I I

72-15,329 t

WILLIAMS, Richard Darby, 1942- POETA LUDEHS: EXPLORATIONS IN THE THEORY OF ART AS PLAY.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan

© Copyright by

Richard Darby Williams

1972

THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN-MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED POETA LUDENS; EXPLORATIONS IN

THE THEORY OP ART AS PLAY

DISSERTATION

Presented In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By Richard Darby Williams, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University 1971

Approved by

Adviser Department of English PLEASE NOTE:

Some pages have indistinct print. Filmed as received.

University Microfilms, A Xerox Education Company PREFACE

Play Is an elusive term, rich in meaning and implication and varied in usage. We speak of the erotic love play or foreplay of lovers and of the holy play of the gods. We play games, musical instruments, and roles; we play with ideas, with toys, and with playmates; in various senses we play up, play down, play out, play into, play on, play off, and play back. Movies play at theatres, sunlight plays on waves, otters play on mudslides, lovers play the field, and gamblers play the horses. Almost any activity, any creation, and any person can be described as playful.

Such linguistic fluidity makes it extremely difficult to define play from any single perspective. Considering the richness and elusiveness of the concept, it seems more appropriate to examine play from several related or over­ lapping points of view. That is the method I have followed in this thesis, coming at play through diverse channels and examining many of its multiple uses and meanings. The main approaches are political, historical, metaphysical, aesthetic, physiological, psychological, and structural.

No one approach tells us all we need to know, but each one

11 furthers our understanding of play and suggests how valuable the concept has become In the humanities.

My chief interest is to examine the usefulness of the term play in aesthetic theory. Throughout this thesis I am working toward a theory of art as play. It seems clear to me that art is one of the extensions into adult life of the child's world of play. The artist shares with the child the fun of imitating and of playing roles, the freedom of imagining and toying with reality, the challenge of making and creating— of transforming fictions into forms.

But this aesthetic theory is placed in a much larger human context. I arrive at aesthetics and literary criticism only after the much ado of two major excursions in the first two chapters— one into politics and history, the other into metaphysics. These two chapters represent opposite sides of the same coin. Wavering between heaven and earth, man is a creature of two worlds, one time-bound, the other timeless. I look at play both as a process of becoming and as an end of being; I try to demonstrate that both sides of man's paradoxical nature are tied up with the notion of play.

I reveal and celebrate my political and spiritual beliefs with an enthusiasm that will undoubtedly seem subjective, confessional, and self-assertive— modes that seem legitimate to me even If they are not ordinarily used

i l l In graduate school dissertations. Conceivably, the arguments for art as play In the final three chapters could stand on their own, independent of the political and religious orientations of the first two chapters. But much of the significance of my play aesthetics would be lost without these broader concerns. The theory of art as play remains incomplete without some sense of how play does have meanings, secular and sacred, which touch the very tissues of life itself.

Politics and metaphysics provide then the two larger perspectives of my aesthetics. Chapter I deals with the political overtones of play: play seen both as revolution­ ary means and as utopian end. I consider play in this section as part of the historical process of becoming and emphasize its peculiarly contemporary driving force. Play has become the identification card for members of an emergent counter-culture intent upon creating their own variety of political and cultural freedom. This alone has helped to make play such an important, richly-loaded, and elusive word in our time. In Chapter II I look at life sub specie aeternltatls. play God, and try to divine the metaphysical meanings of play. In many respects these cosmic meanings simply rediscover on another plane the political implications of play; freedom and creation are again the key concepts. And so these first two chapters

iv finally meet to form a circle.

Within this circle, on the magical playground of art,

I have elaborated a theory of art as play. A brief sketch

of ray aesthetic theory is provided in the third chapter,

an outline that is gradually refined and expanded in the

two concluding chapters. Much of what is set forth as my

own play aesthetics in Chapter III I have learned from

previous play aestheticians and theorists. I record my

debt to the past in the fourth chapter, a critical survey of various theories of play— physiological, biological, and psychological. In the final chapter I turn to structural­

ism as another approach and indicate possible future directions for a continually evolving play aesthetics.

The gist of my thesis can be stated in one sentence: art, like the best of life, is play. The rest, all that has been built upon this childishly innocent belief, can be aptly described as attempts to give as many reasons as possible for believing this and as many qualifications and refinements as time and space allowed. Because good reasons for considering art a species of play can be found everywhere and because variety is a virtue, I have some­ times recited these reasons from the past, have sometimes

Identified them in the present, and have sometimes attempted to divine them in the future.

One result of this theoretical Indirection (or

v multiplicity) will be obvious at first glance: the Protean

term play undergoes a surprisingly large number of meta­ morphoses, Although play stands at the center of everything

I write, I have not attempted (as Huizinga for one did) to fold all into one and to seek a single definition of play that will remain inclusive throughout. I think of play as the creative spark of the universe, Deus ludens, from which all else springs forth. Arriving long after the creation of the universe, we hear only the distant reverberations, the echoes, of that great event. Rather than turning back on play, I ride a few of the crests of numerous waves spreading out from the central point.

What has been lost in the way of precise focus I hope has been made up for in well-roundedness. Not a dissertation in the conventional sense of a clean, well- lighted place, what follows is an apology both for life and for art. If this seems unscholarly and undisciplined, perhaps it is because our rationale for the function of scholarship in the humanities has been, in the past, too limited and too parochial,

I regard the present work not as my final contribution to literary criticism nor even as my last words on the subject of play, but only as an unfinished intermediate stage in the long-range creation of an aesthetic theory.

I have not, for example, made much of an attempt to put

vl theory into practice by discussing specific literary works 4 sub specie ludi. That crucial task remains to be done.

And the theory itself needs to be perfected and sharpened.

So at most I have staked out a territory that needs

exploring. And I have argued that literary critics need to

take their places among the many others who are presently

exploring the fertile garden of play.

X am indebted to many teachers, critics, and players.

I owe special thanks to Charles Wheeler for his enthusiastic

support and critical advice throughout the writing; to Joan

Webber for providing inspirations and insights I have yet

to bring to maturity; to Julian t&rkels for being both a

good reader and a good sport; and to Tony Stoneburner for

ministering to my spirit and teaching me the theology of

play. I dedicate this playful work to my playmates, whose communal dancing, laughing, and sporting have brought

me the feast of joy.

vll VITA

January 20, 19*1-2 , , , Born - Goshen, Indiana

196*1- ...... B.A, , The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

I967-I969 ...... N.D.E.A. Fellow and Teaching Assistant, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

I9 6 9 ...... M.A., The Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio

1969-1970...... Teaching Associate, Denison University, Granville, Ohio

1970-1971 ...... G.L.C.A. Fellow and Visiting Lecturer, Denison University, Granville, Ohio

PUBLICATIONS

"Two Baroque Game Poems on Grace: HerbertTs ’Paradise' and Milton's 'On Time'," Criticism. XII (1970), 180- 19*1-.

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

Studies in Literary Criticism. Professor Charles Wheeler.

Studies in Renaissance and 17th Century Poetry and Poetics. Professors Joan Webber and Ruth Hughey.

Studies in 19th Century Literature. Professor James Logan.

vlil TABLE OP CONTENTS

Page PREFACE ...... il

VITA ...... viii

Chapter

I. THE DEATH OP HISTORY AND THE BIRTH OP P L A Y ...... 1

The Abolition of Time: the Political Significance of Play The Abolition of Work: Play and Technological Revolution II. "WELTSPIEL": THE SACRED PLAY OF CREATION ...... 5^

III. POETA LUDENS: TOWARD A PLAY AESTHETICS . . 114

Games, Rules, and Art: Costumes and Uniforms Play, Display, and Replay In Art

IV. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY OP ART AS PLAY: A HISTORY OF PLAY AESTHETICS . . 156

Autonomy: Art as Recreation Physiology: Art as Surplus Energy Biology: Art as Instinct Psychology: Art as Wish-Fulflllment, Therapy, and Assimilation

V. ON THE STRUCTURES OP GAMES AND ARCHETYPES . 214

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 242

ix CHAPTER 1

THE DEATH OP HISTORY AND THE BIRTH OP PLAY

If you make a revolution, make it for fun, don't make it in ghastly seriousness, don't do it in deadly earnest, do It for fun.

— D. H. Lawrence, "A Sane Revolution"

I. The Abolition of Time: the Political Significance of Play

"Let's make a revolution for fun!" D. H. Lawrence's advice for conducting a sane revolution has become the rallying cry for a generation of young Americans intent upon destroying an old culture and replacing it with a newly created one. The spirit of play that unites many of these festive radicals may, at first glance, seem incongruous with their professed revolutionary ends and frequently militant means. What have fun and revolution got to do with one another?

It Is my purpose in this chapter to show what the spirit of play and revolutionary ardor actually do have in common and to explore some of the political Implications of play. Since a rather wide field will be covered, let me briefly outline the terrain. I begin by observing how both 2

play and revolution make similar attempts to escape from

time and history. This leads into a discussion of play as

it is used in contemporary anti-historical political thought.

Play is seen hy many young counter-cultists and certain

radical political theorists as both the force and utopian

model for liberating man from history and time. Play in

political thinking becomes a metaphor for describing the

creation of human freedom and utopia. In the second half of

the chapter I look at a hypothetical model of the future and

try to imagine how the political dream of a world without

work and time-clocks (unfree labor) might conceivably come

about through modern technology. This allows me to pose

fundamental questions regarding the value of the humanities, the academic world, art, and literature. I try

to show, in other words, that the political meaning of play has a direct bearing on theories of art, which are them­

selves products of time. Play is radical by nature. It Is

In connection with Ideas about play that utopian schemes to

abolish time and to abolish work are generated.

Play and revolution both seem to require a similar antipathy towards chronological time; both seek to diminish

or destroy the power of time over man. In play this comes about in the creation of a fictional universe, a "play- world," which runs on its own special "play-time," a kind

of unthreatening time that differs radically from the 3

repressive and. unfree world of normal clock-time. In the

language of revolution this same attitude reveals itself as

an effort to break the historical continuum, to interrupt

the flow of time, to stop the historical clock, and to

liberate the present from the dying world of the past. The

final end of revolution is conceived of as the end of

history and the creation of a utopia that is no longer

subject to time, change, decay, and the whims of historical

process. The creation of such a utopia would amount to the

death of history and the birth of play. For utopia, itself

a kind of imaginary play-world, is enclosed apart from the

real world and liberated from the fetters of chronological

time and historical continuity. The ideal goal of political

revolution is the creation of a free world of play, a

utopia that makes further historical struggle unnecessary.

To develop some of these notions I want to begin by

considering the classic monastic utopia envisioned by one

of the most playfully revolutionary writers of all times,

Francois Rabelais. In chapters 52-57 of the first book of

Gargantua and Pantagruel Rabelais imaginatively creates a utopian monastery, the Abbey of Theleme. Richly endowed with sensual delights, the magnificent Abbey stands as almost a complete antithesis to the conventional medieval monastery. Aesthetic rather than ascetic in nature, the

Abbey contains thousands of lavishly furnished apartments, fountains, paint j..js, tapestries, playgrounds, swimming

baths, and pleasure gardens. The men and women (all

beautiful, well-built, and sweet-natured) wear brightly-

colored gowns, precious beads and jewels, and fashionable

accoutrements. They are free to come and go at will, to

marry, to indulge in sex, to pray in private chapels (there

is no main church), and to make merry. She motto "Do What

You Will" aptly summarizes the life-style of the fortunate

UiSlemltes: "All their life was regulated not by laws,

statutes, or rules, but according to their free will and

pleasure.111 Supported entirely by the unlimited wealth of

Gargantua, their patron, the Thelemites never need to work

and remain wholly free to pursue lives of luxury, pleasure,

and communal play.

Like most utopian schemes, the Abbey of Theleme stands

outside the world of real time as we know it. Most liter­

ary utopias are situated in some remote geographical area

or in an imagined future: as ideal play-worlds they need to

be spatially or temporally separated from the practical,

everyday world. Setting utopia in the future is one method

of insuring the freedom of the creation from experienced

time. Rabelais achieves much the same temporal freedom in his utopian vision by symbolically banning clocks:

And because in the religious foundations of this world everything is encompassed, limited, and regulated by hours, it was decreed that there 5

should be no clock or dial at all, but that affairs should be conducted according to chance and opportunity. For Gargantua-said-that the greatest waste of time he knew was the counting of hours— what good does it do?— and the greatest nonsense in the world was to regulate one's life by the sound of a bell, instead of the promptings of reason and good sense.2

The absence of clocks symbolizes the kind of freedom that is possible when time itself has been abolished. The perfect utopia would be an eternal paradise or heaven, where time, change, and death are unknown. Rabelais saw clearly the repressiveness of clock-time; like Kant he placed freedom outside of time. Only in states of unfreedom, when men must work and regulate their lives according to the hands of a clock, is chronological time important. In complete freedom, in play, ordinary clock time ceases to matter, to threaten, or to control. To the person who has no schedule to keep the hours of the day are meaningless.

In play we come as close as humanly possible to experiencing freedom, Including the psychological feeling of being liberated from time. Intense play absorbs and involves a person so completely that the real world ceases to exist and time seems to stand still. This phenomenon is commonly experienced in sexual foreplay and orgasm. It is also akin to the mystical experience of a timeless present attained under certain meditative states. Certain hallucinogenic drugs produce a similar effect; motions may 6

■be speeded up or slowed down at the percelver's will. The perception of time depends on the state of consciousness of the observer; the experience of time is relative. In this sense play can be described as the experience of freedom from time or of control over time.

A child deeply engrossed in play may refuse to hear his mother shouting the inevitable, ,lit,s time for dinner."

The adult world of clocks, schedules, routines, and appointed hours comes as an intrusion on his timeless play-world. For in the midst of intense play a child 'forgets' the passing of hours; time flies by unnoticed; all that matters is the present moment. Gradually, after being punished for being

'late', the child learns to confine his play-time to limited periods and to abide by the adult regulations concerning time. He learns to accept the adult world of clock hands and real time, a world that is perpetually ticking away and dying. There is a considerable degree of truth in the maxim that says that the amount of freedom a person possesses can be expressed as the amount of time he can call his own. As a worker the adult has considerably less free time than the child. Work is unfree time that we owe to someone else.

Play is free time that we own completely. This seems to me to be the essential difference between work and play: work assumes time owed, play assumes time owned.

The distinction holds true even for kinds of play that 7

require the observance of time. For even here a different

kind of time belongs to the world of play. One way in which

to note the differences is by comparing the clock on the

wall of an office to the scoreboard clock at a football

game. The hands on the office clock never cease to revolve:

time is an inescapable, external, regulatory force. Ihe

workers have no control over the clock, no power over time;

they must regulate their activities according to prearranged

points marked by the perpetual sweep of the clock hands.

The clock on the football scoreboard, on the other hand,

records time that is owned by the players. Time is not an

endless duration but a specified number of units or periods,

lumps of time; the clock hands measure playing time

remaining— that is, how much time Is still possessed. The

most striking feature of the scoreboard clock is that it

can be stopped by the players; play-time, unlike real time,

can be made to stand still. "Time out11 is an expression used only by players; for workers there can only be "time

off." In play we possess time; in work and everyday life

time possesses us. A team of players may decide to hold

the ball and "eat up the clock." Such a metaphor could not be applied to the ordinary world of clock-time, in which time is always the consumer and we are the consumed.

Our degree of subserviency to time can be considered

in a larger perspective as a major influence in determining 8

our attitude towards history. Those who feel bound by the continuity of history, tradition, and the Individual past are usually "conservative11 In politics. Those who feel little obligation to the weight of the past and who favor drastic change rather than continuity are generally

"radical." The spirit of revolution, of radical discontin­ uity, shares this with play: it too seeks to dissolve or discredit time. The break with the past is justified as a renewal and repossession of the world, a stopping of the historical clock, and a release from the dying world of the past. Owing little to the past, the revolutionary seeks to possess the present. What he desires is the freedom to create his own social order.

There is, then, something inherently "radical" about the very nature of play. If play is universally experienced as the freedom to create and invent, revolution is the attempt to create that freedom. Revolution is the effort to liberate the spirit of play; play Is the spirit and final end of revolution. Thinkers as diverse as Marx, Rabelais,

Marcuse, and Abble Hoffman have been telling us this all along. A life of pure play becomes the utopian goal of revolution; in the free state all activity Is voluntary; time ceases to be a threat or compulsion because It is owned by each individual. Only when he no longer owes himself to the clock and no longer owes his time to someone 9

else, but possesses his time fully and completely, is an individual ever free to "do what he wilt" ("do his own thing").

With this brief discussion of the anti-temporal nature of play before us, let us now further examine the politics of play. I want to concentrate in the remainder of this section on contemporary anti-historical attitudes, those associated with the counter-culture in America and often attributed to such radical political theorists as Herbert

Marcuse.

We no longer live in an age of unquestioning reverence for the past. History is under selge. Prom all sides we hear the prophetic death knell: history, like God, is dead.

Or rather, history must be willfully condemned and executed if we are to be released from its pertinacious, constricting bonds. Man— so the war cry goes— must be freed from his past, for only by transcending, by going "beyond history" can a new, more humane man be born.

Not only is history being attacked by the present generation of young student activists, marching under un­ furled banners proclaiming the victory of the "here and now," but by many of their well-established, grandfatherly university professors— those very dons most responsible for keeping the past alive and conversant. These latter converts' find themselves branded traitors and turncoats by their 10

more conservative colleagues.

One such turncoat might be the medieval historian

Lynn White, Jr., who believes that knowledge of the past, far from benefitting modern man, actually incapacitates him:

The new world in which we live is so unlike the past, even the past that is close to us, that in proportion as we are saturated in the Western cultural tradition we are incapacitated for looking clearly at our actual situation and thinking constructively about it. The better we are educated, the more we are fitted to live in a world that no longer exists.3

A future-oriented rationale is often offered to justify the attack on the past. History, say the time effacers, shall be destroyed in the name of liberation, the liberation of man from the past so that he is free to enjoy the present or to mold the future. The freedom of a generation to answer only to itself and its children, to refuse to share a collective responsibility for the sins of parents, and to

Ignore arguments that appeal to authority, tradition, and time-tested practicality— this is the liberation from his­ tory. The death of history presents Itself in an apocalyptic vision.

What makes this liberation, this escape from history conceivable is, ironically, the very technological progress that only the continuity of history has made possible. This is the view of such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0.

Brown, Marshall McLuhan, and others. Our electronic age of telephones, televisions, communication satellites, and 11 computers has rendered the written word obsolete— we are familiar with McLuhan's provocative thesis. If he is right, we need seriously contemplate the thought that the day may come when the past is either inaccessible or accessible to only a select few, those industrious scholars willing to relearn a dead language, the language of the written word, the language In which history is preserved to us.

Naturally we can hope that these energetic scholars will also be kindly translators, willing and able to translate the antiquated written language into the images and sounds, the wavelengths of our electronic age, and so preserve the past in the new media. Such a process seems feasible enough, though it obviously entails something far more difficult and complex than, say, libraries that can flash pictures of the printed pages of their books onto closed circuit television screens In the comfortable viewing rooms of subscribers' homes (that produces not a translation but an electronic facsImlle).

But translation is born of love; we translate works from dead languages into living languages only when we cherish and seek to preserve the originals. The much more crucial question is not whether it is technically possible to convert the records of the past into present media but whether the preservation of the past is itself desirable.

And this brings us to the thoughts of the Freudian-Marxian 12

revisionists, Marcuse and Brown. Both men urge the libera­ tion of man from his present repressive, materialistic, progress-oriented, consumptive societies. They borrow the notion of repression and discontent from Freud, especially

Civilization and Its Discontents. but unlike Freud and like

Marx, they are somewhat more optimistic about the chances of man's transcending this unhappy state. They bank their hopes on the creation, in Marcuse's phrase, of a "new man"— biologically distinct from his predecessors and motivated by "qualitatively new human needs."**' The new man, a higher creature on the evolutionary ladder, will be motivated by the needs for love, peace, calm, quiet, happiness, and beauty— rather than, as he is now in advanced capitalistic society, by the needs for acquisition, material progress, competition, frivolous luxury, and wasteful productivity.

And the evolution of the new man will require a revolution that effects a clean break with the past, provoking the death of history:

It can only be understood as the "end of history" in the very precise sense that the new possibilities for a human society and its environment can no longer be thought of as continuations of the old, nor even as existing in the same historical continuum; they presuppose the qualitative difference between a free society and societies that are still unfree, which, according to Marx, makes all previous history only the prehistory of man.5

For Marcuse this radical transformation of society is made possible by the very materialistic progress which must, 13

to some extent, now cease or at least radically redirect

Itself. This is the central paradox in the dialectics of

MarcuseTs futuristic thinking: progress has rendered progress obsolete. Automation provides the key for freeing man from enslavement to work and opening him to a life of play; or, more precisely, when labor becomes fully mechanized and automated, the worker is set free from the drudgery of alienated work, and his "work becomes play."6

I shall have more to say about this later.

Norman 0. Brown similarly looks forward to the rejuven­ ation of man, though his hopes are less founded on the sanguine faith in technological automation that comforts

Marcuse. Brown distrusts the claims of technology and science: they signify the primacy of intellect and the atrophy of sexuality; they create work but kill play. For

Brown liberation requires "the resurrection of the body," by which he means the "abolition of repression" and the release of sensual, erotic activity:

The life Instinct, or sexual instinct, demands activity of a kind that, in contrast to our current mode of activity, can only be called play. The life instinct also demands a union with others and with the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism and erotic exuberance.7

According to Marcuse repression has become a biological reality, rooted in the very needs of man; hence the near- impossibility in his view of radicalizing the proletariat in 14

a technological society that increasingly rewards their materialistic needs: it will take a new man to create the new world, but to create the new man we need a new world.

This is the locked circle, the Gordian knot that so frustrates Marcuse, Brown, on the other hand, accepts repression as a psychological rather than biological fact and believes it can be treated by psychoanalytic therapy.

But it is culture, not the individual, that must submit to the couch; culture, not the individual, that is neurotic and in need of treatment. Freud treated his patients by making them consciously aware of their unconscious drives, wishes, and instincts; Brown would apply the same technique to society as a whole (his book is such therapeutic disclosure). What stands to be destroyed by successful treatment and heightened consciousness is, again, history:

If historical consciousness is finally trans­ formed into psychoanalytical consciousness, the grip of the dead hand of the past on life in the present would be loosened, and man would be ready to live instead of making history, to enjoy instead of paying back old scores and debts, and to enter that state of Being which was the goal of his Becoming.8

History, argues Brown, records man’s restlessness, his striving for contentment; fully satisfied man would not seek anything; hence he would cease to write (which is to live) history.

While Marcuse and Brown share an equal contempt for the tyranny of the historical mind, and while both look eagerly towards the annihilation of history, they are willing to

sacrifice the past in order to achieve two distinct ends.

Harvey Cox, in an excellent section of his The Feast of

Fools.9 has characterized these two distinct attitudes

towards exorcising the past as "eschatologlcal immolation,"

or condemning the past in the name of the future, and

‘'Incarnational immolation," or condemning the past In the name of the present. Although he discusses these in

connection with the contempt for the past typified by Antonin

Artaud and John Cage, his observations hold equally true if we substitute Marcuse and Brown for the theatrical theorist and contemporary musical composer, respectively.

As an example of one who would immolate the past in the name of the future, Marcuse shares Artaud's fervor for

creating radically new forms— unlike any we have experienced before. These of course are political and social forms rather than theatrical ones, and we do not find

in Ifercuse the Artaudian dark view of mankind, a deep pessimism that threatens always to become a mere loathing of the wretched human lot and a willingness to endure (if not savor) scenes in which man is flayed by misfortune and misdeeds in, as it were, the stage spectacle of actor becoming cadaver. Still, Marcuse harbors fears about the violent means that may be required to usher in the new man; and, if he does not delight in Images of violence, pain, sickness, disease, and death like Artaud, he is prepared to 16

envision a living "Theatre of Cruelty" in the streets, a

bloody, elitist-led terrorist revolution as perhaps the

necessary prelude for negating present society and

radicalizing the proletariat.

Marcuse's pessimism stems, in part, from his awareness

that the traditional social agent for change in revolution­

ary theory, the worker, has been successfully absorbed and

neutralized by capitalism. Exploited in modern society by

skillful propaganda and slick advertising rather than the

slavemaster's whip, the worker has been brainwashed and sold

capitalism and its values so subtly that he remains

ignorant of his own oppression. Paradoxically, the most

totally dominated classes are the most complacent and

contented. With the emergence of the mass mentality and

the shrunken "one-dimensional ego,"^® Industrial man has succumbed to invisible forces beyond his narrow comprehension. In ignorant bliss the worker has no desire to rock his own treasure-laden burial ship while his material prosperity increases as he moves up the ladder of success: from 2.50 to 3.70 per hour, from one car to two, from black and white to color T.V., from electric shoe-polisher to electric toothbrush. The Establishment gluts and perpetuates itself by continually proffering new frills and gadgets whose acceptance Insures its own well-being and growth. The worker, grappling for each new trinket, remains 17

oblivious to his spiritual impoverishment and manipulation

by a repressive society.

How to break this vicious circle Marcuse does not pretend to know. In his optimistic moments he feels the worker can be educated and freed of his delusions, thus making mass enlightenment the first revolutionary project.

In his pessimistic moments he alludes to such traditionally distasteful topics as the emergence of a revolutionary counterestablishment, an enlightened dictatorship which would use force to impose higher consciousness and higher values (needs) upon the ignorant, oppressed classes. In any event, the good life Is a post-revolutionary, post-historical one: make revolution now, make love later. To usher In the future and end present exploitation, all thinking in terms of historical possibilities must cease. It is solely for the sake of the future that the past (as well as much of the present) must be destroyed. Marcuse*s immolation of the past is clearly eschatologlcal. Although Utopia Is technically capable of being created even now, its practical realization seems far distant. For Marcuse the

New Jerusalem, whose cornerstones must be laid now, awaits completion in an ever-receding future.

Brown, on the other hand, would find friendly listeners among Coxfs "incarnational lmmolators.11 Like the avant-garde composer John Cage, Brown asks that we listen 18

to the music around and within us, here and now— the sounds

we ourselves are capable of making, hearing, and

appreciating. The Bower of Bliss, a sensual recreation of

the Garden of Eden, offers its five delicious fruits to

each of us; if we would only pick and taste, we would

relish. Where Marcuse reflects the militant's quest for the

future., Brown affirms the mystic's delight in the present.11

Our cultural neuroses— guilt, anxiety, aggression,

restlessness— ensue from sublimation (desexualization) of

the body, from our worship of Apollonian reason to the neglect of Dionysian instinct.

We have had and have always had the means for

salvation within: Eros lives within our bodies and speaks

to us through the five physical senses. If we would only emancipate our senses and stop sublimating our instincts,

if we would only be receptive instead of aggressive, we

could enter the happy state of self-enjoyment and gratification, the immediacy of delight in sexuality that

is the key to happiness. Brown's is an lncarnatlonal

immolation. He seeks not to ring in the obscure future so much as to resurrect the concrete present. He calls upon us to celebrate the spirit in the flesh, to pursue direct erotic and sensual experience, to cease Becoming in order to enjoy Being. His message, as well we know, has been warmly embraced and accorded sacramental sanction by the 19

High Priests of the psychedelic sect, notably Alan Watts and

Timothy Leary, and their large congregations of euphoric

followers. Perhaps in its extreme forms we recognize this

brand of modernism as intellectualism's oldest enemy—

hedonism. If the torchbearers in Marcuse's imagination

brandish lighted incendiaries, those in Brown's twirl

lighted incense.

But despite these differences Marcuse and Brown share

one overriding belief: the uncrowning of history will

bring about the reign of play. Marcuse envisions the post-

revolutionary , post-historical metamorphosis of work into

play; whatever work now enslaves man will in the future be

performed by technology's machines and computers; whatever

activities do not enslave but liberate man will endure by

becoming forms of play— freely chosen and pursued as ends

in themselves. The determining concept is freedom: play

and freedom become virtually interchangeable terms for

Marcuse. He considers necessary labor degrading and

,,inhuman,,, totally Incompatible with freedom in a non­ repress lve society:

the realm of necessity, of labor, is one of unfreedom because the human existence in this realm is determined by objectives and functions that are not its own and that do not allow the free play of human faculties and d e s i r e s . 12

Only Play— an unnecessary, unutilitarian, gratuitous, and unproductive activity— is sufficiently free of external 20

purposes and pressures to become the ideal model for human activity in a free and non-repressive society. Play plays ball only with itself; it serves no other masters, bows to no •■higher" (i.e., sublimated) causes, and needs no "reason" to guide, manipulate, and thereby repress its free and sensuous activity:

play is unproductive and useless precisely because it cancels the repressive and exploitative traits of labor and leisure; it "just plays" with the reality. But it also cancels their sublime traits— the "higher values." The desublimation of reason is just as essential a process in the emergence of a free culture as is the self-sublimation of sensuousness.13

When the sublimation, domination, and repression that Freud found so productive of discontent in civilized society are finally abolished, when history dies, the free culture which emerges will be based not on purposiveness and labor but on sensuousness and play.

Similarly Brown Identifies the erotic play of the body and its senses as the specific mode of play that the death of the historical consciousness will liberate. This does not mean, as is sometimes vulgarly supposed, that unrepressed man and woman will become lecher and harlot or that future happiness will be served by socialized prostitution and free brothels for all. For the eroticism set free will not be confined to adult genital sexuality; instead, it will in­ clude and demand the full play of the entire sensuous body, best understood by the way a child delights in playing with 21

his whole body as a sexual object, an organ for pleasure.

Freud’s unfortunate label for this Infantile sexuality was

"polymorphous perversity." But what sounds like a childhood

disease in Freud’s words is for Brown the ideal pattern

for adult behavior, an erotic activity free from work and

"serious business":

Play is the essential character of activity governed by the pleasure-prlnclple rather than the reality-principle. Play is "purposeless yet In some sense meaningful." It is the same thing If we say that play is the erotic mode of activity. Play Is that activity which, in the delight of life, unites man with the objects of his love, as is Indeed evident from the role of play in normal adult genital activity. But according to Freud, the ultimate essence of our being is erotic and demands activity according to the pleasure-principle.^

Brown accepts Freud’s portrait of civilization breeding

discontent by forcing the child to repress and sublimate his sexual instincts. But unlike the realistic and

pessimistic Freud, Brown does not consider this state of advanced civilization a necessary or permanent curse.

Freud’s mistake was in treating the individual and encourag­

ing him to accept the reality-principle by adapting to his repressive society— In making, that is, adults of children.

What we should do instead, insists Brown, is apply our therapy to culture Itself; we must change the reality- principle to suit the pleasure-principle. Adults work, children play; children are happy, adults are not. The corrective Is clear: man ought to regain the lost 22

contentment of his innocent childhood, the age in which the

pleasure-principle prevails; he should heed the advice of

Jesus— "except ye become as little children, ye can in no

wise enter the kingdom of heaven." "Play," writes Brown,

"is the essential mode of activity of a free or of a

perfected or of a satisfied humanity" and "has obvious

Implications for social reform."15 For both Harcuse and

Brown play rides the crest of a giant wave that drowns

history and time and sweeps man toward the Elysian isles.

Eros, the god of love and play, leads the way in the form

of a child.

II. The Abolition of Work: Play and Technological Revolution

Herbert Marcuse speaks of the transformation of work

into play, the assumption being that plenty of work will remain in the future to be transformed. But some evidence

suggests that human work itself is declining— not only in reputation but in sheer quantity and availability. If the

cybernetic revolution continues at its present pace, we may now be educating the first generation in the history of mankind, a large number of whose members may not be able to work for a living. It Is not rash to predict that work will someday no longer be a necessity for survival but a luxury for the privileged few. Already Job markets grow tight, 23

the markets are falling through, and this phenomenon may

well he due not to a temporary recession but to a much

larger cultural shift, With increased automation a trend

towards large scale unemployment seems likely to continue

unabated. The alternative— one man, one job— can only be

maintained by shortening the productive work years (longer

education, earlier retirement), by finding vast areas of new work, by increasing consumption, obsolescence, and waste, or by assuming that Parkinson*s Law— the law that says

the amount of work to be done will swell to fill the amount

of time available for it— will come to the rescue (that is to say, that human efficiency will decrease steadily to offset the growth of automation).

Thus, in the not-too-distant future we may well witness not only decreased working hours ("the five-day weekend1’) but the imposition of maximum limits on the number of hours an individual may work or on the number of individuals allowed to work in any one family (family perhaps being extended to mean larger groups, communes of people dependent on one wage earner). It simply will not prove practicable to employ a large working force, the total number of goods and services being better provided by a small group of technicians running the machines and watched over by an even smaller handful of administrators and scientists. The

Marxian concept of man alienated b£ work may turn an ironic zk

aboutface: man alienated from work.

What the consequences of such a profound and

unprecedented change in cultural history will be, few can

surmise. One thing seems obvious. We will many of us need

to learn hoi': not to work, how to fill the vacated working hours of a day, a year, a lifetime, with something that

engages human Interest and energy. The other alternative Is

death, the withering away of human potential through disuse,

the gradual atrophy of muscles, nerves, Impulses, emotions, resources, thoughts, and skills rendered obsolete by auto­ mation. Where man once died from starvation of body, he may now die from starvation of spirit: flaccidity, boredom, malaise of mind.

Here we may want to consider very seriously theories of the anthropologist Claude L6vl-Strauss, who sees tension and the struggle for survival as inherently vital for the continuance of the race. An organism remains healthy only so long as it must fight to insure Its existence and well­ being. Nature once offered the obstacles man needed to combat in order to grow and prosper; but with the taming of nature and molding of environment, man has steadily improved his security and comfort at the expense of his own well­ being. His muscles slacken, he grows flabby. Levi-Strauss sees today*s violence and disturbed equilibrium of mind as ways the human organism tries to compensate for the 25

relaxation of its verve. Gratuitous violence (senseless

opposition to others) and schizophrenia (senseless opposi­

tion to the self) are, so to speak, artificial tautenings

of muscle and nerve. No longer sufficiently threatened

and harrassed by natural forces, man creates artificial

opponents, fabricates enemies, and thus reestablishes a

direction for his need to compete, combat, destroy. War

and perpetual civil strife would appear to be inevitable,

life-renewing processes. If this view is correct, the age

of convenience seems destined to end in holocaust, for we

are running out of games worth playing and wars worth waging.

Of course the opposite is equally likely. We may witness a renaissance of man’s creative and Imaginative

faculties; freed from exhausting menial labor and the

tedious monotony of mechanical exercise, man may discover a paradise within, a treasure-house of resource and Inspira­ tion that has lain dormant and locked to all but the exceptional artist. History testifies unmistakably to the resiliency, buoyancy, and adaptability of the human spirit.

New games may be found to recharge the weakened cells of our batteries.

What the new games will be is anyone’s guess. But we have not run short of speculators; take, for instance, the inner and outer space experts. Many scientists contend 26

that the exploration of outer space allows unlimited room

for expansion in terms of technological development,

productivity, and manpower. If natural resources discovered

on other planetary bodies replace and surpass those that will be required for the conquest of space, there may be work enough for all in this one vast enterprise alone.

Then too the proponents of psychedelic drugs assure us that we have barely even begun the discovery of "the paradise within," that great, uncharted recompense for the Fall.

Bocketed along the network of nerve fibres through the aid of consciousness-opening chemical propellants like LSD, man may someday journey into inner space, his own mind, with as much enthusiasm and enlightenment as now accompany his exploration of external space.

Still others envision the re-creation on this planet of the Garden of Eden as man's next major chore. Fathoming the ocean's deep mysteries, domesticating sea creatures, and harvesting the ocean floor— these will provide challenges for years to come. And there is the desperate need to save and renaturalize the environment, to restore badly upset ecological systems, and to undo the nightmare

Industrial man has made of Mother Earth. Nigel Calder,

British correspondent for the New Statesman, has given us one remarkably detailed and imaginative account of just such a future In The Environment Game. Statistical 27

calculations of future levels of population, food supply, and natural resources constantly inform Calder*s science- fictional predictions concerning the Master Game of the twenty-first century. He believes that agriculture has been the root of human boredom and unhappiness, because the cultivation of the land diverted man from his instinctive delight in hunting. Man, having evolved as the most efficient of predatory animals, made a big mistake when he invented agriculture:

. . . since the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago, most men have been obliged to bend their straight backs to cultivate the land. We have grown mightily in numbers, and have constructed remarkable civilizations on the basis of agriculture. But we have made it a distinctly boring world for most people; only in sport and war can we recapture something of the excitement of the chase, which was the everyday occupation of the first of our species.

"Eden was no Garden," argues Calder, dismissing the traditional Christian view of Adam as the happy gardener.

Man is by nature a hunter; his shrewd intellect developed during the Palaeolithic period to offset his physical disadvantages; he was a successful, happy hunter. But with the invention of agriculture, man "bent his back to a self- imposed drudgery"; the tilling of the soil led both to advanced civilization and to man*s enslavement to farming, other forms of menial labor, and boring affluence.

Prom this departure point Calder proceeds to unveil his portrait of a world freed of agriculture, drudgery, boredom, 28

and war. Synthetic food production will replace agriculture

(farming is failing us and will not support the population

explosion). This will in turn make available some sixty

percent of the earth*s surface, now required for farming,

for vast parklands— the regreening of the land. Calder

hopes that man will embark upon a vast ecological project

to restore, oversee, and control (via computers and

electronic sensing devices) an artificial nature— herds of wild animals roaming free across a restored wilderness and

man once again their hunter— not from necessity (factories will chemically produce all needed food) but for sheer

sport, tfein will supplement his synthetic diet with meat

that he himself has slain, preferably by silent crossbow, and again taste the spice of adventure in the swift pursuit

of the hunt.

"Environment game" has a two-fold meaning, for Calder uses "game" as a pun that means both a recreation and a hunted prey. M a n ^ game (play) will be to conserve, enhance, and beautify the environment, thereby providing a wilderness for game (prey) that will afford him excitement and an outlet for his hunting Instincts. He will be both gamekeeper and gamehunter, both preserver and pursuer. Although man will

continue to live in a shielded, air-conditioned, technologi­

cal society, he will be able to periodically venture into the wilderness— perhaps for a month each year— to live off 29

the land. Underground caches will contain emergency food

supplies and water should his primitive hunting skills

fall him. Sensing devices hidden in the ground and relayed

to computers will provide the means for studying the wilderness, recording the movements of wild animals , and regulating their slaughter— to assure that all species have an equal chance to evolve.

We may not care to attribute the woes of modern

industrial life to agriculture or believe that a revival of hunting would deliver man from boredom, unhappiness, and the threat of self-annihilation. Even so, the bizarre vision of a restored natural wilderness conveniently plugged into electronic amplifiers and computers— this unlikely blend of trees and transistors— may titillate our romantic, escapist fantasies. So perhaps we come full round after all? Wordsworth was mistaken then: science only temporarily divorces man from nature. In the end science will rewed them in a world free of work and suffering. A curious mixture of nostalgia for the pastoral past and faith in the technological future, this brand of romanticism--perhaps we can call it "cybernetic romanticism"

— makes its voice heard in the works of the young West

Coast author Richard Brautigan. His poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" celebrates the coming-together of past and future, the marriage of natural beauty and 30

technological benevolence:

I like to think (and the sooner the better.') of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky.

X like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms.

I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace.*7

The attitude is ahistorical or anti-historical. The

future is tamed: it loses its mystery and its Individuality by promising to restore the romantic past. Apocalyptic and

regressive at the same time, this form of technological

utopianism defies in order to destroy time.

These and other schemes may guarantee a reasonable

level of employment for the foreseeable future. Still, no

one can predict how fast automation will replace human employment. We seem to have a huge amount of work ahead of us, but this work may very well prove illusory. Machines 31

and computers may do the work whose creation we have just

been imagining: unmanned exploring of space; automated

manufacturing of foods, goods, and services; computer-

programmed renaturalizlng of the environment. The truth is

that the role man will play in the future is as unknown as

the relatively new science of robot cybernetics that will help redefine— to limit, redirect, or expand— human functions and capabilities. We must be prepared to cope with various

possibilities for the future— and, among these, that Homo

laborans may gradually be replaced by Homo ludens. It is this possibility— admittedly hypothetical— that interests me most and that forms one backdrop for what I have to say about the study of literature.

Let us then think hard. We may be educating the first generation in the history of mankind that may have to adapt to enforced leisure. The aristocracy of the past provides no very helpful analogy, for the leisure of the aristocrat was, first, willfully chosen— he could have found employment had he wanted it— and, secondly, well prepared for by a long tradition of idleness— thanks to the hereditary nature of wealth. The present generation may have no choice. Leisure may become the rule rather than the exception. It may be enforced rather than enjoyed.

The situation is perhaps more alarming if we think In terms of our own profession. Just what are we doing when 32

we profess to "teach literature"? What will those well-

taught minds do with the insights, bits and pieces of

information, and academic trivia that we so laboriously and painfully ask them to stuff into their memories? And, what

is more, how are we even going to understand our students,

to know what and how to teach them, when they may be facing a way of life so completely foreign to our own? For the possible contrast is startling. We are engaged in the study of literature as a profession; we are fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on one*s point of view) in being a part of the working class. We earn a living by exercising our minds and we have a captive audience for our interests.

A class of students sits quietly and receptively as we

"work," however delightful it is to us, and seek to

"produce" (enlightened minds? the right answers on exams? carbon copies of ourselves? future teachers? creative thinkers?). But what if these students or a large majority of them will not, in turn, find a market for their enlighten­ ed minds and hard-earned talents? Can we still go on

"teaching" in the traditional way we have learned to think of that activity, namely the handing down of our cultural inheritance? I wonder.

I think it is safe to say that our culture is at a crossroads in history, a crossroads between the paradisaical and the precarious. The roads lead equally to heaven and 33

hell. But no young teacher now preparing himself to stand

In front of a classroom can afford the luxury of Ignoring

the unparalleled change In the tide of human history. Behind

the faces staring at him are potentialities, attitudes, dreams, fears, and frustrations unheard of before. What he should expect to hear in their quavering voices is the fearfulness of the unknown that accompany this profound shift of orientation from work to leisure. For our young are already aware of what is happening. For most of them affluence is a given of life. They have grown up with little pressure, few wants, little hunger. And already we begin to see the effects of this cultural shock. We blame the rise of campus violence on revolutionaries who have time to kill, and our legislators respond with, "why can’t you keep them busy in the classroom?" We see some of our very best students dropping out of the establishment, the university, the society. And we query, "why are they so bored with academic pursuits?"

Militancy and mysticism: these seem to carry the day.

And yet they are surely part of the same phenomenon. The militant struggles with others, the mystic with himself.

But both seek immediate change; both oppose the patterns of living in our society. Whether they call it fascism or materialism is beside the point; what is being opposed and reacted against is quite simply the value system of a 3*-

technological, bourgeois society. The militant files to

the future, the mystic soars In the present, neither wants

to inherit the past. And in the face of this, what are we

doing?

The sciences will continue to prosper. It is they,

after all, that generate the genius needed to insure the

growth of technology. And we shall no doubt see an increase

in the number of technical schools, where those who run the machines and program the computers will be trained. But what of the humanities? What does the future hold in store

for them? Is it not likely that they will inevitably tend

to cater to the leisured class, to those who will be—

ironically enough— "preparing" themselves to perform no useful function in society? A cultural elite removing

itself further and further from the healthy, growing, vital technocracy— will it lead to a sterile, backwards-looking monasticism? For the monastic way of life, we must note, is not far removed from today's commune, nor is it fundamentally different from the notion of a cultural "lelsurocracy."

For the impulse of the monk and hippie are similar: retreat from the workaday world, communal brotherhood, the pursuit of higher values so absent in the materialistic world, shared love and communion, a return to a simpler, agrarian community. Of course love in the monastery was officially sacred and love in the commune is openly secular, but 35

these differences seem superficial and Inconsequential in

terms of the broader likenesses. Is heterosexual neo-

monastlclsm the model for living ■with less labor and more

leisure? Will the humanities foster it?

The old question used to be, What are you going to do

when you grow up? This is not the question the young ask

themselves or others today. The new question appears in

two forms: How are you going to live? and Who are you going

to be? These questions are variations of one another that

imply different sorts of answers. Those who ask how to

live seem generally more inclined to challenge the pre­

vailing political structure; they tend to become militants

bent on radically altering the political scene. Those who

ask who to be seem more inclined to the search within;

they turn to drugs, Zen, sex, rock music, communal living— all chosen to quench the thirst for ecstasy, fulfillment,

transcendence. One is a personal, the other a social response. One leads to the brick-throwing mob, the other

to the freaked-out mind. And it is easy to see why the way

the same question is posed leads to such different responses.

How to live is, by its very nature, a social question requiring a .political-social response, for how one lives depends greatly on how one is allowed to live and how those about the individual live. I can wear long hair and work at a bank only if the bank manager agrees to let me. 3 6

Asking who am I? on the other hand, leads in the direction

of self rather than society. It demands a personal response.

I can be anyone in the privacy of my own mind, in the

Isolation of my own commune.

We still teach, by and large, as though the old question

of what to do was foremost in the minds of our students. We are, almost by definition, anachronisms. We can not begin to help students in their searches, for we fall to respond to the kinds of questions they are asking. They ask who to be, we tell them what to do. They ask how to live, we tell them what to learn. As a result, our educational system is obsolete, outmoded, sterile, and self-defeating. We train teachers to be teachers of teachers. That seems to me the awful plight of the humanities.

What can be done? Again, the wrong question. How can it be done? That Is the question. It is not so much what we are reading and teaching but how we are reading and teaching that is at fault. Our history, scholarship, and learning have not failed u s ; we have failed them. We turn the humanities into poor competitors with the sciences; we emulate the cold, objective detachment of the physicist; we borrow the scientists goal of discovering "truth" (we call it the examination question or the original research paper); we fossilize literature with statistics (what is the percentage of simple sentences in Hemingway*s prose?) 37

and with irrelevant historical facts— perhaps to bolster the amount of data pertaining to our discipline; we dangle grades as rewards for learning and so foster academic gamesmanship and one-upsmanship in a competitive system where scoring points replaces loving to learn and learning to love. Much of this has been done under the pressure of the exact sciences, particularly statistics, which has also corrupted other liberal arts— sociology and economics having both withdrawn from words to numbers, and philosophy having exchanged language for the non-verbal signs of symbolic logic. All of the humanities are now in doubt. And in jeopardy.

Why is the academic world so high and dry? Why is the study of literature turned into a serious, quasi-sclentific assemblage of dull historical footnotes and pompous, pretentious sermons? Why is the prevailing tone of most classrooms so Incongruous with the substance of the material at hand? Why does a witty, lighthearted poem often become the subject of some pedantic, learned, dull article tracing historical sources and analogues and laboring to discover the true meaning with nothing short of scientific exactitude? Why, to make literature work well for others, have we made it work for ourselves? Why have we forgotten that the classroom is the playground for ideas and that— as

Josef Pleper reminds us— leisure forms the very basis of 38

education?

And even the history of the word attests the fact: for leisure in Greek is skole. and in Latin scola, the English fschool*. The vrord used to designate the place where we educate and teach is derived from a word which means ’leisure*. School* does not, properly speaking, mean school, hut leisure.18

Why have we come to love books we can call ’'solid pieces of

work" and pride ourselves on being indefatigable "intellec­

tual workers"? Why has the scholarly snort displaced the

gentlemanly smile?

We take ourselves much too seriously. And we take our

discipline much too seriously. In long-winded, pious,

zealous lectures we try to convince ourselves and our

students that literature is a fine and noble thing, not to

be taken lightly. We quote Sidney and Johnson and Arnold

and speak well of the great humanizing influence of a

literary education. In dead seriousness and grave earnest­

ness we do this, in spite of the fact that we have no

evidence of how or why the reading of a great work of art

necessarily leadeth men to virtue and the good life. How

often do we question such basic assumptions? I know of no

modern critic who has challenged our usual assumptions and

posed the crucial questions more forcefully or eloquently

than George Steiner. I quote him at considerable length because his questions are of the utmost importance. He is

speaking about "the political bestiality of our age," 39

best typified by the horrors of two World Wars and the accompanying destruction of humane hopes and values:

That ruin is the starting-point of any serious thought about literature and the place of literature in society. Literature deals essentially and continually with the image of man, with the shape and motive of human conduct. We cannot act now, be it as critics or merely as rational human beings, as If nothing of vital relevance had happened to our sense of the human possibility, as if the extermination of some ?0 million men, women and children in Europe and Russia between 191^ and 19 ^ 5 had not altered, profoundly, the quality of our awareness. We cannot pretend that Belsen is irrelevant to the responsible life of the imagination. What man has inflicted on man, in very recent time, has affected the wrlter*s primary material— the sum and potential of human behavior— and it presses on the brain with a new darkness. Moreover, it puts in question the primary concepts of a literary, humanistic culture. The ultimate of political barbarism grew from the core of Europe. Two centuries after Voltaire had proclaimed its end, torture again became a normal process of political action. Not only did the general dissemination of literary, cultural values prove no barrier to totalitarianism: but in notable instances the high places of humanistic learning and art actually welcomed and aided the new terror. Barbarism prevailed on the very ground of Christian humanism, of Renaissance culture and classic rationalism. We know that some of the men who devised and administered Auschwitz had been trained to read Shakespeare or Goethe, and continued to do so. This is of obvious and appalling relevance to the study or teaching of literature. It compels us to ask whether knowledge of the best that has been thought and said does, as Matthew Arnold asserted, broaden and refine the resources of human spirit. It forces us to wonder whether what Dr. Leavis has called 1 the central humanity* does, in fact, educate towards humane action, or whether there is not between the tenor of moral intelligence developed in the study of literature and that required in social and political choice, a wide gap or contrariety. The latter possibility is particularly disturbing. There is some evidence that a trained, persistent commitment to the life of the printed word, a capacity to Identify deeply and critically with imaginary personages or sentiments, diminishes the immediacy, the hard edge of immediate circum­ stance. We come to respond more acutely to the literary sorrow than to the misery next door. Here also recent times give harsh evidence. Men who wept at Werther and Chopin moved, unrealizing, through literal hell.^9

Steiner, obviously, would never tolerate the death of history or the eradication of time; the weight of the recent past presses all too heavily upon his shoulders to be ignored. Recent history challenges our traditional notions about the value of a literate culture. "We must," writes Steiner, "countenance the possibility that the study and transmission of literature may be of only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like the preservation of the antique. Or, at worst, that it may detract from more urgent and responsible uses of time and energy of spirit" (pp. 23-2^). He does not believe either of these to be true. And he goes on to defend a three-fold role for literary criticism: to preserve from the legacy of the past those works that still speak directly to the living; to assure that no political regime will destroy or distort a valuable literary work; to maintain a dialogue between past and present and to establish links between literatures and between languages. In performing these functions, the critic should aim throughout at nurturing a humane 41

literacy, a living, active discourse with the voice of a

book; he should encourage reading as a mode of action that

affects our entire consciousness. Steiner begins by-

doubting but ends by assigning a high level of seriousness

and therapeutic value to literature and criticism.

In asking the question of ultimate worth Steiner raises

the most perplexing and confounding issue in the history of

literary criticism. Explaining what useful purpose

literature serves or denying that literature has any

didactic value has discomfited virtually all of the major

literary apologists from Plato and Aristotle down to present

day critics. Aut prodesse aut delectare— no one has much

improved upon Horacefs inconclusive compromise. And we shall see that this holds true for discussions of play as well: here too the vexatious question of utility— whether

or not play can be considered a purposeful activity— has proved the most crucial, most bewildering, and most divisive of issues. Literature and play— are they of any value?

And, more importantly, what kind of value? If we mean simple economic value, measurable in dollars and cents, sales quotas, and marketability surveys, the problem resolves itself, for we can easily defend the usefulness of literature and play in terms of the profitable industries which have sprouted around them. Tourist, sports, enter­ 42

tainment, recreation, and vacation industries plus such new

enterprises as sensitivity training institutes and sex

shops pander to ma^s desire for pre-packaged, organized

play; for some reason man thinks he needs a Team Leader,

Recreation Director, or Travel Agent, some Professional

Pimp to plan, arrange, and direct his holidays and leisure activities. Some commercial Magister Ludi is always lurking nearby, eager to sell fun to the highest bidders.

Similarly, literature supports a number of profitable commercial trades. Besides the writer earning his bread through the sweat of his pen,the employees In the publications field— publishers, editors, copy readers, printers, and book sellers— depend upon the selling and hoarding of books as consumer products. Paperbacks— non-returnable, disposable, guaranteed to yellow, split, and require replacement in a few years— utilize the big business strategy of planned obsolescence. Then too we keep re-editing classics in "New, Improved Versions" and encourage readers to purchase, own, and display several editions of the same work— nothing different, really, than being persuaded to buy that second car or third television set. Building a private or professional library, whose shelves bulge with books he has not yet read or perhaps never plans to read and with books he once read and never plans to open again, constitutes the educated man^ 43

acceptable form of wasteful consumption and obsessive

accumulation. If, unlike his less scholarly friends, he

tends to arrange his impressive array of books by author,

period, or topic rather than size, binding, or the color of

dust jackets, the distinction seems trifling. However

catalogued, books (we sometimes like to forget) once grew as trees. Teachers, scholars, and critics— peddlers of belles-lettres in their own rights— they too know that

literature can be pursued as a lucrative profession.

There is, as we would say, money In literature and money in play. Both sell well as marketable commodities.

But commerical usefulness is not what most of us have in mind when we speak of these two activities. We like to think that literature has some intrinsic worth, independent of careers plotted and wallets padded by retailing It to consumers. And we like to imagine that play, at least In

Its adult manifestations, yields something of noncommercial value to the amateur as well as the professional, even if that something Is as mundane as relaxation or diversion, the pause that refreshes us for work.

I will argue that literature, like play, serves no utilitarian function and that therein lies its peculiar value and importance for humanity. It Is precisely because play and art have no Immediate use that they are immensely useful. I realize this statement may strike one as being the slithy ravings of a madman with a Jabberwocky fetish,

or the cultivation of paradox for paradox's sake. I also

believe it is right and will hold up under careful scrutiny.

At least since the Industrial Revolution, since the

reign of Victoria and red brick factories, we have heard

one great rallying cry: work, work, work. Work to live and

live to work. Work: bottled in six delicious flavors;

Dr. Plunkett's sure-fire cure-all, the remedy for all

pains and discomforts; hawked by vendors from coast to

coast. Work to acquire wealth, work to buy nice things,

work to relieve boredom, work to work up an appetite, work

to build a better nation, work to save your soul from

damnation. Now, gazing into Cassandra's crystal ball, look

ahead to the twenty-first century. Suppose, suddenly, no

more work for many or much less work for all. Why we have

run short of work is clear. We have simply admitted the

painful truth to ourselves: we can no longer afford to

artificially create and perpetuate work by continually

Increasing frivolous consumption and wasteful obsolescence.

Natural resources are being exhausted too rapidly, the

slices of the pie are getting too thick, the goal of

"progress" is rejected as being ultimately destructive. In

the twenty-first century, in order to survive, man reluctantly ends his centuries-old love-affair with work; he discards it along with the outmoded myths of progress ^5

and growth, the beliefs that once sanctioned his worship of

the Gross National Product as a Benthamite felicity index.

If you do not consider this scenario too far-fetched

or fanciful, ask the unavoidable question. Well, now what?

Now what will man do with himself? Everything he has taken

for granted acquires a new flavor. Time and space, for

example, lose some of their traditional potency and meaning.

Not compelled to report to work each day to earn his living,

unemployed man no longer esteems punctuality as a self-

evident virtue. What time he rises or goes to bed or how

he divides the hours of the day— these mean little. Where

he chooses to live in a global village linked by instan­

taneous electronic communication and supersonic transporta­

tion ceases to matter. Not having to commute to work, not

even having a place to go or specified space to occupy

five days a week, makes such things as having a "permanent

residence" almost laughable. Stay in one place? Why

indeed? No— travel. See the world. Have fun. Vive le

,1euj Ifen ceases to work and begins to play.

We frequently hear laments over the impending "death

of the novel" or "the demise of literature" and hysterical

debates on whether art will survive at all in the post­ revolutionary, post-historical utopia. My own view is

obvious by now. If man finally does succeed In abolishing work, he will need to learn to play— to play more wholly k6

and wholeheartedly than ever before. And literature— the

language game— is one of the wonderful playthings that

have always diverted and delighted and will continue to

divert and delight civilized man. If play Is the way of the

future, literature, and the liberal arts in general, will

not die but, on the contrary, will discover new and

healthier modes of life for themselves. They will be pur­

sued vigorously not because they make man work or function

any better, but because they encourage him to play more

creatively and more completely.

Literature will continue to flourish not only because

it fills time and absorbs space (art as diversion), but,

more importantly, because it makes sense of them (art as

design). Fiction will continue to impart Its meaning to

time and space in a future in which these human categories for ordering thoughts and lives may become progressively less dominant. And since the mental world fiction creates and occupies is as timeless and spaceless as the imagination

itself, literature will always be infinitely expandable and never entirely expendable. The poet is not "the unacknow­ ledged legislator of the world" but only the delightful and diversionary Kagister Ludl of the word. And that is good enough.

We must expect, however, that substantial changes will accompany the transition of literature and the other arts 4?

from a work-dominated world to one in which leisure becomes

increasingly predominant. Extended leisure time, made

available by technology’s machine labor force, will

stimulate radically different life styles, in which games,

play, and recreation increasingly engage human interest and energy. We can already observe, I think, the beginnings

of this cultural shift in the emerging counter-culture of

the young. The ideology and attitudes of many of them are

typified by the life styles and writings of young revolutionaries like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, harbingers for the "Festive Left" who advocate purposeless play as a way of life. The serious and bloody business of revolution, for example, has already become for many young radicals a playful adventure, a game pursued not so much for the sake of future goals as for its own sake—

Revolution, as Abbie Hoffman entitles his playful book, just for the Hell of It. Chairman Mao and Che Guevara exchange their bullets for billets in the communal camps of the Merry

Prankster and the Court Jester. And this extraordinary revolution in life styles and cultural values may in turn have far-reaching consequences for the manner in which we view and value literature and the arts.

I leave to better qualified prophets the mission of predicting how the novel, poetry, the cinema, music, or the fine arts are likely to mutate and what new evolutionary 48

courses await them In the play-world of the future. I

repeat only what I have endeavored to argue thus far,

namely, that the reading, teaching, and criticizing of

literature and the arts will witness profound conversions.

I foresee the emergence (really a re-emergence as following

chapters will show) of a play aesthetics, a play theory of

the arts and perhaps of the humanities in general. Herbert

Marcuse is certainly right to envision meaningful human

activities undergoing a transformation from work to play, a change-over that those who cherish "working" with litera­

ture and the arts will surely welcome. Norman 0. Brown1s

insistence on the need for erotic play and sensuousness will be satisfied by those of us who value literature and the arts too. We will need only to reaffirm and make better felt in our teaching and writing that love we have for what has always been at the very heart of literature and the arts— their beauty, their sensuousness, their concrete immediacy and Imagery, their ability to afford intense erotic pleasure.

Nor will scholarship, research, and historical under­ takings be crushed by the "death of history." But a playful spirit will certainly reinvigorate these "tasks"; they will be undertaken because they are fun, because they are enjoyable ways of playing with the past. Scientists play with ideas in order to discover and create the future. 49

Humanists, by and large, play with ideas to discover and

preserve the best of the past. Whether their interests lie

in the future or in the past, both are players in the

present. If scientists succeed in creating a more playful

world in the future, we humanists will respond by creating

more playful and attractive worlds in our own spheres.

Regardless, then, of whether or not literature Is,

resembles, or has been thought to be play, we can argue that

It is destined to become play in the future. This conclusion, reached by the line of reasoning followed in this chapter, hinges upon the credibility of our imagination, that peculiar ability we have of being able to conjure up Images

of the future. And this is why we have sought out the

oracles, why we have enlisted the prophecies of futuristic

thinkers like Norman 0. Brown and Herbert Marcuse, and why we have tried to decipher how automation and cybernetics will shape the future and alter men’s lives.

But to found a theory of literature solely upon an

imagined model of the future would be to build a castle of sand and never know if the tide were about to rise and topple the fragile structure or recede and leave it standing. The theory, no matter how cogent or convincing, would remain a contingent one; the reasonableness and usefulness of Its tenets would await (perhaps forever) the verification of time. For the strength of this model 50

resides in what is also its vulnerability— its very imaginativeness.

And we are self-conscious enough to know that our imaginings of the future are likely to be overwrought, motivated by a modern sense of crisis, influenced by end- determined paradigms, and blatantly fictional. We recognize, thanks to works like Frank Kermode's The Sense of an

Ending, that our 1970's apocalyptic visions of the future descend from the fantasies of a long line of fln-de-siecle mllleniallsts: like the Christian chiliasts anticipating the year 1000, we expect earth-shattering terrors or spectacular renovations in the year 2000. Our hopes and fears are exaggerated and given fictional forms, mythical paradigms probably destined to be "disconfirmed" by time, but which we who always live "in the middest" embrace as patterns for making sense of the world and of our own places in It:

What it seems to come to is this. Ken in the middest make considerable imaginative investments In coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle.20

This realistic assessment of why we most likely do mis imagine the future chills and sobers our utopian dream of a world free of greed and toil and abounding with love and play; of a world filled with green forests, benevolent machines, frolicsome animals, and playful idlers; of a 51

world in which the university (once the auditorium for the scholar's cant) has "become the schola cantorum bustling with happy learners and singing players— something like

Castalia with its learned Glass Bead Game players in

Hermann Hesse's Kaglster Ludl. The apocalyptic revelation may prove spurious; the dream may dissolve into fiction.

And the danger of such utopian fictions is that they degenerate into perilous myths, fictions whose fictitious­ ness has been forgotten. So we will not stake our entire fortune on this one deal of the Tarot cards, especially when the hand can only play Itself out in the future. We will leave for now the imagined and perhaps imaginary future.

We will not forsake our grand dream, but neither will we live entirely in its airy vapors. We remove, with Prospero, our magic mantle. We seek complementary ways of arguing that literature is play. CHAPTER 1

FOOTNOTES

*The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. J. M. Cohen (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1955)» P. 159.

2Ibid., p. 150.

3"0n Intellectual Gloom," The American Scholar, XXXV (I966), 224.

Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis, Politics. and Utopia (London^ 1970), p. 65 .

5Ibid., p. 62.

6lbid.. p. 41.

?Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death; The Psycho­ analytic Meaning of History (Middletown, Conn., 1959)» P. 307. Slbld.. p. 1 9 .

9The Feast of Fools; A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, Mass., 1969)7 "The Immolation of the Past," pp. 33-43.

lOSee Marcuse, One Dimenslonal Man (London, 1964).

Usee, for example. Brown's favorable discussion of the Western tradition of body mysticism, animism, and alchemy, Life Against Death, pp. 310 ff.

l^Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosoph1cal Inquiry into Freud (BostonT 1955)7 P. 195.

13lbid., pp. 195-96.

l^Brown, Life Agalnst Death, pp. 32-33.

15lbld.. p. 34.

52 53

l^The Environment Game (London, 1967), P. 9.

17Richard Brautlgan, The Pill versus The Sprlnghlll Mine Dlsaster (New York: Delta," "i9'6'8')", "p. 1,

18josef Pleper, Leisure: the BasIs of Culture. trans. Alexander Dru (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), p. 26,

l9George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays 1958- 1966, (London, 1967), pp. 22-23.

20The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London, I967T, p. I7 . CHAPTER 2

"WELTSPIEL": THE SACRED PLAY OP CREATION

When all Is done, human life Is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over. — Sir William Temple, "Of Poetry"

In the preceding chapter I asked that we project our prophetic imagination into the future. This enabled us to wonder whether play will not become a way of life in some future secular utopia. In the present chapter we set off in an opposite direction, along a path that leads into the remote past. We will seek the origin and trace the development of the Idea that life is a way of play— a broad philosophic worldview and one that complements the idea that play is a way of life. Eventually we come full round and the two paths join to form a circle: thoughts about the future and thoughts about the past meet when they pass the point of the known and begin to speculate on the unknown.

The footing is relatively firm so long as we are dealing with recorded history— memory and language guide

54 55

our steps here. But the Journey into the past does not end with recorded history. It ends where life began--at the moment of Creation, the ’'big bang" that burst forth the energy of the universe and sent wave-partlcles careening through time and space. For the idea that life is play originates here. It originates in theories of the Creation and in philosophic speculation on what life ultimately means when viewed from a metaphysical vantage point. I call the metaphysical worldview which understands the world and life as games created in holy play the Weltsplel conception of the universe. Weltsplel: a world at play and a world created in play. How Is this idea born? What does it mean? What happens to the idea as civilization unfolds?

This Investigation will lead us along a circuitous path that departs from the mainstream of Western humanism.

We must concede this at the outset. The Idea that life is play, by no means a contemporary revelation, is an ancient religious belief and thereafter has a tradition. But throughout history the play conception of the universe has led a precarious life, continually being maligned and attacked by earnest zealots who consider play a

•’nonserious" waste of time. Even so, within this broad philosophic worldview of Weltsplel the special aesthetic theories of play in art emerge and develop. These we will 56

look at In the following chapter. But first we will survey a broader landscape and try to get a better perspective of the place play aesthetics occupies in play thinking generally. For the idea that literature is play, while having a history of its own, is only one aspect of the more encompassing worldview. It is this fuller picture that now concerns us.

In The Joyous Cosmology, that remarkably vivid and poetic account of his experiments with hallucinogenic drugs,

Alan Watts expresses, eloquently, a philosophic worldview that is fast becoming a commonplace in our time:

Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening. For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely of itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no problem of life; it is completely purposeless play— exuberance which is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatever to explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone.' 1

Life, the "gesture" no one made, is "completely purposeless play"— an illusion perhaps, a game certainly. We get an idea of how common the game metaphor is if we recall Just a diverse few of many recent specimens in the fine art of titlesmanship: Games People Play (Eric Berne); Games 57

Analysts Play (Martin Shepard and Marjorie Lee); The Name of the Game (popular television series); Gamesmanship

(Stephen Potter); The Sex Game (Jessie Bernard); The Master

Game (Robert Deropp); The Money Game ("Adam Smith"); The

God Game (Karl Olsson); The Environment Game (Nigel Calder);

The Rose-Garden Game (Elthne Wilkins); and, to end the list, Endgame (Samuel Beckett). We moderns seem obsessed by the notion that the activities of our dally lives— from making money to making love— assume the forms of various games.

But the tendency to view life as a game, the familiar

"all the world1s a stage," is actually quite old and originates in ancient Eastern and Western religious thought. David L. Miller, a contemporary "play theologian," who finds "talk about play and games . . . practically platitudinous in our time," has traced the idea that life is play to certain creation stories common to Hindu,

Hebrew, Christian, Greek, and Chinese scriptures.2 These stories can be found in Vedantic interpretations of Hindu creation hymns, in the eighth-century Bhagavatam Purana and earlier Vishnu Purana. in the Biblical Wisdom Literature, in Greek Orphic mythology, and in the Chinese Tao Te Chlng.

The metaphor common to all of these stories pictures the world being created by the playing of God. The world is conceived as a giant game, a playground for the gods, 58

men, and all created things. One line of Hindu thought,

for example, views the sensory world we experience as

maya. or a divine illusion produced by God as trickster and

magician. God creates the illusion for his own pleasure;

because he is lonely and bored he daydreams like a child

and plays at being other things— all the other things that

exist in the universe. Our world is merely a stage on which

God acts out all dramatic roles in the script of his own

play called "Divine Illusion." Alan Watts describes this

Eastern version of God’s play as the game of pretending:

But because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. This is his way of hiding from himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he. has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.3

If it takes us a long time to awake and discover God as the Magister Ludl playing within ourselves and pretending not to be himself, this is just to make the cosmic game more interesting. Soon enough the game will end, and we will awake to discover we are all the single Self that has been disguised In so many unusual and delightful forms,

Christian religious thought too contains a play theory of creation. In the Book of Proverbs Wisdom, who declares herself at least as old as the earth, claims she sported 59

with God and with man during the creation of the universe:

When he marlced out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a little child; and I was daily his delight, playing before him always, playing in his inhabited world and delighting the sons of men.^*

God creates the world in childlike play; huge planets skip and spiral across the universe like balls hurled in some child*s game; an infant Logos dances and plays before the creator and delights the children of men. Creation is

Invested with the almighty power of the creator and with the free, joyous, spontaneous play of the nimble "little child." To give Gloucester's sad words a merrier twist, we are Indeed the playthings and created toys of the gods: they will us for their sport.

Various meanings and implications attach themselves to the play theory of creation. Father Hugo Rahner has interpreted the play theory in Proverbs as seeking to convey the freedom and lack of constraint that characterized the creation. God acted under no metaphysical necessity or compulsion in creating the universe; rather, like a child at play, Deus Ludens freely, spontaneously, and light- heartedly fashioned the game of life. The creation of the cosmos, of man, and of god-in-man was unnecessary and in that sense childish; but it was also a gift of love and a promise of grace and in those senses meaningful: 6o

It Is that both creation and Incarnation are expressions of God's love, and that this love, though full of meaning and purpose, is a love that works in creative freedom wholly ungoverned by necessity or constraint, , , , The whole game of the Logos which he enacts upon earth to the delight of the Father, his cosmic dance on the globe of the world, is only a playful hint of what has reposed since the beginning of time In the divine archetypes of Eternal Wisdom, and of what will be revealed when the earthly dance has come to an end.5

This is the same identification of freedom with play that modern thinkers like Herbert lfercuse make. The existen­ tialist may insist on creating his world of freedom and play in this earthly life, and the orthodox Christian may be content to await felicity and festivity in an afterlife— but their utopian hopes remain essentially the same.

The Weltsplel theory contrasts to an alternate conception, one that emphasizes the tremendous strength and awesome power required for the creation, God, exhausted by six days of hard, self-imposed labors, needed to rest and recuperate on the seventh day. The differences between these two conceptions can be easily reconciled by, for instance, drawing an analogy between the play-work of creation and the obvious fact that children and animals often play and frolic until thoroughly fatigued ("played out"). Our play is sometimes exhausting "work," and our work is sometimes exhilarating "play." Nevertheless, as we shall see shortly, these two concepts lose the mutual friendship that once united them. Tensions mount, a rift 61

develops. They quarrel, split, and go their own separate

ways: play skipping along the back paths of Western thought,

work marching along the main avenues. Throughout most of

history work and play lead separate and often conflicting

lives. Men play when they are not working, and work when

they are not playing. Business and pleasure— the slogan

goes— don't mix. Only in comparatively recent times has it

seemed possible— through technology and cybernetics— to

envision a practical remarriage of work and play in men's

lives.

The play imagery of the creation found in Proverbs has

even earlier Western sources and analogues in the Grecian

games, in Orphic mythology, and in Greek philosophy. In

one Orphic fragment "the infant Dionysus plays with the

bright playthings of which the world is made up: 'tops of

different kinds and dolls with moving limbs, apples too,

the beautiful golden ones of the clear-voiced daughters

of H e s p e r u s '."6 Hermes, Apollo, and Heracles were all

originally divine children whose legendary play is supposed

to have created the universe. And most of the other Greek

gods and goddesses— when not busily indulging themselves

in the game of meddling in the affairs of men— idle away

their time on Mount Olympus playing musical instruments and sporting in ball games and athletic contests of all sorts.

Ihe anthropomorphic Greek gods knew intuitively what we now 62

seem to be struggling to redis cover-free from the compulsion and necessity to work, our activities become all fun and games.

The immense Importance of the public games in Greek life— the Olympic, the Pythian, the Isthmian, and the

Nemean— is of course well known. Popular athletic contests— principally chariot-racing, gymnastics, running events, discus-throwing, wrestling, and boxing— flourished alongside aesthetic contests, such as musical, dance, and dramatic competitions— the very wellsprings of Western art.

So fondly did they sport and play that a Marxian lover of agrarian toil, Simone Well, once lamented, "The Greeks knew about art and sport, but not about work."7

We know too that Greek sports and games were closely connected to ancient religious rites and seasonal ceremonies. Superintended by the priesthood and magistracy, seasonal religious festivals— celebrated with sporting events and athletic contests In honor of Heracles, Athene, or another of the gods— preserved much of their original sacred significance. The gods and goddesses were honored with specific games and sports, which, according to the mythical stories, enjoyed special favor In each of their lives: thus swift Mercury is the patron of foot-racing; powerful Heracles, of wrestling; warlike Mars, of Javelin- throwing and battle games; the huntress Diana, of archery; 63 and so on. In demonstrating their prowess in games and

sports, Greek athletes mimicked and appeased their playful gods,

Not only were certain games associated with the heroic adventures of the gods, but special funerary games were played to celebrate burials and commemorate the dead.

These athletic contests honoring a fallen chieftain or hero probably served the same rejuvenative purpose as funeral sacrifices. So at least thinks Lewis Spence, who has traced the mythical and religious sources of dances, games, and nursery rhymes: "both games and sacrifices had a similar intention— to afford vigour and vitality to the spirit of the dead man. Thus the athlete Sacrificed1 his vigour precisely as did the dead man his blood."8

Funerary sports and games could help restore the departed strength of the fallen hero in his afterlife. The great expenditure of brawn, sweat, and skill on earth could be felt deep in the underworld: games provided a direct channel for influencing activities in the heavenly realms.

Various ball games were held in special reverence, probably because the spherical shape of the ball and its motions back and forth across the playing field made It an appropriate symbol of the heavenly bodies and their movements across the skies. Such ball-planet symbolism is universal. In Apollonius* account, Urania hurls a ball into the sky, and it trails a line of purple fire like a

comet.9 And in medieval iconography an infant Jesus often holds the sphere of the world in his hands like a ball he has Just tossed and caught. Lewis Spence finds remnants of the astronomical significance of ball games in the ancient

Mexican game of tlachtl (something of a hybrid between modern handball and basketball).^-0 The ball with which the game was played is described in Mexican manuscripts as being half-dark and half-light. Xolotl, one of the deities associated with the sport, is depicted as playing ball with the moon-god, and his name means "twin." Spence believes the game of tlachtl. as well as similar ball games, may once have represented the unceasing strife between sun and moon, light and darkness, a cosmic strife now only obscurely preserved in the propulsion of the ball from one side of the playing court to the other. Play and games are deeply infused with religious meanings and cosmic motions.

The gods sport, frolic, and idle away their time; planets and stars dance across the heavens; the universe, the whole

Joyous cosmology, seems to sparkle with dancing orbs and playing spirits.

The Greeks also enjoyed various board games, similar to our chess and checkers, and gambling games played with dice. These games derived from much earlier prototypes in ancient Egypt and China and were invested with special 65

religious meanings and dlvinatory powers. Competitive board games allegorically re-enacted the great mythical battles of the gods or foreshadowed the real military exploits of men.As early as the Chinese game Wei-Hai, dating from about 3000 B.C., such strategic board games have also enabled generals to test and plan actual war strategies. This form of practical divination persists today: war-gaming has become a highly technological weapon, now played via computer programs and used to predict the likely outcomes of various military, political, economic, and business strategies.12

Gambling games also developed from attempts to foretell the random turns of fortune*s wheel or divine the will of the gods. In Games. Gods. and Gambling.13 P. N.

David shows how mathematical probability theory evolves from the ancient practice of casting dice. It was his response to a gambler*s inquiry about the mathematical odds for winning a certain bet that inspired Pascal to make the first dramatic advances in statistics and probability theory. And originally the tossing of the die— a four­ sided astragalus or heel bone— was used exclusively in divination. Since the roll of the die was determined not by random chance but by divine intervention, in the sequence of numbers turned up the fortunate soothsayer could read and decipher a cryptic message from the gods 66

('the medium is the messenger'). Gambling games spring from these primitive fortune-telling rituals. If the hordes of people who flock yearly to Las Vegas are in search of a more tangible and negotiable kind of fortune, the old Goddess of Fortune still metaphorically spins the roulette wheel. Games and gods make odd but friendly bedfellows.

The playfulness of mythical stories concerning the world-creating, world-playing gods and the sacredness of the consecrated playgrounds on which the popular Greek games were conducted, combine to furnish one Important context for the subsequent incorporation In Christian thought of the play-creation idea. Games and gods have already been linked together in a people's Imagination; the act of playing has been endowed with sacred, dlvinatory, and world-creative meanings. But the wisdom of the Greek sages offers an even more enlightening commentary on the Weltsplel conception of the universe. Hence, to the pithy sayings and mature writings of the Greek philosophers we now turn our attention.

"Time is a child playing, moving counters on a game board. The kingdom belongs to the child." This enigmatic saying, attributed to Heraclitus the Obscure, was traced by Nietzsche to the Orphic myths of gods playing with toys.

The maxim seems to offer the same good counsel as would a 67 later Jesus: only those who become "as little children” will "enter the kingdom of heaven." This at least would be the gist of the quotation if we can assign an absolute, normative meaning to "kingdom." The saying would then be recommending playful enthusiasm and childish innocence as human ideals and goals.

But Heraclitus* remark may have a more limited, secular meaning. The king ruling his kingdom is like a child playing at draughts. Stated another way, the play of the child prefigures the play of the king. All temporal affairs take place in a world that is only a constant game of flux. The rules are predetermined, and the main one says *all things must pass1. Because the child outlives his master, he inherits the throne, much as a pawn gets

"kinged" in checkers. The king advancing his real armies across the battlefield must obey the same rules as the child who moves his mock battle pieces across a gameboard.

Just as games are always executed within certain fixed limits of time and space, so too is life short-lived, enclosed in space, and bounded by life and death— the gamefs beginning and end. The chlld^ gameboard allegorically represents the manfs kingdom; life on this earth is that one brief game man knows he gets to play. Both the child and the king play themselves across the board, contesting to win victory for themselves, a victory measured in success, fame, wealth, 68

territories, or— ultimately— in the winning of an afterlife.

Heraclitus* aphorism echoes throughout the utterances

of later Greek philosophers. Proclus alludes to the epigram in his commentary on Plato's Tlmaeus: "Others also say that he who fashioned the world was playing a game in his shaping of the cosmos, as Heraclitus already declared.And Maximus, as Father Rahner points out, was motivated hy such speculations to construct "an entire mystical theory of the playing of God"; man's agonistic struggles in this worldly sphere reveal themselves, under the eye of eternity, as little more than moves and counter­ moves on an enclosed gameboard; for, as Maximus said, "this earthly life, when compared with the life to come, the true, divine, archetypal life. Is but a children's game."15 But these brief Intimations would have been largely lost to history had they not found their finest expression and fullest elaboration in the writings of Plato— the most playful of Greek philosophers and the one with most to say about play.

"May we not," asks Plato in the Laws. "conceive each of us living beings to be a puppet of the Gods, either their plaything only, or created with a purpose?"16 There is a note of quiet melancholy in this conception of human nature, a gentle world-weariness that runs throughout the

Laws. The tone whispers the calm resignation of a wise 69

but aging philosopher (Plato was about 7^ years old when

he wrote this), who has turned from speculating on the best

ideal state, the Republic, to the more mundane business of

describing how a practically attainable state might best be

regulated, the Laws. Worldly affairs still occupy his mind,

but he attaches far less importance to human life. His

thoughts are humbled and colored by religious meditations; an old man preparing for death is thinking back on his own nearly-rounded life and wondering what it ultimately might mean. He extends this to the question of what purpose human life in general has. And, though he knows he cannot answer this question, he imagines how trivial even the

greatest achievements of man must appear to the gods, how ridiculously inconsequential this earthly life compared to

the eternity beyond.

When thoughts are bent towards the hereafter, life on this earth seems but a game, a bit of play that precedes we know not what. All we can reasonably conclude is that if man indeed is the puppet and plaything of the gods, his affairs are scarcely worth taking very seriously. Hence we find that Plato must continually rally his wits and

"psyche himself up" in order to "seriously" philosophize on the subject of effective governing laws for the state:

"Now human affairs are hardly worth considering in earnest, and yet we must be earnest about them,— a sad necessity 70

constrains us" (Laws. 803b). The sad necessity is the

necessity of making do with the imperfect world we must

live in and with the one little hunk of life allotted to

each of us. Given the knowable facts of life, the only question to ask is "by what means, and in what ways, we may go through the voyage of life best" (Laws, 803a).

And this single question gives rise to philosophy, medita­

tion, and other forms of speculation. But if the basic question of life must be seriously asked from a "sad necessity," it can at least be playfully answered with joy and enthusiasm. This is the other half, the playful side of Plato— the one I want to draw our attention to.

For what pleases us most about Plato's philosophy is its youthful vigor, idealism, and hopefulness. These attract us to the playful, light-hearted man behind the mask of the serious, reflective philosopher. They are the qualities of his spokesman Socrates In Plato's early writings: the enlightened guru who wins converts by asking his students unanswerable questions and letting them grope along, step by step, at their own pace, to discover truth for them­ selves; the humble knower who frankly confesses ignorance; the skillful dialectician who delights in playing with ideas. The dialectical method, the Socratic dialogue, is itself a playful game. All participants must enthusiastically join in; no spoilsports can be tolerated. The dialogue 71

seems to wander freely along, twisted this way and that by

the whims of the wise teacher’s companions. Behind the apparent haphazardness of the meandering dialogue we recog­ nize, of course, the deliberate, secretive ploys of

Socrates, trickster and Magister Ludi. The ploy is his play. He pulls from his logician-magician’s hat a handful of rhetorical tricks, riddles, jests, ironies, and mind- twisters— each carefully chosen to seduce his listeners.

He has been playing a game and deceptively acting a role— pretending to be ignorant, pretending not to know where a conversation is headed, pretending his listeners have discovered on their own what he has so playfully and skillfully been sneaking into their minds all along. And

Plato’s dramatic use of the dialogue as a fictional art form— his pretending to be Socrates pretending to be ignorant and his pretending to be the other speakers— this is play on top of play!

It should come as no surprise to us, then, to hear

Plato call his life’s serious occupation of philosophy a mere "game of play,1' a recreation, a pleasant pastime.

The Athenian Stranger of the Laws expresses just this to the two companions who accompany him as the three old men walk together to the cave of Zeus on a midsummer’s day: "we are inquiring about laws, this being our old man's sober game of play, whereby we beguile the way, as I was saying 72

when we first set out on our journey" (Laws. 685a). Plato

realized how much of philosophy was a playful amusement, a

"sober game," a spectacle for entertaining companions with

their own mental processes.

Gavin Ardley has written on the importance of play in

Plato’s philosophy; he believes we are again coming to

recognize the Implicit playfulness of philosophic

speculation and disputation; in the light of this, he says,

"we must re-write the history of philosophy.1117 The

playfully serious philosophers— those who explicitly

recognized the playfulness of their endeavors— would include

Aristotle, the patristic writers, St. Thomas Aquinas,

Berkeley, Kierkegaard, the Thomas Carlyle of Sartor Resartus, and the later Wittgenstein. But at the head of the class

for Ardley would stand Plato, the most playful Thought

Jester of them all:

For Plato, philosophy is either a joyful game or it is less than nothing. Play is not an incidental sop with which to beguile the reader; it is the very stuff of good argument. Fecundity, genuine seriousness, real under­ standing, are to be found only in aerial flights of play; without play, our Intellectual exertions lead but to fatuous solemnities. In Kierkegaard's phrase, humour is the Incognito of life; it enables us to pass through the world without succumbing to the prevailing mood of alternating agitation and hopelessness. Through irony, mimicry, gay satire, and sometimes bitter mockery, Plato shocks, puzzles, and gains rapport with the world in order to redeem that world.

Philosophy is an agonistic game of wits and of wit, 73 played because It is fun. Competing Ideas are played off, one against another. The sophist descends from the vatic medicine-man, whose sacred riddles (used in initiation rites) were the archetypes in philosophyfs game of question and answer. It is serious, but then seriousness is not the enemy of playfulness. For, as Johan Huizinga has explained,

Play is a thing by itself. The play concept as such is of a higher order than seriousness. For seriousness seeks to exclude play, whereas play can very well include seriousness,^9

In play no dichotomy separates seriousness and non- seriousness ; they are, Plato tells three of his friends, siblings. In his Sixth Letter Plato urges his friends

(Hermeias, Erastos, and Koriskos) to take an oath of mutual friendship and agree to devote themselves to "the study of ideal forms." But he adds that this oath is to be taken

"half in play and half in earnest, with an earnestness free from pedantry, and a playfulness that is sister to earnestness."20 play is not thought of as the opposite of seriousness but as its complement. Seriousness and non- seriousness are playmates. Play mates them.

Ideally, play and work should be fused. Work that is edifying and enjoyable begins to merge with our concept of play; we need to distinguish satisfying work from servile labor, sheer drudgery that leaves no place for playfulness.

Similarly, when play becomes purposeful it is indistinguish­ 74

able from enobling work; hence many forms of play can be

exhausting and exhilarating at the same time (mountain-

climbing, for example). The addition of a serious purpose

to play insures that personal enjoyment will not lead

simply to narcissism, hedonism, or frivolity. When serious­

ness of purpose combines with playfulness of style, the

result is a powerful fusion of play and work for which our

language has no name.

Plato*s philosophic method blends playfulness of style

with earnestness of subject. He constantly punctures his

opponents’ arguments with jests and witticisms, the

playful ploys that make thinking both worthwhile and

delightful. He performs mental gymnastics, juggles words

and ideas, makes Ideal Forms and Republics appear and

disappear before his spectators* eyes, practices every

manner of trompe l ’oell to dazzle, sway, and win his

adversaries. He is the serious philosopher who knows and

employs all the tricks of the playful artist.

Plato considers his own life’s work play, and he

recommends the play-filled life to others. Men should know when to be serious and when not to be; they should pass

their lives In "the noblest of pastimesu (which for Plato

included philosophy):

I say that about serious matters a man should be serious, and about a matter which is not serious he should not be serious; and that God Is the natural and worthy object of our most 75

serious and blessed endeavors, for man, as I said before, is made to be the plaything of God, and this, truly considered, is the best of him; wherefore also every man and woman should walk seriously, and pass life in the noblest of pastimes, and be of another mind from what they are at present (Laws, 803c).

The other "mind" is the one that assigns too much importance

to human affairs and serious work. Most men value the wrong things: they subordinate play to work, and their preoccupation with business leads to such "serious" pursuits as war. Instead, says Plato's Athenian, men should make play, games, and sports the very content of their lives; they should sing, dance, and sport on the stage before the gods and aspire to lives of peace, pleasure, and love.

At present they think that their serious pursuits should be for the sake of their sports, for they deem war a serious pursuit, which must be managed well for the sake of peace; but the truth is, that there neither is, nor has been, nor ever will be, amusement or Instruction in any degree worth speaking of in war, which is nevertheless deemed by us to be the most serious of our pursuits. And therefore, as we say, every one of us should live the life of peace as long and as well as he can. And what is the right way of living. Are we to live in sports always? If so, In what kind of sports? We ought to live sacrificing, and singing, and dancing, and then a man will be able to propitiate the Gods, and to defend himself against his enemies and conquer them in battle (Laws, 803de),

When Megillus interrupts the Stranger1s encomium on the noble life of play to protest what he takes to be a "low opinion of mankind," the Athenian replies that he has been viewing man from the lofty vantage point of divinity:

"Nay, Megillus, be not amazed, but forgive me:— I was 76

comparing them with the Gods; and under that feeling I

spoke. Let us grant, if you wish, that the human race is

not to be despised, but is worthy of some consideration"

(Laws. 804-b). It is the unbounded potentiality that makes

light play of our limited, myopic actuality.

We find additional evidence of Plato's high regard for

play and games in his educational theories. He was one

of the first to recognize the tremendous, formative influ­

ence of children's games. Children learn through playing,

and the games they play and amuse themselves with affect

their adult lives and eventually touch the whole fabric of

society. Thus, in both the Republic and the Laws, Plato

allocates much of the dialogue to dictating the proper

kinds of play to be used in rearing and nurturing the

young. Gymnastics (dances, sports, boxing and wrestling

matches) and music (songs, Instrumental melodies, hymns,

and poetry) form the two main branches of education: the

first strengthens the body, the second perfects the soul.

Plato sees the identity between freedom and play, and he

praises a free and playful method of education. "Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind," he argues; therefore, "do not use compulsion, but

let early education be a sort of amusement" (Republic, 536e).

Play is the right way of perfecting skills and discovering talents. Hie arts of the carpenter and the 77

warrior (and presumably the other arts and occupations

as well) are first learned and practiced "in sport and

earnest" by the child:

According to my view, anyone who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in its several branches: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; he who is to be a good husbandman, at tilling the ground; and those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools. They should learn beforehand the knowledge which they will after­ wards require for their art. For example, the future carpenter should learn to measure or apply the line in play; and the future warrior should learn riding, or some other exercise, for amusement, to their final aim in life. The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be guided to the love of that sort of excellence in which when he grows up to manhood he will have to be perfected (Laws, 6^3b-d).

Whoever gave the brand "Playskool" to the educational toys

("mimic tools") manufactured under its name hit upon precisely the point Plato was trying to make. Schooling is play, play is schooling. Pretending is pre-tending. The

child takes his first steps towards becoming an adult when he pre-tends to act like one.

Plato's respect for the play-learning of children is strong enough to evoke fear. Fully aware of how forcibly

games shape the ideas of the young, he dreads and outlaws any innovations in the established games he would allow in the state: 78

children who make innovations in their games, when they grow up to be men, will be different from the last generation of children, and, being different, will desire a different sort of life, and under the Influence of this desire will want other institutions and laws . . . (Laws. 798c).

"The plays of childhood," he observes, "have a great deal to do with the permanence or want of permanence in legislation" (Laws, 797a). Revolutions In childrens games breed revolutions in the state, and "if childish amusement becomes lawless, it will produce lawless children" (Republic, k2$a). Plato would have readily believed what some are now saying about the permissive counter-culture our young radicals are nourishing: that at the heart of this revolution is a revolution in musical tastes.2 Plato's restrictions are harsh. Innovations in music, song, dance, poetry, and sports are strictly forbidden. No new modes of play will be tolerated by the ideal, unchanging state. Educators must ordain all festivals, consecrate all dances and melodies, and prescribe what hymns may be sung and what poems recited.

Play and art are frozen in fixed and prescribed forms.

All of this reeks of repressive totalitarianism and reminds us of Plato's banishment of the poet from the

Republic. The very freedom that a player requires to enjoy his play, or a poet his writing, is denied. Plato's rigidity can be justified— or at least understood— only in the context of the peculiar necessities he demands of his 79

utopian state, one being that an ideal state would be

static, permanent, and unchanging. But this political

conservatism still pays indirect tribute to the powers of

play and poetry. Plato fears, distrusts, and seeks to

manacle these activities precisely because he considers

them so potent. If our libertine contemporary attitudes are healthier, they may well result from the lower estimate we have of these activities. We do not fear play and poetry as Plato did. But neither do we take them quite as

"seriously" as he did either.

Yet even our supposedly libertine attitudes towards art and play are contestable. Ours is the great age of voyeurism— witness the popularity of mail-order pornography, nudity on stage and screen, sex shops, and electronic sex stimulation. But it is also the age of police raids, X- ratings, political campaigns against obscenity, and electronic surveillance. President Nixon*s flat denouncement of the controversial findings of the Commission^

Report on Obscenity and Pornography Is a recent case in point. "Pornography is to freedom of expression what anarchy is to liberty," Nixon hissed as he angrily brushed aside the scientific evidence considered in the report.

We have Oh! Calcutta! and Hair. We also have locked library stacks and banned books. We must not forget the plight of

Alexander Solzhenitsyn now or of D. H. Lawrence only a 80

decade earlier. Eroticism and political radicalism have not yet universally won their freedoms to be.

Then too there are our notoriously severe and undiscriminating drug laws, Timothy Leary gets thirty years for possessing a few ounces of marijuana and for having experimented openly with hallucinogenic drugs; he would perhaps have fared better if tried for larceny, rape, or second-degree murder. Considering the paucity of scientific evidence on the harmfulness of some illegal drugs— notably marijuana— can we not conclude that the severity of our drug laws reflects the same fear of lawless

"childish amusement" that terrified Plato? So many of our young people now choose to live outside the law that the very concept of established laws— especially those laws that supposedly protect an individual from himself— has been called into doubt. Our young demand the right to new forms of amusement; they have found new games to play and new ways of enjoying life. For the euphoric circle of pot smokers sharing in the communion of passing the peace pipe, giggling, blowing soap bubbles, sniffing incense, listening to rock music, and engaging in other "childish" amusements displays a love of play more convincingly than does, say, a foursome of Sunday golfers or a party of tipsy Martini sippers. The Establishment recognizes as clearly as did Plato that these new forms of play pose a 81

threat to existing laws and institutions of the State.

Already many of the last generation of "flower children" have become adults who demand new laws and social institu­ tions— just as Plato had predicted they would. We still fear art and play whenever their form or content seems to pose challenges to established values and life styles.

The writings of Plato are as "relevant" now as they ever have been.

Plato bequeathed his combined love and fear of play to his student Aristotle. In the writings of Aristotle we begin to observe the breakdown of the original unity between play and work, between seriousness and nonseriousness. For Aristotle these are polar extremes, reconcilable only by compromise in the "golden mean," that comfortable middle ground between solemnity and festivity.

In Book IV, chapter 8 of his Nlchomachean Ethics,

Aristotle discusses the balanced mean between seriousness and nonseriousness. He begins by tempering his earlier concentration on the serious moral virtues: "We must not forget, however, that recreation or relaxation has its place in our lives, and that includes entertaining conversation."22 There are two extremes, says Aristotle: the "bomolochos" or Joker who makes light of everything, and the "agroikos" or boor who never cracks a smile. 82

Well, the man “who carries fun to all lengths is regarded as an ill-bred buffoon who feels he must be funny come what may and would rather venture on risque jokes and hurt the feelings of his victim than fall to raise a laugh. On the other hand, the man who never cracks a joke himself, and does not care for those who do, is looked upon as a dour and humourless fellow (Ethics, p. 134).

Between the buffoon and the boor towers the ideal man who takes the media via, the well-cultivated "witty man" who jests but observes propriety in his pleasantries. He amuses without ridiculing, he delights without offending.

The virtue he practices is eutrapella, literally a

"well-turning.The seriously playful man makes us laugh and smile but does not descend to Indecent ribaldry or injurious raillery.

The norm for Aristotle falls somewhere between solemnity and festivity, but it does not fall midway between them. The ideal comes much closer to gravity than to levity. Nonseriousness is, in fact, considered more of an ornament— perhaps not entirely superfluous but clearly subordinate to seriousness. In Book X of the Ethics, discussing happiness as the end of life, Aristotle carefully distinguishes mere pleasure (play) from serious activity

(work):

It is not in amusements that happiness is to be found. Certainly it would be strange if the end of life were amusement, and we are to labour and endure hardness all our days merely for the fun of it. Almost every objective we choose is chosen for an ulterior purpose. But not 83

happiness; happiness Is an end In Itself. To make a serious business of amusement and spend laborious days upon it is the height of folly and childishness. The maxim of Anacharsis, Play so that you may be serious, may be taken as pointing in the right direction. For amusement is a form of rest or relaxation, and rest we need because we cannot always be working. Rest then is not an end but a means to future activity (Ethics, p. 302).

David L. Miller has coined an apt label for this point of

view; he calls it "the Coca Cola philosophy of play."

According to this notion play serves the higher cause of

work: "man pauses to be refreshed £o that he may better

perform a life of labor."2^ Play becomes merely ’the pause

that refreshes* for work, the comic relief allowed to

briefly interrupt the serious matters of life. It quenches

a subordinate thirst, for, says Aristotle, "serious things

are intrinsically better than funny or amusing things"

(Ethics. X, 6, p. 302).

Missing entirely is Plato’s recognition of the

complementarity of work and play and his conception of the

contemplative life as a "noble pastime." Aristotle equates

the good life with the virtuous and productive workaday

life, in which pleasure is not an end but a means to more

effective labor. Nothing as serious as philosophy can

Aristotle call play or a noble pastime. He associates play with sensual gratification and the simple hedonism of wine, women, and song. And he shows a scholar’s condescension

towards the lowly playthings of life: "Anybody can enjoy 8^

fleshly pleasures— a slave no less than Socrates" (Ethics, p. 302).

Why did Plato value play so much more highly than his student? I think this can be explained quite simply:

Plato was an idealist and mystic; Aristotle, a pragmatist and naturalist. For Plato play still preserves its holiness. Aristotle, viewing it as a purely secular and physical human activity, strips play of its sacred meanings.

Plato's is the world of play; Aristotle's is the world of work. The Ion is playful, joyous, and religious— the rhapsodic inspirations of a synthesizer of wisdom; the

Poetics is reasonable, solemn, and practical— the workman­ like distinctions of a classifier of knowledge.

Seriousness and work have been separated from nonseriousness and play in Aristotle's analysis, with the laurels awarded to the former. For the next 2000 years work and play will occupy separate compartments in Western thought. We will not attempt to pursue their separate histories to the present day. But we will briefly note how the dichotomy was preserved, sharpened, and reinterpreted by some of the early Christian thinkers. Their views are representative of the two Western traditions that have persisted until very recent times.

The antithetical claims of work and play found one locus for expression in Christian attempts to envision the 85

prelapsarlan age— the Golden Age of Innocence and content­

ment before the Fall. Did Adam work in the Garden of Eden—

was he a busy gardener? Or did he sport away his time in

idle bliss as an unemployed player? Was labor an original

virtue or a penalty levied for man*s overreaching and

consequent Fall? Freud was merely substituting modern

terminology when he posed the same question in Civilization

and Its Discontents; is civilization— built upon the

perfection of sublimated labor and the repression of play

(Eros)— a curse or a blessing?

Two schools of Christian thought developed. One

school, represented by St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St.

Chrysotom and reaching extremes in Luther and Calvin,

stressed the seriousness of life and the glory of work.

Adam would have been bored stiff had he not practiced the agreeable occupation of farming; work must be intrinsically good. This is the position St. Augustine takes in his De

Opere Monachoru. an attack on hooded sluggards. Monastic

idlers ought to be punished; their proper business is to work up a sweat for the greater glory of God, to observe strict punctuality in punching the time-clock with their round-the-clock prayers, and to shun the tempting life of ease. Leisure is the frivolous and unproductive "waste11 of time; It is a form of "nothingness" or diabolical emptiness.

In his sermon on a passage from Matthew, St. Chrysotom 86

gives unequivocal expression to this attitude. The world

is not a theatre, in which we can laugh and Joke, but a

confessional box, in vihich we should weep for our sins:

"It is not God who gives us the chance to play, but the devil.,,25 Play has lost its divinity; no longer the handiwork of God, it is now the temptation of the devil.

The unforgiveable Christian sin is idleness or sloth. Hard work and good works measure the man. The dignity of labor is its divinity. And this justifies a love of fervent

Christian activism: the spirit behind the Crusades, the

Reformation, the Protestant work ethos, evangelical and missionary zeal, and the modern church’s political and social welfarism.

The other line of thought divests work of its Edenic nobility and divinity. It Is typified by Abelard's repudiation of Augustine’s portrait of Adam as the happy gardener. Abelard considers even gardening to be miserable peasant’s toil, scarcely befitting a prince; instead, work was a penalty exacted on Adam at the time of the Fall.

Work, fatigue, and suffering were punishments for original sin; there is nothing Intrinsically good about them. At best work is a human necessity and duty to be performed; at worst, a degrading drudgery to be endured. Because work results solely from human failing, Utopian schemes, which eliminate or diminish the painfulness of labor, seek to 87

rectify the flaw and. "repair the ruins of our first parents."

In fantasies like Thomas More’s Utopia and John Ruskin’s

Seven Lamps of Architecture, the effort Is made to imagine

a Christian world— existing either "nowhere" or in a

romanticized past— where the worker sweats less and reaps

more. The Ideal Christian worker— for More the leisurely

contemplator, for Ruslcln the Gothic craftsman— loves what

he does, freely and spontaneously creates beautiful objects,

and turns his work into exuberant play. The ability to play

thus becomes man’s compensation for the Fall. Play is the

activity that most nearly approximates the prelapsarlan

doings and beings of the first parents. In playing man

comes as close as is humanly possible to re-experlenclng

the original freedom, bliss, and purposelessness of life

in the Golden Age— Eden before the soil had to be tilled,

the seeds planted, the weeds pulled, the crops tended, and the trees pruned.

The medieval cloisters presumably bulged with men who had fled the workaday xtforld In search of Edenic playalife retreats. The issue of idleness does not, however, properly figure into the debate at all, for work and play are both energy-absorbing activities. Play is an intense, energetic, consuming, and often exhausting activity— it Is very much opposed to the sin of inactive sloth. More directly to the point is whether the proper Christian spirit is gravity or mirth. And we perhaps do not go far astray to read in the conflicting answers the differences in tone between the Old and the New Testaments. Those who emphasize man's sinful nature are inclined to believe perpetual mourning is the appropriate human sentiment.

Those who look optimistically ahead to redemption and grace are more willing to hold up mirth, gaiety, and festivity as the fitting Christian faces. In the writings of St.

Thomas Aquinas we notice one Christian attempt to reconcile these two feelings.

Aquinas devotes one question in the Summa Theologlca to precisely this topic. He asks whether seriousness or mirth is the true Christian spirit, whether ’’there can be a virtue about playful actions," and whether either an excess or a lack of play can produce sinfulness.26 He uses as one departure point Ambrose's remark, "Woe to you who laugh, for you shall weep." He repudiates this sullen and dogmatic assertion by arguing that mirth, pleasure, and play afford a needful remedy for the weariness of the soul.

Now suchlike words or deeds wherein nothing further is sought than the soul’s delight, are called playful or humorous. Hence it is necessary at times to make use of them, in order to give rest, as it were, to the soul (p. 297).

We readily detect the Influence of the Nlchomachean Ethics in Aquinas' argument, and Indeed it is on the authority of

Aristotle that he bases most of his reply. Frequently he 89

borrows directly from Aristotle, "the Philosopher" to whom

he graciously defers:

Therefore there can be a virtue about games, The Philosopher gives it the name of wittiness (eutrapella), and a man is said to be pleasant through having a happy turn of mind, whereby he gives his words and deeds a cheerful turn: and inasmuch as this virtue restrains a man from immoderate fun, it is comprised under modesty (p. 298).

In Aristotelian fashion Aquinas tries to synthesize

seriousness and nonseriousness in the balanced mean of the

grave-merry man. Excessive play, which "goes beyond the rule of reason"— by being insolent or obscene, or by detracting from the worship of God, is declared a mortal sin. Moderation in play and games must always be observed.

On the other hand, the want of mirth is also a vice, though less sinful than the excess of it. The unmirthful man is boring and displeasing to others:

Now a man who is without mirth, not only is lacking in playful speech, but is also burdensome to others, since he is deaf to the moderate mirth of others. Consequently they are vicious, and are said to be boorish or rude, as the Philosopher states (p. 302).

Nevertheless, the synthesis between work and play that

Aquinas attempts to make clearly assumes his own acceptance of a natural antagonism between the two. His effort to bring them closer together reveals how far apart they have, in fact, grown. Aquinas takes for granted the primacy of gravity and work. It is play— not work— that must be defended and allowed Its little recuperative function in

life. He regards 'purposeless play* as heinous and bans

the pursuit of pleasure for pleasure's sake. Only when pleasures have a useful and recognizable purpose, when they move a Christian to work all the harder in the service of

God, can they be construed as virtuous. Although Aquinas pays lip service to the value of play, his sympathies dwell in the camp of the serious workers. Behind all the praise he musters for the playful way of life looms his cautious reprimand: "do not introduce play into undue matters and seasons" (p. 301). There is a time for work and a time for play. The two do not coincide.

Modern man has inherited the dichotomy between work and play and the assumed primacy of work over play. In the

19th century Industrial man made dramatic advances in the efficiency of his labors and his tools. He learned to harness the natural energy of steam for greater productivity.

He developed economic theories of Homo laborans and the working class, for mass man was defined above all else as the "worker." He also put his children to work in coal mines and factories, depriving them of the one period in life when play should enjoy at least a temporary reign.

A vocal minority of dissenters cried out early against the growing cult of labor worship. We recall that Rousseau saw more value in the free play of the child than in the forced labor of the adult. In the brief Romantic movement, with Its idealization of the child, the simple rustic,

primitivism, and an undisturbed nature, loud protests were registered against rampant industrialization, A few tried

to live by their ideals: the 19th century had Its flirtation with communal living experiments and agrarian revivals; most of these died young; a few— like Oneida— endured by becoming commercial enterprises. But the voices of Wordsworth and Thoreau went unheeded: they seemed to exalt the dying world of the past while Dame

Progress herself ignorantly steamed and screamed down 'the ringing grooves of change* into the future. Only the occasional eccentric like Fourier had foresight enough to ponder whether, in that unknown future, work and play could not somehow be brought together in a utopian, socialistic society.

Industrialization demanded a commitment to physical and mental toil. The labors of men who sacrificed their physical and psychic energies to the cause of material progress, industry, and science made possible our comtemporary world of sophisticated electronic gimmickry, monstrous machines and skyscrapers, concrete landscapes, and screaming turbine engines. Some real doubt remains whether the end has justified the means--whether the vast expenditure of brute human strength has created a 92

qualitatively better and more Inhabitable world, or whether it has simply cheapened life and left hideous scars and pocks on the earth's surface for later generations to erradicate.

Some recent evidence suggests that the gallop towards productivity and Industry is being gradually bridled and abated. A new spirit and consciousness dawn on the horizon.

We seem to be reaching a new level of mass mind that cele­ brates the quality rather than the quantity of life.

Charles Reich sees it in the emergence of Consciousness III and the "Greening of America." Norman Mailer sees it in

Muhammad All, whose dancing footwork and playful punches symbolize the language of the new consciousness; the new style opposes the old values of exhausting work and plodding effort, nicely typified by Joe Frazier's indefatigable training and boxing style. And other commentators have heralded the refusal of Congress to refinance the American

SST as an optimistic sign of the changing times, for one split in that debate was clearly between employment and environment: work versus a place to play.

We have come, so to speak, full round. We have reached the point at which the first chapter began— in wondering about the future. Our tendency to overvalue industry and deify work as the most rewarding activity of our lives is being challenged by a growing number of radical thinkers. Because play Is one human activity that

can never be automated, It appears to many to be the ray

of the future. Play is the key metaphor in an emerging

mythology; festivity and fantasy are rapidly becoming the

religious postures of the new world. A broader perspective

has been given our contemporary fascination with play by

a brief glimpse into the past. We discovered an age (part

real and part fictional) in which work and play, serious­

ness and nonseriousness, did not grapple together in the

ring so violently as they now do. It was a profoundly

religious age that gave play a position of sacred importance.

Play reigned on earth because it was divined to reign in

a primitive Golden Age or future utopia— Mt. Olympus, the

Garden of Eden, Christian heaven. Primitivism and eschato-

logy Joined hands to worship play.

The gradual secularization of man— what Home did to

Greece the Renaissance did to the medieval worldview and

the 19th century seemed to do to religious belief of any

sort— undid the knot which originally bound play and the

sacred. Lacking their religious meanings, play and games

could be regarded only as relatively unimportant human activities— unimportant because nothing utilitarian seemed

to accrue from them. There was a breakdown of the holy and play to parallel the breakdown of the holy and the arts, which Gerardus van der Leeuw so brilliantly unfolds for us in his Sacred and Profane B e a u t y .^7 For some reason

the arts seem to have held onto their sacred ties more

tenaciously than did play. 'Play expired its holy "breath

In one swift exhalation. Play was holy for Plato "but

secular for his student. Play existed on an ideal plane

transcending seriousness and nonseriousness in Plato's

ethereal thoughts. Aristotle, his eyes cast down upon the

terrestrial playground, saw games and play as "nonserlous11

activities, whose sole purpose was to recharge fatigued

minds and muscles for "serious" employment.

Play is valued when its divinity is supposed. The

childish act of playing is emulated when it is seen as a

foretaste of life in a more perfect world. This explains why the contemporary revival of play as a way of life is equally rooted in a spiritual conception of life as a way of play. The Weltsplel conception of the universe is being revived in the 20th century, and along with it comes a new

Interest in play.

We can conveniently date the revival as "beginning in

1933. In that year Johan Huizinga, the Rector of Leyden, delivered as his annual university address a lecture originally entitled "The Cultural Limits of Play and the

Serious" and later renamed "The Play Element of Culture."

This was eventually expanded by the Dutch historian to his classic book on the subject, Homo Ludens; A Study of the n O Play-Element In Culture. completed five years later (1938).

Huizinga's thesis, stated simply, is that higher civilization— culture as we know it— arises and unfolds as sacred play. Traces of the idea appear in his other works, notably The Waning of the Middle Ages. In that study he explained the persistence of long-outdated heroic codes and conventions in medieval culture as vestiges of ancient

Initiation rites, which had originated as sacred play.

What seemed to explain the passionate love of a people for the exotic knight errantry of the past— celebrated publicly in Jousting tournaments replete with colorful heraldic devices, banners, trumpets, and cumbersomely- armored contestants, and enjoyed clandestinely and vicariously in the romantic ideals and literary motifs of the courtly love tradition— was the spirit of play in which these chivalric gestures to the past were made.

In Homo Ludens Huizinga extends his insight to the whole of civilization. Culture as a whole, he argues, plays itself into being;

Social life Is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, which enhance its value. It Is through playing that society expresses its Interpretation of life and the world. By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culture has the play-character, that it proceeds in the shape and mood of play. In the twin union of play and culture, play is primary (Homo Ludens, p. W . 96

As civilization grows more and more complex, play recedes into the background, "being absorbed for the most part in the sacred sphere," but leaving remnants which crystallize as various forms of knowledge: folklore, myth, poetry, philosophy, the arts, law, war, and education. And as an historian Huizinga does not pass up the opportunity of showing and explaining the "play-elements" of various historical periods in Western civilization. There is very little, in fact, that Huizinga cannot explain as being invested with the "play-element" (he prefers that term to the more ambiguous "play-instinct," though the distinction is not altogether convincing), Man is the competitive player in all that he does; even such superficially "non- play" activities as the waging of war, the practicing of law, or the electing of an American president, preserve their basic agonistic and combative elements— their ritualistic "play-contest" forms. And he finds abundant traces of play in the most refined and sophisticated of civilizations and their styles: the Greek and Roman empires, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the "Baroque"

17th century, and the exceptionally playful "Rococo" 18th century.

lbe historical turning point for Huizinga was the

19th century, the Industrial Age that had "lost all feeling for its play-qualities" and "left little room for play" (Homo Ludens, p. 187 & P. 191). In that age, when "all of

Europe donned the boller-suit," utilitarianism and prosaic

efficiency overwhelmed the play-element of culture and

depreciated play to Its inferior status as mere

entertainment--existlng alongside but severed from the

serious aspirations of society. Art, emptying itself of

play, degenerates into dull realism and naturalism. And

contemporary civilization, through systematization and

regimentation, has only further profaned play: play has

been reduced to commercially profitable and utilitarian

"sport". Play has lost its culture-creating function; it

has become decorative icing. At fault is the emergent self-

consciousness of art and play: "when art becomes self-

conscious, that is, conscious of its own grace, it is apt

to lose something of its eternal child-like innocence"

(Homo Ludens. p. 202). The play-element in culture, Huizinga

concludes, "has been on the wane since the 18th century, when it was in full flower" (Homo Ludens, p. 206).

Huizinga sought to put the Weltspiel conception of the

universe— or at least of the civilized world— on a firm anthropological and historical footing. What Plato had

grasped intuitively, Huizinga tried to document

scientifically, by studying the rituals and myths of primitive peoples and tracing their manifestations in the

"higher" forms of civilization and culture. As sceptical moderns we may take exception xvith his findings as being

too "reductionistic"; too much seems conveniently to collapse

into the catch-all "play." The very concept of the "play-

element" seems blurred by being applied both too broadly

and too narrowly. Applied too broadly because it is made

to cover almost the full spectrum of human activities;

play becomes an alternate word for culture: everything

and then nothing is explained. Applied too narrowly

because Huizinga concentrated on only one kind of play—

the competitive play that informs riddle contests,

parliamentary debates, legal and philosophical disputes,

and even war,29 Huizinga himself resisted the conclusion

that "all is play," calling it "a cheap metaphor, no doubt,

mere Impotence of mind" (Homo Ludens, p. 212). Yet he was

clearly tempted by the Platonic simplicity and compelling

wisdom of the idea. Some would say he succumbed to the

idea despite his better judgment. In any case he

accurately perceived that the Weltsplel conception of the

universe rests ultimately upon an otherworldly temperament

and a religious worldview. "The human mind can only

disengage itself from the magic circle of play by turning

towards the ultimate" (Homo Ludens. p. 212). As a corollary

to this, we can add that man first begins to think of his life on earth as a game, bounded by time and space and

enacted within the bounds of the confined earthly 99

playground, when he imagines the ultimate seriousness and

unboundedness of time and space in some divine realm or

practical utopia extending far beyond the life of the

individual. That is the paradox and funniest joke of all:

life is play until proven otherwise, but man can never know

the truth until he can no longer communicate it to the

living. The point at which human life reveals Itself as

having been meaningful or meaninglessness, serious or

nonserious, a playful game or not, fades always into the

ever-receding future. Apocalypse, revelation, and utopia

keep getting postponed or called off on account of bad

weather. We understand life when we are sure we understand

death. But we are sure we understand death only when it is

too late to explain life.

But we can guess. And we can stake our fortunes and

live our lives on the chance of our speculations accurately

prophesying the truth. I am more convinced than Huizinga

that the decline of play in the 19th and 20th centuries

can be ultimately connected to the collapse of religious belief. I have argued throughout that the "life is play"

idea flourishes only when it accompanies an eschatologlcal

faith— a hope in some sort of eternity or practical utopia.

Destroy such a hope, deny the holiness or hopefulness of play, and you rob play of its meaning, seriousness, and worth. 100

This does not mean, however, that the spiritual hope must be “religious11 in any traditional or orthodox sense.

It does not matter for this purpose whether one is an existentialist, a Christian believer, or a Buddhist monk.

What matters is only that one look forward with hope to an unknown world "around the corner"— whether a secular utopia of human freedom created on this earth, or the eternal afterlife of the soul in a Christian heaven, or a pantheistic flowing of all created things into the One.

Or it may be the possession of a cosmic consciousness, a nonmetaphysical awareness of how vast has been and may be the presence of man on this tiny globe— the endless flood of children who have sprung and who spring from the womb, and who insure the endless panorama of human history.

History streams past the cosmic eye like rapidly speeded- up old movie films; everything looks so ridiculously funny and purposeless— just an unceasing cycle of people being born and dying, being born and dying. And how much funnier all this is when the cosmic mind simultaneously remembers how Infinitesimal the human span of existence on earth, how tiny the little ball on which he spins through the vast universe, and how far away a planet from its sun or a particle of matter from the center of an atom. Each of these beliefs or states of mind, in its own peculiar fashion, gives credibility to the idea that life is play and makes mirth and joy the appropriate moods for going through life.

In each of these views there is an imagined end or a

completed whole towards which all living things flow.

Some "thing" is being created, and some "body" seems to be

creating it. Believing In such an end or wholeness makes hoping, loving, and playing possible for adults; children have no need of such beliefs because they have never had occasion to doubt them. "Play," as Gerardus van der Leeuw writes, "is the prerequisite for those forms of existence which strive toward a communion with the other, and finally for a meeting with God" (Sacred and Profane Beauty.

P. 112).

Play is the way of joyous creation. That is no doubt why children, who are in the process of creating themselves, play so intently and have so much more fun than adults.

The spirit of play assures that whatever is created will be free, unservile, innocent, and gratuitous; creation bears the Imprint of grace freely given in the form of a gift or pledge. That is why the creation of a practical utopia on earth can only be envisioned, as I described it in the preceding chapter, as "the birth of play." Creative play

Is the one bright ray of light apocalyptic thinkers see dawning in the Good Morning of man, for play is the one human activity that unmistakably emanates love, Joy, spon­ taneity, freedom, and mirth. Creative play seeks to close 102

the sap between the natural and the supernatural. A prayer asks for grace and inspiration. A player, in contrast, acts as though divinity has already granted its blessing and bestowed grace. The artist, whose play creates a work,

is thus said to Imitate God, whose play creates the world.

Holy play is also characterized by its freedom. This helps us understand why the enlightenment of mystics, the

Intuitive flashes of wisdom that leave intellectual reasoning and logical analysis far behind, can be communicated only in flights of poetic fancy and in nonsense, irrationalities, logical contradictions, puzzles, paradoxes, parables, jests, and jokes.

Empty-handed I go, and behold, the spade is in my hand; X walk on foot, yet on the back of an ox I am riding. VJhen I pass over the bridge Lo, the water floweth not; it is the bridge doth flow.

This, one of the most famous of Zen sayings, Intrigues, teases, delights, and puzzles the mind. It is both amusingly flippant and deadly serious, both nonsense and beyond sense, both playful and holy. It is highly

"unreasonable" and defies logical analysis, but then neither does it address itself to intellect or reason. It Is uttered on the level of holy play which transcends lesser distinctions between seriousness and nonseriousness.

Although It speaks words, It can neither be explained nor comprehended in language, for language Is a tool of the intellect. Words pull the strings of reason, but they

clip the wings of wisdom. Zen "nonsense" is divine play

in its purest, freest, zaniest, and most sublime form.

Not even reason and common sense can fetter or contain its

strange and mysterious ways.

All of this brings to bear upon what must, X think, be heralded as a major spiritual reawakening in our time. It seems that God needed to die in the 20th century (as he always seems to do from time to time) only so he might arise again, aglow in new shapes and colors and afresh with new meanings. The contemporary spiritual quickening has exhibited a contempt for religious dogma, sects, and even scriptures and a rejection of traditional liturgies and other forms of organized worship. Now there is probably more religious meditation and contemplation practiced and certainly more love and joy expressed in dormitory rooms, communal kitchens, and at rock Festivals of Life across the country than in all of suburbia’s Protestant churches combined, Protestant hymns have been scrapped in favor of folk and rock lyrics. The slow, mellow drone of the organ has given way to the tlnkly and lively rhythms of tambourine, cymbal, and sitar. And "getting high" has become not only the latest jargon for describing marijuana euphoria but also a way of expressing one’s contentment and sheer joy in being alive, of flowing "together" with the universe, 104

of feeling love and loved. "High" is the contemporary expression for the sensual experience of "grace," Perhaps these feelings of high are a poor-man's substitute for the bliss, mirth, and Joy awaiting him beyond, but such intimations of grace and love are surely worth having— both as good feelings in themselves and as pointers to the divine life.

With the death of God and the rebirth of religious feeling has come a revival of play as the way of the present and the ray of the future. The gloomy solemnity with which "radical theologians" first relayed the news that 'God has died1 is fast disappearing. In its wake wells and bubbles up a "theology of play" to sanction joyous dancing, frolicking, rejoicing, and freaking about on the grave of the demised (secularized) God, Play theology has already won a substantial following; leading the movement are such theologians and works as: Alan

Watts, Beyond Theology: the Art of Godsmanshlp (1964) and his other writings; Josef Pieper, In Tune with the World:

A Theory of Festivity (1965); Hugo Rahner, Man at Play

(I967); David L. Miller, Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Play (1969); Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: a

Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (I969); and

Robert E, Neale, In Praise of Play: Toward a Psychology of

Religion (New York, I969). 105

Play theology goes "beyond, radical theology," as

Harvey Cox notes, by setting up hope as "the axis around which all other Christian virtues must find their place"

(Feast of Fools, p. 127), and by encouraging festivity

(folk and rock rituals, dance liturgies, and merriment in the church) and fantasy (utopian speculation, science fiction, the experimental creation of radically new human communities, and visionary politics). In the Divine Comedy of Christianity, Christ enters dressed as a Harlequin. The theology of play, adds David L. Hiller, is a pretend-faith of "make-believe" and its true minister is "an interior decorator" who brightens up our souls and makes us smile.

Play becomes a wandering purposelessness, a "letting-be" and a "waitlng-upon" the future. Play theology celebrates secular man as imaglner, player, and hoper rather than as sinner and historical degenerate. Life is meant to be enjoyed as a game, as the earthly foreplay which brings into being an even better world of play in the future.

There is a secular emphasis in the movement, an insistence on creating the utopian world of play in "the here and now." And play theologians share a bright hope that such a secular utopia can and will be created if only we will

"let it be."

Theologlca ludens: religion turns into play. Gods and games merge again into the original harmony that once 106

united them. The contemporary religious awakening seeks to

recapture the primitive innocence, spontaneity, festivity,

and freedom of worship. It renews itself with the

delightful play-feeling that is, as Joseph Campbell reminds

us, the spirit of a religious life:

From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending series. The laws of life in time and space— economics, politics, and even morality— will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and disbelief, we are to carry the point of view and spirit of man the player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of children, where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life

We need to distinguish between what play theologicans mean by ‘'life is a game" and some different contemporary uses of the same emotive metaphor. For example, when Eric

Berne speaks of "the games people play," he uses the "life

is play" metaphor flippantly. We are asked to think of an activity such as mild, cocktail-party flirtation as the game of "first-degree Rapo" so that we can stand above our actions and see how amusing and funny they are. Much of the seriousness of the idea has been expunged. Although we are encouraged to look down upon our dally activities 10?

from a god-like vantage point, the games we play deteriorate into despicable ego trips. On the other hand, some writers, like Beckett, find life to be a serious but empty game that is meaningless, absurd, pointless, and worthless.

This extreme carries the seriousness of the metaphor to cynicism and despair: festivity, joy, and merriment do not turn their somersaults on the stage of life. Creativity totters precariously on a thin rope stretched across the deep void: words give way to silent yawns.

But in itself the idea that life is play is cause for neither flippancy nor cynicism. It does say that If life is worth living (and we have little reason to suspect otherwise), It Is worth embracing, celebrating In creative freedom, and playing with the gusto and innocence of the little child. And it says that all human activities ought

Ideally to be conducted in the spirit of holy play. The philosopher, the poet, and the mystic are the visionaries whose flights of imagination should inspire us to contemplate the divinely-creative play of Deus ludens. and whose prophetic dreams and fantasies should guide our attempts to Imitate God, "repair the ruins of our first parents," and create a childlike world of play on our tiny planet.

For the philosopher, the poet, and the mystic are most like the child and most like God. In their creative play 108

they mimic the world-creating play of the Creator. Their visions, insights, and creations dwell in "another" world, an extraordinary world in which many of the rules of every­ day life are suspended. If the world of intuition, imagina­ tion, serendipity, and the unconscious obeys rules of its own inclination, the rules cannot be circumscribed or comprehended by the purely rational mind. In this extraordinary world the unfettered play of adult children frequently transcends the earthbound limitations of ordinary reason and common sense. The creative mind bypasses and reverses many conventional rules of thinking: Einstein’s discovery of relativity theory owed much, for instance, to his metaphysical disregard for traditional ways of thinking about time and space. It is this lawlessness and freedom, this playfulness, that make Eureka discoveries and imagina­ tive creations possible. In his brilliant analysis of the creative act, Arthur Koestler pays high tribute to the unconscious "underground games" played by the creative mind:

, , . ordered, disciplined thought is a skill governed by set rules of the game, some of which are explicitly stated, others implied and hidden in the code. The creative act, in so far as it depends on unconscious resources, presupposes a relaxing of the controls and a regression to modes of ideation which are indifferent to the rules of verbal logic, unperturbed by contradiction, untouched by the dogmas and taboos of so-called common sense. At the decisive stage of discovery the codes of disciplined reasoning are suspended— as they are in the dream, the reverie, the manic flight of thought, when the stream of Ideation 109

Is free to drift, by its own emotional gravity, as it were, in an apparently lawless* fashion.31

Weltsplel conception of the universe thus gives ultimate metaphysical sanction to rational attempts to describe all forms of human creation sub specie ludi.

Like the child and like culture, literature and the arts play themselves into being in a cosmos that Itself is a game created by God the Player. Play creates freedom. It also frees creation. CHAPTER 2

FOOTNOTES

•^The Joyous Cosmology; Adventures In the Chemistry of Consclousness(New York: Vintage, 1962), p. 72.

^Gods and Games: Toward a Theology of Flay (New York, 1969), p. 9. The relevant historical section Is ch. 3» "The Origin and History of Ideas about Games and Play," pp. 97-117. Throughout my study I remain much indebted to Professor Miller's playfully serious book. His bibliography, incidentally, provides the most complete listing I have found of works in all fields of the humanities which deal with or touch upon the subject of play.

3The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are (New York:" Pantheon, 19&6)» P. 13.

^Proverbs 8.30-31. I have used the text of the RSV but have substituted the word "playing" for "rejoicing." The Vulgate uses ludens and Luther's translation splelen. both meaning "to play." The actual Hebrew wording In this passage as well as later commentaries would support a translation of either "playing" or "dancing." For a full discussion of the linguistic difficulties in rendering this passage, see Hugo Rahner, S.J., Nan at Play (New York, 1967), PP. 19-24. 5Ibid., p. 24.

^Cited in Rahner, Man at Play, p. 17.

7Gravity and. Grace (London, 1952), p. 157.

8Myth and Ritual in Dance, Game, and Rhyme (London, 1947), PP. 23 -22ir

9see Rahner, Man at Play, pp. 17-18.

l°See Spence, Myth and Ritual, ch. 2, "The Religious Origin of Primitive Games," esp. pp. 18-20.

110 Ill

i]-For an interesting discussion of the allegorical quality of one such board game— chess— and its relationship to utopian fiction, see Michael Holoquist, "How to play Utopia," Yale French Studies, Game, Flay, Literature, XLI (I908), 106-123. Holoquist discusses the medieval literature of "chess moralities" and various chess allegories from ancient China to modern Russia (one Russian chess set is made up of pieces carved to represent class warfare, one side modeled on Czarlst aristocrats with enslaved worker pawns, the other depicting a prole­ tariat of happy workers). It is worth remembering too that Caxton's second printed book in English was a translation of Cessolis's allegorical description of the various chess pieces, "The Game and Play of Chess,"

12por a lively history of this subject, see Andrew Wilson's War Gaming (Middlesex, England: Penguin, I970). In his judicious critique of the pitfalls of modern war- games played by all branches of the military and some private corporations like RAND, Wilson notes that the disastrous U.S. involvement in Vietnam "has been the fullest gamed, fullest analysed, and most extensively 'planned' war in history" (186). The whole war has been played— if not planned— by computer war-gaming.

13Games. Gods, and Gambling: The Origins of Probability and Statistical Ideas from the Earliest Times to the Newtonian Era (New York, 1962).

Incited in Rahner, Man at Play, p. 16.

15Rahner, Man at Play, pp. 24-25.

l^Laws, 644e. Unless indicated otherwise, all quotations from Plato are taken from The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 4th edT (Oxford, 19537.

171!The Role of Play In the Philosophy of Plato," Philosophy. XLII (1967), 227.

18Ibid., p. 226.

l9Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. trans, R. F. C. Hull"TBoston, 1950)» P. ^5.

^Letter VI, 323d. Quoted from The Platonic Epistles. trans. J, Harward (Cambridge, 1932"7T"p 7 11^. 112

21It is Interesting to note, in this connection, that the F.C.C. recently served notice to radio and television broadcasters that they will be held responsible for playing records which may "promote or glorify the use of illegal drugs." Is a broadcaster's license in jeopardy if he plays such suspiciously double-jointed lyrics as "Fuff, the Magic Dragon"? When revolutionary songs are in and on the air, we are never far from Plato*s remedy: ban them.

22Ethics. IV, 8 (p. 134). I have used J. A. K. Thomson's Penguin Classics edition (Middlesex, England, 1953)» which follows the Loeb translation. Page numbers in text refer to Thomson's edition.

23Father Hugo Rahner has tried to revive this Greek virtue as the ideal Christian norm. See "Eutrapella: A Forgotten Virtue," In Han at Play, pp. 9I-IO5.

24oods and Games, p. 106.

25commentary on Matthew, Homily 6.6. Quoted in Rahner, fen at Play, p. 98.

2^Questlon CLXVIII in The "Summa Theologlca" of St. Thomas Aquinas. trans.Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London, 1932), vol. 13, 292-303.

2?Sacred and Profane Beauty: the Holy in Art, trans. David E. Green (New York, 1963)." In an interesting chapter on "Sacer Ludus," or holy play, Van der Leeuw notes the connections between dance, games, and other primitive arts. Although he does not specifically discuss the breakdown of the holy in play, he does stress the original holiness of play. See especially pp. 110-112.

28Flrst translated into English by R. F. C. Hull (London, 19^9). and first published in America by Roy Publishers in 1950. A Beacon paperback edition appeared in 1955. Both American editions follow Hull's translation.

29This is essentially the charge against Huizinga made by the French anthropologist Roger Caillois, whose Les jeux et les hommes (Gaillimard, 1958) easily follows Homo Ludens as the second most important study of the play- element and games in culture. I will consider the important revisions and additions by Caillois in the next chapter. 113

3^The Masks of God, vol. I (New York: Viking Press, 1959) Primitive Mythology, pp. 28-29.

3^-The Act of Creation (London: Danube edition, 1969)* . P. 178. CHAPTER 3

POETA LUDENS: TOWARD A PLAY AESTHETICS

There are no rules, only images. Only a System has boundaries, — Abble Hoffman

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. — Wallace Stevens

I. Games. Rules, and Art; Costumes and Uniforms

We have seen that purposeless play, with Its twin attributes of freedom and fun, has been seriously proposed as a futuristic social model by certain avant-garde philosophers, political Illuminati, social therapists, historical psychoanalysts, and radical theologians.

Purposeless play also describes the life styles and ambitions of a growing cult of disenfranchised youth who make up what is variously known as the underground, pop culture, the New Left, or simply the Movement. Purposeless play, so often associated by the young with the good gods of the East and with tribal rituals from the primitively romantic past, has been set in opposition to productive

' ” Ilk 115

work— now regarded as the Satanic golden calf of the West.

So important Is the concept of play for understanding

contemporary radical politics that Richard Neville

entitles his inslderfs report on underground culture

simply Play Power (London, I97I). The chapters on radical

politics, the sexual revolution ("group grope"), pop music,

drugs, the underground press, and a hip travelerTs Journey

to the East lead up to the climactic final chapter on "The

Politics of Play." In that chapter the author attempts to gather together the diverse, multicolored costumes of the

Movement under the rainbow arch of play politics. What

Neville examines is the anti-work, pro-play ethic of a large segment of the New Left. It is precisely their antipathy towards work that has so alienated the headbands from the hardhats. In current radical mythology culture is made to stand for the puritanical, mercenary values of servile and wearying work and the counter-culture, for the personal bliss of free and spontaneous play. This, if not patently false, is a gross distortion.

For the same dichotomy clearly manifests itself within the Movement itself. When Eldrldge Cleaver places Timothy

Leary under house arrest in Algiers, his action symbolizes a wide chasm between New Left militant revolutionaries and the so-called "Festive Left" or "psychedelic" visionaries.

Sober militants, bent on violent social upheaval, want nothing to do with ever-smiling, playful, euphoric radicals, who advocate revolution for the fun of It, who brandish electric guitars Instead of guns, who insist that psychedelic revelation and media exploitation have replaced guerilla warfare as the strategies for social change, and who steadfastly refuse to work hard for anyone— Including subversive groups— to alter the system they oppose.

Ritually destroying the parent-guardians of society has become obsolete in an advanced technological age, argue the revelationists. By exploiting the mass media— television, radio, cinema, rock music, drugs— we can "turn on" and radicalize their children instead. Revolution isn't a children's game, answer the militants, it's a bloody and serious business. Your pop superstars and their bourgeois recording companies grow rich preaching revolution in art while the poor continue to starve at home and the oppressed to die abroad. It Is an interesting moment in the Movement: some are swearing allegiance to art and some to action. It

Is the old debate between the power of the word and the might of the sword all over again.

In most respects this split merely reflects and carries on the Western tradition which Insists on dichotomizing work and play. Elated Frisbee players show too little enthusiasm for work; scowling militants display too little compassion for play. An Impasse is reached.

Radicals are told they must make a choice between working 117

and playing, between militancy and mysticism (apocalyptic

science-fiction or drug-induced daydreaming). That work

must somehow be transformed into play most young radicals

sanguinely agree. But that play might Just as pleasurably

and perhaps more profitably be converted into work— into the business of making, creating, producing, and constructing—

too few of the Festive Left prophets seem willing to

concede. For now the "creative destructionists" seem to be having the last say. The relatively new phenomenon of hippie capitalists— owning and running record studios and shops, radio stations, restaurants, coffee houses, and clothing stores— has been vehemently denounced by the ^ure1 advocates of the alternative society, who prefer to survive by occasional menial labor (truck driving is an acceptable

Job, thanks to the American romance with the road), by selling handicraft goods of their own making, or by working communal farming plots. Nevertheless, in many fields the underground seems to be surfacing to take on gainful employment in traditionally respectable, aboveground structures.

Perhaps the counter-cultists are discovering the self- imposed limitations of their own unstructured, uncompetitive, hedonistic life styles. Not all of life is pure, spontaneous play. Social games frequently require hard work and con­ formity to laws, codes, and norms. Despite the current 118

preference for costumes, most people must also wear uniforms.

The vision of a guaranteed annual living wage, of people

being paid and encouraged not to work, and of machines

eventually taking over the nasty tasks of servile

production, remains a far-distant, perhaps mythical

utopian prospect. The everyday need for most young people

is to find a means of gaining a livelihood that is both

meaningful (a job that provides an outlet for revolutionary

ardor) and pleasurable (a job that is fun and allows as much

freedom as possible).

Pop music superstars have found one generous solution

in art. Art strikes a happy balance between the pleasures

of playing and the rewards of working. To survive in the hotly competitive world of rock music demands not only

creative genius, musical and poetic talent, and revolutionary lyricism, but a capacity for hard work— long hours of jamming, monotonous perfection of single tracks in recording sessions, and the exhausting routine of one-night stands. But because creation itself is fun, the medium of pop music relatively free, innovative, and unconventional, and the fruits of being a superstar numerous (money, sex, fame), artistic production becomes play. Who would think of saying that Hick Jagger "works" for a living?

Each new album awaits the discriminating ear of the undergrojund music critic and arbiter of popular taste, ready to hail the work as a musical step-forward or

denounce it as a slovenly commercial "rip-off." The

message is scrutinized as carefully as the sound— what is

said is as important as how well it is sung— as though the

release of a new album were as significant as the

publication of an urban guerilla handbook or radical

political treatise. And, to be sure, it is. The Federal

Government may have been slow in catching on, but the young

have known it all along— the political thinking of young

radicals is constantly Influenced and reinforced by the

music they devour. Rock music, far from being mere enter­

tainment, is propaganda. It is an introspective art taken

seriously by those who don stereo earphones and listen

attentively to the lyrics. Its values and Interest are

transient largely because pop music, like pop culture as a

whole, addresses itself to matters of the Immediate moment,

and these Issues themselves are ephemeral and in a constant

state of flux. And yet the playfulness of rock music

(some would date that self-conscious playfulness as having

been Initiated by the Beatles in their "Sergeant Pepper"

album) is one of its most enlivening and endearing

features.

The playful on and off-stage antics of many pop performers appear to be attempts to merge art and life in

the same way that Oscar Wilde or Salvador Dali "performed" 120

a second version of their art in the streets, salons, and

galleries of their respective days. On stage Jimi Hendrix

wielded his guitar as an electronic phallus, so that the

lyrics, the sounds, and the erotic movements of the

performer melded together In a mixed-media worship of sex.

When couples at rock festivals make love to the music

■bellowed from amplifiers (epater le bourgeois? ), art rounds

Itself out in communal action— cause and effect blur

together in a single Dionysian revel. Wot even Orpheus

could wield as much hypnotic power as do some of today1s

rock musicians.

Art Is central to the Movement. Without its music the

Movement would probably have withered away long ago. At the

same time music is the Movement's vulnerable Achilles heel.

Art can be censored, expurgated, distorted, or simply

ignored. Already actions by the F.C.C. suggest a possible

censorship of rock lyrics, and there have been repeated repressions of other radical media as well— the underground press, radio stations, films, books. An ultimately more dismal prospect for the political struggle, however, may well be the casual absorption by the middle class of token aspects of revolutionary art— enough to take the winds out of its independent sails. Because art is communal, it draws people closer together. This is how rock music has held together such a large and diverse segment of youth In the counter-culture. But It is also drawing "straight"

culture much closer to the underground, which may be a

friendly kiss or a fatal embrace. Already rock music has

become culturally respectable; business executives wear

freaky clothes, sport long hair, denounce the war, smoke

pot during lunch breaks, hum the latest pop tunes; old

ladies in mink stoles go slumming to see Hair, Broadway’s

own slng-a-long commercialization of pop culture; under­

ground rags metamorphosize into hlgh-brow newsweeklies;

Madison Avenue salesmen quickly appropriate the colors

and designs of psychedelic painting for use in advertising

layouts; and high-brow fashion experts appropriate the same

psychedelic designs for the trendlest fashion fabrics.

The Establishment steals the outward form and style of pop art while altering the subversive content to suit its

own commercial Interests. If this defensive maneuver is successful, if the costume does not become a uniform, we will undoubtedly someday look back upon pop culture of the

1960*s and 70fs as having ushered in a minor revolution in artistic tastes— a passing fad in style and leisure-time activities— something akin to the Beat-Jazz-folk movement of the 50's.

This raises some perplexing questions about art.

Questions, for example, about whether art is ultimately an efficacious Instrument for instigating social change, or 122

whether It Is only a festive diversion, allowing a momentary

escape from reality. Since Croce we have been accustomed

to thinking that form and content are indivisible in art—

content is nothing but expressed form. Form la content,

as every twentieth-century "new11 critic knows. Marshall

McCluhan modernized the jargon of the idea and added

technological nuances when he told us 'the medium is the

message.' Yet, If this is true, how do we explain the fact

that Middle Americans can so comfortably consume a good

portion of pop art's media without being noticeably

chastened or repelled by the subversive 'message' of that

art? Do they not hear the lyrics? Or do they ignore them?

The Middle American, who cannot accept the rules of the

hippie game, dons the costume, apes the style, and plays

a little at being the hippie— bell-bottomed suits,

psychedelic ties, a collection of rock albums, a few

nouveau posters and defiant bumper stickers, some pot to

enhance his sex life, perhaps a weekend orgy. Art Is the kind of game that can be seriously played or leisurely

played with. The art of the counter-culture is rapidly becoming a profitable toy, manipulated and peddled by

Madison Avenue, especially the fashion and entertainment

industries, for the conspicuous consumption of Middle

America, Main Street is playing underground music, but It

is not playing the underground game. However the dedicated political activist may resent it, straight culture is •'buying*' many of the products the

counter-culture has been selling or freely giving away.

Abbie Hoffman may urge people to "Steal this Book," but most readers will have bought it from the local bookshop and have read it for recreation and a casual interest in what the radicals are up to now. Revolution for the Hell of It is read for comic relief. Say the cross-cultural voyeurs: we cannot live your lawless lives (we have jobs from nine to five), but we can purchase and "dig" your art.

And as armchair freaks we can vicariously enjoy your escapades and stunts in the safety of our own cultural playgrounds; wetll enjoy your antics on stage, on screen,

In book, on tape, and on record. You make a Woodstock, and w e 111 watch the replays on film.

For most of us life is neither all art nor all play.

The main limitation of the Weltsplel conception of the universe is that it depends upon a metaphysical perspective a perspective enjoyed in adulthood only in those rare and fleeting moments of divine speculation and reverie. Our thoughts are not always bent on the utopian future, nor are our senses always "turned on" to the gratifications of the present moment. Frequently our affairs are utilitarian, selfish, and mundane. In the rational business of living from day to day, we are all too aware of the chores that must be done: duties to perform, time-cards to punch,

dishes to wash, messes to clean up. Practically speaking,

not all of life is play. The commune is no Eden: someone

harvests the fields or brings home the paychecks. Even

Alice isn't always in Wonderland— sometimes she's running

a restaurant.

Yet one of the times that life does become play is

when it is transformed on the sacred sphere of art. Enclosed

by form in time and space, art moves inside a magic circle—

on a gameboard severed from ordinary life. In this privi­

leged and consecrated arena, the constraints, repressions,

and deficiencies of ordinary life lose their grips.

Disbelief, as Coleridge put it, is willingly suspended for

the moment: a magical spell is cast over the illusion.

We grant works of art the license to be unlike reality

in important respects so long as the illusions produced are

confined and set aside in time and space— during a "playtime"

or recess from serious business. Art can be fanciful and

free only if it does not intrude upon, or cause us to mis­

take it for, reality. Hence art exists in artificial forms and shapes, clearly distinguishable from ordinary reality.

The stage is curtained, paintings are framed, novels have covers, poems have titles. Inside the circle the artist is free to tamper or play with reality— to bend, alter, select, rearrange, interpret, or invent the world according to his 125

own fanciful and bountiful imagination. Art Is freedom, the

artistic imagination Is free. Poets play with words in

language, with images in metaphor, and with reality in

imagination.

And yet the confined playground of art has its own

tightly-knit codes, conventions, and traditions— the "rules"

of the game. Some are rules of medium (the rules of

grammar, logic, common usage, and structure in language),

some are rules of style (rhetoric and metaphor), some are

rules of form (the conventions of the sonnet or of the epic),

some are rules of content (the traditions of certain genres

and literary themes), and some are rules of the audience

(social decorum, public tastes, fashionable styles, and

censorable material). The poetic imagination— like the

dream, the mystic reverie, and the eureka discovery— seems

to play freely and wantonly; it follows its own irrational and unconscious paths, apparently unencumbered by the needs for logical order, communicability, utilitarian ends, or other pragmatic concerns. But in transforming vision into substance the poet must sacrifice the freedom of imagination to the servitude of form. Getting his imaginative genius

into a communicable shape or form constitutes the "work" or craftsmanship of the artist. If he is a perfectionist, as the best artists are, he may toil long and hard to achieve the finest expression of his intuitions. Considerations of 126

this sort allowed Horace to censure "the poem that has not been pruned by time and many a cancellation— corrected ten times over and finished to the finger-nail,11 to encourage the would-be poet to set aside his first draft for a decade, and to bring his ill-turned lines "to the anvil again" for hammering into perfection (The Art of Poetry.

29/1-, 386, *j40).

As Horace's metaphor of the anvil suggests, much of this formal activity is violent and aggressive in a way that simple intuition never is. The poet becomes a voracious and hungry "hunter" of words, words themselves become weapons and tools to be sharpened for the kill, creation proceeds by violent spurts of furious energy in the "heat" of composition, and the fragile poet may need the brawn of a muscular blacksmith to complete his

Herculean labors. Work and play fuse in the artistic process of creation.

If the artist Is free to transcend or distort the rules of the "real world" and to justify his departures by poetic license, he still must continually conform to the formal laws of artistic production and to the marketplace conventions of communication. The poet's imagination may be free, but the products of his imagination are not. Art is not pure, spontaneous play. It is free only within fixed boundaries: it is both work to achieve form, and play within that form. Art is consumed, evaluated, censored,

and brought to life by a public with its own codes, values,

tastes, and predispositions— expectancies which the artist

must always take into account, even if only to flaunt or

criticize them. The artist is a prisoner, whose mind is

free, but whose footsteps are confined by the four walls

of his cell and whose activities are carefully scrutinized,

if not controlled, by Big Brother,

What separates the artist from the moral man who must

conform to similar social rules and conventions in real

life is that the artist always voluntarily chooses to

submit to the rules of his craft. He may lament the loss

of his grand vision, but he Inevitably sacrifices imagina­

tive freedom to the demands of formal art. Once he elects

them, the rules are absolutely binding. The artist may bend and extend the rules (as Hopkins stretched the rules of the sonnet), he may make fun of them (as the mock-epic pokes fun at the conventions of the epic, or as a parody pokes fun at a literary style), he may willfully discredit the artificiality of the rules (as Pirandello breaks the rules which separate illusion and reality in his plays), or he may claim antinomian exemption from the rules under grace (as Coleridge claimed to have transcended the rules of logical composition through opiate inspiration in writing

"Kubla Kahn"). But he is never free to simply disregard 128

or Ignore the rules; he is bound to them even as he tampers with them. The Innovative artist, however original and revolutionary his creation, shows us by Indirect means that he is consciously aware of having broken or rewritten traditional rules and conventions.

Poets are often their own best adversaries. Aware of their own inabilities, of the superficiality of given forms, and of the limits of language Itself, they often compose anti-form poems. These anti-form poems are fascina­ ting reminders of the fact that, even in order to attack or lament the rules, the poet must first bend to them.

Well-known examples of this genre include Robert Herrick's

"Delight in Disorder," Ben Jonson's "A Fit of Rhyme Against

Rhyme," George Herbert's "The Collar," John Keats' "If by

Dull Rhyme our English Must be Chained," and William Carlos

Williams' "When Structure Fails Rhyme Attempts to Come to the Rescue." They range in tone from Herrick's gentle and playful protest against formal gowns,

A winning wave, deserving note, In the tempestuous petticoat, A careful shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility, Do more betwitch me than when art Is too precise in every part, to Herbert's childish temper tantrum and fierce rant against the confining cage he finds himself in, 129

Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands. Which pettie thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away; take heed: X will abroad.

Art turns in upon itself in these poems; the question of

form is raised within form. In Ben Jonson's literary

temper tantrum the circle is complete and self-contained:

rhyme attacks itself.

Rhyme, the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits, True conceit, Spoiling senses of their treasure. Cozening judgement with a measure, But false weight. Wresting words, from their true calling; Propping verse, for fear of falling To the ground. Jointing syllables, drowning letters, Fast'ning vowels, as with fetters They were bound! Soon as lazy thou wert known. All good poetry hence was flown, And art banished.

Outside these fetters an age of childish freedom is recalled: "Greek was free from rhyme's infection,

/ Happy Greek, by this protection,/ Was not spoiled." But the playfulness of the rhymed poem itself tells us that the attack on artificial rules is not meant in all earnestness. Queen Rhyme's sway over verse is never so repressive as it seems; since she cannot wholly govern content, she cannot prevent sense— even dressed in her own livery— from running directly counter to her own 130

sovereignty. Paradoxically, rhyme makes herself look

foolish. Jonson reminds us that even the most rigid of

rules permit unlimited freedom, that there is something in

art that refuses to obey rules or only pretends to obey

them: "Still may reason war with rhyme." Rhyme confesses

her own transgressions against sense, and sense insists

that rhyme's transgressions have been, for the most part,

Illusions of grandeur. Rhyme confesses, sense pardons.

That an anti-rhyme rhyming poem can be written is Itself a

testimonial to the freedom existing within a given form.

Rhyme absolves herself in rhyme.

Sometimes the tables are turned, and it is sense that

confesses shortcomings to rhyme. The reversal of the anti­

form poem is the nonsense or anti-sense poem. In the

nonsense limericks of Edward Lear sense seems to cower

before rhyme. Rhymete reign is so complete that she can

conjure up meaningless nonsense words, whose sole functions are to wear her colors and come to her aid in the most

trying of times (such as when rhyme needs an echo for a supposedly unrhymable word). But we recognize the half- truths in nonsense— the world is orderly and meaningful only because we impose that order upon it. Words have accidental meanings and incidental sounds. Chance has played its part in the formation of the language we accept as so final. Beyond the world of prosaic common sense, 131

assigned meaning, and rational order may lie an irrational

or suprarational, topsy-turvy, looking-glass world, to

which nonsense may bring us much closer than sense. And

because nonsense never makes no sense but always makes some

sense (The "Jabberwock" has to be given "claws that catch"),

it comes as no surprise to us that what is called nonsense

often makes exceedingly good sense after all:

If the butterfly courted the bee. And the owl the porcupine; If churches were built in the sea, And three times one was nine; If the pony rode his master, If the buttercups ate the cows, If the cat had the dire disaster To be worried, sir, by the mouse; If mamma, sir, sold the baby To a gipsy for half a crown; If a gentleman, sir, was a lady,— The world would be Upside-Down* If any or all of these wonders Should ever come about, I should not consider them blunders. For I should be Inside-Out!1

Silly or an impeccable piece of logical thinking? It all depends on what one's perspectives happen to be.

To play the game of art Is to willingly acknowledge and submit to rules. As we have seen, however, this does not prevent the artist from making Jokes about the rules, making the rules play tricks on themselves, or turning the rules upside-down. These are perfectly acceptable ways of

"cheating". The cheat is a nonconformist who acknowledges the rules even as he personally deflates them. He differs from the spoilsport, who, on the contrary, neither accepts 132

the rules nor plays the game: he "spoils" all the fun.

For not to accept the rules is not to play the game.

Johan Huizinga has very nicely elaborated on this

distinction,

The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a "spoil-sport". The spoil­ sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others (Homo Ludens. P. 11).

Consider, in this light, what the effect of Jonson's anti-

rhyme poem would be had he not written in rhyme. The whole

attack would lose its playfulness, good sportsmanship, and

fun. The sword would lose one of its cutting edges,

Jonson would then seem to us a grumbling old sourpuss, a

spoilsport venting his spleen, instead of the way he

appears in the version given us— a merry prankster, delight­

ing In teasing our wits. Any seriously intended attack on rhyme would logically belong in a prose treatise on the

subject. Outside the magic circle of art we can and do

tolerate critics as "spoilsports" who tell us what Is silly

or wrong with the games we are playing. But inside the

circle sport comes first and any "spoiling" will have a touch of the absurd about it. Rules, then, are what make 133

games— even destructive games— possible.

Art rewards the cheat, but it cannot tolerate the

spoilsport, who, Instead of going beyond the rules, remains

outside the perimeter of their influence altogether. The

spoilsport never enters the magic circle of art and no

creation is possible for him: silence prevails. On the

other hand, the rules are, in a sense, designed to be

broken. Otherwise no new forms of art would ever be

tolerated. Let us consider one illustration to clarify

this. It might be supposed that "formless" or random

compositions in art (John Cage's randomly-scored musical

pieces, William Burroughs' randomly-shuffled literary

works, the haphazardly-flung blobs of action painting, or

the chance occurrences at a "happening" or "Living Theatre"

production) represent flagrant exceptions to the communal

laws of form. Isn't the artist who invokes the aid of

haphazard chance simply a spoilsport refusing to play the

game of art?

The random artist does allow improvisation and

indeterminacy to usurp some of the traditional conventions

regarding craftsmanship and conscious control. The action

painter who flings handfuls of paint on his canvas cannot

foresee or predict the final product as accurately as the artist who patiently applies colors with the traditional brush. But it would be a mistake to say that chance alone 13^ determines the outcome of an action painting, What kinds and colors of paint will the artist select? How hard and with what motions will the paints be thrown? How large is the canvas? How far from it will the artist stand? Where does he aim? When does he stop?

The action painter must make conscious choices of this nature which influence the final result. The most important choice he makes is that of intending to create a painting in the first place; this intention carries with it a number of necessary considerations. In deciding how he will create the artist subscribes to certain freely-elected

"rules" which govern the composition. There is method behind the madness, This is particularly evident in the creation of literary works, whose very intelligibility depends on the shared rules of a communal language. William

Burroughs may shuffle the paragraphs of one of his books to allow randomness a part in the creative process, but only after much determinate control has already been exercised.

He has already written in complete sentences and arranged these in paragraphs, following the rules of language and usage; and he has already produced a certain bulk of writing— that is, he has determined the size and nature of the work. Only the precise ordering of the individual paragraphs or sections has been left to chance.

Though he does not conform to certain traditional conventions, the artist who incorporates random elements in the creative process does not call into doubt the validity or necessity of rules themselves. He does not spoil the game but enlarges, redefines, and reinterprets the rules to his own advantage. John Cage can theoretically justify his randomness by comparing it to what some physicists call the "indeterminacy principle" of the whole universe. If the creation of the universe can be considered an event spawned by chance, random musical compositions more closely approximate "reality" (the universe seen as it really Is) than do the purely human efforts at consciously ordering It.

Randomness, like nonsense, may sometimes make better sense than sense does.

We will probably want to say that the random artist creates a new and slightly different kind of game, a new genre, a work which has significantly modified the rules of the older games. So indeterminacy begins generating a whole new set of rules. How, for example, will the artist allow indeterminacy to operate? Will he flip coins with John

Cage? Shuffle cards with William Burroughs? Have separate chapters written by ghost writers? Follow the instructions in the Chinese I-Chlng? Let a computer arrange his materials for him? Even indeterminacy cannot be taken for granted; it has to be created according to a set of rules.2

(Che random artist makes conscious decisions which determine 136

the end result, and he must obey the rules he sets out to follow. In terms of space (form) this means that every new game has, to use Wittgenstein*s phrase, "family resemblances" to all the other games of art. In terms of time (history) this means that every new worlc, however radical a departure it makes, belongs to a cultural tradition and a particular milieu.

There is an excellent illustration of how randomness and form can fruitfully combine in a festal dance of the

Hopi Indians, which celebrates the return of the hunters with their kills. The participants dance in a closed circle; their steps and motions are highly formal, regular, and traditional— as handed down from the past. But outside the circle a shaman, "possessed" by the spirits of the slain animals, dances out his private visions. He continually breaks through the circle, making spontaneous movements and gestures, which some of the dancers— caught up In the frenzy— may or may not imitate.

Those innovations of the shaman that are Imitated by all of the dancers are absorbed and made a part of the formal dance. Thus, from year to year the dance may take on new variations, even though the basic form remains fairly constant over the years. In this way form is kept alive; rather than becoming frozen and habitual, the dance is continually freshened and renewed with the input of new 137

experience. Randomness here Is the unknown element of the

dance; Its purpose seems to be to maintain the variety and

excitement that come with unpredictable inspiration.

II. Play, Display, and Replay in Art

Play can be free, spontaneous, and formless. Display, as the very word itself suggests, can not. Freedom (play) always yields to form (display). A work may be freely played into existence (improvised), but in order to be available to an audience for replay, it must first be displayed (provided a shape). Formlessness must surrender to the exigencies of form. As Marianne Moore says,

"Ecstasy / affords / the occasion and expediency determines the form.11 And form involves adherence to structural rules, conventional tools, and communally agreed-upon meanings.

Let us develop this idea by directing attention to the rules of one medium, language, rules to which all literary works subscribe,3

Logical positivists and structural linguists have identified and analyzed many of the rules— both of 'surface1 and of'depth* grammar— which underlie, inhibit, direct, and generate language. But we owe our philosophic conception of "language-games" largely to the investigations and aphoristic gleanings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein gradually moved away from his substantial analysis of 138

language in the Philosophic Investigations. Recurrent

throughout his philosophic work is the relationship between

language and reality and the question of how metaphysics—

mystical, silent, shapeless, and inexpressible— finds its way into the fetters of logical discourse, which can neither

contain nor support it. Abandoning the logical-positlvistic description of the limits of language in his early writings

(where each word has a substantial meaning that pictures a

"state of affairs"), Wittgenstein developed his mature view

of language as a living, chameleon-like, playful organism with fluid communal rules and multiple meanings or uses.

Beginning with the discovery that the same word can function

In a variety of different ways ("Slab" as a command initiating an action and not as the name of a substance), he offers the game of chess as a model for the rules of language,

Under the concept of "language-game" Wittgenstein includes both "language and the actions into which it is woven.It is the activity and activeness of language that make it analogous to a game of chess:

Here the term "language-game" is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life, . . . It is Interesting to compare the multiplicity of the tools in language and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of language (Ph. I., 23). 139

Because a single word can be used in different ways, it has multiple meanings (plastic uses and functions) above and beyond the various dictionary definitions it may also have.

Not abstract definition but actual usage and context are what govern the meanings of words.

Central to Wittgenstein's understanding of language- games is his notion of "family resemblances," Many words refer not to a definable property or group of qualities but to a set of members in a "family" which display "family resemblances" to one another. Anthony Manser develops

Wittgenstein's idea by using the example of "the Churchill face"— some ten features or so which ten members of the *x> Churchill family might-collectively display, though their

Individual faces would differ considerably and no single individual would have all of the defining f e a t u r e s . 5

Wittgenstein himself had used the example of multi-games:

Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card- games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball-games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.— Are they all 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill In tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here Is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And 1^0

we can go through the many, many other groups of games In the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail (Ph. I., 66).

Language does not make up a single "game" but includes a

complicated network of overlapping circles and numerous

games— words refer not to common properties but to sets of

members with various similarities and dissimilarities among

themselves.

Because the day-to-day use of words is flexible, the

limits, rules, and meanings of language are contingent and

continually being changed. Far from being mere display,

frozen forever in fixed forms, language is continually

playing itself into new modes of being. Still, the rules

which govern the acceptable meanings words can have at a

given point in time are public ones— the result of a

tentative agreement in practice by the actual speakers of

a language. These rules are learned and practiced when one

first acquires language: when the child begins to play

"language-games," he also bends to the social conventions

of public speech. He learns, that is, to "follow orders"

and to conform to the arbitrary rules of the linguistic

game. There can be no private language; the meaning of words depends upon shared rules— the accepted uses,

practices, customs, and conventions which prevail at the time. Language, like art, freely ■welcomes the cheat (one who coins a new word or uses a familiar word in a new way

or puns and "plays" upon words for delight). But it shuts

out the spoilsport who, because he refuses to submit to any rules, must remain forever mute or mumble unintelli­ gible noises to himself.

Enough has been said, I think, to establish a basic resemblance between literature and games that have rules.

To communicate at all, the writer must consent to rules of a game which society and history largely impose upon him.

Not all of the rules are equally constricting or binding, and many are entirely optional or peculiar to specific forms. Enclosed on a playground within time and space is a universal rule applicable to all art forms. The laws of grammar, logic, and meaning cut across all literary works because they encompass the whole spectrum of linguistic activity; as such these laws lie beyond the whims of the individual practitioner; they change only as the public usage of language itself changes. On the other hand, the rules of specific forms or genres— the conventions of the epic, the sonnet, or of tragedy, for Instance— are open to widely differing Interpretations. That is to say, there is less consensus among readers about what constitutes a good sonnet than about what constitutes good sense, and there is less agreement because of the many varying usages of the 142

sonnet by poets. Shakespeare and Petrarch, Milton and

Hopkins, Wordsworth and Cummings practice rather different

"private" rules of the sonnet. These private rules are

more like the fine points of a treaty, to be ratified or

not by later sonneteers as they see fit. A poet may choose

to rhyme his quatrains abab, or abab, or not to rhyme them

at all: there are no fixed rules here, only provisional

ones. Once he chooses to rhyme his stanzas in a certain way, the poet accepts and must conform to an optional but now binding rule of form. The freely accepted rule may at this point be felt as an external executioner, as Robert

Frost so succinctly expresses in his "In a Poem":

The sentencing goes blithely on its way, And takes the playfully objected rhyme As surely as it keeps the stroke and time In having its undeviable say.

Public taste may well influence a poet's decisions regarding form: to write free verse in an age that devours rhymed couplets or domestic tragedy in an age that applauds bawdy comedy is to risk ridicule or neglect. Still, the poet's lines and life are free, even if his public reputation is not. It is the dilemma of every artist that to break too many of the rules is to be ■unintelligible, while to break too few of them is to be uninteresting.

This discussion of rules, design, conformity, logical order, and convention seems to have carried us far away from the primeval fun and freedom of play, I have been talking about institutionalized games with their communal laws and repressive uniforms. But what about the other kind of play that knows no rules— such as the spontaneous frisking and leaping about of children on a sunny day? Doesn't free, spontaneous, improvised play have a place in art as well?

We certainly do need to distinguish between purposeful games with rules and 'pure*, purposeless play without rules.

And here we can profitably employ Roger Calllois' distinguishing terms for these two modes of play: paldla— free, improvised, tumultuous, undisciplined, primitive play; and ludus— structured, ruled, competitive, civilized play.6 These represent the two polar extremes, between which there is a wide spectrum of possible combinations.

The paldla in the unregulated wrestling and running games of young boys gives way to an increasingly ludlo quality as these forms of competitive play develop into institution­ alized sports, professional contests, and competitive athletics.

Both kinds of play characterize the artistic creation.

Art is both play and display, elements of both paldia and ludus are present. We constantly encounter not only form but freedom within form. We look upon art, despite its many rules and conventions, not as a repressing but as a liberating force. Art points the way to a freedom beyond itself in exactly the same way, as Wittgenstein recognized so clearly, that the very limitedness of language points to an unbounded metaphysical or mystical world beyond its

tiny confines.? Similarly, by awakening our imaginations,

art transports and carries us not only beyond the ordinary

world of prosaic rules and humdrum events, but beyond the

logical constraints of form as well. We recall not only

memorized lines and passages from Paradise Lost but also

the inexpressible feelings, visual sensations, and private

imaginings that accompany our memory of that epic: the

sense of timelessness and astronomical vastness, mystic

visions of things both seen and not seen (like Milton*s

God), dim recollections of having travelled in time, of

having experienced the world sub specie aeternltatls. of

having seen man from God*s point of view, of having trans­

cended the human bounds of time and space and the fetters

of language. We tend to intermingle the formal words of

the poet with the formless wanderings of our own imagina­

tions, which that work has inspired.

Art, which must be confined In form when displayed,

takes on an independent life of its own when replayed, when it plays upon and within our own imaginations. For we

see both less and more than the poet intended us to see.

Freedom is carried out of the enclosed arena on the back

of an unfree slave. A transcendent, mystical reality has been communicated through or despite the Inadequacies of language— perhaps indirectly in the concealed manner of 1^5

the Cipher* as Karl Jaspers has suggested. How art does

this we have no words to explain: "what we cannot speak about we must pass over In silence" (Wittgenstein,

Tractatus, 7 ). That it does so we have no doubt. We use art, to borrow Wittgenstein's metaphor for language, as a ladder to climb up and then throw away once we have reached

the top.

Art is like looking at yourself in a mirror. When you look into the mirror you see yourself. When you look away from it you disappear (the eye is the I). Art reflects the consciousness of the percelver; it encloses images that are chopped off at its boundaries— there is no way of seeing what extends beyond the frame (nothing and everything does).

But art always implies the existence of things beyond and outside its surface, and these things are imaginable. The very frame around the mirror suggests that more could be contained— with a larger mirror, a better reflecting surface, a more discriminating eye. And even what it does show the mirror frequently blurs, distorts, and complicates; to show us better what we are art often shows us what we are not; the ripples on the funhouse mirror are equivalent to the artist's imagination, fictions, and fantasy— they are the tricks he freely plays upon reality rather than obediently displaying it. And because we remember how we looked, hoitf we reacted, and what we thought when we saw ourselves in a 146

particular mirror at a particular moment in time, art continually replays itself, renews, and recreates. We carry on the work in our memory and actions, just as we carry on where the work leaves off in our imagination and creations,

The metaphor of the mirror introduces us to another aesthetic debate involving play and display. In the classic tradition art is likened to a "mirror" which imitates and reproduces what we call reality, rather than to the "lamp" or "fountain" which, in the romantic conception, is a metaphor for the expressionistic theory of art.8 in the degree to which artists have consciously aspired to realism or naturalism, a faithful reproduction of living nature, do their works become committed to an

"unplayful" display of that reality. In realism— as in pornography and propaganda— the writer or illustrator attempts to make belief; in romantic fantasy, on the other hand, he is content simply to make believe. Realistic fiction is comparatively less free from the rules of reality than is poetic fantasy, which celebrates the very freedom of unreality. The spontaneous play that almost certainly accompanied the creation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe or

James* The Ambassadors simply does not display itself in the finished work to the same extent that it does in an unrealistic novel. By "unrealistic novel" I mean to Include ■works that, like Swift's Gulliver's Travels, cloak thematic realism in grotesque costumes; like Rabelais' Gargantua and

Pantagruel. topple both existing social norms and existing reality; like Sterne's Trlstram Shandy, poke fun at the conventions of psychological realism in an age; like Twain's

A Connecticut Yankee, destroy past history and present society; like Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur, turn photographic fidelity of description into obsessional fantasies; like

Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, poke fun at the rules of language itself; or like science-fiction, take us beyond the temporal and spatial limits of knowable reality in the first place,

There is, it seems, more fun to be had in breaking rules, rocking boats, flaunting norms, and toppling

Institutions than in working within the systems. In this respect Abbie Hoffman and Franqois Rabelais sing the same songs of liberation for the fun of it,9 When the walls come tumbling down, a "free-for-all" ensues, during which time the satirist, the surrealist, the romantic, the mystic, the parodist, the fool, the buffoon, the grotesque giant, and the rebel wear crowns for the day. Jokers are wild and beat kings. As in the medieval feast of fools, the clownish jester usurps the seat of the stately church bishop, and the world is turned topsy-turvey. The extravagant, the exuberant, the wild, the festive, the 1^8

fantastic, the baroque, the grotesque, the ribald, and the

saturnalian are liberated and carry the day. The pious and

obedient voice of submissive 1 truth to life1 is drowned

under the immoderate laughter, Dionysian shrieks, and

festive cheers of gay celebration.

This would lead us to conclude that while art does not tolerate the "spoilsport," it certainly welcomes the jests of the "workspoiler." A wide range of rebelliousness is allowed the artist in his public creations, to parallel the way that even puritanical societies must make room for the legendary licentiousness of artists in their private lives.

It Is generally acceptable for the artist to fictionally

"spoil" the great works and achievements of his day, whether these be social works (the satirist as spoiler of institutions), works of nature (the grotesque writer and the surrealist as spoilers of natural appearance), or literary works (the parodist and the burlesque author as spoilers of literary styles or the world's great classics).

All of the fun seems to go to the work-spoller, the radical who topples laws, institutions, conventions, logic, and our sense of reality itself. Play always has a creatively destructive, revolutionary quality about it. As Fellini's

Satyricon tells us, Rome was built by work and fell to play.

All the work of cleaning up seems left to the law-abiding preservers and rebuilders of Institutions, the guardians of 1*1-9

tradition and normalcy, the conservatives, and the conserva­

tionists. A novelist spends several years perfecting his

grand opus, only to have some parodist ‘spoil* his prose in

a single clever paragraph. A politician trains diligently

under psychologists to improve his public image, only to

watch some caricaturist ‘spoil* his face in a single cartoon

or some comedian ‘spoil' his gestures, intonations, habits,

and mannerisms in a five-minute spiel. A culture labors

for centuries to perfect its values, institutions, and

norms, only to have the satirist and the playful fanatic

turn them upside down and inside out. When the thousands

of demonstrators have vacated the park, turned topsy-turvy

in carnival play, rows of workers in grey uniforms quietly

collect the tons of litter left behind.

While all art is a game, not all art is play. Or, to be more precise, some art is ludlo— conforming to rules and norms, preserving Institutions and values; while some art is paldio— flaunting rules and values, upholding rebellion, spontaneity, and destructive liberation. The work of construction finds its counterpart in the liberating fun of destruction. Because the disintegration takes place within a confined magic circle of play (note how the police always cordon off the playgrounds for demonstrators), because the

illusion (literally, "in-play") of art never permanently

'spoils* reality, because not every day is a May Day— society manages somehow to assimilate the transgressions

against it in art and play. When his extraordinary

adventures have ended, Bilbo Baggins returns to the

domestic comforts of a well-furnished hobbit hole. When

the bright lights fade and the curtains close, we all make

our way home to a rather humdrum and perfectly ordinary life.

Only in art, dreams, games, and memories— the replays and

replaylngs of our childish imaginations— do we ever again

feel as free and lawless as once we must have been.

This combination of play and display, making and

unmaking, artistic freedom and human necessity, provides a

starting point for developing a play aesthetics, a play

theory of the arts. Games are liberating and confining

exactly as works of art are both. John Conway1s game of

"Life" only approximates the rules of the universe: it is

confined to a graphic gameboard whose size Is governed by

physical expediency and the size of the computer. The

1living’ organisms never grow beyond the edge of the board.

To escape the rules of everyday life, the game-player

consents to arbitrary rules of artifice and accepts the dimensions of the gameboard. Paradoxically, he wins freedom

only by losing it. Huizinga's classic definition of play serves perfectly as a description of art and draws attention to both the liberating 11 extra-ordinariness" of the event and the restraining boundedness ("ordinariness" we might 151

Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call It a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means (Homo Ludens, P. 13). Like the act of reading a novel, play is a non- utilitarian and gratuitous activity, informed by a spirit of make-believe, confined In time and space, freely engaged in and terminated, set somehow apart from ordinary "reality," accompanied by pleasure and Intensity ("fun"), and often governed by arbitrary but unexceptionable rules and conventions. In the emergence of culture play comes first and art follows close upon its heels. The artist plays before he displays; the spectator has already played as a child what he later replays in art as an adult.

Individuals and cultures are young before they are old, are children before they are adults. Art displaces the cosmic tribal games and rituals of less civilized cultures.

How art became a sort of civilized substitute for magical games and rituals is the story of the detrlbalization which came with literacy. Art, like games, became a mimetic echo of, and relief from, the old magic of total Involvement. As the audience for the magic games and plays became more Individualistic, the role of art and ritual shifted from the cosmic to the humanly psychological, as in Greek drama. Even the 152

ritual became more verbal and less mimetic or dancelike. Finally, the verbal narrative from Homer and Ovid became a romantic literary substitute for the corporate liturgy and group participation.10

But even in saying all this we have only begun to scratch the surface and have unearthed only a few of the

"family resemblances" between art and play. Major literary questions remain untouched. What else do we know about play— its physiology, its psychology, its patterns— that may help us understand its affinity or identity to art? What are the special kinds of games poets play? What is the impulse behind literary gamesmanship? What special author- reader relationships are perhaps established by the presence of a game in a literary work? What is the value, purpose, and function of the play-element in art? Does play have the same liberating and therapeutic function in literature that its counterpart, physical play, is said to have in society? What are the benefits and limitations of viewing literature sub specie ludi? How can play-game aesthetics be practically and profitably employed in liter­ ary criticism? That is, can we make use of the poetry as play analogy for discussing particular works of art? (It is one thing to say that poetry is very much like play, quite another to be able to use the idea for elucidating a given poem.) 153

In seeking to answer such questions as these, we will need first to understand how, when, and why such issues were raised in the first place. This entails a turning, once again, to history for enlightenment. CHAPTER 3

FOOTNOTES

^William B. Rand's "Topsyturvey-World" in A Book of Nonsense. ed. Ernest Rhys (London: Everyman, 1927). p. 123.

2a s a recent case in point, consider the Cambridge mathematician, John Horton Conway's ingenious game of "Life," currently the rage of computer programmers. Although the game hinges on indeterminacy, is unpredictable, and requires the gamester to play God, it is governed by an arbitrary set of rules that define the precise mathematical conditions under which cells will reproduce, survive, or die. From these rules are generated the lifelike snowflake patterns which emerge, form clusters, live, reproduce, grow, move, multiply, rhythmically pulse, or collapse and die— Just like the building blocks of life itself. Even randomness can only be generated from rules.

3ln discussing the rules of language, which forms the matter from which literary works are composed, I do not mean to imply that literature can be considered a paradigm for all the arts. Written in language— a unique symbolic instrument with meaning, literature presents something of a "special case" in the arts. The colors in painting or the notes in music, for instance, do not communicate in the same precise way that words do. Even so, we note similar material rules in painting and music: certain colors and notes "go together" better than others, and some are discordant when juxtaposed. A much fuller discussion would be needed to explore these similarities and dissimilarities. The treatment of rules in language and literature cannot be extended to provide conclusions for the other art forms, where differing circumstances prevail.

fyph. I., 7. 1 have used the standard English edition: Philosophic Investigations, trans, G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 196b).

5»Games and Family Resemblances," Philosophy, XLII (I967), p. 212 f. Manser refutes the use of the notion of "fhmTLy resemblances" as a final solution to "the problem of universals," which some philosophers have taken Wittgenstein’s discussion to mean. Using Huizinga's Homo

154 155

Ludens as his departure point, Manser argues that what we call a "game" depends not so much on a set of shared resemblances to other games as it does on our predetermined attitude towards "playing." Whether or not we decide to call Russian roulette a "game" will depend not on its similar­ ities and dissimilarities to other games of chance, but on our attitude towards playing it— whether or not we would really choose to play it as a game. Since the stakes are life or death, we may logically decline to play and refuse to call Russian roulette a game.

^Roger Calllols, Man, Play, and Games. trans. Meyer Barash (London, I962), pp. 27-35.

^Because in his view language Itself calls this timeless and spaceless world into being or into consciousness, Wittgenstein’s departure from Kant’s trans­ cendental idealism has been aptly labeled "transcendental lingualism."

8

^Probably no author has more radically flaunted the norms and canons of his day than did Rabelais. Gargantua and Pantagruel is the classic example of playfulness in fiction: a healthy, popular ffc/flc culture liberates itself— through abundant mirth, festivity, laughter, hallucination, drunkenness, sport, and indecency— from stiff-laced officialdom, ugly uniformity, and repressive conventionality. A brilliant study of the play-element in Rabelais’ novel and the revolutionary nature of play itself is Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World (Cambridge, Mass., I968). Despite or perhaps thanks to Bakhtin's Marxist polemics, his study Is the finest model we have of how a theory of playfulness in art can be brilliantly employed in the elucidation of particular authors, ages, and literary works.

1Offershall McLuhan, Understending Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965)7 P. 237. CHAPTER 4

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE THEORY OF ART AS PLAY:

A HISTORY OF PLAY AESTHETICS

The peasant may play cards In the evening while the poet writes verses, but there is one political principle to which they both subscribe, namely, that among the half dozen or so things for which a man of honor should be prepared, if necessary, to die, the right to play, the right to fri­ volity, is not the least.

— W. H. Auden, "The Poet and the City"

It will be useful at this point to backtrack and cover

some preliminary historical grounds. In order to broaden,

deepen, refine, and clarify the play-aesthetic notions I have

been pursuing, I want to briefly trace the development of

play theories of art. There is a rather steady progression

and refinement of thinking about the relationships between

art and play to mesh with the gradual sophistication In West­

ern self-consciousness generally. There is an emergence,

development, and perfection of the idea that literature is

play— a tradition. But this tradition lies outside and has been largely obscured by the more conventional and better-

established stream of literary criticism, represented by such famous moralistic critics as Horace, Sidney, Dryden, Pope,

156 157

Johnson, Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and P. R. Leavis— all of whom

place chief emphasis on the useful, didactic value and "high

seriousness" of literature. I will concentrate on another line of thinkers, those who underscore the gratuitous pleas­ ures as against the instructive purposes of literature.

They do not necessarily find any incompatibility between teaching and delighting, but their sympathies lean notice­ ably towards the latter.

The path we will follow might best be regarded as the radical or subversive tradition in Western thought generally and in aesthetics and literary criticism specifically. It is the tradition of a minority of "hedonistic" thinkers who uncover the roots of art in its delightfulness, sensuous­ ness, and playfulness and who dare to extol the virtues of a life of play to men who unremittingly devote themselves to lives of work. These radical thinkers protest (some loudly, some softly) the established view of the vast multi­ tude of men who persist in stressing the seriousness and purposiveness of literature and of life.

We have already seen that certain tendencies In Eastern and Western metaphysics, especially the mystic elements, gave rise to a Weltsplel conception of the universe, according to which all human creation is ultimately viewed sub specie ludl. It is within this broad metaphysical conception, as carried on by Western philosophers and metaphysicians (from 158

Plato to present-day play theologians), that theories of

play In art emerge and thrive, I will be concerned here only

with the specific aesthetic uses that have been made of cer­

tain theories of play. And, for the most part, I will be

mainly interested In the application of play aesthetics to

the field of literature.

In terms of politics and metaphysics, play means free­

dom and fun, as I have argued in preceding chapters. But

these are only two of many vantage points from which play

and art may be surveyed. I think it will be advantageous to

identify as clearly as possible the particular slant or per­

spective in each of the play theories of art we will examine.

For this reason I have classified various theories of play under subheadings that characterize the different perspec­

tives and relate them to traditional intellectual discip­ lines of knowledge. This classification should also help remind us of the broader metaphysical perspective which, having examined, we now put aside.

Autonomy: Art as Recreation

The first literary critic to develop a comprehensive play theory of literature was the Renaissance Italian hu­ manist, Jacopo Mazzoni. In his On the Defense of the Comedy of Dante (158?), Mazzoni sets forth his theory that litera­ ture is recreation: poetry is play, a pastime, a game. Mazzoni finds support for his view in certain passages from

the ancients— Vergil, Horace, Eusebius, and above all, Plato.

The passages he refers to and cites for authority are, how­

ever, only suggestive openers. Vergil's "I / can play what­

ever tunes X like on this country reed-pipe" is purely meta­

phorical.^ And Horace's "ludusque repertus / et longorum

operum finis" (Ars Foetlca, *f05-*J-06), as a complement to

his description of the hypnotic powers of Orphic song, does

little more than to associate festal mirth with Dionysian

dramatic performances. For the most part, then, Mazzoni's

theory of art as play— although it owes much to the sections

of Plato's Republic and Laws examined in chapter two— marks

a fresh and original departure from traditional aesthetics.

There is little bondage to the past. In his Defense, un­

like most of his fellow Renaissance critics, Mazzoni does

not seem heavily dominated by the Aristotelian tradition.

Traditional Aristotelian apologists sought mainly to

exhibit the usefulness of art: delightfulness tended to be

regarded as the sugar-coating on a cathartic pill. In Sid­

ney's rephrasing, poetry is a "medicine of cherries"— a

pleasing outward shell containing a distasteful but thera­

peutic moral lesson. Mazzoni*s radical Innovation was in

tipping the scales in the other direction, in favor of the

sheer pleasure of poetry. This is not to say that he denies poetry any utilitarian function— tradition is too strong for 160 such heresy— but only that he consistently subordinates teaching to delighting.

Mazzoni anticipates modern "language-game" and "art- game" theories when he endorses an allegorical description of the game of prlmero to illuminate an analogous game of poetry:

Since, then, imitation is always Joined with delight, it has therefore come about that all who have wished to devise plays and pastimes have done so by means of some kind of imita­ tion, as we show in dealing with the ancient games of backgammon and chess. . . . And we are now able to add . . . the game of prl­ mero, in which is set forth the figure of the ochlocracy, that is, the state in which the common people have more power than the nobles. . . . Now as in this game of primero it is pos­ sible to consider the imitation for itself, and in this way it has no other end than to present the figure of an ochlocracy, and as it is also possible to recognize no other end than de­ light and pleasure, so in my opinion poetry in itself can be considered as an imitative art and as a game and pastime. . . . I conclude, then, that poetry as an imitative art has the exactness of the image as its end, but as a thing to be used for play and pastime and to secure some cessation of graver and more se­ rious business, it proposes as its end the de­ light that rises from suitable imitation.2

Mazzoni struggles to find words for what twentieth-century

"new" critics would call the autonomy and gratuitousness of the poetic artifact. The autotelic nature of poetry pro­ vides recreation in both senses of the word: re-creation as mimesis, and recreation as play. His pastime theory can be included under the aesthetic which considers art and play as refreshing pauses or interludes in life, the cessations of 161

"graver and more serious 'business." Work and play are di­

chotomized: to this extent Aristotle’s influence on Mazzoni

is unmistakable. Carried to its logical extreme such a one­

sided aesthetics would reduce all art to the level of kitsch,

popular entertainment and diversion.

Mazzoni, however, does not carry his thinking to such

extremes. He makes way for two notions, by seeing poetry

from one way and then from another. He understands that the

formal autonomy of the artistic work does not wholly sever

its ties with the public state; the medium of language it­

self connects poetry to society. He qualifies his assertion

that "as a recreation [poetry] should have for its end pleas­ ure alone" by adding:

But if this pleasure is considered as regulat­ ed and qualified by the civil faculty, one must needs say that it should be directed to the use­ ful, consequently that the species of poetry which was classed under praiseworthy sophistic— that is, under the sophistic which arranges the appetite and subjects it to reason— would be considered as recreation controlled by the civil faculty and would have utility as its end (p. 378).

Mazzoni effects a compromise between Proclus' prescription

that "poetry should be rather a medicine than a pastime" and Plato's view that "poetry is the bringer of the useful to our spirits by the means of the delight it gives under the appearance of play and pastime" (p. 379). In his com­ posite, final definition of poetry he adds a third consid­ eration and views art from three diverse but related points 162

of view, each of which is contingent upon the others and true only to a degree:

I say then that . . . poetry is always an imi­ tative art and, so far as it is, has always as its end the correct representation of the images of things, but all the same when it is consid­ ered as play it has pleasure as its end, and con­ sidered as play regulated by the civil faculty it has for its immediate end delight, but de­ light directed to benefit. From these premises it seems it can be concluded that poetry is ca­ pable of three definitions according as it is considered in three different manners, that is, as imitation, as play simply, or as play regu­ lated by the civil faculty (p. 38*0.

If we Imagine a measuring stick for art, with pleasure at one end and profit at the other, we can say that while

Mazzoni and Horace begin at opposite ends, they eventually meet at a halfway point, where poetry Is seen as a composite of the two extremes— either "delightful teaching" or "in­ structive pleasure."

Mazzoni does leave unanswered the question of whether purposeless play may not, in and of itself, be useful and therapeutic in some discernible way. That question could not be meaningfully posed until much later, after physiology, biology, psychology, and anthropology (roughly in that or­ der) had provided new concepts for understanding the cul­ tural manifestations and functions of play.

Two centuries separate Mazzoni*s recreation theory of art from the next Important play aesthetics. The great Age of Reason had little theoretical interest In play. There are wonderful examples of literary play during the inter­ val: metaphysical poetry with its ingenious wit games, 3 tricks, conceits, riddles, and Jests;^ Pirandello-like dra­ matic games on illusion and reality ("The Knight of the

Burning Pestle" or the playful sculpture of Bernini); the satirical squibs half-seriously exchanged by 18th century men of letters; and such delightfully playful works as

Dryden's "The Hind and the Panther," Swift's "Gulliver's

Travels" or his astrological parodies, Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," and many more. But there are no noteworthy at­ tempts to develop a play theory of the arts. The revival of play aesthetics corresponds to the beginnings of Romanticism.

Rousseau's interest in the child and the noble savage sets off a chain reaction: educationists suddenly Interested in learning how children learn; biologists searching for natural play Instincts in men and beasts; political radicals exploiting play as an example of free and liberated social activity; philosophers analyzing the major characteristics of children's play; and literary scholars interpreting the mythical meanings of nursery rhymes and children's games.

Not until 'the child of nature' was taken seriously by adults was play once again looked upon as an archetypal, positive, culture-renewing life force. 16^

Physiology: Art as Surplus Energy

In 1795 Friedrich Schiller, German romantic lyricist,

dramatist, historian, political radical, and philosopher,

published a revised and expanded series of aesthetic let­

ters. These he had originally written two years earlier to

a patron Danish prince. On the Aesthetic Education of Man,

the collective title of the final version, remains today

the most poetically-inspired play aesthetics ever written.

Politics, metaphysics, poetics,, and an eclectic philosophy

tug aesthetics in several directions at once. Like Witt­

genstein’s aphorisms, Schiller’s Letters continually allude

to a transcendent reality which language itself cannot en­

compass. As In the Defense of Poetry by Shelley, his near­

est English counterpart, visitations of divinity have left

their indelible marks on Schiller’s fecund prophetic imag­

ination and inspired, poetic prose.

The letters were composed during the Reign of Terror

in France, and the Influence of radical political thinking,

though tempered in subsequent revisions, is unmistakable in

Schiller’s work. His sympathies lie wholly with the humani­

tarian Ideals of the French Revolution; he even apologizes

in the second letter for writing about Beauty instead of political Freedom, the great cry of his age. But the whole

theme of the Letters justifies his preference for aesthetics:

"it is through Beauty that we arrive at Freedom." Mankind, 165

not yet ripe enough for political freedom, must find the route to Utopia by first cultivating a sense of the beauti­ ful. Art alone will set men free.

Schiller's play theory of art was prompted, as he ac­ knowledges, by a number of casual remarks by Kant in the

Critique of Judgement (1790), published only a few years be­ fore the Letters were written. In Kant's analysis, "only 5 production through freedom . . . should be termed art."

The honeycomb cells bees produce we call art only by a mis­ leading analogy to human architecture; in actuality they are brought about through labor, for the activity of bees is instinctual and unfree— ordained by the laws of nature. The so-called "seven free arts" must also be distinguished from handicrafts and the industrial arts; drudgery, utility, and commerclality drag art down, first to the level of craft, and finally to that of labor. Kant recognizes the compul­ sion of form in art (he mentions the rules of prosody and meter in poetry) as the "mechanism" which gives a body to the free, evanescent driftings of the creative "soul." As a formalist Kant voices disapproval with the "leaders of a newer school [who] believe that the best way to promote a free art is to sweep away all restraint, and convert it from labour into mere play" (Critique of Judgementt p. 16^).

Expanding Kant's suggestions, Schiller worked out an elaborate, albeit sometimes inconsistent, defense of art as 166

play. His argument assumes the Kantian distinction between

human sensuousness and reason; Schiller sees modern man as

a fallen, fragmented being, possessing both a "natural" and

a "moral" character, and constantly torn between heart and

mind. The fundamental antithesis is between Nature (multi­

plicity, concrete phenomena, and feeling) and Heason (unity,

abstract morality, and consciousness). What has brought

about this dissociation, says Schiller, is a peculiarly

modern curse— the "over-subtlety of Intellect." The Greek

wholeness and harmony, provided by an "all-uniting Nature,"

has been sacrificed to the modern tyranny of an "all-divid­

ing intellect."

Anticipating Freud*s pronouncement on civilization's

discontents, Schiller agrees "it was culture itself that in­

flicted this wound upon modern humanity" (Sixth Letter, p.

39 )• And he shares Marcuse's view that culture discovers

ever more sophisticated handcuffs for enforcing obedience.

So far from setting us free, culture only de­ velops a new want with every power that it be­ stows on us; the bonds of the physical are tightened ever more alarmingly, so that the fear of loss stifles even the burning impulses towards improvement, and the maxim of passive obedience passes for the supreme wisdom of life (Fifth Letter, pp. 36-37).

When "enjoyment was separated from labour" (play from work), man became a mere extension and slave of his profession:

Eternally chained to only one single little fragment of the whole, Man himself grew to be only a fragment; with the monotonous noise of 16?

the wheel he drives everlastingly In his ears, he never develops the harmony of his being, and Instead of Imprinting humanity upon his na­ ture he becomes merely the imprint of his oc­ cupation, of his science (Sixth Letter, p. *1-0).

To set right this unbalanced state of affairs; to re­ store the lost wholeness of fragmented humanity; to edu­ cate, nourish, and prepare man for Freedom— these are,

Schiller says, the functions of Art. Beauty and Art, not the politics of the State, will pave the road to Freedom.

Moral wisdom, a love of Beauty, and an ennobling of human character must precede any meaningful improvements in the

State: aesthetic education, not political revolution, will restore man’s lost Paradise. Art, which unites matter and form, multiplicity and unity, stands midway between sen­ suous Nature and formal Reason, the two contrary worlds of modern man. As a synthesis of the sensuous and formal im­ pulses, art liberates man from two absolute constraints: the physical laws of nature and the moral dictates of rea­ son. The antithesis between the sensuous and formal im­ pulses gives birth to a third, harmonizing impulse in which the other two are brought into equilibrium. This third, synthesizing impulse Schiller calls the play impulse, which aims "at the extinction of time in time and the reconcilia­ tion of becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity" (Fourteenth Letter, p. 7*0* Hence Schiller^ fa­ mous and spirited declaration: "Man plays only when he is 168

in the full sense of the word a man, and he ls^ only wholly

Man when he Is playing” (Fifteenth Letter, p. 80).

Schiller uses the word "play" to denote "everything that Is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent, and yet Imposes neither outward nor inward necessity" (Fif­ teenth Letter, p. ?8). Straddling the "midway point between law and exigency," play liberates man from both physical law and morally self-imposed necessity. Play makes man whole again by displaying his two-fold nature. Beauty draws both extremes to an Intermediate state, a liberated zone:

"through Beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; through Beauty the spiritual man is brought to mat­ ter and restored to the world of sense" (Eighteenth Letter, p. 87). Beauty restores man to himself; play is a "second creator" (Twenty-first Letter, p. 102) which does nothing but makes everything possible. Beauty then is purposeless

("It realizes no individual purpose, either intellectual or moral; it discovers no individual truth, helps us to perform no individual duty" [Twenty-first Letter, p. 101] ), but pur­ pose is empty without Beauty. Thus Beauty has an incidental moral and utilitarian value even though, as an autonomous creation, it does not subserve the strict demands of moral­ ity, rationality, or utility.

In order to ascend from the world of physical sensa­ tion to a life of moral order, man must climb through a 169

middle state which contains harmonized elements from the two neighboring states. Aesthetic education is the missing link through which sensuous man evolves into moral man. To free man from the multiplicity, indeterminacy, and contingency of sensations, Beauty imposes a shape on spontaneity, es­ tablishing her superiority to Nature. To prepare man for absolute moral necessity, Beauty delights man with gratui­ tous ornaments and sensual delights, establishing her super­ fluity to physical and moral needs.

Schiller never explains precisely how art and play are related. Presumably they are causally related, art being one of the beautiful gowns that play wears in culture. He does, however, specify the connection between the play-im- pulse and nature. Play originates in natural abundance and superfluity; play is activated in nature by a "surplus" or

"overflow" of vital energy. In one of his most poetically descriptive passages Schiller paints a romantic landscape of luxuriant Nature overbrimming with "surplus energy" and spilling over in lavish profusion. Energy not spent in se­ curing the bare necessities of life remains free to be 'wast­ ed1 in purposeless but exuberant play.

Certainly Nature has given even to the crea­ ture without reason more than the bare neces­ sities of life, and cast a gleam of freedom over the darkness of animal existence. When the lion is not gnawed by hunger and no beast of prey is challenging him to battle, his idle energy creates for itself an object; he fills the echoing desert with his high-spirited 170

roaring, and his exuberant power enjoys it­ self in purposeless display. The insect swarms with joyous life in the sunbeam; and it is assuredly not the cry of desire which we hear in the melodious warbling of the song-bird. Undeniably there is freedom in these movements, but not freedom from need in general, simply a definite external need. The animal works when deprivation is the main­ spring of its activity, and it plays when the fullness of its strength is its own stimulus to activity. Even in mindless Nature there is revealed a similar luxury of powers and a laxity of determination which in that natural context might well be called play (Twenty- seventh Letter, p. 133)-

To summarize Schiller's surplus-energy theory of art: art

is likened to play which originates in nature as the aimless

childish activity of "blowing off steam." There is more

than a casual affinity between Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's roaring lion and the films that emblem introduces. Schiller's the­ ory can be understood in the light of a primitive physio­ logy. It hinges on a dualistic conception of human nature and an anthropomorphic attribution of the play-impulse to the surplus energy seemingly displayed by living organisms.

By virtue of its superfluity play gives rise to purposeless art forms that are free from the external laws of nature and from the Internal moral absolutes of reason. In this way the purposeless (free) play of art has, but only incidental­ ly and mediately, a harmonizing and humanizing educational value. Art liberates in order to perfect humanity. Play makes morality agreeable and freedom possible.

Schiller's play theory of art was taken up and re-expressed nearly a century later by the English philoso­

pher, Herbert Spencer. In a chapter of his monumental

Principles of Psychology Spencer examines the function of

"aesthetic sentiments" and agrees with the gist of a half-

remembered quotation to the effect that these sentiments 6 "originate from the play-impulse." Spencer charmingly con­

fesses that he cannot remember the name of "the German au­

thor" (Schiller, obviously) who had first suggested this

origin, but he regards it as "the adumbration of a truth."

Play, says Spencer, does not "subserve, in any direct way,

the processes conducive to life," but it does maintain "the

organic equilibrium of the individual" (p. 627). Aesthetic

gratifications have "proximate ends" but no "ulterior bene­

fits"; only as the aesthetic faculties are exercised and

perfected over a long period can we speak of art's bene­

ficial effect on life as a whole.

Spencer gives Schiller’s theory an evolutionary slant,

bringing it Into better accord with the Darwinian discoveries

of his age. Like Schiller he believes that play originates

as an aimless expression of surplus energy; but he does not

think that "inferior kinds of animals" play (swarming In­

sects was one of Schiller's examples). Their energies are wholly expended in fulfilling the basic necessities of life—

hunting food and shelter, defending territories, escaping

from enemies, mating. "But," says Spencer, "as we ascend 1?2

to animals of high types, having faculties more efficient and more numerous, we begin to find that time and strength are not wholly absorbed in providing for immediate needs.

. . . Thus it happens that in the more-evolved creatures, there often recurs an energy somewhat in excess of imme­ diate needs" (pp. 628-29). Were it not for its overflow in play this excess of time and strength would lead to a state of dormancy in which nerve-centers not in use would slowly "decompose." Play brings these unused organs into activity in a simulated but purposeless situation— a game of make-believe— thereby permitting "an artificial exer­ cise of powers which, in default of their natural exercise, become so ready to discharge that they relieve themselves by simulated actions in place of real actions" (p. 630).

Art is a competitive wit game, which we play to "win" and to release pent-up steam, and whose function is to exercise unused intellectual faculties in simulated, make-believe actions.

Schiller and Spencer’s surplus-energy theory of play must be subjected to critical appraisal, and the weaknesses in their aesthetic arguments must be pointed out. But be­ fore doing this we can conveniently include the modifica­ tions made by a third biological theorist, Karl Groos. 173

Biology; Art as Instinct

Groos, a German professor of philosophy at Basle, wrote two important studies— The Play of Animals (1896) and

The Play of Man (1899)— in which he rejected the surplus- energy theory of Schiller and Spencer and replaced it with

Darwin’s principle of natural selection.

As a philosopher Groos became interested in using the play of animals and man to found a biological philosophy oif aesthetics. Unlike Schiller and Spencer, Groos attempts to empirically scrutinize and logically classify the various ways animals and men play and to show the Intrinsic simi­ larities between specific kinds of play and their parallels in art. In support of his aesthetic theories Groos collects a wealth of illustrations from the published studies of other naturalists and from his own perceptive observations of animal life and children’s play. His book on The Play of

Animals contains a potpourri of interesting examples of ani­ mal play; In addition to such familiar activities as cats chasing balls of string or toying with captured mice, we hear of baboons teasing dogs; horses chasing men; birds decorating their nests or spreading their feathers, dancing, and performing aerial sky-dives to charm potential mates; puppies that nip and growl In make-believe battle; butter­ flies whose wings mimick owl eyes that frighten off enemies; 17^ and animals who pretend to groom themselves (to avoid a fight). The numerous animal activities discussed are clas­

sified by Groos under such useful headings as "experimenta­ tion," "movement plays," "hunting plays," "fighting plays,"

"constructive arts," "nursing plays," "imitative play,"

"curiosity," and "courtship games."

What Groos concludes from his minute observations of weasels, chimpanzees, geese, fish, and magpies is that play is useful in the battle for survival of the fittest, for it allows the young animal of a species to practice and per­ fect skills needed in adult life. This has come to be known as the practice or mastery theory of play. Play is "an in- 7 st.J net developed by natural selection."' It is more "gen­ eralized" than rigid hereditary instincts which regulate patterns of behavior, so that a young animal first needs to imitate adult forms of behavior In order to learn and perfect his undeveloped skills. Being more generalized than rigid hereditary patterns, the play Instinct allows considerable room for Individual adaptation and experimentation. As we move up the evolutionary ladder from lower to more advanced animals, natural selection progressively favors those species whose instincts are general and undeveloped— plastic enough to be molded by individual experience. "The more adaptable and Intelligent a species is, the more it needs a period of protracted infancy and childhood for the practice gained in 175

O play and Imitation," So, as Groos Insists, "the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play" (Play of Animals, p. xx).

Young animals play not to expend surplus energy but

in order to learn from experience. The experience itself is only a simulation (make-believe) of adult behavior, but this playful element is precisely what makes learning pos­ sible. Had he not played at fighting In his youth, the in­ experienced animal would most likely be killed in his first real-life clash with an enemy. In the mock-battles of play­ fully fighting puppies or other carnivorous animals, where the dangers of real injury are lessened or removed, the young animal learris to perfect skills without fear. Play is not superfluous, it is an instinctual necessity required

In the battle for survival.

For our purposes the most interesting section of Groos* first book is the final chapter on "The Psychology of Ani­ mal Play." Biology has explained to his satisfaction why young animals play (to practice and perfect generalized in­ stincts), but not why play persists in later life. Why do adults continue to play long after their skills and instincts have been perfected? To solve this riddle Groos turns to psychology and examines the "mental accompaniments" of play— the pleasures that make an adult want to play as if he were still young. Groos distinguishes the following 176

major "psychic accompaniments" of play:

1) Pleasure in Power: the Joys of movement (giddiness, dizziness, elation, excitation); curiosity; the Joy in victory (subduing a rival, overcoming opposition or friction).

2) Absorption in Mock Activity: the joy of de­ ceiving and being deceived; the loss of self in communal play.

3) Divided Consciousness: the delight of con­ scious self-delusion; oscillation between illusion and reality; the dreamlike state halfway between ordinary consciousness and pathological hysteria or hypnosis; the mu­ tual interaction between a real and a pre­ tend ego; joy in being the cause of an il­ lusion.

U) Peeling of Freedom in Make-Believe: the fun of pretending; the freedom of not having to make real choices or suffer real wounds; the liberation from both nature and reason.

These pleasures remain ends in themselves, long after they have served their purpose of initiating learning and assur­ ing mastery. The adult continues to play because playing continues to be fun.

Using these criteria Groos argues that art displays the same essential characteristics he has enumerated in play. This enables him to conclude that the playing of young animals, when consciously repeated in adulthood, takes us to the very threshold of human art.

. . . there is the strongest probability that the playing animal has this conscious self- deception. The origin of artistic fantasy or playful illusion is thus anchored in the firm ground of organic evolution. Play is needed for the higher development of intelligence; at first merely objective, it becomes, by 177

means of this development, subjective as well, for the fact that the animal, though recog­ nizing that his action is only a pretence, re­ peats it, raises it to the sphere of conscious self-illusion, pleasure in making believe— that is, to the threshold of artistic produc­ tion. Only to the threshold, however, for to the production belongs the aim of affecting others by the pretence, and pure play has none of this aim. Only love play shows something of it, and in this respect it is nearest to art (pp. 302-303)*

Particularly enlightening is Groos' comment on divided con­

sciousness— conscious self-illusion in play and art. The child playing with his stuffed teddy bear and the adult enraptured by his favorite television drama, despite com­ plete absorption in their games, are equally conscious of the pretence in their activities.

It appears, then, that play, when it rises to conscious self-deception, produces a strange and peculiar division of our consciousness. The child is wholly absorbed in his play, and yet under all the ebb and flow of thought and feeling, he has the knowledge that it is only a pretence, after all. Behind the sham I, that takes part in the game, stands the un­ changing I of real life, which regards the game with quiet superiority (pp. 303-30^).

It is this very self-consciousness that separates the player from the psychotic and the artist from the schizophrenic.

Although the make-believe "I" is compelled to respond to play and art, this compulsion is unlike actual physical re­ pression, for the real "I" is always conscious of the game's make-believe. Hence the paradox of freedom within compul­ sion! "we are compelled, because we are under the power of 178

Illusion, and we are free because we produce the illusion voluntarily" (p. 321).

In closing this book Groos appends a brief note and diagram to explain how three specialized forms of play are analogous to specific human arts. These forms of animal play are courtship, imitation, and the constructive arts; they are linked, respectively, to three principles of human art: self-exhibition, imitation, and decoration. Although t there is obviously much overlapping of these three prin­ ciples, Groos suggests that we recognize particularly close relationships between play and art. These relationships he indicates, without further comment, in a formulaic table:

PLAY. Exp crxmentaiion. (Joy in being able.)

(Pretence: conscious self-deception.)

Sclf-cxhibition. Imitation. Decoration. Tiie personal. The true. Tho beautiful.

With ( Courtship Imitativo arts. animuls. ( arts. Building arts. 'Donee with Imitative dance. Ornamentation. excitement Pantoroimo. Architecture. With 'Music. Sculpture. m an.' Lyric poetry. Painting, Epic poetry. Drama.

Little new is added to Groos* basic theory of art and play In his second work, The Play of Man. He does prefer a new term, play Impulse, to his older notion of a play "in­ stinct," but his central thesis remains the same: "in 179

child’s play . . . opportunity is given to the animal,

through the exercise of inborn dispositions, to strengthen

and increase his inheritance in the acquisition of adapta­

tions to his complicated environment, an achievement which 9 would be unattainable by mere mechanical instinct alone."

Play is still regarded as a "natural or inherited impulse"

whose function is to develop specific skills. A child imi­

tates adult behavior because someday he will need in reality

to behave like one. Art is one of the acceptable ways in which play can be extended into adult life.

Groos sees in the mock sword-flghting of young boys— as well as in the jousts and tourneys of medieval knights— a playful "natural demand to satisfy an inborn impulse to fight" (p. 183). Even cruelty among children (hair-pulling, pin-sticking, dunking, torturing) has a playfully instinc­ tual, aggressive character. This mode of play, if it be­ comes too rough, degenerates into gory spectacles— such as the Roman gladiatorial games. Groos cites a deadly play­ ful example among the ancient Thracians:

A man stands on a round stone holding a sickle in his hand and having his head through a noose suspended from above. When he is not expect­ ing it a bystander pushes the stone away and there hangs the poor wretch who has been chosen by lot for this fate. If he has not sufficient skill and presence of mind to cut the knot at once with the sickle he flounders there until he dies, amid the laughter of the spectators (p. 224).

This is Russian roulette with a new twist to the noose; a 180

quick wit and quick reflexes can overcome bad luck. These

various forms of fighting games have their closest artistic

parallels in epic poetry (where "the excitement of fight­

ing furnishes the motive" ]^p. 2k6~\) and in tragedy (where

a contest "is pursued to the bitter end, usually violent

defeat" [p. 2^7]).

The other major mode of play, similar to courtship

rituals among animals, Groos calls simply "love play." The

young girl who fondles her pillow, kisses her'doll, or sub­

mits to the playful wooing of a pretend mate (they "get

married" and "play house") delights in practicing the court­

ship arts. In the liberty of play, children freely engage

in the sham affections which they must learn by practice to

sincerely express in real life. Because the pretence Itself

is fun, erotic love play continues to stimulate adults and

provide pleasure in the games of art. Lyric poetry, the

romantic novel, nude painting, obscenely-exaggerated sculp­

ture, and tribal native dances are all, says Groos, adult

manifestations of the erotic "play-impulse." The Impetus

for this kind of art is the need to display and "exhibit"

oneself— much as a male peacock struts, bows, and fans his

colors to attract or delight a mate. The self-exhibition

impulse is as Instinctual as the courtship rituals of ani­ mals.

The theories of Schiller, Spencer, and Groos have 181

added much to our understanding of play In art. My third

chapter on play aesthetics is especially indebted to

Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. But useful as these theories

are, some of their basic premises are unsound. To begin with, each of the three theorists is guilty, to one de­

gree or another, of the anthropomorphic interpretation of

animal behavior. To anthropomorphically attribute "play"

to the activities of animals may be metaphorically felici­

tous, but it can be logically fallacious. To say, as Groos does, that a moth flying into a flame displays intellectual

"curiosity" is to wantonly stick human labels where they do not belong. Describing an animal activity as "play" may do more to reveal the ignorance of the observer than to make sense of what, otherwise, seems to make no sense at all.

Many positivists have cautioned naturalists against this tendency to ascribe human psychological states to the curious activities of animals. A classic example has been the interpretation of a curious habit of certain fish (Ty- losurus raphldoma) that leap over free-floating sticks:

First the fish will swim up slowly to the stick so as to be nearly at right angles to it (in a horizontal plane) and gently pro­ trude the beak through the surface of the water, sliding the tip over the stick. Usually if the stick is too small and gives way too easily, or too large and gives way too little, the fish will withdraw. If it is of the proper buoyancy and sinks ever so little under the weight of the beak, a 182

violent tail action follows and the fish clears the water, but in such a manner that usually part of the body rubs against the stick in passing and the fish falls to the other side, from which it may turn and leap back a- gain.10

Naturalists were once fond of describing this leaping of

fish as a 'playful activity' with no practical significance.

But later more scientifically-minded observers discovered

that these fish leap over and scrape floating sticks and debris in order to dislodge ectoparasites which have in­

fested their scales. The earlier use of the term "play" was simply a result of careless observation and ignorance.

Difficulties of this sort have thrown the whole con­ cept of play into some disrepute among psychologists.

Harold Schlosberg, reviewing various interpretations and definitions of play, was led to a cynical conclusion: "the category 'playful activity' is so loose that it is almost useless for modern psychology.Still, we can certainly continue to use the term "play" as Susanna Millar does in her excellent guide, The Psychology of Play (Baltimore,

1968). Rather than singling out any one feature or defini­ tion of play from the various psychological theories re­ viewed, she refuses "to restrict the term 'play' to one or other category" and admits that "different kinds of play are subject to a somewhat different array of conditions"

(p. 99). Play is a richly loaded word, dense with meanings, connotations, and Implications. In fact, the very richness 183

of the concept of play is what makes it so Indispensable in the vocabulary of the humanities, even if that fluidity rightly disturbs scientists and positivists. That is why, in this thesis, I have not narrowed play to any one simpli­ fied definition but, Instead, have pursued its many uses and meanings— political, historical, metaphysical, aesthetic, biological, psychological, and so on. What has been lost in precise focus, I hope has been regained in breadth of vi- i sion. We do, however, sometimes need to be discriminating in our use of the term. For this reason we can classify various kinds of play on the basis of "family resemblances," such as the distinction we found it appropriate to make be­ tween ludlc and paldic play. Other distinctions, similar to this one, will obviously be needed if play is to become a meaningful term in the language of literary criticism.

Nor do we need to condemn the use of the word "play" in all discussions of animal behavior: it is only that we must be constantly alert to pitfalls and errors. On the basis of sound empirical data and careful observations naturalists can and do legitimately apply the term "play" to certain animal activities, especially those of the higher primates— from which man descends. Desmond Morris recently advanced a biological theory of art which he supported by exhaustive experiments with young chimpanzees, who can be taught to scribble and paint pictures. His The Biology of 184-

Art (London, 1962) examines that grey area between animal and man, where the borders between animal play and human art are blurred but recognizable. We cannot be so ignorant as to label every apparently ‘useless' animal activity

"play." But neither can we be so proud as to assume that only members of the human species really do play.

Schiller, Spencer, and Groos use the term "play" too indiscriminately, and this ambiguity weakens the evidence i mustered for their aesthetic theories. There are other deficiencies as well. The surplus-energy theory fails to take into account the well-known phenomenon in which play acts as an incentive. A child, wearied after a long walk, will perk up if a game can be made of his getting home

("Step on a Crack and You Break Your Mother's Back" or

"Last One Home is a Rotten Egg"). A fatigued, half-asleep kitten may suddenly bounce into activity if a sock is wig­ gled on a string. Excess energy is not a necessary cause of play, nor is it a sufficient cause: the energy might

Just as easily have been expended in work. Work and play both require at least minimal energy; both are sometimes exhausting and sometimes exhilarating.

Objections can also be made to Groos' derivation of play from a natural instinct for survival. The nature of play may well be influenced by heredity, but it is pre­ sumptuous to assume that advanced species simply "play 185

out" their "instinct to play." Groos' theory reduces to a near-tautology: animals instinctively play because they have an Instinct to play. Perhaps modern genetics will

someday discover a "play" chromosome or a "play" code in

the DNA double helix. But until we learn much more about the idioms of heredity, we would do well to not lay much importance on instinct theories in general. If, for example, we can justifiably suppose the existence of a "play-instinct," i why not of a separate "art-instinct" too?

In addition to these problems, none of the biological theories adequately establishes the precise relationship between animal play and human art. How do we know they arise from a similar or identical hereditary Impulse? Not enough attention is paid to the dissimilarities between art and play, and no explanation is offered as to how and why play necessarily matures into art. Groos comes closest of the three in offering such an explanation in his discus­ sion of the "psychic accompaniments" of play; when biology alone could not provide all the answers, Groos turned to psychology. But psychology was then in its Infancy, and many of Groos* psychic motives for play seem quaint and crude by the standards of modern, sophisticated psychology.

While it is Inadmissible to speak of "divided consciousness" in the play of a young puppy or goldfish, it is yet true that human adults and children normally seem consciously 186

aware of pretence, make-believe, and Illusion while at

play. Groos prepared the way for further psychological

studies by at least raising, even if he could not answer

to our satisfaction, some basic questions about conscious and unconscious motives in human art. It is time now to look at the fresh replacements which psychology sent into

the game.

Psychologyi Art as Wlsh-Fulflllment, Therapy, and Assimilation

It would be impossible to review and summarize all of the numerous psychological explanations of play and art.

There are conceivably as many plausible theories as

"schools" of psychology or independent psychoanalysts who have written on play and art. Psychology has not yet at­ tained the status of a science. I will largely confine my brief discussion to the most original psychologists who have speculated on play— Sigmund Freud (plus some of his fol- 12 lowers) and Jean Piaget.

In abandoning his early treatment of hysteria through hypnosis and adopting his mature clinical method of "free association," Freud discovered or invented the major tool of modern psychoanalysis. The technique of free associa­ tion assumes that a speaker who lets his mind drift freely will allow repressed traumatic experiences and forgotten painful feelings of childhood to appear in disguised, sym­

bolic forms. Infantile experiences and feelings, which would be embarrassing or shameful to a rational adult, be­

come transformed in play, dreams, fantasy, and imaginative

association. The painful is transformed into the pleas­

urable: acceptable playful outlets are found for uncon­

scious libidinal wishes, impulses, and obsessions. The un­

conscious disguises herself, wins the approval of the psy­

chic censor, and thus finds a channel for speaking directly

to the conscious mind— but in a secret code.

Verbal free association in adults has, Preud also discovered, ,an earlier equivalent in the free play of child­ ren. The child at play uses objects and events from his real world as toys in an imaginary world of his own making.

In his fictional world the child re-creates the world around him to suit the needs of his own developing ego.

If lonely he creates imaginary playmates; if authoritarian he bosses around his dolls; if adventurous he leads hun­ dreds of toy soldiers into gory battle; if tender he cares­ ses a stuffed animal; if insecure he reshapes reality for his protection (a pile of boxes becomes a castle, and there is a universal rule that says ’under the bedsheets no harm can come' ). In his daydreams, fantasies, and games a child manages to fulfill his deepest wishes. The reality-prin- ciple is put to sleep for the occasion, and the pleasure- 188

principle (Eros) enjoys unlimited free reign in the play- world of the imagination. Play, like daydreaming, is dis­ guised wish-fulfillment.

Freud was quick to recognize the parallels between the daydreaming state and the artistically creative mind.*^

Just as in play, dreams, and fantasy the harsh facts of reality do not operate with the same force, so too in art is the poet free to fulfill unconscious wishes and act de­ fiantly oblivious to reality. Play is the dramatic enact­ ment of unconscious fantasies. Art is simply a more re­ fined adult elaboration of the same therapeutic exercise in wish-fulfillment. The poet, like the child at play, creates a second world, a microcosmos, in his own imagina­ tion. He is the Ancient Mariner of his own imaginary ship: he builds the craft, raises the sails, blows the wind, and steers the helm. His imaginary creation may have little correspondence to the real world, but it almost certainly corresponds to repressed fantasies and obsessions, and these are real enough to the unconscious mind.

The main difference between the daydreaming child and the imaginative poet is that, while the child delights in hiding his pleasurable fantasies, the poet enjoys dis­ playing them for the pleasure of others. That is where art departs from play: play "unplays" itself into "dis­ play" and thus becomes art— that is how I explained it 189

earlier. How the poet manages to please others with his

own fantasies (often grotesque and repulsive) Is "his

innermost secret." But Freud attempts to rationally de­

cipher the workings of this secret talent:

We can guess at two methods used in this technique. The writer softens the egotisti­ cal character of the day-dream by changes and disguises, and, he bribes us by the offer of a purely formal, that is, aesthetic, pleas­ ure in the presentation of his phantasies. The increment of pleasure which is offered us in order to release yet greater pleasure aris­ ing from deeper sources in the mind is called an "incitement premium" or technically, "fore­ pleasure." I am of the opinion that all the aesthetic pleasure we gain from the works of imaginative writers is of the same type as this "fore-pleasure," and that the true enjoyment of literature proceeds1 from the release of tension in our minds.1^'

Fantasy, daydreams, and play are therapeutic. They give

shape to the unconscious; they substitute pleasant un­

reality for unpleasant reality; and their purpose is ca­

thartic— to release pent-up tensions and anxieties.

In later writings Freud understood the daydreams,

fantasies, and games of childhood as the means a child em­

ploys to master both himself and the world around him. By

dramatically re-enacting traumas and unpleasurable ex­

periences the child reduces the anxieties these disturbances

have aroused. Play is an impulse to master events by re­ peating them; to dramatize a painful experience, to re­

create a painful event, in short to make the pain reoccur

In play, gives one a feeling of mastery over fate. The 190

pain of having suffered Is displaced by the pleasure in

being the cause. Freud coined the notion of "compulsive

repetition" to explain the impulse by which this mastery

is achieved. Most of the anxieties and neuroses of adults

and children are, Freud believed, infantile in origin;

they arise as crises in the development of a normal child

through his oral, anal, and Oedlpal stages. These anxiety- producing fantasies are sexual in nature, though it must be remembered that "infantile sexuality" is not localized

(until much later) in the genital region. In play, as in daydreams and fantasy, repressed sexual obsessions (such as the Oedipal desire to possess the mother and destroy the father) can be "played out" in fictional disguises.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud explains how the compulsion to repeat overrides the pleasure-princlple to admit unpleasant experiences in play. He bases his interpretation of play on the case-history of a one-and- one-half -year-old boy and his unusual game.

He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys was often quite a busi­ ness. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, 191

long-drawn-out 'o-o-o-o,' accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ♦fort* ['gone'] . I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play 'gone' with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at Its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skil­ fully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive 'o-o-o-o.' He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful 'da' ['there'] . This, then, was the complete game— disappearance and return.*5

Freud interprets this game as "the child's great

cultural achievement— the instinctual renunciation . . . which he had made in allowing his mother to go away with­ out protesting" (p. l*f). The child, in other words, com­ pensates for the displeasure of his mother's departure by turning reality into a game. He takes revenge on his real world by converting passivity into compulsive, repeti­ tive activity in a play-world.

At the outset he was in a passive situation— he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part (p. 15)*

In similar fashion we might add that a young girl, dislik­ ing the daily doses of vitamin syrup her mother administers, may 'punish' her dollies by giving them frequent doses from 192 a ’pretend' bottle, thus compensating- for her own miseries.

Art too has this cathartic function; art Is to adults what play is to children. Freud is very much a proper Aristo­ telian when he declares that

the artistic play and artistic imitation car­ ried out by adults, which, unlike children's, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators {in tragedy, for instance) the most painful experiences and yet can be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind (p. 17).

Play, then, is more than simple wlsh-fulfillment (if that were true, unpleasurable experiences would not arise in play). Play is also the impulse to master events, and it takes the form of a therapeutic compulsion to repeat painful experiences under the liberty of disguise. Through repetitive play equilibrium is restored as psychic ten­ sions are either reduced or released. Play is a step tow­ ards adult stability.

Freud's explanations of play have greatly influenced modern psychological thinking, especially in the field of child psychology. Play therapy, as a substitute for adult free association, is widely used for understanding and treating disturbed children; Freud's daughter, Anna, was the first to clinically employ this technique with child­ ren. It is interesting to note that poetry is also now 193

being widely used in similar clinical therapy, once again demonstrating Freud's view that art and play are both ca- 16 thartic. Stories made up by children to pictures and inkblots are interpreted for clinical diagnosis; children's games are carefully scrutinized and psychoanalytically evaluated by teams of professional play analysts. For in their play, unlike in their private daydreams, children display the workings of the unconscious in physical acti­ vities and gestures, which can be observed and analyzed by therapists. It is safe to say that at no time in history has play ever been taken as "seriously" as it now is.

Frued's specific psychological theories, however, have been taken up more conscientiously by literary critics than by professional psychologists. Much literary mileage can be (and has been) gotten out of Freud's theory of the arche­ typal Oedipal conflict; but most of the early enthusiasm for finding scapegoat fathers and Incestuous sons in every literary classic has graciously subsided. Nevertheless,

Freudlanism has left an indelible mark on the literary mind and has prompted a fashionable school of literary criti- clsm.

Not the least of Freud's impacts has been in opening up poetic symbols to interpretation on preconscious levels.

Freud added another unknown, the unconscious, to those supernatural, mystic, and transcendental realms which lit­ erature often points a finger towards but can never touch. 19^

Once again the creative mind could be seen as being In­

spired by events removed from everyday life and conscious

recall. From some dark, deep, half-forgotten world of the

past, mysterious fantasies arise as if from nowhere to force

themselves upon the imagination in strange shapes and arche­

typal symbols. Freud made mysticism, daydreaming, and fan­

tasy seem intellectually respectable in an age that was

forgetting how to play.

In The Poetic Mind Frederick Prescott, In adapting

Freudianism to a theory of poetry, extended some of Freud’s

comments on child's play. Like Freud he believes the poet

thinks as a child does— in associative patterns, in which

trains of images are linked by contiguity or resemblance

rather than logical order. The child takes the first flights of imagination; he invents poetic metaphor and personificatlon by giving life to inanimate objects and living creatures, both real and imaginary.

Children are fond of stories, of hearing, composing and telling them endlessly,— about themselves, about other people, about ani­ mals and objects they have personified, and about characters of their own Invention. . . . The child readily invents conversa­ tions, "fitting his tongue to dialogues of business, love, and strife." He readily in­ vents plays and games of a dramatic charac­ ter. With his playmates, but quite as well or better alone— that Is with persons of his own imagination— he plays store or Indian, he impersonates Robin Hood, he dramatizes the story of Pocahontas, and himself assumes his chosen part. . . . Here are the origins, in the history of the individual, of fiction and drama— of what, using the language of childhood, we still call story and play

Play, as Freud had said, is the father of fiction. In good

Wordsworthian fashion, the child seems mystically aware of

a spiritual world and ideal existence, of which the tan­

gible world is only a faint echo. The child at play con­

jures up a mysterious origin for himself: he is a hero, a

king, a god. This we recognize as the familiar motifs of

obscure births and supernatural origins so common in fairy

tales, folklore, and mythology.

The child first lives poetry and only later learns

prose. Voluntary thought and acquired reasoning soon rele­

gate the imaginative view of life to second place. Poets

and old men in their "second childhoods" are among the few

moderns who allow associative, imaginative, childish thought

to reappear in adult life. And what is true for the in­

dividual is true for the species: ontogeny repeats phy-

logeny. For, says Prescott, " the thought of the primi­

tive man, like that of the child, is at first entirely, or

almost entirely, associative" (p. 60). This explains why

poetry invariably appears first in literature and prose is

a later development. In the myths of the Greeks, in the

parables of the Bible, in the romances of the Middle Ages—

a primitive associative pattern of thought is still at play.

In "the childhood of the race" fantasy, dreams, and free play vividly stir men's imaginations; prosaic reasoning has 196

not yet awakened men from their poetic dreams. The dreams

of our ancestors, Prescott sighs, must surely have been

more vivid than our own.

Ernst Kris also adds a few new footnotes to Freudian

play psychology. In Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art

Kris argues that children's play represents a "holiday from

the super-ego" and performs three functions. Play assists

the child in gaining mastery over his environment, wards off

unpleasant experiences, and promotes pleasure in learning.

Kris observes these three principles operating during the

child's acquisition of language:

We learn how the three interact when we turn our attention to precisely that aspect of play which survives in the comic word play of adults, the child's play with words. This phenome­ non receives a partial explanation when one reflects that the urge to communicate . . . also at times finds expression in the child's play with words, or better put, playful ex­ perimentation with words; although it is evi­ dent that at a still earlier stage playing with words is aimed at securing mastery over them.1?

We might expand upon Kris' observations. To the child words

are playthings, toys to have fun with, pieces to fit to­

gether In the complex puzzle of interlocking "language-

games." He has not yet thought of language In the manner

Milton considered his prose— as a mental weapon with which

to assault, clobber, and overwhelm opponents. To the Imagi­ native mind words are playful objects of sensual delight; only to the rational, prosaic mind do words become aggressive 197

claws and teeth, to be employed in propaganda. Children

first love to play with words and only later learn to work

with them. And this is an insight that should have far-

reaching consequences for educationists who teach language.

Erik Erikson, another contemporary neo-Freudian, ap­

plies a basically Freudian psychoanalysis of childhood to

social and historical processes. Erikson's Childhood and

Society (1950) revolves around one indisputable fact, but

one that is too often ignored by historians? "every adult,

whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of a mass 20 or of an elite, was once a child." To study man’s un­

usually prolonged period of childhood is to understand the

neuroses, fears, and anxieties of adulthood: the processes

of history can be interpreted as the attempts by society

to come to terms with its own infantile origins. Society

prepares children for parenthood and seeks to assuage or

find suitable outlets for "the unavoidable remnants of

infantility in its adults" (p. ^05)* Adult defenses to

Infantile fears and civilized sublimations of primitive

superstitions: these constitute the major currents and

crosscurrents of history.

Society collectively tames, exploits, and represses

the child in man. It must do so because "the immature ori­ gin of his conscience endangers man's maturity and his works? Infantile fear accompanies him through life" (p.405i 198

Erikson identifies various basic childish fears that pro­

duce adult anxieties; among other things the child fears:

suddenness, being manipulated, being interrupted, being

impoverished, losing his autonomy, being closed up or hemmed

in, (or its contrary) losing his boundaries and territo­

ries, being attacked from the rear, falling, being cas­

trated (deprived of a weapon), remaining small, being im­

prisoned, being left alone or left empty, and being raped

(a particularly feminine fear).

In the process of becoming an adult and acquiring a

sense of identity, the child— with the help of his parent

culture— normally learns how to control and construct suit­

able barriers against these latent infantile anxieties.

Growing up should mean growing out of fear. The real dan­ ger man faces is fear Itself, along with the terrifying pow­

ers that society can unleash for exploiting the collective fears of its members. Erikson reminds us what can happen:

"the most ruthless exploiters of any nation*s fight for a safe identity have been Adolf Hitler and his associates . . ."

(p. 326). Hitler preached his way to power by shrewdly play­ ing upon infantile anxieties; he made himself a symbolic figurehead: boyish father-rebel, histrionic and hysterical adventurer, super-human mother-idolizer, adolescent gang leader, sacrificial Jew-killer, and manly soldier. By ex­ ploiting fears and nurturing an identity crisis among the 199

defeated German people, Hitler concocted a powerful Nazi

mythology, in which he became the chosen deity in control

of an awesome political machine. Such are the perils when

adults play out their childish fantasies and fictions in

real life.

There must be some less destructive way for an indi­

vidual to find an Identity and come to terms with his in­

fantile fears than to collectively fall victim to the mass

hypnotic spell of a psychopathic, adolescent hero. The con­

structive way for an individual to establish an identity and

synthesize his ego, says Erikson, is "to find recreation and self-cure in the activity of play" (p. 209). Erikson re-examines Freud*s theory of infantile sexuality and in­

cludes the results of his own clinical observations cf children. He had discovered, for instance, that boys and girls have formally distinct ways of playing that reflect the genital difference between male and female. In one study he asked boys and girls to construct an "imaginary moving picture" from a random selection of small toys; he found that girls tend to arrange a scene or room in the form of a circle of furniture, while boys prefer to erect tall towers, structures, and buildings. "Boys adorned high structures; girls, gates" (p. 106). It boils down to the erect penis versus the womb enclosure, the masculine and the feminine morphology of the sex organs. In their play 200

children construct spatial modalities that are determined by the biological Occident' of sex; they reveal a male and a female experience of space and suggest different sexual attitudes and conflicts that must be resolved. "Experience,” says Erikson echoing Freud, "is rooted in the ground plan of the body" (p. 108).

In the chapter entitled "Toys and Reasons" Erikson demonstrates the psychological validity of William Blake*s fine sentiment: "The child’s toys and the old man*s rea­ sons are the fruits of two seasons." He agrees with Freud that "to hallucinate ego mastery and yet also to practice it In an intermediate reality between phantasy and actual­ ity is the purpose of play" (p. 212), but he also sees the senselessness in comparing adult and child*s play. (Freud, we recall, had nearly equated the two.) The child does not work, and this alone suffices to decisively separate him from the adult who "must play rarely and work most of the time," that is, the adult who "must have a defined role in society" (p. 21^). The fruits are both fruits, but they are not the same fruits. Since the child does not work, he must play. And play, for the child, is mastery:

What is infantile play, then? We saw that it is not the equivalent of adult play, that it is not recreation. The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery. I propose the theory that the child’s play is the infantile form of the hu­ man ability to deal with experience by 201

creating model situations and to master real­ ity by experiment and planning (p. 222).

In this sense, we might add, the mock-ups and simulated test

flights by astronauts before venturing on an outer-space

expedition seem very closely aligned to the child*s play with similar models to achieve mastery.

From these perspectives Erikson goes on to discuss the

therapeutic value of play— “to *play it out' is the most natural self-healing measure childhood affords" (p. 222)— ,

to outline the clinical uses o f .therapeutic play psycho­ analysis In understanding identity crises, and to note dif­ ferences in the ways the children of primitive tribes and civilized societies play. In all of this, Erikson circles around his central theme, that the evidence for social health is to be discovered in the patterns of childhood and adolescence and how well individual cultures deal with the emerging identity crises of their young.

This completes my brief review of the Freudian theory of play, which, as we have seen, Is thriving healthily after having been extended into a theory of culture and history.

Erikson*s Childhood and Society introduces us to the broader social implications of play and opens the question of whether society as a whole should not be treated In preference to

Freud*s treatment of the individual. In the first chapter of my thesis I dealt with .these Issues by considering the contemporary political significance of play and by elaborating 202

the neo-Freudian insights of Herbert Marcuse, Norman 0.

Brown, and others. Freud’s theories of play and of civi­

lization's discontents still have much to tell us about the

desperate search for a new identity, about the groping of

youth for a liberated "counter-culture," and about the na­

ture of both the revolutionary violence and national ag­

gressiveness of our times.

No psychological theory of play has yet emerged to

stand as a serious and equal rival to Freud's. Neither

stimulus-reflex behavioural psychology nor Gestalt and Field

theories have provided any major new models for understand­ ing play. Psychologically, we do not understand play any better nor much differently than Freud did. On the other hand, we have certainly learned more about how play actually operates to promote learning and mastery; knowledge of the structures of play and games has enabled psychologists and anthropologists to classify various kinds of games in both childhood and culture. These studies have furthered our understanding of play in individual development and the functions of play in culture. But Freud's theory has not been Jeopardized or called into doubt by these recent de­ velopments, for play is simply being studied from perspec­ tives Freud had already entertained: play is a method of ego mastery and a force to be reckoned with in culture.

What we are learning more about is specifically how this 203

mastery Is achieved, how learning actually takes place, and what topographical structures play assumes In history.

This brings us to the work of the Swiss psychologist, Jean

Piaget, whose studies of play in intellectual development are second in clinical importance only to Freud’s.

Piaget, professor of developmental psychology at the

University of Geneva, began his prolific career as a zoolo­ gist studying snails and later turned his biological in­ terests to good use in advancing a theory of knowledge.

How do children come to know? How does the acquisition of logical reasoning take place? How does a child learn to

'adjust' to reality? It was in studying the growth of in­ telligence to answer such questions as these that Piaget was led to make his worthy contribution to the theory of play. In La Formation du symbole (English title: Play.

Dreams and Imitation in Childhood). Piaget develops his no­ tion that play, unlike Imitation, Is the child's activity, throughout various stages of his development, of assimilat­ ing external reality to his Internal psyche. Play fulfills a biological need of the individual to establish an equi­ librium, a conclusion Piaget reached that Is remarkably similar to the biological theories of Schiller, Spencer, and Groos.

Piaget's thesis centers upon his postulation of two biological processes fundamental to all organic development: 20k

assimilation and accommodation. Eating is the most univer­

sal and simplest example of assimilation: food is ingested,

digested, absorbed, and made a part of the organism. Assimi­

lation differs from accommodation, or the adjustments an or­

ganism makes to its environment: contracting the eye-

muscles to avoid a bright light is a familiar example of

accommodation. Piaget then uses these biological distinc­

tions to describe two poles in the intellectual processes.

Assimilation refers to any process whereby the organism changes the information it re­ ceives, in the process of making it part of the organism*s know-how. Information is, as it were, digested. Accommodation means any adjustment the organism has to make to the external world in order to assimilate informa­ tion. Intellectual development is due to the continual, active interplay between assimilat­ ing and accommodating. Intelligent adapta­ tion occurs when the two processes balance each other, or are *in equilibrium*. When they are not, accommodation or adjustment to the object may predominate over assimilation. This results in Imitation. Alternatively, as­ similation— fitting the impression In with previous experience and adapting it to the individual's needs--may predominate. This is play. It is pure assimilation which changes incoming information to suit the in­ dividual's requirements. Play and imitation are an integral part of the development of Intelligence, and. consequently, go through the same stages.

Play is not the same as imitation as some— Groos, for ex­

ample— have assumed. Rather they are the two poles between which learning and mastery take place. The child both

destroys or learns to assimilate reality in play and ex­

plores or learns to accommodate reality through imitation. To use a grotesque metaphor: play is eating the

world, while imitation is letting the world eat you. This

is essentially the same difference, as I pointed out in

discussing realism in fiction, that separates a work like

Rabelais* Gargantua and Pantagruel from a work like George

Moore's Esther Waters. It is the difference between the

hero as eater in Rabelais and the heroine as eaten in Moore.

The romantic "I" tries to absorb the whole world (think here

of Don Quixote, Goethe's Faust, or Wordsworth's The Prelude),

while the realistic "I" struggles to avoid being swallowed

up by the external forces (think here of naturalism or of

the typical existentialist hero in one of Hemingway's,

Camus', or Malamud's novels). The tragic hero is such an

interesting character because he has one foot in both worlds,

is eaten because he would be eater, and is destroyed by the

very reality he sets out to remold to suit his own ego

(Oedipus, Prometheus, Sisyphus, Lear, perhaps even Napoleon).

Tragedy reminds us that play, however large and luxuriant

its garden, is not the whole of life.

Wholeness is what Piaget's theory of learning, in­

telligence as the interplay between play and imitation, would have us recognize. While I will naturally want to

concentrate on what he has to tell us about play, we need to remember that this is but one side of the coin and only one half of Piaget's theory of learning. Piaget divides early intellectual development into

several major periods or stages, each with a number of sub-

stages: the sensory-motor period (birth to about 18 months) in which the infant achieves sense and motor coordination; the representative stage (years 2-7) in which the child learns to imagine, symbolize, verbalize, assume roles, and play games with rules; and the cognitive stage (beginning about the age of 11 or 12) in which the child becomes capa­ ble of reversing logical operations mentally. Throughout his development, the child continually oscillates between receiving and adjusting to information— between playing and imitating. A little girl not only Imagines herself a prin­ cess but also learns to 'play house* and enjoys washing dishes 'Just like mommy does.*

In the early stages of the child's development (the years of infancy), play is "mere functional or reproductive 22 assimilation." Discovering that he can rattle a toy and learning to coordinate and master the technique of shaking come about through exploration and imitation. Having learned how to make the toy rattle, the infant delights in repeating the same action over and over again: this is play. What motivates the child, as Groos had pointed out earlier, is 'the pleasure in being a cause,' or the fun of rattling itself. Later play becomes experlmentive; the older a child, the quicker he becomes bored with repeating a single activity and the more experimenting he initiates— 207

trying all sorts of variations of an activity. Learning to

hide toys and make them reappear becomes a step towards be­

ing able to imagine an object not in view; when the child

discovers the unlimited freedom of interiorlzed action in

the absence of objects (imagination), he enters into a

period in which symbolization, pretence, make-believe, and—

eventually— rational conceptualization are possible. Making up stories, giving life and speech to imaginary playmates, distorting in imaginative play things that have happened in reality, and inventing for the sake of inventing become the main activities for fun of the two to seven year old. But despite the sophistication of these later games, they all descend from a single marvellous discovery: that a toy hidden from view can be imagined, thought about, anticipated, and made to reappear. The child has discovered he is a ma­ gician.

Piaget classifies the various kinds of play he has ob­ served in children according to the structures of the games.

He rejects previous classifications of play, such as Groos' division according to the nature of the activity ("hunting play," "love play," etc.), because they assume predetermined categories and unprovable instincts.

If neither the content, i.e., the function of the game, nor its origin provides univocal classifications, it is because these classifi­ cations depend on preconceived interpretations. In order to classify games without being tied beforehand by a theory which explains them, in 208

other words so that the classification shall serve as an explanation instead of assuming one, we must confine ourselves to an analysis of the structures presented by each game: the degree of mental complexity, from the elementary sensory-motor game to the advanced social game (p. 108).

Using this structural approach, Piaget classifies games into

three main structural types: "there are practice games,

symbolic games, and games with rules, while constructional

games constitute the transition from all three to adapted behaviours" (p. 110). Practice games— e.g., somersaults— have no rules, make-believe, or symbols; their function is

to exercise sensory-motor reflexes. Symbolic games--e.g., a child pushing a box and pretending it is a car— make use of the child*s ability to interiorize actions, to make-be­ lieve, to imagine, to symbolize, and to play roles (imagin­

ing himself the tiny driver of the box-car, for instance).

Games with rules (sports, contests, card games, tag, hide- and-seek, etc.) develop as a child begins to play more with others and to take part in group play: "rules are a regu­ lation imposed by the group, and their violation carries a

sanction" (pp. 112-113)* Creative and constructive (semi­ work) games— such as the boy building a model airplane or a tree house— indicate the region where symbolic play gives way to symbolic imitation. Such games as this do not com­ pose a separate category but occupy, says Piaget, "a posi­ tion half-way between play and intelligent work, or between 209

play and Imitation" {p. 113)•

It is from this last mid-way category of symbolic

play-imitation that art, which I have described as half-way

between play and display, comes Into existence. Objectively

speaking, all art Is pseudo-activity, since we are always aware of the element of make-believe. But this is also art's saving grace: "this Is why play is accompanied by a feeling of freedom and is the herald of art, which is the full flowering of this spontaneous creation" (p. 152).

Piaget's description of the function of symbolic games will

seem very familiar to us:

Far from being preparatory exercises, most of the games we have given as examples either re­ produce what has struck the child, evoke what has pleased him or enable him to be more fully part of his environment. In a word they form a vast network of devices which allow the ego to assimilate the whole of reality, i..e., to integrate it in order to re-live it, to domi­ nate it or compensate for it (p. 15^)•

Here, Piaget's remarks on repetition and compensation in play sound surprisingly reminiscent of Freud's theory of play. But to note where the two part company, we should follow this quotation with one of the many passages in which

Piaget records his departure from Freud.

Like Groos, Freud also failed to understand the cause of the unconscious symbols which he himself discovered, and for the same reason, that he sought to explain them by their con­ tent. For Freud, there is symbolism because the content of the symbols has been repressed, while for Groos there is symbolic fiction be­ cause the content of the ludic symbols is 210

still beyond the child’s reach. But in both cases the formation of the symbol is not due to its content, but to the very structure of the child's thought (p. 156).

Freud had tried to interpret the meaning of the ludic sym­

bols of play, dreams, art, and the unconscious; Piaget is

content to relate the formation of ludic symbols to various

structures that appear in the stages of intellectual de­

velopment. There is a second major difference between the

two theories of play. Freud had spoken of play and imita­

tion in the same -breath; Piaget, on the contrary, insists

that imitation and play are dissimilar activities with dif­

ferent attributes, functions, and ends. Play has a purely biological function in Piaget's analysis: through experi­ ment and repetition a child mentally digests novel experi­

ences and situations. In this respect play is like fiction,

in which a hypothetical situation, a 'model,* is created and the likely consequences drawn out in a plot. As the child grows older he plays less and imitates more accord­ ing to Piaget; assimilation is primarily fantasy, the mere hallucination of power over the world; thus play is of no value in that external world (play destroys that world) even though it does serve to strengthen (through deception) the Individual ego. Through accommodation or imitation, on the other hand, the child learns to conform to the roles expected of him as he matures into an adult. Imitation molds the child and makes him obedient; play simply gives 211

him an illusory sense of power— but real fun and joy— along

the way.

If we were to substitute Schiller's "Nature" and "Rea­

son" for Piaget's "assimilation" and "accommodation," we

would probably conclude that they come close to saying the

same thing in much different jargons. Like Schiller, Piaget

sees play as only a helpful intermediate activity on the

long road to mature equilibrium. According to both theorists,

the moral adult— the contented man of reason--no longer has,

to any great extent, a need to play. The rational adult outgrows egocentric, childish play and advances to a higher level as his ties to reality and his acceptance of the rules of social games (the moral laws of culture) grow stronger.

Poets, if this notion is correct, would appear to be child­ ren who refused to "grow up." This is the same charge that the business executive, who doesn't like poetry either, levels against his hippie son. "Why don't you grow up and get a job?" To this parental accusation there is one le­ gitimate ethical rejoinder: "But why grow up?" It was what

Jesus wanted to know. And it is not a question that psy­ chologists or parents can readily answer. 212

CHAPTER k

FOOTNOTES

1 The Eclogues of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (London, 1963), 1. 10. 2 On the Defense. in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, ed. Allan H. Gilber t (Detro i t, 1962 ), pp. 377-378. 3 On the Baroque sacred play of the Metaphysical poets, see Frank J. Warnke, "Sacred Play: Baroque Poetic Style," JAAC, XII (1964), A55-^64; and my own article, "Two Baroque Game Poems on Grace: Herbert*s 'Paradise* and Milton's 'On Time'," Criticism, XII (1970), 180-19^. 1+ Second Letter; On the Aesthetic Education of Man, trans. Reginald Snell "(New York, 195^)* P* 27.

^Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement (1790), trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1951), p. 163.

^"Aesthetic Sentiments," ch. ix, Book II of The Prin­ ciples of Psychology. 3d. ed. (London, I89O), vol. II, p. VzT. 7 The Play of Animals: A Study of Animal Life and In­ stinct , trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin (London, 1898), p. iv. 8 A summary of Groos' position by Susanna Millar in The Psychology of Play (Baltimore: Penguin, 1968), p. 19* 9 The Play of Man, trans. Elizabeth L. Baldwin (New York, 1901), p. 2. 10 As described by C. M. Breder, Papers Tortugas Lab., Carnegie Institute Wash., no. ^35 (1932 J.

11"The Concept of Play," Psychol. Rev., LIV (19^7), p. 231. Frank A. Beach had already cited the example of Tylosurus raphldoma to voice cautious scepticism about the use of the term "play" in animal studies. See his article on "Current Concepts of Play in Animals," Am. Naturalist, LXXIX (19^5)1 523-5^1, to which Schlosberg's article is a reply. 213

12 For a fine introduction to and survey of various psychological theories of play, the reader should consult Susanna Millar's The Psychology of Play, including her ex­ haustive bibliography. Other relevant works that deserve special mention are: Franz Alexander, "A Contribution to the Theory of Play," Psychoan. £. , XXVII (1958), 175-193; Hilde Heine, "Play as an Aesthetic Concept," JAAC, XXVII (1958), 67-71; P. Greenacre, "Play in Relation to Creative Imagination," Psychoan. Stud. Child, XIV (1959 )i 61-80; H. C. Lehman and P. A. Witty, The Psychology of Play Acti­ vities; and Karl Menninger, "Play," Virginia Q. Rev., XVIII (19^2 ), 591-599. 13 See especially: The Interpretation of Dreams (New York. I9I3 ); Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (New York, 1959); and "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming," re­ printed in On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York, 1958). 14- Sigmund Freud, On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1958)» p. 5^* 1 ‘i -^Beyond the PIeasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York, 19507» pp. 12-13*

^For a fascinating introduction to the Muses in the art of healing, see the collection of recent articles in Poetry Therapy: The Use of Poetry in the Treatment of Emo­ tional Disorders, ed. Jack J. Leedy, M.D. (Philadelphia, 1969). 17 For one of the sanest applications of Freudian psy­ chology to literature, see Frederick J. Hoffman’s Freudlan- lsm and the Literary Mind (Baton Rouge, La., 19^5). 18 Frederick Clarke Prescott, The Poetic Mind (New York, 1922), p. 55*

^ Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York, 1952), p. 182. 20 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society. 2nd. ed. (New York, 1963), p. 4o4. 21 This is a better summary than I can manage of Piaget's tedious prose style by Susanna Millar in The Psy­ chology of Play, p. 51. 22 Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, trans. C. Gattegno and F. M. Hodgsou (New York: Norton, 1962), p. 87. CHAPTER 5

ON THE STRUCTURES OF GAMES AND ARCHETYPES

What Is expressed in play is no different from what is expressed in culture. The results coincide. — Roger Caillois

We near the end of a long Journey. I have reviewed the contributions to our understanding of the psychology of play made by a number of Important psychoanalysts. To simplify matters I concentrated on two main psychological approaches--Freud’s and Piaget’s, Freud, his followers, and Piaget have made perceptive observations to explain why children play most of the time and grownups play some of the time. All of these theorists establish meaningful links between play and art. It is not, I think, finally necessary to prefer one set of psychological theories over the other. For they tend more to overlap and complement than to exclude or contradict one another.

And yet in trying to assess the psychic motivations and accompaniments of play, we have not by any means exhausted our subject. Indeed play is such an extraordinary activity that it defies exhaustion, just as it defies rational attempts to delimit its exhilarating sphere of

21^ 215

influence. But every game must end. I must draw a line

someplace, to bring the magic circle to a close, even if

the playground I thereby mark off is arbitrary in size and

shape. As the last, but certainly not a 'final'

perspective from which to look upon play, I once again

turn to the role of games in culture. And here I am

especially interested in what nuances the relatively new

field of structural anthropology has added to the theory

of play. For, as I shall suggest shortly, the structures

of games offer the most promising analogies for detecting specific correspondences between literature and play.

That is why I have reserved a special, compact chapter for this perspective.

Structural Anthropology; A Typology of Games

Next to Huizinga's Homo Ludens, the classic treatise on play in culture, the second most significant publication in this field is Roger Caillois* Les Jeux et les homines.

1958 (English title: Han. Flay and Games, 1961). Caillois, editor of the French journal Diogenes. had praise enough for Huizinga's seminal study to call Homo Ludens "the most important work in the philosophy of history in our century," Yet he also recognized the limitations and weaknesses of Huizinga's masterpiece: "'Has everything sprung from games?' the reader wonders in closing 216

Homo ludens.11 ^

In the article in Diogenes that would serve as a blue­

print for his complete study, Caillois agrees that "play is

coessential to the culture" (p. 99)— which had been Homo

Ludens * main theme— and also accepts Huizinga's analysis

of the essence of play. Like Huizinga he regards play as essentially an activity which is:

1) free (not obligatory but freely engaged in)

2) separate (circumscribed in time and space)

3) uncertain (the outcome unpredictable in advance)

*0 unproductive (no goods or wealth are created, although property frequently is exchanged

in play)

5) governed by rules

6) fictive (informed by make-believe and

unreality).

But he takes exception to Huizinga's genetic supposition that play necessarily precedes civilization. According to

Huizinga the rules of law, prosody, liturgy, stagecraft, philosophic disputation, and even military tactics derive from the spirit of play: in history games come first.

Later, since cultural patterns have been established and cultural values adhere to them, the games develop into serious institutions. The problem with this theory, argues Caillois, is that it does not always seem verified 217

by practical experience and common knowledge. The very

opposite Is often the case: games can Just as easily be

childish degradations of discarded adult activities, which have long since lost their purpose and meaning. "Thus, weapons that have fallen into disuse become toys: the bow, the shield, the peashooter, the slingshot" (p. 93).

The mask, the rope, and the kite were all originally sacred objects xfith spiritual meanings (in the Far East, for example, the kite used to represent the aspiring soul of

Its earthly owner). All of these have now declined to the lowly status of children's toys: their divinity and serious functions have expired. So there is much to say for the common belief of the man on the street that games and toys are useless pastimes for children when adults have found better things to do.

On the other hand, admits Caillois, children also play with water pistols, cap guns, air rifles, motorized tanks, toy submarines, and miniature airplanes that drop lmitatijCTJ^aiomic bombs. "No new weapon exists that is not quickly converted to a toy" (p. 97). The importance and seriousness of an object does not preclude its being used as a toy. Children of African tribes make and play with sacred masks, so long as their imitation does not go so far as to become sacrilege. Thus Huizinga was certainly correct to sense the similarity between games and serious 218

activities. But the chicken-egg dilemma does not seem

solvable, so Caillois judiciously dismisses It.

Ultimately, the matter of ascertaining which came first, play or serious structure, seems to be a rather idle one. To explain games by laws, customs, and liturgies, and Inversely to explain jurisprudence, liturgy, the rules of strategy, logic, or aesthetics by the spirit of play, are complementary operations, equally fruitful if they do not claim to be exclusive. The structure of play and utilitarian structures are often Identical, but the respective activities which they govern are Irreducible one to the other in a given time and place (p. 99).

Caillois notes one other major shortcoming in Huizinga's

study of play. The Dutch historian, like so many other

students of games, had almost totally ignored games of

chance— lotteries, gambling casinos, horse-races, and the like. This is a surprising omission since games of chance are often so important that they determine the way of life of a whole society: the impoverishing gambling game of

"Chinese Charades," frequently cited as the 'incurable cancer' of the Cuban peasant class, is a noteworth example.

Unlike the competitive games favored and encouraged by industrial cultures, games of chance thrive on primitive superstition and seductively lure players into a contagious spell. Instead of matching wits or brawn against an opponent, the gambler puts all of his powers at the mercy of fate; he yields himself to the turn of the wheel and the will of the gods; he accepts a rigid determinism and trusts in destiny; he does not display his superiority but 219

acknowledges his absolute passivity to external powers beyond his control. In addition, games of chance are peculiar to adults of the human species. Animals lack the abilities to imagine, anticipate, and speculate; they

cannot conceive of an abstract power to whose verdict they would have to submit to gamble. Nor do children, closer perhaps to the animal level of experience, show much

interest in games of chance. They rely much more on skill in their games than on luck. Only adults seem bitten by the gambling fever.

Previous scholars, probably because of personal dislike and cultural indoctrination, ostracized games of chance from their studies of games. Only the mathematician seems interested in such games, and his efforts are wholly devoted to understanding the laws of probability and developing the best "strategies" for playing games of chance. Yet, as

Caillois points out, whenever mathematicians have been successful in determining perfect strategies for certain games, interest in these games wanes. This is why card players will throw in a hand as soon as an unavoidable outcome can be foreseen by all and why, if an ideal game of chess could be developed by a computer, no one would bother playing it: the first move would be decisive.2 Caillois sets out to rectify this theoretical neglect of games of chance by historians, sociologists, and psychologists. 220

To make room for these rags-or-riches games Caillois re­ examines the structures of all kinds of games (his detailed knowledge of games— past and present, common and obscure— is remarkable) and presents a structural typology of games.

Man, Play and Games is the mature fruit of his research.

X discussed earlier one of the distinctions Caillois makes, the one between paldia (characterized by freedom and improvisation) and ludus (characterized by rules and regulation). These are two modes of playing rather than types: they have to do with the spirit in which play is conducted, not with any formal qualities of games. They cut horizontally across the various categories of games.

Caillois employs another set of rubrics to categorize games according to their structures and formal attributes.

He classifies games into four main structural types: agon

(Competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and illnx (vertigo).

In games of agon adversaries confront one another on equal grounds (same weapons or tools, same rules, plus handicaps to offset advantages) and, within the limits

(rules) of the game, use strength, Ingenuity, skill, endurance, and other traits to contest and establish superiority. The appeal of competitive games is the desire to win, to defeat an opponent, overcome obstacles, and demonstrate one's superiority. In games of chance (alea is 221

the Latin name for the game of dice) players are also equalized (individual differences are abolished, the peasant enjoys the same odds as the prince, and a player has as much to win as the size of the stake he bets) because they must all submit to impersonal decisions over which they exercise no control. The capriciousness of chance, the alluring possibility of instant wealth, constitutes the hypnotic appeal of alea. Thus, while agon and alea both require an artificial and unlifellke equality between players, they stem from quite different motives: "agon is a vindication of personal responsibility; alea is a negation of the will, a surrender to destiny."3

Mimicry includes all games that depend upon the temporary acceptance of an illusion or of an imaginary universe: impersonation, acting, mask and disguise play, masquerades, boys playing Cowboys and Indians, the cinema, and dramatic spectacles of all varieties. Fascination and spell-creating are the chief attractions of mimetic games.

Illnx (the Greek term for whirlpool and vertigo) describes all those games in which mental equilibrium is willingly and momentarily destroyed— a surrendering of the individual to controlled shock, panic, seizure, fear, hypnosis, exhilaration, inebriation, dizziness, or frenetic reverie.

High-wire acrobatics, sledding, skating, swinging, twirling,

Jumping, scary amusement park rides, sports car racing, and 222

feverish dancing— -all of these are basically vertigo games.

The excitements offered by Illnx are Intoxication, temporary

disorder, the thrill of overcoming gravity or friction

(cf, jumping and skating), paroxysm, and ecstasy.

Thus Caillois' typology of the games people play

contains both a vertical series and a horizontal spectrum.

The diagram he appends to the second chapter indicates

these relationships quite clearly,

f ■ ...... Table (, Classification of Gomes

AGON AIFA AUMiCflV UINX (Comp.h'lJan) (Chance) (Simulation) (Vert/go)

PAID/A Hating ] Counlfng-aul CMtdfen'i Initiation* Children "whlillng" rhyme* Gamer of lliuilon Horrebatk riding Tumult WrtfnBJ Head* or lalft Tog, Arms Swinging Agitation A lM tllc i Motki, Dfigulwi W a llih g Immod.rat. laught.r

BoxTng, Gllltardi Betting Yotodor Kilo-Hying Fencing, C htcktn Roulette Traveling carnival* S o tlla lr. Football, Chtu Skiing P a ll.n c. Mountain climbing Croitword Contnliy Spoilt Simple, complex, Tfceoler Tightrope walking p u iilt t In g an iro l and continuing Spectacle* In lotterfel* general tVDUS

K l . In «

•A iltnpl* letttry comlitt of iho ono bailc drawing. In a comp!** lotltry th tr. or. many potiibl. camblnallom. A continuing lalltry (t.g. Irlih SwttpilolrtO b an* coniiiling of two or mar* ilag.i, Ih* wlnn.r of Iht lint ilogt b.lng granltd lha opportunity to porllctpal* in a sound lolltry. [From corrotpondinc. with Collloli. H.B.J .

What we have here is the first sensible classification of

games on rational, structural, and formal grounds.

Caillois1 categories take into account all of the varying

kinds of play. We have the basic logical tools for understanding the fundamental structures of play. 223

Caillois takes his basic theory several steps further.

In chapters on 11 The Social Function of Games" and "The

Corruption of Games" he begins to outline the sociological

implications of his findings. Games not only become more

socialized and Institutionalized (from riddles to

philosophy, from group games to spectacles enacted before

large crowds, from mad gambling to regulated stock market

speculation), but they also tend to become corrupt; games

degenerate when they spread, like cancer, over into real

life. Agon perverted provokes violence, the will to power,

and trickery; alea degenerates into superstition and astro­

logy; mimicry may result in alienation or schizophrenia;

Illnx may lead to alcoholism or drugs. Recognizing the dangers to culture of games gone wild, Caillois is encouraged

to seek still broader social meanings for his basic

categories. As he puts It, "I have not only undertaken a sociology of games, I have the Idea of laying the foundations for a sociology derived from games" (p. 67).

In Part II of his book Caillois turns his attention to the patterns of history and culture and develops his sociology derived from games. He works variations on his

Initial theme, considers the precise circumstances under which each of the four basic game types either combines or refuses to combine with another, and elaborates his

"expanded theory of play." He begins by noting that there are six theoretically possible couplings of the four game

types:

Competition - chance (agon - alea)

Competition - simulation (agon - mimicry)

Competition - vertigo (agon - illnx)

Chance - simulation (alea - mimicry)

Chance - vertigo (alea - illnx)

Simulation - vertigo (mimicry - ilinx)

Of these six possibilities he finds that the first and

last couplings in the list are highly compatible and

probable, the middle two are unnatural, impossible, or

"forbidden," and the remaining two (second and fifth) are

merely viable or possible.

Vertigo refuses to be associated with regulated rivalry (blind fury knows no rules); simulation and chance also do not mix (deceiving chance is cheating): so these

two possible sets are strictly "forbidden." But chance may harmlessly combine with vertigo (the gambler possessed by his mad passion) and competition with mimicry (sports

contests as spectacles, movie stars competing for attention): so these relationships are contingent or possible under certain conditions. The two remaining relationships, by contrast, are symmetrical and fundamental simulation-vertigo and competition-chance.

Although they have opposite ways of designating the 225

winner, agon and alea are surprisingly similar: both require

"absolute equity" between players, mathematical equality of

chances for winning, and meticulous rules to govern play.

Many board games (Monopoly for one) blend various elements

of chance into a basically competitive game, and football

captains call the flip of the coin to establish initial

advantages. Competition and chance both take place in an unreal, exceptionally well-ordered and regulated universe.

Agon and alea make a highly compatible natural combination.

Mimicry and llinx, in contrast, presume a very different sort of universe: "a world without rules in which

the player constantly improvises, trusting in a guiding fantasy or a supreme inspiration, neither of which is subject to regulation" (p. 75)* Vertigo, of course, is the total obliteration of rational ego under the spell of ecstatic intoxication. In mimicry there is a 'divided consciousness' or split personality between ego and role being played (person and actor combined). But when mimicry and vertigo (the dissolution of ego) team up, as they naturally tend to do, the result is panic, Insanity, or wild frenzy. Mimicry itself generates both vertigo (the trance) and split personality (the mask), a combination that can lead to dangerous disorder and poses a threat to rational society:

Pretending to be someone else tends to alienate and transport. Wearing a mask is intoxicating 226

and liberating. As a result the conjunction of mask and trance f In this dangerous domain where perception becomes distorted, is very frighten­ ing. It provokes such seizures and paroxysms that the real world is temporarily abolished in the mind that is hallucinated or possessed (P. 75). With ilinx-mlmicry. that is, we enter the hallucinatlve

world of sorcery and superstition.

Anyone who has delved into the recent publications of

structural anthropologists and linguists will recognize at

first glance that Caillois1 expanded theory of play makes

use of the four-sided matrix that has been used for

elucidating relations (natural, contrary, contradictory)

among such diverse things as sexual practices and taboos

or units of language. Although Caillois himself does not

use the following matrix, I think it perfectly illustrates

the nature of the relationships he finds among games.

AGON -» MIMICRY

s' ' s

\ ALEA *- -»ILINX

The vertical pairings are fundamental (strong), the horizontal couplings are contingent (weak), and the diagonal 227

relationships are forbidden (taboos).

It would be relatively easy to pinpoint minor dis­ crepancies and difficulties in this almost too-neat structural schema, Caillois must sometimes bend the data to fit the schema. One thinks at once, for example, of the enthusiastic sports-car racer who, while aggressively competing for first place, may yet be intoxicated by the speed at which he is moving, the dizzying turns, dips, and spins, and the hallucinative flow of rapid Images, Agon and illnx seem to combine in this case quite nicely.

Similarly, children will accept randomly-assigned roles to play in group mimetic games— "you be the witch"— which Is a submission to arbitrary fate of sorts and an example of a combination of alea and mimicry. In fact one could argue that all imitation implies a submission to external forces of sorts; one always behaves like someone or something other; the pattern that must be followed Is a random given,

A child born in an African or Australian primitive society will mimic quite a different sort of external model than the suburban child. Chance always seems to play its role; there is an arbitrary and higher force that governs what kinds of imitation will be acceptable and tolerated in a given culture. But such quibbling over fine points ought not to blind us to the validity and importance of Caillois1 findings generally. His four basic categories are, I 228

■believe, Impeccable. And his analyses of the complex inter­ relationships among the four game types in his expanded theory are much more convincing than I have had space to show.

In the remaining chapters Caillois uses his expanded theory of play to demonstrate the interdependence of games and culture. "It is not absurd," he insists, "to try diagnosing a civilization in terms of the games that are especially popular there" (p. 83). His anthropological conclusion is that primitive societies favor the mask

(mimicry) and the trance (illnx). while rational societies tend to reward merit (agon) and allow a place for luck

(alea),

Some primitive societies, which I prefer to call "Dionysian," be they Australian, American, or African, are societies ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e. by mimicry and illnx. Conversely, the Incas, Assyrians, Chinese, or Romans are orderly societies with offices, careers, codes, and ready-reckoners, with fixed and hierarchical privileges in which agon and alea, i.e. merit and heredity, seem to be the chief complementary elements of the game of living. In contrast to the primitive societies, these are "rational" (p. 87).

Stated another way, the primitive costume gives way to the contemporary uniform, whether Inherited or earned. The seizures and sacred convulsions of frenzied, possessed,

Dionysian dancers get replaced by the equalitarlan, stable, and orderly movements of men who submit to uniform rules and social conventions. 229

Mimicry and Illnx hearken back to the tempting, powerfully explosive force of savage stupor and Dionysian ecstasy; illusory and magical, they are inimical to social progress and lead to stagnation. Agon and alea. by contrast,

Introduce us to a world of rational order, governed by rules that are equally compulsory and applicable to all.

In this universe of uniform, regulated rivalry— with gambling or chance as partial compensation for those who would surely be losers in a strictly competitive game-playing culture— civilized progress is made possible and society emerges from the delirious spell of the past. That Apollonian civilization never completely forgets its Dionysian origin is suggested by the popularity, in even the most advanced industrial societies, of periodic but well-confined 'explo­ sions of license*: the carnival, the costume-ball, the circus, the freak show, April Fools Day, Guy Fawkes Day,

Halloween, to name only a few. Although carefully set aside and circumscribed, these occasions seem to be the residuals of the old world of the trance and the mask: a license for revelry is granted for a fixed period of time. Some people in Apollonian society even manage to make a profession of vertigo and mimicry: the tightrope-walker, the trampoline expert, the trapeze artist, the clown, the court jester, the movie actor. The actions of these Dionysian revelers continue to delight the devotees of reason and order, 230

perhaps because they provide occasionally needed escapes

from the world of rigid rules and boring uniformity.

I find It remarkable how applicable Caillois* socio­

logical insights are to the contemporary antagonism between

counter-culture and culture In the United States and

several other advanced Western countries. Certainly at

the heart of this antagonism is a split in the kinds of

games played and favored on either side. The counter-

cultists display a clear preference for uncompetitive,

unruled, Dionysian games. Frisbee-throwing, bubble-blowing,

costume-wearing, face-painting, spontaneous dancing, 'mind-

blowing* sensations and light shows, ecstatic transport

beyond ego under earphones, and the disintegration of

reality in the hypnotic trances induced by hallucinogenic

drugs— these are the underground pastimes. Vertigo and

mimicry are decidedly in fashion among many young people

who consider Monopoly something of a national scandal.

This challenge to Apollonian order— culture*s laws, rules,

competitive games, and national lotteries (the military

draft is the most notorious)— surely deserves the labels of

"primitive" and "tribal" it has received. But this still

does not address the more crucial question: was civili­

zation, built upon competition, aggression, and monotonous

uniformity, worth its spiritual costs? Maybe the mask and

the trance were preferable to a world at war.

; 231

Of all the theories we have examined, this structural-

sociological approach seems by far the most fertile soil

in which to sow the seeds for a mature aesthetic concept

of play. We cannot erect much of a practical literary

criticism around the naive statement that "art is play."

There is simply no place to go from there except outwards,

showing the numerous ramifications of that idea. This is

pretty much the theoretical indirection I have followed in

the present thesis. But the statement is too loose to be of

any practical value in approaching and elucidating specific works of art; once you have said a certain poem Is

"playful," providing you are aware how much that means and

implies, you have said It all. When Caillois* precise and thoughtful distinctions are added, however, the job Is only half-begun. For now the object will be to analyze what exact kind and type of game is being played In the poem being considered. To speak of "play in art" is to broadly identify a complex phenomenon; to speak of "games in art" Is to identify, categorize, discriminate, and make specific what was too general to be serviceable. The latter task comes much closer to what literary criticism is all about than the former. Caillois, then, has been the first theorist to offer us a potent means of Implementing a play- aesthetics in practical criticism. If we are going to look for games in literature, we perhaps ought to know in advance what types of games are played in culture. 232

Literary Archetypes and Games

I was struck when reading Man, Play and Games with the

number of enlightening insights Caillois offers for a fresh

new look at the history of English literature. I was e

especially excited about certain very close parallels

between the four basic categories of games that Caillois

distinguished and the four archetypal mythoi that Northrup

Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism, examined as the

structural determinants of literature. The correspondences

are so striking that one is doubly convinced both of the value of structuralism generally and of the similarities between art and play. One cannot help but believe that

such a remarkable coalescence of two very different

intellectual disciplines is anything but accidental. Let me point out the basic correspondences.

Anyone familiar with Northrop Frye's theory of mythoi will immediately recognize, I think, the following

correspondences (if 'identities' is too strong) between his four archetypes and the four game types Roger Caillois distinguishes. 233

Types of Games Archetypes of Myth (Caillois) (Frye)

Agon (Competition) Romance (Summer)

Alea (chance) Tragedy (Autumn)

Illnx (vertigo) Irony (Winter)

Mimicry (mimesis) Comedy (Spring)

In the mythos of romance the essential elements of the

plot are conflict and adventure: the quest, the

perilous journey, the crucial struggle. Romance is

fundamentally dialectical and antagonistic: the shining warrior pitted against the monstrous ogre, the white king

against the black king. The episodic adventures are like

aggressive moves on a chess board, and the action stops at precisely the point at which either the hero or the ogre wins. Both halves of Beowulf display this pattern; the

tension mounts as the contest becomes hotter, a climactic battle takes place, and the story ends with the death of

the villain (first half) or of the hero (second half). The best battles in romance are exactly like the best game

competitions, ones in which the two opponents are so well matched that the outcome is very much in doubt: Beowulf against Grendel, Achilles against Hector, the adventurous knight against the horrible dragon. It Is perfectly understandable, then, that Northrop Frye should use the 234

following analogy: "Hence every typical hero in romance

tends to have his moral opposite confronting him, like

black and white pieces in a chess game."^ Romance is the

literary counterpart for games of agon like chess.

Tragedy has traditionally been associated with chance;

in the medieval period tragedy meant Just that— a random

turn of the Wheel of Fortune, bringing high to low estate

or making a prince of a pauper. Implicit in the nature of tragedy is the existence of some higher power or powers

that be. Northrup Frye explains.

The tragic hero is very great as compared to us, but there is something else, some­ thing on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is small. This something may be called God, gods, fate, accident, fortune, necessity, circumstance, or any combination of these, but whatever it is the tragic hero is our mediator with it (Anatomy, p. 207).

This is exactly what happens in games of chance where the player must submit to a determinism beyond his control.

The tragic hero is the gambler par excellence. He bets everything (even his oi*n life) against the odds. Oedipus defies the decree of the gods and struggles valiantly against destiny; Macbeth denies his own better Judgment and is swept away by the gambler's lust, over-confidence, and willingness to risk all in a double-or-nothing game.

The willingness to take exceptional risks, to be against the odds— that is what characterizes the tragic hero.

What we learn from tragedy is that the most reasonable 235

and safe bet, not the most spectacular, speculative, and selfish one, usually pays off better in the long run. Hence the tragic hero is invariably 'the loser,' the one who overbids his hand and risks too much. We admire him for the sheer size of the stakes he is willing to play for

(kings are better tragic heroes because they have more to gamble and more to lose), but we recognize that he must eventually lose back everything he has temporarily won, and much more, to the Dealer— the cards have been stacked against him from the very beginning. We learn, with Lear, that the more we have to gamble, the more we stand to lose.

Tragedy is Informed by the spirit of alea: the universe of order, rules, risks, and catastrophes.

Illnx finds its literary equivalents in irony and satire. The unruled, illogical, topsy-turvy world of hallucination, sorcery, delirium, and dizziness in games of vertigo is matched in irony and satire by a similar dissolution of norms and reason. Again, to quote Frye:

Sparagmos, or the sense that heroism and effective action are absent, disorganized or foredoomed to defeat, and that confusion and anarchy reign over the world, is the archetypal theme of irony and satire (Anatomy, p. 192).

Confusion and anarchy are precisely the effects of vertigo, the disruption and distortion of the lucid mind. Intoxica­ tion is a putting to sleep of reason and order. Reality itself in irony and satire is distorted; the world becomes 236

a grotesque caricature of itself. Dizzying wit, double entendre, ironic reversals, complexity, absurdity, ambiguity, fantasy, and the grotesque— these are the

intoxicants and ecstasies irony and satire afford. The mishaps of the drunken sailor of folk tradition and the fantastic exploits of Lemuel Gulliver spring from the same disintegration of rational ego and the accompanying dissolution of reality. The reader is transported to another world: a universe in which disorder, confusion, and instability temporarily reign. The spirit of irony is vertigo.

Finally, mimicry shows much in common with the mythos of spring, comedy— the newborn society arising in triumph over the dying old world. The basic comic plot involves a young man who manages to win a young woman over the opposition of parents or parental society. The comic world is one of disguises, Impostures, unmaskings, and unravellings.

The Imposters, frauds, and stock character types of comedy bear a strong similarity to those who wear masks and costumes in games of mimicry. The whole business of the younger generation having to don disguises and play roles of deception in order to surmount obstacles appears similar to the savage*s wearing of a mask to receive supernatural powers. Transcendence of social conventions and parental rules through the license of the mask is what comedy deals with: 237

Thus the movement from plstls to gnosis, from a society controlled by habit, ritual bondage, arbitrary law and the older characters to a society controlled by youth and pragmatic freedom Is fundamentally, as the Greek words suggest, a movement from Illusion to reality. Illusion is whatever is fixed or definable, and reality is best understood as its negation: whatever reality is, it's not that. Hence the importance of the theme of creating and dispelling illusion in comedy: the illusions caused by disguise, obsession, hypocrisy, or unknown parentage (Anatomy, pp. I 69- 7 0 ).

The comic Masque is thus a suitable symbol for the theme

of comedy. And since mimicry is also mimesis, comedy stands

likewise for realism, the "movement from Illusion to reality.11

These parallels are astonishing. Or, rather, they

might be astonishing had we not already learned to suspect

a very strong correspondence between art and play. Placed

in the context of what vie have already seen, these

structural similarities are exactly what we would logically

expect. If art and play arise from the same impulse or

from the same primitive rituals, it would be more unusual

if we did not find these identities in structure between literary archetypes and game types. Northrup Frye connected his archetypes, at least nominally, with the four seasons, and these are the most common repetitive structures man recognizes in the universe. That games and art forms have the same four basic structures Illustrates what Caillois wrote and that serves as the headnote to this chapter:

"What is expressed In play is no different from what is 238

expressed in culture. The results coincide."

But they coincide so well* The correspondences are so enlightening that they become virtually indispensable for developing a practical play aesthetics, one that significantly adds not so much to our understanding of games and play as to our appreciation of literature. What is needed now, I think, is another book like Frye’s, but directed towards classifying literary works sub specie ludi and perhaps written in a more playful prose style.

The conclusion may be similar but the language and scope will differ. The story of English literature needs to be retold in terms of the games poets play. The games popular in certain historical epochs can be used to shed light on the literary games fashionable during the same periods.

Games can tell us much about literary works, and literary works can reveal to us their playfulness in gamelike structures. There will be much to cover: Anglo-Saxon riddles, the complicated wit games of the Metaphysical poets, and the typographical tricks of E. E. Cummings; the riddle- solving delights of detective fiction or the dizzying dissolution of reality in science fiction; the competitive motives of writers (e.g., to write the epic of a nation) or their delirious flights of imagination; the random

(alea) technique of composition and the doctrine of mimesis

(mimicry) in art. All this and much else needs to be explored from the new perspectives I have been outlining. 2 3 9

A Closing Word

Such wilt thou he to mee, who must Like th*other foot, obliquely runne; Thy firmnes makes my circle just, And makes me end, where I begunne.

In closing the circle of play I end where I began,

I am, like Donne, not done. My conclusion is that I must start over again. This theoretical thesis has paved the way, I hope, for a more practical study of playfulness in literature, one that will examine the game-like structures of specific literary works.

Such a conclusion— the closing of an endless circle— seems particularly appropriate to the subject matter of play. When work is concluded it is finished and completed: the movement is linear— from the "in" to the "out” file, from the start to the finish of the production line. The worker hurries to move on to unfinished business. The player, on the other hand, is forever starting over again.

Play and games do not "conclude" with the same finality as finished business. A game ends only to begin again: players pick up the same cards, reshuffle them, and deal new hands. This would be comparable to assembling an automobile only to take it apart and put it back together again. If the final end were commercial utility or efficiency, such a procedure would seem foolish Indeed.

But with games that are unproductive and unutilitarian, such repetition may easily be part of the fun of playing.

Thus a teenage boy, fascinated with automotive complexity,

may have as much fun taking apart and reassembling a

junked car as his younger brother gets in redoing an old

Jigsaw puzzle. Play and games have this circularity about

them; they thrive on repetition. Games are not exhausted

in being continually replayed.

As spectators we gather to watch players running

through similar motions over and over again. In contrast, we would be quickly bored with watching workers perform

the same tasks with mechanical regularity. Great works

of literature share this too with play: they are not

"finished" in a single reading but can be re-read with pleasure numerous times. The powers of literature and play reside in this untiring circularity of beginning and ending, for the pleasure comes not from the accomplishment but from the actual reading and playing themselves. On this note I playfully close. CHAPTER 5

FOOTNOTES

■*-Caillois, "Unity of Play: Diversity of Games," Diogenes, XIX (1957). P. 94.

^Similarly, the game of "Tic-Tac-Toe" ceases to interest a child as soon as he figures out all of the possibilities of winning, losing, and tying. The game*s magic exposed and the tricks of winning or tying understood, the desire to submit to the spell disappears.

3Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (London, 1962), p.

^Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N.J., 1957)» P. 195»

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