Georg Büchner's Woyzeck: A History of Its Criticism by David G. Richards (review)

320 REVIEWS interrogating "race"? Moreover, although Wertheim does not want to consider except by way of dismissal some of the economically based criticisms of Fugard's engagement with "race," only serious address of these as well as other problematics will enable understanding of the courage, as well as the measure, of Fugard's achievement in this regard, Again, if this is a book "from South Africa to the world," what significance - negative as well as positive - do Fugard's own movements between South Africa and abroad, or the use of the Yale Repertory Theatre, have for his work? Wertheim 's insistence on the primacy of the psychodynamics of family in his discussions also elides other pressing questions. What does Fugard's extraordinary representation of fractured masculinities in his plays - from Morrie, Zach, and lohnnie to Boesman, lohn, Winston, Hally, and others - tell us in the context of the (changing) conventions of masculinity current at the times of writing? Or how is Fugard's representation of sexuality inflected by his own engagement with Calvinism? And in the context of differing forms of South African patriarchy over the years, what can be said on the subject of his representation of femininity, from the again extraordinary presentations of Hester, Lena, and Miss Helen to the women who appear in My Life or Valley Song? Wertheim's reportage of the narratives and interactions of Fugard's characters never considers, finally. what Fugard's use of narrative itself might suggest about, say, memory and subjectivity, or whether or when Fugard's reliance on narrative becomes anti-theatrical, except in passing acknowledginent of this problem in The Captain's Table. Indeed, for all their often impressive and huge richness of detail, the narratives of Wertheim's chapters, with their determined hunt for "human relationships" and a didactic teleology, end up losing sight of perhaps one of Fugard's greatest dramatic achievements : his representation of the unpredictabilities of ongoing existential struggle , always within panicular intractable conditions, and never, finally, completely explicable or resolved. DAVID G. RtCHARDS. Georg Biicllller's Woyzeck: A History of Its Criticism. Rochester: Camden House, 2001. Pp. 167. $55.00 (Hb). Reviewed by John Osburn, The Cooper Union for the Advancement ofScience and Art It is a commonplace conceit to see the Georg Buchner who wrote Woyzeck as the prophetic if unwitting inventor of a host of theatrical and literary "isms." This striking play - based on the actual case of a mentally disturbed soldier who murdered his wife - possesses a Hamlet-like tolerance for varied and Reviews 321 even contradictory interpretations. Woyzeck has been linked to movements as varied as naturalism and absurdism, to say nothing of the romanticism and the neoclassicism of its own period. And since the play is known through multiple manuscripts, recuperated decades after the author's death in 1837, it is even tempting to regard the choice of which scenes to include and in what order, as an almost aleatory exercise. David G. Richards' concise and well-organized Georg Buchner's Woyzeck : A History of Its Criticism adds an important corrective to these somewhat undisciplined tendencies. The provenance of the texts is not nearly as wide open as many of us have imagined, although the unfinished state of the apparent "final"version means that even a textual purist must make aspeculative choice or two. Richards' book is useful in sorting out which choices have the greatest historical credibility. There exists a close-to-final, if still unfinished , manuscript of the entire play, along with fragments and an earlier draft. These documents are discussed throughout and summarized in an appendix of a "generally accepted" scene order and chronology (147-49). If potential may be glimpsed in a contrary order, then Richards' book allows one to do so with eyes wide open. The book is equally valuable in its review of the critical literature in both German and English, a literature that has enlisted Woyzeck in projects ranging from romanticism to feminism. Richards allows one to weigh these perspectives individually, as well as to draw a few conclusions about the underlying ideologies. It is, for example, revealing to encoUliter a parallel rhetoric between those who have seen Woyzeck as a drama...