Character as Destiny in Hofmannsthal's Electra

CHARACTER AS DESTINY IN HOFMANNSTHAL'S ELECTRA As AN ARTIST HUGO VON HOFMANNS'IlIAL was always violent in his reaction against materialism in philosophy and naturalism in art. Even as a young man, living in the morally debilitated pre-World War I city of Vienna, Hofmannsthal saw the limitations of an art which was committed to an external view of reality. Naturalism in the drama, with its convention of environmental credibility, from the time of Hebbel, Becque, Hauptmann, and Ibsen (up to The Wild Duck) had tended to show life as it existed on the surface; it was all too often sociological in its orientation and failed to capture the multiple complexities of man's inner life. It was because of this very ordinariness, this exaction of truth to life, that Hofmannsthal turned to Symbolism, the shrine of all the disenchanted young poets and dramatists of his time. The symbolists' ideal at that time was a poetry of "Stimmung." Their poetry was often exotic and usually esoteric, but so long as it was inward and cultured, and avoided contamination with the rawness and crudities of the external social milieu of the time, it served the symbolists ' purposes. Their aim was to recapture that musical intensity which is present to some degree in all art, but which was ·completely lost in the arid and sterile atmosphere of the sociological plays and novels. Walter Pater was the leading critic and spokesman of this movement in its rebellion against naturalism. His dictum about all the arts "aspiring towards the conditions of music" sprang from his sensitive diagnosis of the condition of art at that time, and it became the credo of many artists. Hofmannsthal was one of them. Like Strindberg, he was moved by the music of Debussy and influenced by the paintings of Gauguin and Van Gogh. In a similar way the symbolist poets, particularly Mallarme, Valery, and Stefan George influenced the young Viennese playwright. Hofmannsthal came to believe, under these influences , that human experience is so complex that words can never express and explain it; that life can only be approached obliquely by the indirect method of symbols. As a result, Hofmannsthal rejected most of Ibsen's drama as too exact and precise for symbols and sought in his own plays to achieve the lyrical suggestiveness of music. Hofmannsthal's early lyric dramas fit very well into this atmosphere of "Stimmung." But all too often critics have mistakenly held that symbolism is the predominant characteristic of his drama and that his plays, therefore, are more lyrical than dramatic. This is a mistake, 17 18 MODERN DRAMA May for Hofmannsthal thought of the theater primarily in dramatic and not symbolical terms. By the turn of the century he had realized that although symbols could be used to heighten and deepen the implications of naturalistic drama, they also led to an ambiguity, an abstractness , and an allusiveness which the theater could not control and express. In this connection one is reminded of Hedwig's word to her mother at the end of the second act of The Wild Duck: GINA: Wasn't that queer talk about wanting to be a dog? HEDWIG: Do you know, mother, I believe he [Gregers] meant something quite different by that. GINA: Why, what should he mean? HEDWIG: Oh, I don't know; but it seemed to me he meant something different from what he said-all the time. If what Hedwig says is true, if everything that is explicit really means something else, then the drama either loses touch with reality or it becomes so diffuse that it can communicate only in a private and personal way rather than in the communal way that the theater requires. It is for this reason, despite his lyrical tendencies and the fact that he was strongly influenced by the symbolist ideals of verse, that Hofmannsthal ultimately broke with many writers of his generation who included a social art like the theater in the world they rejected. After Death and the Fool (1893), in which he repudiates the aestheticism of the symbolists, Hofmannsthal's work is a continuing effort to achieve a theatrical form which would combine the symbolists' rich and...