Family Scenes: Some Preliminary Remarks on Domesticity and Theatricality

There can only be theater from the moment when the impossible really begins.

—Antonin Artaud

Is there a structural connection between domesticity and theatricality? There is, to be sure, an obvious historical connection, domestic drama having dominated Western theater for at least three centuries. Its dominance has been explained in terms of the powerful historical, sociological, and economic forces associated with the emergence of modern capitalism. The family, above all the “nuclear” family, has provided institutional support for a view of the world that would construe and portray market relations as “natural”: buyers and sellers, producers and consumers confront each other “in the market” as independent, self-contained entities—an individualist view of the world that the family seems to confirm.

But, as compelling as such explanations may be, they contribute very little to explaining why such relations should be portrayed theatrically. The question remaining unanswered, if not unasked, is just what relationship might hold between the institution of the family and that of the theater. And if “drama” is defined primarily as the representation of conflict through action, then the question that remains is whether “domestic drama” in this sense has any structural or specific relation to the medium of theater, understood as something more distinctive than a mere means of staging narratives which in themselves are not necessarily or exclusively theatrical.

Such questions, however, have been asked, at first implicitly and then more explicitly, for at least two centuries. And the posing of such questions has tended to converge with a rethinking and a reworking of the significance of theater. The way in which these questions have been developed is both very new and very old; indeed, its newness consists in a certain type of return to an earlier, premodern conception of theater—a return, for instance, in relation to narrative, to what Aristotle called (in the Poetics) mythos.

What I want to explore here, in a truncated and preliminary manner, are a few strands in the complex of issues raised by this rethinking of the domesticity/theatricality relationship and, in particular, the function of narrative with respect to scene. Beginning with passages from works by two modern theoreticians of theater, Walter Benjamin and Antonin Artaud, as a context, the question of domesticity and theatricality is then reexamined by rereading Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.

In his writings on “epic theater,” Benjamin emphasizes what today would be called the “performative” dimension of Brecht’s dramaturgy, as distinct from its merely representational or cognitive-thematic element. “Epic theater thus does not reproduce conditions; rather, it uncovers them,” he notes. And it does so “by means of the interruption of sequences.” These are primarily narrative sequences, components of what is called plot, the diachronic representation of a series of actions or events. In order to illustrate how this works in Brechtian theater, Benjamin provides his readers with “the most primitive example: a domestic scene.” The scene he then describes begins abruptly:

Suddenly a stranger enters. The woman was in the process [im Begriff] of crumpling up a pillow in order to throw it at the daughter; the father was in the process [im Begriff] of opening the window in order to call for the police. At this instant [Augenblick] the stranger appears at the door. “Tableau,” as one would have said around 1900. That means: the stranger stumbles now upon the situation [den Zustand]: crumpled linens, open window, demolished furniture.¹

A curious “scene,” to say the least—one which reminds us, first of all, that the notion of scene is not exclusively theatrical, let alone aesthetical. “Don’t make a scene!” is the admonition not to cause a ruckus. But between the domestic scene, in this sense, and the theatrical scene there is perhaps an underlying connection that is not simply verbal. What makes a domestic dispute “scenic” is precisely what makes theater theatrical: not merely the apparition of events or their representation, but rather the power of their apparition or representation to provoke an essential intrusion—that of the “stranger” in this “scene,” which, in its “primitive” quality, could itself be said...