Exploding the Individual

Looking back over my posts for this blog, I find a few themes emerging in my treatment of Shaw’s Heartbreak House. I have been interested in images of illusions and façades, in role-playing and theatricality, in the pervasive stasis and sleepiness of the characters, and in violence and corruption as a possible foundation for everything in the play. In the end, I think my various readings of the play all agree that it is concerned with the possibility of a false, agency-less, purposeless, and violent social system. This is not to say that the play is consistently dire—it is in fact both comedic and haphazard. But it is playing with and proposing the possibility of such a society.

I’d like to think for a bit about this idea in relation to the idea of “trans-corporeality.” In the introductory chapter of Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures, she proposes “trans-corporeality” as the name for what she argues is an emerging and potentially transformative theoretical conception of bodies and environments. She writes, “by emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors ” (Alaimo 2). I don’t know that Heartbreak House is all that interested in bodies as such. Where Alaimo emphasizes the materiality of bodies, Heartbreak House is all about the costumes and illusions that cloak them. I think the play’s basic concerns are related to Alaimo’s, however, in that both the play and the article explore the diffusion of selves.

In these posts, I have argued that Heartbreak House is interested in socially performed and/or imposed roles, which change with the characters’ surroundings, and with the re-writing of texts that accompanies their social enactment. Both of these concerns lead the play to critique the notion of a coherent or intentional self with predictable “inputs” and “outputs.” I have also argued that Heartbreak House “mock[s] the very idea of holding on to singularity in meaning” and “expresses the fear that destruction, without simultaneously introducing new modes of being, is empty” while simultaneously “remind[ing] us of just how much courage it will take to move away from those places in which we are comfortable.” And in my most recent post, I found that the characters “behave as though they are in a constant state of spiritual siege, but this siege has no location. If it stems from anywhere, it stems from each of the other characters in turn: it is diffuse.” My point with all of these quotations is that I can see myself returning again and again to the same image: a diffuse, trans conception of individuals.

The metaphors of the play may even speak to Alaimo’s interest in the material world. [I would argue that the theatre always speaks to the idea of trans-corporeality a bit, simply by being a process of enactment, but that’s a generic idea about the medium…] As I have mentioned, the characters are always falling asleep. And, in part, I think this is an image of stasis and the characters’ deep reliance upon various social networks in order to function. It is an enactment, in other words, of Alaimo’s ideas. But, as I discovered in a recent post, sleep always occurs for them at a particular moment. I wrote, “as soon as these figures are no longer playing—indeed, as soon as their present roles begin to erode? They fall sleep. They have nothing else.” That is, as soon as the characters are no longer explicitly participating in a network, they lose control over and presence (of a sort) in their bodies. Metaphorically, they realize Alaimo’s central claim: without networks, they do not have bodies.

In the end, then, I think that the first chapter of Bodily Natures is connected to Heartbreak House by the ways in which both imagine individuals. And both are presenting a potential image of the society in which they are set. And yet the final act of the play is one of violence--the explosion of individual bodies. Metaphorically, it may stand for the very act in which Alaimo is engaged. But it is also a disturbing act of power. It reminds us that what remains unanswered in both Alaimo's chapter and Shaw's play is the extent to which power informs these structures and the extent to which agency is possible within them.