Modern Theatre and Melville's Moby-Dick: Writing and Sounding the Whale

Modern Theatre and Melville's Moby-Dick: Writing and Sounding the Whale ANTHONY KUBIAK Even in a special " drama and the novel" issue, the reader will no doubt find it strange to encounter what she encounters here: in a publication devoted to modem theatre, a piece that discusses a nineteenth-century novel - neither drama, nor modern, certainly not theatre - a mere essay surfacing among scholarly articles. The reader wi11, in addition, detect a certain tentative hubris in this undertaking - while I am making a very preliminary foray into uncharted waters, I I am also, perhaps, presenting some rather too easy overgeneralizations about theatre and about American theatre' in particular. I ask the reader's forbearance and patience if I skate too quickly across some rather complex circumstances in my desire to address a lingering and difficult question: the early (and some might say continuing) absence ·of a vital intellectual and theoretical theatre in America. While this absence has been remedied somewhat in recent decades through the work of such experimental theatre and performance artists as Richard Foreman, The Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, the ACT, Mabou Mines, Karen Finley, Rachel Rosenthal and others, there often seems to be a singular aversion to the issue of theatre theory among those groups in American performance and theatre. Robert Wilson, for example, claims that even he doesn't understand his work, while more politically conscious groups like Mabou Mines tend at times to " preach to the converted," neglecting the more difficult theoretical issues of power politics in the theatre. Similarly, while individual performance artists have initiated some profound and brilliant inquiries through their work, there has also been a profusion of superficial and facile work being done. This has had, in my opinion. a significant impact on American theatre as a whole. The lack of an intellectual and theoretical tradition in modem American drama and theatre is implicated in that theatre's continuing struggle 108 ANTHONY KUBIAK against the stranglehold of realism and naturalism - regional theatres still find audience resistance to anything that is not "realistic," and new and fertile directions and ideas in the theatre are not, apparently, easy to come by. But the point here is not to attack the traditions of realism or naturalism. Neither is it my intent to critique at length the work 'of the theatre groups and performance artists just mentioned. Rather, if my suspicions are correct, the challenge that poses itself is this: how might we articulate an "alternative" theoretical and experimental tradition in American theatre? Where might we find a different kind of "stage" for modem American theatre theory? How might we better understand this seeming lack of an intellectual and theoretical tradition in American theatre history? I would suggest that the "avant-garde" impulses of the early part of this century in Europe have in fact appeared in American culture, but that they surfaced not in the playhouse, which could not accommodate them, but rather in certain novels which superseded the playhouse as theatre - novels which still strike us as "spectacular" and grandly theatrical, but works which also reveal profound sensitivity to the problematic phenomenology of the stage. I would, moreover, suggest that these "avant-garde" impulses were formulating themselves much earlier than we might have thought - in the midnineteenth century. in fact - because there was as yet no theatre adequate ·to the intensity and scope of these impulses. I would locate this " repressed" or submerged theatre in the American novel, and most emblematically in the work of Herman Melville. I would like to suggest in Melville's work the presence of a kind of silent or submerged theory of the theatre in American culture. This submerged theory and its theatre is aligned with a tradition of theatricality that American audiences have always been suspicious of - a tradition obsessed with selfreflexiveness and the consciousness of theatre in the theatre. This is the theatre of emergencies, a theatre theory with affinities to the work of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud - theorists whose real influence came to America's stages very late, and has, in my estimation, never felt comfortable there. Now before I proceed, I should clarify the claim I am making here - I am not...