Auctor Ludens: Essays on Play in Literature

238 Pages·1986·16.149 MB·English

by  Gerald Guinness, Andrew Hurley

AUCTOR LUDENS
CULTURA LUDENS:
IMITATION AND PLAY IN WESTERN CULTURE
General Editors:
Giuseppe Mazzotta
(New Haven, Connecticut)
Mihai Spariosu
(Athens, Georgia)
Editorial Board:
Umberto Eco (Bologna) ; Paul Feyerabend (Berkeley and Zurich)
Ernst von Glasersfeld (Athens, Georgia); Claudio Guillén (Cambridge, Massachusetts)
Erie A. Havelock (New Haven, Connecticut); Ingeborg Heidemann (Bonn)
Barbara Herrnstein Smith (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) ; W. Wolfgang Holdheim (Ithaca, New York)
Wolfgang Iser (Konstanz) ; Julian Jaynes (Princeton, New Jersey)
Murray Krieger (Irvine, California) ; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (Strasbourg)
Herbert S. Lindenberger (Stanford, California); Louis Marin (Paris)
C. A. Patrides (Ann Arbor, Michigan); Paul Ricoeur (Chicago and Paris)
Brian Sutton-Smith (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) ; Gianni Vattimo (Torino)
Frank Warnke (Athens, Georgia)
Series Consultants:
Matei Calinescu (Bloomington, Indiana); Betty Jean Craige (Athens, Georgia)
Françoise Desbordes (Paris); Achim Eschbach (Essen)
Erika Fischer-Lichte (Frankfurt) ; John Freccero (Stanford, California)
Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, Minnesota) ; James Hans (Winston-Salem, North Carolina)
André Helbo (Bruxelles) ; Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, New York)
Virgil Nemoianu (Washington, D.C.); John Peradotto (Buffalo, New York)
Jean-Pierre Piriou (Athens, Georgia); Steven Rendali (Eugene, Oregon)
Enrico Santi (Ithaca, New York) ; Paolo Valesio (New Haven, Connecticut)
Linda Waugh (Ithaca, New York)
2
Gerald Guinness & Andrew Hurley (eds.)
Auctor Ludens:
Essays on Play in Literature
AUCTOR LUDENS:
Essays on Play in Literature
edited by
Gerald Guinness & Andrew Hurley
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA/AMSTERDAM
1986
The publication of this volume was made possible
in part by a contribution from the
University Research Fund of the University of Puerto Rico
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Auctor ludens.
(Cultura ludens, ISSN 0882-3049; v. 2)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Play in literature. I. Guinness, Gerald. II. Hurley, Andrew. III. Series.
PN56.P53A93 1986 809'.91 86-4247
ISBN 0-915027-20-8 (US) / 90 272 4230 5 (European) (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 0-915027-19-4 (US) / 90 272 4229 1 (European) (hb.: alk. paper)
© Copyright 1986 - All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or
any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
Table of Contents
Preface
Pre-Lude
From Spells to Spills, by Gerald Guinness 1
Superliminal Note, by Roger Shattuck 9
Part I: Authors at Play
1. Playing with the Audience
To "Make" an Audience, or a Night's Dalliance,
by Andrew Hurley 15
Brecht and the Scientific Spirit of Playfulness
by Martin Esslin 25
2. Playing with the Canon
Hagiographic (Dis)play: Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale,"
by Katharina Wilson 37
Playing with Fire and Brimstone: Auctor Ludens,
Diabolus Ludicrus, by William Lewis 47
3. Playing with Authorship
Acts of Willful Play, by Walter Isle 63
The Playful Atoms of Jorge Luis Borges,
by Alexander Coleman 75
Inter-Lude
Play-Translations, edited by Gerald Guinness 91
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part II: The Games of Literature
1. Literature as Game of Pleasure
Amorous Agon, Erotic Flyting: Some Play-Motifs in the
Literature of Love, by Frank Warnke 99
From Play to Plays: The Folklore of Comedy,
by Harry Levin 113
Waiting for the Other Shoe: Some Observations on Rhyme,
by Andrew Hurley 127
2. Literature and Role-Playing
Playing for Life in Donne's Elegies and Songs and
Sonnets, by Gerald Guinness 137
The Games of Consciousness in "The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock," by Mihai Spariosu 157
3. Literature as Existential Play
Games for Death and Two Maidens,
by Christopher Clausen 171
Godot's Games and Beckett's Late Plays,
by Ruby Cohn 183
Post-Lude 191
List of Works Cited 195
Note on Contributors 199
Index 201
PREFACE
Auctor Ludens is a book about play practice rather than play theory. Practice,
no doubt, inevitably presupposes theory--even if by "theory" we only mean those
general assumptions a critic makes about what sort of thing he chooses to say, about
what sort of work; nonetheless, for tactical reasons, we decided in Auctor Ludens to
keep these general assumptions under cover rather than to force them into explicitness,
since we believed that this would allow practice to move about freely (perhaps even to
skip a little) without the encumbrance of a theoretical ball and chain. In other words,
we gave our contributors free rein to discuss whatsoever aspect of literary play caught
their fancy, without briefing them in advance about what "play" was (something we
weren't always sure we knew ourselves!) or where they should be looking for it.
Auctor Ludens may as a consequence lack cogency, the cogency that a predetermined
theoretical program could perhaps have given it, but we think this is more than
compensated for by the variety and even idiosyncrasy of the different forms of "play"
our contributors came up with. Here was a case for paidia or play without rules; play
according to rule and within set boundaries, in other words ludus, could surely come
later.
This decision to make Auctor Ludens a book of paidia-przctice rather than of
ludus-theory should not, however, be taken to imply that we didn't start with, and
remain faithful to, one very general conviction about play--namely, that it has an
incalculable importance for our understanding of literature in general and of
individual works in particular. We acquired such a conviction as a result of reading
Huizinga's Homo Ludens and our indebtedness to that book should be apparent from
the title we have chosen for this one. Nevertheless, it was an indebtedness that
stopped well short of idolatry, for what Homo Ludens seemed to us to lack was any
working out of the idea of cultural play in depth, in terms of a single discipline and
with a copious and detailed analysis of specific cases. Here, we believe, lay the oppor
tunity for a book that took as its starting point just where Homo Ludens left off-and
the result is Auctor Ludens.
The gamut of possible readings of the play idea that our contributors have
turned up is truly astonishing. At one extreme are surface games and mystifications,
evidence of the writer as deliberate "player," and at the other the view that all
literature, from a Petrarchan sonnet to Paradise Lost, is in some sense "playful"; in
between come widely varying expressions of ludic energy and "performance." Play, in
other words, may be interpreted as anything from surface ornamentation to the
viii PREFACE
essential component of any creative activity whatsoever, or as integral to the as if
presumption of all imaginative constructions. This point taken, then criticism too
must alert itself to such a range of possibilities. Indeed, the delightful prospect offers
itself of mounting a flanking action against all current critical orthodoxies, or at the
very least offering a prophylactic against their worst excesses: for example, by
insisting on the author as "playing" his material, thereby strengthening a sense of
authorial intention to set against deconstructional indeterminacy; or focusing attention
on surfaces, and so away from psychoanalytic (or any other) searches for "latent
meaning"; or highlighting the irreducibly anarchic elements in literature, and so
undermining the New Critical emphasis on a perfect match between form and content;
or restoring literature to the realm of self-justifying pleasure, and so snatching it from
the jaws of Marxist instrumentality. Such a paragon of critical method, could it be
conjured into being, deserves a name of its own, and what better one, on the analogy
of the "erotics" of literature proposed by Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text,
than ludics?
Ludics and erotics have in fact a great deal in common. Both of them place
value on skill and performance, on a controlled yet often passionate insincerity, on
creative habits of improvisation and flux within set limits, and on the enhancement of
pleasure. Moreover, they both concede to their subject some of that mystery and sense
of the unknowable for which Denis Donoghue argues in his most recent book The Arts
Without Mystery. Pleasure, performance and mystery: a formidable, and currently
undervalued trinity of virtues. No doubt a concern with them will not exhaust all
that critics will feel the need to say in discussing a work of literature, but bringing
them center stage at least may help to restore to reading, and hence to writing about
literature, much of that bloom of joyousness and unpredictability that many current
approaches to the "text" increasingly threaten to rub off.
Where perhaps Auctor Ludens most conspicuously fails is in eliciting from its
contributors (and not least, from its editors) a playfulness commensurate with that of
the works they examine. We had hoped to be able to demonstrate play as well as write
about it, but play has evidently proved to be a more serious occupation than we had
bargained for; obviously the problem of how to write playfully (but not frivolously)
about play is one that still awaits its solution. We wish subsequent critici ludentes luck
in finding the appropriate tone and hope that their excursions into paidia and ludus
will benefit from the start we have made in Auctor Ludens.
The Editors
Pre-Lude