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RICHARD GILMAN
logical novel, poetic novel, etc. - and so turn art into history, is
what keeps us from seeing what the artist is and why he has con–
tinually to repudiate what he has been thought to be. It keeps us
from seeing that at anyone time the subject of an art and its manner
are almost wholly provisional and interrogatory, not answers but
questions and at the same time screens behind which the next subject
and the next manner are being prepared. The subject and manner
- content and form - are of course indissoluble, but more than
that they are revolutionary precisely in their meeting, in their not
having found any other way to exist except through each other. And
the revolution is always against the previous rebellion, that which
had thought to fix the continuing questions into replies, so that in
the hey-day of the so-called social novel the "psychological" novel was
already advancing a more radical art (as Balzac recognized about
Stendhal); during, not after the reign of impressionism, "post-im–
pressionism" was sketching a new visual kingdom.
This is why the seemingly miraculous flowering of drama in the
first decades of the nineteenth century in Germany is not to be con–
sidered an aberration, something isolated, premature and off-center. To
abstract it into the linear perspective of time, to deplete it by making
it an historical conundrum, something which throws chronological un–
derstanding out of whack, is to end up by being literally unable to ac–
count for it.
If
it arose outside the charted course of time, in other
words, we bring it back in the form of the exceptional. And such
are our habits that not being able to account for it - the exceptional
is that which can't be accounted for - we preserve it in eccentric
and isolated existence and look elsewhere for what we consider the
true historical course of drama.
That course leads us to the theater, which we go on identifying
with drama as though there were not a deep tension between them,
one which has grown more exacerbated in our time but which has
actually been exhibiting itself continuously since a breakdown oc–
curred in their relationship sometime in the seventeenth century. In
this tension between drama as an act of the individual mind and
theater as an act of what we may call the social body lie the roots
of the crisis which, as I have said, we persist in seeing as merely local
and as being resolvable by will, wit or magic.
Popular expectation and hardened definitions afflict all the arts:
