“What do they know of theatre who only theatre know?” goes Aleks Sierz’ cautionary exhortation at his Pirate Dog journal, and it is an interesting question, especially from a critical point of view. Levying a broader cultural body of knowledge towards only one of its aesthetic disciplines may not be necessary, but it is enlightening, and it’s enlightening to the extent that it provides a deeper and more subtle context for and understanding of the individual work of art itself. The best critics can call upon this not only to illuminate the work, but also to illuminate the culture from which it arises. Those critics who do this may go overboard, but even in their excesses serve not only the art but the readership as well.
This may be especially true for drama, the art of the spoken word, and music. As it happens, contemporary drama and contemporary music have many points of conceptual contact, and for many dramatists music is far more influential, or at least suggestive, than the work of other dramatists. In an anonymous 1960 review from The Times (UK) about Harold Pinter’s early plays, the critic notes:
To find another artist with whom Mr. Pinter may fruitfully be compared one must look farther afield than drama, or even literature, to Music — to [Anton] Webern, in fact, with whose compositions Mr. Pinter’s plays have much in common. Like Webern he has a taste for short, compressed forms, as in his revue-sketches which are really complete plays five minutes long, and like Webern he inclines to etiolated pointilliste textures, forever trembling on the edge of silence, and to structures elusive, yet so precisely organized that they possess an inner tension nonetheless potent because its sources are not completely understood.”[]
Never mind the deliberate and appropriate vocabulary of “etiolated” and “pointilliste” — unusual but otherwise perfectly good words that can be found in any dictionary, and even Stephen Sondheim fans will recognize the latter — the reference to one of the major figures of the Second Viennese School snaps out as a reference one likely wouldn’t find in daily theatre journalism these days (I leave it to you to ask why). In this case, the mention is somewhat clairvoyant as well, since in a 1966 interview Pinter confirms the comparison:
INTERVIEWER: Has music influenced your writing, do you think?
PINTER: I don’t know how music can influence writing; but it has been very important for me, both jazz and classical music. I feel a sense of music continually in writing, which is a different matter from having been influenced by it. [Pierre] Boulez and Webern are now composers I listen to a great deal.[]
As I said, both drama and music are served — those readers unfamiliar with Webern may seek out his music, as those unfamiliar with Pinter may seek out his plays (and others have drawn comparisons between Beckett and Schubert, Barker and Bartok) — and another cultural dimension is opened for both forms. It deghettoizes each of these disciplines — contemporary drama and contemporary music — in the service of a broader cultural discourse. But for this kind of criticism to be written, it must have critics who have done their homework, and for it to be published, it requires editors who believe that journalism is more than a mere business, and has cultural responsibilities similar to those of a public trust.
In a Culture Industry that caters to a fascination with celebrities, however, there’s little place for it, and both critics and editors have rejected such criticism as pedantry (as if any reference to any cultural work outside of popular culture after 1975 or so constitutes “pedantry”). In this excerpt from his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” one of the most important texts of Modernist criticism, T.S. Eliot responds, and what he says has as much validity for the critic as for the poet:
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.[]
The final line denies most categorically both an Art and a Criticism of Celebrity. Those critics and artists who may be more interested in their television appearances, the growth of their Twitter feeds, invitations to gala receptions and openings, their names in advertisements that follow pull-quotes for popular shows, or in the progress of their own professional careers, take heed.
Footnotes
