‘Ceremonious ape!’

Abstract

Samuel Beckett's woebegone creature Vladimir calls his companion Estragon a 'Ceremonious ape!' in the 1953 play Waiting for Godot. 'Punctilious pig!' comes the reply (Beckett 2006: 67). Following the pair's niceties 'no, no, after you' and 'no, no, you first', this bout of puerile name-calling makes a mockery of civilised propriety. The caustic remarks imply that prim and proper human behaviours are superficial routines pasted over repressed animality. Vladimir's and Estragon's phrases bear a far-reaching criticism of human identity, particularly bourgeois ideals of humanity, as a delicate façade performed to gain distance from animal cousins. Similarly but more literally, a ceremonious ape appears in Franz Kafka's 1917 short story 'A Report to an Academy' and is embodied by Kathryn Hunter in Colin Teevan's 2009 adaptation Kafka's Monkey for the Young Vic. The primate Red Peter effectively reports on his anthropomorphic transformation from an animal to a human-aping creature under his captor's tutelage. Given that he refers to his ape life in the past tense and claims to have 'reached the cultural level of an average European' (Teevan 2009: 53), it is noticeable that Red Peter's transformation challenges the supposition that humanity is an exalted, exclusive and innate category. On the contrary, humans perform humanity according to the script bestowed to them, much like the imitating ape. Red Peter clearly recognises this affinity between teacher and pupil: 'we were on the same side, fighting against our ape-like natures' (Teevan 2009: 45). These examples imply that human behaviour has an anthropomorphic slant to it inasmuch as the animal undersigns the human performance. In this essay I will trace the double process of dehumanisation and rehumanisation manifest in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, his short 1982 play Catastrophe, Teevan's Kafka's Monkey and Vesturport's 2006 adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis. These plays enact the destabilisation of the human and enter 'creaturely' territory only to convey anthropomorphic performances of the human model. The concept of the creature, theorised variously by Julia