The deconstruction of representation: Wilson’s model

Summary

The theoreticians of postmodernism were late in encompassing the theater in the orbit of their consideration, but once this occurred, they discerned almost immediately the ideal symmetry between the assumptions underlying the trend and the essence of the theatrical. At once, they emphasized the active participation of theater and drama in the creation of the critical phase of modernism (especially in Europe; there was an enumeration of the examples of German expressionism, dadaism, futurism, the creativity of Maeterlinck and Yeats, and later Artaud and Brecht). They went on to point out another, programmatic contiguity: every work of theater illustrates the tension between product and process (no complete final version of the work exists, after all). Finally, more than other form of art, theater embraces the extremes of high and low culture.

In the philosophical texts of the patron saint of the entire movement, Jacques Derrida, it is no accident that the metaphor of the stage appears. The Derridian theses that the theatrical space is an undecided and at the same time deconstructive space involved in the “impossibility of unambiguity” and that “the audience becomes a stage unto itself,” corresponds perfectly to the self-consciousness of twentieth-century theater and to the state of mind of the theatrology of the time. Attempts at putting the world of drama in order after the experience of the theater of the absurd (analogous to the phenomenon of art after the end of art) also indicate the multiplicity of mimesis in the contemporary theater (Austin E. Quigley), the lack of dialogue and closing of the dramatic structure (John Peter), and the end of individualism and the image of “rootless existence” (George E. Wellwarth, Erika Fischer-Lichte).

In 1984, Darko Suvin diagnosed the malaise of the “individualistic drama,” connected with the history of the illusionistic stage. In 1980, Maurice Valency announced the “end of the play” as a result of the rejection in the twentieth century of the traditional doctrine of mimesis and the myth of cosmic order. For this reason, perhaps, the dominant theme in plays (and theater) at the end of the twentieth century seems to be the conflict between reality and illusion, between the truth of human existence and the necessary mendacity in interpersonal conventions as described by Anthony S. Abbott. Precisely this conflict is intended to unite the diversity of models of post-absurdist drama: Harold Pinter, Peter Weiss, Tom Stoppard, Peter Handke.