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| ISBN-13: | 9781587295218 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2009 |
| Series: | Studies Theatre Hist & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Writing & Rewriting National Theatre Histories
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2004 University of Iowa Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87745-906-4
Chapter One Some Critical Remarks on Theatre Historiography
ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE
When Friedrich von Schiller appeared before his students on May 26, 1789, to hold his inaugural lecture at the University of Jena as the newly appointed professor for general history, he had taken as the title for his talk the question "What is the meaning of universal history, and what is the purpose of studying it?" Using this as a theme, he developed an enthusiastic program, which was to help the student fulfill the "aim of his studies": to receive an insight into the purposeful path of history, which transforms "unnoticed, the individual into the species":
The human being is transformed and flees the stage; his opinions flee and are transformed with him. Only history remains, uninterrupted, on the scene.... What she keeps hidden from the punishing conscience of a Gregor or a Cromwell, she hurries to publish to humanity: that the selfish person can naturally pursue unworthy ends, but unknowingly furthers excellent ones.
Is world history, then, a kind of theatre history, the philosophical study of which must inevitably lead to enlightenment about the infinite perfectibility of the human race? When we have recourse to Schiller's question today in writing a theatre history, this appropriation rapidly reveals itself as a futile attempt at finding in the storeroom of history - to remain with Schiller's image - a costume that would make it possible to hide our own helplessness and at the same time act it out. For in order to write a history of theatre, one would presumably have to answer the question "What is the meaning of theatre history, and what is the purpose of studying it?" However, this meets a deeply rooted skepticism as to whether it is now possible to answer this question at all.
The difficulties begin as soon as we want to determine the object whose history is to be written: What is theatre? What are we talking about when we employ the term theatre? Since the historic avant-garde movements in the first decades of the twentieth century made the claim to transcend the rift between art and life, to transport art into life, the concept of theatre has been constantly broadened. Its usage was extended to cover the most varied events of exhibition, demonstration, and spectacle. It was employed for the performances of circus artists, clowns, and entertainers; for the "happenings" of the dadaists and surrealists on the streets and in cafés, in church and in parliament; for the May Day celebrations, rallies, and sports festivals of trade unions and parties. The rediscovery of "ritual theatre," and the performance culture of the 1960s and early 1970s, resulted in an even greater extension of the concept: wherever someone put him- or herself, someone else, or something on show, consciously presenting a person or object to the gaze of others, people spoke of theatre. This "enormous activation of the semantic field 'theatre'" blurred the transitions to the metaphorical use of the concept. Thus Michel Foucault could speak of his "theatrum philosophicum," Jean-François Lyotard of the "philosophical and political stage," and Jean Baudrillard of the "stage of the body." The concept of theatre seems currently to be booming - and to have widened to the concept of theatricality; various cultural studies take it as a model for explaining utterly heterogeneous - and quite often historical - phenomena.
On the other hand, historians are well aware of the fact that the concept of theatre is culturally and historically determined and that, within Western culture since the sixteenth century, it has constantly changed. Thus, in the seventeenth century, the term theatrum meant a raised place where something that was regarded as worthwhile was shown, so that it could be applied to an execution, a theatrum anatomicum, a Kunst- und Wunderkammer, or a theatre performance. While in the eighteenth century, the concept narrowed down, so that the term could be applied only to theatre performances and the building in which they took place (and in some European languages, such as French, also to the dramatic work of an author, as in le théâtre de Racine).
If these findings are taken seriously, it will have far-reaching consequences for the project of a theatre history. One will have to abandon the fiction that a certain consensus exists as to an object that is always meant by the term theatre, which would enable one to undertake a geographical (a regional or a European theatre history, or a history of world theatre) or genre-specific delimitation (history of dramatic theatre, musical theatre, dance theatre, puppet theatre). Instead, it will be impossible to avoid an initial delimitation of the object of one's own examination by defining a particular area within the semantic field "theatre." Many of the relevant theatre histories which have appeared in European languages over the last thirty years (or which came out in new editions) seem to take account of this insight to the extent that they - usually implicitly, in some cases however quite explicitly - base their respective examinations on a specific concept of theatre. They proceed from theatre as a basic anthropological category (Gregor, Kernodle), as a cultural phenomenon (Berthold, Kuritz, Schöne), as a social institution (Allen, Brockett, Frenzel, Jomaron, Kindermann, Nicoll, Pandolfi, Raszewski, Vince), an interaction between actors and audience (Southern) or from the performance as a work of art (Brauneck, Knudsen, Michael and Daiber, Stamm). These conceptual definitions, however, often remain remarkably devoid of consequences for the course of the investigation. In each case, independently of the breadth of the underlying concept, the more or less well-documented theatrical events of the institutionalized (literary) spoken theatre in the large cities is generally what is presented. Such an approach nourishes the suspicion that the conceptual definition is intended to satisfy the demand to be exhaustive - and hence potentially consensual - a demand that the subsequent investigation will only fail to live up to, because it must, for pragmatic reasons, remain partial. The indication - which appears as a genuine topos - that one is not aiming for completeness also seems to point in this direction. It is probably to be understood as an insurance clause against the embarrassing possibility that one might miss an event which is then mentioned by another author. Here a virtue is made of necessity - even if the presentation lasts for five, seven, eight, or even ten volumes.
In my view, however, a partial perspective is a condition of the possibility of a history of theatre. Everyone must delimit the subject area of their theatre history in accordance with their specific epistemological interests and competence, select the events that are likely to be productive in terms of the questions they are asking, and construct their history from their examination of the documents related to these events. Having formulated this procedural rule, one could proceed to the immediate agenda - that is, to the delimitation of the subject area - if it was not that we had overlooked another difficulty, which becomes critical at this point, if not before. The concept "theatre history" consists of two terms: theatre and history; and the second term appears to be hardly less problematic than the first. Today the statement that we no longer have a universalist concept of history available is practically a truism. We neither see Hegel's world spirit realizing itself in history, nor recognize in its course the law-governed regularity of a development from the original community via class society to classless society. We are also no longer adherents of the modernization theory of the Enlightenment, according to which - as Schiller was still firmly convinced - the course of history leads to the perfection of humanity. The totalizing and teleologically oriented constructions of history have long since become obsolete. The discipline of history has drawn its consequences from this. On the one hand, it reacts against attempts to revive traditional strategies for making sense of history and, for example, return to the epic procedures of a narrative historiography. On the other hand, quite a number of new, culture-oriented directions have been established in historical research, among them history of daily life, gender history, historical anthropology, history of mentalities, and history of emotions, as well as discourse analytic approaches of the so-called linguistic turn. Common is the concentration on microhistory and individual processes of meaning formation:
The issue no longer has anything to do with developments as temporal transformations, whose direction can enter into the current orientations of praxis as quantities which open up the future, but rather it is about a reabsorption of unilinear images of development into the relativity of different possibilities of human life-forms. In the place of macrohistory - the single, comprehensive history of the modern world - appears the microhistory of the many small histories, each of which has its own importance.
This "resubjectivization" of the discipline of history, the turn to emotions, mentalities, and perceptions, has now, interestingly, led to the formulation of questions that were traditionally dealt with in the historical approaches of history's neighboring disciplines - in philology, theatre studies, and art history. They relate to human thought, its "forms of consciousness, habits of thought, worldviews, ideologies, and so on," which form the subject of intellectual history, the history of ideas or history of concepts, pursued above all in Germany. This new orientation in the discipline of history has led less to a conflict between different schools than to the profession of faith in a fundamental pluralism of theories and methods. The partial nature of the perspective was made into a condition of the possibility of historiography: every theory explains a different form of microhistory; every method relates to a different level.
These developments in the discipline of history have also had far-reaching consequences for the historiography of theatre. The early theatre histories of the eighteenth (e.g., Löwen, Schütze) and nineteenth centuries (e.g., Devrient, Mentzel) - to an extent even in the twentieth century (e.g., Gregor) - were derived from a totalizing concept of progress. The history of the German theatre, for example - or the theatre of Hamburg or Frankfurt - was presented as a continual progression upward from primitive and rough origins toward an ever more civilized and perfected state. The yardstick by which the level of development of the theatre at any given time was measured was its ability to produce the illusion of real, "natural" life on the stage. More recent theatre histories, however, proceed from different concepts of history and different methodological approaches. These determine theatre history as cultural history (Kernodle), social history (Craik, Kindermann), history of ideas (Knudsen, Nicoll, Stamm) or as moral and political history (Raszewski). Despite such proclamations, most theatre histories then proceed in a largely historicist fashion (e.g., Allen, Berthold, Brockett, d'Amico, Jomaron, Kindermann, Michael and Daiber, Nicoll, Pandolfi, Schöne, Vince, Xolodov); in other words, they pile source on source, description on description, anecdote on anecdote, names, dates, and facts, without formulating a problem for whose resolution the material presented was selected and examined. Of course, it is recognized in principle that theatre history can be carried out as cultural history, history of mentalités or social history, as psychohistory, intellectual history or history of ideas, the history of knowledge or art history, and much else. But the methodological consequences of this recognition are not drawn; no specific problematic is developed that might explain or justify the choice of documents as well as the method of their analysis and evaluation. One often gets the impression that the only criterion for the choice and breadth of material used was that it was available. This means that the partial nature of the perspective is not really accepted as the condition for the possibility of theatre historiography - the historicist ideal of completion comes through at every point. The deceptive hope that it could be possible to completely reconstruct the theatre of a period "as it really was," if one only has sufficient material at hand, still seems to provide the objective here.
Against this, it is necessary to insist on the partial nature of the approach as the condition for the possibility of writing theatre history. That means that not only does the area of study require delimitation, but the relevant problematic, in relation to which the investigation is to be undertaken, must be specified. Here both procedures have to be seen as directly related to each other: a given material can make a specific problematic possible or suggest it, while, in reverse, a specific problematic can lead to the selection of particular materials. In any case, theatre history can be carried out only with a problem-oriented approach. There is currently widespread consensus about this approach. There are also already a number of theatre history monographs which proceed accordingly and in which different theoretical and methodological perspectives are applied, depending on the problematic that is identified.
General theatre histories, however (and this holds without distinction for theatre histories of a regional, national, continental, intercontinental, or global scope), have rarely used this approach. This is certainly lamentable, but thoroughly understandable, for here problems come to the fore that in monographs in theatre history are generally only of more peripheral significance. In the monographs the subject chosen is usually studied within a limited stretch of time. The emphasis is then placed on its synchronic structure (within this stretch of time), and the results of the investigation into structure then determine whether the stretch of time chosen can be seen as a period in relation to the problematic or not. In theatre histories, by contrast, the process - in other words, the diachronic change that the object of study goes through over a long space of time - has to be examined. To present theatre history as a process, it does not, however, suffice, as Luhmann has rightly commented, "to narrow everything down to a before-and-after difference - such as 'Europe before the potato' and 'Europe after the potato' - since this difference itself, which separates the periods, could only describe the event, but not history as a process." Theatre histories, then, cannot avoid facing the problem of the formation of periods and the question of the transition between periods and of possibilities of delimiting periods. The problem can only be ignored - or, better, disguised - if one draws up a factography with a purely chronological approach, listing or presenting, in sequence, what happened after what. Only by presenting material about events that happened one after another in a chronological order can one avoid the problem of delineating periods, but one thus denies - or at least ignores - the processual nature of theatre history. Even here it is clearly not possible to do without the old classificatory categories related to periods of intellectual history, such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Baroque, and so on, or at least resorting to the centuries. Within a chronologically developing presentation, the vocabulary is thus one of baroque theatre or seventeenth-century theatre, of Enlightenment theatre or eighteenth-century theatre, and so forth, as if a period were meant by this. If one takes a problem-oriented approach, however, and hence sets specific questions for theatre history, it will not be possible to avoid undertaking periodizations and constructing periods according to the alignments that the course of the investigation indicates in each case. One will thus have to select differing criteria according to the problematic. Hence, for example, a change in the social responsibility for the institutional theatre could act as a criterion, or a change in its social function; an alteration of the norms, values, and attitudes propagated by the theatre would be just as thinkable a criterion as an alteration in its aesthetic principles; a shift in the hierarchical structure of the individual theatrical systems could be a criterion, as much as a fundamental change within one of these systems (in acting methods, in drama, in music, in scenery, in theatre architecture, etc.). Here it has to be borne in mind that the criteria can only contribute to answering the question of whether a change of periods has occurred, but not of why it has occurred. However, one will not be able to do without such explanations if theatre history is to be written as a history of process, that is, as a history of diachronic changes.
(Continues...)
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