Postmodern Theater & the Void of Conceptions

169 Pages·2006·1.32 MB·English

by  William S. Haney II

Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions

Postmodern Theater and the Void of Conceptions

By

William S. Haney II

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

This book first published 2006 by

Cambridge Scholars Press

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2006 by William S. Haney II

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

ISBN 1-904303-65-X
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface.................................................................................................................vii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Index..................................................................................................................155

PREFACE

This book argues that, by allowing to come what Derrida calls the
unsayable, the theater of Tom Stoppard, David Henry Hwang, Caryl
Churchill, Sam Shepard, Derek Walcott and Girish Karnad induces the
characters and spectators to deconstruct habitual patterns of perception,
attenuate the content of consciousness, and taste “the void of conceptions”
(Maitri Upanishad). While the experience of the sublime is often associated
with the grandeur of sayable qualities, to comprehend the unsayable involves
shifting our attention from conceptuality toward the direct experience of non-
thought after the exalted qualities of the sublime have run their course. The
unsayable in this sense also implies a radical defamiliarization insofar that it
does not have a propositional status that lends itself to a narrative framework
with a definite meaning. What the nine plays analyzed in this book do over
and above dramatizing their thematic content is to take their characters and
audience from the level of object awareness toward a taste of contentless pure
awareness—the silence beyond conception that is simultaneously the source
of thought.
The unsayable (and the language used to convey it) that Derrida finds in
literature has clear affinities with the Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta.
Derridean deconstruction contains as a subtext the structure of consciousness
that it both veils with the undecidable trappings of the mind and makes to
come as an unsayable secret through a play of difference. As J. Hillis Miller
puts it, Derrida’s “intuition (though that is not quite the right word) of a
certain unsayable or something unavailable to cognition is, I claim, the
motivation of all his work” (2001, 76). This intuition emerges from that
which is immanent as well as transcendent. It pervades everything, but is not
limited to the expressions of worldly phenomena. In revealing the idiomatic
style through which a particular work invokes the other, tracing its secret,
Derrida brings the reader toward the unsayable, which, as I argue here, is
available only to a nonpluralistic consciousness. In his radical approach to
literature, Derrida hints at a connection between language and subjectivity
found not in Western philosophy but in the Indian theory of language.
Like deconstruction, the nine plays analyzed below invoke that which is
unavailable to ordinary comprehension: namely, the nontemporal
connectedness of meaning and consciousness. In this version of metaphysics,
what is gathered up or united does not close anything off, but remains open
and boundless, inviting a unity-amidst-diversity. The sacred events of stage
drama do not represent absolute reality or universal truth because no
viii
conceptual context is absolute and because sacred events involve a void of
conceptions. An unsayable experience cannot serve as the ground for truth or
even propositions because it is not in itself propositional. While cognitive
knowledge includes a cultural context and linguistic background, the
unsayable is not a form of cognitive knowledge, but rather an experience
through which language and consciousness unite. Furthermore, the nine plays
that this book argues induce a void of conceptions originate in a variety of
cultures, indicating that these encounters with the sacred are cross-cultural
and even trans-cultural events. The plays are thus universal because they can
un-construct the intentional objects of consciousness for spectators anywhere
through aesthetic experience.
Western drama theorists and playwrights are still trying to understand the
trans-verbal nature of presence, the transpersonal quality of performance,
and the relation between performer and spectator. As argued here, the
theater of Stoppard, Hwang, Churchill, Shepard, Walcott and Karnad, in
leading to a self-transformation of characters and spectators, suggests that
witnessing consciousness or the internal observer lies behind all cultural
constructs as a silent beyond-ness, and immanently within knowledge as its
generative condition of unknowingness.

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

1. The Plays: Life after Unconstructed Identity

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