[page 86]

Daniel Larner, Ph.D.
Western Washington University

Metaphor II:
Understanding Dramatic Form In The Transportation Systems Of Metaphor

Introduction

This paper is a continuation of an investigation into the essence of metaphor. I will argue here that dramatic action seems to epitomize that essence and intensify it. Further, I will argue that the world of tragicomedy is an ancient, almost genetic metaphor for the course of human events and the way of the world. It is a form of perception, a way of knowing. The vitality of contemporary tragicomedy, and the analogy between dramatic action and the metaphors of physics show us how fundamental this view has come to be.

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 primal mystery of identity, and in the very act of knowing. 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.

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"--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, transferring meaning from one object to another. This is beyond-carrying, or (in Greek) meta-phoring.

[page 87] 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 might not be 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.

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 there 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 symbolic world. The drama, by contrast, is more like physics. Most physicists believe that they are describing a world that is "out there," independent of our observations of it. Similarly, something about the drama is starkly "there," leaning on us to understand it as if it had a life beyond our conceptions of it. When an action is played out in front of us, embodied, we hang on the "virtual history" of the action, focusing on its effects and consequences. Most drama is like a hothouse, where every ray of sun, every particle of moisture or fertilizer has an intense effect. We see each drop and particle applied, and note each effect. In this intense scrutiny for [page 88] cause and effect, we see the shape and character of the action, we look hard at that action for what we know and understand about it, to see if the image of that action in our own minds makes sense of the events as they unfold. Do we understand what happens? Do we comprehend the changes that occur? What do we not know and not understand? What is unclear or strange? Our feelings are simultaneously involved in all these questions. Are they familiar or strange? Do we understand what has been seen and felt by the characters? Do we somehow understand their actions and reactions? Can we apprehend their choices, distinguish them from what they seem compelled to do, and understand their own reflections on their positions?

But couldn't we do all this with fiction? The crucial factor is this: drama's physicality reminds us in a brutally direct way that it stands for something else. We know it cannot be what it literally is. If the gun fires and someone falls, no one will be dead (as Pirandello challenged us to remember). A retelling feels like one remove. A reenactment feels like two removes. We have been transported to another plane, where a vision has remade the original event so it can be reproduced. In it's immediacy, its presence, it reminds us with vivid urgency that it is not itself, but a vision of something, transported, to make us wonder, and reach to understand something out of the ordinary.

Thus the telling of a story describes what happens, and usually quotes the persons in the story. Sometimes the narrator may explain or illustrate the point of what we are given to see. But a performance, a drama, takes the story and distills the whole telling into an action that is played out in front of us. It is almost never self-explanatory. Thus the story is transfigured, or transported, metaphored into action. The burden is now on us to see the story in the action, to understand and respond to what we see as if it were real. This very large "as if" is of course the stuff of metaphor.

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 when we encounter a strong drama is that what we saw, what we took for real has been replaced, or at least challenged, 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 [page 89] 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.

This leads us to tragicomedy. In its ironic combination of success and failure, of destruction and creation, of chaos and order, it has particular appeal in our times not simply as a formal medium for drama (as the success of Angels in America might suggest), but also as an emblem for understanding reality. In this metaphor, nothing in the world in intrinsically good or bad, but alloyed, inherently ironic. Even the physical world as exemplified by quantum mechanics reflects these realities: matter and energy are both particles and waves, both knowable and unknowable, both here and nowhere in particular. Tragicomedy is the mode of our time, the fitting affirmative force for a century featuring two world wars, the invention and use of weapons of total annihilation, the advent of the possibility (if not the actuality) of manmade ecocatastrophe, a deadly worldwide epidemic propagated by sexual contact, and the achievement of near-global communications. Tragicomedy is a mode of knowing and of discovering darkness, of building and of mourning loss, of discovering that clarity and uncertainty are a part of each other, of recognizing that life is a stand, futile as it may be, against entropy, and that irony can be funny, bracing, encouraging, as well as killing.

To be very clear about what tragicomedy is, we need to describe its ancestry. It is by no means clear, considering the huge variety of Greek drama performed as "tragedy" and as "comedy," that tragicomedy, the alloyed form, is not the oldest and most fundamental one. But it helps to get a clear view of tragedy and comedy as paradigms. It seems to me they emerge most clearly not as blueprints for dramatic forms, but as sensibilities, as ways of knowing, on which dramatic forms may be based. In the world of tragedy, what is at stake is the largest of human concerns--understanding and obeying divine decree, protecting and maintaining city and family, doing justice. That life and death, right and wrong, and even the survival of civilization, are often at stake along with these huge matters is not a surprise. What happens in a tragic action is typically discovery by failure. That is, the largest and most powerful of us is stretched beyond his or her limits of understanding, vision and action, on [page 90] behalf of what is at stake. Because the hero fails, he or she sees what the limits are, and so do we. We experience the terror of the impending failure, and the exhilaration of the vision attained--we have been able not only to see what the limits are, but to catch a glimpse of what is beyond them. The tragic irony is that the largest and greatest of our efforts will fail, and destruction and chaos will follow.

In comedy, by contrast, what is at stake is strictly domestic. We see social tensions resolved, problems solved, and people reconciled. We muddle through, learn to correct our defects, and to live together. A comic action typically involved pairs of people, usually a young man and a young woman, making their way through the obstacles they find in the fabric of society to come together, usually with the blessings of the same society that has stood in their way. In the process we learn about that society--its manners, morals, customs and institutions, and we experience the elation of the happy couple. They are together, and they will continue to maintain the society and propagate the race. The ironies we find are those generated by the rigidities of customs and institutions, and by the foibles, blunders, and stupidities of the characters, who muddle through in spite of their deficiencies and flaws. What is excluded from our comic vision is precisely what is included in tragedy--those largest and most fearsome matters of ultimate good and bad, right and wrong, survival and the destruction of both individuals and the society, and the nature of things, both human and divine. Comedy, by contrast, is a strictly protected world.

In both tragedy and comedy, what is at stake for the audience, as well as for the central characters, is vision--a way of knowing, of seeing the world. Part of what happens in tragedy is that large, usually competing visions of the world are in conflict with each other. Sometimes one wins. Most often, both are destroyed in the clash and a third is distilled from the wreckage. This is not a Hegelian synthesis, but a vision that could only arise from a failed test, a sunken voyage. In order to have the life of this vision, something strong must die.

In comedy, the vision is of a way to thrive in society, a way to be reconciled with its large customs and institutions, and a way for those institutions to make room for individuals who before were ostracized, or threatened with isolation. The vision is one of enlarged capacity, flexibility, and reconciliation.

[page 91] With tragicomedy comes impurity, and new dimensions in irony. In tragicomedy, love may cause death. The tragic has leaked through the wall protecting the strictly domestic world of comedy, and everything that was simple is now complex, everything that was clear is now multifold and relative, and everything that in the tragic or comic worlds alone we assumed to be true is now uncertain, equivocal.

Tragicomedy forces us to understand that nothing is unalloyed, and that nature itself is equivocal and ironic in its essence. I believe it is this disposition that animates Shakespeare's King Lear. King Lear sees a world that is ironically inhuman. The gods are oblivious to the actions of men and women, and do not share the moral imperatives or the assumptions of societal order that people carry with them. It is as if the gods were a kind of black hole, soaking up the moral energy of the universe, all sense of order and meaning, the fruit of all seeds, and sucking them into a place beyond meaning, beyond response of any kind. As Lear inveighs on the heath:

And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o' th' world,
Crack Nature's moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man. (III, ii, 6-9)

There is nothing in the maddening disconnections of quantum physics that would be unfamiliar to Lear. A black hole is exactly what he would expect to find in a universe set up by the gods he sees. It can be argued that he looks directly into such a black hole, and it is on the border, the event horizon, of the black hole that he teeters when he speaks to Cordelia, "bound upon a wheel of fire," as he wakes from his great rage (IV, vii, 46-7).

Just as Steven Hawking discovers, against all intuition, that black holes do indeed radiate, so does King Lear resonate, throwing off the ironies of the king's titanic attempt to preserve institutions in abandoning them, maintain order in abjuring all signs of it, and affirm meaning in embracing the absurdity of the universe which rains on him.

In a reversal of reversals, this meaningful abyss of Lear's is wholly dark. We "that are young will never see so much, nor live so long" (V, iii, 326-7). We cannot even begin to see what he saw, to appreciate what vision was lost, to fathom the magnitude of the "authority" [page 92] that was there and the emptiness it leaves as it exits the land of the living. To save us from this darkness, to prevent us from being nothing but victims of this vision of vision itself being entropied away to nothing, Shakespeare has cobbled up the remnants of a society and set of traditions which, in calling out evil and defeating it in combat, will reveal the core of that structure, that authority, which will sustain us and allow us somehow to live on. Albany and Edgar, two good men and true, are left to tell the tale. They dare to live in a time of darkness and assume the mantle of government.