Metadrama: conclusion

So you can go ahead and forget that things, at bottom, rest upon shaky ground, the world an illusion, your own concoction, all built on hypotheses, including the

similarity of other people to yourself; forget that your life is experimental in nature -because even if you don't, there is nothing you can do about it. If you accept what everyone else calls reality as existing for certain, it may lead to catastrophe, but in the meantime it is the best you can do - at least with your amalgamated spectator-actor self, which is at the mercy of the arbitrary incidents of the free movie.

Geza Ottlik: Buda The fundamental question here is this: what is the difference between fiction and pre-tence? At this point the difference seems to be merely "haphazard": sometimes there is a difference, but sometimes there is no difference between the two. This is why, al-though perhaps we may say that the Fool loves Lear and Iago hates Othello (and conse-quently we like to see the Fool a positive and Iago a negative figure morally), the diffe-rence between Iago and the Fool is not necessarily that big at all in regards to Iago's most heinous crime, that of corrupting reality and meaning, playing with empty signs, concerning the game of role-plays and pretence, the lack of intrinsic meaning behind mere signs. This is so for two reasons. On the one hand, Iago is actually corrupting no reality, he is just showing that - since it can be proven corruptible - it does not exist as

"real" in the sense it was taken to be real, and it applies both within and without the drama. On the other hand, the Fool is also pointing out how the difference between reality and fiction is vague, and in this context the idea of pretence is also blurred, be-cause the notion of "pretence" is dependent on a clear picture of its opposite. Once the whole world is shown as pretentious, it is impossible to define this opposite.

If we compare Iago with the evil understood as the privation of reality¹⁸³ we see how far from the roots of the medieval Christian tradition of comic evil we have come.

Perhaps here we also witness a privation of reality, but with a reversed sign, not neces-sarily the privation of reality it was before: Iago does not represent the lack of reality in his iniquity, but rather shows that all reality is illusion,¹⁸ making the characters of the drama as well as the audience realise that what they thought to be reality can be de-prived of its realness by being turned into illusion. The Fool is not so radical in his ac-tions. He does not work actively towards destroying the assumed reality of the others, but he does show the contextual nature of it, and shows how, with staging different contexts, different versions of reality can be generated.

The real difference between Iago's and the Fool's metadramatic activities, I would like to suggest, is in the ways they fictionalise the assumed reality of their respective playworlds. The new context the Fool creates to ridicule tragic events liberates them from the unbearable weight of their sincerity, their tragic pain, and with the help of this attitude he actually teaches Lear and the audience to survive. The way Iago shows that reality can be arranged and directed in a similarly fictitious way as plays in theatre, achieves the opposite effect: he seems to "eat away" the genuineness, the authenticity of supposed reality.

Thus, it is possible perhaps to assert that the difference of the effect of Iago's and the Fool's metadramatic behaviour is rooted in their different attitudes towards fiction. Both characters, as the descendants of the Vice of moralities, act as Masters of Ceremony, and in this case it does not matter how much Iago's metadramatic role as the director of the play is more intrinsic to the play's dramaturgy than the counterpoint the Fool provides in the process of Lear's suffering. And both characters feature traditional involvement techniques and improvisation, encouraging the audience for more active participation, as it is typical for the platea-oriented characters. Also, they both stress the play's theatrical quality, making this quality part of their game. As for identity and role-playing, they both seem to suggest that there is no intrinsic identity, only roles. Still, the "fiction" generated by the Fool is healing nonsense. In addition, this nonsense seems to be closer to the logic of the play's universe than the reality Lear thought himself in possession of at the beginning of the play. Thus, the Fool's nonsense shows that what sounds fictional may be taken as aversion of reality. On the other hand, the theatrical separation between play and reality, theatrical persona and offstage, non-fictional individuals is used by Iago as a threatening and immensely powerful tool. When he utters sentences that are actually true but make Othello disbelive what he says, he is creating a context where reality cannot function as not fictional the fictional discourse he creates is capable of invalidating the Venetian reality and the identity of its distinguished individuals.

183 According to a certain explanation of medieval laughter at the comedy of evil, "laughter is the response on the part of Being to the exposure of non-Being. In other words, then, laughter occurs when that which is real perceives the absence of reality, and when that which is good becomes aware of that absence of good which we call evil." Charlotte Spivack, 26.

184 Another way to explain the way Iago seems to "eat away" or corrupt reality is to say that it is exactly illusion that is his reality. It is not such an illusion that hides a deeper reality, but an illusion that hides nothing: an illusion that is perfectly real. Cf Kallay, 119.

Iago's fiction, it seems, works against the reality it corrupts exactly because he can count on the gap between assumed identity and fictional role, because this gap is a monstrous secret, a taboo. The Fool, on the other hand, wants to teach Lear, and appa-rently manages to teach him, exactly the fact that the gap, the tension between role and identity, is generated by the false idea that the identities, social functions and positions are more than mere roles played in specific contexts and specific situations. Similarly, I find it the effect of the Fool's activities that Lear, as in the Fool's examples, is capable of integrating fiction in his own world and appreciating it as the "mystery of things" -although, of course, this is not the point where the play ends.

Once fiction is expelled from reality, it will turn into a sneaking monster, threat-ening that reality will be eaten up by fiction. As Jonas Barish has pointed out, the deepest root of the anti-theatricalism of the age belonged to the conservative ethical em-phasis in which order, stability, constancy and integrity play a crucial role.¹⁸³ The trickster in this sense is the epitome of theatre, entertainment and everything that anti-theatricalists were against.186 This is why it is fortunate that Iago's trickery on a marked place in front of the audience - the stage - does not have to be identified necessarily with the trickery he plays on Othello. At least to this extent the monster is not put be-hind curtains: Iago is certainly not a devil on the metadramatic level, although he knows how to play one.187

As I was trying to suggest, metadrama works towards doing rather than representing.

This kind of literary presentation can be described in Stanley Fish's terms as dialectical (versus rhetorical):188 he analyses different ways of presentation, and says of a dialectical presentation (versus rhetorical) that it is "disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by." Both Iago's and the Fool's activities are disturbing because they invite the audience to see things they are not particularly at ease with, or do not want to see.

The metadramatic qualities of the discussed plays unveil some major structural inconsistencies in the ways by which the audience perceives itself and the world. The effect of metadrama identified by Hornby as alienation will have a wide scope: the audi-ence will be alienated not only from the play but also from the world they are set into,

183 Jonas Barish, The AntitheatricalPrejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 117.

186 For a more detailed discussion of the idea that the term "Vice" could be used as a syno-nym for "actor" in anti-theatrical tracts, condemning actors of corrupting reality with fiction, see my "'Masking players, painted sepulchers and double dealing ambidexters' on duty," Sederi Yearbook 18 (2008): 45-60.

187 Iago and the Fool thus become "generators of fiction" in the sense that the "fiction" of saying something becomes reality. It is perhaps similar to the way Austin imagines "perform-ative utterances," when "to say something is to do something, or in which by saying or in saying something we are doing something." See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1975), 12. A perfect illustration of this logic could be the line of Vindice in The Revenger's Tragedy, where he exclaims: "Is there no thunder left, or is't kept up / In stock for heavi-er vengeance? [Thundheavi-er] Thheavi-ere it goes!" (4.2.196-7).

188 Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 3.

as well as from themselves: under such an experience all the familiar ways of perception are shaken.

Bristol asks about the problem of boys playing female roles and its effect on the un-derstanding of gender and its coding. "Were the boy actors in Shakespeare's company engaging in a conventional form of ridicule of the feminine? Or were they engaged in a general parody of the artifice of gender coding itself?"189 The question is clearly appli-cable, apart from the question of gender identity and gender coding, to "the artifice of coding" in general. Were Iago, the Fool, Shakespeare or Robert Armin engaging in a ridicule of the conventional forms of understanding reality? Where they parodying the ways the world was perceived as real? We do not have to answer it, we do not have to identify the drive behind Iago's or the Fool's, or the actor's or the author's parody, be-cause even without that we can identify its effect on the audience and the necessity that the audience will have to reflect on their own ways of perception.190

Utterances that communicate doubt about some fact, according to Fish, can be communicated in different ways. He makes a difference "between an uncomfortable, unsettling experience in which the gradual dimming of a fact is attended by a failure in perception, and a wholly self-satisfying one in which an uncertainty is comfortably cer-tain, and the reader's confidence in his own powers remains unshaken, because he is always in control."¹⁹¹ Perhaps we can use this distinction to come closer to the nature of the above mentioned effect of a need to reflect on the artifice of coding, generated both by Iago and the Fool. The first instance Fish mentions, the "meaning" of which is not any reportable "content" but rather an event, is characteristic of what Iago and the Fool make of their plays: they will feature the great Signifying Machine at work, plays in which no curtains hide - yet - the ways meaning is produced. And it is produced exactly in the way fiction is produced.

189 Bristol, 148.

190 We are facing here situations where some problematic devices force us to reflect on the ways we perceive reality, by facing us with obvious problems in our method, via creating situa-tions where our "normal" ways of understanding prove untenable. Thomas Kuhn's example of reactions of experimentees who were asked to identify cards with unconventional combination of colour and shape illustrate the puzzling experience when the automatized ways of perception fail to work. The result is an experience of crisis that opens the possibility for a new framework of understanding. One of the experimentees who failed to identify the unconventional combina-tion but realised that something was "wrong" exclaimed: "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or heart. I'm not sure I even know what a spade looks like. My God!" Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 63-4.

191 Fish, 389.