Male Fantasies (Volume I): Women, Floods, Bodies, History by Klaus Theweleit (review)

France. She then moves to our problematic modern era to ponder tragedy's reported demise in Ibsen's subsuming of tragedy in melodrama, lonesco's Absurdist denial of the tragic/comic dichotomy and, finally, Chaikin's crossing of the boundary between dramatic text and performance. I wish the author had amplified one point, however, which she only sporadically considers: that our experience of tragedy-indeed, all theatre -is a replication or reinforcement of a basic mourning pattern, that the stage itself, by its very nature, is a liminal realm. The spectators experience what it is like to be a mourner by viewing impersonating performers who, like the Absent Dead One, are present and absent simultaneously. This suggestive insight lies at the heart of the paradox of "ghosting" which Herbert Blau sees at the root of theatre itself. Cole suppresses this question in her desire to affirm that "tragedy is not dead; death itself assures the life of tragedy." Whether or not we are fully convinced by her faith in tragedy's endurance, there is no doubt that this stimulating study not only illuminates the tragic canon but also suggests why contemporary theatrical representations of tragedy are so dessicated: with a few exceptions like The Gospel at Co/onus , they lack a living ceremonial surrogate. Like Hamlet, our theatre mourns in a world without the means for mourning. Gerald Rabkin Male Fantasies (Volume I): Women, Floods, Bodies, History Klaus Theweleit University of Minnesota Press; 517 pp.; $25.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper) Marx and Freud have increasingly been placed in uneasy tandem as the private unconscious turns out to be politically constructed. Male Fantasies takes fantasy seriously: it is not the negative of reality but a rich archive of information about how ideology shapes our most personal emotions. Theweleit argues that, in the West, "if desire flows at all, it flows through Woman." The fantasies he examines are those of the Freikorpsmen, who served between 1923 and 1933 and became the core of Hitler's SS. These men loved to kill, and above all they loved to kill women; or rather they loved to kill women, workers, communists, Jews, all of whom they constructed as "Woman." Their murderous fantasies about women condoned, and even produced, the destruction of life itself. Much of the book is an anti-Oedipal refutation of Marx and Freud: Freud for his failure to recognize that "the names of Oedipus (incest and castration) originate . . . in society, not in desire or in the unconscious"; and Marx for his inability to understand materiality at the level of the sexualized body. These positions will please neither those who define revolution in economic terms nor those who define it in terms of pleasure. But it does suggest that the ideology of "Woman" is the only site which reconciles the 91 two, and enables Theweleit to demonstrate how language about women has constructed Western civilization. While Theweleit never decides whether an affirmation of life resides in economic revolution or in disobedience to the Oedipal laws of gender identity , his odd mix of detailed history, speculative analysis, personal, unexpurgated confession (and some questionable interpretation) creates a book that oozes, slips, leaks into precisely those living forms the Freikorpsmen would destroy. Highly accessible, shocking, finally hopeful, Theweleit's accumulation of detail and de-centerings performs its own exuberant antipatriarchal and revolutionary gesture. Kathleen Hulley Theatre Is Not Safe Gordon Rogoff Northwestern University Press; 280 pp.; $42.95 (cloth), $15.95 (paper) For over twenty years Gordon Rogoff has written intelligently,cogently, and sensitively about American theatre; therefore it is a pleasure to have in hand a collection of his articles and reviews, most of which appeared in The Village Voice. One of the joys of this book is to observe the evolution of a real theatre mind, to be witness to the long, slow development of a complex and very human sensibility. This is the record of a rich life, carefully considered . It sometimes seems that New York critics are divided into two camps: the Social Validators uptown, whose self-appointed task is the creation of the official canon of "good' theatre, and the Thought Police downtown, who cannot resist pointing out mistakes in...