Monthly Archives: December 2009

A critique of tragedy 4

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The Decision (aka The Measures Taken) (1930) by Bertolt Brecht.

The tragedy of commitment. Among Brecht’s plays the Lehrstücke are the most radically experimental in form and radically political in content; the best-known, The Decision, is a spare austere revelation of individual sacrifice for a social ideal. Four Communist agitators from the West travel to China to incite revolution; along the way, they gain another party functionary, the Young Comrade. In China the functionary, in demonstrating compassion and anger at the inhumanity he witnesses, makes a series of “mistakes” — including his attempts to alleviate individual suffering. Finally, on the run from the police, at risk of arrest and execution themselves, they shoot the Young Comrade and toss his body into a lime pit, with his acquiesence:

THE CONTROL CHORUS:
Was that the only answer?

THE FOUR AGITATORS:
With so little time we could think of no other.
Like an animal helping an animal
We too would gladly have helped him who
Fought for our cause with us.
For five minutes, in the teeth of our pursuers, we
Considered if there was any
Better possibility.
Pause.
So what we decided was straightaway
To cut our own foot away from our body. It is
A terrible thing to kill.
But not only others would we kill, but ourselves too if need be
Since only force can alter this
Murderous world, as
Every living creature knows.
It is still, we said
Not given to us to kill. Only on our
Indomitable will to alter the world could we base
This decision.

As in many tragedies, the story of The Decision is either well-known to its audience or telegraphed to the audience in the first scene or two; the rest is the journey to the tragic end. The dedication to a radical progressive point of view constitutes the bizarre motive for the murder/suicide; and because the Young Comrade’s death is mentioned in the second line of the play (“We have to report the death of a comrade. … We killed him. We shot him and threw him into a lime pit”), mortality hovers over the events of all the successive scenes.

It is a curious piece of agit-prop, even more curious in its production. Brecht’s notes insist that the Young Comrade be performed by each of the Four Agitators, each Agitator playing the Young Comrade from scene to scene; and it’s also noted that the play is a learning play not necessarily for the audience but for the performers instead. In a 1956 letter to Paul Patera, who planned a production of the play in Sweden, Brecht wrote: “The Decision was not written for an audience but exclusively for the instruction of the performers. In my experience, public performances of it inspire nothing but moral qualms, usually of the cheapest sort. Accordingly, I have not let anyone perform the play for a long time.” (Editor John Willett notes that Patera apparently planned an anti-Communist production of the play.)

The discomfort that Brecht describes, those “moral qualms,” arise from a variety of sources in the play: the Young Comrade demonstrates a compassion and willingness to act that are absent from the Four Agitators’ activities; the nature of his death (shot, then thrown into a lime pit, in which his skin melts away from his body — a painful fleshed sensuousness of violence); and, despite the rationalizations offered, the explanations do not fully suffice. Designed for performance before an audience of local political activists, this is a play written for community performance that manages to alienate that very community from its ideological goals.

And yet the play remains powerful, and its conflicts and dynamics are tragic: it is an inner compulsion to individual compassion that the Young Comrade cannot ignore, and all the calls to ideological discipline fail to move him; it is this compassion that leads to his voluntary death. Even now, decades after the fall of Soviet-style Communism, the play retains considerable power and interest, not least because it speaks to every attempt to place the progressive community above the individual. In its austerity and performance practice (the performers are to experience most intensely the stresses and anxieties of the play, rather than the audience; indeed, the performers themselves are the ideal audience), The Decision still suggests an avenue for the exploration of a dramatist- and actor-centered erotic tragedy as well. For the Four Agitators, in taking the role of the Young Comrade individually, experience themselves the extremes of the Young Comrade’s imaginative life and share in his death. The story of the Young Comrade also bears echoes of the other great Western tragedy of an individual man, who voluntarily was nailed to a cross and died for his beliefs, betrayed by his comrades.

The Decision by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willett. In Brecht: Collected Plays: Three, London: Methuen, 1997.


Books: Outrageous Fortune

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Santa, in the form of New Dramatists artistic director Todd London and the Theatre Development Fund, left a copy of Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play under my tree on Christmas morning, though I don’t know why they didn’t just slip it into my stocking with the other lumps of hard black coal. Written by London with Ben Pesner and Zannie Giraud Voss, the book is the culmination of a six year study of the current status of the American playwright. (Full disclosure: I participated in the study myself.) The word “grim” occurs with alarming frequency, attached to the findings of the study, both statistical and anecdotal; I was among over 200 playwrights who were asked about their financial and economic status, the frequency of play production, our relationships with artistic directors and so on. It’s said that suicidal feelings rise to their highest point of the year during the yuletide holidays. Outrageous Fortune may have you reaching for the nearest rope.

The book is a gift to the blogosphere too, which will I’m sure parcel out selected chapters of the book for further discussion in the coming weeks. There are chapters on diversity (check), New York centrism and the use of theatre in “community building,” whatever that is (check), and new play development programs (check). Among the findings are that a profound conceptual disconnect between artistic directors and playwrights about new work exists; that it’s impossible to make a living as a playwright in America; that boards, funding agencies and audiences are all primarily responsible for what the study calls “premieritis,” in which first productions of new plays are frequent and second productions almost non-existent; that most new play development programs lead only to more development rather than full productions; that audiences for new work are shrinking; that theatre, in the world of mass communication, is becoming a more and more marginal cultural activity. And there’s more, of course. Much of it has been suspected for years, but in collecting broad statistical and anecdotal evidence, there is now some kind of substantiation for these suspicions.

Anecdotes prove nothing, and you can prove anything you want with statistics, but it’s hard to quibble with the conclusions of the report when accompanied by the best that can pass for hard evidence. Its purpose was to provide as objective as possible a “snapshot” of the current professional status of the living dramatist in America, and dim it is; TDF hopes to promote conversation about this picture and the ways in which it might be changed for the better of not only playwrights but the art of theatre as well. In this I have no doubt it will succeed.

“One of the clearest messages I’ve received throughout the course of this study,” writes TDF’s executive director Victoria Bailey in the introduction to the book, “is that language is failing us” — harsh words, so to speak, for a profession that prides itself on the use of language. One of the places in which language is failing us, clearly, is in the use of the word “risk,” not to mention “community” and “audience” (the definition and participation of which in the process of theatremaking receives a chapter all its own).

It is not the fault of the book that it fails to define “risk” (risk of aesthetic form or content, risk of financial health, risk of losing audiences — these are harder to quantify); the study’s authors examined attitudes to the word, not its definition. But it’s difficult to see how any future conversation based on this study will be able to avoid it. And the issue does arise, here and there, in various comments from both playwrights and artistic directors. Some address it specifically. One artistic director (all of the study’s participants quoted in the book remain anonymous — no risk there) says:

It would be easier for me to do a play like Quills [a play by American playwright Doug Wright about the Marquis de Sade] in which Jesus comes out of the grave with three erect penises and fucks Mary on the floor than it would to do No Man’s Land by Harold Pinter. A play that is abstract in the storytelling — I’d do it, but that would be more controversial than content.

And No Man’s Land is one of those four-character one-set plays that come in for serious drubbing as a formal example of the shrunken ambitions of American dramatists.

There are other words that are problematic as well, and have to do with the aesthetic form and content discussion that is beyond the purview of this study. Chief among them is “relevance.” The same example may serve: Quills may have a better chance of reaching this artistic director’s stage than No Man’s Land, but which is more relevant? Few audience members practice any of de Sade’s formal sexual innovations, no doubt, but more may be titillated by them; Pinter’s play, about the vagaries of memory and power as well as their dissipation in the face of mortality, could be said to be relevant for any living man or woman. The study’s authors are fond of lists of questions, so I’ll offer my own on this topic: What does it mean to call a play “relevant” or “risky”? In whose eyes and by what standards? When one writes for an audience (any audience, really, but specificially a young audience, the demographic which according to the study seems to be disappearing from institutional theatres), is there a line between “writing for” that audience and pandering to its interests and experience, both aesthetic and personal? How thin is that line, and where does it lie? Should playwrights cater to that ideal or to Sarah Kane’s: “I’ve only ever written for myself” — a sentiment which led to one of the most innovative and influential bodies of work of the 1990s, but almost entirely absent from this study?

In a recent online imbroglio about Edward Albee’s dedication to the written play as central to the health of the theatre, Albee was castigated for his aesthetic egocentrism and stubbornness, but he might have had a point. A second theme to emerge from the study was the contemporary playwright’s belief that the text is no longer at the center of the production process, but remains to be fulfilled by the work of others: there is some evidence presented in the first chapter of the book that some playwrights deliberately leave their plays in an “unfinished” state, to make them more palatable and attractive to development programs and directors. Said another participant, in regard to sharing out the future profits of an untried play:

A [director] a number of years ago said, “A friend called me. He’s got a new play and he asked me if I could get a bunch of actors together in my living room so he could just hear it. What should I ask for?” He didn’t mean 50 dollars to pay for the chips. It was like what piece of the play do you think would be fair for me to get as a result of this? I said, “Zero would be fair.” It’s out there, and it’s hard to tell how much of it has to do with anybody’s actual financial interests, and how much of it has to do with some seismic shift away from the idea that the theatre is about the voice of the playwright.

If, in the opinion of directors, artistic directors and even many playwrights themselves, the theatre is no longer about the voice of the playwright, it’s very difficult to make an argument that the playwrights’ (and the study’s) call for an equitable financial return on a written play has much validity to begin with. Playwrights who see themselves as little more than a necessary evil have little ground to stand on when pressing for greater economic return for their work; for ultimately, who then needs them?

Finally, one weakness of the book is its lack of reference to self-production, an avenue which many experimental and non-traditional playwrights have taken: if the system is as sick as it is painted here, then perhaps the system should be abandoned in its entirety. Of all the playwrights surveyed, two outstanding absences from the list of participants in the back of the book are Young Jean Lee and Richard Maxwell, both of whom formed their own companies; lacking bricks-and-mortar theatres, they produce their work where they can, without the overhead that an institutional theatre requires. It’s true that many self-producers may work out of a sense of their own vanity. It’s also true that many believe that self-production, in the face of the challenges that working within institutional theatres

represent, is the best way of developing their work: where they’re least likely to give in to the temptation of compromise, and most likely to see it bodied on stage, where it belongs. It may cost more, in the end: but given the thin scraps offered to playwrights now, as this study attests, the reward is not in dollars but in seeing one’s work performed as first envisioned: and this is most likely where the theatrical advances in America will be made.

All that said, other bloggers will no doubt take it from here. (Mind you, there’s little sympathy for what we might write. One commenter is quoted as calling Internet critics “anonymous fools,” and one literary agent says: “The playwrights read [online reviews and blogs], and it affects them. A play’s in previews and you call your clients and hear it in their voices. The playwrights don’t listen to the subscribers, yet they’ll listen to some little fifteen-year-old queen who doesn’t know anything.” See page 234. Neither anonymous nor fifteen years old — it’s been quite a while since I saw that age — I am amused.) But in its valued objectivity, broad scope and thoughtful and fair analysis, Outrageous Fortune will spark the conversation, I’m sure, that TDF wishes.

A critique of tragedy 3

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That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of the Night

Melancholia (or, to call it by its more 20th century name, depression) is cheerfully described as a mental illness to be cured on the psychoanalytic couches and from within the medicine cabinets revised and retained by the Culture Industry. Surely, it is a condition: common and extensive enough to deserve Robert Burton’s 1621 The Anatomy of Melancholy (an impressive 1,382 pages in the NYRB Classics series); it is the height of the Culture Industry’s mechanistic optimism that these thirteen hundred pages might be rendered irrelevant with the prescription of the proper pill.

Melancholy is not a quality solely of tragedy. Twenty years before Burton, Shakespeare’s Jaques in As You Like It casts a pall over the marriages in the final scene when he declines an invitation to stay in the forest of Arden and opts instead for the spiritual life. No doubt he is a spoilsport. But it underscores the isolation of the melancholic spirit; it also points the way to the more ambivalent romances and tragedies that were just to follow; and the chill cast over the final scene is real.

Jaques’ decision is that of the man or woman who sees as a life’s work the mapping of the abyss. Perhaps it is a disease — perhaps a prescription for Celexa would ameliorate Jaques’ darkness and permit him the dance of Act V. On the other hand, his isolation would not leave us with a slightly bitter taste if it were not somehow possessed of some kind of truth.

Let us turn the tables for a moment and suggest that melancholia is not a disease but rather a condition of spiritual health, the necessary product of the full acceptance of Schopenhauer’s single thought: a metaphysical condition of knowledge, not a mental and physical sickness. All tragic artists work from a condition of this melancholia, and the tragic imagination emerges from it. Julia Kristeva writes in Black Sun, her study of depression and melancholia:

For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. …

Rather than seek the meaning of despair (it is either obvious or metaphysical), let us acknowledge that there is meaning only in despair. The child king becomes irredeemably sad before uttering his first words; this is because he has been irrevocably, desperately separated from the mother, a loss that causes him to try and find her again, along with other objects of love, first in the imagination, then in words. Semiology, concerned as it is with the zero degree of symbolism, is unavoidably led to ponder over not only the amatory state but its corollary as well, melancholia; at the same time it observes that if there is no writing other than the amorous, there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy. (3, 5-6)

What is found after this journey through melancholia, especially with another, is knowledge, and it is a knowledge that is not merely intellectual, but sensual, sexual and metaphysical: the joy of this knowledge is hard-won, as Oedipus, Antony, Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde will attest, and at times it is won at the loss of noumenal existence, even in the brief moments of noumenal union available to us in the world of representation. (The comedy, wit and humor is similarly hard-won: and therefore more true. It is this kind of comedy that we find in Lear’s Fool and the gravediggers of Hamlet: a wit that magnifies, not diminishes or ameliorates, the tragic consciousness that animates these plays.)

In the art of contemporary tragedy, this journey through melancholy is mapped through the long periods of Morton Feldman and dark expanses of Mark Rothko, the broad negative spaces of Giacometti, the plays and novels of Beckett after How It Is, Sarah Kane’s plays: and there is a beauty in it not available to comedy as a genre, because the melancholy is utterly without respite. But it is essential. Melancholy is denied in the products of the Culture Industry, especially in those of its theatre, where the melancholic project is bodied and spoken, shared with the fleshed bodies that share the room with us. It is as if, in the wake of the unparalleled catastrophes of the 20th century, we have turned resolutely away from the truths that melancholy and despair offer us, and also away from the profound and sublime joys and ecstasies that may emanate from the knowledge and experience the melancholic journey suggests.

It is not melancholy or depression that is the sickness; it is the palliatives offered by the Culture Industry that constitute the disease; we welcome it and ask it to wrack our bodies into a laughing stupor and call ourselves amused and happy. And it is this disease that kills the theatre, the dramatists who write it, the performers who enact it and the audiences that attend it. Tragedy is its antidote.

A critique of tragedy 2

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There was a time I blushed to speak about these things.

Aeschylus
Agamemnon (1204)

The degendering and regendering of Agamemnon in the final moments of the play that bears his name is central to the tragic consciousness. Clytemnestra strips her husband of his martial attire and catches him in “rich robes” — a feminization that he cannot escape, and a feminization that he welcomes at the hands of his wife. Similarly Oedipus’ crime is haunted by both the death of his father and the erotic appeal of his sister/

wife; the great quartet of Shakespearean tragedies too is centered in desire and gendered indefinition (Lear is not desexed, but his sexuality is mirrored in his female daughters, who themselves take on the the mantle of masculinist power that Lear himself sloughs from his [S]overeign body). In Shakespeare the greatest nexus of eros, the will and death occurs in Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida, in which gender and desirous will circulate freely among the characters, offering ecstasies and terrors unbearable.

These ecstasies and terrors accompany knowledge of the Other, for eros does circulate. It is a desirousness for identity with that phenomenal Other, his or her body, and through that identity a recognition and experience of the will in its most sublime manifestation, an avenue to the single thought that “The world is the self-knowledge of the will.” Schopenhauer notes:

If I am asked where the most intimate knowledge of that inner essence of the world, of that thing in itself which I have called the will to live, is to be found, or where that essence enters most clearly into our consciousness, or where it achieves the purest revelation of itself, then I must point to ecstasy in the act of copulation. That is it! That is the true essence and core of all things, the aim and purpose of all existence. (Manuscript Remains, III:262)

Even Schopenhauer did not recognize the most radical nature of this desire, this nature inhering in the metaphysics of tragedy. The theatre is unique in that the play of sexual signifiers among gesture, body and language can penetrate to aesthetic demonstration, once again a triangulation among first character, second character and spectator: and not the sexual act itself, but the circulation of eros. In comedy, orgasm is the product; in tragedy, it is erotic imagination; in comedy, titillation; in tragedy, woundedness, tragic alienation from the world and Other, and ecstasy. Our currently non-tragic theatres are arenas for titillation and mutual masturbation, not the circulation of an erotic possibility that has profound phenomenal consequences in the relations among men, women and the world. The Culture Industry turns gender, sensuality and sexual preference into corporatized T-shirts: products to purchase; badges; marketing slogans.

Erotic possibility inheres in the circulation of these sexual signifiers as erotic transgressive poetry and the erotic transgressive body, married within the tragic aesthetic. They are shared between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra; Antony and Cleopatra; Tristan and Isolde (or, more recently, in the bodies of Jan Fabre’s Je Suis Sang and Howard Barker’s The Twelfth Battle of Isonzo). Among these characters the phallus and the womb — the erect cock, the damp cunt, the sexualized mouth and asshole — are shared, passed from character to character, given and possessed freely; in undermining cultural and social definition, the Procrustean beds of what it means to be either masculine or feminine, the spirit’s redefinition of gender and ecstatic possibility are found. The will, the thing-in-itself, knows of no separation of masculine and feminine; it is the phenomenal world that does; in the agony of separation tragedy inheres. The cock, the cunt, brushes the soft and pregnant belly, the skin, externalized in fashion and costume, sung in the spoken word; tragedy bears the ecstatic sensation.

A critique of tragedy 1

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It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.

Theodor Adorno
Aesthetic Theory (1)

Tragedy, both as genre and as consciousness, requires a metaphysics. Comedy has not attracted the same philosophical attention (from Aristotle to Eagleton) because comedy is essentially of the empirical world: the material world is the banana peel, man as machine, rising above his station only to be slapped down by the limitations that objecthood, fate and coincidence place in front of him. We don’t require a rationalization for comedy. It appeals, it reminds us of our earthbound condition and reconciles us to its whimsical ironies. There is, even in the greatest comedic achievements such as Twelfth Night or The Producers, a warning to know our place and portion: taking on a pretense of sexual otherness is a hindrance to happy matrimony; the conman is caught upon his own cleverness, in courting failure achieving unwanted success. But those are lessons for this world, not something beyond it.

This is not to say that tragedy requires a system of philosophy any more than comedy does, but in trying to explain the attraction of tragedy — the witnessing of almost unendurable earthly suffering — appeals to reconciliation, levelling lampoon or necessary amusement will not do. The necessity for tragedy will not be found in the same world as comedy, but somewhere beyond, behind. We have few treatises on comedy or the philosophy of comedy, but of tragedy these are legion. And many, interestingly, are not the product of dramatists but of philosophers. Neither Aristotle, Nietzsche, Hegel, Steiner, Kaufmann nor Eagleton, to name only six who have written at considerable length on the form, is a playwright himself. But all are in one way or another philosophers who found in the tragic consciousness an avenue to metaphysics.

Any radical reconsideration of tragedy may begin even from the expression of a single thought, as complex as that thought might be: The World as Will and Representation, its author said, was spun from a single thought; Rudolf Malter has said that it might be posed as: “The world is the self-knowledge of the will.” There is in this thought the indissoluble kernel of the tragic consciousness itself. The will can come to our own knowledge as subjects only through that very special object, our own bodies; it is this object that we know most intimately, from inside and out, as it were, though we as objects can’t readily “know.” But we can experience, we can sense, the will operating through the body: it can be recognized though we cannot define it in empirical terms. The evidence of this will, as it were, can be seen in our own experience as well as everywhere else in history and the world: and it is a smoking gun.

The nature of this will, in the tragic consideration, is beyond moral valuations such as optimism and pessimism; these two terms are useless indicators and forecasts of an unknown and unknowable future, which may be welcomed or feared, and they do not speak to the present; in any event, they reek of determinism; and it is the present condition of humanity which is under tragedy’s examination. If we live anywhere in time, it is not in the future, but the morphing present, under the shadow of the past. Comedy (like some progressive politics) attempts to slip from this shadow into a sunny meadow, but is this possible, or is this mere illusion as well? The first great tragic work, the Oresteia, suggests that with the establishment of earthly justice we live in sunny brilliance and have broken with our bloody pasts. But even the Oresteia does not convince, and in any event, the Libation Bearers may have been a bone tossed to the elders of Athens in hopes of the annual prize rather than an honest reconciliation.

In The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner argues that the genre of classic tragedy in its ancient and Elizabethan forms became untenable in the Enlightenment that followed the 1660 restoration of Charles II, but it took less than three centuries for that Enlightenment to begin devouring itself. Or to finish: the will through its male and female human agents turned against the world in a subatomic form at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in an administrative form in the camps of Germany and Russia; but certainly, terms of physical and social science, this was a science determined by Enlightenment values. If one wanted proof of Enlightenment’s failure, what more proof could one ask for? Surely this should be enough. (Which renders any talk of “futures” additionally absurd; how many futures were eradicated in Europe and Asia in the years between 1939 and 1945; and as a species we are complicitous in this eradication, for it wasn’t Nazis or Manhattan Project scientists in whom the guilt inheres but in the human animal himself, in all of us. How we would like to forget this and blame it on some nation-state, ideologue or quasi-abstract malicious outsider.) This was the judgment, in any case, of Adorno and others of the Critical Theory school. In the wake of the catastrophes of the First World War and those that followed, tragedy was routed, however. The search for justice had for some time been a lodestone of tragic practice; but justice could not be found (nor would it be found, the task was impossible), and so tragedy still awaited new expression for the 20th century. One would have thought that the dark promises of self-knowledge experienced in Oedipus and King Lear had been fulfilled: that the tragic consciousness would re-emerge with a vengeance.

The single thought, however, continued to live, and it lived most in theatre, because theatre, the unique speaking, bodied self-knowledge of the will, was its most appropriate arena. In the work of Artaud and Grotowski, tunnels were dug under the Disneyland of mass culture in the wake of World War II. In their work the tragic consciousness continued to inhere, and it partook not of rationalist Enlightenment values but of values of the spirit: and they were necessarily tragic, with almost nothing of the comic in the work. (There are no “funny bits” in To Have Done with the Judgment of God.) Here, too, the tragic rediscovered its radical roots in the body; it took some time for dramatists to begin seeking a literary, lyrical appropriate text for the stage.

But they have begun, some years later, to do so. Completing the circle, some dramatists have begun to create a philosophical theatre once again, a theatre that is rooted in the metaphysics of tragedy.

Some notes here in the spirit of Adorno: evidence of the necessity for tragedy in the 21st century. And perhaps the irrelevance and blindness of unthinking comedy.