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THOMAS G. ROSENMEYER
gaged.
The plot is a product of the author's own imagination and
not rooted in a fixed tradition.
The characters tend to improvise, thus usurping the role
of the playwright.
And the correlate: the playwright is not fully in control of
his own material; the characters and the events are always
on the point of eluding his directive.7
Inmetatheater, the action ismarked by a dream or has the
quality of a dream.8
Closure is undermined, and authority subverted.
The language is self-centered, with words manipulated as
"continually."
How does metafiction view the engagement of the author
in his work? In the words of an eminent critic, we must dis
tinguish between writers like Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
who "make us aware of the intricate artifice of their narra
tions ... in the service of a moral and psychological realism"
and John Fowles, who "causes himself to sit down in the
same railway compartment with his protagonist,"28 thus in
serting the author into his artifact. Alternatively, note that
another acknowledged metafictionalist, cited by Waugh, in
trudes his authorship so hegemonically that he can say: "I
want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very min
imum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go
further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose
his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing
is a failure."2? This restriction of the recipient's engagement
may be counted as one indication of the snarls in which the
tizing,' a
locution taking it for granted that a dramatic
performance, like narrative fiction, has a 'theme' the audience
is invited to capsulize and monitor. But there is a difference.
The character of written narrative fiction speaks to the indi
vidual reader who, if engaged, is readily induced to reflect on
what he reads; the character of drama speaks to a collective
listenership which, though engaged, is allowed little time to
reflect. Both reader and listener are expected to recognize sim
ulacra or transmogrifications of themselves in the characters
qualified to stimulate
such questioning. But it is difficult to
understand how even the cruelty and contrariety of Dionysus
directing the punishment of Pentheus can be said to prompt
an audience's inquiry into the nature of the tragic form or of
this version of the form, any more so than the problematic
paternity of Apollo in Ion or, say, the introductory comments
of Pan in Menander's DyskolosJ6 The immediacy and the
power of the performance before a large audience would not
have allowed the luxury of such an examination, on top of
the natural response of wondering about life and death or the
relationof the worship of Dionysus to the politics of the city;
on the contrary, they would have been arrested by it. It is one
of the curious paradoxes of the Abelian position that it
comes down heavily on performance, but recommends a de
. . .
reasoning of a critic who claims: "Using John Austin's
useful terminology, I would suggest tentatively that if 'illo
cutionary acts move the play along,' a perlocutionary speech
act like addressing the public has sufficient impact to make
everyone?actors and audience alike?feel that the play has
NOTES
Jim Porter for their remedial comments on an earlier version of this paper.
i. 'Metadrama' and 'metaplay' designate the playbook; 'metatheater' the
erty to mark off the features of any one performance from the book texts
that have come down to us. Nor am I in this paper concerned with what to
5. See Abel (note 2), 83. The high rank of the dream is owed to Calder?n
and two key figures in Abel's thinking. Not unexpectedly, N.
Strindberg,
Slater, Power in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton 1985)
begins to struggle when at the end of his book, pages 170-72, he tries to ap
on the dream to his material.
ply Abel's emphasis play
6. See Abel (note 2), 72: in Calderon's play, "A tragedy was predicted,
but did not occur. And if it did not, this was because of the dramatic inven
tion of King Basilio, who substituted for the play intended by fate one of his
own inventions." For the avoidance of the plot intended by fate via a
tragedy of a character's own initiative, Abel might also have gone to Sopho
cles' Oedipus the King.
7. See Abel (note 2), 63: "Nor are the events adequately understood by
Marlowe."
does not see any inner necessity in the lives of people, will not their lives be
dreamlike?"
13. How, for instance, does Abel's itemization of the features of metathe
ater help us to appreciate the special of Marat/Sade, with its
qualities
identification of theater and madness, its amazing stage effects, and its char
acters (not actors) taking on historical, not fictive, roles? See Adams (note
10), 206.
15. For a detailed list of types of drama that get away from a putative
norm, see the still magisterial P. Szondi, Theorie des modernen Dramas
(Frankfurt 1956), 14.
16. Thus F. Muecke, "I Know You?By Your Rags: Costume and Dis
guise in Fifth-Century Drama," Antichthon 16 (1982), 17-34 thinks that
ticularly apt vehicle for metatheatrical comedy in that, through the change
of costume entailed, it calls attention to the physical and personal nature of
referring to D. C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (London and New York
1970). It is true that some of the items listed by Abel are more simply
defined as varieties of irony. See note 108.
17. For a recent argument, see George Steiner, "Tragedy, Pure and Sim
ple," in M. S. Silk, ed., Tragedy and the Tragic (Oxford 1996), 534-546.
See also Most (note 4). For a probing skepticism concerning the use of
generic concepts in the history of the arts, see D. Perkins, Is Literary His
goes beyond drama (at least drama of a traditional sort), becoming a kind
of anti-form in which the boundaries between the play as a work of self
contained art and life are dissolved." It should be said that on the whole
Calderwood's discussion stays safely within the confines established by
Abel, not stipulating a drama beyond drama.
23. W. H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York 1970), 24-25.
Gass later includes Nabokov, Coover, and Barthelme among the writers of
metafiction. The model he cites does not cash out; in line with his final
statement, the comparandum in mathematics would not be a metatheorem,
but simply the imposition of one equation upon another equation. In any
case, Gass is too subtle a critic to make significant use of the term in his es
says on individual writers or works.
33. Hansen-L?ve 1978 (note 32), 191-95; Erlich 1965 (note 32), 194.
40. A. Barton, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London 1962).
For various theories of theater since Abel's time, see M.
41. developed
Carlson, Theories of the Theatre (Ithaca, NY 1984), 454-515.
Lichte, coming out of the European ambience with its varied history, avoids
the term, though I am not sure that her "dissolution of the boundaries of
the self on the semantic level" is very helpful either. See, among her many
works, The Show and the Gaze of Theatre: A European Perspective (Iowa
scenic illusion.
52. See F. Muecke 1982 and 1986 (note 16) and A. G. Batchelder, The
Seal of Orestes: Self-reference and Authority in Sophocles' Electra (Lanham,
MD 1995), 3 5: "In its close assocation with speech and action, falsehood and
truth, the [empty] urn also functions as a symbol of the deception of the the
atrical situation per se. In this respect it is ... a 'metatragic' symbol of
tragedy ..."
ality." That is, he reserves 'metatheater' to the changes one play rings upon
another, or to its argument with it. This is in the tradition of B. Gentili, The
atrical Performance in the Ancient World: Hellenistic and Roman Theatre
(Amsterdam 1979), 15: "I use the term 'metatheatre' in the sense 'plays con
structed from previously existing plays.'" The plays can be and often are the
author's own. The process has been referred to as 'The Palimpsestic Code':
A. J. Boyle, Tragic Seneca (London and New York 1997), ch. 5. But G.
Genette (trans. C. Newman and C. Doubinsky), Palimpsests: Literature in
the Second Degree (Lincoln, nb 1997), 5 refers to the process as 'hypertex
55. M. Ringer, Electra and the Empty Urn: Metatheater and Role-Play
56. E.g., see Batchelder 1995 (note 52), 6: "Sophocles' Electra is a play
about playwriting."
58. Rose 1979 (note 25), 154, cites Foucault's Les Mots et les Choses for
parody as a method of analyzing how a discourse is constructed and re
ceived, to give parody a place in the development of self-reflexivity. But
Rose, to her credit, also acknowledges, 105, that the concepts of self-reflex
ion and self-criticism in drama await further clarification.
59. Cf. Gentili 1979, Anderson 1993, and Boyle 1997 (note 54). Abel
1963 (note 2), 107, claimed that Shaw's Don juan inHell ismetatheater be
cause "each character in it comes from the stage and the opera."
directly
Once again, is this not true of much ancient tragedy?
60. G. W.
Dobrov, Figures of Play: Greek Drama and Metafictional Po
etics(Oxford 2001), 16 and 33-35, applies the musical term 'contrafact,'
but does not assign to it a diagnostic function.
61. Stam 1985 (note 35), 127-29 shows that the same synonymity ob
tains in film criticism. The perspective is thought to be Hegelian, but Hegel's
Sebstbewusstsein, in its metaphysical reach, does not at all coincide with the
self-consciousness of the Abelians, but is read into all of tragedy and its he
roes: G. W. F. Hegel, Ph?nomenologie des Geistes, in Theorie-Werkausgabe,
vol. 3 (Frankfurt 1970), 534-41. Cf. C. Menke,
Trag?die im Sittlichen:
Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel (Frankfurt 1996), 57-58: "In der
Trag?die wird die Erfahrung des Sch?nen und seiner Tragik selbstreflexiv:
zu einer Erfahrung des in dieser Erfahrung und seiner Darstellung Voraus
gesetzten."
62. Then there is the phonetic homonymity of reflexion and reflection,
65. Waugh 1984 (note 24), 149 quotes John Barth, an acclaimed writer of
Lear, or, How Not to do it," in Laroque 1992 (note 11), 217-223. Hatt
Schmeling 1982 (note 11), 10. Schmeling's essay is full of terms like cri
remembering I becomes part of the formal subjectivity of the play. His fam
73. See notably H. P. Foley, Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripi
des (Ithaca, NY 1985), ch. 5.
74. See I. Lada-Richards,Initiating Dionysus: ritual and theatre in
Aristophanes' Frogs (Oxford 1999), esp. ch. 4. Bierl 1991 (note 37),
140-42,162, and 182: "The Bacchae is the culmination of the growing ten
dency in the last decade of the fifth century of tragedy referring to itself via
the encoded . . . The varied
key of Dionysus metatragic functions, earlier
only marginally connected with the central action, in the Bacchae are con
centrated in a 'tragedy about
to result tragedy.'" R. Seaford, Reciprocity
and Ritual (Oxford 1994), 273-285, protests against self-reflexive readings
of theatricality and sacrificial elements in The Bacchae. In his index he
refers to such readings as metatheatrical. Given the interpretation of drama
as ritual, the audience, as the witness or indirect agent of the ritual, would
of course not be expected to engage in the diagnostic exercise associated
with self-reflexion.
theater; but sees a close analogy the nature of the god and the na
between
ture of tragedy: "Euripides uses the figure of Dionysus as god of the tragic
mask to reflect on the paradoxical nature of tragedy itself?paradoxical, be
cause by creating illusion tragedy seeks to convey truth . . .The paradoxes
of Dionysus, therefore, his liminal status, his place between?between truth
and illusion, sanity and madness, divinity and bestiality, civilization and the
wild, order and chaos?are in part also the paradoxes of tragedy." Cf. Segal
76. Slater 1985 (above, note 5), 54-55 observes on the of Asi
prologue
naria that it is metatheatrical because "the speaker can speak both from
within and from without the world of his play." It is not clear where he sets
the boundaries the play; but along these lines most
of if not all prologues
would be metatheatrical. Or are they paratextual peritexts, as G. Genette
performance is itself a text, but this should not discourage us from distin
between a staging and a If the Greek dramatists can be
guishing playbook.
thought of as also composing for a reading public, the literature of
'metatheater' takes little account of that option.
84. See Hattaway 1992 (note 66), 227, concerning the blinding scene in
Lear: "We are diverted from the suffering of the character to the tech
King
iswhy the scene is so difficult to stage. Cf. the con
nique of the actor." That
troversy over staging the suicide of Ajax in Sophocles' play, and the general
tendency in ancient drama to have violence enacted off stage.
tegral and integrating elements of the entire plot," see F. Zeitlin, "Travesties
of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazousae,n in Foley
1982 (note 14), 182-83, also 188, 203.
88. See my "Irony and Tragic Choruses," in Ancient and Modern: Essays
for Gerald Else (Ann Arbor, mi 1977), 31-44; and A. Henrichs, "Why
should I dance?" Arion 3.1 (1995), 56-111? now expanded in Warum soll
ich denn tanzen? Dionysisches im Chor der griechischen Trag?die (Darm
stadt 1996). See also F. Tonelli, Sophocles' Oedipus and the Tale of the The
atre (Ravenna 1983), 109: "The chorus continues here to speak in the first
person ('I'), but from the stance of a third-person theatrical observer"; and
in, in his Blanchodian vein: "The hiatus opened and closed by the second
stasimon recuperates tragedy into tragic temporality and ironic self-aware
ness."
90. Goffman (note 83). But ch. 5, "The Theatrical Frame," is too rigid in
its acceptance of the conventions of the proscenium stage. Cf. also G. Bate
son, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (San Francisco 1972), 177-93. The sub
ject of frames is not unrelated to the range of issues taken up
by K. Burke
in his A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1969). The best
extended discussion of the composite nature of drama is Pfister 1988 (note
57)
91. 'Improvisation' is a key word in Slater 1985 (note 5) who may owe
this concept to the treatment of the commedia dell' arte in J. L. Styan 1975
(note 39). For this notion, Slater cites S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fash
ioning (Chicago 1980), but improvisation in Greenblatt is of an entirely dif
ferent order. It is understandable, however, that performance criticism,
welcome as it is, will find itself attracted to the extemporizing vitality of the
San Francisco Street Theater and look at pre-fashioned theater that
through
lens.
92. Not the play discussed by R. Carne, "The Actor and Improvisation:
The Making of Crystal Clear," Themes in Drama 6 (1984), 221-45, which
was put together by the collaborative of actors and director,
improvisation
but then made book text.
98. Goffman (note 83), 134. Even a Prospero is no more endowed with
an integral vision of the drama's flow than, say, Aristophanes' Trygaios.
99. W. Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cam
on the marginal
bridge 2000), 44, bases his claim of metatheatricality posi
tion of the slave, who find himself "in a position to move between the world
of the dramatic fiction and that of the audience." This is surprising, since
one of the compelling theses of Fitzgerald's fine book is the sustained and
104. Wilshire (note 80), 27: "The actors and the audience are co-creators
of each character." Cf. also A. Ubersfeld, "The Pleasure of the Spectator,"
Modern Drama 25 (1982), 127-39; and M. De Marinis, The Semiotics of
in 1993), ch. 7: "The Spectator's Task." For the
Performance (Bloomington,
of the spectators, see D.
appeal to visual images in achieving the complicity
T. Steiner, Images inMind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature
and Thought (Princeton 2001), 50-54.
107. Barton (note 40), 44-45; see also Styan (note 39), 181. ?N. W.
Slater's Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes
(Philadelphia 2002) was published when my paper was already in the edi
torial office of Arion. Slater argues that Old Comedy is metatheatrical be
cause it acknowledges that it knows itself and names its parts, delights in
disguises, and engages, often politically, with its viewers. Thus, using Bar
ton's terms, in the performance of Old Comedy "audience and actors share
the same world," and enjoy talking about and making fun of each other.
That iswhat Old Comedy does, and Slater's scene-by-scene inventory of the
plots of eight Aristophanic plays is detailed and enjoyable, marred only by
its redundant use of the term 'metatheatre.'