Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions

Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions

By

William S. Haney II

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

 Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions, by William S. Haney II

This book first published 2006 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2006 by William S. Haney II

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-904303-65-X
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface.................................................................................................................vii

Chapter 1:
Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater .............................................1

Chapter 2:
Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater................................................................20

Chapter 3:
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls:
The Self Beyond Narrative Identities...........................................................45

Chapter 4:
M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence.............................................66

Chapter 5:
Artistic Expression, Community and the Primal Holon: Sam Shepard’s
Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime...................................................85

Chapter 6:
Hybridity and Visionary Experience:
Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain ..........................................101

Chapter 7:
Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana: The Incompleteness of Mind/Body ...................116

Chapter 8:
Conclusion: Theater and Non-pluralistic Consciousness ..................................131

Notes .................................................................................................................141

Bibliography......................................................................................................145

Index..................................................................................................................155
 PREFACE

This book argues that, by allowing to come what Derrida calls the
unsayable, the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Henry Hwang, Caryl
Churchill, Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott and Girish Karnad induces the
characters and spectators to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception,
attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste “the void of conceptions”
(Maitri Upanishad). While the experience of the sublime is often associated
with the grandeur of sayable qualities, to comprehend the unsayable involves
shifting our attention from conceptuality toward the direct experience of non-
thought after the exalted qualities of the sublime have run their course. The
unsayable in this sense also implies a radical defamiliarization insofar that it
does not have a propositional status that lends itself to a narrative framework
with a definite meaning. What the nine plays analyzed in this book do over
and above dramatizing their thematic content is to take their characters and
audience from the level of object awareness toward a taste of contentless pure
awareness—the silence beyond conception that is simultaneously the source
of thought.
The unsayable (and the language used to convey it) that Derrida finds in
literature has clear affinities with the Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta.
Derridean deconstruction contains as a subtext the structure of consciousness
that it both veils with the undecidable trappings of the mind and makes to
come as an unsayable secret through a play of difference. As J. Hillis Miller
puts it, Derrida’s “intuition (though that is not quite the right word) of a
certain unsayable or something unavailable to cognition is, I claim, the
motivation of all his work” (2001, 76). This intuition emerges from that
which is immanent as well as transcendent. It pervades everything, but is not
limited to the expressions of worldly phenomena. In revealing the idiomatic
style through which a particular work invokes the other, tracing its secret,
Derrida brings the reader toward the unsayable, which, as I argue here, is
available only to a nonpluralistic consciousness. In his radical approach to
literature, Derrida hints at a connection between language and subjectivity
found not in Western philosophy but in the Indian theory of language.
Like deconstruction, the nine plays analyzed below invoke that which is
unavailable to ordinary comprehension: namely, the nontemporal
connectedness of meaning and consciousness. In this version of metaphysics,
what is gathered up or united does not close anything off, but remains open
and boundless, inviting a unity-amidst-diversity. The sacred events of stage
drama do not represent absolute reality or universal truth because no
viii

conceptual context is absolute and because sacred events involve a void of

conceptions. An unsayable experience cannot serve as the ground for truth or
even propositions because it is not in itself propositional. While cognitive
knowledge includes a cultural context and linguistic background, the
unsayable is not a form of cognitive knowledge, but rather an experience
through which language and consciousness unite. Furthermore, the nine plays
that this book argues induce a void of conceptions originate in a variety of
cultures, indicating that these encounters with the sacred are cross-cultural
and even trans-cultural events. The plays are thus universal because they can
un-construct the intentional objects of consciousness for spectators anywhere
through aesthetic experience.
Western drama theorists and playwrights are still trying to understand the
trans-verbal nature of presence, the transpersonal quality of performance,
and the relation between performer and spectator. As argued here, the
theater of Stoppard, Hwang, Churchill, Shepard, Walcott and Karnad, in
leading to a self-transformation of characters and spectators, suggests that
witnessing consciousness or the internal observer lies behind all cultural
constructs as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its
generative condition of unknowingness.

I would like to thank several colleagues and friends for helping to

complete this book. First of all, its very conception was inspired through
discussions with Peter Malekin and Ralph Yarrow, without whom I would
not have begun writing it. I am also grateful to Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe for
organizing the international conference on “Consciousness, Theater,
Literature and the Arts” at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (May 2005),
and for having given generously of his time to read the manuscript and offer
suggestions. I also thank the IT staff at the American University of Sharjah
for their invaluable assistance, as well as the university administration,
particularly Dean Robert Cook and Chancellor Winfred Thompson for their
vital support of faculty research and development.
 CHAPTER 1:
INTRODUCTION: SACRED EVENTS IN
POSTMODERN THEATER

1. The Plays: Life after Unconstructed Identity

As suggested by the nine plays analyzed in this book, whatever we may

expect sacred events in postmodern theater to be like, they do not conform to
familiar states of phenomenality. On the contrary, these events involve the
taste of a “void of conceptions” (Hume 1921, 436), also known in Zen
Buddhism as “no-thought” or “no mind” (Suzuki 1956, 189). Beyond the
trinity of knower, object of knowledge, and epistemological process of
knowing, this void of conceptions forms the screen of pure consciousness
upon which the qualities of subjective experience (qualia) are reflected.
Although first-person and immediate in-and-of themselves, sacred events in
theater, being ineffable, are mediated through suggestion and aesthetic
experience. As such these theatrical events are necessarily transient, subtle,
elusive, and postexperiential insofar that they are conveyed through language
after the fact. They are also, therefore, open to interpretation. Nevertheless,
postmodern theater leads to the self-transformation of characters and
spectators by inducing them to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception
and thought, attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste the void of
conceptions.
After this opening chapter, the following sections of which theorize
sacred events in postmodern theater, Chapter Two argues that in Travesties
(1974) and Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead (1967),1 Tom Stoppard
uses a variety of theatrical devices to undermine our culturally constructed
habits of discursive thought. These plays lead the characters and spectators
toward an experience of intersubjective space in which the sense of a
subject/object duality begins to dissolve. In Rosencrantz, Ros and Guil
demonstrate that no matter how much they try, neither thought nor action can
lead them to a true sense of identity or answer the question of freedom. Their
experiences during the play serve rather to empty the content of
consciousness and lead them to co-create with the spectators an
intersubjective space beyond normative frames of reference. In Travesties,
Stoppard infuses a postmodernist form with a modernist spirit to parody
absolute notions of art and politics. The play transforms the characters and
spectators beyond conceptuality by inducing a self-reflexiveness through
2 Chapter One

which they transcend the logic of either/or and the limitations of knowledge
based on reason and sensory experience.
Chapter Three explores how Caryl Churchill, in developing a feminist
drama in Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982), demonstrates that the best
if not the only way to change society is first to change the individuals in
society. I suggest that self-transformation does not happen merely by
exchanging one set of culturally induced attributes for another. In Cloud
Nine, by exposing the gaps between binary opposites such as male/female,
power/powerlessness, Churchill promotes self-transformation by taking her
characters and spectators to a sacred space of empathy and inter-being. Top
Girls extends this theme by adding the opposition between the ethics of
caring and patriarchal competition, thus revealing a distinction between
discursive thought and the self as no-thought.
David Henry Hwang achieves a similar effect in his poststructuralist play
M. Butterfly (1988). Chapter Four argues that Hwang deconstructs the notion
of “the concept of self” used by postmodernists in defining self-identity. As
the play suggests, the phrase a “concept of self” involves a contradiction, for
the essential self can be approached not conceptually but only by emptying
the conceptual content of consciousness. This self, as Rene Gallimard
demonstrates, lies in the spaces between and beyond his socially constructed
identities.
In Suicide in B-Flat (1976) and The Tooth of Crime (1972), Sam Shepard
extends our consideration of self-identity by exploring the creative process
through his artist protagonists. Chapter Five asserts that to sustain creativity
an artist must tap into the “primal artistic holon,” which corresponds to the
experience of no-thought or pure consciousness. As Niles in Suicide in B-
Flat and Hoss in The Tooth of Crime demonstrate, this key element of the
creative process involves a void in thought that eludes conventional society
and can be easily overshadowed in the artist by the allure of fame and riches,
much to the detriment of art itself. Moreover, Shepard shows that to succeed
the artist must be able to integrate the primal artistic holon within the context
of a community with its traditional forms and values, however much these
may themselves undergo aesthetic transformation.
In Chapter Six, I argue that Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain
(1970) portrays a sacred event in the form of a visionary experience. In the
quest for Caribbean cultural identity, the play transforms its schizophrenic
main characters from mimic men pulled apart by Europe and Africa into
genuine hybrids who transcend these twin “bewitchings” toward a cultural
in-between-ness or a void of conceptions. This transformation, I suggest,
emerges through Makak’s visionary experience and its effect on the other
characters, an experience with a decontextual aspect that makes it less a
multicultural than a trans-cultural event.
Finally, Chaper Seven argues that in Hayavadana, Girish Karnad
demonstrates that human completeness depends on the physical unity of head
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 3

and body while simultaneously exceeding the physical dimension. Of all the
plays discussed here, Hayavadana deals most explicitly with the question of
human selfhood beyond our everyday socially constructed identities. Karnad
shows that while identity depends on the materialism of the mind/body, it
also extends beyond this to include witnessing consciousness. In trying to
identify solely with mind and body, both of which are essentially physical,
the characters end up feeling confused and frustrated. In taking the audience
toward a sense of completion, Hayavadana illustrates that while a mystery in
terms of theoretical understanding, completion can be known through direct
experience.
As the plays discussed here suggest, sacred events are experienced as
more or less the same by everybody. As Jonathan Shear notes, such events
are “completely independent of all spatio-temporal qualities and distinctions”
and thus refer to “experiences of unboundedness which are
phenomenologically the same” (1990, 136). This similarity accounts for the
many correlations between the plays, even though the way each playwright
evokes the sacred is phenomenologically unique. Stoppard ambushes the
constructed identities of characters and performers alike with the sudden
paradoxes of daily life and the negation of the intentional objects of
experience. Churchill, in undermining the narrative identities of her
characters and audience, pushes them away from the suffering of daily life
while simultaneously pulling them toward the fulfillment and freedom of the
better self. Hwang, in revealing the hidden presence of a reflexive
consciousness, orchestrates a charade of multiple identities that nobody takes
for anything but simulacra. Sheppard shows what can happen when an artist
loses contact with the inner self as a source of creative intelligence, and with
the community and cultural context through which this creativity can be
expressed. And Walcott’s dream play demonstrates that a visionary
experience is perhaps the most effective way to achieve cultural hybridity, an
in-between-ness defined as both an inter-national identity as well as a void of
conceptions that underlies all identity. These correlations in postmodern
theater mark an iterability that reflects the recurrence of sacred events in the
drama of living. I suggest that the recurrent taste of the sublime induced by
sacred theater, which alternates discursive thought with silence, enhances
knowledge of the transpersonal self and can even help in stabilizing higher
states of consciousness.

2. The Sacred as a Void in Thought

In the aftermath of the poststructuralist deconstruction of the metaphysics

of presence, how do we account for the fact that contemporary theater often
seems to manifest and evoke the basic attributes of sacred experience? If a
modern play can be considered sacred, one may assume this is because it
4 Chapter One

evokes a subjective experience described as sacred and not because it

conforms to a culturally specific, third-person, objective theory of
sacredness. Nevertheless, a theoretical framework may be useful to explain
what it is like to have a sacred experience in theater, after the fact. Antonin
Artaud, in The Theater and Its Double, famously attempts such an
explanation by comparing the avant garde with “Oriental theater,”
specifically Balinese dance. In the deconstruction of logocentrism, however,
critics have pointed to the necessary contradictions and paradoxes of trying
to explain subjective, first-person experience through objective, third-person
analysis. While this book emphasizes a first-person approach, the sacred has
been analyzed from a third-person perspective by thinkers such as Friedrich
Nietzsche, Emile Durkheim, Georges Bataille, René Girard, Martin
Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Giorgio Agamben, among others.
Jacques Derrida, for example, deconstructs Artaud’s efforts to create a
theater beyond representation with signs fully present to themselves (1978).
Nonetheless, Artaud’s definition of the sacred, which integrates Western and
non-Western views, still holds currency and may help to elucidate sacred
experience.
While most of the works discussed here bear little physical resemblance
to Balinese theater—with its sacred rites, lofty myths, and dance—they do
evince what Artaud considers its most significant effects. Artaud claims that
in Occidental theater "the Word is everything, and there is no possibility of
expression without it" (1958, 68). “Oriental” (or, if you prefer, Asian) theater,
on the other hand, has "its own language” identified with the mise en scène,
one constituted by "the visual and plastic materialization of speech" and by
everything "signified on stage independently of speech" (68-69). The
purpose of this materialization of speech is to restore and reinstate the
metaphysical aspect of theater, "to reconcile it with the universe" (70) and
“to rediscover the idea of the sacred” (Artaud 1988, 276). Artaud’s aim,
however, is not a theater that regresses to a pre-rational, pre-verbal state in
the Freudian sense, but rather one that includes and then transcends language
and reason to evolve to higher, trans-verbal, trans-rational states (see
endnote 2, Chapter 2). He describes this as “communication with life,” or
“the creation of a reality” (1958, 157, 155). Arguably, the sacred elements
found in Asian theater can also be found in Occidental theater. The
sacredness of theater as discussed here relies on ordinary language and the
Word, but also produces one of the salient effects of Asian theater: taking the
spectator (and performer) toward a trans-verbal, transpersonal experience.
The way Asian theater does this, as Artaud says, is by

creat[ing] a void in thought. All powerful feeling produces in us the idea of

the void. And the lucid language which obstructs the appearance of this void
also obstructs the appearance of poetry in thought. That is why an image, an
allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal have more significance for
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 5

the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics. (1958, 71, italics
added)

A void in thought is a state of mind that begins with language and

meaning and then goes beyond them through a shift in consciousness. As an
unidentifiable emptiness, this void is knowable not through ideas indirectly,
but rather through the immediacy of transcognitive, noncontingent Being
after ideas have run their course. Whatever third-person, objective theory we
use to describe it, the subjective “experience” of the void is trans-cultural,
transpersonal, and thus largely the same in any theater, whether Asian or
Occidental.
Sacred experience, then, can be defined as that which entails a voiding of
thought, and by implication a shift in consciousness that blurs the boundaries
between subject and object, self and other. As discussed below, the sacred in
theater is particularly significant in contemporary culture where social drama
and stage drama meet in life lived as performance—as Victor Turner,
Umberto Eco, and others have shown. Stage drama and social drama,
theatricality and history, the sacred and the profane converge whenever we
go beyond pairs of opposites. As neither one pole nor the other, the sacred is
a void that cannot be defined except in negative terms. As I suggest through
plays by Tom Stoppard, Caryl Churchill, David Henry Hwang, Sam Shepard,
and Derek Walcott, the spectator in postmodern theater oscillates between
opposites toward a sacred wholeness that is not a fixed point of reference, but
a spiraling pattern that encompasses the sacred and the profane, ordinary
mind (thought) and “pure” consciousness (a void in thought).

3. Social Drama and Performance

People today do not merely live but perform their lives, and life as
cultural performance holds a mirror up to art. This mirroring of art results
from the interrelation between social drama, or the "drama of living," and
aesthetic drama, particularly stage drama as defined by Artaud and theorists
such as Jerzy Grotowski, Peter Brook, Eugenio Barba and Richard
Schechner. Postmodern drama theorists have reexamined the notions of
essential form, the plural identity of the dramatic work, its embeddedness in
social and historical contexts in the hope of better understanding the relation
between text and performance, presentation and re-presentation, original and
simulacrum. In what sense might a performance present rather than re-
present? What is the nature of presence? Is it full or is it empty? While
postmodern theorists claim that theater is a fictional representation, Turner
and other critics see it not only as a derivation or a fiction but as something
closer to the drama of living. In this book I suggest that the transformational
structures of social drama that have always influenced stage drama have
6 Chapter One

begun to proliferate and intensify, while at the same time the numinous
supernatural aspect of ritual drama has begun to penetrate a wider range of
cultural practices. The distinction between presence and absence,
presentation and representation begins to fade. Turner, as an anthropologist
and comparative symbologist, says that

social drama feeds into the latent realm of stage drama: its characteristic form
. . . influences not only the form but also the content of the stage drama of
which it is the active or “magic” mirror. The stage drama . . . is a
metacommentary, explicit or implicit, witting or unwitting, on the major
dramas of its social context (wars, revolutions, scandals, institutional
changes). (1998, 67)

I would also add sacred events. Social drama and other types of cultural
experience display the aesthetic forms of stage drama, including ritual, music
and dance. In some ways life and dramatic art are becoming
indistinguishable, as I discuss in greater detail below in terms of the trans-
traditional “Grassroots Spirituality Movement of America” (Forman 2004).
Turner identifies four phases of the completed social drama reminiscent
of Joseph Campbell's monomyth--breach or breaking a rule, crisis, redressive
or reflexive action to remedy the crisis, and reintegration if the remedy
succeeds or schism if it fails. In this view, the world of theater and
performance has its roots in the third phase of redressive rituals that are
either “prophylactic” or “therapeutic.” This liminal third phase, a phase of in-
between-ness, also constitutes the point of exchange between life and drama.
It is the channel connecting self and world, subject and object, old and new.
In-between-ness is a process of breaking boundaries, of disidentifying with
one phase of life and beginning the transformation to another phase.
Schechner, who also explores the threshold between life and performance,
examines how in-between-ness collapses the difference between presenting
and re-presenting and suggests that it has both a cultural and a metaphysical
dimension (1988). For Turner, “cultural performance, whether tribal rituals
or TV specials, are not . . . simply imitations of the overt form of the
completed social drama” (1998, 64-65). Rather they emerge from the
redressive, reflexive phase of the drama of living, the threshold stage
dominated by the “’subjunctive mood’ of culture” (65). Performance art
gains from the drama of living through which we evolve toward states of
greater wholeness, a process that in turn is continually modified by the
metacommentary of performance.
The threshold experience in theater is not dependent on the dramatic text
or its author. For Artaud, true theater signifies an interpenetration of the self
and world as the self transcends the opposition between subject and object
toward a void in thought. “When this happens in performance,” Turner
writes, “there may be produced in the audience and actors alike what d'
Aquili and Laughlin call in reference to ritual and meditation a ‘brief ecstatic
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 7

state and sense of union (often lasting only a few seconds)’” (1998, 66). This
ecstatic union, achieved by working through a crisis to its remedy, involves
the same process through which the self in the drama of living undergoes a
transformation of identity toward the greater wholeness of a void in thought
achieved after language has run its course. This remedy and transformation
can be an individual or social, an ontogenetic or phylogenetic experience.
For Ken Wilber, any development through different structures of identity
entails transcendence, whether spontaneous or aesthetically induced (2000).
The self, by emptying the mind of its conceptual content, ceases to identify
with one stage of development and undergoes a transformation to a more
integrated stage. In drama as in life, transcendence toward remedy or ecstatic
union exceeds language, as in the language of a text, for as Artaud
demonstrates, in performance the verbal is itself transcended.

4. Liminality and Subjectivity in Theatrical Space

The shift in consciousness toward the sacred experienced in theater by
performers and spectators is described differently by different symbolic
traditions. In the Vedic tradition of India (which recent evidence suggests
could be 10,000 years old), this shift is the special focus of the classical
treatise on dramaturgy, the Natyashastra. This treatise and Indian thought in
general have profoundly influenced Western theories of drama. Notable
examples of this influence are Grotowski’s “poor theater,” which creates a
“translumination” in performer and spectator (1969); Barba’s “transcendent”
in theater (1985); Brook’s “total theater” (1987); and Turner’s redressive
phase of social drama responsible for transformations (1998). Turner’s
redressive phase constitutes a threshold or liminal phase, “a no-man's-land
betwixt-and-between the structural past and the structural future as
anticipated by the society's normative control of biological development”
(65). In contrast to the indicative mood of ordinary life, the liminal
constitutes the “subjunctive mood” of maybe, which includes “fantasy,
conjecture, desire,” and can “be described as a fructile chaos, a fertile
nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities” (65). This fertile nothingness is the
“ground” of in-between-ness against which binaries can be distinguished.
In this book I define liminality or in-between-ness as a void in thought,
which can be experienced continuously as the screen of consciousness
behind thoughts upon which they are reflected, or intermittently in the spaces
between thoughts. This void in thought has clear affinities with the absolute
one of Plotinus, the nondual consciousness as suchness of Buddhist
Vijnanas, and the Brahman-Atman of Shankara's Advaita (nondual) Vedanta.
In Advaita Vedanta, for example, the aim is to establish the oneness of reality
and to lead us to a realization of it (Deutsch 1973, 47).2 This realization
comes through the "experience" of consciousness in its unified level as
8 Chapter One

noncontingent Being. Vedanta explains this “experience” with reference to

the four quarters of mind: the three ordinary states of consciousness—
waking, sleeping, dreaming—and a forth state (turiya) of Atman or pure
consciousness.3 This forth state, which underlies the mental phenomena of
the three ordinary states, corresponds to Artaud’s description of a void in
thought. The Maitri Upanishad (6:18-19), a possible source of Artaud’s
phrase, describes this as a “void of conceptions,” “That which is non-
thought, [yet] which stands in the midst of thought” (Hume 1921, 436). As a
witnessing awareness immanent within the other states, it constitutes an
“experience” based on identity, unlike the ordinary sense of experience as a
division between subject and object. As Robert Forman says, turiya

involves neither sensing nor thinking. Indeed, it signifies being entirely “void
of conceptions,” by which I understand that there one does not encounter
images, imagined sounds, verbalized thoughts, emotions, etc. In short, in
turiya one encounters no content for consciousness. . . One simply persists
“without support.” (1999, 12, 13)

Forman describes this as a “pure consciousness event” (samadhi) (1999, 6),

thus avoiding confusion caused by the term “experience,” which involves the
dualism of a temporal gap between the subject and object of experience. A
sacred experience, then, is not in actual fact an experience but a sacred event.
Liminal interiority in theater, then, involves a void of conceptions shared
by performer and spectator. Not reducible to the mundane, this void lies in
the gaps between words and thoughts, in the background of all language and
ideas as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its
generative condition of unknowingness. This experience occurs in varying
degrees, however, depending on whether the operative medium is the text of
the drama, the non-verbal signs of the theater, or the interaction between
actors and audience in the actual performance. As Schechner says, “the
drama is what the writer writes . . . the theater is the specific set of gestures
performed by the performers . . . [and] the performance is the whole event”
(85). In terms of sacred events, while reading the script can no doubt evoke
these events, the optimal intersubjective experience of them, one that
interfuses the verbal and the transcendental, the sacred and the profane is
certainly that of the performance itself.

5. The Metaphysics of Speech

As this overview suggests, Western drama theory has been more
receptive to Asian influences, particularly Indian thought, than has Western
literary theory. In “The Theater of Cruelty: First Manifesto,” Artaud says,
“The question, then, for the theater is to create a metaphysics of speech,
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 9

gesture and expression in order to rescue it from its servitude to psychology

and ‘human interest’” (1958, 90). Artaud believes that theater should
abandon the Western style of speech with its abstract conventions and
parasitic dependence on the text and instead adopt the concrete Oriental style
of speech that integrates mind and body. When he describes “the language of
the stage” in terms of the language and symbolic gestures of dreams where
objects and the human body have “the dignity of signs,” and when he draws
inspiration from hieroglyphic characters “that are precise and immediately
legible,” Artaud suggests the integration of form and content, sound and
meaning that Oriental theories of language, as discussed below, describe as
attainable through aesthetic experience. The theater of cruelty—which
signifies not sadism or bloodshed but “implacable intention and decision,
irreversible and absolute determination” (Artaud 1958, 101)—is determined
not to reflect the world or text but to produce change through its own force as
a metaphysical embodiment. It “is through the skin that metaphysics must be
made to re-enter our minds” (Artaud 1958, 99). Theater changes the world
not by the ordinary use of language derived from a text but rather by
integrating the mind and body, actor and spectator through a process of
letting go of the boundary between subject and object, sound and meaning.
Like Turner, Artaud describes an interrelation between the actor and the
text. Actors and spectators enter what Artaud calls a “communication with
pure forces” (1958, 82) that produces an experience of “purification” or
sublimation (ibid.). In calling for an end to masterpieces, he says that the
actor must not adhere to the formal properties of the text, for “an expression
does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; . . . all words,
once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are
uttered” (1958, 75). The fact that the action and words of drama “only
function at the moment when they are uttered” corresponds to what Derrida
calls the iterability of dramatic language and action; the same words and
actions repeated in different contexts have different meanings (1977, 249). In
the theater of cruelty, actors do not read the text but interpret it. Or rather, as
Derrida says, the actor participates in

The end of representation, but also original representation, the end of

interpretation, but also an original interpretation that no master-speech, no
project of mastery will have permeated and leveled in advance. (1978, 238)

W. B. Worthen says that “performing reconstitutes the text”; the

citational elements of drama—such as acting style, scenography, and
conventions of directing—“transform texts into something with performative
force” (1988, 1097-98). Adopting the term “surrogation” introduced by
Joseph Roach to define dramatic performance “as an alternative or a
supplement to textual mediation” (qtd. 1988, 1101), Worthen uses the term to
mean “an understanding of the text [that] emerges not as the cause but as the
10 Chapter One

consequence of performance” (ibid.). Through surrogation performance

interrogates and thereby deconstructs a text, allowing for a move beyond
language and meaning toward a void of conceptions. In this way it produces
change in the audience, exerting what J. L. Austin calls a perlocutionary
force—defined as the effect of an utterance on the addressee or hearer.
But how does performance in fact produce the changes described by
terms such as surrogation, sublimation and liminal transformations. Taking
the negative approach, Derrida argues that performance is without presence
because it cannot represent presence or logos purported to exist in a dramatic
text, that it is not even present before the audience. “Artaud,” he writes,
“knew that the theater of cruelty neither begins nor is completed within the
purity of simple presence, but rather is already within representation, in the
‘Second time of Creation,’ in the conflict of forces which could not be that of
a simple origin” (1978, 248). “Presence,” he claims, “in order to be presence
and self-presence, has always already begun to represent itself, has always
already been penetrated” by difference (1978, 249). But as Turner and the
other drama theorists discussed here suggest, the connection between life and
art blurs the divide between presenting and re-presenting, presence and
difference.
Theorists who have tried to understand the transverbal, transpersonal
nature of performance as well as the relation between performer and
spectator include Grotowski, Brook, Barba, Schechner, and Yarrow. For
Grotowski, “what takes place between the spectator and actor” (1998, 204),
the common ground between them, is the defining quality of theater which
“they can dismiss in one gesture or jointly worship” (1998, 204). This ground
he defines in terms of myths “inherited through one's blood, religion, culture
and climate. . . . myths which it would be difficult to break down into
formulas” (ibid.). Like Turner, he locates the presence of theater in the force
of universals to remedy a crises or contradiction by dissolving the boundary
between binaries like subject and object. His “poor theater” aims for a state
of “translumination,” a move toward a void in thought in both performer and
spectator. “Translumination” is the condition in which the dualism of
subject/object no longer exists. The actor ideally transcends the
incompleteness of the mind-body-split and achieves totality and a full
presence, thus becoming what Grotowski calls a “holy actor” (Meyer-
Dinkgräfe 2001, 105).
Brook describes theater and happenings as “holy theater,” which is not a
reflection of the text but “a new object, a new construction brought into the
world, to enrich the world, to add to nature, to sit alongside everyday life”
(1998, 207). Like Artaud’s metaphysical embodiment, “holy theater”
attempts to make the invisible visible; happenings shout “Wake up!” (1998,
206). But even Zen “assert[s] that this visible invisible cannot be seen
automatically—it can only be seen given certain conditions” (ibid.). In life as
in art, for the invisible to interpenetrate and revive the ordinary, a condition
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 11

conducive to letting go of the boundary between subject and object has to be

constructed, as through an appropriate social gathering. This letting go of
boundaries results in what Barba calls the “transcendent” in theater.
The Natyashastra of Sanskrit dramaturgy describes techniques that allow
a performer to transcend personal boundaries and achieve temperamental
states that are transverbal, transpersonal, and eternal, as in the sacred
experience of pure consciousness (turiya, or sat-chit-ananda: being,
consciousness, bliss). On this basis, the performer is able to create an
aesthetic experience in the spectator that corresponds to Turner's liminal
phase, Artaud's sublime or metaphysical embodiment, Worthen's
“surrogation,” Grotowski's “translumination,” Brook's “holy theater,” and
Barba's “transcendent” theater, all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste
of a void of conceptions. As Artaud says, such theater is not about the mind's
verbal or conceptual content. Rather it transcends verbal content to achieve a
nonverbal presence which is by definition outside the text. Derrida sees
theater and the text as mutually deconstructing, arguing that presence “has
always already begun to represent itself” (1978, 249). But which is re-
presenting which? Can we deny presence to a cultural performance that still
uses language but aims through its universally ambiguous and symbolic types
at a totality which is transverbal as well as transpersonal? Arguably, through
their liminality and perlocutionary force drama and performance create their
own brand of presence, an invisible presence that escapes the deconstructive
gaze. The semiotics of theater suggests this presence through the power of
suggestion, a feature explained by Indian literary theory in terms of a
correlation between levels of language and consciousness.

6. Vedic Language Theory

The difference between Indian (Vedic) language theory and Saussurean
semiology is that while the latter examines language in itself, the former goes
further by examining language in relation to the levels of consciousness.
From this perspective, the subject and object of knowledge form an
integrated whole that cannot be separated without distortion or
misrepresentation. As recorded in the Rig-Veda and explained by Indian
grammarians such as Bhartrhari, language consists of four levels
corresponding to different levels of consciousness, ranging from the spoken
word in ordinary waking consciousness to the subtlest form of thought in
pure consciousness (Coward 1976). As we move from the ordinary waking
state toward pure consciousness (turiya), the unity of sound and meaning,
name and form increases. Of the four levels of language, the first two are
vaikhari and madhyama, which in Saussurean terms correspond to the
general field of parole and langue. They belong to the ordinary waking state
and consist of a temporal/spatial gap between sound and meaning. The two
12 Chapter One

higher levels of language are pashyanti and para, which can only be
experienced through pure consciousness. They are transverbal in the sense of
being without a temporal sequence between sound and meaning. As Harold
Coward notes, the main difference between the two higher levels is that
pashyanti, which consists of an impulse toward expression, lies at the
juncture between Brahman and maya (illusion or expressed form), while
para, which has no impulse toward expression, lies within Brahman itself
(1990, 90). Both of these levels, however, are conveyed in theater through
the power of suggestion.
The notion of suggestion (dhvani) in Sanskrit Poetics operates in
connection with aesthetic rapture (rasa). This theory is comparable to the
notion of defamiliarization in Russian formalism and to the alienation effect
in Bertolt Brecht, which Tony Bennett describes as a way “to dislocate our
habitual perception of the real world so as to make it the object of renewed
attentiveness” (1979, 20). Through rasa a theater audience will remain
detached from all specific emotions and thereby appreciate the whole range
of possible responses to a play without being overshadowed by any one in
particular. As such, the taste of rasa involves tasting an idealized flavor and
not a specific transitory state of mind. By invoking the emotional states latent
within the mind through direct intuition, rasa provides an experience of the
subtler, more unified levels of the mind itself, thus moving from vaikhari and
madhyama toward pashyanti and para. As aesthetic experience, rasa
culminates in a spiritual joy (santa) described by K. Krishnamoorthy as
“wild tranquility” or “passionless passion” (1968, 26). Rasa allows
consciousness to experience the unbounded bliss inherent within itself, those
levels of awareness associated with pashyanti and para. As S. K. De says,

an ordinary emotion (bhava) may be pleasurable or painful; but a poetic

sentiment (rasa), transcending the limitations of the personal attitude, is lifted
above such pain and pleasure into pure joy, the essence of which is its relish
itself. (1963, 13)

As described in Indian literary theory, this experience is the nearest

realization through theater and the other arts of the Absolute or moksa
(liberation).
The notion of suggestion (dhvani) evolved to explain how the artist’s
emotion (bhava) gives rise to the experience of rasa. Anandavardhana says
that dhvani is the suggested meaning that “flashes into the minds of
sympathetic appreciators who perceive the true import (of poetry) when they
have turned away from conventional meaning” (1974, 75). In theater, the
presence of sacred experience can only be evoked through the power of
suggestion as a form of rasa, given that the ineffable cannot be rendered
directly, and especially not through logical discourse. The nine plays
analyzed in this book render sacred events allegorically by suggestion, which
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 13

brings about what The Natyashastra describes as a “pacification of mind”

(Tarlekar 1975, 54), or a move toward a void of conceptions. As The
Natyashastra says, “Drama was meant to evoke Rasa. Rasa is so called
because it is relished. Its meaning can be accepted as ‘aesthetic delight’”
(ibid.). Rasa is the relish of “the permanent mood,” or sentiments that “are
not in the worldly experience” (Tarlekar 1975, 56). The Natyashastra
describes eight basic sentiments or emotional modes, each of which has its
basis in pure consciousness: the comic, erotic, pathetic, furious, heroic,
terrible, odious, and marvelous (ibid.). Drama employs suggestion because
the idealized flavor of these sentiments, being outside of worldly experience,
can only be apprehended “by that cognition which is free from obstacles [like
ego consciousness] and which is of the nature of bliss” (Ramachandran 1980,
101). From this perspective, the suggestive power of art pacifies the thinking
mind by taking us toward a level of language (pashyanti/para) and
consciousness (turiya) where it can relish a void of conceptions, which is
ultimately nothing other than the self as bliss consciousness (sat-chit-
ananda) knowing itself.

7. The Phenomenology of Presence

As suggested by the phenomenology of performance, then, presence has
dimensions that are trans-linguistic. The transformations of life correspond to
and engender the transformations of art, which lead towards the transverbal
in the form of pashyanti and para. This reciprocal structure is made up of
parallel recurring sequences. That is, in life and art we find the following
universal patterns. In life: breach, crisis, remedy and integration; in art:
desire, intention, action, resistance and fulfillment; or impulse, initiation,
quest, loss and restoration; or as Ralph Yarrow observes, annunciation,
embodiment, acts, mortality, salvation, peripeteia and resolution; or in terms
of the levels of language in Sanskrit dramaturgy, para, pashyanti,
madhyama, vaikhari and utterance (Yarrow 2000, 12). Life and performance
become indistinguishable in their interrelated desire for “communication with
pure forces” (Artaud 1958, 83), for their letting go of the confines and
contradictions of the verbal, “single self” phase of human development. This
process has accelerated in the multimedia age of life as cultural performance,
and will most likely continue to intensify.
Performance as “holy theater” whether of life or art can be understood as
a radical inwardness that is not like ordinary introspection. The latter has
something as its content, while the former is not like anything. Indeed, it
entails the complete absence of empirical phenomenological content—other
than the rasa of bliss itself. The commonality of experiential reports of
radical inwardness reflects a commonality of experience that is independent
of the variables of culture and belief. It is the common ground of
14 Chapter One

translumination that performance renders phenomenologically present for

actor and spectator. But however this may be, no fundamental theory of
consciousness has reached consensus in the West.
The Australian philosopher David Chalmers divides the problems of
understanding consciousness into “easy” problems, which he defines as
understanding the neural mechanisms involved, and the truly “hard
problem,” which he defines as “the question of how physical processes in the
brain give rise to subjective experience” (1995, 63). Although the hard
problem has yet to be scientifically solved, consciousness usually means
subjectivity. In his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?” the American
philosopher Thomas Nagel defines consciousness in terms of “what it is like
to be” an organism (1974, 436), whether that organism is a bat, a bird, a
stone, or a dramatic character. Chalmers believes that “‘To be conscious’ . . .
is roughly synonymous with ‘to have qualia’” (1986, 6)—the qualities of
subjective experience, or what something is like phenomenologically. But not
everybody accepts the reality of a phenomenal consciousness.
In his “astonishing hypothesis,” Francis Crick argues “that ‘you,’ your
joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of
personal identity and free will, are in fact no more that the behavior of a vast
assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules” (1994, 3). In this
reductionist approach, conscious experience is neither caused by, nor
interacting with, but in fact nothing other than the behavior of neurons. Yet
the question remains, “But what about the actual phenomenology?” The
American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who like Crick consigns
phenomenology to neuroscience, replies, “There is no such thing” (1991,
365). While conceding that human beings are conscious, he argues that we
misconstrue consciousness and claims that in fact we only seem to have
actual phenomenology. Dennett rejects the Cartesian dualism of mind and
body and does not acknowledge the self understood as what Arthur Deikman
calls “the internal observer” (1996, 355). His position resembles the Buddhist
doctrine of annatta or no-self and may have been indirectly influenced by it.
Dennett also rejects what he calls the “Cartesian theater” (1991), the idea
of a place inside my brain or mind where “I” am and from which everything I
experience comes together. Through his third-person approach to
consciousness, he rules out the subjective ontology of a central place or time
in the brain where consciousness happens, claiming that this experience is
only an illusion. Dennett has been criticized for this theory because in the
end he fails to explain the mystery of consciousness; he only explains it
away. The American philosopher John Searle, on the other hand, argues that
“consciousness has a first-person or subjective ontology and so cannot be
reduced to anything that has third-person or objective ontology” (1997, 212).
But whether we side with the third-person approach to consciousness as
represented by Crick and Dennett, or with the first-person approach of
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 15

Chalmers, Nagel, Searle, Forman and others, the mystery of consciousness

still remains.
Most Western philosophers, particularly constructivists like Steven Katz
(1978), Robert Gimello (1978), Wayne Proudfoot (1985) and others, claim
that consciousness always has an intentional object, and that even mystical
experience is constructed by language and culture. As Forman argues,
however, mystical or sacred experiences

don’t result from a process of building or constructing mystical experiences . .

. but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief . . . from
something like a releasing of experience from language. (1999, 99; his
emphasis).

By language he implies the lower levels of language that involve space, time
and the duality of subject and object, not pashyanti and para. The notion of
intentionality entails a subject being conscious of an object, event or other
qualia, which William James classifies into two kinds of knowledge:
“knowledge-about,” which we gain by thinking about something; and
“knowledge-by-acquaintance,” which we gain through direct sensory
experience (see Barnard 1994, 123-34; Forman 1999, 109-27). Forman refers
to the pure consciousness event as a non-intentional experience or
“knowledge-by-identity,” in which there is no subject/object duality; “the
subject knows something by virtue of being it. . . . It is a reflexive or self-
referential form of knowing. I know my consciousness and I know that I am
and have been conscious simply because I am it” (1999, 118; Forman’s
emphasis). As a truly direct or immediate form of knowledge, non-intentional
pure consciousness is devoid of the dualism of the subject-perceiving-object
and subject-thinking-thought (Forman 1999, 125).
Other Western philosophers also make a distinction between two aspects
of consciousness similar to the intentional/non-intentional division. John
Locke, for example, says it is “impossible for any one to perceive, without
perceiving that he does perceive” (1975, 335). Jean-Paul Sartre, although
without referring to samadhi or higher states of consciousness, says that
along with the awareness of objects in any intentional perception, there is
also a “non-positional consciousness of consciousness itself” (1956, lv). This
reflexive “non-positional consciousness,” which is non-intentional, Sartre
refers to as consciousness “pour-soi” (for itself), while the object of
consciousness is “en-soi” (in-itself): “For if my consciousness were not
consciousness of being consciousness of the table, it would then be
consciousness of the table without consciousness of being so. In other words,
it would be a consciousness ignorant of itself, an unconscious—which is
absurd” (1956, Liv). For Sartre, “non-positional self consciousness” is
beyond perception in that it is not itself an object of intentional knowledge
knowable by the thinking mind, although it nevertheless ties perceptions
16 Chapter One

together. For the thinking mind to know consciousness as an object would

imply an infinite regress, which Sartre argues against through a reductio ad
absurdum. For Sartre, however, this epistemological dualism is only a
theoretical experience of intentional consciousness against a background of
self-reflexiveness; it is not a sacred event. As Forman notes, “non-positional
consciousness” for Sartre “transcends my particular ego-infused situation. . .
. [However,] one can sense oneself as a disengaged or withdrawn
consciousness pour-soi only amidst or behind the encounters with the en-soi”
(1999, 156).
Even without considering sacred events, therefore, Sartre contributes to a
Western precedent of a twofold epistemological structure of perception:
intentional knowledge of the object, and non-intentional non-positional self-
awareness. Within the framework of ordinary experience, Sartre’s “non-
positional self-consciousness” is analogous to transcendental pure
consciousness. As Forman explains, “Though most of us overlook the
inherently transcendental character of consciousness and identify with our
roles, this identification is a mistake: we are not truly our roles, and we all
intuitively know it” (1999, 157). All the plays analyzed in this book
dramatize this distinction. Each one in its own way helps the spectator intuit
the difference between intentional consciousness through which we identify
with our roles and egos, and non-intentional consciousness through which
the qualityless self knows itself reflexively through “knowledge-by-identity.”
This non-intentional experience encompasses those defined by Western
drama theorist as liminal, sublime, metaphysical, surrogated, transluminating,
holy, transcendent, all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste of the void of
conceptions.
Postmodern performance, typically regarded as a form of intentional
experience within the duality of subject and object, has been defined as not a
full presence but an empty presence, an “aesthetics of absence” (qtd. in
Connor 1989, 141). Henry Sayre remarks that

An aesthetics of presence seeks to transcend history, escape temporality. An

aesthetics of absence subjects art to the wiles of history, embraces time . . .
An aesthetics of presence defines art as that which transcends the quotidian;
an aesthetics of absence accepts the quotidian’s impingement upon art.
(quoted in Connor 1989, 141)

But as I suggest, the sacred events of postmodern theater, as an aesthetics of

presence, are transcendent to yet simultaneously immanent within the
quotidian, the temporal and the historical. These events are contingent only
on the displacement of absolute forms of identity and on the wiles of letting
go of the dramatic text. The presence of radical inwardness and
interrelatedness in life and art does not form a circle, a timeless repetitive
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 17

pattern, but a spiraling pattern responsive to the changes associated with time
and place.

8. The Drama of Living and Grassroots Spirituality

The postmodernist argument against presence focuses on the ordinary
mind and in fact does not address the issue of pure consciousness. J. Hillis
Miller, who notes that “Literature is for Derrida the possibility for any
utterance, writing, or mark to be iterated in innumerable contexts and to
function in the absence of identifiable contexts, reference, or hearer” (2001,
59), proceeds to show that Derrida calls into question the primacy of
consciousness in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and other Western
thinkers. He thereby deconstructs—or rather re-contextualizes through the
play of difference—the presence, unity, and transcendentality associated with
sacred experience in metaphysical traditions. But in terms of non-dual
Vedanta, which distinguishes between thought and consciousness, sacred
experience in theater—understood as a taste of Being (rasa) as opposed to
the conception of an intentional object—is always already contextualized in
the experiencer’s physiological condition. The difference here is between the
dualism of the thinking mind and the non-duality of witnessing
consciousness. As explained by Samkhya-Yoga (the third system of Indian
philosophy), “there are two irreducible, innate, and independent realities in
our universe of experience: 1. consciousness itself (purusha); 2. primordial
materiality (prakrti),” which as discussed further in chapter two includes the
thinking mind (Pflueger 48).
In using the “aconceptual concept” of iterability (Derrida 1977, 118) to
define literature in terms of “the possibility of detaching language from its
firm embeddedness in a social or biographical context and allowing it to play
freely as fiction” (Miller 2001, 60), Derrida in a sense takes literature to the
outer boundaries of conceptual dualism. That is, iterabiility itself suggests
that theater, by pointing beyond the referent, also points beyond the dualism
of the mind as a material entity situated within a cultural context toward the
possibility of an experience so rarified that it underlies the infinity of
contexts in which a work of literature can be read or dramatized. Ultimately,
what iterability as an aconceptual concept suggests is the possibility of the
mind expanding toward an experience of non-material consciousness, as in
rasa-dhvani (Chakrabarti 1971, 33; Deutsch 1973, 48-65). For the average
theater goer, the connection between the non-referential (or non-material)
and the experience of consciousness as a conceptual void does not
necessarily entail anything they might not already be familiar with even
outside of aesthetic experience.
In binaries such as reference/self-referral, material/non-material,
mind/consciousness, the latter term suggests itself not only in theater and the
18 Chapter One

other arts but also in what Forman calls a “Grassroots Spirituality

Movement” involving around “58% . . . or 152.8 million Americans!” (2004,
11). Forman’s definition of spirituality, based on a widespread U.S.
government-funded study of its grassroots movement in American culture,
suggests how the contextual/non-contextual opposition self-deconstructs in
the experience of higher consciousness, whether this occurs spontaneously or
is induced by sacred theater or meditative techniques. As Forman writes,

Grassroots Spirituality involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is

indwelling, sometimes bodily, as the deepest self and accessed through not-
strictly-rational means of self-transformation and group process that becomes
the holistic organization for all of life. (2004, 51; his emphasis)

As the research conducted by Forman and his team indicate, the drama of
living in the United States today involves a growing interest in the spiritual, a
not-strictly-rational interest that “dwarfs Judaism, Islam, and every single
denomination of Christianity” (Forman 2004, 11). This interest parallels and
possibly underpins not only the deconstructive interest in freedom from
rationalizations and logical certitudes but also the sacred events of
postmodern theater.
As distinct from pantheism (“the doctrine that the deity is the universe
and its phenomena”), Forman defines panentheism as the doctrine “that all
things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made up of one single
principle, but that one principle is not limited to those worldly phenomena”
(2004, 52; his emphasis). All things, including humans, “are made up of a
single ‘stuff’ or substance” (52), but this “stuff,” while including the beings
within it, also extends beyond them. “It is both transcendent (in the sense of
beyond) and immanent (within). As the early Hindu Upanishads put this,
‘having pervaded the universe with a fragment of myself, I remain’” (ibid.).
The panentheistic experience of grassroots spirituality thus suggests a
deepening interconnectedness between the drama of living and sacred events
in theater.
Remarkably, a growing number of people not only in the United States
but also around the world are beginning to realize that the
phenomenologically reductive understanding of consciousness as always
having an intentional object—in the sense that “Consciousness is always
consciousness of some object or other, never a self-enclosed emptiness”
(Miller 2001, 62)—is not confirmed by the immediacy of their own
panentheistic experience, or knowledge-by-identity. In the words of one
spiritual leader interviewed by Forman and his team, the panentheistic
spiritual ultimate is “a formless reality that lies at the heart of all forms. It’s
something that is one, beyond our usual apprehension of space and time. . . .
It’s like quietness within, the still point of the turning world” (qtd. in Forman
2004, 55). For another, “that transcendent reality . . . is both within us, at the
 Introduction: Sacred Events in Postmodern Theater 19

core of our being, and all around us” (qtd. in Forman 2004, 58). On the basis
of this widespread evidence of sacred events in the drama of life, Forman
deduces that “the traditional Western ‘transcendent’ model of God is no
longer operative in the Grassroots Spirituality Movement. Its Ultimate is
reminiscent of the omnipresent, immanent yet infinitely extended vacuum
state of quantum physics, more like an ‘It’ than a ‘He’ or ‘She.’ In ‘It’ ‘we
live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28)” (2004, 58). It is not
surprising, then, that even postmodern theater would powerfully suggest
sacred events.
In a definition of mysticism that includes the panentheistic, Forman
clarifies the nature of sacred events by distinguishing between their different
aspects. The word mysticism “can denote the unintelligible statements of an
illogical speaker, a schizophrenic’s vision, someone’s hallucination, a drug-
induced vision, the spiritual ‘showings’ of Julian of Norwich or a Mechthilde
of Magdeburg, the unspoken, silent experience of God that Meister Eckhart
called the ‘Divine Desert,’ or the Buddhist Nagarjuna’s empty shunyata”
(1999, 4). On the one hand, hallucinations, acute schizophrenic states, and
visions fall on what Forman calls the “ergotropic side” of mysticism, defined
as states of hyperarousal in which “cognitive and physiological activity are
relatively high” (ibid.). On the other hand, the “trophotropic side” of
mysticism, defined as hypoaroused states, are “marked by low levels of
cognitive and physiological activity: here we find Hindu samadhi, mushinjo
in zazen, the restful states associated with The Cloud of Unknowing’s ‘cloud
of forgetting,’ or Eckhart’s gezucket” (ibid.).4 Forman proposes the term
mysticism primarily for the trophotropic states of hypoarousal and refers to
ergotropic, hyperaroused phenomena such as hallucinations, visions and
auditions as “visionary experiences” (1999, 5). In terms of mental activity,
emotional arousal and other metabolic excitations, these two scales move in
opposite directions. In hypoaroused states, research indicates a decline in
physiological parameters “such as heart rate, skin temperature, spontaneous
galvanic skin response, etc.,” while on the other side of the scale we find an
increase in these parameters (1999, 4).5 For the nine plays I discuss, sacred
events as a void of conceptions fall mainly on the hypoaroused side, except
for the visionary experiences dramatized by Derek Walcott in Dream on
Monkey Mountain, in which the protagonist combines both sides of the scale.
 CHAPTER 2:
INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN STOPPARD'S
THEATER

1. Intersubjectivity
Tom Stoppard is famous for undercutting preconceptions, treating
philosophical and moral issues with a lightness of nonattachment, and
developing a new relation between ideas and farce, all for the sake of
entertainment and enjoyment. Against a background of inquiry into basic
reality, Stoppard examines how people conduct themselves with one eye
focused on their activities and the other eye observing or witnessing that
activity. The gap between engagement and witness enlivens his plays with a
unique quality of entertainment and relieves the audience from the pressures
of mental agitation. Rather than trying to solve the problems of goodness and
the human condition, his plays invite us to stand back and observe the world
from a nonattached, pre-interpretive vantage point—which includes yet
surpasses Brecht’s “alienation effect” (1964). From this perspective, the
vagaries of human existence are seen not as tragic, but as farcical and
humorous.
The elements of Stoppard's theater from the 1960s most relevant to the
sacred include brilliant language, absurd yet inspired theatrical ideas, and a
frame of reference that escapes the tone of general mockery. These can also
be found in his recent plays such as Arcadia (1993) and Indian Ink (1995). In
addition to Shakespeare, the influences on Stoppard’s work include Oscar
Wilde, James Joyce, quantum physics, chaos theory, and Wittgenstein’s
Philosophical Investigations (Levenson 2001, 160). His most famous
theatrical idea was to set a play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,
within and around the action of Hamlet, with the two attendant lords who are
marginal in Hamlet holding center stage. Similarly, in a style reminiscent of
Joyce's Ulysses, Stoppard models his play Travesties on Wilde's play The
Importance of Being Earnest. The intellectual frame of reference of many of
his plays is also striking for his style of rendering translucent the content by
revealing the silence or void behind it. However profane the content, it can
still evoke a sacred experience.
In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, characters and audience co-
create a sacred space of intersubjectivity. The participants begin with
language and interpretation within a specific cultural context, and then cross
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 21

into a space or “presence” characterized by the “absence” of exterior

boundaries. As a liminal field, this presence involves a dis-identification with
the profane exterior, including the verbal and conceptual tokens of our
interpretive frameworks. Unlike film and television, which on the whole
present more accurate detail with faster cutting than stage realism, theater has
broken free of realism and gathers a live audience to witness a representation
not dependent on a full simulation. Theater spectators, although immersed in
the material context of the hall and stage, experience the attenuation of
exterior domains in a move toward an intersubjective, nonphysical presence
constituted by the performance as a whole. This attenuation or fading out of
the external, which induces a decontingencing of the historical self,
resembles that in meditative quiescence, as described by B. Alan Wallace:

As long as one is actively engaged in society, one's very sense of personal

identity is strongly reinforced by one's intersubjective relations with others.
But now, as one withdraws into outer and inner solitude, one's identity is
significantly decontextualized. Externally, by disengaging from social
interactions, one's sense of self as holding a position in society is eroded.
Internally, by disengaging from ideation--such as conceptually dwelling on
events from one's personal history, thinking about oneself in the present, and
anticipating what one will do in the future—one's sense of self as occupying a
real place in nature is eroded. To be decontextualized is to be deconstructed.
(2001, 211)

This decontextualizing process abounds in Stoppard, most notably in his

plays within plays, such as Hamlet in Rosencrantz and The Importance of
Being Earnest in Travesties.
Since 1972, according to a statement for BBC Television entitled "Tom
Stoppard Doesn't Know," Stoppard has suspended the choice between binary
opposites that contextualize the world. He describes a common pattern in
himself with the phrase, "firstly, A; secondly minus A": "that particular cube
which on one side says for example: 'All Italians are voluble' and on the other
side says, 'That is a naive generalization'; then, 'No, it's not. Behind
generalizations must be some sort of basis'" (quoted in Hunter 2000, 17).
Stoppard repeatedly traces such binaries in his writing. Influenced by
Wittgenstein’s reflections on language, his plays question the functioning of
reason and the reliability of philosophical tools like syllogism (Levenson
2001, 160-61). "There is very often no single, clear statement in my plays.
What there is, is a series of conflicting statements made by conflicting
characters, and they tend to play out a sort of infinite leapfrog" (Theatre
Quarterly; quoted in Sales 1988, 14-15). Rather than pretend to certainties,
Stoppard shows how the mind's stream of binary opposites doesn't yield the
truth, and that to cling to any one conceptual point or context is to invite
falsehood. As a dialectical movement, his "A, minus A" opposition is not an
exclusive either/or system but a both/and system. This style, as illustrated
22 Chapter Two

below, has the effect of attenuating social or objective boundaries,

decontingencing the historical subject, dissolving the boundary between self
and other, and creating an intersubjective space—even without sacred rites,
lofty myths, and dance.

2. Rosencrantz: Ambushes and A Void in Thought

Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead takes two minor
characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which becomes a play-within-a-play
here, and makes them central characters constantly on stage. One morning
before the play begins Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are called to court by a
messenger and given the mission to discover what troubles Hamlet. They
have no memory of anything previous to this or any knowledge of how to
fulfill their mission, and they mistrust all perceptions and ideas, being certain
only of the fact that they were called by a messenger. Another play
underlying the decontingencing of the historical subject in Rosencrantz is
Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Both Godot and Hamlet provide an anti-
intellectual framework for Stoppard's work, neither one offering a conceptual
solution to the problems they pose. Stoppard's Ros and Guil are barely more
coherent than Beckett's characters, anti-hero's like Hamlet who in their
confused identities question everything, including themselves.
From the opening scenes of Rosencrantz, Stoppard undermines the
intellect through a series of frog-leaps or ambushes. “I tend to write through
a series of small, large and microscopic ambushes—which might consist of a
body falling out of a cupboard, or simply an unexpected word in a sentence”
(Theater Quarterly 1974; qtd. in Sales 1988, 14). These repeated ambushes
undermine our naturalistic expectations. The first ambush centers on Guil
and Ros' game of heads and tails, with heads coming up over 85 times. The
pun on head counting results in the actors’ metaphorically counting the
spectators in a reversal of their traditional roles, with the spectators becoming
the spectacle. As Ros says, the repetitiveness of heads threatens to become "a
bit of a bore" (3), a sure sign that the intellect is being diminished in a
decontingencing move beyond language and interpretation.
These ambushes combine with Stoppard’s “A, minus A” technique or
“infinite leap-frog,” the arguments, refutations, and counter-arguments that
never lead to the last word. The audience is teased out of its culturally
conditioned habits of discursive thought and into the relative openness of a
new intersubjective space. While Ros spins the coins unconcerned, Guil tries
desperately to rationalize the spinning after 85 head counts, wondering why
Ros has no “fear” of this uncanny outcome. “Ros: ‘Fear?’ Guil: (in fury--
flings a coin on the ground) ‘Fear! The crack that might flood your brain
with light’” (5). His outburst suggests the possibility of a break in conceptual
boundaries, a frogleap beyond the field of “A, minus A” toward a void in
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 23

thought. Once performers and spectators approach this void within

themselves, they can share it on stage as an intersubjective realm. The power
of this experience, which is generated through the "visual and plastic
materialization of speech," serves “not to define thoughts but to cause
thinking” (Artaud 1958, 69, original emphasis)—in the sense of taking us to
the “fertile nothingness” (Turner 1998, 65) at the source of thought, the void
from which thoughts arise.
Each of the four explanations for the succession of heads proposed by
Guil in the opening scene, though doubtful, have metaphysical undertones.

One. I'm willing it. Inside where nothing shows, I am the essence of man
spinning double-headed coins, and betting against himself in private atonement
for an unremembered past. [. . .] Two. Time has stopped dead, and the single
experience of one coin being spun once has been repeated ninety times . [. . .]
Three. Divine intervention . . . . (6)

Ros, who is Guil's audience on stage, fails to understand as Guil

continues to explain with two syllogisms. Gradually Ros and Guil enter a
space beyond meaning. When Ros can't answer the question, “What is the
first thing you remember?”, Guil says, “You don't get my meaning. What is
the first thing after all the things you've forgotten?” (6-7). But Ros has
forgotten everything, every interpretation, even the question. He seems to be
content here to drift on the fringes of a conceptual void. When Guil then asks
if he's happy, Ros says, "I suppose so." And Guil says, "I have no desires"
(7). This condition evokes in performers and audience a hint of freedom from
the contingency of intentional consciousness and suggests a taste of non-
intentional pure consciousness—the groundless ground of a sacred event.
Stoppard avoids or parodies intellectual investigations because he intuits
that the intellect does not hold the solution to human suffering. Comedy, on
the other hand, offers greater promise. Humor, which Stoppard exploits, can
be said to arise from a distinction between emotion and intellect—or more
specifically between mind and consciousness. In Advaita Vedanta and
Samkhya-Yoga, which elaborate on the distinction between mind and
consciousness, the mind includes the intellect, emotions, and all the qualities
(qualia) of phenomenal experience: perceptions, memories, sensations,
moods, etc. In contrast, consciousness (purusha) is distinct from primordial
materiality (prakrti), which contains twenty-three components, including
mind (manas), intellect (buddhi, mahat), and ego (ahamkara) (Pflueger
1998, 48). Intellect, mind, and ego together with thought, feeling and
perception are thus defined as different forms of nonconscious matter, all of
which make up the content of witnessing consciousness (purusha). This
tradition underlies the model for theatrical experience presented in the
Natyashastra. The mind/consciousness distinction, in which both mind and
body are unequivocally material, differs from the garden variety of
mind/body dualism in Western thought (Pflueger 1998, 49).1 The material
24 Chapter Two

content of experience related to the intellect, mind, and ego comprises only
part of experience, which is made whole by the element of consciousness
itself. Stoppard's theatrical devices—the leapfrogging of “A, minus A,”
humor, dis-identification, and unpredicatability—serve to heighten the sense
of a distinction between mind and consciousness, if only subliminally.
Spectators are encouraged to leapfrog into a trans-conceptual space after
language has run its course, to witness the mind reflexively as it plays with
logical conundrums. We find the sacredness of Stoppard's theater, then, in its
pointing away from the agitated mind toward the joys of unbounded
consciousness.

3. Aspects of Subjectivity
The anthropologist C. Jason Throop clarifies the trans-conceptual by
distinguishing two aspects of subjectivity: cognition, which is culture-
specific; and non-cognitive direct experience, which is trans-cultural.
Whereas anthropology tends to collapse all subjectivity into the cognitive
camp, including pre-conceptual emotion, Throop proposes that “pure
experience” is a type of non-conceptual awareness corresponding to pure
consciousness:

While both pure experience and pure consciousness can be considered types
of non-conceptual awareness, pure experience as a pre-conceptual awareness
corresponds to a view of consciousness that focuses on describing the initial
“stages” of sensation and perception from one moment to the next, while pure
consciousness as a trans-conceptual awareness points, on the other hand, to
different “levels” of consciousness that may transcend culturally conditioned
conceptual awareness. (2000, 48)2

Pre-conceptual pure experience occurs in the initial stages of perception

or sensation before the cognitive function of the mind kicks in to interpret it.
Throop suggests that most people are familiar (if only unconsciously) with
the pre-conceptual glimpse of an object of perception—the consciousness of
an object before habit spurs the interpretive faculty. This pure experience sets
the stage for a shift from culturally-dependent interiors toward the pure
consciousness event (Forman 1999, 6-7), as evoked in the theatrical
production of intersubjective presence—a fusion of sacred and profane
elements. While poststructuralist/postmodernists hold that the human subject
is constructed by the discursive contexts in which it is situated, Stoppard
demonstrates how theater can point beyond itself and allow the spectator to
experience subjective awareness in the gaps between these contexts.
Stoppard’s theater thus intimates that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon
of semiotic materialism.
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 25

Ros and Guil live in the present to the point of having no foreknowledge
of Hamlet—a production that to any Western audience, as Jacques Derrida
would say, has “always already” begun (1978, 232-50). In addition to their
not being able to enlighten the audience about the anomaly of 92 consecutive
heads, the actors are also at a loss about their roles in the play. They have no
past beyond the memory that, in terms of the law of probability, as Guils puts
it, “a coin showed heads about as often as it showed tails. Then a messenger
arrived. We had been sent for. Nothing else happened” (8). Being summoned
to perform their parts in a play they've never heard of, they appear,
“Practically starting from scratch” (10), out of the mystery of a timeless
nowhere associated with unicorns and myth. In one of his philosophical
treatises, Guil comments on the unreliable and relative nature of sensory
impressions. He speculates on whether an obscure object will be seen as a
unicorn or as a "horse with an arrow in its forehead" (12). According to
Throop this would depend in any ordinary realistic context on the stage of
one’s perception: a pre-conceptual pure experience, or the consensual
agreement of an interpretive community—which may override the pure
experience of the thing itself. As the on-stage audience, Ros ignores Guil's
speculations. While this reaction may reflect the general lack of interest in, or
confusion by, the true nature of human experience, Stoppard’s audiences are
repeatedly confronted by this kind of pure experience prior to interpretive
agreement.
Throughout the play, Ros and Guil act out their parts as characters in
Hamlet with a non-involvement that heightens the distinction between mind
and consciousness, interpretation and a void of conceptions. We often find
them in a mode of witnessing the Other before reaching an interpretative
agreement. Any pre-conceptions the audience may have about Hamlet will be
attenuated by watching Ros and Guil approach the play with an unintentional
innocence of the initial stage of our encounter with the Other. Performers and
audience join in reversing the direction of ordinary thought, erasing habitual
discursive patterns, even about their own self-identity, and co-creating an
intersubjective space outside the exterior tokens of linguistic consensus.
Stoppard's characters approach the immutability of Pirandello's in Six
Characters in Search of an Author (1921), but whereas the six characters
know who they are, Stoppard's do not, at least not in any conventional sense.
Ros makes the introductions to the Tragedians:

Ros: My name is Guildenstern, and this is Rosencrantz.

Player: I recognized you at once--.
Ros: And who are we?
Player: --as fellow artists.
Ros: I thought we were gentlemen. (13)
26 Chapter Two

Whatever their social identities, Ros and Guil continually act out of
character, responding to others in a pre-cognitive sense. At times they fail
perversely to get the point, as when the Player covertly offers them sex and
violence, “flagrante delicto at a price.” Like the theater audience, Guil acts as
voyeur to Ros' confusion. When the Player adds, “I don't think you
understand” (15), Guil, “shaking with rage and fright,” finally catches on to
the offer of Alfred dressed as a girl. But he expected more: “No enigma, no
dignity, nothing classical, portentous, only this--a comic pornographer and a
rabble of prostitutes . . .” (18). Guil and Ros are not afraid, however, “that
there might be nothing beyond a purely physical existence” (Sales 1988, 24).
In fact, they resist the pressure to abandon their purely physical, pre-
conceptual existence—a metaphor of the pure, if fleeting, experience of a
trans-cultural presence that Artaud finds in Asian theater. But the performers
encounter difficulties, as evidenced by their uncomfortable reaction to the
Tragedians and by their inability to undergo change or to take initiative.
Ros and Guil are prone to stagnate throughout the play, especially in Act
Three. Once they bring the spectators into a sacred space, they have merely
set the stage for the next level of development. This involves re-entry into the
surrounding cultural context in a continual oscillation between the varied
aspects of human experience: cultural and material, subjective and
intersubjective, contingent and non-contingent, which interact and co-evolve
simultaneously. Ros and Guil lead the way in the decontingencing of the
human subject through their pre-cognitive reactions on stage, but then leave
it up to the spectators to imagine a follow up in real life. At best the
characters indicate through negation or non-realization how the audience
might realize the benefits of their intersubjective insights. They become
catalysts for the audience, both by disrupting discursive boundaries and by
embodying the risks of not acting upon their unexpected freedom. This ironic
doubling of cultural and trans-cultural states underlies much of the play's
comic effect.
Whether or not Stoppard intended to evoke states of pre-conceptual
awareness or non-contingent being is, by his own account, irrelevant. As
Stoppard says, if a customs officer were to ransack Rosencrantz and come
“up with all manner of exotic contraband like truth and illusion, the nature of
identity, what I feel about life and death,” he (Stoppard) would say, “I have
to admit the stuff is there but I can’t for the life of me remember packing it”;
“one is the beneficiary and victim of one’s subconscious: that is, one’s
personal history, experience and environment” (Delaney 2001, 25; Macaulay
1998, 7). In a related interpretation of the play, Neil Sammells argues that
“The choices faced by the two courtiers, and the pressures that envelope
them, are clearly political pressures: the pressures of individuals trying to
assert themselves against collectivism” (2001, 111). The courtiers do have
difficulty making choices and exerting control against collectivism, as we
have seen. In viewing collectivism politically as the historical effect of a
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 27

totalitarian state, Sammells seems to suggest, as I have argued here, that even
in their subjectedness, Ros and Guil have the power to act and thereby effect
something as autonomous agents. But for Sammells, the agents can never act
from their subjected positions with more than a very limited autonomy and
power. It seems to me, however, that Stoppard’s play suggests the possibility
of a more radical freedom from subjectedness. As postcolonial writers have
shown, the possibility does exist for an “historyless” world (Ashcroft et al
2002, 33)—a world experienced in trans-political, trans-historical terms. We
are certainly all subjected to cultural as well as trans-cultural influences, most
of which are beyond our control. As Sammells says, “Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern fight to preserve the distinction between actor and agent, to
hang on to the short-lived sense of purpose that will give their actions
meaning” (2001, 110). Another collective force that needs to be considered
here in relation to agency, a force universal for all but zombies, is that of the
mind’s irrepressible flow of thoughts. As anyone who tries deliberately to
“create a void in thought” can tell, no amount of agency or effort as
advocated by Sammells will interrupt the stream of mental activity or induce
a pure witnessing experience. Effort will only increases mental activity,
producing more thoughts, more pressures of all kinds over which we have
less control. Ironically, then, to lose control like Ros and Guil suggests in one
sense to go beyond control, to escape thought and the pressures of political
collectivism—as in the spontaneous experience of aesthetic rapture.
By integrating the sacred and the profane through a transformation of the
latter, Rosencrantz can be said to enhance freedom by opening an auratic
space. Walter Benjamin defines aura as a relation between an artwork
(sacred) and its viewer (profane): the viewer looks and the artwork looks
back (1969). In looking at something we invest it with the capacity to look at
us and produce a transformation. In this process, the viewer’s attention enters
an auratic space through which it undergoes a subtle shift from mind to
consciousness. Benjamin believed the loss of aura in art occurred in the
middle of the 19th century with the development of photography. Because
the camera could not see, film was postauratic, yet the emancipatory effect of
reproduction compensated for the loss of aura. Theater on the other hand
retains the quality of aura because the performers are influenced by the live
audience—just as an actor can be influenced by the camera. In Rosencrantz,
the spectators look at the actors, and the actors look back, causing the
spectators to reflect on their own experience.
In deconstructing the playwright’s control over a dramatic text, however,
poststructuralists like Gerald Rabkin argue that the script in theater precludes
presence through “dispersion, discontinuity and dissemination” (1983, 51).
Elinor Fuchs, moreover, in deconstructing the aura of theatrical presence
associated with live actors and spectators, calls into question “the theatrical
enterprise of spontaneous speech with its logocentric claims to origination,
authority, authenticity” (1985, 172). In its place she posits a “theater of
28 Chapter Two

absence” that “disperses the center, displaces the Subject, destabilizes

meaning” (1985, 165). But given the distinction between mind and
consciousness, which the vast interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies
today has given serious consideration (Forman; Chalmers; Throop; Wilber),
Stoppard’s theatrical enterprise simultaneously achieves a theater of absence
on the level of mind, and an aura of presence on the level of consciousness.
On the level of mind, Rosencrantz destabilizes meaning by loosening the
mind’s control over pre-cognitive experience and disperses the center of
political hegemony through humor and parody; on the level of consciousness,
it displaces the subject(ed) by evoking a liberating void of conceptions. The
cultural materiality of the mind associated with our subjected-ness is
temporarily supplanted in theater by an auratic presence. Both spectators and
actors, in their reciprocal looking back and forth, find their awareness
momentarily lightened of the discursive frameworks with which to judge
their relationship. In this way Stoppard’s theater of absence effects a
decontingencing of mind toward unknowingness as a void in thought. His
theatrical devices serve to open an intersubjective space, not that of testing or
judgment, but of a co-created auratic lightness.

4. Rosencrantz: Social Mirrors and Stage Mirrors

In social mirror theory originated by Dilthey, Mead, and others, self-
reflection or mirrors in the mind depend on mirrors in society (Whitehead
2001, 3). As Stoppard suggests, self-awareness in both the socially induced
and trans-cultural sense is evoked by social mirrors and shared worlds of
experience. A dramatic change occurs in Rosencrantz just before the
appearance of Hamlet when the coin falls on tails for the first time and the
play’s social mirror suddenly shifts. As Hamlet and Ophelia enter, Ros and
Guil witness incomprehensibly an ambiguous mime verging on the
licentious. Rather than engage in sustained action, they begin to explore their
relationships with others. Any determinate meaning they might have found in
Hamlet, had they remembered the play at all, is ambushed by the
unexpectedness of Hamlet's mime, the lack of a famous speech, and the
ongoing fluidity of their own identities. Claudius turns to Guil and says,
"Welcome, dear Rosencrantz.” Guil and Ros remain at a loss, Guil managing
only, "We both obey / And here give up ourselves in the full bent / To lay
our service freely at your feet, / To be commanded" (26-27). They need their
lines fed to them, or mirrored, a theatrical technique that Sammells sees as
manifesting political pressure but that Stoppard parodies. In doing so, he
mirrors the actors’ attenuated mental content as they hover on the threshold
of a pre-conceptual pure experience—unable to fix on conceptual meaning in
their decontingencing lack of memory of Hamlet or their intended roles.
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 29

As the first act draws to a close, Ros and Guil increasingly enter a space
beyond logic, memory and meaning. Guil asks, “What in God's name is
going on?” Ros responds, “Foul! No Rhetoric. Two-one” (34). As the
wordplay continues, Guil seizes Ros violently and shouts, “WHO DO YOU
THINK YOU ARE?” (35), which of course has no answer in terms of social
appellation.

Ros: It's all questions.

Guil: Do you think it matters?
Ros: Doesn't it matter to you?
Guil: Why should it matter?
Ros: What does it matter why? (35-36)

The matter of the play is the play itself, just as the matter of the mirror is
the mirror itself, and the matter of awareness is awareness itself, not its
content. In the mirror theory of human identity, as Charles Whitehead
explains, the content of our reflective consciousness depends on public
expression, a shared experiential world, and social reflectivity (2001, 28). If
this is the case, then we might reasonably extend this theory to include a
mirroring of emptiness—as implied above in Fuchs deconstruction of
presence. Instead of reflecting only the content of reflective consciousness,
could the mirror not also reflect the emptiness of consciousness, as in the
thought voiding state experienced by Ros and Guil, and induced in the
audience? Stoppard's theater, being theater of theater, parallels the mirror
being mirror of mirror. In social mirror theory, as Whitehead puts it, “it is
only when subjective states are made objective by public confirmation that
we can pay attention to them, so making them conscious” (2001, 21).
Although this typically applies to the content of consciousness, it can also
apply to consciousness itself. In watching Rosencrantz, our capacity to
attribute mental states to ourselves and others, including states beyond
thought, is verified by their dramatization. Pure awareness or a void of
conceptions is not created by social mirroring; it is not a third-person
formulation, but a first-person experience that comes with the territory,
something once experienced we automatically know that we know. The
mirror of social and stage drama helps us to pay attention to it, and thereby to
reap its benefits, which include love, freedom, and joy.
Ros and Guil for example find themselves in situations where they don't
so much identify with their own bodies as observe them in action. In this way
they cultivate what B. Alan Wallace calls “a kind of self-alterity,”
experiencing their bodies "simply as a matrix of phenomena, rather than as a
self" (2001, 214). They break away from a reified sense of identity as being
localized in the material domain of their minds and bodies. Observing each
other, Ros and Guil perceive certain qualities unique to each as well as
30 Chapter Two

qualities they share in common. This common ground includes their feelings
of empathy and compassion. As Wallace puts it,

Is consciousness essentially intersubjective in the sense that the very nature of

consciousness, with its own innate luminosity, is constituted by the relation of
the self to others? The observation that the bhavanga [Sanskrit for the primal
state of contentless awareness] is of the nature of love would imply that
empathy is innate to consciousness and exists prior to the emergence of all
active mental processes. One might infer from this that empathy on the part of
researchers must be a prerequisite for any genuine science of consciousness.
On the other hand, the assertion that this state of awareness is free of all
sensory and mental appearances implies a certain degree of autonomy from
language, conceptual frameworks and active engagement with others. This
could suggest that consciousness is not really constituted by the relation of the
self to others, but rather that it is intersubjective in the weaker sense of simply
being inherently open to, and connected with, others. (2001, 213)

Intersubjectivty, as mentioned earlier, does not create contentless awareness,

but only mirrors it, allowing it to be shared by the inter-subjects. By
parodying notions of reality that have become conceptually fixed, Stoppard
opens communication out from verbal agreement to a participation beyond
discursive constructs. Rosencrantz emerges out of absurdism and initially
seemed to be an absurdist work itself, but it is now generally regarded as
more high-spirited, light-hearted, compassionate, and gentler than absurdist
drama. Stoppard does not succumb to the modernist despair over a lost unity.
He delights in providing yet another angle of vision in a series that does not
endorse fragmentation, chaos, or nihilism, but leads instead to an empathetic
co-creation of a theater of sacred presence based on a void of conceptions.
In Act Two, Ros and Guil continue to be at a loss about their dramatic
roles and social identities. They test the practical validity of concepts by
putting them on performative display, hoping someone will give them a sense
of direction by mirroring their expected behavior. By implication, the
absence of social mirrors would reverse the normal acculturation process.
That is, without the objectification of our subjected states, we would tend
more readily to accept the (liberated) condition of pure physicality or
experiential immediacy prior to interpretive agreement. But as Guil says,
“Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we
are . . . condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one—that is the
meaning of order” (51). In “The Murder of Gonzago,” Shakespeare
anticipates social mirror theory by showing how the pretend play's social
reflectivity evokes Claudius and Gertrude’s reflective consciousness, and
how self reflection can change the order of meaning and the nature of reality.
When Hamlet arranges for a play-within-the-play to trap his uncle
Claudius into revealing his guilty conscience, the audience finds itself
watching more actors acting people (Hamlet and Horatio) “watching more
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 31

actors acting more people [Claudius and Gertrude] watching still more actors
acting yet more people [the Tragedians/Players] acting even more people
[Claudius and his queen]” (Hunter 2000, 9)—with the “onionlike” contexts
unfolding all at once in theatrical exuberance. When actors dress up to play
characters who put on further disguises, spectators are encouraged not only
to adopt a critical distance on the conceptual level but also to engage in the
phenomenology of dis-identification. Actors and spectators participate in a
space where exterior boundaries dissolve. The ordinary identification
between an actor and a role is distanced by the fact that characters are doubly
not who they pretend to be. Each layer of disguise unravels before a free-
floating witness with none of the tangible roles producing a reliable or fixed
point of identity. In the theatrum mundi, where in Shakespeare’s words “all
the men and women are merely players,” the real self behind our roles is not
just another in an infinite series of subjected appellations, but the innate
luminocity of our contentless awareness (bhavanga)—a field of all
possibilities for self formulation. The shifting roles of stage drama, as of
social drama, do not leave us in a state of limbo, tossed back and forth
between contingent identities, as poststructuralist/postmodernists claim.
Rather, if Stoppard’s theater is anything to go by, spectators and performers,
engaging linguistic and conceptual tokens from their various context-bound
subject positions while instantaneously transcending them, are given the
opportunity to relish a void in thought beyond contingency, a move toward
the unity of the pashyanti and para levels of language and consciousness. On
this groundless ground, they co-create a sacred space—however nonsacred
the play's actual content.
In Rosencrantz this process has two components: the dialectical
movement of "A, minus A” and the other devices through which characters
and audience reflect on the arbitrary nature of thought; and the aftermath of
this reflection through which they slip momentarily into a suspension of
thought—a decontingencing of the historical subject toward pure
consciousness. As an escape from political collectivism, the latter is perhaps
also the ultimate form of “control”—in the sense of self-mastery over the
thinking mind’s inexorable stream of qualia. In Rosencrantz both stages of
self-awareness are mirrored in a spiraling interplay of thought and non-
thought, boundaries and freedom.

5. Acting Naturally
When the Tragedians act without somebody watching, the Player says
they feel humiliated because it means nothing happens (55). Theatrical and
everyday consensual reality depend on a reciprocity of social mirrors. To be
without an audience, the forth wall of a stage in theatrical jargon, is like
being Dead in a box. The audience in this analogy symbolizes the light of
32 Chapter Two

witnessing consciousness, without which everything on stage would occur in

virtual darkness. Hamlet's pretended madness may seem real because the
court spends a lot of time in the dark acting without an audience.

Ros: He talks to himself, which might be madness.

Guil: If he didn't talk sense, which he does.
Ros: Which suggests the opposite.
Player: Of what?
Small pause.
Guil: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a
man
talking nonsense not to himself.
Ros: Or just as mad.
Guil: Or just as mad.
Ros: And he does both.
Guil: So there you are.
Ros: Stark raving sane. (59-60)

Stoppard's comic treatment teases the spectator out of an either/or logic.

Again casting about for social mirrors, in this case for dealing with Hamlet,
Ros and Guil seek guidance from the Player:

Guil: We don't know how to act.

Player: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.
Guil: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all
we know it isn't even true.
Player: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on
trust; truth is that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. (59)

The Player's advice to act naturally is paradoxical because everything in

theater is artificial. As Sales says, "the further over the top an actor goes, the
closer he gets to acting naturally. Heightened artificiality and theatricality
are, or ought to be, natural phenomena in the theater" (1988, 40). But you
can also say that the further an actor goes over the top of socially expected
behavior, the closer s/he gets to the edge of thought.
As a theatrical mirror, Rosencrantz reflects the courtiers’ constantly going
over the top as a form of voiding the discursive mind and revealing the non-
historical dimension of life in the present. In trying to act natural by
rehearsing their roles, Guil and Ros play a game with the Player who feeds
them questions about Hamlet. But the game only leads them over the top,
having no rational end other than being an end in itself. The actors and
spectators cannot genuinely be who they say they are, not completely.
Although Jacques Lacan claims that subjectivity exists in language, that the
unconscious mind is structured as a language (1978, 188), subjectivity is also
consciously aware of language, separated from and extending beyond
language. Sammells as noted earlier questions the confusion here between
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 33

the possibility of a spontaneous act versus a capitulation to collectivism, to a

“logic unstoppable and absurd”: “Are we all just actors in someone else’s
script—defined not by individual, authentic voice, but by the pressures of
collectivism?” (2001, 110). Ros and Guil suggest not, for in spontaneously
skirting the boundaries of thought they reveal the possibility of also
transcending the script. They do this not by dispensing with words, but by
using words to open their attention to a realm beyond semiotic materialism.
Similarly, they transcend the body/mind not by denying its reality, but by
using it as a springboard to higher levels of consciousness. Herbert Blau,
who like Rabkin and Fuchs questions the notion of presence in theater, agues
that the immediate presence of the body on stage is “ghosted” by the script
(1987, 164). Even without the text, performance seems written because of the
semiotics of theater (Blau 1987, 171). The body/mind, however, while of
course still there on stage, is ghosted not only by stage semiotics but also by
the leapfrogging from semiotics toward a witnessing vantage point. Theater
thereby reveals that although we are both mind and body, we are also non-
intentional consciousness, and that the hard problem of Western metaphysics
is not how ideas and bodies relate, but more importantly how ideas/bodies
and consciousness relate.
In the interweaving of Hamlet and Rosencrantz leading up to a discussion
of death, Ros and Guil are baffled to see two characters dressed like
themselves played by the Tragedians, thus heightening the ambiguity over
identity and the distinction between reality and illusion. When Ros claims,
“you can't act death,” the Player argues that real death on stage, such as the
one he was once able to arrange, “just wasn't convincing! It was impossible
to suspend one's disbelief—and what with the audience jeering and throwing
peanuts, the whole thing was a disaster!” (77). Significantly, as drama
theorists from Diderot to Stanislavsky and Brecht have argued, the performer
who holds an aesthetic distance between actor and performance is more
convincing in conveying the desired emotion to the audience. On stage,
literal identification fails to convince, to swing one over the top of language
and interpretation and thereby open a gap between mind and consciousness.
The point of theatrical language use is not its referential meaning but its
manner of ghosting itself to reveal the underlying self-awareness of
performer and spectator.
In Act Three, Ros and Guil have several opportunities to change their
lives and influence the plot, as by preventing Hamlet’s death, but fail to
exploit them. As Guil says, “we are brought full circle to face again the
single immutable fact—that we, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, bearing a
letter from one king to another, are taking Hamlet to England” (93). Acting
naturally, they almost make a difference by opening the letter to discover
Hamlet's intended fate. But even at this turning point, they miss their chance
to effect change when Guil refuses to rescue Hamlet. In their normative
subjected state, their material agency is indeed limited. In a final attempt to
34 Chapter Two

discover their identity and purpose, they again prod the Player, but he can
only tell them that in his experience, “most things end in death” (115). He
means literally, but the play also suggests metaphorically. What the death of
man in Stoppard’s theater suggests is the death of our subjected-ness and a
rebirth of the memory of consciousness, as opposed to consciousness itself—
which in Eastern thought is beyond space/time and thus beyond death and
(re)birth. Feeling desperate, Guil snatches the Player's dagger and stabs him
in the throat, for the first time taking action into his own hands. But agency
must have a purpose beyond physical change. After dying convincingly, the
Player gets up and brushes himself off to the applause of his fellow players,
with the dumb show of death transforming the tragedy into a comedy. The
Player’s metaphorical, feigned death opens a space for “death” as rebirth, as
transcendence from the material mind/body condition. In the end, Ros is
happy not to have harmed anyone as far as he or Guil can recall: “All right,
then. I don’t care. I’ve had enough. To tell you the truth, I’m relieved” (118).
Does Rosencrantz not show, then, that neither thought nor action can
provide the answer to identity or freedom? Perhaps one needs to transcend
agency into noncontingent Being before knowledge becomes true and action
effective. As Ros and Guil demonstrate, gaining self-awareness involves
putting ourselves in the shoes of what George Mead called "'the generalized
other' and from that third-person perspective look[ing] back and observ[ing]
[our] own thoughts" (Whitehead 2001, 18). In Rosencratz, this reflective
“generalized other” has an added dimension: conceptuality (thought) and
emptiness (non-thought), the duality of otherness and the “witnessing” of
wholeness as a space of inter-being. In the latter condition, which Stoppard’s
theater induces, the sense of being this or that begins to dissolve, along with
the spatio/temporal gaps between the three components of experience—
“experiencer, experience, experiencing” (Maharaj 1988, 164).

6. True Intersubjectivity

Stoppard's power as a dramatist derives from his ability to distance his

characters and audience from attachment to or identification with our
everyday concerns. Instead we glimpse how to appreciate these concerns
from a field of pre-interpretive awareness. Stoppard shows how the
discordancy of our thoughts, emotions, and actions appears farcical in light
of the harmony, silence and freedom at deeper levels of experience. His plays
expose the discrepancy between conceptual, analytical frameworks on the
one hand, and the observing theatergoer who is led to dis-identify with these
intentional frameworks on the other. Spectators can laugh at the show and
appreciate its illusion in the process of going over the top. We see the
illusion as uninevitable and realize that things might have turned out
differently with only a slight change of perspective. Through transcendence
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 35

and transformation, the spectators co-create with the performers a new space
beyond normative frames of reference.
Although Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead ends in a frenzy that
apparently achieves nothing, throughout the play the actors and spectators
co-create a theatrical space which, as we have seen, has two dimensions.
They find their attention moving from meaning to non-meaning, thought to
non-thought, contingency to non-contingency, representing two types of
intersubjectivity, as reflected in the play's bifocal mirror. Intersubjectivity has
been variously defined by theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Ken Wilber,
and Christian de Quincey. Habermas rejects the "paradigm of consciousness"
in favor of a paradigm of "communicative action" mediated by language and
reason (1987). He sees language and reason as underlying intersubjective
recognition, and on this basis tries to integrate the context-bound and the
universal. Similarly, Wilber seems to define intersubjectivity as mediated
by language and interpretation: "You will talk to me, and interpret what I
say; and I will do the same with you" (2000, 161). De Quincey (like
Stoppard), however, recognizes that intersubjectivity can include language
and interpretation but also extend to consciousness by itself. This involves
the co-creation of a nonphysical presence. He thus contends that
intersubjectivity allows for

direct interior-to-interior engagement even when contact is made via

language—in fact, that is the only way people can share meaning and
understand each other. But the point is that the actual sharing of meaning is
not accomplished by linguistic exchanges, but by the accompanying interior-
to-interior participartory presence--by true intersubjectivity. (2000, 188, de
Quincey's emphasis)

Although their definitions differ, Habermas, Wilber, and de Quincey each

accept the importance of intersubjective space, which in Rosencrantz
includes the exterior and interior, mind and consciousness. Ros and Guil
constantly participate in linguistic mediation—the logical ambushes, the
discourse of “A, minus A,” the shifting identities, the self-reflection on roles
and on theatricality in general—which take them and the spectators to a
space beyond language and interpretation. While social mirrors reflect
subjective experience as communicated by the physicality of human
discourse, Stoppard's theater dramatizes how they also reflect a direct
“interioir-to-interior participatory presence.”
36 Chapter Two

Travesties

1. Postmodernized Humanism
Although Stoppard’s theater is postmodernist in form, its taste of a
participatory presence tends to make it modernist in spirit. It uses parody or
travesty not to promote nihilism but to render suspect all intellectual
allegiances—including the fallacy of nihilist subversion. An extreme form of
nihilism is Tzara’s Dadaists, who vented their political and social anger over
Western's society's support of World War I. They believed that if society can
fund horrific slaughter, it must be rotten at the core, including its entire
superstructure, and especially art. Dadaists, who included playwrights such
as Eugène Ionesco, mocked and “smashed” traditional art. In Travesties,
Stoppard explores the relation between art and politics. He caricatures
absolute notions of reality in recent history, parodies modernist figures such
as James Joyce and Tristan Tzara, and questions but does not abandon
modernist principles. As Vanden Heuvel says, Stoppard

finds himself paradoxically but not unreasonably upholding a kind of

humanized postmodernism (or postmodernized humanism). (2001, 219)

While wearing a modernist guise, Stoppard's comic sense highlights

postmodern uncertainty and undecidability. Rosencrantz and Travesties are
both set intertextually against other plays, but if Rosencrantz can work for
someone who hasn't read Hamlet, Travesties depends for its comedy on some
knowledge of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. It also
assumes a familiarity with modernism, Marxism, Lenin, twentieth-century
Russian history, and of course the work of James Joyce, who in 1918 staged
Earnest while living in Zurich. These conflicting elements in the play's
conceptual background do not create a coherent meaning or final resolution,
but rather extend the dialectical “A, but minus A” technique of encouraging
in the spectator a critical distance. Does this imply that Stoppard is a
postmodern writer? Or does his intellectual insouciance recuperate high-
modernism with its political, cultural, and aesthetic metanarratives, only to
paradoxically make him a postmodernist after all, given, as Heuvel puts it,
that “postmodernism has always expressed a reactionary bent in the midst of
even its most radical and disorienting theories” (2001, 214)?
As argued here, Stoppard work transcends the logic of either/or and
moves the spectator beyond conceptuality to a sacred space. Most of the
characters in Travesties are farcical stereotypes lacking the psychological
realism that would ground the audience in a fixed or stable reality. Instead
the audience participates in a pattern of surprises that parallels those in
Earnest, with conflicting concepts juxtaposed without any one being
privileged over the other. The lack of a totalizing synthesis in the play stems
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 37

in part from its textual instability between sign and referent, signifier and
signified. This irreducible différance leads to self-referral not only of
language, but also of the subject, inducing a self-reflexiveness in performer
and spectator that moves by way of language not to a transcendental signified
but to a trans-verbal phenomenology.3 In subverting the transcendental
signified and precluding a stable meaning, the intertextuality of Travesties
arguably enhances the phenomenology of witnessing.

2. Dramatic Structure

To see how intertextuality and self-referral generate this phenomenology,

we start with the play’s dramatic architecture. As Toby Zinman has pointed
out, Travesties has three identifying structural features: an initial false front,
or “trompe-l’audience” ploy; a doubling, trebling, or mirroring of identity
within the play; and a set design that includes lighting and sound integral to
the script (2001, 120-25). Through his non-synthesized dialectics of “A,
but minus A,” Stoppard portrays a situation that initially appears absurd, as
the beginning of Travesties when Tzara and Joyce speak in their unique
stream of consciousness styles. Then he restores it to normalcy through a
rational explanation, like the plot based on Carr's reminiscences, only to shift
back to the ludicrous when Carr distorts the past through his faulty memory.
In the end the audience realizes that the bizarre is only bizarre when viewed
within a particular context, but as the context changes, so does the meaning
in an infinite extension of contexts, which in this case is primarily within the
world of Carr’s imagination and unreliable memory. Through this process,
spectators (and ideally performers) experience the attenuation of all contexts
and their conceptual baggage. The self-referral of the play’s structure, as in
the “trompe-l’audience” in which the audience seems to be “in the real” but
turns out to be in Carr’s memory, induces a self-referral in the spectator’s
mind through which the referent is attenuated by dislocation, displacement
and disarrangement. This “unmaking” feature of Travesties—which for the
postmodernist Ihab Hassan would include “decreation, disintegration,
deconstruction, decenterment, displacement, difference, discontinuity,
disjunction, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition, demystification,
detotalization, [and] deligitimation,” (1987, 92)—results in the absence of a
full presence of meaning on the level of mind. But as suggested with
Rosencrantz, it simultaneously induces a different kind of presence, a
presence of non-meaning or emptiness, of non-intentional consciousness by
itself. The attenuation of unmaking evokes the taste of the unity of both/and,
both mind and consciousness. Characters and spectators, from the platform
of theatrical embodiments (mind), by discarding these embodiments
(unmaking or emptying the mind), become self-present to themselves and to
each other (inter-connected in consciousness). This emptying of the mind
38 Chapter Two

that leads to consciousness is what distinguishes sacred events in

contemporary theater.
As Act One begins, we can see this process in the blending of ideas and
farce. The ideas may sound important, but their style of presentation makes
them unintelligible. Tzara declares, in so many words, “all that matters is
art,” but what he says is unintelligible in English, making sense only when
translated into French (Hunter 1982, 240; Zinman 2001, 123). Tzara, Joyce,
and Lenin find themselves together in the Zurich public library, along with
Gwendolen and the librarian, Cecily. Gwendolyn is Joyce’s assistant, and
Cecily is Lenin’s assistant. In the parallel with Earnest, Tzara corresponds to
Jack, who pretends to be Earnest in London, and like Jack he courts
Gwendolen; Carr represents Jack's friend Algeron, the brother of Gwendolen
who falls in love with Jack's sister Cecily; and Joyce, who at birth was
mistakenly registered as Augusta instead of Augustine, approximates the role
of Lady Augusta Bracknell, Gwendolen's mother.4
This cross-casting, in which none of the characters are who they seem to
be, is the basis of the play’s structure of doubling, which includes twinning,
puns, and malapropisms (Zinman 2001, 121; see also 1991). Stoppard, who
at the age of eight changed his name to his stepfather’s from Tomáš
Straüssler, says he didn’t care about the change: “but then it occurred to me
that in practically everything I had written there was something about people
getting each other’s names wrong, usually in a completely gratuitous way,
nothing to do with character or plot” (Macaulay 1998, 7). In Travesties, like
Rosencrantz, the confusion is not gratuitous: it produces a double awareness
in the performer who plays two roles simultaneously, and in the spectator
who has to juggle more than one identity per character. Each identification
by the performer and spectator with a role in Travesties is juxtaposed by a
second role in Earnest that parodies the first. This allegory of self-referral
theater, in which both roles are difficult to accept at face value, parallels the
allegory of reading defined by Paul de Man. As works of literature become
self-reflexive allegories of reading, or the impossibility of reading for author-
imposed meaning (de Man 1979), Stoppard’s theater similarly becomes a
self-referential meditation on its own interpretability. But while de Man
operates on the level of mind, Stoppard’s theater extends also to the level of
consciousness. For the spectator, the interpretation of one identity is
immediately supplanted by that of a different identity. Arbitrary and artificial,
these roles are meant to be disburdened, not to be identified with or
interpreted as the playwright’s final word. The gaps between them generate a
growing sense of abstraction or indeterminacy, a widening background of
emptiness out of which each de-totalized meaning emerges to be displaced
by another in an endless play. In a “psychic polyphony,” as the play unfolds
diachronically, the meanings disseminate synchronically before the spectator
(Carlson 1990, 99). The mind as a container of synchronic meaning,
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 39

stretched thin by allegories of decomposition and displacement, becomes

translucent, allowing the light consciousness to shine through.
In the Prologue Tzara and Joyce, who practice their modernist art
incomprehensibly, appear as fools with Cecily and Gwen their foils. Lenin on
the other hand appears intensely earnest. The contrast between Lenin's
seriousness and Tzara and Joyce's playfulness adds to the spectator's double
consciousness. The scene then shifts to the Room, where Old Carr indulges
in his erratic reminiscences of Tzara and Lenin:

Spiegelgasse!—narrow, cobbled, high old houses in a solid rank, number 14

the house of the narrow cobbler himself, Kammerer his name, Lenin his
tenant—and across the way at Number One, the Meierei Bar, crucible of anti-
art, cradle of Dada!!! Who? What? Whatsisay Dada? You remember Dada!—
historical halfway house between Futurism and Surrealism, twixt Marinetti
and André Breton, 'tween the before-the-wars years--Dada!—down with
reason, logic, causality, coherence, tradition, proportion, sense and
consequence, my art belongs to Dada 'cos Dada 'e treats me so--well then,
Memories of Dada by a Consular Friend of the Famous in Old Zurich: A
Sketch. (8)

The play itself has a distinctly Dada flavor, as Old Carr becomes young
again, has tea brought to him by his servant Bennett, and feels relief at not
being back in the trenches. The time shift bridges us into the scheme of
Earnest: "Parenthetically, Bennett, I see from your book that on Thursday
night when Mr Tzara was dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are
entered as having been consumed" (13)—the eight bottles linking us to the
opening of Earnest.

3. Hyperspace

As the play unfolds, each character defends a particular position on the

relation of art to politics, with none taking precedence over the others.
According to Heuvel, the play “produces a sense of what Jameson calls
‘hyperspace,’ a disorienting but not necessarily debilitating map of ideas
existing without a center of gravity or absolute cartographical code” (2001,
220). As each character in Travesties interconnects with a corresponding
character in Earnest, their interconnectedness is repeated in the spectator.
Derrida would describe this as iteration or a continuity of difference.
Hyperspace, however, pertains to a disorientation of mind, as opposed to
consciousness, and the corresponding lack of narrative/authorial presence
pertains to the intermittent emptying of mental content. This aporia, an aspect
of Stoppard’s “humanized postmodernism” or “postmodernized humanism,”
can take us beyond the mind and the duality of subject and object toward the
40 Chapter Two

unity of consciousness itself. The lack of narrative/authorial presence thus

tends to attenuate the objects of awareness, allowing one to taste the space
between any two thoughts or between two sets of identities. When this
occurs in theater both characters and spectators participate in an
intersubjective dialogic presence based on the screen of witnessing
consciousness.
Later in Act One Tzara enters both as himself and as Wilde's Jack with a
non-English accent, followed by Joyce and Gwen, who turns out to be Carr's
sister (as she is also Algernon's). Joyce and Tzara begin a manic sequence of
limericks in which Joyce introduces himself and then invites Carr and Tzara
to act in his production of Earnest. As Travesties unfolds its conflicting
themes, the spectator undergoes a subtle shift in awareness as the repeated
shifts in space, time, and identity lead one to dis-identify with the external
boundaries of the experiences being travestied. The very shift in spatio-
temporal and psychological boundaries highlights the fact that nothing is
stable or lasting. This vacillation takes the audience, as in Rosencrantz, to a
pre-conceptual state of hightened awareness, the junction point between
thought and non-thought, change and non-change, meaning and nonsense,
self and other. The sacred element of Travesties, which involves crossing the
gap between these oppositions toward a void of conceptions, is further
enhanced by a shift in communication.
The exchange between the characters themselves and between performers
and spectators begins by relying on linguistic signs. But signs are unreliable
and the exchange soon shifts beyond language to an unmediated link of
interiority between characters with their alternating identities from two plays,
and between performers and spectators. For Wilber, as noted earlier, the
customary mode of communication depends on language and interpretation:
“You will talk to me, and interpret what I say; and I will do the same with
you” (2000, 161). But this mode, which involves the movement of
différance, has run its course in Travesties, and the sharing of meaning that
follows, as we recall from de Quincey, is “not accomplished by linguistic
exchange, but by the accompanying interior-to-interior participatory
presence,” or a true intersubjectivity (2000, 188; his emphasis). As suggested
here, this may also occur in the allegory of theater when the self-referral
movement of aporia has run its course and opened out to a pre-interpretive,
transpersonal state. The performers and spectators share an intersubjective
space beyond language and interpretation, even though these exterior
elements are instrumental in promoting presence. The important point here is
that a true intersubjective presence in theater, though situated in time and
space between physical beings, comprises a sacred experience that is non-
physical, transpersonal, non-linguistic, and trans-cultural. The proximity of
the sacred to the profane in Travesties may cause the spectator to miss the
sacred conceptually, which is fine because the sacred is not a conceptual
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 41

experience to begin with. Nevertheless, its presence may be registered by the

joy (ananda of sat-chit-ananda) in appreciating the play’s comedy.

4. Theatricality, History, and Master Narratives

In the sacred space that opens up in the debate on art and politics, both
Tzara and Joyce expound ahistorical theories of art that Carr finds confusing
and thus rejects. Using a Wildean style, Tzara says that “Nowadays, an artist
is someone who makes art mean the things he does. A man may be an artist
by exhibiting his hindquarters. He may be a poet by drawing words out of a
hat” (21). But when Tzara says, “how much better to live bravely in
Switzerland than to die cravenly in France,” Carr loses his temper and calls
Tzara, among other things, a “little Romanian wog” (22). Tzara has more
success in his pursuit of Gwendolen, who he impresses with his ideas on
aesthetics: “All poetry is a reshuffling of a pack of picture cards, and all
poets are cheats” (35). Each of the three expatriots—Tzara, Joyce, and
Carr—is criticized by the others, but when Joyce makes a joke at his
expense, Tzara like Carr loses him temper and casts a racial slur upon the
Irish writer (41). Unfazed, Joyce brings the first act to an end with a defense
of the sacred dimension of art, describing it as an immortality that will “leave
the world precisely as it finds it” (42).
But as Joyce points out, without art, history, like Troy, would be a “minor
redistribution of broken pots” (42). Although art doesn't change the world, it
changes our perception of it, and the world is little more for us than our
imaginative perception. The artist can gratify our urge for immortality, free
us from the egoic boundaries of mind and body, and provide a sacred space
after language has run its course. Lenin, the play's earnest representative of
history, at times seems to approach Joyce’s position on art as a superhuman
miracle. While listening to Beethoven’s sonata, he exclaims, “Amazing,
superhuman music. It always makes me feel, perhaps naively, it makes me
feel proud of the miracles that human beings can perform” (62). But he
avoids listening to music often lest it make him say stupid things, when what
he’d really like to do is “to hit heads, hit them without mercy, though ideally
we're against doing violence to people” (62). Clearly art fails to make Lenin
more compassionate, however awesome he finds its beauty.
Of all the characters in Travesties, Lenin is the one who remains largely
excluded from its comic dimension and the intersubjectivity that integrates
history with the ahistorical. Stoppard denies him the sacred experience of
inter-being and the trans-cognitive emotion of empathy or compassion.
Moreover, as Steven Conner argues, Stoppard not only shows that the logic
of world systems is arbitrary, that the legitimacy of one side doesn’t negate
that of the other side, but also that “the ‘other’ of theater—the realities of
politics and history that seemingly lie beyond its jurisdiction—has itself been
42 Chapter Two

penetrated by theatricality” (1986, 112). In a sense, Lenin stands outside not

only the performance of theater but also the performance in the “other” of
theater, history itself. In missing the “link between theater and life” (Eco
1994, 110), or what Turner calls the redressive phase of both stage drama
and social drama (1998, 64), Lenin’s effect on the world is relegated from
changing our perception of it—as do artists like Joyce, Tzara, and Wilde—to
a “minor redistribution of broken pots.”
In a series of crossovers in Act Two, Carr's attraction for Cecily distracts
him from stopping Lenin from returning to Russia, and in his banter on art
and beauty he misses an opportunity to alter the course of history: “I might
have stopped the whole Bolshevik thing in its tracks” (58). Carr moreover
feels attracted to Lenin: “Yes, I would have enjoyed a crack with Old
Vladimir Ilyich . . . . It wasn't the same with Tzara and Joyce—never hit it off
with them, never saw eye to eye” (61). As stereotypes whose conceptual
stances fail to inspire life, Lenin as a totalitarian socialist and Carr as
bourgeois philistine stand opposed to the avant garde modernists. But in the
end the play juxtaposes without making an explicit preference, directing our
attention elsewhere. In the non-correspondence between the exaggerated
self-confidence of politics and the non-committal panorama of art, Travesties
opens a sacred space for humor, farce and empathy.
While Stoppard seems to imply that political fanatics like Hitler or Stalin
would undermine the humanist position of Joyce's art-for-art's sake or Tzara's
Dadaism, Travesties does not leave the audience with a sense of despair that
the Lenins of the world may triumph. Rather the audience senses that the
play is pro-Joyce. Lenin, who as a character comes straight out of history
books without Stoppard's embellishment, subverts the credibility of history
and its master narratives with his own sentences. As a work of humanized
postmodernism, or postmodernized humanism, Travesties debunks the master
narratives that underpin our faith in history like the myth of progress and a
total and unified knowledge of the world. In the phenomenology of direct
experience, the micronarratives of plurality and performance take precedence
over theories of unity and third-person legitimation (Lyotard 1984). If
anything is unreliable, then, it is not art but history itself, particularly when
stripped of its thought-voiding theatricality. The micronarratives of
performance, moreover, accrue from the spectators’ turning inward toward
the relation between consciousness and its qualia, not outward toward the
relation between mind and third-person representations of qualia as master
narratives. Postmodernism entails a weakening of thought, presence, and
truth (Vattimo 1988). But phenomenologically, this weakening undermines
the representational structures of the mind, not consciousness, which as the
background of presence is already beyond any tangible modality of truth.
As Stoppard illustrates, a humanized postmodern condition lacking in
adherence to grand patterns of abiding truth suggests a life being lived more
in the equality of multiple moments of knowledge-by-identity, that is, of
 Intersubjectivity in Stoppard's Theater 43

knowledge in which the subject/object duality of mind has been transcended

self-reflexively through an identity with consciousness itself. If grand truths
like Lenin’s narrative representations reside in the mind, then micronarratives
of performance, like Travesties, by definition reside closer to the immediacy
of direct local experience. This experience remains historical in the sense of
being contingent on time and place, but it is also trans-historical in the
Joycean sense of more readily escaping the narrative representations, the
broken pots, through which history is formulated. To be transhistorical thus
means to be on the margins of (master) narratives. Insofar that history and
the postmodern subject are functions of narrative, particularly grand
narratives, the way to elude them is through contentless awareness, the self
as a trans-verbal, trans-conceptual experience.
In the end the new identities of Carr and Tzara are revealed to Gwen and
Cecily, and Old Cecily discovers the falseness of Carr's memories. “And you
were never the Consul,” she says. “Never said I was,” he says. “Yes you did”
(70-1). Nothing can be historically trusted here; it was all a travesty.
Stoppard and the audience don't settle on any one ideology or viewpoint, for
the purpose is not to know more, but to know less. The simplicity of this
emptying takes the actor and spectator toward the continuum of contentless
awareness. While this awareness may seem to be hermeneutically or
epistemologically arbitrary, it is all that remains once the identities of the
characters have been displaced. Stoppard doesn't know conceptually what is
best or right or moral, but he does know that truth can’t be equated with any
fervently held belief. It lies rather in the impartial witness, the only truth we
have that does not depend on outside, third-person verification. The humor
and entertainment of the play stem from the joy of witnessing, and this
allows us to see that conceptual constructs tend to be farcical and possibly
dangerous.

5. Layers of Identity
Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties enjoys being
self-reflexive, indulging in appearances for the sake of revealing hidden
truths. These plays, like Hapwood with its framework of quantum physics,
encourage us to develop a critical distance. We identify with and then
distance ourselves from the acting roles in a successive peeling away of
layers of identity. Actors and audience co-create intersubjective spaces of
participation, and ultimately a sacred ontology of inter-being. In the process
of rejecting grand narratives—post-Newtonian physics, religion, Marxism,
psychoanalysis, history—Stoppard doesn't swing over to a radical
postmodernism based on extreme social constructivism. Travesties and
Jumpers (1972) anticipate postmodernist themes, but Stoppard doesn't reject
44 Chapter Two

all universal truths and claim that everybody's truth is relative except his
own.
His plays suggest rather a more moderate constructivism, one that
recognizes that the world and our perceptions of it are not pre-given but
develop historically. They suggest, as Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Foucault, and
Habermas have indicated, that our thoughts and feelings are not a reflection
of reality but participate in the movement of reality itself. The mapmaker and
the map are not separate from the territory; rather the mapmaker co-creates
the territory by engaging it through conceptual and linguistic tools. Although
intellectuals generally believe what they can rationalize rhetorically, we
usually have a sense of right and wrong that precedes utterance (see McGinn
1991, passim). As argued here, Stoppard, like Artaud, evokes a deeper sense
of truth that suggests a knowledge-by-identity not delimited by discursive
thought and perceptual habits that characterize knowledge-about or
knowledge-by-acquaintance. Since the mid 1970s his plays have been
innovative as well as sympathetic to traditional beliefs, including absolute
goodness and moral justice, natural innocence prior to the socially
determined subject, and the vital role of art. Yet Stoppard’s plays, like those
of Caryl Churchill, also intimate how intellectual speculation begets a
transformative process that takes us beyond conceptuality altogether.
 CHAPTER 3:
CARYL CHURCHILL’S CLOUD NINE AND
TOP GIRLS:
THE SELF BEYOND NARRATIVE IDENTITIES

Individual and Social Transformation

Caryl Churchill presents a vision of justice in a theater that, like

Stoppard's, is playful, comic, and startling, but also subversive in a manner
she intends to be “not ordinary, not safe” (1960, 446). As a feminist artist
who experiments with subject, form, and style, Churchill departs from the
Brechtian technique of distancing the audience and develops a new process
of identifying and confronting social problems. She is particularly concerned
with gender oppression and the inequalities of capitalism, largely induced by
patriarchal ideology. In defining human identity, Churchill shows how the
representation of a dramatic work to an audience parallels the way an
individual represents the self to society. She exposes the patriarchal
definitions of masculinity as dependent on the exclusion of the feminine as
“Other” in a closed structure of oppositions in which the feminine is
objectified and women repressed. In her confrontation with traditional male
dominated theater, Churchill deals not only with stages, curtains, scenes, and
lighting, but also with the historical and economic conditions that support
and legitimize male hegemony. In Cloud Nine and Top Girls, Churchill links
societal change with personal development, showing that individuals can
effect significant changes not only in themselves but also in society. The
relevance of Churchill's feminist drama for sacred theater derives in part
from its linking of opposites. Her approach to theater opens the spectator to
an inner space beyond the opposites of male/female, power/powerlessness,
subjective experience/historical circumstance. As in Stoppard's theater, her
plays transcend the duality of subject and object through empathy and inter-
being, an experience her spectators can relish through a knowledge-by-
identity as they approach non-intentional pure consciousness.
46 Chapter Three

Cloud Nine

1. Player/Role

Rachel Blau du Plessis has pointed out that socialist/feminists working in

theater have tried to “break the sentence” of the symbolic order that
legitimizes masculine authority (1985). In analyzing Churchill's theater as a
feminist deconstruction of “the sentence” of patriarchal subjectivity and its
institutions, Amelia Kritzer examines the key elements of theatrical
representation that Churchill challenges. Kritzer explains that “the sentence”
in theater consists of four conventions: a) the space accommodating the stage
and audience; b) the relation between the performance and the written role of
at least one actor; c) the “density of signs,” as Roland Barthes defines it
(1972, 26), created by lighting, staging, and the actor's physical presence,
gesture, vocal tones, and costume; and d) time (1991, 8). Churchill takes on
the first element of space by giving voice to female and feminist viewpoints.
This involves breaking down the patriarchal boundaries erected on stage
between performers and audience. Churchill “uses both Brechtian devices
(such as seating non-performing actors on stage) and literary techniques (i.e.,
fragmented narratives and open endings) in her plays to challenge the
convention of audience passivity and engage the audience in a relationship to
imaginative reciprocity” (Kritzer 1991, 9). The second element, the
player/role relationship, has a special significance for feminist theater. It is
based on Barthes’ description of theater as “the site of an ultraincarnation, in
which the body is double, at once a living body deriving from a trivial nature,
and an emphatic, formal body, frozen by its function as an artificial object”
(Kritzer 1991, 27-8). In theater, which reflects in the process of undermining
the social construction of identity, the performer/role doubleness reinforces
the masculine/feminine opposition central to a masculine or patriarchal
subjectivity. As Kritzer puts it,

Theater's player/role opposition mimics the division and hierarchization of

masculine and feminine. The player is real, while the role makes visible the
false man—i.e., the feminine—that must be repressed in the attainment of
subjectivity. Stage parlance, which places the player “in” a role, confirms the
penetrable, “feminine” quality of the role, as well as the unitary, “masculine”
quality of the player. (1991, 9)

In this hierarchized opposition between the “real” man as the unitary

player and the “false” man as the feminized role, the “false” man position
sustains the “real” masculine subject as a phallic unity by reinforcing the role
as the "other" that threatens masculine unity. The false man of the role
position masquerades on stage as the real or true man, who is both comforted
and threatened by the role. This doubleness of theater, which replicates the
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 47

ambiguity of the subject/object division, can be seen as opening a sacred

space in Churchill's theater within the subjectivity of actors and audience.
The sacredness of theater, as I’ve suggested, unfolds within the space of
subjectivity created by the decontingencing of the subject through a dis-
identification with fixed roles. The dis-indentification or decontextualization
of subjectivity that begins with the player/role doubleness of representation
accelerates when the player is a woman. A “woman playing a role would be
not-man enacting false man, and the reassuring value of doubleness would be
lost” (Kritzer 1991, 10), with the effect of accentuating the threat to the
phallic unity of the true man, who ironically would be exposed as doubly
false. For this reason women tend to be cast as ideal feminine objects given
to passive acceptance of the hierarchal male/female opposition. Because the
patriarchy considers the true woman (player) and false woman (role) to be
the same, women are generally denied the kind of ambiguities and
fragmentation that construct, but can also deconstruct social identity.
Feminists like Churchill try to express a non-patriarchal subjectivity by
answering Hélèn Cixous' call for an écriture feminine (1986). This project
would help dissolve the male/female opposition and the link between the
phallus and the word that marks patriarchal discourse, and substitute a
"density of signs," the third convention noted earlier, based on feminine
attributes: breast, clitoris, and vagina. According to Kritzer,

Feminist theater must attempt to deconstruct the socially constructed

wholeness of the gendered subject. To do so, it must break down the
masculine/feminine opposition reified in the player/role division,
theatricalizing the possibility of a subjectivity based in multiplicity and
relationality rather than binary opposition and separateness. (1991, 11)

This deconstructed place is where women, as Cixous puts it, would make a
“shattering entry into history” (1976, 880). But in fact this entry always
already occurs whenever an actor plays a role, as we saw in Stoppard, for the
doubleness of representation can be understood not only in terms of the
division between a true man/woman and a false man/woman, but also
between the constructed identity of any role and the witnessing or self-
reflexive attention of the player performing this role. As Churchill’s theater
suggests, the point is not only “to deconstruct the socially constructed
wholeness of the gendered subject,” as Kritzer puts it, not only to fracture the
subject into multiple identities, but also to disassociate oneself from all
identities in the sacred taste of a void of conceptions, or the fullness of non-
intentional consciousness as pure witness.
48 Chapter Three

2. Identity and Gender in Cloud Nine

Cloud Nine, written in 1978-79, has two acts: the first is set in Victorian
Africa and explores the links between imperialism and the oppression of
Africans, homosexuals, and women; the second is set around a hundred years
later in 1970s London, where several members of the same family in Act One
together with their new friends try to free themselves from their Victorian
heritage. In playing with the element of time (the fourth convention Kritzer
identities), Churchill not only separates the two acts by a hundred years while
maintaining continuity, but also has the characters—specifically the mother
(Betty) and her two children (Edward and Victoria)—age only 25 years
between the acts. Act One begins with Clive coming home after touring the
restless native villages to the care of his wife, Betty, who complains about
the rudeness of their servant, Joshua. Betty tells of the unexpected arrival of a
widowed neighbor, Mrs. Saunders, who Clive will incessantly pursue, and he
in turn tells Betty of the imminent arrival of their friend Harry Bagely, a
homosexual with whom Betty is infatuated. During the first act, while the
socially constructed identities of the characters gradually dissolve, the Clives
and friends hold a Christmas picnic, hostilities with the Africans mount and
Joshua patrols the compound. Edward is caught playing with his sister's doll,
Harry inadvertently reveals his homosexuality to Clive, and in the final scene
Joshua aims a gun at Clive as he makes a wedding toast. In addition to the
identity un-constructing effect of the player/role doubling, we see a farcical
clash between the outrageous behavior of the characters and a Victorian
ethical code common in British satire.
Act Two, set mostly in a London park, consists of a series of scenes from
every day life in the 1970s and features both familiar and new characters:
Victoria, now a middle-class professional, and her husband, Martin; Lin, a
working-class lesbian who becomes Vic’s lover, and her daughter Cathy;
Vic’s brother Edward, now a gardener in the park, and his lover Gerry; their
mother Betty, recently divorced from Clive and about to become liberated;
and Lin, Vic, and Edward in a ménage á trois. The characters from Act One
find sexual liberation in Act Two, but have not completely thrown off their
Victorian ghosts. In the doubling of roles, none of the characters are played
by the same actors in both acts, while one character plays the roles of Ellen
and Mrs. Saunders in Act One.
Churchill, who accentuates the doubleness of theatrical representation by
cross-casting her characters, makes these comments in the Preface:

Betty, Clive’s wife, is played by a man because she wants to be what men
want her to be, and, in the same way Joshua, the black servant, is played by a
white man because he wants to be what whites want him to be. Betty does not
value herself as a woman, nor does Joshua value himself as a black. Edward,
Clive’s son, is played by a woman for a different reason—partly to do with
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 49

the stage convention of having boys played by women (Peter Pan, radio plays,
etc.) and partly with highlighting the way Clive tries to impose traditional
male behavior on him. (1985, 245)

By contrasting two historical periods, Churchill shows how sexuality and

power are not fixed but can change over time along with the other personal
qualities of our constructed identities. The fact that the identity of the
characters as characters continues across the two acts, then, depends not on
their roles, genders or any of their changing attributes, including narrative or
memory, but rather on their witnessing awareness remaining unchanged,
providing a sense of continuity to a shifting conventional identity. In
analyzing Paul Ricoeur’s concept of discursive or narrative identity, Dieter
Teichert writes that

To be a person and to gain one’s identity—in the sense of identity as

selfhood—means [for Ricoeur] to be a being which does not possess a stable,
closed and fixed identity. Identity as selfhood is not simply there like an
objective fact. To possess an identity as selfhood means to be the subject of
dynamic experience, instability, and fragility. (2004, 185-86)

As Ricoeur says, “narrative identity is not a stable and seamless identity. Just
as it is possible to compose several plots on the subject of the same incidents
. . . so it is always possible to weave different, even opposed, plots about our
lives” (1988, 248). But even though flexible and open, narrative identity is
derived from intentional consciousness, either that of ourselves, as in
autobiography, or of society in the case of our constructed roles. Teichert
continues that “The self does not exist as an isolated, autonomous entity
which constitutes itself as a Cartesian ego. Nor is the self a mere passive
product of a society. Ricoeur’s position takes a middle path between these
extreme positions. Selves are built up in the process of assimilating,
interpreting, and integrating the contents of the cultural environment” (2004,
186; Ricoeur, 1969). In Churchill’s theater, the dynamic, unstable and fragile
identities of the characters are woven into different plots, but the changeable
nature of these plots exposes a background of non-intentional consciousness
through which these identities are held together.
Against the background of self-observation, which is nonchanging, Cloud
Nine dramatizes the liberating move from patriarchal domination to greater
individual freedom. Clive's role as Cathy in Act Two highlights the
arbitrariness of gender and hegemonic status, as well as the openness and
flexibility of human development. As Churchill says, “Cathy is played by a
man, partly as a simple reversal of Edward being played by a woman, partly
because the size and presence of a man on stage seemed appropriate to the
emotional force of young children, and partly, as with Edward to show more
clearly the issues involved in learning what is considered correct behavior for
a girl” (Preface 1985, 246). This cross-casting has the effect of startling the
50 Chapter Three

audience out of their preconceptions about human relationships and the

distinctions of race, gender, and power.
This startling effect is further enhanced by the irony of cross-cast
performers playing the role of the "other" they try to deny. Clive as Cathy in
Act Two caricatures his role as patriarch in Act One, and despite being black
Joshua has a pseudo white-male subjectivity apparent in his contempt for his
own race and for Betty, who as a women is oppressed like blacks. Betty in
Act One is played by a man, to ironic effect when her homophobic husband,
Clive, embraces her. She tries to seduce Harry Bagley, family friend and
explorer, who is having casual affairs with Edward and Joshua. Ellen,
Edward's governess, lusts after Betty, but is forced to marry Harry after he
mistakenly comes on to Clive. In unexpected ways the play shifts our
conceptions of space, time and identity in two acts that span over a hundred
years. These differences of setting, time and narrative discourse are balanced
by corresponding situations in each of the acts; while the relaxed quality of
Act One generates passion and disturbance, the kaleidoscopic design of Act
Two produces lethargy. Churchill's aesthetics simultaneously calls attention
to and undermines the qualities of her fictional world and its characters, not
only by changing the narrative context, but also by exposing all contexts and
character attributes to be illusory constructs that conceal an underlying
disinterested awareness. The multi-level paradigm and partial discontinuity
between the two acts thus empower the characters to begin shedding their
socially conditioned attributes.
In deconstructing gender politics, Churchill makes gender visible by
separating it from the body and sex. As the characters are introduced, the
incongruities multiply: Joshua, played by a white, internalizes colonial
values; Edward, played by a woman, tries to elude the role expectations of
his father; and Victoria, at first played by a doll, illustrates the mindless
status of Victorian children. The play begins with the imperialist song,
“Come Gather Sons of England,” with the characters introducing themselves
in the rigid language of rhymed couplets. Betty says:

I live for Clive. The whole aim of my life

Is to be what he looks for in a wife.
I am a man's creation, as you see,
And what men want is what I want to be. (251)

Even in her adulterous attraction to Harry Bagley, she remains locked in her
role as object, unable to become an active agent:

Betty: When I'm near you it's like going out into the jungle. It's
like going up the river on a raft. It's like going out in the dark.
Harry: And you are safety and light and peace and home.
Betty: But I want to be dangerous.
Harry: Clive is my friend.
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 51

Betty: I am your friend.

Harry: I don't like dangerous women. . . .
Betty: Am I dangerous?
Harry: You are rather.
Betty: Please like me.
Harry: I worship you.
Betty: Please want me. (261)

The degree to which Betty as a character identifies with her role as object
prevents her from experiencing her sexuality directly, compelling her instead
to experience it through the mediated idealizations of the male: “You are
safety and light and peace and home” (261). And later: “Betty: Can't we ever
be alone? Harry: You are a mother. And a daughter. And a wife” (268). The
immediacy of her experience of sexual indulgence is erased, replaced by the
masculine representation of it, which takes primacy over female desire.
Moreover, if Betty were played by a woman, her role as a not-man enacting a
false man would undermine the reassuring doubleness of representation that
preserves masculine identity. But Betty’s being played by a man maintains
the hierarchized opposition between the true man as the unitary player and
the false man as the feminized role. The false man position of Betty as man
would thus seem to sustain the masculine subject as a phallic unity by
reinforcing the role position as the “other” that threatens masculine unity.
The problem, however, is that the performer, although played by a man, is
supposed to be a woman. Does this mean that she is ironically sustained as a
masculinized subject with a phallic unity? If so, the gay Harry hasn't noticed,
for he resists seduction by Betty as a man, acting a woman, even though s/he
supposedly reinforces masculine empowerment. But then, is Harry really
a man seeking empowerment himself? In the ambiguity of the pairing of Beth
and Harry, they can be viewed as either a heterosexual or homosexual
couple, depending on whether Betty is viewed in terms of gender or biology.
This complex, defamiliarizing doubleness in Churchill's theater, which
multiplies the ambiguities of the subject/object division, creates a sacred
space in the subjectivity of actors and audience by first scrambling and then
emptying out its content. What replaces this content is not only a Brechtian
critical mind but also the suggestion of an impersonal, disinterested
awareness that witnesses the rapid decontingencing of any sense of
conventional identity—whether of a fixed and finite subject, or “the subject
of dynamic experience, instability, and fragility” open to a variety of
opposing plots (Teichert 2004, 185-86).
The lesbian Ellen tries to seduce Betty, but like Betty she also fails to
communicate her feelings directly. She can only express her desire by trying
to substitute herself for Harry. When she says, “I love you, Betty,” Betty
responds from an indoctrinated perspective, “I love you too, Ellen. But
women have their duty as soldiers have. You must be a mother if you can”
(281), spoken convincingly as a “man.” Joshua reports to Clive on having
52 Chapter Three

spied on Ellen's talking “of love to your wife, sir,” but Clive refuses to take it
seriously (285). He does however condemn Betty for her flirtation with
Harry, which he also hears about from Joshua. Indeed, no woman in Act One
succeeds in fulfilling her desires. Mrs. Saunders tries in vain to fend off
Clive, and when she succumbs he can only satisfy himself:

[He (Clive) has been caressing her feet and legs. He disappears
completely under her skirt.]
Mrs. Saunders: Please stop. I can't concentrate. I want to go home. I wish
I didn't enjoy the sensation because I don't like you, Clive. I do like living in
your house where there's plenty of guns. But I don't like you at all. But I do
like the sensation. Well I'll have it then. I'll have it, I'll have it--
[Voices are heard singing The First Noël.]
Don't stop. Don't stop.
[Clive comes out from under her skirt.]
Clive: The Christmass picnic. I came.
Mrs. Saunders: I didn't.
Clive: I'm all sticky.
Mrs. Saunders: What about me? Wait.
Clive: All right, are you? Come on. We mustn't be found.
Mrs. Saunders: Don't go now. (263-64; original emphasis)

Though farcical, Clive as the symbolic father imposes his divine right as a
colonialist on anyone he pleases, exploiting his linguistic authority and
control over language and desire. In coercing his lascivious will on Mrs.
Saudners, he flaunts the caricature of a romantic rhetoric: “Caroline, if you
were shot with poisoned arrows do you know what I'd do? I'd fuck your dead
body and poison myself. Caroline, you smell amazing. You terrify me. You
are dark like the continent. Mysterious. Treacherous” (263). Mrs. Sauders
like Betty is reduces to monosyllables—“Don't stop. Don't stop.” Clive's
discourse, as Kritzer puts it, “enforces the opposition between subject and
object on both women and colonized people, as is evident in parallels
between patriarchal concepts of women and Western European concepts of
Africa in his speech” (1991, 118). As in the above quotation: “You are dark
like the continent.” Similarly, when he hears of Betty's infidelity, Clive says,
“This whole continent is my enemy. . . . I sometimes feel it will break over
me and swallow me up. . . . you must resist it Betty, or it will destroy us. . . .
We must resist this dark female lust, Betty, or it will swallow us up” (277).
Although Betty agrees to resist these dark impulses, the play's sexual
nonconformity suggests a covert resistance to partriarchal authority. But
Betty as played by a man shows resistance not only to male authority—as in
a subject/object, male/female opposition discussed by Kritzer—but also to
the very constructedness of the personal subject, whether male or female,
which is based on our identification with arbitrary attributes. Churchill’s
overall dramatization heightens our mindfulness of body, mind, thoughts,
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 53

and emotions in a manner that opens a space in our attention between these
attributes and awareness per se, with the result that awareness mirrors itself.
As we saw with Stoppard, the matter of theater as mirror is the mirror, just as
the matter of awareness is awareness—mirroring the emptiness of fullness.
One of the most comical scenes of the play involves the misunderstanding
between Clive and Harry, who mistakes Clive's assertion, “There is
something dark about women, that threatens what is best in us. Between men
that light burns brightly,” as an expression of homosexual desire (282). Clive
is taken aback when “Harry takes hold of Clive” (stage directions), and says,
“My God, Harry, how disgusting” (283). Afterwards, forced by Clive to take
a wife, Harry proposes to Mrs. Saunders, who chooses to be alone, and then
to Ellen who he finds more receptive, though ironically their both being
attracted to the same sex offers little prospect of conjugal bliss. Shortly
afterwards Betty sees Clive kissing Mrs. Saunders and attacks her. Clive
springs to the rescue, declaring, “Betty--Caroline--I don't deserve this--
Harry, Harry” (297). To appease his wife, he embraces and kisses her, a
show of affection between two male actors who again can be viewed as
having either a heterosexual or homosexual relationship, but who also instill
a sense of “identity” beyond cultural constructs.
The basic doubleness of representation we find in Act One has long been
noticed by drama theorists who describe the paradox of acting in which the
performer remains detached from the emotion of a role even while evoking
this emotion in the spectator, as in Diederot's paradox between actor and
spectator and Stanislavsky's paradox within actors observing themselves. But
the paradox in Churchill is that roles and emotions are not more convincingly
played but more convincingly undermined. As noted earlier, drama theorists
point to a state of consciousness beyond ordinary emotion and speech:
Brook’s “total theater” touches on the transcendent, and "holy theater" makes
the invisible visible; Grotowski’s “poor theater” induces a state of
"translumination" in performer and spectator; and Barba’s “transcendent” is a
quality of the performer's presence. Theater not only engages the critical
mind, but also expands consciousness in performers and spectators (see
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, 2001). In “Theater Degree Zero,” Ralph Yarrow develops
this approach into a “metaphysics of praxis” (2001, 90). Hence, as Churchill
so aptly demonstrates, self-discovery involves not so much knowing what
you are, as knowing what you are not. This entails watching yourself
carefully and rejecting or “zeroing” all that doesn't go with the basic fact: “I
am.” The spectator in Cloud Nine, as in any theatrical doubleness of
representation, is led away from the identification with “I am this or that,”
whether “this or that” is a performance, a role, a self-image, or even a job,
friends, and family. What remains after racial, ethnic, professional, gender,
and other attributes fall aside is simply the “I am” of impersonal, non-
intentional self-awareness. In this process one goes from knowing and
identifying with relative qualities, toward a taste of pure knowingness
54 Chapter Three

beyond the subject/object duality of conceptual content. Even if distinctions

remain in our awareness, sacred theater helps us to un-construct our
perceptual experiences, to see them as transitory properties of the mind and
body. We initially witness these experiences from the nonattachment of what
Sartre calls “non-positional consciousness” or consciousness “pour-soi,” and
then move toward a qualityless, impersonal “I am” transcendent to yet
immanent within duality. Churchill’s feminist theater accentuates this
witnessing attention by deconstructing the oppositions that would preserve
the masculine subject, however ambiguously or under threat. Any egoic
identity is revealed to be an illusion, nothing more than a relational matrix of
multiple energies.

3. Mindfulness

Cloud Nine, therefore, not only challenges, as Brecht does, “the

traditional belief in the continuity and unity of the self” by showing how
individuals evolve through different historical contexts (Speidel 1982, 45); it
also undermines the notion that a series of contexts fully constitute the
individual. The sacred quality of Churchill's theater suggests that the
individual, not completed by the sum of social fragments, has another
dimension: mindfulness or witnessing awareness. The ability to develop
mindfulness is part of the Theravada Buddhist tradition. As Wallace
explains, mindfulness as a practice entails an observation of

the body, feelings, mental states and mental objects of oneself and others. A
common theme to each of these four applications of mindfulness is first
considering these elements of one's own being, then attending to these same
phenomena in others, and finally shifting one's attention back and forth
between self and others. Especially in this final phase of practice, one engages
in what has recently been called reiterated empathy, in which one
imaginatively views one's own psychological processes from a “second-
person” perspective. (2001, 213)

Churchill’s doubling and cross-casting of characters encourages

mindfulness, a second-person perspective between player and role, or as
noted earlier the third-person perspective of Mead’s notion of “the
generalized other” (Whitehead 2001, 18). When the player, such as Betty in
Act One, is a man in the role of a woman, s/he is spontaneously mindful of
his/her multiple identities. The player/role division, far from locking the
subject (performer/spectator) within binary oppositions, explodes all
conceptual boundaries through a multiplicity that not only deconstructs a
gendered wholeness but also destroys the very concept of identity, whether
essentialist or constructed. In breaking down masculine/feminine
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 55

oppositions, the identities of the player/role mutually negate each other

through a multiplicity of the “I is not I,” as Yarrow illustrates in his analysis
of Beckett (2001, 84-89). Experiencing (non) identity as not this/not that
(neti, neti in Buddhism) points to the qualityless state of “I AM” (Maharaj
1988). This knowledge-by-identity of non-intentional witnessing
consciousness is mirrored in the sacred events suggested by Churchill’s
theater.

4. Are We Really Free?

In Act Two, as the pace slows down and the language expands to express
unprogrammed desires, we see the effect of the power structure on sex and
relationships. Clive is gone and with him the authoritative center, replaced by
greater freedom and a matching uncertainty. Lin as a lesbian mother reverses
Ellen's position in Act One by making her own decisions without constant
self-doubt and feeling the need for patriarchal approval. Scene One begins
with the child Cathy, played by Clive, in a rebellious mood, responding to
Lin's suggestions for games to play by repeating, "Already done that" (289).
Her defiant attitude sets the mood of questioning and exploration in which
the characters reject normative behavior and the play further explores the
place beyond cognitive content.
As mothers in a park playcenter, Lin says to Vic, “I really fancy you”
(290). In contrast to the first act where the women where usually confined
indoors, the outdoor setting here fosters open expression and freedom of
choice. While Vic and Lin talk about their lives, we see their preoccupation
with ordinary everyday concerns in which they make their own decisions:

Lin: I've got a friend who's Irish and we went on a Troops Out march.
Now my dad won't speak to me.
Victoria: I don't get on too well with my father either.
Lin: And your husband? How do you get on with him?
Victoria: Oh, fine. Up and down. Your know. Very well. He helps with
the washing up and everything.
Lin: I left mine two years ago. He let me keep Cathy and I'm grateful for
that.
Victoria: You shouldn't be grateful.
Lin: I'm a lesbian.
Victoria: You still shouldn't be grateful.
Lin: I'm grateful he didn't hit me harder than he did.
Victoria: I suppose I'm very lucky with Martin.
Lin: Don't get at me about how I bring up Cathy, ok?
Victoria: I didn't.
Lin: Yes you did. War toys. I'll give her a rifle for Christmas and blast
Tommy's pretty head off for a start. [Tommy is Vic's son.]
56 Chapter Three

[Victoria goes back to her book.] (291-92; original emphasis)

Lin has rejected certain aspects of her socially constructed identity, but she
still craves acceptance by the people she likes. The characters break taboos
and find new identities, but the important thing in Act Two is not their new
identities, which they eventually transcend, but the process of transformation
itself: giving up the familiar world and their status quo as a substitute ideal,
and seeking out instead new possibilities for love and happiness. The fact
that the characters espouse one sexual preference over another is secondary
to the fact that they have begun the process of transformation and self-
discovery. The contrast between gays and straights adds to the doubleness of
representation, sharpening awareness of both the arbitrary nature of all social
conditioning, and of the need to deconstruct and overcome this conditioning,
which gays and women may have more practice in than ordinary males.
Edward and Gerry talk about their different attitudes toward gender roles,
with Gerry at one point describing in graphic detail a homosexual encounter
with a stranger on the train, insinuating that he's more liberated that Edward.
Later they discuss their relationship: Edward says he likes knitting and wants
to be married, and Gerry says he doesn’t mind the knitting but wants a
“divorce.” Afterwards, Edward discloses his bisexuality to Victoria:

Edward: I like women.

Victoria: That should please mother.
Edward: No listen Vickey. I'd rather be a woman. I wish I had breasts like
that, I think they're beautiful. Can I touch them? (307)

By the end of Act Two, Lin, Vic and Edward have a ménage á trois that
plays havoc with the doubleness of representation by being simultaneously
heterosexual, homosexual and incestuous.
In contrast, Martin can only express a conventional desire for his wife
and like most ordinary men feels insecure about discussing his sexual
prowess. He talks about his feelings with Vic:

Martin: My one aim is to give you pleasure. My one aim is to give you
rolling orgasms like I do other women. So why the hell don't you have them?
My analysis for what it's worth is that despite all my efforts you still feel
dominated by me. . . . You're the one who's experimenting with bisexuality,
and I don't stop you, I think women have something to give each other. (301)

Martin feels insulted because he thinks Vic hasn't been able to get herself
together, but Churchill suggests that none of the characters have succeeded in
doing so, that their behavior will never lead to the desired results. The point
suggested here is not only that the characters will find it hard to make
changes in their personal lives, to lay to rest the ghosts of Victorianism, but
also that they will always face other conceptual or ideological constraints
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 57

obstructing their happiness and freedom by leading them to identify with

other narrative identities. The very absence of happiness and freedom,
however, implies the possibility of their attainment. The performers and
spectators intimate this, not by sensing the end of patriarchal hegemony,
which they don’t, but rather by participating in the co-creation an
intersubjective space beyond language and the emotions of
attraction/repulsion.
Churchill convincingly portrays the attenuation of worldly emotions in
leading the spectator to a taste of the presence of non-intentional
consciousness. A significant example is Betty, who divorces Clive at the
beginning of Act Two in a futile attempt to break her ties with the past. Her
children haven't fully accepted her, and she has lost her sense of
independence. But finding a job gives her confidence and leads to her
experimenting with autoeroticism: “Afterwards I thought I'd betrayed Clive.
My mother would kill me. But I felt triumphant because I was a separate
person from them” (316). When Vic, Edward and Lin try in their drunken
orgiastic ritual to evoke a mythical goddess, Vic says, “You can’t separate
fucking and economics” (309). But even with her newfound eroticism and
job, is Betty really fulfilled?
Critics have noted the lack of wholeness or completion in Cloud Nine. As
Mark Fortier says, the fact that the characters change for the better “doesn’t
mean that they all find their essential selves” (2002, 119)—essential self here
being defined not as non-intentional pure consciousness but rather the
ultimate construct. Moreover, Act One does not complete the destruction of
Victorianism, just as Act Two does not complete Betty's transformation. It
offers only the “before” and “during” but not the “after,” which the audience
must imagine for itself (Kritzer 1991, 129). The play in fact dramatizes the
point that “before” and “after” are conceptual constructs, that the immediate
reality of non-intentional consciousness is “during,” the on-going process of
transformation that zeroes or voids the mind of thought. For the spectator, the
sacredness of Churchill's theater unfolds in the experience of “during” as a
space of inter-being that compels us to break out of a doubled reality
mediated by representation—even while using representation as a means of
escape. The openness of “during” in Cloud Nine, which takes precedence
over the closure of “before” and “after,” collapses oppositional structures in
the immediacy of a participatory presence between performer and spectator.
Churchill uses different formal innovations to achieve a similar effect in Top
Girls.
58 Chapter Three

Top Girls

1. Gender Politics
Top Girls employs a variety of structural devices to dramatize the
relationship between women and male-dominated labor, and between women
from different economic, educational, class, and historical backgrounds as
they deal with the universal plight of women. These devices include mixing
historical periods, doubling the roles played by the performers, reversing the
chronological sequence of the acts, and emphasizing dramatic irony. The
play has three acts, with the third act preceding chronologically the first and
second. Churchill’s theatrical devices have the combined effect of inducing
mindfulness in the audience, both male and female. Mindfulness, by opening
a space for non-intentional consciousness, challenges performers and
spectators to recognize their identities as arbitrary, incomplete, and capable
of transformation. With a cast of sixteen female characters from history,
literature, and art played by seven women, Churchill explores how women
are forced inadvertently to compromise the ethics of caring, their traditional
calling, by adopting an ethics of competition in a quest for parity with men.
Given the treatment of the ethical divide in the play, there is no question of
the audience taking one side or the other, for neither side has the answer: all
socially constructed roles when taken on their own are part of the problem,
not the solution.
Through a process of negation, Top Girls leads the audience toward a dis-
identification with historical constructs. Individual conflict and societal
problems are given no easy remedy, and any individual course of thought or
action is revealed as inadequate or incomplete. The audience senses that
neither side of the argument is right, that perhaps nobody on the basis of
rationalizations or logical certitudes can come up with a viable solution for
the plight of women. The play is set against the background of the 1980s,
when Margaret Thatcher and the feminist movement tried to equalize
government policy in England. It shows that in spite of the social change that
followed the Abortion Act, Divorce Act, and Sex Discrimination Act, among
others, since the 1980s the lot of the average women has improved but little.
This makes the play relevant today even though some critics believe the
feminist theme is dated. While the play may seem to be dated, its
representation of inequalities in society is not only pertinent, but also
suggests that discrimination is not the cause of oppression and suffering but a
symptom that accentuates the need for a radically new consciousness. I
suggest that this can be achieved not by merely reshuffling the phenomenal
contents of consciousness but only by relishing a void of conceptions, the
source of creativity (as explained further in the chapter on Sam Shepard.)
The irony of the play’s title says it all: even after reaching the top, what the
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 59

girls experience leaves much to be desired. Their lack of fulfillment pushes

them ever further in the quest for success and happiness, however elusive.
Yohanan Grinshpon describes the heart of storytelling in terms of “the
healing potency of ‘knowledge of the better self’” (2003, viii). As opposed to
the “lesser self,” the better self is defined as Atman or witnessing
consciousness, which Grinshpon refers to as “Vedic otherness” (5). The
experience of the better self does not involve discursive thought, such as that
engaged in by Churchill’s women; rather it involves a state of Being, or a
void of conceptions. Churchill leads the spectator to these ineffable trans-
conceptual, trans-linguistic moments of Being—thereby invoking a taste of
the core of human nature. The knowledge and skill in action associated
with the lesser self provides the necessary context through which awareness
transcends conceptuality in attaining the better self as a state of Being. Top
Girls describes the experiences of women who are not only pulled toward the
better self through a desire for success and happiness, but also pushed in this
direction by the crises of their daily lives and a corresponding sense
inferiority, which in turn instills a desire for transcendence. The personal
crisis and sense of inferiority of the characters causes them to aspire for
excellence, thereby guiding the character and spectator toward the full
meaning of the better self.
Act One begins with a dinner party in a restaurant on a Saturday night
hosted by Marlene, who is celebrating her promotion over a male colleague
to managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency, a small step
toward achieving her better self. Her guests are five women of different
class, education, and historical periods. As described in the notes on
characters, Isabella Bird (1831-1904) comes from Edinburgh and for thirty
years up to the age of 70 traveled the world; Lady Nijo (b. 1258) is a former
Japanese courtesan to the Emperor and a wandering Buddhist nun; Dull Gret
is a physically powerful woman and the subject of Brueghel’s painting Dulle
Griet, in which she charges through hell with her band of women fighting
devils; Pope Joan was a theologian disguised as a man and said to have been
Pope from 854 to 856, when she was exposed by childbirth and stoned to
death; and last to arrive, Patient Griselda, is the obedient wife who Chaucer
depicts in The Clerk’s Tale of The Canterbury Tales. The festive mood of the
dinner party, with the characters constantly interrupting each other and
talking simultaneously, sours as the women realize that ironically their stories
display mostly despair and loss rather than success or happiness. The act
concludes in a drunken debauch with Joan sick and Nijo sobbing, mired in
the suffering of the lesser self. However determined they were in their
struggle for respect and appreciation in a man’s world, in the end they all feel
disappointed.
As the play suggests, however, their troubles arise not from the
experiences of their socially constructed identities, their lesser selves set
mainly in the past, but rather from their present identification with these
60 Chapter Three

experiences, which stem ultimately from the interplay of the relational

structures of society that have nothing to do with them. Happiness or bliss,
which the characters seek by way of the concepts of happiness, reveals itself
only in the no-concept state. It cannot be perceived in the past or future, it
can only be enjoyed “during” knowledge-by-identity in the eternal present.
Our social identity with its complex of emotions, as Churchill suggests, is
constructed by the intellect in association with the five senses. From an
Advaitan perspective, consciousness itself has no identity; “Out of ignorance,
and identification with the body, you experience pleasure and pain even
though consciousness is universal and just functions through the body”
(Maharaj 2001, 163). Churchill’s theater helps character and spectator to end
this identification.

2. Behind the Mask

The performers play the five characters from the past with modern
accents, creating an ironic distance between player and role. The ironic
quality of Churchill’s writing, however, does not allow for a climax of
defeat. Instead, through negation it opens the historical subject to new levels
of being in the direction of non-contingency. In Act One, all the women
emerge out of history, and two of them out of literature. They appear on
stage like specters emerging from our own constructed set of concepts and
beliefs while simultaneously revealing the backdrop of a shared transpersonal
identity. As Goldman notes, the way an actor presents herself to an audience
is not like the readable, orderly mask that most people present to society, but
rather like the complex way we identify ourselves to ourselves, full of
contradictions and conflicting thoughts and emotions (2000, 20-21). The
actors’ shifting identities, which cross the internal boundaries that ostensibly
hold them together, activate “a buried volatility that we normally keep under
tight control” (Goldman 2000, 22). On the one hand, the constant
interruptions overlapping the dialogue in Act One imitate the instability of
our constantly shifting constructed identities. The self never stop evolving,
and during social intercourse co-evolves simultaneously with those of others
around us. On the other hand, what we discover in Act One of Top Girls and
extending throughout the play is not only what women must do to succeed in
a patriarchal society, but also what society itself must do to provide both men
and women with greater opportunity to fulfill their human potential. This
potential is suggested to the audience as the transpersonal dimension of the
better self, which appears on stage as a reflection of the non-intentional
consciousness of the audience.
Goldman quotes Nietzsche as describing the process of identification
between audience and actors in drama. When the spectators see a character
reflecting a transpersonal dimension of (constructed) identity, it’s as if they
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 61

recognize a figure returning from the dead (2000, 24). In other words, when
Marlene and the other women at the restaurant describe their relationships
with men that have influenced their development as people, they reveal the
process of identification that we all recognize as the same process we
undergo in the formation of our own constructed identities. As Goldman puts
it, “Watching an actor is like seeing the inside of your head walking toward
you. . . . The actor projects into physical reality a figure already active in our
intimate mental life; to see the actor-as-character is like discovering that
someone close to you has returned from the dead. The actor assumes an
identity that has the uncanny force of one of our identifications” (2000, 24).
Or in Nietzsche’s words,

This process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see

oneself transformed before one’s own eyes and to begin to act as if one had
actually entered into another body, another character. This process stands at
the beginning of the origin of drama. (qtd. in Goldman 2000, 24-25)

Nietzsche and Goldman are referring to an identification on the level of mind.

Churchill, however, also dramatizes an uncanny disidentification with mind
through a void of conceptions. Watching these women out of history
gradually descend into the recognition of defeat, the spectators realize that
their failure has nothing to do with their true nature. These women, each
having achieved a status beyond conventional norms, have started the
process of transcending the limits and barriers of patriarchal society and their
narrative selves. As we watch the play, the internal boundaries that divide
actors and spectators gradually dissolve, and self and other begin to merge
not so much on the level of substance attributes as on a level approaching the
fourth condition, or pure consciousness. The spectator participates in un-
constructing the intentional content of the thinking mind, made easier by the
fact that this content turns out to be disagreeable and futile.
Throughout Act One, the intrapersonal events that in drama become
“transpersonally recognizable” (Goldman 2000, 116) are recognizable not
only as personal attributes that people happen to share in common but also as
breaches in attributes that disrupt our identification with the familiar; only by
surmounting the need for the set of concepts and beliefs that have
consistently failed throughout history will women ever succeed. This
transformation, however, will not happen through an emulation of men, as
Marlene, Nell, and Win attempt in Acts Two and Three; this struggle will
only lead to continuing fallout and defeat. Rather it will only happen through
the creation of a new paradigm. Adrian Jones notes that the effect of Pope
Joan being discovered as a female and Nijo attacking the Emperor is that
future women suffer greater oppression and are “prevented from achieving
what Joan and Nijo do” (1999, internet). Top Girls encourages spectators to
envision a new social paradigm as an alternative to the patriarchal system,
62 Chapter Three

but to prevent a relapse to earlier conceptual boundaries this shift must

involve not only a new definition of femininity independent of men but a
simultaneous shift in the notion of identity itself through the taste of a pure
consciousness event. If we create the world in the act of perceiving it, then
the only way to change the world, as Churchill’s plays suggest, is to first
change the basis of our perception.
As Churchill says, she consciously decided not to write her play in a
traditionally male style. She remembered “thinking of the ‘maleness’ of the
traditional structure of plays, with conflict and building in a certain way to a
climax. But it’s not something I think about very often” (qtd. in Naismith
1991, xxii). Critics have noted the “feminine” quality of her writing, in which
openness replaces climax and dialectic replaces conflict (ibid.). In the
dialectical openness of the party in Act One, the characters and audience
realize through a process of negation that even though perfection is
impossible in terms of socially constructed identity, the very awareness of
imperfection propels one to search for something better. As the behavior of
the women in Top Girls implies, however, without a radical shift in
consciousness women as well as men could end up perpetuating social
inequalities.

3. Acting Like Men

Act Two demonstrates the limitations of Marlene, Nell and Win as
successful women, calling into question not only the attitude of the women
once they reach the “top” but also the notion of success itself. The main
ambiguity of their so-called success in the Top Girls Employment Agency
comes across in their attitude toward other people, including the women they
interview. In discussing Howard, who lost out to Marlene in becoming
manager, Nell says, “Howard thinks because he’s a man the job was his as of
right. Our Marlene’s got far more balls than Howard and that’s that.” Win
replies, “Poor little bugger” (46). When Howard’s wife, Mrs. Kidd, visits
Marlene’s office to express her misgivings about a family man with three
kids losing in promotion to a single woman, tempers flare.

Mrs. Kidd: You’re one of these ballbreakers / that’s what you are. You’ll
end up / (The slash indicates when the speaker is interrupted by the next
speaker, with the two then speaking simultaneously.)
Marlene: I’m sorry but I do have some work to do.
Mrs. Kidd: miserable and lonely. You’re not natural.
Marlene: Could you please piss off? (59)

While interviewing Shona, an inexperienced 21 year old pretending to be

an experienced 29 year old, Nell asks her about closing: “Because that’s what
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 63

an employer is going to have doubts about with a lady as I needn’t tell you,
whether she’s got the guts to push through to a closing situation. They think
we’re too nice. They think we listen to the buyer’s doubts. They think we
consider his needs and his feelings.” Shona replies, “I never consider
people’s feelings” (61). When the girls hear that Howard, traumatized by his
setback at work, has had a heart attack, Marlene says, “Poor sod,” and Nell
retorts, “Lucky he didn’t get the job if that’s what his health’s like” (66). The
play’s dialogue debunks the idea that to change your set of concepts will lead
to a transformation of your state of being. In an ultimate irony, the only
transformation the top girls undergo in their putative success is to become
like all the men whose behavior and attitude they have always resented.
In Act Two we learn that Marlene, in the ironic quest for her better self,
gave up her daughter Angie at birth to be raised by her sister, Joyce, who
adopts Angie; that Joyce unlike her sister never leaves home in search of a
better life; and that Angie suspects her real mother to be Aunt Marlene. One
day Angie pays a surprise visit to Marlene in her office only to be given the
cold shoulder: “Unfortunately you’ve picked a day when I’m rather busy, if
there’s ever a day when I’m not, or I’d take you out to lunch and we’d go to
Madame Tussaud’s” (55). Later when she finds Angie dozing in her office
she comment to Win and Nell, “She’s a bit thick. She’s a bit funny.” Win,
“She thinks you’re wonderful.” Marlene, “She’s not going to make it” (66).
The problem with constructing identity solely on the basis of one conceptual
paradigm as opposed to another rather than on an experience of a liminality
that would instill a true transformation toward the better self comes across in
the way Marlene casually rejects her daughter, who she didn’t visit for six
years. The type of redressive phase the top girls do undergo by emulating
men remains stagnated on the level of mind. Although the characters seem
oblivious to the full extent of their dilemma, the spectators can sense that by
living in a haze of misguided conceptions the top girls fail to reach the more
subtle levels of intuition and feeling that might assist them in changing a
system to which they’ve become enthralled. As the play suggests, the
ambiguity of the women’s attitude centers not so much on the relation
between different sets of beliefs and concepts as it does on the relation
between conceptuality per se and the need for transcending all sets through a
void in thought. Arguably, given that the top girls themselves undergo at best
a limited development, the play’s optimal transformative impact hinges on
the audience’s intuition that conceptuality alone cannot resolve the ambiguity
of their predicament. Coleridge reminds us that “the mind half-sees and half-
creates” (1983); as constructivists like Katz ( 1978) say, the seeing part
depends on our cultural background, but as decontextualists like Forman
(1999) say, the creative part also depends on our tasting a void of
conceptions that would allow for a new consciousness and possibly a new
world order to emerge.
64 Chapter Three

4. Class Structure, Socialism and Consciousness

In Act Three the emphasis shifts from an argument on the oppression of
frustrated women to that of people in general, as expressed by Joyce who
believes that only socialism can change society. Joyce and Marlene argue
about the conditions in England in the 1980s England when Margaret
Thatcher was prime minister under which their parents were forced to
subsist, conditions still prevalent in many parts of the world today.

Joyce: You say Mother had a wasted life.

Marlene: Yes I do. Married to that bastard.
Joyce: What sort of life did he have? / Working in the fields like
Marlene: Violent life?
Joyce: an animal. / Why wouldn’t he want a drink?
Marlene: Come off it.
Joyce: You want a drink. He couldn’t afford whisky.
Marlene: I don’t want to talk about him.
Joyce: You started, I was talking about her. She had a rotten life because
she had
nothing. She went hungry.
Marlene: She was hungry because he drank the money. / He used to hit
her.
Joyce: It’s not all down to him. / Their lives were rubbish. They
Marlene: She didn’t hit him.
Joyce: were treated like rubbish. He’s dead and she’ll die soon and what
sort of life
/ did they have? (84-85)

In critiquing a wider social context beyond gender relations, the play

dramatizes how the ambiguous achievement on the part of individuals has
dire implications for society as a whole. Just as a dying forest consists of a
large number of individual trees that are dying, so a distressed society
consists of a large number distressed people. The top girls as well as
Joyce are preoccupied with conceptual boundaries of their lesser selves,
which from an Advaitan standpoint can be distressing when not
counterbalanced by an experience of wholeness. Marlene condones
Thatcher’s policies for encouraging individuals who “have what it takes,”
while Joyce divides people into the rich and poor. Marlene says, “Them,
them. Us and them?” Joyce replies, “And you’re one of them.” Marlene says,
“And you’re us, wonderful us, and Angie’s us / and Mum and Dad’s us.”
Joyce replies, “Yes, that’s right, and you’re them” (86). Such boundaries can
only proliferate in the absence of a void of conceptions, the ultimate state of
unboundedness that serves as the most effective means of counteracting
stress.
 Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Top Girls 65

But the play ends with no immediate relief in sight from the suffering of
the lesser selves, at least not for the characters. At first it seems that Marlene
will make amends when she tells Joyce, “You’ve got what it takes,” and that
she didn’t mean what she said earlier, to which Joyce replies, “I did” (87). In
the end, however, Joyce says she’s “sorry” and goes to bed, while Marlene
has one last drink before sleeping on the sofa. At this point Angie walks into
the room, sees Marlene and implores, “Mum?” She repeats the question, to
which Marlene says, “No, she’s gone to bed. It’s Aunty Marlene.” Angie
simply says, “Frightening,” twice, aptly summing up the response of the
innocent to the way adults can fixate on their conceptual boundaries, as if
they constitute objective reality. Although a victim herself, as a reasonably
open 16 year old Angie offers potentially the best hope in the play for
debunking the credulity that the objects of awareness, whatever they are,
represent the ineluctable facts of life.

5. Un-constructing Identity
Churchill demonstrates how society imposes a system of social identity
on people that not only oppresses them but also limits their options to a set of
alternative identities that are usually no less oppressive. As M. Silverstein
says, Churchill “remains committed to the search for new representational
forms, new strategies for encoding the body, new ways to organize the
sex/gender relations we live in,” all under the cultural conditions that shape
anything new we might create (1994, 20). Churchill, however, not only
situates the potentially new within cultural contexts. She also suggests how
these contexts can themselves evolve into new forms through a reciprocal
relationship between our changing sets of beliefs and concepts, which
collectively constitute our cultural conditions, and the never-changing void
of conceptions that lies beyond these conditions. Although her plays do not
explicitly address the possibility of a non-intentional pure consciousness
event, they demonstrate that no socialist or feminist enterprise can succeed in
realizing the better self merely on the basis of conceptual maneuverings.
Moreover, by portraying an unsayable dimension of human experience, they
provide the backdrop for, and contribute significantly toward, the very
possibility of a new consciousness. While Churchill uses feminism in helping
us to unconstruct our perceptions and behavior and to forget our concepts
and beliefs, Hwang uses poststructuralist drama to achieve a similar end.
 CHAPTER 4:
M. BUTTERFLY: NONIDENTITY AND
THEATRICAL PRESENCE

1. Deconstructing East and West

David Henry Hwang based his play M. Butterfly on the New York Times
reported espionage trial of the French diplomat Bernard Boursicot, who
provided state secrets during a twenty-year love affair to what he claimed to
believe was a female Chinese opera singer. At the trial the opera singer was
revealed to be a man, but the defendant insisted that he never knew this fact
during their twenty-year relationship. Hwang concluded as he says in the
Afterword that “the diplomat must have fallen in love, not with a person, but
with a fantasy stereotype. . . . He probably thought he had found Madame
Butterfly” (1989, 94-95). He goes on to explain that

Heterosexual Asians have long been aware of “Yellow Fever”—Caucasian

men with a fetish for exotic Oriental women. I have often heard it said that
“Oriental women make the best wives.” (Rarely is this heard from the mouths
of Asian men, incidentally.) This mythology is exploited by the Oriental mail-
order bride trade which has flourished over the past decade. (1989, 98)

On this basis Hwang decided to write a “deconstructivist Madam Butterfly”

that would cut through the “layers of cultural and sexual misperception” and
reveal how “considerations of race and sex intersect the issue of imperialism”
(1989, 95, 99, 100). M. Butterfly is widely regarded as “the ultimate
postmodern, poststructuralist play,” blending periods and styles and
suggesting that “all intimate relationships are determined by politics” (Smith
1993, 44). On this argument, the rhetoric of empire inexorably constructs
identity, with the West valorized as masculine and powerful and the East
denigrated as submissive and weak. In M Butterfly, Rene Gallimard, as
Boursicot now jailed in Paris as a spy , fantasizes that he was Pinkerton in
Puccini’s opera and that his lover was Butterfly. By the end of the play,
however, he realizes their roles have been reversed: “it is he who has been
Butterfly, . . . duped by love; [while] the Chinese spy [Song Liling], who
exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton” (95-96). In the play’s
Orientalism, the West defines itself in relation to the East, its Other, but
Hwang’s deconstruction of the East/West binary demonstrates that
masculinity is not an essential attribute of Western identity. In fact, the play
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 67

suggests that ultimately no attribute is essential or nonchanging, that you

have to transcend attributes if you’re looking for something nonchanging.
Through its alienation devices, M. Butterfly not only deconstructs the
fixed meaning of a unified subject associated with Orientalism and its violent
hierarchies, it also takes us beyond attributes. As we discussed in the context
of Stoppard and Churchill, given the popular poststructuralist metanarrative
that the self is a reactionary trope, that the metaphysics of presence is
“always already” an illusion, and that the only universality is our socially
constructed identities, the question arises, one may wonder what holds these
identities together as dynamic matrices that function coherently within their
discursive contexts. The answer may lie with the nature of mind and the
experience of subjectivity. This chapter examines identity as represented
through Gallimard’s experience of a witnessing silence in between and
behind thoughts and social roles, a silence that suggest the presence of the
internal observer, which is independent of all socially induced identities.
As we have seen, Daniel Dennett, who like Crick consigns
phenomenology to neuroscience, rejects the Cartesian dualism of mind and
body and does not acknowledge the self as internal observer. He also rejects
what he calls the “Cartesian theater” (1991), the notion that “I” have place
inside my brain or mind where “I” am and from which everything I
experience comes together. Unlike John Searle, who argues that first-person
experience cannot be reduced to a third-person or objective ontology,
Dennett rules out the subjective ontology of a central place or time in the
brain where consciousness happens, claiming that this experience is only an
illusion. In the following analysis I argue that although reductionists such as
Dennett and Crick as well as poststructuralists are probably right about the
qualia of consciousness being an illusion, Hwang’s M. Butterfly suggests that
they are probably wrong about what something is like to be, and particularly
about what it is like to be pure consciousness or the self as witness. If the
hard problem is to explain the connection between the brain and subjectivity
or consciousness, Hwang’s M. Butterfly like the other plays I’ve discussed
suggests an answer that scientists specializing in third-person approaches
may find hard to accept.
Although Dennett has no time for first-person methods, he does develop
what he calls a method of heterophenomenology, a study of other people’s
phenomena—such as our study of the characters of M. Butterfly. He defines
heterophenomenology as

the neutral path leading from objective physical science and its insistence on
the third-person point of view, to a method of phenomenological description
that can (in principle) do justice to the most private and ineffable subjective
experiences, while never abandoning the methodological scruples of science.
(1991, 72; his emphasis)
68 Chapter Four

Yet heterophenomenology in itself can only study what other people say,
leaving out their actual experiences, while Hwang’s theater aesthetically
extends this method by allowing us to intimate the nature of these
experiences themselves.
Crick and Dennett’s approach to consciousness has affinities with that of
poststructuralists such as Dorrine Kondo. In commenting on the play from a
postmodernist perspective, Kondo says that “Hwang opens out the self, not
to a free play of signifiers, but to a play of historically and culturally specific
power relations. Through the linkage of politics to the relationship between
Song and Gallimard, Hwang leads us toward a thoroughly historicized,
politicized notion of identity” (1990, 22-23). She claims that “Asia is
gendered, but gender is . . . not understandable without the figurations of race
and power relations that inscribe it” (1990, 24-25). Similarly, David Eng, in
his psychoanalytic reading, declares that the “white diplomat’s ‘racial
castration’ of Song . . . suggests that the trauma being negotiated . . . is not
just sexual but racial difference” (2001, 2), with sexuality and race being
“mutually constitutive and constituted” (2001, 5). But Hwang also de-
essentializes identity by showing that much of the content or qualia of
Gallimard’s consciousness is an illusion, thus exploding the stereotypical
notions of gender and race and the abstract “concept of self” (Kondo 1990,
26). Even if the play’s performers and audience resist Althusser’s
interpellative injunction (1971) by alternating subject positions, they would
only have exchanged one prison house of language for another with its own
set of ideological constraints. The third-person theoretical claim that
Gallimard’s immediate first-person phenomenology outside discursive
contexts is a liberal humanist delusion is ironic given that his historicized,
politicized identity—his twenty-year long belief that Song Liling was
female—is itself a delusion. In M. Butterfly, by creating a first-person
phenomenology, a literal as well as literary “ghost in the machine,” of what it
is like to be outside of rhetorical contexts, Hwang provides a taste of
observing or witnessing the stream of thoughts and social roles that make up
both constructed identity and what Kondo refers to as the “concept of self.”

2. Concept of Self vs. Nonintentional Pure Consciousness

Kondo’s demystification of the “concept of self,” contrary to what she
implies, does not refer to a deconstruction of the self as the internal observer,
but rather, as the phrase indicates, to a deconstruction of a “concept” of self.
As M. Butterfly demonstrates, however, the self as a locus of integrated
energy is ultimately not a concept, not an object of observation, but the
internal observer. If the observer and the object of observation, or concept of
self, can be conflated, as poststructuralists seem to imply, then by inference a
concept would be able to engage in thought and simultaneously be aware of
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 69

itself in the act of thinking. While Dennet argues against thoughts having
awareness, Lacan’s definition of the subject as a cultural construct dispersed
along a chain of signifiers (1978) and determined by relations of race,
gender, and power seems to support this possibility. But in that case, nothing
would distinguish us from zombies, defined as hypothetically perfect
physical duplicates who behave like their human originals but lack feelings
and inner awareness. Although William James posits a material and social
self as well as a spiritual self, he nevertheless argues that “thought is itself the
thinker, and psychology need not look beyond” (1890, Vol. 1, 401; original
emphasis). But even if we agree with James, as does Dennett, that “the
passing Thought itself is the only verifiable thinker” (1890, Vol. 1, 346; his
emphasis), thought as an object of awareness cannot also be defined as a
conscious subject, except perhaps in a materialism that rejects the self, or a
“conscious inessentialism” that regards consciousness as not necessary but a
kind of optional extra. Even Sartre, as we have seen, posits a distinction
between concepts and reflexive consciousness, arguing that “Every positional
consciousness of an object is at the same time a non-positional consciousness
of itself” (1956, lv).
Although artificial intelligence or DNA computers, like zombies, can be
said to engage in thought, they are not conscious entities, and as some argue
may never become conscious. In questioning the ability of thoughts to be
aware, Dennett posits another form of non-conscious existence, a “zimbo,”
defined as “a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal (but
unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about its other, lower-
order informational states” (1991, 310). Hence, even machines that think in
this way cannot be aware of the act of thinking and appreciate the meaning of
their thoughts like humans can. The poststructuralist fallacy is to conflate self
and concept-of-self in humans, and thereby to implicate thought in the
unlikely task of being aware of itself thinking. Kondo is an unwitting
advocate of this position in her defense of Hwang’s self-proclaimed
deconstruction of essentialist identity:

It [the play] subverts notions of unitary, fixed identities, embodied in

pervasive narrative conventions such as the trope of the "Japanese woman as
Butterfly." Equally, it throws into question an anthropological literature based
on a substance-attribute metaphysics that takes as its foundational point of
departure a division between self and society, subject and world. M. Butterfly
suggests to us that an attempt to describe exhaustively and to fix rhetorically a
"concept of self" abstracted from power relations and from concrete situations
and historical events, is an illusory task. Rather, identities are constructed in
and through discursive fields, produced through disciplines and narrative
conventions. (1990, 26)

In the duality of mind and body, Kondo sets up an opposition within the
mind between a socially constructed self and an essentialist self, which she
70 Chapter Four

calls illusory. But as a product of language and historical events, the

constructed self is physical like the body, not metaphysical.
But this mind/body opposition prevails only in the garden variety of
Western dualism. In the hard problem of consciousness, the opposition is not
between mind and body but increasingly between mind/body on the one hand
and self-reflexive pure consciousness on the other. The mind is characterized
by thought and corresponds to our constructed identity, while consciousness
in its pure form is trans-linguistic, a void of conceptions, and knowable only
through knowledge-by-identity. The mind/body and consciousness duality,
with the mind/body defined as material and consciousness as non-material,
derives from the Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga tradition of India
(Pflueger 1998), but is increasingly accepted in the vast interdisciplinary
field of consciousness studies in the West (Shear 1990; Chalmers 1996;
Forman 1998). The missing element in the Western literary critical
understanding of the self in general, and in the constructivist deconstruction
of identity in particular, is an appreciation of nonthought associated by
Artaud with Asian theater, and suggested in Western theater through the
unconstructing of our cultural identity as a function of the mind’s intentional
content. As evidence by the plays we’ve discussed, non-intentional
consciousness as internal observer complements the third-person concept of
self as an object of knowledge, a rhetorical construct or the “Word as
everything” typically associated with Western theater (Artaud 1958, 68).
M. Butterfly questions the unified concept of self as a function of the
intentional mind, but in the process opens up a theatrical space in which
performers and spectators can taste the self as a function of consciousness
without qualities. William Demastes says that theater “forces us to think
materially about everything before us, even the apparently immaterial” (42).
But as Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes, “This is incorrect if we consider
thinking. The immaterial cannot be thought about immaterially, because
thinking is a function of the intellect, and the intellect, on the model of mind
in Vedic literature, cannot grasp any more refined levels than itself, and thus
cannot grasp the level of the immaterial, which is the level of pure
consciousness” (2003, original emphasis). As Deikman says, “We know the
self not by observing it but by being it” (1996, 355, Deikman’s emphasis), or
in Forman’s words, through a knowledge-by-identity. Immaterial pure
consciousness exceeds the material mind, just as the actor in entering a
dramatic text exceeds the text, adding, as we shall see, the presence of a new
life that the text does not exhaust.

3. Theatrical Gaps
For constructivists, Hwang powerfully exposes identity as being
constructed through “disciplines and narrative conventions” (Kondo 1990,
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 71

26). Significantly, however, Hwang’s characters do not consistently believe

in themselves as coherent and easily apprehended linguistic or conceptual
entities; instead they acknowledge the fact that their identities “are multiple,
ambiguous, shifting locations in matrices of power” (ibid.). If that is the case,
and Gallimard informs the audience repeatedly in his frame-rupturing
comments that he lives subjectively within his unstable imagination, then
which “concept” is witnessing these shifting subject positions in the
mind/body matrix of material power? As Song reminds Conrade Chin, her
supervisor who questions her integrity, “I am an actor” (48). Later she tells
Gallimard, “I am an artist, Rene. You were my greatest . . . acting challenge”
(63). Through its reflexiveness, its constantly shifting frames of reference
and its attention on dramatic technique, the play focuses the performer and
spectator on the process of re-presentation, on the forms of utterance that
subvert iconicity and the illusion of a real or natural performance. This
division between referential narrative and metanarrative, histoire and
discours (Benveniste 1971, 209), or “the simultaneous inscribing and
subverting of the conventions of narrative” (Hutcheon 1989, 49), reveals a
distinction between subject and object, non-intentional pure consciousness
and the mind’s intentional content.
If Rene Gallimard and Song Liling do not fully identify with the content
of their subject positions, then some modality of self must be witnessing this
content from a central place in the Cartesian theater beyond “rhetorical
identification” (Burke 1966, 301). Hwang’s play suggests that to see the
“bounded, coherent and easily apprehended entities” (Kondo 1990, 26) of
identity as illusory rhetorical constructs, as constantly changing and unreal,
implies a non-changing dimension of the self that is possibly real. This
distinction between the changing and non-changing, which is ultimately that
between mind and consciousness, thought and a void in thought, pervades
the play right from the opening scenes when Gallimard retells the narrative
history of his relation with Song from his prison cell in Paris.
In deconstructing the axes of historicized identity, Hwang opens the
dramatic spectacle from several points of view simultaneously, as Kondo,
Haedicke, Lye and others have pointed out. The Brechtian practice (1964) of
baring theatrical devices by presenting a diversity of visual frames has the
effect of exposing monological perspectives as nothing more than competing
ideologies. But something else occurs in M. Butterfly that is typically
overlooked. In his prison cell in scene one, Gallimard, downstage with “a
sad smile on his face,” gazes upstage at a vision of Song, who appears as a
“beautiful woman in traditional Chinese garb, danc[ing] a traditional piece
from the Peking Opera. . . . without acknowledging him” (1; stage
directions). Gallimard says, “Butterfly, Butterfly,” and the audience watches
Song dancing through his gaze. Right afterwards, as the stage directions
indicate, Gallimard “forces himself to turn away, as the image of Song fades
out” (1), and the illusion of realism in Hwang’s theater—if its theatricality is
72 Chapter Four

not seen already as artificial—suddenly dissolves. The spectator’s rhetorical

identification with Gallimard’s unitary gaze breaks up, a rupturing process
that polysemously creates multiple points of view, those of performer and
audience. The spectator, momentarily put in a self-reflexive state of non-
(constructed) identity, like Sartre’s “non-positional consciousness,” must
either choose or oscillate between them.
At the end of scene one, Gallimard again disrupts the frame, which by
now has become a metaframe: “With a flourish, . . . [he] directs our attention
to another part of the stage” (2). The audience and Gallimard are now both
spectators sharing a distant scene in which three characters on stage discuss
Gallimard’s notoriety. But instead of perceiving the scene as “real,” our joint
spectators perceive it as a mediated doubling of narrative visualities. In a
deconstructive interpretation, the disparity between a real and mediated
frame leads the spectator to perceive any identity as already a social
construct. This view implies that an unmediated subjectivity or trans-verbal
first-person experience is an illusion, thur privileging a third-person objective
representation of our linguistically splintered subjectivity. As Janet Haedicke
notes,

Gallimard's life story [is depicted] as “always already” constructed much as

Hwang has constructed Boursicot's history [in the playwright’s notes].
Gallimard directly forewarns the audience that the illusion of unmediated
subjectivity constitutes performance and that the specular eye/ I confuses
theatre with history, history with truth, autobiography with life. (1992, 30)

By this account, our immediate first person experience, as portrayed

theatrically through the specular eye/I, confuses performance and history, or
a constructivist notion of identity with an essentialist “concept of self.” But if
as argued here these two mental constructs do not differ to begin with, then
who is there to witness the shifting constructions of identity in the play’s
multiplying of narrative visualities along a hegemonic and hierarchic chain of
signifiers?
What emerges from behind or between these rhetorical identities in these
early scenes and throughout the play is a taste of an underlying screen of
trans-conceptual, self-referral consciousness upon which these identities are
reflected. To demystify metanarratives and to refuse iconic representation can
certainly deconstruct rhetorical identity as a conceptual absolute, but how
reasonable is it to assume that this also delegitimates first-person subjectivity
or non-intentional consciousness per se? As I have argued elsewhere, non-
intentional pure consciousness is beyond the reach of the deconstructive play
of difference (Haney 2002, 2004). To define essentialist/non-changing
identity as a rhetorically fixed “concept of self” is to confuse an absolute
thought about the known with the internal observer as a void of conceptions.
In the dialectic between Gallimard and the audience at the beginning of Act
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 73

One, Scene Three, Gallimard does not completely lose himself in the
illusions of identity but rather toys with these illusions and bids the
audience’s indulgence. As Gallimard puts it:

Alone in this cell, I sit night after night, watching our story play through my
head, always searching for a new ending, one which redeems my honor,
where she returns at last to my arms. And I imagine you—my ideal
audience—who come to understand and even, perhaps just a little, to envy
me. (4)

Gallimard enters the scene as one of the spectators, and through empathy
the spectators can share both in his phenomenal qualia and in the self-
reflexive internal observer. As the play demonstrates, he is not merely a
mind/body with thoughts running through it; he is also a conscious agent
aware of the process of having thoughts. Thoughts about self-identity here
coexist with non-positional, self-referral consciousness, which
simultaneously comprehends the value of change and nonchange, boundaries
and unboundedness, thought and nonthought.1 Even as a postmodernist play,
M. Butterfly suggests the presence of no-mind or non-thought as the
background to thought opened up by the play’s dramatic structure, thus
supporting Artaud’s claim that pure consciousness as a void in thought is
available through Western theater. Gallimard and the spectators break their
fixation on any particular role not through the agency of the mind and its
intentional content, but rather through their intersection with the conceptual
void lying behind and between the mind’s rhetorical identifications that
formulate the narrative self.
In writing about Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, which defines gender
as a construct, Judith Butler locates “an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes
on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other
gender” (1990, 9). This cogito, like Sartre’s “non-positional consciousness,”
serves as a witness to mental content, although it remains firmly associated in
feminist discourse with the mind rather than with non-intentional
consciousness or the natural self. But as an anagogic trope for non-
intentional consciousness, the cogito does suggest a capacity to stand outside
of constructed identity and enjoy a degree of autonomy over the mind’s
intentional content. Without this power of a thought-transcending self-
refexiveness, which phenomenology usually discusses merely in terms of a
subject-object division,2 Gallimard or Song would not be able to witness and
thereby perform their transvestite roles.
As Hwang demonstrates, what Brechtian theater with its narrative
discontinuity, refusal of realism, and alienation effect (A-effect) attempts to
achieve ultimately is not a distinction between one imaginary unity of mind
and another, but rather a distinction between mind and consciousness,
knower and known. This distinction emerges when the Brechtian gestus—“a
74 Chapter Four

gesture, a word, an action” that exposes “the social attitudes encoded in the
play-text” (Diamond 1988, 89)—succeeds in evoking the semiotically
invisible; that is, when it directs attention from a self-dramatization to a self-
shedding, thereby opening awareness to the coexistence of silence and
dynamism, boundaries and unboundedness characteristic of higher
consciousness. Gallimard as theatrical witness, which antedates linguistic
constructs,3 watches his life stories run through his head in the form of
thoughts that Hwang renders to the audience through dramatic narrative. His
thoughts depict the phenomenal features of his experience, the intentional
content of his awareness centered on his love for Song—however
delusional—and his desire for sympathy from the audience as judge and jury.
These phenomenal qualities are mental properties within awareness yet
distinct from awareness. Throughout the play Gallimard expresses ideas
about the Orient, gender, Song, and imperialist power, and as the play
unfolds his ideas are un-constructed, but his witnessing self remains
unchanged, until overshadowed by the mind’s rhetorical identifications in the
final scenes. Through a heterophenomenology, then, the ineffable subjective
experiences of M. Butterfly suggest that “The body appears in your mind,
your mind is the content of your consciousness; [but] you are the motionless
witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without
changing you in any way” (Maharaj 1988, 199). In observing his life unfold
before him, Gallimard’s witnessing awareness as intermittently manifested
remains unchanging and without diversity.

4. Dismantling Binaries
Gallimard dramatizes his own version of Puccini’s opera Madame
Butterfly as a frame to his performance with Song. Haedicke writes that by
staging a-play-within-a-play, Hwang displaces the binaries of
presence/absence, reality/illusion, perceiver/perceived, subject/object, and
thereby “dismantles the spectator’s unitary gaze as Gallimard . . . [and]
attempts to perform another into existence” (1992, 31). But dismantling
binaries implies going beyond duality. In this sense it will have a greater
chance of succeeding if it shifts the field of perception between play and
spectator from ordinary mental binaries to an awareness of the metabinary of
the witnessing self as the ultimate frame of thought. Otherwise, the attempt to
“perform another into existence” through an A-effect is more likely to
produce a conceptual existence than a living consciousness. In his gloss on
Puccini’s opera, Gallimard creates a distance to his own rendition by
characterizing Cio-Cio-San as “a feminine ideal,” and Benjamin Franklin
Pinkerton of the US Navy as “not very good-looking, not too bright, and
pretty much a wimp” (5). Gallimard ends by saying, “In the preceding scene,
I played Pinkerton, the womanizing cad, and my friend Marc from school
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 75

(Marc bows grandly for our benefit) played Sharpless, the sensitive soul of
reason. In life, however, our positions were usually—no always—reversed”
(7). As we saw in Churchill, although the play’s Brechtian double casting
and role reversal demystifies the process of dramatic representation, the
dismantling of conceptual binaries requires going beyond the plane of
conceptuality to the underlying screen of pure consciousness. As long as the
spectator merely exchanges one of Gallimard’s roles for another, the unitary
gaze will dominate.
Critics typically overlook one of the implications of the A-effect: namely,
that spectators cannot step beyond binaries by merely switching between
interpellated positions. What happens when performer and spectator become
critically aware of dismantling identification, besides shifting between
different modes of thought? Arguably, it is not unreasonable to assume that
they will begin to quell the noise of their historical identities only by
relishing the underlying omnipresent silence of consciousness as internal
observer. Only then would they elude the power relations latent within the
political unconscious (Jameson 1981) responsible for violent hierarchies.
Through the A-effect, performer and spectator may avoid conflating actor
and role univocally, but to negotiate the play’s multiple perspectives implies
a self-reflexive awareness of nonattachment to any one of them, even while
the thinking mind continues simultaneously to identify with them in serial
form. Although never dealing explicitly with pure consciousness events, M.
Butterfly suggests a situation in which the intentional consciousness of
objects occurs simultaneously with self-reflexive, non-intentional
consciousness, or consciousness for itself. This experience corresponds to
Forman’s “dualistic mystical state”:

in this phenomenon, two distinct epistemological modalities are enacted

simultaneously: intentional seeing and the self’s knowing itself through a
knowledge-by-identity. (1999, 162)

Sartre saw this dual epistemological structure through his reflexive “non-
positional consciousness,” even if only in theory through a conceptual
analysis. In common parlance, the phrase “shift” or “expansion of
consciousness” is used mainly to describe a shift in mental content and often
ignores what the term consciousness potentially implies for deconstructive
theater. One thing it does not imply, as Hwang suggests, is that the self is
fully determined by historical materialism, dispersed along a chain of
signifiers.
The self-reflexive gaps exposed between knower and known, actor and
character, theater and history in M. Butterfly can be understood as opening a
window beyond mind, language and text toward the freedom of self-
awareness. This freedom, a panentheistic experience that is both transcendent
and immanent, differs from polysemy or textual indeterminacy. As the play
76 Chapter Four

proceeds, Gallimard tends to dwell on the grand narratives of a unified

realism based on racist/imperialist illusions about Song, gender, and the
Orient. After watching Song perform Madame Butterfly at the German
ambassador’s house, he says, “I believed this girl, I believed in her suffering.
I wanted to take her in my arms—so delicate, even I could protect her, take
her home, pamper her until she smiled” (15-16). But Gallimard’s desire for
an iconic identity that would verify his preconceptions about East-West
relations is immediately debunked by Song as being a romantic stereotype.
She asks, “what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love
with a short Japanese businessman? . . . I believe you would consider this girl
to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself
for a Westerner—ah!—you find it beautiful” (17). As Karen Shimakawa
notes, Song’s insubordination to Gallimard casts doubt on all the “binaries
that structure their relationship, and despite Gallimard’s attempt to reimpose
that order, it will no longer function smoothly or invisibly” (2002, 125). If
the only thing this scene and others like it accomplish is to make the mind
rethink its adherence to racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes, then their impact
would be fleeting and ineffective. Invariably, as we see in Gallimard, the
mind continually reverts to its pre-established patterns of thought. If on the
other hand we understand the play to lead the spectator to un-construct
identification with the mind’s intentional concepts, even if the mind itself
may initially fail to notice this trans-conceptual development, then we might
succeed in dismantling binaries.

5. Doing Identity
As an actor, then, Gallimard is also a spectator who ruptures the frame by
commenting self-reflexively on his entry into the drama at different points
throughout the performance. After his rendition of Madame Butterfly, the
play-within-the-play, with himself as Pinkerton and Marc as Sharpless, he
notes that “The ending is pitiful. . . .” (15). Later in recounting his own story
he says, “I returned to the opera that next week, and the week after that . . .”
(27). At the end of Act Two, after his wife, Helga, says, “I hope everyone is
mean to you for the rest of your life,” he turns to the audience and says,
“Prophetic” (75). In these entries and others like them Gallimard’s reflexive
commentaries exceed their conceptual content and open a space in the
performance through which the spectator recognizes and identifies with the
actor’s self-referral posture. In his recent book On Drama, Michael Goldman
analyzes the Brechtian process of recognition and identification in theater in
terms of “making or doing identity” (2000, 18). Although Goldman defines
identity as an aspect of mind, his model touches on my analysis of the self
through its emphasis on the “most inward” part of mind (2000, 77)—or pure
consciousness in Vedic psychology. Theater, as Gallimard’s performance
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 77

demonstrates, portrays the confusions of self-identity, but his repeated entries

into the text establishes what Goldman calls “a self that in some way
transcends the normal confusions of self” (2000, 18). Contrary to the popular
poststructuralist view, Goldman defines “subtext,” or the “mutual
permeability of actor and script,” as not reducible to text (2000, 49). An
actor’s performance can always be treated semiotically,

But in drama one finds inevitably an element in excess of what can be

semiotically extracted—something that is also neither irrelevant to nor . . .
completely independent of the text. No matter how exhaustively one tries to
translate what an actor does with a script into a kind of writeable commentary
on it, there will always also remain the doing of it—the bodily life of the actor
moving into the world, at a specific moment in time, to set in motion these
words, these gestures, these writeable ideas, this other identity. And, if the
doing were itself to be reduced to a text, there would still remain the doing of
the doing. The actor enters the text. (2000, 50; his emphasis)

Gallimard performs the script self-reflexively in excess of the text just as the
spectator experiences non-intentional consciousness in excess of the play’s
constructed identities. If the actor’s physical entry into the text as subtext
exceeds what can be extracted semiotically, then his entry as self-reflexive
consciousness must exceed it even more.
The actor playing the part, then, not only enters the text as Gallimard, he
also enters it self-reflexively in excess of Gallimard. This double entry
highlights the gaps between text and subtext and enhances for the audience
the distinction between mind and consciousness, thought and the awareness
of having thoughts. In Hwang’s treatment of subtext as a double entry,
spectators still identify with the actor as mind/body, if only as a hypothetical
construct. More subtly, they recognize the entry of Gallimard’s trans-verbal,
transpersonal self as their most intimate identity, the “most inward” part of
mind—as when he attempts to un-construct identification with the mind’s
pre-established patterns of thought. As Goldman says, “Contrary to Derrida,
there is always an hors-texte, a place from which someone at some moment
needs to enter, even to constitute the text as a text” (2000, 51, his emphasis).
Although Derrida himself does not deny the existence of the world outside
the text, he holds that that someone is always already contaminated by
context. But as Gallimard’s self-reflexiveness suggests, there is also a place
from which someone at some moment needs to enter the constructed self as
defined by the text, otherwise it would languish as nothing more than what
Peter Brook calls a “deadly” text. When spectators recognize and identify
with the actors’ total entry into the play, which involves “making or doing
identity,” they do so not only on the basis of constructed identities, but also
on the basis of pure consciousness, a process that makes the invisible visible.
M. Butterfly thus dramatizes the Advaitan principle that pure consciousness
is nonpluralistic and therefore changeless, which is one reason we tend not to
78 Chapter Four

notice it unless it can be brought to our attention under certain conditions. To

notice the nonchanging requires a different kind of theatrical mirror, a space
through which self and other, audience and performer can recognize their
interconnectedness beyond language and interpretation.

6. Presence and the Nonchanging

When Song and Gallimard talk after her performance at the Beijing opera
house, she remarks on his long absence since their first encounter: “So, you
are an adventurous imperialist?” (21). Although true in one sense, Gallimard
denies the accusation, but she insists: “You’re a Westerner. How can you
objectively judge your own values?” He replies: “I think it’s possible to
achieve some distance,” which as we have seen he has been doing already.
Song suggests they go outside to escape the stink of the opera house, which
he calls the “smells of your loyal fans.” She retorts, “I love them for being
my fans, I hate the smell they leave behind. I too can distance myself from
my people” (21). The trans-Brechtian implications of this exchange
accentuates the possibility of stepping outside of race, sexism, and
imperialism into an “historyless” world (Ashcroft 2002, 33), however briefly.
Two performers claim not to be who they seem to be historically, implicitly
inviting the audience to share a dialogical space beyond their social
identities. The shared space is dialogical because they mutually distance
themselves from their respective people, East and West, dissolving into thin
air the historical ground beneath them. Although the self-reflexive moment
passes quickly, it lingers to the extent that Song asks Gallimard to be a
gentleman and light her cigarette, thus reminding the audience that a covert
distancing continues between Song’s reflexive consciousness as an actress
and her transvestite facade. In scenes such as this performers and audience
share a transpersonal, intersubjective presence. They experience this
presence (the screen of consciousness discussed earlier) as being either
intermittently between, or more continuously together with and thus behind,
their constructed identities, depending on the degree to which they can
sustain within their awareness the non-changing condition of a silent void in
thought together with thought itself (or qualia in general).
M. Butterfly thus contradicts the generalizing constructivist discourse for
which the only non-changing condition for the subject is a seamless
continuum of interpellated positions trapped within the matrices of language
and power. Toulon, the French Ambassador, having noticed a change in
Gallimard’s interpellated position, tells him,

Want to know a secret? A year ago, you would’ve been out. But the past few
month, I don’t know how it happened, you’ve become this new aggressive
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 79

confident . . . thing. And they also tell me you get along with the Chinese. So
I think you’re a lucky man, Gallimard. Congratulations. (37-38)

Gallimard’s conquest of Song has given him a newfound sense of

masculinity and power. But in the retrospective framework of the play,
Gallimard also develops a sense of power through having intermittently
distanced himself from his various constructed identities, and at this point in
the play he no longer embraces any of them as irrevocable. He senses that
another aspect of his identity lies beyond them, even though in the end he
loses sight of this and succumbs to his fixating ideas.
In creating a space devoid of textual identities behind the playacting, M.
Butterfly suggests the presence of non-intentional consciousness as a void of
conceptions. Performer and spectator may taste this theatrical void for only a
succession of fleeting subliminal moments, but to deny the intersubjective
space of the self-reflexive observer as a real presence would be in effect to
contradict the demystification of unitary, fixed identities. Without this trans-
textual better self, the deconstruction of stereotypes would leave one with a
mere succession of thoughts or qualia, each fixed and unitary, however vast
the constellation of alternatives. Derrida attempts to undermine logocentrism
and establish a democracy free of hierarchies (man/woman, white/brown,
West/East, powerful/submissive) is laudable; but as the play suggests,
without the sense of non-intentional reflexive consciousness against which
intentional objects appear, any dismantled binary will inevitably devolve
through racist, sexist, and political forces into another hierarchy. While
Derrida hopes to resist this trend through constant vigilance, M. Butterfly and
the cycles of history both suggest that without the spontaneous input of the
internal observer, the intellect struggles in vain.
Ostensibly, a Brechtian, purely intellectual demystification does not
liberate Gallimard of his racial stereotypes. We see this failure in the way he
repeatedly ruptures the theatrical narrative only to retreat into Orientalist
deceptions. Visiting Song who is still offstage, Gallimard tells the audience
what he thinks of her: “She is outwardly bold and outspoken, yet her heart is
shy and afraid. It is the Oriental in her at war with her Western education”
(27). Later in the same scene, he says to the audience, “Did you hear the way
she talked about Western women? Much differently than the first night. She
does—she feels inferior to them—and to me” (31). The dramatic irony
allows the audience to see through the sham and even to taste the self-
reflexive void in thought that Gallimard points to. But Gallimard himself is
always at risk as he floats in and out of his various roles, intermittently
sharing with the audience a liminal presence/absence of non-intentional
consciousness.
Nevertheless, the taste of a non-changing witness underlies Gallimard’s
realization that his thinking mind is not always in control of his theatrical
representations. In Act Two, Toulon refers to the gossip of Gallimard’s
80 Chapter Four

“keeping a native mistress” (45), and comments approvingly, “Now you go

and find a lotus blossom . . . and top us all” (46). From the self-referral
margins of this socially constructed identity, Gallimard tells the audience,
“Toulon knows! And he approves!” (46). Witnessing from the Cartesian
theater of his awareness, he feels empowered. Hence, right afterwards when
Song appears and Comrade Chin intrudes, he protests, “No! Why does she
have to come in?” (47). The attempt to control the scene suggests that he has
already half shifted toward a position of agency, a cogito or “non-positional
consciousness” outside of re-presentation and historical identity. Through
such discontinuities between dramatic frames, Hwang unveils an opening
between or behind conceptual reifications, evoking a taste of witnessing
consciousness in performer and audience.

7. False Reversals
Some critics, as Haedicke notes, believe that M. Butterfly ultimately
portrays a fixed subject by simultaneously salvaging the position of “hero”
while attempting to deconstruct it (1992, 29). This seems to occur in
Gallimard’s ritual suicide at the end of the play, when his mind fixates on
one of the play’s multiple perspectives. Tina Chen (1994) and Coleen Lye
(1995) for example think that M. Butterfly fails to effect a transformation on
spectators because they identify with Gallimard univocally as a tortured
protagonist. In the first half of the play, as we have seen, the Brechtian
mechanism demystifies the dramatic representations, setting up a subliminal
distinction for the audience between two levels of subjectivity: mind and
consciousness. In the second half beginning in Act Two, Gallimard and Song
compete for control over the play, which continually retreats to the fixed
representation of binaries and their restricting influence on the subject
positions of the audience. But by this stage, Hwang’s theater also goes
beyond the Brechtian A-effect and dwells more on the possibility of
experiencing consciousness as a void of conceptions.
By the end of the play, Gallimard suffers a relapse when he cross-dresses
into the role of Madame Butterfly after Song discards his own transvestite
identity. Although the masculine/feminine and West/East hierarchies seem to
be reversed, they end up being preserved instead. Throughout Act Three,
Song and Gallimard repeatedly rupture the dramatic narrative. At the
beginning of Scene One in the courthouse, Song reviews his acting career for
the audience: “So I’d done my job better than I had a right to expect” (80).
His opening re-performance puts the audience at a critical distance from the
rest of the scene, which serves as a meta-commentary on Orientalism. In
response to the Judge’s questions, which center on whether or not Gallimard
knew he was a man, Song demystifies Western men in relation to Oriental
women, but without satisfying the Judge, or the audience, about what
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 81

Gallimard may or may not have known. The upshot of his analysis of
Gallimard is that when he “finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more
than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. . . . And being an
Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (83). Although spectators may
sympathize with Gallimard as a tortured protagonist beset by illusions, they
also share in his self-reflexive distancing from these illusions.
Like Song in Scene One, Gallimard opens Scene Two by addressing the
spectators, again rupturing their uneasy fix on constructed identity. He says
that “even in this moment [of greatest shame] my mind remains agile, flip-
flopping like a man on a trampoline. Even now, my picture dissolves, and I
see that . . . witness . . . talking to me” (84). On Gallimard’s cue two things
occur: Song, who is standing in the witness box, turns to address him, “Yes.
You. White man”; and the spectators self-reflexively “witness” the
postmodern attempt to distinguish between appearance and reality, theater
and world. But something peculiar happens here to the tradition of stage
phenomenology with its gap between reality and theater. While Gallimard
confesses to Song, “I know what you are. . . . A—a man” (87), and Song
insists, “Wait. I’m not ‘just a man’” (84), Gallimard sends him away: “You
showed me your true self. When all I loved was the lie. . . . Get away from
me! Tonight, I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing
the difference, I choose fantasy” (89-90). The postmodern ambiguity of
multifaceted identities prevails throughout the scene, especially now that
Song switches from acting femaleness to acting the performative cues of
maleness. As Shimakawa notes, we can view Song’s twin

performances—feminine Song and masculine Song—as critical deliberate

undertakings that call into question the means and effects of gender/sex
differentiations. (2002, 125)

But even so, Gallimard’s choice is more complicated than he thinks.

In the postmodern world, with simulation found not only in theater but
permeating all cultural forms, distinguishing fantasy from reality, theater
from world, is like distinguishing constructed identity from “concept of self.”
There is no difference between them insofar that both are equally imaginary.
Likewise, the Orientalism of the world and as re-presented in M. Butterfly is
also equally imaginary. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña says in his performance
piece The New World Border, “Is this re-a-li-ty or performance? Can anyone
answer?!” (1994, 127); “I want everyone to repeat after me: ‘This is art
(pause); this is not reality (pause). Reality is no longer real’” (1994, 131).
Hwang’s theater suggests that in spite of the apparent gap between world and
simulation, to attain the real in theater hinges on the audience being able to
sense the presence of a non-intentional internal observer—even if only as
intimated by “non-positional consciousness” as defined by Sartre. If the
audience had merely shuffled through a repertoire of narrative identities,
82 Chapter Four

Hwang’s play would not have touched reality by closing off its re-
presentation in reference to an all pervasive simulacrum.
After donning the kimono, Gallimard says, “Death with honor is better
than life . . . life with dishonor. . . It is 19__. And I have found her at last. In
a prison on the outskirts of Paris. My name is Rene Gallimard—also known
as Madame Butterfly” (92-93). As Lye notes,

If what Hwang objects to . . . is that the West “wins,” then it is not surprising
that the response should present a scenario in which the East “wins” instead.
This structure of winning and losing expresses itself . . . in problematically
conventional ways, through gender and sexual signification. The feminizing
effect of Song’s gender disclosure upon Gallimard follows from M.
Butterfly’s proposal that Orientalism functions to secure Western masculinity.
. . . The problem, however, is that M. Butterfly attempts not just to dramatize
the effects of Orientalist desire, but to naturalize its origins. Orientalist
fantasy in M. Butterfly serves to secure Western masculinity because the West
is shown as “actually” emasculated” (1995, 274-75)

Lye suggests that the hierarchy in the play is merely reversed, not un-
constructed. This would mean that the intentional mind, although
intermittently transcended during the play, continues to identify with limiting
conceptual constructs. Indeed, this would be the case until one is fully
liberated through what Forman, as we have seen, calls a dualistic mystical
state. Theater can at best aesthetically point the way by providing a taste of
pure consciousness. Gallimard directs us beyond rhetorical constructs, but
then reverts to a binary either/or logic, as represented by the familiar world
and its all-pervading simulated conceptual boundaries, however nauseating.
This action shifts the burden of dis-identification back to the spectator, who
must learn to act not only from the level of thought and feeling (knowledge-
about and knowledge-by-acquaintance), but also from a level approaching
the self-reflexive witness (knowledge-by-identity). Gallimard’s suicide
reveals the danger of mental constructs, the illusion not only of unitary
conceptual identity but also of the pseudo-freedom of choice. Angela Pao has
faulted critics for their inadequate “reading and viewing competencies” that
have led them to “ignore” the postmodern impulses of Hwang’s formal
techniques (1992, 4-5). But simply choosing among a diversity of
postmodern identities does not engender freedom from simulacra, which calls
for renouncing all identifies on the groundless ground of awareness beyond
attributes.

8. Conclusion: Theater and Metanarrative

As we have seen, Kondo (1990) and Lye (1995) (among others) argue
that the identities of self (West/masculine) and Other (East/feminine) must
 M. Butterfly: Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence 83

not be dealt with as ahistorical grand narratives, but instead as micro

narratives based on historical circumstances. When Lyotard says,
“Simplifying in the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward
metanarratives” (1986, xxiv), he delegitimates not only the narrative
function, but also the “concept of self”—which in any narrative as argued
here serves as a (false) representation of consciousness. Lyotard’s notorious
vagueness about the material causes of the decline of metanarratives has led
to considerable speculation. One possible cause not sufficiently recognized,
at least in the critical literature, centers on the complementarity between
mind/history/narrative on the one hand and consciousness/non-history/non-
narrative on the other. Grand narratives often deal with experiences on the
margins of thought, beyond ordinary conceptual knowledge, like the nature
of Enlightenment, the prospect of emancipation from bondage, the
development of a more self-conscious human being or an evolved “Spirit”
(Lyotard 1986, xxiii, 23). These phenomena stretch the thinking mind’s
intentional capacity to know through knowledge-about or knowledge-by-
acquaintance, thus challenging the third-person means of investigating reality
favored by Dennett. To talk about the rational subject becoming Spirit or
“enlightened” is pointless if we limit this process to a function of the
intentional mind, when it entails the transcending of thought through
knowledge-by-identity. Narrative representations of trans-rational, trans-
verbal experience, as in theater, are in a sense mis-re-presentations insofar
that they point beyond narrative form altogether, to an hors-texte.4 The
question is not whether theater as simulation can bridge the gap with
reality—for, as Hwang dramatizes, everyday reality is simulated to begin
with—but whether theater can reveal the reality of consciousness responsible
for all simulation, whether in stage drama or social drama.
We can trace the crisis of metanarratives to the fact that all narratives are
challenged to re-present that which lies beyond symbol and interpretation,
beyond gestus—in a taste of pure consciousness behind historical identities.
While narrative can render phenomenal qualia, it can only intimate non-
intentional consciousness through the aesthetic power of suggestion, as M.
Butterfly so effectively demonstrates. Moreover, as third-person
representation, the delegitimizing effect of narrative, in spite of claims made
by Dennett and others, usually applies only to the object of knowledge, not to
the first-person internal observer, which is self-shining and knowable not
through observation but only by being it. We may understand this experience
in others through heterophenomenology, but ultimately it is a first-person
phenomenon.
Incredulity toward metanarratives, then, reflects the postmodern lack of a
first-person appreciation of knower as witness. We see this in the plethora of
anti-essentialist criticism of M. Butterfly, and in the postmodern disregard for
changelessness, which like the silent witness behind Gallimard’s subject
positions so easily escapes attention. On the one hand, narratives have
84 Chapter Four

traditionally served to reflect phenomenal experience or the objects of

consciousness (Lodge 2002), and sometimes, whether intentionally or not,
consciousness itself (Malekin and Yarrow 1997). The postmodern over-
valorization of mental computation and materialism at the expense of a
concrete experience of more abstract levels of consciousness seems to have
undermined the suggestive power of narrative, whether grand or micro. On
the other hand, postmodern incredulity has had the ironic effect of subverting
faith in almost everything that forms the content of consciousness, leading
the cogito to dis-identify with its personal attributes. By way of negation,
Hwang’s poststructuralist play underscores the existence of a transpersonal,
immaterial knower, without whom incredulity would have no witnessing
subject. The debate over the ending of M. Butterfly, whether or not it
transforms the spectator, stems in part from “the simultaneous inscribing and
subverting of the conventions of narrative” (Hutcheon 1989, 49)—the
simultaneity here revealing the inteconnectedness of all levels of self. You
can demystify Gallimard as a social construct, but his self-reflexive
awareness as available to the spectator and sometimes to himself is
transcendent to, while simultaneously immanent within, his iconic symbolism
in the staging of a theatrical presence. In the following chapter on Sam
Shepard, we see what can happen in theater when the protagonist is an artist
with the natural inclination for both the reception and production of aesthetic
experience.
 CHAPTER 5:
ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, COMMUNITY AND
THE
PRIMAL HOLON: SAM SHEPARD’S SUICIDE
IN B-FLAT AND THE TOOTH OF CRIME

1. Creative Transcendence
As the eccentric genius in Suicide in B-Flat, Niles tries to create a form of
“visual music” that parallels Shepard’s own pursuit of a polysensory
theatrical form. Obsessed with liberating himself from the Other, Niles seeks
a purely aesthetic realm closed off from community and its intrusive voices.
In the end, however, he has no choice but to reconcile himself with
communal consciousness, partly because the Other also inheres in the mind
of the artist. Similarly in The Tooth of Crime, Hoss, the king of rock music,
finds his aesthetic realm under attack by an arrogant young rival, Crow. In
their ultimate showdown, their weapon of choice is not guns or music but
language. Like all artists, Niles and Hoss produce through creative
transcendence, but find that communicating with an audience also involves a
dialogic relation between artist, art expression, and community. This dialogic
relation, moreover, depends on the intimacy between the artist and his/her
most inward self. As Michael Goldman notes, “Intimacy comes from the
Latin superlative intimus, ‘most inward,’ and the impulse, the desire, perhaps
the need to achieve a superlative degree of inwardness, has haunted
European thought since who-knows-when” (2000, 77; original italics).
Intimacy between self and other thus depends on the intimacy between two
aspects of the self: self as constructed identity, and self as one’s “superlative
degree of inwardness.” In both plays, Shepard was influenced by
developments in American popular culture during the 1950s and 60s and
wanted to create what he called “total” theater, or theater “where everything
is present at once” (Gilman 1984, xvi)—a process, as we shall see, that
points toward a transcendental reality. Although credited with bringing a
postmodern aesthetic to the American stage, Shepard, as I will argue, does
not undermine transcendental awareness but rather contextualizes it within
American culture through theater that attempts to create a new
consciousness.
86 Chapter Five

Through an aesthetic symbiosis, Shepard’s plays suggest a link between

the social identity and transpersonal consciousness of the artist. Moreover,
the intersubjective encounter between artist and audience dramatizes mythic
encounters with sacred experience. As we have seen, Artaud claims that in
Occidental theater "the Word is everything, and there is no possibility of
expression without it" (1958, 68). Asian theater, on the other hand, has "its
own language” identified with the mise en scène, one constituted by "the
visual and plastic materialization of speech" and by everything "signified on
stage independently of speech" (1958, 68-69). The materialization of speech
serves to restore and reinstate the metaphysical aspect of theater, "to
reconcile it with the universe" (1958, 70) and “to rediscover the idea of the
sacred” (Artaud 1988, 276). As I have argued, the sacred elements of Asian
theater can also be found in Occidental theater. Sam Shepard’s theater relies
on ordinary language and the Word, but also produces one of the salient
effects that Artaud describes in Asian theater: taking the spectator (and
performer) toward the source and goal of art, namely, a trans-verbal,
transpersonal experience paradoxically set within a cultural context. Theater
achieves this by creating a void in thought, a state of mind that begins with
language and meaning and then goes beyond them through a shift in
consciousness, as suggested by the creative enterprises of Niles and Hoss.
Shepard’s theater achieves this in part through a process of
transformations, an idea borrowed from Open Theater and expanded upon in
plays like Angel City, Suicide in B-Flat, and The Tooth of Crime. As
Richards Gilman explains, a transformation exercise involves

an improvised scene . . . in which after a while, and suddenly, the characters

were asked to switch immediately to a new scene and therefore to wholly new
characters. Among the aims (which were never wholly clear) were increased
flexibility, insight into theatrical or acting clichés and more unified ensemble
of playing. (1984, xvii)

Such transformations, as I suggest, also involve the decontingencing of actor

and spectator from the boundaries of ordinary language and identity,
allowing for greater intimacy with no-mind or a void in thought—which is
one reason transformations may seem “never wholly clear” in terms of
logical discourse. Intimacy with our superlative degree of inwardness
arguably forms the basis for all other forms types of intimacy. It involves
going beyond the duality of one’s socially constructed identity, beyond the
intentional knowledge of the other in a subject/object dualism toward
knowledge-by-identity.
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 87

2. The Primal Holon

Shepard’s creative impulse or aesthetic vision of a total theater can be
understood through the expressivist theory of the part/whole relationship in
what Ken Wilber calls a “primal artistic holon” (1997, 114-16). Holon is a
term coined by Arthur Koestler (1967) to describe an entity that is itself a
whole but simultaneously part of a larger whole, in an infinite series, such
that each entity is neither whole nor part, but a whole/part simultaneously. In
Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime, Niles and Hoss’s creative
impulses originate from a “primal artistic holon,” which bubbles up from the
source of thought or the inner self. This source, as we have seen, corresponds
to transcendental consciousness or the transpersonal self in Shankara’s
Advaita (non-dual) Vedanta (Chakrabarti 1971, 33; Deutsch 1973, 48-65),
the void of conceptions in the Upanishads (Maitri 6:18-19), and Artaud’s
void in thought. When manifested through aesthetic form, the primal holon
enters the artist’s mind not in a vacuum but by instantly engaging the
multiple contexts of human existence: unconscious structures of the mind,
organization of culture, social roles with which we identify, and global
currents of the world about which we may not even be consciously aware.
Paradoxically, as defined in non-dual Vedanta, the transcendent primal whole,
pure consciousness, being immanent as well as transcendent, subsumes and,
by entering, becomes part of the tangible holons of the artist’s expressions
within their cultural contexts.1 Throughout Suicide in B-Flat, Niles resists the
intimacy of this holonic fusion with community in his attempt to reach the
transpersonal-self or void in thought at the basis of aesthetic contemplation,
but he is ultimately compelled to accept the reality of social integration. Hoss,
on the other hand, has lost confidence in his ability to tap into his primal
holon and becomes obsessed with the glamour of being an artist as defined
by social conventions.
As an unidentifiable emptiness, the primal holon as pure consciousness or
a void in thought is knowable, at least initially, not indirectly through
language or ideas, but only through the immediacy (or knowledge-by-
identity) of transcognitive, noncontingent Being after language and ideas
have run their course. Whatever third-person, objective theory we use to
describe it, the subjective “experience” of a void of conceptions, as
demonstrated in the plays already discussed, is trans-cultural, transpersonal,
and thus largely the same in any theater, whether Asian or American. While
functionalists like Dennett (1991), Katz (1978) and others question the
likelihood of unmediated experience, claiming that different types of
mystical, Gnostic, or aesthetic experience do not point to a shareable
transcendent source, but merely reflect different cultural traditions, Shepard’s
work illustrates that while all contentful experiences are context related, it is
not inconsistent to assume that contentless Gnostic or aesthetic experience,
even though arising out of appropriate contexts, are nevertheless in and of
88 Chapter Five

themselves context-free (see Almond 1990, 216). Differences in the

expression of aesthetic experience, as Shepard uniquely demonstrates, reside
only in the cultural contexts through which transpersonal, mythic encounters
with superlative inwardness are evoked.
As discussed earlier in relation to Hwang, Dorrine Kondo (1990) and
other postmodernists argue against the unmediated experience of the self as
pure consciousness and purportedly demystify the so-called “concept of
self.” As Shepard demonstrates, the deconstruction of a concept as part of a
cultural context does not extend to contentless experience, for the self in its
context-free status is not a concept. To conflate self and concept (or thought)
of self would imply that a concept would be able to engage in thought and
simultaneously be aware of itself in the act of thinking, a claim that holds
only if we accept the poststructuralist definition of the subject as a cultural
construct dispersed along a chain of signifiers (Lacan 1978) and subjugated
by relations of race, gender, and power. It would also apply to the generally
accepted definition of the posthuman self (Pepperell 2003; Hayles 1999) It
becomes invalid, however, from an Advaitan perspective that includes the
consideration of non-intentional pure consciousness, which, as a void of
conceptions, is the source of concepts as well as the cultural paradigms that
artists seek to amend through the primal artistic holon. In the basic
ontological opposition between mind/body on the one hand and
consciousness on the other (Samkya-Yoga; Pflueger 1998), the latter as the
internal observer complements the former, which as a “concept of self” is a
rhetorical construct based on the “Word as everything” associated with
Western theater (Artaud 1958, 68)—an association this book attempts to
revise.
Shepard questions the unified concept of self as a function of the mind,
but in the process opens up a theatrical space in which performers and
spectators share an intimacy with the self as a function of consciousness
without qualities (see Deutsch 1973, 62-65). The fact that we can know the
internal observer only by being it and not by observing it (Deikman 355)
precludes the possibility of infinite regress through which the self-reflexive
subject becomes the object of another subject in an endless chain of
subject/object duality. Sartre, recall, makes this argument for “non-positional
consciousness” through a reductio ad absurdum. Moreover, as Daniel
Meyer-Dinkgräfe shows, immaterial consciousness cannot be thought about
by the material intellect (2003).2 As Niles and Hoss demonstrate, immaterial
pure consciousness as expressed through the primal artistic holon exceeds the
material mind, just as the actor in entering a dramatic text exceeds the text by
rendering intimate for the audience the presence of a new life that the text
does not exhaust (see Goldman 2000, 50).
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 89

Suicide in B-Flat

1. Holy Theater
In Suicide in B-Flat, Shepard dramatizes the manifestation of the invisible
identity of an avant-garde artist. As Peter Brook says in terms of holy theater:

All religions assert that the invisible is visible all the time . . . [but] it can only
be seen given certain conditions. . . . [T]o comprehend the visibility of the
invisible is a life’s work. Holy art is an aid to this, and so we arrive at a
definition of holy theater. A holy theater not only presents the invisible but
also offers conditions that make its perception possible. (1968, 56)

As in holy theater, the conditions of Suicide in B-Flat that render visible the
invisible center on Nile’s ontological crisis, his attempt to express in the pure
form of jazz the silent or invisible dimension of music, which is transcendent
to as well as immanent within jazz. Pushing against the familiar world, the
play expands the awareness of character and spectator by voiding its content.
As critics have pointed out (Roudané 2002; Wade 1996), Shepard often uses
baffling and illogical dramatic content, the effect of which is the
decontingencing of conventional awareness. The artist’s hallucinatory states,
the arbitrary character turns, the feverish monologues, the mass-cultural
allusion, and the surrealistic antics of the play all contribute to a narrative
line that moves back and forth between visible and invisible reality. As the
play opens, Louis and Pablo, two ineffectual detectives, investigate Nile’s
recent murder/suicide/disappearance. They conduct an eccentric
investigation, with Louis theorizing and Pablo eventually agreeing that Niles
was not murdered but rather seems to have orchestrated his own
disappearance. But whether he was abducted, murdered, or simply
disappeared, Niles presents an enigma for the detectives, who in their
conventional mindset cannot fathom a musician’s unconventional
sensibilities. Unlike an artist, they lack the desire for intimacy with the more
abstract levels of human identity that would connect them with a wider
humanity.
In the play’s epistemological context, the allusions to Dick Tracey and
Raymond Chandler suggest that the range of detective work extends from
popular-culture and a who-done-it motif to an investigation of something that
surpasses computation and the conceptual mind. Louis and Pablo set up a
distinction between themselves as public servants and Niles and his friends
as artists, or between the outer and inner, the visible and invisible domains
that are not so much oppositional as complementary, the latter transcendent
to but immanent within the former.
While Louis and Pablo conduct their investigation of Niles’ apartment as
the scene of the crime, Petrone comes in looking for Niles, blowing silently
90 Chapter Five

on his sax. In the ensuing conversation, Petrone refers to the Indian caste
system and twice complains of being a “Low Dog” (128, 131). This low
regard implies that the artist often registers as an untouchable in American
society, the apex of consumer capitalism. In the hierarchy of American
values, the invisible as represented by Petrone’s silent horn playing not only
falls below the visible threshold of the material world, but is misconstrued by
the very detectives bent on revealing its secrets. Goldman comments on this
non-affinity for human intimacy; while “fictional representations of intimate
contact have become more and more detailed and explicit, not only in sexual
matters but in the increasingly nuanced portrayal of consciousness and
speech, the exchanges reported are increasingly unsatisfactory. . . . Certainly,
from the point of view of drama the crisis of privacy is best understood as a
crisis of intimacy” (2000, 79).
The conceptual, as symbolized by Pablo’s Master’s Degree, cannot
render a void in thought, as symbolized by silent music, except by way of its
own transcendence. The “immaterial cannot be thought about” (Meyer-
Dinkgräfe 2003, 11), whether by fully- or “half-baked intellectual notions”
(Suicide 138). With his own crackpot ideas about artists, Pablo argues that
Niles, being possessed by his own gift, turned to “religion, Superstition,
Cultism” to have his demons tamed, with the result that his melodies have
become boring (129), a theory that Petrone rightly rejects. As a conventional
public servant, Pablo naively reverses Niles’ true situation: namely, that of an
artist trying to exorcise not his own gift but rather the demons which as other
voices interfere with and obstruct this gift.
Laureen, another friend of Niles, wheels in a double acoustic bass fiddle
while emitting a high pitched scream. Playing the bass and talking to Louis
and Pablo, she says, “This music has no room for politics” (133), an attitude
that reflects Niles’ attempt to separate art and community. Throughout this
scene Louis struggles on the floor against killing himself with a knife, as if
possessed by a demon. Louis’ demon, however, is not the kind that Pablo
describes as possessing Niles, but rather the kind that Niles, with Paulette’s
help, has been trying to exorcise by orchestrating the death of all the voices
that belong to other people, including people like Louis and Pablo. As a
Republican, Louis represents the political, conceptual, role playing end of the
identity spectrum, the culturally constructed aspect of the self like his partner
Pablo, while the artists and especially Niles, who embodies the primal artistic
holon, represents the self as a void of conceptions. At this point in the play
Niles and Paulette appear on stage under the spot light with the action
alternating between them and the other characters. This alternation
juxtaposes our role-playing identities in the visible world with the attempt to
reach the invisible dimensions of music and the self.
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 91

2. Other Voices
Although Niles has accepted Paulette’s help to prevail over other voices
obstructing his way toward the invisible better self, he has qualms about her
ruthless approach. Paulette justifies her method, however, arguing that the
first victim, whose “whole face was blown off,” was a mistake (141), and
that Niles wanted to find a way out anyway. The gruesome fate of the first
victim not only helps to hide what happened to Niles from the detectives,
who double as agents of social conformity, but also suggests that the roles of
our socially constructed selves, our masks, do not represent our true identity.
On the contrary, the face as mask not only conceals but also precludes
intimacy with the invisible nature of the inner self underlying all social
constructions, whether conventional or unconventional, avant garde artist or
public servant. Louis, who resists the loss of his constructed identity and its
familiar contexts, says,

We’ve gotten ourselves into deep water here! Can’t you feel it? Everything’s
crazy! I’ve got to get my bearings back. It feels like we’re involved in
something we’d be better off not knowing about. I never wanted to kill myself
before. (138)

Figuratively, to kill himself implies an unconscious attempt to escape the

saturated self (Gergen 1991) and move beyond conventional bearings toward
the openness of non-intentional consciousness. In contrast to the detectives,
Niles invites self-transformation and the wholeness of the self beyond
qualities: “All these ones have to go because they’re crowding me up.
They’ve gotten out of control. They’ve taken me over and there’s no room
left form me. They’ve stolen their way into my house when I wasn’t looking”
(141). The other voices, including those of Pablo and Louis searching his
house, have invaded his inner space, blocking access to his core identity as
pure awareness.
Although Shepard sets up the condition for Niles’ liberation, as in social
drama the bid for freedom is not without ambivalence. Niles became attached
to the other voices, the musicians he had learned from and invited into his
house, and now says, “I don’t want to be lonely” (142). But as Paulette
reminds him, “you can’t get to anything new. It’s always the same. You’re
repeating yourself”; Niles agrees: “It’s not even myself I’m repeating. I’m
repeating them. Over and over. They talk to me all the time. (Suddenly
screaming) THERE’S VOICES COMING AT ME!” (142). By donning a
variety of costumes like the cowboy outfit of Pecos Bill, King of Cowboys
(who Paulette will shoot with an arrow that hits Louis in the back), Niles
undergoes the kind of transformation used in total theater. He switches
suddenly from one character to another, with the hybridity of his social
92 Chapter Five

identity connoting an experience of being neither one nor the other, but an
internal observer that witnesses both.
Dressed as Pecos Bill, Niles worries whether it’s even possible to kill a
legend. In saying, “You can’t kill a myth!” (143), he recognizes the difficulty
faced by an artist in going beyond conceptual content to the primal artistic
holon. Pecos Bill’s mythical hold over Niles makes him ambivalent and
uncertain whether he wants to live or die. Paradoxically, the two go hand-in-
hand, for death to the old self comforted by familiar voices implies rebirth to
the non-pluralistic self as internal observer. His anxiety of influence compels
him finally to accept “thanatos,” the death of the familiar in exchange for a
new, inchoate potentiality associated with aesthetic experience. Later,
Paulette shoots Niles dressed in a new guise of black tails. This time the
bullet finds Pablo, who like Louis represents the grand narrative of logical
discourse and isolated constructed identity that Niles hopes to shed.
In the final scene, Petrone escorts Niles to his home to confront the
others. Finding Pablo on the floor, Niles accuses him of groveling, but Pablo
says, “I was on the verge of prayer” (154). Louis, on the other hand, says he
lacks faith, claiming to “subscribe to no system of thought. I’m on the verge
of total madness” (154). Niles questions this statement: “The verge. Only the
verge?” insisting there is no point in madness. Ironically, however, modern
science has confirmed a long-suspected link between madness and creativity.
As Neus Barrantes-Vidal says,

Substantial empirical work has shown that both creativity and the
temperamental roots of psychoses have common features at a biological (e.g.,
high levels of dopamine), cognitive (e.g., a brain organization characterized
by a weak inhibitory control that enables loosened or more flexible styles of
mental activity), and emotional level (e.g., high openness to experience and
phases of elation and intense enthusiasm). (2004, 74-75)

Creativity, like madness, has its own neuro-physiological condition, which

corresponds to the “hypoaroused states” of mysticism that Forman describes
as “marked by low levels of cognitive and physiological activity” (1999, 4).
The ultimate hypoaroused state, according to Vedanta, is the pure
consciousness event, as represented in Shepard through the primal artistic
holon, which is also a mean to the ultimate state of intimacy. Shepard’s play
suggests, therefore, that going off the deep end, while resembling madness,
does not have to signify going mad per se; it can also denote the process of
going beyond conscious content and its corresponding cultural contexts
toward an altered state of awareness with its own corresponding
physiological condition.
Although an artist would be more inclined to experience this process than
the average person, it can happen to anybody (particularly a theater
audience), as suggested by the fact that Niles is not the only one who appears
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 93

to be mad. Pablo and Louis also behave insanely when on the verge of
voiding thought, a process Niles describes in his final monologue:

Are you inside me or outside me? Am I inside you? Am I inside you right
now? . . . . Or am I just like you? Exactly like you? So exactly like you that
we’re exactly the same. So exactly that we’re not even apart. Not even
separate. Not even two things but just one. Only one. Indivisible. (155)

From a postexperiential perspective, Niles is describing the contentless

primal artistic holon, or what Yohanan Grinshpon would call the artist’s
better self or “Vedic otherness” (2003, 4); it is a boundary-less state of non-
intentional awareness inherent within yet beyond all thought and creative
expression. Leslie Wade notes that this passage more than any other in
Shepard expresses the dialogic relation between artist, art expression, and
community (1996). It also suggests a fusion of the visible and invisible, mind
and consciousness, artist and community. In the end, Niles accepts his social
responsibility by condemning murder; “Someone should pay for that” (155),
he says, implying that cultural and primal holons are compatible as well as
mutually interdependent.
With Suicide-in-B-Flat, Shepard illustrates that aesthetic experience, like
Gnosticism, involves a movement of self-redemption induced by purifying
one’s inner Being from the bondage of conscious content, including the
“concept of self” misconstrued as our essentialist identity. As H. Jonas
writes, the spiritual being “does not belong to any objective scheme, is above
the law, beyond good and evil, and a law unto himself in the power of his
‘knowledge’” (1979, 334). The desire of an artist, like Niles, to be elsewhere,
to be different, in part reflects what Harold Bloom calls the anxiety of
influence, the drive to discover “what is oldest in oneself” (1982, 12), which,
being the most inward or intimate, would also be the most universal. As a
function of the primal artistic holon, whether Gnostic or aesthetic, this drive
to “see earliest, as though no one had seen before us” (Bloom 1982, 69), is
dramatized by Suicide in B-Flat and suggested by its trace in The Tooth of
Crime.

The Tooth of Crime

1. Rock Musicians
The Tooth of Crime dramatizes an ostensible paradigm shift within rock
culture through the rivalry between two rock musicians. From an optimistic
viewpoint, a younger, more vital generation supercedes an older one
preoccupied with the status quo. More pessimistically, the ruthless,
mechanical power of ego displaces a humaneness weakened by complacency
94 Chapter Five

and loss of self. Given the constraints of drama, the final contest between
Hoss, the established artist, and Crow, the brash contender, unfolds in a
variety of “languages,” both real and invented, through which each
contestant vies to define himself as the superior artist. The Referee, who sees
the showdown as a no contest, announces Crow the winner because of his
greater linguistic novelty and creative self-definition. Shooting the Referee in
revenge, Hoss resigns himself to defeat and assumes the role of student to the
younger man in the attempt to change his identity, at least on the surface. As
the play suggests, however, any real development must originate from
within, and Hoss, having failed in this regard, gives up “to the big power . . .
[a]ll the way” (249) and shoots himself in despair.
Shepard traces the genesis and decline of an artist who begins as a rebel
but loses courage and ends up “respectable and safe” (215). As the play
suggests, Hoss’s early success and recognition derive from his connection
with the primal artistic holon, but begin to slip away once he allows the
accoutrements of success to distract him from the source of inspiration
within. By succumbing to an obsession with turf wars and fame, he sets
himself up as an easy target for an aspiring younger artist.
In Act One, Hoss says, “Something’s lacking. I can’t seem to get it up
like the other kills. My heart’s not in it” (222). Ironically, Hoss is more
concerned with protecting his isolated persona than with keeping alive the
unifying creative powers that helped construct this social identity in the first
place. While claiming not to be worried about the “Gypsy” wanting to
replace him, he nevertheless admits that he’s intrigued: “His style is copping
my patterns. I can feel it already and he’s not even here yet. He’s got a
presence” (222). This interest in the Gypsy and in preserving his own
dominance undermines his work and status as an artist. As Doc says, “You
gotta stay disengaged, Hoss. The other way is fatal” (222). Significantly,
Shepard reveals that the construction of social identity depends not only on
the way others perceive us, but also on the extent to which we stay in touch
with the disengaged inner self or non-intentional consciousness. For the
artist, this represents the primal artistic holon, the trans-linguistic source of
all artistic content manifested through contextual expressions. As The Tooth
of Crime demonstrates, both artistic achievement and the constructedness of
social identity are not purely social phenomena but closely connected to the
individual’s ability to transcend the limits of rationalization and logical
discourse.
The fact that Hoss loses touch with his own being gradually undermines
his confidence in himself both as an artist and a public figure. Hoss says,

Ya’ know, you’d be O.K., Becky, if you had a self. So would I. Something to
fall back on in a moment of doubt, or terror or even surprise. . . . Look at the
Doc. A slave. An educated slave. Look at me. . . . I feel so trapped. So
fucking unsure. Everything’s a mystery. I had it all in the palm of my hand.
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 95

The gold, the silver. I knew. I was sure. How could it slip away like that?
(225)

The self he refers to has two aspects, whether for himself as an artist or
Becky as a non-artist: the public, socially constructed self, and the inner self
as internal observer, the former a complex of conventional boundaries and
the latter an infinite, holistic reservoir of creative intelligence. Openness to
this reservoir, as the play suggests, determines how good we feel about
ourselves and the world around us. Any blockage to creativity results in
frustration, solipsism and discontent, inevitably affecting not only our
emotions but also our behavior. Even subtle imbalances in our behavior
determine how we are perceived by others, as illustrated by the consequences
of Hoss’s inability to disengage. Social identity reflects our inner sense of
self, which in turn depends on how open we are to the source of our own
creative intelligence. For Shepard this source is available to all, both artists
and non-artists alike.
When Hoss exits momentarily at the beginning of Act Two, Crow
imitates his walk and sits in his chair, as if tasting victory in advance. When
the contest begins, Hoss finds Crow’s aggressive ingenuity with language
disconcerting. As Crow spins out new, staccato rhythms, Hoss reverts to the
tried and tested language of older styles—Cowboy-Western, 1920s gangster,
voodoo—and is then surprised when Crow uses ordinary English: “There!
Why’d you slip just then? Why’d you suddenly talk like a person? You’re
into a wider scope than I thought” (230). As the play suggests, Crow’s
agility at switching back and forth between everyday language and creative
expressions derives from his connection with the primal artistic holon, a skill
Hoss has long forfeited by selling out to riches and fame. Hoss intuits this
loss when he says, “This is really weird, me learnin’ from you. I mean I can’t
believe myself admitting it” (229). After their initial encounter Hoss exits
again and Crow sings his “Crow’s Song,” with the refrain, “But I believe in
my mask—The man I made up is me / And I believe in my dance—And my
destiny” (232-33). Although referring to his mask, Crow succeeds in
projecting a winning social identity because of his greater ability to invoke
the creative power of his inner being, as illustrated by his figurative
language, originality, cognitive power, and exuberance of diction. In the
middle of round one, Hoss, feeling outgunned by Crow’s verbal ingenuity
and confused by his violation of verisimilitude, complains, “You can’t do
that!” (236).
Crow’s language takes liberty with reference, creating its own imaginary
context that belies Hoss’s past:

He [Crow] was pickin’ at a past that ain’t even there. Fantasy marks. Like a
dog scratchin’ on ice. I can play that way if I was a liar. The reason I brought
you [the Referee] into this match was to keep everything above the table.
How can you give points to a liar? (237).
96 Chapter Five

Although at one time he was perhaps equally innovative in achieving his own
status as near-mythic hero, Hoss now clings to what he considers traditional
realism, while Crow emerges as the radical innovator who shifts the ground
in the repetitive cycle of modernist change. But like Shepard, Crow is not a
deconstructive postmodernist. Rather than undermining transcendence, the
battle between the rival musicians reveals that the language of the more
creative artist has a disturbingly defamiliarizing effect on his opponent
because of its closer affinity with transcendence or presence. Derrida, as
we know, deconstructively argues with regard to the trace that “the
possibility of the reference to the other, and thus of radical alterity and
heterogeneity, of difference,” is always already inscribed “in the presence of
the present that it dis-joins” (1994, 75). While Crow’s non-referential style
may resemble poststructuralist self-referral, however, it does not undermine
transcendental awareness so much as recontextualize it within American
culture. Hoss doesn’t see it that way, of course, having lost his former
aptitude for transcendence through the distraction of worldly success.

2. Language and Presence

For Derrida, “transcendence” refers only to the relation between inside
and outside, with the outside being “transcendent” merely to the inside,
rather than being something independent of thoughts like non-intentional
consciousness as the internal observer. From an Advaitan perspective, on the
other hand, the other in its radical alterity always already encompasses two
dimensions: duality and singularity, mind and consciousness, with the latter
dimension both immanent within the former as well as transcendent. Crow
and Hoss, therefore, while in some ways radically other on the outside, can
be understood as sharing a oneness on the inside, in terms of their social
identity as artists and their affinity for aesthetic experience. Through the self-
referral indeterminacy of his jiving word play, Crow invokes the
transcendent unity of the primal artistic holon that Hoss possesses, and at one
time could reach, but has now enshrouded with the familiar duality of the
material world that obstructs his view. This materialism has the effect of
directing Hoss’s awareness outward through the five senses rather than
inward toward the unity of non-intentional consciousness. In the context of
the play, Crow’s figurative language, which attends more to the signifier than
to the signified as in ordinary, nonpoetic language, produces an alienating
and even mystical effect.
Explaining literature in terms of cognitive science, Reuven Tsur argues
that wit and mysticism when used as artistic devices produce more than the
merely conceptual effect of formulating mystic or religious ideas; they also
“somehow seem to reach the less rational layers of the mind by some drastic
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 97

interference with the smooth functioning of the cognitive system, or by some

quite smooth regression from ‘ordinary consciousness’ to some ‘altered state
of consciousness’” (2004, 60). That is, Crow’s songs and verbal dueling,
while perhaps not as radical today as when the play was first performed,
derive from and have the practical effect of moving the mind toward an
altered state of consciousness. They not only display and evoke knowledge-
about and knowledge-by-acquaintance, but also provide a taste of
knowledge-by-identity. Tsur claims that even “dead” ornaments, when
revived through poetic manipulation, can to various degrees create an
experience of alienation (from the familiar world), ecstasy, and
transcendence. In the case of Crow, the effect depends on whether we
consider Hoss from within the play or focus on the contemporary audience
for whom his style of verbal play may now seem all too familiar.
Shepard’s notion of the influence of an artist, however, is supported by
Tsur’s study of the effects of mysticism and metaphysical poetry. Katz, as a
cognitive scientist, explains how the shock of paradoxes can take the mind
beyond rationalizations and logical certitudes toward a superlative degree of
inwardness:

Such linguistic ploys exist in many places throughout the world, usually
connected with the conscious construction of paradoxes whose necessary
violations of the laws of logic are intended to shock, even shatter, the standard
epistemic security of “disciples,” thereby allowing them to move to new and
higher forms of insight/knowledge. That is, mystics in certain circumstances
know that they are uttering nonsensical propositions, but in so doing they
intend, among other things, to force the hearers of such propositions to
consider who they are—to locate themselves vis-à-vis normal versus
transcendental “reality.” (1992, 7-8)

Crow’s “jive rhythms” involve, at least for Hoss and Shepard’s original
audience, the construction of paradoxes. Unable to cope with Crow’s non-
representational language, Hoss feels confused and insecure. As discussed in
chapter one, Indian language theory, first expounded in the Vedas and
developed by the fifth-century grammarian Bhartrhari, posits that ordinary
waking and transcendental pure consciousness yield the experience of
different levels of language. In ordinary waking consciousness, language
appears as a temporal sequence and consists of two aspects: vaikhari or
outward speech, and madhyama or inward speech or thought. In non-
intentional pure consciousness, on the other hand, the two higher levels of
language (pashyanti and para) extend beyond ordinary experience (Coward
1980, 126-37). These higher levels, which are unavailable to the ordinary
mind, consist of a unity of sound and meaning without temporal sequence; all
phenomenal differentiations disappear and meaning is apprehended as a
noumenal whole. In ordinary waking consciousness, spoken words (vaikhari)
and thoughts (madhyama) give only a partial expression of a unified meaning
98 Chapter Five

or “transcendental signified” available on the higher levels of language. As

suggested in The Tooth of Crime, these higher levels, which transcend the
spatializing/temporalizing movement of difference that depends on a
space/time continuum, are analogous to Crow’s musical speech. This
language involves a shift from a referential toward a non-referential or
transcendent reality, which has a defamiliarizing and disorientating effect on
Hoss, now stagnated on the isolating ordinary level of language and
consciousness.
The higher levels of language, unavailable in the temporality of ordinary
waking consciousness and its duality of subject and object, are cognized
through a process in which meaning and consciousness begin to fuse, as in
the case of aesthetic experience suggested by Shepard’s play. In light of this
distinction, Derrida and other poststructuralists operating on the level of
mind attempt to deconstruct the absolute truth value of that which turns out
to be merely a relative manifestation of the absolute (vaikhari and
madhyama) rather than the absolute itself (para). According to Advaita (non-
dual) Vedanta, because the latter is unavailable to the temporal mind alone,
strictly speaking it can neither be deconstructed nor legitimated by it. This
distinction makes it essential for artists, like Hoss and Crow, to keep open
their connection with non-intentional consciousness, the basis of all forms of
intimacy. Otherwise, instead of achieving the status of a mythic hero with
whom all can identify, they will merely lose their grounding and point of
reference. As Tsur says, “Orientation is the ability to locate oneself in one’s
environment with reference to time, place, and people” (2004, 69). Crow’s
jive shatters Hoss’s “standard epistemic security,” as if Crow were the master
and Hoss the disciple brought face-to-face with the specter of his lost
transcendental reality—the only point of reference that never changes and
thus constitutes the source of all stability. After the third round of their dual,
which the Referee calls a T.K.O, Hoss tries to redeem himself by imploring
Crow, “You could teach me. I could pick it up fast” (241).
But the cost is high, the new master unscrupulous, and Hoss not only
disoriented on all levels of language and mind but also dispossessed when
Crow takes everything as the victor’s spoils: “O. K. This is what I want. All
your turf from Phoenix to San Berdoo clear up to Napa Valley and back. The
whole shot. That’s what I want” (242). Hoss fails to exploit his disorientation
to his own advantage for the sake of greater knowledge/insight:

This isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen. Why do you wanna be like me
anyway. Look at me. Everything was going good. . . . Now I’m
outa’control. . . . Nothin’ takes a solid form. Nothin’sure and final. Where do
I stand! Where the fuck do I stand! (243).

Instead of reorienting himself to transcendent reality through the primal

artistic holon by reviving his music, Hoss yearns for his “normal” world of
 Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of Crime 99

stardom, which he tries to regain by imitating Crow. “Just help me into the
style. I’ll develop my own image. I’m an original man. A one and only. I just
need some help” (241). As viewed from the outside, Hoss thinks of himself
as an original man, but the inner source of that originality and the true basis
for its preservation has been overshadowed. Feeling trapped and defeated,
Hoss tries to refashion himself by imitating Crow, who asks, “Are you blank
now?” (246). Going blank implies not only emptying out the contents of
mind that sustain one’s socially constructed identity but also attaining pure
consciousness as a void of conceptions. What Crow explicitly intends,
however, is that Hoss merely blank out his failed social identity in the vain
hope that he can more readily assume the ruthless role of “A true Killer”
(247) like Crow himself. Yet Hoss, having once tasted the true emptiness of
non-intentional pure consciousness, soon realizes that Crow’s manipulating
tactics have misled him down a soul-destroying path: “It ain’t me! IT AIN’T
ME! . . .” (247).
In a vain attempt to undermine Crow’s self-confidence, Hoss attacks his
image as an artist, calling him “pitiful,” a description Crow rejects (248-49).
Ultimately, however, the play suggests that Crow’s victory will be just as
fleeting as Hoss’s, given that his attention has switched from the primal
artistic holon to the accoutrements of his worldly status he tries to enhance
by defeating Hoss. Crow might be a “master adapter,” but adapting to the
socially constructed identity of a pre-existing situation can not compete with
the transformative powers of genuine innovation derived through the internal
observer. Having reached what he perceives to be the end of the road, Hoss
takes his own life, in effect suggesting a transcendence through death that he
failed to sustain in life. Although Crow says that Hoss didn’t “answer to no
name but loser” (250), the subtext of the play indicts both artists for getting
distracted from the internal observer as the core of creative intelligence, and
society for allowing money to dictate our values and detach us from our true
self-identity.

3. Conclusion: The Rock Messiah

What Shepard’s theater makes visible is not just the material, one-
dimensional multiplicity of difference but the radical alterity of pure
consciousness on the intimate level of knowledge-by-identity. Niles and
Hoss, like Derrida’s trace and other aconceptual concepts, demonstrate that
while presence as the ultimate intimacy is inaccessible to the thinking mind,
it can still be pointed to by way of suggestion, either through the theater’s
unsayable secret, or, as posited by Indian literary criticism, through the
power of figurative language to allow or make come a non-ordinary level of
language and consciousness—the essence of aesthetic experience. David
DeRose claims that “In the end, Shepard’s writings suggest that the rock
100 Chapter Five

messiah is an unattainable ideal, the pursuit of which leads to self-delusion or

self-destruction” (2002, 230). What this implies, however, is that no rock star
or any other artist can become a mythic hero unless they keep an open
channel to the primal artistic holon. An artist does not attain the status of
rock messiah deliberately, as in the case of a socially constructed identity, but
only as an epiphenomenon of the experience of transcendental reality. While
Hoss tries to preserve his social identity as an artist without regard for its
foundation in higher consciousness, Niles wants to divest himself of the
conventional voices that block his access to pure consciousness as the source
of creativity.
To fulfill their highest social and creative aspirations, both artists must
realize a symbiosis between the material and immaterial, mind and
consciousness, artist and community. Suicide in B-Flat and The Tooth of
Crime dramatize the subtle presence/absence of a contentless realm of
experience that underlies all intimacy and all forms of expression, both social
and artistic. In setting up the conditions that make perception of the invisible
possible, these plays also reveal the risks of neglecting the visible-invisible
interdependence of all human activity. As Niles and Hoss demonstrate, any
lasting success or happiness in life comes through appreciating the visibility
of the invisible, however defamiliarizing and disorienting this process may
feel. In Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain, to which we now turn,
the hero Makak’s visionary experience unequivocally evokes this invisible
dimension.
 CHAPTER SIX:
HYBRIDITY AND VISIONARY EXPERIENCE:
DEREK WALCOTT’S DREAM ON MONKEY
MOUNTAIN

1. Caribbean Cultural Identity

As a poem in dramatic form or a drama in poetry, Derek Walcott’s
Dream on Monkey Mountain belongs to the 20th-century genre of dream
plays associated with playwrights such as August Strindberg (A Dream Play,
The Ghost Sonata), John Synge (Riders to the Sea), and Wole Soyinka (The
Road, A Dance of the Forests). Dream on Monkey Mountain is an allegory of
racial identity based on the visionary experience of the protagonist, Makak
(French patois for monkey or ape). The play is set on a Caribbean island like
St. Lucia, where Walcott was born in 1930 when it still belonged to the
British Empire. In exploring the nature of Caribbean cultural identity, Dream
on Monkey Mountain dramatizes the region’s hybrid relationship with
Europe and Africa by fusing a wide range of cultural intertexts. In his “Note
on Production,” Walcott says that

The play is a dream, one that exists as much in the given minds of its
principal characters as in that of its writer, and as such, it is illogical,
derivative, contradictory. Its source is metaphor and it is best treated as a
physical poem with all the subconscious and deliberate borrowings of poetry
(1970, 208).

As the Note indicates, while the psychodrama originates in the consciousness

of the play’s main character, Makak, it also becomes part of the collective
consciousness of the other characters, as well as a significant part of the
dramatic structure. Each of the play’s two parts begins with an epigraph
taken from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Prologue to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the
Earth, in which Sartre describes how the colonized psyche, pulled in
opposite directions, becomes culturally schizophrenic. The epigraph for Part
Two includes the line, “Two worlds; that makes two bewitchings; they dance
all night and at dawn they crowd into churches to hear Mass; each day the
split widens” (1970, 277).
In the quest for Caribbean cultural identity, the play transforms its
schizophrenic characters from mimic men pulled in opposite directions by
Europe and Africa into genuine hybrids who transcend cultural oppositions
102 Chapter Six

toward an in-between-ness or a void of conceptions. This transformation, I

suggest, emerges through Makak’s visionary experience and its effect on the
other characters, an experience with a decontextual aspect that is less a
multicultural than a transcultural event. Walcott’s dream play suggests that a
visionary experience is perhaps the most effective way to achieve cultural
hybridity, an in-between-ness defined in terms both of an inter-national
subject as well as a conceptual void immanent within yet beyond culturally
constructed identity. In other words, hybridity is less a state of mind than a
state of being beyond conceptual boundaries.
As critics have pointed out, those victimized by globalization in Walcott’s
drama try to adjust to the dominant culture of the West by transforming,
reinterpreting and indigenizing it through their own cultural heritage. In
Dream on Monkey Mountain critics have noted that this adjustment involves
a shift from the mundane everyday world to the abstraction of the sacred.
Robert Fox (1993) and Lloyd Brown (1993), although taking different
approaches, both underscore the play’s dream element and metaphoric
dimension. Brown compares Dream with Leroi Jone’s The Slave (1964) and
illustrates that both plays are revolutionary and combine symbolism with
fantasy, although Walcott is more explicit. In spite of its Eurocentric style, he
argues, Walcott’s play clarifies The Slave for critics who dismiss it as “naïve
and suicidal” and the author as “an hysterical monomaniac” (194), insisting
instead on the transcultural unity of black American and Caribbean
experience. Fox emphasizes the mythological aspect of Walcott’s drama,
arguing that Dream goes beyond redeeming the downtrodden to dramatize
“the disparities between a consciousness that is creative and metaphoric, and
one that is straightforward and imprisoning” (204). Makak’s dream, which is
collective and universalized according to Fox, liberates Makak by allowing
him to outgrow and discard external values and thereby rediscover his
personal roots. Robert Hamner says that what is “original in Walcott is the
use he makes of his manifold voice, his particular combination of
imagination and experience” (1995, 18). Walcott he argues sees Makak as a
potential warrior, a noble primitive repressed by slavery.
This nobility also manifests in the play’s spiritual dimension rooted in the
Rastafari tradition. As Patrick Taylor notes, “Rastafari ‘reasoning’ lays claim
to an ancient African biblical tradition of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as
expressed in the thirteenth-century Kebra Nagast, the narrative of the
Ethiopian nation. Quintessentially Caribbean, Rastafari is an expression of a
Caribbean national identity that is fundamentally African yet forever marked
by Europe and India” (2001, 9). Taylor shows that Caribbean writers such as
Walcott and Roger Mais invoke the spirituality and beauty of the Rastafari.
Mais, a Jamaican novelist, has his main character in Brother Man (1974, 74)
say, “But de spirit of de Lawd passed over into Ethiopia, after the Queen of
Sheba came to Solomon and learned all his wisdom, an’ passed over back to
her own land. So it was black men out of Africa who became God’s chosen
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 103

people, for they had learnt de Way” (quoted in Taylor 72). Similarly, in
Walcott’s O Babylon!, the main character named Sufferer poetically states:

In him [Emperor Selassie] is beauty. In him is wisdom.

For when Sheba travel to Ethiopia
her jangling procession on the horizon
a moving oasis of palms and banner,
Lions in the desert rise up to look.
She couple with Solomon and from their deed sprang
Ras Makonnen, the vine and the fig tree
of fragrant Zion, Selassie himself. (1978, 167-68; quoted in Taylor 73)

Taylor suggests that the lion symbol (Lion of Judah, African Lion) and its
messianic message—“wait for the coming of the savior”—may seem like a
“passive compromise with reality” (73). But as I argue, Dream on Monkey
Mountain points to a non-active, reflexive state of consciousness beyond
religious dogma that represents the true potency of the lion and its messianic
message. Through this “historyless” state, Makak symbolizes the power of
agency behind cultural identity and change. In “The Muse of History”
(1974), as noted by Bill Ashcroft et al, Walcott “takes issue with what he
regards as the West Indian writer’s obsession with the destructions of the
past, and makes a plea for an escape from a prison of perpetual
recriminations into the possibilities of a ‘historyless’ world, where a fresh but
not innocent ‘Adamic’ naming of place provides the writer with
inexhaustible material and the potential of a new, but not naïve, vision”
(Ashcroft 1989, 33). As I will show, this Adamic vision of a new universe
based on the recollection of the old springs from Makak’s mystical
experience as a first-person event and not from Rastafari or other religious
reasoning.
The play begins with a naturalistic Prologue that features an elaborate
mime within a non-verbal folk context of rituals and symbols. A Conteur and
chorus introduce Makak, who Corporal Lestrade, the prison guard,
mockingly refers to as “de King of Africa” (214). The Prologue and the
dream itself, as Artaud would say, has "its own language” identified with the
mise en scène, one formed by "the visual and plastic materialization of
speech" and by everything "signified on stage independently of speech"
(1958, 68-69). Makak, a black charcoal burner arrested on a first offense for
drunkenness and disorderly conduct, finds himself in jail with two felons,
Tigre and Souris, symbolic of the two thieves crucified with Christ. Makak’s
situation parodies that of Jesus and suggests that he serves as a Messiah
figure for his compatriots, who like himself are subjugated by colonial
brainwashing on the one hand while simultaneously pressured to return to the
purity of their ancestral roots in Africa on the other. In searching for their
cultural identity, people like Makak, Tigre, Souris, Corporal Lestrade (a
mulatto) and the other subalterns do not know which way to turn, whether
104 Chapter Six

toward Europe or Africa. They are often at risk of becoming mimics of one
or more cultures instead of genuine hybrids capable of rising above
prescribed boundaries by rediscovering the self.

2. Hybridity and a Void of Conceptions

In his analysis of the play, John Thieme says that the responses favoring
either Europe or Africa are “psychologically damaging, because they involve
the repression of the hybridized reality of the Caribbean situation” (1999,
71). Homi Bhabha defines cultural hybridity in terms of “difference without
an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (1994, 4). The colonized live in-between
cultures, and by extension in-between different sets of conceptuality. As
Bhabha observes, the colonized inhabit “an international culture, based not
on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the
inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. To that end we should
remember that it is the ‘inter’—the cutting edge of translation and
negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of
culture” (1994, 38; Bhabha’s emphasis). The in-between-ness that I focus on
here refers not only to the space between cultures but also to the effect it has
on attenuating the contents of consciousness among the colonized. In
addition to being able to identify with more than one culture, a hybrid by this
definition can also distance herself from all cultures—which suggests the
innate human capacity to be conscious of being conscious independently of
culture. Furthermore, as Sartre say in the epigraph to Part Two, “The status
of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler
among colonized people with their consent” (277). Globalization makes the
colonized nervous in part because the promised benefits often accrue mainly
to the colonizer through a process that undermines colonized’s traditional
values. Makak is an extraordinary example of such nervousness as revealed
by the visionary experience he describes in the Prologue during the mock
trial staged by Corporal Lestrade, who acts as constable with the two felons
acting as judges.
During the interrogation, the Corporal, who at this point in the play
espouses European law, asks Makak to tell him his name, but he says, “I
forget”; then Lestrade asks, “What is your race?” and Makak says, “I am
tired” (219). Makak, in the aftermath of his visionary experience, has already
begun the process of dropping his pre-formations about his identity. Corporal
Lestrade describes the reason for Makak’s arrest, his drunkenness and
disorderly conduct, his damaging the “licenced alcoholic premises of one
Felicien Alcindor,” and mentions his story of a dream in which a voice tells
him he’s “the direct descendant of African kings, a healer of leprosy and the
Savior of his race” (224-25). In his own defense, Makak says, “I suffer from
madness. I does see things. Spirits does talk to me. All I have is my dreams
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 105

and they don’t trouble your soul” (225). At this point the play switches from
naturalism to the expressionistic structure of a dream as Makak relates his
visionary experience, while the cage, as indicated by the stage directions, “is
raised out of sight”:

Sirs, I am sixty years old. I have lived all my life

Like a wild beast in hiding. Without child, without wife.
People forget me like the mist on Monkey Mountain.
Is thirty years now I have look in no mirror . . .
I will tell you my dream. Sirs, make a white mist
In the mind; make that mist hang like cloth
From the dress of a woman, on prickles, on branches,
Make it rise from the earth, like the breath of the dead
On resurrection morning, and I walking through it
On my way to my charcoal pit on the mountain.
Make the web of the spider heavy with diamonds
And when my hand brush it, let the chain break. . . .
And this old man walking, ugly as sin,
In a confusion of vapour,
Till I feel I was God self, walking through cloud.
In the heaven of my mind. Then I hear this song. . . .
And the bandage of fog unpeeling my eyes,
As I reach to this spot,
I see this woman singing
And my feet grow roots. I could move no more.
A million silver needles prickle my blood,
Like a rain of small fishes.
The snakes in my hair speak to one another,
The smoke mouth open, and I behold this woman,
The loveliest thing I see on this earth,
Like the moon walking along her own road. (226-27)

While Makak recounts his dream the apparition of a White Goddess appears
to him and the audience, but not to the other characters, and then withdraws.
In his vision she tells Makak that he is destined to become the racial
redeemer of his people by leading them back to Africa. Walcott uses the
paradox of a European muse impelling Makak back to Africa not only to
heighten the irony of the binary forces acting upon the schizophrenic colonial
psyche, but also to reveal how the “two bewitchings” spur the colonized to
reject the boundedness of both—propelling colonial consciousness from a
cultural in-between-ness toward a void of conceptions. Although constructed
in part by African influences, Makak’s visionary experience as we shall see
also has a decontextual aspect that makes it less a multicultural than a
transcultural phenomenon.
106 Chapter Six

3. Visionary Experience and Hypoaroused Events

In analyzing Makak’s visionary experience, we find that it contains both
aspects of Forman’s definition of mysticism mentioned earlier. To reiterate,
Forman distinguishes two aspects of mysticism, which characterize all
mystical traditions around the world: hyperaroused states of schizophrenic
visions or hallucinations, and hypoaroused states “marked by low levels of
cognitive and physiological activity” (1999, 4), and ultimately by a void in
thought. In Makak’s vision we find both conditions, with the hypoaroused
state setting the stage for the hyperaroused hallucination or vision, which
propels him after the fact toward his schizophrenic activity. While the dream
story interfuses the two states, we can tease their features apart to see how
they interrelate. All the sensory data in the dream—the sound of birds, the
brushing against the spider’s web, the sight of the woman singing—makes up
the visionary experience. But this vision emanates from something else: the
“white mist / In the mind,” the “confusion of vapour, / Till I feel I was God
self, walking through cloud. / In the heaven on my mind,” “the bandage of
fog unpeeling my eyes.” What Walcott describes here suggests a
dematerialized world in which everything solid melts into air, which
symbolizes the attenuation of the content of consciousness. In other words,
Makak’s dream with its subsequent activity begins from a hypoaroused state
of reduced cognitive and physiological activity, with everything covered by a
“white mist” in which “my feet grow roots. I could move no more.” This
description, which is postexperiential, implies a settling down of the mind
and body to a state of restful alertness, such as that associated with a void
awareness or pure consciousness. Hence, the two stages of Makak’s
experience suggest what is known as “introvertive mysticism” followed by
“extrovertive mysticism,” although in his dream account they seem to
alternate. Postmodernist may misconstrue the decreation of his dream as
undermining the transcendental state of hyoarousal through “disintegration,
deconstruction, decenterment, displacement, difference, discontinuity,
disjunction, disappearance, decomposition, de-definition, demystification,
detotalization, deligitimation,” (Hassan 1987, 92), but this would only apply
to the intentional content of the mind, not to Makak’s visionary experience of
going beyond the mind and the personal self.

4. Introvertive and Extrovertive Mysticism

W. T. Stace, in distinguishing between introvertive and extrovertive
mysticism, describes the former as a nonspatial experience of pure
consciousness and the latter as the experience of a unity between oneself and
the external world (1960, 62-133). Forman, however, believes that Stace as
well as others miss the key fact about this distinction; namely, that the
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 107

extrovertive is an extension of the introvertive into activity, as suggested by

Makak’s vision and the allegorical dream play itself.
Walcott describes the play as a dream because introvertive and
extrovertive events are physiologically distinct from ordinary waking
consciousness, and because the psychodrama of a dream perhaps best serves
in theater to metaphorically render the nonordinary experience of Makak and
the other characters. According to Walcott’s note, the entire play, including
the Prologue and Epilogue, belongs to the dream. Moreover, everything from
Part I, Scene I, to the end of Part II comprises an extended flashback that
dramatizes Makak’s story up to the Prologue. In the Epilogue, after having
exorcised the White Goddess who appears in his vision, Makak finally
remembers his real name, Felix Hobain, and longs for the blessedness of
once again being “swallowed up in the mist” (326). The Prologue and
Epilogue thus symbolize an introvertive event, while everything in between
can be understood as an allegory of an extrovertive experience in which
certain elements of the introvertive event are continuous.
Part I, Scene I, begins on Monkey Mountain with Makak’s crippled
friend and fellow charcoal burner, Moustique, arriving to bring him to town
for market day to sell their charcoal. Makak, having obviously undergone a
psychic transformation, repeats the story of his vision that in prison he
initially describes as madness. In the ensuing dream that constitutes the play,
Makak and eventually Moustique and the other characters experience an
attenuation of their colonial identities as they shift from the dissociated
psyche of the cultural schizophrenic toward the postcolonial ideal of in-
between-ness. Bhabha regards hybridity as an “international” culture
involving the “national, anti-nationalistic histories of the ‘people’” (1994,
38-39). But as mentioned earlier, other postcolonial writers allow the
possibility, as we have seen, for an “historyless” world (Ashcroft et al 2002,
33)—a world experienced in trans-political, trans-historical, nonspatial
terms, as suggested by Makak’s introvertive and extrovertive events. When
Makak retells his vision to Moustique, he makes the same declarative
statements he made in the Prologue: “Make a white mist in the mind; make
that mist hang like cloth from the dress of a woman” (235). These statements
do not merely describe his experience but in a way also constitutes it for his
listener. It produces a change in the on-stage audience, as well as the theater
audience, exerting what J. L. Austin calls a perlocutionary force—defined as
the effect of an utterance on the addressee or hearer. Indeed, Makak seems to
be instructing others on how to empty the content of consciousness.
The performative effects of these statements are evidenced by the fact
that Moustique and the other characters participate in the dream by becoming
part of its collective consciousness. As John Searle says,
Performatives as well as other declarations create a state of affairs just by
representing it as created. . . . we have a double direction of fit because we
change the world and thus achieve the world-to-word direction of fit by
108 Chapter Six

representing it as having been changed, and thus achieve the word-to-world

direction of fit. (1998, 150)

By saying, “Make a white mist in the mind,” Makak suggests this double
direction of fit by pointing us toward deconstructing the perceptual
experiences responsible for our constructed identity. Just as the Maitri
Upanishad says to “restrain the breath,” “withdraw the senses,” “put to rest
objects of sense” in order to “continue void of conceptions” (Hume 1921,
436), so Walcott suggests through Makak that to forget, restrain the mind,
cease thinking, or “put behind a cloud of forgetting” will encourage the
colonized to liberate themselves from their twin “bewitchings”—Africa and
Europe, black and white. By implication it will also help them avoid the
other constructions of language and belief that block hybridity from being a
kind of unity-amidst-diversity without an imposed hierarchy. As I argue,
therefore, hybridity implies an in-between-ness in terms of culture and
consciousness simultaneously. Metaphorically speaking, only Makak has the
full introvertive visionary experience, at least insofar that only he recounts
having entered the white mist of the mind that represents a decontextualized
event. Nevertheless, all the characters come under the sway of his vision. In
wrestling with their cultural schizophrenia, they empty consciousness first of
its European and then its African concepts and schemata, un-constructing the
old automatized patterns of perception and belief.
Thus Makak’s visionary experience and the play’s dream structure in
general represent a negation of the perceptual automatism and linguistic
constructedness that characterize ordinary experience. Makak’s
deconstructive visionary instruction to Moustique, for example, uses a via
negative language intended to make him see the world in a new light, with
the “bandage of fog unpeeling” his cultural preconceptions. In terms of
mystical events, Forman says that via negative language

is designed to get you to cease applying your automatized expectations, and

get you to open to the world more immediately. (1999, 100)

Paradoxically, to liberate themselves and discover their true,

decontextualzed self-identity, Mukak’s compatriots must learn from his
example that it is possible to taste that which is “non-thought,” to “unpeel
conceptual content,” and thereby to clear the ground for the immediacy of
contextual experience—the dream play’s central via negative instruction.

5. From Cultural Schizophrenia to Liminality

Makak alternates between saying he’s going mad and his vision is a
dream, and then denying his madness—“Moustique. I am not mad. To God, I
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 109

am not mad” (241)—and declaring that his vision “Is not a dream”; “I tell
you is no dream” (237). These contradictions imply that visionary
experience, although a lesser mystical state, still involves going beyond
rationalizations and logical discourse. From an ordinary third-person
perspective he may appear to be mad and his vision to be an illusion. But in
Part I, Scene II, his actions manifest the supernatural power associated with
mystical states when he revives Josephus, the victim of a snake bite, by
holding live coals in his hand over the victim’s forehead. This power seems
to associate Makak with shamanism and the African witch doctor, but during
the healing he also includes the European tradition by invoking Moses and
the “blazing bush” (248). He not only successfully tells Josephus to sweat in
order to break his fever, thus producing an outer change in a word-to-world
fit; he also tells him and his entourage to “believe in me. Faith, faith! Believe
in yourselves” (249). As Paula Burnett notes, “When Walcott’s drama enacts
such rites as a healing, a quasi resurrection, as in Dream on Monkey
Mountain, a miracle performed by the least respected person of a hierarchical
racialized community, it does so as part of its strategy to mark the social
deprivation but spiritual strength of a real, historic group” (2000, 103).
Through rituals such as this Walcott suggests that any change in the material
world depends on a transformation of the self, like that experienced by
Makak and to a lesser extent by the other characters.
But not everyone is ready for his message. As a pragmatist Moustique is
only interested in survival and tries to capitalize on his friend’s newfangled
powers as a healer. In Part I, Scene III, however, he goes too far when he
impersonates Makak in the market place for money only to have the crowd
beat him to death with sticks once they discover his deception. His death,
foreshadowed by two appearances of a white spider, causes Makak to look
into his dying eyes for a sign of what he should preach next, but all he sees is
a “black wind blowing” (274). Part I ends with drums and a mime, “shapes,
demons, spirits, a cleft-footed woman, a man with a goat’s head, imps,
whirl[ing] out of the darkness around Makak, and the figure of a woman with
a white face and long black hair of the mask, all singing” (274-75). This
scene suggests what Turner calls the threshold or liminal phase, "a no-man's-
land betwixt-and-between the structural past and the structural future as
anticipated by the society's normative control of biological development"
(1998, 65). The binary in this case juxtaposes the normative controls of
Africa and Europe, the uncanny and the rational. As opposed to the
indicative mood of ordinary European life, the liminal (which Walcott seems
to associate more closely with Africa because of it consciousness voiding
rituals) constitutes the "subjunctive mood" of maybe, which includes
"fantasy, conjecture, desire,” and can "be described as a fructile chaos, a
fertile nothingness, a storehouse of possibilities" (ibid.). Makak’s vision, as a
fertile nothingness, is the transcultural “ground” of in-between-ness against
which the binaries of Dream on Monkey Mountain can be distinguished and
110 Chapter Six

finally overcome. Without Makak’s vision as a move toward a void of

conceptions, the characters would have no basis from which to escape the
opposing forces of their African ancestral roots on the one hand and colonial
oppression on the other.
In Part II, Scene I, inspired by the two felons, Makak stabs Corporal
Lestrade with a knife. The three prisoners then escape and head into the
forests of Monkey Mountain. In the next scene, Tigre and Souris by necessity
align themselves with Makak and pretend for safety’s sake to conform to
what they perceive as his African spirit. Tigre says, “Let’s mix ourselves in
his madness. Let’s dissolve in his dream” (289). When they ask him what
they should do next if their intention is to return to Africa, Makak says,

Once, when Moustique asked me that, I didn’t know. But I know now. What
power can crawl on the bottom of the sea, or swim in the ocean of air above
us? The mind, the mind. (291)

As Makak knows from experience, if you can control the content of

consciousness, you can control the world, for again, as Coleridge says, “the
mind half-sees and half-creates.” At this point, as Makak relates a series of
visions transporting them as saviors back to Africa, the forest suddenly
comes alive with Corporal Lestrade in hot pursuit. Lestrade, however, like
the felons, quickly undergoes a transformation and exchanges European law
for tribal law and adopts a communal African identity. Even the paragon of
the colonizer’s oppressive rule, the upholder of European law and order,
succumbs to Makak’s visionary power. Although initially this power has the
effect of reshuffling the content of Lestrade’s consciousness in favor of
negritude, in the end it is he who takes the initiative and persuades Makak to
divest himself of the White Goddess, the ironic instigator of his quest for
Africa. Arguably, she symbolizes not only European/African binaries but
also the very presence of conceptual content itself.

6. Death of an Archetype
Makak’s visionary experience, as we have seen, has two sides:
introvertive and extrovertive. The fleeting initial introvertive side, which is
one of hypoarousal, is more closely associated with a void of conceptions or
pure consciousness, while the extrovertive side that emerges from it in the
dream play (pure consciousness continuing through activity) is partially
influenced or constructed by the play’s two opposing sets of cultural
contexts, European and African. In this way the play generates hybridity in
two phases. The twin “betwitchings” of Europe and Africa provide the
context of a cultural in-between-ness, which in turn impels the characters
toward the void of conceptions, thus rendering in-between-ness a
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 111

knowledge-by-identity rather than a mere thought or belief. In the Apotheosis

scene, the climax (Part II, Scene III), the chorus returns to set up a dream-
within-a-dream in which Lestrade initiates in Makak a readiness to return to a
pure visionary or introvertive state free of cultural/conceptual content.
Leading up to this, however, just as Walcott earlier mocked the Caribbean
mimicry of European traditions, he now parodies African atavism through
another trial. This time Lestrade imposes tribal law in exacting black revenge
on European “prisoners,” whose shared crime is judged to be their whiteness.
The prisoners range from Abraham Lincoln, Alexander of Macedon, and
Shakespeare, to Plato, Galileo and Christopher Marlowe (312). This comic
catalogue is followed by another in which “petitions, delegations,
ambassadors, signatories, flatterers” arrive and “offer to revise the origins of
slavery. A floral tribute of lilies from the Ku Klux Klan. . . . An offer from
Hollywood,” tokens of reconciliation from the white world that Makak
summarily rejects (313-14). Until now the characters have been trapped in
the binaries of their conceptual content, but things change when Lestrade
inadvertently liberates Makak from the allure of his African heritage.
As Makak prepares to go to Africa after the trial, Lestrade persuades him
first to behead the apparition of the White Goddess, which now also appears
to Lestrade. As we have seen, she is responsible both for inducing the
preconceptions of negritude and for blocking the characters’ passage to a
healthy state of hybridity. Corporal Lestrade, who wants to prevent Mukak
from being like himself as a mulatto “neither one thing nor the other,” says,
“Kill her! Kill her!”

She is the wife of the devil, the white witch. She is the mirror of the moon
that this ape look into and find himself unbearable. . . She is lime, snow,
marble, moonlight, lilies, cloud, foam and bleaching cream, the mother of
civilization, and the confounder of blackness. I too have longed for her. She is
the colour of the law, religion, paper, art, and if you want peace, if you want
to discover the beautiful depth of your blackness, nigger, chop off her head!
When you do this, you will kill Venus, the Virgin, the Sleeping Beauty. She is
the white light that paralyzed your mind, that led you into this confusion. It is
you who created her, so kill her! kill her! The law has spoken. (319)

As we have seen, in the aftermath of the hypoaroused event of the “white

mist in the mind,” the White Goddess appears to Makak as part of the
hyperarousal of his vision. As such she represents the postexperiential
characterization of the thinking mind, that is, a culturally induced flavor
experienced simultaneously with the lingering taste of the vision proper that
extends into and becomes part of the dream play as it unfolds. As Burnett
says, “the authority figure of whiteness—of white culture’s hold on the self-
image of black people—has to be sacrificed” (2000, 199). This
characterization of the White Goddess, therefore, is not unique to Makak, not
part of a transcultural void of conceptions represented by the “white mist,”
112 Chapter Six

but shared by the Corporal as an archetype of the African collective

consciousness. It is this conceptual component of the dream vision that needs
to be purified of binary predispositions if the mystical event is to retain its
effective power for self-transformation. By beheading the Goddess, after first
removing the African robe he put on during his Apotheosis, Makak
repudiates the Afrocentric cultural essentialism that she instills in the
extrovertive phase of his visionary event. In this way he rejects the twin
“bewitchings” of Europe and Africa that contaminate the purity of his self
transformation. Only at this point in the dream is Makak prepared to adopt a
hybrid consciousness, which as defined here suggests an in-between-ness not
only in terms of opposing cultural values but also in terms of a void in
thought.
Because the extrovertive phase of Walcott’s theatrical dream is partially
constructed by multicultural influences, the only way to insure a disinterested
balance between cultures is through a continuum of the void of conceptions
first encountered during the introvertive “mist in the mind.” In the Epilogue
Makak seems to intuit the need for this continuity. Although he appears in
the Epilogue to emerge from his dream, Walcott’s Note implies that the
dream encompasses the entire play. In any case, having beheaded the White
Goddess and transcended the thrall of the twin “bewitchings,” Makak now
remembers his name, Felix Hobain (“Felix” means “happy”). Just as Makak
is about to be released from prision, Moustique, who is still alive, arrives
looking for his friend: “He is a good man, Corporal. Let me take him where
he belong. He belong right here,” that is, not in Africa (325). Makak agrees:

Lord, I have been washed from shore to shore, as a tree in the ocean. The
branches of my fingers, the roots of my feet, could grip nothing, but now,
God, they have found ground. Let me be swallowed up in mist again, and let
me be forgotten, so that when the mist open, men can look up, at some small
clearing with a hut, with a small signal of smoke, and say, “Makak lives there.
Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dream of his people.” Other
men will come, other prophets will come, and they will be stoned, and
mocked, and betrayed, but now this old hermit is going back home, back to
the beginning, to the green beginning of this world. Come, Moustique, we
going home. (326)

In Dream on Monkey Mountain, then, home has a literal as well as an

anagogic meaning. It refers not only to the Caribbean world but also to
something else suggested by the line, “but now this old hermit is going back
home, back to the beginning, to the green beginning of this world” (326).
The source of Makak’s dream is the home within, “the white mist in the
mind” that he longs to be swallowed up in again in the Epilogue, going full
circle from where he began.
The white mist, as I have argued, symbolizes a void of conceptions, pure
consciousness, the source of all thought and the witness of all phenomenal
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 113

experience. His wanting to “be forgotten” implies a longing to leave behind a

world of conventional identity as well as magical attributes and supernatural
performances, for which the prophets who come and go will only be “stoned
and mocked.” Instead he wants to live as an “old hermit,” which signifies
nonattachment to the world, whether visionary or profane. In terms of the
Maitri Upanishad, he longs to “restrain his mind from the external,” “put to
rest objects of sense,” and “continue void of conceptions” (6:18-19; Hume
1921, 436). This experience, which Walcott as a writer finds so appealing,
corresponds to the primal artistic holon discussed above in connection with
Sam Shepard. The trajectory of Dream on Monkey Mountain has led full
circle back to this source of creative intelligence, from which the “mind half-
sees and half-creates.” With Makak and Moustique heading back to the
Mountain, the chorus sings the refrain, “I going home, I going home” (326).

7. Conclusion: Coming Home to the Self

For Makak, therefore, home includes neither Africa nor the dualism of
being for or against Europe. It does, however, include being established in
the self. In his essay “The Muse of History,” as David Mikics says, Walcott

identifies Whitman, Neruda, Borges, and St. John Perse as New World writers
who overcome this restrictive dualism. These figures prove their difference,
not by a Caliban-like cursing of the European past, but by a renewal of certain
classical European themes as “instant archaism”: “So [in Borges’
‘Streetcorner Man’] the death of a gaucho does not merely repeat, but is, the
death of Caesar. Fact evaporates into myth.” . . . Exploiting anachronism to
generate an “Adamic” vision of the New World, Walcott goes on, causes a
primitive “wonder” . . . “an elation which sees everything renewed,” liberated
from the oppression of the past, and yet which also sees the past that remains
visible within the present, “the ruins of great civilizations.” (2003, 111)

Walcott rejects historical determinism in favor of a New World aesthetic

capable of renewing the Caribbean through an Adamic vision, such as his
and Makak’s. Arguably, to overcome dualism through an Adamic vision that
induces a primitive wonder implies that the experience of non-dual
consciousness through knowledge-by-identity does not occur in a vacuum
but within a specific cultural context. The simultaneity of introvertive and
extrovertive experience renews civilizations and renders cultural knowledge
more complete. Although Mikics suggests that the “liberating potential of
magical vision” in the play seems to decrease because of the artist-observer’s
sense of cultural alienation (2003, 120), this would only be the case if Makak
lacked the connectedness of a true mystical experience. Makak and to a
certain extent Lestrade, however, see the ruins of great civilizations renewed
through an extrovertive experience that incorporates these civilizations
114 Chapter Six

within a continuum of a new world consciousness suggested by the play.

This vision and its dream rendering are homegrown in more ways than one.
As Fox says, “The dream that transforms Makak is, in a very real sense,
Walcott’s own dream, his artist’s vision which espies the potential for
greatness in ‘a degraded man’ . . . Makak then becomes a representative of
the downtrodden and impoverished blacks who long to be redeemed” (1993,
202). Home, as the play suggests, is not only a place but also something
residing within each one of us, regardless of our position in society or the
nature of our socially constructed identities.
Although rendered as a dream play, Makak’s visionary experience
emerges not from any particular tradition but from his own grassroots
experience. This phenomenon evokes the reality of a Grassroots Spirituality
movement in the drama of living, which as Forman explains

involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is indwelling, sometimes bodily,

as the deepest self and accessed through not-strictly-rational means of self-
transformation and group process that becomes the holistic organization for
all of life. (2004, 51; his emphasis)

Makak’s experience in Dream on Monkey Mountain reveals a spiritual, not-

strictly-rational inclination that supercedes the influence of European or
African culture and, as Forman would suggest, “dwarfs Judaism, Islam, and
every single denomination of Christianity” (2004, 11). Through Makak’s
spiritual inclination and its powerful influence of inducing hybridity among
his Caribbean countrymen, Walcott suggests a growing interconnectedness
between the drama of living and sacred events in theater.
Although in analyzing Dream on Monkey Mountain I have looked mainly
at the self-discovery of the characters, the same experience of going home
would also apply for the spectators. Through the structure of a dream play,
Walcott uses the power of suggestion to give the audience a taste of their
own spiritual strength. When the play dramatizes the rite of healing
performed by the lowest person in the hierarchy of a racialized community,
the audience intuits the possibility on a grassroots level that anyone,
including themselves, can achieve a sacred transformation of the self. In
addition to Makak, we see that Corporal Lestrade, as a foil to Makak like
Moustique, also undergoes a transformation. As a mulatto who embodies
both sides of the African/European divide, he begins by repudiating his own
blackness, then replaces his Eurocentric predisposition with an Afrocentric
one, and ultimately persuades Makad to behead the White Goddess. In the
Apotheosis both Makak and Lestrade are symbolically emancipated from
their roles as mimics of Europeans and Africans. In this way they open a
hybrid space of in-between-ness that the audience—whether European,
African, or Caribbean—can appreciate as accessible within themselves. As
Girish Karnad demonstrates in his play Hayavadana, however, it is not only
 Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain 115

postcolonials but the whole of humanity that struggles with the fate of
incompleteness.
 CHAPTER 7:
GIRISH KARNAD’S HAYAVADANA:
THE INCOMPLETENESS OF MIND/BODY

1. Head, Body, Mask and Beyond in Indian Theater

In Hayavadana, a two-act play that won the Natya Sangh Award in 1971,
Girish Karnad follows Indian folk tradition more closely than in his earlier
dramatic works such as Yayati (1961), based on the Mahabharata, and
Tughlaq (1964), a tale of the fourteenth-century Sultan of Delhi.
Hayavadana adopts the performative model of Yakshagana, the theater form
of Karnad’s birthplace in the rural southern part of Karnataka. Karnad’s use
of Yakshagana’s open-air style of performance, which combines music,
dance and improvised dialogue, is seen by critics as launching contemporary
Indian theater’s “encounter with tradition” (Awasthis 1989, 49). In his
versatile career Karnad has worked in the United States and England and
served as the director of the Nehru Center, the cultural branch of the Indian
High Commission in London, but still regards himself first and foremost as a
playwright. His love for drama began with his fascination for the traveling
theater groups called Natak companies that would perform in his home town
when he was young: “I loved going to see them and the magic has stayed
with me” (Karnad 1995b, 360). As Karnad says about his background in
theater,

My generation was the first to come of age after India became independent of
British rule. It therefore had to face a situation in which tensions implicit until
then had come out in the open and demanded to be resolved without apologia
or self-justification: tensions between the cultural past of the country and its
colonial past, between the attractions of Western modes of thought and our
own traditions, and finally between the various visions of the future that
opened up once the common cause of political freedom was achieved. This is
the historical context that gives rise to my plays and those of my
contemporaries. (1995a, 3)

In Hayavadana, Karnad combines contemporary Western and traditional

Indian influences on both form and content to explore a universal
philosophical question regarding human completeness: does the essential
identity of an individual derive from the head or body? As we have seen
through the plays discussed in the previous chapters, the answer is neither.
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 117

As Hayavadana demonstrates, human identity extends beyond the

materialism of the mind/body to include witnessing consciousness. The
attempt to identify solely with either the head/mind or body, both of which
are essentially physical, will lead only to frustration, confusion and remorse,
as portrayed by the characters in the play.
As Yarrow notes, Karnad exploits regional traditions such as “songs,
myth and ritual—which are given contemporary relevance as analogies of
sexual, political and social interaction” (2001, 165). While based on the
collection of Sanskrit tales called the Kathasaritsagara, Hayavadana draws
explicitly on Thomas Mann’s 1957 version, “The Transposed Heads”
(Gilbert 2001, 180). Ironically, Hayavadana opens with a Ganesha Puja, an
invocation for the completion of an endeavor from the god Ganesh who has
the head of an elephant and the body of a human. Ganesh was accidentally
decapitated by his father, Shiva, who then lost the original head and then
replaced it with that of an elephant. The fact that the invocation of
completeness is carried out through rituals to Ganesh complicates the play’s
theme of the quest for wholeness among humans who identify almost entirely
with their minds and bodies. The Bhagavata, who performs the ritual, also
fulfills the multiple roles of narrator, stage manager and musical director,
which is typical of a Yakshagana performance. While introducing the
characters, commenting on the dramatic action, and mediating between
audience and characters, Bhagavata also addresses the paradox of Ganesh,
“the Lord and Master of Success and Perfection” who simultaneously “seems
[to be] the embodiment of imperfection, of incompleteness” (2001, 183). He
points out through the appearance of Ganesh that “the completeness of God
is something no poor mortal can comprehend” (ibid.)—at least not on the
level of the head or body.
As Bhagavata introduces the play and invokes Ganesh to insure the
success of the play’s performance, an Actor interrupts him and excitedly
declares that while relieving himself on the side of the road he was amazed to
hear himself reprimanded by a speaking horse. The entrance of Hayavadana,
which means “the one with a horse’s head,” introduces the play’s sub-plot
that frames and parallels the main plot, which involves a love triangle
between two men and a woman. As Karnad says, he created the story of
Hayavadana, an incomplete person who wants to rid himself of his horse’s
head and become fully human, because he had “always felt tremendous
fascination for Shakespeare’s sub-plots—how he tells us the same story
twice, from two different points of view” (quoted in Dhanavel 1993, 118).
By dramatizing its thematic concerns on a spectrum that ranges from the
animal and human to the divine, Hayavadana takes the performers and
audience from the level of mundane human concerns related to the physical
dimension of the mind and body to a sacred insight on the need for
transcending the physical in the search for completion.
118 Chapter Seven

In the play, the character Devadatta, a poet and the only son of a revered
Brahmin, represents the head as a man of intellect, while his close friend and
diametrical opposite, Kapila, the brawny son of an iron-smith, represents the
body. Both men fall in love with the beautiful Padmini, who first becomes
Devadatta’s wife but then feels irresistibly attracted to the manly Kapila. By
the end of Act One, jealousy between the two men leads to their chopping off
their heads in a comic scene of double suicide. Padmini, who is pregnant,
pleads for the goddess Kali to bring them back to life, but when the goddess
consents and instructs her to replace their heads, she makes the fateful
mistake of putting the wrong head on each body. During the interval,
Bhagavata invites the audience to reflect on this dilemma. Is the individual
with Devadatta’s head and Kapila’s body Devadatta or Kapila, and vice
versa? When Act Two begins, the audience discovers that they had consulted
a rishi or holy man, who told them that the head rules, that the person with
Devadatta’s head is Padmini’s husband—much to her satisfaction and relief.
As Gilbert notes,

Mann’s version of the tale ridicules this artificial divide between head and
body, found in Indian and Western philosophy alike, by taking such a solution
to its logical conclusion: each of the bodies gradually transforms to match the
head to which it is attached. (2001, 180)

This outcome reveals that the difference between head and body in the two
men does not lead to self-transcendence but merely reinforces the gap
between mind and body. The logic of trying to achieve a synthesis between
the two men on the level of head and body ultimately fails and leaves
Padmini profoundly disappointed; logic itself, being associated with the
head, cannot provide a solution to the dilemma of human incompleteness.
In addition to its ironic commentary on the philosophical quest for
completeness in the field of duality, the play also ironizes theatrical devices
found in Western theater such as the full-length curtain. Instead of shielding
a character from the audience with a full curtain, Hayavadana uses the
standard Yakshagana device of the “half-curtain” that prolongs the entrance
of a new character on stage. Curtains, moreover, symbolize the covering over
of the unsayable unity of reality by the field of difference. As Shankara says
in the Crest-Jewel of Discrimination (Viveka-Chudamani), “The ‘covering of
bliss’ [the ego-idea in man] is that covering of the Atman which catches a
reflection of the blissful Atman itself” (1978, 66). While Hayavadana does
not explicitly reveal the whole truth, it points in that direction by suggesting
where truth may not be found. In the process of using such conventions,
Karnad also subverts them. When Hayavadana first appears on stage, the
half-curtain serves as a prop that allows him to hide himself. As the stage
directions indicate,
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 119

The curtain is lowered by about a foot. One sees Hayavadana’s head, which is
covered by a veil. At a sign from the Bhagavata, one of the stage-hands
removes the veil, revealing a horse’s head. . . . The curtain is lowered a little
more—just enough to show the head again. (185, original italics)

This process continues until finally the audience sees that Hayavadana has a
man’s body and a horse’s head. Similarly, when Devadatta and Kapila cut off
their heads in Kali’s Temple, the terrifying figure of Kali also appears from
behind a gradually lowered curtain:

her arms stretched out, her mouth wide open with the tongue lolling out. The
drums stop and as the goddess drops her arms and shuts her mouth, it
becomes clear she has been yawning. (197, original italics)

Had Kali not simply been yawning, her open mouth would have signified the
destruction of ignorance and the mystery of the universe. Yet because the
characters had not achieved completion as human beings, Kali was merely
yawning, not revealing what the onlookers would have been unable to
perceive in the first place.
Karnad says that in spite of this folk influence, the idea for the play
“started crystallizing in [his] head right in the middle of an argument with B.
V. Karanth . . . about the meaning of masks in Indian theatre and theatre’s
relationship to music” (1995a, 12). Although masks are not traditionally used
in Yakshagana, which relies on make-up, they helped Karnad dramatize the
primacy given the head over the body and the problematic theme of the
nature of selfhood. As a device, the mask facilitates the head swap between
Kapila and Devadatta. The fact that their bodies gradually change to conform
to their new heads suggests that the mask, like the head itself, achieves its
identity and meaning only in relation to a specific body. As we shall see, just
as a character may not identify with a particular mask, so he may also not
identify with a particular head in the process of finding completion as a
person. Body, head and mask all represent only one side of the equation in
defining selfhood. As the play suggests, the impossibility of separating head
and body in realizing one’s social identity parallels the impossibility of
separating head and body on the one hand from witnessing consciousness on
the other in attaining completion beyond social identity.
As a deviation from traditional Indian theater, Hayavadana uses two doll
characters that have the ability to fathom Padmini’s dreams and subconscious
desires, thus parting the curtain on what cannot be presented visually. As
Karnad explains,

In the first half, the Devadatta-Kapila-Padmini story goes on without

interruptions . . . In the second half the story is continually interrupted by the
dolls [and] the songs, and the Bhagavata interferes in the action, talks to the
characters, comments on their mental state. This is done merely to bring out
120 Chapter Seven

the disintegrated state of the three people’s lives. In the first half everything is
neat and clear, but in the second I wanted to create the impression of a
reflection in a broken mirror—all fragmented, repetitious, out-of-focus, all
bits and pieces. (quoted in Banfield 1996, 149)

By providing psychological insight, the dolls reveal the complexity and

ambivalence of the characters. As an anti-naturalistic device, the dolls also
undermine the theatrical illusion commonly sustained in modern Western
theater. As Gilbert says, this device

links Karnad’s work to that of Brecht, whose rejection of psychological

realism and emotional identification sensitized Karnad and his contemporaries
[as Karnad says] “to the potentialities of nonnaturalistic techniques available
in [their] own theatre.” (Gilbert 2001, 181; Karnad 1995a, 15)

In addition to the Brechtean technique of providing a critical distance

through half-curtains, masks and dolls, the content of Karnad’s play inspires
further critical distance by thematically shifting the audience’s attention from
the intentional mind toward a glimpse of the non-intentional internal
observer. The play’s cultural context and philosophical theme combined with
its formal devices intensifies the effect of attenuating the phenomenal mind
and promoting a transpersonal experience.

2. A Question of Synthesis
When Bhagavata discusses with Hayavadana how best to become a
complete man by getting rid of the horse’s head, Hayavadana says that in
trying to become human he has taken an interest in all aspects of his nation,
from civics and politics to nationalism and Indianization, but nothing seems
to help: “I have tried everything. But where’s my society? Where? You must
help me to become a complete man, Bhagavata Sir. But how? What can I
do?” (187). Bahagavata tells him to seek help in Banaras, but Hayavadana
says he has searched everywhere in India for completeness. Then Bhagavata
suggests he try the Kali of Mount Chitrakoot, where he may have greater
success. The play now shifts from the sub-plot to the main action between
Devadatta, Kapila and Padmini. Concerned about his friend, Kapila senses
that Devadatta has again fallen in love with another woman. Through
Kapila’s offer to help his friend fulfill his desire, the play suggests that one
way for humans to find completion is through love and understanding. After
sending Kapila on a mission to discover the woman’s identity, however,
Devadatta ominously begins to have second thoughts:

Kapila—Kapila . . . He’s gone. How fortunate I am to have a friend like him.

Pure gold. (Pause.) But should I have trusted this to him? He means well—
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 121

and he is a wizard in his smithy, in his farm, in his field. But here? No. He is
too rough, too indelicate. He was the wrong man to send. He’s bound to ruin
the whole thing. (Anguished.) Lord Rudra, I meant what I said. If I get her my
head will be a gift to you. Mother Kali, I’ll sacrifice my arms to you. I swear.
(190; original italics)

Ironically, Devadatta does not realize the extent to which his promise will be
carried out. Not only is he correct in his intuition, but Kapila, who succeeds
not only in discovering who Padmini is but also inadvertently charming her,
warns his friend:

I confess to you I’m feeling uneasy. You are a gentle soul. You can’t bear a
bitter word or an evil thought. But this one is fast as lightening—and as sharp.
She is not for the likes of you. (191)

His friend of course pays no attention. As Bhagavata comments, soon

Devadatta and Padmini are married and she is pregnant. One day they plan to
go on a trip to Ujjain with Kapila, but Devadatta has second thoughts
because of his wife’s condition. He also feels somewhat imposed upon by
Kapila’s frequent visits and says, “shouldn’t he realize I’m married now?”
(192). Afraid of being deprived of their friend’s company, Padmini accuses
him of jealousy. Even though she agrees to cancel the trip, declaring “I’m
your ‘half’ now. The better half! We can go to Ujjain some other time”
(ibid.), she changes her mind as soon as Kapila arrives in the carriage.
On their trip, Padmini and Kapila become increasingly flirtatious until
they reach the temple of Kali near the temple of Rudra. Against Devadatta’s
wishes, Padmini and Kapila go to the temple of Rudra, while he insists on
staying behind, claiming fatigue. In their absence, Devadatta goes to the
temple of Kali by himself. He finds a sword in the temple that may have been
used already by one of Kali’s devotee in a sacrifice, and in a fit of despair,
screams, “Here. Mother Kali, here’s another. My head. Take it, Mother,
accept this little offering of my head. (Cuts off his head.)” (195). When
Kapila and Padmini return from the temple of Rudra and find Devadatta
missing, Kapila immediately goes to the temple of Kali where he finds his
headless friend. Guilt stricken, Kapila laments, “I did wrong. But you should
know I don’t have the intelligence to know what else I should have done”
(196). He realizes now that if he goes home with Padmini alone, he would be
a prime suspect in his friend’s death and accused of plotting to steal his wife.
Determined to follow his friend, Kapila says, “You spurned me in this world.
Accept me as your brother at least in the next. Here, friend, her I come. As
always, I follow in your path. (Cuts off his head.)” (ibid.). Upon discovering
the two headless bodies, Padmini is grief stricken and asks Kali why she did
not stop them. Annoyed by humans and their never-ending demands to solve
their problems, Kali tells her to “Put these heads back properly. Attach them
to their bodies and then press the sword on their necks” (197). Padmini as we
122 Chapter Seven

have seen puts the wrong head on each body, thereby initiating that phase of
the play in which the characters and spectators have a growing awareness
that the self extends beyond mind and body.
With Hayavadana having introduced the theme of the distinction between
an individual’s mental and physical attributes on the one hand and the
essence of human identity on the other, the three lovers now extend this
theme into the realm of human behavior with all its practical implications.
When Devadatta and Kapila come back to life with the wrong heads,
Padmini exclaims, “What have I done? . . . I don’t deserve to live—forgive
me” (198). Initially both men are thrilled by this exchange; Devadatta now
has the body that his wife lusted after, and Kapila now has his friend’s brains
and refinement. The problem begins when they try to decide which one of
them is Padmini’s husband. As they argue whether head or body determines
who is who, the internal observer within both themselves and the audience
begins to differentiate itself from head and body as the primary decider of
human self-identity. Just as Caryl Churchill’s doubling and cross-casting of
characters in Cloud Nine encourages mindfulness, a second-person
perspective between player and role, or the third-person perspective of
Mead’s notion of “the generalized other” (Whitehead 2001, 18), so in
Hayavadana the doubling of two people sharing one head/body entity causes
the observer to disidentify with each person, to transcend their physically and
socially constructed attributes, and to regard them as separate from an
underlying internal observer.
The fact that Devadatta and Kapila preserve their sense of identity even
after the exchange of heads depends not on their heads per se, but rather on
their witnessing awareness remaining unchanged, providing a sense of
continuity to a shifting mind/body complex. Karnad’s play demonstrates that
selfhood consists of two aspects: the dynamic experience and instability of a
constructed subject on the one hand, and a witnessing observer that never
changes on the other. Even though the open and flexible identity that
Devadatta and Kapila experience after their exchange of heads is a physically
constructed one, the fact that they can still experience a continuity of self
stems from their glimpse (taste or whiff) of non-intentional pure
consciousness, not merely from their identification with either mind or body.
If the self is not an isolated, autonomous entity, neither is it a passive product
of society. As a bimodal entity, the self assimilates, interprets and integrates
the contents of one’s cultural environment, while simultaneously witnessing
that content from the unboundedness of pure awareness. In Karnad’s play,
the tenuous identities of the two men change according to the changing plot,
but aesthetically speaking, for the character and spectator to recognize the
changeability of both plot and identity depends upon and exposes a
background of non-intentional consciousness through which these identities
are held together.
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 123

When it looks as if Padmini has chosen Devadatta with Kapila’s body as

her husband, Kapila with his friend’s body strongly objects. He asks
Devadatta, “what has she got to do with you now? . . . I mean Padmini must
come home with me, shouldn’t she? She’s my wife, so she must . . .” (199).
But Devadatta demurs, saying that “According to the Shastras, the head is the
sign of a man” (ibid.). Although the head may seem to signify a man in the
sense of being the site of the Cartesian theater of the mind, what the Shastras
are referring to is not the mind as the home of intentional knowledge, but
rather non-intentional consciousness as distinct from mind and body. As
Shankara puts it, when individuals are constrained by the powers of duality,
“subject to bondage, deluded by them . . . mistaking the body to be the
atman, [they] wander about in such delusion” (1988, 172). At this point
Kapila becomes angry and replies,

That may be. But the question now is simply this: Whose wife is she?
(Raising his right hand) This is the hand that accepted her at the wedding.
This the body she’s lived with all these months. And the child she’s carrying
is the seed of this body. (ibid.)

Kapila clearly senses what Padmini truly desires when she displays her alarm
at the prospect of going back to Devadatta’s body: “I know what you want,
Padmini. Devadatta’s clever head and Kapila’s strong body” (ibid.). At the
beginning of Act Two, Bhagavata announces the rishi’s answer to the
question of which man is Padmini’s husband: “As the heavenly Kalpa
Vriksha is supreme among trees, so is the head among human limbs.
Therefore the man with Devadatta’s head is indeed Devadatta and he is the
rightful husband of Padmini” (200). Again, the rishi is referring not to the
mind itself, which cannot insure matrimonial bliss or any other kind of
happiness. Only when the mind “is unconnected with anything external” is it
“unaffected by the dualities of cold and heat” (Shankara 1988, 39). Oblivious
to the perils of attachment, Padmini tries to appease Kapila as she leaves with
Devadatta by whispering, “It’s my duty to go with Devadatta. But remember
I’m going with your body. Let that cheer you up” (201).
Throughout the beginning of Act Two, Devadatta displays the physical
prowess associated with Kapila’s strong body by working out and wrestling.
As Devadatta explains, although he once believed he had to think while
wrestling, now he realizes that “this body just doesn’t wait for thoughts—it
acts!” (ibid.). As time goes on, however, his body gradually begins to change
back to its original form, but his sense of self-identity remains the same. As
we have seen from an Advaitan perspective, given that mind and body are
both physical, and that as one changes the other also changes, then the
continuity of Devadatta’s identity must hinge on something beyond the
mind/body complex, namely nonchanging consciousness toward which he
begins to move again through his pursuit of knowledge. This dynamic among
124 Chapter Seven

the characters has two effects: first, it intimates for the audience that selfhood
is not confined to one’s physical attributes; and, second, it induces a swing of
awareness in the audience from a concrete sense of physical self-identity to
an abstract sense of witnessing the instability of that identity from a
nonchanging perspective. In this way Hayavadana helps to induce in the
characters and audience what Shankara advises regarding the higher self:

Realize the Atman, the eternal pure consciousness and bliss. Detach your self
completely from this covering, the body . . . . The truly wise man burns his
ignorance with all its effects in the fire of Brahman—the Absolute, the
Eternal, the very Self. He then remains established in the knowledge of the
Atman, the eternal pure consciousness and bliss. (1978, 102)

As a sign that Devadatta intuits this move toward the better self, he begins to
apply sandal oil to his body, a smell associated with the practice of yoga that
Padmini finds annoying: “Your body had that strong, male smell before—I
liked it,” she says. He replies, “You mean that unwashed, sweaty smell
Kapila had? (Incredulous) You liked that?” (202). While Devadatta starts to
rediscover the sublime, his wife remains attached to the physical world, a fate
that portends the suffering she will ultimately have to endure.
The two dolls that appear in the second act provide a running
commentary on the quality of life in Padmini’s household and on the
changing nature of her husband and marriage. Doll 1: “What have we come
to! One should never trust God.” Doll 2: “It’s our fault. We should have been
wary from the moment we saw that child in her dreams” (202). The presence
of the dolls, by breaking through the illusion of psychological realism and
emotional identification in the play, prepares the audience to recognize the
illusory nature of a socially constructed identity and its consequences. During
this process, Padmini can no longer identify her husband. When Devadatta
refuses to take Padmini and their son swimming, she complains that he has
started to sit home all day and never goes out. As a Brahmin he says his duty
is to study:

It was fun the first few days because it was new. All that muscle and strength.
But how long can one go on like that? I have the family tradition to
maintain—the daily reading, writing and studies. (203)

As the dolls indicate, Devadatta’s hands have changed from those of a rough
laborer to those of a young girl. The dolls also notice that while singing a
lullaby to her child, who will remember the tune in later years, Padmini
dreams of Kapila. As Devadatta’s body changes and he starts losing his
wrestling matches, Padmini suspects that Kapila must also be changing:
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 125

([S]uddenly vicious) Change! Change! Change! Change! Change! The sand

trickles. The water fills the pot. And the moon goes on swinging, swinging,
swinging, from light to darkness to light. (204)

However fixated she has become on the physical dimension of her

attachment to Kapila, Padmini’s perception of the changing world around her
implies that in her lucid moments she can still discern a non-changing point
of awareness through which change becomes apparent. She has a fleeting
sense that, as Shankara puts it, “The world of appearances is a mere
phantom; there is but one Reality. It is changeless, formless and absolute”
(1978, 100). If that which changes is unreal, and if Devadatta and Kapila’s
constructed identities are constantly changing like everything else in the
world of appearances, then as Karnad’s play suggests their constructed
identities must also be illusory. As Shankara states,

The universe of appearances is indeed unreal. The sense of ego must also be
unreal, since we observe how it comes and goes. But we are conscious, also,
of being the witness, the knower of everything. This consciousness does not
belong to the ego-sense and the other perceptions which exist only for a
moment at a time. (1978, 81)

At this point in the play, Devadatta has changed back to his original self,
distanced himself from the body and started to expand his awareness again
through study. Wearing Devadatta’s mask, he has the slender body he had at
the beginning of the play and resumes meeting with pundits who come to
hear him expound on poetry. His marriage has now reached a point where
they can no longer satisfy each other’s needs. Padmini, who says she wants
to replace the dolls, sends her husband on a trip to the Ujjain fair where he
can buy new ones. During his absence, she makes the fateful decision to take
her son into the wilderness in search of Kapila.

3. The Unsayable Secret beyond Constructed Identity

Bhagavata prepares Kapila for Padmini’s visit by bringing him up to date
on events that occurred during his absence, such as the death of his father
and the birth of Padmini’s son. Upon seeing them, Kapila comments on how
the boy looks like her, and she replies that he also looks like him, with the
same mole on his shoulder. But true to her expectations, she quickly notices
that Kapila’s body has changed: “These arms were so slender and fair. Look
at them now. Why have you done this to yourself?” (206). Kapila says,

When this body came to me, it was like a corpse hanging by my head. It was a
Brahmin’s body after all—not made for the woods. . . . The moment it came
to me, a war started between us. (207)
126 Chapter Seven

Karnad suggests that even an ordinary person cannot avoid such a war except
by going beyond the mind/body complex altogether. Although they realize
that the head wins over the body, their nostalgia for past intimacies causes
them to dwell on the head’s conscious content, such as memories of their
visit to the temples of Rudra and Kali. These memories prevent them from
moving toward the void of conceptions that would free them from their
physical attachments. Padmini’s memory of the Kali temple has become her
“autobiography”: “Kapila with Devadatta’s body! Devadatta with Kapila’s
body! Four men in one lifetime” (ibid.). Bhagavata enters the scene again to
provide a commentary on Padmini’s thoughts, explaining that had Devadatta
changed back to his original body overnight, she would have completely
forgotten Kapila. Because he changed so gradually, she could not help but
remember Kapila’s touch—to which she had become irrevocably attached
while living with Devadatta. Both head and body, therefore, carry their own
memories, and these memories define incompleteness by obstructing access
to the void of conceptions.
Tired of “this mad dance of incompleteness,” Kapila was happy that he
had buried his memories, at least until Padmini dug them up again with her
“claws”:

One beats the body into shape, but one can’t beat away the memories in it.
Isn’t that surprising? That the body should have it own ghosts—its own
memories? Memories of touch—memories of a touch—memories of a body
swaying in these arms, of a warm skin against this palm—memories which
one cannot recognize, cannot understand, cannot even name because this head
wasn’t there when they happened. (207-208, original emphasis)

By changing back to his original body, Kapila had hoped to weaken the
memories of Devadatta’s body and achieve a semblance of completeness
between his own mind and body. Padmini, however, tries to distort Kapila’s
logic by arguing that unless his head knows what his body knows, he will
continue to be incomplete. Her real motive, of course, is to insure that
Kapila’s head and body achieve completion through memories with her
rather than without her. But as Karnad demonstrates, any memory of mind
and body, whether united or not, would prevent completion by dint of
evoking the mind’s intentional qualities rather than the emptiness of non-
intentional pure consciousness—which is also the ultimate fullness. By
evoking the mental and physical effects of action, Karnad here implicitly
refers to the law of karma, a basic doctrine in Indian philosophy. As Deutsch
says, karma refers to “the principle of causality which holds that all moral
actions produce moral effects . . . [related to] the principle that there is a
transmigration of the self . . . in a series of births, deaths, and rebirths” (1973,
68). By exchanging heads, Devadatta and Kapila have also exchanged
karma as indicated by their bondage to past action and memory.
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 127

Bhagavata here sings a song about the impossibility of leaving a trace of

memory in a fluid substance like a river: “You cannot engrave on water nor
wound it with a knife, which is why the river has no fear of memories” (208).
While experience and memory can make an impressions on the physical
mind and body, the fluidity of water symbolizes the flexible nature of
consciousness upon which any impression immediately disappears. As
consciousness becomes more refined in the direction of a void in thought, it
becomes like air, a medium so intangible that neither experience nor karma
can leave a trace. Karma and mind, moreover, are interconnected:

[I]f there were no influence of karma, mind would not be. . . . When we look
at karma we find that without the mind (the doer), karma or action cannot be
produced. . . . This Karma is inert. This inert karma supplemented by the life
force, prana, gives rise to mind. This mind is a composite of prana and karma,
and through prana it is connect with unmanifest Being. (Maharishi 1995, 37-
38)

With karma encapsulating both mind and body, for one to become liberated
entails going beyond the physical. In spite of being drawn toward the
completion of emptiness, Devadatta and Kapila have some distance to go
before they are liberated from memory and karma. Having caught up with his
wife and son, Devadatta now enters the scene “yearning to taste the blood of
Kapila” (208). The two friends now admit that they simultaneously feared
and coveted each other’s strengths—Devadatta’s intellect and Kapila’s
power. Each also admits to still loving Padmini. Reaching a deadlock in this
regard, they have a sword fight, not to determine who wins Padmini, but
rather to end their lives for a second time. As Devadatta says, “There’s only
one solution to this,” and Kapila agrees, “We must both die,” and then
continues, “With what confidence we chopped off our heads in that temple!
Now whose head—whose body—suicide or murder—nothing’s clear” (209).
Again they die, and again they leave Padmini out. She realizes afterwards
that offering to live with both of them would not have prevented this
outcome, for they would have had to share not only her, but also the
memories of each other’s bodies and their karmic attachments. The two men
could have liberated themselves from karmic memory only by attaining
completion. As Deutsch notes regarding Atman, karma

cannot be applied to this Oneness. There is nothing within the state of being
designated by ‘Brahman’ or ‘Atman’ that admits of being subject to karma. In
its true nature the self is eternal and hence is untouched by anything that
pertains to the jiva [personal self] or the empirical world of names and forms.
(1973, 72-73; his emphasis)

As the play demonstrates, self-identity based on the attachment to head and

body results in ever more karma and fragmentation.
128 Chapter Seven

Again an outcaste, Padmini asks Bhagavata to have her son raised in the
forest and rivers and then taken to his grandfather, the Revered Brahmin
Vidyasagara. She also tells him, “Make me a large funeral pyre. We are
three” (210), implying that she will join the men. As a sacrifice to Kali, to
whom she still complains for not providing her with a complete husband,
Padmini performs an extraordinary sati for two men simultaneously. But
even at the very end she misconstrues completion in her desire for a physical
head and body that would both appeal to her. As the female chorus implies,
love on this dimension does not bring completion:

Why should love stick to the sap of a single body? When the stem is drunk
with the thick yearning of the many-petaled, many-flowered lantaa, why
should it be tied down to the relation of a single flower? A head for each
breast. A pupil for each eye. A side for each arm. I have neither regret nor
shame. The blood pours into the earth and a song branches out in the sky.
(ibid.)

Just as the whole flower and not merely a single petal is nourished by its
colorless sap, so also a liberating, transpersonal love is not bound to a
physical mind or body, but extends from earth to sky, from mind/body to
consciousness or soul. Once released from the duality of subject and object,
the self no longer feels bound to the body, even though two people may still
be attached physically through marriage. The paradox of human identity thus
hinges on the complementarity of mind/body and witnessing consciousness.
As Karnad’s play demonstrates, without the latter, the former cannot escape a
life of suffering and confusion.
At the end of the play, an Actor brings in Padmini’s son who never
speaks, never reacts, and never lets anybody touch his dolls, leading the
Actor to say, “There’s obviously something wrong with him” (211).
Shortly afterwards, Hayavadana also arrives as a complete horse singing the
National Anthen. When Bhagavata greets him as an old friend, they both roar
with laughter, causing the boy to break his silence and start laughing too.
Bhagavata theorizes that “real beauty lies in the child’s laughter—in the
innocent joy of that laughter. No tragedy can touch it,” but Hayavadana
disagrees, claiming “that it’s this sort of sentimentality which has been the
bane of our literature and national life. It has kept us from accepting Reality
and encourages escapism” (213). Coming from a horse, Hayavadana’s
meaning remains a mystery, but perhaps he implies that joy in a pluralistic
world manifests itself in many ways and cannot be theorized. From a human
perspective, the very act of theorizing the expression of happiness would be
to dwell on the physical, while joy itself, though manifested through the head
and body, has its source beyond the physical in sat-chit-ananda (being,
consciousness, bliss), the state of completion. Unlike Karnad’s play, which
takes the audience toward the void of conceptions, a literature that theorizes,
that tells rather than shows, would lead to escapism and fail to bring Reality
 Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana 129

alive for its audience. After telling the story of how the goddess fulfilled his
request to be complete before he could specify that he meant a complete
human, Hayavadana explains that he sings the National Anthem so it will
ruin his human voice and he can talk like a horse.

I have become a complete horse—but not a complete being! This human

voice—this cursed human voice—it’s still there. How can I call myself
complete? (212)

Singing finally does the trick and he begins to neigh like a real horse, at last
becoming complete. He invites the boy on his back and they ride off together
singing.
Bhagavata concludes by saying,

Unfathomable indeed is the mercy of the elephant-headed Ganesha. He fulfils

the desires of all—a grandson to a grandfather, a smile to a child, a neigh to a
horse. How indeed can one describe his glory in our poor, disabled words?
(213).

The Bhagavad-Gita, however, does find words to express the relation

between body and desire, as in Chapter Six, verse ten.

Let the yogi always collect himself

remaining in seclusion, alone, his
mind and body subdued, expecting
nothing, without possessions. (Maharishi 1967, 402)

The commentary explains how the practice of meditation, which theater

reflects and even to a certain extent replicates,

takes the mind from the consciousness of possessions to the consciousness of

Being. In terms of possessions, it is a process of becoming possessionless: the
Self is left by Itself. (Maharishi 1967, 404)

In the end, Devadatta and Kapila become possessionless in terms of their

own minds and bodies, metaphorically highlighting for the spectator the
presence of the Self or Being left by Itself beyond the physical. To reach the
Self, then, one has to be prepared to lose everything, as do Devadatta and
Kapila. As the commentary continues, “With a free mind he should go to
Being and be—awake in himself and lost to the world. As a result, he will be
possessed of the Self in the midst of the possessions of the world” (ibid.,
original emphasis). Unfortunately for our two lovers, they never manage
while still alive to go beyond their attachment to the mind and body enough
to enjoy the “Self in the midst of the possessions of the world”—that is, to
enjoy the coexistence of mind/body and witnessing consciousness. Instead of
130 Chapter Seven

“expecting nothing” and being “without possessions,” through which they

may have fulfilled their desire for completion in “the midst of possessions,”
they expected and craved lasting fulfillment by gaining possession of
Padmini, which given the transient nature of human relationships was not to
be. Although they failed in this process, the play suggests that the spectator,
with the help of the elephant-headed Ganesha, may still succeed in becoming
complete through their negative example.
 CHAPTER 8:
CONCLUSION: THEATER AND NON-
PLURALISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS

1. The Plays
As discussed in Chapter One, different symbolic traditions have different
ways of describing the shift of consciousness in theater toward sacred events.
In the tradition of Advaita (nondual) Vedanta, this shift is the special focus of
the Natyashastra, the classical treatise on dramaturgy, which has had a
significant influence on Western theories of drama. We can see this influence
in Grotowski’s “poor theater,” Brook’s “total theater,” and Turner’s
redressive or liminal phase of performance art. In this book, I define
liminality or in-between-ness as a “void of conceptions” (derived from the
Maitri Upanishad), which is experienced either intermittently in the spaces
between thoughts, or continuously as the screen of consciousness that
reflects the mind’s phenomenal content. This void, the forth state of pure
consciousness (turiya or Atman) that underlies the three ordinary states of
waking, deep sleep and dreaming, constitutes the transcendent reality of the
world’s diverse mystical traditions—a state beyond images, thoughts,
emotions and other conscious content. By describing this as a “pure
consciousness event” (1999, 6), Forman avoids the confusion caused by the
dualism of a temporal gap between the subject and object associated with the
term “experience.” In this sense, a sacred experience is really a sacred event.
As suggested by the nine plays discussed here, liminal interiority or the
void of conceptions, shared by performer and spectator, lies behind all
cultural constructs as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within
knowledge as its generative condition of unknowingness. Stoppard, Hwang,
Churchill, Shepard, Walcott and Karnad evoke what Artaud calls a concrete
style of speech that integrates mind and body, actor and spectator through a
process of letting go of the boundary between subject and object, sound and
meaning. By investigating this form of theater, Western drama theorists have
tried to understand the transverbal nature of presence, the transpersonal
quality of performance, and the relation between performer and audience.
The Natyashastra, moreover, describes techniques through which a
performer can achieve presence by transcending personal boundaries toward
the unbounded bliss of pure consciousness (sat-chit-ananda), inducing an
aesthetic experience in the spectator that corresponds to Turner's liminal
132 Chapter Eight

phase, Artaud's sublime or metaphysical embodiment, Worthen's

“surrogation,” Grotowski's “translumination,” Brook's “holy theater,” and
Barba's “transcendent” theater—all of which are linked to the Advaitan taste
of a void of conceptions. By taking performer and spectator beyond the
mind's conceptual content, postmodern theater can achieve a presence that is
outside the text even by using language. Although Derrida views theater and
the text as mutually deconstructing and argues that presence “has always
already begun to represent itself” (1978, 249), the six playwrights discussed
here show that presence can indeed be located in a cultural performance that
points through its universally ambiguous and symbolic types toward a
transverbal, transcultural wholeness.
Advaitan language theory explains how wholeness springs from the unity
of the subject and object of knowledge, and how a lack of unity leads to
distortion or misrepresentation. As we move from the ordinary waking state
toward a pure consciousness event, we begin to experience the unity of
sound and meaning, name and form, going from the
temporalizing/spatializing gap between sound and meaning in speech
(vaikhari) and thought (madhyama), to their unity in pashyanti and para
(Coward 1980, 126-37). Theater represents while simultaneously evoking
this unity through the power of suggestion. In Sanskrit Poetics the notion of
suggestion (dhvani) operates in connection with aesthetic rapture (rasa),
which together corresponds to the alienation effect or defamiliarization.
Although defamiliarization can disrupt our “habitual perception of the real
world so as to make it the object of renewed attentiveness” (Bennett 1979,
20), replacing one perceptual paradigm with another, sacred events as
dramatized by the plays above have the power to transform not only
perception, but also consciousness itself, taking us beyond perceptual
paradigms altogether.
Each of the plays above, moreover, renders the ineffability of the void of
conceptions not explicitly as a rationalization, but only as a first-person taste
elicited through aesthetic experience. Postmodern theater suggests that in the
phenomenology of performance, presence is a trans-linguistic state achieved
after language and interpretation have run their course. Through the desire
for “communication with pure forces” (Artaud 1958, 83), life and
performance become indistinguishable as they go beyond the verbal, “single
self” phase of human development. This process has clearly accelerated in
the multimedia age of life as cultural performance. Whether in life or art,
performance as “holy theater” is a radical inwardness devoid of conscious
content that differs from the phenomenology of ordinary introspection.
Performance renders the common ground of translumination present for both
actor and spectator, attenuating the content of consciousness, despite the fact
that modern science has yet to agree on a fundamental theory of
consciousness that explains subjective experience.
 Conclusion: Theater and Non-pluralistic Consciousness 133

Chalmers as we have seen believes that “‘To be conscious’ . . . is roughly

synonymous with ‘to have qualia’” (1986, 6), but even phenomenal
consciousness is called into question by philosophers such as Crick and
Dennett. In their third-person approach, they reduce consciousness to
neuroscience, while others such as Chalmers, Forman, Shear, Nagel and
Searle believe that consciousness as a first-person subjective ontology cannot
be reduced to a third-person objective ontology. Even Sartre, who as we have
seen does not consider sacred events, posits a “non-positional consciousness
of consciousness itself” (1956, Iv). In response to constructivists who claim
that intentional consciousness and even mystical experiences are the product
of language and culture, Forman shows that sacred events result not from a
constructing “but rather from an un-constructing of language and belief . . .
from something like a releasing of experience from language” (1999, 99;
Forman’s emphasis). By language he implies not pashyanti and para but the
lower levels that involve space, time and the duality of subject and object.
Unlike the intentional consciousness of James’ “knowledge-about” and
“knowledge-by-acquaintance,” Forman’s “knowledge-by-identity” is a non-
intentional pure consciousness event beyond the dualism of the knower,
known and process of knowing as in subject-perceiving-object (Forman
1999, 125).
Postmodern performance is usually thought of as a form of intentional
experience involving the duality of subject-thinking-thought, which would
make it not a full presence but an empty presence, or an “aesthetics of
absence” (quoted. in Connor 1989, 141). But as I suggest, even postmodern
theater allows for an aesthetics of presence, given that sacred events are
transcendent to while also immanent within history and the drama of living.
Such events depend only on the displacement by performer and spectator of
fixed forms of identity and on letting go of language and interpretation after
they have served their purpose. As Stoppard and the other playwrights
demonstrate, the radical inwardness and interrelatedness of life and art are
not detached from everyday experience but form a pattern responsive to the
changes associated with time and place.
As discussed in Chapter Two, Stoppard parodies intellectual constructs,
as if intuiting that the intellect, unlike humor, offers no remedy for human
suffering. Humor, which Stoppard exploits, arises from the difference
between emotion and intellect and points to the distinction between mind and
consciousness that underlies the model for theatrical experience presented in
the Natyashastra. In Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga, which formulate
this distinction, consciousness (purusha) differs from primordial materiality
(prakrti), which contains twenty-three components, including mind (manas),
intellect (buddhi, mahat), and ego (ahamkara) (Pflueger 1998, 48). Mind,
intellect, ego, thought, feeling and perception all comprise nonconscious
matter, or the content of witnessing consciousness (purusha). This
nonconscious matter makes up only part of our experience, which finds
134 Chapter Eight

completion through the element of consciousness itself. Stoppard’s theatrical

devices throughout Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead—the
leapfrogging of “A, minus A,” humor, dis-identification, and
unpredictability—accentuate this distinction, if only subliminally. The play
encourages us to leapfrog into a trans-conceptual space beyond language,
and to reflexively witness the mind as it plays with logical conundrums. The
sacredness of Stoppard’s theater consists in pointing us away from the
agitated mind toward the freedom and joy associated with self-discovery
through the internal observer.
Carly Churchill also demonstrates that self-discovery involves not so
much knowing what you are, as knowing what you are not. As we saw in
Chapter Three, this entails “zeroing” everything outside the basic “I am” of
nonintentional self-awareness. Churchill starts from what Sartre calls “non-
positional consciousness” or consciousness “pour-soi,” and then moves
toward a qualityless “I am” transcendent to yet immanent within duality. Her
feminist theater deconstructs the oppositions that would privilege the
masculine subject or any egoic identity, revealing it to be nothing more than
part of a relational matrix of multiple energies. Cloud Nine undermines the
claim that a series of contexts fully constitute the individual by showing that
identity also includes witnessing or mindfulness, which Wallace describes as
imaginatively viewing “one’s own psychological processes from a ‘second-
person’ perspective” (2001, 213). The doubling and cross-casting of
characters in Cloud Nine encourages mindfulness by un-constructing
conceptual boundaries that lock the subject within the binary oppositions of
player/role, masculine/feminine. When a player, such as Betty in Act One, is
a man in the role of a woman, s/he is spontaneously mindful of his/her
multiple identities. In this process performer and spectator transcend the very
concept of identity, whether essentialist or constructed, and move toward “I
am” through knowledge-by-identity.
Similarly in Top Girls, the personal crisis of the female characters causes
them to aspire for excellence and a higher self. Grinshpon, who distinguishes
between what he calls the “lesser self” and the “better self,” argues that the
heart of storytelling involves “the healing potency of ‘knowledge of the
better self’” (2003, viii). In contrast to the lesser self, the better self is defined
as Atman or witnessing consciousness, which Grinshpon refers to as “Vedic
otherness” (5). The hardships endured by the characters, especially those at
the dinner party in Act One, arise not from their socially constructed
identities, their lesser selves usually set in the past, but rather from their
ongoing identification with the interplay of the relational structures of
society. On the basis of action associated with the lesser self, which provides
the historical context for awareness to go beyond conceptuality, the play
pulls the women toward the better self through a desire for success and
happiness, and pushes them in this direction through the crises of their daily
lives. At the same time, it leads the spectator through the power of suggestion
 Conclusion: Theater and Non-pluralistic Consciousness 135

toward the ineffability of Being. As the fate of Churchill’s women

demonstrates, happiness cannot be constructed by the intellect in connection
with the five senses, but rather reveals itself only in the state of no-self or no-
concept. We enjoy happiness “during” knowledge-by-identity in the present,
not in the past or future. Like Churchill, Hwang also dramatizes the Advaitan
adage that consciousness has no identity; “Out of ignorance, and
identification with the body, you experience pleasure and pain even though
consciousness is universal and just functions through the body” (Maharaj
2001, 163).
M. Butterfly questions the unified concept of self as a function of the
intentional mind and opens up a theatrical space through which performers
and spectators can taste the void of conceptions. As the play unfolds, Rene
Gallimard watches from a reflexive distance the stories of his narrative self
run through his mind. His phenomenal experience centers on his love for
Song—however delusional—and his longing for empathy from the spectator
as judge and jury. His ideas about the Orient, gender, Song, and imperialist
power, rendered to the audience through dramatic monologue, are repeatedly
un-constructed, but his self as witness remains unchanged, until
overshadowed in the final scenes by his mind’s rhetorical identifications with
his past. Hwang’s theater, like that of Churchill and Shepard, suggests that
the mind with its phenomenal features is the content of consciousness, and
that the internal observer witnesses the mind’s ever-changing content without
in the least changing itself.
As argued in Chapter Five, Shepard’s aesthetic vision involves a “primal
artistic holon” (Wilber 1997, 114-16), with a holon being an entity that is
neither whole nor part, but part/whole simultaneously (Koestler 1967). The
creative impulse of Niles in Suicide in B-Flat and Hoss in The Tooth of
Crime originates from a primal artistic holon, or pure consciousness as the
void of conceptions. The primal holon does not enter the mind of the artist in
a vacuum, but rather instantly engages all the cultural and psychological
contexts of human existence. In tying to empty his consciousness of the other
voices that prevent his reaching the primal holon, Niles initially resists the
holonic fusion with community, but finally sees the value of accepting the
reality of social integration. Hoss, on the other hand, has lost faith both in
himself as an artist and in his ability to tap into his primal holon. He becomes
obsessed with his socially constructed image as a rock messiah and thus
vulnerable to Crow, the younger artist who challenges his dominance.
As Shepard’s work illustrates, even though contentful experience is
context related, aesthetic experience as a void of conceptions can still be
context-free in and of itself. The deconstruction of a mediated concept does
not extend to contentless experience of the self as witness—which in its
context-free status is not a concept. The poststructuralist view of the subject
as a cultural construct dispersed along a chain of signifiers (Lacan 1978)
implies that a concept can be aware of itself thinking. This claim, however,
136 Chapter Eight

does not hold from an Advaitan view, which includes a consideration of non-
intentional pure consciousness. Derrida and other poststructuralists try to
deconstruct transcendentality and consciousness, but as Shepard’s theater
suggests, the void of conceptions eludes the reductiveness of the temporal
mind. Niles and Hoss reveal that the self as witness expressed through the
primal artistic holon exceeds conscious content, just as the actor appearing
on stage exceeds the dramatic text by rendering present for the audience a
new life that the text does not exhaust (see Goldman 2000, 50). In his final
monologue, Niles says that he and the others are not separate but “Only one.
Indivisible” (155). Here he describes from a postexperiential viewpoint the
primal state of interconnectedness immanent within yet beyond all thought
and creative expression. As suggested by Katz (1992, 7-9), the paradox of
this kind of assertion has the power to impel the mind beyond
rationalizations and logical certitudes toward the kind of interconnectedness
suggested by Shepard’s theater.
The drive toward a void of conceptions dramatized by Suicide in B-Flat,
however, appears only as a trace in The Tooth of Crime. In his duel with
Crow, Hoss loses out to Crow’s self-referential style of verbal ingenuity.
Crow’s technique points to the more unified levels of language associated
with higher consciousness as described by the Indian grammarian Bhartrhari
(Coward 1980, 126-37). These higher levels, where meaning emerges as a
noumenal whole, have a disorientating effect on Hoss, who now languishes
beyond access to the primal artistic holon. Reminiscent of Derrida’s
aconceptual concepts, Hoss and Niles dramatize the subtle presence/absence
of a contentless realm of experience as the essence of theater. By setting up
the conditions for making the invisible visible, Shepard highlights the risks
of neglecting the invisible dimension of human activity. Like Shepard,
Walcott also points to the invisible in Dream on Monkey Mountain through
Makak’s visionary experience.
As Chapter Six proposes, the white mist of Makak’s mystical experience
symbolizes a void of conceptions. By the end of the play, Makak wants to
return to Monkey Mountain and “be forgotten,” which implies a
nonattachment to the world of conventional identity as well as to the magical
attributes and supernatural performances brought on by his visionary
experience. Predicting that future prophets who come and go will only be
“stoned and mocked,” he now wants nothing more than to live as an “old
hermit” unencumbered by profane or even visionary attachments. When he
says, “Come, Moustique, we going home” (326), he refers not to Africa, nor
to the dualism of the twin “bewitchings” represented by Africa and Europe,
white and black, but rather to a place within each of us beyond our socially
constructed identities. By putting an end to his mimicking of Europe and
Africa, his visionary experience transforms him into a genuine hybrid, and
hybridity, as I suggest, is ultimately a function of his longing to “restrain his
mind from the external,” “put to rest objects of sense,” and “continue void of
 Conclusion: Theater and Non-pluralistic Consciousness 137

conceptions” (Maitri Upanishad, 6:18-19, in Hume 1921, 436). This

experience, which corresponds to the primal artistic holon in Shepard, is
something that Walcott as a writer also finds appealing. Dream on Monkey
Mountain comes full circle back to this source of creative intelligence, from
which the “mind half-sees and half-creates.” Through Makak’s Adamic
vision, Walcott suggests a New World aesthetic, one that can recreate the
Caribbean beyond the duality of historical determinism. Also writing from a
postcolonial context, Girish Karnad explores Indian cultural values that deal
specifically with higher consciousness.
Drawing upon Western and Indian influences, Karnad’s Hayavadana
examines the universal question of human completeness: does our essential
identity derive from body or mind? As I argue throughout the book, the
answer is neither. Like all the plays I have discussed, Hayavadana
demonstrates that human identity extends from the material to the non-
material, from mind/body to witnessing consciousness. As dramatized by the
characters in the play, to identify solely with either mind or body leads only
to confusion and despair. In addition to the Brechtian technique of enacting a
critical distance through devices such as half-curtains, dolls and masks,
Hayavadana further extends this critical distance through its Indian
philosophical content, thematically shifting the attention of the audience from
intentional mind toward a glimpse of non-intentional pure consciousness.
The Indian cultural context combined with the play’s formal devices has the
effect of emptying the phenomenal mind and promoting a transpersonal,
transcultural experience. Even after decapitating themselves and then being
restored to life when Padmini reattaches but accidentally exchanges their
heads, Devadatta and Kapila still experience a continuity of self. This
continuity results not from identification with either mind or body, but rather
from the non-contingent observing self. As a bimodal entity, the self has the
capacity to interpret the content of its cultural environment while at the same
time witnessing it through pure awareness. The identities of the characters
change with the changing plot, but character and audience also lend
coherence to this change through the unifying perspective of the internal
observer.
As I suggest throughout the book, the missing element in the
deconstructive understanding of the self is an appreciation of non-thought
associated by Artaud with Asian theater, and suggested in postmodern theater
through the unconstructing of cultural identity as a function of the mind’s
conscious content. As the nine plays interpreted here demonstrate, first-
person consciousness as the internal observer complements the third-person
concept of self as an object of knowledge, a rhetorical construct or the “Word
as everything” typically associated with Western theater (Artaud 1958, 68).
Although different cultural interpretations of the non-intentional void of
conceptions are possible after the fact, this diversity does not validate
relativism or the constructivist argument. For one thing, not all cognitive
138 Chapter Eight

contexts from which we view sacred events are equally appropriate, and for
another the void of conceptions is accurately understood only by being it.
Postmodern theater, moreover, suggests that this void in thought can
originate in any of cultural context, thus supporting the claim that access to
non-intentional consciousness is cross-cultural as well as trans-historical.
Through the power of suggestion, then, the nine plays above, like much of
postmodern theater, can induce ordinary spectators around the world to un-
construct the duality of intentional consciousness.

2. Theater, Deconstruction and Universality

In addition to dramatizing sacred events, each of the plays analyzed
above also makes them aesthetically available to the audience through its
self-reflexive dramatic structure. While latent within the self, such an event
still depends on an appropriate context. Even postmodern contexts, as part of
the expanding Grassroots Spirituality Movement in the United States and
around the world, can induce a sacred event. As I suggest, postmodernism
presents no obstacle to the right conditions for making the invisible visible.
On the contrary, by deconstructing the contents of consciousness,
postmodernist playwrights can be highly effective in leading the spectator
toward a void of conceptions. Whether or not the characters—as they shift,
forget or replace their historical identities—recognize these events in
themselves does not preclude the spectator from having the aesthetic
experience of subliminally recognizing them through knowledge-by-identity.
Often, as we have seen, both performer and spectator share this event
through an intersubjective theatrical space. Particularly in plays such as M.
Butterfly, The Tooth of Crime, Dream on Monkey Mountain and
Hayavadana, the self-reflexiveness of the characters can negate the contents
of the spectator’s mind and lead them both toward a taste (rasa) of pure
consciousness (turiya).
As Derrida, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and others have repeatedly
declared, the fact that contexts are infinite and sliding does not imply that
conceptual meaning cannot be established or that truth does not exist.
Meaning emerges from the intentional content of consciousness and is
therefore context specific, while sacred events that manifest through specific
contexts emerge from non-intentional pure consciousness, which in itself is
non-linguistic and decontextual. Derrida claims that “no meaning can be
determined out of context, but no context permits saturation” (1979, 81). As
Jonathan Culler puts it, one can “identify deconstruction with the twin
principles of the contextual determination of meaning and the infinite
extendibility of context” (1982, 215). On this view, any experience, meaning,
or perspective is always already an interpretation mediated by a set of
concepts, never direct or natural. Constructivists like Steven Katz argue
 Conclusion: Theater and Non-pluralistic Consciousness 139

against the notion of a single, shared reality and the “mirror of nature” (as in
self-nature) paradigm in art, while Forman, Shear and others have shown the
fallacy of the claim that all experience, including the sacred, is an
epiphenomenon of neuroscience, language and culture. In their view, the
constructivist model works only for the ordinary experience of thought,
speech and perception that involves the intentional objects of mind; it does
not apply to the trophotropic states of non-intentional pure consciousness like
those suggested by the plays above.
In a more moderate constructivism, subject and world are not pregiven
but exist within contexts that develop in history. As Kant revealed, subjects
create the world in the reciprocal process of being created by it. Thoughts
and language do not merely reflect reality, but as a performance of what we
seek to know constitute a movement of that reality. Judith Butler argues that
“truth” cannot be separated from presentation, from the rhetoricity through
which it is communicated. She relates this position to an “affirmative
deconstruction”—elaborated by writers such as Derrida, Spivak, and
Agamben—which does not deny truth but simply makes it dependent on
language and the capacity of concepts to change when they appear in
different contexts. “Language,” Butler says, “will not only build the truth that
it conveys, but it will also convey a different truth from the one that was
intended, and this will be a truth about language, its unsurpassability in
politics” (2000, 279). This moderate cultural constructivism, which entails
James’ knowledge-about and knowledge-by-acquaintance, does not
contradict but rather complements the theatrical suggestion of an aesthetic
taste (rasa) of knowledge-by-identity, which does not deal only with
meaning on the temporal levels of vaikhari and madhyama but extends it to
pashyanti and para. Theater as a sacred space encompasses the exterior
components of the physical and social worlds that Butler refers to, but also
transcends these through an interior-to-interior aesthetic connection that co-
creates the qualitatively unique experience of reflexive non-intentional
consciousness, which includes a non-temporal dimension of meaning.
If we do not find absolute reality or universal truth in the sacred events of
stage drama, it is both because no conceptual context is absolute and because
sacred events involve a void of conceptions. A non-intentional experience
cannot serve as the ground for truth or even propositions because it is not in
itself propositional. Cognitive knowledge on the ordinary levels of language
and consciousness includes a cultural context, a background of language,
concepts, behavioral patterns, definitions, etc., all of which give this
knowledge its meaning and significance. Being empty of conceptual content,
however, non-intentional pure consciousness as evidenced by these plays
does not constitute a form of cognitive knowledge, such as knowledge-about,
but rather a knowledge-by-identity through which language and
consciousness unite (para). In spite of not being absolute in a cognitive
140 Chapter Eight

sense, therefore, these plays still qualify as being universal because they can
induce the trans-cultural experience of emptying the mind’s cultural content.
In the hope of redressing the kind of criticism made against structuralism
and poststructuralism for failing to take universality into account and for
eroding “its force by questioning its foundational status,” Butler and her co-
authors “maintain that universality is not a static presumption, nor an a priori
given, and that it ought instead to be understood as a process or condition
irreducible to any of its determinate modes of appearance” (Butler 2000, 3).
Just as universality is irreducible to its modes of appearance, so also is pure
consciousness, as a field of unity or silence devoid of constituent parts,
irreducible to the modes of mind. While an American theater audience will
differ culturally from a Korean theater audience, all evidence suggests that
the experience of relishing a sacred event through stage drama would be the
same for both. As Jonathan Shear says, “the experience of pure
unboundedness is phenomenologically unique. This is because two
experiences of qualityless unboundedness cannot be phenomenologically
different, since there is nothing in either to distinguish it from the other”
(1990, 136). He goes on to say that, given the overall correlation between
accounts of a void of conceptions, “it appears reasonable, in the face of any
reference to differentiating content, to think that the unbounded components
of the various experiences are also the same, even where . . . such
components are not explicitly identified as qualityless” (1990, 137).
The void of conceptions suggested by these nine plays forms a thread
connecting all theater audiences who have had a taste of no-thought. Latently,
it also connects people in general who as ordinary humans have the capacity
for a non-intentional aesthetic experience, as indicated by grassroots
spirituality. Because consciousness itself is omnipresent as the container of
qualia or conscious content, it is not unreasonable to expect that a sacred
event can occur at almost any time, whether through stage drama or the
drama of living. Whenever the right conditions destabilize our constructed
identities and diminish the mind’s conscious content, as in postmodern
theater, we have the potential to experience consciousness in its pure
unbounded state. Forman says that “Consciousness itself is a, or perhaps the
only, nonpluralistic feature of what it is to be human” (1999, 132). Arguably,
as these plays demonstrate, if the intentional consciousness of an object is a
universal experience, then non-intentional consciousness is also potentially
universal, being omnipresent behind our perceptions and historical selves.
While only Karnad, Walcott and perhaps Shepard directly refer to mystical
experience, all of these plays suggest a double epistemological structure that
encompasses both the awareness of objects, and the delightful taste of what it
is like to be self-aware through knowledge-by-identity.
 NOTES

Chapter 1:
1. All in-text citations to the plays in this and the following chapters refer to the
texts listed in the Works Cited.
2. I follow the definition of consciousness in the Vedic tradition, specifically
Shankara’s Advaita (nondual) Vedanta, as expressed in Vedic texts such as the
Upanishads and expounded in the West by writers such Jonathan Shear (1990),
Robert Forman (1998, 1999), Arthur Deikman (1996), and others. In this definition
pure consciousness cannot be reduced to neuroscience—to a bunch of neurons—or
assimilated to behavior or function. It is not merely an epiphenomenon of brain
functioning but an autonomous entity. The Vedic model of the mind also posits
higher states in the development of consciousness. Vedic psychology, as Charles
Alexander notes, proposes “an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally
integrated faculties or levels of mind (1990, 290). The term “mind” as I use it
throughout the book derives from the latter of its following two uses in Vedic
psychology: “It [mind] refers to the overall multilevel functioning of consciousness as
well as to the specific level of thinking (apprehending and comparing) within that
overall structure” (Alexander 1986, 291). The levels of the overall functioning of
mind in Vedic psychology extend from the senses, desire, mind, intellect, feelings,
and ego, to pure consciousness. As used here in the analysis of sacred experience in
theater, self as a void in thought refers to pure consciousness (turiya), which is
neurophysiologically distinct from the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and
dreaming, and which is both immanent within and transcendent to the individual ego
and thinking mind.
3. In addition to the fourth (turiya), Vedic psychology also posits further stages in
the development of consciousness. The permanent experience of pure consciousness
(turiya chetana) simultaneously with the other three states (waking, sleeping, and
dreaming) is called cosmic consciousness (turiyatit chetana or the fifth), which
Forman refers to as the “dualistic mystical state” (1999, 131-67). As sensory
perception is enhanced through pure consciousness, one achieves “refined” cosmic
consciousness (Bhagavat chetana or the sixth). Finally, in unity consciousness
(Brahmi chetana or the seventh), one is able to perceive everything in terms of one’s
own transcendental self (Alexander 1990, 290).
4. Several hundred psychological, physiological, behavioral, and sociological
studies have shown that hypoaroused states, as in subjects practicing a wide range of
meditative techniques, including Zen Buddhism, Yoga, and the TM technique, are
characterized by a more refined neurophysiology than ordinary states. These studies
have been published in a variety of research journals (Scientific American, Journal of
Counseling Psychology, International Journal of Neuroscience, American Journal of
Physiology, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, Psychosomatic
Medicine, Perceptual and Motor Skills, Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, etc.). A well-known example is the study made by John Farrow,
“Physiological Changes Associated with Transcendental Consciousness, The State of
Least Excitation of Consciousness,” in David Orme Johnson, ed., Scientific Research
142 Notes

on the Transcendental Meditation Program, Livingston Manor, N.Y.: Meru Press,

1977. As Maharishi Mahesh Yogi asserts, “Through transcendental meditation (TM),
the attention is brought from gross experience to subtler fields of experience until the
subtlest experience is gained. . . . This state of transcendental pure consciousness [is]
also known as Self-consciousness, Self-awareness [or] Samadhi” (1967, 144).
Moreover, with regard to Buddhist mindfulness meditation, Varela, Thompson and
Rosch suggest that “the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and of nondualism that grow out
of this method have a significant contribution to make in a dialogue with cognitive
science” (1991, 21).
5. As Jonathan Shear observes, “Much of this research has examined
physiological correlates of reports of samadhi experiences. This research, conducted
on people practicing Zen, Yoga and the Transcendental Meditation technique, has
shown repeatedly, for example, that reports of experiences are highly correlated with
deep states of physiological rest, including decreased cardio-vascular activity and
complete cessation of respiration, as long claimed in the traditional meditation
literature” (1990, 47). These parameters have not been observed outside of sacred
experiences, such as reports of samadhi, which indicates that they do not correspond
to the state of ordinary waking consciousness.

Chapter 2:
1. As we have seen, no theory of consciousness has yet been generally accepted
by the scientific community. Cognitive scientists like Daniel Dennett (1991) and
Francis Crick (1994) define consciousness in material terms as a “virtual machine”
and “a pack of neurons,” respectively, while others like David Chalmers (1996),
Joseph Levine (1983), Colin McGinn (1991), and Robert Forman (1999) point to the
failure of purely materialistic theories to explain consciousness or the nature of
subjective experience. Science has yet to resolve the “explanatory gap” (Levine)
between materialism and qualia—the phenomenal properties of our experience such
as colors, smells, and tastes. Western theories of consciousness include materialism
(Dennett, Crick, and Michael Tye (1995)), dualism (Chalmers) and mysterianism
(McGinn, who believes we lack the right concepts for understanding consciousness,
which therefore remains a mystery). Relying on third-person observation, Western
theories of consciousness are still in the developmental phase, while Eastern theories,
based on first-hand experience (knowledge-by-identity) and the record of sacred texts,
have long reached their full maturity.
2. In a footnote Throop distinguishes between his use of pre- and trans-conceptual
awareness and Ken Wilber's notion of the "pre/trans fallacy" used in the defense of a
non-regressive transpersonal experience. In Wilber's usage, pre-conceptual is viewed
as regressive and "pre-egoic," and trans-conceptual is viewed as progressive and
"trans-egoic" (see Wilber 1997, 182-85; 1996, 59-65). Throop, on the other hand,
views pre-conceptual awareness in opposition to post-conceptual awareness, the
stages of "consciousness or perception that have already been shaped and mediated by
conceptual constructs and models"; and trans-conceptual awareness in opposition to
sub-conceptual awareness, "which is precisely the level of consciousness that
corresponds to the developmental state of an infant's consciousness early in
ontogenesis" (2000, note 22, 48). Wilber's pre-conceptual thus corresponds to
 Notes 143

Throop's sub-conceptual, while their definitions of trans-conceptual awareness seem

to be largely the same and are shared by Forman, Shear, and Deikman.
3. “Self-referral” as used here signifies the self knowing itself as pure
consciousness through knowledge-by-identity, or as the Upanishadic text says, of
knowing “That which is non-thought, [yet] which stands in the midst of thought.” In
the advaitan tradition it also means that pure consciousness (Atman) is fully awake to
itself, undifferentiated and self-shining, beyond space and time, “aware only of the
Oneness of being” (Deutsch 1973, 48).
4. See Hunter, 2000, for a helpful synopsis of Earnest in relation to Travesties
(111-15).

Chapter 4:
1. In the context of Vedic aesthetics, the incipient experience of pure
consciousness (turiya or the fourth) together with qualia, the qualities of the ordinary
waking mind, carries a flavor of the higher state, the fifth, which Maharishi Mahesh
Yogi refers to as cosmic consciousness, and Robert Forman refers to as the dualistic
mystical state.
2. Phenomenological critics like Poulet describe the audience as passive
recipients of the content of the author’s consciousness, but in the experience of M.
Butterfly, as I suggest, the audience actively transcends content toward a taste of pure
consciousness.
3. For an analysis of how consciousness antedates language in the Vedic tradition
and how this pertains to literature, see Haney 2002, 67-88.
4. As Harold Coward suggests in The Sphota Theory of Language (1980), going
beyond narrative, as in hors-texte, does not mean to leave language behind entirely,
but only the lower levels of language. The two higher levels, pashyanti and para, as
we have seen, posit a transtemporal unity of signifier and signified, name and form
that underlies aesthetic experience.

Chapter 5:
1. This integration between the primal artistic holon (pure consciousness) and
ordinary waking consciousness, if it becomes an all-time experience, would
correspond to the dualistic mystical state or cosmic consciousness.
2. In describing what it is like to experience pure consciousness or never-
changing Being, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, one of the most renowned sages of India,
says, “Change can be brought about only in the unreal. No change can be made in the
real, the truth. In the world you can effect improvement in the concepts, but do not
dare call the concepts the truth. The truth can understand untruth; but can untruth
understand truth? . . . The truth cannot be seen or perceived; but the truth can observe
the untruth” (2001, 159-60).
 WORKS CITED

Alexander, Charles N., Robert W. Cranson, Robert W. Boyer, David W.

Orme-Johnson. 1986. “Transcendental Consciousness: A Fourth State of
Consciousness beyond Sleep, Dream, and Waking.” Sleep and Dream
Sourcebook. Ed. Jayne Gackenbach. New York and London: Garland
Publishing Inc.
Alexander, Charles N. et al. 1990. “Growth of Higher Stages of
Consciousness: Maharishi’s Vedic Psychology of Human Development.”
Higher Stages of Human Development. Perspectives of Human Growth.
Eds. Charles N. Alexander and Ellen J. Langer. New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Almond, Philip. 1990. “Mysticism and Its Contexts.” The Problem of Pure
Consciousness. Ed. Robert K. C. Forman. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Althusser, Louis. 1971. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. London: New
Left Books, 1971.
Anandavardhana. Dhvanyaloka. 1974. Ed. And trans. K. Krishnamoorthy.
Dharwar, India: Karnatak U P.
Artaud, Antonin. 1958. The Theater and Its Double. Trans. Mary C.
Richards. New York: Grove Press.
———. Selected Writings. 1988. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. 2002. The Empire Writes
Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures, 2nd edition.
London and New York: Routledge.
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of
Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso.
Awasthi, S. 1989. “’Theater of Roots’: Encounter with Tradition.” Drama
Review. 33.4: 48-69.
Banfield, C. 1996. “Girish Karnad and an Indian Theatre of Roots.” An
Introduction to Post-colonial Theatre. B. Crow and C. Banfield. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Barnard, G. William. 1994. Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and
the Philosophy of Mysticism. Dissertation. The University of Chicago.
Barba, Eugenio. 1985. "Interview with Gautam Dasgupta." Performing Arts
Journal. January.
Barrantes-Vidal, Neus. 2004. “Creativity and Madness Revisited from
Current Psychological Perspectives.” Journal of Consciousness Studies.
11.3-4:58-78.
146 Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. 1974. "Baudelaire's Theater." Critical Essays. Evantston:

NorthWestern University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 1969. Illuminatioins. Ed. Hannah Arend. Trans. Harry
Zohn. New York: Schocken Books.
Bennett, Tony. 1979. Formalism and Marxism. London: Routledge.
Benveniste, Émile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Trans. M. E.
Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press.
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York:
Routledge.
Bharata. 1987. The Natyashastra. Trans. A Board of Scholars. Delhi: Sri
Satguru.
Blau, Herbert. 1987. The Eye of Prey: Subversions of the Postmodern.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Blau du Plessis, Rachel. 1985. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative
Strategies of 20th Century Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1982. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willet. New
York: Hill and Wang.
Brook, Peter. 1968. The Empty Space. London: McGibbon and Kee.
———. 1987. The Shifting Point: Forty Years of Theatrical Exploration:
1946-1987. London: Methuen.
———. 1998. “The Holy Theatre: Happenings.” Modern Theories of
Drama. Ed. G. W. Brandt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brown, Lloyd. 1993. “Dreamers and Slaves: The Ethos of Revolution in
Walcott and Leroi Jones.” Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Ed.
Robert Hamner. Colorado Springs: Three Continents Press.
Burke, Kenneth. 1966. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life,
Literature and Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Burnett, Paula. 2000. Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of
Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, co-authors. 2000.
Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the
Left. London and New York: Verso.
Carlson, Marvin. 1990. Theater Semiotics: Signs of Life. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Chakrabarti, Tarapada. 1971. Indian Aesthetics and Science of Language.
Calcutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar.
Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
 Works Cited 147

Chan, Tina. 1994. “Betrayed into Motion: The Seduction of Narrative Desire
in M. Butterfly.” HCM: A Journal of Assian American Cultural Criticism.
1.2 (Spring): internet.
Churchill, Caryl. 1960. "Not Ordinary, Not Safe." The Twentieth Century.
Vol. CLXVIII: 446.
———. 1985. Plays One: Owners, Traps, Vinegar Tom, Light Shining in
Buckinghamshire, Cloud Nine. London: Methuen.
———. Top Girls. 1991. “Commentary and Notes,” Bill Naismith. London:
Methuen.
Cixous, Hélèna. 1976. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Signs 1 (Summer): 880.
———. 1986. “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays.” The Newly
Born Woman. H. Cixous and C. Clïment. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Coetzee, J. M. 2001. "Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project. The New York
Review of Books.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1983. Biographia Literaria: Biographical
Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions. 1817. Eds James Engell and
W. Jackson Bate. Princeton: Bollingen.
Conner, Steven. 1986. “Postmodern Performance.” Postmodernism and
Politics. Ed. Jonathan Arac. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1989. Postmodern Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the
Contemporary. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Coward, Harold. 1976. Bartrhari. Boston: Twayne.
———. 1980. The Sphota Theory of Language. Columbia, MO: South Asia
Books.
———. 1990. Derrida and Indian Philosophy. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
Culler, Jonathan. 1982. On Deconstruction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Crick, Francis. 1994. The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Dhanavel, P. 1993. “The Romance of Influence: A Bloomian Perspective on
Girish Karnad’s Hayavadana.” Indian Journal of American Studies. 23.1:
118-20.
De, S. K. 1963. Sanskrit Poetics as a Study of Aesthetics. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Deikman, Arthur. 1996. “’I’ = Awareness.” Journal of Consciousness
Studies. 3.4:350-56.
Delaney, Paul. 2001. “Exit Tomáš Straüssler, enter Sir Tom Stoppard.” The
Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Ed. Katherine E. Kelly.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge U P.
Demastes, William W. 2002. Staging Consciousness: Theater and the
Materialization
of Mind. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
148 Works Cited

Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness Explained. London and New York:

Penguin.
de Quincey, Christian. 2000. "The Promise of Integralism: A Critical
Appreciation of Ken Wilber's Integral Psychology." Journal of
Consciousness Studies. 7.11-12: 177-208.
DeRose, David J. 2002. “Sam Shepard as Musical Experimenter.” The
Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. Ed. Matthew Roudané.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1977. “Limited Inc.” Supplement to Glyph 2. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press.
———. 1978. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
———. 1979. "Living On: Border Lines." Deconstruction and Criticism.
Eds. Bloom et al. New York: Seabury.
———. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York
and London: Routledge.
Deutsch, Eliot. 1973. Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction.
Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Diamond, Elin. 1988. "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic
Feminist Criticism." TDR 8 (Spring): 82-94.
Eco, Umberto. 1994. The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana U P.
Eng, David L. 2001. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian
America. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Farrow, John. 1977. “Physiological Changes Associated with Transcendental
Consciousness, the State of Least Excitation.” Scientific Research on the
Transcendental Meditation Program. Ed. David Orme-Johnson.
Livingston Manor, New York: Meru Press.
Fortier, Mark. 2002. Theory/Theatre: An Introduction, 2nd edition. London
and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Forman, Robert K. C. 1998. “Introduction: Mystical Consciousness, the
Innate Capacity, and the Perennial Psychology.” The Innate Capacity:
Mysticism, Psychology, and Philosophy. Ed. Robert K. C. Forman. New
York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 1999. Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness. New York: SUNY Press.
———. 2004. Grassroots Spirituality: What it is, Why it is here, Where it is
going. Exeter, UK & Charlottesville, VA: Academic Imprint.
Fox, Robert E. 1993. “Big Night Music: Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey
Mountain and the ‘Splendours of Imagination.’” Critical Perspectives on
Derek Walcott. Ed. Robert D. Hammer. Washington: Three Continents
Press.
Fuchs, Elinor. 1985. “Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-thinking
Theater after Derrida.” Performing Arts Journal. 26.7:163-73.
 Works Cited 149

Gergen, Kenneth J. 1991. The Saturated Self: Dilemma of Identity in

Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books.
Gilbert, Helen, ed. 2001. Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. London and
New York, Routledge.
Gilman, Richard. 1984. “Introduction.” Sam Shepard: Seven Plays. Toronto,
New York, London: Bantam.
Gimello, Robert. 1978. “Mysticism and Mediation.” Mysticism and
Philosophical Analysis. Ed. Steven Katz. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Goldman, Michael. 2000. On Drama: Boundaries of Genre, Borders of Self.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. 1994. “The New World Border: Prophecies for the
End of the Century.” The Drama Review. 38.1 (Spring): 119-42.
Grinshpon, Yohanan. (2003). Crisis and Knowledge: The Upanishadic
Experience and Storytelling. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grotowski, Jerzy. 1969. Towards a Poor Theatre. Ed. Eugenio Barba with
Preface by Peter Brook. London: Methuen.
———. 1998. “The Theatre’s New Testament.” Modern Theories of Drama.
Ed. G. W. Brandt. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haedicke, Janet V. 1992. "David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly: The Eye on
the Wing." Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. (Fall): 2744.
Hamner, Robert. 1995. “Introduction to Critical Perspectives on Derek
Walcott.” Three Dynamite Authors. Ed. Donald E. Herdick. Colorado
Springs: Three Continents Press.
Haney II, William S. 2002. Culture and Consciousness: Literature Regained.
Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press.
———. 2004. “Derrida’s Indian Literary Subtext.” Chapter in Derrida’s
Indian Philosophical
Subtext. Eds. Dimple Godiwala and William S. Haney II. Special Issue of
online journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 5, No. 2
(August).
http://www.aber.ac.uk/~drawww/journal/
Habermass, Jürgen. 1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 2.
Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason. Trans.
Thomas McCarthey.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Hassan, Ihab. 1987. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory
and Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University.
Hayles, Katherine N. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in
Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago & London: University
of Chicago Press.
Heuvel, Michael Vanden. 2001. “’Is Postmodernism?’”: Stoppard
Among/Against the Postmoderns.” The Cambridge Companion to Tom
150 Works Cited

Stoppard. Ed. Katherine E. Kelly. Cambridge: Cambridge Univerity

Press.
Hogan, Patrick C. “Literature, God, and the Unbearable Solitude of
Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 11, No. 5 (2004): 116-
42.
Hume, Robert. 1921. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads. Oxford: Oxford
Univeristy Press.
Hunter, Jim. 1982. Tom Stoppard’s Plays. New York: Grove Press.
———. 2000. Tom Stoppard: Faber Critical Studies. London and New
York: Faber and Faber.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.
Hwang, David Henry. 1989. M. Butterfly. New York: Plume.
--———. 1988. Author's Notes. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play
Service, Inc.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1988. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological
Approach.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge.
London and New York: Longman.
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology (2 volumes). London:
Macmillan.
Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act. London and New York: Routledge.
Jonas, H. 1979. Gnostic Religion. New York: Beacon Press.
Jones, Adrian. 1999. “Gender Roles in Churchill’s Top Girls.”
Sales@innogize.com. Retrieved on 8 November 2004 from
http://www.innogize.com/papers/topgirls.html.
Karnad, Girish. 2001. “Hayavadana.” Postcolonial Plays: An Anthology. Ed.
Helen Gilbert. London and New York: Routledge.
Karnad, Girish. 1995a. Three Plays: Naga-Mandala, Hayavadana, Tughlaq.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Karnad, Girish. 1995b. “Performance, Meaning, and the Materials of Modern
Indian Theater. Interview by A. Dharwadker. New Theater Quarterly.
11.44: 355-70.
Katz, Steven T. 1978. “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism.” Mysticism
and Philosophical Analysis. Ed. S. Katz. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
———. 1992. “Mystical Speech and Mystical Meaning.” Mysticism and
Language. Ed. Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, Katherine E., ed. 2001. “Introduction: Tom Stoppard in
Transformation.” The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univesity Press.
Koestler, Arthur. 1967. The Ghost in the Machine. New York: Macmillan.
Kondo, Dorrine K. 1990. "M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique
of Essentialist Identity." Cultural Critique (Fall): 5-29.
 Works Cited 151

Krishnamoorthy, K. 1968. Some Thoughts on Indian Aesthetics and Literary

Criticism. Prasaranga, India: University of Mysore Press.
Kritzer, Amelia Howe. 1991. The Plays of Caryl Churchill. London:
Macmillan.
Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.
Trans. Alan Sheridan. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: Norton.
Levenson, Jill L. 2001. “Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textural Re-visions.” The
Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Levine, Joseph. 1983. “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap.”
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 64.4 ( October): 354 - 361.
Locke, John. 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Lodge, David. 2002. Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Lye, Colleen. 1995. “M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Antiessentialism:
Minority Discourse in an International Frame.” The Ethnic Canon:
Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Ed. David Palumbo Liu.
Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press. 260-89.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 1992. "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?" The
Postmodern Condition. Trans. R. Durand. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1986. 7182. Rpt. in Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed.
Patricia Waugh. London: Edward Arnold.117-125.
Macaulay, Alastair. 1998. “The Man Who Was Two Men.” Financial Times.
31 October, p. 7.
Maharaj, Sri Nisargadatta. 1988. I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadata
Maharaj (1973). Trans. Maurice Frydman. Ed. Sudhakar S. Dikshit.
Durham, North Carolina: The Acorn Press.
———. 2001. The Nectar of Immortality: Discourses on the Eternal. Ed.
Robert Powell. San Diego, California: Blue Dove.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. 1967. Bhagavad Gita. A New Translation and
Commentary with Sanskrit Text. Baltimore: Penguin Books.
———. 1995. Science of Being and Art of Living: Transcendental
Meditation. London: Meridian.
Malekin, Peter, and Ralph Yarrow. 1997. Consciousness, Literature and
Theatre: Theory and Beyond. London: Macmillan.
McGinn. 1991. The Problem of Consciousness. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
ˁˁˁ. 1997. Ethics, Evil and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ˁˁˁ. 1999. New York Times Book Review. 3 January.
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel. 2001. "Consciousness and the Future of Theater."
In Humanism and the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century. Ed.
152 Works Cited

William S. Haney II and Peter Malekin, 103-17. Lewisburg, New Jersey:

Bucknell University Press.
ˁˁˁ. 2003. “Staging Consciousness: Updating Demastes.”
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. Vol. 4. No. 2 (July),
http://www.aber.ac.uk/tfts/journal/archive/dmddemastes.html
Mikics, David. 2003. “Derek Walcott and Alejo Carpentier: Nature, History,
and the Caribbean Writer.” Derek Walcott: Bloom’s Modern Critical
Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.
Miller, J. Hillis. 2001. “Derrida and Literature.” Derrida and the Humanities:
A Critical Reader. Ed. Tom Cohen. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What is it like to be a bat?” Philosophical Review 83:
435-50.
Naismith, Bill. 1991. “Commentary and Notes.” Top Girls. Caryl Churchill.
London: Methuen.
Olsen, Mark. 1989. The Golden Buddha Changing Masks: Essays on the
Spiritual Dimension of Acting. Nevada City, CA: Gateways/IDHHB, Inc.
Pao, Angela. 1992. "The Critic and the Butterfly: Sociocultural Contexts and
the Reception of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly." Amerasia Journal:
1-16.
Pepperell, Robert. 2003. The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond
the Brain. Bristol, UK, Portland, OR: Intellect.
Pflueger. Lloyd W. 1998. “Discriminating the Innate Capacity: Salvation
Mysticism of Classical Samkhya-Yoga.” The Innate Capacity: Mysticism,
Psychology, and Philosophy. Ed. Robert K. C. Forman. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Proudfoot, Wayne. 1985. Religious Experience. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Rabkin, Gerald. 1983. “The Play of Misreading:
Text/Theater/Deconstruction.” Performing Arts Journal. 19:44-60.
Radhakrishnan, S, ed. 1992. The Principle Upanishads. Delhi and New
York: Oxford University Press.
Ramachandran, T. P. 1980. The Indian Philosophy of Beauty. Part Two.
Madras: University of Madras Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1969. Le Conflict des Interprétations. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1988. Time and Narrative III. Trans. K. Blame and D. Pellauer.
Chicago, Il: University of Chicago Press.
Roudané, Matthew, ed. 2002. The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sales, Rober. 1988. Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
London and New York: Penguin.
Sammells, Neil. 2001. “The Early Stage Plays.” The Cambridge Companion
to Tom Stoppard. Ed. Katherine E. Kelly. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press.
 Works Cited 153

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1956. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on

Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York:
Philosophical Library.
Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory, revised edition. New York
and London: Methuen.
Searle, John R. 1998. Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real
World. New York: Basic.
Shankara. 1978. Crest-Jewel of Discrimination. (Viveka-Chudamani.) Trans.
Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood. Hollywood, CA:
Vedanta Press.
Shankara. 1988. Vivekacudamani. Trans. S. Candrasekhara Bharati and P.
Sankaranarayanan. Bombay: Bharaiya Vidya Bhavan.
Shear, Jonathan. 1990. The Inner Dimension: Philosophy and the Experience
of Consciousness. New York: Peter Lang.
Shepard, Sam. 1976. Buried Child and Seduced and Suicide in B-Flat.
Vancouver, Canada: Talon.
———. 1981. Seven Plays. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam.
Shimakawa, Karen. 2002. National Abjection: The Asian American Body
Onstage. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Silverstein, M. 1994. “’Make Us the Women We Can’t Be’: Cloud Nine and
the Female Imaginary.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. 8.2
(Spring): 7-22.
Skloot, Robert. 1990. "Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry
Hwang." Modern Drama 33 (March): 59-66.
Smith, Dinitia. 1993. “Face Values: The Sexual and Racial Obsessions of
Playwright David Henry Hwang.” New York (January 11): 40-45.
Speidel, Erich. 1982. "The Individual and Society." Brecht in Perspective.
Ed. Graham Bartram and Anthony Wayne. London: Longman.
Stace, W. T. 1960. Mysticism and Philosophy. London: Macmillan.
Stoppard, Tom. 1968. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. London:
Faber and Faber.
———. Indian Ink. 1995. London and Boston: Faber and Faber.
———. Travesties. 1975. London and Boston: Faber and Faber.
Suzuki, D. T. 1956. “The Zen Doctrine of No Mind.” Zen Buddhism:
Selected Writings of D. T. Suzuki, Vol. 3. Ed. William Barrett. Garden
City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books.
Tarlekar, G. H. 1975. Studies in The Natyashastra. Delhi: Motilal
Banarsidass.
Taylor, Patrick. 2001. “Sheba’s Song: The Bible, the Kebra Nagast, and the
Rastafari.” Nation Dance: Religion, Identity and Cultural Difference in
the Caribbean. Ed. Patrick Taylor. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Teichert, Dieter. 2004. “Narrative, Identity and the Self.” Journal of
Consciousness Studies. 11.10-11: 175-91
154 Works Cited

Thieme, John. 1999. Derek Walcott. Manchester and New York: Manchester
University Press.
Throop, C. Jason. 2000. "Shifting From a Constructivist to an Experiential
Approach to the Anthropology of Self and Emotion." Journal of
Consciousness Studies. 7.3: 27:52.
Tsur, Reuven. 2004. “Some Mannerist Ingenuities in Mystic Poetry.” Journal
of Consciousness Studies: Controversies in Science and the Humanities.
Vol. 11 No. 5-6: 60-78.
Turner, Victor. 1998. "Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual,
and Drama?" Modern Theories of Drama: A Selection of Writings on
Drama and Theater, 1840-1990. Ed. G. W. Brandt. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Tye, Michael. 1996. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Varela, E. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. 1991. The Embodied Mind.
London: MIT Press.
Vattimo, G. 1988. The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in
Postmodern Culture. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wade, Leslie A. 1996. Sam Shepard and the American Theater. Westport,
Conn. & London: Praeger.
Walcott, Derek. 1970. Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays. New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Wallace, B. Alan. 2001. "Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism."
Journal of Consciousnes Studies. 8. 5-7: 209-30.
Wilber, Ken. 1996. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala
Publications.
ˁˁˁ. 1997. The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone
Slightly Mad. Boston: Shambhala Publications.
ˁˁˁ. 2000. Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology,
Therapy. Boston and London: Shambhala.
Whitehead, Charles. 2001. "Social Mirrors and Shared Experiential Worlds."
Journal of Consciousness Studies. 8.4: 3-36.
Worthen, W. B. 1988. “Drama, Performativity, and Performance.” PMLA
113:5: 1093-1107.
Wright, Elizabeth. 1989. Postmodern Brecht: A Re-Presentation. London:
Routledge.
Yarrow, Ralph. 2000. Indian Theatre: Theatre of Origin, Theatre of
Freedom. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
———. 2001. “Theater Degree Zero.” Studies in the Literary Imagination.
34.2 (Fall): 75-92.
Zinman, Toby. 1991. “Blizintsy/Dvojniki, Twins/Doubles, Hapgood/
Hapgood.” Modern Drama. 34.2 (June): 312-21.
———. 2001. “Travesties, Night and Day, The Real Thing.” The Cambridge
Companion to Tom Stoppard. Ed. Katherine E. Kelly. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Index
absence, 6, 13, 16, 17, 20, 27, 30, 37,
57, 64, 74, 78, 79, 100, 121, 125,
133, 136
aconceptual concept, 17
Advaita (nondual) Vedanta, 7, 131
Advaitan, 11, 16, 60, 64, 77, 88, 96,
123, 132, 135
aesthetic experience, 1, 9, 11, 12, 17,
84, 87, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 131,
132, 135, 138, 139, 140
Agamben, Giorgio, 4, 139
ahistorical, 41, 83
Alexander, C.N., 111, 141
Almond, Philip, 87, 141
alterity, 95, 96, 99
Anandavardhana, 12, 141
annatta, 14
Arcadia, 20
Artaud, Antonin, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
11, 13, 23, 26, 44, 70, 73, 86, 87,
88, 103, 131, 132, 137, 141
Ashcroft, Bill, 27, 78, 103, 107, 141
Augé, Marc, 141
aura, 27
Austin, J. L., 10, 107
Awasthi, S., 141
Balinese theater, 4
Banfield, C., 120, 141
Barba, Eugenio, 5, 7, 10, 11, 53, 132,
141, 145
Barnard, G. W., 15, 141
Barrantes-Vidal, Neus, 92, 141
Barthes, Roland, 46, 142
Bataille, Georges, 4
Beckett, Samuel, 22, 55
Benjamin, Walter, 27, 74, 142, 143
Benveniste, Emile, 71, 142
Bhabha, Homi, 104, 107, 142
Bhartrhari, 11, 97, 136
bhava, 12
Blau, Herbert, 33, 46, 142
Bloom, Harold, 93, 142, 144, 148
Brecht, B., 12, 20, 33, 54, 120, 142,
149, 150
A-effect, 73, 74, 75, 80
Brechtian, 45, 46, 51, 71, 73, 74,
75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 137, 144
Brook, Peter, 5, 7, 10, 11, 53, 77, 88,
131, 132, 142, 145
Brown, Llyod, 102, 142
buddhi, 23, 133
Buddhist, 7, 14, 19, 54, 59
Burke, Kenneth, 71, 142
Burnett, Paula, 109, 111, 142
Butler, Judith, 73, 138, 139, 140, 142
Campbell, Joseph, 6
Carlson, Marvin, 38, 142
Chakrabarti, T., 17, 87, 142
Chalmers, David, 14, 28, 70, 132,
133, 142
Chen, Tina, 80
Churchill, Caryl, 2, 3, 5, 44-62, 65,
67, 75, 122, 131, 134, 135, 143,
146, 148
Cixous, H., 47, 143
Cloud Nine, 2, 45, 47, 49, 53, 54, 57,
122, 134, 143, 149
Coetzee, J. M., 143
cognitive science, 96
Coleridge, S. T., 63, 110, 143
completeness
incompleteness, 2, 116, 117, 118,
120, 126, 137
completion, 3, 57, 117, 119, 120, 126,
127, 128
Conner, Steven, 41, 143
conscious content, 92, 93, 126, 131,
132, 136, 137, 140
conscious inessentialism, 69
consciousness, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12,
13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25,
27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 37,
38, 39, 42, 45, 47, 49, 53, 55, 57,
58-63, 65, 67-85, 87, 88, 90, 91,
156
92, 93, 94, 96-113, 117, 119, 122,
123-140
dualistic mystical state, 75, 82
epiphenomenon, 24, 99, 138
immanent, 8, 16, 18, 54, 75, 84,
87, 89, 96, 102, 133, 134, 136
internal observer, 14, 67, 68, 70,
73, 75, 79, 81, 83, 88, 91, 94,
96, 99, 120, 122, 134, 135, 137
knowledge-by-identity, 15, 16, 18,
42, 44, 45, 55, 60, 70, 75, 82,
83, 86, 87, 96, 99, 111, 113,
133, 134, 135, 138, 139, 140
non-intentional, 16, 33, 37, 49, 57,
70, 72, 73, 75, 83, 96, 98, 123,
137, 139, 140
non-positional, 15, 16, 54, 69, 88,
133
pure awareness, 29
pure consciousness, 8, 11, 12, 15,
16, 23, 24, 67, 70, 72, 73, 75,
77, 87, 88, 97, 99, 106, 110,
124, 131, 133, 137, 138, 139
purusha, 17, 23, 133
transcendence, 7, 34, 59, 85, 90,
95, 96, 99, 118
witnessing, 3, 8, 17, 20, 23, 25,
27, 31, 33, 34, 37, 39, 43, 47,
49, 54, 55, 59, 67, 68, 71, 74,
80, 84, 117, 119, 122, 124,
128, 130, 133, 134, 137
Crick, Francis, 14, 67, 68, 133, 143
Culler, Jonathan, 138, 143
de Beauvoir, Simone, 73
de Quincey, Christian, 35, 40, 144
De, S.K., 12, 35, 143
deconstextualized, 108
deconstruction, 3, 29, 37, 46, 66, 68,
69, 70, 79, 88, 106, 135, 138, 139
decontextualized, 21
decontingencing, 21, 22, 26, 28, 31,
47, 51, 86, 89
Deikman, Arthur, 14, 70, 88, 143
Delaney, Paul, 26, 143
Demastes, William, 70, 143, 147
Dennett, Daniel, 14, 67, 68, 69, 83,
87, 133, 144
Index
Derrida, Jacques, 4, 9, 10, 11, 17, 25,
39, 77, 79, 95, 96, 98, 99, 132,
135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, 145,
148
Deutsch, Eliot, 7, 17, 87, 88, 126,
127, 144
Dhanavel, P., 117, 143
dhvani, 12, 17, 132
Diamond, Elin, 74, 144
Diderot, 33
dis-identification, 21, 24, 31, 47, 58,
82, 133
doubleness, 46, 47, 48, 51, 53, 56
drama, 2-10
social drama, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,
11, 16, 18, 29, 30, 31, 33, 41,
45, 53, 60, 61, 65, 76, 77, 83,
90, 91, 93, 101, 102, 109, 114,
116, 131, 133, 139, 140
Dream on Monkey Mountain, 2, 19,
100, 101, 102, 103, 109, 110, 112,
113, 114, 136, 138, 144, 150
dualism, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, 67, 70, 86,
113, 131, 133, 136
Durkheim, Emile, 4
Eckhart, Meister, 19
Eco, Umberto, 5, 41, 144
Eng, David, 68, 144
ergotropic, 19
extrovertive mysticism, 106
Fanon, Frantz, 101
fertile nothingness, 7, 23, 109
Forman, Robert, 6, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18, 19, 24, 28, 63, 70, 75, 82, 92,
106, 107, 108, 114, 131, 133, 138,
140, 141, 144, 148
Fortier, Mark, 57, 144
Foucault, Michel, 43
Fox, R.E., 102, 114, 144
Fuchs, Elinor, 27, 29, 33, 144
Ganesh, 117
Gergen, Kenneth, 91, 144
Gilbert, Helen, 117, 118, 120, 144,
146
Gimello, Robert, 14, 145
Girard, R., 4
globalization, 102
Gnostic, 87, 93, 146
 Index
Goldman, Michael, 60, 61, 76, 77, 85,
88, 89, 136, 145
Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 81, 145
Grassroots Spirituality Movement, 6,
17, 18, 138
Grinshpon, Yohanan, 59, 92, 134,
145
Grotowski, Jerzy, 5, 7, 10, 11, 53,
131, 132, 145
Habermas, J., 35, 43
Haedicke, J. V., 71, 72, 74, 80, 145
Hamlet, 20, 21, 22, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33,
36
Hamner, Robert, 102, 142, 145
Haney, W. S., 72, 145, 147
Hassan, Ihab, 37, 106, 145
Hayavadana, 2, 115, 116, 117, 118,
119, 120, 122, 124, 128, 137, 138,
143, 146
Hayles, N.K., 145
Heidegger, Martin, 4, 43
heterophenomenology, 67, 68, 74, 83
Heuvel, M. V., 36, 39, 145
historyless, 27, 78, 103, 107
Hogan, Patrick, 145
holon, 2, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93,
94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 113, 135, 136
primal artistic holon, 2, 87, 135
Hume, 1, 8, 108, 113, 136, 146
Hunter, Jim, 21, 31, 38, 146
Husserl, Edmund, 17
Hutcheon, L., 71, 84, 146
Hwang, David Henry, 2, 3, 5, 65, 66,
67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77,
80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 87, 131, 135,
145, 146, 148, 149
hybridity, 3, 91, 102, 104, 107, 108,
110, 111, 114, 136
hypoaroused states, 19, 92, 106
identity, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 14, 16, 21, 25,
26, 29, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42,
43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 53,
54, 56, 60, 62, 63, 65-73, 76, 77,
79, 80, 81, 82, 85, 86, 88-96, 98,
99, 101-104, 108, 110, 113, 116,
119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 128, 133,
134, 135, 136, 137
157
essentialist, 54, 69, 70, 72, 83, 93,
134
in-between-ness, 2, 3, 6, 7, 102, 104,
105, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115,
131
Indian Ink, 20, 149
Indian literary criticism, 99
inter-being, 2, 34, 41, 43, 45, 57
interconnectedness, 18, 39, 78, 114,
136
intersubjectivity, 20, 35, 40, 41
intimacy, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92,
98, 99, 100
introvertive mysticism, 106
Iser, Wolfgang, 146
iterability, 3, 9, 17
James, William, 15, 20, 36, 69, 133,
139, 141, 143, 146
Jameson, Fredric, 39, 75, 146
jiva, 127
Joyce, James, 20, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41,
42, 63, 64, 65
Kali, 118, 119, 120, 121, 126, 128
karma, 126, 127
Karnad, Girish, 2, 3, 115, 116, 117,
118, 119, 120, 122, 125, 126, 128,
131, 137, 140, 141, 143, 146
Katz, Steven, 14, 63, 87, 97, 136,
138, 145, 146
knowledge-about, 15, 44, 82, 83, 96,
133, 139
knowledge-by-acquaintance, 15, 44,
82, 83, 96, 133, 139
Koestler, Arthur, 87, 135, 146
Kondo, Dorrine, 68, 69, 70, 71, 82,
87, 146
Krishnamoorthy, K., 12, 141, 146
Kritzer, Amelia, 46, 47, 48, 52, 57,
146
Lacan, Jacques, 32, 69, 88, 135, 146
Laclau, Ernesto, 138, 142
Levenson, J. L., 20, 21, 147
Levinas, Emmanuel, 4
liminal, 6, 7, 10, 11, 16, 21, 79, 109,
131
Lodge, David, 84, 146, 147
logocentrism, 4, 79
Lye, Coleen, 71, 80, 82, 147
158 Index

Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 42, 83, 147 pashyanti, 11, 12, 13, 15, 31, 97, 132,
M. Butterfly, 2, 66-71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 133, 139
78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 135, 138, Pepperell, Robert, 88, 148
143, 145, 146, 147, 148 performance, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16,
Macaulay, Alastair, 26, 38, 147 21, 33, 41, 42, 46, 53, 71, 72, 74,
madhyama, 11, 12, 13, 97, 98, 132, 76, 78, 80, 81, 116, 117, 131, 132,
139 133, 139
Mahabharata, 116 performer/role, 46
Maharaj, Sri N., 34, 55, 60, 74, 135, perlocutionary, 10, 11, 107
147 Pflueger, Llyod, 17, 23, 24, 70, 88,
Maharishi, 127, 129, 141, 147 133, 148
Mais, Roger, 102 phenomenology, 13, 14, 17, 31, 37,
Maitri Upanishad, 8, 108, 113, 131, 42, 67, 68, 73, 81, 132
136 Pirandello, Luigi, 25
Malekin, Peter, 84, 147 Plotinus, 7
Mann, Thomas, 117, 118 posthuman, 88
Marxism, 36, 43, 142 postmodern, 1, 3, 5, 16, 18, 19, 36,
masculinity, 45, 66, 79, 82 42, 66, 81, 82, 83, 85, 132, 133,
mask, 60, 91, 95, 109, 119, 125 137, 138, 140
McGinn, Colin, 44, 147 postmodernist, 2, 24, 31, 87
metanarrative, 67, 71 poststructuralist, 2, 3, 24, 31, 65, 66,
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel, 10, 53, 70, 67, 69, 77, 84, 88, 96, 135
88, 90, 147 prakrti, 17, 23, 133
Mikics, David, 113, 148 pre-cognitive, 26, 28
Miller, J. Hillis, 17, 18, 146, 148 pre-conceptual, 24, 25, 26, 28, 40
mind/body dualism, 23 presence, 3, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 16, 17,
moksa, 12 20, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 35, 36,
mystical experience, 15, 103, 114, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46, 49, 53, 57, 67,
136, 140 70, 73, 74, 78, 79, 81, 84, 88, 94,
Nagel, Thomas, 14, 133, 148 95, 99, 100, 110, 124, 129, 131,
Naismith, Bill, 62, 143, 148 132, 133, 136
Natyashastra, 7, 11, 12, 23, 131, 133, Proudfoot, Wayne, 14, 148
142, 149 qualia, 1, 14, 15, 23, 31, 42, 67, 68,
Nietzsch, Friedrich, 4 73, 78, 79, 83, 132, 140
no-concept, 60, 134 Rabkin, Gerald, 27, 33, 148
no-mind, 73, 86 Radhakrishnan, S., 148
nonchanging, 49, 67, 78, 124 Ramachandran, T. P., 13, 148
nonpluralistic, 77, 140 rasa, 12, 13, 17, 132, 138, 139
non-referential, 17, 96, 97 Rastafari, 102, 103, 149
noumenal, 97, 136 rationalization, 94, 132
objective ontology, 14, 67, 133 Ricoeur, Paul, 49, 148
Olsen, Mark, 148 Rig-Veda, 11
Orientalism, 66, 67, 80, 81, 82, 146 Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are
panentheism, 18 Dead, 1, 35
Pao, Angela, 82, 148 Roudané, Matthew, 89, 144, 148
para, 11, 12, 13, 15, 31, 97, 98, 132, sacred, 1-8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
133, 139 20, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 36,
37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 51,
 Index
54, 55, 86, 102, 114, 117, 131,
132, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140
Sales, Robert, 21, 22, 26, 32, 146,
148
samadhi, 8, 15, 19
Samkhya-Yoga, 17, 23, 70, 133, 148
Sammells, Neil, 26, 27, 28, 32, 148
Sanskrit Poetics, 12, 132, 143
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 16, 54, 69, 72,
73, 75, 81, 88, 101, 104, 133, 134,
140, 148
sat-chit-ananda, 11, 13, 40, 128, 131
Saussurean semiology, 11
Sayre, Henry, 16
Schechner, Richard, 5, 6, 8, 10, 148
Searle,John, 14, 67, 107, 133, 149
self, 68-72
concept of self, 2, 68, 69, 70, 72,
81, 83, 88, 93, 135, 137
self-alterity, 29
self-referral, 17, 36, 37, 38, 40, 72,
73, 76, 80, 96
Shankara, 7, 87, 118, 123, 124, 125,
149
Shear, Jonathan, 3, 70, 133, 138, 140,
149
Shepard, Sam, 2, 5, 58, 84, 85, 86, 87,
88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98,
99, 113, 131, 135, 136, 140, 144,
145, 148, 149, 150
Shimakawa, Karen, 76, 81, 149
Soyinka, Wole, 101
spiritual, 12, 18, 19, 69, 93, 102, 109,
114
Stanislavsky, K.S., 33, 53
Stoppar, Tom
leapfrog, 21, 24, 134
Stoppard, Tom, 1, 3, 5, 20-32, 34, 35,
36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45,
47, 53, 67, 131, 133, 134, 143,
145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150
A, minus A, 21, 22, 24, 31, 35,
133
Strindberg, August, 101
subjective ontology, 14, 67, 133
subjectivity, 14, 24, 32, 46, 47, 50,
51, 67, 72, 80
159
Suicide in B-Flat, 2, 85, 86, 87, 88,
89, 93, 100, 135, 136, 149
Suzuki, D. T., 1, 149
Synge, John, 101
Tarlekar, G. H., 12, 13, 149
Taylor, Patrick, 102, 103, 143, 149
Teichert, Dieter, 49, 51, 149
The Tooth of Crime, 2, 85, 86, 87, 93,
94, 97, 100, 135, 136, 138
theater, 1-21
feminist theater, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17,
18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 26-41, 45,
46, 47, 49, 51, 53, 54, 55, 57,
60, 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75,
76, 80, 81, 83, 84-89, 91, 92,
99, 107, 114, 116, 118, 119,
120, 123, 129, 131-138, 140
Thieme, John, 104, 149
Throop, C. Jason, 24, 25, 28, 149
Top Girls, 2, 45, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61,
62, 134, 143, 146, 148
transcendental signified, 36, 97
trans-cultural, 2, 5, 24, 26, 27, 28, 40,
87, 139
translumination, 7, 10, 11, 13, 53, 132
transpersonal, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 40, 60,
77, 78, 84, 85, 87, 120, 128, 131,
137
trans-verbal, 4, 37, 43, 72, 77, 83, 86
Travesties, 1, 20, 21, 35, 36, 37, 38,
39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 149, 150
Tsur, Reuven, 96, 97, 98, 150
turiya, 8, 11, 13, 131, 138
Turner, Victor, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 23,
41, 109, 131, 150
universal truth, 139
vaikhari, 11, 12, 13, 97, 98, 132, 139
Varela, E. J., 150
Vattimo, G., 42, 150
Vedic otherness, 59, 93, 134
via negative, 108
visionary experience, 2, 3, 100, 101,
102, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110,
114, 136
void of conceptions, 1, 2, 3, 8, 10, 11,
12, 16, 19, 25, 28, 29, 30, 40, 47,
58, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 70, 73, 79,
160
80, 87, 88, 90, 98, 102, 105, 108,
110, 112, 113, 126, 128, 131, 132,
135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140
void in thought, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10,
23, 27, 28, 31, 63, 71, 73, 78,
79, 86, 87, 90, 106, 112, 127
Wade, Leslie, 89, 93, 150
Walcott, Derek, 2, 3, 5, 19, 100-109,
111-114, 131, 136, 137, 140, 142,
144, 145, 148, 149, 150
Wallace, B.A., 21, 29, 54, 134, 150
Whitehead, 28, 29, 34, 54, 122, 150
Index
Wilber, Ken, 7, 28, 35, 40, 86, 135,
144, 150
Wilde, Oscar, 20, 36, 40, 42
Wittgenstein, L.J.J., 20, 21
Worthen, W.B., 9, 11, 132, 150
Wright, Elizabeth, 150
Yakshagana, 116, 117, 118, 119
Yarrow, Ralph, 10, 13, 53, 55, 84,
117, 147, 150
zeroing, 53, 134
zimbo, 69
Zinman, Toby, 37, 38, 150
zombie, 69