The Iceman, The Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent: Tragedy and Melodrama on the Modern Stage by Robert Bechtold Heilman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 123 grows a few feet every year, but it is still impossible to refer readers to any books, apart from the biographies, that really extend their understanding. Shaw was untiringly self-explanatory and, in almost everything he wrote, vital in a sense that rarely applies to criticism. To attempt to apply everything he wrote about plays to his own plays is to lose one's labour, for the pen of Shaw the critic and theorist was just as wayward as that of Shaw the dramatist. Consequently criticism of Shaw, like theology, or criticism of Shakespeare, cannot hope to last as long as the phenomenon that gives it being. The critic is beaten before he starts. He may provide some insights, some fruitful juxtapositions, and now and then a new fact, but anything in the nature of a coherent theory is bound to elude him. Professor Dukore has given us some good pages, but too often as we read his book we are aware that Shaw has said it before, and said it more powerfully. Explaining Shaw is like explaining music. We can, if we choose, read admirable books that tell us how Bach managed counterpoint or how Mozart achieved dramatic force and compression. We read with admiration and agreement, but with what a sense of reliefwe turn to the music itself! The test of Shaw's dramatic theories is stage performance, and it is a test he survives with greater insouciance as the years pass. It is somewhat surprising to read what Professor Dukore says of the contemporary "relevance" of some of the plays, even some of the earliest. It is the contemporaneity of great art, not of social problems; just as we spare little thought for the fact that Mozart wrote for courtly audiences, so we do not greatly care about the social milieu of the London audiences for whom Shaw wrote, usually rapidly and sometimes carelessly. Theory meant as little to him when he was busy at a playas it meant to Moliere. It would be ungrateful to suggest that this book merely covers well-explored ground, for it often discloses things that have been ignored or superficially treated by earlier critics. The chapter on the elements of the Absurd and Existential in Shaw is excellent, and we wish that there had been more investigation on this level. It is not Professor Dukore's fault that Shaw cannot be pinned down at all points, and that insofar as he eludes them his critics are, in Shaw's own word, "nonentitized." ROBERTSON DAVIES University of Toronto THE ICEMAN, THE ARSONIST, AND THE TROUBLED AGENT: TRAGEDY AND MELODRAMA ON THE MODERN STAGE, by Robert Bechtold Heilman. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973. xviii & 357 pp. $12.95. Defining genres is heavy work. One is apt to find oneself preaching to the converted and antagonizing the heretics (those who disagree or who don't believe that generic definition is valid at all). In his earlier book, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions ofExperience (1968), R.B. Heilman expounded fully his definitions of the two genres; in this sequel, The Iceman, The Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent, he restates the definitions and applies them to the modern scene in general and six dramatists in particular: O'Neill, Williams, Miller, Brecht, Frisch, and Duerrenmatt. 124 BOOK REVIEWS Heilman defines tragedy and melodrama in terms of character: the tragic character is divided within himself while the melodramatic character is not; the dramatic conflict thus takes place either within the individual or between the individual and something or someone "other," and Heilman labels plays tragedies or melodramas accordingly. Much subtilizing, ramifying, and overlapping of genres proceeds from this basic distinction, and "there is vast evidence of the crossing, mingling, and modifying of forms," but the principle, frequently repeated, remains unchanged. And like all constructors of systems, Heilman is to a certain extent limited by his terms. In order to discuss some of the dramatists he has chosen, he must stretch the meanings of his own words or exercise some ingenuity in interpreting theirs. In his two-page discussion of ~ohn Arden, for example, the category "melodrama" becomes "unhackneyed melodrama" so that it can, with some justice...