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In [amazon_link id=”0826326757″ target=”_blank” ]Leslie Marmon Silko’s[/amazon_link] [amazon_link id=”0143104918″ target=”_blank” ]Ceremony[/amazon_link], the encounter of the protagonist, Tayo, with the old shaman, Betonie, is arguably the most important section of the book. Besides the section’s physical placement at the book’s center, the Betonie section marks a major transformation in Tayo’s perception of the world and marks a point of positive behavioral change—in contrast with his behavior in the book to this point.

Ceremony

Tayo’s psychology and behavior in the first half of the book is marred by bouts of alcoholism, fighting, and sickness of soul, mind, and body. There are several etiologies for Tayo’s behavior and psychological sickness. The first source is strained family relations, most painfully embodied in Tayo’s relationship with his aunt—a relationship that is much like the fairy tale relationship of Cinderella to her stepmother: more specifically, the aunt is subtly abusive, emotionally distant, and has no qualms about demonstrating her belief that Tayo is inferior to her and her own son, Rocky. The second source of Tayo’s sickness is the death of Rocky during World War II (despite his mother’s attitude, Rocky and Tayo were as close as brothers). A third source of sickness in Tayo can be found in the conflict between the white world and "his own" Pueblo world—that is, his inability to fit into either: the former not wanting him because of who he is, i.e., Indian; the later to which Tayo cannot relate by merit of its lack of evolution. Finally, Tayo suffers from an inability to determine what his expectations of and prospects in both the white and Pueblo world should rightly be.

It is against the backdrop of Tayo’s self-abuse and self-destruction that Betonie appears. Betonie is a shaman to whom Tayo has been referred by Ku’oosh, a local medicine man who has failed an initial attempt at curing Tayo by means of a traditionally performed scalp ceremony—a ceremony designed to remove from the recipient the psychological burden of having killed other people. While there are two high points in the Betonie section: the story of a witches’ contest that marks out the disastrous future for Native American Indians; and a healing ritual performed by Betonie on Tayo; it is, perhaps, merely the fact that Tayo spends several days with the old shaman, simply listening to him and being present with him, that ultimately proves to be of most benefit to Tayo. This is precisely because of Betonie’s heteroglossia, and the fact that he is a chronotopic, heterochronous healer.

In her essay (Burton 199), “Bakhtin, Temporality, and Modern Narrative: Writing ‘the Whole Triumphant Murderous Unstoppable Chute’,” Stacy Burton considers three lesser-explored concepts of [amazon_link id=”B001HSYZKK” target=”_blank” ]M. M. Bakhtin’s[/amazon_link] critical theory: the chronotope, heterochrony, and heteroglossia; and the significance these concepts have to the critical understanding of modern fiction. Chronotopes are "conceptions of time and space… [that] determine ‘to a significant degree the image of a person in literature.’” (Burton 1996, 45) The chronotope is also understood to be "the key term in [Bakhtin’s] discussion of time and narrative." (Burton 1996, 43) The essence of the chronotope is twofold: it contains a temporal component and a spatial component, both of which defines a character within a novel and impacts the narrative. The temporal component can loosely be defined as the placement of the character within time, and the spatial component can be understood to be the physical placement of the character within space—also known as "framing" or "viewpoint." Thus, within a novel whose attached narration is concerned with a character’s action in the present tense, the character’s chronotope can be understood to be the "now" and "here”—that is, current time and current physical space. This, however, is a simplistic representation of a chronotope, as within a novel multiple chronotopes can be present at one time. Each character in a novel will manifest his or her own chronotope and each narrative strand will manifest its own distinct viewpoint. It is this aspect of the novel that greatly increases its complexity, for as M. M. Bakhtin notes:

". . .the modern novel, sensing itself on the border between two languages, one literary, the other extraliterary, each of which now knows heteroglossia, also senses itself on the border of time: it is extraordinarily sensitive to time in language, it senses time’s shifts, the aging and renewing of language, the past and the future—and all in language.” (Bakhtin et al. 1988, 67)

What is true of the novel is also true of chronotopes—as the first-person, attached narrative viewpoint of a character reading the diary of a person alive several hundred years before, suddenly makes manifest several chronotopes—not including that of the reader. Added to this is the presence within a narrative viewpoint of multiple expressions of time: "Bakhtin amplifies these early hints about multiple chronotopes and proposes the outlines of a more complex theory of narrative temporality. Here he describes the world as fundamentally multitemporal, or ‘heterochronous.’ Within any narrative, he explains in a crucial passage, several chronotopes may be at work:

Chronotopes are mutually inclusive, they co-exist, they may be interwoven with, replace or oppose one another, contradict one another or find themselves in ever more complex interrelationships. . . The general characteristic of these interactions is that they are dialogical (in the broadest sense of the word)… (this dialogue) enters the world of the author, of the performer, and the world of the listeners and readers. And all these worlds are chronotopic as well." (Burton 1996, 47)

Plainly put, within any narrative moment, multiple time references may be present, as well as multiple points of view and conceptions of time. A simple instance of this is a character in the present tense who is remembering an incident from his past—thus, the character is at one moment experiencing two distinct time events. As if this weren’t enough, per what is mentioned in the quoted section above, the presence of a character, an author, and a reader introduces one of many possible dialogues that can exist in a narrative—that is, instances of multiple voices speaking to one another. This possibility extends equally to characters within a novel, and introduces the concept of heteroglossia. With these three conceptual tools: the chronotope, heterochrony, and heteroglossia, the importance of the Betonie section of [amazon_link id=”0143104918″ target=”_blank” ]Ceremony[/amazon_link] can be more fully understood: in terms of the images present within the section, the language that is used by Betonie, and the narrative strands that are interwoven.

As Betonie’s section opens, Tayo and readers are confronted first by visual images that construct a heterochronous dialogue that blurs the temporal position of Betonie within the narrative. Betonie’s hogan is in opposition, both imagistically and dialogically, to the town of Gallup, and there is a chronotopic contrast between the two: Gallup the new town sits by a junkyard in the valley, while Betonie’s hogan sits atop the side of a mountain—spatially, the two are in a dialogue of position. This dialogue of position recurs, as Tayo later contrasts the artificial lights of the city at night, with the natural light of the stars. In addition, Betonie’s hogan and Gallup are in a dialogue of time:

"It strikes me funny," the medicine man said, shaking his head, "people wondering why I live so close to this filthy town. But see, this hogan was here first. Built long before the white people ever came. It is that town down there which is out of place. Not this old medicine man.” (Silko 1986, 118)

Deepening this dialogue is the town of Gallup’s dependence on Native Americans to bolster its economic base during the annual tourist season, known as "Ceremonial time," a time in which, in the middle of the present, the "old time" rituals of the past are enacted. The physical appearance of Betonie is also a dialogue of time: "He kept his hair tied back neatly with red yarn in a chongo knot, like the oldtimers wore." (Silko 1986, 117) And yet, "his motions were strong and unhesitating, as if they belonged to a younger man.” (Silko 1986, 117) In fact, the mix of old and new confuses Tayo at first and immediately constructs a dialogue between Tayo’s expectations of what a medicine man should be, and what he actually sees and hears: "This Betonie didn’t talk the way Tayo expected a medicine man to talk. He didn’t act like a medicine man at all.” (Silko 1986, 118) As if this weren’t enough, Betonie has the uncanny ability of reading Tayo’s thoughts, and entering a dialogue with Tayo even when he doesn’t speak. Then, when Tayo enters the old man’s hogan, the heterochrony explodes:

[Tayo] could see bundles of newspapers, their edges curled stiff and brown, barricading piles of telephone books with the years scattered among cities—St. Louis, Seattle, New York, Oakland—and he began to feel another dimension to the old man’s room. His heart beat faster, and he felt the blood draining from his legs. He knew the answer before he could shape the question. Light from the door worked paths through the thick bluish green glass of the Coke bottles; his eyes followed the light until he was dizzy and sick. He wanted to dismiss all of it as an old man’s rubbish, debris that had fallen out of the years, but the boxes and trunks, the bundles and stacks were plainly part of the pattern: they followed the concentric shadows of the room.

The old man smiled. His teeth were big and white. "Take it easy," he said, "don’t try to see everything all at once." He laughed. "We’ve been gathering these things for a long time—hundreds of years. She was doing it before I was born, and he was working before she came. And on and on back down in time." (Silko 1986, 120)

It is the presence of "modern" things in a traditional setting that allows them to be viewed differently—as almost foreign. The datedness of the things gives a history to them as well. This view of their datedness allows Tayo to see their nature, a fundamental insight: that modem things perish, too—fade away. And yet, in Betonie’s hogan, an eternity is established, a timelessness—in fact, the hogan itself is a multitemporal vehicle extending back through generations, standing in stark contrast to the all-too temporal junkyard of ephemeral things that are rusting away below. In addition, the presence of the things in the hogan, and the description by Betonie of how they have come to be there, slowly introduces other voices to the hogan, and to the conversation.

In terms of time, it is critical to understanding Tayo’s character to note that up to this point in the novel, Tayo’s sense of time and history has been extremely myopic and self-referential: he is consumed by his own past and his own personal history. In terms of voice, Tayo has precisely the same problem: the voices he hears in the first half of Ceremony are the voices of personal reference: Rocky’s, Josiah’s (Tayo’s uncle), Old Grandma’s, the extraordinarily critical voice of his aunt, and the destructive and equally confused voices of those he considers friends: Harley, Pinkie, Emo, and Leroy. And, in fact, it is precisely this intrusion of both time and voice that ails Tayo:

He had not been able to sleep for a long time—for as long as all things had become tied together like colts in single file when he and Josiah had taken them into the mountain… He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present, tangled up like colored threads from old Grandma’s wicker sewing basket… He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past—something that existed by itself, standing alone like a deer." (Silko 1986, 6-7)

Betonie, as it were, begins clearing the air, straightening the threads and rewinding them into their places. To do this, Betonie has a two-pronged approach: to give Tayo a broader sense of time and history (heterochrony), and to introduce more voices into Tayo’s conversations (heteroglossia). This notion is supported by at least two of Betonie’s comments: “’In the old days it was simple. A medicine person could get by without all these things. But nowadays…’

He let his voice trail off and nodded to let Tayo complete the thought for him." (Silko 1986, 121) And in a discussion about his first train ride, Betonie remarks: “She sent me to school. Sherman Institute, Riverside, California. That was the first train I ever rode. I had been watching them from the hills up here all my life. I told her it looked like a snake crawling along the red-rock mesas. I told her I didn’t want to go. I was already a big kid then. Bigger than the rest. But she said "It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too." (Silko 1986, 122)

The first comment is suggestive as to the reason for the junk in the hogan, and it is in the context of Tayo’s arrival that we see the effect. Spatially speaking, Tayo is at the very center of the hogan, standing in a circle of sunlight—in effect, standing literally in the present. Spiraling out, that is, away from the center, falling farther and farther into darkness and oblivion, is an ever increasing (decreasing?), concentric circle of time—"the bundles and sacks were plainly part of the pattern." (Silko 1986, 120) The imagistic effect is that of showing the falling of time away from the center of the hogan, the present. Also important is the recognition by Tayo of the Santa Fe Railroad calendars, and his admission of this fact. “’That gives me some place to start,’ old Betonie said… ‘All these things have stories alive in them.’" (Silko 1986, 121) In essence, Tayo has been placed in time, or in a context of time, and this, psychologically or strategically speaking, gives Betonie a place to begin his work. The second remark by Betonie reaffirms the importance of language, and of a dialogue of voices. It isn’t enough, as Betonie’s old grandmother pointed out, that he know the ceremonies and stories, he needed to know how to convey them: he needed to know all the languages of those who might need his help.

As a chronotopic healer—a heterochronous healer—and a healer speaking in multiple voices and languages, Betonie is given a sizable task. With Tayo, especially, he has to either bury the voices in Tayo’s head, or put them in a context that de-emphasizes their importance—to connect Tayo to a larger system of reference. Using heteroglossia, Betonie has to add more voices to Tayo’s dialogue—to remove the monologic nature of the voice of modern science (which Tayo learned in white schools), and counter the negative voices (of Tayo’s aunt and Tayo’s friends). This is precisely Betonie’s role: he serves as an eternal chronotope, a chronotope that transcends both time and space. For readers familiar with the movie Star Wars, Betonie is, in a way, comparable to Obi Wan Kenobi. That is, Kenobi represents to Luke Skywalker (another displaced and wandering young hero) an historic connection (he knew Luke’s father), a connection with the present (in the here and now of the tale), and later, after he dies, Kenobi transcends both time and physical space to advise Luke. In a similar way, Betonie retains a strongly dialogic purpose within the narrative—both in this section with his physical presence, and later, when he is for Tayo just a remembered voice that advises him. Betonie thus becomes a voice for multiple time periods and, shadow-like, occupies multiple spatial zones. For as "the chronotope is the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied,” (Burton 1996, 45) so Betonie must act chronotopically to untie Tayo’s personal knots and retie them to something much larger. For Betonie, the primary vehicle for this effect is language, but it is not the only vehicle, a fact that is demonstrated on at least one occasion:

[Betonie] ran his fingers through his mustache again, still smiling as though he were thinking of other stories to tell. But a single hair came loose from his thick gray mustache, and his attention shifted suddenly to the hair between his fingers. He got up and went to the back of the hogan. Tayo heard the jingle of keys and the tin sound of a footlocker opening; the lock snapped shut and the old man came back and sat down; the hair was gone.

"I don’t take any chances," he said as he got settled on the goatskins again. Tayo could hear his own pulse sound in his ears. He wasn’t sure what the old man was talking about, but he had an idea. "Didn’t anyone ever teach you about these things?”

Tayo shook his head, but he knew the medicine man could see he was lying. He knew what they did with strands of hair they found; he knew what they did with bits of fingernail and toenail they found.” (Silko 1986, 122)

In stark contrast to scientific thought, here we see the workings of magic, or as Sir James Frazer would say in his imperialistic nineteenth-century voice, the “spurious system of natural law… a fallacious guide of conduct…a false science…an abortive art." (Frazer 1993, 11) To be more specific, Betonie is defending himself against what Frazer terms "contagious magic:” the form of magic that allows one person to act on another person by merit of an object that was at one time in contact with that person—that whatever the practitioner "does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed a part of his body or not." (Frazer 1993, 11) This system of belief forms a sharp dialogic contrast with the system of belief of modern science, and shows a more traditional understanding of how the world operates. That Tayo is familiar with this system is shown by his nervous denial of it, and the increase in his heart rate as the realization of what the old man is doing breaks upon his mind. Processes precisely like this do not rely on language as a vehicle, but are systems of belief latent in Tayo’s mind, and a personal history to which Betonie sees he can refer—and on which he can rely to reconstruct Tayo’s self-image, or construct a new image altogether.

This magical system of thought is not unknown to Tayo, as much as he may like to deny it, and it is while Tayo is opening up to Betonie, demonstrating the psychological consequences of the war and his life prior to it, that we first see the indications that Tayo is more like the old shaman than he may suspect:

My uncle Josiah was there that day. Yet I know he couldn’t have been there. He was thousands of miles away, at home in Laguna. We were in the Philippine jungles. I understand that. I know he couldn’t have been there. (Silko 1986, 124)

Here we see Tayo discussing a war moment in which he was convinced he saw his uncle’s face on the bodies of Japanese soldiers he had been ordered to execute. As readers, though, and as Betonie, we can see two dialogues: that of science ("he couldn’t have been there"), that is, the idea of omnipresence being scientifically ridiculous; and that of magic, that is, the fundamental insight that all things in the world are connected, and that one thing certainly can affect another at great distances. To Tayo as white man, the possibility of Josiah being in the Philippines is impossible; to Tayo as Laguna Pueblo, Josiah was there. For Betonie, the confusion is easily dispelled; he is thoroughly familiar with the logic of magic. Further, on a more philosophical note, to Betonie, there is no difference between Laguna Pueblo and Japanese. This is a trick of thinking; a trick of the "destroyers," who are seeking the end of mankind. Tayo was right in seeing what he saw—it was a fundamental insight into the nature of the universe, that all people are to be valued, all life. Enemies and allies are tricks of thought.

An additional dialogue that takes place outside the realm of language, though relying on language as its vehicle, is the dialogue of values: that is, determining what is important. For

Tayo, this is certainly a conversation between his white, materialistic expectations—generated by both his identification with his own mixed blood, and the taste of material possessions he experienced as a soldier (the attraction of women, new clothing, and abundant food); and his Native American expectations—an identity attached to landscape, and strong sense of autonomous unity with the earth, governed by natural patterns of time—latent, again, in Tayo’s mind and remembered only vaguely in the stories of old Grandma and Josiah. For Tayo, in the

Betonie section, this dialogue of self and value becomes more prominent, and the words of Betonie harmonize with a more traditional expectation of what is important: "He wanted to believe old Betonie. He wanted to keep the feeling of his words alive inside himself so that he could believe that he might get well.” (Silko 1986, 126) For Tayo, this harmony is one with the living earth, revealed most in Tayo’s strong desire to recapture Josiah’s scattered herd of cattle, and take up Josiah’s dream. Yet, as soon as the old shaman leaves, Tayo looks around Betonie’s hogan and sees how shoddy the place is, the rags and boxes of sticks and how run down and meager the hogan is. We see the chronotope of "white" Tayo entering the narrative again; we see Tayo viewing Betonie through the eyes of the destroyers, through the eyes of the materialist:

"All Betonie owned in the world was in this room. What kind of healing power was in this?" And yet, soon after, Betonie answers Tayo, not directly, but in looking at Mount Taylor he remarks, "They only fool themselves when they think it is theirs. The deeds and papers don’t mean anything. It is the people who belong to the mountain." (Silko 1986, 128)

And so the dialogue of value continues—the slow, steady reversal of Tayo’s misunderstanding of the world: the heteroglossia, the many voices, working to undo the damage that has been done.Beyond the non-language vehicles that Betonie uses to open a dialogue with Tayo (the assumption of Tayo’s knowledge of magic and tradition, as well as the assumptions of what it is he values), the language vehicles, or language images, that Betonie draws upon are twofold: stories and ceremonies. While there is an ongoing story in Ceremony to this point in the book (a story largely concerned with the rejuvenation of the land—rejuvenation brought about by Hummingbird and Fly), in this section we will see Betonie introduce far more.

In the article, "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse," taken from the book of essays entitled [amazon_link id=”B001HSYZKK” target=”_blank” ]The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays[/amazon_link], M. M. Bakhtin discusses, among other things, novelistic images. To Bakhtin, a novelistic image is "the image of another’s language.” (Bakhtin et al. 1988, 44) This image is important for two reasons: it is distinct from the voice of the author, as it does not represent the author’s direct speech, but an instance of someone else’s speech; and it is a vehicle for creating a dialogue between various narrative strands within a novel: that is, it is a distinct voice that can speak independently of the author, or even a character, and advance or reverse any rhetorical elements that may be at play within the scene, or novel. It is with this concept in mind that one can consider the verse sections within Ceremony, and draw complex conclusions regarding the nature of the stories in Betonie’s section, and Betonie’s voice as well.

In the Betonie section of Ceremony there are several narrative strands that step outside the chronotope of Tayo, which is to say, outside Tayo’s temporal and spatial sphere. In some instances, the reader can attribute the verse sections, which appear to be stories, as belonging to Betonie. That is, the verse sections are stories told, perhaps, by Betonie to Tayo, and are presented in verse to emphasize a voice that it is distinct from the narrator’s voice and governed, syntactically, by someone else. However, there is at least one other section, the "Note on Bear People and Witches," that takes on an authoritative and encyclopedic voice that may be outside even the voice of Betonie.

Presuming that these verse sections are presented by Betonie, the concepts mentioned at the outset of this essay come in to play: namely, the concepts of the chronotope, heterochrony, and heteroglossia. These concepts are important by merit of Bakhtin’s dialogic principle, that is, “the language of the novel is a system of languages that mutually and ideologically interanimate each other." (Bakhtin et al. 1988, 47) That is, the languages refer to and contrast one another and present us with not Betonie’s language, but Betonie’s rendition of traditional language—an image of traditional language. Another way of looking at it is that stories are vehicles of knowledge passed down through time—and not necessarily the language of only one individual. As such, Betonie’s chronotope alters from a voice in the "here and now" to one that transcends time, and becomes representative of all the years through which the story has passed prior to his re-telling it. Betonie becomes heterochronous in that he begins speaking for multiple times. Additionally, Betonie becomes a vehicle for the story he tells; becomes a purveyor of heteroglossia, as he suddenly allows the voices of all times to pass through him and into the present. These "images" of another’s voice are presented often throughout Betonie’s section, and have the effect of altering Tayo’s view of himself and his perception of the world, for:

As Bakhtin notes…human life is a process of orientation in “a world of others’ words,” a course of transforming “the other’s word” into “one’s own…” In terms of language, this process conventionally is described as “finding one’s voice”; in terms of one’s understanding of the world, shaped through language, experience, and concepts about time, it may be read as developing one’s chronotope.

The human world exists as an ongoing dialogue in which multiple languages and chronotopes engage and reshape each other perpetually. It is characterized not only by heteroglossia, but equally by multitemporality or heterochrony. In Morson’s words, “there are always multiple senses of time that can be applied to the same situation; thinking and experience therefore often involve a dialogue of chronotopes.” (Burton 1996, 48)

In the face of these stories, Tayo cannot help but begin a dialogue with what he hears, even if it is only to come to some understanding of the stories that the old medicine man tells. But for Tayo, knowing that the stories Betonie relates somehow apply to him, to his own condition, both Tayo and the reader cannot help but internalize the stories and try to apply them.

For Tayo, and perhaps the others that Betonie has helped, the stories and the ceremony serve different but important purposes—each form speaks to a different need. The story works as a novelistic image and carries the meaning of the culture—when Betonie speaks a story, he speaks with an historical voice: the voice of the people who have come before him. The story is a social vehicle and, in essence, suggests that what is happening to Tayo has happened to other people as well. Further, it is in a social landscape that the story operates and in the same landscape that the result will be achieved: in Betonie’s story of both the bear and coyote the child hero and young man hero each are helped by the social group, and always brought back to the social group—but aided by a ceremony. The ceremony, on the other hand, works at the individual level. The specific ceremony that Betonie performs on Tayo moves Tayo through the five directions, the North, East, South, and West, and then, into the center, into himself—into the dark, whirling blackness of his own interior, his own mind and his own soul. The ceremony, in this regard, cannot work on a social level; instead, it relies on the individual to find meaning. To aid in this process, for Tayo, homage is paid to the four cardinal points, the four directions, and can be clearly seen as a spatial attempt to reconnect Tayo to the larger world—to, in effect, reset his psychological reference: to put him in alignment with the world, and in perspective against it. Then the ceremony drives Tayo into the center, the interior. "What will cure you?" the ceremony asks. The individual has to find that answer—find that answer inside his or her own self: as what will cure or heal one person will not likely cure another. And, as we see with Betonie, perhaps what is best is not so much a good ceremony, as a sound dialogue between the person performing it, and the person receiving it.

As a vehicle from the past, that is, the story as a vehicle of knowledge or wisdom that is passed down from generation to generation, Betonie becomes a carrier of an eternal chronotope—a vehicle of heterochrony—of past, present, and the future. Betonie carries time on his shoulders and distributes it to all who come to him. The ceremony, on the other hand, stands ironically in contrast to the passage of time, and becomes the voice of the eternal moment. That is, the ceremony defies time and seeks to transcend the time forms of the world and show that a uniformity of existence lies behind the whole of the world—and that world is within, too. That Tayo comes to understand this is demonstrated later by such realizations on Tayo’s part as, "This night is a single night; and there has never been any other." (Silko 1986, 192) As a vehicle of other voices, the story and the ceremony become the carrier of other’s words, or other’s voices which speak to Tayo and enlarge the catalog of voices already inside his head—that is, there are voices beyond those of Rocky, and his Auntie, and his alcoholic friends. "Human beings are shaped in and through the words they use: consciousness and ideology develop in ‘the process of selectively assimilating the words of others."’ (Burton 1996, 48) Ironically, Betonie’s personal role—his chronotopically distinct voice that emerges from within the chronotopically eternal voice of the story and ceremony—serves at once to undermine the continuum of the story and the eternity of the ceremony, and to expand their efficacy; that is, Betonie alters the language of the stories and ceremonies, not to undermine or modify their meaning, message, or importance, but rather to make a more natural connection to the hearer or participant in the ceremony. Betonie endeavors to speak a language that the hearer or participant will understand—in Tayo’s case, to use a language that both meets Tayo’s expectations of traditional practice, and also connects with Tayo on a personal level: a language that is at once formal and ceremonial, and also understandable and common. As if this tightrope weren’t enough, Betonie must use the language to convey stories to Tayo that speak specifically to the psychological and social dilemma in which Tayo has become entangled. This practice can be seen in most of the stories within Betonie’s section, but especially in the key story of the section, and possibly the book: the story of the witches’ contest. In this story, there are numerous instances of Betonie’s speech defying traditional language patterns and introducing words and phrases of a more contemporary style. And it is complex language images such as this that Betonie will use to heal Tayo. In this regard, Betonie succeeds where previous medicine men, like Ku’oosh, have failed—precisely because of Betonie’s understanding of the importance of heteroglossia and heterochrony. Ku’oosh’s rendition of the scalp ceremony altered nothing with regard to the language and, chronologically, the ceremony was static—and consequently failed to connect with Tayo—or any of the other young men for that matter, and failed to fulfill its function as a vehicle for healing and individual insight. As Betonie has implicated the witches in Tayo’s trouble, it is important here to note that the witches, the destroyers, do not want Tayo, or anyone, to have the heteroglossia that Betonie is offering. That is, the destroyers do not want the people to hear multiple voices—they do not want changes in ceremonies or stories, they do not want life—which by necessity alter the static present. The witches fight change in the people; they fight the life-altering effects of time. Like human interaction, ceremonies must change: they must form a dialogue with the people who rely on them, a dialogue of meaning and purpose. Ceremonies must create in their recipients a fundamental understanding about the nature of the universe and an understanding of what it is to be alive; otherwise, the ceremonies are not effective, and people look on the world with dead eyes.

Beyond the stories and ceremony, Betonie is not above speaking in very logical and practical terms. This is certainly the case with regard to Shush, the boy who helps him. Tayo notes, "There was something strange about the boy, something remote in his eyes," (Silko 1986, 130) and we sense Tayo’s uneasiness in the boy’s presence. But Betonie remarks,

"You don’t have to be afraid of him. Some people act like witchery is responsible for everything that happens, when actually witchery only manipulates a small portion." He pointed in the direction the boy had gone. "Accidents happen, and there’s little we can do. But don’t be so quick to call something good or bad. There are balances and harmonies always shifting, always necessary to maintain.” (Silko 1986, 130)

Betonie tells Tayo that not everything has an explanation—the incidents of the world are not always explicable—for good or bad; and this Zen bit of common sense, or matter-of-fact wisdom, lends credibility to Betonie’s voice: it shows him to be a man of the world, a man of perception.

For Tayo, Betonie’s two principal modes of healing are enormously beneficial: namely, the expansion of time (heterochrony), by presenting multiple time-voices to Tayo; and the expansion of voice (heteroglossia), by presenting multiple narrative viewpoints. The expansion of time allows Tayo to free himself from the confines of his own personal history and see a larger pattern into which he fits, a pattern that affects all of his people through all time, and eventually, all people in the world, including the whites and the evil witches or "destroyers" that Silko introduces. By seeing how his life and problems fit into this pattern, Tayo is freed from the burden of ambiguity and malaise, and can address himself to actions that force a solution—such as finding Josiah’s cattle. The expansion of voice allows Tayo to consider the words of other people, people who have experienced what Tayo has experienced and found a solution. These voices expand his understanding, and form a contrasting dialogue to the personal references that are too personal, negative, and destructive.

References

Bakhtin, M.M. “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse.” In [amazon_link id=”B001HSYZKK” target=”_blank” ]The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays[/amazon_link]. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988.

Burton, Stacy. “Bakhtin, temporality, and modern narrative: Writing ‘the whole triumphant murderous unstoppable chute’.” Comparative Literature 48, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 39-64.

Frazer, James George, Sir. [amazon_link id=”0192835416″ target=”_blank” ]The Golden Bough[/amazon_link] Wordsworth Reference. Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1993.

Silko, Leslie. [amazon_link id=”0143104918″ target=”_blank” ]Ceremony[/amazon_link]. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 1986.

I tried approaching the question of “what is theatre” from several different points of view: what is theatre, why is theatre important, etc., all to no effect: the articles seemed boring or redundant, definitely uninteresting: academic. This changed for me when I found Eugene Ionesco’s article “Discovering the Theatre” in a 1959 issue of The Tulane Drama Review. The article shocked me. At first, it shocked me because I was appalled by what Ionesco was saying about theatre. Then, I was shocked because I was agreeing with him. Finally, I found myself mentally applying the points he was discussing against the play I wrote most recently and identifying what was right and what was wrong with it—and I knew that what Ionesco was saying was correct. Being thus overwhelmed by the article, I have decided to use it as a spring-board for my discussion of theatre: not so much to make any vain attempt at providing any objective truth about what theatre is, nor to even create a framework by which works may be tagged as theatrical or not; but instead to come to some definition of what theatre is to me: that I may work out of strength regarding my suppositions at this point in time.

To begin the discussion, I’ll highlight one of the comments that Ionesco makes late in his essay which, although it may seem confounding, is precise and elucidating:

The theatre can only be theatre, even though for certain contemporary doctors of “theatrology” this identity with itself is charged with tautology, or considered false, an attitude which strikes me as the most incredible and amazing of paradoxes. / For these doctors, the theatre, being something other than theatre, is ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essays or literature. This is as aberrant as if one were to claim that music should be archeology, or painting, physics and mathematics. (Ionesco and Pronko 16)

The point is so critical that I will no doubt make a fool of myself here articulating it clearly, redundantly, to myself: theatre is theatre. Well, what does that mean, precisely? It certainly begs a question. It begs a question that I want to avoid like the plague; a question that you, my good reader, should want me to avoid like the plague as well. But, as it is pushing up from underneath, swelling my tongue to be spoken, pressing my patience at every turn, I will ask it: If theatre is theatre, what then is theatre?

In his essay defending poetry, Shelley begins with a discussion of reason and imagination and the actions of mental processes on the individual and society. I will not presume to be so lofty. I will instead attempt to identify, of my own accord, those elements that make theatre unique. That is, what is it about theatre that makes it theatre? What makes theatre different from poetry, or different from screenplays, or what is unique when it is compared against the novel? To do this, I’ll begin with questions: Is theatre simply a physical space in which an action takes place? Is theatre the notion of seeing an action or event enacted? Or is theatre a glib sneer for practices that are intentionally dramatic and unnecessarily emotional—red herrings drawing attention from something more important? This question ‘what is theatre’ is likely has old as theatre itself and, despite my attempts, it not likely to be any nearer an answer than theatre is near its end. Perhaps theatre can be defined using the words of Potter Stewart, the Associate Justice of the United States, who, in articulating a definition of pornography said, simply, “I know it when I see it.” But if that’s the case, then it begs the willful suspension of disbelief: a phrase that not only irritates some but is a statement whose precise spirit led Eugene Ionesco to write his essay in the first place: namely, that theatre had become dishonest and embarrassingly false. (Ionesco and Pronko 3-18) The complicated fact is that theatre is all of those things mentioned above: a space, an action, and, unfortunately, a diversion. Theatre is many different things to many different people: to children, it is Bread and Puppet Theater or guignol; to subscribers at the Cleveland Play House, it is On Golden Pond; and for more sophisticated palates, it is the productions of experimental theatres such as convergence-continuum or the more extreme performance art of Karen Finley. In the introduction to his book Playwriting in Process: Thinking and Working Theatrically, Michael Wright, talks about plays in a way that can be generalized to theatre, saying:

…there is no longer any meaningful single definition of a play that applies across the spectrum of what is being created around the world, beyond saying that a play is a (largely) live event that takes place in a space that all involved have agreed is a “stage.” And in the end Wright concludes that “there is little reason to believe that theatre will retreat to the well-made play or to some rigid Aristotelian framework. Theatre is far more likely to continue its expansion of form, subject matter, language, use of space, and so on…theatre continues to evolve in an open and free manner. (Wright xiv)

If this is so, then how can one define it? Worse still, how can one judge what is good theatre and what is not good? Is good theatre a full evening of theatre? Is it an hour? Ten minutes? Is it theatre that makes you laugh and feel good—or should it make your heart break? Or should it come right out and punch you in face and scream “hey, buddy, wake up and take a look around you?”

Let’s go back to Michael Wright, who has several ideas regarding what is important about theatre: first, it is a witnessed present, that is, the event that happens in real time; second, it is immediate: there is no filter or interpreter. To Wright, theatre is a ‘witnessed present’ that is “the problems of the characters are being worked out in front of us, right here and now,” and this, whether the play was written “today or in 504 B.C.” (Wright 6-7) And further, Wright notes, that “since the play needs this ‘us’ in order to exist, it’s our present at the same instant, because the problems of the characters reflect on our own lives.” More precisely, “the play is a present event—a play needs real time in which to occur and is put on by real people in front of other real people. Humans are watching humans…when we watch a play, the people performing in the play are right there, we are aware of them and they of us. And this means that thinking theatrically is also rooted in this awareness of the existence of the other.” (Wright 7) The theatre provides a sense of immediacy unlike other forms, “there is no filter between you and what’s acting upon your sensory receptors: we listen, watch, and feel the human struggles on the stage directly.” (Wright 8 ) Wright gives the example that, “we know without hearing a word that the couple over there is arguing, or the man sitting to our left is really nervous. We read these things in the behavior of people, but we also feel these things because we are in the same environment.” (Wright 7)

Aristotle in his Poetics states that theatre’s object is imitation, “Since those who imitate imitate men in action, and these must necessarily be either worthwhile or worthless people.” (Aristotle and Else 17) He then goes on to describe the elements that create good imitations and what they may be categorized as (comedy, tragedy, epic) and of what attributes they must consist. It is of note that the categorizations and attributes that Aristotle outlined where rebranded later as principles and eventually became a form of dogma in Europe that controlled what was and, more importantly, what was not produced for centuries.

Augusto Boal in his book Theatre of the Oppressed suggests that Aristotle’s Poetics presents a coercive structure who’s plain intent was to glorify the powerful and to dissuade those who would challenge them: seeking to elevate one moral sense (that of the patron) above another (that of the viewer) and disenfranchise the “worthless people” mentioned above. (Boal 3 ) Boal defiantly states that theatre is a means to political action and a means of creating political action and a political consciousness. For his trouble he was run out of Brazil.

William Henderson in his article “Why Theatre?” raises possibilities that are both similar to those raised by Michael Wright and yet different, identifying elements important to both those participating in the creation and those viewing it. Henderson is unique in including in his consideration of theatre the aesthetic elements attendant to all aspects of theatre: both inside and out, both actor and audience member. Specifically, Henderson points to the adrenalin of performance and the never-to-be-repeated moments of sheer astonishment; the sensual “pleasure of entering unfamiliar and strange ramshackle buildings, or coming upon an entirely new spatial configuration…the simultaneous danger and allure of performers’ bodies in the space around us”; in true Bakhtinian form, “the multiplicity of dialogues that exist—between performers and audience; between the various technological media at work; amongst the performers themselves; and between them and the technological forces employed—create the possibility of an intellectual engagement at a level which purely electronic media can only gesture at.” Henderson comments that “Theatre is also and always, the circus…is a high-wire event through time with the constant risk of falling off and never being able to recover…”; and that “the frailty of the performance…the very real vulnerability of the performer, the artist; and here, possibly, the real truth…the question not of our power to woo and entertain and audience but of our weakness…the sheer vulnerability of the human being in front of us surely confronts us with our own…the real sense that in our vulnerability and weakness we are fully human and thus fully connected with those around us…” (Henderson 11/08/2007)

In his article, “Why Theatre: Questions and Answers”, Craig Stewart Walker quotes Rick Salutin, a Canadian novelist and playwright, who bluntly states, “anything that brings people together in a communalizing way is valuable.” (Walker 55)

So, to sum things up (to this point), theatre is a physical space (that may or may not be dangerous to get to or strangely configured) in which actors (who may be dangerous or alluring or both at the same time) intentionally imitate (or enact) dramatic and emotional actions (that may or may not be politically coercive) which take place before us in real time (and thus will never be precisely repeated again) allowing no filter or intermediary interpreter (so we have to figure things out ourselves) which exposes the vulnerability and weakness of all present and may demonstrate the truth of our human condition (as weak and vulnerable) in a communal environment such that a dialogue is created, connecting all of us.
Ionesco would be quick to point out, I think, that what is missing (and it should be missing) from the summation I provided above is that which is contained in the latter part of the opening quote I took from him, namely that misapprehension that theater “is ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essays or literature. “ That is, nowhere in the summation I provided is there any mention of the content of the theatre (okay, there’s one mention)—nor is there any attempt to explain theatre in terms of something else: something that it is not. It is precisely Ionesco’s point that theatre should not be ideology, allegory, politics, lectures, essay or literature, for these forms already exist and do perfectly well on their own. So, theatre should be theatre.

But the confluence of many of these elements into theatre had a damaging (and still does have a damaging) effect on the experience of theatre, leading Ionesco to write that:

I derived no pleasure from [theatre]…The playing of the actors disturbed me: I was embarrassed for them…there was something false in it all…it seemed to me that the actor was doing something inadmissible, censurable. He was renouncing himself, abandoning himself, changing skin…It seemed painful to me, and somehow dishonest…To go to the theatre meant for me to go and see apparently serious people make a spectacle of themselves. (Ionesco and Pronko 3)

Ionesco points out that novels did not have this effect on him, nor did music, nor films, and, in fact, the actors in films did not disturb him at all—whereas the playing of actors in a theatre did:

Why could I not accept theatrical reality? Why did its truth appear false to me? And why did the false seem to want to parade as true, substitute for truth?…[The actor’s] material presence destroyed the fiction. It was as though there were present two levels of reality, the concrete reality, impoverished, empty, limited, of these banal living men, moving and speaking upon the stage, and the reality of the imagination. And these two realities faced each other, unmasked, irreconcilable: two antagonistic universes which could not succeed in unifying and blending. (Ionesco and Pronko 4)

That is, some might argue, it was a failure of the willful suspension of disbelief. Ionesco concludes, however, that “it was with a sort of desacralized awareness that I attended the theatre, and that is why I did not like it, feel it, or believe in it.” (Ionesco and Pronko 4)

Novel, music, painting, these are pure fiction, containing no heterogeneous elements; that is why they stand alone, and are admissible. The cinema itself can stand alone, since it is a series of images; it also is pure, whereas the theatre seemed to me essentially impure: fiction was mingled with elements foreign to it; it was imperfectly fiction, a raw material which had not undergone an indispensable transformation, a mutation…I saw no way out, no way to reconcile freshness, spontaneity, naïveté, that is to say, creative authenticity, with theatrical thought, with preconceived ideas, dogmatic and stifling. (Ionesco and Pronko 5)

So, apparently what ruined theatre for Ionesco was not only his inability to suspend his disbelief and overlook the two realities present in front of him, but it was the impurity of theatre in this same regard: that it had fictional events enacted by real people, and that it also mixed its media: that is, theatre could contain elements not, perhaps, native to it: music, painting, etc. It is also possible that Ionesco felt that he should not need to suspend anything in order to believe, but I am jumping ahead of myself.

Ionesco doesn’t stop at performance, though, taking on directly the texts of plays. He states that he found some worthwhile: Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare—and some by Kleist and Buchner. But these texts, he found, were exciting to him for their literary merits and not necessarily their theatrical merits. His problem with most texts is that they are not theatrical:

Strindberg seemed insufficient and clumsy. Moliere himself bored me…What do these stories of people matter to me, or these characters and customs seen in such a narrow perspective? Shakespeare questions the totality of the condition and destiny of man. The problems of Moliere seemed to me…relatively secondary, sometimes sad…but never tragic: for they can all be resolved. There is no solution to the intolerable, and only that which is intolerable is truly theatrical. (Ionesco and Pronko 6)

Theatricality is a tricky one. What is theatrical? On my blog, (Hayes 11/16/2007) I write that:

To me, writing theatricality means grasping space as you write. It means apprehending not only the characters and events that you mean to portray, but the physical environment in which they exist; how that physical environment affects your characters and events—and then using this apprehension creatively to your advantage—or more specifically, passing the three-dimensional world of the play that you are creating on to the audience and thereby making that world actively interesting, engaging, and unique to the meaning and content of your play.

But theatricality is more than just a comprehension of space and how it can be used. Going back to Michael Wright, theatricality is also dialog and it is behavior—and very often, it is the way these two elements play against one another. For example, take one of your encounters with people in the morning at work.

Take 1:
You: “Hi, Bob, how are you today?”
Bob: (Smiles) “I’m fine.”

Take 2:
You: “Hi, Bob, how are you today?”
Bob: (Scowls) “I’m fine.”

Subtext is in behavior. With regards to behavior, is your character flighty? Is she clumsy? Is she hysterical? How do any of these behaviors play out in a scene? What do they reveal about the character—without that character ever saying a word? That is, theatre is about providing your audience with something to see and figure out—making them discern what a character is about based on what that character does and letting them judge if what the character says jibes with what the character does. (Wright 8 )

For Ionesco, though, theatricality drives a bit deeper still:

The spectacle of the guignol held me there, stupefied by the sight of these puppets who spoke, who moved, and bludgeoned each other. It was the spectacle of life itself which, strange, improbable, but truer than truth itself, was being presented to me in an infinitely simplified and caricatured form, as though to underline the grotesque and brutal truth. (Ionesco and Pronko 6)

And this is a point that becomes increasingly important to Ionesco and one with which I whole-heartedly agree: art must aspire to the universal. It must find the archetypes, the forms that stand beyond all forms, and therefore reach all humans. Going back to Ionesco’s consideration of Moliere above on page seven, Ionesco writes, “What do these stories of people matter to me, or these characters and customs seen in such a narrow perspective?” Or, to reverse the perspective here and to look at it from the point of view of Robert McKee, author of numerous ‘how to’ works on writing screenplays:

The archetypal story unearths a universally human experience, then wraps itself inside a unique, culture-specific expression. A stereotypical story reverses this pattern: It suffers a poverty of both content and form. It confines itself to a narrow, culture-specific experience and dresses in stale, nonspecific generalities. (McKee 4)

Ionesco’s essay, so critical of the theatre to this point, begins to slowly articulate a theatre that he can bear, one that drives at what is universal and holds human (and hence, artistic) truth. “It is true that all authors have wanted to propagandize. The great ones are those who failed, who, consciously or not, arrived at more profound and general truths.” (Ionesco and Pronko 8 ) He goes on,

If one counted the dramatists which can still move the public, one would find through the centuries about twenty, or thirty at the most. But the pictures, the poems and the novels which still speak to us can be counted by the thousands. The naïveté necessary for a work of art is lacking in the theatre…I mean a lucid naïveté, springing from the profound sources of being, revealing them, revealing to ourselves, restoring to us our naïveté, our secret being. (Ionesco and Pronko 9)

And at this point, Ionesco lashes out a many forms of theatre, especially those that are political in nature or the “vehicle of ideologies.” Such theatre, Ionesco contends, diminishes the art, finally ridiculing those who believe that the “play should be a sort of presentation of a thesis, whose solution appears upon the stage.” Such theater, Ionesco contends, is stuck forever between being true art, in the sense outlined briefly above, and rhetoric: again, a (to him) dreadful mixing of forms, a falling away from purity.

I’ll step away from this line of thought for a moment to expand the discussion, namely, I’ve considered through various voices (as well as my own) what theatre is, or can be considered, but I have not properly addressed why it is important—and so many of the sources I’ve quoted thus far have had as their title ‘why theatre’—some asking a question and some not.

In his book Millennial Stages, Robert Brustein writes, in his essay entitled “Does Theatre Matter?”:

Who needs theatre. Does theatre matter. In the past such questions would have seemed absurd. Theatre mattered a lot to the citizens of Periclean Athens who went to see plays the way Christians go to churches and Muslims go to mosques, for spiritual sustenance through sustaining myths. It mattered a lot in medieval Europe whose church services included a theatrical Quem Quaeritis, trope that evolved into adaptations of the Old Testament and the synoptic gospels called Miracle and Morality plays, and then evolved in to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. It mattered enormously to Londoners of all classes in Elizabethan England, who followed the fortunes of Falstaff from play to play the way people today follow the fortunes of Tony Soprano from episode to episode. It mattered enough to the Puritans and Anabaptists that in 1642 they shut down the playhouses the moment they had cut off the head of the English king. It mattered in Golden Age Spain, and in France during the reign of Louis XIV, when people of all classes would no more think of missing a new play by Lope or Molière than skipping their evening meal. (Brustein 12)

There is much in this paragraph that Brustein points to that is important with regards to theatre: that it had its origin in religion and certainly in religious sentiment; that it was one of the first widely followed and communal forms of entertainment and education; and that it was politically dangerous.

There is not enough time to go into the lengthy history of the theatre here, but all evidence points to its origin, somewhere back in the vast deep dark, in the religious practices of a community. Religious ceremonies from so-called primitive tribes or cultures that are extant today have revealed that the ceremonies are enactments of the mythological age—the mythological (i.e. religious to them) landscape of their people. That is, a ceremony is an eternal moment in which the gods and forces and mysteries of the world are demonstrated to the people of a community in real time, in real presence. In his essay, “The Shadows of the Gods,” Arthur Miller draws similar comparisons. In this essay he comments that he was ’shaped’ as a person by the Great Depression and that the time period gave him “a sense of an invisible world” that:

The hidden laws of fate lurked not only in the characters of people, but equally if not more imperiously in the world beyond the family parlor. Out there were the big gods, the ones whose disfavor could turn a proud and prosperous and dignified man into a frightened shell of a man whatever he thought of himself, and whatever he decided or didn’t decide to do…There was an invisible world of cause and effect, mysterious, full of surprises, implacable in its course. (Miller 36-7)

Theatre brings people together. As with the ceremonies mentioned above, and as pointed out by Michael Wright earlier and even Aristotle, people gather together in the dark to witness an event or to see an imitation of an original action. Brunstein remarks that theatre provides “as sense of community, and…a penetrating spiritual experience.” (Brustein 13) And as with a religious ceremony, where drums and chants and other effects work to create a shared environment in which all present are experiencing the same sensations, so does theatre take advantage of this effect. Michael Wright chose the following example to explain it:

When I lived in New York, I rode the subways nearly every day. A crowd of strangers, totally oblivious to one another, would become an electrified and connected group instantly if somebody abnormal or scary got on the train. Without any effort to communicate, we would all know to watch out and be careful: this person is sending out hostile or crazy energy. If that person subsequently left the car, you would immediately feel the flood of relief all around you, and sometimes there would even be eye contact between passengers (usually verboten on subways), accompanied by smiles or those ironic headshakes that make life in New York bearable. (Wright 7)

The use of theatre for Miracle and Morality plays shows that the theatre is often used as an instrument of education and instruction: the Everyman plays demonstrating how to avoid the seven deadly sins and find paradise. And finally, Brustein’s quote demonstrates the power that theatre has to activate and unite people. Theatre is not only a place where ideas are expressed, but acted out: that is, as Aristotle notes, the actions of man are imitated. And further, as Augusto Boal showed, theatre can be used to demonstrate clearly how one can change one’s environment and life through action. It is no accident that Roundheads shut down the theatres; that Louis the XVI banned Beaumarchais’ The Marriage of Figaro; or that Boal was run out of Brazil. But Brunstein’s quote also points to an opposite power: to divide and confront people:

…in the 19th century, serious theatre began to develop an adversary role in regard to its audience—something I discussed in a book called The Theatre of Revolt. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Pirandello, Brecht—none of these could any longer be called “popular” playwrights devoted to providing the audience with consoling myths. They were often messianic, provocative, bleak…The title of one of Peter Handke’s plays, Offending the Audience, pretty much summed up the tensions that had grown between the stage and the auditorium. 12 (Brustein 12)

But for the most part theatre still brings people together. Brustein states that theatre is among a very few kinds of activities—churchgoing, concerts, sports events—that still bring Americans into contact with one another, one of the last shreds of evidence that we are a people and not just an isolated mass of fantasists, barricaded in our homes, seeking safety from a sinister and threatening world through canned and recorded images, whether on tape, disc, or celluloid. (Brustein 13)

True to form, Ionesco has something to say regarding the place of theatre:

Theatre is one of the most ancient arts. I think that we cannot do without it. We cannot help giving in to the desire to place upon the stage living characters which are at once both real and invented. We cannot resist this need to make them speak and live before us. To incarnate phantoms, to give life is a prodigious and irreplaceable adventure, so much so that I was fascinated when, at the rehearsals of my first play, I saw suddenly moving about the stage of the Noctambules characters which had come out of me. I was frightened. By what right had I done that? Was it permitted? …It was almost diabolical…It was only when I wrote for the theatre entirely by chance and with the intention of ridiculing it, that I began to love it, to rediscover it in myself, to understand it and to be fascinated by it; and I understood what my role would be.(Ionesco and Pronko 10)

And yet, it was precisely through this process that Ionesco came to his vision of what theatre should be; that it should not be a theatre that used the “language of philosophical treatises;” and that when theatre used “too many subtleties and nuances, it was at once both too much and not enough;” and that while the “deplorable enlarging of nuances” disturbed him, in the end “it was simply that the magnification was insufficient. The too great was not great enough, the too slightly nuanced, was too nuanced.” (Ionesco and Pronko 3-18) All of which led Ionesco to what would become his mode of operation in the theatre:

If then the essence of the theatre was in this enlarging of effects, it was necessary to exaggerate even more, to underline and accentuate them to the maximum. To push the theatre beyond that intermediate zone which is neither theatre nor literature, is to restore it to its proper frame, to its natural limits. It was necessary not to hide the strings, but to make them even more visible, deliberately evident, to go all the way in the grotesque, in caricature, beyond the pale irony of witty drawing room comedies. Not drawing room comedies, but farce, an extreme burlesque exaggeration…A hard comedy…A return to the intolerable. Push everything to a state of paroxysm, there where the sources of tragedy lie. Create a theatre of violence: violently comic, violently dramatic. (Ionesco and Pronko 10)

In this, I have learned from Ionesco. In my most recent work, A Howl in the Woods, which just received a reading at Cleveland Public Theatre, there was much in the play that was exactly what Ionesco has described: my play is a play from the unconscious, it is out of the zone of literature and is theatre in a pure state, things are pushed to a state of paroxysm. And yet, during the re-writing, something went wrong. Drastically wrong. There are many ways to characterize the nature of the defect, and on my blog I have discussed one in particular: the intervention of the conscious mind: the intervention of the mind that thinks it knows what the play “is about” and knows “which direction” the play should go. It is what another blogger I often read refers to as the “Editor’s Mind”—the internal critic, the internal censor. What entered into my play is that which Ionesco derided above, this notion that a “play should be a sort of presentation of a thesis, whose solution appears upon the stage.” This notion so engrained in me and ingrained in many a fellow playwright I see around me, ruined the play: destroyed it as surely as if I put the printed text to flame. Instead of forcing my characters to articulate themselves, I should have driven the piece to greater exaggeration, I should have known to, as Ionesco advises, “Avoid psychology, or rather give it a metaphysical dimension.” (Ionesco and Pronko 11) Or rather, in my case, I should have continued on the path I started, explored what was uneasy and frightening rather than falling back on what was safe, banal, and boring.

Ionesco continues, driving hard:

If…the actors bothered me because they appeared too unnatural, it is perhaps because they also wanted to be too natural: by renouncing this, they become natural perhaps in another way. They must not be afraid of being unnatural. / To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow. Without a new virginity of spirit, without a purified outlook on existential reality, there is not theatre; there is no art either; we must effect a dislocation of the real, which must precede its reintegration. (Ionesco and Pronko 11)

Ionesco then begins suggesting methods for achieving this result, and in many ways the essay takes on the practicality of a guide or handbook—one that I likely will use to correct the faults in my most recent effort. Ionesco discusses, in cursory fashion, many of his plays, which he refers to as “anti-plays,” “comical dramas,” “pseudo-dramas,” and “tragical farces.” But the contradictions inherent in these references are central to the thesis of his essay and his proposal for a new theatre: that “the contradictory principles” are necessary and “constitute the bases of…theatrical construction.” So, it is by contradictory alignments and exaggeration that the effect described above will, for Ionesco, be achieved:

If one believes that the theatre is only a theatre of words, it is difficult to admit that I can have its own language. It can only be dependent upon other forms of thought which are expressed by words: philosophy or ethics…words constitute only one of the elements of theatrical shock…by using them with ferocious exaggeration in order to give to the theatre its true measure, which is lack of measure, the Word itself should be strained to its limits, language should almost explode, or destroy itself, in its impossibility to contain meanings. / But there are more than words: the theatre is a tale which is lived, beginning again at each performance, and it is also a tale which one sees being lived. The theatre is visual as much as it is auditory…/ Everything is permitted in the theatre: to incarnate characters but also to materialize anguish, inner presences. It is therefore not only permitted, but it is recommended, to make props act, and objects live, to breathe life into the settings, to make the symbols concrete. (Ionesco and Pronko 13)

And all of this confirms me in how my play began and in many of the theatrical choices that I made—barring the dismal choices I made later: to have my characters explain themselves. The mere reflection on this process makes me cringe and now I know why, as my reading drew closer, I began to feel sick: it is because I had so damaged my play by the “thesis-oriented” choices I made that it had become repellant. Aligned with Ionesco’s ideals, as stated immediately above, the muffins in my play wept, the surrounding set howled to the men trapped inside their campsite, the characters were unnatural: straining against the societal constructs that tried to pin them down. In reflection, so much is right with this play, and Ionesco is pointing the way for how it can be cleaned, purified, made right again.

So where does all this tend? Ionesco writes:

When some morning, touched by grace, I wake not only from my nocturnal slumber but also from my accustomed mental slumber, and become suddenly aware of my existence, and of the universal presence, when all appears strange to me and yet familiar, when the wonder of being overcomes me; this feeling, this intuition belongs to any man, to any time. This state of mind, one can find expressed in almost the same words by poets, mystics, philosophers, who feel it exactly as I feel it, and as all men have certainly felt it…In that eternal moment, shoemaker and philosopher, “slave” and “master,” priest and layman meet, and become identified with each other. (Ionesco and Pronko 13-14)

That is, it all tends toward the universal. It tends toward the universal via the naïveté Ionesco described above. It tends toward the universal by way of helping people to see the world, again, in all its strangeness. Art is a way of seeing the world. The great artist allows others to see the amazement that he or she sees and in the way that he or she sees it. Ionesco, through the process that he outlines, and which I have very briefly touched, shares in this essay a way of seeing and a way of creating theatre that make it possible for others to see similarly. And this, for me, not just through Ionesco, but through a process of which I have become increasingly aware, is what theatre is about: exposing the unconscious forms and casting them upon the stage; revealing in these strange shapes and behaviors the truths that are universal to us as humans; to jar our way of seeing the world from the sleepy and the banal and re-awaken the sense of wonder that was everywhere present in our lives as children: the wonder that I see in the eyes and on the face of my own two-year-old daughter: resplendent, unveiled, the startling joy of being alive.

As Ionesco puts it, through the lens of Shakespeare’s Richard II:

When Richard II, fallen from power, is alone imprisoned in his cell, it is not Richard II that I see, but all the fallen kings of the earth; and not only all the fallen kings, but also our beliefs, our values, our desacralized truths, corrupted, worn out, our civilizations which disappear, our destiny. When Richard II dies, it is what I hold most dear that I see die; it is I who die with Richard II…in the final analysis it is not history that Shakespeare is writing, although he is using history; it is not a history that he presents me, but my history, our history, my truth beyond time, through showing me a time which goes beyond time and joins universal philosophic truth. / The theatre is that eternal living presence; it answers without doubt, to the essential structures of tragic truth, and of theatrical reality; its truth has nothing to do with the precarious truths of ideologies, nor with the so-called theatre of ideas: in this play we see theatrical archetypes, the essence of theatre, and theatrical language. (Ionesco and Pronko 14-15)

To reach what is universal, what allows people to see the world anew, to restore or reinvent the old, Ionesco contends that we must return to “primary truths” for these “are precisely what we lose sight of, what we forget.” (Ionesco and Pronko 16) For Ionesco these primary truths consist of what has been described above, and “spontaneity.” For he feels that “artistic creation is spontaneous,” and that it is by this method that the “instinctive and permanent schemas of the objective reality of the theatre…the essence of theatre,” will be discovered: given direct knowledge, and for Ionesco “nothing is true for the artist except what he does not borrow from others.” (Ionesco and Pronko 16)

Works Cited

Aristotle, and Gerald Frank Else. Poetics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970.

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press, 1993.

Brustein, Robert Sanford. Millennial Stages :Essays and Reviews, 2001-2005. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Hayes, Thomas. Weebelly.com: A playwright’s blog: dedicated to all things play building. October (2007): 11/16/2007. http://weebelly.com/26/playwriting-process-thinking-theatrically/

Henderson, William. “Why Theatre?” Craft Culture. September (2006): 11/08/2007. http://www.craftculture.org/Bench/whenderson1.htm

Ionesco, Eugene, and Leonard C. Pronko. “Discovering the Theatre.” The Tulane Drama Review 4.1 (1959): 3-18.

McKee, Robert. Story :Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. 1st ed. New York: ReganBooks, 1997.

Miller, Arthur. “The Shadows of the Gods: A Critical View of the American Theater.” Harper’s Magazine 217 (1958): 35-43.

Walker, Craig Stewart. “Why Theatre: Questions and Answers.” Canadian Theatre Review Spring.86 (1996): 55.

Wright, Michael. Playwriting-in-Process : Thinking and Working Theatrically. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997.