Metacommunication in Plays by N. F. Simpson, D. Campton, and J. Saunders

This paper deals with the problem of metacommunication in dramatic discourse. Following the approaches of Slawomir Świontek, Patrice Pavis, Hans-Thies Lehmann and others, it discusses the ways of compensating the lack of a single mediating figure in drama. This analysis employs the concept of “semiotic profanation of a symbol” developed by Yuri Shatin. The investigation is based on several English plays that embody the poetics of theatrical absurd. Norman Frederic (“N. F.”) Simpson’s plays A Resounding Tinkle (1957) and The Hole (1958) both make extensive use of such characters as authors, critics, actors, visionaries. Characters are familiar with established interpretative models (Bergson's theory or modernist visionary poetics), even applying those models to their own actions. David Campton’s play Us and Them (1972) and James Saunders’ play Over the Wall (1977) utilize mediating figures such as the Recorder and the Narrator. While both works present themselves as parable plays, the inclusion of narrative instances does not streamline the perception of aesthetic signs. Instead, it attracts the recipient’s attention to the dual nature of drama as a media (a text for reading and a part of a theatrical performance). In addition, all four plays tend to deconstruct traditional cultural signs such as the wall, the hole / abyss, the veil, etc. The paradoxal situation of being forcedly freed from established patterns of interpretation awakens the addressee’s receptive potential.

The Calender’s Visions of Beauty

By reconsidering the main female exemplars of beauty in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, this chapter shows that the admiration of beauty is central there, as it is also in early modern Platonic poetics. As in the Phaedrus, beauty for Spenser inspires visionary apprehension; yet unlike Plato the poet links this stimulus to literary pursuit of the sublime. Platonism associated genuine beauty with truth and goodness, and Spenser likewise assumes that his Calender’s esthetic disclosures foster wisdom and virtue in at least some readers, and hence in the nation. However, whereas Plato valorizes philosophy for illuminating truth, Spenser advocates the enraptured poetic imagination endued with learning. In doing so, he seeks to circumvent, insofar as possible, the intrinsic limitations of words, images, and written discourse, such as those that Plato had identified in the Phaedrus. This reading newly illuminates the strategies of Spenser’s visionary poetics.

Absolutely Modern

Bob Dylan’s turn from “folk music” to “electric music” in the 1960s involves the development of a new visionary poetics. Through a consideration of his affinity with the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, this essay traces Dylan’s recasting of himself as a visionary and studies the pressures placed by this process on lyric form, on poetic diction, and on the representation of the self in popular music.