[In the following essay, Rabillard argues that Fornes's plays combine postmodern techniques of distancing the audience with dramatic scenes of emotional transcendence.]

Maria Irene Fornes' recent play, Enter the Night, is situated in the intersections between “high art” and “popular culture”; “mediatized” and “live” performance; cultural assimilation and nightmares of miscegenation. While such intersections have become familiar territory for post-modern interrogation, Fornes draws from the ruptured boundaries of late capitalism a means to rearticulate a language of desire in the face of human suffering. The most striking manifestation of Fornes' delicately transgressive dramaturgy is her binding of post-modern techniques that point out the limits of representation to her concern with classic questions of constructing an emotional sublime. This is the curious conjunction that I want to consider: whether, in a “mediatized culture” (to borrow Baudrillard's term), through pastiche and cultural recycling, Fornes can discover the possibility of psychic coherence. If the term “sublime” seems almost anachronistic here, its employment is intentional for it posits the strongest possible contrast between the phantasmagorical sampling techniques Fornes employs in this drama and her articulation of a species of emotional transcendence. This negotiation of a concordia discors lies at the heart of her play.¹

Enter the Night received its world premiere 16 April 1993 at Seattle's New City Theater under Fornes' direction.² Commissioned in 1990 by the resident company, the drama began as a series of monologues that came to Fornes between sleep and waking:

She wasn't yet sure which direction the script would take, or even what it might be about, until she began hearing the voices of friends in the early hours of the dawn. “They were telling me things about themselves, things I wouldn't otherwise have known. … When I woke up completely, I would write down these monologues, and some of them were quite wonderful. I thought, why not use them in the play?”³

As she assembled these fragments, the shape of Enter the Night began to appear: a delicate triangle involving three old friends—Tressa, a nurse who tends the dying; Jack, working as a stage manager and mourning his gay lover's death from AIDS; and Paula, a woman threatened by bankruptcy and a fatal heart disease. The play developed in keeping with what she has called her collage technique: incorporating material from her subconscious; from the culture's collective memories of Hollywood, Shakespeare, and Christian iconography; from chance discoveries. Among the latter were a nurse's diary found at an auction; a newspaper account of an 18th-century Chinese scholar who produced the first Chinese-French dictionary; and the sight of a light-man on a ladder which prompted Fornes to include a brief sample of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.⁴ The play presents a succession of haunting moments that openly allude to their disparate sources; under Fornes' direction, the Seattle première was framed by videotapes (played in the lobby before the performance and during intermission) showing scenes from two classic films that would be reenacted, in part, by the characters of her play.

One of the most striking features of the drama lies in the way in which it engages specific aspects of the cultural vocabulary of the cinema. In particular, Fornes is fascinated with the image of the Asiatic “other” inherited from Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) and Capra's Lost Horizon (1937). Through these two films—the one a tragedy focusing on the unassailable barrier between the races, the other offering a utopian vision of assimilation—Fornes inscribes the essential strategies of her play. As she discloses the conceptual imperialism and inherent contradictions of Hollywood representations, she endows a post-modern cliché of the precession of simulacra with a powerfully elegiac quality. When Tressa and Jack enact the famous scene from Broken Blossoms where the scholarly Asian servant hovers trembling above the sleeping body of Lillian Gish, crucially Tressa (played by a white actress) becomes the manservant and Jack recreates the role of Gish, both in full costume and makeup.⁵ Here, Fornes subverts the emotional moment with a battery of post-modern devices: the parody of a locus classicus, crossings of gender and race, and the interfacing of live and recorded performance. Yet it is by means of these dissonances that Fornes asserts the depth of the emotional encounter between her characters. As each actor becomes a collection of cultural images, he or she appears to offer only a parody of profundity. But Fornes manages to transform these seemingly chance assemblages into a kind of palimpsest a text which inscribes the history of a culture through a series of accumulations and partial erasures—in effect, a layered record of attempts, individual and collective, to confront the otherness of race and gender and above all the ultimate estrangement of mortality.

Originally titled Dreams, the play takes place largely at night or in dim early dawn. The setting is Tressa's loft in a geographically unspecified Chinatown.⁶ Softly lit, sparsely furnished, the playing area is raised above the stage with a stairwell in the center of the structure leading to an invisible ground floor; when characters enter, they seem to climb up into a space of temporary refuge that hovers above the ordinary level of existence. Both the slightly dislocated acting surface, and the setting of the action—in Chinatown, but not of it, for all three characters appear to be non-Asian—suggest that the playwright is developing a subtle rhetoric of margins and disjunctions. Within this liminal space, three friends from very different worlds attempt to cross the boundaries that separate them and to comfort one another. Each is confronting illness: Tressa, the nurse, has made it her business but suffers no less for that; Paula, who belongs to a more sheltered, suburban existence, in the course of the play learns that she does not have long to live; Jack, from the insecure world of theatre, has lost his lover to AIDS and is consumed by rage and guilt, at times tempted to expiate the sin of survival by convincing himself that he too is infected.

As the play begins, Tressa enters. It is 6:30 a.m., and she seems to have just finished her night shift, for she is exhausted, and—apparently still preoccupied with her work—she reads aloud from a diary that recounts in intimate detail the deterioration of a dying patient. Interestingly, we are not told that the diary is hers; as she pronounces the words, however, we take them as indicators of the suffering with which she is only too familiar. Refuge is bound, in contrast, to the exotic, for as she gradually relaxes, the Caucasian actress puts on loose, dark-blue Chinese trousers and tunic and slowly powders her face a rice-powder white, like a character in a silent film or a Chinese opera. When the costume and make-up are complete, Tressa seems wholly composed—in both senses: playing to the hilt a stereotypical “oriental” calm. (Curiously, the reading of the diary and the clichéd Asiatic composure, although both in a sense “quoted” performances, are moving.) At this point in the play, although the implications of Tressa's transformation are as yet obscure, the elements of the drama have been established: illness; quotation of roles; and what Roland Barthes has called “Sinité”—the west's mythical concept of Chineseness.⁷

Throughout the drama, the characters are granted moments in which they seem to enter one another's experience, although only in dream or play—Paula, for instance, claims to have met an exotic foreigner, who turns out to be either a dream, or Jack playing a joke, or a dream premonition of Jack's entrance in a false mustache and fake gold tooth; and the three play the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, fluidly enacting the lovers' duet in a trio of voices. But the dominant note is desire: the unappeased longing of each friend to ease the other's pain, or even to comprehend it; and Fornes' exploration of this longing (by turns selfless and egotistical) is most vivid in moments where Tressa, Jack, and Paula enact snippets from a repertoire of familiar cultural texts, among them Frank Capra's Lost Horizon and D. W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms. Quotations from the two films, popular Western fantasies of the Asiatic Other, emphasize Fornes' setting on the margins of the exotic and allow her to evoke more overtly the ways in which mass culture has confronted “the undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveler returns” via the imagined boundaries of race. At one extreme, the frontiers between life and death, and between East and West, are erased (or rather, almost infinitely distanced)—although only in the guise of a lost Shangri-la which can never be regained. And this is the gently ironic note on which the play ends, with a reading from Lost Horizon.

But the most powerful scene of the play is the reenactment by Jack and Tressa of the central gestures from Griffith's silent film. There was not a hint of laughter in the house as Jack, in the Lillian Gish role, was rescued by Tressa as Huang, the gentleman Chinese scholar who tries to bring teachings of peace to the West but finally fails to save even the frail girl from a brutal death. As Huang, barred by race from his broken blossom, Tressa's austere yet erotically charged pantomime played out a yearning passion not expressed in her reading of the clinical diary record of a patient's decline; and Jack, as Gish, was released from rage, grateful for succor, a beautiful victim rather than a guilty survivor. Each gesture in this scene presents itself as a quotation from the film which the audience has just seen in the intermission, and is layered with reminders of the play's own accumulations of roles. The audience can see the masculine outlines of Jack's body under the graceful posture of the doomed girl, and read against his/her sentimentally beautiful, innocent death the aggression of his previous brief, suicidal performances: his angry claiming of the role of crucified Christ, his self-dramatizing exit into the night to meet with violence or infection. Likewise, Tressa's present role is marked, and enriched, by traces of her previous playing as her ministrations in the guise of “Huang” recall the opening scene in which she escaped from her painful duties on the terminal ward by donning the costume and mythical imperturbability of the Orient.⁸ These traces serve not to distract from the scene before us but to freight the disjunctions between actress and Huang, between Tressa and Huang, so that the current scene speaks of gaps and mismatches, of the deferrals of representation, of desire for what cannot be fully possessed—in bodily experience or in language. “Tressa” both is and is not “Huang” (nor, of course, can actress be identified with character when pastiche continually de-centers subjectivity); and the failure of one role to disappear completely into the other reminds us of an analogous failure: the role of nurse, the one who attempts to comprehend another's pain, is always that of the unworthy Other, filled with longing and distanced from what can never be touched. There is an expressive fullness in the exposure of representational poverty; and there is also comfort for the characters in the action of playing together. When Paula happens on the scene-playing she learns that this is a customary game, and her pleasure in this discovery adds to the strength and subtlety of the allegiances binding the three. Beyond this, a curious formal grace can be gleaned from the tinsel-town triteness of the Oriental stereotyping. Via quotation, the status of Huang (i.e., Griffith's Cheng Huan) or the Lama of Shangri-la as stereotypical Other is the more exposed—and the inadequacy of representation is thematized in a way that lends it an almost elegiac quality. At this point I should explain what I mean by claiming that Fornes thus achieves a version of the sublime.

The concept of the sublime is very much a creature of history and Jameson's post-modern formulation—upon which I draw here—must be understood as part of a conversation originating at least with Boileau's reading of Longinus. For many critics today, under the influence of the Derridean challenge to Kantian formalism, the sublime has come to represent something like an inversion of the Kantian claim about it: namely, the view that the sublime represents an “excess” in language that keeps it from ever assuming any fixed form or meaning.⁹ But with Jameson, in a definition almost reminiscent of Burke's, we turn away from the purely linguistic. Jameson's postmodern sublime is not found in the natural world, however; it is the system of late capitalism. “The other of our society is … no longer Nature at all, as it was in precapitalist societies” and what we try to grasp is “the whole new decentred global network of the third stage of capital itself.”¹⁰ (Moreover, the challenge to comprehension is not so much magnitude or intentionlessness, as the tendency of the system itself to co-opt necessary aesthetic distance.) And, as with older forms of the sublime, Jameson promises that a vision of this world space of multinational capital will not paralyze; that a cognitive mapping is possible.

Fornes, I suggest, offers a version of the sublime that can be aligned with Jameson's. In some respects, to be sure, Fornes' sublime seems to resemble that of Burke: an encounter, in imagination, with the intransigent natural phenomena of human mortality—geographies of bodily decay, tidal waves of AIDS infection as terrifying as any mountainscape, and in particular with the painful opacity of the experience of another human being's suffering.¹¹ But as Judith Butler reminds us, what count as natural matters of the facts of the body are always also the material products of a culture's discourse. And here I want to locate Fornes' performance of the sublime: in confrontation with the mass-media processes of commodifying mortality. In Enter the Night, Fornes focuses attention on the processes whereby the immense, intentionless phenomenon of death, and the impregnable privacy of another person's suffering, are commercially packaged with images of the Oriental “other.” (Race, sex, and death are slickly intertwined on celluloid: as Huang fails to save his broken blossom, the barriers against miscegenation, the passive and philosophical character of the East, the brute fact of mortality, are similarly constructed as natural, mourned as inevitable. Likewise, though Lost Horizon seems to promise an idealized meeting of East and West, as well as a virtual immortality, it binds action and sexual passion to the West, punishes inter-racial romance, and in the end confirms the superiority of the West through its association with the ultimate reality—death.) Fornes presents a Jamesonian sublime: a glimpse of mediatized culture, of the dream-factory at work, as her characters perform the acts of mourning and rehearse the gestures of longing that the imagery of mass culture affords them. Yet at the same time as she suggests that the world “threatens to become a glossy skin, a stereoscopic illusion, a rush of filmic images without density,”¹² Fornes evokes a sense of richness—an intimation of complexities of fear and desire created in part by the layering of dramatized and quoted roles (though eschewing any simplistic metaphors of surface and depth, illusory versus veracious). Chiefly, Fornes creates a plangency through the very crudeness of the cinema's Orientalizing stereotypes. Within the action of the drama, passages from Lost Horizon and Broken Blossoms, because their specific racisms are outdated and hence their promise to express desires and fears of the unknowable are faded, become signs of loss. In a broader sense, the reductive mythology of “Chineseness,” thus quoted and historicized, reveals a gap in the cultural system that constructs us as subjects desiring what the system provides.

At this point, I must add a small caveat. The effect of the pastiche of excerpts from Lost Horizon and Broken Blossoms that I have just hypothesized depends upon recognition of what Edward Said's landmark study might lead us to call “Orientalism” (although Said, of course, did not deal specifically with the discursive construction of China or Tibet). But I am obliged to point out that in the theoretical writing that has helped me to develop the present argument—and perhaps in Fornes' own dramatic strategies—I detect a hint of “Orientalizing” of another sort. By referring to Asian peoples, and China in particular, for examples of the “Other” who is stereotyped and misrepresented, it might be argued, Fornes' play reinscribes the East as inscrutable. Ironically, Jameson's seminal essay, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” also turns to China for an exemplar of the disjunct. In defining what he describes as a new, joyously schizophrenic style, Jameson quotes Bob Perelman's poem “China” and observes that it “turns out to have little enough to do with that referent called China.” Moreover, Jameson points out that China serves as exemplar for Barthes in what may be a significant instance: “Barthes of Mythologies … saw connotation as the purveying of imaginary and stereotypical idealities, ‘Sinité,’ for example, as some Disney-EPCOT ‘concept’ of China.”¹³ In short, it is not easy to find our location on the global cognitive map while using Jameson to analyze a play set in “Chinatown” that concludes with a character reading a speech by a mythical Lama from a supposed lost realm in the Himalayas.

If I have expressed a faint unease concerning Fornes' use of the Orient in her creation of a postmodern sublime, perhaps I can put the great and delicate pleasures of the play into perspective by concluding with a very brief analysis of a much less nuanced prelude to the manipulation of stereotype in Enter the Night. Fornes' earlier play, What of the Night? (1989), though it has a similar title is very different: a collection of four playlets with a number of overlapping characters, spanning a period from before World War II into the projected future, What of the Night? has been compared to The Danube (1982) and The Conduct of Life (1985).¹⁴ The playlets that concern me here are numbers two and three, Springtime-1958, and Lust-1983.

Springtime explores the love between two women: Greta, a German girl who is ill and confined to bed, and Rainbow. Despite the sickness, the tone is romantic and affection between the two is expressed through linguistic play: Rainbow asks Greta to teach her phrases (“I love German,” she says), and Greta teases her by mis-translating. As the title announces, Lust is designed as a sharp contrast in theme and mood. What is interesting for the present argument, however, is the fact that lust—here treated as an infantile, utterly self-centered greed for possession, whether of pleasures and bodies, or money and power—is not simply demonstrated in sexual acts and financial dealings, but also figured through linguistic and cultural self-centredness. In the first scene we see one businessman, Joseph, taking a younger man, Ray, from behind; as he does so he assures him that the sex won't interfere with their business conversation. And it doesn't; negotiations are carried on uninterrupted during the sex act; sexual pleasure is just another commodity.

By the sixth scene, the play develops into a series of Ray's dreams, and the dream-visions contain shockingly clear-cut stereotypes of the Asian “other.” The shift to dream is signaled by a change of lighting, an announcement projected on the rear wall, and a touch of Chinoiserie: “Wang walks across to up-center, then down-center. His appearance and behaviour mimic a traditional Chinese prototype. Wang: Ray has a dream.”¹⁵ The first dream concerns a casual, homosexual encounter. In the second dream, Ray is in the midst of a quarrel with a woman, whom he has locked into the bathroom because he suspects her of sharing her sexual favours with someone else. Again, the theme is greed, possession: and the essentially self-centred nature of this lust is demonstrated amusingly for, in the course of the argument, as Ray leans against the mirrored door to keep it shut, he begins to grind his pelvis against his own image and eventually climaxes as the scene ends. By the fourth dream, Ray is in a Chinese restaurant. And here we see the contrast between love and lust reworked in terms of language and culture. If Rainbow and Greta play with one another's tongues, in Ray's solipsistic dream-world Chinese is simply gibberish—when pressed to order his meal, he gabbles in mock-Chinese nonsense syllables and the waiter is made to speak in a caricature form of heavily-accented English. Moreover, the operators of the restaurant try, in vain, to conform to Western ways: a woman, Wing, dressed like Wang in supposedly traditional clothes, sprays Christmas decorations on the window but confesses that she has spoiled one part of the lettering and made a mess of the picture of a bird. (Homi Bhabha has analyzed the ways in which a dominant culture attempts to reduce the dominated to strategies of imperfect imitation.) The link between the dream scene outside the bathroom door, and the dream of the Chinese restaurant, then, is not simply the continuing theme of unbridled physical appetite (although Ray grabs a girl, “slurps” on her chest, and chews on a menu, suggesting an infant's uninhibited oral pleasure); rather, the infantile self-absorption, the imperfect awareness of others, allies commodified sex with the inability to hear another language as language, or to comprehend another culture except as an imperfect approximation of one's own. Stereotypes of Chinese people, in this context, become the means of dramatizing the potentially political as well as personal dimension of “lust.” Fornes' use of Orientalisms for the blunter purposes of satire, then, may illuminate the subtler strategies of the sublime that I have attempted to uncover in this paper.

Despite Fornes' post-modern techniques—pastiche and quotation; characters with a seemingly performative subjectivity, continually rehearsed from the repertoire of mass cultural imagery—I have argued that her drama recuperates a species of emotional transcendence. Though his formulations have been criticized by Jameson (among other theorists of the post-modern), I propose, in conclusion, that Jurgen Habermas offers a way of articulating the core of Fornes' emotional appeal. (And Fornes is, after all, a self-described romantic.)¹⁶ Habermas holds that language, however distorted or manipulative, always has consensus or understanding as its inner telos. We speak to be understood, even if what we say is a curse or an insult. It is therefore possible to project from this condition the contours of an ideal communicative situation, implicitly anticipated in every actual act of dialogue.¹⁷ Fornes, I suggest, in drama that evokes not merely individual interchanges but the encompassing discourse of a commercial, global culture, shows us isolation, incomprehension, slick superficialities, the endless precession of simulacra, and inspires a dream of what is not—a Shangri-la.

Notes

1. I am well aware of the variety of contending characterizations of the concept of the post-modern. Among the godfathers of the term, for instance, Charles Jencks dismisses works of extreme disjunction and abstraction as merely “Late-Modernism,” reserving “Postmodern” for those “connected with semantics, convention, historical memory, metaphor, symbolism and respect for existing cultures” (What Is Post-Modernism? [London: Academy Editions, 1989], ch. 3); Jean-Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) sees a radical break in scientific research and systems of knowledge which Jameson, in turn, contends is rather “the very ‘permanent revolution’ of capitalist production itself” (Jameson, “Foreword,” The Postmodern Condition, xx). As should become clear, the present essay is most indebted to Jameson's idea of the post-modern; see “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-92. In discussing features of Fornes' style, however, Todd Gitlin's summary of post-modern cultural phenomena has provided a useful guide:

   “Postmodernism” usually refers to a certain constellation of styles and tones in cultural works: pastiche; blankness; a sense of exhaustion; a mixture of levels, forms, styles; a relish for copies and repetition; a knowingness that dissolves commitment into irony; acute self-consciousness about the formal, constructed nature of the work; pleasure in the play of surfaces; a rejection of history.

   “Postmodernism: Roots and Politics,” in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, ed. Ian Angus and Sut Jhally (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 347.

2. In this premiere production by Theater Zero (New City Theater and Art Center, Seattle), Mary Ewald played Tressa/Huang; Patricia Mattick played Paula; and Brian Faker played Jack. The producing director was John Kazanjian, the scenic designer was Donald Eastman, lighting was designed by Anne Militello and costumes by Rose Pederson.

3. Interview of Fornes by Misha Berson, Seattle Times, 16 April 1993.

4. In her interview with Berson, Fornes described the various trouvés that found their way into this play. “I save things like that because when I was a painter, the idea of creating collages was very attractive to me,” she told Berson. “I apply the same collage technique to playwriting” (Seattle Times, 16 April 1993). Actress Patricia Mattick, who played Paula in the premiere production, explained the introduction of the scene from Shakespeare: “‘Like she sees a light man on a ladder bending over a wall to adjust a fixture. And this guy on a ladder reminds her of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. So she decides to put a bit of the balcony scene into Enter the Night. She's very open to ideas and inspirations.’” (Quoted by Joe Adcock in his preview of Enter the Night, “What's Happening,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 16 April 1993, 7.)

5. Griffith's Asian character is called “Cheng Huan”; in the program for the Seattle production of Fornes' play, he is referred to as “Huang.”

6. Joe Adcock's preview of the performance states that the play is set in San Francisco, but the program for the New City/Theater Zero production says simply: “Tressa's loft in Chinatown.”

7. “China is one thing, the idea which a French petit-bourgeois could have of it not so long ago is another: for this peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium dens, no other word is possible.” Roland Barthes, Mythologies, selected and translated by Annette Lavers (London and Glasgow: Collins, 1973), 130.

8. It's interesting to compare this technique with Fornes' characteristic exposure of the gaps between a drama and its staging. As William Worthen comments in “Still Playing Games: Ideology and Performance in the Theater of Maria Irene Fornes,” Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, ed. Enoch Brater (Oxford University Press, 1989):

   Despite their variety, Fornes' experiments share a common impulse: to explore the operation of the mise-en-scène on the process of dramatic action. Rather than naturalizing theatrical performance by assimilating the various “enunciators” of the stage—acting, music, set design, audience disposition—to a privileged gestural style encoded in the dramatic text (the strategy of stage realism, for instance), Fornes' plays suspend the identification between the drama and its staging.

   (168)

9. The foregoing summary of versions of the sublime is drawn from the essay by T. V. F. Brogan, Gerald F. Else, and Frances Ferguson in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan, et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

10. Jameson, 77, 80.

11. The mystery of another person's experience of pain, physical or mental, is the center around which The Conduct of Life circles, and Fornes returns to this meditation in many of her plays.

12. Jameson, 76-77.

13. Jameson, 75, 67.

14. See the introductory essay by Rosette C. Lamont, Women on the Verge (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1993), xxvi.

15. What of the Night? in Women on the Verge, 203.

16. See Fornes' interview with Scott Cummings, “Seeing with Clarity: The Visions of Maria Irene Fornes” Theater 17.1 (Winter, 1985): 55.

17. Habermas has said that the central intuition he hoped to clarify in his Theory of Communicative Action was “the intuition that a telos of mutual understanding is built into linguistic communication.” Jurgen Habermas, Autonomy and Solidarity: Interviews with Jurgen Habermas, ed. Peter Dews (London, New York: Verso, 1992), 100.