Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Tuesday, 19 February 2008
Ibsen's ghost. What would we do with Ibsen now, sit him in front of the audience after a performance of Ghosts or A Doll's House for a Norwegian-accented talkback, rendering the problems of the spirit an issue of the hour, forgotten by the time we get home for the eleven o'clock news? (It's now the talkback, not the play itself, that provides the audience's catharsis.) Despite the creakiness of some translations and productions, the terrain of these plays remains ours: the suppression of secret, disease-ridden truths in the interest of maintaining connection and status within the community (Ghosts), the destruction that may be necessary to attain even a nominal freedom of the individual human spirit (A Doll's House). It was these, and not the issues of venereal disease or incipient feminism, that led to Ibsen's condemnation (an English critic on Ghosts: "a dirty deed done in public") in his time and his eloquent self-defense in An Enemy of the People.
We see an Ibsen play now as we might visit a museum on a rainy Sunday afternoon: safely ensconced in the past, no matter. Ibsen has had descendants, not aesthetic but spiritual, and their names sometimes surprise: Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Richard Foreman, Howard Barker -- valorising the freedom of the spirit and the power of the individual consciousness. A few of these now, along with Ibsen, have been absorbed into the post-capitalism that defangs them. In essence they remain unabsorbed. The same terrain that Ibsen surveyed -- of conventional morality, of the individual dead inside, of the pressures of conformity, of our responsibility for our own and others' suffering, of our willful blindness to both our complicity in this suffering and the possibilities that arise in critical contemplation of it -- remains with us still; indeed, it might be said that little or nothing has changed.
The freedom of individual consciousness is not a road to an illusory salvation, as the fatal avalanches at the end of Brand and When We Dead Awaken prove, but that does not mean that that freedom is either unnecessary or impossible; the value is in recognition of the destiny of death, to somehow be able to, in our contemplation of it, gain a kind of illumination about our condition. This illumination, to the community, is dark and valueless, not utile, not a comfort. To dismiss it, we call it Modernist, or its creator Romantic, thereby consigning it to the museum or to the margin of aesthetic history.
Community, in its number, can smother the single individual, can deny him or her access to the avenues of public expression; the individual can't do the same thing to the community, which has numberless avenues for expression. (So the suppression of the tragic in Plato's Republic, just for a start, but the approval of an art which provides succor, facile amusement and entertainment, and illusory hope.) In the twenty-first century the question may be more complex, but not by much. Calls for the theatre to cure itself by integrating the artist closer into the community, to ask him to share its values (one wonders what Ibsen would have thought of that -- no, on the other hand, one knows what he would have thought of that -- Ibsen understood those values all too well, but that understanding did not prove happy), to accommodate itself to post-capitalist business and marketing practices, is ultimately to deny and suppress the illumination provided by Ibsen and his followers -- to keep the theatre sick. (Not to mention the efficacy of this accommodation: one glance at the current health of the American economy, and you wonder just what it is that these business innovators have to contribute, if not a new form of suicide.) The kinds of plays that might be produced on our stages, given these assumptions of theatre's assumed social function and use, are easy to see. They are there now. And we also see (or read, if we care enough to seek them out) what plays are denied the light and air of production, given that assumed social function and use.
If the artist chooses to remain an exile from mass culture, it is premature -- and says more about us than it does about him -- to assume that this stance is not necessary, at least for him, and to condemn that as Romantic or Modernist (insofar as these have become terms of condemnation) is an avenue to blindness towards what he might contribute to our illumination. And there are negative labels we ourselves can place on the idea that it is only the community, and not the individual's capacity for wonder and recognition, the artist's attempt to chart within him or herself the ecstasies possible with a daring, disciplined and uncompromising exploration of the extremes of consciousness, that gives meaning to our lives.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 8.57 am in /Organum
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