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A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Howard D. Pearce
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Abstract

The theater-dream metaphor raises fundamental ontological and epistemological questions and treats them in much the same way as phenomenological thought does. Both the metaphor and Edmund Husserl’s theory “reduce” the ontological problem to a play of experience—to activity and process—leaving the final question of what is “real” unresolved. Such activity necessarily involves Heideggerean “dimensions” that are not only open, mobile, temporal, “in play” but also structural, patterning. Examples ranging from Renaissance to modern drama, from the Russian to the American stage, show how dimensions are revealed both as the familiar structures of our thinking (stratifications, circles within circles, temporal delineations, subject-object categories, etc.) and as the structuring principles by which “real” and “imagined” worlds establish relationships. Thus we can move among such implicit structures to consider multiple stage-world relations—the interplay of subjects and objects of experience and concomitant audience-art-artist implications.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 95 , Issue 1 , January 1980 , pp. 42 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1980

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References

Notes

1 David Storey, Three Plays: The Changing Room, Home, The Contractor (New York: Avon Books, 1975), p. 199. Subsequent citations of Storey's plays are from this edition.

2 Storey's plays have had critical recognition for their lyric qualities, but I have seen no treatment of them in terms of the theatrum mundi metaphor. In “Dualism and Paradox in the ‘Puritan’ Plays of David Storey,” Modern Drama, 20 (1977), 131–43, John J. Stinson quotes Storey talking about the Rugby League as a “form of work that goes beyond the merely personal and becomes, like art, something transcending, both to the performer and the observer” (p. 141), but Stinson does not follow up this implication. John Simon's comments on Ewbank's tent make of it a symbol, the “embodiment of work,” and emblem of human endeavor, but not the specifically artistic endeavor that it clearly is (Hudson Review, 27 [1974], 82–83). In “The Ironic Anger of David Storey,” Modern Drama, 16 (1973), 307–16, William J. Free similarly considers the tent raising a “task of labor” (p. 310), identifies the dominant mood of the play as “joy in the act of building the tent” (p. 313), but never notices the theatrum mundi motif. Only after developing my ideas about Storey's play did I discover that Storey himself has made the observation that is most pertinent to my view: the play may be “a metaphor for artistic creation: all the labour of putting up this tent, and when it's there, what good is it?” (quoted, without any comment on the metaphor, by John Russell Taylor. The Second Wave: British Drama for the Seventies [New York: Hill and Wang, 1971], p. 145).

3 Heidegger uses the term “dimension” frequently in the Letter on Humanism, and significantly in Being and Time and in “… Poetically Doth Man Dwell…. ” William J. Richardson, S.J., comments on the metaphorical value of dimension in “… Poetically Doth Man Dwell …” (Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought [The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974], p. 589). For Heidegger dimension is essential to Being, and it underlies even the radical dimensions we talk so much in terms of, space and time. “Everything spatial and all space-time occur essentially in the dimensionality which Being itself is” ‘West ailes Raumliche und aller Zeit-Raum im Dimensionalen, als welches das Sein selbst ist.‘ (Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell [New York: Harper. 1977], p. 213; hereafter cited as BW. The German is quoted from the bilingual text Lettre sur l'humanisme, trans. Roger Munier [Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1964], p. 84.) Heidegger suggests that when we are “just looking” at space, that is, merely casting our unconcerned glance on it, “the environmental regions get neutralized to pure dimensions” (my italics; Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson [New York: Harper, 1962], p. 112; hereafter cited as BT; my page numbers refer to the marginal numbers of this edition, which refer as well to the pagination of the later German texts).

4 Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt, 1972). Michael McCanles has an excellent, instructive discussion of this play in “The Literal and the Metaphorical: Dialectic or Interchange,” PMLA, 91 (1976), 279–90. I go beyond McCanles, however, on the question of open dimensions. McCanles explores two worlds, those of “the daylight world of the literalist Theseus” and “the nighttime, forest dreamworld of Oberon, Titania, and Puck” (p. 282).

5 The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973). Showing how Renaissance drama is under the pervasive Platonic influence, Cope treats La vida es sueno in terms of the allegory of the cave (pp. 245–60). He does not, of course, explore dimensionality in terms of my treatment here. In Metathealre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), Lionel Abel traces the development of a reflexive theater in modern times. Other treatments of the metaphor include those of Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto and Windus, 1964); William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library. 1966); and Dieter Mehl, “Forms and Functions of the Play within a Play,” Renaissance Drama, 8 (1965), 41–61. In the same volume as Mehl's study is Jackson I. Cope's “Bartholomew Fair as Blasphemy” (pp. 127–52), in which he describes the pig booth as “that center within the center of the fair” (p. 142).

6 These dimensions in Bartholomew Fair have been commented on. See. e.g.. Jonas A. Barish. Ben Jonson and the Language of Prose Comedy (New York: Norton. 1970). p. 236.

7 Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. Eugene M. Waith (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963).

8 My use of the term “imagination” may require some comment. It has been analyzed from the phe-nomenological vantage by Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976). Casey treats imagination as an image-presenting faculty, but he does not pursue implications that are there, I think, in the instances he uses for analysis (pp. 26–33). Instead of taking examples from imaginative literature, he begins with simpler imaginative moments of his own, describes them, and identifies qualities of “act-phase” and “object-phase.” Subtly manifest, though perhaps not in the sharp objects of imagination or in the freedom of the acts, is an impulse to make connections and completions. Casey observes in his “dolphin” episode that an “intrinsic but unknown ordering principle seemed to be at work throughout” (p. 27). This aspect of the imagination seems more important to me than to Casey. It is a metaphorizing faculty, as Wallace Stevens insists in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (New York: Random, 1951), pp. 71–82. It is involved in the play of mind between dimensions—subject and object, stage and world, and so on. For a discussion of the imagination in terms of associationist principles, going back to Hume in opposing Sartre's view of the imagination, see Mary Warnock, Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1976).

9 Burke, Counter-Statement (Los Altos, Calif.: Hermes Publications, 1953), pp. 45–51.

10 Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 103–09. Interestingly, Robert Fludd uses the relation of the theater model to the subjective dimension as a mnemonic device. For a provocative discussion of Fludd's method see Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 136–61. Interiorized spatiality is explored by Georges Poulet in The Interior Distance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1959).

11 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 8.

12 Calderôn de la Barca, Life Is a Dream, trans. Roy Campbell, in Six Spanish Plays, ed. Eric Bentley, Vol. iii of The Classic Theatre (Garden City, N.Y.: Double-day, 1959), p. 432.

13 Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking?, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper, 1968), p. 71; hereafter cited as WCT.

14 Plato, The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1963), pp. 90–91.

15 In my article “Virtu and Poesis in The Revenger's Tragedy,” ELH, 43 (1976), 19–37, I focused on Vin-dice as artist figure. I cite the play from the Revels Plays text, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1966).

16 Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck, trans. Dounia B. Christiana (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 36.

17 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Beyond Bourgeois Theatre,” trans. Rima Drell Reck, Theatre in the Twentieth Century, ed. Robert W. Corrigan (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp. 131–40.

18 Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p. 25.

19 Alexander Ostrovsky, Five Plays, trans, and ed. Eugene K. Bristow (New York: Pegasus, 1969), p. 426.

20 E. D. Hirsch would agree with Heidegger about hermeneutics (Validity in Interpretation [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1967], pp. 76–77), but Hirsch sees the author as a strictly biographical being (pp. 1–23) rather than as an artist, who, in my view, shades from the historically unique individual to the type. The artist is less a preconception than an anticipation. Berel Lang sees the work's “intentionality” answering audience's “expectation” (Art and Inquiry [Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1975], pp. 171–87).

21 The artistic construct is an object of experience both for the audience and for the artist himself. Playwright stands before play as Treplev stands before his play. Reverberating among the dimensions of subjectivities and objectivities involved in the aesthetic event are the “polyphonic harmonies” of Roman Ingarden (The Literary Work of Art, trans. George G. Grabo-wicz [Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973]). These harmonies are what make a literary work art, and they require of the audience an “aesthetic attitude” (pp. 369–73).

22 “La Joie absurde par excellence, c'est la création” (Albert Camus, Essais [Dijon: Gallimard, 1965], p. 173).