Geneva—or the Failure of Rationalism

Shaw’s farcical representation of Hitler in his late play, Geneva, has been criticized as inadequate and inappropriate, since he mocks democratic institutions as powerless while letting the dictator get away with his self-serving agenda. But if we read Geneva as an experiment with modernist strategies, rather than as a play in the realist tradition, we discover that Shaw is making interesting new assumptions about historical discourse that are buried in the unrecognized inner frames and deeper structures of this late play. Shaw seems to envision political discourse in which specific positions are no longer confined to individual speakers, but are disseminated throughout a public sphere that is not just based on rational judgment. Instead, Shaw’s dramatic devices direct us to the less visible and less reasonable forces in public discourse as well as to the mythic and irrational forces behind political power.