Every culture has had its work of eudaemonics — some of them have had several. Marcus Aurelius, Gracian, more recently Arthur Schopenhauer and Theodor Adorno provided a few. These latter two provide eudaemonics for a modern catastrophic age, but some individuals, especially those who have come to accept the epiphanies that reveal the truth of both pessimism and elitism, need their own internal guides to happiness. It is not a paradox to say that one can find happiness, even joy and ecstasy, in traversing the post-catastrophic landscape through a lifetime. But it is also true that a post-catastrophic eudaemonics will of necessity be radically different than those which came before. It must be constructed from the ground up, for the catastrophe has levelled the culture. Aesthetic creation and experience has its place in this eudaemonics as well. The human animal is made of a mixture of the urge to create and the urge to destroy, though these urges are not equal, the latter far outstripping the former in some individual cases. But there are no saints either. In a post-catastrophic landscape, a eudaemonics of aesthetic experience, of compassion, of resignation — of those three qualities which are the themes of the third and fourth movements of Schopenhauer’s great symphonic philosophical work — is more important and urgent than ever if one is not to become buried in the despair that accompanies a recognition of the post-catastrophic world. But the fact is that most twenty-first century men and women do not need a eudaemonics; they remain deterministic optimists, faithful to the race and the world, and to reason and administrative instrumentality. Their heads remain buried in the sweet-smelling artificial fertilizer of the Culture Industry, which feeds their amour-propre. They are voluntarily blind, and eternally happy.

Of course, turnabout is fair play; Terry Teachout’s sensitive, informed, and largely positive review of the recently opened revival of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Roundabout appears in the Wall Street Journal today. Mr. Teachout:

It’s easy enough to see why Look Back in Anger made so electrifying an impression in 1956. But Mr. Osborne assumes an awareness of Jimmy’s cultural context that most modern-day Americans simply don’t have. He is a member of the first generation of working-class Britons to have received a college education, which fostered in them a sense of possibility that was thwarted by the country’s rigidly stratified class system. Hence his venomous anger at postwar England’s “sycophantic, phlegmatic and pusillanimous” upper middle classes, among whom the right accent was far more valuable than a high IQ. In America, where class and money are largely interchangeable, such rage makes no sense, and Jimmy himself is a wholly alien figure, a poverty-stricken slum dweller who opens Look Back in Anger by complaining about the “posh papers” that he reads every Sunday: “Different books — same reviews.” It’s as if Stanley were griping to Stella about how the cartoons in The New Yorker aren’t as clever as they used to be.

The full review is here.

The 25 writers profiled range across the ethnic, social, and gender spectrum, and include writers like debbie tucker green, Tanika Gupta, and Kwame Kwei-Armah; critics include Sierz (on Jez Butterworth), Graham Saunders (on David Eldridge), Ken Urban (on Sarah Kane), Caridad Svich (on Mark Ravenhill), and Dan Rebellato (on Philip Ridley). As to be expected, these individual entries are a mixed bag, though always quite useful. Martin Middeke’s essay on Martin Crimp, for example, is a bit jargon-thick, perhaps inevitable in the profile of a writer fond of postmodernist form. The critics also provide important lists of both primary and secondary texts, however, making this volume an essential contribution to the assessment of European drama.

Such a volume (along with its unofficial companion, The Methuen Drama Book of 21st Century British Plays), published by a major commercial publisher which also publishes collections by many of the playwrights mentioned in the guide, remains indicative of the centrality of the arts of drama and theatre to British culture. These publications come in the wake of two other recent books about drama for the general reader — Sierz’ Rewriting the Nation and Michael Billington’s State of the Nation (this latter published by the commercial U.K. house Faber & Faber, which also maintains an extensive backlist of plays and books of drama criticism) — that take more critical and idiosyncratic views of the landscape.

Needless to say, hundreds of new U.S. dramatists emerged in the first decade of the 21st century as well. But here the possibilities for the discussion of this work via publishing are dimmer. We’ve got no similar volumes about new American dramatic writing from Ben Brantley, Charles Isherwood, or David Cote from U.S. publishers; I frankly doubt it’s a matter of time, for while these three are busy working journalists and reviewers, so are Billington and Sierz. Commercial U.S. publishers have not published critical work or anthologies like this for years — likely because there is no demand for it. Which underscores the marginality of the drama and theatre to a U.S. culture which has no deeply-rooted concern for the art. While smaller and university publishers continue to publish criticism and new plays, these do not have the reach or resources of major U.S. publishing houses, and remain, as they say, “niche” outlets.

It is something of a shame, because at the situation’s heart is an interesting question: could this new American work itself sustain such assiduous critical inquiry, or would it collapse under the weight of deeper examination? At least some U.S. dramatists are worthy of such treatment: Young Jean Lee, Richard Maxwell, John Jesurun, Theresa Rebeck, Neil LaBute, and Thomas Bradshaw come to mind after only five minutes of thought. First reviews tell only part of the story; if the short newspaper or magazine review is the first draft of cultural history, volumes like the Methuen collection of essays or Sierz’ and Billington’s books are the second, enjoying the additional value of some critical distance from the plays’ original productions and the placement of these plays in a wider aesthetic and political context. And certainly The Methuen Drama Guide to Contemporary British Playwrights whets the palate for the plays under discussion. The book delightfully informs, instructs, and contemplates the plays themselves: you want to see them, or at least read them (the more likely and convenient option for the American reader). Lacking similar volumes about the U.S. scene, American drama and theatre remain off to one side, and underexamined.

TRISTAN
Tristan you,
I Isolde,
no longer Tristan.

ISOLDE
You Isolde,
Tristan I,
no longer Isolde!

TOGETHER
Un-named,
free from parting,
new perception,
new enkindling;
ever endless
self-knowing;
warmly glowing heart,
love’s utmost joy!

Obviously this is far more than a description of de- or re-gendering. This experience — this un-naming, self-knowing, this “joy” (the German original is “Liebeslust”; perhaps a native German speaker could provide a more subtle translation, for I suspect “Lust” is not a precise equivalent to “Freude”) — is only available to the transgressive erotic pair, for it flies in the face of the culture itself, even the quasi-romantic culture of the opera. Indeed, it repudiates that culture in this solemn ecstasy: there is no further participation possible in the culture, even if the desire itself is doomed. One should read Tristan and Isolde’s transgression more closely, too, as to the nature of that transgression. In a sense it is a least a fetishization of death that leads to the desire: of extraordinary risk, of opening the self to what may be a profoundly dangerous enactment of erotic expression. To a darkness, to a point of no return, and to indissolubly bind oneself to the Other, are the destinations of the couple, even beyond ordinary experience of sight and movement. It is not for this phenomenal world, but a possible brief glimpse and experience of the thing-in-itself as a bodied union, the driving “will,” for want of a better word, that justifies the repudiation and renunciation.

But what of resignation? That the condition to which lovers aspire is insupportable in the phenomenal world, and must be located beyond it, even if the project is hopeless. It is in the nature of sexual and erotic ecstasy, as it is in the nature of the aesthetic experience, that the moment of recognition, the moment of realization, the moment of true jouissance, is brief and rare, and it does not last. Perhaps the experience which follows those moments (for life, such as it is, does go on once they’ve passed) is an attempt to capture that moment again, once in a while. But moments of aesthetic or erotic transcendence are necessarily rare; we are not built for it, perhaps, bound to the world as we are.

It is possible to be a pessimist and a bodied philosopher (blood and head, flesh and mind) of eros. Perhaps all of eros’ true devotees are pessimists. The rest are devotees of something else, perhaps: pleasure, or titillation: the surface qualities so beloved of those who live on the surface.

In this, the most Schopenhauerian of operas, Wagner repurposes eros as a means to renunciation and repudiation of the world as a means to experience the thing-in-itself, that which lies beyond the world. Below, a post from last June, in which I discuss a few associated issues. It has been slightly revised.

At the beginning of his 2001 book The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett, Beckett’s friend and publisher John Calder writes:

Voltaire considered himself to be a novelist, a poet, a dramatist and a writer of opera libretti, but we think of him today largely as a philosopher. The same fate may overtake Samuel Beckett, because what future generations can expect to find in his work is above all an ethical and philosophical message; the novels and plays will increasingly be seen as the wrapping for that message. This will [in] no way detract from the originality and daring of the stage works nor from the power and craftsmanship of the fictions. They were however written for a purpose: to make us face, head-on, the realities of the human condition; and nowhere does he offer us a hopeful message, only a positive attitude and an injunction to face those realities with courage and dignity.[1]

I was reminded of this passage as I reached the midpoint of the new Cambridge University Press translation of The World as Will and Representation this weekend. If Beckett’s work might be seen as a philosophy wrapped in the guise of art (imaginative prose and drama), then Schopenhauer’s might be seen as a work of art wrapped in the guise of a philosophy (expository prose). This perspective may provide one explanation for Beckett’s continuing appeal to philosophers, and Schopenhauer’s to artists. As Calder suggests, the generic form of this content partakes of a certain oscillation of any given work among various forms, in this case the imaginative and the expository. Schopenhauer’s work has its longeurs and repetitions, like Beckett’s, like that of any artist who works in forms that express a problematic relation to time. The title of Ulrich Pothast’s book on Beckett and Schopenhauer, The Metaphysical Vision, points to the same kind of oscillation. There is metaphysics and there is art: and they may be separate or fused.

I have written before of the architectonic structure of Schopenhauer’s main work (not dissimilar to that, in its power and sublimity, to Beethoven’s Choral Symphony), and he is widely considered to be one of the most accomplished prose stylists of 19th-century Germany in whatever form. It is also relevant to note Schopenhauer’s valuation of aesthetic work as a means to renunciation and resignation as superior to that of the philosophical treatise, the genre in which he pursued his project. The pursuit of philosophical ends through aesthetics, as Calder conceived Beckett’s enduring reputation, is mirrored by that of the pursuit of aesthetic ends through philosophy, which permits both Beckett and Schopenhauer to maintain significant footings in both genres. As Pothast notes, it’s not as if Beckett conceived of his project as putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy on stage or in the novel, and Pothast argues that as Beckett’s career went on it resembled Schopenhauer’s metaphysics less and less. I think the first part of his note is quite true but the second is not necessarily true, but even if it were, it only indicates that the work of no philosopher or artist constitutes a final end, but only a dynamic of concerns that evolve and change through an artist’s work.

That some philosophers and artists have elective affinities with each other is a lesson that Schopenhauer’s enduring influence on artists, and Beckett’s enduring appeal to critics and philosophers, demonstrates perhaps better than any other philosopher. Any mental or creative dialogue that an artist or a philosopher maintains through a lifetime must include a dialogue with the dead, and the communication of these affinities within groups of like-minded writers and artists permits of revision and reconsideration. Schopenhauer famously refuted what he considered Kant’s missteps in an extended appendix to WWR, but there’s no reason why an artist may not also participate in this revision and consideration as well.

To take one example particularly relevant to my own project, Richard Wagner was the first major artist to have his life’s work stopped and radically revised in the middle of his career as a result of a reading of The World as Will and Representation. It was through Schopenhauer’s work that this reconsideration occurred, but Wagner also revised his mentor. In his important new book Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, Laurence Dreyfus cites an 1858 letter to Mathilde Wesendonck in which Wagner, then at work on Tristan und Isolde, does just this:

It is really a matter of proving — something no philosopher has done, not even Schopenhauer — that the recognized redemptive path to the complete pacification of the Will is through Love, and in fact not an abstract human love but rather by means of sexual love, that is, a love germinating in the attraction between man and woman.[2]

It is also important to note here Dreyfus’ gloss on Wagner’s letter:

Far from being doomed to failure and eternal disappointment as in Schopenhauer’s clear exposition, Wagner’s notion of sexual love becomes a means to assuage the gnawing desires of the Will-to-live. Even Schopenhauer admitted in his second volume that there is a difference between understanding renunciation as a philosopher and practicing it as an ascetic mystic, a statement that undercuts the effect of his philosophical conclusions … . Perhaps Wagner intended to air a legitimate criticism of Schopenhauer’s unconvincing pseudo-Buddhist account of renunciation. But as soon as one examines the composer’s assertion about sexual love, its logical inconsistency becomes glaring. For if sexual desire (according to Schopenhauer) embodies the essence of the Will-to-live, it is nonsense to allow sexual love to pacify the Will. It is like giving whiskey to cure an alcoholic, or pornography to treat a sexual obsessive.[3]

True enough, and Dreyfus here has stumbled upon a central paradox of Schopenhauer’s conclusion — that is, how can the will be turned by a helpless vehicle of that will, the human individual, against itself? The paradox is insoluble except through an appeal to mystery and mysticism — but it is this mystery and mysticism itself which constitute the possibility of any kind of true, redemptive aesthetic experience as well. That it is logically inconsistent, as Dreyfus notes, perhaps makes The World as Will and Representation poor philosophy (though only if philosophy must abjure any appeals to a mysticism and mystery — and this does not necessarily mean God or purposiveness — which is beyond human understanding). But that does not make it bad art — indeed, in its openness to aesthetic and imaginative possibility, it makes it very good art indeed. And it confirms that Kant, Schopenhauer and Wagner can all ascertain new forms and understandings of experience from each other’s work without ignoring the weaknesses and mistakes of each.

It is instructive to note that great philosophy that aspires to the condition of art has similar effects in the best critics and expositors of that philosophy. Bryan Magee concludes his magisterial The Philosophy of Schopenhauer not with a summation chapter, but with a poem — as if expository prose could not contain the enduring value and appeal of Schopenhauer’s work to that writer. More recently, David Ian Rabey’s two-volume survey of Howard Barker’s career is as much philosophy and art as it is literary criticism, as James Balestrieri noted upon the publication of the first volume: “Rabey mobilizes powerful metaphors, almost as responses in kind to Barker’s lines, in sentences that have the quality of muscular poetry. …  At the border between criticism and theatre, Politics and Desire stands opposite Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues, challenging critical boundaries of theatre, and inviting us to experience the catastrophic throes of tragic transformation.” All of this argues for the possibility, indeed the value and the necessity, of an art which strains towards philosophy, and a philosophy which strains towards art.

1. John Calder, The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett. London: Calder Publications, 2001, p. 1.
2. Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, p. 71.
3. Ibid.

For more on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, see the hour-long conversation between Bryan Magee and Frederick Copleston, posted here.

Those seeking an additional introduction to Gaddis’ work can be referred to Cynthia Ozick’s fine review of Carpenter’s Gothic, his third novel, which appeared in the 7 July 1985 issue of the New York Times.

One of the pleasures of The Paris Review‘s new online archive of their author interviews is the availability of Zoltán Abádi-Negi’s 1987 talk with American novelist William Gaddis (1922-1998).

It would be nice to say that Gaddis’ first novel, The Recognitions (1955), “burst onto the scene,” but its appearance was greeted with a polite silence in most corners. The novel is among those monumental works of American modernism, like Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, Mark Rothko’s paintings and Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, that beggar easy description: nearly 1,000 pages in its hardcover edition and not much less in the paperback, The Recognitions, along with Gaddis’ next book J R (1975), are essential to an understanding of the United States in the postwar period. More than this, though, as Sven Birkets wrote in his New York Times Book Review notice of Agapē Agape, Gaddis’ novels constitute in all their brilliance “the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art.”

And Gaddis was, quite explicitly, a modernist writer. “Speaking of influences, I think mine are more likely to be found going from Eliot back rather than forward to my contemporaries,” Gaddis told Abádi-Negi shortly after the publication of Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); in the interview Gaddis demonstrates little enthusiasm for either postmodern fiction or criticism. In form, style and content, Gaddis’ five novels are largely composed of Americans talking: J R is set out almost entirely in dialogue, and A Frolic of His Own (1994) incorporates most of Gaddis’ only (unproduced) play, Once at Antietam.

Gaddis is, on the surface, a satirist, but like Horace, Swift and Kraus he is far more than that. All of his novels painfully and often hilariously tear the scabs from the American experience, the Puritan ethic and Western capitalism, but underlying all of it is a firm faith in the redemptive qualities of aesthetic creation, always under siege from the administered society from which it rather wondrously and paradoxically emerges. He begins broadly — the locales of The Recognitions circle the globe — but as time goes on his focus becomes narrower. J R is set largely in Long Island and New York City; Carpenter’s Gothic in an isolated New England house (constantly barraged from within by television stories and telephone messages from far-off African lands); A Frolic of His Own, his satire of the legal system (and therefore the administered American culture), in a home on Eastern Long Island; and finally, in his brilliant short novel explicitly influenced by Thomas Bernhard, Agapē Agape (published posthumously in 2002), in the room and the mind of a dying man (also suggesting that other master of the rooms and minds of dying men, Samuel Beckett).

There is a development in Gaddis’ work from the monumental to the concise, stripping down to the core the essence of Gaddis’ satiric vision: that of opportunities lost, of humanity unable to achieve its hopes, in either art or life. As he writes in the very last pages of Agapē Agape:

Age withering arrogant youth and worse, the works of arrogant youth and the book I wrote then, my first book, it’s become my enemy, o Dio, odium, the rage and energy and boundless excitement the only reality where the work that’s become my enemy got done and the only refuge from the hallucination that’s everything out there is the greater one that transforms you good God, Pozdnyshev [a character in Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata], those words that Levochka gave you to transform the whole thing when “music carries you off into another state of being that’s not your own, of feeling things you don’t really feel, of understanding things you don’t really understand, of being able to do things you aren’t really able to do” yes, that transforms that transfigures you yourself into the self who can do more! That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

The satirist’s vision is hung between the tragic and the ecstatic; it’s to Gaddis’ great talent that we can owe its brilliant containment in comic form (the events of A Frolic of His Own, for example, begin when the main character, novelist and Gaddis-double Oscar Crease, manages to run himself over with his own car); and though these last words are the cry of a dying man, Gaddis was a great one for first sentences, too:

Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. (The Recognitions)

– Money … ? in a voice that rustled. (J R)

Justice? — You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. (A Frolic of His Own)

Gaddis’ work has been eclipsed by that of many of his contemporaries — among those living, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth; among those dead, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer — but it is heartening to see that, in 2010, his satiric vision hasn’t been entirely fulfilled, despite the notorious “Mr. Difficult” essay by Oprah’s Book Club favorite Jonathan Franzen, which in all its condescending and moronic glory appeared in a 2002 issue of The New Yorker. All of Gaddis’ novels, as well as his book of essays The Rush for Second Place (2002), remain in print. Though one shudders to think what Gaddis would think of the Internet after the cacophony of J R, the Internet has been kind to him. There is an excellent Web site devoted to his novels here; it includes the full text of Stephen Moore’s groundbreaking 1989 full-length study of the novelist. There is another excellent collection of Gaddis pages at The Modern Word‘s “Scriptorium” here. I was fortunate enough to take a class with William Gaddis at Bard College on “The Literature of Failure” in 1979, which I wrote about several years ago here (my contribution begins about halfway down the page).

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal

According to Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Beckett’s early poem was a response to Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter”:

As a vulture would,
That on heavy clouds of morning
With gentle wing reposing,
Seeks for his prey –
Hover, my song. (Tr. Edwin H. Zeydel)

Harvey contrasts the two poems thusly:

The optimism, expansive joy, and religious mysticism of the original are missing in Beckett’s poem. … “The Vulture” might be called (by a critic) “The Artist on his Art.” It is the most explicit account in Echo’s Bones of the author’s views on the nature of poetry. While the model and its offshoot have in common the theme of artistic creation, even here the views disclosed differ greatly. Goethe’s “Geier” might well be a hawk in search of its prey, for there is nothing in the above lines that suggests the carrion-consuming Accipitridae of science. Even the “heavy clouds” are heavy only in order to furnish a stable resting-place, and the poet’s heart is light. His poem is a song waiting to be born, and its author in his joyful moment of expectant creativity is in the state of poetic grace. There is little doubt that the poem will be born a healthy, happy offspring. Not so with the somber song of Samuel Beckett. (113)

This occurs whether three or eighty-three. The sadness that attaches to the young life is that it is so new, and the door shuts just as it opens. It attests also to the truth of Pozzo’s realization, “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more,” and of Vladimir’s conclusion built upon Pozzo’s truth, “Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener.” We may find in this the invitation to compassion and love, but only if we accept this truth, if we imbue our art with it or remember it every single day.

“A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you cannot expect an angel to look out.”

Bearing the humbling injunction from Arthur Schopenhauer above in mind, I recently attempted once again a sympathetic, open-minded reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and like my attempts to read Nietzsche sympathetically in the past, I failed once again. In some circles (but not in mine; I don’t have a circle), Nietzsche is the contemporary philosopher par excellence, esteemed for his style, his rhetoric, his polemic power; for me, ass though I may be, I find little sympathy for any of the three. There may be many reasons for this. No English translation of any of Nietzsche’s work sounds like anything but an English translation from a foreign language; if this were untrue of any of the translations I’ve come across (and I’ve tried three different translations of BT), I might blame the translator, but there may be something in Nietzsche’s thought itself which renders it so unaccommodating to my ears. The fetishization of the Dionysiac spirit, and of pre-Platonic Greece itself, is profoundly unconvincing to me (as is Bataille’s obsession with ritual and rite); again, this may be because by nature I am more sympathetic to the Apollonian spirit, but I am not at all sure that this is true. All that heightened rhetoric, all those exclamation points! Reading Nietzsche I can’t help but feel subjected to a loud never-ending harangue from a soapbox, punctuated with a loud, forced laughter and unhelpful references to abstractions like an Übermensch or an eternal recurrence (the concept of the latter, especially, is unpleasant). I have my suspicions as to why Nietzsche is one of the most popular and certainly most influential philosophers of the modern age, but perhaps these are best saved for another time.

I do not require that a philosopher be systematic. Nietzsche certainly is not. Neither, despite all of the secondary literature defining his system, is Schopenhauer, and he admits as much in the very first preface to the very first edition of The World as Will and Representation. But reading Schopenhauer I feel rather differently, as if in a quiet conversation in a dimly-lit study equipped with all the bourgeois pleasures of the mind and body — a roaring fireplace, a carafe of brandy, quiet talk, ironic laughter, as outside a snowstorm rages in the night. Schopenhauer’s manner convinces me as much as his insight; I am happier to admit his inconsistencies, as he himself admits he has them, especially when it comes to women and sex; as Schopenhauer said of Kant, great minds must be allowed to make occasional mistakes with impunity. For me it does not ameliorate the force of his thought or his writing.

I will be fifty in two months’ time, and perhaps I value these bourgeois pleasures more than I ever have: it is night outside, after all, and there is a fierce blizzard blowing. And I am perhaps less interested in popularity or community than ever before. I doubt that any sacrifices I might have to make to be popular or clubbable, whether it’s within a small circle or a large public arena, would justify the returns, quite small as I can imagine them in the larger scheme of things. I can see no justifiable or significant recompense to the exertion to be popular, or at least more widely read. I do not believe, like Nietzsche does (sometimes; sometimes he doesn’t; it depends on which of his aphorisms you quote, and that’s a game I’m not interested in playing, for I don’t have the time), that a culture or a civilization might somehow be recreated that reflects the characteristics of a society that would value tragedy, through revalorizing the Dionysian spirit or what-have-you, and I don’t have the desire for propagandizing those values within my portfolio as a writer.

When it comes to whatever I may write about drama or theatre, especially as it exists now in the country of my birth, I find myself to be more disconnected than ever before, no matter the blowsy and illusory “connections” that things like the blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook pretend to provide. I suppose I have a reluctance to be absorbed into the corporatized digital world that these represent. The mad desperate craze for connection, for accessibility, for popularity, for community, I find profoundly foreign and hostile to my nature as a writer and as a person, especially in an art form like theatre. And yet it is this nature which must be the source for my writings about and for the theatre and drama. This places me outside, which is where I suppose I prefer to be. “A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time,” Kenneth Tynan wrote in the foreword to his 1967 book Tynan Right and Left. “A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.” In both Word Made Flesh and in my writings about erotic tragedy, I have written about what is not happening. I make no pretense that I am, QED, a great critic. But Tynan suggests there is some value to it, and I am content to rest with that.

And besides — it is unfair to write about the dramatists and theatremakers in America without the opportunities to see and become more deeply acquainted with their work than is possible for me now. In acknowledging this, I trust that my readers will understand that from now on Superfluities Redux will be less about theatre and drama and more about other things (theatre and drama will inevitably be engaged on occasion as well, though, as I conceive it, rarely). I write for no community, but for you, if you would like to read it; no harm done at all if you would not and go elsewhere; I will be happy to sit alone with you in that quiet bourgeois den and speak quietly about those obscure, quiet things that matter to me and just may matter to you as well. We may even talk a little about that storm outside, for it is certainly spectacular. Together we can talk away the hours, sharing our resignation, until the blizzard finally slows and ceases and the endless night is peaceful once more.