Aesthetic Prejudice in Modern Drama

Aesthetic Prejudice in Modern Dramal MICHAEL 1. SIDNELL The aesthetic prejudice chiefly in question is that subordination or suppression of the performing subject that is particularly associated with realism in modem drama. It stands revealed as such not only in the staging but also in the perfonnative elements of the verbal texts in which dramatic realism, rather paradoxically, defined itself. The incommensurability of an act of representation and a corresponding embodiment of a performing subject is often made quite obvious in the juxtaposition of modern dramas and their operatic versions , and it is a given in the aesthetics of physical theatre. In the earliertwentieth century, such aesthetic issues were so embroiled in fateful political struggles as to induce such crises of representation as those instanced here: the transmutation, in Walter Benjamin's theory, that brought with it an acceptance of didactic performance; the severe problems encountered in Marc Blitzstein's operatic and remedial transformation of Lillian Hellman's flawed aesthetic in The Lillie Foxes and its associated moral blindness; and the divergent theatre practices of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot with respect to speech, music, and dance. In these instances, perfonnativity versus discourse is a critical issue, and it remains so in contemporary practice, though hardly th~ dangerous one that it has been in the past. The long-drawn-out iconoclastic crisis of early Byzantium, for instance, was a dynastic struggle in which the aesthetic preferences of the rivals were explicit motivations for violence. In the early stages of the crisis. the iconoclastic Leo III ruthlessly suppressed anthropomorphic religious images and their veneration.' He couldn't "bear," he said, "to see Christ represented by an image that could neither breathe nor speak, and preferred a symbol" (Lassus 86). After more than a century of conflict and persecution, figural religious imagery was restored in Byzantium, and with it the veneration of the divinity immanent in the icon. A contemporary approximation to the Byzantine opposition might be found Model'nDrama,44:I (Spring 200 1) 16 Aesthetic Prejudice in Modem Drama 17 in the dramatic character, as a function of realism, contrasted with the performing subject, which conflates signifier and signified in the immanence of the enactment. There need be nothing magic about this hypostatization or embodiment of the performing-self as such. It might appropriately be called performative iconicity but for the fact that semiotics has boldly appropriated the term "icon" to mean a kind of sign, whereby instantiation defers to interpretation . Resistance to this co-option of the performing subject as sign has been taken to be a justification for the continuation of theatre and even for the theatricalization of social life; at the same time, the reception of theatre has remained mostly a reading practice, the interpretation of a so-called performance text. In the 19305, the crises of representation were more acute and dangerous. perhaps, than ever before. The prejudices of realism and aestheticism were organized on a massive scale and aspired to total domination - and not just in art. As Walter Benjamin famously observed, fascism was an aestheticization of political life (Gesammelte SclzriJten 1.2.506-8; lllumillations 241-42).' And Benjamin himself was one of those driven by the exigencies of the time to forge a radically new aesthetic. In relation to theatre, he had to come to terms with what is immanent in the non-linguistic presentation; he did so, though in a manner constrained by his unqualified acceptance of Brechtian epic theatre. Earlier, in his pre-Marxist writings. Benjamin's attention was sharply focused on language. Greek tragedy he conceived as nothing other than a form - the only form, moreover - of pure dialogue; and baroque tragedy , or Trauerspiel, in his view, consisted mostly of emotive dialogue, though it sprang from nature and found its fulfilment in music (Selected Writings 60). The early Benjamin contested the critical reception of drama whereby its contents or meanings are privileged over its (verbal) embodiments. "Truth, bodied forth in the dance of represented ideas, resists being projected, by whatever means, into the realm of knowledge" (Gesammelte Schriftell 1.1.209; Origin 29), is his lapidary pronouncement.4 This doctrine is easier to assent to than to abide...