The Modern Stage and Other Worlds by Austin E. Quigley (review)

REVIEWS Austin E. Quigley. The Modern Stage and Other Worlds. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Pp. xvi + 320. $36.00. It is Austin E. Quigley's theme that the modern theater uniquely dramatizes a pluralistic universe—i.e., that the diverse performing spaces the modern dramatists require of the theater represent the multiple worlds of our modern consciousness and, while recording the "discontinuities" created by these separate world-views, at the same time achieve forms of continuity. This is the single idea of the book, stated early and whose elements are iterated for the first sixty-five pages, somewhat like the scattered Leitmotifs of Wagnerian music-drama which, at certain moments , gather together in a single passage, as in the following quotation where the terms of Quigley's idea coalesce: The spatial language of the theatre thus has the thematic consequences which are exemplified in the nature of the issues we are invited to consider and in the kinds of questions we are invited to ponder when we evaluate social interaction. The key shift in our approach to horizons is from taking the possibility of mutual understanding for granted, and thus focusing our attention on the need to explain and remove isolated misunderstandings, to taking the potential for misunderstanding for granted, and consequently needing to promote and exploit local possibilities for achieved understanding. Many of the key crises of life in this view of the modern theatre involve encounters between domains so different that the metaphor of opposing worlds seems thoroughly appropriate; but these domains are so insistently juxtaposed that some kind of transaction between them becomes essential and unavoidable. Contact across these horizons becomes simultaneously problematic and indispensable as discontinuity and continuity become, not opposing, but related concerns. And because the seemingly impossible becomes pragmatically indispensable, we, as audience, are forced to consider, not just what the realms within horizons enable, nor just what those horizons limit, but what degree of merging and what kind of interaction are possible when horizons of discontinuous domains are brought into compulsory contact . It is at just this point that the unreliable epistemological foundations of human interaction in a pluralistic world become the basis for crises that might seem, at first glance, remote from epistemological concerns, (p. 44) Unraveled, this means: (a)The modern theater's creation and division of its performing spaces ask us to recognize divisions within our social world as well as within the world of the stage. (b)Recognizing these divisions within reality, we should try to overcome or at least better understand them. (c)Though different ideas of reality (worlds) might seem mutually contradictory , the fact that they co-exist means they can, and must, interact, however difficult they (and we) might find this to be. (d)It is just because such interaction is difficult that we come to see the distinctive advantages and limitations both of these ideas of reality and of their merging together. 270 Reviews21 i (e) Realizing, now, how difficult it is to be certain of what we know when there are so many different and competing claims to knowledge , we find that our difficulties are difficulties of knowledge. The reader probably already detects a disconcerting feature of Quigley 's method—i.e., its tendency to inflate relatively ordinary situations into major and complex ones. "Social interaction" slides into "horizons," "crises of life," "opposing worlds," "domains," "realms," and "a pluralistic world." We have brought our multiple worlds to birth by loose analogy only. The claim that the modern world uniquely presents a plurality of worlds (and domains, horizons, borders) involves a very questionable use of the term "world." After claiming that J. M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton with its contrast of Britain and the remote island is a symptom of "geographical and social pluralism"—as if Shakespeare's The Tempest did not far more radically dramatize a plurality of "realms"—Quigley continues: We might also note the split-staging in Pinter's The Collection that keeps the "off-stage" action visible, the door that slams shut on so much in Ibsen's A Doll's House, the lava-like areas in Miller's After the Fall that divide and connect Quentin's...