Performing Character in Modern Irish Drama

Between Art and Society

Michał Lachman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319765341
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319765358
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

This book is about the history of character in modern Irish drama. It traces the changing fortunes of the human self in a variety of major Irish plays across the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium. Through the analysis of dramatic protagonists created by such authors as Yeats, Synge, O'Casey, Friel and Murphy, and McGuinness and Walsh, it tracks the development of aesthetic and literary styles from modernism to more recent phenomena, from Celtic Revival to Celtic Tiger, and after.

The human character is seen as a testing ground and battlefield for new ideas, for social philosophies, and for literary conventions through which each historical epoch has attempted to express its specific cultural and literary identity. In this context, Irish drama appears to be both part of the European literary tradition, engaging with its most contentious issues, and a field of resistance to some conventions from continental centres of avant-garde experimentation. Simultaneously, it follows artistic fashions and redefines them in its critical contribution to European artistic and theatrical diversity.

© The Author(s) 2018

Michał LachmanPerforming Character in Modern Irish Dramahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76535-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Michał Lachman¹

(1)

University of Łódź, Łódź, Poland

End Abstract

It would be hard to imagine an epoch more complex and deeply contradictory than modernism. Its historical moment, the very last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, places it at the outset of the modern world as we know it.¹ Even if later stages of the twentieth century generated many significant philosophical revolutions and produced a number of artistic, avant-garde movements, modernism still lies as a bedrock on which all of the subsequent ideas germinated or at least through which they were reinterpreted. The aim of this chapter is to concentrate on one specific theme: the presentation of the human self, human voice, human agent within modernist drama, to project the analysis onto a wider spectrum of phenomena within the art and literature of modernism and the rest of the twentieth century with some selected references to Irish drama.

Modernism articulates its own complex identity through the presentation of the human figure. The presentation of the human self penetrates deeply into the mechanisms of the artistic, political and philosophical premises on which modernism is overtly or covertly founded. On philosophical and artistic or literary levels, the human agent, voice, presence or self is incarnated, clad or expressed in ways that modernist literature sees as fragmentary, incomplete and contrasted. Be it the opposition between the pure categories of the mind in symbolic, abstract forms of poetry and realism, or the political theories of Marx , imperialism, or colonialism juxtaposed against individual life, the human protagonist remains exposed to the fragmentation and incompleteness of imagined or real experience available to him or her in a disrupted, erratic form. Naturally, this is one of the ways in which modernist writers or artists cope with a deeply felt fear of the epoch plagued by the disintegration of the known world reflected in revolutions in physics, science, technology, abstract art and experimental narratives in literature. Unlike postmodernism, modernist literature and drama may still believe in the possibility of a single, solid human subject; yet, the period’s major authors realise that the path to it leads through thoroughly fragmentary, misleadingly relativised, ironically subverted and self-reflexive forms of articulation.

Modernism’s complexity lies precisely in the fact that its broad spectrum of economic, cultural and religious phenomena encompassed contradictory tendencies. As James McFarlane observes, around the late 1890s the concept of the modern started to be associated with two elements of a distinct nature: the mechanic and the intuitive (1991, 71). “Intellectual inquiry” rests on two opposite drives: “the analysis of life and the flight from life” (McFarlane 1991, 71). In the world of art and literature, the dynamics of change had a double momentum: the diminishing reliability of the scientific method was countered by the need to penetrate the realms of experience rooted in the occult, subconscious and irrational. For instance, it is significant to see Yeats’s flight from material existence and realistic psychological experience as a result of the belief that literature could no longer adequately explain the world by turning books into laboratories of scientific analysis of motives (as Zola would proclaim). The modernist concept of personality, plagued by rift or tension between reason and intuition, could be described as “made up of competing systems, driven by instinct and sexual tension, capable of dreaming (without knowing it) of times long past” (Butler 1994, 95). The idea of the divided self, fragmented both in its composition, in the way it is represented and in the kind of experience it gives access to, naturally forms the bulk of thematic preoccupation for many literary and dramatic works of the period.

One of the most important battles waged in the second half of the nineteenth century and having a decisive bearing on many literary and artistic works that followed was an attempt to understand the gap between the mind and the world, between the intellectual and the vitalist views of human life. In literary terms, this opposition translates into abstract, non-figurative forms of art and into realism based on a social and economic determination. How to define human perception and how to analyse its content was vital for the understanding of the image of the world produced in the human mind. For Henri Bergson , it was a task of “considering how conscious perception may be analysed” (1929, 26). It depends on what Bergson calls a “privileged image” that is “my body” (1929, 12). Henri Bergson offered perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic account of the anti-Cartesian philosophy, formulating new ideas on intuition, memory and duration in time and the vitalist impulse permeating the intellectual sphere. Opposed to purely rational conditions of knowledge promulgated by Zola , whose ideas Bergson decried (Carlson 1984, 299), he argued that intuition had a superior power to penetrate the changeable realms of lived experience uncharted by reason and logical clarity. However, the real dilemma lay in the problem of duality between the spiritual and the real as well as in defining the nature of our perception. Bergson’s objective, presented in the introduction to Matter and Memory was formulated as a task to “affirm the reality of spirit and the reality of matter”. His primary task is to “overcome the duality of body and mind” (1929, vii); this ambitious project constituted a central artistic dilemma for many modernist writers, as it concerned the way of viewing the position of the narrating and narrated selves, dramatic, poetic or novelistic, within varied representations of the world.

It seems that precisely the attempt to marry the two worlds of existence and appearance, of matter and idea, of reality and spirituality, of realism and imagination, of life and art, of concrete social reality and abstract political doctrine, is what to a large extent constituted the bulk of the philosophical, aesthetic and political dilemma of the modernist period, that is, the period obsessed with the powerful contribution of, on the one hand, the subconscious and, on the other hand, the language to specific ways we perceive the reality in front of us. The very possibility of a smooth passage from minute records of daily impressions to the intellectual speculation of the mind or images of the unconscious was narrated by modernist literature and art. Concluding his study of Bergson’s philosophy, Deleuze also adequately captures the main dividing lines of the entire modernist period. In Bergson’s view, as Deleuze states it, the Absolute is composed of two halves: science and metaphysics. They remain in constant rapport, as:

Thought divides into two paths in a single impetus, one toward matter, its bodies and movements, and the other toward spirit, its qualities and changes . (Deleuze 1991, 116)²

In modernism, individualised and subjectivised experience becomes the focus of artistic presentation and either in the private dimension or in the social realm provides evidence for the fragmentation of the image of the world which writers and artists attempt both to represent and overcome. The literature of the period, including the drama of the first two or three decades of the twentieth century, is preoccupied with the impossibility of presenting an individual and his or her relations with the outside world in a coherently verifiable way.³ According to Butler , the modernist hero is “threatened by disintegration, under the pressures diagnosed by Ibsen , Nietzsche , Freud , and many others” (1994, 96). Modernism also offers the concept of the human self, which is a “site of internal dialogue, of separate voices from past and present, of conscious and unconscious”, in other words it undertakes an extensive search for “disclosing the nature of the ‘true self’ ” (Butler 1994, 119). Ibsen played a fundamental role in presenting the self as a playground of different forms of determination. Under his influence, Joyce , Pound, Eliot and Beckett immersed their characters in “archetypal and mythical allusions” that escaped strictly figurative representation (Ruppo Malone 2010, 107). Thus the flight from life into abstraction, decadent symbolism, into the realm of art which exists for its own sake significantly influences the condition of the human agent, human voice, human figure. The single voice of the narrator, poetic self or an artist dominating the earlier period of realism now erupts into a multitude of sounds and noises emitted from multiple centres and produced by a variety of agents. The plethora of speech coincides not only with the disappearance of a single unified speaking subject, but also with a more profound tendency in modernist art that aimed to dehumanise the very act of artistic creativity and communication.

The dehumanising tendency of the epoch was also related to the overpowering presence of the machine. While the cult of the machine shifted the emphasis from the natural human being to an artificial mechanical agent, the technological repetitiveness of the machine disabled the human body from its natural movement, and a human voice from composing narratives originating in a distinctively subjective and psychological perspective. As Marinetti proclaimed, in one of his manifestos of Futurism, art should “Destroy the “I”: that is all psychology”. Art is obliged to “substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter” (qtd. in Nichols 1995, 93). Thus , for Marinetti too, the theatre actor must “completely dehumanize his voice, systematically doing away with every modulation of nuance” (Nichols 1995, 94). The completely “dehumanized face” of the actor is not only supposed to “cancel subjectivity” and destroy the “I” (Nichols 1995, 97–8), but also to expose the mechanical pattern, the identical repetition of shapes and movement instead of the idiosyncratic nature of the personalised body.

The escape from the organic, biological human being was also visible in highly abstract and aesthetic literary and artistic doctrines of the period, associated among others with such names as Edward Gordon Craig and his übermarionette, Wyndham Lewis or T.S. Eliot .⁴ The dissipation of the voice and the disappearance of the unified speaking subject reflect T.S. Eliot’s ideas on the roles and responsibilities of poetry. Eliot’s views on poetry combine the need for purging literature of self-expression and a plea for clarity of vision (Daiches 1997, 1122) with the claim that literature should be a medium for the passage of a multitude of c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Social Man
• 3. Linguistic Man
• 4. Interactive Man
• Back Matter