Tragedy Walks the Streets: The French Revolution in the Making of Modern Drama

Conclusion

Conclusion The modernist theatre—understood as a self-consciously revolutionary insurgency—has set itself off from the dramas of the past. Yet time and again it has been haunted by that which it believes it has displaced, that “tradition of all the dead generations.” For by defining itself in relation to the past, it betrays a secret link to history. David Savran In the foregoing pages I have argued that the transition from traditional to modern drama is best understood not as an aggregate of disconnected ruptures —of isolated and irreconcilable formal experiments gathered about the French Revolution’s epistemological void—but as a continuous and extended crisis , worked out not only in literature and the theater but also in political and social performance, of the drama’s authority as a narrative form. This crisis was not limited to the Revolutionary decade, though it found there a decisive moment of realization. Rather, the drama’s crisis emerged from, reflected, and contributed to a more general crisis of representation that was rooted in the late eighteenth century’s awareness of the accelerating pace of time and of historical change. Within the realm of dramatic practice, this crisis was experienced as a widening gap between the codes and conventions required by the traditional dramatic genres and the actual conduct and social construction of everyday life. That gap, which had been understood by neoclassicism as a problem to be rectified by order and veiled by decorum, came to be seen by enlightenment dramatists as a breach to be exploited and rendered in increasingly explicit terms. Contemporary consciousness of this crisis in representation was evident in the delegitimation of dramatic form, but it was most thoroughly expressed in the French Revolution itself, a radical revolt in the spheres of political and social life that overturned those codes and conventions of historical representation that had lent stability and authority to the ancien régime. Yet, as others have pointed out, contemporaries understood the Revolution itself in fundamentally theatrical ways, for the articulation and negotiation of political and social crisis in the 1790s were thoroughly inflected by the language of performance, presentation, and the achievement or enforcement of “audience belief.” On the evidence of this striking usage, one of my aims in this book has been to argue that the French Revolution marks a moment of convergence in these dual reconceptions of narrative time—a moment, that is, when the temporal authority of both drama and history, their capacities to produce plausible horizons of expectation, became so diminished that they met—and merged—in their mutual reduction to the span of a day. But this Revolutionary political appropriation of traditional drama, its application of outmoded generic norms to the conduct of contemporary historical action, did not result simply in the mutual delegitimation of both drama and history . Drama became during this period an experimental instrument for selfconsciously shaping the perception, the performance, and the course of unfolding events, and history became the primary context in which dramatic form was asserted, tested, and reconceived. The Revolution was not an interruption or an epistemological background to the history of the drama but an integral, constitutive part of that history, every bit as central to its course as any literary work or movement. By appropriating the terms of drama, the French Revolution did not shut drama down but extended and fulfilled its enlightenment critique. It subjected drama, not on the stage or in literary form but in the streets of Paris, to what might be thought of as a radical reality check. By enacting the gap between the representational and the actual, the historical drama of the Revolution exploded the old dramatic forms with a violence that could not have been matched in the arts, not only demonstrating their inadequacy to the pace and structure of modern existence but also revealing in stark terms the limitations of their structures of action and the anachronistic assumptions of their implied social visions. And when this revolutionary moment of convergence had passed, the interpenetration of drama and history remained in the dramatic imagination  Tragedy Walks the Streets as a latent formal structure, implicit but no less present for being unacknowledged and unaddressed. The latency of this formal structure is evident in the way the earliest dramatic responses to the French Revolution avoid it. Romanticism’s displacement of Revolutionary history and its efforts to resolve the...