[page 70]

Daniel Larner, Ph.D.
Western Washington University

Trucking Systems From Greece To America:
Metaphorai, The Bacchai, and the Problem of Vision in the Contemporary Theatre

Imagine my surprise as I walked around Athens in April of 1995, eagerly reading every word on every sign I saw, trying to digest my surroundings and intensify my encounter with the Greek language--imagine my surprise to see the same startling word painted on the side of one truck after another, the word metaforai.

It was a foreign land, a new culture for me. Maybe it would not be totally outrageous to find one truck full of metaphors, but two...three...a dozen? This is quite a business in Greece! Maybe when you have a culture that is three or four thousand years old you need a fleet of trucks to carry your metaphors around in.

In modern Greek the word means something like our "transfer," or more crudely "trucking." In ancient Greek the word for "to bear" is foreign, for "beyond" is meta. Imagine, then, that these trucks have a somewhat transcendental purpose, and see them as transferring beyond, as bearing their burdens to somewhere we cannot see or know about. Imagine too that the load is not easy to bear, and requires some special strength or ability. Metaphor-ing, then, comes about its present connotations in English through a long journey in a very special truck. At least three thousand years of transformation (and transportation) have brought it to its present state, a rare earth in the very ordinary ore of language. This ore can be mined by anyone, but refined only by those who, something like the comic-strip Superman, can see what is hidden.

A metaphor goes beyond, carries beyond, identifies one thing in another, brings meaning to the unknown or unfamiliar by carrying another meaning from somewhere else and attaching that new meaning to it. In this way metaphor becomes embroiled in mystery, the large primal mystery of identity. What is the world, my life, nature, death? Who am I, who are you, and what is our fate? And who or what is God? Each of these requires a transfer [page 71] of meaning from one thing to another, one set of ideas or conceptions to another, to "mean" anything at all. By being the trucker, the transferer, the enzymic force that brings meaning from one thing and somehow catalyzes something else to receive it, to accept it, to wear it like a garment, to digest it through the skin, metaphoring makes knowing possible. What might be less obvious is that it makes mystery accessible, and makes vision a perquisite of life. Finally, it makes vision a carrier of value, of enduring values.

How? We say we "know" something when it enters our experience intimately, when we can "recognize" or "understand" it, when we can appreciate both its uniqueness and its connection to other things we know about. We can move around it, have an idea of where we are going in doing so, and appreciate it from different angles. Hence "under-standing" is appreciating something from its foundations up. And we can express that unique identity as a product of the connections we see. We call this "recognizing"--"re-cognizing," or, in other words, re-thinking, re-imag-ining, transfering meaning from one object to another: beyond-carrying, meta-phoring.

This might suggest that only by "carrying beyond," as metaphor does, can we have any meaning at all. It is not a stretch to suggest that all conceptual systems, all knowings, have this property. It is a commonplace, for instance, to suggest that mathematics is a collection of imaginary worlds in which mathematicians are the Magellans, discovering the ways and means by which they can navigate through these often very strange lands. The occasional capacity of a few mathematical systems to be very helpful with the task of describing physical reality turns out to be a rather startling, and somewhat unexpected bonus, connecting some parts of the mathematical world to the physical one--or, I should say, connecting our vision of the mathematical world (which seems to be nothing apart from our vision), to our vision of the physical world (which we usually imagine as having a reality independent of our visions of it). Apart from these happy events, the world of mathematics appears to be one of "pure" imagination, relating only to its own structures and its own rules, and to have no clear "meaning" beyond that. Music is sometimes seen in this same way, with no meaning beyond itself and its structures. It might be more surprising to assert that the sciences are entirely metaphorical constructions, whose visions, and the web of theoretical consistencies and empirical investigations that support them, are constantly being re-cognized, re-imagined, reshaped by the international trucking company we call the scientific community. And in this [page 72] century, developments in physics have even led some to question the previously reliable idea that nature is sitting out there waiting for us to discover it--that is, that its reality is independent of our conception of it.

This view of the nature and power of metaphor gives us an immediate grasp of the power of fictions of all kinds. Metaphors testify to our power to imagine, to wind around what we did not previously know, to apprehend a construct previously unknown through meanings transported from what we do know. Knowing something (particularly something large and contextual, like a story) that we did not know before, it is possible that we might find ourselves with a vivid sense of what we still do not know. This may appear as the mystery of the unknown or simply as the conviction that are other views, other contexts, other things to be known. When an identity (say, the fictive "construct" just evoked) is revealed, it affirms the universe of things unknown that lie beyond it. What is seen and understood, seems to carry with it somehow what is not yet seen or understood, or even what is apparently invisible or unknowable.

Dramatic fictions are particularly vivid in this respect, because they embody the imaginative reality they construct. By physicalizing a play in the theatre we set before ourselves in the baldest manner the fact that the elements of the dramatic fiction--the characters, the plot, the setting, and the action that they express--are only emblems. They stand for something else. And the more vividly they appear to be themselves, the more strongly they stand for something else, and ask us to "understand" that. To make a crude analogy, fictions (stories) are more like math--the storyteller helps us navigate in that unique world. The drama, by contrast, is more like physics. Something about it is starkly "there," leaning on us to understand it as if it had a life beyond our conceptions of it. The more sharply we ache for the pain of Agave and Cadmus in The Bacchai, and the angrier we get at the deceptions and manipulations of Dionysus, the deeper we are driven into the world which Dionysus controls, a world of contradictory feeling and action, of huge elation and horrifying destruction, quite beyond our knowing if not our feeling. We have the shocking revelation of sacrificial divinity--the god dies that we may know he lives--and the equally shocking conviction of sacrificial worship--we swallow the hubris of our anger in the fear that we, too, may be being punished, even as we watch and weep. Attending the drama becomes a metaphor in experience (not merely in thought) for being possessed by the god. While we are [page 73] captivated by the theatre, the god has entered us and the sacrifice has taken place. Something has died (at least complacency and certainty) and something has been reborn. At its largest and most awesome, this rebirth is a sense that the universe lives, objective (like physics) in the divine vision, but obscure to us. At it's least, it is a personal a fear of the unknown and unpredictable. Convinced now that we must keep searching for vision, keep trying to get it right, we may never be the same again.

If we assume that whether or not we sought one, we had a vision of the world before we entered the theatre, what has happened is that what we saw, what we took for real has died and been replaced by another (larger, more ecstatic, more frightening) vision. Knowing so much, being able to envision so vividly what is not there, what is hidden, by means of what is there, what is seen and heard, puts us in direct contact with mystery. The unknown, in this framework, is a constant companion. Strong dramas are those which not only show us vividly the contours of the vision and sensibility, the shape of the lives we already have, but also, by carrying these beyond their immediate factuality, show us connections and implications, layers of meaning and experience we had not yet apprehended. They may also unleash the ecstatic reaches of our feelings, dreams and sensations beyond the bearable moderations of the everyday. Whether revelations of brilliant new understandings, or of the darkness of a tragic abyss, the tension between what we can safely understand and what is dark, forbidden, or closed off to us, is as organic to the drama as death is to life.

The deception some popular drama pulls on us is to convince us that the reality in front of us is not extraordinary at all, but very much what we acknowledge as our everyday experience. Nothing is dark, or ecstatic. On the contrary, matters of selection and emphasis notwithstanding, it seems to be what it is and very little more. Barefoot in the Park, or, for that matter, The Perfect Ganesh or The Sisters Rosenzweig scarcely mean to transcend. Their sentimentality embeds them firmly in ordinary expectation. Even the irony is gentle, familiar, comforting, and the mystery, deeper down, stays buried unnoticed. But even so, the sacrifice is exacted of us. The theatre freezes us--or at least threatens to freeze us--in the vision we came with. The truck gets stalled, and we go out of the theatre exactly as we came in. The sacrifice is that we do not know yet what we have lost.

[page 74] Let us look at a more complicated, and much more interesting example. Daniel Kiefer, writing about Tony Kushner's Angels in America, criticizes the play for failing to keep us in its campy, mock-tragic world. "The greatest possibility for a new dramatic substitute for divine revelation is camp," he asserts.(1) "The mock-serious reaches deeper into the destitution of AIDS suffering than the real, because it speaks to a queer audience immersed in camp".(2) But Kieffer finds a deep failing in Part II of the play.

Angels in America should conclude with its irreverent mixture of violence, delirium, and queer mockery. Instead, we get a fade-out ending, neither comic nor tragic, as rough irony is planed down into smooth good wishes. The question of how we might receive divine help has been presented theatrically, and we deserve a theatrical answer, not a declamatory one. It is not enough to decry the supernatural power represented before our eyes. The great works of Euripides, Shakespeare, Brecht, and Beckett do more than that. They provide understanding--in dramatic action--of how human beings recover from the loss of divine guidance, or how they do not.(3)

It might be argued on Kushner's behalf that he has shown how his characters do not recover by showing how they lapse into sentimental seriousness and declamation. Charles McNulty asks:

[W]ere the almost unbearable scenes of Prior's illness, the pain of his and Harper's abandonment, and the punishing hypocrisy of Roy Cohn and his kind so overwhelming, so prolific of suffering, that they forced the playwright to seek the cover of angels?

By the end of Perestroika, Kushner stops asking those pinnacle questions of our time, in order to dispense "answers" and bromides...(4)

[page 75] These "bromides," like Prior's "more life," are the stuff of sentimentality and self-congratulation--the reward for having survived the plague. But it is just this kind of complacency, sentimentality and self-absorption that are marked by the Euripidian Dionysus as targets for destruction. Somehow, Kushner loses his sense of irony (as well as his sense of style) in his effort to bring the play to a hopeful conclusion. This he does in spite of Prior's discovery that God is on vacation and the angels are hollow. The final irony may be that Dionysus lives anyway, and the mistake was to seek him anywhere outside of the theatre. If this is so, and the audience is to draw some revelation from the experience, the arena of the drama must shift from the audience sharing the mockery inside the drama, to mocking the drama; and if the sentimentality and seriousness of the ending are not laughable, they are most assuredly deadly. Kushner's campy, delirious, romantic, bombastic, satirical truck got stuck on the tracks(5) of sentiment.

The deepest lesson is found in reconstructing Kushner's metaphors. As I see it in this play, mockery here stands for life, for resisting what Kiefer calls the "phallic" dominant paradigm,(6) for standing up to the absurdity of history, to the tyranny of sex roles and divine images, to the lullaby of willful delusion or drugged reverie, to the addictive rush of substituting theories about yourself and society for behavior that keeps your integrity and makes you happy, or the even stronger rush of using others for sex or position, of arrogating power. And mockery is the mode of choice for standing up, finally, to the causeless horror of the plague, to the "why me?" and "why now?" which wells up in us as we watch the reaper work. In Angels in America, the sit-com, the vicious political satire, the climb-to-the-top (or descend-to-the-bottom) melodrama, the wild fantasy and sock-o revelations all depend for their effect on the mockery of each of these forms. The tragedy emerges in the burlesque, in our understanding that these pat forms represent our ordinary expectations and understandings, and that in becoming aware of them and laughing at their narrow-nesses and absurdities, we open new possibilities for sympathy, understanding, disappointment and terror in ourselves. Dionysus lives in our ability to see in the trickery, savagery and mockery, the workings of what must be, of life as we see it in its fullness. What this provokes is the kind [page 76] of outrageous laughter that splits our sides and breaks our hearts.(7) Translated into the terms of this discussion, Kieffer is arguing that Kushner did not go ahead and break our hearts, and this is at the root of his (and my) disappointment with the play.

It is also at the root of the whole metaphoring process of tragedy. It lives in irony and contradiction. Only by seeing a great soul fail can we experience the limits of human action, knowledge and sensibility that that soul could reach. Only by taking the experience of laughter, of love or pleasure to the outer limits of terrible, Dionysiac abandon, by finding the absurdity that finally breaks our hearts, can we discover our full capacity for knowing, loving, understanding. That is where the classical exaltation of tragedy came from--experiencing through the dramatic action a vision of human action and possibility one could not encounter any other way, that is not available in ordinary life. We are captivated, captured in the form of the drama and the experience of the action. Our vision is transformed (transported to a new view) and with it the life we see we live, or could live. With Dionysus we give up the life we had in order to take on the new one we see. And, hopefully, we keep truckin' on down.

When we do this, as we allow ourselves to be transported to meaning, we become an intimate part of the metaphoring process. That is, just as we transport meaning from the rose to the love, from the sun to Juliet, from the universe of knowable, predictable Newtonian billiard balls to the relativistic, quantumized field in which we now dwell, we are metaphored ourselves. In the drama as in no other art-form are we invited directly to experience the loss of ourselves that we might gain new vision. Those biblically minded will immediately think of Matthew 10:39: "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." The spirit is similar. The action is an engagement in vision, in meaning, which is transporting--"transforming," as we more normally say. The devastation of tragedy or the reunion of comedy happens to us, too, in the transformations of our visions. Whoever thought we were really going to the theatre to get trucked? Getting caught up with the god, following Dionysus into this realm of action, where even its form can mock itself, must be something like that.

[page 77] Thus when we talk of values that endure in the theatre, and of eternal verities, it seems to me that the first of these is that the dramatic form projects us, and our experience directly, organically, into metaphor. As we engage with the drama we engage everything that is most at stake--love, liberty, justice, knowledge, peace, understanding--unless, of course, we choose not to, to bury or ignore these trying and taxing matters. Any time we find our theatre talking of things at the edge of our experience, we are dealing with enduring values. The moral horror of the holocaust, the terror of the AIDS plague, and the battle to make a nation founded on a democratic, civil authority are recent examples. Any time we find ordinary questions pushed forward, demanding our attention in ways that challenge and upset us, we are dealing with enduring values. Plays that ask about our essence as men and women, as males and females, as lovers and beloved, are doing this. Plays that ask about our responses to conflicting demands from private needs and public responsibilities are doing this. Plays that ask us to laugh at the sacred and revere the ordinary are also doing this, probably more frequently than we realize. Most academics are fond of finding golden calves in everything from sit-coms and action cop-dramas, to MTV, Star Trek, soap operas, and celebrity interviews on talk shows. False gods are everywhere, but hidden in this experience is the god-of-many-names, ready to pop out anytime, to show us where we got it right or missed it. No one who has read and loved The Bacchae is going to try to tell us in advance how to find the right manifestation of the divine, or to distinguish with confidence holy ways of being and behaving from unholy. And there is no guarantee that it is not the holy as we may see it at the moment) who will be punished and unholy saved, as that same play reminds us. When that happens visions of Right and of morality tend to suffer cataclysm. The censors of pornography, no matter how vile, might stop to think about this as well. The typical form of this argument pits a redefinition of pornography as discrimination against women against a thesis that argues that such a redefinition makes women passive victims and, by denying them choice, infantilizes them. What would Dionysus say? Or, to move to a more contemporary form of the question, are there hidden imperatives we are missing here? What does it cost us to indulge such extruded fantasies, or, on the other hand, to put away our Bacchic visions? Who will step forward and tell us what is holy? In the action of a drama, we may work out a vision that will give us ground to stand on. Eurpides, who may have seen his world collapsing, showed us a society that could not tell brutality from holiness, or wisdom from righteousness and arrogance. In The Bacchai he chose to leave his audience reeling, stunned by the tragic vision of a whole city struck blind.