possibilities: the historical and textual referent. However, as I
would hope to demonstrate, interpretive possibilities are obliterated in
the dominating desire of the play — and the church — to control the
social structure and to entrench the values — and therefore "laws" —
of the church apparatus. Oscillating within the literal referential
articulations of the play, the allegorical, moral, and anagogical levels
or senses operate. The allegorical mode is directed through the
implicit parallel between Christ’s history — his redemption of the
souls — and the church’s history — the break near the end of the play
(Chester 337 and Towneley 305) when the audience/congregation chants the
"Te Deum laudamus." The moral level is the individual, where the
subject in the audience is able to participate in self-interpolation,
placing the individual of today in the history of both the past and the
future simultaneously. The individual’s redemption, however, remains
collective, addressed to Adam’s "osspringe":
Peace to thee, Adam, my dearlynge,
and eke to all thy osspringe
that ryghtwise were in yearth livinge.
From mee yee shall not severe.
To blys nowe I wyl you bringe
there you shalbe withowt endinge.
(Chester 334, 205-210)
Isias. Adam, thrugh thi syn
here were we put to dwell,
This wykyd place within;
The name of it is hell;
here paynes shall neuer blyn.
That wykyd ar and fell
loue that lord with wyn,
his lyfe for vs wold sell
Et cantent omnes "salutor mundi," primum versum.
(Towneley 294, 37-44)
Identification with Adam’s sinfulness prefigures a (re)collection in
Jesus’s redeeming effort to break the gates of hell. Nonetheless, the
activity is utterly collective; morality cannot be apprehended on an
individual level, excluding individual interpretation from the
audience’s role. The exclusion of the individual places the
interpretive dilemma at the anagogical level, confronting the collective
"meaning" of history and giving authority to the spectacle of the
performance itself.
Earlier in this paper I identified the performance with sport —
a type of game in which the arbitrariness of the result is predetermined
by the apparatus of its production. What the Corpus Christi pageant in
general and the Harrowing of Hell play in particular present is a
dialectical foundation of empowerment and control. The spectacle posits
a knowing of "truth," creating an audience empowered by its own capacity
to know what is and to therefore possess that knowledge. The real, as
it is signified in the clarity of its repetition and form, is entrusted
to an audience of arbiters, who decide a personal validity for the means
of its articulation (to extend Barthes’s reading of wrestling, the
audience may judge the performance and the value of the performance even
if it does not judge the necessary relationship between the body of the
wrestler and the outcome of the event). The play, however, within its
limited origination as church extension, reaffirms the authority of the
church by limiting the authority of the individual. The collective is
privileged over and against the individual — so that, indeed, an
individual consciousness exists in the play only as rebellion (e.g.
Judas and Cain are left to dwell in hell with Satan exactly because they
positioned themselves as individuals, against the dominant domain of
Adam’s sinfulness).
The dialectic between the play as spectacle — and therefore a
means of enlightenment — and value-producing mechanism of the
"collective" church which institutes the myth as valid poses the problem
of seeing both operations, that is both functional modes, within the
play as identical. Adorno and Horkheimer’s potent and persuasive
definition of myth and enlightenment shows how each mode of cultural
operation serves to exercise power through what Lukacs calls
reification:
Myth turns into enlightenment, and nature into mere
objectivity. Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation
from that over which they exercise their power. Enlightenment behaves
toward things as a dictator toward men. He knows them in so far as he
can manipulate them.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and enlightenment, magic and science,
mechanization and spirit, all serve as polar oppositions in a
dialectically organized agenda of manipulation and control. Likewise,
the pageant and the play orchestrate a subsumption of the individual’s
power — especially the interpretive power of the masses — into the
collectivized agency of the church.
The result of transforming the individual consciousnesses
present in the audience and the congregation into a homologized and
homogenized extension of orthodox values is coded in the presentation of
its form. All history as it is posited within the play has already been
written; the only question — and here I mean the undervalued question
of a member in the audience — is what position is marked — not
necessarily predestined or predetermined, although the means of making
this a self-determination have been completely removed from the mass
culture of medieval Catholic orthodoxy — for the individual. Will the
audience member be a member classified as goat or sheep (a question
addressed in a parable played briefly before the Harrowing? Is hell
harrowed for him/her? Moreover, the result of the question interrogates
mass culture itself, for the operations of the church-state apparatus
are not distinctly separate in effect from the culture industry and the
mechanization of the factory that Adorno and Horkheimer evaluate:
Culture as a common denominator already contains in
embryo the schematization and process of cataloging and classification
which bring culture within the sphere of administration. And which
entirely accords with this notion of culture. By subordinating in the
same way and to the same end all areas of intellectual creation, by
occupying men’s senses from the time they leave the factory in the
evening to the time they clock in again the next morning with matter
that bears the impress of the labor process they themselves have to
sustain throughout the day, this subsumption mockingly satisfies the
concept of a unified culture which the philosophers of personality
contrasted with mass culture.
Indeed, what could be more subsumptive than a mythos of redemption and
salvation, constructed through a series of social and socially required
events, that ultimately demand a vilification of self-value and a
celebration of the church establishment.
In both the Towneley play and the Chester play, the chorus of
prophets, all participating in the monolithic community of
hell-to-be-redeemed, offer a collective subsumption of the individual.
The greatest desire of the audience must be to share in voice with the
prophets who speak of both praise and thankfulness. The consumptive and
subsumptive chorus in the Towneley play moves from Moses to David to
Isaiah in progressively shorter lines to silence the audience, rather
ironically, by invoking their collective chorus in litany:
Dauid. As I saide ere yit say I so,
"ne derelinquas, domine,
Animum meam in inferno;"
"Leyfe neuer my saull, lord, after the,
In depe hell wheder dampned shall go;
suffre thou neuer thi sayntys to se
The sorow of thaym that won in wo,
ay full of fylth and may not fle."
Moyses. Make myrth both more and les,
amd loue oure lord we may,
That has broght vs fro bytternes
In blys to abyde for ay.
Ysaias. Therfor now let vs sing
to loue our lord ihesus.
(Towneley 305, 389-402)
Affirmation through association becomes the fulfillment of the
audience’s constructed desire. The members of the audience join ranks
with the great prophets who have all been associated with their own
histories during the action of the Harrowing. The audience must join,
for it does not have access to the already written history; by being
displaced from the narratizing of redemption, it can only associate with
the characters who already participate in the code.
By this code I intend to suggest the positioning of the already
achieved narrative action which cannot be possessed as spectacle, but,
instead, must be apprehended as the mechanism of the church-state
apparatus to maintain power. The state apparatus is "defined by the
perpetuation or conservation of organs of power." The state apparatus,
to borrow an analogy from Deleuze and Guattari, is a contained system
with components and limits similar to the game of chess. The game is
played with a definite code, the pieces are determined to be what they
are by what they are. A knight is always a knight simply because he is.
A king will always be protected. In the same way, as a character to be
"played" again and again, in every year of the pageant and in every
other formulation of church doctrine, Jesus is always Jesus; he must
always win against Satan who is always Satan. God, in his redemptive
activity must be consistent (we still have this code and its response in
contemporary culture, as is typical in the Baptist belt where the phrase
"that’s not my God, my God is …" indicates an utter lack of
interpretive understanding as it is constrained by the operations of a
fundamentalist approach to a univocal God in a univocal way). The
consistency of the players, whether on a chess board or a medieval
horse-drawn carriage platform, necessitates the homogenization of the
players’ audience — the church’s congregation. Deleuze argues that the
state’s ability to reproduce itself exactly is determined through its
own public presentation — i.e. the fact that the state is and must be
public: "The State-form . . . has a tendency to reproduce itself,
remaining identical to itself across its variations and easily
recognizable within the limits of its poles, always seeking public
recognition (there is no masked state)."
The Corpus Christi plays offer then an extension of the
church-state apparatus to construct, even as the mass does, a
congregation utterly unified in its interpretive understanding and
consolidated in its desire for redemption and its means of happening.
The collective meaning of history — the anagogical level of
interpretive meaning — is discernible only through the allegorical —
which is to say that church history accurately reflects redemptive
history to the point of requiring participation in one to assure
inclusion in the other. These claims concerning the plays and its most
dramatic representative of redemptive force, the Harrowing of Hell,
attempt to discern the mechanism of producing the power of the
church-state apparatus — how indeed, the superstructure gains support
from its base — and how, in fact, the pageant is the most accessible
form for disseminating the conservation of this power.
The plays demonstrate as a combination of social artistry and
cultural design an historical moment of political conservation and
dominant authorizing. It seems we are not merely to claim, as Hardin
Craig does, that the plays are "a theological intelligence motivated by
structural imagination that lasted from age to age in the development of
a great cycle of mystery plays." Instead, we should interrogate the
multiple dimensions of artistry and artificiality of the play; our task
is to ask how these plays operate as a performative moment coming
directly from the dominant arms of orthodoxy while still being
influenced by the severely limited mass culture. We may find, then, at
the center of the controlling mechanisms of the church-state apparatus,
the necessitated desire for community that even Satan validates and
proclaims:
Nay, I pray the do not so;
Vmthynke the better in thy mynde;
Or els let me with the go,
I pray the leyffe me not behynde!
The desire, of course, extends past Satan’s plea, for the homogenized
desire of the congregation ultimately — which is in history written and
yet to be — is directed toward a different answer from Jesus: one that
affirms salvation and again confirms the church’s orthodox pageantry of
performance.