spectator in drama/drama in spectator

8/10/2019 Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

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Una Chaudhuri

Modern Drama, Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 1984, pp. 281-298 (Article)

DOI: 10.1353/mdr.1984.0027

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The

pectator

in

Drama

Drama in the

pectator

UN CH UDHURI

[ ] text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering

into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place

where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we

have hitherto said it was, but the reader.

Roland Barthes

The theoretical maneuver by which the reader came to occupy the space vacated

by the disappearing author did not remain unquestioned for long. The reader-

whether it be the mock-reader, the model reader, the implied reader, the

super reader, or even the real reader (me) 2 - could hardly withstand the

pressure exerted by contemporary literary theory upon any construct in which

meaning can be grounded (or, as Barthes says, collected, united ). The

multiple writings which Barthes found playing through and pulverizing the

once closed, organic, stable, objective, autonomous text

~ o u l

hardly remain

absent from the reader. They soon appeared, in the forms either

of

the

institutional codes and conventions of semiotic theory (see Culler's literary

competence 3) or

of

interpretive strategies, shared, cultivated and enjoined

by the fact of one's membership in interpretive communities. 4 Barely

installed as a literary fact, the autonomous reader was revealed as a critical

fiction, the latest in a series that has included the autonomous author and the

objective text.

f

the reader remains at all, it is

as

a psychologically unique

individual (the actual person reading) imprinting private fantasies, desires and

neuroses, in a radically personal way, upon the text.

5

This reader

is

a construct

of little theoretical use to literary study, though not without attraction to literary

theologians desirous of justifying the existence

of

literature.

6

Thus, from the denial of the reader (the affective fallacy) to the elevation

of

the reader (the affective fallacy fallacy7), criticism has arrived, in a few short

decades, at the extinction

of

the reader (the affective fallacy fallacy fallacy?).


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UN

CHAUDHURI

However, the explosion

of

this promising construct has not been concluded

without considerable fallout. Reader-response criticism - a very mixed

bag

of

critical writings sharing an orientation towards the role

of

the reader - has

contributed greatly to the specification of the critical and pedagogical

enterprises, generating a set

of

terms and articulating a range

of

issues that have

had no less n effect than that of irreversibly altering the path ofliterary studies.

Preeminent among these issues is that

of

the locus and nature

of

literary

meaning, with its attendant inquiry into the question of how such meaning can

be apprehended and described. The most extreme response to this question

is

probably that of Stanley Fish, for whom meaning is reading, and vice versa.

Defining meaning as an event rather than a content, Fish argues for a criticism

that describes - in minute detail - the dynamics of this event, revealing the

work's meaning

s

a response to the question: what does this text

o

to its

reader? Thus the text is no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event

something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader.,,8

The preponderance of words like event, participation and happens in

Fish's discourse, as well

s

that of words like performance, activity and

process in the discourse

of

reader-response criticism in general, would lead

one to expect this criticism to be particularly suited to and productive in the

study

of

drama. In fact, however, the drama is conspicuous by its absence from

the concerns of reader-oriented criticism. Neither as literary type nor s

theoretical model does drama enter here

(in contrast, for instance, to its

ubiquity as theoretical model in the social sciences

10).

This situation is already

being remedied, no doubt, as testified by Patrice Pavis's recent essay on The

Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception: Variations on a Few Relationships. I

Pavis opens his discussion with a description

of

the present state

of

this line

of

inquiry, not neglecting to highlight the paradox of its paucity in the one field

seemingly most suited to it:

The theatrical work has always been subjected to a very detailed analysis

of

its working

parts, an analysis which has described even the most insignificant mechanisms

of

composition and function. But the question of its reception by the spectator seems to

have been totally neglected, except for the famous instance of catharsis or its Brechtian

counterpoint, alienation. Such is the paradox of theatre criticism: more than any other

art, theatre demands, through the connecting link of the actor, an active mediation on the

part

of

the spectator confronted by the performance; this happens only during the

event

of aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, the modalities

of

reception and the work of

interpreting the performance are very poorly understood. I

Why this should be the case is a great deal more complicated than Pavis

suggests: he accounts for it in terms

of

the suspicion about theory

of

reception,

which has been accused

of

idealism because it is too centered on the perceiving


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Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

subject and too far removed from a structural description

of

the performance.

That such a suspicion exists is certain, but why it should paralyze dramatic

criticism while being overcome in the criticism of poetry and the novel is

mysterious. The success (or at least progress)

of

reader-response criticism

of

other literature and its nondevelopment in drama criticism hint at the existence

of deeper problems.

Reader-orientation in drama criticism

is

hampered by the preexistence of

another sort of reception problem in drama study: the problem that dramatic

texts appear to have at least two addressees. Whereas novels and poems are

addressed directly to their readers (although one must distinguish between

readers belonging to different historical periods and cultural contexts - readers

from the work's original time and place, and those from other times and places

in which the work is read), plays are addressed to spectators through

performers. Or, to put it differently, the reception of a play involves a

relay -like process: the play is received first by performers and then by

spectators. Nor does the plurality

of

addressees stop here. Dramatic texts are

also read usually (but not always) after they have been produced

thUS

adding

another step in the relay process, for the production experience may well alter

the way texts are read). Moreover, the existence of contemporary as well as

later receivers, noted in the case

of

novels and poems, also holds true for plays,

and is exacerbated by the continuation and repetition, over time,

of

the relay

process that distinguishes the dramatic text to begin with. The extension of the

map of drama's addressees over that of a map of literature's addressees is

expressed in the following table:

Drama

Other literature

(a) contemporary performers

(b) contemporary spectators contemporary readers

(c) contemporary readers

(a) later performers

(b) later spectators later readers

(c) later readers

t should be noted that groups (a) and (c) - both in the contemporary and the

later case - though performing the same physical act (reading), do so for

altogether different reasons. (a) reads in order to perform, that is, in order to

produce an aesthetic experience (in b, while (c)'s reading is the aesthetic

experience. The two activities are wholly different, therefore, involving

distinct interpretive procedures and decisions. (This is not to say that no

overlapping of interpretive strategies will occur in the readings

of

(a) and (c):

indeed, to the extent that both share the same cultural and ideological codes,


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UNA CHAUDHURI

their interpretations will coincide to a large extent. Nevertheless, the

performer-reader will constantly tailor his interpretation to fit within the

constraints set by the conventions

of

his theatre a process that may even

involve drastic censorship

of

the text.)

The state

of

affairs is actually greatly more complicated than my table

suggests. None

of

the groups occupying the four boxes is by any means

homogeneous. For example, the group contemporary spectators will include

subgroups and individuals having greatly varying degrees

of

dramatic

competence, not to mention very different cultural orientations. In the case

of

most dramatic types, spectators will be present who occupy a number

of

different positions on such social and intellectual continua as rich-poor,

educated-illiterate, sophisticated-naive, refmed-vulgar, etc., and such psycho

logical continua

s

attentive-inattentive, serious-casual, sensitive-insensitive,

etc. This sort

of

variation within groups is bound to be far greater in the case

of

drama's addressees than in that

of

other literature, the former's reception

occurring in the context

of

a social event in which one engages for many

(nonaesthetic) reasons, including

self-display,

status seeking and tourism,

whereas the latter's is the result

of

an activity usually pursued for its own sake.

The multiplicity

of

addressees in drama reveals its force as an obstacle to a

reception-oriented drama criticism when we consider the transformation such

criticism effects on traditional categories. According to Umberto Eco, every

reception

of

a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance

of

it,

because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself. 13

The application

of

this idea to literature has the effect

of

collapsing the hitherto

distinct but essentially complementary activities

of

reading and writing,

making this essential complementarity into an essential identity: not writing

and reading, but reading/writing. The text processes the reader and the reader

processes the text, the two operations occurring not successively but simul

taneously. Thus reader-response criticism gradually breaks through the

boundaries that separate the text from its producers and consumers and

reconstitutes it as a web whose threads have no beginning and no end. I4

The problems arising in any attempt to apply the notion

of

reading

s

performance to drama can be found even at the simple level

of

terminology. To

say that the reader

of

a novel performs this novel is relatively clear, not

involving the transformation

of

any other traditional category. To say that the

spectator or reader

of

a play performs the play is far less acceptable, for the

obvious reason that there already exists a distinct performance category in

relation to drama. Of

course, this terminological problem can be solved by

keeping in mind that the spectator's/reader's performance is a mental event,

while the performer's performance is physical. In the case

of

a staged play, this

would then involve the existence

of

two performances, the mental one carried

out by the spectator and the physical one carried out by the performer, the latter

being preceded by another mental performance (the performer's reading

of

the


6/19


5

play text prior to staging it).

t

may be argued that it is a question here not

of

several performances but

of

several texts (each reading involves the putting

into operation of different deciphering, decoding and interpretive strategies

which produce different texts altogether). This position, which has the

effect

of

denying the objective existence

of

a text independent

of

the way

readers process it, puts the whole critical project into question. f here are no

texts but only readings (which is what the term reading/writing implies),

what are these readings readings oj? If only o themselves (as Fish's notion of

interpretive communities suggests: reading, he says, is an activity that

processes its own user 15), then what is criticism but another performance of

its own inherent categories, strategies, prejudices?

Fish's

response to this

apparent circularity is to accept it, urging the superiority of an interpretation

that is at least aware of

itself'

over one that is unacknowledged as such. 16

Nevertheless, the difference between the activity of the reader of a literary

work and that

of

literary critics writing on that work is at least apparent (if

highly problematic). One expression of this perceived difference lies in the

development of a branch of reader-response criticism devoted not to the

interpretive activity of the individual (time-less) reader, but rather to the history

of responses to a literary work. Rezeptionsgeschichte or the history of

reception, associated with, among others, Hans-Robert Jauss, takes as its

project the survey and analysis of a critical discourse extended over time and

adhering to specific works. While this metacritical discourse is aimed largely at

identifying the various aesthetic and ideological codes. that organize and

articulate criticism in various periods of history, and as such falls outside the

domain of

literary

criticism

strictly defined, it can be undertaken at times to

solve problems ofliterary history - why a given play

or

novel succeeded at one

time and not another, why a work meant one thing at one time and something

else at another - and so can contribute indirectly to the traditional critical

project: interpretation.

The critical discourse studied in this way need not be (and has not been) re

stricted to the past. In an essay on The Discourse

of

Dramatic Criticism, 17

Patrice Pavis concludes a discussion of the plurality of theatrical meta

languages with an analysis of a corpus of 32 texts published in the French and

English press on Measure for Measure directed by Peter Brook at the Bouffes

du Nord in November 1978. Pavis's discussion

of

this more or less complete

sampling has the modest aim

of

comparing common points and thematic

divergences, ideological presuppositions and a few stylistic 'tics '1S - no

attempt is made to arrive at a systematic

or

rigorous classification

of

codes and

procedures at work in this body of writing.

9

That a more thoroughgoing

exposition would be possible, and that the discourse studied need not be re

stricted to journalistic responses to productions but can encompass academic

critical writings as well, are demonstrated by (among others) Richard Levin's

recent study

of

contemporary Shakespearean criticism

,

which (though far


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86

UN

CH UDHURI

removed in intention from reception theory, being indifferent to the ideological

bases of criticism) is a model of completeness and categorization.

Spectator-oriented dramatic criticism has before it two options: it can attempt

to study the processes - psychological, semiotic, ideological - by means

of

which the individual spectator receives (or construes) the meaning

of

a play

(these processes themselves being perhaps - following Fish - the meaning); or

it can develop, in a more precise and code-conscious way, the already old

tradition

of

studying the historical fortunes of a play. The two options are not,

of

course, mutually exclusive: the spectator's response being a matter

of

experience rather than

of

intellect, it can be apprehended mainly in

records of

it, even

if

the spectator was oneself (the I who writes as critic is different from

the I who experienced the play).

The question

of

the spectator's response, or more precisely,

of

its

apprehension

for theoretical purposes, plunges us into a central issue

of

reader-response criticism: the question as to whether the responses a work

of

art

can elicit are implicit, implied, inscribed - whatever, and to whatever degree-

within the work itself. In short, does art guide the responses to it?

To ask this question is,

of

course, to slip back into the position

of

maintaining

that a text - in however mysterious or multiple a form -

exists

a claim denied,

as mentioned earlier, by Fish (and others). Fish will not deny, however, that the

notion of a text exists, sanctified by our interpretive community, and this

notion may well be a

sine qua non

(though possibly an acknowledgedly

fictional or conventional one)

of

contemporary criticism.

To what extent can a play direct - or at least restrict - the spectator's

(potentially limitless) responses to it? There are few instances in drama theory,

as

Pavis notes, of explicit attention to the spectator's experience. The most

famous of these - Aristotle's catharsis and Brecht's alienation - are both

articulated, significantly,

as

principles

of

dramatic composition and theatrical

production. Although both Aristotle and Brecht display a distinctly moral

concern with spectators' actual experiences (catharsis and alienation are both

good for us, though for very different reasons), the emphasis in their

discussions is clearly on textual inscription. Both hold the position that the

causes

(stimuli, clues, directions, etc.)

of

the spectator's response can be and

are inscribed within the play and can, consequently, be discovered there,

read

out o the play. Spectator-response criticism, this suggests, can take as its

object

of

study the text itself, as other (author- and text-oriented) criticisms

have done.

t

is a matter only

of

changing the angle of vision to focus more

exclusively on those elements

of

the play which

do

something to the spectator,

call forth or create some sort

of

response, be it ease, acceptance, comfort,

security (characteristic responses to what Brecht called the culinary theatre ),

or unease, embarrassment, confusion, bewilderment, terror, etc.

Having decided to investigate the spectator's response

as

it is structured into

the play, we now face the perennial problem

of

deciding what (or where) the


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play is - is it the play script, the production, or the individual performance?

Aristotle's response-paradigm (catharsis) would seem to be capable

of

a more

complete textual inscription than Brecht's, although alienation too is a

function of many devices that can be recorded in the text (such

as

the episodic

structure, the songs, the ironic use

of

language in dialogue, and even certain

scenic elements). Many other alienation devices - particularly acting style -

are purely theatrical.

I shall not attempt to solve this problem here (it may have no solution);

however, the following application

of

spectator-response criticism will, I hope,

explore and help to specify the issue. The play I have chosen, Peter Shaffer's

Equus has the virtue of having elicited a sort of critical response which

highlights the problematic

of

dramatic affect. Writings on the play, especially

early journalistic ones but also more scholarly treatments, exhibit a curious

schizophrenia typical of much contemporary response to theatre. This

schizophrenia takes the form of a theoretical dichotomy between drama and

theatre, the former being roughly synonymous with intellectual depth or

originality

of

ideas, the latter referring mainly to matters like staging, acting

and scene design.

The problem with this dichotomy is revealed when it

is

applied to

postrealistic drama, which no longer contains those elements upon which this

definition of drama is based. Patrice Pavis, discussing the discourse of

dramatic criticism, points to this very fact:

[a]

time lag (or out

of

sync ) can be observed in the evolution of the critical apparatus

which has been developed and adopted for classical dramaturgy (which can be made to

span from classical seventeenth-century tragedy to the naturalistic well-made play ).

t

corresponds to a dramaturgy founded on segmentation into acts and scenes, on

characters representing a certain individuality, and on an illusionist mode

of

acting. The

critical vocabulary describing this genre is extremely precise and readily normative.

However, as soon as it is used, through lack ofother tools, to account for modem forms,

the results are as imprecise as they are misleading. 2 I

In the case

of

Equus the classically based critical apparatus yields a negative

judgment, framed in terms of the drama-theatre dichotomy. Frequently charged

with intellectual superficiality, staleness and even dishonesty, the play

nevertheless compels critics - in the light

of

its huge theatrical success - to

remark upon what is termed either its packaging or its brilliant staging

(depending on how the critic feels about the dichotomy). Jack Richard's

judgment is typical. Equus he says,

is

a perfect case-study in the mediocrity of insight necessary nowadays for the play to enjoy

a popular reputation for profundity. From the schematic psychology to the simple

minded cultural criticism, there is nothing in this play that either informs us what life is


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88

UNA

CHAUDHURI

or what it ought

t

be. It is all contrivance, all middle-class whines and whimpers . . . .

And yet ... I have to say that the presentation of this nonsense has a galling merit to it.

3

In short: good theatre, bad drama.

That so much Equus criticism has been an attempt to extract the play's ideas

is partly due to the nature of the play itself, which has all the marks of serious

drama. Its central situation seems to belong to a category firmly established,

long before being perfected by Ibsen, in eighteenth-century bourgeois drama :

the conflict between the

individual

part free soul, part social product - and his

society. Alan Strang, the play's passionate young antihero,

is

in danger

of

being sacrificed to the deadly demands ofa conforming society. Society's agent

is Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist charged with domesticating this free soul,

as

obsessively self-critical a protagonist as any in Ibsen. The encounter between

these two familiar types engages the familiar dilemmas

of

democracy

structured into hundreds of realistic plays: can society permit its citizens to

indulge an independence of spirit which, while it affords them the opportunity

to experience life profoundly and elementally, also risks unleashing destructive

forces that could ruin society? From a different point of view, can such

authenticity

of

experience remain pure in a necessarily compromising,

repressive environment? Will it not inevitably isolate the individual

so

utterly

that he will tum violent, go mad, ruin

himself?

The implied inevitability of such effects proceeding from such causes, an

inevitability that is really a

convention

strengthened by countless instances

of

its dramatic use, is the hidden backbone

of Equus.

It is what ensures that a

certain

reading

of

the fictional events will occur. This reading

is

further

promoted by the delayed-exposition structure of the play: as play-time moves

forward, it carries the spectator backward in fictional time, encouraging him or

her mentally to construct a narrative

of

causality to stand against the

discontinuous, achronological representation one actually witnesses.

There

is

yet another way in which

Equus

prompts the spectator to seek a

coherent set of ideas in it. The play employs a version of the stage-house

relationship that achieves a Brechtian effect. By seating part of the audience on

stage, on

tiers o seats in the fashion

o

a dissecting theatre , 2

4

it manages to

shift the audience's experience away from that

of

usual play watching and

toward one of assisting at a lecture-demonstration. This unconventional

arrangement subtly affects the status

of

the play. The on-stage activities, it

suggests, are there not simply to be watched and enjoyed, but rather to be

actively observed, as one observes, say, a scientific experiment, or a trial.

What we see are simply the facts; it is up to us to evaluate them, to derive their

significance, to interpret their meaning. This implied interpretive sanction

to

the audience

is

only apparent. In actuality, the play deploys bits

of

information

carefully selected to guide the emerging mental narrative along a fairly narrow

path.


10/19


To promote the desired reading, Peter Shaffer has recourse to one

of

the most

well-established of modem myths: Freudian psychology. In responding

intellectually to a case of madness, a modem audience will draw first upon this

paradigm, the author can safely assume, evoked for them by various catch

phrases and cliches strewn throughout the play: transference, abreaction,

repression, superego, etc. Not surprisingly, the most notorious feature of the

Freudian paradigm, the Oedipus complex, provides the play with its central

relational model. Frank Strang, Alan's father, is the embodiment of the

repressive, authoritarian father, and is opposed by his wife, Alan's mother,

protective, indulgent, insidiously overpowering. t is her influence on the boy,

we are convinced, that has resulted in his peculiar obsessions.

Into this familiar nursery drama (primarily responsible for the critical

dismissal

of

the

pl y s

bad - i.e., intellectually stale - drama), Shaffer

introduces one more element, also conventionally associated with Freud

(indeed, the main sign

of

Freudian thought to the popular mind): sex. The

worship of Equus turns out not to be entirely spiritual: its central ritual involves

a naked gallop in a midnight meadow, ending in orgasm. On the basis of this

repeated experience, it is suggested, the boy has come

to

believe that his

is

a

jealous, omniscient god who demands absolute fidelity. This conviction is

responsible for his impotence with the girl Jill, which in tum leads to his final

desperate attack on the accusing gaze of the all-seeing God.

Thus, at one level, the play answers (or, more precisely, allows the

spectator to believe h or sh has answered) the question that lies on its

surface: why did Alan do what he did? The process of this answer is a process of

passive reading, the valorizing and mobilizing of cliches (in this case,

fragments of a central modem myth: Freudian psychology).

Critical disappointment with this part of the play leads some

to

focus on a

secondary theme, this one revolving around the psychiatrist, but no more

satisfying, ultimately, than Alan's theme. The elaboration of this part of the

play employs the same method s the first did - its logic is the logic of cliche.

The organizing myth here is the Romantic myth of the Noble Savage or mad

artist, presented here in its most updated, R.D. Laingian version: the psychotic

s poet. Dysart

is

the type of the mid-century culture hero, disillusioned with

modem civilization, uncomfortable with his role in it, disgusted even with his

safe style of dissent. He sees himself s a servile priest of the Normal, turning

unique individuals into uniform, standardized parts

of

the social machine.

Believing Alan to be possessed of an authenticity rarely seen in modem society,

he looks upon his own attempts to cure the boy s nothing less than homicide:

... that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life.

And let me tell you something: I envy it. . .. Such wild returns I make to the womb of

civilization. Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every

meal paid for by vouchers, cautious jaunts in hired Fiats, suitcase crammed with


11/19

UNA CHA

UDHURI

Kao-Pectate Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive. And I use that word endlessly:

"primitive." "Oh, the primitive world," ' I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling

the soil ofArgos - and outside my window he is trying to

become one,

in a Hampshire

field ... I watch that woman knitting, night after night - a woman I haven't kissed in six

years - and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his

God's

hairy

cheek ... Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the

kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of Dionysus for

luck - and go

off

to the hospital to treat him for insanity. (pp.

94-95)

Eloquent as Dysart is about his dilemma, he is hardly original. The view that

madness may be the price of ecstasy or the mark ofpenetrating wisdom is as old

as Plato. More recently, the suspicion that insanity may be a culturally

determined label for political and social oppression has been established in the

popular mind by such works as One Flew Over the Cuckoo s Nest and The Bell

Jar.

25 Hence the second strand of the play's intellectual level , like the first, fails

to provide the insights expected from serious drama. When seen as all the play

has to offer, it produces a judgment

of

the

playas

a crude subterfuge which

promises "some significant glimpse of the truth," but leaves us instead "with a

bogus

or

trivial message.

26

To dismiss the play at this point, however, may be a sign of critical

shortsightedness, a stopping short. More importantly, it may be an example of

the critical failure to distinguish between what a play

says

(or seems to say) and

what it

does

to the spectator. Although it may appear, from what they say about

the play, that spectators value primarily the so-called "ideas" they have

"discovered" in it, a critical study of spectator-response quickly reveals this

response to be other than intellectual.

It

is clear, for instance, that it is not just

the Freudian explanation that is satisfying, but rather the

process,

enjoined by

the play's structure, of arriving at this explanation.)

A striking feature of Equus is that it itself incorporates several instances of

dissatisfaction with the Freudian paradigm. Mrs. Strang challenges it directly,

insisting that Alan alone, and not his past, is responsible for what happened:

We're not criminals. We've done nothing wrong. We loved Alan. . . . Our home wasn't

loveless. I know about privacy too - not invading a child's privacy No, doctor.

Whatever's happened has happened because o Alan. Alan is himself. Every soul is

himself.

f

you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to

this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing - because that's him not just all

of

our things added up. (p. 90)

Dora's position, even if it is motivated by a desire to exonerate herself, is

remarkable. It flies in the face

of

the cozy causal narrative that spectators have

been encouraged to construct. It is, in fact, the mark

of

a rival paradigm

of

madness: madness as the unknown. Dora herself cannot resist naming this

unknown, taming it. She does so by pouring religion into its structure:


12/19


29

You've got your words, and I've got mine. You call it a complex, I suppose. But if you

knew God, Doctor, you would know about the Devil. (p. 91)

Thus, against the Freudian paradigm of madness, Dora sets up the Demonic

paradigm. Though not as fashionable, this latter is no less familiar, having

prevailed for centuries before ours.

However, it is not Dora but Dysart who introduces the paradigm that

structures the play at its deepest level. The implications of this paradigm have

little to do with the so-called ideas received

as

the Brechtian, lecture

demonstration, intellectual level of the play proceeds. Rather, they are

structured into the play in such a way that they operate at an experiential level,

while the spectator's conscious attention is being diverted by the activity of

constructing the Freudian narrative. The latter is necessarily and perhaps

deliberately simplistic, serving only as a convenient, shared fable used to draw

the audience into a collectivity upon which the deeper level of the play can

work. The process has been partly noticed by Gifford, who ascribes the play's

success to the fact that, [p]erhaps in Shaffer's skillful mixture of truth,

banality and pretension there is something for us all. . . . something that gratifies

our universal fantasies about our therapists and indulges

a

very common fear

that our symptoms cannot be removed without destroying our creativity. 27

But the paradigm that structures

Equus

at the deepest level does more than

fulfill fantasies. And it is this paradigm that accounts for the theatrical power of

Equus, a power coded in the play text itself, not independently endowed by an

imaginati ve director. '

In his first speech, Dysart introduces the central image of this paradigm:

... of all nonsensical things, he says, I keep thinking about the horse Not

the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do (p.21). While for Dora it is

Alan who is the remainder ofthe Freudian equation, for Dysart it

is

the horse.

The terms with which he describes it at the opening

of

Act Two bring us even

closer to the nature of the paradigm:

I can hear the creature's voice. It's calling me out

of

the black cave of the Psyche. I shove

in my dim little torch, and there he stands - waiting for me. He raises his matted head.

He opens his great square teeth, and says - (mocking) "Why Why Me? ... Why -

ultimately - Me? ... Do you really imagine you can account for Me? Totally, infallibly,

inevitably account for

Me?

(pp. 87-88)

[T]he black cave of the Psyche is, in

Equus,

the storehouse of irreducible,

unfathomable images, images that defy domestication by any causal analysis. t

is

the embodying of one

of

these images that Shaffer has in mind in the stage

directions for the blinding scene:

[the] horses appear in cones of light: not naturalistic animals but dreadful creatures

out ofnightmare. Their eyes flare - their nostrils flare - their mouths flare. They are

archetypal images - judging, punishing, pitiless. (p.

122,

my emphasis)


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29

2

UNA CHAUDHURI

The theatrical power

of

Equus has often been attributed to the horses with

their surrealistic wire masks, their eerie humming noise, their "precise" and

"ceremonial" movements. At least one critic has recognized this power to be

central to the playwright's conception, not just a director's happy invention:

Indeed, both theatrically and dramatically, the Equus form proves pivotal in achieving a

coherent whole in the play. Without uttering a single line ofdialogue, Equus determines

the fates of all the play's central characters, thereby demanding close scrutiny by

audiences and critics alike.

8

Such scrutiny reveals that it is not only the play's central characters but also its

spectators that "the Equus form" affects. Its role in the play goes far beyond that

assigned to it in the Freudian narrative: the role of obsessional object and

victim. The number and manner

of

its appearances on stage, as well as the

intention expressed by the playwright about its realization ("They are

archetypal images"), give us a clue to the existence

of

a hidden response

structure in the play, a structure masked by the rationalistic, analytical terms

of

the surface structure. In short, there

is

an archetypal paradigm at work in

Equus not merely as a theme or an explanatory mechanism, but as something

directing the spectator's experience.

In Symbols o Transformation Jung surveys the horse myths

of

diverse

cultures. All

of

them, he finds, "attribute properties to the horse which

psychologically belong to the unconscious

of

man: there are clairvoyant and

clairaudient horses, path-finding horses who show the way when the wanderer

is lost, horses with mantic powers. 29 The horse is frequently "a symbol of the

animal component in man," which accounts, Jung says, for its "numerous

connections with the devil" who has a "horse's hoof and sometimes a horse's

form.

3

0

This Christian version

of

the archetype appears in

Equus

as

we have

seen, through Dora. Other traditional attributes are also evoked, the most

striking

of

which is energy. Jung writes: "Since the horse is man's steed and

works for him, and energy is even measured in terms

of

'horse-power,' the

horse signifies a quantum

of

energy that stands at man's disposal. It therefore

represents the libido which has passed into the world."3

1

That the worship of

Equus is an exalted celebration

of

libido is clear to Dysart as he gazes lovingly

at it from within the confines

of

his sterile marriage:

He lives one hour every three weeks - howling in a mist. And after the service kneels to a

slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee

worship .. . Many men have less vital with their wives. (p. 93)

The compelling power

of

the horse archetype is perhaps primarily a function

of its universal associations with man's animal nature. The most graphic

representation

of

this aspect

of

the archetype is the mythic centaur, half man,


14/19


293

half horse. In Equus this archetype

is

realized theatrically - the horses are

represented by masked actors - and is ubiquitous. The spectator's analytical

activity is frequently interrupted by the eruption on stage

of

Equus , an image of

man's participation in prerational, preverbal forces. This image gathers within

it a host

of

psychological associations, developed over the course

of

historical

human experience:

The horse

...

is

...

an animal

of

darkness, representing unbridled instinct, night (the

mare as in "nightmare"), and terror. As a nourishing force, the horse is said to be able to

force water out of springs by stamping his hooves. In a medieval French epic concerning

the four sons

of

Aymon, their famous horse Bayard did just that. In psychological terms,

the horse symbolizes the unconscious world: imagination, impetuosity, desire, creative

power, youth, energy, and sensuality

. . . .

A white horse implies majesty, as when Christ

mounted one (Rev.

9:

1I). t

brings death, however, when an overly impetuous outlook

is

allowed to flourish. "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on

him was Death, and Hell followed him" (Rev. 6:8).3

2

That these associations may well be active within the fiction (i.e., as an

explanation, along with or beyond the Freudian explanation,

of

Alan's

behavior) does not mean they are restricted to this area of the play. Even within

the fiction, the horse organizes more than Alan's narrative: it

is

not only Alan

but also Dysart who identifies with the horse, experiencing it as a relentless,

irreducible question within the self. In the play's final moments, he confesses:

And now forme it never stops: that voice of Equus out

of

the cave - "Why Me?

...

Why

Me?

...

Account for Me "

...

In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place -

yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do - yet I do essential things .

... There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out. (p.

125)

Beyond the fiction, the horse archetype is able to structure the spectator's

experience of the play because Shaffer emphasizes one particular attribute of

the horse more than any other. Many legendary horses, according to Jung, are

clairvoyant. Alan's god

is

all-seeing. His portrait in Alan's bedroom at home,

says Dora, "is a most remarkable picture, really. You very rarely see a horse

taken from that angle - absolutely head on." "What does it look like?" asks

Dysart. "Well,

it s

most extraordinary.

t

comes out all eyes." "Staring straight

at you?" "Yes, that's right

...

" (p. 52).

Of

course, this information gets accommodated easily in the linear narrative

of

Alan's dementia, which ends in the blinding

of

six horses. However, this is

not its only role in the play.

t

finds an echo - a far more muted one - in the

dream Dysart recounts. In this dream, Dysart is a priest in ancient Greece,

performing a macabre mass-child-sacrifice during which he gets progressively

sicker. The dream hardly needs interpretation - its supposed meaning

is

as


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294

UNA

CHAUDHURI

obvious to Dysart as it is to us: it symbolizes his growing professional

skepticism and increasing sense

of

guilt at performing what he fears may be a

form of spirit murder. This is the meaning

of

the dream at the play's

intellectual level.

Itsfunction,

however, may be that

of

introducing, through certain repeated

key words and images, a semantic field already being cultivated elsewhere in

the play. Twice in his account Dysart mentions that his assistant priests are

wearing lumpy, pop-eyed masks (p. 29). The second time, after they have

discovered his sickness, their gold pop-eyes suddenly fill up with blood (p.

30). Twice, also, Dysart mentions the name of the place in the dream: it s

Argos - called horse-grazing Argos in The Iliad, the place where the earliest

known representations

of

centaurs were discovered.

The word also recalls

Argus, the giant with a hundred eyes.

The semantic field evoked through these repetitions has to do with sight,

especially unnaturally powerful or threatening sight.

n

a way, Freud's favorite

myth is central to

Equus,

though it is not Oedipus the patricide but rather

Oedipus the self-blinder who matters here.

The play's emphasis on eyes, sight and blindness in developing the horse

archetype is related to the theatrical paradigm that lies beneath the thesis-play

paradigm of its surface. Just as Jungian archetypes seem to remain after the

Freudian analysis, so the Brechtian style

of the presentation is actually set

within an experience much closer to the kind envisioned by Artaud. n other

words, the distance, critical judgment and rationalization implied by the

lecture-hall type

of

seating arrangement are merely convenient ways of

implicating the audience, of using its rationalistic predilections to get it to

participate in what is - experientially - a secular ritual.

The proposition that

Equus

belongs to the Artaudian kind of theatre has been

systematically tested by Helene Baldwin in an essay entitled Equus: Theatre of

Cruelty or Theatre

of

Sensationalism? 34 Her conclusion, that the play is soap

opera; the direction is theatre ofcruelty plastered on over the plot, 35 is based on

the preponderance in the play of psychological themes, for which Artaud had

no use: Such preoccupation with personal problems disgusts me; psychology

on stage works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the

quotidian and the ordinary, [and] is the cause

of

the theatre's abasement and

fearful lack of energy 36 Nor does Shaffer's inclusion

of

religious themes

seem to Baldwin to qualify his

playas

Artaudian, for the concept

of

religion in

the play is found to be limited and one-sided,

37

in the service

of

cheap

eroticism.

There s no doubt that the intellectual level of Equus lacks the awe and

mystery Artaud envisioned. But this level is merely the avenue into the play's

experiential core. Artaud believed that only ancient myths could provide such

an avenue; Equus demonstrates that it is not defunct myths but living ones

-like

psychoanalysis - that will weld the group into a collectivity and allow ritual


16/19


95

participation. Such participation, involving the spectator in the drama by

carrying the drama into the spectator, was to Artaud the essence of the theatre's

alchemical process, allowing it to transmute the basely quotidian and individual

into the pure, transcendent and collective:

There is a mysterious identity

of

essence between the principle

of

the theater and that

of

alchemy . . . . Where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation

which functions only on the level of real matter, the theater must also be considered as

the Double, not of his direct everyday reality ofwhich it is gradually being reduced to a

mere inert replica ... but

of

another archetypal

nd

dangerous reality a reality of which

the Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into

the obscurity

of

the deep.

3

8

Equus has two response-structures, layered one above the other and corre

sponding to the two kinds

of

reality Artaud mentions ( direct, everyday and

archetypal

...

dangerous ). The spectator

is

carried into the drama by the

former, the mechanism

of

his involvement being the galvanizing

of

popular

myths and cliches; the drama

is

carried into the spectator by the latter, the

mechanism being the horse archetype as realized and defined in the play.

Primary in this definition

is

the emphasis on eyes and sight. As such, the play

stresses that aspect

of

the horse archetype which

is

coincident with the primary

condition

of

theatre:

t

be seen. The stage of Equus is encircled by watching

eyes. The audience, Argus-like, has gathered to see, to be shown, to be

enlightened. Like Oedipus, it must know who it is, and like him, it will learn

of

its own blindness. In the ritual

ofEquus

the spectator will participate at several

levels, observing, thinking, interpreting and, finally, experiencing. While

ritualistic chants, made up of the cliches and catch phrases

of

our culture, keep

the spectator's mind occupied, the archetype conspires with the theatrical

moment and rears its head before the collective. Thus, what seems an

intellectual inquiry

is

in effect an encounter with myth, with what Artaud called

historic or cosmic themes, the great preoccupations and great essential

passions which the modem theater has hidden under the patina

of

the

pseudocivilized man. 39 Equus draws the spectator into Dysart's black cave

of

the Psyche.

The archetype

is

coded into

Equus

as thoroughly as its rationalistic opposite.

f

the latter disappoints (critics), it does

so

necessarily, revealing the ultimate

inadequacy

of

intellectual schemes in accounting for human experience, an

inadequacy we recognize,

if

only secretly, an inadequacy symbolized in the

mysterious unfathomable image

of

Alan's man-horse-god, Equus.

Significantly, the response-structure inscribed in

Equus

(of which the

compositional counterpart

is that

of

a secular ritual, disguised,

as so

many

rituals are in the modem world, in rationalistic terms) is analogous not only to

alchemy but also to psychotherapy:


17/19

UNA

CHAUDHURI

The psychotherapist seeks to encounter the unconscious, to understand some of its

contradictions and antagonisms as well as its creative elan. To transform what is

negative into a positive and fruitful orientation or ruling principleof the personality is his

goal. In so doing, the psychotherapist is elevating unregenerate matter (a leaden

condition) or chaos into a new golden sphere or cosmos.

40

The action of

Equus

on the spectator is analogous to that of the play's

psychiatrist on his patient - both are processes

of

discovery, journeys into the

unconscious, encounters with the irrational parts of the self. Just

as

Alan uses

commercial jingles to ward off this encounter, the play supplies the spectator

with a set of safe, familiar objective terms to protect himself with. In both

cases, an illusion of individual control is encouraged which permits the ritual

experience - be it the initiation of the patient into his individuality or of the

spectator into his collective identity - to occur.

t

is worth pointing out that, in the foregoing response-oriented analysis of

Equus

a curious complicity is revealed between two paradigms of theatre

usually regarded

as

organizing radically opposed spectator-responses: the

Brechtian and the Artaudian. While both Artaud and Brecht take as their points

of departure the paltry, passive responses inscribed in realist drama, the

alternatives they suggest seem to constitute two wholly different spectators.

Brecht's spectator is observer, critic, thinker, judge; Artaud's is ritual

participant. The dichotomy thus introduced into twentieth-century theatrical

thought and practice

is

a reflection of the dichotomy suffered by the West since

the Enlightenment, and now in the process of decay.

Equus

is simply one example of a general trend in modem drama away from

intellectualism or, more precisely,

through

and

beyond

intellectualism,

towards experience. The critical problematic to which this drama gives rise

an

example

of

what Pavis calls the time-lag

of

critical discourse - can begin

to be overcome by cultivating a spectator-oriented criticism. The description of

how a play works on a spectator - rather than ofwhat it means - can supply the

terms our criticism needs in order to erase the gap between theory and its object.

NOTES

The Death of the Author, in Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord, eds.,

The

Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings

n

Contemporary Consciousness

(New York, 1972), p.12.

2 For a brief and amusing survey of hypothetical readers suggested by various

critics, see Robert Rogers, Amazing Reader in the Labyrinth of Literature,

Poetics Today,

3,

NO 2

(1982), 31.

3 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study o

Literature (Ithaca, N.Y. 1975), Chapter 7, pp. 13

1

-

160

.

4 Stanley E. Fish, Interpreting the Variorum, Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976),

465-4

85.


18/19


19/19

UNA CHAUDHURI

4

West Virginia University Philological Papers

25 1979), II8-

2

7

35 Baldwin, 126.

36 Antonin Artaud,

The Theatre and Its Double

trans. Mary Caroline Richards New ,

York, 195

8

), pp. 42 77.

37

Baldwin,

1

2

3.

38

Artaud, p.

48

my emphasis).

39 Ibid., pp. 87.

1

2

3.

40 Knapp. p.

2.

spectator in drama/drama in spectator

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