Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama by June Schlueter (review)

Reviews 389 Is such a moment due historical timing? This would make the Gaelic Revival and the rise of nationalism responsible. Does such a movement carry its own elements of destruction? Hunt implies that longtime Abbey managing director Ernest Blythe’s Irish language policy was detrimental, diverting resources to plays with limited audiences and restricting the pool of actors and playwrights. Is such a moment due the providential appearance of a charismatic genius like Yeats? Hunt, like previous Abbey historians, implies by his record that the luminescence of the golden age was a reflection of Yeats’s brilliance, that only he could lead the disparate egos, that only he could effectively withstand hostile social and political pressures. Indeed, is such a moment due the tensions within a developing na­ tional mentality? Does the resolution of such tensions bring uniformity? and then standardization? and ultimately mediocrity? Hunt’s compila­ tions in themselves suggest that single-sector dominance is unproductively egalitarian, at best encouraging conformity, at worst discouraging originality. Perhaps this is not what his compilations mean. But he gives us the merest reportage. Whatever the reason, when 67% of the text covers the Abbey up to Yeats’s death, i.e., the first 35 years, and the remaining 33% covers the next 40 years, we have the impression that the Abbey since Yeats is best skimmed over quickly. In this last section Hunt becomes more schematic and limits commentary to casual editorializing. We are put, finally, in the curious position of recommending this book as a useful reference chiefly because of its final chapter and appendix. MARILYN GADDIS ROSE SUNY-Binghamton June Schlueter. Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1979. Pp. x + 143. $15.00. In Metafictional Characters in Modern Drama June Schlueter has written a series of short essays devoted to one interesting aspect of self­ reflexive dramatic form. Concentrating on Pirandello, Genet, Beckett, Weiss, Albee, Stoppard, and Handke, the emphasis here is on the dra­ matic figure who appears to be aware of his existence as stage character— hence the use of the term “metafictional.” Although this study is far too brief to examine its subject in detail, it nevertheless demonstrates famili­ arity and control over complicated scripts like Henry IV, The Maids, The Balcony, The Blacks, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Marat/Sade, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Real Inspector Hound, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and The Ride Across Lake Constance (the last essay, the best of the lot, is reprinted in slightly altered form from its appearance in this journal in 1977). Schlueter’s approach, though it promises structural evaluation, relies instead on resemblance and recur­ rence of thematic issues crucial to the impact these playwrights aim for on stage. The essays are always guided by the question of whether or 390 Comparative Drama not man still possesses an essential self. Metafictional characters are seen as fundamental elements in that “other tradition’” in modern drama which goes beyond the illusion of reality to pursue basic aspects of illusion itself. Schlueter therefore offers us a fine study in comparative literature, but her essays have some strict limitations as convincing arguments concerning the precise nature of dramatic form. First and foremost, Schlueter’s approach needs to consider very deliberately the possibility of an emerging dramatic form as independent, though not necessarily immune, from changes in the philosophical Zeitgeist. Drama is as much a craft as it is an art and as such it has an internal structure and integrity of its own. Strictly academic terms like “metafictional,” borrowed far too closely from a critical theory of the novel, may not be entirely appropriate to what constitutes an entirely different movement in an entirely different genre. Long before the in­ vention of modernism and post-modernism, the theater had already developed several strategies for highlighting characters conscious of their function as actors on the boards. Prologues, epilogues, asides, the play-within-a-play, the figures of the raisonneur and the narrator, the lazzi of the commedia dell’arte, as well as the Greek chorus, already show signs of what Schlueter calls “the other tradition.” What distin­ guishes the use of these dramatic conventions from...