THE THEATRE OF REVOLT
Let us begin with a pair of images.
First, imagine an open temple of classical proportions, surrounded by rising tiers. Gathered on separate levels are artisans, citizens, nobility — divided into classes but forming a unified congregation of spectators. In front of the temple is an altar before which stands a high priest in hieratic robes. Beyond the temple is a city; beyond the city, the celestial spheres, moving steadily in their orbits. The priest conducts a ritual ceremony by miming a myth of heroism and violence. The congregation is startled by the growing frenzy of the action; the atmosphere grows taut and strained. The high priest concludes his service with a ritual sacrifice, and blood pours from the altar. The congregation screams as if it were the victim. Some spectators fall from their seats; the temple cracks; the city begins to crumble; the spheres start wildly from their course. At the point when total dissolution seems imminent, the scene freezes. The spectators file out, their anxiety mingled with an ethereal calm.
Now, imagine a perfectly level plain in a desolate land. In the foreground, an uneasy crowd of citizens huddle together on the ruins of an ancient temple. Beyond them, a broken altar, bristling with artifacts. Beyond that, empty space. An emaciated priest in disreputable garments stands before the ruined altar, level with the crowd, glancing into a distorting mirror. He cavorts grotesquely before it, inspecting his own image in several outlandish positions. The crowd mutters ominously and partially disperses. The priest turns the mirror on those who remain to reflect them sitting stupidly on rubble. They gaze at their images for a moment, painfully transfixed; then, horror-struck, they run away, hurling stones at the altar and angry imprecations at the priest. The priest, shaking with anger, futility, and irony, turns the mirror on the void. He is alone in the void.
The first is an image for the theatre of communion; the second for the theatre of revolt.
By theatre of communion, I mean the theatre of the past, dominated by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Racine, where traditional myths were enacted before an audience of believers against the background of a shifting but still coherent universe. By theatre of revolt, I mean the theatre of the great insurgent modern dramatists, where myths of rebellion are enacted before a dwindling number of spectators in a flux of vacancy, bafflement, and accident. I have described these two theatres metaphorically in order to make two points rapidly: (1) that the traditional and the modern theatres are clearly distinguishable from each other in regard to the function of their dramatists, the engagement of their audiences, and the nature of the worlds they imply and evoke, and (2) that the playwrights of the modern theatre form a movement just as distinctive as the various schools of the past. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw, Brecht, Pirandello, O’Neill, and Genet — to name the dramatists discussed at length in this book — are all highly individualistic artists. Yet they share one thing in common which separates them from their predecessors and links them to each other. This is their attitude of revolt, an attitude which is the product of an essentially Romantic inheritance. It is my purpose in this book to isolate the distinguishing characteristics of modern drama, to demonstrate its unity as a Romantic movement, and to trace the development of Romantic revolt in the works of its eight foremost playwrights.
As a prologue to these discussions, however, it is necessary to examine how dramatic revolt evolved; and for this purpose I must emphasize not the differences between the traditional and modern theatres, but rather their organic connections. For while the theatre of revolt has immediate roots in nineteenth-century Romanticism, it is, in a larger sense, the inevitable consequence of a long preparatory process which begins in the Middle Ages. The ruins in the second image are the remains of the proud monuments of the first. It is atop the broken hierarchies, discredited values, and collapsed institutions of traditional culture that the modern dramatist meditates his revolt.
The theatre of communion, in fact, reaches its historical climax with a premonitory glimpse into the disintegration of the traditional world order. The drama of the Western world, like the drama of the Greeks, describes a trajectory which arches from belief to uncertainty to unbelief, always developing in the direction of greater skepticism towards temporal and spiritual laws. Greek tragedy, for example, moves from the religious piety of Aeschylus to the tragic ambivalence of Sophocles to the angry agnosticism of Euripides, finally dissipating itself in the spiritual indifference of Menander and New Comedy. And Western drama develops from the religious certainty of the medieval playwrights to the doubts and hesitations of the Stuart dramatists, where the characters of Webster and Middleton look up to empty heavens and Shakespeare’s tragic heroes peer into a vast abyss. A growing sense of futility and despair infects both Hellenistic culture and the culture of late Renaissance Europe, which is reflected in certain Naturalistic philosophies, calling everything in doubt.
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all relation.
In England, John Donne speaks for an age anticipating the imminent collapse of order.
Donne’s contemporaries provide these premonitions with theatrical form in myths of defeat, and in images of decay, mutability, and disease. The music of the spheres turns to a discord; the string of degree is untuned; the paragon of animals is also a quintessence of dust. Skulls and skeletons become recurrent props in the theatrical display, and the highest value is courage in the face of death. Comedy grows brutal, tragedy loses its clear definition, and good and evil become confused, as the universal order is rearranged to the accompaniment of loud cracking sounds in the heavens. Before long, the theatre is dominated by purely secular forms. When the Romans took over from the Greeks, they banished God from the stage and plumped the audience down in the area once reserved for the altar. In Western drama, Heroic plays and Restoration comedies accomplish the same ends, providing an atmosphere of fake idealism or brutal cynicism, but little interest in the religious nature of man.
If the theatre of communion climaxes with a sense of spiritual disintegration, the theatre of revolt begins with this sense, inheriting from the Western tradition a continuity of decay in an advanced stage. Shakespeare developed, slowly and painfully, a negative view of life, but this is the initial assumption of the modern dramatist; and unlike the Greeks, he can make no restitution for the bitterness of his protest. No plague is purged by the exile of his Oedipus, no Court of the Areopagus founded on the suffering of his Orestes, no Denmark restored by the death of his Hamlet — even though exile, suffering, and death are often the unreasonable fate of his heroes. Similarly, if the theatre of communion incorporated fearful visions and agonizing prophecies, these have all been realized in the theatre of revolt. Lear’s eloquent madness has degenerated into the insane babbling of Ibsen’s Oswald; Leontes’s momentary jealousy has become the pathological obsession of Strindberg’s Father. Gloucester mutters against the wanton cruelty of gods which Chekhov’s futilitarians do not even grace with curses; Albany foresees a day when men will prey upon each other — it has already arrived in Brecht. Benedict and Beatrice are wilting in Shaw’s Heartbreak House; the melancholy of Hamlet quickens into the painful anguish of Pirandello and the black despair of O’Neill; Iago’s half-world becomes the whole world of Jean Genet. No and nothing and never — Lear’s repeated negatives — are now the modern dramatist’s vocabulary of refusal, as he labors to cast off his legacy of dissolution.
This legacy, of course, is not just a literary inheritance; it is the time’s bequest; the world which fosters the modern dramatist is growing increasingly circumscribed and limited. When Ibsen leaves Norway in 1864 to begin his great epic dramas in Rome, the scientific Naturalism prefigured by Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes has already triumphed; it is now the world view of civilized Europe. Darwin’s Origin of the Species has appeared in 1859, a mortal blow at the divine origins of man. In the same year, Marx has completed his Critique of Political Economy, a mechanistic approach to history which analyzes the development of cultures solely on the basis of class interests. And in 1863, Renan publishes his Life of Christ, in which Jesus, denied his divine birth, his miracles, and his resurrection, is characterized less as a supernatural being than as an inspired prophet and rebel.
Naturalism is replacing supernaturalism, the experiment is superseding the apparition. The statistic is being substituted for the insight, prose is supplanting poetry. Religious orthodoxy is still powerful, but the Church has become the prey of pharisees, of hypocritical observances and superficial respectability. Science is growing arrogant and assured, but is providing no magical ideas or metaphysical grace to satisfy mankind’s yearning for ritual and sanctity. As for the great social-political revolutions, these have resulted in the consolidation of middle-class power; and the failure of the radical revolutions of 1848 have discouraged hopes that this power will be easily overthrown. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are becoming cant terms, as wage slavery replaces serfdom, justice is corrupted by privilege, and neighbors prey upon each other for gain, while progress pays for its blessings with the evils of industrialism: slag heaps, child labor, blackened cities. The revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century had anticipated the full realization of human freedom. But the deterministic sciences have put limits on man’s possibilities, the machine has broken his link with nature and his fellow beings, and the State is beginning to make increasingly greater claims on his person. Modern man is stalked by chaos:
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Yeats rephrases the premonitions of Donne in even more apocalyptic accents. The image of modern society becomes that of a dungeon — gray, filthy, squalid, forbidding — where man labors interminably, in the poisoned air, at humiliating tasks.
The modern drama, in short, rides in on the second wave of Romanticism — not the cheerful optimism of Rousseau, with his emphasis on institutional reform, but rather the dark fury of Nietzsche, with his radical demands for a total transformation of man’s spiritual life. And Nietzsche remains the most seminal philosophical influence on the theatre of revolt, the intellect against which almost every modern dramatist must measure his own. When Nietzsche declared the death of God, he declared the death of all traditional values as well. Man could create new values only by becoming God: the only alternative to nihilism lay in revolt. Nietzsche’s arrogant I will was a desperate response to an absurd universe. And all modern revolt, as Albert Camus writes in his monumental study The Rebel (L’Homme Révolté), is “born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition.” Confronted with the same metaphysical absurdity, the modern dramatist takes up Nietzsche’s challenge, assuming an attitude of refusal which puts him in conflict with the laws of modern necessity. Rejecting God, church, community, and family — vindicating the rights of the individual against the claims of government, morality, conventions, and rules — he adopts the posture of the rebel, chafing against restraints, determined to make all barriers crack.
The revolt of the dramatist, it is important to add, is more imaginative than practical — imaginative, absolute, and pure. In the earlier phases of the theatre of revolt — in some of the works of Ibsen, for example, and of Shaw — the drama sometimes begins to look like an act of utility; and in the plays of Brecht, it is designed to lead to political revolution. Even in the majority of these works, however, the programmatic element is actually insignificant — or much too radical for any practical application. Dramatic art is not identical with reality, but rather proceeds along a parallel plane; and dramatic revolt, therefore, is always much more total than the programs of political agitators or social reformers. The modern dramatist is essentially a metaphysical rebel, not a practical revolutionary; whatever his personal political convictions, his art is the expression of a spiritual condition. For he is a militant of the ideal, an anarchic individualist, concerned with the impossible rather than the possible; and his discontent extends to the very roots of existence. The work of art itself becomes a subversive gesture — a more imaginative reconstruction of a chaotic, disordered world.
One consequence of the dramatist’s revolt is his estrangement from officialdom, and — since he rejects the conventional pieties — from the official culture. This culture continues to persist, of course, in the theatrical marketplace, where the commercial dramatist, in Strindberg’s words, functions as a “lay preacher, peddling the ideas of his time in popular form, popular enough for the middle classes, mainstay of theatre audiences, to grasp the gist of the matter without troubling their brains too much.” But the theatre of revolt is not a popular theatre, nor are its dramatists much concerned with instructing the middle classes. Quite the contrary, they have apparently determined, like Théophile Gautier, to be “the terror of the sleek, baldheaded bourgeois” — their common enemy becomes middle-class man himself. From Ibsen, who turned in rage on those “fatted swine-snouts,” to Genet, who puts upon the stage the ritual annihilation of the entire white race, every rebel dramatist is incensed by some aspect of this prosperous world; and even Chekhov, the gentlest spirit in the theatre of revolt, is moved to declare about his plays, “All I wanted to say was ‘Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are.’ ”
Chekhov indicts the bourgeois for his lack of culture and lack of nerve, Ibsen for his mediocrity and compromise, Strindberg for his cowardice, Shaw for his complacency, Brecht for his hypocrisy and greed, Pirandello for his meddling and scandal-mongering, O’Neill for his Philistinism, Genet for his sham. The indictments accumulate, adding fuel to the fire of Nietzsche, who had declared war on “the mediators and mixers” — those “half-and-half ones that have neither learned to bless nor to curse from the heart.” The ideal of the golden mean was anathema to Nietzsche (“That is mediocrity,” he wrote, “though it be called moderation”); and many of the rebel dramatists share his contempt for the soft virtues of Christianity and the reasonable, humanitarian values of liberal democracy. Detesting middle ways, scorning middle emotions, defying the middle classes, the rebel dramatist begins to celebrate, secretly or openly, the values of the extreme — excess, instinct, emancipation, ecstasy, drunkenness, rapture, revolt. Thus, the “damned compact liberal majority,” as Ibsen called it, becomes the dramatist’s chief antagonist. And since this majority constitutes the theatre audience, the spectator himself comes under attack, either assailed from the stage directly, or represented on the stage as a satirical figure. No longer the spokesman for the audience, or its paid entertainer, the dramatist becomes its adversary, letting the spectators know, as Shaw lets them know in the preface to his earliest plays, that “my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.”
Inevitably, the dramatist pays for his revolt by being rejected in turn. Like Joyce, who fled from Ireland refusing to serve what he no longer believed, the modern dramatist spends much of his creative life in exile — a fugitive, outcast, or outlaw. Ibsen, the Norwegian, goes to Rome and, later, to Germany, declaring, “I had to flee the swinishness up there to feel fully cleansed”; the Swedish Strindberg finds refuge from the real and imagined abuse of his countrymen in Paris; Shaw leaves Ireland forever to live in England; Brecht, in retreat from the Nazis, moves to Scandinavia and thence to the United States; Genet spends most of his young manhood in European jails. As a result, the theatre of revolt is a cosmopolitan movement, nourished by international sources. While the dramatist continues to write of his country, even in exile, he no longer exalts it or advances its cause. Nationalistic dramas are rare, while national characteristics stimulate his satire and reproaches.
Even when the rebel dramatist is not in geographical exile, he feels like an outlander, since he has lost his sense of belonging. A stranger to his family, a leper to society, a heretic to the Church, he is also a metaphysical outcast, for he is spiritually destitute as soon as he ceases to believe in God. “Then the time of exile begins,” writes Camus, discussing Nietzsche, “the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, ‘the most painful, the most heartbreaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?’ ” “Where is — my home?” the inconsolable Nietzsche continually asked. “For it do I ask and seek, and have sought, but have not found it.” And Ibsen writes to Georg Brandes, upon his return to Norway: “Up here by the fjords in my native land. But — but — but! Where am I to find my homeland?” Where am I to find my homeland? — each rebel dramatist must ask himself the same heartbreaking question. In the theatre of revolt, the note of banishment is repeatedly struck, and the modern drama aches with nostalgia, loneliness, and regret.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche prophesied the end of exile: “Ye lonesome ones, ye seceding ones, ye shall one day be a people: out of ye who have chosen yourselves, shall a chosen people arise. . . .” The dramatist of revolt looks forward to the same consummation, and even tries to realize it through his work. The more isolated and hermetic he becomes, the more his vision of communion intensifies — the alienated spirit begins to seek out those of his kind. Even writing for the theatre suggests these needs, since the theatre audience represents a collective in miniature; but the dramatist wants to convert this collective into a “chosen people” through the transforming power of his art. He is, in short, like a spoiled priest who still wants to exercise his function but cannot believe in the Christian sacraments. In a world without God, he must shape a congregation, invent a liturgy, create a faith. “To kill God and to build a Church,” writes Camus, “are the constant and contradictory purposes of rebellion.” These contradictory purposes are the foundation of the theatre of revolt, where each dramatist labors to make a new union out of his secession — to make his initial act of revolt the occasion for a new kind of grace.
In Inferno, Strindberg speaks of a religion for which the whole world is waiting — not “a compromise with the established religions” but rather “a progress towards the new.” This is the demand of the theatre of revolt. Playwrights like Eliot and Claudel may make their peace with “the established religions,” but the theatre of revolt is distinctly heterodox, when not downright heretic. And though Strindberg and O’Neill are both temporarily attracted to Christianity, the Church even for them is only a way station on a long Romantic quest for faith. This quest is common to all the rebel dramatists, though it takes various directions. Some are drawn to science, some to politics, some to art, some to Satanism, some to Buddhism, Hinduism, or Confucianism — but each of these creeds is a religious alternative, and even the most materialistic programs are embraced as a form of metaphysical salvation. Ibsen’s Darwinism has strong mystical overtones; Shaw’s Lamarckism is a branch of his “vital religion”; even Brecht’s Communism seems like a substitute for going into a monastery. Needless to say, none of these faiths prove very satisfactory as a means to salvation — the new world religion has yet to arrive. The theatre of revolt fails to build its Church, and records this failure in a growing mood of despair.
And also in a growing mood of withdrawal. The drama begins to assume the characteristics of a private art, even though it has always been the most public of literary expressions. Because of the dramatist’s breach with his audience, and his indifference to dramatic rules, modern plays begin to assume epic dimensions — longer, more difficult, and more episodic than plays of the past. This increasing formlessness is accompanied by an increasing discursiveness, as the rebel dramatist becomes an evangelist, proselytizing for his faith. Prefaces, prologues, critical tracts, manifestos, and appendices start to accompany works of drama — the playwright produces not only myths but also commentaries on the myths. Chekhov alone, in the theatre of revolt, remains uninterested in general ideas; the others become obsessed with doctrine and dogma, frequently breaking out of dramatic forms into extradramatic formulations.
The theatre of revolt, in other words, is extremely self-conscious and self-involved, as befits a Romantic movement. And like the other Romantics, the dramatist begins to enter his work to a hitherto unprecedented degree. Strindberg and O’Neill are almost indistinguishable from their heroes; Ibsen and Shaw identify themselves with their heroes to a large extent; Brecht hides his experience in his plays, but speaks out directly through the figure of a third-person narrator; Pirandello and Genet shape their works to an almost solipsistic concept; and even Chekhov hovers about his plays as a moral presence. Whether involved as an idea or a character, the modern dramatist is continually exploring the possibilities of his own personality — not only representing but exhorting, not only dramatizing the others but examining the self. This self-examination, common enough to the other Romantic arts, does not with them constitute such a radical break with tradition. The material of the lyric poet has always been largely personal, and even the autobiographical element in Proust or Joyce does not violate the conventions of a form which, ever since Homer, has permitted the author his part in the narrative. The subjectivity of the rebel dramatist, on the other hand, is unique, since the drama has traditionally been a form of imitation — impersonal, objective, detached — with the author excluded from the work.
Still, the theatre of revolt is only partially subjective; the rebel dramatist continues to observe the requirements of his form. A play proceeds by dialogue, and dialogue implies debate and conflict. Without debate, the drama is propaganda; without conflict, mere fantasizing. The rebel dramatist may desire to live out his revolt in his art, but this desire is disciplined by his objective consciousness. Personal fantasies and abstract ideas enter the modern drama, but concrete action and imitation remain — the self shares the stage with the others. The platform is double-layered because the artist himself is split — split in his attitude towards himself, towards life, towards the world. “Artistic creation,” observes Camus, “is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world. But it rejects the world on account of what it lacks and in the name of what it sometimes is.” And so it is with dramatic creation. The rebel who wishes to transform the world is also an artist who must accurately represent it; the Romantic who would destroy all boundaries is also a Classicist, accepting limitations in life and art. This ambivalence makes the rebel dramatist vacillate between negation and affirmation, between rebellion and reality. Unable to master his contradictions, he dramatizes them in his plays, grateful for a form in which tensions do not have to be resolved.
Thus, while each of the rebel dramatists takes revolt as his central theme, he also criticizes revolt in the name of reality; at the same time that he identifies with his rebel characters, he repudiates them too. In Ibsen, especially, revolt is ambiguously treated, being alternately exalted and punished; but this ambiguity pervades all the major dramatists. In Shaw, the rebel is both the hope of the world and a windy orator; in Chekhov, he is torpid and apathetic for all his vigorous speechifying; in Brecht, he embodies the impulse towards change and the impulse towards adaptation; in Strindberg, O’Neill, and Pirandello, he subsides into a melancholy stoicism after the failure of his dreams; in Genet, he develops into the very image of authority he wants to annihilate. The idea of revolt remains pure and absolute, but the act of revolt is usually a source of tension, suffering, or despair. And while the rebel character is usually an extension of the playwright, the playwright is always examining the consequences of his actions.
It is this conflict between idea and action — between conception and execution — which forms the central dialectic of the modern drama. For the rebel dramatist is one who dreams — and puts his dreams to the test. This may suggest why the conflict of illusion and reality is such an important theme in the modern drama: illusion and reality are the twin poles of the dramatist’s imagination. All true rebels hate reality and labor ceaselessly to change it; but no true artist can withdraw entirely from the world of matter. The more rebellious the artist, the more he takes refuge in a sphere of fancies and illusions; but even the most subjective artists in the theatre of revolt are pulled irresistibly back to the tangible, material world they would escape. The dream landscapes of Strindberg and Genet are contiguous with the views seen from our own windows; beneath the drama of appearances lies a pattern of solid facts.
This may account for the style of the modern drama — and, especially, its ambiguous realism. The mark of the genius, for that arch-Romantic Jean Jacques Rousseau, was his refusal to imitate; by this remark he intended to express his abhorrence of the real. Pirandello illuminates Rousseau’s statement when he observes that “in imitating a preceding model, one denies one’s own identity, and remains of necessity behind the pattern” — the more one copies reality, the less one realizes the self. Camus carries this one step further by demonstrating how the most individual style is the sign of the most passionate rebellion, while realism, with its subordination of the self, is the official aesthetic of totalitarianism. Yet many of the most fiercely individualistic modern dramatists write in a relatively realistic style.
It must be understood, however, that modern dramatic realism is usually a subterfuge. For just as the antirealist dramatists are constantly evoking reality, so the realist dramatists are merely sublimating their Romantic individualism in a chastened style. Edmund Wilson tells how Flaubert, with his appetite for “the gorgeous and the untamed,” forced himself to write, in corseted prose, of the “pusillanimity and mediocrity of contemporary bourgeois France.” This exactly describes the willed development of the modern realist dramatist. Ibsen, considered the father of modern realism, begins his career with extravagant epics, celebrating man in nature, then turns to the most prosaic-seeming forms; but beneath the humdrum surface, his old Romanticism continues to bubble; even his “modern” plays are acts of rebellion in disguise. Ibsen’s problem remains one that every modern dramatist must solve for himself — how to find, without spurning reality altogether, that necessary link between the natural and imaginative worlds. And thus while the rebel may wish to withdraw into untamed nature or into a realm of his own invention, his plays are set, more often than not, in a world of sober probability — contemporary citizens in urban drawing rooms, conversing in the flat language of everyday life.
These are hardly ideal terms for those who would, no doubt, prefer to unleash their imaginations, heighten their language, and break out into passionate revolt — but to rebel against the world, one must continue to confront it. And herein lie the paradoxes of the rebel dramatist. He would exalt the ideal, yet he is imprisoned in the real. He would vindicate the self, yet he must also examine the claims of the others. He would sing of ecstasy, wildness, and drunkenness, yet he must cope with the tedious, conditioned world.
The theatre of revolt, then, is the temple of a priest without a God, without an orthodoxy, without even much of a congregation, who conducts his service within the hideous architecture of the absurd. A missionary of discord, he spreads a gospel of insurrection, trying to substitute his inspired vision for traditional values, trying to improvise a ritual out of anguish and frustration. Instead of myths of communion, he offers myths of dispersal; instead of consoling sermons, painful demands; instead of a liturgy of acceptance, a liturgy of complaint. He is an apostate priest, and one who secretly would be God. Taking as his motto Lucifer’s Non serviam, he emerges as the spirit of denial, the man who says No, pursuing his Yes down the countless avenues of revolt.
To chart these avenues is the purpose of this book. The process is difficult and complicated, since their direction varies with each dramatist. But, in general, we can distinguish three main highways into which the avenues run. The first is extremely broad, the second more narrow, and the third a one-way street, for the modern drama grows progressively more confined as the exigencies of the time begin to limit the possibilities of revolt. I have called these categories of revolt messianic, social, existential. These terms will be more fully elaborated, but I can define them quickly through reference to my initial images. Messianic revolt occurs when the dramatist rebels against God and tries to take His place — the priest examines his image in the mirror. Social revolt occurs when the dramatist rebels against the conventions, morals, and values of the social organism — the priest turns the mirror on the audience. Existential revolt occurs when the dramatist rebels against the conditions of his existence — the priest turns the mirror on the void. Each of the eight dramatists considered in this book — in fact, most of the dramatists in the modern theatre — can be classified as messianic, social, or existential rebels; some fall into one category, some into two, some into all three. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to examine the background, nature, and style of each aspect of dramatic revolt.
Messianic revolt is the initial stage of the modern drama, and the most unashamedly Romantic. It can be found in Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and O’Neill; it crops up again in Genet; and it characterizes minor dramatists like Wagner, D’Annunzio, Sartre, and Camus. The messianic drama is designed as an act of revelation — a Pisgah view of Palestine — for it revolves around the thought and actions of a new Messiah, who thinks himself destined to replace the old God and change the life of man. Messianic revolt is the most subjective, grandiose, and egotistical of all dramatic rebellion — and so persistent in the drama that one is forced to say it is with Ibsen’s early messianic epics, and not with his later “modern” plays, that the modern drama properly begins. For it is messianism which detonates the theatre of revolt. And though the explosion is loudest at the beginning of the movement, when the dramatist is bursting with a turbulent Romanticism and everything seems possible, its reverberations can be felt throughout the entire modern theatre.
Messianic drama is a medium of absolute liberation, unrestrained by dramatic rules or human limitations, through which the rebel dramatist indulges his insatiable appetite for the infinite. Conceiving the universe to be a projection of his own personality, which can be altered or manipulated through superhuman will, he imagines himself a Creator superior to God, and destined to transform life into something more ordered than the meaningless botch he sees around him. As Strindberg puts it, through his autobiographical character, the Stranger, in The Road to Damascus, Part I:
And I feel my spirit growing, spreading, becoming tenuous, infinite. I am everywhere, in the ocean which is my blood, in the rocks which are my bones, in the trees, in the flowers; and my head reaches up to the heavens. I can survey the whole universe. I am the universe. And I feel the power of the creator within me, for I am He! I wish I could grasp the all in my hand and refashion it into something more perfect, more lasting, more beautiful. I want all creation and created beings to be happy, to be born without pain, live without suffering, and die in quiet content.
Here, where Strindberg imagines himself gigantic and transcendent — assuming divine powers and refashioning the world after his own plan — is the very essence of messianic revolt.
Strindberg is the least reticent of the messianic dramatists about his personal urge towards Godhead, but this hungry I want — the cry of perpetual dissatisfaction — rings through all the dramas of this type: it is the sound of the will to power. “Dead are all the Gods,” wrote Nietzsche, “now do we desire the Superman to live” — the messianic rebel echoes this demand. Ibsen, in Emperor and Galilean, foresees a Third Empire of the Will where “the present watchword of revolt will be realized” and “men will not need to die in order to live as gods on earth.” Shaw, in Man and Superman, envisions a future man “omnipotent, omniscient, infallible, and withal completely, unilludedly self-conscious: in short, a God,” and introduces this self-conscious deity into the last play of Back to Methuselah. Siegfried, the protagonist of Wagner’s Ring cycle, breaks the god Wotan’s spear with his sword Nothung, thus becoming the seliger Held, or sanctified hero. Camus’s Caligula aims “far above the gods . . . taking over a kingdom where the impossible is king.” O’Neill’s Lazarus, in Lazarus Laughed, announces that “the greatness of Man is that no god can save him — until he becomes a god!” And Genet’s Chief of Police, in The Balcony, turns his lust for reputation into a rebellious assault on the very heavens.
The messianic hero, in short, is a superman, combining the qualities of malefactor and benefactor — of one who kills God and one who builds a Church. As a malefactor, he is in the tradition of earlier Romantic heroes — Schiller’s Karl Moor, Goethe’s Goetz, Hugo’s Hernani — an outlaw, warring on society and seeking complete gratification beyond conventional laws (the heroines of messianic drama — Ibsen’s Solveig and Agnes, Strindberg’s Lady, Wagner’s Brunhilde, Shaw’s Ann Whitefield — are also related to a type from earlier drama, the Romantic ewig Weibliche). The struggle of the messianic hero with God, however, makes him more akin to Aeschylus’s Prometheus and Goethe’s Faust, not to mention Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, who desired to “set black streamers in the firmament to signify the slaughter of the gods.” Prototypes for the messianic hero, in fact, can be found among all the great insurgents of myth and religion: Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Cain, Judas, Don Juan. Cain and Judas, for example, are among the rebels who appear in a vision to Ibsen’s Emperor Julian — two “freedmen under necessity,” pointing the way to his own rebellion. Strindberg’s Stranger announces “I am Cain, you see,” and dabbles in the Devil’s work. Cain, the “revolted son,” is also a prominent character in Back to Methuselah, while Don Juan, the “enemy of God,” is the hero of Man and Superman. Genet identifies himself with “Lucifer, crossing swords with God,” and O’Neill’s Dion Anthony develops, throughout The Great God Brown, into a Faust figure under a pact with the Devil. In short, the messianic hero feels accursed, and draws his defiance and strength from the deepest springs of evil.
As a malefactor, the messianic hero desires to kill God and destroy the old order; as a benefactor, he desires to build an order of his own. Like Prometheus, he defies the heavens for the sake of man — but like Moses, Christ, Buddha, Brahma, and Confucius, he tries to form new laws, representing himself as a savior with the means of salvation in his grasp. Like most saviors, he suffers the fate of the scapegoat at the hands of the multitude; and the betrayal of the messianic hero provides the dramatic climax of the messianic play. But his doctrine provides its intellectual spine. This doctrine, of course, belongs to the author, embodying his personal convictions and commitments. He designs his work, therefore, as creative religion or scriptural writings or wisdom literature — the modern equivalent of the gospels, the Koran, Confucian maxims, the Upanishads.
The messianic drama, in consequence, is tendentious and systematic — a philosophical play on the order of Goethe’s Faust. It is also rather windy and rhetorical, sometimes spilling over — like the Revolutionist’s Handbook which Shaw appended to Man and Superman — into discursive, nondramatic prose. Epigrammatic maxims and revolutionary mottos are not unusual: “All or nothing” (Brand); “Death to old Death” (Lazarus Laughed). And it is notable for a hortatory, admonitory tone. As for its doctrine, this is not usually very impressive when separated from the play proper. For the various messianic creeds — whether Ibsen’s philosophy of the will, Wagner’s religion of art, Strindberg’s Hindu resignation, Shaw’s life force, O’Neill’s neo-Dionysianism, or Genet’s cult of crime and evil — are neither very comprehensive nor very convincing nor even very original (most of this material is borrowed from other rebel thinkers like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, or D. H. Lawrence). Still, the significant thing about messianic drama is not so much its philosophical content as its posture of revolt — its restless search for coherence in a world of abandoned gods.
The messianic play, in short, is a dramatization of the Romantic quest for faith; as such, it is the most personal mode in the theatre of revolt, and functions as the dramatist’s religious testament. This is not to say the material is autobiographical (though it sometimes is), but rather that the messianic dramatist always has strong affinities with his protagonist. The messianic hero, in one way or another, is an extension of the playwright, who thus provides himself with superhuman faculties: the hero is the imaginative realization of the playwright’s dreams, the vicarious acting out of his moral imagination. Ibsen admitted that Brand, Peer Gynt, and the Emperor Julian were aspects of himself; Wagner identified with Siegfried, and named his child after him; Strindberg put himself into his Stranger, as O’Neill did with most of his central characters; and Shaw had much (too much) in common with his Ancients.
Each dramatist, on the other hand, preserves his distance from his play as well. The hero’s messianic doctrine is almost invariably rejected, and the hero himself never quite achieves divinity, for he is usually abandoned by the playwright by the end of the play. Ibsen’s Julian dies, a victim of his own power drive, and Brand is rebuked by the God of Love; Strindberg’s Stranger ends up on the threshold of a monastery, befogged by doubts and contradictions; O’Neill’s Dion Anthony expires in agonies of self-hatred and uncertainty; Genet’s Satanic rebels learn that their revolt cannot succeed, since God is “the final victor.” In the last play of Back to Methuselah, Shaw projects himself into a world of the future where all his prophecies have been realized — but this is the only instance of Utopian wish-fulfillment in the theatre of revolt. For even in the messianic drama — the most audacious, wishful, and egocentric of all theatrical revolt — the Romantic urge towards freedom is partly checked. Despite the prominence of subjective ideas, the drama still remains a form of conflict — a clash between the ideal desires of the hero and the insurmountable obstacles of the real world.
Naturally, the messianic drama is conceived on a grand scale. It is almost always very long, and sometimes — a result of the artist’s revolt against rules — almost unstageable, though it is obviously shaped by the hand of a dramatist (closet dramas with messianic qualities, like Hardy’s Dynasts, do not qualify). Brand takes at least seven hours to perform; Emperor and Galilean is a double drama; The Road to Damascus is a trilogy; Back to Methuselah is a “meta-biological pentateuch”; and the Ring cycle must be played on four separate evenings, each of them exhausting. The length of the messianic play suggests its testamental function — and also suggests its epic structure. Such a work rarely enjoys a unified plot, but consists instead of short, episodic scenes with multiple set changes. As for its setting, it takes place either in the past (Emperor and Galilean), the future (Back to Methuselah), or some unlocalized time and place, like that of a dream (The Road to Damascus). When the setting is contemporary (Man and Superman), a dream sequence may be introduced at some point (the Don Juan in Hell scene) to distance the play. Despite this remoteness, however, the contemporary relevance of the messianic play is never in doubt. For just as Nietzsche used the old Persian God Zarathustra to express his modern philosophy, so the messianic dramatist employs his characters to enact his revolt and to embody his vision of salvation.
As a literary genre, the messianic drama falls into the category of myth or romance, for its central figure conforms to the definitions supplied by Northrup Frye, in The Anatomy of Criticism, of the mythic hero (“superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men”) and of the Romantic hero (“superior in degree to other men and to his environment”). His actions are the marvelous doings of a superhuman figure — sometimes a god, sometimes a great hero, sometimes an inspired visionary. Still, his superiority lies not so much in noble birth, physical prowess, or miraculous deeds as in certain lofty moral and spiritual qualities which raise him above the common run of men. Ibsen looked forward to an “aristocracy of character, of will, of mind” — Nietzsche to a “new nobility . . . which shall be the adversary of all populace and potentate rule” — that is the class to which the messianic hero belongs. For, despite the touch of divinity about him, he is still mortal. (Shaw’s Ancients live to be over three hundred, and Genet’s Chief of Police will reign for two thousand years, but most messianic heroes ultimately face death and disillusionment.)
Finally, the language of messianic drama is lofty and elevated. Some plays are written in verse, some in a heightened prose — but messianic diction is invariably oracular, if not bombastic. For the messianic drama is informed by a powerful prophetic quality. It is the newest testament of the author, who functions as an inspired seer, handing his enlightened revelation to a benighted world.
The second stage of the modern theatre, social revolt, is much less ambitious, though much more familiar to modern audiences: it characterizes the best-known plays of the contemporary stage. Social revolt dominates Ibsen’s “modern” plays, Strindberg’s “Naturalist” dramas, Chekhov’s inner actions, most of Shaw, a large part of Brecht, and some of Pirandello — as well as the peasant dramas of Synge and Lorca, the parables of Dürrenmatt, and the entire work of such secondary dramatists as O’Casey, Odets, Miller, Osborne, Wesker, and Frisch. Social revolt, of course, is usually an aspect of messianic drama, but there it is subordinate to other matters; when it dominates a play, it is a relatively modest manifestation. The emphasis of the drama shifts from radical cures to careful diagnoses, with the patient taking the stage and the physician withdrawing behind the scenes. Instead of examining the relationship between man and God, the social dramatist concentrates on man in society, in conflict with community, government, academy, church, or family.
There is a corresponding change in dramatic form. The episodic play gives way to the three- and four-act structure; the drama loses its untidy flamboyance and becomes tight, compact, well-made. Social drama is Classical in the sense of Edmund Wilson’s definition of Classicism: “In the domain of politics and morals, a preoccupation with society as a whole; and in art, an ideal of objectivity.” Though the social drama is occasionally Expressionistic, it is more frequently written in the realistic or Naturalistic style, through which the objective ideal is best maintained. Messianic voluptuousness and exuberance are replaced by more controlled and modulated feelings, as the playwright absents himself from the proceedings and permits the action to speak for itself. Social, political, moral, and economic questions are aired in an atmosphere of impartiality; sociological and psychological insights grow common; scientific ideas begin to influence the dramatist, particularly Darwin’s theory of heredity and environment. Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and Brecht all begin to think of themselves as literary scientists under the influence of Darwin, Lamarck, or Marx, while Chekhov, who claims no intellectual influences, adheres to an ideal of juridical detachment.
As for characters, the social drama puts contemporary society on the stage and draws its dramatis personae from the middle class. The protagonist is subject to the same laws as the rest of us, shares the same ambitions (or lack of them), performs the same domestic duties, speaks the same unlovely prose. Human stature shrinks to average height, and man’s surroundings close in. Ibsen’s Brand makes his way up the heights to die, but Oswald Alving is doomed to stagnation by inherited disease and environmental oppression; Strindberg’s Stranger enjoys the freedom of a dream, but his Father is confined in a straitjacket; Shaw’s John Tanner is occupied with the future of the race, but his Candida is primarily concerned with domestic problems. The empires of messianic drama have been replaced by crowded, sweating towns; the sun is out of reach; and human possibilities are dwindling. Ibsen’s townspeople are degenerating in their “tasteless parlors”; Chekhov’s gentry are paralyzed by apathy and inertia; Pirandello’s escapists are frozen in illusion; Brecht’s oppressed characters cannot even afford personal opinions. The roar of the lion is drowned by the bleating of the lamb; I want and I will give way to I accept. Compromise, adaptation, and survival become the order of the day, as man draws back from his boundaries and begins to tiptoe gingerly through his life.
Under these circumstances, it is a wonder that rebellion continues to function at all. But, as I suggested earlier, the Classical style of the social drama is constructed on a fundamentally Romantic base. Ibsen abandons the messianic play because, being ordered towards the artist rather than the audience, it is inappropriate for the presentation of modern life — but he never abandons his rebellious inclinations. Strindberg’s wild prejudices, similarly, make a mockery of his attempts at “Naturalism”; Pirandello’s metaphysical anguish permeates his surface realism; and Brecht’s anarchistic nature makes his social dramas leap with fury and mockery. Indeed, the rebel dramatist even enters the social drama occasionally, if only in disguise — as Doctor Stockmann in An Enemy of the People, as Jean in Miss Julie, as Captain Shotover in Heartbreak House, as Laudisi in It Is So! (If You Think So), as Mackie in The Threepenny Opera. And even in the more rigorously objective plays, like those of Chekhov, rebellion is still rumbling in their depths. To write for modern audiences, as Ibsen saw, is to repudiate the subjective heroic mode; but in the social drama, the action itself is a form of rebellion, being an assault on the abuses of the time.
Social drama, in short, represents modern life for the purpose of whipping and scourging it — it is an imitation for essentially satiric purposes. Such revolt, however, is negative. The dramatist may still be trying to kill God (if only through His earthly institutions and delegated figures of authority), but he is no longer much occupied with building a Church: the social rebel rarely suggests any clear-cut alternatives to the things he would like to destroy. It is true that propaganda plays and problem dramas are offshoots of social revolt, but I am excluding such works from this study. When Sean O’Casey writes about a Communist revolution bringing sensuality to Puritan Ireland, or when Arthur Miller evokes our sympathy for the plight of the common man, we are confronted less with works of art than with political acts or social gestures, and it is by utilitarian rather than literary criteria that such acts and gestures should be judged. As for Shaw and Brecht, these writers may also be political revolutionaries, but insofar as a positive ideology informs their work, their work is compromised. And, as a matter of fact, Shaw’s Socialism, discussed at length in prefaces and tracts, remains outside his plays, while Brecht’s Communism is a matter of implication in all but his explicit agitprop dramas. The major social rebels are philosophical anarchists, whatever their political affiliations, for they display a profound distaste for every form of human organization, if not for humankind itself.
The social rebel can trace his heritage back to Lillo, Steele, Diderot, Beaumarchais, Lessing, and Hebbel, though he differs from these bourgeois dramatists in his satiric animus and his hatred for middle-class life. In place of the virtuous apprentice and the honest merchant, he substitutes the vicious criminal and the venal capitalist. And though Arthur Miller may, like Diderot and Beaumarchais, “seek for tragedy in the heart and spirit of the average man,” most social rebels (possibly even Brecht, who always refused to idealize the proletarian) reserve a secret admiration for heroes: “I would have my mob all Caesars,” writes Shaw, “instead of Toms, Dicks, and Harrys.” Nor do they often “seek for tragedy”; tragedy is no longer possible in this mode. Instead, comic and serious elements begin to jostle each other with an effect of dissonance which grows ever more irritating. The bourgeois dramatists measured their success by the ability to draw tears from the audience, a faculty which their drama possessed, according to Coleridge, in common with the onion. But modern social drama possesses a harsh, condemnatory tone which thwarts and frustrates hypocritical sentimentality, and it draws no tears at all, unless they be tears of exasperation. For while the bourgeois dramatist supported democracy (still a revolutionary creed), the modern social dramatist is more concerned with the degradations of the democratic dogma. He may begin by believing in social progress, but he grows increasingly skeptical about the capacity for human perfectibility.
The drama of social revolt is usually written in what Frye calls the “low mimetic mode,” the style of most realistic fiction: “The hero is one of us; we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet the same canons of probability that we find in our experience.” This hero is “superior neither to other men nor to his environment” — as Frye proceeds to observe, in fact, the word “hero” no longer retains its full meaning. This degeneration of the hero is evident, in the social drama, in a moral, structural, and sexual sense. The central character disappears from Chekhov’s dramas altogether, and the group takes the stage; in Brecht, the protagonist is retained, but is now significant less for heroism than for cowardice and rapacity; in most social dramas, women begin to assume central roles. The setting of the social play is usually contemporary; its structure is compact, and organized towards climaxes of feeling; its language is the prose vernacular of everyday life. In social revolt, the rebel dramatist has suppressed his will to power in order to examine and protest against the institutionalized life of man.
In the last stage of the modern drama, existential revolt, the dramatist examines the metaphysical life of man and protests against it; existence itself becomes the source of his rebellion.1 The drama of existential revolt is a mode of the utmost restriction, a cry of anguish over the insufferable state of being human.
This form of revolt is identical with what Camus calls “metaphysical rebellion . . . the movement by which man protests against his condition and against the whole of creation.” Such a definition could be applied, with equal accuracy, to messianic revolt, and, indeed, existential drama embodies the same kind of discontent with the basic structure of life. On the other hand, while messianic revolt is potent and positive, existential revolt is impotent and despairing. The messianic dramatist makes his characters superhuman; the existential dramatist makes them subhuman. The one exaggerates the extent of human freedom; the other, of human bondage. It is significant that the existential drama begins to appear with increasing frequency in our own age — an age of totalitarianism. The Gods and supermen of messianic drama have turned into animals and prisoners; the world is a vast concentration camp where social intercourse is strictly forbidden. Alone in a terrifying emptiness, the central figure of existential drama is doomed, as it were, to a life of solitary confinement.
Existential revolt, in short, occurs during the old age of the modern drama, though chronologically it may sometimes appear much earlier. It is the revolt of the fatigued and the hopeless, reflecting — after the disintegration of idealist energies — exhaustion and disillusionment. This explains its close relationship to messianic revolt, for it is actually an inverted development of the messianic impulse. As a matter of fact, a number of modern dramatists, messianic in their youth, conclude their careers as existential rebels, their urge towards Godhead dissipating in anguish and frustration. Typical of this progression is the career of the early nineteenth-century dramatist Georg Büchner — the ancestor of modern existential drama — who, after a short period as a radical messianic rebel, becomes convinced that human action is futile and writes of man crushed under the awful fatalism of history. Büchner is an extraordinary figure in his age, but his development is quite common in ours. Strindberg, for example, turns to existential revolt after the horrors of the Inferno crisis convince him of the vanity of trying to be God; O’Neill, in his last plays, converts his messianic demands into existential appeals; and existential revolt can even be detected under the fixed smile of Shaw. The early plays of Brecht, moreover, have a substructure of existential revolt and so have the plays of Pirandello. And existential revolt is the dominating impulse behind the plays of Williams, Albee, Gelber, and Pinter — not to mention Beckett, Ionesco, and the entire “theatre of the absurd.”
Existential revolt represents Romanticism turned in on itself and beginning to rot. Extremely contemptuous of messianic ideals, disbelieving totally in messianic individualism, the existential rebel, nevertheless, shows vestiges of the old radical demands. He is a Neo-Romantic, raging against existence, ashamed of being human, revolted by the body itself. One of the strongest identifying marks of the existential drama is its attitude towards the flesh, which is usually described in images of muck, mud, ashes, and fecal matter, in a state of decomposition and decay. Strindberg, obsessed throughout his existential plays with the “dirt of life,” identifies the world with garbage pits and dungheaps, and feels imprisoned in Swedenborg’s Excremental Hell. Brecht, in Baal, calls man “a creature eating on a latrine,” while inveighing against “the good god who so distinguished himself by joining the urinary passage with the sex organ.” Shaw’s amusement at the physical nature of man barely disguises his Swiftian revulsion from it. O’Neill’s Edmund, in A Long Day’s Journey into Night, muses, “We are such stuff as manure is made on,” and Samuel Beckett creates a world in which the sexual organs have lost their procreative power and man’s functions are now exclusively excretory. As Lucky describes the situation, during his garbled monologue in Waiting for Godot, “Man in brief in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation wastes and pines wastes and pines. . . .” Existential man certainly wastes and pines. The body is no better than a waste product destined for the disposal heap, while the extent of human progress is measured in the bowels and the digestive system.
This Neo-Romantic horror at the physical functions is an aspect of what Lionel Trilling, in his essay “The Fate of Pleasure,” calls the “modern spirituality,” and attributes to a number of modern writers: Kafka, Joyce, the later Yeats. Antihumanist, sometimes antihuman, these writers are opposed to the “comfortable and consumer-directed” arts (those arts which Brecht is to call “culinary”), and dedicate their work not to luxury and enjoyment but rather to discomfort and unease. The existential dramatist is one with these writers, for he also excludes the principle of pleasure from his work, and shares the same distaste for humanistic affirmations. Gusto, joy, and sensuality give way to dark brooding and longings after death — the ideal of human perfectibility to a vision of human decay. Out of these feelings is created the existential hero — or antihero — a character related to that figure of disgust whom Professor Trilling calls the original of the species (though Büchner’s Woyzeck antedates him by about thirty years): Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man. The antihero of existential drama is rarely as articulate as Dostoyevsky’s character, but he is just as miserable, morbid, and morose — which is to say, just as opposed to idealism and ideals. Where the messianic superman is vigorous, aristocratic, heroic, the existential antihero is disadvantaged, humiliated, perverse, and thoroughly incapable of significant action.
The very opposition of the two types suggests there is a relationship between them, which Nietzsche himself was quick to perceive: “Dostoyevsky’s Underman and my Overman,” he wrote, “are the same person clawing his way out of the pit into the sunlight.” The Underman, however, never clambers out of the pit, and rarely sees the sunshine. Strindberg’s characters in A Dream Play are losing their color in a quarantine station — in The Ghost Sonata they are hardening into mummies. The Brecht menagerie is immobilized by the horrifying implications of the Copernican system. Pirandello’s characters are imprisoned in their illusions. O’Neill’s derelicts in The Ice Man Cometh are lost in pipe dreams, while the blasted family of A Long Day’s Journey are swallowed up in fog. Under these conditions, the antihero cannot act — partly because of a growing paralysis, partly because of external causes, partly because he will not move those limbs and organs he detests. The central figure of existential drama is sometimes very old — like the solitary character of Krapp’s Last Tape, or the two figures in Ionesco’s Chairs — but usually just inert. The best image of existential drama is Winnie, in Beckett’s Happy Days, buried up to her neck in the earth — or the two tramps in Waiting for Godot with their famous “Yes, let’s go. (They do not move.)”
Without action, there can be no tragedy; yet existential drama is, in tone and atmosphere, the most tragic of the modern genres. The messianic rebel may project himself into the heroic exploits of his dramatic characters, but the existential dramatist projects himself into their melancholy and complaint, and often manages to transcend his disgust with genuine feelings of compassion. “Humankind is pitiable,” Strindberg’s Daughter of Indra intones repeatedly, while the author, recoiling from the abyss of absurdity, forces himself to accept the painful riddles and contradictions of life. Strindberg’s stoicism is rather typical of existential drama, which frequently subsides into a kind of resignation — an acceptance of waiting, patience, and ordeals. O’Neill’s derelicts wait for death; Beckett’s tramps wait for Godot; Gelber’s junkies wait for their connection — even Brecht, the most relentless of the existential writers, eventually works his way through to a state of Confucian calm and serenity. Thus, if the existential drama is tragic, it is tragic in its perceptions. It lacks a tragic hero, but it evokes a tragic sense of life, that mood one often finds in Sophocles:
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the light of day;
The second best’s a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
Here, as translated by Yeats, in the third stasimon of another drama of old age, Oedipus at Colonus, one finds the underlying theme of existential rebellion, a theme restated almost as beautifully in Beckett’s Godot: “They give birth astride a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”
“And a man’s life’s no more than to say ‘One,’ ” muses Hamlet, while Beckett’s Pozzo, three hundred years later, makes the same observations on the awful brevity of life: “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second.” But if the gravedigger puts on the forceps, it takes him an eternity — time’s winged chariot rushes by a scene of intense boredom and ennui. This sense of double time, alternately swift and tedious, is implicit in most existential drama,2 and becomes the lament of the existential rebel. Hating the present, fearing the future, he withdraws into the past, and writes his plays on the theme of time and memory. Williams’s Glass Menagerie, for example, is an existential exploration of memory; O’Neill in A Long Day’s Journey moves forward in time and backwards in memory simultaneously; and time is the central subject of Pirandello, who, agonized by the formless flux, conceives of characters escaping into the immobility of history or the timelessness of art. Bergson’s philosophical theories, especially his theory of duration, strongly influence the existential drama — from him, the existential dramatist borrows the concept of subjective, as opposed to clock, time. This emphasis on time suggests the reflective, nostalgic quality of this drama; its central figure is a man whose life is spent mournfully meditating on his past. The antihero is no longer a Cartesian chose qui pense — he is now the Bergsonian chose qui dure.
This melancholy resignation, however, is accompanied by a continuous protest, occasionally expressed through violent outbursts, almost always through a mordant, biting style. If all the more vigorous forms of revolt have now become futile, the rebel can still express his outrage verbally. To the nothingness of life, he responds with the dry mock, even though this irony is sometimes expended on himself. Even in the act of accepting the absurd, in short, he is still caught in an act of negation. And the best personification of this ambivalent mood is Strindberg’s Poet, in A Dream Play, one who bathes in mud while he continues to scan the heavens:
POET, ecstatically. Out of the clay the God Ptah fashioned man on a potter’s wheel, a lathe, mockingly, or some other damned thing. . . . Ecstatically. Out of clay the sculptor fashioned his more or less immortal masterpieces, mockingly, which are usually only rubbish. . . . Ecstatically. Such is clay! When clay is fluid, it is called mud.
O’Neill’s characters alternate in the same manner between yea- and nay-saying, between ecstasy and mockery; and hope and despair, of course, are the vacillating moods of Beckett’s tramps. Pirandello also breaks his compassionate mood with loud, mocking laughter; and Brecht’s scorching irony is one of the most famous marks of his style.
Irony, in fact, is the mark of the entire existential drama, which is written in what Frye calls the “ironic mode.” In the ironic mode, the word “hero” has lost its meaning entirely — the central figure is “inferior in power and intelligence to ourselves, so that we have a sense of looking down on a scene of bondage, frustration, or absurdity.” This is the scene of the antihero — usually a tramp, a proletarian, a criminal, an old man, a prisoner, confined in body and spirit, and deteriorating in his confinement. Strindberg imprisons his characters in a nightmare, and Beckett in an undefined world (probably the future) of bareness and infertility. But even when the setting is relatively realistic — as in the plays of Pirandello, Brecht, and O’Neill — the claustrophobic atmosphere is just as oppressive. For in existential drama, nature, society, man no longer exist. In this final phase of the modern drama — in these nightmares, chimeras, hallucinations, and feverish fables — revolt finds its most pessimistic, contracted, and exhausted form.
Existential revolt is the final phase — but it is not the conclusion of the modern drama, even though so many recent plays are permeated by it. For in the radical theory of the French writer Antonin Artaud, the theatre of revolt again begins to develop messianic ambitions, and in the plays of Jean Genet, these ambitions are now being imaginatively realized. Could it be that the drama is about to repeat its cycle? According to Giovanni Battista Vico, civilization itself has a cyclical form, proceeding from divine to heroic to human manifestations — after which a clap of thunder signals the repetition of the process. This theory certainly describes the development of Greece and the West, and the concomitant development of the theatre of communion. Does it describe the development of the theatre of revolt as well? Since Vico, an eighteenth-century philosopher, could not imagine a cycle of civilization lower than the human, or a form of life baser than civic man, his Scienza Nuova omits an important stage of the modern experience. But Vico’s prophecy is otherwise fulfilling itself in the theatre of revolt, and that clap of thunder is especially ominous. The new messianic writers are consciously striving to re-create the conditions of traditional theatre. Artaud wishes to restore to the drama its primitive function, and Genet’s work takes the form of hieroglyphic ritual. But these very efforts become acts of revolt. With Artaud and Genet, the modern theatre turns apocalyptic once again, and once again Romanticism is in full flower. If the modern theatre is an Eternal Recurrence, and Gods and Heroes are again to take the stage, then the obvious place to start this study is where the theatre of revolt began — in the magnificent messianic mind of Henrik Ibsen.
1 Unfortunately, the adjective existential has recently been monopolized by a fashionable French philosophy, but I am using this late seventeenth-century word in its original, more neutral sense. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines “existential,” it means simply: “of and pertaining to existence.” Existentialism is a highly self-conscious movement; existential revolt is not. And though Sartre and Camus may be existential rebels on occasion, very few existential rebels are formal Existentialists.
2 It is also implicit in Chekhov. In The Cherry Orchard, old Firs concludes a play about apathy and tedium with the remark, “Life has slipped by as though I’d never lived”; and in The Three Sisters, Chekhov shows his characters aging while seeming to stand stock-still. Like the existential dramatists, Chekhov often writes of regret for a wasted life, and of paralysis and inertia — but he lacks their rage and disgust. The existential dramatist is in revolt against life; Chekhov seems to be more in revolt against his characters.