Integral Drama: Culture, Consciousness and Identity (Consciousness Literture and the Arts)

Integral Drama

Consciousness Liter ture the Arts

&

15 General Editor:

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, Per Brask, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Michael Mangan, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster, Ralph Yarrow

Integral Drama

Culture, Consciousness and Identity

WIllIam S. Haney II

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2389-5 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2008 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

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Chapter 2: The Fall of Private Man in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party

33

Chapter 3: Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros: Defiance vs. Conformity

57

Chapter 4: Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: Orderly Disorder

83

Chapter 5: Discovering Happiness in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming

107

Chapter 6: Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author: Being vs. having Form

125

Chapter 7: The Reality of Illusion in Jean Genet’s The Balcony

139

Chapter 8: Soyinka’s Integral Drama: Unity And the Mistake of the Intellect

159

Bibliography

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Index of Names

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Integral Drama: Culture, Consciousness and Identity Introduction Drama and The Natyashastra The seven plays examined in this book focus on the difference between the experience of pure consciousness and our socially constructed identities and suggest how these two aspects of identity can coexist. In analyzing these plays, I apply theories of consciousness developed in Advaita (nondual) Vedanta (the sixth system of Indian philosophy) and the Indian philosophical treatise The Natyashastra, which deals with theatre aesthetics, as well as theories developed in the context of consciousness studies, a thriving interdisciplinary field that includes philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, physics and biology and increasingly focuses on the phenomenology of firstperson experience. The seven plays analyzed here include Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Jean Genet’s The Balcony and Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. As these plays demonstrate, performance has the effect of taking the characters and audience from an awareness of something toward awareness per se, and then toward having awareness per se simultaneously with the intentional content of the mind, thereby providing a glimpse of higher states of consciousness. The three ordinary states of consciousness are waking, dreaming and sleep, and the higher states include the fourth state of pure consciousness (Atman or turiya, the fourth), cosmic consciousness and unity consciousness. As Eliot Deutsch says in Advaita Vedanta, pure consciousness or

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Integral Drama Atman (or paramatman, the highest Self), for Advaita Vedanta, is that pure, undifferentiated self-shining consciousness, timeless, spaceless, and unthinkable, that is not different from Brahman and that underlies and supports the individual human person. (1973: 48)

When one has stabilized Atman, the fourth state of consciousness, then one can observe mental content without being overshadowed by it, thus entering the fifth state or cosmic consciousness. Robert Keith Wallace notes in The Physiology of Consciousness that In cosmic consciousness the individual realizes his essential identity as transcendental or pure consciousness as an all-time reality. In this fifth state, transcendental consciousness coexists with waking, dreaming and sleep. For example, in cosmic consciousness, even in the most dynamic waking-state activity, one has an inner quality of consciousness that is restful and absolutely clear. (1993: 27, original emphasis)

Anna Bonshek illustrates this through the analogy from the Vedic tradition of a Lamp at the Door that “describes the bidirectional function of awareness that illuminates inside and outside simultaneously” (2007: 45). As Robert Boyer explains, Experience of unbounded awareness along with mental activity are natural experiences that typically develop over time. Increasingly, the deepest inner sense of who one is gets permeated by nonlocality and fewer restrictions, and eventually complete, unchanging unboundedness. The individual ego or sense of self merges with the universal Self, as the unbounded, unchanging background of daily living. (2006a, 440).

Ken Wilber also describes this coexistence of transcendental and waking consciousness: Mahayana Buddhism maintained that while the realization of nirvana or emptiness is important, there is a deeper realization, where nirvana and samsara, or Emptiness and the entire world of Form, are one, or more technically, Emptiness and Form are ‘not-two.’ As the most important sutra on this topic—The Heart Sutra—puts it: ‘That which is Emptiness is not other than Form, that which is Form is not other than Emptiness.’ (2006: 108)

As Advaita Vedanta puts it, “We find that pure existence which is the common cause of the entire world is itself formless, though appearing

Introduction

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in various forms; partless, though divisible in different forms; it is infinite though it appears in all finite forms” (Sharma 2004: 63). What distinguishes the seven plays examined here is that they induce in the characters and audience a glimpse of cosmic consciousness, the coexistence of Emptiness and Form, giving the performers and audience a taste of awareness per se, the internal observer, while they simultaneously witness their mental activity and perceptions of the world. As discussed in the following chapters, integral drama through a variety of techniques not only calls into question the truth-value of logic and reason, but also highlights the uncertainty and illusion of ordinary experience in the field of duality by pointing beyond this dimension to a field of unity. Integral drama, therefore, creates intensely uncertain dramatic situations that may often seem illusory, and in the process exposes how this illusion derives mainly from our perceptions of “reality” devoid of the witnessing quality of awareness per se. In their descriptions of the process of acting, drama theorists such as Denis Diderot and Constantin Stanislavsky allude to the phenomenon of actors witnessing their performances. Diderot, for examples, in what is known as Diderot’s paradox, says the actor “must have in himself an unmoved and disinterested onlooker. He must have, consequently, penetration and no sensibility” (1955: 14). While Diderot focuses on the relation between actors and audience, Stanislavsky focuses on the actor’s awareness itself but also defines the actor as a disinterested onlooker: “an actor is under the obligation to live his part inwardly, and then to give to his experience an external embodiment” (1986: 15). He adds that the aim of the art of acting involves “the creation of this inner life of a human spirit, and its expression in an artistic form” (14). The actor, regardless of his own will, “lives the part, not noticing how he feels, not thinking about what he does, and it all moves of its own accord, subconsciously and intuitively” (13). Acting thus entails a witnessing quality that not only occurs within the actor but also induces a similar experience in the audience. To further explain this phenomenon, I now turn to the works of several authors who discuss the nature of identity and consciousness. In Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe explains the link between higher

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states of consciousness and key aspects of theatre, ranging from the creative process, the actor’s involvement, aesthetics, and audience reception. His book analyzes the relation of theatre to consciousness not only to enhance our understanding of theatre but also to reveal how theatre serves as a vehicle for developing higher states of consciousness, or enlightenment, known as moksha in Indian philosophy. As an explanatory basis for his analysis, Meyer-Dinkgräfe also draws upon The Natyashastra and points out that theatre consists of two areas related to consciousness, production and reception, which involve the following eight aspects of theatre: dramatist, play, director, actors, designers, spectators, venue and theatrical experience. These aspects in relation to consciousness entail a wide range of questions about theatre that he attempts to answer, focusing especially on how theatre affects the spectator and why spectators react the way they do. Theatre and Consciousness demonstrates that a comprehensive answer to the key questions on theatre would have to address not only recent developments in consciousness studies but also The Natyashastra, which he approaches through a novel Eastern perspective on consciousness studies known as Vedic Science. Although Meyer-Dinkgräfe presents Indian aesthetics through Vedic Science with the disclaimer that he does not have the final answers to all the questions relating to theatre, his book provides an outlook on theatre to be taken up in an ongoing debate. Although personally convinced of the arguments here, I also invite further theoretical response and empirical research. Meyer-Dinkgräfe begins his book by investigating the nature of inspiration and the creative process, which has also been investigated by the philosopher Ken Wilber. Like Wilber, Meyer-Dinkgräfe connects the reality of inspiration and the creative process to altered states of consciousness, specifically in this case from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta. He examines the experience of playwrights such Alan Ayckbourn, Christopher Hampton and David Mamet, as well as of the composer Johannes Brahms, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the novelist Franz Kafka. The inspirational experiences of these artists across different genres reveal common characteristics associated with altered states of consciousness, which suggest that these states transcend the notion of a constructed self defined by contextualists as the sole basis of human identity. In response to critiques against inspirational experience, Meyer-Dinkgräfe provides ample counter

Introduction

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evidence from modern psychology, including the theories of Freud and Jung, as well as from writers such as John H. Clark, who identifies various faculties involved in mystical experience. As we shall see in the present book, these faculties include knowledge, unity, eternity, light, body sense, joy and freedom. On the basis of Advaita Vedanta, the mind consists of increasingly subtle levels, ranging from sense, desire, mind, intellect, feeling, ego and pure consciousness, which correspond to the increasingly subtle states of consciousness, ranging from waking, dreaming, sleep, pure consciousness, cosmic consciousness, refined cosmic consciousness, and unity consciousness (as explained in greater detail below), with each of the latter being associated with different modes of perception. According to The Natyashastra, an artist’s creative inspiration is not a fantasy, but rather mirrors the process of cosmic creation on the level of the individual’s experience of pure consciousness. The fact that a dramatist engages pure consciousness through creative inspiration suggests that this experience would naturally be reflected in the characters. We can differentiate two aspects of consciousness in dramatic characters, the ordinary states of consciousness and the development of consciousness to higher states throughout the play. As examined here, the ordinary states of consciousness include waking, dream and deep sleep, while the development of consciousness extends from waking to pure consciousness and beyond. We can see a detailed development of the different states of consciousness in the context of specific plays, notably Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Hamlet. In analyzing Shakespeare, Meyer-Dinkgräfe also draws upon Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad-Gita. For example, in The Tempest, Prospero’s development hinges on his use of magic, which he finally abandons. His magical skills parallel the powers or siddhis described in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and the fact that he abandons them allows for two interpretations of his state of development: either he does not achieve enlightenment or moksha at the end of the play, given that he does not attain all the siddhis mentioned by Patanjali, or the siddhis that he does gain symbolize all of them and therefore he does gain moksha, through he abandons these powers at the end of the play. Similarly, Hamlet finally “accepts divine providence as the guiding principle of (his) life” (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 2005: 52), and thus like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita restores

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cosmic order. Unlike Arjuna, however, whose spiritual development was guided by Lord Krishna, Hamlet dies at the end in retribution for his mistakes. Given that dramatic characters usually undergo a change of consciousness, we can ask the question of whether or not actors should become emotionally involved with the sentiments of the roles they play. Theories on this include those of Diderot, Pinciano, de Salas, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, Strasberg, Block, Barba, Mnouchkine, Grotowski and Artaud. Meyer-Dinkgräfe argues that drama theorists and performers need to develop a performative means to “ensure that the performer is enabled to experience higher states of consciousness during performance” (2005: 91). While The Natyashastra discusses yogic techniques that condition the mind and body to function at higher states, other traditions in Western theatre may offer similar techniques, but as yet these are hypothetical and need to be tested empirically. It may be advisable, however, to follow the insights of the Indian philosophical and aesthetic tradition, which has the advantage of enlightened spiritual masters who can supply a methodological approach already proven to be effective. This book, Integral Drama, critically explores modern drama in the context of Indian aesthetics as presented by The Natyashastra and Advaita Vedanta, focusing specifically on how Indian theatre aesthetics has influenced drama theories and practice, and to what extent this has promoted the development of higher consciousness in actors and audience. A review of some of the main principles of Indian aesthetics, including the theory of rasa or aesthetic rapture, will help in this approach. According to Indian aesthetics, Rasa is here used to mean such bliss as is innate in oneself and manifests itself [. . .] even in the absence of external aids to happiness. It emphasizes that the bliss is non-material, i.e. intrinsic, spiritual, or subjective. (Rhagavan 1988: 198)

The Natyashastra describes how fully developed actors can perform to create rasa in the spectator; moreover, several modern theatre artists such as Ray Reinhardt have already taken inspiration from this treatise and from Indian philosophy in general. To elaborate on how rasa takes effect, I will deal with empirical spectators, not just hypothetical constructs. This book also addresses the prominent issue of the language of theatre. Given that theatre is

Introduction

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often said to have its source in ritual, theatre in tune with Indian aesthetics is understandable in terms of Vedic ritual, known as yagya, a practice for attaining higher consciousness. Moreover, postmodernism arguably suggests that the search for translumination, language of nature, presence and total theatre represents a search for an experience of higher states, and that the postmodern concept of the decentered self in Lacan also points in this direction (see Haney 2006: chapter 3). As mentioned in terms of Advaita Vedanta, pure consciousness when established in cosmic consciousness can witness all mental and physical activity. At this stage, the more expressed levels of the mind, such as ego, intuition and feeling, intellect, mind, desire, and senses, are also more developed. One can therefore express whatever is latently available on the level of pure consciousness, for a division no longer exists between pure consciousness and our (symbolic) expressions of it, whether in conscious discourse, behavior or culture. Demastes’ approach to theatre is similar to Meyer-Dinkgräfe. Damastes, however, takes a materialist, bottom-up approach, while Meyer-Dinkgräfe, as does this book, takes an abstract, top-down approach to the link between theatre and consciousness. Overall, this book will explore the relation between theatre and higher states and demonstrate that one of the key purposes of theatre is to help the spectator access the pure consciousness event described in consciousness studies by theorists such as Ken Wilber, Robert K. C. Forman, Jonathan Shear and others. As Forman says, “the distinguishing mark of the pure consciousness event is that it is not described as an experience of something” (1999: 75, original emphasis). He further explains in The Innate Capacity that “If one truly forgets all concepts and beliefs for some period, then those concepts and beliefs cannot play a formative role in creating the mystical experience(s). This forgetting model shows how at least some forms of mysticism—that is, the pure consciousness event, a wakeful but objectless consciousness—should be viewed as decontextualized” (1998: 7, original emphasis). Narratives and Identity I will now briefly analyze Narrative and Consciousness—edited by Gary Fireman, Ted McVay and Owen Flanagan who define iden-

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tity solely in terms of contextualization or narrative—in order to contrast the conventional modern understanding of identity with the Vedic tradition as applied in the following chapters. Narrative and Consciousness deals with the role of narrative in the development of conscious awareness; narrative and autobiographical memory; autobiographical narrative, fiction, and the construction of self; narrative disruptions in the construction of self; and the neural substrate of narrative and consciousness realization. In contrast to the present book, this collection argues that narratives not only pervade our lives but are essential to conscious experience because the personal stories we construct about experience allow us to reflect upon our self-identity and communicate with others. In explaining how narrative relates to consciousness, this volume employs what Flanagan calls the “natural method” to examine the relations among the findings, concepts, and methods of phenomenological, psychological, and neurobiological analyses of narrative and consciousness, recognizing that each line of analyses has legitimate aims. (2003: 3)

In their approach to narrative and consciousness, the authors intend to “corral consciousness by paying attention to how it seems (its phenomenology), what mental labor it does (its psychology), and how it is realized (its neurobiology)” (4). The editors, however, conspicuously omit any mention of consciousness by itself, focusing instead mainly on the content of consciousness. In support of 20thcentury Western philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett who take an intellectual as opposed to a first-hand experiential approach to consciousness, the book agrees with the stance that “the portions of human consciousness beyond the purely somatic—self awareness, self-understanding, and self-knowledge—are products of personal narratives” (4). The editors and contributors contend, therefore, that narrative not only allows us to describe, communicate or examine the self, but that in fact “narrative constructs the self” (5). In contrast to the stance held by perennial psychologists such as Robert Forman, Ken Wilber, Jonathan Shear and others, this approach implies that the self has no extra-linguistic dimension, that it does not extend beyond the conscious content of mind as rendered by narratives. In order to avoid subjectivism, the editors explain how narratives, whether in theatre or fiction, are a public medium that can be

Introduction

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observed, shared and influenced by their cultural contexts. Any time we tell a personal story, we are influenced by an audience, either present or anticipated, which results in tensions between real events and how we rhetorically re-present them to others in an effort to persuade. Following the work of Owen Flanagan, the book presents an interdisciplinary approach to narrative and consciousness sensitive to a “phenomenological seeming” yet restricted by the intellect through the empirical findings of psychology and cognitive science (2003: 6). In one sense, therefore, the book focuses on already established research based on “credible naturalistic analysis” (ibid.). To its credit, the book attempts to coordinate phenomenological and scientific approaches, in spite of what some philosophers claim to be the incommensurability of science and phenomenology. The book challenges this conventional view, although in coordinating science and phenomenology it restricts itself to that realm of experience available only through narrative. This leads to an analysis not so much of narrative and consciousness per se, but to an analysis of narrative and the contents of consciousness. Katherine Nelson, who critically examines how narrative promotes the emergence of consciousness as related to the self, argues that communicative discourse and the disposition to narrated events that impose meaning on behavior has the effect of expanding a child’s consciousness. Narrative in this case belongs to the developmental stage of the child’s entry into a linguistic community. It helps the child develop a sense of self and become aware of the social world of subjective experience. Nelson concludes that “A new level of consciousness emerges in the early childhood years that is based on the differentiation of the self-awareness of the early years and the selfand-other awareness of the transition period” (2003: 33). This new consciousness depends on language and communication with others, not on the experience of awareness per se. Similarly, Valerie Gray Hardcastle argues that not only does narrative foster the emergence of consciousness in childhood, but also that a child’s selfhood emerges through continuous narrative activity that promotes linguistic and cognitive development. A child from the beginning attempts to understand the world by assigning meaning to it. This meaningmaking process fosters a child’s affective development by enhancing

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his or her conscious awareness of the surrounding world. Hardcastle shows how memory and cognition become instrumental processes in the service of creating a self. [. . .] As we tell and retell stories of ourselves either [ . . .] we are in effect shaping our memories of these events, making them more and more a part of who we are. (2003: 47)

As we shall see in contrast to the present study of drama, both Nelson and Hardcastle take a conventional view by focusing on the content of consciousness, a Western approach that does not address the nature of consciousness itself as the witness of language, self and meaning. Similarly, David C. Rubin and Daniel L. Greenberg explore the role of narrative in autobiographical memory. They examine individuals with neurological impairments such as autism in order to understand the relationship between bodily structure and its cultural context. Rubin and Greenberg analyze how the recollection of personal events by adults involves two things: narrative reasoning and the support of multiple neural systems in the brain. Any “full-blown” autobiographical narrative depends on the integration of neurological and psychological elements. The authors illustrate this by comparing normal adults to those suffering from damaged neural systems vital for recollection to succeed. They conclude that for research on autobiographical memory and recollection, the relative role of the brain as a metaphor is shrinking in relation to the role of the brain as physical entity about which a great deal is known. (2003: 77).

In a sense, Rubin and Greenberg, like the other authors of this volume, tend to reduce the narrative self to brain functioning and behavior rather than examining the self in terms of consciousness as a state of Being. Sidonie Smith also takes a constructivist approach to identity, but instead of relating the self solely to its neural or subatomic quantum level she examines autobiographical memory in terms of its sociocultural, historical and political contexts. In exploring the connection between autobiographical memory and scientific studies, Smith analyzes the interrelation between narrative and its material context in the case of an autistic woman. The elements that constitute autobiographical subjectivity such as language, experience, and cul-

Introduction

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ture may, as Smith argues, relate to our socially induced identity, but no evidence suggests that they constitute consciousness per se. Although she emphasizes how the storied self is situated in culture, she like the other authors in this volume does not tackle the question of how the self can also escape its cultural context, as exemplified by the plays analyzed below. Mark Freeman argues that even though autobiographical narrative may falsify experience through its literary elements, this reconstruction of the past does not undermine the capacity of narrative for depicting reality or historical truth. The aesthetics of fiction, in other words, does not obviate narrative reality. Freeman argues that we do not live only in the time of clocks. We also live in the time of stories, and through this time it is sometimes possible to see things and to feel things that could not be seen or felt earlier on. (2003: 125)

He thus concludes that autobiographical narrative is quite complicated, more so than “the fiction/reality opposition tends to convey” (127). This position at least hints at the unbounded nature of consciousness and the ability of the self to transcend the limits of language and narrative. James Phelan expands upon this narrative fusion between fiction and nonfiction, focusing on the ethics of representing the content of consciousness. In analyzing the retrospective pseudoautobiography of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, he focuses on the dual identity of the protagonist Humbert Humbert who is a represented character as well as a representing character with the conscious agenda of trying to persuade the audience to be sympathetic toward his relationship with Lolita. Humbert’s design reveals a conflict within him regarding the ethics of being both a character and the narrator of his surreptitious activity. The authors also explore how a breakdown in the construction of self results in a corresponding disruption in personal narrative. Lawrence L. Langer analyzes how the suffering of Holocaust survivors affected their autobiographical narratives. The intensity of such suffering causes the victims to be obsessed with death long after their trauma, as if they had died in the concentration camps yet paradoxically continued to live a semblance of life. In one example, Langer shows how a victim has to find “a way of expressing the idea

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that the meaning of one’s life can no longer be separated from the meaningless death of others” (2003: 163). Similarly, Robert A. Neimeyer and Finn Tschudi examine how people who experience troubles and conflicts tend to express themselves through disrupted narratives. Improved coherence in personal narrative, they argue, results in improved well-being, particularly in a clinical setting. They suggest that such therapeutic techniques would benefit the Western criminal system and argue that “the social construction of crime in Western cultures reinforces a dominant narrative of conflict as an offense against the state and the appropriate societal response as one of retribution” (185), and hope that their study will encourage others to understand human engagement with losses and conflicts. While this proposal has its value, an experience of consciousness per se beyond narrative, as suggested by the World’s Contemplative Traditions, would prevent loss and conflict to a much greater extent. As Forman explains in The Innate Capacity, That we must tie all percepts and thoughts together Kant calls the ‘supreme principle of understanding.’ If he is correct, then we must leave room for a consciousness that is not part of intentional thoughts and perceptions so it can tie them together. (1998: 17, original emphasis)

Unlike a socially constructed identity based on narrative, therefore, consciousness is decontextualized because it is without parts; as Forman puts it, “I cannot phenomenologically tease out its constituent parts or elements; any parts or elements would be known only by consciousness” (1998: 24, original emphasis). Grassroots Spirituality While socially constructed identity may indeed depend on a variety of narrative genres, many people throughout the world have had ineffable experiences beyond ordinary waking consciousness and the conceptual, narratable content of the mind. The conceptual state of mind does not encompass the unsayable dimension of the sublime, aesthetic experience (rasa) or mystical revelations. In 1997 Robert Forman and his team of colleagues received a generous grant from the Fetzer Institute to conduct research on the range and extent of what they call the Grassroots Spirituality Movement in the United States, resulting in the book Grassroots Spirituality: As they discovered, this

Introduction

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movement includes “Buddhists, Neo-advaitan meditators, Esoteric Christians, Renewal Jews, Taoists, spiritual healers, the spirituality in business consultants, and so on” (2004: 17), with signs of Grassroots Spirituality erupting everywhere across the US and around the world. As Forman’s book documents, between a third and a half of all Americans say that their lives have been seriously impacted by spiritual experience; 23% say they regularly practice yoga, meditation or other exercises to reduce stress; 59% of Americans consider themselves both spiritual and religious, while 20% considered themselves only spiritual; 12% have had personal experience of a spiritual figure such as God, Jesus, Elija, Mary or Buddha; and 41% say they have had a miraculous experience. Most of these experiences in their immediate first-person dimensions transcend narrative expression. One purpose of his study, Forman writes, was to “determine if this loose gaggle of seekers could communicate or develop into something like a community across the great religious divides” (2004: 18). If so, Forman speculates that we may find a way to solve the ancient religious conflicts that have plagued humanity throughout its history. On the basis of extensive interviews with people from a wide range of religious and spiritual backgrounds, Forman and his team found that grassroots spirituality developed more or less spontaneously among ordinary people without a founder or the organization of a singular leadership. In fact, a new profession has emerged consisting of “spiritual leaders and teachers” who help people develop through their own first-hand spiritual experiences beyond narrative accounts. A remarkable thing about this leadership, moreover, which is primarily non-traditional, is that it does not form a hierarchy but rather a collection of spiritual seekers from all walks of life. Through extensive interviews, Forman found that spirituality carries the “inner” overtones associated with Western and Eastern schools of meditation, thus pointing to an introvertive experience that is not strictly rational. In the tentative definition Forman offers, 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: 54)

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Not to be confused with pantheism (which holds that the deity is the universe and its phenomena), panentheism is 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” (52). The analogy he gives is that all the fish in the ocean are constituted entirely by the ocean, but the ocean, instead of being limited to the fishes, is panentheistic to them. In describing the panentheistic ultimate that is immanent within yet transcendent to the individual, Forman provides testimonies from people of diverse religious traditions and spiritual paths, including Christians, Jews, Muslim Sufis, Buddhists, practitioners of the Transcendental Meditation technique, Yoga teachers, Eco-feminists and many others. He concludes that while the Grassroots Spirituality Movement springs from every major religious and spiritual tradition around the world, it shares a worldview and set of experiences of far greater depth and specificity than previously understood. Indeed, the evidence provided by Grassroots Spirituality supports the conclusions of Forman’s earlier book, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, that spiritual experience, contrary to claims by constructivists such as Stephen Katz, is not a linguistic or cultural construct but rather a trans-cultural, trans-rational experience based on a pure consciousness event. People from all cultural, religious and spiritual traditions share common panentheistic experiences. For example, a Jewish respondent describes the panentheistic spiritual ultimate as “a formless, eternal 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.” Similarly, a Muslim Sufi leader describes the panentheistic as follows: “Spirit is behind everything. It is the hidden aspect of nature. Everything is a crystallization of spirit. Spirituality is looking beyond the surface, being in touch with the living energy. The spirit is the source behind everything we see, the invisible energy behind it all.” Contributing to this “majority report,” a Buddhist respondent says, “Buddhism talks of mind and body disappearing. This sounds like a negative expression. But it’s not nihilism. It is through this negation that life emerges. When as the Buddhists say, you disappear, then ‘It’ lives me” (2004: 55). Not everybody fits within this majority report. A Native American, for instance, did not describe a single panentheistic principle but a series of links or a web inter-

Introduction

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connecting all of us. Everybody in the Grassroots Spirituality Movement, however, longs for the intuitive or “not-strictly-rational” side of life largely neglected by narrative accounts and the rational worldview of modern science. By using Venn diagrams, Forman illustrates how the Grassroots Spirituality Movement draws from nearly all the religions and nontraditional spiritual groups, as well as millions of the unaffiliated, each overlapping the other on the introvertive level. He compares this movement to an ocean fed by a vast variety of spiritual rivulets, including many independent religious rivulets. Each of these may regard Grassroots Spirituality as the offspring of its own tradition, but that would be a mistake. As Forman says, “Grassroots Spirituality is its own thing, the bastard child of all and none of them” (2004: 93). This Movement, moreover, has many dialects, including the Men’s movement, TM, Ramana Maharshi, Havurah Jews, Traditional Judaism, Sufis, Transpersonal psychologists, Christian contemplatives, Theosophy, Aromatherapy, and others facets beyond the immediate boundaries of the Venn diagram. Forman suggests that the cause of Grassroots Spirituality is “over-determined”; that is, it has many intersecting causes ranging from the attempt to overcome the alienation caused by demographic shifts from the rural to the urban and exurban; changes in gender roles, a loosening of family ties, and the rise of the feminine; the baby boomers and the 1960s revolutionaries; disenchantment with the Church; the influx of lay as well as priestly non-European immigrants to America, including Vietnamese, Burmese, Chinese Buddhists, and Hindus, all contributing to a “stew of religions”; the declining faith in science and rationality; and the disillusionment with the American dream. In addition to these historical causes, Forman identifies a perennial cause, which he attributes ultimately to the possibility of “an innate human drive for spirituality” (2004: 132). Added to these causes is the growing support for spirituality in society’s institutions, particularly the workplace. People are increasingly disillusioned with work, which in-and-of-itself is unable to satisfy the individual. Many corporations and hospitals now provide counseling centers, day care centers and meditation rooms to help foster people’s well-being and spiritual growth. Spirituality is now championed in the business world as an answer to morale problems,

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fatigue and stress. Health care is shifting in its orientation to include self-help through yoga and meditation. As Forman says, At some point, we may have to decide whether health problems are the product of bad genes and environmental exposure, or if they stem from more transcendent causes, reflecting some imperfect match of a soul’s purpose and a body’s conduct. (2004: 152)

Modern medicine he concludes seems to be moving toward accepting spirituality as a tool for healing. Forman argues that Grassroots Spirituality provides an opportunity for the world to transcend its differences and unite on the basis of what he calls a “trans-traditional spirituality” (173). Instead of being divided by our different traditions, we should come together “in the light of our common spiritual depths,” recognize that these depths can encourage us to grow “beyond any single path,” and enjoy our common panentheistic ground while at the same time exploring our differences (173). Forman offers a realistic plan for achieving this integration through the organization of trans-traditional processes. These include ongoing local gatherings, non-dogmatic conversations between spiritual groups, integrating these local conversations within a national infrastructure—while always focusing on process instead of content. As Integral Drama will demonstrate, theatre also achieves this integration through a trans-traditional process. In Grassroots Spirituality, moreover, the ultimate, when it is identified, seems more like an ‘It’ than a ‘He’ or a ‘She.’ The ‘It’ here is no longer some personalized and judging God-figure. . . [but] a much more integrated and immanent panentheistic presence. It is directly available to each and every mind and heart, no matter what social role or station we enter or where we move. (208)

Forman’s book provides an objective and insightful report on one of the most significant social developments in recent history. Not since the Middle Ages has the world seen the kind of spirituality movement that he describes. His survey of this modern phenomenon graphically illustrates the power of consciousness to know itself through a broad range of interconnected spiritual avenues. Millions of readers from around the world will be uplifted by the knowledge that their own

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panentheistic experience is shared by many, just as the experience of awareness per se in theatre is shared by spectators. The Four Quadrants In support of Forman’s research, The Natyashastra, and the unsayable states of consciousness beyond narrativity, Ken Wilber develops “the integral approach” to life based on the four quadrants, or an integral operating system. In his recent book Integral Spirituality, he defines the four quadrants as consisting of the “I,” “We,” “It,” and Its.” The “I” and “We,” which constitute the interior realm, belong to the upper left or subjective, phenomenological and the lower left cultural or intersubjective, hermeneutic quadrants respectively. The “It” and “Its,” which constitute the exterior realm, belong to the upper right objective and lower right interobjective quadrants. The upper left, or “I” quadrant, consists of “your own immediate thoughts, feelings, sensations, and so on,” while the upper right quadrant is “what any individual event looks like from the outside. This especially includes its physical behavior; its material components; its matter and energy; and its concrete body—for all those are items that can be referred to in some sort of objective, 3rd-person, or ‘it’ fashion” (2006: 20-21, original emphasis ). The objective upper right quadrant thus consists of what subjective awareness looks like to objective science, the neurotransmitters, DNA, cells and organs systems. The lower left or “We” quadrant consists of the relations between one “I” and other “I’s,” representing not the individual but group or collective consciousness, not merely subjective but intersubjective awareness. Every “We,” moreover, has an exterior, which constitutes the lower right quadrant. While the lower left is the cultural dimension, the interior awareness and shared feelings of groups, the lower right is the social dimension, the behavior of groups studied through third-person science. Each of the four quadrants shows development or evolution. As Wilber puts it, In the Upper Left or ‘I,’ for example, the self unfolds from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, or body to mind to spirit. In the Upper Right, felt energy phenomenologically expands from gross to subtle to causal. In the Lower Left, the ‘we’ expands from egocentric (‘me’) to ethnocentric (‘us’) to worldcentric (‘all of us’). This expansion of group awareness allows social systems—in the Lower Right—to

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Wilber shows that the upper left quadrant first emerged in the Great Wisdom Traditions which looked at the “I” from the inside. As we shall see, Forman refers to self-awareness in the upper left quadrant as knowledge-by-identity: In knowledge-by-identity the subject knows something by virtue of being it. I know what it is to be conscious, what it is to ‘have’ ‘my’ consciousness, because and only because I am or ‘have’ that consciousness. [. . .] 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, original emphasis)

The upper left quadrant truths of the premodern Great Wisdom Traditions, however, have been rejected by modernity and postmodernity. Modernist epistemologies demanded of the Wisdom Traditions empirical evidence, which they were ill-prepared to provide. Although the phenomenological core of the Wisdom Traditions were savaged by modern epistemologies, these epistemologies were themselves monological and did not draw upon the four quadrants in defending their interpretations of truth. Postmodernity, which rejected premodernity and modernity both, argued that all perceptions are really perspectives embedded in bodies situated in cultures, not just in social systems of the lower right quadrant as argued by modernists. Wilber argues that every epistemological occasion has four quadrants, including the lower left cultural, intersubjective and upper left subjective, phenomenological quadrants. While modernism tended to focus on the upper right objective exterior quadrant, and postmodernism on the cultural lower left quadrant, the Great Wisdom Traditions specialized in the upper left quadrant, the interior of the individual with all the stages “of consciousness, realization, and spiritual experience” (2006: 44). Wilber salvages the great wisdom traditions by situating them in an integral framework that includes the premodern, modern and postmodern realizations. He notes that although contemplative traditions do not free individuals from their culture, integral methodological pluralism “can reconstruct the important truths of the contemplative traditions” (2006: 49, original emphasis). These truths include the five natural states of consciousness of the wisdom traditions: waking,

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dreaming, deep sleep, witnessing (turiya or the fourth state) and nondual (turiyatita). The latter two states are variations on the ordinary states induced by meditation as well as aesthetic experience (rasa), such as that induced by the plays discussed below. As Wilber says, in my direct, 1st-person experience, phenomenal states in many types of meditation are said to unfold from gross phenomena (‘I see rocks’) to subtle phenomena (‘I see light and bliss, I feel expansive love’), to causal phenomena (‘There is only vast emptiness, an infinite abyss’) to nondual (‘Divine Emptiness and relative Form are not two’). These are not 3rd-person structures (seen by zone #2 [from the outside]), but first person states (zone #1 [seen from the inside]). (2006: 76, original emphasis)

The upper left quadrant, therefore, has two zones: zone #1 is the direct, first-person immediate experience of consciousness, while zone # 2 is a first-person conceptual reflection on that experience. This integral model has in recent decades been adopted by many disciplines, including medicine and business. While conventional medicine deals mainly with the upper right quadrant, the integral model now claims that any physical event associated with the upper right quadrant is really influenced by all four dimensions. The cure for physical illness depends on research into all four quadrants, with the upper right being only a quarter of the story. Similarly, the integral model has also been employed in business, which now needs to address the four environments or markets for a product to be successful. Businesses today put emphasis on individual behavior, psychological understanding, cultural management, and the governance of social systems (Wilber 2006: 27-29). Wilber concludes that all levels of existence—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual—must be exercised in the I, we and it quadrants—the self, culture, nature and society—for maximum development toward truth and happiness. As we shall see in the plays discussed below, zone #1 in the upper left quadrant constitutes the witnessing or awareness per se aspect of the performer and spectator’s subjective experience, while zone #2 constitutes the witnessing of a particular conceptual content, such as that based on the perception of a play.

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The Plays Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party presents Stanley as a character who has opted out of conformity to a social community and attempts to live a life of freedom. He shuns the outside world and its immeasurable demands on him by withdrawing into the silence and peacefulness of his subjective world, until Goldberg and McGann invade his privacy and attempt to reintegrate him into the community from which he managed to escape. Having rejected his socially constructed identity, Stanley attempts to rediscover the natural self he enjoyed during his stint as a pianist. Through the confrontation between Stanley and Goldberg and McGann, Pinter moves the characters and spectators toward an experience of the unsayable secret of theatre, namely a glimpse of pure consciousness as a void of conceptions in the upper left quadrant. Of all the characters in The Birthday Party, only Stanley experiences an epiphany of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form, a unity-amidst-diversity through which the self as internal observer can witness the contents of the mind and the perceptual world. Goldberg and McGann, however, also intuit the possibility of such an experience, although in their anxiety to conform to their community they don’t take advantage of this possibility like Stanley. In Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Berenger alone manages to resist rhinoceritis by not conforming to the urge to give up his humanity and become a rhino like each the other characters. In the opposition between consuming to sustain biological existence and desiring to consume as a means of wish fulfillment, only Berenger has the self-sufficiency to avoid the over-indulgence, gluttony and intemperance that impels the other characters to transmogrify into beasts. Although the play shows the absurdity of defiance as much as the absurdity of conformism, Berenger has the strength of character to remain an individualist by not joining the happy throng of less sensitive people. Through Berenger’s taste of the void of conceptions beyond cultural constructs as displayed by his selfless support of the best interest and wellbeing of others, the audience also glimpses a state of unity beyond duality. The real freedom of a unified, transpersonal self approached by Berenger and the spectators derives from a sense of the connection between the local field of matter and action and an underlying nonlocal field of mind and consciousness. Berenger and through him the audience gain access to the coexistence of pure

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awareness per se and the world of duality by not clinging to the desire for the sensory pleasures of a specific Form, namely that of a rhinoceros. The audience in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros gains an aesthetic experience (rasa) through devices such as absurdity, the dream-like nature of reality, illogical argumentation and duplicitous wrangling between friends that swing their awareness between an ordinary state of mind and a more highly developed spiritual consciousness. The rationalists operate out of ordinary self-interested cravings, while Berenger exhibits an increased ethical discernment based on a greater purity of consciousness. In Arcadia, Stoppard juxtaposes the dimensions of time and timelessness, intuition and logic, heart and mind, thereby inducing in the characters and audience a transpersonal, transrational experience of freedom even from within the boundaries of time. Taking us beyond the limits of time, the structure of the play dramatically juxtaposes two historical periods—1809-12 and the present—while also integrating two aspects of physics, Isaac Newton’s theory and Chaos theory, which undercuts Newtonian physics. In the 1809-12 setting, the thirteen-year-old genius Thomasina Coverly, the lead female character, represents Romanticism through her scientific outlook and emergent affection for her tutor Septimus Hodge. In the contemporary setting, the leading female character, Hannah Jarvis, an author doing research on the Coverly estate, represents a neoclassical attitude based on Newtonian physics and a denial of feelings. The duality set up by the opposition between classical and Gothic landscapes, Enlightenment and Romanticism, reason and feeling, rationality and nonrationality, Newtonian determinism and the chaos of Eros ultimately leads the characters and audience to a taste of unity as embodied by love. Although Hannah rejects Romanticism, in the end she and Thomasina grow toward a genuinely spiritual domain that does not involve the rejection of the physical or a pseudo union of a regressive stage of development, but rather a transcending of the separate-self sense to a transrational, transverbal experience. This experience for characters and audience alike may be momentary and fragile, but involves a coexistence of Emptiness and Form that characterizes a taste of cosmic consciousness. In The Homecoming, Harold Pinter portrays Ruth as a character who defies the stereotype of a conventional woman. When her philos-

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opher husband Teddy brings her to his parental home in London to meet his father, uncle and two brothers, they try to sexually dominate her. Although in the end Ruth abandons Teddy and remains in London with his family, her position in a demanding male world is not only ambiguous but violates every rule in the male book of female subservience. Ruth does not represent a female ideology that will become the norm so much as a transcendence of all ideology in a world of rapid change. She establishes a self not in imitation of the male self tied to philosophical debate or the domination of others; rather she achieves a trans-linguistic, trans-logical dimension of identity, not only tapping into pure awareness but also showing evidence of experiencing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form through her ability to remain detached while engaging the men in their pseudophilosophical debates. The audience of The Homecoming can sense that although the men seem to exploit Ruth, she turns the tables on them by liberating herself from the force of their abuse. Like Stanley in The Birthday Party, Ruth transgresses the norms of a patriarchal society because of her inner strength of character, achieving a level of unity within herself through which she can witness the world of Form represented by a male community. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, as Mark Musa spells out in the “Introduction,” Pirandello distinguishes between having form, like ordinary people and actors in the play, and being form, like the characters who feel compelled to find an author and thereby actualize their form. Having form implies continual change in an impermanent world, while being form implies an immutable (neverchanging) and eternal identity. The Father, like the other characters as opposed to the actors, is form, but he resists the fixity of a form that traps him in a particular moment in life that can be judged by others. In ordinary cultural and social contexts, people may have no fixity of form, but at the same time they have an innate, immutable form within the mind, namely pure awareness, which they often don’t recognize or try to deny. Pirandello confronts the issue of finding truth or determining whether or not it exists. Truth no doubt exists but remains beyond the reach of the ordinary intellect, on the basis of which each individual would interpret “the truth” differently. Six Character suggests, therefore, that one can know truth by being form as part of an immediate experience, but to understand or narrate truth within the context of language and reason involves the process of having form.

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In terms of the four quadrants, truth arises through our being form in the upper left quadrant. Wilber refers to this as a zone #1 experience, but one can also reflect upon this experience afterwards through zone #2, also in the upper left quadrant but outside the circle of zone #1 (2006: 39). As the play suggests, the Directors and actors find it difficult to represent reality because they are lost in the field of change with no access to witnessing consciousness, which is never-changing. The characters, on the other hand, accept their performance as illusion because they sense that all activity is illusory, while the only reality is that which never changes—the quality of witnessing that arises from being form. The characters, then, as well as the audience, can experience a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form by witnessing the social activity surrounding them. Although Genet’s The Balcony, set during a revolution, centers on social phobia and the attempt to escape it even within the church, law and defense forces, Martin Esslin argues that Genet is not condemning lawyers, bishops and generals merely for lusting after power but is also dramatizing their sense of impotence within a social hierarchy. The gap between members of different social strata and within the individuals themselves points toward a double awareness that underlies The Balcony and suggests a way of transcending both social phobia and the feeling of impotence. The men who frequent Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony act out roles they aspire to as a means of gaining power and virility, trying to fulfill their fantasies of grandeur by donning outfits worn by either bishops, judges or generals and lording it over the prostitutes who play their opposites—a process through which they attempt to become desirable commodities. In each of these minidramas, the men glorify themselves, subjugating the women for their own self-aggrandizement, but they have much less control over the situations they enact than do the women. Madame Irma’s women can not only make the men feel either good about themselves or undermine their illusions, they can also witness what they do with the men because they remain nonattached to male fantasies. The girls and audience, therefore, can distance themselves from these fantasies and thereby witness them through a glimpse of the coexistence of the internal observer and all the roles that substitute for our true identity. Yoruba metaphysics posits a transcendental reality, which Wole

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Soyinka defines as "the fourth space." This space is separated from terrestrial life by an abyss or gulf, which the protagonists in A Dance of the Forests attempt to bridge. While West African metaphysics, like postmodernism, questions the principle of binary oppositions at the basis of transcendentality, Soyinka in his plays does so on the basis of a coexistence of opposites and not by giving precedence to one alternative over the other, as in the poststructuralist "privileging" of the signifier over the transcendental signified. Soyinka explores the ritual form of drama not as an ahistorical ideal but as an examination of history, raising it to cosmic proportions. His representation of the experience of unity in West African myth is complemented by analogous representations in another non-Western tradition, that of Sanskrit poetics, which also describes the structure of binary oppositions as being subsumed by a coexistence of opposites. Soyinka's "fourth space," which he distinguishes from the three commonly acknowledged African worlds—that of the ancestors, the unborn, and the living—constitutes a coexistence of all spaces, which forms the basis for a glimpse by performer and spectator of a coexistence of Emptiness and Form. A Dance of the Forests dramatizes the integration of essence and materiality, unity and diversity, a coexistence of opposites that provides a logical answer to postmodernist dilemmas, one conveyed through Soyinka's portrayal of the Yoruba transitional abyss and its effects upon the audience, which can also be elucidated through the Sanksrit theory of the interdependence of consciousness and language. Both traditions provide a means through which people gain direct experience of expanded awareness. In the context of modern Africa, colonialism has complicated and corrupted the relationship between ritual and myth, experience and understanding. Nevertheless, in Soyinka's ritual theatre, idealism and history meet in the very response of the audience. The seven plays analyzed below all suggest an opportunity provided by a Lamp at the Door, which as Bonshek says simultaneously illuminates for awareness the inside and outside, giving the audience a glimpse of cosmic consciousness. Bonshek quotes Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s explanation of the silence and dynamism of this experience: “Now that state of Being [pure, selfreferral consciousness] is both ways at the same time. Outside lighted, inside lighted, but what do we mean by in and out in that state? In and out is the reality of dynamism and silence. But if we take it to be in

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and out then it is with infinite speed in and out. It’s a straight line representing silence and dynamism only when the dynamism is of infinite frequency—when at no time is it out or in; it is in and out at the same time” (2007: 52). The plays lead the characters and audience to an experience of silence and dynamism at the same time, which underlies the basic nature of self-referral consciousness experienced in the upper left quadrant. This bi-directional coexistence of silence and dynamism induced by the plays represents, however briefly, the effect of a taste of knowledge-by-identity after narrative discourse has run its course. When an audience first glimpses an aesthetic experience (rasa) through zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, they may not reflect upon it immediately afterwards through zone #2, but as each of the plays discussed here progresses by inducing a series of such glimpses, the audience then begins to a appreciate the innate bi-directional nature of higher states of awareness.

The Fall of Private Man in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party The Two-Tiered Loss of the Public World Harold Pinter’s first three plays, The Room, The Birthday Party and The Dumb Waiter, are collectively known as “Comedies of Menace” because they dramatize the terrors that most individuals experience in confrontation with external forces. In commenting on The Birthday Party, Pinter says that the play dramatizes how the true and false, real and unreal, are not easily distinguishable: “The thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false” (quoted in Naismith 2000: 45). The main characters in The Birthday Party emerge out of a past that remains a mystery except for references to the possibility of earlier encounters between Stanley Webber and the two men, Goldberg and McCann, who have come to take him away. Stanley lives more or less peacefully in a modest boarding house in a town on the south coast of England run by Petey and Meg Boles, both in their 60s. In the first of three acts, Petey comes home one morning and tells Meg that two men he met in town have asked about a vacancy, and Meg says she has a room for them. When Stanley hears about the two men, Goldberg and McCann, he suddenly for no apparent reason becomes highly anxious. As Katherine Worth says, Pinter brilliantly conveys the suggestion that the inquisitors are unreal beings, a projection of Stanley’s obscure dread, without quite destroying the possibility of their being taken as real; this is what makes them so alarming. (1986: 37)

Critics have argued that Goldberg and McCann represent agents of conformity who have come to apprehend Stanley for his nonconformist and even disrespectful attitude toward the Boles, his family,

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religion and society in general. Martin Esslin suggests that while the play “has been interpreted as an allegory of conformity,” it could also be seen as an allegory of death—man snatched away from the home he has built himself, from the warmth of love embodied by Meg’s mixture of motherliness and sexuality, by the dark angels of nothingness, who pose the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. (1991: 241)

As argued here, however, the allegory of death can also be interpreted as a transformation to the transpersonal, transverbal self. In Act One Meg organizes a birthday party for Stanley against his will, while in Act Two Goldberg and McCann interrogate Stanley about the chicken and the egg and other such inanities, and finally Act Three ends with Goldberg and McCann, who are Jewish and Irish outsiders themselves, ironically reconstructing Stanley and taking him to the unknown Monty. Stanley’s complex emotional state, with its multiple levels of association and allusions, centers on his mysterious fear of the public world. Bill Naismith argues that “Stanley is guilty of being Stanley. His fears concern the world outside, which makes immeasurable demands on him (the individual) from the kinds of directions which he chooses not to fulfill” (2000: 43). Throughout the play the mystery of Stanley’s background and the reason for Goldberg and McCann’s attempt to reconstruct him can only be speculated upon. Pinter, moreover, says, “The more acute the experience the less articulate the expression” (quoted in Naismith 2000: 43). This quote suggests that any relationship between an individual and society or between an individual and deeper levels of the self involves two aspects of human identity: the socially constructed aspect that Stanley tries to abandon, and the transpersonal, transverbal aspect that remains unsayable. This qualityless level of identity, an objectless awareness that underlies all human thought and activity and corresponds to Wilber’s zone #1 in the upper left quadrant, can be accessed only after language and interpretation have fulfilled their purpose. By the end of the play, Goldberg and McCann drive Stanley away from his nonconformist lifestyle in the boarding house, at least temporarily, and in the process open the spectator’s awareness to the marginalized unsayable dimension of human identity. Regarding the theme of the threat to a person’s identity and security by “unknown outside forces,” Steven Gale says it produces “the generalizing effect that allows the

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meaning of the play to extend to all members of the audience. This includes the idea of verification, which contains within it the problem of identity” (2003: 183). Stanley’s domination by the visitors symbolizes the way society interferes with the identity of individuals and thereby hinders their development, compelling them to neglect the potential of their inner dimension as a field of all possibilities and to adopt the socially acceptable roles of a specific community. In The Birthday Party, Pinter moves the characters and spectators toward the unsayable secret of theatre, providing them with a glimpse of the sacred experience of pure consciousness as a void of conceptions in the upper left quadrant. Only Stanley, however, evinced a taste of the coexistence between Emptiness and Form, a unity of the witnessing internal observer and the contents of the mind, which the audience also glimpses through aesthetic experience (rasa). The unanswered questions concerning the background of the main characters, which reveal an uncertainty about identity, can only be addressed indirectly, especially in the case of Stanley. Varun Begley argues that The Birthday Party is animated by catastrophe, not spiritual or existential but emphatically historical in character. Thirty years later, Harold Bloom claimed that sensitivity to the Holocaust was ‘inevitable for a sensitive dramatist, a third of whose people were murdered before he was fifteen.’ (2005: 47; Bloom 1987: 1)

Even so, the human context of historical catastrophe can be understood as having its roots in spiritual or existential plight. The unanswered questions of the play refer not only to historical ambiguity but also to the trans-linguistic aspect of identity reflected by Stanley’s bearing toward social responsibility. Some critics suggest that Stanley’s anxiety toward the visitors and his apparent guilt stem from having discarded his social accountability, but we can also interpret his anxious reaction to the visitors as caused by his sense that the public sphere has begun to encroach upon the private world he would rather inhabit. As Naismith notes, “To define one’s identity simply as ‘the fact of being who or what one is’ has never satisfied Pinter. His whole theory of the way we use language is based on his belief that we do not wish to be ‘known’ and we don’t wish to know people. Furthermore, he isn’t at all confident that we can even know ‘who we

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are’” (2000: 44). Pinter is right insofar that language cannot reveal the core of human identity, a state beyond the boundaries of social responsibility that Stanley seems to have touched upon. As suggested here, The Birthday Party reveals a complementarity between the inner and outer dimensions of human identity that parallel the inner and outer aspects of the contemporary world as described by sociologists such as Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman. In exposing the interrelationship between the inner and outer aspects of society and individual identity, Pinter’s play shifts the spectator’s awareness from the social world of phenomenological difference toward a sacred, nonpluralistic experience of the transpersonal self, or from the “We” and “It” quadrants to the “I” quadrant. In The Fall of Public Man, Sennett argues that the theory and practice of intimacy in modern society has undermined the public domain based on impersonality, objective rules, polite behavior and effective government administration that upholds individual rights and freedom, replacing this with an emphasis on personality and the identification of the self with class and professional status. Because the public sphere in industrial capitalist society has been stigmatized as evil and immoral due to its impersonal tone and political favoritism, people in the twentieth-century retreated into local communities based on shared feelings, motivations and ethnicity. Sennett explains the fall of public man through an analogy between the games children play and the public sphere. When children play games they learn how to make and follow rules, and when necessary they modify these rules to create equality between younger and older kids playing together. Modern man, on the other hand, has lost the ability to act effectively in the political arena because he places greater emphasis on personality and charisma than on the ability to interact with strangers on an impersonal level, as children do while playing games. Localism has thus led to the impersonality of the public world being replaced by the personality of a charismatic leader whose only qualification is the ability or skill to express emotions in public. People for the past century have increasingly felt so alienated from the impersonality of the public world that they can only identify with a leader who inspires a sense of familiarity by expressing himself on clichéd issues they as a community have in common. No track record of political activism counts for people today because they care less about political, economic or religious issues than about the personality of a leader

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with whom they can identify. This attitude has undermined the public sphere and led to the globalization of local communities. By emphasizing shared emotions, special interests and material goals, these communities consist of people who have lost the capacity for dealing with the unknown or taking risks for the benefit of society as a whole. According to Sennett, localism does not lead to fraternity so much as fratricide because unless you conform to the common interests of the group, you become a threat and therefore a potential scapegoat. As Elizabeth Sakellaridou argues, in The Birthday Party ontological and existential questions take a concrete form; Stanley complains he has sleepless nights, he fears the coming of strangers, he feels trapped in his own refuge, he looks in the mirror in quest of an identity for himself. (1988: 29)

The external menace in The Birthday Party, as Gale and Sakellaridou both observe, does not end with the early plays but extend throughout Pinter’s work. As Sennett says, “Community has become both emotional withdrawal from society and a territorial barricade within the city” (1992: 301). People in local communities share “the same outlook” on the basis of peer pressure, without sharing “the same in look,” such as the religious faith, mores and customs of that community (306). The more people get involved in the passions of community, the more they avoid the impersonality of the social order. The more they fear impersonality, the more they fantasize about a parochial collective life. Sennett argues, however, that people can be sociable with each other only if they have some protection from each other. Without boundaries or barriers between members of a community, they become paranoid and even destructive. The impersonal public world stems from a belief in human nature, while local communities promote a belief in human natures, which entails, as Sennett puts it, “a movement from the idea of natural character to that of personality” (314). In communities based on narcissism, everyone else in the group has to reflect yourself, your own personality as opposed to an impersonal set of interests. Children’s play, on the other hand, allows children to associate with the rules of the game and thereby achieve an experience of self-distance, which helps them focus on the rules of the game rather than on instant gratification. When children play together

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they learn the kind of disinterested activity that adults used to be able to perform in public. To play, Sennett says, “requires a freedom from the self” (319), specifically the socially constructed self from which Stanley has managed to distance himself. Sennett says that “the sharing of impulses rather than the pursuit of a common activity began to define a peculiar sense of community at the end of the last [19th] century, and is now tied to the localization of community—so that one shares only as far as the mirror of self reflects” (1992: 326). As suggested by The Birthday Party, the public world as represented by Goldberg and McCann is no longer a place free of self-identity constructed by localized communities. One is no longer allowed to live impersonally, in freedom from a self defined by special interest groups. Pinter presents a world no longer based on impersonal, objective rules but rather on the localization of shared values often enforced through intimidation, the threat of ostracism and even fratricide. Stanley’s penchant for self-distance, his ability to live outside the boundaries of a local community, becomes a threat to that community. Although Jewish and Irish respectively, Goldberg and McCann have aligned themselves with an outside, non-ethnic community that apparently represents the public world. In a postmodern context, however, this world can no longer be an impersonal domain based either conceptually on meta-narratives, or experientially on the groundless ground of human nature, but instead has become a world that enforces conformity to specific attributes considered desirable by its members as represented by a charismatic leader, such as Monty. As Pinter’s play suggests, what has been lost through the demise of the public world, in addition to the capacity for polite interaction with strangers through a general acceptance of meta-narratives or the rules of the game, is the ability to access a transpersonal, transverbal dimension of experience, a field of all possibilities beyond the socially constructed human natures espoused by individual communities. Because it can no longer sustain these impersonal qualities, people in postmodern society have stigmatized the contemporary public world as immoral and evil and supplanted it with the pseudo safety of local communities. The public world was thus more integral in terms of the four quadrants, while localization restricts one to cultural or social allegiances by excluding integration with the upper left quadrant.

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Stanley, therefore, fears not the outside world in itself but rather its replacement by a localized attitude that imposes boundaries on his freedom of thought and action. The only community he belongs to is that of the boarding house of Meg and Petey, who he keeps at a distance through his mischievous banter. His freedom, moreover, is not a conceptual but an experiential phenomenon that he never tries to express through a narrative about his past. Pinter’s characters and spectators cannot know this inner freedom, which comprises the sacred dimension of human nature, through conceptuality or narrative accounts but only as a transverbal, transpersonal direct experience. In the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, this level of experiential knowledge corresponds to Plato’s Forms, as related to Being, the Good and the Beautiful, and to the Vedic state of Sat-ChitAnanda (transcendent Being, Intelligence and Bliss). As Jonathan Shear notes, Being, the Good, and the Beautiful are reached, like samadhi or qualityless pure consciousness, through a “mental faculty distinct from ordinary intellect to ‘reverse’ the direction of attention within and produce experience of a transcendental ground of thought, knowledge and awareness,” an experience associated “with gaining wisdom, virtue, self-sufficiency and freedom” (1990: 34). Plato’s Forms, the fourth level of his Divided Line, is reached through the faculty he calls the “dialectic” (Shear 1990: 11-29), just as Sat-ChitAnanda or pure consciousness is reached through a reversal of the direction of attention within through the transcendence of ordinary mental faculties to an abstract, objectless state of awareness. This experience of unbounded consciousness corresponds to the experience in Zen called “no-mind.” As described by Huang-po, No-mindness means having no mind (or thoughts) whatever [. . .] inwardly it is like wood or stone; it is immovable, unshakable; outwardly, it is like space where one knows no obstructions, no stoppage. It transcends both subject and object, it recognizes no points of orientation, it has no forms, it knows neither gain nor loss. (quoted by Suzuki 1956: 218)

As we shall see, Pinter’s play induces such a reversal in the mind of the spectator through the surreal uncertainly of the background of Stanley, Goldberg and McCann, and through a series of climaxes in each of the three acts.

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Reversing Attention Just as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Sun, Zen, Yoga and the Advaitan technique of meditation emphasize a reversal of attention inward toward pure awareness, so The Birthday Party has the effect of emptying the content of the spectator’s mind through the uncertainty surrounding the characters’ identities and backgrounds. As they try to transform Stanley back into a citizen of respectable society as they understand it, Goldberg and McCann do not so much destroy his identity—namely, the constructed self that Stanley has already discarded—as attempt to fill the void by re-imposing the attributes from which Stanley has begun to free himself. To the displeasure of his two subjugators, Stanley through a process of self-distancing has replaced his socially constructed identity with a non-learned or innate neuro-physiological condition capable of sustaining a trans-cognitive mode of freedom as direct experience. D. T. Suzuki describes this mode of direct experience in terms of Zen: Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. [. . . ] Zen [. . .] wants us to open a “third eye,” as Buddhists call it, to the hitherto undreamed-of region shut away from us through our own ignorance. When the cloud of ignorance disappears, the infinity of the heavens is manifested, where we see for the first time into the nature of our own being. (1949: 11)

Regarding the uncertainty of Stanley’s past, in Act One Meg tells Goldberg of Stanley’s successful piano concert: “In . . . a big hall. His father gave him champagne. But then they locked the place up and he couldn’t get out” (1968: 32). Meg has fabricated this story because we know that Stanley told her his father did not attend the concert; nevertheless, we have no way of knowing whether Stanley himself told her the truth. As Pinter has said, “we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning” (quoted in Naismith 2000: 46). An added difficulty arises when the past consists of an experience beyond language, beyond the capacity for narrative exposition. As the play suggests, such a transverbal phenomenon would characterize the empty state that Stanley may have tasted by abandoning his socially constructed identity. He may have first had this experience while engaging in creative activity, such as playing the

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piano or even listening to music. According to Eastern and even Western philosophy, the self consists of two aspects: linguistic and extra-linguistic. The extra-linguistic experience of the self beyond the duality of attributes cannot be rendered through narrative, for in reflecting non-intentional consciousness, it contains no objects to be related. From a constructivist view, as we have seen, Gary Fireman notes that “Narrative does not merely capture aspects of the self for description, communication, and examination; narrative constructs the self” (2003: 5). Fireman also claims that “the portions of human consciousness beyond the purely somatic—self-awareness, self-understanding and self-knowledge—are products of personal narratives” (4). As argued here, however, the self-awareness generated and communicated by means of narrative applies only to the linguistic, constructed aspect of the self. As Shear explains in his analysis of Descartes, Hume and Kant, pure consciousness can be defined uniquely as that experience which has absolutely no identifiable empirical qualities within it, that is, which is devoid of identifiable spatio-temporal content. [. . .] For if we identify the experience of pure consciousness with experience of the self, then this experience, containing absolutely no discernable empirical qualities, uniquely allows us to give experiential significance to Descartes’ characterization of self as simple and nonpicturable, Hume’s characterization of self as (supposedly) distinct from all impressions, and Kant’s characterization of it as pure consciousness independent of all spatio-temporal appearances. (1990: 104)

By keeping the backgrounds and identities of Stanley, Goldberg and McCann unknown, Pinter prevents the spectator from concentrating on a particular narrative account of their lives with its phenomenal content. Shear notes that “if one concentrates on something, the act of concentration itself keeps the mind active and focused on the object being concentrated on, thus, once again, preventing one from experiencing the completely non-active state of pure objectless consciousness (100). The Birthday Party turns the direction of the spectator’s attention inward by preventing her from concentrating on the specific empirical qualities of the characters’ past. Stanley does not talk about his past because the most important aspect of it for him is extra-linguistic and transpersonal, related to a level of creative intelligence beyond the conventional self-

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understanding acquired through ordinary mental faculties. In describing his piano concert to Meg, Stanley says, “I had a unique touch. Absolutely unique. They came up to me and said they were grateful” (22-23). Even before discarding his socially constructed self, therefore, Stanley was already different in his style of musical performance—provided what he says is true. This non-conformist tendency may have originated through his approach to art and then spilled over into his social behavior. When Lulu, a friend of Meg in her early twenties who finds Stanley attractive, asks him to go for a walk and “get a bit of air” (26), he declines, suggesting instead they go away together. When she asks where, he replies, “Nowhere. Still, we could go” (26). Again, by pointing to a non-place, The Birthday Party prevents the spectator from concentrating on the spatio-temporal dimension. Stanley implies that if Lulu wants to go somewhere with him, she will have to surrender her attachments to conventional behavior and everyday reality. Even the question of whether or not Stanley is telling the truth about the nature of his performance has the effect of emptying the mental content of the spectators and other characters. Finding him impossible to deal with or even understand, Lulu tells Stanley, “You’re a bit of a washout, aren’t you?” This remark further suggests how Stanley’s overall performance in the play has a decontingencing effect on characters and audience—in a sense washing out their world of familiar attributes. In contrast to Stanley, Goldberg in a conversation with McCann narrates his own past in a way that extols conformity to established values and behavior. Honour thy father and thy mother. All along the line. Follow the line, the line, McCann, and you can’t go wrong. What do you think, I’m a self-made man? No! I sat where I was told to sit. I kept my eye on the ball. [. . .] And that’s why I’ve reached my position, McCann. Because I’ve always been as fit as a fiddle. My motto. Work hard and play hard. Not a day’s illness. (77-78)

Although Goldberg does not go into narrative detail about his past, he clearly presents an attitude of conformity to what he regards as the establishment, even though what he refers to consists more of a localized system of values. As real as this attitude may seem to Goldberg, the play suggests that it is not entirely real or unreal, true or false. Whatever its reality or truth may be, moreover, pertains primarily to the linguistic self. Indeed, even Goldberg has doubts about his own narrative self-presentation, as foreshadowed by his announce-

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ment in Act Three: “I don’t know why, but I feel knocked out. I feel a bit . . . It’s uncommon for me” (76). In his narrative account of his past, whether true of false, Goldberg may be trying to counteract the effect of Stanley’s voided identity, which seems to undermine Goldberg’s own self-confidence. After all, Goldberg, like McCann, comes from an ethnic minority and may have already had to surrender some of his own values to conform to a localized community led by Monty. Although McCann comes across like a gangster, in Act Three Goldberg tells Lulu that “He’s only been unfrocked six months,” suggesting that McCann may share some of Stanley’s innocence and even an inclination for freedom from the narrative self. The fact that Goldberg and McCann are vulnerable emerges when they first arrive at the boarding house. When they enter with their suitcases, Goldberg says, “We’ll both take a seat. Sit back, McCann. Relax. What’s the matter with you? I bring you down for a few days to the seaside. Take a holiday. Do yourself a favor. Learn to relax, McCann, or you’ll never get anywhere” (27). McCann’s anxiety, as suggested later in the play, could be linked to a spiritual conflict within himself. Having left the clergy only six months ago, McCann may feel uncomfortable coercing people into conforming to the Judaeo-Christian dogma of Western Civilization, given that he himself may have realized that dogma alone does not constitute spirituality. This realization may have been one reason for his leaving the clergy. When they arrive at the boarding house, McCann asks if it’s the right place, and Goldberg tries to calm him by saying that their present work, which to McCann still remains unclear, is not that different from his previous job. Goldberg: The main issue is a singular issue and quite distinct from your previous work. Certain elements, however, might well approximate in points of procedure to some of your other activities. All is dependent on the attitude of our subject. At all events, McCann, I can assure you that the assignment will be carried out and the mission accomplished with no excessive aggravation to you or myself. Satisfied? (30)

Goldberg implies that their mission with Stanley consists of reincorporating him back into the Judeo-Christian fold, back to social and religious orthodoxy, after he has ventured beyond the attributes of ordinary identity and computation into the trans-cultural realm of

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direct experience. Given that members of the most oppressed communities—the Jews and the Irish—have been assimilated into a quasi public orthodoxy and become the tormentors of those remaining beyond the pale suggests that they indeed represent the opposite extreme to the nothingness and nowhere that Stanley has fathomed by transcending the empirical qualities of mind toward pure awareness. By setting up an opposition between the freedom pursued by Stanley and the conformism enforced by Goldberg and McCann, Pinter sets up a framework through which spectators can move toward their own innate tendency for freedom in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, while at the same time witnessing the content of the play in a unity of Emptiness and Form. In this state, as Bonshek notes, “both the inner transcendental reality and the outer field of relative perception are experienced; the lamp is ‘at the door’ illuminating inside and outside” (2007: 46). Party Interrogation In Act Two, Goldberg and McCann descend upon Stanley and begin their interrogation. Stanley meets McCann first and asks him if he has ever been to Maidenhead, and then tells him that business calls and he plans to move back home. McCann, who says he has never been to Maidenhead, asks Stanley if he’s in business, and Stanley says no, he’s given it up, but then divulges that he has a small private income, the economic basis for his current lifestyle (40). Stanley hears Goldberg talking outside with Petey, but when he tries to leave the room, McCann blocks his way. Stanley becomes defensive in an attempt to evade what he rightly perceives as the malign intention of McCann and Goldberg: I suppose I have changed, but I’m still the same man that I always was. I mean, you wouldn’t think, to look at me really . . . I mean, not really, that I was the sort of bloke to—to cause any trouble, would you? (McCann looks at him.) Do you know what I mean? (40)

Stanley’s remarks suggest that his inner transformation remains invisible because it has nothing to do with his socially constructed self, which he has abandoned—although he admits to drinking a bit more than before. The subtext of his argument implies that because his inner change is undetectable, he should not be suspected as being a threat to anyone, and therefore the visitors should leave him in peace. Further-

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more, he says he’s the same man he always was, which implies that the inner dimension beyond the discernable empirical qualities of his constructed identity is innate, not something learned and therefore not something that can ever be taken away. This non-pluralistic phenomenon also underpins the identities of McCann and Goldberg, as indicated by their reactions to him. McCann displays anxiety and a lack of confidence from the beginning, while Goldberg displays them later in the play. Stanley’s level of being on the one hand complements the conceptual self, while on the other hand has the effect of turning the visitors and audience inward toward the higher self. This move toward the inner dimension induces an anxiety of defamiliarization in Goldberg and McCann, threatening to undermine the secure and familiar attributes of their constructed identities as well as the shared interests of their localized community. Although Stanley tells McCann, “You needn’t be frightened of me,” McCann acts confused and uncomfortable and tells him, “You know, I’m flabbergasted with you” (42). When McCann and Petey leave to buy drinks for the birthday party, Stanley finds himself alone with Goldberg and tells him, “Don’t mess me about” (44). When McCann returns they force Stanley to sit down and begin their interrogation: McCann: Why did you leave the organization? Goldberg: What would your old man say, Webber? McCann: Why did you betray us? Goldberg: You hurt me, Webber. You’re playing a dirty game. McCann: That’s the Black and Tan fact. Goldberg: Who does he think he is? McCann: Who do you think you are? Stanley: You’re on the wrong horse. Goldberg: When did you come to this place? Stanley: Last year. Goldberg: Where did you come from? Stanley: Somewhere else. Goldberg: Why did you come here? Stanley: My feet hurt! Goldberg: Why did you stay? Stanley: I had a headache! . . . Goldberg: You don’t know. What’s happened to your memory, Webber? When did you last have a bath? Stanley: I have one every— Goldberg: Don’t lie.

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As their questioning continues they accuse him of killing his wife, and McCann snatches Stanley’s glasses and eventually breaks them. When Goldberg asks him his name, Stanley says, “Joe Soap” (50). Goldberg also has other names: Nat and Simey, and McCann is called Dermot, which reflects the postmodern condition of multiple constructed identities, as discussed below. Goldberg then asks: “Do you recognize an external force? Stanley: What? [. . . ] Goldberg: Do you recognize an external force, responsible for you, suffering for you?” (50). Although this question has religious overtones—McCann says, “You’re a traitor to the cloth” (51)—it also refers to the organization they accuse Stanley of having betrayed. In answering the question about his trade, Stanley says he plays the piano. His interrogators look down on artists, especially a bohemian artist who epitomizes the nonconformist threat to their paranoid “position”: “Goldberg: No society would touch you” (ibid.). Their question about which came first—the chicken or the egg?—indicates that their motive in questioning Stanley is not intended to gain information or elicit logical answers but only to intimidate. At this point Goldberg threatens: “We can sterilize you” (52), suggesting that they have a subliminal fear of Stanley’s power. Comments like, “McCann: You betrayed our land. Goldberg: You betray our breed” (ibid.), indicate that the visitors are acting more out of self-preservation than any genuine interest in “saving” Stanley. If Stanley displays anxiety about interference from the two visitors, they display an even greater anxiety about having the likes of Stanley on the loose. As the birthday party gets underway, Meg makes a toast to Stanley: “I think he’s a good boy, although sometimes he’s bad” (55), a reference to their risqué banter—which represents the full extent of Stanley’s overt defiance. This banter, moreover, hardly compares to Goldberg’s impudence toward Lulu. During the party when Goldberg and Lulu become intimate, she finds his discourse seductive and tells him, “You’re the dead image of the first man I ever loved,” to which he responds, “It goes without saying” (61). When it suits his purpose, Goldberg openly accepts the attribution of multiple identities—a sign

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of the postmodernist saturated self (see Gergen). As we shall see, however, he later balks when McCann calls him by a different name. His inability to cope with the ambiguity of multiple selves suggests that he, and to a lesser extent McCann, is blind not only to the constructed nature of his own identity but also to that of Stanley. During the climax of the party, they decide to play blind man’s bluff, forcing Stanley to play against his will and breaking his glasses. When Stanley reaches Meg he begins to strangle her until Goldberg and McCann throw him off. After the lights suddenly go off, Stanley moves toward Lulu, who screams and faints, the result of an apparent assault that has led to the psychoanalytic interpretation of his venting a repressed psychic fear of the father and resentment for the mother (Naismith 2000: 52). From another perspective, Stanley without his glasses may simply have confused Meg for Goldberg and mistaken Lulu for McCann. As we can see, therefore, The Birthday Party uses various dramatic devices to call into question socially constructed identity, attenuate the mind’s conscious content, and intimate the move toward an experience of consciousness devoid of attributes. The uncertain background and identities of the characters, their multiple names indicating a diversity of masks, Stanley musical talent, the ulterior motives of the interrogation, and the insecurity experienced by the two visitors all lead to a decontingencing of the conscious content of characters and audience. This decontingencing constitutes a move from their cultural or intersubjective and social or interobjective contexts toward pure, non-intentional subjectivity in the upper left quadrant, a move that subtly creates a more integral awareness in Stanley and the audience as they sense a unity of the silence of consciousness and the activity of the mind. The Unsayable in Theatre The unsayable inner dimension The Birthday Party points to through its decontingencing devices centers on what Jean Baudrillard calls postmodern simulacra, the work of simulation, as distinct from feigning or pretending. Postmodern concealment consists of blurring or eliminating the distinction between truth and falsity. As Zygmunt Bauman says in Postmodernity and its Discontents, postmodern simulacra make

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As Baudrillard, like Stanley, demonstrates, what we take for reality is but an illusion. Art as fantasy, by uncovering the illusion of reality, is more real than the “real” world of conventional interests. As Pinter shows, the difference between truth and falsity derives not from the outer world but from the eyes of the beholder who can see beyond the sensory to the extra-linguistic, trans-rational dimension of human experience. Art allows us to perceive the fabrication of the external world, as Pinter and Stanley may have intuited through their own creative intelligence. The unsayable, therefore, corresponds to the state of pure objectless awareness, the field of unbounded subjectivity upon which conventional reality as represented by Goldberg and McCann depends for its existence. The Birthday Party reveals how the modernist prophets of universal humanity are being challenged by postmodern communities, tribal enclaves that attempt to achieve ideals similar to those of modernists but now through a more intimate degree of localized phenomenological experience. The move from modernism, in which the impersonal public world to a certain extent still existed, to postmodernism entails a move from an elite hierarchy, in which only a few pass down their conception of the ideal to the masses, to a situation in which the masses have organized themselves into localized communities in which they formulate their own interpretation of meaning based on direct experience. Unfortunately, the community to which Goldberg and McCann belong has not succeeded in extending its experience beyond the finite, sensory dimensions of the socially constructed self. Their localized community represents not a postmodernist community in Bauman’s sense, or in the sense that Pinter’s theatre itself is postmodernist. In other words, unlike Goldberg and McCann, contemporary art challenges anything that has social acceptance. The postmodernist artist like Pinter seeks a new language that will become a consensual language again in a new public domain. To quote Bauman,

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As François Lyotard put it, if since the beginning of modernity arts sought the ways of representing the ‘sublime,’ that which by its nature defies representation—the modern artists’ search for the sublime formed a ‘nostalgic aesthetics’; they posited the non-representable as an ‘absent content’ only. Postmodern artists, on the other hand, struggle to incorporate the non-representable into the presentation itself. (1997: 104)

Bauman goes on to explain that the postmodern artist works without rules in order “to give voice to the ineffable, and a tangible shape to the invisible” (105)—as Pinter does through Stanley. Goldberg and McCann function like finite waves on an unbounded ocean or the localized position of a mirror in infinite space, while Stanley’s mystifying lifestyle gives tangible shape to the invisible and voice to the ineffable. Shear explains the analogy found in Eastern philosophical traditions between pure consciousness on one hand and the ocean and a mirror on the other, as exemplified in The Birthday Party through the contrast between Stanley’s perspective and that of Goldberg and McCann. For centuries Eastern traditions have used images such as a wave on the ocean, and a mirror in space to display the relation between pure consciousness and the individual self. The wave and mirror in these images represent experience of individual self, and the ocean and space represent that of pure consciousness. A wave is of course nothing but water, localized in activity and place, and the mirror is portrayed as reflecting nothing but space, although from a localized position and perspective. Thus in each of these images the content of the experience of the individual self is represented as nothing but a localized expression (wave, reflection) of the relevant overall unbounded field (ocean, space). (1990: 116)

Goldberg and McCann function like waves and mirrors through their fixation on the localized perspective of a community that no longer represents a trans-cultural, transpersonal ideal, while Stanley points the spectator toward a state of awareness liberated from the authority of external “reality” as a supreme judge of truth. Pinter presents the image of Stanley, in all its ambiguity, as the meaning-maker insofar that it demonstrates that more than one interpretation of the real or true is possible; it invites the spectator to engage in the process of interpretation through a taste of the unbounded ocean or the infinity

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of space beyond the confines of waves and mirrors. Although a wave is nothing but water and a mirror reflects nothing but space, they still represent a localized position and perspective. Instead of merely reflecting life, therefore, The Birthday Party adds to its content. This content, however, consists of the ineffability of the self knowing itself, given that the play points the spectator toward an emptiness—the uncertainty of Stanley’s background and identity—that generates a taste of pure consciousness, at least for those not guilt ridden or clinging to the familiar world, combined with a ongoing awareness of the dramatic action itself. Pinter demonstrates how postmodern artists recognize that the act of perception creates reality. In this sense, the art of Pinter’s play and the non-artistic “reality” of Goldberg and McCann operate on the same footing. Because the material, manifest world is nothing but simulation or illusion, any meaning—whether stemming from the world itself or imputed by the artist—is always a product of human creative intelligence. The difference between the meaning generated by Goldberg and McCann and that suggested by Stanley’s invisible background and identity is that the former hinges on a localized position while the latter unlocks the boundless. As Bauman notes, modernist artists and the avant-garde attempt to blaze trails to a new consensus, while postmodern avant-gardism undermines any possibility of a future universal based on conceptuality (1997: 109). It strangles agreement that does not lead to a non-localized, non-pluralistic (or boundless) experience, which as argued here points ultimately to objectless pure awareness, which as a transverbal state does not hinge on a conceptual formulation about the nature of reality. Stanley’s choice of existence can be shared only through the intersubjective experience of a participatory presence, as that between the performers and spectators of Pinter’s theatre. As Bauman argues and The Birthday Party dramatizes, postmodern simulation threatens the difference between true and false, real and imaginary, rendering sense and meaning senseless and meaningless in the context of the non-pluralistic experience of the non-localized, extra-linguistic self. As Shear writes, 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)

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Goldberg and McCann militate against such an experience, against sharing with Stanley a qualityless unboundedness, in favor of phenomenological qualities that conform to their localized community. Throughout the play, the spectators swing repeatedly from the concrete to the abstract, from an intentional, object awareness toward a non-intentional qualityless state of awareness and back, never able to fill the void of Stanley’s background and identity with locally acceptable conceptual content. Yet both Stanley and the audience do retain an awareness of the self as Emptiness along with the world of Form. In the aftermath of the birthday party in Act Three when Petey asks what came over Stanley, Goldberg replies, “What came over him? Breakdown, Mr. Boles. Pure and Simple. Nervous breakdown” (71). Petey offers to get a doctor, but Goldberg says they’ll take care of him: “I’ll take him to Monty” (74). He tells McCann to go upstairs and bring Stanley down, but McCann refuses, having already been upstairs to return his glasses. McCann notices that Goldberg appears to be out of sorts and asks him what’s wrong. Although Goldberg gets annoyed, he confesses he feels “knocked out” (76), only to launch into his speech about how he reached his position by respecting authority. By this time his sense of identity has been shaken up by Stanley’s emptiness to the point that when McCann calls him Simey, he explains: “(murderously): Don’t call me that! (He seizes McCann by the throat.) NEVER CALL ME THAT!” (76). Whatever else it may signify, his outburst reveals a fixation on a particular quality of egocentric self-identity. His reaction implies a false sense of security in the belief that the exclusion of other qualities would prevent his sliding into the void or indeterminacy of a nonlocalized, qualityless state as represented by Stanley. Lulu interrupts their conversation by accusing Goldberg of taking advantage of her after the party: “Do you think I’m like all the other girls? [. . .] You used me for a night. A passing fancy” (79-80). Disingenuous as ever, Goldberg replies, “I’ve never touched another woman” (79). Lulu felt an emotional attraction to Goldberg, but claims that “You didn’t appreciate me for myself. You took all those liberties only to satisfy your appetite” (80). As the spectator sees, Goldberg fears the loss of his own socially constructed position, but has no qualms about undermining or exploiting Lulu’s position. While he doesn’t mind her descending to a position that fulfils his

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own appetites, he does everything he can to prevent Stanley from escaping a position imposed by Monty’s orthodox community, and he especially abhors the possibility that Stanley may entirely exceed all social positions. Stanley finally comes downstairs dressed in “a dark well cut suit and white collar” (81), ready to be abducted to Monty by the visitors, who begin to woo him with the following platitudes: Goldberg: You need a long convalescence. McCann: A change of air. Goldberg: Somewhere over the rainbow. McCann: Where angels fear to tread. Goldberg: Exactly. McCann: You’re in a rut. Goldberg: You look anaemic. McCann: Rheumatic. Goldberg: Myopic. McCann: Epileptic. Goldberg: You’re on the verge. McCann: You’re a dead duck. Goldberg: But we can save you. McCann: From a worse fate. Goldberg: True. . . . Goldberg: You’ll be adjusted. McCann: You’ll be our pride and joy. Goldberg: You’ll be a mensch. (82-83)

When they ask Stanley what he has to say for himself, he can only stammer incoherently, which signifies his strong resistance to conforming to convention or the desires of others. In the long run, as the play suggests, Goldberg’s desire to win over Stanley is doomed to failure, just as the desire of a consumer in a capitalist society can never achieve gratification, but is always postponed into the future. Of all the characters in The Birthday Party, only Stanley comes close to transcending desire. Unlike Goldberg in his hankering to seduce women and convert outsiders, Stanley alone recognizes that fulfillment comes through the absence of desire, that as long as desire dominates, fulfillment will have to wait. As Bauman explains in Liquid Modernity, free capital has freed individuals, especially landlords, from the land as never before (2000: 149). But as Pinter shows through Goldberg and McCann, this freedom is illusory. The tourist, as opposed to the vagabond, may think he is free because he can travel anywhere and be accepted, but what happens when the money is gone? Even a vagabond, as Stanley

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illustrates, can achieve genuine freedom on the level of consciousness by overcoming desire. For Bauman, freedom in liquid modernity means little more than to be free within time and space, as desired by Goldberg and McCann; it does not mean to be free of time and space, as happened upon by Stanley. Just as capital depends on consumers, so a localized community depends on people who desire the security of shared interests and the personality of a charismatic leader. But as soon as consumers realize that desire cannot be satisfied by consumerism, by acquiring commodities or sensations, capitalist society will be doomed. Likewise, when individuals realize that fulfillment cannot be achieved within a spatio-temporal dimension, localized communities based on waves and mirrors will lose their appeal. As Bauman says, “desire does not desire satisfaction. To the contrary, desire desires desire” (1998: 83). The prospect of desire disappearing horrifies consumers like Goldberg and McCann. They sense that the loss of new sensations, in this case associated with seducing women and pressuring others into complying with the arbitrary rules of a localized community, would confine them even more within the boundaries of time and space, a prospect their limited, linguistic selves may long for, but which their extra-linguistic, transpersonal selves would naturally shun. Bauman’s analysis of the nature of consumerism also applies to the nature of localized communities in search of collective agreement: For the consumers in the society of consumers, being on the move— searching, looking for, not-finding-it or more exactly not-finding-ityet is not a malaise, but the promise of bliss; perhaps it is the bliss itself. Theirs is the kind of traveling hopefully which makes arriving into a curse. [. . .] Not so much the greed to acquire and possess, not the gathering of wealth in its material, tangible sense, as the excitement of a new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the consumer game. Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of sensations; they are collectors of things only in a secondary and derivative sense. (1998: 83, original emphasis)

Goldberg and McCann pursue the commodity of human conformity to their organization, with their sensation or bliss consisting of depriving others of their independence and freedom. The momentary fulfilling of desire gives the illusion of transcending space and time, of a change of circumstances, but this change is artificial

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and transitory. It amounts to no more than shifting the boundaries of temporality, not transcending them altogether. Stanley, who won’t even go for a walk with Lulu, represents an individual who finds greater fulfillment in the absence of desire than in its gratification. Unlike Goldberg, Stanley senses that fulfilling a desire has nothing to do with acquiring a tangible object or sensation, but simply with the momentary suspension of desire itself. If that suspension can be prolonged, then fulfillment becomes an abiding state of mind. Members of a localized community such as that to which Goldberg and McCann belong fear such a suspension for it would undermine their very existence, which depends upon the need of individuals to find support and security in shared objects of desire. To whatever extent Stanley himself has overcome desire, The Birthday Party points to an existential state after desire has run its course. Stanley’s desire and hope centers on being liberated from desire, on not being coerced into playing the game of consumer society, in which each community pursues its own localized brand of sensations. In Act Three Stanley appears to suffer a breakdown. But the question about how successful Goldberg, McCann and Monty will be in reconstructing Stanley remains. Even though tortured in the second and third acts, Stanley already left the organization once and could easily leave it again. No evidence in Act Three suggests that an organization will succeed in dominating his non-identity with a socially constructed self, or in replacing his sense of nonattachment with a commitment toward the collective interests of its members. If anything, Goldberg’s furious reaction to McCann’s inexplicable paper tearing, his being called Simey, and his sudden apprehension of feeling “knocked out” all suggest that Goldberg, McCann and the organization are moving toward an emptiness like Stanley’s, and that ultimately they will be the ones to undergo a reconstruction. Even within the naturalistic setting of the play, the visitors’ stylized language and unspecified mission add a surreal dimension to the play that implies a menace not only to Stanley but also to the conventional organization to which the visitors belong. The bizarre and improbable nature of their questions and accusations suggest that what needs to be reconstructed more than Stanley are the social and religious establishments that attempt to impose conformity to arbitrary rules. The Birthday Party, as an example of integral theatre, reveals not only how a sensitive individual can fear the demands of an outside

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world, but also how the public world as a collection of local communities can fear the inner dimension of nonconformists who follow their innate callings. While Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes that the material intellect cannot grasp immaterial consciousness (2003), the play suggests that Stanley provides us with a glimpse of the coexistence of both dimensions in his ability to remain nonattached to the content of the mind while simultaneously witnessing what goes on within and around him, which the audience also experiences through rasa. Similarly, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, by dramatizing the plight of an individual caught between conformity and defiance, also takes the spectator toward an integral experience.

Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros: Defiance vs. Conformity Consumerism and the Anticipations of Joy Critics have pointed out that Rhinoceros dramatizes Ionesco’s aversion for the Fascist movement in Rumania when he left in 1938 (Esslin 1991: 181). From a 21st century perspective, however, the play not only demonstrates how public opinion can pressure an individual into conformity, it also suggests how present-day consumer society can transmogrify an individual into a monster with an insatiable appetite. The play sets up a contrast between the necessity to consume in order to sustain biological existence within a certain standard of social decency, and the extravagant desire to consume as a means of wish fulfillment. In this contrast between self-sufficiency and overindulgence through gluttony and intemperance, the play impels the audience to experience a gap between the basic needs of human existence on the one hand and on the other the desire to gratify the appetites in a bestial, uninhibited manner as symbolized by the rhinoceros. In terms of conformity to public opinion, as in the case of Fascism, Ionesco says of Rhinoceros, As usual, I went back to my personal obsessions. I remembered that in the course of my life I have been very much struck by what one might call the current of opinion, by its rapid evolution, its power of contagion, which is that of a real epidemic. People allow themselves suddenly to be invaded by a new religion, a doctrine, a fanaticism. . . . At such moments we witness a veritable mental mutation. I don’t know if you have noticed it, but when people no longer share your opinions, when you can no longer make yourself understood by them, one has the impression of being confronted with monsters—rhinos, for example. They have that mixture of candor and ferocity. They would kill you with the best of consciences. And history has shown us during the last quarter of a century that people thus transformed not only

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Esslin notes that the characters in the play choose a pachydermatous existence because “they admire brute force and the simplicity that springs from the suppression of over-tender humanistic feelings” (1991: 182). Some conform to the herd of rhinos because they feel it’s the only way to learn how rhinos think in order to persuade them to revert back to their humanity, while others like Mlle Daisy conform because they cannot resist kowtowing to the majority. Berenger, a character who appears in several other Ionesco plays, watches as his friend Jean and then his colleague Dudard turn into rhinos, with more and more people converting until he and Daisy, a colleague he’s in love with, end up as the last remaining humans. Everyone but Berenger and Daisy has been infected by rhinoceritis, a mysterious disease that makes them want to abandon their flabby, weak, pale humanity and become vigorous, hardy, thick-skinned pachyderms. As Deborah Gaensbauer says, Berenger is an anti-hero whose immunity to rhinoceritis, having begun as the cloud of a hangover, is an instinctive resistance to ideology and propaganda for which, according to Ionesco, ‘it is probably impossible to give any explanation.’ (1996: 104)

In the end, therefore, even Daisy cannot resist the temptation of joining the majority in their insensitive and aggressive lifestyle. Left alone, Berenger rebelliously asserts that he will never capitulate. To his friends Jean and Dudard, Berenger defends his desire to resist becoming a rhino and live on as a human being, but after everyone including Daisy has become non-human, he regrets being unable to change into a rhino himself. Ultimately, though, he reasserts his defiant preference for the qualities of humanity, yet not as some critics believe without a strong hint of the fox’s scorn for unattainable grapes. As Esslin puts it, Far from being a heroic last stand, Berenger’s defiance is farcical and tragicomic, and the final meaning of the play is by no means as simple as some critics made it appear. What the play conveys is the absurdity of defiance as much as the absurdity of conformism, the tragedy of the individualist who cannot join the happy throng of less sensitive people, the artist’s feelings as an outcast. (1991: 183)

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Esslin goes on to compare Berenger to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. While Samsa finds himself transformed into a giant bug as everyone else remains normal, Berenger soon discovers that the definition of normalcy has undergone a radical modification: the conventional qualities of a human are no longer considered to be as normal as the attributes of a rhino, for, as we shall see, even before their physical transformation the characters have already started to undergo an internal transformation. Ionesco both reacts against conformity and derides the individualist who flaunts his or her superiority as a sensitive human. In addition to highlighting the absurdity of the human condition, however, Ionesco creates a gap between what the audience feels intuitively as the true nature of its own humanity and the conditions that consumer society has imposed upon humanity. Although Berenger’s final stand emphasizes the ambivalence of our need to conform while simultaneously preserving our individuality, the play suggests that consumer society has artificially induced this ambivalence as a way to insure its success in the production of consumers. Unlike the characters who transform into rhinos, the audience would generally resist identification with the rhinos because they would appreciate the gap between humans and beasts, which constitutes a gap between ordinary existential needs and extravagant desires based solely on the transitory nature of wish fulfillment—as if Freud’s “reality principle” were being replaced by the “pleasure principle.” Rhinos are characterized by the lack of that dimension of cognitive reflection that would allow them to be spontaneously aware of their indulgence. Humans, in contrast, may at times suffer from the sense of gluttony and bestial behavior found in rhinos, but the play induces self-awareness in them of the excessive nature of this indulgence and the fact that they can manage without it. Indeed, this indulgence becomes a factor of conformity, with the majority following their appetites because of an inability to resist the pressure from others to conform, not because of any inherent satisfaction or pleasure derived from their indulgence. Bauman argues that consumer society has created a new relation between Freud’s reality and pleasure principles. The pleasure principle, in which pleasure has to adjust itself to the limitations of reality, has undergone a radical transformation. Today the pleasure principle

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has itself become the ultimate reality. In this scenario, the reality principle must now sustain pleasure by way of privileging instant as opposed to delayed gratification, which was previously held to be the basis of social reality. Bauman observes in Society Under Siege that Consumer life is a never-ending sequence of new beginnings. The joy of shopping is greater than any joy the purchased product, brought home, may bring. It is the shopping that counts. [. . .] Pleasures are at their best, most alluring and most exhilarating when encapsulated, as anticipations of joy, in the exhibits on display. (2002: 154, original emphasis)

He concludes that capitalist market society, while originally based on the greed for possessions, has paradoxically “ended up denigrating material possessions and replacing the value of ‘having’ with that of living through a pleasurable (yet volatile and fast evaporating) experience” (155). Ionesco’s rhinos live for the pleasurable experience of sheer bestiality, not for acquiring possessions. They represent a society, as Bauman puts it, in which pleasure has been “miraculously transmogrified into the mainstay of reality,” and the search for pleasure has become “the major (and sufficient) instrument of pattern maintenance” (187). In other words, the fluidity of moving from one new pleasurable beginning to another has become the “ultimate solidity—the most stable of conceivable conditions” (ibid.). On the basis of the substitution of the reality principle by pleasure, Ionesco’s play suggests that the universal condition of rational thought and action is being replaced in today’s market society by the free reign of irrational pleasure as represented by the rhinos. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, however, does not wholeheartedly embrace the rational strategies of a solid modernist society, as evidenced by Berenger’s dilemma when at the end of the play his will to save humanity weakens and he feels tempted to conform to the irrationality of the rhinos. Although he finds it impossible to renounce his humanity and become a rhino, Berenger realizes that he needs to respond sensibly to the conditions of an irrational society, that rational strategies may not always be the most effective in dealing with the irrational passions of consumerism and the pleasure principle. As Bauman notes, “under certain conditions irrational behavior may carry a trapping of rational strategy and even offer the most immediately obvious rational option among those available” (2002: 189). Iones-

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co’s audience does not have a clear option in choosing one side of the equation or the other, but rather finds itself in a gap between them. This gap arguably represents and indeed constitutes a taste of the void of conceptions, that qualityless state of pure consciousness beyond thought found in the upper left quadrant. As the play demonstrates, logical analysis does not help characters or spectators in coping with a situation in which a growing number of people become rhinos. Berenger as we shall see undergoes a transformation in the play from an aimless, alienated, apathetic Everyman who drinks too much and suspects life to be a dream to a morally strong individual who even in the face of absurdity refuses to surrender his human identity. Throughout the play he finds himself oscillating in and out of conceptual gaps as he grapples with the mystery of his friends and fellow citizens turning into beasts. The gaps occur at several points during the play: in Berenger’s discussions on logic with his friend Jean and the Logician, in the debate with Jean and his colleague Dudard about the reasons for choosing rhinoceritis over humanity, and in Berenger’s amorous relation with Daisy and their tentative decision to resist relinquishing their humanity. As he says in Present Past Past Present, Ionesco himself also had such experiences in his life: Once long ago, I was sometimes overcome by a sort of grace, a euphoria. It was as if, first of all, every motion, every reality was emptied of its content. After this, it was as if I found myself suddenly at the center of pure ineffable existence. I become one with the one essential reality when along with an immense serene joy, I was overcome by what I might call the stupefaction of being, the certainty of being. (1971: 150-51)

This experience, based on knowledge-by-identity, constitutes the bases for a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form conveyed to Berenger and the audience throughout the play. The Will to Power In Act One, Berenger meets Jean at a café when suddenly a rhinoceros runs by through the town square (off-stage), shocking everybody but Berenger. Jean begins to lecture Berenger on a list of failings—his being a semi-alcoholic with no will-power, no interest in culture and no sense of purpose—when a second rhinoceros runs through the square and tramples a woman’s cat. As Jean harangues

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Berenger on will power, the Logician on a related note explains the concept of syllogisms to the Old Gentleman as he attempts to account logically for the rhinoceros and whether the two that ran through the square were the same or different, and whether they came from Asia or Africa. Ionesco reveals that the Logician, who represents the rationalist characters of the play—namely Jean, Botard and Dudard— comically fails in his logical analysis, proving that logic doesn’t explain everything. While berating Berenger, Jean comes across as hypocritical and full of contradictions like the Logician. He accuses Berenger of being irresponsible yet arrives late for their meeting and refuses to take Berenger out for a day of culture because he want to snooze before going out drinking with his friends. Nevertheless, Jean claims, “I’m just as good as you are; I think with all due modesty I may say I’m better. The superior man is the man who fulfils his duty” (1962: 13). By emphasizing his rational intellect and strength of will, Jean symbolizes the “will to power” of Nietzsche’s “super-man,” a powerful being standing beyond human morality, which foreshadows his metamorphosis into a savage rhinoceros that violently attacks Berenger when he tries to save him. This will to power also prompts the other rationalists to transmogrify into rhinos, including the Logician, Dudard, and Botard, Berenger’s skeptic colleague who initially dismisses the newspaper story about the rhinos as pure fantasy. These men succumb to the fascist rhinos through an attraction to their strength and a primal state of nature beyond morality. With the ineffectual logic of the Logician, Jean rationalizes his lapses in moral conduct to his lackadaisical friend and resists accepting that the universe is not logical but rather absurd, as recognized by Berenger. While Jean and the rationalist metamorphose into rhinos, however, their transformation is merely physical, for on the level of moral values they were already savage and vicious animals. The rhinos thus symbolize a prior inner transformation of humans who believe that brute force can render them super-men and place them above the laws of nature, when in fact the only power they have is their strength in numbers. Ionesco suggests that the collective consciousness of the rhino-men gives them a false sense of security through the illusion of power, considering that this power is only that of collective violence, reminiscent of the totalitarian governments of WW II. This power, moreover, is also associated with pleasure, which derives not only from the pleasure principle but also from wielding

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control over others. The world of rhinos therefore represents a reality in which the pleasure principle has usurped the reality principle by replacing logic, reason and delayed gratification with their polar opposites. Instant gratification, however, comes in two forms: physical and metaphysical. The rhinos achieve the former while Berenger and through him the audience achieve the latter by seeing beyond physical attachments. Through the rhinos’ pseudo power and pleasure, then, Rhinoceros produces a conceptual gap that attenuates the audience’s attachment to any particular concept or thesis—a gap between the physical power/pleasure of the rhinos based on personal desire on the one hand, and the spiritual power/bliss awakened within the audience and Berenger based on a transpersonal freedom from the bondage of desire on the other. Through a taste of the void of conceptions beyond cultural constructs as suggested by Berenger’s selfless support of the best interest and wellbeing of others, the audience glimpses a state of wholeness beyond duality by bridging the gap in ordinary waking consciousness between the three elements of knowledge: a separate object of experience, a process of experience and the experiencer. The real freedom of a unified, transpersonal self approached by Berenger and the spectators thus derives from a sense of the connection between the local field of matter and action and an underlying nonlocal field of mind and consciousness. As R. W. Boyer puts it in “The Whole Creates the Parts,” Brain and mind are no longer just in the head, because brains, minds, and all material objects are no longer just localized physical matter, but rather are also more abstract but real nonlocal processes in a subtler underlying field of existence. (2006b: 4)

Only Berenger demonstrates a connection to this underlying field of existence through his sense of responsibility for humanity at large. Although indecisive at times, his love for Daisy suggests not only an emotional desire for somebody, but a sense of responsibility for her wellbeing, a selfless kind of love that indicates an unconditional caring for all humanity. Berenger feels guilty that he may have pushed his friends including Daisy out toward becoming rhinos, but as the play suggests they would have metamorphosed into savages even without him. Jean and the others become rhinos not so much because they want to conform, given that rhinos are solitary creatures

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to begin with, but rather because of the desire for power and mindless pleasure. Berenger on the other hand doubts his own existence, contradicting Descartes’ claim, “I think, therefore I am.” Through statements such as “Life is a dream,” “I don’t even know if I am me,” and “I sometimes wonder if I exist myself” (20, 24, 26, original emphasis), Berenger not only questions the power of thought but also suggests a modification of the formula in existentialist philosophy, “existence precedes essence.” According to this principle, physical birth as a human being comes before acquiring any essential meaning in life. Berenger’s search extends beyond both physical and mental existence toward that subtler underlying field of existence associated with his love for humanity. As discussed below in terms of Samkhya Yoga, dualism does not consist of a mind/body opposition, which are both considered physical, but rather of an opposition between mind/body and consciousness. Berenger’s selfless love, as a field of unity consciousness, subsumes existence as well as essence. Through its nonlocality and interconnectedness, this unified field creates all the parts of human existence. In other words, Berenger goes beyond thought to a level underlying both existence and essence. As Boyer puts it: From the holistic perspective of levels of phenomenal nature, gross is a limitation of subtle, and subtle is a limitation of the unified field. With respect to the entire cosmos, the big bang thus could be considered not an explosion but an implosion or condensation— because everything resulting from the big bang remains inside the unified field. The big bang would not create time and space, but rather be a phenomenal limitation of eternity and infinity. In the holistic perspective, dimensions of space and time in addition to the ordinary four dimensions may not be necessary to account for nonlocality. Subtle levels of nature don’t necessarily require spatial dimensions in addition to the ordinary three dimensions; they are limited phenomenal manifestations within infinity. (2006b: 7, original emphasis)

Berenger remains the only character who plumbs the depths of the unified field of consciousness beyond essence and existence, ideology and materialism—or the collective life and power-mongering of the rhino fascists. In conforming to fascism, the rationalists have all fallen for a rhino’s existence, even though in their pre-metamorphosed state, like Jean in his hypocrisy toward Berenger, they have already

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adopted the rhino’s essence in what Botard in Act Two refers to as “An example of collective psychosis” (54). Love for humanity, moreover, does not comprise an essence in the existential sense of having a conceptual significance. Berenger’s experience of selfless love, being a nonpluralistic state of intercomnectedness that everyone would experience in the same way, constitutes a state beyond finite meanings and interpretations. Recall that 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)

Shear goes on to say that, given the overall correlation between accounts of a void of conceptions experienced through a phenomenon such as selfless love, 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. (137)

Berenger’s role in Rhinoceros serves to take the audience beyond the realm of finite self-identity to a more subtle underlying human identity devoid of ego. According to “logical fiction” theories, moreover, the notion of “I” often works as a linguistic fiction. As Shear says, Simply put, the fact that verbs such as “think” require a grammatical subject naturally suggests that there is some “I” (in the first person case) doing the thinking. However, it is argued, it may well be that this “I” is merely a “schematic convenience,” required by ordinary grammar but not representing any real thing. For example, when we say “It is raining,” we neither need nor want to postulate any separate “It” doing the raining. Similarly, unless we have reason to think otherwise, it is quite possible that the “I” (in “I think,” etc.) is also superfluous, and that statements such as “Thoughts are occurring” may reflect facts of mind more accurately than those using the term “I.” Thus, if despite careful introspection we cannot locate anything that could properly correspond to the term “I,” we should recognize that this “I” is nothing but a logical “place-holder” (a mere “schematic convenience”) and not be misled into improperly inferring the existence of any real thing corresponding to it. (1990: 108)

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Berenger’s doubts about his existence, about the world being anything but a dream, and about the logical arguments of becoming a rhino all suggest that he has transcended the conceptual dimension of the finite “I” and taken his stand, together with the audience, through a glimpse of the subtlest nonlocal level of human identity. Human in this sense refers to the phenomenologically unbounded state of nonpluralistic being. Throughout Rhinoceros, Ionesco dramatizes Berenger’s resistance to the self-interest of parts in favor of the selfless whole. Evidence of Berenger’s penchant for wholeness emerges frequently in his non-logical remarks. In conversation with Jean, he says, “Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of other people,” to which Jean replies, “You contradict yourself. What oppresses you—solitude, or the company of others? You consider yourself a thinker, yet you’re devoid of logic” (25). In going beyond the logic of non-contradiction and either/or, Berenger assimilates to the wholeness of both/and. To wonder if he exists implies that he both does and does not exist: his finite socially constructed self is a dream, while his infinite better Self as pure consciousness, even though devoid of qualities, exists as the ultimate real. Most Western philosophers, particularly constructivists like Steven Katz (1978) and others, argue that consciousness always has an intentional object, and that even mystical experience is constructed by language and culture. As Robert 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, original emphasis)

By language he implies what the Rig-Veda and Indian grammarians such as Bhartrhari call the lower levels of language that involve space, time and the duality of subject and object. As Bhartrhari notes, 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 1980). As we move from the ordinary waking state toward pure consciousness (turiya or the fourth state), the unity of sound and meaning, name and form increases. Of the four levels of language, the first two are vaikhari and madhyama, which belong to the ordinary

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waking state and in Saussurean terms correspond to the general field of parole and langue, which consist of a temporal/spatial gap between sound and meaning. The two higher levels of language are pashyanti and para, which can only be experienced through non-intentional pure consciousness. They are transverbal in the sense of being without a temporal sequence between sound and meaning. In Derrida and Indian Philosophy, Harold Coward notes that the main difference between the two higher levels is that pashyanti consists of an impulse toward expression because it 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 theatre through the power of suggestion. The notion of intentionality in ordinary waking consciousness from which Berenger begins entails a subject being conscious of an object, event or other qualia. William James classifies this 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 suggested by Berenger’s experience as a non-intentional experience or “knowledge-by-identity,” in which, recall, 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, original emphasis)

As a truly direct or immediate form of knowledge, non-intentional pure consciousness is devoid of the dualism of the subject-perceivingobject and subject-thinking-thought (Forman 1999: 125). When Berenger transcends his socially constructed identity by doubting its existence, he intuits a nonlocal underlying real Self through knowledge-by-identity, and in the process induces a move toward the same experience in the spectator. While glimpsing this state of awareness, then, Berenger and the audience also glimpse the coexistence of both Emptiness and external Form—the effect of The Lamp at the Door

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illuminating for their awareness both inside and outside simultaneously. Berenger’s reliance on alcohol, although detrimental to his health, is a form of escape that serves as a trope for his metamorphosis from a finite socially induced identity based on knowledge-about and knowledge-by-acquaintance to a knowledge-by-identity of the big Self liberated from the ennui of a deadening routine. This knowledge-byidentity, as a field of all possibilities, is intimated by Botard who in Act Two says Berenger has “got such a vivid imagination! Anything’s possible with him!” (53). Jean and the other rationalists also try to escape their oppressive jobs through their metamorphosis into rhinos, but however powerful their new identities may appear on a physical dimension, Berenger alone becomes a true super-man by establishing his identity on a selfless love for his fellow humans. Although the rhinos become more beautiful as the play progresses while humans become more ugly, their beauty derives only from brute physical strength, but as we know from modern physics, matter doesn’t have a material basis. [. . .] the paradigmatic belief in materialism—a core feature of much of modern scientific history—is untenable at more fundamental levels of nature. (Boyer 2006b: 3, original emphasis)

By the end of the play, Berenger demonstrates that true strength and beauty depend not on the material but rather on the immaterial essence of nonpluralistic being, the basis of all love and compassion. The Source of Resolve and Responsibility The fact that Berenger exhibits willpower in the face of strong opposition from his friends and colleagues not only indicates that he has committed himself to a significant cause but also suggests that he acts spontaneously from a self-referral level of awareness beyond the boundaries of conceptual meaning. Working within the theatre of the absurd, Ionesco reflects this subjective self-referral through the structural self-referral of Rhinoceros being aware of itself as a play. Throughout the production, for instance, the rhinoceros heads back-lit on stage produce an alienation effect among the spectators by making them conscious of the fact they’re watching an atypical drama. More explicitly, Jean tries to reform Berenger by suggesting that, “Instead of squandering all your spare money on drink, isn’t it better to buy a

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ticket for an interesting play? Do you know anything about the avantgarde theatre there’s so much to talk about? Have you seen Ionesco’s plays?” (30). This formal self-referral of the stage drama mirrors the self-referral of the characters themselves as they reflect upon their self-identity in the upper left quadrant. While the rationalists such as Jean, the Logician and Dudard examine themselves on the ordinary level of language and thought, Berenger operates from a more subtle self-referral level that goes beyond ordinary language and interpretation. Self-referral here signifies the self knowing itself as pure unbounded 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). As we shall see, Berenger’s self-identity and social reactions are often trans-conceptual, based on a self-referral connectedness with deeper levels of the Self beyond the ideologies of socially induced identity or the thinking mind. Michael Goldman analyzes the Brechtian process of recognition and identification in theatre 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 (77)—or pure consciousness in Vedic psychology. Theatre, as the performance of Jean and the other rationalists demonstrates, portrays the confusions of self-identity. Berenger, on the other hand, displays a self-referral that establishes what Goldman calls “a self that in some way transcends the normal confusions of self” (18). Contrary to the popular poststructuralist view, Goldman defines “subtext,” or the “mutual permeability of actor and script,” as not reducible to text (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

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Berenger performs the script self-reflexively in excess of the text, while through him the spectator receives a taste of non-intentional consciousness in excess of the play’s constructed identities, going from zone #2 to zone #1 in upper left quadrant. 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 to an even greater extent. This phenomenon leads to aesthetic experience (rasa), which involves Berenger and the audience experiencing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form, an inner silence on the basis of which the internal observer perceives itself as well as thought and the surrounding world. In addition, not only does Berenger’s entry into the text exceed what can be extracted semiotically; the rationalists also exceed the text through their metamorphosis into rhinos. Although operating on a physical level, both the back-lit heads of the rhinos on stage and the actual transformation of the characters into rhinos exceed what the text can semiotically extract, just as Berenger’s self-referral exceeds it by pointing toward the nonlocal level of the unified field of consciousness underlying material existence. This self-referentiality of the text, by highlighting the absence of a physical referent, causes the audience to experience a corresponding self-referral on the level of consciousness. This self-referral has the effect of swinging the spectator’s attention from the concrete to the abstract, from referentiality to selfreferral; that is, the spectator’s vision moves from looking at the concrete dimensions of the stage drama toward looking into its abstract dimensions of a more subtle nonlocal level of reality behind the surface. This distinction between looking at stage drama as opposed to looking into its structural features corresponds to Colin McGinn’s theory developed in The Power of Movies of looking into rather than at the images projected on a screen. McGinn argues that unlike cinema, theatre requires no more looking into than do people sitting in a room, except in terms of looking into the actor’s eyes. Watching a film entails seeing an object embedded as a referent in the image, so that in seeing the image we actually look through it to the embedded object. Unlike the actors in a stage drama, the images in

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movies are transparent insofar that they invite us to look into them and not at them as in the case of actors on a stage. As McGinn explains: Of course, there is the space of the stage, but the objects before the eyes—props and human bodies—are not in any way transparent entities that we look through. The audience looks at these things, not through them; there is no analogue of the screen as a traversable medium standing between eyes and objects. So the visual relation we have to the staged play is of a very different nature from that which obtains between the viewer and the cinema screen; the visual system is differently engaged in the two cases, despite the fact that both at some point involve actors moving through space. [. . .] We could say that visually speaking, theatre is a present medium while cinema is an absent medium. The cinema screen is there to be transcended; the stage is the primary object of attention. The screen confronts you with something it wants you to ignore; the stage wants to hold your attention on itself. (2005: 34, original emphasis)

McGinn’s argument holds for theatre in terms of physical sight, perhaps, but not necessarily in terms of the mind’s eye, which focuses more on what is absent than what is present. Through the experience of self-referral, theatre can induce the spectator to look not merely at the stage drama but also into it: that is, through the actors on stage to an abstract nonlocal level of experience evoked through knowledgeby-identity. Ionesco employs this self-referral strategy of looking into rather than at because Berenger’s experience of an underlying nonlocal truth, although describable as a commitment to a significant cause, is essentially unsayable. It belongs to a trans-conceptual level of knowledge that can be shared intersubjectively only by being it in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, not through ordinary language and interpretation. In Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive definition, the unsayable (as well as the language used to convey it) has clear affinities with the Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta. Shear, Forman, Deikman and others have explained the Advaitan definition of consciousness and its derivative in perennial psychology in terms of higher states of consciousness. As Charles Alexander notes, Vedic psychology proposes “an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or levels of mind” (1990: 290). Advaita and Samkhya-Yoga, moreover, distinguish between mind and consciousness. The term “mind,” as in the case of the Logician’s reasoning and Berenger’s

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humanitarian rationale, derives from the latter of the two following uses in Vedic psychology: “It [mind] refers to the overall multilevel functioning of consciousness as well as to the specific level of thinking [buddhi] (apprehending and comparing) within that overall structure” (Alexander 1989: 291). The levels of the overall functioning of mind in Vedic psychology extend from the senses, desire, mind, intellect, feelings, and ego, to pure transcendental consciousness, or self as internal observer as suggested by Berenger’s self-referral experience. Pure consciousness (turiya), which is physiologically distinct from the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, is immanent within yet transcendent to the individual ego and thinking mind. During their arguments in Act One, Jean implies that Berenger transcends the logical boundaries of the mind: Jean: If you think you’re being witty, you’re very much mistaken! You’re just being a bore with . . . with your stupid paradoxes. You’re incapable of talking seriously! [. . .] Berenger: You really can be obstinate, sometimes. Jean: And now you’re calling me a mule into the bargain. Berenger: It would never have entered my mind. Jean: You have no mind! Berenger: All the more reason why it would never enter it. Jean: There are certain things that enter the mind even of people without one. (21-22)

This accusation suggests that Berenger indeed responds to the world from a level deeper than the thinking mind, the faculty that leads the rationalist to give up their humanity and metamorphose into rhinos. As mentioned earlier in terms of the existentialist notion that existence (body) precedes essence (mind), Berenger exceeds both through a taste of the nonlocal, transrational self. What enters Berenger’s mind enters from a more subtle level of consciousness within through knowledge-by-identity, not from thought or senses through which the rationalists are mesmerized into an emulation of the brute strength of the rhinos. Like the subtext of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, then, the aim in Advaita Vedanta is to establish the oneness of reality and to lead us to a realization of it (Deutsch 1973: 47). This realization comes through the "experience" of consciousness as qualityless Being or Atman (turiya). As Shear notes, such an experience corresponds to what Plato intends by his fourth level, the “Forms,” as reached through the

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“dialectic,” a faculty which is “radically different from thinking and reasoning as we find them in mathematics and science” (1990: 14). Arguably, this expansion of the mind toward an experience beyond duality is not unlike the way a deconstructive reader moves toward the unsayable in literature, or the way Berenger and the spectator undergo the rites of passage in the transformation of identity. Given that by definition the mind consists of thoughts, in dispensing with the thoughts that obsess the rationalists, Berenger moves toward attenuating thought and thereby in stages emptying the mind to produce a taste of consciousness in its pure form. In Sanskrit Poetics, the spectator’s experience of this taste is known as rasa or aesthetic rapture, which occurs in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant. Riding on the Back of Rhinos The notion of suggestion (dhvani) in Sanskrit Poetics operates in connection with aesthetic rapture (rasa). The theory of rasa 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). By remaining detached from any specific emotion through aesthetic rapture, a theatre audience will 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 an idealized flavor and not a specific transitory state of mind associated with zone #2 of the upper left quadrant. It invokes the emotional states latent within the mind through direct intuition and thus provides an experience of the subtler, more unified levels of the mind itself. In terms of the connection between consciousness and language, rasa moves awareness from the temporal to the unified levels of language, 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

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As described in Indian literary theory, this experience is the nearest realization through theatre and the other arts of the Absolute or moksa (liberation). As Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes, “The spiritual aspect of the meaning of rasa is emphasized in Shankara’s commentary of the Upanishadic use of the term: ‘Rasa is here used to mean such bliss as is innate in oneself and manifests itself [. . .] even in the absence of external aids to happiness’” (2005: 95; Rhagavan 1988). In Rhinoceros, Berenger moves the audience from specific thoughts and emotions associated with conformity to a collective psychosis toward a release from specific emotional attachments in the self-referral experience of rasa. We see this happening in Berenger’s arguments with Jean, Dudard and Daisy as he tries to prevent them from changing into rhinos under the false pretext of enhancing their power and beauty. Aesthetic rapture as argued here can be induced in a manner unrelated to the notion of the sublime understood as a quality of conscious content. Ultimately rasa emerges from the qualityless gap between thoughts as the awareness transcends mental content. For instance, after the second rhino kills the Housewife’s cat in Act One, Jean and Berenger argue over whether it had one horn or two, with other characters interjecting their own observations between their insults. Jean claims that the first one was an Asiatic rhino with two horns while the second was an African rhino with only one horn. Bereger replies, “You’re talking nonsense . . . How could you possibly tell about the horns? The animal flashed past at such speed, we hardly even saw it” (36). Berenger later regrets his enraged verbal assault, which he suspects may have pushed Jean over into becoming a rhino himself. For spectators, however, his quarrel because of its absurd dimension has the opposite effect of directing them toward the essential nature of humanity through rasa as a taste of the void of conceptions. Jean: I don’t have to grope my way through a fog. I can calculate quickly, my mind is clear! [. . .] Berenger: But it had its head down. [. . .] Jean: Precisely, one could see all the better. [. . .] Berenger: Utter nonsense. [. . .] Jean: What me? You dare to accuse me of talking nonsense? [. . .] Berenger: Yes, absolute, blithering nonsense! [. . .]

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Jean: I’ve never talked nonsense in my life! [. . .] Berenger: You’re just a pretentious show-off—(Raising his voice.) a pedant! [. . .]. (37-38)

As they continue arguing, Jean says that if anyone has two horns it’s Berenger, who he calls an “Asiatic Mongol!” Berenger replies: “I’ve got no horns. And never will have,” to which Jean retorts, “Oh yes, you have!” (38). What this dispute foreshadows and confirms in retrospect is that Jean is indeed full of nonsense and that Berenger is the only one who will remain hornless. In addition, this argument like all the absurd arguments of the play serves to shift the spectator’s awareness from the level of thought toward the void of conceptions in the manner of a Zen koan. As Berenger and Jean argue about whether a rhino has one horn or two, the audience would no doubt finds this question absurd in light of the more critical issue of where the rhinos came from in the first place, what causes them to multiply in a small provincial French town, and how many more of them might appear to the risk of not only pet cats but the entire population. Spectators may feel superior to the characters who engage in such an absurd argument, but they would also be hard-pressed to answer these questions for themselves. The difficulty of solving an absurd paradox, one that becomes even more absurd as the characters begin changing into rhinos, would preclude not only a logical solution but also the possibility of the audience piecing together a meaningful life based on the intellect absorbed in the finite material values of daily life as opposed to the nonlocal experience of pure awareness. Boyer, as mentioned earlier, says that Brain and mind are no longer just in the head, because brains, minds, and all material objects are no longer just localized physical matter, but rather are also more abstract but real nonlocal processes in a subtler underlying field of existence. (2006b: 4)

Ionesco’s play through the device of rasa allows the audience to swing from the concrete thinking (apprehending and comparing) level of mind to a more subtle, abstract underlying field of existence where conventional logic no longer obtains. In other words, the audience experiences aesthetic rapture (rasa) not through the sublime as a qualitative conscious content of the mind, but rather through a process that transports them beyond the mind toward a void in thought. This

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void constitutes the source of Berenger’s intuition of the moral superiority of retaining his humanity in the face of pressure to conform to a collective psychosis. In Act Two we first learn that humans are metamorphosing into rhinos when the wife of one of Berenger’s colleagues, Mrs. Boeuf, arrives at the office to announce that her husband is ill. She tells her husband’s office mates, including Berenger, that she was chased all the way to the office by a rhinoceros. Suddenly she recognizes the rhino as her husband: “It’s my husband. Oh Boeuf, my poor Boeuf, what’s happened to you?” When questioned by Daisy, Mrs. Boeuf says, “I recognize him, I recognize him!” (61). She exclaims that “He’s calling me,” and instead of abandoning him she jumps from the window landing to join him and by implication become a rhino herself. Ionesco combines absurdity with humor when he has Papillon, their boss, say, “Well! That’s the last straw. This time he’s fired for good!” (ibid.). Later in Act Two, scene two, Berenger visits Jean, who is ill at home with a headache, and apologizes for their quarrel, explaining that “in our different ways we were both right” (71). To his amazement, Berenger finds Jean undergoing a distinct transformation, with his breathing becoming boorishly heavy, a bump growing on his forehead and his skin turning green. Obviously turning into a rhino, Jean accuses Berenger of “scrutinizing me as if I were some strange animal,” and then begins to distance himself from his friend psychologically; “There’s no such thing as friendship. I don’t believe in your friendship” (74-75). When Berenger comments on Jean’s “misanthropic mood,” Jean displays a change of attitude indicating a transformation on the level of body that reflects a pre-existing state of mind: “It’s not that I hate people. I’m just indifferent to them—or rather, they disgust me; and they’d better keep out of my way, or I’ll run them down” (75-76). The play suggests that no matter how morally weak and disgusting the human race, how boring and empty the life of the bourgeois working world, and how susceptible the human race is to conforming to collective psychosis, when humans transform into rhinos they will take all these negative attributes and situations with them. In defending Boeuf’s transformation into a rhino against Berenger’s feeling that it won’t improve his life or enhance his pleasure, Jean says, “You always see the black side of everything. [. . .] I tell you it’s not as bad as all that. After all, rhinoceroses are living

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creatures the same as us; they’ve got as much right to life as we have!” (78-79). Berenger reiterates his innate sense that “we have our own moral standards which I consider incompatible with the standards of these animals” (79). Although in one sense Jean is right in wanting to replace morality with nature, his interpretation of nature, which does not extend beyond the ordinary levels of language and conceptuality, consists of no more than extending morality from mental to physical laws, which as we have seen belong to the same category. As Berenger puts it, Jean goes for “the law of the jungle” (ibid.). Berenger observes that unlike animals, human civilization has evolved a philosophy of life, but Jean rejects the value of this idea: “Humanism is all washed up! You’re a ridiculous old sentimentalist” (80). Again, on a purely conceptual level Jean has a point, but the alternative provided by a new philosophy based on a different set of laws associated with rhinoceritis proves ineffectual in lifting humanity out of the jungle, whether of the natural or concrete urban variety. In terms of aesthetic response to this dramatic turn of events, the audience will find itself in a dilemma. Ionesco suggests that any material change in life, which applies to both aspects of the formula “existence precedes essence,” would only leave humans in the same benighted condition. Changing existence on a physical level does not differ from changing essence on a psychological level in the sense that both mind and body constitute a physical element as opposed to consciousness, which comprises the only nonphysical, nonlocal underlying dimension of the human condition. Through rasa, Ionesco’s play alters the level of consciousness of the audience through the change undergone by Berenger, the only character who transcends the physical mind/body component of life through a transformation based on knowledge-by-identity. As mentioned earlier, Samkhya-Yoga (the third system of Indian philosophy), states there are two irreducible, innate, and independent realities in our universe of experience: 1. consciousness itself (purusha); 2. primordial materiality (prakrti), which includes the thinking mind. (Pflueger 1998: 48)

Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga elaborate on this distinction between mind and consciousness, with the mind including the intellect, emotions, and all the qualities (qualia) of phenomenal experience:

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perceptions, memories, sensations, moods, etc. In contrast, consciousness (purusha) is distinct from primordial materiality (prakrti) with its twenty-three components, including mind (manas), intellect (buddhi, mahat), and ego (ahamkara) (Pflueger ibid.). Intellect, mind, and ego along with thought, feeling and perception like those adhered to by the rhino/rationalists comprise 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 as mentioned earlier from the garden variety of mind/body dualism in Western thought (Pflueger 1998: 49). The material content of experience related to the intellect, mind, and ego comprises only part of experience, which is made whole through the experience of pure consciousness. Ionesco's theatrical devices—the absurdity, humor, disidentification, 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 integral aspect of Ionesco's theater, then, like that of Pinter’s, in its pointing away from the agitated mind toward the joys of unbounded consciousness, which like The Lamp at the Door illuminates both inside and outside, inducing a glimpse of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form. In Act Three, Berenger has a similar confrontation with Dudard, who in the end also decides to metamorphose into a rhino. Berenger calls this metamorphosis a nervous disease that one can avoid, but Dudard tells him he’s overreacting, over-nervous and has no sense of humor. He also repeats Jean’s allegation that he can see only the dark side of things, accuses him of playing Don Quixote and tries to persuade him to be more detached. But Berenger, who says he “can’t be indifferent” (92), is not attached in the conventional sense that derives from intellectual self reflection. Having had a taste of pure consciousness through knowledge-by-identity, as the play suggests, he unlike the other characters can operate from a level beyond the division of mind, body and consciousness. In this state of unity, as Meyer-Dinkgräfe says,

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self-reflection is no longer needed and will automatically subside. Mind and body are functioning together as a unit, without impediment; energies can flow freely. (2005: 89)

Dudard tells Berenger that Papillon has also become a rhino and claims that because he had a good position as their boss “his metamorphosis was sincere” (95). As the play suggests, however, social status or intellectual prowess provides no protection from the foibles of the human condition. Dudard like the other rationalists confuses the issue by indiscriminately lumping all levels of the mind together, as when he tells Berenger “one has to keep an open mind— that’s essential to a scientific mentality” (97), when in fact freedom from ignorance and conceptual boundaries comes only from transcending the mind or conceptuality altogether. Claiming the high ground on the basis on the mind, he asks Berenger, “Can you personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality?” (98). In response, Berenger uses the example of practicality versus reason to make his point that logic doesn’t prove anything: “It’s all gibberish, utter lunacy” (99). Ultimately, Dudard in his obsession with mental constructs is the one who fails to be detached, ensnared as he is by the conceptual boundaries of knowledge-about and knowledge-byacquaintance. On the other hand, by going beyond the intellect Berenger achieves a level of nonattachment that characterizes knowledgeby-identity, a pragmatic field of existence beyond the duality of subject and object. As Gaensbauer says, not only do Jean and Dudard undergo transformations, but so does Berenger, who “changes from a listless slouch to an ardent defender of ‘an irreplaceable set of human values’” (1996: 102). Berenger and through him the spectator taste a unity of the knower, known and process of knowing, a unity devoid of an object of observation divorced from the self to which one can become enthralled—like the desire to become a rhinoceros. As Bonshek explains, Maharishi refers to this self-referral move of Atma (the Self) as a big fish of self-referral coming up under the water—the ocean of consciousness. Thus, consciousness, being awake, knows itself as subject, object and their relationship. Consequently, there are three values or shades of consciousness within one field of consciousness. This three-in-one structure of knower, known and process of knowing,

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Never having studied, Berenger catches himself using the wrong word when he says, “I feel it instinctively—no, that’s not what I mean, it’s the rhinoceros which has instinct—I feel it intuitively, yes, that’s the word, intuitive” (99). He knows that the rationalists can run circles around him, but on the basis of his intuition he still holds his ground against becoming a rhino. His will power is severely put to the test at the end of the play when he and Daisy are the last remaining humans. He tries to persuade her to help him “regenerate the human race” (118), but she rejects him, saying, “I don’t want to have children—it’s a bore” (119). They argue, and she claims to be ashamed of their love—“this morbid feeling, this male weakness. And female, too. It doesn’t compare with the ardour and the tremendous energy emanating from all these creatures around us” (120); he slaps her, and she leaves to become a rhino herself, abandoning him to a life of solitude. At this point in the play, Berenger vacillates between seeing himself as an ugly monster and wishing he could become a rhino, and then finally reasserts his conviction to remain human: “Now I’ll never become a rhinoceros, never, never! (124). His momentary wavering suggests that even though he may not have entirely liberated himself from the attachments of his mind, ultimately his intuitive sense of a void in thought helps him to hold his ground as a human being. The main field of play in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, then, is not confined to the realm of ideas, but rather leads the audience beyond conceptuality toward a taste of the gap between socially constructed identities. These identities consist of thoughts that hold us to the world of wish fulfillment and material desires. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros induces in the audience an aesthetic experience (rasa) through devices such as absurdity, the dream-like nature of reality, illogical argumentation and duplicitous wrangling between friends that swing the awareness between ordinary day-to-day psychological consciousness, and a more highly developed spiritual consciousness. On the one hand, we have the rationalists who operate out of ordinary self-interested cravings, and on the other hand Berenger who exhibits an increased ethical discernment based on a purity of consciousness, which by the end has reached a level through which he can experience both Emptiness and Form, the inner silence of Atman along with his own ethical values and emotions. Through rasa, the audience shares in Berenger’s un-

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conditional love, egolessness, purity of compassion and even in the taste of an experience beyond the knowledge-by-acquaintance of socially induced identities toward a coexistence of inside and outside, pure awareness and the mind’s qualia. In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard produces a similar effect through the juxtaposition of a series of temporal and conceptual oppositions that ultimately lead to an experience of unity.

Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia: Orderly Disorder Enlightenment and Romanticism Stoppard’s Arcadia juxtaposes the dimensions of time and timelessness, intuition and logic, heart and mind in a way that paradoxically induces in the characters and audience a transpersonal, transrational experience of freedom even from within the boundaries of time. The structure of the play takes us beyond the limits of time by dramatically juxtaposing two historical periods—1809-12 and the present—while also integrating two aspects of physics, Isaac Newton’s theory of a “universal system of mathematical reason and order divinely created and administered” (Audi 1995: 530), and Chaos theory, which as James Gleick says, “cuts away at the tenets of Newton’s physics” (1988: 6). The term chaos is misleading, however; as the science writer David Porush says, the “proper name is ‘deterministic chaos’” (1985: 438), which conveys the both/and paradigm that interrelates the two concepts in a nonhierarchical manner. With its title alluding to the imaginary “Arcadia” of Virgil, who idealized the life of shepherds and shepherdesses, the play also makes several references to the Latin line, “Et in Arcadia ego.” Critics have suggested that this ambiguous line refers not only to the notion that “I too am in Arcadia,” referring to the aristocratic Coverly family, but also to a painting by Nicolas Poussin in the Louvre (1638-9). This painting has a line inscribed on a tomb which implies that death also resides in Arcadia: “I too lived in Arcadia once,” or, “Even in Arcadia, I am here” (Arcadia 18; Hunter 2000: 156). In addition to its literal meaning of dropping the body, death also symbolizes the transcenddence of sensory perception or the conscious content of the mind. This transcendence suggests the transformation to a higher stage of development through the notion of Thanatos and Eros. With both time frames set in a room facing the garden of Sidley Park, a country estate

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in Derbyshire, the play begins as Sidley Park itself undergoes a transformation. Lady Croom’s husband Lord Croom, the head of Sidley Park and the Coverly family, has against her will employed Richard Noakes to redesign the landscape from a geometrically styled eighteenth-century Enlightenment garden to a Romantic wilderness in the Gothic style of untamed nature with ruins, hermitage and artificial crags representing the unpredictability of Eros. In the 1809-12 setting, the lead female character, the thirteenyear-old genius Thomasina Coverly, represents Romanticism in her scientific outlook and growing affection for her tutor Septimus Hodge; in the contemporary setting, on the other hand, the leading female character, Hannah Jarvis, a bestselling author doing research on the Coverly estate, represents a neoclassical attitude based on Newtonian physics and a denial of feelings. The duality set up by the opposition between classical and Gothic landscapes, Enlightenment and Romanticism, reason and feeling, rationality and nonrationality, Newtonian determinism and the chaos of Eros ultimately leads the characters and audience to a taste of unity as embodied by love. Clarifying this dichotomy, John Fleming writes that Deterministic chaos deals with systems of unpredictable determinism, but the uncertainty does not result in pure randomness but rather in complex patterns. [. . .] Deterministic chaos is only part of the science that informs Arcadia. Other concepts include entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the irreversibility of time, iterated algorithms, fractals, scaling, and population biology. (2001: 193-94)

Although this science points to the increasing disorder in the universe, Stoppard highlights those aspects of deterministic chaos that reveal an underlying order found not only in random events but also in the nature of higher consciousness. Like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Stoppard’s Arcadia takes the awareness of characters and spectators toward a void of conceptions through an intimation that presents the unified field of consciousness as the source of all duality. As Septimus says toward the end of the play, “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be all alone, on an empty shore” (126)—suggesting the wholeness of a unity-amidst-diversity. In the 1809-12 scenes, Septimus educates Thomasina on the mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which

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focuses on regular “Classical” forms derived from Newtonian physics. Thomasina, who asks “Is God a Newtonian?” (6), challenges the notion that Newton has sorted out the mystery of the universe. She questions his explanation of the rules by which God has allegedly created an orderly universe based on a regular and reversible order. In scene one, Thomasina pokes holes in Newtonian science when she discovers that once having stirred jam into her pudding, “You cannot stir things apart” (6). In scene three, she complains to Septimus that the way he teaches geometry confines it to simple forms that are limited and predictable rather than something like an apple leaf, which alludes both to the Eros of Eden (Romanticism) and to Newton’s discovery of gravity (Enlightenment). Septimus responds that Newton “has mastery of equations which lead into infinities where we cannot follow,” but Thomasina rejects this idea: What a faint-heart! We must look outward from the middle of the maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the apple leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equations. You will be famous for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten. (49)

The apple also refers to free will as associated with romantic Eros, a major component of unpredictability in the play. Her ideas are supported by her modern relative in the present, Valentine Coverly. A post-graduate student at Oxford, Valentine argues that chaos, or randomness and disorder, cannot be excluded from but rather complements the order of the universe. Randomness, moreover, relates to the second law of thermodynamics, which as Valentine explains shows that the orderly system is gradually running down through entropy. Throughout the play, therefore, Thomasina challenges the assumptions of the Enlightenment through Romanticism in her pursuit of nonrationality and the study of irregular landscapes of nature in the wild. Hannah, on the other hand, attempts to deny emotions and rejects Romanticism. In scene two, she says, a whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap thrills and false emotion. [. . .] The decline of thinking into feeling. (36-37)

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As Arcadia progresses, these two scientific positions lead characters and audience toward a condition of unity, suggested by Septimus in the lines quoted above: “When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore” (126). Fleming notes that Stoppard constructs Arcadia through a “nonlinear bouncing between time periods [that] suggests disorder, yet lurking underneath is a tightly ordered dramatic structure” (195). He also notes that the term fractal means “self-similar,” as in the “Selfsimilarity of dialogue, situations, characters, props, costumes, and musical accompaniment” across the scenes covering two historical periods (ibid.). As we shall see, Stoppard dramatizes how the mind undergoes a transformation through which the discovery of the mystery of life does not lead to meaning or rationality, but rather toward the transcendence of meaning in the source of thought where we can taste the boundless unity of nonpluralistic consciousness. To be alone as Septimus says, therefore, suggests undergoing a transformation beyond the Romanticism vs. Enlightenment, reason vs. emotion duality toward the unified experience of pure consciousness as opposed to the multiplicity of the mind’s conscious content—the qualia or qualities of phenomenal experience. As Fleming puts it, “All this similarity across scales is significant because in dynamic systems it signifies that some quality is preserved while everything else changes” (196). In Gleick’s words, “Some regularity lay beneath the turbulent surface” (1988: 172). This transformation in Arcadia occurs in part through an oscillation between Eros and Thanatos. These opposites are represented in Arcadia by the emotional attachment encouraged by Romanticism and the inevitability of change, as exemplified in Thomasina’s untimely demise by fire on the eve of her 17th birthday. In literature, however, death or Thanatos as mentioned earlier also symbolizes going beyond the sentience of the physical world by turning inward toward self-reflexiveness, which leads ultimately to the void of conceptions. In breaking attachments to the familiar world, the individual undergoes a series of transformations toward higher stages of development. This process gradually leads to a greater sense of the unity of opposites that characterizes an integral experience. Ken Wilber in The Marriage of Sense and Soul describes this development in terms of the world’s contemplative traditions that entail the Great

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Chain of Being and the corresponding belief in epistemological pluralism. He quotes Houston Smith, who says that “Reality is graded, and with it, cognition.” That is, there are levels of both being and knowing. If we picture the Great Chain as composed of four levels (body, mind, soul, and spirit), there are four correlative modes of knowing (sensory, mental, archetypal, and mystical), which I usually shorten to the three eyes of knowing: the eye of flesh (empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism), and the eye of contemplation (mysticism). (1988a: 35)

The eye of contemplation, as Arcadia illustrates, subsumes both empiricism and rationalism while simultaneously transcending both. As Fleming observes, Whenever the characters try to fix and understand reality—whether it be through the use of language, the use of narratives designed to control and explain their experiences, or the study of science—they discover that life is not so easily confined and defined. (2001: 196-97)

This difficulty applies especially to knowledge-about and knowledgeby-acquaintance. Trained in Newton’s physics, Thomasina foresees that to predict the future through a geometry that explains regular shapes would preclude irregular shapes, thereby presaging through her genius what today is called fractal geometry. Newtonian physics, then, excludes free will as well as the irregular forms associated with the vagaries of emotion that Septimus refers to as “the attraction that Newton left out” (97). As the play suggests, Newtonian science as a way of knowing on its own in the absence of chaos cuts out the bonding power of the human heart that facilitates the move toward the unity of an integral experience. As Chris Clarke says, Below the rulers of the power/knowledge hierarchy there persisted what Foucault termed ‘subjugated ways of knowing,’ including the practical and spiritual knowing of women, until quite recently handed down orally and unrecorded in the histories written by men. The knowledge hierarchy was identified as a patriarchy. [. . .] This was the most malevolent of all hierarchies. (2005: 5)

While Septimus begins by upholding the hierarchy of patriarchal knowledge (not to mention behavior) and favors objectivity, imper-

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sonal logic and scientific evidence, Thomasina rebels against this repressive authority and favors being, subjectivity, emotion and associative ways of knowing that lead to knowledge-by-identity. In the end, Stoppard metaphorically suggests that both positions contribute toward an understanding of truth, for similarities inevitably lie beneath external differences. Predictability vs. Free Will Stoppard’s Arcadia dramatizes how the opposition between Newtonian determinism and the chaos theory intuited by Thomasina over a hundred years before its scientific formulation produces a swing of awareness from the known to the unknown, from the concrete predictability of all events to the mystery of spontaneous activity that leads all bodies to generate heat. According to the second law of thermodynamics intuited by Thomasina, the world is moving from order to increasing disorder. An orderly paradise as represented by the universe before the big bang transforms into a disorderly world, or as Paul Davies says, runs “down towards a state of thermodynamic equilibrium and maximum disorder, after which nothing further of interest will happen. Physicists call this depressing prospect ‘the heat death’” (1983: 199). Metaphorically speaking, however, heat death also implies a phenomenological state of unity. As Davies says regarding the second law of thermodynamics, In its widest sense this law states that every day the universe becomes more and more disordered. There is a sort of gradual but inexorable descent into chaos. Examples of the second law are found everywhere: buildings fall down, people grow old, mountains and shorelines are eroded, natural resources are depleted. If all natural activity produces more disorder (measured in some appropriate way) then the world must change irreversibly, for to restore the universe to yesterday’s condition would mean somehow reducing the disorder to its previous level, which contradicts the second law. Yet at first sight there might seem to be many counterexamples of this law. New buildings are erected. New structures grow. Isn’t every new-born baby an example of order out of disorder? In these cases you have to be sure you are looking at the total system, not merely the subject of interest. [. . .] Physicists have invented a mathematical quantity called entropy to quantify disorder, and many careful experiments verify that the total entropy in a system never decreases. (1983: 10, original emphasis).

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Thomasina leaves clues both on thermodynamics and chaos theory in her lesson book and primer, which Septimus reads. After Thomasina’s death, Septimus goes mad not only from the remorse of losing her but also from trying to reconcile the two laws, Newtonian physics and chaos, by showing how the running down of the world could reverse itself. Valentine’s argument against reversal includes the example of a ball falling through the air, and the play itself suggests the irreversibility of death in the case of Thomasina, reduced to ashes by fire. As Davies suggests, however, one way this reversal may occur within a local context is through the concentration of energy through love, even though this emotion may also result in the entropy of body heat. Another reversal suggested by the play, which is partially induced by the unity of love, involves integral experience. Through emotional attraction, the characters and audience arguably transcend the chaos of thought into the void of conceptions, a field of perfect orderliness found in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, moving as the play progresses toward a coexistence of the void and the mind’s content. Scene one opens with Thomasina asking Septimus for a definition of carnal embrace. At first he tries to evade the question by jesting, “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef” (2), but finally gives her a graphic description in the context of an explanation of Fermat’s theorem. As revealed later, Mr. Noakes, the landscape gardener, saw Septimus in the gazebo in carnal embrace with Mrs. Chater. Thomasina then turns her attention from a discussion of God and Fermat to the irreversibility of the jam stirred into her rice pudding. The chaos of the rice pudding and jam parallels that of Septimus and Mrs. Chater as illustrated by the arrival of her husband, who with his wife are guests of Lady Croom’s brother, Captain Brice. Septimus placates Ezra Chater by falsely praising his poetry and claiming that he told Mrs. Chater of its merit before their carnal embrace. Hearing this, Mr. Chater, subjugated by patriarchal logic, gloats, “There is nothing that woman would not do for me! Now you have an insight to her character. Yes, by God, she is a wife to me, sir!” (11). At this point Lady Croom and Captain Brice enter the room and discuss the parts of the landscape they fear Noakes intends to ruin on Lord Croom’s request. Septimus and Chater mistakenly believe they are referring to the places in the garden Septimus

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and Mrs. Chater met in sexual congress, a confusion that draws another parallel between Romanticism and the entropy of body heat. Lady Croom praises the Classical landscape of Sidley Park and says, “’Et in Arcadia ego!’ ‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina” (16). Shortly afterward, gunshots are heard out in the park, to which Septimus comments, “A calendar of slaughter. ‘Even in Arcadia, there am I!”, to which Thomasian retorts, “Oh, phooey to Death!” (18), and then asks, “Are you in love with my mother, Septimus!” (18). Her attitude points from a literal to a symbolic transformation induced by death as Thanatos. The Eros of Septimus’s affair with Mrs. Chater and then with Lady Croom represents the emotional attraction that leads to entropy and characterizes the second law. Yet it also signifies the profane attachments of the characters that are destined to be short lived as they undergo a transformation through Thanatos to a higher level of Eros, a more unified state of being as demonstrated through the final attraction at the end of the play between Septimus and Thomasina. Death thus refers both to the transformation that Septimus and Thomasina set themselves up for through their relationship in scene one, as well as to Thomasina’s tragic death by fire when she goes to bed alone with a lit candle in 1812 after Septimus prudishly declines her offer to sleep together, indicative of his own choice of free will over determinism. In scene one, then, Stoppard presents an opposition between the intellect associated with Newtonian physics and the emotions associated with the second law, with the audience sensing amidst all the romantic chaos among the other characters the emergence of a budding love between Septimus and Thomasina. This attraction will evolve through a transformation from a lower level of Eros to a more integrated level by means of Thanatos, or the transcendence of chaos through negative entropy. Even within the context of entropy, then, the emotional attraction between characters has the effect of shifting the attention of the audience through negentropy from reason or the surface level of the mind toward more refined levels of consciousness. That is, the spectator’s awareness swings between two states of mind created through the production of order even within the context of disorder—a subtle shift from chaos toward the void of conceptions. As Hersh Zeifman says, “in a chaotically uncertain world, the only certainty is death—even in Arcadia, as Septimus at one point reminds Thomasina” (2001: 189).

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But Thomasina doesn’t need reminding because she intuits that the entire universe is moving toward an entropic dead end as heat converts to cold. Nevertheless, Arcadia reveals that even within the dark night of entropy, a few bright stars of negentropic Eros continue to shine. As Fleming puts it, “life can be chaotic, but also stable, and within chaos there are windows of order” (2001: 200). Scene two bring us up to the present day with the same oppositional structure between chaos and order found in scene one. The scene opens with Hannah on stage looking through Noakes’s sketch book and then leaving as the eighteen-year-old Chloe Coverly enters with Bernard. When Bernard learns from Chloe that the Miss Jarvis he is about to meet is actually Hannah Jarvis, whose book he had reviewed disparagingly, he asks her not to reveal his surname. Chloe exits and her fifteen-year-old brother Gus and older brother Valentine enter, with the latter coming and going throughout the scene. Bernard speaks with Valentine, who invited him to meet Hannah, and learns that the room they occupy has been cleared for a public dance that evening. When Hannah returns, Bernard deceptively praises her book on Lady Caroline Lamb, just as Septimus praised Mr. Chater’s poetry, and says he has come to do research on the poet Chater. Hannah, who reveals her dislike for academics, and Lady Croom are doing research on the gardens of the Park and on Thomasina’s sketch of a hermit. These present day characters, in doing research on their predecessors, also discuss the change in landscape gardening that represents the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism, which parallels the shift from rationality to nonrationality and its effect on the spectator. As mentioned earlier, Hannah considers Romanticism to be a sham. She says the hermit, who they believe to be Septimus, “was off his head. He covered every sheet with cabalistic proofs that the world was coming to an end. It’s perfect, isn’t it? A perfect symbol, I mean,” referring to the decline “from thinking to feeling” (36-37). When Chloe returns and blurts out Bernard’s surname, Hannah says, “You absolute shit” (39). In spite of her resentment, Bernard wants to collaborate with Hannah, believing mistakenly that Byron killed Mr. Chater in a duel. He wants to do research on Byron as well as Chater, and when Hannah informs him that Byron and Chater attended university together, he kisses her on the cheek just as Chloe enters the

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room and he exits. Chloe says of Bernard, “I thought there was a lot of sexual energy there, didn’t you?”, but Hannah has no interest, so Chloe asserts, “If you don’t want him, I’ll have him. Is he married? (44). As the scene closes, Chloe says that her brother is secretly in love with Hannah, who thinks she’s referring to Valentine when she really means her younger brother Gus. At this point, Gus (“in his customary silent awkwardness” (45)), enters with an apple for Hannah—another allusion to the Eros of Eden (Romanticism) and to Newton’s discovery of gravity (Enlightenment). But at this stage Hannah shows resistance to Eros, as did Septimus toward Thomasina. As a guardian of the dispassionate intellect, she copes with life by trying to deny her feelings, either because of a past disappointment or a conscious decision to focus on her intellectual pursuits. Although they represent the arts and humanities, Hannah and Bernard are more scientific in their attempts to interpret the past than the three scientists, Thomasina, Septimus and Valentine, who tend to be less Newtonian and more intuitive in their approach. In her aversion for sentimentality, Hannah sees emotion as an undesirable irregularity, but in proving her theory about the Enlightenment and Septimus as the hermit she ultimately resorts to intuition like Thomasina. Stoppard’s characters thus integrate both freewill and fate, unpredictability and determinism, experiencing a level of unity that goes beyond knowledge-about and knowledge-by-acquaintance linked to Wilber’s three quadrants outside the upper left. The Pre/Trans Fallacy The tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism continues from scenes one and two until the end of the play. In scene one both Mrs. Chater and Lady Croom commit adultery with Septimus and Byron, but in scene two the pain of deception begins to extend its reach to include other characters. That is, the disorder caused by deception and misunderstanding has expanded from the direct relationships between individuals such as Lady Croom, Septimus, Byron and Mr. and Mrs. Chater to encompass the narrative representation of the past based on research that relies on inference based on secondary resources. Hannah has difficulty determining the truth of documents about the hermit, Bernard is mistaken about Byron having killed Mr. Chater in a duel, and all of the characters underestimate the extent to which entropy has saturated their lives. The bio-

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graphical narratives the characters pursue do not reveal the whole truth about their research subjects. As discussed in relation to Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Fireman argues that narrative captures aspects of the self for description and examination and thereby helps to construct the self; he adds that “the portions of human consciousness beyond the purely somatic—self-awareness, self-understanding and self-knowledge—are products of personal narratives” (2003: 4-5). But as argued here, narrative self-awareness applies only to the verbal, constructed aspect of identity, not to the integral experience of the void of conceptions. While reason, language and interpretation suffice to yield knowledge-about the socially constructed self, one needs to take a transrational, transverbal, transpersonal approach to access the self as pure awareness. In the division between Romanticism and Enlightenment, the pre/trans fallacy discussed by Wilber needs to be avoided to reach higher nonrational levels of development suggested by the oscillation between Eros and Thanatos, free will and determinism. Hannah condemns the “whole Romantic sham” (36) because she senses its regressive tendency for a prerational state, which suggests a throwback to an infantile union, not a progressive transformation into a transpersonal state. As Wilber explains, a prerational regression entails an “oceanic adualism, indissociation, and even primitive autism. This is, for example, precisely the route taken by Freud in The Future of an Illusion” (1998b: 88). Hannah believes that the emphasis on feeling in Romanticism tends to undermine the intellect by taking one backwards toward a more primitive state of development, whereas the Enlightenment serves to advance humanity by promoting a higher level of development based on reason. According to Wilber, in the overall Romantic view, “one starts out in unconscious Heaven [as a child], an unconscious union with the Divine; one then loses this unconscious union, and thus plunges into conscious hell; one can then regain the Divine union, but now in a higher and conscious fashion” (1998b: 95, original emphasis). As Wilber explains, one can be conscious or unconscious of one’s union with the Divine, but one can never actually lose that union itself, “or you would cease to be” (96). He further argues that childhood is not really an unconscious Heaven but rather an unconscious Hell, which through the growing awareness of adulthood becomes a conscious Hell. In growing up we experience more misery and alienation because of a lack of awareness of the

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Divine, not because of the loss of a prerational union, which would undermine the basis of our existence. Furthermore, as adults we grow in awareness of the pain of existence not out of an unquenchable desire that was absent to the infant self, but rather out of a heightened awareness of a desire-ridden world that an infant lives unconsciously. As Hannah and especially Thomasina demonstrate, however, the self even within the context of Romanticism can grow in spirituality by transcending its sense of separateness and becoming more conscious of the Divine. This union or oneness, although unconscious, is never absent in the infant self. As Wilber argues, humans develop from an unconscious Hell to a conscious Hell and ultimately to a conscious Heaven (1998b: 97), a sequence Stoppard dramatizes through his characters. Both characters and audience develop from an unconscious duality to a conscious duality and ultimately toward a conscious unity. As Wilber says, the infantile state is not unconscious transpersonal, it is basically prepersonal. It is not transrational, it is prerational. It is not transverbal, it is preverbal. It is not trans-egoic, it is pre-egoic And the course of human development—and evolution at large—is from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious; from prepersonal to personal to transpersonal; from under-mental to mental to over-mental; from pretemporal to temporal to transtemporal, by any other name: eternal. (1998b: 97-98)

Hannah believes that Romanticism involves a regression to a subconscious, prepersonal, under-mental emotional state that she herself attempts to counteract through a denial of feelings and an emphasis on her intellectual pursuits. But Thomasina, through her own intellectual pursuits and intuition, demonstrates that not all Romantics suffer from such a regression. On the contrary, Thomasina—through a transrational, transverbal, transpersonal process— surpasses the intellectual acuity of her tutor, Septimus, who represents an Enlightenment stance on the validity of Newtonian physics. If anything, Septimus himself exhibits the same vulnerability to regression toward a prerational, preverbal, prepersonal state as do Romantics such as Byron. On the one hand, Byron, who is discussed by the other characters but never appears on stage, intellectually rejects much of the Romantic theory on nature, feeling and idealistic love, but in practice he succumbs to the same kind of infantile, mindless passion engaged in by Chater and Septimus.

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Throughout the play Thomasina intuits a deeper level of the laws of nature than Septimus, which implies that unlike him she also remembers, however vaguely, a union with the Divine. Hannah, on the other hand, suffers a mental and emotional block toward a sense of union, as if confusing the transrational, transverbal, transpersonal with the prerational, preverbal, prepersonal. When Bernard entices her to have carnal embrace, she protests: Hannah: Oh . . . No. Thanks . . . (then, protesting) Bernard! Bernard: You should try it. It’s very understated. Hannah: Nothing against it. Bernard: Yes, you have. You should let yourself go a bit. You might have written a better book. Or at any rate the right book. Hannah: Sex and literature. Literature and sex. Your conversation, left to itself, doesn’t have many places to go. Like two marbles rolling around a pudding basin. One of them is always sex. (84).

Earlier, Chloe also accuses Hannah of resisting the offer of intimacy: “You’ve been deeply wounded in the past, haven’t you, Hannah?” (75). Hannah’s fear of intimacy suggests a fear of letting go of the rational, verbal, personal dimension of the narrative self necessary to attain the transrational, transverbal, transpersonal self. This fear may stem in part from her committing the pre/trans fallacy, from confusing the transrational with a prerational, infantile dependence on the other. As Michael Goldman says, 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 whoknows-when. (2000: 77, original italics)

In the context of a Divine or integral experience, intimacy between self and other therefore depends on the degree of intimacy between two aspects of the self: that is, the intimacy between one’s constructed narrative identity and one’s “superlative degree of inwardness.” In Arcadia, Stoppard creates a “total” theatre where both levels of intimacy are present simultaneously—thus intimating and promoting the experience among characters and audience of a transcendental reality beyond the pre/trans fallacy. Far from under-mining transcendental awareness, Stoppard contextualizes it within culture through an integral drama that attempts to create a new consciousness.

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This transformation involves the decontingencing of actor and spectator from the boundaries of ordinary language and identity, allowing for a greater intimacy with no-mind or a void in thought— which is one reason the transformations of character and spectator may seem “never wholly clear” in terms of logical discourse. Intimacy with our superlative degree of inwardness arguably forms the basis for all other 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 knowledgeby-identity. In the early scenes of Arcadia, Hannah resists this transformation while Thomasina embraces it, although by the end of the play Hannah comes around to an acceptance of intimacy, as does Septimus, although belatedly. As Fleming puts it, “Arcadia is a celebration of the human struggle to obtain knowledge, with meaning arriving as much out of the process as the product” (2001: 200). What he omits, however, but what Stoppard renders through his characters, especially Thomasina, is the trans-narrative knower as internal observer, without which the process of knowing an object of knowledge remains incomplete. As an unidentifiable emptiness, pure consciousness or a void in thought is knowable not indirectly through language or ideas, but only through the immediacy (or knowledge-by-identity) of transcognitive, transpersonal 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 through a different way of knowing in the plays of Stoppard, Pinter and Ionesco, is trans-cultural, transpersonal, and thus largely the same in any theatre that demonstrates the integral experience of zone #1 in the upper left quadrant, while also providing a glimpse through aesthetic experience (rasa) of the coexistence of an awareness of Emptiness and Form. 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. Stoppard’s play, on the other hand, illustrates that while all contentful experiences are context related, it is not inconsistent to assume that contentless Gnostic or aesthetic experiences, even though arising out of appropriate contexts, are nevertheless in and of themselves context-free (see Almond 1990:

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216). Differences in the expression of aesthetic experience, as Stoppard illustrates, occur only through the cultural contexts in which transpersonal, mythic encounters with superlative inwardness are evoked. Stoppard 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 1996: 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. Moreover, as Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe shows, immaterial consciousness cannot be thought about by the material intellect (2003). As Thomasina demonstrates, immaterial pure consciousness as experienced through transrational insights such as her intuition of chaos theory exceeds the rational 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 50). As Zeifman says, The problem with Hannah’s attempt to inhabit her own private version of “Arcadia,” a paradise of rationality and predictability, is that God ultimately is not a Newtonian; there is a “serpent” in the garden, and that serpent, as always, is the irrational and seductive power of Eros. (2001: 187, original emphasis)

This Eros has a carnal as well as a spiritual dimension; and to achieve the transrational requires an integration of both mind/body and consciousness, not an exclusive emphasis on the mind/body. Aesthetic Rapture and the Transrational In scene three, Thomasina describes her mother flirting with Byron, a friend of Septimus. As the play unfolds, she also makes advances in her theory of chaos and laments the loss of all the knowledge of antiquity by fire in ancient Egypt. Septimus, however, says that “Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again” (51). But Thomasina refers not only to science but also to the arts:

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Modern scientists can recover losses in the sciences, a field of rationality and empirical observation, but only the arts as a different way of knowing can provide phenomenological experiences of the sort that lead to the transrational, transverbal state associated with knowledge-by-identity, an experience of rasa or aesthetic rapture. As discussed in The Natyashastra, the notion of suggestion (dhvani) evolved to explain how the artist’s emotion (bhava) gives rise to the experience of rasa (aesthetic rapture). 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 theatre, the presence of integral 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 plays of Stoppard, Pinter and Ionesco discussed here render sacred events allegorically by suggestion, which 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). In Arcadia, Stoppard points us beyond the worldly experience of Eros and Thanatos toward the source of all thought and emotions, the transpersonal self, and then back again to provide a glimpse of both dimensions simultaneously. 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 (pash-

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yanti/para) and consciousness (turiya) where we can relish a void of conceptions, which is ultimately nothing other than the self as bliss consciousness (sat-chit-ananda) knowing itself. The emotion associated with rasa, therefore, does not cause a regression to a preverbal, prerational, prepersonal state. Rather it induces a transverbal, transrational, transpersonal transformation, such as that suggested by Thomasina’s realization that although she can entertain a prerational, infantile dream of marrying Byron, she knows transrationally that she is falling in love with Septimus. Even though Septimus is skeptical of Thomasina’s intuition of the second law of thermodynamics, she does not let this theoretical difference interfere with her emotional attraction to him. Indeed, her mind in relation to Septimus exhibits a form of self-transcendence, as if she were the true artist in the play. As Giorgio Agamben says, “The artist is the man without content, who has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression” (1999: 55). Thomasina is like an artist who can experience the no content of a void in thought, while at the same time experiencing the forms of thought. Agamben adds that Artistic subjectivity without content is now the pure force of negation that everywhere and at all times affirms only itself as absolute freedom that mirrors itself in pure self-consciousness. (56)

Stoppard’s Arcadia until almost the end produces this effect on the audience primarily through Thomasina, whose mathematical intuition reflects the no content of an artist, a state of mind open to the freedom of natural law as opposed to the normative conventions of either Classical or Romantic culture. Hannah also toward the end of the play embodies the notion that classical and romantic dispositions are not mutually exclusive, thereby illustrating the coexistence of opposites pervading the performance. In scene four, Valentine confirms Thomasina’s genius when he tells Hannah how with pencil and paper she improvised mathematical techniques that he can only calculate on a computer. He elaborates on the analogy between Romanticism and chaos, explaining how Thomasina was on the right track by renouncing Classical science. Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really. Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is

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Through deterministic chaos Thomasina intuits that irregularity triggers the emergence of life. Classical math before Thomasina was part of nature, but then through the perspective of the second law nature becomes freaky as Thomasina predicted. From a psychological standpoint, conventional reason sometimes appears absurd, but not everything nonrational (like the prerational) deserves to be glorified as a route to the Divine. In one sense Hannah’s skepticism derives from her intellectual stance that sometimes what appears to be transrational may in fact only be prerational, an exaggerated emotionalism that is merely infantile and regressive. Bernard, who in scene four continues to do research on Byron, puts Hannah off because he seems to have regressive tendencies. His attraction for Hannah appears nonrational, but unlike Thomasina’s nonrational attraction for Septimus it veers toward the prerational instead of the transrational, revealing his regressive predisposition rather than a form of spiritual transcendence. In scene five Bernard reads out his mistaken theory that Byron killed Mr. Chater in a duel over his wife. As we have seen, Hannah warns him that his theory will lead to his disgrace. Valentine, moreover, dismisses Bernard’s narrative biographies dealing with personalities, thereby confirming the argument mentioned earlier that narratives cannot access the transpersonal self: “The questions you’re asking don’t matter, you see. It’s like arguing who got there first with the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But it doesn’t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scientific progress. Knowledge” (80, original emphasis). Reminiscent of Agamben, though, Bernard defends art with the argument that art and artistic genius exceed scientific understanding: “Parameters! You can’t stick Byron’s head in your laptop. Genius isn’t like your average grouse” (80). While Valentine advocates a scientific approach that privileges the object of knowledge and its context, Bernard defends art and philosophy as providing greater access to the self. He says, “If knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? [. . .] Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you” (81). Bernard’s argument that art is timeless relies on his mechanistic view of the universe, his claim that Newtonian laws surpass the limits of time, again showing the interdependence of unpredictability and determinism. But we can see

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in his attempt to develop a narrative theory of Byron not for its literary value but rather to enhance his own fame and fortune that his intuition doesn’t match that of Thomasiana or Hannah, again illustrating his contradictory nature. Nevertheless, by promoting knowledge attained through art, even Bernard points to the suggestive power of rasa as opposed to logical discourse as a means to enrich human consciousness through knowledge-by-identity. Nevertheless, Bernard analyzes Byron’s identity only on the basis of narrative. In analyzing Paul Ricoeur’s concept of discursive or narrative identity, Dieter Teichert writes that 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)

Although flexible and open, narrative identity emerges 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)

In Stoppard’s theatre, the dynamic, unstable and fragile identities of the characters are woven into their opposing views on science, culture and romance, but the changeable nature of these views exposes a background of non-intentional consciousness through which these identities are held together. In other words, Bernard’s theory of Byron’s identity cannot fathom the essence of Byron, who as an artist, as Agamben says, is a man without content. Similarly, Hannah and

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Bernard find a narrative reference to the Sidley Park hermit, who they discover to be Septimus, but without understanding his true identity. Bernard, moreover, tells Hannah that the sketch on her book jacket of “Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb at the Royal Academy” is a fake, for Byron was in Italy at the time of the sketch, but he turns out to be wrong about this too. These erroneous narratives suggest that for spectators to access any truth about identity they have to go beyond language and interpretation through a transverbal, transrational experience of rasa. Stoppard shows that we can reach the no content of the transpersonal self only through the power of suggestion. The characters in the present doing research on the characters of the past through the study of narrative demonstrate the fallibility of narrative. But scene seven, by bringing all the characters together in the same time frame, reveals the truth about the co-presence of the rational and the emotional. At the beginning of the scene, Chloe discovers from Valentine that the deterministic universe doesn’t work and concludes that it’s all because of sex [. . .] That’s what I think. The universe is deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be, but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t supposed to be in that part of the plan. (97)

Evidence of this recurs when Valentine tries to flirt with Hannah by asking, “Can’t we have a trial marriage and I’ll call it off in the morning?” (99). Although she turns down the offer, when Valentine produces the computer iterations of Thomasina’s equations of the second law, Hannah finds them beautiful. Hannah rejects Romanticism and denies her emotions, but Thomasina’s equations on the second law and chaos intrigue her, foreshadowing her own impending acceptance of feeling at the end of the play. In discussing the afterlife with Valentine, which serves as a metaphor of self-transformation through Thanatos, Hannah says, Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. (100)

This argument implies that she has yet to grasp the nature of Thanatos as a transformation to an intersubjective community in part based on emotional bonds. Death in Stoppard’s theatre points metaphorically

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beyond our subjected-ness to a rebirth of the memory of consciousness—which embodies an experience beyond space/time and the play’s dichotomies—classical/romantic, Newtonian/chaotic, intuition /logic, heart/mind, order/disorder. As Hannah tells Valentine, Thomasina “died in the fire [. . .] the night before her seventeenth birthday” (101), which on one level symbolizes her undergoing a transformation to a higher state of Eros. The men, on the other hand, remain largely trapped in the heat of sexual passion, each trying to seduce any number of women out of promiscuity rather than love, or as Thomasina puts it, “The action of bodies in heat” (111). Thomasina tells her brother Augustus that Septimus kissed her to seal his promise to teach her how to waltz. Even though she has an ephemeral fantasy of marrying Byron, Thomasina considers him unpredictable and unreliable compared to Septimus. Indeed, she could also be referring to Byron when, during her discussion of him with Septimus and Lady Croom, she exclaims, “The Emperor of Irregularity!” (113) just as Noakes enters the room. When Thomasina tells Noakes that his steam pump “can never get out of it what you put in. [. . .] Newton’s equations go forwards and backwards, they do not care which way. But the heat equation cares very much, it goes only one way ” (115), Stoppard alludes to the possibility that because of their unpredictable passion men are the main victims of entropy. Thomasina and Hannah, on the other hand, experience negentropy in their move away from regressive prerational obsessions toward knowledge-by-identity of the transrational “better self” (Grinshpon 2003, viii). Thomasina’s lifestyle embodies her understanding, while Valentine like the other men are subjugated by disembodied abstractions and the regressive actions of their bodies in heat. Although ignorance on the part of Byron, Septimus and the other men has the effect of accelerating entropy, by the end of the play Thomasina and Hannah manage to reverse this regression in part and recover a semblance of order, at least socially. As Paul Edwards says, The final scene of the play shows us an image of perfect harmony, time overcome through the copresence of past and present as the modern couple Hannah and the new, silent genius of the Coverly family, Gus, dance alongside Thomasina and Septimus to the tune of a waltz. But the audience knows that “tomorrow” or “tonight,” Thomasina will take a candle, mount the stairs to her bedroom and be

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Of all the men, Septimus comes closest to emulating Thomasina and Hannah, although it takes him twenty-two years of reiterating Thomasina’s equations after she dies and leads to his becoming a mad hermit. But having fallen in love with Thomasina on the eve of her death, Septimus has finally become a non-regressive Romantic through his devotion. Similarly, Hannah undergoes a transformation toward emotional commitment when she finally accepts Gus’s request for a dance. As Stoppard says, “None of us is tidy”; “none of us is classifiable. Even the facility to perceive and define two ideas such as the classical and romantic in opposition to each other indicates that one shares a little bit of each” (quoted by Zeifman 2001: 190). The classical and romantic thus represent the duality of human existence, not that of mind and body, but rather of mind/body on one side and consciousness on the other. Although Hannah rejects carnality, her biography on Byron’s lover Caroline Lamb is entitled Caro, which is short for Caroline but also a pun on “flesh” (Zeifman 191). Her growth toward a genuinely spiritual domain, like Thomasina’s, does not involve the rejection of the physical or the pseudo union of the preverbal, prerational, regressive stage of development, but rather a transcending of the separate-self sense to a transrational, transverbal experience. This experience for characters and audience alike may be momentary and fragile, as Edwards claims, but hardly useless—except for the mind/body side of duality, which they move toward transcending through the rasa of the transrational self. Transpersonal love as represented by Thomasina and eventually by Hannah and Septimus starts from the field of duality and transcends to a divine love, a love based on the union of knowledgeby-identity. As Wayne Teasdale says, this journey toward a trans- as opposed to a pre-unified experience puts us on the road to realizing and actualizing who we really are in our ultimate being. Enlightenment is the awakening to our identity as boundless awareness, but it is incomplete unless our compassion, sensitivity, and love are similarly awakened and actualized in our lives and relationships. (1999: 77)

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As the play closes, the two partners dancing simultaneously on stage—Hannah and Gus in the present and Thomasina and Septimus in the past—symbolize not simply the restoration of a semblance of order, or rather of orderly disorder, but also the embodiment of love as knowledge-by-identity through a unity of the rational and transrational, of mind/body and consciousness. Both the characters and spectators achieve a taste of wholeness and diversity, an integral aesthetic experience that, as Meyer-Dinkgräfe says, is an experience that combines pure consciousness with the specific contents of a given performance in which rasa is created by the actors in conjunction with music and various aspects of scenography. (2005: 193)

This dance represents not the innocence of infantile prerational existence but rather a contentful experience that is context related, yet nevertheless yields a contentless Gnostic or aesthetic experience—one that arises out of appropriate contexts but remains in and of itself context-free. As the play suggests, Thomasina and the audience, having tasted the void in thought, also manage to maintain it along with an awareness of their worldly experiences. The ineffable loss endured by Septimus, moreover, symbolizes a transformation from one level of Eros based on duality to a higher level of spiritual development characterized by a unity-amidst-diversity, which the audience glimpses through a coexistence of Emptiness and Form. One of the mysteries of Arcadia concerns why Gus doesn’t speak. Hannah agrees to dance with him after he provides her with the evidence she needs to prove her theory about Septimus, but Gus’s “natural genius” has more to do with his transverbal, psychic-like abilities to suggest that the universe has a deeper mystery to it than that available through a mechanistic description. As Fleming says, In Jumpers Stoppard’s moral philosopher declares that ‘there is more in [humans] than meets the microscope,’ and Gus seems to be an embodiment of that metaphysical belief. (2001: 207)

Arguably, Stoppard suggests through Gus’s transverbal, transrational character that an understanding of truth does not hinge on the use of language and interpretation but rather on a knowledge-by-identity achieved through a pure consciousness event. Stoppard presents this

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event as the basis for a glimpse of cosmic consciousness, the combination of an awareness of inner silence and the temporality of experience that the spectators of Arcadia, like those of Pinter’s The Homecoming, gain through a taste of rasa.

Discovering Happiness in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming Liquid Life and Nondual Identity beyond Speech In The Homecoming, which critics say lends itself to numerous interpretations, Harold Pinter portrays Ruth as a character who critics argue does not reflect the stereotype of a conventional woman but rather a new female ideology. Her husband Teddy, a philosophy professor at an American University, brings her to his parental home in London to meet his father, uncle and two brothers. Max, the tough old family patriarch and retired butcher, and his brothers Lenny, a pimp, and Joey, a boxer, are male chauvinists who abuse and try to sexually dominate women. The ambiguity of the backgrounds of all the characters, like that of Stanley in The Birthday Party, heightens their mystery and allure, especially Ruth’s. Although in the end Ruth abandons Teddy and stays in London with his family, supposedly to replace the dead matriarch Jessie, her position in a demanding male world is not only ambiguous but violates every rule in the male book of female subservience. Speaking with authority and self-confidence, Ruth does not necessarily represent a female ideology that will become the norm so much as a transcendence of all ideology in a world of rapid change. As Zygmunt Bauman says, “Being modern came to mean, as it means today, being unable to stop and even less able to stand still” (2000: 28). This restlessness, which often surprises Pinter’s audience with the incongruity of what they expect and what actually transpires, is not only physical. Ruth never comes to rest on a particular ideology, never seeks satisfaction in anything but her own freedom. As Bauman says, “We move and are bound to keep moving not so much because of the ‘delay of gratification,’ as Max Weber suggested, as because of the impossibility of ever being gratified: the horizon of satisfaction, the finishing line of effort and the moment of restful self-congrat-

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ulation move faster than the fastest of the runners. Fulfillment is always in the future, and achievements lose their attraction and satisfying potential at the moment of their attainment, if not before” (ibid., original emphasis). From her past experiences—the earlier stage of sexuality and the later stage of being a mother and a subservient wife—Ruth in the end comes to sense that the only way to reach fulfillment as a harmoniously integrated person is to give up attachments to these various roles and live openly in the present. Unlike the men, she manages to avoid clinging to any internal subjective or external intersubjective images of her identity, having stabilized herself to a greater extent than the men in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant. In Act two when Ruth listens to Lenny teasing Teddy’s supposed intellectual superiority with abstract questions, she senses the absurdity and irrelevance of these abstractions and points the men back to their concrete state of subjectivity. Her interjection suggests the priority of subjective existence on the level of consciousness over ideological essences exploited mainly for the sake of dominating others. Ruth: Don’t be too sure though. You’ve forgotten something. Look at me. I . . . move my leg. That’s all it is. But I wear . . . underwear . . . which moves with me . . . it . . . captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret. The action is simple. It’s a leg . . . moving. My lips move. Why don’t you restrict . . . your observations to that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant . . . than the words which come through them. You must bear that . . . possibility . . . in mind. (85)

Ruth does not seek gratification in words or ideas, as if realizing that through the play of the signifier or differance any stable meaning is infinitely deferred. As Deutsch notes, according to Advaita Vedanta, “whatever is expressed is ultimately non-Brahman, is ultimately untrue” (1973: 12). Her speech, moreover, suggests an attempt to go beyond thought, beyond language through observation to a more subtle state of consciousness in the direction of the void of conceptions. Although her behavior is influenced by the patriarchal constraints of her environment, her speech tends not only to be unconditioned by external influence but also to undermine that influence by exposing its futility. As Elizabeth Sakellaridou says, Ruth’s speech

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interrupts the “male-to-male philosophical debate” as “an arbitrary invasion of the men’s territory. . . . Ruth forces her way into it, demanding her rights, setting up her terms, speaking her own language, establishing her real self” (1988: 109). The self she establishes, however, is not an imitation of the male self based on philosophical debate or the domination of others; indeed, the self she achieves in the play cannot be defined through language because it suggests a trans-linguistic, trans-logical dimension of human identity. This self, moreover, takes her beyond social criticism because the notion of whoredom, to which she admits, cannot humiliate a level of identity that transcends the verbal. She begins to liberate herself from linguistic determination by approaching a level of the self beyond language. As Pinter says, she’s “used by the family. But eventually she comes back at them with a whip” (Hewes 1967, qtd. in Sakellaridou 1988: 110). She achieves this level of independence by never clinging to the meaning of any label ascribed to her by Teddy’s family. As Bauman says, Thinking makes us human, but it is being human that makes us think. Thinking cannot be explained; but it needs no explanation. Thinking needs no justification; but it would not be justified even if one tried. (2000: 41)

While being human or a Mensch, as Nietzsche says, will make us think, being an Ubermensch allows you to transcend the influence of language by witnessing thoughts flowing through the mind without being subjugated by them. In this case, the self in the upper left quadrant of subjectivity, as Wilber puts it, achieves a state of turiya or pure awareness beyond duality, where “Divine Emptiness and relative Form are not two” (Integral 76). Ruth not only taps into pure awareness but also shows evidence of experiencing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form through her ability to remain detached while engaging the men in their disputes. While Lenny, Joey, Max and Teddy cling to their individual interpretations of words, Ruth remains playful with the use of language, not identifying with the labels imposed on her by men. Martin Esslin observes that “the more helpless a male the more he will tend to dream of women as obedient slaves-prostitutes” (1982: 160). The men do this in part due to their identification of Ruth with the dead mother, which she goes along

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with, though inwardly she remains free of these verbal associations. The audience of The Homecoming begins to sense that although the men seem to exploit Ruth, the tables gradually turn, but not because she exploits them so much as because she liberates herself from the essence of their abuse. The Patriarchal Logos and Distortion of Womanhood Viewed as a family tale, The Homecoming has several narrative components, such as the divorce narrative, the prostitution narrative, the bargaining or business narrative and the Oedipal narrative, all of which have a powerful influence on the men. Ruth on the other hand manages to rise above these narratives as a result of their being deconstructed. The play opens with the Oedipal narrative when Max enters the room from the kitchen and asks Lenny, “What have you done with the scissors?” (3). As Varun Begley says, “The menacing thrust of the question alerts us to a powerful process of cathexis, and, more specifically, the scissors announce a castration threat that looms over the play” (2005: 67). While at the end of the play Max rather than Lenny gets symbolically castrated when he falls on his knees before Ruth and pleads for a kiss, Lenny’s castration anxiety underlies his relationship with Ruth and may have inspired him to become a pimp. Later in the first scene, after some disrespectful banter with Max, who grips his walking stick and tells Lenny to leave the house, Lenny asks in mock seriousness, Oh, Daddy, you’re not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh? Don’t use your stick on me Daddy. No, please. It wasn’t my fault, it was one of the others. I haven’t done anything wrong, Dad, honest. Don’t clout me with that stick, Dad. (9)

Max’s stick, as a phallic symbol, supports his role as the patriarch, but doesn’t prevent Lenny from being disrespectful in their verbal debates. Mark Taylor explains this patriarchal condition of competition and fear in a quote on Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture: culture, Geertz, argues, denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (1999: 86; Geertz 1968: 641).

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Ruth refuses to be subjugated by these symbols and their cultural meanings, ultimately deconstructing them by undermining the conventional roles of men and women by the end of the play. Later in act one, Lenny provocatively asks Max, That night . . . you know . . . the night you got me . . . that night with Mum, what was it like? Eh? When I was just a glint in your eye. What was it like? What was the background to it? I mean, I want to know the real facts about my background. I mean, for instance, is it a fact that you had me in mind all the time, or it is a fact that I was the last thing you had in mind? (55-56)

In mocking his father by trying to gain knowledge of parental sexuality, Lenny violates the taboos in Freud’s Totem and Taboo that underlie the narrative attacks among the characters throughout the play. This secret parental knowledge is associated with incest, patricide and the debates between the men in general. As Begley puts it, In Oedipal patriarchy, preoccupation with the primal scene represents a regressive incestuous fixation, one that defies the father’s proprietary authority and interferes with the “civilizing” deferral and displacement of desire. It is not surprising, then, that Max responds to Lenny’s question as if it were an act of primal insurrection. (71)

In terms of Wilber’s four quadrants, Lenny tries to gain power in the intersubjective, cultural (lower left) and the interobjective social (lower right) quadrants because he feels insecure within himself subjectively, not having stabilized himself in the upper left quadrant. Although the subjective quadrant is certainly influenced by the other three quadrants, it provides the basis for self-confidence and inner stability. Throughout Lenny’s interactions with Ruth, we see that she has far greater inner strength, stability and sovereignty than him. Lenny has a tendency to conceptualize women in stereotypical ways, as if they have no existence of their own but only essences imposed by men. In one of his stories to Ruth, he tells her about a hat he bought for a lovely girl. Lenny: I bought a girl a hat once. We saw it in a glass case, in a shop. I tell you what it had. It had a bunch of daffodils on it, tied with a black satin bow, and then it was covered with a cloche of black veiling. A

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While Lenny attempts to define women in terms of how he interprets commodities they’re expected to own and display, Ruth denies this interpretation with an emphatic “No.” She then turns his attention to the reality of her physical being, Wilber’s upper right or objective quadrant, the only aspect of her nature that Lenny recognizes. The audience, however, sees beyond this to her inner dimension, the basis for her continual rejection of the conceptual associations of women that the men try to impose on her. Soon after this discussion Lenny dances with Ruth and then kisses her in the presence of Teddy, Max and Joey. Ruth’s behavior reasserts her existential freedom as a woman, rather than conforming to a man’s idea of how a woman should behave. Lenny thus tries to assert his masculinity by using tactics not only against his father but also against women. His Oedipal anxiety arises from his lack of a natural identity beyond the roles he’s expected to play within the patriarchy. He can only feel he’s a man by challenging, controlling or subjugating others instead of living an intersubjective life in harmony based on an integral model of balance and completeness. Although Ruth experiences the different stages and aspects of her socially constructed identity, the wholeness she achieves goes beyond these identities toward a level of pure awareness, an Emptiness that in her case also encompasses a witnessing of the world of Form, which the audience also glimpses through aesthetic experience (rasa). This empty state comprises the true home or basis of her identity, a field of all possibilities far exceeding the social possibilities available to her as a women defined by man. In rejecting abstract thought and moving to a physical or existential knowledge of the world, she is not fighting “philosophical thought philosophically,” as Sakellaridou argues (1988: 111), but rather fighting it by transcending even the most abstract level of thought through a dimension of subjectivity that goes beyond conceptuality altogether. The play suggests this by her not adhering to any ideological or philosophical position, even while observing them from a position of non-attachment. In this way she implicitly criticizes the inadequacy of language associated with duality, the ordinary waking state of consciousness, and points toward the higher levels of language, pashyanti and para as

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discussed above in the context of the plays by Ionesco and Stoppard. While some critics like Begley, Sakellaridou and others praise Ruth for her intellectual capacities, the true strength of her character hinges on her ability to intuit a level of Being beyond the intellect. The Social and Cultural Contexts of Identity As we saw above in Pinter’s The Birthday Party, critics suggest that Stanley felt guilty and anxious toward the visitors because he discarded his social accountability, but his anxious reaction to the visitors really stems from a sense, parallel to Ruth’s, that the public sphere has intruded on the inner world he’d rather be living in. As discussed above, Naismith says that Pinter rejected the idea that we use language to reveal ourselves or to know others (2000: 44). One can know oneself, as Forman notes, only through knowledge-byidentity, a trans-linguistic level of knowledge unavailable to ordinary thought. Pinter correctly intuits that ordinary language cannot reveal the core of human identity, a state of awareness beyond the boundaries of social conventions as discerned by both Ruth and Stanley. The Birthday Party and The Homecoming both exhibit a complementarity between the inner and outer dimensions of human identity—the subjective and intersubjective/interobjective—which parallel the inner and outer aspects of the contemporary world as defined by Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman. In dramatizing the interplay between the inner and outer aspects of society and individual identity, Pinter’s theatre takes the spectator’s awareness from the social world of phenomenological difference toward a nonpluralistic experience of the transpersonal self, showing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form of zone #1 in Wilber’s upper left quadrant. As discussed above, Sennett in The Fall of Public Man demonstrates how intimacy in modern society has undermined the public domain based on impersonality, polite behavior formed by objective rules, and instead emphasizes personality and our identification with class, gender and professional status. The local communities people have retreated into based on motivations, ethnicity and shared feelings, as in Max’s family, have replaced the objective public sphere that at one time gave greater freedom to our subjective identities. Teddy, Lenny, Joey and Max have lost their ability to act effectively in both the domestic and political arenas

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because they place greater emphasis on personality, ideological preconceptions, gender and charisma than on the ability to interact with others on an impersonal level. Their localism has replaced the impersonality of culture or society that at one time fostered subjective freedom and enhanced social harmony. Max and his sons, increasingly alienated from their natural identities, can now only identify with their Oedipal or patriarchal clichés. This attitude has undermined their ability to comprehend others on an intersubjective level. They emphasize their own shared emotions and special interests instead of dealing with the unknown or taking risks for the benefit of society as a whole. This domestic localism leads not to harmony but rather to pseudophilosophical debate and strife. As noted above, Sennett says that local community “has become both emotional withdrawal from society and a territorial barricade within the city” (1992: 301). The more Max and his sons surrender to their anxieties and passions, the further they slide from their natural identities. The more they fear impersonality, the more they fantasize about a parochial collective life, becoming paranoid and even destructive. The inner self as represented in The Homecoming is no longer free of narrative constructs enforced by ideological communities, except in Ruth. In both The Birthday Party and The Homecoming, Pinter presents a world no longer founded on the upper left quadrant but rather on the distorted principles of a patriarchal society that threaten to ostracize others, especially women. Ruth’s penchant for living outside the meta-narrative boundaries of the patriarchy bewilders her husband’s family and ultimately frees her from their constraints. The men, on the other hand, because of their conceptual dependence on meta-narratives, are forced to conform to specific attributes that preclude an integral knowledge of themselves and others that would enhance their freedom. Unlike Ruth, they have lost the ability to access a transpersonal, transverbal dimension of experience, a field of all possibilities beyond the socially constructed human natures imposed by patriarchal communities. Ruth, therefore, unlike Teddy and his brothers, has no fear of the external quadrants because of her inner strength and freedom. Her freedom, moreover, is not a conceptual but an experiential phenomenon that she never tries to express through a narrative about her inner self, which has an unsayable dimension. Ruth and the spectators of The Homecoming approach this inner freedom, the integral dimension

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of human nature, not through conceptuality or narrative accounts but only as a transverbal, transpersonal direct experience. As we have seen, this level of experiential knowledge corresponds to the Platonic Forms and to the Vedic state of Sat-Chit-Ananda (transcendent Being, Intelligence and Bliss). Wilber states that the transpersonal is “not usually thought of as personal or rational, it is thought of as profoundly trans-rational and transpersonal—it is the highest levels in any of the lines” or states of mind (2006: 101, original emphasis). As Jonathan Shear would say, Ruth approaches a state of qualityless pure consciousness through a “mental faculty distinct from ordinary intellect to ‘reverse’ the direction of attention within and produce experience of a transcendental ground of thought, knowledge and awareness,” an experience associated “with gaining wisdom, virtue, selfsufficiency and freedom” (1990: 34). Deutsch points out, further-more, that The Real is without internal difference and, in essence, is unrelated to the content of any form of experience. The Real is thus unthinkable: thought can be brought to it only through negations of what is thinkable. (1973: 11)

Through his two plays discussed here, Pinter induces this reversal in the mind of the spectator toward the nonvervbal source of thought through the surreal uncertainly of Stanley’s background as well as Ruth’s ability to toy with the men around her and their conceptual obsessions. Her husband Teddy distinguishes himself from his brothers by arguing that he has a more effective way of looking at the world. It’s a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things. I mean it’s a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two, to balance the two. To see, to be able to see! I’m the one who can see. That’s why I can write my critical works. Might do you good . . . have a look at them . . . and see how certain people can view . . . things . . . how certain people can maintain . . . intellectual equilibrium. You’re just objects. (100)

Ultimately, however, Teddy is just an object like his brothers, for the “intellectual equilibrium” he defends remains within the context of things insofar that mind/thought and body are physical, while pure

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awareness is the true dimension of the nondual where equilibrium actually exists. Ruth, on the other hand, doesn’t go for Teddy’s reductionist rhetoric that eliminates the more subtle emotional and subjective aspects of human identity. As we have seen, Meyer-Dinkgräfe cites The Natyashastra and Advaita Vedanta as describing the levels of the mind, which range from sense, desire, mind, intellect, feeling, intuition, ego and pure consciousness. These levels also correspond to the increasingly subtle states of consciousness, which range from waking, dreaming, sleep, pure consciousness, cosmic consciousness, refined cosmic consciousness, and unity consciousness, with each of the latter being associated with different modes of perception. As The Natyashastra explains, an artist’s creative inspiration is not a fantasy, just as Ruth’s intuition is not a fantasy, but rather mirrors the process of cosmic creation on the level of the individual’s experience of pure consciousness. Even in the ordinary waking state, as Colin McGinn writes, the imagination is a ubiquitous and central feature of mental life. It pervades nearly every mental operation. [. . .] It plays a constitutive role in memory, perception (seeing-as), dreaming, believing, meaning—as well as high level creativity. (2004: 163)

Ruth’s creative stability in the upper left quadrant, moreover, does not render her helpless in the other three quadrants. On the contrary, because she has a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form, she’s quite capable of excelling in culture and society, as evidenced by her ability to negotiate with the men through her knowledge of financial transactions and a mastery of contractual language. In fact, she runs circles around the men, outsmarting them when it comes to their believing they’re deciding her fate as a prostitute. During their negotiations, she not only overthrows the men’s intentions but even manages to execute her own ends, largely without the men realizing it. The male world she finds herself in, which dominates the external quadrants, represents a regressive world or primitive concepts about many aspects of life including women. Although Sakellaridou says that “Ruth is simply a misfit” (1988: 115), this claim is true only in the sense that she doesn’t fit into the sociopathic male world of her husband and his family. The men, moreover, don’t see themselves as comprising a whole such as that suggested by Ruth’s existential identity, but rather

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as parts of a whole, which stems from the fact that they have excluded themselves from the upper left subjective quadrant in their obsession with social power and cultural domination. This fragmentation prevents them from reconciling their subjective intuition with the objective rational side of their identities. While Teddy accuses his family of focusing on the physical, of operating “in things,” he himself focuses on the conceptual or rational by operating “on things,” which is also physical in terms of consciousness as proposed by Samkhya-Yoga. Although his brothers may seem to be more emotional, their feelings operate on a grosser, animalistic level of physical obsessions rather than with any sensitivity for others. Teddy’s position is equally unemotional because he has lost any sense of compassion and tenderness for Ruth and his family. Once he sees that his brothers want to keep Ruth in London, he makes no effort to resist them as a husband but turns his back and leaves, pacified by his aloof and superior world of the intellect. Based on Teddy’s attitude toward Ruth, Peter Hall says that Teddy was “the biggest bastard of the lot . . . not in any way a victim or a martyr” (Lahr 20). Moreover, Michael Craig says that “He’s an awful man, Teddy. He’s rationalized his aggressions, but underneath he’s Eichmann” (Hewes 1967: 96). These criticisms suggest that Teddy is probably the character most alienated from his subjective upper left quadrant, from access to pure awareness, the void of conceptions derived through knowledgeby-identity. As an intellectual, he has immersed himself in the world of philosophical abstractions to such an extent that his only understanding of the world derives from knowledge-about and knowledgeby-acquaintance. The reason Teddy has such difficulty understanding Ruth or predicting her reactions, as we see by his nervousness when they first appear on stage, stems from his inability to decipher his own inner self. Being estranged from his own subjectivity undermines his facility for intersubjective interactions with others, even someone as intimate as his own wife. When he interrupts her account to his family of their life in America, instead of presenting a true portrait of her, he gives his own stereotypical rendition based on his intellectual preconceptions about the role of a wife and mother: She’s a great help to me over there. She’s a wonderful wife and mother. She’s a very popular woman. She’s got lots of friends. It’s a great life, at the University . . . you know . . . it’s a very good life.

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Obviously, Teddy gives his point of view on their marriage, without considering that of Ruth. For him, Ruth does not exist as an independent woman with her own natural identity but only as a woman who satisfies him and their kids as a wife and mother. When Ruth eventually destroys Teddy’s image of her through her scandalous behavior with Lenny and Joey, Teddy has no recourse but to surrender to her choice by pretending to give her the freedom to do as she pleases. Because he lacks the inner strength to deal with her on a positive intersubjective level, all he can do is hide his wounded pride and pretend to be liberal minded, when in fact he simply lacks the emotional commitment to draw her back to him. As we have seen, although modernity and postmodernity rejected the upper left quadrant truths of the Great Wisdom Traditions by demanding empirical evidence, we can see the effects of these traditions throughout fiction and drama. While the phenomenological core of these contemplative Traditions were savaged by modern epistemologies, modernism and postmodernism are themselves monological and do not draw upon an integration of the four quadrants in defending their interpretations of truth. Even though, as modernists argue, all perceptions are embedded in bodies situated in cultural contexts and social systems, the lower left and right quadrants respectively, Pinter’s plays reveal the significance of the upper left subjective quadrant in spite of its being inaccessible to ordinary third person observation. Every epistemological occasion has four quadrants, including the upper left subjective and lower left intersubjective phenomenological quadrants. Modernism tends to focus on the upper right objective exterior quadrant, and postmodernism on the cultural lower left quadrant, but the Great Wisdom Traditions have always specialized in the upper left quadrant, the interior of the individual with all the stages “of consciousness, realization, and spiritual experience” (Wilber 2006: 44). Ruth’s inner freedom may not be accessible to ordinary third person observation, but the play’s audience can intuit her state through an intersubjective presence with her based on aesthetic experience (rasa), even amidst the cultural and social crisis of the play—which in fact promotes the taste of an integration of Emptiness and Form.

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Consciousness and the Psychology of Non-Attachment As David Lodge points out, all literature creates fictional models of what it is like to be a human being, moving through time and space. It captures the density of experienced events by its rhetoric, and it shows the connectedness of events through the devices of plot. (2002: 14)

Quoting Antonio Demasio, Lodge argues that “Human consciousness is self-consciousness” (ibid.). Literature, according to Lodge, has throughout history provided the most direct access into the consciousness of others. He argues that “In a world where nothing is certain, in which transcendental belief has been undermined by scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is qualified by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness” (87). Pinter’s dramatization of Ruth creates an illusion of reality that commands the willing suspension of the audience’s disbelief. He shows that although in the modern world the construction of the real occurs in the individual’s consciousness, which makes communicating verbally separate mental worlds difficult, the connectedness of two subjectivities through the development of the upper left quadrant helps us transcend the limits of human interpersonal understanding through a transverbal knowledge-by-identity. Teddy, on the other hand, we see only externally, which means we can’t know what he really thinks or feels. Although some critics may find Teddy enigmatic, the only true mystery about him consists of the entropy of his character caused by his inability to quell the chaos of his life through an integration of his natural identity and his cultural and social contexts. People like Teddy who are destabilized within themselves would remain shadowy characters until they achieve integration with their identity as the internal observer. As discussed above, we can know the internal observer only by being it and not by observing it (Deikman 1996: 355). Meyer-Dinkgräfe also shows that immaterial consciousness cannot be thought about by the material intellect (2003), so while Teddy can operate “on things,” he cannot operate on himself, which is immaterial, having lost touch with his own self awareness. Although Pinter seems to conceptualize intently on Ruth, as implied by comments such as, “The woman in The Homecoming is not

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a nymphomaniac and if she is playing some kind of game she’s doing it for a very practical reason” (Tynan 1968: 8), the more refined subjective qualities he attributes to her can also be achieved by men, as exemplified by Stanley in The Birthday Party. The fact that only Ruth achieves a sense of self-awareness in The Homecoming does not mean that the men couldn’t also achieve this state. In fact, as Wilber points out, more integrated states of consciousness are available to anyone who develops the upper left quadrant and integrates his or her identity within a cultural and social context. As Charles Grimes puts it, Pinter’s screenplays, no less than his plays, concern the forces that constitute the self at the same time as they constitute society. Running through the plays is the dream—usually frustrated—of escape from a conflict-ridden world or, indeed, from various forms of imprisonment: a wish shared by characters such as Teddy in The Homecoming, [and] Stanley in The Birthday Party. (2005: 144)

Although Teddy doesn’t come close to a real escape, Stanley does, at least for a while, as does Ruth when she outwits the men and remains non-attached from the social restrictions they try to impose on her. In The Homecoming, the intrusion of the outer world into the realms of the self produces a traumatic effect on the men, but has a considerably diminished effect on Ruth. Pinter shows that, as Wilber argues, being stabilized in the natural self protects one from the intrusiveness of the outer world, and even allows one to witness this world. The men, who are mostly responsible for creating the outer world, find it too difficult to escape because it is already part of their identities. Women, on the other hand, already reside in a world less contaminated by the patriarchy and thus find it easier to enjoy life on an existential level. Sociologists believe that because we can’t avoid being drawn into a community or society, as Sennett argues, we find ourselves constantly observed and judged in an often painful way. Stanley tries to avoid this by becoming a recluse, but Ruth has little difficulty transgressing the norms of a patriarchal society because of her inner strength of character. Had she not achieved a level of wholeness within herself, her identity would be as fragmentary as that of Teddy and his father and brothers. As William Mikulas argues in “Buddhism and Western Psychology,” essential Buddhism is not a religion but a psychology” (2007: 8). He continues that “Clearly it is a psychology, for it deals

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with topics such as sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, cognition, mind, and consciousness. The Buddha says his primary work was to reduce suffering (‘dukkha’), and the Dalai Lama continually stresses that his approach to Buddhism is about increasing happiness” (ibid.). Buddhist psychology reduces suffering, or unsatisfactoriness, by training the mind to avoid the tendency “to crave for and cling to certain sensations, perceptions, beliefs, expec-tations, opinions, rituals, images of the self, and models of reality” (10). As Ruth clearly intuits, craving or clinging to beliefs or sensations etc. as do Teddy, Lenny, Joey and Max causes suffering. The men continually compare their present situation to an ideal self based on ideology, but suffer in the process when they discover a discrepancy between the two. Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta train one to avoid clinging to the “marks of existence” that constantly change because of the world’s impermanence. As Mikulas puts it, If one clings to something as it is at some time (e.g. one’s relationship to child or spouse, a restaurant or vacation place, one’s youth), then one will suffer dukkha when it changes. If one doesn’t cling, there is no dukkha and one can go along with the change and perhaps influence it (e.g., allow a relationship to evolve, find a new vacation place, age gracefully). (2007: 11)

He goes on to show how clinging causes psychological inertia that results in resistance to change, even though changing would make life more effective and increase happiness. In addition, as we see in Lenny, Joey, Teddy and Max, clinging to beliefs and models of reality can distort perception and impair thinking. In the case of Ruth, she has stopped clinging to her husband, family and reputation, but has not become apathetic or unemotional. She still has preferences and shows a degree of compassion for the men rather than a quest for power and sensation, although these come to her naturally because of the men’s weakness caused by their delusive clinging to distorted perceptions. Ruth, unlike the men, understands the situation she’s in and tries to do something about it. In the process, she evinces clarity of thought by challenging the men’s philosophical and patriarchal theories of superiority and dominance. Her speech is also proper insofar that she attempts to be constructive and helpful and avoids trying to fulfill her cravings. Whereas the men in the play tend to cling to the contents of their minds, Ruth shows a mindfulness that involves an awareness of

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her mind and its contents, allowing her to witness these contents as an internal observer from a non-attached perspective that prevents her from clinging to them. She alone has the capacity of insightful seeing of the world’s impermanence, which reduces her attachments, as we see throughout the play and especially at the end. More than any of the other characters, Ruth demonstrates an equanimity through which she is equally accepting and receptive toward the objects of her consciousness. She does not display a greater interest or attraction to some objects of consciousness more than others. Max and his sons, on the other hand, have become lost in a personal level of being and confuse the contents of their minds with an assumed concrete reality. When Max questions Ruth at the end of the play, “You think I’m too old for you?” (137), he identifies with a personal level of himself as a functional young man. Obviously, he has not aged gracefully. He like Lenny and Joey use sex as a way to gain control. In the first scene of the play, Ruth uses Lenny’s fear of sex as a way to undermine his dominance, as she also does at the end of the play. When they negotiate with Ruth to stay in London, the whole family of men make the assumption that as a woman Ruth is there to be exploited. Their objective throughout the play centers on the attempt to keep women in their place. Ruth, however, escapes her dead marriage and takes control of the business relations by demanding a contract based on economic principles, not on any craving to dominate the men. Max begins to realize that Ruth, and not the men, has gained control. He asks, Lenny, do you think she understands . . . (He begins to stammer.) Wait . . . what . . . what . . . we’re getting at? What . . . we’ve got in mind? Do you think she’s got that clear?” (Pause.) I don’t think she’s got it clear. (137)

But of course Ruth does have it clear, fully aware that the men are trying to take advantage of her. Her power stems from her ability to stand back and witness the situation without craving for a particular outcome. What she agrees to do for them does not constitute a commitment in her mind but rather a misconception in theirs regarding the extent to which they think they can control her. Max continues: You understand what I mean? Listen, I’ve got a funny idea she’ll do dirty on us, you want to bet? She’ll use us, she’ll make use of us, I can tell you! I can smell it! You want to bet? (138)

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At this point Max falls on his knees groaning and clutching his stick. “I’m not an old man. (Pause.) Do you hear me? (He raises his face to her.) Kiss me. (She continues to touch Joey’s head, lightly)” (138). Lenny stands up at this point, and the curtain falls. Max clings to an image of his personal identity that no longer exists. In The Theatre of the Absurd, Martin Esslin, who considers Ruth a duplicate of Jessie the mother, says, Max’s final pleading for some scraps of Ruth’s favor completes the sons’ Oedipal dream: now the roles of father and son are reversed, now the sons are in proud possession of the mother’s sexuality, and the father is reduced to begging for her favors. (257)

But Ruth as we have seen does not link herself to the sons’ characterization to her as having a personal identity—whether as their mother or a prostitute. As The Homecoming suggests, Ruth attains a transpersonal level of identity that transcends her self-centered reality but gives her and the audience a taste of witnessing the world. While the personal level of identity as experienced by the men focuses on the contents of the mind, the transpersonal level focuses on consciousness itself as a trans-conceptual state of Being. Ruth does not cling as the men do to an illusionary self constituted by the contents of the mind. Rather she moves toward the quieter levels of the mind associated with reduced attachments and increased freedom. Having thus established herself in the upper left quadrant, her subjectivity remains non-attached, even though situated within a patriarchal society dominated by cultural or intersubjective misconceptions about human relationships. While the men try to dominate Ruth by imposing on her what Foucault termed “subjugated ways of knowing” (1980: 81), she effectively rejects the knowledge hierarchy that empowers and sanctions the distorted perceptions of the patriarchy. As June Boyce-Tillman says, the pursuit of order over chaos, light over darkness, integration over deintegration has led to models of self and society that are repressive and authoritarian. The valuing of diversity and deintegration as a necessary part of self and society enable organic change and cultural and personal creativity. (2005: 16)

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By deintegration, Boyce-Tillman does not imply a lack of integral knowledge associated with the integration of the four quadrants, but rather an ability to disentangle the transpersonal self from the distorted conceptions of reality associated with an authoritative form of subjugating knowledge that has as its ultimate purpose not the expansion of truth or happiness but the domination of others. Max and his sons have handed their transpersonal imaginative capacities over to patriarchal authority, which they delude themselves into thinking they control, but which victimizes them even more so than it does Ruth. While Max and sons base their understanding of the world on distorted knowledge from the limited viewpoint of a personal self, Ruth does not confine herself within but rather deconstructs the small box in a small world that excludes visionary experience. As Jennifer Elam notes, “some researchers estimate that those in Western cultures who have had what might be called a mystical experience is somewhere between 40 and 90 percent” (2005: 52). Elam goes on to say that many people are shutting down their visionary experiences for fear of being labeled mentally ill. Max has an intuition at the end of the play regarding Ruth, but he depends on his sons to confirm it for him out of fear of appearing irrational or pathological. This attachment to the rationality of the ordinary waking state of the personal self, therefore, ironically end up leading to a pathological condition. As Bonshek notes, in the move toward a coexistence of Form and Emptiness as experienced by Ruth and the audience, the full value of the outer comes into focus. [. . .] [O]n the basis of a clear inner screen of consciousness, outer perception is refined and sharp, seen in its full glory. [. . .] [T]he inner Self or Atma becomes the only inner experience and permeates all conditions of perception, thought, speech and action. [. . .] The inner is never overshadowed but the distinct values of the outer are appreciated. (2007: 46)

Like Pirandello in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pinter achieves this in Ruth, Stanley and the audience through aesthetic rapture (rasa), providing all with a taste of cosmic consciousness, however briefly.

Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author: Being vs. having Form Distinctions of Identity Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author weaves together three levels of drama, as Mark Musa explains in the “Introduction.” On one level, the six characters, after being refused by the author who conceived them, struggle to realize themselves and their family drama in a play written by another author. On another level, the play shows the suffering of the six characters as their human drama unfolds. In addition, Pirandello attempts to represent his own fantasy on the nature of human identity in an act of creation. In Six Characters, as Musa spells out, Pirandello makes a distinction among the performers between having form, like ordinary people and actors, and being form, like the characters themselves who feel compelled to actualize their form. To have form means to be condemned to continual change in an impermanent world, which usually ends up destroying that form. To be form means to be immutable (neverchanging) and eternal both in time and space. For Pirandello, every character in a work of art created by an author through language is form, while any ordinary human who changes from day to day merely has form, although they also have the potential to be form. Like the other characters as opposed to the actors in the play, the Father is form, but he rebels against the fixity of the existential form that traps him in a particular moment in life through which he is subject to external judgment. In ordinary life, people have no fixity of form, no eternal immutability, yet as representations or symbols or ordinary humans they can’t avoid having an unchanging form within the mind, which they often attempt to deny. As Musa explains, Pirandello confronts the issue of reaching truth or determining whether or not truth even exists. “Truth must

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exist, Pirandello seems to say, but finding it is beyond human capability. Truth appears behind a thick black veil and reveals itself as that which each one of us desires to be. Truth, then, is relative. That which is true for one person may not be true for another. Each person sees, through an impenetrable veil, a vague phantasm which he or she gives the name of truth, but it is only his or her truth” (1995: xiv). What Six Character suggests, therefore, is that one can experience truth by being form as part of an immediate experience, but to understand or narrate truth within the context of language and reason involves the process of having form. In terms of Wilber’s four quadrants, truth emerges only through our being form in the upper left quadrant, a phenomenological experience of subjectivity based on knowledge-by-identity. As we have seen, Wilber calls this a zone #1 experience in the upper left quadrant, but one can also reflect upon this experience afterwards through zone #2, which is also in the upper left quadrant but outside the circle of zone #1 (2006: 39). To understand or express this truth through language and reason, therefore, requires one to leave the nondual inner circle and re-enter the outer circle of duality, both of which exist within the upper left quadrant of subjectivity—the first being a field of unity and the second a field of difference. In Six Characters, Pirandello blurs the distinction between real life and stage illusion by making the play seem more realistic, thereby challenging the spectators who come to the theatre expecting to watch an illusion through the “willing suspension of their disbelief.” One of the themes of the play concerns the habit most people have of taking the illusion of the stage for granted, while also in everyday life mistaking illusions for reality without realizing they could be deceived. Given the arbitrariness of how most people interpret reality, Pirandello questions our ability to distinguish reality from illusion by having the characters claim when they appear on stage that they are more real than the actors, even though they themselves are also actors. As Francis Fergusson notes, Pirandello was quite right to think of his characters as being like Dante’s Francesca. They too are caught and confined in the timeless moment of realizing their individual nature and destiny, and so imprisoned, damned as she is. (1989: 11)

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But Pirandello also takes his characters beyond the ego-centric level of individuality. By showing how in real life people often take illusions for reality, Pirandello suggests a distinction between socially constructed identities, which are illusory, and the natural, transpersonal identity defined as pure consciousness, which is neverchanging and thus real according to the world’s contemplative traditions. People change so much from day to day and year to year that they are never the same person over a period of time in terms of their social identities, but simultaneously they do have an inner dimension of qualityless pure consciousness on the basis of which they can observe their changing lives and identities through self-reflection. As Shear has pointed out, the non-pluralistic experience of the nonlocalized, extra-linguistic self in the nondual zone #1 of the upper left quadrant is an experience of pure unboundedness [which] 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)

So while any two people like the Father and his Stepdaughter can have the same qualityless experience of unbounded non-duality, the narrative accounts of this experience in zone #2, also in the upper left quadrant, will differ, thus making the interpretation of that truth appear to be relative, as Musa describes. Being form thus occurs to zone #1, while having form belongs to zone #2, which as part of duality is also influenced by the other three quadrants. In these outer three quadrants—the intersubjective, objective and interobjective—experience remains relative whenever narrated, even through the experiencer/narrator may be established in Being. By incorporating surrealism, Pirandello’s Six Characters revolutionized drama by liberating the imagination from the limitations of reason and logic and expanding our definition of reality beyond what most people take for granted. While many critics such as Robert Brustein (1962), Umberto Mariani (1989), Aureliu Weiss (1966), Renato Poggioli (1958) and John Gassner (1954) interpret the play as freeing the mind from the limits of rationality, logic and aesthetic conventions, Pirandello takes the characters and audience beyond the ordinary waking state altogether by pointing to a trans-rational,

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transverbal dimension of experience. The play not only includes the marvelous and the fantastic, which oppose realism, but also goes further by undermining the certainty of the three ordinary states of waking, sleep and dream, themselves illusory, and pointing toward the ultimate reality of unbounded consciousness. Ironically, by undermining the illusion of everyday “reality,” Pirandello points to a deeper reality, the ultra-realism of the witness or internal observer that never changes. The play thereby creates a sense of uncertainty about which of the interpretations of the events narrated by the six characters is true. As we shall see, the only truth in the play is the unsayable truth of knowledge-by-identity associated with the internal observer knowing the self, while all the narrative accounts by the different characters of what happens in their lives are relative interpretations after the fact. Pirandello accentuates the uncertainty associated with rationality and logic through which we understand reality based on knowledge-about and knowledge-by-acquaintance, which belong to the ever-changing field of thought as opposed to “the void in thought” as defined by Antonin Artaud (1958: 71). Pirandello, therefore, does not only take us beyond the ordinary standards of reason and logic to a field of relativism, but also suggests a dimension of experience which is absolute insofar that it’s a field of unity. As the characters demonstrate, moreover, this field according to the Great Wisdom Traditions is also a unity-amidst-diversity because the characters interpret “reality” as a field of duality, which they simultaneously witness while experiencing the reality of the internal observer as a field of unity. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the characters consist of the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Young Boy and the Child. As Musa notes, the “Father, Daughter and Son are realized as ‘spirit,’ while the Mother is realized as ‘nature’” (1995: x). Being spirit equates with being form, a knowledge-by-identity of the non-dual, transpersonal self. The Mother, on the other hand, lacks the same level of awareness of being form and therefore corresponds more to nature, which would equate with zone #2. She arrives on stage following her family without a clear awareness of their purpose, focussing instead on taking care of her children. As Musa says, Pirandello creates a new perspective on characters which includes spirit, nature and pure presence: “As created characters they are stable, immutable and eternal truth; as human figures they are unstable,

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changeable and ephemeral reality, like the Director and the actors” (xi). With these categories, the play suggests that every individual has the capacity to transcend thought and exist as form, and to re-enter the realm of conceptuality and therefore to have form. In other words, Pirandello plays with the swing of awareness from the concrete to the abstract, from the duality of the ordinary waking state toward the unity of pure consciousness and back, both of which belong to the field of first-person experience. The experience of pure consciousness or the fourth state consists of a coexistence of opposites when this state coincides with thought and perception and other mental activities in the fifth state of cosmic consciousness (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 2005: 39-46). This coexistence of opposite, as we shall see, informs the interpretation of the ending of the play when the Young Boy appears to commit suicide. Some of the actors shout “Reality,” while others shout “Make-believe,” whereas the Father says “Reality.” As we shall see, these interpretations depend on one’s state of awareness as the basis for interpretation. What may appear illogical at one level of experience will appear perfectly right at a more expanded transverbal, transrational level. Six Characters, which consists of a play within a play, deals with the relation between the relative and absolute, duality and nonduality, with the actors representing duality and the characters nonduality. The characters, furthermore, represent the idea of the “holy actor” developed by the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. As Simon Shepherd and Mick Wallis note, the “holy actor” appears in performances that have a ritual function to discover human essence beneath the influence of culture. [. . .] The assumption is that drama can put us in contact with basic humanity itself. As Esslin put it, drama is “properly linked to the basic make-up of our species.” (1976: 20; Shepherd and Wallis 2004: 59)

As the intersubjective aspect of society—group or collective consciousness—culture expresses what subjectivity looks like from the outside. Pirandello leads the spectator from a cultural to a firstperson experience at the core of human identity by taking him or her through the inside of collective awareness—its worldview, shared feelings and values—which we can only get to from a third-person

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perspective. As the most developed state of awareness, the core of subjectivity constitutes a non-dual experience of pure unboundedness, a qualityless phenomenon the spectators share after the exterior tokens of culture and language have run their course. Six Characters begins with the Father and his family entering a theatre where a Director and actors are rehearsing for a performance, namely Pirandello’s own Rules of the Game. The Father says, “We are here in search of an author,” to which the Director asks, “An author? What author?” (1995: 11). When the Father invites the Director to be their author, the Director replies, “You people must be joking” (11). The Father goes on to say that “life is full of endless absurdities which, bold-faced as they may be, do not even have to appear plausible, since they are true” (12). For him, madness is the only justification for performance as a profession. The Father suggests that theatre, by expressing the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy of discursive thought and the rational approach to life, points to a dimension of life beyond logic and reason. But the Director counters that as actors, they “can still boast of having given life to immortal works of art here on these very boards! (12). Both views, however, imply that fantasy is more real than reality, for all objects in the real world undergo changes that eventually destroy them, while theatre and the arts in essence change only seldom, depending on their quality. The Director’s claim that he produces immortal works describes the aesthetic effect that actors have on spectators. The Father, on the other hand, wants “to pursue creation at a higher level” (12), which suggests that his purpose of entering the theatre is to actualize on stage in a more direct and immediate way that level of Being represented by him and his family. In other words, in their condition of being form, the six characters have transcended their personal selves and exist largely as post-egoic identities. Their search for an author centers in part on the desire to manifest the transpersonal dimension of the self through performance, which will also take the audience beyond having form toward a taste of the experience of being form. What Pirandello’s play conveys to the audience here relates to the way the mind can embody two different states simultaneously. In one dimension of their mental existence, humans subsist in culture and society in the condition of having form, which means they undergo continuous change throughout their lives. In another dimension of their mental existence, humans have the capacity to witness this

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change from a state of Being. At higher states of consciousness, this witnessing quality of the internal observer co-exists with the activity of change in the exterior world. When the play begins, the six characters arrive having lived in a state of being for so long after having been abandoned by their author that they are stuck in the dimension of non-change without the active manifestation of their lives to witness. In other words, the six characters cannot fulfill their potential by living a co-existence of opposites—Being and activity, which defines the true nature of consciousness. By being form, the six characters have access to the state of pure consciousness, a state that once stabilized allows one to experience the diversity of the world of change while simultaneously experiencing the unity of diversity, of perceiving everything as unified or “One.” The six characters arrive after a protracted period of having lived in a “timeless” and “spaceless” condition, which they now wish to combine with the temporal spatial parameters of a concrete everyday experience that characterizes the dramatic narrative created by the author who abandoned them. The non-rational, intuitive, insightful experience of their state of Being, which is not merely subjective in a personal sense but also intersubjectively, needs to be activated through drama in order for them and the audience to witness their transpersonal identities. For the spectators, this coexistence of opposites entails gaining a taste of their own Being, as well as witnessing their Being and activity in the same way the six characters do. Unlike the actors in the play, the six characters understand the intrinsic sacredness of the ability to witness their activity from within. Latently, they can appreciate the feeling of mystery, awe and reverence associated with being form; however, without the ability to actually put the structure of this form into action and thereby make it an object of observation for their internal observer, they will remain trapped within a world of inactivity. As the play suggests, for the six characters to develop from being form in the fourth state of pure consciousness toward the fifth state of cosmic consciousness, a state in which they experience unbounded silence within while simultaneously experiencing thought, perception, sensations and memory etc., they need to actively engage in worldly activity. For example, early in the play the Stepdaughter tells the Director that the Father sent the Mother away with another man, that of the Mother’s four children she

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had three by that other man, and that the Father came to Madame Pace’s brothel in a tailor shop where the Stepdaughter was working. The Father, who went there in search of a pleasure woman, almost mistook his Stepdaughter for one of them, which led his family to accuse him of being incestuous. The Stepdaughter says, “Ah, but we were on the verge of doing it, you know” (19), and then bursts out laughing. The Father, against his Stepdaughter’s objection, explains how he interprets what happened by telling the story from his perspective, although he starts off by saying, “I’m not narrating! I want to explain to him” (19), the Director. He then elaborates on how any first-person experience when rendered after the fact through language is open to a variety of interpretations. All of us have a world full of things inside of us, each of us his own world of things. . . And how can we understand one another, sir, if in the words I speak I put the meaning and the value of things as I myself see them, while the one who listens inevitably takes them according to the meaning and the value which he has in himself of the world he has inside himself. We think we understand each other; we never understand one another. (19)

Pirandello puts his performers and audience in a state of uncertainty because he realizes that uncertainty is the natural condition of life in the ordinary waking state immersed in the context of a changing world where everything is either illusory or escapes the grasp of reason. Although the Father rejects his family’s interpretation of what happened at Madame Pace’s, he asserts that no human identity can be understood as consistent or defined by a particular event. Although each of the six characters lives in a world within, which belongs to zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, when this world is narrated and made available intersubjectively to others in a cultural context, the meaning of that inner world will invariably alter according to the other person’s interpretive strategy as influenced by the other three quadrants. The Father pities the Mother and children, but they see the situation differently from their own perspectives and accuse him of having abandoned them and being incestuous. While the play has a tragic element, it also has a comic element displayed by the resilience of the characters on the level of consciousness when they confront the mystery of human existence.

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Tragedy or Actualization Although Six Characters comes across as a tragedy in terms of what happens to the family, the positive aspect of their story resides in the actual witnessing of this drama from the perspective of the internal observer. The remarkable aspect of the six characters who are form and can still engage in activity within a context of having form concerns the nature of pure consciousness when stabilized during activity, which as we have seen is called cosmic consciousness, to which the spectator is also directed through aesthetic experience (rasa). Being form in this sense, which has the quality of bliss, cannot be overshadowed in everyday experience by the content of the individual’s psyche, as evidenced by the Stepdaughter bursting out in laughter after accusing the Father of nearly propositioning her. She witnesses her activity, for she has established a “stable internal frame of reference from which the changing phases” of her states of consciousness are silently observed (Alexander and Boyer 1989: 342). The actor Ray Reinhardt describes this kind of witnessing experience, an effect of performance both on the performer and the audience: There are two stages of having the audience in your hand. The first one is the one in which you bring them along, you make them laugh through sheer skill—they laughed at that, now watch me top it with this one. But, there’s a step beyond that which I experienced, but only two or three times. It is the most—how can you use words like satisfying? It’s more ultimate than ultimate: I seemed to be part of a presence that stood behind myself and the audience. It was a wonderful thing of leaving not only the character, but also this person who calls himself Ray Reinhardt. In a way, I was no longer acting actively, although things were happening: my arms moved independently, there was no effort required; my body was loose and very light. It was the closest I’ve ever come in a waking state to a mystical experience. (Richards 1977: 43)

Because the six character act from a level of Being, they can witness their activity to a greater extent than the actors in the play, who constantly make judgments based on the content of their minds rather than observing them from a stable internal frame of reference. In this way, different states of consciousness are expressed in drama. For example, the Father explains to the Director why he allowed his wife to leave with his secretary, “a poor man, a subordinate of mine” (20). He felt that the Mother was more compatible with the other man

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and permitted them to create a family: “I became attracted towards that little family of hers which due to me had come into being” (22). After hearing the story, the Director says, “But all this is narrative, dear sirs.” The Son replies, “Of course. It’s literature, literature.” But the Father insists, “What do you mean, ‘literature!’ This is life, sir! Passion” (23). When the Director asks how this passion can be played out, the Father says that so far he has only been giving them the background that leads up to the drama. “Now, sir, comes the drama: new and complex” (23). Much of Six Characters, then, consists of background information given by the Father to convince the Director to take them on so they can perform their drama. The Director wants to go beyond mere discussion and get to the events themselves. The Father says, “Of course, yes sir! But the event is like a sack: when empty it will not stand up. In order for it to stand up, one must first fill it with reason and feelings which are the cause of its existence” (25). During the debate between the Father on the one hand and the Mother and Stepdaughter on the other regarding what happened in their lives—his abandoning them and then coming back as a friend—the Father finally says, The drama for me, sir, lies all in this: in the conscience I have, which every one of us has—you see—we think we are “one” with “one” conscience, but it is not true; it is “many,” sir, “many” according to all the possibilities of being that are in us: “one” with this, “one” with that—all very different! So we have the illusion of always being at the same time “one for everyone” and always “this one” that we believe we are in everything we do. It is not true! It is not true! We see this clearly whenever, in something we do, under very unfortunate circumstances, we are all of a sudden caught, as if suspended on a hook; we realize, I mean to say, that all of our self is not in that act, and that, therefore, it would be an atrocious injustice to pass judgment on us by that single action: to hold us fixed, hooked and suspended for our entire existence, as if our existence were all summed up in this one act! (26)

The Father implies many things by this statement regarding both the state of being form among the six characters and the nature of observing the activity performed by them after the fact. Although the six characters are one in terms of their state of being form, they are not one in terms of their conscience when observing the activity they perform. Although they share a unity on the level of witnessing consciousness, the internal observer, the activity they engage in has the

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potential to be interpreted in a variety of different ways. Moreover, even when the Father or one of the other characters engages in a particular act, this act does not encompass the entirety of the unbounded self as observer or witness, at least not until that person is fully realized in a state of unity consciousness where no discrepancy occurs between consciousness and activity. The Father thus explains that being form, being pure consciousness, cannot be incriminated, hooked or suspended by a particular act that others may judge in a negative light. The Father uses this explanation to exonerate himself of his Stepdaughter’s accusation of wickedness in his behavior at the tailor shop where she worked. In Act two the Director plans for the characters to perform the brothel scene, and the Father even entices Madame Pace into being for the performance. The Director, however, insists that the actors perform the scene even though the characters argue they can act it out more authentically. When the actors perform the roles of the Father and Stepdaughter in the brother scene, the Director is pleased, but the Stepdaughter can’t help but laugh at the discrepancy between the actors’ performance and how the characters envision it. When the Father and Stepdaughter resume their performance, the Director forbids the Stepdaughter from using the line about disrobing, which leads her to accuse him of collaborating with the Father. She also insists that the Mother take part, which pleases the Director, who gradually begins to appreciate their story and accept its reality and potential for commercial success. Although the performance is an illusion, toward the end of Act two the Father tells the Director that the actors are just playing a game; Now, if you consider that we as we are (indicates himself and, summarily, the other five characters) have no other reality besides illusion! . . . What for you is an illusion that must be created, is for us, instead, our only reality. (54)

For this illusion to transform into reality depends on the six characters’ acting it out while simultaneously witnessing their performance, with the active performance being an illusion and the act of witnessing a reality. The Father then goes on to analyze the Director’s identity, telling him that his entire past is an illusion:

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The Director asks, so what?, and the Father continues: “It was merely to show you that if we have no other reality beyond illusion, it would be also a good idea for you not to trust in your own realty, the one you breathe and feel today within yourself, because—like that of yesterday—it is destined to reveal itself as an illusion tomorrow” (55-56). The Director finally apprehends what the Father implies: “You actually would go so far as to say that this play that you have come to act out here is more true and more real than I am!” (56). The basis for the Father’s argument is that the Director’s reality “can change from one day to the next,” while the characters’ reality as internal observers does not change. As Pirandello suggests, the Directors and actors have a more difficult time representing reality because they are lost in the field of change with no access to witnessing consciousness, which is never-changing. The characters accept that their performance is illusion because they understand that all activity as a form of change is indeed illusory, while the only reality is that which never changes— the quality of witnessing that arises from being form. At the end of the play, the Son describes how he saw the Little Boy standing in the garden with a revolver in his pocket. He continues: “I saw something that made my blood run cold: the boy, the boy standing over there fixed, with a crazy look in his eyes staring into the pool at his little sister, drowned” (65). Then a shot rings out from the revolver, the boy having shot himself. The Leading Lady exclaims, “He’s dead! Poor boy! He’s dead! Oh, how awful!” The Leading Man responds, laughing, “What, dead? It’s make believe. He is just pretending! Don’t believe it.” The other actors agree: “No, make-believe. It’s make-believe.” But the Father says. “What make-believe! Reality, sir reality!” (65). At this point the infuriated Director explodes, “Make-believe! Reality! You can all go to Hell, every last one of you! Lights! Lights!” While the Director exclaims that they lost a whole day of rehearsal, the Stepdaughter “burst into shrill laughter, then rushes down the stairway” and looks back still laughing at the Father, Mother and Son left up on the stage. So who is right? Was it make-believe or reality? For Pirandello, both claims carry a degree of

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truth. Although the Little Boy and his sister were underdeveloped as characters, they still represent the quality of being form. Pirandello would see their death as make-believe insofar that all activity in a world of change constitutes illusion, while the never-changing quality of their Being persists as a form of Reality. The Father in exclaiming “Reality” refers to this aspect of their fate, while the actors refer to the manifest drama as a field of illusion. Although Umberto Mariani asserts that the characters cannot attain what they need, namely a universe of certainties through which they can affirm themselves (1989: 1-9), this claim only applies to that aspect of their identity which has form, not to their state of being form, or witnessing awareness. Robert Brustein, moreover, believes that for Pirandello the subjective mind only has access to illusions, not objective reality, and that humans fear anything formless (1962: 281317), but again this applies only to the state of having form, while the witnessing quality of being form is characterized by bliss. Similarly, Aureliu Weiss argues that Pirandello derides certainty and criticizes truth as fragile (1966: 345), but as the play demonstrates, making reality less concrete does not enhance illusion so much as expand the audience’s consciousness and thereby heighten their awareness that illusion belongs to the ordinary waking state, not to the state of Being. On the other hand, Renato Poggioli recognizes that Pirandello shows how reason and logic have no absolute or transcendent value (1958: 19-47), for as the play reveals they function as tools to defend illusion, not as a means to transcend the intellect. Similarly, John Gassner notes that Pirandello’s work questions the intellect’s ability to solve the problem of illusion and certainty (1954: 424-45); but one can only surmount this impasse through knowledge-by-identity, by achieving a state of Being. Francis Fergusson agrees that Pirandello has captured a new level of reality: One might justly say that his attitude is more ‘realistic’—more disillusioned and disbelieving—than simple-minded positivism itself, for he does not have to believe in the photograph of the parlor, and he can accept the actual stage for the two boards it is. But he is left, like Ibsen and Chekkov, with neither an artistic convention like the Baroque, nor a stable scene of human life like the Greek or Elizabethan cosmos. (1989: 10)

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Pirandello thus induces an epiphany in the audience by having them transcend the duality of conceptuality to a void beyond logic and reason, to the knower as pure awareness, the white screen upon which the drama of life plays itself out. As we have seen, aesthetic experience (rasa) stands for the quintessence of self-luminous consciousness, although a taste of this state can be conveyed even if the audience doesn’t have a full-fledged experience of self-luminous consciousness. The characters themselves in Pirandello’s play represent such an experience of the three-in-one structure of knower, known and process of knowing, which gives the audience an epiphany or taste of what it’s like to enter a transpersonal state of mind that entails a coexistence of Emptiness and Form. In The Balcony, Jean Genet adds a new twist to his characters’ identities by having them transform themselves into commodities.

The Reality of Illusion in Jean Genet’s The Balcony Power vs. Impotence As the illegitimate son of a prostitute, Jean Genet grew up in a state-run orphanage and then later with foster parents, but was caught stealing and labeled a thief and a juvenile delinquent by the time he became a teenager. Familiar not only with crime, homelessness and prison, Genet also served in the French Foreign Legion, which he soon abandoned, becoming a vagabond and continuing to engage in criminal activities. He was often arrested, imprisoned and expelled from European countries. In the mid-1940s, Genet started writing plays, two of which, The Balcony (1956) and The Blacks (1957), became commercially successful. As a social outcast, Genet undoubtedly felt powerless, alienated and helpless in a world that to him appeared absurd, a world that considered him in turn a perpetual menace to institutions such as the law, the church, the police and the military. Genet believed that social hierarchies fulfill a lust for power, which he also associated with lust itself. But his attitude toward society did not hinge on simplistic interpretations of power-mongering so much as on an awareness that the world was becoming mixophobic, which Bauman defines as a higher predictable and widespread reaction to the mind-bogging, spine-chilling and nerve-breaking variety of human types and lifestyles that meet and rub elbows and shoulders in the streets of contemporary cities not only in the officially proclaimed (and for that reason avoided) “rough districts” or “mean streets,” but in their “ordinary” (read: unprotected by “interdictory spaces”) living areas. (2007b: 86)

Although the characters of The Balcony, set during a revolution, confront this mixophobia and attempt to escape it even within the church,

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law and defense forces, Martin Esslin argues that Genet is not condemning lawyers, bishops and generals merely for lusting after power but is also “projecting a feeling of impotence of the individual caught up in the meshes of society; he is dramatizing the often suppressed and subconscious rage of the ‘I,’ alone and terrified by the anonymous weight of the nebulous ‘they’” (1991: 220). As we shall see, this gap between members of different social strata and within the consciousness of individuals themselves points toward a double awareness that underlies The Balcony and suggests a way of transcending both mixophobia and the feeling of impotence. The Balcony opens with a series of ritualistic events in Madame Irma’s brothel, the Grand Balcony, also referred to as the Grand Illusion or hall of mirrors, the main venue of the play. The men who frequent the brothel act out various roles they aspire to as a means of gaining power and virility, trying to fulfill their fantasies of grandeur by donning outfits worn by either bishops, judges or generals and lording it over the prostitutes who play their opposites. Scene One opens with a gasman playing the role of a bishop and taking confession from the woman who serviced him, using exaggerated clerical language and being meticulous about her admitting the truthfulness of her sins for him to absolve. Madame Irma tries to hurry him out the door because he has over stayed his welcome, but he refuses to comply, enjoying his role and insisting on continuing to play it as long as possible. In each of these minidramas, the men glorify themselves, subjugating the women for their own self-aggrandizement, but they have much less control over the situations they enact than do the women, who can either make the men feel good about themselves or undermine their illusions. The girl in Scene One placates the bishop by complying with his demands. In explaining the outcome of their drama to Madame Irma afterwards, the bishop says, “We didn’t exactly strain ourselves, you know. Only six sins, and far from my favorite ones.” To which the girl replies, “What do you mean, only six! They were deadly sins. And I had a hell of a job finding those” (1991: 3). This girl in Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony obviously plays an important role in enhancing the bishop’s ego, for had she not come up with her deadly sins the bishop would have suffered a serious let down.

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Later when Madame Irma tries to send him away, he curses them and then throws them out of the room and turns to address the mirror: Now answer me, mirror, answer me. Do I come here to find innocence and evil? In your gilded glass, what am I? Here, in the sight of God, I swear—I have never, never aspired to the Episcopal throne. (5)

The mirror on the one hand represents a prop for the recurring fantasies in Madame Irma’s brothel, thus serving not only as a metaphor for theatre but also as a representation for how people conduct themselves in everyday life. On the other hand, the mirrors symbolize a partial reflection of the self. When the bishop goes on talking to the mirror, he explains: To become a bishop, to rise in the hierarchy—whether by virtue or vice—would have meant my becoming further and further removed from the ultimate dignity of being a bishop. Let me explain. [. . . ] if I had wanted to become a bishop, I should have had to put all my energy not into being one, but into acting in the sort of way that would have led to my becoming one. (5)

He goes on to clarify that if he had “become a bishop for sake of being one,” he would have had “to remember my being one, in order fully to fulfill my function. [. . . ] a function is only a function. It isn’t a mode of being” (ibid.). The bishop displays his confusion here about the true nature of being, for once established in a state of being as his true identity, a function is no longer merely a function but also a reflection of being. He speculates that becoming a real bishop would entail entering a hierarchy in which power replaces dignity, for as a bishop he would only be fulfilling a function, which in his understanding does not reflect a mode of being but rather a finite level of mind. In comparison to Pinter’s The Birthday Party, all the men who visit Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony reflect Goldberg and McCann, who function like finite waves on an unbounded ocean or the localized position of a mirror in infinite space. When the bishop speaks to the mirror, he speaks to himself as a physical object in Wilber’s upper right objective quadrant, not to himself on a level of expanded awareness associated with the subjective upper left quadrant that would

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open his awareness to an immediate experience of spiritual truth associated with being a bishop. As we have seen, Jonathan Shear explains that Eastern philosophical traditions use the analogy between pure consciousness on one hand and the ocean and a mirror on the other: a wave on the ocean, and a mirror in space [. . .] display the relation between pure consciousness and the individual self. The wave and mirror in these images represent experience of individual self, and the ocean and space represent that of pure consciousness. [. . .] Thus in each of these images the content of the experience of the individual self is represented as nothing but a localized expression (wave, reflection) of the relevant overall unbounded field (ocean, space). (1990: 116)

The bishop and the other men who frequent Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony function like waves and mirrors through their fixation on a limited perception of themselves, which does not represent a transcultural, transpersonal identity, but rather an attempt to enhance their power and virility. As opposed to the men, however, Madame Irma’s girls stand outside the reflection of the mirrors in terms of their own subjectivity, evincing a greater awareness of the fetishistic nature of the games these rituals constitute at the Grand Balcony. The bishop, therefore, confuses the vestments and lace he dons as a pseudo bishop with the actual person that may to a certain extent offer him protection from his fears regarding his inferior status in the world. He says, The majesty, the dignity, that illuminate my person, do not emanate from my function—nor from my personal merits, by heaven!—the majesty, and dignity, that illuminate me, irradiate from a more mysterious source: from the Bishop in me taking precedence over me. Have I made myself clear, mirror? Golden image! Ornate Mexican cigar box—and I want to be Bishop in solitude, in appearance only . . . And in order to destroy every vestige of function, I’m going to create a scandal. (6)

Although he refers to a “mysterious source,” he has no access to that source as an immediate experience beyond the conceptual level of the mind. The gasman as bishop, moreover, does indeed emit a torrent of foul gas when he claims to have laid “siege to an ancient fortress, from which I was expelled” (6). He then implies the death of his

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former self by referring to suicide and suggests a rebirth to a better position where his vestments will “protect me from the world. [. . .] My loving kindness, which is destined to inundate the world—it was distilled under your carapace” (7). This transformation to another self, however, merely implies exchanging one socially constructed identity for another, not the expansion of awareness to a greater state of wholeness. Although the church, the law, the police and the military do serve a function other than allowing its representatives an opportunity to lust after power, men like the gasman and the criminal though not the artistic side of Genet himself have no access to the inner dimension of those involved in these institutions. They can only perceive them from the outside on a conceptual level, from a social or cultural perspective, and therefore when the bishop tries to imitate people in a position of power he can only replicate their most superficial attributes. Nevertheless, the bishop does have an ambiguous attitude toward the church, which suggests that to a certain extent, on the level of ordinary waking consciousness, he may have a degree of nonattachment that allows him momentarily to observe his obsessive behavior. The process of having the girl confess her sins, however, suggests that she understands the game more clearly, for in acting out a repentance to satisfy the bishop and asking him is he’d “go to the police” to report her, she has greater control over the bishop’s sense of power and virility than he does over her. She even asks him, “Reality frightens you, doesn’t it?” (4). The fact that the bishop asks questions of the mirror rather than of himself regarding his function and purpose at Irma’s Grand Balcony suggests that he’s locked within a state of ordinary waking consciousness, a socially constructed conceptual framework, without access to his inner self as a witnessing internal observer: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . . Why do I come here? To find evil? To find innocence?” (4). He fails to realize that in the house of Grand illusions, he will find neither evil nor innocence, only his deluded fantasies about them. The gasman’s experience of his role as a bishop, then, involves all of Wilber’s quadrants except the upper left that would lead him to a taste of knowledge-by-identity. Even the knowledge he thinks he has about the girl’s sins would be a form of knowledge-about, which in this minidrama remains a fantasy. Even a real bishop would have difficulty determining the degree of truth in a confession, which may

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stem more from a sense of guilt than the actual commitment of a sin. Nevertheless, in The Balcony the performers and audience both find themselves in a position to perceive the gap between the roles being performed on a physical level and the internal observer, or between the concrete and the abstract, the gap between the ability to act out emotions as opposed to actually embodying them through knowledgeby-identity, as discussed by drama theorists such as Denis Diderot, Constantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht and others. As Meyer-Dinkgräfe says, performance and spectatorship induce a self-reflexive state of consciousness: The means of histrionic representation described in the classical Indian treatise on drama and theatre, The Natyashastra, might be interpreted as functioning as yogic techniques, conditioning the mind and body to function in higher states of consciousness. (2005: 91)

Although Genet’s characters may not reveal a great deal of selfawareness, the performers and audience can perceive the roles being performed as separate from the witnessing faculty of the performers themselves. In terms of Wilber’s quadrants, the performers and spectators can sense this gap through a glimpse of knowledge-by-identity by occupying zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, while they also reflect on this experience through zone #2. Scene One of Genet’s play has the effect, like most of the other scenes, of deautomatizing and thus weakening the link in the audience between the bishop’s performance on stage and how a bishop behaves in the real world. The play thereby avoids lending conventional content to the perceptions of the audience, creating a gap within their awareness that allows them to witness what they perceive rather than being completely absorbed by the object of observation. This process can be understood in terms of what Forman calls the decontrolling utterances that use the via negativa approach, such as “cease looking,” “lay your expectations down,” etc., which causes one to perceive the habitual in a new light. As Forman says, In general, via negativa language serves this very particular cognitive function. It is designed to get you to cease applying your automatized expectations, and get you to open up to the world more immediately. In our Upanishadic text, ‘put to rest objects of sense and [. . .] continue void of conceptions’ is also couched in the via negativa.

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And it does seem intended to serve more as a deconstructive than as a constructive instruction. (1999: 100, original emphasis)

The via negativa of language would also apply to the behavior of the bishop in the first scene and Madame Irma’s other clients throughout the play. By de-linking the bishop’s behavior from that of a priest in the everyday world, the via negativa of the play projects the audience beyond the limits of their ordinary perceptual system, creating a gap through which they transcend the conventional cognitive content of their minds and glimpse the void of conceptions. This reaction would also apply to the girls in the Grand Balcony who have to contend with the different styles used by the men acting out their roles in the minidramas designed to enhance their power. Throughout the play, as we shall see, Madame Irma’s clients attempt to convert themselves into desirable commodities, a phenomenon Bauman discusses in Consuming Life. All the men do not only consume what Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony has to offer but also attempt to convert themselves into commodities that other men would envy. As Bauman says, “The crucial, perhaps the decisive purpose of consumption in the society of consumers (even if it is seldom spelled out in so many words and still less frequently publicly debated) is not the satisfaction of needs, desires and wants, but the commoditization or recommoditization of the consumer: raising the status of consumers to that of sellable commodities. It is ultimately for that reason that the passing of the consumer test is a non-negotiable condition of admission to the society that has been reshaped in the likeness of the market-place. The passing of that test is a noncontractual precondition of all the contractual relations that weave and are woven into the web of relationships called ‘the society of consumers’” (2007a: 57, original emphasis). George, the Chief of Police, is the most obsessed with Bauman’s dictum that “Members of the society of consumers are themselves consumer commodities” (ibid., original emphasis), for while the other clients crave to become commodities by emulating others, he is the only character who craves that other clients try to emulate him as a desirable commodity. All the other men, however, feel trapped by their positions in society and wish to escape. As Bauman says,

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But in the case of Madame Irma’s clients, the leap from a “world of constraints and unfreedom” remains a temporary illusion, only altering their appearance, not their true identities. Their move from having “no choice” or a “limited choice” to the “right of selfassertion” continues within the constraints of the mirrors or finite waves, a purely conceptual dimension, without ever leading to individual autonomy and self-mastery based on knowledge-by-identity. By converting themselves into commodities, they focus more on superficial appearances than on any significant transformation of the self associated with the upper left quadrant. Scene Two of The Balcony introduces another client, a judge, whose girl plays a thief about to be punished by the torturer, played by one of Madame Irma’s employees named Arthur. Like the bishop, the judge also savors his role but gets unnerved by the gunfire outside from the ongoing revolution. Unlike the bishop’s girl, however, the judge’s girl and Arthur end up humiliating him, thus undermining his pleasure. As the scene opens, the judge asks the woman, “Are you a thief or a strangler? (Very softly, appealing to her) Tell me, my child, tell me, I implore you, tell me you’re a thief” (8). The thief replies, “OK, my Lord,” but the torturer says, “No!” (ibid.). The torturer wants her to deny her crime now and confess later, but she worries that she’ll get hit again. The judge then says, “Precisely, my child: you’ll get hit. You have to deny it first, then admit it, and then repent. From forth your lovely eyes, I await the gush of warm springs. Oh! The power of tears! I want to be drenched in them” (ibid.). Obviously the judge like the bishop revels in his power over women, reinforcing his sense of

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domination and virility. Later when the thief confesses, the judge pontificates, I shall have all that to judge. Oh, my child, you reconcile me to the world. Judge! I am going to be the judge of your actions! The scales of justice hang balanced from my hands. The world is my apple: I cut it in two—good people and bad people. (11)

Frightened by the revolution outside the Grand Balcony, the judge bolsters his confidence by taking the woman’s fate into his hands, without acknowledging at the moment that it’s all an act and the world remains a threat. As Bauman says of revolutionaries, who include those who refuse or lack the means to become commodities, The enemies who lay siege to the walls are its own, very own ‘inner demons’: the suppressed, ambient fears which permeate its daily life, its ‘normality,’ yet which, to make the daily reality endurable, must be squashed and squeezed out of the lived-through quotidianity and moulded into an alien body. (2007a: 129)

By scheming to become commodities, Madame Irma’s clients attempt to distinguish and protect themselves from the revolutionaries who lay siege to the city walls. The danger to the “order-building and orderobsessed modern state presiding over the society of producers and soldiers,” as Bauman puts it, was that of revolution. The enemies were the revolutionaries, or, rather, the “hot-headed, hare-brained, all-too-radical reformists,” the subversive forces trying to replace the extant state-managed order with another state-managed order, a counter-order reversing each and every principle by which the present order lived or aimed to live. (ibid.)

These revolutionaries oppose the obsession with consumerism in the sense that rather than constantly shifting their identities from one socially constructed commodity to another, they would prefer discovering their real identities. As Genet and Bauman both indicate, the higher consumer demand is (that is, the more effective is the market seduction of prospective customers), the more safe and prosperous is consumer society. (2007a: 129)

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Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony serves to provide consumers like the bishop and judge with a sense of security by sustaining the illusion of fulfillment through their becoming commodities. After reprimanding the girl, the judge addresses the audience, as if they’re the jury: Ladies and gentlemen, before your very eyes—with nothing up my sleeve, nothing in my hands—I separate the rottenness and throw it away. But this is a painful process. To pronounce every sentence with the gravity it deserves would cost me my life. Which is why I am dead. This is the region, that region of total freedom that I inhabit. King of Infernal Regions, those I weigh in the balance are, like me, dead. (ibid.)

Death here symbolizes a transition from one socially constructed identity, the client’s everyday role, to that of a pseudo judge wielding power over a thief, or one who refuses to become a commodity and thereby help to sustain consumerism. The judge admits to the torturer and the thief that I wouldn’t exist without you . . . (To the thief) Nor without you my child. You are my two perfect complements” (12). He then pleads to the girl acting as a thief, “You won’t refuse to be a thief? (13),

He knows that without her his new identity as a powerful commodity would be undermined. Again, the girls wield greater power than the men, for she replies, “Well . . . you never know . . .” (ibid.). He beseeches her, “Don’t leave me like this, I beg of you—waiting to be a judge” (ibid., original emphasis). As the scene comes to a close, the girl brandishes her power over the judge by hesitating and making him lick her shoes before she agrees to play the thief again. In a sense, therefore, the girl as a revolutionary, an “inner demon,” in this scene fulfills the role of the mirror, only in this case denying the image the client hopes to attain. As an analogy of everyday life, this situation demonstrates that you can’t find your true identity through an intersubjective relationship with others. They’ll undoubtedly help you construct roles to perform in public, but the true self toward which you aspire can’t be garnered through another person’s perception of you based on how you look, speak or behave. An identity dependent on others ends up as nothing more than a social construct, a commodity based on

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knowledge-about or knowledge-by-acquaintance. The judge, like the bishop, seeks a secure identity in the wrong place, in this case a surrogate mirror found in the girl, an interpersonal relationship found in all the quadrants except the upper left, wherein his true self resides. This second scene adds an element of humiliation to the client’s image, thereby accentuating his failure to fulfill his dreams as a powerful and sexually dominant male in a society going through a revolution. The irony of these first two scenes centers on the fact that while the revolution instills fear in the clients, they continue playing the roles of elite commodities against whom the revolutionaries are fighting. If anything, this scenario would further jeopardize a judge responsible for convicting people like a rebel. The girl playing the thief and the audience again enter a zone of awareness where through behavioral via negativa they de-identify themselves with socially constructed roles and instead have a glimpse of awareness by itself, and on this basis simultaneously witness the minidrama involving a deluded judge. This experience involves a taste of cosmic consciousness, however fleetingly. As Robert Boyer notes, development of this fifth state of consciousness spontaneously establishes complete inner freedom from being overshadowed by the inevitable ups and downs of individual life characteristic of various degrees of suffering. Individual experiences of suffering or happiness are associated with what we identify ourselves to be. The relative field of existence is ever-changing. [. . .] If we identify with these changing processes, we ride the waves of change, sometimes the peak and sometimes the trough. (2006a: 444)

The bishop and judge identify themselves with commodity roles in the ever-changing relative field of existence, striving for a peak experience, which however pleasurable remains transitory and results in their soon returning to the trough of another in a long series of socially constructed identities. The women, on the other hand, don’t strive to identify with another role but find themselves compelled to act out roles they recognize as being unreal and transitory, part of their work in the Grand Balcony and even similar to the roles they play outside Madame Irma’s establishment. They more than the men benefit from these rotating roles that free awareness from becoming

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attached to any particular one in the hopes of riding the waves of change to a peak experience. In the third scene, another client in the Grand Balcony plays out his fantasy of being a general with his girl acting as his horse. Madame Irma has his room prepared before he arrives, and they discuss the danger he encountered outside and how he had to take detours to avoid the revolution. He also worries about leaving the Grand Balcony late and possibly getting shot by revolutionaries, especially since his girl/horse has yet to arrive. He wants to ring for her: “I like ringing. It’s authoritative—ringing the charge!” But Madame Irma counters, Not just yet, General . . . Oh, I’m sorry, there I go, giving you your rank already” (15). The general then hears a woman’s scream and wants to rescue her, but Irma tells him it’s “a bit of involuntary improvisation” and that he should “cool it.” (16)

The general’s girl finally arrives a half hour late with his uniform, but he can’t see any blood on his boots that would make his minidrama illusion appear more real. When Madame Irma leaves, the general turns to his girl and asks, Didn’t you get your oats? You’re smiling, aren’t you? Smiling at your rider? Hm? Do you recognize this hand—firm but gentle (He strokes her.) My fiery steed! My beautiful mare—Ah, what lovely gallops we’ve had together. (17)

He then forces her to kneel in front of him and whinny like a circus horse, doing everything he can to convince himself of his power in the midst of a ritualistic fantasy. At this stage she complies and, half naked herself, helps him take off his cloths and don his uniform. Afterwards when he tries to put the bit in her mouth, she refuses. Then he asks “Where’s the war?” She replies, “It’s coming, General— it’s coming” (18). They anticipate the war by talking about death and his soldiers, then he looks into the mirror: Waterloo! General! Man of war, in full dress. Behold me in my pure appearance. With no contingent at my back. Simply myself—I appear. If I have gone through wars without dying, through suffering without dying, if I have risen from the ranks without dying, it was only to reach this minute just before dying. (19)

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The girl then tells him he’s been dead in their fantasy since yesterday, that for a dead man he speaks quite eloquently. As the scene closes, he tells her, “Hang your head, and hide your eyes, I want to be General in solitude. Not for my sake, mind you, but for the sake of my image, and my image for the sake of its image, and so on. In short, we shall be the image of each other” (20). Then finally, “Tell them I died with my boots on!” (21). Death in the play symbolizes immortality, but this also presents a contradiction. The idea that he presents one image for the sake of another image suggests that his new identity consists of a series of images in infinite regress, locked within a field of finitude, not open to infinity or immortality. That is, instead of knowing himself through knowledge-by-identity—as a unity of knower, known and process of knowing—he knows himself only in the field of duality as an object of observation, which in this case is nothing more than a self as a commodity constructed through an illusory minidrama in which a girl and a mirror convince him of the death of his old identity and the birth of a new one. Madame Irma’s clients, therefore, seek fulfillment but have not developed unbounded awareness or self-referral consciousness from which it derives. What they don’t realize is, as Bonshek notes, Knowledge in waking, dreaming and sleep states is unreliable. Our moods, perceptions and experiences change from day to day. [. . .] The only state where consciousness is unchanging, unbounded, eternal, is Transcendental Consciousness. Only at that level can reliable knowledge, or absolute knowledge, be gained. Here the structure of pure knowledge is open to awareness. In Cosmic Consciousness the unchanging reality is maintained along with the changing states of waking, dreaming and sleeping. (2007: 20, original emphasis)

By striving to become commodities, however, which must always be updated to maintain their saleability, Madame Irma’s clients remain trapped within the field of duality and change. As in the previous two scenes, the girl in this scene also manifests greater insight and awareness of the general’s charade. Without her and Madame Irma, the general would be slumped in the trough of a field of change with no avenue for escape. But the girl realizes that the path he has chosen will not provide him with any lasting security or happiness, that indeed he may eventually get killed by the revolutionaries on his way to and from the Grand Balcony. This fate

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would ironically fulfill his desire to die in battle and become a war hero, although the context would of course fall far short of the image of immortality he hoped to portray, both for himself and others. Like the bishop and the judge, the general tries to overcome his sense of impotence and helplessness through the illusions of myths and daydreams—the basis of all commodities. Their visions, however, point in the wrong direction, setting up an opposition between two socially constructed identities instead of closing the gap between all identities and the natural self as pure awareness, the witnessing internal observer that alone can provide security and bliss. While the men focus on various Forms they try to identify with through the conceptual mind, the girls focus more on Emptiness through the nonconceptual mind, for they have no desire to identify with the Forms imposed on them by men. Unlike the male clients, therefore, the girls and through aesthetic experience (rasa) the audience have a greater affinity for the coexistence of Emptiness and Form, which provides them with a taste of cosmic consciousness, of the internal observer perceiving but not being overshadowed through identification with the objects of observation. Madame Irma and George In Scene Six, the longest scene of the play, Madame Irma talks with her accountant Carmen, who wants to leave the Grand Balcony to see her young daughter, but Irma refuses to let her go. Madame Irma also worries about her lover George, the Chief of Police, who has yet to make an appearance. Carmen reports about one of the girls, Chantal, who left the Grand Balcony to join the revolution. Their conversation is interrupted by Arthur, who played the torturer in the scene with the judge. He comes to collect his money, his main interest, but Madame Irma says she will pay only if he finds George at his headquarters. When Arthur returns and reports on the violence outside, his speech is cut short by a bullet that smashes through the window and kills him. Before this event, however, George arrives and also reports that the situation outside “is deteriorating every minute—it isn’t desperate yet, but it soon will be—thank God! The Palace is surrounded” (40). George’s greatest concern centers on whether or not a client of the Grand Balcony has tried to emulate him as the Chief of Police, information he tries to obtain from Carmen: “Has there or has there not been a simulacrum?” Bewildered, she asks, “Simulacrum?” To

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which he furiously retorts, “Yes! Idiot! A simulacrum of the Chief of Police?” (41). George hankers for the status of a commodity that everyone would crave. Madame Irma responds, “The time isn’t ripe, my dear. Your function isn’t noble enough yet to offer dreamers a consoling image that would enshrine them” (ibid.). But George disagrees and feels that his stature in the revolution grows more prominent by the day. Interestingly, as the Chief of Police, a position already endowed with power, George doesn’t depend on emulating others for his self-esteem but rather feels compelled to establish himself as a commodity for others to desire. Genet suggests, moreover, that even the identities of those being impersonated by Madame Irma’s clients do not provide them with power and virility on a permanent basis. All individuals who aspire to become consumer commodities, especially in this case the Chief of Police, must constantly upgrade themselves to remain sellable, to have the appeal that would keep them in demand. Even as the police chief and lover of Madame Irma, George still feels inadequate enough to insist that others should want to impersonate him as the ultimate symbol of admiration. To maintain his saleability he not only attempts to enhance his status by enticing the desires of other but also by building a tomb that would insure his immortality. He announces, Look, my image is growing every day. It’s becoming colossal. I see it reflected in everything around me. And you stand there and tell me you’ve never seen it represented here. (42)

The fact that George claims to see his image reflected in everything around him suggests that his identity is contingent on Wilber’s three quadrants outside the upper left. As a member of the hierarchy, his awareness of himself depends on intersubjective, interobjective and objective consumer representations that have nothing to do with the true nature of the self and will never provide him with the confidence, security and inner peace he so strongly craves. As Bauman says, Consumption viewed in Layard’s terminology as a ‘hedonic treadmill’ fails to increase the sum total of satisfaction among its practitioners. The capacity of consumption to enhance happiness is fairly limited; it can’t easily be stretched beyond the level of the satisfaction of the

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Nevertheless, in consuming to become a desirable commodity, George argues, “I shall force my image to detach itself from me, to penetrate, to violate your studios, to be reflected, to increase and multiply” (ibid.). He believes that when he crushes the revolution, the Queen will call on him, that nothing will be able to stop him. Again we see with George, unlike the girls, that he depends entirely for his prestige on an intersubjective representation of his image by other men, even though he already embodies a role that these men would crave to imitate through their minidramas. He has no awareness of himself through an innate knowledge-by-identity of his inner Being, but rather relies on the superficial attributes of his role as a commodity that he hopes others will admire and attempt to impersonate. For the Chief of Police, then, the clients who might simulate his position of authority would serve the same purpose as mirrors for the other men, a finite representation of identity. What the men fail to realize is that beneath its veneer as a cultural construct aspiring to become a commodity, this identity is in fact endowed with unbounded potential. Because he fights against the revolutionaries and has yet to be simulated by others, George finds himself trapped in a world of mixophobia. Wanting others to simulate his role centers on a desire to create a “we” feeling among Madame Irma’s clients and himself. In this way, as Bauman says, “perhaps one could at least secure for oneself, for one’s kith and kin and other ‘people like oneself,’ a territory free from that jumble and mess that irredeemably afflicts” society (2007b: 87), especially during a revolution. If George and the bishop, judge and general had closer ties with their inner identities of the upper left quadrant, they would undoubtedly experience less mixophobia and more mixophilia even in a diverse cultural and social context. Real and Fantasy Images In the eleventh and twelfth scenes when the revolution has been defeated, Madame Irma simulates the Queen on her balcony where she stands with the clients who play the bishop, judge and general, all of whom are being photographed and advised by the envoy on how to behave. They bow solemnly to the crowd, a little hesitant about acting out their fantasies in the real world. Chantal, now a symbol of the revolution, also appears on the balcony but gets shot and then carried

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away by the general and the Queen. The three clients agree to stand beside the Queen on the balcony to rally support among the loyalists and make them believe the Queen is still alive. The Queen says, Thank you, thank you, gentlemen. (With a benevolent, sad smile.) We notice it is you, my Lord Bishop, who are becoming the spokesman. No no, don’t deny it. It is well that leadership should emanate from the highest spirituality. (Pause.) If only you hadn’t had the abominable idea of having Chantal murdered,” to which the bishop replies, “(Pretending to be frightened) A stray bullet! (77)

Madame Irma as the simulated Queen has her doubts about whether Chantal was killed by a stray bullet or not, yet reveals that Chantal had come to the Grand Balcony to visit her boss, Madame Irma. The bishop says he had turned her into one of their saints, emblazoning her image on their flag, but the Queen complains that it should have been their image and not Chantal’s, thereby revealing a desire for emulation as a commodity similar to that of George. On the balcony, then, the bishop, judge and general have to exercise their simulated powers in the real world, but they feel drained because they’d rather imitate a commodity than attempt to be one. They long to return to acting out their fantasies in the privacy of the Grand Balcony. Although the bishop, judge and general reluctantly appear in public, their performance resembles any role they would normally put across, for people always assume different roles in life even spontaneously when they find themselves in unfamiliar contexts. The three clients, though weary of the revolution, feel privileged to stand on the balcony with Madame Irma the Queen as evidenced by their understanding that they could be consulted on political issues, but the Chief of Police quickly renders them ineffectual by reasserting his authority as the chief commodity. Chief of Police: Gentlemen, I don’t quite follow you. You seem to be showing signs of wanting to act. It’s true that at a decisive moment, at a time of certain conjunctures, I had to appeal to you in order to impose upon the rebellious people. I acknowledge the fact that you one and all rose magnificently to the situation but, gentlemen, your role was merely one of appearance, and I intend it to remain so. (80)

This assessment of their roles reconfirms the fact that all roles acted out even in the everyday world constitute little more that appearances,

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minidramas like the fantasies in the Grand Balcony of pretending to be commodities even without the ability to achieve them. These roles constantly change, suggesting their insubstantial nature and thereby reminding the audience that the only function beyond appearance with lasting significance, stability and truth derives from the internal observer witnessing our socially constructed identities, whether performed as fantasies or in the everyday world. The bishop, judge and general, however, don’t perceive the superficiality of the roles they play and feel offended by the Chief of Police, whose role is no less transitory and superficial than theirs. Bishop: “You brought us together because you wanted to consult us.” Chief of Police “Not to consult you—to give you my orders.” General: “You mean you don’t want us to take part in your decisions?” Chief of Police: “In no way. It is I who command, I who organize everything. Be logical. If you are what you are, Judge, General or Bishop, it’s because that was what you wanted to become, and what you wanted people to know you had become. Right?” General: “More or less.” Chief of Police: “Good. So you have never done anything for its own sake: whatever you have done has always been a link in your becoming a Bishop, a Judge or a General.” (80)

The three men object to this interpretation because they feel that even though they played their roles for glory, these roles still symbolized the qualities they craved to embody. One quality they aspire for is dignity, but the Chief of Police debunks this quality as being “as inhuman as crystal, that renders you unfit to govern men,” for ultimately “Above you, and more sublime than you, is the Queen” (81). The social hierarchy implied here drove Madame Irma’s clients to engage in their fantasies of power and virility to begin with, but while they act out these illusions as if they were real during their minidramas, the Chief of Police lives his entire life as a fantasy that he takes for real. As the play suggests, he feels that his function as an authority figure, in aspiring to become a commodity, needs to be invested with greater nobility and self-esteem by having other men embrace it as an erotic dream, a symbol of power and authority that through their imaginations will compensate for the Chief of Police’s own sense of inadequacy. Because all the men who haunt Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony live their lives primarily in the ever-changing social and cultural domains instead of the never-changing upper left quadrant of pure

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awareness—the world of immediate experience based on knowledgeby-identity beyond duality—they have a sense that all their roles and identities, whether acted out in fantasies or everyday reality, remain illusions. All that we take for real in the field of duality constitutes illusion because it’s always changing and getting replaced or destroyed in an impermanent world. When the Chief of Police tells the bishop, judge and general, “You have absolutely no power,” the bishop responds, But you want us to have some power over people. For us to have power over them, you must first recognize that we have some power over you, to which the Chief of Police and Queen reply, “Never!” (82)

And yet, he assigns them power to bolster his own image through their erotic dreams. This attitude he confirms by constructing an immense mausoleum: “I should appear as a giant phallus . . . (The three men look thunderstruck)” (85). The Chief of Police wants “to symbolize the nation . . . ,” which he interprets purely in terms of sex, the only power the men seem to understand. George feels jealous of his lover Madame Irma and needs to over-ride her with his tomb, which allows him in the end to say, “I’ve won” (95). Madame Irma’s main concern has always been with money and the survival of her Grand Balcony, the Grand Illusion of all commodities. In her final speech on the survival of her institution, she says, Any minute now we’ll have to start all over again . . . put all the lights on . . . get dressed . . . (A cock crows.) . . . get dressed . . . oh, all these disguises! [. . .] I’m going to prepare my costumes and studios for tomorrow. (96)

Her world is one which Bauman calls “mixophilia,” a world where the variety of the men’s costumes and roles is a promise of opportunities, many and different opportunities and chances of adventure in places that are smaller and less tolerant of idiosyncrasy and more close-fisted in the liberties they offer or indeed tolerate. It seems that mixophilia, just like mixophobia, is a selfpropelling, self-propagating and self-invigorating tendency. Neither of the two is likely to exhaust itself, or lose any of its vigor in the course of city renewal and the refurbishment of city space. (2007b: 89-90)

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Although the revolution has been defeated, threats from the world outside and inside the Grand Balcony will always remain and require containment. Madame Irma controls the inside, but the outside will always inspire fear in the men and bring them back to Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony to play out their fantasies of security and power by becoming commodities. Throughout the play, therefore, the girls and through aesthetic experience (rasa) the audience see through the façade of the consumerist syndrome and recognize that underlying all Forms of commodities resides an Emptiness that provides the only true fulfillment. As a result, The Balcony renders a vision of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form, which provides the girls and audience with a glimpse of cosmic consciousness through which the internal observer remains free from identification with the objects of desire—even while perceiving them.

Soyinka’s Integral Drama: Unity and the Mistake of the Intellect Introduction: Unity and Postmodernism Soyinka wrote A Dance of the Forests for the Nigerian independence celebrations (October 1960) and stated that The immediate humanity for whom I speak is the humanity that geographically demarcated is called Nigeria, because it is the entity to which I immediately identify. Beyond that, I think one also speaks for humanity in general. (quoted in Katrak 1987: 138)

He also said in this play he “was thinking of national consciousness and national myth-making” (ibid.). Soyinka believed that Nigeria’s image of itself differed from reality, which accounts for the play’s pessimism regarding his country’s future as well as that of humanity in general. In A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka for the first time integrates English language drama with traditional theatrical techniques. He also demonstrates the continuity of a violent and infamous past into the present. Nevertheless, the play ends on a note of personal regeneration that will lead the Nigerian community and nation as a whole toward a constructive future. The potential for selfregeneration in Nigerian society, as portrayed in Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests and The Road, involves a process of self-discovery through which the gulf between mortality and immortality, the self and other is momentarily crossed. What distinguishes Soyinka's early plays is their success in revealing subtler states of mind in which discursive logic no longer precludes a vision of the underlying unity of life—a postulate that is upheld as a fundamental truth by the Yoruba tradition to which he belongs. In Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka distinguishes between the European and African notions of ideology and literature. European literature, he argues, has an autonomous, objective existence, and European literary

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theories generally comprise ideologies cut off from human experience. On the other hand, African literature not only reflects human experience but also extends this experience through the social vision of the author. This vision as we have seen can also be elucidated by the major principles of Vedanta and Sanskrit poetics. While Soyinka claims that contemporary African literature is also "consciously guided by concepts of an ideological nature" (1976a: 64), these concepts, which are mystical and visionary by tradition, serve to support the “imaginative impulse to a re-examination of the propositions on which man, nature and society are posited or interpreted at any point in history” (66). For Soyinka, this impulse leads not merely to a Western style literary ideology but to a “literature of social vision” (ibid.). He contends that, in West African ritual theatre, the audience participates in the dramatic conflict and undergoes a cathartic transformation parallel to that of the hero. The human world is separated from a divine unity by an abyss or gulf. Through a process that dissolves and reintegrates the self, the protagonist enters what Soyinka calls the “abyss of transition” or “the fourth stage” (26), which ultimately leads to a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form. The threatening reality of the gulf that separates a fragmentary society from an ideal state of communal integration and psychic unity is diminished by means of dramatic rituals, sacrifices, and ceremonies. As Soyinka describes it, Yoruba drama is representational and visionary; it attempts to implement the traditional function of Yoruba myth by actualizing the ritual transition of a metaphysical gulf. In contrast, European literature at the time Soyinka wrote A Dance of the Forests involved a debate on postmodernism and its dilemmas regarding the nature of meaning and representation, the status of the subject, and the structure of binary oppositions. Poststructuralism displaced truth, representation, transcendentality, and the subject through their absence, which resulted in what Warren Montag describes "as a once existing past that has given way to the present as one historical totality to another" (1988: 88). Fredric Jameson notes that, regarding the so-called “death of the subject,” there are two contemporary positions. Proponents of the first assert that, in the classical, premodern age, there was once a species known as the human subject, but that in today's world of corporate capitalism the “older bourgeois individual subject

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no longer exists” (1983: 115). Advocates of the second or radical poststructuralist position argue that "the bourgeois individual subject [. . .] never really existed in the first place; there have never been individual subjects of that type” (ibid., original emphasis). The postmodern era presents a similar challenge to West African myth and ritual. As Femi Osofisan observes, “the flux of social transformation stays unrelieved in the crisis of ritual” (1982: 72). He quotes Biodun Jeyifo as having said that Soyinka's "universal idiom" of ritual, the “victory” of “Ogun's timeless ahistoricism belongs in that realm of thought in which imagined beings and relationships have absolute, autonomous existence. Hence it is easy victory, illusory, undialectical” (73). On the one hand, Yoruba metaphysics posits a transcendental reality, which Soyinka defines as “the fourth space.” This space is separated from terrestrial life by an abyss or gulf, which the protagonists in A Dance of the Forests attempt to bridge. On the other hand, postmodernism questions the very principle of binary oppositions at the basis of transcendentality. The traditional context of West African metaphysics, however, also questions the structure of binary oppositions, but in Soyinka's plays it does so on the basis of a coexistence of opposites and not by giving precedence to one alternative over the other, as in the poststructuralist “privileging” of the signifier over the transcendental signified. Soyinka explores the ritual form not as an ahistorical ideal but as an examination of history, raising the historic to cosmic proportions. His representation of the experience of unity in West African myth is complemented by analogous representations in another non-Western tradition, that of Vedanta and Sanskrit poetics, which also describes the structure of binary oppositions as being subsumed by a coexistence of opposites. Soyinka's “fourth space,” which he distinguishes from the three commonly acknowledged African worlds—that of the ancestors, the unborn, and the living—constitutes a coexistence of all spaces, a “continuum of transition where occurs the inter-transmutation of essence-ideal and materiality” (1976a: 26). A Dance of the Forests dramatizes the mechanics of integration between essence and materiality, unity and diversity, thereby taking the performers and audience toward a glimpse of cosmic consciousness, that simultaneity of the witnessing internal observer and mental

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content. This coexistence of opposites provides a logical answer to postmodernist dilemmas. Soyinka conveys this through the Yoruba transitional abyss and its effects upon the audience, explainable through the Sanksrit theory of the interdependence of consciousness and language. “For Soyinka,” as Joel Adedeji writes, “the purpose of theatre is to impart experience, not to provide 'meaning' or 'moral'; to set a riddle, not to tell a story” (1987: 105). Soyinka's ritual drama is based largely on his definition of Yoruba mythology in his wellknown Myth, Literature and the African World, where he delineates the structural paradigm of all metaphysics, namely, the experience of expanded consciousness, or what Soyinka calls the "metaphysical self” (1976a: 40). In the relationship of ritual to myth, one's experience of ritual determines one’s interpretation of myth. In the context of modern Africa, colonialism has complicated and corrupted the relationship between ritual and myth, experience and understanding. As Osofisan notes, “man's economic separation from nature” (caused by colonialism) has led to the disintegration of the animist metaphysics that underlies Soyinka's rituals (1982: 75). Nevertheless, in Soyinka's ritual theatre, idealism and history, Emptiness and Form, meet in the very response of the audience. Soyinka's Ritual Theatre The ritual experience of theatre is a collective interaction between performers and audience, and among members of the audience itself. Like the religious rituals from which it originates, theatrical performance involves collective experiences that lead the performers and audience to a higher state of spiritual insight. Even an individual’s reading of a dramatic text can also have a transcendental effect. It may not have the social impact and power of a collective experience, but it is no less valid for its greater subjectivity associated with zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, which in Sanskrit poetics as we have seen is called rasa or “aesthetic rapture.” In comparing Soyinka's dramatic theory with those of Nietzsche and G. Wilson Knight, Ann Davis writes that all three are concerned with audience affect and the metaphysical link between ritual and drama: [Soyinka's] theory is [. . .] unique in that it focuses on the dynamics of social and psychological processes within the dramatic experience, whereas the theories of Nietzsche and Knight are concerned with the dramatic experience only in terms of individual psychological

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processes. [. . .] Soyinka is equally concerned with defining the experience of drama in relationship to revolutionary, or liberating, social consciousness. (1980: 148)

As Davis goes on to show, Soyinka sees drama as incorporating ritual in order to develop social consciousness through “the passage from one area of existence to another [. . .] or one level of awareness to another” (150). The lack of a one-to-one correspondence between Soyinka's representation of ritual and the traditional event results both from Soyinka's awareness of the crisis of ritual in modern Africa and from his metaphorical, rather than historical, treatment of ritual as a dialectical process of social transformation. As Soyinka himself writes, “Metaphysical quest is not of itself a static theme, not when it is integrated, by real proportions, into the individual or social patterns of life” (1966: 55). In “Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal,” he states that “ritual is the language of the masses” (87), thereby confirming the way Edmund Leach uses the term ritual interchangeably with the term “custom” (Davis 1980: 149). For Soyinka, ritual experience provides a means for the individual to become integrated into the community and to attain “a renewed mythic awareness” (ibid.). In “The Fourth Stage,” he describes the ritual experience as being parallel to that of the deity Ogun in the “fourth world”—“the area of transition” in which the participants surrender their individuation, experience the joy of community, and recreate the self through dance and poetry (Davis 1980: 140-47). As Katrak points out, This is Soyinka’s only play in which Ogun is anthropomorphized as a dramatic character and the only drama in which the god takes full responsibility for the human crime of his devotee. (1986: 146)

The “audience affect” of Soyinka's ritual drama is not only historical, social, and psychological but also structural, involving the actual experience of “mythic awareness”—an example of cosmic consciousness or the coexistence of Emptiness and Form. Because Soyinka equates ritual and dramatic forms, they can best be understood in terms of their transcendental effect, which is structurally equivalent in individual and collective experience. In defining modern-day ritual theatre, Martin Esslin says that one can “look at ritual as a dramatic, a theatrical event—and one can look at drama as ritual” (1976: 27). Like dramatic forms, ritual forms

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aim to expand individual and collective consciousness and to provide the community with an experience of its own identity. A Dance of the Forests is a ritual drama in that it achieves both objectives, portraying, among other themes, the “conflict between the values of the old society and the new” (Laurence 1968: 74), “the sense of the repetitive futility, folly and waste of human history,” and the need for redemption (Jones 1973: 11). The successful integration of unity and diversity in Soyinka's plays is a function of ritual experience. This integration is less an expressed formal property of the plays than their suggested content, less objective than subjective (rasa), linked to the upper left quadrant. But even as objective mediums, or “subjective experience objectified” (Krishnamoorthy 1968: 53), Soyinka's dramatic forms skillfully enhance reception and suggest the movement of the reader/audience toward an experience of the unity of the inter-nal observer and the mind’s qualia or content. Like many African writers (e.g., Ngugi 1969), Soyinka satirizes postmodern African society for its lack of unity and coherence. Africa, in its self-alienation, is opposed not only to the other of Europe but also to the other of its own ancestral past. Without the spiritual heritage necessary to maintain its purity and growth, Africa has, for Soyinka, fallen easy prey to the worst vices of its former colonizers. He does not suggest that Africa has a glorious past worthy of repetition, but that its mythology provides a means of self-purification, a means of crossing the gulf between the historical and the mythical self. Despite the modern context of Soyinka's ritual theatre, both the characters and the audience of A Dance of the Forests move back and forth across this ontological gap toward an experience of psychic wholeness, an integration of the witnessing self and what it perceives. Soyinka skillfully integrates old mythologies into a modem context, searching for new patterns of ritual experience. Interpreting the ritual archetypes of West African drama in Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka focuses on three hero-gods of the rites of passage, Ogun, Obatala, and Sango: "their symbolic roles are identified by man as the role of an intermediary quester, an explorer into territories of 'essence-ideal' around whose edges man fearfully skirts” (1976a: 1). More than the other deities, Ogun, the Yoruba god of war, iron, and craftsmanship, corresponds to the abyss of transition, the numinous fourth stage of existence through which the ideal and material, abstract and concrete, are integrated for

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the performers and audience of ritual drama. As “Lord of the road” of lfa, the Yoruba traditional religious system, Ogun is the only deity who “sought the way” that would lead the Yoruba people to the essence of lfa wisdom (1976a: 27). Anguished by a sense of incompleteness, the gods feel the need to unite with humans. The original god, Atunda, once solitary and whole, was smashed into a thousand fragments by his rebellious slave, an event that became the analogue to mankind's recurring experience of birth followed by the dissolution of consciousness at the time of death (ibid., 28). In the resulting diversity of social functions, Ogun came to embody the destructive-creative impulse. For Soyinka he represents the “Promethean instinct in man,” “the explorer through primordial chaos” (ibid.: 30). He becomes the key figure in the constant attempt by gods and humans to bridge the gulf between them through the rites of passage. As Soyinka sees it, when the protagonist of drama enters the gulf and transcends conflict to experience the fourth stage, this experience is not a subjective fantasy but a mimetic rite that incorporates poetry and dance. Through the power of suggestion, or dhvani in Sanskrit poetics, it conveys the “primal reality” of the coexistence of opposites. This experience involves “the withdrawal of the individual into an inner world from which he returns, communicating a new strength for action” (ibid.: 33). The “communicant” does not withdraw from conscious reality; rather “his consciousness is stretched to embrace another and primal reality” (ibid.), a coexistence of waking and pure awareness, Form and Emptiness. In a decontextualized, non-ritualized European approach to mythical states, Jung describes the primal mentality in terms of archetypes cut off from the world of concrete experience. But as Soyinka points out, the mythic inner world is “both the psychic substructure and temporal subsidence, the cumulative history and empirical observations of the community” (ibid.: 35). As evidenced by Soyinka's plays, the experience of the transitional abyss engages African psychic archetypes within both an historical and mythical African context, one that fosters a wide range of spiritual insights and critical interpretations (see Jones 1980: 11). This experience integrates the concrete and abstract elements that characterize the cosmic context of the coexistence of opposites. In spite of postmodemism, Soyinka's characters and audience can be seen as moving toward a glimpse of

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turiya or unbounded awareness combined with ordinary mental activity. The universal experience of unboundedness or transcendental consciousness has been called by various names: epiphanies, timeless or visionary moments, privileged moments, peak experiences, transcendent ritual experiences, the abyss of transition, turiya, and so forth. When Soyinka's characters cross the abyss they move from the senses toward the unbounded Self that underlies all metaphysical experience. As a taste of the simplest form of awareness, this experience belies the complexity of philosophical systems. Several characters in A Dance of the Forests approach the state of turiya or self-referral consciousness by confronting their past. Murano in The Road also tastes this state while in possession by Ogun, the patron god of carvers. Unlike post-Saussurean linguistics, Yoruba metaphysics as represented by Soyinka recognizes the integral nature of name and form, poetry and dance, in the mimetic rite of passage. Similarly, Sanskrit poetics recognizes that the field of difference belongs to a level of language corresponding to ordinary waking consciousness and the phenomenal universe, whereas the field of unity belongs to a more subtle and powerful level of language corresponding to transcendental consciousness. When understood through the medium of transcendental consciousness, therefore, the three-in-one structure of the knower (1), known (Me), and knowledge (language) is the essence of both subject and object, self and other, and constitutes the basis for their unification. Discursive logic can be used to build arguments either for or against the unity of the self or language, but logic by itself can provide no effective means for verifying its conclusions on the more subtle level of direct experience in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant. As we have seen in the other plays discussed above and in Wilber’s four quadrant theory, logic alone cannot lead to the concrete experience of pure consciousness itself. Hence, in works such as The Postcard and Glas, Derrida employs a trans-logical antic verbalism, attempting to expand the reader's experience through what Ulmer calls a “picto-ideo-phonographic Writing” (1987: 3-125). In this way, Derrida's philosophy of otherness can be said to harmonize with the “equiprimordiality” (Gasche 1986: 91) of pure consciousness, sound, and meaning in the pashyanti level of language. But these unities belong to more subtle dimensions of natural law and remain vague abstractions until approached through direct experience in zone #1 of

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the upper left quadrant, as by Soyinka's characters and audience. This unity (between self and other) that Soyinka's characters and audience approach also includes the difference of language. While these characters communicate through the suggestive power of ritual drama, they transport the audience from the expressed levels of language to the inner silence of pashyanti. As a transcendental signified, this level constitutes the unity-amidst-diversity of sound and meaning, thus providing a taste of the unity of name and form at the ground of language. The physicist John Hagelin has argued that the notion of diversity disconnected from unity is a fundamental misconception. This misconception is known [in the Vedic tradition] as pragya aparadha, or 'mistake of the intellect. (1989: 23)

As if aware of this mistake, the Yoruba gods feel the need to come to man, who in turn feels the need to diminish the gulf between “himself and the deities, between himself and the ancestors, between the unborn and his reality” by means of sacrifices, ceremonies, and rituals (1976a: 144). Soyinka's characters accomplish this coexistence of opposites by entering the transitional fourth space, integrating terrestrial life with unbounded awareness. In the aesthetic response to A Dance of the Forests, the audience repeats this experience of “cosmogony in reverse.” Integral Awareness in A Dance of the Forests Through a complex interplay between gods, mortals, and the dead, the living in A Dance of the Forests invite two glorious forefathers to participate in the “Gathering of the Tribes.” But the god Aroni, “the lame one,” received permission from the Forest Head Obaniji to select instead “two (obscure) spirits of the restless dead,” the Dead Man and the Dead Woman, a captain and his wife from the army of the ancient Emperor Mata Kharibu. The choice is significant because “in previous life they were linked in violence and blood with four of the living generation” (1970: 1). Selected on the basis of this past debauchery, which Aroni hopes can be expiated through revelation, these four are Rola, a whore immortally nicknamed Madame Tortoise; Demoke, now a carver and then a poet; Adenebi, now the Court Orator and then Court Historian; and Agboreko, at both times

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the Elder of Sealed Lips. Although invited to participate in the welcome dance for the Dead Man and the Dead Woman, the four mortals refuse to “hear their case,” which is tantamount to refusing to acknowledge and thereby expiate their ignominious backgrounds. Thus, they initially refuse to cross the gulf between self and other. Demoke, Rola and Adenebi as the three living characters embody art, love and eloquence respectively, which they use for destructive and selfish ends. But the Dead Woman, who is pregnant, warns that the living are greatly influence by the dead (or the past): “The world is big,” she says, “but the dead are bigger. We've been dying since the beginning” (4). She implies that destiny cannot be controlled by free will unless the entire range of human experience is taken into account—the experience of the relative as well as of the absolute, of difference as well as unity. The Dead can be said to represent the coexistence of opposites such as mortality and immortality. They symbolize the non-changing, unmanifest field of pure consciousness, which as the reservoir of infinite dynamism is the source of all historical change. Although Soyinka explores the "role of the spiritually elect in a human community" (Ogunba 1971: 16), critics still find the play unsettling because in the process of giving individuals a glimpse of possible redemption it does not explain what this state might consist of, given Soyinka's extra-political viewpoints. The question, as Lewis Nkosi points out, concerns the object of Soyinka's commitment: it is the religious tendency in his work, the quest for [. . .] some metaphysical scheme of things, which is a disturbing and dangerous element in Soyinka's work; its link to elitism, to the worship of death and nihilistic gesture, have not been pointed out often enough. (1981: 190)

Soyinka's ideological commitments may not be explicit in A Dance of the Forests, but the play does suggest that, before society can undergo a political transformation, its citizens must be individually transformed on the level of consciousness. Soyinka depicts “an opposition between a messianic individual," who sets the spiritual standard, and "an indifferent humanity” (Nkosi 1981: 190-91) content to live by the mistake of the intellect. The gap between them cannot be crossed by merely treating the symptoms, whether political, economic, or academic. The ambiguity, difficulty, and ostensible danger of Soy-

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inka's drama derive from its exploration of the depths of consciousness beyond the limits of logic and reason. As discussed earlier, Jeyifo demythologizes rituals as being inappropriate or atrophied in the context of modern Africa (Osofisan 1982: 73). In terms of Sanskrit poetics, this atrophy is a reflection of consciousness restricted to a madhyama (inward speech or thought) perspective on the part of society and its critics. When nurtured back to its self-referral state, back into alliance with the government of nature through an integration of ritual and history, consciousness can solve the problems caused by the world of difference, but this solution involves a gradual process, as evidenced by the slow progress made by Soyinka's characters. The mortals in A Dance of the Forests must confront the whole range of life before transition into the self is possible, and the call becomes urgent: “the gap always widens” (5). Eventually, each of the four mortals reveals a secret past. In Demoke's passionate and poetic account of his crime, the negative aspect of creation couples with a feeling more appropriate to the positive aspect. By killing his apprentice Oremole, whom he pulls off the top to the araba tree they were carving together for the occasion, Demoke becomes aware of his capacity for destruction, which propels him toward redemption: “I plucked him down!! ... I /Demoke, sat on the shoulders of the tree,/My spirit set free and singing” (28). The ceremony for the Self-discovery of the four mortals, then, consists of three parts: the reliving of the ancient prototype of their present crime; the questioning of the dead couple; and the welcoming dance for the dead couple. Suddenly the scene retrogresses about eight centuries to the court of the emperor Mata Kharibu. Rola (Madame Tortoise—the queen), Demoke (Court Poet), and Adenebi (Court Historian) all enact the paradigm of his or her recurrent crime. After a bantering session with the Poet, the piqued Madame Tortoise dispatches him to fetch her canary from the dangerously steep roof of the palace. Instead of going himself, the poet sends his pupil, who falls and breaks his arm. At this point, the chained warrior (the Dead Man) is brought before Mata Kharibu on charges of treason. For Mata Kharibu, the captain had fought against a fellow chief and robbed his queen, Madame Tortoise, but now refuses to risk his men for another frivolous battle in an attempt to obtain her forgotten dowry. The Court Physician tries to reason with

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the captain, who confronts authority on the battlefield of his own conscience: “Physician: Was ever a man so bent on his own destruction? Warrior: Mata Kharibu is leader, not merely of soldiers but of men. Let him turn the unnatural pattern of men always eating up one another” (56). By reliving the previous incidents of their present crimes, the mortals reveal the functioning of non-changing pure consciousness, the internal observer, at the basis of historical change. The mortals and the dead pair symbolize, through their multiple lives, the unity of mortality and immortality. They represent a synthesis between history (or waking consciousness) and structure (or transcendental consciousness), a synthesis that allows for the dialogue between change and non-change, time and eternity, Form and Emptiness. As Jameson says in The Prison House of Language, “where everything is historical the idea of history itself has seemed to empty of content” (1972: xi). He later adds that "history is the science of the permanent" (97). Through an historical process of self-referral, the dead pair take the mortals beyond ideological closure and toward an integration of transcendental consciousness and history. This process of self-referral swings the awareness from the concrete to the abstract, from the finite historical present to the field of all possibilities, from mental content to the witnessing internal observer. While Jameson in The Political Unconscious defines the “untranscendable horizon” as the totalizing historical context or “Necessity” underlying conceptual systems (1981: 10), Soyinka's drama portrays this horizon as the cosmic context of mythic or expanded consciousness, which does not underlie historical change as much as it permeates it. From the perspective of Sanskrit poetics, the primal reality of Soyinka's transitional realm contains the essence of all space, time, and causality that find expression in the phenomenal world. After the welcoming of the dead couple, the Dance of Welcome is performed by the spirits of the Forest, represented by Demoke, Rola, and Adenebi, who anticipate the future while momentarily possessed. Each of them wears a mask: “The mask-motif is as their state of mind—resigned passivity” (73). This trance-like state represents the settled state of mind and body associated with the transitional abyss. As defined in Sanskrit poetics, this transcendental state is omnipresent and differs physiologically from the waking, dreaming, and sleep states. It can thus be located in the gaps between the other states,

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which are the fluctuations of ordinary consciousness. Soyinka's characters are continually passing through these gaps as they move back and forth between waking and dreaming, mortality and immortality, a process that strengthens their facility for a glimpse of cosmic consciousness. The dead pair listens in suspense to whether or not the future will be more auspicious than the past or present. During the welcoming dance the Dead Woman's Half-Child walks away from his mother's side. He is followed by a Figure in Red, the disguised god Eshuoro who seeks revenge against Demoke for having killed Oremole. At this point Demoke finally comes to his senses and tries to rescue the Half-Child from the fate of being continually “born dead.” Demoke's attempt to free the Half-Child has been interpreted in many ways (Wilkinson 1980: 69-73), but the deeper significance of his intervention, which occurs immediately after an experience of the fourth stage or expanded consciousness, lies in the fact that it represents his first tangible step toward his own redemption. He cannot intervene directly in someone else's fate. The Forest Head could intervene if he desired, but he prefers to create a setting conducive to the mortal's self-discovery. Yet even though Demoke cannot free the Half-Child, any attempt to free oneself through self-purification increases the coherence of the social collective. De-moke's integration of self and community stems from an integration on the level of consciousness achieved through his “rapport with the realm of infinity” (Soyinka 1976a: 2). This coexistence of opposites cannot be understood in terms of vaikhari or madhyama, which are limited to the field of phenomenalization. Rather, the integration of apparent opposites into a primal wholeness, one not susceptible to infinite deferral by the play of différance, consists of the unity of sound and meaning that characterizes pashyanti as available only in expanded awareness. But how do Soyinka's characters achieve this experience? At the end of the play the god Eshuoro, who demands vengeance against Demoke for killing his apprentice Oremole, sets fire to Demoke's tree, from which he falls into the arms of Ogun, the patron god of carvers. Demoke's rebirth is symbolized not so much with words as with ritual dance and music. Abstract conceptual knowledge does not redeem, but rather the total embodiment of knowledge through physiological renewal, as in Demoke's ritual

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experience. Throughout the play, gods and mortals strive for the unity that is always latent, but this unity can only be stabilized in the awareness by means of a self-referral process that unites the knower, known, and knowledge. The impulse toward unity originates not only from the Forest Dwellers per se or from the outside, but also from within each mortal, from his or her inner god as personified by the Forest. Obaniji is not only the Forest Head; he is also a mortal. In his being, he synthesizes mortality and immortality. In a psychological sense, the position of the other in this play is occupied by the past lives of the four characters who are compelled by the Forest Head to undergo the process of self-discovery. The apparent opposition here between the knower (the present self), and the object of knowledge (the past self) is dispelled through the process of knowing provided by the deities, rituals, and ceremonies that Soyinka dramatizes. When the knower, the known, and the process of knowing are perceived as one in terms of consciousness, this unity can be said to characterize the self-referral experience of the transitional fourth space, or zone #1 of the upper left quadrant. As Soyinka's characters move toward the unity of self-referral consciousness, the audience also moves towards this experience by way of devices which, although aesthetic or formal, are nevertheless historically based. These devices cause the awareness of the characters and audience to swing from the concrete to the abstract, from madhyama toward pashyanti, from the sensory and intellectual boundaries of ordinary consciousness toward a coexistence with the unboundedness of transcendental consciousness. One such device is the play's use of formal and thematic gaps such as those between the self and other, past and present, mortality and immortality. The gap between Demoke's present and past lives allows the audience to turn inward, to refer back to the self and to settle momentarily into the realm of infinity. One could even claim that all knowledge has its source in the structure of the gap, the most fundamental gap being the historical and material (that is, physiologically based) difference between the finite waking state of consciousness and unbounded pure consciousness. This gap underlies all other historical differences, such as that between the Soyinka's characters and their deities, as well as that between the various levels of language. Another aesthetic device related to the gap is Soyinka's figura-

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tive language, which he employs as a key to the self. His use of Yoruba symbolism is significant in that it swings the awareness of the audience from the immediate concrete image, such as that of Rola reliving her past crimes as Madame Tortoise, to the abstract concept of that image, which implies the transcending of temporal/spatial boundaries. What matters in Soyinka's use of metaphor is not the referent itself, but reference as an act of pointing. Reference in this sense has the effect of shifting the awareness from concrete rhetorical boundaries to an abstract unboundedness through which consciousness is stretched. This movement allows the awareness of both audience and characters to expand from the temporality and difference of madhyama toward the "difference-cum-identity" of pashyanti (Chakrabarti 1971: 81). The mistake of the intellect, in its projection toward ever more complex diversity, is corrected through the memory of samhita or the three-in-one dynamics of consciousness. Even Derrida's theory of the trace suggests how the awareness swings from the concrete to the abstract, from the finite to the infinite. In Superstructuralism, Richard Harland makes the analogy between the trace and Eastern meditation (1987: 150-51). Both the trace and meditation spontaneously expand the awareness by means of the empty signifier in its move toward a general meaningfulness—defined as the negation or absence of temporal boundaries—thereby swinging the awareness from the concrete to the abstract. While apparently deferring meaning “ad infinitum,” the notion of the trace in fact expands awareness toward transcendental consciousness, which is also the ground for the unity of sound and meaning in pashyantl that the characters and audience in A Dance of the Forests approach through the process of self-discovery . By giving spiritual power to the protagonist through its choric support, the audience is, as Soyinka says, an integral part of ritual drama: The drama would be non-existent except within and against this symbolic representation of earth and cosmos, except within this communal compact whose choric essence supplies the collective energy for the challenger of chthonic realms. (1976a: 39)

Soyinka says that the "ritualistic sense of space" that encompasses the audience is a medium (ibid.). The spatial/temporal apparatus of

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this dramatic medium, which affects all the senses, parallel[s] [. . .] the experiences or intuitions of man in that far more disturbing environment which he defines variously as void, emptiness or infinity. (ibid.: 39-40)

The enactment of Soyinka's drama establishes a spatial medium in which the metaphysical self is materialized through a unity of poetry and dance, name and form, and the “cosmic envelope” contracts to a dimension manageable by the community (ibid.: 41). For both the protagonist and the audience, entering this microcosm involves a “loss of individuation, a self-submergence in universal essence” (ibid.: 42), and thus a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form in the upper left quadrant. The physical and symbolic enactment of Soyinka's ritual theatre re-presents “the archetypal struggle of the mortal being against exterior forces,” and the medium or stage of this cosmic struggle is created for, and brought into existence by, the communal presence of the audience (ibid.: 43). Through its power of suggestion, or dhvani in Sanskrit poetics, the objective medium of Soyinka's ritual drama evokes from the audience a self-referral response. In a process of mutual reciprocity, the awareness of the audience moves from the concrete condition of its terrestrial existence to the spiritual essence suggested by the dramatic medium, whose metaphysical dimension is in turn concretized in the life and consciousness of the audience. For the individual reader of the play, the experience of expansion only lacks the resonance of group coherence glimpsed by the spectators. In terms of language, the awareness of both the reader and audience moves from the sensory, rational realm of vaikhari and madhyama toward the abstract, holistic realm of pashyanti and para. Soyinka's method of stretching the consciousness of the characters and audience through a ritual process of mutual reciprocity or dialogue can be elucidated by the Indian theories of rasa and dhvani. Soyinka's plays elicit the experience of rasa or aesthetic bliss by means of images and other devices intended to produce the loss of individuation and the resulting flavor of unboundedness or bliss—or, one might say, the flavor of rasa itself. Soyinka's themes of individual quest and self-discovery and their corresponding devices serve as vehicles to induce the self-referral experience of freedom from any one emotional response. Nkosi criticizes such nonattachment in what

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he regards as Soyinka's lack of ideological commitment—which in terms of Sanskrit poetics is really a commitment to the silent source of ideology. Because the freedom of knowing the whole gamut of possible responses (the known), constitutes the experience of pure awareness or the self (the knower), rasa produces the experience of the three-fold unity of the knower, known, and knowledge—a process analogous to the experience of the fourth stage of Soyinka's ritual drama. Through the ritual experience of transcending binary oppositions, Soyinka resolves the paradox of destructiveness and creativity in Ogun, and the structural paradox of “the stasis of tragedy and the dynamism of the rebellious spirit” (Gurr 1980: 143). Hence, the experience of the fourth stage is one of silence and dynamism, an integration of unity and diversity that combines pure consciousness and the forms of thought. Though accused of being elitist, A Dance of the Forests produces an effect that goes beyond the intellect and moves toward the simplest form of awareness; Soyinka himself claims that the play is most popular among stewards and cooks (Akarogun 1966: 19). As elucidated by his view of Yoruba mythology and the notion of language and consciousness in Vedic poetics, Soyinka's ritual drama portrays how literature is always implicated in the process of change. In A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka represents Yoruba mythology not as an isolated ahistorical ideal, but as a cultural system enmeshed in the conflicted environments of modern Africa that gives the audience a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form.

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Index of Names Adedeji, Joel 162, 183 Agamben, Giorgio 99 Alexander, C. N. and R. W. Boyer 133 Alexander, Charles N. 71, 72 Almond, Philip 96 Anandavardhana 98 Artaud, Antonin 12, 128 Audi, Robert 83 Barnard, G. William 67 Bauman, Zygmunt 36, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 59 , 60, 107, 109 , 113, 139, 145, 147, 153, 154, 157 Begley, Varun 35, 110, 111, 113 Bennett, Tony 73 Bloom, Harold 35 Bonshek, Anna 8, 30, 44, 79, 124, 151 Boyce-Tillman, June 123, 124 Boyer, R. W. 8, 63, 64, 133, 149 Brustein, Robert 127, 137, 149 Chakrabarti, Tarapada 173 Clarke, Chris 87 Coward, Harold 66, 67 Davies, Paul 88, 89 Davis, Ann 162, 163 De, S. K. 167 Deikman, Arthur 71, 97, 119 Dennett, Daniel 14, 96 Derrida, Jacques 67, 166 Deutsch, Eliot 7, 69, 72, 97, 108, 115 Diderot, Denis 9 Elam, Jennifer 124 Esslin, Martin 29, 34, 57, 58, 59, 109, 123, 129, 140, 163 Fergusson, Francis 126, 137 Fireman, Gary 41, 93

Fleming, John 84, 86, 87, 91, 96, 105 Forman, Robert 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 66, 67, 71 Foucault, Michel 87, 123 Freud, Sigmund 11, 59, 93, 111 Gaensbauer, Deborah B. 58, 79 Gale, Steven 34, 37 Gassner, John 127, 137 Geertz, Clifford 110 Genet, Jean 7, 29, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 147, 153 Gergen, Kenneth 45 Gleick, James 83 Goldman, Michael 69, 95, 97 Grimes, Charles 120 Grinshpon, Yohanan 103 Gurr, Andrew 175 Hagelin, John 167 Haney, William II 13 Harland, Richard 173 Hewes, Henry 109, 117 Hunter, Jim 83 Ionesco, Eugène 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 66, 68, 71, 76, 77, 98, 113 Jameson, Fredric 160, 165 Jones, Eldred 164, 157 Katrak, Ketu 159, 163 Katz, Steven 20, 66, 96 Krishnamoorthy 73, 164 Lahr, John 117 Laurence, Margaret 164 Lodge, David 119 Mariani, Umberto 127, 137 McGinn, Colin 70, 71, 116 Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel 9, 10, 11, 12, 55, 74, 78, 97, 105, 116, 119, 129, 144

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Mikulas, William 120, 121 Musa, Mark 28, 125, 127, 128 Naismith, Bill 33, 34, 35, 40, 47, 113 Ngugi, James 164 Nkosi, Lewis 168, 175 Ogunba, Oyin 168 Osofisan, Femi 161, 162, 169 Pflueger. Lloyd 77 Pinter, Harold 25, 27, 33, 35, 67, 107 Pirandello, Luigi 7, 28, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128 Poggioli, Renato 127, 137 Porush, David 83 Ramachandran, T. P. 98 Rhagavan, V. 12, 74 Richards, G. 133 Ricoeur, Paul 101 Sakellaridou, Elizabeth 37, 108, 109, 112, 113, 116 Sennett, Richard 36, 37, 38, 113 Sharma, Arvind 9

Shear, Jonathan 13, 14, 39, 41, 49, 50, 65, 71, 72, 115, 127, 142 Shepherd, Simon and Wallis, Mick 129 Soyinka, Wole 7, 29, 160-167 Stanislavsky, Constantin 9, 12, 144 Stoppard, Tom 7, 27, 81, 83-107 Suzuki, D. T. 39, 40 Tarlekar, G. H. 98 Taylor, Mark 110 Teasdale, Wayne 104 Teichert, Dieter 101 Tynan, Kathleen 120 Ulmer, Gregory 166 Wallace, Robert Keith 8 Weiss, Aureliu 127, 137 Wilber, Ken 8, 10, 13, 14, 24, 25, 28, 92, 93, 94, 109, 111, 112126, 141, 143,144, 153, 166 Worth, Katherine 33 Zeifman, Hersh 90, 97, 104