Introduction: Modernism and Anti-theatricality

Introduction: Modernism and Anti-theatricality ALAN ACKERMAN Twenty years ago, Jonas Barish identified a disposition within Western culture that he termed the anti-theatrical prejudice. From the Greeks to the present, he cites instances of a bias against the expressive, the imitative, the deceptive, the spectacular, and the subject that arouses, or even acknowledges, an audience. Exposing the philosophical, moral, and aesthetic assumptions made by the enemies of the theatre throughout the centuries, his Antitheatrica! Prejudice sought to fortify theatre's defenses against its detractors. This special issue of Modern Dramo offers a critical appraisal of Barish's seminal study. While indebted to him, the collection argues that Barish's trans-historical notion both of anti-theatricalism and, by extension, of the theatre itself is in need of a number of revisions. By focusing on aspects of modem drama (including its intersections with other cultural forms), the articles that follow insist on a historical grounding of any understanding of anti-theatricalism and therefore explore various forms of a specifically modernist critique of theatre. In doing so, the collection moves beyond Barish's monolithic understanding of "the theatre" and proposes to see modem theatre as a field marked by competing, and often contradictory, impulses and developments, a field in which different theatres are engaged in a contentious struggle with one another. The Antitheatrica! Prejudice is itself an important historical document, a product not only of Barish's own humanistic sensibility but also of his historical moment. A Jewish New Yorker, Barish fought in World War II before embarking on a career as a Renaissance scholar in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1954 until his retirement in 1991. His book associates anti-theatricality with fascism, from Plato to Nietzsche, and with anti-Semitism. The argument, earlier advanced by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dia!ectic ofEnlightenment (1944) and developed by Barish, that Jews, nomads, players are perceived as "other" and that their Modern Drama, 44:3 (2001) 275 ALAN ACKERMAN very existence is a provocation, a projection of a false mimesis, will be further investigated and complicated in this special issue. In its analysis of Schoenberg 's Moses und Aron, Herbert Lindenberger's contribution, "Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera," shows that Moses not only challenges theatricality but also becomes an embodiment of a spirit of anti-theatricality. From Freud and Joyce to Schoenberg, in fact, Moses, for whom God is Unvorstellbor or unrepresentable, appears as a paradigmatic modernist figure. And in the antithesis between Moses and Aron, Lindenberger sees a tacit critique of the theatrically seductive and popular Arons (read Hitlers) of the world. On the other hand, Rebecca Walkowitz, in "Conrad's Adaptation: Theatricality and Cosmopolitanism," shows ways in which "foreigners" in cosmopolitan Europe appropriated (or were perceived to appropriate) modes of theatricality that were fundamental to the construction of modernism and cosmopolitanism . In Barish's book, "theatricality" is continually associated with the possibilities of self-determination. "Freedom" is The Antitheatrical Prejudice's most pervasive tenn. However, a deep ambivalence, not unlike the antithesis within Schoenberg's opera, informs the work. Barish notes that Plato's prescriptions may appear confining, "[bJut we can hardly help finding their opposite, the spectacle of frenetic metamorphosis, disquieting" (469). And, in this respect also, The Atztitheatrical Prejudice is an unmistakably post-war American work. Written in the midst of the countercultural movements of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam, and the crisis of Watergate, The Antitheatrical Prejudice is alert to "the conditions of our time, to the breakdown of longstanding patterns of culture, I...J the mass media, and above all to the menace of nuclear war, with its dissolving of the boundaries of destruction and its consequent threats to the self and the traditional symbolism of the self' (471). American public life of the 1970S presented ample reason for a heightened concern about theatricality and authenticity. "[TJhe individual flirts desperately with the world at large," writes Barish, "all the while cynically disbelieving in any reality behind his own impersonations" (474). Yet, as Walkowitz argues, Barish's model of theatricality is embedded in a pre-modernist conception of culture. Barish defined theatre as the "representation of the observed and...