On Dramaturgic Agents and Krleža's Agential Structure: The Types as a Key Level

On Dramaturgic Agents and Krleza's Agential Structure: The Types as a Key Level DARKO SUVIN Fortunately, it is not my task here to present the large and much discussed (though not at all well-known in English) dramaturgic oeuvre of Miroslav Krleza (1893-198I), the dominant cultural, literary, and dramaturgic figure that bestrides twentieth-century Yugoslav literature as a giant out of Rabelais. I I must commit two overlapping sins of omission if I am to speak at article-length about his plays: first, presuppose them as known, and discuss only one rarely treated but sufficiently significant aspect in a new light (an analysis which may contribute to dramaturgic theory in general); second, neglect most nuances and possible but not strictly mandatory branchings within my argument, such as a systematic distinction between Krleza'srather differing phases. A very brief, handy, and defensible subdivision of Krleza's play-writing might define its main phases according to: I) the tendency toward expressionism , c. 1913-1919, producing the plays Maskerata, Legenda, Saloma, Kraljevo, Hrvatska rapsodija, Kristofor Kolumbo, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Adam; i Eva, and U predvecerje (the early and late plays in each phase are, naturally, less typical of it); 2) the tendency toward Neue Sachlichkeit in the first halfofthe 1920S, producing the plays Galicija (reworked in the 1930S as U logoru), Golgota, and Vucjak; 3) the return to the Ibsenian dramaturgic model, from the mid 1\920S to the mid 1930s, producing the three "Glembajev cycle" plays Gospoda Glembajevi, U agoniji (successfully enlarged by an additional act after the war), and Leda; and 4) a coda, or largely unsuccessful attempts after the Second World War at syncretic retrospective in a few fantasy plays, the only full-scale one being Aretej. I The approach to agential analysis in dramaturgy that I shall develop here, based on a hypothesis explained at some length in other places,2 requires a more extensive though still very abbreviated premise to my investigation of Krleza. Krleza's Agential Structure 81 The presuppositions for a theory of agential analysis have a pure Slavic pedigree going back to Russian works from the 1920S, beginning with Propp and the other formalists, and continuing to Bogatyrev and Jakobson as links with the Prague Circle of the 1930s-1940s. Nonetheless, my hypothesis arises out ofconsiderations which were developed later (except for the Tartu school of Lotman, Uspenskii, etc.), not primarily in Slavic languages, but in French and Italian narratology or semiotics. The first question that arises at this point is one of pertinence. Is it useful to employ the complex and sometimes clumsy machinery of (even a nonscientistic variant of) semiotics to analyse such well-known works as a canonical and canonized play or group of plays by Krleza (or, say, by Shakespeare)? My answer is conditionally but clearly positive. I respond with a positive answer, because dramaturgy is, within a cluster of young disciplines such as the theory of literature or of fine arts, one of the youngest and least developed: it cannot afford to refuse illumination of its domain, wherever that illumination originates. But my positive answer is only conditional, because I must concede that the highly interesting cognitive potentials of semiotics have been dominated up to now, at least in dealing with narrative (including dramaturgical) agents, by an ahistorical universalism and scientism, a syndrome I have elsewhere called glossocracy (or, if one prefers, linguistic imperialism). I hope that we shall be able to build upon the historical fundamentals of agential analysis in Aristotle and Propp, who proceed by means of sociohistorical induction from precise cultural processes such as genres and discursive traditions, not by unchecked deduction from very dubious "universal laws which constitute the unconscious operation of the spirit."3 Should it prove possible to use semiotics as an analytical technique rather than a technocratic ideology, then such semiotics of dramaturgy may take a useful, perhaps even a key, place within the polyphony of critical approaches. Within a discipline such as the agential theory, which has to cope with such vexed knots as character and type, we especially need, not so much new (be it said with some sadness), as coherent and encompassing views. As a first approximation, I shall...