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the entire play into memory, a radical expressionism without limits. What Peter Szondi has said of Miller's "memory" technique in Death of a Salesman is even truer of The Glass Menagerie: The dramatic unities are likewise abolished-indeed, abolished in the most radical sense: memory signifies not only a multiplicity of times and .places but also the absolute loss of their identity. The temporal-spatial present of the action is not simply relativized in terms of other presents; on the contrary, it is in itself relative. Therefore, there is no real change in the setting , and, at the same time, it is perpetually transformed. [93-94] Szondi might have gone further: even the means of determining change has been lost in some real sense, since no state of mind can be seen as originary. Thus the transformation can be affirmed only in its process, not in its effects. The temporal ordering of mimesis having been relativized radically, its power to stabilize the image is revealed as coercive force. The Einsteinian relativity of time to space is actually denied by realism; time is superior to space in realism's conceptual hierarchy, where the options must be left open for a return to the mimetic referent, to the contemplation of an anterior reality, a genesis. The space of drama seems, or rather is of course meant to seem, arbitrary, a territory that comes with the principle, to reverse the common saying. The bourgeoiS or working-class setting , the family or urban milieu, is understood as standing in place of a totality, but it is also a part of that totality. The space of realism is synecdochic of a larger space of which it is "a slice"-a neatly sectioned radius representing on its own an organic whole, not an oddly shaped fragment from a puzzle. The point is to be able to infer the whole from its part, or put another way, the part is an imitation of its whole, in small. On the other hand, then, the space of realism cannot seem (merely) arbitrary; it has to seem to have a necessary connection to its referent, has to in fact seem to blend with it, beyond the wings. The realistic setting is understood as a segmented space whose arbitrariness is evidence of its system: any random test will produce an apparent order. Space remains static, keeps its place, cannot move. Motion is the prerogative of time. Time, as the originating impulse 82 The Glass Menagerie for mimetic order, is disassociated from spatial consideration and elevated above it, precisely to avoid relativity in the "simple, economic geometry of a 'house of certainty' " (Foucault, Discipline 202). Of "this devaluation of space that has prevailed for generations," Foucault writes: "Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical , the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness, fecundity , life, dialectic" (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 70). For these reasons, perhaps, political and economic theories that posit a "change" from a "present" reality must privilege time (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 76). Meanwhile the segmentation of space was exploited in the capitalist era of population explosion and distributed labor, when it was necessary to discipline bodies in order to accumulate wealth (Foucault , Discipline 220-21). The effort to represent an evolutionary, organic , "liVing continuity" is an effort directed against the primacy of spatial concepts. It creates a gap between the relativistic spacetime coordinates, a war from political motives. "If one started to talk in terms of space that meant one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one 'denied history: that one was a 'technocrat' " (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 70). Nevertheless with the inclusion of the spatial synecdoche as an equal partner in its representational process, realism can be seen to acquire a new insidiousness of territorial obsession. For realism at its most sophisticated complicates the spatial relationships within the synecdochic space. It wages territorial wars over space, makes the domination of space seem to reflect the play's anxiety; whereas this domination turns out to be the anxiety's true object. The parallel opposing figures and dialogical form represent conflict as psychological , but it is really literally the space represented that is at stake, not some issue or moral principle. The struggle in A Doll House, for example, might appear to be Nora's will versus Torvald's concern for propriety, as represented by the forgery, the parallel figures of Kristine and Krogstad, and so forth. But the conflict can also be seen as...

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