Chapter 3 Transforming Anxiety I: Emergence of the Ideal Self
3.2 Narrative Structure as a Circle of Spiritual Renewal
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that the play “picks up one of Shaffer's central concerns, the ongoing struggle between conformity and individuality,” and “the problem [in the play] is to reconcile the conflicting demands of individual will and society's requirements” (105).
Ronald Knowles states that at the heart of Bakhtin's idea of carnival are “the
antinomies of life and death […and the idea of] regenerative becoming (emphasis mine)”
(4). In the therapy, the protagonists’ own poor self-image in the public—depressed and hurt—will die out. In return, they are given a chance to be reborn in a spiritual sense. The therapy helps them not only see their own identity crisis but also reexamine the values that create their anxiety. The spirit of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque, therefore, corresponds with Rollo May’s notion of “becoming.” It will be applied to analyze the scenes where Alan and Dysart confront and communicate with their own inner self.
3.2 Narrative Structure as a Circle of Spiritual Renewal
The play’s narrative manifests Martin Dysart’s determination to solve his own identity crisis. First, the scenes are interwoven by Dysart’s monologues. In the beginning of both Act I, II, and also in the last scene, Dysart narrates from the center of the stage, which has a dark background. The darkness that surrounds Dysart could be seen as his spiritual dismay. Moreover, the play’s narrative begins with where it ends. As readers go through the play and contemplate what has happened in the therapy, it becomes clear that it is the unsettling ending of the therapy prompts Dysart to examine his personal values.
He might be reflecting his own life over and over again.
Martin Dysart’s monologues together form a circle of reflection. In Act I, scene 1, the stage is lit up by Martin Dysart’s “cigarette,” symbolizing the light within his spiritual darkness (Equus 17). However, in Act II, the stage directions indicates the light comes on as Dysart “enters the stage” (Equus 75), striking the audience’s vision in a subtler,
symbolic way. When Dysart speaks from the center of the stage with this lighting effect,
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we are hearing his inner voice, emerging from a vast spiritual hollow. According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carnivalesque, two opposite powers meeting on the
“marketplace” could, by the act of “degradation,” blur the boundary between two sides and lead these two sides to a spiritual renewal. In Equus, Dysart’s double selves can be regarded as two sides confronting each other on the stage, a symbolic “marketplace.” In his monologues, Dysart reveals himself not as the proud doctor he appears publicly but as a guilt-driven, depressed man. His social self has thus been “degraded” into the depressed man on stage.
The story is unveiled with Dysart’s speech of indecision.
Darkness.
Silence.
[…]
The flame of cigarette lighter jumps in the dark…MARTIN DYSART, smoking.
DYSART: With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces. The animal digs its sweaty brow into his cheek, and they stand in the dark for an hour-like a necking couple. And of all nonsensical things—I keep thinking about the horse! Not the boy: the horse, and what it may be trying to do. I keep seeing that huge head kissing him with its chained mouth.
Nudging through the metal some desire absolutely irrelevant to filling its belly or propagating its own kind. What desire could that be? Not to stay a horse any longer? Not to remain reined up forever in those particular genetic strings? Is it possible, at certain moments we cannot imagine, a horse can add its sufferings together—the non-stop jerks and jabs that are its daily life—and turn them into grief? What use is grief to a horse?
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(Equus 17)
Obviously, Dysart recalls his experience with Alan sometime after the therapy was completed. However, the image of the horse draws his attention: the animal appears to have human emotions. As I have mentioned in chapter two, following this scene, Dysart further claims that he is “wearing the horse’s head” (Equus 18). By connecting his own depressed current situation to the image of the horse, Dysart metaphorically “degrades”
his own human form as a proud doctor, who is under the influence of demoralizing social values, into the horse of human emotion, grieving its/his own existence.
In the middle of his reflection, after he has learned about the reason behind Alan Strang’s ambivalent affection for horses, Martin Dysart questions even more the value of his own existence. He initiates his reflection with the same words used in Act I:
DYSART: With one particular horse, called Nugget, he embraces. He showed me how he stands with it afterwards in the night, one hand on its chest, one on its neck, like a frozen tango dancer, inhaling its cold sweet breath.
‘Have you noticed', he said, ‘about horses: how they'll stand one hoof on its end, like those girls in the ballet?'…Now he's [Alan] gone off to rest, leaving me alone with Equus. I can hear the creature's voice. It's calling me out of the black cave of Psyche. I shove in my dim little torch, and there he stands—waiting for me. He raises his matted head. He opens his great square teeth, and says—[Mocking] ‘Why?...Why
Me?...Why—ultimately—Me?...Do you really imagine you can account for me? Totally, infallibly, inevitably account for me?...Poor Doctor Dysart!'” (Equus 75)
This monologue appears after Dysart has hypnotized Alan and learned about Alan’s extreme intimacy with a horse, which will be discussed later in this chapter. Dysart begins
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with the same statement used as he starts telling the story. In this scene mentioned above, the image of “Equus” becomes clearer to Dysart: it is more than just a psychotic creation of his patient, it is the voice that is calling him from his own “black cave of Psyche.”
Understanding the reason behind Alan’s fascination about horses and “Equus” does not relief Dysart from doubting himself as a qualified psychiatrist in a moral sense but drives him into a deeper spiritual darkness. The “torch” Dysart holds still illuminates the face of
“Equus” as a figure that is vague and perplexes him as it did when he begins to tell the story. The inner conflict displayed by his intention to interpret the existence of “Equus”
remains unresolved in the middle of his reflection.
Peter Shaffer has purposefully made the representation of the horses as alienating figures. In the preface of the play Shaffer writes:
THE actors wear track-suits of chestnut velvet. On their feet are light strutted hooved, about four inches high, set on metal horse-shoes. […] On their heads are tough masks made of alternating bands of silver wire and leather; their eyes are outlined by leather blinkers. The actors' own heads are seen beneath them: no attempt should be made to conceal them. Any literalism which could suggest the cozy familiarity of a domestic animal—or worse, a pantomime horse-should be avoided. The actors should never crouch on all fours, or even bend forward. They must always—except on the one occasion where Nugget is ridden-stand upright, as if the body of the horse extended invisibly, through the use of legs, knees, neck, face, and the turn of the head which can move the mask above it through all the gestures of equine
wariness and pride. (Equus 15)
The appearance of the horse actors serves to introduce a special sense of a man’s alienation from his/herself to the audience/readers. By dressing the actors in horse form
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and forbidding them to perform in an animalistic manner, Shaffer presents an image of the human soul troubled with symbolic confinement. While the masks made of wires signify a cage for the actual actors behind it, the “leather,” which is taken from animals, implies human’s cruelty to his/her own kind. In this case, the perpetrator and the victims are the same. The horses’/actors’ moves display an emotional paradox as the stage directions points out their gestures demonstrate both “wariness” and “pride.” When he states that he is “wear[ing] the horse’s head” at the beginning of Act I (Equus 18), Dysart is expressing his own emotional paradox, an existential dilemma resembling that of the horse actors. As I have mentioned, in the end of Act I, Dysart recalls the moment where he learned about the reason of Alan mysterious fascination for horses. However, this recollection does not solve the questions he addresses the audience/readers as he starts to tell the story, because in Act II he cannot stop questioning. He turns his focus of doubts from the ambivalent image of the horse back to himself.
Even at the end of his reflection Dysart still cannot stop questioning the values of his own existence. In Act II, scene 35, the final scene of the play, after the therapy as
completed, Dysart seems to have become fully aware of his own existential crisis:
DYSART: […] And now for me it never stops: that voice of Equus out of the cave─ ‘Why Me?...Why Me?...Account for Me!’…All right—I surrender!
I say it!...In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place—yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do—yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads! […] I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark. What way is this?...What dark is this?...I cannot call it ordained of God: I can't get that far. I will however pay it so much homage. There is now, in my mouth, this sharp chain. And
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it never comes out. (Equus 109).
After the therapy with Alan is completed, Dysart understands that the cause of Alan’s enigmatic lunacy. However, because he was led to examine the dogmatic values he acquired from society, the realization that his profession is nothing but an immoral business has put him into a deeper sense of despair. Although he has finally retrieved his own “horse power,” the enigmatic essence of life he sees in Alan and envies, he is still asking: “What dark is this?” C. J. Gianakaris observes that in Equus “there is a deft balance between the outer narrative framework and the enacted interior scenes,” and that
“the play's conclusion suggests that there are indeed non-rational universal forces of great urgency that shape our lives” (King 92). In this sense, the play’s narrative can be seen as Dysart’s means to communicate with his inner self, because the end of his journey of self-examination raises more questions: the patient’s anguish is removed by his hand, but he himself can never spiritually rest.
3.3 The Presence of the Ideal Self
C. J. Gianakaris notes that the play’s stage formed with “a railed boxing ring,” which is set as a “dissecting theater,” symbolically “entails the battle between the powers of orderly society and the chaotic impulse of instinctual religious worship” (A Casebook 13).
Furthermore, he comments that “[b]eneath the social dimension […] lies Shaffer's pre-eminent subject: our external search for a deity who can lend meaning to our mortal existence” (qtd in. Modern Dramatists 105). In Equus, religious fervor becomes a tool for Alan and Dysart to “lend meaning [to their] mortal existence.” As I have mentioned in chapter one, the search for “divinity” is considered by Peter Shaffer as essential to himself, and the protagonists use it to relocate their own shattered self in the “orderly society” in a similar sense. Respectively, Alan and Dysart momentarily reveal their own ideal self at some moments during the therapy. The nightmares they experience in fact are
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rich in symbols and imply a spiritual transformation.
3.3.1 Alan Strang
In contrast to his uncooperative attitude shown at the beginning of the therapy, Alan decides to record his thoughts on tape, a therapeutic method suggested by the psychiatrist.
In Act I, scene 13, Alan reveals his admiration for the beauty of horses and expresses discontent with his parents.
ALAN: It was always the same, after that. Every time I heard one clop by, I had to run and see. Up a country lane or anywhere. They sort of pulled (emphasis mine) me. I couldn't take my eyes off them. […] I can't remember when it started. Mum reading to me about Prince who no one could ride, except one boy. Or the white horse in Revelations. ‘He that sat upon him was called Faithfull and True. His eyes were as flames of fire, and he had a name written that no man knew but himself'…Words like reins Stirrup. […] Years, I never told anyone. Mum wouldn't understand.
She likes ‘Equitation'. Bowler hats and jodhpurs! ‘My grandfather dressed for the horse,' she says. What does that mean? The horse isn't dressed. It's the most naked thing you ever saw! More than a dog or a cat or anything.
Even the most broken down old nag has got its life! To put a bowler on it is filthy!...Putting them through their paces! Bloody gymkhanas!...No one understands!...Except cowboys. They do. I wish I was a cowboy. They're free. They just swing up and then it's miles of grass…I bet all cowboys are orphans…I bet they are!...No one ever says to cowboys ‘Receive my meaning'! They wouldn't dare. Or ‘God' all the time. [Mimicking his mother.] ‘God sees you, Alan. God's got eyes everywhere— (Equus 49) The feeling of being “pull[ed]” by unnamed forces reminds readers of Alan’s struggle to
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pull something back when he is having a nightmare, in which he is experiencing the presence of “Equus” (Equus 35), as I have discussed in chapter two. The construction of the analogy between “Equus” and himself made by Alan can be understood as Alan’s hardship of living in the shadow of other people’s opinions. He has been waiting to be saved. Alan implies that he has disagreed with what his parents have said for a long time.
Consequently, Alan turns to admire the “cowboy,” whose character is symbolic of spiritual freedom. If we apply Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of carvivalesque, Alan’s
confession made when he is alone (on the stage, the “marketplace”) in the hospital here can be seen as a confrontation with his inner self. Although he is speaking from his bed in the hospital, Alan appears not as a timid young man but assertive and confident,
criticizing the values he received in the family. Because these values play a significant role in shaping his personality, Alan “degrades” not only the values his parents firmly believe in but also his identity as an amiable and submissive young man.
Alan’s desired ideal self is fully conveyed in the scene where he conducts a
“ceremony” (Equus 72) to ride with Nugget, a horse from the stable he works at and is perceived by him as “Equus.” The riding scene presented here follows the scene discussed in chapter two, where Alan is hypnotized by the psychiatrist and reveals his strange religious fantasy by connecting his own situation to that of “Equus” and Jesus Christ. In Act I, scene 21:
[ALAN, lying before NUGGET, stretches out on the square. He grasps the top of the thin metal pole embedded in the wood. He whispers his God's name ceremonially.]
ALAN: Equus!...Equus!...Equus!
[He pulls the pole upright. The actor playing NUGGET leans forward and grabs it. At the same instant all the other horses lean forward
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around the circle, each placing a gloved hand on the rail. ALAN rises and walks right back to the upstage corner. Left.]
Take me!
[He runs and jumps high on to NUGGET's back.]
[…]
[NUGGET mimes restiveness.]
ALAN: Stay, Equus. No one said Go!...That's it. He's good. Equus the Godslave, Faithful and True. Into my hands he commands himself […]
[He punches NUGGET.] Stop it!...He wants to go so badly. (Equus 72)
“Lean[ing] forward” and stretching out a hand, the horse actors move as if they were welcoming an emperor, making this scene “ceremonial.” With the horse actors’
movement aside, Alan is performing a ritual and endowing himself with the symbolic power of a god in this scene. By mounting “Equus,” calling it “Godslave,” claiming that it is at his command and punching it, Alan presents himself as the powerful, almighty God.
This symbolic analogy between “Equus” and God is explained in my discussion in chapter two, where I have analyzed that Alan has come to relate his personal experience to that of a horse in a symbolic, religious way. As shown in the scene given above, the
“ceremonial” mounting helps Alan fulfill his ideal self as a cowboy free from worldly confinements. In this regard, Alan’s horse riding serves as his way of coping with anxiety for he is revealing his own ideal self through such a symbolic act.
This ritual performed by Alan to empower his own self-image as a powerless boy in front of people in reality is carried on by the horse actors referred to by Peter Shaffer as
“chorus” (Equus 13). In Act I, scene 21:
ALAN [ritually]: Equus—son of Fleckwus—son of Neckwus—Walk.
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[A hum from the CHORUS.26
Very slowly the horses standing on the circle begin to turn the square by gently pushing the wooden rail. ALAN and his mount start to revolve. The effect, immediately, is of a statue being slowly turned round on a plinth.
During the ride however the speed increases, and the light decreases until it is only a fierce spotlight on horse and rider, with the overspill glinting on the other masks leaning in towards them.] (Equus 73)
The horse actors are preparing and presenting Alan in a godly image as the rider of
“Equus” here. Their turning the stage around elaborates the scene of Alan’s symbolic riding that comes afterwards. Since the movement of Alan’s riding is carried out on a fixed point in the middle of the stage as if “a statue being slowly turned round on a plinth”
(note that this movement continues in later scenes), it looks as if Alan is exhibiting his rider identity on the stage with pride and confidence. J. A. Cudden explains that the chorus in the play “introduces [and] serve[s] as a commentator on the action” (133). In this respect, the effect of an accelerated speed of riding made by the horse actors serves to emphasize Alan’s rider identity of power and freedom. The lighting range being narrowed down to a focus upon the rider with his horse thus becomes the result of the horse actors’
movement, a “comment” on Alan’s action here. The “overspill[ing]” of the light on the horse actors’ masks, therefore, reflects the glory emanated from the vigorous cowboy master and his horse.
The riding scene also implies Alan’s detestation of worldly values, as those
displayed by his parents and the unsympathetic customers he met at work. Elsewhere in Act I, scene 21, he responds from the perspective of a cowboy as a godly rider to the
26 The playwright notes (or instructs) that the actors together function as a chorus. Peter Shaffer writes:
26 The playwright notes (or instructs) that the actors together function as a chorus. Peter Shaffer writes: