Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions
Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions
By
William S. Haney II
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS
Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions, by William S. Haney II
This book first published 2006 by
Cambridge Scholars Press
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2006 by William S. Haney II
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN 1-904303-65-X
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface.................................................................................................................vii
Chapter 1:
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater .............................................1
Chapter 2:
Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater................................................................20
Chapter 3:
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls:
The Self Beyond Narrative Identities...........................................................45
Chapter 4:
M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence.............................................66
Chapter 5:
Artistic Expression, Community and the Primal Holon: Sam Shepard’s
Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime...................................................85
Chapter 6:
Hybridity and Visionary Experience:
Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain ..........................................101
Chapter 7:
Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana: The Incompleteness of Mind/Body ...................116
Chapter 8:
Conclusion: Theater and Non-pluralistic Consciousness ..................................131
Notes .................................................................................................................141
Bibliography......................................................................................................145
Index..................................................................................................................155
PREFACE
This book argues that, by allowing to come what Derrida calls the
unsayable, the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Henry Hwang, Caryl
Churchill, Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott and Girish Karnad induces the
characters and spectators to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception,
attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste “the void of conceptions”
(Maitri Upanishad). While the experience of the sublime is often associated
with the grandeur of sayable qualities, to comprehend the unsayable involves
shifting our attention from conceptuality toward the direct experience of nonthought after the exalted qualities of the sublime have run their course. The
unsayable in this sense also implies a radical defamiliarization insofar that it
does not have a propositional status that lends itself to a narrative framework
with a definite meaning. What the nine plays analyzed in this book do over
and above dramatizing their thematic content is to take their characters and
audience from the level of object awareness toward a taste of contentless pure
awareness—the silence beyond conception that is simultaneously the source
of thought.
The unsayable (and the language used to convey it) that Derrida finds in
literature has clear affinities with the Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta.
Derridean deconstruction contains as a subtext the structure of consciousness
that it both veils with the undecidable trappings of the mind and makes to
come as an unsayable secret through a play of difference. As J. Hillis Miller
puts it, Derrida’s “intuition (though that is not quite the right word) of a
certain unsayable or something unavailable to cognition is, I claim, the
motivation of all his work” (2001, 76). This intuition emerges from that
which is immanent as well as transcendent. It pervades everything, but is not
limited to the expressions of worldly phenomena. In revealing the idiomatic
style through which a particular work invokes the other, tracing its secret,
Derrida brings the reader toward the unsayable, which, as I argue here, is
available only to a nonpluralistic consciousness. In his radical approach to
literature, Derrida hints at a connection between language and subjectivity
found not in Western philosophy but in the Indian theory of language.
Like deconstruction, the nine plays analyzed below invoke that which is
unavailable to ordinary comprehension: namely, the nontemporal
connectedness of meaning and consciousness. In this version of metaphysics,
what is gathered up or united does not close anything off, but remains open
and boundless, inviting a unity-amidst-diversity. The sacred events of stage
drama do not represent absolute reality or universal truth because no
viii
conceptual context is absolute and because sacred events involve a void of
conceptions. An unsayable experience cannot serve as the ground for truth or
even propositions because it is not in itself propositional. While cognitive
knowledge includes a cultural context and linguistic background, the
unsayable is not a form of cognitive knowledge, but rather an experience
through which language and consciousness unite. Furthermore, the nine plays
that this book argues induce a void of conceptions originate in a variety of
cultures, indicating that these encounters with the sacred are cross-cultural
and even trans-cultural events. The plays are thus universal because they can
un-construct the intentional objects of consciousness for spectators anywhere
through aesthetic experience.
Western drama theorists and playwrights are still trying to understand the
trans-verbal nature of presence, the transpersonal quality of performance,
and the relation between performer and spectator. As argued here, the
theater of Stoppard, Hwang, Churchill, Shepard, Walcott and Karnad, in
leading to a self-transformation of characters and spectators, suggests that
witnessing consciousness or the internal observer lies behind all cultural
constructs as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its
generative condition of unknowingness.
I would like to thank several colleagues and friends for helping to
complete this book. First of all, its very conception was inspired through
discussions with Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow, without whom I would
not have begun writing it. I am also grateful to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe for
organizing the international conference on “Consciousness, Theater,
Literature and the Arts” at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (May 2005),
and for having given generously of his time to read the manuscript and offer
suggestions. I also thank the IT staff at the American University of Sharjah
for their invaluable assistance, as well as the university administration,
particularly Dean Robert Cook and Chancellor Winfred Thompson for their
vital support of faculty research and development.
CHAPTER 1:
INTRODUCTION: SACRED EVENTS IN
POSTMODERN THEATER
1. The Plays: Life after Unconstructed Identity
As suggested by the nine plays analyzed in this book, whatever we may
expect sacred events in postmodern theater to be like, they do not conform to
familiar states of phenomenality. On the contrary, these events involve the
taste of a “void of conceptions” (Hume 1921, 436), also known in Zen
Buddhism as “no-thought” or “no mind” (Suzuki 1956, 189). Beyond the
trinity of knower, object of knowledge, and epistemological process of
knowing, this void of conceptions forms the screen of pure consciousness
upon which the qualities of subjective experience (qualia) are reflected.
Although first-person and immediate in-and-of themselves, sacred events in
theater, being ineffable, are mediated through suggestion and aesthetic
experience. As such these theatrical events are necessarily transient, subtle,
elusive, and postexperiential insofar that they are conveyed through language
after the fact. They are also, therefore, open to interpretation. Nevertheless,
postmodern theater leads to the self-transformation of characters and
spectators by inducing them to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception
and thought, attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste the void of
conceptions.
After this opening chapter, the following sections of which theorize
sacred events in postmodern theater, Chapter Two argues that in Travesties
(1974) and Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead (1967),1 Tom Stoppard
uses a variety of theatrical devices to undermine our culturally constructed
habits of discursive thought. These plays lead the characters and spectators
toward an experience of intersubjective space in which the sense of a
subject/object duality begins to dissolve. In Rosencrantz, Ros and Guil
demonstrate that no matter how much they try, neither thought nor action can
lead them to a true sense of identity or answer the question of freedom. Their
experiences during the play serve rather to empty the content of
consciousness and lead them to co-create with the spectators an
intersubjective space beyond normative frames of reference. In Travesties,
Stoppard infuses a postmodernist form with a modernist spirit to parody
absolute notions of art and politics. The play transforms the characters and
spectators beyond conceptuality by inducing a self-reflexiveness through
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which they transcend the logic of either/or and the limitations of knowledge
based on reason and sensory experience.
Chapter Three explores how Caryl Churchill, in developing a feminist
drama in Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982), demonstrates that the best
if not the only way to change society is first to change the individuals in
society. I suggest that self-transformation does not happen merely by
exchanging one set of culturally induced attributes for another. In Cloud
Nine, by exposing the gaps between binary opposites such as male/female,
power/powerlessness, Churchill promotes self-transformation by taking her
characters and spectators to a sacred space of empathy and inter-being. Top
Girls extends this theme by adding the opposition between the ethics of
caring and patriarchal competition, thus revealing a distinction between
discursive thought and the self as no-thought.
David Henry Hwang achieves a similar effect in his poststructuralist play
M. Butterfly (1988). Chapter Four argues that Hwang deconstructs the notion
of “the concept of self” used by postmodernists in defining self-identity. As
the play suggests, the phrase a “concept of self” involves a contradiction, for
the essential self can be approached not conceptually but only by emptying
the conceptual content of consciousness. This self, as Rene Gallimard
demonstrates, lies in the spaces between and beyond his socially constructed
identities.
In Suicide in B-Flat (1976) and The Tooth of Crime (1972), Sam Shepard
extends our consideration of self-identity by exploring the creative process
through his artist protagonists. Chapter Five asserts that to sustain creativity
an artist must tap into the “primal artistic holon,” which corresponds to the
experience of no-thought or pure consciousness. As Niles in Suicide in BFlat and Hoss in The Tooth of Crime demonstrate, this key element of the
creative process involves a void in thought that eludes conventional society
and can be easily overshadowed in the artist by the allure of fame and riches,
much to the detriment of art itself. Moreover, Shepard shows that to succeed
the artist must be able to integrate the primal artistic holon within the context
of a community with its traditional forms and values, however much these
may themselves undergo aesthetic transformation.
In Chapter Six, I argue that Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain
(1970) portrays a sacred event in the form of a visionary experience. In the
quest for Caribbean cultural identity, the play transforms its schizophrenic
main characters from mimic men pulled apart by Europe and Africa into
genuine hybrids who transcend these twin “bewitchings” toward a cultural
in-between-ness or a void of conceptions. This transformation, I suggest,
emerges through Makak’s visionary experience and its effect on the other
characters, an experience with a decontextual aspect that makes it less a
multicultural than a trans-cultural event.
Finally, Chaper Seven argues that in Hayavadana, Girish Karnad
demonstrates that human completeness depends on the physical unity of head
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
3
and body while simultaneously exceeding the physical dimension. Of all the
plays discussed here, Hayavadana deals most explicitly with the question of
human selfhood beyond our everyday socially constructed identities. Karnad
shows that while identity depends on the materialism of the mind/body, it
also extends beyond this to include witnessing consciousness. In trying to
identify solely with mind and body, both of which are essentially physical,
the characters end up feeling confused and frustrated. In taking the audience
toward a sense of completion, Hayavadana illustrates that while a mystery in
terms of theoretical understanding, completion can be known through direct
experience.
As the plays discussed here suggest, sacred events are experienced as
more or less the same by everybody. As Jonathan Shear notes, such events
are “completely independent of all spatio-temporal qualities and distinctions”
and thus refer to “experiences of unboundedness which are
phenomenologically the same” (1990, 136). This similarity accounts for the
many correlations between the plays, even though the way each playwright
evokes the sacred is phenomenologically unique. Stoppard ambushes the
constructed identities of characters and performers alike with the sudden
paradoxes of daily life and the negation of the intentional objects of
experience. Churchill, in undermining the narrative identities of her
characters and audience, pushes them away from the suffering of daily life
while simultaneously pulling them toward the fulfillment and freedom of the
better self. Hwang, in revealing the hidden presence of a reflexive
consciousness, orchestrates a charade of multiple identities that nobody takes
for anything but simulacra. Sheppard shows what can happen when an artist
loses contact with the inner self as a source of creative intelligence, and with
the community and cultural context through which this creativity can be
expressed. And Walcott’s dream play demonstrates that a visionary
experience is perhaps the most effective way to achieve cultural hybridity, an
in-between-ness defined as both an inter-national identity as well as a void of
conceptions that underlies all identity. These correlations in postmodern
theater mark an iterability that reflects the recurrence of sacred events in the
drama of living. I suggest that the recurrent taste of the sublime induced by
sacred theater, which alternates discursive thought with silence, enhances
knowledge of the transpersonal self and can even help in stabilizing higher
states of consciousness.
2. The Sacred as a Void in Thought
In the aftermath of the poststructuralist deconstruction of the metaphysics
of presence, how do we account for the fact that contemporary theater often
seems to manifest and evoke the basic attributes of sacred experience? If a
modern play can be considered sacred, one may assume this is because it
4
Chapter One
evokes a subjective experience described as sacred and not because it
conforms to a culturally specific, third-person, objective theory of
sacredness. Nevertheless, a theoretical framework may be useful to explain
what it is like to have a sacred experience in theater, after the fact. Antonin
Artaud, in The Theater and Its Double, famously attempts such an
explanation by comparing the avant garde with “Oriental theater,”
specifically Balinese dance. In the deconstruction of logocentrism, however,
critics have pointed to the necessary contradictions and paradoxes of trying
to explain subjective, first-person experience through objective, third-person
analysis. While this book emphasizes a first-person approach, the sacred has
been analyzed from a third-person perspective by thinkers such as Friedrich
Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, René Girard, Martin
Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben, among others.
Jacques Derrida, for example, deconstructs Artaud’s efforts to create a
theater beyond representation with signs fully present to themselves (1978).
Nonetheless, Artaud’s definition of the sacred, which integrates Western and
non-Western views, still holds currency and may help to elucidate sacred
experience.
While most of the works discussed here bear little physical resemblance
to Balinese theater—with its sacred rites, lofty myths, and dance—they do
evince what Artaud considers its most significant effects. Artaud claims that
in Occidental theater "the Word is everything, and there is no possibility of
expression without it" (1958, 68). “Oriental” (or, if you prefer, Asian) theater,
on the other hand, has "its own language” identified with the mise en scène,
one constituted by "the visual and plastic materialization of speech" and by
everything "signified on stage independently of speech" (68-69). The
purpose of this materialization of speech is to restore and reinstate the
metaphysical aspect of theater, "to reconcile it with the universe" (70) and
“to rediscover the idea of the sacred” (Artaud 1988, 276). Artaud’s aim,
however, is not a theater that regresses to a pre-rational, pre-verbal state in
the Freudian sense, but rather one that includes and then transcends language
and reason to evolve to higher, trans-verbal, trans-rational states (see
endnote 2, Chapter 2). He describes this as “communication with life,” or
“the creation of a reality” (1958, 157, 155). Arguably, the sacred elements
found in Asian theater can also be found in Occidental theater. The
sacredness of theater as discussed here relies on ordinary language and the
Word, but also produces one of the salient effects of Asian theater: taking the
spectator (and performer) toward a trans-verbal, transpersonal experience.
The way Asian theater does this, as Artaud says, is by
creat[ing] a void in thought. All powerful feeling produces in us the idea of
the void. And the lucid language which obstructs the appearance of this void
also obstructs the appearance of poetry in thought. That is why an image, an
allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal have more significance for
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
5
the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics. (1958, 71, italics
added)
A void in thought is a state of mind that begins with language and
meaning and then goes beyond them through a shift in consciousness. As an
unidentifiable emptiness, this void is knowable not through ideas indirectly,
but rather through the immediacy of transcognitive, noncontingent Being
after ideas have run their course. Whatever third-person, objective theory we
use to describe it, the subjective “experience” of the void is trans-cultural,
transpersonal, and thus largely the same in any theater, whether Asian or
Occidental.
Sacred experience, then, can be defined as that which entails a voiding of
thought, and by implication a shift in consciousness that blurs the boundaries
between subject and object, self and other. As discussed below, the sacred in
theater is particularly significant in contemporary culture where social drama
and stage drama meet in life lived as performance—as Victor Turner,
Umberto Eco, and others have shown. Stage drama and social drama,
theatricality and history, the sacred and the profane converge whenever we
go beyond pairs of opposites. As neither one pole nor the other, the sacred is
a void that cannot be defined except in negative terms. As I suggest through
plays by Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, David Henry Hwang, Sam Shepard,
and Derek Walcott, the spectator in postmodern theater oscillates between
opposites toward a sacred wholeness that is not a fixed point of reference, but
a spiraling pattern that encompasses the sacred and the profane, ordinary
mind (thought) and “pure” consciousness (a void in thought).
3. Social Drama and Performance
People today do not merely live but perform their lives, and life as
cultural performance holds a mirror up to art. This mirroring of art results
from the interrelation between social drama, or the "drama of living," and
aesthetic drama, particularly stage drama as defined by Artaud and theorists
such as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba and Richard
Schechner. Postmodern drama theorists have reexamined the notions of
essential form, the plural identity of the dramatic work, its embeddedness in
social and historical contexts in the hope of better understanding the relation
between text and performance, presentation and re-presentation, original and
simulacrum. In what sense might a performance present rather than represent? What is the nature of presence? Is it full or is it empty? While
postmodern theorists claim that theater is a fictional representation, Turner
and other critics see it not only as a derivation or a fiction but as something
closer to the drama of living. In this book I suggest that the transformational
structures of social drama that have always influenced stage drama have
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Chapter One
begun to proliferate and intensify, while at the same time the numinous
supernatural aspect of ritual drama has begun to penetrate a wider range of
cultural practices. The distinction between presence and absence,
presentation and representation begins to fade. Turner, as an anthropologist
and comparative symbologist, says that
social drama feeds into the latent realm of stage drama: its characteristic form
. . . influences not only the form but also the content of the stage drama of
which it is the active or “magic” mirror. The stage drama . . . is a
metacommentary, explicit or implicit, witting or unwitting, on the major
dramas of its social context (wars, revolutions, scandals, institutional
changes). (1998, 67)
I would also add sacred events. Social drama and other types of cultural
experience display the aesthetic forms of stage drama, including ritual, music
and dance. In some ways life and dramatic art are becoming
indistinguishable, as I discuss in greater detail below in terms of the transtraditional “Grassroots Spirituality Movement of America” (Forman 2004).
Turner identifies four phases of the completed social drama reminiscent
of Joseph Campbell's monomyth--breach or breaking a rule, crisis, redressive
or reflexive action to remedy the crisis, and reintegration if the remedy
succeeds or schism if it fails. In this view, the world of theater and
performance has its roots in the third phase of redressive rituals that are
either “prophylactic” or “therapeutic.” This liminal third phase, a phase of inbetween-ness, also constitutes the point of exchange between life and drama.
It is the channel connecting self and world, subject and object, old and new.
In-between-ness is a process of breaking boundaries, of disidentifying with
one phase of life and beginning the transformation to another phase.
Schechner, who also explores the threshold between life and performance,
examines how in-between-ness collapses the difference between presenting
and re-presenting and suggests that it has both a cultural and a metaphysical
dimension (1988). For Turner, “cultural performance, whether tribal rituals
or TV specials, are not . . . simply imitations of the overt form of the
completed social drama” (1998, 64-65). Rather they emerge from the
redressive, reflexive phase of the drama of living, the threshold stage
dominated by the “’subjunctive mood’ of culture” (65). Performance art
gains from the drama of living through which we evolve toward states of
greater wholeness, a process that in turn is continually modified by the
metacommentary of performance.
The threshold experience in theater is not dependent on the dramatic text
or its author. For Artaud, true theater signifies an interpenetration of the self
and world as the self transcends the opposition between subject and object
toward a void in thought. “When this happens in performance,” Turner
writes, “there may be produced in the audience and actors alike what d'
Aquili and Laughlin call in reference to ritual and meditation a ‘brief ecstatic
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
7
state and sense of union (often lasting only a few seconds)’” (1998, 66). This
ecstatic union, achieved by working through a crisis to its remedy, involves
the same process through which the self in the drama of living undergoes a
transformation of identity toward the greater wholeness of a void in thought
achieved after language has run its course. This remedy and transformation
can be an individual or social, an ontogenetic or phylogenetic experience.
For Ken Wilber, any development through different structures of identity
entails transcendence, whether spontaneous or aesthetically induced (2000).
The self, by emptying the mind of its conceptual content, ceases to identify
with one stage of development and undergoes a transformation to a more
integrated stage. In drama as in life, transcendence toward remedy or ecstatic
union exceeds language, as in the language of a text, for as Artaud
demonstrates, in performance the verbal is itself transcended.
4. Liminality and Subjectivity in Theatrical Space
The shift in consciousness toward the sacred experienced in theater by
performers and spectators is described differently by different symbolic
traditions. In the Vedic tradition of India (which recent evidence suggests
could be 10,000 years old), this shift is the special focus of the classical
treatise on dramaturgy, the Natyashastra. This treatise and Indian thought in
general have profoundly influenced Western theories of drama. Notable
examples of this influence are Grotowski’s “poor theater,” which creates a
“translumination” in performer and spectator (1969); Barba’s “transcendent”
in theater (1985); Brook’s “total theater” (1987); and Turner’s redressive
phase of social drama responsible for transformations (1998). Turner’s
redressive phase constitutes a threshold or liminal phase, “a no-man's-land
betwixt-and-between the structural past and the structural future as
anticipated by the society's normative control of biological development”
(65). In contrast to the indicative mood of ordinary life, the liminal
constitutes the “subjunctive mood” of maybe, which includes “fantasy,
conjecture, desire,” and can “be described as a fructile chaos, a fertile
nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities” (65). This fertile nothingness is the
“ground” of in-between-ness against which binaries can be distinguished.
In this book I define liminality or in-between-ness as a void in thought,
which can be experienced continuously as the screen of consciousness
behind thoughts upon which they are reflected, or intermittently in the spaces
between thoughts. This void in thought has clear affinities with the absolute
one of Plotinus, the nondual consciousness as suchness of Buddhist
Vijnanas, and the Brahman-Atman of Shankara's Advaita (nondual) Vedanta.
In Advaita Vedanta, for example, the aim is to establish the oneness of reality
and to lead us to a realization of it (Deutsch 1973, 47).2 This realization
comes through the "experience" of consciousness in its unified level as
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noncontingent Being. Vedanta explains this “experience” with reference to
the four quarters of mind: the three ordinary states of consciousness—
waking, sleeping, dreaming—and a forth state (turiya) of Atman or pure
consciousness.3 This forth state, which underlies the mental phenomena of
the three ordinary states, corresponds to Artaud’s description of a void in
thought. The Maitri Upanishad (6:18-19), a possible source of Artaud’s
phrase, describes this as a “void of conceptions,” “That which is nonthought, [yet] which stands in the midst of thought” (Hume 1921, 436). As a
witnessing awareness immanent within the other states, it constitutes an
“experience” based on identity, unlike the ordinary sense of experience as a
division between subject and object. As Robert Forman says, turiya
involves neither sensing nor thinking. Indeed, it signifies being entirely “void
of conceptions,” by which I understand that there one does not encounter
images, imagined sounds, verbalized thoughts, emotions, etc. In short, in
turiya one encounters no content for consciousness. . . One simply persists
“without support.” (1999, 12, 13)
Forman describes this as a “pure consciousness event” (samadhi) (1999, 6),
thus avoiding confusion caused by the term “experience,” which involves the
dualism of a temporal gap between the subject and object of experience. A
sacred experience, then, is not in actual fact an experience but a sacred event.
Liminal interiority in theater, then, involves a void of conceptions shared
by performer and spectator. Not reducible to the mundane, this void lies in
the gaps between words and thoughts, in the background of all language and
ideas as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its
generative condition of unknowingness. This experience occurs in varying
degrees, however, depending on whether the operative medium is the text of
the drama, the non-verbal signs of the theater, or the interaction between
actors and audience in the actual performance. As Schechner says, “the
drama is what the writer writes . . . the theater is the specific set of gestures
performed by the performers . . . [and] the performance is the whole event”
(85). In terms of sacred events, while reading the script can no doubt evoke
these events, the optimal intersubjective experience of them, one that
interfuses the verbal and the transcendental, the sacred and the profane is
certainly that of the performance itself.
5. The Metaphysics of Speech
As this overview suggests, Western drama theory has been more
receptive to Asian influences, particularly Indian thought, than has Western
literary theory. In “The Theater of Cruelty: First Manifesto,” Artaud says,
“The question, then, for the theater is to create a metaphysics of speech,
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
9
gesture and expression in order to rescue it from its servitude to psychology
and ‘human interest’” (1958, 90). Artaud believes that theater should
abandon the Western style of speech with its abstract conventions and
parasitic dependence on the text and instead adopt the concrete Oriental style
of speech that integrates mind and body. When he describes “the language of
the stage” in terms of the language and symbolic gestures of dreams where
objects and the human body have “the dignity of signs,” and when he draws
inspiration from hieroglyphic characters “that are precise and immediately
legible,” Artaud suggests the integration of form and content, sound and
meaning that Oriental theories of language, as discussed below, describe as
attainable through aesthetic experience. The theater of cruelty—which
signifies not sadism or bloodshed but “implacable intention and decision,
irreversible and absolute determination” (Artaud 1958, 101)—is determined
not to reflect the world or text but to produce change through its own force as
a metaphysical embodiment. It “is through the skin that metaphysics must be
made to re-enter our minds” (Artaud 1958, 99). Theater changes the world
not by the ordinary use of language derived from a text but rather by
integrating the mind and body, actor and spectator through a process of
letting go of the boundary between subject and object, sound and meaning.
Like Turner, Artaud describes an interrelation between the actor and the
text. Actors and spectators enter what Artaud calls a “communication with
pure forces” (1958, 82) that produces an experience of “purification” or
sublimation (ibid.). In calling for an end to masterpieces, he says that the
actor must not adhere to the formal properties of the text, for “an expression
does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; . . . all words,
once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are
uttered” (1958, 75). The fact that the action and words of drama “only
function at the moment when they are uttered” corresponds to what Derrida
calls the iterability of dramatic language and action; the same words and
actions repeated in different contexts have different meanings (1977, 249). In
the theater of cruelty, actors do not read the text but interpret it. Or rather, as
Derrida says, the actor participates in
The end of representation, but also original representation, the end of
interpretation, but also an original interpretation that no master-speech, no
project of mastery will have permeated and leveled in advance. (1978, 238)
W. B. Worthen says that “performing reconstitutes the text”; the
citational elements of drama—such as acting style, scenography, and
conventions of directing—“transform texts into something with performative
force” (1988, 1097-98). Adopting the term “surrogation” introduced by
Joseph Roach to define dramatic performance “as an alternative or a
supplement to textual mediation” (qtd. 1988, 1101), Worthen uses the term to
mean “an understanding of the text [that] emerges not as the cause but as the
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consequence of performance” (ibid.). Through surrogation performance
interrogates and thereby deconstructs a text, allowing for a move beyond
language and meaning toward a void of conceptions. In this way it produces
change in the audience, exerting what J. L. Austin calls a perlocutionary
force—defined as the effect of an utterance on the addressee or hearer.
But how does performance in fact produce the changes described by
terms such as surrogation, sublimation and liminal transformations. Taking
the negative approach, Derrida argues that performance is without presence
because it cannot represent presence or logos purported to exist in a dramatic
text, that it is not even present before the audience. “Artaud,” he writes,
“knew that the theater of cruelty neither begins nor is completed within the
purity of simple presence, but rather is already within representation, in the
‘Second time of Creation,’ in the conflict of forces which could not be that of
a simple origin” (1978, 248). “Presence,” he claims, “in order to be presence
and self-presence, has always already begun to represent itself, has always
already been penetrated” by difference (1978, 249). But as Turner and the
other drama theorists discussed here suggest, the connection between life and
art blurs the divide between presenting and re-presenting, presence and
difference.
Theorists who have tried to understand the transverbal, transpersonal
nature of performance as well as the relation between performer and
spectator include Grotowski, Brook, Barba, Schechner, and Yarrow. For
Grotowski, “what takes place between the spectator and actor” (1998, 204),
the common ground between them, is the defining quality of theater which
“they can dismiss in one gesture or jointly worship” (1998, 204). This ground
he defines in terms of myths “inherited through one's blood, religion, culture
and climate. . . . myths which it would be difficult to break down into
formulas” (ibid.). Like Turner, he locates the presence of theater in the force
of universals to remedy a crises or contradiction by dissolving the boundary
between binaries like subject and object. His “poor theater” aims for a state
of “translumination,” a move toward a void in thought in both performer and
spectator. “Translumination” is the condition in which the dualism of
subject/object no longer exists. The actor ideally transcends the
incompleteness of the mind-body-split and achieves totality and a full
presence, thus becoming what Grotowski calls a “holy actor” (MeyerDinkgräfe 2001, 105).
Brook describes theater and happenings as “holy theater,” which is not a
reflection of the text but “a new object, a new construction brought into the
world, to enrich the world, to add to nature, to sit alongside everyday life”
(1998, 207). Like Artaud’s metaphysical embodiment, “holy theater”
attempts to make the invisible visible; happenings shout “Wake up!” (1998,
206). But even Zen “assert[s] that this visible invisible cannot be seen
automatically—it can only be seen given certain conditions” (ibid.). In life as
in art, for the invisible to interpenetrate and revive the ordinary, a condition
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
11
conducive to letting go of the boundary between subject and object has to be
constructed, as through an appropriate social gathering. This letting go of
boundaries results in what Barba calls the “transcendent” in theater.
The Natyashastra of Sanskrit dramaturgy describes techniques that allow
a performer to transcend personal boundaries and achieve temperamental
states that are transverbal, transpersonal, and eternal, as in the sacred
experience of pure consciousness (turiya, or sat-chit-ananda: being,
consciousness, bliss). On this basis, the performer is able to create an
aesthetic experience in the spectator that corresponds to Turner's liminal
phase, Artaud's sublime or metaphysical embodiment, Worthen's
“surrogation,” Grotowski's “translumination,” Brook's “holy theater,” and
Barba's “transcendent” theater, all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste
of a void of conceptions. As Artaud says, such theater is not about the mind's
verbal or conceptual content. Rather it transcends verbal content to achieve a
nonverbal presence which is by definition outside the text. Derrida sees
theater and the text as mutually deconstructing, arguing that presence “has
always already begun to represent itself” (1978, 249). But which is representing which? Can we deny presence to a cultural performance that still
uses language but aims through its universally ambiguous and symbolic types
at a totality which is transverbal as well as transpersonal? Arguably, through
their liminality and perlocutionary force drama and performance create their
own brand of presence, an invisible presence that escapes the deconstructive
gaze. The semiotics of theater suggests this presence through the power of
suggestion, a feature explained by Indian literary theory in terms of a
correlation between levels of language and consciousness.
6. Vedic Language Theory
The difference between Indian (Vedic) language theory and Saussurean
semiology is that while the latter examines language in itself, the former goes
further by examining language in relation to the levels of consciousness.
From this perspective, the subject and object of knowledge form an
integrated whole that cannot be separated without distortion or
misrepresentation. As recorded in the Rig-Veda and explained by Indian
grammarians such as Bhartrhari, language consists of four levels
corresponding to different levels of consciousness, ranging from the spoken
word in ordinary waking consciousness to the subtlest form of thought in
pure consciousness (Coward 1976). As we move from the ordinary waking
state toward pure consciousness (turiya), the unity of sound and meaning,
name and form increases. Of the four levels of language, the first two are
vaikhari and madhyama, which in Saussurean terms correspond to the
general field of parole and langue. They belong to the ordinary waking state
and consist of a temporal/spatial gap between sound and meaning. The two
12
Chapter One
higher levels of language are pashyanti and para, which can only be
experienced through pure consciousness. They are transverbal in the sense of
being without a temporal sequence between sound and meaning. As Harold
Coward notes, the main difference between the two higher levels is that
pashyanti, which consists of an impulse toward expression, lies at the
juncture between Brahman and maya (illusion or expressed form), while
para, which has no impulse toward expression, lies within Brahman itself
(1990, 90). Both of these levels, however, are conveyed in theater through
the power of suggestion.
The notion of suggestion (dhvani) in Sanskrit Poetics operates in
connection with aesthetic rapture (rasa). This theory is comparable to the
notion of defamiliarization in Russian formalism and to the alienation effect
in Bertolt Brecht, which Tony Bennett describes as a way “to dislocate our
habitual perception of the real world so as to make it the object of renewed
attentiveness” (1979, 20). Through rasa a theater audience will remain
detached from all specific emotions and thereby appreciate the whole range
of possible responses to a play without being overshadowed by any one in
particular. As such, the taste of rasa involves tasting an idealized flavor and
not a specific transitory state of mind. By invoking the emotional states latent
within the mind through direct intuition, rasa provides an experience of the
subtler, more unified levels of the mind itself, thus moving from vaikhari and
madhyama toward pashyanti and para. As aesthetic experience, rasa
culminates in a spiritual joy (santa) described by K. Krishnamoorthy as
“wild tranquility” or “passionless passion” (1968, 26). Rasa allows
consciousness to experience the unbounded bliss inherent within itself, those
levels of awareness associated with pashyanti and para. As S. K. De says,
an ordinary emotion (bhava) may be pleasurable or painful; but a poetic
sentiment (rasa), transcending the limitations of the personal attitude, is lifted
above such pain and pleasure into pure joy, the essence of which is its relish
itself. (1963, 13)
As described in Indian literary theory, this experience is the nearest
realization through theater and the other arts of the Absolute or moksa
(liberation).
The notion of suggestion (dhvani) evolved to explain how the artist’s
emotion (bhava) gives rise to the experience of rasa. Anandavardhana says
that dhvani is the suggested meaning that “flashes into the minds of
sympathetic appreciators who perceive the true import (of poetry) when they
have turned away from conventional meaning” (1974, 75). In theater, the
presence of sacred experience can only be evoked through the power of
suggestion as a form of rasa, given that the ineffable cannot be rendered
directly, and especially not through logical discourse. The nine plays
analyzed in this book render sacred events allegorically by suggestion, which
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
13
brings about what The Natyashastra describes as a “pacification of mind”
(Tarlekar 1975, 54), or a move toward a void of conceptions. As The
Natyashastra says, “Drama was meant to evoke Rasa. Rasa is so called
because it is relished. Its meaning can be accepted as ‘aesthetic delight’”
(ibid.). Rasa is the relish of “the permanent mood,” or sentiments that “are
not in the worldly experience” (Tarlekar 1975, 56). The Natyashastra
describes eight basic sentiments or emotional modes, each of which has its
basis in pure consciousness: the comic, erotic, pathetic, furious, heroic,
terrible, odious, and marvelous (ibid.). Drama employs suggestion because
the idealized flavor of these sentiments, being outside of worldly experience,
can only be apprehended “by that cognition which is free from obstacles [like
ego consciousness] and which is of the nature of bliss” (Ramachandran 1980,
101). From this perspective, the suggestive power of art pacifies the thinking
mind by taking us toward a level of language (pashyanti/para) and
consciousness (turiya) where it can relish a void of conceptions, which is
ultimately nothing other than the self as bliss consciousness (sat-chitananda) knowing itself.
7. The Phenomenology of Presence
As suggested by the phenomenology of performance, then, presence has
dimensions that are trans-linguistic. The transformations of life correspond to
and engender the transformations of art, which lead towards the transverbal
in the form of pashyanti and para. This reciprocal structure is made up of
parallel recurring sequences. That is, in life and art we find the following
universal patterns. In life: breach, crisis, remedy and integration; in art:
desire, intention, action, resistance and fulfillment; or impulse, initiation,
quest, loss and restoration; or as Ralph Yarrow observes, annunciation,
embodiment, acts, mortality, salvation, peripeteia and resolution; or in terms
of the levels of language in Sanskrit dramaturgy, para, pashyanti,
madhyama, vaikhari and utterance (Yarrow 2000, 12). Life and performance
become indistinguishable in their interrelated desire for “communication with
pure forces” (Artaud 1958, 83), for their letting go of the confines and
contradictions of the verbal, “single self” phase of human development. This
process has accelerated in the multimedia age of life as cultural performance,
and will most likely continue to intensify.
Performance as “holy theater” whether of life or art can be understood as
a radical inwardness that is not like ordinary introspection. The latter has
something as its content, while the former is not like anything. Indeed, it
entails the complete absence of empirical phenomenological content—other
than the rasa of bliss itself. The commonality of experiential reports of
radical inwardness reflects a commonality of experience that is independent
of the variables of culture and belief. It is the common ground of
14
Chapter One
translumination that performance renders phenomenologically present for
actor and spectator. But however this may be, no fundamental theory of
consciousness has reached consensus in the West.
The Australian philosopher David Chalmers divides the problems of
understanding consciousness into “easy” problems, which he defines as
understanding the neural mechanisms involved, and the truly “hard
problem,” which he defines as “the question of how physical processes in the
brain give rise to subjective experience” (1995, 63). Although the hard
problem has yet to be scientifically solved, consciousness usually means
subjectivity. In his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?” the American
philosopher Thomas Nagel defines consciousness in terms of “what it is like
to be” an organism (1974, 436), whether that organism is a bat, a bird, a
stone, or a dramatic character. Chalmers believes that “‘To be conscious’ . . .
is roughly synonymous with ‘to have qualia’” (1986, 6)—the qualities of
subjective experience, or what something is like phenomenologically. But not
everybody accepts the reality of a phenomenal consciousness.
In his “astonishing hypothesis,” Francis Crick argues “that ‘you,’ your
joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of
personal identity and free will, are in fact no more that the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (1994, 3). In this
reductionist approach, conscious experience is neither caused by, nor
interacting with, but in fact nothing other than the behavior of neurons. Yet
the question remains, “But what about the actual phenomenology?” The
American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who like Crick consigns
phenomenology to neuroscience, replies, “There is no such thing” (1991,
365). While conceding that human beings are conscious, he argues that we
misconstrue consciousness and claims that in fact we only seem to have
actual phenomenology. Dennett rejects the Cartesian dualism of mind and
body and does not acknowledge the self understood as what Arthur Deikman
calls “the internal observer” (1996, 355). His position resembles the Buddhist
doctrine of annatta or no-self and may have been indirectly influenced by it.
Dennett also rejects what he calls the “Cartesian theater” (1991), the idea
of a place inside my brain or mind where “I” am and from which everything I
experience comes together. Through his third-person approach to
consciousness, he rules out the subjective ontology of a central place or time
in the brain where consciousness happens, claiming that this experience is
only an illusion. Dennett has been criticized for this theory because in the
end he fails to explain the mystery of consciousness; he only explains it
away. The American philosopher John Searle, on the other hand, argues that
“consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be
reduced to anything that has third-person or objective ontology” (1997, 212).
But whether we side with the third-person approach to consciousness as
represented by Crick and Dennett, or with the first-person approach of
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
15
Chalmers, Nagel, Searle, Forman and others, the mystery of consciousness
still remains.
Most Western philosophers, particularly constructivists like Steven Katz
(1978), Robert Gimello (1978), Wayne Proudfoot (1985) and others, claim
that consciousness always has an intentional object, and that even mystical
experience is constructed by language and culture. As Forman argues,
however, mystical or sacred experiences
don’t result from a process of building or constructing mystical experiences . .
. but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief . . . from
something like a releasing of experience from language. (1999, 99; his
emphasis).
By language he implies the lower levels of language that involve space, time
and the duality of subject and object, not pashyanti and para. The notion of
intentionality entails a subject being conscious of an object, event or other
qualia, which William James classifies into two kinds of knowledge:
“knowledge-about,” which we gain by thinking about something; and
“knowledge-by-acquaintance,” which we gain through direct sensory
experience (see Barnard 1994, 123-34; Forman 1999, 109-27). Forman refers
to the pure consciousness event as a non-intentional experience or
“knowledge-by-identity,” in which there is no subject/object duality; “the
subject knows something by virtue of being it. . . . It is a reflexive or selfreferential form of knowing. I know my consciousness and I know that I am
and have been conscious simply because I am it” (1999, 118; Forman’s
emphasis). As a truly direct or immediate form of knowledge, non-intentional
pure consciousness is devoid of the dualism of the subject-perceiving-object
and subject-thinking-thought (Forman 1999, 125).
Other Western philosophers also make a distinction between two aspects
of consciousness similar to the intentional/non-intentional division. John
Locke, for example, says it is “impossible for any one to perceive, without
perceiving that he does perceive” (1975, 335). Jean-Paul Sartre, although
without referring to samadhi or higher states of consciousness, says that
along with the awareness of objects in any intentional perception, there is
also a “non-positional consciousness of consciousness itself” (1956, lv). This
reflexive “non-positional consciousness,” which is non-intentional, Sartre
refers to as consciousness “pour-soi” (for itself), while the object of
consciousness is “en-soi” (in-itself): “For if my consciousness were not
consciousness of being consciousness of the table, it would then be
consciousness of the table without consciousness of being so. In other words,
it would be a consciousness ignorant of itself, an unconscious—which is
absurd” (1956, Liv). For Sartre, “non-positional self consciousness” is
beyond perception in that it is not itself an object of intentional knowledge
knowable by the thinking mind, although it nevertheless ties perceptions
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Chapter One
together. For the thinking mind to know consciousness as an object would
imply an infinite regress, which Sartre argues against through a reductio ad
absurdum. For Sartre, however, this epistemological dualism is only a
theoretical experience of intentional consciousness against a background of
self-reflexiveness; it is not a sacred event. As Forman notes, “non-positional
consciousness” for Sartre “transcends my particular ego-infused situation. . .
. [However,] one can sense oneself as a disengaged or withdrawn
consciousness pour-soi only amidst or behind the encounters with the en-soi”
(1999, 156).
Even without considering sacred events, therefore, Sartre contributes to a
Western precedent of a twofold epistemological structure of perception:
intentional knowledge of the object, and non-intentional non-positional selfawareness. Within the framework of ordinary experience, Sartre’s “nonpositional self-consciousness” is analogous to transcendental pure
consciousness. As Forman explains, “Though most of us overlook the
inherently transcendental character of consciousness and identify with our
roles, this identification is a mistake: we are not truly our roles, and we all
intuitively know it” (1999, 157). All the plays analyzed in this book
dramatize this distinction. Each one in its own way helps the spectator intuit
the difference between intentional consciousness through which we identify
with our roles and egos, and non-intentional consciousness through which
the qualityless self knows itself reflexively through “knowledge-by-identity.”
This non-intentional experience encompasses those defined by Western
drama theorist as liminal, sublime, metaphysical, surrogated, transluminating,
holy, transcendent, all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste of the void of
conceptions.
Postmodern performance, typically regarded as a form of intentional
experience within the duality of subject and object, has been defined as not a
full presence but an empty presence, an “aesthetics of absence” (qtd. in
Connor 1989, 141). Henry Sayre remarks that
An aesthetics of presence seeks to transcend history, escape temporality. An
aesthetics of absence subjects art to the wiles of history, embraces time . . .
An aesthetics of presence defines art as that which transcends the quotidian;
an aesthetics of absence accepts the quotidian’s impingement upon art.
(quoted in Connor 1989, 141)
But as I suggest, the sacred events of postmodern theater, as an aesthetics of
presence, are transcendent to yet simultaneously immanent within the
quotidian, the temporal and the historical. These events are contingent only
on the displacement of absolute forms of identity and on the wiles of letting
go of the dramatic text. The presence of radical inwardness and
interrelatedness in life and art does not form a circle, a timeless repetitive
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
17
pattern, but a spiraling pattern responsive to the changes associated with time
and place.
8. The Drama of Living and Grassroots Spirituality
The postmodernist argument against presence focuses on the ordinary
mind and in fact does not address the issue of pure consciousness. J. Hillis
Miller, who notes that “Literature is for Derrida the possibility for any
utterance, writing, or mark to be iterated in innumerable contexts and to
function in the absence of identifiable contexts, reference, or hearer” (2001,
59), proceeds to show that Derrida calls into question the primacy of
consciousness in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and other Western
thinkers. He thereby deconstructs—or rather re-contextualizes through the
play of difference—the presence, unity, and transcendentality associated with
sacred experience in metaphysical traditions. But in terms of non-dual
Vedanta, which distinguishes between thought and consciousness, sacred
experience in theater—understood as a taste of Being (rasa) as opposed to
the conception of an intentional object—is always already contextualized in
the experiencer’s physiological condition. The difference here is between the
dualism of the thinking mind and the non-duality of witnessing
consciousness. As explained by Samkhya-Yoga (the third system of Indian
philosophy), “there are two irreducible, innate, and independent realities in
our universe of experience: 1. consciousness itself (purusha); 2. primordial
materiality (prakrti),” which as discussed further in chapter two includes the
thinking mind (Pflueger 48).
In using the “aconceptual concept” of iterability (Derrida 1977, 118) to
define literature in terms of “the possibility of detaching language from its
firm embeddedness in a social or biographical context and allowing it to play
freely as fiction” (Miller 2001, 60), Derrida in a sense takes literature to the
outer boundaries of conceptual dualism. That is, iterabiility itself suggests
that theater, by pointing beyond the referent, also points beyond the dualism
of the mind as a material entity situated within a cultural context toward the
possibility of an experience so rarified that it underlies the infinity of
contexts in which a work of literature can be read or dramatized. Ultimately,
what iterability as an aconceptual concept suggests is the possibility of the
mind expanding toward an experience of non-material consciousness, as in
rasa-dhvani (Chakrabarti 1971, 33; Deutsch 1973, 48-65). For the average
theater goer, the connection between the non-referential (or non-material)
and the experience of consciousness as a conceptual void does not
necessarily entail anything they might not already be familiar with even
outside of aesthetic experience.
In binaries such as reference/self-referral, material/non-material,
mind/consciousness, the latter term suggests itself not only in theater and the
18
Chapter One
other arts but also in what Forman calls a “Grassroots Spirituality
Movement” involving around “58% . . . or 152.8 million Americans!” (2004,
11). Forman’s definition of spirituality, based on a widespread U.S.
government-funded study of its grassroots movement in American culture,
suggests how the contextual/non-contextual opposition self-deconstructs in
the experience of higher consciousness, whether this occurs spontaneously or
is induced by sacred theater or meditative techniques. As Forman writes,
Grassroots Spirituality involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is
indwelling, sometimes bodily, as the deepest self and accessed through notstrictly-rational means of self-transformation and group process that becomes
the holistic organization for all of life. (2004, 51; his emphasis)
As the research conducted by Forman and his team indicate, the drama of
living in the United States today involves a growing interest in the spiritual, a
not-strictly-rational interest that “dwarfs Judaism, Islam, and every single
denomination of Christianity” (Forman 2004, 11). This interest parallels and
possibly underpins not only the deconstructive interest in freedom from
rationalizations and logical certitudes but also the sacred events of
postmodern theater.
As distinct from pantheism (“the doctrine that the deity is the universe
and its phenomena”), Forman defines panentheism as the doctrine “that all
things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made up of one single
principle, but that one principle is not limited to those worldly phenomena”
(2004, 52; his emphasis). All things, including humans, “are made up of a
single ‘stuff’ or substance” (52), but this “stuff,” while including the beings
within it, also extends beyond them. “It is both transcendent (in the sense of
beyond) and immanent (within). As the early Hindu Upanishads put this,
‘having pervaded the universe with a fragment of myself, I remain’” (ibid.).
The panentheistic experience of grassroots spirituality thus suggests a
deepening interconnectedness between the drama of living and sacred events
in theater.
Remarkably, a growing number of people not only in the United States
but also around the world are beginning to realize that the
phenomenologically reductive understanding of consciousness as always
having an intentional object—in the sense that “Consciousness is always
consciousness of some object or other, never a self-enclosed emptiness”
(Miller 2001, 62)—is not confirmed by the immediacy of their own
panentheistic experience, or knowledge-by-identity. In the words of one
spiritual leader interviewed by Forman and his team, the panentheistic
spiritual ultimate is “a formless reality that lies at the heart of all forms. It’s
something that is one, beyond our usual apprehension of space and time. . . .
It’s like quietness within, the still point of the turning world” (qtd. in Forman
2004, 55). For another, “that transcendent reality . . . is both within us, at the
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater
19
core of our being, and all around us” (qtd. in Forman 2004, 58). On the basis
of this widespread evidence of sacred events in the drama of life, Forman
deduces that “the traditional Western ‘transcendent’ model of God is no
longer operative in the Grassroots Spirituality Movement. Its Ultimate is
reminiscent of the omnipresent, immanent yet infinitely extended vacuum
state of quantum physics, more like an ‘It’ than a ‘He’ or ‘She.’ In ‘It’ ‘we
live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28)” (2004, 58). It is not
surprising, then, that even postmodern theater would powerfully suggest
sacred events.
In a definition of mysticism that includes the panentheistic, Forman
clarifies the nature of sacred events by distinguishing between their different
aspects. The word mysticism “can denote the unintelligible statements of an
illogical speaker, a schizophrenic’s vision, someone’s hallucination, a druginduced vision, the spiritual ‘showings’ of Julian of Norwich or a Mechthilde
of Magdeburg, the unspoken, silent experience of God that Meister Eckhart
called the ‘Divine Desert,’ or the Buddhist Nagarjuna’s empty shunyata”
(1999, 4). On the one hand, hallucinations, acute schizophrenic states, and
visions fall on what Forman calls the “ergotropic side” of mysticism, defined
as states of hyperarousal in which “cognitive and physiological activity are
relatively high” (ibid.). On the other hand, the “trophotropic side” of
mysticism, defined as hypoaroused states, are “marked by low levels of
cognitive and physiological activity: here we find Hindu samadhi, mushinjo
in zazen, the restful states associated with The Cloud of Unknowing’s ‘cloud
of forgetting,’ or Eckhart’s gezucket” (ibid.).4 Forman proposes the term
mysticism primarily for the trophotropic states of hypoarousal and refers to
ergotropic, hyperaroused phenomena such as hallucinations, visions and
auditions as “visionary experiences” (1999, 5). In terms of mental activity,
emotional arousal and other metabolic excitations, these two scales move in
opposite directions. In hypoaroused states, research indicates a decline in
physiological parameters “such as heart rate, skin temperature, spontaneous
galvanic skin response, etc.,” while on the other side of the scale we find an
increase in these parameters (1999, 4).5 For the nine plays I discuss, sacred
events as a void of conceptions fall mainly on the hypoaroused side, except
for the visionary experiences dramatized by Derek Walcott in Dream on
Monkey Mountain, in which the protagonist combines both sides of the scale.
CHAPTER 2:
INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN STOPPARD'S
THEATER
1. Intersubjectivity
Tom Stoppard is famous for undercutting preconceptions, treating
philosophical and moral issues with a lightness of nonattachment, and
developing a new relation between ideas and farce, all for the sake of
entertainment and enjoyment. Against a background of inquiry into basic
reality, Stoppard examines how people conduct themselves with one eye
focused on their activities and the other eye observing or witnessing that
activity. The gap between engagement and witness enlivens his plays with a
unique quality of entertainment and relieves the audience from the pressures
of mental agitation. Rather than trying to solve the problems of goodness and
the human condition, his plays invite us to stand back and observe the world
from a nonattached, pre-interpretive vantage point—which includes yet
surpasses Brecht’s “alienation effect” (1964). From this perspective, the
vagaries of human existence are seen not as tragic, but as farcical and
humorous.
The elements of Stoppard's theater from the 1960s most relevant to the
sacred include brilliant language, absurd yet inspired theatrical ideas, and a
frame of reference that escapes the tone of general mockery. These can also
be found in his recent plays such as Arcadia (1993) and Indian Ink (1995). In
addition to Shakespeare, the influences on Stoppard’s work include Oscar
Wilde, James Joyce, quantum physics, chaos theory, and Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations (Levenson 2001, 160). His most famous
theatrical idea was to set a play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
within and around the action of Hamlet, with the two attendant lords who are
marginal in Hamlet holding center stage. Similarly, in a style reminiscent of
Joyce's Ulysses, Stoppard models his play Travesties on Wilde's play The
Importance of Being Earnest. The intellectual frame of reference of many of
his plays is also striking for his style of rendering translucent the content by
revealing the silence or void behind it. However profane the content, it can
still evoke a sacred experience.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, characters and audience cocreate a sacred space of intersubjectivity. The participants begin with
language and interpretation within a specific cultural context, and then cross
Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater
21
into a space or “presence” characterized by the “absence” of exterior
boundaries. As a liminal field, this presence involves a dis-identification with
the profane exterior, including the verbal and conceptual tokens of our
interpretive frameworks. Unlike film and television, which on the whole
present more accurate detail with faster cutting than stage realism, theater has
broken free of realism and gathers a live audience to witness a representation
not dependent on a full simulation. Theater spectators, although immersed in
the material context of the hall and stage, experience the attenuation of
exterior domains in a move toward an intersubjective, nonphysical presence
constituted by the performance as a whole. This attenuation or fading out of
the external, which induces a decontingencing of the historical self,
resembles that in meditative quiescence, as described by B. Alan Wallace:
As long as one is actively engaged in society, one's very sense of personal
identity is strongly reinforced by one's intersubjective relations with others.
But now, as one withdraws into outer and inner solitude, one's identity is
significantly decontextualized. Externally, by disengaging from social
interactions, one's sense of self as holding a position in society is eroded.
Internally, by disengaging from ideation--such as conceptually dwelling on
events from one's personal history, thinking about oneself in the present, and
anticipating what one will do in the future—one's sense of self as occupying a
real place in nature is eroded. To be decontextualized is to be deconstructed.
(2001, 211)
This decontextualizing process abounds in Stoppard, most notably in his
plays within plays, such as Hamlet in Rosencrantz and The Importance of
Being Earnest in Travesties.
Since 1972, according to a statement for BBC Television entitled "Tom
Stoppard Doesn't Know," Stoppard has suspended the choice between binary
opposites that contextualize the world. He describes a common pattern in
himself with the phrase, "firstly, A; secondly minus A": "that particular cube
which on one side says for example: 'All Italians are voluble' and on the other
side says, 'That is a naive generalization'; then, 'No, it's not. Behind
generalizations must be some sort of basis'" (quoted in Hunter 2000, 17).
Stoppard repeatedly traces such binaries in his writing. Influenced by
Wittgenstein’s reflections on language, his plays question the functioning of
reason and the reliability of philosophical tools like syllogism (Levenson
2001, 160-61). "There is very often no single, clear statement in my plays.
What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting
characters, and they tend to play out a sort of infinite leapfrog" (Theatre
Quarterly; quoted in Sales 1988, 14-15). Rather than pretend to certainties,
Stoppard shows how the mind's stream of binary opposites doesn't yield the
truth, and that to cling to any one conceptual point or context is to invite
falsehood. As a dialectical movement, his "A, minus A" opposition is not an
exclusive either/or system but a both/and system. This style, as illustrated
22
Chapter Two
below, has the effect of attenuating social or objective boundaries,
decontingencing the historical subject, dissolving the boundary between self
and other, and creating an intersubjective space—even without sacred rites,
lofty myths, and dance.
2. Rosencrantz: Ambushes and A Void in Thought
Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead takes two minor
characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which becomes a play-within-a-play
here, and makes them central characters constantly on stage. One morning
before the play begins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are called to court by a
messenger and given the mission to discover what troubles Hamlet. They
have no memory of anything previous to this or any knowledge of how to
fulfill their mission, and they mistrust all perceptions and ideas, being certain
only of the fact that they were called by a messenger. Another play
underlying the decontingencing of the historical subject in Rosencrantz is
Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Both Godot and Hamlet provide an antiintellectual framework for Stoppard's work, neither one offering a conceptual
solution to the problems they pose. Stoppard's Ros and Guil are barely more
coherent than Beckett's characters, anti-hero's like Hamlet who in their
confused identities question everything, including themselves.
From the opening scenes of Rosencrantz, Stoppard undermines the
intellect through a series of frog-leaps or ambushes. “I tend to write through
a series of small, large and microscopic ambushes—which might consist of a
body falling out of a cupboard, or simply an unexpected word in a sentence”
(Theater Quarterly 1974; qtd. in Sales 1988, 14). These repeated ambushes
undermine our naturalistic expectations. The first ambush centers on Guil
and Ros' game of heads and tails, with heads coming up over 85 times. The
pun on head counting results in the actors’ metaphorically counting the
spectators in a reversal of their traditional roles, with the spectators becoming
the spectacle. As Ros says, the repetitiveness of heads threatens to become "a
bit of a bore" (3), a sure sign that the intellect is being diminished in a
decontingencing move beyond language and interpretation.
These ambushes combine with Stoppard’s “A, minus A” technique or
“infinite leap-frog,” the arguments, refutations, and counter-arguments that
never lead to the last word. The audience is teased out of its culturally
conditioned habits of discursive thought and into the relative openness of a
new intersubjective space. While Ros spins the coins unconcerned, Guil tries
desperately to rationalize the spinning after 85 head counts, wondering why
Ros has no “fear” of this uncanny outcome. “Ros: ‘Fear?’ Guil: (in fury-flings a coin on the ground) ‘Fear! The crack that might flood your brain
with light’” (5). His outburst suggests the possibility of a break in conceptual
boundaries, a frogleap beyond the field of “A, minus A” toward a void in