Modern Drama/Modernity's Drama

Modem Drama/Modernity's Drama ELlN DIAMOND We want continuity and we deny continuity. [...JToo much of ourselves, we say, is attached to the past, as if it could be unattached. We develop methods for denying memory. [,.. J [but] [hlistory isstubborn. [.. ,J Like it or not, we are remembered [and thel history that is not played again as farce is, of course, played straight by the aClOrs. It's only history that thinks it's funny. True, all this is merely theoretical; it needs flesh· iog out in the theater. The past always needs blood donors. The theater is a means of transfusion. - Blau 8--9 Modem drama, the question raised by the conveners of the Modem:Drama (defining the field) conferencel and the current editors of Modern Drama, has a past that is selectively remembered and denied in the institutions that support our scholarship. It is nearly absent from current scholarship investigating the times, spaces, and practices of Western modernity and modernism. It is also absent from the academic memories of those who, like me, found themselves happily ensconced in high school literature classes that, even through the 196Os, were dominated by the methods and ideology of the New Critics" Focusing on the autotelic object, most often the short poem, to the exclusion of authorial biography, tradition, and historical context, New Criticism sought to create a preserve of literary language in imitation ofT.S. Eliot's modernist imperative to purify the language of the tribe. In its heyday in the 1940s and I950s, New Criticism exhorted us to never "go outside the poem" lest we merely use literature to defend a depleted liberal humanism or, far worse, to illustrate a Marxist analysis of social forces (Bove 95-97). Yet history has "remembered': the New Critics, in Blau's ironic sense. With their version of a literary preserve and links to Southern Agrarian elites, they Modern Drama, 44: I (Spring 2001) 3 4 ELiN DIAMOND shared a region and a time (the [950S) with the first Civil Rights activists and only history laughs at that juxtaposition. There is also a more interesting problell1: in a paradox worthy of New Critical attention, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren became agents of change, for, in the midst of essentializing literary discourse, they sought to identify what Gerald Graff calls its "human relevance" (t6). In The Well-Wrought Urn, Brooks condemns readers and critics for going "outside the poem" yet endorses Eliot's claim that good poetry is "mature" and "founded on the facts of experience " (254- 55). In the heart of the New Criticism, then, was an untenable contradiction. Having insisted on the essential separateness of the literary word, they also wanted it to circulate. Having banned, for the purpose of rigorous close reading, the author's life and social-historical conditions, the New Critics found themselves in a social-historical conjuncture to which their own critical parameters made them blind. Such blindness, I will argue, removes the New Critics from the ethos of modernism, where they usually lodge, and places them in a feedback loop of longer duree: modernity. Their polemical antihistoricism exposes one of the many threads of metaphysical historicism that modernity itself has fostered. In Frank Lentriccia's summary, "History as [... 1teleological unfolding [... 1history as continuity, or mere repetition [... 1 history as discontinuity - a series of 'ruptures'" producing distinct periods (xiii-xiv), Such a history, Lentriccia continues, "depends on an idealist, and, I would add, Hegelian notion of a "unity and totality [that resists1forces of heterogeneity , contradiction, fragmentation and difference: a 'history' [that] would deny 'histories'" (xii- iv). Some of usm ay remember that Brooks and Warren referred constantly to "drama" in their poetics: "Poetry [.. .1may best be read not as argument inviting us to debate nor as explanation inviting us to understand, but as drama inviting our involvement" (James E. Miller, Jr., and Bernice Slate, qtd. in Graff xii). Yet they followed the Romantics in dismissing drama (excepting Shakespeare) from their canon of organically structured aesthetic objects. There may be cultural and institutional reasons for this, but one is tempted to say that the experience of imaginative "involvement" was riskier with the drama, especially since the...