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Revolution
and the Romantic Theater
by
Brian Johnston
Theater's New Radical Supertext
III. Theater's New Radical Supertext
If heroism was now an egalitarian and not an hierarchical undertaking, it could be represented either by a crowd, (e.g. Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, the plays of Hauptmann and Gorky, and Eisenstein's films) or, later, by 'ordinary' men and women within the drawing rooms of Europe. If modern culture involved a struggle between such individuals and their relation to the past and present - which also metaphorically could be extended as a struggle between light and darkness, the living and the dead, nature and society, confinement and liberty, etc. - a whole new imagery gradually could be built up as a supertext for artists and writers to draw upon. In the 'radical' theater this imagery would rival and transform that of conventional drama's imagery of the fearful disruption of hierarchical order with its attendant consequences of anarchy, madness, social destruction and natural disasters, where "chaos is come again" and where, as in Hamlet or Macbeth, restorative Order requires the destruction of the transgressive agents.
This transformation of rhetoric, imagery and metaphoric action, I believe, occurred between the time of Goethe and Schiller at the Romantic beginning of this modern tradition, and that of Ibsen and Strindberg near its Realist close. Realism itself, therefore, best is seen as an extension and subtilization of this Romantic supertext. Such a supertext could be extended and sustained, deepened and internalized, only for a limited period before it, too, would be exhausted or invalidated, and a new one would need to be found. This probably is what happens in earlier periods of the greatest extension of a dramatic supertext: e.g. the period between Aeschylus and Euripides or the period between Marlowe and John Ford. Such periods create what Roland Barthes has called "a second order semiotic system" or, in Erich Segal's term, a "megatext" of myth "whose sign-and-symbol systems are closely related with the central values of the culture, especially those values that express a supernatural validation, extension, or explanation of the cultural norms"
But what might be new in Romantic-realist literature is the way in which this sign-and-symbol system created what Michel Foucault termed a 'counter-discourse' to the cultural norms, not validating and explaining but challenging the conventional system. Foucault observes of this subversive 'counter-discourse':
And yet throughout the nineteenth century, and right up to our own day - from Hölderlin to Mallarmé and on to Antonin Artaud - literature achieved autonomous existence and separated itself from all other language with a deep scission, only by forming a sort of 'counter-discourse' ... In the modern age literature is that which compensates for (and not that which confirms) the signifying function of language...
That is, the symbology of Romantic art sets itself up in opposition to traditional cultural norms: a feature of Romanticism and modernism with which we are familiar. This alternative system goes on the offensive, creating a militant and avant-garde art that opposes the presuppositions of the 'given' culture. As this avant-garde art (and thought) itself gains acceptance, it in turn becomes the traditional order that must be subverted, creating the endless dialectic of modern avant-gardism.
No doubt there was much that was subversive of traditional concepts in Greek and renaissance theater: Greek drama especially still can astonish us by its intellectual independence. But Romanticism, with the French Revolution as its central 'event', ("the master theme" of the age, as Shelley wrote to Byron) seems self-consciously to be setting up an alternative way of viewing human existence. As a "second order semiotic system", the Romantic supertext seems subversively to perform the function that Roland Barthes claimed for the ancient Greek theater:
Associated with the "loosening" of work time, the theater installed another time, a time of myth and of consciousness, which could be experienced not as leisure but as another life. For this suspended time, by its very duration, became a saturated time."
In classical drama, it would seem, this "time of myth and of consciousness" existed side-by-side with and complemented the 'work time' of quotidian existence. Even the tragic reality revealed as underlying everyday experience could be reconciled, though toughly, with that experience. In Romanticism, on the other hand, this "saturated time" challenged and undermined, by revealing as deeply contradictory, the presuppositions (historical, ethical, philosophical) of our given world. The saturated time of Romantic myth hostilely opposed itself to the given world and evolved such militantly modern 'mythopoetic' forces and entities as Schiller's mytho-historic idealism, the idea of an "alienated" world; of subjective versus objective realities; the dialectic; the Weltgeist; the Zeitgeist; the struggle between past and present, darkness and light; the 'yearning' vertical natural scenography that Romantic drama shared with painting. Themes and concepts such as imprisonment and liberation; 'emperor and galilean'; the 'third empire of spirit' or Nietzsche's Übermensch, Dionysos and the Crucified One, and so on, all ideologically extended the rhetorical vocabulary of Romantic and realist literature and art. Edmund Wilson noted how 19th century German literature "retained and developed to an amazing degree the genius for creating myths."
The Romantic imagination, born out of the consciousness of history, can challenge the Greek in the fertility of its myth-making, clarifying for the artist the nature of his/her quarrel with the age and the counter-forces that needed to be summoned for combat. The new element in Romantic drama as in Romantic philosophy is that of a multilayered ideological conflict. The artists may differ radically from, and even oppose, each other, but they will share a mutual awareness of the battle that is being fought or the malaise that needs to be cured. Kleist's The Prince Homburg, in many aspects a 'corrective' to Romantic aspiration and subjectivity, at the same time is one of the most eloquent expressions of the Romantic temperament and its conflicts. It could have been written at no other time in European history.
And this Romantic dialectic was as apparent in political life, where the forces of reaction, avidly taking up Burke's Reflections as its manifesto, could form a 'Holy Alliance' against the 'pagan' forces of European revolution. Georg Brandes, in his Main Currents of Nineteenth Century Literature, portrayed all of significant modern European literature as nothing but variations upon the central ideological conflict of revolution versus reaction. This omnipresent kulturkampf provides a unity of metaphoric reference behind the diversity of such dramatists as Byron, Shelley, Schiller, Kleist, Büchner, Wagner, Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw and others. By whatever different routes and approaches, they were led to the same arena of cultural conflict.
