Romantic play: from ludus to paidia, from agon to ilinx

151 ROMANTIC PLAY: FROM LUDUS TO PAIDIA, FROM AGON TO ILINX1 Play oscillates on a continuum between the free and the rule-governed polarity. If we use this paradigm to think about the development of Western thought, we see that it is marked by various stages of accentuation along this dynamic continuum between paidia (free play) and ludus (rulegoverned play). This development corresponds to the degree of interest in teleological structures. In the Romantic era, this interest is redefined by a sustained exploration of heterogeneity, performativity, and free play, which manifests itself in the breaking-up or recasting of hierarchical structures. This article addresses the transition from traditional literary aspects of agon (contest) to the free-wheeling vortex of ilinx (vertigo), which seeks to transgress and subvert accepted structures of hierarchy, thereby redefining our understanding and ways of conceptualisation. Negotiating the issues of becoming, indeterminacy and fragmentation, Romanticism is a precursor of avant-garde movements of modernity, and its channelling of certain play strategies is a case in point. The movement is from closed structures (ludus game) to open systems (paidia play), where structures are metaphysical, political, generic, and gender. The stability these structures had been endowed with by tradition and revolution alike are continually interrogated and destabilised by the heterogeneous contingency of Romantic agenda. 1 This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund Project Mirka Horov 152 When from these forms I turned to contemplate I seemed a Being who had passed alone Into a region of futurity, Whose natural element was freedom William Wordsworth, The Borderers (1842)2 Homo Ludens, the modern typology of play was formulated two decades later by the French socio-anthropologist Roger Caillois in his 1958 treatise Les jeux et les hommes (translated into English somewhat loosely as Man, Play and Games in 1961). Caillois identified four basic categories of play: alea (chance), agon (competition, struggle), mimicry (masks, deception) and ilinx (vertigo-inducing, destabilisation of the mind). These can in turn form various combinations and alignments, or stand in contrast to one another, creating a complex and fluid dynamics of conflicting forces, paradoxes and power paradigms. In ay categories of agon, alea, mimicry and ilinx are locked in a fluid continuum ranging from ludus (the orderly sphere of play subject to clearly defined regulations, such as competitive games) to paidia (the extreme opposite of ludus, a domain of free play where primeval energies abound, -based and game-oriented 3 This anthropologically grounded framework of play was later adapted for literary studies by Wolfgang Iser in his works Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (1989) and (1991). On the abovementioned spectrum of play, ludus and paidia nThe Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser FI 247), up any result achi 4 2 William Wordsworth, The Borderers [1842], IV.2.1815-19. This and all subsequent quotations follow this edition of the 1842 text: William Wordsworth, The Borderers, ed. Robert Osborn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Accessed at https:// archive.org/details/borderers00word_0/page/n9/mode/2up. 3 Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 259. Subsequent page references are marked FI and are given in brackets in the text. 4 Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 257. Romantic Play 153 FI xviii). While free play features impulses unchecked by rules, it represents a force of anlawlessness, which for Caillois constitutes the corruption of play. For Iser, however, this same anarchical tendency of free play represents the postmodern outlook. Instrumental or structured play is defined by a set of strict rules that are put in place to keep impulses in check, such as in a game of chess, and the point of the game is ultimately the preservation or re-establishment of s (at once origin and command). according to Iser, the four tive FI 263). He outlines the four strategies of play as follows: agon FI 260).5 Alea pattern of play based when given the upper hand, it aims to FI 261).6 Mimicry FI strategies ilinx - FI 262). Between paidia (denoting spontaneous play) and ludus (denoting rulegoverned games), this dynamic continuum goes through various stages of accentuation in the development of Western thought. This development is marked by the degree of interest or ideological investment in teleological structures. In the Romantic era, this interest is redefined, replaced by a sustained, if infinitely varied, exploration of heterogeneity, performativity, and free play, which manifests itself in the breaking-up or recasting of set hierarchical structures. I will address the transition from traditional aspects of agon in literature to the free-wheeling overhaul of ilinx, which seeks to transgress and subvert accepted structures of hierarchy, and thereby redefine our understanding and ways of conceptualisation. s elements of existence, and it also ties some of these heterogeneities together; but the heterogeneities are 7 As 5 Iser, Prospecting 256. 6 Iser, Prospecting 256. 7 James S. Hans, The Play of the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981) 11. Mirka Horov 154 - - FI 264).8 While traditionally, agon appears to be directed at winning the game, in postmodern literature it is frequently used to play a losing game. This may entail all conflicts of norms and values being deliberately marked as things of the past, thus exposing the closed nature of the systems that gave them their function and validity. It may also show that all forms of meaning are nothing but defense mechanisms designed to achieve closure in a world where open-endedness reigns.9 Negotiating the obsolescence or inadequacy of closed-system arc s and foregrounding the issues of open-endedness, becoming and fragmentation, Romanticism is a precursor of avant-garde movements of modernity, and postmodernity, and its channelling of certain types and individual elements of play is a case in point. The movement is from set structures (ludus game) to open systems (paidia play), where structures are metaphysical, political, generic, economic, and gender. The stability these structures had been endowed with by tradition and revolution alike are continually interrogated and destabilised by the heterogeneous contingency of the Romantic agenda. As Isaiah Berlin puts it, one -10 play of the world, the eternally self11 In dramatic terms, agon traditionally refers to debate in Attic comedy or 12 be it confrontation, debate, strife the very life-blood of traditional dramatic structures. The agonistic scheme, however, requires a certain amount of control to sustain it, 8 Ben de Bruyn, Wolfgang Iser: A Companion (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012) 189. 9 Iser, Prospecting 256. 10 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (London: Pimlico, 1999) 119. 11 Truth and Method, trans. W. Glen Doepel, 2nd rev. edn, ed. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004) 105. 12 Encyclopaedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/art/agon-theatre (accessed 15 October 2019). Romantic Play 155 hence facilitating a successful dramatic situation and while agon is obviously still very much part of Romantic drama, its degree of dramatic control wanes, giving way to the infinitely more subversive potential of ilinx. On the scale of the play polarity between free and controlled play (paidia to ludus), free play gains considerable momentum in Romantic works, manifesting itself across a broad range of symptoms, thematic, discursive and structural. If, for instance, agon functions as orchestrated contest in the confines of rule-governed play e.g., a duel it may become the force of uncontrolled violence under the auspices of free play. Equally, if ilinx under the auspices of rule-governed play manifests itself as the carnival (i.e., the performance of a set-piece subversion, with a surreptitious reversal back to an establishment-affirming norm), ilinx under free play might spin everything out of control without any possibility of or interest in recourse to any recognised norm. In order to bring these abstract concepts and paradigms into a specific literary focus, I will discuss key examples from the highly transgressive and daringly experimental dramatic universe of the Romantic age. Drawing on some other notable Romantic-era dramatic experiments, namely relevant works by Byron and Coleridge, I will predominantly think about the ways in which William The Borderers, written in 1795-96 (revised and published in 1842) constitutes a valuable case in point. Wo unambiguously signals the waning of traditional agon as a key constitutive function of dramatic action, while also showing the subordination of agon to the performative vortex of ilinx. Recasting the dramatic structures laid down by agon, ilinx can be most productively characterised by the subversion of structures, which now becomes the defining dynamic of dramatic action and tension; by extension, alongside dramatic action, ilinx also subverts the traditional ethical and teleological concepts defining history in general, conceptualised in particular by The critical path drawn from the bitter lessons of the French Revolution to the Romantic sense of history as overwhelming chaos is well trodden what might prove rather more interesting for our purposes are the implications of the systematic erosion of the theatrum mundi trope in Romantic drama, as Martin herein 13 Oswald, pits the concept of action as fundamentally arbitrary and hence pointless 13 the Other in European Journal of English Studies, 6.2 (2002): 208-209. Mirka Horov 156 against the ethos of equally pointless but inevitable infinite suffering, in a transgressive bid to overthrow any notion of historical progress or indeed actionendowed meaning, as the following existentially-charged speech shows: OSWALD: Action is transitory a step, a blow, The motion of a muscle this way or that -vacancy We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed: Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, And shares the nature of infinity. (III.5.1539-44) While the original draft has Mortimer r version rewrites this entirely, with Marmaduke now responding in the shown, Wordsworth was all too aw he speaker of The Prelude well as changing his name from Rivers to Oswald.14 Disconcerting similarities do Borderers f theatrum mundi is disrupted a 15 resulting in a blurring almost unto dissolution of traditional ethics as well as the moral vestiges of the tragic form. The ramifications of the increasingly forking path of moral import and dramatic action and ethos have been long in the making, but it is during this particular era of dramatic history that we sense a decisive breaking point. Concerning moral purpose in drama, the following well-known quotation from Preface to The Cenci serves as a pertinent reminder of this decisive shift: There must also be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient 14 Theresa M. Kelley, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 77. 15 Romantic Play 157 aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself.16 m which corrupts drama, and that a growing concern about the efficacy or indeed possibility of such moral education in dering and centrifugal ethos. The paradigmatic wedge between moral purpose and the ethos of the dramatic work becomes increasingly more pronounced in these Romantic texts. According to -mad therefore meaningless lete despair. 17 The moral of this critical reading is itself quite telling and we have to ask, is such The Borderers ndamental failure to incorporate t 18 The tendency towards, or rather deliberate performance of, subversion, marked by an increasing centrality of ilinx, signals a gradual shift in the ethos of [t]he forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms but respond to haphazard conflicts. They do not manifest the successive forms of a primordial intention and their attraction is not that of a conclusion, for they always appear through the singular randomness of events T]he world of effective history knows only one kingdom, without providence or final cause, where there is only the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance. 19 16 P.B. Shelley, Preface to The Cenci, Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Major Works, ed. Zachary 316. 17 Romantic Drama, ed. Gerald Gillespie (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994) 175. 18 19 Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D.F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977) 154-55, quoting Aphorism 130 fr Daybreak. Mirka Horov 158 unpredictable ways. The paradigms of causality endowed with meaning are incompatible with the perceived reality of history which subsists overwhelmingly to resist this view of human history as mala fide mayhem, its performance, and the centrality of its rhetorically endowed antagonist, Oswald, ultimately signals the opposite. In the rather deliciously ludicrous wording of this villain of Borderers, the arbitrariness of existence and the intellectual vacuity of remorse is epitomised as follows: OSWALD: Remorse It cannot live with thought; think on, think on, And it will die. What! in this universe, Where the least things control the greatest, where The faintest breath that breathes can move a world; What! feel remorse, where, if a cat had sneezed, A leaf had fallen, the thing had never been Whose very shadow gnaws us to the vitals. (III.5.1560-67) of many, marks him decisively as the villain of the piece, and his example is clearly designed to shock the reader/a Borderers, who kill him in the finale), the spectral power of remorse is still present here despite the fervent negations our discussion about the paradigm-dissolving maelstrom of ilinx, however, is arbitrary ways, corroding the planned moral fabric of the drama. The seemingly e thing ha strikes a resounding chord if we read the drama alongside play theory, attesting to an open system governed solely by chance, precluding any concept of unifying meaning to arrange its arbitrary nexus of occurrences. The only way Wor elaborate ploy to entrap Marmaduke. erodes the structures of tragedy and its derivatives (revenge tragedy, Gothic drama), exploring the limits of dramatic form. As Matthew Bevis proposes in his most recent academic book, and dare we say one with a most unlikely title, Romantic Play 159 , The Borderers 20 One example among many o Moralist, / I should make a wondrous revolution here; / It were a quaint -24). The performative pple through the fabric of strategy deploys vertigo-inducing ilinx and illusion-weaving mimicry, the key play elements of the carnivalesque, destabilising both the mind and conscience of his illusion of reality, which gradually uproots the ethos of the entire drama. While s Machiavellian strategy pivots around a key mimicry of truth, repeated s) and conscience (internalised s) dazzle and to blin -65) his darker -69). shrewd delusions seek to untie the very -30). We could hardly look for a more apposite quotation to characterise the dynamics of ilinx are subverted, undercut, canceled, or even carnivalized as they are played against 21 And, as Iser explains the textual interaction of ilinx and agon teraction with other characters, in this case the beggars, is also rife with the rhetoric of ilinx (II.3.944-45). His asides betray an intricate psychology of double-edged destabilisation at work, however set him free. What follows? I have learned / That things will work to ends the -37). The same freedom from the confines of conscience prevents Oswald from releasing Marmaduke from the web of delusions. As Hans-Georg Gadamer elucidates the nature of play in general, 20 Matthew Bevis, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019) 148. 21 Iser, Prospecting 256. Mirka Horov 166 under whose auspices, as Iser reminds us, ilinx FI 271). The intertextual medley, scattered across the drama in varying degrees of intensity, is a case in point, attesting to the free reign of ilinx over agon: fo dominant, the conflict of norms, values, feelings, and whatever else is incorporated into the textual repertoire will become illusory; in consequence, the opposing positions will seem like a past world that has been left FI 273). This is manifest throughout the drama, and highlighted even in its moral-binding finale. he sentences himself to wander in the wilderness, exiled from humankind. Heavy with Miltonic resonance, he pronounces his bleak future to his band of borderers thus: MARMADUKE: [ ] a wanderer must I go, The Spectre of that innocent Man, my guide. No human ear shall ever hear me speak; No human dwelling ever give me food, Or sleep, or rest: but, over waste and wild, In search of nothing, that this earth can give, But expiation, will I wander on A Man by pain and thought compelled to live, Yet loathing life till anger is appeased In Heaven, and Mercy gives me leave to die. (V.3.2312-21, emphasis added) The nomadic existence in the Borders which before signified freedom now y of the mind is once again, as Manfred -for source of conciliation. However, the spectrality that looms large throughout the drama, with Marmaduke rehashed into a spectre of ing, is revisited even here in the finale. This peculiar relay of closing speech, is worth noting. Oswald sums up his sinister carnivalesque bid to create an outcast doppelgange become / A shadow of myself -9), a spectral masquerade aimed to forge an unbreakable connection between Marmaduke and - (IV.2.1855victim, Marmaduke, as merely baleful spectrality, for want of any rational Romantic Play 167 the shape of man do cross -6). The confounding encounters and sensory vertigo that transcend the Gothic, resonates with the dynamics of absence, difference and suppression that mark the workings of ilinx. As Iser explains of ilinx, the game is one There is clearly an anarchic tendency in ilinx, and this not only liberates what has been suppressed; it also reintegrates what has been excluded. Thus it allows the absent to play against the present, and in everything that is present it opens a difference that makes whatever has been excluded fight back against the representative claims of what excluded it. Whatever is present is as if mirrored from its reverse side. (FI 262) triggers of uncertainty far from a meaningful closure, th V.3.2293-97) seems like a simultaneous rewriting and erasing of whatever it is we have just witnessed y for what sort of legacy or history is likely to be recorded in this manner? Having argued the case for the predominance of the strategy of ilinx in Romantic drama, it is worth pausing now, at the close, at a notable rewriting of an originally highly transgressive drama and explore its implications. The example Osorio (1797), later recast, published and successfully performed as Remorse (1813). The original version, Osorio, written Borderers, ends with the wronged Moor widow -to-be-satisfied revenge, voicing a powerful, transgressive bid for revolution and liberty: ALHADRA: This arm should shake the Kingdoms of the World; The deep foundations of iniquity Should sink away, Earth groaning from beneath them; And all that wore and had the Spirit of Life Mirka Horov 168 Sang a new song to him who had gone forth, Conquering and still to conquer! (V.ii.206-15)34 speech imbues the finale with a worryingly seductive combination of agon and ilinx where agon stands at the fore in t ilinx comes across most strongly in the latter part, transforming, again rather worrying l and a desire to right wrongs, is dispelled in the later version, Remorse the very suggests what sort of drama we might expect. Here Coleridge deliberately blunts the revolutionary edge and rewrites the finale in a more straightforwardly moral manner: the villain, now called Ordonio, is duly dispatched on stage by Alhadra, managing both to f ; V.i.259)35 and beg forgiveness of his brother Alvar, against whom he has persistently aged by the newly appended moral, Alvar closing the drama with god-fearing resolution: -88), highlighting the working 36 rewriting curbs potential allegations of untoward libertarian fervour to secure a more likely bid from Drury the free reign of ilinx in his drama more profoundly than the moral of accumulated subversions with ease. While these and many other Romantic dramas signal with varying intensity towards the subversive irresolution which marks the ethical conundrum we have often, for want of a better word, labelled modernity, they do so in ways that channel ilinx rather than agon, and favour free play over rule34 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works vol. III, Plays, Part 1, ed. J.C.C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) 148. 35 S.T. Coleridge, Remorse (Printed Version), Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works vol. III, Plays, Part 2, ed. J.C.C. Mays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) 1323. 36 Coleridge, Remorse 1324-25. Romantic Play 169 37 and there are many instances facilitating the potential of ilinx 38 Moreover, as Iser notes e all-consuming passion paidia FI 338), while in older literature and drama, agon and alea hold various s in place, limiting the expanse of free play. In this respect, these Romantic works are less a set of failures, eccentricities of renowned poets whose egotistical hubris or pecuniary need led them astray or indeed, as some traditional critical narratives have it, the nineteenth-century nadir of dramatic history, only redeemed by the great works of realism and naturalism of the latter half and more the natural precursors of modern experimental drama: the theatre of cruelty, the theatre of the absurd, or the holy theatre of Peter Brook, all preoccupied with recovering the mystery of the dramatic through paidiac disruptions of the conventional notions of space, action and its meaning through the subversive deployment of ilinx across the board. 37 Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy, trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 104. 38 Caillois, quoted in Iser, Tristram Shandy 104.