The Comic Mimesis

Previous articleNext article FreeThe Comic MimesisMladen DolarMladen Dolar Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLet me start with a story, which is supposedly a true story, quite apart from its truth-value as a legend. There is nothing comical about it, quite the opposite, although it strangely verges on the comic. It will hopefully lead us straight to the core of the problem of mimesis and its comical penchant.Against all odds, there is in Christianity a patron saint of actors, despite the ways in which Christianity has largely regarded acting, and theatre, as a dubious profession, a source of sinful entertainment and questionable virtue. There are condemnations of actors and acting, in most serious terms, from no lesser authorities than Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But there is an actor who was worthy not only of redemption but also of sanctification. His name is Genesius, and his feast is celebrated on 25 August by the Catholic Church. So how did Genesius become worthy of sainthood and the patron saint of acting to whom actors are to commend their soul (if they have one)?1The time is 303 AD; the place is Rome. This was the period known as the great persecution, namely, the last, the largest, and the bloodiest persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire. A decade later, with the Edict of Milan in 313, Emperor Constantine would stop all persecution, and a few decades later Christianity would become the official religion of the empire. But at the beginning of this bloody wave, which would cost thousands of lives, all means were employed to stop this pest (although Christians probably then formed less than 10 percent of the population). And one formidable weapon of the anti-Christian propaganda was theatre, a modest stand-in for mass media. Emperor Diocletian fostered this kind of theatre production, so he had a play produced in his court whose intent was to show the contemptible behavior of Christians, to display their irrational beliefs and rituals, to expose them to mockery, and to demonstrate by graphic means how the people who followed that creed would finish badly. The play ended with the theatrical torture and execution of Christians, on stage, no doubt to the general delight of the audience.Genesius was a modest actor who had to play a Christian villain in this scenario and be submitted to the deserved ordeal in the end. But as the play progressed, so goes the legend, the young actor, himself a heathen believer in Roman deities, while enacting the Christian rites and professing their creed, no doubt with the great empathy of a good actor, converted suddenly to Christianity. What he enacted then became the place of revelation; he was touched by the grace of God, which enabled him to see the light and espouse the true religion, as the Christian account would have it. He was so profoundly involved in his role that he decided to abandon his previous sinful life, the life now seen in retrospect as a mere theatrical make-believe. He stopped acting and found the truth in what was to be a mere enactment. All previous life appeared as theatre, and theatre appeared as the place of truth. As the play finished, Genesius seemed unable to abandon his role, so he continued preaching Christianity. What was first seen as an incident was soon considered to be the major crime, the very crime against which the play was staged. The theatrical propaganda device backfired, producing a conversion instead of condemnation and repulsion. Genesius was brought to Diocletian; they engaged in bitter controversy and theological dispute, and he was ordered under severe threats to abandon this creed. He courageously refused, and the consequence was that Genesius was tortured and put to death on the very same stage where he just a little before played a tortured Christian put to death by theatrical make-believe. Reality caught up with the play, the last scene was restaged now for real, theatre fakery was replaced by actual torture, the play served retrospectively as the rehearsal for the real martyrdom. (Was the audience as delighted as before, or even more so?)Genesius did indeed become a Christian martyr and a saint, venerated to this day. He is the patron of the British Catholic Stage Guild. There is a shrine of St. Genesius in St Malachy’s Catholic Church in Manhattan (in the Theatre District, just off Broadway); there is a Genesian Theatre in Sydney; and there are other sites of commemoration. There are some accounts of this story already in the fourth century, although it is hard to tell fact from fiction. The incident became very popular, and soon after lifting the anathema on Christianity there was a church built in Rome in his honor.2It is clear that this event offers itself quite evidently to propaganda. What was meant as anti-Christian ideological warfare could be ideally exploited as propaganda for Christianity, staging the event as the showpiece of conversion, thus theatrically demonstrating the superior power of the true religion. So, it is actually quite surprising that it took Christianity more than a thousand years to come upon this simple idea and to produce a play about Genesius’s martyrdom. His story was part of various martyrologies, often recounted in collections of gruesome anecdotes of Christian martyrdom but not put on stage—for a good and simple reason.3 What would be needed to tell his story on stage is a metatheatrical device of theatre within theatre, a play within a play. In the obvious scenario we would watch Diocletian’s court on stage watching the performance of the actors, with one actor then experiencing conversion, thus descending from the stage onstage to the mere stage. The stage would have to redouble itself to tell this story, but this device was not yet available in medieval times. The invention of a play within a play, the play reflected in the play staged on stage, occurred in the sixteenth century when it quickly gained great popularity (particularly in the Spanish baroque theatre), producing its most famous example, the mousetrap in Hamlet.4 It was only after the mousetrap that Genesius could be put on scene, and there followed a number of plays based on his fate, the two most important among them Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero (The True Impostor) (1608, printed in 1621) and Jean Rotrou’s Le Véritable Saint Genest (The True Saint Genesius) (1646). (Here I must point out the most significant subsequent reference, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet, comédien et martyre [1952], the first great apology of Jean Genet, with the explicit reference to Saint Genest in the title and as a subtext.)Jean Rotrou (1609–1650) was a man of spirit and talent who had the misfortune of living in seventeenth-century France, one of the great golden ages of theatre, where in the presence of the great stars Molière, Pierre Corneille, and Jean Racine all lesser stars were virtually eclipsed into oblivion, although their work was no less interesting and valuable. Rotrou was for some time Corneille’s friend and competitor on stage, a formidable writer, but he died young and his plays are now almost never produced (very rarely in France, never outside). His piece on Genesius is no doubt the most accomplished version of the legend and had considerable success at the time. I am insisting on Rotrou’s version of this legend for one simple reason, namely, its possible and likely influence on Blaise Pascal who must have known the piece (or some other pieces about Genesius, although I didn’t find any reference to it in the literature). Now consider these very famous lines by Blaise Pascal from Pensées:You want to find faith and you do not know the road. You want to be cured of unbelief and you ask for the remedy: learn from those who were once bound like you and who now wager all they have. These are people who know the road you wish to follow, who have been cured of the affliction of which you wish to be cured: follow the way by which they began. They behaved just as if they did believe, taking holy water, having masses said, and so on. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more docile.5This is Pascal’s notorious advice for nonbelievers: if you don’t have faith, pretend that you have it, act as if you have it, follow the rite, stage your faith, enact the belief that you don’t have, turn yourself into a machine, and the faith will follow by itself. Turn yourself into an actor, into Genesius performing the religious rituals on stage, an automaton saying the text learned by heart, mechanically and without understanding, a text written by another, imposed and merely repeated. There is “the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (P, p. 247).6Thus, in one bold stroke, we find ourselves at the core of the theory of ideology, as expounded by Louis Althusser who took his cue from Pascal:Besides, we are indebted to Pascal’s defensive ‘dialectic’ for the wonderful formula which will enable us to invert the order of the notional schema of ideology. Pascal says more or less: ‘Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe.’ He thus scandalously inverts the order of things, bringing, like Christ, not peace but strife, and in addition something hardly Christian ... —scandal itself. A fortunate scandal which makes him stick with Jansenist defiance to a language that directly names the reality.... [The subject’s] ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.7From Christian conversion to Marxist theory of ideology, il n’y a qu’un pas. There is Genesius lurking at the bottom of it, and insofar as this describes the very mechanism by which one espouses any ideology (and becomes a subject, for Althusser), we are all Genesius at heart. First acting, then belief, belief induced by acting, acting as an automaton producing belief. The subject of ideology is Genesius.And in one stroke we are thus at the core of the problem of mimesis. One becomes what one enacts. This is the founding myth of mimesis. The enactment, as purely external, has the power of shaping the enactor, it contaminates him, its external mechanism has the power to seize his heart. One imitates, and by imitating one becomes what one imitates. Of course one knows very well that this doesn’t quite happen that way (not with clockwork predictability, if ever), yet this is the inveterate structural supposition that lies at the core of mimesis and its powers, pointing to the enigmatic kernel joining body and spirit. The story has the power of a parable far larger than Christianity. There is something vertiginous in it, bringing together the nature of theatre and its magical power, the nature of material reality, the nature of our beliefs, the inner conviction and the outer automatism.Presenting this story as the demonstration of the superior powers of Christianity is obviously questionable. Does acting work in this way only in this case, when it induces the supposed true belief? But there are many examples, since time immemorial, since the dawn of theatre, of acting inducing all kinds of behavior, preferably the sinful ones, and this was one of the major causes for the various anathemas on theatre and acting, stretching from Plato via Christianity to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Does the same device of conversion by staging apply also to Islam? Or does one become an atheist by acting an atheist? By acting a scoundrel, doesn’t one then run the risk of becoming a scoundrel? By acting a lover, does one fall in love? By acting disease, can one become sick? Every theatre is thick with anecdotes of actors not being able to get out of their roles or of extending their acting in their lives; this is part of theatre folklore. Any actor can become sick by acting disease, but it takes a real genius to act a hypochondriac and to die of it. One of the most famous anecdotes of the entire history of theatre tells us that this is how Molière died, struck by a heart attack on stage when impersonating le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Sick Man). Can one die of mimesis, or rather of mimesis mimeseos, the mimesis of mimesis, of the enactment of a hypochondriac, of someone merely acting having a disease? Fake disease, or rather faking the fake disease on stage, entailing real death. Mimesis of mimesis, imitation of imitation, which appears a very slight thing indeed, can turn into a deadly affair; witness the greatest of all comedians.This is the problem that Plato has to deal with at length in book 3 of the Republic. The problem of modern art is endemically put in terms of how to make art politically relevant, how to create politically subversive art. Plato’s problem was exactly the opposite; art always involves too many political messages, it is far too politically subversive, so he saw his task rather in containing all these political strands in art. So Plato, in this work that laid the foundations of good politics, spent a rather astounding one third of the time discussing aesthetics and the political dangers of artistic endeavors. The problem is ultimately not that there is too much politics in art, so that one would have to protect its purity from political contamination; the problem is that virtually all art’s politics is wrong and dangerous for the community, such as Plato envisioned it, and that one should replace it by an even more artistic politics.I can only give a glimpse of this problem, limiting myself to the Republic.8 The agenda of a large part of the second and the third books is that of censorship: how to censor all these pernicious parts occurring in Homer, the founding father, and on a larger scale (since Greek art took Greek mythology as its major source of inspiration) how to censor the religious narratives on which Greek society was based. Greek gods, to say the least, behaved in most questionable manners, far from setting examples that one should emulate. It all started already at the beginning of theogony, with Uranus, the god of the sky, proceeding to destroy his own children, while the youngest one, Chronos, managed to escape and to castrate him, his own father, with the due help of his mother Gaia.9 Plato is very alarmed by such stories, which abound in virtually all myths: “Even if it were true, it should be passed over in silence, not told to foolish young people. And if, for some reason, it has to be told, only a very few people—pledged to secrecy ... —should hear it, so that their number is kept as small as possible” (R, p. 1016).So Plato has a problem, a huge one: the temptation of emulation is immediate and irresistible, particularly for the unformed youngsters, so religion—all Greek mythology—should be kept away from youth, safely locked as far away as possible, if we are to secure their edification. (One may well wonder what he would make of the Bible.) Furthermore, there are so many questionable deeds by heroes and men depicted by poets that could instill fear of death, passions, lust, frenzy, “pleasures of drink, sex and food,” and others (R, p. 1027).10 “We’ll ask Homer and the other poets not to be angry if we delete these passages and all not that they and to the of but the more they the less they should be by or by men who are supposed to be (R, p. bottom is that we would have to censor the of religion and if we are to the the religion and away from the if you want them to be good are the to the questionable which is insofar as it dubious examples and to But it is if one the The is that not so much can be if one only such with the from them (and hopefully But already Homer had the of not merely the but of into the of his heroes and in their own The problem is ultimately that of and for the he to his heroes and them his in a more One with the of and there is no way of who is even one but the of this other and be by it, by what was meant merely as a By one when he makes a as if he were someone we say that he makes his own as much like that of the as ... to make like someone in or is to the one makes In these it that he and the other poets their p. is the mimesis of directly impersonating without the of and and this is where the greatest is to point out that are like (R, p. One kind of and only and as you kind only by the find this most of all in A third kind in (R, p. theatre a it with all and by very is its So the or not and into our our should be or (R, p. be at or imitating or from the imitation, they come to Or you that from become part of nature and into of and (R, p. should by no means or ... by and and even less one who is in or in and just in case, they should also from imitating the or of that (R, p. In a one from and to or the of a for one is by it, one to be or just in (R, p. (or in it be for Plato and in there a for Can one a in the other one should by all means good examples, the one should be and by so imitation can One can become good or only by of one is to it. are imitation is the The bottom imitation It ultimately contaminates and There can be no or one be by the of one is formed by what one imitates, for or One is always And the is the same as in first the body imitates, one only lips then the spirit it becomes and against follow this there is a point where one becomes or by the powers of mimesis, against many of Plato’s to the But there something and comical about this we already in the of serious poets and were to ask their into the this is what we should tell and our is the and we can any our entire has been so as to be a of the and very thing we is most a So we are poets like in the same and your as and actors in the which true has the powers to to is the true mimesis, not the it is the theatre, the show in the it theatre at its own it is the superior and true show is but what about who means to a will find it to the serious of in from their or indeed at all in the light of its But if we to even on a small we be serious and and this is we must learn to to being by our of must be to and and no one must it at all or must be found is to be able to the its opposite, but its performance should be to and (and should never is an of one in which the of the are so that an audience is to against with clear of their and not in any with is only one kind of for to And it appears that in imitation is even than for Plato, is for art. a particularly of it, as one makes available to all kinds of imitating and and of and by a the to be more But an problem with which is merely the of actually of of since the of which one makes are already in of Plato will this at length in book but I into the problem is in this put in rather than becoming a is with no lesser and the no less is a to all of all the would such a slight thing as a of a imitation of imitation, so much and even would a create and have no reality, or a so much and than the real all this time and over something so and even The is that the the imitation, has the power to the thing itself. it the one becomes what one imitates, it is and it by mere one is the one is touched by it. But there is the never quite but in the namely, that imitation it on the it has an on it, it it, although the is such that it be or One makes a not even a of a and the of ideas to be it has to be against any such the and it the that is two are not but there is the same at the can do more than they can They can merely by They can themselves by something that appears to be an a more they can the order of ideas by the of their as the those in imitation, can the true by merely Plato’s fear was not that the the imitation, the was but a and of the real his fear was that it was too much like the real too to it, not from it, to it by an that be the it to its supposed the itself be from it, in its to its and The is that they are so much that a could the one for the it ultimately takes two kinds of others for the first would be the who would the for reality, unable to tell the as imitation is staged for his But one has to on a second the one who knows the who can that this is a mere the who would the and and can tell them one on the ways of mimesis. Plato’s in a is that the two others to that the other and the are so his fear would ultimately to put it in terms, that there is no of the The other who and the other who knows be quite at the bottom of it, a mechanism to has two kinds of the one, which by by at the will the and which by or by took this up at some length in and In imitation has the power to the and on the other mere has the power to two and are the two of the of says and and as the two of He a later that in the more of by is in the by is in the The of the same for the two kinds of is no doubt for by some in the which we have not yet there is a fact of that in the of and ways of at and the imitation and are in but their Plato, at the to espouse this point of and where although at a from the a most the that lies at the bottom of mimesis us to There have been many to to to out its and but to have the last at all these It always has more up its than can account So, with all the in mind me up one found in are is by but by their makes us (P, p. The and the of this is that it to the comical by the very just by the mechanism of It it to this one is not two is but that two is the of one, its imitation, its its its What one and two to produce the comical one and but two that don’t quite up to they are just of same and at the same time. there should be there is a in the of the are not two So ultimately this is a two two ones, but a one, where parts can be as two The comical in their very who one of the books on the was about this turn in He an just as well be of a no one of which is by by their The truth is that a living life should never itself. there is or we always some mechanism at work the the you get from two that are too much and you will find that you are of

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