Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Irish Drama Michael Bogucki A
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BRUTAL PHANTOMS: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Irish Drama Michael Bogucki A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2009 Approved by: John McGowan Nicholas Allen Gregory Flaxman Megan Matchinske Toril Moi ©2009 Michael Bogucki All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT MICHAEL BOGUCKI: Brutal Phantoms: Modernism, Ireland, and Anti-Theatrical Drama (Under the direction of John McGowan and Nicholas Allen) This dissertation analyzes the fate of realist theatrical conventions in the work of George Moore, John M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce. These writers reconfigured the conditions of theater so as to avoid the debased forms of expression they associated with the performance practices of British touring companies and with commercialism generally. Each playwright experimented with texts, performers, audiences, and theater spaces so as to foreground and criticize those aspects of the material stage they found inauthentic, sensational, and excessive. Recent narratives of the relationship between modernism and theater have rightly focused on the way literary or imagist avant-gardes generate new modes of innovative, radicalized theatrical display by, in effect, taking the stage outdoors or into the text. By locating these writers‘ anxieties about theatricality in the overlapping histories of the Irish Revival and the economies of transatlantic theater production, I argue that the theater itself was often the site of its own most sophisticated critiques, and that the strategies these late naturalist and early modernist writers develop resonate with contemporary questions in Irish studies and performance theory about the status of live theater. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………….....1 Chapter I. THEATRICAL INTERIORS……………………….…………………..22 George Moore, Counterfeit Modernist…………………….…………….22 Naturalist Language-Games……………………...……..………………..37 II. METROPOLITAN PERFORMANCE…………………….…………....56 Ibsen‘s Currency…………………………………………………………56 The Art of Making Up…………………………………………………...70 III. ECHO SIGN…………………………………………………………….84 Theatrical Bodies………………………………………………………...89 Mourning the Living……………………………………………………107 IV. HOLLOW LANGUAGE……………………………………………….124 Mechanism and Melodrama…………………………………………….127 Motley Shadows………………………………………………………...142 V. THE IMPRESS OF THEATER………………………………………...163 Theater in Suspension…………………………………………………..163 Unauthorized Absolution……………………………………………….172 Language in Private…………………………………………………….194 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………....203 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………….216 WORKS CITED…………………………………….………………………………….236 iv INTRODUCTION ―All art is a battle with the phantoms of the mind.‖ -W.B. Yeats, quoting Henrik Ibsen ―It may almost be said that before a verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal.‖ -J.M. Synge Reorientations in our understanding of the nature and scope of performance events have renewed attention to the welter of conflicts, controversies, scandals, riots, and discourses in Ireland from the beginnings of the Irish Revival to the Civil War. Many of these events can be interpretively modeled as operating in ―theaters‖ in a general sense, but more specifically the theater and the values associated with theatricality often shaped and slanted the terms in which these events were understood. As a target for cultural critics and a set of vaguely aesthetic criteria for artists, theatricality took on often contradictory meanings. It became a term for both fraudulent performance and alienated spectatorship, even while the sensational spectacles and blatant political melodramas of the popular theaters in Dublin and London offered exactly the kind of force and effect Irish playwrights were hoping to create. Writers roughly associated with literary naturalism often defined their work as making these sensations and political effects more precise, reducing the threat of theater‘s artificiality to a purely visual scene. At the same time, recoiling from such scenes—and revolted by how easily they could be co-opted by the emerging entertainment industry—writers associated with literary modernism attempted to reject theatricality altogether, either by emphasizing fictional or diegetic qualities of their plays or by avoiding the material stage entirely. This dissertation analyzes a series of in-between cases, plays and performances that operate on both sides of the naturalist/modernist dichotomy. George Moore, John M. Synge, Bernard Shaw, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce all wrote plays aimed one way or another toward production on the stage of the Abbey Theatre, but each of them envisioned drastically different conditions for theatrical performance. The fate of realist theatrical conventions in each writer‘s prose and drama traces a network of connections between anti-theatrical impulses and modernist ideas about the autonomy of language. In strikingly different ways, these writers reconfigured the conditions of theater so as to avoid the debased forms of expression they associated with the performance practices of British touring companies and with commercialism generally. Each playwright experimented with texts, performers, audiences, and theater spaces so as to foreground and criticize those aspects of the material stage they found inauthentic, sensational, and excessive. Recent narratives of the relationship between modernism and theater have rightly focused on the way literary or imagist avant-gardes generate new modes of innovative, radicalized theatrical display by, in effect, taking the stage outdoors or into the text. By locating these writers‘ anxieties about theatricality in the overlapping histories of the Irish Revival and the economies of transatlantic theater production, I argue that the theater itself was often the site of its own most sophisticated critiques, and that the strategies these late naturalist/early modernist writers develop 2 resonate with contemporary questions in Irish studies and performance theory about the status of live theater. The history of the reception of the dramatic work of Moore, Synge, and Joyce in particular is a disjointed account of failures, riots, mismatched expectations, and deferred encounters. The plays they wrote were aimed at different audiences, but, even more strikingly, were the product of very different concepts of theatricality. Basic questions about what a theater is and how it generates its effects trouble the works of these Irish writers, presenting different configurations of discourse about the aesthetics of absorption, the alienation of spectatorship, and the impinging horizons of public space. Assigning these configurations to ill-fitting categories like naturalist, proto-modernist, and modernist diminishes the shock of realizing that these three versions of theatricality emerged so closely in time, say 1893-1911 for Moore‘s experiments, 1902-1909 for Synge‘s, and 1912-1922 for Joyce‘s. Our own inheritance of modernist doctrines leads us to picture the unevenness of three competing versions of a roughly naturalist or realistic aesthetic as signs of the difficult birth of proper or ―high‖ modernist techniques in the theater. Thus, theater‘s ―backwardness‖ as a medium—especially compared to film—is understood retrospectively as the product of its reliance on naïve mimetic forms and performances. Yet recent productions of early twentieth-century Irish naturalist works have suggested just the opposite. These plays are not simply almost modernist. They are complex engagements with senses of theatricality and expression which later avant-gardes rejected, repressed, or derided. For each of these writers, this study asks three interrelated questions: First, what is the relationship between their prose and their dramatic texts? Second, what is the 3 relationship between these dramatic texts and the dominant practices of an expanding transatlantic theater industry? Third, how does the often minor resistance these texts present to theater as an industry compare with later ―serious‖ avant-garde and modernist rejections of the stage, especially in light of the fact that these modernist refusals no longer seem possible in an age where theater itself is a marginal—if not ―minor‖—form in a dominantly televisual age? The complex aesthetic created by Synge and other ―realist‖ dramatists is still often interpreted by means of political resonance or as a precursor to later modernist experiments, i.e. as either politically radical uses of dessicated forms or flawed proto-modernist effects. This dissertation takes up a series of in-between cases, moments when Irish drama‘s political effects are irritating, but not yet explosive, and its relation to its own medium is skeptical, but not yet hostile. As it could not after Independence and the Civil War, theater could still in the opening years of the twentieth century produce images that were simultaneously complicit and critical. Despite the overwhelming amount of work done on theater from the Revival to the Civil War, very few studies have engaged with both theater‘s relationship to imperial authority and its role in the emergence of modernist theater innovations. The work of Cheryl Herr, Stephen Watt, and, more recently, Karen Vandervelde has recovered the vibrancy and intricacy of nationalist melodramas, showing the indebtedness of Synge and Joyce in particular to many of their sensational