Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello by Roger W. Oliver, and: The Dream Structure of Pinter’s Plays: A Psychoanalytic Approach by Lucina Paquet Gabbard (review)

Reviews 289 Roger W. Oliver, Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello. New York and London: New York University Press, 1979. Pp. xv + 167. $16.00. Lucina Paquet Gabbard, The Dream Structure of Pinter’s Plays: A Psychoanalytic Approach. Cranberry, New Jersey, and London: As­ sociated University Presses, Inc., 1976. Pp. 296. $15.00. Dramatic criticism will likely prove to be the last stronghold of phenomenology, that most intransigent of ideologies. One reason, cer­ tainly, is that the roots of phenomenology are the very definition of “common sense”; another, that the character of theatrical performance appears to be wholly opposed to textuality, generic term for all that disrupts the milieu of light, meaning, presence. Theatrical performance, and we will return to the point in a moment, presents itself as the revivification of an only accidentally, temporarily lost presence: the temptation to phenomenology is almost irresistible. Of course, a further reason for the grip phenomenology still exerts on traditional dramatic criticism—that abandoning it would mean surrendering all our most treasured critical immunities—doesn’t bear examination. The theatrical performance: Robert Brustein’s description of it may stand as typical. It is worth quoting here both because it is the unstated premise behind the bulk of dramatic criticism, if only by implication, and because it is cited approvingly by Roger Oliver, author of the first book under review here. “In the interplay between actors, audience, and script,” Brustein writes in The Theater of Revolt, “life and form merge. The living nature of theatrical art is further exemplified by its immediacy . . . the drama takes place in the present with nothing separating the speaker from the speech. If anything written is fixed and dead . . . then anything staged is subject to accident, whim, and change, the actors insuring that it will always be new” (p. 284). The theatrical event, then, for Oliver as for Brustein, has the authorizing, stabilizing function that the resurgent, eternally pristine, living present has in, say, the phenomenology of Husserl (cf. Jacques Derrida, Voice and Phenomena): it becomes the dramatic critic’s principium; the foundation of the primacy of speech and perception; and the relegation to accident­ ally of writing, of the trace, of negativity. But this movement, the institution of a milieu of presence to which the drama can ceaselessly return, this really apotropaic gesture, is, as Derrida has further shown, not one “intellectual position” among others. Rather it is the metaphy­ sical gesture par excellence. And it dissimulates its unity with a chain of political, theological positions, all innocently disguised as a science, an objectivity. Derrida’s position is not the point here; for my present purpose even Theodor Adorno’s emphasis on the inescapability of Vermittlung or Georg Lukacs’s denunciation of phenomenology as “right-wing episte­ mology” would have similar force. The point is, simply, that our ancient habit of accepting, unquestioningly, metaphysics under the guise of criticism seems to be at an end. Even if this “crisis” is permanent and itself has a history, our present history gives criticism like the two books in question here the definite air of begging all the questions. 290 Comparative Drama Actually Oliver’s play-by-play reading of Pirandello is not, at least avowedly, as clear about its presuppositions as the quote from Brustein, drawn upon by Oliver in another connection, would imply. But, in a study aimed at deriving Pirandello’s dramaturgy from the playwright’s description of the structure of humoristic perception, the presence of such a transparent, inarticulate milieu is everywhere the underlying assumption. On this unargued basis Oliver wishes to controvert the view of Pirandello summarized in Lionel Abel’s contention that “. . . the Italian dramatist is lacking in moral interest: his dramaturgy counts only when he is excited by the metaphysical side of a conflict” (Metatheater, p. III) . Building on Pirandello’s essay L’umorismo, Oliver depicts a Piran­ dello to whom it is not “ideas” like our modem “difficulties in perception and communication” or the “multiplicity of . . . personality” but “the relationship these ideas bear to people . . . that takes precedence” (p. 155). Unlike the satirist or ironist from whom Pirandello distinguishes him (Oliver might have asked whether the difference was originary or merely...