einstein on the beach: the primacy of metaphor

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"Einstein on the Beach": The Primacy of MetaphorAuthor(s): Craig OwensReviewed work(s):Source: October, Vol. 4 (Autumn, 1977), pp. 21-32Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778477 .Accessed: 10/12/2012 16:54

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Einstein on the Beach:The Primacy of Metaphor

CRAIG OWENS

If, as is frequently nd strikingly ttested everywhere oday,boldness n theater roclaims, rightly r wrongly, ts fidelity oArtaud,the question of the theater f cruelty, f its present nonexistence ndineluctable necessity, as the force f an historical uestion. Historicalnot in its possible inscription within what we know as the history ftheater, not because it would mark a stage in the development oftheatrical orms r because of its place in the successionof models oftheatrical epresentation. he question is historical n a sense that sboth radical and absolute. It declares the imit of

representation.Jacques Derrida, "The Limit of Representation,"from L'ecriture et la diffkrence.

Across those differences hich segregate the dominant attitudes towardsperformance n our century nto either xpressionistic r analytic modes,' thereappears a single commitment hich may be associated with neither: challenge tothe structure f representation hich has been identical with that of theater versince Aristotle haracterized ramatic poetry s mimetic. This identification ftragedy with the imitation, rather than the immediate presentation, f actionposits a fundamental ualism at the heart of the theater. erformance nd text,representer nd represented, re (it seems rrevocably) plit. Theatrical representa-tion establishes tself n that rift which it alone creates between the tangiblephysical presence of the performer nd that absence which is necessarily mpli-cated in any concept of imitation or signification. he imitated action (thetheatrical ignified) s situated outside of the closed circuit established by thecopresence of performer nd spectator. Thus what is represented s always an"elsewhere." As a result, while the performer s in fact both a presence nd a

I. "There are, in the contemporary enewal of performance modes, two basic and divergingimpulses which hape and animate ts major nnovations. The first, rounded n the dealist xtensionsof a Christian

past,s

mythopoeic n its aspirations, clectic n its forms, nd constantly raversed ythe dominant and polymorphic style which constitutes he most tenacious vestige of that past:expressionism.... The second, consistently ecular in its commitment o objectification, roceedsfrom Cubism and Constructivism; ts modes are analytic

...." Annette Michelson, "Yvonne Rainer,

Part One: The Dancer and the Dance," Artforum, II (January 1974),57.

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signifier for n absence),we alwaysregard him as the atter, s a representative orsomething lse-the actor as perpetual stand-in.

The major innovations in performance f the last fifty ears have beenaddressed o this rift, ither o exaggerate t (Brecht) r to annihilate t Artaud).Both strategies hift rom epresentation opresentation. ince the presence f theperformer s anterior o, and a necessary ondition for, ny theatrical epresenta-tion, the mpulse which animates that hift might be characterized s modernist,reduction to that which is unique and absolutely fundamental o the theatricalsituation. Modernist performance abandons representation by establishingidentity etween representer nd represented. he performer o longer stands foranything ther han himself. The resurgence f nterest n dance at the beginningof this century was a manifestation f the same impulse. According to Yeats'formula, ance has always eluded any such dualism.)

Since the structure of representation s identical with that of verballanguage-a system of signs which always substitute for nonpresence-theambition to overturn n entrenched heatrical epresentationalism as frequentlymanifested tself n programs which would radically lter, f not eliminate, heuseof speech on stage. The nonverbal pectacle s its offspring. et the overthrow frepresentation annot be restricted ononverbal modes, incean identical mpulsehas also animated the poetic theater f our century. hus, modes traditionallyconceived as antithetical ecomecomplementary. n Artaud's polemical writingson theater, t is the conjunction of the nonverbal nd the poetic that constitutesthe very ossibility or the revivification f theater.

While Artaud's modernism s apparent in his move to disestablish theauthor-"the theater, n independent and autonomous art, must, in order torevive or simply to live, realize what differentiates t from text, pure speech,literature, nd all other fixed nd written

means"2--itdoes not follow that he

meant to eliminate speech from the stage altogether. f the theater was to bereconstituted utside of verbal anguage, the author to be replaced by the directorand the stage to become the ocus of research nto alternative anguages of gestureand

scenographywhich would

"always express thought]more

adequatelythan

the precise ocalizedmeanings of words," t was simply that the authority f thespoken word was to be undermined. Artaud advocated the overthrow f allhierarchical rankings of theatrical anguages, which had assigned speech aposition of preeminence, nd reduced the mise en scene to a subsidiary ole.Thetheater f cruelty was to be characterized y a plurality of equipollent voices:spoken, musical, gestural, cenographic. f in the spectacles he envisioned "thespoken and written ortions will be spoken and written n a new sense,"4 till, hesensuous, physical side of language-everything which characterizes ts poeticuse-was to be retained:

2. Antonin Artaud, "Letters on Language," The Theater and Its Double, trans. M.C. Richards,New York, Grove, 1958,p. 106.3. Ibid., p. 109,4. Ibid., p. 111,



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Einstein on the Beach:The Primacy of Metaphor 23

But let there e the east return o the ctive, lastic, respiratory ources

of anguage, et words be oined again to the physical motions hat gavethem birth, nd let the discursive, ogical aspect of speech disappearbeneath its affective, hysical side, i.e., let words be heard in theirsonority ather han be exclusively akenfor what they mean grammati-cally, let them be perceived as movements, nd let these movementsthemselves urn nto other imple, direct movements s occurs n all thecircumstances f life but not sufficiently ith actors on the stage, andbehold! the language of literature s reconstituted, evivified, ndfurthermore-as n the anvassesof certain ainters f the past-objectsthemselves egin to speak.5

Artaud's ambition was thus more than the revivification f theater; t wasnothing less than the complete reanimation of poetic language. Or rather, nenecessarily mplicated the other.' This poetic aspect of his enterprise xtended ohis instructions or the manipulation of scenic elements:

The language of the theater ims then at encompassing nd utilizingextension, that s to say space, and by utilizing t, to make it speak: Ideal with objects-the data of extension-like images, like words,bringing them together nd making them respond to each otheraccording to laws of symbolism nd living analogies: external aws,those of all poetry nd all viable anguage, and, among other hings, fChinese ideograms nd ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.7

That Artaud's prescriptions or he stage should constitute n ars poetica suggestsa historical filiation with a number of modern poets who also identified hestageas an appropriate ocus for research nto intensifying he purely physical, i.e.sonorous, movements of language. Mallarm6 wrote Igitur for the stage. Eliotidentified he poetic moments of tragedy s those at which the anguage reflectsback into itself, becomes aware of itself s a theatrical presence. Further, n apassage reminiscent f Artaud's proposal that words be perceived s movements,he suggested that if verse drama were to be given new life, t might ook tononverbal modes of performance uch as the Mass and the ballet for paradigms.Both poet and metteur en scene would transform anguage into an entirelymaterial vent. And Valery, escribing his own work for he stage as a concatena-tion of music and architecture, alled the resultant enre "melodrama": "I foundno other term o describe this work, which is certainly neither n opera, nor aballet, nor an oratorio." Like Eliot, he drew parallel with religious iturgy: Tomy mind, it must and does bear some resemblance o a ceremony f a religious5. Ibid., p. 119.6. Susan Sontag has stressed he mportance f this trategy orArtaud: The function hatArtaudgives the theater s to heal the split between anguage and flesh.... Artaud's writings n the theatermay be read as a psychological manual on the reunification f mind and body." Antonin Artaud:Selected Writings, ew York, Farrar, trauss and Giroux, 1976,pp. xxxv-vi.7. Artaud, pp. 110-1.



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nature." Yet he reiterated ts poetic nature: The action, imited nd slight s it s,must be further ubordinated o the meaning and poetic substance of each of itsmoments."8

Like Valkry's melodrama" (which it resembled n several respects), obertWilson's recent pectacle Einstein on the Beach (in collaboration with composerPhilip Glass) resists ssimilation to any of the conventional genres of perfor-mance. Although Einstein was identified s an "opera", and while its score mightbe anatomized accordingly nto arias, duets, choral passages, and ballets, theproduction acked the correlation etweenmusic and dramatic ction that definesthat genre. Glass occasionally ncorporated oncrete ural references o the visualsubject of a scene into his score, but his insistence on structure nd logicalprogression only emphasized the independence of music from ction. One wasreminded of that disjunctiveness etween ound and image which Cunninghambrought o the dance. Action exhibited similar utonomy: Einstein progressed sa sequence of highly allusive visual images that ppeared to succeed one anotheraccording to an internal ogic of association. They centered on the figure fEinstein. Habits of his dress and personality; mathematical nd scientific odelsand instruments; he products of technological progress, uch as trains, pace-ships, and atomic explosions, coalesced to form complex portrait y association.From scene to scene, the spectator's ense of both scale and duration was altered,

perhapsin demonstration f the central

hypothesisf Einstein's

thinking thatdimension and velocity re interdependent). ecause of the frequent rbitrarinessof the selection of the images, no detail being too insignificant or nclusion, aswell as the freedomwith which associationsweremade-organization was neitherchronological nor thematic-Wilson's work has been compared with dreams. fthe space evoked in Einstein was dream-like, ne important difference ust benoted. Wilson's images, unlike those of dreams, are not open to interpretation.Dream-images re the mediated representations f dream-thoughts; ence, theirinterpretability. ilson's images are, on the contrary, mmediate, resentational,resistant o analysis. This is supported by the subsidiary function ssigned to

speechand

spokentexts n all of his works. For

anguage is,above

all,the medium

of interpretation.With Einstein, Wilson carries ambivalence towards language one step

further. ven the published "text" for heproduction s nonverbal, seriesof 113charcoal sketches made by Wilson himself and reproduced n a book whichassemblesmusical scores, poken texts, nd choreographic iagrams. Arranged sa sequence of cinematic stills, these atmospheric drawings chart Einstein'sdivision into four acts, nine scenes and five ntermezzi hinges or "knee-plays")and describe hreebasic scenic motifs: train, courtroom, nd a field f dancersover which a spaceship passes. This pictographic extproceeds from nd extends

8. Paul Valbry, "History of Amphion," trans. Haskell Block, Collected Works, New York,Pantheon, 1960,vol. 3, p. 220.



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Einstein on the Beach: The Primacy of Metaphor 25

Wilson's ambition to mount aspectacle

which cannot be contained within verballanguage:

Wilson shuns recipes nd this s why to write bout him, who is alwaysso loath to express udgement sic]or opinions, s to risk ncapsulatinghim in one of those airtight wrappers of culture towards which thewhole of his work is directed, f not as an accusation at least as analternative. o translate nto words ts expressive omplexity means, na way, to prevaricate n both the author's and the public's emotiveparticipation. To single out a particular inear development r a newdefinition f theatre n his work is to misrepresent ts underlyingpremise, he attempt o reconstruct n the stage everything hich lifesystematically hatters. italics added]9Wilson's theater oes not intend to provoke articulate response; rather, t

argues the poverty f those systems hrough which such a response might beformed-primarily anguage, but also all processes f logical thought ccordingto which we parse, analyze, iterally ome to terms with experience. he ambitionto stage a semblance of the unanalyzed, morphous continuum of sensory datawhich is subsequently egmented by the formative ction of language ("every-thing which life systematically hatters") nvolves an implicit argument hat the

activity f anguage upon that continuum s a violation of ts ntegrity. anguageinevitably produces an endless string of synecdoches which, in spite of theirintention o signify, will never reproduce he original unity which s prior to allanalysis, ll logical thought.

This argument bout the synecdochic haracter f language is hardly new,yet t seemsto have exhausted ittle f ts authority. While it has both psychologi-cal and philosophical ramifications-Merleau-Ponty, or example, has writtenthat speech "tears out or tears apart meanings in the undivided whole of thenameable"-it also underpinned the revolution n linguistics which dates fromthe beginning of this century. aussure's now-famous discussion in his Cours

of the arbitrariness f the sign was rooted in the distinction between "form"and "substance"; the latter was considered a nebulous continuum anterior olanguage:

Without anguage, thought s a vague, uncharted nebula. There are nopre-existing deas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance oflanguage.... Phonic substance is neither more fixednor more rigidthan thought; t is not a mold into which thought must of necessity itbut a plastic substancedivided n turn nto distinct arts o furnish heoignifiers eeded by thought. The linguistic fact can therefore e

9. Vicky Alliata, Einstein on the Beach, New York, E.O.S. Enterprises, 976. This attitude, oclearly hostile to the enterprise f criticism, as infected hosewho havewritten bout the production:nearly ll of the published accounts of Einstein to date havebeencontent with imple description. orsuch description, which is not attempted here, see in particular, Barbara Baracks n Artforunm, V(March 1977),30-6; and Susan Flakes in The Drama Review, 20 (December1976),69-82.



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pictured n its totality-i.e. language-as a series f contiguous subdi-visions marked ff n both the ndefinite lane of umbled ideas .. andthe equally vague plane of sounds.... Language works out its unitywhile taking hape between two shapelessmasses. .. Their combina-tion produces a form not a substance.1'

While Saussure's intention was simply to restrict inguistics to the analysis ofform, nd despite his recognition of the fundamental unintelligibility f theprelinguistic, he effect f his formulation s nonetheless o uphold a traditionaldistinction etween what is thought nd what is expressed n language.

Saussure's notion of substance as a shapeless mass was interpreted y theDanish linguist Louis Hjelmslev as purport: n unformed mass of physical orpsychical data which, while common to all languages, snevertheless chematizeddifferently y each.

It is like one and the same handful of sand that is formed n quitedifferent atterns, r like the loud in the heavensthat hanges hape inHamlet's view from minute to minute. Just s the ame sand can be putinto different olds, and the same cloud take on ever new shapes, soalso the same purport s formed r structured ifferently n differentlanguages."

Hjelmslev cites as an example of purport hecolor spectrum, mass of objective,physically measurable data which is segmented ifferently y different anguages:

Behind the paradigms that are furnished n the various languages bythe designations of color, we can, by subtracting the differences,disclose such an amorphous continuum, hecolor spectrum, n whicheach language arbitrarily ets ts boundaries. While formations n thiszone of purport re for the most part approximately he same in themost widespread European languages, we need not go far to findformations hat are incongruent with them.'2

If thought s conceived s a shapelessmass, ust as on the pre-)phonological levelsounds form an indistinct continuum, then both the plane of content (thesignified) nd that of expression the signifier) ill require, ccording to Hjelm-slev, description n terms f both form nd substance. While the analysis of formbelongs in both instances o linguistics, hat of substance iesoutside ts domain:"The description f purport .. may in all essentials be thought f as belongingpartly to the sphere of physics and partly to that of (social) anthropology. ..Consequently, for both planes both a physical and a phenomenological descrip-10. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course n General Linguistics, rans.Wade Baskin, NewYork, McGrawHill, 1966,pp. 112-3.11. Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, trans. F.J. Whitfield, Madison,rUniversity f Wisconsin, 1963, p. 52.12. Ibid., p. 52.



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tion of the purport hould be required." 3Wilson undertakes uch a description n Einstein on the Beach.A phenom-

enological description of purport would presumably im to recover hat unitywhich underlies the constantly changing appearances of things (includinglinguistic objects) as they urface n experience. n Husserl, that unity s under-stood to be a function f (synthetic) onsciousness, f a transcendental ubject.Einstein implies both that aim and that understanding. ach of three motifs(train, rial, nd field) s broken up into a set of mages which, incehomologous,may be reintegrated. he locus of this process f reintegration s the onsciousnessof the individual spectator. tructure s thus inborn, that s, emerges while thework is performed s the spectator spontaneously apprehends the relationsobtaining among images. Thus, coherence s not a result f any logical sequenceof images (the series train-trial-field epeated three times) as program notessuggest, ut resides n intuitively rasped similarities mong images derived roma common motif. This is clearly demonstrated n Wilson's text. The train, s itappears in Act II, its observation deck receding nto the night, reappears as abuilding in Act IV. This relationship, rather than the individual images inisolation, s the subject of these wo scenes nd makes them unit. Similarly, hesharply delineated riangle f ight projected by the ocomotive'sheadlight n theopening scene s congruent with that which streams rom n elevator haft n the

final cene-a visual linking of end with beginning. And the fluorescent ed n thecenter f the courtroom uring the trial cenes n Acts and III becomes, n Act V,a column of light which slowly ascends into the flies nd which, in turn, sreminiscent f the strip f ight which painted tself own the backdrop n the firstscene.These images do not function s isolated signs; instead their onjunctionreveals patterns f interrelationship hich make Einstein a complex, resonantexperiential unit, or gestalt.

To the extent hat Wilson generates unified ield hrough isual means, histheater s nonverbal. Nevertheless, hetechniques ccording to which his imageryis manipulated can only be described as poetic. Here poetic does not mean

evocativeor allusive, but indicates a particular process of establishing elation-ships between mages. Wilson's manipulation of images is primarily nalogical,that s, metaphoric. Metaphor, based exclusively n purely material or sensuousfeatures, as been isolated by the linguist Roman Jakobson s the fundamentalstructure f all poetic texts. If the two poles of language are selection andcombination, the first ased on equivalence (metaphor), he second upon conti-guity metonomy),14 akobson haracterizes oetry s the transference f equiva-lence from the pole of selection to that of combination.'5 n poetic language,

13. Ibid., pp. 77-8.14. On this twofold haracter f

language,see Roman

Jakobson,Two Aspectsof Language and

Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," Fundamentals of Language, The Hague, Mouton, 1971,pp. 90-6.15. Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics," Style n Language, ed. T.A. Sebeok,Cambridge,M.I.T., 1960,pp. 358ff.



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Robert Wilson. Einstein on the Beach, 1976. Act ,scene ;Act , scene ;Act V, scene . Photos: abetteMangolte.)

words are combined nto rhythmic, lliterative, r rhymic equences becauseoftheir equivalence as pure sound. In this way, new semantic relationships reestablished-or lost ones restored-on the basis of purely physical parallelisms.

It follows from Jakobson's characterization f metaphor that the poeticimage must of necessity ranscend he constraints f the signifying hain (whatone might all the metonymic orce) n its movement owardmeaning. Metaphorsare never ontext-sensitive. hey do not reach out to other, ontiguous lements fthe chain that might determine their meanings. Two images standing in ametaphoric relationship re unaffected y those pressures from without whichwould have us perceive them as somehow absolutely different ecause of their

different ositions in a linear, i.e. horizontal, sequence. Rather, the properdirection f the metaphor s vertical, ach metaphor ppropriately ocated n a setof equivalent mages. The principle of equivalenceor congruence hat haracter-izes that set and confers ignificance n each of its members ecomesa kind oftranscendent enter oward which each metaphor gravitates.

If Einstein on the Beachdescribes linear time pan (roughly he ifetime fAlbert Einstein), t nevertheless emains a resolutely onlinear work. Events donot preceed r follow one another ccording oany temporal) ogic. As a result ftheir metaphorical aspect, Wilson's images resist falling into any meaningfullinear sequence. The imposition of a logical scheme train-trial-field-train-trial-field, tc.) only emphasizes the arbitrariness f Einstein's temporal tructure. hecircularity ctivated y that formula ffectively hecks ny inear development. nan analogous way, a recursive reatment f spoken texts works to neutralize he



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ordinary directionality f spoken language. A single text s repeated gain andagain, its final word being nothing more than a cue to the speaker obegin again,until that inear time n which all narrative nd all spoken discourse operate seffectively uspended.

Since metaphor works to suspend the temporalizing ffects f the signifyingchain (its syntactic r syntagmatic imension), t has frequently een associatedwith a corresponding motive. Metaphor reveals n atemporal principle of similar-ity be it a result of divergence r convergence, hat s, of homology or isomor-phism) that onstitutes he possibility f any relation of mages whatsoever. hatprinciple has, in varying ontexts nd to different nds, been identified s a law, aform, n essence;yet whether one grants t regulatory r ontological status, tremains that with which poetry has been principally concerned. The poet hasbeen continually harged with the responsibility f uncovering hatwhich rendersall relationship possible. It is thus, through ts metaphoric base and not itsthematic ontent, hat poetry articipates n the nvestigations f metaphysics.

Yet this motive is operative only within a particular attitude towardslanguage, the primary haracteristics f which have been identified nd analyzedby Jacques Derrida:

To concern oneself with metaphor-a particular figure-is ... topresuppose a symbolist osition. t is above all to concern neselfwith

the nonsyntactic, onsystematic ole, with semantic depth," with themagnetizing ffect f similarity ather han with positional combina-tion, call it "metonymous," n the sense defined y Jakobson, whorightly underlines the affinity etween symbolism not only as alinguistic notion, but also, we should claim, as a literary chool),Romanticism with a more historical-that s, historicist-orientation,and more directed towards interpretation), nd the prevalence ofmetaphor. italics added]16

Certainly the arguments that everyday anguage is essentially ynecdochic ndtherefore n needof rehabilitation, nd that t s the function f

poetic metaphoro

restore anguage to its supposedly primary ature, may be traced o a specific odyof theory rticulated t the end of the 19th Century: he poetic of the FrenchSymbolists, articularly s enunciated n the critical nd theoretical writings fStephane Mallarm&. According to Mallarme, the revolution n poetry, which hedated to Verlaine, was involved in a return o "certain primitive resources nlanguage."'7 Fascinated with speculations concerning he primal symbolizationprocessesof mankind, he sketched theory f the suggestiveness f woras rootedin "a belief that a primitive anguage, half-forgotten, alf-living, xists n eachman. It is a language possessing extraordinary ffinities with music and

16. Jacques Derrida, White Mythology," rans.F.C.T. Moore,New Literary History, VI (Autumn1974),13.17. Stephane Mallarm&, elected Prose, trans. Bradford Cook, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins, 1956,p. 35.



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dreams."'18 his primitive anguage was conceived as a pictographic diom ofhieroglyphs which was the predecessor of the more abstract medium, verballanguage, with which philosophic and scientific ystems ave been erected ndwhich corresponded to a particular state of the world which preceded thedeployment f time.19

For Mallarme, the poet's task was to recover hat data of pre-history. oetrysprang from n impulse to restore oobjectstheir riginal resonance r complica-tion which logic and language had stripped from hem.And metaphor rhythm,rhyme, tc.) made that restoration ossible:

The poetic act consists of our sudden realization that an idea is

naturally ractionized nto severalmotifs f equal value which must beassembled.They rhyme; nd their utward tamp of authenticity s thatcommon meter which the final tress stablishes.20

This conception of language remains tacitly operative in the texts ofphenomenology and gestalt psychology in which the task of reassembly ndreintegration emainsprimary). t also persists n at least one other ontemporarydiscipline-the structural nthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss. Whereas phe-nomenology would dispense with the dentification f that data with prehistory(each of us has access to it in the raw material of perception), Levi-Strauss

emphasizests ink with the

primitive.His

descriptionsf a

pensbe auvagecenter

upon metaphor, which is isolated as the primary ehicle of myth:The effectiveness f symbolswould consist precisely n this "inductiveproperty," by which formally homologous structures, uilt out ofdifferent aterials t different evelsof ife-organic processes, ncon-scious mind, rational thought-are related to one another. Poeticmetaphor provides familiar xample of this nductive rocess.21Thanks to the myths, we discover that metaphors are based on anintuitive ense of the logical relations between one realm and otherrealms; metaphor reintegrates he first ealm with the totality f theothers, n spite of the fact that reflective hought truggles o separate

18. Wallace Fowlie, Mallarmb', hicago, Phoenix, 1962,p. 264.19. The neo-Platonic base of this theory f language has been discussedby Gilles Deleuzein hiswriting n Proust, which embeds the novelist within a decidedly ymbolist radition: Certain neo-Platonists used a profound word to designate the original state which precedes ny development, nydeployment, ny 'explication': complication, which envelops the many in the One and affirms heunity f the multiple. Eternity id not seem to them he absence of change, nor even the xtension f alimitless xistence, ut the complicated state of time tself uno ictu mutationes uascomplectitur).The Word, omnia complicans, nd containing ll essences,was defined s the supreme omplication,the complication of contraries, he unstable opposition. From this they derived the notion of anessentially expressive universe, organized according to degrees of immanent complications andfollowing an order of descending explications." Gilles Deleuze,Proust and Signs, trans. RichardHoward, New York, Braziller, 972, pp. 44-5.20. Mallarme, p. 39.21. Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, rans. Jacobson Schoepf, New York, BasicBooks, 1963,pp. 201-2.



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them. Metaphor, far from eing a decoration hat s added to anguage,purifies t and restores t to its original nature, through momentarilyobliterating one of the innumerable synecdoches that make upspeech.22

If, as LUvi-Strauss laims, the poetic and the mythic re essentially nalogousfunctions, then they themselves tand in a metaphoric relation and must beconceived as a single function. If the techniques according to which mythreproduces n original, pre-discursive nity or totality re primarily oetic--i.e.intuitive ather han ogical and rooted n metaphor-then it follows eciprocallythat the "purpose" of poetry will be to create myths. Here, Levi-Strauss earticu-lates the operation prescribed n all of the great exts f literary ymbolism: hoseof Mallarme,Valkry, nd Eliot, and certainly f Artaud.23 nd the word which bestdescribes hat operation, mythopoesis, ecomesprofoundly autological.

Einstein on the Beach, an essentially metaphoric structure, annot beisolated from his poetic motive. BecauseWilson participates n this mythopoeicimpulse, his attitude owards anguage may be ascribed to a particular inguisticand poetic position and his formal trategies ssimilated to a specific erformancetradition, tself dentified y ts argument bout language. Elsewhere,he has beenquoted to the effect hat Einstein was chosen as central igure ecausehe exhibitedcharacteristics f both thinker physicist, mathemetician, epresentative f theanalytic) and dreamer musician, visionary, representative f the idealistic).24Accordingly, Wilson's desire was to synthesize hose divergent modes of perfor-mance (analytic, xpressionistic) oted at the beginning of this essay. Hence, hiscollaboration with composer Philip Glass and choreographer ucinda Childs,both of whom have previously worked n an analytic mode. Still, this syntheticambition is profoundly mythopoeic, n inductive reintegration f previouslydistinct orders; and Wilson's desire to transcend he polarity of contemporaryperformance modes remained wholly contained within one of its terms. As aresult, he profoundly ntuitive haracter f the frame provided for the work ofGlass and Childs qualified and at times subverted he objective nature of theirstyles. At the same time, the strength f Wilson's images seemeddiluted by thepresence f antithetical material.) Had Einstein achievedencyclopaedic tatus theclaims that have been made for t would be ustified. s it s, Wilson's work, whichhas so frequently een hailed as totally nnovative nd without precedent, emainsenmeshed n a particular tradition, he coordinates of which have already beenmapped.

22. Claude Lkvi-Strauss, he Raw and the Cooked,trans. J. nd D. Weightman, NewYork, Harper&Row, 1969,p. 339.23. "The true purpose of the theater s to create myths." Artaud, p. 116.24. "According to Wilson ... what triggered he fusion was the subject tself, Albert Einstein,mathematician, ut at the same time a dreamer.... It is the contradiction, he interplay, nd theharmony f dreams nd mathematics hat form he central ensionof this work." Flakes, p. 70.

einstein on the beach: the primacy of metaphor

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