Drama and Dramatic Theory: Peter Szondi and the Modern Theater Author(s): Michael Hays Source: boundary

2, Vol. 11, No. 3, The Criticism of Peter Szondi (Spring, 1983), pp. 69-81 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303001 . Accessed: 15/10/2011 02:07
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Dramaand DramaticTheory: Peter Szondi and the ModernTheater

Michael Hays
Because the form of a work of art always seems to express something unquestionable, we usually arriveat a clear understanding of such formal statements only at a time when the unquestionable has been questioned and the self-evident has become problematic. Peter Szondi Theorie des modernen Dramas In the light of contemporary structuralist and semiotic endeavor, these words may not seem very revolutionary. Some of you no doubt even caught the reference to Hegel's, or should I say Minerva's, owl in this formula. If so, Peter Szondi might, at first, appear to be little more than a recent avatar of the "old" Hegelian aesthetics. His work has, in fact, brought new life to this tradition, but it also marks a difference which defines Szondi's historical position and his contribution to modern criticism and hermeneutic theory. I hope I can do justice to part of this contribution today by discussing the nature and implications of Szondi's work on the drama. There is no question about the fact that Szondi drew his early inspiration from Hegel and from Hegel's followers, Lukacs and Adorno. This is obvious in the opening sections of his book, Theoryof

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the Modern Drama, where he first establishes the idea that dramatic form is not an abstract entity, independent of time and place, but rather inextricably tied up with the content it informs. "Context," he quotes Hegel as saying, "is nothing but the inversion of form into content and form nothing but that of content into form." He also cites Adorno's use of a chemical metaphor to express the same idea. Form is "precipitated" context. By borrowing in this fashion Szondi is able to quickly establish the theoretical starting point for his own analysis of the drama: formal structure is as important to the process of signification in a play as is content. There is, for Szondi, no such thing as a form which exists beyond the moment of its use. There are only particular sets of form-content relationships and form, like content must be "read" as a statement about the nature and significance of the aesthetic enterprise as a whole: dramatic form codifies assertions about human existence. Szondi proposes a "structural" model for the drama, then, but unlike the structures which Levi-Strauss had in mind, those discovered by Szondi are not "fundamentally the same for all minds-ancient and modern, primitiveand civilized.... ", They are, instead, inextricably bound to the historical and ideological situation in which they develop. This historicization of the idea of form eliminates the possibility of any systematic, normative poetics as such. The formal distinctions which have traditionally been used to designate the "universal" characteristics of each of the major genres are transformed into historical categories. One cannot discuss genre outside a specific historical context and, therefore, it is useless to discuss, for example, Greek or medieval drama in the same terms that one would use to deal with eighteenth-century drama or modern drama. The significance of this historicization of drama and criticism is obviously rather profound. There is no longer any possibility of positing a simple continuity of either literary or critical tradition. The "history" of literature ceases to be history at all in the sense of a diachronic series of cause and effect relationships. Szondi again seems very close to proposing the same kind of non-linear structure that Levi-Strauss has been accused of propounding-literary history at this point would be nothing but a series of juxtaposed, synchronic moments, each with its own systems of structure and meaning, each independent of that which temporally precedes or follows it. Szondi's theory avoids this a-historical pitfall in two ways. First of all, he demonstrates in his own work that it is not only possible, but sometimes necessary to examine one form, one moment in relation to that which immediately preceded it. History then manifests itself in the demonstration of difference. This as I will show later, is what Szondi does in his work with the modern drama when he analyzes it in terms of its failure to sustain the old drama's formcontent relationship: the modern playwright tries to resolve the contradiction between a new social content and a form which, because it is historically conditioned, is no longer able to inform the statement of the content. History and the process of change appear here as "technical contradictions," as "technical difficulties internal to the
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concrete work itself."'2 This point is extremely important for an understanding of Szondi's method. It shows that unlike other historically oriented critics, Szondi assumes that the social problematic of an age does not simply manifest itself in the content of the work of art. It appears as part of the formal signifying process: social contradictions present themselves as aesthetic problems which the work of art itself attempts to resolve. Thus, as Szondi indicates in his essay on Diderot, the movement of the hermeneutic circle must be from the "text" out into the social context and then back into the text. Exactly how this "text" should be defined is a problem I will discuss later. For the moment, I simply wish to point out the way in which Szondi organizes, successfully as far as I am concerned, the process of investigating the interrelationship between language, text and history. The second source of diachronic movement is to be found in the critic's relationship to the object of his study. Szondi reminds us that criticism and critical models are also historically bound phenomena and, therefore, have the tendency to isolate and fix that which may in fact be part of a process. Such model building may be quite successful when the critic turns toward the past. Critics in fact prove their own historical distance from this past through their ability to define and close out earlier formal processes. But the critic also marks his historical position by his inability to stand outside his own historical-conceptual frame of reference. Critics including Szondi himself enable us to understand socio-aesthetic process and perceive what is fundamentally new to their age through their inability to adequately account for these new artistic structures. History manifests itself in what is left out, in what the critical rhetoric cannot name. Despite these limitations, the critic can try to establish what Szondi calls a "semantics of form," which can be used to analyse the form content relationship of a given historical period. What Szondi has in mind here seems to be the possibility of a semiotic analysis of the signifying structures which organize the dramatic performance as a whole. If he did not say precisely this, it is undoubtedly because these terms were not yet available to him. Szondi's language and choice of focus-as his own theory predicts-depend on his situation. The terms he uses are nonetheless adequate for his analysis of the forms and dramatic theory of earlier drama. If they work only partially for the modern drama it is because Szondi cannot escape his contemporaneousness with the object of his investigation. As I will try to demonstrate later in this paper, a further historical remove is necessary to deal with the formal principles of the modern as such. Szondi could anticipate this problem, but he did not live long enough to overcome it. Thus we must look at his work in two different lights: first of all in terms of his successful description of prior dramatic forms and then in terms of his method and what it offers us in our own encounters with more recent drama. When analyzing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama, Szondi sets about showing the homologies between the signifying properties of acting space, decor, language and gesture. He demonstrates how these systems work together to create a single 71

conceptual "perspective". I have borrowed the term from painting, but it seems most appropriate to the ideologically-bound image-making process Szondi describes. The drama of these periods presented a "picture" of a world in which life was defined solely in terms of the structure of interpersonal relations and their products. As Szondi says, "the verbal medium for this world of the interpersonal was the dialogue. In the Renaissance, after the exclusion of prologue, chorus and epilogue, dialogue became, perhaps for the first time in the history of the theater, ... the sole constitutive element in the dramatic web. In this respect, the neo-classical drama distinguishes itself not only from antique tragedy, but also from medieval clerical plays, from the baroque "world theater" and from Shakespeare's histories. The absolute dominance of dialogue, that is, of interpersonal communication, reflects the fact that the drama consists in the reproduction of, is onPy cognizant of what shines forth in this sphere. Most radical of all was the exclusion of that which could not it entered the realm of express itself-the world of objects-unless interpersonal relations.3 This then was a world the limits of which were determined by the actions of self-conscious individuals, individuals who created their own "presence". There were no external causal factors which might imply the existence of other worlds or other creative forces. The singularity of this condition was reproduced and reinforced by the formal requirements of the drama as a whole as well as by the proscenium stage and its decors. The unities of time, place and action created an absolute linear sequence in the present. Nothing existed outside this sequence-no other place, no other time, no other possible action. The decors in perspective which enclosed this action added to its exclusiveness and, as Jean Duvignaud has pointed out, to its psychological depth.' Thus, the "picture-frame"stage is quite properly named. It enclosed and organized performance systems which indeed produced a "picture" of the world. This picture provided a perspective which incorporated the spectator and his role as well. It operated to exclude all perceptual possibilities from his line of vision that did not correspond to the stage image perported to represent or reflect the real "nature" of things. As Szondi so aptly shows, the specific function of this signifying process depends on the historical situation in which it unfolds. In his discussion of Diderot and middle class drama, he demonstrates the manner in which the "picture" of the world is organized in terms of the ideological stance of this class. Although Szondi does not, in this essay, deal with all the coded systems he introduces in his discussion of earlier drama, he nonetheless builds a model analysis, one which will serve both as a demonstration of his method and a way into my critique of Szondi's discussion of the modern drama. In Tableau und coup de theatre which is subtitled Zur Soziologie des burgerlichen Irauerspiels bei Diderot,5 Szondi illustrates his method of analysing language and context as a means of describing the socio-historical situation of an author and his texts. He wants to show that one cannot define a text or a literary genre
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from the outside, simply by applying knowledge of the historical epoch to the text. The movement of the circle must be from text to history, not from history to text. Cases in point are George Lukacs and Arnold Hauser. Both assert that the bourgeois theater provides the first example of a drama which took as its goal the direct presentation of social conflict and openly played a role in the class struggle. Szondi quickly alerts his readers to the fact that such assertions simply do not correspond to the actual early development of middle class drama in eighteenthcentury England, France, and Germany. None of the earliest of these plays show any overt conflict between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy. In fact, Lessing's and Diderot's heroes come from the upper class. What then, asks Szondi, is bourgeois about these early plays? To what degree are the conditions of their composition determined by the social and political situation of the rising middle class? In order to answer this question Szondi turns first to Diderot's theory of the drama since, as will be seen, this theory, like neo-classical theory before it, naturalizes the ideological perspective of the dominant group in terms of certain formal requisites of the drama itself. The most important motive for Diderot's theory of bourgeois drama, that which leads Diderot to break with the tradition in which tragic heroes are princes or kings can be inferred from a few sentences in the "Entretiens sur le fils naturel". The lines that Szondi focuses on are the following: Si la mere d'lphig6nie se montrait un moment reine d'Argos et femme du general des Grecs, elle ne me paraitrait que la derni're des creatures. La v6ritable dignite, celle qui me frappe, qui me renverse, c'est le tableau de I'amour maternel dans toute sa v6rit6.6 Tableau and verit6 are the two key words here. They appear again in the same conversation when a poor peasant's wife is mentioned. In both cases it is the private emotional response of the individual that Diderot focuses on. This personal response is deemed "true," true that is in the sense that Diderot assumes the existence of "natural" human responses which are true to a situation, not simply to a class. But the feelings naturalized here are of a specific kind. They do not come from nature as Diderot's theory suggests, but from the middleclass drawing room-as his plays show. This contradiction reveals the real thrust of Diderot's effort-his desire to naturalize middleclass emotional economy. In his plays Diderot focuses on a category of feelings, not on action, and the formal homologue to this turning away from action towards situation is found in Diderot's interest in the tableau. Thus, the opening tableau in Diderot's Pere de famille testifies to a social change. This change consists not so much in the appearance of a new social class as in a change in the organizational form of the drama and the way in which the spectator views society. The formal coding of the life led by the characters Diderot brings on
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stage signals the bourgeois perspective. It illustrates the notion which is the socio-historical center of the domestic tragedy: the patriarchal, nuclear family. This transformation demonstrates within the drama itself the restructuring of society that JOrgen Habermas and, more recently, Richard Sennet have attempted to describe in terms of objective changes in social and family practice.7 According to Szondi, the opposite of the tableau in Diderot's theory is the coup de th6atre-the unexpected event which entirely transforms a situation. It is proscribed by Diderot, no doubt because the coup de theatre belongs to the conventions of the court drama and to the family intrigues which surround the king. In its place Szondi shows that Diderot proposes a stable picture of a different kind of family life:8 Ajoutez a cel&,toutes les relations: le pbre de famille, I' poux, la soeur, les freres. Le pere de famille! Quel sujet, dans un siecle tel que le notre, ou il ne parait pas qu'on ait le moindre id6e de ce que c'est qu'un pere de famille!9 The virtues of the bourgeois social order as represented in this drama did not correspond to experienced reality of the public however: C'est en allant au th6etre qu'ils se sauveront de la compagnie des m6chants dont ils sont entoures; c'est la qu'ils aimeront Avivre; c'est Ia qu'ils verront I'espece humaine comme elle est, et qu'ils se reconcilieront avec elle.'0 Seeing virtue embodied in the theater serves the function of allowing people to flee their real but evil environment. The world of illusion, the world of the theater is proposed as "reality". And the spectator who flees out of pernicious reality into the theater finds reality transformed into illusion. Thus the audience is reconciled with the conditions it experiences outside the theater. The middle class fled from the coups de theatre of real life into the verite of the tableau, the formal aesthetic ideal. Szondi has done more here than expose the internal, technical problems which Diderot had to confront in producing his version of middle class drama. He has successfully delimited the formalideological nexus of this drama. As I suggested earlier, Szondi's position in the middle of the twentieth century places him outside the cultural systems which generated the formal structures he describes. He stands at a point where he can not only question the validity of these formal statements, but also determine their historical and ideological grounds. When Szondi turns his attention to the modern drama, he reapplies the formal model of middle class drama as a structural tool in analyzing the works of several early modern dramatists. He does so
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primarilybecause he has no other organizational set available to him. Since, at the time he wrote his book on the modern drama, he stood within the modern himself, he could not develop an analysis of contemporary drama in its own terms. It had not yet, could not be fixed. Therefore, Szondi had to analyze this theater in relation to what preceded it. He marks the advent of the modern not in terms of what it is, but in terms of its difference from what was. "It is in this light," he states in Modern Drama, "that the drama will be dealt with here-in terms of what impedes it today-and the idea of the (earlier) drama will be examined as a moment of inquiryinto the possibility of modern drama." Here again we see the relevance of Szondi's historically based hermeneutics. Within the body of his own critical work we see the tension between his historical position and the object of his investigation, between his method and its content. If he is successful at first in dealing with the modern drama, and he is, it is because the early plays themselves, as Szondi shows, also came to grips with the problem of nineteenth-century formal structure. If he is unable to deal with modern drama as a whole, the problem lies less with his method than with his historical situation. In Theory of the Modern Drama, Szondi begins with a demonstration of the way in which the thematic content of the plays by Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Strindberg, Chekhov and others militates against the stable formal constructs of earlier drama. Szondi begins with Ibsen because it is traditional to do so but I should like to add that the process Szondi describes can be traced in the dramatic works of other less fashionable playwrights such as Daudet as well. Inthese works, the formal requisites of nineteenth-century dramatic theory (e.g., act structure, dialogic form) were rigorously applied, but this "well made" world was subverted from within. The characters in these plays could not create an active world through their language. They describe a situation which is static, in which the past, though irrevocably lost, is at the same time more "real," more amenable to productive acts than the present. All that remains is the presence of what might have been, but this "presence" is in fact absence-the impossibility of unified action or understanding. Strindberg's and Maeterlinck's work carries the process of the formal destruction of the old dramatic world one step further.The individuals in their plays no longer seem able to define their world;they endure it; they wait, they speak past each other in monologues that fill up time but give no center, no logos to the community and space in which they exist.'2 This space, finally, is as fragmented as the social world and the psyche of each of the characters. As subjects they are no longer able to objectify themselves in dialogic interaction with their fellow human beings. This breakdown is paralleled by several other transformations in dramatic form: the logical, linear development of the act structure is fragmented, as are the systems of spatial and temporal representation. Because the characters can no longer create their own presence, the drama itself is in jeopardy. Szondi shows us here then how the early modern dramatists, in trying to solve this problem in fact demonstrate its existence. Their characters,
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far from reestablishing the internal perspective of the old drama, are actually incapable of controlling or defining their worlds. They are locked inside their subjectivity and their metaphysical helplessness. On the plane of formal organization, this leads to the appearance of the "epic" in the dramatic and the epic narrative figure as a necessary formal principle to bind the dramatic movement together. There is no question about the fact that Szondi's analysis of early modern drama provides rewarding insights into its formative problems. His method gives new insight into the formal experimentation which marks the advent of the modern drama. It must be added, however, that his critical model also obliges him to ignore or merely hint at the significance of other fundamental aspects of modern theater practice. As is the case with many other historically oriented analyses, Szondi's decision to use the pre-modern as a model for demonstrating "difference" in the modern drama has led him to deal only with those aspects of the drama for which there is adequate terminology within the old model-a model developed out of a modern critical perception of the inactive forms which preceded it. Szondi's success with the early modern drama stems in great part from the historical position which they hold in common. Ibsen, as Szondi demonstrates so brilliantly, focused primarilyon a lost past, a past in which there existed the possibility of creating an active communal presence. His drama is, in effect, a statement about the loss of this past and its unity, both of which earlier drama had produced in its systematic representation of the middle class perspective. In other words, Ibsen's early plays announce in their own terms the historical and aesthetic movement which Szondi later rephrases in the language of critical analysis. He doubles Ibsen's dramatized nostalgia for unified systems of social and dramatic representation with a critical nostalgia of his own. As a modern critic Szondi can only describe the art and the world of the modern as a dis-ordering of the stable systems of signification which the past offers him once he has mastered the formal structures of its art. This is evident not only in his critical focus, but also in his terminology, which reflects the modern's concern with metaphysical, and spiritual unity as well as the modern critics' dependence on traditional aesthetic and its categories-lyric, epic and drama. Szondi equates the "epic" with the modern in contradistinction to the "dramatic" which serves to designate the formal properties of middle class drama. Because of his interest in locating the "epic," that is, non-"dramatic" features in the modern drama, Szondi fails to notice that this "epic" quality is really part of a larger formal process. Because of this failure he makes distinctions between Brecht's theater, for example, and that of Pirandello, Wilder and Miller,which are distinctions only in terms of the earlier drama not in the formal terms which the modern drama itself generates. Szondi was at least partially aware of this problem I am sure, since he indirectly raised the question by including a discussion of Piscator and his work as a director in a book that is otherwise devoted to dramatic texts. Why was a director included along with these
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critical readings of the works of practicing playwrights? In order to answer the question we must return to Szondi's description of the birth of the modern drama. This theater was generated out of the collapse of a unified perspective based on the production of the world through interpersonal activity.13 Earlier drama contained the formal assumption that language, space and time were ordered according to a single point of view which allowed these conventions to be seen as reflections of common experience. The modern drama, however, seems to deny the existence of any uniform perspective or signifying system, such as which would unite the experiencing subject with the world around him. It is precisely this absence which, in Szondi's eyes, calls forth the epic narratorin the theater. He serves as a coordinating device or figure to provide that background necessary for minimal comprehension of the characters situation. His function within the tests is to prevent a collapse into silence and immobility. But the epic figure is more than just an internal coordinator/communicator. This personage and his function are also symbolic referents for that new figure who makes his appearance in the modern theatrical event; the director. If we apply the method suggested by Szondi's analysis of dramatic production in the Renaissance we are led to an investigation of the total process of semoiosis in theatrical practice. This is a step that Szondi could not take at the time he wrote his book on the modern drama, because his terminology and his method were limited by the traditional literary demands of the modern. A later essay entitled "Der Mythos in modernen Drama und das Epische Theater," indicates that Szondi was in the process of moving beyond these limits at the time of his death." To return to the drama, though, when we begin to analyse the signifying process of the modern theatrical event, it is immediately obvious that the dramatic text is, in fact, a sub-text in the total system of signification. The destruction of the socio-linguistic nexus which Szondi describes as the hallmark of the modern drama in fact functions on several other semiotic planes besides that of the text. There are also de-structions in the performance space, in the system of decor and lighting and in the rapport between the house and the stage: In the modern theater, when the house lights are shut off, the audience is left in much the same situation as the characters which figure in the play text. They are left "in the dark." Thus, the public sees its own experience in the theater objectified in an encoded explanation represented by the stage event. The metatext of performance, then, adumbrates a fragmented world which (re)presents the powerlessness of the individual, the impossibility of interpersonal communication and the futility of trying to comprehend the forces which exist in and outside the subject. This is the new "perspective" provided by the modern drama. But is not a perspective which, like that of the earlier theater, authorizes any action, any conceptual ordering or decision making on the part of the individual, be that individual a character in the play of a spectator. This might lead us to conclude, along with some recent critics, that contemporary drama only offers disorder and mean77

inglessness as its meaning. In fact, the formal structure of play and performance suggest that this discomfiting possibility only represents a partial decoding of the dramatic message. If we look at the performance a whole, we find that the director/interpreter(like the epic narratorin the text) mediates between the helpless individual and the unknown, disjointed world. The problem of the fragmentation of personal and social existence is not resolved by this intercession, however. It is overcome only insofar as it is removed to a higher level. The director's interpretation provides an "order" which is abstract and formal. This ordering simply replaces the objective problems announced in the play with the problem of understanding the interpretation which has been put forth as the meaning of the dramatic experience. And so, the modern theater posits a world in which there is a "director" who stands at the head of a highly codified informational structure. Characters/spectators only have access to the "meaning" disseminated through this structure if they submit to its ordering principles. They must, therefore, negate (or have negated) their own capacity to understand and generate meanings. In order to be enclosed within a "significant" perspective, they must give up their freedom to act. This condition is at once evident when one enters the modern theater. One is engulfed by the bureaucratic structures which the place and the event represent. As Donald Kaplan has put it, the theater has institutionalized the executive function.'5 The dynamic kinesthesis which had been part of the performance in earlier centuries has been overwhelmed by a sense of complacency generated by the knowledge that the event is under the control of someone else. This is the key to understanding why so many different kinds of plays, from avant-garde to classical can be staged one after the other in the same house to essentially the same audience. The metatextual signifying process is the same for all of them and for all of the modern. The uncoded code of the ideological context asserts the need to submit to the authority of the director in order to belong to a reality (mythic or intellectual) which has "meaning." In 1906, Paul Souriau announced this condition in the following manner: The experiencing subject should have very little will and a great deal of imagination. Little will in order to give in without resistance to all impulses he receives from the exterior. Lots of imagination- in order to quickly and painlessly give in to the illusions toward which he is led and dream, as it were, on command. Verbal, graphic or musical suggestion does not provide us with finished images; it only orients our faculties in a predetermined sense...the work of art is not really perceived, it is imagined. It is a dream which the artist offers us and which he directs.'6 A comment made by Henri Bergson and quoted by Souriau is worth
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adding here as well. "The object of art[ modern art that is] is to put to sleep the active and rather the resistant forces of our personality and to so lead us to a state of perfect docility where we realize the idea which one suggests to us."'7 This then is the function of the director. His social and aesthetic role in the modern period is to complete the incomplete, to overcome the lack of a common base in the culture of the modern which he himself represents. This is also why Piscator must appear in Szondi's book-not as Piscator the man, but as representative of the directorial function which Szondi's method allows him to sense but not describe. Had Szondi recognized this initial condition of the modern drama, his discussion of Brecht and other, later playwrights would also have been different. I only have time to sketch out some of these differences, but I hope that my suggestions will illuminate the formal development in and the historical movement of recent drama. Brecht and Pirandello represent dialectically opposite responses to the condition of the modern, though each in his own way codifies its formal process. Pirandello's plays assert the impossibility of establishing a common and meaningful order whether on the level of language, dramatic form or social interaction. Plays like Henry IV and Six Characters in Search of an Author represent the ideological position of the modern which Pirandello attempts to naturalize in his texts on dramatic theory. He propounds a theory of the necessary presence of the author/director as receiver and transmitter of ordering perceptions into the unmanagable world depicted in his plays. Brecht too was in the forefront of the movement towards a radical fragmentation of the dramatic world. But his dramatic theory attempts to naturalize a somewhat different explanation of this world. By doubling the fragmentation of the formal structure of the drama through his alienation effects, he creates a "dis-disorder" which implies that the apparently disjointed and incomprehensible experience of life in fact has a social and historical explanation. In the metatext of performance, his alienation effects establish a semiosis which signifies the return of interpretive control to the audience. At the same time the fragementation depicted by the stage set is revealed as illusory, light once again shines forth from the house onto the stage. The stage no longer sheds its light on spectators sitting in the dark. Brecht never completely broke out of the dramatic structure of the modern however-indeed he could not. He could only symbolically assert the possibility of a reunified socio-aesthetic practice. His theory of codes, if one can call it that, was of necessity more intuitive than scientific and his plays remain within the same modern frame of reference as Szondi's early dramatic criticism. They share a nostalgia for the order and community implicit in the form and dialogue of earlier drama and a utopian desire for a world in which the bits and pieces of the modern would be rejoined. At the same time, their work demonstrates the absence of any such unity. The process of the modern drama of which this absence is a sign has been carried to its logical conclusion in the works of recent
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playwrights like Beckett, Handke and Genet. Szondi refers to Beckett's Waiting for Godot as a conversation piece about the desire for immanence in a world without God. If this reading falls short of the original goal of Szondi's work and of the thematic material in the play itself, one can again ascribe this shortcoming to a critical model which was not yet fully developed and could not completely analyse modern formal signifying practice. Beckett and his contemporaries did not create a new or "absurd" drama either, despite what critics since Esslin have been fond of suggesting. Their works, as did those of the early modern dramatists, deal with the collapse of the systems of signification which had given rise to and ordered the conceptual world of the immediate past. The problems of language and action which confront Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot are, in a sense, only magnified versions of the social and metaphysical problems faced by the characters who await the inexplicable in Maeterlinck's The Blind and Interior. Beckett's works are, in effect, ironic restatements of the thematic material found in these and other plays of the turn of the century. If his plays no longer take this material seriously, that is because the form of the modern drama itself embodies an assertion of the meaninglessness of the cultural paradigms on which it draws. It consumes the past as material for the present. Thus, every aspect of the early modern drama has, like the drama of the nineteenth century, become fair game for the author and director. Their "play" exposes the conventions of the modern at the same time that it employs them. The works of Genet and Handke also deal selfconsciously with the form and conventions of the modern, but, unlike Beckett's, their plays do not remain in the realm of the abstract and the playful. They instead attempt to demonstrate that the conventions of language and action in the theater are grounded in the cultural conventions of society at large and that all these conventions are bound up in the developments of contemporary history and ideology. Their works embody the disorder of the modern as a social as well as aesthetic phenomenon and thereby take a step that Brecht was unable to make. By exposing the formal patterns which have organized the modern, they have marked its historical limits and, in so doing, put an end to it, much as Cervantes did to the romance when he wrote Don Quixote. Genet and Handke do not signal the end of dramatic representation, however. Instead they announce the coming of a new formalideological construct which as yet can only be referred to as the "post-modern." Thus, it seems we have once again reached the point at which "the unquestionable has been questioned." A clear understanding of the formal properties of the modern, as Szondi demonstrated earlier with the nineteenth century drama, can only come when one is in a position to mark off a distance from those forms and use their fragments as the building blocks of a new theater. That is the job of the dramatist. The role of the critic is to shed light on this process both in terms of text and context. Once again the importance of Szondi's contribution is obvious. His critical hermeneutics allows for
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an analysis of the drama that comprehends the situationalness of the critic as well as that of the work of art. Therefore, although his concrete discussion of the modern drama may now seem incomplete, his theoretical work both explains this incompleteness and provides the methodology with which to investigate the modern theater and what comes after. In the very act of going beyond Szondi we see the scope of the critical field he has opened for us. Cornell University NOTES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Claude LUvi-Strauss, StructuralAnthropology(GardenCity, New York,1967), p. 21. Theorie des modernen Dramas (Frankfurta.M., 1956), p. 12. Theorie des modernen Dramas, p. 14 See Spectacle et soci6t6 (Paris, 1970), pp. 67-82. Lekturenund Lektionen (Frankfurta.M., 1973), pp. 13-43. Denis Diderot, Oeuvres Esth6tiques (Paris, 1965), p. 91; Szondi, p. 15. Habermas, Strukturwandelder Offentlichkeit (Neuweid, 1962) and Richard JOirgen Sennet, The Fall of the Public Man (New York, 1977). There is a striking similarity between this transformation in the structure of theatrical performance and that social transformation which Michel Foucault has identified in the transition from public execution to penal incarceration. See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1977). Oeuvres Esth6tiques, p. 154; Szondi, p. 25. Oeuvres Esth6tiques, p. 192-93;Szondi, p. 30. Theorie des modernen Dramas, p. 13. See Theorie des modernen Dramas, pp. 40-62. Compare this with Foucault's discussion of the collapse of a unified field of representation in Les mots etles choses (Paris, 1966). "Der Mythos in modernen Drama,"in Lekturenund Lektionen, pp. 185-91. "TheaterArchitecture as a derivation of the Primal Cavity,"in The Drama Review, Spring, 1968. La Suggestion dans /'art (Paris, 1909), pp. 66-67. Essai sur les donn6s imm6diates de la conscience, fifth ed. (Paris, 1906), cited in Souriau, p. 66.

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