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Una Chaudhuri

Modern Drama, Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 1984, pp. 281-298 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/mdr.1984.0027

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mdr/summary/v027/27.3.chaudhuri.html

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The Spectator in Drama!

Drama in the Spectator
UNA CHAUDHURI

[A] text consists of multiple writings, issuing from several cultures and entering
into dialogue with each other, into parody, into contestation; but there is one place
where this multiplicity is collected, united, and this place is not the author, as we
have hitherto said it was, but the reader.
Roland Barthes I

The theoretical maneuver by which the reader came to occupy the space vacated
by the disappearing author did not remain unquestioned for long. The readerwhether it be the "mock-reader," the "model reader," the "implied reader," the
"super reader," or even the "real reader (me)"2 - could hardly withstand the
pressure exerted by contemporary literary theory upon any construct in which
meaning can be grounded (or, as Barthes says, "collected, united"). The
"multiple writings" which Barthes found playing through and pulverizing the
once closed, organic, stable, objective, autonomous text ~ould hardly remain
absent from the reader. They soon appeared, in the forms either of the
institutional codes and conventions of semiotic theory (see Culler's "literary
competence"3) or of "interpretive strategies," shared, cultivated and enjoined
by the fact of one's membership in "interpretive communities."4 Barely
installed as a literary fact, the autonomous reader was revealed as a critical
fiction, the latest in a series that has included the autonomous author and the
objective text. If the reader remains at all, it is as a psychologically unique
individual (the actual person reading) imprinting private fantasies, desires and
neuroses, in a radically personal way, upon the text. 5 This reader is a construct
of little theoretical use to literary study, though not without attraction to literary
theologians desirous of justifying the existence of literature. 6
Thus, from the denial of the reader (the affective fallacy) to the elevation of
the reader (the affective fallacy fallacy7), criticism has arrived, in a few short
decades, at the extinction of the reader (the affective fallacy fallacy fallacy?).

UNA CHAUDHURI

However, the explosion of this promising construct has not been concluded
without considerable fallout. Reader-response criticism - a very mixed bag of
critical writings sharing an orientation towards the role of the reader - has
contributed greatly to the specification of the critical and pedagogical
enterprises, generating a set of terms and articulating a range of issues that have
had no less an effect than that of irreversibly altering the path ofliterary studies.
Preeminent among these issues is that of the locus and nature of literary
meaning, with its attendant inquiry into the question of how such meaning can
be apprehended and described. The most extreme response to this question is
probably that of Stanley Fish, for whom meaning is reading, and vice versa.
Defining meaning as an event rather than a content, Fish argues for a criticism
that describes - in minute detail - the dynamics of this event, revealing the
work's meaning as a response to the question: "what does this text do to its
reader?" Thus the text is "no longer an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event,
something that happens to, and with the participation of, the reader.,,8
The preponderance of words like "event," "participation" and "happens" in
Fish's discourse, as well as that of words like "performance," "activity" and
"process" in the discourse of reader-response criticism in general, would lead
one to expect this criticism to be particularly suited to and productive in the
study of drama. In fact, however, the drama is conspicuous by its absence from
the concerns of reader-oriented criticism. Neither as literary type nor as
theoretical model does drama enter here9 (in contrast, for instance, to its
ubiquity as theoretical model in the social sciences 10). This situation is already
being remedied, no doubt, as testified by Patrice Pavis's recent essay on "The
Aesthetics of Theatrical Reception: Variations on a Few Relationships. " I I
Pavis opens his discussion with a description of the present state of this line of
inquiry, not neglecting to highlight the paradox of its paucity in the one field
seemingly most suited to it:
The theatrical work has always been subjected to a very detailed analysis of its working
parts, an analysis which has described even the most insignificant mechanisms of
composition and function. But the question of its reception by the spectator seems to
have been totally neglected, except for the famous instance of catharsis or its Brechtian
counterpoint, alienation. Such is the paradox of theatre criticism: more than any other
art, theatre demands, through the connecting link of the actor, an active mediation on the
part of the spectator confronted by the performance; this happens only during the event
of aesthetic experience. Nonetheless, the modalities of reception and the work of
interpreting the performance are very poorly understood. I2

Why this should be the case is a great deal more complicated than Pavis
suggests: he accounts for it in terms of the "suspicion about theory of reception,
which has been accused of idealism because it is too centered on the perceiving

Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

subject and too far removed from a structural description of the performance."
That such a suspicion exists is certain, but why it should paralyze dramatic
criticism while being overcome in the criticism of poetry and the novel is
mysterious. The success (or at least progress) of reader-response criticism of
other literature and its nondevelopment in drama criticism hint at the existence
of deeper problems.
Reader-orientation in drama criticism is hampered by the preexistence of
another sort of reception problem in drama study: the problem that dramatic
texts appear to have at least two "addressees." Whereas novels and poems are
addressed directly to their readers (although one must distinguish between
readers belonging to different historical periods and cultural contexts - readers
from the work's original time and place, and those from other times and places
in which the work is read), plays are addressed to spectators through
performers. Or, to put it differently, the reception of a play involves a
"relay"-like process: the play is "received" first by performers and then by
spectators. Nor does the plurality of addressees stop here. Dramatic texts are
also read, usually (but not always) after they have been produced (thUS adding
another step in the relay process, for the production experience may well alter
the way texts are read). Moreover, the existence of contemporary as well as
later receivers, noted in the case of novels and poems, also holds true for plays,
and is exacerbated by the continuation and repetition, over time, of the relay
process that distinguishes the dramatic text to begin with. The extension of the
map of drama's addressees over that of a map of literature's addressees is
expressed in the following table:
Drama

Other literature

(a) contemporary performers

(b) contemporary spectators
(c) contemporary readers

contemporary readers

(a) later performers

(b) later spectators
(c) later readers

later readers

It should be noted that groups (a) and (c) - both in the contemporary and the
later case - though performing the same physical act (reading), do so for
altogether different reasons. (a) reads in order to perform, that is, in order to
produce an aesthetic experience (in (b, while (c)'s reading is the aesthetic
experience. The two activities are wholly different, therefore, involving
distinct interpretive procedures and decisions. (This is not to say that no
overlapping of interpretive strategies will occur in the readings of (a) and (c):
indeed, to the extent that both share the same cultural and ideological codes,

UNA CHAUDHURI

their interpretations will coincide to a large extent. Nevertheless, the

performer-reader will constantly tailor his interpretation to fit within the
constraints set by the conventions of his theatre, a process that may even
involve drastic censorship of the text.)
The state of affairs is actually greatly more complicated than my table
suggests. None of the groups occupying the four boxes is by any means
homogeneous. For example, the group "contemporary spectators" will include
subgroups and individuals having greatly varying degrees of "dramatic
competence," not to mention very different cultural orientations. In the case of
most dramatic types, spectators will be present who occupy a number of
different positions on such social and intellectual continua as rich-poor,
educated-illiterate, sophisticated-naive, refmed-vulgar, etc., and such psychological continua as attentive-inattentive, serious-casual, sensitive-insensitive,
etc. This sort of variation within groups is bound to be far greater in the case of
drama's addressees than in that of other literature, the former's reception
occurring in the context of a social event in which one engages for many
(nonaesthetic) reasons, including self-display, status seeking and tourism,
whereas the latter's is the result of an activity usually pursued for its own sake.
The multiplicity of addressees in drama reveals its force as an obstacle to a
reception-oriented drama criticism when we consider the transformation such
criticism effects on traditional categories. According to Umberto Eco, "every
reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it,
because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself. "13
The application of this idea to literature has the effect of collapsing the hitherto
distinct but essentially complementary activities of reading and writing,
making this essential complementarity into an essential identity: not writing
and reading, but reading/writing. The text processes the reader and the reader
processes the text, the two operations occurring not successively but simultaneously. Thus reader-response criticism "gradually breaks through the
boundaries that separate the text from its producers and consumers and
reconstitutes it as a web whose threads have no beginning and no end."I4
The problems arising in any attempt to apply the notion of reading as
performance to drama can be found even at the simple level of terminology. To
say that the reader of a novel "performs" this novel is relatively clear, not
involving the transformation of any other traditional category. To say that the
spectator or reader of a play performs the play is far less acceptable, for the
obvious reason that there already exists a distinct performance category in
relation to drama. Of course, this terminological problem can be solved by
keeping in mind that the spectator's/reader's performance is a mental event,
while the performer's performance is physical. In the case of a staged play, this
would then involve the existence of two performances, the mental one carried
out by the spectator and the physical one carried out by the performer, the latter
being preceded by another mental performance (the performer's reading of the

Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

28 5

play text prior to staging it). It may be argued that it is a question here not of
several performances but of several texts (each "reading" involves the putting
into operation of different deciphering, decoding and interpretive strategies
which "produce" different "texts" altogether). This position, which has the
effect of denying the objective existence of a text independent of the way
readers "process" it, puts the whole critical project into question. If there are no
texts but only "readings" (which is what the term reading/writing implies),
what are these readings readings oj? If only of themselves (as Fish's notion of
"interpretive communities" suggests: reading, he says, is an activity that
"processes its own user"15), then what is criticism but another performance of
its own inherent categories, strategies, prejudices? Fish's response to this
apparent circularity is to accept it, urging the superiority of "an interpretation
that is at least aware of itself' over one "that is unacknowledged as such. "16
Nevertheless, the difference between the activity of the reader of a literary
work and that of literary critics writing on that work is at least apparent (if
highly problematic). One expression of this perceived difference lies in the
development of a branch of reader-response criticism devoted not to the
interpretive activity of the individual (time-less) reader, but rather to the history
of responses to a literary work. Rezeptionsgeschichte, or the history of
reception, associated with, among others, Hans-Robert Jauss, takes as its
project the survey and analysis of a critical discourse extended over time and
adhering to specific works. While this metacritical discourse is aimed largely at
identifying the various aesthetic and ideological codes. that organize and
articulate criticism in various periods of history, and as such falls outside the
domain of literary criticism strictly defined, it can be undertaken at times to
solve problems ofliterary history - why a given play or novel succeeded at one
time and not another, why a work meant one thing at one time and something
else at another - and so can contribute indirectly to the traditional critical
project: interpretation.
The critical discourse studied in this way need not be (and has not been) restricted to the past. In an essay on "The Discourse of Dramatic Criticism,"17
Patrice Pavis concludes a discussion of the plurality of theatrical "metalanguages" with an analysis of "a corpus of 32 texts published in the French and
English press on Measure for Measure, directed by Peter Brook at the Bouffes
du Nord in November 1978." Pavis's discussion of this "more or less complete
sampling" has the modest aim of comparing "common points and thematic
divergences, ideological presuppositions and a few stylistic 'tics"'1S - no
attempt is made to arrive at a systematic or rigorous classification of codes and
procedures at work in this body of writing. 19 That a more thoroughgoing
exposition would be possible, and that the discourse studied need not be restricted to journalistic responses to productions but can encompass academiccritical writings as well, are demonstrated by (among others) Richard Levin's
recent study of contemporary Shakespearean criticism20 , which (though far

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UNA CHAUDHURI

removed in intention from reception theory, being indifferent to the ideological

bases of criticism) is a model of completeness and categorization.
Spectator-oriented dramatic criticism has before it two options: it can attempt
to study the processes - psychological, semiotic, ideological - by means of
which the individual spectator receives (or construes) the meaning of a play
(these processes themselves being perhaps - following Fish - the meaning); or
it can develop, in a more precise and code-conscious way, the already old
tradition of studying the historical fortunes of a play. The two options are not,
of course, mutually exclusive: the spectator's response being a matter of
experience rather than of intellect, it can be apprehended mainly in records of
it, even if the spectator was oneself (the I who writes as critic is different from
the I who experienced the play).
The question of the spectator's response, or more precisely, of its
apprehension for theoretical purposes, plunges us into a central issue of
reader-response criticism: the question as to whether the responses a work of art
can elicit are implicit, implied, inscribed - whatever, and to whatever degreewithin the work itself. In short, does art guide the responses to it?
To ask this question is, of course, to slip back into the position of maintaining
that a text - in however mysterious or multiple a form - exists, a claim denied,
as mentioned earlier, by Fish (and others). Fish will not deny, however, that the
notion of a text exists, sanctified by our "interpretive community," and this
notion may well be a sine qua non (though possibly an acknowledgedly
fictional or conventional one) of contemporary criticism.
To what extent can a play direct - or at least restrict - the spectator's
(potentially limitless) responses to it? There are few instances in drama theory,
as Pavis notes, of explicit attention to the spectator's experience. The most
famous of these - Aristotle's catharsis and Brecht's alienation - are both
articulated, significantly, as principles of dramatic composition and theatrical
production. Although both Aristotle and Brecht display a distinctly moral
concern with spectators' actual experiences (catharsis and alienation are both
"good for us," though for very different reasons), the emphasis in their
discussions is clearly on textual inscription. Both hold the position that the
causes (stimuli, clues, directions, etc.) of the spectator's response can be and
are inscribed within the play and can, consequently, be discovered there, read
out of the play. Spectator-response criticism, this suggests, can take as its
object of study the text itself, as other (author- and text-oriented) criticisms
have done. It is a matter only of changing the angle of vision to focus more
exclusively on those elements of the play which do something to the spectator,
call forth or create some sort of response, be it ease, acceptance, comfort,
security (characteristic responses to what Brecht called the "culinary theatre"),
or unease, embarrassment, confusion, bewilderment, terror, etc.
Having decided to investigate the spectator's response as it is structured into
the play, we now face the perennial problem of deciding what (or where) the

Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

play is - is it the play script, the production, or the individual performance?
Aristotle's response-paradigm (catharsis) would seem to be capable of a more
complete textual inscription than Brecht's, although "alienation" too is a
function of many devices that can be recorded in the text (such as the episodic
structure, the songs, the ironic use of language in dialogue, and even certain
scenic elements). Many other alienation devices - particularly acting style are purely theatrical.
I shall not attempt to solve this problem here (it may have no solution);
however, the following application of spectator-response criticism will, I hope,
explore and help to specify the issue. The play I have chosen, Peter Shaffer's
Equus, has the virtue of having elicited a sort of critical response which
highlights the problematic of dramatic affect. Writings on the play, especially
early journalistic ones but also more scholarly treatments, exhibit a curious
schizophrenia typical of much contemporary response to theatre. This
schizophrenia takes the form of a theoretical dichotomy between "drama" and
"theatre," the former being roughly synonymous with "intellectual depth" or
"originality of ideas," the latter referring mainly to matters like staging, acting
and scene design.
The problem with this dichotomy is revealed when it is applied to
postrealistic drama, which no longer contains those elements upon which this
definition of "drama" is based. Patrice Pavis, discussing the discourse of
dramatic criticism, points to this very fact:
[a] "time lag" (or "out of sync") can be observed in the evolution of the critical apparatus
which has been developed and adopted for classical dramaturgy (which can be made to
span from classical seventeenth-century tragedy to the naturalistic "well-made play").
It corresponds to a dramaturgy founded on segmentation into acts and scenes, on
characters representing a certain individuality, and on an illusionist mode of acting. The
critical vocabulary describing this genre is extremely precise and readily normative.
However, as soon as it is used, through lack of other tools, to account for modem forms,
the results are as imprecise as they are misleading. 2 I

In the case of Equus, the classically based critical apparatus yields a negative
judgment, framed in terms of the drama-theatre dichotomy. Frequently charged
with intellectual superficiality, staleness and even dishonesty, 22 the play
nevertheless compels critics - in the light of its huge theatrical success - to
remark upon what is termed either its "packaging" or its "brilliant staging"
(depending on how the critic feels about the dichotomy). Jack Richard's
judgment is typical. Equus, he says, is:
a perfect case-study in the mediocrity of insight necessary nowadays for the play to enjoy
a popular reputation for profundity. From the schematic psychology to the simpleminded cultural criticism, there is nothing in this play that either informs us what life is

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UNA CHAUDHURI

or what it ought to be. It is all contrivance, all middle-class whines and whimpers ....
And yet ... I have to say that the presentation of this nonsense has a galling merit to it. 23

In short: good theatre, bad drama.

That so much Equus criticism has been an attempt to extract the play's ideas
is partly due to the nature of the play itself, which has all the marks of "serious
drama." Its central situation seems to belong to a category firmly established,
long before being perfected by Ibsen, in eighteenth-century "bourgeois drama":
the conflict between the individual- part free soul, part social product - and his
society. Alan Strang, the play's passionate young antihero, is in danger of
being sacrificed to the deadly demands of a conforming society. Society's agent
is Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist charged with domesticating this free soul, as
obsessively self-critical a protagonist as any in Ibsen. The encounter between
these two familiar types engages the familiar dilemmas of democracy
structured into hundreds of realistic plays: can society permit its citizens to
indulge an independence of spirit which, while it affords them the opportunity
to experience life profoundly and elementally, also risks unleashing destructive
forces that could ruin society? From a different point of view, can such
authenticity of experience remain pure in a necessarily compromising,
repressive environment? Will it not inevitably isolate the individual so utterly
that he will tum violent, go mad, ruin himself?
The implied inevitability of such effects proceeding from such causes, an
inevitability that is really a convention strengthened by countless instances of
its dramatic use, is the hidden backbone of Equus. It is what ensures that a
certain "reading" of the fictional events will occur. This reading is further
promoted by the delayed-exposition structure of the play: as play-time moves
forward, it carries the spectator backward in fictional time, encouraging him or
her mentally to construct a narrative of causality to stand against the
discontinuous, achronological representation one actually witnesses.
There is yet another way in which Equus prompts the spectator to seek a
coherent set of ideas in it. The play employs a version of the stage-house
relationship that achieves a Brechtian effect. By seating part of the audience on
stage, on "tiers of seats in the fashion of a dissecting theatre ,"24 it manages to
shift the audience's experience away from that of usual play watching and
toward one of assisting at a lecture-demonstration. This unconventional
arrangement subtly affects the status of the play. The on-stage activities, it
suggests, are there not simply to be watched and enjoyed, but rather to be
actively observed, as one observes, say, a scientific experiment, or a trial.
What we see are simply the facts; it is up to us to evaluate them, to derive their
significance, to interpret their meaning. This implied interpretive sanction to
the audience is only apparent. In actuality, the play deploys bits of information
carefully selected to guide the emerging mental narrative along a fairly narrow
path.

Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

To promote the desired reading, Peter Shaffer has recourse to one of the most
well-established of modem myths: Freudian psychology. In responding
intellectually to a case of madness, a modem audience will draw first upon this
paradigm, the author can safely assume, evoked for them by various catch
phrases and cliches strewn throughout the play: transference, abreaction,
repression, superego, etc. Not surprisingly, the most notorious feature of the
Freudian paradigm, the Oedipus complex, provides the play with its central
relational model. Frank Strang, Alan's father, is the embodiment of the
repressive, authoritarian father, and is opposed by his wife, Alan's mother,
protective, indulgent, insidiously overpowering. It is her influence on the boy,
we are convinced, that has resulted in his peculiar obsessions.
Into this familiar nursery drama (primarily responsible for the critical
dismissal of the playas bad - i.e., intellectually stale - drama), Shaffer
introduces one more element, also conventionally associated with Freud
(indeed, the main sign of Freudian thought to the popular mind): sex. The
worship of Equus turns out not to be entirely spiritual: its central ritual involves
a naked gallop in a midnight meadow, ending in orgasm. On the basis of this
repeated experience, it is suggested, the boy has come to believe that his is a
jealous, omniscient god who demands absolute fidelity. This conviction is
responsible for his impotence with the girl Jill, which in tum leads to his final
desperate attack on the accusing gaze of the all-seeing God.
Thus, at one level, the play "answers" (or, more precisely, allows the
spectator to believe he or she has answered) the "question" that lies on its
surface: why did Alan do what he did? The process of this answer is a process of
passive reading, the valorizing and mobilizing of cliches (in this case,
fragments of a central modem myth: Freudian psychology).
Critical disappointment with this part of the play leads some to focus on a
secondary theme, this one revolving around the psychiatrist, but no more
satisfying, ultimately, than Alan's theme. The elaboration of this part of the
play employs the same method as the first did - its logic is the logic of cliche.
The organizing myth here is the Romantic myth of the Noble Savage or mad
artist, presented here in its most updated, R.D. Laingian version: the psychotic
as poet. Dysart is the type of the mid-century culture hero, disillusioned with
modem civilization, uncomfortable with his role in it, disgusted even with his
safe style of dissent. He sees himself as a servile priest of the Normal, turning
unique individuals into uniform, standardized parts of the social machine.
Believing Alan to be possessed of an authenticity rarely seen in modem society,
he looks upon his own attempts to "cure" the boy as nothing less than homicide:
... that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life.
And let me tell you something: I envy it. . .. Such wild returns I make to the womb of
civilization. Three weeks a year in the Peloponnese, every bed booked in advance, every
meal paid for by vouchers, cautious jaunts in hired Fiats, suitcase crammed with

UN A CHA UDHURI

Kao-Pectate! Such a fantastic surrender to the primitive. And I use that word endlessly:
"primitive." "Oh, the primitive world," '" I sit looking at pages of centaurs trampling
the soil of Argos - and outside my window he is trying to become one, in a Hampshire
field! ... I watch that woman knitting, night after night - a woman I haven't kissed in six
years - and he stands in the dark for an hour, sucking the sweat off his God's hairy
cheek! ... Then in the morning, I put away my books on the cultural shelf, close up the
kodachrome snaps of Mount Olympus, touch my reproduction statue of Dionysus for
luck - and go off to the hospital to treat him for insanity. (pp. 94-95)

Eloquent as Dysart is about his dilemma, he is hardly original. The view that
madness may be the price of ecstasy or the mark of penetrating wisdom is as old
as Plato. More recently, the suspicion that insanity may be a culturally
determined label for political and social oppression has been established in the
popular mind by such works as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Bell
Jar. 25 Hence the second strand of the play's intellectual level , like the first, fails
to provide the insights expected from serious drama. When seen as all the play
has to offer, it produces a judgment of the playas a crude subterfuge which
promises "some significant glimpse of the truth," but leaves us instead "with a
bogus or trivial message. "26
To dismiss the play at this point, however, may be a sign of critical
shortsightedness, a stopping short. More importantly, it may be an example of
the critical failure to distinguish between what a play says (or seems to say) and
what it does to the spectator. Although it may appear, from what they say about
the play, that spectators value primarily the so-called "ideas" they have
"discovered" in it, a critical study of spectator-response quickly reveals this
response to be other than intellectual. (It is clear, for instance, that it is not just
the Freudian explanation that is satisfying, but rather the process, enjoined by
the play's structure, of arriving at this explanation.)
A striking feature of Equus is that it itself incorporates several instances of
dissatisfaction with the Freudian paradigm. Mrs. Strang challenges it directly,
insisting that Alan alone, and not his past, is responsible for what happened:
We're not criminals. We've done nothing wrong. We loved Alan .... Our home wasn't
loveless. I know about privacy too - not invading a child's privacy .... No, doctor.
Whatever's happened has happened because of Alan. Alan is himself. Every soul is
himself. If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to
this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing - because that's him: not just all of
our things added up. (p. 90)

Dora's position, even if it is motivated by a desire to exonerate herself, is

remarkable. It flies in the face of the cozy causal narrative that spectators have
been encouraged to construct. It is, in fact, the mark of a rival paradigm of
madness: madness as the unknown. Dora herself cannot resist naming this
unknown, taming it. She does so by pouring religion into its structure:

Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

29 1

You've got your words, and I've got mine. You call it a complex, I suppose. But if you
knew God, Doctor, you would know about the Devil. (p. 91)

Thus, against the Freudian paradigm of madness, Dora sets up the Demonic
paradigm. Though not as fashionable, this latter is no less familiar, having
prevailed for centuries before ours.
However, it is not Dora but Dysart who introduces the paradigm that
structures the play at its deepest level. The implications of this paradigm have
little to do with the so-called ideas received as the Brechtian, lecturedemonstration, intellectual level of the play proceeds. Rather, they are
structured into the play in such a way that they operate at an experiential level,
while the spectator's conscious attention is being diverted by the activity of
"constructing" the Freudian narrative. The latter is necessarily and perhaps
deliberately simplistic, serving only as a convenient, shared fable used to draw
the audience into a collectivity upon which the deeper level of the play can
work. The process has been partly noticed by Gifford, who ascribes the play's
success to the fact that, "[p]erhaps in Shaffer's skillful mixture of truth,
banality and pretension there is something for us all .... something that gratifies
our universal fantasies about our therapists" and indulges "a very common" fear
"that our symptoms cannot be removed without destroying our creativity. "27
But the paradigm that structures Equus at the deepest level does more than
fulfill fantasies. And it is this paradigm that accounts for the theatrical power of
Equus, a power coded in the play text itself, not independently endowed by an
'
imaginati ve director.
In his first speech, Dysart introduces the central image of this paradigm:
" ... of all nonsensical things," he says, "I keep thinking about the horse! Not
the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do" (p.21). While for Dora it is
Alan who is the "remainder" ofthe Freudian equation, for Dysart it is the horse.
The terms with which he describes it at the opening of Act Two bring us even
closer to the nature of the paradigm:
I can hear the creature's voice. It's calling me out of the black cave of the Psyche. I shove
in my dim little torch, and there he stands - waiting for me. He raises his matted head.
He opens his great square teeth, and says - (mocking) "Why ... Why Me? ... Why ultimately - Me? ... Do you really imagine you can account for Me? Totally, infallibly,
inevitably account for Me?" (pp. 87-88)

"[T]he black cave of the Psyche" is, in Equus, the storehouse of irreducible,
unfathomable images, images that defy domestication by any causal analysis. It
is the embodying of one of these images that Shaffer has in mind in the stage
directions for the blinding scene:
[the] horses appear in cones of light: not naturalistic animals ... but dreadful creatures
out of nightmare. Their eyes flare - their nostrils flare - their mouths flare. They are
archetypal images - judging, punishing, pitiless. (p. 122, my emphasis)

29 2

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The theatrical power of Equus has often been attributed to the horses with
their surrealistic wire masks, their eerie humming noise, their "precise" and
"ceremonial" movements. At least one critic has recognized this power to be
central to the playwright's conception, not just a director's happy invention:
Indeed, both theatrically and dramatically, the Equus form proves pivotal in achieving a
coherent whole in the play. Without uttering a single line of dialogue, Equus determines
the fates of all the play's central characters, thereby demanding close scrutiny by
audiences and critics alike. 28

Such scrutiny reveals that it is not only the play's central characters but also its
spectators that "the Equus form" affects. Its role in the play goes far beyond that
assigned to it in the Freudian narrative: the role of obsessional object and
victim. The number and manner of its appearances on stage, as well as the
intention expressed by the playwright about its realization ("They are
archetypal images"), give us a clue to the existence of a hidden responsestructure in the play, a structure masked by the rationalistic, analytical terms of
the surface structure. In short, there is an archetypal paradigm at work in
Equus, not merely as a theme or an explanatory mechanism, but as something
directing the spectator's experience.
In Symbols of Transformation, Jung surveys the horse myths of diverse
cultures. All of them, he finds, "attribute properties to the horse which
psychologically belong to the unconscious of man: there are clairvoyant and
clairaudient horses, path-finding horses who show the way when the wanderer
is lost, horses with mantic powers. "29 The horse is frequently "a symbol of the
animal component in man," which accounts, Jung says, for its "numerous
connections with the devil" who has a "horse's hoof and sometimes a horse's
form. "3 0 This Christian version of the archetype appears in Equus, as we have
seen, through Dora. Other traditional attributes are also evoked, the most
striking of which is energy. Jung writes: "Since the horse is man's steed and
works for him, and energy is even measured in terms of 'horse-power,' the
horse signifies a quantum of energy that stands at man's disposal. It therefore
represents the libido which has passed into the world."3 1 That the worship of
Equus is an exalted celebration of libido is clear to Dysart as he gazes lovingly
at it from within the confines of his sterile marriage:
He lives one hour every three weeks - howling in a mist. And after the service kneels to a
slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee
worship! ... Many men have less vital with their wives. (p. 93)

The compelling power of the horse archetype is perhaps primarily a function

of its universal associations with man's animal nature. The most graphic
representation of this aspect of the archetype is the mythic centaur, half man,

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293

half horse. In Equus, this archetype is realized theatrically - the horses are
represented by masked actors - and is ubiquitous. The spectator's analytical
activity is frequently interrupted by the eruption on stage of Equus , an image of
man's participation in prerational, preverbal forces. This image gathers within
it a host of psychological associations, developed over the course of historical
human experience:
The horse ... is ... an animal of darkness, representing unbridled instinct, night (the
mare as in "nightmare"), and terror. As a nourishing force, the horse is said to be able to
force water out of springs by stamping his hooves. In a medieval French epic concerning
the four sons of Aymon, their famous horse Bayard did just that. In psychological terms,
the horse symbolizes the unconscious world: imagination, impetuosity, desire, creative
power, youth, energy, and sensuality .... A white horse implies majesty, as when Christ
mounted one (Rev. 19: 1 I). It brings death, however, when an overly impetuous outlook
is allowed to flourish. "And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on
him was Death, and Hell followed him" (Rev. 6:8).3 2

That these associations may well be active within the fiction (i.e., as an
explanation, along with or beyond the Freudian explanation, of Alan's
behavior) does not mean they are restricted to this area of the play. Even within
the fiction, the horse organizes more than Alan's narrative: it is not only Alan
but also Dysart who identifies with the horse, experiencing it as a relentless,
irreducible question within the self. In the play's final moments, he confesses:
And now forme it never stops: that voice of Equus out of the cave - "Why Me? ... Why
Me? ... Account for Me!" ... In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do - yet I do essential things .
... There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out. (p. 125)

Beyond the fiction, the horse archetype is able to structure the spectator's
experience of the play because Shaffer emphasizes one particular attribute of
the horse more than any other. Many legendary horses, according to Jung, are
clairvoyant. Alan's god is all-seeing. His portrait in Alan's bedroom at home,
says Dora, "is a most remarkable picture, really. You very rarely see a horse
taken from that angle - absolutely head on." "What does it look like?" asks
Dysart. "Well, it's most extraordinary. It comes out all eyes." "Staring straight
at you?" "Yes, that's right ... " (p. 52).
Of course, this information gets accommodated easily in the linear narrative
of Alan's dementia, which ends in the blinding of six horses. However, this is
not its only role in the play. It finds an echo - a far more muted one - in the
dream Dysart recounts. In this dream, Dysart is a priest in ancient Greece,
performing a macabre mass-child-sacrifice during which he gets progressively
sicker. The dream hardly needs interpretation - its supposed meaning is as

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UNA CHAUDHURI

obvious to Dysart as it is to us: it symbolizes his growing professional

skepticism and increasing sense of guilt at performing what he fears may be a
form of spirit murder. This is the "meaning" of the dream at the play's
intellectual level.
Itsfunction, however, may be that of introducing, through certain repeated
key words and images, a semantic field already being cultivated elsewhere in
the play. Twice in his account Dysart mentions that his assistant priests are
wearing "lumpy, pop-eyed masks" (p. 29). The second time, after they have
discovered his sickness, "their gold pop-eyes suddenly fill up with blood" (p.
30). Twice, also, Dysart mentions the name of the place in the dream: it is
Argos - called "horse-grazing Argos" in The Iliad, the place where the earliest
known representations of centaurs were discovered. 33 The word also recalls
Argus, the giant with a hundred eyes.
The semantic field evoked through these repetitions has to do with sight,
especially unnaturally powerful or threatening sight. In a way, Freud's favorite
myth is central to Equus, though it is not Oedipus the patricide but rather
Oedipus the self-blinder who matters here.
The play's emphasis on eyes, sight and blindness in developing the horse
archetype is related to the theatrical paradigm that lies beneath the "thesis-play"
paradigm of its surface. Just as Jungian archetypes seem to remain after the
Freudian analysis, so the Brechtian style of the presentation is actually set
within an experience much closer to the kind envisioned by Artaud. In other
words, the distance, critical judgment and rationalization implied by the
lecture-hall type of seating arrangement are merely convenient ways of
implicating the audience, of using its rationalistic predilections to get it to
participate in what is - experientially - a secular ritual.
The proposition that Equus belongs to the Artaudian kind of theatre has been
systematically tested by Helene Baldwin in an essay entitled "Equus: Theatre of
Cruelty or Theatre of Sensationalism?"34 Her conclusion, that "the play is soap
opera; the direction is theatre of cruelty plastered on over the plot, "35 is based on
the preponderance in the play of psychological themes, for which Artaud had
no use: "Such preoccupation with personal problems disgusts me;" psychology
on stage "works relentlessly to reduce the unknown to the known, to the
quotidian and the ordinary, [and] is the cause of the theatre's abasement and
fearful lack of energy .... "36 Nor does Shaffer's inclusion of religious themes
seem to Baldwin to qualify his playas Artaudian, for the concept of religion in
the play is found to be "limited and one-sided, "37 in the service of cheap
eroticism.
There is no doubt that the intellectual level of Equus lacks the awe and
mystery Artaud envisioned. But this level is merely the avenue into the play's
experiential core. Artaud believed that only ancient myths could provide such
an avenue; Equus demonstrates that it is not defunct myths but living ones -like
psychoanalysis - that will weld the group into a collectivity and allow ritual

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295

participation. Such participation, involving the spectator in the drama by

carrying the drama into the spectator, was to Artaud the essence of the theatre's
alchemical process, allowing it to transmute the basely quotidian and individual
into the pure, transcendent and collective:
There is a mysterious identity of essence between the principle of the theater and that of
alchemy .... Where alchemy, through its symbols, is the spiritual Double of an operation
which functions only on the level of real matter, the theater must also be considered as
the Double, not of this direct, everyday reality of which it is gradually being reduced to a
mere inert replica ... but ofanother archetypal and dangerous reality, a reality of which
the Principles, like dolphins, once they have shown their heads, hurry to dive back into
the obscurity of the deep. 38

Equus has two response-structures, layered one above the other and corresponding to the two kinds of reality Artaud mentions ("direct, everyday" and
"archetypal ... dangerous"). The spectator is carried into the drama by the
former, the mechanism of his involvement being the galvanizing of popular
myths and cliches; the drama is carried into the spectator by the latter, the
mechanism being the horse archetype as realized and defined in the play.
Primary in this definition is the emphasis on eyes and sight. As such, the play
stresses that aspect of the horse archetype which is coincident with the primary
condition of theatre: to be seen. The stage of Equus is encircled by watching
eyes. The audience, Argus-like, has gathered to see, to be shown, to be
enlightened. Like Oedipus, it must know who it is, and like him, it will learn of
its own blindness. In the ritual of Equus, the spectator will participate at several
levels, observing, thinking, interpreting and, finally, experiencing. While
ritualistic chants, made up of the cliches and catch phrases of our culture, keep
the spectator's mind occupied, the archetype conspires with the theatrical
moment and rears its head before the collective. Thus, what seems an
intellectual inquiry is in effect an encounter with myth, with what Artaud called
"historic or cosmic themes," "the great preoccupations and great essential
passions which the modem theater has hidden under the patina of the
pseudocivilized man. "39 Equus draws the spectator into Dysart's "black cave of
the Psyche."
The archetype is coded into Equus as thoroughly as its rationalistic opposite.
If the latter disappoints (critics), it does so necessarily, revealing the ultimate
inadequacy of intellectual schemes in accounting for human experience, an
inadequacy we recognize, if only secretly, an inadequacy symbolized in the
mysterious unfathomable image of Alan's man-horse-god, Equus.
Significantly, the response-structure inscribed in Equus (of which the
compositional counterpart is that of a secular ritual, disguised, as so many
rituals are in the modem world, in rationalistic terms) is analogous not only to
alchemy but also to psychotherapy:

UNA CHAUDHURI

The psychotherapist seeks to encounter the unconscious, to understand some of its

contradictions and antagonisms as well as its creative elan. To transform what is
negative into a positive and fruitful orientation or ruling principle of the personality is his
goal. In so doing, the psychotherapist is elevating unregenerate matter (a leaden
condition) or chaos into a new golden sphere or cosmos. 40

The action of Equus on the spectator is analogous to that of the play's

psychiatrist on his patient - both are processes of discovery, journeys into the
unconscious, encounters with the irrational parts of the self. Just as Alan uses
commercial jingles to ward off this encounter, the play supplies the spectator
with a set of safe, familiar "objective" terms to protect himself with. In both
cases, an illusion of individual control is encouraged which permits the ritual
experience - be it the initiation of the patient into his individuality or of the
spectator into his collective identity - to occur.
It is worth pointing out that, in the foregoing response-oriented analysis of
Equus a curious complicity is revealed between two paradigms of theatre
usually regarded as organizing radically opposed spectator-responses: the
Brechtian and the Artaudian. While both Artaud and Brecht take as their points
of departure the paltry, passive responses inscribed in realist drama, the
alternatives they suggest seem to constitute two wholly different spectators.
Brecht's spectator is observer, critic, thinker, judge; Artaud's is ritual
participant. The dichotomy thus introduced into twentieth-century theatrical
thought and practice is a reflection of the dichotomy suffered by the West since
the Enlightenment, and now in the process of decay.
Equus is simply one example of a general trend in modem drama away from
intellectualism or, more precisely, through and beyond intellectualism,
towards experience. The critical problematic to which this drama gives risean example of what Pavis calls the "time-lag" of critical discourse - can begin
to be overcome by cultivating a spectator-oriented criticism. The description of
how a play works on a spectator - rather than of what it means - can supply the
terms our criticism needs in order to erase the gap between theory and its object.
NOTES

"The Death of the Author," in Sallie Sears and Georgianna W. Lord, eds., The
Discontinuous Universe: Selected Writings in Contemporary Consciousness
(New York, 1972), p.12.
2 For a brief and amusing survey of hypothetical readers suggested by various
critics, see Robert Rogers, "Amazing Reader in the Labyrinth of Literature, "
Poetics Today, 3, NO.2 (1982), 31.
3 Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of
Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1975), Chapter 7, pp. 131- 160.
4 Stanley E. Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," Critical Inquiry, 2 (Spring 1976),
465-485.
I

Spectator in Drama/Drama in Spectator

297

5 Nonnan N. Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven, 1975).

6 See Jane P. Tompkins, "An Introduction to Reader-Response Criticism," ReaderResponse Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, 1980), p.
xx.
7 Stanley E. Fish, "Literature in the Reader: The Affective Fallacy Fallacy," in
Tompkins, p. 82.
8 Fish, "Literature in the Reader," p. 72.
9 Tompkins's anthology of reader-response criticism includes an extensive bibliography; the section on theoretical studies contains no works on drama, that on
application only two, both articles.
10 For instance, in the work of Erving Goffman and Victor Turner.
II Patrice Pavis, Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of Theatre
(New York, 1982), pp. 67-94.
12 Ibid., p. 70.
13 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts
(Bloomington, Ind., 1979), p. 49.
14 Tompkins, p. xi.
15 Quoted in Tompkins, p. xvi.
16 Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum," in Tompkins, p. 179.
17 Pavis, pp. 95- 107.
18 Ibid., p. 102.
19 Pavis's purpose in this essay is not to develop a reception theory, but rather to
argue for a more rigorous critical vocabulary even in journalistic criticism.
20 Richard Levin, New Readings vs. Old Plays: Recent Trends in the Reinterpretation of English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1979).
21 Pavis, pp. 100- 101.
22 See, for example, John Simon, "Hippodrama at the Psychodrome," The Hudson
Review, 28 (Spring 1975),97-106.
23 Jack Richardson, "The English Invasion," Commentary, 59 (February 1975), 78
(my emphasis).
24 Peter Shaffer, Equus (New York, 1974), p. 13. All subsequent page references are
to this text and will appear in parentheses after the quotations.
25 Anne Jones, "Thomas Szasz' Myths of Mental Illness and Peter Shaffer's Equus,"
Proceedings of Asclepius at Syracuse (Albany, 1980), p. 282.
26 Sanford Gifford, "A Psychoanalyst says Nay to 'Equus' ," The New York Times, 15
December 1974, Sec.2, p. 5g .
27 Gifford, P.5~.
28 C.G. Gianakaris, "Shaffer's Equus: Monster in Man's Soul," paper delivered at
the Modem Language Association Convention, 1978.
29 C.G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1967), p. 277.
30 Ibid.
3 I Ibid., p. 42 I.
32 Bettina L. Knapp, Theatre and Alchemy (Detroit, 1980), p. 75.
33 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: I (New York, 1960), p. 208n.

UNA CHAUDHURI

34 West Virginia University Philological Papers, 25 (1979), II8- 127

35 Baldwin, 126.
36 Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New ,
York, 1958), pp. 42,77.
37 Baldwin, 1 2 3.
38 Artaud, p. 48 (my emphasis).
39 Ibid., pp. 87. 12 3.
40 Knapp. p. 2.