Dialectic And Spectacle In The Harrowing Of Hell Essay, Research Paper
Roland Barthes’s essay on "The World of Wrestling" draws
analogically on the ancient theatre to contextualize wrestling as a
cultural myth where the grandiloquence of the ancient is preserved and
the spectacle of excess is displayed. Barthes’s critique — which is
above all a rewriting of what was to understand what is — is useful
here insofar as it may be applied back to theatre as another open-air
spectacle. But in this case, not the theatre of the ancients, but the
Middle English pageant presents the locus for discussing the sport of
presentation, or, if you prefer, the performance of the sport. More
specifically, what we see by looking at the Harrowing of Hell — the
dramatic moment in the cycle plays that narratizes doctrinal redemption
more graphically than any other play in the cycle — as spectacle offers
a matrix for the multiple relationships between performance and audience
and the means of producing that performance which, in turn, necessarily
produces the audience.
The implications of the spectacle could sensibly be applied to
the complete texts of the cycle plays, and perhaps more appropriately to
the full range of the pageant and its concomitant festivities. The
direction of pseudo-historical criticism, especially of the Elizabethan
stage, certainly provides a well-plowed ground for advancing the festive
and carnivalesque inherently present in the establishment and event of
theater. Nevertheless, my discussion here is both more limited and more
expansive: its limits are constructed by the choice of an individual
play recurrent through the four extant manuscripts of what has come to
be called the Corpus Christi plays; its expansion is expressed through a
delivery that aims to implicate the particular moment of this play in
the operations of a dominant church-state apparatus, which is,
ostensibly, a model of maintaining hegemony in Western culture. The
Harrowing provides a singular instance in which the mechanisms of
control of the apparatus appear to extend and exploit their relationship
with the audience (i.e. congregation). The play is constructed beyond
the canonized operations of the sacred, originating a narrative beyond
(yet within) the authorized vulgate; it is constructed only through
church authority yet maintains the divinely instituted force of the
orthodox doctrine.
Two introductory instances, one from the Chester cycle and the
other from the Towneley cycle, situate the narrative and event of the
play as a spectacle which engages the possibility of being consumed by
its historical and particular mass culture — a culture which was
primarily illiterate in both the official and the vernacular writings of
the church — and being understood within the hegemonic orthodoxy. The
introductory speech in the Chester Plays (The Cooke’s Play) describes a
previous knowledge that Adam — as representative for a fallen humanity
– apprehends exactly at the moment he articulates his speech:
Nowe, by this light that I nowe see,
joye ys come, lord, through thee,
and one thy people hast pittye
to put them out of payne.
Similarly, though now through Jesus’s self-proclamation, the
introduction in the Towneley cycle reveals the already known nature of
its narrative:
A light will thay haue
To know I will com sone;
My body shall abyde in gaue
Till all this dede be done.
The doubled "nowe" of Adam’s speech and the perfected futurity of
Jesus’s speech dictate a time before narrative. By expressing the
nature of narrative to be known and that the outcome of the particular
battle — which is hardly a battle — between Satan and Jesus is already
determined, both Adam’s and Jesus’s speeches establish a code for
participating in the festival. The audience is relegated within this
code beyond the activity of interpretation; they are placed outside of
the hermeneutic circle. Instead of calling for interpretation, the play
calls for consumption, which means, in this case, to view the spectacle.
The public then is subordinated to its own activity of visualization —
its own sense of perception — to gain access to the operations of the
festival. At this point of subordination to the visual, the audience’s
motives, according to Barthes’s description of the effects of the
spectacle, are extinguished:
The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether
the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the
primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all
consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees.
Though Barthes’s explanation is particularized to explain our
fascination with wrestling, his reading may become more useful if we
explore exactly the points of knowing and not knowing which are
significant for the audience of the Harrowing. The virtual awareness
that the Harrowing is "rigged" becomes impertinent in comparison to the
consequence of knowing the narrative as sacred — as authorized and
privileged text of doctrinal truth. By seeing what they know, the
members of the audience affirm their own knowing — that is their own
capacity to know — validating their own immersion in the light.
As Barthes suggests, the activity then is not of thought, but
instead, of repetitive affirmation. The yearly festival reincorporates
the "known realities" of the church year into the memories of its
congregation. The Harrowing happens because it always happens; its
events do not change because the narrative is merely spectacle,
revealing the necessity of its outcome [it happens because it always
happens or it happens because God (i.e. the church) says it happens].
Every sign of the players and the play is "endowed with an absolute
clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot." The
play is constructed in and as total intelligibility, which should
empower the audience to affirm and control its relationship to the
spectacle — to judge its authority and position. The play gains its
position as spectacle through repetition and institutionalization. The
pageant’s yearly performance, as an iteration of doctrinal litanies,
hypostatisizes the narrative of redemption in the cultural milieu.
Moreover, the authority by which the play is produced and written
validates the history being told. Indeed, it is not a history, but the
history. Even beyond the force of the church-instituted process of
validation, the play holds ceratin social values through convention,
concretization, and repetition. W. A. Davenport has noted that though
"these scenes convey no great moral force," the morality theme, present
in the cycle as it is in even lesser known morality plays such as Mary
Magdalene, gains "liveliness" by the conventionality of its
presentation.
If Barthes is correct about the nature of the spectacle, then
our reading of the Harrowing should allow for a positioning of the
audience where it obtains to a judgement concerning the outcome. For
Barthes, the audience must participate in a "pure and full
signification":
Leaving nothing in the shade, each action discards all
parasitic meanings and ceremonially offers to the public a pure and full
signification, rounded like Nature. This grandiloquence is nothing but
the popular and age-old image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.
What is portrayed . . . is therefore an ideal understanding of things;
it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive
ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of
a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without
obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.
By the positioning and antecedent action of the Harrowing of Hell, the
signification of plot articulates itself in totality — an ideal
understanding of things. Since the center of dramatic action hinges on
Christ’s confrontation with Satan, the dramatic action folds to that
exact point, where Satan has "already been diminished as a force of
opposition and the playwright had prepared for his demise." In the
Chester Plays, specifically, the audience has already been told that
"Christ hasse overcommen the devil" (Chester 224, line 176). But what
Barthes fails to negotiate or perhaps notice in ascribing a power to the
full signification of the spectacle is the audience’s necessary
involvement in the "perfect intelligibility of reality" when it is
predicated not on the intelligible reception but on the nature of
reality. When the stage is more than the wrestling mat, but the very
ground of heaven and hell, the audience’s position becomes tantamount to
eternal destruction or eternal bliss within this intelligible reality.
It is exactly at the point where the audience loses control in the
appearance of control that the operations or mechanisms of the hegemonic
orthodoxy become discernible.
Just as the spectacle privileges the audience and not the
production of the spectacle, so the play, at least the Cooke’s Play in
the Chester cycle, suggests a privileged subjectivity for the members of
the audience — a privileged subjectivity that will ultimately be
rewritten in the master narrative of God’s (that is the church’s)
history. As David comments on the spectacle for the audience, he
describes his own privileged position, which, in turn, escalates the
position of the audience to a heightened knowledge of self-delivery or
self-redemption:
I, kinge Davyd, nowe well may saye
my prophecye fulfilled is, in faye,
as nowe shewes in sight verey,
and soothly ys seene.
I taught men thus here in my lyefe-daye
to worshippe God by all waye,
that hell-yates he should afraye
and wonn that his hath bynne.
(Chester 332-3,
lines 185-192)
David’s speech couples the fulfilling of his prophecy — that Christ
would overcome Satan and the gates of hell — and his didactic function
as Israel’s king. He has taught the act of worship, and, in the
juxtaposition of prophetic fulfillment and Judaic history, Christ’s
actions become utterly dependent on the activity of the people.
Fulfillment is necessarily derived from the "worshippe" of "God by all
waye."
The apparent privileging of human activity in enabling the
freeing of the spirits in hell’s prison is problematized, however, by
the synchronizing of history — by the completion of the act of
redemption in a single speech (or series of plays within the pageant)
and by the position of the play’s audience in relationship to human
activity. The Corpus Christi pageant posits a temporal space that
constructs human history as a priori — in other words, human history
exists only insofar as it can be narrativized in the playing of the
historical scene. For the audience, history is not a text, but is
instead, to borrow form Spinoza, an absent cause that is only accessible
in textual form. Or, as Fredric Jameson says in his contesting of the
master narrative of history that people desire to possess, history "is
inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it
and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior
textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious." The
entire history of humankind is consequently directed by an absent cause
– or master narrative — that is only accessible for the Harrowing’s
audience through the offices of the church proper. Human activity is
subdued beneath the force of a performative narrative that gains its
position from the sacramentalizing of its word. The word is not
contestable; it derives its puissance from its history and from its
already known and knowing completion as narrative.
The history of the Corpus Christi pageant in general and the
Harrowing of Hell in particular provide a ground for the authority of
the text and performance. Some scholars have debated, often with little
effect, the doctrinal and historical connection between the Feast of
Corpus Christi and the cyclic drama that literary historians have
attached to it. Indeed, Harden Craig zealously argues that the
necessary historical connection between the two "is possibly an
ineradicable heresy." Likewise, Glynn Wickham encourages us to
"question how the plays ever became attached to a procession, a form of
celebration so antipathetic to their performance." Nonetheless, as
Jerome Taylor has aptly noted, the feast did attract and "gather" the
procession, and, historically, the plays as contained within the
festival represent the cultural activity of re-historicizing the present
in the master narrative of Catholic history.
We may establish part of the Harrowing of Hell’s historical
significance by relating the audience’s participation, which is an
active-passivity similar to the effects of a lack of drama under
Calvinist dogma, to the congregation’s delimited and litanized response
to the office of readings for Holy Saturday:
Quid istud rei est? Hódie siléntium magnum in terra;
siléntium magnum, et solitúdo deínceps; siléntium magnum, quóniam Rex
dormit; terra tímuit et quiévit, quóniam Deus in carne obdormívit, et a
sæculo dormientes excitivát. Deus in carne mórtuus est, et inférnum
concitávit.
Something strange is happening — there is a great
silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth
keeps silent because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is
still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised all
who has slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and
hell trembles with fear.
The prevailing silence controls the responsiveness of the congregation.
Sovereignty is determined only through the agency of Christ — a "real"
privileged subjectivity whose sleeping or waking determines the
trembling of the world. And just as the world trembles so does hell —
the two becomes analogous spaces marking a simultaneous harrowing of
hell and harrowing of here. The congregation’s response to the Matins
reading confirms its position in the present only as it is textualized
and narratized in the past performance of Christ: "This is the day when
our Savior broke through the gates of death." The audience of the feast
of Corpus Christi, like the congregation of Holy Saturday, responds to
the power of the dramatic harrowing by realizing a position of
deprivation. The audience cannot act; it can only be acted upon.
The audience’s passivity is further underscored by both the
textual and visual representations of the Harrowing of Hell preceding
the dramatic performances during the Corpus Christi pageant. The
narrativizing of the visual in the iconography (see the Holkham Bible
Picture Book, for example) again represents the completion of activity
before the activity begins. As in much of medieval iconography,
temporal spaces are collapsed, endings and beginnings are conflated in
single representative moments, and the spatiality of the image
subjugates the implicit narrative of events. Rosemary Woolf’s
description of the Limbo of Fathers demonstrates the conflation of
crucifixion, harrowing, and resurrection in a single spatial moment:
"the Limbo of Fathers is depicted as a small, battlemented building: its
doors with their heavy locks, have already crashed to the ground at the
touch of Christ’s Resurrection Cross" (emphasis mine). Complementing
the iconographic representations of the Harrowing, the Gospel of
Nicodemus, in its full mystical and miraculous detail, was the popular
and textual source for the Harrowing’s dramatists. Yet, as Rosemary
Woolf and other contextual critics have noted, the plays hardly convey
the dramatic force or poetic possibility of the Gospel. Instead, the
plays textualize the apocryphal source into the orthodox doctrine,
creating a spectacle of excess without the empowering visual
interpretation by the audience.
To some degree, the iconographic and apocryphal referents of
the Harrowing of Hell provide the base level for interpretive
possibilities: the historical and textual referent. However, as I
would hope to demonstrate, interpretive possibilities are obliterated in
the dominating desire of the play — and the church — to control the
social structure and to entrench the values — and therefore "laws" —
of the church apparatus. Oscillating within the literal referential
articulations of the play, the allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels
or senses operate. The allegorical mode is directed through the
implicit parallel between Christ’s history — his redemption of the
souls — and the church’s history — the break near the end of the play
(Chester 337 and Towneley 305) when the audience/congregation chants the
"Te Deum laudamus." The moral level is the individual, where the
subject in the audience is able to participate in self-interpolation,
placing the individual of today in the history of both the past and the
future simultaneously. The individual’s redemption, however, remains
collective, addressed to Adam’s "osspringe":
Peace to thee, Adam, my dearlynge,
and eke to all thy osspringe
that ryghtwise were in yearth livinge.
From mee yee shall not severe.
To blys nowe I wyl you bringe
there you shalbe withowt endinge.
(Chester 334, 205-210)
Isias. Adam, thrugh thi syn
here were we put to dwell,
This wykyd place within;
The name of it is hell;
here paynes shall neuer blyn.
That wykyd ar and fell
loue that lord with wyn,
his lyfe for vs wold sell
Et cantent omnes "salutor mundi," primum versum.
(Towneley 294, 37-44)
Identification with Adam’s sinfulness prefigures a (re)collection in
Jesus’s redeeming effort to break the gates of hell. Nonetheless, the
activity is utterly collective; morality cannot be apprehended on an
individual level, excluding individual interpretation from the
audience’s role. The exclusion of the individual places the
interpretive dilemma at the anagogical level, confronting the collective
"meaning" of history and giving authority to the spectacle of the
performance itself.
Earlier in this paper I identified the performance with sport —
a type of game in which the arbitrariness of the result is predetermined
by the apparatus of its production. What the Corpus Christi pageant in
general and the Harrowing of Hell play in particular present is a
dialectical foundation of empowerment and control. The spectacle posits
a knowing of "truth," creating an audience empowered by its own capacity
to know what is and to therefore possess that knowledge. The real, as
it is signified in the clarity of its repetition and form, is entrusted
to an audience of arbiters, who decide a personal validity for the means
of its articulation (to extend Barthes’s reading of wrestling, the
audience may judge the performance and the value of the performance even
if it does not judge the necessary relationship between the body of the
wrestler and the outcome of the event). The play, however, within its
limited origination as church extension, reaffirms the authority of the
church by limiting the authority of the individual. The collective is
privileged over and against the individual — so that, indeed, an
individual consciousness exists in the play only as rebellion (e.g.
Judas and Cain are left to dwell in hell with Satan exactly because they
positioned themselves as individuals, against the dominant domain of
Adam’s sinfulness).
The dialectic between the play as spectacle — and therefore a
means of enlightenment — and value-producing mechanism of the
"collective" church which institutes the myth as valid poses the problem
of seeing both operations, that is both functional modes, within the
play as identical. Adorno and Horkheimer’s potent and persuasive
definition of myth and enlightenment shows how each mode of cultural
operation serves to exercise power through what Lukacs calls
reification:
Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere
objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation
from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves
toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he
can manipulate them.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and enlightenment, magic and science,
mechanization and spirit, all serve as polar oppositions in a
dialectically organized agenda of manipulation and control. Likewise,
the pageant and the play orchestrate a subsumption of the individual’s
power — especially the interpretive power of the masses — into the
collectivized agency of the church.
The result of transforming the individual consciousnesses
present in the audience and the congregation into a homologized and
homogenized extension of orthodox values is coded in the presentation of
its form. All history as it is posited within the play has already been
written; the only question — and here I mean the undervalued question
of a member in the audience — is what position is marked — not
necessarily predestined or predetermined, although the means of making
this a self-determination have been completely removed from the mass
culture of medieval Catholic orthodoxy — for the individual. Will the
audience member be a member classified as goat or sheep (a question
addressed in a parable played briefly before the Harrowing? Is hell
harrowed for him/her? Moreover, the result of the question interrogates
mass culture itself, for the operations of the church-state apparatus
are not distinctly separate in effect from the culture industry and the
mechanization of the factory that Adorno and Horkheimer evaluate:
Culture as a common denominator already contains in
embryo the schematization and process of cataloging and classification
which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And which
entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the
same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by
occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the
evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter
that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to
sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the
concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality
contrasted with mass culture.
Indeed, what could be more subsumptive than a mythos of redemption and
salvation, constructed through a series of social and socially required
events, that ultimately demand a vilification of self-value and a
celebration of the church establishment.
In both the Towneley play and the Chester play, the chorus of
prophets, all participating in the monolithic community of
hell-to-be-redeemed, offer a collective subsumption of the individual.
The greatest desire of the audience must be to share in voice with the
prophets who speak of both praise and thankfulness. The consumptive and
subsumptive chorus in the Towneley play moves from Moses to David to
Isaiah in progressively shorter lines to silence the audience, rather
ironically, by invoking their collective chorus in litany:
Dauid. As I saide ere yit say I so,
"ne derelinquas, domine,
Animum meam in inferno;"
"Leyfe neuer my saull, lord, after the,
In depe hell wheder dampned shall go;
suffre thou neuer thi sayntys to se
The sorow of thaym that won in wo,
ay full of fylth and may not fle."
Moyses. Make myrth both more and les,
amd loue oure lord we may,
That has broght vs fro bytternes
In blys to abyde for ay.
Ysaias. Therfor now let vs sing
to loue our lord ihesus.
(Towneley 305, 389-402)
Affirmation through association becomes the fulfillment of the
audience’s constructed desire. The members of the audience join ranks
with the great prophets who have all been associated with their own
histories during the action of the Harrowing. The audience must join,
for it does not have access to the already written history; by being
displaced from the narratizing of redemption, it can only associate with
the characters who already participate in the code.
By this code I intend to suggest the positioning of the already
achieved narrative action which cannot be possessed as spectacle, but,
instead, must be apprehended as the mechanism of the church-state
apparatus to maintain power. The state apparatus is "defined by the
perpetuation or conservation of organs of power." The state apparatus,
to borrow an analogy from Deleuze and Guattari, is a contained system
with components and limits similar to the game of chess. The game is
played with a definite code, the pieces are determined to be what they
are by what they are. A knight is always a knight simply because he is.
A king will always be protected. In the same way, as a character to be
"played" again and again, in every year of the pageant and in every
other formulation of church doctrine, Jesus is always Jesus; he must
always win against Satan who is always Satan. God, in his redemptive
activity must be consistent (we still have this code and its response in
contemporary culture, as is typical in the Baptist belt where the phrase
"that’s not my God, my God is …" indicates an utter lack of
interpretive understanding as it is constrained by the operations of a
fundamentalist approach to a univocal God in a univocal way). The
consistency of the players, whether on a chess board or a medieval
horse-drawn carriage platform, necessitates the homogenization of the
players’ audience — the church’s congregation. Deleuze argues that the
state’s ability to reproduce itself exactly is determined through its
own public presentation — i.e. the fact that the state is and must be
public: "The State-form . . . has a tendency to reproduce itself,
remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily
recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public
recognition (there is no masked state)."
The Corpus Christi plays offer then an extension of the
church-state apparatus to construct, even as the mass does, a
congregation utterly unified in its interpretive understanding and
consolidated in its desire for redemption and its means of happening.
The collective meaning of history — the anagogical level of
interpretive meaning — is discernible only through the allegorical —
which is to say that church history accurately reflects redemptive
history to the point of requiring participation in one to assure
inclusion in the other. These claims concerning the plays and its most
dramatic representative of redemptive force, the Harrowing of Hell,
attempt to discern the mechanism of producing the power of the
church-state apparatus — how indeed, the superstructure gains support
from its base — and how, in fact, the pageant is the most accessible
form for disseminating the conservation of this power.
The plays demonstrate as a combination of social artistry and
cultural design an historical moment of political conservation and
dominant authorizing. It seems we are not merely to claim, as Hardin
Craig does, that the plays are "a theological intelligence motivated by
structural imagination that lasted from age to age in the development of
a great cycle of mystery plays." Instead, we should interrogate the
multiple dimensions of artistry and artificiality of the play; our task
is to ask how these plays operate as a performative moment coming
directly from the dominant arms of orthodoxy while still being
influenced by the severely limited mass culture. We may find, then, at
the center of the controlling mechanisms of the church-state apparatus,
the necessitated desire for community that even Satan validates and
proclaims:
Nay, I pray the do not so;
Vmthynke the better in thy mynde;
Or els let me with the go,
I pray the leyffe me not behynde!
The desire, of course, extends past Satan’s plea, for the homogenized
desire of the congregation ultimately — which is in history written and
yet to be — is directed toward a different answer from Jesus: one that
affirms salvation and again confirms the church’s orthodox pageantry of
performance.