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RICHARD GILMAN
geniuses had all died young and unexalted after having written
dramas which must have seemed like monstrous sick dreams in an
age of classical repression. Stemming from rules discovered in the self,
wayward, nervous, "neurotic" and blackly visionary, their plays were
to prove crucial to a future drama. But what was most significant
about them was not their independent morale, their more accurate
psychology or their discovery of demons in an era of Goethean ration–
ality. Technically, dramaturgically, they cleared the ground for new
uses of the scenic art.
Their plays differed widely from one another but were united
by the way they swerved violently away from story-telling and charac–
ter-building to dispose themselves as original universes in which con–
flict was between elements and faculties far more than between
personages or personalities, and in which language pressed forward
to become a kind of plot in itself, a drama. When they were
rediscovered generations later, when, that is to say, what they had
accomplished was felt once again, after the renewed occlusions of
history, to be
necessary,
it was with a sense of enormous wonder, a
dizzying contemplation of their green islands as seen from an ex–
hausted mainland. And this mainland might have been described as
a large body of theory and practice that had itself been cut off from
any new and fertile propositions.
A digression may be permitted here for a word about "main–
lands" in drama, or in any other art for that matter. This persistent
notion, this geography whose nomenclature is built around the con–
tinental designations "realism," "symbolism," "romanticism" and so
on, remains the bulwark of academic defense against art and the chief
instrument of its submission to human polity. Art hasn't for a long
time been susceptible to being codified in any such way, if it ever was
at all. The terminology, and its being wielded in the interests of
rational control over culture, is the product of a pedagogical sortie
against everything that had threatened society's accumulating know–
ledge; to force art into
being
knowledge has been the master stroke
that cut off its roots in ritual and play and mysterious otherness of
presence.
In the same way, the idea of succession in the arts, that chrono–
logical dragon which swallows up almost all true response in the
urgency to construct assimilable sequences - social novel, psycho-
