ON TWO FRONTIERS
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If
his rhetoric seems sometimes strained, sometimes shrill, it is al–
ways honest and moving, the language of a man with a vision of existence
that justifies rhetoric. The minor failures of the book are the marks of
excesses of ambition, the ocassional inability to do justice to all its im–
mensely complex significances.
To honor at once symbol and plot, the felt richness of character in
action and the complex metaphysics of the human situation is to at–
tempt gallantly to heal the breach between our two audiences and our
two literatures. H.
J.
Kaplan, the contributor to little magazines, work–
ing in the Jamesian tradition is the serious artist a little too relaxedly
at home; but Robert Penn Warren,
avant garde
critic and poet, venturing
into the territory of Cooper and Simms and A. B. Guthrie is the
serious artist in disguise among the enemy. His real victories must com–
pensate him for being called traitor by the less astute in his own camp.
Leslie A. Fiedler
RITUAL AND THE DRAMA
THE IDEA OF A THEATER. By Francis Fergussoo. Princeton University
Press. $3.75.
Francis Fergusson, in his profoundly meditated and richly
suggestive book,
The Idea of a Theater,
has made a brilliant contribution
both to modern literary criticism in general and to the aesthetic of the
drama in particular. To modern criticism, Mr. Fergusson has given a
series of penetrating studies of great
plays-Oedipus Rex, Berenice,
Hamlet, Tristan und Isolde-which
combine aesthetic analysis and his–
torical insight
in
an exemplary fashion. To the aesthetic of the drama,
Mr. Fergusson has given a notable renovation of some key concepts
and a bold theory of tragic form-a theory that re-interprets Aristotle in
the light of what we now know about the ritual origins of Greek tragedy,
and which unites Jane Harrison's anthropology with such diverse influ–
ences as the Stanislavsky method and Thomas Aquinas' concept of analo–
gy.
Taking his theory of tragic form as a point of reference, Mr. Fergus–
son uses it to assess the great theaters of the Western tradition and to
throw the problems of the modern theater in an illuminating perspective.
Like Aristotle, Mr. Fergusson goes to Sophocles'
Oedipus Rex
to
illustrate the nature of tragedy, though he is mainly concerned with a
level of meaning-the level of ritual-that Aristotle could take for
granted in his Greek hearers. Aristotle describes tragedy generally as "an
imitation, not of men but of an action," and then, without bothering to
