Theatre and Alchemy by Bettina L. Knapp (review)

572 Book Reviews yourself." Here Ossar stops and thus omits the crux of the whole speech, ofthe play, and possibly also of Toller's entire "anarchist" philosophy; "Wir miissen der Anarchie von oben die Ordnung von uoten entgegensetzen." ("We must counter the anarchy from above with order from below.") This, then, is the clue, and it leads us directly to Pastor Hall, a drama mentioned only in passing. Hall, too, tries to create order below in opposition to the anarchy above, i.e.• Nazism. As Ossar reminds us, Toller disliked labels! if label we must, perhaps "ethical autonomy," a teoo Ossar employs on p. 81, would have been better as a description of Toller's work. In any case, some qualifier should have been added to tone down the stridency of the label "anarchism" in the book's title, especially in view of Webster's definition of "anarchist" ("One who uses violent means to overthrow the established order"), the I911 Encyclopaedia Britannica addition to Kropotkin's article on anarchism, and Bertrand Russell's remarks (both cited by Ossar), and the fact that, in popular usage, anarchist is practically synonymous with assassin. Such modifiers as are used, for example, in the titles of the publications on Gustav Landauer and Ernst Junger, also abound in Ossar's book, tenns like conservative, mystical, ethical, metaphysical, idealistic, religious, spiritual, philosophical, pacifist, messianic, even saintly. Dorothy Thompson called Toller humanitarian, even Shelleyan, and some such adjective would have done much to emphasize Toller's highly introspective and conscientiolls nature and character as - in Theodor Reuss's phrase - "basically a delicate enthusiast." EVA LACHMAN-KALITZKI, UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI BETTINA L. KNAPP. Theatre andAlchemy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 1980. pp. xiii, 283. Bettina Knapp, who in previous books dealing with Artaud, Genet, Racine, and others has shown her mastery of Jungian archetypal criticism, now joins to this already academically sanctioned approach to literature the less conventional methodology of alchemy, which has yet to become a standard analytic tool in the study of drama or the other arts, although there are recent signs of growing interest and acceptance. I In the introduction to Theatre and Alchemy, Knapp gives a brief history of alchemy as a science, psychology, and metaphysics, and investigates its applications to the theatre, drawing upon seminal insights by Jung and, above all, by Antonin Anaud, the spiritual father of the alchemical interpretation of theatrical texts. We learn from this lucid and erudite exposition that the three-part alchemical process - Nigredo (blackening procedure), Albedo (whitening stage), and Rubedo (reddening phase) - corresponds to the different psychological moments in the development of the human personality according to Jung, and becomes, as a mode of analysis, a metaphor for the act of creation. In similar fashion, the seven alchemical operations - Calcinario, Solutio, Coagulatio, Sublimatio, Separatio, PutrefactiolMortificatio, Coniunctio - which collectively result in the fonnation of perfect metal, may also be viewed as psychological operations producing sound personality and enabling the individual to transfonn chaos into cosmos. The rest of Theatre andAlchemy consists ofa series ofchapters in which single plays Book Reviews 573 by Slrindberg, Ghelderode, Claudel, Witkiewicz, Yeats, Villiers de I'Isle-Adam, and Ansky. plus the Noh drama, Matsukaze. and Kalidasa's Shakuntala, are scrutinized in depth according to the alchemical teoria. The neat and admittedly schematic plan whereby the plays are assigned to different stages of the alchemical process (with the exception of the two Oriental dramas, which are considered as Spiritus Mundi! Anima Mundi) is largely an organizational device, since each of the works transcends any given category. although it may instructively be seen as guided by a dominant operation. In Knapp's expert hands the alchemical method is revealed to be an effective synthesis of occult arts and esoteric disciplines that can serve as the basis for learned explications of the symbolism of colors, names, animals, elements, and precious stones. Instead of forcing each play into a fixed pseudoscientific mold (a real danger when there is such wholesale borrowing of tenninology from another, more technical and speculative sphere of knowledge), Knapp discusses particular dramatic works on their own terms, using alchemy less as a precise technique than as a mode of perceiving hidden dimensions and...