Dramatic Dialogue: The Duologue of Personal Encounter by Andrew K. Kennedy (review)

Book Reviews ANDREW K. KENNEDY. Dramatic Dialogue:The Duologue a/Persona/Encounter. New York: Cambridge University Press 1983. Pp. vii, 283. $45.00; $13.95 (PB). In this intelligent and wide-ranging book, Andrew Kennedy analyzes "duologues of recognition" in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, "duologues of transformation" in Shakespeare, "combats of wit" in Shakespeare, Jonson, Etherege, and Congreve. "confessional duologues" in Ibsen, O'Nei1l, and Albee, "duologues of isolation" and "verbal games" in Ibsen, Strindberg, Beckert, Pinter, and Stoppard, and "impersonall personal duologues" in Brecht and Shepard. Though going over much familiar ground, he freshly illuminates such things as the emergence of personal encounter within Greek tragedy, i.ts astonishing variety in Shakespeare, its probing obliqueness in Ibsen, and its paradoxical re-emergence in the Brechtian parable. And though Kennedy's lack of sustained attention to subtext may sometimes distort or reduce his accounts of verbal tone - as in the comments on Etherege and Congreve - he copes very well with the dangers that attend any effort to excerpt brief passages of dialogue from a theatrical whole. The often sensitive detailed analyses, however, do leave the larger outlines of dramatic history pretty much as anti-modernist critics have long understood them. Kennedy presents himselfas a partisan of the stable ego, the solid self, and the objective truth. "From Strindberg on," he can say, "through Pirandello to Pinter. any dialogue written from some doctrine holding that the true relations within a relationship cannot be verified, exhibits the symptoms afflux or diminished coherence." And he finaIly asks us to reflect on "the distance we have travelled" from the Sophoclean duologue in which what matters is "the recognition by Electra ofthe 'innennost being' of her brother" to the "dialogue of the electronic age" in Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, which renders a personality-annihllating lust for power. The agon of Hoss and Crow, he says, plays itself out in a style of pop sUlfaces that "can now be seen to mark a technological civilisation which is losing both its popular and its 'high' culture." This civilization, Book Reviews "stilI more American than European," carries "the risk of a contagious dehumanisation of language and thought." Nor is that grim reflection much qualified by Kennedy's adverse conunents on what he calls the "mannerism" of Pinter and Stoppard. Such anti·modemism. common enough in circles that have been influenced by Lukacs or Leavis or both, is here grounded in a theory of drama that Kennedy nowhere defends. With Martin Buber, he holds that "Isolated speech is a form of existential and linguistic suffering which only dialogue can cure." With Peter Szondi, he holds in effect that the theatre ought to be an objective mimesis of the interpersonal world constituted by determinate selves. Though Kennedy disarmingly distances himself from all such "purist a priori concepts," he gives us through his sampling of duologues a history of drama in which the judgments are, at bottom, functions of the richness, clarity, and coherence with which a play renders such an interpersonal world. These assumptions, the ethical import of which 1would hesitate to challenge, are not axiomatic. Different assumptions no less tenable would lead us to a quite different account of the history of dramatic dialogue - and perhaps of culture itself. What is a "person" or a "stable ego" or a "solid self'? And why should we believe in the existe.nce ofsuch entities? Kennedy nowhere tells us. But it is arguable that all drama - and indeed all human life - is an affair of momentarily reified personae that are not merely imitated but constituted and enacted by those who participate in some present encounter. Bruce Wilshire has suggested in Role Playing and Identity, for example, that our participation in drama, as actors or as audience, brings us to a more lucid awareness of the process of role-playing by which we constitute, momen[ by moment, what we call our identity. Such a view places more emphasis upon the acting of any role than Kennedy's assumptions would allow. It leads us toward the position (deftly articulated by Michael Goldman in Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy) that the figure on stage is always a living amalgam of actor-and...