The Haunted Houses of Modernity

The Haunted Houses of Modernity DA VID SA VRAN Despite having survived a fin-de-siecle anxiety attack, the industrialized world has come more and more to resemble a spook-house. With the emergence of new media and new industrial and social technologies, it has developed ever more subtle ways of creating virtual realities, inspiring fear, and offering intimations of the sublime. Although these achievements of the socalled information age may seem unprecedented, they are far less novel, I want to argue, than they at first appear. These new technologies represent instead the fulfillment of a particular historical logic, a kind of monstrous repetition of the past. And despite a widespread (and arguably premature) disillusionment with Marxism, Marx himself can hardly be accused of overdramatization when he rather famously writes that "[tlhe tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" (15). For the 150 years since he penned those words have witnessed a proliferation of nightmares that I hardly need enumerate. Beginning in the 1960s, however, with the emergence of what passes for postmodemism, the weight of these nightmares has produced a curious side effect that Marx could not have anticipated : it has functioned increasingly to make time seem to have stopped dead in its tracks. Have not theorists, politicians, media celebrities, and the other arbiters of culture ever more incessantly proclaimed the end - the end of man, of liberalism, of the welfare state, of modernity itself? And all the while proclaiming the end, and seeing its signs in everything from the fall of historical Communism to the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary on a window pane in New Jersey, these same prognosticators seem intent on killing history off as well. On the one hand, most U.S. politicians, from George W. to Bill Clinton, have taken the knife to history because the millennial new age, they insist, has already arrived. Standing, in Francis Fukuyama's words, at "the end of history," "we cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better" (qtd. in Kumar 77- 78). Modern Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 583 ~AVID SAVRAN For these neo-liberals obsessed with maintaining "free markets and private property," progress will result automatically from simply fine-tuning the status quo (Friedman 21). Most theorists on the academic left, on the other hand, have become born-again posunodernists who dismiss Marxist historiography as hopelessly outmoded and idealist. For them, the construction of a universal history - or, for that matter, the attempt to critique capitalism as a world system - amounts to little more, in Aijaz Ahmad's mocking words, than "a contemptible attempt" to construct "grand narratives" and "(totalitarian?) knowledges" (69). But modernity is not so easily killed off. Like a zombie, it is coming back to stalk us, and perhaps nowhere as insistently as on the stage. For the plays that have filled U.S. theatres during the past ten years are full of ghosts. From the surprisingly placable apparition of Ethel Rosenberg in Tony Kushner's Angels ill America, to the unquiet spirit of Uncle Peck in Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, to Sarah Brown Eyes in Terrence McNally's stage version of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, the American theatre has become a truly haunted stage. Yet the recent proliferation of ghosts is hardly a unique occurrence. From its beginnings, the modernist theatre - understood as a self-consciously revolutionary insurgency - has set itself apart from the dramas of the past. Yet time and again it has been haunted by that which it believes it has displaced, that "tradition of all the dead generations." For by defining itself in relation to the past, it betrays a secret link to history. And this dependence on the past is no less true of that theatre that some would call postmodernist than of its explicitly modernist precursors. For the return of the living dead is, I believe, symptomatic of the contemporary stage's debt to modernism and a sign of its continuity with the modernist insurgency that began more than 100 years ago. I want first to analyze the haunted American stage...