Christopher Innes
One of the fundamental qualities of modernism is that it explodes traditional genres, demolishing the boundaries between different artistic forms. Criticism has lagged behind, imprisoning these radically unconventional artistic languages in sterile cells of specialization. Sherrill Grace offers an essay in modernist scholarship - cross-cultural, trans-national, imaginatively comparative - and the results of establishing connections between painting and literature, drama and the novel, are illuminating. What emerges is a new map of contemporary realities, in which expressionism ceases to be either a transitory movement that flourished briefly in Germany before being hounded to extinction by the Nazis, or simply a quasi-symbolic and abstract mode of representation to be borrowed as a stylistic commodity. Instead expressionism stands revealed as the essential vision underlying modern art.
Sherrill Grace's thesis is that the explosive revolution in Weimar Germany set the agenda for North American artists, right up to the present. As the title of this study announces, themes of regression and apocalypse are seen as intrinsic to the expressionist approach. These spiritual interpretations of existence not only determine the anti-rational style developed in the 1920s, content and form being inseparable, but mirror and define the twentieth-century psyche. Although these particular terms have been used before, the point is carried further here. The analysis is extended to fresh material in considering North American expressionism; and in itself the argument has considerable provocative value. Demonstrating that atavistic yearnings and apocalyptic visions form a key element of modernism offers a challenging and highly political perspective on the increasingly materialistic, technocratic and urbanized nature of twentieth-century society.
At the same time, the assertion that these themes are all-encompassing turns out to be paradoxically limiting. Making such specific concepts into universal qualities is inherently exclusive, since any works that take different lines are automatically disqualified, even if they correspond on other significant levels. In addition, the picture is distorted by the artificial academic division of 'modernism' from 'post-modernism' - originally developed to distinguish the shift from (European) expressionistic realism to (American-dominated) abstract expressionism in painting. This has only limited validity for poetry and the novel, but is almost completely irrelevant to drama. Intellectual clarity is gained at the expense of narrowness; and indeed the selection of works discussed is curiously restricted.
After an extensive overview of German expressionism, almost equal space is devoted to North American theatre and North American novels. Yet where four novelists are analyzed, only two dramatists are represented. This selectivity is justified by focusing explicitly on writers who were 'demonstrably acquainted with some form(s) of German expressionist art' [p 6]. The promised wider picture dwindles into a conventional study of sources and influences. Even so, this principle is not applied consistently. The dominant influence on Sheila Watson was Wyndham Lewis, through whose Vorticism she came to German expressionism second-hand and extremely indirectly, while Ralph Ellison cannot be shown to have had any significant exposure to Weimar art at all. His admiration for T.S. Eliot is noted; yet Eliot's only contact with the radical experimentation in Germany came in his early work with the Group Theatre, filtered through Auden and Isherwood, and was quickly discarded.
In fact this focus sets up an additional, historical boundary to the cultural map, since by definition post-war writers were too young to have direct experience of Weimar culture. So, despite the claim that expressionism is not only 'a major impulse of modernism' but vital to the understanding of what is happening in art today [p 4], almost all the works discussed are drawn from the 1930s (the exceptions being Sheila Watson's and Ralph Ellison's 1952 novels, respectively The Double Hook and Invisible Man). As a result, the impression given is that North American theatre forms an artistic backwater, a land of lost opportunity which sank back into realistic traditionalism after gaining a short-lived experimental independence in the 1930s. This is highly misleading. What of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard in the U.S.? Or George Ryga, Michael Cook, Linda Griffiths, Michel Tremblay and even George Walker, among others? Almost all these dramatists are more consistently expressionistic than either O'Neill or Herman Voaden (the two North American dramatists considered in detail).
With O'Neill, we are covering familiar ground - the Nietzschean nihilism, the echoes of Strindberg and Kaiser, the collaboration with Jig Cook and Robert Edmond Jones, the experiments with masks and monologue. And although the wider expressionist context is a positive aid to understanding how O'Neill's expressionism functions, it also leads to a confusion between expressionistic values and theatrical effectiveness. As a result some of O'Neill's weakest works are held up as models: Lazarus Laughed, for instance, being hailed as 'O'Neill's one truly apocalyptic vision' [p iii].
This lack of critical distance also colours the discussion of Herman Voaden's highly lyrical and abstract dramatic pieces. Thus his first fully expressionist essay sketched out in 1930, Symphony, is proclaimed a 'stunning work' with 'extraordinary' scenes [p 125], although it never reached the stage and lacks essential elements for its theatrical realization. Voaden's script for this Drama of Light and Motion for a New Theatre (the subtitle is typical of Gordon Craig's visionary theories) remains a skeletal outline - short synopses of five 'movements' - without either the musical composition or choreography that would flesh out the 'symphonic' action. The aesthetic ideas are indeed fascinating; but more than any other type of theatre, this depends on physical performance. Rejecting dialogue, its very essence is the orchestration of dance, music and the visual arts. Notational sets and lighting are simply not enough for critical evaluation. Voaden's other plays of the 1930s and early 1940s, highly praised at the time of their performance, emerge as a significant part of Canadian theatre history, even though the framework of this study prevents them from being explored as such.
Forgotten until very recently, they have had little direct influence on contemporary Canadian drama; and their spiritual lyricism makes them museum-pieces, with the ecstatic birth of the expressionist 'new man' announced at the climactic end of Ascend as the Sun appearing embarrassingly facile from today's perspective. Voaden took expressionism to an extreme that unintentionally revealed its inherent theatrical flaws - though these are precisely what is singled out for attention here. His plays are static and lack objective correlatives for the emotions they seek to arouse. Their undramatic quality is compounded by the northern myth on which the action of each play is centred that substitutes a confrontation between man and the empty landscape for human conflict. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the only one to have been revived - Murder Pattern, which was given a college performance in 1987 - is the most traditional in plot and characterisation, being based on a real incident. Yet Voaden's importance is, as Sherrill Grace shows, that he was the first to set the distinctive atmosphere of the Canadian north on the stage, and to develop a style designed for expressing its nature.
The fact that this has been echoed by Ryga, Cook, Griffiths and others is significant. Although it lies outside the bounds of this particular study, the question of defining a uniquely Canadian drama, mirroring national experience in a particular way of treating its material, is a productive field for future research. Regression and Apocalypse may only touch on the issue, but it offers a valuable starting point.