The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence by Susan Letzler Cole (review)

Denby's rubato phrasing, it's because there's that much more to assess and correct. Denby, when he was writing in the forties, had a circumscribed beat: two major ballet companies, a regular season, and sporadic offerings from the "moderns." Forty years later Croce has to go all over town to keep up-and put up-not only with the first generation, but also with the proliferation of troupes and cross-pollinating dance forms. On she goes, season after season, covering Farrell and Sankai Juku, Cinderella and Mark Morris, and making reasoned, witty connections among them all. One relishes her prose and responds to her response. Croce always explains her praise and her censure so that, whether or not one agrees with, say, her gloriously unequivocal pan of Pina Bausch, one respects her opinion: she has been open about her prejudices all along. She is, to paraphrase Denby, a critic who tells her reader not what but how to think about a piece of art. And she looks beyond the steps to see how dance functions in American society, something for which Denby had neither the space nor, perhaps, the time. Yet Denby (and Balanchine) largely created that space in our culture Croce writes about. Denby bequeathed to dance criticism a language and a method, however quixotic and inimitable, for seeing and making and measuring dance. James Magruder The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence Susan Letzler Cole Pennsylvania State University Press; 183 pp.; $20.00 (cloth) The concept of ambivalence is central to Susan Cole's useful yoking of mourning ritual and tragedy, but it is her salient virtue that she offers a precise theoretical model which escapes the windier shores of tragic peroration. As she herself notes, hers is not a radical theory: it accords with the positions advanced by such scholar-critics as Richard Sewell, Maynard Mack, and Robert Heilman that dividedness is at the heart of the tragic mystery, that in contrast to melodrama, where one is victorious or defeated, simply guilty or innocent, tragedy evokes a dramatic universe in which defeat is experienced in victory or victory in defeat, where guilt and innocence coexist. What distinguishes Cole's acceptance of this definition is that she roots it in the observable paradoxes of mourning ritual. She asserts that tragedy and mourning each possess "a liminal space or journey or status" and "the presence of the uncanny," as well as shared figures, conflicts, and styles. Cole does not cumulatively parallel mourning ritual and tragic example: apart from an initial consideration of funerary rites in China, Nigeria, and Greece, her approach is not anthropological but dramatic-critical. With her model as her guide, she ranges over theatre history, stopping at certain obligatory junctures: classical Greece, Elizabethan England, neoclassical 90 France. She then moves to our problematic modern era to ponder tragedy's reported demise in Ibsen's subsuming of tragedy in melodrama, lonesco's Absurdist denial of the tragic/comic dichotomy and, finally, Chaikin's crossing of the boundary between dramatic text and performance. I wish the author had amplified one point, however, which she only sporadically considers: that our experience of tragedy-indeed, all theatre -is a replication or reinforcement of a basic mourning pattern, that the stage itself, by its very nature, is a liminal realm. The spectators experience what it is like to be a mourner by viewing impersonating performers who, like the Absent Dead One, are present and absent simultaneously. This suggestive insight lies at the heart of the paradox of "ghosting" which Herbert Blau sees at the root of theatre itself. Cole suppresses this question in her desire to affirm that "tragedy is not dead; death itself assures the life of tragedy." Whether or not we are fully convinced by her faith in tragedy's endurance, there is no doubt that this stimulating study not only illuminates the tragic canon but also suggests why contemporary theatrical representations of tragedy are so dessicated: with a few exceptions like The Gospel at Co/onus , they lack a living ceremonial surrogate. Like Hamlet, our theatre mourns in a world without the means for mourning. Gerald Rabkin Male Fantasies (Volume I): Women...