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The Theatrical Values of John Arden
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
In 1977, John Arden produced a collection of essays called To Present the Pretence, in which he tried to articulate for himself and for us the main lines of his development, and to define, through his various projects and enthusiasms for other playwrights, what theatre is and what it might become. Arden's book is a fascinating work which chronicles the itinerary of a man who took the risk of opening himself and his art to the great forces of contemporary history and whose work increasingly bears the marks of the contradictions in that history. At the ideological level, these essays mark the stages in Arden's progress from a vague Left-Wing quasi-liberalism and pacificism tinged with anarchism, to a more affirmative neo-Marxism which still bears some traces of his early idealism. This political development brought with it an increasing pressure on Arden's theory and practice; and perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of his career is the tense interplay between the demands of political praxis and those implied by what he calls ‘the Ancient Principles of Drama’.
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- Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1980
References
Notes
1. Arden, John, To Present the Pretence: Essays on the Theatre and its Public, London, Eyre Methuen, 1977.Google Scholar
2. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance (1959) had, of course, explored the problem of pacificism at a stage in Arden's career when pacificism seemed to be a serious, though not an unproblematic position to hold. As Arden puts it in an introduction to the play (in Arden, , Plays: One, London, Eyre Methuen, 1977, p. 13):Google Scholar
Complete pacificism is a very hard doctrine: and if this play appears to advocate it with perhaps some timidity, it is probably because I am naturally a timid man – and also because I know that if I am hit I very easily hit back: and I do not care to preach too confidently what I am not sure I can practise.
3. Arden, John, Plays: One, p. 5.Google Scholar
4. Arden proposes this definition of the Sacraments as one which can be applied also to the theatre: Maud Ellmann outlines a useful critique of this notion in her ‘Spacing-Out: A Double Entendre on Mallarmé’ in The Oxford Literary Review, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 22–31. In her article she analyses, also, the contradiction in Romantic criticism between a notion of life (and, thus, the artwork) as thing, a self-sufficient hypostasis, and life as process, as infinite development. Much of her article is concerned with a Derridean critique of the notion of presence, of the ontological priority assigned by the Western metaphysical tradition to the logos. For her, a text is a play of surfaces which cannot be resolved or ended by reference which cannot be resolved or ended by reference to ‘any transcendent reality that might elude its mischievous syntax’. Her argument is a useful counterweight to Arden's stance, but the focus of it is writing: drama is a form of writing which depends, partly, on presence (the spoken word; living gesture). To that extent, dramatic writing cannot be adequately accommodated within the Ellmann description: it needs, perhaps, a description whose limits would be set by Arden's position at one pole and Maud Ellmann's position at the other.
5. Julia Kristeva defines intertextuality as the fact that no text can completely free itself from past texts, can avoid absorbing and transforming other texts. The novel, of course, is the genre in which this operates most obviously: ‘le roman semble, de tout temps, avoir voulu se faire comme une OPPOSITION à une loi qui n'est pas seulement celle du genre, mats aussi celle – idéologique – du discours de son époque’, Le texte du roman, The Hague, Paris, 1970, p. 175. See also pp. 12, 14, 67–9, 72, 92–3, 168–76 for a fuller discussion on intertextuality.
6. Here, nevertheless, there are the elements of a specifically formal analysis which Arden develops more fully in his examination of Henry V. Such a formal analysis attempts to show social contradictions at work within the form of the art-work, and not simply within its surface content. This, of course, implies a clear transcendence of reflection-theory, of Goldmann's homologues etc., and points in the direction of Adorno's analyses in his Philosophie der neuen Musik, Frankfurt, 1958: on page 31 of this we find:
Es ist mit der Neigung verfilzt, die Partei des Ganzen, der grossen Tendenz zu ergreifen und zu verdammen, was nicht hineinpasst. Kunst wird dabei zum blossen Exponenten der Gesellschaft, nicht zum Ferment ihrer Veränderung, und so jene Entwicklung gerade des bürgerlichen Bewusstseins approbiert, welche alle geistigen Gebilde zur blossen Funktion, einem nur für anderes Seienden, schliesslich zum Bedarfsartikel herabsetzt.
And on page 125, discussing the art-work's relationship to society, Adorno points out:
Während die Kunstwerke diese kaum je nachahmen, und ihre Autoren vollends nichts von ihr zu wissen brauchen, sind die Gesten der Kunstwerke objektive Antworten auf objektive gesellschaftliche Konstellationen, manchmal angepasst dem Bedarf der Konsumenten, mehr stets in Widerspruch zu diesem, niemals aber von ihm zureichend umschrieben.
For further illuminating exploration of the dynamic aspect of an art-work see Jameson's, F. excellent study Marxism and Form, Princeton, 1971, pp. 22–31, 34–8, 395–6Google Scholar and, indeed, his entire final chapter. Interestingly enough, Arden's subtle response to artistic mediations of social reality rarely appears in his more theoretical essays: the fact that such subtlety is apparent in his specifically dramatic analyses only, is symptomatic once again of the contradictions in the later Arden's theoretical position.
7. See, for example, Fergusson, Francis, The Idea of a Theatre, Princeton, 1968, pp. 98–142Google Scholar and passim, Styan, J. L., The Dramatic Experience, Cambridge, 1965, pp. 38–53, 71–91Google Scholar, and Williams, Raymond, Drama in Performance, Harmondsworth, 1972, passim.Google Scholar
8. See Note 6, above.