138
PARTISAN REVIEW
different from the one voiced by Camille Desmoulins in
Danton's Death :
... unless they have wooden copies of everything, scattered about in
theaters , concert halls , and art exhibits, people have neither eyes nor
ears for it. . ..Take a minor sentiment, a maxim, a notion, and dress it
up in coat and trousers, make pairs of hands and feet for it, color its
face and permit the whole thing to moan and agonize about for three
whole acts until at last it has either married or shot itself dead -and
they will cry out that it was ideal.
Schiller's Romantic idealizations of nature and Kotzebue's popular, senti–
mental plays upset Tieck , Grabbe, and Buchner to the extent that the latter
three became theater critics as well as playwrights. While this threesome's
plays are far more than vehicles for criticism of theater audiences, in part
they ridicule an audience sensibility that craves idealized, beautiful and
noble nature displayed in readily comprehensible and self-congratulatory
drama.
Self-congratulation in theater is not an exclusively nineteenth-century
phenomenon; in fact, some vanity may be inherent in any age's language–
in the illusory control over morality and nature that men find in art. Once
given names, things become classifiable, orderly, predictable , or so the
illusion goes . Tieck destroys this illusion in
Puss In Boots
by breaking the
situational frame of his fairy tale, by having characters in the play (includ–
ing one portraying the author) lose conlrol over events, as if the words of
Tieck's text have been forgotten or disregarded . "So many things come
unexpectedly in this world," says Gottlieb of Tieck's Utopia . One of the
most unpredictable, uncontrollable things in
Puss In Boots
is the audience
response, though paradoxically, the riot is completely controlled by Tieck
insofar as it is scripted in advance.
Hinze the talking cat further derides humanity's assumption that
language or art controls events, when he explains why most cats prefer
silence to human speech:
. . .as soon as language were inflicted on us so-called animals, there
would be no more joy in the world . Think of all the things a dog has
to
do and learn! And the horse! They are foolish animals
to
permit men
to
notice their intelligence; they just have
to
indulge their vanity. We
cats are still the freest race ever, because despi te all our cleverness we
know how
to
pose as creatures so inept that man quite gives up trying
to
educate us.
