Edges of Loss: From Modern Drama to Postmodern Theory by Mark Pizzato (review)

320 REVIEWS The investigation of To Find Oneself as the "triumph of art over life," which mirrored the platonic relationship between the Maestro and Marta, Bini argues, is at the core of Pirandello's later dramatic production. Moreover, the reconstruction of the sources for No One Knows How proves that the playwright's concern with women's issues was not a later development in his artistic career but was present, in embryo, in his earlier work. The strength of this book lies in its broad historical background, especially when Bini deals with Pirandello's disillusion with Fascism, and in her close analyses of the abundant Abba- Pirandello correspondence. More importantly, the book proposes the separation of Pirandello the man (who had a "traditional " view of women), from Pirandello the artist (who instead suffered the exploitation of women). In Pirandello and His Mllse: The Plays for Marta Abba, Bini undeniably demonstrates that the latter redeems the former by embracing a new protagonist for his plays: Marta Abba - that is, woman. DONATO SANTE RAMO, QUEEN'S UNiVERSITY, KINGSTON, ON MARK PIZZATO. Edges ofLoss: From Modern Drama to Postmodern TlteDlY. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1998. Pp. 232. $39.50. Edges ofLoss provides a Lacanian psychoanalytic interpretation of the theatrical work of T.S. Eliot, Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, and Bertolt Brecht. Pizzata also examines a variety of issues in postmodern theory from the same psychoanalytic standpoint. These readings are tied together, unfortunately, by a play on words rather than by a persuasive argument. Playing with the similarities between chorus and chora, Pizzato combines Nietzsche's theory of the birth of Greek tragedy out of the ecstatic Dionysian chorus with Irigaray's and Kristeva's theory of the chora, the semiotic "womb of language, art and personal /social psyche" (137). The history of Western theatre is interpreted as a repression of the chorus/chora, with Apollonian rationalism constraining Dionysian energy and phallocentric modes of representation obscuring the originary womb. Theatrical modernism and theoretical postmodemism are characterized as reactions to this repression. The theatrical modernists who drew on the power of ritual in the theatre, and who tried to break the constraints of naturalistic convention and the proscenium stage, were in some sense trying to reveal the "ritual womb of the stage's edge" (143) and to redress the primal psychological loss of the perpetually sundered bond between mother and child. The extent to which readcrs accept both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean anthropology will detennine the extent to which they will accept Pizzato's interpretation of dramatic texts and theatre history. Pizzato is correct in claiming that, despite the "Death of the Author" declared by Barthes and the New Critical attack on the Reviews 32 1 Intentional Fallacy, there is a place for biographically oriented cnlIcism. However, he fails to provide a coherent theoretical basis for such a criticism. The first section of the book, dedicated to Eliot, is entitled "Psychohistory: Ritual Returns" and provides an illuminating discussion of Eliot's theatrical practices, Nietzsche's philosophy, and the Nietzschean heritage of postmodemism , in tenns of Lacanian psychodynamics. However, in the second section , "Psychobiography: Lost Stage Mothers," Pizzato relates theatrical innovation to life history rather than to cultural history, indulging in biographical speCUlation of the sort that gave orthodox Freudian psychoanalytic cultural criticism a bad name. This approach produces startling results in the case of Eliot: Pizzato invests The Rock, Murder it! the Cathedral, and The Cocktail Party with a new psychosexual intensity and ritual savagery. Pizzato provides a valuable service to theatre history by indicating the Nietzschean undercurrent in Eliot's Christian ritual drama (literary historians have been aware of Eliot's debt to Nietzsche for some time); but the concepts of chorus and chora are less convincingly applied to Artaud, Genet, and Brecht. In discussing these authors, Pizzato devotes more attention to the stage as a metaphoric womb, and the relationship of each author to his mother, than to the analysis of their actual theatrical practices. Unlike either Artaud or Genet, Brecht did make extensive use of the chorus, particularly in his Lehrstiicke, to suggest the power of the collective. There is, however, no reason to regard Brecht's or any other...