416
PARTISAN REVIEW
that she must leave her husband in order to find out what she is.
If
such knowledge is continually being corrupted and turned into
bravado by garrulity (in the commercial theater garrulity is all there
is) which papers over the chasms and so hides reality at the same time
as it seems to proclaim it, the principle remains undisturbed that it
is only through language that the attempt to know can be made, and
the belief is fum that drama is one of our chief means of organizing
this
expressive intent.
Now this doesn't in any way mean that there have been no
poor or stultified inarticulate characters in drama. The point is that
where they exist they have not been at the center of the work and
i
have been surrounded by characters who can speak and so carry the
\
burden of verbal meaning, or else, as in Tolstoy'S
Power o/Darkness,
O'Neill's
Hatry Ape,
or Gorky's
The Lower Depths,
they have been
given a passionate "popular" utterance of their own and so made
articulate after all. The one great exception might seem to be Buch-
ner's Woyzeck, yet even this unprecedented figure of the oppressed
and victimized possesses speech, broken, tormented, mad
if
you
will, but greatly evocative speech nevertheless. On a more debased
esthetic plane the poor and outcast have usually been given an articu–
lateness that is the product of romantic invention, the fake urban
lyricism of Odets or the cracker-barrel loquacity of plays like
Tobacco
Road.
In any case, the condition of being truly unable to utter one's
reality has never been a central element of any play, has never, one
can almost say, been a subject.
In place, then, of characters whose command of language is
their precondition for being characters and who talk so that we may
, 'appreciate" them (appreciate: to judge with heightened perception
and understanding) and so presumably be made more conscious,
Kroetz has created figures whose speech does nothing either to bring
forward ideas or perspectives on their condition or to cover it up, and
in fact only "expresses" it negatively by its injured or inadequate
quality. They seem to speak only because people do speak, struggling
to find some connection berween words and the internal conditions
or facts of the world which make up their situations; they speak, one
feels, because not to speak at all would be the conclusive evidence
of their despair.
In the opening scene of
Michi's Blood,
a scene which with charac-
