Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett: Essays from Modern Drama (review)

??? COHPAnATIST disputes lies for Bongie in the in-between: "[I]t is perhaps time to claim the interregnum as our home rather than (only) as a place ofexile and to begin to learn how to live with a condition that we cannot cure [. . .]" (347). If Bongie's masterful text has a blind spot, it comes in the otherwise brilliant chapter on Edouard Glissant. Focusing on Glissant's most recent works—the novel Tout-monde (1993) and its theoretical correlatives Traité du tout-monde (1997) and Poétique de la relation (1994)—Bongie identifies Glissant as one ofthe most compelling thinkers on the problem ofthe "post/colonial" condition (a term coined by Bongie to highlight the epistemic complicity between the colonial and the postcolonial ). It is in these works that Glissant abandons the specifically Martinican and more broadly insular focus ofhis project to turn his critical energy toward the promotion ofthe process ofglobal creolization. For Glissant, nonhierarchical cultural contact—or Relation—will shortly create a situation in which all identities will be plural to the point oftheir dissolution. The problem, as Celia Britton has pointed out, is that Glissant "increasingly writes as though the values of Relation, chaos, and diversity have in fact already prevailed [. . .]" (Edouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies ofLanguage andResistance [Charlottesville: UP ofVirginia , 1998] 9), when they have, in fact, not yet prevailed on his own island of Martinique. Throughout Islands and Exiles, Bongie underscores the need to balance the calls for hybridization in much recent postcolonial theory with demands for the recognition of a provisionally fixed Caribbean or insular identity. For all his insistence on "epistemic complicity," then, Bongie is too quick to embrace Glissant's recent oddly Utopian and teleologica! declarations regarding global creolization. Richard WattsTulane University FREDERICK J. MARKER and CHRISTOPHER INNES, EDS. Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett: Essays from Modern Drama. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998. 293 pp. Modernism is a term usually reserved for texts other than those intended for the stage. This collection, however, not only imagines the productive application ofthe principles ofinternational Modernism in the first halfofthe twentieth century to the theatre but suggests for theatre and dramatic texts a central, even a constitutive, role in the development and exploration ofmany ofthe central theoretical and practical implications of this important movement, one which is usually limited to lyric poetry, narrative, and the plastic and painterly arts. Frederick Marker and Christopher Innes outline the distinction ofthe project ofthis book, a reasoned selection ofessays from Modern Drama on modem European drama in light of the intellectual history ofthe earlier twentieth century. They create not only a rich and nuanced selection of essays but a provocative palimpsest to the dominant account of the movement which rarely, if ever, includes the drama. With critics as varied and eminent as Cohn and Carlson, Paolucci and Scheduler, and Styan and Sprinchom, the editors provide an account ofModernism in the theatre which will be especially valuable to scholars concerned to expand the range ofModernism beyond the parameters ofthe Anglophone. They also offer a métonymie portrait of Modern Drama's vitality and excellence and a compelling portrait of the ways in which the four dramatists featured in this volume emerge from the radical critiques of the nineteenth century by Kierkegaard and Zola to anticipate and inform the art ofthe modern stage. What is necessary both to offer Vol·. 25 (2001): 187 BOOK NOTES a survey ofcritical receptions oflate nineteenth and early twentieth-century theatre and to attest to the caliber and range ofa journal is variety and distinction. Rosenberg 's fine essay from 1963-64, late in the collection, on the antihumanism of Pirandello's infinite, reflective negativity in the face ofthe realities of Italy during and after Mussolini, initiates the arc ofModernist theatre criticism which the most recent—and first essay in the collection—begins, Johnston's reconsideration of temporality and recovery ofthe past as features not merely of Wagner and Yeats but as characteristic ofthe apparently revolutionary Ibsen. The practitioner essays about the craft and experience ofperformance by Knowlson and Cohn on Beckett and Styan on Pirandello, for example, connect the literary, aesthetic, and ideological to the performative, marking theatre as both...