Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde by Christopher Innes (review)

88Comparative Drama Christopher Innés. Holy Theatre: Ritual and the Avant Garde. New York, Cambridge, and London: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Pp. 283. $13.95 (paperback). Criticism of even the most important works in the avant garde tradition is rife with overt misreadings and cliché oversimplification, when not downright bewilderment. Critics, especially the more academically inclined , are often baffled by the apparent confusion of the tradition—the incomprehensibility of some works, the naivete of others—and are further hindered by the paucity of production by many of the major figures. The artists' self-proclaimed detestation of aesthetic standards, taste, and criticism itself further clouds the issue. The avant garde remains elusive and shadowy, perhaps rightfully so. For some, the avant garde renders criticism impotent since its avowed purpose is to destroy or subvert the very standards and values which are the critic's tools in trade. For others, the avant garde has become the critical equivalent of terrorism to the politician or cancer to the scientist: an irritating aberration in an otherwise ordered system, a grim specter lurking in the wings of the modern theater. Still others scramble in a mad search for signification. Christopher Innes' Holy Theatre is an attempt to impose a method on this apparent madness. Innes' methodology seems straightforward enough—linear historicism and classification by type—symbolism, expressionism, theater of cruelty, and so on. Innes believes that the major problem of criticism of the avant garde is its reductivist categorization of avant garde art as negative: "the avant garde is usually seen as a whole in terms of what they are against" (p. 2). Innes sees a positive unifying premise behind the avant garde, viz.: "the hallmark of avant garde drama is an aspiration to transcendence , to the spiritual in its widest sense" (p. 3). He thus maps out the terrain of his study as: The line of development ... of imagistic and quasi-religious plays or psychodramas: plays which represent archetypes or dreams and use ritualistic structures, substitute visual symbols and sound patterns for verbal communication , or rely on extreme audience participation in an attempt to evoke subliminal responses and tap the subconscious, (p. 5) This description creates what Innes describes as an atavistic paradox at the center of the avant garde—radical, advanced-thinking, revolutionary artists who turn backwards to primitive and escapist forms and "an ideal of primitive man" (p. 1). This appears to be a very interesting thesis, but sadly it leads nowhere and is fraught with numerous problems. First of all, the avant garde is negativistic. From Marinetti's call to burn the libraries (futurism, however , is not included in Innes' study) to Artaud's demand of "No more masterpieces!" the basic impulse of the avant garde is destructive. It is also reductivist; it is a chopping down of conventional aesthetics and life, a flattening of form, like tearing a building down to its individual bricks. Finally, its atavism can be explained by the fact that it is reactionary. The relationship, for example, of Ubu roi to late nineteenth-century French bourgeois society (and the theater created in its image and likeness ) is so reactionary that it is almost parasitic. This is a sine qua non of the avant garde. Reviews89 Innes' need to deny the reductivist/negativist definition and the quest of his atavistic paradox lead him to many peregrinations. For example, he finds a profound meaning in the opening word of one of the icons of the avant garde—Jarry's Ubu roi: Transforming 'merde' into 'merdre' makes the familiar strange, the scatologically shocking becomes simultaneously hallucinatory, and (in one of Jarry's typical puns) a fundamental aspect of reality is subtly distorted to challenge and liberate the spectator's imagination, (p. 28) Shittre! Transforming 'merde' into 'medre' also keeps the familiar familiar . The form of Ubu roi is a kindergarten dream. The text is a schoolboy cartoon. The event of the first production of Ubu roi has enormous meaning, but we cannot forget that Jarry is screaming that a play should not signify but happen. It may signify, indeed it will signify, but that is not its intention. It is the thing itself. It has no meaning, and it...