Maurice Maeterlinck and the Making of Modern Theatre (review)

McGuinness, Patrick. Maurice Maeterlinck and The Making of Modern Theatre. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Pp. 270. ISBN 0-19-815977-3

Often named as an important theatrical innovator of the 1890s, Maeterlinck remains something of an enigma in literary and dramatic history. As Patrick McGuinness points out in the introduction to his important new study, the Belgian writer's career spans some five decades, as well as several literary and dramatic genres. His writings resist easy classification into the familiar if problematic categories of popular and elite culture, for although his early works aimed at very restricted audiences - probably, to adopt Pierre Bourdieu's model, consisting mostly of other writers and artists - after the turn of the century, he turned to the production of popular and often blatantly popularizing works that aimed at the widest possible audiences, eschewing cultural prestige for monetary profit. But although many of his works published between the mid-1890s and the 1930s were translated into many languages, few if any are read today. In fact, some of his most important texts, notably Pelléas et Mélisande, are far better known as adaptations than in the original form Maeterlinck gave them. One may well wonder whether Maeterlinck was worthy of his reputation as a theatrical innovator - or of any of his reputations for that matter. Can a study of his plays of the 1890s do more than debunk a myth of origins?

As his title suggests, Patrick McGuinness argues that Maeterlinck's early work did play an important role in "the making of modern theatre," although he is careful to distinguish between two kinds of originality: "that of having been the first to do something and that of having been the only one to do something" (256). For McGuinness, plays such as L'Intruse and Les Aveugles "were in their time, the only plays of their kind; they have now become the first of their kind. But Pelléas remains the only play of its kind." He argues that the first two are ancestors of the French theater of the absurd, while it is difficult to see where the latter leads, "except to very different musical interpretations" (256).

With some exceptions, the focus of this study is resolutely French or at least francophone. Drawing on the recent publication of some of Maeterlinck's early texts, notably Le Cahier bleu and the essays collected in Maeterlinck: Introduction à une psychologie des songes (1886-1896), McGuinness situates the writer's early work in the context of Belgian Symbolism and decadent aesthetics, suggesting that Maeterlinck's theory and practice paralleled but did not derive from French writers of the time. McGuinness emphasizes that for Maeterlinck, as for many of his Belgian contemporaries, French was a second language. Even Maeterlinck's earliest works betray a suspicion of language, a suspicion that later became the basis for a theater that gives pride of place to silence and turns its back on the Symbolist fetishization of le Verbe.

Indeed, one of the strong points of this rich and suggestive study is its treatment of Maeterlinck's views and uses of language. What to make of the vague, monotonous, and even insipid dialogue in his plays? Historians of Symbolist theater, notably Franticek Deak, have emphasized the relationship between Maeterlinck's texts and a performance aesthetic that emphasized a kind of ritualistic intonation of words. McGuinness considers this issue from the point of view of Maeterlinck's writings for and about the theater. Like many other critics, he emphasizes the importance of the essay, "Le tragique quotidien," in which Maeterlinck develops the notion of a static theater. For McGuinness, the Belgian dramatist's theater of everyday life is already a kind of anti-theater. More importantly, however, the critic ties Maeterlinck's discussion of second-degree dialogue to his development of "a theory of dramatic language which seeks to safeguard its suggestive power by exploiting its insufficiencies and...