Integral drama : culture, consciousness and identity

185 Pages·2008·0.581 MB·English

by  William S. Haney II

Integral Drama
Consciousness
15
Liter& ture
the Arts
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 7

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 177

Index of Names 183

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 first-
person 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 Charac-
ters 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 conscious-
ness.
The three ordinary states of consciousness are waking, dreaming
and sleep, and the higher states include the fourth state of pure con-
sciousness (Atman or turiya, the fourth), cosmic consciousness and
unity consciousness. As Eliot Deutsch says in Advaita Vedanta, pure
consciousness or
8 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 func-
tion 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 wak-
ing 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 9

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 Di-
derot focuses on the relation between actors and audience, Stan-
islavsky 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 conscious-
ness.
In Theatre and Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future
Potential, Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe explains the link between higher