The World In Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept by Matthew Kaiser (review)

Late in Matthew Kaiser’s vivid and original study, The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept, he tells us of the resistance he has encountered at academic gatherings where he has presented his work. Confronted with his vision of “play’s totalizing concept,” of the “pervasiveness of this trope in Victorian representations of modernity,” Kaiser’s colleagues “attempt to name some Victorian category … which they insist is intrinsically antithetical to play, something that proves not all the world, surely, was or could be viewed as ‘in play,’ a toe-hold of not-play on my slippery slope, an ember of unplay in my merciless storm, some remnant of antiplay that escapes the sweep of my net” (147). The category most often proposed, Kaiser tells us, is “earnestness,” a “Victorian beachhead against which play impotently crashes, the category … that reminds play at every turn of its mortality. A vampire at dawn, my little world of play, I am told, bursts into flames of earnestness” (148). These lines are drawn from the final chapter on Oscar Wilde, and it is Wilde, I think, who serves Kaiser as his closest guide in his thinking about play. Wilde had a few choice things to say about earnestness, of course. From A Woman of No Importance (1893): “One should never take sides in anything, Mr. Kelvil. Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterward, and the human being becomes a bore” (Wilde qtd. in Kaiser 148). Kaiser is not a bore, as I hope my quotes from him indicate. He has a gift for phrase-making, and his study is surprising in many ways. But Wilde also best exemplifies a strategy toward the “totalizing concept” of play that Kaiser adopts and admires in his central figures—a refusal of the structure of “taking sides,” a participation in play that is also a refusal of the terms of play. Kaiser calls Wilde a “spoilsport” at one point (8), but really he is what philosopher Bernard Suits calls a “trifler”: someone who plays along, just doesn’t play to win (The Grasshopper: Games, Life, and Utopia [University of Toronto Press, 1980], 44).

The book has an introduction, followed by an overview in the first chapter where Kaiser lays out his concept of a world “in play.” What follows are four “portraits,” a pleasingly various combination of nautical melodrama, Emily Brontë, John Muir and Robert Louis Stevenson in California, and Wilde. The four portraits are united by Kaiser’s conviction that these bodies of work show a complex resistance to the rhetorics of play and game (Rudyard Kipling, for example, would not be a candidate for a Kaiserian “portrait”). At its largest reach, The World in Play has a conceptual argument, and an historical one. Conceptually, Kaiser suggests that play is not a thing, no evolutionary bequest or anthropological given. Nor is it a genus of which “games” would be the more fixed and codified species (16). Rather, play is an immanent representational resource; it “absorbs” all counterconcepts, as Eugen Fink puts it in a phrase quoted by Kaiser, “by representing them” (15). In this sense, play “has no outside” (4). “A world in play is not the same thing as a world in which everything is straightforwardly ludic,” writes Kaiser. “Rather, it is a world in which nothing is immune to the infectious logic of play, in which everything—death, war, earnestness—has the capacity in theory to be exposed to play, overwritten by it, infiltrated by it, represented by it. An unsettling ludic potentiality lurks within the logic of modernity” (9). This last sentence broaches the historical, or periodizing, aspect of Kaiser’s argument: “Play triggers in the Victorians existential and metahistorical anxiety, endless unsettling reflections upon the condition of modern life. While the Victorians were not the first ludic subjects or the first to perceive the world as structured by play, they were the first to leap...