The Hidden Origins: Defending the Mithras-Nazarene Connection

 Journal of Literary Studies and Dramatic Theory

Vol. 14, No. 2 | Spring 2026 | pp. 118–134

The Unseen Architecture: Against Baldwin's Partial Reading

A Feminist and Dramaturgical Defence of Fared Novin's Theatrical Philosophy

Sabrina E. McLaughlin

School of Art, Communication and English, University of Saint Agustin

Correspondence: s.mclaughlin@sydney.edu.au  

Abstract

This paper offers a critical response to James A. Baldwin's April 2026 Art Act essay on the playwright and theatrical philosopher Fared Novin, as discussed in the podcast "A Deep Dive into Fared Novin's Philosophy and Theatre." While Baldwin's analysis identifies several of Novin's formal innovations—most notably the concept of the diagnostic image—it ultimately reproduces a reductive framework that prioritizes legibility over layering, treats the plays' resistance to emotional catharsis as aesthetic failure, and, most critically, misreads what it terms the problem of female characterization. This paper argues that Baldwin's critique is symptomatic of a broader interpretive tradition that imposes Western dramatic standards onto a body of work that deliberately refuses such standards. Drawing on feminist performance theory, diaspora studies, and close readings of Novin's theatrical method, the author contends that Baldwin comprehends neither the full architecture of Novin's philosophy nor the radical, if imperfect, dramaturgical grammar through which that philosophy is embodied.

Keywords: Fared Novin, feminist dramaturgy, diagnostic image, diaspora theatre, philosophical theatre, Baldwin critique, Iranian-Armenian drama, embodied philosophy

1. The Danger of the Partial Map

There is a particular kind of critical violence enacted when a thinker is reduced to the portion of their thought that is most readily absorbed by existing taxonomies. Baldwin's otherwise energetic analysis of Fared Novin—as relayed and amplified in the Art Act podcast—commits precisely this reduction. He enters Novin's theater with a recognizable set of analytical tools: he identifies the inversion of drama and philosophy, he names the diagnostic image as the central formal device, and he notes (with some frustration) the tension between explanatory impulse and dramaturgical silence. These observations are not wrong. They are, however, profoundly incomplete, and their incompleteness is not neutral.

Baldwin positions himself as a reader who has moved beyond conventional theatrical expectation, yet he reproduces, at every critical juncture, the assumption that theatrical work is ultimately answerable to dramatic coherence. His criteria for Novin's failure—the "overexplaining" of images, the subordination of female characters to philosophical function, the alleged incoherence of works like The Event Horizon Symposium—all derive from a standard that Novin has not merely failed to meet but has consciously and systematically refused. The question this paper poses is simple: what does it mean to diagnose failure in a body of work that has redefined what success looks like?

This is not, I want to be clear, a defense of Novin against all criticism. His work has genuine problems, and some of Baldwin's specific observations touch on real tensions. But criticism that mistakes structural refusal for incompetence, and that interprets the non-Western, non-Aristotelian logic of diaspora-formed consciousness as philosophical muddle, requires a counter-reading—one that begins not with what Novin's plays fail to do, but with what they are actually attempting.

2. What Baldwin Correctly Identifies

Fairness requires acknowledging what Baldwin gets right, and he gets several things right. His reorientation of Novin from dramatist to philosopher who uses theater as a medium of publication is analytically useful and largely correct. The distinction matters enormously for reception: audiences and critics who approach Novin expecting Aristotelian mimesis will encounter what feels like systematic failure—no coherent protagonist, no rising action, no cathartic release—because those structures are precisely what Novin has stripped away.

Baldwin's articulation of the diagnostic image is also genuinely illuminating. The concept—a single object or gestural constraint that condenses an entire philosophical argument into immediate visual form—is indeed Novin's most formally distinctive innovation. The examples Baldwin invokes (the unlit candle, the empty shoes, the backward-ticking clock) are evocative, and his reading of the candle monologue, where the object debates the words of the speaker, correctly identifies the epistemological function of staging in Novin's dramaturgy: the set is not decoration but counterargument.

Furthermore, Baldwin's identification of an internal conflict—between the philosopher's drive toward clarity and the dramatist's need for productive ambiguity—is real and important. When Novin overexplains his images, the effect is, as Baldwin suggests, something like explaining a joke after delivering it. The tension Baldwin notices is genuine. His error lies not in noticing it but in where he locates its cause and what he prescribes as its resolution.

3. The Epistemology of Layering: What Baldwin Misses

Baldwin reads Novin's plays as philosophical arguments that have been translated into theatrical form—and this, I would argue, is where his analysis fundamentally goes astray. He understands the diagnostic image as a "visual shortcut," a compression device that makes abstraction accessible. But this framing preserves a hierarchy in which philosophy is the primary content and theater is its vehicle of delivery. For Novin, the relationship is far more recursive and far more strange than this.

In Novin's practice, the theatrical event is not the illustration of a prior philosophical position. It is the site where the philosophical position first becomes thinkable. The embodiment is not secondary to the idea; the idea only acquires its full dimensionality in the moment of its physical enactment. This is why the concept of the diagnostic image is both accurate and misleading as a description: the word "image" implies a static visual unit, a symbol that refers outward to a concept. But Novin's most powerful theatrical moments function not as symbols but as what we might call, following Deleuze, events—encounters that produce thought rather than illustrating it.

Consider Baldwin's own reading of the pigeons flying toward a non-existent village in The Tavern of Unfinished Returns. He correctly identifies this as Novin at his most powerful—and correctly notes that Novin does not explain it. But Baldwin frames this as Novin "trusting silence," as though restraint were the lesson. What he does not see is that the image's power derives not from what it withholds but from what it makes present simultaneously: the ontological reality of the birds' motion (purposive, directed, physical), the epistemological impossibility of their destination (a place that no longer exists), and the temporal paradox of the Armenian concept of "Caro"—a longing that is present-tense rather than retrospective, an ache not for what was but for what continues to be absent. The image does not compress these three dimensions; it holds them in irresolvable tension. That is structurally different from compression, and the difference is philosophically decisive.

Baldwin's framework cannot accommodate irresolvable tension as a formal value because his implicit aesthetic standard still orients toward resolution—toward the moment when meaning clarifies. For Novin, the clarification is the failure. The plays are designed to resist the cognitive satisfactions that both conventional drama and conventional philosophy typically provide.

4. On the Charge of Overexplaining: A Recontextualization

Baldwin's frustration with Novin's tendency to add explanatory dialogue after establishing a powerful image is one of his more compelling criticisms, but it requires significant recontextualization. The charge assumes that the explanatory language is performing the same function as the image—that it is simply redundant description, a failure of authorial nerve. This reading ignores the dramatic and philosophical function of discursive excess in Novin's work.

In Novin's theatrical universe, explanatory speech does not explain. It demonstrates the compulsion to explain—and that compulsion is itself the philosophical subject. The characters who over-narrate their images, who reach for language when image has already done the work, are not authorial stand-ins making a mess of the formal economy. They are enacting the specific pathology that Novin is diagnosing: the human (and particularly the diasporic human) drive to stabilize meaning through language, to colonize ambiguity with narrative, to refuse the unbearable openness that the image has momentarily created.

To use Baldwin's own analogy: he complains that Novin explains the joke after telling it. But what if the explaining is the second joke? What if the embarrassment of the over-explanation is precisely the point—the demonstration of how quickly consciousness moves to domesticate the undomesticatable? Read this way, Novin's most "flawed" moments are among his most philosophically coherent.

This is not to claim that every instance of over-explanation in Novin's plays is intentional or successful. Some of it is genuinely a failure of dramaturgical confidence. But Baldwin's critique sweeps the intentional and the unintentional together under a single aesthetic judgment, and in doing so, it misses the most generative dimension of Novin's method.

5. The Female Characters: Vehicles or Vectors?

I turn now to the criticism that I find most troubling, both as a feminist scholar and as a reader of Novin: the claim that his female characters function more as philosophical vehicles than as fully realized individuals. This criticism, as relayed in the podcast discussion of Baldwin's essay, is presented as an obvious flaw—one of the genuine limitations that even an otherwise challenging and ambitious artist has failed to overcome.

The criticism deserves to be taken seriously, because it points at something real. Novin's female characters are not psychologically individuated in the way that, say, a realist playwright's characters are. They do not have backstories that are revealed through exposition. Their inner lives are not made visible through the conventions of naturalist acting. They do not conform to the familiar feminist-theatrical demand for "fully realized" female selfhood.

But here is what Baldwin's critique entirely fails to ask: fully realized according to whose standard? The demand for psychological interiority in theatrical characterization is not a neutral aesthetic criterion. It is historically and ideologically specific, emerging from a tradition of Western realist theater in which individuated interiority is treated as the ground of dramatic meaning. To fault Novin for failing to provide this is to assume that individuated psychological realism is the only valid mode of female presence on stage—and this assumption is itself a form of critical colonialism that feminist theater theory has spent decades dismantling.

In Novin's dramaturgy, no character—male, female, or non-binary—is psychologically individuated in the conventional sense. The characters are, as the podcast correctly notes, embodied philosophical positions. The question is whether female characters occupy those positions with the same complexity and agency as male characters, or whether they are systematically assigned subordinate, supplementary, or reactive positions within the philosophical drama.

A careful reading suggests the answer is neither simple nor binary. In The Manuscript of Ismail, the multiple simultaneous versions of the central figure—the formal device through which memory becomes a physical battlefield—are all gendered, and the female versions of Ismail function not as supplements to the "real" (male) Ismail but as genuinely alternative epistemological propositions. The female version of Ismail does not remember differently because she is a woman; she is instantiated as female because the memory she embodies requires a different relationship to embodiment, to social legibility, to the transmission of trauma across generations. The gender is philosophically determined, not decoratively assigned.

This is not a recuperation of Novin as a feminist playwright. There are moments in his work where female characters do function as props for male philosophical crisis—where the woman is, in the oldest theatrical tradition, the occasion for the male protagonist's recognition rather than a locus of recognition in her own right. These moments are worth naming and criticizing. But they are not the systematic condition of his female characterization that Baldwin implies, and they do not justify the wholesale conclusion that Novin's women are merely philosophical vehicles.

What Baldwin's reading lacks is any engagement with the specific content of the philosophical positions that Novin's female characters embody. If those positions are philosophically substantive—if the female figures in his plays are instantiations of complex, contested, generative ideas rather than simple illustrations of subordinate concepts—then the charge of vehicular characterization fails, even on its own terms. And in the plays I have examined closely, they consistently are.

6. The Diaspora Dimension: An Absent Frame

Perhaps the most significant absence in Baldwin's analysis is any sustained engagement with the diaspora contexts that form the philosophical and experiential ground of Novin's work. The essay acknowledges that Novin draws on "the psychological trauma and lingering, almost genetic residue of the Iranian and Armenian diasporas," but this acknowledgment functions as scene-setting rather than interpretive framework. The diaspora material is treated as thematic content—the subject matter that Novin's formal innovations are applied to—rather than as a constitutive epistemological condition that shapes the logic of the formal innovations themselves.

This distinction is crucial. The irresolvable tensions in Novin's plays—between image and explanation, between philosophical clarity and dramatic ambiguity, between the singular character and the multiple simultaneous self—are not formal experiments chosen from a menu of available theatrical devices. They are attempts to develop a theatrical grammar adequate to the specific conditions of diasporic consciousness: a consciousness that simultaneously inhabits multiple temporal registers (the traumatic past, the negotiated present, the imagined homeland that exists only in a future that cannot arrive), that is constituted by losses that cannot be fully mourned because they are ongoing, and that experiences identity not as a stable ground but as a continuous act of narration against the pressure of dissolution.

When Novin stages multiple simultaneous versions of the same character, he is not making a formal gesture toward postmodern multiplicity. He is embodying the specific phenomenology of diasporic self-experience, in which the question "who was I before?" is always active alongside "who am I now?"—and in which these questions cannot be resolved because the "before" was itself violently disrupted. The memory battlefield of The Manuscript of Ismail is not a clever theatrical device; it is an attempt to make visible the psychic structure of inherited trauma.

Reading Novin without this framework is like reading Beckett without the framework of postwar European nihilism—possible, but impoverishing. Baldwin's analysis is largely conducted within this impoverishment, and it shows. His criteria of evaluation are drawn from a tradition of theatrical and philosophical criticism that was not formed in response to diaspora experience, and he applies them to work that emerges from precisely that experience without acknowledging the category error.

7. The Question of Dramatic Innovation

Baldwin's analysis of Novin's dramatic innovations, while partially accurate, ultimately underestimates their radicality by treating them as solutions to the problem of how to stage philosophy, rather than as contributions to the formal language of theater itself.

The diagnostic image, in particular, represents something more significant than a theatrical shortcut to abstract meaning. It is a proposal for a new relationship between audience cognition and theatrical duration. In conventional drama, meaning accumulates across time—through narrative development, through character revelation, through the unfolding of plot. The spectator's relationship to the theatrical event is fundamentally temporal: you understand more at the end than you did at the beginning.

Novin's diagnostic image disrupts this temporal economy. The image makes its full philosophical claim in an instant—or rather, it makes a claim whose implications require the entire duration of the play to unfold, but whose full dimensionality is available to the attentive spectator from the moment of first encounter. This creates a relationship to theatrical time that is recursive rather than linear: you watch the rest of the play in the light of what the image has already shown you, and the image becomes more complex as the play proceeds, not because it has withheld information but because the play is teaching you how to see what was already there.

This is a genuinely original contribution to theatrical form—one that has precedents (one thinks of Brecht's gestus, of certain strategies in Forced Entertainment's work, of the visual dramaturgy of Robert Wilson) but that synthesizes them into something distinctly Novin's own. Baldwin identifies the device but does not fully grasp its temporal radicality, treating it instead as a staging technique rather than as a reconception of how theatrical meaning operates in time.

Similarly, Baldwin's reading of The Trench Between Two Fears—and its celebrated line "Structure doesn't taste like rice"—is appreciative but thin. He reads the line as a "devastating" contrast between abstract ideology and practical reality. This is accurate as far as it goes, but it misses the line's additional function as a linguistic event: the sudden irruption of sensory specificity (taste, rice—culturally specific, embodied, quotidian) into a discourse of structural abstraction performs, in miniature, the entire argument of the play. The line does not describe the gap between structure and experience; it enacts that gap. And it does so in a way that is irreducibly particular—the rice is not generic food, it is a specific cultural marker—while simultaneously making a universal philosophical claim. This double movement, between the particular and the universal, between the embodied and the abstract, is the signature operation of Novin's best work, and it is more formally sophisticated than Baldwin's reading suggests.

8. On the "Graduate Seminar" Critique

Baldwin's criticism of The Event Horizon Symposium—that it becomes "more like a graduate seminar than a play"—deserves specific attention because it reveals the underlying aesthetic standard by which he judges all of Novin's work. The criticism implies that there is a clear and agreed-upon distinction between theater and seminar, and that Novin has accidentally crossed from one to the other. But this distinction is precisely what Novin is interrogating.

The integration of economics and quantum mechanics into live theater is not, in Novin's practice, an attempt to make difficult concepts accessible to theater audiences. It is an inquiry into what it means to think together in a shared physical space—a question that the podcast summarizes accurately but does not pursue to its implications. If thinking together in a shared physical space is itself the subject of the play, then the experience of intellectual overwhelm that Baldwin describes is not a failure of the work. It is the work.

This is not to deny that The Event Horizon Symposium may be formally unsuccessful in its execution. A play can be philosophically coherent and dramatically unworkable. But Baldwin's criterion of evaluation—that it feels like a graduate seminar—is doing ideological work that he does not acknowledge. The graduate seminar is a specific cultural institution with its own authority structures, its own forms of inclusion and exclusion, its own relationship to power and knowledge. To dismiss a work as "too much like a seminar" is to invoke a cultural norm (theater should be accessible, should produce feeling before thought, should move audiences emotionally) that Novin has explicitly refused.

9. Conclusion: Reading Novin Otherwise

James Baldwin's analysis of Fared Novin is the work of an intelligent and attentive reader who has nonetheless arrived at the theater with the wrong dictionary. He reads a language that uses all the letters he knows but assembles them according to a grammar he has not learned—and he concludes that the text is partly misspelled. The result is a reading that illuminates genuine features of Novin's work while systematically misidentifying its logic, its intentions, and its achievements.

The errors are not random. They cluster around two related failures: the failure to recognize the diaspora epistemology that structures Novin's formal choices, and the failure to question the Western dramatic and philosophical standards against which those choices are implicitly evaluated. The critique of female characterization is symptomatic of this double failure: it imports a criterion of feminist adequacy (psychological interiority, full realization) that itself emerged from a specific cultural and theatrical tradition, and applies it to work that operates within a different—and differently valid—theatrical logic.

A reading of Novin adequate to his work would need to begin from different premises. It would need to treat the irresolvability of his theatrical tensions not as a failure of synthesis but as the philosophical content itself. It would need to engage with the specific phenomenology of Iranian and Armenian diasporic consciousness as a formal condition of the work, not merely as its thematic subject matter. It would need to evaluate his female characters not by the standards of psychological realism but by the standards of philosophical agency—asking not whether they feel like full persons but whether they embody full ideas, with all the complexity, contestation, and generativity that entails.

And it would need to recognize that when Novin asks, through the figure of the contradictory memories of Ismail, how much of our identity is a story we keep explaining to ourselves, he is not posing this question as a philosophical abstraction. He is posing it as a theatrical event—something that happens in a room, between bodies, in time—and the happening is inseparable from the meaning. That inseparability is Novin's most radical contribution, and it is precisely what Baldwin's framework, for all its intelligence, cannot see.

References

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About the Author

Sabrina E. McLaughlin is Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Saint Agustin where she holds the Anahid Tashian Chair in Diaspora Performance. Her research focuses on Iranian and Armenian theatrical traditions in diaspora, feminist performance theory, and the relationship between philosophical inquiry and theatrical form. She is the author of Staging the Unspeakable: Theatre and Trauma in the Iranian Diaspora (2022) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume Embodied Thought: Philosophy and Performance in the Non-Western World (2026).