Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s by Mardi Valgemae (review)

Book Reviews • ACCELERATED GRIMACE: EXPRESSIONISM IN THE AMERICAN DRAMA OF THE 1920s, by Mardi Valgemae. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972. xiv, 415 pp. $5.95. The expressionist movement of the 1920s is so important in American drama that it is strange that Professor Valgemae's book should be the first full exploration of the subject. Yet, such it is; and to the importance of its topic, it adds not only an excellent title (from Ezra Pound's "The age demanded an imagej Of its accelerated grimace") but also the virtues of first-hand evidence - in the form of communications to the author by John Howard Lawson, John Dos Passos, Paul Green, George Sklar and others - and a clear thesis. Professor Valgemae argues that, despite the disclaimers of O'Neill, Elmer Rice, and Lawson, nearly all the American expressionists were familiar with and directly influenced by German theatre and film, and that the forms they evolved have continued to influence American drama to the present. In spite of these virtues, however, the study disappoints because it has three major weaknesses, whose common denominator is that they lead Professor Valgemae to neglect his promise to be "concerned with technique only insofar as it illuminates specific dramatic works (p. xii). The first weakness comes from a difficulty inherent in expressionism itself, which Valgemae recognizes but fails to master: its heavy reliance on visual and theatrical effects, as distinct from verbal, literary qualities. Valgemae promises to emphasize the production aspects of the plays he discusses (p. xiii) but does not allow himself space to analyse them in sufficiently individualizing detail. The result is a catalogue of general theatrical effects, which is very repetitive, and obscures precisely those differences on which the assessment of an individual play depends. One suspects that such repetition of generalized effects was the great vice of expressionism. But Accelerated Grimace does not make this point; it exemplifies it. 457 458 BOOK REVIEWS Secondly: though Valgemae proves, I think conclusively, that O'Neill, Rice, and Lawson were familiar with Kaiser, Toller and German cinema before they wrote expressionistically and that there are sufficient similarities in their work to warrant an assumption of influence, he again fails to use this discovery to illuminate individual plays. He is too intent on finding parallels to the Germans to investigate their critical significance; and, far too often, the parallels themselves are mere analogies and superficial resemblances. Phrases such as "are somewhat reminiscent of," "reminds one of," reflect a disabling want of rigour; and again one is struck by the extraordinary repetitiveness of the detail noted - all those outsize typewriters and ticker tapes, top-hatted plutocrats, leaning walls, dream trials, masks, and so on. Perhaps such repetition is endemic to art forms that rely on shock and overstatement, but a scholar need not accept this fact uncritically; and there were certainly more differences in the use of the recurrent devices than Professor Valgemae makes clear. Lastly, and most seriously: Accelerated Grimace falls victim to the confusion of ideas and conflicting philosophies which lay behind expressionism 's shared techniques. Valgemae quotes Joseph Wood Krutch's opinion that expressionism was ideal to express the "confused emotions" of the time (p. 121), but suggests that a coherent common denominator was the expressionists ' wish to cut through the surface of "realism" to the "essence" of human experience. When one asks what the expressionists understood by "essence," however (which Professor Valgemae does not), the answers are bewilderingly diverse. They range from the insane subjectivity of a protagonist like Caligari; through the artists' own mystical, "super-rational" vision, in Strindberg and the surrealists; through the intellectualizations of metaphysical allegory; to the "objective" socio-political propaganda of Piscator and agit-prop; with all sorts of mixtures in between. One could make a case, in fact, that it is precisely this confusion which provides the dynamic of good expressionism, particularly in its dialectic between Marxism and psychoanalysis (as in O'Neill's contradictory theories of the mask). But the only place where Professor Valgemae grapples with the problem is in his chapter on Lawson, and even here the analysis depends more on Lawson's own perceptions and critique of expressionism than on any...