Eugene Ionesco by Richard N. Coe, and: Samuel Beckett: The Language of Self by Frederick J. Hoffman (review)

108 MODERN DRAMA May Steiner prides himself on being a practitioner of the "old" criticism. The "old" criticism describes births and deaths of mythologies, movementS, civilizations, and literary genres. It loves the Spenglerian sweep, the broad generalization, and the large polar distinction. It conveys its insights through analogy and figure. It flatters the reader by assuming that he has a thorough knowledge of history. literature, and philosophy. In all of these ways it is opposed to the "new" criticism . The Chicago Critics, a group to which Elder Olson belongs, are also in fundamental disagreement with the "new" critics but, like them, have argued that criticism should concern itself primarily with the particularized study of individual literary texts. For this kind of study, the Chicago Critics have been recommending the principles and distinctions of Aristotle and showing how these can be refined, expanded, and supplemented into a full and coherent literary theory . The first part of Olson's book (on the poetics of the drama) is the latest and most complete effort in this direction. In the second part of his book, Olson presents extended analyses of three plays that achieve a powerful tragic effect (Agamemnon, King Lear, and Phedre) and of one that fails (Mourning Becomes Electra). His last chapter, "Modem Drama and Tragedy," raises the question why great tragedy is not produced today. His answer is that modern dramatists have committed themselves to the narrow realism of common life and do not imitate characters and actions or present issues that have the quality of "high seriousness" which is indispensable for the tragic effect. "Serious" means "whatever can importantly affect our happiness or misery; whatever can give great pleasure or pain, mental or physical; whatever similarly affects the happiness or pleasure of those for whom we have some concern , or of a good number of people, or of people whom we take to be of considerable worth; or whatever involves a principle upon which all such things depend ; or anything that bears a sufficient resemblance to these, or a sufficient relation ." The tragic effect culminates in catharsis, in which "the audience is compelled to transcend a lower set of moral values to a higher; it is compelled to fear and pity, for instance, only to acknowledge in the end that in a higher judgment there are worse evils than those it has been fearing and pitying; and by confronting great misery it has learned, momentarily at least, something of the great conditions upon which human happiness truly depends, and something of the high dignity of which man is capable." Modem dramatists may formulate and defend new definitions of tragedy, but effects of this kind no longer appear in their plays. Fabian Gudas Louisiana State University EUGENE IONESCO, by Richard N. Coe, Grove Press (Evergreen Pilot Book), New York, 1961, 120 pp. Price 95 cents. SAMUEL BECKETT: THE LANGUAGE OF SELF, by Frederick J. Hoffman, Southern Illinois University Press (Crosscurrents: Modem Critiques), Carbondale , 1962, 177 pp. Price $4.50. Both the volumes reviewed here deal with writers who have made their impact on the public within the last ten years. Yet both have several pages of bibliography appended to the text, containing items for the most part less than five years old. The sudden surge of interest in Beckett and Ionesco, and in the other writers of their kind, is explained at least incidentally in both of these ex- 1963 BOOK REVIEWS 109 tended analyses of their work. Messrs. Coe and Hoffman are pilots across still uncharted waters-something one must keep in mind-and they acquit themselves rather well. . Mr. Coe points out, first of all, the logic, or illogic if you will, that underlies the new theater of which he considers Ionesco by far the greatest practitioner. Ionesco is in revolt against "the prevailing concepts of time and space, of cause and effect, of psychological continuity"-of a deterministic universe, in other words, such as Western society seems to conceive it more and more helplessly each decade. Ionesco poses against it the "science" of pataphysics, which Mr. Coe explains very well, and the practical philosophy of the absurd, a recognition of the illogicality and inconsequence of our daily existence...