Modern man is a conflicted individual always struggling within the public and the private sphere, trying to be both a productive member of society and a free being living the life he wants to live. This struggle and conflict of modern man is a central theme in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. Leonard Mustazza, in his article “A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgment in Shaffer’s Equus,” claims that most of the play’s critics focus on “the Nietzschean distinction between Dionysian impulse and Apollonian order” (Mustazza 174). He quotes Dean Ebner who argues that “the play makes a striking comment upon society by viewing these longings of soul and body, of worship and sexuality, in opposition to corporation, parent, profession, and conventional religion which conspire subtly to thwart all mystery and ecstasy in modern life” (Mustazza 174). Mustazza contends that the Dionysian interpretation of Alan Strang’s worship and ritual is influenced by Martin Dysart’s distorted perspective because the facts revealed in the narrative and by Alan Strang evinces that Alan’s peculiar practices is “based upon Judeo-Christian theology and rite” (Mustazza 174). Essentially, Mustazza is arguing that Dysart projects his own desires upon his interpretation of Alan’s behavior because unlike Alan who has created his own mythology, Dysart is trapped in a world of governmentality and normalcy.
The distortion in Dysart’s point of view and the struggle with self that Dysart faces illuminates Equus as a dialectic of modern man’s struggle between desire and responsibility. While there are Nietzschean threads evident in the play, I argue that the conflict in Equus is reflective of a conflation of Michel Foucault’s philosophies on discipline, knowledge, power and technologies of the self. In Equus, Peter Shaffer explores how man internalizes discipline and how that internalized discipline perpetuated by the societal gaze conflicts with man’s desire to be an autonomous being living life as a work of art. This conflict is apparent both within the narrative and at the meta-level as it is reflected in Dysart’s monologues and confessions, and in Shaffer’s design to have the cast always present on stage symbolizing the presence of the panoptic gaze.
In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault uses Bentham’s Panopticon as a metaphor elaborating how modern society internalizes discipline through “the instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible” (Foucault 560). Discipline is instilled in society through a heterogenic dispensing of societal power where such “[p]ower is exercised by individuals and groups upon others, or, more precisely, upon their potential endeavors” (Chowers 163). In this sense, an individual is simultaneously both disciplinarian and disciplined.
In Equus, Shaffer illuminates the effect of societal panoptic gaze through the character of Martin Dysart. Dysart is an entrepreneur of normalcy, a psychiatrist who is involved in the transformation of transgressive beings into normal, productive citizens. He claims that “[t]he Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his Priest” (Shaffer Act 1. Scene 19). That is, Dysart recognizes his role in society as the dispenser of normalcy, as the maintenance man of social order. His professional role is the reason for his consciousness of societal surveillance and expectations. Dysart is very much aware that an individual’s worth is measured according to how he follows the rules of society and how much he contributes as a citizen, and that transgressing rules and expectations lead to consequences. This awareness makes him acknowledge his own limitations. He confesses that he feels “[a]ll reined up in old language and old assumptions, straining to jump clean-hoofed on to a whole new track of being I only suspect is there. I can’t see it, because my educated, average head is being held at the wrong angle” (Shaffer 1.1). The trapped feeling Dysart feels illustrates how “the imposition of discipline and punishment is accompanied by a whole dimension of unstated assumptions, of unsuspected consequences, of ethical and epistemological issues that are veiled from public view by the unquestionable authority of ideological guarantees” (Racevskis 97). Dysart is a man who has fully internalized discipline, aware of what is expected of him and of the possible consequences if he dares defy social expectations. The internalization of discipline is at the core of his identity, a part of him he cannot escape.
How aware Dysart is of societal gaze is further evinced in one of his nightmares. In a monologue, Dysart describes a peculiar dream where he officiates a sacrificial ritual in Homeric Greece. In charge of carving up children, he begins to feel nauseated. He confesses, “I redouble my efforts to look professional” (Shaffer 1.5). Dysart is afraid that his fellow officials will notice the change in his demeanor because he admits, “that if ever those two assistants so much as glimpse my distress – and the implied doubt that this repetitive and smelly work is doing any social good at all – I will be the next across the stone” (Shaffer 1.5). Essentially, Dysart spells out how discipline is internalized: firstly, through the gaze of the other that carries expectations and second, through one’s own consciousness of expectations and one’s role in the maintenance of social order. In a sense, Dysart’s nightmare illustrates how “power is in me as well as you, that it is internal as well as external, that I am responsible for its operation as well as you are” (Chowers 170). There is no hierarchy in the dispensation of societal power as it is heterogenic, held by every member who keeps watch of themselves and of others. Furthermore, there is no institution or law aligned with societal power; it is mainly in the hands of the citizens. Power is merely an exercise of knowledge because “[t]he exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power” (Racevskis 97).
However, in as much as knowledge and power regulates discipline, one’s awareness of this regulation effects the desire to live a life that is free. In elaborating on technologies of the self, Foucault illuminates that “the possibility of societal transformation in the present was linked not simply to the genealogical disassembly of modern configurations of power; it was intimately tied to the creative activity of strong and free individuals intent upon living their lives as works of art” (Paras 127). According to Foucault, “[t]he art of living is the art of killing psychology, of creating with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, beings, relations, qualities. If one can’t manage to do that in one’s life, that life is not worth living” (Paras 129). In other words, Foucault explains that a life worth living is one where an individual relates to others in a more personal sense. A life of art is a life of creation where an individual abandons or, at least, questions social limitations, transgressing them by doing something dedicated for the self. A life that is like a work of art, in other words, is a life of creating space for the self beyond social responsibility.
The desire to live a life worth living is a strong one indeed, especially for Martin Dysart. Dysart realizes that life has to be more than fulfilling responsibilities, than being a productive citizen and this realization materializes in his dreams of living a life of “fantastic surrender to the primitive” (Shaffer 2.25). Dysart dreams of a life of passion, of complete surrender to instinctual desires.
Dysart’s further realization of his desires for a life that is more comes about through his acquaintance with Alan Strang, a boy put under his psychiatric care. Unlike Dysart, Alan seems to be free from society’s panoptic gaze. Dysart views Alan as a “boy [who] has known a passion more ferocious than [he has] felt in any second of [his] life” (Shaffer 2.25). While Dysart is dreaming a life in mythology, Alan has created his own mythology. For Dysart, Alan’s mythology and worship is central to the boy’s creativity and is the only thing linking the boy to life. Dysart sees Alan as “a modern citizen for whom society doesn’t exist” (Shaffer 2.25). That is, Alan seems to represent the idea that “it was the right of every individual to define the modality of his existence, to choose his way of being and relating to others” (Paras 126). Alan seems to embody perfect autonomy where the self is primary to social responsibility and expectations.
But Alan is not a free being nor is he truly free from the panoptic gaze. Whereas Dysart is held in place by the expectations of society, of his wife and even his friend Hesther, Alan is in the constant watch of the god he created. Like Dysart who is immobilized by the societal gaze, Alan too is incapacitated by the all-seeing eye of his imaginary god Equus. What Dysart’s and Alan’s situations reveal is the “’agonism’ between power and freedom, ‘of a relationship which is at the same time reciprocal incitation and struggle; less of a face-to-face confrontation which paralyzes both sides than a permanent provocation’” (Foucault qtd. in Allen). To function as an autonomous being is to recognize how power and discipline is part of the equation because there is no such thing as being truly free without struggle. Creating a self means appropriating power, questioning its authority but not neglecting its influence. This is where Dysart and even Alan, fails. Alan succumbs to the doctor who can kill his passion, to the doctor who does not really want to know what struggle entails. And Dysart abandons his dreams and surrenders to his social responsibility. Dysart admits, “In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place – yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what to do – yet I do essential things” (Shaffer 2.35). The lack of knowledge or the abnegation of knowledge is what truly immobilizes Dysart because to attain a mastery of self means to acknowledge that autonomy is tied to knowledge and “the courage to know is ultimately the courage to recognize the contingency of limits and to begin to think beyond them” (Allen 39). To master the self and to begin living life as if it were an art means to embrace knowledge and power, to acknowledge discipline, and in such embrace and acknowledgement, use knowledge and power to question the limits of discipline and society.
Autonomy is based on struggle, on operating within and out of power relations. Freedom is not attained through creating a world outside of society but rather through questioning the structures that society imposes. Autonomy is always deeply linked with knowledge and power. Dysart fails at living a creative life not because someone or something reins him in, but rather his failure is defined by his lack of courage to use his knowledge, his power, and his discipline as points of transgression. Dysart refuses to engage in struggle and a life of art is always about struggle; it is refusing to leave societal assumptions unquestioned. As he kills Alan’s passion to integrate the boy into social order, he too kills his own passion falling back into his place within the order.
Works Cited
Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary
Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.
Chowers, Eyal. The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin
and Michael Ryan. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 549-566. Print.
Mustazza, Leonard. “A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgment in Shaffer’s Equus.” Papers on
Language and Literature 28.2 (1992): 174-184. Print.
Paras, Eric. Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. New York: Other, 2006. Print.
Racevskis, Karlis. Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
Print.
Shaffer, Peter. Equus. 1973. New York: Scribner, 2005. Print.
Annotated Bibliography
Allen, Amy. The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary
Critical Theory. New York: Columbia UP, 2008. Print.
In this book, Allen explores the different critical theories concerned with the politics of the self. Using Foucaultian theories of power and self as a foundation, Allen argues that while “Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary and normalizing power has proven extremely fruitful,” such analysis also “generated a host of problems concerning subjectivity, agency, autonomy, collective social action, and normativity” (3). With this premise, Allen explores the boundaries of epistemologies of the self from Foucault, Kant, Habermas, Butler and Benhabib.
Chowers, Eyal. The Modern Self in the Labyrinth: Politics and the Entrapment Imagination.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
Chowers explores entrapment as a theme and as a condition of modern man. He argues that “[e]ntrapment refers to the predicament wherein social institutions, which are perceived as overpowering and inescapable, sap moderns of their distinct identities” (2). In this book, he discusses the different theories of power aligned with Weber, Freud and Foucault, examining how these theorists illuminate the connections between power and the modern self.
Mustazza, Leonard. “A Jealous God: Ritual and Judgment in Shaffer’s Equus.” Papers on
Language and Literature 28.2 (1992): 174-184. Print.
In this article, Mustazza argues against criticisms on Equus that sees the play as a “Nietzschean distinction between Dionysian impulse and Apollonian order” (174). He contends that these interpretations focus on Dysart’s distortion of Alan Strang’s ritual and worship. Mustazza argues that “too much critical attention has been paid to Dysart’s interpretation of events and not enough to the facts that lie before him” (175). Hence, focusing on Alan Strang, Mustazza traces the Judeo-Christian threads in the play and the implications of those threads to reveal that Alan’s main conflict is one against a ‘jealous God’ (184).
Paras, Eric. Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge. New York: Other, 2006. Print.
Paras labels this work as “the first broad-based historical study to make full use of Foucault’s lecture courses from the College de France” (2). Tracing the evolution in Foucault’s philosophy, Paras illuminates how the philosopher “abandoned his hard structuralist position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty, individualism, ‘human rights’, and even the thinking subject” (4). In these terms, Paras studies Foucault’s later philosophy which focused on the self, living life as a work of art, and meditations on death.
Racevskis, Karlis. Michel Foucault and the Subversion of Intellect. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1983.
Print.
In this work, Racevskis delineates “the critical relation Foucault’s discourse maintains with the intellectual traditions that have produced our civilization and its truths” (15). Working with several of Foucault’s texts, Racevskis explores the archaeology and genealogy of Foucault’s philosophy and the philosopher’s use of archaeology and genealogy to trace society’s relation with power, knowledge and discipline.
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