Vladimir's Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination by John Peter (review)

Book Reviews JOHN PETER. Vladimir' sCarrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press t987. Pp. x, 372 . $24.95 [n his persuasive and thoroughly engaging book, Vladimir's Carrot: Modern Drama and the Modern Imaginatioll, John Peter, chief drama critic for the London Sllnday Times, attempts to define what is distinctly modem about modem drama. Searching for the quintessential modem drama, Peter chooses to by-pass Alfred Jarry's Vbu Rai and the polemical dramas of Bcrtolt Brecht, among others, finding Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Gadat to be the pivotal example. Around this play Peter authoritatively explicates the fundamental differences between the ritualized plays of the ancients or the literary dramas of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov and Beckett's towering play whose original production may have been, according to Peter, "the single most important event in the theatre since Aeschylus" (p. 17). Peterexamines the significanceof Waiting/or Godot by tracing the impact ofthe most potent philosophical influences on modem thought on Beckett. ]n separate chapters Peter traces the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka and Marcel Proust, and Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque on both the depiction of a nihilistic modem society and the profound changes in dramatic art exemplified by Beckett's towering work. In a finely constructed argument, Peter demonstrates the ways in which Beckett has reinvented the use of character, plot, and, most significantly, meaning, in Waiting/or Godot. Peter points out that traditional classical and modem plays arc "open" an, typically presenting multi-sided moral and political arguments in which the audience could engage. Beckett has, Peter states, presented a world that is "closed" to questioning; it can only be accepted or rejected. For Peter, this "closed" art depicts the "closed" society inhabited by both Beckett's characters and audience. In this respect. Peter' s study transcends its most obvious intention: it questions the place and importance of thought and drama for an anxious and threatened society. Book Reviews 319 Attempting to address the unsettling changes in modern drama represented by Beckett's works, Peter quotes the late director Alan Schneider, discussing Beckett's Happy Days: I accept Winnie's dominating presence in the mound, the literal absence of legs in the first act and of anything below the neck in the second act as I accept Picasso's lady with several faces or Dati's bent watch. (P.264) The need to suspend traditional critical expectations in Beckett's sometimes alien dramaturgy, is central to Peter's notion that the search for modem drama must be open-ended. In dealing specifically with Wailillg for Godor, as well as with Beckett 's other dramatic works, Peter examines Beckett's use of character, symbol, language, staging elements, and the playwright's poetic vision. For Peter, Beckett's works are a sublimely realized culmination of complex and intricate modernist ideas that have been articulated in the last eighty years, and the reason that Waiting for Godot, especially, "speaks to us with such immediacy is that, in this sense, too, it is a work of its time" (p. 355). Peter points out that the relations of ordinary human life have no practical validity here; the ideas of time, and of the passage of time, are meaningless. The past has no bearing on the future. The factuality. the logic, and the morality of life are powerless. There is no willed human action or movement; the characters of such an event can only be certain of moving towards extinction. This is the most closed world of all. (p. 356) Peter addresses the issue of the seemingly endless interpretive problems of the play and concludes by wondering if Waitingfor Godot is a study ofsuffering. a dramatization of anxiety. a religious aJlegory, or a Freudian examination of guilt. But, he fmds, in Beckett's "closed" world the play is ultimately about "the experience of being alone" (p. 357). Vladimir's Carrol is a provocative, sometimes troubling study , profound and Challenging in both its content and implications. Peter is at his best in making complex connections between Waiting for Godot and the seminal works of modem culture and dramatic literature. He...