ART AND HISTORY
283
the novel was and still
is
expected to be a narrative, music was sup–
posed to
be
tonal and hannonic, painting to represent and so forth.
But the drama faces something more than this; the public nature of
the theater and what can only be called the too-human content of
its operations work inevitably to keep the drama isolated from aesthetic
changes and help account for its conservatism and lag, its periodic
iFrelevance. The drama finds itself pressed to the past by a cultural
expectation reinforced by the practicalities of theater, by physical
and social exigencies: a necessary physical plant, seats to be filled,
a community of skills to be organized and held together, technical
apparatus to be on hand, a score of other functional considerations
- props, lighting, tickets and ticket takers, fire extinguishers, char–
women, ushers, press agents, programs and much more.
All this investment, these stakes, this as it were municipal and
clerical disposition of things, are what help to bind the theater to the
. historical, to what has already been done and what has already been
known. And one result of this is that avant-garde and traditional are
more widely separated in the theater than in the literary and graphic
arts, although not in
music
or the dance, which are locked into the
material world in the same way as drama. From this rises the fact
that a body of repetitive, banal and compromised work perpetually
occupies most of the space in the theater while everything original is
crowded into comers.
The struggle simply to find a space on stage, to rescue itself
from the fate of being nothing but dramatic literature, has marked
the course of contemporary drama ever since artist-playwrights who
had emerged, miraculously it sometimes seems, from an age of mere
artisans, began to write it. That drama could be an art, issuing from
the same order of aspiration, consciousness and morale as poetry,
music, painting or the novel, had virtually to be newly established
after the nineteenth-century theater's long sterility. And in order to
establish this, to extricate itself from the theater as an institution
while retaining it as the necessary physical ground, the "place for
seeing" (the original meaning of the word), dramatists had to be
guileful, to use the theater against itself, by practicing a fonn of judo;
Artist-playwrights had to present most of their visions under the guise
of something else, in order to satisfy audience expectation on one
level while working out insurrectionary programs on another. They
