The Dimensions of the Moment: Modernist Shorts

This article recasts the two rivals factions who founded modern drama in Europe's little theaters – the naturalists and the symbolists – as partners in a mutual retreat from the gigantism of the nineteenth century and its theatre. A comparison of the theatrical faits-divers of Oscar Méténier and the early one-act plays of Maurice Maeterlinck reveals that both naturalist and symbolist playwrights replaced length with intensity, reduced the amount of plot and character while increasing the role of atmosphere, and eschewed absorption in favor of concentrated suspense and effect. More surprisingly, as plays from both camps shrank, they started in certain respects to resemble their "other": naturalist shorts revealed symbolic underpinnings, and symbolist shorts came increasingly to rely on the legibility of the material world of the stage. Like the laconic newspaper items from which they took their name, theatrical faits-divers may seem like the epitome of hard-boiled naturalism, but in fact they present parables of modern urban vulnerability whose reticence reveals symbolic overtones. Such overtones become the subject of Maeterlinck's Interior. By sealing a naturalist living room inside a dark world full of mysterious figures, Maeterlinck both defamiliarizes naturalism by revealing the unseen symbolic world it excludes but cannot ignore and illustrates symbolism's reliance on the fundamental elements of the theatre. Considered together, these minimal plays illuminate an understudied turn to brevity during the genesis of modern drama while at the same time exposing the ontological complexity of dramatic activity in general. In both camps of the early French avant-garde, drama stripped to its minimum reveals the persistent, uneasy coexistence in the theater of time-bound bodies and timeless ideas.