The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History by Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker (review)

424 BOOK REVIEWS Hersh Zeifman's interpretations of the plays on the basis of religious imagery; but his assertions are so carefully considered and scrupulously substantiated that we must agree with his conclusion that "Beckett's plays 'claw' because they set off haunting reverberations, because each of the elements of his drama invariably suggests so much more than it at first seems to. And it is precisely this wedding of the implicit with the explicit that provides Beckett's drama with its extraordinary religious density, the wellspring of both its beauty and its power." Many of the papers in this collection effect the wedding of elements which is the keynote of much of Beckett's art: narrative point of view with spiritual perspective , syntactic order with artisitic vision and (in a piece by Elin Diamond) fiction with drama. Jan Hokenson weds Beckett's fictional technique to Beethoven's music in an article which borrows the term "large black pauses" from Beckett's own early work. And the analogies of Beckett's work with the other arts is made even more specific in Dougald McMillan's "Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: The Embarrassment of Allegory". This piece is especially helpful because of all the information it provides regarding the particular paintings which have influenced Beckett in a lifetime filled with reflection upon the history of the visual arts and the plight ofliterature (in the words of a letter Beckett wrote in 1937) "left behind on that old stale path which has been long abandoned by music and painting." Articles by H. Porter Abbott and Yasunari Takahashi explore the origins and development of Beckett's comic sense from two points of view. The former concentrates on the early fiction and makes an interesting case for Bram Stoker's Dracula as a possible source for Watt. Takahashi traces the development of the figure of the fool from Beckett's earliest fiction through to some recent drama and suggests that the fool represents Beckett's reaction to the Cartesian rationalism of the modern age which excludes the problem of madness. Indeed the question of madness takes us right back to Kay Boyle's conversation with Beckett in 1930. Here Beckett characterized the problem of insanity in terms of a spiritual journey in the manner of Dante and Virgil. "As he talked," Kay Boyle recalls, "it was almost as if we moved through purgatory together, and he was quite modestly showing me the way out for the condemned." So too between sanity and insanity lies a fathomless abyss and "once one has crossed over" (Beckett is quoted as saying) "there is no way back unless a bridge can be constructed for the return." A most apt visual image this is for capturing the essence of Beckett's own art - Samuel Beckett as simultaneously guide and follower , as both Virgil and Dante, constructing his elaborate bridges across the abyss between sanity and insanity, between the rational and the irrational, between being and nothingness. And our task as readers? To traverse the bridge of Beckett's art not once and with finality but in a seemingly endless translation from one side to the other, in a seemingly endless process of coming and going. VINCENT J. MURPHY Fordham University THE SCANDINAVIAN THEATRE: A SHORT HISTORY, by Frederick J. Marker and LiseLone Marker. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975, xiii & 303 pp. £7.50. Drama, of the literary genres, is most difficult fully to comprehend from an arm- BOOK REVIEWS 425 chair perspective, since unlike poetry or fiction, it insists on a medium beyond the printed word. Theatre as that medium, however, is all too often obscured as an aspect of literary interpretation. A dramatist is commonly viewed within an intellectual tradition, but material is much less readily accessible that suggests perceiving the playwright within a theatrical tradition. For studel)ts of Ibsen and Strindberg, particularly those who have no Scandinavian language (and also for theatre history students who want a trans-national view of the theatre in Denmark , Sweden, and Norway), Professors Frederick J. Marker and Lise-Lone Marker have provided in The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History a most welcome volume. As in other European countries, the history of...