Miracles of contingency: Pericles as a drama of possibility

Abstract

This article argues that an exploration of contingency in Pericles is central to understand the play's achievement, which is born of the tensions the play sets up between narrative and dramatic accounts of experience, and vesting in the figure of Miranda an ‘otherness’ that opens possibilities that are foreclosed by an anthropocentric, law-based world view. The play's aesthetic is founded on this, and, indeed, on the contingent effect of its damaged state. This encourages an improvisatory approach to performance, which displaces the figure of the author just as the drama itself questions the role of the father.

Pericles is a miraculous play – not simply a narrative of events that demand our ‘fancies’ thankful doom’ (22.20), ¹ but a dramatic space in which the miraculous can occur. The play's ruinous state contingently repeats its origins in what Ben Jonson called ‘a mouldy tale’; ² ‘the truth’ is directly at issue here, on both the level of credibility of the events it dramatises, and of the insatiable editorial quest over its attribution to Shakespeare ³ whose collected works initially omitted it. In the person of Gower, the play signals a return to narrative that is also an immersion in the past. According to its narrator, the entertainment it offers is dignified by a therapeutic ‘restorative’ purpose, which is as much a complaisant gesture towards a nostalgia in its audience for the mediaeval weighting of ‘solaas’ with ‘sentence’ ⁴ as a celebration of the themes of resurrection and restoration that contribute to Gower's specification of its value: ‘The purchase is to make men glorious’ (1.9). ⁵ As such, the play's purpose is located at the intersection of morality with commodity; its value precisely specified for the audience by a character who, in his role as one of the ‘fathers’ of English poetry, implicitly designates the work also as ‘literature’, further distancing an audience from its direct experience in the theatre by relating it to a work – Confessio Amantis – which arguably initiates the historically defined canon of English writing.

 Yet this careful placing of the story in time, and the relegation of its intrinsic interest in favour of a more instrumental concern with its use as an exemplum of moral conduct working within a providential framework, demonstrably misses the dramatic impact of the play as distinct from the project of Gower, which is explicitly designated as a narrative one. The truth of the play does not lie in its carefully coordinated pattern of teleological causality, but in the very lack of verisimilitude that its limited moral purpose excuses. On the level of both the personal experience of the characters and of the larger forces working in the play, we are offered the experience of a contingent world revealed through the improbabilites of Gower's narrative vehicle: one in which natural laws, together with those of kinship and, indeed, of literary genre are rendered arbitrary when set against a cosmos whose contingency refuses them any objective guarantee. This world glances at King Lear's stormy heath, which in Pericles becomes the sea that serves as the field of action, birth, death, and apparent resurrection, all of which occur in the open sea or on shipboard in a port, looking towards the land rather than out from it. The human as well as the Earth is displaced in the system of Galileo, Shakespeare's contemporary. Blaise Pascal's evocation of the emotional repercussions of these discoveries casts light on the way in which the play renders its own cosmos transparent to inchoate forces of nature and desire:

We sail over a vast expanse, ever uncertain, ever adrift, caried to and fro. To whatever point we think to fasten ourselves it shifts and leaves us; and if we pursue it it escapes our grasp, slips away, fleeing in eternal flight. Nothing stays for us. That is our condition, natural, yet most contrary to our inclination; we have a burning desire to find a sure resting place and a final fixed basis whereon to build a tower rising to the Infinite; but our whole foundation cracks, and the earth yawns to the abyss. ⁶

The moral system of the play, related (via ‘purchase’ [1.9]) in Gower's narrative project to the taming of these inchoate forces by trade and exchange, is replaced to visionary effect by Marina's disinterested gift of herself in scene 21, which will be examined more closely below. As Gower's world of narrow predestination is seen to become increasingly inadequate to our experience of the play, the terrors of the contingent world also reveal a possibility that things could be other than they are. The play anticipates Quentin Meillassoux's observation: ‘[E]verything and every world is without reason, and is therefore capable of becoming otherwise without reason’. ⁷ Instead of becoming subject to a narrative of the way things should be, we are allowed the disruptive excess permitted by a world in which the terrors of the otherness of the universe and of ourselves are tempered by the transformative possibilities they afford. The implications of this for the play both in itself and as a work of art as well as for us as contemporary spectators will be more fully explored in the final section of this article.

Initially, Pericles elusively challenges the claim that the social regulation of kinship and desire is justifiable by a grounding in natural law. This is achieved by taking a sequence of apparently far-fetched events and allowing them to be haunted by the ghost of a sense in which they are familiar without being recognisable. Pericles’ decipherment of Antiochus’ riddle at the beginning of the play and his subsequent abhorrence of the dysfunctional family he has encountered plays a large part in the moral message of the story as recounted in Confessio Amantis. Without the framing narrative of Confessio, its function is initially merely a springboard to the plot: the riddle is fairly easy to decipher, ⁸ so it does not distinguish Pericles as particularly gifted intellectually or indeed exceptionally virtuous. Its particular importance to the play as we experience it (as opposed the story as presented to us by Gower) is only revealed gradually when the situation it embodies is essentially re-enacted as the play proceeds.

This becomes clearer when, in the scene where Marina's relationship with Pericles finally becomes known, his rejoicing acceptance of the discovery is commemorated in the words: ‘Thou that begett'st him that did thee beget […]’ (21.183). The paradoxical presentation of Pericles’ sense of regeneration here pointedly recalls the riddling presentation of incestuous family relationships in scene 1: ‘I sought a husband, in which labour / I found that kindness in a father’ (1.109–110). The relationship between these moments in the play has usually been described in redemptive terms: ‘Pericles thus transforms father-daughter incest, the subject of tragedy, into a reaffirmation of “family values”, the matter of comedy’. ⁹ However, the suggestion of an incestuous element in the relationship between Pericles and Marina leads us to reinterpret the initial scene in terms less outlandish than they appear to us today in their literal form. Pericles’ apparent ease in answering the riddle suggests that the real riddle is elsewhere. What for Oedipus is a proof of unusual insight is for Pericles a moment to suppress the knowledge he possesses:

It is enough you know, and it is fit,

What being more known grows worse, to smother it.

All love the womb that their first being bred:

Then give my tongue like leave to love my head. (1.148–51)

Pericles’ parapraxis (‘smother it’) alerts us less to the incestuous leanings of Antiochus than what would (in Freud's view) have been Pericles’ incestuous feelings towards his own mother; in other words, just as the initial scene in the play is rephrased later, the first scene comes itself to be an acceptable rearrangement of desires that cannot be entertained without a threat to the desiring self. The displacement of the mother figure to Antiochus’ marriageable daughter – for Pericles an object of legitimate desire – and that of the incestuous feelings that accompany an infant's relationship with its mother in opposition to the intrusive Oedipal father, create an inviolable moral space for Pericles that serves to maintain his role as illustration of ‘[v]irtue preserved from fell destruction's blast’ (22.112), as set forth in Gower's version of the story. The riddle comes to resemble Jean Laplanche's ‘enigmatic message’, which understands the self to be constituted from early infancy by the child's failure fully to comprehend the messages – both conscious and unconscious – of the parent while caring for it; the child consequently creates the ego to process these messages and the unconscious emerges from the residue of the meanings (often unknown to parents themselves) that their behaviour conveys. ¹⁰ Antiochus’ riddle is precisely a message whose meaning exceeds the sense that Pericles makes of it; an excess (resembling the effect of the Ghost's words on Hamlet ¹¹ ) that is repeatedly addressed in the various moments later in the play when enigmatic messages are translated, ¹² and above all in Pericles’ meeting with Marina. It also goes some way to explaining the shift from daughter to mother, which within the play happens in the case of Marina in Pericles’ eulogy of her as his begetter, and outside of it in the authors’ transposition of the figure of Thaisa, who while in Gower's story is the daughter of Pericles, serves the role of Marina's mother in the play. In this way, an ‘unconscious’ opens within the play itself where the lack of superficial verisimilitude – in contrast to other plays in the Shakespearean canon in which apparently incredible events are made to appear entirely plausible ¹³ – challenges the audience not so much to look for a comforting solution that might naturalise the improbable, but to experience the uncanny disquiet of an unspeakable truth.

The unease that is aroused by Pericles’ encounter with Antiochus is related to the suspicion in that a law of nature has been flouted and also that the very idea of a law arising from nature rather than imposed upon it by human decision has been questioned. A corollary of this is the play's displacement of legislating father figures, again in spite of the centrality of Gower, whose mediation of the play's meaning and value – consistent with his historical position in English literature – would contrastingly suggest a reinforcement of that role. The oedipal quality of the story of Pericles has been noted by many readers of the play; ¹⁴ it is clear that this aspect (in the form of the relationship of Pericles to a number of father figures) makes significant changes to the story as told by Gower's narrator in Confessio Amantis. Surrounding himself with representations of fatherhood, Pericles gropes for a social belonging that eludes him, but also fends off his own ascent to patriarchal power. He seems to wish to remain a child throughout the play, shrinking from the revelations of Antiochus’ abuses and submitting his kingdom to a more benign father figure, Helicanus, as he embarks on his voyages that begin to resemble the frantic deferral of a confrontation with the enigma of identity in which the blind activity of the sea acts both as his ally and as a figuration of the inchoate forces that compel him to construct a form of sense to take refuge from them. In terms of the play as a whole, this reinforces the effect, evoked explicitly in the Antiochus scene, of rendering meaning ambiguous rather than transparent. It is epitomised in the episode in which the fishermen recover Pericles’ father's armour just in time for him to use it to ‘appear a gentleman’ (6.184). His adoption of his father's armour might be seen as an accession to the symbolic world of the warrior king it signifies (as does the very precisely described armour of Hamlet's father), but its rusty quality and the question of whether it is this paternal signifier or in fact the egalitarian-minded fishermen who rescue him perplexes this relationship. ¹⁵ This is recalled in particular when the good but playful king Simonides is identified as a further representation of his father – ‘like to my father's picture’ (7.36). Pericles seems to covet the social approval rather than the marriage that his joust at Pentapolis secures; Thaisa's desire is far more pronounced than his. His swift disposal of Marina and his vow to remain ‘unscissored’ (13.29) until she is married therefore achieve a resonance that the original story does not accord them; he shuns anything that might threaten his uncut – uncastrated – status as a man-boy, and represses signs of his own paternity. The puzzling quality of the play is thus linked closely with the threat to coherent meaning dramatised in the protagonist's uneasy relationship with his own authority and sets up a tension with the clarity of moral sense that Gower as narrator of an exemplum would wish wishes to secure.

This requirement for closure associated with exemplary narrative comes into further conflict with a dramatic form more open to the contingencies of performance and interpretation. This is particularly evident in the role of Lysimachus in the play. It has been argued that the fear of incest – and, I would add, the uneasiness with paternity – reach beyond the initial scenes and influence the speed with which Pericles disposes of Marina in marriage, anticipating Lysimachus’ own request as if the association of Pericles and Marina should inherit the guilt by association of Antiochus and his daughter: LYSIMACHUS

[…] when you come ashore I have a suit.

PERICLES

You shall prevail, were it to woo my daughter

For it seems you have been noble to her. (21.245–7) ¹⁶

In Confessio, this may be a reasonable conclusion (apart from the failure on both occasions to consult Marina's wishes), but in Pericles Lysimachus’ character has been most vividly encountered in the brothel scenes where Marina encounters her future husband for the first time as a customer. The enhancement of Lysimachus’ character makes dramatic sense and improves on the rather colourless Athenagoras, his counterpart in Confessio, but the happy ending that this romance secures in Gower's poem fails in the play, as the dramatic interest gained in enlarging the role of Lysimachus undermines its narrator's attempt to achieve an ending that secures anything more than a superficial conformity with the ‘law of genre’. ¹⁷ This use of drama to subvert its own regulation throws the violation of its protagonist forward from the brothel scenes to the conclusion in matrimony, opening a wound in the fabric of the play consistent with its entertainment of contingency itself. In his attempt to curb its confrontation with desire, the play ends up by suggesting what it would exclude by the failure of the closure its narrator urges.

The portrayal of sex as a commodity simultaneously highlights and undermines the way in which the moral ‘purchase’ of the play depends to a considerable degree upon economies of exchange. For example, the spontaneous act of generosity represented by Pericles’ gift of corn to the starving people of Tarsus is later called in as a debt when he needs to have Marina fostered by Cleon and Dionyza, and scene 21 is bracketed by Lysimachus’ proposal to offer Marina to ‘win some words’ (21.34) of the silent Pericles, inevitably recalling the less savoury trading relationships of her previous employment, and indeed of her earlier adoption. The scene closes with Pericles’ offer of Marina to Lysimachus, alongside his request that they be allowed to ‘refresh’ themselves on shore ‘and give you gold for such provision’ (21.242–3), echoing Helicanus’ request at the start of the scene ‘that for our gold we may provision have’ (21.45). This structure of moral reciprocation would be unexceptionable were it not for such juxtapositions that align it with the trade in human bodies, and reveal the problems with a notion of ‘purchase’ (1.9) turning the play itself into a moral commodity, as completely packaged as the closure that its concluding celebration of marriage proposes for us. Each form of closure though is undermined by the way in which the dramatic action implicitly questions the drift of the narrative, exposing its inconsistencies and speaking through its lacunae.

The reassurance that the figure of Gower presents to the audience of the play has some of the allure of Walter Benjamin's ‘storyteller’, who, in a pre-literate society, offers what Benjamin calls ‘counsel’; in other words, contact with a community of shared experience based on oral narrative committed to memory: ‘The storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those that are listening to his tale’. ¹⁸

This body of knowledge is measured by the human solidarity it engenders rather than its verifiability in a scientific sense; it is the revelation of a coherent structure of reality lying behind the arbitrariness of everyday experience. Something similar applies to riddles and imprese of the kind that we see in the play. Aristotle assimilates riddles to metaphoric language and argues that the puzzling literal sense of the riddle yields when solved a sense of a coherent familiar world that metaphoric equivalences themselves suggest, encouraging a response of the type: ‘How true it is, but I missed it.’ ¹⁹ This element of knowledge-as-recognition is also central to the moral context in which the exemplum evolves. In both modes, we are offered an ultimately comforting insight (the more so if we can answer the riddles or gloss the exemplum correctly) into a world where problems can be solved by means of the intellectual resources we possess and the frames of reference that support them. It is a world where the miraculous is simply the discovery that the evasions on which our refuge in the everyday depends are actually justified by the way things are.

These sources of reassurance are nevertheless denied us in the play as we experience it. The historical Gower is far from Benjamin's vernacular storyteller, and by the time, the play was first performed such sources of popular instruction were vulnerable to the nostalgia that the stage figure of Gower exploits in his opening speech, which itself marks the distance from any truth that might have adhered to the narratives in their original social setting. Instead, we are compelled to attend to what such narratives conceal, giving precisely the sense that common experience does not yield the consolations that a model of nature based on the needs of mankind might produce. This is confirmed by the failure of Pericles to lay the ghost of incest by solving Antiochus’ riddle, and in the way that the real riddle that the play poses takes the form of the person of Marina herself.

***

The source from which Gower probably derived his story – the Gesta Romanorum – has Thaisa (Marina) asking Apollonius (Pericles) riddles in what is scene 21 of the play. When he answers correctly she submits to him, having proved himself to be a king by his superior intelligence, and she rebukes him for not bearing his losses with an equanimity befitting his insight. In other words, the riddles towards the end of Gesta counterbalance that which begins it, with both having the effect of proving the intellectual and moral prowess of Pericles. These are riddles of the kind that Aristotle analysed; puzzles that have a surprising but familiar solution. In the play, however, the enigmatic way in which Marina presents herself is not banished by the simple discovery of her relationship to Pericles, but instead redirects the focus onto her rather than her father. Her answers to Pericles’ questions are couched as paradoxes that relate to her own identity: PERICLES

[…] Pray you, turn your eyes upon me.

You’re like something that – what countrywoman?

Here of these shores?

MARINA

No, nor of any shores,

Yet I was mortally brought forth, and am

No other than I seem. (21.90–5)

PERICLES

[…] Where do you live?

MARINA

Where I am but a stranger. From the deck

You may discern the place. (21.102–04)

From being offered as a healer for Pericles’ despair, Marina becomes another riddle that Pericles is challenged to resolve. But, unlike his easy mastery in the Gesta that causes Thaisa to submit to him, Marina retains a remoteness that threatens Pericles’ assumption that women's capacity for suffering is less than men's: PERICLES

Tell thy story.

If thine considered prove the thousandth part

Of my endurance, thou art a man, and I

Have suffered like a girl. (21.123–6)

This reversal of the hierarchy of gender and prestige allows the figure of Marina an enigmatic quality that she lacks in both Confessio and Gesta, especially as she remains impassive as Pericles celebrates his discovery of her relationship to him, as if for her the presumably equally surprising course of events were already known, or of a different significance from that welcomed by her father. In posing herself as a problem, Marina makes a demand that is answered by Pericles’ aroused curiosity. In fact, his attention is initially provoked at the moment when he pushes her away: ‘Didst thou not say when I did push thee back, / Which was when I perceived thee, that thou cam'st / Of good descending?’ (21.115–17). It is as if the act of rejecting her has, by a form of ‘nachträglichkeit’, released the unrecognised significance of his flight from the traumatic encounter with Antiochus’ incest. He initially sees this as a threat to his life from Antiochus’ revenge rather than from his own anxieties: ‘Then, lest my life be cropp’d to keep you clear, / By flight I’ll shun the danger which I fear’ (1.184–5).

Yet in the later moment, the physicality of this repetition of the act of repression makes Pericles aware in a premonitory way of the identity of the person he wishes to disavow. In Confessio and Gesta, Apollonius pushes Thaisa away after she has challenged him with her questions, whereupon the violent gesture motivates her to reveal her identity directly. In contrast, Pericles discovers for himself the identity of his daughter (‘I perceived thee’) rather than receiving it as a piece of information; his process of realisation is bound up with the subsequent confrontation with the enigma of Marina.

By this token, the figure of Marina begins to achieve a complexity that is not so much one of characterisation as pertaining to the ‘ultra-dramatic’ of T. S. Eliot's formulation. ²⁰ The demand that Marina makes can be considered in relation to what Jacques Lacan has argued is the question in the infant mind posed by the desire of the mother, prompting the need for the child to fulfil in itself what is imagined to be her desire. ²¹ In facing this problem, Pericles’ own desire to remain in a child-like state, assumed from his behaviour in the play up to now, is fulfilled by his occupation of the place of the child in this relationship, which offers a slightly different inflection to the idea that Marina restores his life. It is effectively rebirth that she gives him here, rather than resurrection from the metaphorical death of his hopes; this is acknowledged when he designates her as his begetter. She has essentially come to occupy the position of his own mother; thus, rather than finally lifting the cloud of incest that has lowered over the rest of the play, it offers a nostalgic symbolic sublimation of it that is consistent with the play's mediaeval narrative frame. This, perhaps once again, fits Eliot's desire for the play to embody religious truth, reflecting as it does the words from Dante's Paradiso he would excerpt in The Dry Salvages that describe the Virgin Mary as ‘figlia del tuo figlio’ (daughter of your son). ²²

Importantly, though, for the presumed audience of Pericles, the protestant aversion to the cult of the Virgin would risk compromising the symbolic power of a figure who is at once daughter and mother of her son, dissolving any nostalgic appeal in a queasiness over idolatry. The sublimity of the association that would transform the incestuous theme into a redemptive one bears at its centre a cultural fragility that holds it perilously in equipoise between revealed truth and saccharine fantasy.

If we see scene 21 as one dramatising the rescue of Pericles by Marina, the action conforms to the spirit of Gower's prologue in gesturing towards folktale topoi used in Shakespeare's romances attributed to Shakespeare alone, and carries with it a satisfaction consistent with a literary form that, in Sarah Beckwith's view, ‘converts chance into providence’, ²³ a benign vision of the contingencies of experience harmonising into a significant and signifying totality embodied in the play by the music of the spheres that Pericles – and perhaps the audience – hears at the end of scene 21. Freud argues that the story of rescue of ‘the emperor, king or some other great man’ results from the need ‘to produce intellectual and aesthetic pleasure’ from an unconscious desire, born of the early attachment of the child to the mother, to rescue her from the father. ²⁴ When the child reaches puberty, he becomes conscious of his mother's sexuality as he discovers his own, and this arouses intuitions of his own infantile erotic attachment to her. ²⁵ The anxiety that manifests these feelings is then assuaged in the fantasy of returning in the form of a gift the life the parent gave to the child, or in other words, ‘to find satisfaction in the single wish to be his own father’. ²⁶ This recalls a central play motif of the child begetting the parent; but while it is possible to apply it to Marina it can equally apply to Pericles, thus distorting the pleasurable folktale resonance of the narrative into one in which the miraculous restoration of life to a parent is overshadowed by the more disturbing rescue of a daughter by a father who is playing out the fantasy of the male child. This would have the effect of ‘disenchanting’ the romance elements attaching to Marina alongside the religious implications compromised by cultural conditions prevailing at the time. In part, this unpleasurable reduction of romance takes as its manifestation in the play's action the less-than-happy ‘reward’ of marriage to Lysimachus that her action earns Marina – an ‘unequal match’ that Margaret Healey argues would be seen by contemporaries as coerced to the extent of inflicting syphilis upon Marina. ²⁷

If we grant that the spirit in which Pericles encounters Marina has some of the elements of a child rescuing its mother alongside that of a father encountering his daughter, it becomes clearer why the experience for Pericles takes on the lineaments of a realised fantasy: ‘This is the rarest dream that e’er dull’d sleep / Did mock sad fools withal’ (21.149–50). Despite this, the pleasurable dimension of the experience has to be sustained against the threat that such a return to the mother poses to the ego, created as it is as the result of a resistance to, or a refusal of, the desire for re-incorporation into the mother that the incest taboo polices. The son who wishes to offer his mother the gift of a child that would be like him (‘that begett'st him that did thee beget’) must grow into the adult who knows at some level that the desire for oneness with the mother excludes the reduplication of the ego that such a desire takes as its pretext. There is here, in Pericles’ words, a reproachful glance at the foolishness of one who would allow himself to be taken in by such a dream, however ‘rare’: he wants the experience to be both fantasy and reality at the same time, defending himself against a surrender that he desires by doubting the authenticity of the experience that has aroused it. At the moment of his fullest acknowledgement of Marina, he turns away from her and calls on Helicanus, a father figure, to restore her identity to the prescriptions of an order founded on paternal preeminence. The emotional impact of his experience, though identified as joy, is felt as destructive enough to require a painful repression that recalls his violent casting aside of Marina initially and the ‘smothering’ of his discovery of Antiochus’ incest:

O Helicanus, strike me, honoured sir,

Give me a gash, put me to present pain

Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me

O’erbear the shores of my mortality

And drown me with their sweetness! (21.178–82)

The riddle of his own desire posed by the meeting with Marina sends back the message of a forbidden jouissance that recasts the sea as the image of an inner life that threatens to overwhelm the ego, just as it thwarts the efforts of humanity to subdue it into a channel for commerce and empire. The need to retreat into a safely ordered patriarchal world shows that, far from being a ‘recognition scene’ for Pericles, this encounter precipitates a desperate flight from acknowledgement of a reality that resists human attempts to support structures of kinship and social preeminence by appeals to a cosmos possessing an order complicit with them. The figure of Pericles can therefore no longer be any sort of guide as to how the audience might respond to this scene; the play instead invites us to experience, via the subversion of its own structures; a risky liberation from the self-protection that motivates Pericles’ own retreat to the safety of a reality characterised by what it excludes rather than what it makes possible.

Her father's gift of marriage restores Marina to family and prestige in a way that makes the coercive dimensions of this institution manifest. By contrast, she restores the life that Pericles has abjured in the form of the gift of herself. This act of giving is, in its essence, ‘free’, in that it does not require reciprocation and is not offered in the consciousness of a preceding obligation. Though it resembles it enough to recall it for comparison, neither is it the gift that Freud describes of a life offered to reproduce its own identity. Derrida observes that, usually, the offering of a gift indeed returns a gratifying sense to the giver of ‘goodness or generosity’; it is in essence an act ‘of auto-recognition, self-approval, and narcissistic gratitude’. ²⁸ As such, the giving of gifts is indistinguishable from the pattern of debt and reciprocation that has characterised the ethical system of the play up to now, infected with the association with trade that finds its nadir in the brothel scenes where human persons are trafficked, and in Marina's marriage. Because Marina has liberated herself from this cycle of trade, and perhaps also because the recompense for the gift of life that she gives her father is so incommensurate with her action, her gift is far closer to one, which, in the deepest sense, is selfless: ‘For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity, exchange, countergift, or debt’. ²⁹ Instead of reinforcing the ego, a gift of this kind exchanges ‘auto recognition’ for a focus on the other and the extent to which the other's unknowability, especially in this scene, precipitates Pericles’ frantic salvage of his own selfhood in his recoil to Helicanus and deepens the enigma of Marina herself in the eyes of the audience.

Indeed, Marina herself shows an awareness of the threat that she represents, attempting to control the way in which she discloses herself to Pericles by a teasing roundabout approach that arouses his curiosity by denying its fullest satisfaction: ‘If I should tell / My history, it would seem like lies / Disdained in the reporting’ (21.106–8). She also carefully controls the wilder excesses of his response to the information she imparts, at times in a reproachful manner, to which he submits: MARINA

Patience, good sir,

Or here I’ll cease.

PERICLES

Nay, I’ll be patient. (21.134–5)

A complex affective texture is allowed in moments like these that can be evoked in performance, but which resists exact linguistic formulation. By hovering between invitation and denial, seduction and repression, she enacts the forces operating in Pericles himself while allowing her speech to occupy at once the complex of mother, child, and lover, uncannily turning her father's fantasy into performance while allowing the enigma of herself to be suggested in its interstices. She encourages him to abandon the limitations in his perception, leading him away from an anxious pusillanimity that demands ‘fact and reason’ into a receptivity that amounts to a risky surrender of his own sceptical guardedness: PERICLES

How, a king's daughter,

And called Marina?

MARINA

You said you would believe me,

But not to be a troubler of your peace,

I will end here. (21.139–42)

Her concern for his sanity takes the form of a reprimand in which we can perhaps hear the voice of the child who had been abandoned by her father to a murderous fate taking the tone of Freud's male child who returns life to his father in a spirit of outraged reproach. On being asked to supply her mother's name, something similar is audible in Marina's response to her father's insistence on narrow verification: ‘Is it no more / To be your daughter than to say my mother's name?’ (21.197–8). Instead of opening himself to the miraculous affirmative possibilities that this encounter affords, Pericles clings the shreds of a reductive legalism that his daughter undermines by refusing to dissolve the riddle that gives her life into a solution in keeping with her father's thirst for the knowable.

Some of the currents that scene 21 releases re-emerge in the final scene where Pericles and Marina encounter Thaisa, reappearing like Marina after apparent death. In response to finding his wife alive, Pericles again looks for the lesser proof rather than imagining the greater miracle: CERIMON

[…] Early one blustering morn this lady was

Thrown upon this shore. I op’d the coffin

Found there rich jewels; recover’d her, and plac’d her

Here in Diana's temple.

PERICLES

May we see them? (22.42–5)

The astonishing fact that she was revived is passed over by Pericles, his allusion to ‘them’ momentarily disorienting until we realise that its reference is three clauses back in Cerimon's sentence. When finally he is convinced (again, on Thaisa's pointing out his wedding ring) his response is a prayer: ‘You [gods] shall do well, / That on the touching of her lips I may / Melt and no more be seen’ (22.63–5). His appeal to the gods to afford him an intimacy with his wife that only she can consent to indulge draws attention to the fact that he is not asking for death here, but a state more like the infant's invisibility to itself before consciousness is fully developed; the appeal to the gods can be seen as an acknowledgement of the guilt that might accompany such a desire when linked to an erotic melting. Then, addressing her directly for the first time, he figuratively invites her once more to be buried alive: ‘O come, be buried / A second time within these arms’ (22.65–6). The metaphor, which reverses the roles in the previous petition, would convey a cosy tenderness were it not for the sea-burial that it cannot help recalling, and combines an acceptance of Thaisa with an assertion of power that revises the desire expressed before, as if he is remembering his social role as well as inadvertently recalling his responsibility for their first separation.

Marina, on the other hand, desires incorporation into her mother: ‘My heart / Leaps to be gone into my mother's bosom’ (22.66–7). She betrays an understandable desire ‘to be gone’ – to escape her marital fate, giving her heart to her mother rather than having it taken by Lysimachus at her father's behest – a passion for absence reflected in her silence for the rest of the play. More than this, perhaps, she expresses a desire that things should be other than they are, by playing another variation on the play's theme of rebirth; by literally becoming one with her mother, rather than simply guessing the riddle of the mother's desire that she performatively posed to her father in the previous scene, she returns the life to her mother that chance snatched away in the storm and Dionyza attempted to steal by murder. Avoiding the defensive idealisation of childhood in later life by such characters as Leontes and Polixenes in The Winter's Tale, she wishes for a different life entirely by placing her depersonalised heart again within her mother, free from any suggestion that the issue of such a pregnancy would narcissistically reproduce the life of the person who offered it.

***

What for Pericles is an opportunity to restore his dynasty, put to sleep the aftershocks of his encounter with Antigonus and allay his guilt in what would have led to the murder of his daughter, has a larger range of possibility for an audience. The figure of Marina has what Maurice Blanchot would have called a ‘fascination’ that is the more distinct through Pericles’ resistance to being captivated by it. This quality of fascination, which Blanchot calls ‘passion for the image’, ³⁰ arises from the way in which the image simultaneously affirms perception by appearing to allow us control over the reality it appears to resemble, while revealing the extent to which that reality is merely the appearance of an object presented as absent. The objectivity of the world that our masterful gaze appeared to guarantee is, disquietingly, therefore revealed as a projection rather than as immutable fact. However, the ambivalence of the image also allows a liberation from our subjection to a world of would-be facts and to the temporality that weaves them into a history; the world instead is offered like Marina's gift of herself, gazing at us in a way that reduces selfhood to a fiction produced to defend the self from the contingency of absolute otherness. Blanchot relates this to the maternal gaze: ‘Perhaps the force of the maternal figure receives intensity from the very force of fascination, and one might say then, that if the mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives altogether in fascination's gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment’. ³¹ The quality of fascination embodied in Marina emerges from a realisation of the potential of the play as performance rather than narrative text, permitting what we have called the haunting of the play by an insurgent otherness that exposes the scandal of its ending and opens an abyss at its centre that releases a significance quite at odds with the familiar quality of the coherence generated by the narrative worldview.

For Gower, Marina's purpose in the narrative is the production of that ‘intellectual and aesthetic pleasure’, which Freud saw as the province of literature in the creation of romance. ³² Yet what the play offers us in the person of Marina is closer to a version of the aesthetic that Lacan sees as being profoundly related to the infant's oneness with the mother that is later consigned to the unconscious by the incest taboo ³³ that troubles Pericles, and which he attempts to allay as he turns from her to Helicanus and Lysimachus. Marina's otherness in the play – her transcendence of the narrative and moral aims of Gower, the way she avoids being pinned down to a role, a place or even a gender, and her ability to resist death and return in spite of the laws of probability – gives her the quality of ‘the other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent’. ³⁴ The form that such a representation takes is employed by art itself that places itself at once on the margins and at the centre of human motivation, giving access to the origin of desire through rifts in the sublimated representations of it that constitute the pleasure principle. ³⁵ Marina's beauty is of a kind that brings its spectators into confrontation with the evasions that make up the self and hint at the ecstasy of their undoing. The tension between the narrative and dramatic elements of the play are productive of the rifts in its representative process and allow the drama to exceed the will of Gower who ultimately is discovered to be one of its characters rather than a source of extra-textual auctoritée. In demoting its narrator, the play anticipates its anonymous status by displacing the author figure as well, committing it to the care of its myriad performers who are thus invited to recreate, rather than to recover, the sense of this orphaned work. This freedom in dispossession wrests the play in turn from a saturation in the historical circumstances that brought it into existence.

The challenge to credibility that the play makes, therefore, is not so much a wanton ‘effort to dissociate the popular theatre from its cultural contexts’, ³⁶ but an opportunity for an actors’ theatre to turn the means by which the true and the possible are established within a culture against themselves, creating a space in the familiar for a sense of miraculous possibility out of the abyss of contingency. Gower's effort to derive a providential pattern from the bizarre events of his story – a teleology governed by a marketable moral outcome – is undermined by its failure to match its project with the genre that articulates it. Instead, when his encounter with Marina exposes the fragility of Pericles’ hold upon his place in the hierarchical world of verifiable truth, we are offered the transformative experience of what Blanchot calls the ‘pas au-delà’, the step that traverses its own refusal by undoing the linguistic terms in which it is coded. ³⁷ Linguistic and symbolic structures that supposedly reflect a universal order are deprived of their authority when, in spite of Gower's intentions, they are seen to be guaranteed by a paternal precedence that is compromised in different ways throughout the play. The enigma of Marina unpicks the language of her father's – and indeed, the play's – flight from the implications of its initial riddle through a therapeutic attentiveness that, refused by her father, is made available to the audience as the play opens towards them in its refusal of closure through its capacity for infinite renewal though performance. In effect, the play allows us to experience a contingent world that resists our temptation to turn accident into destiny and then to bind each other to live within its prescripts. The terrors of contingency haunt the play as a modality of the forbidden ecstasy that Marina allows to be glimpsed. However, the risks of contingency allow for the embrace of the impossible – if possibility consists merely in what is conceivable according to a given understanding of the world. It is not so much an alternative, more utopian world to the one in which we live but the other of that world, which undoes the accustomed terminology that will always limit what can be desired. Pericles allows us to conceive the world as if things could be other than they are; it is a possibility that Marina herself embraces in desiring to be incorporated into her mother, allowing herself for a brief moment the freedom that she offered her father by playing the role that Thaisa restores to her. The excess of potential that a purely contingent world offers gives a glimpse of the impossible becoming possible in a reality that Blanchot evokes when describing the work of art: ‘[T]he work is always original and at all moments a beginning. It is thus that it appears ever new, the mirage of the future's inaccessible truth’. ³⁸

Just as the atemporal quality of this experience makes the refuge of nostalgia impossible, so this future is not one that can only be conceived within the terms in which our present reality is understood, but a sudden access to that which is refused by the human refuge of time and causality where objects (like the sea-borne suit of armour) betray the effort to arrest them into a meaning that erases their capacity to surprise and disturb us. For an audience today, this Copernican displacement of human centrality might, for example, suggest an experience of the world no longer defined by its assumed subjection to the needs of one species. We cannot live in such a dimension of infinite possibility but its absence, ‘more distant than the stars and nearer than the eye’ ³⁹ haunts this play and alerts us to the poverty of our self-defence, allowing us relief from the masochistic disavowal of Pericles in a messianic intuition afforded by the work of art. The accident of the play itself, coming in its tattered state authorless to us is a contingent reminder of the contingencies it occasions, and of the gamble that this and any attempt to think it out is bound to lose, depriving us of the alibi of Shakespearean genius to link it to a literary canon that the play itself, ontologically and thematically, disowns.