The Modern Form of Drama

...Literature can become, for anyone who wishes it to be, not an escape, but the very expression of a personal despair, the expression, in the end, of a morality and a politics which, on their deepest level, must surely involve us all...

...Clearly Mr...

...From Nietzsche on, European phi losopher-critics have interpreted high drama as the literary expression of a moral philosophy, seeking in their ex amination of this literature to derive the actual conditions of man's au thenticity...

...Elsewhere Mr...

...He captures Aeschylus and says to him: Aeschylus, you must change the ending of your play...

...The world, Mr...

...For though the divergence of the two forms was there for all to see, yet criteria and standards derived from long study of the one were continually being applied to the other...

...Later on he says: Tragedy makes human existence more vivid by showing its vulnerability to fate...

...That the heroes of tragedy with their implacable values have been replaced by metatheatre's self-conscious protagonists, molded by the skepticalliberal Western imagination which has rejected implacable values, Mr...

...It seems to me a peculiar, an anemic, concept of self-consciousness that does not have for one of its components precisely a relation to the world...

...Abel rejects from the concerns of lit erature any special pleading on the part of politics or ethics...

...The question of dramatic forms is answered by Mr...

...Abel describes as playwrights even, figures capable of dramatizing other characters as actors and with the power to make other situations dramatic beside the ones they originally appeared in...

...In particular cases, the critic's preference could be explained in terms of the European philosophical-literary tradition versus the Anglo-American...

...Tragedy cannot operate without the assumption of an ultimate order...

...For the aesthetic concepts of any significant theory of high drama enter into the domain of ethics and—if the term is understood in its broad sense —of politics...

...Abel remarks that if Beckett had known who the enemy of his protagonists was, he would have written "works with a thesis, not pieces of metatheatre...

...For are we not all of us, in the political context of our world, weaklings...

...and, after his enduring this destruction, the hero's becoming divine, a daemon, in Oedipus at Colonus...

...Interpreting the Antigone of Sophocles he sees it as the encounter of the true daemon Antigone with the false daemon Creon, merely a pathetic character...

...The essential movements of tragedy he analyzes in the two Oedipus plays: the destruction of the tragic hero, in King Oedipus...

...Such a theory would also suggest—but not explicitly state—the answer to the further question: what are the ethical implications of these dramatic forms which, after all, were invented by men seeking to understand their world...

...or, idealist versus positivist...

...But a gain in consciousness, according to Mr...

...But I hasten to assure the academic critics that in spite of—maybe because of—Lukacs' paramount moral concerns, his incidental insights into the problems of literature have amounted to a far greater contribution than that of the literati whose sole concern has been literature...

...Abel's book in these pages were it not for the fact that such an achievement is of more than merely literary concern...

...Abel says: Any play written at a certain depth should have some other aim than to suggest social change or moral reform...

...Abel's argument...

...Lionel Abel, in his book, answers the first question...

...And lest I be accused of throwing everything to metatheatre, I must add that it was Sainte-Beuve who called the plot of King Oedipus "une histoire a dormir debout"—a cock and bull story...

...And the playwright who ventures to touch us very deeply ought to know that he is touching a part of us which is irrelevant to the achievement of our most rational goals...

...Perhaps one may point to certain philosophers and poets whose intense self-consciousness casts doubt on the reality outside themselves...

...Are not tragedy and metatheatre products of the imagination, and if the characters of metatheatre are to be found by the playwright in past literature, were not the plots of Attic tragedy found in myth, in legend, in older literature...

...if we require, instead, a theory whose judgments are not extraneous but germane to the dramatic literary forms it is examining— then such a theory must first of all answer the question: what are the forms of high drama...

...Yet, surely, ethical and political concerns have a profundity of their own...

...But what literature could not be denoted by this definition of metatheatre...

...But was it not metatheatre which precisely the great realist, Balzac, gave us in his Comedie Humaine, an imaginative projection of a "reality" that could not be observed or experienced...

...In his essay The Myth of Metatheatre, Mr...

...For metatheatre, order is something continually improvised by men...

...Rather, as he says in his essay on Hamlet, "none of us, no matter what our situation, really knows the form of the plot he is in," and he makes the point that Hamlet himself was the first theatrical figure to give full expression to this fact...

...Here I am led to suggest that it may indeed be time for a redefinition, once again, of realism and literary verisimilitude...

...Abel says: "Tragedy gives by far the stronger sense of the reality of the world...

...the implications of his theory for an answer to the second...

...The defeat of the tragic hero points up the reality of the world, but the protagonist of metatheatre can suffer no decisive defeat, therefore the belief in the reality of the world is affected...

...After criticizing Ibsen for combining the kind of realism he found in the European novel with the necessitarian structure of fated events that he found in Greek tragedy, Mr...

...It is hubris in the character which has brought tragedy about...

...He summarizes the values and disvalues of tragedy and metatheatre: Tragedy, from the point of view of metatheatre, is our dream of the real...

...Returning to his desk, the realist Balzac was doing exactly what Ulrich, a character in Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities, said he would like to do if he had the government of the world in his hands: abolish reality...

...Now I happen to agree with Mr...

...he desires literature to be his escape, his ideology...

...At the meeting reported in the Symposium, Socrates is not being ironical when he tells his friends that three days before, while watching Agathon's play, he was not one of the wise...

...Macbeth he holds to be Shakespeare's only true tragedy, in which the true daemon Macbeth encounters Macduff, made a true daemon by Macbeth's murder of his wife and children...

...In all these pieces of metatheatre we can indeed see that "Life is a dream," and "All the world's a stage...

...and those whose bent was toward his drama, wrongly interpreted the Greeks...

...I might say that this makes me wonder whether Georg Lukacs, for example, after almost six decades and forty volumes of writings on the subject of Literature and Aesthetics, has ever really been interested in literature...

...Does not the characterization of metatheatre fit even the socalled realistic vision of the world which he denies to it, and other forms of literary work which, I suppose, he would not allow to come in under his category...

...These critics have seen the tragic hero as the rep resentative of absolute values, pitted against a world in which only compromise and cunning could guarantee survival...

...on the far other side, I. A. Richards applied the term "pseudotragedies," "near-tragedies," to the Greeks when compared to the six plays of Shakespeare he deemed to be true tragedies...

...Abel, implies a loss in the reality of the object of consciousness—in the reality, that is, of the world...

...Its defect lies in its insistence on repudiating all tragedy that does not fit its peculiar scheme, and repudiating such other works not through an aesthetic but a moral evaluation...

...It seems to me not very illuminating to say, as Mr...

...Abel defines as a "claim to a certain kind of divinity which may or may not be granted," and he clarifies this view by consideration of further examples...

...Philosophers may talk with the learned, but in their spontaneous behavior they act with the vulgar...

...From this, Mr...

...And does not the narrower distinction of Mr...

...I for one find the events of that paradigm of all tragedy, King Oedipus, no more believable than any event in a piece of metatheatre...

...and, All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players (from As You Like It...

...The philosophers that we know of who have claimed that the existence of an external world demands proof would, I suspect, be ducking cars when they cross the street and not something unreal seen by them as blobs of color...

...Abel amply proves in his analysis of Hamlet and Life is a Dream, and in his interpretation of Genet, Beckett and Brecht...

...still, a gain in consciousness does not necessarily imply such doubt of the world...

...Abel has created the figure of a young Athenian named Orestes, who failed to avenge the death of his father, murdered by his mother and her lover...

...Hubris Mr...

...Yet all this, however interesting and important, might still not warrant discussion of Mr...

...Finally, in Racine's Athalie, we are shown how the daemon Athalie is even more uncompromising in her slaughter of David's descendants than the Old Testament God, her Opponent, in his destruction of the posterity of Ahab...

...Illusion and reality then intermix, become confused...

...Such, in brief outline, is the theory of tragedy held, for example, by the young Lukacs and which indeed may be traced to Nietzsche...

...I want to see myself die by torture...

...Abel appears to accept...

...Metatheatre makes human existence more dreamlike by showing that fate can be overcome...

...All this, however, does not diminish Mr...

...I repeat again: what is stated here about metatheatre could, it seems to me, equally well be said of many other forms of art and literature...

...The young Georg Lukacs, arguing for Greek tragedy, seriously put forth the hope that critics and public alike might abandon Shakespeare in favor of Corneille and Racine...

...I am not sure that he can establish a firm distinction between tragedy and metatheatre on the ground that fantasy and imagination are central to the latter, whereas they operate in the former merely to reflect the structure of the real world...

...or, in the older term, of his moral autonomy...

...Abel derives his two basic postulates of metatheatre: Life is a dream (the title of a Calderon play...

...We are all more profound than our purposes seem to indicate...

...But if we, on our part, reject the idea that a theory of high drama must be the literary expression of a positive moral philosophy, which in the guise of a critique of tragedy is mainly concerned to define the conditions of man's authenticity...

...But is it not hard for us to be deaf to the cri de coeur of the young Athenian...

...His two basic postulates stand firm...

...Abel's metatheatre break down...

...Abel might agree with me—our spontaneous behavior and response are affected, and not our epistemological or metaphysical theories...

...The hero's role was to choose to sacrifice his life for these values, and his was regarded as the authentic moral choice, even though it might deprive him both of a personal future and vindication in the court of history...

...In contradistinction to the daemonism by which the tragic hero is possessed, the protagonist of metatheatre possesses simply self-consciousness...

...and he leaves it to his readers to interpret—or misinterpret...

...Obsessed with his failure, he has allowed his life to become an empty dream in which the Oresteia of Aeschylus is the only reality...

...Abel further argues that the characters of metatheatre are the inventions of the playwright's imagination, not plucked by him out of the real world...

...Seen from this perspective, contemporary literary forms are not too far removed from their realistic precursors...

...Abel when he redefines tragedy, and offers us a new name, metatheatre, for significant drama that is not tragedy...

...However, if we neither know the plot of history nor are acting in that plot, then politics cannot have a central place in our lives, and from this it follows that great literature cannot validly be the expression of either a moral philosophy or a politics that exhorts us to some positive course...

...The contemplative imagination can and does delight in what moral and practical wisdom urges us to reject...

...and he describes for us in a fresh way the modern form of drama, which he calls metatheatre, from its beginnings in Calderon and Shakespeare to its contemporary embodiment in Brecht, Genet, and Beckett...

...Metatheatre assumes there is no world except that created by human striving, human imagination...

...Abel does, that we can believe the events in Macbeth took place in some sense in which we can not believe in the reality of the events in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus...

...Abel writes in criticizing the idea of Martin Esslin's The Theatre of the Absurd, "can no more become absurd than it can sin, starve, or fall down...

...Abel's contribution in demonstrating for us the truth of his primary distinction between tragedy and what he has chosen to call metatheatre...

...Metatheatre gives by far the stronger sense that the world is a projection of human consciousness...

...Do this for me, and you will have given meaning and worth, on certain occasions—when the Oresteia is shown—to an otherwise empty life...

...Mr...

...But if we do not know the form of the plot we are in, if we do not know the kind of a play we are in, we also do not know the plot of history...

...The failure on both sides was no accident...

...Metatheatre, from the point of view of tragedy, is as real as our dreams...

...The future and history were for the others, who had secured their survival by inauthentic moral choice...

...Tragedy tries to mediate between the world and man...

...The fault of hubris moves the hero to act as if he were already a daemon and invulnerable, as if he had undergone tragedy when in fact it still awaits him...

...Tragedy wants to be on both sides...

...Here again I would question Mr...

...or, rationalist versus empiricist...

...Critics who all their lives had pondered the Greek and French classical tragedies failed to comprehend the greatness of Shakespeare...

...Hamlet and Tartuffe, two of the great exemplars of metatheatre, Mr...

...Since I did not kill my mother and can do so now only in imagination, since my real life now consists only in your work, you must make the end of your play as terrible as the beginning...

...As Mr...

...or, if they were found, they were in myth or legend, in literature of the past, and already pre-dramatized: thus, unlike the possessed heroes of tragedy, they are aware of their own theatricality...

...Now, if ethics only admonished, and politics only propagandized, if their force were exhausted in this, we could condemn Orestes as a weakling who yearns for the charm of literature to console him in his helplessness...

...By concrete example he demonstrates that if we refrain from imposing upon either form the standards which can measure only the other, we are able to understand both...

...It is Lionel Abel's achievement, in the theory of drama he presents in his book Metatheatre, to have shown that the old alternative Sophocles/ Shakespeare is a false one...

...Let us return to reality" he is supposed to have said when, during the revolution, he sat down at his desk to work, and the phrase, it seems to me, points up the gross misconception of realism current, and which Mr...

...Abel's conclusions, with these two fundamental postulates of metatheatre, but I find his argument unconvincing...

...And in the theatre—here Mr...