418
PARTISAN REVIEW
events or, more accurately, the expected significance of those events
and their' 'values." In the first scene the quarreling lovers
(if
we can
call them that-their relationship mocks all the classic, lyrical attri–
butes of the word) stumble verbally round one another, exchanging
blows of sad, depleted forcefulness, blows without point, delivered
in the dark. The cliches, the repetitions of banalities, the bromides
all testify to the stricken nature of their speech, not so much its lack
of expressiveness-that is obvious-as the entire absence of original–
ity, the queer and terrifying sense it gives of not having been created
by them but of having instead passed through them, as it were.
It
is
as though their language has been come upon,
picked up,
scavenged
from the grey mindless stretches of a mechanical culture.
In the second scene the pathos of this derivative, radically in–
appropriate speech is still deeper. We know from what has gone
before that the woman is anguished over the abortion, or rather we
have to intuit it since she is wholly unable
to
express it in terms we
would think appropriate. The man, for his part, is embarrassed,
frightened, bellicose; but once again these emotions and attitudes
have no appropriate style, no diction we can accept as directly consti–
tuting the experience, the way traditional drama has always organized
its effects. The cliches and fragmented responses, the sad aphoristic
wisdom ("One should never lose hope!" Kroetz's plays are full of
such sayings in the mouths of victims) move to fill the space between
feeling and event, but the gap remains intact. And it is from this
abyss that there rises the extraordinary sense in the spectator of being
present at a sort of fatal accident, a crack-up at the edge of truth.
"Cause I'm human too," the woman says. We know she is, but the
sorrowfulness of the remark is that she has been injured past the
capacity to demonstrate it.
If the damaged speech of Kroetz's characters is their most strik–
ing departure from conventional stage figures, it doesn't mean that
the physical in his work is any less original. If anything, the physical
action in these plays is more mysterious and disturbing than the
verbal, not so much in its substance as in the ways it is disposed.
Where the connection between speech and physical action in tradi–
tional drama might be said
to
be that of comment and reciprocity–
an "acting" out of the verbal, a "speaking-out" of the material, in
Kroetz's plays this relationship
is
ruptured; the two orders of expres-
