Anti-theatricality and the Limits of Naturalism

Anti-theatricality and the Limits of Naturalism KIRK WILLIAMS In the broadest and most transhistorical sense, the anti-theatrical prejudice can be seen as a trope whereby the longstanding Western anxiety about secondariness or supplementarity finds cultural expression. This metaphysical problematic leads by implication to other familiar moral hierarchies, most notably the binarisms that set essence against appearance, feminine against masculine, writing against speech, fiction against truth. For the anti-theatrical polemicist, theatre stands in for the ambiguities and indeterminacy of history itself, metaphorically invoking, as Jonas Barish so eloquently puts it, "a whole shoal of evils, of varying shapes and sizes, from the social sea" (85). The reading of anti-theatrical discourse in the Western tradition that Barish gives us reveals the startling paradox that anti-theatricality is ultimately not about the theatre and always about something else: the stage is inevitably a mere symptom of some other, less effable social or metaphysical malady. The case "against" the theatre is fascinating precisely because it stages such a broad spectrum of transhistorical anxieties in historically and culturally specific terms, such that anti-theatrical diatribes often come to powerfully dramatize conflicts and antipathies that are essentially local and radically contingent.' Barish notes that the anti-theatrical stance is, by its very nature, riddled with contradiction and ambivalence, owing in part to the epistemological privilege accorded the visual and specular throughout Western history: even as it is dangerously seductive and misleading. feminizing and excessive, the theatre also partakes of the immediacy of the Event (as opposed to the mediacy of narrative) and the truth of empirical observation. It is precisely because it promises to be the most "real" of all the arts that its factitiousness must be attacked so vigorously .' Theatre practitioners have long been aware of and even thematized this particular anti-theatrical charge. Dramas going back to Euripides's Bacchae have meditated on the power and perils of theatrical performance and often rely for their dramatic effect on the spectator's anxiety about the shifting Modern Drama, 44:3 (2001) 284 Limits of Naturalism nature of images. Western theatre has been concerned with its enabling conditions from its very beginning, and, for this reason, the stage itself is often the best and most persuasive setting for an exploration of its own moral failings and ontological dangers. Anti-theatricality is, in short, a trope specific to and even parasitically dependent upon theatrical representation. One might argue that it is the raison d' erre of the theatre itself. A particularly stunning example of "anti-theatrical" theatricality is evinced by the first of the self-proclaimed "modem" theatrical movements in Germany : the Naturalist movement of the closing decades of the nineteenth century . Naturalist sensibilities appeared relatively late in Germany, more than a decade after Zola's pioneering work in France and Ibsen's first naturalist experiments in the theatre.3 Yet the Germans made up for their belatedness by attempting to articulate and put into practice a rar more systematic program of Naturalist aesthetics than any of its earlier practitioners in other countries. Beginning with the literary criticism of the Hart brothers and refined in the theoretical essays of Otto Brahm, Max Halbe, Michael Georg Conrad, Arno Holz, and 10hannes Schlaf, among others, German dramaturgical discourse articulated a rigorous aesthetic agenda that dramatists like Gerhart Hauptmann and the group of theatre practitioners assembled by Brahm, first at the Freie BUhne (the Free Stage) and later at the Deutsches Theater, worked to implement .4 The German Naturalists saw themselves in opposition to an idealist tradition that had - rightly or wrongly - come to be associated with social and aesthetic conservatism. Their explicit objective was to completely remove the barrier separating theatre from life, to create an illusion so powerful thai it would render the theatrical medium absolutely transparent. One must experience theatre as one experiences life itself, argued Arno Holz, seeing in the events onstage "a slice of life as if one is peering through a window" ("Evolution des Dramas" 227).5 The point is to replace theatrical artifice with "a nearperfect reality, in other words, to drive the 'Theatre' gradually from the theatre " ("Vorwart" 138). The Naturalists replaced traditional theatricality wilh scientific accuracy of...