Integral Drama

Consciousness
&
Liter ture
the Arts 15

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
10 Integral Drama

states of consciousness and key aspects of theatre, ranging from the

creative process, the actor’s involvement, aesthetics, and audience
reception. His book analyzes the relation of theatre to consciousness
not only to enhance our understanding of theatre but also to reveal
how theatre serves as a vehicle for developing higher states of con-
sciousness, or enlightenment, known as moksha in Indian philosophy.
As an explanatory basis for his analysis, Meyer-Dinkgräfe also draws
upon The Natyashastra and points out that theatre consists of two
areas related to consciousness, production and reception, which
involve the following eight aspects of theatre: dramatist, play, director,
actors, designers, spectators, venue and theatrical experience. These
aspects in relation to consciousness entail a wide range of questions
about theatre that he attempts to answer, focusing especially on how
theatre affects the spectator and why spectators react the way they do.
Theatre and Consciousness demonstrates that a comprehensive an-
swer to the key questions on theatre would have to address not only
recent developments in consciousness studies but also The Natya-
shastra, which he approaches through a novel Eastern perspective on
consciousness studies known as Vedic Science.
Although Meyer-Dinkgräfe presents Indian aesthetics through
Vedic Science with the disclaimer that he does not have the final
answers to all the questions relating to theatre, his book provides an
outlook on theatre to be taken up in an ongoing debate. Although
personally convinced of the arguments here, I also invite further
theoretical response and empirical research. Meyer-Dinkgräfe begins
his book by investigating the nature of inspiration and the creative
process, which has also been investigated by the philosopher Ken
Wilber. Like Wilber, Meyer-Dinkgräfe connects the reality of inspira-
tion and the creative process to altered states of consciousness, spe-
cifically in this case from the perspective of Advaita Vedanta. He
examines the experience of playwrights such Alan Ayckbourn, Chris-
topher Hampton and David Mamet, as well as of the composer
Johannes Brahms, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the
novelist Franz Kafka. The inspirational experiences of these artists
across different genres reveal common characteristics associated with
altered states of consciousness, which suggest that these states
transcend the notion of a constructed self defined by contextualists as
the sole basis of human identity. In response to critiques against
inspirational experience, Meyer-Dinkgräfe provides ample counter
 Introduction 11

evidence from modern psychology, including the theories of Freud

and Jung, as well as from writers such as John H. Clark, who
identifies various faculties involved in mystical experience. As we
shall see in the present book, these faculties include knowledge, unity,
eternity, light, body sense, joy and freedom. On the basis of Advaita
Vedanta, the mind consists of increasingly subtle levels, ranging from
sense, desire, mind, intellect, feeling, ego and pure consciousness,
which correspond to the increasingly subtle states of consciousness,
ranging from waking, dreaming, sleep, pure consciousness, cosmic
consciousness, refined cosmic consciousness, and unity consciousness
(as explained in greater detail below), with each of the latter being
associated with different modes of perception. According to The
Natyashastra, an artist’s creative inspiration is not a fantasy, but rather
mirrors the process of cosmic creation on the level of the individual’s
experience of pure consciousness.
The fact that a dramatist engages pure consciousness through
creative inspiration suggests that this experience would naturally be
reflected in the characters. We can differentiate two aspects of con-
sciousness in dramatic characters, the ordinary states of consciousness
and the development of consciousness to higher states throughout the
play. As examined here, the ordinary states of consciousness include
waking, dream and deep sleep, while the development of con-
sciousness extends from waking to pure consciousness and beyond.
We can see a detailed development of the different states of con-
sciousness in the context of specific plays, notably Shakespeare’s The
Tempest and Hamlet. In analyzing Shakespeare, Meyer-Dinkgräfe also
draws upon Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras and the Bhagavad-Gita. For
example, in The Tempest, Prospero’s development hinges on his use
of magic, which he finally abandons. His magical skills parallel the
powers or siddhis described in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and the fact
that he abandons them allows for two interpretations of his state of
development: either he does not achieve enlightenment or moksha at
the end of the play, given that he does not attain all the siddhis men-
tioned by Patanjali, or the siddhis that he does gain symbolize all of
them and therefore he does gain moksha, through he abandons these
powers at the end of the play. Similarly, Hamlet finally “accepts di-
vine providence as the guiding principle of (his) life” (Meyer-Dink-
gräfe 2005: 52), and thus like Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita restores
12 Integral Drama

cosmic order. Unlike Arjuna, however, whose spiritual development

was guided by Lord Krishna, Hamlet dies at the end in retribution for
his mistakes.
Given that dramatic characters usually undergo a change of
consciousness, we can ask the question of whether or not actors
should become emotionally involved with the sentiments of the roles
they play. Theories on this include those of Diderot, Pinciano, de
Salas, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, Strasberg, Block, Barba,
Mnouchkine, Grotowski and Artaud. Meyer-Dinkgräfe argues that
drama theorists and performers need to develop a performative means
to “ensure that the performer is enabled to experience higher states of
consciousness during performance” (2005: 91). While The Natya-
shastra discusses yogic techniques that condition the mind and body
to function at higher states, other traditions in Western theatre may
offer similar techniques, but as yet these are hypothetical and need to
be tested empirically. It may be advisable, however, to follow the
insights of the Indian philosophical and aesthetic tradition, which has
the advantage of enlightened spiritual masters who can supply a
methodological approach already proven to be effective.
This book, Integral Drama, critically explores modern drama in
the context of Indian aesthetics as presented by The Natyashastra and
Advaita Vedanta, focusing specifically on how Indian theatre
aesthetics has influenced drama theories and practice, and to what
extent this has promoted the development of higher consciousness in
actors and audience. A review of some of the main principles of
Indian aesthetics, including the theory of rasa or aesthetic rapture, will
help in this approach. According to Indian aesthetics,

Rasa is here used to mean such bliss as is innate in oneself and

manifests itself [. . .] even in the absence of external aids to happiness.
It emphasizes that the bliss is non-material, i.e. intrinsic, spiritual, or
subjective. (Rhagavan 1988: 198)

The Natyashastra describes how fully developed actors can perform to

create rasa in the spectator; moreover, several modern theatre artists
such as Ray Reinhardt have already taken inspiration from this treatise
and from Indian philosophy in general.
To elaborate on how rasa takes effect, I will deal with empirical
spectators, not just hypothetical constructs. This book also addresses
the prominent issue of the language of theatre. Given that theatre is
 Introduction 13

often said to have its source in ritual, theatre in tune with Indian
aesthetics is understandable in terms of Vedic ritual, known as yagya,
a practice for attaining higher consciousness. Moreover, post-
modernism arguably suggests that the search for translumination,
language of nature, presence and total theatre represents a search for
an experience of higher states, and that the postmodern concept of the
decentered self in Lacan also points in this direction (see Haney 2006:
chapter 3). As mentioned in terms of Advaita Vedanta, pure con-
sciousness when established in cosmic consciousness can witness all
mental and physical activity. At this stage, the more expressed levels
of the mind, such as ego, intuition and feeling, intellect, mind, desire,
and senses, are also more developed. One can therefore express
whatever is latently available on the level of pure consciousness, for a
division no longer exists between pure consciousness and our
(symbolic) expressions of it, whether in conscious discourse, behavior
or culture.
Demastes’ approach to theatre is similar to Meyer-Dinkgräfe.
Damastes, however, takes a materialist, bottom-up approach, while
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, as does this book, takes an abstract, top-down
approach to the link between theatre and consciousness. Overall, this
book will explore the relation between theatre and higher states and
demonstrate that one of the key purposes of theatre is to help the
spectator access the pure consciousness event described in con-
sciousness studies by theorists such as Ken Wilber, Robert K. C.
Forman, Jonathan Shear and others. As Forman says, “the dis-
tinguishing mark of the pure consciousness event is that it is not
described as an experience of something” (1999: 75, original
emphasis). He further explains in The Innate Capacity that “If one
truly forgets all concepts and beliefs for some period, then those
concepts and beliefs cannot play a formative role in creating the
mystical experience(s). This forgetting model shows how at least
some forms of mysticism—that is, the pure consciousness event, a
wakeful but objectless consciousness—should be viewed as decon-
textualized” (1998: 7, original emphasis).

Narratives and Identity

I will now briefly analyze Narrative and Consciousness—edited
by Gary Fireman, Ted McVay and Owen Flanagan who define iden-
14 Integral Drama

tity solely in terms of contextualization or narrative—in order to con-

trast the conventional modern understanding of identity with the
Vedic tradition as applied in the following chapters. Narrative and
Consciousness deals with the role of narrative in the development of
conscious awareness; narrative and autobiographical memory; auto-
biographical narrative, fiction, and the construction of self; narrative
disruptions in the construction of self; and the neural substrate of nar-
rative and consciousness realization. In contrast to the present book,
this collection argues that narratives not only pervade our lives but are
essential to conscious experience because the personal stories we
construct about experience allow us to reflect upon our self-identity
and communicate with others. In explaining how narrative relates to
consciousness, this volume employs what Flanagan calls the “natural
method” to examine

the relations among the findings, concepts, and methods of

phenomenological, psychological, and neurobiological analyses of
narrative and consciousness, recognizing that each line of analyses has
legitimate aims. (2003: 3)

In their approach to narrative and consciousness, the authors intend to

“corral consciousness by paying attention to how it seems (its
phenomenology), what mental labor it does (its psychology), and how
it is realized (its neurobiology)” (4). The editors, however,
conspicuously omit any mention of consciousness by itself, focusing
instead mainly on the content of consciousness. In support of 20th-
century Western philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett who
take an intellectual as opposed to a first-hand experiential approach to
consciousness, the book agrees with the stance that “the portions of
human consciousness beyond the purely somatic—self awareness,
self-understanding, and self-knowledge—are products of personal
narratives” (4). The editors and contributors contend, therefore, that
narrative not only allows us to describe, communicate or examine the
self, but that in fact “narrative constructs the self” (5). In contrast to
the stance held by perennial psychologists such as Robert Forman,
Ken Wilber, Jonathan Shear and others, this approach implies that the
self has no extra-linguistic dimension, that it does not extend beyond
the conscious content of mind as rendered by narratives.
In order to avoid subjectivism, the editors explain how nar-
ratives, whether in theatre or fiction, are a public medium that can be
 Introduction 15

observed, shared and influenced by their cultural contexts. Any time

we tell a personal story, we are influenced by an audience, either
present or anticipated, which results in tensions between real events
and how we rhetorically re-present them to others in an effort to
persuade. Following the work of Owen Flanagan, the book presents an
interdisciplinary approach to narrative and consciousness sensitive to
a “phenomenological seeming” yet restricted by the intellect through
the empirical findings of psychology and cognitive science (2003: 6).
In one sense, therefore, the book focuses on already established
research based on “credible naturalistic analysis” (ibid.). To its credit,
the book attempts to coordinate phenomenological and scientific
approaches, in spite of what some philosophers claim to be the in-
commensurability of science and phenomenology. The book chal-
lenges this conventional view, although in coordinating science and
phenomenology it restricts itself to that realm of experience available
only through narrative. This leads to an analysis not so much of
narrative and consciousness per se, but to an analysis of narrative and
the contents of consciousness.
Katherine Nelson, who critically examines how narrative
promotes the emergence of consciousness as related to the self, argues
that communicative discourse and the disposition to narrated events
that impose meaning on behavior has the effect of expanding a child’s
consciousness. Narrative in this case belongs to the developmental
stage of the child’s entry into a linguistic community. It helps the
child develop a sense of self and become aware of the social world of
subjective experience. Nelson concludes that “A new level of con-
sciousness emerges in the early childhood years that is based on the
differentiation of the self-awareness of the early years and the self-
and-other awareness of the transition period” (2003: 33). This new
consciousness depends on language and communication with others,
not on the experience of awareness per se. Similarly, Valerie Gray
Hardcastle argues that not only does narrative foster the emergence of
consciousness in childhood, but also that a child’s selfhood emerges
through continuous narrative activity that promotes linguistic and
cognitive development. A child from the beginning attempts to
understand the world by assigning meaning to it. This meaning-
making process fosters a child’s affective development by enhancing
16 Integral Drama

his or her conscious awareness of the surrounding world. Hardcastle

shows how

memory and cognition become instrumental processes in the service

of creating a self. [. . .] As we tell and retell stories of ourselves either
[ . . .] we are in effect shaping our memories of these events, making
them more and more a part of who we are. (2003: 47)

As we shall see in contrast to the present study of drama, both Nelson

and Hardcastle take a conventional view by focusing on the content of
consciousness, a Western approach that does not address the nature of
consciousness itself as the witness of language, self and meaning.
Similarly, David C. Rubin and Daniel L. Greenberg explore the
role of narrative in autobiographical memory. They examine indi-
viduals with neurological impairments such as autism in order to
understand the relationship between bodily structure and its cultural
context. Rubin and Greenberg analyze how the recollection of
personal events by adults involves two things: narrative reasoning and
the support of multiple neural systems in the brain. Any “full-blown”
autobiographical narrative depends on the integration of neurological
and psychological elements. The authors illustrate this by comparing
normal adults to those suffering from damaged neural systems vital
for recollection to succeed. They conclude that

for research on autobiographical memory and recollection, the relative

role of the brain as a metaphor is shrinking in relation to the role of
the brain as physical entity about which a great deal is known. (2003:
77).

In a sense, Rubin and Greenberg, like the other authors of this volume,
tend to reduce the narrative self to brain functioning and behavior
rather than examining the self in terms of consciousness as a state of
Being.
Sidonie Smith also takes a constructivist approach to identity,
but instead of relating the self solely to its neural or subatomic
quantum level she examines autobiographical memory in terms of its
sociocultural, historical and political contexts. In exploring the
connection between autobiographical memory and scientific studies,
Smith analyzes the interrelation between narrative and its material
context in the case of an autistic woman. The elements that constitute
autobiographical subjectivity such as language, experience, and cul-
 Introduction 17

ture may, as Smith argues, relate to our socially induced identity, but
no evidence suggests that they constitute consciousness per se.
Although she emphasizes how the storied self is situated in culture,
she like the other authors in this volume does not tackle the question
of how the self can also escape its cultural context, as exemplified by
the plays analyzed below.
Mark Freeman argues that even though autobiographical
narrative may falsify experience through its literary elements, this re-
construction of the past does not undermine the capacity of narrative
for depicting reality or historical truth. The aesthetics of fiction, in
other words, does not obviate narrative reality. Freeman argues that

we do not live only in the time of clocks. We also live in the time of
stories, and through this time it is sometimes possible to see things
and to feel things that could not be seen or felt earlier on. (2003: 125)

He thus concludes that autobiographical narrative is quite complicated,

more so than “the fiction/reality opposition tends to convey” (127).
This position at least hints at the unbounded nature of consciousness
and the ability of the self to transcend the limits of language and
narrative.
James Phelan expands upon this narrative fusion between
fiction and nonfiction, focusing on the ethics of representing the
content of consciousness. In analyzing the retrospective pseudo-
autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, he focuses on the dual
identity of the protagonist Humbert Humbert who is a represented
character as well as a representing character with the conscious
agenda of trying to persuade the audience to be sympathetic toward
his relationship with Lolita. Humbert’s design reveals a conflict within
him regarding the ethics of being both a character and the narrator of
his surreptitious activity.
The authors also explore how a breakdown in the construction
of self results in a corresponding disruption in personal narrative.
Lawrence L. Langer analyzes how the suffering of Holocaust
survivors affected their autobiographical narratives. The intensity of
such suffering causes the victims to be obsessed with death long after
their trauma, as if they had died in the concentration camps yet
paradoxically continued to live a semblance of life. In one example,
Langer shows how a victim has to find “a way of expressing the idea
18 Integral Drama

that the meaning of one’s life can no longer be separated from the
meaningless death of others” (2003: 163). Similarly, Robert A. Nei-
meyer and Finn Tschudi examine how people who experience troubles
and conflicts tend to express themselves through disrupted narratives.
Improved coherence in personal narrative, they argue, results in
improved well-being, particularly in a clinical setting. They suggest
that such therapeutic techniques would benefit the Western criminal
system and argue that “the social construction of crime in Western
cultures reinforces a dominant narrative of conflict as an offense
against the state and the appropriate societal response as one of
retribution” (185), and hope that their study will encourage others to
understand human engagement with losses and conflicts. While this
proposal has its value, an experience of consciousness per se beyond
narrative, as suggested by the World’s Contemplative Traditions,
would prevent loss and conflict to a much greater extent. As Forman
explains in The Innate Capacity,

That we must tie all percepts and thoughts together Kant calls the
‘supreme principle of understanding.’ If he is correct, then we must
leave room for a consciousness that is not part of intentional thoughts
and perceptions so it can tie them together. (1998: 17, original
emphasis)

Unlike a socially constructed identity based on narrative, therefore,

consciousness is decontextualized because it is without parts; as For-
man puts it, “I cannot phenomenologically tease out its constituent
parts or elements; any parts or elements would be known only by
consciousness” (1998: 24, original emphasis).

Grassroots Spirituality
While socially constructed identity may indeed depend on a
variety of narrative genres, many people throughout the world have
had ineffable experiences beyond ordinary waking consciousness and
the conceptual, narratable content of the mind. The conceptual state of
mind does not encompass the unsayable dimension of the sublime,
aesthetic experience (rasa) or mystical revelations. In 1997 Robert
Forman and his team of colleagues received a generous grant from the
Fetzer Institute to conduct research on the range and extent of what
they call the Grassroots Spirituality Movement in the United States,
resulting in the book Grassroots Spirituality: As they discovered, this
 Introduction 19

movement includes “Buddhists, Neo-advaitan meditators, Esoteric

Christians, Renewal Jews, Taoists, spiritual healers, the spirituality in
business consultants, and so on” (2004: 17), with signs of Grassroots
Spirituality erupting everywhere across the US and around the world.
As Forman’s book documents, between a third and a half of all Amer-
icans say that their lives have been seriously impacted by spiritual
experience; 23% say they regularly practice yoga, meditation or other
exercises to reduce stress; 59% of Americans consider themselves
both spiritual and religious, while 20% considered themselves only
spiritual; 12% have had personal experience of a spiritual figure such
as God, Jesus, Elija, Mary or Buddha; and 41% say they have had a
miraculous experience. Most of these experiences in their immediate
first-person dimensions transcend narrative expression.
One purpose of his study, Forman writes, was to “determine if
this loose gaggle of seekers could communicate or develop into
something like a community across the great religious divides” (2004:
18). If so, Forman speculates that we may find a way to solve the
ancient religious conflicts that have plagued humanity throughout its
history. On the basis of extensive interviews with people from a wide
range of religious and spiritual backgrounds, Forman and his team
found that grassroots spirituality developed more or less sponta-
neously among ordinary people without a founder or the organization
of a singular leadership. In fact, a new profession has emerged con-
sisting of “spiritual leaders and teachers” who help people develop
through their own first-hand spiritual experiences beyond narrative
accounts. A remarkable thing about this leadership, moreover, which
is primarily non-traditional, is that it does not form a hierarchy but
rather a collection of spiritual seekers from all walks of life.
Through extensive interviews, Forman found that spirituality
carries the “inner” overtones associated with Western and Eastern
schools of meditation, thus pointing to an introvertive experience that
is not strictly rational. In the tentative definition Forman offers,

Grassroots spirituality involves a vaguely panentheistic ultimate that is

indwelling, sometimes bodily, as the deepest self and accessed through
not-strictly-rational means of self transformation and group process
that becomes the holistic organization for all of life. (2004: 54)
20 Integral Drama

Not to be confused with pantheism (which holds that the deity is the
universe and its phenomena), panentheism is the doctrine “that all
things are in the ultimate, that is, all things are made up of one single
principle, but that one principle is not limited to those worldly
phenomena” (52). The analogy he gives is that all the fish in the ocean
are constituted entirely by the ocean, but the ocean, instead of being
limited to the fishes, is panentheistic to them. In describing the
panentheistic ultimate that is immanent within yet transcendent to the
individual, Forman provides testimonies from people of diverse
religious traditions and spiritual paths, including Christians, Jews,
Muslim Sufis, Buddhists, practitioners of the Transcendental Medi-
tation technique, Yoga teachers, Eco-feminists and many others. He
concludes that while the Grassroots Spirituality Movement springs
from every major religious and spiritual tradition around the world, it
shares a worldview and set of experiences of far greater depth and
specificity than previously understood. Indeed, the evidence provided
by Grassroots Spirituality supports the conclusions of Forman’s ear-
lier book, Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness, that spiritual experience,
contrary to claims by constructivists such as Stephen Katz, is not a
linguistic or cultural construct but rather a trans-cultural, trans-rational
experience based on a pure consciousness event. People from all cul-
tural, religious and spiritual traditions share common panentheistic
experiences.
For example, a Jewish respondent describes the panentheistic
spiritual ultimate as “a formless, eternal reality that lies at the heart of
all forms. It’s something that is one, beyond our usual apprehension
of space and time. It’s like quietness within, the still point of the
turning world.” Similarly, a Muslim Sufi leader describes the
panentheistic as follows: “Spirit is behind everything. It is the hidden
aspect of nature. Everything is a crystallization of spirit. Spirituality
is looking beyond the surface, being in touch with the living energy.
The spirit is the source behind everything we see, the invisible energy
behind it all.” Contributing to this “majority report,” a Buddhist res-
pondent says, “Buddhism talks of mind and body disappearing. This
sounds like a negative expression. But it’s not nihilism. It is through
this negation that life emerges. When as the Buddhists say, you dis-
appear, then ‘It’ lives me” (2004: 55). Not everybody fits within this
majority report. A Native American, for instance, did not describe a
single panentheistic principle but a series of links or a web inter-
 Introduction 21

connecting all of us. Everybody in the Grassroots Spirituality Move-

ment, however, longs for the intuitive or “not-strictly-rational” side of
life largely neglected by narrative accounts and the rational worldview
of modern science.
By using Venn diagrams, Forman illustrates how the Grassroots
Spirituality Movement draws from nearly all the religions and
nontraditional spiritual groups, as well as millions of the unaffiliated,
each overlapping the other on the introvertive level. He compares this
movement to an ocean fed by a vast variety of spiritual rivulets,
including many independent religious rivulets. Each of these may
regard Grassroots Spirituality as the offspring of its own tradition, but
that would be a mistake. As Forman says, “Grassroots Spirituality is
its own thing, the bastard child of all and none of them” (2004: 93).
This Movement, moreover, has many dialects, including the Men’s
movement, TM, Ramana Maharshi, Havurah Jews, Traditional Juda-
ism, Sufis, Transpersonal psychologists, Christian contemplatives,
Theosophy, Aromatherapy, and others facets beyond the immediate
boundaries of the Venn diagram.
Forman suggests that the cause of Grassroots Spirituality is
“over-determined”; that is, it has many intersecting causes ranging
from the attempt to overcome the alienation caused by demographic
shifts from the rural to the urban and exurban; changes in gender roles,
a loosening of family ties, and the rise of the feminine; the baby
boomers and the 1960s revolutionaries; disenchantment with the
Church; the influx of lay as well as priestly non-European immigrants
to America, including Vietnamese, Burmese, Chinese Buddhists, and
Hindus, all contributing to a “stew of religions”; the declining faith in
science and rationality; and the disillusionment with the American
dream. In addition to these historical causes, Forman identifies a
perennial cause, which he attributes ultimately to the possibility of “an
innate human drive for spirituality” (2004: 132).
Added to these causes is the growing support for spirituality in
society’s institutions, particularly the workplace. People are
increasingly disillusioned with work, which in-and-of-itself is unable
to satisfy the individual. Many corporations and hospitals now provide
counseling centers, day care centers and meditation rooms to help
foster people’s well-being and spiritual growth. Spirituality is now
championed in the business world as an answer to morale problems,
22 Integral Drama

fatigue and stress. Health care is shifting in its orientation to include

self-help through yoga and meditation. As Forman says,

At some point, we may have to decide whether health problems are

the product of bad genes and environmental exposure, or if they stem
from more transcendent causes, reflecting some imperfect match of a
soul’s purpose and a body’s conduct. (2004: 152)

Modern medicine he concludes seems to be moving toward accepting

spirituality as a tool for healing.
Forman argues that Grassroots Spirituality provides an oppor-
tunity for the world to transcend its differences and unite on the basis
of what he calls a “trans-traditional spirituality” (173). Instead of
being divided by our different traditions, we should come together “in
the light of our common spiritual depths,” recognize that these depths
can encourage us to grow “beyond any single path,” and enjoy our
common panentheistic ground while at the same time exploring our
differences (173). Forman offers a realistic plan for achieving this
integration through the organization of trans-traditional processes.
These include ongoing local gatherings, non-dogmatic conversations
between spiritual groups, integrating these local conversations within
a national infrastructure—while always focusing on process instead of
content. As Integral Drama will demonstrate, theatre also achieves
this integration through a trans-traditional process.
In Grassroots Spirituality, moreover,

the ultimate, when it is identified, seems more like an ‘It’ than a ‘He’
or a ‘She.’ The ‘It’ here is no longer some personalized and judging
God-figure. . . [but] a much more integrated and immanent
panentheistic presence. It is directly available to each and every mind
and heart, no matter what social role or station we enter or where we
move. (208)

Forman’s book provides an objective and insightful report on one of

the most significant social developments in recent history. Not since
the Middle Ages has the world seen the kind of spirituality movement
that he describes. His survey of this modern phenomenon graphically
illustrates the power of consciousness to know itself through a broad
range of interconnected spiritual avenues. Millions of readers from
around the world will be uplifted by the knowledge that their own
 Introduction 23

panentheistic experience is shared by many, just as the experience of

awareness per se in theatre is shared by spectators.

The Four Quadrants

In support of Forman’s research, The Natyashastra, and the
unsayable states of consciousness beyond narrativity, Ken Wilber
develops “the integral approach” to life based on the four quadrants,
or an integral operating system. In his recent book Integral Spirituality,
he defines the four quadrants as consisting of the “I,” “We,” “It,” and
Its.” The “I” and “We,” which constitute the interior realm, belong to
the upper left or subjective, phenomenological and the lower left
cultural or intersubjective, hermeneutic quadrants respectively. The “It”
and “Its,” which constitute the exterior realm, belong to the upper
right objective and lower right interobjective quadrants. The upper left,
or “I” quadrant, consists of “your own immediate thoughts, feelings,
sensations, and so on,” while the upper right quadrant is “what any
individual event looks like from the outside. This especially includes
its physical behavior; its material components; its matter and energy;
and its concrete body—for all those are items that can be referred to in
some sort of objective, 3rd-person, or ‘it’ fashion” (2006: 20-21,
original emphasis ). The objective upper right quadrant thus consists
of what subjective awareness looks like to objective science, the
neurotransmitters, DNA, cells and organs systems. The lower left or
“We” quadrant consists of the relations between one “I” and other
“I’s,” representing not the individual but group or collective
consciousness, not merely subjective but intersubjective awareness.
Every “We,” moreover, has an exterior, which constitutes the lower
right quadrant. While the lower left is the cultural dimension, the
interior awareness and shared feelings of groups, the lower right is the
social dimension, the behavior of groups studied through third-person
science.
Each of the four quadrants shows development or evolution. As
Wilber puts it,

In the Upper Left or ‘I,’ for example, the self unfolds from egocentric
to ethnocentric to worldcentric, or body to mind to spirit. In the Upper
Right, felt energy phenomenologically expands from gross to subtle to
causal. In the Lower Left, the ‘we’ expands from egocentric (‘me’) to
ethnocentric (‘us’) to worldcentric (‘all of us’). This expansion of
group awareness allows social systems—in the Lower Right—to
24 Integral Drama

expand from simple groups to more complex systems like nations and
eventually even to global systems. (2006: 23, original emphasis)

Wilber shows that the upper left quadrant first emerged in the Great
Wisdom Traditions which looked at the “I” from the inside. As we
shall see, Forman refers to self-awareness in the upper left quadrant as
knowledge-by-identity:

In knowledge-by-identity the subject knows something by virtue of

being it. I know what it is to be conscious, what it is to ‘have’ ‘my’
consciousness, because and only because I am or ‘have’ that
consciousness. [. . .] It is a reflexive or self-referential form of
knowing. I know my consciousness and I know that I am and have
been conscious simply because I am it. (1999: 118, original emphasis)

The upper left quadrant truths of the premodern Great Wisdom

Traditions, however, have been rejected by modernity and post-
modernity. Modernist epistemologies demanded of the Wisdom Tra-
ditions empirical evidence, which they were ill-prepared to provide.
Although the phenomenological core of the Wisdom Traditions were
savaged by modern epistemologies, these epistemologies were them-
selves monological and did not draw upon the four quadrants in
defending their interpretations of truth. Postmodernity, which rejected
premodernity and modernity both, argued that all perceptions are
really perspectives embedded in bodies situated in cultures, not just in
social systems of the lower right quadrant as argued by modernists.
Wilber argues that every epistemological occasion has four quadrants,
including the lower left cultural, intersubjective and upper left
subjective, phenomenological quadrants. While modernism tended to
focus on the upper right objective exterior quadrant, and post-
modernism on the cultural lower left quadrant, the Great Wisdom
Traditions specialized in the upper left quadrant, the interior of the
individual with all the stages “of consciousness, realization, and
spiritual experience” (2006: 44).
Wilber salvages the great wisdom traditions by situating them in
an integral framework that includes the premodern, modern and post-
modern realizations. He notes that although contemplative traditions
do not free individuals from their culture, integral methodological
pluralism “can reconstruct the important truths of the contemplative
traditions” (2006: 49, original emphasis). These truths include the five
natural states of consciousness of the wisdom traditions: waking,
 Introduction 25

dreaming, deep sleep, witnessing (turiya or the fourth state) and

nondual (turiyatita). The latter two states are variations on the ordi-
nary states induced by meditation as well as aesthetic experience
(rasa), such as that induced by the plays discussed below. As Wilber
says,

in my direct, 1st-person experience, phenomenal states in many types

of meditation are said to unfold from gross phenomena (‘I see rocks’)
to subtle phenomena (‘I see light and bliss, I feel expansive love’), to
causal phenomena (‘There is only vast emptiness, an infinite abyss’) to
nondual (‘Divine Emptiness and relative Form are not two’). These are
not 3rd-person structures (seen by zone #2 [from the outside]), but first
person states (zone #1 [seen from the inside]). (2006: 76, original
emphasis)

The upper left quadrant, therefore, has two zones: zone #1 is the direct,
first-person immediate experience of consciousness, while zone # 2 is
a first-person conceptual reflection on that experience.
This integral model has in recent decades been adopted by many
disciplines, including medicine and business. While conventional
medicine deals mainly with the upper right quadrant, the integral
model now claims that any physical event associated with the upper
right quadrant is really influenced by all four dimensions. The cure for
physical illness depends on research into all four quadrants, with the
upper right being only a quarter of the story. Similarly, the integral
model has also been employed in business, which now needs to ad-
dress the four environments or markets for a product to be successful.
Businesses today put emphasis on individual behavior, psychological
understanding, cultural management, and the governance of social
systems (Wilber 2006: 27-29). Wilber concludes that all levels of
existence—physical, mental, emotional and spiritual—must be exer-
cised in the I, we and it quadrants—the self, culture, nature and
society—for maximum development toward truth and happiness.
As we shall see in the plays discussed below, zone #1 in the
upper left quadrant constitutes the witnessing or awareness per se
aspect of the performer and spectator’s subjective experience, while
zone #2 constitutes the witnessing of a particular conceptual content,
such as that based on the perception of a play.
26 Integral Drama

The Plays
Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party presents Stanley as a
character who has opted out of conformity to a social community and
attempts to live a life of freedom. He shuns the outside world and its
immeasurable demands on him by withdrawing into the silence and
peacefulness of his subjective world, until Goldberg and McGann
invade his privacy and attempt to reintegrate him into the community
from which he managed to escape. Having rejected his socially
constructed identity, Stanley attempts to rediscover the natural self he
enjoyed during his stint as a pianist. Through the confrontation
between Stanley and Goldberg and McGann, Pinter moves the
characters and spectators toward an experience of the unsayable secret
of theatre, namely a glimpse of pure consciousness as a void of
conceptions in the upper left quadrant. Of all the characters in The
Birthday Party, only Stanley experiences an epiphany of the co-
existence of Emptiness and Form, a unity-amidst-diversity through
which the self as internal observer can witness the contents of the
mind and the perceptual world. Goldberg and McGann, however, also
intuit the possibility of such an experience, although in their anxiety to
conform to their community they don’t take advantage of this
possibility like Stanley.
In Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, Berenger alone manages to
resist rhinoceritis by not conforming to the urge to give up his
humanity and become a rhino like each the other characters. In the
opposition between consuming to sustain biological existence and
desiring to consume as a means of wish fulfillment, only Berenger has
the self-sufficiency to avoid the over-indulgence, gluttony and intem-
perance that impels the other characters to transmogrify into beasts.
Although the play shows the absurdity of defiance as much as the
absurdity of conformism, Berenger has the strength of character to
remain an individualist by not joining the happy throng of less
sensitive people. Through Berenger’s taste of the void of conceptions
beyond cultural constructs as displayed by his selfless support of the
best interest and wellbeing of others, the audience also glimpses a
state of unity beyond duality. The real freedom of a unified, trans-
personal self approached by Berenger and the spectators derives from
a sense of the connection between the local field of matter and action
and an underlying nonlocal field of mind and consciousness. Berenger
and through him the audience gain access to the coexistence of pure
 Introduction 27

awareness per se and the world of duality by not clinging to the desire
for the sensory pleasures of a specific Form, namely that of a
rhinoceros. The audience in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros gains an aesthetic
experience (rasa) through devices such as absurdity, the dream-like
nature of reality, illogical argumentation and duplicitous wrangling
between friends that swing their awareness between an ordinary state
of mind and a more highly developed spiritual consciousness. The ra-
tionalists operate out of ordinary self-interested cravings, while
Berenger exhibits an increased ethical discernment based on a greater
purity of consciousness.
In Arcadia, Stoppard juxtaposes the dimensions of time and
timelessness, intuition and logic, heart and mind, thereby inducing in
the characters and audience a transpersonal, transrational experience
of freedom even from within the boundaries of time. Taking us
beyond the limits of time, the structure of the play dramatically
juxtaposes two historical periods—1809-12 and the present—while
also integrating two aspects of physics, Isaac Newton’s theory and
Chaos theory, which undercuts Newtonian physics. In the 1809-12
setting, the thirteen-year-old genius Thomasina Coverly, the lead fe-
male character, represents Romanticism through her scientific outlook
and emergent affection for her tutor Septimus Hodge. In the
contemporary setting, the leading female character, Hannah Jarvis, an
author doing research on the Coverly estate, represents a neoclassical
attitude based on Newtonian physics and a denial of feelings. The
duality set up by the opposition between classical and Gothic land-
scapes, Enlightenment and Romanticism, reason and feeling, ratio-
nality and nonrationality, Newtonian determinism and the chaos of
Eros ultimately leads the characters and audience to a taste of unity as
embodied by love. Although Hannah rejects Romanticism, in the end
she and Thomasina grow toward a genuinely spiritual domain that
does not involve the rejection of the physical or a pseudo union of a
regressive stage of development, but rather a transcending of the
separate-self sense to a transrational, transverbal experience. This
experience for characters and audience alike may be momentary and
fragile, but involves a coexistence of Emptiness and Form that
characterizes a taste of cosmic consciousness.
In The Homecoming, Harold Pinter portrays Ruth as a character
who defies the stereotype of a conventional woman. When her philos-
28 Integral Drama

opher husband Teddy brings her to his parental home in London to

meet his father, uncle and two brothers, they try to sexually dominate
her. Although in the end Ruth abandons Teddy and remains in London
with his family, her position in a demanding male world is not only
ambiguous but violates every rule in the male book of female sub-
servience. Ruth does not represent a female ideology that will become
the norm so much as a transcendence of all ideology in a world of
rapid change. She establishes a self not in imitation of the male self
tied to philosophical debate or the domination of others; rather she
achieves a trans-linguistic, trans-logical dimension of identity, not
only tapping into pure awareness but also showing evidence of
experiencing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form through her ability
to remain detached while engaging the men in their pseudo-
philosophical debates. The audience of The Homecoming can sense
that although the men seem to exploit Ruth, she turns the tables on
them by liberating herself from the force of their abuse. Like Stanley
in The Birthday Party, Ruth transgresses the norms of a patriarchal
society because of her inner strength of character, achieving a level of
unity within herself through which she can witness the world of Form
represented by a male community.
In Six Characters in Search of an Author, as Mark Musa spells
out in the “Introduction,” Pirandello distinguishes between having
form, like ordinary people and actors in the play, and being form, like
the characters who feel compelled to find an author and thereby
actualize their form. Having form implies continual change in an
impermanent world, while being form implies an immutable (never-
changing) and eternal identity. The Father, like the other characters as
opposed to the actors, is form, but he resists the fixity of a form that
traps him in a particular moment in life that can be judged by others.
In ordinary cultural and social contexts, people may have no fixity of
form, but at the same time they have an innate, immutable form within
the mind, namely pure awareness, which they often don’t recognize or
try to deny. Pirandello confronts the issue of finding truth or deter-
mining whether or not it exists. Truth no doubt exists but remains
beyond the reach of the ordinary intellect, on the basis of which each
individual would interpret “the truth” differently. Six Character
suggests, therefore, that one can know truth by being form as part of
an immediate experience, but to understand or narrate truth within the
context of language and reason involves the process of having form.
 Introduction 29

In terms of the four quadrants, truth arises through our being form in
the upper left quadrant. Wilber refers to this as a zone #1 experience,
but one can also reflect upon this experience afterwards through zone
#2, also in the upper left quadrant but outside the circle of zone #1
(2006: 39). As the play suggests, the Directors and actors find it
difficult to represent reality because they are lost in the field of change
with no access to witnessing consciousness, which is never-changing.
The characters, on the other hand, accept their performance as illusion
because they sense that all activity is illusory, while the only reality is
that which never changes—the quality of witnessing that arises from
being form. The characters, then, as well as the audience, can experi-
ence a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form by witnessing
the social activity surrounding them.
Although Genet’s The Balcony, set during a revolution, centers
on social phobia and the attempt to escape it even within the church,
law and defense forces, Martin Esslin argues that Genet is not con-
demning lawyers, bishops and generals merely for lusting after power
but is also dramatizing their sense of impotence within a social
hierarchy. The gap between members of different social strata and
within the individuals themselves points toward a double awareness
that underlies The Balcony and suggests a way of transcending both
social phobia and the feeling of impotence. The men who frequent
Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony act out roles they aspire to as a means
of gaining power and virility, trying to fulfill their fantasies of
grandeur by donning outfits worn by either bishops, judges or generals
and lording it over the prostitutes who play their opposites—a process
through which they attempt to become desirable commodities. In each
of these minidramas, the men glorify themselves, subjugating the
women for their own self-aggrandizement, but they have much less
control over the situations they enact than do the women. Madame
Irma’s women can not only make the men feel either good about
themselves or undermine their illusions, they can also witness what
they do with the men because they remain nonattached to male
fantasies. The girls and audience, therefore, can distance themselves
from these fantasies and thereby witness them through a glimpse of
the coexistence of the internal observer and all the roles that substitute
for our true identity.
Yoruba metaphysics posits a transcendental reality, which Wole
30 Integral Drama

Soyinka defines as "the fourth space." This space is separated from

terrestrial life by an abyss or gulf, which the protagonists in A Dance
of the Forests attempt to bridge. While West African metaphysics,
like postmodernism, questions the principle of binary oppositions at
the basis of transcendentality, Soyinka in his plays does so on the
basis of a coexistence of opposites and not by giving precedence to
one alternative over the other, as in the poststructuralist "privileging"
of the signifier over the transcendental signified. Soyinka explores the
ritual form of drama not as an ahistorical ideal but as an examination
of history, raising it to cosmic proportions. His representation of the
experience of unity in West African myth is complemented by
analogous representations in another non-Western tradition, that of
Sanskrit poetics, which also describes the structure of binary
oppositions as being subsumed by a coexistence of opposites.
Soyinka's "fourth space," which he distinguishes from the three
commonly acknowledged African worlds—that of the ancestors, the
unborn, and the living—constitutes a coexistence of all spaces, which
forms the basis for a glimpse by performer and spectator of a
coexistence of Emptiness and Form. A Dance of the Forests
dramatizes the integration of essence and materiality, unity and
diversity, a coexistence of opposites that provides a logical answer to
postmodernist dilemmas, one conveyed through Soyinka's portrayal of
the Yoruba transitional abyss and its effects upon the audience, which
can also be elucidated through the Sanksrit theory of the inter-
dependence of consciousness and language. Both traditions provide a
means through which people gain direct experience of expanded
awareness. In the context of modern Africa, colonialism has compli-
cated and corrupted the relationship between ritual and myth, experi-
ence and understanding. Nevertheless, in Soyinka's ritual theatre,
idealism and history meet in the very response of the audience.
The seven plays analyzed below all suggest an opportunity
provided by a Lamp at the Door, which as Bonshek says
simultaneously illuminates for awareness the inside and outside,
giving the audience a glimpse of cosmic consciousness. Bonshek
quotes Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s explanation of the silence and
dynamism of this experience: “Now that state of Being [pure, self-
referral consciousness] is both ways at the same time. Outside lighted,
inside lighted, but what do we mean by in and out in that state? In and
out is the reality of dynamism and silence. But if we take it to be in
 Introduction 31

and out then it is with infinite speed in and out. It’s a straight line
representing silence and dynamism only when the dynamism is of
infinite frequency—when at no time is it out or in; it is in and out at
the same time” (2007: 52). The plays lead the characters and audience
to an experience of silence and dynamism at the same time, which
underlies the basic nature of self-referral consciousness experienced in
the upper left quadrant. This bi-directional coexistence of silence and
dynamism induced by the plays represents, however briefly, the effect
of a taste of knowledge-by-identity after narrative discourse has run
its course. When an audience first glimpses an aesthetic experience
(rasa) through zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, they may not reflect
upon it immediately afterwards through zone #2, but as each of the
plays discussed here progresses by inducing a series of such glimpses,
the audience then begins to a appreciate the innate bi-directional
nature of higher states of awareness.
 The Fall of Private Man in Harold Pinter’s
The Birthday Party

The Two-Tiered Loss of the Public World

Harold Pinter’s first three plays, The Room, The Birthday Party
and The Dumb Waiter, are collectively known as “Comedies of
Menace” because they dramatize the terrors that most individuals
experience in confrontation with external forces. In commenting on
The Birthday Party, Pinter says that the play dramatizes how the true
and false, real and unreal, are not easily distinguishable: “The thing is
not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false”
(quoted in Naismith 2000: 45). The main characters in The Birthday
Party emerge out of a past that remains a mystery except for
references to the possibility of earlier encounters between Stanley
Webber and the two men, Goldberg and McCann, who have come to
take him away. Stanley lives more or less peacefully in a modest
boarding house in a town on the south coast of England run by Petey
and Meg Boles, both in their 60s. In the first of three acts, Petey
comes home one morning and tells Meg that two men he met in town
have asked about a vacancy, and Meg says she has a room for them.
When Stanley hears about the two men, Goldberg and McCann, he
suddenly for no apparent reason becomes highly anxious. As
Katherine Worth says,

Pinter brilliantly conveys the suggestion that the inquisitors are unreal
beings, a projection of Stanley’s obscure dread, without quite
destroying the possibility of their being taken as real; this is what
makes them so alarming. (1986: 37)

Critics have argued that Goldberg and McCann represent agents

of conformity who have come to apprehend Stanley for his non-
conformist and even disrespectful attitude toward the Boles, his family,
34 Integral Drama

religion and society in general. Martin Esslin suggests that while the
play “has been interpreted as an allegory of conformity,” it could also

be seen as an allegory of death—man snatched away from the home

he has built himself, from the warmth of love embodied by Meg’s
mixture of motherliness and sexuality, by the dark angels of
nothingness, who pose the question of which came first, the chicken
or the egg. (1991: 241)

As argued here, however, the allegory of death can also be interpreted

as a transformation to the transpersonal, transverbal self.
In Act One Meg organizes a birthday party for Stanley against
his will, while in Act Two Goldberg and McCann interrogate Stanley
about the chicken and the egg and other such inanities, and finally Act
Three ends with Goldberg and McCann, who are Jewish and Irish out-
siders themselves, ironically reconstructing Stanley and taking him to
the unknown Monty. Stanley’s complex emotional state, with its mul-
tiple levels of association and allusions, centers on his mysterious fear
of the public world. Bill Naismith argues that “Stanley is guilty of
being Stanley. His fears concern the world outside, which makes
immeasurable demands on him (the individual) from the kinds of
directions which he chooses not to fulfill” (2000: 43). Throughout the
play the mystery of Stanley’s background and the reason for Goldberg
and McCann’s attempt to reconstruct him can only be speculated upon.
Pinter, moreover, says, “The more acute the experience the less arti-
culate the expression” (quoted in Naismith 2000: 43). This quote sug-
gests that any relationship between an individual and society or
between an individual and deeper levels of the self involves two
aspects of human identity: the socially constructed aspect that Stanley
tries to abandon, and the transpersonal, transverbal aspect that remains
unsayable. This qualityless level of identity, an objectless awareness
that underlies all human thought and activity and corresponds to
Wilber’s zone #1 in the upper left quadrant, can be accessed only after
language and interpretation have fulfilled their purpose. By the end of
the play, Goldberg and McCann drive Stanley away from his non-
conformist lifestyle in the boarding house, at least temporarily, and in
the process open the spectator’s awareness to the marginalized
unsayable dimension of human identity. Regarding the theme of the
threat to a person’s identity and security by “unknown outside forces,”
Steven Gale says it produces “the generalizing effect that allows the
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 35

meaning of the play to extend to all members of the audience. This

includes the idea of verification, which contains within it the problem
of identity” (2003: 183). Stanley’s domination by the visitors
symbolizes the way society interferes with the identity of individuals
and thereby hinders their development, compelling them to neglect the
potential of their inner dimension as a field of all possibilities and to
adopt the socially acceptable roles of a specific community. In The
Birthday Party, Pinter moves the characters and spectators toward the
unsayable secret of theatre, providing them with a glimpse of the
sacred experience of pure consciousness as a void of conceptions in
the upper left quadrant. Only Stanley, however, evinced a taste of the
coexistence between Emptiness and Form, a unity of the witnessing
internal observer and the contents of the mind, which the audience
also glimpses through aesthetic experience (rasa).
The unanswered questions concerning the background of the
main characters, which reveal an uncertainty about identity, can only
be addressed indirectly, especially in the case of Stanley. Varun
Begley argues that

The Birthday Party is animated by catastrophe, not spiritual or

existential but emphatically historical in character. Thirty years later,
Harold Bloom claimed that sensitivity to the Holocaust was
‘inevitable for a sensitive dramatist, a third of whose people were
murdered before he was fifteen.’ (2005: 47; Bloom 1987: 1)

Even so, the human context of historical catastrophe can be

understood as having its roots in spiritual or existential plight. The
unanswered questions of the play refer not only to historical ambiguity
but also to the trans-linguistic aspect of identity reflected by Stanley’s
bearing toward social responsibility. Some critics suggest that Stan-
ley’s anxiety toward the visitors and his apparent guilt stem from
having discarded his social accountability, but we can also interpret
his anxious reaction to the visitors as caused by his sense that the
public sphere has begun to encroach upon the private world he would
rather inhabit. As Naismith notes, “To define one’s identity simply as
‘the fact of being who or what one is’ has never satisfied Pinter. His
whole theory of the way we use language is based on his belief that
we do not wish to be ‘known’ and we don’t wish to know people.
Furthermore, he isn’t at all confident that we can even know ‘who we
36 Integral Drama

are’” (2000: 44). Pinter is right insofar that language cannot reveal the
core of human identity, a state beyond the boundaries of social
responsibility that Stanley seems to have touched upon. As suggested
here, The Birthday Party reveals a complementarity between the inner
and outer dimensions of human identity that parallel the inner and
outer aspects of the contemporary world as described by sociologists
such as Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman. In exposing the inter-
relationship between the inner and outer aspects of society and
individual identity, Pinter’s play shifts the spectator’s awareness from
the social world of phenomenological difference toward a sacred,
nonpluralistic experience of the transpersonal self, or from the “We”
and “It” quadrants to the “I” quadrant.
In The Fall of Public Man, Sennett argues that the theory and
practice of intimacy in modern society has undermined the public
domain based on impersonality, objective rules, polite behavior and
effective government administration that upholds individual rights and
freedom, replacing this with an emphasis on personality and the iden-
tification of the self with class and professional status. Because the
public sphere in industrial capitalist society has been stigmatized as
evil and immoral due to its impersonal tone and political favoritism,
people in the twentieth-century retreated into local communities based
on shared feelings, motivations and ethnicity. Sennett explains the fall
of public man through an analogy between the games children play
and the public sphere. When children play games they learn how to
make and follow rules, and when necessary they modify these rules to
create equality between younger and older kids playing together.
Modern man, on the other hand, has lost the ability to act effectively
in the political arena because he places greater emphasis on
personality and charisma than on the ability to interact with strangers
on an impersonal level, as children do while playing games. Localism
has thus led to the impersonality of the public world being replaced by
the personality of a charismatic leader whose only qualification is the
ability or skill to express emotions in public. People for the past
century have increasingly felt so alienated from the impersonality of
the public world that they can only identify with a leader who inspires
a sense of familiarity by expressing himself on clichéd issues they as a
community have in common. No track record of political activism
counts for people today because they care less about political,
economic or religious issues than about the personality of a leader
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 37

with whom they can identify. This attitude has undermined the public
sphere and led to the globalization of local communities. By empha-
sizing shared emotions, special interests and material goals, these
communities consist of people who have lost the capacity for dealing
with the unknown or taking risks for the benefit of society as a whole.
According to Sennett, localism does not lead to fraternity so much as
fratricide because unless you conform to the common interests of the
group, you become a threat and therefore a potential scapegoat. As
Elizabeth Sakellaridou argues, in The Birthday Party

ontological and existential questions take a concrete form; Stanley

complains he has sleepless nights, he fears the coming of strangers, he
feels trapped in his own refuge, he looks in the mirror in quest of an
identity for himself. (1988: 29)

The external menace in The Birthday Party, as Gale and Sakellaridou

both observe, does not end with the early plays but extend throughout
Pinter’s work.
As Sennett says, “Community has become both emotional
withdrawal from society and a territorial barricade within the city”
(1992: 301). People in local communities share “the same outlook” on
the basis of peer pressure, without sharing “the same in look,” such as
the religious faith, mores and customs of that community (306). The
more people get involved in the passions of community, the more they
avoid the impersonality of the social order. The more they fear imper-
sonality, the more they fantasize about a parochial collective life.
Sennett argues, however, that people can be sociable with each other
only if they have some protection from each other. Without bound-
aries or barriers between members of a community, they become
paranoid and even destructive. The impersonal public world stems
from a belief in human nature, while local communities promote a
belief in human natures, which entails, as Sennett puts it, “a
movement from the idea of natural character to that of personality”
(314). In communities based on narcissism, everyone else in the group
has to reflect yourself, your own personality as opposed to an
impersonal set of interests. Children’s play, on the other hand, allows
children to associate with the rules of the game and thereby achieve an
experience of self-distance, which helps them focus on the rules of the
game rather than on instant gratification. When children play together
38 Integral Drama

they learn the kind of disinterested activity that adults used to be able
to perform in public. To play, Sennett says, “requires a freedom from
the self” (319), specifically the socially constructed self from which
Stanley has managed to distance himself.
Sennett says that “the sharing of impulses rather than the pursuit
of a common activity began to define a peculiar sense of community
at the end of the last [19th] century, and is now tied to the localization
of community—so that one shares only as far as the mirror of self
reflects” (1992: 326). As suggested by The Birthday Party, the public
world as represented by Goldberg and McCann is no longer a place
free of self-identity constructed by localized communities. One is no
longer allowed to live impersonally, in freedom from a self defined by
special interest groups. Pinter presents a world no longer based on
impersonal, objective rules but rather on the localization of shared
values often enforced through intimidation, the threat of ostracism and
even fratricide. Stanley’s penchant for self-distance, his ability to live
outside the boundaries of a local community, becomes a threat to that
community. Although Jewish and Irish respectively, Goldberg and
McCann have aligned themselves with an outside, non-ethnic
community that apparently represents the public world. In a post-
modern context, however, this world can no longer be an impersonal
domain based either conceptually on meta-narratives, or experientially
on the groundless ground of human nature, but instead has become a
world that enforces conformity to specific attributes considered
desirable by its members as represented by a charismatic leader, such
as Monty. As Pinter’s play suggests, what has been lost through the
demise of the public world, in addition to the capacity for polite
interaction with strangers through a general acceptance of meta-nar-
ratives or the rules of the game, is the ability to access a transpersonal,
transverbal dimension of experience, a field of all possibilities beyond
the socially constructed human natures espoused by individual com-
munities. Because it can no longer sustain these impersonal qualities,
people in postmodern society have stigmatized the contemporary
public world as immoral and evil and supplanted it with the pseudo
safety of local communities. The public world was thus more integral
in terms of the four quadrants, while localization restricts one to
cultural or social allegiances by excluding integration with the upper
left quadrant.
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 39

Stanley, therefore, fears not the outside world in itself but rather
its replacement by a localized attitude that imposes boundaries on his
freedom of thought and action. The only community he belongs to is
that of the boarding house of Meg and Petey, who he keeps at a
distance through his mischievous banter. His freedom, moreover, is
not a conceptual but an experiential phenomenon that he never tries to
express through a narrative about his past. Pinter’s characters and
spectators cannot know this inner freedom, which comprises the
sacred dimension of human nature, through conceptuality or narrative
accounts but only as a transverbal, transpersonal direct experience. In
the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions, this level of
experiential knowledge corresponds to Plato’s Forms, as related to
Being, the Good and the Beautiful, and to the Vedic state of Sat-Chit-
Ananda (transcendent Being, Intelligence and Bliss). As Jonathan
Shear notes, Being, the Good, and the Beautiful are reached, like
samadhi or qualityless pure consciousness, through a “mental faculty
distinct from ordinary intellect to ‘reverse’ the direction of attention
within and produce experience of a transcendental ground of thought,
knowledge and awareness,” an experience associated “with gaining
wisdom, virtue, self-sufficiency and freedom” (1990: 34). Plato’s
Forms, the fourth level of his Divided Line, is reached through the
faculty he calls the “dialectic” (Shear 1990: 11-29), just as Sat-Chit-
Ananda or pure consciousness is reached through a reversal of the
direction of attention within through the transcendence of ordinary
mental faculties to an abstract, objectless state of awareness. This
experience of unbounded consciousness corresponds to the experience
in Zen called “no-mind.” As described by Huang-po,

No-mindness means having no mind (or thoughts) whatever [. . .]

inwardly it is like wood or stone; it is immovable, unshakable;
outwardly, it is like space where one knows no obstructions, no
stoppage. It transcends both subject and object, it recognizes no points
of orientation, it has no forms, it knows neither gain nor loss. (quoted
by Suzuki 1956: 218)

As we shall see, Pinter’s play induces such a reversal in the

mind of the spectator through the surreal uncertainly of the back-
ground of Stanley, Goldberg and McCann, and through a series of
climaxes in each of the three acts.
40 Integral Drama

Reversing Attention
Just as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and Sun, Zen, Yoga and
the Advaitan technique of meditation emphasize a reversal of attention
inward toward pure awareness, so The Birthday Party has the effect of
emptying the content of the spectator’s mind through the uncertainty
surrounding the characters’ identities and backgrounds. As they try to
transform Stanley back into a citizen of respectable society as they
understand it, Goldberg and McCann do not so much destroy his
identity—namely, the constructed self that Stanley has already
discarded—as attempt to fill the void by re-imposing the attributes
from which Stanley has begun to free himself. To the displeasure of
his two subjugators, Stanley through a process of self-distancing has
replaced his socially constructed identity with a non-learned or innate
neuro-physiological condition capable of sustaining a trans-cognitive
mode of freedom as direct experience. D. T. Suzuki describes this
mode of direct experience in terms of Zen:

Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one’s own
being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom. [. . . ] Zen [. . .]
wants us to open a “third eye,” as Buddhists call it, to the hitherto
undreamed-of region shut away from us through our own ignorance.
When the cloud of ignorance disappears, the infinity of the heavens is
manifested, where we see for the first time into the nature of our own
being. (1949: 11)

Regarding the uncertainty of Stanley’s past, in Act One Meg

tells Goldberg of Stanley’s successful piano concert: “In . . . a big hall.
His father gave him champagne. But then they locked the place up and
he couldn’t get out” (1968: 32). Meg has fabricated this story because
we know that Stanley told her his father did not attend the concert;
nevertheless, we have no way of knowing whether Stanley himself
told her the truth. As Pinter has said, “we are faced with the immense
difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean
merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning” (quoted in Naismith
2000: 46).
An added difficulty arises when the past consists of an
experience beyond language, beyond the capacity for narrative expo-
sition. As the play suggests, such a transverbal phenomenon would
characterize the empty state that Stanley may have tasted by aban-
doning his socially constructed identity. He may have first had this
experience while engaging in creative activity, such as playing the
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 41

piano or even listening to music. According to Eastern and even

Western philosophy, the self consists of two aspects: linguistic and
extra-linguistic. The extra-linguistic experience of the self beyond the
duality of attributes cannot be rendered through narrative, for in
reflecting non-intentional consciousness, it contains no objects to be
related. From a constructivist view, as we have seen, Gary Fireman
notes that “Narrative does not merely capture aspects of the self for
description, communication, and examination; narrative constructs the
self” (2003: 5). Fireman also claims that “the portions of human con-
sciousness beyond the purely somatic—self-awareness, self-under-
standing and self-knowledge—are products of personal narratives” (4).
As argued here, however, the self-awareness generated and com-
municated by means of narrative applies only to the linguistic,
constructed aspect of the self. As Shear explains in his analysis of
Descartes, Hume and Kant,

pure consciousness can be defined uniquely as that experience which

has absolutely no identifiable empirical qualities within it, that is,
which is devoid of identifiable spatio-temporal content. [. . .] For if
we identify the experience of pure consciousness with experience of
the self, then this experience, containing absolutely no discernable
empirical qualities, uniquely allows us to give experiential
significance to Descartes’ characterization of self as simple and non-
picturable, Hume’s characterization of self as (supposedly) distinct
from all impressions, and Kant’s characterization of it as pure
consciousness independent of all spatio-temporal appearances. (1990:
104)

By keeping the backgrounds and identities of Stanley, Goldberg

and McCann unknown, Pinter prevents the spectator from con-
centrating on a particular narrative account of their lives with its
phenomenal content. Shear notes that “if one concentrates on
something, the act of concentration itself keeps the mind active and
focused on the object being concentrated on, thus, once again,
preventing one from experiencing the completely non-active state of
pure objectless consciousness (100). The Birthday Party turns the
direction of the spectator’s attention inward by preventing her from
concentrating on the specific empirical qualities of the characters’ past.
Stanley does not talk about his past because the most important
aspect of it for him is extra-linguistic and transpersonal, related to a
level of creative intelligence beyond the conventional self-
42 Integral Drama

understanding acquired through ordinary mental faculties. In des-

cribing his piano concert to Meg, Stanley says, “I had a unique touch.
Absolutely unique. They came up to me and said they were grateful”
(22-23). Even before discarding his socially constructed self, there-
fore, Stanley was already different in his style of musical per-
formance—provided what he says is true. This non-conformist ten-
dency may have originated through his approach to art and then
spilled over into his social behavior. When Lulu, a friend of Meg in
her early twenties who finds Stanley attractive, asks him to go for a
walk and “get a bit of air” (26), he declines, suggesting instead they
go away together. When she asks where, he replies, “Nowhere. Still,
we could go” (26). Again, by pointing to a non-place, The Birthday
Party prevents the spectator from concentrating on the spatio-temporal
dimension. Stanley implies that if Lulu wants to go somewhere with
him, she will have to surrender her attachments to conventional
behavior and everyday reality. Even the question of whether or not
Stanley is telling the truth about the nature of his performance has the
effect of emptying the mental content of the spectators and other
characters. Finding him impossible to deal with or even understand,
Lulu tells Stanley, “You’re a bit of a washout, aren’t you?” This
remark further suggests how Stanley’s overall performance in the play
has a decontingencing effect on characters and audience—in a sense
washing out their world of familiar attributes. In contrast to Stanley,
Goldberg in a conversation with McCann narrates his own past in a
way that extols conformity to established values and behavior.

Honour thy father and thy mother. All along the line. Follow the line,
the line, McCann, and you can’t go wrong. What do you think, I’m a
self-made man? No! I sat where I was told to sit. I kept my eye on
the ball. [. . .] And that’s why I’ve reached my position, McCann.
Because I’ve always been as fit as a fiddle. My motto. Work hard
and play hard. Not a day’s illness. (77-78)

Although Goldberg does not go into narrative detail about his

past, he clearly presents an attitude of conformity to what he regards
as the establishment, even though what he refers to consists more of a
localized system of values. As real as this attitude may seem to
Goldberg, the play suggests that it is not entirely real or unreal, true or
false. Whatever its reality or truth may be, moreover, pertains pri-
marily to the linguistic self. Indeed, even Goldberg has doubts about
his own narrative self-presentation, as foreshadowed by his announce-
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 43

ment in Act Three: “I don’t know why, but I feel knocked out. I feel a
bit . . . It’s uncommon for me” (76). In his narrative account of his
past, whether true of false, Goldberg may be trying to counteract the
effect of Stanley’s voided identity, which seems to undermine Gold-
berg’s own self-confidence. After all, Goldberg, like McCann, comes
from an ethnic minority and may have already had to surrender some
of his own values to conform to a localized community led by Monty.
Although McCann comes across like a gangster, in Act Three Gold-
berg tells Lulu that “He’s only been unfrocked six months,” sug-
gesting that McCann may share some of Stanley’s innocence and even
an inclination for freedom from the narrative self.
The fact that Goldberg and McCann are vulnerable emerges
when they first arrive at the boarding house. When they enter with
their suitcases, Goldberg says, “We’ll both take a seat. Sit back,
McCann. Relax. What’s the matter with you? I bring you down for a
few days to the seaside. Take a holiday. Do yourself a favor. Learn to
relax, McCann, or you’ll never get anywhere” (27). McCann’s anxiety,
as suggested later in the play, could be linked to a spiritual conflict
within himself. Having left the clergy only six months ago, McCann
may feel uncomfortable coercing people into conforming to the
Judaeo-Christian dogma of Western Civilization, given that he himself
may have realized that dogma alone does not constitute spirituality.
This realization may have been one reason for his leaving the clergy.
When they arrive at the boarding house, McCann asks if it’s the right
place, and Goldberg tries to calm him by saying that their present
work, which to McCann still remains unclear, is not that different
from his previous job.

Goldberg: The main issue is a singular issue and quite distinct from
your previous work. Certain elements, however, might well
approximate in points of procedure to some of your other activities.
All is dependent on the attitude of our subject. At all events, McCann,
I can assure you that the assignment will be carried out and the
mission accomplished with no excessive aggravation to you or myself.
Satisfied? (30)

Goldberg implies that their mission with Stanley consists of re-

incorporating him back into the Judeo-Christian fold, back to social
and religious orthodoxy, after he has ventured beyond the attributes of
ordinary identity and computation into the trans-cultural realm of
44 Integral Drama

direct experience. Given that members of the most oppressed

communities—the Jews and the Irish—have been assimilated into a
quasi public orthodoxy and become the tormentors of those remaining
beyond the pale suggests that they indeed represent the opposite
extreme to the nothingness and nowhere that Stanley has fathomed by
transcending the empirical qualities of mind toward pure awareness.
By setting up an opposition between the freedom pursued by Stanley
and the conformism enforced by Goldberg and McCann, Pinter sets up
a framework through which spectators can move toward their own
innate tendency for freedom in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant,
while at the same time witnessing the content of the play in a unity of
Emptiness and Form. In this state, as Bonshek notes, “both the inner
transcendental reality and the outer field of relative perception are
experienced; the lamp is ‘at the door’ illuminating inside and outside”
(2007: 46).

Party Interrogation
In Act Two, Goldberg and McCann descend upon Stanley and
begin their interrogation. Stanley meets McCann first and asks him if
he has ever been to Maidenhead, and then tells him that business calls
and he plans to move back home. McCann, who says he has never
been to Maidenhead, asks Stanley if he’s in business, and Stanley says
no, he’s given it up, but then divulges that he has a small private
income, the economic basis for his current lifestyle (40). Stanley hears
Goldberg talking outside with Petey, but when he tries to leave the
room, McCann blocks his way. Stanley becomes defensive in an
attempt to evade what he rightly perceives as the malign intention of
McCann and Goldberg:

I suppose I have changed, but I’m still the same man that I always was.
I mean, you wouldn’t think, to look at me really . . . I mean, not really,
that I was the sort of bloke to—to cause any trouble, would you?
(McCann looks at him.) Do you know what I mean? (40)

Stanley’s remarks suggest that his inner transformation remains

invisible because it has nothing to do with his socially constructed self,
which he has abandoned—although he admits to drinking a bit more
than before. The subtext of his argument implies that because his inner
change is undetectable, he should not be suspected as being a threat to
anyone, and therefore the visitors should leave him in peace. Further-
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 45

more, he says he’s the same man he always was, which implies that
the inner dimension beyond the discernable empirical qualities of his
constructed identity is innate, not something learned and therefore not
something that can ever be taken away. This non-pluralistic phenom-
enon also underpins the identities of McCann and Goldberg, as
indicated by their reactions to him. McCann displays anxiety and a
lack of confidence from the beginning, while Goldberg displays them
later in the play. Stanley’s level of being on the one hand
complements the conceptual self, while on the other hand has the
effect of turning the visitors and audience inward toward the higher
self.
This move toward the inner dimension induces an anxiety of
defamiliarization in Goldberg and McCann, threatening to undermine
the secure and familiar attributes of their constructed identities as well
as the shared interests of their localized community. Although Stanley
tells McCann, “You needn’t be frightened of me,” McCann acts con-
fused and uncomfortable and tells him, “You know, I’m flabbergasted
with you” (42). When McCann and Petey leave to buy drinks for the
birthday party, Stanley finds himself alone with Goldberg and tells
him, “Don’t mess me about” (44). When McCann returns they force
Stanley to sit down and begin their interrogation:

McCann: Why did you leave the organization?

Goldberg: What would your old man say, Webber?
McCann: Why did you betray us?
Goldberg: You hurt me, Webber. You’re playing a dirty game.
McCann: That’s the Black and Tan fact.
Goldberg: Who does he think he is?
McCann: Who do you think you are?
Stanley: You’re on the wrong horse.
Goldberg: When did you come to this place?
Stanley: Last year.
Goldberg: Where did you come from?
Stanley: Somewhere else.
Goldberg: Why did you come here?
Stanley: My feet hurt!
Goldberg: Why did you stay?
Stanley: I had a headache! . . .
Goldberg: You don’t know. What’s happened to your memory,
Webber? When did you last have a bath?
Stanley: I have one every—
Goldberg: Don’t lie.
46 Integral Drama

McCann: You betrayed the organization. I know him!

Stanley: You don’t
Goldberg: What can you see without your glasses?
Stanley: Anything.
Goldberg: Take off his glasses. (48-49)

As their questioning continues they accuse him of killing his

wife, and McCann snatches Stanley’s glasses and eventually breaks
them. When Goldberg asks him his name, Stanley says, “Joe Soap”
(50). Goldberg also has other names: Nat and Simey, and McCann is
called Dermot, which reflects the postmodern condition of multiple
constructed identities, as discussed below. Goldberg then asks: “Do
you recognize an external force? Stanley: What? [. . . ] Goldberg: Do
you recognize an external force, responsible for you, suffering for
you?” (50). Although this question has religious overtones—McCann
says, “You’re a traitor to the cloth” (51)—it also refers to the organi-
zation they accuse Stanley of having betrayed. In answering the
question about his trade, Stanley says he plays the piano. His
interrogators look down on artists, especially a bohemian artist who
epitomizes the nonconformist threat to their paranoid “position”:
“Goldberg: No society would touch you” (ibid.). Their question about
which came first—the chicken or the egg?—indicates that their
motive in questioning Stanley is not intended to gain information or
elicit logical answers but only to intimidate. At this point Goldberg
threatens: “We can sterilize you” (52), suggesting that they have a
subliminal fear of Stanley’s power. Comments like, “McCann: You
betrayed our land. Goldberg: You betray our breed” (ibid.), indicate
that the visitors are acting more out of self-preservation than any
genuine interest in “saving” Stanley. If Stanley displays anxiety about
interference from the two visitors, they display an even greater anxiety
about having the likes of Stanley on the loose.
As the birthday party gets underway, Meg makes a toast to
Stanley: “I think he’s a good boy, although sometimes he’s bad” (55),
a reference to their risqué banter—which represents the full extent of
Stanley’s overt defiance. This banter, moreover, hardly compares to
Goldberg’s impudence toward Lulu. During the party when Goldberg
and Lulu become intimate, she finds his discourse seductive and tells
him, “You’re the dead image of the first man I ever loved,” to which
he responds, “It goes without saying” (61). When it suits his purpose,
Goldberg openly accepts the attribution of multiple identities—a sign
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 47

of the postmodernist saturated self (see Gergen). As we shall see,

however, he later balks when McCann calls him by a different name.
His inability to cope with the ambiguity of multiple selves suggests
that he, and to a lesser extent McCann, is blind not only to the
constructed nature of his own identity but also to that of Stanley.
During the climax of the party, they decide to play blind man’s bluff,
forcing Stanley to play against his will and breaking his glasses.
When Stanley reaches Meg he begins to strangle her until Goldberg
and McCann throw him off. After the lights suddenly go off, Stanley
moves toward Lulu, who screams and faints, the result of an apparent
assault that has led to the psychoanalytic interpretation of his venting
a repressed psychic fear of the father and resentment for the mother
(Naismith 2000: 52). From another perspective, Stanley without his
glasses may simply have confused Meg for Goldberg and mistaken
Lulu for McCann. As we can see, therefore, The Birthday Party uses
various dramatic devices to call into question socially constructed
identity, attenuate the mind’s conscious content, and intimate the
move toward an experience of consciousness devoid of attributes.
The uncertain background and identities of the characters, their
multiple names indicating a diversity of masks, Stanley musical talent,
the ulterior motives of the interrogation, and the insecurity experi-
enced by the two visitors all lead to a decontingencing of the con-
scious content of characters and audience. This decontingencing
constitutes a move from their cultural or intersubjective and social or
interobjective contexts toward pure, non-intentional subjectivity in the
upper left quadrant, a move that subtly creates a more integral aware-
ness in Stanley and the audience as they sense a unity of the silence of
consciousness and the activity of the mind.

The Unsayable in Theatre

The unsayable inner dimension The Birthday Party points to
through its decontingencing devices centers on what Jean Baudrillard
calls postmodern simulacra, the work of simulation, as distinct from
feigning or pretending. Postmodern concealment consists of blurring
or eliminating the distinction between truth and falsity. As Zygmunt
Bauman says in Postmodernity and its Discontents, postmodern simu-
lacra make
48 Integral Drama

the issues of the ‘heart of the matter,’ of sense and of meaning

senseless and meaningless. It is reality itself which now needs the
‘suspension of disbelief,’ once the preserve of art, in order to be
grasped and treated and lived as reality. Reality itself is now ‘make
believe,’ although [. . .] it does its best to cover up the traces. (1997:
125-26)

As Baudrillard, like Stanley, demonstrates, what we take for reality is

but an illusion. Art as fantasy, by uncovering the illusion of reality, is
more real than the “real” world of conventional interests. As Pinter
shows, the difference between truth and falsity derives not from the
outer world but from the eyes of the beholder who can see beyond the
sensory to the extra-linguistic, trans-rational dimension of human
experience. Art allows us to perceive the fabrication of the external
world, as Pinter and Stanley may have intuited through their own
creative intelligence. The unsayable, therefore, corresponds to the
state of pure objectless awareness, the field of unbounded subjectivity
upon which conventional reality as represented by Goldberg and
McCann depends for its existence. The Birthday Party reveals how the
modernist prophets of universal humanity are being challenged by
postmodern communities, tribal enclaves that attempt to achieve
ideals similar to those of modernists but now through a more intimate
degree of localized phenomenological experience.
The move from modernism, in which the impersonal public
world to a certain extent still existed, to postmodernism entails a move
from an elite hierarchy, in which only a few pass down their con-
ception of the ideal to the masses, to a situation in which the masses
have organized themselves into localized communities in which they
formulate their own interpretation of meaning based on direct
experience. Unfortunately, the community to which Goldberg and Mc-
Cann belong has not succeeded in extending its experience beyond the
finite, sensory dimensions of the socially constructed self. Their
localized community represents not a postmodernist community in
Bauman’s sense, or in the sense that Pinter’s theatre itself is
postmodernist. In other words, unlike Goldberg and McCann, con-
temporary art challenges anything that has social acceptance. The
postmodernist artist like Pinter seeks a new language that will become
a consensual language again in a new public domain. To quote
Bauman,
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 49

As François Lyotard put it, if since the beginning of modernity arts

sought the ways of representing the ‘sublime,’ that which by its nature
defies representation—the modern artists’ search for the sublime
formed a ‘nostalgic aesthetics’; they posited the non-representable as
an ‘absent content’ only. Postmodern artists, on the other hand,
struggle to incorporate the non-representable into the presentation
itself. (1997: 104)

Bauman goes on to explain that the postmodern artist works without

rules in order “to give voice to the ineffable, and a tangible shape to
the invisible” (105)—as Pinter does through Stanley. Goldberg and
McCann function like finite waves on an unbounded ocean or the
localized position of a mirror in infinite space, while Stanley’s
mystifying lifestyle gives tangible shape to the invisible and voice to
the ineffable.
Shear explains the analogy found in Eastern philosophical
traditions between pure consciousness on one hand and the ocean and
a mirror on the other, as exemplified in The Birthday Party through
the contrast between Stanley’s perspective and that of Goldberg and
McCann. For centuries Eastern traditions

have used images such as a wave on the ocean, and a mirror in space
to display the relation between pure consciousness and the individual
self. The wave and mirror in these images represent experience of
individual self, and the ocean and space represent that of pure
consciousness. A wave is of course nothing but water, localized in
activity and place, and the mirror is portrayed as reflecting nothing but
space, although from a localized position and perspective. Thus in
each of these images the content of the experience of the individual
self is represented as nothing but a localized expression (wave,
reflection) of the relevant overall unbounded field (ocean, space).
(1990: 116)

Goldberg and McCann function like waves and mirrors through

their fixation on the localized perspective of a community that no
longer represents a trans-cultural, transpersonal ideal, while Stanley
points the spectator toward a state of awareness liberated from the
authority of external “reality” as a supreme judge of truth. Pinter pre-
sents the image of Stanley, in all its ambiguity, as the meaning-maker
insofar that it demonstrates that more than one interpretation of the
real or true is possible; it invites the spectator to engage in the process
of interpretation through a taste of the unbounded ocean or the infinity
50 Integral Drama

of space beyond the confines of waves and mirrors. Although a wave

is nothing but water and a mirror reflects nothing but space, they still
represent a localized position and perspective. Instead of merely
reflecting life, therefore, The Birthday Party adds to its content. This
content, however, consists of the ineffability of the self knowing itself,
given that the play points the spectator toward an emptiness—the un-
certainty of Stanley’s background and identity—that generates a taste
of pure consciousness, at least for those not guilt ridden or clinging to
the familiar world, combined with a ongoing awareness of the drama-
tic action itself.
Pinter demonstrates how postmodern artists recognize that the
act of perception creates reality. In this sense, the art of Pinter’s play
and the non-artistic “reality” of Goldberg and McCann operate on the
same footing. Because the material, manifest world is nothing but
simulation or illusion, any meaning—whether stemming from the
world itself or imputed by the artist—is always a product of human
creative intelligence. The difference between the meaning generated
by Goldberg and McCann and that suggested by Stanley’s invisible
background and identity is that the former hinges on a localized
position while the latter unlocks the boundless. As Bauman notes,
modernist artists and the avant-garde attempt to blaze trails to a new
consensus, while postmodern avant-gardism undermines any pos-
sibility of a future universal based on conceptuality (1997: 109). It
strangles agreement that does not lead to a non-localized, non-plura-
listic (or boundless) experience, which as argued here points ulti-
mately to objectless pure awareness, which as a transverbal state does
not hinge on a conceptual formulation about the nature of reality.
Stanley’s choice of existence can be shared only through the
intersubjective experience of a participatory presence, as that between
the performers and spectators of Pinter’s theatre. As Bauman argues
and The Birthday Party dramatizes, postmodern simulation threatens
the difference between true and false, real and imaginary, rendering
sense and meaning senseless and meaningless in the context of the
non-pluralistic experience of the non-localized, extra-linguistic self.
As Shear writes,

the experience of pure unboundedness is phenomenologically unique.

This is because two experiences of qualityless unboundedness cannot
be phenomenologically different, since there is nothing in either to
distinguish it from the other. (1990: 136)
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 51

Goldberg and McCann militate against such an experience, against

sharing with Stanley a qualityless unboundedness, in favor of
phenomenological qualities that conform to their localized community.
Throughout the play, the spectators swing repeatedly from the con-
crete to the abstract, from an intentional, object awareness toward a
non-intentional qualityless state of awareness and back, never able to
fill the void of Stanley’s background and identity with locally accept-
able conceptual content. Yet both Stanley and the audience do retain
an awareness of the self as Emptiness along with the world of Form.
In the aftermath of the birthday party in Act Three when Petey
asks what came over Stanley, Goldberg replies, “What came over him?
Breakdown, Mr. Boles. Pure and Simple. Nervous breakdown” (71).
Petey offers to get a doctor, but Goldberg says they’ll take care of him:
“I’ll take him to Monty” (74). He tells McCann to go upstairs and
bring Stanley down, but McCann refuses, having already been upstairs
to return his glasses. McCann notices that Goldberg appears to be out
of sorts and asks him what’s wrong. Although Goldberg gets annoyed,
he confesses he feels “knocked out” (76), only to launch into his
speech about how he reached his position by respecting authority. By
this time his sense of identity has been shaken up by Stanley’s
emptiness to the point that when McCann calls him Simey, he
explains: “(murderously): Don’t call me that! (He seizes McCann by
the throat.) NEVER CALL ME THAT!” (76). Whatever else it may
signify, his outburst reveals a fixation on a particular quality of
egocentric self-identity. His reaction implies a false sense of security
in the belief that the exclusion of other qualities would prevent his
sliding into the void or indeterminacy of a nonlocalized, qualityless
state as represented by Stanley.
Lulu interrupts their conversation by accusing Goldberg of
taking advantage of her after the party: “Do you think I’m like all the
other girls? [. . .] You used me for a night. A passing fancy” (79-80).
Disingenuous as ever, Goldberg replies, “I’ve never touched another
woman” (79). Lulu felt an emotional attraction to Goldberg, but
claims that “You didn’t appreciate me for myself. You took all those
liberties only to satisfy your appetite” (80). As the spectator sees,
Goldberg fears the loss of his own socially constructed position, but
has no qualms about undermining or exploiting Lulu’s position.
While he doesn’t mind her descending to a position that fulfils his
52 Integral Drama

own appetites, he does everything he can to prevent Stanley from

escaping a position imposed by Monty’s orthodox community, and he
especially abhors the possibility that Stanley may entirely exceed all
social positions. Stanley finally comes downstairs dressed in “a dark
well cut suit and white collar” (81), ready to be abducted to Monty by
the visitors, who begin to woo him with the following platitudes:

Goldberg: You need a long convalescence.

McCann: A change of air.
Goldberg: Somewhere over the rainbow.
McCann: Where angels fear to tread.
Goldberg: Exactly.
McCann: You’re in a rut.
Goldberg: You look anaemic.
McCann: Rheumatic.
Goldberg: Myopic.
McCann: Epileptic.
Goldberg: You’re on the verge.
McCann: You’re a dead duck.
Goldberg: But we can save you.
McCann: From a worse fate.
Goldberg: True. . . .
Goldberg: You’ll be adjusted.
McCann: You’ll be our pride and joy.
Goldberg: You’ll be a mensch. (82-83)

When they ask Stanley what he has to say for himself, he can
only stammer incoherently, which signifies his strong resistance to
conforming to convention or the desires of others. In the long run, as
the play suggests, Goldberg’s desire to win over Stanley is doomed to
failure, just as the desire of a consumer in a capitalist society can
never achieve gratification, but is always postponed into the future.
Of all the characters in The Birthday Party, only Stanley comes close
to transcending desire. Unlike Goldberg in his hankering to seduce
women and convert outsiders, Stanley alone recognizes that ful-
fillment comes through the absence of desire, that as long as desire
dominates, fulfillment will have to wait.
As Bauman explains in Liquid Modernity, free capital has freed
individuals, especially landlords, from the land as never before (2000:
149). But as Pinter shows through Goldberg and McCann, this free-
dom is illusory. The tourist, as opposed to the vagabond, may think he
is free because he can travel anywhere and be accepted, but what
happens when the money is gone? Even a vagabond, as Stanley
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 53

illustrates, can achieve genuine freedom on the level of consciousness

by overcoming desire. For Bauman, freedom in liquid modernity
means little more than to be free within time and space, as desired by
Goldberg and McCann; it does not mean to be free of time and space,
as happened upon by Stanley. Just as capital depends on consumers,
so a localized community depends on people who desire the security
of shared interests and the personality of a charismatic leader. But as
soon as consumers realize that desire cannot be satisfied by con-
sumerism, by acquiring commodities or sensations, capitalist society
will be doomed. Likewise, when individuals realize that fulfillment
cannot be achieved within a spatio-temporal dimension, localized
communities based on waves and mirrors will lose their appeal.
As Bauman says, “desire does not desire satisfaction. To the
contrary, desire desires desire” (1998: 83). The prospect of desire
disappearing horrifies consumers like Goldberg and McCann. They
sense that the loss of new sensations, in this case associated with
seducing women and pressuring others into complying with the
arbitrary rules of a localized community, would confine them even
more within the boundaries of time and space, a prospect their limited,
linguistic selves may long for, but which their extra-linguistic,
transpersonal selves would naturally shun. Bauman’s analysis of the
nature of consumerism also applies to the nature of localized com-
munities in search of collective agreement:

For the consumers in the society of consumers, being on the move—

searching, looking for, not-finding-it or more exactly not-finding-it-
yet is not a malaise, but the promise of bliss; perhaps it is the bliss
itself. Theirs is the kind of traveling hopefully which makes arriving
into a curse. [. . .] Not so much the greed to acquire and possess, not
the gathering of wealth in its material, tangible sense, as the
excitement of a new and unprecedented sensation is the name of the
consumer game. Consumers are first and foremost gatherers of
sensations; they are collectors of things only in a secondary and
derivative sense. (1998: 83, original emphasis)

Goldberg and McCann pursue the commodity of human

conformity to their organization, with their sensation or bliss con-
sisting of depriving others of their independence and freedom. The
momentary fulfilling of desire gives the illusion of transcending space
and time, of a change of circumstances, but this change is artificial
54 Integral Drama

and transitory. It amounts to no more than shifting the boundaries of

temporality, not transcending them altogether. Stanley, who won’t
even go for a walk with Lulu, represents an individual who finds
greater fulfillment in the absence of desire than in its gratification.
Unlike Goldberg, Stanley senses that fulfilling a desire has nothing to
do with acquiring a tangible object or sensation, but simply with the
momentary suspension of desire itself. If that suspension can be
prolonged, then fulfillment becomes an abiding state of mind.
Members of a localized community such as that to which Goldberg
and McCann belong fear such a suspension for it would undermine
their very existence, which depends upon the need of individuals to
find support and security in shared objects of desire. To whatever
extent Stanley himself has overcome desire, The Birthday Party points
to an existential state after desire has run its course. Stanley’s desire
and hope centers on being liberated from desire, on not being coerced
into playing the game of consumer society, in which each community
pursues its own localized brand of sensations.
In Act Three Stanley appears to suffer a breakdown. But the
question about how successful Goldberg, McCann and Monty will be
in reconstructing Stanley remains. Even though tortured in the second
and third acts, Stanley already left the organization once and could
easily leave it again. No evidence in Act Three suggests that an
organization will succeed in dominating his non-identity with a so-
cially constructed self, or in replacing his sense of nonattachment with
a commitment toward the collective interests of its members. If
anything, Goldberg’s furious reaction to McCann’s inexplicable paper
tearing, his being called Simey, and his sudden apprehension of
feeling “knocked out” all suggest that Goldberg, McCann and the
organization are moving toward an emptiness like Stanley’s, and that
ultimately they will be the ones to undergo a reconstruction.
Even within the naturalistic setting of the play, the visitors’
stylized language and unspecified mission add a surreal dimension to
the play that implies a menace not only to Stanley but also to the
conventional organization to which the visitors belong. The bizarre
and improbable nature of their questions and accusations suggest that
what needs to be reconstructed more than Stanley are the social and
religious establishments that attempt to impose conformity to arbitrary
rules. The Birthday Party, as an example of integral theatre, reveals
not only how a sensitive individual can fear the demands of an outside
 Pinter’s The Birthday Party 55

world, but also how the public world as a collection of local

communities can fear the inner dimension of nonconformists who
follow their innate callings. While Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes that the
material intellect cannot grasp immaterial consciousness (2003), the
play suggests that Stanley provides us with a glimpse of the coexis-
tence of both dimensions in his ability to remain nonattached to the
content of the mind while simultaneously witnessing what goes on
within and around him, which the audience also experiences through
rasa. Similarly, Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, by dramatizing the
plight of an individual caught between conformity and defiance, also
takes the spectator toward an integral experience.
 Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros:
Defiance vs. Conformity

Consumerism and the Anticipations of Joy

Critics have pointed out that Rhinoceros dramatizes Ionesco’s
aversion for the Fascist movement in Rumania when he left in 1938
(Esslin 1991: 181). From a 21st century perspective, however, the play
not only demonstrates how public opinion can pressure an individual
into conformity, it also suggests how present-day consumer society
can transmogrify an individual into a monster with an insatiable
appetite. The play sets up a contrast between the necessity to consume
in order to sustain biological existence within a certain standard of
social decency, and the extravagant desire to consume as a means of
wish fulfillment. In this contrast between self-sufficiency and over-
indulgence through gluttony and intemperance, the play impels the
audience to experience a gap between the basic needs of human
existence on the one hand and on the other the desire to gratify the
appetites in a bestial, uninhibited manner as symbolized by the rhi-
noceros.
In terms of conformity to public opinion, as in the case of Fas-
cism, Ionesco says of Rhinoceros,

As usual, I went back to my personal obsessions. I remembered that in

the course of my life I have been very much struck by what one might
call the current of opinion, by its rapid evolution, its power of
contagion, which is that of a real epidemic. People allow themselves
suddenly to be invaded by a new religion, a doctrine, a fanaticism. . . .
At such moments we witness a veritable mental mutation. I don’t
know if you have noticed it, but when people no longer share your
opinions, when you can no longer make yourself understood by them,
one has the impression of being confronted with monsters—rhinos, for
example. They have that mixture of candor and ferocity. They would
kill you with the best of consciences. And history has shown us during
the last quarter of a century that people thus transformed not only
58 Integral Drama

resemble rhinos, but really become rhinoceroses. (Esslin 1991: 181-82;

Sarrute 1960 interview)

Esslin notes that the characters in the play choose a

pachydermatous existence because “they admire brute force and the
simplicity that springs from the suppression of over-tender humanistic
feelings” (1991: 182). Some conform to the herd of rhinos because
they feel it’s the only way to learn how rhinos think in order to
persuade them to revert back to their humanity, while others like Mlle
Daisy conform because they cannot resist kowtowing to the majority.
Berenger, a character who appears in several other Ionesco plays,
watches as his friend Jean and then his colleague Dudard turn into
rhinos, with more and more people converting until he and Daisy, a
colleague he’s in love with, end up as the last remaining humans.
Everyone but Berenger and Daisy has been infected by rhinoceritis, a
mysterious disease that makes them want to abandon their flabby,
weak, pale humanity and become vigorous, hardy, thick-skinned pac-
hyderms. As Deborah Gaensbauer says,

Berenger is an anti-hero whose immunity to rhinoceritis, having begun

as the cloud of a hangover, is an instinctive resistance to ideology and
propaganda for which, according to Ionesco, ‘it is probably impossible
to give any explanation.’ (1996: 104)

In the end, therefore, even Daisy cannot resist the temptation of

joining the majority in their insensitive and aggressive lifestyle. Left
alone, Berenger rebelliously asserts that he will never capitulate. To
his friends Jean and Dudard, Berenger defends his desire to resist
becoming a rhino and live on as a human being, but after everyone
including Daisy has become non-human, he regrets being unable to
change into a rhino himself. Ultimately, though, he reasserts his defi-
ant preference for the qualities of humanity, yet not as some critics
believe without a strong hint of the fox’s scorn for unattainable grapes.
As Esslin puts it,

Far from being a heroic last stand, Berenger’s defiance is farcical and
tragicomic, and the final meaning of the play is by no means as simple
as some critics made it appear. What the play conveys is the absurdity
of defiance as much as the absurdity of conformism, the tragedy of the
individualist who cannot join the happy throng of less sensitive people,
the artist’s feelings as an outcast. (1991: 183)
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 59

Esslin goes on to compare Berenger to Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in

Metamorphosis.
While Samsa finds himself transformed into a giant bug as
everyone else remains normal, Berenger soon discovers that the
definition of normalcy has undergone a radical modification: the
conventional qualities of a human are no longer considered to be as
normal as the attributes of a rhino, for, as we shall see, even before
their physical transformation the characters have already started to
undergo an internal transformation. Ionesco both reacts against con-
formity and derides the individualist who flaunts his or her superiority
as a sensitive human. In addition to highlighting the absurdity of the
human condition, however, Ionesco creates a gap between what the
audience feels intuitively as the true nature of its own humanity and
the conditions that consumer society has imposed upon humanity.
Although Berenger’s final stand emphasizes the ambivalence of our
need to conform while simultaneously preserving our individuality,
the play suggests that consumer society has artificially induced this
ambivalence as a way to insure its success in the production of
consumers. Unlike the characters who transform into rhinos, the
audience would generally resist identification with the rhinos because
they would appreciate the gap between humans and beasts, which
constitutes a gap between ordinary existential needs and extravagant
desires based solely on the transitory nature of wish fulfillment—as if
Freud’s “reality principle” were being replaced by the “pleasure
principle.” Rhinos are characterized by the lack of that dimension of
cognitive reflection that would allow them to be spontaneously aware
of their indulgence. Humans, in contrast, may at times suffer from the
sense of gluttony and bestial behavior found in rhinos, but the play
induces self-awareness in them of the excessive nature of this in-
dulgence and the fact that they can manage without it. Indeed, this
indulgence becomes a factor of conformity, with the majority fol-
lowing their appetites because of an inability to resist the pressure
from others to conform, not because of any inherent satisfaction or
pleasure derived from their indulgence.
Bauman argues that consumer society has created a new relation
between Freud’s reality and pleasure principles. The pleasure prin-
ciple, in which pleasure has to adjust itself to the limitations of reality,
has undergone a radical transformation. Today the pleasure principle
60 Integral Drama

has itself become the ultimate reality. In this scenario, the reality prin-
ciple must now sustain pleasure by way of privileging instant as
opposed to delayed gratification, which was previously held to be the
basis of social reality. Bauman observes in Society Under Siege that

Consumer life is a never-ending sequence of new beginnings. The joy

of shopping is greater than any joy the purchased product, brought
home, may bring. It is the shopping that counts. [. . .] Pleasures are at
their best, most alluring and most exhilarating when encapsulated, as
anticipations of joy, in the exhibits on display. (2002: 154, original
emphasis)

He concludes that capitalist market society, while originally based on

the greed for possessions, has paradoxically “ended up denigrating
material possessions and replacing the value of ‘having’ with that of
living through a pleasurable (yet volatile and fast evaporating)
experience” (155). Ionesco’s rhinos live for the pleasurable experience
of sheer bestiality, not for acquiring possessions. They represent a
society, as Bauman puts it, in which pleasure has been “miraculously
transmogrified into the mainstay of reality,” and the search for
pleasure has become “the major (and sufficient) instrument of pattern
maintenance” (187). In other words, the fluidity of moving from one
new pleasurable beginning to another has become the “ultimate
solidity—the most stable of conceivable conditions” (ibid.). On the
basis of the substitution of the reality principle by pleasure, Ionesco’s
play suggests that the universal condition of rational thought and
action is being replaced in today’s market society by the free reign of
irrational pleasure as represented by the rhinos.
Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, however, does not wholeheartedly em-
brace the rational strategies of a solid modernist society, as evidenced
by Berenger’s dilemma when at the end of the play his will to save
humanity weakens and he feels tempted to conform to the irrationality
of the rhinos. Although he finds it impossible to renounce his
humanity and become a rhino, Berenger realizes that he needs to
respond sensibly to the conditions of an irrational society, that rational
strategies may not always be the most effective in dealing with the
irrational passions of consumerism and the pleasure principle. As
Bauman notes, “under certain conditions irrational behavior may carry
a trapping of rational strategy and even offer the most immediately
obvious rational option among those available” (2002: 189). Iones-
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 61

co’s audience does not have a clear option in choosing one side of the
equation or the other, but rather finds itself in a gap between them.
This gap arguably represents and indeed constitutes a taste of the void
of conceptions, that qualityless state of pure consciousness beyond
thought found in the upper left quadrant. As the play demonstrates,
logical analysis does not help characters or spectators in coping with a
situation in which a growing number of people become rhinos.
Berenger as we shall see undergoes a transformation in the play from
an aimless, alienated, apathetic Everyman who drinks too much and
suspects life to be a dream to a morally strong individual who even in
the face of absurdity refuses to surrender his human identity.
Throughout the play he finds himself oscillating in and out of
conceptual gaps as he grapples with the mystery of his friends and
fellow citizens turning into beasts. The gaps occur at several points
during the play: in Berenger’s discussions on logic with his friend
Jean and the Logician, in the debate with Jean and his colleague
Dudard about the reasons for choosing rhinoceritis over humanity, and
in Berenger’s amorous relation with Daisy and their tentative decision
to resist relinquishing their humanity. As he says in Present Past Past
Present, Ionesco himself also had such experiences in his life:

Once long ago, I was sometimes overcome by a sort of grace, a

euphoria. It was as if, first of all, every motion, every reality was
emptied of its content. After this, it was as if I found myself suddenly
at the center of pure ineffable existence. I become one with the one
essential reality when along with an immense serene joy, I was
overcome by what I might call the stupefaction of being, the certainty
of being. (1971: 150-51)

This experience, based on knowledge-by-identity, constitutes the

bases for a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form conveyed
to Berenger and the audience throughout the play.

The Will to Power

In Act One, Berenger meets Jean at a café when suddenly a
rhinoceros runs by through the town square (off-stage), shocking
everybody but Berenger. Jean begins to lecture Berenger on a list of
failings—his being a semi-alcoholic with no will-power, no interest in
culture and no sense of purpose—when a second rhinoceros runs
through the square and tramples a woman’s cat. As Jean harangues
62 Integral Drama

Berenger on will power, the Logician on a related note explains the

concept of syllogisms to the Old Gentleman as he attempts to account
logically for the rhinoceros and whether the two that ran through the
square were the same or different, and whether they came from Asia
or Africa. Ionesco reveals that the Logician, who represents the
rationalist characters of the play—namely Jean, Botard and Dudard—
comically fails in his logical analysis, proving that logic doesn’t
explain everything. While berating Berenger, Jean comes across as
hypocritical and full of contradictions like the Logician. He accuses
Berenger of being irresponsible yet arrives late for their meeting and
refuses to take Berenger out for a day of culture because he want to
snooze before going out drinking with his friends. Nevertheless, Jean
claims, “I’m just as good as you are; I think with all due modesty I
may say I’m better. The superior man is the man who fulfils his duty”
(1962: 13). By emphasizing his rational intellect and strength of will,
Jean symbolizes the “will to power” of Nietzsche’s “super-man,” a
powerful being standing beyond human morality, which foreshadows
his metamorphosis into a savage rhinoceros that violently attacks Ber-
enger when he tries to save him. This will to power also prompts the
other rationalists to transmogrify into rhinos, including the Logician,
Dudard, and Botard, Berenger’s skeptic colleague who initially
dismisses the newspaper story about the rhinos as pure fantasy. These
men succumb to the fascist rhinos through an attraction to their
strength and a primal state of nature beyond morality. With the
ineffectual logic of the Logician, Jean rationalizes his lapses in moral
conduct to his lackadaisical friend and resists accepting that the
universe is not logical but rather absurd, as recognized by Berenger.
While Jean and the rationalist metamorphose into rhinos,
however, their transformation is merely physical, for on the level of
moral values they were already savage and vicious animals. The
rhinos thus symbolize a prior inner transformation of humans who be-
lieve that brute force can render them super-men and place them
above the laws of nature, when in fact the only power they have is
their strength in numbers. Ionesco suggests that the collective con-
sciousness of the rhino-men gives them a false sense of security
through the illusion of power, considering that this power is only that
of collective violence, reminiscent of the totalitarian governments of
WW II. This power, moreover, is also associated with pleasure, which
derives not only from the pleasure principle but also from wielding
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 63

control over others. The world of rhinos therefore represents a reality

in which the pleasure principle has usurped the reality principle by
replacing logic, reason and delayed gratification with their polar
opposites. Instant gratification, however, comes in two forms:
physical and metaphysical. The rhinos achieve the former while
Berenger and through him the audience achieve the latter by seeing
beyond physical attachments. Through the rhinos’ pseudo power and
pleasure, then, Rhinoceros produces a conceptual gap that attenuates
the audience’s attachment to any particular concept or thesis—a gap
between the physical power/pleasure of the rhinos based on personal
desire on the one hand, and the spiritual power/bliss awakened within
the audience and Berenger based on a transpersonal freedom from the
bondage of desire on the other. Through a taste of the void of
conceptions beyond cultural constructs as suggested by Berenger’s
selfless support of the best interest and wellbeing of others, the
audience glimpses a state of wholeness beyond duality by bridging the
gap in ordinary waking consciousness between the three elements of
knowledge: a separate object of experience, a process of experience
and the experiencer. The real freedom of a unified, transpersonal self
approached by Berenger and the spectators thus derives from a sense
of the connection between the local field of matter and action and an
underlying nonlocal field of mind and consciousness. As R. W. Boyer
puts it in “The Whole Creates the Parts,”

Brain and mind are no longer just in the head, because brains, minds,
and all material objects are no longer just localized physical matter,
but rather are also more abstract but real nonlocal processes in a
subtler underlying field of existence. (2006b: 4)

Only Berenger demonstrates a connection to this underlying

field of existence through his sense of responsibility for humanity at
large. Although indecisive at times, his love for Daisy suggests not
only an emotional desire for somebody, but a sense of responsibility
for her wellbeing, a selfless kind of love that indicates an uncon-
ditional caring for all humanity. Berenger feels guilty that he may
have pushed his friends including Daisy out toward becoming rhinos,
but as the play suggests they would have metamorphosed into savages
even without him. Jean and the others become rhinos not so much
because they want to conform, given that rhinos are solitary creatures
64 Integral Drama

to begin with, but rather because of the desire for power and mindless
pleasure. Berenger on the other hand doubts his own existence,
contradicting Descartes’ claim, “I think, therefore I am.” Through
statements such as “Life is a dream,” “I don’t even know if I am me,”
and “I sometimes wonder if I exist myself” (20, 24, 26, original
emphasis), Berenger not only questions the power of thought but also
suggests a modification of the formula in existentialist philosophy,
“existence precedes essence.” According to this principle, physical
birth as a human being comes before acquiring any essential meaning
in life. Berenger’s search extends beyond both physical and mental
existence toward that subtler underlying field of existence associated
with his love for humanity. As discussed below in terms of Samkhya
Yoga, dualism does not consist of a mind/body opposition, which are
both considered physical, but rather of an opposition between
mind/body and consciousness. Berenger’s selfless love, as a field of
unity consciousness, subsumes existence as well as essence. Through
its nonlocality and interconnectedness, this unified field creates all the
parts of human existence. In other words, Berenger goes beyond
thought to a level underlying both existence and essence. As Boyer
puts it:

From the holistic perspective of levels of phenomenal nature, gross is

a limitation of subtle, and subtle is a limitation of the unified field.
With respect to the entire cosmos, the big bang thus could be
considered not an explosion but an implosion or condensation—
because everything resulting from the big bang remains inside the
unified field. The big bang would not create time and space, but rather
be a phenomenal limitation of eternity and infinity. In the holistic
perspective, dimensions of space and time in addition to the ordinary
four dimensions may not be necessary to account for nonlocality.
Subtle levels of nature don’t necessarily require spatial dimensions in
addition to the ordinary three dimensions; they are limited
phenomenal manifestations within infinity. (2006b: 7, original
emphasis)

Berenger remains the only character who plumbs the depths of

the unified field of consciousness beyond essence and existence,
ideology and materialism—or the collective life and power-mongering
of the rhino fascists. In conforming to fascism, the rationalists have all
fallen for a rhino’s existence, even though in their pre-metamorphosed
state, like Jean in his hypocrisy toward Berenger, they have already
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 65

adopted the rhino’s essence in what Botard in Act Two refers to as

“An example of collective psychosis” (54).
Love for humanity, moreover, does not comprise an essence in
the existential sense of having a conceptual significance. Berenger’s
experience of selfless love, being a nonpluralistic state of intercom-
nectedness that everyone would experience in the same way, consti-
tutes a state beyond finite meanings and interpretations. Recall that as
Jonathan Shear says,

the experience of pure unboundedness is phenomenologically unique.

This is because two experiences of qualityless unboundedness cannot
be phenomenologically different, since there is nothing in either to
distinguish it from the other. (1990: 136)

Shear goes on to say that, given the overall correlation between

accounts of a void of conceptions experienced through a phenomenon
such as selfless love,

it appears reasonable, in the face of any reference to differentiating

content, to think that the unbounded components of the various
experiences are also the same, even where [. . .] such components are
not explicitly identified as qualityless. (137)

Berenger’s role in Rhinoceros serves to take the audience beyond the

realm of finite self-identity to a more subtle underlying human identity
devoid of ego. According to “logical fiction” theories, moreover, the
notion of “I” often works as a linguistic fiction. As Shear says,

Simply put, the fact that verbs such as “think” require a grammatical
subject naturally suggests that there is some “I” (in the first person
case) doing the thinking. However, it is argued, it may well be that
this “I” is merely a “schematic convenience,” required by ordinary
grammar but not representing any real thing. For example, when we
say “It is raining,” we neither need nor want to postulate any separate
“It” doing the raining. Similarly, unless we have reason to think
otherwise, it is quite possible that the “I” (in “I think,” etc.) is also
superfluous, and that statements such as “Thoughts are occurring”
may reflect facts of mind more accurately than those using the term “I.”
Thus, if despite careful introspection we cannot locate anything that
could properly correspond to the term “I,” we should recognize that
this “I” is nothing but a logical “place-holder” (a mere “schematic
convenience”) and not be misled into improperly inferring the
existence of any real thing corresponding to it. (1990: 108)
66 Integral Drama

Berenger’s doubts about his existence, about the world being

anything but a dream, and about the logical arguments of becoming a
rhino all suggest that he has transcended the conceptual dimension of
the finite “I” and taken his stand, together with the audience, through a
glimpse of the subtlest nonlocal level of human identity. Human in
this sense refers to the phenomenologically unbounded state of
nonpluralistic being. Throughout Rhinoceros, Ionesco dramatizes Ber-
enger’s resistance to the self-interest of parts in favor of the selfless
whole.
Evidence of Berenger’s penchant for wholeness emerges
frequently in his non-logical remarks. In conversation with Jean, he
says, “Solitude seems to oppress me. And so does the company of
other people,” to which Jean replies, “You contradict yourself. What
oppresses you—solitude, or the company of others? You consider
yourself a thinker, yet you’re devoid of logic” (25). In going beyond
the logic of non-contradiction and either/or, Berenger assimilates to
the wholeness of both/and. To wonder if he exists implies that he both
does and does not exist: his finite socially constructed self is a dream,
while his infinite better Self as pure consciousness, even though de-
void of qualities, exists as the ultimate real. Most Western philos-
ophers, particularly constructivists like Steven Katz (1978) and others,
argue that consciousness always has an intentional object, and that
even mystical experience is constructed by language and culture. As
Robert Forman argues, however, mystical or sacred experiences

don’t result from a process of building or constructing mystical

experiences [. . .] but rather from an un-constructing of language and
belief [. . .] from something like a releasing of experience from
language. (1999: 99, original emphasis)

By language he implies what the Rig-Veda and Indian grammarians

such as Bhartrhari call the lower levels of language that involve space,
time and the duality of subject and object. As Bhartrhari notes,
language consists of four levels corresponding to different levels of
consciousness, ranging from the spoken word in ordinary waking con-
sciousness to the subtlest form of thought in pure consciousness
(Coward 1980). As we move from the ordinary waking state toward
pure consciousness (turiya or the fourth state), the unity of sound and
meaning, name and form increases. Of the four levels of language, the
first two are vaikhari and madhyama, which belong to the ordinary
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 67

waking state and in Saussurean terms correspond to the general field

of parole and langue, which consist of a temporal/spatial gap between
sound and meaning. The two higher levels of language are pashyanti
and para, which can only be experienced through non-intentional pure
consciousness. They are transverbal in the sense of being without a
temporal sequence between sound and meaning. In Derrida and
Indian Philosophy, Harold Coward notes that the main difference
between the two higher levels is that pashyanti consists of an impulse
toward expression because it lies at the juncture between Brahman and
maya (illusion or expressed form), while para, which has no impulse
toward expression, lies within Brahman itself (1990: 90). Both of
these levels, however, are conveyed in theatre through the power of
suggestion.
The notion of intentionality in ordinary waking consciousness
from which Berenger begins entails a subject being conscious of an
object, event or other qualia. William James classifies this into two
kinds of knowledge: “knowledge-about,” which we gain by thinking
about something; and “knowledge-by-acquaintance,” which we gain
through direct sensory experience (see Barnard 1994: 123-34; Forman
1999: 109-27). Forman refers to the pure consciousness event
suggested by Berenger’s experience as a non-intentional experience or
“knowledge-by-identity,” in which, recall, there is no subject/object
duality;

the subject knows something by virtue of being it. . . . It is a reflexive

or self-referential form of knowing. I know my consciousness and I
know that I am and have been conscious simply because I am it.
(1999: 118, original emphasis)

As a truly direct or immediate form of knowledge, non-intentional

pure consciousness is devoid of the dualism of the subject-perceiving-
object and subject-thinking-thought (Forman 1999: 125). When
Berenger transcends his socially constructed identity by doubting its
existence, he intuits a nonlocal underlying real Self through knowl-
edge-by-identity, and in the process induces a move toward the same
experience in the spectator. While glimpsing this state of awareness,
then, Berenger and the audience also glimpse the coexistence of both
Emptiness and external Form—the effect of The Lamp at the Door
68 Integral Drama

illuminating for their awareness both inside and outside simulta-

neously.
Berenger’s reliance on alcohol, although detrimental to his
health, is a form of escape that serves as a trope for his metamorphosis
from a finite socially induced identity based on knowledge-about and
knowledge-by-acquaintance to a knowledge-by-identity of the big Self
liberated from the ennui of a deadening routine. This knowledge-by-
identity, as a field of all possibilities, is intimated by Botard who in
Act Two says Berenger has “got such a vivid imagination! Any-
thing’s possible with him!” (53). Jean and the other rationalists also
try to escape their oppressive jobs through their metamorphosis into
rhinos, but however powerful their new identities may appear on a
physical dimension, Berenger alone becomes a true super-man by
establishing his identity on a selfless love for his fellow humans.
Although the rhinos become more beautiful as the play progresses
while humans become more ugly, their beauty derives only from brute
physical strength, but as we know from modern physics,

matter doesn’t have a material basis. [. . .] the paradigmatic belief in

materialism—a core feature of much of modern scientific history—is
untenable at more fundamental levels of nature. (Boyer 2006b: 3,
original emphasis)

By the end of the play, Berenger demonstrates that true strength and
beauty depend not on the material but rather on the immaterial essence
of nonpluralistic being, the basis of all love and compassion.

The Source of Resolve and Responsibility

The fact that Berenger exhibits willpower in the face of strong
opposition from his friends and colleagues not only indicates that he
has committed himself to a significant cause but also suggests that he
acts spontaneously from a self-referral level of awareness beyond the
boundaries of conceptual meaning. Working within the theatre of the
absurd, Ionesco reflects this subjective self-referral through the struc-
tural self-referral of Rhinoceros being aware of itself as a play.
Throughout the production, for instance, the rhinoceros heads back-lit
on stage produce an alienation effect among the spectators by making
them conscious of the fact they’re watching an atypical drama. More
explicitly, Jean tries to reform Berenger by suggesting that, “Instead
of squandering all your spare money on drink, isn’t it better to buy a
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 69

ticket for an interesting play? Do you know anything about the avant-
garde theatre there’s so much to talk about? Have you seen Ionesco’s
plays?” (30). This formal self-referral of the stage drama mirrors the
self-referral of the characters themselves as they reflect upon their
self-identity in the upper left quadrant. While the rationalists such as
Jean, the Logician and Dudard examine themselves on the ordinary
level of language and thought, Berenger operates from a more subtle
self-referral level that goes beyond ordinary language and inter-
pretation. Self-referral here signifies the self knowing itself as pure
unbounded consciousness through knowledge-by-identity, or as the
Upanishadic text says, of knowing “That which is non-thought, [yet]
which stands in the midst of thought.” In the Advaitan tradition it also
means that pure consciousness (Atman) is fully awake to itself,
undifferentiated and self-shining, beyond space and time, “aware only
of the Oneness of being” (Deutsch 1973: 48). As we shall see, Ber-
enger’s self-identity and social reactions are often trans-conceptual,
based on a self-referral connectedness with deeper levels of the Self
beyond the ideologies of socially induced identity or the thinking
mind.
Michael Goldman analyzes the Brechtian process of recognition
and identification in theatre in terms of “making or doing identity”
(2000: 18). Although Goldman defines identity as an aspect of mind,
his model touches on my analysis of the self through its emphasis on
the “most inward” part of mind (77)—or pure consciousness in Vedic
psychology. Theatre, as the performance of Jean and the other ratio-
nalists demonstrates, portrays the confusions of self-identity. Ber-
enger, on the other hand, displays a self-referral that establishes what
Goldman calls “a self that in some way transcends the normal con-
fusions of self” (18). Contrary to the popular poststructuralist view,
Goldman defines “subtext,” or the “mutual permeability of actor and
script,” as not reducible to text (49). An actor’s performance can al-
ways be treated semiotically,

But in drama one finds inevitably an element in excess of what can be

semiotically extracted—something that is also neither irrelevant to nor
[. . .] completely independent of the text. No matter how exhaustively
one tries to translate what an actor does with a script into a kind of
writeable commentary on it, there will always also remain the doing of
it—the bodily life of the actor moving into the world, at a specific
moment in time, to set in motion these words, these gestures, these
70 Integral Drama

writeable ideas, this other identity. And, if the doing were itself to be
reduced to a text, there would still remain the doing of the doing. The
actor enters the text. (50, original emphasis)

Berenger performs the script self-reflexively in excess of the

text, while through him the spectator receives a taste of non-inten-
tional consciousness in excess of the play’s constructed identities,
going from zone #2 to zone #1 in upper left quadrant. If the actor’s
physical entry into the text as subtext exceeds what can be extracted
semiotically, then his entry as self-reflexive consciousness must
exceed it to an even greater extent. This phenomenon leads to
aesthetic experience (rasa), which involves Berenger and the audience
experiencing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form, an inner silence
on the basis of which the internal observer perceives itself as well as
thought and the surrounding world.
In addition, not only does Berenger’s entry into the text exceed
what can be extracted semiotically; the rationalists also exceed the text
through their metamorphosis into rhinos. Although operating on a
physical level, both the back-lit heads of the rhinos on stage and the
actual transformation of the characters into rhinos exceed what the
text can semiotically extract, just as Berenger’s self-referral exceeds it
by pointing toward the nonlocal level of the unified field of conscious-
ness underlying material existence. This self-referentiality of the text,
by highlighting the absence of a physical referent, causes the audience
to experience a corresponding self-referral on the level of conscious-
ness. This self-referral has the effect of swinging the spectator’s
attention from the concrete to the abstract, from referentiality to self-
referral; that is, the spectator’s vision moves from looking at the
concrete dimensions of the stage drama toward looking into its
abstract dimensions of a more subtle nonlocal level of reality behind
the surface. This distinction between looking at stage drama as
opposed to looking into its structural features corresponds to Colin
McGinn’s theory developed in The Power of Movies of looking into
rather than at the images projected on a screen. McGinn argues that
unlike cinema, theatre requires no more looking into than do people
sitting in a room, except in terms of looking into the actor’s eyes.
Watching a film entails seeing an object embedded as a referent in the
image, so that in seeing the image we actually look through it to the
embedded object. Unlike the actors in a stage drama, the images in
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 71

movies are transparent insofar that they invite us to look into them and
not at them as in the case of actors on a stage. As McGinn explains:

Of course, there is the space of the stage, but the objects before the
eyes—props and human bodies—are not in any way transparent
entities that we look through. The audience looks at these things, not
through them; there is no analogue of the screen as a traversable
medium standing between eyes and objects. So the visual relation we
have to the staged play is of a very different nature from that which
obtains between the viewer and the cinema screen; the visual system
is differently engaged in the two cases, despite the fact that both at
some point involve actors moving through space. [. . .] We could say
that visually speaking, theatre is a present medium while cinema is an
absent medium. The cinema screen is there to be transcended; the
stage is the primary object of attention. The screen confronts you with
something it wants you to ignore; the stage wants to hold your
attention on itself. (2005: 34, original emphasis)

McGinn’s argument holds for theatre in terms of physical sight,

perhaps, but not necessarily in terms of the mind’s eye, which focuses
more on what is absent than what is present. Through the experience
of self-referral, theatre can induce the spectator to look not merely at
the stage drama but also into it: that is, through the actors on stage to
an abstract nonlocal level of experience evoked through knowledge-
by-identity. Ionesco employs this self-referral strategy of looking into
rather than at because Berenger’s experience of an underlying non-
local truth, although describable as a commitment to a significant
cause, is essentially unsayable. It belongs to a trans-conceptual level
of knowledge that can be shared intersubjectively only by being it in
zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, not through ordinary language and
interpretation.
In Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive definition, the unsayable (as
well as the language used to convey it) has clear affinities with the
Brahman-Atman of Advaita Vedanta. Shear, Forman, Deikman and
others have explained the Advaitan definition of consciousness and its
derivative in perennial psychology in terms of higher states of con-
sciousness. As Charles Alexander notes, Vedic psychology proposes
“an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated
faculties or levels of mind” (1990: 290). Advaita and Samkhya-Yoga,
moreover, distinguish between mind and consciousness. The term
“mind,” as in the case of the Logician’s reasoning and Berenger’s
72 Integral Drama

humanitarian rationale, derives from the latter of the two following

uses in Vedic psychology: “It [mind] refers to the overall multilevel
functioning of consciousness as well as to the specific level of
thinking [buddhi] (apprehending and comparing) within that overall
structure” (Alexander 1989: 291). The levels of the overall func-
tioning of mind in Vedic psychology extend from the senses, desire,
mind, intellect, feelings, and ego, to pure transcendental consciousness,
or self as internal observer as suggested by Berenger’s self-referral
experience. Pure consciousness (turiya), which is physiologically
distinct from the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and
dreaming, is immanent within yet transcendent to the individual ego
and thinking mind. During their arguments in Act One, Jean implies
that Berenger transcends the logical boundaries of the mind:

Jean: If you think you’re being witty, you’re very much mistaken!
You’re just being a bore with . . . with your stupid paradoxes. You’re
incapable of talking seriously! [. . .]
Berenger: You really can be obstinate, sometimes.
Jean: And now you’re calling me a mule into the bargain.
Berenger: It would never have entered my mind.
Jean: You have no mind!
Berenger: All the more reason why it would never enter it.
Jean: There are certain things that enter the mind even of people
without one. (21-22)

This accusation suggests that Berenger indeed responds to the

world from a level deeper than the thinking mind, the faculty that
leads the rationalist to give up their humanity and metamorphose into
rhinos. As mentioned earlier in terms of the existentialist notion that
existence (body) precedes essence (mind), Berenger exceeds both
through a taste of the nonlocal, transrational self. What enters Ber-
enger’s mind enters from a more subtle level of consciousness within
through knowledge-by-identity, not from thought or senses through
which the rationalists are mesmerized into an emulation of the brute
strength of the rhinos.
Like the subtext of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, then, the aim in
Advaita Vedanta is to establish the oneness of reality and to lead us to
a realization of it (Deutsch 1973: 47). This realization comes through
the "experience" of consciousness as qualityless Being or Atman
(turiya). As Shear notes, such an experience corresponds to what Plato
intends by his fourth level, the “Forms,” as reached through the
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 73

“dialectic,” a faculty which is “radically different from thinking and

reasoning as we find them in mathematics and science” (1990: 14).
Arguably, this expansion of the mind toward an experience beyond
duality is not unlike the way a deconstructive reader moves toward the
unsayable in literature, or the way Berenger and the spectator undergo
the rites of passage in the transformation of identity. Given that by de-
finition the mind consists of thoughts, in dispensing with the thoughts
that obsess the rationalists, Berenger moves toward attenuating
thought and thereby in stages emptying the mind to produce a taste of
consciousness in its pure form. In Sanskrit Poetics, the spectator’s
experience of this taste is known as rasa or aesthetic rapture, which
occurs in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant.

Riding on the Back of Rhinos

The notion of suggestion (dhvani) in Sanskrit Poetics operates
in connection with aesthetic rapture (rasa). The theory of rasa is
comparable to the notion of defamiliarization in Russian formalism
and to the alienation effect in Bertolt Brecht, which Tony Bennett
describes as a way “to dislocate our habitual perception of the real
world so as to make it the object of renewed attentiveness” (1979: 20).
By remaining detached from any specific emotion through aesthetic
rapture, a theatre audience will appreciate the whole range of possible
responses to a play without being overshadowed by any one in
particular. As such, the taste of rasa involves an idealized flavor and
not a specific transitory state of mind associated with zone #2 of the
upper left quadrant. It invokes the emotional states latent within the
mind through direct intuition and thus provides an experience of the
subtler, more unified levels of the mind itself. In terms of the con-
nection between consciousness and language, rasa moves awareness
from the temporal to the unified levels of language, from vaikhari and
madhyama toward pashyanti and para. As aesthetic experience, rasa
culminates in a spiritual joy (santa) described by K. Krishnamoorthy
as “wild tranquility” or “passionless passion” (1968: 26). Rasa allows
consciousness to experience the unbounded bliss inherent within itself,
those levels of awareness associated with pashyanti and para. As S. K.
De says,

an ordinary emotion (bhava) may be pleasurable or painful; but a

poetic sentiment (rasa), transcending the limitations of the personal
74 Integral Drama

attitude, is lifted above such pain and pleasure into pure joy, the
essence of which is its relish itself. (1963: 13)

As described in Indian literary theory, this experience is the nearest

realization through theatre and the other arts of the Absolute or moksa
(liberation). As Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes, “The spiritual aspect
of the meaning of rasa is emphasized in Shankara’s commentary of
the Upanishadic use of the term: ‘Rasa is here used to mean such bliss
as is innate in oneself and manifests itself [. . .] even in the absence of
external aids to happiness’” (2005: 95; Rhagavan 1988). In Rhinoc-
eros, Berenger moves the audience from specific thoughts and
emotions associated with conformity to a collective psychosis toward
a release from specific emotional attachments in the self-referral
experience of rasa. We see this happening in Berenger’s arguments
with Jean, Dudard and Daisy as he tries to prevent them from
changing into rhinos under the false pretext of enhancing their power
and beauty.
Aesthetic rapture as argued here can be induced in a manner
unrelated to the notion of the sublime understood as a quality of
conscious content. Ultimately rasa emerges from the qualityless gap
between thoughts as the awareness transcends mental content. For
instance, after the second rhino kills the Housewife’s cat in Act One,
Jean and Berenger argue over whether it had one horn or two, with
other characters interjecting their own observations between their
insults. Jean claims that the first one was an Asiatic rhino with two
horns while the second was an African rhino with only one horn.
Bereger replies, “You’re talking nonsense . . . How could you possibly
tell about the horns? The animal flashed past at such speed, we hardly
even saw it” (36). Berenger later regrets his enraged verbal assault,
which he suspects may have pushed Jean over into becoming a rhino
himself. For spectators, however, his quarrel because of its absurd di-
mension has the opposite effect of directing them toward the essential
nature of humanity through rasa as a taste of the void of conceptions.

Jean: I don’t have to grope my way through a fog. I can calculate

quickly, my mind is clear! [. . .]
Berenger: But it had its head down. [. . .]
Jean: Precisely, one could see all the better. [. . .]
Berenger: Utter nonsense. [. . .]
Jean: What me? You dare to accuse me of talking nonsense? [. . .]
Berenger: Yes, absolute, blithering nonsense! [. . .]
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 75

Jean: I’ve never talked nonsense in my life! [. . .]

Berenger: You’re just a pretentious show-off—(Raising his voice.) a
pedant! [. . .]. (37-38)

As they continue arguing, Jean says that if anyone has two horns
it’s Berenger, who he calls an “Asiatic Mongol!” Berenger replies:
“I’ve got no horns. And never will have,” to which Jean retorts, “Oh
yes, you have!” (38). What this dispute foreshadows and confirms in
retrospect is that Jean is indeed full of nonsense and that Berenger is
the only one who will remain hornless. In addition, this argument like
all the absurd arguments of the play serves to shift the spectator’s
awareness from the level of thought toward the void of conceptions in
the manner of a Zen koan. As Berenger and Jean argue about whether
a rhino has one horn or two, the audience would no doubt finds this
question absurd in light of the more critical issue of where the rhinos
came from in the first place, what causes them to multiply in a small
provincial French town, and how many more of them might appear to
the risk of not only pet cats but the entire population. Spectators may
feel superior to the characters who engage in such an absurd argument,
but they would also be hard-pressed to answer these questions for
themselves. The difficulty of solving an absurd paradox, one that
becomes even more absurd as the characters begin changing into
rhinos, would preclude not only a logical solution but also the pos-
sibility of the audience piecing together a meaningful life based on the
intellect absorbed in the finite material values of daily life as opposed
to the nonlocal experience of pure awareness. Boyer, as mentioned
earlier, says that

Brain and mind are no longer just in the head, because brains, minds,
and all material objects are no longer just localized physical matter,
but rather are also more abstract but real nonlocal processes in a
subtler underlying field of existence. (2006b: 4)

Ionesco’s play through the device of rasa allows the audience to

swing from the concrete thinking (apprehending and comparing) level
of mind to a more subtle, abstract underlying field of existence where
conventional logic no longer obtains. In other words, the audience
experiences aesthetic rapture (rasa) not through the sublime as a
qualitative conscious content of the mind, but rather through a process
that transports them beyond the mind toward a void in thought. This
76 Integral Drama

void constitutes the source of Berenger’s intuition of the moral superi-

ority of retaining his humanity in the face of pressure to conform to a
collective psychosis.
In Act Two we first learn that humans are metamorphosing into
rhinos when the wife of one of Berenger’s colleagues, Mrs. Boeuf,
arrives at the office to announce that her husband is ill. She tells her
husband’s office mates, including Berenger, that she was chased all
the way to the office by a rhinoceros. Suddenly she recognizes the
rhino as her husband: “It’s my husband. Oh Boeuf, my poor Boeuf,
what’s happened to you?” When questioned by Daisy, Mrs. Boeuf
says, “I recognize him, I recognize him!” (61). She exclaims that
“He’s calling me,” and instead of abandoning him she jumps from the
window landing to join him and by implication become a rhino herself.
Ionesco combines absurdity with humor when he has Papillon, their
boss, say, “Well! That’s the last straw. This time he’s fired for good!”
(ibid.). Later in Act Two, scene two, Berenger visits Jean, who is ill at
home with a headache, and apologizes for their quarrel, explaining
that “in our different ways we were both right” (71). To his amaze-
ment, Berenger finds Jean undergoing a distinct transformation, with
his breathing becoming boorishly heavy, a bump growing on his
forehead and his skin turning green. Obviously turning into a rhino,
Jean accuses Berenger of “scrutinizing me as if I were some strange
animal,” and then begins to distance himself from his friend
psychologically; “There’s no such thing as friendship. I don’t believe
in your friendship” (74-75). When Berenger comments on Jean’s
“misanthropic mood,” Jean displays a change of attitude indicating a
transformation on the level of body that reflects a pre-existing state of
mind: “It’s not that I hate people. I’m just indifferent to them—or
rather, they disgust me; and they’d better keep out of my way, or I’ll
run them down” (75-76). The play suggests that no matter how
morally weak and disgusting the human race, how boring and empty
the life of the bourgeois working world, and how susceptible the hu-
man race is to conforming to collective psychosis, when humans
transform into rhinos they will take all these negative attributes and
situations with them.
In defending Boeuf’s transformation into a rhino against
Berenger’s feeling that it won’t improve his life or enhance his
pleasure, Jean says, “You always see the black side of everything. [. . .]
I tell you it’s not as bad as all that. After all, rhinoceroses are living
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 77

creatures the same as us; they’ve got as much right to life as we have!”
(78-79). Berenger reiterates his innate sense that “we have our own
moral standards which I consider incompatible with the standards of
these animals” (79). Although in one sense Jean is right in wanting to
replace morality with nature, his interpretation of nature, which does
not extend beyond the ordinary levels of language and conceptuality,
consists of no more than extending morality from mental to physical
laws, which as we have seen belong to the same category. As Ber-
enger puts it, Jean goes for “the law of the jungle” (ibid.). Berenger
observes that unlike animals, human civilization has evolved a phi-
losophy of life, but Jean rejects the value of this idea: “Humanism is
all washed up! You’re a ridiculous old sentimentalist” (80). Again, on
a purely conceptual level Jean has a point, but the alternative provided
by a new philosophy based on a different set of laws associated with
rhinoceritis proves ineffectual in lifting humanity out of the jungle,
whether of the natural or concrete urban variety.
In terms of aesthetic response to this dramatic turn of events, the
audience will find itself in a dilemma. Ionesco suggests that any
material change in life, which applies to both aspects of the formula
“existence precedes essence,” would only leave humans in the same
benighted condition. Changing existence on a physical level does not
differ from changing essence on a psychological level in the sense that
both mind and body constitute a physical element as opposed to con-
sciousness, which comprises the only nonphysical, nonlocal under-
lying dimension of the human condition. Through rasa, Ionesco’s play
alters the level of consciousness of the audience through the change
undergone by Berenger, the only character who transcends the phys-
ical mind/body component of life through a transformation based on
knowledge-by-identity. As mentioned earlier, Samkhya-Yoga (the
third system of Indian philosophy), states

there are two irreducible, innate, and independent realities in our

universe of experience: 1. consciousness itself (purusha); 2.
primordial materiality (prakrti), which includes the thinking mind.
(Pflueger 1998: 48)

Advaita Vedanta and Samkhya-Yoga elaborate on this distinction

between mind and consciousness, with the mind including the intellect,
emotions, and all the qualities (qualia) of phenomenal experience:
78 Integral Drama

perceptions, memories, sensations, moods, etc. In contrast, conscious-

ness (purusha) is distinct from primordial materiality (prakrti) with its
twenty-three components, including mind (manas), intellect (buddhi,
mahat), and ego (ahamkara) (Pflueger ibid.). Intellect, mind, and ego
along with thought, feeling and perception like those adhered to by the
rhino/rationalists comprise different forms of nonconscious matter, all
of which make up the content of witnessing consciousness (purusha).
This tradition underlies the model for theatrical experience presented
in The Natyashastra. The mind/consciousness distinction, in which
both mind and body are unequivocally material, differs as mentioned
earlier from the garden variety of mind/body dualism in Western
thought (Pflueger 1998: 49). The material content of experience
related to the intellect, mind, and ego comprises only part of
experience, which is made whole through the experience of pure con-
sciousness. Ionesco's theatrical devices—the absurdity, humor, dis-
identification, and unpredicatability—serve to heighten the sense of a
distinction between mind and consciousness, if only subliminally.
Spectators are encouraged to leapfrog into a trans-conceptual space
after language has run its course, to witness the mind reflexively as it
plays with logical conundrums. We find the integral aspect of
Ionesco's theater, then, like that of Pinter’s, in its pointing away from
the agitated mind toward the joys of unbounded consciousness, which
like The Lamp at the Door illuminates both inside and outside,
inducing a glimpse of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form.
In Act Three, Berenger has a similar confrontation with Dudard,
who in the end also decides to metamorphose into a rhino. Berenger
calls this metamorphosis a nervous disease that one can avoid, but
Dudard tells him he’s overreacting, over-nervous and has no sense of
humor. He also repeats Jean’s allegation that he can see only the dark
side of things, accuses him of playing Don Quixote and tries to
persuade him to be more detached. But Berenger, who says he “can’t
be indifferent” (92), is not attached in the conventional sense that
derives from intellectual self reflection. Having had a taste of pure
consciousness through knowledge-by-identity, as the play suggests, he
unlike the other characters can operate from a level beyond the
division of mind, body and consciousness. In this state of unity, as
Meyer-Dinkgräfe says,
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 79

self-reflection is no longer needed and will automatically subside.

Mind and body are functioning together as a unit, without impediment;
energies can flow freely. (2005: 89)

Dudard tells Berenger that Papillon has also become a rhino and
claims that because he had a good position as their boss “his
metamorphosis was sincere” (95). As the play suggests, however,
social status or intellectual prowess provides no protection from the
foibles of the human condition. Dudard like the other rationalists
confuses the issue by indiscriminately lumping all levels of the mind
together, as when he tells Berenger “one has to keep an open mind—
that’s essential to a scientific mentality” (97), when in fact freedom
from ignorance and conceptual boundaries comes only from
transcending the mind or conceptuality altogether. Claiming the high
ground on the basis on the mind, he asks Berenger, “Can you
personally define these conceptions of normality and abnormality?”
(98). In response, Berenger uses the example of practicality versus
reason to make his point that logic doesn’t prove anything: “It’s all
gibberish, utter lunacy” (99). Ultimately, Dudard in his obsession with
mental constructs is the one who fails to be detached, ensnared as he is
by the conceptual boundaries of knowledge-about and knowledge-by-
acquaintance. On the other hand, by going beyond the intellect Ber-
enger achieves a level of nonattachment that characterizes knowledge-
by-identity, a pragmatic field of existence beyond the duality of
subject and object.
As Gaensbauer says, not only do Jean and Dudard undergo
transformations, but so does Berenger, who “changes from a listless
slouch to an ardent defender of ‘an irreplaceable set of human values’”
(1996: 102). Berenger and through him the spectator taste a unity of
the knower, known and process of knowing, a unity devoid of an
object of observation divorced from the self to which one can become
enthralled—like the desire to become a rhinoceros. As Bonshek ex-
plains,

Maharishi refers to this self-referral move of Atma (the Self) as a big

fish of self-referral coming up under the water—the ocean of
consciousness. Thus, consciousness, being awake, knows itself as
subject, object and their relationship. Consequently, there are three
values or shades of consciousness within one field of consciousness.
This three-in-one structure of knower, known and process of knowing,
80 Integral Drama

within consciousness, Maharishi describes as the structure of pure

knowledge. (2007: 13-14, original emphasis)

Never having studied, Berenger catches himself using the wrong

word when he says, “I feel it instinctively—no, that’s not what I mean,
it’s the rhinoceros which has instinct—I feel it intuitively, yes, that’s
the word, intuitive” (99). He knows that the rationalists can run circles
around him, but on the basis of his intuition he still holds his ground
against becoming a rhino. His will power is severely put to the test at
the end of the play when he and Daisy are the last remaining humans.
He tries to persuade her to help him “regenerate the human race”
(118), but she rejects him, saying, “I don’t want to have children—it’s
a bore” (119). They argue, and she claims to be ashamed of their
love—“this morbid feeling, this male weakness. And female, too. It
doesn’t compare with the ardour and the tremendous energy ema-
nating from all these creatures around us” (120); he slaps her, and she
leaves to become a rhino herself, abandoning him to a life of solitude.
At this point in the play, Berenger vacillates between seeing himself
as an ugly monster and wishing he could become a rhino, and then
finally reasserts his conviction to remain human: “Now I’ll never
become a rhinoceros, never, never! (124). His momentary wavering
suggests that even though he may not have entirely liberated himself
from the attachments of his mind, ultimately his intuitive sense of a
void in thought helps him to hold his ground as a human being.
The main field of play in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, then, is not
confined to the realm of ideas, but rather leads the audience beyond
conceptuality toward a taste of the gap between socially constructed
identities. These identities consist of thoughts that hold us to the world
of wish fulfillment and material desires. Ionesco’s Rhinoceros induces
in the audience an aesthetic experience (rasa) through devices such as
absurdity, the dream-like nature of reality, illogical argumentation and
duplicitous wrangling between friends that swing the awareness
between ordinary day-to-day psychological consciousness, and a more
highly developed spiritual consciousness. On the one hand, we have
the rationalists who operate out of ordinary self-interested cravings,
and on the other hand Berenger who exhibits an increased ethical
discernment based on a purity of consciousness, which by the end has
reached a level through which he can experience both Emptiness and
Form, the inner silence of Atman along with his own ethical values
and emotions. Through rasa, the audience shares in Berenger’s un-
 Ionesco’s Rhinoceros 81

conditional love, egolessness, purity of compassion and even in the

taste of an experience beyond the knowledge-by-acquaintance of
socially induced identities toward a coexistence of inside and outside,
pure awareness and the mind’s qualia. In Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
produces a similar effect through the juxtaposition of a series of tem-
poral and conceptual oppositions that ultimately lead to an experience
of unity.
 Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia:
Orderly Disorder

Enlightenment and Romanticism

Stoppard’s Arcadia juxtaposes the dimensions of time and
timelessness, intuition and logic, heart and mind in a way that
paradoxically induces in the characters and audience a transpersonal,
transrational experience of freedom even from within the boundaries
of time. The structure of the play takes us beyond the limits of time by
dramatically juxtaposing two historical periods—1809-12 and the
present—while also integrating two aspects of physics, Isaac New-
ton’s theory of a “universal system of mathematical reason and order
divinely created and administered” (Audi 1995: 530), and Chaos
theory, which as James Gleick says, “cuts away at the tenets of
Newton’s physics” (1988: 6). The term chaos is misleading, however;
as the science writer David Porush says, the “proper name is
‘deterministic chaos’” (1985: 438), which conveys the both/and para-
digm that interrelates the two concepts in a nonhierarchical manner.
With its title alluding to the imaginary “Arcadia” of Virgil, who
idealized the life of shepherds and shepherdesses, the play also makes
several references to the Latin line, “Et in Arcadia ego.” Critics have
suggested that this ambiguous line refers not only to the notion that “I
too am in Arcadia,” referring to the aristocratic Coverly family, but
also to a painting by Nicolas Poussin in the Louvre (1638-9). This
painting has a line inscribed on a tomb which implies that death also
resides in Arcadia: “I too lived in Arcadia once,” or, “Even in Arcadia,
I am here” (Arcadia 18; Hunter 2000: 156). In addition to its literal
meaning of dropping the body, death also symbolizes the transcend-
dence of sensory perception or the conscious content of the mind. This
transcendence suggests the transformation to a higher stage of devel-
opment through the notion of Thanatos and Eros. With both time
frames set in a room facing the garden of Sidley Park, a country estate
84 Integral Drama

in Derbyshire, the play begins as Sidley Park itself undergoes a

transformation. Lady Croom’s husband Lord Croom, the head of
Sidley Park and the Coverly family, has against her will employed
Richard Noakes to redesign the landscape from a geometrically styled
eighteenth-century Enlightenment garden to a Romantic wilderness in
the Gothic style of untamed nature with ruins, hermitage and artificial
crags representing the unpredictability of Eros.
In the 1809-12 setting, the lead female character, the thirteen-
year-old genius Thomasina Coverly, represents Romanticism in her
scientific outlook and growing affection for her tutor Septimus Hodge;
in the contemporary setting, on the other hand, the leading female
character, Hannah Jarvis, a bestselling author doing research on the
Coverly estate, represents a neoclassical attitude based on Newtonian
physics and a denial of feelings. The duality set up by the opposition
between classical and Gothic landscapes, Enlightenment and Roman-
ticism, reason and feeling, rationality and nonrationality, Newtonian
determinism and the chaos of Eros ultimately leads the characters and
audience to a taste of unity as embodied by love. Clarifying this di-
chotomy, John Fleming writes that

Deterministic chaos deals with systems of unpredictable determinism,

but the uncertainty does not result in pure randomness but rather in
complex patterns. [. . .] Deterministic chaos is only part of the science
that informs Arcadia. Other concepts include entropy and the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, the irreversibility of time, iterated
algorithms, fractals, scaling, and population biology. (2001: 193-94)

Although this science points to the increasing disorder in the

universe, Stoppard highlights those aspects of deterministic chaos that
reveal an underlying order found not only in random events but also in
the nature of higher consciousness. Like Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and
Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Stoppard’s Arcadia takes the awareness
of characters and spectators toward a void of conceptions through an
intimation that presents the unified field of consciousness as the
source of all duality. As Septimus says toward the end of the play,
“When we have found all the mysteries and lost all the meaning, we
will be all alone, on an empty shore” (126)—suggesting the wholeness
of a unity-amidst-diversity.
In the 1809-12 scenes, Septimus educates Thomasina on the
mid-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 85

focuses on regular “Classical” forms derived from Newtonian physics.

Thomasina, who asks “Is God a Newtonian?” (6), challenges the
notion that Newton has sorted out the mystery of the universe. She
questions his explanation of the rules by which God has allegedly
created an orderly universe based on a regular and reversible order. In
scene one, Thomasina pokes holes in Newtonian science when she
discovers that once having stirred jam into her pudding, “You cannot
stir things apart” (6). In scene three, she complains to Septimus that
the way he teaches geometry confines it to simple forms that are
limited and predictable rather than something like an apple leaf, which
alludes both to the Eros of Eden (Romanticism) and to Newton’s
discovery of gravity (Enlightenment). Septimus responds that Newton
“has mastery of equations which lead into infinities where we cannot
follow,” but Thomasina rejects this idea:

What a faint-heart! We must look outward from the middle of the

maze. We will start with something simple. (She picks up the apple
leaf.) I will plot this leaf and deduce its equations. You will be famous
for being my tutor when Lord Byron is dead and forgotten. (49)

The apple also refers to free will as associated with romantic Eros, a
major component of unpredictability in the play.
Her ideas are supported by her modern relative in the present,
Valentine Coverly. A post-graduate student at Oxford, Valentine
argues that chaos, or randomness and disorder, cannot be excluded
from but rather complements the order of the universe. Randomness,
moreover, relates to the second law of thermodynamics, which as
Valentine explains shows that the orderly system is gradually running
down through entropy. Throughout the play, therefore, Thomasina
challenges the assumptions of the Enlightenment through Roman-
ticism in her pursuit of nonrationality and the study of irregular
landscapes of nature in the wild. Hannah, on the other hand, attempts
to deny emotions and rejects Romanticism. In scene two, she says,

a whole Romantic sham, Bernard! It’s what happened to the

Enlightenment, isn’t it? A century of intellectual rigour turned in on
itself. A mind in chaos suspected of genius. In a setting of cheap
thrills and false emotion. [. . .] The decline of thinking into feeling.
(36-37)
86 Integral Drama

As Arcadia progresses, these two scientific positions lead characters

and audience toward a condition of unity, suggested by Septimus in
the lines quoted above: “When we have found all the mysteries and
lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore” (126).
Fleming notes that Stoppard constructs Arcadia through a “nonlinear
bouncing between time periods [that] suggests disorder, yet lurking
underneath is a tightly ordered dramatic structure” (195). He also
notes that the term fractal means “self-similar,” as in the “Self-
similarity of dialogue, situations, characters, props, costumes, and
musical accompaniment” across the scenes covering two historical
periods (ibid.). As we shall see, Stoppard dramatizes how the mind
undergoes a transformation through which the discovery of the mys-
tery of life does not lead to meaning or rationality, but rather toward
the transcendence of meaning in the source of thought where we can
taste the boundless unity of nonpluralistic consciousness. To be alone
as Septimus says, therefore, suggests undergoing a transformation
beyond the Romanticism vs. Enlightenment, reason vs. emotion
duality toward the unified experience of pure consciousness as op-
posed to the multiplicity of the mind’s conscious content—the qualia
or qualities of phenomenal experience. As Fleming puts it, “All this
similarity across scales is significant because in dynamic systems it
signifies that some quality is preserved while everything else changes”
(196). In Gleick’s words, “Some regularity lay beneath the turbulent
surface” (1988: 172).
This transformation in Arcadia occurs in part through an
oscillation between Eros and Thanatos. These opposites are
represented in Arcadia by the emotional attachment encouraged by
Romanticism and the inevitability of change, as exemplified in
Thomasina’s untimely demise by fire on the eve of her 17th birthday.
In literature, however, death or Thanatos as mentioned earlier also
symbolizes going beyond the sentience of the physical world by
turning inward toward self-reflexiveness, which leads ultimately to the
void of conceptions. In breaking attachments to the familiar world, the
individual undergoes a series of transformations toward higher stages
of development. This process gradually leads to a greater sense of the
unity of opposites that characterizes an integral experience. Ken Wil-
ber in The Marriage of Sense and Soul describes this development in
terms of the world’s contemplative traditions that entail the Great
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 87

Chain of Being and the corresponding belief in epistemological plu-

ralism. He quotes Houston Smith, who says that

“Reality is graded, and with it, cognition.” That is, there are levels of
both being and knowing. If we picture the Great Chain as composed
of four levels (body, mind, soul, and spirit), there are four correlative
modes of knowing (sensory, mental, archetypal, and mystical), which
I usually shorten to the three eyes of knowing: the eye of flesh
(empiricism), the eye of mind (rationalism), and the eye of
contemplation (mysticism). (1988a: 35)

The eye of contemplation, as Arcadia illustrates, subsumes both em-

piricism and rationalism while simultaneously transcending both. As
Fleming observes,

Whenever the characters try to fix and understand reality—whether it

be through the use of language, the use of narratives designed to
control and explain their experiences, or the study of science—they
discover that life is not so easily confined and defined. (2001: 196-97)

This difficulty applies especially to knowledge-about and knowledge-

by-acquaintance.
Trained in Newton’s physics, Thomasina foresees that to predict
the future through a geometry that explains regular shapes would
preclude irregular shapes, thereby presaging through her genius what
today is called fractal geometry. Newtonian physics, then, excludes
free will as well as the irregular forms associated with the vagaries of
emotion that Septimus refers to as “the attraction that Newton left out”
(97). As the play suggests, Newtonian science as a way of knowing on
its own in the absence of chaos cuts out the bonding power of the
human heart that facilitates the move toward the unity of an integral
experience. As Chris Clarke says,

Below the rulers of the power/knowledge hierarchy there persisted

what Foucault termed ‘subjugated ways of knowing,’ including the
practical and spiritual knowing of women, until quite recently handed
down orally and unrecorded in the histories written by men. The
knowledge hierarchy was identified as a patriarchy. [. . .] This was the
most malevolent of all hierarchies. (2005: 5)

While Septimus begins by upholding the hierarchy of patriarchal

knowledge (not to mention behavior) and favors objectivity, imper-
88 Integral Drama

sonal logic and scientific evidence, Thomasina rebels against this

repressive authority and favors being, subjectivity, emotion and asso-
ciative ways of knowing that lead to knowledge-by-identity. In the
end, Stoppard metaphorically suggests that both positions contribute
toward an understanding of truth, for similarities inevitably lie beneath
external differences.

Predictability vs. Free Will

Stoppard’s Arcadia dramatizes how the opposition between
Newtonian determinism and the chaos theory intuited by Thomasina
over a hundred years before its scientific formulation produces a
swing of awareness from the known to the unknown, from the
concrete predictability of all events to the mystery of spontaneous
activity that leads all bodies to generate heat. According to the second
law of thermodynamics intuited by Thomasina, the world is moving
from order to increasing disorder. An orderly paradise as represented
by the universe before the big bang transforms into a disorderly world,
or as Paul Davies says, runs “down towards a state of thermodynamic
equilibrium and maximum disorder, after which nothing further of
interest will happen. Physicists call this depressing prospect ‘the heat
death’” (1983: 199). Metaphorically speaking, however, heat death
also implies a phenomenological state of unity. As Davies says re-
garding the second law of thermodynamics,

In its widest sense this law states that every day the universe
becomes more and more disordered. There is a sort of gradual but
inexorable descent into chaos. Examples of the second law are found
everywhere: buildings fall down, people grow old, mountains and
shorelines are eroded, natural resources are depleted.
If all natural activity produces more disorder (measured in
some appropriate way) then the world must change irreversibly, for to
restore the universe to yesterday’s condition would mean somehow
reducing the disorder to its previous level, which contradicts the
second law. Yet at first sight there might seem to be many counter-
examples of this law. New buildings are erected. New structures grow.
Isn’t every new-born baby an example of order out of disorder?
In these cases you have to be sure you are looking at the total
system, not merely the subject of interest. [. . .] Physicists have
invented a mathematical quantity called entropy to quantify disorder,
and many careful experiments verify that the total entropy in a system
never decreases. (1983: 10, original emphasis).
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 89

Thomasina leaves clues both on thermodynamics and chaos

theory in her lesson book and primer, which Septimus reads. After
Thomasina’s death, Septimus goes mad not only from the remorse of
losing her but also from trying to reconcile the two laws, Newtonian
physics and chaos, by showing how the running down of the world
could reverse itself. Valentine’s argument against reversal includes the
example of a ball falling through the air, and the play itself suggests
the irreversibility of death in the case of Thomasina, reduced to ashes
by fire. As Davies suggests, however, one way this reversal may occur
within a local context is through the concentration of energy through
love, even though this emotion may also result in the entropy of body
heat. Another reversal suggested by the play, which is partially
induced by the unity of love, involves integral experience. Through
emotional attraction, the characters and audience arguably transcend
the chaos of thought into the void of conceptions, a field of perfect
orderliness found in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, moving as the
play progresses toward a coexistence of the void and the mind’s
content.
Scene one opens with Thomasina asking Septimus for a
definition of carnal embrace. At first he tries to evade the question by
jesting, “Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around
a side of beef” (2), but finally gives her a graphic description in the
context of an explanation of Fermat’s theorem. As revealed later, Mr.
Noakes, the landscape gardener, saw Septimus in the gazebo in carnal
embrace with Mrs. Chater. Thomasina then turns her attention from a
discussion of God and Fermat to the irreversibility of the jam stirred
into her rice pudding. The chaos of the rice pudding and jam parallels
that of Septimus and Mrs. Chater as illustrated by the arrival of her
husband, who with his wife are guests of Lady Croom’s brother, Cap-
tain Brice. Septimus placates Ezra Chater by falsely praising his
poetry and claiming that he told Mrs. Chater of its merit before their
carnal embrace. Hearing this, Mr. Chater, subjugated by patriarchal
logic, gloats, “There is nothing that woman would not do for me!
Now you have an insight to her character. Yes, by God, she is a wife
to me, sir!” (11). At this point Lady Croom and Captain Brice enter
the room and discuss the parts of the landscape they fear Noakes
intends to ruin on Lord Croom’s request. Septimus and Chater mis-
takenly believe they are referring to the places in the garden Septimus
90 Integral Drama

and Mrs. Chater met in sexual congress, a confusion that draws

another parallel between Romanticism and the entropy of body heat.
Lady Croom praises the Classical landscape of Sidley Park and says,
“’Et in Arcadia ego!’ ‘Here I am in Arcadia,’ Thomasina” (16).
Shortly afterward, gunshots are heard out in the park, to which
Septimus comments, “A calendar of slaughter. ‘Even in Arcadia, there
am I!”, to which Thomasian retorts, “Oh, phooey to Death!” (18), and
then asks, “Are you in love with my mother, Septimus!” (18). Her
attitude points from a literal to a symbolic transformation induced by
death as Thanatos.
The Eros of Septimus’s affair with Mrs. Chater and then with
Lady Croom represents the emotional attraction that leads to entropy
and characterizes the second law. Yet it also signifies the profane
attachments of the characters that are destined to be short lived as they
undergo a transformation through Thanatos to a higher level of Eros, a
more unified state of being as demonstrated through the final
attraction at the end of the play between Septimus and Thomasina.
Death thus refers both to the transformation that Septimus and
Thomasina set themselves up for through their relationship in scene
one, as well as to Thomasina’s tragic death by fire when she goes to
bed alone with a lit candle in 1812 after Septimus prudishly declines
her offer to sleep together, indicative of his own choice of free will
over determinism. In scene one, then, Stoppard presents an opposition
between the intellect associated with Newtonian physics and the
emotions associated with the second law, with the audience sensing
amidst all the romantic chaos among the other characters the emer-
gence of a budding love between Septimus and Thomasina. This
attraction will evolve through a transformation from a lower level of
Eros to a more integrated level by means of Thanatos, or the
transcendence of chaos through negative entropy. Even within the
context of entropy, then, the emotional attraction between characters
has the effect of shifting the attention of the audience through
negentropy from reason or the surface level of the mind toward more
refined levels of consciousness. That is, the spectator’s awareness
swings between two states of mind created through the production of
order even within the context of disorder—a subtle shift from chaos
toward the void of conceptions. As Hersh Zeifman says, “in a
chaotically uncertain world, the only certainty is death—even in
Arcadia, as Septimus at one point reminds Thomasina” (2001: 189).
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 91

But Thomasina doesn’t need reminding because she intuits that the
entire universe is moving toward an entropic dead end as heat
converts to cold. Nevertheless, Arcadia reveals that even within the
dark night of entropy, a few bright stars of negentropic Eros continue
to shine. As Fleming puts it, “life can be chaotic, but also stable, and
within chaos there are windows of order” (2001: 200).
Scene two bring us up to the present day with the same
oppositional structure between chaos and order found in scene one.
The scene opens with Hannah on stage looking through Noakes’s
sketch book and then leaving as the eighteen-year-old Chloe Coverly
enters with Bernard. When Bernard learns from Chloe that the Miss
Jarvis he is about to meet is actually Hannah Jarvis, whose book he
had reviewed disparagingly, he asks her not to reveal his surname.
Chloe exits and her fifteen-year-old brother Gus and older brother
Valentine enter, with the latter coming and going throughout the scene.
Bernard speaks with Valentine, who invited him to meet Hannah, and
learns that the room they occupy has been cleared for a public dance
that evening. When Hannah returns, Bernard deceptively praises her
book on Lady Caroline Lamb, just as Septimus praised Mr. Chater’s
poetry, and says he has come to do research on the poet Chater.
Hannah, who reveals her dislike for academics, and Lady Croom are
doing research on the gardens of the Park and on Thomasina’s sketch
of a hermit. These present day characters, in doing research on their
predecessors, also discuss the change in landscape gardening that re-
presents the shift from Enlightenment to Romanticism, which parallels
the shift from rationality to nonrationality and its effect on the
spectator.
As mentioned earlier, Hannah considers Romanticism to be a
sham. She says the hermit, who they believe to be Septimus, “was off
his head. He covered every sheet with cabalistic proofs that the world
was coming to an end. It’s perfect, isn’t it? A perfect symbol, I mean,”
referring to the decline “from thinking to feeling” (36-37). When
Chloe returns and blurts out Bernard’s surname, Hannah says, “You
absolute shit” (39). In spite of her resentment, Bernard wants to
collaborate with Hannah, believing mistakenly that Byron killed Mr.
Chater in a duel. He wants to do research on Byron as well as Chater,
and when Hannah informs him that Byron and Chater attended
university together, he kisses her on the cheek just as Chloe enters the
92 Integral Drama

room and he exits. Chloe says of Bernard, “I thought there was a lot
of sexual energy there, didn’t you?”, but Hannah has no interest, so
Chloe asserts, “If you don’t want him, I’ll have him. Is he married?
(44). As the scene closes, Chloe says that her brother is secretly in
love with Hannah, who thinks she’s referring to Valentine when she
really means her younger brother Gus. At this point, Gus (“in his
customary silent awkwardness” (45)), enters with an apple for
Hannah—another allusion to the Eros of Eden (Romanticism) and to
Newton’s discovery of gravity (Enlightenment). But at this stage
Hannah shows resistance to Eros, as did Septimus toward Thomasina.
As a guardian of the dispassionate intellect, she copes with life by
trying to deny her feelings, either because of a past disappointment or
a conscious decision to focus on her intellectual pursuits. Although
they represent the arts and humanities, Hannah and Bernard are more
scientific in their attempts to interpret the past than the three scientists,
Thomasina, Septimus and Valentine, who tend to be less Newtonian
and more intuitive in their approach. In her aversion for sentimentality,
Hannah sees emotion as an undesirable irregularity, but in proving her
theory about the Enlightenment and Septimus as the hermit she
ultimately resorts to intuition like Thomasina. Stoppard’s characters
thus integrate both freewill and fate, unpredictability and determinism,
experiencing a level of unity that goes beyond knowledge-about and
knowledge-by-acquaintance linked to Wilber’s three quadrants outside
the upper left.

The Pre/Trans Fallacy

The tension between the Enlightenment and Romanticism
continues from scenes one and two until the end of the play. In scene
one both Mrs. Chater and Lady Croom commit adultery with
Septimus and Byron, but in scene two the pain of deception begins to
extend its reach to include other characters. That is, the disorder
caused by deception and misunderstanding has expanded from the
direct relationships between individuals such as Lady Croom, Septi-
mus, Byron and Mr. and Mrs. Chater to encompass the narrative
representation of the past based on research that relies on inference
based on secondary resources. Hannah has difficulty determining the
truth of documents about the hermit, Bernard is mistaken about Byron
having killed Mr. Chater in a duel, and all of the characters under-
estimate the extent to which entropy has saturated their lives. The bio-
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 93

graphical narratives the characters pursue do not reveal the whole

truth about their research subjects. As discussed in relation to Pinter’s
The Birthday Party, Fireman argues that narrative captures aspects of
the self for description and examination and thereby helps to construct
the self; he adds that “the portions of human consciousness beyond the
purely somatic—self-awareness, self-understanding and self-knowl-
edge—are products of personal narratives” (2003: 4-5). But as argued
here, narrative self-awareness applies only to the verbal, constructed
aspect of identity, not to the integral experience of the void of
conceptions. While reason, language and interpretation suffice to yield
knowledge-about the socially constructed self, one needs to take a
transrational, transverbal, transpersonal approach to access the self as
pure awareness. In the division between Romanticism and Enlight-
enment, the pre/trans fallacy discussed by Wilber needs to be avoided
to reach higher nonrational levels of development suggested by the
oscillation between Eros and Thanatos, free will and determinism.
Hannah condemns the “whole Romantic sham” (36) because she
senses its regressive tendency for a prerational state, which suggests a
throwback to an infantile union, not a progressive transformation into
a transpersonal state. As Wilber explains, a prerational regression en-
tails an “oceanic adualism, indissociation, and even primitive autism.
This is, for example, precisely the route taken by Freud in The Future
of an Illusion” (1998b: 88). Hannah believes that the emphasis on
feeling in Romanticism tends to undermine the intellect by taking one
backwards toward a more primitive state of development, whereas the
Enlightenment serves to advance humanity by promoting a higher
level of development based on reason. According to Wilber, in the
overall Romantic view, “one starts out in unconscious Heaven [as a
child], an unconscious union with the Divine; one then loses this
unconscious union, and thus plunges into conscious hell; one can then
regain the Divine union, but now in a higher and conscious fashion”
(1998b: 95, original emphasis). As Wilber explains, one can be
conscious or unconscious of one’s union with the Divine, but one can
never actually lose that union itself, “or you would cease to be” (96).
He further argues that childhood is not really an unconscious Heaven
but rather an unconscious Hell, which through the growing awareness
of adulthood becomes a conscious Hell. In growing up we experience
more misery and alienation because of a lack of awareness of the
94 Integral Drama

Divine, not because of the loss of a prerational union, which would

undermine the basis of our existence. Furthermore, as adults we grow
in awareness of the pain of existence not out of an unquenchable
desire that was absent to the infant self, but rather out of a heightened
awareness of a desire-ridden world that an infant lives unconsciously.
As Hannah and especially Thomasina demonstrate, however,
the self even within the context of Romanticism can grow in
spirituality by transcending its sense of separateness and becoming
more conscious of the Divine. This union or oneness, although un-
conscious, is never absent in the infant self. As Wilber argues, humans
develop from an unconscious Hell to a conscious Hell and ultimately
to a conscious Heaven (1998b: 97), a sequence Stoppard dramatizes
through his characters. Both characters and audience develop from an
unconscious duality to a conscious duality and ultimately toward a
conscious unity. As Wilber says,

the infantile state is not unconscious transpersonal, it is basically

prepersonal. It is not transrational, it is prerational. It is not transverbal,
it is preverbal. It is not trans-egoic, it is pre-egoic And the course of
human development—and evolution at large—is from subconscious to
self-conscious to superconscious; from prepersonal to personal to
transpersonal; from under-mental to mental to over-mental; from pre-
temporal to temporal to transtemporal, by any other name: eternal.
(1998b: 97-98)

Hannah believes that Romanticism involves a regression to a

subconscious, prepersonal, under-mental emotional state that she
herself attempts to counteract through a denial of feelings and an
emphasis on her intellectual pursuits. But Thomasina, through her
own intellectual pursuits and intuition, demonstrates that not all
Romantics suffer from such a regression. On the contrary, Thom-
asina—through a transrational, transverbal, transpersonal process—
surpasses the intellectual acuity of her tutor, Septimus, who represents
an Enlightenment stance on the validity of Newtonian physics. If
anything, Septimus himself exhibits the same vulnerability to regres-
sion toward a prerational, preverbal, prepersonal state as do Roman-
tics such as Byron. On the one hand, Byron, who is discussed by the
other characters but never appears on stage, intellectually rejects much
of the Romantic theory on nature, feeling and idealistic love, but in
practice he succumbs to the same kind of infantile, mindless passion
engaged in by Chater and Septimus.
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 95

Throughout the play Thomasina intuits a deeper level of the

laws of nature than Septimus, which implies that unlike him she also
remembers, however vaguely, a union with the Divine. Hannah, on the
other hand, suffers a mental and emotional block toward a sense of
union, as if confusing the transrational, transverbal, transpersonal with
the prerational, preverbal, prepersonal. When Bernard entices her to
have carnal embrace, she protests:

Hannah: Oh . . . No. Thanks . . . (then, protesting) Bernard!

Bernard: You should try it. It’s very understated.
Hannah: Nothing against it.
Bernard: Yes, you have. You should let yourself go a bit. You
might have written a better book. Or at any rate the right book.
Hannah: Sex and literature. Literature and sex. Your conversation,
left to itself, doesn’t have many places to go. Like two marbles
rolling around a pudding basin. One of them is always sex. (84).

Earlier, Chloe also accuses Hannah of resisting the offer of

intimacy: “You’ve been deeply wounded in the past, haven’t you,
Hannah?” (75). Hannah’s fear of intimacy suggests a fear of letting go
of the rational, verbal, personal dimension of the narrative self neces-
sary to attain the transrational, transverbal, transpersonal self. This
fear may stem in part from her committing the pre/trans fallacy, from
confusing the transrational with a prerational, infantile dependence on
the other. As Michael Goldman says,

Intimacy comes from the Latin superlative intimus, ‘most inward,’ and
the impulse, the desire, perhaps the need to achieve a superlative
degree of inwardness, has haunted European thought since who-
knows-when. (2000: 77, original italics)

In the context of a Divine or integral experience, intimacy between

self and other therefore depends on the degree of intimacy between
two aspects of the self: that is, the intimacy between one’s constructed
narrative identity and one’s “superlative degree of inwardness.”
In Arcadia, Stoppard creates a “total” theatre where both levels
of intimacy are present simultaneously—thus intimating and pro-
moting the experience among characters and audience of a tran-
scendental reality beyond the pre/trans fallacy. Far from under-mining
transcendental awareness, Stoppard contextualizes it within culture
through an integral drama that attempts to create a new consciousness.
96 Integral Drama

This transformation involves the decontingencing of actor and

spectator from the boundaries of ordinary language and identity,
allowing for a greater intimacy with no-mind or a void in thought—
which is one reason the transformations of character and spectator
may seem “never wholly clear” in terms of logical discourse. In-
timacy with our superlative degree of inwardness arguably forms the
basis for all other types of intimacy. It involves going beyond the
duality of one’s socially constructed identity, beyond the intentional
knowledge of the other in a subject/object dualism toward knowledge-
by-identity. In the early scenes of Arcadia, Hannah resists this
transformation while Thomasina embraces it, although by the end of
the play Hannah comes around to an acceptance of intimacy, as does
Septimus, although belatedly. As Fleming puts it, “Arcadia is a
celebration of the human struggle to obtain knowledge, with meaning
arriving as much out of the process as the product” (2001: 200). What
he omits, however, but what Stoppard renders through his characters,
especially Thomasina, is the trans-narrative knower as internal ob-
server, without which the process of knowing an object of knowledge
remains incomplete.
As an unidentifiable emptiness, pure consciousness or a void in
thought is knowable not indirectly through language or ideas, but only
through the immediacy (or knowledge-by-identity) of transcognitive,
transpersonal noncontingent Being after language and ideas have run
their course. Whatever third-person, objective theory we use to de-
scribe it, the subjective “experience” of a void of conceptions, as
demonstrated through a different way of knowing in the plays of Stop-
pard, Pinter and Ionesco, is trans-cultural, transpersonal, and thus
largely the same in any theatre that demonstrates the integral
experience of zone #1 in the upper left quadrant, while also providing
a glimpse through aesthetic experience (rasa) of the coexistence of an
awareness of Emptiness and Form. Functionalists like Dennett (1991),
Katz (1978) and others question the likelihood of unmediated expe-
rience, claiming that different types of mystical, Gnostic, or aesthetic
experience do not point to a shareable transcendent source, but merely
reflect different cultural traditions. Stoppard’s play, on the other hand,
illustrates that while all contentful experiences are context related, it is
not inconsistent to assume that contentless Gnostic or aesthetic
experiences, even though arising out of appropriate contexts, are
nevertheless in and of themselves context-free (see Almond 1990:
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 97

216). Differences in the expression of aesthetic experience, as

Stoppard illustrates, occur only through the cultural contexts in which
transpersonal, mythic encounters with superlative inwardness are
evoked. Stoppard questions the unified concept of self as a function of
the mind, but in the process opens up a theatrical space in which
performers and spectators share an intimacy with the self as a function
of consciousness without qualities (see Deutsch 1973: 62-65). The fact
that we can know the internal observer only by being it and not by
observing it (Deikman 1996: 355) precludes the possibility of infinite
regress through which the self-reflexive subject becomes the object of
another subject in an endless chain of subject/object duality. Moreover,
as Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe shows, immaterial consciousness cannot
be thought about by the material intellect (2003). As Thomasina de-
monstrates, immaterial pure consciousness as experienced through
transrational insights such as her intuition of chaos theory exceeds the
rational mind, just as the actor in entering a dramatic text exceeds the
text by rendering intimate for the audience the presence of a new life
that the text does not exhaust (see Goldman 50). As Zeifman says,

The problem with Hannah’s attempt to inhabit her own private version
of “Arcadia,” a paradise of rationality and predictability, is that God
ultimately is not a Newtonian; there is a “serpent” in the garden, and
that serpent, as always, is the irrational and seductive power of Eros.
(2001: 187, original emphasis)

This Eros has a carnal as well as a spiritual dimension; and to achieve

the transrational requires an integration of both mind/body and con-
sciousness, not an exclusive emphasis on the mind/body.

Aesthetic Rapture and the Transrational

In scene three, Thomasina describes her mother flirting with
Byron, a friend of Septimus. As the play unfolds, she also makes
advances in her theory of chaos and laments the loss of all the knowl-
edge of antiquity by fire in ancient Egypt. Septimus, however, says
that “Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more.
Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their
time again” (51). But Thomasina refers not only to science but also to
the arts:
98 Integral Drama

Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians!
Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes—thousands
of poems—Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle’s
ancestors? How can we sleep for grief? (50)

Modern scientists can recover losses in the sciences, a field of

rationality and empirical observation, but only the arts as a different
way of knowing can provide phenomenological experiences of the
sort that lead to the transrational, transverbal state associated with
knowledge-by-identity, an experience of rasa or aesthetic rapture. As
discussed in The Natyashastra, the notion of suggestion (dhvani)
evolved to explain how the artist’s emotion (bhava) gives rise to the
experience of rasa (aesthetic rapture). Anandavardhana says that
dhvani is the suggested meaning that “flashes into the minds of
sympathetic appreciators who perceive the true import (of poetry)
when they have turned away from conventional meaning” (1974: 75).
In theatre, the presence of integral experience can only be evoked
through the power of suggestion as a form of rasa, given that the
ineffable cannot be rendered directly, and especially not through
logical discourse. The plays of Stoppard, Pinter and Ionesco discussed
here render sacred events allegorically by suggestion, which brings
about what The Natyashastra describes as a “pacification of mind”
(Tarlekar 1975: 54), or a move toward a void of conceptions. As The
Natyashastra says, “Drama was meant to evoke Rasa. Rasa is so
called because it is relished. Its meaning can be accepted as ‘aesthetic
delight’” (ibid.). Rasa is the relish of “the permanent mood,” or
sentiments that “are not in the worldly experience” (Tarlekar 1975:
56). In Arcadia, Stoppard points us beyond the worldly experience of
Eros and Thanatos toward the source of all thought and emotions, the
transpersonal self, and then back again to provide a glimpse of both
dimensions simultaneously.
The Natyashastra describes eight basic sentiments or emotional
modes, each of which has its basis in pure consciousness: the comic,
erotic, pathetic, furious, heroic, terrible, odious, and marvelous (ibid.).
Drama employs suggestion because the idealized flavor of these
sentiments, being outside of worldly experience, can only be
apprehended “by that cognition which is free from obstacles [like ego
consciousness] and which is of the nature of bliss” (Ramachandran
1980: 101). From this perspective, the suggestive power of art pacifies
the thinking mind by taking us toward a level of language (pash-
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 99

yanti/para) and consciousness (turiya) where we can relish a void of

conceptions, which is ultimately nothing other than the self as bliss
consciousness (sat-chit-ananda) knowing itself. The emotion asso-
ciated with rasa, therefore, does not cause a regression to a preverbal,
prerational, prepersonal state. Rather it induces a transverbal,
transrational, transpersonal transformation, such as that suggested by
Thomasina’s realization that although she can entertain a prerational,
infantile dream of marrying Byron, she knows transrationally that she
is falling in love with Septimus. Even though Septimus is skeptical of
Thomasina’s intuition of the second law of thermodynamics, she does
not let this theoretical difference interfere with her emotional
attraction to him. Indeed, her mind in relation to Septimus exhibits a
form of self-transcendence, as if she were the true artist in the play. As
Giorgio Agamben says, “The artist is the man without content, who
has no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness
of expression” (1999: 55). Thomasina is like an artist who can
experience the no content of a void in thought, while at the same time
experiencing the forms of thought. Agamben adds that

Artistic subjectivity without content is now the pure force of negation

that everywhere and at all times affirms only itself as absolute
freedom that mirrors itself in pure self-consciousness. (56)

Stoppard’s Arcadia until almost the end produces this effect on the
audience primarily through Thomasina, whose mathematical intuition
reflects the no content of an artist, a state of mind open to the freedom
of natural law as opposed to the normative conventions of either
Classical or Romantic culture. Hannah also toward the end of the play
embodies the notion that classical and romantic dispositions are not
mutually exclusive, thereby illustrating the coexistence of opposites
pervading the performance.
In scene four, Valentine confirms Thomasina’s genius when he
tells Hannah how with pencil and paper she improvised mathematical
techniques that he can only calculate on a computer. He elaborates on
the analogy between Romanticism and chaos, explaining how
Thomasina was on the right track by renouncing Classical science.

Then maths left the real world behind, just like modern art, really.
Nature was classical, maths was suddenly Picassos. But now nature is
100 Integral Drama

having the last laugh. The freaky stuff is turning out to be the
mathematics of the natural world. (59)

Through deterministic chaos Thomasina intuits that irregularity

triggers the emergence of life. Classical math before Thomasina was
part of nature, but then through the perspective of the second law
nature becomes freaky as Thomasina predicted. From a psychological
standpoint, conventional reason sometimes appears absurd, but not
everything nonrational (like the prerational) deserves to be glorified as
a route to the Divine. In one sense Hannah’s skepticism derives from
her intellectual stance that sometimes what appears to be transrational
may in fact only be prerational, an exaggerated emotionalism that is
merely infantile and regressive. Bernard, who in scene four continues
to do research on Byron, puts Hannah off because he seems to have
regressive tendencies. His attraction for Hannah appears nonrational,
but unlike Thomasina’s nonrational attraction for Septimus it veers
toward the prerational instead of the transrational, revealing his
regressive predisposition rather than a form of spiritual transcendence.
In scene five Bernard reads out his mistaken theory that Byron
killed Mr. Chater in a duel over his wife. As we have seen, Hannah
warns him that his theory will lead to his disgrace. Valentine,
moreover, dismisses Bernard’s narrative biographies dealing with
personalities, thereby confirming the argument mentioned earlier that
narratives cannot access the transpersonal self: “The questions you’re
asking don’t matter, you see. It’s like arguing who got there first with
the calculus. The English say Newton, the Germans say Leibnitz. But
it doesn’t matter. Personalities. What matters is the calculus. Scien-
tific progress. Knowledge” (80, original emphasis). Reminiscent of
Agamben, though, Bernard defends art with the argument that art and
artistic genius exceed scientific understanding: “Parameters! You
can’t stick Byron’s head in your laptop. Genius isn’t like your average
grouse” (80). While Valentine advocates a scientific approach that
privileges the object of knowledge and its context, Bernard defends art
and philosophy as providing greater access to the self. He says, “If
knowledge isn’t self-knowledge it isn’t doing much, mate. Is the
universe expanding? Is it contracting? [. . .] Leave me out. I can
expand my universe without you” (81). Bernard’s argument that art is
timeless relies on his mechanistic view of the universe, his claim that
Newtonian laws surpass the limits of time, again showing the
interdependence of unpredictability and determinism. But we can see
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 101

in his attempt to develop a narrative theory of Byron not for its literary
value but rather to enhance his own fame and fortune that his intuition
doesn’t match that of Thomasiana or Hannah, again illustrating his
contradictory nature. Nevertheless, by promoting knowledge attained
through art, even Bernard points to the suggestive power of rasa as
opposed to logical discourse as a means to enrich human conscious-
ness through knowledge-by-identity.
Nevertheless, Bernard analyzes Byron’s identity only on the
basis of narrative. In analyzing Paul Ricoeur’s concept of discursive
or narrative identity, Dieter Teichert writes that

Identity as selfhood is not simply there like an objective fact. To

possess an identity as selfhood means to be the subject of dynamic
experience, instability, and fragility. (2004: 185-86)

As Ricoeur says,

narrative identity is not a stable and seamless identity. Just as it is

possible to compose several plots on the subject of the same
incidents . . . so it is always possible to weave different, even opposed,
plots about our lives. (1988: 248)

Although flexible and open, narrative identity emerges from

intentional consciousness, either that of ourselves, as in autobiography,
or of society in the case of our constructed roles. Teichert continues
that

The self does not exist as an isolated, autonomous entity which

constitutes itself as a Cartesian ego. Nor is the self a mere passive
product of a society. Ricoeur’s position takes a middle path between
these extreme positions. Selves are built up in the process of
assimilating, interpreting, and integrating the contents of the cultural
environment. (2004: 186)

In Stoppard’s theatre, the dynamic, unstable and fragile identities of

the characters are woven into their opposing views on science, culture
and romance, but the changeable nature of these views exposes a
background of non-intentional consciousness through which these
identities are held together. In other words, Bernard’s theory of By-
ron’s identity cannot fathom the essence of Byron, who as an artist, as
Agamben says, is a man without content. Similarly, Hannah and
102 Integral Drama

Bernard find a narrative reference to the Sidley Park hermit, who they
discover to be Septimus, but without understanding his true identity.
Bernard, moreover, tells Hannah that the sketch on her book jacket of
“Lord Byron and Caroline Lamb at the Royal Academy” is a fake, for
Byron was in Italy at the time of the sketch, but he turns out to be
wrong about this too.
These erroneous narratives suggest that for spectators to access
any truth about identity they have to go beyond language and
interpretation through a transverbal, transrational experience of rasa.
Stoppard shows that we can reach the no content of the transpersonal
self only through the power of suggestion. The characters in the
present doing research on the characters of the past through the study
of narrative demonstrate the fallibility of narrative. But scene seven,
by bringing all the characters together in the same time frame, reveals
the truth about the co-presence of the rational and the emotional. At
the beginning of the scene, Chloe discovers from Valentine that the
deterministic universe doesn’t work and concludes that

it’s all because of sex [. . .] That’s what I think. The universe is

deterministic all right, just like Newton said, I mean it’s trying to be,
but the only thing going wrong is people fancying people who aren’t
supposed to be in that part of the plan. (97)

Evidence of this recurs when Valentine tries to flirt with Hannah by

asking, “Can’t we have a trial marriage and I’ll call it off in the
morning?” (99). Although she turns down the offer, when Valentine
produces the computer iterations of Thomasina’s equations of the
second law, Hannah finds them beautiful. Hannah rejects Roman-
ticism and denies her emotions, but Thomasina’s equations on the
second law and chaos intrigue her, foreshadowing her own impending
acceptance of feeling at the end of the play. In discussing the afterlife
with Valentine, which serves as a metaphor of self-transformation
through Thanatos, Hannah says,

Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life. Believe in God, the
soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you like, but not in the
great celestial get-together for an exchange of views. (100)

This argument implies that she has yet to grasp the nature of Thanatos
as a transformation to an intersubjective community in part based on
emotional bonds. Death in Stoppard’s theatre points metaphorically
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 103

beyond our subjected-ness to a rebirth of the memory of conscious-

ness—which embodies an experience beyond space/time and the
play’s dichotomies—classical/romantic, Newtonian/chaotic, intuition
/logic, heart/mind, order/disorder.
As Hannah tells Valentine, Thomasina “died in the fire [. . .] the
night before her seventeenth birthday” (101), which on one level
symbolizes her undergoing a transformation to a higher state of Eros.
The men, on the other hand, remain largely trapped in the heat of
sexual passion, each trying to seduce any number of women out of
promiscuity rather than love, or as Thomasina puts it, “The action of
bodies in heat” (111). Thomasina tells her brother Augustus that
Septimus kissed her to seal his promise to teach her how to waltz.
Even though she has an ephemeral fantasy of marrying Byron,
Thomasina considers him unpredictable and unreliable compared to
Septimus. Indeed, she could also be referring to Byron when, during
her discussion of him with Septimus and Lady Croom, she exclaims,
“The Emperor of Irregularity!” (113) just as Noakes enters the room.
When Thomasina tells Noakes that his steam pump “can never get out
of it what you put in. [. . .] Newton’s equations go forwards and
backwards, they do not care which way. But the heat equation cares
very much, it goes only one way ” (115), Stoppard alludes to the
possibility that because of their unpredictable passion men are the
main victims of entropy. Thomasina and Hannah, on the other hand,
experience negentropy in their move away from regressive prerational
obsessions toward knowledge-by-identity of the transrational “better
self” (Grinshpon 2003, viii). Thomasina’s lifestyle embodies her
understanding, while Valentine like the other men are subjugated by
disembodied abstractions and the regressive actions of their bodies in
heat.
Although ignorance on the part of Byron, Septimus and the
other men has the effect of accelerating entropy, by the end of the play
Thomasina and Hannah manage to reverse this regression in part and
recover a semblance of order, at least socially. As Paul Edwards says,

The final scene of the play shows us an image of perfect harmony,

time overcome through the copresence of past and present as the
modern couple Hannah and the new, silent genius of the Coverly
family, Gus, dance alongside Thomasina and Septimus to the tune of a
waltz. But the audience knows that “tomorrow” or “tonight,”
Thomasina will take a candle, mount the stairs to her bedroom and be
104 Integral Drama

burnt to death. She cannot be brought back—certainly not by algebra.

The overcoming of time at the conclusion of Arcadia is a triumph of
art, not of science, and like all such triumphs it is momentary, fragile,
and all the more poignant for being quite useless. (2001: 182-83)

Of all the men, Septimus comes closest to emulating Thomasina

and Hannah, although it takes him twenty-two years of reiterating
Thomasina’s equations after she dies and leads to his becoming a mad
hermit. But having fallen in love with Thomasina on the eve of her
death, Septimus has finally become a non-regressive Romantic
through his devotion. Similarly, Hannah undergoes a transformation
toward emotional commitment when she finally accepts Gus’s request
for a dance. As Stoppard says, “None of us is tidy”; “none of us is
classifiable. Even the facility to perceive and define two ideas such as
the classical and romantic in opposition to each other indicates that
one shares a little bit of each” (quoted by Zeifman 2001: 190). The
classical and romantic thus represent the duality of human existence,
not that of mind and body, but rather of mind/body on one side and
consciousness on the other. Although Hannah rejects carnality, her
biography on Byron’s lover Caroline Lamb is entitled Caro, which is
short for Caroline but also a pun on “flesh” (Zeifman 191). Her
growth toward a genuinely spiritual domain, like Thomasina’s, does
not involve the rejection of the physical or the pseudo union of the
preverbal, prerational, regressive stage of development, but rather a
transcending of the separate-self sense to a transrational, transverbal
experience. This experience for characters and audience alike may be
momentary and fragile, as Edwards claims, but hardly useless—except
for the mind/body side of duality, which they move toward tran-
scending through the rasa of the transrational self.
Transpersonal love as represented by Thomasina and eventually
by Hannah and Septimus starts from the field of duality and
transcends to a divine love, a love based on the union of knowledge-
by-identity. As Wayne Teasdale says, this journey toward a trans- as
opposed to a pre-unified experience

puts us on the road to realizing and actualizing who we really are in

our ultimate being. Enlightenment is the awakening to our identity as
boundless awareness, but it is incomplete unless our compassion,
sensitivity, and love are similarly awakened and actualized in our lives
and relationships. (1999: 77)
 Stoppard’s Arcadia 105

As the play closes, the two partners dancing simultaneously on

stage—Hannah and Gus in the present and Thomasina and Septimus
in the past—symbolize not simply the restoration of a semblance of
order, or rather of orderly disorder, but also the embodiment of love as
knowledge-by-identity through a unity of the rational and transrational,
of mind/body and consciousness. Both the characters and spectators
achieve a taste of wholeness and diversity, an integral aesthetic
experience that, as Meyer-Dinkgräfe says,

is an experience that combines pure consciousness with the specific

contents of a given performance in which rasa is created by the actors
in conjunction with music and various aspects of scenography. (2005:
193)

This dance represents not the innocence of infantile prerational

existence but rather a contentful experience that is context related, yet
nevertheless yields a contentless Gnostic or aesthetic experience—one
that arises out of appropriate contexts but remains in and of itself
context-free. As the play suggests, Thomasina and the audience,
having tasted the void in thought, also manage to maintain it along
with an awareness of their worldly experiences. The ineffable loss
endured by Septimus, moreover, symbolizes a transformation from
one level of Eros based on duality to a higher level of spiritual
development characterized by a unity-amidst-diversity, which the
audience glimpses through a coexistence of Emptiness and Form.
One of the mysteries of Arcadia concerns why Gus doesn’t
speak. Hannah agrees to dance with him after he provides her with the
evidence she needs to prove her theory about Septimus, but Gus’s
“natural genius” has more to do with his transverbal, psychic-like
abilities to suggest that the universe has a deeper mystery to it than
that available through a mechanistic description. As Fleming says,

In Jumpers Stoppard’s moral philosopher declares that ‘there is more

in [humans] than meets the microscope,’ and Gus seems to be an
embodiment of that metaphysical belief. (2001: 207)

Arguably, Stoppard suggests through Gus’s transverbal, transrational

character that an understanding of truth does not hinge on the use of
language and interpretation but rather on a knowledge-by-identity
achieved through a pure consciousness event. Stoppard presents this
106 Integral Drama

event as the basis for a glimpse of cosmic consciousness, the

combination of an awareness of inner silence and the temporality of
experience that the spectators of Arcadia, like those of Pinter’s The
Homecoming, gain through a taste of rasa.
 Discovering Happiness in Harold Pinter’s
The Homecoming

Liquid Life and Nondual Identity beyond Speech

In The Homecoming, which critics say lends itself to numerous
interpretations, Harold Pinter portrays Ruth as a character who critics
argue does not reflect the stereotype of a conventional woman but
rather a new female ideology. Her husband Teddy, a philosophy
professor at an American University, brings her to his parental home
in London to meet his father, uncle and two brothers. Max, the tough
old family patriarch and retired butcher, and his brothers Lenny, a
pimp, and Joey, a boxer, are male chauvinists who abuse and try to
sexually dominate women. The ambiguity of the backgrounds of all
the characters, like that of Stanley in The Birthday Party, heightens
their mystery and allure, especially Ruth’s. Although in the end Ruth
abandons Teddy and stays in London with his family, supposedly to
replace the dead matriarch Jessie, her position in a demanding male
world is not only ambiguous but violates every rule in the male book
of female subservience. Speaking with authority and self-confidence,
Ruth does not necessarily represent a female ideology that will
become the norm so much as a transcendence of all ideology in a
world of rapid change.
As Zygmunt Bauman says, “Being modern came to mean, as it
means today, being unable to stop and even less able to stand still”
(2000: 28). This restlessness, which often surprises Pinter’s audience
with the incongruity of what they expect and what actually transpires,
is not only physical. Ruth never comes to rest on a particular ideology,
never seeks satisfaction in anything but her own freedom. As Bauman
says, “We move and are bound to keep moving not so much because
of the ‘delay of gratification,’ as Max Weber suggested, as because of
the impossibility of ever being gratified: the horizon of satisfaction,
the finishing line of effort and the moment of restful self-congrat-
108 Integral Drama

ulation move faster than the fastest of the runners. Fulfillment is

always in the future, and achievements lose their attraction and
satisfying potential at the moment of their attainment, if not before”
(ibid., original emphasis). From her past experiences—the earlier
stage of sexuality and the later stage of being a mother and a
subservient wife—Ruth in the end comes to sense that the only way to
reach fulfillment as a harmoniously integrated person is to give up
attachments to these various roles and live openly in the present.
Unlike the men, she manages to avoid clinging to any internal
subjective or external intersubjective images of her identity, having
stabilized herself to a greater extent than the men in zone #1 of the
upper left quadrant.
In Act two when Ruth listens to Lenny teasing Teddy’s
supposed intellectual superiority with abstract questions, she senses
the absurdity and irrelevance of these abstractions and points the men
back to their concrete state of subjectivity. Her interjection suggests
the priority of subjective existence on the level of consciousness over
ideological essences exploited mainly for the sake of dominating
others.

Ruth: Don’t be too sure though. You’ve forgotten something.

Look at me. I . . . move my leg. That’s all it is. But I
wear . . . underwear . . . which moves with me . . . it
. . . captures your attention. Perhaps you misinterpret.
The action is simple. It’s a leg . . . moving. My lips
move. Why don’t you restrict . . . your observations to
that? Perhaps the fact that they move is more significant
. . . than the words which come through them. You
must bear that . . . possibility . . . in mind. (85)

Ruth does not seek gratification in words or ideas, as if realizing

that through the play of the signifier or differance any stable meaning
is infinitely deferred. As Deutsch notes, according to Advaita Vedanta,
“whatever is expressed is ultimately non-Brahman, is ultimately
untrue” (1973: 12). Her speech, moreover, suggests an attempt to go
beyond thought, beyond language through observation to a more
subtle state of consciousness in the direction of the void of con-
ceptions. Although her behavior is influenced by the patriarchal
constraints of her environment, her speech tends not only to be uncon-
ditioned by external influence but also to undermine that influence by
exposing its futility. As Elizabeth Sakellaridou says, Ruth’s speech
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 109

interrupts the “male-to-male philosophical debate” as “an arbitrary

invasion of the men’s territory. . . . Ruth forces her way into it,
demanding her rights, setting up her terms, speaking her own language,
establishing her real self” (1988: 109).
The self she establishes, however, is not an imitation of the male
self based on philosophical debate or the domination of others; indeed,
the self she achieves in the play cannot be defined through language
because it suggests a trans-linguistic, trans-logical dimension of
human identity. This self, moreover, takes her beyond social criticism
because the notion of whoredom, to which she admits, cannot
humiliate a level of identity that transcends the verbal. She begins to
liberate herself from linguistic determination by approaching a level
of the self beyond language. As Pinter says, she’s “used by the family.
But eventually she comes back at them with a whip” (Hewes 1967,
qtd. in Sakellaridou 1988: 110). She achieves this level of
independence by never clinging to the meaning of any label ascribed
to her by Teddy’s family. As Bauman says,

Thinking makes us human, but it is being human that makes us think.

Thinking cannot be explained; but it needs no explanation. Thinking
needs no justification; but it would not be justified even if one tried.
(2000: 41)

While being human or a Mensch, as Nietzsche says, will make us

think, being an Ubermensch allows you to transcend the influence of
language by witnessing thoughts flowing through the mind without
being subjugated by them. In this case, the self in the upper left
quadrant of subjectivity, as Wilber puts it, achieves a state of turiya or
pure awareness beyond duality, where “Divine Emptiness and relative
Form are not two” (Integral 76). Ruth not only taps into pure
awareness but also shows evidence of experiencing a coexistence of
Emptiness and Form through her ability to remain detached while
engaging the men in their disputes. While Lenny, Joey, Max and
Teddy cling to their individual interpretations of words, Ruth remains
playful with the use of language, not identifying with the labels
imposed on her by men. Martin Esslin observes that “the more
helpless a male the more he will tend to dream of women as obedient
slaves-prostitutes” (1982: 160). The men do this in part due to their
identification of Ruth with the dead mother, which she goes along
110 Integral Drama

with, though inwardly she remains free of these verbal associations.

The audience of The Homecoming begins to sense that although the
men seem to exploit Ruth, the tables gradually turn, but not because
she exploits them so much as because she liberates herself from the
essence of their abuse.

The Patriarchal Logos and Distortion of Womanhood

Viewed as a family tale, The Homecoming has several narrative
components, such as the divorce narrative, the prostitution narrative,
the bargaining or business narrative and the Oedipal narrative, all of
which have a powerful influence on the men. Ruth on the other hand
manages to rise above these narratives as a result of their being
deconstructed. The play opens with the Oedipal narrative when Max
enters the room from the kitchen and asks Lenny, “What have you
done with the scissors?” (3). As Varun Begley says, “The menacing
thrust of the question alerts us to a powerful process of cathexis, and,
more specifically, the scissors announce a castration threat that looms
over the play” (2005: 67). While at the end of the play Max rather
than Lenny gets symbolically castrated when he falls on his knees
before Ruth and pleads for a kiss, Lenny’s castration anxiety underlies
his relationship with Ruth and may have inspired him to become a
pimp. Later in the first scene, after some disrespectful banter with
Max, who grips his walking stick and tells Lenny to leave the house,
Lenny asks in mock seriousness,

Oh, Daddy, you’re not going to use your stick on me, are you? Eh?
Don’t use your stick on me Daddy. No, please. It wasn’t my fault, it
was one of the others. I haven’t done anything wrong, Dad, honest.
Don’t clout me with that stick, Dad. (9)

Max’s stick, as a phallic symbol, supports his role as the patriarch, but
doesn’t prevent Lenny from being disrespectful in their verbal debates.
Mark Taylor explains this patriarchal condition of competition and
fear in a quote on Clifford Geertz’s definition of culture: culture, Ge-
ertz, argues,

denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in

symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic
forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop
their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (1999: 86; Geertz
1968: 641).
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 111

Ruth refuses to be subjugated by these symbols and their cultural

meanings, ultimately deconstructing them by undermining the con-
ventional roles of men and women by the end of the play.
Later in act one, Lenny provocatively asks Max,

That night . . . you know . . . the night you got me . . . that night with
Mum, what was it like? Eh? When I was just a glint in your eye.
What was it like? What was the background to it? I mean, I want to
know the real facts about my background. I mean, for instance, is it a
fact that you had me in mind all the time, or it is a fact that I was the
last thing you had in mind? (55-56)

In mocking his father by trying to gain knowledge of parental

sexuality, Lenny violates the taboos in Freud’s Totem and Taboo that
underlie the narrative attacks among the characters throughout the
play. This secret parental knowledge is associated with incest, patri-
cide and the debates between the men in general. As Begley puts it,

In Oedipal patriarchy, preoccupation with the primal scene represents

a regressive incestuous fixation, one that defies the father’s
proprietary authority and interferes with the “civilizing” deferral and
displacement of desire. It is not surprising, then, that Max responds to
Lenny’s question as if it were an act of primal insurrection. (71)

In terms of Wilber’s four quadrants, Lenny tries to gain power in the

intersubjective, cultural (lower left) and the interobjective social
(lower right) quadrants because he feels insecure within himself
subjectively, not having stabilized himself in the upper left quadrant.
Although the subjective quadrant is certainly influenced by the other
three quadrants, it provides the basis for self-confidence and inner
stability. Throughout Lenny’s interactions with Ruth, we see that she
has far greater inner strength, stability and sovereignty than him.
Lenny has a tendency to conceptualize women in stereotypical
ways, as if they have no existence of their own but only essences
imposed by men. In one of his stories to Ruth, he tells her about a hat
he bought for a lovely girl.

Lenny: I bought a girl a hat once. We saw it in a glass case, in

a shop. I tell you what it had. It had a bunch of
daffodils on it, tied with a black satin bow, and then
it was covered with a cloche of black veiling. A
112 Integral Drama

cloche. I’m telling you. She was made for it.

Ruth: No . . . I was a model for the body. A photographic
model for the body. (92)

While Lenny attempts to define women in terms of how he

interprets commodities they’re expected to own and display, Ruth
denies this interpretation with an emphatic “No.” She then turns his
attention to the reality of her physical being, Wilber’s upper right or
objective quadrant, the only aspect of her nature that Lenny recognizes.
The audience, however, sees beyond this to her inner dimension, the
basis for her continual rejection of the conceptual associations of
women that the men try to impose on her. Soon after this discussion
Lenny dances with Ruth and then kisses her in the presence of Teddy,
Max and Joey. Ruth’s behavior reasserts her existential freedom as a
woman, rather than conforming to a man’s idea of how a woman
should behave. Lenny thus tries to assert his masculinity by using
tactics not only against his father but also against women. His Oedipal
anxiety arises from his lack of a natural identity beyond the roles he’s
expected to play within the patriarchy. He can only feel he’s a man by
challenging, controlling or subjugating others instead of living an
intersubjective life in harmony based on an integral model of balance
and completeness.
Although Ruth experiences the different stages and aspects of
her socially constructed identity, the wholeness she achieves goes
beyond these identities toward a level of pure awareness, an Empti-
ness that in her case also encompasses a witnessing of the world of
Form, which the audience also glimpses through aesthetic experience
(rasa). This empty state comprises the true home or basis of her
identity, a field of all possibilities far exceeding the social possibilities
available to her as a women defined by man. In rejecting abstract
thought and moving to a physical or existential knowledge of the
world, she is not fighting “philosophical thought philosophically,” as
Sakellaridou argues (1988: 111), but rather fighting it by transcending
even the most abstract level of thought through a dimension of
subjectivity that goes beyond conceptuality altogether. The play
suggests this by her not adhering to any ideological or philosophical
position, even while observing them from a position of non-attach-
ment. In this way she implicitly criticizes the inadequacy of language
associated with duality, the ordinary waking state of consciousness,
and points toward the higher levels of language, pashyanti and para as
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 113

discussed above in the context of the plays by Ionesco and Stoppard.

While some critics like Begley, Sakellaridou and others praise Ruth
for her intellectual capacities, the true strength of her character hinges
on her ability to intuit a level of Being beyond the intellect.

The Social and Cultural Contexts of Identity

As we saw above in Pinter’s The Birthday Party, critics suggest
that Stanley felt guilty and anxious toward the visitors because he
discarded his social accountability, but his anxious reaction to the
visitors really stems from a sense, parallel to Ruth’s, that the public
sphere has intruded on the inner world he’d rather be living in. As
discussed above, Naismith says that Pinter rejected the idea that we
use language to reveal ourselves or to know others (2000: 44). One
can know oneself, as Forman notes, only through knowledge-by-
identity, a trans-linguistic level of knowledge unavailable to ordinary
thought. Pinter correctly intuits that ordinary language cannot reveal
the core of human identity, a state of awareness beyond the boundaries
of social conventions as discerned by both Ruth and Stanley. The
Birthday Party and The Homecoming both exhibit a complementarity
between the inner and outer dimensions of human identity—the
subjective and intersubjective/interobjective—which parallel the inner
and outer aspects of the contemporary world as defined by Richard
Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman. In dramatizing the interplay between
the inner and outer aspects of society and individual identity, Pinter’s
theatre takes the spectator’s awareness from the social world of
phenomenological difference toward a nonpluralistic experience of the
transpersonal self, showing a coexistence of Emptiness and Form of
zone #1 in Wilber’s upper left quadrant.
As discussed above, Sennett in The Fall of Public Man
demonstrates how intimacy in modern society has undermined the
public domain based on impersonality, polite behavior formed by
objective rules, and instead emphasizes personality and our
identification with class, gender and professional status. The local
communities people have retreated into based on motivations, eth-
nicity and shared feelings, as in Max’s family, have replaced the
objective public sphere that at one time gave greater freedom to our
subjective identities. Teddy, Lenny, Joey and Max have lost their
ability to act effectively in both the domestic and political arenas
114 Integral Drama

because they place greater emphasis on personality, ideological

preconceptions, gender and charisma than on the ability to interact
with others on an impersonal level. Their localism has replaced the
impersonality of culture or society that at one time fostered subjective
freedom and enhanced social harmony. Max and his sons, increasingly
alienated from their natural identities, can now only identify with their
Oedipal or patriarchal clichés. This attitude has undermined their
ability to comprehend others on an intersubjective level. They empha-
size their own shared emotions and special interests instead of dealing
with the unknown or taking risks for the benefit of society as a whole.
This domestic localism leads not to harmony but rather to pseudo-
philosophical debate and strife.
As noted above, Sennett says that local community “has become
both emotional withdrawal from society and a territorial barricade
within the city” (1992: 301). The more Max and his sons surrender to
their anxieties and passions, the further they slide from their natural
identities. The more they fear impersonality, the more they fantasize
about a parochial collective life, becoming paranoid and even de-
structive. The inner self as represented in The Homecoming is no
longer free of narrative constructs enforced by ideological com-
munities, except in Ruth. In both The Birthday Party and The
Homecoming, Pinter presents a world no longer founded on the upper
left quadrant but rather on the distorted principles of a patriarchal
society that threaten to ostracize others, especially women. Ruth’s
penchant for living outside the meta-narrative boundaries of the
patriarchy bewilders her husband’s family and ultimately frees her
from their constraints. The men, on the other hand, because of their
conceptual dependence on meta-narratives, are forced to conform to
specific attributes that preclude an integral knowledge of themselves
and others that would enhance their freedom. Unlike Ruth, they have
lost the ability to access a transpersonal, transverbal dimension of
experience, a field of all possibilities beyond the socially constructed
human natures imposed by patriarchal communities.
Ruth, therefore, unlike Teddy and his brothers, has no fear of
the external quadrants because of her inner strength and freedom. Her
freedom, moreover, is not a conceptual but an experiential phenom-
enon that she never tries to express through a narrative about her inner
self, which has an unsayable dimension. Ruth and the spectators of
The Homecoming approach this inner freedom, the integral dimension
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 115

of human nature, not through conceptuality or narrative accounts but

only as a transverbal, transpersonal direct experience. As we have
seen, this level of experiential knowledge corresponds to the Platonic
Forms and to the Vedic state of Sat-Chit-Ananda (transcendent Being,
Intelligence and Bliss). Wilber states that the transpersonal is “not
usually thought of as personal or rational, it is thought of as
profoundly trans-rational and transpersonal—it is the highest levels in
any of the lines” or states of mind (2006: 101, original emphasis). As
Jonathan Shear would say, Ruth approaches a state of qualityless pure
consciousness through a “mental faculty distinct from ordinary intel-
lect to ‘reverse’ the direction of attention within and produce expe-
rience of a transcendental ground of thought, knowledge and aware-
ness,” an experience associated “with gaining wisdom, virtue, self-
sufficiency and freedom” (1990: 34). Deutsch points out, further-more,
that

The Real is without internal difference and, in essence, is unrelated to

the content of any form of experience. The Real is thus unthinkable:
thought can be brought to it only through negations of what is
thinkable. (1973: 11)

Through his two plays discussed here, Pinter induces this reversal in
the mind of the spectator toward the nonvervbal source of thought
through the surreal uncertainly of Stanley’s background as well as
Ruth’s ability to toy with the men around her and their conceptual ob-
sessions.
Her husband Teddy distinguishes himself from his brothers by
arguing that he has a more effective way of looking at the world.

It’s a question of how far you can operate on things and not in things.
I mean it’s a question of your capacity to ally the two, to relate the two,
to balance the two. To see, to be able to see! I’m the one who can see.
That’s why I can write my critical works. Might do you good . . . have
a look at them . . . and see how certain people can view . . . things . . .
how certain people can maintain . . . intellectual equilibrium. You’re
just objects. (100)

Ultimately, however, Teddy is just an object like his brothers, for the
“intellectual equilibrium” he defends remains within the context of
things insofar that mind/thought and body are physical, while pure
116 Integral Drama

awareness is the true dimension of the nondual where equilibrium

actually exists. Ruth, on the other hand, doesn’t go for Teddy’s reduc-
tionist rhetoric that eliminates the more subtle emotional and
subjective aspects of human identity.
As we have seen, Meyer-Dinkgräfe cites The Natyashastra and
Advaita Vedanta as describing the levels of the mind, which range
from sense, desire, mind, intellect, feeling, intuition, ego and pure
consciousness. These levels also correspond to the increasingly subtle
states of consciousness, which range from waking, dreaming, sleep,
pure consciousness, cosmic consciousness, refined cosmic conscious-
ness, and unity consciousness, with each of the latter being associated
with different modes of perception. As The Natyashastra explains, an
artist’s creative inspiration is not a fantasy, just as Ruth’s intuition is
not a fantasy, but rather mirrors the process of cosmic creation on the
level of the individual’s experience of pure consciousness. Even in the
ordinary waking state, as Colin McGinn writes,

the imagination is a ubiquitous and central feature of mental life. It

pervades nearly every mental operation. [. . .] It plays a constitutive
role in memory, perception (seeing-as), dreaming, believing,
meaning—as well as high level creativity. (2004: 163)

Ruth’s creative stability in the upper left quadrant, moreover, does not
render her helpless in the other three quadrants. On the contrary,
because she has a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form,
she’s quite capable of excelling in culture and society, as evidenced by
her ability to negotiate with the men through her knowledge of
financial transactions and a mastery of contractual language. In fact,
she runs circles around the men, outsmarting them when it comes to
their believing they’re deciding her fate as a prostitute. During their
negotiations, she not only overthrows the men’s intentions but even
manages to execute her own ends, largely without the men realizing it.
The male world she finds herself in, which dominates the external
quadrants, represents a regressive world or primitive concepts about
many aspects of life including women. Although Sakellaridou says
that “Ruth is simply a misfit” (1988: 115), this claim is true only in
the sense that she doesn’t fit into the sociopathic male world of her
husband and his family.
The men, moreover, don’t see themselves as comprising a
whole such as that suggested by Ruth’s existential identity, but rather
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 117

as parts of a whole, which stems from the fact that they have excluded
themselves from the upper left subjective quadrant in their obsession
with social power and cultural domination. This fragmentation pre-
vents them from reconciling their subjective intuition with the
objective rational side of their identities. While Teddy accuses his
family of focusing on the physical, of operating “in things,” he
himself focuses on the conceptual or rational by operating “on things,”
which is also physical in terms of consciousness as proposed by
Samkhya-Yoga. Although his brothers may seem to be more
emotional, their feelings operate on a grosser, animalistic level of
physical obsessions rather than with any sensitivity for others.
Teddy’s position is equally unemotional because he has lost any sense
of compassion and tenderness for Ruth and his family. Once he sees
that his brothers want to keep Ruth in London, he makes no effort to
resist them as a husband but turns his back and leaves, pacified by his
aloof and superior world of the intellect. Based on Teddy’s attitude
toward Ruth, Peter Hall says that Teddy was “the biggest bastard of
the lot . . . not in any way a victim or a martyr” (Lahr 20). Moreover,
Michael Craig says that “He’s an awful man, Teddy. He’s rationalized
his aggressions, but underneath he’s Eichmann” (Hewes 1967: 96).
These criticisms suggest that Teddy is probably the character
most alienated from his subjective upper left quadrant, from access to
pure awareness, the void of conceptions derived through knowledge-
by-identity. As an intellectual, he has immersed himself in the world
of philosophical abstractions to such an extent that his only under-
standing of the world derives from knowledge-about and knowledge-
by-acquaintance. The reason Teddy has such difficulty understanding
Ruth or predicting her reactions, as we see by his nervousness when
they first appear on stage, stems from his inability to decipher his own
inner self. Being estranged from his own subjectivity undermines his
facility for intersubjective interactions with others, even someone as
intimate as his own wife. When he interrupts her account to his family
of their life in America, instead of presenting a true portrait of her, he
gives his own stereotypical rendition based on his intellectual
preconceptions about the role of a wife and mother:

She’s a great help to me over there. She’s a wonderful wife and

mother. She’s a very popular woman. She’s got lots of friends. It’s a
great life, at the University . . . you know . . . it’s a very good life.
118 Integral Drama

We’ve got a lovely house . . . we’ve got all . . . we’ve got everything
we want. It’s a very stimulating environment. (80)

Obviously, Teddy gives his point of view on their marriage, without

considering that of Ruth. For him, Ruth does not exist as an indepen-
dent woman with her own natural identity but only as a woman who
satisfies him and their kids as a wife and mother.
When Ruth eventually destroys Teddy’s image of her through
her scandalous behavior with Lenny and Joey, Teddy has no recourse
but to surrender to her choice by pretending to give her the freedom to
do as she pleases. Because he lacks the inner strength to deal with her
on a positive intersubjective level, all he can do is hide his wounded
pride and pretend to be liberal minded, when in fact he simply lacks
the emotional commitment to draw her back to him.
As we have seen, although modernity and postmodernity
rejected the upper left quadrant truths of the Great Wisdom Traditions
by demanding empirical evidence, we can see the effects of these
traditions throughout fiction and drama. While the phenomenological
core of these contemplative Traditions were savaged by modern
epistemologies, modernism and postmodernism are themselves mono-
logical and do not draw upon an integration of the four quadrants in
defending their interpretations of truth. Even though, as modernists
argue, all perceptions are embedded in bodies situated in cultural
contexts and social systems, the lower left and right quadrants
respectively, Pinter’s plays reveal the significance of the upper left
subjective quadrant in spite of its being inaccessible to ordinary third
person observation. Every epistemological occasion has four
quadrants, including the upper left subjective and lower left
intersubjective phenomenological quadrants. Modernism tends to
focus on the upper right objective exterior quadrant, and post-
modernism on the cultural lower left quadrant, but the Great Wisdom
Traditions have always specialized in the upper left quadrant, the
interior of the individual with all the stages “of consciousness,
realization, and spiritual experience” (Wilber 2006: 44). Ruth’s inner
freedom may not be accessible to ordinary third person observation,
but the play’s audience can intuit her state through an intersubjective
presence with her based on aesthetic experience (rasa), even amidst
the cultural and social crisis of the play—which in fact promotes the
taste of an integration of Emptiness and Form.
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 119

Consciousness and the Psychology of Non-Attachment

As David Lodge points out, all literature

creates fictional models of what it is like to be a human being, moving

through time and space. It captures the density of experienced events
by its rhetoric, and it shows the connectedness of events through the
devices of plot. (2002: 14)

Quoting Antonio Demasio, Lodge argues that “Human consciousness

is self-consciousness” (ibid.). Literature, according to Lodge, has
throughout history provided the most direct access into the
consciousness of others. He argues that “In a world where nothing is
certain, in which transcendental belief has been undermined by
scientific materialism, and even the objectivity of science is qualified
by relativity and uncertainty, the single human voice, telling its own
story, can seem the only authentic way of rendering consciousness”
(87). Pinter’s dramatization of Ruth creates an illusion of reality that
commands the willing suspension of the audience’s disbelief. He
shows that although in the modern world the construction of the real
occurs in the individual’s consciousness, which makes communicating
verbally separate mental worlds difficult, the connectedness of two
subjectivities through the development of the upper left quadrant helps
us transcend the limits of human interpersonal understanding through
a transverbal knowledge-by-identity. Teddy, on the other hand, we see
only externally, which means we can’t know what he really thinks or
feels. Although some critics may find Teddy enigmatic, the only true
mystery about him consists of the entropy of his character caused by
his inability to quell the chaos of his life through an integration of his
natural identity and his cultural and social contexts. People like Teddy
who are destabilized within themselves would remain shadowy
characters until they achieve integration with their identity as the in-
ternal observer. As discussed above, we can know the internal
observer only by being it and not by observing it (Deikman 1996: 355).
Meyer-Dinkgräfe also shows that immaterial consciousness cannot be
thought about by the material intellect (2003), so while Teddy can
operate “on things,” he cannot operate on himself, which is immaterial,
having lost touch with his own self awareness.
Although Pinter seems to conceptualize intently on Ruth, as
implied by comments such as, “The woman in The Homecoming is not
120 Integral Drama

a nymphomaniac and if she is playing some kind of game she’s doing

it for a very practical reason” (Tynan 1968: 8), the more refined
subjective qualities he attributes to her can also be achieved by men,
as exemplified by Stanley in The Birthday Party. The fact that only
Ruth achieves a sense of self-awareness in The Homecoming does not
mean that the men couldn’t also achieve this state. In fact, as Wilber
points out, more integrated states of consciousness are available to
anyone who develops the upper left quadrant and integrates his or her
identity within a cultural and social context. As Charles Grimes puts it,

Pinter’s screenplays, no less than his plays, concern the forces that
constitute the self at the same time as they constitute society. Running
through the plays is the dream—usually frustrated—of escape from a
conflict-ridden world or, indeed, from various forms of imprisonment:
a wish shared by characters such as Teddy in The Homecoming, [and]
Stanley in The Birthday Party. (2005: 144)

Although Teddy doesn’t come close to a real escape, Stanley does, at

least for a while, as does Ruth when she outwits the men and remains
non-attached from the social restrictions they try to impose on her.
In The Homecoming, the intrusion of the outer world into the
realms of the self produces a traumatic effect on the men, but has a
considerably diminished effect on Ruth. Pinter shows that, as Wilber
argues, being stabilized in the natural self protects one from the
intrusiveness of the outer world, and even allows one to witness this
world. The men, who are mostly responsible for creating the outer
world, find it too difficult to escape because it is already part of their
identities. Women, on the other hand, already reside in a world less
contaminated by the patriarchy and thus find it easier to enjoy life on
an existential level. Sociologists believe that because we can’t avoid
being drawn into a community or society, as Sennett argues, we find
ourselves constantly observed and judged in an often painful way.
Stanley tries to avoid this by becoming a recluse, but Ruth has little
difficulty transgressing the norms of a patriarchal society because of
her inner strength of character. Had she not achieved a level of
wholeness within herself, her identity would be as fragmentary as that
of Teddy and his father and brothers.
As William Mikulas argues in “Buddhism and Western
Psychology,” essential Buddhism is not a religion but a psychology”
(2007: 8). He continues that “Clearly it is a psychology, for it deals
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 121

with topics such as sensation, perception, emotion, motivation,

cognition, mind, and consciousness. The Buddha says his primary
work was to reduce suffering (‘dukkha’), and the Dalai Lama
continually stresses that his approach to Buddhism is about increasing
happiness” (ibid.). Buddhist psychology reduces suffering, or un-
satisfactoriness, by training the mind to avoid the tendency “to crave
for and cling to certain sensations, perceptions, beliefs, expec-tations,
opinions, rituals, images of the self, and models of reality” (10). As
Ruth clearly intuits, craving or clinging to beliefs or sensations etc. as
do Teddy, Lenny, Joey and Max causes suffering. The men
continually compare their present situation to an ideal self based on
ideology, but suffer in the process when they discover a discrepancy
between the two. Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta train one to avoid
clinging to the “marks of existence” that constantly change because of
the world’s impermanence. As Mikulas puts it,

If one clings to something as it is at some time (e.g. one’s relationship

to child or spouse, a restaurant or vacation place, one’s youth), then
one will suffer dukkha when it changes. If one doesn’t cling, there is
no dukkha and one can go along with the change and perhaps
influence it (e.g., allow a relationship to evolve, find a new vacation
place, age gracefully). (2007: 11)

He goes on to show how clinging causes psychological inertia that

results in resistance to change, even though changing would make life
more effective and increase happiness. In addition, as we see in Lenny,
Joey, Teddy and Max, clinging to beliefs and models of reality can
distort perception and impair thinking. In the case of Ruth, she has
stopped clinging to her husband, family and reputation, but has not
become apathetic or unemotional. She still has preferences and shows
a degree of compassion for the men rather than a quest for power and
sensation, although these come to her naturally because of the men’s
weakness caused by their delusive clinging to distorted perceptions.
Ruth, unlike the men, understands the situation she’s in and tries
to do something about it. In the process, she evinces clarity of thought
by challenging the men’s philosophical and patriarchal theories of
superiority and dominance. Her speech is also proper insofar that she
attempts to be constructive and helpful and avoids trying to fulfill her
cravings. Whereas the men in the play tend to cling to the contents of
their minds, Ruth shows a mindfulness that involves an awareness of
122 Integral Drama

her mind and its contents, allowing her to witness these contents as an
internal observer from a non-attached perspective that prevents her
from clinging to them. She alone has the capacity of insightful seeing
of the world’s impermanence, which reduces her attachments, as we
see throughout the play and especially at the end. More than any of the
other characters, Ruth demonstrates an equanimity through which she
is equally accepting and receptive toward the objects of her conscious-
ness. She does not display a greater interest or attraction to some
objects of consciousness more than others. Max and his sons, on the
other hand, have become lost in a personal level of being and confuse
the contents of their minds with an assumed concrete reality. When
Max questions Ruth at the end of the play, “You think I’m too old for
you?” (137), he identifies with a personal level of himself as a
functional young man. Obviously, he has not aged gracefully.
He like Lenny and Joey use sex as a way to gain control. In the
first scene of the play, Ruth uses Lenny’s fear of sex as a way to
undermine his dominance, as she also does at the end of the play.
When they negotiate with Ruth to stay in London, the whole family of
men make the assumption that as a woman Ruth is there to be
exploited. Their objective throughout the play centers on the attempt
to keep women in their place. Ruth, however, escapes her dead mar-
riage and takes control of the business relations by demanding a
contract based on economic principles, not on any craving to dominate
the men. Max begins to realize that Ruth, and not the men, has gained
control. He asks,

Lenny, do you think she understands . . . (He begins to stammer.)

Wait . . . what . . . what . . . we’re getting at? What . . . we’ve got in
mind? Do you think she’s got that clear?” (Pause.) I don’t think she’s
got it clear. (137)

But of course Ruth does have it clear, fully aware that the men are
trying to take advantage of her. Her power stems from her ability to
stand back and witness the situation without craving for a particular
outcome. What she agrees to do for them does not constitute a
commitment in her mind but rather a misconception in theirs regard-
ing the extent to which they think they can control her. Max continues:

You understand what I mean? Listen, I’ve got a funny idea she’ll do
dirty on us, you want to bet? She’ll use us, she’ll make use of us, I can
tell you! I can smell it! You want to bet? (138)
 Pinter’s The Homecoming 123

At this point Max falls on his knees groaning and clutching his stick.
“I’m not an old man. (Pause.) Do you hear me? (He raises his face to
her.) Kiss me. (She continues to touch Joey’s head, lightly)” (138).
Lenny stands up at this point, and the curtain falls. Max clings to an
image of his personal identity that no longer exists. In The Theatre of
the Absurd, Martin Esslin, who considers Ruth a duplicate of Jessie
the mother, says,

Max’s final pleading for some scraps of Ruth’s favor completes the
sons’ Oedipal dream: now the roles of father and son are reversed,
now the sons are in proud possession of the mother’s sexuality, and
the father is reduced to begging for her favors. (257)

But Ruth as we have seen does not link herself to the sons’ charac-
terization to her as having a personal identity—whether as their moth-
er or a prostitute.
As The Homecoming suggests, Ruth attains a transpersonal level
of identity that transcends her self-centered reality but gives her and
the audience a taste of witnessing the world. While the personal level
of identity as experienced by the men focuses on the contents of the
mind, the transpersonal level focuses on consciousness itself as a
trans-conceptual state of Being. Ruth does not cling as the men do to
an illusionary self constituted by the contents of the mind. Rather she
moves toward the quieter levels of the mind associated with reduced
attachments and increased freedom. Having thus established herself in
the upper left quadrant, her subjectivity remains non-attached, even
though situated within a patriarchal society dominated by cultural or
intersubjective misconceptions about human relationships. While the
men try to dominate Ruth by imposing on her what Foucault termed
“subjugated ways of knowing” (1980: 81), she effectively rejects the
knowledge hierarchy that empowers and sanctions the distorted
perceptions of the patriarchy. As June Boyce-Tillman says,

the pursuit of order over chaos, light over darkness, integration over
deintegration has led to models of self and society that are repressive
and authoritarian. The valuing of diversity and deintegration as a
necessary part of self and society enable organic change and cultural
and personal creativity. (2005: 16)
124 Integral Drama

By deintegration, Boyce-Tillman does not imply a lack of integral

knowledge associated with the integration of the four quadrants, but
rather an ability to disentangle the transpersonal self from the distorted
conceptions of reality associated with an authoritative form of subju-
gating knowledge that has as its ultimate purpose not the expansion of
truth or happiness but the domination of others.
Max and his sons have handed their transpersonal imaginative
capacities over to patriarchal authority, which they delude themselves
into thinking they control, but which victimizes them even more so
than it does Ruth. While Max and sons base their understanding of the
world on distorted knowledge from the limited viewpoint of a
personal self, Ruth does not confine herself within but rather
deconstructs the small box in a small world that excludes visionary
experience. As Jennifer Elam notes, “some researchers estimate that
those in Western cultures who have had what might be called a
mystical experience is somewhere between 40 and 90 percent” (2005:
52). Elam goes on to say that many people are shutting down their
visionary experiences for fear of being labeled mentally ill. Max has
an intuition at the end of the play regarding Ruth, but he depends on
his sons to confirm it for him out of fear of appearing irrational or
pathological. This attachment to the rationality of the ordinary waking
state of the personal self, therefore, ironically end up leading to a path-
ological condition. As Bonshek notes, in the move toward a coexis-
tence of Form and Emptiness as experienced by Ruth and the audience,

the full value of the outer comes into focus. [. . .] [O]n the basis of a
clear inner screen of consciousness, outer perception is refined and
sharp, seen in its full glory. [. . .] [T]he inner Self or Atma becomes
the only inner experience and permeates all conditions of perception,
thought, speech and action. [. . .] The inner is never overshadowed but
the distinct values of the outer are appreciated. (2007: 46)

Like Pirandello in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pinter

achieves this in Ruth, Stanley and the audience through aesthetic
rapture (rasa), providing all with a taste of cosmic consciousness,
however briefly.
 Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search
of an Author: Being vs. having Form

Distinctions of Identity
Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author weaves
together three levels of drama, as Mark Musa explains in the
“Introduction.” On one level, the six characters, after being refused by
the author who conceived them, struggle to realize themselves and
their family drama in a play written by another author. On another
level, the play shows the suffering of the six characters as their human
drama unfolds. In addition, Pirandello attempts to represent his own
fantasy on the nature of human identity in an act of creation. In Six
Characters, as Musa spells out, Pirandello makes a distinction among
the performers between having form, like ordinary people and actors,
and being form, like the characters themselves who feel compelled to
actualize their form. To have form means to be condemned to con-
tinual change in an impermanent world, which usually ends up
destroying that form. To be form means to be immutable (never-
changing) and eternal both in time and space. For Pirandello, every
character in a work of art created by an author through language is
form, while any ordinary human who changes from day to day merely
has form, although they also have the potential to be form. Like the
other characters as opposed to the actors in the play, the Father is form,
but he rebels against the fixity of the existential form that traps him in
a particular moment in life through which he is subject to external
judgment. In ordinary life, people have no fixity of form, no eternal
immutability, yet as representations or symbols or ordinary humans
they can’t avoid having an unchanging form within the mind, which
they often attempt to deny.
As Musa explains, Pirandello confronts the issue of reaching
truth or determining whether or not truth even exists. “Truth must
126 Integral Drama

exist, Pirandello seems to say, but finding it is beyond human

capability. Truth appears behind a thick black veil and reveals itself as
that which each one of us desires to be. Truth, then, is relative. That
which is true for one person may not be true for another. Each person
sees, through an impenetrable veil, a vague phantasm which he or she
gives the name of truth, but it is only his or her truth” (1995: xiv).
What Six Character suggests, therefore, is that one can experience
truth by being form as part of an immediate experience, but to
understand or narrate truth within the context of language and reason
involves the process of having form. In terms of Wilber’s four quad-
rants, truth emerges only through our being form in the upper left
quadrant, a phenomenological experience of subjectivity based on
knowledge-by-identity. As we have seen, Wilber calls this a zone #1
experience in the upper left quadrant, but one can also reflect upon
this experience afterwards through zone #2, which is also in the upper
left quadrant but outside the circle of zone #1 (2006: 39). To
understand or express this truth through language and reason,
therefore, requires one to leave the nondual inner circle and re-enter
the outer circle of duality, both of which exist within the upper left
quadrant of subjectivity—the first being a field of unity and the se-
cond a field of difference.
In Six Characters, Pirandello blurs the distinction between real
life and stage illusion by making the play seem more realistic, thereby
challenging the spectators who come to the theatre expecting to watch
an illusion through the “willing suspension of their disbelief.” One of
the themes of the play concerns the habit most people have of taking
the illusion of the stage for granted, while also in everyday life mis-
taking illusions for reality without realizing they could be deceived.
Given the arbitrariness of how most people interpret reality, Pirandello
questions our ability to distinguish reality from illusion by having the
characters claim when they appear on stage that they are more real
than the actors, even though they themselves are also actors.
As Francis Fergusson notes,

Pirandello was quite right to think of his characters as being like

Dante’s Francesca. They too are caught and confined in the timeless
moment of realizing their individual nature and destiny, and so
imprisoned, damned as she is. (1989: 11)
 Pirandello’s Six Characters 127

But Pirandello also takes his characters beyond the ego-centric level
of individuality. By showing how in real life people often take illu-
sions for reality, Pirandello suggests a distinction between socially
constructed identities, which are illusory, and the natural, trans-
personal identity defined as pure consciousness, which is never-
changing and thus real according to the world’s contemplative tradi-
tions. People change so much from day to day and year to year that
they are never the same person over a period of time in terms of their
social identities, but simultaneously they do have an inner dimension
of qualityless pure consciousness on the basis of which they can
observe their changing lives and identities through self-reflection. As
Shear has pointed out, the non-pluralistic experience of the non-
localized, extra-linguistic self in the nondual zone #1 of the upper left
quadrant is an

experience of pure unboundedness [which] is phenomenologically

unique. This is because two experiences of qualityless unboundedness
cannot be phenomenologically different, since there is nothing in
either to distinguish it from the other. (1990: 136)

So while any two people like the Father and his Stepdaughter can have
the same qualityless experience of unbounded non-duality, the narrative
accounts of this experience in zone #2, also in the upper left quadrant,
will differ, thus making the interpretation of that truth appear to be
relative, as Musa describes. Being form thus occurs to zone #1, while
having form belongs to zone #2, which as part of duality is also influ-
enced by the other three quadrants. In these outer three quadrants—the
intersubjective, objective and interobjective—experience remains
relative whenever narrated, even through the experiencer/narrator may
be established in Being.
By incorporating surrealism, Pirandello’s Six Characters revo-
lutionized drama by liberating the imagination from the limitations of
reason and logic and expanding our definition of reality beyond what
most people take for granted. While many critics such as Robert
Brustein (1962), Umberto Mariani (1989), Aureliu Weiss (1966),
Renato Poggioli (1958) and John Gassner (1954) interpret the play as
freeing the mind from the limits of rationality, logic and aesthetic
conventions, Pirandello takes the characters and audience beyond the
ordinary waking state altogether by pointing to a trans-rational,
128 Integral Drama

transverbal dimension of experience. The play not only includes the

marvelous and the fantastic, which oppose realism, but also goes
further by undermining the certainty of the three ordinary states of
waking, sleep and dream, themselves illusory, and pointing toward the
ultimate reality of unbounded consciousness. Ironically, by un-
dermining the illusion of everyday “reality,” Pirandello points to a
deeper reality, the ultra-realism of the witness or internal observer that
never changes. The play thereby creates a sense of uncertainty about
which of the interpretations of the events narrated by the six
characters is true. As we shall see, the only truth in the play is the
unsayable truth of knowledge-by-identity associated with the internal
observer knowing the self, while all the narrative accounts by the
different characters of what happens in their lives are relative
interpretations after the fact. Pirandello accentuates the uncertainty
associated with rationality and logic through which we understand
reality based on knowledge-about and knowledge-by-acquaintance,
which belong to the ever-changing field of thought as opposed to “the
void in thought” as defined by Antonin Artaud (1958: 71). Pirandello,
therefore, does not only take us beyond the ordinary standards of
reason and logic to a field of relativism, but also suggests a dimension
of experience which is absolute insofar that it’s a field of unity. As the
characters demonstrate, moreover, this field according to the Great
Wisdom Traditions is also a unity-amidst-diversity because the char-
acters interpret “reality” as a field of duality, which they simulta-
neously witness while experiencing the reality of the internal observer
as a field of unity.
In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the characters consist
of the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Young Boy
and the Child. As Musa notes, the “Father, Daughter and Son are
realized as ‘spirit,’ while the Mother is realized as ‘nature’” (1995: x).
Being spirit equates with being form, a knowledge-by-identity of the
non-dual, transpersonal self. The Mother, on the other hand, lacks the
same level of awareness of being form and therefore corresponds
more to nature, which would equate with zone #2. She arrives on stage
following her family without a clear awareness of their purpose, fo-
cussing instead on taking care of her children. As Musa says,
Pirandello creates a new perspective on characters which includes
spirit, nature and pure presence: “As created characters they are stable,
immutable and eternal truth; as human figures they are unstable,
 Pirandello’s Six Characters 129

changeable and ephemeral reality, like the Director and the actors”
(xi). With these categories, the play suggests that every individual has
the capacity to transcend thought and exist as form, and to re-enter the
realm of conceptuality and therefore to have form. In other words,
Pirandello plays with the swing of awareness from the concrete to the
abstract, from the duality of the ordinary waking state toward the unity
of pure consciousness and back, both of which belong to the field of
first-person experience.
The experience of pure consciousness or the fourth state
consists of a coexistence of opposites when this state coincides with
thought and perception and other mental activities in the fifth state of
cosmic consciousness (Meyer-Dinkgräfe 2005: 39-46). This coexis-
tence of opposite, as we shall see, informs the interpretation of the
ending of the play when the Young Boy appears to commit suicide.
Some of the actors shout “Reality,” while others shout “Make-believe,”
whereas the Father says “Reality.” As we shall see, these
interpretations depend on one’s state of awareness as the basis for
interpretation. What may appear illogical at one level of experience
will appear perfectly right at a more expanded transverbal, trans-
rational level.
Six Characters, which consists of a play within a play, deals
with the relation between the relative and absolute, duality and non-
duality, with the actors representing duality and the characters non-
duality. The characters, furthermore, represent the idea of the “holy
actor” developed by the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski. As Simon
Shepherd and Mick Wallis note, the “holy actor” appears in perfor-
mances that have a ritual function

to discover human essence beneath the influence of culture. [. . .] The

assumption is that drama can put us in contact with basic humanity
itself. As Esslin put it, drama is “properly linked to the basic make-up
of our species.” (1976: 20; Shepherd and Wallis 2004: 59)

As the intersubjective aspect of society—group or collective

consciousness—culture expresses what subjectivity looks like from
the outside. Pirandello leads the spectator from a cultural to a first-
person experience at the core of human identity by taking him or her
through the inside of collective awareness—its worldview, shared
feelings and values—which we can only get to from a third-person
130 Integral Drama

perspective. As the most developed state of awareness, the core of

subjectivity constitutes a non-dual experience of pure unboundedness,
a qualityless phenomenon the spectators share after the exterior tokens
of culture and language have run their course.
Six Characters begins with the Father and his family entering a
theatre where a Director and actors are rehearsing for a performance,
namely Pirandello’s own Rules of the Game. The Father says, “We are
here in search of an author,” to which the Director asks, “An author?
What author?” (1995: 11). When the Father invites the Director to be
their author, the Director replies, “You people must be joking” (11).
The Father goes on to say that “life is full of endless absurdities which,
bold-faced as they may be, do not even have to appear plausible, since
they are true” (12). For him, madness is the only justification for
performance as a profession. The Father suggests that theatre, by ex-
pressing the senselessness of the human condition and the inadequacy
of discursive thought and the rational approach to life, points to a
dimension of life beyond logic and reason. But the Director counters
that as actors, they “can still boast of having given life to immortal
works of art here on these very boards! (12). Both views, however,
imply that fantasy is more real than reality, for all objects in the real
world undergo changes that eventually destroy them, while theatre and
the arts in essence change only seldom, depending on their quality.
The Director’s claim that he produces immortal works describes the
aesthetic effect that actors have on spectators. The Father, on the other
hand, wants “to pursue creation at a higher level” (12), which suggests
that his purpose of entering the theatre is to actualize on stage in a
more direct and immediate way that level of Being represented by him
and his family. In other words, in their condition of being form, the six
characters have transcended their personal selves and exist largely as
post-egoic identities. Their search for an author centers in part on the
desire to manifest the transpersonal dimension of the self through
performance, which will also take the audience beyond having form
toward a taste of the experience of being form.
What Pirandello’s play conveys to the audience here relates to
the way the mind can embody two different states simultaneously. In
one dimension of their mental existence, humans subsist in culture and
society in the condition of having form, which means they undergo
continuous change throughout their lives. In another dimension of
their mental existence, humans have the capacity to witness this
 Pirandello’s Six Characters 131

change from a state of Being. At higher states of consciousness, this

witnessing quality of the internal observer co-exists with the activity
of change in the exterior world. When the play begins, the six
characters arrive having lived in a state of being for so long after
having been abandoned by their author that they are stuck in the
dimension of non-change without the active manifestation of their
lives to witness. In other words, the six characters cannot fulfill their
potential by living a co-existence of opposites—Being and activity,
which defines the true nature of consciousness. By being form, the six
characters have access to the state of pure consciousness, a state that
once stabilized allows one to experience the diversity of the world of
change while simultaneously experiencing the unity of diversity, of
perceiving everything as unified or “One.” The six characters arrive
after a protracted period of having lived in a “timeless” and “spaceless”
condition, which they now wish to combine with the temporal spatial
parameters of a concrete everyday experience that characterizes the
dramatic narrative created by the author who abandoned them. The
non-rational, intuitive, insightful experience of their state of Being,
which is not merely subjective in a personal sense but also inter-
subjectively, needs to be activated through drama in order for them
and the audience to witness their transpersonal identities. For the
spectators, this coexistence of opposites entails gaining a taste of their
own Being, as well as witnessing their Being and activity in the same
way the six characters do.
Unlike the actors in the play, the six characters understand the
intrinsic sacredness of the ability to witness their activity from within.
Latently, they can appreciate the feeling of mystery, awe and
reverence associated with being form; however, without the ability to
actually put the structure of this form into action and thereby make it
an object of observation for their internal observer, they will remain
trapped within a world of inactivity. As the play suggests, for the six
characters to develop from being form in the fourth state of pure
consciousness toward the fifth state of cosmic consciousness, a state
in which they experience unbounded silence within while simulta-
neously experiencing thought, perception, sensations and memory etc.,
they need to actively engage in worldly activity. For example, early in
the play the Stepdaughter tells the Director that the Father sent the
Mother away with another man, that of the Mother’s four children she
132 Integral Drama

had three by that other man, and that the Father came to Madame
Pace’s brothel in a tailor shop where the Stepdaughter was working.
The Father, who went there in search of a pleasure woman, almost
mistook his Stepdaughter for one of them, which led his family to
accuse him of being incestuous. The Stepdaughter says, “Ah, but we
were on the verge of doing it, you know” (19), and then bursts out
laughing.
The Father, against his Stepdaughter’s objection, explains how
he interprets what happened by telling the story from his perspective,
although he starts off by saying, “I’m not narrating! I want to explain
to him” (19), the Director. He then elaborates on how any first-person
experience when rendered after the fact through language is open to a
variety of interpretations.

All of us have a world full of things inside of us, each of us his own
world of things. . . And how can we understand one another, sir, if in
the words I speak I put the meaning and the value of things as I myself
see them, while the one who listens inevitably takes them according to
the meaning and the value which he has in himself of the world he has
inside himself. We think we understand each other; we never
understand one another. (19)

Pirandello puts his performers and audience in a state of uncertainty

because he realizes that uncertainty is the natural condition of life in
the ordinary waking state immersed in the context of a changing world
where everything is either illusory or escapes the grasp of reason.
Although the Father rejects his family’s interpretation of what
happened at Madame Pace’s, he asserts that no human identity can be
understood as consistent or defined by a particular event. Although
each of the six characters lives in a world within, which belongs to
zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, when this world is narrated and
made available intersubjectively to others in a cultural context, the
meaning of that inner world will invariably alter according to the other
person’s interpretive strategy as influenced by the other three quad-
rants. The Father pities the Mother and children, but they see the
situation differently from their own perspectives and accuse him of
having abandoned them and being incestuous. While the play has a
tragic element, it also has a comic element displayed by the resilience
of the characters on the level of consciousness when they confront the
mystery of human existence.
 Pirandello’s Six Characters 133

Tragedy or Actualization
Although Six Characters comes across as a tragedy in terms of
what happens to the family, the positive aspect of their story resides in
the actual witnessing of this drama from the perspective of the internal
observer. The remarkable aspect of the six characters who are form
and can still engage in activity within a context of having form
concerns the nature of pure consciousness when stabilized during
activity, which as we have seen is called cosmic consciousness, to
which the spectator is also directed through aesthetic experience
(rasa). Being form in this sense, which has the quality of bliss, cannot
be overshadowed in everyday experience by the content of the
individual’s psyche, as evidenced by the Stepdaughter bursting out in
laughter after accusing the Father of nearly propositioning her. She
witnesses her activity, for she has established a “stable internal frame
of reference from which the changing phases” of her states of
consciousness are silently observed (Alexander and Boyer 1989: 342).
The actor Ray Reinhardt describes this kind of witnessing experience,
an effect of performance both on the performer and the audience:

There are two stages of having the audience in your hand. The first
one is the one in which you bring them along, you make them laugh
through sheer skill—they laughed at that, now watch me top it with
this one. But, there’s a step beyond that which I experienced, but only
two or three times. It is the most—how can you use words like
satisfying? It’s more ultimate than ultimate: I seemed to be part of a
presence that stood behind myself and the audience. It was a
wonderful thing of leaving not only the character, but also this person
who calls himself Ray Reinhardt. In a way, I was no longer acting
actively, although things were happening: my arms moved
independently, there was no effort required; my body was loose and
very light. It was the closest I’ve ever come in a waking state to a
mystical experience. (Richards 1977: 43)

Because the six character act from a level of Being, they can
witness their activity to a greater extent than the actors in the play,
who constantly make judgments based on the content of their minds
rather than observing them from a stable internal frame of reference.
In this way, different states of consciousness are expressed in drama.
For example, the Father explains to the Director why he allowed his
wife to leave with his secretary, “a poor man, a subordinate of mine”
(20). He felt that the Mother was more compatible with the other man
134 Integral Drama

and permitted them to create a family: “I became attracted towards

that little family of hers which due to me had come into being” (22).
After hearing the story, the Director says, “But all this is narrative,
dear sirs.” The Son replies, “Of course. It’s literature, literature.” But
the Father insists, “What do you mean, ‘literature!’ This is life, sir!
Passion” (23). When the Director asks how this passion can be played
out, the Father says that so far he has only been giving them the
background that leads up to the drama. “Now, sir, comes the drama:
new and complex” (23). Much of Six Characters, then, consists of
background information given by the Father to convince the Director
to take them on so they can perform their drama.
The Director wants to go beyond mere discussion and get to the
events themselves. The Father says, “Of course, yes sir! But the event
is like a sack: when empty it will not stand up. In order for it to stand
up, one must first fill it with reason and feelings which are the cause
of its existence” (25). During the debate between the Father on the one
hand and the Mother and Stepdaughter on the other regarding what
happened in their lives—his abandoning them and then coming back
as a friend—the Father finally says,

The drama for me, sir, lies all in this: in the conscience I have, which
every one of us has—you see—we think we are “one” with “one”
conscience, but it is not true; it is “many,” sir, “many” according to all
the possibilities of being that are in us: “one” with this, “one” with
that—all very different! So we have the illusion of always being at the
same time “one for everyone” and always “this one” that we believe
we are in everything we do. It is not true! It is not true! We see this
clearly whenever, in something we do, under very unfortunate
circumstances, we are all of a sudden caught, as if suspended on a
hook; we realize, I mean to say, that all of our self is not in that act,
and that, therefore, it would be an atrocious injustice to pass judgment
on us by that single action: to hold us fixed, hooked and suspended for
our entire existence, as if our existence were all summed up in this one
act! (26)

The Father implies many things by this statement regarding both

the state of being form among the six characters and the nature of
observing the activity performed by them after the fact. Although the
six characters are one in terms of their state of being form, they are
not one in terms of their conscience when observing the activity they
perform. Although they share a unity on the level of witnessing con-
sciousness, the internal observer, the activity they engage in has the
 Pirandello’s Six Characters 135

potential to be interpreted in a variety of different ways. Moreover,

even when the Father or one of the other characters engages in a
particular act, this act does not encompass the entirety of the un-
bounded self as observer or witness, at least not until that person is
fully realized in a state of unity consciousness where no discrepancy
occurs between consciousness and activity. The Father thus explains
that being form, being pure consciousness, cannot be incriminated,
hooked or suspended by a particular act that others may judge in a
negative light. The Father uses this explanation to exonerate himself
of his Stepdaughter’s accusation of wickedness in his behavior at the
tailor shop where she worked.
In Act two the Director plans for the characters to perform the
brothel scene, and the Father even entices Madame Pace into being for
the performance. The Director, however, insists that the actors
perform the scene even though the characters argue they can act it out
more authentically. When the actors perform the roles of the Father
and Stepdaughter in the brother scene, the Director is pleased, but the
Stepdaughter can’t help but laugh at the discrepancy between the
actors’ performance and how the characters envision it. When the
Father and Stepdaughter resume their performance, the Director
forbids the Stepdaughter from using the line about disrobing, which
leads her to accuse him of collaborating with the Father. She also
insists that the Mother take part, which pleases the Director, who
gradually begins to appreciate their story and accept its reality and
potential for commercial success. Although the performance is an
illusion, toward the end of Act two the Father tells the Director that
the actors are just playing a game;

Now, if you consider that we as we are (indicates himself and,

summarily, the other five characters) have no other reality besides
illusion! . . . What for you is an illusion that must be created, is for us,
instead, our only reality. (54)

For this illusion to transform into reality depends on the six characters’
acting it out while simultaneously witnessing their performance, with
the active performance being an illusion and the act of witnessing a
reality. The Father then goes on to analyze the Director’s identity, tel-
ling him that his entire past is an illusion:
136 Integral Drama

if you think back to those illusions which now you no longer have, to
all those things which now no longer ‘seem’ to be for you what they
‘were’ at one time, don’t you feel—not necessarily the boards of this
stage—but the ground, the very ground beneath your feet give way . . .?
(55).

The Director asks, so what?, and the Father continues: “It was merely
to show you that if we have no other reality beyond illusion, it would
be also a good idea for you not to trust in your own realty, the one you
breathe and feel today within yourself, because—like that of yes-
terday—it is destined to reveal itself as an illusion tomorrow” (55-56).
The Director finally apprehends what the Father implies: “You
actually would go so far as to say that this play that you have come to
act out here is more true and more real than I am!” (56). The basis for
the Father’s argument is that the Director’s reality “can change from
one day to the next,” while the characters’ reality as internal observers
does not change. As Pirandello suggests, the Directors and actors have
a more difficult time representing reality because they are lost in the
field of change with no access to witnessing consciousness, which is
never-changing. The characters accept that their performance is
illusion because they understand that all activity as a form of change is
indeed illusory, while the only reality is that which never changes—
the quality of witnessing that arises from being form.
At the end of the play, the Son describes how he saw the Little
Boy standing in the garden with a revolver in his pocket. He continues:
“I saw something that made my blood run cold: the boy, the boy
standing over there fixed, with a crazy look in his eyes staring into the
pool at his little sister, drowned” (65). Then a shot rings out from the
revolver, the boy having shot himself. The Leading Lady exclaims,
“He’s dead! Poor boy! He’s dead! Oh, how awful!” The Leading
Man responds, laughing, “What, dead? It’s make believe. He is just
pretending! Don’t believe it.” The other actors agree: “No, make-be-
lieve. It’s make-believe.” But the Father says. “What make-believe!
Reality, sir reality!” (65). At this point the infuriated Director ex-
plodes, “Make-believe! Reality! You can all go to Hell, every last one
of you! Lights! Lights!” While the Director exclaims that they lost a
whole day of rehearsal, the Stepdaughter “burst into shrill laughter,
then rushes down the stairway” and looks back still laughing at the
Father, Mother and Son left up on the stage. So who is right? Was it
make-believe or reality? For Pirandello, both claims carry a degree of
 Pirandello’s Six Characters 137

truth. Although the Little Boy and his sister were underdeveloped as
characters, they still represent the quality of being form. Pirandello
would see their death as make-believe insofar that all activity in a
world of change constitutes illusion, while the never-changing quality
of their Being persists as a form of Reality. The Father in exclaiming
“Reality” refers to this aspect of their fate, while the actors refer to the
manifest drama as a field of illusion.
Although Umberto Mariani asserts that the characters cannot
attain what they need, namely a universe of certainties through which
they can affirm themselves (1989: 1-9), this claim only applies to that
aspect of their identity which has form, not to their state of being form,
or witnessing awareness. Robert Brustein, moreover, believes that for
Pirandello the subjective mind only has access to illusions, not
objective reality, and that humans fear anything formless (1962: 281-
317), but again this applies only to the state of having form, while the
witnessing quality of being form is characterized by bliss. Similarly,
Aureliu Weiss argues that Pirandello derides certainty and criticizes
truth as fragile (1966: 345), but as the play demonstrates, making
reality less concrete does not enhance illusion so much as expand the
audience’s consciousness and thereby heighten their awareness that
illusion belongs to the ordinary waking state, not to the state of Being.
On the other hand, Renato Poggioli recognizes that Pirandello shows
how reason and logic have no absolute or transcendent value (1958:
19-47), for as the play reveals they function as tools to defend illusion,
not as a means to transcend the intellect. Similarly, John Gassner
notes that Pirandello’s work questions the intellect’s ability to solve
the problem of illusion and certainty (1954: 424-45); but one can only
surmount this impasse through knowledge-by-identity, by achieving a
state of Being.
Francis Fergusson agrees that Pirandello has captured a new
level of reality:

One might justly say that his attitude is more ‘realistic’—more

disillusioned and disbelieving—than simple-minded positivism itself,
for he does not have to believe in the photograph of the parlor, and he
can accept the actual stage for the two boards it is. But he is left, like
Ibsen and Chekkov, with neither an artistic convention like the
Baroque, nor a stable scene of human life like the Greek or
Elizabethan cosmos. (1989: 10)
138 Integral Drama

Pirandello thus induces an epiphany in the audience by having them

transcend the duality of conceptuality to a void beyond logic and rea-
son, to the knower as pure awareness, the white screen upon which the
drama of life plays itself out. As we have seen, aesthetic experience
(rasa) stands for the quintessence of self-luminous consciousness,
although a taste of this state can be conveyed even if the audience
doesn’t have a full-fledged experience of self-luminous consciousness.
The characters themselves in Pirandello’s play represent such an
experience of the three-in-one structure of knower, known and process
of knowing, which gives the audience an epiphany or taste of what it’s
like to enter a transpersonal state of mind that entails a coexistence of
Emptiness and Form. In The Balcony, Jean Genet adds a new twist to
his characters’ identities by having them transform themselves into
commodities.
 The Reality of Illusion in Jean Genet’s
The Balcony

Power vs. Impotence

As the illegitimate son of a prostitute, Jean Genet grew up in a
state-run orphanage and then later with foster parents, but was caught
stealing and labeled a thief and a juvenile delinquent by the time he
became a teenager. Familiar not only with crime, homelessness and
prison, Genet also served in the French Foreign Legion, which he
soon abandoned, becoming a vagabond and continuing to engage in
criminal activities. He was often arrested, imprisoned and expelled
from European countries. In the mid-1940s, Genet started writing
plays, two of which, The Balcony (1956) and The Blacks (1957),
became commercially successful. As a social outcast, Genet undoubt-
edly felt powerless, alienated and helpless in a world that to him
appeared absurd, a world that considered him in turn a perpetual
menace to institutions such as the law, the church, the police and the
military. Genet believed that social hierarchies fulfill a lust for power,
which he also associated with lust itself. But his attitude toward
society did not hinge on simplistic interpretations of power-mongering
so much as on an awareness that the world was becoming mixophobic,
which Bauman defines as

a higher predictable and widespread reaction to the mind-bogging,

spine-chilling and nerve-breaking variety of human types and
lifestyles that meet and rub elbows and shoulders in the streets of
contemporary cities not only in the officially proclaimed (and for that
reason avoided) “rough districts” or “mean streets,” but in their
“ordinary” (read: unprotected by “interdictory spaces”) living areas.
(2007b: 86)

Although the characters of The Balcony, set during a revolution, con-

front this mixophobia and attempt to escape it even within the church,
140 Integral Drama

law and defense forces, Martin Esslin argues that Genet is not
condemning lawyers, bishops and generals merely for lusting after
power but is also “projecting a feeling of impotence of the individual
caught up in the meshes of society; he is dramatizing the often
suppressed and subconscious rage of the ‘I,’ alone and terrified by the
anonymous weight of the nebulous ‘they’” (1991: 220). As we shall
see, this gap between members of different social strata and within the
consciousness of individuals themselves points toward a double
awareness that underlies The Balcony and suggests a way of tran-
scending both mixophobia and the feeling of impotence.
The Balcony opens with a series of ritualistic events in Madame
Irma’s brothel, the Grand Balcony, also referred to as the Grand
Illusion or hall of mirrors, the main venue of the play. The men who
frequent the brothel act out various roles they aspire to as a means of
gaining power and virility, trying to fulfill their fantasies of grandeur
by donning outfits worn by either bishops, judges or generals and
lording it over the prostitutes who play their opposites. Scene One
opens with a gasman playing the role of a bishop and taking
confession from the woman who serviced him, using exaggerated
clerical language and being meticulous about her admitting the
truthfulness of her sins for him to absolve. Madame Irma tries to hurry
him out the door because he has over stayed his welcome, but he
refuses to comply, enjoying his role and insisting on continuing to
play it as long as possible. In each of these minidramas, the men
glorify themselves, subjugating the women for their own self-aggrand-
izement, but they have much less control over the situations they enact
than do the women, who can either make the men feel good about
themselves or undermine their illusions. The girl in Scene One
placates the bishop by complying with his demands. In explaining the
outcome of their drama to Madame Irma afterwards, the bishop says,
“We didn’t exactly strain ourselves, you know. Only six sins, and far
from my favorite ones.” To which the girl replies, “What do you mean,
only six! They were deadly sins. And I had a hell of a job finding
those” (1991: 3). This girl in Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony
obviously plays an important role in enhancing the bishop’s ego, for
had she not come up with her deadly sins the bishop would have
suffered a serious let down.
 Genet’s The Balcony 141

Later when Madame Irma tries to send him away, he curses

them and then throws them out of the room and turns to address the
mirror:

Now answer me, mirror, answer me. Do I come here to find innocence
and evil? In your gilded glass, what am I? Here, in the sight of God, I
swear—I have never, never aspired to the Episcopal throne. (5)

The mirror on the one hand represents a prop for the recurring
fantasies in Madame Irma’s brothel, thus serving not only as a
metaphor for theatre but also as a representation for how people
conduct themselves in everyday life. On the other hand, the mirrors
symbolize a partial reflection of the self. When the bishop goes on
talking to the mirror, he explains:

To become a bishop, to rise in the hierarchy—whether by virtue or

vice—would have meant my becoming further and further removed
from the ultimate dignity of being a bishop. Let me explain. [. . . ] if I
had wanted to become a bishop, I should have had to put all my
energy not into being one, but into acting in the sort of way that would
have led to my becoming one. (5)

He goes on to clarify that if he had “become a bishop for sake of being

one,” he would have had “to remember my being one, in order fully to
fulfill my function. [. . . ] a function is only a function. It isn’t a mode
of being” (ibid.). The bishop displays his confusion here about the true
nature of being, for once established in a state of being as his true
identity, a function is no longer merely a function but also a reflection
of being. He speculates that becoming a real bishop would entail
entering a hierarchy in which power replaces dignity, for as a bishop
he would only be fulfilling a function, which in his understanding
does not reflect a mode of being but rather a finite level of mind. In
comparison to Pinter’s The Birthday Party, all the men who visit
Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony reflect Goldberg and McCann, who
function like finite waves on an unbounded ocean or the localized
position of a mirror in infinite space. When the bishop speaks to the
mirror, he speaks to himself as a physical object in Wilber’s upper
right objective quadrant, not to himself on a level of expanded aware-
ness associated with the subjective upper left quadrant that would
142 Integral Drama

open his awareness to an immediate experience of spiritual truth

associated with being a bishop.
As we have seen, Jonathan Shear explains that Eastern philoso-
phical traditions use the analogy between pure consciousness on one
hand and the ocean and a mirror on the other:

a wave on the ocean, and a mirror in space [. . .] display the relation

between pure consciousness and the individual self. The wave and
mirror in these images represent experience of individual self, and the
ocean and space represent that of pure consciousness. [. . .] Thus in
each of these images the content of the experience of the individual
self is represented as nothing but a localized expression (wave,
reflection) of the relevant overall unbounded field (ocean, space).
(1990: 116)

The bishop and the other men who frequent Madame Irma’s Grand
Balcony function like waves and mirrors through their fixation on a
limited perception of themselves, which does not represent a trans-
cultural, transpersonal identity, but rather an attempt to enhance their
power and virility. As opposed to the men, however, Madame Irma’s
girls stand outside the reflection of the mirrors in terms of their own
subjectivity, evincing a greater awareness of the fetishistic nature of
the games these rituals constitute at the Grand Balcony.
The bishop, therefore, confuses the vestments and lace he dons
as a pseudo bishop with the actual person that may to a certain extent
offer him protection from his fears regarding his inferior status in the
world. He says,

The majesty, the dignity, that illuminate my person, do not emanate

from my function—nor from my personal merits, by heaven!—the
majesty, and dignity, that illuminate me, irradiate from a more
mysterious source: from the Bishop in me taking precedence over me.
Have I made myself clear, mirror? Golden image! Ornate Mexican
cigar box—and I want to be Bishop in solitude, in appearance only . . .
And in order to destroy every vestige of function, I’m going to create
a scandal. (6)

Although he refers to a “mysterious source,” he has no access to that

source as an immediate experience beyond the conceptual level of the
mind. The gasman as bishop, moreover, does indeed emit a torrent of
foul gas when he claims to have laid “siege to an ancient fortress,
from which I was expelled” (6). He then implies the death of his
 Genet’s The Balcony 143

former self by referring to suicide and suggests a rebirth to a better

position where his vestments will “protect me from the world. [. . .]
My loving kindness, which is destined to inundate the world—it was
distilled under your carapace” (7). This transformation to another self,
however, merely implies exchanging one socially constructed identity
for another, not the expansion of awareness to a greater state of
wholeness. Although the church, the law, the police and the military
do serve a function other than allowing its representatives an
opportunity to lust after power, men like the gasman and the criminal
though not the artistic side of Genet himself have no access to the
inner dimension of those involved in these institutions. They can only
perceive them from the outside on a conceptual level, from a social or
cultural perspective, and therefore when the bishop tries to imitate
people in a position of power he can only replicate their most super-
ficial attributes. Nevertheless, the bishop does have an ambiguous
attitude toward the church, which suggests that to a certain extent, on
the level of ordinary waking consciousness, he may have a degree of
nonattachment that allows him momentarily to observe his obsessive
behavior. The process of having the girl confess her sins, however,
suggests that she understands the game more clearly, for in acting out
a repentance to satisfy the bishop and asking him is he’d “go to the
police” to report her, she has greater control over the bishop’s sense of
power and virility than he does over her. She even asks him, “Reality
frightens you, doesn’t it?” (4). The fact that the bishop asks questions
of the mirror rather than of himself regarding his function and purpose
at Irma’s Grand Balcony suggests that he’s locked within a state of
ordinary waking consciousness, a socially constructed conceptual
framework, without access to his inner self as a witnessing internal
observer: “Mirror, mirror, on the wall . . . Why do I come here? To
find evil? To find innocence?” (4). He fails to realize that in the house
of Grand illusions, he will find neither evil nor innocence, only his
deluded fantasies about them.
The gasman’s experience of his role as a bishop, then, involves
all of Wilber’s quadrants except the upper left that would lead him to
a taste of knowledge-by-identity. Even the knowledge he thinks he has
about the girl’s sins would be a form of knowledge-about, which in
this minidrama remains a fantasy. Even a real bishop would have
difficulty determining the degree of truth in a confession, which may
144 Integral Drama

stem more from a sense of guilt than the actual commitment of a sin.
Nevertheless, in The Balcony the performers and audience both find
themselves in a position to perceive the gap between the roles being
performed on a physical level and the internal observer, or between
the concrete and the abstract, the gap between the ability to act out
emotions as opposed to actually embodying them through knowledge-
by-identity, as discussed by drama theorists such as Denis Diderot,
Constantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht and
others. As Meyer-Dinkgräfe says, performance and spectatorship in-
duce a self-reflexive state of consciousness:

The means of histrionic representation described in the classical

Indian treatise on drama and theatre, The Natyashastra, might be
interpreted as functioning as yogic techniques, conditioning the mind
and body to function in higher states of consciousness. (2005: 91)

Although Genet’s characters may not reveal a great deal of self-

awareness, the performers and audience can perceive the roles being
performed as separate from the witnessing faculty of the performers
themselves. In terms of Wilber’s quadrants, the performers and spec-
tators can sense this gap through a glimpse of knowledge-by-identity
by occupying zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, while they also
reflect on this experience through zone #2.
Scene One of Genet’s play has the effect, like most of the other
scenes, of deautomatizing and thus weakening the link in the audience
between the bishop’s performance on stage and how a bishop behaves
in the real world. The play thereby avoids lending conventional
content to the perceptions of the audience, creating a gap within their
awareness that allows them to witness what they perceive rather than
being completely absorbed by the object of observation. This process
can be understood in terms of what Forman calls the decontrolling ut-
terances that use the via negativa approach, such as “cease looking,”
“lay your expectations down,” etc., which causes one to perceive the
habitual in a new light. As Forman says,

In general, via negativa language serves this very particular cognitive

function. It is designed to get you to cease applying your automatized
expectations, and get you to open up to the world more immediately.
In our Upanishadic text, ‘put to rest objects of sense and [. . .]
continue void of conceptions’ is also couched in the via negativa.
 Genet’s The Balcony 145

And it does seem intended to serve more as a deconstructive than as a

constructive instruction. (1999: 100, original emphasis)

The via negativa of language would also apply to the behavior of the
bishop in the first scene and Madame Irma’s other clients throughout
the play. By de-linking the bishop’s behavior from that of a priest in
the everyday world, the via negativa of the play projects the audience
beyond the limits of their ordinary perceptual system, creating a gap
through which they transcend the conventional cognitive content of
their minds and glimpse the void of conceptions. This reaction would
also apply to the girls in the Grand Balcony who have to contend with
the different styles used by the men acting out their roles in the
minidramas designed to enhance their power.
Throughout the play, as we shall see, Madame Irma’s clients
attempt to convert themselves into desirable commodities, a
phenomenon Bauman discusses in Consuming Life. All the men do
not only consume what Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony has to offer
but also attempt to convert themselves into commodities that other
men would envy. As Bauman says, “The crucial, perhaps the decisive
purpose of consumption in the society of consumers (even if it is
seldom spelled out in so many words and still less frequently publicly
debated) is not the satisfaction of needs, desires and wants, but the
commoditization or recommoditization of the consumer: raising the
status of consumers to that of sellable commodities. It is ultimately for
that reason that the passing of the consumer test is a non-negotiable
condition of admission to the society that has been reshaped in the
likeness of the market-place. The passing of that test is a non-
contractual precondition of all the contractual relations that weave and
are woven into the web of relationships called ‘the society of
consumers’” (2007a: 57, original emphasis). George, the Chief of
Police, is the most obsessed with Bauman’s dictum that “Members of
the society of consumers are themselves consumer commodities” (ibid.,
original emphasis), for while the other clients crave to become
commodities by emulating others, he is the only character who craves
that other clients try to emulate him as a desirable commodity. All the
other men, however, feel trapped by their positions in society and
wish to escape. As Bauman says,
146 Integral Drama

Its latest stage, the passage from the society of producers and soldiers
to the society of consumers, is commonly portrayed as a process of
gradual, ultimately to be complete, emancipation of individuals from
the original conditions of ‘no choice’ and later ‘limited choice,’ from
pre-scripted scenarios and obligatory routines, from preordained and
prescribed, non-negotiable bonds and from compulsory or at least
unchallengeable behavioral patterns. In short, that passage is portrayed
as another, possibly the conclusive, leap from the world of constraints
and unfreedom towards individual autonomy and self-mastery. More
often than not, that passage is painted as the final triumph of the
individual’s right to self-assertion, understood primarily as the
indivisible sovereignty of the unencumbered subject; a sovereignty
which tends in turn to be interpreted as the individual’s right to free
choice. (2007a: 61)

But in the case of Madame Irma’s clients, the leap from a

“world of constraints and unfreedom” remains a temporary illusion,
only altering their appearance, not their true identities. Their move
from having “no choice” or a “limited choice” to the “right of self-
assertion” continues within the constraints of the mirrors or finite
waves, a purely conceptual dimension, without ever leading to indi-
vidual autonomy and self-mastery based on knowledge-by-identity.
By converting themselves into commodities, they focus more on
superficial appearances than on any significant transformation of the
self associated with the upper left quadrant.
Scene Two of The Balcony introduces another client, a judge,
whose girl plays a thief about to be punished by the torturer, played by
one of Madame Irma’s employees named Arthur. Like the bishop, the
judge also savors his role but gets unnerved by the gunfire outside
from the ongoing revolution. Unlike the bishop’s girl, however, the
judge’s girl and Arthur end up humiliating him, thus undermining his
pleasure. As the scene opens, the judge asks the woman, “Are you a
thief or a strangler? (Very softly, appealing to her) Tell me, my child,
tell me, I implore you, tell me you’re a thief” (8). The thief replies,
“OK, my Lord,” but the torturer says, “No!” (ibid.). The torturer wants
her to deny her crime now and confess later, but she worries that she’ll
get hit again. The judge then says, “Precisely, my child: you’ll get hit.
You have to deny it first, then admit it, and then repent. From forth
your lovely eyes, I await the gush of warm springs. Oh! The power of
tears! I want to be drenched in them” (ibid.). Obviously the judge like
the bishop revels in his power over women, reinforcing his sense of
 Genet’s The Balcony 147

domination and virility. Later when the thief confesses, the judge
pontificates,

I shall have all that to judge. Oh, my child, you reconcile me to the
world. Judge! I am going to be the judge of your actions! The scales
of justice hang balanced from my hands. The world is my apple: I cut
it in two—good people and bad people. (11)

Frightened by the revolution outside the Grand Balcony, the judge

bolsters his confidence by taking the woman’s fate into his hands,
without acknowledging at the moment that it’s all an act and the world
remains a threat. As Bauman says of revolutionaries, who include
those who refuse or lack the means to become commodities,

The enemies who lay siege to the walls are its own, very own ‘inner
demons’: the suppressed, ambient fears which permeate its daily life,
its ‘normality,’ yet which, to make the daily reality endurable, must be
squashed and squeezed out of the lived-through quotidianity and
moulded into an alien body. (2007a: 129)

By scheming to become commodities, Madame Irma’s clients attempt

to distinguish and protect themselves from the revolutionaries who lay
siege to the city walls. The danger to the “order-building and order-
obsessed modern state presiding over the society of producers and sol-
diers,” as Bauman puts it,

was that of revolution. The enemies were the revolutionaries, or,

rather, the “hot-headed, hare-brained, all-too-radical reformists,” the
subversive forces trying to replace the extant state-managed order
with another state-managed order, a counter-order reversing each and
every principle by which the present order lived or aimed to live.
(ibid.)

These revolutionaries oppose the obsession with consumerism in the

sense that rather than constantly shifting their identities from one
socially constructed commodity to another, they would prefer dis-
covering their real identities. As Genet and Bauman both indicate, the

higher consumer demand is (that is, the more effective is the market
seduction of prospective customers), the more safe and prosperous is
consumer society. (2007a: 129)
148 Integral Drama

Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony serves to provide consumers like the

bishop and judge with a sense of security by sustaining the illusion of
fulfillment through their becoming commodities.
After reprimanding the girl, the judge addresses the audience, as
if they’re the jury:

Ladies and gentlemen, before your very eyes—with nothing up my

sleeve, nothing in my hands—I separate the rottenness and throw it
away. But this is a painful process. To pronounce every sentence with
the gravity it deserves would cost me my life. Which is why I am dead.
This is the region, that region of total freedom that I inhabit. King of
Infernal Regions, those I weigh in the balance are, like me, dead.
(ibid.)

Death here symbolizes a transition from one socially constructed

identity, the client’s everyday role, to that of a pseudo judge wielding
power over a thief, or one who refuses to become a commodity and
thereby help to sustain consumerism. The judge admits to the torturer
and the thief that

I wouldn’t exist without you . . . (To the thief) Nor without you my
child. You are my two perfect complements” (12). He then pleads to
the girl acting as a thief, “You won’t refuse to be a thief? (13),

He knows that without her his new identity as a powerful commodity

would be undermined.
Again, the girls wield greater power than the men, for she
replies, “Well . . . you never know . . .” (ibid.). He beseeches her,
“Don’t leave me like this, I beg of you—waiting to be a judge” (ibid.,
original emphasis). As the scene comes to a close, the girl brandishes
her power over the judge by hesitating and making him lick her shoes
before she agrees to play the thief again. In a sense, therefore, the girl
as a revolutionary, an “inner demon,” in this scene fulfills the role of
the mirror, only in this case denying the image the client hopes to
attain. As an analogy of everyday life, this situation demonstrates that
you can’t find your true identity through an intersubjective relation-
ship with others. They’ll undoubtedly help you construct roles to
perform in public, but the true self toward which you aspire can’t be
garnered through another person’s perception of you based on how
you look, speak or behave. An identity dependent on others ends up as
nothing more than a social construct, a commodity based on
 Genet’s The Balcony 149

knowledge-about or knowledge-by-acquaintance. The judge, like the

bishop, seeks a secure identity in the wrong place, in this case a
surrogate mirror found in the girl, an interpersonal relationship found
in all the quadrants except the upper left, wherein his true self resides.
This second scene adds an element of humiliation to the client’s image,
thereby accentuating his failure to fulfill his dreams as a powerful and
sexually dominant male in a society going through a revolution. The
irony of these first two scenes centers on the fact that while the
revolution instills fear in the clients, they continue playing the roles of
elite commodities against whom the revolutionaries are fighting. If
anything, this scenario would further jeopardize a judge responsible
for convicting people like a rebel.
The girl playing the thief and the audience again enter a zone of
awareness where through behavioral via negativa they de-identify
themselves with socially constructed roles and instead have a glimpse
of awareness by itself, and on this basis simultaneously witness the
minidrama involving a deluded judge. This experience involves a taste
of cosmic consciousness, however fleetingly. As Robert Boyer notes,
development of this

fifth state of consciousness spontaneously establishes complete inner

freedom from being overshadowed by the inevitable ups and downs of
individual life characteristic of various degrees of suffering.
Individual experiences of suffering or happiness are associated with
what we identify ourselves to be. The relative field of existence is
ever-changing. [. . .] If we identify with these changing processes, we
ride the waves of change, sometimes the peak and sometimes the
trough. (2006a: 444)

The bishop and judge identify themselves with commodity roles in the
ever-changing relative field of existence, striving for a peak
experience, which however pleasurable remains transitory and results
in their soon returning to the trough of another in a long series of
socially constructed identities. The women, on the other hand, don’t
strive to identify with another role but find themselves compelled to
act out roles they recognize as being unreal and transitory, part of their
work in the Grand Balcony and even similar to the roles they play
outside Madame Irma’s establishment. They more than the men
benefit from these rotating roles that free awareness from becoming
150 Integral Drama

attached to any particular one in the hopes of riding the waves of

change to a peak experience.
In the third scene, another client in the Grand Balcony plays out
his fantasy of being a general with his girl acting as his horse.
Madame Irma has his room prepared before he arrives, and they dis-
cuss the danger he encountered outside and how he had to take detours
to avoid the revolution. He also worries about leaving the Grand
Balcony late and possibly getting shot by revolutionaries, especially
since his girl/horse has yet to arrive. He wants to ring for her: “I like
ringing. It’s authoritative—ringing the charge!” But Madame Irma
counters,

Not just yet, General . . . Oh, I’m sorry, there I go, giving you your
rank already” (15). The general then hears a woman’s scream and
wants to rescue her, but Irma tells him it’s “a bit of involuntary
improvisation” and that he should “cool it.” (16)

The general’s girl finally arrives a half hour late with his uniform, but
he can’t see any blood on his boots that would make his minidrama
illusion appear more real. When Madame Irma leaves, the general
turns to his girl and asks,

Didn’t you get your oats? You’re smiling, aren’t you? Smiling at your
rider? Hm? Do you recognize this hand—firm but gentle (He strokes
her.) My fiery steed! My beautiful mare—Ah, what lovely gallops
we’ve had together. (17)

He then forces her to kneel in front of him and whinny like a circus
horse, doing everything he can to convince himself of his power in the
midst of a ritualistic fantasy. At this stage she complies and, half
naked herself, helps him take off his cloths and don his uniform.
Afterwards when he tries to put the bit in her mouth, she refuses.
Then he asks “Where’s the war?” She replies, “It’s coming, General—
it’s coming” (18). They anticipate the war by talking about death and
his soldiers, then he looks into the mirror:

Waterloo! General! Man of war, in full dress. Behold me in my pure

appearance. With no contingent at my back. Simply myself—I appear.
If I have gone through wars without dying, through suffering without
dying, if I have risen from the ranks without dying, it was only to
reach this minute just before dying. (19)
 Genet’s The Balcony 151

The girl then tells him he’s been dead in their fantasy since yesterday,
that for a dead man he speaks quite eloquently. As the scene closes, he
tells her, “Hang your head, and hide your eyes, I want to be General in
solitude. Not for my sake, mind you, but for the sake of my image,
and my image for the sake of its image, and so on. In short, we shall
be the image of each other” (20). Then finally, “Tell them I died with
my boots on!” (21). Death in the play symbolizes immortality, but this
also presents a contradiction. The idea that he presents one image for
the sake of another image suggests that his new identity consists of a
series of images in infinite regress, locked within a field of finitude,
not open to infinity or immortality. That is, instead of knowing
himself through knowledge-by-identity—as a unity of knower, known
and process of knowing—he knows himself only in the field of duality
as an object of observation, which in this case is nothing more than a
self as a commodity constructed through an illusory minidrama in
which a girl and a mirror convince him of the death of his old identity
and the birth of a new one.
Madame Irma’s clients, therefore, seek fulfillment but have not
developed unbounded awareness or self-referral consciousness from
which it derives. What they don’t realize is, as Bonshek notes,

Knowledge in waking, dreaming and sleep states is unreliable. Our

moods, perceptions and experiences change from day to day. [. . .]
The only state where consciousness is unchanging, unbounded, eternal,
is Transcendental Consciousness. Only at that level can reliable
knowledge, or absolute knowledge, be gained. Here the structure of
pure knowledge is open to awareness. In Cosmic Consciousness the
unchanging reality is maintained along with the changing states of
waking, dreaming and sleeping. (2007: 20, original emphasis)

By striving to become commodities, however, which must always be

updated to maintain their saleability, Madame Irma’s clients remain
trapped within the field of duality and change.
As in the previous two scenes, the girl in this scene also mani-
fests greater insight and awareness of the general’s charade. Without
her and Madame Irma, the general would be slumped in the trough of
a field of change with no avenue for escape. But the girl realizes that
the path he has chosen will not provide him with any lasting security
or happiness, that indeed he may eventually get killed by the
revolutionaries on his way to and from the Grand Balcony. This fate
152 Integral Drama

would ironically fulfill his desire to die in battle and become a war
hero, although the context would of course fall far short of the image
of immortality he hoped to portray, both for himself and others. Like
the bishop and the judge, the general tries to overcome his sense of
impotence and helplessness through the illusions of myths and day-
dreams—the basis of all commodities. Their visions, however, point
in the wrong direction, setting up an opposition between two socially
constructed identities instead of closing the gap between all identities
and the natural self as pure awareness, the witnessing internal
observer that alone can provide security and bliss. While the men
focus on various Forms they try to identify with through the
conceptual mind, the girls focus more on Emptiness through the non-
conceptual mind, for they have no desire to identify with the Forms
imposed on them by men. Unlike the male clients, therefore, the girls
and through aesthetic experience (rasa) the audience have a greater
affinity for the coexistence of Emptiness and Form, which provides
them with a taste of cosmic consciousness, of the internal observer
perceiving but not being overshadowed through identification with the
objects of observation.

Madame Irma and George

In Scene Six, the longest scene of the play, Madame Irma talks
with her accountant Carmen, who wants to leave the Grand Balcony to
see her young daughter, but Irma refuses to let her go. Madame Irma
also worries about her lover George, the Chief of Police, who has yet
to make an appearance. Carmen reports about one of the girls, Chantal,
who left the Grand Balcony to join the revolution. Their conversation
is interrupted by Arthur, who played the torturer in the scene with the
judge. He comes to collect his money, his main interest, but Madame
Irma says she will pay only if he finds George at his headquarters.
When Arthur returns and reports on the violence outside, his speech is
cut short by a bullet that smashes through the window and kills him.
Before this event, however, George arrives and also reports that the
situation outside “is deteriorating every minute—it isn’t desperate yet,
but it soon will be—thank God! The Palace is surrounded” (40).
George’s greatest concern centers on whether or not a client of the
Grand Balcony has tried to emulate him as the Chief of Police,
information he tries to obtain from Carmen: “Has there or has there
not been a simulacrum?” Bewildered, she asks, “Simulacrum?” To
 Genet’s The Balcony 153

which he furiously retorts, “Yes! Idiot! A simulacrum of the Chief of

Police?” (41). George hankers for the status of a commodity that
everyone would crave. Madame Irma responds, “The time isn’t ripe,
my dear. Your function isn’t noble enough yet to offer dreamers a
consoling image that would enshrine them” (ibid.). But George
disagrees and feels that his stature in the revolution grows more
prominent by the day. Interestingly, as the Chief of Police, a position
already endowed with power, George doesn’t depend on emulating
others for his self-esteem but rather feels compelled to establish him-
self as a commodity for others to desire. Genet suggests, moreover,
that even the identities of those being impersonated by Madame
Irma’s clients do not provide them with power and virility on a
permanent basis. All individuals who aspire to become consumer
commodities, especially in this case the Chief of Police, must con-
stantly upgrade themselves to remain sellable, to have the appeal that
would keep them in demand.
Even as the police chief and lover of Madame Irma, George still
feels inadequate enough to insist that others should want to
impersonate him as the ultimate symbol of admiration. To maintain
his saleability he not only attempts to enhance his status by enticing
the desires of other but also by building a tomb that would insure his
immortality. He announces,

Look, my image is growing every day. It’s becoming colossal. I see it

reflected in everything around me. And you stand there and tell me
you’ve never seen it represented here. (42)

The fact that George claims to see his image reflected in everything
around him suggests that his identity is contingent on Wilber’s three
quadrants outside the upper left. As a member of the hierarchy, his
awareness of himself depends on intersubjective, interobjective and
objective consumer representations that have nothing to do with the
true nature of the self and will never provide him with the confidence,
security and inner peace he so strongly craves. As Bauman says,

Consumption viewed in Layard’s terminology as a ‘hedonic treadmill’

fails to increase the sum total of satisfaction among its practitioners.
The capacity of consumption to enhance happiness is fairly limited; it
can’t easily be stretched beyond the level of the satisfaction of the
154 Integral Drama

basic ‘needs of existence’ (in distinction from the ‘needs of being’ as

defined by Abraham Maslow). (2007a: 45)

Nevertheless, in consuming to become a desirable commodity, George

argues, “I shall force my image to detach itself from me, to penetrate,
to violate your studios, to be reflected, to increase and multiply”
(ibid.). He believes that when he crushes the revolution, the Queen
will call on him, that nothing will be able to stop him. Again we see
with George, unlike the girls, that he depends entirely for his prestige
on an intersubjective representation of his image by other men, even
though he already embodies a role that these men would crave to
imitate through their minidramas. He has no awareness of himself
through an innate knowledge-by-identity of his inner Being, but rather
relies on the superficial attributes of his role as a commodity that he
hopes others will admire and attempt to impersonate. For the Chief of
Police, then, the clients who might simulate his position of authority
would serve the same purpose as mirrors for the other men, a finite
representation of identity. What the men fail to realize is that beneath
its veneer as a cultural construct aspiring to become a commodity, this
identity is in fact endowed with unbounded potential. Because he
fights against the revolutionaries and has yet to be simulated by others,
George finds himself trapped in a world of mixophobia. Wanting
others to simulate his role centers on a desire to create a “we” feeling
among Madame Irma’s clients and himself. In this way, as Bauman
says, “perhaps one could at least secure for oneself, for one’s kith and
kin and other ‘people like oneself,’ a territory free from that jumble
and mess that irredeemably afflicts” society (2007b: 87), especially
during a revolution. If George and the bishop, judge and general had
closer ties with their inner identities of the upper left quadrant, they
would undoubtedly experience less mixophobia and more mixophilia
even in a diverse cultural and social context.

Real and Fantasy Images

In the eleventh and twelfth scenes when the revolution has been
defeated, Madame Irma simulates the Queen on her balcony where she
stands with the clients who play the bishop, judge and general, all of
whom are being photographed and advised by the envoy on how to
behave. They bow solemnly to the crowd, a little hesitant about acting
out their fantasies in the real world. Chantal, now a symbol of the
revolution, also appears on the balcony but gets shot and then carried
 Genet’s The Balcony 155

away by the general and the Queen. The three clients agree to stand
beside the Queen on the balcony to rally support among the loyalists
and make them believe the Queen is still alive. The Queen says,

Thank you, thank you, gentlemen. (With a benevolent, sad smile.) We

notice it is you, my Lord Bishop, who are becoming the spokesman.
No no, don’t deny it. It is well that leadership should emanate from
the highest spirituality. (Pause.) If only you hadn’t had the
abominable idea of having Chantal murdered,” to which the bishop
replies, “(Pretending to be frightened) A stray bullet! (77)

Madame Irma as the simulated Queen has her doubts about whether
Chantal was killed by a stray bullet or not, yet reveals that Chantal had
come to the Grand Balcony to visit her boss, Madame Irma. The
bishop says he had turned her into one of their saints, emblazoning her
image on their flag, but the Queen complains that it should have been
their image and not Chantal’s, thereby revealing a desire for emulation
as a commodity similar to that of George. On the balcony, then, the
bishop, judge and general have to exercise their simulated powers in
the real world, but they feel drained because they’d rather imitate a
commodity than attempt to be one. They long to return to acting out
their fantasies in the privacy of the Grand Balcony.
Although the bishop, judge and general reluctantly appear in
public, their performance resembles any role they would normally put
across, for people always assume different roles in life even
spontaneously when they find themselves in unfamiliar contexts. The
three clients, though weary of the revolution, feel privileged to stand
on the balcony with Madame Irma the Queen as evidenced by their
understanding that they could be consulted on political issues, but the
Chief of Police quickly renders them ineffectual by reasserting his
authority as the chief commodity. Chief of Police:

Gentlemen, I don’t quite follow you. You seem to be showing signs of

wanting to act. It’s true that at a decisive moment, at a time of certain
conjunctures, I had to appeal to you in order to impose upon the
rebellious people. I acknowledge the fact that you one and all rose
magnificently to the situation but, gentlemen, your role was merely
one of appearance, and I intend it to remain so. (80)

This assessment of their roles reconfirms the fact that all roles acted
out even in the everyday world constitute little more that appearances,
156 Integral Drama

minidramas like the fantasies in the Grand Balcony of pretending to

be commodities even without the ability to achieve them. These roles
constantly change, suggesting their insubstantial nature and thereby
reminding the audience that the only function beyond appearance with
lasting significance, stability and truth derives from the internal ob-
server witnessing our socially constructed identities, whether perform-
ed as fantasies or in the everyday world.
The bishop, judge and general, however, don’t perceive the
superficiality of the roles they play and feel offended by the Chief of
Police, whose role is no less transitory and superficial than theirs.

Bishop: “You brought us together because you wanted to consult us.”

Chief of Police “Not to consult you—to give you my orders.” General:
“You mean you don’t want us to take part in your decisions?” Chief of
Police: “In no way. It is I who command, I who organize everything.
Be logical. If you are what you are, Judge, General or Bishop, it’s
because that was what you wanted to become, and what you wanted
people to know you had become. Right?” General: “More or less.”
Chief of Police: “Good. So you have never done anything for its own
sake: whatever you have done has always been a link in your
becoming a Bishop, a Judge or a General.” (80)

The three men object to this interpretation because they feel that even
though they played their roles for glory, these roles still symbolized
the qualities they craved to embody. One quality they aspire for is
dignity, but the Chief of Police debunks this quality as being “as
inhuman as crystal, that renders you unfit to govern men,” for ul-
timately “Above you, and more sublime than you, is the Queen” (81).
The social hierarchy implied here drove Madame Irma’s clients to
engage in their fantasies of power and virility to begin with, but while
they act out these illusions as if they were real during their mini-
dramas, the Chief of Police lives his entire life as a fantasy that he
takes for real. As the play suggests, he feels that his function as an
authority figure, in aspiring to become a commodity, needs to be
invested with greater nobility and self-esteem by having other men
embrace it as an erotic dream, a symbol of power and authority that
through their imaginations will compensate for the Chief of Police’s
own sense of inadequacy.
Because all the men who haunt Madame Irma’s Grand Balcony
live their lives primarily in the ever-changing social and cultural
domains instead of the never-changing upper left quadrant of pure
 Genet’s The Balcony 157

awareness—the world of immediate experience based on knowledge-

by-identity beyond duality—they have a sense that all their roles and
identities, whether acted out in fantasies or everyday reality, remain
illusions. All that we take for real in the field of duality constitutes
illusion because it’s always changing and getting replaced or de-
stroyed in an impermanent world. When the Chief of Police tells the
bishop, judge and general, “You have absolutely no power,” the bish-
op responds,

But you want us to have some power over people. For us to have
power over them, you must first recognize that we have some power
over you, to which the Chief of Police and Queen reply, “Never!” (82)

And yet, he assigns them power to bolster his own image through their
erotic dreams. This attitude he confirms by constructing an immense
mausoleum: “I should appear as a giant phallus . . . (The three men
look thunderstruck)” (85). The Chief of Police wants “to symbolize
the nation . . . ,” which he interprets purely in terms of sex, the only
power the men seem to understand. George feels jealous of his lover
Madame Irma and needs to over-ride her with his tomb, which allows
him in the end to say, “I’ve won” (95).
Madame Irma’s main concern has always been with money and
the survival of her Grand Balcony, the Grand Illusion of all com-
modities. In her final speech on the survival of her institution, she says,

Any minute now we’ll have to start all over again . . . put all the lights
on . . . get dressed . . . (A cock crows.) . . . get dressed . . . oh, all these
disguises! [. . .] I’m going to prepare my costumes and studios for
tomorrow. (96)

Her world is one which Bauman calls “mixophilia,” a world where the
variety of the men’s costumes and roles

is a promise of opportunities, many and different opportunities and

chances of adventure in places that are smaller and less tolerant of
idiosyncrasy and more close-fisted in the liberties they offer or indeed
tolerate. It seems that mixophilia, just like mixophobia, is a self-
propelling, self-propagating and self-invigorating tendency. Neither of
the two is likely to exhaust itself, or lose any of its vigor in the course
of city renewal and the refurbishment of city space. (2007b: 89-90)
158 Integral Drama

Although the revolution has been defeated, threats from the world
outside and inside the Grand Balcony will always remain and require
containment. Madame Irma controls the inside, but the outside will
always inspire fear in the men and bring them back to Madame Irma’s
Grand Balcony to play out their fantasies of security and power by
becoming commodities. Throughout the play, therefore, the girls and
through aesthetic experience (rasa) the audience see through the
façade of the consumerist syndrome and recognize that underlying all
Forms of commodities resides an Emptiness that provides the only
true fulfillment. As a result, The Balcony renders a vision of the
coexistence of Emptiness and Form, which provides the girls and
audience with a glimpse of cosmic consciousness through which the
internal observer remains free from identification with the objects of
desire—even while perceiving them.
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama:
Unity and the Mistake of the Intellect

Introduction: Unity and Postmodernism

Soyinka wrote A Dance of the Forests for the Nigerian
independence celebrations (October 1960) and stated that

The immediate humanity for whom I speak is the humanity that

geographically demarcated is called Nigeria, because it is the entity to
which I immediately identify. Beyond that, I think one also speaks for
humanity in general. (quoted in Katrak 1987: 138)

He also said in this play he “was thinking of national consciousness

and national myth-making” (ibid.). Soyinka believed that Nigeria’s
image of itself differed from reality, which accounts for the play’s
pessimism regarding his country’s future as well as that of humanity
in general. In A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka for the first time
integrates English language drama with traditional theatrical tech-
niques. He also demonstrates the continuity of a violent and infamous
past into the present. Nevertheless, the play ends on a note of
personal regeneration that will lead the Nigerian community and
nation as a whole toward a constructive future. The potential for self-
regeneration in Nigerian society, as portrayed in Soyinka's A Dance of
the Forests and The Road, involves a process of self-discovery
through which the gulf between mortality and immortality, the self
and other is momentarily crossed. What distinguishes Soyinka's early
plays is their success in revealing subtler states of mind in which
discursive logic no longer precludes a vision of the underlying unity
of life—a postulate that is upheld as a fundamental truth by the
Yoruba tradition to which he belongs. In Myth, Literature and the
African World, Soyinka distinguishes between the European and
African notions of ideology and literature. European literature, he
argues, has an autonomous, objective existence, and European literary
160 Integral Drama

theories generally comprise ideologies cut off from human experience.

On the other hand, African literature not only reflects human expe-
rience but also extends this experience through the social vision of the
author. This vision as we have seen can also be elucidated by the
major principles of Vedanta and Sanskrit poetics.
While Soyinka claims that contemporary African literature is
also "consciously guided by concepts of an ideological nature" (1976a:
64), these concepts, which are mystical and visionary by tradition,
serve to support the “imaginative impulse to a re-examination of the
propositions on which man, nature and society are posited or
interpreted at any point in history” (66). For Soyinka, this impulse
leads not merely to a Western style literary ideology but to a
“literature of social vision” (ibid.). He contends that, in West African
ritual theatre, the audience participates in the dramatic conflict and
undergoes a cathartic transformation parallel to that of the hero. The
human world is separated from a divine unity by an abyss or gulf.
Through a process that dissolves and reintegrates the self, the
protagonist enters what Soyinka calls the “abyss of transition” or “the
fourth stage” (26), which ultimately leads to a taste of the coexistence
of Emptiness and Form. The threatening reality of the gulf that
separates a fragmentary society from an ideal state of communal
integration and psychic unity is diminished by means of dramatic
rituals, sacrifices, and ceremonies.
As Soyinka describes it, Yoruba drama is representational and
visionary; it attempts to implement the traditional function of Yoruba
myth by actualizing the ritual transition of a metaphysical gulf. In
contrast, European literature at the time Soyinka wrote A Dance of the
Forests involved a debate on postmodernism and its dilemmas
regarding the nature of meaning and representation, the status of the
subject, and the structure of binary oppositions. Poststructuralism dis-
placed truth, representation, transcendentality, and the subject through
their absence, which resulted in what Warren Montag describes "as a
once existing past that has given way to the present as one historical
totality to another" (1988: 88).
Fredric Jameson notes that, regarding the so-called
“death of the subject,” there are two contemporary positions. Pro-
ponents of the first assert that, in the classical, premodern age, there
was once a species known as the human subject, but that in today's
world of corporate capitalism the “older bourgeois individual subject
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 161

no longer exists” (1983: 115). Advocates of the second or radical

poststructuralist position argue that "the bourgeois individual subject
[. . .] never really existed in the first place; there have never been
individual subjects of that type” (ibid., original emphasis). The
postmodern era presents a similar challenge to West African myth and
ritual. As Femi Osofisan observes, “the flux of social transformation
stays unrelieved in the crisis of ritual” (1982: 72). He quotes Biodun
Jeyifo as having said that Soyinka's "universal idiom" of ritual, the
“victory” of “Ogun's timeless ahistoricism belongs in that realm of
thought in which imagined beings and relationships have absolute,
autonomous existence. Hence it is easy victory, illusory, undialectical”
(73).
On the one hand, Yoruba metaphysics posits a transcendental
reality, which Soyinka defines as “the fourth space.” This space is
separated from terrestrial life by an abyss or gulf, which the
protagonists in A Dance of the Forests attempt to bridge. On the other
hand, postmodernism questions the very principle of binary
oppositions at the basis of transcendentality. The traditional context of
West African metaphysics, however, also questions the structure of
binary oppositions, but in Soyinka's plays it does so on the basis of a
coexistence of opposites and not by giving precedence to one
alternative over the other, as in the poststructuralist “privileging” of
the signifier over the transcendental signified. Soyinka explores the
ritual form not as an ahistorical ideal but as an examination of history,
raising the historic to cosmic proportions. His representation of the
experience of unity in West African myth is complemented by
analogous representations in another non-Western tradition, that of
Vedanta and Sanskrit poetics, which also describes the structure of
binary oppositions as being subsumed by a coexistence of opposites.
Soyinka's “fourth space,” which he distinguishes from the three
commonly acknowledged African worlds—that of the ancestors, the
unborn, and the living—constitutes a coexistence of all spaces, a
“continuum of transition where occurs the inter-transmutation of
essence-ideal and materiality” (1976a: 26).
A Dance of the Forests dramatizes the mechanics of integration
between essence and materiality, unity and diversity, thereby taking
the performers and audience toward a glimpse of cosmic conscious-
ness, that simultaneity of the witnessing internal observer and mental
162 Integral Drama

content. This coexistence of opposites provides a logical answer to

postmodernist dilemmas. Soyinka conveys this through the Yoruba
transitional abyss and its effects upon the audience, explainable
through the Sanksrit theory of the interdependence of consciousness
and language. “For Soyinka,” as Joel Adedeji writes, “the purpose of
theatre is to impart experience, not to provide 'meaning' or 'moral'; to
set a riddle, not to tell a story” (1987: 105). Soyinka's ritual drama is
based largely on his definition of Yoruba mythology in his well-
known Myth, Literature and the African World, where he delineates
the structural paradigm of all metaphysics, namely, the experience of
expanded consciousness, or what Soyinka calls the "metaphysical
self” (1976a: 40). In the relationship of ritual to myth, one's
experience of ritual determines one’s interpretation of myth. In the
context of modern Africa, colonialism has complicated and corrupted
the relationship between ritual and myth, experience and understand-
ing. As Osofisan notes, “man's economic separation from nature”
(caused by colonialism) has led to the disintegration of the animist
metaphysics that underlies Soyinka's rituals (1982: 75). Nevertheless,
in Soyinka's ritual theatre, idealism and history, Emptiness and Form,
meet in the very response of the audience.

Soyinka's Ritual Theatre

The ritual experience of theatre is a collective interaction
between performers and audience, and among members of the
audience itself. Like the religious rituals from which it originates,
theatrical performance involves collective experiences that lead the
performers and audience to a higher state of spiritual insight. Even an
individual’s reading of a dramatic text can also have a transcendental
effect. It may not have the social impact and power of a collective
experience, but it is no less valid for its greater subjectivity associated
with zone #1 of the upper left quadrant, which in Sanskrit poetics as
we have seen is called rasa or “aesthetic rapture.” In comparing
Soyinka's dramatic theory with those of Nietzsche and G. Wilson
Knight, Ann Davis writes that all three are concerned with audience
affect and the metaphysical link between ritual and drama:

[Soyinka's] theory is [. . .] unique in that it focuses on the dynamics of

social and psychological processes within the dramatic experience,
whereas the theories of Nietzsche and Knight are concerned with the
dramatic experience only in terms of individual psychological
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 163

processes. [. . .] Soyinka is equally concerned with defining the

experience of drama in relationship to revolutionary, or liberating,
social consciousness. (1980: 148)

As Davis goes on to show, Soyinka sees drama as incorporating

ritual in order to develop social consciousness through “the passage
from one area of existence to another [. . .] or one level of awareness
to another” (150). The lack of a one-to-one correspondence between
Soyinka's representation of ritual and the traditional event results both
from Soyinka's awareness of the crisis of ritual in modern Africa and
from his metaphorical, rather than historical, treatment of ritual as a
dialectical process of social transformation. As Soyinka himself writes,
“Metaphysical quest is not of itself a static theme, not when it is
integrated, by real proportions, into the individual or social patterns of
life” (1966: 55). In “Drama and the Revolutionary Ideal,” he states
that “ritual is the language of the masses” (87), thereby confirming the
way Edmund Leach uses the term ritual interchangeably with the term
“custom” (Davis 1980: 149). For Soyinka, ritual experience provides a
means for the individual to become integrated into the community and
to attain “a renewed mythic awareness” (ibid.). In “The Fourth Stage,”
he describes the ritual experience as being parallel to that of the deity
Ogun in the “fourth world”—“the area of transition” in which the
participants surrender their individuation, experience the joy of com-
munity, and recreate the self through dance and poetry (Davis 1980:
140-47). As Katrak points out,

This is Soyinka’s only play in which Ogun is anthropomorphized as a

dramatic character and the only drama in which the god takes full
responsibility for the human crime of his devotee. (1986: 146)

The “audience affect” of Soyinka's ritual drama is not only historical,

social, and psychological but also structural, involving the actual
experience of “mythic awareness”—an example of cosmic
consciousness or the coexistence of Emptiness and Form. Because
Soyinka equates ritual and dramatic forms, they can best be under-
stood in terms of their transcendental effect, which is structurally
equivalent in individual and collective experience.
In defining modern-day ritual theatre, Martin Esslin says that
one can “look at ritual as a dramatic, a theatrical event—and one can
look at drama as ritual” (1976: 27). Like dramatic forms, ritual forms
164 Integral Drama

aim to expand individual and collective consciousness and to provide

the community with an experience of its own identity. A Dance of the
Forests is a ritual drama in that it achieves both objectives, portraying,
among other themes, the “conflict between the values of the old
society and the new” (Laurence 1968: 74), “the sense of the repetitive
futility, folly and waste of human history,” and the need for
redemption (Jones 1973: 11). The successful integration of unity and
diversity in Soyinka's plays is a function of ritual experience. This
integration is less an expressed formal property of the plays than their
suggested content, less objective than subjective (rasa), linked to the
upper left quadrant. But even as objective mediums, or “subjective
experience objectified” (Krishnamoorthy 1968: 53), Soyinka's dra-
matic forms skillfully enhance reception and suggest the movement of
the reader/audience toward an experience of the unity of the inter-nal
observer and the mind’s qualia or content.
Like many African writers (e.g., Ngugi 1969), Soyinka satirizes
postmodern African society for its lack of unity and coherence. Africa,
in its self-alienation, is opposed not only to the other of Europe but
also to the other of its own ancestral past. Without the spiritual
heritage necessary to maintain its purity and growth, Africa has, for
Soyinka, fallen easy prey to the worst vices of its former colonizers.
He does not suggest that Africa has a glorious past worthy of
repetition, but that its mythology provides a means of self-purification,
a means of crossing the gulf between the historical and the mythical
self. Despite the modern context of Soyinka's ritual theatre, both the
characters and the audience of A Dance of the Forests move back and
forth across this ontological gap toward an experience of psychic
wholeness, an integration of the witnessing self and what it perceives.
Soyinka skillfully integrates old mythologies into a modem context,
searching for new patterns of ritual experience.
Interpreting the ritual archetypes of West African drama in
Myth, Literature and the African World, Soyinka focuses on three
hero-gods of the rites of passage, Ogun, Obatala, and Sango: "their
symbolic roles are identified by man as the role of an intermediary
quester, an explorer into territories of 'essence-ideal' around whose
edges man fearfully skirts” (1976a: 1). More than the other deities,
Ogun, the Yoruba god of war, iron, and craftsmanship, corresponds to
the abyss of transition, the numinous fourth stage of existence through
which the ideal and material, abstract and concrete, are integrated for
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 165

the performers and audience of ritual drama. As “Lord of the road” of

lfa, the Yoruba traditional religious system, Ogun is the only deity
who “sought the way” that would lead the Yoruba people to the
essence of lfa wisdom (1976a: 27). Anguished by a sense of
incompleteness, the gods feel the need to unite with humans. The
original god, Atunda, once solitary and whole, was smashed into a
thousand fragments by his rebellious slave, an event that became the
analogue to mankind's recurring experience of birth followed by the
dissolution of consciousness at the time of death (ibid., 28). In the
resulting diversity of social functions, Ogun came to embody the
destructive-creative impulse. For Soyinka he represents the “Prome-
thean instinct in man,” “the explorer through primordial chaos” (ibid.:
30). He becomes the key figure in the constant attempt by gods and
humans to bridge the gulf between them through the rites of passage.
As Soyinka sees it, when the protagonist of drama enters the
gulf and transcends conflict to experience the fourth stage, this
experience is not a subjective fantasy but a mimetic rite that
incorporates poetry and dance. Through the power of suggestion, or
dhvani in Sanskrit poetics, it conveys the “primal reality” of the
coexistence of opposites. This experience involves “the withdrawal of
the individual into an inner world from which he returns, com-
municating a new strength for action” (ibid.: 33). The “communicant”
does not withdraw from conscious reality; rather “his consciousness is
stretched to embrace another and primal reality” (ibid.), a coexistence
of waking and pure awareness, Form and Emptiness.
In a decontextualized, non-ritualized European approach to
mythical states, Jung describes the primal mentality in terms of
archetypes cut off from the world of concrete experience. But as
Soyinka points out, the mythic inner world is “both the psychic sub-
structure and temporal subsidence, the cumulative history and
empirical observations of the community” (ibid.: 35). As evidenced by
Soyinka's plays, the experience of the transitional abyss engages
African psychic archetypes within both an historical and mythical
African context, one that fosters a wide range of spiritual insights and
critical interpretations (see Jones 1980: 11). This experience integrates
the concrete and abstract elements that characterize the cosmic context
of the coexistence of opposites. In spite of postmodemism, Soyinka's
characters and audience can be seen as moving toward a glimpse of
166 Integral Drama

turiya or unbounded awareness combined with ordinary mental

activity.
The universal experience of unboundedness or transcendental
consciousness has been called by various names: epiphanies, timeless
or visionary moments, privileged moments, peak experiences,
transcendent ritual experiences, the abyss of transition, turiya, and so
forth. When Soyinka's characters cross the abyss they move from the
senses toward the unbounded Self that underlies all metaphysical
experience. As a taste of the simplest form of awareness, this
experience belies the complexity of philosophical systems. Several
characters in A Dance of the Forests approach the state of turiya or
self-referral consciousness by confronting their past. Murano in The
Road also tastes this state while in possession by Ogun, the patron god
of carvers. Unlike post-Saussurean linguistics, Yoruba metaphysics as
represented by Soyinka recognizes the integral nature of name and
form, poetry and dance, in the mimetic rite of passage. Similarly,
Sanskrit poetics recognizes that the field of difference belongs to a
level of language corresponding to ordinary waking consciousness and
the phenomenal universe, whereas the field of unity belongs to a more
subtle and powerful level of language corresponding to transcendental
consciousness. When understood through the medium of transcenden-
tal consciousness, therefore, the three-in-one structure of the knower
(1), known (Me), and knowledge (language) is the essence of both
subject and object, self and other, and constitutes the basis for their
unification. Discursive logic can be used to build arguments either for
or against the unity of the self or language, but logic by itself can
provide no effective means for verifying its conclusions on the more
subtle level of direct experience in zone #1 of the upper left quadrant.
As we have seen in the other plays discussed above and in Wilber’s
four quadrant theory, logic alone cannot lead to the concrete ex-
perience of pure consciousness itself. Hence, in works such as The
Postcard and Glas, Derrida employs a trans-logical antic verbalism,
attempting to expand the reader's experience through what Ulmer calls
a “picto-ideo-phonographic Writing” (1987: 3-125). In this way,
Derrida's philosophy of otherness can be said to harmonize with the
“equiprimordiality” (Gasche 1986: 91) of pure consciousness, sound,
and meaning in the pashyanti level of language. But these unities
belong to more subtle dimensions of natural law and remain vague
abstractions until approached through direct experience in zone #1 of
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 167

the upper left quadrant, as by Soyinka's characters and audience.

This unity (between self and other) that Soyinka's characters and
audience approach also includes the difference of language. While
these characters communicate through the suggestive power of ritual
drama, they transport the audience from the expressed levels of
language to the inner silence of pashyanti. As a transcendental signi-
fied, this level constitutes the unity-amidst-diversity of sound and
meaning, thus providing a taste of the unity of name and form at the
ground of language.
The physicist John Hagelin has argued that

the notion of diversity disconnected from unity is a fundamental

misconception. This misconception is known [in the Vedic tradition]
as pragya aparadha, or 'mistake of the intellect. (1989: 23)

As if aware of this mistake, the Yoruba gods feel the need to come to
man, who in turn feels the need to diminish the gulf between “himself
and the deities, between himself and the ancestors, between the
unborn and his reality” by means of sacrifices, ceremonies, and rituals
(1976a: 144). Soyinka's characters accomplish this coexistence of
opposites by entering the transitional fourth space, integrating ter-
restrial life with unbounded awareness. In the aesthetic response to A
Dance of the Forests, the audience repeats this experience of
“cosmogony in reverse.”

Integral Awareness in A Dance of the Forests

Through a complex interplay between gods, mortals, and the
dead, the living in A Dance of the Forests invite two glorious
forefathers to participate in the “Gathering of the Tribes.” But the god
Aroni, “the lame one,” received permission from the Forest Head
Obaniji to select instead “two (obscure) spirits of the restless dead,”
the Dead Man and the Dead Woman, a captain and his wife from the
army of the ancient Emperor Mata Kharibu. The choice is significant
because “in previous life they were linked in violence and blood with
four of the living generation” (1970: 1). Selected on the basis of this
past debauchery, which Aroni hopes can be expiated through revela-
tion, these four are Rola, a whore immortally nicknamed Madame
Tortoise; Demoke, now a carver and then a poet; Adenebi, now the
Court Orator and then Court Historian; and Agboreko, at both times
168 Integral Drama

the Elder of Sealed Lips. Although invited to participate in the

welcome dance for the Dead Man and the Dead Woman, the four
mortals refuse to “hear their case,” which is tantamount to refusing to
acknowledge and thereby expiate their ignominious backgrounds.
Thus, they initially refuse to cross the gulf between self and other.
Demoke, Rola and Adenebi as the three living characters embody art,
love and eloquence respectively, which they use for destructive and
selfish ends. But the Dead Woman, who is pregnant, warns that the
living are greatly influence by the dead (or the past): “The world is
big,” she says, “but the dead are bigger. We've been dying since the
beginning” (4). She implies that destiny cannot be controlled by free
will unless the entire range of human experience is taken into
account—the experience of the relative as well as of the absolute, of
difference as well as unity. The Dead can be said to represent the
coexistence of opposites such as mortality and immortality. They sym-
bolize the non-changing, unmanifest field of pure consciousness,
which as the reservoir of infinite dynamism is the source of all
historical change.
Although Soyinka explores the "role of the spiritually elect in a
human community" (Ogunba 1971: 16), critics still find the play
unsettling because in the process of giving individuals a glimpse of
possible redemption it does not explain what this state might consist
of, given Soyinka's extra-political viewpoints. The question, as Lewis
Nkosi points out, concerns the object of Soyinka's commitment:

it is the religious tendency in his work, the quest for [. . .] some

metaphysical scheme of things, which is a disturbing and dangerous
element in Soyinka's work; its link to elitism, to the worship of death
and nihilistic gesture, have not been pointed out often enough. (1981:
190)

Soyinka's ideological commitments may not be explicit in A

Dance of the Forests, but the play does suggest that, before society
can undergo a political transformation, its citizens must be individ-
ually transformed on the level of consciousness. Soyinka depicts “an
opposition between a messianic individual," who sets the spiritual
standard, and "an indifferent humanity” (Nkosi 1981: 190-91) content
to live by the mistake of the intellect. The gap between them cannot be
crossed by merely treating the symptoms, whether political, economic,
or academic. The ambiguity, difficulty, and ostensible danger of Soy-
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 169

inka's drama derive from its exploration of the depths of conscious-

ness beyond the limits of logic and reason. As discussed earlier, Jeyifo
demythologizes rituals as being inappropriate or atrophied in the
context of modern Africa (Osofisan 1982: 73). In terms of Sanskrit
poetics, this atrophy is a reflection of consciousness restricted to a
madhyama (inward speech or thought) perspective on the part of
society and its critics. When nurtured back to its self-referral state,
back into alliance with the government of nature through an inte-
gration of ritual and history, consciousness can solve the problems
caused by the world of difference, but this solution involves a gradual
process, as evidenced by the slow progress made by Soyinka's
characters.
The mortals in A Dance of the Forests must confront the whole
range of life before transition into the self is possible, and the call
becomes urgent: “the gap always widens” (5). Eventually, each of the
four mortals reveals a secret past. In Demoke's passionate and poetic
account of his crime, the negative aspect of creation couples with a
feeling more appropriate to the positive aspect. By killing his
apprentice Oremole, whom he pulls off the top to the araba tree they
were carving together for the occasion, Demoke becomes aware of his
capacity for destruction, which propels him toward redemption: “I
plucked him down!! ... I /Demoke, sat on the shoulders of the tree,/My
spirit set free and singing” (28). The ceremony for the Self-discovery
of the four mortals, then, consists of three parts: the reliving of the
ancient prototype of their present crime; the questioning of the dead
couple; and the welcoming dance for the dead couple. Suddenly the
scene retrogresses about eight centuries to the court of the emperor
Mata Kharibu. Rola (Madame Tortoise—the queen), Demoke (Court
Poet), and Adenebi (Court Historian) all enact the paradigm of his or
her recurrent crime. After a bantering session with the Poet, the
piqued Madame Tortoise dispatches him to fetch her canary from the
dangerously steep roof of the palace. Instead of going himself, the
poet sends his pupil, who falls and breaks his arm. At this point, the
chained warrior (the Dead Man) is brought before Mata Kharibu on
charges of treason. For Mata Kharibu, the captain had fought against
a fellow chief and robbed his queen, Madame Tortoise, but now
refuses to risk his men for another frivolous battle in an attempt to
obtain her forgotten dowry. The Court Physician tries to reason with
170 Integral Drama

the captain, who confronts authority on the battlefield of his own

conscience: “Physician: Was ever a man so bent on his own
destruction? Warrior: Mata Kharibu is leader, not merely of soldiers
but of men. Let him turn the unnatural pattern of men always eating
up one another” (56).
By reliving the previous incidents of their present crimes, the
mortals reveal the functioning of non-changing pure consciousness,
the internal observer, at the basis of historical change. The mortals and
the dead pair symbolize, through their multiple lives, the unity of
mortality and immortality. They represent a synthesis between history
(or waking consciousness) and structure (or transcendental conscious-
ness), a synthesis that allows for the dialogue between change and
non-change, time and eternity, Form and Emptiness. As Jameson says
in The Prison House of Language, “where everything is historical the
idea of history itself has seemed to empty of content” (1972: xi). He
later adds that "history is the science of the permanent" (97). Through
an historical process of self-referral, the dead pair take the mortals
beyond ideological closure and toward an integration of
transcendental consciousness and history. This process of self-referral
swings the awareness from the concrete to the abstract, from the finite
historical present to the field of all possibilities, from mental content
to the witnessing internal observer. While Jameson in The Political
Unconscious defines the “untranscendable horizon” as the totalizing
historical context or “Necessity” underlying conceptual systems (1981:
10), Soyinka's drama portrays this horizon as the cosmic context of
mythic or expanded consciousness, which does not underlie historical
change as much as it permeates it. From the perspective of Sanskrit
poetics, the primal reality of Soyinka's transitional realm contains the
essence of all space, time, and causality that find expression in the
phenomenal world.
After the welcoming of the dead couple, the Dance of Welcome
is performed by the spirits of the Forest, represented by Demoke, Rola,
and Adenebi, who anticipate the future while momentarily possessed.
Each of them wears a mask: “The mask-motif is as their state of
mind—resigned passivity” (73). This trance-like state represents the
settled state of mind and body associated with the transitional abyss.
As defined in Sanskrit poetics, this transcendental state is omnipresent
and differs physiologically from the waking, dreaming, and sleep
states. It can thus be located in the gaps between the other states,
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 171

which are the fluctuations of ordinary consciousness. Soyinka's

characters are continually passing through these gaps as they move
back and forth between waking and dreaming, mortality and im-
mortality, a process that strengthens their facility for a glimpse of cos-
mic consciousness.
The dead pair listens in suspense to whether or not the future
will be more auspicious than the past or present. During the
welcoming dance the Dead Woman's Half-Child walks away from his
mother's side. He is followed by a Figure in Red, the disguised god
Eshuoro who seeks revenge against Demoke for having killed
Oremole. At this point Demoke finally comes to his senses and tries to
rescue the Half-Child from the fate of being continually “born dead.”
Demoke's attempt to free the Half-Child has been interpreted in many
ways (Wilkinson 1980: 69-73), but the deeper significance of his
intervention, which occurs immediately after an experience of the
fourth stage or expanded consciousness, lies in the fact that it re-
presents his first tangible step toward his own redemption. He cannot
intervene directly in someone else's fate. The Forest Head could
intervene if he desired, but he prefers to create a setting conducive to
the mortal's self-discovery. Yet even though Demoke cannot free the
Half-Child, any attempt to free oneself through self-purification
increases the coherence of the social collective. De-moke's integration
of self and community stems from an integration on the level of
consciousness achieved through his “rapport with the realm of
infinity” (Soyinka 1976a: 2). This coexistence of opposites cannot be
understood in terms of vaikhari or madhyama, which are limited to
the field of phenomenalization. Rather, the integration of apparent
opposites into a primal wholeness, one not susceptible to infinite
deferral by the play of différance, consists of the unity of sound and
meaning that characterizes pashyanti as available only in expanded
awareness. But how do Soyinka's characters achieve this experience?
At the end of the play the god Eshuoro, who demands
vengeance against Demoke for killing his apprentice Oremole, sets
fire to Demoke's tree, from which he falls into the arms of Ogun, the
patron god of carvers. Demoke's rebirth is symbolized not so much
with words as with ritual dance and music. Abstract conceptual
knowledge does not redeem, but rather the total embodiment of
knowledge through physiological renewal, as in Demoke's ritual
172 Integral Drama

experience. Throughout the play, gods and mortals strive for the unity
that is always latent, but this unity can only be stabilized in the
awareness by means of a self-referral process that unites the knower,
known, and knowledge. The impulse toward unity originates not only
from the Forest Dwellers per se or from the outside, but also from
within each mortal, from his or her inner god as personified by the
Forest. Obaniji is not only the Forest Head; he is also a mortal. In his
being, he synthesizes mortality and immortality.
In a psychological sense, the position of the other in this play is
occupied by the past lives of the four characters who are compelled by
the Forest Head to undergo the process of self-discovery. The
apparent opposition here between the knower (the present self), and
the object of knowledge (the past self) is dispelled through the process
of knowing provided by the deities, rituals, and ceremonies that
Soyinka dramatizes. When the knower, the known, and the process of
knowing are perceived as one in terms of consciousness, this unity can
be said to characterize the self-referral experience of the transitional
fourth space, or zone #1 of the upper left quadrant. As Soyinka's
characters move toward the unity of self-referral consciousness, the
audience also moves towards this experience by way of devices which,
although aesthetic or formal, are nevertheless historically based.
These devices cause the awareness of the characters and audience to
swing from the concrete to the abstract, from madhyama toward
pashyanti, from the sensory and intellectual boundaries of ordinary
consciousness toward a coexistence with the unboundedness of
transcendental consciousness.
One such device is the play's use of formal and thematic gaps
such as those between the self and other, past and present, mortality
and immortality. The gap between Demoke's present and past lives
allows the audience to turn inward, to refer back to the self and to
settle momentarily into the realm of infinity. One could even claim
that all knowledge has its source in the structure of the gap, the most
fundamental gap being the historical and material (that is, physio-
logically based) difference between the finite waking state of
consciousness and unbounded pure consciousness. This gap underlies
all other historical differences, such as that between the Soyinka's
characters and their deities, as well as that between the various levels
of language.
Another aesthetic device related to the gap is Soyinka's figura-
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 173

tive language, which he employs as a key to the self. His use of Yo-
ruba symbolism is significant in that it swings the awareness of the
audience from the immediate concrete image, such as that of Rola
reliving her past crimes as Madame Tortoise, to the abstract concept
of that image, which implies the transcending of temporal/spatial
boundaries. What matters in Soyinka's use of metaphor is not the
referent itself, but reference as an act of pointing. Reference in this
sense has the effect of shifting the awareness from concrete rhetorical
boundaries to an abstract unboundedness through which conscious-
ness is stretched. This movement allows the awareness of both
audience and characters to expand from the temporality and difference
of madhyama toward the "difference-cum-identity" of pashyanti
(Chakrabarti 1971: 81). The mistake of the intellect, in its projection
toward ever more complex diversity, is corrected through the memory
of samhita or the three-in-one dynamics of consciousness.
Even Derrida's theory of the trace suggests how the awareness
swings from the concrete to the abstract, from the finite to the infinite.
In Superstructuralism, Richard Harland makes the analogy between
the trace and Eastern meditation (1987: 150-51). Both the trace and
meditation spontaneously expand the awareness by means of the
empty signifier in its move toward a general meaningfulness—defined
as the negation or absence of temporal boundaries—thereby swinging
the awareness from the concrete to the abstract. While apparently de-
ferring meaning “ad infinitum,” the notion of the trace in fact expands
awareness toward transcendental consciousness, which is also the
ground for the unity of sound and meaning in pashyantl that the
characters and audience in A Dance of the Forests approach through
the process of self-discovery .
By giving spiritual power to the protagonist through its choric
support, the audience is, as Soyinka says, an integral part of ritual
drama:

The drama would be non-existent except within and against this

symbolic representation of earth and cosmos, except within this
communal compact whose choric essence supplies the collective
energy for the challenger of chthonic realms. (1976a: 39)

Soyinka says that the "ritualistic sense of space" that encompasses

the audience is a medium (ibid.). The spatial/temporal apparatus of
174 Integral Drama

this dramatic medium, which affects all the senses,

parallel[s] [. . .] the experiences or intuitions of man in that far more

disturbing environment which he defines variously as void, emptiness
or infinity. (ibid.: 39-40)

The enactment of Soyinka's drama establishes a spatial medium in

which the metaphysical self is materialized through a unity of poetry
and dance, name and form, and the “cosmic envelope” contracts to a
dimension manageable by the community (ibid.: 41). For both the
protagonist and the audience, entering this microcosm involves a
“loss of individuation, a self-submergence in universal essence”
(ibid.: 42), and thus a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form
in the upper left quadrant. The physical and symbolic enactment of
Soyinka's ritual theatre re-presents “the archetypal struggle of the
mortal being against exterior forces,” and the medium or stage of this
cosmic struggle is created for, and brought into existence by, the
communal presence of the audience (ibid.: 43). Through its power of
suggestion, or dhvani in Sanskrit poetics, the objective medium of
Soyinka's ritual drama evokes from the audience a self-referral
response. In a process of mutual reciprocity, the awareness of the
audience moves from the concrete condition of its terrestrial
existence to the spiritual essence suggested by the dramatic medium,
whose metaphysical dimension is in turn concretized in the life and
consciousness of the audience. For the individual reader of the play,
the experience of expansion only lacks the resonance of group
coherence glimpsed by the spectators. In terms of language, the
awareness of both the reader and audience moves from the sensory,
rational realm of vaikhari and madhyama toward the abstract, holistic
realm of pashyanti and para.
Soyinka's method of stretching the consciousness of the
characters and audience through a ritual process of mutual reciprocity
or dialogue can be elucidated by the Indian theories of rasa and
dhvani. Soyinka's plays elicit the experience of rasa or aesthetic bliss
by means of images and other devices intended to produce the loss of
individuation and the resulting flavor of unboundedness or bliss—or,
one might say, the flavor of rasa itself. Soyinka's themes of individual
quest and self-discovery and their corresponding devices serve as
vehicles to induce the self-referral experience of freedom from any
one emotional response. Nkosi criticizes such nonattachment in what
 Soyinka’s Integral Drama 175

he regards as Soyinka's lack of ideological commitment—which in

terms of Sanskrit poetics is really a commitment to the silent source of
ideology. Because the freedom of knowing the whole gamut of
possible responses (the known), constitutes the experience of pure
awareness or the self (the knower), rasa produces the experience of
the three-fold unity of the knower, known, and knowledge—a process
analogous to the experience of the fourth stage of Soyinka's ritual
drama. Through the ritual experience of transcending binary opposi-
tions, Soyinka resolves the paradox of destructiveness and creativity
in Ogun, and the structural paradox of “the stasis of tragedy and the
dynamism of the rebellious spirit” (Gurr 1980: 143). Hence, the
experience of the fourth stage is one of silence and dynamism, an
integration of unity and diversity that combines pure consciousness
and the forms of thought. Though accused of being elitist, A Dance of
the Forests produces an effect that goes beyond the intellect and
moves toward the simplest form of awareness; Soyinka himself claims
that the play is most popular among stewards and cooks (Akarogun
1966: 19).
As elucidated by his view of Yoruba mythology and the notion
of language and consciousness in Vedic poetics, Soyinka's ritual
drama portrays how literature is always implicated in the process of
change. In A Dance of the Forests, Soyinka represents Yoruba
mythology not as an isolated ahistorical ideal, but as a cultural system
enmeshed in the conflicted environments of modern Africa that gives
the audience a taste of the coexistence of Emptiness and Form.
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 Index of Names
Adedeji, Joel 162, 183
Agamben, Giorgio 99
Alexander, C. N. and R. W. Boyer
133
Alexander, Charles N. 71, 72
Almond, Philip 96
Anandavardhana 98
Artaud, Antonin 12, 128
Audi, Robert 83
Barnard, G. William 67
Bauman, Zygmunt 36, 47, 48, 49, 50,
52, 53, 59 , 60, 107, 109 ,
113, 139, 145, 147, 153,
154, 157
Begley, Varun 35, 110, 111, 113
Bennett, Tony 73
Bloom, Harold 35
Bonshek, Anna 8, 30, 44, 79, 124,
151
Boyce-Tillman, June 123, 124
Boyer, R. W. 8, 63, 64, 133, 149
Brustein, Robert 127, 137, 149
Chakrabarti, Tarapada 173
Clarke, Chris 87
Coward, Harold 66, 67
Davies, Paul 88, 89
Davis, Ann 162, 163
De, S. K. 167
Deikman, Arthur 71, 97, 119
Dennett, Daniel 14, 96
Derrida, Jacques 67, 166
Deutsch, Eliot 7, 69, 72, 97, 108, 115
Diderot, Denis 9
Elam, Jennifer 124
Esslin, Martin 29, 34, 57, 58, 59, 109,
123, 129, 140, 163
Fergusson, Francis 126, 137
Fireman, Gary 41, 93
Fleming, John 84, 86, 87, 91, 96, 105
Forman, Robert 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 18,
19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 66, 67,
71
Foucault, Michel 87, 123
Freud, Sigmund 11, 59, 93, 111
Gaensbauer, Deborah B. 58, 79
Gale, Steven 34, 37
Gassner, John 127, 137
Geertz, Clifford 110
Genet, Jean 7, 29, 138, 139, 140, 143,
144, 147, 153
Gergen, Kenneth 45
Gleick, James 83
Goldman, Michael 69, 95, 97
Grimes, Charles 120
Grinshpon, Yohanan 103
Gurr, Andrew 175
Hagelin, John 167
Haney, William II 13
Harland, Richard 173
Hewes, Henry 109, 117
Hunter, Jim 83
Ionesco, Eugène 57, 58, 59, 61, 62,
66, 68, 71, 76, 77, 98, 113
Jameson, Fredric 160, 165
Jones, Eldred 164, 157
Katrak, Ketu 159, 163
Katz, Steven 20, 66, 96
Krishnamoorthy 73, 164
Lahr, John 117
Laurence, Margaret 164
Lodge, David 119
Mariani, Umberto 127, 137
McGinn, Colin 70, 71, 116
Meyer-Dinkgräfe, Daniel 9, 10, 11,
12, 55, 74, 78, 97, 105, 116,
119, 129, 144
184 Integral Drama

Mikulas, William 120, 121 Shear, Jonathan 13, 14, 39, 41, 49, 50,
Musa, Mark 28, 125, 127, 128 65, 71, 72, 115, 127, 142
Naismith, Bill 33, 34, 35, 40, 47, 113 Shepherd, Simon and Wallis, Mick
Ngugi, James 164 129
Nkosi, Lewis 168, 175 Soyinka, Wole 7, 29, 160-167
Ogunba, Oyin 168 Stanislavsky, Constantin 9, 12, 144
Osofisan, Femi 161, 162, 169 Stoppard, Tom 7, 27, 81, 83-107
Pflueger. Lloyd 77 Suzuki, D. T. 39, 40
Pinter, Harold 25, 27, 33, 35, 67, 107 Tarlekar, G. H. 98
Pirandello, Luigi 7, 28, 124, 125, 126, Taylor, Mark 110
127, 128 Teasdale, Wayne 104
Poggioli, Renato 127, 137 Teichert, Dieter 101
Porush, David 83 Tynan, Kathleen 120
Ramachandran, T. P. 98 Ulmer, Gregory 166
Rhagavan, V. 12, 74 Wallace, Robert Keith 8
Richards, G. 133 Weiss, Aureliu 127, 137
Ricoeur, Paul 101 Wilber, Ken 8, 10, 13, 14, 24, 25, 28,
Sakellaridou, Elizabeth 37, 108, 109, 92, 93, 94, 109, 111, 112-
112, 113, 116 126, 141, 143,144, 153, 166
Sennett, Richard 36, 37, 38, 113 Worth, Katherine 33
Sharma, Arvind 9 Zeifman, Hersh 90, 97, 104