Download POSTMODERN TIPPING POINTS

BEGINNINGS
POSTMODERN TIPPING POINTS
Daniel K. Jernigan
BECOMING POSTMODERN
This collection of essays begins with the observation that while other
genres (notably, fiction and film) have been thoroughly examined from
a postmodern perspective, drama has received relatively little attention
concerning its place in the postmodern literary landscape. In Postmodern Drama (1984), Rodney Simard undertakes the first foray into this
field, but Simard applies the term postmodern far too loosely, using it as
little more than a convenient label with which to explain various forms
of experimentation in contemporary theatre. Around the Absurd (1990),
edited by Ruby Cohn and Enoch Brater, is subtitled Essays on Modern
and Postmodern Drama, and yet in her introduction, Cohn manages to
avoid the word postmodern entirely; moreover, only the H. Porter Abbott
essay attempts even the briefest definition of the term. Moreover, while
Marvin Carlson’s Deathtraps: The Postmodern Comedy Thriller (1993)
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carefully implements a description of the postmodern as outlined by
Linda Hutcheon in order to recognize that a postmodern element exists
in contemporary dramatic murder mysteries, Carlson’s focus is so decidedly narrow as to be of little use to describing a postmodern drama more
generally.
The most notable study of the postmodern in drama is Stephen Watt’s
Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (1998), which, upon
recognizing the poor showing drama makes in various theorizations of the
postmodern condition, suggests that the solution to this oversight is simply
a matter of learning to read the postmodern in theatre; for Watt, postmodernity is in the eye of the beholder. However, while similarly concerned
with querying the reasons why there is such a dearth of postmodern dramatic criticism, this collection tacks differently to Watt’s exploration in
that many of the enclosed essays are most fundamentally concerned with
how the various morphological features of theatre promote a cycle of tilting to and away from the postmodern.
Another useful account of the postmodern in drama comes in Austin Quigley’s essay “Pinter, Politics and Postmodernism.” Like Quigley,
I too “find myself much persuaded by [Jean-Francois] Lyotard’s argument that we would benefit by thinking of postmodernism as one of the
recurring phases of modernism rather than as something posterior to and
opposed to modernism,” (12) so much so, in fact, that this attitude toward
the postmodern lies behind the original conceptualization of this collection, which began with the observation that the postmodern in drama
pre-existed the postmodern in fiction, and moreover, has followed a very
different path.
Of equal importance to this discussion, however, is Lyotard’s account
of the postmodern era’s rejection of grand metanarrative truths in favor
of “the little narrative” (60) whose “rules…must be local…agreed on by
its present players and subject to eventual cancellation” (66). I would
argue, moreover, that the theatre’s unique potential for examining the
proliferation of locally agreed upon truths (i.e., its unique ability to question the boundary between the real and the artificial, the constructed and
the extant) makes the dearth of criticism on the postmodern in drama all
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the more profound. For what other genre allows its practitioners to wear
their constructivist attitude so boldly, allowing their characters to break
that fourth wall separating the stage from the audience in real time, with
a live audience, even as the play’s producer makes modifications to the
production in real time according to the needs of the moment (as can
be seen, for instance, in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an
Author).
In his foundational text on postmodernist trends in fiction (Postmodernist Fiction), McHale comments on how the unique features of theatre
can be exploited to metaleptical effect:
Metalepsis appears so early in twentieth-century drama, and
attains such precocious sophistication by comparison with prose
fiction, for reasons which should be fairly obvious. The fundamental ontological boundary in theater is a literal, physical threshold, equally visible to the audience and (if they are permitted to
recognize it) the characters: namely, the footlights, the edge of the
stage. (121)
Moreover, the fact that theatre is not only meant to be performed but also
reperformed (both on successive nights by a single theatre company as
well as throughout geographic space and time by a nearly limitless number of additional theatre companies) makes the dramatic text especially
susceptible to reinterpretation (or reconstruction) at the hands of producers, directors, and actors.
Given these features of live theatre, it is reasonable to assume that the
ontological and epistemological fragility of the theatrical environment
would make it a particularly engaging forum within which to investigate a wide variety of postmodern crises, be they epistemological, ontological, aesthetic, or ideological. This observation, in turn, leads to the
fundamental questions driving this collection: That is, “Why hasn’t dramatic experimentation of this sort become the norm?” and “Why hasn’t
it at least become prevalent enough that “postmodern drama” is as publicly recognizable a literary type as are ‘postmodern fiction’ and ‘postmodern film’?”
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One reasonable answer to these questions—and the answer driving
much of the discussion in this collection—is that perhaps these postmodern attitudes had become so routine within drama by the time postmodernism came into its own as a literary and cultural category with
which to describe important innovations in post WWII fiction and film
that the term lacked both categorical utility and interpretive resonance
when it came to contemporary drama; and having become postmodern
so early, it is also possible that by this time, drama had simply tipped
away from the postmodern, a possibility assumed within McHale’s own
description of the postmodern’s relation with the modern:
Intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes at a certain point
ontological plurality or instability: push epistemological questions far enough and they “tip over” into ontological questions.
By the same token, push ontological questions far enough and
they tip over into epistemological questions—the sequence is not
linear and unidirectional, but bidirectional and reversible. (11)
This account of how fiction tips back and forth from the modern to the
postmodern serves as a fair description of what most of these essays take
notice of vis-à-vis drama, except that with theatre, the “literal, physical
threshold, equally visible to the audience” causes this tipping to be intensified; in turn, those very same morphological features of theatre that
allow that drama tip toward the postmodern in the first place might just
as quickly allow that drama to tip away from the postmodern as well. For
example, someone all too comfortable with a postmodern attitude toward
knowledge and reality might suddenly shift for any one of a number of
reasons (ideological, aesthetic, by sheer accident, or out of desire to parody either mode) into a more definitive attitude toward knowledge and
reality. Indeed, a historical overview of nineteenth and twentieth century
drama clearly suggest that the fourth wall is as easily ignored—think
Realism—as it is made use of (again, the best example is Pirandello).
In general, the first half of the collection contains essays which consider the circumstances under which theatre tips toward the postmodern,
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while the second half of the collection contains essays which consider
the circumstances under which theatre tips away from the postmodern.
Moreover, these initial essays do much to provide substance to Jean
Francois Lyotard’s claim that “[a] work can become modern only if it
is first postmodern” (79). Indeed, without such a statement from one of
postmodernism’s foremost theorists, Jenn Stephenson’s essay on King
Lear (herein), which finds convincing postmodern dramatic features
in Shakespeare, might strain this collection’s credibility. Instead, the
essay’s thesis (the reasonableness of which is substantiated by Lyotard)
only reinforces the central conceit of the work—which is that the unique
morphological features of drama lead to the early and inevitable appropriation of various postmodern concepts, or, as Stephenson puts it in
arguing the case for King Lear,
Any stage which has been rendered perceptually vacant by virtue
of the lack of representational scenery possesses this capability of
indeterminate blankness. Being characteristically without scenery
or indicative props (except on occasion), the professional London stage of the era of King Lear typifies this potential for scenic
ambiguity. It is the innate ability of the stage to be superficially
nowhere in particular that provides the key to this scene in performance. (33 in this volume)
While this might not quite be the self-conscious making “visible to the
audience and (if they are permitted to recognize it) the characters” of
“the footlights, the edge of the stage” that McHale speaks of, it is—at
the very least—a self-conscious exploitation of features all the same.
Bill Angus also explores how the Renaissance theatre presented a
particularly apt environment for the postmodern play not only because
of the theatre’s specific morphology, but because of the way in which
this morphology allowed its practitioners “a place where tacit questions can be asked of oppressive structures simply by recreating them
onstage, without necessarily making explicit their oppressive nature”
(48 in this volume) Angus uses this observation as a means to push his
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own understanding of why postmodernism never became a significant
categorical term for drama studies:
Finally, perhaps drama has not been perceived as postmodern
for critical purposes because, so closely and early allied to the
capitalist system, the structures that dictate self-reflexive drama
became mere conventions, themselves to be transcended in order
to keep “bums on seats”. No longer carrying weight as reflections
of social structures, they became mere techniques, the staples
of dramatic irony. An example of this might be the typical early
modern aside, conventionally taken for Protestant psychological
“interiority” rather than as deliberately self-conscious dramatic
technique. (57 in this volume)
Perhaps, moreover, it is because dramatic self-reflexivity has had such a
long, varied, and diverse theatrical history (stretching back, in its various
guises, at least as far as Shakespeare) that the explicit self-consciousness
of Pirandello and Brecht didn’t cry out for a whole new critical paradigm
with which to explain it, and instead, we got much more focused critical
treatments (the epic theatre, the theatre of the absurd).
Skipping forward some four hundred years from Shakespeare to the
twentieth century, we find that the fourth wall of theatre can be just as
important thematically in nominally realist texts as it was in Elizabethan times, regardless of the realist tendency to ignore this fourth wall.
Indeed, Ibsen himself provides a notable case in point, as a fair amount of
criticism has observed postmodern tendencies in his later work, making
Ibsen scholarship a notable exception to the lack of dramatic postmodern
criticism.1 Eugene McNulty’s essay “Parody, Metatheatre, and the Postmodern Turn” (herein) on the early twentieth century Irish playwrights
Bernard MacNamara and Denis Johnston paints a stark picture of how a
stifling romantic nationalism, for all its pretensions toward appropriating
realist representations of nationalist cultural traditions, is essentially constructivist in nature; moreover, McNulty uncovers a whole tradition of
self-conscious Irish drama wherein “the idea that history’s agents could
be re-performed through an unmediated process of realist presentation
is revealed as a convention in need of revisiting” (71 in this volume).
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McNulty’s essay is notable, moreover, for recognizing how essential the
realist mode of Synge is to the antirealism of postmodern self-consciousness playwrights, such a MacNamara and Johnston, who used the theatre
to comment on the very constructed nature of the original. In stark contrast to Synge’s Playboy of the Western World,
MacNamara’s peasant characters are not only aware of the needs
and desires that drive bourgeois tourists to seek them out, but are
prepared to enter into an economy of representational exchange
with them. Synge’s West has become, just two years after Playboy,
an early form of theme park—a simulacra of a lost authenticity.
(75 in this volume)
McNulty further notes how at times the tip from one mode to another
was as much sociocultural as it was performative-textual. Upon having his play Shadowdance rejected by the Abbey theatre with the note
“The Old Lady Says No,” (the old lady being Lady Gregory), Johnston
changed the title of his play to “The Old Lady Says No,” which, by the
time it was produced instead at The Gate, “was now a strident record
of the developing challenge posed by Johnston’s generation to the outmoded orthodoxies of the Abbey” (67 in this volume), which only goes
to show how, just as focusing on “the footlights, the edge of the stage,”
the very title of a work might play a part in explicating its constructed
qualities, as well as the artificiality of a tradition that had built its reputation on authenticity (i.e., the Abbey Theatre).
Lance Norman’s essay on Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (herein)
makes the case that even when a realist playscript itself doesn’t exactly
go out of its way to reference its constructed nature, it might tip over
into a self-conscious postmodernism all the same in performance. Norman argues, for instance, that “[Charles S.] Gilpin’s [the actor who made
the role famous] creation of Jones in a perfomative present supersedes
O’Neill’s creation of Jones in a historical text and offers a productive link
between Gilpin’s performance of Jones and Jones’ performance of self
within the narrative of the play” (91 in this volume). The argument here
is that even as the Brutus Jones of O’Neill’s play attempted to fashion
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his own self-identity, Gilpin overpowers the original text in just such a
way that he self-consciously fashions his own identity as an actor even as
he refashions Brutus Jones’ into a character of his own making. And in this
self-conscious appropriation, the production of the play tips over into an
explicitly self-conscious and self-correcting endeavor that highlights the
constructed nature of text, performance, and even character.
Norman proceeds to track this potential in The Emperor Jones to tip
over into the postmodern into the present, describing how the Wooster
group reinvented the play with “Kate Valk play[ing] Brutus Jones in
Blackface in 1993 and 2006” (88 in this volume), in a production that
“not only calls attention to theatrical representations of race” (86 in this
volume) but also “calls attention to the impossibility of subverting a historical text more than momentarily by privileging O’Neill’s language
and title” (103 in this volume). In turn, Norman makes clear the way in
which a single play can tip over into revealing its constructed nature,
only to tip away again once a particular theatrical run has been completed. We can, then, add actors to that list of items “equally visible to
the audience and (if they are permitted to recognize it) the characters.”
Looked at one way, Brutus Jones is simply a character fulfilling his part
in a realist narrative. Look again, and he is obviously an actor’s construct. Look again, and all you see is the character.
Teresa Requena Pelegrí sees Gertrude Stein as one of the earliest thoroughly postmodern playwrights and as embodying many of those same
characteristics that Patricia Waugh would eventually find to be definitive
of postmodernism:
[O]nce more, we find another point of connection with Waugh’s
definition of metafiction, as Waugh argues that frames constitute all those elements that constitute an identifiable fictional
space. Thus, openings, endings, the division of acts and scenes,
the use of curtains, etc. are all strategies designated to frame the
fictional status of the text. Therefore, the deconstruction of such
formal divisions leads to an explicit discussion of the arbitrary
nature of all demarcation, becoming one of the characteristics of
postmodernism. (Requena 121 in this volume)
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What is especially notable here is that in addition to making use of
the morphological features of the stage in order to self-consciously
reflect on the constructed nature of theatre, Requena also finds that
Stein has made use of the morphological features of the script (i.e.,
the “openings, endings, the division of acts and scenes” (a metatheatrical self-consciousness that wouldn’t arrive in fiction until at least
the late 60s).
Samuel Beckett, perhaps, has been critiqued more thoroughly from
a postmodern perspective than any other playwright, most notably for
how in a succession of plays beginning with Waiting for Godot, Beckett
went out of his way to disrupt grand narrative attitudes about truth and
language. And yet in response to this standard take on Beckett, Matthew
Paproth shows how easily even Beckett’s work tips from postmodern
to modern because of Beckett’s commitment to ensuring that his plays
were performed to his specifications:
What this means is that in his private role as writer, Beckett created texts that acknowledge the inherent and unavoidable artificiality of writing; however, in his public role as author, when it
came to questions of publishing and performing his texts, Beckett
was obsessed with maintaining the very authority in his own life
that he questions in his texts. (135 in this volume)
As Paproth explains it, this tendency in Beckett became ever more intense
as his career progressed, so that even “as his plays became increasingly
concerned with the impossibility of stable or controllable representation,
Beckett himself became increasingly concerned with controlling the
public reception of them” (135–136 in this volume).
REGRESSIVE MODERNITIES
After having become postmodern so early, there is some evidence that
drama moved beyond engagement with postmodern perspectives at the
same time that fiction and film were just beginning to engage them
(perhaps even for the very reasons mentioned by Murphy). Indeed, this
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is the argument of my own essay from this collection, “Tom Stoppard’s
Regressive Postmodernity,” which argues that after a brief flirtation
with postmodern attitudes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
and The Real Inspector Hound, Stoppard moved gradually away from
a postmodern treatment of theatrical space and philosophical concerns
during the rest of his career. The essays of the second half of this collection continue in the same vein, describing various playwrights,
from Caryl Churchill, to Tony Kushner, to Mark Ravenhill, who, after
having given consideration to and flirted with the postmodern, began
to move away from the postmodern in important, complex, and profound ways.
Christine Kiebuzinska’s “Elfriede Jelinek: Staging a Heideggerian Postmodern Debate in Totenauberg” argues that Jelinek is “postdramatic” in a way that at first recalls Brecht for its “unmasking of the
illusion that theatrical art replicates reality” where “there are no distinct
characters, and stage images are constructed out of film clips, disconnected collage-like stage imagery” (183 in this volume). However,
Kiebuzinska is also careful to detail where Jelinek’s aesthetic transcends
Brecht’s Epic theatre:
in her construction of postdramatic form in Totenauberg, she
is decidedly positioning herself as a post-Brechtian who rejects
his “self-confident reductionism that keeps planing off, sharpening, and pointing its subject matter like a lollipop, until finally
the specter of a sense comes out of the mouth of the actors.”
Brecht’s “tireless naming of victims and their exploiters” have
become for Jelinek akin to second-hand goods. (185–186 in this
volume)
As Kiebuzinska explains it, because there is none of the modernist moralizing of Brecht in Totenauberg, the metadramatic liveliness of the play
has more room to serve as a “deconstruction of past and present fictions”
(188 in this volume) surrounding the life and career of Martin Heidegger
and his Jewish student (and prewar lover), Hanna Arendt. Accordingly,
after balancing between the modern and the postmodern, the work
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finally does tip over into the postmodern, although only reluctantly so,
as Jelinek finally favours an Arendt who capitulates to “the new myths
of a self-conscious New Age ideology” rather than one who “took her
experiences with Nazi fascism as the departure point for her work on
totalitarianism” (202 in this volume).
Each of the remaining essays in the collection is similarly concerned
with playwrights who decry how the antirationalism often associated
with postmodernism is potentially disruptive of progressive politics, and
they describe how these playwrights make various theatrical concessions
that cause their work to tip away from the postmodern. In turn, these
essays indicate how self-consciousness about the tension between political progressivism and postmodernity is fast becoming the most salient
feature of a post-postmodern climate.
Set in a 1960s Germany struggling to move beyond its Nazi era indiscretions, Peter Weiss’s The Investigation, as Scott Windham explains it, is
engaged at least in part with exploring the tension between postmodern
aesthetics and moral and political judgments for how it “uses the postmodernist strategy of implicating the audience in the performance…
in order to achieve the modernist goal of providing a clear, morally
informed, politically actionable lesson to the audience” (207 in this
volume). Windham, however, is pessimistic about the potential of
Weiss’ approach:
Though it seems clear the playwright Weiss is promoting a clear,
universal truth in these cases, the structure of his play, with its
gaps, inconsistencies, and lack of finality, undermines that
attempt. …Thus, while the ending could be read as an attempt to
galvanize audiences against the attitude portrayed in the defendant’s final statement, it is also unsettlingly inconclusive. No one
emerges to counteract Defendant 1’s declaration; his is the more
vehement, though not better, argument. (223 in this volume)
According to Windham’s reading, The Investigation is a transitional piece
that seeks to employ postmodern aesthetics to political ends without being
fully cognizant of how this tension potentially undermines his agenda.
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As Prapassaree Kramer describes Caryl Churchill’s work in “Top
Girls: Postmodern Imperfect,” Top Girls also employs many of the traditional features of postmodernism, especially in the first act:
We seem to be in the realm of the postmodern eclectic, a playful
mix of perspectives and costumes which challenge our grasp on
reality and render all debates ultimately undecidable. What may
appear a chaotic bricolage, however, comes to resolve itself into
a decisive conclusion about the protagonist’s failures of comprehension on both a political and human level (and implicitly, therefore, a decisive conclusion about the correct perspective on these
human and political issues). (235 in this volume)
Churchill’s commitment to various postmodern features is part and parcel of a larger concern on her part: That is, the explicitly socialist-feminist
works of her immediate peers ignore some of the larger issues faced by
women in the Thatcher era. However, even while Churchill retains a tendency to reject epistemological trends generally, her desire to pursue claims
against both feminism and the patriarchy ultimately necessitates her turn
toward realism in the second two acts of the work.
The basically realistic portrait of the modern world in the second
and third acts serves to quash any such temptation to complacency
and also to reinforce the themes of the inadequacy of a feminism
based on individualist premises. …With its “retreat” into realism,
Top Girls may be said to deny us any sense of constant progress
towards a state of greater freedom, both on a political and a literary level. Its “imperfect” postmodernism is a feature––not a bug.
(252 in this volume)
Perhaps while similarly motivated as her peers, this final turn toward
realism might best be regarded as regressive rather moving beyond the
postmodern given how slight is its self-consciousness about the tension
between political progressivism and postmodernity.
James Fisher is understandably reluctant to peg Tony Kushner as
postmodern, at least in part because Kushner has described himself as
a “premodern modernist…not quite ready for postmodernism” (255 in
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this volume). Fisher does, however, find an aesthetic kinship between
Kushner and his more postmodern contemporaries:
Kushner’s postmodern aesthetic encompasses all of the significant signposts of contemporary culture: history, race, gender, politics, economics, spirituality. …He presents his themes through
a dramatic style encompassing both the real and the fantastic, as
exemplified by an hermaphroditic angel and various historical
ghosts floating through Angels, an otherwise realistic play. These
figures of an imaginary realm and of the historical past collide
with a very real present struggle in Angels and Kushner’s other
metatheatrical plays. (257 in this volume)
Among other connections to the postmodern, Fisher also notes that
Kushner often “goes beyond a mere articulated rejection of the status
quo to imagine a differently constructed society.” Clearly, grand narratives have been given up in Kushner’s work in favor of constructed ones
(a postmodern move, if ever there was one). However, Fisher goes on to
argue that “Kushner’s emerging aesthetic offers a vision in which postmodern pessimism is merged with his essential ‘optimism of the will’ ”
(261 in this volume) and that Kushner’s ultimate emphasis “is on what
must come next: the question of how America will choose to move forward into the future” (262 in this volume). Perhaps, the ability to replace
traditional grand narratives with new ones can tip negative, in which
case the postmodernist will decry how we will never have anything to
believe in again, or positive, in which case we get Kushner’s optimism of
the will). In either case, we find once again that Kushner’s work is selfconscious of this dilemma between postmodernity and political progressivism, even while Kushner himself seems more than willing to trade in
his postmodernity for a premodern modernism ideology.
BEYOND
THE
POSTMODERN
What late-twentieth-century drama seems to be telling us, then, is that in
the aftermath of a postmodern epistemology comes a post-postmodern ethical sensibility. This change has its counterpart in theoretical discussions of
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postmodernity, given its kinship to a paradox that has caused some leftist
critics to reject the positions of such contemporary philosophers as Michel
Foucault for what they see as his pessimism about the possibility of revolution. Vincent Leitch provides a poignant example of this reaction:
[Foucault’s project] leaves little room for resistance or transformation, not to mention revolution. Implicitly, it counsels quietism,
as many of Foucault’s critics note. …Moreover, the notion that all
aberrations and delinquencies occur within the system and that
they are calculated to do so similarly accords little possibility for
opposition and change. With Foucault the era of oppositional politics appears at an end; the subdued masses can be counted. (131)
Leitch’s point is that if Foucault is right, then the power/knowledge
cycle is so pervasive that emancipatory progress is impossible. This is
the plight that a reader of Foucault faces, as each epistemological level
that we traverse brings us no closer to a way out of the power/knowledge
cycle, since whatever knowledge we happen to gain along the way
always and already serves the status quo in our oppression.
This sort of self-consciousness about the futility of postmodern attitudes becomes especially apparent in Leslie A. Wade’s and William C.
Boles’ essays on Ravenhill and Penhall respectively, as each play suggests that the socialist (Ravenhill) and/or feminist (Penhall) politics that
often accompanied postmodern forms (think of Bertolt Brecht and also
of traditional readings of Caryl Churchill, Tony Kushner, and even Harold Pinter) had become their own cultural dominant. In his discussion of
Ravenhill, Wade begins by explaining that Ravenhill’s plays
go beyond shock value and attempt serious philosophical (and
political) inquiry. Giving potent voice to a generation disillusioned
by national civic life, facing the complexities of an emerging global
marketplace, Ravenhill questions the possibility of moral action.
With volatile emotion and dark humor, his plays seek the ethical
in a postmodern, post-ideological world. (284 in this volume)
As it turns out, Wade’s essay raises a number of difficulties for pinpointing the postmodern in late-twentieth-century theatre, given how
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Ravenhill’s plays themselves are conscious of how his immediate
predecessors (David Edgar, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Trevor
Griffiths) were committed to various socialist causes and given how he
sought to distance himself from them:
I argue that Ravenhill’s play exhibits a profound yearning for
interpersonal connection and altruistic possibility; however, the
work reveals a deep ambiguity. Ravenhill remains suspicious of
ideology, of any foundational authority, and thus cannot embrace
the assurances of socialism (there is no going back); yet his
depiction of postmodernism offers no positive alternative. The
play ably captures the frustration and anxiety of a 1990s generation, bereft of moral grounding though still desirous of political
efficacy. (285 in this volume)
It is easy to get lost here. On the one hand, Ravenhill being conscious
that his predecessors valued a socialist politics—and his commitment to
move beyond it—is reminiscent of the tipping into postmodernism that
we might find in Pirandello or Stoppard or even Beckett; on the other
hand, it appears that Ravenhill partly tips into postmodernism out of a
desire for a truly progressive politics (as if that were possible). Moreover, it is also worth noting how this desire that his work somehow be
progressive (that he is “still desirous of political efficacy”) is reminiscent
of what we see in Weiss and Kushner (indicating a tipping away from
the postmodern instead). Wade sums up Ravenhill’s own conflictions on
this score as follows:
Clearly the play underscores the need for some point of resistance,
some assertion of value that works to counter the dehumanizing
effects of an increasingly powerful global capitalism. Ravenhill
appears ambivalent on this matter, nostalgic for a larger ideological frame from which to combat a marketplace that reduces all to
commodity, yet suspicious of any totalizing outlook that is too
certain of its premises and proposals. (296 in this volume)
Wade ultimately turns to postmodern ethics—and Emmanuel Levinas—
to help him understand what is happening with Ravenhill and his peers,
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settling on the idea that rather than pursuing a full-fledged political
agenda: “[P]ostmodern ethics rather underscores the call for responsibility, the primacy of the self’s obligation to the other” (287 in this volume).
Instead of “socialist activities and grand postures” (297 in this volume),
Wade argues that the characters of Some Explicit Polaroids “come to an
awareness of minor acts of outreach, expressions of care” (297 in this
volume).
Whereas the driving concern of Ravenhill’s plays is the bankruptcy of
’70s style theatrical socialism, according to Boles, Penhall’s New Lads
serve as reactionary to the New Man sensitivity of the ’80s:
And just who was the New Lad? He rejected the New Man philosophy that stipulated “men have repeatedly been redesignated as
the fragile sex” and “sensitivity and emotional literacy [should] be
at the heart of the new masculinity” (Beynon 93, qtd. in Boles, 309
in this volume).
Quoting Phyllis Nagy and Mel Kenyon, Boles documents the feminist
response to the New Lad as suggesting that “violent misogyny is alive,
kicking and applauded” (310 in this volume); Nagy and Kenyon further
worry that “[f ]or women in their thirties…to realise that misogyny was
never really conquered but simply lay low until it was ready for a counter attack is terrifying” (310 in this volume). Boles notes, however, that
Penhall’s appropriation of the New Lad was vastly different than that of
his peers:
In addition to not following the same stylistic and thematic model
as his peers, Penhall is also not interested in highlighting and glorifying the misogynistic characteristics of the New Lad. …Penhall,
instead, is more interested in the state of those males who are not
part of the target demographic of Maxim, FHM and Loaded. (312
in this volume)
Thus, while cognizant of the way in which some of Penhall’s peers had
latched onto various antifeminist and antisocialist attitudes, Boles essay
ultimately finds that Penhall, of all the late-twentieth-century playwrights,
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appears most comfortable with the political implications of his work.
Thus, while the play is cognizant of the various and sundry stereotypes
which now populate British culture, “his male characters struggle in
their inability to fulfill the stereotypical societal roles expected of men.”
It would seem, then, that even given Penhall’s approach to the various
themes of postmodernity (i.e., in toying with how types never fit their
apparently representative models), he is well prepared to pursue political
truths in a way that marks him as having moved beyond the postmodern.
However, when placed alongside his pears, it is also clear just how tenuous this positioning is and how likely it is he might yet tip toward a more
postmodern perspective in the future.
Margaret F. Savilonis’ essay on Kirk Lynn’s WAR provides a final and
recent example of this tension between fulfilling a progressive politics
and recognizing how postmodern attitudes toward truth refuse the very
concept of progress, while yet committing to the idea that the solution
to this dilemma resides, once again, in local and individual responses to
larger social issues:
The desire to present multiple solutions, to offer limitless possibilities, generates action. The intervention to save Sister broadens
out conceptually as Mother, Waitress, Boss, and Secretariat devote
their energy to presenting their solutions for fixing the world while
One Man and One Guy dedicate themselves to saving Sister. Fixing the world happens incrementally; not everything can be fixed
at once, but by taking the initiative to change even just one small
thing, even at the most personal level, each individual makes a
significant contribution. (343 in this volume)
Savolinis’ essay, moreover, is notable for how it tracks the way in which
this tension can be examined performatively as well as both narratively
and textually:
Sister’s “escape” at the play’s end depends on not only the other
characters in the world of the play, but also on the audience, as
indicated by Secretariat’s closing speech, in which she proposes
that the audience will likely need to help her fix whatever is
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wrong with the world. …[This] resonates with Linda Hutcheon’s
assertion that “Postmodernism works to show that all repairs are
human constructs, but that from that very fact, they derive their
value as well as their limitation. All repairs are both comforting
and illusory” (7–8). Though War consistently acknowledges itself
as a construct, an illusion, the enactment of the effort to repair is
concrete, enabling Lynn’s piece to refute this contradiction even
while acknowledging it. (345 in this volume)
Perhaps there is no better statement of what is happening in late-twentieth
and early-twenty-first-century drama than that it is “acknowledg[ing] itself
as a construct” even while “the effort to repair” is concrete. Indeed, when
presented with enough examples, we begin to see an even larger contemporary trend that exists outside of and beyond the way in which each of
these plays is about the dilemma of appropriating a progressive politics
in the face of postmodern ideological pessimism (i.e., that they are each
excessively self-conscious about the limits of postmodernity). About its
dilemmas, paradoxes, and dead ends.
It is worth noting, moreover, that even while late-twentieth-century
theatre never decisively appropriates—nor rejects—the postmodern, the
continually shifting perspectives of contemporary theatre might themselves be seen as part and parcel of a postmodern climate, as, ultimately,
we are left with the numerous and conflicting small narratives. To borrow
from Lyotard, then, it would appear that the grand narrative gestures of
modernism have indeed been replaced by the more localized gestures of
the postmodern, meaning that in the final analysis these plays by Ravenhill, Penhall, and Lynn tip postmodern or at least try to. In either case, it
is worth noting all the same that this balancing at the tipping point—this
desire to have it both ways—is perhaps itself a definitive feature of late
postmodern drama. Indeed, we should not be surprised that the continual tipping between a postmodern perspective and an antipostmodern
becomes ubiquitous at this point given that, as Wade explains it, “these
playwrights and thinkers were responding to the same historical moment,
to a contemporary world in continuous revision, with no recourse to
metaphysical, rationalist, or political assurances” (287 in this volume).
Postmodern Tipping Points
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In other words, late-twentieth-century theatre might yet be postmodern
(i.e., as a cultural phenomenon) despite itself.
A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE
The importance to this collection of Neil Murphy’s essay on Beckett
resides in the fact that it argues against one of the central conceits of
this collection, arguing instead that while there are perhaps fundamental
morphological differences between theatre and other postmodern genres,
those features are as likely to provide epistemological and ontological
grounding to a performance as they are to lead to epistemological and
ontological disruptions:
With respect to postmodern drama the implications are as follow:
postmodern drama is different to postmodern fiction quite simply
because the words we hear on stage frequently offer views that
challenge the idea of the validity of meaning, life, action but, in
an implicit sense, this may be compromised by the actuality of the
stage, even if the characters appear to be living futile lives; they
are still there, they speak, they act, they exist. So a gap between
word and deed in postmodern drama at very least ‘delays’ the full
impact of the arrival at “unmeaning.” (353 in this volume)
However, even while situating itself in opposition to the idea that the
very morphological features of the theatre are fundamental to how and
why theatre became postmodern, Murphy’s essay fits the overall arc of
the collection all the same. For while I might argue that it is because the
fourth wall is so visible (through ostension, even) that theatre became
so quickly and self-consciously metatheatrical as early as Pirandello,
Murphy’s point isn’t so much oppositional to mine, as the reverse side
of the same coin. For while I argue that the “reality” of the fourth wall is
hard to ignore, and Murphy argues that the “reality” of physical objects
and characters onstage are equally hard to ignore, the thesis of the collection more generally is that the tipping from one perspective to another is
something akin to a gestalt shift and that while both attitudes toward the
artificial/real dichotomy are always and already available, attention to
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one necessarily obscures attention to the other, until that attention shifts,
and you get the reverse. Thus, while Murphy argues that “the vividness
of the stage is too intense to be made unequivocally ‘fictional,’ ” (354 in
this volume) I argue, rather, that it is when this vividness makes itself
evident (for whatever reason) that drama tips away from metanarrative
display and moves beyond the postmodern, and moreover, that when
this vividness is obscured, it tips back again. From one perspective, the
stage is composed of ontologically stable objects; but from another, as
Peter Handke explains, the objects of theatre “are deprived of their normal function in reality” such that “a table can serve as an ornament,
as a door, as scenery,” (17) in turn raising the distinct possibility that
a theatrical production might appropriate props as one more means to
self-consciously comment on the artificiality of theatrical production.
Handke attempts this in his own play, Offending the Audience: “They
have an artificial function in the game I force them to play. They are like
the objects a circus clown makes factually unreal” (57).