Against Interpretation (19 page)

As a piece of cultural diagnostics, Abel’s book is in the grand continental tradition of meditation on the tribulations of subjectivity and self-consciousness, inaugurated by the romantic poets and Hegel and continued by Nietzsche, Spengler, the early Lukács, and Sartre. Their problems, their terminology loom behind Abel’s spare, untechnical essays. Where the Europeans are heavy, he travels light, without footnotes; where they write tomes, he has written a set of blunt essays; and where they are gloomy, he is crisply sanguine. In short, Abel has expounded a continental argument in the American manner: he has written the first American-style existentialist tract. His argument is clean-cut, pugnacious, prone to slogans, oversimplified—and, in the main, absolutely right. His book does not plumb the windy depths (but they are depths) of Lucien Goldmann’s great work on Pascal, Racine, and the idea of tragedy,
Le Dieu Caché,
which I would guess Abel has learned from. But its virtues, not the least of which are directness and brevity, are formidable. To an English-speaking audience unfamiliar with the writing of Lukács, Goldmann, Brecht, Duerrenmatt,
et al.,
the very problems that Abel raises should come as a revelation. Abel’s book is far more stimulating than George Steiner’s
Death of Tragedy
and Martin Esslin’s
The Theater of the Absurd.
Indeed, no recent English or American writer on the theater has done anything as interesting or sophisticated.

As I have suggested, the diagnosis presupposed in
Metatheatre
—that modern man lives with an increasing burden of subjectivity, at the expense of his sense of the reality of the world—is not new. Nor do works for the theater constitute the main texts which disclose this attitude and its correlative idea, reason as self-manipulation and role-playing. The two greatest documents of this attitude are Montaigne’s
Essays
and Machiavelli’s
The Prince
—both manuals of strategy which assume a gulf between the “public self” (the role) and the “private self” (the true self). The value of Abel’s book lies in the forthright application of this diagnosis to the drama. He is quite right, for example, in arguing that most of the plays of Shakespeare which their author, and everyone else since, have called tragedies are not, strictly speaking, tragedies at all. In fact, Abel could have gone even further. Not only are most of the putative tragedies really “metaplays”; so are most of the histories and comedies. The principal plays of Shakespeare are plays about self-consciousness, about characters not
acting
so much as
dramatizing themselves
in roles. Prince Hal is the man of perfected self-consciousness and self-control, triumphing over the man of rash, unself-conscious integrity, Hotspur, and over the sentimental, cowardly, self-conscious man of pleasure, Falstaff. Achilles and Oedipus do not see themselves as, but are, hero and king. But Hamlet and Henry V see themselves as acting parts—the part of the avenger, the part of the heroic and confident king leading his troops to battle. Shakespeare’s fondness for the play-within-a-play and for putting his characters into disguise for long stretches of the story clearly partakes of the style of metatheater. From Prospero to the Police Chief in Genet’s
The Balcony,
the personages of metatheater are characters in search of an action.

*   *   *

I have said that Abel’s main thesis is right. But it is also, with respect to three issues, mistaken or incomplete.

First, his thesis would be more complete, and I think somewhat altered, if Abel had considered what comedy is. Without wanting to suggest that comedy and tragedy divide the dramatic universe between them, I would argue that they are best defined in relation to each other. The omission of comedy is particularly striking when one recalls that counterfeit, deceit, role-playing, manipulation, self-dramatization—basic elements of what Abel calls metatheater—are staples of comedy since Aristophanes. Comic plots are stories either of conscious self-manipulation and role-playing (
Lysistrata, The Golden Ass, Tartuffe
) or else of improbably unself-conscious—underconscious, one might say—characters (Candide, Buster Keaton, Gulliver, Don Quixote) playing strange roles which they assent to with a cheerful dumbness that secures their invulnerability. It might well be argued that the form which Abel calls the metaplay, particularly in its modern versions, represents a fusion of the posthumous spirit of tragedy with the most ancient principles of comedy. Some modern metaplays, such as Ionesco’s, are obviously comedies. It is hard, too, to deny that Beckett is writing, in
Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape,
and
Happy Days,
a kind of comédie noire.

Second, Abel considerably oversimplifies, and I think indeed misrepresents, the vision of the world which is necessary for the writing of tragedies. He says: “One cannot create tragedy without accepting some implacable values as true. Now the Western imagination has, on the whole, been liberal and skeptical; it has tended to regard
all
implacable values as false.” This statement seems to me wrong and, where it is not wrong, superficial. (Abel is here perhaps too much under the influence of Hegel’s analysis of tragedy, and that of Hegel’s popularizers.) What are the implacable values of Homer? Honor, status, personal courage—the values of an aristocratic military class? But this is not what the
Iliad
is about. It would be more correct to say, as Simone Weil does, that the
Iliad
—as pure an example of the tragic vision as one can find—is about the emptiness and arbitrariness of the world, the ultimate meaninglessness of all moral values, and the terrifying rule of death and inhuman force. If the fate of Oedipus was represented and experienced as tragic, it is not because he, or his audience, believed in “implacable values,” but precisely because a crisis had overtaken those values. It is not the implacability of “values” which is demonstrated by tragedy, but the implacability of the world. The story of Oedipus is tragic insofar as it exhibits the brute opaqueness of the world, the collision of subjective intention with objective fate. After all, in the deepest sense, Oedipus is innocent; he is wronged by the gods, as he himself says in
Oedipus at Colonus.
Tragedy is a vision of nihilism, a heroic or ennobling vision of nihilism.

It is also untrue that Western culture has been on the whole liberal and skeptical. Post-Christian Western culture, yes. Montaigne, Machiavelli, the Enlightenment, the psychiatric culture of personal autonomy and health of the 20th century, yes. But what of the dominant religious traditions of Western culture? Were Paul, Augustine, Dante, Pascal, and Kierkegaard liberal skeptics? Hardly. Therefore one must ask, why was there no Christian tragedy?—a question Abel does not raise in his book, though Christian tragedy would seem to be inevitable if one stops at the assertion that belief in implacable values is the necessary ingredient for making tragedies.

As everyone knows, there was no Christian tragedy, strictly speaking, because the content of Christian values—for it is a question of
what
values, however implacably held; not any will do—is inimical to the pessimistic vision of tragedy. Hence, Dante’s theological poem is a “comedy,” as is Milton’s. That is, as Christians, Dante and Milton make sense out of the world. In the world envisaged by Judaism and Christianity, there are no free-standing arbitrary events. All events are part of the plan of a just, good, providential deity; every crucifixion must be topped by a resurrection. Every disaster or calamity must be seen either as leading to a greater good or else as just and adequate punishment fully merited by the sufferer. This moral adequacy of the world asserted by Christianity is precisely what tragedy denies. Tragedy says there are disasters which are not fully merited, that there is ultimate injustice in the world. So one might say that the final optimism of the prevailing religious traditions of the West, their will to see meaning in the world, prevented a rebirth of tragedy under Christian auspices—as, in Nietzsche’s argument, reason, the fundamentally optimistic spirit of Socrates, killed tragedy in ancient Greece. The liberal, skeptical era of metatheater only inherits this will to make sense from Judaism and Christianity. Despite the exhaustion of religious sentiments, the will to make sense and find meaning prevails, although contracted to the idea of an action as the projection of one’s idea of oneself.

The third caveat I would make is to Abel’s treatment of the modern metaplays, those plays which have all too often been thrown together under the patronizing label “theater of the absurd.” Abel is right to point out that these plays are, formally, in an old tradition. Yet the considerations of form which Abel addresses in his essays must not obscure differences in range and tone, which he slights. Shakespeare and Calderón construct metatheatrical
jeux d’esprit
in the bosom of a world rich in established feelings and a sense of openness. The metatheater of Genet and Beckett reflects the feelings of an era whose greatest artistic pleasure is self-laceration, an era suffocated by the sense of eternal return, an era which experiences innovation as an act of terror. That life is a dream, all the metaplays presuppose. But there are restful dreams, troubled dreams, and nightmares. The modern dream—which the modern metaplays project—is a nightmare, a nightmare of repetition, stalled action, exhausted feeling. There are discontinuities between the modern nightmare and the Renaissance dream which Abel (like, more recently, Jan Kott) neglects, at the price of misreading the texts.

For Brecht, particularly, whom Abel includes among the modern metadramatists, the category is misleading. At times Abel seems to use “naturalistic play” rather than “tragedy” as a foil for meta-theater. Brecht’s plays are anti-naturalistic, didactic. But unless Abel is willing to call
The Play of Daniel
a metaplay—because it has on-stage musicians, and a narrator who explains everything to the audience, and invites them to see the play as a play, a performance—I cannot see that Brecht fits very well into the category. And much of Abel’s discussion of Brecht is unhappily disfigured by callow Cold War platitudes. Abel argues that Brecht’s plays must be metaplays because to write tragedies one must believe that “individuals are real” and one must “believe in the importance of moral suffering.” (Does Abel mean the moral importance of suffering?) Since Brecht was a Communist, and since Communists do “not believe in the individual or in moral experience” (what does it mean, to “believe” in moral experience? does Abel mean moral principles?), Brecht lacked the essential equipment to write tragedies; therefore, dogmatic as he was, Brecht could only write metatheater—that is, make “all human actions, reactions, and expressions of feeling theatrical.” This is nonsense. There is no more moralizing doctrine abroad today than Communism, no more sturdy exponent of “implacable values.” What else is meant when Western liberals vulgarly call Communism a “secular religion”? And as for the familiar accusation that Communism does not believe in the individual, this is equally nonsense. It is not so much Marxist theory as the sensibility and historic traditions of the countries in which Communism has taken power that do not and never have held the so-called Western idea of the individual, which separates off the “private” from the “public” self, seeing the private self as the true self which only lends itself grudgingly to the activities of public life. Neither did the Greeks, the creators of tragedy, possess a notion of the individual in the modern Western sense. There is a deep confusion in Abel’s argument—his historical generalizations are mostly superficial—when he tries to make the absence of the individual the criterion of metatheater.

Admittedly Brecht was a sly, ambivalent guardian of Communist “morality.” But the secret of his plays is to be sought in his idea of the theater as a moralizing instrument. Hence his use of stage techniques borrowed from the non-naturalistic theater of China and Japan, and his famous theory of stage production and acting—the Alienation Effect—which aims to enforce a detached, intellectual attitude upon the audience. (The Alienation Effect seems to be mainly a method of writing plays and of staging them, non-naturalistically; its effect as a method of acting, from what I have seen of the Berliner Ensemble, is mainly to moderate, to tone down, the naturalistic style of acting—not fundamentally to contradict it.) By assimilating Brecht to the metadramatists, with whom he surely shares something, Abel obscures the difference between Brecht’s didacticism and the studied neutrality—the mutual cancellation of all values—which is represented by the true metadramatists. It is something like the difference between Augustine and Montaigne. Both the
Confessions
and the
Essays
are didactic autobiographies; but while the author of the
Confessions
sees his life as a drama illustrating the linear movement of consciousness from egocentricity to theocentricity, the author of the
Essays
sees his life as a dispassionate, varied exploration of the innumerable styles of being a self. Brecht has as little in common with Beckett, Genet, and Pirandello as Augustine’s exercise in self-analysis has with Montaigne’s.

[
1963
]

Going to theater, etc.

T
HE
theater has a long history as a public art. But, outside the provinces of socialist realism, there are few plays today dealing with social-and-topical problems. The best modern plays are those devoted to raking up private, rather than public, hells. The public voice in the theater today is crude and raucous, and, all too often, weak-minded.

The most notable example of weak-mindedness around at the moment is Arthur Miller’s new play,
After the Fall,
which opened the first season of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theater. Miller’s play stands or falls on the authenticity of its moral seriousness, and on its being about “big” issues. But, unfortunately, Miller chose as the method of his play the garrulous monologue of the psychoanalytic confessional, and falteringly designated the audience as the Great Listener. “The action of the play takes place in the mind and memory of Quentin, a contemporary man.” The Everymanish hero (remember Willy Loman) and the timeless, placeless interior setting give the show away: whatever stirring public issues
After the Fall
may confront, they are treated as the furniture of a mind. That places an awful burden on Miller’s “Quentin, a contemporary man,” who must literally hold the world in his head. To pull that one off, it has to be a very good head, a very interesting and intelligent one. And the head of Miller’s hero isn’t any of these things. Contemporary man (as Miller represents him) seems stuck in an ungainly project of self-exoneration. Self-exoneration, of course, implies self-exposure; and there is a lot of that in
After the Fall.
Many people are willing to give Miller a good deal of credit for the daring of his self-exposure—as husband, lover, political man, and artist. But self-exposure is commendable in art only when it is of a quality and complexity that allows other people to learn about themselves from it. In this play, Miller’s self-exposure is mere self-indulgence.