Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a particularly theatrical construct: an audience watching shadows on a wall in front of it. But a more tactile, sensuous allegorical statement of the metaphysical dramatic form is also possible. The same audience faces an opaque scrim — gray and silk for preference, stretched taut across the fourth wall — and perceive, through a dim light, shapes that press against the scrim from behind. They are at times violent, at times tender; they move, the outlines of the shapes perceptible but the precise nature and identity of these shapes impossible to define. It is a sensuous, tactile experience; they can be perceived like the limbs beneath clothing, like a leg pressing and brushing through a skirt or dress. The light plays on them and with them, shadows, which can’t be identified with the shapes or movements themselves, providing darker grays for the eye to contemplate. It is the project of the artist (dramatist, designer, director, performer) to choreograph these movements, to describe them with body, voice, costume and words: to provide a visible map of the invisible territory that lies behind the veil. What lies behind the taut silk is impossible to know; only hints and suggestions are possible; but nonetheless, in their reaching to the audience’s perception, their terrors, struggles and tendernesses become known and visible.

Maurice Benn’s study of the work of Georg Büchner suggests that Büchner may have been familiar with Schopenhauer’s philosophy (The World as Will and Representation having been published in 1818, twenty years before the composition of Woyzeck in 1837, while Schopenhauer was still alive). “The world is chaos. Nothingness its due messiah,” goes a line in Danton’s Death, a line which echoes Schopenhauer’s metaphysics (as well as the final line of WWR itself).

Büchner demonstrated “a pessimism deeper and darker than any to be found in the previous history of German thought with the possible exception of Schopenhauer,” Benn notes (61), but I wish to point out in connection with Woyzeck the play’s structural relationship to time, space and causality — the three qualities which constitute the perception of the empirical world, according to the philosopher. The notorious structural difficulties of the play, unsolved by Büchner, stem from a deviation from the classical form which still inheres in Danton’s Death and even Leonce and Lena. This classical form bears resemblances to the idea of the wellmade tragedy as it came down from Aristotle in antiquity, but in Woyzeck the unities are entirely shattered: locations and times shift with an arbitrary rapidity. And not merely that: the great personages, kings and queens, of classical tragedy, even of Shakespearean tragedy, are absent from Büchner’s collection of soldiers, bourgeois professionals and criminals.

Woyzeck, in which we find the first tentative steps towards the modern tragedy, suggests an attempt at the aesthetic project in Schopenhauer to deny the highly-structured empirical mirror of the well-told story or the well-made plot: an empiricism, according to Schopenhauer, which necessarily denies a recognition of the Will or thing-in-itself. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the status of Reason as a controlling factor in the government of men had been seriously compromised by the bloody failures of the French Revolution to provide that democratic egalitarianism promised by the leaders of that revolution.

It may, perhaps, have been a reactionary turn of the theatre in the face of that failure towards the well-made domestic plays of the Victorian era: it was the era of Sardou and a little later Pinero, highly-constructed plots that were based most immovably in time, space and logical causality. It should also be noted that Schopenhauer preferred the tragedies of Shakespeare to those of the ancient Greeks, and one must note too that the stories of Shakespeare’s plays are often extraordinarily ill-built from the point-of-view of logical development. Hamlet constructs a bewilderingly incomplete series of family, personal and political relationships, only to have nearly all of the characters die at the end from a combination of arbitrary chance, accident and spite. In nearly all the Shakespeare tragedies, everyone dies at the end: death as a deus ex machina to cut off, if not tie up, any loose ends of the plot. This is, from a classical view, poor storytelling. And additional proof, if any were needed, that it is not the story that drives the Shakespearean tragedy, but the language.

The desire of some contemporary theatre practitioners to put “a good story” on the stage (by which they seem to mean a narrative that follows a logical plot development and persuasive if commonplace psychological characterization) demonstrates a refusal to consider the drama as an avenue to exploring the catastrophic expression of the noumenal reality within the phenomenal world. Indeed, the phrase “getting lost in a story” is more than just a desire for a blinding enchantment: it is a fetishization of the phenomenal. This is of an entirely different nature than the contemplation of the noumenal that forms the center of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic experience: for it is catastrophe that is contemplated, rather than an easy curiosity served. The contemporary wellmade story brings blindness rather than knowledge.

Charles Lamb, in his book The Theatre of Howard Barker, suggests a different approach. Lamb took up the study of Barker’s work upon noticing that traditional rehearsal practices seemed not to serve these contemporary tragedies. Barker’s texts, like that of Woyzeck, are rich in catastrophic, irrational moments; the attempt to approach them from within traditional storytelling did not serve the work. “This gave me the idea of reversing the procedure,” Lamb wrote: “Instead of working through the scene and elucidating it with a set of a priori ‘rational’ assumptions, what would happen if one started with the irrational moment? If, instead of treating it as a wholly inscrutable aberration [within the narrative], one posited it as the key to everything else?” (Lamb 2) This would mean that, in dramatic time, irrational and catastrophic events would radiate outward, stretching from the irrational moment to the more “rational” stage events that surrounded them, instead of directing those “rational” events towards the catastrophes that shattered empirical time within the drama — catastrophes that suggested and described the noumena that existed beneath and behind the phenomenal world.

Story in the drama and the theatre serves the same purpose as tonality in music or figurative, representational plastic arts: they root the aesthetic experience in the empirical world, rather than suggesting the noumenal. It is a necessity of the metaphysical, Schopenhauerian tragedy to smash the insistently empirical nature of the realistic or naturalistic play, a play which keeps us firmly a part of the world of blind suffering. It provides no knowledge: only ignorance.

In The Metaphysical Vision, Ulrich Pothast describes Schopenhauer’s conception of tragedy and its relationship to Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels, but also provides a broader relationship to contemporary drama, underscoring Schopenhauer’s radical understanding of the form and providing a basis for its relevance to contemporary tragedy.

Apart from music, which is a special case, tragic poetry represents the highest objectivication of the knowledge that is available to us about the Thing-in-itself, the will. “Tragedy,” Pothast writes, “gives a view of this life stressing that life is essentially suffering and leads finally to death. It belongs to the arts which try to give a near replica of a [Platonic] Idea; in tragedy, this is the Idea of the human being. … Only in tragedy is the Idea of human being presented as a living and dying person — to the effect that the value and nature of life as well as of death can be seen clearer than anywhere else.” (68)

As Howard Barker reminds us, the knowledge and recognition of death and suffering are at the center of all tragedy: but, in opposition to Aristotle, this knowledge is not necessarily accompanied by catharsis; the knowledge itself is the experiential takeaway from tragic experience. “It is not fear and sympathy with the individual heroes of the tragic action which are to be induced,” Pothast continues, “but rather, in the tragedy’s characters as well as in the spectators, a new kind of knowledge: the knowledge that individual existence in the world of appearances is thoroughly deceptive and that, therefore, individual death is unimportant, being nothing more than an illusion fading away. This knowledge allows the characters to free themselves from the drive of their individual will, and it allows the spectators to temporarily acquire the same attitude of freedom, a kind of happiness. … Therefore, one can say that in Schopenhauer’s theory of tragedy, suffering and death of the leading characters become the inspiring genius of a philosophical world view in the spectators. The tragic action enables them to renounce their normal affirmation of the Will-to-life and to temporarily find a new attitude of freedom and calmness.” (70-71; emphasis mine)

Knowledge in the Schopenhauerian sense is not empirical knowledge of the world through science or documentary, but an experienced, bodied knowledge of the individual self: a knowledge available only through art, not philosophy, which participates in the world of rational concepts. This is thoroughly consistent with Schopenhauer’s emphasis on experience rather than abstract intellectualism as the source of knowledge. When the extremes of some contemporary tragedy are examined for their value to the individual spectator, such as in Barker, Kane, Rudkin and Bond, it must be said that this knowledge — necessary, as Pothast suggests, for the true autonomous freedom of the individual, including the freedom to turn the will against itself — is the sublime product of contemporary tragedy. This knowledge is unavailable to contemporary comic irony, which undermines this knowledge by providing, through camp or a facile wink at the audience, plausible deniability of that knowledge: it is all a joke, if we wish it so. It is too easy to turn away from this knowledge (which is, it must also be stressed, not truth in the sense that it is a final declaration of philosophical meaning).

The sexually desiring and desirous human body is the highest phenomenal representation of the will as it acts through the world of objects, according to Schopenhauer; there is an implicit link between this and his concept of tragedy as the highest (with the exception of music) of the arts. The contemporary tragedians named above render this connection explicit, linking ecstatic sensuality to a knowledge of death and through this knowledge achieving a form of freedom. This is an amoral project, if it is the knowledge of the will that is gained. Schopenhauer’s terminology here is problematic: in our time, the word “will” is associated with volition, but it must be remembered that the word itself is a necessarily imperfect description of that empirically indescribable thing-in-itself. Schopenhauer’s concept is of an unconscious force or activity: a will, to coin a term, without volition and operating through the human body in both sexuality and suffering; and without this volition, the will becomes something beyond ethics and morality. It suggests a constant conflict between the will and its objectification in the world. It is this conflict itself which constitutes the formal basis of tragedy.

There are formal and technical consequences to this neo-Schopenhauerian critique as well. “We must keep in mind,” Pothast writes, “that the logic of dramatic action in Schopenhauer’s view of tragedy totally conforms to the logic of empirical events which are experienced by well-identified individuals in the forms of time, space and causality. It is through their knowledge, induced by the tragic action, that the tragic characters can free themselves from the bounds of individual existence and see through the veil of Maya. And only this knowledge also enables them to adopt the new attitude of resignation in which they even accept their individual death and give up their lives ‘cheerfully and willingly.’” (71) Traditional narrative and theatrical forms participate in “the logic of empirical events” that inhere to the telling of a traditional story, which then becomes just another manifestation of the veil of Maya that must be torn apart to gain recognition of the Thing-in-itself behind all things. But the description of empirical events doesn’t provide access to the knowledge that the tragic experience suggests. The neo-Schopenhauerian tragedy — and their characters — destroys these forms in the path to knowledge.

More on this next. And a reminder to myself that the relationship between repudiation and resignation must also be discussed in terms of the “contemplation” that belongs, according to Schopenhauer, to the true work of art.