Modern Tragicomedy by Karl S. Guthke (review)

1967 BOOK REVIEWS 461 comments upon it instead. Frequently he uses. art as a springboard for the presentation of original ideas. Dr. Weissman is himself an excellent example of the genre. GEORGE E. WELLWARTH Pennsylvania State University MODERN TRAGICOMEDY, by Karl S. Guthke, Random House, 204 pp. Price $1.95 (paperback). The stated purpose of this essay in genre definition (one of the Random House Studies in Language and Literature) is to supply "background for the study and enjoyment of tragicomic drama" (p. ix), meaning the kind of serious "mixed" drama being written today by playwrights of international reputation. Neither comic nor tragic in any conventional sense, this drama is not to be paired with the tragicomedy written in the past, say by Beaumont and Fletcher, and justified by theorists like Giambattista Guarnii. Accordingly, in his opening chapter, Professor Guthke gives a historical survey of tragicomedy from the sixteenth century onward and of theoretical comment on it, century by century, his conclusion being that "modern" tragicomedy is essentially romantic in critical provenience, but twentieth century in its major successes. The principal exceptions to this generalization are, of course, certain of Ibsen's more non-conventional plays. (The Wild Duck is the only play interpreted at any length, owing to limitations of space, and it is interpreted solely in the light of Professor Guthke's descriptive definition of "modern" tragicomedy as detailed in Chapters II and III.) The book is thus a groundbreaker of sorts, provocative, illuminating, sometimes persuasive , frequently provoking. To begin with Chapter III. The philosophical tenor of the book is simply this: that "modern" tragicomedy is the only mode capable today of coping with the ethical and esthetic burdens formerly divided between tragedy and comedy in times when thoughtful men were largely agreed about the metaphysical and theological structure of the universe (a structure composed of absolutes) and could depend upon that structure to provide universal ethical and esthetic norms. As a result playwrights and play-goers were agreed that there are two different, but not finally antagonistic ways of assessing human existence, one tragic and one comic, and that individual dramatists could have their say in any of the dramatic modes expressive of these two ways. No such situation prevails today, which is to say that in contemporary "mixed" plays two predominant characteristics are omnipresent: (1) a fairly stable set of structural patterns that reveal themselves once a sufficiently large number of contemporary "mixed" plays are examined inductively; and (2) a vision of life that insists that human existence is at once both comic and tragic and must therefore be rendered dramatically as a total fusion of comic and tragic insights and ironies. Otherwise the human condition as we experience it today will be falsified, since modern man no longer, so it is claimed, lives in a world of absolutes presided over by a benevolent deity. Instead , the assumption is that man today lives in a universe that may perhaps best be described as nihilistic, or to soften this pessimistic outlook, a universe bleak enough so that men who genuinely reflect find in nihilism a means toward at least negative awareness of the absolute. For if a god exists at all, he is probably a savage puppeteer deity who laughs at human suffering and remains heartlessly indifferent to it. In either case, the spectator reacts to "modern" tragicomedy with one eye weeping and the other laughing. This body of theoretical, metaphysical pronouncements Professor Guthke derives from the theoretical es- 462 MODERN DRAMA February says of playwrights like Diirrenmatt, lonesco, Arthur Miller, even Bernard Shaw (to cite only a few names), from a variety of critics who have undertaken to assess the intelIectual tone of serious, recent drama, and from his own study of a broad spectrum of modern plays. Professor Guthke's approach to the study of structural patterns is systematic and precise. He begins Chapter II by stating what "modern" tragicomedy is not. It is not parody nor travesty nor melodrama. It is not satire, which in his view is always grounded in firm ethical norms, contrary to what one finds in tragedy and tragicomedy, forms in which the writer does not proceed "from such a...