Cinema, Theater and Opera: Modern Drama as Ceremony

Cinema, Theater and Opera: Modern Drama as Ceremony BENJAMIN K. BENNETT I In the criticism ofliterature, since Aristotle, practically no significant work has been done that does not include, or at least presuppose, a discussion ofgenres or types or modes, an analysis ofthe artistic universe into units compact enough to provide a basis for characterizing, differentiating and comparing particular phenomena. Even in the case ofbroad theoretical attempts to explain the artistic endeavor or the aesthetic experience as such, some basic notion of types is necessary in order to identify, in the first place, what the philosophical or political or psychological argument is meant to account for. Still, it is in the practice of technical criticism, criticism that more or less consciously takes a stance within an artistic or literary tradition, that the analysis oftypes is developed most fully, and it is in technical criticism that the historical change in our manner of carrying out such analysis is most clearly marked. In particular, the attempt to formulate exact or exhaustive definitions, in order to classify individual works, has for the most part been abandoned in favor of a technique perhaps best called discrimination, 1 by which I mean not the establishment of supposedly firm boundaries between types, but rather the concentration upon cases where it is evident precisely that a firm boundary cannot be drawn, and the examination, then, of the nature and significance of whatever more complex form of differentiation is insisted upon nonetheless in cultural and intellectual tradition. The problem of discrimination, for example, does not arise until we recognize clearly, perhaps painfully, how uncertain the boundaries are that separate such types of writing as literature, history, philosophy and criticism. Only then are we compelled to ask not what literature is, but what we mean by literature, what sort of intellectual act is represented by our drawing of the distinctions. Only when we recognize the inadequacy of the obvious definitions of, say, autobiography, biography, 2 BENJAMIN K. BENNETT biographical fiction, and the novel, are we in a position to undertake the more fruitful task ofdiscriminating among them, perhaps rhetorically. Only when we take seriously Milton's sense of the direct continuity between Spenser's work and his own, do we begin to discriminate between the types of endeavors represented by Paradise Lost and The Faerie Queene, rather than simply assign the poems to different categories. The case of drama, however, presents special difficulties. Within the general area ofdrama - as within the general area ofwritten orpotentially spoken texts any number of illuminating discriminations have been made. But when we inquire into the application of the technique to drama as a whole, as itself a single basic type, we find very little; for the boundaries separating drama from other poetic types of the same order, especially the traditional boundaries with lyric and epic - curious as this may sound - are not sufficiently fluid or uncertain or questionable. Strong affinities can be established, hence discriminations undertaken, between various dramatic and nondramatic genres, with respect to such specific qualities as imagery, character, fictional structure; but at least one primary distinguishing characteristic of drama as such does not participate in those affinities and discriminations: I mean the ontological defectiveness of the dramatic text as merely written or printed and merely read or heard, the necessity, in other words, that the work be realized as an actual communal ritual, involving both players and spectators. Drama, unless we abstract from its quality as ritual - which would mean abstracting from its quality as drama - is thus too clearly differentiable from other poetic types for the purposes ofdiscrimination. Attempts have been made to develop a notion of "performance," or of "reproductive art," that would embrace both the reading of a text and the performance of a play.2 But such notions are useless at least in technical criticism; there is too fundamental a difference between something that happens in the individual's mind and something that happens in actual human community. Discrimination therefore presents a problem. It is all too easy to answer the question: what is drama? But it is correspondingly difficult even to pose the questions of what we mean by drama, what stake we have in...