ART AND
HISTORY
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which
by
their implicit mockery of "real" characters and plots gave
a new blow to the latter's self-sufficiency and imperium in drama.
Uneasily kicked against, sporadically violated but never wholly
thrown off, a fixed conception of what characters were supposed to
be and of what plots were supposed to make them do had lain at
the heart of the practice of drama ever since
it
had passed its so–
called heroic crest several centuries before. Such a conception was in
fact the enervated and abstracted essence of the soul of that earlier
drama, the outcome of its passage from actuality - from being plays
created and performed at a time and in a place - to a condition of
ideality, its alteration from process into proposition.
Twenty years before
Waiting for Godot,
to which Beckett had
come after a series of brilliant coups against the remaining entrench–
ments of fiction, he had written these words about James Joyce: "he
is not writing about something; he is writing something." What had
become at least theoretically unassailable as the main tenet of serious
fiction - that literature is its own reality, that fictive language is a
new, concrete, independent fact - had in drama, the slowest of the
arts to register or contribute to an era's broad aesthetic and philos–
ophical changes, been a troubled aspiration, a scent of freedom, a
series of inconclusive forays into forms that were perpetually made
to smack of eccentricity and arbitrary capers. Such is the theater's
conservatism and committee-like soul.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, at just the point when
drama seemed to have settled into mere, absolute reproduction of
itself, the German playwright and critic Friedrich Hebbel had set
down in his journals truths which we are still trying to overtake and
turn into exemplifications:
All dramatic art has to do with impropriety and incomprehension.
To present the necessary in the form of the accidental - that
IS
the whole principle of dramatic ·style.
Drama shouldn't present new stories but new relationships.
The latter remark might have been as much e1egaic as hortatory,
since Hebbe1 had risen out of an era which had contained the re–
markable but hermetic achievements of Friedrich Buechner, Heinrich
von Kleist and Christian Dietrich Grabbe. These three German
