Essay II
The dramatic text as type of the text
The Theatre of Godâs Judgments, The Theatre of Genealogies, Theatre of Cities, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum...
One cannot read very widely in or about early modern literature without coming upon book title after book title of this sort.
The Theatre of Fine Devices, Theatrum Vitae Humanae, Theatrum Mundi, Universae Naturae Theatrum...
None of these volumes are about theatre or contain plays. Some are works of philosophy or theology; others treat architecture, genealogy, geography, emblems⊠The Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings is a poetry anthology; The Theatre of Love, a collection of novels. Theatrum Sanitas is a medical handbook; Theatrum Chemicum, a compilation of writings on alchemy. What can have led all these authors of treatises and compilers of anthologies to call their books âtheatresâ?
One may feel one grasps, in a general sort of way, the logic of this practice. Books, after all, are âperformancesâ designed to attract an âaudienceâ; to publish is to bring a âproductionâ before the âpublic,â etc.
Still, the trend is puzzling. For one thing, the experience of ploughing through these (mostly) weighty tomes cannot have been very much like theatregoing.1 Nor was this an era (if there has ever been such an era) when associating oneâs intellectual or artistic project with theatre was likely to raise it in anyoneâs esteem. To early modern taste, epic poetry represented the height of literary attainment; theatre â profane, vernacular, urban â was far down the list of cultural splendors, if it so much as made the list. We may view the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spain, France and England as a golden age of theatre. But it was no less a golden age of hostility toward theatre. Indeed, while medieval attacks on the stage were far from rare, one must go back to the Church Fathers2 to find anything like the sustained torrent of abuse that greets us in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.3 The âantitheatrical prejudiceâ so characteristic of the period was no doubt shared by more than a few of the sober scholars who titled their books âTheatreâ or âThĂ©Ăątreâ or âTheatrumâ of this or that. Why, then, did they so title them?
For a long time, I made small headway on this problem, until one day I chanced on a sentence by Paul de Man that seems to bear no relation to it:
We have, to a large extent, lost interest in the actual event that Mallarmé was describing as a crisis, but we have not at all lost interest in a text that pretends to designate a crisis when it is, in fact, itself the crisis to which it refers.4
De Man is here contrasting the slight intrinsic interest possessed by the subject matter of an essay of MallarmĂ©âs (certain minor advances in French pros-ody) as compared with the imaginative force displayed by the essay (âCrise de versâ) itself. Nothing could be farther from de Manâs mind than the use of âtheatreâ in book titles. Yet the terms in which he frames his contrast â âa text that pretends to designate a crisis when it is, in fact, itself the crisis to which it refersâ â begin to suggest what may be at stake in such titling.
The text as event
How can a text be a âcrisisâ? For that, it would have to be even such an âactual eventâ as de Man here opposes to mere texts; for what is a crisis but a certain kind of â a decisive, a culminating â event? Can texts be events?
Indeed they can, critics of every stripe hasten to assure us. âThe text is an event,â proclaim, in identical words, the deconstructionist William Spanos and the reader-response critic Stanley Fish5 â an âopen event,â adds Wolfgang Iser,6 and therefore to be âexperienced as an event.â7 âTexts as Eventsâ an historian calls his essay on historical documents, for such âtexts are events and make history.â8 âBooks as Eventsâ is the subtitle of a Folger Institute seminar that explores âhow [seventeenth century] political books⊠were understood as deeds.â9
As these last two examples illustrate, it is not only texts in general but specific kinds of texts that may bear this character. âThe poem⊠must be thought of as an event in time,â asserts Louise Rosenblatt (in an essay entitled âThe Poem as Eventâ).10 âPoems are dialectical events,â claims Harold Bloom11 â a claim that Paul Alpers perhaps only seems to reverse in proposing that âthe âgross eventsâ of [Spenserâs] Faerie Queene⊠are⊠lines and stanzas of poetry.â12 And much the same claim has been advanced for prose fiction by Maurice Blanchot: âThe tale is not the narration of an event, but that event itself.â13
It is not hard to see what underlies this manner of speaking. After all, everything that can happen to a text, or that a text can make happen, is some kind of event. The conceiving, imagining and elaborating of a text are (mental) events. The writing and revising of a text are events. Publication is an event. Once published, the text may make a splash, stir controversy, or possibly sink without a trace â events all. Above all, âthe reading of a text is an event.â14 Surely all these many events attendant upon the text must impart something of their event-status to the text itself? Surely the text itself can be no less of an event than all the events that produce, or are produced by, it?
But this makes no sense. The analytic philosophers have taught us to regard events as âchanges in objects.â15 Doubtless, as between objects and the changes they undergo there are some middle cases. If I fix my gaze on a just-applied dab of cadmium yellow, am I looking at some still-wet pigment (an object) or watching paint dry (an event)? But there seems little doubt which side of the object/event divide texts must be placed on. Much as one might like to think (and I shall speak presently of why one might like to think it) that a text is ânot an object⊠but an act that is also an eventâ16 or at very least is âsuspended between object and event,â17 plainly a text is some kind of entity there before one. As complex, as dynamic, as elusive an entity as you please, but⊠a thing in the world, something in your path. âA thing, they say, is an event,â muses Robert Frost, but concludes: âNot quite.â18 Such was long since the verdict of Clement Greenberg on his rival Harold Rosenbergâs attempt to claim event-status for abstract expression-ist paintings (surely one of the sources for the subsequent literary trend to claim it for texts). What appears on these canvases, Rosenberg held, is ânot a picture but an event.â No, countered Greenberg, merely âthe⊠aftermath of an eventâ; for, as Mary McCarthy pointed out, you canât hang an event on the wall.19
Nor can you slip one between the covers of a book. MallarmĂ©âs essay (to return to our Paul de Man passage) cannot in fact be the crisis it pretends to designate, though the writing, reading, and reception of it may all be crises and are certainly events.
All this seems too plain to argue with. Surely what we have here is not a false position that cries out to be refuted but a true need that cries out to be understood. It is a need that lets itself be glimpsed in such claims as the following:
Sometimes a book is itself an event and not only a record of events.20
and declares itself openly in a formulation like this:
Even when a literary work is a representation of something else it is always also an event in itself.21
Not only a record⊠a representation of something else â do we not here catch an echo of writingâs perennial (or at least post-Platonic) unease with its own secondariness, its status as mere recounting, retelling, writing up? Must we not recognize, in all this talk of the text as an event like any other, the latest vocabulary for artâs longstanding aspiration to be no mere mimesis (ânot only a recordâ) of reality but a reality among other realities, a force or act or presence in the world, âpart of the res itself and not about itâ?22
This is, one might suppose, an aspiration plainly destined fo...