The Death of Character

Perspectives on Theater after Modernism

Elinor Fuchs

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780253113474
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

"Extremely well written, and exceedingly well informed, this is a work that opens a variety of important questions in sophisticated and theoretically nuanced ways. It is hard to imagine a better tour guide than Fuchs for a trip through the last thirty years of, as she puts it, what we used to call the 'avant-garde.'" —Essays in Theatre

"... an insightful set of theoretical 'takes' on how to think about theatre before and theatre after modernism." —Theatre Journal

"In short, for those who never experienced a 'postmodern swoon, ' Elinor Fuchs is an excellent informant." —Performing Arts Journal

"... a thoughtful, highly readable contribution to the evolving literature on theatre and postmodernism." —Modern Drama

"A work of bold theoretical ambition and exceptional critical intelligence.... Fuchs combines mastery of contemporary cultural theory with a long and full participation in American theater culture: the result is a long-needed, long-awaited elaboration of a new theatrical paradigm." —Una Chaudhuri, New York University

"What makes this book exceptional is Fuchs' acute rehearsal of the stranger unnerving events of the last generation that have—in the cross-reflections of theory—determined our thinking about theater. She seems to have seen and absorbed them all." —Herbert Blau, Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

"Surveying the extraordinary scene of the postmodern American theater, Fuchs boldly frames key issues of subjectivity and performance with the keenest of critical eyes for the compelling image and the telling gesture." —Joseph Roach, Tulane University

"... Fuchs makes an exceptionally lucid and eloquent case for the value and contradictions in postmodern theater." —Alice Rayner, Stanford University

"Arguably the most accessible yet learned road map to what remains for many impenetrable territoryan obligatory addition to all academic libraries serving upper-division undertgraduates and above." —Choice

"A systematic, comprehensive and historically-minded assessment of what, precisely, 'post-modern theatre' is, anyway." —American Theatre

In this engrossing study, Elinor Fuchs explores the multiple worlds of theater after modernism. While The Death of Character engages contemporary cultural and aesthetic theory, Elinor Fuchs always speaks as an active theater critic. Nine of her Village Voice and American Theatre essays conclude the volume. They give an immediate, vivid account of contemporary theater and theatrical culture written from the front of rapid cultural change.

PART I

Modern after Modernism

1

The Rise and Fall of the
Character Named Character

IN 1960, the Polish playwright Tadeusz Rozewicz published a short play entitled The Card Index. The play has a Hero and a Chorus of Elders, ironic references to a vanished classical dramaturgy. In that dramatic world, unlike Rosewicz’s and our own, plays proudly bore the names of their protagonists. For Rosewicz’s “Hero” one name is as good as another; he submits to several in the course of the play. From time to time, as the playwright suggests in his stage directions, he may even wander offstage to be replaced by another actor. He is as anonymous as the serial card catalogue that gives the play its title. Yet the Hero is onstage every minute of the play, even if he spends it mostly lying in bed, occupying in his relative absence the very center of attention that heroes of an earlier day commanded by their presence.

In a wry comment on the inaction of this un-hero, the Chorus of Elders declaims mock-heroic verses celebrating Heracles:

He who in childhood cut off Hydra’s head . . .

Will in his youth the blood of Centaurs shed . . .¹

This parody of the art of a golden, mythic age is matched elsewhere by a parody of formalist modernism, as the Chorus gravely recites the alphabetical catalogue of the title (“Guatemala, goulash, guzzle . . .” etc.). The Chorus attempts to rouse the Hero to a sense of his symbolic role in the drama.

CHORUS OF ELDERS:

Do something, get a move on, think.

There he lies while time flies.

(HERO covers his face with the newspaper.)

Say something, do something,

Push the action forward,

At least scratch your ear!

(HERO is silent.)

There is nothing happening

What is the meaning of this?

There must be action on the stage,

Something should be happening at this hour!

HERO:

Isn’t it enough when the hero scratches his head and stares at the wall? . . .

I don’t feel like doing anything.

As a last resort, the Chorus pleads a higher cause.

CHORUS OF ELDERS:

But even in a Beckett play

somebody talks, waits, suffers, dreams,

somebody weeps, dies, falls, farts.

If you don’t move the theater is in ruins.

Stubbornly, the Hero refuses action.

HERO:

Today a flea circus is performing Hamlet

leave me alone

I am going away.

Rozewicz has created an amusing political allegory on the impotence of the postwar generation in Poland and the paralysis of the bureaucratized subject. But he plays not just with political and social dead ends, but with theatrical dead ends as well. In the universe of The Card Index, all theatrical traditions are portrayed as exhausted—classical, renaissance, and avant-garde alike. If Hamlet, the hero who would not act to redeem his father, is reduced to performance by a flea, why should his contemporary descendant bestir himself merely to save the theater? The only thing left to do, as the Hero says, is to “go away.”

Could that threatened departure be a clue to a new poetics of theater? In this chapter, I will follow the career of the dramatic “element” Character up to a crucial turning point, circa 1890, when symbolist playwrights all but formally announced their loss of interest in the principle of character as the motor or agency of dramatic structure. I shall turn to this moment of change at the end of this chapter, and conclude by suggesting some of its dramaturgical consequences for twentieth-century modern drama. At present I am interested in the history of character’s changing representation in dramatic theory. Like a good Aristotelian, I shall attempt my account of Character, by studying its changes of fortune. I want to know, What is the story those changes tell?

Each generation of modern students puzzles afresh over Aristotle’s discussion of Plot and Character as primary and subordinate elements of tragedy. They approach the Poetics with the assurance that the rounded, inward character of the psychological stage has always been fundamental to the dramatic form and to the human mind. When we explain that to read Antigone, say, for the psychological subtext is anachronistic, they may be tempted to counter that Freudian psychology itself is based on her parents’ relationship. Yet the topic, Aristotle on Character, presents problems to even the most sophisticated modern scholars. I quote the disputed text at length, first from Butcher’s well known translation of chapter VI:

For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. . . . Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all. Again, without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character. . . . Again, if you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents. . . . The Plot then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place.²

Some translators have softened Aristotle’s dismissal of character. Where Butcher tells us there may be tragedy “without character,” Grube has “a tragedy without characterization is possible.”³ Some now believe Else’s more recent translation with the blunt plural, “without characters,” to be closer to Aristotle’s meaning. The crucial passage above, “Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character . . . ,” has been the occasion of particular dispute. Else’s translation of the passage becomes a wilderness of lost antecedents, “Hence they are not active in order to imitate their characters, but they include the character along with the actions for the sake of the latter.”⁴

In an important 1960s commentary on the Poetics that overturned a century-long idealization of the “tragic hero,” John Jones brought an almost ruthless clarity to the passage, “And so the stage-figures do not act in order to represent their characters; they include their characters for the sake of their actions.”⁵ To Jones, Aristotle saw tragedy as expressing no conception of autonomous character.

[Aristotle] is not saying, or he is saying only incidentally, that character is less important than action. This crucial inflexion of argument has not been acknowledged, either in close professional analysis, where stress falls on the “subordinate significance” of character and on the “superiority of activities over states,” or in the general and popular expositions with their antithetical talk of Plot and Character, those capital-letter fixtures of commentary. It needs to be said that the plot-character dichotomy is radically false to Aristotle’s understanding of Tragedy, that character, like colour [in painting], must be denied even the most primitive autonomy.⁶

According to Jones, the “tragic hero” may inhere in the “omnipresent consciousness” of a Hamlet, but the Aristotelian figure is one of “bare doings” touched with ethical coloring, not an inner man at all as we understand the “no doubt transient self of the modern West.” The sum total of “doings” amounts to character. “(N)o potent shaping spirit lodges aboriginally behind the face,” he writes, in an allusion to the power and function of the tragic mask. “By the erosive flow of action the individual features are carved out.”⁷

In the twenty-five years since Jones’s powerful intervention (albeit prepared by Bruno Snell and other, especially German, critics), a series of re-revisions by scholars of tragedy has emerged in the effort to recuperate a somewhat more continuous, psychological notion of character for Aristotle. Nonetheless most of these critics—Christopher Gill, P. E. Easterling, John Gould, and Simon Goldhill—acknowledge the importance of Jones’s “no character” position. As recently as 1992, Elizabeth Belfiore, in perhaps the most substantial re-reading of the Poetics since Jones, reaffirms his basic orientation. “Because Aristotle . . . insists that plot is essential to tragedy while ethos is not,” she writes,

his views on the nature of tragedy differ radically from those of many modern readers and scholars, for whom character is the center of interest. . . . A bias in favor of character has often led scholars to attempt to find a “psychological realism” in Greek drama that the dramatic conventions of this genre did not allow and that the extant tragedies do not display. The inappropriateness of the view that agents in drama are psychological entities much like their real-life counterparts is now widely recognized, as scholars from Tycho von Wilamowitz to Thomas Rosenmeyer have argued. . . . There are, as John Jones remarks, no further realities lying behind the masks.⁸

It is not difficult for actors to discover for themselves, without benefit of sophisticated philology, that imagining an Oedipus at the level of individual psychology does not so much enhance him with lifelike detail as dissipate his moral force. On the contrary, it is the actor’s difficult task to inhabit the actions of an Oedipus with such concentration that, in effect, no “excess” character is left over. The actor seeks the actions, not the coherent personality that commits them. The inexhaustibility of the great Greek tragic roles lies precisely in this mystery, that their tragic actions do not appear directly to be anchored in the recognizable contexts of psychological and material life. By contrast, Shakespeare’s characters seem to the reader/spectator to exist not only within but outside the dramatic narrative that gives them life. It is possible to imagine a Hamlet apart from his tragic circumstance. Or put another way, we imagine an extended “whole” in which we place the only partially visible Hamlet of the text. In contrast to the Greek roles, the inexhaustibility of Shakespeare’s tragic roles lies in the permission they give actors to make new wholes of the feeling and thinking dimensions suggested by the text.

It is difficult today to be certain whether the move to “denature” Shakespeare’s psychological depth by such critics as Francis Barker and Jonathan Goldberg springs from modernist dehumanist/semiotic moves retrospectively projected, or whether they are uncovering the transitional, proto-psychological Shakespeare on whom later generations projected their growing commitment to depth psychology.⁹ Clearly, however, from the eighteenth century on, theorists looked almost exclusively to Shakespeare as they began to advance a standard of inwardness for character, and, as a parallel development, began to revise the Aristotelian assimilation of character to plot.

Aristotle developed his ideas on dramatic structure in the century after the work of the great tragedians. Similarly, it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that a new theory of tragedy arose in response to the forms that emerged in England two centuries earlier, and to a lesser extent in the playwriting of the Spanish Golden Age. Well before German romantic critics announced the new Shakespearean synthesis, however, eighteenth-century critics like Luigi Riccaboni, Marmontel, and Lessing began to link character, actor, and spectator in a mutual play of subjectivity (intended here in its allied senses of consciousness of self and of spiritual inwardness).¹⁰

Lessing, though he was a modified classicist and adherent of the ideal of artistic “objectivity,” struck a peculiarly modern note by finding in Aristotle’s enigmatic remarks on catharsis the center of Aristotle’s theory of tragedy. The authenticity of a tragic work turned for Lessing primarily on its ability to stir, and then to purge, an emotional or inward state in the spectator.¹¹ With the German Sturm und Drang movement in the last quarter of the eighteenth century came a wholesale collapse of the classical ideal. Sturm und Drang strove to replace external representation with the turmoil of the inner world of feelings. These “romantic” values were clarified and pushed forward at the end of the century by the young Friedrich Schlegel and his circle (Novalis, Schleiermacher, Schelling), for whom the inward, or subjective, was elevated to a transcendental principle. As Schleiermacher wrote in 1800, “As often as I turn my gaze inward upon my inmost self, I am at once within the domain of eternity. I behold the spirit’s action, which no world can change, and no time can destroy, but which creates both world and time.”¹²

The application of romantic theory to dramatic literature was systematically carried out by Friedrich Schlegel’s older brother, August Wilhelm, in the famous Vienna lecture cycle of 1808. There he leaves no doubt that romantic subjectivity in art is a concomitant of the inward and mystical bent of Christianity, which, unlike polytheism, “claimed an authority over the whole inward man and the most hidden movements of the heart.”¹³ Like Herder and Friedrich Schlegel in their earlier formulations of romantic theory, Wilhelm identified Shakespeare as the emblematic “romantic” poet. And the emblematic talent of this artist, according to Schlegel, was characterization (“Never perhaps was there so comprehensive a talent for characterization as Shakespeare”¹⁴) considered in its multifarious aspects as behavior, passions, and structural element in a dramatic scheme. Quoting Goethe, Schlegel links Shakespeare’s brilliance in characterization with the admired quality of inwardness: Shakespeare’s characters are comparable to “watches with crystalline plates and cases, which, while they point out the hours as correctly as other watches, enable us at the same time to perceive the inward springs whereby all this is accomplished.”¹⁵ Yet Schlegel distances himself from the naive mechanicism of the simile, preferring to identify as the secret of Shakespeare’s gift for creating characters a near-mystical capacity to transport himself into every human being.

In G. W. F. Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics and the fine arts of the 1820s came the apogee of a trend that had grown steadily in romantic critical thought: romantic inwardness raised to the power of religious revelation.¹⁶ Hegel based his distinction ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Modern after Modernism
• Part II Theater after Modernism
• Reviews And Articles 1979–1993 Reports from an Emerging Culture
• Notes
• Index