The Problem of Realism in Modern Drama

The Problem of Realism in Modern Drama
Author(s): Jovan Hristić and Maria Shoup

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 8, No. 2, Explorations in Literary History (Winter,
1977), pp. 311-318
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/468524
Accessed: 12-07-2019 13:53 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to New Literary History
This content downloaded from 78.184.194.99 on Fri, 12 Jul 2019 13:53:33 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Problem of Realism in Modem Drama
Jovan Hristid
W E COULD BEGIN with a number of possible definitions of realism, and

then observe the ways in which they can be applied to the modem
drama. But it seems to me that there is an approach which is far more
relevant to the problem of realism in modem drama. We should not forget that
literary movements do not take the form of more or less abstract theoretical
definitions: they are closely connected to certain literary genres, and we can
scarcely think about them without considering these genres at the same time.
Romanticism represents the absolute domination of lyric poetry, and when we
say "realism," there immediately comes to mind the novel, "the major vehicle
of literary realism," as Harry Levin has called it. The novel is certainly the genre
in which the ideals of realism are best and most adequately realized-to be
more precise, in order that they be realized at all, the novel was needed, the
only literary genre equipped to recreate observed and everyday life in a way
which would satisfy our instinct for imitation and the desire for recognition.
That is why the problem of realism in modern drama should first of all be
treated as a problem of the relationship between the drama and the novel. It is
not at all accidental that the beginnings of naturalistic theater are connected
with the dramatization of one novel in particular, Zola's Thir'ese Raquin. In this
manner realist theater (the expressions realism and naturalism can for now be
considered synonymous) already at the very outset emphasized the close tie
with the art of the novel, which had become a certain type of model for
observing and representing life. Nor can we forget that Ibsen's realist plays-
the first realist plays in the history of modem theater-are often considered
final chapters of unwritten novels. It is for this reason that Lukics says that
Rosmersholm is in fact a novel, whose last chapter Ibsen "dressed in the exterior
form of the drama," and Raymond Williams says that The Wild Duck "involves
a degree of detail which cannot fully be realized in the explicit, spoken
framework of the play. The refinement of the characters, one might say, is a
fictional refinement; the degree of attention to motive and behavior is that of
the psychological drama." In the jargon of the theatrical world, realist drama is
often called "the art of the novel on the stage."
What does all this mean? Ibsen is a writer who initiated the modem period in
the history of drama, and when at the very beginning of this period we find
that the drama is in such close proximity to the novel, something is revealed
about the nature not only of realist drama, but also of modem drama in
general. Ibsen wanted to return to drama its lost literary and intellectual dignity
and-consciously or unconsciously-he found himself close to the art of the
novel, the central literary genre of the second half of the nineteenth century.
312 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
The novel was-and still remains

fashion possible about problems
and Ibsen wanted, without doub
them. He wished to show how t
accomplish this, he had to write
the novel spoke of, in a way wh
proof of seriousness, just as in
from classical mythology and h
serious literary genre, and not j
a genre which is in constant
dramatists, when they wish to e
often to others for help. When R
Livy, it is not only an exhibition
writing for the theater can be
nineteenth century, when socio
form in which we know them t
life, expressing certain ultimate
That is why Ibsen leaned on th
the novel because it was a guaran
even possible to show who his m
were meant to be studies of soc
La Com'die humaine. Admittedl
great second-rate writer, but bo
man in the various relationships
La Comedie humaine-if we have
without int9rruptions; we cann
another. But if it were possible, in
Ibsen's thirteen realist plays on
personalities would appear in fr
great capitalist firms, public li
themselves, and those who do n
This relationship with the novel
it only the beginning of modem
develops within its framework.
of the novel: for example, Chekh
write novels. Drama was his gr
psychological analysis of charact
accepted temporal extension, w
say that we discover behind his
frontiers of drama-as all great w
they write-in the direction of
succeeded in incorporating into
English language. On the other
antinaturalistic reaction which in
ism, or realism, but also an effo
effort to create, in our time, a sp
But what is this specific dramat
THE PROBLEM OF REALISM IN MODERN DRAMA 313
ately are the limitations of the drama in relationship

says Una Ellis-Fermor in her brilliant book The Fron
"strong passions, a brief, shapely series of related d
idea, directness, rapidity and shapeliness of presen
matic form are: brevity, concentration and immediac
artistic form, concentration of emotion and tempo,
return, from this spring "heavy liabilities inheren
poverty of implication or detail, thinness of charact
comment." In contrast to drama, the novel is an en
genre that can assimilate practically everything; it is,
her study Roman des origines et origines du roman-
litterature, le roman fait rigoureusement ce qu'i
d'utiliser a ses propres fins la description, la narrat
commentaire, le monologue, le discours... le roman
ouvert a tous les possibles, en quelque sorte indefini
is a genre which can support a mixture of genres,
especially in these times; drama, by its very nature,
because it is performed on the stage. If it can be said i
destined for purity, and that is one of the reasons w
more tempted to write drama than have novelists.
Yet this formal purity is far from being the only
dramatic form. There are several far more evident features with which we must
begin. In his The Historical Novel LukAcs suggests that drama is a basically
public art:
As soon as the absent fourth wall of the theatre became only a transparent attic from
Lesage's "Le Diable briteux," drama ceased to become really dramatic. For the individ-
ual viewing drama does not accidentally participate in some sort of accidental event
taken from life, does not observe through some key-hole the private life of his fellow-
men, but on the contrary that which is presented to him, in its most profound content
and in its essential form, must be a public event. The difficulty of a modern dramatic
writer's work lies just in finding such topics in life and in subjecting these topics to an
internal dramatic transformation so that, in their entirety, and in the sense previously
referred to, they can satisfy the public. And here a modem dramatic writer must fight
against not only the live material of modern society in the external sense, but also
against his own living feelings which originate in the roots of that society.
Only what is meant by "public"? Is it only an event which is not private, that
is to say, which does not limit itself to the space of one room in a house into
which only those are allowed who are invited? No doubt we live in times of
privacy, when everything most important in man's life takes place in his house
or in his room, out of reach of those who are not directly involved in the events
in question. On the other hand, the idea of what is public has degenerated to
what we read in newspapers or see on television. And just because of that
degeneration, drama finds itself in a rather paradoxical situation: by its most
profound nature, drama is a public art, but an ever smaller circle of truly
serious and meaningful events is public today. That which is public is in fact
only the visible result of what is to us an inaccessible and concealed mise-en-
scene; what is important take

the props, and we see only the
we ourselves do not have acce
public but actually only a deco
neous public realm of the pol
space where I appear to others
merely like other living or in
itly." Only in the private realm
for his actions and their cons
their consequences have signif
ble, in respect to which he is
upon.
However, this concept of the public realm does not mean only that an event
is not private, that it is limited in its consequences and significant only to a few
persons who participate directly in it. For Lukacs, the dramatic hero is similar
to Hegel's "universal-historical individual," that is, he is a personality whose
"particular goals contain what is essential in the will of the universal spirit": "a
completely developed, dramatically formed plastic personality of the 'univer-
sal-historical individual' is presented in such a way that this personality, in that
behavior to which he is driven by conflict, finds not only a form of direct and
complete expression, but that expression at the same time comes to represent
the general social, historical, and human balance of the struggle." This forma-
tion may appear quite abstract and indefinite, especially for those who do not
have great sympathy for Hegel's philosophical jargon. In fact, Lukacs wants to
say the same thing that Northrop Frye says about the tragic hero: "The tragic
hero is very great as compared with us, but there is something else, something
on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is small. This
something else may be called God, gods, fate, accident, fortune, necessity,
circumstance, or any combination of these, but whatever it is the tragic hero is
our mediator with it." In other words, conflict between two persons in a play is
not only a conflict between two individuals, but something larger and more
embracing is at stake, something that is projected on a more universal plane.
"L'essential, pour le tragique, est de mettre en pr6sence transcendence et
liberte," says the philosopher Henri Gouhier, and this observation does not
refer only to tragedies, but to great drama in general insofar as we consider that
"tragedy" and "great drama" are synonymous, as in fact they are. In contrast
to the novel, which does not require that universal and transcendental plane on
which conflicts and events are projected in the drama, the drama is always
focused on something which is beyond and above life. The novel is a form of
gossip, says Virginia Woolf, and this clearly expresses the basic direction taken
by the novel: towards personality, towards personal history and psychology.
Drama is turned away from personality, towards something which surpasses
it. "Le theatre ne s'occupe pas de la r6alit6, mais seulement de la verit6," says
Sartre. In contrast to the novel, which is a layman's form, drama is a religious
genre par excellence: from man, it always turns toward the Other, toward a
broader context in which human actions acquire a meaning. That context we
can call by various names, but what is important is its continual presence.
The presence of this transcendental plane on whi

means that drama is not a picture of life, as is the re
of life. Of course, it is extremely difficult to define
by "picture" and "formula," and for this reason w
roundabout path. Instead of a definition, let us con
a negative example: O'Neill's drama, Mourning Bec
tried to create from the classical tragedy, Aeschylus'
psychological drama, and the result is a psychology
to turn into the pathological. In Oresteia, meanwhil
ical, because the motives which drive Clytemnest
and Orestes and Electra to murder Clytemnestra a
from those everyday psychological motives which
room. We cannot be completely convinced by the
(Electra) toward Christine (Clytemnestra), nor the
(Orestes) toward Christine: they are only crutches
logically convincing and recognizable a set of circu
nonpsychological. But the relationships in the fam
translated into the language of our psychology, b
hardly any role in them. They relate to our lives in a
not as an extension of our psychological and empirica
way that mathematical formulae express certain re
world, translating them into a completely differen
that transcendental level where events achieve th
does not exist; in its place, he uses psychologically
necessarily lead us to the pathological, in the same
against motion-which can be considered as an attem
ical concepts directly into the language of percep
Now we can see more clearly where the problem
drama. The demands of realism that events which we see in drama be immedi-
ately recognizable are in fact contrary to demands which drama must make of
events about which it speaks. To be more exact, drama by its nature is a
nonrealistic genre. It is hardly accidental that the idea of "realism," when
applied to drama, has come to have pejorative connotations. Thus T. S. Eliot
speaks about the "desert of absolute likeness to reality," and Francis Fergusson
finds that "modem realism is a lingua franca, a pigeon-English of the imagina-
tion which everyone in our time can understand . . . If we have lost our
bearings, if we automatically reject any stable picture of the human condition,
we can still gossip about the neighbors and eavesdrop on other lives." And a
man of the theater, the director Branko Gavella, concludes: "realism is too
limited, and too narrow to fill the large spiritual space which the stage pre-
sents." What is more, we hardly speak about realistic drama; most often we
speak about "naturalistic" theater or drama, in this way tacitly assuming that
naturalism is an expression which does not flatter drama, but quite the oppo-
site.
In any case, the problem is not only that realistic drama-as T. S. Eliot
thinks-lacks firm conventions which would hold it "within the limitations of
art," or (as Fergusson says) that realistic drama is "paradoxical theater, which
pretends to be not art, but life

tions come later; they are som
That which is basic for Greek t
which is "within the limitatio
looking at people, for which c
Without this manner of observ
become an empty form, which
resurrect for our time conventi
of W. B. Yeats could serve as a
only a question of aesthetics, b
phers call a world view, and th
of realism, with their demand
fidelity to our perceived world,
rejects any idea of the possible
For, can we say that a great dr
next to the brilliant creations of which we are aware, the answer to this
question cannot be given with certainty. First of all, for one very general
reason, which relates not only to drama. Our age is not an age which has
created forms capable of a long and fruitful life; it is an age of individual efforts
pushed to their extremes, which demonstrate to us the existence of certain
problems, but whose solution is valid only for one writer, and no one else.
Those who follow in the footsteps of these writers always appear a bit comical,
and end up revealing more about their origins than becoming associated with
the elaboration of a fruitful program. What Eliot said for Joyce's Ulysses-one is
enough-applies here also. In that respect, Pirandello is a challenging example.
With his "theater within the theater" it appears that he was on the track of
creating a great dramatic form for our time, a dramatic form of an age which
rejects everything that is transcendental as far as man is concerned; yet the
plays which Pirandello wrote after Six Characters in Search of an Author fall far
short of this first effort. Neither Each in His Own Way nor Tonight We Improvise is
the elaboration of a fruitful discovery, but both are rather a marking time,
repeating in a somewhat monotonous fashion an idea in such a way that it
turns into a cliche. The dramatic metaphors of the "theater of the absurd" have
been too quickly transformed into cliches; Brecht's epic theater is somewhat
more fruitful-his followers at least look less comical-but its inherent limita-
tions lie in the fact that Brecht's view of man is too narrow: he thought,
mistakenly, that society is the court of final judgment before which all ques-
tions of man's fate are decided. Thus we return to what has been said before: to
be created, a great dramatic form demands a method of observation of man
which is directly contrary to our own.
That is why, no matter how many efforts are made to break with realism, it is
characteristic that modern drama returns to realism. Three of the most recent
plays by playwrights whom we usually place among the avant-garde, or
nonrealistic, demonstrate this unambiguously. I am thinking of Not I by
Beckett, All Over by Albee, and Old Times by Pinter. After the great dramatic
metaphors in Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Beckett has more and more
begun to approximate a special version of psycho

most recent plays are almost all realistic, with one
cleverly hides their realistic basis. Play is, in fact, a
into fragments by a complex theatrical apparatus--
large earthenware jugs, lights which illuminate th
remembrances of which only fragments are left. E
realistic drama of the Ibsen type clothed in a bizarr
see the woman who speaks, but only the reactions
addressing herself. Not I is also very close to psyc
the fact that the theatrical presentation is unusua
consciousness monologue by an enormous mou
obvious model is the monologue of Molly Bloom at
man listens to, from time to time lifting his hand
From the theatrical point of view, this is a brillian
avant-garde achieves an almost classical purity and
tally, Not I is a psychological and realistic play, not
which the listener listens to is a realistic story bro
because-and this is still more important-in this p
theme which is typically psychological and realistic
ness. At first glance this may sound conventional, bu
is not, as we often think, that of the difficulty of c
(that is banal) but that some of our most importan
up by those for whom they were not intended. In Be
listening to that which, clearly, is not intended for
which is not directed toward anyone. And we all,
for someone to hear and understand that which, i
anyone, and which no one can understand. Her
found an adequate dramatic form for the basic h
privacy. Similarly, both in the case of Albee an
inferior to Beckett--characters speak in monolog
overhear rather than listen to. If the form of the
were not today overworked, Old Times would be su
play of psychological causes and consequences is n
longer believe in causality in the unswerving w
rather events, words, sentences, memories, associa
from nowhere, as though they fall before us like
these events and these memories belong absolutel
psychological drama.
We must be clear about one thing: art never ren
conquered. Psychological realism-no matter how m
and represents, in fact, the novel on the stage-is s
us as a fact; it can be the "lingua franca of the im
created any other. We have not created either a p
language today is a caricature of language--or a g
visions of the human situation; we have created t
loneliness, and we have nourished it, regardle
expresses. And it is for this reason

not in the discovery of great dram
rather in the manner in which on
loneliness has been portrayed.
FACULTY OF DRAM
BELGRADE
(Translated by Maria Shoup)

The Problem of Realism in Modern Drama

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Problem of Realism in Modern Drama

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Problem of Realism in Modern Drama

Author(s): Jovan Hristić and Maria Shoup

W E COULD BEGIN with a number of possible definitions of realism, and

The novel was-and still remains

ately are the limitations of the drama in relationship

scene; what is important take

The presence of this transcendental plane on whi

pretends to be not art, but life

begun to approximate a special version of psycho

expresses. And it is for this reason

(Translated by Maria Shoup)

You might also like