The Problems of Viewing Performance: Epistemology and Other Minds 2020044233, 2020044234, 9780815348474, 9781351166966

Citation preview

The Problems of Viewing Performance

The Problems of Viewing Performance challenges long-held assumptions by considering the ways in which knowledge is received by more than a single audience member, and breaks new ground by, counterintuitively, claiming that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Given that viewers come to each performance with differing amounts and types of knowledge, they each make different assumptions as to how the performance will unfold. Often modified by other viewers and often after the performance event, knowledge of performance is made more accurate by superimposing the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers. These differences in the viewing experience make knowledge surrounding a performance intersubjective. Ultimately, this book explains the how and the why audience members have different viewing experiences. The Problems of Viewing Performance is important reading for theatre and performance students, scholars, and practitioners, as it unpacks the dynamics of spectatorship and explores how audiences work. Michael Y. Bennett is an Associate Professor of English and Affiliated Faculty in Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. He is the author or editor of a dozen books in the fields of theatre and performance studies and the philosophy of theatre.

Routledge Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies

Dynamic Cartography Body, Architecture, and Performative Space María José Martínez Sánchez Situated Knowing Epistemic Perspectives on Performance Edited by Ewa Bal and Mateusz Chaberski Japanese Political Theatre in the 18th Century Bunraku Puppet Plays in Social Context Akihiro Odanaka and Masami Iwai Aotearoa New Zealand in the Global Theatre Marketplace Travelling Theatre James Wenley The Scenography of Howard Barker The Wrestling School Aesthetic 1998–2011 Lara Maleen Kipp Modernizing Costume Design, 1820–1920 Annie Holt The Teaching of Kathakali in Australia Mirroring the Master Arjun Raina Practices of Relations in Task-Dance and the Event-Score A Critique of Performance Josefine Wikström The Problems of Viewing Performance Epistemology and Other Minds Michael Y. Bennett For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

The Problems of Viewing Performance Epistemology and Other Minds

Michael Y. Bennett

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Michael Y. Bennett The right of Michael Y. Bennett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bennett, Michael Y., 1980- author. Title: The problems of viewing performance : epistemology and other minds / Michael Y. Bennett. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre and performance studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020044233 (print) | LCCN 2020044234 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815348474 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351166966 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater audiences‐‐Psychology. | Theater‐‐Philosophy. Classification: LCC PN2139.A8 .B46 2012 (print) | LCC PN2139.A8 (ebook) | DDC 806.484‐‐dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044233 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044234 ISBN: 978-0-815-34847-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-16696-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To those whom I adore (and miss)—my aunts and uncles: Rhonda, Lisa, Mickey, Howard, Joel, Gail, as well as Mark (deceased) and Bob (deceased)

Contents

Acknowledgments Glossary of terms and concepts Foreword: What does the play “mean”? Introduction: Viewing and understanding performance: in light of other minds

ix xi xiii

1

PART I

11

1 2 3

13 21 32

A public experience: But is it shared? Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds A public reality of one’s own

PART II

4 5

6

7

Epistemic problems: Hamlet and Horatio’s “Hamlet” … in light of other minds Temporal-spatial problems: Border progressions and locating the self: mobility and immobility in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance Contextual problems: Witting and unwitting contexts: translating public and private experience in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul Lingual problems: (Private and public) performances of the self: the performance of language (and the self) in Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns

39

41

50

74

89

viii Contents

8

Emotional problems: Breathing in Maria Irene Fornes’ “sharper air” in her “PAJ plays”

107

Conclusion: Viewing … or, turning away: upending the ‘gaze,’ upending the subject

119

Bibliography Index

123 128

Acknowledgments

This book has been a burden of love that was made ever-increasingly possible by so many colleagues and friends, both old and new: James R. Hamilton (Kansas State University) helped extend my view of triangulation happening, not just after the performance, but during it, too; David Krasner (Five Towns College), for his insightful comments during the writing process and a wonderful Foreword; Keith Lehrer (University of Arizona), for some enlightening email exchanges; Tzachi Zamir (Hebrew University at Jerusalem), who helped me narrow down a couple of the central questions of the book; David Kornhaber (University of Texas, Austin), for some good feedback; Eyal Tamir (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), for both being a helpful reader, and being my best friend; Maija Birenbaum (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater), who read the introductory chapters a couple times and provided some great editorial advice; Louis Betty (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater), who also read the introductory chapters; David Friedell (Union College), for help with various philosophical ideas that made it into this book; my dear family friend and retired Principal and Actuary at Deloitte, Jan Lommele, who directed me to Bayesian probability; and to Daniel Sack (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Andrew Sofer (Boston College), and John Muse (University of Chicago), all of whom led me to some really helpful sources. Easy to forget, but important to remember, I would also like to thank all of those anonymous reviewers throughout the many years of this project and/or related projects that helped ensure clarity and helped me flesh out and develop my ideas, even, a few times, giving me some of the very language that was needed to make my points. In practical terms, I want to thank the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for a sabbatical (Spring 2019). Finally, I would like to thank Text and Performance Quarterly, for allowing a modified reprinting of an article that first appeared as, Michael Y. Bennett, “Carrying the Private in Public: Language and Performance in Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns.” Text and Performance Quarterly 36, no. 2–3 (2016): 137–148; I would also like to thank Rhizomes, for allowing a modified reprinting of an article that first appeared as Michael Y. Bennett, “The Minoritarian Linguist in Translation: Homebody/Kabul’s Answer to Deleuze and Guattari,” Boundaries of

x

Acknowledgments

Publication: Posthumography, Special Issue of Rhizomes 20 (Summer 2010): http://www.rhizomes.net/issue20/bennett.html (Open Access). Of course, none of this would have been possible without my friends and family. My best friend, Eyal, my parents, and my wife, Kelly, were particularly helpful for support and love over the past couple of years. I have needed and relied on them more than ever. I thank them for their unconditional love; I hope I am able to reciprocate even a tenth of what they give me every day.

Glossary of terms and concepts

Given that some of the words and phrases in this book are employed in quite specific ways, for added clarity, I want to provide a glossary of the terms and concept as they will be used and understood in this book: Abstract Object – An “abstract object” is immaterial; it may, or may not, exist. Concrete Object – A “concrete object,” and also a “concrete action,” has a material reality. Experiences Individual (experience) – An “individual experience” is one’s own experience of an action/object. Private (experience) – A “private experience” is a singular-and-unique experience an individual has to an action/object. Public (experience) – A “public experience” is when two or more people experience the same action/object. Shared (experience) – A “shared experience” is when two or more individuals have the same individual experience when experiencing the same action/object. Parallax – When viewing (broadly defined) a concrete object or action (broadly defined), “parallax” is the (inherent) resultant error that is due to one’s perspective (broadly defined). Performance – “Performance” refers to the entirety of an artistic idea and its material enactment(s). “Performance,” then, subsumes “theatre” as a broader term. That is, traditionally, “theatre” refers to the combination of a dramatic text and the performance of a dramatic text; “performance” is broader in that it still holds the category of “theatre” within, but also works for the category of non-text-based performance. Further, using this idea that performance refers to the entirety of an artistic idea and its material enactment(s), performance casts a broader net, here subsuming other art forms like film and television (as well as more traditional “performing arts” like dance, opera, music, etc.).

xii Glossary of terms and concepts

Performance Event – A “performance event” is a specific-and-singular enactment of a performance. “Performance events” are specific instances of a performance, often localized and restricted to a specific time and space/place. Performance Text – A “performance text” refers to a written text that sets the rules and/or guidelines for a performance event. NOTE: Not all “performances” have a “performance text.” Proposition – A semi-technical term that has broad and different usage in philosophy, here, I will be using it to refer to the thought content of a statement that can be true or false. Propositional Attitude – A “propositional attitude” is the attitude, feeling, or belief one has towards a proposition. Qualia (or, Quale, singular) – A quale is an individual instance of experience. Superimpose – To “superimpose” is to layer and overlap beliefs, justified beliefs, justified true beliefs, and knowledge from numerous individual perspectives in order to create a more-accurate objective understanding of a concrete object or action (broadly defined). “Superimposition” lessens the parallax (i.e., the error caused by observing/experiencing an object from a unique perspective). Triangulate – In the most literal sense, “triangulating” describes the process of the superimposition of beliefs, justified beliefs, and knowledge about an object in situations where three minds are all experiencing the same object. More broadly, “triangulation” simply means superimposing the experiences of more than two minds. Viewer(s) – A “viewer” is an individual who attends (or attended) a performance event. “Viewers” refers to a group of individuals (i.e., viewer1 + viewer2 + viewer3, etc.), all of whom attend a particular performance event. The focus here is not on viewing, specifically, as a visual process, but as the mental contemplation (of an object).

Foreword What does the play “mean”? David Krasner

Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity [Vermögen] of human reason. —Immanuel Kant1 Michael Y. Bennett’s book presents the compelling question regarding the “problem” of viewing performance: how can two or more audience members perceive a play yet derive different understanding? The same play, at the same time, with the same actors, set, dialogue, lights, and costumes can produce alternative evaluations. Simply put, one audience member asks another: “what does the play mean?” and the response can come as a complete surprise. The play’s “meaning,” as Kant might say, transcends every capacity of human reason, since epistemology for Kant is not an Empiricist/Rationalist accumulation of data, but rather understanding [Verstand ] is intuitive and a priori. According to Kant, knowledge and understanding require receptivity; like an audience, receptivity means an openness to the world, which is the condition of possible human experience. Audiences comprise a group of people—from one to thousands—who observe a play (or movie, sporting event, music concert) and, having absorbed the “data,” that is, the empirical experience, formulate epistemological conclusions. Audiences arrive at the theatre with differing backgrounds, education, agendas, and social habits, all of which inform how each constellates his or her conclusion. These “conclusions” can concur through a hegemonic response; or assessments can disagree; or two or more people find agreement on parts but disagreement elsewhere. On an epistemological level, Bennett’s book illuminates the concept of communication—how do actors “communicate” knowledge to an audience, who, in turn, receive the information, make critical judgments, and assess “meaning.” Language is one form of communication, though hardly the only, used by playwrights, directors, and actors to convey “meaning” to audiences. In the space between speaker and listener, communication, the linguist Roman Jakobson contends, is the twofold characteristic of language:

xiv Foreword

Speech implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination into linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity. … But the speaker is by no means a completely free agent in his choice of words: his selection … must be made from the lexical storehouse which he and his addressee possess in common. The communication engineer most properly approaches the essence of the speech event when he assumes that in the optimal exchange of information the speaker and the listener have at their disposal more or less the same “filing cabinet of prefabricated representations”: the addresser of a verbal message selects one of these “prefabricated possibilities,” and the addressee is supposed to make an identical choice from the same assembly of “possibilities already foreseen and provided for.”2 Jakobson’s observation appears to coincide with Bennett’s examination of how different minds perceive the same event, deriving meaning by establishing what Jakobson calls the filing cabinet of prefabricated representations. Simply put, epistemology is a two-way street, whereby the speaker (actor) must contend with the optimal exchange of information to reach the listener (audience). Another way of looking at the “problem”: children in the theatre. A child enters the theatre and is told to sit quietly and watch. The behavior is counterintuitive to the child’s kinesthetic, hyperactive condition. The child, however, learns theatrical protocol, inculcating the proper passive behavior for viewing performance that, in Western culture, is logged into Jakobson’s “filing cabinet of prefabricated representations.” Yet this is only one way of “viewing performance.” Protocol differs with many cultures, some encouraging audience participation, or at least a vociferous response. The well-known African American Church call-and-response paradigm, for example, is a different form of audience engagement, whereby audiences have free range to vocally respond to the actor/speaker. Here, then, is another pathway to the problem of viewing performance. Understanding a performance is not necessarily a theoretical knowing that leads to abstract concepts, nor a rule-governing cognition that can be tracked empirically; rather, theatre provides a visceral absorption of events onstage. Emotion, tears, joy, and laughter are part of the theatrical experience. An example of “the problem of viewing performance” is gauging audience laughter. Laughter is almost ubiquitously acceptable behavior in virtually every theatrical context; every culture accepts, indeed, encourages laughter as part-and-parcel of the audience’s viewing experience. Laughter is a form of agreed-upon “bet,” what Bennett terms as a “probability calculus” one makes when attending a performance. Laughter, simply put, is permissible as an egalitarian equalizer in viewing performance. Henri Bergson’s examination of laughter (le rire), for example, addresses the problem of viewing performance. Laughter, for him, has three criteria: it is (1) strictly human, whereby it exists only as it refers to what is human; (2) devoid of pity, or sympathy because

Foreword

xv

3

sympathetic emotion nullifies laughter; and (3) in need of an echo. This third point establishes a uniformity to viewing performance: laughter, according to Bergson, is contagious; it reverberates from person to person and functions at its apex when there are fellow audiences laughing uproariously and simultaneously. Television laugh tracks owe much, if not everything, to Bergson’s theory. Aristotle’s Poetics provides a potential answer to the problem of viewing performance. For Aristotle, plot—the arrangement and sequence of events—is the unifying cohesion when viewing performance. Aristotle insists that the need for plot is baked-in-the-cake of human understanding—and he has a point, up to a point. Example: you enter a living room and your friend is watching a movie on TV; the movie has begun for a short while and the story is already underway. Your friend is deeply engaged with the TV screen; curious, you say, “what’s this about?” Your friend replies: “there are ten thousand pixels moving horizontally across the screen, while the vertical pixels are aligned by twenty thousand.” No one, of course, expects the scientific answer. Still, if words accurately reflect the screen color and electronic waves, then the friend has responded accurately, truthfully, and, to put a fine point on it, empirically. But that is Aristotle’s point: we expect plot to be the response. Because plot, Aristotle tells us, is the “soul” of tragedy.4 But is it? What of Chekhov’s plays, or Beckett’s? In Chekhov’s Three Sisters, the plot, if there is one, revolves around three siblings wanting to go to Moscow. That is, in Aristotelean terms, the “action” of the play. But is that what the characters really want—and if so, why don’t they just take a train, bus, plane, car, Uber ride, etc., to Moscow? Is there a psychological underpinning here, in which “Moscow” symbolizes our unattainable longings and desires? And who says that is what audiences should come away with when viewing the play? And we drift even more afield from “plot” with Samuel Beckett’s plays. The “waiting” in Waiting for Godot is merely a more abstract but no less opaque entity than Moscow is for Chekhov’s protagonists. However miasmic or passive his plays might appear, Beckett’s plays are, like Chekhov’s, grounded in the reality of human engagement and experience. In his study of Beckett’s Endgame, Stanley Cavell writes that if one takes a step back from the bizarre and unusual, the play is simply about family. However, Not just any family perhaps, but then every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way—gets in its own way in its own way. The old father and mother with no useful functions any more are among the waste of society, dependent upon the generation they have bred, which in turn resents them for their uselessness and dependency. They do what they can do best: they bicker and reminisce about happier days.5 But how do we know that? Cavell’s point is that the play represents disengagement with sanity, which helps him to formulate the play’s meaning. “Endgame is a play whose mood is characteristically one of madness,” he adds, and

xvi Foreword

in this way, the play turns against logical positivism; logical positivism, Cavell contends, had hoped to construct an ideal language based on scientific evidence, “in which everything could be said … would be said clearly, its relations to other statements formed purely logically, its notation perspicuous—the form of the statement looking like what it means.”6 Wittgenstein tried to amend this with a post-positivist spin, calling “ordinary language philosophy” quotidian speech, but speech, for Wittgenstein, is more than the making of statements; speech, for him, contains “communication,” comprehensible to the listener, but not necessarily “logical.” Adorno, too, raises the problematic issue of viewing Beckett’s Endgame. “Thoughts are dragged along and distorted,” Adorno tells us about the play, “like the residue of waking life in dreams, homo homini sapienti sat [one man wise enough].” For Adorno, interpreting Beckett “is so awkward,” because Beckett shrugs his shoulders at the possibility of philosophy today, at the possibility of theory. The irrationality of bourgeois society in its late phase rebels at letting itself be understood; those were the good old days, when a critique of political economy of this society could be written that judged it in terms of its own ratio. For since then the society has thrown its ratio on the scrap heap and replaced it with virtually unmediated control. Hence interpretation inevitably lags behind Beckett.7 Michael Bennett confirms this when he says, in another work, that “theatre goers need a new framework in which to see and understand the ahead-of-itstime and, frankly, difficult play, Waiting for Godot.”8 Yet Chekhov, Beckett, and other dramatists of the “Absurd,” to borrow Martin Esslin’s well-known term, are still tied to the theatre’s emphasis on time and space. No matter the plot, or lack of one, a performance takes place in a location, and it moves temporarily; and time, again referring to Kant, “is not an empirical concept that is somehow drawn from an experience,” but rather “is a pure form of sensible intuition.” Furthermore, time and space, Kant contends, “are accordingly two sources of cognition”; taken together, they are “the pure forms of all sensible intuition, and thereby make possible synthetic a priori propositions.”9 Or, as Heidegger would say, the “primordial ontological ground” of existence is “temporality.”10 Audiences may derive different meanings and assessments, but they all share the sensorial experience in the theatre of time and space. But is mere time and space sufficient to address the problem of viewing performance? Is there, ultimately, a “purpose,” or functionality, to a play’s aesthetic assessment? Returning to Kant, he famously defined aesthetic as “purposefulness without purpose” (Die Zweckmäßigkeit kann also ohne Zweck sein).11 Aesthetics is the functionality of art without utilitarian purposefulness. And this leads the reader straight to Michael Bennett’s book. Bennett raises the distinction between public and shared experience in viewing performance. One of the first to point out the differences between public and private reason is, again, Kant, who notes in his short essay, “What is

Foreword

xvii

Enlightenment?” that reason “is the freedom to make public use of one’s reason at every point.” Public reason, Kant insists, must always be “free,” and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men,” whereas private reason is a kind of passivity where humans conform to what one might deem a civic duty.12 Kant shifts the ground of the Empiricists who depend on practicality and past experience, using reason to undercut the metaphysics that appeal to experience in moral, political, and aesthetic judgments. Reason’s purpose, Kant contends, is to provide ground-rules that tell us what ought to happen, even if they do not happen, rather than laws of the past or of nature, which tell us what has happened. As Susan Neiman points out, no one knows better than Kant “that ideas of reason are not things in the world.” His attack on rationalism and empiricism “depend on the recognition that reason’s ideas are not objects of experience”; instead, ideas of reason, “though not things in the world, nevertheless play a critical role in it.”13 While Kant moves us toward freedom of reason, he is still under the restraint of a dominant power device that grants authority to a single, almost elitist view of aesthetics. As Bennett’s book makes clear, we can no longer acknowledge and appreciate the assumption that there is some type of uniformity of thought to the viewing experience, or some superimposition of truth on an art object. For Bennett, the presence of other minds impacts beliefs, knowledge, evaluations, and critical judgments about the object being viewed. Other minds, or intersubjectivity, as Edmund Husserl might say,14 exist in relationship to public and private experience of viewing performance, emphasizing the idea of performance as a social phenomenon. For Husserl, connecting “apperceptive transfer from my animate organism” to another being is defined simply as “that body over there.”15 Along similar lines is Michel Foucault’s critique of Kant’s Enlightenment, where Foucault acknowledges Kant’s contribution, nevertheless emphasizes that our critical ontology plays a significant factor in our epistemology: who we are, where we come from, how we got here, and what influences have we experienced, dissolves Kantian unity of reason and transforms it into an interconnected dynamic that deconstructs pure meaning. “The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered,” Foucault insists, “not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experience with the possibility of going beyond them.” Simply put, “This philosophical attitude has to be translated into the labor of diverse inquires.”16 Michael Bennett’s book does just that: each chapter translates the potential of diverse inquiries through the viewing of performance. Bennett makes clear in this superb work that differing minds observing the same art object is like a jigsaw puzzle with new pieces added all the time. This is what Bennett calls “triangulation,” the way in which different minds imbricate a cross-section of viewpoints and assessments of the performative viewing experience.

xviii

Foreword

Notes 1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 99. 2 Roman Jakobson, Language and Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 97. 3 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, Trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4352/4352-h/ 4352-h.htm. 4 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (NY: Hill & Wang, 1961), 63 (VI, 14). 5 Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 117. 6 Ibid., 123. 7 Theodor Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), 244. These remarks are a not-so-subtle dig at Georg Lukacs, who attached Beckett’s obtuseness as bourgeoisie and anti-socialist. 8 Michael Y. Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (NY: Palgrave, 2021), 90. 9 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 162, 166. 10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 216. 11 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft [Critique of Judgement] (Hamburg: Felix: Meiner Verlag, 1990), 59. 12 Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?” in Kant: On History, trans. and ed. Lewis White Beck (New York: MacMillan, 1963), 4, 5. 13 Susan Neiman, The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 109. 14 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962); see also Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (Washington, DC: ISC Pub, 1989), for a discussion on empathy in relation to indersubjectivity. 15 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1988), 110–111. 16 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 49.

Introduction Viewing and understanding performance: in light of other minds

In the opening of his book, The Empty Space (1968), Peter Brook famously remarks, “I can take an empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”1 However, while theatre may occur with just a single person watching, what happens to understanding (of the performance) when an audience is composed of two (or more) people? Thought to originate from the Indian subcontinent, the parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” was made most famous to the West by John Godfrey Saxe’s 1872 poem of the same name. The (generic-version of the) parable tells of a group of blind men who are all touching a different part of the same elephant at the same time: each blind man, then, understands what is meant by “elephant” in a different way. “The Blind Men and an Elephant” is similar to the “Rashomon Effect”—the phenomenon of multiple interpretations of the same event—as explored in Akira Kurosawa’s movie, Rashomon (1950). However, the long history of “The Blind Men and the Elephant”—with versions of this parable found in various texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sufism—it is quite appropriate because the very situation described and, more importantly, how that situation is viewed varies because of the circumstances surrounding the ethnic, religious, temporal, and geographical group writing the story. “The Blind Men and an Elephant” adds a (I think, needed) twist to Brook’s above formulation of theatre: an audience member trying to understand a “performance” is like how each one of these blind men views this “elephant.” Since I am using the idea of “view,” not only related to vision and eyesight, but to the “Mental contemplation of something (sometimes combined with sight); attention; observation; notice,”2 we are discussing understanding. I am concerned with understanding something, specifically, with “performance” being our specific object of understanding. This book, then, will think about performance epistemologically.3 Importantly, though, in this book, we are not examining interpretation (i.e., meaning), per se; instead, we are investigating our knowledge of (or, justified beliefs about) performance. Performance provides instances where the audience confronts fictional things (i.e., fictional characters and/or fictional scenarios, sometimes viewed for the first time, or as new

2

Introduction

iterations, or fictionalized versions of actual objects and events).4 With fictional objects that we cannot be acquainted with, we understand via description by way of the unfolding of the performance. And these entities and scenarios that we have not been acquainted with and have not been a part of our individual experience, we come to understand through a public experience of viewing. When an audience is composed of two or more people, the viewing of performance raises a fundamental epistemological question: what is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience?5 Because viewers of performance have different prior knowledge and experiences, each viewer possesses a different “probability calculus” (or, more simply, would make a different bet) as to how the events before them will unfold. Further, because these viewers of performances have differing degrees of belief about the unfolding of these events (some which are constant and some are variable), due to this, they need to, each, collect different amounts, and types, of information from the performance, from other minds, and/or from themselves. In this counterintuitive way, and contrary to many presumptions, viewing performance is not a shared experience. In his recent book, Incapacity (2014), Spencer Golub builds off Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “pain behavior” to make the case that “performance behavior” is a shared experience that gives public expression to a private experience. Golub’s notion of “performance behavior” demonstrates how disability is articulated in theatre as an expression of incapacity.6 “Performance behavior,” to Golub, makes public what is usually experienced in private (i.e., as individual experience). In The Art of Theater (2007), James R. Hamilton suggests that by understanding precedence and projecting salient features of the performance—and by understanding that everyone else is doing the same thing—that the spectators all come to possess a rough common knowledge of the same events. However, to complicate Hamilton’s claim, I posit that (not all, but) much of what we view at a performance event is based upon, not only knowledge, but upon beliefs and, importantly, justified beliefs. Because of the viewers' differing circumstances, each with differing justified beliefs, further, of varying degrees of belief about the performance event, there is a resulting error due to perspective (i.e., parallax). Triangulating the experiences of multiple viewers, then, yields a more accurate public understanding of the performance event. By extension, it yields a more accurate public understanding of the performance. In contrast to Golub’s study (which is just putting into words the implicit presumptions of the field), by thinking about issues of knowledge that arise from multiple viewers, I make the counterintuitive claim that being neither wholly public nor private, viewing performance is not a shared experience: viewing performance is a deeply-personal, highly-individualized experience that, paradoxically, relies on the experiences of other minds and is, as such, an experience privately constructed through public mediation. In short, when an audience is composed of two or more people, the viewing of performance raises a fundamental epistemological question: what

Introduction 3

is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience? Turning to insights from Bayesian epistemology to explain differences in the viewing experience, contrary to many presumptions, I suggest that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Because of this, knowledge surrounding a performance is intersubjective; often modified by other viewers and often understood after the performance event, knowledge of a performance is made more accurate by triangulating (or superimposing) the experiences and justified beliefs of multiple viewers. *** Why is this book written and coming out now? The first reason is scholarly in nature as the burgeoning explosion of the philosophy of theatre and/or performance philosophy shows no sign of slowing down, and, rather, it is still gaining momentum and speeding up. This firstinchoate to now-semi-self-recognized birth, or renaissance of the philosophy of theatre—as the latter term (re)members that the birth of theatre criticism starts with Plato and Aristotle—is finding roots around the world all across academia. Amie L. Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics (1999), a seminal book on the ontological status of fictional entities, sits on one side of le fin-de-millénaire; on the other side, sits the special section in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (2001)—with contributions by philosophers in aesthetics, Noël Carroll and James R. Hamilton, and a theatre scholar, David Z. Saltz—debating the relationship between the dramatic playtext and theatrical performance. To note, as I wrote elsewhere, the latter, however, is by no means the first foray of theatre scholars into the field of philosophy, as theatre theorist from the late-1970s to early-1990s engaged heavily with the field of semiotics, and the field of performance studies got much of its theoretical backbone from broadly defined philosophically influenced cultural studies.7 After the, we can call it, philosophical turn in theatre and performance studies in the new millennium. The studies in the field of performance philosophy have gained in speed and in number, not unilinear in the micro sense, but essentially the growth is exponential in the macro. Starting in 2006, five years after the above-mentioned special issue, which sees the publication of David Krasner and Saltz’s Staging Philosophy; in 2007, Hamilton publishes a book-length form of his short article that appeared six years earlier in that same special issue, The Art of Theater. And then essentially, every year thereafter, a pattern emerges of more books coming out in this field each subsequent year than came out the year before. One comes out in 2008 (Paul Woodruff’s The Necessity of Theatre). Two years pass and then two books come out in 2010 (Freddie Rokem’s Philosopher and Thespians and Martin Puchner’s The Drama of Ideas); two years pass, and then book-length studies start coming out every year, one in 2012 (my own, Words, Space, and the Audience); one in 2013 (R. Darren Gobert’s The Mind-Body Stage), then four in 2014 (Golub’s Incapacity; Pannill Camp’s The First Frame; Tzachi Zamir’s Acts; and Tom Stern’s Philosophy and Theatre) and then three more books were also published

4

Introduction

in the inaugural year of the “Performance Philosophy” book series published by Palgrave Macmillan (for a total of seven books in 2014). The journal, Performance Philosophy, starts in 2015, with one issue that year and then one issue in 2016. Three more books come out in the “Performance Philosophy” book series in 2016, along with David Kornhaber’s The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Philosophy. Four more books are then published in that series in 2017, which is the same year as my book, Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play. Furthermore, in 2017, the journal, Performance Philosophy, begins publishing three issues a year. Second, we now are all too familiar with the simultaneously abstract and concrete reality of the Trump Effect. The political arena, if you will, has seemingly always been a battlefield of public figures waging a war of interpretation, or “spin.” But with the recent assault on fact—with the rise of “fake news”—questions of public and private interpretation of (objective) facts have become alarmingly important. The intersection and confluence of belief, justified belief, and fact has been playing out dangerously in the public sphere among public and private citizens, the latter of whom are now not just spectators, but with the power of the internet and social media, active participants in “spinning” truth. This Wild Wild West (www) poses an existential threat to truth/fact. Again, these abstract and concrete reasons are of vital importance now. Faced with a counterfactual conditional situation (i.e., a situation with counter-to-fact constants and variables set up at the beginning of performance), viewers of performance, in order to project these constants and variables, project this situation through betting behaviors based upon their varying degrees of knowledge and belief. The liveness of performances matters precisely because one cannot go back and verify, as this privatepublic venture in truth making and truth verification builds social trust and social responsibility. Maybe even more importantly, this betting behavior rewards us not only for being right (in the feeling of, “I knew it!”), but also equally rewards us for being wrong (in the enjoyment of being surprised). Thus, coming into an agreement over an agreed-upon set of facts matters less, as an important social function, than learning both how to be wrong and how to disagree about beliefs. As such, viewing performance exposes the need for/inevitability of public mediation of personal experience, turning private intellectual pursuits into public discourse. In this, unfortunate, post-truth moment in world history, any activity (like viewing performance) that encourages private thought in public expression and piques intellectual curiosity and the desire for verification is of the utmost need in this age.

Overview of the book In this book, I turn to specific instances of theatre, performance, and performance art to examine where and when these art forms present unique case

Introduction 5

studies to contemplate some epistemological questions: situations where/when the presence of other minds affects justified beliefs (and/or knowledge) about the object or the object being viewed. “Other minds” in relation to the simultaneously publicand-private experience of viewing performance gets to the heart of the idea of performance as a social phenomenon. Each of the body chapters explores specific ways (via specific performances) that demonstrate, however, that public experiences are often not public, and, at the same time, individual experiences rely on other minds for understanding. In this respect, each chapter looks at different aspects of performance—for example, time-space, context, language, and so on—and the performance as a social and a community phenomenon, and its effects on the individual in light of the individual being both a part of and separate from community. This book is divided into two parts. Part I lays out the problems and the theses. Chapter 1, “A Public Experience: But Is It Shared?” explores some problems by poking some holes into presumptions regarding the public experience of viewing performances, suggesting that viewing performance is not a shared experience. Chapter 2, “Knowledge, (Dis)Agreement, and Other Minds,” lays out the theoretical frame, in which I endeavor to engage with epistemological questions surrounding other minds, justified belief, and issues surrounding projecting beliefs. Chapter 3, “A Public Reality of One’s Own,” then, attempts to offer solutions to the problems explored both in Sections I and II, by claiming that performance is not a shared experience and, thus, the path to a more accurate understanding of a performance is to triangulate the experiences of multiple viewers of the performance event. The overarching thesis laid out in Part I is that performance is not a shared experience and triangulation is needed to lessen the effects of the parallax due to each viewer’s unique position and circumstances. In Part II, the book puts forth eight more theses over the book’s five subsequent chapters. The first five theses—(1), (2), (3), (4), and (5)—are meant to confront largely unquestioned presuppositions theatre and performance scholars and audience members from the (non-academic) public generally hold/make about the nature of performance and the nature of viewing performance. These five chapters, respectively, explore epistemological problems related to the viewing process, with special attention paid to the relationship between individual-private and public-shared knowledge related to viewing performance in light of other minds. However, these chapters are not applications of the claims developed in Part I, though Chapter 4, on Hamlet, does revisit almost all of the ideas developed in Part I. But unlike this single chapter, which does bring most of Part I full circle in a direct manner, instead, Part I and Part II largely sit side by side in exploring, respectively, general problems and then specific problems, both related, though, to multiple viewers viewing performance. The five chapters of Part II explore specific problems related to viewing and epistemology in light of (1) knowledge, (2) time and space, (3) context, (4) language, (5) emotion and intellect. Each chapter presents a case study, or

6

Introduction

case studies, in which to test out the following theses to investigate some unexplored presumptions: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7 8

Calling or referring to theatre and performance as “ephemeral” is an inaccurate description. Theatre and performance are “processes.” Viewing (a performance) is a part of the (much larger) process. Because of this, and due to this, the viewers become “witnesses,” and the more witnesses that view, paradoxically, more versions, counteract any narratorial biases both within, and external to, a text-based play to hone in on the truth. Different stage spaces do, of course, affect how a spectator interacts with the actors/performers during a performance. However, different stage spaces also affect how a spectator interacts with other spectators during a performance, and how this, in turn, further affects the spectator’s interaction with the performance. But this is also a contemporary view. Medieval vernacular plays demonstrate that these types of demarcations, such as the understanding of borders in relation to the self and others, are socio-cultural constructs. While often the most powerful linguists, minoritarian linguists, in certain contexts, cannot always powerfully perform their identity. The identity of a minoritarian linguist who is dependent upon translation is something both “bloody and beautiful,” yielding a question mark surrounding the performance of identity as a public and/or private experience. Performances of the self are not simply public performances of privately desired representations (intended for public, social consumption, and interpretation). Performances of the self demonstrate the need to address the indeterminacy of personal identity. Performances do not only elicit an either/or intellectual-or-emotional response, but emotion can be used to heighten the intellectual response. These five theses will be addressed, respectively, in the five chapters that constitute Part II (i.e., Chapters 4–8). The final three theses wade into debates in epistemology in light of other minds and debates over public-private language/experience. Each of these three observations is, in their own way, a response to the fundamental epistemological question this book raises (i.e., what is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience?): Theatre furthers the conclusion that objective facts are more-fully revealed after a viewing by suggesting that the best approach to understanding an external reality is that the more contexts—personal and group—that can be overlaid on top of one another by triangulation, the smaller the error from personal and group parallax. Public experiences when viewing performance are rarely public experiences. When viewing performance, private experiences are generally interpreted by, and dependent upon, public experiences or other minds for justified beliefs and knowledge about private experiences.

Introduction 7

The above three theses—that is, (7), (8), and (9)—will be addressed throughout the chapters, without any specific correspondence, as these observations will be littered throughout the book. Thinking about these five specific problems in viewing in light of other minds, theatre and performance become necessarily communal events that pass well beyond the event itself (both before and after) but are also events that are communal only because of individual experience. The following is the narrative The Problems of Viewing Performance attempts to tell: because objective facts are revealed after a performance and because one cannot take in all of a performance, there is an uneasy relationship between self and other(s) and how this relationship affects the acquisition of knowledge. But, how, then, are we to make sense of what we see? To build off J. L. Austin’s observation about observation, I suggest that because Austin argues that understanding or knowledge is based upon the circumstances from which we understand an object (very-broadly defined)—in turn, and extending off the work of Donald Davidson—I argue that the triangulation of knowledge and experiences from individual spectators and groups (e.g., from criticism, dialogues, reviews, future productions, cinematic adaptations, etc.) is beneficial to lessen the parallax created by the fact that objective facts are revealed after a performance and one cannot take in all of the performance. The fact that parallax persists regarding performance, no matter how many experiences are triangulated with one another, is not a problem, per se: this elusive quest for mastery and understanding, rather, is precisely what keeps its participants yearning to come back over and over. Chapter 4, entitled “Epistemic Problems: Hamlet and Horatio’s ‘Hamlet’ … in Light of Other Minds,” suggests that Hamlet is a play that in all of the characters’ quests for gaining certainty and truth, we understand that each character, in a sense, has some narratorial bias, given the fact that Horatio is the only eyewitness of the events and only eyewitness to some of them. This chapter suggests that Horatio, like Nick in The Great Gatsby, is kind of the main character of the play, as it is his narrative/perspective that we are witnessing. Further, given that Hamlet, then, is more of an idea, based upon a single eyewitness, and one who has a lot of reasons to deliver an efficacious story, Hamlet allows differing participants to enter and exit. That, then, sums up how knowledge about a performance is rhizomal. Chapter 5 is entitled “Temporal-Spatial Problems: Border Progressions and Locating the Self: Mobility and Immobility in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance” and examines two medieval vernacular plays to both demonstrate how what appears to be the natural demarcation between stage and audience, as recently discussed by R. Darren Gobert and Pannill Camp, this was a societally learned understanding. By looking before the advent of the Cartesian spectator, to pre-Elizabethan medieval drama and thinking about the “border” and crossing borders in these plays, we can not only see a difference between how we as contemporary audiences process a play, but how even medieval audiences, separated by two hundred plus years and the English Channel may

8

Introduction

have seen these Le Jeu du Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance from different vantage points. This chapter exposes the fact that some seemingly static points of view and vantage points of viewing performance are not constants, but reflect socio-cultural thoughts about self and others. Chapter 6, “Contextual Problems: Witting and Unwitting Contexts: Translating Public and Private Experience in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/ Kabul,” thinks about the ways in which there is always a question mark surrounding the performance of identity as a public and/or private experience. To this end, then, this chapter develops two further parallel lines of thought: (1) first, it examines Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul through the lens of Deleuze and Guattaris idea of the minoritarian linguist; and (2) then, just like the map in the play marked “Grave of Cain?” I argue that this play is about what it means to conceptualize the world with a question mark attached to it. Like translation, where everything is inaccurate because a true translation is impossible, Kushner posits a world (with a metaphoric question mark attached to it) where everything is utterly unknowable. Knowledge is gained only through translations—personal, literal, social, cultural. And thus, although much is lost in these translations, so much is gained in these hybrid moments. What I am arguing in this chapter is that Homebody is a minoritarian linguist whose own language is a forgotten language, but she speaks in English. What she creates is a minor language that is marked by its hybridity. Homebody’s own unique lingual position mimics the art of translation, with its possibilities and impossibilities. Translation becomes a metaphor for cultural hybridity. As a minoritarian linguist, performance yields power, but the inability to perform at Homebodys comfortable level turns out to have disastrous consequences. Because Homebody is imagined, I argue, as “Homebody?” in Afghanistan (similar to “Grave of Cain?”), Kushner’s play ultimately asks the question that Deleuze and Guattari never ask or answer themselves: what happens to a minoritarian linguist when read in translation? In a line from the play, Kushner suggests that the results of translating a minoritarian linguist are “bloody, beautiful.” Homebody becomes “Homebody?” when read in translation and is therefore susceptible to being “traumatically separated.” Chapter 7, “Lingual Problems: (Private and Public) Performances of the Self: The Performance of Language (and the Self) in Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns,” discusses Jahoda’s art installation piece, Flight Patterns, and problems over language. Flight Patterns functions as performance art that investigates what happens to language as it is exposed to the public and the private viewer/ reader. Blurring the lines between public and private language by displaying a series of hand-written letters and envelopes sent through the mail, Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns questions if the demarcation between public and private language is ever really possible. As a matter of central importance to studies of performance and rhetoric, ultimately, Jahoda suggests that performances of the self are constructed by language that is unavoidably, and simultaneously, public and private. The act of addressing is a rhetorical performance, or a

Introduction 9

performance of rhetoric, for the ways in which language both demarcates and blurs the boundaries of self and other. Chapter 8, “Emotional Problems: Breathing in Maria Irene Fornes’ ‘Sharper Air’ in Her “PAJ Plays,” examines the idea that theatre has to be either intellectual or emotional. This either/or binary has long plagued theatre theorists, commentators, and practitioners. Fornes’ plays, particularly her socalled “PAJ Plays,” are viscerally and palpably intense. This would suggest that her plays, too, side with an emotional response. However, with her “PAJ Plays,” because of what I call her use of “Fornesian pauses,” which are structural pauses at moments of tension, Fornes creates plays that are like “pressure cookers,” but ones where the steam is never released. The result is that there is no cathartic experience for the viewers so that the only way to ease the feelings of unease during the performance is to stream out of the aisles in a discussion. I conclude this book with “Viewing … or, Turning Away: Upending the ‘Gaze,’ Upending the Subject.” In this short Conclusion, I think playfully about the “gaze” of the audience. To do this, constructed in the general vein of Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, I suggest that Larry David’s Curb your Enthusiasm provides an alternative to the patriarchal male gaze that Mulvey described, as the viewers are so uncomfortable and experience such visceral and intellectual displeasure that they have no choice, but to squirm, and even simply look away.

Notes 1 Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 9. 2 “View,” Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd ed. 2016. 3 For an excellent book on the historical overlap between epistemological concerns and theatre, see David Kornhaber, Theatre & Knowledge (New York: Red Globe Press, 2020). 4 Given that I am not investigating the concept of fictionality or fictional entities, I will leave this idea of “fictional” alone as an uninvestigated idea here, for fear of sidetracking my current lines of inquiry. However, I have discussed the nature of “fiction” at length in relation to what is a fictional entity and a fictional world, concluding that “fiction” or “fictional” is not an accurate description of the phenomena at hand. See my book, Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play (London: Routledge, 2017). 5 While The Problems of Viewing Performance does, to a degree, raise the question—do audience members receive the same common data?—this is a question that I will be addressing in detail in a separate book project, currently entitled, Between the Lines, a Philosophy of Theatre. 6 Spencer Golub, Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 11. 7 Bennett, World of the Play, 7–9.

Part I

1

A public experience But is it shared?

The title of this book makes it appear as though there is some problem(s), or maybe some difficulty, in viewing theatre and performance. Watching theatre and performance seems like a pretty straightforward endeavor. What can go wrong? Or, rather, what is problematic about viewing performance? Exploring the fine lines among individual, private, shared, and public experiences—and other philosophical problems that emerge from having multiple viewers—The Problems of Viewing Performance is a philosophical inquiry into individual and community viewings of performance (i.e., theatre, performance, and performance art). This book looks at the ways in which reception theory and performance studies have not adequately taken into account the presence of other minds when viewing performance. By doing so, this book, then, is able to address some inaccurate presumptions that have remained as ingrained-and-unquestioned presuppositions when encountering and commenting upon the theatre and performance arts. In short, by considering some specific problems, concerns, and preoccupations central to performance studies—and contemplating viewing performance epistemologically in light of other minds—radical new ways to think about theatre and performance as private and public experiences emerge. I want to revisit a personal experience I had in my teens at the theatre to describe how meaning is made in a play. During the drive into New York City to see Smokey Joe’s Cafe on Broadway, I asked my mom, what was it about? As I remember hearing it, she told me that it was a “typical musical.” Once it started, though, I was having trouble following the characters from scene to scene and thought how terrible the character development was. During Intermission, my mom asked what I thought about it, and I told her that I loved the music but was having trouble following the plot. Her response stuck with me: “what kind of plot would there be in a musical revue?” Once that single word was added, I adored the second half of the musical revue. Hence, that night, I watched two different shows: first, an undeveloped musical and, then, second, a thoroughly entertaining musical revue. That experience, which I relay in Words, Space, and the Audience (2012), made a lot more sense to me by considering the tension between empirical and rational ways an audience member receives the meaning of a play.1 That book is concerned, though, with meaning-making.

14 A public experience

However, a lingering issue that I had not yet resolved, or even elucidated at that time, remained: while “I watched two different shows that night,” my mom and I saw two different shows, as well. Even more importantly, I saw two different shows that night because of the presence of another mind (i.e., my mom). In that specific instance, my mom’s comments did not change the actual reception of the knowledge, but the framing and significance of the event. That is, my observational data about Smokey Joe’s Cafe did not change, but how I interpreted that data did. While this anecdote raises questions more specifically about interpreting meaning, it does raise a somewhat-parallel question, how is knowledge affected by other minds? Here, in The Problems of Viewing Performance, I turn to epistemological conversations about other minds to investigate some problematic issues concerning, to make clear, our basic knowledge of viewing performance. This book suggests that despite the strength and validity of one’s “justified beliefs” (whether “justified beliefs” or “justified true beliefs”), objective facts are more-fully revealed after viewing. The interplay among text, performer, performance, and audience is delayed largely until after the performance. Performance, however, is also much more dynamic for that very reason. While the concrete actions (broadly defined) of performance cease after the performance event, most of theatre and performance are understood after a performance. This challenges the notion of the liveness of theatre and performance and their supposedly fleeting natures. Similar to Joe Kellerher’s arguments in The Illuminated Theatre (2015), a performance lingers and lives on through memory, discussion, written and filmed records, and criticism, and these bear their own fruits in new productions.2 In some ways, theatre never ends.3 Even during the performance, there exists a residue and aura of other productions, similar to Marvin Carlson’s idea of ghosting.4 The more a play is performed, the less a single performance can be known. Prodding at simple answers to these questions exposes some cracks in what we assume is one of the fundamental building blocks of the experience of performance: viewing. Given the lack of sustained and/or critical investigation into this phenomenon, viewing performance remains a ratheruncomplicated, relatively-straightforward concept. The purpose of pointing out these cracks—and, then, prodding at them further until some of the bricks crumble and the overall structure becomes suspect and unstable—is not meant to be an academic exercise in problematizing and/or abstraction. Rather, tearing down a simplified structure allows us to consider the faulty ways in which we built some unquestioned givens surrounding the viewing of performance. This book, then, aims to rectify and re-edify our understanding of viewing performance by providing an accurate description of the phenomenon at hand: how do we understand “the thing” that we all love and adore? The overall project of The Problems of Viewing Performance is, then, to more accurately describe the phenomenon of viewing theatre, or “the thing” that we refer to as theatre, and, by extension, performance (i.e., from Hamlet’s pronouncement, “the play’s the thing…”).5 Here, I approach the

A public experience

15

phenomenon of performance through epistemology (specifically, epistemology in light of other minds) by describing our understanding of “the thing” (i.e., theatre and performance).6

Individual and shared experiences The issues surrounding individual experiences and shared experiences get to the heart of a central debate and a main spine of philosophy that is centuries old. The famous quote discussing the mind-body duality by Rene Descartes, “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), is notable, too, for the ways in which it paves the way for the private language argument and makes a case for the possibility of private experiences.7 The contemporary application and response to this, by Ludwig Wittgenstein, is that private language does not exist because language is shared, and, therefore, private experiences are impossible too, since our experiences are shared because we conceptualize the world through a shared language.8 In the same vein as Wittgenstein, it would appear that theatre and performance are, therefore, shared activities. While studies proliferate on “audience”9 and, more recently, “spectatorship,”10 and studies also abound on the “gaze”11 and on “image,”12 and while the idea of viewing has, in one way or the other, has been addressed in these above conversations, I still think we take the idea of “viewing” and/or (more broadly) “experiencing” a performance as something of a given. The performer-audience model of theatrical production and reception is based on a largely-unproblematized and simple conceptual structure of an audience at the theatre (though, this version is the one that probably occupies the majority of the space of many of our minds). Particularly related to the viewing process, the (I think, inaccurate) idea remains—largely uninvestigated and unchallenged—that theatre and performance are community experiences and public experiences, and, therefore, shared experiences.13 In order to address what we think of when we talk about viewing performance, let us take, as an example, the idea of an evening at the theatre. This is what we (or certainly, I) casually think happens when we “go to the theatre”:

(A play in five acts) Act I – The audience arrives at the theatre and takes their seats. Act II – The audience watches the first half of an embodied story unfold before their eyes. Act III – Intermission (i.e., food, drinks, restroom visits, etc.). Act IV – The audience watches the second half of an embodied story unfold before their eyes. Act V – Applause, and the audience discusses what they thought of the production as they exit the theatre and make their way home.

16 A public experience

Instead, here is a more accurate structure of the viewing of performance, even despite it being a limited sample (and having a limited sample size) of what more-accurately describes the viewing experience at “the theatre”:

Ad infinitum plays in a 100-or-so acts

Act 1

Spectator X Read the play twice

Act 2

Walks to the theatre

Act 3

Arrives ten minutes early Quickly goes right to seat

Spectator Y Read the play once, saw it performed twice (once back in college by the theatre department, and another time, a few years back, Off-Off-Broadway), and attended a talk about the play Takes a taxi to the theatre Arrives two minutes late Waits until usher seats spectator

Act 4

Thinks the set is relatively bare

Still waiting for usher to escort to seat

Act 5

Thinks, “I forgot that was the first line”

Act 6

Thinks, “oh yes, now I remember”

Act 7

Thinks, “what a grave rendition of Character X, as I always pictured X as ironic”

Has trouble hearing first line from the back of the theatre Escorted to seat, trying to pay attention not to trip, only having the light of the flashlight to follow Thinks, “Actor 1, in the Off-OffBroadway production was much better

Act 4

Spectator Z Never saw or read it, but always felt guilty for never seeing or reading it, though did read two reviews of the play in the past few days

Drives a car to the theatre Arrives forty minutes early Wanders around lobby and theatre for thirty minutes before finally sitting in seat and reads Playbill two and a half times Loves the “minimalistic”1 set1 Critic A, The New York Times Thinks, “what a great first line” Starts paying attention to the costumes, noting the array of fabrics used by costume designer Still trying to figure out who each character is

A public experience Act 8

Act 9

Act 10 Act 11 Act … Act 89

Act 90

Act 91

Act 92

Act 93

Starts paying more Thinks about what attention to Actor 2, Professor Gsaid at who is playing the lecture about Character X, to see the play, and what if the Actor is parts of the play intentionally trying follow or depart to be grave from the professor’s interpretation “This is such a “This is a true example tragedy.” of tragicomedy, just as ProfessorG noted.” Sees Character X smile Sees Character X snicker … … … … Slowly stands for an Sits and begrudgingly ovation stands, not because the show wasn’t but feet kill, and just want to jump in taxi, get home to my apartment and take off my shoes Thinks about whether Rubs feet during cab or not Character X ride home, and is, in fact, grave or is instructs cabbie ironic on which cross-town walk home street to take to get through the Park Gets home and leafs Immediately takes off through a copy of shoes, and the play remembers what ProfessorG said about how the play makes you feel Over the next few Over next few days, days, decides to read works late a review of the play in the newspaper, and calls friends who saw it to see what they thought about it Starts reading two Runs into friends at a biographies, one of cocktail lounge and the playwright and discuss what they the other is of did the past President C

Remembers a spoiler from one of the reviews in one of the papers, which helps keep the characters straight

“Wait, was Character Z a sister ora friend of Character J” Was paying attention to Character J … … Is fourth person to jump up for a standing ovation

First gets stuck in traffic, infuriated at city congestion, and after getting out of it, puts on NPR for rest of ride Gets home and feeds the dog.

Decides to watch the 1957 film version of the play, and consults Best Movies of All Time guide to see what the book says about the film Spends weekend mowing the lawn and doing chores around the house

17

18 A public experience weekend, mentioning the play Over next year, the play did not come up again

Act 94

Over the next year, had a few random chats about the play with other booklovers

Act 95

Five years later, sees an Over the next five years, while Off-Broadway production of the cleaning out closet, play, and then, comes across the Playbill, and within two days, remembers loving watches the 1957 the play film and the2001 remake … …

Act 96 Act…

Over the next year, decides to read the play, but never made it more than a third through the play Over the next five years, the play did not come up again

…

While these viewers were, largely, viewing the same concrete actions and objects, the large disconnects and differences in the experiences among our spectators hinges on, not only on their different experiences but on our (or the different spectators’) basic knowledge of things. However, further, it also hinges on our differing circumstances. Given that an audience member cannot view a performance panoptically, as one is limited to one’s specific circumstances and position, there is an epistemological problem inherent in an individual taking in all of a play: “In a sense, the totality of the performance does exist during the performance, but the totality of performance is only epistemologically revealed after the performance…”14 Therefore, because each view is limited, “The more that is written and discussed about the performance—from as many vantage points as possible—the more that the totality of the play is revealed and understood.”15 With this in mind, we must think about the need for a bevy of viewers from a “panopticon” to make sense of an object (whether it be a simple gesture or action, a person, or something as complex as, say, a theatrical production). While the audience members are present for the same series of concrete events that unfold before them, the understanding of those events is, largely, an individual experience. However, that experience is also, in part, based upon others’ knowledge of both that same event itself, and their knowledge surrounding/ about that event.16

Notes 1 Michael Y. Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3–4.

A public experience

19

2 “…‘theatre’ becomes a rather fluid thing… ‘it often straddles the boundary between physical and mental existence’” (Joe Kelleher, The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images [Abington: Routledge, 2015], 5). 3 See Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience, particularly the discussion of when does a play start and when does it end (4–7). 4 Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003). 5 Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play examines, as Marvin Carlson observes in that book’s Foreword, “not what [theatre] is like or how it functions, but what, fundamentally, it is (Marvin Carlson, foreword to Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play, by Michael Y. Bennett (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), xi). Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play attempts to describe how and in what way theatre exists and what type of object theatre is. I argue in Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play that theatre is part of a sub-class of abstract objects that I call “dialectical-synecdochic objects” in that theatre is a “re-creation” of actually-existing subjects and predicates arranged in such a unique manner that it does not actually exist except as an abstract object. These abstract objects are understood “dialectically” and through their “synecdochic elements” (see, particularly, 29–51). Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play approached the phenomenon of theatre through ontology by describing “the thinghood of the thing” (112). 6 I consciously italicize the “of” here, as well, to pay particular homage and alert the reader to James R. Hamilton’s excellent chapter, “The Myth of ‘Of,’” in his equally excellent, The Art of Theater (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007). 7 Rene Descartes, Meditations. 8 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (NY: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1951). See, especially, the “beetle” language game (100) and “pain behavior” (89–93; 97–100). For a thorough overview of the issues surrounding private language (and private experience by extension), see Stewart Candlish and George Wrisley, “Private Language,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2019, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ private-language/. 9 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1997); Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012); Helen Freshwater, Theatre & Audience (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Dennis Kennedy, The Spectator and the Spectacle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 10 Special Issue “Spectatorship,” October 2014. 11 In the field of theatre and performance studies, the most notable is, Dolan, The Feminist Spectator, 2012. Much of the academic study of the “gaze” in the Humanities (including Dolan’s book) comes from Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay: “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 no. 3 (October 1975): 6–18. 12 The field of theatre semiotics in the 1990s and early 2000s spent much time thinking about the reception of images: Elaine Aston and George Savona, Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance (London: Routledge, 1991); Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 2002); Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Marco de Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre (New York: PAJ Books, 2001).The focus on image(s) was also a preoccupation of philosophical aestheticians just before the above period of theatre semiotics: Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Gregory

20 A public experience

13

14 15 16

Currie, The Nature of Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). While not really developed, Frederich Nietzsche seems to hint at this and use the Apollonian-Dionysian distinctions to discuss spectatorship as being both an individual and a collective experience. For more on this, see particularly Section 8 in his The Birth of Tragedy. Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience, 8. Ibid. The Greek Chorus operates in a somewhat-similar manner, in which they all witness the same action, divide according to their understandings and responses to it, and then, ultimately, come back together into a kind of shared knowledge.

2

Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

In The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Bertrand Russell creates two helpful and quite-straightforward concepts to explain our knowledge of things: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Russell’s two terms are indebted to the work of Immanuel Kant and Kant’s concepts of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. A priori knowledge is knowledge that can be known prior to, or independent of, an experience; a posteriori knowledge is knowledge that is obtained after, or is dependent upon, experience. For Russell, to return to his two terms, knowledge by acquaintance is having an acquaintance with a direct awareness of a thing, with no intermediate process or knowledge of truth.1 This type of knowledge is gathered from our own empirical evidence, directly from our own senses and experience. On the other hand, knowledge by description is knowing the truth about the thing, or knowledge of truths (i.e., know the truth[s], not the actual thing, itself ).2 In order to understand by way of description, “Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted.”3 Russell gives the example of Julius Caesar: while we are not acquainted with him, we have knowledge of particulars and universals with which we are acquainted that are associated with a description of him (e.g., “the man who was assassinated on the Ides of March,” “the founder of the Roman Empire,” and “the man whose name was Julius Caesar”).4 Russell concludes that the importance of knowledge by description lies in its ability to “[enable] us to pass beyond the limits of our private experience.”5 In simple, straightforward situations— such as our knowledge of George Washington (via description) or our knowledge of the tree in our own backyard (via acquaintance)—I find Bertrand Russell’s two concepts (i.e., “knowledge by description” and “knowledge by acquaintance”) certainly adequate to help explain our knowledge of things. However, what happens when knowledge/information is changing or unfolding? There has been some previous work done regarding updating expectations and/or knowledge as audiences/readers learn new information from an art form (though not much work has been done specifically regarding theatre and performance studies). Writing specifically about reading literature, Tzachi Zamir suggests that it is not necessarily knowledge or, by extension, information (i.e., that

22 Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

which is either true or false) that is being learned (in his case, by reading), but what is being learned is, what he terms, meaningfulness, how “literature expands lived experience” and justifies one’s own beliefs, whether beliefs, justified beliefs, or justified true beliefs.6 Jerrold Levinson, in Music in the Moment (1997),7 suggests that musical understanding occurs from the listener grasping small, successive bits of music; this would be in contrast to the idea that a listener needs to grasp (aurally or intellectually) a piece of music in its entirety. On the other hand, in discussing the understanding of cinema, Noël Carroll—in his article, “Performance” (1986),8 and his book, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (2008)9—suggests that the moviegoer (consciously or unconsciously) asks a series of questions that he or she answers as new data from the movie emerges, allowing for the moviegoer to update his or her comprehension. However, Zamir, Levinson, and Carroll’s accounts of updating comprehension (granted, for three different art forms) are focused upon individuals, who are each individually receiving these art forms. What happens, then, when other people are introduced into the equation? In The Art of Theater (2007), Hamilton discusses at length how people come to an agreement and can describe the same object and/or event. Hamilton extends David Lewis’ coordination games to introduce the way that audiences become “learners.”10 Audience members, thus, learn to look to the precedence of “salient” features (i.e., features of the performance that stand out).11 By doing so, audience members can “project” what is going to be “right most of the time.”12 The understanding of a performance is shaped, according to Hamilton, by picking out salient features “reasonably related to her own perspective”:13 Spectators do not know in advance what they will find. But, crucially, they know that everyone else will be looking for the same things. Thus, while spectators are not guaranteed to find exactly and all the same things salient, the thickened concept of common knowledge guarantees the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that they will find roughly the same set of features salient.14 Hamilton’s notion of picking out salient features and projecting what will happen while knowing that everyone else is doing the same admirably addresses how we agree on discrete facts and situations. However, even if we “find roughly the same set of features salient,” does that mean we share the same experience? What happens, further, in much more complex situations, when much of the information is based upon, say, beliefs, justified beliefs, and justified true beliefs?

“Justified belief ” and “Justified true belief ” One of the seminal studies of contemporary epistemology is a very short article from 1963 by Edmund L. Gettier called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”

Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

23

Gettier’s article is a response to attempts made by his contemporary philosophers to explicate what conditions are necessary and sufficient for someone to know a given proposition.15 In order for someone to know something, what circumstances and/or conditions must be present? Or, even more specific to Gettier’s article, what is required for a belief to be justified? For example (though this is as Gettier also begins), what is necessary and sufficient for someone to know that 2 + 2 = 4? Or stated another way, at what point, and/or in what cases, and/or what has to be known for someone to be justified in believing that 2 + 2 = 4? Gettier initially presents three ways that his contemporaries would answer the preceding example (i.e., how does someone know that 2 + 2 = 4?). The first way is an amalgamate definition of the criteria for stating that A knows x (that Gettier bases somewhat off of the work of Plato), where 1) 2 + 2 = 4 is true, 2) A believes 2 + 2 = 4, and 3) A is justified in believing 2 + 2 = 4. Gettier, then, explains the criteria that Roderick M. Chisholm and A. J. Ayer, respectively, present that are more specific examples that fall similarly into the above criteria. Chisholm: 1) A accepts 2 + 2 = 4, 2) A has adequate evidence that 2 + 2 = 4, and 3) 2 + 2 = 4 is true. Ayer: 1) 2 + 2 = 4 is true, 2) A is sure that 2 + 2 = 4 is true, and 3) A has the right to be sure that 2 + 2 = 4 is true.16 In his article, Gettier presents two cases where the amalgamate criteria (presented first above) are true for some propositions, but yet at the same time, the person does not actually know that proposition.17 The epistemic problem presented by Gettier’s two examples has come to be known as the “Gettier Problem.” For the sake of brevity, here is just Gettier’s first case. Smith and Jones both applied for the same job, but Smith has strong evidence that “(d) Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket” because the evidence gathered by Smith might be that the president of the company said that Jones would get the job and Smith had, ten minutes prior, counted ten coins in Jones’ pocket. Proposition (d) entails that “(e) The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket,” which Smith accepts on the grounds of (d), for which Smith has strong evidence. As Gettier says, “Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.” However, Gettier continues his thought experiment: what if, unknown to Smith, he (i.e., Smith) gets the job and not Jones? And what if, it is also the case, that Smith also has ten coins in his own pocket? It turns out, as Gettier explains, that 1) (e) is true, 2) Smith believes that (e) is true, and 3) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. However, while (e) is true, this is the all-important point: Smith does not know that (e) is true.18 In short, Smith has a justified belief and that justified belief turns out to be true, yielding a justified true belief. However, Smith does not have knowledge of the truth of the situation. The “Gettier Problem,” thus, exposes some of the differences between truth and knowledge. Alvin Goldman gives a famous example of a justified belief: someone is in a car and sees a barn, and even as the car approaches, it still looks like a barn, but after the car has passed, it turns out it was just a life-like facade. That person in

24 Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

a car was well justified in believing that the barn was a barn (in Goldman’s example), as that person reached the limit of their possible knowledge about their own private experience.19 In John Pollock’s “solution” to the “Gettier Problem,” Pollock assumes that a person is aware or could be aware of certain necessary facts in order to have an “objective epistemic justification” (e.g., knowing that the barns are sometimes real and sometimes are just facades, to address, for example, Alvin Goldman’s barn-façade example).20 We are not, however, always privy to the types of facts that Pollock highlights. While the literature on the “Gettier Problem,” responses to the “Gettier Problem,” and the literature on justified beliefs is exhaustive,21 I am less interested in dealing (directly) with the “Gettier Problem,” than using it both to introduce some central concerns in contemporary epistemology and to use it to get to some problems inherent in the epistemic study of other minds. This idea of justified belief is important because it straddles the two poles of what we believe and of what we know. What we often assume is our knowledge of a performance is, instead, largely, our justified beliefs about a performance. We could most likely arguably-agree that one can have knowledge of, say, the words spoken by an actor X or who is playing character Y.

Justified beliefs and viewing performance Unlike, say, knowledge about who is playing character Y. At the same time, all the following are understood based upon the same concrete events, most of these other things that we usually think of as knowledge of a performance, instead, fall into the realm of, more broadly, justified belief: intonation of spoken lines (e.g., was the line “whispered” or “murmured audibly”?); feelings of the characters that the actors project (e.g., was the character “angry” or “incensed”?); mood created by the lighting design (e.g., was the lighting projecting a “bleak” or a “dark” mood?); and, among many other examples, gesture (e.g., was the arm “thrusted” or “whipped out”?). The questions raised by these parenthetical examples of justified beliefs about a performance event is twofold: 1) are these examples of justified beliefs or example of justified true beliefs? and 2) can two or more people hold different justified true beliefs about the same event? In short, if someone holds a justified belief that the lighting of a particular performance was “bleak” and another holds a justified belief that the lighting of the same performance was “dark,” can/do they both simultaneously hold justified true beliefs about the lighting design of this same performance event (even though their beliefs are different)? I am not sure that this book has precise answers to these two specific questions, but these questions do seem to muddy the waters between observational data and the interpretation of that observational data. That is if one “thrusted” an arm or “whipped out” an arm, is there an observational difference between the two actions? Can an arm be straightened quickly in two different ways: a way that it is “thrusted” versus a way that it is “whipped out”? And could, in isolating the movement of the arm, anyone perceive the

Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

25

difference between those two, and/or is there any difference between the two? (Try the following yourself as you read this: try to “thrust” your arm out and then try to “whip out” your arm. Is there any difference, and/or could an outside observer notice a difference between those two movements? [Conceptually, I can fully understand the two movements as different and distinct, but I, personally, cannot discern any difference of feel or of look when I try to do this myself.]) Or is it merely the circumstances of the viewer as to why one viewer holds that it was “thrusted” and another holds that it was “whipped out”? That is if an arm is extended quickly, can it not both be true that it was “thrusted” and/or “whipped out”? Therefore, can it not also be the case that both viewers hold two different justified true beliefs about the same observational data?

Projecting “degrees of belief” I opened this book with the parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” which tells of a group of blind men who are all touching a different part of the same elephant at the same time, where each blind man, would then, understand what is meant by “elephant” in a different way. The purpose of this parable was to demonstrate how understanding is both subjective and not uniform in an audience, and thus, viewing performance, while a public event, may not be a shared experience. But what happens if we repeat the “Blind Men and the Elephant” scenario over and over again with changing and/or rotating participants? That is, some blind men may be confronting one part of the elephant for the first time, while others may be revisiting the same part of the elephant or experiencing a different part of the elephant than they have experienced before. Whether it is the first time one of these blind men are touching the elephant or the tenth time, each additional stroke of the elephant yields additional information for each blind man, be it new information or confirmation and/or rejection of previous knowledge/justified beliefs/beliefs. As a group, considering the blind men as a whole, all of these additional pieces of information from the blind men with different experiences yields a more complete understanding of an elephant after consulting with one another and past blind men who also felt the same elephant. It is one thing to try to understand the experience after the event and with the help of others (though with different degrees of belief). However, what happens during the experience of the event? How does understanding change and/or become more accurate with added information through the passage of time? If we take this same group of blind men, each additional stroke gives more clues as to what the future strokes of the elephant might be like. To return to our arm that is “thrusted” or “whipped out,” would it not be the case that the first time you tried this experiment, you would feel and observe no difference? But is it possible that with practice, a highly-skilled mover—a professional dancer, for example—could do these two movements,

26 Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

and maybe a professional dance critic, for example, could see the difference? I know I cannot tell the difference between a pianist at a house of worship playing a piece versus a true virtuoso playing the same material, just as I cannot hear the difference between when I hit a single key on a piano versus when my aunt, a former professional, hits a single note, versus when a true worldclass virtuoso hit a single key. I cannot discern a difference at all, but my aunt certainly can. Therefore, just like our blind men touching the elephant, the circumstances matter. Without trying to bring up questions of authority, as that further muddies the waters, this raises another prospect: accuracy.22 Would it not, likely, be the case that the blind man touching the elephant for the 100th time might be more accurate about the elephant than the first time one of our blind men ever touches an elephant? (A parallel, of course, is that my aunt will hear things and nuances in a piano performance that I would never even hear and/or notice.) If I am a complete newbie to something, I may not know enough to know that I do not know that others can know more. But with increased exposure, I both learn increasingly that I know less, and others can know more. Therefore, part of the equation is whether one knows enough to know whether their own beliefs based upon their own observations are justified or not. On the other hand, the other part is to what degree can they be justified or certain? The implication here is that there remains the following question when there is disagreement: is the knowledge that is received by observational data 1) a matter of objectivity, which some understand, and some misunderstand? or 2) ultimately, a matter that is of interpretation? I am not suggesting that a concrete reality does not exist, but there is the question as to whether, given all our differing circumstances, we can ever have the same knowledge of the same concrete reality, or, related and more relevant to this book, have the same experience of the same concrete reality. I am not sure I am fully prepared in this book to make a definitive assertion one way or the other, but I hope that the case of theatre and performance will help us get to a better place—into a better position and circumstance—in which to answer this fundamental question. Again, as I have claimed that much of what we view at a performance event is based upon, not only knowledge, but upon beliefs and, importantly, justified beliefs and justified true beliefs, this parable, “The Blind Men and the Elephant,” is quite relevant to theatre and performance because the principles of vagueness are inherent in performance (especially in the case of text-based theatre).23 There are constants (e.g., the lines laid out in the dramatic text) and variables (e.g., the variety of performance choices) that are continually projected forward. Both the performers and the viewers project their beliefs (of various degrees of certainty) in order to be more certain of what is before them (with objects that do not present themselves as not-black-and-white, true-or-false, objective facts).

Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

27

Performance and Bayesian epistemology Once we introduce this idea of projecting variables (or, projecting beliefs), in order to understand concrete objects and/or actions, we fall into the realm discussing the “probability calculus,” central to Bayesian statistics (it sounds utterly daunting, and it can be extremely technical, but the basic concepts, without the need for any math, are quite simple). Developed out of a famous mathematical theorem about probability by Reverend Thomas Bayes (1701–1761), Bayesian statistics and probability calculus are based upon the concept of betting behavior, which is “the inclination to accept and reject bets according to our degrees of belief.”24 By extending this idea to philosophy, in the field of “Bayesian epistemology,”25 the “probability calculus is especially suited to represent degrees of belief (or, credences) and to deal with questions of belief change, confirmation, evidence, justification, and coherence.”26 This idea of measuring one’s betting behavior based upon one’s “degrees of belief” is especially relevant to performance since, as I have suggested that performance projects a counterfactual (versus a fact), Bayesian ideas about probability and the conditions of viewing become important here because the audience is constantly being exposed new information, and while knowledge changes, so too do one’s degrees of belief. However, further, there must remain opposing senses and/or feelings of plausibility and of surprise. That is, as the performance goes on, the viewer should continually possess the belief that something might or could happen,27 or else there is generally little pleasure in the viewing process if the viewer’s expectations of what is going to happen are constantly met (i.e., the performance becomes predictable). In short, without the need to get into the weeds of logic and mathematics, engaging with general insights from Bayesian epistemology helps explain why viewers have different experiences while viewing the same observational data. For simple purposes of reference, in order to explain the fundamentals of the Bayesian “probability calculus,” I use the following formula (based upon the “Simple Principle of Conditionalization”): Pnew(A) = P(A|E ). While the formula can look rather complex, it is a generally-simple idea that can be used to quantify one’s new degree of certainty about an object or event when new information is presented that affects one’s prior degree of certainty about an object or event. Here, P represents the “probability corresponding to S’s degree of belief.” Simply, P means that a person (i.e., S) believes that A will occur [0–100]% of the time. Therefore, let us say that A is the occurrence that at least one character dies in the final scene of a particular Shakespearean tragedy that S has not seen. We could say that for S—who, let us say, is a collegeeducated theatre or English major graduate—that his or her P(A) is 90% (or, technically, .90). In plain English, that means that S believes with a 90% degree of belief of A, or this person has a 90% degree of belief that at least one character will die in the final scene of this particular Shakespearean play that he or she has not seen. Let us say, further, that as the play goes along, S encounters some new information that is relevant to this person’s P(A),

28 Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

which means new information that affects this person’s degree of belief that at least one character will die in the final scene of this play. We call this new information, E. At the moment that this new information is revealed, we can calculate a new P (i.e., Pnew), where, given E, S believes that A will occur a new percentage of the time. In short, S believes that (now) after learning E, that A will occur ___% of the time. Stated another way, after learning E, S (now) believes with ___% degree of belief that A will occur. This general concept from Bayesian epistemology helps explain differences in the viewing experience for different members of an audience. For example, maybe a college-educated theatre or English major might have a P(A) of 90%, referring to the fact that in a Shakespearean tragedy not seen before that this person believes that there is a 90% chance that at least one character will die at the end of the play. However, let us say another viewer in the same audience is a 14-year-old freshman in high school and this is the first Shakespeare play they have ever read or seen. Not only would the 14-yearold’s sense of the probability (i.e., P) vary of what will transpire, the very notion of what can or cannot, or might or might not, transpire (i.e., A), will vary greatly, as well. Now, compare this to, say, a Shakespearean scholar or actor, who has read and seen the play (or maybe acted in this play) a number of times. Their sense of probability (i.e., P) of what will transpire (i.e., A) will be quite different, both their assuredness and what facts they are looking for. That is, this Shakespearean scholar or actor is not looking for the same A as our college-educated English or theatre major, the “occurrence that one character dies at the end of the play,” but their A, the occurrence or object they are looking for, might be how this particular production, and the actors within, handle a particular scene, in terms of, say, how seriously or humorously a few lines are acted. The above example about a high school freshman and a Shakespearean actor or scholar both watching the same play highlights an important issue: what is the relationship between receiving common data and having the same experience? To a large degree, this is the question that is at the very heart of this entire book. Therefore, I would like to offer the following thought experiment intended to demonstrate some of these problems surrounding interpreting and understanding an object and holding justified beliefs or justified true beliefs, and also having differing levels of degrees of belief, but in this case, when more than one observer encounters the same object. I will return to this thought experiment shortly, but the idea is to introduce a bare-bones “theatre,” if you will, in which to examine later justified beliefs and performance. As mentioned earlier, Peter Brook suggests that theatre occurs when a person walks on a stage and another person watches. Here, let us reconfigure Brook’s equation to a person walks on stage, two people watch, and while the two agree on much of the performance, the two viewers still disagree as to what transpired. However, in this first instance, let us analogize this dynamic by setting up this scenario with multiple observers of color as our bare-bones theatre:

Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

29

If A is color blind and has the most trouble with color x, only perceiving x in large quantities/high ratios (i.e., X), when A looks at color xYZ, A only perceives YZ (i.e., x cannot be perceived by A, in this particular ratio of colors). When A, from planet Earth, sees xYZ, seeing it as YZ, A calls xYZ “brown.” B, from planet Bearth, who is not color blind, also calls xYZ “brown,” for that—coincidentally—is the name of xYZ on Bearth. B decides to visit Earth and, upon landing, meets A—who has never even heard of planet Bearth (and whether or not A even realizes B is from the planet Bearth does not matter)—and is staring at the color xYZ. A, knowing about A’s own color blindness, asks if B sees all colors, and after getting an affirmative, asks B what color it is. B replies, “brown.” B gets a call on B’s cell phone and immediately returns to Bearth. C, shortly after, who is not color blind and is from Earth, walks up to A and sees xYZ and calls the color “rust.” A, who admits the color blindness, dissents, saying that B, who affirmed B’s own ability to see all colors, also called it “brown.” To C, A and B cannot hold the same thoughts as C’s own thoughts. For while C can explain A (i.e., as being color blind), C cannot explain B’s ideas that that color is “brown.” With a nod to Berkeley’s immaterial language, to C, A can be an “idea” of C, as C knows about color blindness, but B’s ideas about the color being “brown” cannot be a part of C’s “ideas,” as C holds, with solid empirical evidence, that xYZ is “rust” to all people who are not color blind. How can someone who sees all colors like I do, C muses perplexingly, call “rust” the color “brown”? While we will revisit this bare-bones “theatre,” we first need to examine how circumstances lead to problems that arise with multiple viewers (particularly at “the theatre”).

Notes 1 Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 46. 2 Ibid., 47. 3 Ibid., 58. 4 Ibid., 59. 5 Ibid. 6 Tzachi Zamir, Just Literature: Philosophical Criticism and Justice (London: Routledge, 2019), 12. 7 Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). 8 Noël Carroll, “Performance,” Formations 3.1 (1986): 63–81. 9 Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 10 Hamilton, “The Myth of ‘Of,’” 95. Hamilton plays off Robert Sugden’s model for analyzing discovery situations (“The Role of Inductive Reasoning in the Evolution of Conventions,” Law and Philosophy 17 [1998]: 380–388). 11 Hamilton 97. 12 Ibid. 97. 13 Ibid. 98. 14 Ibid. 100.

30 Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds 15 Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23, no. 6 (June 1963): 121. 16 Ibid. 121. 17 Ibid. 122. 18 Ibid. 19 Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 771–791. 20 See, John Pollock, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Totowa: Rowman, 1986): 183–193. 21 Aside from the articles and books discussed here, see the following, which should provide a solid base to further wade into discussions on, or about, the “Gettier Problem” and/or justified belief: Chisholm, R. M. Theory of Knowledge (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966/1977/1989); Feldman, R. “An Alleged Defect in Gettier Counterexamples.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1974): 68–69; Hetherington, S. Knowledge Puzzles: An Introduction to Epistemology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996); Hetherington, S. Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge: On Two Dogmas of Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Keefe, R. and P. Smith, eds., Vagueness: A Reader (Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press, 1996); Lehrer, K. “Knowledge, Truth and Evidence.” Analysis 25 (1965): 168–175; Lehrer, K. “Why Not Scepticism?” The Philosophical Forum 2 (1971): 283–298; Lewis, D. “Elusive Knowledge.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996): 549–567; Lycan, W. G. “Evidence One Does not Possess.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 55 (1977): 114–126; Lycan, W. G. “On the Gettier Problem Problem,” In Epistemology Futures, ed. S. Hetherington. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Moser, P. K., ed., Empirical Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. 1986); Pappas, G. S., and M. Swain, eds., Essays on Knowledge and Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); Roth, M. D., and L. Galis, eds., Knowing: Essays in the Analysis of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1970); Shope, R. K., The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Williamson, T., Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 22 For more on the connection among belief, experience, and accuracy, see Susanna Siegel, “The Contents of Perception,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-contents. In particular, see Section 2.2 “Beliefs and Experiences”:There are many ways of developing the idea that experiences are assessable for accuracy. One idea is that the contents of experience derive in some fashion from the contents of beliefs, so that experiences bear some constitutive link to beliefs. Three sorts of constitutive links to belief have been discussed in the literature. The first is that experiences are acquisitions of beliefs; the second is that they are dispositions to form beliefs; the third is that they are grounds of dispositions to form beliefs. A fourth position simply identifies experiences with beliefs about how things look (Gluer 2009), or even more simply, with beliefs whose content characterizes the way things look (Bryne 2016). 23 See Bennett, World of the Play, 64–67; also indirectly discussed in, Michael Y. Bennett “Intrinsic-Extrinsic Properties in Theatre,” Philosophy and Literature (forthcoming). 24 Stephan Hartmann and Jan Sprenger, “Bayesian Epistemology,” Routledge Companion to Epistemology (London: Routledge. 2010), 610. For a more technical account of the claims of, and arguments against, Bayesian Epistemology, see Alan Hájek and Stephan Hartmann, “Bayesian Epistemology,” A Companion to Epistemology, eds. J. Dancy et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 94–106. 25 For a technical account and overview of Bayesian epistemology, see William Talbott, “Bayesian Epistemology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, winter ed., ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/ epistemology-bayesian.

Knowledge, (dis)agreement, and other minds

31

26 Hartmann and Sprenger, “Bayesian Epistemology,” 609. See, also, Talbott, “Bayesian Epistemology,” particularly, section 2 “A Simple Principle of Conditionalization.” 27 Modals express possibility, permissibility, or necessity. Modals are qualifiers that express permissibility or the likelihood or of something coming to pass or being true. Examples of modality in the English language include modal verbs/modal auxiliaries (e.g., would, could, might, will, can, may, etc.) and other expressions of modality (e.g., ought to, it is possible that, perhaps, maybe, etc.). Let us examine the expectations that playwrights have, or said in another way, the expectations that are set up in the text by way of the counterfactual and modals: If x were the case, the playwright and reader/audience must agree, that then y would have been, or at least, could or might have been, the case.* [*NOTE: If this agreement is not made by the reader/audience, or, if the playwright does not write a counterfactual conditional that demonstrates the minimum probability/possibility of “might” or “could”—tha is, if x were the case, then y might/could have been the case—then the reader/audience experiences disbelief and/or displeasure.]

3

A public reality of one’s own

If we all come to a performance and experience the projection of the counterfactual situation presented to us with varying degrees of belief (and knowledge), how will we make sense of the information observed before us? In Sense and Sensibilia (1962), J. L. Austin responds to A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap’s defense that one only perceives sense-datum and never a material object itself: For if, when I make some statement, it is true that nothing whatever could in fact be produced as a cogent ground for retracting it, this can only be because I am in, have got myself into, the very best possible position for making that statement—I have, and am entitled to have, complete confidence in it when I make it. But whether this is so or not is not a matter of what kind of sentence I use in making my statement, but of what the circumstances are in which I make it.1 Austin recognizes the contextual nature of knowledge and that there is a subjectivity to the situation of the person making the statement, as there is the (implicit) idea that the “kind of sentence” is some kind of objective universallycommunicable unit of thought. But Austin (as does Hamilton) understands that circumstances (from which perceiving occurs) are unique and subjective. In light of recent studies on visual perception in the field of social psychology, Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter argue that “people’s understanding of the world is in fact highly, if not exclusively, subjective.”2 Kristin Pauker, Nicholas O. Rule, and Nalini Ambady discuss the subjective nature of viewing face perception, noting studies that have revealed that “face perception is not just detection of a configuration of stimuli, but depends on a combination of what information exists, what information the person attends to, and what information is useful to that perceiver in that particular environment.”3 Further, the emotions that humans bring into the viewing process, at least in terms of perceiving emotions on others’ faces, affect how (and for how long) humans perceive an emotion on another person’s face.4 In a personal exchange, coming from the field of philosophy, Keith Lehrer relays his own “hypothesis” to me that “Mirror neurons probably supply the

A public reality of one’s own

33

kinesthetic sensations in viewers that performers experience,” and that this, then, creates “empathy.”5 According to David Krasner, despite Bertolt Brecht’s critique of empathy, empathy is, precisely, what allows viewers to transcend the limits of their personal experiences and knowledge.6

Circumstances While “empathy” may be a shared experience in the theatre and performance—and (via Lehrer) each observer’s mirror neurons are observing the same object to mirror (though, if all facing the same way, of course)—an audience is a random set of eyes, ears, and minds (though, usually from higherincome households with higher education levels). The point is that the facts going into the play—or, rather, the facts about, and circumstances of, the individual observers and what each observer “attends to” and what/which emotions are brought into the theatre space at any given two-hour or so span of time—are not evenly dispersed among the audience members (and even participants). Some know the play line-by-line, others know the main stage directions, some have just read it, some have just seen it, and some do not even know the play at all. Each “spectator,” then, uses and/or has a different lens, or “spectacle,” through which he or she experiences a (largely-similarly viewed) object or action. Thus, truth needs to be revealed by the experiences and thoughts of everyone included in order to have something like Pollock’s objective justified belief possible, given that the “spectacles” are going to be slightly different for each “spectator,” to play off the title of, and some of the ideas in, Dennis Kennedy’s The Spectator and the Spectacle. The spectators each spectate through their own unique and subjective circumstances (to think back to our “evening at the theatre”), which, rarely, is steady (even for each spectator), as circumstances change based upon new information and experiences. Theatre and performance are always different, inevitably different. Even if the words and actions are exactly the same (which is essentially impossible), the audience is always a different audience.7 This is true even when it is just one reader, one actor, or one spectator. It is not only that the physical composition or location generally changes in an audience, but the knowledge both personally experienced and acquired from other minds changes over the course of a day or two, if not decades or centuries. However, while the act of triangulating the experiences of spectators gives each a better understanding of the object/performance commonly viewed, this activity poses some further problems. To return to my experience of seeing Smokey Joe’s Cafe, when my mom and I reconvened during intermission to talk about the performance, my own experiences and my feelings and attitudes were subject to re-evaluation and change. In order to discuss these ideas with more precision, I need two helpful terms: qualia and “propositional attitudes.” In short, individual instances of experience are called qualia (quale is singular); the attitudes/feelings/beliefs one has towards a proposition are called

34 A public reality of one’s own

“propositional attitudes.” After consulting with another mind during intermission (i.e., my mom), the qualia remained intact, in terms of how I experienced the first half of the show; my propositional attitude towards the first half changed to a degree. However, with the newfound knowledge about the show, my propositional attitude and the qualia certainly changed for the second half of the show. Before the intermission, the qualia presented in a way that I felt like I was experiencing a disjointed musical. The propositional attitude was one of “I dislike that the musical is disjointed” (for added clarity, here, the propositional attitude is italicized; the proposition is underlined). During intermission, after finding out that it is supposed to be a “musical revue,” the qualia regarding the first act did not change, per se. However, I understood, now, why my “propositional attitude” changed (“I, now, understand why I thought that the musical is disjointed.”) Heading into the second half of the show, my individual experience was entirely different. The qualia presented itself as a musical revue, and my “propositional attitude” changed drastically to “I love that I am watching this musical revue.” In short, my attitude toward the show changed because both the “proposition” and the qualia changed to me (even though, in fact, little-to-nothing about the show, itself, changed between the first half and the second half). What caused this change was the knowledge I gained from another mind, which changed the circumstances from which I was experiencing the performance. However, further, what has happened to my experiences and attitudes over the years? What has happened to those qualia and propositional attitudes, with my fading memory of that experience and, now, having more knowledge about theatre and performance? Besides a snippet or two of visual memories of the set and actors and auditory memories of the music, all that I remember now is the first fifteen minutes of the show, the disjointedness I experienced during those first fifteen minutes, my attitude towards the show, and the fact that I remember that my attitude and experience changed after intermission.8

Parallax and triangulation I would like to introduce another thought experiment, this one analogous to my above “rust-brown” thought experiment, to illuminate some of my above points: Let us say that Hamlet is playing at the local theatre which has a thrust stage. On a given night, A is sitting to the left of the stage and on that same night, B is sitting to the right of the stage. When Hamlet faces A, the back of Claudius in a particular scene is visible to A (i.e., Hamlet looks in Claudius’ direction). This Hamlet paces a lot: sometimes facing Claudius and sometimes walking away (i.e., facing B). In this particular scene, whenever Hamlet faces Claudius (i.e., in A’s direction), the actor makes a “crazy” face. When Hamlet walks away, his face is “calm.” (This actor playing Hamlet has decided to “play” Hamlet as an “actor,” make-believing

A public reality of one’s own

35

that he [Hamlet] is “mad” in order to fool, especially, Claudius.) After the play ends, A, who is a theatre critic, goes home and begins to write a review for the local newspaper and B goes home and goes to sleep. The next day, C, who is B’s friend, sees Hamlet at the same theatre. C sits in front of the stage with a very tall man in front of C, but slightly to C’s right (i.e., blocking C’s view when Hamlet walks away from Claudius, in the direction where B sat the night before). The following day, B picks up the newspaper and reads A’s review, which describes Hamlet as “mad” and “crazy.” B calls C, whom B knows saw the play the night before, and asks whether C thought Hamlet was “mad.” C says, yes, Hamlet had a “crazy” face, but C also mentioned that C could not see the play well because there was a very tall man in front of C. B can make sense of how C could have thought as much with C’s physical limitations in viewing the play, but B could not fathom A’s assessment. In my two (analogous) thought experiments, A, B, and C, then, each possessed (via Austin) a circumstantial knowledge. In both thought experiments, A, B, and C all had justified beliefs within their own internal experience based upon what “the circumstances are.”9 Ultimately, however, the information as received by A, B, and C was paradoxically externally logical but presented itself as internally illogical. This, I argue, is from parallax. In Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001), Donald Davidson introduces the concept of triangulation to epistemology in situations where two or more creatures interpret both the world and each other simultaneously, where “each creature learns to correlate the reactions of other creatures with changes or objects in the world to which it also reacts.”10 For Davidson, the “shared perceptual stimulus” of two or more minds reacting to the world yields a “triangular set of relations.”11 Building off Davidson’s ideas about triangulation, I want to suggest that the more minds/observers there are reacting to the same object, the less the effect of parallax: the more observers, the more understandings can be superimposed on one another.12 Essentially, the more superimpositions that come from more viewers from many and different angles, the more accurate the viewing (and think of Google Earth as a world-ly example of this). To this conception of superimposing, we can add the rationale from Bayesian epistemology for the variety-of-evidence thesis in thinking about confirmation theory—“the more varied the evidence is, the better”—and also the fact that act of superimposing, like Bayesian epistemology, takes into account the source of knowledge/belief, being able “to model the effect of combining the testimony of several witnesses.”13 On a smaller scale (than Google Earth) to demonstrate my ideas about triangulating knowledge, I would like to make a slight adjustment to the end of Gettier’s example to address the idea that some things present themselves as internally illogical, but are perfectly logical externally: … When Smith makes his assertion that the man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job, Smith—unbeknownst to himself—does indeed have ten coins in his

36 A public reality of one’s own

pocket. In the next few proceeding hours, after purchasing a snack and lunch, however, Smith spends the coins that were in his pocket, unaware of how many he had in his pocket in the first place. After lunch, Smith gets awarded the job. His assessment that the man with ten coins will get the job appears to be false. Internally there is a contradiction; externally it is logical. With overlapping experience and knowledge from both the snack vendor and the lunch vendor—while Smith was justified in his belief that the man with ten coins in his pocket would get the job and did not know his assertion was true—Smith can learn that his original assertion was true and that he was justified in believing it, even though that original assertion presented itself as false. The approach to an external truth, seemingly illogical, now based upon the internal contradiction, can be approached by triangulating the experiences of Smith, the snack vendor, and the vendor at lunch. Much in the same way, our thought experiment theatre spectators—A, B, and C—can learn about the performance by triangulating their three experiences. Following the observation about the difficulty of taking in all of a play, the only remaining path left to approach an understanding of the totality of performance lies in the fact that the more contexts—personal and group—that can be overlaid on top of one another by triangulation, the smaller the error from personal, and group, parallax. With its corresponding infinitesimallylarger units and infinitesimally-smaller units, the concept of infinity ensures that error from parallax is impossible to overcome (e.g., something like Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise). For clarity, I am not using “parallax” in the same way as Slavoj Žižek’s Lacanian use of it in his book, The Parallax View. Instead, I am invoking the literal use of the term as it pertains to (visual) perception (i.e., experiencing the world from different circumstances or positions). Different circumstances inherently allow some direct lines of experience, indirect lines of experience, and blocked lines of experience. Due to the resulting parallax—with no God-like observer to work to mesh these views the way that our brain, via stereopsis, makes the visual parallax into one clear image—there must be inter-personal, inter-personal-and-group, and inter-group stereopsis by way of layering contexts and evaluating either the displacement, the alignment, and/or error in order to gain knowledge about the object being viewed. In light of epistemic concerns about other minds, using theatre and performance as case studies demonstrate that the relationship among justified belief, knowledge, and truth (to think back to the “Gettier Problem”) is a product of the overlap of personal and group contexts and circumstances.14 The case of theatre and performance, then, furthers the conclusion that objective facts are more-fully revealed after the viewing. In its totality, a performance event is 1) not quite an exact time-place-space-defined event, 2) too complex to observe all aspects of the event, and 3) based on different subjective understandings of the event based on different subjective experiences of the individual spectators. Therefore, triangulation from individual spectators

A public reality of one’s own

37

and groups is necessary to lessen the parallax created by these three abovementioned factors. Viewing performance blurs the line between private/individual and public/ shared experiences, in part, because performance lives. As one calls The Constitution of the United States a “living document,” one can also argue that performance is a living idea of embodied artistic expression. Performance is made up of a series of concrete objects and events that can only, however, be understood in its entirety as an abstract object. While the essential composition remains the same—if delineated and bounded by a dramatic text—the changing parts and participants of performance constantly change. Those same bounds can change shape, shade, color, and intensity based upon how the performance participants understand the shape, shade, color, and intensity of the text. In turn, this affects how we understand the shape, shade, color, and intensity of the text. A piece of performance, then, is a living idea that develops both within and changes the perceivable boundaries delineated by the text. The ever-changing parts and participants of performance across time and place are precisely what reveal the limits, but also the many different shapes, shades, colors, and levels of intensity that can (or cannot) exist within the malleable container that houses a living artistic idea. Performance, then, is a living artistic idea: performance is a malleable conceptual matrix that creates, holds, develops, and explores an embodied artistic idea and/or expression. The assertions in this book are significant both to theatre and performance studies and to philosophy. In theatre and performance studies, much work has been done, separately, on 1) theatre and performance in relation to reception theory—how an audience member receives a play/performance—and 2) what is an audience?—how we think of an audience and/or its composition. This book suggests that these two concerns (from reception studies and works about audiences) are intimately intertwined. However, I argue that these two lines of inquiry are intertwined because of the following two highly-counterintuitive arguments: 1) public experiences are often not “public,” and 2) private experiences need/rely on “other minds” for understanding. These two arguments force a full re-evaluation of many unquestioned assumptions regarding how we understand theatre and performance that past studies in reception theory and about audiences simply take as (presumed) givens. While this book does not directly challenge either Descartes or Wittgenstein’s views concerning the private/public nature of language and experiences—for those interested in this debate, which is one of the most significant in the history of philosophy—this book does offer specific case studies that expose some challenging cracks to both Descartes’ and Wittgenstein’s opposing positions. On one hand, theatre incorporates other minds, views, and opinions in such a way that we are not, as Descartes argued, individual minds (I think, therefore I am). Instead, we are social beings whose minds are shaped by other minds. On the other hand, Wittgenstein’s notion that we only understand the world via a shared reality because of language is not right either, as we have vastly different understandings and experiences

38 A public reality of one’s own

when viewing performance. Stated again, viewing performance is a highlyindividualized experience that, paradoxically, relies on the experiences of other minds.

Notes 1 J. L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 114. 2 Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter, Introduction to Social Psychology of Visual Perception, eds. Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 1. 3 Kristin Pauker, Nicholas O. Rule, and Nalini Ambady, “Ambiguity and Social Perception,” Social Psychology of Visual Perception, eds. Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter (New York: Psychology Press, 2010), 11. 4 Ibid., 11. 5 Keith Lehrer, personal email, March 16, 2018. 6 David Krasner, “Empathy and Theater,” in Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, eds. David Krasner and David Z. Saltz (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 255–256. 7 This is the grand joke of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and also provides the philosophical backbone behind Borges’ short story, “The Library of Babel.” 8 For a playful (or, theatrical) take on qualia, see Eric Lormand, “Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater Near You),” Philosophical Topics 22 (1994): 127–156. 9 While color-blind A, in the first thought experiment, may not have been fully justified, given A’s own self-aware limitations, given that color may not even exist as an independent reality and just be a sensation, A could still have a justified belief because A was justified in believing B. 10 Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 128. 11 Ibid., 88. For more on Davidson, and an explanation of his triangular externalism, see M. Cristina Amoretti and Gerhard Preyer, “Introduction: Mind, Knowledge, and Communication in Triangular Externalism,” in Triangulation: From an Epistemological Point of View, eds. M. Cristina Amoretti and Gerhard Preyer (Ontos, 2011), 15–19. 12 My account of triangular knowledge from the perspective of the philosophy of mind, largely, takes an externalist point of view, where the outside world individuates mental content, or “the content of the mental states depends upon or is individuated by external objects and events” (Amoretti and Preyer 11). 13 Hájek and Hartmann 101 & 102. For more on Bayesian Confirmation Theory, see Talbott, “Bayesian Epistemology,” particularly, Section 4 “Bayesian Confirmation Theory.” 14 I am not arguing for semantic contextualism put forth, generally, in “Epistemic Contextualism” (EC). Given that this is not what this book is concerned with, I will simply point the reader in the direction of an excellent introduction on the subject: “Epistemic Contextualism” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Part II

4

Epistemic problems Hamlet and Horatio’s “Hamlet” … in light of other minds

William Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a play about confirming one’s beliefs to hone in on the truth. As there is really only a single eyewitness, per se, in the whole play—Horatio—there appears to be a narratorial bias present in the story/play of Hamlet. Taken further, this fact exposes something of a narratorial bias about theatre, as different participants bring their own perspective and vantage points of how they bear witness to the unfolding of events. In this way, theatre is less an ephemeral event and more of a rhizomal process that different participants and actors (in more than one sense of the word) can enter into and exit out of.

The presumption Unlike fiction, theatre is considered “ephemeral.” In regard to fiction, the question of narratorial bias is seemingly always at hand. With a few very notable exceptions (e.g., Tom Wingfield of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Managerie, The Stage Manager of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, etc.), there is a presumption that there is not a narratorial bias in the theatre. Given the general absence of narrators in text-based plays, the audience witnesses the unfolding of events as they occur(ed) in the world of the play, and its characters are actors (not in the theatrical sense, but in the sense that they are principal participants or active participants) that are a part of this unfolding.

The performance William Shakespeare’s Hamlet (i.e., The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark) is ubiquitous enough that I shall forgo any summary of its contents. However, while the play—i.e., the text of Hamlet—remains the same, its manifestations vary by the manifold. Here, I will explore the play, Hamlet, by thinking about the many “Hamlet”s in the play, Hamlet.

The problems with the presumption With the end of Hamlet, Shakespeare implies that we, the audience members, see the story of Hamlet, “presently performed,” because of the fact that

42 Epistemic problems

Horatio—as he said he would to both Hamlet and Fortinbras—has/had told Hamlet’s story. While essentially all of the characters in Hamlet are told to watch Hamlet find out what Hamlet is really like, Horatio is the one character who observes Hamlet at his most natural, who is told by Hamlet of his plot to play mad. Furthermore, Horatio is like all of us, the audience members, privy to watching Hamlet watching others watch him (i.e., Hamlet). Thus, Hamlet presents a parallel narratorial situation to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: the great Gatsby’s tale is preserved because his friend, Nick, tells the tale. But, more importantly, much like how Nick is the main character, even though it is Gatsby who is the focus of the novel, so too (in such a parallel way) is Horatio the main character of Hamlet. First, Horatio—not Hamlet—is the character who more-or-less starts and ends the play. Second, Hamlet, much like Gatsby, while thoroughly human and bound by his flaws, is sort of like a Shavian superman: so extraordinary that he is essentially un-relatable to the masses (though worshipped by the masses, almost because of this). And third, Horatio is the only living witness to the events of the play.

The proposal In The Art of Theater (2007), James R. Hamilton discusses the audience’s ability to identify common things that happen within the time of the performance and across performances. To take Hamilton’s observations further, theatrical events are paradoxically-and-simultaneously dependent and independent of time and place— of the “here and now.” In a (single) performance event of Hamlet, for example, the audience does not observe a world where the characters presently perform (present tense) the play, but a world that has already played out and is performed (present participle) presently (adverb), where Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, and a lot of the court are already dead. When watching Hamlet, and “the mousetrap” suggests as much as well for theatre as a whole, we are viewing a performance of a past event in our present. The key here is that this is an event for the audience.1 That is, we are not watching the characters live out their lives in the here and now.2 This idea, then, suggests that theatre is rhizomal, in the sense that theatre (or, say, Hamlet) becomes an “idea”—an abstract entity—where participants are allowed to enter and exit and the “performance” is oddly paradoxically forever stable and unstable. In this rhizomal way, calling or referring to theatre and performance as “ephemeral” is an inaccurate description. Theatre and performance are “processes” that try to explore the story and/or idea being investigated. Viewing (a performance) is a part of the (much larger) process of performance.

The projection (of the proposal) Horatio’s “Hamlet”

Besides Horatio, the play also opens, more or less, with the testimony of an eyewitness recalling a past event: the ghost of King Hamlet tells of his own

Epistemic problems

43

murder. Despite the fact that King Hamlet was asleep and therefore, while perfectly justified in his belief that Claudius murdered him, did not have direct knowledge of this. This is a moment that foreshadows the epistemic vacuum that I discuss later about “the mousetrap.” That is, the whole play, in a sense, rests on the murder, and the first-hand eyewitness does not actually see or experience the act, itself, the moment that precipitates that murder. The importance of eyewitnesses is, thus, central, but while King Hamlet was a firstdegree observer (or at least experienced the murder firsthand), Prince Hamlet, despite hearing this, only knows this information via the second degree. That is, Hamlet spends the entire play wanting to confirm, but with his own eyes and ears, the fact that Claudius was the murderer. Even with damning circumstantial evidence and a confession by Claudius, it took “the mousetrap” to see with his own eyes and ears Claudius’ guilt. Much like Hamlet wanting to confirm his own suspicions about Claudius and his mother, Gertrude, while Hamlet sought eyewitness evidence, the entire play everyone was seeking that same eyewitness account of Hamlet. Everyone watched and/or was directed to watch Hamlet and his moves, both to discern what he knew and whether or not Hamlet was, in fact, mad. But here is the key point, while we see Hamlet confide in Horatio to tell him his plot of playing mad, and thus Horatio is the only observer who sees Hamlet at his most natural, with his guard down, in the mousetrap, not a single person—including Horatio and (in general) the viewers, both of whom are watching Claudius—is watching Hamlet. While maybe we, the viewers are aware of Hamlet, we, like Hamlet, are watching Claudius’ reaction. So, at arguably the most important moment of the play, Hamlet, we have a brief moment of an epistemic vacuum, when Horatio’s retelling is something of an educated conjecture, as Horatio’s focus was on Claudius. It is not that Horatio could not know or have a well-justified belief about what Hamlet did/does at that moment, but just that that moment provides the only hole in the visual continuum of the play where all eyes are on Hamlet. Moments after, and for the rest of the play, all eyes are back on Hamlet, but the fact that everyone looks at Hamlet, almost without a pause throughout the whole play, makes for a striking absence of knowledge about that one instant. By the end of the play, when Fortinbras asks, what happened here?—with all of the “witnesses” dead—we just get Horatio’s “Hamlet,” as Horatio is the only living witness to the events that unfolded prior to Fortinbras entering. In the same way that Nick is to The Great Gatsby, Horatio is the Everyman of Hamlet. Horatio is the one character in Hamlet who can seemingly listen and talk to everyone, regardless of their position in life. With Horatio accompanying Hamlet to Ophelia’s grave, Horatio represents the middle ontological view between Hamlet’s much more lofty view of Being—“to be or not to be”—and, as I argue elsewhere, the Gravedigger’s opposing practical and pragmatic view of Being—“to act, to do, to perform.”3 One is the product of their birth (Hamlet’s view of Being) and the other is the product of what one

44 Epistemic problems

does (Gravedigger’s view of Being). Here, Horatio simultaneously embodies the mass of humanity in between these two extremes of existence: between a princely existence and an existence at the bottom of a grave. Maybe Horatio is accessible and approachable to many due to Horatio being “just,” as recent scholarly conversations surrounding Horatio’s character have focused on this description of Horatio by Hamlet.4 However, going even further than Christopher Warley’s suggestion that Horatio is in the know, and not simply “just,”5 I argue that it is Horatio—not Hamlet—who is not only the main character in the same way that Nick is the main character of The Great Gatsby, but Horatio is also the smartest and most cunning person in the play. By looking at the first and last scenes of Hamlet through a simple interpretive metaphoric/symbolic lens, I try to show how Horatio cleverly exploits his liminal position as being both an outsider and an insider, both in Claudius’ Court and in Fortinbras’ Court, managing to come out of the bloodbath not just alive, but finding himself in another powerful position as seemingly something of an advisor-like confidant to Fortinbras, the new ruler, now of two countries. The first scene of the play begins with the guards on watch. But it is where these guards, and then Horatio, are—on the outer wall of the castle—that is symbolically important. Horatio was Hamlet’s friend in Wittenberg, presumably at the university there, and presumably not from the Danish Court. Thus, Horatio comes from outside the castle walls to be housed on the inside, but we encounter Horatio at that liminal space, on the edge of the castle, being able to both look out and in. Horatio is summoned from, presumably, within the castle because of the appearance of the ghost of King Hamlet, a liminal presence between life and death. It is Horatio that is the intermediary between Hamlet and the guards, who appropriately stay on watch at the outer edge of the castle (representative of their position in the Court, as having a rank just enough to get them inside the castle walls, but not that far away from the peasants, who they look out at from above). This scene establishes Horatio’s insider and outsider status that he retains throughout the remainder of the play. In the final scene, Horatio kind of hints to Fortinbras that Fortinbras should tell Horatio to tell Hamlet’s story. This hint kind of gives Fortibras the idea to give Hamlet a soldier’s burial, endearing Fortibras to the Danish people, who love Hamlet. But this crucial move also aligns Fortibras with Horatio, who is not directly a part of the Danish Court and, thus, is not dirtied by the scandal that just transpired. Further, Horatio, as an insider, provides Fortinbras, a total outsider to the Danish Court, a person who can help Fortinbras make a smooth transition to power. On the other side, Horatio gets two valuable things out of this deal: 1) immortalizes himself by immortalizing Hamlet, and 2) finds himself in the exact same advantageous outsider-insider position in Fortinbras’ Court. Horatio is essentially the only character to outlive Hamlet’s mistaken approach to taking revenge for his father’s (King Hamlet’s) murder. And Horatio sides with Fortinbras, who realizes that the best way to ensure

Epistemic problems

45

that revenging his father’s (King Fortinbras’) murder actually lasts and will not, in turn, lead to his own murder, is through cunning diplomacy. David Thatcher rightly observes that Horatio has committed himself to present two narratives: the narrative that Hamlet wants to be told and the narrative that Fortinbras wants to be told.6 However, Thatcher assumes something of a “just” Horatio that feels bound to satisfy these two narratives with fidelity. However, following Warley, Horatio is not “just,” and, as I suggest, also is the smartest, most cunning character in the play for his ability to play different sides, possibly for personal gain, then Horatio wants to tell Horatio’s tale, as well. Horatio’s liminal status creates a liminal narrative where we, the audience, must—like Hamlet and Horatio observing “the mousetrap”—be careful observers, splicing what is fact from fiction, knowing full well that the narrative’s own liminal status resists the audience’s attempt to pin it down. And, thus, we rely on that other mind, Horatio, to give us enough information to continue to enter and exit the performance and our understanding of Hamlet/”Hamlet”/Hamlet. However, Horatio, too, also knowing full well that as soon as he (Horatio) enters this newly created “performance” piece, so too will Fortinbras enter and exit whenever Fortinbras sees the story of “Hamlet,” or certainly Horatio’s Hamlet, as a needed and efficacious performance to bolster Fortinbras’ own rule. While it can be argued that theatrical characters are actors (or active participants) in the world of the play, Shakespeare, with Hamlet, highlights the fact that theatrical characters are the “witnesses” within the world of the play. A “witness” tells/recalls the story as they see/saw it; thus, directors, actors, and designers (not necessarily intentionally, but inevitably) create narratorial bias through which each actor-character-witness is playing out their own side—the character’s own personal viewpoint of what transpired—of the story as is “presently performed” (e.g., think of the narratorial bias that the other character accuse The Father of in Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author). In Hamlet, Horatio is the only first-hand eyewitness of the events of the play. This conception does have an implication for theories of acting (and possibly directing), as thinking about a character as an eyewitness performing their own past story through their own perspective (i.e., this is my (the character’s) story within this (particular) story, of which I may or -may not be a major character), can certainly present a different manner for an actor in which to act or get into the role. That is, this suggests not a linear externally imposed narrative that each character fits into in their own role in the narrative, but a collection of internally derived ensemble personal narratives, the latter being how real life operates. However, if acting and a play is thought about as an actor embodying a witness to a story presently playing out a past event, then we will see an amount of either (intended or unintended) parallax (i.e., error due to perspective) from both the actor who has a specific perspective of the character and for the character who it is imagined has their own (limited, if you will) perspective. This way to think about the relationship between the

46 Epistemic problems

actor’s perspective and the character’s perspective is between Brechtian technique and Stanislavski’s approach. The parallax from the narratorial bias present in the characters and the actors (and directors, designers, etc.), however, far from producing jumble, presents quite a dynamic (both within a [singular] performance event and within the life of a performance [as a whole]), as the more a play is performed, and thus the more narratorial biases that enter the fray over time, paradoxically and counterintuitively, theatre audiences are able to hone in on the necessary truths of a play by triangulating where the narratorial biases of the directors, actors, and designers intersect (and/or diverge). Ultimately, Hamlet is a play about becoming more certain about one’s beliefs and bearing witness, and the importance of being an eyewitness, and getting oneself into the position to be an eyewitness, is an integral part of Hamlet. The characters are constantly searching for more knowledge to confirm their beliefs. Ultimately, who “Hamlet” is becomes a triangulation of all of the different “Hamlet”s by the various viewers who view him, which is how we come to understand the character, and the play, as a whole.

Conclusion Hamilton claims that audience members are able to come to an agreement, roughly, of the same events over the course of a performance by picking out salient features. This enables audience members, further, to understand and identify the same character across different performances: … spectators pick out individuals, objects, and so on by catching sight or sound of them first, and then begin to converge on the same features of particular individuals or objects in their common field of sensory experience and project the same characteristics to whatever is being developed for them to observe over the course of the performance. Spectators react to sounds and movements and have directional responses triggered by the phenomenal experience of people and things moving and sounding in the space they inhabit. Only then do they attach features and project characteristics onto those items. This is built into our biology. Thus, when a spectator has basic grasp of what is presented in a theatrical performance, she is already prepared to grasp the same character, events, props, and so on, when those show up later in the same performance or in other performances.7 This ability to pick out salient features allows changes in composition across time and place. That is, a viewer can identify Hamlet as stable across 1) Director X’s Hamlet and Actor A’s Hamlet and 2) Director Y’s Hamlet and Actor B’s Hamlet. Thinking about these changes in composition across time and place and with different “actors” and “viewers,” take the following thought experiment:

Epistemic problems

47

An experienced scholar comes across a list of numbers scribbled in the marginalia of a previously-unknown illuminated manuscript that dated back at least 800 years: 2, 13, 16, 45, 68, 82, 93. This scholar—wizen and humble, after spending a few days trying to see if a pattern emerged that would, pun intended, illuminate the meaning of these numbers—brought the list of numbers to a colleague in the mathematics department. Nothing. The scholar documented the seemingly-random list of numbers and published it in a well-known academic journal. Part novelty and part puzzle-to-solve, scholars had a lot of fun, spending many countless hours trying to make sense of this list of numbers. Finally, after decades of well-documented arguments, interest in these numbers waned and became a footnote in history. However, after about 200 years, an academic smart-aleck decided to play, what was, initially, meant to be a scholarly joke. Managing to purchase an illuminated manuscript that dated a couple centuries later than the original aforementioned manuscript and had no real academic or historical importance, this smart-aleck scribbled down the following numbers in the margins written in an age-appropriate type of ink: 20, 130, 160, 450, 680, 820, 930. So bemused of this idea, this smart-aleck rushes into a car and drives off in a hurry to show an academic friend this wickedly-clever act of parody. However, in this flurry of smug cleverness, our smart-aleck fails to pay attention to the road, and the car hits a tree head on and the smart-aleck dies an immediate death. When the police arrive, the illuminated manuscript is found and sent to the local university, and it eventually made its way to another academic who studies illuminated manuscripts. While it was not immediately apparent, something looked familiar about these numbers to this scholar. Eureka! This scholar writes an article entitled, “Numbers in the Margins: The Story of the Told and Foretold in Two Illuminated Manuscripts.” In the article, this scholar hazards a guess that the later scribe was maybe was a part of a cult that worshipped those seemingly-random numbers; wanting to move up in the cult, this later scribe figured out a way to reinvigorate the study of those so-beloved and worshipped numbers. By placing the two number sets side by side, a pattern emerges: 2, 13, 16, 45, 68, 82, 93 20, 130, 160, 450, 680, 820, 930 By creating a seeming pattern with the new (second) set of numbers, this scholar opined that this possible cult was able to create a future that seemed foretold in the past. This thought experiment is a smart-alecky way to make the same point as our smart-aleck illuminated manuscript scholar. We understand our present and (moving forward) our future through our understanding of a past object/thing; our sense of that past object/thing changes due to our current and future understanding of that object/thing. Similar to the concept that once birthed, only ideas live forever, the performance of a play is a process that centers around a constant (i.e., the playtext) that contain built-in variables (due to what is not specified):

48 Epistemic problems

… the text is the text is the text. And the text is fundamental to the existence of (one might say) “traditional” theatre. The text is the unchanging essence of the play. The text just is … It is the doing of theatre that expresses and determines what the text is. In other words, the director and actors (and everyone else associated with the production of a play), as long as they find justification in the text for their choices, create the boundaries and explore the nuances of the text. And this is not just a solitary endeavor particular to each performance. If, again, we are assuming that responsible choices are being made in different performances of the same text, then the entire history of the performances of a particular text helps to manifest what the text is.8 Therefore, thought about in such a manner, viewing (a production) is only part of the ongoing process of performance. We are now ready to make two counterintuitive statements about the understanding of performance: 1 2

Understanding the past changes the reality of the future. Future understandings change the reality of understanding the past.

Furthermore, this is a process that one enters into and leaves, in that the process has already started well before the time when almost anyone and everyone first encounters it and will continue long after one has passed away. Viewers come into the process at different points and leave at different points. Performance is a processual rhizome; it is part of an intricate and ongoing network of many entering and exiting participants. It is in this way that Hamlet can be viewed at any time and in any place. However, this is largely analogous to literary interpretation, say, fiction or a movie is contained in an “envelope,” to hint at Chapter 8, that is contained and preserved in such a manner that while it doesn’t change, how we interpret it does change. However, that is not what theatre is, or how we understand theatre. Saying so does not discount the literary, theatrical, performance interpretation of theatre, but the following is the added-unique feature of theatre: Director X’s Hamlet allows the-later Director Y’s Hamlet to come into existence, which in turn, affects, then, how we understand not only Director X’s Hamlet, but also Horatio’s Hamlet, Fortinbras’ Hamlet, and, ultimately, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Notes 1 See Michael Y. Bennett, “Propositions in Theatre: Theatrical Utterances as Events,” Journal of Literary Semantics 47, no. 2 (November 2018): 147–152. 2 For more on the concept of a play being performed again and not in the here and now, see my discussion, specifically of the modern history play, of the tense of theatre in Michael Y. Bennett, Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four Crucial Texts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2012). 3 Bennett, Words, Space, and the Audience, 2.

Epistemic problems

49

4 See Jonathan Crewe, “Reading Horatio,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 271–278, and Lars Engle, “How Is Horatio Just?: How Just Is Horatio?” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 256–262. 5 Christopher Warley, “Specters of Horatio,” ELH 75, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 1027. 6 David Thatcher, “Horatio’s ‘Let Me speak’: Narrative Summary and Summary Narrative in Hamlet,” English Studies 74 (June 1993): 256. 7 James R. Hamilton, “From the Author’s Perspective: The Art of Theater,” American Society for Aesthetics, n.d., https://aesthetics-online.site-ym.com/page/HamiltonTheater 8 Bennett, World of the Play, 61–62.

5

Temporal-spatial problems Border progressions and locating the self: mobility and immobility in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance

The very notion of stage space is a modern (Renaissance and postRenaissance) invention. This chapter examines two medieval vernacular plays, Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance. The ways in which their representations of borders and crossing borders show that demarcations related to time and space regarding the self and others are socio-culturally dependent.

The presumption Scholars have well-traversed the implications of different stage spaces and how they affect interpretation and personal experience. The proscenium arch is everyone faced forward, like a “prisoner in a cave.” Thrust stage half of the theatre are “prisoners” while the other half see the other audience members watching the performance. Theatre in the round, you see “through” panoptically at practically everyone (actors and audience). Pageant you are free to look and go where you want, and with whom you want to do these with. Black box theatres allow for any combinations of spectatorship, immersive, and/or interactive experiences.

The performance This chapter examines two later medieval vernacular dramas, Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance.

The problems with the presumption R. Darren Gobert has recently explored Elizabethan stagings and theatre architecture, while Pannill Camp has also recently examined 18th-century Enlightened French theatre architecture.1 However, while both periods present nascent inquiries into theatre spaces, what do we learn from earlier times, times when there was little precedent and set rules in theatre spaces and theatre architecture? I contend that different spaces change the interaction with the performance and change the interaction among viewers (with each other). However, this is for contemporary audiences. Medieval audiences, then, would

Temporal-spatial problems

51

have received common data differently (from contemporary audiences). How were staging and/or borders thought about by medieval audiences? What happened, or what was reflected, by staging borders? Gobert briefly sets up the medieval worldview in relation to Cartesianism: The medieval worldview, we know, was not mapped by the latitudes and longitudes that we associate with Cartesianism and through which we locate and navigate our positions in the world: inner/outer, self/ other, subjectivity/objectivity. Indeed, the very notion of a fixed self locatable in a cartographic world is a modern one, incompatible with the picture presented by7 medieval art, for example, in which the constituent elements float spatially unmoored, their sizes not relative to one another. There is no ontological unity, no fixed perspective, and this is precisely because the illusion of a spatially locatable beholder remains inconceivable and unconceived in both the medieval aesthetic and ethos. Reconstructing a medieval theatrical mise-en-scène, we observe the same immersive quality, as performer and spectator (sometimes the same person changing roles mid-play) ambulate to, from, and through areas used variously for playing and watching: mansions that represent places in the mystery cycle—hell, for example, or Gethsemane—without being locations in the Cartesian sense or having fixed positions within an ontologically unified whole.2 While space and place have received ample attention in theatre/drama studies—with the emergent study of borders extending from and inherent in many of these previous scholarly discussions and being reinvigorated by the also-emerging study of site-specific performance—the scholarship examining “borders” in relation to specifically medieval drama, literature, and culture has not emerged to nearly the same degree. However, the one notable exception is Michelle R. Warren’s book from 2000, entitled History on the Edge, which examines border narratives between, largely, 1100–1300 that focus, not on centers of power, but on the boundaries that mark the edges of medieval powers. Looking to postcolonial theory, Warren suggests that “a theory of the border,” contains an inherent paradox because, “the line of the limit seeks to institute an absolute difference at the place of most intimate contact between two spaces (or concepts, or peoples, or times, or…).”3 By examining Arthurian legends, Warren demonstrates how medieval historiography “performs and comments on acts of conquest.”4 Here, in this chapter, I examine the “border” in two later medieval plays—not from the visage of a medieval historicist—but through the lens of theatrical and dramatic criticism and theory. While Warren focuses on the place of the border, given that I am reading the plays with an eye towards the movements on stage, when I refer to “borders,” I am intending the term to connote a threshold that can be crossed that divides two “locations” (whether these “locations” are literal or figurative). Thus, crossing a border connotes the

52 Temporal-spatial problems

movement between one demarcated location to another demarcated location (again, whether these “locations” are literal or figurative). While Warren is concerned with what happens at/on the border, I am concerned with the crossing of (or the inability to cross) borders, and how contemplating staging and the movements on the stage associated with crossing/not crossing borders produces new readings and new insights into not only the minds of the playwrights of Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance, but to the medieval viewing experience and how those experiences were understood and processed. Ultimately, and only suggestively, this chapter puts forth the claim that views and vantage points of viewing performance are not constants, but reflect socio-cultural thoughts about self and others.

The proposal In 13th-century medieval vernacular drama, such as in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, and Le Jeu de La Feuilée, the gains of metaphorical invasion or expansion are temporary. In thinking about literal, physical, and geographic movement (versus the metaphorical progression of the soul, for example, often found in medieval art), the characters in these plays, particularly in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, return to their original states at the beginning of the plays. In this manner, the characters in, particularly, Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas follow pre-determined paths (i.e., lines that have already been established to direct movement in a prescribed manner), but paths, specifically here, that ultimately loop back on themselves, like in the medieval Wheel of Fortune. These characters cannot escape their fate, and, thus, paths—not borders—figure prominently in the metaphoric space of Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas. The world of Bodel’s play shows vast movements, but without the audience actually seeing and experiencing the movement of travel and the traversing/crossing of spaces and borders, there is no representation of the actual change of scenery and, therefore, no change of situation. The staging of the play metaphorically suggests that one always returns to one’s fate and place—one’s “location”—without the possibility of anything actually getting exchanged or experiencing anything other than a temporary change of one’s lot. There exists a greater sense of permanent change, or the possibilities of change, however, with changes in staging and stage movement in early 15thcentury morality plays like Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance. As reflected metaphorically by the “T-O map,” for the playwright of The Castle of Perseverance, the border, both metaphorically and in actuality, becomes a threshold that demarcates different “locations” that can be crossed. The staging of The Castle of Perseverance creates a division between actor and audience that aids the audience to understand the metaphoric (internal) border between the body and the soul of Mankind. The (external) movements reflect this internal border on the stage: for when Mankind makes a decision, both Mankind’s attitude and, literally, his location change.

Temporal-spatial problems

53

In medieval France and England, serfdom was a fact of life for, what we think was, the majority of people. Being that the primary occupation of most people in the Middle Ages was farming, land obviously was important to all. However, very few if any farmers at all owned their own land. Instead, farmers had to farm by the “custom of the manor,” or the assolement obligatoire, whether or not they were serfs or free. Earlier in the Middle Ages, most villages worked on the open field system, where enclosures did not surround individual holding. Earlier on, the two field system was used, where half of the land was used every other year. Soon, the three-field system was used where two-thirds of the land was farmed every year. Within these open fields, “the unit of cultivation was, like other medieval measures, a natural one—the amount of land that a plow could plow in one day—the acre, or journée, or morgen.”5 These strips were set apart by one strip of unplowed land. Even though these strips of land were, in practice, their own, even passed down through generations, obviously, we know, that the land belonged to the lord of the manor. But moreover, the serf basically belonged to the lord: The serfs were called vestitus terre, pecunia viva, hommes de corps. Legally, “they had no belongings but their belly,” nichil praeter ventrem. Bracton defines the unfree man as one who ought not to know in the evening what he will have to do on the morrow. (Nec scire debeat sero quid facere debeat in crastino.) Such a test would imply economic subjection, but it is clear that it can have been only theoretically binding. In the complex routine of obligatory communal agriculture described above as inherent in the open field system, the peasant would almost necessarily know what the next day’s duties would be, which fields would be next ready for plowing, what meadows to be cut, what crops to be reaped or garnered. The essential truth of Bracton’s statement is clear, however; the serf or unfree man was at the will of his lord, ad voluntatem domini sui.6 Life was predictable for the serf, not just in the sense that they would have to farm day after day, but that they always had to follow the will of their lord. Robert Brenner puts it in simple language: “Feudalism, then, from the standpoint of lords, was not so much about ownership of land as about power over the people.”7 Brenner explains that lords extended their land beyond their own estates and took over land that was not technically theirs. At the same time, these same lords took control of the people in this land, whether or not they had control over them before. These banal lords thus set up the system of feudalism as we described above. This jurisdiction over the people was by no means limited to jurisdiction over the land. In fact, the serfs’ entire lives and very movements were controlled by the banal lords. It should be noted here, too, that even many of the free people8 in the villages still had to abide by many of the lords' taxes and still had to farm by the “custom of the manor.” Neilson conveys the full extent of control that lords had in France in the 12th century: They paid taille high and low at the lord’s will; chevage, a rent recognizing their status; census capitis, which in some cases enabled them to live away from

54 Temporal-spatial problems

the fief, but always with the lord’s permission. They were never free to leave their lord by their own will, and the lord had the right for a limited time, in any case, to pursue fugitives and bring them back. They paid for marriage and were subject to mainmorte. They made corvées, days of labor service either à merci or in stated number. They made many small payments in kind, and also payments for pasture rights, like those of England. They were subject to the lord’s ban or order and were usually required by him to grind their corn at his mill, bake at his oven, support his dovecote, use his winepress. They were justiciables of his court for the kind of justice, high or low, which he exercised. These obligations except the inability to leave the land, might on occasion, be characteristic of free peasants also, but always as the result of an agreement with the lord, real or theoretical, and not merely as part of the custom of the fief and the result of the lord’s will.9 After reading through this list of controls that the lord had over the serf, it becomes easier to understand why a typological model and the Wheel of Fortune dominated the Middle Ages. As soon as one’s fortunes rose, it could only be a matter of time until the lord of the manor brought one back down. As soon as one hit rock bottom, one knew that their subsequent gains would only be temporary and that one would find themselves at rock bottom another time. And since the land was not really theirs, gain and loss was an abstract idea for serfs. There was no real personal gain or loss, for everything belonged to the lord. There was nothing to gain and there was nothing to lose. In 1095 a decree was issued at a council of the Church in Claremont. It read: “Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.”10 Although at the time, the First Crusade was not fully defined, this was the starting point of the crusades to come. Tyerman describes how papal power was to set power over the State as well and begin the crusades: The invitation from the eastern Christian emperor of Byzantium (Constantinople), Alexius I Comnenus to Pope Urban suited the new papel policy of asserting supremacy over both Church and State developed over the previous half century. An earlier scheme by Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) to lead an army eastwards to Jerusalem had come to nothing in 1074. This time, Urban II, already a sponsor of war against the Muslims in Spain, seized on the opportunity to promote papel authority in temporal affairs. From its inception, crusading represented a practical expression of papal ideology, leadership, and power.11 The First Crusade met with miraculous success. Recruitment stretched all over Europe and recent estimates put the number of soldiers at 50,000 to 70,000 in 1096–1097.12 After successful victories in Nicaea, Doryleaum, Antioch, and Mosul, the crusaders finally captured Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. Most of the soldiers, however, left after the victory and subsequent massacre of Muslims and Jews. Of the over 100,000 soldiers who left on the

Temporal-spatial problems

55

First Crusades, 14,000 reached Jerusalem and only 300 knights remained in southern Palestine by 1100.13 In an attempt to bulk up their power in Jerusalem, a Second Crusade was called for in 1145. This was a miserable failure. They were defeated at Dorylaeum and had to withdraw from Damascus. And after a series of defeats by the Muslims in the middle of the 12th century, a call for jihad and culminating in the rise of Saladin and his overthrowing of Jerusalem in 1187, the crusaders were called again. This Third Crusade was a bit more successful than the Second. Though they got close to Jerusalem, they were never able to capture it. And in this sense, the crusade was a failure. Starting out as an ambitious dream and even greater success with the First Crusade, by the end of the Third Crusade everyone was left to reexamine the crusades: While failing to recapture Jerusalem, the Third Crusade determined the pattern for later eastern crusades… Diplomacy and truces between Muslims and Christians became standard practice… A more precise theology of violence refined the privileges and obligations of the crusaders themselves. After the failures fo 1191–1192, even the focus on Jerusalem shifted, the iter Jerosolymitana (Jerusalem journey) became subsumed into the negotium terrae sanctae (the business of the Holy Land), or simply the sanctum negotium (the holy business).14 The two major setbacks (the failure of the Second Crusade and the loss of Jerusalem in 1187) in the 12th century were heartfelt. Especially after the enormous success of the First Crusade, morale must have been way down at the turn of the 13th century. After the Second Crusade, William of Tyre wrote, “Thus a company of kings and princes such as we have not read of through all the ages had gathered and, for our sins, had been forced to return, covered with shame and disgrace, with their mission unfulfilled.”15 Another written account read, “God allowed the Western church, on account of its sins, to be cast down.”16 And finally, in response to the Second Crusade, St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote in an apologia, “As you know, we have fallen upon grave times, which seemed about to bring an end not only my studies but my very life, for the Lord, provoked by our sins, gave the appearance of having judged the world prematurely, with justice, indeed, but forgetful of his mercy. He spared neither his people nor his name.”17 We see this same extreme reaction by Stevenson when Jerusalem was captured by Saladin: Our people held the city of Jerusalem for some eighty-nine years … Within a short time, Saladin had conquered almost the whole Kingdom of Jerusalem. He exalted the grandeur of Muhammed’s law and showed that, in the event, its might exceeded that of the Christian religion.18 This is the world for Jean Bodel. Writing Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas between 1199 and 1201, or as it has been suggested that the first performance was on December 5, 1200,19 Bodel understood a world where the Wheel of Fortune

56 Temporal-spatial problems

made sense. Serfs generally saw no net gain or loss in life and what was gained in the Holy Land was lost until the next might prove a success or a failure. Thus, life for Bodel and for many of the inhabitants of medieval France only saw temporary changes. By 1420, the best guess as to when The Castle of Perseverance was written, early Renaissance England was ideologically a very different place from Bodel’s France. By 1420, the Crusades had long been over, and the initial disappointment of the Second Crusade and the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, must have been much greater than the soon predictable disappointments of later crusades, as Europe must have gotten used to the fact that the Holy Land was not to be theirs. The latter half of the 14th century witnessed a huge social upheaval. 1348–1349 England saw an outbreak of the plague epidemic, followed by more generalized epidemics in 1361, 1369, and 1374–1375. Also, in 1369, the Anglo-French war started back up again. With it came higher taxes that fell primarily on the lower class. The new burden of taxation led to the Great Revolt of 1381, otherwise known as the Peasant’s Revolt, though “‘Peasants Revolt’ is a misleading description, deliberately avoided in this pamphlet. The revolt provoked troubles in several towns; and even in the countryside, textile workers and men living by other kinds of ‘industrial’ occupation formed groups in some of the rebellious districts. It is true, however, that the Great Revolt was more predominantly a revolt of workingmen than were subsequent uprisings.”20 The Great Revolt of 1381 saw with it the end of serfdom and the following weakening of the landlord’s grip on the peasant class. What was one of the most noticeable results of the Great Revolt of 1381 was the new mobility of the peasantry: The reluctance of some landlords to make necessary concessions to their shrinking peasantry contributed to the increase in this exodus of tenants. It was particularly extensive on some estates which are known to have been badly run. But the general causes encouraging migrations operated throughout England. Labour was becoming increasingly scarce, able-bodied migrants could be sure of finding employment and they could reckon on driving satisfactory bargains about securing good wages… If the migrating peasants were in a position to take up fresh holdings on estates of new landlords, away from their native villages, there were abundant opportunities for doing so, as most landowners had so vacant peasant holdings on their land.21 Of special importance to this chapter, land became something that could be traversed, and with it, crossing borders became something real. When serfs were confined to the manor, border-crossing must have seemed like a fanciful affair. Now with real mobility, the idea of crossing vast stretches of land became something tangible to not just royal messengers, but to everybody. Just as the lowest class saw increased mobility in the 14th century, there was an increase in the one class who was defined by their mobility: the merchant class. Late 14th-century London contained about thirty to forty thousand people. In the early 14th-century Sylvia L. Thrupp estimates that 1,900 adult men were in the merchant class.22 And this number was on the rise in 1420.

Temporal-spatial problems

57

By 1501–1502, there were an estimated 6,300 people in the merchant class in London. This rise in the merchant class signals the rise in a middle class, with new upwards mobility. Thus the period after 1381 marked a new period of mobility, both physical and social. And maybe, more importantly, the period marked a time where one had choices, albeit few, but one was able to at least ‘shop around’ for a landlord, and had to be empowered by at least that. And thus, as scholars note, around the same time a purely eschatological model that looked towards the Last Judgement pervaded the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. With the eschatological model, came an idea of free will. Unlike the fate of the Wheel of Fortune, an individual now had a choice as to whether he or she would be good and go to heaven or be bad and go to hell. And so, we witness in The Castle of Perseverance a new conception of concrete and meaningful borders, in which one has the choice to cross them, and thus the borders become a meaningful place. The result of a landed bourgeoisie, that can permanently transcend the borders of serfdom and own property that changes (usually) in accordance with their physical and social mobility, is the subsequent rise of the importance of borders in the psyche of the medieval gentry. Lurking in this same region of the mind is the continual gain and loss of the Holy Land during the Crusades. This is a massive thesis that I believe needs exploration from many academic fields; however, I would like to initiate this examination on a smaller scale. In my analysis of medieval plays, I will try to show how borders went from being meaningless places to places filled with actual and symbolic meaning. Besides the rise of physical and social mobility, it is also important to keep in the back of our minds the progression of the typological underpinnings of early Middle Age eschatology to the eschatology of the early Renaissance, where typological relations were no longer so prevalent in such conceptualizations of history. The typological model is best represented by a spatial stasis that takes the form of the Wheel of Fortune and the axis mundi. These representations highlight the bounded nature that feudalism imposed upon the massive serfdom. The possibilities for social and physical mobility for serfs were truly limited, and therefore, this unchangeable attitude found its way, naturally, into plays. “Typology rest on the belief that God’s ways of acting are consistent throughout history.”23 Because of this consistent manner and the fact that God is on repeat mode with the Old and New Testaments, typology may be said to be recapitulative, consummative, and reiterative.24 Thus the teaching of typology mirrored the experiences of most everyone in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, once land ownership became a possibility for those who were not members of the royal family or the Church, typology was no longer so dominant and an eschatological model began to pervade the works of medieval drama. This model, which allowed a certain amount of free will and was probably a result of the rise of social and physical mobility, was reflected in the mappa mundi, the rise of cartography, an understanding of perspective, and the increasing divisions between actors and audience with a more and more noticeable stage. This vast ideological shift, spanning the fields of art,

58 Temporal-spatial problems

cartography, philosophy, the humanities, and even the sciences, can be observed effectively through an analysis of medieval drama. In earlier medieval vernacular drama, as in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, and Le Jeu de La Feuilée, the gains of invasion or expansion were always temporary. The characters in these plays return to their original states at the beginning of the plays. Characters in this type of drama follow pre-determined paths that ultimately loop back on themselves, as demonstrated by the Wheel of Fortune. These characters cannot escape their fate, and thus paths, and not borders, figure prominently in the metaphoric space of the play. With the advent of the morality plays a bit later, there exists a greater sense of permanent change, or the possibilities of change, in plays like Everyman and The Castle of Perseverance. The border, both metaphorically and in actuality, became a place to contemplate. What I am arguing is that this vast ideological shift—the shift from the bounded nature of serfdom where physical and social mobility was extremely limited that was mirrored in a typological world conceived by the Wheel of Fortune, where gain and loss is temporary, to a world where some physical and social mobility was possible and was reflected in an eschatological world where permanent change can be assured through one’s own decisions and actions in life—is reflected in these two plays through a change in the conception of borders being imaginary and meaningless to being concrete, meaningful and symbolic. To serve as a prolegomenon to this potentially vast subject (which is only suggestive here), I think an examination of the measurable movements on the stage and the stages themselves of Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas and The Castle of Perseverance would serve us best to understand how audiences processed these movements. I acknowledge the difficulties of discussing two such disparate works, separated by the English Channel and 220 some-odd years. However, I wanted to choose examples that would best explicate this vast ideological shift despite the necessary limitations.

The projection (of the proposal) I want to begin my exploration of the medieval sense of how borders were experienced on stage by examining the very character who makes a living by crossing them: Auberon, the messenger,25 in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas by Jean Bodel. The entrance of Auberon is separate from the entrances of the King, Seneschal, and Connart. Presumably, then, Auberon is coming from a different ‘place.’ Auberon has entered the domain of the King, and his messengerial language comes across. Auberon addresses the King: O King, Mahomet who begot you Save and keep you and all your barons! And give you strength to defend yourself From those who are attacking you, Ravaging and ruining your land.

Temporal-spatial problems

59

Our gods they neither invoke nor honour For they are Christians, a stinking tribe.26 I am unaware of any research that has ever placed Bodel in the royal court at any time, but as a native of Arras, “when that town had become a centre of literature, commerce, and industry, when its rich, luxury-loving nobility and citizenry consciously cultivated the arts and freely indulged in festivities designed to foster them,” it would not be too hard to imagine that Bodel, “who held some post in the town,” either met, or knew, some messengers, or would have met those who might have been in their presence at the royal court.27 I bring up Bodel’s possibly accurate portrayal of the messenger’s speech not because of what is lacking in Bodel’s portrayal of Auberon. Grace Frank notes, Just as the religious spirit of the crusades evoked by the King, his Emirs, and the battle between Christians and pagans gave immediacy to the miracle performed by the saint, so the realism and comedy that pervade the scenes involving the thieves—their drinking, games, and quarrels in an Artois tavern—produced contemporaneity and verisimilitude. Nor does the transition from the realm of the African king to the town of Arras prove difficult. Auberon, the King’s messenger, travels from one to the other ‘swifter than a camel’ and Connart serves as crier not only to the Oriental potentate but to the magistrates of Arras. These phenomena troubled no medieval audience, nor need they bother us.28 But these phenomena trouble me. Why is Auberon the speaker of messages, but not the traveler who delivers them? The act of travel, of crossing vast stretches of land, should be essential to the character of a messenger, especially Auberon, which Donald Maddox personally informed me was also the name of a fairy, as in the Old French epic poem Hum de Bordeaux, “where as a messenger, he is able to cross large distances instantaneously, on account of his supernatural essence as fairy. Bodel’s audience was probably familiar with this character.” If medieval audiences were not troubled by transgressions of space such as these, then we should certainly explore the fact that they were not. The staging of Le Jeu de Saint Nicholas mirrors the lack of care about realistic border crossings. The audiences found no problems with the fact that probably all of the locations in the play were represented on the stage at the same time. This, of course, could be the result of the lack of development in changing sets. But whether or not this was the case, medieval audiences must have been used to seeing more than one place on the same set. Grace Frank explains what the stage might have looked like: Despite the variety of movement in the play, few properties and little in the way of scenery would have been needed for its staging. At the far left there may have been placed a paradise to house the angelic messenger and

60 Temporal-spatial problems

St. Nicholas. Some indication of the King’s dwelling at one side and of the tavern at the other would have been needed. The exotic lands of the Emirs might or might not have been suggested by mansions of some sort; probably one of these little structures housed the Christians, whereas in another, representing a prison, Durand the gaoler took his stand. The great battle must have occurred in the playing-space in front, and there messenger and criers could also have their say. The well-differentiated likenesses of pagan god and Christian saint would be necessary properties, and, of course, so would the wine-cups, candles, coins, and dice of the tavern scenes, as well as a chest for the King’s treasure, some items to represent its contents, and a sack in which to carry them off.29 By having many locations on the stage at once, a real sense of travel cannot be felt. The world of 12th-century France must have felt pretty small for most of its inhabitants. All of the necessary locations of the play are presented in one small area. For those living on a manor, which was probably the majority of people at the time, all of the necessary places that one would need to go in their life are located on the manor. Thus, the microcosm of the stage mirrored their reality. You could walk from one end of the manor to the other, and that was realistic, and your situation would be the same: you would not have entered into different lands, you would not have to deal with the realities of travel, and you would still be a serf and always be a serf no matter where you are on the manor. The same can be said for Auberon. Auberon effortlessly walks from place to place and the realities of travel are not felt. But maybe, more importantly, there is not a symbolic gesture when he crosses land. The short distance the Auberon has to travel actually hampers the meaning that could be attached to a change of location, for Auberon’s language changes with his change of location. Auberon speaks formally around the upper class and with wit around the lower class. This distinction is less obvious when he simply has to cross the stage. Also, there is nothing lost in this crossing of the stage: neither time nor energy is spent, the dangers of long-distance travel are not met, and real experience is not gained from travel. Auberon’s movement on the stage is like his dealings with the men at the tavern: nothing gets exchanged and nothing changes. As Cliquest so aptly describes Auberon, “[messengers are] always slippery customers.”30 We are privy to witness the dice games and verbal games of exchange in the tavern. Upon Auberon’s arrival in the Artois tavern, the Taverner immediately engages him in a verbal game of exchange: TAVERNERPay me a penny, and then next time You’ll have a pint for a halfpenny— It sells at a shilling, and no mistake. Pay me a penny, or have another! AUBERON No, you shall have the halfpenny now— And the penny next time that I come.31

Temporal-spatial problems

61

To settle this game that appears to have no resolution, or is at least not producing an exchange, we see a game of chance. But just like the verbal games of exchange where something should get exchanged, the pots are never won in the dice games. Instead, every character ends up getting back what they put in. Auberon leaves the tavern without having exchanged any money after he wins ‘Highest Points’ and puts his wine on credit.32 Like the impossibility of exchange in this play, true travel is symbolically impossible, the ‘stage’ is always too small for its characters to roam. There is only so far that they can go in their movement. There is no crossing over into new lands, but only temporary transplantation. Auberon is a messenger who ‘slips’33 through borders and should reside in the fringe with the “Giants and Canaanites,”34 but he exists in this play in the royal court and a tavern, in the decidedly ‘known’ regions of the kingdom. Like the prisoner, the Good Man, who is chained by the King, no one or nothing really ventures to a different place, or, at least, they always return to the same place they started. The two prime examples of this are the movements of the thieves and of the relic of Saint Nicolas. The thieves begin the play in the Artois tavern. As soon as it appears the thieves’ lives will change once they are in possession of the treasure, they are commanded by Saint Nicolas to “Retrace your steps along the way / And carry this treasure back to the King!”35 The thieves, then, are following the exact path of the Wheel of Fortune, making a complete circle by bringing back the treasure. At the beginning of the play, the thieves were in the tavern without any money. They then moved to the castle to take the treasure with the relic of Saint Nicolas on top and proceeded to return to the tavern with the money. This moment is the high point of their ‘Fortune.’ When they fall asleep, they are visited by Saint Nicholas in their dreams and told to retrace their steps or they will surely perish. Deciding against even taking a little money out of the treasure chest, the thieves follow the same path, except this time towards the castle, and make certain to return the treasure to the very spot where it originally sat: RASOIR Put it here—that’s where we got it. And put the image back on top.36 Back where the thieves started, back at the bottom of the Wheel, Bodel suggests that this entire cycle will immediately start again. Pincedé leaves the play with the same desire as he started it: “God lead us all in the paths of wealth!”37 In this play, they are truly ‘chained’ to their paths. Like their penchants for gambling, they cannot contemplate anything besides the ‘stake’ of gold. They circle around that center, around their own personal axis mundi of fabulous wealth. Their quest is helpless and they always end up in the same spot, as the wandering foot on a compass ends up where it started. Their dreams are based on money. Without land, these thieves are chasing after the dream of paying off their ‘debts’; they are serfs in the true sense of the word: they are indentured servants without even land to work on to pay off their debts of credit.

62 Temporal-spatial problems

Twice we game of dice where nothing gets exchanged, except for the money that was owed to the taverner in the first game. At the tavern, it is decided that everyone who is playing the Highest Points will put down threepence. Everyone rolls and then Cliquest is the last to roll. Immediately after he rolls Pincedé claims that his roll should not count. As Cliquet attempts to pick up the money, a fight breaks out. The taverner intervenes and decides what should happen: Gentlemen, since it’s up to me, Your know I can’t afford to lose. Twopence is mine for candles and wine,— The other six divide between you. If one man were to get it all There’d always be someone with a grudge. Now Cliquet, you pour out some wine And offer Pincedé a drink. I want you two to make it up, Since the problem is in my hands.38 The taverner is the only one to make money on this game, except they all owed him money before the game and he is merely collecting for what he was already owed. The taverner gave out wine and candles and is paid back for it. He comes out even. Each player put money in and got it back, except for the money they owed the taverner for the wine and the candles. Nothing gets exchanged. Even Cliquet and Pincedé despite a fight end up friends just like before the game. A game where all of the money is returned and nobody wins. Later in the play, we see a similar situation when playing with the money from the treasure chest. The dice are thrown and Pincedé appears to have won. When he goes to take the money, Rasoir reminds him of a past debt. They fight and the taverner comes over and decides that they should just return all of the money to the treasure chest. Neither gains anything; neither loses anything. There is one major change, however, in the play: the King, the Seneschal, and the Emirs are baptized. This ‘gain’ only happens to the one group of individuals whose ‘lot’ can actually change. Two Emirs offer the King riches near the beginning of the play. One offers one hundred shiploads of gold; the other offers thirty wagons filled with rubies and emeralds (Bodel 89). The King gains a vast fortune. But the Emirs do not really lose here. They gain the favor of the King, which they believe is worth more than all of the riches that they gave him. Upon examining the Historical Atlas of the British Commonwealth and Empire, we can understand how very real the gains and losses of Kings must have played upon the minds of the residents of Arras in the almost fifty years leading up to the composition of Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas:

Temporal-spatial problems

63

ENGLAND AND HER FRENCH POSSESSIONS 1154–1189. Henry II., possessing Anjou and Touraine through his father; Maine and Normandy through his mother; Poitou, Aquitaine and Gascony through his wife. His son rules Brittany. 1157. Cumberland, Westmoreland, Northumberland ceded by Malcolm IV. of Scotland. 1157, 1158, 1163, 1165. Expeditions to Wales. 1169–1172 Expeditions to Ireland. Henry II. acknowledged King of Ireland. 1177. Ireland allotted to various nobles and chiefs. Most of Ulster conquered. 1187–1189. Henry driven out of Maine and Touraine by his son Richard and Philip of France. 1189–1199. Richard I.39 Here we see real exchanges of land, but not for the medieval peasantry. Borders were very real, in both money and power for the kings and queens and nobles of medieval England and France. But for the average peasant, the shifting borders of nationhood must have been both threatening and rather petty at the same time. The world of the serf, though not quite as confined to the manor as one may think, was, however, pretty small.40 Though 13th-century England and France lacked the certain stability of national identity that was later achieved after the War of the Roses and the Hundred Years War—when Europe was starting to shape up, national borders began to solidify, and the acquisition of wealth for the everyday worker became more realistic—there did exist the stability of the manor. The position of the serf would surely remain the same on the manor, regardless of outside politics. There existed a concrete hold on the serfs, certainly during Bodel’s lifetime. Even lawyers at the time found it dubious for serfs ever to actually buy their freedom. H. S. Bennett synthesizes what the lawyer, Glanvill, said around 1187 about the possibility of serfs buying their own freedom: “[Glanvill] said that a serf is unable to buy his freedom since he has nothing but what belongs eventually to his lord.”41 Taken in this vein, the immediacy for medieval audiences in Bodel’s Arras of the thieves always coming out empty-handed and never truly possessing any money, even when they held it in their hands, becomes obvious. Ultimately, the King’s conversion comes about, not through anything that he did, but only because the thieves stole the money in the first place. The thieves did the work; the King gets the reward (of becoming a Christian). In the face of this change, however, there was still visible work to be done. The resistance to conversion by the Withered Tree serves as a thorn in the side of the Christians. Bodel understands that physical struggle can only subdue some ‘enemies’ physically. Converting the beliefs of the Arabs is a wholly different task. It takes the work of miracles, such as those of Saint Nicolas, and the fidelity of believers such as the Good Man to bring about these

64 Temporal-spatial problems

conversions. However, just as the agency of the thieves was necessary to bring about the conversion of the King while they received nothing for their troubles, the Good Man’s apparent reward is not being “[kept] at death’s door, alive, / For two whole days before he dies,”42 but rather, that he has the privilege of ending the play with the final words, a final prayer: “‘Te Deum laudamus.’”43 *** First fickle Fortune gave me wealth short-lived, Then in a moment all but ruined me. Since Fortune changed her trustless countenance, Small welcome to the days prolonging life. Foolish the friends who called me happy then Whose fall shows how my foothold was unsure.44 ‘We praise you, God,’ may not be as much of exaltation in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas as a true cry of desire. The theological model of the day was ruled by typological inquiry, everything from the Old Testament was prefigured as something in the New Testament. Thus like the inevitable return of the treasure chest and the relic of Saint Nicolas and the hopeless return to poverty for the thieves, the world was set by God on ‘repeat-mode.’45 Even though God had a hand in the workings of the world, the typological model underscored the circular motion of the Wheel of Fortune, and therefore the inability to escape Fate. Thus, ‘Te Deum laudamus’ might be a plea by a peasant to escape the cruel hands of Fate, by ultimately affixing oneself to God: Anything that joins itself to the middle circle is brought close to simplicity, and no longer spreads out widely. In the same way whatever moves any distance from the primary intelligence becomes enmeshed in ever stronger chains of Fate, and everything is the freer from Fate the closer it seeks the centre of things. And if it cleaves to the steadfast mind of God, it is free from movement and so escapes the necessity imposed by Fate.46 It would seem as though, to a modern reader, serfs must have had a very real sense of borders, for they were constantly kept within one. But to the very early 13th-century serf, no outside existed. A border needs two sides; medieval serfs, however, lived within the geometrically impossible space of a one-sided border. Auberon will most likely return to the King, the Saint Nicholas statue left the King’s side and returned to the King, and the thieves returned back to the tavern with no change in their fortune, leaving to start this similar process of trying to advance their own fortune, but failing in the end, once again. The world of Bodel’s play shows vast movements, but without actually seeing the movement, there is no representation of the actual change of scenery and, therefore, situation. One always returns to one’s fate and place, without the

Temporal-spatial problems

65

possibility of anything getting exchanged or experiencing anything other than a temporary change of one’s lot. *** The new role of the spectator in relation to the picture, which played such an important part in the discussion of Brunelleschi’s two panels [that have been lost, but are said to have been the first cases of perspective in art], is underlined throughout Alberti’s treatise, and reflects the growing humanism of the period. This humanist approach is carried into the pictorial world itself when Alberti points out that all the appearances of things are purely relative, and that it is the human figure which alone provides the measure of whatever else the artist cares to represent. Man’s central position as observer of a pictorial world of which he himself is the measure, together with the new reality to which that world aspires, is shown immediately Alberti describes his actual method of perspective composition, beginning with a suitably large square which he says, ‘I consider to be an open window through which I view that which will be painted there.’ --John White, discussing Alberti’s theory of perspective in Della Pittura, written in 1435.47 The world of art—specifically Brunelleschi, and Donatello—in the first half of the 15th century put into pictures what had been developing in its embryonic state throughout Western Europe. As discussed above, the introduction of a one-point perspective placed the medieval serf in a very different world than the conceived world of his or her ancestors of the early 13th century. Somehow, the all-powerful axis mundi and Wheel of Fortune gave way to a less intrusive, relativistic, and far-less domineering world of one-point perspective. The frequent portrayals of a mappa mundi held in the arms of a woman, left a decidedly human fingerprint on the time: the ‘T-O map’ lost its center. Instead, maps became localized, and with the boom of the cartographer’s zoom, lines were drawn not just between great continents and countries, but within vast oceans and seas, and between counties, towns, villages, and properties. As the field of the map shrunk, the applicability of the map for more people grew. The Castle of Perseverance was written during this exciting time when the lens for looking at the world fractured into many pieces, and each inhabitant of the world (or at least, the middle to upper-class European man) was encouraged to pick up a piece and share the beholdings. The famous plan for the theatre for The Castle of Perseverance resembles the ‘T-O maps,’ in a way. The distinguishing feature of the ‘T-O map’ is Jerusalem’s central position within an all-encompassing circle. This Ptolemic space finds its double later in the theatrical space for The Castle of Perseverance. However, the two differ in the properties of the circle. Unlike the circle of the ‘T-O map,’ the circle in the plan for staging The Castle of

66 Temporal-spatial problems

Perseverance is permeable. Though F. J. Furnivall and Richard Southern have different conceptions of where the audiences either sat or stood48, either conception factored in an ‘outside,’ most likely for practical reasons of crowd management and perspective. Either way, though, the moat or ditch (or bars) created a world of the play and a world that went on around it. This setup emphasized the division between play and reality, and furthermore, the division between actor and audience.49 The enactment of these clear borders helped the audience to see the internal borders of ‘Mankind.’ Thus the indefinite space of ‘the place’ could be comprehended as existing in the body and soul of ‘Mankind.’ As ‘Mankind’ makes decisions, simultaneously, the character changes attitude, and just as importantly, changes location. There are outside forces in this world, but The Castle of Perseverance suggests that ‘Mankind’ ultimately decides his own fate. With reason, ‘Mankind’ enters the Castle, and therefore enters into an internal state of perseverance. He has free will to stay or leave. However, most importantly to the play is the fact that nothing can actually enter his ‘castle’ and pull him out; he, himself, can only leave or enter. The Castle of Perseverance theatricalizes the strong boundary between the inner self and the outer world. Here, conflict occurs when ‘Mankind’ opens up his boundaries and lets the outside world influence the decisions of his inner self. Unlike the shackled fate of the thieves in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas, there is no chance in this play. Fate depends upon the decisions of the character. Overall the reasoning of the play has an eye towards death and the Last Judgement. This eschatological ideology allows for ‘Mankind’ to move freely in the world, based upon his own choices. Each move to a new location, to the scaffolds of each of the Seven Deadly Sins, brings with it a new conflict. Conflict becomes overstepping the borders and boundaries of one’s inner self. I find it suggestive that the World—Mundus—bookends the speeches of the Seven Deadly Sins. The World opens the play and then leaves it to progeny, to the Boy. This suggests that everything can be experienced in this world, regardless of one’s position in it. Yet even though The Castle of Perseverance argues for a certain universality, the place is a very real thing, and that is why the World takes so much time to list location after location: Assarye, Acaye, and Almayne, Cauadoyse, Capadoyse, and Cananee, Babyloyne, Brabon, Burgoyne, and Bretayne, Grece, Galys, and to the Gryckysch See, I meue also Masadoyne in my mykyl maybe, Frauns, Flaundrys, and Freslonde, and also Normande, Pyncecras, Parys, and longe Pygmayne, And euery toun in Trage, euyn to the Dreye Tre, Rodys and ryche Rome.50

Temporal-spatial problems

67

There is widespread applicability for this piece, yet these places are not lumped together. This grounding of the play in the World foreshadows the earthly pleasures that Mankind seeks: Myth I ryde be sompe and syke And be ryche and lordlylyke.51 ‘Mankind’ seeks one thing: mobility. Mankind equates the rich with the power of mobility and thus Mankind wants both. The Bad Angel understands this desire for mobility and so he does not just offer Mankind gold and silver, but mobility in the world. It is by going within the world that one can get money: “Go we to the Werld, I rede the, blyue, / For ther thou schalt mow ryth wel fare” (Eccles 14). Mankind understand this: Wyth so that I be lordlyche. I folwe the as I can. Thou schalt be my bote of bale, For were I ryche of holt and hale Thanne wolde I geue neuere tale Of God ne of good man.52 It is through mobility around the world that Mankind can gain. By following the Bad Angel to the World’s scaffold and encountering Lust-Liking and Folly, Mankind begins his path to riches. Mobility becomes a thing that needs to be controlled. It allows Mankind choice, but the World becomes a smaller place, and like swift messengers, vice quickly reaches out and tempts ‘Mankind’ into sin: Lust, Lykyng, and Foly, Comly knytys of renoun, Belyue thorwe this londe do crye Al abowtyn in toure and toun. If any man be fer or nye That to my seruyse wyl buske hym boun, If he wyl be trost and trye He schal be kyng and were the croun Wyth rycchest robys in res.53 The World further delegates the job of the World’s messenger specifically to the Backbiter: Therfore I am mad massenger To lepyn ouyr londys leye Thorwe all the world, fer and ner, Vnsayd sawys for to seye.54

68 Temporal-spatial problems

The Backbiter not only ‘Vnsayd sawys for to seye,’ but does this ‘lepyn ouyr londys leye.’ Movement and the act of trekking over land’s lay are central to the Backbiter, who is a character aptly named “Detraccio.” To backbite is “To detract from the character of, to slander, traduce, speak ill of.”55 Thus the act of backbiting is the act of devaluation, but more importantly, as Alexandra F. Johnston’s stage directions read in her modernization of the text—based on the acting edition by David Parry—“[Backbiter] crosses the ditch into the Castle enclosure,” backbiting is an invasion into another’s inner self. This type of invasion requires a twofold type of attack. As Douglas W. Hayes argues, Backbiter doubles linguistic crossings with actual physical crossings. Backbiter is able to transgress the borders of good and evil through his language: Backbiter crosses--transgresses--boundaries between what is ostensibly good and evil in the play and renders those boundaries susceptible to ambivalence in the process. More is at stake here than comic appeal. The medium Backbiter uses and, indeed, embodies allegorically and dramatically, to transgress these boundaries is language.56 Backbiter is not simply a skilled linguist, but one who uses rhetoric for his own ends. In this sense, Backbiter becomes an evil and eloquent force: a very dangerous combination. The ambivalence present in his speech confirms the tradition of detractio at work: This concept of rhetorical ambivalence is linked to the last important element behind Backbiter’s representation: the tradition of the “sins of the tongue” of which backbiting or detractio forms a part … it inheres within the very heart of the ambivalence of that tradition; it is rhetoric used for evil ends.57 But it is in his name that backbiting, as I alluded to above, takes on physical action, and one of invasion. He is a messenger, a backbiter, and rhetorically ambivalent at the same time.58 This hard-to-pin-down nature makes Backbiter a very intense threat to Mankind. Backbiter exhibits two things that are particularly both positive and negative attributes. He has mobility (“To lepyn ouyr londys leye”) and has the gift of gab (“Vnsayd sawys for to seye”). These two attributes can be good or bad; it is just a matter of how they are used. For Mankind words and mobility allow him to enter the Castle of Perseverance, but they also allow him to visit each of the vices’ scaffolds. We see that Backbiter is the agent of movement and personal gain: Bakbytynge and Detraction Schal goo with the from toun to toun. Haue don, Mankynde, and cum doun. I am thyne owyn page. I schal bere the wyttnesse with my myth.59

Temporal-spatial problems

69

To escape this threat ‘Mankind’ makes his own journey over ‘solid land’ into the castle. It is his potential for mobility that makes this possible. He must combine action with words to enter the Castle of Perseverance and assure himself a good fate. His fate is up to himself, and his mobility will take him wherever he chooses: A, Schryfte, blessyd mote thou be ! This castel is here but at honde. Thedyr rapely wyl I tee, Sekyr ouyr this sad sonde. Good perseueraunce God sende me Whyle I leue here in this londe. Fro fowle fylthe now I fle, For the to faryn now I fonde To thone precyous port.60 Once in this new location where the borders are set and solid, the character of ‘Mankind’ is altered. ‘Mankind’ now has adopted a new attitude towards life. Change of character has come with a change of location and the crossing of a definite border: Goode Aungyl, I wyl do as thou wylt, In londe whyl my lyfe may leste, For I fynde wel in holy wryt Thou counseylyste euere for the beste.61 Once in the castle, there is no movement, and hence, no conflict. The inner life is just as calm as the outer one. And even the attack of the vices on the castle is unsuccessful because once Mankind chose to enter the castle, nothing can make him leave, except his own choosing. Mankind has determined his own fate, and as long as his resolve is strong, his own personal borders will mirror the strong walls of the castle: they will be impervious to outside attack. Though Mankind is safe within the castle, this is only as long as he chooses to remain there. Greediness lures Mankind, now old, out of the castle, “Thorwe this werld to walkyn and wende.”62 Again, it is the dream of mobility that makes Mankind come out of the castle. Mobility is the double-edge sword. It is the thing that saves and destroys Mankind. Outside of the Castle, Mankind moves from Scaffold to Scaffold, and with it comes conflict. His movement is by his own choosing. The Seven Deadly sins propose what Mankind can have, and he chooses to go to the scaffold or not. Thus Mankind chooses not to go back into the castle, on its ‘solid land’ and stay in the safety of its strong walls. After spending the rest of his life going from scaffold to scaffold with the Seven Deadly sins, Death approaches and Mankind dies outside of the castle.

70 Temporal-spatial problems

Conclusion I have tried to show that there was a fundamental shift in the way borders were viewed and conceptualized in Le Jeu de Saint Nicholas and The Castle of Perseverance. Unlike the bounded nature of Le Jeu de Saint Nicholas, where its characters are bounded by their fate and their position at the beginning of the play, The Castle of Perseverance acknowledges a certain amount of free will. Le Jeu de Saint Nicholas is characterized by an unrealistic movement that always loops back upon itself and returns things and people to their original places. All gains and losses are nullified in this play as mirrored by temporary physical and symbolic transplantations. Most notable in The Castle of Perseverance is the mobility that Mankind enjoys. Mankind can either move around the world and gain financially, or he can remain immobile and therefore with inner peace. Borders become a meaningful place that takes on significant symbolism. When Mankind is at inner peace, his outside borders become impervious to the attack of the Seven Deadly sins. When Mankind is not at inner peace, the Seven Deadly sins can invade his borders. The border is both a real place (as in the walls of the Castle and the border between the actors and the audience) and a metaphoric place (as in the border between one’s inner self and one’s outer self and the dividing line between the world of the play and the world of the audience).

Notes 1 R. Darren Gobert, The Mind-Body Stage: Passion and Interaction in the Cartesian Theater (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013); and Pannill Camp, The First Frame: Theatre Space in Enlightenment France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 2 Gobert 121. 3 Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100–1300 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2. 4 Ibid., 22. 5 N. Neilson, Medieval Agrarian Economy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936), 9. 6 Ibid., 27–28. 7 Robert Brenner, “The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, ed. M. L. Bush (London: Longman, 1996), 248. 8 There were two types of free tenants. One had family landholdings. The other held small tracks of “land cut off from the demesne for money rent” (Neilson 54). 9 Neilson, Medieval Agrarian Economy, 57–58. 10 Christopher Tyerman, Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 27. 11 Ibid., 38. 12 Ibid., 39. 13 Ibid., 44. 14 Ibid., 56. 15 James A. Brundage, The Crusades: A Documentary Survey (Milwaukee: The Marquette University Press, 1962), 120. 16 Ibid., 121.

Temporal-spatial problems 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

71

Ibid., 122. Ibid., 163. Grace Frank, The Medieval French Drama (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), 98. E. B. Fryde, The Great Revolt of 1381 (London: The Historical Association, 1981), 9. E. B. Fryde, Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 116–117. Slyvia L. Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London: 1300–1500 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962), 44. Willaim W. Klein, Craig L. Bloomberg and Robert L. Hubbard, Jr., Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993), 183. K. J. Woollcombe, Essays on Typology (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1957), 42. Surprisingly, very little has been written of early medieval messengers. Mary C. Hill’s work in The King’s Messengers, 1199–1377 appears to be the most complete collection of historical facts about this group. Her approach is detail-oriented. In examining medieval records, Hill has created, in a way, a complete job description of the evolving medieval messenger, delving deep into the contractual elements of this profession. She discusses such things as the wardrobe of the messengers and even the “Provision for Sickness and Age” (57–86). Her work is invaluable. However, the study of medieval messengry can, and probably should be, the study of border crossings. In an article about blank spaces on twelfth, fifteenth, and sixteenth century world maps, appropriately entitled “Blank Spaces on the Earth,” Alfred Hiatt briefly notes how Albertus Magnus blamed the inability of “the messengers and armies of kings” to secure passage to vast regions in the south, leading ultimately to royal commerce and even conquest (233). However, Hiatt is just as unable as his kingly predecessors to use this potentially penetrating tangent to ‘fill in the map.’ Jean Bodel, Medieval French Plays, trans. Richard Axton and John Stevens (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), 80. Frank, The Medieval French Drama, 96–97. Ibid., 102. Ibid., 104. Bodel, Medieval French Plays, 87. Ibid., 85. One possible interpretation of these events is that this play is an exploration of the Christian position on credit. Transposed to the land of the emirs, we can see the scheming that Bodel believes goes along with the use of credit. The Arabs invented the idea of credit, yet they did not really put credit to use. Christian European travelers recognized the potential that credit had for economic gain, but because of some laws in the Bible forbidding Christians from making money on interest, Christians made the Jews become creditors/bankers, thus paving the way for early forms of Capitalism (Manuel De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History [New York: Swerve Editions, 2000]). Auberon is sent out by the ‘Arabic’ King to call on the “Giants and Canaanites” (Bodel 84). It is possible to read this play as an attack on those who make money on credit, for those who deal in credit, the men at the tavern, get nothing in the end. Although a tangent to the thesis of this paper, this interpretation helps us understand the attitudes of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century Christians. Unlike credit where interest is made, the credit in the minds of Christians at this time yields no change. Bodel, Medieval French Plays, line 311. Ibid., line 242. Ibid., 125. Ibid., 128. Ibid. Ibid., 111.

72 Temporal-spatial problems 39 Thomas Mark, Historical Atlas of the British Commonwealth and Empire (London: Macmillan and Company Limited, 1962), 3. 40 In Tenure and Mobility, J. Ambrose Raftis suggests that peasants actually where quite mobile and were probably not confined, in the penitentiary sense, to the manor: “… the villager on Ramsey manors, or his servant, would be required to goes as far as twenty to thirty miles, perhaps a dozen times a year, in order to bring food rents to the abbey and produce to the various markets of the region” (9). 41 H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions, 1150–1400 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1969), 286. 42 Bodel, Medieval French Plays, 123. 43 Ibid., 134. 44 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 35. 45 For a modern equivalent, see Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake, where the universe expands and contracts and everyone must live their same life over and over again. 46 Ibid., 136. 47 John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 122. 48 Eccles does a marvelous job of explaining the different conceptions of the manner of performance of The Castle of Perseverance in his Introduction in The Macro Plays: “Furnivall supposed that ‘The audience, if not let into the enclosure, must have been a movable one, going from one scaffold to another as its occupants spoke,’ but Southern makes it clear that the audience stood or sat within ‘the place,’ a theatrical term here meaning the area within the circle. The purpose of the ring of water or bars was probably to keep out spectators unless they paid to be admitted. The scaffolds, though on the plan they appear to be outside the ring, may have been inside it, since the actors move freely between the scaffolds and ‘the place’ and they would need longer ramps if they had to cross the ditch each time. Southern suggests that the scaffolds were mounted by steps and that they may have been enclosed with curtains, which opened to reveal first the World, then the Devil, the Flesh, later Covetousness, and finally God. The actors also played in ‘the place’ or ‘green,’ since the Daughters of God are to ‘play in the place altogether till they bring up the Soul’” (xxi). 49 This play makes the audience aware that they are an audience seven times. This helps separate the world of the play from the world of the audience. I will use Alexandra F. Johnston’s modern translation here because it has an eye towards production. The citations refer to line number. (1) “Therefore on the hill, / Sit you all still, / And watch with good will / Our rich array” (115–19). (2) “Ya! Peter! others do too — / [Mankind] indicates the whole audience / We have eaten garlic everyone …” (1212–14). (3) “[Backbiter] turns to the audience, and indicates them as the subject of the next line / In truth, at many I jeer!” (1587–90). (4) “[Mankind] to the audience” / Surely, this you will know …” (2383–4). (5) “[Charity] now addresses the audience / He is of age, to use his wit / You all of you well know” (2436–9). Following this Abstinence, Chastity and Industry address the audience as well. (6) “Mankind picks himself up from the ground, and speaks to the audience / “I don’t know who?” – so well away! …” (2813). (7) “Here the actor playing God will remove his mitre and mask and address the audience / Thus end our games …” (3496). 50 Anonymous, “The Castle of Perseverance,” in The Macro Plays, ed. Mark Eccles (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 8. 51 Ibid., 15. 52 Ibid., 16. 53 Ibid., 17. 54 Ibid., 23. 55 “Backbite,” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989.

Temporal-spatial problems

73

56 Douglas W. Hayes, “Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction,” Comparative Drama 34, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 53–78. 57 Ibid. 58 Hayes, “Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction,” 53–58: “Backbiter enacts this conceptual web of rhetoric not just in his speeches but in his name, or, rather, names, as well. When this dramatized allegorical and rhetorical abstraction first appears in The Castle of Perseverance at line 647 as the World’s ‘messenger’ he tells the audience his name is ‘Bacbytere’ (659). This is significant because his name indicates that he is a performer of actions as well as a dramatized representation of an abstraction, that is backbiting.(17) His name tells the audience that he stands for sins of the tongue and that he commits them as well. This appears to be straightforward enough until one notices that in the Latin speech headings that are used throughout The Castle of Perseverance Backbiter is referred to as ‘Detraccio’ (e.g., 647 s.h.). Detractio, or detraction, is a rhetorical abstraction within the framework of the sins of the tongue (and, by implication, within the framework of Ciceronian rhetoric), and can be translated into English as ‘backbiting.’ Although it is true that this designation would not be available to an audience viewing a performance of the play and that the Latin speech headings are a convention of the manuscript, it is nevertheless the case that at some level of textual production someone saw Backbiter as susceptible of being read both as a dramatized perpetrator of sins of the tongue and as a rhetoricized abstraction, and registered that reading consistently in the form of the Latin speech heading. To complicate matters even further, he is also referred to by a third name at lines 775, 1724, and 1733: ‘Flypergebet’ or ‘Flibbertigibbet’ in modern English. One of the meanings for this Middle English word, an ‘onomatapoeic representation of unmeaning chatter,’ is a ‘chattering or gossiping person’ (OED) (18). Thus, Backbiter’s names classify him not only as a performer of verbal action and as a representative of ordered rhetorical abstraction, but also as the embodiment of rhetorical action that deviates from discipline and means--in a loaded sense—nothing (19). The most important point to take from these observations is that these three names are not entirely synonyms for each other and that they work to represent Backbiter in a shifting and non-symmetrical fashion that highlights his simultaneous inherence within superficially differentiated sites of rhetorical power. All of this ambivalence takes place at the level of Backbiter’s name; it is in his speeches that this polymorphous figure appears at his most rhetorically and morally ambivalent.” 59 Eccles, 26. 60 Ibid., 48–49. 61 Ibid., 50. 62 Ibid., 77.

6

Contextual problems Witting and unwitting contexts: translating public and private experience in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul

What happens when someone controls language but is later controlled by others’ language because one is no longer a powerful linguist due to a translation? That is, then, what does Kushner say about a speaker who becomes spoke about because of a change in context? Homebody—the protagonist in Tony Kushner’s play, Homebody/Kabul, which is about a woman who goes over to Afghanistan and is reportedly murdered—first performs this implosion and collapse for us in London, not on the streets of war-torn Kabul, but in her “comfortable chair, in [her] pleasant room.”1 Her language is unique: a pastiche of eclectic words. After Act One, scene one, Homebody, we have discovered, has performed this same implosion and collapse again, but in Kabul—“a gossipy city … full of windows.”2 Away from the safety of her home, and in the city where the Universal Drift is public, open and transparent like a window, Homebody has intentionally dislocated herself. She left the safety of her own home and went to Kabul, where she can no longer powerfully perform her identity because, contextually, she’s been rendered less powerful as she is a minoritarian linguist who is dependent upon translation, yielding a question mark surrounding the performance of identity as a public and/or private experience.

The presumption Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari develop the idea that the most powerful linguists are “minoritarian linguists,” who come from a minor culture but write in the language of the major culture.

The performances Tony Kushner’s prescient play, Homebody/Kabul, was written only shortly before September 11th. “The play takes place in London, England, and Kabul, Afghanistan just before and just after the American bombardment of the suspected terrorist training camps in Khost, Afghanistan, August 1998. The final scene, Periplum, is set in London in the spring of 1999.”3 The play is divided up into two acts. Act I is a lengthy monologue by a verbose housewife named Homebody, who talks about Afghanistan and her desire to go there.

Contextual problems

75

The plot in Homebody/Kabul takes a rather complex turn after Homebody’s lengthy monologue. In Act II and III, the reader finds out that her life came to an end as well in the most brutal way on the streets of Kabul, where she ventured by herself. Finding out about Homebody’s death, her husband and daughter go to Afghanistan to retrieve the body, only to be given the runaround by the Taliban concerning the location of her body. While Homebody’s husband, Milton, gets high on opium and other narcotics with a British aid worker, her daughter, Priscilla (who is full of doubt about her mother’s death), meets a Tajik Afghan Esperantist poet named Khwaja who helps her find out that her mother is actually alive and well: faking her death in order to marry a “pious Muslim man of means.”4 Priscilla is told of Homebody’s reasoning: “She wish to remain in Kabul, not to see you nor the father of you, her husband of the past.”5 Khwaja arranges for Priscilla to meet the wife that Homebody replaced, Mahala. Mahala corroborates the story that Homebody is, in fact, alive and living with her Muslim husband. Mahala wants Priscilla to take her back to London with her. Priscilla does not want to but is eventually convinced to try to take Mahala back to London. For his help, Khwaja, also through much convincing, gives Priscilla some of his Esperanto poems to deliver to a fellow Esperantist in London. When Priscilla, Milton, and Mahala are finally ready to depart from Afghanistan, the Taliban search their belongings and find the Esperanto poems in Priscilla’s suitcase. The Taliban say that they are not poems, but Tajik information in codes concerning weapons placement, saying that Khwaja is a spy. Thinking Mahala has more papers, the Taliban threaten to kill Mahala. Eventually talking the Taliban out of killing Mahala, Priscilla and Milton are told that the story that Mahala told them about Homebody was made up: “They have tell you this woman is wife of Muslim man, Kabuli man who have marry dead British woman, she have not die … This woman is Pashtun woman, crazy woman, who she is? She is doctor wife, Doctor Qari Shah.”6 Before the three are allowed to go free, they are told that Khwaja has been arrested and executed. Almost a year later, we find out that Mahala is living with Milton in the same house that Homebody once lived in.

The problems with the presumption Homebody is a minoritarian linguist whose own language is a forgotten language, but she speaks in English. What she creates is a minor language that is marked by its hybridity. Homebody’s own unique lingual position mimics the art of translation, with its possibilities and impossibilities. Translation becomes a metaphor for cultural hybridity. As a minoritarian linguist, performance yields power, but the inability to perform at Homebody’s comfortable level turns out to have disastrous consequences. Because Homebody is imagined, I argue, as “Homebody?” in Afghanistan (similar to “Grave of Cain?”), Kushner’s play ultimately asks the question that Deleuze and Guattari never ask or answer themselves: what happens to a minoritarian linguist when read in

76 Contextual problems

translation? In a line from the play, Kushner suggests that the results of translating a minoritarian linguist are “bloody, beautiful.” Homebody becomes “Homebody?” when read in translation and is therefore susceptible to being “traumatically separated.”

The proposal In this chapter, I develop two parallel lines of thought about the context of one’s language usage and ability to pin down meaning and certainty connected to it: 1) first, I examine Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the minoritarian linguist; and 2) then, just like the map in the play marked “Grave of Cain?” I contend that this play is about what it means to conceptualize the world with a question mark attached to it. Like translation where everything is inaccurate because a true translation is impossible, Kushner posits a world with a metaphoric question mark attached to it, where everything is utterly unknowable. Knowledge is gained only through translations—personal, literal, social, cultural. And thus, although much is lost in these translations, so much is gained in these hybrid moments.

The projection (of the proposal) As Jenny Spencer argues, much of the plot of Homebody/Kabul hinges on translation and its difficulties.7 The need for translation serves as a plot device where confusion can abound. But much more central to the play, the need for translation is only one of the symptoms plaguing two clashing cultures when two very different cultures collide. Priscilla and Milton are not having trouble finding out where Homebody is because they are having trouble getting a decent translation: the poor translations are only symptomatic of the impossibility of translating one culture to another, performing cultural hybridity. It is in both the failure and attempt of translation that, at least, some hope is born in this play. True, most meaning is lost in translation, but something new is created in the act of translating. In this play, Mahala’s new life represents that new creation: the byproduct of two cultures coming together. Homebody/Kabul recounts translation as a tragedy, but a tragedy that springs hope and growth. Going off of Spencer’s article, I examine a very specific aspect of translation. Positing first that Homebody is a minoritation linguist, what I argue in this article is that Kushner takes up what Deleuze and Guattari fail to do: ask what happens to a minoritarian linguist when read in translation. The result of being read in translation is that she is read as “Homebody?” and becomes susceptible to being “traumatically separated.” Translation, minor language, and hybridity

In their chapter, “What Is a Minor Literature?” in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss Franz Kafka’s “geopolitical triangle of German-Czech-Jews” by noting how “In Prague, people

Contextual problems

77

reproached [the Jews] for not being Czechs, and in Saaz and Eger, for not being Germans.”8 What this means, is that Kafka was in a very unique lingual situation: he was a minoritarian linguist. In an indirect response to Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari discussed the intranslatability of language. Instead of relying on the task of translators, being a Jew, living in Czechoslovakia and writing in German, Kafka wrote “minor literature:” “A minor literature does not come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”9 Deleuze and Guattari note the three characteristics of minor literature and a minoritarian linguist. First, for Kafka, writing becomes an impossible activity, an impossible one to avoid, and it is also impossible to write in German.10 It is impossible for Kafka to write not in German because then he will feel cut off from his German Czech territory. It is impossible for Kafka to write in German because then he will not be speaking to the masses, but only the oppressed minority. And it is impossible for Kafka not to write because, as an oppressed person, he must develop a national consciousness by means of literature. Second, everything for a minoritarian linguist is political: “the family triangle connects to other triangles—commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical—that determine its values.”11 And third, everything within minor literature takes on a collective value. Because minor literature comes from a minority, there is not an abundance of voices where each voice can be heard separately. In this case, each voice takes on the voice of the masses. And “because collective or national consciousness is ‘often inactive in external life and always in the process of break-down,’ literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation.”12 The minoritarian linguist, then, finds it impossible to speak and not to speak in a major language, is always political, and always speaks collectively. They have the unique position of subverting the major language and culture by using the major language to work for their own purposes. This is a powerful move that avoids the need for translation and the pitfall that accompanies it. The author controls the original language. This admixture of minor culture and major language produces a culturally and literally “hybrid” text. The idea of hybridity works nicely with the current conversations surrounding the play: there is a focus on geopolitics and history. Spencer argues that translation becomes the point of contact between cultures and serves as a “broader trope for contemporary geopolitical struggles.”13 Judith G. Miller also sees the global scope and conflict of the play. Miller argues that the play gives off feelings of a murky international scene, a global future without a vision and, “an inability to locate and name the ‘enemy.’”14 Framji Minwalla examines the collision of personal, private history and sociopolitical, public history.15 A similar collision can be seen in M. Scott Phillips’ argument that the play explores a cultural and political apocalypse as a “binary opposition” is created “between a consumer-driven western imperialism and a misogynistic anti-western theocracy represented by radical Islam.”16 The struggle of binaries can be seen further in Catherine Stevenson’s argument that the play

78 Contextual problems

constantly deals with the “central dialectical struggle between past and future, stasis and progress…,” etc., that helps to “dramaticize acts of creative negation.”17 This article fits into the conversation by addressing aspects of geopolitical hybridity through the trope of translation. Homebody as a minoritarian linguist

It needs a bit of explaining as to how Homebody is a minoritarian linguist. After all, Homebody is British and is addressing us in English. Meanwhile, Kafka was Jewish and instead of writing in the language used where he lived, Czech, Kafka wrote in German. Homebody’s minoritarian position becomes the most obvious when she begins talking about the guidebook to Afghanistan. For Homebody, her language is that of the “… guidebook. Its foxed unfingered pages, forgotten words: ‘Quizilbash.’”18 Homebody is deterritorialized because her words come from another time. And though the place may be the same in a physical location (England), it is difficult to argue that late 20th-century England is the same place as 17th-century England, from where words like “gigantine” come. Thus her native language of forgotten English words is deterritorialized by time and, thus, by place. The language of 17th-century England (metaphorically like Kafka’s Czech) is subsumed by the dominant language, 20th-century English (metaphorically like Kafka’s use of German). She, however, does not address us entirely in her native language of forgotten and made-up English words (like “Quizilbash”). She tries to address us in modern English—creating a story and minor literature that “doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”19 The resulting language that she creates is a hybrid between forgotten and made-up English words and modern English that is structured around modifiers and modifying clauses. She is “a person who uses words like gigantine,” a nearly forgotten and obscure version of gigantic, making her “impossible-to-clearly-comprehend.”20 Furthermore, her monologues spin to the political, because as Deleuze and Guattari say, “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.”21 This same word, “Quizilbash,” stirs up the feeling of something “So lost; and also so familiar.”22 It is in this gesture of connecting the here and the there—by connecting that which is “lost” to that which is “familiar”—that Homebody asserts individual agency: The home (She makes the gesture) away from home. Recognizable: not how vast but how crowded the world is, consequences to everything: the Macedonians, marching east, one tribe displacing another …23 Homebody’s life, even in the comfort of her home, her most natural environment, is thereby connected to the Macedonians. That which is lost, “the home away from home,” is still connected to Homebody. And, in fact, as Homebody argues, her actions today can even affect the past, as there are

Contextual problems

79

“consequences to everything.” This inevitability of the political infused in her language is followed by one collective enunciation after another: What after all is a child but the history of all that has befallen her, a succession of displacements, bloody, beautiful? How could any mother not love the world? What else is love but recognition? Love’s nothing to do with happiness. Power has to do with happiness. Love has only to do with home. Where stands the homebody, safe in her kitchen, on her culpable shore, suffering uselessly watching others perishing in the sea, wringing her plump little maternal hands, oh, oh. Never joining the drowning. Her feet, neither rooted nor moving. The ocean is deep and cold and erasing. But how dreadful, really unpardonable, to remain dry. Look at her, look at her, she is so unforgivably dry. Neither here nor there. She does not drown, she … succumbs. To Luxury. She sinks.24 Homebody’s minoritarian language becomes clear. She has created a hybrid language that is both political and speaks collectively; however, Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of minoritarian linguists and literature falls short. What I think Tony Kushner seems to address that Deleuze and Guattari do not address in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature is what happens when Kafka, for example, is read in English and not in German, or more specifically, what happens when a minoritarian linguist, such as Homebody, is translated. In her home in London, when telling the dreamlike tale of her affair with the Kabuli hat vendor, Homebody controlled her language. She speaks, as she describes it, “Elliptically. Discursively.”25 But once she is in Kabul, where she must rely on translations, for her self-acknowledged, limited knowledge of Farsi makes lingual control unavoidable. Translation becomes, The touch which does not understand is the touch which corrupts, the touch which does not understand that which it touches which corrupts that which it touches, and which corrupts itself.26 In Kabul, Homebody becomes the child who, through translation, has stepped in front of the gaze of the public window, exposing her dislocations—exposing “the history of all that has befallen her, a succession of displacements, bloody, beautiful.” Homebody is susceptible to these dislocations because, even though she is a minoritarian linguist, she cannot be a powerful minoritarian linguist in Kabul. What, however, is a minoritarian linguist? Minoritarian linguists would answer the following questions “no,” only because they have created their own language for themselves: How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve?27

80 Contextual problems

Rather, the minor linguists create their own language by subverting “the major language that they are forced to serve,” by subverting it from within. Becoming “Homebody?”

Cain is the founder of a city and a fratricide, the father of the arts and the first person to usurp God’s power of determining mortality, the first person to usurp the role of the angel of death. Tragedy is the annihilation from whence new life springs the Nothing out of which Something is born. Devastation can be a necessary prelude to a new kind of beauty. Necessary but always bloody.28 Cain serves as a reoccurring symbol of tragedy in Tony Kushner’s Homebody/ Kabul. As Kushner wrote in his essay, “An Afterword,” found after Homebody/ Kabul, Cain represents a paradox of sorts. Even though he is the first murderer, the first destroyer, the arts and all of its creations sprung up through him. The resting place of Cain, as legend has it, is somewhere in Kabul. The tragedy of Cain, then, comes to symbolize the tragedy of Afghanistan. The tragedy of Cain is the extended metaphor from which meaning is derived in this play. As, ultimately, an extended metaphor, this parable locates its theme in the map of Kabul. Priscilla, having possession of her mother’s guidebook tries to find the Grave of Cain. However, her mother wrote a question mark next to Grave of Cain. Khwaja, Priscilla’s guide, comments: Yes. This says, not “Grave of Cain,” but rather, “Grave of Cain?” She was pursuing a rumor. On no official map is there ever a question mark. This would be an entirely novel approach to cartography. The implications are profound. To read on a map, instead of “Afghanistan,” “Afghanistan?” It would be more accurate, but—.29 The question mark is puzzling on a map because a map is supposed to be authoritative. Thus the question mark denotes uncertainty. The Grave of Cain becomes, not a definite place, but a rough idea. If the grave cannot be located with precision, it may not exist, and thus the nature of the grave itself is left in doubt. Reading Afghanistan as “Afghanistan?” dislocates the very nature of the country. The country is not a set place, but a rough idea, one without solid definition. So too, then, is Homebody. If Homebody cannot be located with precision, she may no longer exist, and thus Homebody’s nature is left in doubt. Homebody is an amalgam of memories, artifacts she left behind, and rumors. She is impossible to locate and thus she must be read with a question mark, for she is a shifting and indefinable idea, just like the Grave of Cain. Because of Homebody’s physical transplantation, the plot hinges on interpretations and translations. Like the many literal translations in the text, Homebody is a body that is first transplanted and then necessarily translated.

Contextual problems

81

Besides the translation that was needed due to her journey, we are told by Priscilla that, “She was a mother who demanded interpretation.”30 Indeed, as the plot suggests, the word Homebody needs as much interpretation and translation as the story that is being told about Homebody to Priscilla and Milton (through translation). So how exactly does Homebody become “Homebody?” At a lecture on translation, translators and translating at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst called “The White Company: The Construction of English Ethnicity in the Nineteenth Century,” Robert Young carefully pointed out (though he was by no means the first to say it) that the respective Latin and Greek roots of the words translation and metaphor have the same meaning: “to carry or bear across.” (The Oxford English Dictionary shows that roots of both words contain the verb “to transfer.” Robert Young must have been acting as a bit of a translator himself, for only metaphor has the root meaning “to bear, carry.”) But he went further than other scholars by calling metaphor a “creative lie,” implying the same for translation. The key to the metaphor, and thus translation, is that they are open signifiers that are socially and historically determined, and they even afford an opening for agency. Of course, I am ignoring the “lie” inherent in these two words. There are countless instances where the lie is intentional (speaking of translations). There are also countless instances where good-faith attempts have been lies. It is these good-faith attempts that are interesting because they adhere to Foucault’s famous maxim—everything is not bad, but dangerous—for, “The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue.”31 What can be translatable then becomes a lie. In London, Homebody is a powerful linguist whose control of her own language firmly helps her establish her own identity. In some way, she performs her identity through language, but her language also performs her identity. She claims to have no control over her speaking, saying that she has read too many books and they are responsible for her manner of speech, however, she makes it very clear that, besides one dreamy love affair, only books have broached her, books which she freely read on her own. Since she acknowledges that her speech might be difficult to understand, she is constantly rephrasing her own phrases. She acts as her own translator, translating “for readers who do not understand the original.”32 Thus she ensures that she is correctly understood, that nobody can read her incorrectly. However, one time she does let something slide without trying to attempt a translation: There is an old Afghan saying, which, in rough translation from the Farsi, goes: “The man who has patience has roses. The man who has no patience has no trousers.” I am not fluent in Farsi, of course, I read this, and as I say it must be a rough translation.33 Unlike other times when the reader may question her meaning, she at least acknowledges the question mark by attempting to rephrase a line; here, the

82 Contextual problems

question mark remains. Though she may be able to remove or at least acknowledge a question mark in her version of English, the question mark is not even addressed when she faces a translation. Therefore, in Afghanistan—where 1) it is difficult to tell a translation from a “creative lie” and 2) she is not present—she, her actions, and her body are translated (by a number of translators with varying degrees of talent in translating) without the question mark being considered—how else can Homebody be read other than “Homebody?”? Though the United States is never the center of action, or even remotely close to it, Homebody/Kabul is about countries like the United States, countries filled with minoritarian linguists—hybridizers of language. The play, then, is about how bodies who are constantly putting up a fight against Universal Drift are read in translation. It is particularly revealing then that Homebody is not even American. The United States’ touch, “the American bombardment of the suspected terrorist training camps in Khost, Afghanistan, August 1998”—“a touch which does not understand”—is translated so poorly that it confuses those being touched to the point where even different nations become indistinguishable. The United States, a country whose potential for being a minoritarian country of language and literature is great, becomes the ‘United States?’: just like, as I stated above, Homebody—a minoritarian linguist—is translated to the point where she becomes “Homebody?” “Homebody?” is a wavering idea: one that cannot be pinned down and defined with any certainty. There is something wholly uncontrollable about the minoritarian linguist and Homebody, and this inevitable mistranslation produces a shifting border that neither Homebody nor anybody else can understand. Therefore, a thick border has enveloped Homebody: this deaf line produces “Homebody?” Getting wwept up in the “Universal Drift”: Homebody in Kabul

… does that nebula know it nebulates? Most likely not. So my husband. It knows nothing, its nature is to stallate and constellate and nebulate and add its heft and vortices and frequencies to the Universal Drift, un-selfconsciously effusing, effusing, gaseously effusing, and so my husband, and so not I, who seem forever to be imploding and collapsing and am incapable it would seem of lending even this simple tale to the Universal Drift, of telling this simple tale without supersaturating my narrative with maddeningly infuriating or more probably-irritating synchitic expegeses. Synchitic expegeses. Jesus.34 “Universal Drift” works like a dominant language that “un-self-consciously” pulls minor languages into “its heft and vortices.” The “drift” implies something almost nonchalant, but powerful. Languages and people in the presence of a dominant language are swept up. This is a universalizing gesture: one that negates difference, thus negating the particulars and peculiarities of individuals

Contextual problems

83

and languages. Occasionally, there are individuals who can avoid being swept up in the Universal Drift of language with strong lingual control and play. Someone or some language that “implodes and collapses” may be resistant to the Universal Drift, but, at the price of or because of, a dislocation, which is “always bloody.” This is the drive behind the phrase “perform—or else” from Jon McKenzie. Perform cultural lingual norms or be swept up in a bloody dislocation. “Dislocation” comes from “dislocate,” with its root meaning “to put out of place.” Homebody is marked by “supersaturating [her] narratives.” In a world that does not understand her “synchitic expegeses,” Homebody is dislocated to the home. She is put out of place by her language and thus relegated to a space where dangling modifiers and made-up words are allowed. She is “redeployed.” She is allowed to have her own lingual rules in her house, out of the reach of the public and its Universal Drift of language. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a “homebody” as “a person, etc., who prefers staying at home to going out or traveling.” This is not the type of person who you would expect to say, “Oh I love the world! I love love love love the world!”35 Thus, we are immediately led to question Homebody’s status as a homebody. The home, for a homebody, connotes a retreat from the outside world. For the homebody, the world is divided, primarily, into a private inside and a public outside. These spheres remain separate by choice. The homebody is one who is not forced into solitude, but one who “prefers” it. Thus, there must be something in the outside world that makes the homebody prefer the inside world; or, the benefits of the private, inside world must outweigh the benefits of the public, outside world. It comes as no surprise, then, to find the character called “Homebody” situated in the home. What is surprising is her obsession with a land so far away, her obsession with Kabul. As she says, the obsession does take the form of reading and research,36 and this type of solitary activity is in line with a homebody. But for a woman who has “never strayed so far from the unlit to the spotlight,”37 Homebody certainly spends a lot of time in both the literal and figurative spotlight. What becomes troubling for Homebody is that though she is in her house, the very place that she should theoretically “prefer” to be, she clearly fantasizes about being somewhere else—in some other place, in some other time. Homebody says, “The Present is always an awful place to be.”38 Her object of attention, then, becomes both the past and Afghanistan. This past and Afghanistan are dangerous places for her. Homebody understands the safety of her present situation: “Where stands the homebody, safe in her kitchen, on her culpable shore, suffering uselessly, watching others perishing in the sea, wringing her plump little maternal hands, oh, oh. Never joining the drowning.”39 In this “safe” place, she “live[s] with the worlds utter indifference.”40 But she wants this to change. She fantasizes about “joining the drowning.” The tale that she tells is when she visited the “holocaustal effacement” of Kabul.41 Upon traveling to Kabul, she let her body be mangled in such a way that Kabul “ripped her open” to reveal “her fucking secrets.”42 This is the “or else”

84 Contextual problems

of not “performing” normalcy. Her dislocations are revealed in the gaze of the public: In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.43 In front of the “windows” of Kabul, Homebody is framed. She has allowed herself to take on the passive female role without agency. In Kabul, a maledominated society, she gave up her one powerful tool: her language. Her language made her a powerful linguist in London. But here in Kabul, she is ripped open by others because she is not fluent in Farsi. She could not control the image behind the window. She lacked agency because she could not speak. She was silenced, and therefore, could only take on an exhibitionist role. Her body, thus, becomes no more than a text to be read by a male doctor in dire need, himself, of a translation: The conoid tubercle of the left clavicle was found to have been traumatically separated from the conacoid process of the left scapula following severe damage to the conoid ligament…After dislocation of the humerus form the glenohumeral joint, there was separation and consequent calamitous exsanguination from the humeral stump.44 The detailed analysis of what happened to Homebody is “traumatically separated” from meaning because of the doctor’s reliance on a language that is understood by only a select few. Though the doctor is speaking in English, the language is a hybrid language of modern English and scientific, anatomical terms, unknown to the vast majority of English speakers. Like the Esperanto that appears throughout Kushner’s play, these anatomical terms are meant to serve as universal referents. What the Esperanto poet recognizes, and that the doctor does not, is that these referents are not universally understood. In the same way, Homebody is just as “traumatically separated” from the Afghani population as is the doctor speaking to Homebody’s husband and daughter in English. Because she is not fluent in Farsi, as she admits early on in the play, she has no way to control the image behind the window. Her performance is a series of powerless speech acts. She is left exposed to the translation of others. Those in the world of windows read her and not the other way around. Whatever has really happened to her does not matter, but the “Homebody” that is created through language in London is out of her grasp in Kabul. That Homebody has a question mark on her. We must read Homebody like the map of Afghanistan is read in the play: “Afghanistan?” and “Homebody?”. This paper (and play, as I suggest) is about how bodies who are constantly

Contextual problems

85

putting up a fight against Universal Drift—or how minor/minoritarian linguists—are read in translation, and how the result is “a succession of displacements, bloody, beautiful.” In translation, minor linguists suffer the consequences of not performing. They suffer the “or else” of the mantra “perform—or else.” Performing Islam

I am reading the Quran again. For all those terrible years, I was too angry. I am myself becoming Muslim again.45 Una Chaudhuri and Elinor Fuchs’ edited collection, Land/Scape/Theater, imagine the landscape as a new spatial paradigm for the theater. Inherent in the idea of landscape is the idea of representing space and place. The landscape is a useful concept over ‘space’ and ‘place’ because landscape “is inside space, one might say, but contains place.”46 In her chapter, “Land/Scape/Theory,” Chaudhuri explains how invoking the landscape helped bolster nationalist ideologies: … landscape was pressed into service of nationalist ideology by giving “face” to the nation, a face sufficiently distinguishable from those of other nations and sufficiently simplified so as to be easily recognizable and “quotable” as needed.47 We have already seen how the Grave of Cain brought confusion to Kabul’s landscape. Kushner clearly plays off the above idea by ironically giving “face” to the opening scene in Act Two. Kushner creates a landscape that says that the scene can only take place in Taliban-run Kabul, but at the same time, it is ‘sufficiently indistinguishable from other nations.’ Kabul (and Afghanistan) becomes as indistinguishable as the United States and England: On a street in Kabul. Priscilla is in her burqa, trying to read the guidebook’s small map through the burqa’s grille, holding it close, changing angles so as to find the strongest light. A group or women pass by, all shrouded head to toe in burqas, whispering.48 Giving “face” to the nation and to Islam in the presence of the oppressive Taliban regime becomes the shrouding of it for Kushner. In the Kabuli landscape, Priscilla is trying to read a landscape (the map). But even the authoritative map cannot be translated in this city. It is difficult to read the map, for Priscilla is trying “to find the strongest light.” The burqa is literally shrouding the landscape. Under Taliban rules, Islam is conflated with confusion and shrouded landscapes: … can you tell me where the Ladies Hospital is. Or the Red Crescent offices, or the U.N. compound, it’s all turned around somehow.49

86 Contextual problems

Under the shroud of the Taliban, the geography of Kabul is unreadable and “all turned around.” Even space becomes difficult to navigate in that society. It is only when the shroud is removed, in this play, that language can again resurface and work to form a strong identity. It is only after Mahala removed her burqa that she was able to become Muslim: … In the same room as Act One. Mahala is dressed like a modern English woman. She looks very different. She has been reading.50 Identity is wrapped up in language. It is only by reading that Mahala can assume her Muslim identity. She says, “The Book is so beautiful, even in English. In Arabic its beauty is inexpressible.”51 As Mahala says herself, her English has improved since she returned to London with Milton.52 And now in Homebody’s house, Mahala has “examined [Homebody’s] library. Such strange books. I spend many hours.”53 The play has come full circle at this point. Homebody, the minoritarian linguist, began the play, and now Mahala, the minoritarian linguist (a native Farsi speaker who speaks in a language, not her own, English), concludes the play. Mahala has been able to “[plant] all [her] dead” only in a place where she can read and ‘subvert the language from within.’54 Just as Homebody could only assume her identity by playing with language, Mahala can only assume her identity by playing the powerful minoritarian linguist after, or because of, a dislocation. Homebody dislocated from London to Kabul; Mahala dislocated from Kabul to London.

Conclusion: the dislocation of culture Dislocations also have lasting effects because, unlike a break, where something is severed, the dislocation can many times continue functioning as it once had (only that some movements are more awkward or painful than others); for example, when a colonial power rules a colonized land, or even when the United States sets up puppet governments in the Middle East, the natives are merely being ruled in a manner which addresses their needs no better than the inefficient or corrupt rulers before the colonizers. Thus, in most cases, a colonial power’s rule constitutes a dislocation rather than a break. And so “Homebody?” becomes the dislocation that pains the elbow, that houses the Afghani humerus and the Western ulna. “Homebody?” becomes the point of pain and misunderstanding. “Homebody?” does not break relations between the Afghanis and their Western counterparts, but their relationship continues, strained, more mangled than ever. “Homebody?’s” dislocation, however, produced a new life for Mahala, from whose hybrid identity springs a bastion of hope in a play of pain. The extended metaphor of a dislocation where two cultures have to live side by side with uneasiness works within the larger parable of translation. Two languages coexist and neither can truly find home within the other, but

Contextual problems

87

through translation, something new, a hybrid creation, can be born which is decidedly not the original, but says something about both languages, and ultimately, both cultures.

Notes 1 Tony Kushner, Homebody/Kabul (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002), 9. 2 Ibid., 51. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Ibid., 69. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 131. 7 In “Performing Translation in Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul,” presented at the University of Massachusetts, April 2004, Jenny S. Spencer has noted the absolute centrality of translation to any understanding of Kushner’s play. See also Jenny Spencer, “Performing Translation in Contemporary Anglo-American Drama,” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 389–410. 8 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 17. 12 Ibid. 13 Spencer, “Performing Translation,” 393. 14 Judith G. Miller, “New Forms for New Conflicts: Thinking about Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and the Théatre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail,” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 2 (2006): 212. 15 Framji Minwalla, “Tony Kushner’s Hombody/Kabul: Staging History in a Post-Colonial World” Theater vol. 33. no.1 (May 2003): 29–43. 16 M. Scott Phillips, “The Failure of History: Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and the Apocalyptic Context,” Modern Drama 47, no .1 (Spring 2004): 1. 17 Catherine Stevenson, “‘Seek for Something New’: Mothers, Change, and Creativity in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change,” Modern Drama 48, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 758. 18 Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 27. 19 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 16. 20 Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 27. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 17. 22 Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 27. 23 Ibid., 27. 24 Ibid., 28. 25 Ibid., 12. 26 Ibid., 28. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 19. 28 Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 150. 29 Ibid., 63. 30 Ibid., 115. 31 Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. trans. Harry Zohn (NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 81. 32 Ibid., 15. 33 Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 13.

88 Contextual problems 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Ibid., 14. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 27–28. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 49. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Ryan Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 589. Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 31. Ibid, 134. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri, eds., Land/Scape/Theater (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002) 3. Ibid., 23–24. Kushner, Hombody/Kabul, 45. Ibid. Ibid., 136. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 139. Ibid.

7

Lingual problems (Private and public) performances of the self: the performance of language (and the self ) in Susan Jahoda’s Flight Patterns

Performances of the self are not always a matter of choice, and even context (to refer to the previous chapter). Often, as demonstrated in Susan Jahoda’s performance art installation piece, Flight Patterns, one enters the crossroads of identity in the co-mingling of the private and public displays of self.

The presumption Much like Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of how a waiter in the café demonstrates bad faith in their performance of being a waiter, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life also presumes something of a privately desired role that is publicly displayed for the sake of others (for the sake of oneself).

The performance In October 2001, Susan Jahoda—an artist and art professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst whose work has been featured/discussed in Yale Journal of Criticism and Rethinking Marxism—presented a performance art installation called Flight Patterns. Jahoda’s Flight Patterns (which can be viewed on Jahoda’s professional website, http://www.susanjahoda.com/ flight_ex.html) was a part of a group exhibition called “Back and Forth: Mapping Memory” at the Vacancy Gallery in Mott Haven, New York, which is an area in the South Bronx through which every day thousands of commuters pass on their way to and from Manhattan. Writing letters and then sending them in the mail with an address and a return address that was no longer inhabited, Jahoda displayed ten undeliverable letters and their corresponding envelopes, as well as quirky black and white photographs that accompanied most of the ten letter and envelope pairings. All of the envelopes were addressed to A. Bela-Gera from Agnes Bela-Gera, of 344 East 134 Street #6, Bronx, NY 10454. Each letter began, after the above address and the date, with either “Dear A,” or “A,” and simply concluded “Agnes.”

90 Lingual problems

The problems with the presumption A typical 4 ⅛ inch × 9 ½ inch (10 cm × 24 cm) white envelope is made out of one, folded and glued, roughly diamond-shaped piece of paper. Seldom is the envelope seen in its unfolded form: the envelope lies unprotected; its glue forms a Mobius-like strip around the edges. This state becomes apparent because the envelope started out with neither an inside nor an outside. The questions then follow: is the envelope, itself, “in wrap”? or are the contents of the envelope “in wrap”? The obvious answer would be that the contents of the envelope are “in wrap.” However, we would miss the remarkable way that the envelope masks its own two-dimensionality. By folding upon itself, the envelope has created a three-dimensional outside, as well as a hidden three-dimensional inside. If the envelope, itself, is “in wrap,” should we question the assumed separation between the public and private spheres that the concealing attributes of the envelope afford? Or here is another way to ask the same question: is the difference between the public and the private spheres merely a couple of folds?

The proposal When viewing/reading Flight Patterns, one is reminded, almost even forced to think, of A. R. Gurney’s 1988 play, Love Letters. Love Letters is located in the historical moment bordering the dominance of dramatic-text-based theatre and the emergence of performance (and performance art and performance studies). Gurney’s play (which is only used here as a juxtaposition) is a simple exchange of private letters read out loud between a man and a woman over the course of nearly 50 years: as such, its on-stage performance is both odd (in that one generally reads letters to oneself) and enlightening (in that one publicly sees a generally private reaction to reading a letter). Like Gurney’s play, which is cast in the historically appropriate mold of dramatic literature, Jahoda’s Flight Patterns is cast in its own historically appropriate mold of interdisciplinary performance. Flight Patterns is similarly significant for the ways in which a private form of written communication can so effortlessly become a public performance of the self. In its historical moment—finding itself firmly located in the computer age, but on the historical precipice of the soon-to-be dominant digital age of social media—Jahoda’s piece re-figures the Yoruban Trickster, Esu-Elegbara, as the anagrammatic trickster-as-letter-writer, A. Bela-Gera. Flight Patterns simultaneously exposes the possibilities and also the dangers that a porous public and private sphere has on language and identity formation by prophesizing the blurring of public and private communication. Performances of the self are not simply public performances of privately desired representations (intended for public, social consumption, and interpretation). Performances of the self demonstrate the need to address the indeterminacy of personal identity, by negotiating either/both privately constructed

Lingual problems

91

identities through public mediation, and publicly-constructed identities through private mediation.

The projection (of the proposal) When Flight Patterns was first exhibited, it would have been rather un-noteworthy, for while email had begun to cut into the volume of letters (and bills) sent through postal services, the world and business still used mail. However, three recent events—one representing the established avant-garde, one representing the emerging avant-garde (inspired by the former), and one representing popular culture—bring the art of letter writing (and, thus, Flight Patterns) back into our consciousness: 1) the 2014 death of (performance) artist, On Kawara, known for art using now-outdated modes of communication (e.g., postcards and telegrams)1; 2) award-winning poet Chris Hosea’s Kawarainspired still-ongoing, currently-exhibited project of using postcards for communication, but, unlike Kawara, relying, largely, on 21st century modes of communication for the presentation of his project;2 and 3) LeBron James’ 2014 decision to return home to play basketball for the Cleveland Cavaliers, announced publically in a personal letter enveloped within Sports Illustrated magazine’s cover (in stark contrast to James’ earlier announcement that he is going to play for the Miami Heat in a televised circus-like ESPN special/ spectacle, “The Decision”).3 In light of these above events, Jahoda’s piece, now in hindsight, takes on special relevance and heightened importance: in part because it was signaling of the end, and in part because it was a sign of things to come. Flight Patterns lives on the border of literature, theatre, and visual art. In this piece, Jahoda contemplates the connection between words (as texts) and acts (as presentations and/or displays), particularly in relation to performance. Especially considering the recent due given to the text-performance divide in this journal’s 2014 Special Issue on “Rhetoric and Performance,” Flight Patterns provides a now-timely case study to examine the limitations of scholarly perceptions viewing text and performance in a dichotomous manner. Jahoda’s piece metaphorically anticipates the 21st century phenomenon of social media and the ability to digitalize practically anything to demonstrate that the difference between rhetoric as a textual phenomenon and performance as an aesthetic display is vanishing. By discussing identity formation through language that exists and/ or is communicated in the borderland between the public and the private sphere, Flight Patterns exposes how our identity (conceived and created by a mix of rhetorical iterations and performances of the self ) sits ever so tenuously and precariously on the border between self and other. Crossing not just the disciplinary borders of art, performance art, and life writing, Jahoda’s process of 1) writing a letter (usually in the literary and metaphorical vein); 2) the act of sending, receiving, and opening a letter that was always intended to be returned by the postal service; 3) and the public display of personal letters as an art installation in an art gallery; highlights the idea of

92 Lingual problems

communicating the self—an idea of central importance to the study of performance (as performances of the self) and to the study of rhetoric (self-expression and the commonality, duality, and double-edged sword of language-identity formation). By blurring the lines between public and private language by displaying a series of hand-written letters and envelopes sent through the mail, Jahoda questions if the demarcation between public and private language is ever really possible. Ultimately, as a matter of central importance to studies of performance and rhetoric, Jahoda suggests that performances of the self are constructed by language that is unavoidably, and simultaneously, public and private. Because a letter is “addressed” to someone (both publicly on the envelope and privately in the letter, but in Flight Patterns, both become public), the act of addressing is a rhetorical performance, or performance of rhetoric, for the ways in which language, given the public and private nature of Jahoda’s Flight Patterns, both demarcate and blurs the boundaries of self and other. Creating a “hyperbolic example” of the disciplinary differences between Performance and Rhetoric to exaggerate and make their point, the editors of a special issue on performance and rhetoric in Text and Performance Quarterly, Mindy Fenske and Dustin Bradley Goltz explain the difference between performance and rhetoric as, respectively, “a conspicuous aesthetic display” and “a textual phenomenon,” but note the problems with this demarcation: If “performance” is understood as simply a conspicuous aesthetic display, it is reduced to being an object of inquiry and loses its conceptual power. Conversely, when “rhetoric” is approached as a textual phenomenon, this necessarily undercuts its capacity to explain non- or extra-textual phenomena. (Fenske and Goltz 4) While the special issue on performance and rhetoric deals more explicitly with the doing of interdisciplinary scholarship, that is, focusing on the need and difficulty of interdisciplinarity between performance and rhetoric scholarship, the co-mingling of the subject matters of performance studies and rhetoric—admitted-simply stated (above) as “aesthetic display” and “textual phenomenon,” respectively—is key to both reading/interpreting specifically Jahoda’s Flight Patterns. Jahoda’s piece explores how questions of performance and rhetoric overlap when it comes to presenting texts as art to be viewed by the public—that is, the “aesthetic display” of a “textual phenomenon.” Jahoda’s “text” is a series of private letters, but on “aesthetic display” and open for public interpretation. Jahoda’s Flight Patterns shows how, in the porous private and public spheres, language is used by a “Trickster” to navigate the borders of public and private and of textual phenomena and aesthetic displays to essentially demonstrate that rhetoric and performance are two sides of the same coin. Anticipating both the ability to digitalize almost anything and the omnipresent nature of social media which yield almost no difference between private forms of writing and public performances of the self, on one hand, possessing the power of the Trickster to

Lingual problems

93

navigate this porous space with the creative tactful language yields exciting possibilities and new-found control over one’s identity. On the other hand, if one does not have the ability (whether due to natural and/or social constraints) to operate like a trickster, then one enters a dangerous space without a means to control one’s identity, lessening one’s ability to maintain a dividing line between self and other. To further the goals of the abovementioned Special Issue of bridging the rhetoric (textual)-performance (aesthetic display) divide and exploring modes of interdisciplinarity, Jahoda’s Flight Patterns exposes the very inadequacy of scholarly either/or models to study “aesthetic display” and “textual phenomenon,” providing a key case study that requires—as Tami Spry, Marla Kanengieter, and Daniel Wildeson advocate—transcending the limits of “Dame Rhetoric” and “Outlaw Performance” (91). Due to the now-dominance of the digital domain and our ability to digitalize practically everything, Jahoda’s piece presciently presents a case study where this either/ or approach to art/literature/theatre/performance criticism neither adequately describes our art (broadly defined) nor describes art that reflects our new reality of the digital age. Following Spry, Kanengieter, and Wildeson’s above charge, one must understand that “possibility and positionality”—the title of their article—is not just a plea to ease the academic rigidity of the text-performance dichotomy but is also a reflection of what art (very broadly defined) can, and already does, do. In this vein, Jahoda’s piece metaphorically suggests and foreshadows that the only differences between public and private, between language and performance, and between self and other are a couple of folds, or more maybe even more appropriately, simply unfolding for all to see. Now consider the analog information internetwork, a century-old combination of character-transmission telegraph, voice-transmission telephone, and physicaltransport Post Office networks. Although these different technological systems were each built upon specialized electromechanical devices, all three worked together in many unrecognized ways. The fact that a telegram sold by the telegraph network could be shepherded by messengers through the other two networks on its way to the addressee is but one example of how the telegraph, telephone, and postal system constituted a multimodal information internetwork that began and ended with messengers but encompassed a variety of technologies, commodities, and institutions in between. A useful way to begin to think about these two internetworks is to use the technological systems framework, which treats individual technologies—whether physical devices or scripted procedures—not in isolation but together in the service of larger goals. Historians using this framework have convincingly shown how the resulting large-scale arrangements of technologies emerge through a historically specific process of competition, compromise, and happenstance. This process has been variously labeled the “social shaping” or “social construction” of technology, which simply means that the specific kinds of technological infrastructures that result are

94 Lingual problems

neither preordained by the technology itself nor free of the material constraints of the physical and chemical properties of matter, but are instead a compromise between technological possibility and societal action--even if in many cases those actions are carried out by a relatively small and elite segment of society. I know very little about the flight strategies of birds. For example, how do birds decide whether to ignore topographic features or follow them? —Greg Downey, “Virtual Webs, Physical Technologies, and Hidden Workers” (213–215) —Agnes, “July 26, 2001” from “Flight Patterns” The word “envelope” comes from the French enveloppe, adapted from the modern French word for “envelop,” envelopper. Its Old French predecessors come through the Provencal envolupar and enveloper. Made up of the French prefix en-, meaning “in,” and two Romanic bases of obscure origin, volup- and vilup- (possibly from the Middle English wlappen, meaning “to wrap,” from an altered form of wrap), which are cognate with the Italian viluppo, meaning “bundle,” envelop, and therefore envelope, mean “in bundle” or “in wrap” (OED). This essay concerns itself with the performance of borders that are “in bundle” or “in wrap.” To unwrap this idea, it might be productive to follow a slight tangent. The postcard offers a variation of an open envelope. There is obviously no interior or exterior, however, there is a decided front and back. Though totally ‘open’ to unintended eyes, the postcard does have a public side (the picture) and a private side (the writing). Granted, the private side of a postcard is not necessarily private, in the sense of the word that only the intended reader may read it, but there is a shared specificity between writer and intended reader that cloaks the openness of the writing. Whereas the picture on the postcard needs (sometimes) very little contextualization to, at least, be enjoyed by the casual onlooker, the missing contextualization of shared experience can leave the unintended reader feeling as though he or she is missing something. In that sense, a postcard still contains an amount of privacy. Nonetheless, partly due to its very low cost, the postcard opens (or opened) the world up to a great influx of private conversations that could be consumed by the public. However, because of the very public and private nature of the postcard, a different side of specificity comes under attack: Yoke-Sum Wong writes, “A world in which communication is universally possible is a world in which not much can be said with specificity, and even less with grace, consistency, or sophistication” (Wong 334). Though the writing may be less specific, the vague nature of unspecificity (a strain of universality) reveals so little detail about those in conversation (the writer and intended reader) that the postcard is effectively entirely private. The intermingling of public and private create, not necessarily a simpler form than the letter, but one that is, in some ways, more complex. Hosea speaks to this very notion of the public and private intermingling on a postcard in his abovementioned piece, “What Do You Feel?”:

Lingual problems

95

I thought of, and still think of What Do You Feel? as an experiment. I didn’t know what I was hoping to accomplish or demonstrate at the start of the project, and still don’t. I had some ideas. I hoped to work my way back to a more polite, neutral, and bland approach to meeting strangers, and to demonstrate to myself that I was capable of a kind of professionalism in art making that I hadn’t tested, to the same degree, by writing and reading poems. But beyond that it was a mystery to me. It remains, I suppose, a kind of prayer in that the majority of the cards go unanswered. So it is a kind of supplication, I guess. Although it was recently reported that US spy agencies have sophisticated mail reading technology, so that in a sense “closed” forms like handwritten letters are quite open for certain individuals, it’s true that there is something about the postcard that is particularly open, available to anyone who might pick it up. Postcard writers are always writing for more than one audience, in a sense, and they can’t quite ever be sure which people will form that audience. So you get a kind of generic, often enthusiastic, summing up. Beyond which, of course, I publish the postcards on my website, so subjects are aware that they will have an audience of some size, an audience that is anonymous. However, it is interesting for me to see how some subjects try to subvert this flattening-out effect by deploying personal (even quite personal) information. Some of cards could just as well have been sent to Dear Abby. Which, I suppose, is a way of being private in public, which is part of the interest of advice columns, that they teach us how to parse our most private worries acceptably. They prune or edit down our lamentations. With a few important exceptions, I view all of the language on the cards as impersonal, in that as part of the series what is personal about them is stretched thin, leaving one more blot in a long swatch of language. Taken collectively, the cards are personal, in that they might say something about New York City, viewed as a golem, perhaps. But one by one, individually, they look to me like more and more delicious sausage links. I really enjoy getting them. If I often photograph them against reproductions of famous works of art, it is because I see the cards as phrases in some vast, collective wall text. I think any language which will conduce toward group action and group change must draw equally, perhaps, on the personal and impersonal. So in a sense I am simply the custodian of these postcards, a municipal worker for a bureau to come. (Hosea, Interview) And, further, Wong notes the fragmentation that the postcard elicited: The postcard rendered an empire [Britain] as fragments. Consider how fragments manifest themselves, interlacing the universe of everyday lives—whole intricate worlds, circles otherwise closed to view, are presented in extract for those who do not take to adventuring, laboring over hard languages, making friends and enemies, learning to “follow”

96 Lingual problems

what is said and what is done. Hindu temples, pyramids, medieval castles, wild game, rattan baskets, and scantily clad peoples lay alongside the tea cozies in Victorian or Edwardian front rooms and parlors and were displayed and passed around, pasted randomly or categorically in a scrapbook or by themselves, evoking myriad responses from gasps to sighs, from giggles to outrage, from a brief comment to a less brief discussion—and, often enough, a complete lack of interest. (Wong 356) The postcard, thus, encouraged and encourages a, sometimes unintended, cultural pastiche. The public form of private writing creates/ed a reliance on the picture to mediate the public and private conversation. Again, the lack of specificity only made/makes the possession of private experiences that much more necessary. Like an ‘inside joke,’ only those who share the same experiences and knowledge will fully understand it. The postcard, then, ‘speaks’ like the Signifying Monkey. In his oft-quoted chapter, “The Blackness of Blackness: A Critique on the Sign and the Signifying Monkey,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. calls the Signifying Monkey, “he who dwells at the margins of discourse, ever punning, ever troping, ever embodying the ambiguities of language” (Gates 904). Occupying a liminal space in language, the Signifying Monkey—an archetypal signifier in black mythology, most well known in Yoruba mythology as Esu-Elegbara— subverts hegemony by reworking the very same hegemonic norms (of language). Known as a trickster, the Signifying Monkey is “guardian of the crossroads”: “These trickster figures, aspects of Esu, are primarily mediators: as tricksters they are mediators, and their mediations are tricks” (Gates 904). This space of the crossroads, then, becomes the threshold of unstable interpretation. As “Esu is the Black Interpreter, the Yoruba god of indeterminacy” (Gates 905), the postcard is the indeterminate signified that ‘embodies the ambiguities of language.’ Where language works by invoking the referentially specific, the postcard (for all except one) plays off of unspecificity. Why Jahoda invokes the Yoruban trickster is because in the trope of the Signifying Monkey, what the trickster specifically does is reinvent the private uses of language in the face of a vast public, creating a liminal space of private interpretation. In the same manner, in Jahoda’s Flight Patterns, she unfolded the envelopes in a number of ways to make them ‘postcards’: namely, displaying torn open envelopes; letters addressed to the ambiguous “A.”; and accompanying the letters with a picture. However, the presence of the envelope highlights the dual public-private nature of, not just the postcard, but of writing and communication in general. The envelope invokes a public transfer of private communication that, in this case, negates itself with its return: remaining entirely private, shared with nobody. But Jahoda’s impulse to reveal the utterly private to the public reveals how little she has given up. There is a unique ‘intersection’ between specificity and lack of it, and place and placelessness. Occupying this unique ‘space’ of place and placelessness is the messenger: Esu-

Lingual problems

97

Elegbara. Appearing in six of her letters, Esu-Elegbara weaves in and out. “Stepping out of the offices of GEO Information and Mapping,” EsuElegbara—an anagram of the female letter writer, A. Bela-Gera—functions like a “letter carrier” (a postman), or rather, he is a ‘carrier’ of ‘envelopes.’ The word “carry” has its origins in the Latin carricare, meaning “load.” Though carricare was first adopted by Old French to form charchier and chargier, which would eventually take form to become “charge,” it later became carier and charier (also in Old French) used in the sense of “transport in a cart.” In modern English, “carry” has two main divisions: one of which is where ‘removal,’ ‘transport,’ or ‘motion’ serves as the underlying notion behind the meaning of the word; the second of which is where ‘support’ serves as the principal notion (OED). In this sense, as a ‘carrier’ of ‘envelopes,’ EsuElegbara both ‘bears’ what is ‘in wrap’ and is an agent of motion and transference; in this guise, he performs how language can be carried across borders or dwell within them. *** A swan rose from the waters off a lake. Its neck, the trickster noticed, was pink as the single magnolia blossom on a nearby tree. Esu-Elegbara entered the mind of the flying bird and saw a map of a city spread below. —Agnes, “July 13, 2001” The photograph that accompanies the letter and envelope for “July 13, 2001,” and thus begins Flight Patterns, is a black-and-white photograph of an origamiesque swan (or another type of bird of the same physical stature). What is striking about this photograph is not the almost-stark white contrasting against the deep black background, but the subtle creases of the bird’s midsection and the gaping hole under that midsection where the bird’s innards should be found. What holds the head and tail, which appears to be one long piece, to the wings, which sit on top of the body of the swan? How does the body of the swan ‘carry’ the wings, which appear to be unattached and merely resting on the body? Paper-folding, or origami, works by the same following principles as language. The first objection to this argument may be that paper folding is not quite an arbitrary science (if we can call it that, though there are many manuals of standardized instruction). However, like the Saussurean onomatopoeia, and like language, paper-folding “is only the approximate imitation, already partly conventionalized.” (Saussure 69). Paper-folding—again, like language—is a suggestion, a referential approximation that requires a certain amount of shared specificity. Beginning with a flat piece of paper, each fold, each crease brings about some meaning lost and some meaning gained: simultaneous stability and instability are stable constants. Likewise, a border is a crease made by language. The idea of a border, and the act of naming it, requires (though not sonorously, but logically) a referential approximation of an understood, or explainable reality that also requires a shared specificity of not just the ‘border,’ but the surroundings.

98 Lingual problems

Therefore, being “at a juncture, an intersection” is being at a place of linguistic power ( Jahoda July 13). It is quite empowering to be able to crease language, to give shape to what appears un-shapeable. But it is a burden, ‘a load,’ fraught with, ultimately, responsibility. Thus, it must be Esu-Elegbara who mediates this power. For language is something slightly out of the control of humans. Though humans may have created language, language shapes how humans think. There is something mystical, but also disfiguring about having power over and within language. In “Yoruba mythology, Esu always limps because his legs are of different lengths: one is anchored in the realm of the gods, and the other rests in this human world” (Gates 905). But it takes one who understands disfiguration to be able to transubstantiate and understand the intricate folds and borders that shape our reality: “Esu-Elegbara entered the mind of the flying bird and saw a map of a city spread below.” Jahoda’s winged Esu-Elegbara—whose Esu comes even closer to the winged Greek god, Hermes (whose “role as interpreter lent his name to ‘hermeneutics’”), than the Esu that Henry Louis Gates, Jr. describes—must take flight. Esu-Elegbara can only understand reality while he is in motion. Similarly, borders can only really be understood when they are crossed and experienced from both sides. Geography, then, with its geological foundations, gives artists a language with which to understand a reality grounded in place: An uncanny similarity is emerging between the evolution of certain kinds of art work and the process of geological formation. Geological strata are formed in a two part process: sedimentation, or the depositing of material, followed by the folding process that fuses the material into a stable and functional structure. This stratification process has been described like this: “Strata … consist of imprisoning intensities or singularities into systems of resonance and redundancy. Strata are acts of capture … they proceed simultaneously by code and territoriality.” (Ritchie 53) Thus, when Esu-Elegbara emerges “out of the offices of GEO Information and Mapping,” he is ready to deliver the folds to humans; he ‘carries envelopes’ that “fuse the material into a stable and functional structure” through language: for “[Esu] is known as the divine linguist, the keeper of ase (logos) with which Olodumare created the universe” (Gates 905). *** Jahoda’s “July 21, 2001” letter sticks out among the rest for its strength of narrative, overall beauty of language, and its thematic depth, especially in its handling of borders. The letter begins with its normal address to “A” and a question: “Have you ever been inside one of those elegant apartment buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?” With this question, Agnes then describes a foreign world that few are privileged to inhabit. She writes to “A” that her reason for going was an interview for a job as a freelance editor. She had to

Lingual problems

99

knock on the door, as there was no doorbell. A man, who Agnes described as possessing “a grayness, like a prisoner in need of a change of air,” undid the deadbolt and opened the door. Agnes followed the man in and was offered a chair, to which she replied that she would rather stand. She asked whether the man-made his living as a writer, and he said “sometimes” and then he lit a cigarette. There is a cool distance in this opening. The elegance, perhaps the plush environment that we expect to encounter, is instead cloaked in “a grayness.” Agnes seems to have stepped into a jail, having followed a “prisoner” into an apartment “deadbolt[ed]” to the world. However, the conversation between the man and Agnes sounds awkward, more for Agnes than for the man. The events and even the tone of Agnes’ account to “A” suddenly change when Agnes’ impulse, rather than her polite performance, takes over: I stepped backwards onto a pile of crumpled papers, my shoe leaving an imprint across a number of sheets. The man turned his head, exhaled, and then flicked some ash into a saucer. I bent down, intending to straighten the papers but, instead, picked up a sheet, and read in a whisper. “I took the bird by its neck and squeezed hard. Its breath came in short bursts. A heat from its swelling breast warmed my palm. Its death was repulsive.” The man smiled and said that he had an interest in ornithology, that he wrote about flight strategies in his free time. “Actually,” he continued, I’m an engineer, specializing in invisible fencing for border territories.” ( Jahoda July 21) ‘Enclosure’ defines the actions and desires, at least associated with, the engineer. Not all folds are healthy and productive. With the image of the bird being strangled in the tightening grip of the warm palm, we see the destructive nature of the border. He studies, not birds, but “ornithology”: he studies the study of birds. As a branch of zoology, ornithology is interested in the classification of creatures within this category. Foucault discussed time and time again how medicalization and classification were both productive and dangerous; Zen Buddhism says that if you name something, you destroy it. The engineer specializes in “invisible fencing for border territories.” Thus, he specializes in that which masks its own power. Though the engineer clearly desired control, it was an error, however, that allowed Agnes and this man to connect and produce a smile. Up to the point where Agnes stepped on the piece of paper, the introductions, pleasantries, and start of the interview had a ‘scripted’ feel, and we know, like the bird gasping for breath, the engineer was “in need of a change of air.” It was at the moment of ‘improvisation’ that the strictures relaxed; it was at that moment that the engineer smiled. The letter concludes: “This is a city of electronic signals that causes birds in flight to lose direction” ( Jahoda, July 21). We know that the birds are displaced and may be lost, and we must pity that our human interference caused

100

Lingual problems

this, but we may also smile, for even the birds will now get their moment of improvisation.

Conclusion: performing language in public/private: performing ourselves I’m doing this essay because I want an opportunity to explain myself uninterrupted. I don’t want anyone thinking: He and Erik Spoelstra didn’t get along. … He and Riles didn’t get along. … The Heat couldn’t put the right team together. That’s absolutely not true. I’m not having a press conference or a party. After this, it’s time to get to work. Last night Esu-Elegbara came to me as a birdman, carrying a book of empty pages. Placing the book in my hands, he told me to collect all my memories, envision them as unidentifiable landscapes, and walk without origin or destination. Then he said, “When you have finished your journey, return the book to me.” —LeBron James, “I’m Coming Home” —Agnes, “August 4, 2001” Given the rise of both private and/or public communication over the past decade-plus through a largely public forum—social media via the internet—Lacan’s description of the mirror stage, his analysis of a child’s first recognition of himself or herself in a mirror and misinterpreting his or her own individuality, is extremely applicable here. With language we try to right/ write our earlier misinterpretation (think of James’ letter) by reifying our boundaries through an “address”: for example, “you,” “Joe,” “Mr. Smith,” “Mom,” etc. and referring to ourselves as “me” or “I,” or by our own names. Suzanne M. Daughton and Nathan P. Stucky, in the same abovementioned special issue on “Performance and Rhetoric” in Text and Performance Quarterly, reiterate Mary Frances HopKins’ concern about the “facile construction of rhetoric as performance,” especially in relation to the misinformation surrounding the similarities and difference between performance and Austin’s performatives, by suggesting that performance can be a rhetorical event and act (120). The “address” (e.g., as above, “you,” “Dad,” “me,” “Mrs. Jones,” etc.)—thought of both literally and figuratively as a performance and as a rhetorical event and act, in the vein of Daughton and Stucky—is a performative, the notion of which J. L. Austin elucidated in order to refute (logical positivists) that a statement is necessarily either true or false, but can, in fact, be neither true nor false, instead performing something or performing some action. In this case, it is through this process of “addressing” that we, in a sense, dub ourselves “me” or “I” or dub others as “not me.” What we dub (what is performed) in an address is not the giving out of a name, but the statement of “address” is/becomes an affirmation and/or construction of identity, or

Lingual problems 101

identities (in relation to ourselves): an “address” is, thus, a rhetorical performance, or performance of rhetoric. Thus, everything about the letter form encourages an address: an envelope needs both an address where the letter will be sent and a return address, demarcating a division of place, and the letter needs an address to the person to whom you are writing—for example, “Dear A,”—and an addressing of yourself—your own name, for example, “Agnes.” These ‘addresses,’ meant to denote where your body, personality, and personal experience end and another’s begin, are made through language: made in a common language that both parties must be able to understand. But as Jahoda makes clear in Flight Patterns, our own ‘addresses’ are uninhabitable: we occupy an “unknown address.” We speak to each other in the crossroads, in an indeterminate place where only Esu can reside. Language creates untrue borders that isolate individuals in their bodies: “A” is distinct from “Agnes.” But as Jahoda already suggested, “This is a city of electronic signals that causes birds in flight to lose direction.” The public, ambiguous “A” is a facet of Anges’ private self, forged, ultimately, from the same letters, words, phrases, sentences, and definitions. With language, as Flight Patterns suggests, as well as in LeBron James’ recent open letter, we do not reinscribe our distinct borders, again reifying our original misinterpretation, rather, we enter the crossroads between the public and the private (a space much more understandable and much more commonly experienced in the second decade of this century than in 2001). We enter the juncture where we share our own indeterminacy and finally connect and conjoin to another human being. But we must also ‘carry’ our own private—what is “in wrap”—in public: we must speak to others in order to speak to ourselves. We send out letters (and messages and Facebook posts and Instagram pictures) that we know will never be received: from and to addresses that do not really exist. Yet we do this because of our original misinterpretation. We spend our entire lives using language to try to enter the space of the trickster, so that we too may become disfigured, folded and unfolded as we so desire, with ‘one leg anchored in the realm of the gods, and the other rest[ing] in this human world.’ Only then will we feel comfortable in our space at the crossroads when we interpret our indeterminacy correctly. P.S. Unbeknownst to me when I originally wrote most of what became this chapter, which first appeared as an article in 2016, Chris Hosea met his now-wife, Lillian Tong, via Hosea’s “What do you Feel?” postcard project.

(POST/TRANS)SCRIPT “What do you Feel?”… Now By Chris Hosea and Lillian Tong

102

Lingual problems

Recording a brief conversation about Chris Hosea, What do you feel? (2012–2016) on Sunday, June 16, 2019. At 1 pm. In Brooklyn, NY the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Chris Hosea: Lillian Tong: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT:

CH:

LT: CH:

I wanted to ask you how you felt when you moved to the Upper East Side. I don’t know if I remember how I felt. It was more interesting than Roosevelt Island, which was where I stayed before. What was interesting about it? Because Roosevelt Island is just so boring. So just the contrast. Yeah. On the Upper East Side, how far did you live from the Metropolitan Museum of Art? I would say it was a fifteen-minute walk. Did you go there often? Probably not often enough, considering how close it was. What kind of feeling do you get from the space in the Metropolitan Museum? It feels very grand, overpowering, very beautiful, like a church of art. I know what you mean. It’s so big and ornate and massive. Honey, can I interrupt? Sure. Can we have a normal conversation? I feel like we don’t normally talk like this. Really? Yeah. Maybe I am aware that we’re being recorded. I think so, and it makes sense, because we are. But I feel like you are, you know, how you are when you read poetry. You’re performing. You are talking like yourself, but you are also performing. I’m not saying that’s not good. That might be very good. But I feel like we can try to have a conversation that’s just like how we talk, day-to-day. All right. I’m willing to try that. I guess I’m aware that I am making a document. So maybe you’re right. Maybe I am going into this more performative mode. Well, how would we talk normally? I think when you try to perform you have a certain agenda. It might be more interesting to have a conversation where you don’t know where it will go. Also it might not be great. Maybe it would be easier if you take the lead, because I might be more inclined to have an agenda.

Lingual problems 103

LT: CH: LT:

CH: LT: CH: LT: CH: LT: CH:

LT:

CH:

Okay. Should we start another recording or keep it going. Keep it rolling? Yeah, keep it rolling, why not? Okay. I guess the reason why we’re sitting on the couch right now with the recorder on is that your friend Michael earlier this year asked you to include one of our conversations in his book. How do you feel about that? I feel good. I’m a little bit apprehensive, because I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to say. I think it’s interesting the way we met. When Michael included your project last time, was that before we met or was it after? It was before I met you. It sounds like this conversation might be an interesting continuation of his first inclusion of What do you feel? Yes, I think that’s part of his intention. So what do you think of this “Part II?” How would you describe that? I may start to sound like I’m being interviewed. I feel like the fact that I met you through What do you feel? was really wonderful but it also created issues for my project. Because when I was handing out the postcards I wasn’t interested in really meeting people. I was doing this project as a way to put myself out there and to feel more bold and to feel visible in a public space and to address strangers. Having given out about 2,000 postcards at that point, roughly, I really was still going through my project and was feeling that I had distance from it. I felt that in meeting you, and the fact that we had a relationship and then got married, that put such an overwhelming focus on the end of the project. It seemed like our connection was the reason for the project. I think because we met through your project as two strangers, and we ended up getting married, and shortly after that you kind of stopped that project, I think that does kind of shift the purpose, or seeming shift the purpose of the project. But also, the interesting thing about performance art is that you can design it. But it can might shift as things go. The project meant a lot to me. I spent a lot of days going out and handing out postcards. I always felt like I was a conduit. Because I wasn’t really talking to people much. I felt I was in between people, their feelings, and the motion of postcards. One of the things about you that really cut through my understanding of the project, and maybe made it much more difficult for me, was that you were willing to write me a letter. You were the first person to write me a letter.

104

LT:

CH:

LT:

CH:

LT:

CH:

LT:

Lingual problems

I think, to be fair, what happened was that I received the postcard from you, which you had handed me outside of the Metropolitan Museum. I hardly remembered what you looked like. I saw the postcard with the question What do you feel? on it. I shared my feeling at the moment. But I also asked you another question in response: Why are you doing this project? Your letter answering that question is the first point of the interaction between us. And you clearly told me why you were doing the project. I think that was really fascinating to me at the moment. That’s true. You didn’t initially write me a letter. But you were the first person to include their address on the postcard. You were the first person to directly ask a question back and ask me to write back to you. When you asked me what I was doing, that was very exciting to me. Honestly, I felt anxious. Because I didn’t really know why I was doing the project. But you had a lengthy answer. I was really surprised because I thought either I won’t hear back from the artist for various reasons. You don’t have to answer my question. Or, I thought I would get back another postcard as a response. Your letter was a really pleasant surprise because I felt impressed that you took my question very seriously and you also were very serious about your project. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about my reasons for doing the project very much before I got your postcard. When I was answering your question, I was trying to understand for myself what the project meant. I wanted to give the best answer that I could. I kept on trying to figure it out and write that to you. It think that’s great. I didn’t know that. I mean, I really didn’t know. This is the first time I’ve heard that piece of information. I thought you had thought it over and you were just describing it in the letter. I think if I had thought it through the letter would have been shorter and it would have been clearer. I hadn’t written an artist’s statement. I was thinking more about other postcard projects like Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you (1970–1971). The end of the project came with your question. It’s not so much that you’re the person that I fell in love with and who I got married to. That’s much, much more important than any project. It might be I started to understand the reasons for What do you feel? because of you. You were asking very persistently: What is the purpose of this? And I started to wonder, you know, what is the purpose of this? What am I doing? That was productive for me. I have to say I’m really happy to hear that. To know that my question was helpful.

Lingual problems 105

CH: LT:

There’s this feeling that I didn’t really complete the thought that I had started with the project, years before. I just don’t need to. It just occurred to me that the reason we met, for both of us, is very authentic and true to each of us. My first impression of you is your project. The question What do you feel? speaks to you as a poet a lot, and how you did the project in such a personal way. I think that’s very you. And my asking you, What’s the purpose, is also very me in that I do like to ask direct questions that might lead to unexpected responses. That might be why we’re in love.

Notes 1 In 2014, On Kawara passed away. Kawara was known for thinking about time, and two of his most famous works that contemplate the passage and marking of time are particularly relevant to this essay. Starting in 1970 and sending his last telegram in 2000, just a few years before Western Union stopped its telegram service, Kawara composed his piece “I Am Still Alive,” dispatching about 900 telegrams with the simple message, “I am still alive.” Kawara’s “I Got Up” is another art project that is composed of a collection of thousands of postcards postmarked from 1968 to 1979, many sent to his friend and artist, John Baldessari, that simply stated “I got up,” with an accompanying time stamp marking the time he awoke that particular morning. The Guggenheim Museum is exhibiting the work of Kawara in 2015. 2 Exhibiting also in 2015 in New York City, and influenced by Kawara’s “I Got Up,” the still-ongoing three-year project, entitled “What Do You Feel?,” by Chris Hosea—whose 2014 book of poetry, Put Your Hands In, won the prestigious Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets in 2013, judged that year by John Ashbery—appeared as a part of a larger exhibition of Hosea’s work at the Transmitter Gallery throughout the month of July 2015. Hosea collects and displays the postcards he receives in the mail after he approaches strangers and gives them a stamped and self-addressed postcard with just the question, “WHAT DO YOU FEEL?” Hosea’s primary means of making the postcards public before his 2015 exhibit was, and continues to be, via his website, http://chrishosea.com, and public posts of the returned postcards on his Facebook page. Thus, “What Do You Feel?” is composed on a now-almost outdated mode of communication, the postcard, but is presented (to the majority of people who have and will encounter the project) via two 21st century modes of communication: a personal website and public posts on Facebook. 3 In 2010, LeBron James, the NBA basketball superstar, appeared in the ESPN feature presentation, “The Decision.” Drawing nearly ten million viewers (nielsen.com), the live announcement filled, with circus theatrics (i.e., dramatic lighting and pyrotechnics), immediately rocked the internet and Twitterverse. The theatricality of “The Decision” (along with his [often-perceived as pompous] proclamation, “I’m bringing my talents to South Beach”) was to blame for a great deal of the criticism surrounding James’ announcement that as a free agent, he was leaving his hometown team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, to join forces and create a “Big Three” for the Miami Heat. The form of this announcement probably should not have come as that much of a surprise given that the very economy of professional basketball is entertainment, with its performers and viewers: the higher the theatrics, drama, and story, generally the higher the viewership and the greater the flow of dollars. But it was the public interpretation of this televised event, “The Decision,” that turned LeBron into a

106

Lingual problems

“villain,” as he commonly came to be known.Thus, it was in this context that LeBron James, finding himself, again, a free agent, wrote an essay in a summer 2014 issue of Sports Illustrated—one of the most hallowed and traditional journalistic outlets for sports coverage and commentary—concerning his decision to return home to play for Cleveland. In such contrast to his earlier “Decision,” the essay is essentially a personal letter (in part to himself and) to his entire hometown (and to the world). James’ open letter, as privately told to someone at Sport Illustrated, but addressed to nobody in particular within the magazine’s front and back cover, and its written form and its perceived initial success, being well received in the media, in such stark contrast to the 2010 television special.

8

Emotional problems Breathing in Maria Irene Fornes’ “sharper air” in her “PAJ plays”

It is often presumed that viewers process either an emotional response or an intellectual response to the performance. However, Maria Irene Fornes creates a theatre, especially in her so-called “PAJ Plays,” that can blend the seemingly incompatible theatres of Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht to heighten the effect of both. The use of palpable energy and emotional heartbreak allows a cathartic experience for actors, but the audience finds themselves in a pressure cooker with no release, except to change the very conditions that are re­ sponsible for the heartbreak. In this way, Fornes uses emotion to heighten an intellectual response to the viewer.

The presumption Emotional and intellectual theatre are more-or-less incompatible. Antonin Artaud and Bertolt Brecht are, largely, thought to sit on opposite sides of the spectrum.

The performance Maria Irene Fornes’ The Conduct of Life (1985) follows Orlando, an army torturer, who keeps, and constantly rapes, 12-year-old Nena in his basement, despite his wife’s knowledge of this. The visceral and palpable violence increases, too, heading toward the vicious end of the play: when Leticia (Orlando’s wife) shoots Orlando and then places the gun in Nena’s hands.

The problems with the presumption In a 2002 article in The Brooklyn Rail, Michelle Memran sums up Maria Irene Fornes’ work via Tony Kushner, who writes, “Every time I listen to Fornes, or read or see one of her plays, I feel this: she breathes, has always breathed, a finer, purer, sharper air.”1 This observation by Kushner took me aback, as every time I encounter Fornes’ work (in a book, classroom, or the theatre), I find that I do not breathe. Of course, Kushner is talking about Fornes

108

Emotional problems

(the person, the playwright, and the director) and I am talking about me (as a reader, professor, and audience member). I think, maybe, this dynamic is due to the fact that I am breathing in Fornes’ air, a “shaper air,” that I—and I suspect most others—simply cannot handle. Sally Porterfield has suggested that Fornes’ dark characters and Porterfield specifies Orlando from The Conduct of Life, “allowed Fornes to make peace once more with her own darkness,” and further suggests that the audience must also do the same and own their own darker aspects.2 Fornes, as Porterfield notes, was cognizant of the “painful emotional states” she, as a playwright and a director, put the actors in.3 Realizing that these states became something cathartic for the actor, Fornes said, “I felt you could poison your emotional system with such things, but it doesn’t work that way.”4 It makes perfect sense how an actor, performing in a Fornes play, particularly in a play like The Conduct of Life discussed by Porterfield above, can experience cath­ arsis. However, I think a successful production of, say, The Conduct of Life, withholds that experience from the audience. As Susan Sontag has called Fornes’ theatre “a theatre of heartbreak,”5 it is important to hone in on the physical and emotional experience of heartbreak: heartbreak is decidedly not cathartic. Heartbreak gives no release and leaves one with a lump in one’s throat that only dissipates because of the passage of time. Therefore, while Fornes correctly observes how acting in one of her plays is cathartic, the au­ dience longs/yearns for release after getting only heartbreak, and the question for this talk is, to what effect does create these opposing experiences of release for the actor and the audience have? As a writer/director herself, Fornes provides a clue to future directors on directing her work through a recollection of how she directed Sheila Dabney, playing Nena, in the original 1985 production of The Conduct of Life, when Dabney was having trouble with the gut-wrenching speech where Nena describes to Olimpia why Orlando beats her: …Fornes suddenly knew that she had to make the experience physical. She told the actor, who shells beans during the speech, to squeeze the bean tightly and then press into her finger with a fingernail. “This produces a kind of painful energy, up the arms, around the back and down the other hand, like an electric current.”6 Fornes’ plays demand a certain masochism, and it is the physical pain and energy that produces the very energy that then is released for the pleasure of release. But a director cannot merely think about masochism, as witnessing masochistic acts does not necessarily lead a viewer to experience the feeling of withholding release. Yolanda Manora has argued that in A Vietnamese Wedding, Fornes destroys the fourth wall by putting the voyeur, the audience, in the shoes of the entire family, allowing the audience to interrogate both cultural and gendered sub­ jectivities.7 I do not disagree with Manora and her assessment, which can be

Emotional problems 109

quite easily extended to much of Fornes’ work in the more generallymetaphorical (not literal) sense, but I think the frame is much more complex than in, what Manora suggests, is the “absurdist, meta-theatrical fashion.”8 But unlike being put in the characters’ shoes in A Vietnamese Wedding, the audi­ ence in The Conduct of Life is left witnessing a horror that they can do nothing about. Any sense of agency is entirely withheld from the audience. The audience is silenced, witnessing a horror that the audience members cannot stop that befalls on “The Innocent” (named as such by Cummings). Building off Manora’s suggestion of Fornes’ “absurdist” leaning, given the similarity with the narrative structure of absurd plays, which will be explained in more detail later, how and why does Fornes’ “PAJ plays” feel so different? In discussing the legacy of absurdist theatre (a theatrical “movement” that one could argue Fornes might have been a part of but was certainly influenced by), elsewhere I suggest that one of the innovations of absurd theatre is that the audience often experiences the exact same emotions as the characters in viewing an absurd play; this is in contrast to theatrical realism, where the audience responds to the characters’ situation.9 For example, in Eugene O’Neill’s “Sea Plays,” while the characters feel trapped by the sea and their situation, the audience does not feel trapped, and this contrasts to how Vladimir and Estragon and the audience all experience the same feeling and sensation of waiting.10 But Fornes does something entirely different than theatrical realism or absurd theatre: essentially, the actors, themselves, experience release while the audience members are left yearning for release.

The proposal Scott T. Cummings has called Maria Irene Fornes’ The Danube, Mud, Sarita, and The Conduct of Life her “PAJ plays,” and describes them as the point in Fornes’ career where her “playwriting and directing were virtually inseparable and equally precise.”11 This precision led to a “principle of compression,” making Fornes’ theatre “more rigorous and more demanding, for actors and audiences alike…” as “these plays present characters in the midst of an ordeal that is both physical and spiritual…”12 Cummings argues that despite Fornes’ continued experimentation, by the early 1980s Fornes’ plays began to feature a host of common, reoccurring elements and themes (80). In 1982, The Danube premiered and Fornes won an Obie for “Sustained Achievement” (her fourth). The year 1984 brought the awarding of her fifth and sixth Obies for directing and playwriting for The Danube, Mud, and Sarita. In 1985, Fornes won the Obie for Best New American Play for The Conduct of Life. And concluding this remarkable stretch, the 1986 publication of these four aforementioned plays by the book publisher, PAJ Publications—in conjunction with scholars writing about her plays and an increase in the production of her plays by university theatres and Off-off-type theatre companies—introduced Fornes to a wider audience than in just New York City theatre circles (Cummings 96). It can be argued, then, that with these four plays, Fornes found her unique voice and

110

Emotional problems

style, on that the publisher of the PAJ Plays, Bonnie Marranca, called “a new language of dramatic realism.”13 Much of the power, pressure, and build-up found in a Fornes play, I argue, is due to her use of what I call the “Fornesian Pause”: a space, place, and pace that is full of potential for a director, the actors, and the crew, but one that should engender a violent unease for the audience. However, this build-up of energy in the PAJ Plays is much like the same instinctual energy that Antonin Artaud wants released through theatre, which creates such tension for the audience that the emotional journey yields quite a similar result in Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre. That is, while the Brechtian technique exists to keep the emotions at bay so those thoughts on improving social conditions could stay at the forefront, the Fornesian plot line that features Fornesian pauses ultimately accomplishes much the same thing, as the audience must discuss how one is to get rid of the violent unease that has built-up. For a theatre audience, their only resort is to run away from the theatrical pressure cooker, stream out of the aisles, thinking and talking. In The Conduct of Life, the most visceral of her PAJ Plays, Fornes creates a distinctly “Fornesian plot line” from a series of increasingly emotional scenes. Without offering the audience emotional release (either between scenes or by the end of the play), the build-up of visceral and palpable energy has no place to go. While Artaud envisions that the theatre experience will release that energy in hopes of freeing those sick and repressed by civilization, Fornes examines that very civilization that traps her characters (and, for the time of the play, the audience) into a state of shock and horror that knows no release. However, because of the unique theatrical structure of the play, Fornes is able to marry the seemingly opposite theatres of Brecht and Artaud by advocating for the simultaneous need for intellect (a la Brecht) and primal emotion (a la Artaud) to both change and upwardly-lift individuals and society. Ultimately, Fornes suggests that the only way for individuals to release the energy produced by witnessing these horrors is to change the very civilizations that create those perpetual cycles of horror.

The projection (of the proposal) The Conduct of Life displays remarkable similarities with absurd theatre, as it displays two techniques commonly used by the so-called playwrights: 1) ab­ surd plays rarely have an “end,” per se, with any sort of traditional resolution, and 2) absurd plays generally leave the audience member with a paradox that must be resolved by the audience and/or leave numerous loose ends that are never tied up.14 On the other hand, the play both displays marked departures from absurd plays, as it neither experiments, per se, with (non-realistic or hyperrealistic) language, and more or less follows an Aristotelian arc throughout the vast majority of the play (until the absent end/resolution). However, the narrative arcs of the PAJ plays, as will be described in more detail in the next section, are reminiscent of many quintessential plays of the

Emotional problems 111

so-called absurd. Each act or scene of Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, The Birthday Party, The Dumb Waiter, Rhinoceros builds tension: either increasing levels of hope with the two abovementioned Beckett plays or increasing de­ struction with Pinter’s plays and Ionesco’s above play. And each subsequent act/scene resets the building tension: for Beckett, while the level of hope rises at the end of the first act of Godot and Happy Days, the next act finds the characters in an equal or more depressing spot, while for Pinter and Ionesco, the increase of entropy from the beginning of the act/scene to the end of the act/scene is paused and a new calm starts the next act/scene. Cummings calls Fornes’ unit of short scenes “emotigraphs,” following a critic’s comparison of Sarita to Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, because of Sarita’s “use of short, episodic scenes and terse, often symbolic and enig­ matic dialogue.”15 Fornes, herself, in 1986 discusses how she loves how Büchner’s Woyzeck is “so economical” and “just depicts a kind of agony, almost like a triptych.”16 Cummings sees Fornes experimenting with “short rapid-fire scenes” as early as her The Successful Life of 3, but that it was with her plays in the 1980s that Fornes began to make regular use of this “unit of dramatic construction,” which Cummings describes as “a brief, momentary, static scene that offers an emotional snapshot or crosssection of a changing dramatic situation.”17 Cummings “emotigraphs” are descriptive, and I am not here to disagree with Cummings’ astute description. Instead, I want to take Cumming’s observation about the construction of each scene and extend it over the course of the entire play to see how a series of these “emotigraphs” create a uniquely-Fornesian theatrical narrative and experience for the audience. The “Fornesian pause” and “Fornesian plot line”

While Harold Pinter is known for his, what scholars refer to as, pregnant pauses—pauses that are full of meaning—Maria Irene Fornes creates structural pauses that are forced upon the audience, unwanted, and give birth to vio­ lently undesirable feelings. Pinter’s pregnant pauses are found and littered throughout the speeches of the characters; Fornes’ pauses are found in the narrative structure and theatrical arc of her plays, as one can see how the end and the subsequent beginning of each scene constitute a unique “Fornesian Pause.” The Conduct of Life, The Danube, Mud, and Sarita are able to accomplish these feelings of providing a release for the actors and withholding it from the audience through Fornesian Pauses due to remarkably similar plot lines (demonstrated in a simplified/generic manner below), which I call the “Fornesian plot line.” In Fornes’ “PAJ plays,” the scene changes allow the audience to believe they have a chance to catch their breath from the emotional build-up. However, each scene, as seen in the above section, while starting out in a more subdued state than the end of the previous scene, starts out with the unresolved tension from the previous scene(s) and then builds upon those tensions to produce

112

Emotional problems

Figure 8.1 “Fornesian Plot Line”

an even greater state of emotion, and this pattern repeats throughout both plays. This is something like what I have suggested is the narrative arc of “absurd tragicomedy”: ___________________ (Absurd Tragicomedy18) The Conduct of Life, as the other PAJ plays, do display similarities with absurd theatre: 1) absurd plays rarely have an “end” (as these plays do not have a traditional “resolution”), and 2) absurd plays generally leave the audience member with a paradox that must be resolved by the audience and/or leave numerous “loose ends” that are never tied up.19 However, especially with The Conduct of Life, Fornes displays a marked departure from absurd plays, as she does not experiment, per se, with (non-realistic or hyper-realistic) language, and she, more or less, does follow an Aristotelian arc (until the absent end/resolution). Regarding the above absurd tragicomic arc, Fornes essentially tilts the arc upward towards more tension, effectively raising the line 45° to ratchet up the agony. Like Mud—which follows a love triangle between, what Cummings calls, the “Innocent” and the pull of two different men—The Danube is a bit dif­ ferent in that the thing that suffocates the “Innocent” is not a man, but the city of Budapest, itself.20Sarita, similarly, follows Sarita (another “Innocent”) in short vignettes from age 13 through her teen pregnancy and the subsequent years of a love triangle between mister wrong (i.e., Julio) and mister right (i.e., Mark) until the age of 21, when she finds herself in a mental hospital (after killing Julio). The play tracks the gradual slide of Sarita into madness from being torn between the cheating Julio, whose love she always craves, and the kind and semi-simple GI, Mark. Sarita, comprised of 20 scenes, uses songs to break up the emotional rhythm of the scenes and between scenes. The songs and the aftermath of these songs constitute the Fornesian pauses in Sarita. Sarita follows Sarita in short vignettes from age 13 through her teen preg­ nancy and the subsequent years of a love triangle between mister wrong (i.e., Julio) and mister right (i.e., Mark) until the age of 21, when she finds herself in

Emotional problems 113

a mental hospital (after killing Julio). The play tracks the gradual slide of Mae into madness from being torn between the cheating Julio, whose love she always craves, and the kind and semi-simple GI, Mark. Sarita, comprised of 20 scenes, uses songs to break up the emotional rhythm of the scenes and between scenes, in something of a Brechtian manner. The songs and the aftermath of these songs constitute the Fornesian pauses in Sarita. For example, at the end of Scene 10, the last scene of Act One, Sarita’s pain is becoming ever-so evident when speaking to Mark and telling him of her “want to die” because she is “miserable,” “jealous,” as Julio has “no respect for [her],” “takes advantage of [her],” “mistreats [her].”21 Immediately after her rant about if Julio ever hit her, saying, “If he hits me I’ll kill him” and continues to the point where she concludes “I don’t want to live,” there is an about-face, as Sarita looks at Mark and says, “You are so nice.—You are so nice.—I know you’re so nice,” to which Mark immediately starts singing a love song, which ends the scene and act.22 The pause offered by the song stops the increasing theatrical tension, but does not release it, only letting that built-up tension that will build up even more so as the play continues, to be put on hold, but not dissipate. Mud also follows another love triangle between another, what Cummings calls the “Innocent” and the pull of two different men.23 Mae and Lloyd are an illiterate couple, and Lloyd farms and Mae does the laundry and cooks. When Mae, who is learning to read, picks up medicine for Lloyd and cannot read the medical pamphlet, she brings home a man in his fifties named Henry to read it. Henry cannot read perfectly, but it is enough to make Mae want to learn more. Mae soon falls in love with Henry and invites him to move in and share her bed instead of with Lloyd, which precipitates a rivalry between Henry and Lloyd. When Mae eventually threatens to leave Lloyd, Lloyd picks up a shotgun and kills her. Besides the abrupt ending, the Fornesian pause can be seen, for example, between the end of Scene 13 and 14, where the growing tension between Lloyd and Mae and Henry becomes palpable and fore­ shadows the violence to come. Scene 13 ends with Lloyd threatening to kill Henry and Mae responds, “So kill him,” and then Scene 14 immediately starts with the mundane act of Lloyd teaching Henry to read, letter by letter.24 The threat of violence is simply replaced by the mundane, leaving no room for the audience to ease the tension. The Danube is a bit different in that the thing that suffocates the “Innocent,” again, as Cummings suggests of the women in these plays, is not a man, but the city of Budapest, itself. In this fifteen-scene play, a Hungarian man meets and then introduces a young American businessman, Paul, to his daughter, Eve. After the two fall in love and marry, Eve and Paul come down with an illness that eventually affects all of Budapest. With worsening conditions and in­ creasing turmoil, Paul decides to leave with Eve for the United States. The play ends with Eve having to say goodbye to both her father, the Danube River, and the city she loves so much Budapest. Here, the language lesson tapes in English and Hungarian heard throughout the play create a stifled speech and rhythm. That is, the very repetition of lines in Hungarian and

114

Emotional problems

English first in the tape and then by the actors displaces the increasing emo­ tional thrust, as despite the “naturalistic” speaking style of the actors,25 there is something artificial and mechanical about the presentation of the play because of the repetition. The growing concerns of the couple and their increasing illness are stilted—or, rather, put on hold, paused—by the nature of the speech and its repetition. The Conduct of Life is Fornes’ ultimate tale of torturing an “Innocent,” a young girl. The play follows Orlando, an army torturer, who keeps, and constantly rapes, 12-year-old Nena in his basement. Despite his wife’s knowledge of this, the visceral and palpable violence increases, too, toward the end of the play when Leticia (Orlando’s wife) shoots Orlando and then places the gun in Nena’s hands. The Conduct of Life accomplishes the same thing as it draws the end of one scene to an increasingly terrifying height only to end that scene and begin the next scene with something usually light and mundane. Even at the beginning of The Conduct of Life, in Scene 1 and 2 this dynamic arc is developed. Orlando starts the play by doing jumping-jacks, a healthy activity, but this exertion leads him to the conclusion that his wife, “Leticia must not be an obstacle.—Man must have an ideal, mine is to achieve max­ imum power.”26 This militaristic idea of removing obstacles and attaining power, is quickly faded to black, and Scene 2 starts in the home, and of all places the familial dinner table, where Leticia is shocked at the thought of hunting: “Do you think I’m going to shoot a deer, the most beautiful animal in the world?”27 Fornes creates a scene that ends with the expression of an increasing desire to hunt for power fade into casual dinner talk and the expression in possibly-passing laughter at the very thought of hunting at all. As the play progresses, we see a similar pattern in Scenes 3 and 4, but of an increasingly violent nature, followed by an even more mundane scene. Scene 3 ends with the introduction of Nena and how quickly Orlando’s violence and sexual lust mixed with power is set off when Orlando physically grabs her repeatedly and “He opens his fly and pushes his pelvis against her,” before the light fade to black.28 The darkness disrupts the horror to come, but when the lights come back on, “Olimpia is wiping crumbs off of the dining room table,” an infinitely mundane task, with Leticia sitting to the left.29 This scene, where the servant, Olimpia, is trying to convince Leticia that she needs a “pressure cooker,”30 foreshadows not only the violence that is percolating, but also sets the emo­ tional tone for the play for the audience, as a pressure cooker intentionally does not allow for the release the steam, but uses the steam’s increasing heat and motion and pressure to cook the food faster. A pressure cooker only works, just like ultimately the emotional journey of the play, by stopping the release of built-up steam. If the pressure cooker is not constructed correctly or is heated up too quickly, then it can be in danger of exploding; so just the right amount of increasing pressure must be created so enough pressure is there to agitate the food into proper doneness, but not so much that the steam forces everyone running out of the room for their lives. So when the audience experiences Orlando discussing cutting his torture victims open and a man

Emotional problems 115

dying of fear (in Scene 10) and then observing the juxtaposition of Olimpia and Nena playing (in Scene 11) all the way to the final (literally) explosive ending where Orlando starts to sexually assault Leticia and Leticia shoots him and then gives Nena the gun, there is increasing pressure and violence that cannot be released because of the viciously violent cycle of militaristic power and the torturer-tortured relationship. In The Conduct of Life, Fornes disrupts the Aristotelian plot line in a manner meant only to heighten the audience’s emotional journey. Particularly in this play, these emotional journeys are heightened to such boiling points that without resolution, as these PAJ Plays more-or-less have no resolution, the audience is forced to reflect and react critically, as the audience’s bottled-up emotions have to go somewhere. Without resolutions, the audience feels confused as to what their emotion is or should be, and, thus, the audience must talk through their tightly-wound-but confused emotional state at the end of the play.

Conclusion: the cruelty of Fornes’ theatre In his recent book, Acts, Tzachi Zamir discusses masochism and the actor: Masochism is a form of sexualize type-acting, in which resistance and distancing from the role work in tandem with the fascination exerted by it, the willingness and capacity to enter further into it, and permitting it to take over. In masochism the mask is allowed to lead.31 But when directing, say, The Conduct of Life, a director can direct the actors not only to be masochistic but to a point where this arousal for the masochist and the voyeur (whether pleasurable or not) is sadistically painful in its unease to the audience. Memran discusses Fornes’ own experiences with the visual arts, particu­ larly painting: In the ’50s, Irene entrenched herself in the Greenwich Village art scene and studied with Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann. Hofmann, she said, shaped her sense of character and also cultivated her desire to direct. “So much of his class had to do with dynamic. The dynamic of two shapes. Two colors. Hofmann would call it ‘push and pull.’ Two colors next to each other have a certain dynamic. They effect each other. That kind of observation helped me a lot in playwriting. I was much more interested in dynamic than anything analytical the actor would say.” Irene remembered that Hofmann instructed his students to paint on paper. When he came around to look at the work, he would politely ask, “May I?” “‘May I’ meant ‘can I cut it up,’” said Irene. “And he would take the page and tear it very carefully. With a fine knife he would take a certain section

116

Emotional problems

and turn one side upside-down, or take it from the left to the right. But you could immediately understand what he meant by dynamic.”32 This example that Fornes uses to demonstrate “dynamic” is quite telling. If we imagine an abstract expressionist painting—say, from the early abstract expressionist pioneer, Mark Rothko, whose rectangular forms held against the backdrop of a color field are etched into the public’s mind—and cut a square from it, turning it ninety degrees, the entire flow and design are disrupted. Just in a single place (as in Hofmann’s above demonstration to his students), this disruption creates an uneasy dynamic, one that disrupts order just enough that one craves order (even if that order is disorderly). There is something almost cruel about it, like titling a single painting in a wall of paintings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in front of a museum patron who suffers from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, knowing full well that this stricken museum patron cannot just walk up to a painting in The Met and tilt a frame back into an orderly position. This unfortunately stricken museum patron in this above example is the very sick and repressed person whose instinctual energy Artaud wants to re­ lease. On the other hand, Fornes' theatre desires this instinctual energy to be incited, aroused, and increased, but prolonged, frustrated, and ultimately withheld. In this manner, one needs to find a way to release that built-up energy. And in this way, this is a very Brechtian move by Fornes, as the only way to solve the problems presented in The Conduct of Life is to understand and change the very social and political structures that Fornes summons in her plays, so that these cycles of power, violence, and abuse (both literally and metaphorically) are broken. Bertolt Brecht created a theatre, Epic Theatre, to disrupt the Aristotelian plot line in order to, in turn, disrupt the audience’s emotional journey. Brecht envisioned that if the audience were no longer responding in an emotional manner to the characters and the plot, then the audience would be able to think critically. While Maria Irene Fornes’s plays have previously been read through Brechtian theatre (most notably by Deborah R. Geis), Fornes is not generally considered a Brechtian playwright. However, Fornes accomplishes the very same end goals as Brecht, but get there by a very different route. While Artaud envisions that the theatre experience will release that energy in hopes of freeing those sick and repressed by civilization, Fornes examines that very civilization that traps her characters (and, for the time of the play, the audience) into a state of shock and horror that knows no release. It seems Fornes suggests that the only way to release the energy produced by witnessing these horrors is to change the very civilizations that create those perpetual cycles of horror. Fornes seems to quite aware that the call for revolt, for societal change, comes most urgently from those who are personally and emotionally affected by society’s horrors. A Shavian lecture is nice and in­ spiring; a Fornesian play is emotionally painful and horrific. One’s call to Arms and the Man leaves you feeling good about voting for the Fabians; the

Emotional problems 117

other leaves you almost physically with the need to destroy the very Arms war complex and the Man whose mere depictions on stage can cause such emotional distress: until then, that lump in your throat will remain, and only after that, after a full social and political revolution, maybe we will be able to breathe again. As a way of final summation, to return to Kushner’s words about Fornes’ “sharp air,” I would like to add to Kushner’s reflection and suggest that Maria Irene Fornes’ PAJ plays, are a lot like a samurai sword: one can admire and be in awe of the blade’s sharpness, but one is sliced and bleeds when one actually experiences the sharpness of that blade. But while being sliced by a samurai sword yields excruciating pain and then one is usually relieved of that pain through death, a Fornes play does not allow the audience to “die” to release the built-up pain. A director of a successful production of The Conduct of Life creates pacing, especially in these PAJ Plays, to increase and prolong the state of (sadomasochistic) arousal through the disruptions, but ultimately withhold the release of non-sexual sexual frustration).

Notes 1 I would like to thank Gwendolyn Alker (New York University) for her keen and insightful comments on a few earlier drafts of this chapter.Michelle Memran, “Moment to Moment: with Maria Irene Fornes,” The Brooklyn Rail, 1 October 2002 http://www. brooklynrail.org/2002/10/theater/moment-to-moment-with-maria-irene-fornes. 2 Sally Porterfield, “Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes,” Modern Drama 43, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 209. 3 Ibid., 208. 4 Ibid. 5 Susan Sontag, Preface to Plays, by Maria Irene Fornes (New York: PAJ, 1986), 9. 6 Porterfield, “Black Cats and Green Trees,” 209. 7 Yolanda Manora, “Discourse and Intercourse: Gender, Exile, and Dialogical Subjectivities in Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud.” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 845–46. 8 Ibid., 845. 9 Michael Y. Bennett, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 116–17. 10 Ibid., 117. 11 Scott T. Cummings, Maria Irene Fornes (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 96. 12 Ibid., 97. 13 Cited in Ibid., 96. 14 Michael Y. Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 15 Cummings, Maria Irene Fornes, 107. 16 Cited in Ibid., 107–08. 17 Cummings, Maria Irene Fornes, 108. 18 Bennett, Cambridge Introduction, 20. 19 Bennett, Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd. 20 Fornes, 104. 21 Fornes, Plays, 109. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 104. 24 Ibid., 35.

118 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Emotional problems

Ibid., 42. Ibid., 68. Ibid. Ibid., 70. Ibid. Ibid., 72. Tzachi Zamir, Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014), 191. 32 Memran, “Moment to Moment.”

Conclusion Viewing … or, turning away: upending the ‘gaze,’ upending the subject

Like in Fornes’ plays, there has, of course, been “unease” before in the theatre, and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was one of the first plays to really capture that feeling of “unease,” as the airing of one’s private dirty laundry via a spousal quarrel in front of strangers made the audience squirm (and certainly in the 1960s).1 But while one may feel uneasy about watching spouses quarrel in public, one also has trouble not looking away. There is a curiosity factor that keeps one attuned, though the “pressure cooker” is clearly whistling, and one knows when it is time to look away. It is one thing, however, when the audience—or “viewers,” rather—feels they must leave the “pressure cooker” of the performance, but what happens when viewers feel the need to turn away when viewers cannot even look? To conclude, I intend to play off Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” to discuss when a viewer simply cannot watch. As such, I attempt to respond to many of the same issues that Mulvey brings up in her essay. Like Mulvey, I will employ a psychoanalytic mode of interpretation to read, in this instance, Curb your Enthusiasm. Unlike Mulvey, who argues that cinema is “a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form,”2 ultimately, I suggest that the television show, Curb your Enthusiasm, deconstructs the notion of patriarchal privilege by tapping into the audience’s sense of moral disgust. My purpose here is not to disagree with Mulvey but to suggest that an alternative cinema/television show to the patriarchal cinema does exist. But even more so, Curb, as it is affectionately often called, raises the specter of a viewer who can no longer—or does not want to—view.

Visceral displeasure and narrative television: Curb your enthusiasm The audience’s reaction is generally an either/or reaction to such moral selfdegradation: schadenfreude if we align ourselves with the main character, Larry David; denial if we align ourselves with the victims of Larry’s deeds (Larry is simply put into a box of troublemaker [which is an attempt at splitting] and the audience member refuses to acknowledge the unpleasant truths that

120

Conclusion

Larry dwells on); or unease and the uncanny if we recognize the interaction of the two parties (Larry’s ability to [try to] manipulate a situation is both humorous and almost charming and simultaneously morally repulsive). There are three reasons that Curb your Enthusiasm generates these types of reactions: 1) the main character, Larry David (who is [playing] supposedly “himself” in real life), is visually displeasing; 2) self-degradation in the form of humor; and, 3) the assumptions of viewing a “well-made” play/movie are subverted to leave the audience unfulfilled and ill at ease. Ultimately, these taken together, the “gaze” through the eyes of the patriarchal male becomes transformed into a squirming sensation and the difficulty of “gazing” at this show. At times, one must turn away their “gaze” away from the show because of disgust, moral repulsion, and an overwhelming sense of uneasiness and being uncomfortable.

Main character is visually displeasing Larry is the typical middle-aged Jewish, Woody Allen-type whose neuroses are symbolically marked by his less-than-flattering features: not too tall, wears glasses, has a biggish nose, and has male-pattern baldness. In fact, the boxes of the DVDs for each of the show’s seasons have Larry, in all of his un-glory, making clearly unpleasant faces. In the style of the show—a type of cinema verite—the audience is forcefully drawn through a day or two of Larry’s uncannily typical-and-atypical life. There is no mistaking the fact that Larry is the object of our “gaze.” This is, in part, dictated by the plot of the episodes, which clearly follows a sort of day-in-the-life-of-Larry schema. But this also has to do with the fact that we metaphorically gaze at the world through Larry’s eyes. Larry sees the world as an ugly place and, therefore, we see it as ugly, as well. Schadenfreude—The audience member either 1) identifies with Larry’s lessthan-average appearance and roots for the underdog and enjoys seeing the victims of Larry’s manipulations suffer, or 2) is subconsciously maligned against Larry because of his displeasing looks and this same audience member enjoys seeing Larry suffer. Denial—The audience member refuses to acknowledge the good, the right, and/or the well-intentioned in Larry because they see his displeasing looks as a sign of his troubled psyche. Therefore, the audience member subconsciously chalks up Larry’s villainy, in part, to his displeasing looks. Sense of the Uncanny—The audience member sees both Larry’s wellintentioned nature, but also his anti-establishment values. This might be reflected in Larry’s clothes: he attempts to look nice (usually wears khaki or corduroy pants and, sometimes, a sports jacket), but he rebels in defiance against fashion (and by extension, society) by wearing sneakers. As demonstrated by the sneakers’ casualness, this inability to take things seriously is threatening to audience members who see life as intrinsically purposeful and good. In terms of his physiognomy, Larry is unthreatening as an unheroic, middle-aged man, but his willingness (or enjoyment) of engaging in societally threatening behavior is too much for this audience member who pushes Larry away.

Conclusion 121

Self-degradation It must be acknowledged that this television show decidedly plays off Jewish humor, and especially, its use of self-degradation. Continuing from the previous section, the very fact that Larry is not particularly good-looking and generally suffers, in the end, can be seen in stark contrast to the Hollywood hero whose dashing good looks help the audience align himself or herself with how genuinely good they are and how this hero is rewarded at the end for his heroism and goodness (that are implied by his manly, but woman-appealing qualities). Schadenfreude—The audience member who is self-degrading himself or herself will not mind the failings of Larry and will, subconsciously, see these failings as a way to cope with the same hostile world that Larry encounters. Denial—The audience member who has a lack of self-confidence and cannot make fun of himself or herself will undoubtedly find the show’s selfdegrading humor as threatening. This type of audience member will actually see themselves in Larry, in their unflattering view of themselves, and hate themselves. The other response will be to project their own feelings of unworthiness onto Larry and thus detest in Larry what they detest in themselves. Sense of the Uncanny—The audience member who is not used to this type of humor will not fully understand Larry and the show’s self-degrading nature. After all, Larry is the creator of Seinfeld, is married to a beautiful wife (for most of the seven seasons), and has rich and famous friends. How can someone so successful put themselves down so much, this audience member asks. The conclusion is that there must be something wrong with him, or he is maligned with the world, or just simply so neurotic that we must pass him off as societally unfit.

The “well-made play” Eugene Scribe is credited with pioneering the form of the “well-made play.” His 1842 play, The Glass of Water, is a masterpiece in play construction. The fate of characters and nations rests on simply a glass of water. By the end of the play, the audience experiences a sense of satisfaction in that all of the potentially entropic elements of the play are neatly put back into order. The good guys win; the bad guys lose. However, in Curb your Enthusiasm, which extends the structure pioneered by Seinfeld, the audience experiences the same sense of entropy-based upon trifling objects or actions. However, unlike in the well-made play, or in a typical Hollywood romantic comedy, the sense of entropy usually climaxes at the moment the show ends, offering no chance of order or redemption. This absence of a dénouement was felt similarly by early audiences who saw Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. However, whereas Waiting for Godot ended without an “end,” there was also an absence of a climax. To end with a climax without resolution, Curb your Enthusiasm does not allow for any type of

122

Conclusion

comedic catharsis that is needed by the audience because of the buildup of comedic, dramatic tension. Schadenfreude—The audience member who, especially, is prone to dislike him and wants to see him suffer will be rewarded because Larry is stuck in a moment of unease and entropy himself. Larry does not get a nice resolution, and thus, this type of audience member gets to see Larry in an extremely uncomfortable position. Denial—The audience member who needs resolution and happy endings will be unsatisfied and left with agitation because there is no resolution. Whereas Larry can clearly bounce back from awkward or uncomfortable situations, this audience member cannot. The typical response is to say that Curb your Enthusiasm is a bad show and/or poorly made. This was a typical early response to Waiting for Godot. Sense of the Uncanny—The audience member both sees how everything wraps up in the end, with a sensical climax, but he or she is also aware of the lack of an ending where he or she can let go of the dramatic tension that has built up. The negative visceral response to not being fulfilled is too much for the pleasure of the intellect. *** The visceral displeasure brought on by Curb your Enthusiasm functions as a way of heightening our senses to the absurdity of the world, where, via Camus, our desires are not met by the reality of the world. Through Larry, the audience is faced with the failure of a patriarchal figure (one whose color, success, and wealth all signify the supposed power of the white male). Instead of seeing that patriarchal figure enact order on the world, the world and all of its inhabitants create a world of chaos for Larry that is echoed by subverting the “well-made play.” Larry’s imperfect looks and his self-degrading humor turn the patriarchy into a neurotic failure. Those who can wade through the visceral displeasure of Curb your Enthusiasm will be rewarded by seeing their own imperfections in themselves and their own world astutely observed in Larry and his world.

Notes 1 Michael Y. Bennett, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (London: Routledge, 2018). 2 Mulvey, 6.

Bibliography

Amoretti, M. Cristina and Gerhard Preyer, “Introduction: Mind, Knowledge, and Communication in Triangular Externalism.” In Triangulation: From an Epistemological Point of View, edited by M. Cristina Amoretti and Gerhard Preyer Ontos: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 2011. Aston, Elaine and George Savona, Theatre as Sign System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance London: Routledge, 1991. Austin, J. L. Sense and Sensibilia. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Balcetis, Emily and G. Daniel Lassiter, “Introduction.” In Social Psychology of Visual Perception, edited by Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter. New York: Psychology Press, 2010. Bennett, H. S. Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions, 1150–1400. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1969. Bennett, Michael Y. Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play. New York: Routledge, 2017. Bennett, Michael Y. The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre and Literature of the Absurd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Bennett, Michael Y. “Intrinsic-Extrinsic Properties in Theatre.” Philosophy and Literature 45, no. 1 (April 2021): forthcoming. Bennett, Michael Y. Narrating the Past through Theatre: Four Crucial Texts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bennett, Michael Y. “Propositions in Theatre: Theatrical Utterances as Events.” Journal of Literary Semantics 47, no. 2 (November 2018): 147–152. Bennett, Michael Y. Reassessing the Theatre of the Absurd: Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, and Pinter. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Bennett, Michael Y. Words, Space, and the Audience: The Theatrical Tension between Empiricism and Rationalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Bennett, Susan. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 1997. Blau, Herbert. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Bodel, Jean. Medieval French Plays. Translated by Richard Axton and John Stevens. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by V. E. Watts. London: Penguin Books, 1969. Brenner, Robert. “The Rises and Declines of Serfdom in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” In Serfdom and Slavery: Studies in Legal Bondage, edited by M. L. Bush. London: Longman, 1996: 247–276.

124

Bibliography

Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Brundage, James A. The Crusades: A Documentary Survey. Milwaukee: The Marquette University Press, 1962. Candlish, Stewart and George Wrisley, “Private Language.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall ed. edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ private-language/. Carlson, Marvin. Foreword to Analytic Philosophy and the World of the Play, by Michael Y. Bennett. London and New York: Routledge, 2017, ix–xvi. Carlson, Marvin. The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003. Carlson, Marvin. Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Carroll, Noël. “Performance.” Formations 3, no. 1 (1986): 63–81. Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Anonymous, “The Castle of Perseverance.” In The Macro Plays, edited by Mark Eccles. London: Oxford University Press, 1969. Chisholm, R. M. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1966/ 1977/1989. Crewe, Jonathan. “Reading Horatio.” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 271–278. Cummings, Scott T. Maria Irene Fornes. London and New York: Routledge, 2013. Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Davidson, Donald. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve Editions, 2000. De Marinis, Marco. The Semiotics of Performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic, rev. ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge, 2002. Engle, Lars. “How Is Horatio Just? How Just Is Horatio?” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 256–262. Feldman, R. “An Alleged Defect in Gettier Counterexamples.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 52 (1974): 68–69. Fischer-Lichte, Erika The Semiotics of Theater. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Frank, Grace. The Medieval French Drama. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967. Freshwater, Helen. Theatre & Audience. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Fryde, E. B. The Great Revolt of 1381. London: The Historical Association, 1981. Fryde, E. B. Peasants and Landlords in Later Medieval England. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996. Fuchs, Elinor and Una Chaudhuri, eds. Land/Scape/Theater. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. Gettier, Edmund L. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23, no. 6 ( June 1963): 121–127. Goldman, Alvin. “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 73, (1976): 771–791.

Bibliography 125 Golub, Spencer. Incapacity: Wittgenstein, Anxiety, and Performance Behavior. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Hájek, Alan and Stephan Hartmann. “Bayesian Epistemology.” In A Companion to Epistemology, edited by J. Dancy, Ernest Sosa and Matthias Steup. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010, 94–106. Hamilton, James R. The Art of Theater. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. Hamilton, James R. “From the Author’s Perspective: The Art of Theater.” American Society for Aesthetics. n.d. https://aesthetics-online.site-ym.com/page/HamiltonTheater. Hartmann, Stephan and Jan Sprenger. “Bayesian Epistemology.” In Routledge Companion to Epistemology, edited by Sven Bernecker and Pritchard Duncan. London: Routledge, 2010. Hayes, Douglas W. “Backbiter and the Rhetoric of Detraction.” Comparative Drama 34, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 53–78 Hetherington, S. Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge: On Two Dogmas of Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Hetherington, S. Knowledge Puzzles: An Introduction to Epistemology. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Hiatt, Alfred. “Blank Spaces on Earth.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 223–250. Hill, Mary C. The King’s Messengers, 1199–1377: A Contribution to the History of the Royal Household. London: Edward Arnold, Limited, 1961. Hosea, Chris. “What Do You Feel?” 2020. https://chrishosea.com. James, LeBron. “LeBron: I'm coming back to Cleveland” July 11, 2014 issue Sports Illustrated https://www.si.com/nba/2014/07/11/lebron-james-cleveland-cavaliers accessed 2020. Johnston, Alexandra F. “The Castle of Perseverance.” 9 Dec 2003. http://www.chass. utoronto.ca/~ajohnsto/cascomp.html. Keefe, R. and Smith, P., eds. Vagueness: A Reader. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1996. Kelleher, Joe. The Illuminated Theatre: Studies on the Suffering of Images. Abington: Routledge, 2015. Kennedy, Dennis. The Spectator and the Spectacle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Klein, William W., Craig L. Blomberg and Robert L. Hubbard, Jr. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1993. Kornhaber, David. Theatre & Knowledge. New York: Red Globe Press, 2020. Krasner, David. “Empathy and Theater.” In Staging Philosophy: Intersections of Theater, Performance, and Philosophy, edited by David Krasner and David Z. Saltz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006, 255–277. Kushner, Tony. Hombody/Kabul. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2002. Lampe, G. W. H. and K. J. Woollcombe. Essays on Typology. London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1957. Lehrer, Keith. “Knowledge, Truth and Evidence.” Analysis 25 (1965): 168–175. Lehrer, Keith. Personal email, 16 March 2018. Lehrer, Keith. “Why Not Scepticism?” The Philosophical Forum 2 (1971): 283–298. Levinson, Jerrold. Music in the Moment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Lewis, C. S. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Lewis, D. “Elusive Knowledge.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996): 549–567.

126

Bibliography

Lormand, Eric. “Qualia! (Now Showing at a Theater near You).” Philosophical Topics 22 (1994): 127–156. Lycan, W. G. “Evidence One Does Not Possess.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 55 (1977): 114–126. Lycan, W. G. “On the Gettier Problem Problem.” In Epistemology Futures, edited byS. Hetherington. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Manora, Yolanda. “Discourse and Intercourse: Gender, Exile, and Dialogical Subjectivities in Maria Irene Fornes’s Mud.” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 845–860. Mark, Thomas. Historical Atlas of the British Commonwealth and Empire. London: Macmillan and Company Limited, 1962 Memran, Michelle. “Moment to Moment: with Maria Irene Fornes.” The Brooklyn Rail, 1 October 2002. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2002/10/theater/moment-to-momentwith-maria-irene-fornes. Miller, Judith G. “New Forms for New Conflicts: Thinking about Tony Kushner’s. Homebody/Kabul and the Théatre du Soleil’s Le Dernier Caravansérail.” Contemporary Theatre Review 16, no. 2 (2006): 212. Minwalla, Framji. “Tony Kushner’s Hombody/Kabul: Staging History in a Post-Colonial World” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16, no. 3 (October 1975): 6–18. Moser, P. K., ed. Empirical Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology., edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Neilson, N. Medieval Agrarian Economy. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1936. Pappas, G. S. and Swain, M., eds. Essays on Knowledge and Justification. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978. Pauker, Kristin, Nicholas O. Rule, and Nalini Ambady, “Ambiguity and Social Perception.” In Social Psychology of Visual Perception, edited by Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter. New York: Psychology Press, 2010. Pavis, Patrice. Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre. New York: PAJ Books, 2001. Phillips, M. Scott. “The Failure of History: Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul and the Apocalyptic Context.” Modern Drama 47, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 1. Pollock, John. Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefields, 1986. Porterfield, Sally. “Black Cats and Green Trees: The Art of Maria Irene Fornes.” Modern Drama 43, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 204–215. Raftis, J. Ambrose. Tenure and Mobility: Studies in the Social History of the Mediaeval English Village. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1964. Rene Descartes, “Meditations.” The Decision. ESPN, 2010. Roth, M. D. and Galis, L., eds. Knowing: Essays in the Analysis of Knowledge. New York: Random House, 1970. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. Shope, R. K. The Analysis of Knowing: A Decade of Research. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Siegel, Susanna. “The Contents of Perception.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2016. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perceptioncontents. Sontag, Susan. Preface to Plays, by Maria Irene Fornes. New York: PAJ, 1986.

Bibliography 127 “Spectatorship,” Special Issue. Theatre Journal 66, no. 3 (October 2014). Spencer, Jenny S. “Performing Translation in Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul.” Paper presented at the University of Massachusetts, April 2004. Spencer, Jenny. “Performing Translation in Contemporary Anglo-American Drama.” Theatre Journal 59 (2007): 389–410. Stevenson, Catherine. “‘Seek for Something New’: Mothers, Change, and Creativity in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, and Caroline, or Change.” Modern Drama 48, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 758. Sugden, Robert. “The Role of Inductive Reasoning in the Evolution of Conventions.” Law and Philosophy 17 (1998): 380–88. Talbott, William. “Bayesian Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. 2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2016/entries/epistemology-bayesian/. Thatcher, David. “Horatio’s ‘Let me speak’: Narrative Summary and Summary Narrative in Hamlet.” English Studies 74 (June 1993): 246–257. Thrupp, Sylvia L. The Merchant Class of Medieval London: 1300–1500. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1962. Tyerman, Christopher. Fighting for Christendom: Holy War and the Crusades. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Vonnegut, Kurt. Timequake. New York: Berkley Books, 1998. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Warley, Christopher. “Specters of Horatio.” ELH 75, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 1027. White, John. The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. London: Faber and Faber, 1967. Williamson, Timothy. Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Pearson, 1973. Wollheim, Richard. Art and Its Objects, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Zamir, Tzachi. Acts: Theater, Philosophy, and the Performing Self. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Zamir, Tzachi. Just Literature: Philosophical Criticism and Justice. London: Routledge, 2019.

Index

a posteriori knowledge 21 a priori knowledge 21 abstract objects xi, 37 absurdist theatre 109–10 accuracy 26 acquaintance, knowledge by 21 Adorno xvi aesthetics xvi Albee, Edward 119 Ambady, Nalini 32 Aristotle xv Art of Theater, The 2, 22 Artaud, Antonin 107, 110, 116 audiences: description of xiii, xvi; epistemological question 2–3; medieval 50–1; See also viewers Austin, J.L. 32 Ayer, A.J. 23, 32 backbiting 68 Balcetis, Emily 32 Bayes, Thomas 27 Bayesian epistemology 3, 27–9 Bayesian statistics 27 Beckett, Samuel xv–xvi, 111, 121 beliefs: justified 22–6; justified true 22–3; projecting of 25–6 Bergson, Henri xiv–xv betting behavior 4, 27 Birthday Party, The 111 “Blind Men and the Elephant, The” 1, 25–6 Bodel, Jean 55, 58, 61 borders: description of 51, 58; in Flight Patterns 97; from language 101; in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas 58, 64; in The Castle of Perseverance 65–9 Brecht, Bertolt 33, 107, 110, 116 Brenner, Robert 53

Brook, Peter 1, 28 Büchner, Georg 111 call-and-response paradigm xiv Camp, Pannill 50 Carlson, Marvin 14 Carnap, Rudolf 32 Carroll, Noël 22 Cartesianism 51 Castle of Perseverance, The: backbiting in 68; borders in 65–9; change in 58; free will in 70; Mankind in 66–9; presumption 50–2; proposal 52–8; stage space in 52, 65–9; universality in 66; writing of 56, 65 Cavell, Stanley xv–xvi Chaudhuri, Una 85 Chekhov, Anton xv Chisholm, Roderick M. 23 cinema: patriarchal 119; understanding of 22 circumstances 26, 29, 32–4 circumstantial knowledge 35 communication: by actors xiii; language as xiii–xiv; private 100; public 100 comprehension 22 concrete objects xi, 37 Conduct of Life, The 107–11, 114–17 counterfactual situation 4, 32 Crusades 54–6 culture, dislocation of 86–7 Cummings, Scott T. 109, 111, 113 Curb your Enthusiasm 119–22 Dabney, Sheila 108 Danube, Mud, Sarita, The 109, 111–13 Daughton, Suzanne M. 100 David, Larry 119–22 Davidson, Donald 35

Index 129 “degrees of belief”: betting behavior based on 27; projecting of 25–6 Deleuze, Gilles 76–7, 79 Descartes, Rene 15, 37 description, knowledge by 21 dislocation of culture 86–7 Downey, Greg 94 Dumb Waiter, The 111 “emotigraphs” 111 emotions 32 empathy 33 Empiricists xvii Empty Space, The 1 Endgame xv–xvi enlightenment xvii ephemeral 6, 42 Epic Theatre 116 epistemology xiii–xiv, 3, 22–3 Esslin, Martin xvi Everyman 58 face perception 32 Fenske, Mindy 92 feudalism 53 fictional entities 3 First Crusade 54–5 Flight Patterns: performance 89–90; presumption 89; proposal 90–100 Fornes, Maria Irene 107–17 “Fornesian pause” 111–15 “Fornesian plot line” 111–15 Foucault, Michel xvii Frank, Grace 59 Fuchs, Elinor 85 Furnivall, F.J 66 Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 96 Geis, Deborah R. 116 Gettier, Edmund L. 22–3, 35 “Gettier Problem” 23–4, 36 ghosting 14 Glass Menagerie, The 41 Glass of Water, The 122 Gobert, R. Darren 50 Goffman, Erving 89 Goldman, Alvin 24 Goltz, Dustin Bradley 92 Golub, Spencer 2 Great Gatsby, The 43–4 Great Revolt of 1381 56 Guattari, Felix 76–7, 79 Gurney, A.R. 90

Hamilton, James R. 2, 22, 46 Hamlet: audience of 42; characters as witnesses in 45; description of 41; Horatio in 42–6; performance of 41; presumption 41–2; proposal regarding 42–6; understanding of 48 Happy Days 111 Hayes, Douglas W. 68 heartbreak 108 Historical Atlas of the British Commonwealth and Empire 62 History on the Edge 51 Hofmann, Hans 115–16 Homebody/Kabul: dislocation of culture in 86–7; Homebody as minoritarian linguist in 76, 78–80; hybridity in 77–8; Islam 85–6; overview of 74; performances 74–5; presumption 74–6; projection (of the proposal) 76–86; proposal 76; translation in 76–7, 79–81; “Universal Drift” in 82–5 Hosea, Chris 101 Husserl, Edmund xvii hybridity 77–8 Illuminated Theatre, The 14 Incapacity 2 individual experience: concrete events understood as 18; definition of xi; shared experience and 15–8; viewing performance as 38 instinctual energy 110 intersubjectivity xvii, 3 “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” 22 Islam 85–6 Jahoda, Susan 89–105 Jakobson, Roman xiii–xiv James, LeBron 100–1, 105–6 Johnston, Alexandra F. 68 justified belief: definition of 23; example of 23–4; overview of 22–3; viewing performance and 24–6 justified true belief 22–3 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature 76, 79 Kanengieter, Marla 93 Kant, Immanuel xiii, xvi–xvii Kawara, On 105 Kellerher, Joe 14 knowledge: a posteriori 21; a priori 21; circumstantial 35; contextual nature of 32; learning of 21–2; meaningfulness of

130

Index

22; from observational data 26; understanding and xiii knowledge by acquaintance 21 knowledge by description 21 Krasner, David 33 Kurosawa, Akira 1 Kusher, Tony 74–87, 107 Land/Scape/Theater 85 language: borders created by 101; as communication xiii–xiv; in performance of self 92; in private 100; private/public nature of 37; in public 100; “Universal Drift” of 82–5 Lassiter, G. Daniel 32 laughter xiv–xv, 15 Le Jeu de La Feuilée 58 Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion 58 Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas: borders in 58, 64; characters in 58; presumptions 50–2; projection (of the proposal) 58–65; proposal 52–8; staging of 59–65; writing of 55–6 Lehrer, Keith 32 Levinson, Jerrold 22 logical positivism xvi Love Letters 90 Maddox, Donald 59 Manora, Yolanda 108 masochism 108, 115 meaningfulness of knowledge 22 meaning-making 13 medieval audiences 50–1 medieval plays: border in 51, 58; stage space in 50 medieval vernacular 6 metaphor 81 Middle Ages 53–4 Miller, Judith G 77 minor literature 77 minoritarian linguist: description of 6; Homebody as 76, 78–80 Minwall, Framji 77 mirror neurons 32–3 Mulvey, Laura 119 Music in the Moment 22 narratorial bias 45–6 Neiman, Susan xvii objective facts 6–7

observational data, knowledge from 26 O’Neill, Eugene 109 origami 97 Our Town 41 pain behavior 2 “PAJ Plays”: Conduct of Life, The 107–11, 114–17; “Fornesian Pause” in 111–15; narrative arcs of 110–11; performance 107; presumption 107–9; projection (of the proposal) 110–15; proposal 109–10; scene changes in 111–12; Vietnamese Wedding, A 107–9 panopticon 18 paper-folding 97 parallax xi, 6, 34–8, 45 Parallax View, The 36 Parry, David 68 patriarchal cinema 119 Pauker, Kristin 32 pauses 111–15 “Peasant’s Revolt” 56 performance: abstract objects in 37; Bayesian epistemology and 27–9; circumstances and 26, 29; concrete objects in 37; as constant 47; definition of xi; as ephemeral 6, 42; as living artistic idea 37; plausibility of 27; rhetoric and 92–3; as rhizomal process 41–2, 48; salient features gained during 22, 46; of self 6, 89–105; as shared experience 15; as social phenomenon xvii; spectator of 33; surprise of 27; totality of 18; understanding of xiv performance art 89–105 performance behavior 2 performance event: definition of xii, 14; triangulation during 36–7 performance text xii performative 100 performer-audience model of theatrical production 15 personal experience: example of 13–4; viewing performance as 2, 4 Phillips, M. Scott 77 Philosophy of Motion Pictures, The 22 Pinter, Harold 111 Pirandello, Luigi 45 plausibility 27 play: audience of xiii; meaning of xiii; “well-made” 121–22 plot xv Poetics xv

Index 131 Pollock, John 24, 33 Porterfield, Sally 108 prefabricated representations xiv pregnant pauses 111 Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, The 89 private communication 100 private experience: definition of xi; when viewing performance 6 probability calculus xiv, 2, 27 Problems of Philosophy, The 21 projecting variables 27 proposition xii propositional attitudes xii, 33–4 public communication 100 public experience: definition of xi; shared experience versus xvi; when viewing performance 6 public reason xvii qualia xii, 33–4 Rashomon 1 receptivity xiii rhetoric, performance and 92–3 Rhinoceros 111 rhizomal process 41–2, 48 Rothko, Mark 116 Rule, Nicholas O. 32 Russell, Bertrand 21 salient features during performances 22, 46 Saxe, John Godfrey 1 schadenfreude 119–22 Scribe, Eugene 121 “Sea Plays” 109 Second Crusade 55–6 Seinfeld 121 self: communicating of 92; performance of 89–105 self-degradation 121 Sense and Sensibilia 32 serfdom 53 shared experience: common data and 28; definition of xi; empathy as 33; individual experience and 15–8; performance behavior as 2; public experience versus xvi; viewing performance not as 2–3 “Simple Principle of Conditionalization” 27 Six Characters in Search of an Author 45 social media 92, 100 social psychology 32 Sontag, Susan 108 Southern, Richard 66

spectator: experiences of 33; triangulating the experiences of 33; See also viewers Spencer, Jenny 76 Spry, Tami 93 St. Bernard of Clairvaux 55 stage space: in Le Jeu de Saint Nicolas 59–65; in medieval vernacular plays 50; spectator interactions affected by 6; in The Castle of Perseverance 52, 65–9 Stucky, Nathan P. 100 Subjective, Intersubjective, and Objective 35 subjectivity of understanding 25, 32 Successful Life of 3, The 111 superimpose xii, 35 surprise 27 temporality xvi Text and Performance Quarterly 92, 100 Thatcher, David 34 theatre: as ephemeral 6, 41; as rhizomal process 41–2, 48; as shared experience 15; “unease” in 119 Third Crusade 55 Three Sisters xv Thrupp, Sylvia L. 56 “T-O map” 52, 65 Tong, Lillian 101 totality of performance 18 translation 79–81 triangular set of relations 35 triangulate xii, xvii, 34–8 triangulating 2, 33 Trump Effect 4 typology 57 uncanny 120–21 understanding: of cinema 22; knowledge and xiii; of performance xiv; subjectivity of 25, 32 “unease” 119 “Universal Drift” 82–5 variety-of-evidence thesis 35 Vietnamese Wedding, A 108–9 viewers: definition of xii; differing circumstances of 2; probability calculus of 2; stage space effects on 6; superimpositions from 35; triangulating the experience of 2; as witnesses 6; See also audiences; spectator viewing performance: definition of 1; emotions during 32; as individualized

132

Index

experience 38; justified belief and 24–6; laughter and xiv–xv; objective facts revealed after 6–7; as personal experience 2, 4; plot and xv; private experience when 6; public experience when 6; salient features gained during 22, 46; structure of 16–8 visceral displeasure 119–20, 122 visual displeasure 120–21 “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” 119

White, John 65 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 119 Wilder, Thornton 41 Wildeson, Daniel 93 William of Tyre 55 Wingfield, Tom 41 Wittgenstein, Ludwig xvi, 2, 15 Wong, Yoke-Sum 94 Words, Space, and the Audience 13 Woyzeck 111 Young, Robert 81

Waiting for Godot xv–xvi, 111, 121–22 Warren, Michelle R. 51–2 “well-made play” 121–22 Wheel of Fortune 55, 57–8, 64–5

Zamir, Tzachi 21, 115 Zizek, Slavoj 36