The Futile Encounter in the Plays of John Whiting

THE FUTILE ENCOUNTER IN THE PLAYS OF JOHN WHITING THE CURRENT REVALUATION OF THE PLAYS of John Whiting,! done, unfortunately, for the most part, posthumously, offers us a good illustration of significant formal transitions in modern drama: the artistic reconsideration of the nature of dramatic form accomplished by the plays themselves; and the critical reconsideration of formal aesthetic structure. To a large degree, the disintegration of form, in its conventional sense, is the result of the process begun in the Renaissance with the disintegration of the conception of an ordered universe: the movement from the concept that form exists within the structure of the universe itself, which is imitated in art, to the concept that the individual consciousness is the source of any form w-hich exists, bringing a subjective order to that which is otherwise chaotic. Correspondingly, our increasing understanding of the metaphoric process, related to our understanding of the function of the unconscious, has given us a way to respond to the subjective ordering of experience and a notion of form more complex than the conventional interaction of character and plot. While our emotional life has not, perhaps, grown more complex and, in poetry we will still imitate archetypal experiences, our psychological, aesthetic, and critical articulation of these experiences has grown more complicated. In that sense, the contemporary poet or playwright is more conscious, surely, of the process of infusing into the realistic imitation, the complex motivations and colorations which he both feels intuitively and explores intellectually. This increasingly elaborate articulation of human experience provides both the poet and the critic with clearer but more complex mechanisms for clarification. With works as obviously subjective, as obviously structured in a phenomenological form as Waiting for Godot and Endgame~2 it is easy to accept the fact that the aesthetic structure is not imitative of what we call "objective reality." However, John Whiting's earlier plays-Saint's Day and Marching Song-share with the plays of Ibsen's last phase a puzzled critical response to the infusion of a highly 1 See, for example, John Dennis Hurrell, ".John Whiting and the Theme of Self-Destruction," Mod,ern Drama, VIII (September, 1965), 134-141. 2 Charles R. Lyons, "Beckett's Endgame: An Anti-Myth of Creation," Modern Drama, VII (Fall, 1964), 204-209. 283 284 MODERN DRAMA December metaphoric structure into a dramatic work which assumes an ostensibly realistic attitude towards the events presented. It is possible to see, for example, the various tensions, fears, and attitudes of all the figures of Ibsen's The Master Builder as tensions, anxieties, fears, and guilts present and transforming within a single consciousness. The curious presence of Hilde Wangel, seen as an emanation of Solness' own guilt and desire for freedom from recrimination, becomes much clearer. The whole genre of modern tragedy is being understood with increasing clarity as the manifestation of the protagonist's own being, realized in the metaphor of the action itself. Martin Foss, in Symbol and MetaPhor~ speaks clearly on this point: . . . [the] shift from outward events to an inner development is also reflected in the role which 'evil' plays in Greek and modern tragedy. . . . In modern tragedy no fate, no chance, no demon have their place. Destruction is rooted in the very heart of the hero whose own self is the source of failure, sin, or guilt, and it needs only the awareness of this inner failure to reveal in him the transcending movement of grace, his resurrection beyond the finite level of his purposive and failing nature. The parallel to the religious realm is obvious. If this is so, then the plot, indeed, fuses into one unity with the life and character of the hero. The plot becomes the mere manifestation and realization of the hero's life ... he represents in metaphorical extension more than himself and turns out to be the destiny of his fellowmen, assuming, in spite of his individual concreteness, the general validity of a law which makes a whole world transparent for our understanding. In this way it happens that the other personages of the drama appear not as exterior instruments of fate, thrown into the way of the hero in order to...