Thea Sharrock - The Independent - Unfortunately there is not a whole lot of interviews where Sharrock discusses Equus. I'm going to keep searching.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The Motherload of Interviews
William Inge Theatre Festival - Peter Shaffer - Best resource for Shaffer interviews
Monday, August 24, 2009
Equus as a Modern Tragedy
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1997 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
[In the essay below, Timm compares Equus to the classical Greek dramas Oedipus and Antigone and to Racine's Phèdre in an attempt to define a modern version of tragedy.]
Whether our age is capable of producing real tragedy is a question that has preoccupied critics and philosophers. I would like to pose that question as a basis for discussing Peter Shaffer's Equus. I will proceed by comparing the play to several tragedies, Antigone, Oedipus, and Phedre, in order to evolve a working definition of tragedy. This essay will raise two questions: Is it necessary to have a hero of elevated stature, and can post-Freudian writers find a uniquely “modern” way of approaching tragedy?
Antigone's pattern of oppositions provides a formal paradigm for many of Shaffer's plays: Shrivings and The Royal Hunt of the Sun in addition in Equus. In these plays a person who holds religious or quasi-religious beliefs is violated by a more cynical, more rationalistic outsider. Antigone's religious devotion to the sacred rite of burial brings her into fatal conflict with Creon, who represents (as Hegel suggested) the interests of society, despite his own blindness. In Equus Alan Strang has evolved a personal religion based on the god he sees in all horses. While Creon can literally bury Antigone alive to perpetuate his limited view of the state, Martin Dysart relies on the more subtle instrument of torture, modern psychiatry. There are, of course, important differences between these two young victims. Antigone's act is one of great piety, even socially accepted, while Alan's act of blinding the horses is deviant and repugnant to the audience. In Equus what is socially acceptable is opposed to Alan's personal religion. There is also a difference between the tyrant Creon, who himself betrays the public conscience, and Dysart, who serves as the guardian of the Normal. Both Antigone and Alan Strang are pitted against authority figures. Both are consumed by a personal vision that precludes love and marriage. Haimon stabs himself, superfluous next to Antigone's suicide; the girl who tries to seduce Alan, however warm and compassionate, is worse than superfluous. She precipitates Alan's violent attempt at self-punishment and worship: the blinding.
If we assume that a hero must recognize his guilt in order to be tragic, then in both Antigone and Equus the hero is the persecutor, not the victim. Creon recognizes his tragic error; so too does Martin Dysart. In some ways Dysart is more “tragic” than Creon, for, having realized his error, Dysart will, nonetheless, continue to dispatch his patients to the living death of the Normal through psychiatric cure. Something final has been reached for Creon, who longs for death. There will be no more Antigones. Neither victim is tragic: Antigone has committed no crime, at least against the gods, and Alan will have re-enacted his crime and moved on, not through recognition, but through catharsis.
Oedipus, too, has illuminating similarities to Equus. If both Dysart and Oedipus are detectives, they are searching in some sense for different things in bringing the hidden crime to light: Oedipus wants facts and truth; Dysart searches for motives, the why. Yet each becomes the object of his own search through a pattern of reversal. Oedipus is, of course, literally the criminal, while Dysart's guilt is, in some ways, more complex. Dysart is implicated in the murder of the god through Alan's abreaction, but not in the literal murder of a person. Nonetheless, Dysart's guilt is so intense that he becomes the victim, in his own eyes like the boy, with a “sharp chain” in his mouth.
Philosophical questions about the nature of man and his place in the universe are common to all tragedy. InEquus the sphinx's riddle appears in terms of the horses. Where does the animal become the man? What is it that makes us uniquely human? As Dysart puts it: “Is it possible ... a horse can add its sufferings together—the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life—and turn them into grief? What use is grief to a horse?” Paradoxically, the horse is both god and animal. There is a strange equation here of the distinction between man and the divine and the distinction between man and the animal. Such is the richness of the horse as a symbol in the play. Grief, or the ability to perceive tragedy, is affirmed as the special realm of the human. As a sex fantasy of an adolescent, the horse god Equus can seem jealous, but only Dysart can experience grief at the loss of a god. As Dysart tells Hesther: “... to go through life and call it yours—your life—you first have to get your own pain.”
In the Oedipus Cycle there is ultimate redemption for suffering, and in most tragedy there is a sense of renewed life after the tragic calamity—a concept which has been associated with fertility myths by such thinkers as Gilbert Murray. The idea of sacrifice is represented in Dysart's dream. He finds himself sacrificing children to an obscure god that we see as the Normal, and he is in danger of being unmasked as a charlatan. Shaffer is showing that the psychiatrist cannot restore fertility through sacrifice. There is no successful transition to heterosexual fulfillment that includes worship. The specific reference to ritual sacrifice is intended, I believe, to make this play an antitragedy, at least in terms of this one approach to tragedy. Re-enactment may bring a catharsis to Alan, exciting his emotions to purge them, but Dysart and the spectator are left with a sense of loss that, if such generalizations make sense, only increases their pity and terror.
A discussion of Oedipus in this context would be incomplete without some mention of the rôle of the Oedipus complex in Alan's family life. In an act of symbolic castration, the father drags the boy off the horse in the beach scene, infringing on his ecstatic experience of sex. Alan speculates that his mother denies his father sexually, the father thinks mother and son are “thick as thieves.” I believe that the Oedipus complex is a psychiatric cliché and is meant to be seen as such. Freudian analysis alone, no matter how extensively it is developed in the play, is meant to be seen as inadequate. The crime is mysterious and eludes any one rational explanation, including other problems in the boy's life, such as his mother's religious fanaticism, a materialistic culture, and the boy's discovery that his father attends pornographic motion pictures. Even the totality of these negative factors, biological, developmental, and cultural, falls short of explaining the crime. Alan's mother may want to exonerate herself, but she is still speaking for the playwright when she says: “Whatever's happened has happenedbecause of Alan. Alan is himself. Every soul is itself. If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first day on earth to this, you wouldn't find why he did this terrible thing.” This is, I think, a central statement about tragedy. The tragic error or crime exceeds any simple explanation, and the tragic hero is more than a victim of circumstances. He manages to find his identity in the very deed that creates his guilt. Alan is not the tragic hero precisely because he becomes or is to become someone else for whom this crime will not have central significance. We should remember that the crime and the boy who committed the crime are central for Dysart and for the audience.
The tragedies of Corneille and Racine focus on a tragic conflict between reason, frequently expressed as duty, and the heart. This pattern works out neatly for Dysart, who listens to Judge Hester remind him of his duty to cure Alan. Dysart experiences the unfulfilled longing of the heart for the ultimate consummation that Alan achieves in the god Equus. (Perhaps this use of Hester is a little too schematic, and the Doctor's wife too stereotypically bland.) The result of these conflicting claims on Dysart is a dilemma: His duty to society and even his compassion for the boy dictate that he effect a cure, while his own repressed instincts tell him of the great wrong he would be committing. Does his choice reflect a passive capitulation? In other words, has he really made a choice?
The central issue here is whether compromise is an acceptable course of action for a tragedy. The tragic hero pursues the consequences of his act to a limit, usually death. Racine's Phèdre presents a heroine who, according to Lucien Goldmann in The Hidden God, cannot accept the necessary compromise of living in the world. Having lusted after her stepson, Phèdre is caught between this impure desire and her demand for absolute purity. The goddess Venus, representing the ability to attain a pure love, remains hidden. There is a kind of logic in Phèdre's refusal of the world through suicide, and she is clearly tragic. Dysart yearns for a similar kind of absolute that combines illicit sexuality and a hidden god. Dysart imagines an Equus hidden in the “black cave of the Psyche,” and he can experience the god only through the reenactment of Alan's immediate or immanent perception of it. Like Phèdre, Dysart has glimpsed the contradiction between truth and his social rôle, between the power of raw emotion and the malaise of a corrupt world. Dysart is not tragic in the sense that Phèdre is because he compromises and survives. But a refusal to be corrupted through actions in the world would condemn Alan to a “superiority based on Alan's sucking of equine perspiration” to quote the critic John Simon [“Hippodrama at the Psychodrome,” The Hudson Review 28, 1975]. True, the horse may seem like a god, but it is still destroying a human being. There is a logic and inevitability in Dysart's decision to betray the hidden god and act in the world. It may be that this decision to act in the world is tragic in a different sense from Phèdre's decision to refuse to act in the world.
The horses in Phèdre, like those in Equus, are charged with symbolic meaning. Hippolytus, like Alan Strang, has a private relationship with horses which he has driven “half-deranged along the sand-bars, pulling a foaming chariot ... tilting and staggering upright through the surf.” This image of oneness with the horse is similar to that orgiastic union of Alan and the horse Trojan at the beach. In both plays the turn toward heterosexual love leads to a crisis. Hippolytus is afraid of his love for Aricia, and later of Phèdre's love for him, and tries to flee. Compared to Alan with his “chinkle chankle,” Hippolytus is a boy scout in the woods. Still, in both cases the horse represents potentially violent forces of the id, and in Phèdre, as in Equus, the horse can destroy the man who has failed to find in a woman a successful way to express sexual drives. At the end of Phèdre the monster emerges from the ocean, a metaphor for the human psyche, to incite the horses to trample Hippolytus to death.
That which was under control through reason and social decorum (that is, emotions, the id, sex) takes its victims, Phèdre and Hippolytus: “... then the horses, terrorstruck, stampeded. Their master's whip and shouting went unheeded, they dragged his breathless body to the spray. Their red mouths bit the bloody surf....”This passage from Phèdre highlights an important difference in the two authors' approaches to theater. Is it more effective to have an eyewitness describe Hippolytus' death through the medium of poetry than to employ Shaffer's more literal approach in representing horses on stage? It has been argued that Shaffer is too theatrical in exploiting the medium of dance. The scene of the blinding, the nude boy leaping up into the spotlight, is, visually at least, powerful. But the question lingers. Has spectacle been substituted for the power of language or has Shaffer discovered a more elemental language of forms, of the body? Has the play begun to get back to the roots of tragedy in ritual sacrifice? Formally, maybe. Thematically, Equus is closer to Death of a Salesman than to the Greeks. The Greek chorus, the music of words, has been replaced by the unnerving buzz of the horses, theatrically most effective, and by the bland and unconvincing character of Hester. On the other hand, one could argue that myth precedes language and that Shaffer has fulfilled Thomas Mann's hope that post-Freudian writers may eventually recreate myth [“Freud and the Future,” in Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray, 1968]. This would, however, not result in tragedy, which deals with human incompleteness.
Shaffer's more literal approach to theater is also evident in the controversial nude scene. Tragedy frequently involves the progressive stripping away of illusions as, for example, with King Lear, who, it should be noted, does shed clothing, baring his chest, as a metaphor for this process. Lear's nakedness is expressed mainly through language, while Shaffer relies more heavily on literal nudity on stage. In addition to the stripping away of defenses, nudity suggests a sense of indecent exposure in Equus. The psychiatrist has violated another individual's integrity, or as Dysart sees it, he has stripped Alan of his religion, his worship. The scene also presents an image of feminine beauty, the heterosexual love that is so violently enticing and threatening to the adolescent boy.
Let us return, at this point, to the questions I raised at the outset. Is Equus a tragedy and do we need to revise our definition to accommodate this play? The play does not lead to catharsis, and the action lacks the kind of finality needed to achieve a new order out of tragic disorder. Instead of pursuing his tragic knowledge of his crime, curing the boy, to its limit, Dysart compromises. He does not have the stature of a statesman, someone larger than life. But he does achieve complete recognition of his dilemma, and it may be that there is a kind of transcendence in that recognition. No, he does not transcend himself like Othello, who affirms his personal value in the extremity of guilt before committing suicide. If Dysart does transcend the everyday, it is through his human understanding of and sympathy for Alan Strang.
He tears himself apart in doing what he has to do. Even as he becomes more uncertain of his rôle, more depressed about his own lack of religion, he becomes more intensely involved in the life of his patient. He is by turns clever, wily, cagey, unsparing, sarcastic, sardonic, and ruthless in his quest for a problematic cure that will leave himself exposed and guilty of self-betrayal. Like Oedipus, Dysart knows that he will endanger himself by bringing secrets to light. He lacks Oedipus' faith that the public good, or even the private good, will be served. Dysart is a man of greater courage because he is not a man of conviction.
So great is Dysart's insight that, by the end of the play, Dysart knows what Equus will say without the mediation of Alan. In that final brutal cross-examination, Dysart speaks for the god: “And you will fail!... You will see ME—and you will FAIL!... The Lord thy God is a Jealous God! He sees you.” After this moment of great intensity, Dysart cradles the broken Alan in his arms and covers him with a blanket. That gesture speaks with more eloquence than words. Dysart has made his own pain by helping to alleviate Alan's. He has discovered in a personal way his separation from the hidden god that could be described as a kind of worship. He has taken the moral ambiguity of the situation and pursued it to the limit in breaking and thus saving another human being. If he compromises, it is a courageous act in the face of radical doubt.
A definition of modern tragedy would have to allow for a private and incomplete form of transcendence that does not lead to a renewal of community bonds. Whether any public good, social or moral, is affirmed is problematic. But Dysart's honesty in confronting his dilemma and his ability to overcome potential paralysis represent a triumph of imagination and humanity. None of us believes that the boy should be abandoned to a sado-masochistic fantasy. All of us see the loss in Alan's cure through the pain that Dysart, and Peter Shaffer, have made for us.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
The Anger in Equus
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1990 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Peter Shaffer's Equus is neither great theatre nor bad psychology, but it has elements of both. It is an exhilarating play: a remarkable blend of delayed exposition and theatrical effect, of melodrama and circus, which has inspired huge ticket sales and adoring critical reviews. And it is that increasingly rare serious drama which capitalizes on lurid events while maintaining a devotion to “ideas.” Yet, in spite of its wide popular acclaim,Equus is difficult to sort out even when all the clues have been discovered. Why does Alan make his slightly sadomasochistic leap from Jesus to horses? What specifically does the scene in the porno theatre have to do with Alan's confrontation with Jill and the horses? Is the climactic nude scene an organic part of the play's structure or simply a gratuitous bow to contemporary fashion?
Equus is that increasingly rare serious drama which capitalizes on lurid events while maintaining a devotion to “ideas”These questions—and a variety of others—have been raised in the aftermath of the play's initial sensation. Sanford Gifford has criticized the drama for its faulty psychology and for its deceptive views of the patient-psychiatrist relationship. And John Simon has indicted it as a trumped-up plea for a homosexual life style. James Lee, on the other hand, has praised Equus for the fullness of its dramatic experience, and James Stacy has pointed out the strength of its religious passion, particularly in relation to Shaffer's earlier Royal Hunt of the Sun. What we are confronted with, then, is a major work of serious drama which continues to enthrall sophisticated (and not so sophisticated) audiences, but which leaves many viewers uneasy because they are uncertain what they are so enthusiastically applauding. Robert Brustein, for instance, has written about his surprise at seeing Broadway audiences heartily endorsing sodomy. It is probable that the controversy will continue, and the purpose of this essay is to shed some light on the traditions which have given us Equus nearly twenty years after a similar work—Look Back in Anger—began changing the face of the contemporary English theatre.
The comparison is not so surprising as might be initially assumed. In its subject matter, its dramatic tradition,Equus is still infused with the same philosophical outlook which was so popular and controversial in 1956. And in spite of a variety of dramatic viewpoints carefully exhibited by two generations of English playwrights, we seem to be back almost where we began. Thus, being truly alive is synonymous with suffering an intensity of experience which frequently borders on the abnormal and which is repeatedly glamorized as “passion.” Alison Porter in Look Back in Anger can only be “saved,” after all—as she herself comes to realize—if she grovels and suffers. (This despite the fact that she confides to Helena that she was very happy for the first twenty years of her life.) Jimmy Porter, whose passions we are sometimes invited to admire in much the same way that we are Alan Strang's, tells his wife that there is hope for her if she “could have a child and it would die.” Indeed, Jimmy accuses everyone of wanting to avoid the discomfort of being alive, and he describes the process of living as a realization that you must wade in and “mess up your nice, clean soul.” Routine is the enemy for Jimmy Porter, and those who are not willing to take part in his crusade of suffering are forced to desert him.
The same points and counterpoints are echoed in Shaffer's drama. Dr. Dysart's bland and colorless life is endlessly exhibited and catalogued. Like Alison and her brother, Nigel, Dysart is not a participant but a spectator. He has never ridden a horse. He experiences passion only vicariously. He is married to an antiseptic dentist whom he no longer even kisses. He travels to romantic climes with his suitcases stuffed with Kao-Pectate. And because he is acutely conscious of his normality, he feels accused by Alan just as Alison is attacked by Jimmy.
Alan Strang, on the other hand, experiences passion in its extremity; a passion which Dysart not only lacks but envies. Like Jimmy Porter, Alan has made a pain which is uniquely his, and uniquely part of his being alive.
DYSART. His pain. His own. He made it. Look ... to go through life and call it yours—your life—you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say, “That's enough!”
Dysart's description of Alan recalls Jimmy's complaint that, “They all want to escape from the pain of being alive,” as well as Alison's cry, “Oh, don't try and take his suffering away from him—he'd be lost without it.”
The pain that defines both Jimmy and Alan, of course, is always contrasted with the commonplace, the normal experiences of everyday life. Both of these plays explore, without ever resolving, the conflict between the abnormal and the ordinary events of our existence. Jimmy wants Alison to show some enthusiasm in order to experience the emotions of being alive. But it is always life by his terms, and his terms are demanding. He wants to “stand up in her tears.” And ultimately he wins. “I was wrong,” she admits. “I want to be a lost cause. I want to be corrupt and futile.” She becomes a kind of victim-healer, because she is willing to give him his pain and reaffirm his vision of a world where “plundering” is equated with being alive.
Shaffer covers much of the same ground. Instead of Jimmy Porter, we now have the tormented Alan, whose horrible acts are translated by Dysart into a kind of enviable pain. The extremity of Alan's passions is what Dysart covets, and he is reluctant to remove Alan's pain because (like Alison) Dysart sees in the pain the source of a passionate life.
You won't gallop any more, Alan. Horses will be quite safe. You'll save your pennies every week, till you can change that scooter in for a car, and put the odd fifty P on the gee-gees, quite forgetting that they were ever anything more to you than bearers of little profits and losses. You will, however, be without pain. More or less completely without pain.
Dysart finally accepts his part as healer because any other alternatives are simply unacceptable. Alan's extremity—the blinding of the horses—is a shocking dramatic device, but no amount of theatrical trickery can enable Shaffer to equate barbarism with an enviable passion for life.
But what are we to make of all this? Is this stern indictment of the commonplace what is so compelling aboutEquus? Is it the core “idea” at the center of the drama? Or is it a metaphor for a more complex statement?
John Simon has examined the thematic issues in Equus and discovered a thinly disguised homosexual play beneath the surface of Shaffer's pseudo-psychology. Simon claims that the depiction of Dysart's wife and marriage, the sexual imagery associated with the horses, and the inability of Alan to perform with Jill are all clear indications of a viewpoint which rejects heterosexuality—the ordinary—in favor of a homosexual world view. Simon additionally points out that the marriage of Jill's parents is also painted in a bad light, and that Jill, herself, is presented as a naughty seductress tempting Alan away from his Horse-Eden. Thus, for Simon the play abounds with dishonesty: “...toward its avowed purpose, the explication of `a dreadful event,' by making that dreadfulness seem fascinating and even admirable. Dishonesty to the audiences, by trying to smuggle subliminal but virulent homosexual propaganda into them. Dishonesty toward the present state of the theatre, in which homosexuality can and has been discussed openly and maturely.”
This point of view is particularly interesting in light of the comparison with Look Back in Anger, because Osborne's play has also been analyzed in terms of its strong homosexual overtones. Indeed, psychiatric criticism of the play addressed the ménage à trois implications of the Porter household two decades ago. How else, some critics believed, could you account for the characters' behavior? Writing in Modern Drama, E. G. Bierhaus, Jr. has argued that the real lovers in the play are Jimmy and Cliff, and that while both of the women pursue Jimmy, he pursues only Cliff. “That Alison loses her baby and Cliff keeps his ulcers is symbolic: neither can give Jimmy what he needs.”
Uncovering homosexuality in literature, however, is often a shell game, and the degree of sleight of hand frequently vitiates the worth of the results. Once certain premises are established, almost anything is fair game. Perhaps Simon is accurate, and Bierhaus too, but there may be a more obvious answer to the apparent disdain with the ordinary which seems to infuse both Look Back in Anger and Equus.
Certainly the “angry young men” of the 1950's did not require a homosexual world view in order to see the failures of the welfare state, the outdated monarchy and the vanishing empire. Assaulting the commonplace was for Osborne and his contemporaries a thematic way of rejuvenating the English drama as well as tapping theangst that was so compelling in the surrealistic experiments of Beckett and Ionesco. And the normal represented everything from the inequalities of the class system to the blunders at Suez. In its world view, then,Equus is an extension not only of Look Back in Anger, but also of John Arden's Live Like Pigs, Arnold Wesker'sRoots, Harold Pinter's The Lover, and numerous other dramatic ventures which contrasted the passion of the abnormal with the drabness of the postwar English world, and which, consequently, have led to an often misplaced admiration of violence and aberration.
In the final analysis, the thematic issues in Equus sometimes seem muddled and confused not because the play is disguised homosexuality, but because it is part of an ongoing fascination with life as “passion,” a fascination which also has its counterparts in English films and popular music. The current extremity termed “punk rock,” for example, owes its lineage to the grittiness of the early Rolling Stones just as much as Equusdescends from Look Back in Anger. Iconoclasm has become institutionalized. The original “causes” are somewhat shrouded, but the rebellion goes on. Life as “passion” continues to be dramatic and highly theatrical, but after twenty years somewhat unsatisfactory as “IDEA.”
Fortunately, like so many other English plays of the past two decades, Equus lives not by what it says but by the sparks that it ignites in its attempts to be articulate. And while Shaffer's dramatic traditions go back to Look Back in Anger, his theatrical tradition is closely linked to the experiments of a decade ago in the modes of Brecht and Artaud. For what is ultimately applauded in Equus is not its message but its packaging. Like spectators ofMarat-Sade, audiences at Shaffer's play are frequently carried headlong into a vague kind of catharsis without a very clear knowledge of what they are experiencing or applauding. This is not, and has not been, an unusual occurrence in the contemporary theatre. It would be interesting to know, for instance, how many audience members have come away from Marat-Sade confused by the complex arguments of Peter Weiss's dialectic on revolution, yet enormously moved by the grotesque images in the play: the deranged inmates, the club-swinging nuns, the saliva, semen and revolutionary songs.
The “total theatre” of a decade ago was an exciting theatre. And it did play a large part in replacing a poetry of words with what Artaud called a poetry of the senses. Marat-Sade is the most famous of the total theatre experiments, because of the publicity surrounding its creation and its huge popular success outside the United Kingdom. But there were others of the same ilk. John Whiting's The Devils is a wonderfully theatrical play which rambles in its structure, avoids an obvious obligatory scene, and strains for “meaning” on a variety of levels. Ultimately, however, it works—or does not work—in terms of its theatrical effects: the possessed sisters, Jeanne's sexual obsessions, Grandier's torture. (Interestingly, Ken Russell focused on these very elements in filming Whiting's script.) In varying degrees, the same may be said of Edward Bond's Narrow Road to the Deep North, John Arden's Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, Shaffer's own Royal Hunt of the Sun, and others.
It is from this theatrical tradition that Equus also draws, and it is this tradition which frequently convinces us that we are seeing and hearing something important because the images which bombard us are so exciting. Equusis an exciting play. The eerie music and equus noise are provocative and foreboding. The men as horses serve as a compelling theatrical invention which helps to intensify both the act-one curtain and the blinding sequence near the end of the play. The nude encounter between Jill and Alan is strikingly theatrical, as is the physical setting of the drama which allows one scene to flow rapidly into the next.
But ultimately Equus is a schizophrenic play, because its theatrical fireworks cannot mask its muddled logic and tired philosophy. After sorting through what Shaffer has to say, it is tempting to dispense with the intellectual straining and experience the play on a more visceral level. After all, Alan will be better once he is cured. And Dysart, too, may yet survive his menopause and move on to a time and place where he can admire his own great gifts as much as his patients' horrifying illnesses.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Title:Equus: Shaffer, Nietzsche, and the Neuroses of Health
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1990 Gale Research, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning
Nietzsche wrote The Birth of Tragedy not only to discuss the origin of tragic drama in Greece, but also to elucidate a form of madness, the madness of limited vision in the German culture of his day.... Peter Shaffer, like Nietzsche, is a student of psychology as well as culture, and he is very much interested in the idea of madness, certainly not in praising it ... but rather in illustrating dramatically a particular strain of madness: the madness personified in Equus by the psychiatrist Martin Dysart. Everyone familiar with Equus understands that Alan Strang is mad. The challenge of the play—to those among us who are “normal” and “sane”—is to see what may be our own madness, a modern malady which has become so commonplace that we may fail to recognize it.
Speaking of Equus, Shaffer made the following comments:
There is in me a continuous tension between what I suppose I could loosely call the Apollonian and the Dionysiac sides of interpreting life, between, say, Dysart and Alan Strang.
It immediately begins to sound high falutin', when one talks about it oneself—I don't really see it in those dry intellectual terms. I just feel in myself that there is a constant debate going on between the violence of instinct on the one hand and the desire in my mind for order and restraint. Between the secular side of me the fact that I have never actually been able to buy anything of official religion—and the inescapable fact that to me a life without a sense of the divine is perfectly meaningless.
The reading offered in this essay will run the risk of sounding “high falutin'” when it proceeds from a strict, rather than loose, definition of “those dry intellectual terms” Apollinian and Dionysian as they are used by Nietzsche inThe Birth of Tragedy. And because the terms will be used in the Nietzschean sense, this reading will take the liberty of departing from the idea that Dysart schematically represents the Apollinian and Alan the Dionysian. Although Shaffer uses the terms “Apollonian” and “Dionysiac,” he admits to using them “loosely.” Consequently, Shaffer's remarks are too tenuous to prove a direct influence of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy on Equus. However, the affinities between these two works do exist, and The Birth of Tragedy can be used to provide a framework for an approach to Equus which will illustrate a concern common to both men: health. (pp. 314–15)
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche provides a critique of what he believed to be the unhealthy German culture of his day; he writes of a “new opposition”: the Dionysian vs. the Socratic, theoretical man. By comparing the case of Alan Strang (the Dionysian man) with the extreme case of Martin Dysart (the Socratic, theoretical man), one can illuminate the two characters around whom Shaffer's play is structured.
Alan Strang is the product of a mother who has—with the best of intentions—taken him through the paces of myth with her Christianity. Alan is also the product of a father who has—with noble intentions—encouraged his son to gain “Further Education.” The father has done so by discouraging Alan from watching television (because it is a “swiz”; it takes away one's intelligence and concentration) and by discouraging Alan's orientation toward the Christian myth through his own atheism.
But Mrs. Strang is correct when she informs Dysart that Alan is much more than merely a product of his parents. She may have oversimplified the case by blaming what Alan has come to on the Devil; nevertheless, Alan has become possessed by a spirit—it just happens to be one of his own creation. Nietzsche writes that it was out of “a most profound need” “that the Greeks had to create ... gods.” Tutored enough to have a taste for myth and unlettered enough not to have to fight his way out of a web of abstractions (the modern malady), Alan moves instinctively to create his own myth surrounding the horse. By following his father's wishes, the boy would lose myth and become entangled in abstractions and optimism like a modern-day Laocoön. By following his mother's wishes, Alan would succumb to the naysaying of traditional Christianity that negates the will to power. In Christianity, Nietzsche sees “[h]atred of `the world,' condemnations of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality, a beyond invented the better to slander this life, at bottom a craving for the nothing, for the end, ...”
Why does Alan's father pull him from the horse? Is it merely because the stranger who offered the ride might harm him, or because the boy might be hurt unintentionally? Or is it that the parents fear passion, fear beauty and sensuality? Is it a fear of these concepts, or is it a lack of appreciation for them, that has caused a rift between Alan's parents in their sex life? It may be that fear of these concepts led Alan's father to offer an excuse for being at a skinflick. Would Mr. Strang be embarrassed because a movie is a swiz, or because this particular kind of movie illustrates his unacknowledged desire for passion? Alan, on the other hand, creates a myth that allows for passionate worship. And if his myth is an abomination, at least it is an active abomination rather than a passive one. At least it is a myth that says yes to the present rather than placing its hope in a time to come, as the mother's Christianity and the father's socialism trust.
Nietzsche provides a definition of “the mystery doctrine of tragedy”: it is “the fundamental knowledge of the oneness of everything existent, the conception of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation as the primal cause of evil, and of art as the joyous hope that the spell of individuation may be broken in augury of a restored oneness.” Alan seeks this union in his worship, that is, in the night rides he takes on his god—a horse—which culminate in sexual orgasm. Alan shouts “Make us One Person!” to “Equus,” or Nugget, one of the horses from the stable. This attempt to create oneness, as Nietzsche explains, is sacrilege: “In the heroic effort of the individual to attain universality, in the attempt to transcend the curse of individuation and to become the one world-being, he suffers in his own person the primordial contradiction that is concealed in things, which means that he commits sacrilege and suffers.” However, this very sacrilege is necessary in order to gain “[t]he best and highest possession mankind can acquire”: it “must be paid for with consequences that involve the whole flood of sufferings and sorrows with which the offended divinities have to afflict the nobly aspiring race of men.” Nietzsche claims that the sacrilege has “dignity.”Because of the sacrilege he has committed, the Dionysian man “feels himself a god.” And Nietzsche claims that, consequently, the Dionysian man “is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: ...” That Alan becomes a work of art through sacrilege and suffering means that he is something instead of nothing. He is creator become creation. And as Nietzsche asserts: “... it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified....” This is to say that Alan justifies his suffering in the world as an individual by creating a myth which unifies the totality of his existence in the world, and consequently, provides a place for himself inside that myth.
Alan's sacrilege is not the blinding of the horses. That is the crime he commits which almost sends him to prison rather than to the care of a psychiatrist. Alan's sacrilege is his destruction, momentarily through his artistic worship, of the division between individuation and oneness. This aspect of Alan's story links him to the Dionysian myth. This one aspect emphasizes the myth itself more than Alan. The passion involved emphasizes a pure passion. (pp. 315–17)
In the “un-Dionysian myth-opposing spirit” of tragedy since Sophocles, Nietzsche sees more attention to the individual and less attention to the myth, a “victory of the phenomenon over the universal.” Yet for all the peculiar details which make Alan more than the “usual unusual” for Dysart, Alan's sexual episodes with the horse appear more as religious rites than attempts to reach sexual satisfaction. It is helpful at this point to visualize the nonhorse aspect of the actor playing the horse; that is, an idea—the idea of passion and its link to worship—is being communicated, not a vision. These very facts point to the conclusion that Alan represents much more than a young man whose sexual inclinations lean toward bestiality.
Such a view also makes it apparent that an intelligent and “normal” man such as Dysart could find himself attracted to some vital quality of spirit in a young man who has committed the horrific crime of stabbing the sight from the eyes of six horses. Clearly, Alan is not unequivocally the positive pole in the play. There can be no doubt in the spectator's mind that Alan Strang is a tortured soul who is unbalanced and dangerous; consequently, we, along with Hesther Salomon, hope that the doctor will be able to end Alan's suffering. Our first reaction may be similar to that of the stable owner, Harry Dalton: “In my opinion the boy should be in prison. Not in a hospital at the tax-payers' expense.” However, it is just as clear that such initial responses of repulsion and fear will not do justice to the depth of Shaffer's play. Dalton can understand Alan's problem only as an isolated phenomenon; Dysart sees beyond the isolated phenomenon and understands Alan's problem as the absence of passion, worship, myth, and art in the modern world. Alan blinds six horses, and Dysart begins his struggle with new vision. The spectator of Equus must accept the paradox that a repulsive, horrific crime committed against innocent horses ignites a positive, poetic, spiritual fire within the deadened, timid soul of Dysart. It is, as Dysart says on more than one occasion, the “extremity” of Alan's case, one might say the Dionysian excess, which has started the struggle which Dysart faces.
Nietzsche writes that “the noblest opposition to the tragic world-conception—and by this I mean science” has “its ancestor Socrates at its head.” The Socratic man is the man of logic rather than instinct. He has “the optimism of science.” Nietzsche longs “for a rebirth of tragedy” and claims it will come about “only after the spirit of science has been pursued to its limits, and its claim to universal validity destroyed by the evidence of these limits....”
Not quite eight decades after Nietzsche published The Birth of Tragedy, twelve men of letters who were affiliated with the American South published [I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition], a volume of essays that takes as its main subject the following dichotomy: “Agrarian versus Industrial.” Their introduction states that “... the word science has acquired a certain sanctitude.” One essay in the collection, “Remarks on the Southern Religion” by Allen Tate, contains a few paragraphs which will help to illustrate more clearly how Nietzsche's comments on the culture of his day can illuminate Dysart and his growing realization of not only the value of myth, but also the danger of the theoretical approach and its manifestations in the modern world:
The reader must here be entreated to follow some pages of abstraction conducted in the interest of my religion, but partaking of that religion not an ounce. For abstraction is the death of religion no less than the death of anything else. Religion, when it directs its attention to the horse cropping the blue-grass on the lawn, is concerned with the whole horse, and not with (1) that part of him which he has in common with other horses, or that more general part which he shares with other quadrupeds or with the more general vertebrates; and not with (2) that power of the horse which he shares with horse-power in general, of pushing or pulling another object. Religion pretends to place before us the horse as he is.
Since this essay is not religion, but a discussion of it, it does not pretend to put before you the complete horse. It does pretend to do the following: to show that the complete horse may be there in spite of the fact that this discussion cannot bring him forth. In other words, there is a complete and self-contained horse in spite of the now prevailing faith that there is none simply because the abstract and scientific mind cannot see him.
This modern mind sees only half of the horse—that half which may become a dynamo, or an automobile, or any other horsepowered machine. If this mind had much respect for the full-dimensioned, grass-eating horse, it would never have invented the engine which represents only half of him. The religious mind, on the other hand, has this respect; it wants the whole horse, and it will be satisfied with nothing less.
Reading Equus in light of the preceding paragraphs, one can say that Dysart has “the abstract and scientific mind,” while Alan has “the religious mind.” The modern mind has lost half the picture—and now another name, Allen Tate, is added to those of Nietzsche and Shaffer as one who is concerned with the idea of balance, not madness. In the Tate paragraphs, one can see that science is manifested in industrialism; modern man respects the half of the horse that drives cars up and down the highways. This passage provides the transition from Nietzsche's comments on science and optimistic knowledge to Equus, particularly the last speech Dysart makes: he realizes that he will replace Alan's horse with “a nice mini-scooter” and send him off “on his metal pony tamely through the concrete evening....” Dysart also questions the concept of “Normal” during this speech: is it normal, “blinking our nights away in a nonstop drench of cathoderay ...?” Motor-driven appliances—by Hoover, Philco, Remington, Pifco, Volex, Croydex, and Robex—are labeled by Alan as foes he rides against withEquus. They are, the unessential. They are the foes that separate human beings from the elemental forces of nature. Man, Nietzsche tells us, is the “lost son” of nature, and the Dionysian can bring about a “reconciliation” between man and nature.
Dysart has “the one great Cyclops eye of Socrates,” an eye “denied the pleasure of gazing into the Dionysian abysses.” In the last few lines of the play, Dysart states that he needs “a way of seeing in the dark.” The limited vision of the Socratic view as opposed to the tragic view leaves one in weakness:
And now the mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by all past ages, and digs and grubs for roots, even if he has to dig for them among the remotest antiquities. The tremendous historical need of our unsatisfied modern culture, the assembling around one of countless other cultures, the consuming desire for knowledge—what does all this point to, if not to the loss of myth, the loss of the mythical home, the mythical maternal womb?
We may compare the preceding passage by Nietzsche with Dysart's ironic statement to Hesther: “Such wild returns I make to the womb of civilization.” Modern man's state of weakness leaves him afraid: “It is certainly the sign of the `breach' of which everyone speaks as the fundamental malady of modern culture, that the theoretical man, alarmed and dissatisfied at his own consequences, no longer dares entrust himself to the terrible icy current of existence: he runs timidly up and down the bank.” We may compare Nietzsche's comment on weak and timid modern man to Dysart's growing knowledge of himself in the world and the admission that he makes by the end of the play: “Without worship you shrink, it's as brutal as that ... I shrank my own life. No one can do it for you. I settled for being pallid and provincial, out of my own eternal timidity.”
In this state of weakness, there are things which Dysart cannot do. We know that on the physical level Dysart cannot procreate; he has, by his own admission to Hesther, “[t]he lowest sperm count you could find.” ... Dysart's physical inability to reproduce or create is symptomatic of his inability to create in terms of his profession. There are two reasons for this professional impotence. The first reason is what Nietzsche calls “the delusion of being able ... to heal the eternal wound of existence,” the “delusion of limitless power.” The second reason why Dysart is struggling while trying to treat Alan is paradoxical. Dysart experiences doubts concerning his work which are so severe that he reveals the following to himself, at last, through the dream where he envisions himself as a chief priest who sacrifices children: “It's obvious to me that I'm tops as chief priest. It's this unique talent for carving that has got me where I am. The only thing is, unknown to them, I've started to feel distinctly nauseous. And with each victim, it's getting worse. My face is going green behind the mask.” Nietzsche explains this paradox of gaining knowledge and losing the ability to act:
In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no— true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man.
Nietzsche proposes a remedy for this impotence: “When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail—suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy.” When Dysart tells Hesther that he is jealous of Alan, he is saying that he is jealous of a passion which can create gods; he is jealous of a spiritual and artistic creativity which Alan, disturbed though he is, has illustrated. Even when Hesther mentions Alan's pain, Dysart responds: “His pain. His own. He made it.” Without such creativity, Dysart lacks the “horsepower” which would enable him “to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being....” Consequently, Dysart's one eye not only keeps him from seeing existence whole, but incapacitates him in terms of spiritual and artistic vision. Dysart has greater and greater difficulty in justifying himself. (pp. 317–20)
Socrates had “a divine voice” which spoke to him, and Nietzsche writes that the voice “always dissuades. In this utterly abnormal nature, instinctive wisdom appears only in order to hinder conscious knowledge occasionally.” The instinctive voice Socrates heard could only dissuade, “[w]hile in all productive men it is instinct that is the creative-affirmative force, ...” Similarly, Dysart cannot create and affirm anything for Alan; Dysart can only negate and deny a part of Alan's self. His only creation will be a form of desecration: “Can you think of anything worse one can do to anybody than take away their worship?” During Alan's final abreaction, Dysart rushes toward him to stop him from stabbing at his own eyes with the invisible pick. By instinct, Dysart sheds his new-found doubts and reassures the boy by repeating the line: “I'm going to make you well”; however, his new insights have taken hold, found root in the small plot of Grecian soil in his soul, and he immediately refutes his instinct and modern training by saying the following as “[t]he light brightens,” as he moves “into the centre of the square”:
I'm lying to you, Alan. He won't really go that easily. Just clop away from you like a nice old nag. Oh, no! When Equus leaves—if he leaves at all—it will be with your intestines in his teeth. And I don't stock replacements ... If you knew anything, you'd get up this minute and run from me fast as you could.
An analogy is made complete at this point in the play: if and when Equus leaves, he will take the intestines of Alan with him, that is, Alan's very being, just as Dysart's dream has told him he will, by “helping” Alan, carve out the inner Alan: “I part the flaps, sever the inner tubes, yank them out and throw them hot and steaming on to the floor.”
Dysart realizes that he will not be able to accomplish what he wants to do for Alan: to make of him “an ardent husband—a caring citizen—a worshipper of abstract and unifying God.” In fact, all he can do is replace ecstasy with “the Normal.” In Nietzschean terminology, one could say that Dysart, the Alexandrian spirit, “substitutes for a metaphysical comfort an earthly consonance.” He will try to “... confine the individual within a limited sphere of solvable problems, ...”Dysart has a “reproduction statue of Dionysus” which he can “touch ... for luck”; this detail illustrates that Dionysian power is only a force outside of Dysart, not an intoxication within.
By the end of Equus, we have Alan destroyed not because he has tried to break past individuation into the realm of oneness, but because he is finally torn between two myths: the classical, pagan one he created; and the Christian one he inherited from his mother, which saddled him with guilt and shame concerning his sexuality and its relation to an ultimate concept like God. And he is destroyed also because he is torn between the outlet his sensuality has found in horses and his burgeoning physical interest in Jill Mason, which indicates a desire for a more normal sexual relationship. Dysart should be giving birth through creation to this patient, Alan. But he finds that he is artistically and spiritually impotent because he is what Nietzsche would call the Socratic man, devoid of Dionysian passion, worship, and creativity. He realizes his delusions, and his nausea prevents action. There is a birth trying to happen within Dysart; this birth, given Dysart's background, must appear illegitimate. He had conceived the idea of the tragic world view before he met Alan, and now he cannot decide what to do. Should he abort the Dionysian wisdom growing inside him and, by so doing, “help” Alan, so that Alan can carry on as half a man, rather than as a mental case? Or should he give birth to a new world view, a tragic one, and set Alan free, leaving him the dignity of his myth and worship, yet leaving him with the corresponding pain?
Nietzsche explains “[t]he metaphysical joy in the tragic” as follows:
... the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not´ affected by his annihilation.... the struggle, the pain, the destruction of phenomena, now appear necessary to us, in view of the excess of countless forms of existence which force and push one another into life, in view of the exuberant fertility of the universal will.
Whatever metaphysical joy in the tragic is apparent at the end of Equus stems from the idea that Dysart, a caretaker of people, gains some self-realization because he is faced directly with the passion of the Dionysian will. And perhaps he has been, in some sense, infused by this passion which cannot be annihilated. At the very least, he is more knowledgeable by the end of the play. And the struggle which he has begun could well be the catalyst for creation. When one considers the cultural criticisms which Shaffer makes, and the difficulty with which Dysart struggles between the tension of his modern, Socratic mind and his new-found Dionysian wisdom, one can find some joy in the fact that Shaffer, like Nietzsche, is engaging his public, so that it will realize that both science and art are necessary in our world. In Equus, Shaffer tells us that the age of the Socratic man is not over, but the idea of a healthy balance is still alive. (pp. 321–22)
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