Reconstruction 6.2 (Spring 2006)
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The Phenomenology of Nonidentity and Theatrical Presence in M. Butterfly / William S. Haney II
Abstract: David Henry Hwang’s postmodernist play M. Butterfly, abounds with alienation devices for deconstructing the notion of a unified subject. This essay, however, seeks to challenge the assumed poststructuralist vantage-point that the self and the metaphysics of presence are illusory by exploring what holds the play's identities together as dynamic matrices that function coherently within their discursive contexts. How tenable is the constructivist claim that our shifting subject positions designated by power relations are self-sustaining, that the self does not in fact extend beyond the material tokens of narrative conventions and discursive fields? Even if performers and audience can shift their interpellative identities, they would only have switched from one constructed position, one prison house of language to another with its own set of ideological constraints. How plausible is the generalizing third-person theoretical implication that our immediate first-person phenomenal experience outside discursive contexts is nothing but a liberal humanist delusion? Drawing upon Eastern thought and the experience of pure consciousness, this paper suggests that in M. Butterfly, Hwang creates a phenomenology of non-identity and theatrical presence between performer and spectator based on a recognition of self that exceeds and underpins our constructed identity.
<1> Blending periods and style and suggesting that “all intimate relationships are determined by politics,” M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang is widely regarded as “the ultimate postmodern, poststructuralist play” (Smith 1993, 44). In his Afterward, Hwang says he wanted to write a “deconstructivist Madam Butterfly” that cuts through the “layers of cultural and sexual misperception” and reveals how “considerations of race and sex intersect the issue of imperialism” (1989: 95, 99, 100). The rhetoric of empire on this argument inexorably constructs identity. Patriarchy, as the basis for imperial conquest and colonial discourse, has inscribed hierarchical definitions of geopolitics, ethnicity, gender, and race that valorize the West as masculine and powerful and denigrate the East as submissive and weak. In M. Butterfly, Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat in Beijing now jailed in Paris as a spy, fantasizes that he is Pinkerton in Puccini’s opera and that his lover is Butterfly. By the end of the play he realizes their roles have been reversed: “it is he who has been Butterfly, . . . duped by love; [while] the Chinese spy, who exploited that love, is therefore the real Pinkerton” (95-96). While its Orientalism posits a binary through which the West defines itself in relation to the East, its Other, the play demonstrates that masculinity is not an essential attribute of Western identity.
<2> M. Butterfly abounds with alienation devices for deconstructing the notion of a unified subject and fixed meaning associated with Orientalism and its “violent hierarchies.” But given the popular poststructuralist metanarrative that the self is a reactionary trope, that the metaphysics of presence is “always already” an illusion, and that the only universality is our socially constructed identities, the question arises, what holds these identities together as dynamic matrices that function coherently within their discursive contexts? How tenable is the constructivist claim that our shifting subject positions designated by power relations are self-sustaining, that the self does not in fact extend beyond the material tokens of narrative conventions and discursive fields?
<3> Poststructuralists argue that M. Butterfly reconstitutes identities as shifting positions within discursive fields. As Dorrine Kondo says,
Hwang opens out the self, not to a free play of signifiers, but to a play of historically and culturally specific power relations. Through the linkage of politics to the relationship between Song and Gallimard, Hwang leads us toward a thoroughly historicized, politicized notion of identity. (1990: 22-23).
Kondo believes that Hwang de-essentializes identity and explodes stereotypical notions of gender and race and the abstract “concept of self” (26). She asserts that “ Asia is gendered, but gender is . . . not understandable without the figurations of race and power relations that inscribe it” (24-25). Similarly, in a psychoanalytic reading David Eng declares that the “white diplomat’s ‘racial castration’ of Song . . . suggests that the trauma being negotiated . . . is not just sexual but racial difference” (2001, 2), with sexuality and race being “mutually constitutive and constituted” (5). But even if performers and audience can resist Althusser’s interpellative injunction (1971) by shifting identities, they would only have switched from one constructed position, one prison house of language to another with its own set of ideological constraints. How tenable is the generalizing third-person theoretical implication that our immediate first-person phenomenal experience outside discursive contexts is nothing but a liberal humanist delusion? Drawing upon Eastern thought and the experience of pure consciousness, I will suggest that in M. Butterfly, Hwang creates a phenomenology of non-identity and theatrical presence between performer and spectator based on a recognition of self that exceeds and underpins our constructed identity.
Concept of Self vs. Pure Consciousness
<4> What are Kondo and other postmodernists referring to in their demystification of the “concept of self”? As I will demonstrate, they are referring not to a deconstruction of the self, but rather, as the phrase indicates, to a deconstruction of a concept, for the self, as a locus of integrated energy, is for all practical purposes not a concept. If self and concept (or thought) of self can be conflated, as poststructuralists seem to imply, then by inference a concept would be able to engage in thought and simultaneously be aware of itself in the act of thinking. But can thought be aware of itself? By implication the answer is yes if we accept the poststructuralist definition of the subject as a cultural construct dispersed along a chain of signifiers (Lacan 1978), subjugated by relations of race, gender, and power. Bur in that case what would distinguish us from zombies, hypothetically perfect physical duplicates who behave like their human originals, but lack anything resembling human feelings and awareness? Although artificial intelligence or DNA computers can be said to engage in thought, they are not conscious entities, and as some argue may never become conscious. As far as we know, only humans and not machines, as discussed below, can be aware of the act of thinking and appreciate the meaning of their thoughts. The constructivist fallacy is to conflate self and concept of self in humans, and thereby to implicate thought in the unlikely task of being aware of itself thinking. Kondo is an unwitting advocate of this position in her defense of Hwang’s self-proclaimed deconstruction of essentialist identity:
It [the play] subverts notions of unitary, fixed identities, embodied in pervasive narrative conventions such as the trope of the "Japanese woman as Butterfly." Equally, it throws into question an anthropological literature based on a substance-attribute metaphysics that takes as its foundational point of departure a division between self and society, subject and world. M. Butterfly suggests to us that an attempt to describe exhaustively and to fix rhetorically a "concept of self" abstracted from power relations and from concrete situations and historical events, is an illusory task. Rather, identities are constructed in and through discursive fields, produced through disciplines and narrative conventions. Far from bounded, coherent and easily apprehended entities, identities are multiple, ambiguous, shifting locations in matrices of power. (1990, 26)
This claim is valid to the extent that the self identified as a container of substance-attributes is a function of the mind. As a storehouse of phenomenal qualities (qualia), the mind is increasingly understood not as separate from the body but rather as co-extensive with the body and the environment (Pepperell 2003).
<5> But this mind/body distinction prevails only in the garden variety of Western dualism. In the hard problem of the relation between the human brain and consciousness in cognitive science, the opposition is not between mind and body but increasingly between mind/body on the one hand and consciousness on the other. The mind is characterized by thought and corresponds to our constructed identity, while consciousness in its pure form is beyond thought, body, and environment and corresponds to the trans-verbal, transpersonal self. This self is what Antonin Artaud, in distinguishing between “Oriental” and Occidental theater, refers to as “a void in thought” (1958, 71). The mind/body and consciousness duality, with the mind/body defined as material and consciousness as non-material, derives from the Samkya-Yoga tradition of India (Pflueger 1998), but is increasingly acknowledge as a viable distinction in the vast interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies in the West (Chalmers 1996; Forman 1998).[1] The missing element in the Western literary critical understanding of the self in general, and in the constructivist deconstruction of identity in particular, is an appreciation of the first-person experience of the self as pure consciousness, the void in thought associated by Artaud with Asian theater. This self as knower, which Arthur Deikman calls “the internal observer” (1996, 355), complements the third-person concept of self as known, a rhetorical construct based on the “Word as everything” associated with Occidental theater (Artaud 1958, 68).
<6> M. Butterfly questions the unified concept of self as a function of the mind, but in the process it opens up a theatrical space in which performers and spectators can experience the self as a function of consciousness without qualities. This state of pure consciousness (turiya), or contentless awareness, is variously defined by different contemplative traditions; it is the absolute one in Plotinus, Atman/Brahman in Advaita Vedanta, and nondual consciousness in Buddhist Vijnanas.[2] As Deikman notes, “we know the internal observer not by observing it but by being it” (1996, 355, Deikman’s emphasis). William Demastes says that theater “forces us to think materially about everything before us, even the apparently immaterial” (2002, 42). But as Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe notes, “This is incorrect if we consider thinking. The immaterial cannot be thought about immaterially, because thinking is a function of the intellect, and the intellect, on the model of mind in Vedic literature, cannot grasp any more refined levels than itself, and thus cannot grasp the level of the immaterial, which is the level of pure consciousness” (2003, 11, original emphasis). Immaterial pure consciousness exceeds the material mind, just as the actor in entering a dramatic text exceeds the text, adding, as we shall see, the presence of a new life that the text does not exhaust.
Theatrical Gaps
<7> For constructivists, Hwang powerfully exposes identity as being constructed through “disciplines and narrative conventions” (Kondo 1990, 26). But the interesting thing about Hwang’s characters is that they do not consistently believe in themselves as coherent and easily apprehended linguistic or conceptual entities; instead they acknowledge the fact that their identities “are multiple, ambiguous, shifting locations in matrices of power” (ibid.). If that is the case, and Gallimard informs the audience repeatedly in his frame rupturing comments that he lives subjectively within his unstable imagination, then which “concept” is witnessing these shifting subject position in the mind/body matrix of material power? Hwang’s constantly shifting frames of reference and attention on dramatic technique focuses the performer and spectator on the process of re-presentation, on the forms of utterance that subvert iconicity and the illusion of a real or natural performance. This division between referential narrative and metanarrative, histoire and discours (Benveniste 1971, 209), or “the simultaneous inscribing and subverting of the conventions of narrative” (Hutcheon 1989, 49), opens a gap between subject and object, consciousness and mind.
<8> If Rene Gallimard and Song Liling do not identify with their shifting subject positions, then some modality of self must be witnessing these positions from the gaps in their “rhetorical identification” (Burke 1966, 301). To see the “bounded, coherent and easily apprehended entities” (Kondo 1990, 26) of identity as illusory rhetorical constructs, as constantly changing and unreal, implies a non-changing dimension of the self that is possibly real. This distinction between the changing and non-changing, which is ultimately that between mind and consciousness, thought and a void in thought, pervades the play right from the opening scenes when Gallimard retells the narrative history of his relation with Song from his prison cell in Paris.
<9> In deconstructing the axes of gendered, racialized, and politicized identity, Hwang opens the dramatic spectacle from several points of view simultaneously, as Kondo, Haedicke, Lye and others have pointed out. The Brechtian practice (1964) of baring theatrical devices by presenting a diversity of visual frames has the effect of exposing monological perspectives as nothing more than competing ideologies. But something that has been overlooked also occurs here. In his prison cell in scene one, Gallimard, downstage with “a sad smile on his face,” gazes upstage at a vision of Song, who appears as a “beautiful woman in traditional Chinese garb, danc[ing] a traditional piece from the Peking Opera. . . . without acknowledging him ” (1). Gallimard says, “Butterfly, Butterfly,” and the audience watches Song dancing through his gaze. Right afterwards, as the stage directions indicate, Gallimard “forces himself to turn away, as the image of Song fades out” (1), and the illusion of realism in Hwang’s theater—if its theatricality is not seen already as artificial—suddenly dissolves. The spectator’s rhetorical identification with Gallimard’s unitary gaze breaks up through a rupturing process that polysemously creates multiple points of view, those of performer and audience. The spectator, momentarily put in a self-reflexive state in between constructed identities, must either choose or oscillate between them.
<10> At the end of scene one, Gallimard again disrupts the frame, which by now has become a metaframe: “With a flourish, . . . [he] directs our attention to another part of the stage” (2). Both the audience and Gallimard are now spectators sharing a distant scene in which three characters on stage discuss Gallimard’s notoriety. But instead of perceiving the scene as “real,” our joint spectators perceive it as a mediated doubling of narrative visualities. In a deconstructive interpretation like Kondo’s, the disparity between a realistic and mediated frame allegedly causes the spectator to perceive all identity as always already a social construct. This implies that unmediated subjectivity or trans-verbal first-person experience is an illusion, that the only “real” identity is a third-person objective representation of our linguistically splintered subjectivity. As Janet Haedicke puts it,
Gallimard's life story [is depicted] as “always already” constructed much as Hwang has constructed Boursicot's history [in the playwright’s notes]. Gallimard directly forewarns the audience that the illusion of unmediated subjectivity constitutes performance and that the specular eye/ I confuses theatre with history, history with truth, autobiography with life. (1992, 30)
By this account, our immediate first person experience, as portrayed theatrically through the specular eye/I, confuses performance and history, or a constructivist notion of identity with an essentialist “concept of self.” But if thought is an object of knowledge as opposed to the knower, we can only make a virtual, not a real distinction between a constructed identity and a “concept of self.” The hard problem is to determine who witnesses the shifting constructions of identity in the play’s multiplying of narrative visualities along a hegemonic chain of signifiers.
<11> While the constructivist position appears true on the level of mind, what emerges in the gaps between rhetorical identities in these early scenes and throughout the play is a taste of an underlying, trans-conceptual, self-referral witnessing consciousness (rasa).[3] To demystify metanarratives and to refuse iconic representation can certainly deconstruct rhetorical identity as a conceptual absolute. But to assume that this also delegitimates first-person subjectivity or consciousness per se, relegating the human being to the level of a machine, is hardly reasonable. To define essentialist identity as a rhetorically fixed “concept of self” is to confuse the knower as a void in thought with a totalized thought about the known. In the dialectic between Gallimard and the audience at the beginning of scene 3, act 1, Gallimard does not completely lose himself in the illusions of identity but rather toys with these illusions and bids the audience’s indulgence. As Gallimard puts it:
Alone in this cell, I sit night after night, watching our story play through my head, always searching for a new ending, one which redeems my honor, where she returns at last to my arms. And I imagine you—my ideal audience—who come to understand and even, perhaps just a little, to envy me. (4)
Gallimard enters the scene as one of the spectators, and through empathy the spectators can share his phenomenal experiences and the gaps between them. As the play demonstrates, he is not merely a mind/body with thoughts running through it; he is a conscious agent aware of the process of having thoughts. Thoughts about self-identity here coexist with self-referral witnessing consciousness, which simultaneously comprehends the value of change and nonchange, boundaries and unboundedness, thought and nonthought.[4] If we accept provisionally the Vedic definition of pure consciousness (sat-chit-ananda: being-consciousness-bliss (Deutsch 1973, 9)), then we may see how M. Butterfly reveals a presence in the interstices of thought. Gallimard and the spectators break their fixation on any particular role as a constructed identity not through the agency of the mind and its content, but through their presence in a void in thought, the gaps between the mind’s rhetorical identifications.
Identity: Machine or Witness
<12> In her analysis of gender identity in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Judith Butler writes that for “Beauvoir, gender is ‘constructed,’ but implied in her formulation is an agent, a cogito, who somehow takes on or appropriates that gender and could, in principle, take on some other gender” (1990, 9). This cogito, which serves as a witness to mental content, remains firmly associated in feminist discourse with the mind rather than with consciousness or an essential self. Butler ’s only reference to anything resembling such a self is a critique of the sexist conflating of “the universal person and the masculine gender,” in which women are denigrated and men extolled as “the bearers of a body-transcendent universal personhood” (1990, 9). While cogito can be understood as a representation of the internal observer or pure consciousness, the long association of patriarchy with body-transcendent universals in Judeo-Christian onto-theology has biased critics from recognizing this. Their political/historical preconceptions preclude access to self-awareness. Recently, however, Butler and others sought to redress the criticism made against poststructuralists for failing to take universality into account and for eroding "its force by questioning its foundational status" (2000, 3). As a trope substituting for pure consciousness, the cogito suggests a capacity to stand outside of constructed identities and enjoy a degree of autonomy over the mind. Without the capacity for thought-transcending self-referral—which phenomenological critics such as Georges Poulet (1969) discuss in terms of the subject-object division[5]—Gallimard and Song would find it difficult to perform as transvestite protagonists.
<13> Reviewing three books on artificial intelligence, the British philosopher Colin McGinn notes that because machines can duplicate human behavior does not mean, as the Turing test alleges, that they can also duplicate subjective experience (1999). The three authors here are like deconstructive postmodernists who equate self and concept of self, subject and object, direct and mediated experience, Gallimard’s theatrical representations and his first-person experience of life. As McGinn notes, human identity cannot be equated with the computational mind: “It is true that human minds manipulate symbols and engage in mental computations, as when doing arithmetic. But it does not follow from this that computing is the essence of mind; maybe computing is just one aspect of the nature of mind” (ibid.). There are many kinds of computational systems, such as silicon chips or DNA computers, that can replicate the mind but have no consciousness. While posthumanism merges biology and machine (Pepperell 2003), human beings remain distinct from computational systems primarily because of their conscious awareness, regardless of how misled they are about the identification between mind and consciousness. What Brechtian theater with its narrative discontinuity, refusal of realism, and A-effect attempts to achieve ultimately is a distinction not between one imaginary unity of mind and another, but rather between mind and consciousness, knower and known. This distinction emerges when the Brechtian gestus—“a gesture, a word, an action” that exposes “the social attitudes encoded in the play-text” (Diamond 1988, 89)— succeeds in evoking the semiotically invisible; that is, when it directs attention from a self-dramatization to a self-shedding, thereby opening awareness to the coexistence of silence and dynamism, boundaries and unboudnedness characteristic of higher consciousness.
<14> Like proponents of artificial intelligence who dispute the uniqueness and relevance of qualia, constructivist critics dispute the self as unmediated subjectivity. Both define humanity in terms of mental computation, as represented by third-person theoretical models, and question the validity of first-person experience. From an advaitan perspective, however, witnessing consciousness antedates discourse and narrative constructs.[6] Gallimard, as theatrical witness, observes with the audience the dramatization of his thought-stream: his love for Song—however delusional—and his desire for sympathy from the audience as judge and jury. These dramatized thoughts are within yet distinct from awareness, just as the act of computation is distinct from the knower. “The self is single. You are the self and you have ideas of what you have been or will be. But an idea is not the self” (Maharaj 1988, 188). Gallimard has ideas about the Orient, gender, Song, and imperialist power, and as the play unfolds his ideas are debunked, but his witnessing self remains unchanged, until it is fatally overshadowed by the rhetorical identifications of the mind in the final scenes. As M. Butterfly suggests, “The body appears in your mind, your mind is the content of your consciousness; you are the motionless witness of the river of consciousness which changes eternally without changing you in any way” (Maharaj 1988, 199).
The Actor’s Double Entry
<15> Gallimard dramatizes his own version of Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly as a frame to the representation he stages with Song. Haedicke writes that by staging a-play-within-a-play, Hwang displaces the binaries of presence/absence, reality/illusion, perceiver/perceived, subject/object, and thereby “dismantles the spectator’s unitary gaze as Gallimard . . . [and] attempts to perform another into existence” (1992, 31). Dismantling binaries, however, only makes a difference if it shifts the field of perception between play and spectator from ordinary mental binaries to an awareness of the metabinary of the witnessing self as the ultimate frame of thought. Otherwise, the attempt to “perform another into existence” will produce a mere mental existence, not a living consciousness. In his gloss on Puccini’s opera, Gallimard creates a distance to his own rendition, characterizing Cio-Cio-San as “a feminine ideal,” and Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of the US Navy as “not very good-looking, not too bright, and pretty much a wimp” (5). Gallimard ends by saying, “In the preceding scene, I played Pinkerton, the womanizing cad, and my friend Marc from school (Marc bows grandly for our benefit) played Sharpless, the sensitive soul of reason. In life, however, our positions were usually—no always—reversed” (7). The play’s Brechtian double casting and role reversal demystifies the process of dramatic representation. But the gaze will remain unitary, or a series of unitaries, incapable of dismantling binaries, if the spectator merely exchanges one of Gallimard’s roles for another, without an appreciation of the gaps between them.
<16> Critics typically overlook the implication of the A-effect: namely, that spectators cannot step beyond binaries by merely switching between interpellated positions. What happens when performer and spectator become critically aware of dismantling identification, besides shifting between different modes of thought? Arguably, it is not unreasonable to assume that they begin to purge their constructed identities by tasting the gaps between them. How else could they elude the power relations latent within the political unconscious (Jameson 1981) responsible for violent hierarchies? Through the A-effect, performer and spectator may avoid conflating actor and role univocally, but to negotiate the play’s multiple perspectives implies an awareness of nonattachment to any of them, even while simultaneously the thinking mind continues to identify with them in serial form. In common usage, the phrase “shift” or “expansion of consciousness” is used merely to describe a shift in mental content and ignores what the term consciousness potentially implies for a deconstructive theater. One thing it does not imply, as M. Butterfly suggests, is that the self is fully determined by historical materialism.
<17> The gaps exposed by theatrical alienation and historicization between knower and known, actor and character, theater and history in M. Butterfly can be understood either as being confined within the mind, language, and the text, or as opening a window beyond the mind to the freedom of self-awareness. This freedom, which differs from polysemy or textual indeterminacy, has radical implications for theatrical presence. As the play proceeds, Gallimard tends to dwell on the grand narratives of a unified realism based on racist/imperialist illusions about Song, gender, and the Orient. After watching Song perform Madame Butterfly at the German ambassador’s house, he says, “I believed this girl, I believed in her suffering. I wanted to take her in my arms—so delicate, even I could protect her, take her home, paper her until she smiled” (15-16). But Gallimard’s desire for an iconic identity that would verify his preconceptions about East-West relations is immediately debunked by Song as a romantic stereotype. She asks, “what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? . . . I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it’s an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner—ah!—you find it beautiful” (17). If the only thing this scene and others like it accomplish is to make the mind rethink its adherence to racial, ethnic, or gender stereotypes, then its impact would be ephemeral and ineffective. Inevitably, the mind, like Gallimard’s, would revert back to its pre-established patterns of thought. But Hwang’s play actually prompts the spectator to transcend identification through a expansion of consciousness, which initially may go unnoticed by the thinking mind. Awareness itself is changeless, and changelessness is too obvious to see, like water to fish and air to humans, unless it is brought to your attention. Hwang makes it noticeable, aesthetically taking the audience from a Brechtian phenomenology to a taste of going over the top of conceptual boundaries altogether (rasa), and back again. In this way the play can hold dynamism and silence in awareness simultaneously.[7]
<18> As an actor, then, Gallimard is also a spectator who ruptures the frame by commenting on his entry into the drama at different points throughout the performance. After his rendition of Madame Butterfly, the play-within-the-play, with himself as Pinkerton and Marc as Sharpless, he notes that “The ending is pitiful. . . .” (15). Later in recounting his own story he says, “I returned to the opera that next week, and the week after that . . .” (27). At the end of act 2, after his wife, Helga, says, “I hope everyone is mean to you for the rest of your life,” he turns to the audience and says, “Prophetic” (75). In these entries and others like them Gallimard’s reflexive commentaries exceed their conceptual content and open a space in the performance through which the spectator recognizes and identifies with the actor’s self-referral posture. In his recent book On Drama, Michael Goldman analyzes the process of recognition and identification in theater, which he describes as “making or doing identity” (2000, 18). Although Goldman defines identity as an aspect of mind, his model touches on my analysis of the self (as pure consciousness in Vedic psychology) through its emphasis on the “most inward” part of mind (77). Theater, as Gallimard’s performance demonstrates, portrays the confusions of self-identity, but his repeated entries into the text establishes what Goldman calls “a self that in some way transcends the normal confusions of self” (18). Contrary to the popular poststructuralist view, Goldman defines “subtext,” the “mutual permeability of actor and script,” as not reducible to text (49). An actor’s performance can always be treated semiotically,
But in drama one finds inevitably an element in excess of what can be semiotically extracted—something that is also neither irrelevant to nor . . . completely independent of the text. No matter how exhaustively one tries to translate what an actor does with a script into a kind of writeable commentary on it, there will always also remain the doing of it—the bodily life of the actor moving into the world, at a specific moment in time, to set in motion these words, these gestures, these writeable ideas, this other identity. And, if the doing were itself to be reduced to a text, there would still remain the doing of the doing. The actor enters the text. (2000, 50, Goldman’s emphasis)
<19> If the actor’s physical entry into the text, as subtext, exceeds what can be extracted semiotically, his entry as consciousness exceeds it even more. Not only does the actor enter the text as Gallimard, he enters it self-reflexively, highlighting the space between text and subtext, enhancing for the audience the distinction between mind and consciousness, thought and awareness of having thoughts. In Hwang’s treatment, then, the subtext constitutes a double entry. Spectators still identify with the actor as mind/body, if only as a hypothetical construct. But more subtly, they recognize the entry of Gallimard’s trans-verbal, transpersonal self as their most intimate identity, the “most inward” part of mind. Goldman says that “Contrary to Derrida, there is always an hors-texte, a place from which someone at some moment needs to enter, even to constitute the text as a text” (51, Goldman’s emphasis). As Hwang dramatizes in M. Butterfly, there is also a place from which someone at some moment needs to enter the constructed self, which otherwise would languish as nothing more than what Peter Brook would call a “deadly” text. Spectators of M. Butterfly recognize and identify with the actors’ double entry into the play, the “making or doing identity” by means of consciousness—the non-constructed, non-changing internal observer.
Changlessness and Presence
<20> Noticing changelessness entails the mirror of a theatrical presence, a space through which self and other, audience and performer can recognize their interconnectedness beyond the tokens of language and interpretation. When Song and Gallimard talk after her performance at the Beijing opera house, she remarks on his long absence since their first encounter: “So, you are an adventurous imperialist?” (21). Although true in one sense, Gallimard denies the accusation, but she insists: “You’re a Westerner. How can you objectively judge your own values?” He replies: “I think it’s possible to achieve some distance,” which he has been doing already as we have seen. Song suggests they go outside to escape the stink of the opera house, which he calls the “smells of your loyal fans.” She retorts, “I love them for being my fans, I hate the smell they leave behind. I too can distance myself from my people” (21). This exchange accentuates the possibility of standing outside of race, sexism and imperialism. As postcolonial critics would argue, they have entered a “historyless” world (Ashcroft 2002, 33), even though the trans-Brechtian implications of this stance can easily go unnoticed. Two performers claim not to be who they seem to be historically, implicitly inviting the audience to share a dialogical space beyond their constructed identities. The shared space is dialogical because they mutually distance themselves from their respective people, East and West, dissolving into thin air the historical ground beneath them. Performers and audience share an intersubjective liminality between constructed identities. They embrace simultaneously the constructed and decontextual dimensions of self—contrary to the generalizing discourse that finds only a seamless continuum of interpellated positions trapped within matrices of language and power.
<21> Toulon , the French Ambassador, says to Gallimard that he has noticed a change in him:
Want to know a secret? A year ago, you would’ve been out. But the past few month, I don’t know how it happened, you’ve become this new aggressive confident . . . thing. And they also tell me you get along with the Chinese. So I think you’re a lucky man, Gallimard. Congratulations. (37-38)
The obvious interpretation of these remarks is that Gallimard’s conquest of Song has given him a newfound sense of masculinity and power. But Gallimard’s sense of power may derive not only from his contact with Song, but also from his having intermittently distanced himself from his various constructed identities, to the point where he is no longer cowed by any of them as being inevitable. Something else lies beyond them, even though in the end he loses sight of this and succumbs to his fixating ideas
<22> It is not illogical to assume, then, that M. Butterfly, in creating a space devoid of textual identities behind the playacting, suggests the presence of consciousness devoid of qualities. Performer and spectator may taste this theatrical void (rasa) for only a fleeting succession of subliminal moments, but to deny the intersubjective space of the witnessing observer as a real presence would be in effect to contradict the demystification of unitary, fixed identities. Without this trans-textual self, the deconstruction of stereotypes would leave you with a mere succession of thoughts, each fixed and unitary, however vast the constellation of alternatives. Through the movement of différance Derrida attempts to undermine logocentrism and establish a democracy free of privileged hierarchies: man/woman, white/brown, West/East, powerful/submissive. But as noted earlier, without the controlling influence over thought by consciousness, any dismantled binary will inevitably devolve into another hierarchy by dint of racist, sexist, and political forces. While Derrida hopes to resist this trend through constant vigilance, both M. Butterfly and history suggest that without the spontaneous input of the internal observer, the intellect struggles in vain.
<23> Ostensibly, then, a Brechtian, purely intellectual demystification does not liberate Gallimard of his racial stereotypes. We see this failure in the way he repeatedly ruptures the theatrical narrative only to retreat into Orientalist deceptions. Visiting Song who is still offstage, Gallimard tells the audience what he thinks of her: “She is outwardly bold and outspoken, yet her heart is shy and afraid. It is the Oriental in her at war with her Western education” (27). Later in the same scene, he says to the audience, “Did you hear the way she talked about Western women? Much differently than the first night. She does—she feels inferior to them—and to me” (31). While the dramatic irony allows the audience to see through the sham, and even to sense the (self-reflexive) void in thought of Gallimard’s subtext, Gallimard himself is always at risk as he floats in and out of his various roles, intermittently sharing with the audience a liminal presence/absence of the self as consciousness.
<24> This presence/absence underlies Gallimard’s realization that his thinking mind is not always in control of his theatrical representations. In act 2, Toulon refers to the gossip of Gallimard’s “keeping a native mistress” (45), and comments approvingly, “Now you go and find a lotus blossom . . . and top us all” (46). From the self-referral margins of his constructed identity, Gallimard tells the audience, “ Toulon knows! And he approves!” (46). In this liminal space he feels empowered. But right afterwards when Song appears and Comrade Chin intrudes, he protests, “No! Why does she have to come in?” (47). The attempt to control the scene suggests that he has already half shifted toward a position of agency, a cogito outside of re-presentation and constructed identity. This discontinuity between dramatic frames opens gaps between conceptual reifications, evoking a taste of witnessing consciousness in performer and audience.
False Reversals
<25> Some critics, as Haedicke notes, believe that M. Butterfly ultimately posits a fixed subject by simultaneously salvaging the position of “hero” while attempting to deconstruct it (1992, 29). This seems to occur in Gallimard’s ritual suicide at the end of the play, when his mind fixates on one of the play’s multiple perspectives. Tina Chen (1994) and Coleen Lye (1995) for example think that M. Butterfly fails to achieve a transformation on the spectator because s/he identifies with Gallimard univocally as a tortured protagonist. In the first half of the play, as we have seen, the Brechtian mechanism demystifies its dramatic representations. This as we have seen sets up for the audience a subliminal distinction between two levels of subjectivity: mind and consciousness. In the second half beginning in act 2, Gallimard and Song compete for control over the play, which retreats to the fixed representation of binaries and their restricting influence on the subject positions of the audience. By this stage, however, Hwang’s theater goes beyond the Brechtian A-effect, revealing the possibility of self-identity devoid of attributes.
<26> By the end of the play, Gallimard suffers a relapse when he cross-dresses into the role of Madame Butterfly after Song discards his own transvestite identity. Although the masculine/feminine and West/East hierarchies seem to be reversed, they end up being preserved, at least as discerned by the thinking mind. Throughout act 3, Song and Gallimard repeatedly rupture the dramatic narrative. At the beginning of scene 1 in the courthouse, Song reviews his career for the audience: “So I’d done my job better than I had a right to expect” (80). His opening re-performance puts the audience at a critical distance from the rest of the scene, which serves as a meta-commentary on Orientalism. In response to the Judge’s questions, which center on whether or not Gallimard knew he was a man, Song demystifies Western men in relation to Oriental women, but without satisfying the Judge, or the audience, about what Gallimard may or may not have known. The upshot of his analysis of Gallimard is that when he “finally met his fantasy woman, he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. . . . And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (83).
<27> Like Song in scene 1, Gallimard opens scene 2 by addressing the spectators, again rupturing their uneasy fix on constructed identity. He says that “even in this moment [of greatest shame] my mind remains agile, flip-flopping like a man on a trampoline. Even now, my picture dissolves, and I see that . . . witness . . . talking to me” (84). On Gallimard’s cue, the act of witnessing takes center stage: Song, who is standing in the witness box, turns to address him, “Yes. You. White man”; and the spectators “witness” the postmodern attempt to distinguish between appearance and reality, theater and world. But something peculiar happens here to the tradition of stage phenomenology with its gap between reality and theater. While Gallimard confesses to Song, “I know what you are. . . . A—a man” (87), and Song insists, “Wait. I’m not ‘just a man’” (84), Gallimard sends him away: “You showed me your true self. When all I loved was the lie. . . . Get away from me! Tonight, I’ve finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy” (89-90). The postmodern ambiguity of multifaceted identities prevails throughout the scene, but Gallimard’s choice is more complicated than he thinks.
<28> In the postmodern world, with simulation found not only in theater but permeating all cultural forms, distinguishing fantasy from reality, theater from world, is like distinguishing constructed identity from concept of self. There is no difference between them insofar that both are equally imaginary. Likewise, the Orientalism of the world and as re-presented in M. Butterfly is also equally imaginary. As Guillermo Gómez-Peña puts it in his performance piece The New World Border, “Is this re-a-li-ty or performance? Can anyone answer?!” (1995, 127); “I want everyone to repeat after me: ‘This is art (pause); this is not reality (pause). Reality is no longer real’” (131). As Hwang’s theater suggests, given the illusory gap between world and simulation, any hope of attaining reality in theater depends on whether the audience merely shuffles around mental content and its constructed identities, or intuits the field of pure consciousness. For theater to recover its re-presentation from an all pervasive simulacrum, the audience must know the self as consciousness by being it, not by trying to conceptualize or observe it.
<29> After donning the kimono, Gallimard says, “Death with honor is better than life . . . life with dishonor. . . It is 19__. And I have found her at last. In a prison on the outskirts of Paris . My name is Rene Gallimard—also known as Madame Butterfly” (92-93). As Lye notes,
If what Hwang objects to . . . is that the West “wins,” then it is not surprising that the response should present a scenario in which the East “wins” instead. This structure of winning and losing expresses itself . . . in problematically conventional ways, through gender and sexual signification. The feminizing effect of Song’s gender disclosure upon Gallimard follows from M. Butterfly’s proposal that Orientalism functions to secure Western masculinity. . . . The problem, however, is that M. Butterfly attempts not just to dramatize the effects of Orientalist desire, but to naturalize its origins. Orientalist fantasy in M. Butterfly serves to secure Western masculinity because the West is shown as “actually” emasculated (1995, 274-75)
If the underlying hierarchy is preserved rather than subverted for performer and spectator in act 3, it is because the mind will continue to identify with limiting conceptual constructs until the intermittent transcendence that occurs during the play is grounded in experience (as explained in note 2). Theater can point the way by providing a taste of pure consciousness through aesthetic delight (rasa; see note 3). Throughout the play, Gallimard directs us beyond rhetorical constructs, but then reverts to a binary either/or logic—the world of simulated boundaries, however repugnant. This action shifts the burden of dis-identification back to the spectator, who must learn to act on the level of witness as well as thought. Gallimard’s suicide reveals the danger of mental constructs, the illusion not only of unitary conceptual identity but also of the pseudo-freedom of choice. Angela Pao has faulted critics for their inadequate “reading and viewing competencies” that have led them to “ignore” the postmodern impulses of Hwang’s formal techniques (4-5). But simply choosing among shifting postmodern identities does not engender freedom from simulacra; this calls for renouncing all identifies on the groundless ground of self beyond attributes, beyond essentialist concepts.
Conclusion: Theater and Metanarrative
<30> As we have seen, Kondo (1990) and Lye (1995) (among others) argue that the identities of self (West/masculine) and Other (East/feminine) must not be perceived as ahistorical grand narratives, but as micro narratives based on historical circumstances. When Lyotard says, “Simplifying in the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives” (1986, xxiv), he delegitimates not only the narrative function, but also the “concept of self”—which in narrative as argued here serves as a (false) representation of consciousness. Lyotard’s notorious vagueness about the material causes of the decline of metanarratives has led to considerable speculation. One possible cause for this decline not mentioned before, as far as I can tell, centers on the neglected complementarity between mind/history/narrative on the one hand and consciousness/non-history/non-narrative on the other. Grand narratives often deal with experiences on the margins of thought, beyond ordinary conceptual knowledge, like the nature of Enlightenment, the prospect of emancipation from bondage, the development of a more self-conscious human being or an evolved “Spirit” (Lyotard 1986, xxiii, 23). These phenomena stretch the thinking mind’s capacity to know to the point of transcendence. To talk about the rational subject becoming Spirit or “enlightened” is futile if we limit this process to a function of mind, when it entails the transcending of thought. Narrative representations of trans-rational, trans-verbal experience, as in theater, are in a sense mis-re-presentations insofar that they point beyond narrative form altogether, to an hors-texte.[8] The question is not whether theater as simulation can bridge the gap with reality—for, as Hwang shows, everyday reality is simulated to begin with—but whether theater can reveal the reality of self responsible for all simulation, in stage drama as well as social drama.
<31> The crisis of metanarratives can thus be traced to the fact that narratives are challenged to re-present that which lies beyond symbol and interpretation, beyond gestus—like the breach in Gallimard’s constructed identities. While narrative can render phenomenal content, it can only intimate consciousness through the aesthetic power of suggestion (rasa), as M. Butterfly so effectively demonstrates. Moreover, while the delegitimizing effect of narrative may apply to the known (third-person construct), it does not always apply to the self (first-person knower), which is self-shining and knowable not through observation but only “by being it” (Deikman 1996, 355).
<32> Incredulity toward metanarratives, then, clearly reflects a postmodern lack of appreciation for transcendental consciousness. We see this in the plethora of anti-essentialist criticism of M. Butterfly, for which the gaps in Gallimard’s constructed identities so easily escapes notice. On the one hand, narratives have traditionally served to reflect inner experience (Lodge 2002), and sometimes, whether intentionally or not, pure consciousness itself (Malekin and Yarrow 1997). The postmodern over-valorization of mental computation and materialism to the neglect of more abstract levels of self seems to have undermined the suggestive power of narrative, whether grand or micro. On the other hand, postmodern incredulity has had the ironic effect of subverting faith in just about everything that forms the content of consciousness, leading the cogito to disidentify with its personal attributes. By its very negativity, then, Hwang’s poststructuralist play underscores the existence of a transpersonal, immaterial knower, without whom incredulity would not have a witnessing agent. The debate over the ending of M. Butterfly, whether or not it transforms the spectator, stems in part from “the simultaneous inscribing and subverting of the conventions of narrative” (Hutcheon 1989, 49)—the simultaneity here revealing the inteconnectedness of all levels of self. You can demystify Gallimard as a social construct, but the (double) subtext of his self-referral awareness (as available to the spectator and sometimes to himself) transcends, while also complementing, his iconic symbolism in the staging of a theatrical presence.
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Notes
[1] No theory of consciousness has yet been generally accepted by the scientific community. Cognitive scientists like Daniel Dennett (1993) and Francis Crick (1994) define consciousness in material terms as a “virtual machine” and “a pack of neurons,” respectively, while others like David Chalmers (1996), Joseph Levine (1983), and Colin McGinn (1991) point to the failure of purely materialistic theories to explain consciousness or the nature of subjective experience. Science has yet to resolve the “explanatory gap” (Levine) between materialism and qualia—the phenomenal properties of our experience such as colors, smells, and tastes. Western theories of consciousness include materialism (Dennett, Crick, and Michael Tye (1995)), dualism (Chalmers) and mysterianism (McGinn, who believes we lack the right concepts for understanding consciousness, which therefore remains a mystery). Relying on third-person observation, Western theories of consciousness are still in the developmental phase, while Eastern theories, based on first-hand experience and the record of sacred texts, have long reached their full maturity. [^]
[2] In the discussion of M. Butterfly, I follow the definition of consciousness in the Vedic tradition, specifically Shankara’s Advaita (nondual) Vedanta, and its derivative in perennial psychology as expounded by Jonathan Shear (1990), Robert Forman (1998), Arthur Deikman (1996), and others. The Vedic model of the mind posits higher states in the development of consciousness. Vedic psychology, as Charles Alexander notes, proposes “an architecture of increasingly abstract, functionally integrated faculties or levels of mind (1990, 290). The term “mind” as I use it here derives from the latter of its two uses in Vedic psychology: “It [mind] refers to the overall multilevel functioning of consciousness as well as to the specific level of thinking (apprehending and comparing) within that overall structure” (Alexander 1986, 291). The levels of the overall functioning of mind in Vedic psychology extend from the senses, desire, mind, intellect, feelings, and ego, to pure consciousness. As used here in the analysis of M. Butterfly, self as internal observer or void in thought refers to pure consciousness (turiya or the fourth state), which is physiologically distinct from the three ordinary states of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, and which underlies and is transcendental to individual ego and thinking mind.
Vedic psychology also proposes higher stages of the development of consciousness. The permanent experience of pure consciousness (turiyachetana or the fourth) along with any of the other three states (waking, sleeping, and dream) is called cosmic consciousness (turiyatitchetana or the fifth). This becomes refined cosmic consciousness (Bhagavat chetana or the sixth) through the refinement of sensory perception. Finally, in unity consciousness (Brahmi chetana or the seventh), one is able to perceive everything in terms of one’s own transcendental self (Alexander 1990, 290).[^]
[3] In Sanskrit poetics, rasa is an aesthetic experience through which awareness, “transcending the limitations of the personal attitude, is lifted . . . above pain and pleasure into pure joy [of turiya], the essence of which is its relish [rasa] itself” (De 1963, 13). The term “self-referral” as used here means the process of the self knowing itself as pure consciousness—a process of growing self-awareness. In the Advaitan tradition it also means that pure consciousness (Atman) is fully awake to itself, undifferentiated and self-shining, beyond space and time, “aware only of the Oneness of being” (Deutsch 1973, 48). [^]
[4] In the context of Vedic aesthetics, the incipient experience of pure consciousness together with qualia (the qualities of the ordinary waking mind) carries a flavor of the higher state of cosmic consciousness (see note 2 above). [^]
[5] Phenomenological critics describe a process in which audience members, as passive recipients, internalize the content of the author’s consciousness. In M. Butterfly, as suggested here, the emphasis is not on content, but on the audience actively transcending content toward an experience of pure consciousness (Iser 1988). [^]
[6] For an analysis of the relation between levels of language and consciousness in the Vedic tradition, see Haney 2002, 67-88. [^]
[7] This simultaneity of opposites is another example of the integration of pure consciousness (turiya) and thought (the ordinary waking state), which once stabilized results in cosmic consciousness (see notes 2 and 4 above). [^]
[8] See Harold Coward’s The Sphota Theory of Language (1980) for an excellent overview of the levels of language discussed by Classical Indian grammarian Bhartrhari, who posits a level of language (para) that hich consists of an absolute unity of name and form, sound and meaning. The para level connects language and referent and underlies the experience of rasa. [^]