reduced to its simplest counters. A desk. A map. A glass of water. A single man talking:
And they were laughing. There was a lot of laughter, a lot of laughter. And eyewitnesses said that if you pleaded for your life, they laughed harder. If it was a woman pleading for her life, they would laugh even harder. And they would take the half-dead bodies and throw them into American bomb craters, which acted as perfect graves. It was a kind of visitation of hell on earth. Who needs metaphors for hell, or poetry about hell? This actually happened. Here on this earth. Pregnant mothers disembowelled, eyes gouged out, kids (children) torn apart like fresh bread in front of their mothers. And this went on for years until two million people were either systematically killed or starved to death by the same people. And nobody can really figure out how such a thing could have happened.
(Swimming, film version)
Viewed in this way, history is difficult if not impossible for the psyche to assimilate. It seems both real and fantastic, so Gray must repeat, "This actually happened. Here on this earth." According to Kristeva's analysis, the abject—the horrible—borders the fantastic, fuses the imaginary and the real: "The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part…. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us." The abject is experienced both inside and outside the self: "Excrement and its equivalents (decay, infection, disease, corpse, etc.) stand for the danger to identity that comes from without: the ego threatened by the non-ego, society threatened by its outside, life by death." Rather than repressing the abject and the horrible, Gray exposes them—both within himself and outside. Swimming to Cambodia begins with a story about a bad drug trip:
Up it came, and each time the vomit hit the ground I covered it over with sand, and the sand I covered it with turned into a black gauze death mask that flew up and covered my face … until I looked down to see that I had built an entire corpse in the sand and it was my corpse.
(Swimming, film version)
The abject thus operates at a variety of levels within the monologue: physical (nausea), personal (death), and political (autohomeogenocide). Gray's laughter is not empty laughter, but a "way of placing or displacing abjection." His humor confronts and contains the abject of history and of the self. Spalding Gray is a comedian of crises who is not trivializing the tragic but bodying it forth. "After all, what is this film about? Survival! Whose survival? My survival" (Swimming, film version). And ours.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.