Mask Metempsychosis Reinventing Cultural Icons

Călin D. Lupiţu

a Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in Intercultural Humanities

Approved Dissertation Committee

Prof. Dr. K. Ludwig Pfeiffer_____ Name and title of Chair Prof. Dr. Immacolata Amodeo Name and title of Committee Member Prof. Dr. Ursula Frohne Name and title of Committee Member

Date of Defense: 7/06/2012

School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Table of Contents

Abstract 3

I. Introduction. Mask and Mask Rituals: Origins and Mechanics 4

II. A Chronology of Masks in the Western World 20

1. From Myths to Tragedies 21

2. From Saturnalia to Shakespeare 32

3. From Novels to Graphic Novels 69

4. Nowadays 88

III. The Mask Metempsychosis 95

IV. The Archetype Matrix 103

V. Articulating Power: Aesthetic and Cognitive Monsters 121

Conclusions 130

Annexes 132

Bibliography 139

The Mask Metempsychosis: Reinventing Cultural Icons

Abstract: Apart from the author‟s personal interest in phenomena dealing with the construction, negotiation, maintenance, manipulation and reification of personal and public identity, this work is based on consistent recent confirmations of masks not only being „alive and well‟ in popular culture as well as in (social) media, but in fact articulating socio-political power in ways not unlike those of their archaic prototypes. Therefore, one aim pursued herein is the tracing of an evolution of masks in the Western collective consciousness, across several outstanding epochs and genres, which we have linked together in order to better visualise performance, reception and interaction trends leading up to the present. Another aim of this research is the introduction of new patterns and categories as conceptual tools for further investigation, beginning with defining the Mask Metempsychosis process itself and discussing its three phases in specific contexts of cultural history, as indicated above. Thirdly, mask-wearing archetypes of folklore and more recent fiction will be analysed throughout, together with outstanding characters they have engendered, based on the previously set two layers of reception. The reader shall thus gain further insight into masks‟ articulation of power and aesthetics as part of the complex everyday and ceremonial negotiations of private and public, self and community, as well as of the socio-political with the religious and the psychological.

I. Introduction. Masks and Mask Rituals: Origins and Mechanics

Self-awareness is a crucial factor in determining whether an entity should be designated as sentient. Even living in isolation, self-aware beings will find ways to outwardly express their uniqueness, to distinguish themselves from – and perhaps set boundaries against – the environment they are otherwise part of. The issue is complicated when several such entities of sufficient similarity share living quarters or otherwise come in contact. At this point, while they are each aware of being distinct from the world at large, of being „the one‟ as opposed to „the all‟, the challenge is to prove and assert themselves as each distinct from one another. Being different is no longer as relevant as it is exactly how one is different; the emergence of a community thus manages to shift the members‟ reflexive focus from self-awareness and individuality to identity. In nature, a specimen‟s identity – i.e., as per the above, the set of particulars whose totality unequivocally differentiates it from all other individuals of the same species – is indeed a matter of life and death, as it prominently features in finding a suitable mate or defending oneself against predators. The latter is particularly one section of life where not just identity, but especially its manipulation, has proven critical, from common cases of slightly altering one‟s colours, sound, smell, or size so as to avoid detection, to entire subspecies permanently adapting such features to better withstand a new environment. Among humans, identity representation – and especially its misrepresentation – occurs much like above, yet with greater deliberateness. Departing from the initial stage of imitating the camouflage and mimicry successes of the animal kingdom, man‟s statements of identity are, on one hand, telling measures of intellect, insight and creativity, even via their role of circumventing, if not answering, the dreaded question of „Who am I?‟. On the other, their more sophisticated forms further spice their grasp on the human condition by recourse to the social, psychological, political

4 and religious aspects. Further, due to the interconnectedness and prominence of such aspects in a person‟s life, identity representation becomes identity simulation – „dress rehearsal‟, or a community play that becomes a learning game – and genuine transformations of the performers‟ social, psychological, political and religious fibre may indeed occur. It is hardly surprising then that the act of identity representation and manipulation among human beings should have far greater implications than a mere act of defence. Since mankind‟s societies are based on and enforced in their norms by (un)written contracts between individuals and the community, abusing the representation of one‟s identity, for whatever reason, is an „expert-level‟ form of playing the community game. Namely, the misrepresentation of identity is thus a cheat or violation of those contracts, yet whose existence is needed to reinforce those very foundations of normalcy, as we shall later observe. Undertaking it situates the performer in an uneasy cognitive and artistic locus, ever shifting between the former and the new; the truth and the deception; the permanent and the transient; the one and the many; the simple (or „proper‟, „natural‟) and the composite (or „monstrous‟, „chimerical‟). For human beings as visual creatures, perceiving reality, negotiating it and attempting to make sense of it have always relied heavily on the sense of sight. The particular realities of one‟s personal identity and social participation are similarly dominantly linked to facial traits such as the eyes and the mouth, particularly their motion cues and, foremost, the extent of their visual availability. While there are also documented exceptions (in, for instance, Pollock 1995: 591), of relatively isolated cultures where identity is managed to an equal or higher extent via aural or olfactory strategies, in the Western world, apart from the sight-impaired community, bodily references to personal identity have mostly remained visual. Therefore, the need and the solutions to dissimulate and thus reconstruct visual identity must also belong to the realm of vision, whose most successful such solutions appear to have been the masks. The practices and meanings associated with them differ throughout the world, yet it would not be in error to affirm that most human cultures, past and present, have had at least some rituals involving masks and masking (Segy 1976: 2-4). In fact,

“the mask has […] been used for various geo-political, socio-cultural, and religious purposes, for example warfare, divination, and rites [of] passage, even for exhibitions and tourist indulgences. It is virtually being used today in most cultures for the same or similar objectives.” (Ebong 1984: 1)

Enshrouded in the mists of historical speculation, the origins of mask rituals can nevertheless be estimated as having been, as he also writes, in the “religions, rituals, and theatre crafts of the so-called “primitive,” non-literate societies.” (Ebong 1984: 1) For the early man in his initiation rites, masking literally signified becoming, “men transforming themselves into spirits” (Mack 1994: 17), by simply applying “new faces” to themselves, in accordance with what those faces were made of and what they could be held to signify. To this day, many surviving animist and polytheist cults perform their (male) initiation ceremonies with the assistance of masked figures whom they do not, or choose not to, perceive as humans, but proper deities or nature spirits. In fact, the core moment of the entire ceremony, the mystery, in which the man behind the mask is revealed to them, is met with either silent-sworn disillusionment or elation at being reborn into a society of humans able to embody supernatural beings (Mack 1994: 17-19). And yet, the most familiar masks of nowadays appear far removed from their ritual-employed ancestors, having, for the most part, far lighter meanings and serving more mundane purposes, from entertainment to work safety. In the words of Ronald L. Grimes (1992), “those of us who make Halloween masks with our children do not enter ecstatic states when we put on our witch and vampire masks.” Have we perhaps lost something subtle and precious on the way through the history of civilisation from then to now? How has our perception of, and interaction with, masks changed over the ages? We would rather argue that for any epoch, while masks in their physical form are limited to certain extra-ordinary performances or social settings, as well as to certain individuals or social groups, the concepts of masks and mask rituals continue to haunt our imagination and exert a tremendous fascination over us all. Their wide and potent appeal may largely be explained when we realise masks give concrete

6 weight to the above considerations on cheating the community game, allowing for immense, if momentary, power as a manifestation of our individual and community- wide fantasies. It is precisely that conspicuous concreteness of theirs that renders the social mechanics of masks able to dislodge their bearers from the banal and the mundane in which they have ontologically been immersed prior, and whence they will return at the end of the performance. Meanwhile, they are projected onto a plane of symbolic, perceived and/or ritually real existence where they become identified with the sacred, the uncanny and the non-human, warranting their participation in community events where the interface of the sacred and the profane can only be achieved by personages who are both, or neither. Claude Calame elaborates on that:

“[T]he mask‟s wearer incarnates for another the identity that his disguise confers on him. The abandonment of one‟s own identity, the self-dissimulation, goes hand in hand with the actualisation of the social identity tied to the mask itself […] a representation for the community of the sacred, mythological reality on which it is founded.” (Calame 1986: 126)

Admittedly, popular festivities such as Halloween or the various Carnivals around the world are little more than recent (or imported/copied), commercial and most often superficial surrogates of their eponymous predecessors. However, they are a good example of the „Mask Metempsychosis‟ phenomenon further pursued by this research as they unite past and present on an individual level, via the sense of power by fantasy channeling, as well as on a public-cultural level. In support of the latter, we should clarify that such masks as encountered at Halloween or Carnivals may well function as something akin to time capsules, or „pop-cultural palimpsests‟: they do not only pay homage to their own real or romanticised original traditions but also mirror and even exacerbate trends and traditions found in the cultures and societies contemporary to the masks. After all, such modern masks – while still perhaps grotesque – no longer have the apotropaic functions previously associated with that aesthetic category, and instead often materially document public figures – real or fictional – , widely (in)famous concepts, human archetypes etc. As the following chapters will show, the documentary value of such (modern) masks, their

7 ability to piece together a reasonably accurate image of a society‟s pop culture from its reflecting shards, is closely connected to the Metonymic Phase present within the Mask Metempsychosis process and ensuring the conceptual elasticity of masks across the ages. This research investigates the ways in which the above multiple considerations on the power articulation abilities of masks, verified in fields such as anthropology, comparative religion and social psychology, still hold true in comparative literature. In particular, our foray will shed light on how the processes that originally transferred major masked characters and their accompanying rituals from mythology and oral literature to increasingly socio-psychologically complex literary genres are still viable, quite active and even variably prolific to this very day. After all, the original audience response corresponding to a (well-performed) mask ritual was precisely the suspension of disbelief at the individual as well as community-wide level, such that the audience themselves would have the crucial function of granting the support of acceptance and credence to the performance, and thus directly partaking in creating it fully. This is also remarked by e.g. Henry Pernet (1982), when he refers to a mask‟s identity being constructed “as much by its wearer as by those who attend the ritual action of which he is a protagonist.” As the following sections will note, that same function of the audience stays fundamental all through literary history, despite differences in conceptualising the performer/author and the audience/readership, the prevalent media of production and expression, or the genres‟ guidelines and conceit specifications. As already mentioned in the opening statements on individuality and identity, acts involving the manifestation of one‟s identity often have the presence of another individual as psychological or even psychosomatic trigger, to the extent that the other may even become a requisite of such a process. Alternatively, the physical presence of the other can be approximated via projections of the self in critical introspection or „rehearsals‟ of the self‟s response when confronted by the future/virtual other, as per the notorious „what would the neighbours say?‟. Thus, whether in the earliest or remotest of human communities or our global „Youtube Generation‟, all performances dealing in representations and perceptions of identity are statements, declarations, instances of communication. Indeed, as pointed out by

Calame (1986), “the mask cannot be understood outside of the enunciative process of which it is a part.” As such, the mask enunciations perpetually require the unity of their fundamental three constituents, the transmitter (the performer), the receiver (the audience) and the common channel or code (the performance). The message, or signified, transmitted can be summarised or heuristically recalled by the material signifier, the mask. The latter is intrinsically linked to the corresponding masking process, i.e. the ritual, just as the performer is to the audience. Nevertheless, while the links between mask and ritual, on one hand, and performer and audience, on the other, are indissoluble, they are not rigid, as this research will strongly emphasise (Fig. I). Earlier, we referred to Halloween as being, though much watered down, a recovered (or rather reinvented) contemporary Western form of mask ritual. However, it is but one of many ancient practices either reimagined or encroached on by modern and contemporary consumerism, with variable effects. For instance,

“when Walter Spies wanted to include an extract from a sanghyang (a trance- dance concerned with ritual purification and exorcism) in the 1932 film Insel der Dämonen (Island of Demons), the Balinese refused-or rather substituted the trance-dancers with scenes from the Ramayana and thus invented kechak just as today they put on tourist versions of the barong play so as to protect their own magically potent performances from the intrusion of skeptical outsiders.” (George, 1987: 128)

The above is a fortunate example of how civilisation clashes occasionally generate cultural novelty, but many rituals of old have had to face the harsh „adapt or die‟ ultimatum, as Ferdinand de Jong (1999) remarks: “Commoditisation of the mask performance has resulted in a radical transformation of the mask-audience relationship.” In fact, in one of the cases he documents in Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, in Senegal the masked figure of the ever-watchful spirit Kumpo, routinely implicated in local political tugs of war, is well aware of contemporary issues such as city unemployment:

“The young female migrants […] left the village with the intention of earning an income that would allow them to purchase clothing and cosmetics, and to

make themselves attractive partners for wealthy men. The young men, jealously watching their female peers seeking out better opportunities, fell back on the Kumpo performance in the hope of controlling the girls' behaviour. […] The Kumpo obliged them to take up labour in the fields and to keep up the skills which would eventually enable them to make good wives in an agrarian household.” (De Jong, 1999: 61-62)

Ultimately, the ability of many rituals, masked or otherwise, to stay abreast of the times by adapting some aspects should not be taken as the kind of compromising symptomatic of loosely constituted or shallow systems, but as strength achieved by communitarian mental flexibility. David E. R. George (1987) theorises that strength as residing in the triple conceptual structure of rituals, enmeshing the three strata of religion, sociopolitics and psychology in constant interplay:

“What is distinctive about ritual is not that one stratum is reducible to the others, but rather the complexity of its triangular structure. The theological definition of what is knowable and true creates a cosmological paradigm which predicts both fields of being and a sense of self which in turn feed ideologies which are in turn legitimized by religious myths which in turn supply norms of ideal conduct.” (George, 1987: 138-139)

The above quote provides concepts and relationships that will prove instrumental for the current research, and will be revisited over its course, but for now let us only focus on the way in which cosmological paradigms predict, inspire and indeed coordinate the other two vertices of what we may call the Ritual Social Triangle (Fig. II), namely social ontology and the “sense of self”. Much like the relationship between the mask and its specific process or ritual, the link between performer and audience1, or individual and community, or, in the above terminology, between the sense of self and social ontology (approximated to the private and the public spheres), is unbreakable and dynamic. Otherwise put, the performer induces effects upon the audience and will, in turn, be influenced by them, in an interplay that may be described as that between social power and social responsibility, since the masking processes operate inevitably within the context of

1 Never alone, but mediated by the Mask (Fig. I.a.).

10 the community game as described at the beginning, despite being an exception thereof. Becoming the Masked Man, the performer is transformed and empowered. His actions and indeed his very presence polarises the community, creating noticeable distance between him and them, on one hand, but also often among them. The latter is clearly indicated in John Picton‟s examples from the African community of Ebira, where the Eku – versatile masks, fetishised items and masquerades – are mostly taboo for women in a social game of (feigned) ignorance that has become etiquette, much like witchcraft – considered almost a „birthright‟ of women – being taboo for men (Picton 1990: 181-185). Further in the same article, What’s in a Mask, Picton elaborates on masks and the creation of distance, or what he calls “dramatic distance”, by either the power of secrecy producing the effect of a “denial of human agency” or by resorting to iconographic means, whereby the mask-wearer is marginally acknowledged, but only as a vessel, an “embodiment of spirit”. Ultimately, he concludes, a similar effect, at least as far as social perception and exclusion are concerned, is achieved in institutional settings without the need for a mask per se, by resorting to specific profession- or rank-indicating attire or ornaments, which convey authority as the proxy or even embodiment of the concept or institution that has issued them (Picton 1990: 190-194). We have seen above, and in the Kumpo example, that mask rituals lend themselves well to exerting authority, usually translated in practice as social enforcing and even – as De Jong aptly notices – as precedent-setting and lawmaking (altering the rules of the community game):

“[…] I will argue that a mask performance, like any other ritual, does not reflect or legitimise social relationships but produces them. […] The performance, in which rules of secrecy are imposed on the audience, serves very well the purpose of exerting coercive power.” (De Jong, 1999: 54)

In doing so, they draw on all three of the rituals‟ strata by playing on human beings‟ instinctive fear of the Unknown and of the Other (of the Faceless Authority) and manipulating the collective subconscious of the community in which the mask ritual takes place towards revering and obeying the Mystery (i.e. Masked) Man.

Quoting Elizabeth Tonkin (1979), the same Ferdinand de Jong (1999) comments that masking is “a richly concentrated means of articulating Power” (ibid.: 53). However, the way to attain that has often less to do with actual intimidation than fascination, a particularly irresistible one, which binds both the performer and the audience into a sublime play stemming from the mask‟s inherent ambiguities. By his very definition and means of coming about, both on improvised rural stages and in western urban scenes, the Masked Man is a liminal creature, straddling the ontologically thin line between microcosm and macrocosm, between human and sacred. Around this point of liminality, Ebong sets up his “three absolutes” of a Masked Man, namely:

“(1) mélange of cosmo-physical powers and attributes, (2) symbol of the universal paradox and duality of the cosmo-human personality, and (3) visceral matrix for the comprehension of the metaphysical paradox of man and phenomena.” (Ebong 1984: 3)

As such, The Mask (i.e. the Masked Man) draws on and realises the manifold conceptual allure and complexities of cheating the community game (as referred to on p. 5). He is assembled on a variety of cognitive and aesthetic paradoxes, with “a face and a not-face, he is transformed by what dehumanises him” (Tonkin 1979: 1) and being historically

“used for the serious and the farcical, the tragic and the comic and [the] humorous, the exotic and the commonplace, the metaphysical and the mundane, the picturesque and the bizarre, the profound and the sordid, etc.” (Ebong 1984: 2).

His purpose thus harmoniously blends his aesthetic and cognitive distinguishing features, as his appearance distances and conceals while simultaneously revealing “the multifarious forms and attributes, polarities and essences of life” (Ebong 1984: 3). In pre- and illiterate societies, where connecting with history and religion (the community‟s cognitive values) had to take place, as much as possible, directly, in performative, visual and aural ways, the Masked Man doubled as an early instructor and cultivator of the specific aesthetic values of that

12 society as well, “to inform and regenerate the thought of posterity towards the profound” (Ebong 1976, in Ebong 1984: 4). Stanley Macebuh even refers to masks being deliberately configured so as to “compel” into the contemplation of the sublime, of “the psychological significance of the beautiful” (Macebuh 1974: 17). Naturally, this falls in line with what Kasfir (1988b), also quoted by De Jong, calls “seducing the audience to enter into a delightful and frightening interaction with the mask”, the latter being then able “to manipulate the behaviour of its audience, both during and after the performance.” (De Jong, 1999: 53). But for all its power detailed above, the relationship between mask/performer and audience is highly specialised and would not exist without the right circumstances in place, paramount of which is the suspension of disbelief. This was originally guaranteed via, on one hand, the audience being of a socio- cultural milieu facilitating the ready acceptance of the performed material as plausible, acceptable or indeed often undisputable fact, also traditionally successfully supported by the secrecy or even taboo status imposed on most things related to the mask. Seen from behind the veil of (pretended, as for many Ebiran women) ignorance, such masks as the West may well consider gruesome and grotesque reveal yet another function, beyond raw fear, that of intensifying the metaphysical powers activated (made „live‟ and living) by the ritual performance. By so doing, they reaffirm and sustain the social institutions and paradigms in place with endorsements of awe and reverence, and they in turn of course legitimise the Masks. (Ebong 1984: 4) On the other hand, the displayed context should pertain to a set of extraordinary circumstances or characters beyond conventional abilities and logic, most commonly involving a ritual of perceived transfiguration, “an impersonation, the coming into being of a persona.” (Napier 1988: 232; Tonkin 1979: 240, in De Jong, 1999: 50-52). This is what Ebong (1984: 4-5) refers to as a “depersonalisation”, a submergence to the point of near-possession – or “rounding” – whereby the performer is transposed from “masterful explorer” to “mastered vehicle”, becoming “awesome and fearful […] both exciting and terrible” (Ebong 1984: 9). On multiple levels, it is a ritual granting passage “into, and through, the psychic interior” (Cole 1975: 23), a quasi-channeling similar to shamanic

13 experiences, the likes of which we shall encounter later on, in the second and third chapters. But while the performer has such a clear impact on and hold over the audience, the latter must also convey their own influence, which may not be as noticeable or perhaps intuitive, yet should not be ignored, as it is the natural reverse of the performative exchange empowering the mask wearers over their audience. In The Life History of a Mask (1992), Ronald L. Grimes cites Young-Laughlin and Laughlin (1988) on their provocative thesis that “masks transform the brain […] that of the wearer or that of the participant audience” and recalls masks as “instruments of ecstasy” (Eliade 1964: 524). Firstly, a mask wearer needs to undergo certain procedures (indeed, rituals) before entering his/her character, the temporary new self of superhuman authority, which is on most traditional and some modern occasions just as intimidating to the performer as to the audience, as both know “[t]he masker does not just symbolise a spiritual power but actually becomes it” (Grimes 1992: 65). According to Grimes,

“The range of possibilities is considerable. Japanese noh performers, for example, sit in front of a mirror contemplating their masks before they go on stage. Hopis feed theirs ritually. And we need to understand such performances with or on masks in relation to what Erving Goffman called "face work," the performative transformation of faces themselves into masks to avoid "the state of ritual disequilibrium or disgrace" (1967: 19)” (Grimes 1992: 66)

Secondly, wearing a mask might seem a liberating experience, of almost voyeuristic quality, to the extent of seeing without being seen (or controlling what and how much can be seen). That is part of the rationale behind the collocation of law-breakers and facial disguises, as Grimes (1992) also informs on the fact “[s]ome maskers claim that wearing a mask is an expression of freedom: one has a different identity and can hide one‟s personal feelings.” Furthermore, much has been written on the topic of masks allowing their performers to channel out their unconscious and repressed emotions, but, more often than not, as Grimes nonetheless observes, in rituals the wearer has no say in the “character” s/he “plays”, it being the product of a particular culture, shared by the performer or not, such that, if anything, s/he only

14 acts out “the collective unconscious” (Grimes 1992: 66). In his phrasing, “Not all masks are “of” the wearer.” (ibid.: 66). Thirdly, not only does the masker not have the option of taking creative licences towards the mask s/he performs as, but the experience may even be “one of bondage: one feels unimportant, a mere channel for forces greater and more important” (ibid.: 66, and see earlier, p.14). Moreover, the performer is mostly spoiled for his/her own performance, as s/he cannot fully suspend his/her disbelief while continuously exposed to “the constructedness of their power” (ibid.: 66) inside the mask. Regarding the latter, while the materiality of a mask cannot be dismissed, least of all by the wearer, the mask is by no means a mere bundle of natural (or technological) elements. Whenever crafting a mask, the choice of materials is virtually as important as the art itself. From bark and leather to stone and precious metal, the artisan (as a cultural hero) is fully aware of how long and for what purpose the mask would be needed, much more than the wearers themselves (Segy 1976: 34-37) and certainly more than the audience. Indeed, there are masks fashioned to decay shortly, in a concrete as well as a symbolic sense, Mack (1994: 31) even mentioning certain African masks that become “too potent magically or mystically for them to be placed over the heads of humans”. Then there are masks intended for perennial use, whether cyclical or perpetual, with the materials and even the place on the body where such masks would be worn (Segy 1976: 29) being often indicative of their connotations and temporal value, while also serving as social indicators. Depending on what sort of effect it wishes to achieve, as well as the cultural background, a mask may come in all shapes and sizes, from larger-than-life and grotesque, if highly ornate, to very small and subtle. As we have pointed out earlier, for the Western world the standard of disguise is masking the eye area. That is also the minimum necessary for a disguise to work, which, in many cases, only means drawing one‟s attention to the fact that the person is disguised at all. Typical guises, such as sunglasses or domino masks, do little in the way of actually occulting one‟s facial features, instead acting as accessories standing in for the idea of masking. Grimes (1992) offers the example of Japanese noh masks “sometimes designed with

15 very narrow sides to call attention to, rather than hide, what is behind them”. Thus, “[j]owls of old male actors hanging out around the edges of small, delicate female masks are considered aesthetically powerful because of the visual paradox set up” (Grimes 1992: 69). In the same paragraph, he contrasts that with the idea of self- effacing masks, masks advertising their own transparency, teasing the viewer‟s urge to peer behind them. The example he provides is that of funeral veils, which

“kept us out but simultaneously invited us to take note of the interior dimensions […]. So we should resist the tendency to think of masks only as hiding faces. Some attempt to hide the fact that they hide anything. Makeup is an even more obvious example than the veil.” (ibid.: 69).

Faced with the confounding multitude of mask types, each with distinct purposes and usage, meanings and connotations, scholars have attempted various ways to systematise them, only to find few things applicable throughout. One of them is what Grimes (1992) describes as the “seven moments in the life history of a mask”, namely: the Making, the Wearing, the Encountering, the Removing, the Exchanging, the Displaying and the Destroying. In his same-titled article, he uses that “mask history” to delineate performative or ritual masks from biographical masks, the latter intended for contemplation, unlike the participative function of the former. Another main distinction of masks regards their reception, some being embodied spirits, some mere objects (of art), in accordance with how the audience interprets them (“Sacredness and secularity are determined by the social interaction itself” [Grimes, 1992: 67]). Against the background of wildly proliferating mask forms and lacking an all- encompassing academic tool for their conceptual containment, Pollock (1995) proposes a return to the very notional core of masking, where he surveys “how form and function […] become linked in the mask.” Considering masks as “icons and indexes of identity” allows him to expand the previous concept of masks “to include other signalling systems which may be called upon by the semiotics of identity in any particular culture” (Pollock, 1995: 581-583). Thus, masking would become “one of a variety of means for signaling identity, or changes in identity” and “a technique for transforming identity, either through the modification of the

16 representation of identity, or through the temporary – and representational – extinction of identity.” (Pollock, 1995: 581-583). However, we feel such ample generalisations would only confuse the matter further, providing grounds for even the inclusion of such ideas as expressed by Goldman:

“Speech in particular, because of its nobility, its density of impressions, should always be thought of as a disguise – a disguise that slips, reveals, changes, strains to be adequate, strains even to be true or transparent to what it describes, breaks away, breaks down, stiffens, must be bolstered up. It is the fastest- changing mask of all.” (Goldman 1975: 93)

Nevertheless, the present research will limit itself to the pursuit of masks in their physical sense, i.e. material objects applied to the body but especially the face and effecting either the occulting or metamorphosis of the (typical) human features found thereon. Furthermore, of particular interest to this investigation will prove to be those masks under the above definition which exist in semi-fictional or fictitious settings and are employed for reflections upon the articulation of power in private and in public and upon the cognitive and aesthetic appeal of personal identity, as well as in a wider context for the better understanding of the construction, maintenance, manipulation and commoditisation of human identity. Such masks will be found to articulate socio-political power in a roughly similar way throughout time, but allowing for noticeable differences generated by their ways of responding to the socio-cultural novelties and challenges of the age in which they are used. Pursuing their lines of development over time allows us to identify trends in the popular culture of the various ages, symptomatic of greater shifts in cultural history, as well as to note certain associated patterns in the idealising and normatising of socio-psychological behaviours. Their fictional reinforcing agglutinates and solidifies such patterns into the legendary protagonists of a certain age or community, or what this research shall term, in a wider frame of reference, „cultural icons‟. We may then define cultural icons as being the salient characters and accompanying cultural tropes specific to, and considered defining for, a certain period or ethno-geographic space, particularly those that are instrumental in describing the extant societal paradigms or in proposing others, of higher quality, to

17 replace them. They often draw on widely recognisable archetypes and psychosocial mainstays and are themselves the origins of future cultural forms. Throughout this work, we shall observe how the masked rituals of old have established cultural icons which, in turn, have produced their own reinterpretative descendants and discourse, carrying over into various new media, as soon as they became available for reinscription. In this introductory section, we have gained insight into the psycho-social and ontological process and instance of communication involving the representation and the manipulation of identity. By transcending certain societal norms, the ones undergoing such a transformation – as indeed “masking is becoming” – are empowered over their peers, being at once human and immortal, yet at the same time find themselves bound to the audience‟s will, appreciation and cognition. Only together can the inseparable performer and audience create the performance, the story, the legend, just as well as the mask ritual cannot exist without its mask. In the early and „primitive‟ human communities, masking allows for deus-ex-machina opportunities of extra-ordinary power to be manifested and subtly negotiated between the three ever-balancing social poles of politics, religion and psychology. It is a means of enforcing, but also of social and institutional cohesion, as the social power of the Masked Man is wielded not in a destructive, but seductive, display meant to (momentarily) equalise all individuals before the sacred in what is ultimately a most democratic exercise of sublime entertainment for consent. Social rituals involving masks are not about protecting anonymity so much as articulating power. Whether in the interest of preserving the cultural background and propagating its values, or actively taking part in sublime ceremonies joining the man and the sacred in a collaborative effort of the artist and the society‟s tradition and imagination, or called upon to mediate and enforce with supernatural authority, the power of masks has always seduced and transformed us. Nowadays, though we in the West may have stopped believing in their literal power, we can still feel masks as “a release and a control” (Baisch 1977: 18). They help us reconnect with various cultural forms of our past and with the more playful or the more profound aspects within us, and on occasion to “critique, criticise and reconstruct” (Hollis 1985: 221). Masks of various kinds thus serve public users, e.g. participants in a carnival,

entertainers on a concert stage or sports ring, but also participants at protest gatherings (as documented by the Person of the Year 2011 choice of Time Magazine2) or even, on a more permanent basis, the followers of certain religions. Equally, they cater to private and semi-public maskers engaged in costume parties, various forms of roleplay including the growing Japanese-inspired trend of cosplay, and even criminal activities. The steady application of mask rituals may well be said to have helped „train‟ human consciousness, in its most ludical and creative elements, to a genuine taste for the suspension of disbelief, which we have dearly kept throughout all subsequent genres of fiction and which has contributed to the creation of ever-daring, ever more imaginative protagonists, and thus role models, eventually helping us teach values and constant improvement to each coming generation. In the following sections, we will examine four ages seminal for the cultural development of the (Western) world, together with their defining literary genres and phenomena related to masks and mask rituals. In so doing, we will observe how such fundamental elements as the articulation of social power and the nature and purposes of mask rituals have varied over time, yet remained equally important in informing us of what we should – but wouldn‟t – like to know about ourselves as private and public individuals.

2 Due to the „Arabic Spring‟ movements backed up by social media, „The Protester‟ (featured as masked with a turban-like headscarf and a bandanna) was chosen Person of the Year 2011 by Time Magazine.

II. A Chronology of Masks in the Western World

In the previous chapter, we have discussed the characteristics of masks and mask rituals and considered their origins in pre-literary societies, where they embodied and wielded great social power, whether as preservers and teachers of tradition and its values or as warrants and enforcers, with superhuman authority, of the intricate social wiring between the religious, political and psychological poles. Their paradoxical nature brought to the fore such civilisation-founding tensions as between the private and the public and between the individual and the community/the Self and the Other, while also taking into account certain notes pertaining to the aesthetic and cognitive registers, which shall be dealt with more in detail towards the end of this investigation. Ultimately, masks‟ existence and creativity has shaped the collective imagination of subsequent generations and has allowed mankind to start sharing dreams and fantasies by developing our suspension of disbelief. The several examples provided by the introductory chapter revealed mask rituals in tribal societies that, though altered by their contact with the Western world or one another, managed to find inspiration (and often additional resources) in the cultural clash. Some other rituals similarly went underground and into near- oblivion only to be resurrected in contemporary times, indeed reinvented in many aspects, such as their objectives and their channels of artistic expression. Regardless of the specifics of the respective processes, such examples emphasise the great adaptation potential masks and their accompanying rituals carry within, effectively granting them a kind of immortality, of certainly their embodied ideas, if not of their outer forms, both of which bear witness to the vast imagination and creativity of mankind. In the following subsections, we will investigate that immortality of masks across four major cultural epochs, each with its subdivisions and particularities, on

20 a trajectory of oblivion and reinvention from the most conspicuously traditional mask usages to the point where advances in society and technology have largely redesigned masks as standalone virtual entities. In each of those cultural ages, we will find mask rituals to be associated with, or rather expressed and reinvented through, a specific literary genre and/or medium that have shaped our understanding of culture and the world. We will continue to focus on masks in fictional settings as expressions and influences of real-world issues, masks which cover and/or modify the face – being, as such, primarily visual and performative – applied with a high degree of deliberateness. That will further help us consider identity and power articulation between the private and the public, as well as how they engage with their respective audiences and social realities.

II. 1. From Myths to Tragedies

An apt place to start on our historical investigation of masks after the pre- literate societies would have to be Ancient Greece. The Greeks have, for most practical purposes, laid the foundations for all that would later be the European and Western theatre tradition, while simultaneously being at the root of the wider literary tradition of the Old World as well. It is widely accepted – Webster (1956), Ebong (1984), Calame (1986), etc. – that the origins of comedy, and ultimately drama, are to be found among the masked dances related to the early agrarian cults in Greece, as typically observed with various satyr figures. Such “burlesque fertility-dancers” were readily adopted into what would become comedy from their previous status as warrants and defenders (apotropaic dancers) of the earth‟s bounty. Indeed, as pointed out by Charles T. Murphy (1972), the burlesque and specifically satyr-reminding elements (the leather phallus attached to clothes, various torch and stick dances, rude

21 reveling and obscene puns) survived well into the times of Aristophanes, perhaps to show that even high comedy needs to entertain – thus curry the favour of, and the suspension of disbelief from – all members of the audience (Murphy 1972: 170- 173). Nevertheless, however low-brow, the satyr-plays remained one of the three defining genres of ancient Athens, alongside comedy and tragedy, and perhaps closest to the average citizen as a satyr “remained a satyr” (Dobrov 2007: 260). It did not get entangled with the political intrigues of the day, nor did it absorb or fuel the psychoses of the citadel, but stayed true to its natural liminality, forever between gods and men and possessed of “primal dionysiac joy”, an “inventor of culture” who had retained its primeval innocence. As Dobrov aptly remarks,

“The fundamental appeal of satyr-plays appears to have been an Edenic nostalgia of sorts, a pre-political wholeness redolent of drama‟s ritual origins.” (Dobrov 2007: 260)

Similarly, stylisations of such burlesque performers, whether on stage or on the fields, gave rise to the visual-arts genre of caricature, just as it seems likely that, in time, stylisations of deviant and caricatured portraits produced the iconic masks of comedy and tragedy (Webster 1956: 272-273). In like manner to the costumes worn on stage, masks attained a certain degree of stylisation and especially of standardisation, allowing for the ready identification of the character depicted and for setting the certain mood of the performance, as they had in the earlier ritual dances (Winter 1965: 102). But the function of theatre masks as inducers of a certain emotional state appears to have reached its apex in tragedy, where the colours and occasionally the configuration of masks were meant to instill the distress of fear and pity, in order for the spectator to achieve catharsis from them and through them (Calame 1986: 129). That symbolic trajectory from suffering to purification should come as no surprise when considering the origins of tragedy in the Mystery cults of ancient Greece, such as those of Demeter and Artemis but especially the one of Dionysus, on whose celebration and in whose theatre they came to typically be performed. Their initiating ceremonies, meant to confer immortality, fertility, maturity, insight, and especially an extent of socio-political escapism and short-lived

22 egalitarianism, allow us to understand how the liminal character of masks was most appropriate for their representation and performances, as well as to see their connections to the pre-literary types. The experiences holding the focus point of such Mystery rituals are those fundamental to understanding life as a human being. They will be accordingly mirrored in tragedies, where the multifarious misfortunes of the protagonists are as profound as the human experience itself, as they play much less on factual causality as on the predetermined doom and guilt of simply existing. William I. Thompson, in Freedom and Comedy, writes that

“Greek tragedy is a tragedy of an evil predicament; the tragic error is not sin, not a conscious action of the self; it is a mistake of being. […] The only way out of this predicament is to cease being one in a world of many, to re-enter the world of the undifferentiated One. This is the ritual of rebirth in death, the ritual of the dying and resurrected god.” (Thompson 1965: 216)

While wooden masks of children and old women, and sometimes bears and other wild game, were used in the initiation rites of the adolescents, honouring Artemis, and Demeter‟s worship involved the iconography of animals and the crops‟ life cycle (Calame 1986: 133), the cultic manifestations of Dionysus were the most socially impactful and symbolically fitting as the birthplace for the future theatrical tradition. Stemming from the ritual dances accompanying the god‟s phallic processions and orgiastic celebrations, the tragedies would come to feature increasingly serious performances, reaffirming the role of mask rituals – in however stylised a form – as explorers of the fears and traumas seated deep within and which can be acknowledged, reclaimed and transformed for cathartic progress. Much like the „primitive‟ mask rituals, Dionysus‟ initiation ceremonies of the Mysteries – from what incomplete information posterity has managed to recover – featured secrecy and remoteness, masks covering either the initiates‟ or the initiators‟ faces (or both), and the threat of death or other trauma to be overcome, so the candidate may re-emerge glorious and greater in knowledge, having communed with the spiritual plane (Dionysus, in this context), gaining the promise of immortality and so on. Furthermore, the social roles of the early mask rituals were also continued, in the public manifestations of the Dionysian rites, as they partly united the community, getting all citizens involved in the celebrating, as well as

23 creating a sense of community pride or patriotism when considering that the central Dionysian festival (the City Dionysia), held in Athens, would bring in plenty of tourists from the other parts of Greece, which in turn only stimulated play and game production. Of course, the rites honouring the Greek god of wine were never originally mainstream, as demonstrated by him not having been an initial Olympian god, and accurately described as a deity inspiring to both constructive and (self-) destructive acts, with an even higher rate of „ethical randomness‟ than the already fairly morally grey Olympians. Regarding his destructive aspects, the social division or disintegrative aspect of the mask rituals came into play in his rites as, by their very characteristic of allowing their „wild side‟ or Dionysus himself take them over, the citizens involved in the rituals freely denounced the polis they were part of and civilisation at large and temporarily seemed to revert to a primeval, savage order. The rituals thus also momentarily empowered the marginalised sections of ancient Greek society, such as the women and the slaves, to freely participate and interact with the „alpha‟ Athenians, i.e. the voting adult males, a great challenge to the patriarchal oligarchy- veering-towards-democracy. It is thus telling that, much like a mask, the figure of the god was multifold (thrice-born, double-embodied, etc.) and made up of ambivalent pairs: underworldly and Olympian, maddening and inspiring, crude and cunning, etc. As such, it is no coincidence that, unlike in the larger Greek community of the time, and even though many of his insignia were openly or subtly phallic, women enjoyed at least an equality of rank with men in what his worship was concerned. They are typically the more visible parts of his follower cohorts, as for instance his blood-frenzied maenads would be much more fearful than his drunk satyrs. That, as Zeitlin (1985) explains, may well be due to the fact that

“[m]adness, the irrational, and the emotional aspects of life are associated in the culture more with women than men. […] [Their] perceived physical and cultural instability makes them weaker than men; it is also all the more a source of disturbing power over them, as […] in the divine world it is feminine agents, for the most part, who, in addition to Dionysus, inflict men with madness” (Zeitlin 1985: 65).

Zeitlin goes on to write that “it is precisely Dionysus‟ identification with the feminine that gives him and his theatre their power” (ibid., 65), just as the grapevine he embodies draws its sustenance from the maternal soil of Gaia – but also from the (male) sun. The deity thus naturally assembles a genuine coincidentia oppositorum within himself, as a trickster entity that undermines reality to provide alternate dreamscapes:

“he […] challenges the hierarchies and rules of the public masculine world, reintroducing it into confusions, conflicts, tensions and ambiguities, insisting always on the more complex nature of life than masculine aspirations would allow.” (ibid., 65).

It is indeed no less than we could expect from the god presiding over Greek theatre, where similar ambivalences hold true, in the widest sense between the Self and the Other, and especially when considering that male actors played the female characters as well. In this sense, Dionysus‟ involvement with Greek culture and tradition may to an extent be likened to the deity‟s dealings with the mortal Pentheus, as played out in Euripides‟ Bacchae. There, the god responds to the human‟s mockery of him looking effeminate by persuading him in disguise to admit wishing to spy on women and gradually remove his typically-masculine attire of a hoplite in exchange for women‟s clothing so he may accomplish that, but only getting ripped apart by Dionysus‟ maenads (Zeitlin 1985: 65-67). Save for the gruesome ending, tragedy (as well as theatre in general) has likewise permeated Greek patriarchy and become not only mainstream and high art – while retaining its powers of subversion and social commentary – but indeed one of ancient Greece‟s most celebrated cultural exports and the forerunner of Western theatre. Besides such exceptions as terracotta effigies and temple offerings, most of the Attic theatre masks did not survive, having seemingly been made of such perishables as cloth and plastered linen. Much of the current information on them has been obtained from preserved painted pottery and mosaics, or via deductions from subsequent Hellenic sources. As Calame (1986) indicates, some of the earliest tragic „masks‟ were in fact just disguises and face decorations meant to cover the performers‟ civil identity, such as fig tree leaves, which were sacred to Dionysus.

The earliest actors – initially performing solo with the choir, who would daub themselves with wine dregs and plaster – whitened their faces and added flowers and leaves before resorting to very thin fabric masks. They were more like veils “not designed to superimpose a new identity on the I of the enunciator” (Calame 1986: 129) and which did not “incarnate or represent any individual identity” but efface that of their wearer “in order to allow a new character […] to be constituted through the dramatic action” (Calame 1986: 134). It is noteworthy, however, that whenever they are depicted on such pottery as being worn – i.e. not merely frontally shown to the vase‟s viewer as hand-held, but on a human face and thus typically seen in profile – the masks lose their symbolic, as well as graphic, delineation, and the actor is indeed seen to be the character. One thus often sees, particularly in artwork from the „official‟, or public, beginning of tragedy and associated competitions in Athens, the 5th century BC onwards, actors in character represented alongside or opposed to actual mythological figures, with very little, save theatre-specific attire (i.e. conventions of representing certain characters on stage via props or costume), to tell them apart. Yet in practice, as the same Calame elaborates towards the end of Facing Otherness, the tragic masks of Attica were halfway from the distance which retelling Greek myths posed between “enunciator” and audience, and yet not entirely „there‟ for a complete and direct identification either. They were self- referential in the sense they were artistic-cognitive shortcuts to assuming the characters‟ identities, being little more than covers with eye-holes behind which the actor, the enunciator, remained visibly present, and yet his own personal, facial identity was also effaced by the „veil-mask‟. What may appear as a contradiction between the two forms of representation is settled by considering that the graphic identification between man and mask (character) may imply the adherence of the actor to a kind of mytho-iconographic canon, while in turn reinforcing that template for the viewers and granting vicarious credence to both the performer and the performance. And, like in the case of masked dances, the myth can only profit from the flesh-and-blood concretisation of stage acting, often allowing for greater impact and more visual sense than oral expounding, even though their way of performing was also „halfway‟, part-

26 narrative via the chorus and part-performative, via the actors. By means of the former, by distancing the viewer from the presented image that is nevertheless embedded in the cultural canon, but especially the latter, by having the characters transposed on stage, i.e. initially in the agora, among the people, tragic masks would more easily achieve the “contract of veridiction” Calame refers to. As we have mentioned above, there is no surprise in the dual god of wine and revelry having unchallenged claim on theatre, as his own paradoxical nature makes it not only believable, but appropriate, that he should sanction and indeed empower the union of the proximal and the distal, the Self and the Other – or the “recovery of the Other in the Self” (Calame 1986: 141) – while still preserving some distance between the performer (in this case, a Composite Self of sorts) and the audience. After all, he is, like the other two Greek deities with known mask rituals, Artemis and Demeter, the head and focus of a cult of human liminality, whose rituals entailed various forms of transition or metamorphosis: between savage and civilised, between earth and heaven, from adolescence into adulthood, etc. – generally speaking, mediating Before and After, Inner and Outer, and Self and Other. While they might confuse modern audiences, the tragedies of the ancient Greeks were the natural step forward from their ritual dances and myth narrating, if a rather hybrid form of the two, of having masks that, in a sense, faced both the spectator and the performer, confronting them, as masks were intended to direct their message towards the audience, showing while also telling and teaching. The oral tradition of epic poetry had the myths well distanced from the audience in time (the ever-revisited illo tempore) and space (bucolic or monstrous, but most importantly, exotic i.e. foreign, Other), presenting no ambiguity as to deictic markers, as everything was intuitively narrated in the third person. On the other hand, in tragedies, there was something of a confrontation‟s joy-mingled shock for the common man to meet his heroes up-close, in the flesh (and plastered linen), in his own otherwise banal reality, all the more so as they were somewhat there, while also not at all. The ambiguity set up by the actor saying “I” to refer, in concepts and props, to an illustrious “s/he”, fundamentally different from the earlier stage of mask rituals, where by possession or transformation the protagonist was said to

27 have become the spirit or the god, necessitated a different kind of suspension of disbelief. The cognitive dissonance thus stirred by the inability to forget that both individuals were to some extent present produced a form of what would later be termed an alienation effect. Here, forcing the spectators‟ awareness of the character being different from, and yet in the same space-time point as the actor – effectively rendering the actors as mouthpiece narrators/enunciators of the characters – allowed for that half-distance to exist between the audience and the protagonists, such that at least some of the needed sense of awe easily triggered verbally in epic poetry would be recuperated visually and performatively in tragedies. Another paradox to be explored here was the fact that the very sense of awe was maintained by the presence of masks, and yet not directly (as discussed regarding their self-referencing and the wearer‟s effacing). The interest in producing them lay very little with objective realism, as they were not means of reproducing reality but of conjuring up a new one, fictional and normative. They were not conceptualised (at least no longer in the public, theatric phase) as empowering the wearer in any magical or mystical sense, as he was not seen as possessed or transformed. He remained there, present behind the actions of the character he played (“the I supports the he”, Calame 1986: 135), such that the wearer was as much an actor as a puppeteer and as a narrator. As we have alluded to above, this “less than transparent identification” or “imperfect assimilation”, as Calame calls them, was the mechanism allowing suspension of disbelief to paradoxically endure in spite of the same enunciator acting out the parts of several characters within the same play. Not only was, via the implied boon of Dionysus, the actor able to blend Self and Other, but, with the development of tragedies boosted also by the social build- up behind their patriotic significance to Attica, the very constructedness of masks began adding to their specific sense of awe. As spectators overflowed the agora and claimed hillside-carved theatres for their bleachers, it was necessary for actors to ensure their message was also properly conveyed visually besides by the excellent acoustics. Thus, Ebong remarks that those tragedy masks of the times when theatre had grown to be a true polis and pan-Hellenic event were “heavily coiffured and of

28 a size to enlarge the actor‟s presence” (Ebong 1984: 5). By having the mythological characters literally appear larger than life on stage, they ensured the full range of the actors‟ rendered emotions would reach every member of the audience. The physical effort required of each actor would then be somewhat diminished, while his art would increase in abstraction and symbolic intensity, magnified “by simply transferring his facial expressions and gestures to his whole body.” (Ebong 1984: 5) Finally, while on the subject of ancient Greek society, we must once again refer to the specific impact of the Mask upon its community. We have already noted that the main function of the tragic mask was the stirring of fear and pity – believable and relatable in both a mythical-historical and contemporaneous context – in order for them to be psycho-socially transmuted, via the cathartic effect of theatre mimesis, into a new form of reality. Namely, by creating the middle distance between the characters and the audience, the latter obtained both the epic- discourse awe and the peer empathy necessary for fueling their suspension of disbelief towards a sense of community involvement, since, after all, many of those characters were, whether perceived as literal or symbolic, their ancestors. It was particularly by mingling the traces of awe with those of relatability that the ancient Greek tragedies could embed a second function as part of what the modern lingo would term their social outreach. Firstly, catharsis was always an individual effect (although with long-term community impact), rather linking the performers as a mythological collective or community (connected public Others) to each individual (further-connecting private Selves). This was done in order to have the latter not only able to bear the often grim messages of their mythological past – such as the tragically fatal predetermination they believed in – but further grow in wisdom and artistic reception and refinement, become better citizens and human beings with the consumption of each new play, in what was a subtle but eloquent remnant of their Dionysian initiations and of rites of passage in general. Secondly, it was the same figure of Dionysus that, in reconciling Self and Other for the tragedy-goers, managed to also be the “guarantor […] of tragedy‟s normative and civic value” (Calame 1986: 141). Before the hillside theatres, the performances would take place in the agora, where the experience of community participation would be heightened. Within that social context of public interplay,

29 the above-described half-distancing effect provided the welcome opportunity for narration to become instruction, while empathy gave rise to the intimate familiarity of kindred disclosure. Together, the two social movers led to a poignant sense of filial and citizen duty – a subtle but potent new form of articulating social power in the repertoire of mask rituals, this time generated by the combined stage performance of the mythological collective of Semi-Others and targeting the polis as a whole, the connected public (and private) Selves. In what we may term a political catharsis, this second function, combining instruction with disclosure, meant to promote the political refinement of the citizen partaking in the tragedy-going experience. By witnessing heroic deeds and the adherence to lofty values even at the expense of death not only „preached‟, but (re- )enacted by ultimately their fellow citizens, the Athenians and their peers, enemies and later emulators were in fact exposed to the ancient-world equivalent of a socio- political activism advertisement, the most immersive their technology could provide. They were taught by the combined example of their legendary ancestors and their common peers that excellence was not only desirable, but genuinely achievable, on first a personal, then a community scale, as well as to consider the implications of their actions within society (e.g. the moral lessons inferred from the punishment of human hubris or of betraying the polis and moral laws). By seeing their Self always reflected, however distorted, in the mask of the Other, the keenest playgoers would comprehend the fundamental civil-didactic values of the Greek tragedies. Comedies and satyr-plays were no exception to that, as behind the crude mockery there was always the mythical substratum connecting the audience, as well as the personal (if shameful) relatability to many of the vices exposed publicly that made the sharing in everyone‟s implied vulnerability an act of community bonding. Drawing on the previous experience of ritual mask dances, Ancient Greece refined the paradigm of mask rituals to the above level, that of theatre. Its culture has given the world not only a vast and imaginative mythology, fully relatable even nowadays, but a way of refining the cultural experience thereof into mythico- historical acts of communication that are simultaneously profoundly human literature and sensible guidelines for socio-political exchange and community-

30 building. Their values are fast in place at the foundation of what we now call the Western World, having given us the knowledge and wisdom of art improving mankind. First there were the fertility dances under the guise of creatures pertaining liminally to both man and beast. Then the initiation rituals wherein the neophyte would, like his god, ascend from death to life and temporarily shed his civilised visage in order to gain the ecstatic insight of his inner animal. Further still, onwards to stylised ritual chanting whereby the community is enhanced, together and one at the time, cognitively as well as artistically, tragedies have absorbed the gist of their predecessors and continued to be reinvented in order to create a gem of human creation that has lasted, despite changes in genres, composition and even media, till our very days. We owe the ancient Greek playwrights, known and forgotten, the beginnings of a systematisation of masks, of forming consistent criteria for signaling characters and their meanings via the Western conventions of their costumes, props and even – where available – mask features. Moreover, they pioneered the distancing effect in theatre by effacing the performer and yet keeping his body visible behind the mask, speaking through it, as both an enunciator and an actor, narrating the myths of yore but simultaneously enriching the experience of the spectators with visual, audio and even haptic cues, via live reenactments. Between the mythical material providing awe-inspiring role models and the live actors giving off familiarity and a relatability of unlockable human potential for betterment, a paradoxical suspension of disbelief, or rather the wishful thinking of ancestral pride, was attained, triggering catharsis. From emotional to political catharsis, the Greeks were the first to turn on the self- renewing gift of art as a human catalyst, in realising that behind every demigod there is a virtuous citizen.

II. 2. From Saturnalia to Shakespeare

Ancient Greece planted the seeds of what would be an enduring worldwide culture and institution of the theatre. As the plays in Attica drew increasingly more Greeks as well as foreigners, they would soon have imitators among the „Barbarians‟, as cultural ambassadors for the coming Hellenic age. Rome continued the theatre expansion, paving the way for the medieval and Renaissance performers, such as those of the Commedia dell‟Arte, the Court Masques, and most notably Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan-Jacobean playwrights, all of whom used a similar gamut of “empathy and alienation, excitement and alarm” (Ebong 1984: 2) to achieve the artistic goals of their own mask rituals, whether in plain sight or disguised. In the Italian peninsula, some of the earliest known forms of theatre were the Atellanae farces, first played in the town of Atella, near modern-day Naples, in the local Oscan dialect. They were seemingly related to such characters appearing in later Greek comedy as Phylax the buffoon, a rather plump burlesque character in decline in Greece by the third century BC, when the Atellanae farces reached Rome (Murphy 1972: 181). The latter were improvised satire skits, featuring similarly grotesque characters, like fools, hunchbacks and various braggarts, together with various transvestite and identity-mistaken characters. Local mythological parodies and farces based on real-life scenes and lampooning various trades or unfaithful spouses were also common, as well as in the constantly popular related genre of the mimes, which nevertheless drew on a wider range of social subjects and was often slightly more complex. Later on, the farce themes would resurface, reworked, into the more refined comedies of a Plautus or Terence, and persist in the public memory well into the days of the Commedia dell‟Arte. After the fall of the Roman Empire, it seems the tradition of acting was maintained mostly in Italy, southern France and northern Spain (Ogilvy 1963: 606). Although in the service of various municipal authorities and, on occasion, even of the churches, the jongleurs or minstrels, the most frequent umbrella terms for the

32 diverse multitude of mime-qualified performers of the Middle Ages, were seen as outlaw rabble, only slightly better than slaves and criminals. While their very occupation made them prone to constant mischief, particularly including satiric jabs at the scholastic and political authorities of the day, they were perhaps most infamous for such popular community events variously known as the Carnival or the Feast of Fools. Likely the European cultural heir of such Roman orgiastic carnivalesque traditions as the Saturnalia, the Feast of Fools is noted for its “[m]asks and monstrous visages (larvae et personae)” and

“characterised by its reversals. […] all types of opposite or contrary behaviour […] transformations from human to animal, from male to female, and from spirit to body. They are interrelated and refer to each other in a running transition from form to lack of form.” (Gilhus 1990: 27).

The Feast seems not to have stopped at the gates of cathedrals, as the lower ranks of the Catholic clergy were often participants themselves, noted for having brought donkeys into the churches, as well as “grimaced and made contortions. They used unclerical costumes like female clothes and clothes of panders and minstrels.” (Gilhus 1990: 27) The participant subdeacons flipped around the meanings of their symbols and hierarchies, inverting the Christian rites of ascension towards the Light into a descent within their inner bestial layers. For the brief moment of the Feast, they put spirituality aside and summoned the sensuality of the flesh, using animal and monstrous masks (visual cues) but particularly donning female clothes (haptic, potentially sexual cues), playing “wanton songs” (audio cues) and replacing incense with malodorous shoes (olfactory cues). Apart from their playing on the stern rigidity and ornate character of the Church, there was also a political statement being made, as the subdeacons, ranked lowest in the ecclesiastical orders, would then have the opportunity to be selected as Archbishops or even Popes of Fools, a social-status swap reminding of the Saturnalia Roman festival, where the masters would similarly briefly trade places with their slaves.

By breaking monotony and the previous social order, the participants found themselves briefly empowered, and not just with the authority of their regular-day superiors, but simultaneously with the extra layer of being able to play their superiors playing buffoons. As expected, the community was engaged as well, with many locals freely interacting and making merry in the company of the Pope of Fools. One may gain further understanding of Saturnalia by considering the deity it was honouring, once more a multivalent god as in the case of Dionysus. Although ultimately associated with the Greek titan Cronus, god of time and cannibalising father of the Olympians save Zeus, the Roman deity Saturnus was originally a (potentially Etruscan) god of vegetation and crops. From the latter extending his conceptual jurisdiction over agriculture and its rhythms, times of sowing and times of reaping, he was easily associated with the Greek Cronus, and even with the Roman double-faced god Janus, of beginnings and endings, of roads, of time, etc. The merger between the two Roman gods is even more striking when we consider that Saturnalia, otherwise originating in agricultural rites, hence the name, was observed around the middle of December, where it was removed from both the harvest season and the beginning of spring. On the other hand, the time of the festival roughly corresponded to the Winter Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, i.e. the point when the nights are longest and it appears that the Sun „is dying‟. As such, it was the ideal moment to hold a celebration where all order is reversed and humans wear animal, spirit and demon masks in order to either exorcise their fears of the similar by laughter and mockery, or frighten them away from prematurely contaminating/consuming the new year via noisy revelries, or both. In many ways, our contemporary celebration of the New Year at the end of December (clearly unrelated to any natural rhythms but not far from the time of Saturnalia) may just be our misremembered copy of the Roman festival, whereby the order of things in the previous year is ceremonially put to death along with the old year itself, and the new year is ushered in (i.e. the continuity of life is preserved) with what may well seem apotropaic fires and noise (fireworks and parties, many of which are even in costume).

The road from Dionysian theatre to the carnivalesque medieval festivals occurring over much of Europe is indeed long and difficult to accurately reconstitute. Nor is Saturnalia a satisfying (direct) explanation for festivals that had much more to do with the natural rhythms of the incoming spring and „packaged‟ as Easter (itself a name highly suspect of hasty relabelling and religious assimilation), the most important Christian holiday, but visibly related to the Celtic feasts of Ostera and Beltane, major Druidic holidays devoted to life and fertility. Yet the colourfully imaginative guises worn by the participants of such community events, from Nuremberg to Venice and Spain to Bohemia, represent the next major step in the history of masks and their rituals, in many ways their „reboot‟ given the Dark Ages in between. In the interest of concision, this research will not dwell upon the specifics of the myriad of even regional varieties of such festivals, but rather shed some light on their most notable common elements. It seems plausible that, just as ancient theatre had its origins in rural fertility rituals, the street merrymaking of Western and Northern Europe can be traced back, on one hand, to Celtic and Germanic vegetation rites, such as the sacred battle between the leaving Winter and the approaching Spring, together with their cohorts (the re-enactors of which nowadays „duel‟ with flowers, water, tomatoes or oranges in the streets), or various acts of music and dance whereby mythological scenes of the impregnation of the Earth Goddess to ensure agricultural bounty were performed (male sword, staff, or horse/goat dances). It may also be that various non-native elements of such festivals (viz. the reversing iconoclasm of Saturnalia and of similar yearly traditions taken to legendary excess in Rome) were introduced by the Roman colonists of various ethno-cultural extraction and „Mediterranean levelling‟. Over time, they seamlessly fused with the native elements, such that, by the time the Renaissance would „rediscover‟ the Greco-Roman mythology, much of the latter would have been warped and woven into regional folklore, which would also explain the difficulties encountered by Christianity trying to ban the “heathen rites”. Eventually, the Christian Churches‟ attempts to combat the various folk-pagan manifestations turned towards more benign forms, from overlapping supersession to assimilation and even acceptance (motivated, in many cases, by disguised

35 material interests e.g. using the Carnival earnings for charity funds etc.). By allowing the carnivals, the (Catholic) Church had effectively resurrected a form of Saturnalia, thus seemingly restoring some power to the masses, but on its own terms and „hijacked‟ into a Christian near-assimilation, i.e. no longer honouring vegetation spirits and solar deities but circumscribed to Lent, Easter, Corpus Christi etc. And, much like during Saturnalia, the paradoxical provision of sanctioned channels for anti-establishment sentiments and pent-up social tension to be released only helped said establishment in the long run, while confirming our initial considerations on masks as „cheats‟ in the wider social game, yet which reassert normalcy through the very contrast of the two ontologies. As Natalie Z. Davis (1971) writes, quoting the sixteenth-century lawyer Claude de Rubys,

“It is sometimes expedient to allow the people to play the fool and make merry […] lest by holding them in too great a rigour, we put them in despair… These gay sports abolished, the people go instead to taverns, drink up and begin to cackle, […] to decipher Kings, princes […] the State and Justice and draft scandalous defamatory leaflets.” (Davis 1971: 41).

In other words, while on a societal level the power imparted to the public was not immense, within the citizens‟ private sphere the changes would have been very noticeable and welcome, as the great number of masks around town created a complex „buffer zone‟ where individuals of various social strata and social statuses, defended by fanciful anonymity, could freely, if briefly, intermingle and have fun, normally without consequence to their round-the-year civil identities. Medieval carnivals (and their modern continuators) betray their origins in the vegetation/natural cults, from the date of their observance in spring or near the border of winter and spring, to the motifs their masks use. Some of them conceptually explore the tension between nature and human civilisation – what we may term „human liminality‟ - by depicting the highly popular medieval Wild Men, or just as well in the various mismatched animal-human costumes. Others relate to the equally omnipresent Green Man, the bushy and blooming spirit of vegetation, the very figurehead of the prior, native beliefs and equally telling of the admixture of those pagan beliefs into the Christian imaginary due to its depiction on and inside medieval churches and cathedrals. Disguised as the Green Man, participants

would prance around as if finally released from their wintry bonds, often getting up to various mischief, and wearing green boughs, bells and sometimes glass or mirror shards to “spread the light” with. Also significant in the context of nature‟s revival and re-fertilising were the male costumes reminiscent of centaurs (once more, human liminality), horses or unicorns, donkeys and goats, or those involving swords, sticks, trumpets etc. Apart from mythological costumes, many masks drew from community life, parodying social categories and human types – reminding of the burlesque and grotesque elements of the ancients‟ comedies – as well as their pastimes and interests, virtues or vices, institutional and occupational emblems, etc. In time, it was this satirical-grotesque type of masks, rooted in regional folklore, that would grow into, and prominently feature among, the masks used by the Commedia dell’ Arte3, which re-valued various archetypes made (in)famous by the Greco-Roman comedies and added a few of its own, relevant to the new times and social milieus. For instance, the stock character of the Captain was following in the satirical footsteps of the Romans‟ miles gloriosus, and initially poked fun at the boastful Italian soldiers, but would soon after lampoon the proud Spanish troops and similar other would-be macho heroes in the provinces the performers toured (e.g. becoming Scaramouche in France). In like manner, the fools known as Zanni (from a regional form of the common Italian male name Giovanni), usually playing knavish servants and boors, also followed ancient traditions, such as the complaining/quarrelling Greek slaves, though in both the above examples the connections owe perhaps more to perennial human propensities than theatrical or folkloric influences. Commedia dell’ Arte appeared partly as a reaction against the stiffness of the written Commedia Erudita, which consciously drew on Roman theatre and used elevated language that made it mostly unavailable to the masses. With the advent of the new comedians (who nevertheless did get ideas from the Commedia Erudita),

3 The further analysis on the Commedia dell’ Arte is derived after researching the following:

Griffiths, David. The Italian Commedia, And, Please be Gentle. New York: Routledge, 1998. Katritzky, M.A. The Art of Commedia: A Study in the Commedia Dell’Arte, 1560-1620 with Special Reference to the Visual Records. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Nicoll, Allardyce. The world of Harlequin: a critical study of the commedia dell’arte. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.

37 thieves, ruffians, tricksters, courtesans, pompous old men and pretend savants, corrupt officials and boastful soldiers, carefree and melancholy types, as well as the couples in love and/or lust, sprang up on stage and filled the audience‟s imagination with fully relatable human beings that spoke their language and were often unflattering reminders of their own neighbours. The greatest novelty, however, of the Commedia dell’ Arte was, as its name advertises, the skill, or professional art, of its performers, who thus revived a variant of the Greco-Roman comedy theatre and enhanced it via their own talent for improvisation developed by the generations of jugglers, mimes and minstrels before and around them. We may not be able to recover the full atmosphere of the Commedia dell’ Arte performances, but it seems the actors, coordinated by their leader, decided only on the main ideas for each play, leaving room for the individual talents of the players to connect the dots and, oftentimes, to turn an otherwise banal storyline into side-splitting comedy. Of great help in achieving their popularity were of course the masks and costumes the actors used, which followed the general direction of stylisation and especially standardisation found in Greek theatre, except the role of the masks was much greater for the Italian artists, as the latter were no longer narrators, but proper actors. On stage, they appeared as the characters themselves, no longer imbued with any deictic paradoxes, but clearly being the characters during the performance. The experience of carnivals, while having stretched the participants‟ imagination in terms of designing and using masks and having subtly (and discreetly) empowered them in their socialising, had nevertheless brought belief in the abilities of masks as transcendent “instruments of ecstasy” to an absolute low, with the help of their own dainty-surreal constructedness pointing rather to art and imagination than to metaphysical potentialities. Thus, as the Commedia „transformation‟ was, despite the flamboyant costumes, only slightly „more sacred‟ (by its sheer theatrical virtues) than in the case of carnivals, there was much less of an effort in supplying suspension of disbelief to the performance. After all, the audiences were witnessing humans impersonate other, quite lifelike, humans, endowed with nothing more supernatural than agility, quick wits (or apparent idiocy) and, often, the gift of being ridiculous.

Troupes of about a dozen actors would thus play a clearly defined set of characters drawn from real life, their features exaggerated so as to become cues signaling their identity to the audience and how they were supposed to receive and/or interact with them, some perhaps modeled after contemporaneous or historical persons (hats, long noses or wigs, military regalia, make-up etc.) but projecting those caricatured individual features into the archetypical. On closer inspection, their most notable elements – some of which have survived to our very days in the costumes of clowns and other circus entertainers – reveal their descent from the Carnival masks. Their particoloured outfits, sometimes including bells, point to their kinship with the mismatched beasts and the mirror-adorned Wild and Green Men in the Carnival processions, while their slapstick-based comedy and over-the-top behaviour were potential reminders of the ritual contests between the cohorts of Winter and Spring. We have seen that the masks of the Commedia dell’ Arte had a more significant role than their Greek ancestors and, as such, were also much more conspicuous than the old visages made of plastered linen. In an ironic twist, though the Renaissance actors required much more inventiveness and talent than their ancient counterparts, the former were, at first glance, the less visible ones, given that their disguises were – with only a few exceptions – full-body. The Italian masks were thus self-effacing – catching the audience‟s eye with their ornamentation before the actors‟ playing – as well as iconographic, all but denying the agency of their performers by showing „embodied‟ vastly relevant human archetypes, clearly typified such that the audience be made aware of a certain character belonging to a certain (literary) typology and be thus pre-informed as to how to read the character‟s performance. Being aware of a mask‟s constructedness no longer weakened its effect on the audience, but rather the identification of various elements of a costume allowing one to deduce its nature allowed for a more in-depth reading of the character and perhaps of the play itself. Dark academic robes and a pot-belly, alongside the pretentious jargon, would announce a Dottore, while a green half-mask warned of an aggressive Brighella. Similarly, the long noses and the masks once resembling Wild Men were indicative of the Zanni, later distinguished themselves into the smarter and more agile Arlecchino – typically in colourfully patched attire – and

39 the more melancholy Pulchinello (later, Pierrot) – in his whitish tunic and long cap reminiscent of ghosts. On the other hand, the implied irrelevance of the actors behind the masks, made manifest by the costume‟s monopoly on the audience‟s visual input, underscored their standardisation as human types, the unity of all similar masks under one socio-psychological profile, and, in so doing, pointed out their flaws to the audience and humorously suggested means of dealing with such types in real life. While most characters in the Commedia dell’ Arte wore distinguishing masks, there were also two staple categories easily identified by their habitual lack thereof. One of them was the Lovers, an otherwise little-developed and fairly bland subset of characters, yet nevertheless a staple of Commedia plays as they constituted the narrative pretext for most lazzi, or comic routines, to occur in the plot, which they thus drove forward. They also contributed to the cognitive symmetry of most plays, wherein one found the one (or two) couple(s) of Lovers, opposed by the traditional two Old Men, i.e. the lecherous and stingy Pantalone and the self-absorbed pedant Dottore. He and Pantalone often found themselves opposing the equally womanising Captain/Scaramouche, forming a dynamic trio balanced off by the three servants (most often Zanni) belonging to the two Old Men and the Male Lover, who caused further havoc of their own. The two Lovers also mirrored one another, as they often wore matching colours – always of the most fashionable clothes of the time – and were accompanied and aided by their respective servants, Arlecchino and Colombina (often in a couple of their own), who also provided lots of slapstick comic relief and complicated the plot before helping its denouement. The other mask-less type were the majority of female characters, initially played by men as in most European theatre traditions but gradually replaced by actual women, who sometimes also manifested the more risqué (and thus wildly popular) side of the Commedia dell’ Arte, by appearing in „dramatic‟ post-robbery or post-disaster scenes with (some of) their clothes torn off. Nevertheless, apart from such examples perhaps lending credence to those protesting women on stages, the actresses partaking in the Commedia plays broke important ground for all future female artists. Confirming our speculative Dionysian finds of the previous section, the „Italian Comedy‟ was indeed stronger when males and females worked together,

40 not so much due to the alchemical virtues of the coincidentia oppositorum but rather because the parts played by women provided a more realistic and perhaps even delicate complement to the cruder parts played by men. Revealing the satirical origins of the new theatre, the male roles were caricatures of human typologies, while women largely played realistic women of flesh and blood, who – much like the men – were morally grey but also psychologically complex. Naturally, there was also a great deal of what would later be called melodrama in the female Lover‟s character, often named Isabella in honour of one of the first and most talented actresses to have played her, and we would like to argue that, realistic or not, such a role could not have been successfully acted out by men, particularly not in the same vein of acting as they employed for their other, ruder characters. And, despite the relative unfamiliarity with noble types causing them to imagine somewhat less tridimensional lady protagonists, the creative minds behind Commedia dell’ Arte struck feminine gold a second time in the character of Colombina. Considered the female counterpart to the „elevated Zanni‟ Arlecchino, who often loves her or is also loved by her – a pairing which explains her alternate persona of „Arlecchina‟ as well as the mask she singularly wears on occasion – she is nevertheless a distinct and versatile type, which started out as the nameless Maid and eventually gained a position of interchangeability with the Female Lover. Even then, she remained a realistically complicated young woman, typically evoked as free and proud, sometimes mean, often a vain gossiper and a flirt that would not readily yield to love but rather deceive and manipulate to further the plot. Having developed in the millenary wake of the Roman comedy tradition and fully imbued with the joy of life and creativity fostered by the carnivals of the Middle Ages, Commedia dell’ Arte was quick to establish itself in the worlds of both the performing arts and literature. Running strong for about four centuries, from approximately the fourteenth to the eighteenth, it spread out from Italy to most of the European continent, influencing contemporaneous and subsequent playwrights and authors (from Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare to Molière and beyond), as well as encouraging the growth of multiple national comedy traditions across Europe. Significant traces of its cultural impact are still to be found in circus

41 performances, television and cinema comedy (from Chaplin to sitcoms), visual and electronic art (particularly via the mask types it introduced), etc. The „Italian Comedy‟ also revolutionised the way we conceive theatre and performance arts up to the very present by developing creativity and spontaneous wit towards obtaining the first generation of truly professional actors, including the talented pioneers of women-playing women. The reboot of mask rituals achieved in the Middle Ages by the European carnivals brought about new means of expression and new channels to sustain them, along with increasingly new expectations of art and the world. It experimented with the flexibility of both the link between performer and audience (bringing the two to effective identification) and the link between mask and ritual (by increasing the distance between the two, since the ritual itself was minimal and many different masks partook simultaneously). Participants lacked the ideology, the organisation and initially even the legal support that theatre had previously enjoyed in Attica, so their art, little more than an exercise in imagination, constituted partly a form of protest, partly a form of popular entertainment and, not unlikely, partly also a form of showing off social status as the richer citizens could afford the most flamboyant guises. With the exception of the latter aspect, most Carnival masks were self-effacing, drawing attention away – as was their very goal – from the „actual‟, i.e. daily, identity of those behind the masks, allowing them to use the Christian occasions for free mingling and Bakhtinian reversal-regenerations of the social status quo. There were no theatres or arenas to host their shows, despite some of the celebrations taking place in the actual churches, and there were no great or epic stories to be told. The Carnivals of the medieval citizens then resembled the processions of the ancient world, except the former had arguably even more freedom to join in and to effectively lead the entire celebration in whatever direction they saw fit, specifically because there were no rules and no scripted parts. As opposed to e.g. the cohorts of Dionysus, based on the initiated members of the cult, who nevertheless tried to get as many members of the community involved as well, the medieval festivities were entirely flexible, required no prior allegiance or skill and were „by the people, for the people‟. Any meanings were created on the

42 spot, in the free mingling (minimal dramatic distance) of „performers‟ and „audience‟, in a liberating social game that was, in a very subtle sense, a community-wide ritual of empowerment, while outwardly a parade of human creativity. As Kinser (1986) aptly notes, there can be no clear-cut distinction between how much was ritual and how much parade within the Carnival, as

“[a]ctor and observer in rituals are closely associated: the onlooking crowd is always virtually and often actually part of the ritual process. The lead dancer may pull the weaving line of [dancers] into the midst of the bystanders; the wildman may chase you. […] Parades institutionalise distance between observer and actor, turning “you” into an objective eye contemplating “them”. Whenever this space between observer and actor is violated, the performance loses its objectified form and moves toward ritual, transforming observers into actors associated with the parade.” (Kinser 1986: 6)

Carnival masks empowered by revealing the wearers‟ imagination, fantasies, beliefs, and especially by concealing the same, in probably an iceberg proportion. They did not cause distance between „performers‟ and „audience‟, but rather united the two as participants, into what may have started as a parade but steadily grew into a ritual. It was indeed distinct from the „primitive‟ concept of what that ritual should be and, in the most, lacking in metaphysical significance, but it was nevertheless a social ritual involving religion (Christian excuse), politics and psychology (release of social tensions, strengthening the communitarian bonds, indirect support for the providing authorities) and whereby power was being articulated, in dynamic conversion between the private and public spheres. In transit between the two during the social mingling, every individual was supremely empowered, if still briefly, not from metaphysical sources but in a mass phenomenon of sanctioned social deviancy, that of a playfully guiltless social bypass. As opposed to the chosen ones in the initial forms of masked rituals, the participants were the ones doing the choosing themselves, in what was undoubtedly a secondary form of empowerment refused by very few and which validated masks as providers of the combined freedoms of anonymity, of exuberant liberation and of voyeurism. However, despite uniting performers and audience, Carnivals only

43 superficially united Self and Other (although still engendering a stronger sense of the community, as the Greek drama had before them) and particularly dissociated the individuals from their community on the deeper levels, exactly because of the above freedoms leading towards the cultivation of self-gratification. In that egocentric aspect, somewhat paradoxically given their „voyeuristic hideout‟ character, Carnival masks were also self-referential on the more profound level where their main purpose was showcasing – parading – the wearers in all their finest, real or fanciful. They were thus an extension of their imagination and pride, of their inner world, a spilling-over or „blooming‟ of their private sphere into a larger one, onto the public sphere. It is then precisely by that extension of the private sphere that social power, in lieu of any supernatural source, and as if by proxy of an artistic auto-deification, is articulated in the transformed mask ritual that is Carnival, via a method which we may term „escapism‟ or „liberation‟. A particular case of Carnival occurring at a brief later moment were the entertainments known as Court Masques, a hybrid genre of literature and choreography also of Italian descent but exclusive to England in its development, given for, and not seldom with, the ruling English monarchs, particularly the Tudors and the Stuarts. They were unique occasion-based (wedding, enthronement, etc.) performances, partly formed on earlier traditions of „mummings‟ and „disguisings‟, whereby mime and dance would be offered as homage to various noblemen at their manors, and partly derived from carnivalesque processions and Roman triumphal marches (Adams 1979: 315). Masqued performers would put on elaborate and allegorical shows, in some way glorifying the royal power or the very person of the ruler, or both. This was achieved by means of including the symbol or often the real person of the monarch in the masque, such that e.g. s/he was portrayed as the judge of various „quarrels‟ between mythical figures or personified abstracts, such as seasons, lands, virtues or vices, etc., which was nothing other than a thinly-veiled allegory for the “exalted conception of the divine right of kings” (Creaser 1984: 118). This set-up was further enhanced by the creation of the anti-masque towards the later years of the masques‟ popularity, by poet and playwright Ben Jonson at the behest of Queen Anne. The anti-masque provided a grotesque counterpart to the more elaborate and

44 graceful „masque proper‟, and was therefore intended to set off the orderly and more cultivated character of the latter as signifying, once again, the reach of the sovereign‟s royal powers, metaphorically and flatteringly thus extended to metaphysical proportions, i.e. creating order out of chaos and so forth (Limon 1990: 67). The opposition between anti-masque and masque was also based on acting styles, social barriers, choreography and music, as the former opened with a chaotic scene of professional actors playing negative human attributes, inanimate objects or natural elements, etc., and dancing about in some suggested degree of disarray. They were chased away by the triumphal entrance of the nobility playing loftier elements, embodiments of order etc., in lavish costume, parading on floats and executing highly stylised choreographed numbers (geometric patterns, symbolic shapes), often with various mechanical props. At the end of the performance, after several dance routines and intervening speeches, mime or singing by courtiers or even household servants if so gifted, the masque performers would invite members of the audience to dance with them. Their „breaking through the fourth wall‟ thus only enlarged the previously established metaphysical aura of the monarch, adding concrete weight to it “by meshing the symbolic overtones of the masque‟s praise with the reality of the attending court‟s presence” (Orgel 1975: 76). The Court Masques reached the combined apex of both their opulence and articulation of stately power in the Stuart Age, by which point the parade character of the royalty-honouring performance had shifted towards ritual use. Used even by the Tudors to consolidate monarchic image, it had become a clever political tool in the reign of Charles and Anne, as the queen was a fairly active performer herself and made political use of the masques whether internally, with/on the native nobility, or for “diplomatic occasions” (Barroll 1998: 123). In the above – as well as in the similar French and Italian court performances of the time, less elaborate and stylistically closer to the English masques‟ origins, as Brotanek (1902) and Cunliffe (1907) argue – we see a different paradigm of articulating power to what the Carnival revellers used, although it is, essentially, its outgrowth. Whether including them, given by them or only for their glorification, the masques necessarily connected to the monarchs, thus transforming the initial

45 parade meanings into those of an elaborate, if stylised, ritual. Most courtiers had some part to play in the greater masque, if nothing else, at least by dancing at the end of it, in a process of gradual inclusion of all present completed via the creation of the anti-masque. In a sense, masques were the reversal of the powers of carnivals, considering that performers and audience were almost switched, such that the most visible political ritual performed here went from the many performers to the one most significant member of the audience (the king or the honoured noble), even when they occupied „the same‟ position as performers in the masque. As such, it was no longer escapism that power – political power – was being articulated by, but a form of flattery, of persuasion in the larger sense, despite the process never being one-directional, i.e. consisting of as much adulation of the king as, if not even more, considering the perpetual need to reassert the monarch‟s position in the public eye, of the king‟s service towards their court. The set-up probably worked as a kind of power-negotiating persuasive loop, whereby the royalty offered the court the opportunity of the performance, such that they be able to glorify him/her but also that s/he be able to ingratiate themselves with the court via the flamboyant spectacle they were creating together. We thus notice surprising similarities of the masques to the primeval forms of mask rituals, namely that the former seem to have also worked as social enforcers, and equally for a select part of the people, those initiated not by gender and warrior prowess but social status and artistic talent. Masques enforced instead not by direct lawmaking, but by persuasion mingled with a certain kind of suspension of disbelief stirred once more in the right conditions of the exalted atmosphere of the performance and given the spectacle of the king‟s transcendent nature. On the other hand, the masques of course also showed signs of hybridisation with the Carnival festivities they less remotely descended from. The imagery evoked by them was also considered the manifestation of the ruler‟s imagination and, overall, of his mind and intellect (Limon 1990: 67-68), but here the mechanics of the self‟s empowerment were, as we have seen, reversed. Performers and audience members did mix, but they never truly became one, save for the most prominent member of both, the monarch, whose any action made him/her partake of both, as, even when strictly in the audience, s/he needed “to be seen seeing”

(Orgel 1975: 42). With its high elaboration of detail and metaphorical etiquette, the masque straddled the boundaries between parade and ritual, as we may well conclude that the parades of costumes, floats and dance routines were in fact the ritual interplay. A carnival-goer sought, if not in so many words, to expand his freedom and power with the expansion of his private sphere onto the public one. Yet in the case of masques there was an interplay and even merger of the private and public spheres, based on the mutual need of monarch and subjects to be seen by and with one another in what was both a haven from the political turmoil of the day and an optimistic projection of the future. The end of the performance played on specifically that merger, by encouraging the effects of the cognitive paradox set up by the intradiegetic performers – considered as being within the monarch‟s mind – coming out to directly engage the audience like a literal „dream come true‟. In case the king or queen had been part of the performance, the illusion was furthered by the blurring of the two sets of deictic markers, combining the „there‟ with „here‟ but keeping the „s/he‟ in place. In fact, it was this unity of the royal person from „here‟ with his/her more glorious aspect from „there‟ that managed to empower the monarch with an apotheosised aura and cause the coalescing of the court around him/her, in a form of articulating power which we may term seduction. It was comparable to the process occurring in the ancient Greek theatre, where a like effect was achieved by means of identifying the glorious ancestors with their progeny audience. Similarly, in the Tudor and particularly Stuart masques, the dramatic distance between audience and performers – who, as we have seen, occasionally mingled – was at a medium value, maintained by an artfully sustained balance of sovereign-due awe and familiarity with their „only human‟ persona. Back to the Commedia dell’ Arte, we are met with the same middle distance between the performers and the audience. Indeed, the actors did portray types that were easily identifiable and relatable, regardless of whether they were touring their homelands or Europe, and even regardless of the regional vocabulary, or even language, they used, as the characters‟ antics and the plots were easy to follow. It did not take much suspension of disbelief to thus see them as rather lifelike humans. But the characters displayed on stage and portrayed with their typifying

47 masks nevertheless introduced – improving the means and methods of the Greek theatre on this point – a „fourth wall‟ between audience and performers, despite the undoubted direct interaction of the two „sides‟ during the shows. For the most part, despite acknowledging the reality-grounded potentialities of the plot, the audience were aware they were being told a (funny) story, and indeed one in which the articulation of power by the performers over the audience took the negative form of persuasion, i.e. derision. By it, by lampooning the vices and misconceptions of various types of the public, the artists were likely able to induce some social change, however slight, in a different way from that of the Greeks, appealing to perhaps baser emotions and reactions, but nonetheless effective. By means of the fourth wall raised between the performance space and that of the audience, there was also a clear separation of the private and the public domains, both for the actors and their public. Namely, starting from the conceptual free-for-all of the Carnivals, the rising Renaissance theatres further emphasised such ideas as individual creation and authorship – though they were themselves at the very beginning of that trend – combining them with the genuine talent of the artists in order to create travelling troupes of genuine stars. Moreover, various actors would be more experienced and more adept at performing a specific small range of characters, or even introduced some that would, upon gaining popularity, forever be linked to their name (such as the very famous previously mentioned Isabella subtype of the Female Lover). Knowing that provides us with yet another layer of understanding of the standardisation of the Commedia masks: in but a few visual cues, they could reveal to the keen playgoer not only the caricature of a human type, how s/he will perform in the play and how his/her counterparts should be dealt with in real life, but often who might be playing them as well. And while actors were certainly distinct among themselves and to the audience, from individual talent to costumes, the great majority of the audience would have – unlike the Greek citizens – remained unconnected while enjoying the play. The latter did unite them in laughter but, in the end, could only provide them with so much in terms of an overarching human experience: they saw general and ubiquitous human types, which they were implicitly taught to ridicule (and perhaps feel for the various mishaps of the Lovers), but were told nothing about any

48 admixture of the private and the public, of how the individual should relate to the community apart from the sense of „every man for himself‟. Chains of mutual trickery and profiting, while raising laughter and applause, did little to engender any kind of social cohesion. The examples of the ever-starving Zanni having to cheat before they were cheated on only reaffirmed their belief in a semi-fluid but ruthless „scavenging chain‟, where weakness was readily exploited and intelligence – cunning in particular – was the survivors‟ (only) virtue. Things were only slightly less grim for the European masses of the Renaissance than they had been in the Dark Ages, with war, famines and the plague still always around the corner, so it only made sense for the Commedia dell’ Arte performers to infuse that distinct kind of Schadenfreude-based bittersweet humour into their plays the more they traveled away from home, across Europe. Yet in England, partly influenced by the comedians‟ plays and partly drawing on the early notes of a „national patriotism‟ under their triumphant Queen Elizabeth I, William Shakespeare helped establish a new theatrical tradition, with characters universal enough, but unmistakeably English, that not only entertained, but unified and inspired his audience. His works bear the mark of the spirit of his age, of intellectual curiosity for all under the sun and in particular of the possibilities to challenge the known limitations, notably of such absolutes as political, religious and patriarchal authority, viz. Greenblatt (2010). They also contain many references to the rituals of either the public or the private sphere, rural or courtly, tucked under the multilayered fabric of his enchanted reality featuring times and places that sound real, feel real and work in believable ways, yet are always slightly out of the reach of the ordinary. Many of his characters, particularly those appearing in his subversively profound comedies, are faced, much like the protagonists of the ancient mask rituals, with the extraordinary and the uncanny challenging their creativity. They encounter besotting Gordian knots raveling up the threads of their reality, which they, far from mere “playthings of the gods”, must strive to set right once more, not by the might of the sword, but by the earnest cunning of their wits, in order to gain mastery of their own destiny.

One of the best examples of such creative syncretism is found in the comedy aptly titled A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In it, the ongoing dichotomy of appearance and essence is twisted around several diegetic planes to reveal a royal couple‟s nuptial festivity, four young men and women in a fortuitously complicated courting ritual and a supernal squabble over a changeling resolved via orgiastic- alchemical rites in disguise. The royal couple, Theseus and Hippolyta, plan their wedding festivities to include what turns out to be the involuntarily hilarious production of a merry band of “rude mechanicals”. Of mythical fame, the two spouses-to-be are not explicitly related to their ancient Greek legendary counterparts, but nor are they said to be different people, pertaining, as we have shown above, to a fluid reality (indeed, an oneiric space) where possible and impossible coexist and even interweave, to the point where it makes perfect sense that one could be several and the Self could be the Other. The two appear as embodiments of the male and female principles, respectively. Theseus is the Greek hero who slew the Minotaur, thus a man that is mightier than a man and bull combined, in the context of multiple civilisations, even beyond the Mediterranean, having depicted their major impregnating gods as divine bulls. As Theseus, the king is not only strong, but wise as well. He is the vanquisher of the maze holding the Minotaur and thus one who has conquered his own lesser nature and/or transcended the earthly web of illusions, as recommended by the floors of multiple European medieval cathedrals having absorbed the local symbolism of Celtic ritual mazes, as well as by the Shakespearean overlapping diegetic layers themselves. On the other hand, Hippolyta is the name of the Amazon queen whose precious sash or girdle, a gift of the virgin hunter-goddess Artemis, Herakles needed to take to complete his sixth labour. Incidentally, if we interpret the labours of Herakles as the yearly procession of the sun through the twelve zodiac constellations, and thus the taking of Hippolyta‟s belt as corresponding to the sign of Virgo, we appropriately discover the beginning of the sign to correspond with summer solstice, or indeed the “Midsummer” (from the Celtic feast of that name, celebrating the peak of solar/male potency). Hippolyta‟s mention in the context of

50 the nuptial ceremony points to the imminent consummation of her marriage, the removal of her girdle, no longer by forceful Herakles, the openly solar hero of the ancient age, but by the more resourceful Theseus, a well-rounded hero-of-all-trades more befitting of the English Renaissance and its emerging ethno-cultural awareness. The Mechanicals are another set of intricately crafted characters, both inside and outside their diegesis, as from the point of view of the audience they are actors playing actors playing parodic characters (despite their best intentions of producing something akin to a mumming or masque in honour of the royal couple). Their presence, adding comic relief and perhaps ensuring the unaware readers gloss over the more esoteric meanings of the play, may also be construed as a knowledgeable wink to the Commedia dell’ Arte performers, despite Shakespeare‟s fictional troupe being somewhere in the vague zone between improvisation and rather memorisation as far as their hilarious delivery is concerned. Through them, theatre experts may also reconstitute the contrast between the „more organic‟ plays conceived directly for certain actors to perform in – as had become the case with the Commedia dell’ Arte – and the more erudite, or „mainstream‟, form of theatre of the time, wherein established playwrights would produce fairly complete, character-driven scripts and place the drudgery of finding the right cast of actors to fit those characters in the hands of others. Nevertheless, Shakespeare‟s “rude mechanicals” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3.2.10) are, despite their facile surface, an important set of characters easing the readers‟ way into the „revealing and concealing‟ depths of the play. Firstly, it is through them that we are once again shown the similarities between mask rituals and their sublimated forms recovered by theatre, as both the masked performer and the actor must, as mentioned before, go through various preparatory micro-rituals in order to ensure both he and the character would be „spiritually aligned‟. In this particular case of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Mechanicals choose to conduct their rehearsals in the enchanted forest, where they soon get lost, as profane members before the initiating entrance of the subsequent rites involving „star actor‟ Nick Bottom.

Regarding the latter, we must bear in mind that, as opposed to the others, largely restricted to restorative crafts, he is a weaver, a rather poetically appropriate prosaic occupation for a theatrical lead performer. Once more in opposition to the others in the troupe, who mostly accept whatever parts are provided with by their leader, Bottom actively seeks out a part befitting what he holds to be his great performative talent, and is fairly disappointed with what lot he gets as far as their little would-be masque is concerned. Nevertheless, he has a significant part to play in the future unfolding of events between the human and the fairy realms. Concerning the Athenian youths, it is also of note that Hermia and Lysander, the early couple, are the ones who wish to flee “the sharp Athenian law” (Dream, 1.1.164). The phrase can read equally well as the oppressive spirit of (patriarchal) civilisation, which they wish to leave in favour of a simpler, rural life, but also as the rule of reason, i.e. of the conscious mind, which they would escape by recourse to fantasy and perhaps ceremonial use of certain psychotropic fungi or herbs, not uncommon in the age of Shakespeare, nor in the ancient Greece he warpedly references (cf. the comments on the Dionysian rituals). If the latter is the deeper and perhaps more accurate reading of the two, then theirs and the faeries‟ loathing of the “clamorous owl” (Dream, 2.2.6) may be realistic in both a symbolic and physiological way, that of more vivid sensorial perceptions, and all subsequent events taking place in the deep, dark enchanting woods, from their losing their way and engaging in both spontaneous violence and affection, to such audience cues as the names of the fairies in Titania‟s retinue4, could very well point to a narcotic Midsummer‟s dream. Secondly, their names are also likely significant in an alchemic reading of the play, where Hermia (the female version of the Thrice-Great Hermes patroning the alchemists) and Lysander (“release of man”) are followed by Demetrius (the male version of goddess Demeter, the literal Earth Mother of the ancients) and Helena. The latter‟s name ironically, in this context of her being less wanted than Hermia,

4 Mustard seeds, pea blossoms, moths‟ wings or spider silk (cobweb) would have been easy to procure from the apothecaries of the time, selling both healing and harming pharmacological products, and whose inventories significantly overlapped with those of the “witches”, i.e. the folk healers‟ (cf. Gr. pharmakos, magic potion).

52 connotes the strong feminine allure of her iconic predecessor, Helen of Troy, but also references the Moon, as selene, or an electric spark, helene. They are subsequently put to sleep (material death), once again using a potent botanical extract, woken up (spiritual rebirth) and stirred about the dark womb-like cauldron (immersed in generative moisture and warmth) of the forest by Puck as the elements of his world-healing alchemical purification reuniting male and female on all ontological levels. Thirdly, the case has been made, beginning notably with Sigmund Freud – e.g. in his conversations with Wilhelm Fliess (Bernfeld 1955: 465) and, in passing, in The Uncanny (1919) – that the immersion of the Athenian youths into the increasingly confusing and bizarre (i.e., unheimlich) woods, in a mind-warping experience of the uncanny, for things there are everything but what they appear as, is indeed similar to a dream experience. Spontaneous lust and aggression, neurosis and melancholia, sexual taboos and fetishes (zoophilia, aphrodisiac abuse, ritualised pre-nuptial violence, isolation), as well as the many dominant father figures are all staples of the later Freudian discourse, with even the narrative planes depicting the characters fitting into the Austrian psychoanalyst‟s triple structure of the human psyche. Thus, the world of the fairies presents a polarisation alongside the male/Id and female/Superego divide, between the rash and vengeful Oberon and the rational (then also out of control) Titania. Between them, the fairy retinue (with the exception of Puck, who is rather an Id avatar) symbolises the Ego, just as most of the Mechanicals are Ego-like, with the exception of Bottom (Id) and Quince (tentative Superego). Even Theseus‟ court follows a similar division, albeit a more complicated one, with Theseus as the Ego caught between the high values of Superego Hippolyta (viz. the Pyramus and Thisby scene) and the vengeful autocracy of Id/Superego Egeus. Through the overlapping layers of the proto- Freudian dream, the political mirrors the mythological and the cultural, as social identities are retraced and linked across time. Finally, the two squabbling fractions of the world of faeries, Oberon‟s and Titania‟s courts, constitute the main symptoms of a state of turmoil affecting both their world and the mortals‟, in many ways also reminiscent of the state of facts in the perpetually gender-negotiating Elizabethan England. The eventually fixed two

Athenian couples, the royal couple of Theseus and Hippolyta, as well as the two immortals ruling over the sprites, are in corresponding relationships to one another and may even be said to embody the same fundamental pair, merely shifted along temporal and spatial-dimensional coordinates. Some are not yet properly united, others are soon to be united, while the last couple is faced with a potential schism of their marital union. When their two worlds align, the pair is in a state of unrest, of unbalanced yang and yin, so it is only fitting that their ultimate attempt at setting their two dimensions right again would occur on Midsummer‟s Eve, the summer solstice, when the sun, as the male fertilising force, is at its yearly peak, and entering the constellation of Virgo. That supreme level of the hieros gamos, the cosmic wedding, is what Puck‟s restorative alchemy attempts to (re-)establish on all the ontological levels of those involved. It is a total ritual of the two worlds, or what Theseus candidly refers to as a “rite of May” (Dream, 4.1.133). As stated earlier, the term “rite of May” would not have sounded out of place for Shakespeare‟s contemporaries, as diluted and hidden forms of the ancient rites of Dionysus or, later, of the Druidic Goddess on Beltane Eve, would have commonly been associated with – and publicly become – rural Christian festivals by that time. Of course, to the great majority of the audience, “rite of May” would have simply implied said Christian pastoral festivities, filled with relatively innocent field frolicking and dancing around the Maypole, often in association with the holiday of St. George, given great public significance as the patron saint of England. Yet one may assume that Shakespeare, immersed in both the English countryside of partly disguised, partly misremembered rituals and the social milieu of the Queen, whose intelligentsia were allegedly well-versed in astrology, alchemy and ceremonial magic, would not have introduced such an accurate reference without meaning it. It is thus well meaningful to read in the brief and otherwise implausible adoration of the asinine Bottom by Titania, Queen of Fairies, the symbolic performance of an ancient hierodulic ritual transcending class and, here, even ontological barriers. Once again involving the “little western flower, / Before milk- white, now purple with love‟s wound” (Dream, 2.1.168-169) flower in the West”, highly symbolic by its nocturnal habitat and its colour, both royal and psychic, and

54 particularly its “love juice” (Dream, 3.2.38) as perhaps a psychotropic aphrodisiac, the ritual addresses the Fairy Queen. With the full participation of her followers, she embarks on what seems to be a hallucinatory dream, with herself as a High Priestess and the mortal labourer elevated to the condition of a theriomorphic god, still skeptical as he is brought offerings of food and garlands befitting his new cult- central position. Thus, their hieros gamos play touches upon another level of mythological restoration, by redesigning the classical pattern of the pursuing satyr enamoured with the fleeing nymph, their attitudes now switched such that the feminine polarity is turned to active, and thus effecting yet another permutation to the multiple guises of the archetypal couple. It should be noted that the play elicits similarly high amounts of suspension of disbelief (and retro-rationalising via Puck‟s multi-level, multi-purpose epilogue) from both its audience and its intra-diegetic participants, who have all been engaged, without mutually realising it, in interwoven layers of fanciful trans- cultural play. As the enchantment wears off and the couple taking part in the most central and truest “rite of May” as a trans-dimensional hierogamy, Titania and Bottom, revert to their „true selves‟, they reject the hazy memory of their actions, either through a sense of marital propriety and spousal reconciliation or through skepticism and chosen ignorance, respectively. Nick Bottom, his name having already tagged him as with Arlecchino‟s fox-tail hat for his farcical, but no less profound, initiation journey, is perhaps the most transformed of them all, and now has to cope with the ineffable and peer-incommunicable truths received in his wondrous “dream”, such as “man is but an ass” (Dream, 4.1.209), in classic man- and-mask identification. Once again, their actions fall in line with those of the disguised participants in the presumably orgiastic rituals of the ancient Mysteries, who, upon having completed their ritual duties, would simply return to their daily identities without any fear of public identification or any sense of regret (cf. Saturnalia and Carnivals). They thus reverted to the established order, which their island of chaos only reinforced in opposition, if through the social and psychological improvement of those involved.

Starting from the pre-literary societies and moving upwards, to Greek theatre and beyond, there is a marked increase in the degree of stage freedom that masked characters appear to have within their own diegeses. The „performative elasticity‟ they gradually acquire throughout time is yet another characteristic of the evolution of masked characters across genres and time. Starting off from the fertility, initiation and social-regulating rituals and often drawing on their symbols and imagery, the „stage career‟ of masks gradually took on a more realistic or animated feel, by extra-diegetic changes ranging from inaccurate transcriptions or recalling to their being referenced and reused in other works, to changing from one iteration of their performance to the other, something which the tradition-restricted initial masks could not do. The peak of spontaneity and, thus, of lifelike zaniness, of the characters was most likely reached in the Commedia dell’ Arte, but the Bard more than compensated the drawback on his side by introducing the multiple dynamically embedded diegetic layers that characterise most of his plays, further increasing the verisimilitude of his theatrical performances. The above was one example among the several easily identifiable in Shakespearean plays of storylines containing multiple layers of reading encasing references of certain socially-embedded rituals already in altered popular use but still traceable back to their communitarian mask-ritual forms. Another example can be readily provided by another season-titled play, celebrating not the union of male and female but rather that of life and death in order to advance some modern ideas about the world, governance and even theatre, namely The Winter’s Tale. We shall consider the three main interlocking levels of the play, namely the socio-political, the occult-mythological and the metaliterary, in order to provide potentially novel ways of construing this sometimes overlooked play. Firstly, it can be treated as a vehicle for denouncing the abuses of absolutist monarchs, through the character of Leontes, who tyrannically overrules the better advice of his noblemen on paranoid misjudgements, as the noblemen themselves sparking the debate of monarchy versus democracy/oligarchy. The other king, Polixenes, strongly opposed to his son marrying his shepherdess lover, becomes the butt of anti-class society criticism, while perhaps a more Machiavellian point raised is that, in the context of the rulers‟ “folly” (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.294), even

56 treason (as is Camillo‟s) can serve a lofty purpose and ultimately bring about a happy end. Secondly, the play features a wealth of natural and mythical elements hinting at overarching ritual meanings. Queen Hermione, arguably the central character, as well as her daughter Perdita and others, undergo cycles of death and resurrection/loss and recovery, corresponding to agricultural cycles, of great importance in the ancient mysteries, particularly for fertility goddesses. After all, the inspiration for Hermione can easily be found in goddess Demeter, the later „Mother Earth‟ of the Greeks in her agricultural valences, whose Mysteries were based on the goddess‟ journey to Hades, in order to find Persephone, her daughter who was lost (“Perdita”). In Greek mythology, her journey was given as the explanation for the cycling seasons, with winter of course corresponding to the period of her subterranean absence and mourning. Thus, her return signaling spring – and joining life, death and resurrection, as per her Mysteries – would indeed correspond to the recovery of the ground (Demeter) from its previous frozen, stone- like condition, much like Hermione re-emerging from her petrified condition. Also of high significance, she is the one to initiate those around her, such as the two kings, who come from the darkness of their ignorance and wrath to discover life-changing truths, in the same way that the sun, whose sovereign symbol they are, was seen as having revived from the darkness in which it plunges during winter. This is hardly surprising from a character who, by bearing the name of the female version of the revered Hermes of the alchemists, manages to become herself characterised as the hermaphrodite and the spiritual all-solvent, further empowered to the status of Queen, or High Priestess. As as psychopomp deity, Hermes would also lead the souls of the dead into and through Hades, therefore Hermione is perfectly qualified to bear the symbol of the one enlightening the two kings and guiding them from darkness towards light. Lastly, the quasi-Galatean ritual of Hermione‟s coming (back) to life gives way to questions regarding the hieratic condition and purpose of the arts (sculpture, music, literature), in ways similar to the ancient Greeks‟ concept of the catharsis via the arts. Metaliterary considerations about the meanings and the reception of literature, authorship and veracity, are introduced as well, with Time itself

57 personified to expound upon some of them, breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience to that end. Calling the explicit attention of the spectators thus provides the right end of the „rabbit‟s hole‟, as in other multi-layered plays containing „incommunicable truths‟, for the readers‟ embarkation upon the personal unraveling of the text‟s meanings. Ultimately, The Winter’s Tale remains a complex play, with its multiple rhythms and reading keys overlapping to create a masterfully polyphonic work of literature. Drawing on the symbols of sun-worshipping societies and subverting them to evoke a de facto hierarchy of all the other characters to the one representing the Mother Goddess, it manages to discreetly teach without preaching, while also leaving valuable hints as to the political and social debates of the time. In doing so, in proving that sensitive information, including suggestions of treason, can always be hidden best in plain sight, Shakespeare‟s style demonstrates on a smaller scale how the symbols and messages – perhaps even the characters – of ancient rituals can seep through the successive layers of history covering them, camouflaged in other messages or more salient art or simply on too small a scale for many to notice, in order to reach the next stage of their being reincarnated, in an age of novel possibilities. In the above examples, as previously noted in other theatrical traditions this far, we may notice the high importance given to female characters and, in general, to affirming the feminine principle as on par with the masculine one – which already constituted a bold statement in the patriarchal societies of Greece, Italy and England as well – if not of higher standing. Despite the glorious rule of Queen Elizabeth I – whose political insight helped her decide to sacrifice marriage and, partly, femininity in the interest of gaining nationwide acceptance and, ultimately, awe as the „Virgin Queen‟ – England, proud of its advanced social and technological principle, was still unwilling to have men and women placed on equal social footing. And that was precisely where Shakespeare‟s subversive genius came into play, uniquely contributing not only to the development of the English language, but to the shaping of Western culture as well. Apart from the lifelike-complex interlocking levels of plot structures in his plays, he continued the Greek tradition

58 of educating the populace via art, yet not by anchoring their development to social and cultural forms of the past but rather by planting suggestions and allowing them to ferment and take root in their minds, by means of such catalysts as English pride and humorous insight. Certainly some of the most advanced and long-reaching ideas his plays planted were in relation to gender and its social construction and representation – most noticeably in his five comedies depicting female characters intra- and extra-diegetically assuming male guises. Renaissance England was a male-dominated society, where a wife was her husband‟s property, legally punishable for having “provoked him to hit her” (Trueman 2009) and indoctrinated from birth that “[w]oman in her greatest perfection was made to serve and obey man”, according to Scottish Protestant reformer John Knox (Wojtczak 2009). As such, there was no practical reason for a man to assume a woman‟s identity, and the rare instances of that happening were considered pardonable exceptions, most often connected with carnivals and private burlesque celebrations. On the other hand, a woman dressing up as a man would have enjoyed access to superior social positions and privileges as long as she was not discovered. That was no longer drunken revelry; it was a crime. Michael Shapiro, in his Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Boy Heroines and Female Pages), reveals that London courts of law of the time scarcely needed any further evidence to convict a woman of being a harlot than having seen her dressed as a man, regardless of her motives and despite the very few actual cases of cross-dressing prostitutes (Shapiro 1996: 16-18). He goes on to contrast the London archives with some of their Dutch contemporaries, which mention women rather cross-dressing for such reasons as finding employment or in self-defence from sexual predators when traveling alone (Shapiro 1996: 18-19). The Dutch sources thus confirm the likelihood of many fictional situations occurring in the Elizabethan theatre, where, instead of advocating licentious behaviour, cross-dressing allowed women to gain access to places, social settings or privileges normally denied to them as women, in order for them to either right a wrong or find happiness. Art may have thus imitated true life, and likely also reinforcing it with its behavioural models. That posed a great threat in an age when theatre was still not

59 removed from crude entertainment for the masses, be it slapstick comedy or carnavalesque celebrations like Twelfth Night, officially linked to Christian holidays but drawing on earlier public practices of Roman and Celtic/Germanic ancestry. The festival of Saturnalia (celebrated only two days away from Twelfth Night) brought about the reversal of the established order, e.g. turning slaves into masters, but that reversal was only temporary, serving as a necessary outlet for social frustrations and, thereby, actually reinforcing the very system it was perceived as being against (Howard 2004). On the contrary, theatres were perennial, physical structures, rekindling the memories of watched plays by their very presence in the urban landscape. Most importantly, they were originally not regulated by the City, being in fact playhouses, areas of “licensed misrule” (Shapiro 1996: 6), initially built outside the City, where they would escape centralised censorship and be free to parody and satirise. Yet even playhouses could not cross certain lines, especially regarding women. By and large, and certainly from a legal perspective, there were no actresses on the stages of Elizabethan England, as (most) female characters were played by men, especially adolescent boys, who were thus called “play-boys”. While remaining in the realm of fiction and representation, their love scenes nevertheless raised objections in the more Puritan-aligned spectators, as well as allegations of pederasty, supporting Stephen Orgel‟s opinion that “England preserves its all-male acting companies as a way of containing female sexuality, a force felt to be more threatening than male homosexuality” (Shapiro 1996: 2). If any changes were to occur in the Elizabethan socio-political climate, the „paralegal‟ position of playhouses made them the perfect hotbeds for disseminating the radical ideas of women‟s empowerment avant la lettre. But their conveying characters were sending mixed signals, even scrambling signals, as the male- mediated female characters on stage were, visibly, transvestites. For, though the educated would have admitted, in theory, that the sexes could be reconciled naturally and perhaps also metaphysically, as speculated in alchemical treatises, it was always the reconciliation on cultural, i.e. social and especially political, terms that was problematic. And it was exactly the latter aspects that the stage cross- dressing symbolically hindered, by having „un-fused‟ disguises allowing the

60 spectators to remain partially aware of, and sometimes interact, with both the male and female persona of the on-stage composite. Such layered self-referentiality replaced a would-be perfect human being with a grotesque, generating a jarring, haunting image “of physical bisexuality, or hermaphrodism, which was generally regarded as monstrous” (Shapiro 1996: 3), only reinforcing the traditional segregation of the sexes. In such a context, William Shakespeare was not the first to feature women outsmarting men or dressing up as them to achieve some lofty goal. In fact, from the 1580s until Cromwell‟s Protectorate closed the theatres, there were eighty-one plays by some forty playwrights to depict heroines donning male attire and subverting their conditions (Shapiro 1996: 8). Instead, he was arguably the one English playwright to portray them most credibly and innovatively. His women run the gamut from lambs to shrews and from common to aristocratic; they love and fight, dream, fear and think, and they change. Some of the most intricate Shakespearean women have to take on male outfits to attain their goals, including love. In doing so, they confound the transvestite stage scrambling effect by appearing in deliberately confusing situations, where they are diegetically cross-dressing too, the cloak of comedy allowing for metatextual gender explorations and peering underneath the many layers of mistaken identity. The multiple self-referential gender layers most importantly introduce the element of choice, undermining the „scientific‟ credo of the time, according to which women were merely imperfect males. It is that choice, when faced with adversity, and how they deal with its complex consequences, which empowers the cross-dressing Shakespearean women, rather than any usurping of male prerogatives. As You Like It is perhaps best known for having originated the famous Shakespearean adage, “All the world‟s a stage/And all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, 2.7.147), in keeping with the playwright‟s known propensity for depicting interwoven plot layers and generating metatextually referential fields, as even the title suggests, the “You” in it directly relating to the audience. It is also the „birthplace‟ of Rosalind, the one Shakespearean woman with the most lines and, perhaps even more so than Portia from The Merchant of Venice

(who only seems to surpass her in determination), one of the few female characters of the age to single-handedly (dis)entangle all the plotlines, since she is, in whichever guise, at the heart of every one of them. As such, she provides a new key for interpreting the title, since her entire persona, male, female, or both (a male playing a female playing a male), as it would have appeared on stage, is deliberately open to interpretation (“there‟s much virtue in If,” as Touchstone the jester wisely points out at 5.4.97), implying the borders between the genders may in fact be less rigid than imagined, or even irrelevant. The play opens on the suggestion of a social climate of usurpers and banished heroes: Frederick has banished his brother, the Duke Senior, taking hold of his duchy, while within it Oliver similarly expels his brother Orlando to keep the entire estate to himself. The Duke Senior‟s daughter, Rosalind, has been allowed to remain at Frederick‟s court only because she is the cousin and childhood friend of Celia, the tyrant‟s daughter. Yet she soon overstays her welcome and is also cast out of the duchy, with Celia accompanying her in protest and out of solidarity into the forest of Arden, where all characters eventually converge. Taking Touchstone, the court jester, along with them, the two young ladies decide to assume new identities for themselves, Rosalind becoming the male Ganymede and Celia, the maiden Aliena. Like Viola becoming Cesario in Twelfth Night, Rosalind adopts a famous male name, to reinforce her future identity as a male. But unlike Viola as Cesario, whose homoerotic signals are mostly symbolically present, by the merger of „Cesario‟ and „Viola‟ as she remains cross-dressed during her betrothal, Rosalind takes the name of Ganymede, “Jove‟s own page” (As You Like It, 1.3.122), (deliberately?) charging her claims to masculinity with overt homosexual tones. Having fallen in love with Orlando as Rosalind, she – already bolder (thus, „more male‟) than Celia prior to their escape – blurs her gender(s) further as she explores more of her underlying masculinity by playing the cold and cynical youth. As such, she probes Orlando‟s true feelings for Rosalind under the guise of his confident Ganymede and even pretends to be “your Rosalind” (As You Like It, 4.1.57) – adding yet another layer of gender play and exploration – in a game of romantic sparring and rehearsals.

Celia, as her name would indicate (from the Latin caelus, “sky”, “heaven”), leads a serene and sheltered life at Frederick‟s court. Evoked as the more feminine of the two young women, she nevertheless undertakes the ultimate act of rebellion, by leaving home and family, and, thereby, most of her own identity up to then (rightly becoming “Aliena”), to be with her best friend, who represents the other relational pole defining her and her world. Their bond may appear as vaguely homoerotic, or perhaps bisexual, if Rosalind‟s latent masculinity is to be considered, but it is never acted upon as such, Celia later marrying Oliver (who restores her identity, in gender and class). On the other hand, in a sense, it is possible that Rosalind may have served her as yet another practice partner, her „masculinity‟ preparing Celia for her future married life. Touchstone, the court jester, enjoys an equally apt name. Just as the real touchstones indicate the quality of gold by having it scratched against their hard surface, his profession as a court jester allows him to come into contact with the most diverse of people, whom he may often mock and caricature, being „abrasive‟ to them to fathom them by their reactions. Within reasonable limits, he is the freest man in the duchy, able to speak his mind, if most often necessarily encrypted in puns and riddles: “the more pity, that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.” (As You Like It, 1.2.81) His condition of being a jester, an artist, a philosopher, privy to people‟s secrets and possessing the cunning and wisdom necessary to find the “gold” inside them, as well as see reality, including art, for the illusion it is (“for the truest poetry is the most feigning”, 3.3.16), provides him with a certain spiritual dimension, as the mystical all-seeing Fool, or Trickster. As one who transcends the limited physical existence, he is however cursed to be solitary, shunned by most of his fellow human beings, who fail to understand him properly and thus fear him, until the end of the play, when he succeeds in marrying Audrey, his partner in countryside mischief (together, they are a couple reminiscent of Arlecchino and Colombina). Banding together for their escape from the usurping court of the ironically- named Frederick („peaceful ruler‟), the three characters constitute themselves as an itinerant group of an assertive woman become a cynical androgyne, a submissive woman become an identity-dispossessed being and a physically-unreachable (thus

symbolically emasculate) spiritualised man retaining his own identity. Their runaway transgendered trinity is thus the inversion of the classical one of the Father, the Mother and the Son, both in concept and representation. While the former typically points downwards when depicted as a graphic symbol (a triangle), from the intuitive concept of a son being the (literal) descendent of a mother and a father, their figure here points upwards, or rather forwards, as Rosalind/Ganymede becomes the spearhead and the actual driving force of their escape, dragging the other two with her. As head of their trinity, Rosalind/Ganymede is best represented by the transgendered symbol, as she herself comments her transition to the Ganymede persona by marking its disguising and empowering elements, respectively an axe (an Amazon symbol, here placed by her loins, thus graphically reconstructing the Venus symbol from her womb as the circle and the axe as the cross) and the male-fetishist hunters‟ spear:

A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh, A boar-spear in my hand. (As You Like It, 1.3.115-116)

Beside her, held together by her both symbolically and diegetically, are Aliena and Touchstone. By the same graphical analysis as above, Celia‟s initial feminine symbol has had the vertical part of the cross removed, much like by the untying of a tether; the new identity thus forged has the graphic aspect of a circle above a flat line, an apt depiction of Aliena‟s wandering and estranged condition. Touchstone, perceived as outside of the average social pool of males for being the transcendent Fool, should thus be represented by an incomplete symbol of Mars, a circle supporting a lateral line not capped with an arrowhead. By the end of the play, both of them will have found their respective mates, being thus reinstated as “full symbols” of their gender, and the temporary trinity will be dissolved as even Ganymede ultimately reverts to Rosalind. In fact, it is this reversal, the symbolic removing of the „extra masculinity‟ of her transgendered icon that creates the necessary conditions for Aliena‟s and Touchstone‟s reinstatement, diegetically as well as graphically, the full arrow taken from Ganymede‟s symbol

64 being dividable and distributable, such that both their incomplete symbols are mended. Prior to that, Rosalind enjoys her double nature, the layers of the composite new entity enabling her to explore new opportunities. While referencing Rosalind, both before and after the forest sojourn, the triple personality layer allows for the expression of identity, be it as the Duke‟s daughter or as the upcoming wife of Orlando; as Rosalind dons the (diegetic) self-effacing attire (becoming Ganymede), she gains security and access to information. Ganymede‟s layers, when self- referencing, bring about extra information and simulated intimacy, as Rosalind, playing Ganymede, offers to be Orlando‟s “own Rosalind” in a rehearsing game between the two, but they also entail the complication of Phebe‟s unwanted affection. Lastly, the ultimate self-effacing of Ganymede – his removal – provides closure, social order and reconciliatory magic, leading to the four weddings, consecrated by the four elements and the classical gods summoned. During their disguised stay in the woods, Rosalind and Celia find a spare moment to philosophise, discussing their gender as nature versus nurture (Fortune) and as woman versus male-dominated society:

Celia: ‘Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally.’ Rosalind: ‘I would we could do so, for her benefits are mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.’ […] Celia: ‘When Nature hath made a fair creature, may she not by Fortune fall into the fire? […] Rosalind: ‘There is Fortune too hard for Nature, when Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit.’ (As You Like It, 1.2.30-47)

In what starts as an idle chat aimed at consoling one another, Rosalind and Celia thus present the main issue the play tackles, regarding gender inequality in Elizabethan times and especially the peer pressure for an individual to act according to the behavioural patterns set out for the gender they pertain to, to act out conventions, regardless of what their natural drives dictate. The mild-mannered Celia makes it even clearer when she makes Rosalind the parting wish of “Your heart‟s desires be with you!” (As You Like It, 1.2.179)

The catalyst challenging their trinity is Phebe, who adds another layer to the social complexity of Ganymede/Rosalind‟s web, confirming the latter as a perfect androgyne. Loved herself by the shepherd Silvius, Phebe stays true to her lunar symbol by being irresolute about him, thus subverting the bucolic cliché of Selene and Endymion. The transgendered trinity‟s presence in the forest further upsets nature, Ganymede making a lasting impression on Phebe, who falls in love with „him‟ and even enlists the aid of Silvius as the messenger of her love. In symbolic terms, Ganymede/Rosalind, as a „perfect human‟ and thus the Renaissance microcosm, cannot avoid generating an irresistible natural (cosmic) attraction for Phebe as the Moon, the same way Silvius, as the personified forest, thus a subject of the Moon, cannot help himself loving Phebe. As Ganymede, the cynical youth is the hyperbole of Rosalind‟s inner masculinity channeled outwards, a male as perfect and complete as „he‟ is largely imaginary. Phebe, her name dedicating her to the Moon, is on the other hand fundamentally female and magic, and while her union with Ganymede would be no less than a cosmic hieros gamos, it is impossible due to “him” being a mere mask, a concealing mirror. The rhythm of her virginity is naturally linked with Silvius, the true Green Man of the realm, the Adam to her as a lunar Eve, and it is this realisation of the chaos produced by the transit of the transgendered trinity that ultimately pushes Ganymede to unmask „himself‟. Claiming to be acquainted “with one most profound in his art and yet not damnable” (As You Like It, 5.2.63), Ganymede performs the magic whereby he disappears and Rosalind takes his place the next dawn. In her doing so, her father, the Duke Senior, meets his long-lost daughter, Orlando meets and will marry his beloved Rosalind (which then also allows Oliver and Celia, and even Touchstone and Audrey, to be wedded), while Phebe is forced to obey her oath and be with Silvius. The happy ending is sealed with a final ritual (masque) presided by a Hymen figure and invoking the blessing of “great Juno‟s crown”, (As You Like It, 5.4.135) confirming Rosalind‟s (re)gained forces, of femininity and maternity respectively. While debating in the woods, Celia and Rosalind do not reach any explicit solution to the social issues pressing them. However, one consistent solution arises from Rosalind‟s behaviour: in blurring the uncrossable boundaries between male and female within her own being, she reveals gender as fluid, and often conjunctural.

Rather than the nature of individuals, it evidences their nurture (or “Fortune”). Rosalind‟s „social experiment‟ of being Ganymede shows that the gender one has or projects outwards should be irrelevant to leading a happy life, making friends or discovering the world, and that, as always in Shakespeare‟s work, the greatest ally of individuals and societies alike is an open mind possessed of copious free thinking. The second solution is put forth by Rosalind herself in the play‟s epilogue (As You Like It, 5.4.194-215), as she breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience (“I charge you, O women […] I charge you, O men […]”). Admitting it “is not the fashion” for a lady to present the epilogue and speculating it should nevertheless be “no more unhandsome” for a lord to present the prologue, the play- boy plainly unravels the play-generated suspension of disbelief towards „her‟ outfit (“If I were a woman”), much like Viola‟s “I am not that I play” (Twelfth Night, 1.5.171). S/he appeals to both men and women (“for the love you bear to men […] for the love you bear to women”) to reconcile on the common grounds of love and human solidarity, as well as art as social catharsis. Elizabethan England, with its commercial theatres and troupes contending for reputation and the favour of the crowds, thus necessarily attuned to the innovations of each other, as well as what stirred the audience, represented the crowning end of the English Renaissance. Its playhouses engaged the public opinion, gauging reactions and disseminating ideas, but especially addressing issues previously thought untouchable and immutable, to the point where, under exceptional circumstances of geopolitical glory and innovation, profound changes would be set in motion. Central to such a backdrop, Shakespeare provided multilayered battlefields for ideas, old and new, to be confronted, in the self-referential and self- effacing interplay of the stage and the mind. Among his best-known and most often performed comedies, As You Like It engages the audience directly, as well as through the compellingly complex Rosalind, denouncing “the constructed nature of patriarchy‟s representations of the feminine” (Shapiro 1996: 3) and appealing for a gender-reconciled society of art and wisdom. We may finally draw some conclusions following the extensive investigations into the Shakespearean material presented above. Firstly, it is important to note that he lived in an age of important transitions, where England recovered from internal

67 strife and, also as a result of that, managed to acquire unprecedented power and prestige abroad. Having a queen on the throne provided an opportunity for the virtual renegotiating of the internal as well as external power balance with regard to gender, if perhaps only in a supra-individual, and thus symbolic, way. This is precisely why Shakespeare, perhaps even more so than his contemporaries, as we have shown, in light of his realistic female characters, was perfectly placed to make the audience ponder the state of things. As in the theatrical traditions we have thus far investigated, the actors of Shakespeare‟s plays, in their capacity as masked performers, were situated at medium dramatic distance from the audience. The fourth wall we have encountered during the Commedia dell’ Arte performances is once more present in England, with the distinction that the traveling troupes of the Italians would simply gather crowds around them and their quickly-assembled backdrops, a fact which reduced dramatic distance. Instead, the Elizabethan playhouses had several types of purchasable seats for the audience, around and increasingly higher above the stage, which increased the distance between actors and audience proportionally with the physical distance from the stage and the comfortableness of the seat, i.e. the more one could afford to pay, the more they could feel entitled to look down upon the performed plot and its characters. At the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, the cheapest „seats‟ available would be on the ground right next to the stage, so the members of the audience making use of that option – incidentally the loudest ones – would often directly interact with the performers and even interrupt the play. Moreover, on the relatability level, the Shakespearean (and the Elizabethan- Jacobean) plays depicted characters which, though often bearing mainland names, were very English in terms of behaviour and attitudes, thus allowing for easier identification and potential influencing. Some of the most prominent aspects Shakespeare seemed to have tried to subvert were related to the constructedness of genre, both on- and particularly off-stage in his days. The verisimilitude of his characters was thus balanced off by the awkwardness of female roles, only permitted to play-boys, whose appearance evoked a failed hermaphrodite offering nothing to solve the gender issue, but rather hindering even the suspension of disbelief. His solution was exposing the playgoers to a comedic „laundrying‟ of gender conventions

68 through many layers, artistic and cognitive, alternatively self-referential and self- effacing, of disguising which he controlled and manipulated. In so doing, Shakespeare turned the original „parade‟ character of his art behind the fourth wall into a form of minute social ritual, with the unwitting participation of the audience, whether on the spot or later at home – a kind of philosophical time-bomb. By it – as if alchemically – the Self could be reconciled with the Other in the harmonious encounter of imagined world citizens who taught via the prodding of the audience towards their asking themselves all the right social questions. Thirdly and finally, if Greek tragedies compelled the viewers to absorb and act upon their lessons via notions of filial and political duty, Shakespeare had the skills and the favourable context to do so – perhaps influenced by the successful examples of the Italian actors – via sheer persuasion, i.e. the seduction of subtle but hard- hitting cues hidden, like „thought tablets‟, in entertainment packets. In that, his comedies (and tragedies) manage to go beyond the Greek ones, by conditioning the spectators to, on one hand, appreciate his plays and thus return for more, but also, while appreciating them, to, in a sense, lower their mental defences and be receptive to the ideas conveyed. Thus, by continuing the marketing similes from the section dealing with the Greek tragedies as advertisements for social activism, Shakespeare‟s plays would come nearer to subliminal advertisement, by using the reward of laughter and of a satisfying happy-end not only to maintain suspension of disbelief, but to equally promote the philosophical questions he wanted the audience reflecting on, from gender conventions to the duties and powers of an English subject.

II. 3. From Novels to Graphic Novels

Closer to our times, we find the novel as the most influential literary genre of the nineteenth and the twentieth century. The audience was back to the original position of maximum distance from the masked performers, i.e. the evoked

69 characters, much like when listening to the narrated myths of yore, except in this case the medium was now visual, and requiring literacy, which restricted the audience somewhat. The medium of the written text, of ample distribution and penetrative power especially after the invention of printing, also transformed the audience, not only by imposing literacy-based separators, but most importantly, by pushing one‟s experience of witnessing fiction performed out of the public sphere and into the private one. A spectacle once put on for a certain important figure – as were the court masques – now all but removed everyone else in the „audience‟, rendering the entire experience of the spectacle much more intimate. Whether the plot made them laugh or cry, the now individualised audience – the One Reader – could do so as they pleased, in a (typically private) place of their choice, where the likelihood of escaping the bothersome interference of other members of the audience was significantly higher than it was in theatres. Novels, like theatre, often had didactic valences, providing food for thought for people around the world, in numbers and locations which theatre had previously not been able to cover, and who could then agree or disagree on what they had read despite cultural barriers or differences in education, social status, wealth, creed or gender. As in the case of the myths of the oral literatures of old, the novel had a pronounced „parade‟ character, completed and transformed into a cognitive and aesthetic ritual by the audience (the readership). Drawing on the experience of the medieval and Renaissance theatre, the ritual aspect of novels – and of reading in general, including the „reading‟ of visual arts and the hybrid forms of the two – grew in prominence especially in the twentieth century, where experiments in the (non- real-time) interplay of author, narrator and reader in order to create meaning together abounded. Nevertheless, as opposed to theatre and the early mask rituals, and closer again to the tradition of narrating or singing myths, the novel was never a performative genre, which also allowed for the creation of distance between the „performers‟, or characters, and the „enunciators‟. Despite a significant initial trend of writing novels as testimonies of extraordinary events supposedly experienced first-hand by their authors, the enunciators were, throughout most of the novel‟s career, cognitively cleft into the (occasionally blurred, multiplied or absent) personae of the author and

70 the narrator. This scheme was further complicated by, on one hand, the historical person of the author being disguised, for various reasons, behind pen names, as well as, on the other hand, by the previously mentioned recent experimenting with the concept of an inexistent author, or multiple and/or unreliable narrators, etc. Even given the many stylistic and structural experiments that novels went through, suspension of disbelief is rarely ever problematic in their case. This is perhaps because the very „constructedness‟ of a novel – a material object opening to reveal language inscribed on its divisions (the pages) as text, whose reading cognitively transports to a virtual reality – could never claim its layers, from the material to the cognitive, to be anything but virtual, despite, as we have seen, attempts at assuring the reader of the veracity or the potentiality of the story. The latter aspect, however, can be problematic in the cognitive registration of the deictic markers, as indeed by not claiming truth, one can go anywhere. For instance, many novels, past or contemporary, present readers with worlds that closely resemble past forms of our own or claim to anticipate events in our future, i.e. merging the imaginary future with the probable historical one. Does then „there‟ stay „there‟ or must it necessarily be conceived of at some point as being „here‟? And if so, are both worlds real or both fictional? As per post-modern conceptions, only the Reader may tell. The beginnings of the novel are linked to a certain sobriety of style, and, as we have seen, to a certain craving of truth or at least verisimilitude, perhaps in fear that virtual stimulation for its own cognitive-imaginative sake would be regarded as ridiculous, counterfeit or time-wasting. The realism of the prose meant a strong drive to draw on the human examples within the author‟s historical reality and produce a similar alternate world based on them and driven by some didactic and/or reassuring principle. No longer were the protagonists gods and demigods or princes and gentry – art was returning to the slums and the gruesome industrial areas with its myriads of poor miscontents, particularly in such „slice-of-life‟ novels as by a Charles Dickens. Quite notably as well, it was also turning to face women, slowly but steadily allowing the ladies of the nineteenth century and beyond to occupy their rightful place as equal creators of mimetic life that the theatre had systematically denied them for centuries, despite the vibrant exceptions we have heretofore described.

As opposed to plays, novels could take advantage of the far superior printing opportunities existent in their centuries, such that authors would be able to publish their work in a serialised format, able to almost instantly gauge the public‟s (commercial) appreciation of their work. This, in turn, led to an interesting state of facts where, even more than in the previous ages of theatre and currying favours by means of playing out praises, authors could simply choose how to maximise their own profits. Soon, this would lead to new relationships between the author, the performers (the characters) and the audience: while the author gradually became quite important, it eventually came to pass that the audience truly realised that their cooperation was vital in creating suspension of disbelief – as well as putting food on the author‟s table. Before long, specialised subgenres of novels would be printed, and writers with a certain specific style would be able to find their right section of the audience and meet their demands. While looking for masked characters or traces of mask rituals in novels, we need to approach some of those niches, foraying into the more recent and more imaginative subgenres such as horror and science-fiction, where indeed we will make the (re)acquaintance of a set of extraordinary gentlemen whose masks, in one way or another, have made them (in)famous. We should first remember that, once again reminiscent of oral literature and mythology but also of the performances of the early masked rituals, the characters in novels are not able to directly interact with the readership – unlike, for instance, the characters played in the Commedia dell’ Arte or Elizabethan plays – and were only as spontaneous and as „alive‟ as the author has conceived of them or managed to render them, via the voice of the narrator or the characters‟ own words and actions. They are thus closer to the spiritual characters played by the performative mask rituals of old, which were also fixed in certain behavioural ruts set by mythology and tradition. What that means for the characters of a novel is that everything committed in writing can be assumed as purposeful. And that, further in our context of identifying and interpreting masks and the means they articulate identity and power, simply means that the very reason behind a mask could be a virtual question addressed by the author, and which the reader needs to answer.

One such question can first be traced in the eighteenth century, regarding the still somewhat controversial figure of the Man in the Iron Mask, or simply The Iron Mask, first mentioned anonymously in a Dutch anthology of 1745, but whose story was debated and rewritten at length over the following centuries, making its way into cinema, television, etc. According to the subsequent retellings of Voltaire and Dumas, either the proper or the bastard son of Louis XIV was imprisoned for life, for reasons such as having struck his brother in anger, or because of a plot by his brother, etc. He was not only locked behind the iron bars of various island prisons, but also behind an iron mask applied to his face such that his identity, presumably strikingly similar to that of the royal family, would forever be effaced (particularly since he was reported dead on the battlefield). There are several things that fascinate the audience regarding the mental image of the Iron Mask. One of them may even be a certain sense of Schadenfreude in considering „how the mighty have fallen‟, while questions have been raised as to how the insanitary hot and humid environment in his mask did not cause the lethal infection of any wounds he may have had. However, we would argue that it is precisely this cognitive dissonance that draws us to the subject, of the beauty and the beast juxtaposed on the same body (face), of the youth and beauty left to wither away behind a crude and cold monstrous visage presumably barely revealing any kind of features. The phenomenon is somewhat similar to that of watching a knight pulling down his visor. The noble and/or handsome man disappears, for his place to seemingly be taken by a metal giant with heavy weaponry. Except that when we see a knight do so, we can feel his determination and his eagerness for battle, wherein he will slay or be slain, and yet die proud; when the young prince received the mask, it was against his will, in a sense a violation of his beauty and his prestige. There was no epic outcome to wait for, the fatal wound – of body but more so of the mind – had already been delivered. Ultimately, his is a sad and a potentially true story (a tidbit of information that is tantalising enough in its own right) about the heartless rigours of an antiquated class-based justice system and the implicit dread of absolute power. His is the story

73 of a fairly innocent man who was effectively turned into a monster against his will, a monster that restricts and frightens even him, yet a monster with which he has to live. A similar situation, up to a point, can be found in Robert Louis Stevenson‟s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In it, physician Dr. Henry Jekyll struggles to maintain a reputable appearance within the Victorian climate of conformism and hypocrisy, despite his antisocial violent impulses waiting for the chance to surface and wreak havoc. At face value, the 1886 novella is thus an allegory of man‟s constant struggle between his higher (or “more civilised”) and his lesser nature, a cautionary tale encoding a clear Christian moral explaining its instant popularity and cross-demographic readership in Stevenson‟s contemporaneous Scotland. Upon a closer inspection, however, the reader may notice elements harking back to the very dawn of mankind: Henry Jekyll is a socially disengaging man leading a solitary life hidden out of the reach of most people, in perpetual “restless” experimentation and who ends up trying his concoction upon himself, with terrifying and yet edifying results. In other words, Henry Jekyll may be forcefully compared to a wildly driven ascetic figure using chemicals to enter altered states of conscience, in which he engages in a literal interchange with beastly essences, in order to bring back deeper, chilling insight regarding various planes and modes of existence. He is, in a scientifically unsafe way, a modern shaman. The mask he starts wearing and with which he becomes so irreparably entangled is the self-referencing (e.g. the oversized clothes) persona of one Mr. Edward Hyde, a shorter ape-like man personifying the impulses of eros and thanatos unbound by reason, impulses which Jekyll wished to have discarded in the interest of his own chemical betterment (forced self-evolution towards a state of almost bodiless beatitude as later described in H. G. Wells‟ Eloi). While unconnectable to Hyde, Jekyll momentarily enjoys an overwhelming sense of freedom and of removal of social and personal guilt – Hyde is the evil Other, a scapegoat conveniently solely responsible for the cruelty which both remember, and, ultimately, a welcome outlet for his pent-up aggression and frustrations (an individual Saturnalia, yet which grows out of hand). Hyde can do whatever Jekyll dared not, and it does not take long for him to desire more and more freedom, a freedom which Jekyll himself grows addicted to. The subhuman eventually craves nothing less than complete and sole

74 dominion over all that is Jekyll‟s – a total substitution – but his greed, and then his panic, get them both killed in the end. Jekyll himself regards Hyde as something of a mask at first, confident he can use and dispose of the vicious hominid, which is after all supposed to be a part of him. However, its very excision, i.e. its removal from within his structures of organic control, causes the chemical imbalance (and thus the addiction) within Henry Jekyll. In shamanistic terms, it may be said that Jekyll used the irrecoverably impure substance in order to force open a gateway which he, as the cliché would have it, „was never meant to tamper with‟ – a gateway towards the abyssal depths of his own soul and, arguably, towards the wild depths of early man‟s instinctual aggression, which he cannot control and will instead possess him. To draw an equally viable alchemical parallel, by using the impure substance, his Great Work is doomed from the very start, as he does not achieve a transmutation of the self towards a higher state of being, but only corrupts and debases himself further. The freedom he gains is thus merely the illusion of freedom, hardly a Promethean freedom in keeping with the Romantic ideals, derived by toil and vision and aimed at bettering mankind, but a Cainite freedom, a cursed freedom to roam and never find peace but to lust for more and more destruction. If The Iron Mask was monstrous because of his not being able to be perceived as a man, because one cannot see the real him, Jekyll and Hyde are together and separately monstrous because we can see what they are like on the inside and that frightens us because of the implication that we could be the same. In a sense, the interlocked figure of Jekyll and Hyde may also be a retelling of the ancient myth of the Minotaur, except in the modern terms of scientific abuse and perhaps also of the implications of civilisation and its constraints. Jekyll and Hyde has spawned well over a hundred adaptations for cinema and television, its dual-nature motif pervading popular culture to this day, from comic books and video games to vocabulary, where „Jekyll and Hyde‟ is a phrase labeling one very polar or inconstant in behavior. The story conceptually links to alchemical literature, as discussed above, as well as with the Romantic and Gothic texts devoted to the doppelgänger phenomenon and to Scottish devil stories. It also draws on similar concepts appearing in E. T. A. Hoffmann, E. A. Poe and Théophile Gautier, and thematically belongs to the more pessimistic discourse of the end of the

Victorian age, where the previous hype of progress had come under question, particularly with regard to such themes as social hypocrisy and the role of the Western civilisation in the world. In that sense, the novella may even read as a racial allegory about the interdependence of the developed and developing nations. The character‟s haunting duality reappears in contemporary pop culture, in such famous comic-book characters as The Hulk and Harvey Two-Face. The former, also a product of out-of-control science but presenting a reversal of the Jekyll and Hyde motif by The Hulk being much larger than his human counterpart, Dr. Banner, and often a force for good (or at least lesser evil), despite the colossal destruction he leaves in his wake5. Harvey Two-Face, a recurrent antagonist of Batman, resembles the original by his reputable past as an attorney before his disfigurement and is a grotesque literalisation of the permanent tensions between Ego and Id, between man and monster, tensions which are most often resolved by chance – the toss of his emblematic coin – ruling in favour of one of his „faces‟. But if Jekyll found the chilling, addictive and uncontrollable thrill of „do what thou wilt‟ when in the guise of Hyde, Griffin, the protagonist of Herbert George Wells‟ The Invisible Man (1897), took things one step further, in terms of deliberation, as well as of madness. His monstrosity is also provided by our lack of cognitive and aesthetic access to him: he is there and yet not, wielding the frightfully unsettling power of seeing while not being seen. The Invisible Man is also a cautionary tale, a novel raising the issue of the unfortunate consequences of often getting what one wished for. The allegedly brilliant albino medical student named only Griffin (subsequently Jack Griffin, starting with the 1933 cinema version) wanted to make a name for himself and become wealthy by discovering the invisibility formula, without his supervising professor sharing the credit. Although he is successful in turning his neighbour‟s cat invisible using a prototype formula, Griffin starts being questioned about his activities and is forced to make himself invisible and flee, setting fire to the building. Alone and unable to return to his visible state, he burgles and has delusional fantasies

5 Stan Lee, co-creator of The Hulk: “I combined Jekyll and Hyde with Frankenstein […] and I got myself the monster I wanted, who was really good, but nobody knew it. He was also somebody who could change from a normal man into a monster, and so, a legend was born.” (Sound on Sight, 2010).

about setting up a “Reign of Terror”, being eventually stopped by his former friend Kemp and the authorities. It should be noted that Griffin actively sought invisibility from the beginning, realising its great potential for power over the others, financially (as he has robbed before, including his father) as well as psychological, well aware of the potent hold The Unseen has over individuals. His fantasising about a Reign of Terror is also no happenstance, but the effect of masks as articulating power by proxy of unidentified, undisclosed (and in this case, unseen) authority. His own literally self-effacing mask6 allows for his identification, as a living being, with the invisible to extend into the perceived immaterial, thus the untouchable, and even, in the form of a living and physically-interacting voice, into the godly, which further fuels his madness. On the other hand, his other mask, the self-referential one represented by his stolen clothes and especially the bandages and goggles may be interpreted as a desperate attempt at regaining his lost humanity, as he is inconvenienced by his permanent invisibility and actively attempts to find the reversing formula (so he may choose between the two states as appropriate) but to no avail. The ritual he has thus simulated is in fact the ascension, the apotheosis of man attaining (partial) godhood in death, the visible mask he wears, namely the bandages, hinting at the afterlife beliefs of ancient Egypt. Upon his taking the bandages, he is already dead to the world, as he has become invisible, or otherwise ghostly, no longer restrained by the conventions his former self could not help but adhere to, yet not fully deified either, as he has much conceptual power but still requires visible middlemen (Marvel, Kemp) to handle things for him. Such a limbo state, of being, for most practical purposes, a ghost or rather poltergeist to everyone else, envied perhaps but certainly feared and hated, is explicable by his fractured state, his self (by the two, effacing and referential, masks) and his mind – roughly corresponding to his Ka and his Ba – having been denied access into the afterlife. Since human beings are first and foremost visual creatures, invisibility has stirred many imaginations across various cultures, being shown, from Greek and

6 Despite not strictly speaking a mask as a material object, his invisible body does still adhere to the secondary characteristics of the masks discussed herein, namely the obscuring of the wearer‟s identity, the modification of his (perceivable) features and the social power over his peers.

Norse myths to such contemporary works as Harry Potter, to be granted by various divine or magic items as helmets, rings and cloaks. Though the use of invisible devices seems modern to us, folklore records several instances of magic jewellery or armour pieces conferring the gift of vanishing out of sight. Perhaps most famously, in some versions of the myth, Athena (or Hermes) allows Perseus, before battling the Medusa, to borrow Hades‟ invisibility helmet (Phinney Jr., 1971: 448), the power symbol he has received when given dominion over the Underworld, more appropriate to the lord of the dead and the hidden underground riches than Zeus‟ lightning or Poseidon‟s cataclysmic trident. We are thus confirmed that invisibility has been often intimately linked to superhuman and godly power. It is for this intuitive reason that Plato, in The Republic, has Glaucon narrate the tale of the Ring of Gyges as a philosophical exercise regarding the possibility of freely upholding the law. Discovered by the eponymous shepherd in a giant‟s tomb, the ring makes him invisible, so Gyges seizes the opportunity to seduce the queen, murder the king and become the new ruler of Lydia himself, supposedly founding the bloodline that would produce the legendarily wealthy Croesus. While Gyges did not become criminally insane (not by the standards of the time), the issue raised by both Plato and H. G. Wells is that, upon assuming such a power that conventional norms and laws can no longer restrain one‟s freedom – especially when peer pressure and shame disappear – the individual in question would almost certainly succumb to the temptation of using the power for selfish gain (even if not exclusively) and disrupt society unless stopped. Wells‟ novel has been successfully adapted into numerous cinema and television productions, becoming a stock character of the „Universal Monsters‟ and featuring in much of pop culture, especially animation and games of both the science-fiction and the fantasy genres. By now, the idea of invisibility has carried over from magic to science, entering science-fiction, where it generated the concept of the „cloaking device‟, a field generator allowing most often a vessel, but also buildings or even cities, to appear invisible to the naked eye. For increased realism, the trope is often complemented with such drawbacks as high energy requirements, or the inability to fire or reach high speeds while cloaked, or various combinations thereof. Interestingly, scientists have also begun researching ways of further

exploring the notion of an invisible cloak or fabric, potentially one day turning science-fiction into stunning science7. Another interesting quasi-mask that has enthralled generation after generation is the Count from Alexandre Dumas‟ Count of Monte Cristo. In it, the framed and imprisoned Edmond Dantès is also one to discard a figurative mask, the remains of his connection to humanity, upon the death of his mentor, the Abbot Faria. However, the discarding of his previous self – and, presumably, of parts of his mind in connection with it – occurs outwardly with the donning of various disguises corresponding to the social characters he reinserts himself into society by, while his very facial features have likely undergone extensive changes during the long years of imprisonment. Having crossed the point of no return of his self-excision, he uses the hidden treasure of the Abbot to create his multiple social masks, Lord Wilmore the benefactor, The Count of Monte Cristo the avenger, Abbot Busoni the trustworthy priest, and even Sinbad the Sailor, all meant to supplant his lost original self with more versatile ones, able to further his new goals. His „masks‟, however, fit poorly with the present research as we are given no reasons to believe they are more than changed clothes (fitting the depicted society of the time, strong believers in the old adage of „the clothes make the man‟) and minor disguises, aided by the aging and roughening undergone in prison. Still, his public „masks‟ cover his social monstrosity, that of having given up on his empathy along with his humanity, and the precious little he hides behind his disguises in his delusions of a presumed superhumanity (implied through his assumption of being able to raise Edward with the help of his potent elixir) is a yearning void in search for a justifying façade. It should also be noted that his main antagonists, Villefort and Mondego, also take up aliases throughout the novel, the former to avoid negative associations with his Bonapartist father, and the latter to give weight to himself as a nouveau riche, suggestive of an overall atmosphere of social falsehood and the cult of appearances. Due to its big themes and layered content appealing to readers of most ages and reading interests, The Count of Monte Cristo remained fairly popular throughout the

7 I Look Forward To (2010).

79 two centuries since its publication, having been successfully adapted for cinema and television, followed eventually by even a fairly faithful (if sci-fi/fantasy rendered) anime adaptation. The protagonist, potentially recycling the name of Dante, has himself generated a stock character in popular culture, to the extent that the name Edmond Dantès, and especially that of Monte Cristo, has remained an emblem of alienation and vengeful justice. Similarly, the mighty Chateau d‟If, where he was imprisoned, has entered myth as well, being, in a sense, the French version of the American allegedly inescapable Alcatraz. Gaston Leroux‟s Phantom of the Opera opens in a Baroque/Gothic atmosphere, contrasting the surface, the upper world (and crust) of Parisian splendour with the maze of many underground canals left over after the Opera Palace‟s construction, wherein dwells another Minotaur, of the modern world, the eponymous Phantom. The fascination exerted by his story is synonymous with the seduction of his self-effacing mask, which covers the sublime complexity of his character and in fact completes it (for who could dissociate the man from his mask anymore?). As opposed to the crude metal visage of the Man in the Iron Mask meant to hide the presumable stately handsomeness underneath, the mask of the Opera Ghost is outwardly much more delicate and white, a mortuary mask of sorts frozen in its gentlemanly hollowness. It is in fact an incomplete mask itself, meant to cover the superficial decay and incompleteness of the flesh beneath it in what, like the character itself, is a patchwork of light and darkness, of grace and repulsion. His story fascinates because of the cognitive and aesthetic paradox set up precisely by such intermingled contrasts, on one hand the almost supernal genius masquerading as the „Angel of Music‟ (itself „monstrous‟ because of its lack of social contact and semblance of constant supervision), on another hand, his inhuman appearance rendering him basely organic and incomplete, while on the last one, the very human and dramatic depths of his rejection-caused loneliness, his cold bitterness and his redeeming, if obsessive, love for Christine. His equally great obsession, his greatest fear, of being unmasked, reveals the very human motivations behind his supernatural-posing self. Considering his Persian origins as implied by Leroux, he is an outsider to Parisian society, pertaining to that fearful Otherness of the East – an East which,

80 particularly in the age of the novel‟s conception, was seen as backward, pestilent, depraved and warlike. Further still, his incomplete face, missing extremities like the nose, an ear and skin (depending on the version), such that it evokes the overall aspect of a flayed skull, may also recommend him as in fact a leper, the ultimate Untouchable of the ancient world, carrying the eternal biological scares of death (or an undead nature), decay and contagion. Combining the two elements, we not only see the revealed full drama of the Opera Ghost – an educated man rejected for his humble and exotic origins in search of the all too human feelings which he had thought discarded with the vulnerability they brought – but also an all too familiar tale of human superficiality and preconception. If we read the external image of the Phantom as being the metaphor of the inner one of his origin, we once again find the sadly familiar tale of fear and rejection addressing the Other. His is the drama of a society that rejects and demonises its outsiders out of suspicions and panic related more to its own shallowness and disconnection than anything else, as later on found in science-fiction under the many guises of respectively „the alien invasion‟ and the „zombie outbreak‟. In this respect, his donning of the white expressionless half-mask is a micro- ritual attempting to symbolically once more „recover the Self in the Other‟ and gain acceptance and power, in a vein similar to the thought expressed by Dr. Frankenstein‟s creature, “if I cannot have love, I will have fear”. Thus, his continuous performance from behind the mask is as much a form of social security as it is a ritual of exerting power, taking differentiated forms in correlation with the private and the public sphere where it may be performed. Respectively, it becomes fascination or seduction, for Christine, and intimidation, for the Opera managers. While the novel itself achieved limited gradual popularity, its many adaptations, whether musicals, films, animation on both sides of the Pacific, rock music videos, Phantom theme parks, etc., made it into nothing short of mythological. The compelling tragic story inspired many fans to create their own „how it should have been‟ versions, culminating with Susan Kay‟s best-selling novel Phantom, of 1990. The above more than warrant Leroux‟s work standing among the examples for our Mask Metempsychosis as it has been referenced, parodied and pastiched almost everywhere, the white half-mask and the paratextual rose becoming instantly

81 recognisable worldwide. But the best argument for its inclusion here is that the legendary Opera Ghost has long detached its mask from the mere status of a turn-of- the-twentieth-century novel, taking on a life of its own as a cultural icon, as his Metempsychosis is notably far from over, with every other generation rediscovering and recreating him to fit their style. On the other hand, the Phantom of the Opera himself may be said to be recycling certain previous masks, for instance the Deformed Hero, as witnessed in Hugo‟s Notre Dame de Paris, through its Quasimodo, and the Divine Bard, originating with Orpheus, and hints of a combination of both Daedalus and the Minotaur, as he is both lord of his underground maze and the monster confined within it. The youngest but already strong subgenre of the novel with particular relevance to our research of masks is the graphic novel subgenre, most notably the superhero genre, itself a development of the adventure and science-fiction/fantasy comics industry. In many ways, whether explicit (in such titles as The Mighty Thor) or symbolic (Superman being simply the modern repackaging of the sculptural Greek heroes), they represent living proof that the collective imagination needs the haven and inspirational pool of a sharable mythology, and, when it is not provided with one, will simply (re)create it. With the superhero comics taking off in the 1930s, we witnessed a slip back to the early days of narrating myths, in the attempt to recapture the entire unspoilt awe of the ancestors at the heroic feats of their god-men, except in a visual and literate key, having thus drawn on the engrossing experience of the novel as well. Even the narratorial passages in comic books and graphic novels are similar to the television concept of flash cards and/or voice-over, thus bringing the modern adventures ever closer to the original recitations of the epic adventures of demigods. And like then, silver-screen renderings and the routine portrayal of comic-book heroes on television, in computer games, in cross-over multimedia productions and electronic entertainment have kept the distance gap between performers and audience wide open, despite the recent drive to make certain superheroes more and more „down-to- earth‟.

One of the most iconic elements of the superhero genre is the secret identity conceits. If the famed heroes of old were considered known public personas, part of community life and frequently placed within the lineage of tribes and nations, sired and protected by various deities – while loathsome to some others – their modern equivalents, the superheroes, lack their ancient counterparts‟ divine boon. Children of the techno-secular world, even when of a marked arcane nature (viz. Dr. Fate), they typically require the protection of anonymity, for themselves and especially for their „ordinary human‟ peers. The distinction between their public and private personas is thus literalised in the alternative existence of two deliberately contrasting socio-psychological entities (consider the diverging social characters of Bruce Wayne and, respectively, Batman – a trope absorbed almost unchanged from such predecessors as Zorro or even the Scarlet Pimpernel). The distinction is also, perhaps even more strikingly, signalled graphically, by the already classical depiction of masked superheroes without visible irises in their costumed persona. While the graphic suggestion was initially that of having only the mask slits visible, the visual trope became a code of its own – to the point where large eye slits are still codified as expressively mobile blank „eyes‟ (cf. Spiderman‟s mask) – standing in for the millenary concept of the masked individual becoming more than his previous self, particularly “a legend”, as the Batman mythos informs. The meta-individual persona of superheroes is thus also symbolically related to the „possession‟ as described earlier by Ebong as part of the masking process, the blank white eyes being reminiscent of either the luminescent eyes of spirits and divinities or the rolled-up eyes of various shamanic characters entering ecstatic and trance-like states to channel them. Masked superheroes supremely express the idea that masking equals empowering, as best seen when we contrast them with their relatively rare mask-less fellows, of whom Superman readily stands out, despite his inverted attempt at disguise (the removal of his „mild-mannered‟ Clark Kent glasses and the bringing forward of his trademark heroic forehead lock). Unmasked heroes, of whom females are much more numerous, provide greater reliability via instant identification with their clearly human features, as also seen in the above example of Superman, whose double nature of a Herculean Messiah would otherwise fail. Of course, Superman is

83 markedly a solar character (in symbols and character abilities) very clearly derived from ancient models of heroism. Opposed to him is the other iconic variety, Batman, who (like Zorro and The Phantom) is the ultimate lunar character, making less use of any superior physical attributes as much as he does of intelligence – including the use of technology – and deception, as „inherited‟ from the highwaymen-derived heroes of medieval, Romantic and Victorian times. The details of his costume are explicitly selected so as to instill fear, empowering himself with a psychological arsenal that is yet to fail him, of particular significance considering that his opponents are often personifications of psychological traumas and disorders. And while the demigod heroes of ancient times were ontologically and aesthetically distinct from their foes, as often embodying the struggle between forces of order/civilisation and chaos/wilderness – an effect also achieved by the more easily relatable non-masked superheroes – one may argue that the masked superheroes making use of the intimidating power of their masks are indeed often visually similar to their antagonists (often the distinction is visually made only via a „more orderly‟ colour scheme or design). Furthermore, the early comics of the Thirties and Forties even inverted that distinction, having an otherwise frightening (and armed) Batman or Iron Man fight non-powered offenders such as minor thugs, mobsters or political opponents (Nazis, Communists, etc.) – blurring the distinctions between heroes and villains while driving home some socio-ideological points. Superheroes and supervillains alike wear masks and costumes codifying their abilities or personal symbols as literalised („living‟) layers of their own personalities, their battles being thus reminiscent of the jousting of medieval knights, with each defending his (lord‟s) banners and cause. Such costumes are self-effacing full masks that (especially in the case of supervillains) strive to entirely replace the original human individual with an „upgraded‟ version. In general, once a costumed character has established their identity, their costume is as much their defence as their battleflag: having it damaged will not only bring them shame, but sometimes even temporary depowering (apart from obvious causal responses), in the same way a regular army is demoralised by the loss of their flag or field insignia. Conversely, the artist can draw attention to the tension and danger of a scene particularly by portraying villains or their shots, blades, concussive force, etc., rip through the fabric

84 of the hero‟s costume, reminding us once more that masks, intra- and extra- diegetically, articulate power. Whether they are the bright spandex costumes of the Golden Age of Comics, suits of armour, or just as well the uniform of some assembled team, superhero costumes acquire both a fetishised (Reynolds 1992: 42) and fetishising nature, of particular visibility in the often risqué superheroine attires, which thus become technical, if not deliberate, self-referential masks standing in for the idea of epic (fetishised) femininity and showing that the creators are well aware of their readership. Interestingly enough, the concept is not too different from the almost literal ogling of spaceships in the science-fiction genre, reinforcing the age- old conceptualisation of a ship as a „she‟. Finally, the fetishising socio-psychological impact of masks in the superhero genre is on occasion debated intra-diegetically as well, culturally or politically, or both. In one of the best-known graphic novels, Frank Miller‟s Watchmen, the tensions and suspicions produced by the social empowerment of masks – in an age of Cold-War-intensified paranoia and nuclear fears – triggers a legislative backlash against “the supers” (many of whom were just masked, and very few actually super- powered). Forced to unmask, the protagonists pursue various coping strategies, from acquiescent attempts to resume ordinary, petty lives plagued by nightmares of removing flesh layers upon costume layers (Niteowl, a socially-inverted parody of Batman) to an increasing sense of alienation from all humanity (Dr. Manhattan, whose essentially limitless nuclear powers turn him into an indifferent cosmic wanderer, a dark reflection of the Silver Surfer). The violent leading anti-hero, Rorschach, opposes the government‟s unmasking edict by continuing to sport his distinctive blank mask with inkblots, which has not only become his „true face‟ but the reflection of his personality as well, as per the eponymous inkblot visual- associations test, according to which his facial design dynamically changes. In that sense, though he otherwise has no actual powers of his own, the mask is his power, as demonstrated in his reluctance to take it off, a power that is double-jointed in its significance, intra- and extra-diegetically and dynamic in empowering, but also expressing him. A similar phenomenon, of even more versatility, can be traced in the Dark Horse comics The Mask, where cartoon aficionado and hapless nobody Stanley

Ipkiss is transformed by the donning of a wooden mask releasing inhibitions and allegedly connected to Norse trickster god Loki into the very publicly visible accidental superhero The Mask. His flamboyant shenanigans involve the visual quoting of, i.e. metamorphosing his face into, various pop-culture tropes and breaking the fourth wall (not unlike Deadpool‟s epic ironies, though in much more colourful tones). The mask-as-power is also literalised in the action horror comics Spawn, where the necroplastic visage of the rebellious general of Hell is, like his body, able to produce various upgrades and weaponry, but also in Dark Man, itself a combination of The Invisible Man and Frankenstein, where the protagonist uses revolutionary facial grafts in order to both hide his burnt face and impersonate various mobsters so he may thwart their plans. Comics and graphic novels – particularly in the superhero genre, the one most relevant to our investigation – make up a revisited or even reinvented mythology, up to the extent where every imagining of the future is in fact a reinterpretation of the past, from the Wild-West-like lawlessness to the constant Doomsday scares, whether supernatural or technological, and the trope of „every myth was true‟ reminiscent of the Dark Ages. There are indeed multiple similarities between the articulation of masked power in pre-literary societies and their contemporary descendents. To begin with, suspension of disbelief seems provided by default, as most comic titles seem synonymous with boundless supplies of, and sometimes absurdly-proportioned exercises in imagination – but from a technical standpoint, the means of achieving it are the same. The acceptant social milieu is always there, regardless of their age, and the extraordinary circumstances abound. Then there is plenty of secrecy and ignorance (accidents, random chance, mysterious and/or inexplicable forces or technologies), implied possession (whether supernatural or psychotropic or technological) and some degree of denial of human agency in the insisting on the continuity of the displayed adventures as being natural chains of intra-diegetic causality, and not changes in editorial and/or economic preferences. On the other hand, except for „special editions‟ where cross-overs between their world and ours are displayed, most superhero universes are diegetically self-contained and closed to any beyond the scope of their publishing company‟s umbrella, thus constituting,

86 from the reader‟s interaction point of view, parade-like events, rather than actual rituals, with the exception of various fan-involving events. Nevertheless, comics do stay true to the readers‟ reality. From the Americans sending Captain America to fight against monstrous Nazis in the Forties, to the Watchmen keeping a pessimistic eye on the Cold War and the nuclear threat, to the X-Men recently (Spring 2012) participating to a gay wedding in New York, comics have always responded to social and political changes. They adapt quickly and weave any major news into their plotlines for a continuously maintained suspension of disbelief stemming from two sources in unison. First, as they are rather closer to science-fiction stories, the protagonists are relatably human, with usually only one fundamental aspect that happens to be different, such that the readers should believe in the possibility they could be just as strong, or fast, or intelligent at some point, or that s/he may at one point join their world, etc. This again raises the deictic issues we have discussed previously, as the main demographic target of comic books and graphic novels – children and teenagers – may well be disillusioned to grow up and witness their „there‟ has failed to turn into „here‟. But on the other hand, comics‟ adhesion to the events of „our world‟ and the often-made implication that our own world is but one in an endless Multiverse – and perhaps just as fictional – may well serve to the reconciliation of Self and Other. To that extent, in proxy-fighting the bugbears of our reality, they not only encourage hope for a better future and in the loftier ideas of the Western world (despite some obvious American or British biases), they may indeed serve, like theatre and the traditional novels before it, as political tools. Indeed, there are many comics worldwide, including in the superhero genre, who have taken political sides or „discreetly‟ lobbied for various campaigns, thus becoming social and political propaganda. From superheroes battling addictions such as drugs or alcohol in their plotlines to the popular example of V in V for Vendetta reminding the world of “The Fifth of November” and of the struggle for liberty, if at the price of anarchy, in the Thatcher era (currently having re-emerged as indeed another cultural icon spawning offspring symbolising the fight for internet privacy), the superhero genre offers constant reminders of the educating benefits of literature, whichever form it may take.

II. 4. Nowadays

The following section represents but an overview of matters that warrant in- depth research of their own, and which should find themselves duly treated in subsequent works, but which will only be mentioned here so as to provide meaningful hints (despite the possibility of the author‟s suppositions being partially disproved by said research) of the continuity into contemporary times of, as we shall see, the process of Mask Metempsychosis recreating avatars of various cultural icons involving masks for subsequent generations and their respective defining genres and media. Generally speaking, while there are plenty of masks around nowadays, there are comparatively much fewer mask rituals, although some may require a little effort of the imagination in order to notice their elements for the ritual stages they are. It is often said that the advent of the ubiquitous social media has in fact all but done away with the social membrane between the private and the public sphere. Should we accept that premise (or warning?) as truth, we are suddenly able to detect a few public mask rituals that may have redefined and started replacing their previous selves, which focused more on the private. For instance, we have mentioned masks as articulators of power in social contexts, which primes them for such vocations as enforcing law and social order. We are able to see them as part of uniform outfits, which usually include some kind of protective facial mask and/or headgear. Just like the traditional masks, relying on initiation ranks, they unite (professional segments of) the community by means of their common training, skills and daily activities, while also internally distinguishing the members of the same trade according to their respective higher specialisation and/or authority, whether or not the masks they contain cover the wearer‟s faces or just frame them. By putting on a certain uniform or its mask, particularly in the line

88 of duty but perhaps also to a limited, ludic degree at costume parties, one is expected to partake in the mentalities associated with that specific occupation, to the extent that masking is not only becoming, but living up to certain stereotypes and standards imposed by the sub-community the uniform represents. “With great power comes great responsibility,” indeed. The flipside of uniforms identifying and uniting their wearers into intra- community groups of their own is that the latter are necessarily achieved by means of a visible segregation from the main society, as can be witnessed in the presence of police enforcers in full riot gear. Their military-resembling equipment and weapons, despite conveying less punitive force than those issued by the army, are quite potent with psychological intimidation, as much of the tactics intended to control and subdue unruly crowds are based on little more than the otherwise greatly effective show of force – an embedded modern-day mask ritual. Their dark-visored helmets or their distinctive balaclavas (interestingly resembling the stereotypical “self-customised” sock masks of robbers and performing similar psycho-social functions) set them apart from the regular members of the community, being as much means of protecting their after-hours, plain-clothes identity as they are psychological weapons. Such modern masks have retained their original function and power, denying the viewer any visual knowledge of what lies behind them and evoking a strong sense of sensory-cognitive monstrosity (the Faceless Authority) that supremely empowers them over the others. Much like uniform insignia, tattoos were originally the means for an individual to inscribe long-lasting socio-cultural marks on his/her body to signal belonging to a certain group or the age- or merit-appropriate advancement within it, not rarely in accordance with beliefs that the values and experiences of the human soul are reflected on the body. Thus, tattoos would have functioned as basic identification tags of sorts, pre-empting imposture and cordoning off certain social groups or individuals that would not have „clearance‟ to a certain gathering or sacred place (e.g. the initiated from the profane) or, just as well, those that, through their occupation (smiths, witches, healers etc.) or their past deeds (taboo-breakers, the mentally ill, etc.) were best avoided by the community at large. This latter socially isolating character of tattoos made them ideal for such notorious uses as marking

89 slaves and criminals, a long-lasting practice that ultimately created a genuine graphic language of prison inmates or soldiers, who knowingly tattoo certain symbols on their bodies, relevant to their own history (thus returning tattoos to their other meaning of displaying personal and social achievements). Admittedly, tattoos are not masks – except in such cases when they are extensive enough (and/or placed on the face) to actually fade out some of the facial features, becoming thus self-effacing and self-referential. Such body art raises interesting questions about one‟s dealing with a reinvented self when the latter is near-permanently depicted on his/her skin and the identification (or the replacement) is reinforced with each look in the mirror. Unlike most masks, which are readily discardable second identities (thus denoting, in many languages, shallowness, trickery and falsehood), tattoos – particularly the ones decorating the entire face or body – are deliberately perennial, visible and, most importantly, non-removable except by surgical means. Paint can be wiped off, a helmet can be taken off, but a tattooed face is always on, locking its wearer in place within the very intersection of his/her private and public spheres and exposing him/her to various forms of social isolation due to the sheer effect of his/her face being thus permanently “masked”. Alternatively, people with similar body artwork can find each other and form global communities more easily that way. Knowing the above, and considering the sometimes significant pain of getting a tattoo depending on its location on the body, the act of one having such extensive and conspicuous tattoos becomes a true social statement and/or manifesto. On occasion, that is verified in practice by auxiliary body changes (removed hair, sharpened teeth, feline or reptilian contact lenses, bone ridge implants etc.) asymptotically connecting the human to the desired animal (usually) or concept. The idea of human beings trying to mimic animals of remarkable strength, endurance, vitality or (presumed) wisdom is very old, originally employing only skins, furs, horns, fangs or claws (and skull masks) but in some cases also tattooing (parts of) the body, and it was restricted to ritual use, as it was believed that holding on to the power granted by the spirits of the dead animals would eventually harm the participants‟ souls. Trying to apply that ancient caveat to the contemporary context when modern technology could help man all but perfect his physical zoomorphosis,

90 multiple questions regarding the undoubtedly complex changes in the associated psychological mechanisms should be considered. Similar issues need be pondered in the context of stardom, where indeed modern technology is able to routinely apply at least some superficial modifications to the body of an aspiring celebrity in order for them to be more appealing. The costs of esthetic surgery aside, and barring any side effects, there will always be the question of “who am I now?”, which the patient should be willing to seriously address prior to undertaking the medical enhancement procedure. Especially since some changes are painfully irreversible, as the late Michael Jackson could have always attested. On the other hand, certain parallels can be drawn between modern crowd-gathering events such as concerts, including the massively watched Superbowl half-time intermezzos, and the ancient crowd-gatherers, such as the Dionysian or Saturnalia festivals, particularly since some of our contemporary performers, in their flamboyantly bizarre choices of costume, may indeed remind viewers of the ancient hierodules. The oft-quoted adage of “in cyberspace, no one can hear you scream”, itself a parody of the tagline of the film Alien (“In space, no one can hear you scream,” 1989), should rather express the fact that, though the internet is permanently alert, so to speak, its users may have some difficulty in identifying (in human terms, not IP addresses) who „screams‟ due to the multiple forms of electronic presence and online identity representation. From our early crude „re-paintings‟ in pixels to the ever more intricate digital manipulations of our real-time web snapshots, and beyond, to avatars of the users‟ selection and creation (in what might even count as „identity art‟), we have learnt, alongside our machines, how to be increasingly effective (and efficient) at repackaging our identity. In some instances, such as on social forums and the world‟s blogosphere, fanciful and catchy user names with associated creative avatars serve the double purpose of attempting to provide the real user with the encouraging security of „loud anonymity‟ and popularising the internet-metaphorical Masked Man thus created in whatever social activism he embarks upon. Moreover, much online entertainment such as gaming platforms provide users with virtually unlimited abilities to reinvent, customise and multiply themselves as in-game playable characters that „level up‟,

91 growing in experience and corresponding skills in ways mimicking human life that far surpass anything our predecessors could have dreamt of. The multiple and more subtle forms of mask rituals we encounter nowadays appear as recombinations of the previous and more noticeable forms, in thus partly confirming our subsequent methodological implications. Thus, the internet community in many ways resembles the crowds gathering at the Carnival events, as an expansion of the private sphere over the public one occurs (particularly via socialising platforms), whereby the users may often burrow into their own little world of their own (illusory) fashioning – their avatar and its accompanying self- recreating persona. The dramatic distance between performers and audience is then, once again, minimal, as they fashion the community together, in what is once more not just a parade, but a ritual uniting Self and Other in a (virtual) global village. Unsurprisingly, we may find the same analysis applicable to the modern versions of Halloween and the various worldwide carnivals from Venice to Rio, having all of course sprung from their medieval ancestor of the same name. In contrast to the above, the dramatic distance between performers and audience in the case of tattoos, as well as that of riot gear, is maximised by the stark difference in status between the tattooed and the masked enforcers, both exuding a sense of force, thus articulating their masked power via a process we may call coercion, whereby they conceal (most of) their features in order to reveal their intimidation power. In both cases, the Self and the Other are sharply opposed, by choices often underpinned by strong biases.

In this chapter, we have ventured into an exploration of some of the most significant literary genres related to masks and mask rituals, whether in their open, community-ceremonial form, or embedded within older or newer texts and social situations. From the pre-literary societies and their myth-chanting and lawmaking and moving forwards, through Greek and Roman public rituals and theatrical traditions, then pursuing their influences emerging through folklore into the medieval Carnivals and the Italian and English theatre traditions. We entered modern times with considerations upon novels and then graphic novels and followed our contemporaries as they renegotiate their private and public masked identity in modern carnivals, social and political activism and on the internet. In doing so, we trust we have managed to point out the fine links of influence and imitation connecting the past to the future and provided insight as to how mask rituals evolve over time, usually in the direction of their increased (compounded) symbolic complexity – as in chrono-cultural palimpsests – but their reduced outer expression. At every step, we have considered the interplay of religion, politics and social psychology; the means of achieving and sustaining the suspension of disbelief; the constructedness of masks; the various rosters of systematised masks and their meanings; and the creation of cultural icons, or the cultural persistence of masks. We have meanwhile also discussed the multilayered paradoxes and tensions bundled within the aesthetics and the cognitive aspects of masks, those between the private and the public sphere, between Self and Other, between performer and audience/individual and community, between parade and ritual, between male and female, and any deictic paradoxes there may have occurred. Throughout our chronology of masks in the Western World, we have also discovered a set of meaningful correlations from the specific method of articulating power in the social negotiation between performer and audience to the dramatic distance (or the alienation effect) produced between the same two categories. We are thus able to chart that distance among the mask genres and forms we have discussed this far (see Fig. VII.). As further indicated in the two tables below the Performer-Audience Chart, the medium levels of dramatic distance correspond to the educational genres often interposing the fourth wall but nevertheless allowing

93 for possibilities of direct interaction between stage and audience, regardless of whether they educate via seduction or derision. The minimal and maximal levels correspond to the methods of power articulation characterised as, respectively, liberation (as in the case of festivals and carnivals) and coercion (the case of inaccessible or intimidating channels). Furthermore, by thus reconsidering the interaction between Self and Other depending on the interplay of the private and public spheres, as we have this far investigated, we obtain the grid validating the above processes of power articulation. Namely, Liberation corresponds to the empowerment of private (discreet) Selves before private Others, given the extensive freedoms of self-expression provided by carnivals. Coercion (inaccessibility) articulates power by means of allowing an undisclosed, thus private, Self access to the public (whether sung about or broadcast) acts of the Other. Conversely, Derision suggests the exposure of a private Other to the searing laughter of the public Selves making up the audience, while public Selves converse with public Others in the agora- and theatre-in-the-round- reminiscent educational process of Seduction.

III. The Mask Metempsychosis

Despite the present research‟s self-stated commitment to, foremost, the masks proper, in the physical sense of tangible, yet often untouchable, objects pertaining to social institutions of the past and, if much less, the present, masks are hardly ever just physical objects. In the earlier chapter, due consideration was given to masks in performative, ritual use and to the ways in which the complex power they hold is exerted upon and within the community, by individuals who, upon assuming the mask, transcend their human ontology. Thus, it was evident that, beyond the vastly diverse physicality of masks, there is always an unseen but poignantly felt component, which we might designate as the „mystique‟ of masks, engaging the spiritual, psychological and political aspects of the audience in a social interplay of disruptive and re-formative identity. We believe it is precisely that mystique which Pollock had in mind when attempting to reach the unifying core of masks and define them all as “indexes of identity”. As abstract and as broad a notion as “indexes of identity” is, it nevertheless facilitates the understanding of the great proliferation of masks, in ever subtler form, out of the original myths and oral literature towards the written literature and eventually the new visual and electronic media. At present, a mask‟s display of identity can be understood as occurring in at least four distinct contexts. We may refer to a psycho-social kind of masking, related to one‟s occupation, exhibited social character and attitudes, social status, etc., being reminded of the proverb stating that clothes make the man or its humorous reversal in the story about the emperor‟s new clothes, both related to biased social assessment as an effect of superficial layers (the „masks‟) being regarded as the genuine self. There is also an artistic understanding of masking, as seen in theatre, cinema, the visual and plastic arts, interpretable as being the remnant of much older and complete mask rituals due

95 to their surviving identification between performer (actor) and the mask (the part played), as an exercise of potentialities accepted in a general context of suspension of disbelief. Thirdly, individuals representing various groups they belong to may be said to be their „talking heads‟ or their fronts (thus, their masks), to the point where metonymic identification has taken such a strong hold that the individual and the group are merged towards the virtual public disappearance of the latter, as the former takes on the group‟s name and social attributes. Thus, the public eye perceives the entire organisation or community mostly in light of their representative, as very frequently seen in politics and media, for either positive or negative community biases, e.g. a company‟s spokesmodel vs. “the face of terrorism”. Finally, actual masks ironically enjoy a comparatively smaller, if still meaningful, presence in contemporary culture, at times associated with artistic masking in performative arts, or appearing on their own in fiction genres and part of carnival-type festivities, or as protective professional gear. While psycho-social, artistic and representational (metonymic) masks are connected to the masks proper of either the past or the present, the former we would nevertheless better describe as pseudo-masks (the psycho-social and representational ones) and meta-masks (the artistic). We shall then proceed to devote the following paragraphs to the understanding of the way they work, believing it should be possible to gain more insight into the related chronological evolution of the actual, i.e. physical-spiritual and physical-psychological masks primarily dealt with in this paper. Just as pseudo- and meta-masks are frequent in today‟s globalised culture and civilization having something of a cult for visual spectacle – literature, much like cinema and the electronic media, is rife with its own “indexes of identity”, especially meta-masks. Whether or not they begin their existence as masks proper, pseudo-masks or none at all, most memorable characters will at some point cross into the realm of meta-masks, as we shall see in the eponymous protagonist of V for Vendetta wearing his signature stylised mask based on the historical person of Guy Fawkes. Once created, they become liable to eventually be referenced in other works, pastiched, parodied, plagiarised, modified, retold, reinvented, adapted to other media, leaked badly mutated into folklore, popular culture and anecdotes, etc.

If masking is the process that turned prehistoric ideas and myths into physical masks of more concrete relating and awe and thus imbued with even greater spiritual potency, meta-masking continues that evolution by projecting the physical forms into the realm of ideas and back again, tempering them, re-casting them, endowing them with yet more creative power. The sublimated ideas of former masks thus solidify into masks proper by being rediscovered and reinvented by posterity as new forms of their own, in a chain of transformations and reincarnations that crystallise a cultural icon. For a ready example of meta-masking at work alongside pseudo-masking and masking proper in literature, we need look no further than Romeo and Juliet. There, Juliet perceptively argues, “What‟s in a name? that which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet” (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.45-46). While most readers and spectators might pay most attention to the tragedy for the heart- wrenching story of the two ill-fated lovers, a deeper analysis does not fail to reveal how the conflict in Romeo and Juliet hinges on the dichotomy between appearance and essence, between the names and kinship laws of Capulet and Montague, as psycho-social masks, and the characters‟ true feelings and selves. In itself, the latter concept of the „true self‟ of a played character would have been labyrinthine enough for most playgoers, as it introduced giddy mixes of meta- masking, pseudo-masking and masking proper. It involved an artistic disguise (the suspension of disbelief required from the audience so they may believe they are watching potentially real people displaying their life‟s critical moments in a minimalist Verona) and a psycho-social one (layered as class, family and gender identity). The latter simultaneously also consisted of concrete disguises, further complicated in the case of the characters‟ gender, as we had discussed. Given the presumably deliberate puzzling layering of Shakespearean identity above, the irony of the two lovers pertaining to the two feuding households “alike in dignity” (namely, separated only by superficial guises) meeting at a masquerade ball is something the Bard himself would have likely relished. For indeed, what‟s in their names but pseudo-masks, performing on the psycho-social stage? To round up the hallucinatory concentric complexity, they weave a play within the actual play of

Romeo and Juliet, itself immersed in our own, as of course “All the world‟s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players” (As You Like It, 2.7.141-142). Shakespeare would have been well aware of the collapsible levels of plays within plays found in his works, to an extent almost irrecovered before the advent of deconstructive thinking. Romeo and Juliet may be considered metatextual and metadiegetic avant la lettre, as they both attempt to break free of the social play their families are performing in, only to symbolically emerge in a wider play. In doing so, in forfeiting their masks, now in the metaphysical sense of their bodies, and thereby, their lives, they reinforce Grimes (1992) in his appreciation that

“The moment of removal is sometimes one of high reflexivity, of heightened self-consciousness. Removing a mask raises the question of our identification with it and our difference from it.” (Grimes 1992: 7)

The fatal unmasking, as proposed by the star-crossed protagonists, also forces the discerning reader to pay closer attention to the effects of masked rituals upon what is otherwise the secular, or the profane, course of everyday life. Considering the masquerade where Romeo and Juliet meet to be the zero-sum point of Veronese social interaction, with blood feuds and city-wide antagonisms canceling each other out in a precarious, fleeting balance of freely-associated unknown players, we are reminded that masks may well intrude upon the order and the restrictions of social life to grant the wish for change. Without the boundaries set up by their names and mingling into a crowd of masks, Romeo and Juliet find their world-shattering, mind- boggling freedom, which is at once their blessing and their curse. Fighting the system, escaping it, denouncing it as a simulacrum were no novel ideas even then. Any two of those three have been consistently found together throughout the history of the world‟s religions and philosophies. All three of them can be seen as facets – once again masks – of the greater concept of appearance vs. essence, which Shakespeare would have been most attuned to even by simply having emerged in the socially and politically complex Elizabethan England, very familiar with and fond of highly ornate masquerades (Twycross – Carpenter 2002: 1-2).

Therein lies precisely the crucial aspect of meta-masks – of that subtle slipping into the figurative – which, as transitional liaisons between the old and the new, allow the growth and reinvention of older masks into ever innovative guises of the subsequent generations while retaining intact their conceptual core, the foundation of all the certain mask‟s evolutions, past or future, and thus providing the idea material for the formation of cultural icons. In seeking after the means by which the evolution towards increasingly complex forms occurs, we note the high prevalence and great significance held by pseudo-masks and meta-masks. Apart from being mere companions, cultural carriers or even discarded attempts at reinscribing rituals involving masks proper into the cultural flow of the ages, pseudo-masks and meta-masks retain culturally significant presences of their own. Shakespeare‟s theatre transferring elements of rural-dissimulated ancient mask rituals between social performance and performed literature or the contemporary techno-psychological world of the internet reversely turning electronic art into psycho-social performance are only two such instances showing how meta-masks hold the key to the evolution of the human mind. Ultimately, meta-masks are, together with the masks proper, of high importance for the cultural anthropology of mask rituals, arguably in a similar relationship as that between RNA and DNA in cellular biology due to their invaluable support in establishing cultural icons via the multiple avenues of genre and media reinterpretation they open for the physical masks.

The earlier example of Romeo and Juliet ultimately discarding their masks in the reconciliatory act nevertheless synonymous to their death brings us to the first step in describing what we might call the Mask Metempsychosis, the cross- generational process of rediscovering and reinterpreting the cultural icons of the past. Namely, this is the Identification Phase. In it, the character takes on the mask towards becoming an unbreakable single entity with it. Otherwise put, in the conceptual framework of the original mask rituals, the mortal wears the mask to become the god/the spirit/the immortal. Their union can only be dissolved by the destruction of one or both of them, and a famous historical example of such a belief may be readily found with the ancient Egyptians, whose belief in the afterlife led

99 them to create, among others, beautifully adorned mortuary masks and sarcophagi for their royalty, intended to mystically preserve their unblemished figure. All the more telling is then the case of Akhenaton, the legendary apostate Pharaoh condemned to oblivion by having his mask and name effaced from most art and documents of the time. The second step of the Mask Metempsychosis would be called the Corruption, or Metamorphosis, Phase. This is the longest phase, spanning multiple generations and/or covering vast geo-cultural spaces. At this point, the legend of the immortal Man with the Mask is being told from parents to children and, through cultural contamination, becomes known to neighbouring cultures. In the process, inconsistencies with the original version start arising, by either deliberate exaggeration, or memory inaccuracy, or other causes. In the end, a significantly different version of the story has emerged, one where perhaps the very immortal has been changed, replaced or even excluded. Continuing the example above, the myth of a cursed Pharaoh began spreading to nearby peoples over time, eventually reaching Europe, where tales and novels dealing with generic undead royalty rising up as mummies enjoyed massive readership during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The third and final step is the Metonymic, or Reboot, Phase. By now, the myth has been circulated so much that the chance of anyone within the relevant geo- cultural space and time period not having been exposed to it is very slight. As such, since the context has been saturated with the propagated concept, the collective mind has already developed heuristic memories regarding it, such that a mere token of the original is enough to suggest the whole story. As the metonymy in the title would imply, the part heuristically stands for the whole, which allows for much licence from the original. At this point, pastiches and parodies are well likely and, to an extent, even expected, to prevent the topic becoming too monotonous. By the end of the phase, if the myth has not been overcirculated to triteness, it may start being retold from different points of view (e.g. those of other characters), reinterpreted in light of new discoveries or new ideologies, adapted to new media, etc. On the other hand, if it has fallen into disuse due to having become hackneyed, a similar process would happen, except over a presumably longer period of time, such that newer

100 generations, who have not been exposed to the original, would come to rediscover it. In the end, the metonymic phase will have given rise to an entirely new ritual and myth from the heuristic scraps of the old one, and so the process can restart. Generally, this is a cyclical process, continued over vast spans of time, as the name might imply. As for the Akhenaton-mummy example, the metonymic phase applies once again, mummies making one comeback roughly at the beginning of cinema, where such actors as Boris Karloff portrayed a new wave of lurching and shuffling undead Egyptians, visibly different from their previous Victorian incarnations in that they were no longer glamorous and noble but blindly monstrous ranging to maniacally vindictive. The one thing connecting them, the point of metonymy, was the outfit, or parts of it (the funerary rags), which lingered on in popular culture perhaps more than genuine ancient Egyptian attire, to the point where a mummy is, on average, no longer remembered with the gilded Pharaoh headdress and scarab jewels but mostly with dirty decayed rags. Reaching closer to our age, another apt example of Cultural Icon recycling is Alan Moore‟s V for Vendetta, a massively popular graphic novel also adapted into a movie, which in fact can be said to combine elements from both The Count of Monte Cristo and The Phantom of the Opera, acquiring for itself the title of a meta- example for the Metempsychosis process. Through it, also drawing on novels such as 1984, Alan Moore gives a masterfully allegorical account of a post-apocalyptic Britain ruled by a Fascist regime mirroring certain elements of the real-life Thatcher government of the time. The elusive anarchist and freedom fighter known only as V (a perfect example of identification with the Guy Fawkes mask he dons at all times) rebels against the system, encouraging the populace to also rise against it by Guy Fawkes‟ Day (commemorating the failed Gunpowder Plot on the English Parliament). Within the story, V initiates his protégée Evie through a „textbook ritual‟ not unlike those participating in the original masked rituals, such that, via sensory deprivation and psychological torture, she would escape any fear towards what the regime might do to her (effectively recreating many of the conditions that created V, not surprisingly since he is grooming her to take his place).

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Combining the bloody vendetta and alienation from humanity themes (including some of the democratic ideals) from The Count of Monte Cristo with the white mask (though Guy Fawkes-styled) and the notion of a monstrous (from the tortures) genius mentor from The Phantom of the Opera, V for Vendetta is truly a merging of the two into a self-sufficient masterpiece, revaluing the ageless themes in both of them and lacing them with the contemporary terrors of totalitarianism, surveillance technology and bioterrorism. In hope the above examples will have managed to effectively illustrated the three phases of the Mask Metempsychosis, the Identification, the Corruption and the Metonymy/Reboot, we shall like to invite the reader to further the technical insight obtained at this stage by means of an incursion into the characters driving the transformation of a mask, the four fundamental archetypes behind Cultural Icons.

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IV. The Archetype Matrix

As concluded in the previous chapter, meta-masks provide the needed support for rituals involving masks of physical production and spiritual, psychological and socio-political impact to rise beyond their original performative genre‟s limitations. Thus, by being repeatedly referenced and reinvented as new masks of their own (worn, or not, by fictional characters), the ideas in the older masks (worn by real-life performers) become the foundation of what we have defined as cultural icons, human types describing and prescribing behavioural patterns and ideological paradigms in accordance with the values of their originating cultures. Despite their high degree of detail stylisation and purification, such cultural icons still function as performers in mask rituals (and in fact fulfill more natural parts in terms of human interaction), being “trapped” between, on one hand, the constant interaction of the self with the audience and, on the other, the intricate tripolar structure of all social rituals. We have previously discussed (George, 1987) how social rituals are founded on the tripartite structure of Religion, Psychology and Social Politics. The cosmological paradigms set up by the religious institutions help define and delineate the individuals‟ sense of self and their ontological domains of living and functioning in the community, thus contributing to the creation of psychological paradigms and socio-political institutions. The constant exchange of social norms and ideological values between the latter two is coordinated towards an ideal balance and legitimised by the same religious institutions through the power of religious myths. Similarly, psychology and socio-politics each reinforce the religious institutions with their respective normative behavioural and political models, while religion‟s paradigms once again legitimise them both through myths (see Fig. III.).

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Otherwise put, religious authorities uphold the psychological power and the daily influence of the social institutions via myths and dogma, while political authorities support them, in return for the right to rule, with the might to rule, whereas psychological controls such as peer shame and authority fear or adoration work to reinforce those desired social behaviours fitting the cosmological paradigms of the religious authorities. Meanwhile, politics affecting the community and its individuals easily form a series of heuristic mechanisms (social programming) for maintaining social order and cooperation towards certain set goals, which the individuals will thus relate to and internalise largely effortlessly – “infrastructural power”, in Mann (1984) terminology – under the often literal blessing of the religious institutions (see Fig. III.a.). We argue that any typical rituals articulating social power can be satisfactorily described within the confines of this triangle structure, which we shall henceforth call the „social trinity‟. On the other hand, masked rituals are not typical rituals. They exist as exceptional (if recurring) manifestations of the sacred and the uncanny, originally in order to (re)introduce, enforce, sanctify, repel, cure or simply manipulate anything that is unusual, incomprehensible, new, or otherwise distinct from the lay and the profane (see Eliade). Due to the double-jointed relationship of the mask to both the performer and the audience, as well as to the suspension of disbelief, via ambiguity and/or secrecy, required in their social contexts, masked rituals transcend the ordinary confines of the Religion-Politics-Psychology trinity. If basic (i.e. founding or essential) social rituals and their respective social institutions are performed and represented by the Many and the Known members of the community (e.g. the army, the healers, the sacerdotal ranks), masked rituals merge the performer and the performed (“masking is becoming”) towards a power shift into the hands of the One (occasionally, also the Many) and the Unknown. That is to say the character depicted is known, or an accepted unknowable figure, but the man behind it, if perceived at all (as shown earlier) is unknown and meant to stay that way. Such a shift in power may be described as a violation of the socially normative laws, necessary in the Bakhtinian sense of the carnivalesque, whereby it is a welcome disruption of the social order, so that it may be restored from its own

104 ashes, with more numerous or more adequate normative laws. Upon one‟s wearing the mask, the public mentality suddenly sees no more mask and no more bearer as distinct space-time objects. The two have become the Masked Man, a new entity that is the embodied concept, myth, force, ancestor or god depicted by the original mask. As such, the Masked Man is typically above and beyond the reach of everyday social limitations: in short, The One Unknown has licence to break any or all of the social trinity‟s taboos applicable to mortal, law-abiding and, most of all, average members of the community. As an Immortal or Reborn, he trespasses against the religious boundary between life and death, by attaining apotheosis; as an Outlaw or a Sacred Ruler, he exudes glory, disregarding the sociopolitical norms (common law) by ritual murder (including preparations for war) or requests of tribute and slaves; as a Liminal Being, he violates the taboos of the human condition itself, by depicting the wretchedness of man, relapsed to his lesser nature of beast (cannibalism, vampirism etc.). Nevertheless, one must bear in mind that the Masked Man appearing in the context of social rituals, as opposed to his stylised version evolved in literature and discussed in the following sections, only engages in lawful violation, as he is more often than not restricted in his social iconoclasm by and to pre-programmed, rehearsed and symbolic actions and activities his performer is called on to display. Apart from their trespassing encounter with the social trinity of Religion- Politics-Psychology, mask rituals are also described by their permanent interplay with both the performer and the audience (see Fig. I.a.). Namely, the Masked Man can be the individual Unknown One or the collective Unknown Many, his performance impacting himself or his own community. The above two social planes of characterising mask rituals, namely the social trinity structure and the self- community axis, will provide the bases for a three-step two-by-two matrix of archetypes revealing the potential profiles of the Masked Man and fundamental in our subsequent exploration of the cultural icons of the Mask Metempsychosis. As a means of ritually articulating power between performer and the audience, mask rituals are still founded on and abiding by the structure and social mechanisms encountered in George‟s 1987 model of the Social Trinity. That is, the power, in flux between self and community, is articulated in every vertex of the scheme‟s

105 triangle, partaking equally in all three of the trinity‟s aspects (see Fig. IV.). This creates three grids, each revealing the interplay of the individual and the community as one passes social power to the other, through the lens of respectively the Psychology, the Socio-politics and the Religion (or Spirituality) foci of mask rituals (see Fig. V.). From the psychological point of view, the performer engaged in a mask ritual can thus be characterised by egoism (when the individual uses the mask to keep psychological power, e.g. prestige or awe, to himself), by altruism (when the individual makes use of his power towards the benefit of the community), by parasitism or oppression (when the community‟s resources, including psychological capital, are pooled towards empowering one individual), and by fraternity, otherwise known as herd spirit (or sometimes hive mentality), whereby the community empowers itself by supra-personal efforts, ignoring the individual aspects towards the benefit of the entire collective. The same intermeshing of self and community, in a sociopolitical key (as further expounded in Fig. V.), provides four respective types of sociopolitical organisational structures, namely independence (or anarchy), democracy, monarchy (or dictatorship) and commune. Similarly, the application of the same method in a spiritual context offers one the ways in which the self and the community are united in their participation to the sacred: the self-guided and self-empowered correspond to the thelemic principle of “Do What Thou Wilt”, the self-originating, community- empowered are driven by a strong sense of sacrifice, while conversely, the community following the one are submissive and obeying, so that, in the end, the community experiencing the sacred through and of themselves are in a state of (and adhering to a mentality of) agape, „neighbourly love‟ or communion. The reader must remember that the social trinity scheme contained the respective interactions of every two of the three components, so the same model employed to analyse the power articulation of mask rituals must also consider (and, indeed, to a higher degree of interest) the edges of the adapted triangle (for the following, see Fig. VI.). By combining the sociopolitical analysis of the ideologies legitimising the self-to-community claims to power with the psycho-social attitudes as described previously by the Psychology vertex‟s self-community grid, we obtain

106 another set of four types, respectively individualism (as the product of anarchism and egoism), collectivism (democracy and altruism), hierarchy (monarchy and submission) and egalitarianism (commune and communion). As it may already be apparent, this set of four types resulting from the combination of sociopolitical power and psychological power represent social attitudes towards power or towards its means of exertion, alternatively interpretable as the reasons or goals – the „WHY?‟ – for the Masked Man to be articulating power towards himself or his community. On the psycho-spiritual side of the social trinity triangle, by applying the same procedure as above and combining the two self-community grids of psychology and religion, we are in fact witnessing the fusion of the moral-value spectrum with the inclusion-exclusion spectrum to produce a matrix essentially answering the question of „HOW‟ a certain masked figure is empowered. It also offers intriguing insight into types of spiritual enlightenment and types of social participation from a psychological standpoint, by revealing that self-originated types (the thelemic egoist and the altruistic martyr) derive their power from overcoming their normal condition, often by negotiating their way around various traumas, while collectivity- originated types tend to minimise their audience‟s response and direct involvement, whether psycho-socially including or excluding them. Thus, a thelemic egoist will typically muster power for himself by recourse to the inner depths of his psychology, unsurprisingly excluding the community from access to his mental and spiritual inner workings. Oftentimes, this results in him undertaking perilous descents towards the lesser layers of his own subconscious, with shocking and irreversible consequences (trauma induced by himself, if unwittingly), as his psycho-spiritual descensos ad inferos is in fact a rapprochement with and a surfacing of the liminal man-beast lurking inside. A sacrificing altruist, as the type name may already imply, gains power to share with the community, therefore involving them, if often without their prior knowledge, by overcoming similar traumas through ascension or catharsis, following a genuine trial by ordeal. Whether induced by others or accidentally, the latter occasionally resulting in a „Chosen‟ mentality, the process works by him converting his own hurt into indomitable will to pursue his lofty ideals; thus he is cleansed and empowered.

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The submission-demanding parasite excludes the community from his inner life (after all, the Faceless Authority would fatally lose its awe-inspiring grip if the multitudes discovered intimate details about it, thus making it cognitively and emotionally available to them); he also reduces their interaction or dialogue with him to a bare minimum, usually consisting in reports (and praises) and their taking of his orders, thereby exercising his power by means of control and terror. Conversely, the communion-inspired brethren are largely interested in including the others, but true interaction or dialogue is not achieved here either, as their methods include conversion, or assimilation, to a coordinated or centralised ideology and general ways of acting in unison, rather than actual exchange and creative cooperation. The remaining side of the adapted triangle depicts the joining of the spiritual and the sociopolitical onto the representational background of the same self-to- community grids, a merger also revealing another mix of underlying spectra, namely the subtle-open and the structured-unstructured. As seen in Fig. VI., the first (top left) cell of this last table presents the Outlaw, the fusion of the previous types it is built upon, as the thelemic anarchist (or independent). While „outlaw‟ may instill colour the reception of this type with villainous undertones, the character denoted by it is no more, no less than the one literally outside the law, trespassing it for his unspecified reasons. As such, he belongs, together with his fellow self-based type, the Hero, to the unstructured region of the spectrum, as he defies laws and hierarchies alike, while subtly (or secretly) exercising his power. The aforementioned fellow self-originating type, the Hero, is the other great challenger of social structures, the „democratic martyr‟ who manifests power openly (in the so- deemed „heroic exploits‟) in the interest of the community. The Outlaw and the Hero, while conventionally distinct and intuitively classifiable as „bad‟ and „good‟ respectively, are quite intriguingly similar in terms of their breaking of the common law in pursuit of ends that may or may not justify their means. It is often only their „inwards‟-„outwards‟ polarity which convincingly sets them apart, but, as the reviewed material will show, that very distinction has been greatly blurred over the generations, with such perhaps truer-to-life categories as the anti-hero and the anti-

108 villain bringing the two ever closer to identification, or rather bringing the Hero more and more within the conceptual sphere of the Outlaw. The community-originated types are, conversely, based on a much tighter social structure, whether „vertically‟ or „horizontally‟. The Master, constituted as the submission-demanding monarch or dictator, is placed at the top of the verticalised hierarchy he commands and strictly regulates. He is thus making use of his power in a rather subtle manner, via decrees and hinted threats, requiring little more than the very structure he has set in place and only rarely his direct involvement. On the other hand, the Comrade (the Fellow, the Brother) is one of the faceless many pertaining to a nevertheless closely coordinated social structure of horizontal design, its peers tightly woven into a network of mutual support economically resembling a commune. Power is exercised in an open fashion, although not always publicly per se (consider, for instance, various secret societies, subversive resistance groups or social minorities) and it takes the form of physical or economic support and ideological reinforcement distributed between the fraternally-bonded members of the collective. Despite the differences in the social orientation of their respective structures, and especially the socio-cultural and ideological enmity between the historical representatives of such societies, Masters and Comrades are, in practice, most often found interconnected. They are both part of the historic cycle turning Comrades occasionally wanting to become „more equal‟ than their peers into Masters and overturning the latter and their hierarchy into egalitarian-styled structures, which nevertheless have hierarchies of their own (e.g. the meritocratic- intended advancing ranks of secret societies or of various cults). As the above results indicate, the four types of the Outlaw, the Hero, the Master and the Comrade elucidate the „WHO?‟ of mask rituals, defining four fundamental personas the Masked Man becomes upon the identification of performer and mask. In the social trinity scheme, the last arrow segment depicted religious authority as providing legitimacy to the relationship between psychology and social politics, coordinating and reinforcing their balance. Indeed, a close inspection reveals that our interpretation of the social trinity model via the dual link of the self to the community was correct, as it is accurate, in all four cases, to describe respectively the Religion monopolar types as lending power or legitimacy

109 to the corresponding type on the psycho-sociopolitical grid: thelema encourages individualism, sacrificial spirit will encourage collectivism, a habit of submission will assist the formation of hierarchies, while finally agape supports egalitarian attitudes and values. We have thus completed the detailing of the social trinity by means of the interaction between the performer‟s self and community, obtaining the motives, the means and the identity of the above-mentioned Mystery Man. At this stage it is important to remember that in the social rites involving physical masked characters interpreted as hierophanic presences ineffably lodged in the mundane reality and simultaneously transcending it, said masked characters enjoy(ed) fairly limited, mostly socially predetermined freedom of action. Unlike them, yet drawing on their implied transcendence, the stylised, impact- shrunk and most often de-sacralised figures of the Masked Man appearing in subsequent and current world literatures enjoy greater (diegetic) freedom, providing the reader with the distinct sense of their actions being of their own planning and accord. In other words, it is only here that the Masked Man starts being perceived as a believably potential human, despite strong implications, tackled later in this work, of his inherent inhumanity or monstrosity. Thus, it is only now that it finally makes sense to convincingly describe such types as the Outlaw taking the mortal gamble and deciding to undergo a descent into the abyss of his psyche, to say nothing of the full cultural and historic valences of the Comrade type only attained by reference to literary figures of the last two centuries. Then, in the context of what we may call history-recorded literature, to distinguish it from prehistoric myths and various oral forms of literature not yet in full separation from the socio-politically relevant rites, we are at last able to assemble the motives, the means and the identity of the Masked Man along the established four major types given by the WHY, the HOW and the WHO tables (as seen previously in Fig. VI.). To wit, we are in possession of respectively the individualism-driven Outlaw descending to his liminal form (hence referred to herein as the „Descending Outlaw‟), the collectivism-driven Hero ascending through catharsis (the „Ascending Hero‟), the hierarchy-oriented Master controlling through either seduction or terror (the „Controlling Master‟) and, last but not least,

110 the egalitarian-inspired Comrade converting and assimilating others into his ranks (the „Assimilating Comrade‟). It is these four archetypes, grouped under the proposed moniker of “the Archetype Matrix”, which provide us with a fitting tool for the study of specific characters and their begetting cultural icons, fundamental motifs re-encountered across various ages and geo-cultural spaces, providing normative and descriptive insight into human and world paradigms. Most importantly in the context of the current research, the four referential cultural icons of the Descending Outlaw, the Ascending Hero, the Controlling Master and the Assimilating Comrade provide what the author argues to be psychological, spiritual and socio-political templates instrumental in analysing past and contemporary masked characters, along with the cultural strands they pertain to, as well as providing what may well serve as predictive models for future socio-cultural development. At this point, in order to verify our findings before proceeding to the analysis of the various other examples offered by literary masks, we ought to revisit the previously discussed examples of the mask-related cultural phenomena and re- approach them in the new light of the typology formulated above in order to verify its overall usefulness and gain perhaps new insight from the new layer of interpretation. As we have taken note earlier, extensive tattoos including highly visible body locations such as the face make their wearer stand out among the still vast majority of his/her untattooed peers, at least as seen in the average Western-world community. Coupled with the often remarkable physical pain clients must take in order to have such body art decorating their entire skin, that isolation effect, most often accompanied by other psychological inconveniences, such as still-encountered social-milieu intolerance or the occasional severing of the ties with some social circles, calls for a good amount of prior reflection on whether or not to truly undergo such a permanent identity change. That is to say that those choosing to have their face or entire skin thus marked are often acting out their strong desire to be unique, perhaps more attractive, to reflect what they feel is their true, inner self, or even to shock their peers. That is a desire which labels them as pertaining to the Outlaw type, yet aspects characteristic of other types can also be identified in the similarly

111 outstanding tattooed eventually seeking out one another and creating Comrade-like communities and in the sublime vibe given off by the altered human visages, which may at once be quite eerie or frightening and highly artistic, even beautiful when considering the actual artwork, thus recommending them as somewhat pertaining to the Master type as well. Uniforms, as commented on previously, help create social subsets within the larger community, by connecting those sharing the profession represented by the uniform, while also isolating them from the community as a whole. Such a description allows uniforms to claim the Comrade type for themselves, but the issue of uniforms showing differences according to specialisation, rank and authority allow them to equally fit the Master type. In that respect of externalising socio- professional ranks and their respective rules of engagement, uniforms also aptly exemplify the concepts of obligation/expectation between different classes of individuals, especially the asymmetric formal rules of deference due to one‟s superiors (Goffman 1967: 50-56). The particular case of the protective-uniformed police officers handling population control is, of course, no exception, as their intimidating attire still embodies the combined patterns of the Master and the Comrade, despite the well-known logo of “to protect and to serve” that might have otherwise recommended them for the Hero category. On the other hand, the rioters themselves, particularly in the instances of masked protests and skirmishes, can also be held to be enacting Comrade-type rituals (granted anonymity by and collectively identified by their improvised disguises, despite their social structure being less organised) and even Hero-type rituals. The latter is particularly true in such cases when social turmoil is sparked off by one individual‟s (self-)justified challenging of the authorities towards the so-perceived momentary benefit of his community (on occasion framed as actual rites of initiation into underground social cliques) and, of course, of his own (thus involving the Outlaw typology as well). Regarding the internet and its great potential for continual meta-masking through evolving avatars and myriads of forms of second-self global presence, its examples provided in the earlier section illustrate a mix of especially the Outlaw and Comrade archetypes, by the illusion of all individuals pursuing their very own customised route to happiness when online, coupled with an overarching sense of

112 loose but social and time-independent community, partly overlapping with “real” social networks. If in the case of tattoos the paramount social-psychology questions dealt with one‟s ability to cope with the permanence of their new identity (virtually) indelibly inked into their skin, the global h(e)aven that is the internet raises the otherwise classic masking issue of the genuineness of one‟s identity with regard to the perpetual renegotiation of the borders between the private and public sphere. Admittedly, anyone who has ever surfed the World Wide Web is probably aware that, from chatting to online shopping, anyone else‟s online claims should be taken with fair amounts of skepticism, yet what happens to one‟s own claims? Due to the high interpenetration of “real life” and “online life”, from abbreviations and humorous memes to white-lie misrepresentations of ourselves or our products to friends and customers and to the seemingly rising affluence of internet dating and relationships, users find that their usual psychological wrestle with the internet is no longer about having to remember exactly what their online persona is like. Instead, it has become about the fact that their online persona, their own variably-sincere creation, has escaped their conscious control and reinfiltrated their mind to make personality updates and upgrades. In that, the current generation may be confronting a “Narcissus is Pygmalion is Narcissus” syndrome, wherein the articulation of power has become no longer a highly appealing option for liberation, as was the case with Carnivals, which it indeed resembles, but rather something of a confusing addiction given by the virtuality of power. Many of us grow so enraptured with our alternate selves, of our own creation, that we eventually join them to us, or worse, they end up absorbing us. Since our hijacking avatars were intended as better versions of ourselves, the replacement may seem an upgrade, yet in the long run we may just discover that the creations of flawed creators can only be more flawed. Yet the meta-mask phenomenon of the internet also exhibits traces of the Hero archetype in such cases as the various online support groups, where individuals provide advice or other forms of online/offline socio-psychological empowerment to others, typically in larger numbers, having superseded such earlier editorial subgenres as the Agony Aunt columns in printed press. Finally, the immense proliferation of data, including original creations, on the internet has also helped the

113 rise of a concept somewhat returning to the medieval standards of loose authorship, the creative commons. That is to say one may customise a previous creation by another towards producing what is thenceforth an original work of its own, as long as the originator of the idea is given due credit. This provides the bases for the existence of otherwise entirely unknown celebrities, (deliberately?) mysterious online personas with massive following by fans who typically know, or care to know, very little about their artistic idol beyond his/her work, as seen with most amateur online literature, graphic art and musical covers, which thus provide some ground for the assumption that aspects of the Master archetype may also be detected in the complex identity of the online Masked Man. In what concerns theatre in general, in its featuring a community united by their meta-masking profession but ultimately consisting of individuals who are, by and large, equal before their art, we may affirm it to be included in the typology of the Assimilating Comrade. The distinction is once again attained by the expression of gender, as both the Greek and the English theatre discriminated actors with regard to their suitability for various female roles, such as the boys and the teenagers for girls and young women. Only those roles involving old women or hag-like females portrayed as grotesque either for comic relief or to embody some villainous traits would also be suitable for the adult and older men of the troupes. Commedia dell’ Arte, on the other hand, while including women on stage, was itself at times discriminated against, for not being the exponent of the learned elites, and thus probably was most similar to our concept of the Assimilating Comrade in their slightly pariah nature, yet acceptant of all with genuine talent. On the other hand, court masques were more aligned with the Controlling Master archetype, as they were, yes, a closed social circle representing the nobility, but where the emphasis was mostly on the relationship of the nobility with the monarch, to the effect of improving the hierarchic bonds in place. Yet in general, considering European theatre as stemming from various local rural traditions, continuing and improving on their stage predecessors, and generally striving for the better education and cognitive-artistic response of the audience in whichever way, it also makes sense to

114 regard the Greek theatre, the Elizabethan theatre and the Commedia dell’ Arte as adhering to the Ascending Hero archetype. Of course, the Hero model as conceptualised for the mask rituals only loosely applies in the case of the English and Italian theatres, as even though there are unquestionable effects of entertaining and educating the audience, the performers have already made the transition towards their art not being a voluntary dabbling in or calling for the sacred, but a trade, some including guilds and royal privileges. In fact, the prestige of a certain troupe or author, a concept whose importance had quite clarified by their time, could often make certain social and even political differences, from garnering favour for a ruler or a military campaign by showing plays drawing on heroic deeds of the past, to subtly shifting the playgoers‟ view on certain socially-debated issues by addressing them in allegoric forms in comedies or tragedies. Thus, in some cases the rewards the troupes would even unwittingly reap from their audiences could well exceed their expectations and thus also, by far, the modicum due to Hero performers, placing acting into the Master archetype as well. It should suffice to only refer to two of our Shakespearean examples, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in order to confirm our general findings. In the former, we see the entire city of Verona, as well as, if to a smaller extent, the two households of Capulet and Montague, organised by patriarchal hierarchies. The city is ruled by the Prince, who has city-wide authority but is depicted as allowing the system in place to largely govern itself, not interfering directly unless the order has broken down. Similarly, the two clans are led by their respective father figures – Traditional Authorities à la Max Weber – who decide and have veto rights on all family matters large and small, from education and marriage arrangements to intra- and inter-clan conflicts, typifying their Master template. On the other hand, as previously anticipated regarding such matters as the depiction of historically realistic societies, the Master-led hierarchy is linked with the Comrades‟ ranks, as seen in the Capulets and the Montagues drawing ranks around their offended respective clansman, as in the duel between Tybalt and Mercutio. As also evidenced by a large number of social structures throughout history, created and surviving (even thriving) on the premise of safety in numbers, in Shakespeare‟s Verona we may also observe the phenomenon of characters

115 defending the honour of their family and household and thus supporting the generational blood feud despite their own direct irrelevance to it. Essentially, despite the sense of equality and fraternity binding the Capulets and the Montagues to their respective relatives and allies through intra-diegetic psycho-social masking, this is interestingly a social structure whereby the many coalesce around, and thus empower, the one, whether it be the clan chieftain or the clan‟s chief warrior, corresponding, as the reader will know by now, to the Master archetype. On the other hand, the clans themselves, taken as collective characters, just as well as their representatives, both in the duel scene or in the taboo romance of Romeo and Juliet, are breaking the laws (of the city or of their respective family heads) in order to pursue their own interests and passions, in both of those instances towards tragic outcomes, and can then also be classified as Outlaws. The two teenagers breaking the cross-clan fraternisation taboo are perhaps the greatest Outlaws, as their defiance of the established laws (or rather the feuding tradition) is motivated not by desire for justice or vengeance, but by the stronger and less family- justifiable passion of love. Their burgeoning relationship, despite the pacifying consequences it eventually triggered, which could have thus easily been anticipated towards a happier end by the no-doubt politically savvy Veronese family heads, was perceived as such a monstrous act specifically because it was a threat towards the social establishment combining hierarchy and clan fraternity, both social structures rewarding impersonal participation and self-effacing. On the other hand, their sacrifice, while apparently marking them as Heroes in the long run, as it brings about the reconciliation of their two clans, and thus presumably a much more peaceful and stable community uniting Capulets and Montagues as Comrades with only the Prince as their Master, was nevertheless not triggered with any such thought. From the masquerade where the two meet, to the balcony scene where Juliet denounces the psycho-social masks they have to wear (“Wherefore art thou Romeo?”), and on to the very scene of their tragically bungled attempt at escaping their stage, the two teenaged lovers perfectly fit the Outlaw paradigm, Shakespearean realism then accounting for their (accidental) recontextualisation as Heroes.

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In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we encounter a similar situational distribution of types, at least in what the Master-Comrade link is concerned. Theseus, king of the Shakespearean Athens, rules the city-state by implied military power and, most apparent in the actual play, by patriarchal authority, as he is, as the Prince in Verona, largely uninvolved in social matters, with whose resolution he entrusts his hierarchic underlings. He makes and changes laws, with monarchic vetoing rights, in like manner to the way the father figures on the lower levels of his hierarchy organise their own communities, i.e. their families. This is a similarity he knowingly condones, for instance when he rebukes Hermia for her unwillingness to obey her father in his choice of her husband (“your father should be like a god”). The pattern is applied, with even stronger notes of (hollow) gender tension, in the Fairy realm, where Titania‟s and Oberon‟s depicted retinues appear gender-coordinated (and it may be inferred that Titania has a much larger following). Yet this is a powerful, if unfounded and perhaps anthropocentric and socially conditioned, assumption, about a world which is believed to contain many more beings like Puck, who can shape- shift (thus making any identity a question of choice, not nature), and where in fact, apart from the changeling boy, even Titania and Oberon are barely given any kind of material gender identity. In light of the above, of en-masse participation to a meaningless conflict by beings simply following their adored rulers, the subtle depersonalisation thus achieved among the two fractions of the Seelie Court gives further weight to the argument of their social structure, complete with the obvious Master-appropriate centralisation achieved around the royal figures, including the known intra-tier Comrade bonds. Naturally, when discussing the Comrade type of structure occurring among the Fairies, the emphasis falls largely on Titania‟s servants, although they are individually named, addressed and given minor parts to play. Puck, on the other hand, perceived as perhaps the only, but the most trusted and capable, servant of Oberon, and likely content to be peerless, would have his own loose place in the Master hierarchy. He is mostly compliant yet “improvising” to his whim and according to what, in the esoteric readings of the play, could pass for higher magic expertise or understanding (after all, he does boast his explicit identity with such folk names for the devil as Old Nick), and appears to engage his

117 lord in an Odin-Loki type of family and feudal interaction complicated by an undercurrent of looming revolt. As in Romeo and Juliet, all evoked couples are seen as Outlaws. This is because, in fleeing Athens, Hermia and Lysander want to escape parental and royal order, while Demetrius follows them to make sure his own desire for Hermia is fulfilled before her and Lysander‟s, and Helena out of her unreciprocated interest in Demetrius. As Puck confounds their emotions in the woods, their archetype structure remains the same, except their passions now shift some of their initial targets, with the two men dueling mentally, verbally and almost physically as well over Helena, causing her to fall out with Hermia. Theseus and Hippolyta just want to be wedded and provided entertainment, while „the most Outlaw‟ are Oberon and Titania, quarrelling, separated and almost on the brink of war because of their respective wish of owning the changeling being denied by the other. Furthermore, the mutual accusations of the two imply that their Outlaw character may also be confirmed in their breaking of their marital vows, as each accuses the other of having been involved with mortals on prior occasions. Still, both Theseus and Oberon are given the opportunity to slightly „redeem‟ their characters by acquiring some „Hero points‟ via, ironically, showing concern or benevolence to the others in their Master hierarchies. Theseus, though goaded by Hermia‟s father Egeus to make full use of the law in punishing his runaway daughter, decides instead to celebrate the resolution of the four young Athenians‟ discord and their happy coupling by seeing them all wedded. Oberon, despite having desired to play a prank on Titania and get the changeling, nevertheless knows some measure to his tricks and commands Puck to reverse his actions, releasing the four Athenians with the bonus of their improved marital prospects and breaking the hex placed on Titania and Bottom. Of course, his ending of Puck‟s farces only occurred after he obtained the changeling and noticed the two teenage males were about to engage in likely fatal duel, so his status of a typological Hero is still in question. Finally, the amateur acting troupe of the Mechanicals may be seen as Heroic in two contexts, both by performing (in what becomes a truer mask-ritual meaning than they, or Bottom, had prepared) at the royal banquet and by extra-diegetically revealing to the Shakespearean audiences some of the comical hidden realities of

118 theatre performances. Most of them correspond to the Comrade archetype, yet again, as in the case of the Fairy retinue of Titania, with the reserve of them retaining some individuality of character (of their own, despite their depicted interchangeability during their performance of Pyramus and Thisbe). They are, however, at times, seen as acting in unison, such as in the woods, where they are all rehearsing (yet separately) and are subsequently seen to run away in collective fear from the transformed Bottom. The latter, though likely considering himself as belonging to the Hero archetype in light of his performance, which he trusts and, unexpectedly, manages to not only be artistically successful, but also emotionally benign (“I shall roar most gently”), is nevertheless closer to the Outlaw type. That is due to his desire of getting the best parts for himself and of exhibiting himself as a protagonist or at least the lion, but getting transformed into the potentially telling hybrid of a man with a donkey‟s head (thus, a living symbol of stubbornness). His second and final step towards being a Hero comes by means of his expulsion out of the enchanted „dream‟, which, if one is to consider the mask-orgiastic reading of the passage, has instilled supernal and ineffable wisdom into him, which he yet attempts to convey further to his fellows („man is but an ass‟).

The Archetype Matrix, elaborated at the beginning of this section, was based on the original mask rituals and their social articulation of power, on one hand among the constant poles of religion, psychology and politics, and on the other along the axis connecting performer (self) and audience (community). The resulting types, the Descending Outlaw, the Ascending Hero, the Controlling Master and the Assimilating Comrade, as testaments of fictional masks originating in, but having evolved away from, social-ritual masks, reach beyond the original uses and understanding of masks, from performed concepts and social adjustors to fictional characters as the semblances and potentialities of actual human beings. The first step of that evolution, from the ceremonially sacred masks of the early social rituals to the earliest forms of literature, could not have occurred without the huge help given by the pseudo-masks and then the meta-masks, which helped extract and recontextualise the original ideas, putting time and again novel age- and

119 genre-appropriate flesh on their conceptual skeletons as cultural icons. It was then only appropriate that, before starting to compare and contrast and mask reincarnations against the four mask-referential cultural icons, we should verify our finds on the intermediary forms as well. Nevertheless, the examples provided above clearly indicate that the neat division of the Archetype Matrix into its four fundamental types, while being descriptive and normative, is likely to remain a set of theoretical guidelines at least as far as the pseudo-masks and the meta-masks are concerned. In both their social and fictional settings, the four archetypes were more often than not found in combinations, allowing for higher psychological detail and realism. Despite the shift from pseudo-masks to meta-masks not always being linear and the co-existence, in multiple chrono-cultural instances, of multiple forms derived from the same root, it may be noted that the said shift occurs most visibly with the drive towards the abstraction of characters. Simultaneously, however, as we would theorise particularly in the contemporary post-modernity, the said trend in the abstractisation and reduction in the outward forms of the masks and/or of their rituals down the temporal lines of the Mask Metempsychoses occurs nevertheless with a palimpsest-like agglutination of multiple such lines of Metempsychotic development. We have witnessed the phenomenon in such characters as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, V, etc., and further research will also demonstrate the process in other, more recent literary samples.

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V. Articulating Power: Aesthetic and Cognitive Monsters

On our way to discovering the four types of the Archetype Matrix, we acknowledged that mask rituals share certain basic elements with social rituals at large, described by the social trinity structure, but stand out from them due to two essential aspects, most relevant in the context of power articulation and particularly its lasting impact. One of them, the constant interrelating to both performer and audience, or self and community, was already instrumental towards our setting up of the four cultural icons of the Archetype Matrix. The other one, the sense of transgression, of „lawful violation‟, committed by mask rituals against what is perceived as societal normalcy, otherwise known as the fundamental social institutions and domains of religion, psychology and socio-politics, is no less important in establishing the full range of the phenomena involving the emergence and metamorphoses of mask-related cultural icons. In the earlier sections, we have seen that a mask‟s power is often based on ambiguity, at times also involving secrecy or the suspension of disbelief. We have learnt that they create their own social interactions, either alongside upholding the ones already in place or modifying them. As tools of ecstasy and modifiers of the mind, they manipulate the collective subconscious in a game of dying to know and not daring to know. That game, the tease, of masks is perhaps so universally potent because it engages two fundamental dimensions of the human mind, cognition and aesthetics. It is a game of mental seduction, placing the viewers in front of a sublime spectre, which terrifies them with the ancestral fear of the Great Unknown, of the Darkness Out There, of all that is Alien and Other, while simultaneously offering them hope, joy, entertainment, communitarian solutions to dilemmas of the sacred and many more. We then argue that the universally thrilling aspect hidden within masks‟ identity-indexing mystique is a deep-rooted sense of the sublime. To wit, that

121 sublime can be explained, on a superficial level, as being the cognitive dissonance to which the viewer is subjected when exposed to both the unnamed terror and the artful allure of masks, the bizarreness of their ornate or deformed features chiming together most curiously with the seduction of the mystery peeking from behind them. The somewhat deeper level of the sublime composite attraction is represented by the very sense of the masks‟ transgression, as they not only represent the Other, the Uncanny and even the Monstrous, but are, in a larger sense, a forbidden fruit of sorts, dangling within elusive reach in the social sphere. Thirdly, the sense of the monstrous which they stir into the viewers‟ imagination is often composed of both cognitive impossibility – or ontological paradox – and aesthetic judgment acting in unison, in parallel to the repulsion- attraction doublet found on the first layer. Regarding repulsion and attraction, we may note that the monstrous has become not just a commodity, but a craved item of mass consumption. As Wes Williams explains in his Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture: Mighty Magic (2011), (western) audiences seem to have come a long way from perceiving monstrosity as a warning of “private and public evils”, to an adventure of “epistemological heroes” going about “anatomising and taxonomising in order to distinguish what it means to be human, while at the same time mastering […] the abundance and variety of Nature and divine creation”. In the end, having respectively feared, slain and collected the Other, the modern reader, “a never-to-be-satisfied dreamer”, is simply bored and seeks the next monster, the next thrill. Lastly, as there is no defining of the Other or of the Monstrous without a sense of Self to binarily set it off, we may yet again distinguish between the self-based (and self-defining) aspect of masks, namely the self-constant of sensory-somatic abnormality, and the relational-based interpersonal abnormality. It is by the intricate combination of the multiple factors above that masks are able to go beyond their roots of social rituals and plunge the mind into a maze of mysteries, on the winding way from concrete and performative to abstract and imaginative. Intuitively enough, masks are social creations, insomuch as the very existence of masks can only be discussed in terms of a Self-Other duality, as necessarily no

122 isolated individual would find a good reason to wear a mask (apart from protective gear) if they do not conceive of the possibility of being seen (at the very least by themselves), of the eventual presence of another. It is precisely that duality which underpins the foundations of masks as social rituals and makes it unimaginable that they should have emerged in any other context. Simultaneously, it is that duality which allows masks to have evolved beyond their social foundation. We have earlier found, in the interplay of Self and Community, the necessary research tool to adapt David E. R. George‟s social trinity scheme towards our analysis of cultural icons in their process of age- and genre-wide Mask Metempsychosis. Similarly, we shall now use the Self-Other axis to determine the link between the Archetype Matrix and what we may similarly dub the Monstrosity, or Transgressions, Table. As the first layer of the masks‟ sublime is sufficiently clear, we shall start on the second (inner) level, detailing the matter of masks‟ transgression from the point of view of our previously-used social trinity structure. Despite the relatively low degree of freedom which the Masked Man enjoys in the original social rituals, as opposed to his subsequent incarnations in fiction, there is nevertheless a uniquely high amount of power which he possesses and articulates in what is usually perceived as being his desire or will as a non-human. As such, he is able and in fact on many occasions warranted to go beyond certain limitations imposed on the average members of the community, in order to deal with phenomena that already transcend their understanding or abilities, from rainmaking to cursing a rival community. He may thus straddle the uncrossable border of life and death, challenging the ontological taboos of religion separating the dead from the living from the gods, by appearing in an apotheosis ritual such as the manifestation of a deity, spirit or hallowed ancestor. He may plunge the minds of the viewers in psychological and ontological horror to or beyond the thin line of the primeval entwining of man and beast in the context of some liminality ritual, such as initiating boys to be warrior men, or summoning onto them the boon of wild stamina prior to battle, etc. He may also defy the laws of a community as one endowed with socio-political authority, such as a fabled ruler or representative of some foreign tribe, entitled to ask for more or less symbolic sacrifice. Finally, the Masked Man may once again challenge the

123 remaining segment of the social trinity figure, destabilising the pathway of legitimacy originating in the religious institutions and reinforcing the balance between the psychological and the socio-political institutions, by the other earthly, or communitarian, process, humour, allowing him to parody and (symbolically) criticise various ills of the society. As the reader may already suspect from the analogy alluded to above, there is a loosely-fitting correspondence to be made between those four transgressing categories and the results of our Archetype Matrix, appropriate given that they have the same source, despite different means of transformation. That is, Apotheosis rituals correspond to the Assimilating Comrade archetype, due to the typical understanding of that glorification as not being power obtained by one‟s own means and/or for themselves, but as being “adopted” or reborn into the community of similarly sacred figures. Liminality (or Horror) rituals match the concept exhibited by the Descending Outlaw without much need for clarifications, while Authority rituals bear resemblances to the Controlling Master type, by means of clear socio- political conquest implications. Finally, the Ascending Hero can be seen as similar to the Humour-based rites and performances, due to the multiple valences of jesters, jugglers and other Trickster-like figures in entertaining the audience while similarity functioning as subtle soothsayers or magicians, and in general dabbling in the spiritual, psychological and political spheres, such as the keenly observant and wise- beyond-their-looks court fools seen in Shakespeare and throughout most of theatre. While there is little to add on this topic for the time being, this secondary association of quartets could provide the departure point for further research on the matter. Instead, we shall content ourselves to note that there is a different division created on this level, between the ontological, or individual, categories (Apotheosis and Liminality) and the value-judgment, or communal, ones (Authority and Humour). The former both affect the individual through what is at times a radical transformation of his own being, whether in spirit or in mind and body, for „positive‟ or „negative‟ ends, or, in more accurate terms, whether a complete ontological renewal has occurred (typically on final terms), or only a mixed one, where the earlier form and the new form coexist, or are interchangeable.

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Returning to the four-layered understanding of a mask‟s sublime appeal, we are now able to proceed to the elucidation of the two remaining layers, developing on the previous concept of the mask as a transcender of social power centres and, thereby, of the Masked Man being a hybrid with special status and unusual powers and prerogatives. As such, he is uncommon and in many ways an outsider, while fundamentally relevant to the given community, being the Other and the Monster in a social game that, by defining their mirroring, defines them both. The transgressing quality, the forbidden factor (or the liberating voyeurism) of some masks, when one delves deeper into its meanings, is monstrous in a specific way, irreducible to aesthetic or psycho-social or other such “conventional” labeling. The monstrous of a mask is based first on the cognitive and aesthetic principles. The former describes the uncanny-filled niche in one‟s mental mapping occupied by that mask, or rather by the constant riddle of what lies behind it, in the sense of the cognitive impossibility and/or dissonance posed by it. The aesthetic value of that mask, such as that evoked by stylisations enhancing the feeling of artificial, of non-human, or of strange, by distortions and grotesque transformations of a few traits deemed as significant to the mask‟s character, or by a combination of the above, represents the suggestion of horror and disgust often built into the mask for various purposes, from satirical to apotropaic, or arrived at via cultural shock or misappropriation. Secondly, a mask‟s monstrous is also given by the abnormalities it introduces, as the Other, in dealing with Us, whether interpersonal or sensory- somatic, meaning that a mask may deny its viewers any social or psychological relatability to or interaction with it and respectively that its viewers are similarly barred from even taking sensual note or appreciations of it. Admittedly, the last option does not exist in the practice of masks as social-ritual items, but it does feature in several instances of fictional masks. By combining the results obtained thus far in characterising the seduction of masks, a new grid emerges, called the Monstrosity Table (see Fig. VII). It offers a combined scale of four points that a certain mask can score as describing the monstrous in reference to the joined values of cognitive-aesthetic and interpersonal- sensory-somatic abnormalities. Thus, the monstrosity of Apotheosis scores three out of four positives, explicable by the immense change it presumes, thus rendering the

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Masked Man fundamentally different from the average human being. An apotheosised figure is thus perceived as being socially monstrous, i.e. one‟s normal exchanges and relating to that person are irretrievable, to the point where it may even be taboo to actually try and address such a figure. He is then also sensually and somatically monstrous, otherwise known as intangible, rather to be expected in this case of sacralised personages, despite some such Masked Men being considered bringers of good fortune and therefore expected to be ritually touched. Lastly, the one having undergone Apotheosis is cognitively abnormal, due to its abilities or even very nature being perceived as defying all logic or causality or simply beyond the capacity of human reasoning and understanding. In Liminality, or Horror, rituals, the same high score is achieved, by such a Masked Man being possessed of – most notably, perhaps – aesthetic monstrosity, given that the treacherous journey to liminality tends to be accompanied by frightful physical transformations or items representing (or enhancing) terrorising bodily elements or creatures. He is also described by social and sensory-somatic monstrosity, as the obtained man-beast is of course no longer capable or willing to entertain the previous interpersonal relationships and may even be untouchable (a spiritual beast) or unsafe to be touched, at least by some members of the community, such as the uninitiated or the non-healers, etc. In the other two cases, we find two positives for each, displayed in a clearly opposing manner. We may thus check interpersonal and sensory-somatic monstrosity for the Authority rituals, whose protagonists obviously do not wish or are not allowed (by their very own structure of command, typically) to interact with their original social acquaintances, while being, in many cases, treated as near- apotheosised physical untouchables, except by their consorts or immediate family. On the other hand, the case of Parody-based rituals reveals them to be cognitively monstrous, as much of comedy fails to follow threads of typical logic, and is in fact based on extraordinary circumstances, unusual complications, non-sequiturs and complex fantasy. They may be aesthetically monstrous too, considering the well- represented genres of caricature and satire, involving, since ancient times, masks portraying characters noticeably ugly or otherwise distorted in physique in order to

126 suggest their similarly rotten socio-psychological nature but also to force reconsiderations of aesthetic value. While the Authority and Parody performances are thus expectedly clearly opposed, we find that the ontological duo of Apotheosis and Horror rituals are contrasted within the same layer, the fourth and innermost, as their main difference is, interestingly, that Horror or Liminality deforms the body while providing some cognitive relatability and justification (in animal impulses and instincts) for the beast‟s actions, whereas Apotheosis largely does not change the appearance of the body (except for perhaps radiating light or fiery auras) but turns the Masked Man into a miraculously incomprehensible new being. Such monstrosity criteria feature equally visibly in fiction, where, much like in the case of the Archetype Matrix, they are most often found not on their theoretical own, but in realism-inducing combinations, particularly in meta-masking cases. One such example is provided by Grenouille, the protagonist of Patrick Süskind‟s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, who, born as a unique organism not exuding any scent of his own in a masterfully depicted eighteenth-century France rife with all odours imaginable, from the most rank to the most seductive, is the illustrative embodiment of the sensory-somatic component of monstrosity. His particular blend of monstrosity is auctorially constructed very clearly from the beginning, by the description of the circumstances of his birth in the rotting reeking slums where he draws his first breath and where it is already clear that, despite their not knowing what it could be about him, everyone finds the boy to be disturbingly peculiar. Moreover, the name he is given (despite his unassuming, otherwise average or homely exterior) is a psycho-social mask intra-diegetically forced upon him by society, who thus manifest their ontological terror of him in relation to the frog, as one of the most classically loathed creatures, in a naming ritual reminiscent of the ancient Hebrews‟ scapegoat practices. „Frog‟ is perhaps also an admission of their cognitive insufficiency regarding how to handle him or relate to his inner world, given that one of the most oft-quoted reasons for frogs eliciting disgust is their unappealing exterior, combining warts, an incriminating staple of biological contagion, with the coat of slime evoking unknown terrors of the primordial ooze and of the rampant, monstrously-creative

127 biological. Extra-diegetically, the mask of his name reveals him to the reader to be a prince (of artists) in disguise, according to the known myths about young royalty cursed to don the guise of the amphibians for particularly such reasons of warranting revulsion as above, and who can only be transformed back into humans by such elusive tokens of love as a (maiden‟s, or first) kiss. In Grenouille‟s case, the cursed prince is rather an exceptional artist, whose curse manifests itself as extreme social rejection become mutual at an early stage and who struggles to find a cure on his own, via self-improvement in his craft, even if the costs are the lives (together with the fragrance) of such said maidens. Grenouille the legend is a Masked Man in a pseudo-mask form, lacking a mask per se, but disguised in a psycho-social manner, whether in his early years of being overlooked or outright despised and abused or in his adult years of perfumer apprenticeships, ascetism and even high artistry of his own. In both stages of his life, the biases of the others with regard to his appearance and social-status clothing provide him with the security of social anonymity and even untouchability, behind which he can unperturbedly carry out what he perceives to be his artistic manifesto and mission. His monstrosity is based on, foremost, a bio-ontological divide between himself and everyone and everything else, which, in an ironic twist, becomes his paramount strength: as he himself does not exude any characteristic odour, he is uniquely suited, above everyone else, for his study of the “perfect fragrance”, being thus the only one to truly raise claims to an infinitesimally minimal interference with his work. Internally, the effects of his most lonely monstrosity engender his obsession of finding what is his complement, the most sublime aroma in the world, the refined totality befitting his raw empty genius, in whose coupling all would be transformed, purified and annihilated, in what is a sociopathic re-enactment of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth, with freshly smothered flesh fragrances in lieu of the sculptor‟s clay. His monstrosity occupies only the fourth layer of our interpretation of the monstrous concept, as he is not aesthetically repulsive, but rather unassuming and easily overlooked, while his actions do make sense and are in fact most logical in an abstract, unempathic and also woefully naïve way, the way of pure mechanical and

128 depersonalised reasoning, lacking all distracting emotion, social belonging or social responsibility. Grenouille is then best described by the mix of his sensory-somatic monstrosity and his interpersonal monstrosity, concretised in his lack of empathy or ability to perceive his young victims as more than raw materials for his craft, ultimately in itself a survival strategy forged in the lonely fires of his childhood and adolescence having taught him to fear and distrust anyone else. Together, they place him in the monstrous category of Authority, justified in full by the ending scene of the novel, wherein, for however briefly, Grenouille is empowered over all his human fellows, his art having, in its own frightfully intriguing way, all but justified itself for all (fictional) posterity. Nevertheless, it is difficult to confidently mark Grenouille as a Master, despite the unquestionable sway he has over all of his audience in his final moments. By hijacking his own execution, turning it into no less than a cannibalistic orgy under his near-magic rule, he both creates a social structure of thralls for himself and sacrifices it to his own outburst creed and values, incidentally and even – to a large extent – deliberately allowing himself to be sacrificially consumed as well. This act appears to fulfill the criteria of the Hero type, except for the gesture actually causing the liminality descent of all his audience beneficiaries. Indeed, for the most part of his life, Grenouille is best described as an Outlaw, having had to pursue his own needs (admittedly, with some degree of personal satisfaction) in complete disregard of the others‟ attempts to dominate or stop him. While the above is an excellent example of aesthetic and cognitive paradoxes reworking the articulation of „standard‟, neutral-authoritarian or awe-imposed power into the intimidation and seduction of the monstrous, many more examples could be given, which will be included in future research. Of significance here could also be the correlations that can be made between the fear factor, on one hand, and the distancing, or alienation, effect that mask genres have to a variable degree (see Fig. VIII.) – as well as the ensuing analysis of whether the advances of social media may be truly causing a definitive (if placebo) reduction in dramatic distance in the case of ritual (non-parade) events online (DeviantArt, Facebook games and sharing, etc.).

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Conclusions

The emergence and modification of human identity has fascinated mankind for millennia. From the tragedies of Ancient Greece to animation and graphic novels and from rites of initiation into adulthood to rites of passing into the afterlife, masks and masking ceremonies have been as much the marks of human creativity as the signs of man‟s struggle to make sense of an overwhelming cosmos, to tangibly belong to something humblingly vast out there. Great life experiences, individual or societal, have produced equally great myths, typically featuring at least some form of masking. Masks provide “alarm and excitement” (Boston 1960: 59), while teaching and reinforcing “the religions, history, aspirations, hopes, fears, morality, etc., of the community” (Ebong 1984: 1). The present research has endeavoured to shed some light on the admittedly vast cultural trove made up of mask rituals and some of the cross-generational phenomena set up around them. In particular, we have shown that the rituals involving masks, while having been around for dozens of generations, may still surprise us with their creativity in re-emerging throughout history. They are never entirely set in stone or rendered obsolete by the passing of time, but can easily evolve together with culture in order to better face the new challenges of the day and to avoid core values being lost. Secondly, of great interest was also the negotiation of identity, particularly the mask-enhanced identity, in the context of the perpetual interplay of private and public and between the individual (otherwise referred to throughout as the Performer or the Self) and the community (the Audience and/or the Other). We have noted that masks can unite and divide, while empowering but also placing a great deal of responsibility on the bearer. They may indeed temporarily remove him from a banal existence, but it may always happen that he be introduced to a nightmarish realm in exchange.

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At the intersection of the individual and community dimensions, we have discovered a new scheme and new research tools for the investigation of mask characters and rituals appearing, whether disguised, embedded in local traditions or out in the open, in the literatures of the ages. By following their way of articulating social power, we determined the four referential archetypes of the Ascending Hero, the Descending Outlaw, the Controlling Master and the Assimilating Comrade, instrumental for describing and predicting the social psychological traits of typical mask-donning characters. Moreover, by investigating related aesthetic and cognitive criteria in search for the monstrous and the uncanny of masks, we have uncovered future research pathways, involving the categories of Apotheosis, Horror (or Liminality), Authority and Parody, and further delved into the distancing effects of masks via their four- fold articulation of power as Liberation, Derision, Seduction and Coercion. Last but certainly not least, pursuing the experiences of mask performances along a few critical points in time allowed us to make certain observations regarding social effects (from fear and superstition to the engendering of a community conscience), social inequality and the forced realisation thereof through humour-wielding theatre, as well as advance some suppositions regarding the future development of masks and/in the media. As the above arguments have hopefully been successful in demonstrating, the Mask Metempsychosis is a genuine ongoing and even prolific phenomenon involving the rediscovery and revaluing of past works thought forgotten, but which are being brought back through equally valuable contemporary works towards proving that the literary and artistic world is a fertile environment of continuously brewing ideas and of fruitful cultural interchange. Great ideas are never truly lost, they simply disappear for a moment in time, waiting for the right generation to demand and rediscover them. Whoever picks up a mask nowadays does not only gaze upon mere decorated leather, wood or metal, but upon a conch echoing with the immortal whispers of past generations, which they are free to revisit and re-consider time and again, in a global play of imagination and interpretation.

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Annexes:

Fig. I. Enunciative process of Mask Rituals

Mask

flexible but Performer / Audience / indissoluble Individual Community

Ritual / Process

Reducible to

Fig. I.a.

Mask Performer / Audience / Individual Community

Fig. II. The Ritual Social Triangle

Cosmological paradigm

Social ontology Sense of self

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Fig. III. The Ritual Institutional Triangle (David E. R. George, 1987)

RELIGION (cosmological paradigms) norms norms

ideol. ideol.

legitimacy: legitimacy: legitimacy:

relig. myths sense relig. myths fields of relig. myths of self being

PSYCHOLOGY SOCIOPOLITICS ideologies, norms

Fig. III.a. The Social Trinity

Religion/Spirituality

Psychology Social politics

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“We argue that any basic rituals articulating social power can be satisfactorily described within the confines of this triangle structure, which we shall henceforth call the social trinity.”

Fig. IV. Articulation of Power in the Mixed Two-Plane Structure

Religion/Spirituality

(Self x Community)

Psychology Socio-politics

(Self x Community) (Self x Community)

“[…] the power, in flux between self and community, is articulated in every vertex of the scheme‟s triangle, partaking equally in all three of the trinity‟s aspects.”

Fig. V. The Articulation of Power per Social Trinity Poles:

Given (owned) by\Used for SELF COMMUNITY

SELF Egoism Altruism

COMMUNITY Parasitism/Oppression Hive, Herd/Fraternity

Socio-political power in light of the Self x Community grid:

Given (owned) by\Used for SELF COMMUNITY

SELF Independence/Anarchy Democracy

COMMUNITY Monarchy/Dictatorship Commune

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Religious/spiritual power in light of the Self x Community grid:

Given (owned) by\Used for SELF COMMUNITY

SELF Thelema Sacrifice/Martyrdom

COMMUNITY Submission/Obeying Communion/Agape

“[…] three grids, each revealing the interplay of the individual and the community as one passes social power to the other, through the lens of respectively the Psychology, the Socio-politics and the Religion (or Spirituality) foci of mask rituals.”

Fig. VI. The Articulation of Power Based on the Social Trinity’s Bipolar

Interactions

“[…] the social trinity scheme contained the respective interactions of every two of the three components, so the same scheme analysing the power articulation of mask rituals must also consider (and, indeed, to a higher degree of interest) the “edges” of the triangle”

Psycho-Sociopolitical power in light of the Self x Community grid:

Given (owned) by\Used for SELF COMMUNITY

SELF Individualism Collectivism

COMMUNITY Hierarchy Egalitarianism

(The social attitudes of the Masked Man with regard to power, or the reasons/goals (WHY) for him to be taking up the mask to gain that power)

“[T]his set of four types resulting from the combination of sociopolitical power and psychological power represent social attitudes towards power or towards its means of exertion, alternatively interpretable as the reasons or goals – the “WHY?” – for the Masked Man to be articulating power towards himself or his community.”

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Psycho-Spiritual power in light of the Self x Community grid:

Given (owned) by\Used for SELF (exclusion) COMMUNITY (inclusion)

SELF (earned:trauma) Descent (to liminality) Ascension (catharsis)

COMMUNITY (loss of Control/Terror Assimilation genuine audience response)

(The social requirements of wearing the mask, or the processes (HOW) by which the Masked Man influences his social surroundings)

“On the psycho-spiritual side of the social trinity triangle, by applying the same procedure as above and combining the two self-community grids of psychology and religion, we are in fact witnessing the fusion of the moral-value spectrum with the inclusion-exclusion spectrum to produce a matrix essentially answering the question of HOW a certain masked figure is empowered. It also offers intriguing insight into types of spiritual enlightenment and types of social participation from a psychological standpoint […]”

Spiritual (moral)-Sociopolitical power in light of the Self x Community grid:

Given (owned) by\Used for SELF (power -- secretly) COMMUNITY (power --

openly)

SELF (loose) Outlaw Hero

COMMUNITY (struct.) Master Comrade (Fellow/Brother)

(The fundamental personas (WHO) the Masked Man can have upon identifying with the mask, or the quintessential cultural icons he can be typified as)

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Distance Articulation

Min. Liberation

Med. - Derision

Med. + Seduction

Max. Coercion

Private Others Public Others

Private Self Liberation Coercion

Public Self Derision Seduction

Fig. VIII. The Monstrosity Table

“By combining the results obtained thus far in characterising the seduction of masks, a new grid emerges, called the Monstrosity Table. It offers a combined scale of four points that a certain mask can score as describing the monstrous in reference to the joined values of cognitive-aesthetic and interpersonal-sensory- somatic abnormalities.”

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Monstrosity Apotheosis Liminality/Horror Authority Parody Table

Cognitive ♦ ♦

Aesthetic ♦ ♦

Interpersonal ♦ ♦ ♦

Sensory- ♦ ♦ ♦ somatic

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