Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Michael Hays
Because the form of a work of art always
seems to express something unquestionable, we
usually arrive at a clear understanding of such formal
statements only at a time when the unquestionable
has been questioned and the self-evident has
become problematic
Peter Szondi
Theorie des modernen Dramas
In the light of contemporary structuralist and semiotic endeavor, these words may not seem very revolutionary Some of you no
doubt even caught the reference to Hegel's, or should I say Minerva's,
owl in this formula. If so, Peter Szondi might, at first, appear to be
little more than a recent avatar of the "old" Hegelian aesthetics. His
work has, m fact, brought new life to this tradition, but it also marks a
difference which defines Szondi's historical position and his contribution to modern criticism and hermeneutic theory I hope I can do
justice to part of this contribution today by discussing the nature and
implications of Szondi's work on the drama
There is no question about the fact that Szondi drew his early
inspiration from Hegel and from Hegel's followers, Lukacs and
Adorno This is obvious in the opening sections of his book. Theory of
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the Modern Drama, where he first establishes the idea that dramatic
form IS not an abstract entity, independent of time and place, but
rather inextricably tied up with the content it informs "Context," he
quotes Hegel as saying, "is nothing but the inversion of form into content and form nothing but that of content into form " He also cites
Adorno's use of a chemical metaphor to express the same idea Form
IS "precipitated" context. By borrowing m this fashion Szondi is able
to quickly establish the theoretical starting point for his own analysis
of the drama: formal structure is as important to the process of
signification in a play as is content. There is, for Szondi, no such thing
as a form which exists beyond the moment of its use There are only
particular sets of form-content relationships and form, like content
must be "read" as a statement about the nature and significance of
the aesthetic enterprise as a whole, dramatic form codifies assertions
about human existence
Szondi proposes a "structural" model for the drama, then, but
unlike the structures which Levi-Strauss had in mind, those
discovered by Szondi are not "fundamentally the same for all
mindsancient and modern, primitive and civilized .."' They are, instead, inextricably bound to the historical and ideological situation m
which they develop. This historicization of the idea of form eliminates
the possibility of any systematic, normative poetics as such The
formal distinctions which have traditionaily been used to designate
the "universal" characteristics of each of the major genres are transformed into historical categories. One cannot discuss genre outside a
specific historical context and, therefore, it is useless to discuss, for
example, Greek or medieval drama in the same terms that one would
use to deal with eighteenth-century drama or modern drama
The significance of this historicization of drama and criticism
is obviously rather profound. There is no longer any possibility of
positing a simple continuity of either literary or critical tradition. The
"history" of literature ceases to be history at all in the sense of a
diachronic series of cause and effect relationships. Szondi again
seems very close to proposing the same kind of non-linear structure
that L6vi-Strauss has been accused of propoundingliterary history
at this point would be nothing but a series of juxtaposed, synchronic
moments, each with its own systems of structure and meaning, each
independent of that which temporally precedes or follows it.
Szondi's theory avoids this a-historical pitfall in two ways.
First of all, he demonstrates in his own work that it is not only possible, but sometimes necessary to examine one form, one moment in
relation to that which immediately preceded it History then manifests
itself in the demonstration of difference. This as I will show later, is
what Szondi does in his work with the modern drama when he
analyzes it in terms of its failure to sustain the old drama's formcontent relationship: the modern playwright tries to resolve the contradiction between a new social content and a form which, t}ecause it
IS historically conditioned, is no longer able to inform the statement
of the content History and the process of change appear here as
"technical contradictions," as "technical difficulties internal to the
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concrete work itself "" This point is extremely important for an understanding of Szondi's method. It shows that unlike other historically
oriented critics, Szondi assumes that the social problematic of an age
does not simply manifest itself m the content of the work of art. It appears as part of the formal signifying process social contradictions
present themselves as aesthetic problems which the work of art itseif
attempts to resolve Thus, as Szondi indicates in his essay on Diderot,
the movement of the hermeneutic circle must be from the "text" out
into the sociai context and then back into the text Exactly how this
"text" should be defined is a problem I will discuss later For the
moment, I simply wish to point out the way in which Szondi organizes,
successfully as far as I am concerned, the process of investigating
the interrelationship between language, text and history
The second source of diachronic movement is to be found m
the critic's relationship to the object of his study. Szondi reminds us
that criticism and critical models are also historically bound
phenomena and, therefore, have the tendency to isolate and fix that
which may in fact be part of a process Such model building may be
quite successful when the critic turns toward the past. Critics in fact
prove their own historical distance from this past through their ability
to define and close out earlier formal processes But the critic also
marks his historical position by his inability to stand outside his own
historical-conceptual frame of reference Critics including Szondi
himself enable us to understand socio-aesthetic process and perceive
what IS fundamentaily new to their age through their inability to adequately account for these new artistic structures History manifests
Itself m what is left out, in what the critical rhetoric cannot name
Despite these limitations, the critic can try to establish what
Szondi calls a "semantics of form," which can be used to analyse the
form content relationship of a given historical period. What Szondi
has in mind here seems to be the possibility of a semiotic analysis of
the signifying structures which organize the dramatic performance as
a whole. If he did not say precisely this, it is undoubtedly because
these terms were not yet available to him. Szondi's language and
choice of focusas his own theory predictsdepend on his situation. The terms he uses are nonetheless adequate for his analysis of
the forms and dramatic theory of earlier drama If they work only partially for the modern drama it is because Szondi cannot escape his
contemporaneousness with the object of his investigation. As I will
try to demonstrate later in this paper, a further historical remove is
necessary to deal with the formal principles of the modern as such
Szondi could anticipate this problem, but he did not live long enough
to overcome it. Thus we must look at his work m two different lights,
first of all in terms of his successful description of prior dramatic
forms and then in terms of his method and what it offers us m our own
encounters with more recent drama.
When analyzing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drama,
Szondi sets about showing the homologies between the signifying
properties of acting space, decor, language and gesture. He
demonstrates how these systems work together to create a single
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far from reestablishing the internal perspective of the old drama, are
actually incapable of controlling or defining their worlds. They are
locked inside their subjectivity and their metaphysical helplessness.
On the plane of formal organization, this leads to the appearance of
the "epic" in the dramatic and the epic narrative figure as a necessary
formal principle to bind the dramatic movement together
There is no question about the fact that Szondi's analysis of
early modern drama provides rewarding insights into its formative
problems His method gives new insight into the formal experimentation which marks the advent of the modern drama. It must be
added, however, that his critical model also obliges him to ignore or
merely hint at the significance of other fundamental aspects of
modern theater practice. As is the case with many other historically
oriented analyses, Szondi's decision to use the pre-modern as a
model for demonstrating "difference" m the modern drama has led
him to deal only with those aspects of the drama for which there is
adequate terminology withm the old modela model developed out
of a modern critical perception of the inactive forms which preceded
it. Szondi's success with the early modern drama stems in great part
from the historical position which they hold in common. Ibsen, as
Szondi demonstrates so brilliantly, focused primarily on a lost past, a
past in which there existed the possibility of creating an active communal presence. His drama is, in effect, a statement about the loss of
this past and its unity, both of which earlier drama had produced in its
systematic representation of the middle class perspective. In other
words, Ibsen's early plays announce in their own terms the historical
and aesthetic movement which Szondi later rephrases in the language
of critical analysis. He doubles Ibsen's dramatized nostalgia for
unified systems of social and dramatic representation with a critical
nostalgia of his own. As a modern critic Szondi can only describe the
art and the world of the modern as a dis-ordering of the stable
systems of signification which the past offers him once he has
mastered the formal structures of its art. This is evident not only in his
critical focus, but also in his terminology, which reflects the modern's
concern with metaphysical, and spiritual unity as well as the modern
critics' dependence on traditional aesthetic and its categorieslyric,
epic and drama. Szondi equates the "epic" with the modern in contradistinction to the "dramatic" which serves to designate the formal
properties of middle class drama.
Because of his interest in locating the "epic," that is,
non-"dramatic" features in the modern drama, Szondi fails to notice
that this "epic" quality is really part of a larger formal process.
Because of this failure he makes distinctions between Brecht's
theater, for example, and that of Pirandello, Wilder and Miller, which
are distinctions only in terms of the earlier drama not in the formal
terms which the modern drama itself generates.
Szondi was at least partially aware of this problem t am sure,
since he indirectly raised the question by Including a discussion of
Piscator and his work as a director In a book that is otherwise devoted
to dramatic texts. Why was a director included along with these
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adding here as well "The object of art[ modern art that is] is to put to
sleep the active and rather the resistant forces of our personality and
to so lead us to a state of perfect docility where we realize the idea
which one suggests to us " "
This then is the function of the director His social and
aesthetic role in the modern period is to complete the incomplete, to
overcome the lack of a common base in the culture of the modern
which he himself represents This is also why Piscator must appear in
Szondi's booknot as Piscator the man, but as representative of the
directorial function which Szondi's method allows him to sense but
not describe
Had Szondi recognized this initial condition of the modern
drama, his discussion of Brecht and other, later playwrights would
also have been different I only have time to sketch out some of these
differences, but I hope that my suggestions will illuminate the formal
development in and the historical movement of recent drama
Brecht and Pirandello represent dialectically opposite
responses to the condition of the modern, though each in his own way
codifies Its formal process Pirandello's plays assert the impossibility
of establishing a common and meaningful order whether on the level
of language, dramatic form or social interaction Plays like Henry IV
and SIX Characters m Search of an Author represent the ideological
position of the modern which Pirandello attempts to naturalize m his
texts on dramatic theory He propounds a theory of the necessary
presence of the author/director as receiver and transmitter of ordering
perceptions into the unmanagable world depicted m his plays Brecht
too was m the forefront of the movement towards a radical fragmentation of the dramatic world But his dramatic theory attempts to
naturalize a somewhat different explanation of this world By doubling the fragmentation of the formal structure of the drama through his
alienation effects, he creates a "dis-disorder" which implies that the
apparently disjointed and incomprehensible experience of life m fact
has a social and historical explanation. In the matatext of performance, his alienation effects establish a semiosis which signifies the
return of interpretive control to the audience. At the same time the
fragementation depicted by the stage set is revealed as illusory, light
once again shines forth from the house onto the stage The stage no
longer sheds its light on spectators sitting in the dark
Brecht never completely broke out of the dramatic structure of
the modern howeverindeed he could not. He could only symbolically assert the possibility of a reunified socio-aesthetic practice His
theory of codes, if one can call it that, was of necessity more intuitive
than scientific and his plays remain within the same modern frame of
reference as Szondi's early dramatic criticism. They share a nostalgia
for the order and community implicit m the form and dialogue of
earlier drama and a Utopian desire for a world in which the bits and
pieces of the modern would be rejoined At the same time, their work
demonstrates the absence of any such unity
The process of the modern drama of which this absence is a
sign has been carried to Its logical conclusion in the works of recent
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17
Essai sur les donnes immidiates de la conscience, fifth ed (Pans, 1906), cited in
Sounau, p 66
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