Occasional Prose Read Online Free PDF

seeing—was proclaimed in martial language reminiscent of field dispatches; there was continual news of “break-throughs” on one front or another, and the term “vanguard” or “avant-garde,” having been borrowed from the military, was appropriated with bold finality by artists. In fact, as Duchamp made clear, the movement was aimed at subverting Art, perceived as a bundle of tricks, and it often took its cues from science and advanced technology. The discrepancy between appearance and what lay underneath was repeatedly “proved” by modernists in a variety of fields. There was no “break” with reality—only a tremendous shattering of surfaces. Honesty, an ever-greater honesty, was the rallying cry responded to by architects and furniture designers as well as by wordsmiths like Joyce and Pirandello. What had happened to the Six Characters, Chiaromonte notes, was that a fact had exploded among them.
    Anyone who knew and loved Chiaromonte will recognize that an intransigent and fearless honesty was a basic trait of his character. Still the value he set on modernism in the theatre (when he could dispense with it more readily in the other arts) may seem bewildering if we do not grasp what he conceived the theatre’s function to be. His ideas on this score were highly independent, at any rate not current in his profession, where few ideas of what the theatre is or could be are ever framed in the shape of a thought. Meditation had convinced him that the theatre, among the arts, had a special, privileged position in that its forms—comedy, farce, tragedy—constitute means by which reality is met and accepted for what it is, i.e., that which is ineluctable and cannot be altered. No other mode of seeing and rendering experience possesses this capability.
    Among literary forms, the novel deals with the subjective ego and its dreams and reveries, which in principle are only limited by the exhaustion of the novelist’s imagination, but the theatre deals with men and women acting and interacting in a physical space and hence rigorously limited in their outward motions. Each, as he moves, encounters the boundaries that define the others’ outline. These boundaries, at the start of the play, may go unperceived by the characters, who picture themselves as free; it is the discovery of them, swift or gradual, the knocking up against them, rebounding, attempting to circumvent them, that make up the agon, never a straightforward contest between two individuals (Antigone vs. Creon), but between the one and a dense plurality. This plurality may be conceived as Necessity, the Law, the Divine, or simply the Others (Sartre’s Huis Clos )—whatever name is given under the prevailing dispensation to a limit felt to be there , outside, constraining human action, and which, when accepted and measured, in some way liberates the higher faculties for an act of contemplation.
    Agon (though I do not recall that Chiaromonte says this) originally meant an assembly, a gathering, rather than what took place in it, and the social character of the theatre, the being together for a limited space of time in a limited but populous space, surely comprehends both the audience and the drama or interplay they watch. The silent participation of the spectator in the give-and-take of dialogue, which is nothing less than a continuous exchange , emphasizes the togetherness (if the word can be excused) of the dramatic situation, just as the solitude of the reader engrossed in a book mirrors the subjectivity, represented often by the narrative “I,” of the novel’s consciousness.
    Dramatic action, being circumscribed, has a logic far more compelling than that of the strung-out incidents in a novel or tale; within a closed circle, everything follows necessarily , unfolds from what is implicit. This is just as true of comedy as of tragedy, in fact, I would add, more evidently so, since the comic turnabout demonstrates as exquisitely as any syllogism the