'A word by which you will be revealed': the problem of language in Will Eno's monologues.

In Will Eno's monologue Lady Grey (in ever-lower light), .the eponymous narrator asks, "Does this ever happen to you? (Brief pause.) You're looking for something, a word ... by which you will be revealed, expressed. Wondering what the story of yourself is, and, how to tell it" (50). Lady Grey's search for such a word--a word possessing the power to effect an almost Heideggerian unconcealment of being--confronts her with the problem Hannah Arendt finds inherent in philosophical discourse, especially the discourse of the Western metaphysical tradition. For Arendt, in such discourse, who someone is, that singularity Lady Grey seeks to reveal, "retains a curious intangibility that confounds all efforts toward unequivocal verbal expression ... The very moment we want to say who someone is our very vocabulary leads us astray into saying what he is" (181). "What" describes everything but the essential--the fundamental being and concrete uniqueness, i.e., the "who" of the speaker.

If the inability to define the singularity of the "who" marks the limit of philosophical discourse, the transformation, hence erasure, of the "who" into the "what," for Louis Althusser defines the linguistic cultural codes through which the various ideological discourses interpellate social subjects: "Ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all)" (174). Althusser seems to point to a moment when the individual, standing outside ideology, precedes the subject, and still retains its "whoness"; still maintains, like Lady Grey, the possibility of allowing its existential truth to pass into a word that would re-present its ontology of uniqueness. However, Althusser goes on to say that he has recourse to the category of "individuals" only "for the convenience and clarity of" his description of ideological interpellation (175). The individual remains a necessary descriptive fiction, when in fact each of us is "always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by {our} specific familial ideological configuration ... once {we have} been conceived" (176).

Lacan, whose theory of the mirror stage stands behind Althusser's account of ideology, will go even further. For him, the issue is neither the failure of philosophical language to express concrete singularity nor the power of ideological discourse to foreclose singularity, but the rupture that any act of speaking introduces between the subject and the real, the absolute incommensurability between being and signification. When considering what it means that humans are speaking beings, Lacan asserts that "the dominant factor here is the unity of signification, which proves never to be resolved into a pure indication of the real" (Lacan, Ecrits 126). Language and the symbolic order it forms mark the subject's radical alienation from the real, the realm of being, and thus language itself becomes the obstacle to Lady Grey's search for the word that will reveal and express being.

Indeed, for Lacan, to speak means to "become engaged in an ever-growing dispossession of ... being" (Lacan, Ecrits 42), and it is the struggle to resist this "dispossession," to find the self-revelatory word that will not compound the lack and sense of loss from which they suffer, that drives the figures in Will Eno's monologues, Lady Grey and Thom Pain, narrator of Thorn Pain (based on nothing). If there exists, however, such an unbridgeable chasm between being and signification, the ontological real(ity) of the "who" and the linguistic order of the "what," then the utopian word Eno's characters seek would necessarily become a dystopian signifier of the speaker's lack-of-being, expressing the absence of "who" and reducing the subject from a "what" to a whatever. Thom Pain asks his audience, "You know who I suddenly don't need? ... No, I don't, either. No bother. Or--to employ the popular phrase we use today to express ... the breakdown of distinction ... --'whatever.' Casually. I'm like whatever. Pointedly. As if a grave admission. I really am like whatever" (15).

"Whatever" expresses not only "the breakdown of distinction" but the dissolution of the singularity of being within what Lacan calls the "defiles of the structure of the signifier" (Lacan, Ecrits 255). "Whatever" reveals the absence of the subject's interiority; its lack of unity (even an illusory sense of unity); its linguistic vulnerability--its status, that is, as an empty vessel that will only achieve "presence" through the words, codes, and discourses that always precede it as an external force. Obviously, my use of "expresses" and "reveals" in the preceding sentences differs from Lady Grey's use of these words. If she and Thorn Pain seek, in her words, "to convey an inner reality" (44), a pre--or nondiscursive reality that they can "convey" through a language they own, "whatever" defines the subject's reality in terms of its complete enmeshment within a symbolic order that effectually transforms it into a signifier. As Lacan argues, the signifier "represents the subject for another signifier, which ... has as its effect the aphanisis of the subject. Hence the division of the subject--when the subject appears somewhere as meaning {i.e., when the subject uses language}, he is manifested elsewhere as 'fading,' as disappearance" (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 218). The subject's accession to language turns on a dialectic of presence and absence, appearance and disappearance. To be present in language means to be present as language, hence absent as a "who." To appear in the symbolic order means to disappear as a singular existent possessed of being. Thorn Pain "strike{s} people as a person who just left" and declares that, despite his dislike of magic, he "doles} do a little Disappearing Act" (16, 35). Pain here describes nothing less than the cost of subjectivity, the price we pay in order to purchase any linguistic reality, any recognition as belonging to the symbolic order--the only locus in which, as Lacan says, the subject "finds his meaning" (Lacan, Ecrits 68).

If Eno's characters appear angst-ridden concerning the inescapable "disappearance" that marks us as speaking beings, this is because we are not taught to experience language in the terms outlined by Lacan and other poststructuralist theorists. If, like Lady Grey and Thom Pain, we search for "a word by which we will be revealed," seeing language as capable of yielding a metaphysics of substance, we can attribute this to our sense that there exists an univocal correspondence between words and the constituent elements of the phenomenal world. Even in the midst of postmodernity, many hold it as an article of faith that language functions as a system of nomenclature, an ensemble of names that ground the world beyond themselves, hence verifying and communicating the stability of being. Essence--the "who" rather than the "what"--becomes a substance inhering in the world that language must make intelligible through its taxonomic categories. Such an utopian vision of the unproblematic passage of the world into the word, of the power of names to disclose being, may account for why, when Thom Pain leaves his parents' house to enter the world, he took with him "no real belongings other than a dictionary," which he "read{s} like a novel, scanning ahead to see if the story picks up" (32, 33). Like Lady Grey, "wondering what the story of myself is, and, how to tell it," Pain hopes the dictionary will yield the magic words through which he can narrate his story in such a way that he can suture the alienating gap between being and meaning, self and signifier.

Even when he appears to have found such a word, however, he discovers an extreme case of the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. Eno opens the monologue with Pain focusing on a word from the dictionary that seemingly grants the audience a sense of who (and not what) he is, a sense of his "inner reality": "We should define some terms here ... From the New Century Dictionary of English ... Quote, 'Fear: 1. Any of the discrete parts of the face ... 2. The capital of Lower Meersham ... 3. Fear. 4. See three. 5. There is no seven'" (13). That Pain selects the word "fear" should tell us something about his existential condition, but the word either names things that have no apparent connection to our understanding of "fear" (the first two definitions) or else provides a clear example of the self-reflexive nature of signification (the last three definitions), where signs refer only to themselves, "never," as Lacan writes, "to be resolved into a pure indication of the real." However much Pain may seek to use language as a mirror of being, his inability to find himself (and his self) in the signifying field of "fear" only accentuates his disappearance, the consignment of his being to the "elsewhere" of the Lacanian real that resists signification. The proliferation of definitions may exist, as Pain remarks, "to make life seem more full" (36), but ultimately the dictionary solidifies the rupture between language and life.

The dictionary is not the only way we learn the imaginary (in Lacan's sense of the word) correspondence between word and world. As Lady Grey points out, our education system also imparts this view of language as part of our socialization. Eno frames her monologue with a discussion of that seemingly innocuous school activity, Show and Tell: "Show-and-tell helps the child apply language to an object, to see if it sticks. Helps the child grow in his ability to convey an inner reality, assuming any of those words applies" (43-4). Of course, the language will stick to the object; if it does not, we can attribute this to student error that lends itself to correction rather than to something inherent in the nature of signification. Eno also points out here the connection between the child's linguistic mastery demonstrated by the object "agreeing" with the definition and her sense of "an inner reality." Language functions as a kind of mirror stage here. If the words the child speaks nail the world in place, expressing the being of objects, and objects obey the definitions we offer, then, by extension, we introject this sense of language's ability to guarantee the phenomenal world's stability, reading off of it our sense that language can name and guarantee the integrity of our "inner reality."

Just as the dictionary fails to secure the imaginary dimension of language for Pain, so Lady Grey also sees the inability of Show and Tell to guarantee the expressive nature of language. She goes beyond the linguistic imaginary, recognizing that "the stream of little sentences" meant to capture the object's essence amount to nothing more than a "stream of little crap" (44). She discovers the gap in the order of signification, the constitutive absence of the real upon which this order founds itself. While Show and Tell ostensibly works to instill a belief in the expressive power of language, its ability to "stick" to the object under examination, Lady Grey emphasizes "the human urns and ohs and I-don't-knows. All meant to express the dearness of the shown object, a dearness that remains ... unexpressed. There's something impossible about it ... Real. In this simple little structure. That's all" (44). The real "speaks" but only through the inarticulate sounds ("ums and ohs") that intrude in without ever finally disrupting the symbolic order. These sounds may be "human" but reduced to the level of non-sense. Indeed, it is precisely the human that remains excluded from language except insofar as it is represented by a signifier. What "remains unexpressed" within the symbolic order, that which the subject will never recover, is the real of being, the "who" that would recuperate the alienation that language imposes on the subject.

Eno's focus on Show and Tell and the dictionary emphasizes the epistemological crisis his characters confront. Show and Tell provides an excellent illustration of the idea of language games in the late works of Wittgenstein, especially his final major work On Certainty. This work marks the ultimate rejection of his early position that language functions as an expressive structure of re-presentation, in which words act as names with the power of direct revelation. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein declares, "I d{o} not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish true and false" (no. 94). Rather than disclosing essence or being, language can only disclose the "inherited background"--the rules of the language game--through which we learn to attach names to objects. It is precisely this sense of naming as inherited through socialization and education that leads to the book's key distinction between knowledge and certainty. If we "distinguish true and false" based on the naming games (such as Show and Tell) each of us "learned ... as a child" (no. 167), then our sense that language yields knowledge of essence only means that we have "inherited" the same linguistic culture, that we play the same naming game with certainty about the rules rather than knowledge about the world that words presume to designate.

Wittgenstein elaborates this certainty/knowledge distinction in order to refute G. E. Moore's claim that when he held his hand in front of his face, he knew beyond doubt that it was indeed a hand. For Wittgenstein, however, such a claim only demonstrates Moore's adroitness at playing the naming game we learn as children when someone offers a definition, then points to an object as an illustration of that specific definition and a more general example of the agreement between word and world. Wittgenstein rejects Moore's claim to knowledge, arguing that "we teach a child {the phrase} 'that is your hand' ... An investigation or question, 'whether this is really a hand' never occurs to him. Nor, on the other hand, does he learn that he knows that this is a hand" (no. 374). Even if the object we claim to know as a hand corresponds to all the names and propositions contained within the signifying field of the word "hand," even if the world "agrees" with the word, "at the very best it shows us what 'agreement' means. We find it ... difficult to make use of it" (no. 203). As Thom Pain observes, we "pile the words on top. And watch them seep down" (27-8), but rather than saturating the object, animating it with life, the words themselves fall into the abyss that always threatens to dissolve that tenuous sense of "agreement" that allows us to misrecognize certainty as knowledge.

Indeed, Wittgenstein contemplates the possibility that such "agreement" will break down, that the behavior of the world will assert its autonomy from and primacy over the rules of the naming game: "What if something really unheard-of happened? ... If ... houses turn{ed} into steam without any obvious cause ... if trees gradually changed into men and men into trees" (no. 513). That such "unheard-of" transformations do not occur does not mean that they cannot; Wittgenstein's point is that the naming game lacks any intrinsic safety mechanism to prevent their occurrence. Pain may not witness the kind of metamorphoses Wittgenstein describes, but he viscerally experiences the insubstantiality of names: "I went out for a walk ... I thought about the world ... I just ... {l}et the words run. They came and went, disappeared. Like the things they stood for" (35). Initially, we might be tempted to read these lines as positing an "agreement" between word and world, where the latter disappears should the former lose its stabilizing force and designating function as a name. Since this passage occurs after Pain's quotation of the dictionary entry for "fear," however, we can see these lines point to his discovery of the vanishing point of the rules of the naming game, which, after all, works by dissimulating its status as a game. Another way of phrasing this is to say that he discovers that naming is only a game, with no purchase on the world, with no way to secure either our knowledge or the being of the things for which they only presume to stand. Seeing the game as only a game, Pain acknowledges the absolute rupture of the splitting of the sign (with its attendant splitting of the subject), with no connection linking signifier, signified and referent: "Ffff. Ffff. Eeearr. A word without definition. 'Fear'" (37).

I have turned to Lacan and Wittgenstein, as well as to Arendt's useful distinction between the "who" and the "what," not because we should read their meditations on language and subjectivity as all saying the same thing, but because each can illuminate in different ways, the existential, ontological and epistemological dilemmas that plague Eno's characters. If language can never express the concrete singularity--the "who"--of the speaker (although Arendt reserves this critique for philosophical language, which we might expect to address precisely this issue, rather than language tout court); if the subject must become alienated from its being through the very use of speech; if language forecloses the ability to know that being, to express that which we lose through becoming subjects, then we find Hamlet's question, "to be or not to be," replaced by Lady Grey's Beckettian musing, "How to be, or, not, or.. for what for, exactly? Meaning what? Unknown" (52) and, Wittgenstein might add, unknowable.

Yet, we tend, by and large, to act as if meaning were knowable; as if words could deliver the world before our eyes with full presence; as if language had the ability to name and thus give form and pattern to what could remain an inchoate "inner reality." That we communicate with and understand each other (albeit, on occasion, agonistically) surely provides evidence of the relative transparency of language. Lady Grey appears to suggest this herself when she begins telling a story about a young girl named Jennifer, whom she describes as having "brown hair, completely arresting and sparkling dark--you know what, you've seen a girl before. Jennifer is the girl you see when someone says 'girl'" (45). What interests me here is less the sense that we share a knowledge of the meaning of "girl" (which Wittgenstein would remind us is only a shared certainty about how to play the naming game that allows us to pretend that language can convey the meaning of "girl"), than the emphasis on "girl" as a linguistic entity, a word that--given my discussion of language in Eno's work--does not refer us to the real, but designates that "inherited background" through which "girl" comes to act as a signifier. If we respond with common images and concepts "when someone says 'girl,'" it is because we learn to do so through Show and Tell and the other cultural practices that do not simply teach us to use language, but underscore the extent to which language functions as an ensemble of cultural codes that work ideologically to transmit the desires, meanings and values of a dominant cultural order. Roland Barthes describes these codes with an apt theatrical metaphor: "Alongside each utterance, one might say that off-stage voices can be heard: they are the codes: in their interweaving, these voices ... de-originate the utterance" (21; emphasis added). These codes, he continues, are the means by which language "states a general will, the law of a society, making the proposition concerned ineluctable or indelible," thus concealing "its ideological perspective" (100).

Once "the proposition concerned {becomes} ineluctable or indelible," once we confuse the linguistic with the natural, with that which is given as beyond question, we have firmly entered the realm of the ideological. Even Lady Grey's abbreviated description of Jennifer reveals the "off-stage voices" speaking through her monologue. "Brown hair, completely arresting and sparkling dark--" eyes would necessarily follow (precisely how she describes her own eyes (47))--a description that appeals directly to our visual sense. Just two sentences later, she mentions Jennifer "walking past houses, through wheatfields, men watching her pass ... a pretty dress, she is girly ... Jennifer. A girl, a body ... See the girl" (45; emphasis added). As these lines suggest (and as feminist film and drama theorists have been telling us for some time), in a largely androcentric culture "when someone says 'girl,'" this signifies a passive being, objectified and eroticized by the controlling (male) gaze. As Laura Mulvey argued in her groundbreaking essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are ... coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness" (62).

Lady Grey's sense that her audience knows what "girl" signifies--with its invocation of women's "traditional exhibitionist role" and its linking of the encoding of that role to the language of school primers and Show and Tell ("See the girl")--allows Eno to place what has appeared to be a personal existential crisis within the larger context of the ideology of sexual difference. Eno utilizes Lady Grey's sense that she cannot find "a word by which she will be revealed," then, not only to raise the issue of language's failure to communicate the unique singularity of the "who," but to focus on the status of language as an instrument of cultural power, a mode of (re)production for the play of patriarchal power relations. If Lady Grey wonders "how to tell" her story, this is because within patriarchal culture, as Lacan observes, "when any speaking being lines up under the banner of women it is by being constituted as not all ... There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words" (1985: 144). Women may speak, but language "in a world ordered by sexual imbalance," reduces them to the "not all;" language, that is, positions them as objects within a masculine imaginary rather than granting them full subjectivity.

We can certainly respond that language also confirms men's lack; that, like Thorn Pain, who sees speaking as the self's "disappearing act," men also must confront their status as "not all" when their presence in/as language exacts the price of their absence as being. Since, however, the "sexual imbalance" characterizing our dominant culture ideologically associates men with linguistic authority and the power of the Word, women live their relation to language and signification differently than do men. Eno succinctly illustrates this extremely problematic relation when Lady Grey says, "Jennifer. A girl, a body." We move from the name ("Jennifer"), the most fundamental signifier of personal identity, to a broader, more general category whose identity emerges from cultural codes and ideological practices Ca girl"), and finally to the objectified matter Ca body") that, as Irigaray writes, "signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation" (26).

This discursive reduction of women to the "not all" provides another way of thinking about how language functions to foreclose the expression of "who" while only signifying the "what." If this is a problem of philosophical discourse, it is also how cultural coding operates through language both to establish and to conceal what Barthes calls an "ideological perspective." Lady Grey illustrates this when she discusses how "we can try to overcome ... the fact that we use the same words for things but don't have the same things for the words" (47). She chooses for an example a word that, no matter how many variations it permits or how much we try to personalize it, will always bear the same meaning within the existing cultural framework of gender relations: "We all think our mothers are named Mother. We may try to specify: Mom, Momma, Mommy, Mummy, Maman, Mum, Ma. To make her feel special, less anonymous. She is merely the thing that gets the name. The body that drifted through the word" (47; emphasis added).

This passage acknowledges the ideological power of the signifier, for the very words that are meant to make the individual mother "feel special, less anonymous"--the words promising to restore some of the concrete singularity to the body imprinted with the word "mother"--only confirm her anonymity as "merely the thing that gets the name." The name "mother" itself calls attention to the pervasive nature of ideology since it is less a signifier of personal identity than an indicator of a social role, what Althusser calls "mother-being" (211). Ironically, this role consists precisely in transmitting and reproducing dominant forms of ideology within the family, since the mother initiates the educative process of socialization through which the child will come to take up its "proper" and "appropriate" subject position as articulated through the symbolic network of patriarchal culture. Just as the mother is "a body that drifted through the word" that interpellated her as an object of ideological power, so she will ensure that she gives her children the names and words that will produce their "correct" social existence.

Curiously, given Lady Grey's example of the word "mother," we hear nothing about her own mother, although we do have the sense that, to some degree at least, "mothering" has flailed to transform her into a completely docile body, a "thing" willing to accept the names assigned her. She tells us, "I caught the acting bug when I was very young ... The doctors said it was all in my head. Then they said it had spread to my spine ... Me and my acting bug ... eight years old, unable to walk. It turned out to be something viral, something you just get" (43-6). Despite Eno's obvious pun on the meaning of "bug" as something with which we are fascinated, if not obsessed, and as "something viral," the passage remains confusing. Why should a fascination with acting necessitate calling in the doctors? Was she really paralyzed or was she being pathologized/punished because of "the acting bug?" What is the potential danger in acting? Perhaps nothing, if we think of acting in terms of method acting and the kind of realistic or naturalistic acting characterizing mainstream Western theatre--acting in which the performer disappears totally into character, becoming, as it were, the character. However, as Brecht and, in a different way, the "absurdists" (and I acknowledge the overgeneralization in this term) recognized, this form of theatre helps reproduce dominant ideology by showing the order of the world as a given. In this theatre, the actor's disappearance into her role becomes an extension (and support) of the cultural imperative that demands the disappearance of the singularity of the "who" into the socially validated "what," the ideological interpellation of the unique existent into the "appropriate" subject position defined by the practices and linguistic codes of the symbolic order.

If, like Brecht, we think of the actor as standing outside the role, presenting the role for critical scrutiny, demystification and deconstruction, then we can see why Lady Grey's enthusiasm for acting would necessitate a call to the doctors and a diagnosis/construction of her as ill. This point becomes even clearer if we think of Irigaray, who borrowed Brecht's idea of alienation effects in acting and transformed it into a feminist strategy for the offstage denaturalizing of gender roles--a strategy she terms "mimicry." Irigaray writes, women "must assume the feminine role deliberately. Which means already to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation ... To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it ... so as to make 'visible' ... what was supposed to remain invisible" (76).

Such potentially subversive "acting" threatens the "sexual imbalance" of patriarchy, which works to ensure, in Irigaray's words, that "the 'feminine' is never to be identified except by and for the masculine" (85). We can thus see the doctors who attend to Lady Grey's "affliction" as the agents who enforce the regnant ideology of sexual difference, who "mother" Lady Grey by ensuring that rather than "'play with mimesis," she act the appropriate role in the master script of patriarchal culture. This role allows women to enter what Irigaray calls the culture's "discursive mechanism" (76) only "to connote to-be-looked-at-ness." The doctors, through their diagnosis/construction of Lady Grey as paralyzed and requiring confinement to her bed thus effect that "consignment to passivity" that the feminine comes to signify. "When someone says 'girl,'" when Lady Grey herself calls Jennifer "girly," they do not mean the subversive mimic claiming agency and empowerment through "the acting bug," but rather a woman who, as Lady Grey does when unable (or not allowed) to leave her bed, "began to see myself as watchable" (46). We hear Barthes' "off-stage voices" clearly in such lines, as Lady Grey comes to accept her feminine role--a role "identified by and for the masculine"--as the specular object of desire: "it doesn't work, my life, without people sitting there, staring, undressing me with their eyes" (43; emphasis added).

Perhaps we might be tempted to read Lady Grey as herself mimicking this role. Speaking perhaps of herself, perhaps of Jennifer (and Eno strongly suggests that Jennifer is Lady Grey), she declares, "She sang, danced, spoke, stopped ... refined her performance of herself" (52; emphasis added). That she refers to this image of woman as spectacle and object of specula(riza)tion as a "performance" suggests she possesses the capacity of the mimic, in Irigaray's words, to "step ever so slightly aside from herself" (29), to see through the linguistic coding that objectifies her. Indeed, the monologue begins with Lady Grey not so much mimicking as reversing the "sexual imbalance" of the dominant scopic economy, a reversal that only emphasizes that "imbalance." The play opens with a long pause during which the spectators feel growing discomfort as Lady Grey "regards audience, very still, as if watching a play," and then delivers her first line: "You seem nervous, so, why don't I start" (43). This sense of discomfiture does not abate once Eno restores the "(im)balance" of specular power relations, once the woman becomes the scene/seen. As "nervous" as we may find ourselves when positioned as the object of Lady Grey's gaze, we cannot help feeling a nagging sense of complicity for not questioning the "ineluctable and indelible" coding of women as "connot{ing} to-be-looked-at-ness" once we regain our specular privilege as spectators. When Lady Grey suddenly asks, "Do you want me to take my clothes off," and then "immediately. I thought so" (50), we don't need an audience response to know that the unspoken answer is yes, that the feminine signifies total erotic(ized) display.

That Lady Grey does not strip, that she makes the audience uncomfortably conscious of what it means within patriarchal culture "when someone says 'girl,'" however, does not in itself render her performance an example of subversive mimicry. She talks about herself in terms of performance in one other section of the monologue. When the doctors--these menacing enforcers of patriarchal ideology--confine her to her bed, she recalls that "people came by, stared, told me what I was missing ... filled me in ... if someone came by to quote visit, I couldn't move, I couldn't run away. And so I bore the attention of your fellow human beings ... {w}ho would, after dismounting, smoke ... give their notes on my performance as a woman lying down" (46, 48; emphasis added). This passage enacts the same movement we saw in the lines "Jennifer. A girl, a body," as Lady Grey finds herself reduced to a kind of inert matter that is both object of coercive sexual desire ("I couldn't run away") and site of the lack ("what I was missing") that confirms her as the "not all." Concerning this last point, we should note that equation of woman with lack, is an effect neither of nature nor of some gendered essence, but results from a discursive construction, an ideological deployment of language that relegates women to the status of the other--"people ... told me what I was missing." Such linguistic violence, reenforcing the sexual violence she has suffered, in effect transforms Lady Grey into the "not all" by limiting her linguistic ability to find the expressive, revelatory word. She can recount what happened to her, but she remains unable to convey her anger and outrage about this experience: "Others might not have been so--what's the word--as I was. Others might have been even more whatever-the-word-is than I was" (48; emphasis added). Such communicative failure underscores that if women, as Lacan writes, are inscribed as the "not all" insofar as they are "speaking beings," this is not because they lack voices, but because their voices remain unheard, their "who" remains unrecognized and unvalidated by the discursive apparatus of patriarchal culture.

In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler points out that the "ongoing interpellations of social life" occur through "what I have been called" (The Psychic Life of Power 38), which confronts the subject with a set of terms, names and linguistic codes that appear foreign, while nevertheless possessing the power to secure the subject's consent to inhabiting these codes. As Butler argues, "One may well imagine oneself in ways that are quite to the contrary of how one is socially constituted; one may ... meet that socially constituted self ... with alarm ... or even shock ... {which} underscores the way in which the name wields a linguistic power of constitution" (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power 31). Lady Grey may manifest "alarm" and "shock" at the social existence mapped out by patriarchal discourse, but she cannot totally escape the "linguistic power of constitution" wielded by the name. She accepts the "notes on my performance" given by the people {who} told me what I was missing," and it is through these notes that she internalizes the discursive coding of women as object of specular and sexual desire: "I began to see myself as watchable ... I learned that the world was something I might lie down for, holding my nose while it enacted its worldliness on me" (46).

No matter how much she may "hold her nose," she fundamentally acquiesces to the cultural imperative that she fulfill women's "traditional exhibitionist role." Even her private life conforms to this role as she takes for her lover a man who would "stare at me ... he liked to look at my face" (48, 51); a man who confirms her sense of herself as a "what" rather than a "who," a "watchable" object. Indeed, one of the details Lady Grey emphasizes when describing this man is the pair of dark sunglasses he wears, in which she sees herself in the image that her culture provides for her--"me staring at myself in his sunglasses" (48), confirming her specular objectification. If her relationship with the man confirms her cultural coding as "a girl," hence "a body," it also confirms the binary opposition that codes men in terms of linguistic authority and the source of meaning: "He told me I was beautiful. I started thinking I was beautiful" (54). Once the man leaves and "doesn't speak to {her} anymore ... there you are, left not knowing what to say, stripped of your previous meanings" (53-4). These lines provide an excellent example of the (particularly female) subject's linguistic vulnerability, for she cannot enter social life, which is coextensive with linguistic life, except insofar as she finds herself named by another, granted meaning by the other's discourse. She may, as Butler observes, regard this situation "with alarm ... or even shock" (and Lady Grey responds to her abandonment, the stripping of her meaning, with "fantasies of betrayal and hate ... in which I came out, bloodily, on top" (49), yet they remain only fantasies), but the "linguistic power of constitution" wields an inexorable force, perhaps never more so than when it is withheld.

Ironically, Eno juxtaposes this moment when Lady Grey feels "stripped of meaning" with an act of stripping through which the female "subject" accedes to meaning, as Lady Grey ends her monologue by narrating Jennifer's turn at playing Show and Tell in school: "For my thing I brought in this, she says, and takes off her clothes, her underwear. She is naked before them ... she says ... This is for being a girl ... Can we touch it, a boy with asthma asks ... Everyone looking and seeing ... And all stare straight ahead" (54). Both Jennifer and Lady Grey may hope their audiences will "look close. See another person clearly" (50), but Eno's play demonstrates the seemingly unassailable ideological force of the language of cultural power that makes it almost impossible to "see" in terms other than those set by the linguistic coding that determines how and what the subject will come to signify. To "see another person clearly" would mean to see the "who" of that person, not the "what" inscribed by the "ongoing interpellations of social life," those acts of ideological capture that leave the subject unable to find that utopian "word by which you will be revealed, expressed." Without such a word, all Lady Grey and Jennifer are left with is an overwhelming sense of loss as they realize that rather than "s{eeing} her" (54), their audiences see only "a girl, a body."

While Lady Grey may live her relationship to lack and loss differently than men do (at least those who have been ideologically coded as masculine) within patriarchy, in a sense every "speaking being"--male and female--inscribes itself as the "not all" through language. Males may enjoy the cultural privilege that Lady Grey lacks, but "lack" itself becomes constitutive of the subject, no matter how it is gendered. I have already discussed Thorn Pain's frustration with the dictionary in his search for a self-revelatory word--a search as fruitless as that undertaken by Lady Grey. At one point, describing "the backside" of a woman with whom he has a brief affair, he offers "apologies for the dirty language. But it's all dirty language if you look at it right" (22). The obscenity, the dirtiness of language, rests in the splitting of the subject it produces--a subject who becomes, as Pain says, "a foreigner ... to the place where he was born" (24). In this connection, we might remember the famous Lacanian dictum that "the {linguistic} symbol manifests itself first of all as the murder of the thing" (1977: 104). The subject gains meaning through its entrance to the symbolic order, even as it becomes lost in a perpetual state of exile from the immediacy of the experience and the access to being that defines the uniqueness of the "who."

This dialectic of presence and absence, this appearance entailing disappearance, does not only define for Lacan the accession to subjectivity through language, but also marks the mirror stage, the prelinguistic stage in which the baby finds its identity through identification with its mirror image. The baby's "jubilant assumption of his specular image," its introjecting the image so deeply that it misrecognizes a coherent bodily gestalt as a sign of the ontological coherence of selfhood, "situates the ego ... in a fictional direction" (Lacan, Ecrits 2). The baby can never attain the plenitude of being the mirror promises because the image is just that--an image that situates the baby in "the armor of an alienating identity" (Lacan, Ecrits 4). This misrecognition of the image for the thing itself leaves the specular I of the mirror stage with only a "paranoiac {self-}knowledge" since the I finds itself formed through a "succession of phantasies" (Lacan, Ecrits 2, 4) that, like the symbolic order of language, remove it further from the concrete singularity of its being. Eno captures the truth of the mirror stage, the reality (or perhaps one should say fantasy) that our misrecognition covers over when Pain "walks upstage toward {a} plywood cutout of himself Regards it. Oh, me" (14). In this context, "oh, me" registers the absurdity of defining the self in terms of and essentially as an image. Certainly the mirror reflects a three-dimensional lifelike image that a plywood cutout does not, but the cutout reminds us that Lacan calls the mirror stage "a stage in objectifying identification" (Lacan, Ecrits 17). To the extent that Pain's "oh, me" even ironically indicates an identification with the cutout figure, it does so by laying bare the mirror stage's structure, underscoring the "objectifying" nature of this phase of identity formation while revealing the "jubilant assumption" of the specular I as marking yet another in the series of losses that constitute the history of the subject.

Indeed, for Lacan, these losses begin with birth, what he terms the "specific prematurity of birth in man" (Lacan, Ecrits 4), a lack for which the child attempts to compensate by introjecting into itself prior to the mirror stage those objects which it sees as extensions of itself, as the privileged objects that will complete it. Chief among these objects we find the mother's breast: "The breast ... certainly represents that part of himself that the individual loses ... and which may serve to symbolize the most profound lost object" (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 198). Such objects, standing in for "the most profound lost object"--the individual's being, its "whoness," its ontology of uniqueness--because they can never rise above their status as symbols, fail to fulfill desire and only lead to a succession of substitute objects (what Lacan calls the objets petit a) that, like the mirror stage and the symbolic order of signification, can never recuperate the subject's feeling of deficiency and self-loss. That the mother's breast, voice, and gaze are listed by Lacan as the earliest objets petit a makes perfect psychological sense but also emphasizes the cultural importance of the mother as the figure who begins to lead the child to social subjectivity and away from the consciousness of the lack at its core. Since the mother often introduces the baby to its reflected image, she frequently oversees the mirror stage that produces the specular I. It is hardly surprising then that Pain's overwhelming sense of lack, his failure to experience a mirror stage that allows him to feel the illusion of ontological coherence, even his sense that language "{i}s all dirty language," can be traced to the mother's failure to play the ideological role assigned her within patriarchal culture.

Like Lady Grey with her story of young Jennifer, Pain takes up a good deal of his monologue with the story of a young boy (and Eno leaves even less room for doubt than he did in Lady Grey that the play's titular narrator and the child are the same person) whose beloved dog died when they were out playing. Returning home in search of comfort, the boy, in Pain's evocative image of "the only-child, make{s} his way from room to room, in search of anything to mother ... him ... {to} pat his head ... {to} muss up his hair and say, Good Boy. He comes and goes, untouched" (24). When he becomes an adult and leaves home, "his mother wept" but "due to an unrelated malady" (32). The mother fails to act as the source of the objets petit a for Pain, fails to extend the validation and recognition ("Good Boy") that her ideological role demands. In place of the mother, the dog becomes the most valued object of desire, an object that, unlike Pain's mother, reciprocates that desire, thus producing in the boy a temporary sense of existential coherence: "Ah, the dog. Long story short, boy loves dog, dog loves boy, no question, no amendment, no need to revise" (17). This love proves so fulfilling that the boy lies with his dog, "whispering, 'I do. I do'" (18), the linguistic formula that promises--but only promises--to eradicate lack by transforming two separate entities into a complete being; the formula that, we might say, governs the subject's relation to anything positioned as an objet petit a.

To the extent that language itself transforms the specular I of the mirror stage into full subjectivity, inserted within the network of social meanings and frames of intelligibility; to the extent that language has an imaginary dimension that dissimulates its rupture with the real and promises to re-present the world, including the subject's "inner reality"--to this extent, language itself can become an objet petit a. When the dog dies--electrocuted by lapping water from a puddle in which lay a frayed downed power line--the boy, playing in another puddle, takes a stick and "wrote maniacally ... We don't know why" (17). In some ways, however, we do know why the boy immediately turns to writing, to the chain of signifiers, after losing the dog. We see the boy playing out a variation of the fort/da game, in which Freud's grandson, when his mother was absent, would hold a reel by the string, throw it out of his crib while uttering a drawn-out "o-o-o-o" sound found in the word fort {gone}. He would then pull the reel back into the cot, uttering the drawn out "a-a-a-a" sound found in the word da {there}. While Freud sees this game as a way for his grandson to distance himself from the unease caused by the mother's disappearance, Lacan sees the reel as symbolizing not the mother, but the boy himself, as an objet petit a, with the signifiers he voices as "the first mark of the subject" (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts 62).

Since the "o-o-o-o" and "a-a-a-a" sounds "name" the reel which, as an objet petit a, "is a small part of the subject which detaches itself from him" (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts: 62), we can read the incident of the boy and the dog in similar terms. The boy turns to writing with such urgency as a way to master the pain of the dog's death--a dog which, as the objet petit a, symbolizes the boy. In other words, at issue here is less the dog than the potential traumatic disappearance of the boy, which sends him to language so that he "appears somewhere as meaning." Yet, the "maniacal" nature of the writing points to what we have already seen--that the subject's appearance in language entails the disappearance of its being. Rather than granting mastery over the traumatic sense of lack and self-division that the loss of the dog accentuates, the boy's turn to language cannot save him from "childhood{s} end," from being "a wee little hurtable thing" that, even though possessed of "a few hundred words ... never recover{s}" (17). No matter how much or how desperately the boy writes and speaks, as Pain later discovers with his voracious reading of the dictionary, language only seems to recuperate loss, "to make {the subject's} life seem more full." As Lacan succinctly observes, "I can come into being {as the subject of language} and {yet} disappear from what I say" (Lacan, Ecrits 300).

The dog's death and the attendant failure of language either to fill the void left by the death or guard the boy against self-loss, together with the mother's ideological if not actual absence, constitute the events that situate Pain in a highly problematic relation to social subjectivity. He will spend his life poring over the dictionary in search of a word "almost unbearably precise" (21) in its ability to express him as a "who" rather than a "what," yet the dictionary only leaves him with a visceral sense of "the pain of the words" (22) seeming only to refer to each other in an endless chain of signifiers that never names the uniqueness of the subject. He will also spend his life searching for an object to replace the dog in its role as "symboliz{ing} the most profound lost object." In this connection, it is noteworthy that what attracts Pain to the woman with whom he has the affair is "a doggy sort of way I found very fetching" (22). Just as language cannot act as either compensation or supplement for the dog's loss, however, so neither can it protect Pain against the loss of his new objet petit a. Indeed, once he gives voice to his desire for the girl, once desire makes its way through "the defiles of the signifier," their affair ends: "He couldn't see the story through. He did not love too much, nor too well, but ... with too many long words, too many commas" (34; emphasis added). Even a love affair becomes reduced to a linguistic structure ("the story") which, by its very nature as language, dooms the lovers to division from each other as well as the self-division to which all speakers are subject. Eno mirrors this division in the very narrative structure of the play, for no matter how clear he makes it that the young boy has grown into the adult Pain, the latter delivers much of the monologue in the third person. As Judith Butler observes in The Psychic Life of Power, "The subject can refer to its own genesis only by taking a third-person perspective on itself, that is, by dispossessing its own perspective" (11).

Butler's comments echo Lacan's argument (to which I referred earlier) that speaking involves us "in an ever-growing dispossession of ... being." Perhaps the one advantage to Pain's failure to obtain a firm position within the symbolic order lies in his ability to see how language leads to ontological "dispossession." As much as Pain can seem obsessed by finding a word "almost unbearably precise" in its power to suture the gap between meaning and being, he also pulls away from language. After the dog's death and the boy's failed quest for "anything to mother ... him," Pain tells us "he said almost nothing" (30) while growing up. When he would sing, "he sang a little song without words" (18). Although he attended school, "he was schooled, to no effect" (30)--apparently, Show and Tell and the other ideological naming games through which we are taught to apply language unquestioningly failed to gain any purchase on him.

In this connection, one of the strangest incidents Pain recounts concerns a wet dream the boy has the night after his dog dies. He dreams of "a girl saying a word he liked...Whispering one of those funny little words that only refer to words, like 'Such' ... he just felt ... a nice little physical feeling in the night, and came, without language ... What a mysterious scene" (25; emphasis added). Again, Pain reminds us of his sense that "all language is dirty language," its obscenity lying precisely in the self-dispossession it imposes on the speaking subject. In this sense, "such" would provide the ultimate example of obscenity, since it acts as a microcosm of language in general insofar as "such," no more than any other word, ever serves as "a pure indication of the real." The boy's climax, his jouissance, becomes all the more valuable, all the more real, because it occurs "without language," because he refuses to allow the word to act as "the murder of the thing" and detach him from the experience. In this connection, it is worth noting that as long as Pain's affair with the woman remains purely sexual, located in what Lacan calls "the real of sexual copulation" (1985: 82), then "we were pretty compatible, for a while there, what with the dick and the cunt" (21). Their sexuality provides Pain with an (albeit illusory) sense of unity and coherence-"Then, the lost was found" (30)--that dissolves when he attempts to express desire in language with "too many long words"--a length measured not in the number of letters or syllables but in how far desire becomes deferred; in how wide the gap the signifier opens between the subject and the sense of completion for which it yearns.

In arguing that Pain has an highly problematic relation with subjectivity--that he lives his experience of subjectivity in terms of the lack and loss that the recourse to language entails while mystifying--I am not suggesting that Pain finds himself exiled from the symbolic order as well as from the singularity of his being. We think of Pain, as we do of Lady Grey, as speaking beings who can utilize language in very creative and distinctive ways, even as it ensnares them "in an ever-growing dispossession of ... being." At issue, then, is their problem with inhabiting the subject positions that the cultural/linguistic order makes available to them. With Lady Grey, as I have argued, we can trace this problem to the dominant gender ideology within patriarchal culture. Thorn Pain appears to bracket ideological concerns in favor of an emphasis on the ontological and existential, yet we can trace Pain's instability within the symbolic order to an ideological rupture within structure of the patriarchal family.

I have already mentioned the mother's failure to serve as the source of Pain's objets petit a, the objects meant to stand in for some missing component of the self. In the Lacanian analysis of patriarchy, the cultural order charges the mother with the ideological imperative of recognizing the father's word as law; recognizing the father as a symbolic father invested with the power of the phallus--not the penis, the real anatomical appendage, but the phallus as master signifier of cultural privilege and linguistic authority (a distinction on Lacan's part that, as many critics have argued, is hardly unproblematic). The phallus becomes the mother's object of desire in its role as the signifier, in Kaja Silverman words, that "designate{s} all of those values which are opposed to lack" (182-3) and thus opposed to the feminine, the "not all." The mother's ideological conflation of the biological and symbolic father and her desire for the phallus and all it comes to signify prove particularly important when the child is male, for it facilitates his identification with the father's symbolic and discursive power and thus his cultural coding as masculine, a speaking being constructed as the "all" and stamped with the Name-of-the-Father. Both of Pain's parents prove unable to fulfill their cultural mission. The mother shows no signs of providing the ideological (mis)recognition of the real father as the symbolic father, any more than she guides Pain through the mirror stage or evinces any concern with his passage to subjectivity. Eno provides only one reference to Pain's father that certainly does not allow us to see him as a symbolic figure of cultural and linguistic authority. When Pain leaves his childhood home, "his father, who is still alive, God rest his soul, waved goodbye" (32). We note first the silence of that being who should stand for the symbolic order; who should, in a sense, endow his son with language and subjectivity. We also register a certain ineffectuality in this man whose life resembles a kind of death ("God rest his soul"), and who apparently has had no impact or determinative effect on Pain's own life. The very brevity of the references to both parents, the absence of any interaction with each other, let alone with Pain, suggests that his own failure to occupy a firmly defined subject position has its roots in what amounts to an ideological crisis of family structure. His closing benediction to the audience, "be stable, be stable, be stable, be stable" (37), names the very thing this crisis has prevented him from gaining within the symbolic order.

This instability manifests itself corporeally as well as linguistically. If interpellation means, as Lady Grey remarks, a "body that drifted through the word," that word marks, territorializes, delimits, and defines the borders of the body. While, as I have indicated, Pain speaks of the boy's wet dream and his climax in ideal terms because it occurs "without language," even beyond language, most of his physical references image the body as porous and fluid, at the point of dissolving, with selfhood becoming liquified and unbounded. We hear of the boy's "heart and body full of bleeding wonder" (16; emphasis added); of his becoming a bedwetter; of "his body ... exploding in painful sores" (26; emphasis added) after being stung by bees. The adult Pain remembers one morning during his affair waking "to cold sores tearing through our lips" and thinks back to kissing the woman, which he refers to unromantically as "covering her in me, my saliva ... drooling" (29; emphasis added). He develops a nosebleed during the monologue and reminisces about walking through a park one night when he "vomited, and then collapsed ... shivered on the freezing ground, covered in stomach fluid, saliva, and bile" (32). Rather than installed in a secure position where embodied subjectivity can emerge within its culturally coded limits, Pain's body, "bleeding ... exploding ... tearing," remains unconfined to any position. Far from enjoying a subjectivity dissolving into the postmodern utopia of free play and indeterminancy, however, Pain experiences his body as abject rather than subject, as radically unstable, defiling and defiled, contaminating and contaminated, polluting and polluted; a site without the boundaries that allow it to function as a site.

Eno mirrors this corporeal instability at the level of speech. Towards the end of the monologue, Pain unleashes a torrent of words, and we find ourselves asking the familiar poststructuralist question, who is speaking when we hear "the mouth moving" (27), for we cannot locate a coherent "I" to unify the speech. The passage is lengthy, and I quote it only in part: "I left home...I could smell my insides. I lay there ... He said to me, 'Sarah? Mary?' I didn't say anything. I thought I'd get dragged up on stage ... We barked at cars. He put his mouth on me, and I, a lady, put my leg around his neck ... I bled in the night ... I wasn't anywhere" (33-6). Initially, the "I" acknowledges that Pain is the adult the boy with the dead dog became; next the "I" assumes the role of a female audience member Pain has addressed at various points during his narration; then the "I" gives voice to the dog, the woman with whom he had the affair and, finally, a girl he has imagined experiencing her first period. As Pain traverses these various subjectivities, the "I," like his body, appears to "explode" and "tear" itself into fragments that leave it no subject position to occupy: "I wasn't anywhere." In the midst of this multitude of voices that make Pain "a feeble thing, in a wordy body," a voice that we might identify as "Pain" does temporarily emerge, but, ironically, only to question its lack of personal and social identity and meaning: "Who am I, now, and what difference does it make?" (23, 36).

This question returns us to the problem of "who" and how to give expression to the ontology of uniqueness the "who" represents that, as I have argued, lies at the very heart of Eno's monologues. Pain's "Who am I, now," like Lady Grey's "How to be, or, not, or, what," underscores the gap that refuses all suture: the gap between being and meaning, self and signification. Pain's address to the audience at the play's end leaves us not only with the inescapable nature of this gap, but with the impossible choice between the absence and disappearance that become constitutive of the speaking subject and an even more traumatic absence that does not exist as part of the dialectic that allows us presence in/as language, and thus consigns us to an ineluctable invisibility. This latter form of absence threatens to overtake anyone who hopes to find the word by which the "who" will be revealed; the transcendental word that escapes the discursive mechanism of cultural coding, ideological interpellation and the rules governing the symbolic order. Pain asks his audience, "What do you want? Not to disappear, I'm sure. Then, what? ... Then there's you. Don't say anything. Don't think anything. Just be yourself" (36-7).

In order to save oneself from disappearance, to "be" oneself, preserving the concrete singularity of the "who," Pain can only advise us to abjure language altogether: "Don't say anything." While silence may qualify as a form of resistance to ideological interpellation, it does not help situate the "I" in a world made up of others; does not provide a frame of intelligibility in which the "I" can become meaning-ful; does not eliminate the various losses and lack of completion that mark even the prelinguistic history of the "I." Silence entails its own kind of disappearance, one which--as I remarked above--does not find itself in dialectical balance with the (albeit problematic) appearance that language grants the subject. On the other hand, as Lacan's image of the word as "the murder of the thing" reminds us, language enacts a fundamental form of violence in order for the "I" to name itself as a subject. Language splits, fractures and fragments, giving us the words with which to talk or write about a plenitude of being while forever deferring that (granted, illusory) plenitude. The symbolic order allows us to say or write the word "who," while foreclosing what Arendt calls the "unequivocal verbal expression" that would allow us to translate the contents of the "who" into language. Language promises us epistemological fulfillment, but because it is organized into a series of games we play with certainty about the rules rather than knowledge about the world, it leaves us only with what Lacan calls the "paranoiac knowledge" that yields "paranoiac alienation" (Lacan, Ecrits 5). Because we are encouraged to misrecognize the linguistic as the phenomenal, we see language as possessing a metaphysics of substance that promises to endow the subject "with attributes of permanence, identity, and substantiality" (Lacan, Ecrits 17)--"attributes" that belong solely to the ideological or, in keeping with Lacan's terminology, imaginary dimension of language.

As Eno's work so vividly demonstrates, we can neither solve nor escape the dilemma with which Pain's choice confronts us. If we cannot "be" in language, neither can we live in the invisibility of exile from the symbolic order, a point emphasized by the compulsion to speak that drives both Pain and Lady Grey. Eno challenges his audience through his investigation and dramatizing, sometimes with ironic humor, almost always with unbearable pain, of what it means that we are speaking beings defined by our linguistic vulnerability. Lacan's "dispossession of being" that speech entails is not some thesis that Eno sets out to prove, but a process we watch, with growing discomfort and dis-ease, enacted before our eyes. Despite the many differences between their works, like Harold Pinter, Eno creates a dark comedy of menace, in which language becomes the source of that menace. If we feel this menace extend to us, it is because of the occasionally aggressive stance Pain and Lady Grey adopt towards us, an aggression at its sharpest when they claim kinship with us. When Pain looks at us and declares, "What a nice crowd. I see no difference, really ... Between the you and the me ... I see no separation, no unbridgeable distance between us" (20), then Thom's pain becomes our pain, the pain of having to rely on a language that necessarily betrays us. Eno forcefully communicates this pain to us as part of his signal contribution to the contemporary American theatre: an intense and powerful examination of the loss, alienation, and self-division we incur as speaking beings, as well as an evocation of that dimension--the "who"--that does not and cannot speak.

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