“The Semiotics of Theater”: An Instructive Intermission

In “Writing the Absent Potential: Drama, Performance, and the Canon of African-American Literature,” published in the seminal Performativity and Performance reader, theatre studies scholar Sandra Richards takes issue with the state of scholarship on African American drama.Footnote ⁴⁴ What she regards as a dearth (in quality and quantity) of critical attention given to African American drama stems partly from an academic hesitancy about the status of all plays and dramatic texts. As Richards explains, dramatic texts, gesturing to an art beyond the text, trouble literary studies’ long-standing investments in interpretive stability—its anxieties about “textual purity” (66) and “textual incompleteness” (79). To elucidate this hesitancy, Richards quotes critic C. W. E. Bigsby:

Highlighting Bigsby's language of “violation” and “transmission,” Richards argues that the preoccupation with the individual author and concern for stable, objectively knowable textual objects is complicated by black drama. For here again we must understand that black arts, like black life, emerging within and always conversant with a history of natal alienation and racialized captivity that produced (the) black as the sign of the not- and not-quite human Other, bears a privileged relation to the problem of incompleteness, to the (im)possibility of moving in and as (cultural, material, political) “violation.” Richards argues that it is precisely via instability—the incompleteness of the script—that a communal folk articulation, essential to black aesthetics and black radical thought, emerges. In anticipating and playing with the “absent potential” of dramatic texts, black dramatists and their collaborators examine contradictions, resistances, and the power of presence and material relation.

The black dramatic text, Richards implores, must be read with attention to what she calls “the semiotics of theater” (74) even if it is an as-yet unproduced script or a script that, infused with Eugene O'Neillian literary realism, reads like a novel, as if everything about the play is “quite ‘present’ on the page …” (79). Such realism is an illusion to which, Richards argues, performance practitioners—whose readings “must account for bodies in space” (79)—are not as susceptible. While scholars reading texts as contained literary objects may read the absence of scripted lines or scarcity of stage direction as signs of a character's relative insignificance, theatre practitioners must recognize that details that are minor or absent in the text retain the possibility of being intensely potent once embodied onstage: a character with no lines might make the most resonant noise if moving with a heavy cane. Likewise the historical-political context noted by a single reference to 1968 may saturate the play via lighting or sound selections. Notably these production choices constitute both collaborations with and interpretations of the “absent potential in black drama” (69) that, though not explicitly scripted, is potentially vital to the play. Thus considering the “absent potential” is less about considering what's not there and more about recognizing and “‘playing with the possibilities that are also there’” (70).Footnote ⁴⁶

Contending that a like sensitivity to the “… also there” can deepen scholars’ approach to textual representations of black girls, I extend Richards's call to read drama as drama by positing that reading as drama is a reading mode, one that we might also apply to nondramatic texts. Perhaps, ethically, we ought to apply it to those historical black narratives that dare to write of, while entrenched in/as, the life thought to be (socially) dead or always just outside life—bare(ly) life; sub(altern) life; merely life—which is to say, black life. For to regard a semiotics of theatre, to imagine staging these narratives with bodied performers in material space and “real” time with a live audience, is to imagine the lives in these incredible narratives as having (had) life, and having it in abundance.

Attending to the semiotics of theatre is a reading “approach [that] destabilizes interpretation” (72) centered on the primacy of subject voice. For it is an approach that considers the possibilities (and impossibilities) that “result from the materiality of theater,” which, Richards explains, encompasses “a semiotics of movement, tones, silences, costumes … spatial arrangements onstage … [and] reactions of spectators in the audience” (72). It is in the interplay between explicitly written language and an implied semiotics of theatre that we may recognize the presence of what has been thrown into the narrative representation and yet remains in the representation as the scarcely and not there.

The stakes of this point extend both to scholars reading Jacobs's narrative and to performance practitioners producing Diamond's play. For producers of Diamond's play must be critical readers of not only Diamond's play but also Jacobs's narrative, and not only for the sake of dramaturgical thoroughness, but also as a matter of political and ethical integrity. Indeed Richards's call for scholars to consider black playwrights’ use of theatre's absent potential should also be read as a call for performance practitioners to remember that the interpretative practice inherent in their craft has political, epistemological, and ethical stakes, particularly when producing black dramatic texts. Moreover those stakes may demand a certain sensitivity to the explicitly scripted (if still sometimes subtle) literary qualities of black dramatic texts. For their critical use of the absent potential and implied material does not preclude black playwrights from also making critical use of explicitly scripted linguistic signs. That is to say that while scholars ought not let the literary realism of something like August Wilson's stage directions tempt them into ignoring the absent potential of his scripts, performance practitioners need not overlook the particularities of how black playwrights use language in literary-esque but no less performative ways.

• • •

(i)

Structurally in the written narrative, the agency of this scene can all be assigned to Linda. While her grandmother plays a key supporting role, she does so with a reluctance that suggests she is submissive to Linda's direction, a suggestion that belies earlier portraits of her as the willful, free, property-owning matriarch. Indeed, as narrated, Linda's grandmother is peculiarly mute during this incident. Jacobs writes the doctor's performance as a single monologue. In one paragraph, he announces his desire to “help” Linda; reads the letter (which the narrative relays in full); reflects on the letter; issues his commands; and bids farewell. There is no response verbal or otherwise from Linda's grandmother, nor does Jacobs suggest that the doctor notices and/or cares about that lack of response. On the one hand, this narration stresses the doctor's ability to presume his word will stand uninterrupted and unquestioned. On the other hand the silencing of Linda's grandmother foregrounds Linda's narrative voice. While Jacobs did not speak when the incident happened, we learn of the event through Linda's narration, which includes her retrospective commentary and positions her confident, knowing voice in contest with the doctor's ignorantly self-assured monologue—a contest that he, unaware of, has already lost.

Jacobs goes so far as to have Linda describe the doctor as putting on something like a one-man show in which he not only delivers, with elocutionary confidence, a sympathetic stage reading of the bereft fugitive (an arguably minstrelesque moment of gendered and racial impersonation) and a passible performance of benevolent slaveowner, but also even plays the role of audience, the spectator joyful, to find he has “expected” correctly. Yet the comedy of the scene—what makes his otherwise spurious con act a humorous spectacle—lies in our being privy to what Linda knows, which is that Dr. Flint is ignorant; he (like Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream) does not know that his performance is generated by and part of an unseen but intricate ensemble production complete with epistolary ventriloquism, carefully constructed props, and unseen but reliable production crew. At once the product of Linda's orchestration and Jacobs's narrative reproduction, this performance of the master's ignorance and trickery does indeed function “as good as a comed[ic]” relief.

But what of Ellen? While Linda's grandmother and the doctor are under Linda's direction, they are players in the orchestration. Ellen though is not a player, nor is she very present in the written text. The narration eclipses Ellen's body as peculiarly as it mutes Martha's voice. Even as she physically and verbally interacts with the doctor, her body and agency fade from narrative view. There is no mention of Ellen's prior movement of arrival on the piazza. She simply appears, and only by way of her effect on the doctor. For the syntax in this moment makes the doctor the subject, and aligns the narrative perspective closer to him. It is the doctor who “stepped out onto the piazza,” and it is the doctor who “stumbled over” Ellen. But similar to the muting of Linda's grandmother, this syntactical obscuring of Ellen not only highlights the doctor's violent mastery but also foregrounds Linda's epistolary and Jacobs's narrative performance, subsuming the incident that she did not wholly orchestrate into the essential material of her narration. In this incident Ellen manifests rhetorically (as well as legally and socially) as mere property: “[the doctor's] little curly-headed nigger” and “[Linda's] little girl.”

Formally speaking too, Ellen, though not part of nor party to Linda's orchestration, is essential to the “as good as a comed[ic]” theatricality of both Linda's orchestration and Jacobs's narrative. It is as if Linda usurps Ellen's encounter, incorporating it into her narrative performance. For when Linda says, “This was as good as a comedy to me,” the demonstrative pronoun “this” has no clear referent; we can't be certain about whether she is referring to her epistolary performance or to Ellen's encounter with the doctor. The ambiguity allows Jacobs to link Linda's epistolary theatrics and Ellen's encounter with the doctor as one dramatically funny incident. Read in terms of the plot, the doctor's stumbling over Ellen is extraneous. The central action has commenced and concluded by the time Ellen shows up on the piazza. Yet, read for timing and tone, that excess is essential to the narrative's affective climax and the thematic tension. Including it, Jacobs can take the still serious, situational comedy of the doctor's foolish ignorance to a bold physical humor reminiscent of minstrel and vaudeville slapstick standards in which the foolishly haughty or unaware actor is brought ungracefully and comically low by tripping on a seemingly insignificant and harmless object they fail to notice.

(ii)

How we recognize Ellen's presence, or even our ability to recognize Ellen's presence, in this scene is significantly altered if we read with an attention to the semiotics of theatre at play in the text. If we read the written text not as a closed system of meaning but as one also gesturing beyond the page, both (as record) to past performances and (as script) to possible reenactments of past performances, then all sorts of questions arise: When did Ellen arrive onstage? Has she been there the whole time? (Certainly she overheard some of the conversation.) If so, has she been actively eavesdropping or engaged innocently in some other, separate task? If not, when does she enter? How does she enter? Why? And from where? Does she enter? Did she rush in midway? Or tiptoe? How does the stumble affect the terribly petite Ellen? Did she dart to the side? Or did the weight of this falling man (a detail that leads to other sets of questions) hurt Ellen? Did she cry out? Did her grandmother move to protect her or alleviate her hurt? Undergirding these and other questions (each with a myriad of possible responses) is an acknowledgment of Ellen's, or we may say Lulu's, irreducible physical presence.

Where Ellen's words are necessarily (if not also strategically) mediated to the point of potentially rendering her voice mute, Ellen's physical presence is less mediated. To the extent that this incident is true at all, the narrative marks a moment of Lulu's black and girlish bodily resistance. Jacobs's power is one of framing, of having already mastered the plan; but if we can consider staging the incident, if we can imagine it as having once been a material event, then Ellen (with a trace of Lulu) offers an embodied and immediate challenge to the doctor's performance. Having spoken, he simply “step[s] out on the piazza,” presumably in order to leave, but here his step is interrupted, and he “stumble[s] over [Linda's] little girl.” In this moment Ellen emerges in Linda's and the doctor's interlocking performances. If we go by the amount of narrative or textual space spent on this incident or on describing the doctor's and Ellen's bodies, then the stumble seems to have no effect at all on the doctor, who immediately addresses Ellen in a tone that continues his act of “gracious” patriarch. If we focus on what it textually explicit, which is just a quick dialogue exchange, the doctor appears to retain his power, and Ellen by contrast seems naive, innocent, and vulnerable to a specious performance of benevolent care, the violence of which is accented by the doctor's cheerful reference to Ellen as a “little curly-headed nigger.” However, if we consider the text as script, and this dialogue as only part of a dynamic encounter, then we may dwell on Ellen's sudden presence and Dr. Flint's sudden recovery from the stumble a little bit longer. For when staged, it becomes harder to dismiss the impact of this stumble, which does not make Ellen (who could have been hurt in this encounter) less vulnerable, but which does render the doctor less invulnerable. Enacting Ellen allows us to consider how Lulu's black and girlish body physically confronts the master and alters his performance. Simply put, she is in his way, and he must notice her. Her material presence interrupts the doctor's ability to make a clean exit. Toppling his haughty verticality, her material presence troubles his ability to keep balance; disturbs the authoritative airs assumed in his masterful gait; and brings him toward the life that is low(ly). Her body, by forcing him to feel what he hadn't seen, destabilizes, at least for a moment, the totality of his power over her as adult, as male, as white, as learned doctor (who, ironically, presumed to help her with her poor vision), and as master of her fugitive mother. If Jacobs's epistolary performance metaphorically throws Flint's movements into other directions, Ellen's childish body accentuates that throwing by concretizing it—throwing off his equilibrium, forcing his body to reckon with the substantive presence of the dependent and minor, the black and girlish object. Though passive object, Ellen is alive, there, and moving. And inasmuch as the incident is based on lived experience, what is registered in the materiality of Ellen's interruption is Lulu's irrefutable weight. While this weight is not explicitly rendered in (but actively obscured by) the written text, it emerges in the palpable implications and minor presuppositions, to which a semiotics of theatre demands we attend.

(iii)

Importantly, attending to the implied material at play in the semiotics of theatre does not mean we should bypass the textual choices. The point is not to ignore the syntactical choices that align the reader with the master as the subject and eclipse Ellen's body. Rather the point is to distinguish between, even as we understand we can never fully extricate, the possibilities at play in Ellen's physical performance in the story from those at play in the narrative performance of relaying these incidents. Even though we know Ellen and Lulu only through Linda's narration, the semiotics of the written narrative neither erase nor fully dictate the existence of Ellen/Lulu's materiality. We do not have to constrain our reading of the incident to the sense of disembodiment projected by the narrative's syntax. Nor, I argue, would any such constraining honor Jacobs, whose narrative gestures as often to the force of written words and illusory letters as it nods to the power of embodied performance. For to recognize the minor and the mere prop as having a material presence that exceeds their supporting role in the central drama is to also complicate our understanding of the central drama and the lead characters. Let's then conclude by returning to the moment of comedic escalation and the syntactical eclipsing of Ellen's body on the piazza.

Privileging the semiotics of the written narrative, we may interpret the failure to show up syntactically as a reflection of Ellen's immateriality, or at least as a way to signal that this character is not important, not really a player, but rather an incidental device for the larger action. If we watch the incident onstage with no knowledge of the written text, it is possible that this syntactical eclipsing of Ellen's body is itself eclipsed or undone by the materiality of the performing body. For somehow Ellen's arrival on the piazza must be addressed, and if she is there the whole time, her body is quite present. It's possible even that she in her play might upstage the doctor's performance. But if we consider the interplay between written text and its implied performance, what emerges is a complex narrative play between illusive visuals and elusive material. For Jacobs linguistically creates the conditions by which readers also fail to see Ellen's physical presence. In a text presumably invested in exposing the evil of slavery and aligning readers’ sympathies with the plight of black captives, the narrative positions readers with the white master, who is tripped up by the embodied presence of the black girl object he doesn't see but forcibly feels. The joke then is also on those readers, more so if they fail to notice this syntactical sleight of hand. Bringing readers in on the joke only to put the joke on them, this multilayered performance suggests a moment of narrative instability—a moment in which the focus on Linda as subject relents to the fugitive minor.Footnote ⁴⁹

(i)

If we privilege the written sign and approach the narrative as a closed system of meaning, then the focus of the paragraph and incident is Linda. Consider two scholarly readings of this scene:

Identifying Ellen's crawling under the plantation house as part of how Jacobs visually deploys Gothic tropes of live burial, Georgia Kreiger writes:

And Anne Warner, marking this incident as the beginning of Jacobs's tonally distinctive, long middle section of garreted fugitivity in the South, writes:

On the one hand both Warner and Kreiger offer us very “literary” readings that, treating Linda as central subject, focus on Jacobs as author, her deployment of tropes and visual allegory, and her strategic manipulations of genre and cultural symbols. On the other hand, however, Kreiger's and Warner's literary readings are bound up with visual readings. Kreiger's isn't a reading of Jacobs's poetic use of alliteration (for example, “One day, she sat under the window where I was at work, crying that weary cry which makes a mother's heart bleed”). Nor is it a reading of Jacobs's diction; for Kreiger, “fast asleep” translates just as well as “lost in deep sleep.” What she is reading is the visual image that the language seems to project. Fittingly her analysis revolves around retelling the narrative in language that emphasizes the Gothic nature of the image she wants us to recognize in Jacobs's language. (Consider her use of “buried,” “hidden,” “dark recess”). Warner too is reading an image—in her case, one that does not actually appear in the narrative. She examines the image we might imagine that Linda imagines when she, at some unspecified later point, learns that the master had killed a snake. For Warner what is important is showing how this scene functions as an impetus for both Linda's decision to escape and for one of Jacobs's particularly poignant symbolic tropes. As such she points out the visual juxtaposition of the slumbering child rescued from the crawl space (just in the nick of time) and a poisonous snake.

What I want to get at here is twofold. First, these readings are already readings of something other than the language. The literary reading here works within a visual bias, in which we read the narrative as a series of images. Sequencing and narrative action are important, but only to the extent that they help contextualize these images. This visual analysis is not in and of itself a problem. Again, the text does indeed highlight certain images and/or construct images in various ways. The problem is the ubiquity with which this visual reading is regarded as synonymous with reading narrative. I suggest that we read not only the images highlighted but also the material conditions, gestures, movements, and sounds, the whole abundantly dimensioned environment of relations bound up in this incident. This wider consideration of what is projected with the language is what Richards means when she asks us to attend to the semiotics of theatre.

Second, the visual bias in literary analysis is so strong that attention to the image seems to supplant attention to the language that projects it. Consider how, for Kreiger, the “image of Ellen buried beneath the house” creates such a strong visual allegory that she does not address the fact that this deep, dark, domestic subspace that threatens to bury the black child and destroy the black family is also the site where Linda and Ellen are reunited. Additionally if we put the logic of the visual allegory in conversation with the other textual details that gesture toward actions and a scene leading up to this visual, then the critique issued forth in the visual allegory is complicated by the fact that Linda has actually just defied the requirements that the white domestic space places upon the enslaved black family. For in this moment she is supposed to be up in the house; yet she, without seeking approval or waiting to her allotted rest time, departs from her post to attend to her child.

Similarly in Warner's essay, the details of action, movement, direction, encounter, and so forth in the incident are entirely eclipsed. In order to highlight the phallic image of the snake, Warner's analysis, reflected even in her sentence construction, places the focus on the master's action. She puts forward what Jacobs's narration suggests was unseen. Moreover privileging the paragraph's beginning focus on Linda and the end focus on the master, she (ironically) subordinates the middle details in a way that undermines the affective intensity of the incident just relayed. For Warner it is the threat of the snake that could have been there and its phallic undertones that cause Linda to send Ellen home. To be sure, Jacobs does up the ante with the inclusion of this later-learned detail, but it is a detail that comes afterward in every respect. Given that Ellen crawls under the house around noon, and the master kills the snake in the afternoon, the actual killing of the snake happens after the incident. Then Linda does not learn about the killing of the snake until some unspecified “afterwards” (which, though unspecified, comes at least after later that night, when the master sends the biscuit). While it's possible that between sometime late that night and the next morning Linda becomes aware of the snake and makes a quick decision then and there to send Ellen home, it's just as possible that Linda doesn't learn of the snake until after Ellen has been sent home. And in any event, Jacobs also waits until after the incident to relay this later detail. So while the inclusion of the detail amplifies the violence of slavery's landscape, the threat of the snake cannot be said to be (for Linda or Jacobs) the threat that initiates the anxious concern and causes Linda to leave her assigned duties, nor the threat that causes her painfully to consider death a better option for her child as she holds the sleeping Ellen in her arms. Already—with this attention to temporality, to what characters know and experience, versus the perspective of the image the narrative presents for the reader—I am moving toward a consideration of the semiotics of theatre—the implied material—at play in this incident. Doing so does not necessarily invalidate Kreiger's or Warner's reading, but it does complicate them with the physicality of Ellen and Linda's presence, their movement, and relation.

(ii)

If we approached the written text as gesturing to embodied performance, then we must attend not just to the seemingly static visual image projected by the narrative language but also to the implication of so much movement and embodied relation between and in those visuals. In performance Ellen's presence must be addressed. Onstage Ellen is not, or is not only, the passive object around which Jacobs as Linda emerges as a motherly and writerly subject. Even if she remains visually hard to see (perhaps represented by a doll baby or offstage sound), her physical presence must manifest; it must be considered. In the text, crying is a concept signaled by the word “cry.” But if staged, the cry is visceral, embodied. Whether it comes from an on- or offstage body or recording, it is a force not just upon the narrator or the actor playing Linda but also upon the audience.

Indeed, in a staged performance the choice to play into the visual slightness of Ellen and her cry—that is to say, to keep Ellen offstage—may in fact emphasize the black and girlish fugitive force at play in Ellen's choreosonic departure. Taking astro- and quantum physics as instructive analogy, Andrew Sofer examines what he regards as theatre's “dark matter.” Just as dark matter in physics refers to the believed “between 85 and 90 percent of the matter in the universe” that is visually undetectable but physically discernible by way of its gravitational pull on visible matter, dark matter for Sofer refers to that which comprises “the invisible dimension of theater that escapes visual detection, even though its effects are felt everywhere in performance” (for example: “offstage spaces and actions, absent characters, the narrated past, hallucination, blindness, obscenity, godhead, and so on”).Footnote ⁵³ While Sofer emphasizes this “dark matter” as being “incorporeal,” “materially unrepresented onstage,” detectable only if we “investigat[e] … beyond material bodies and objects,”Footnote ⁵⁴ his argument importantly calls our attention to the fact that dark matter is material; that dark and invisible, it matters; it moves and can be felt. Indeed the black and girlish minor material of Ellen's cry may be most resonant as dark, offstage matter, which though not visually represented can and must “be inferred by its gravitational effects on the motion of [the] ordinary matter”Footnote ⁵⁵ of Linda's domestic labor. For though readers may quickly skim over the detail of Ellen's crying, audience members cannot skim over the black and girlish cry. As spectators who can neither steel themselves nor act upon or affect the cry, the audience not only hears Ellen but comes under the power of her sonic materiality. Like Linda, they are subjected to the dynamic dark matter of the black and girlish minor they cannot see, but that they can feel as it carries beyond the limits of the ocular.

While the intensity of the cry is a detail already implied in the written text—Linda must “steel [her]self to bear” its sonic force—in performance, in holding open the possibility of performance, the girlish cry emerges as a palpable force that destabilizes the dominant order and troubles the footing of those above her. While the written language highlights Linda's act of emotional resistance, attention to the embodied dynamics that language implies reveals Linda's steeling to be less action and more reaction. For in the sudden onstage caesura of the cry, Linda is unarmed. The metaphor of steeling one's self calls to mind a kind of affective suit of arms. But unlike protective armor that remains on the body even when attackers retreat, Linda's steeling is a reactive tool that leans on (is obliged and propped up by) the strength of the sonic materiality of Ellen's cry. When the force of that material gives way, Linda, we might say, also loses her footing and falls. In steeling herself against it, Linda becomes inversely linked to and bound by Ellen's cry. Where she had been obliged by that cry to steel herself, she is now obliged to look up, take note of an absence, and “venture” “down” to “search for her” child.

And this search is one that takes time. In the narrative, the entire incident is one paragraph and can be read aloud in under two minutes. The middle section detailing Ellen crawling can be read in well under a minute. But if staged, the whole incident can easily take much longer to enact. How much time is given to just listening to Ellen's cry? And Ellen must crawl under the house and cry herself to sleep before Linda comes looking for her, which means there may be a period where the foregrounded action is Ellen's rather than Linda's. Is Ellen still crying when she crawls? Or does the sudden silence also compel the audience to focus more on Ellen's crawling? How long does it take for Linda to be unnerved by the silence? What is the sonic and visual experience of this expanded temporality? Is it really silent? Do we hear Ellen's slumbering breaths, or a panicked Linda gasping as she maneuvers under the house? Does Linda's descent to the ground render her hard-to-see? (To everyone? Or just those sitting near the apron?)

What also become clearer in the temporal and spatial expansion of the incident onstage is the physical repetition between Ellen's and Linda's crawling under the house (made palpable, sonic, and visual by choreography of performance). Realizing that Ellen has crawled under the raised foundation of the house, Linda must get way down, not just down into the yard, but also in an infantile position close to the ground; she herself must crawl (“cre[ep]”) under the house in order to “dr[a]w” Ellen out and “h[o]ld” her in her arms. That Linda is tracing and repeating a path and a manner of moving is harder to note in the text because the narrative language stays with Linda; thus Ellen's body and movements are obscured. But in the temporal expansion of performance, this repetition becomes more notable. Even if the set design is not such that we see Linda moving down a set of stairs and into the yard, at least some time must be given to her alarm, her abandoning the work, her looking, and so on. Perhaps the set design and use of lights create the sense that the actor is moving through a larger range of space. Can the audience see under the house? Does Ellen's departure take place in shadows behind a scrim? I am raising these potential performance choices in order to illustrate how considering the implied performances in the text necessitates a consideration of so much more than the visually representable subject or the character development of the protagonist, or even of the author's compelling use of metaphor and symbol. Thinking about the materiality of theatre, the embodied grounds, the complicated environmental elements, the sonic interventions, bring us to a consideration of the multisensory, fully immersed-in-life living of the supposedly dead and minor. And there is no fixed response. Maybe one production has the audience sit with the painful materiality of Ellen's cry for a whole minute (a long time if you're listening to the uninhibited cries of children and babies). Perhaps another emphasizes Ellen's wandering about the yard and retreat under the house; a third, something altogether different. In fact a production might not stage this scene at all. My point here is not about the actualization of a particular production. Rather I am highlighting the importance of considering these possibilities, of what it means to understand these incidents as embodied and relational. Regardless of how any particular production might stage the incident, to think about staging it requires at least that we give some thought to Ellen's body, the corporeality of her cry, her wandering, and crawling. And for those specifically interested in the historical experience of black and girlish life, considering Ellen's corporeality may just reveal the presence of the two-year-old Lulu.

Thinking of the incident narrated as an embodied event of sonic, visual, kinesthetic, and affective relation destabilizes the picture of Linda as the strong motherly subject. Without wholly invalidating that portrait, the semiotics of theatre undergirding the portrait also call attention to Linda's body and movement. We must take note of the easily skimmable fact that in order to find her daughter Linda must follow her daughter. And this following requires moving like, with, and to her daughter; it requires a move into girlish passion and impropriety down onto the ground. If a dominant tension in the narrative is Linda's struggle to cope with what her grandmother and, likely, Jacobs's antebellum readers regard as Linda's fall from grace, here descent is rethought in material terms as the precondition for care and maternal power. Linda must give up verticality, and its associations with respectability, propriety, and adulthood; she must get low. Descending and crawling are ways in which Linda, in an intense caring, gets carried away. While the narrative language emphasizes an agential control, what we see here is Linda being so caught up that she demonstrates a rare instance of the enslaved person's failure to be vigilant. Not only does she not notice the master, but also she is so swept away in this moment that she curiously vocalizes aloud her half-wish that Ellen never wake. Linda is carried away by Ellen's materiality, the irreducible materiality of Lulu presenced in Ellen—her fleshy cries, her wandering, her fast-asleep breath.

(iii)

If we think of the interplay between the narrative and the materiality of this implied performance of intergenerational getting carried away, we can see that what manifests onstage as a choreographic union—Linda's following Ellen—emerges not only as a moment of Linda's physical abandonment of vertical stance, but also as a rupture of grammatical continuity in the semiotics of Jacobs's written text: a giving up of the subject, or rather, a giving over to a certain propensity in the minor object to get carried (away). Note the beginning of that paragraph: the first three sentences are not about Ellen; instead they communicate Linda's anxieties about her weakening ability to mask her feelings. This anxiety is communicated just as much in the sentence's form as in its content. It's easy to miss the vague circuity of the second sentence because narrative prose disciplines us to expect a certain triadic development: conflict, action, resolution. The first and third sentences fit this mold (conflict, “wish[ing] to appear”; resolution: failed efforts). But the second sentence communicates nothing about Linda's related action or her efforts. Rather it is a circuitous admission that “[s]ometimes” fulfilling the “wish[ ] to appear” was “made … difficult.” This evasive formulation leaves questions: Does Jacobs mean to imply that usually (except these sometimes) it was more or less easy for Linda to appear content? Or is this a euphemistic way of saying it was always difficult, but “sometimes” it was made nearly impossible? We can't know. Jacobs limits readers’ ability to view Linda even as she has Linda call attention to her declining ability to maintain appearances. Drawn into a looking that raises questions rather than reveals, readers find themselves gazing with something like the master's suspicious eye. Withholding both Linda's efforts and her potential discomposure, Jacobs retains a sense of Linda's self-possession while generating a sense of anxiety by leaving readers uncertain about the severity of her agitation or the master's suspicions. But before readers can dwell on the anxiety of this ambivalence, the paragraph leaps away.

With no explanation, the paragraph shifts from Linda to Ellen. Read with a focus on the linguistic and narrative signs, this rupture works in such a way that mutes the anxiety around the potential of Linda's affective unraveling. Contrasted with Ellen, Linda is once more the strong-willed and dutiful mother. The narrative seems to dispel any doubts about Linda's weakening capacity for self-possession. Not only does she demonstrate the capacity to regulate her emotional appearance, to steel herself and disguise her maternal anxiety, but she also seems to transcend the mandates for her composure and labor. When she leaves her kitchen tasks to look for Ellen, she abdicates her duties, violates the master's command, and challenges the presumption that her duty as a slave trumps her duty as a mother. This reading of Linda's triumphant rise against slavery's violence to black families requires that we privilege the explicitly written text and consent to the narrative and syntactical constructions that suggest that Linda—as the opening subject of the paragraph, the retained “I,” and the closing commentator—is the subject, and that action and meaning are organized through her and largely about her.

However, if we consider these syntactical moves in conjunction with embodied movements implied in the text, the stability of that reading becomes quite tenuous. At the very least, Jacobs's decision to include it—and to do so at what both Kreiger and Warner deem a pivotal turn in the action—reveals another instance in which Jacobs amplifies her affective tension by having Linda subsume Ellen's girlish physical performance into her narrative performance. Just as Ellen's encounter with the doctor allowed Linda to escalate the situational humor of her epistolary theatrics to a forceful scene of physical slapstick comedy, here the narrative splicing of Linda's wavering composure with Ellen's explosion of emotion enables the narrative to present the illusion of preserved composure without squelching the intensity of that anxiety and emotional frustration.

Ellen's breakdown cry does what Linda cannot do on at least two registers. At the plantation Ellen can give full vent to the intensity of her discontent without the violent censure Linda would face were she to do the same. And in the narrative recounting, Ellen can be described as totally losing composure in a way that Linda cannot. Even if readers might sympathize with an image of Linda's emotional agitation, such an image would belie the narrative's effort to picture Linda as a composed and reliable beacon of strength for her children. Through splicing Linda's discontent to Ellen's, Jacobs constructs Linda's narration as both giving vent to the intensity of her feelings sans censure and staging an incident in which she rises above this occasion of almost lost control. In this way, Jacobs allows Linda to reassure readers of her self-regulatory power (her ability to steel herself) and her capacity to mother (to steal away and attend to her child). Though this may read as a form of displacement, where the minor takes up the degrading excess of passion and feeling, leaving the subject rarified and exalted, I argue that if we take into account the interplay between written text and implied gestures, what we see is less of a displacement or a muting of Linda's weakness, and more of an amplifying dispersal.

For unlike the previously discussed incident, Linda is not aligned with Jacobs as the orchestrator of this scene. Although Jacobs and Linda may retrospectively claim authority as writer and narrator, in the incident itself, Ellen's cry is the acting force. In the materiality of her uncouth and childish vent, the black and girlish minor not only gets carried away but also draws Linda into an affective act of nonperformance (noncompliance with the master's command). Linda, carried away by the material force of the sonic and its withdrawal, gives up any “effort[ ]” or “wish[ ] to appear” content and in place, which is a departure from the master's control. What is embodied onstage, then, is a refusal (by Ellen and Linda) that might be read (in one more than the other) as a failure to regulate emotion and contain signs of distress. In this intergenerational black and girlish departure, Ellen and Linda move in what Ashon Crawley might call a “choreosonic”Footnote ⁵⁶ union of crying, exhausted breath, and crawling into the dark and liminal. Importantly, while only temporary, this girlish performance of getting carried away brings Ellen, and then Linda, not into visual relief as distinct subjects but into affective relief: Ellen's distress is alleviated in her slumbering space, and Linda's anxiety about her daughter's whereabouts are appeased. Together in crawling and in the crawl space, they enact the longed-for familial caring and embrace that the master (whether the doctor or his son) endeavors to destroy.

Moreover this implication of embodied and affective departure is not a reading divorced from the signifying moves of the written text; nor is it even necessarily an oppositional move against the grain of the text. Rather it is a move into the abundant and embodied at play in the text. For indeed the implied performance of an embodied black and girlish departure echoes an already explicit destabilization of the subject in the written text. Notice how tentatively the narrative retains the illusion, and only the illusion, of Linda as the “I” agent: “I was obliged to steel myself. …” In a curious variation on the passive voice's tendency to erase the subject, the passive here offers the reader an illusion that (at least visually, on the page) keeps Linda present as the “I” subject even though she is, grammatically speaking, the object (obliged by Ellen's cry). If our reading privileges the explicitly scripted sign, then the syntactical maneuver creates an illusion of Linda that ultimately works to obscure the force of Ellen's cry. However, if we read this syntactical maneuver in tandem with the implied performance of Ellen and Linda's collective crawl, the illusion that this syntactical maneuver manifests seems less about keeping Linda foregrounded as agential subject and more about surreptitiously extending the anxious syntactical evasions in the first three sentences. In the unruly grammatical shift between the master's suspicious eye and Ellen's breaking down, the subject has indeed gone astray: she has been carried away as an “obliged” object compelled by the force of an elusive minor.

When Linda abandons her work and follows her daughter—crawling under the house beyond the immediate view of the slave master but still very much on Southern ground—she enacts with Ellen a temporary fugitivity that historian Stephanie Camp might call an instance of “truancy” or “absenteeism.” Absenteeism, as Camp explains, was a common mode of slave resistance, especially for black women, for whom running away presented even greater challenges. These moments of truancy (she uses the terms synonymously) were also potentially instructive occasions for learning about the surrounding topography; discerning the movements of patrollers; and testing how much time could pass before whatever “leniency” the master might grant to the usual truancy is withdrawn and a more massive corralling of resources to recover the fugitive property commences.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Incidents, Ellen and Linda's instance of intergenerational black and girlish flight is perhaps doubly rehearsive. Not only does this instance of truancy rehearse Linda in the choreography of her later flight; it also rehearses readers in the aesthetics of that choreography. For this incident in which a forcefully material infantile cry affects the captive's capacity to get carried away—which, when later repeated in the doctor's house, Linda calls a “special providence”—precedes not only the time in the garret, but also her time in other hiding places (such as the similarly serpent-ridden bushes; the secreted storeroom sanctuary; and the below-board kitchen refuge). But reading this crawling incident as rehearsive of Linda's later fugitivity puts pressure on traditional readings of Linda's flight, particularly as to how we regard the aesthetics of her infamous hiding place. On the one hand this truant refuge under the master's house does echo the much-theorized horizontality of Linda's escape and the liminality of the at once womblike concealment and tomblike confinement that defines the garret Linda's uncle outfits for her. On the other hand, though, the crawl space opening above her grandmother's attic and the space opened up in Ellen and Linda's girlish crawling differ in their architectural, geographic, legal, and cultural materiality. To attend to the semiotics of theatre in Incidents is to attend to how these material differences subsequently affect the politics, sociality, and epistemology engendered in these two incidents. Indeed the loophole of retreat Linda finds at her grandmother's house is a vertically ascendant destination; it affords a privileged maternal view, the proximity to familial appendages, and the protective shield of her grandmother's domestic proprietorship. By contrast, the truant space opened by crawling under the master's house is a vertically inferior space, a space under foot, accessible only by way of a corresponding declination. Yet abdicating vertical stance affords its own gifts: privileged proximity to the ground, connection to fugitive movement, and the ecstatic experience of being held.

Where emphasis on Linda's time in the garret enables a vision of black and female resistance that can claim some title to property, domestic power, maternal dignity, visual surveillance, vertical ascendency, and even influence over local news and public opinion, the aesthetics of Ellen and Linda's rehearsive crawling—what emerges in the implied performance—intervenes on our desires to view Linda as the strong, independent, black female subject. More accurately, it intervenes on our expectations that black female strength and liberation will manifest in traditional Western forms of subjecthood, namely, the figure of an autonomous, property-owning personhood. For the directions provided in this crawling rehearsal do not locate Linda's later flight within an exceptionally laudable maternal performance, fittingly ensconced in the upper chambers of the domestic. Rather they locate—materially for Linda and symbolically for readers—the potential to escape the master's house and the possibility of refusing slavery's refusal of black care within the infantile movement of the unexceptional black and girlish minor.

While this mention of crawling is minor in Jacobs's narrative (and absent from Diamond's script), the possibility of crawling and the possibilities in crawling impact how we imagine black and girlish fugitivity in both texts. For the material performance of crawling is full-bodied, intense, intimate, social, and political, precisely in that it is antepolitical and un(der)political. As black performance artist William Pope.L has demonstrated with his solo and group crawls, “[c]rawling brings us back to basics” physically, emotionally, socially, and politically.Footnote ⁵⁸ Pope.L began his performance crawls in 1979 as a way to combat the apathy with which New Yorkers regarded the increasing population of homeless people on the streets. For Pope.L, to crawl, to enter the problem of horizontality, is to “evoke loss and lack. Crawling is direct. Common. It performs both humility and willfulness. It touches on our contemporary ambivalence toward organic matter, our bodies and the earth. Both are us and nurture us and yet we find them filthy.” Footnote ⁵⁹ And as scholars have shown, “our contemporary ambivalence” with fleshy materiality and its accompanying desire for an immaterial purity can be traced to the very middle-class antebellum audience that Jacobs addresses. Preoccupied with issues of propriety, progress, purity, and order—with imagining the representable subject—this audience would have found the image of Linda crawling on all fours incongruous with the gracefully upright-despite-all-odds character deemed worthy of their affective, if not also political-economic, goodwill. “[F]or a healthy, sane person to choose to give up his or her verticality,” and to do so, notes Pope.L, “[i]n a country like the United States where moral virtue has traditionally been tied to uprightness of body carriage,” is unnerving, even threatening. To watch one opt to crawl, as if a natural vertical stance was merely an option one might refuse, is to be confronted with the possibility of the impossible, and that confrontation can elicit a range of responses from excitement and curiosity to disgust and anger.Footnote ⁶⁰

But then there is also the experience of crawling, which even when done as intentional performance, is not reducible to onlookers’ reactions. It's also about the ground, and breath, sunlight, and exhaustion; it's about fellow crawlers, ordinary sounds, and limbs pulling together; it's about “the interactions [crawling] foments and the feelings it makes possible as material for more intimate engagement with the world.”Footnote ⁶¹ Thus the scholarly, performative, and ethical work of attending to the material experience of Ellen and Linda's crawling extends beyond locating oppositional sites of resistance. It is also a matter of asking, What kind of relations, knowledge, and ways of being are made available in that crawling material? Of wondering, and moving into the wonder of, what it might mean to exercise the option of the merely optional (children), the childish, the fugitive, and the minor.