Semiotics of Appearance and Cantwell's Notebook on Folklife Festivals, Stephen Pallas

     Often regarded as a linguistically morbid and puzzling, Samuel Beckett--perhaps more than any other playwright--provided strict costume, hair, and makeup directions for the performance of his plays to provide stability and structure to otherwise bewildering scripts.  In Endgame, for example, wanderer Clov is "dressed for the road.  Panama hat, tweed coat, raincoat over his arm, umbrella, bag" (51).  Through this lens, costume acts as a symbolic representation between subjects and objects.  Observable from a distance and under close scrutiny, the costume can substitute for many lacking cultural representations.  The semiotics of appearance are part of the whole scheme of identity, performance, habitus, and reflexivity.  As for Beckett, Cantwell pays careful attention to the authenticity of costume at various folk life festivals.  In doing so Cantwell engages in the discourse of the semiotics of appearance, and similarly invokes Foucauldian systems of power when observing, for instance, that "the circumstances place the visitor in a position of pwer, either familiar or habitual or bizarre or unreal; however admired they may be, moreover...the artists are in a position of apparent interment, even servility, and visitors often speak of them, and observe them, as if separated by a one-way mirror" (155).  Cantwell writes of entirely real system of order and power structures, but the visual synecdoche of costume visually represents the potential for alienation. Of his many observations, "the handkerchiefs in the breast pocket of the gospel singers, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt or a woven poncho, an Orioles cape or cowboy hat, a pair of Nikes, blue jeans or a polyester jacket…these constitute the cabinet of wonders that one must interpret from whatever resources of connection one has at hand.  And, as signs, they never really dissipate” (150).  And these costumes engender stereotypes which represent the larger--potential--failure of observers and performers alike.  Cantwell discusses "the difficulty of presenting something that we don't actually understand" (130), of, for instance, extinct cultures or misunderstandings of performance by observers, including misrepresentations during "Mardi Gras [as] an 'exaggeration, reverse ethnicity'" (131).  But as awful as this reality seems, the problem of intention is a problem ignorance rather than malice.

     Usually, the problem of misrepresentation of culture, as much of the language in Cantwell's project illustrates, is a creation of market forces which, in turn, shape everyday life.  Often, theater (against which Beckett will so often create his images by removing performers from the modern world into something surreal, psychologically-derived, and fantastical), "literature, film, and television can promulgate stereotypes either out of their own fancies or by echoing the images of the street" (156).  However, "art and the folk festival break through the veil of social hallucination and explore the common humanity that the hallucination strives, in ignorance, to mediate" (156).  In popular culture and in the movements of everyday life, people often get swept into the currents of market-created systems of appearance, as symbolic of the overlying order of power.  Through folk festivals, however, it becomes possible (though not always) to engage as performers and observers of authentic representations of otherwise abject cultures, peoples, and individuals.