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Essays From The English Institute 2022: Action

2024; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.2024.a945307

1080-6547

Essays From The English Institute 2022:Action Sandra Macpherson and Martin Harries "Who needs action when you've got words?" —Meat Puppets, "Plateau"1 The English Institute's conference on Action, planned for Irvine in the fall of 2020 and twice postponed, happened at last in 2022. Virginia Jackson, in her introduction to the conference, and remembering that the Institute had been previously postponed only because of World War II, remarked that "we only stop for Nazis and Covid." That it should have been this conference on action that was twice postponed seems both an all-too-obvious irony and a cause for reflection on the topic of action. What was it to stop for Covid? In 2020, that choice was a no-brainer—but this would mean, according to some analytic philosophers of action, that that choice to postpone, as sheer necessity, involved no choice or real intention at all and therefore could not qualify as an action. Where there is no choice not to do something, not to postpone, there is no action. And the converse is also true: if there is no choice but to perform some action, if that action has become automatic, then that action may not qualify as action at all. Action, understood in this way, must include the possibility of not acting. Or, put otherwise: some delay, however momentary, is necessary to what divides involuntary or automatic movement from action. All action is to some degree, however slight that degree may be, delayed. The second postponement, which meant that we did not meet in 2021 either—that, then, was a real action. And, indeed, there were skeptics who thought the choice to hold a conference in 2022 was still too rash and that the wisest action would have been inaction and another postponement. Covid and Nazis remain. There were delays, there was action, we did go forward. "Who needs action when you've got words?" The temptation is to read this line as an opposition: words instead of actions. [End Page 907] Meat Puppets are playing with the cliché: actions speak louder than words. But just as that cliché paradoxically suggests that actions matter because they "speak," because they are a form of language or speech, albeit a loud one, so the Meat Puppets might be insisting that words are a superior form of action—or, at any rate, the one they have chosen for now. What happens when words are actions? What happens when we dismiss, or admit, the force of imitations of actions?2 Aristotle's lapidary formulation often haunts literary discussions of action: "Thus, tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and possessing magnitude; in embellished language, each kind of which is used separately in the different parts; in the mode of action and not narrated; and effecting through pity and fear [what we call] the catharsis of such emotions."3 "Action" names both what tragedy imitates and a mode of imitation, and here our problems begin. What makes an action "serious," and when is an action "complete"? The implication that there are actions that are not complete and do not possess "magnitude" contrasts with the "actions" performed by the performers: the "mode of action" does not need to meet the qualifications for the "action" that the tragedy as a whole imitates. This is not the place to pretend to unravel what Aristotle means by action, but the suggestion in this famously contested passage that there is a kind of hierarchy of action, with those actions suitable for tragic representation somewhere near the top, has proven durable. What counts as action, and when, and for whom? Is it an action when Lear puts a footstool on trial? That moment may be part of a "serious" whole, but the metatheatrical comedy of the moment belongs to the narrower category of how things happen on stage, not narrated but in the "mode of action." But is putting a footstool on trial an action at all? One can focus on one distinction traceable through these essays by thinking about representing "in the mode of action." On the one hand, action is the subject of representation. On the other, modes...