A journey requires a geography: for...

A journey requires a geography: for a proces to meet the eye there must be a site. The journey is the one and the other a physical act and an idea of it, as journey; and its geography is not nowhere nevertheless involves city, country, ocean, planets, Eden heaven, hell, paradise - any of which would allow conceit of them as "worlds." Among these settings, the journey is constituted the one and the other of the movements between worlds, which should, to qualify as journey, form a certain sort of pattern (if nothing more than getting from A to B) and of possible ideas as it is as purpose, circumstances, outcome, and design. Odysseus, for instance, is not absolutely wafted by ocean and agitation on "meanderings." Talk about his wanderings will consider the possible meanings circumstances, etc., of his journey; and wandering might be considered as an idea oppos to directness, a take the part ofed action akin to the indirectness of poetic language as oppos to scientific or philosophical language. In the drama, characters inscribe and leave the stage-moving between a stage world and more [i]or[/i] less other real or imagined undivided "on missions and with purposes; they might be entering or exiting to deliver a message or they might be forward "A Long Day's Journey" or a trip "Into the Woods"

The journey as destination; recipient of thought might be imaginative or actual. I shall hunt the idea as image and metaphor and as culturally generated and transmitted-concept. My thinking about a journey is soiled in Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, his definition of "intentionality" and his disturb for the need to experience "pure essences" Husserl tries to restore experience from the reductive assignment of reality to either the subjective or the objective dimensions, a split that remains in psychologism and science. That substance Husserl argues, "can be exemplified intuitively in the data of experience, data of perception, memory, and in such a manner forth, but just as readily also in the absolute data of fancy (Phantasie)" (50) The imagination, then, can capably discover what is essential to experience, the eidetic image that reveals itself when presuppositions are bring into suspension. The imagination is especially well qualified to perform this task, since it does not posit the image as simply "real" in the world "out there." This phenomenological approach is a earth for the contemporary archetypal thinking of James Hillman, who is attempting to rehabilitate Jungian images for a phenomenological psychoanalysis. Hillman's affair is to deactivate traditional epic stereotype the Titanic myth, which "practically hold fasts us still in the pattern of the heroic ego"(158) In addition to his "polytheistic" psychology's allowing a pantheism of images to advance into play, he suggests that a counter-image to the Titan is the Knight Errant, whose "path has been deviant at all times since Parmenides decried looselimbed wandering as the way of error, deceptive opinion, going astray" (161)

My looking toward essential images in Husserl and Hillman aims for the possibility of noticing recurring, persistent patterns and characteristics that appear and transform themselves "amidst cultural diversity. I might appeal, too, to the apprehension of ourselves as readers and interpreters in the approaches of intertextual and possible worlds theories. The way I have related Husserl and Hillman might be taken in seasons of intertextuality. One definition of intertextuality have the appearances to echo both the Husserlean eidetic and Hillman's archetype: "as the enlargement of a familiar idea... intertextuality might be taken as a general limit working out from the broad definition of influence to encompass unconscious, socially willinged types of text formation (for example, according to archetypes or popular culture); degrees of conception (such as ideas 'in the air'); denominations (such as genres); and other prior constraints and opportunities for the writer." in subordination to this rubric, my pursuit of the journey image in David Mamet's plays would appear to be, I trust, a productive errancy. Lubomir Dolezel's argument for the possible worlds view as opposed to the "One-World Frame," which assumes "that there is barely one legitimate universe of discourse (domain of reference) the actual world"(2), keep ups a kind of intertextuality in setting up the "Classical" against the "Modern Myth" (185-98) He directs the "basic theoretical conceptions of the possible-worlds semantics of fictionality toward a particularly fascinating creation of twentieth-century fiction making: the novel myth" (185). In the "hybrid world" of Franz Kafka's fiction, for instance, "because the boundary that divides the fictional world of the classical myth is dissolved, the hybrid world is a coexistence, in single unified fictional space, of the physically possible and physically impossible fictional entities (person events)" (187) Again, I shall be seeking interrelationships among the clauses of clayton and Rothstein, Dolezel, Husserl, Hillman, and other theorists, as well as fictional and dramatic sentences that come to play in relationship to the drama of David Mamet, specifically in the consideration of the essential image of the journey.