The End of Images

In Image as Theology, ed. Mark McInroy, Casey Strine, and Alexis Torrance. Arts and the Sacred 5. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2020. The End of Images: Imagination in Art and Faith Judith Wolfe This essay advances the overall claim of this volume that images can enable theology: both in the sense of inspiring theological reflection after encounter with them, and in the sense of inviting (in some cases even compelling) such encounter as a theological act. Images do so, in part, because they complicate and extend ordinary apprehension by bringing to consciousness a faculty that is operative in all apprehension, but usually remains itself imperceptible: the imagination. The essay proceeds in four steps: an introductory outline of the imagination in its specific philosophical sense of ‘gestalt formation’; a sketch of the role of the imagination in aesthetic cognition; an indication of the relevance of such an account to one area of theological reflection, namely eschatology; and two readings of literary texts demonstrating this relevance. Introduction ‘The imagination’ is a widely used, but notoriously vague term. The first-page results of a Google image search fairly reliably indicate the softness of the term’s intellectual currency. Nevertheless, there is a long tradition of rigorous discussion of the imagination in philosophy, in the fields both of epistemology and of aesthetics. The dominant sense of ‘the imagination’, in that tradition, is not the familiar ‘power or capacity to form internal images or ideas of objects and situations not actually present to the senses’ (OED), but rather ‘the power or capacity by which the mind integrates sensory data in the process of perception’ (also OED). In other words, this tradition defines ‘the imagination’ as the perception or projection of gestalt – the cognitive capacity to perceive or envision a field of isolated, unstructured, or even disparate phenomena as a form, shape, pattern or whole. For philosophers, this capacity plays a central role in aesthetic cognition. They regard the elicitation of imaginative projection not as a by-product but as a core aim of artistic creation, achieved by deliberately withholding realistic information or juxtaposing disparate material. This is most immediately evident in visual and poetic art: to see a representational painting is to construct a three-dimensional whole out of two-dimensional lines, and a significant subject out of an often mundane scene; to read a poem is to project a ‘three-dimensional’ gestalt out of metaphorical juxtaposition, and so to gain an imaginative ‘double’ or ‘depth’ vision of both material and psychological reality. The relevance of this analysis for theology is that imaginative projection of this type – whether stimulated by artistic engagement or merely analogous to it – forms an important part of some philosophical-theological accounts both of the perception of other humans and of religious faith. With regard to other humans, philosophers such as Stanley Cavell (following Wittgenstein), Roger Scruton and Hans Belting regard the perception of other humans as in some respects analogous to the perception of images. Human faces, they argue, can be described more than 1 merely metaphorically as the ‘image of the soul’. Their perception, just as that of a representational image, irreducibly involves the imaginative apprehension of ‘depth’. This is confirmed experimentally in studies documenting the near inability of subjects to see and describe human faces without reference to psychological depth: tiredness, cheerfulness, anger, and so forth. As in representational paintings, this organizing depth is ‘posterior’ to the facial lines in the sense of being inferred from them; but ‘anterior’ to them in the sense of always already organizing their perception. As in the case of art (this will become relevant later), this imaginative moment ensures that the perception of faces can never fully eschew the risk of mis- or overinterpretation – that such risk is integral to what it means to see faces at all. With regard to religious faith, thinkers such as John Hick, Roger Scruton and Rowan Williams (not, admittedly, names often said in a single breath) regard religious cognition as in some respects analogous to both aesthetic cognition and the perception of other humans just outlined. Religious faith, they argue, manifests itself among other things as a mode of seeing the ordinary world involving the imaginative projection of an immaterial ‘depth’. To have faith is to see the world, as Hebrews 11 puts it, as ‘created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible’. On such an account of religious faith, a skilled imagination forms an ineradicable part of the cognitive apparatus by which humans understand the world as witnessing to God. If this last analogical step is apt, then we stand to learn something about the potential, risks and failure modes of the imaginative element of faith from close attention to the way the imagination functions in aesthetic cognition. This is especially relevant to religious faith as hope, that is, to eschatological expectation. Many theological questions immediately arise from this conceptual framing, which I cannot address in this paper. For example, the relationship between imagination in this sense and inspiration by the Holy Spirit is not a straightforward one, but for that very reason requires a better understanding of the imagination rigorously to disentangle. The Imagination in Aesthetic Cognition There is a long (though not currently fashionable) philosophical tradition placing a human faculty it calls ‘the imagination’ (lat. imaginatio; ger. Einbildungskraft) at the centre of its account of cognition. Thomas Aquinas, after Aristotle, defines the imagination as an interior sense that receives and stores phantasms from things perceived, and enables the active intellect to abstract species from these phantasms to gain understanding.1 Immanuel Kant extends this account, famously describing the imagination as ‘a hidden art in the depths of the human soul’,2 ‘a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all, but of which we are seldom even conscious’.3 Ludwig Wittgenstein expresses this insight as the claim that all seeing is ‘seeingas’: to see at all is to see a phenomenon as a particular thing.4 This language is eyed with suspicion by those who regard it as a denial of realism. I do not take this as a necessary implication (it certainly is not for Thomas), though the tradition certainly makes the (perhaps ultimately uncontroversial) claim that there is no unmediated perception and knowledge of the world: that the structure of our cognitive apparatus, both innate and acquired, shapes the way we organize our perceptual field. Summa Theologiae 1.78.4; 1.86.2 ad 2; 1.84.7. Critique of Pure Reason A141 = B181. 3 A78 = B103; see also A120. 4 Philosophical Investigations pt II, §xi. 1 2 2 The focus of this essay, however, is primarily on a type of cognition that involves the imagination not ‘blindly’ but consciously, namely aesthetic cognition. It is my opening claim that works of art deliberately elicit imaginative gestalt-formation; indeed, that such imaginative investment by the recipient is at the heart of what it means to ‘see’ a painting or read a poem. If imaginative gestalt-formation is also active in ordinary perception, though in more automatized and less consciously creative or constructive ways, then this claim suggests that engagements with art have a role to play in shaping our ordinary interaction with the world by ‘training’ the imagination. But that second claim can be bracketed for now. To show what I mean by saying that (more or less conscious) imaginative investment is central to aesthetic cognition, I will concentrate here on examples of representational visual art. Artistic images of this kind elicit imaginative investment by deliberately withholding realistic information or by juxtaposing disparate material. Let me focus on two aspects of this dynamic: spatiality and materiality. With regard to spatiality, ‘seeing’ images at all depends on imaginatively apprehending the perceived parts as organized within a spatial whole. In other words, we see a two-dimensional image in accordance with a three-dimensional framework which is not present in the image, but makes sense of it. This is especially marked, but by no means unique, in optical illusions such as Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit (Figure 1) and Necker’s cube (Figure 2). Here, the two-dimensional elements are compatible with two different spatial organizations, and may thus project two different spaces. In the absence of pictorial context, there are no criteria for arbitrating between these aspects, because the organising space is available only by means of the organised lines. It is perceptually secondary to the image’s elements in the sense that it is not apprehended directly, but inferred from them; at the same time, it is precedent in the sense that it always already governs their perception and meaning. Generally speaking, the success of the attenuated spatiality of images depends on keeping in the viewer’s peripheral awareness their specific materiality. Michael Polanyi calls the two elements of pictorial perception a ‘focal awareness’ of the picture and a ‘subsidiary awareness’ of the canvas and paint blobs.5 Both focal and subsidiary awareness are necessary: the subsidiary awareness of the flat canvas protects the image from being perceived as distorted when viewed from an angle. This claim is borne out by observing trompe l’oeil paintings like Pozzo’s vault in Sant’Ignazio (Rome), where the canvas does not form a subsidiary part of the viewer’s perception, but is fully eclipsed (see Figure 3). This results in much more extreme distortion when viewed from an angle (as seen in Figure 4). ‘There is something peculiar’, Polanyi writes, in the way Gestalt formation takes place when forming a painting. This union is not a fusion of complementary parts into a whole, but a fusion of contradictory features. The flatness of the canvas is combined with a perspectival depth, which is the very opposite of flatness. Such integration of incompatibles is not unknown to psychology. Binocular vision is based on the fusion of incompatibles.… A deep three-dimensional appearance is produced here by fusing two conflicting flatnesses. This fusion produces a radical extension of our eyesight, but the integration of canvas with perspectival design goes much further in its radical innovation. Binocular integration adds wonderfully to our powers of perceiving what is there, but the integration of incompatibles in a painting reveals to us something beyond all that exists in nature or human affairs: for what we see 5 Michael Polanyi, ‘What Is a Painting?’, British Journal of Aesthetics 10, no. 3 (1970): 225–36. 3 is a flat surface having a deep perspective in three dimensions. This quality of flat-depth, which is the hallmark of a normal painting, may be said to be transnatural.6 Images, in other words, work not merely by approximating reality but by simultaneously flaunting their own unreality: they show forth depth only by being flat. ‘The arts do not exhibit things that could be really there and yet are not there; they exhibit things of a kind that cannot exist either in nature or in human affairs.’7 A consequence of this flaunted unreality is that what ‘depth’ images possess is invested in them by the imagination of artists and viewers, mobilized into encounter by and with the image. ‘The factual information content of art’, to quote Polanyi a final time, ‘is slight, its main purpose being to evoke our participation in its utterance.’8 Portraits may serve as an example here. Emotions, practices, habits and character imprint themselves on human faces, and it is one of the tasks of portraits to capture these immaterial imprints or marks of depth. But of course they do not do so by replicating the process by which faces come to acquire their features. Portraits acquire their own depth not from their own interiority (which they do not have), but from a participatory interaction between subject, artist, artistic material, and viewer. Artist and beholder invest their own experience, empathy and imagination in the canvas; and it is that depth, elicited by the artist’s encounter with the sitter, and the viewer’s with the work of the artist, which creates the ‘true illusion’ of depth in the artwork.9 Images succeed as images only by always keeping in the viewer’s peripheral consciousness the images’ own unreality. As soon as they seek to overstep that self-limitation, they are no longer images but simulacra, as exemplified by trompe l’oeil paintings or virtual reality. In philosophical theological language, this distinction is often described as that between icons and idols.10 However, icon/idol discourse tends to obscure the fact that the necessary imaginative participation is always fraught with risk. Images can neither guarantee their authenticity nor secure their interpretation. Because they are constituted partly by the imaginative investment of their viewers, it is impossible categorically to avoid mis- or overinterpretation. Though images may be, in Jean-Luc Marion’s language, saturated, it would be dangerously naïve to deny that viewers project saturation as much as discovering it. But the deliberate unreality of images also furnishes their power to influence our interaction with the ordinary world. Unlike virtual reality (or, arguably, totalizing artworks such as Wagner’s operas), such images do not seek to displace ordinary reality, but to serve as second lenses on it, enabling an imaginative ‘double vision’ that temporarily perceives the ordinary world through the lens of an artist’s interiority or inspiration. This dynamic has a remarkable complexity. An often neglected, but theologically relevant aspect is a ‘transference’ of art’s own flaunted materiality onto the ordinary world, presenting that world, in turn, as a ‘flat canvas’ with an immaterial or metaphysical depth beyond its surface. Rowan Williams observes regarding the poet: ‘The reality before him is obscurely incomplete: it proposes to the poet the task of making it significant – which does not mean imposing upon it an Polanyi, 230. Polanyi, 234. 8 Polanyi, 232. 9 Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Continuum, 2004), sec. I.1.3 and I.2.1. 10 See especially the writings of Jean-Luc Marion, but also a range of recent work including Javier Carraño, ‘Husserlian Approaches to the Icon and the Idol’, in Transcendence and Phenomenology, ed. Conor Cunningham and Peter Candler (SCM Press, 2008), 111–33; Natalie Carnes, Image and Presence: A Christological Reflection on Iconoclasm and Iconophilia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017). 6 7 4 alien structure of explanation’.11 Similarly, Jacques Maritain describes poetry as the ‘recomposition’ of ‘a world more real than the reality offered to the senses’.12 This dynamic of transference is intensified in religious images, which make visible presences and meanings not physically observable in the world. Images such as Bellini’s Blood of the Redeemer (1465, National Gallery, London) or Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity (1500, National Gallery, London) overlay ordinary reality with visions of the world as redeemed by the blood of Christ, or saturated with angelic joy. These images are not making strict truth claims, but teach us to imagine the world as a theatre of divine agency, or as porous to heaven, and so to become receptive to the possibility of a spiritual ‘depth’ to the ordinary. Like the Ignatian Exercises, they can thereby become a school of faith. Images and Eschatology I suggested in the introduction that faith may manifest itself, among other things, as a mode of seeing the ordinary world, which invests that world imaginatively (or inspiredly) with an unseen depth of divine intention and spiritual significance. However, that claim is made more complicated by the fact that such spiritual significance is not easily discerned, not merely because it is obscure, but also because it depends on things yet to come. If Hebrews 11 describes faith as enabling us to see the world as ‘created by the word of God, so that what is seen was made from things that are not visible’, it does not stop there. For faith is grounded not merely in what God has done, but also in what he will do.13 ‘For in…hope’, says Paul of the future redemption, ‘we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience’.14 Accordingly, quite apart from art that seeks to show forth what is already invisibly present, there are a great many Biblical images which cast a double vision of the ordinary world in a more radical sense: not in the sense of revealing what might already be there, but of casting the present in the light of an imagined eschatological future. These are of particular interest in our discussion of aesthetic cognition, because their subject matter participates in significant ways in the dialectic of artistic form outlined above: they ‘do not exhibit things that could be really there and yet are not there; they exhibit things of a kind that cannot exist either in nature or in human affairs’. This is a wide-ranging claim, and this essay can only sketch its outlines. It is not incidental that eschatology is handled in the Bible most often in imagery. Heuristic classifications of these images are readily available. The first class are images of divine judgement.15 A second are images of return and restoration: the return of Israel to Zion,16 the re-establishment of the Temple,17 every man under his own vine and fig tree.18 A third class – in constructive tension with the second – are images of the arrival of (or at) something new and unknown, such as ascent to the divine Rowan Williams, ‘Poetic and Religious Imagination’, Theology 80, no. 675 (1977): 179–80. Jacques Maritain, ‘The Frontiers of Poetry’, in Art and Scholasticism with Other Essays, trans. J.F. Scanlan (London: Sheed & Ward, 1946), 75. 13 See Hebrews 11.39-40. 14 Romans 8.24-25. 15 E.g. Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Matthew 7, Matthew 25, Luke 13, Revelation 20. 16 E.g. Jeremiah 29, Psalm 126, and many others. 17 Ezekiel 40, Revelation 21, and others. 18 E.g. 1 Kings 4.25, Isaiah 36.16, Micah 4.4. 11 12 5 throne,19 the opening of sealed books,20 the descent of the heavenly Jerusalem.21 This constructive tension between restoration and novelty is made explicit in a class of images that are constitutive of New Testament eschatology: images of a fruition that is also radically new, and so redefines what came before it. These include images of a child being born,22 of seed springing to flower,23 of seeing no longer in a dark mirror but now face to face.24 This last type of images is especially rich for the present discussion, because the imaginative investment which they demand cannot be made without radically transforming how we see our present, and ourselves in it. By portraying history as labouring in childbirth, or mortal bodies as seeds that are sown, these images place us in a peculiar position vis-à-vis the eschatological future they describe, namely as something akin to unborn children and unsprung seeds, bearing the promise of life and fruit, but not yet able to fathom what they will be. This sense of unfinishedness is made explicit in passages such as 1 John 3.2-3: ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.’ These eschatological images show forth an eschatological fulfilment which is not contained by either the artwork or the present world, but is imaginatively projected as the completion of present reality, which thus in turn appears as merely an ‘image’ of the reality prophesied.25 A central aspect of this dynamic is the affective aspect of the flaunted unreality of images. In broad terms, images can be said to have two sorts of affective valence: homeopathic and allopathic. In other words, they elicit attenuated versions of the feelings naturally elicited by the objects they portray (what one might call their homeopathic affect), but also feelings particular to themselves, arising specifically from the gap between image and reality (what one might call their allopathic affect). Among allopathic affects, desire and fear are the most prominent: movements of the affective imagination towards or away from an imagined reality. Eschatological images, on this account, are intended in part to awaken beholders to the gap between themselves and the envisioned reality. Thus, as I have argued elsewhere, the Book of Revelation invites not so much a correct reading of the ‘signs of the times’ (as apocalyptic politics and sects demand), as a participation in its eschatological orientation.26 The coda of the text is designed to place the readers in a continuing interplay of voices calling for mutual presence, and in this way to draw them into the ongoing desire of the book for the coming of Christ: ‘And the Spirit and the Bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come…. Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus’.27 Desire is of irreducible significance within a Christian worldview because it is a central claim of biblical eschatology that the present world is not yet as it was created and redeemed to be. Christians must therefore learn to live with desire, and not to foreclose it. Vis-à-vis the eschatological images in Romans 8 and 1 Corinthians 15, desire rather than claims of knowledge E.g. Daniel 7. E.g. Revelation 6. 21 E.g. Revelation 20. 22 Romans 8, probably alluding to Isaiah 9.6, Colossians 1, etc. 23 1 Corinthians 15. 24 1 Corinthians 13.14, Colossians 3.3-5, 1 John 3.2. 25 Rich discussions of this dynamic are offered by Emmanuel Alloa, Das durchscheinende Bild: Konturen einer medialen Phänomenologie (Zürich: Diaphanes Verlag, 2018); Thomas Pfau, Plenitude: Writing the Image in Literature, Aesthetics, & Theology (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2019). 26 Judith Wolfe, ‘“Like This Insubstantial Pageant, Faded”: Eschatology and Theatricality in The Tempest’, Literature and Theology 18, no. 4 (2004): 373. 27 Revelation 22.17, 22.20. 19 20 6 may be the most appropriate orientation. Seed and embryos cannot claim to know what they will be: but they can desire a fulfilment that they cannot yet fathom; indeed, this is part of what it means to be true to the existential incompleteness revealed in the eschatological images. Thomas Aquinas, in a remarkable passage in the Summa Theologiae, even suggests that such desire might increase their capacity for beatitude: [T]he intellect which has more of the light of glory will see God the more perfectly; and he will have a fuller participation of the light of glory who has more love; because where there is the greater love, there is the more desire; and desire in a certain degree makes the one desiring apt and prepared to receive the object desired. Hence he who possesses the more love, will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more beatified.28 In eschatological hope, more plainly than in other modes of apprehension, the imagination is required to leap forward to a whole where perception supplies only fragments. This imaginative projection is integral, not peripheral, to the life of faith: the eschatological images of Scripture draw their hearers into a movement of fear and desire in which all of time participates. It is an important part of this dynamic that images do not arrest their viewers. They reveal their visions in a form that could not itself be real, and so foreclose the ability simply to inhabit the transcendent here. At the same time, such vision is unavoidably fraught with risk. Like other images, eschatological images cannot guarantee their own interpretation, but always remain vulnerable to over- or misinterpretation. It is a mark of apocalyptic sects and political theologies to repudiate this vulnerability, and use these images to control interpretations of current events, associating true faith with the authority correctly to interpret the signs of the times by reference to their Scriptural types. One consequence of a phenomenology of eschatological expectation is to loosen this illusory grip, and enable a coming to terms with the ambiguity of images as irreducibly part of the human condition ‘between the times’. Case Study: Shakespeare’s Late Plays In 1962, Anne Barton presented a seminal analysis of the ambiguous status of the (Shakespearean) stage as self-consciously both continuous and discontinuous with the ordinary world, and under those aspects both more and less substantial than it. Theatre’s discontinuity with ordinary life consists in a drama’s projection of a reality more ‘substantial’ than ordinary life in the sense of constituting a formally complete and meaningful whole. Theatre’s continuity with ordinary life consists in its function within that life of an ‘insubstantial’ pastime without reality or consequences. In a further loop, however, the very unreality of drama also reflects on or implicates the world, drawing attention, as Anne Barton observes, to the fact that ‘elements of illusion are present in ordinary life, and that between the world and the stage there exists a complicated interplay of resemblance that is part of the perfection and nobility of the drama itself as a form’.29 Shakespeare’s late plays (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and Cymbeline) form a group that reorients the playwright’s earlier work in an eschatological direction. They re-enact aspects of the tragedies that precede them, only to continue ‘eucatastrophically’ beyond the tragic ending to a new hope. At the same time, these plays participate consciously (and in some cases extremely) in the meta-theatricality of Shakespeare’s whole oeuvre; that is, they constantly draw attention to their own status as theatre. These two dimensions – eschatological themes and meta-theatrical 28 29 Summa Theologiae 1.12.6. Anne Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962), 86. 7 form – are at the heart of what I have called the eschatological imagination. The remainder of this essay will open up the theoretical reflections of its first part by indicative readings of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.30 The eschatological focus of The Winter’s Tale is resurrection and reunion. Its third act ends, like the fifth act of Othello, with a husband’s (direct or indirect) murder of a faithful wife whom he, with pathological obsession, suspects of adultery. But unlike Othello, The Winter’s Tale passes beyond death to a eucatastrophic ending of revival, rediscovery and reconciliation. Leontes’s wife Hermione has ‘preserved herself’ after her seeming death, and remained hidden for sixteen years, now to be presented to her husband as a statue of his late wife which, beyond all hope, comes to life to embrace and forgive him. The meta-theatrical focus of The Winter’s Tale is ‘seeing as’ or aspect perception, particularly of human faces and actions. As noted in Part One, the role of faces as ‘images of the soul’ leaves humans inherently vulnerable to illusion and deception. They cannot but assume a depth to what they see; yet that depth is not independently verifiable, but is inferred from the image that is seen as expressing it. Humans therefore routinely resort to contextual information for further confirmation of the authenticity of the expression: they ask whether there is something that might have caused pain, joy or tiredness, for example. This is noteworthy in relation to the theatre, because in dramatic presentations faces are images in a more than usually marked sense. Not only is it impossible in the epistemological sceptic’s sense to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic expressions: ordinary criteria for distinguishing between play-acting and sincerity break down altogether, in the sense and to the extent that play-acting (by the actors) is the only means of conveying sincerity (by the characters). The Winter’s Tale foregrounds this inherent riskiness of images and imagination by making Leontes’ suspicion of his wife’s infidelity rely precisely on the difficulty of deciphering with certainty her ambiguous behaviour. His breakdown follows a moment of radical awareness of his inability to know whether her seemingly casual interactions with his friend Polixenes are indeed casual or whether they are marks of illicit affection. This distinction, as Leontes’ pivotal speech confirms, cannot be reaffirmed by reference to an objective criterion, because contrived and natural behaviour look exactly alike. Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, But not for joy, not joy. This entertainment May a free face put on, derive a liberty From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, And well become the agent—’t may, I grant. But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practised smiles As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as ‘twere The mort o’th’deer—O, that is entertainment My bosom likes not, nor my brows. Parts of what follows have been presented previously in Wolfe, ‘“Like This Insubstantial Pageant, Faded”’; Judith Wolfe, ‘Hermione’s Sophism: Ordinariness and Theatricality in The Winter’s Tale’, Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 1A (2015): A83–105; and Wolfe, ‘Eschatology and Human Knowledge of God’.Parts of what follows have been presented previously in Wolfe, ‘“Like This Insubstantial Pageant, Faded”’; Judith Wolfe, ‘Hermione’s Sophism: Ordinariness and Theatricality in The Winter’s Tale’, Philosophy and Literature 39, no. 1A (2015): A83–105; and Wolfe, ‘Eschatology and Human Knowledge of God’. 30 8 (Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale 1.2.107-118; underlining added) Hermione’s behaviour is here described as ‘entertainment’, with its pertinent double-meaning as ‘pastime’ and ‘performance’. What may be ‘liberty’, flowing from ‘heartiness’ and ‘bounty’, may equally be a display of ‘practised smiles’ and affected sighs. Only a subjective arbitration differentiates the one from the other: Leontes’ ‘but’ introduces not a counter-argument, but only an alternative description of the same actions. The real shock here is that this crisis is not only Leontes’, but (by the mere fact of watching a play) also implicates the audience. For while the spectators are deeply suspicious of Leontes’ accusations of dissembling, what they see on stage is in fact exactly what he sees: a display in which spontaneous affection cannot unproblematically be distinguished from theatrical craftsmanship. This foregrounding of the theatricality of The Winter’s Tale problematizes (though it does not denigrate) the ‘suspension of disbelief’ on which the work of a dramatic performance traditionally depends: the audience’s casual construal of the actors’ performances as the spontaneous behaviour of fictional characters. The Winter’s Tale does not try to overcome the problem of images, but integrates it in a phenomenology of eschatological expectation. This is the work of the statue scene (5.3). Typically interpreted either as a pious representation of resurrection or as its secular displacement, the scene is, in fact, something more deliberately ambiguous. Shakespeare neither repudiates Christian hope nor trivializes it by claiming that it is directly representable, but rather stirs and sustains eschatological desire by constructing a participative image of resurrection which tends towards its own dissolution. From Leontes, the sight of Hermione’s statue elicits not a claim of knowledge, but the desire that the statue he sees may precisely be more than what it seems to him, that it may have a life of its own. In other words, it moves him to yield his ambition for certainty and to acknowledge that the statue is not so much an authentic image of Hermione as a reflection of his own condition: ‘I am ashamed. Does not the stone rebuke me/ For being more stone than it?’ (5.3.37f). This identification with Hermione as she has become through his guilt, opening a way back to her and with her to himself, may be illuminated by the model of the Eucharistic liturgy. In the liturgy, the participants accept Christ’s death as their own condition, brought about by their sin, and offer up their lives to God with the prayer that he may transform their gifts into Christ’s body. Identifying with Christ’s death in the faith that he has overcome it, they make themselves present to God in their incompleteness and need, and so open themselves to an authentic encounter with Christ. Thus, when they partake of the Eucharist, they receive his body not only as a separate entity, but also as the guarantor of their own transformed humanity. This return to the ordinary in the awareness of its sacramental dimension also informs Leontes’ desire, not to be certain that Hermione’s stirrings are not an illusion, but to be granted that ‘if this be magic, let it be an art/ Lawful as eating’ (110f), a plea with relevant Eucharistic overtones. Like Leontes’ predicament, the restoration achieved in the statue scene also implicates the audience. Paulina’s exhortation before unveiling the statue, ‘it is required you do awake your faith’ (5.3.94f), is addressed to the audience as much as to Leontes, and calls for ‘faith’ not primarily in a religious but a theatrical sense. They must ‘suspend their disbelief’ – that is, imaginatively entertain the reality of the play – to be able to enter an experience of revelation and reunion inaccessible within their ordinary lives of fragmentation and incompleteness. And yet, the very act of ‘raising’ Hermione also distances the audience from her: only by admitting that she is a theatrical 9 figure can they bring her to life at all. Thus, the scene at once enables an imaginative experience of eschatological fulfilment and enacts the impossibility of such wholeness in the context of the play. In this way, it leads the audience back to the ordinary.31 The eschatological focus of The Tempest is judgement and restoration, a politically charged subject in Reformation England. Many critics have noted the resemblance of the play as a whole to the Book of Revelation32 or, more specifically, to a Jacobean court masque,33 which is itself modelled on that Book.34 Prospero, exiled ruler and thaumaturge, realizes apocalyptic prophecy by achieving a royal wedding feast, a final judgement, and the restoration of the realm. Responding to this structure, critics have tended either to read the play as a religious vision of eschatological resolution (Milward), or as an example of the appropriation of eschatological narrative and imagery for cultural and / or political ends (Marshall, Marx). As with The Winter’s Tale, however, neither reading pays sufficiently close attention to the play’s self-conscious theatricality, i.e. its attention to its own constitution as dramatic image. Read from this perspective, the play portrays Prospero as consciously trying to enact an apocalypse, and follows his growing and poignant realization of the ephemerality of the apocalyptic scenario he is constructing. The meta-theatrical focus of The Tempest, accordingly, is the reciprocal illumination of world and play as infirm images. It achieves its first climax in Prospero’s famous speech in 4.1, when he prematurely breaks off the wedding masque he has produced for Ferdinand and Miranda as a mise en abyme of his larger design. The aging Prospero comforts young Ferdinand: Be cheerful sir, Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. Prospero’s speech spans three levels: at the basic level, he announces the end or breakingoff of the performance of the wedding masque he has staged for Ferdinand and Miranda. On a second level, he reflects on the insubstantiality of the theatre as a whole, including the play the audience is currently attending. And on a third and final level, he identifies the world itself with the theatre, remarking that human life, too, is ultimately no more than a play: an insubstantial pageant which will ‘leave not a rack behind’. For a fuller reading of the play, though without its eschatological dimension, see Wolfe, ‘Hermione’s Sophism’. E.g. Cynthia Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology (Carbondale, ILL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Apocalypse, Renaissance Monographs 26 (Tokyo: Renaissance Institute Press, 2000). 33 See e.g. Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 125–146; Wolfe, ‘“Like This Insubstantial Pageant, Faded”’. 34 See e.g. Stephen Orgel, The Jonsonian Masque (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965); Thierry Demaubus, ‘Ritual, Ostension and the Divine in the Stuart Masque’, Literature and Theology 17, no. 3 (2003): 298–313. 31 32 10 Like Leontes’ realization, upon the death of his son, that he has ‘too much believed [his] own suspicion’ (3.2.149), this is an intensely poignant moment of recognition. And yet, as for Leontes (who ‘shut up himself’ (4.1.19) for sixteen years in unremitting penance without hope of restoration), even this recognition is not enough to effect resolution. Prospero’s great set piece announcing the abjuration of his magic (5.1.33-57) is also, as Stephen Orgel reminds us, ‘the most powerful assertion of his magic the play gives us.’35 What is more, its close resemblance to a speech by Ovid’s Medea36 associates Prospero with the mythical enchantress just as he attempts to dissociate himself from his theatrical magic. It seems that even the recognition of the insubstantiality of the theatre and the need to embrace his humanity is not enough to do just that: it cannot break the entanglement of Prospero’s identity in the theatrical or the fictional. Hence, his abjuration remains incomplete and is, like the liberation of his actor-servant Ariel, finally postponed until after the end of the play (see 5.1.316-318). Likewise, his declaration that, ‘they being penitent’ (5.1.28), he will forgive rather than punish the courtiers smacks partly of a mere re-assignment of roles, for Prospero never solicits or verifies, but merely announces their contrition. Thus, as Stephen Orgel observes, ‘Antonio does not repent’ because ‘he is…not allowed to repent.’37 The full significance of theatricality emerges in the epilogue, where Prospero once more acknowledges his infirmity, but now not merely because the dispersal of a play reminds him of it, but because it existentially involves him. Like Ariel, with whom he repeatedly identifies himself in this speech, Prospero, too, is a theatrical figure, and must vanish with the play. In the epilogue, he abandons the attempt to authenticate himself by presenting to himself a re-enactment of his history, and instead places himself within that performance. His remaining strength is ‘most faint’ (5.1.319321) not only because he is left unable to control others, but because, more painfully, he cannot even authenticate his own existence by himself, but must plead for acknowledgement by the audience. This recognition, given in the form of applause, paradoxically constitutes at once an affirmation of his worthiness to return to Naples and a declaration that the person on stage is not a duke but an actor; it thus simultaneously vindicates and ends Prospero’s existence. This gesture, moreover, involves the audience in a similar renunciation as that undergone by Prospero. By assenting to the dissolution of the play, they relinquish the only medium by which the characters are present to them, and thus, like Prospero, surrender the (illusory) power to oversee the presence of others. This acceptance is caught up with a further acknowledgement: by soliciting both applause (5.1.328) and their prayer for his soul (5.1.334), Prospero associates the end of a performance with the hour of death, and thus extends the audience’s acknowledgement of his theatricality to a recognition of their own transience, their own part in a world that tends towards dissolution. The desire to control and perpetuate presence is thus shown to spring from a denial of mortality that can only be offered to the forgiving ‘mercy’ of God (5.1.336). This shared confession and ‘indulgence’ (5.1.338), however, makes possible a true encounter between Prospero and the audience at the ‘edge’ of the play—an encounter that images, prepares, and stirs desire for a greater encounter at the edge of time, without usurping that final event. Both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale authenticate a deeply engrained desire for (self)revelation and communion without pretending that this desire finds a resting place either in the theatre or in ordinary life. Rather, by conjuring a reality that exceeds ordinary life in coherence, William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 53. Metamorphoses vii.197-209. 37 Shakespeare, 53 (emphasis in original). 35 36 11 meaningfulness and desirability, the plays evoke, though by no means offer a guarantee of, a reality greater than that visible now, of which ordinary life may only be the first image or shadow. Thus, their self-dissolving images empower their spectators in sustaining a dialectic of eschatological expectation: neither to deny nor falsely to anticipate the future realization of an ideal acknowledged as impossible within present conditions. 12