Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind: The Struggle to Represent the Inner Life on Stage Kurt Taroff (Belfast) In the following pages, I will examine the intersection between closet drama and monodrama. While these two forms each have their own discrete and unique histories and characteristics, there is, in several conceptual regards, significant overlap between them. Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, growing fascination with subjectivity, interiority, and the life of the mind opened the doors to experimentation with new forms of drama that attempted to capture psychical experience in dramatic form. The authors of these experiments continually found themselves facing the same dilemma. On the one hand, they could subject their work to the physical limitations and collaborative nature of the stage, where the contributions of designers and actors, with their very presence and their own creativity might serve to diffuse the author's singular vision, even as it renders a vision so complete and fixed as to limit the spectator's ability to play an active creative role in that vision. Conversely, the author might choose to limit their dramatic visions to the non-physical (and therefore boundless) world of the page, allowing it to unfold in the imagination of the reader, and thus form a more direct link between the vision created in the author's mind and that formed in the course of reading. This article traces the historical background of this conundrum, as well as the theoretical concerns with which it is intertwined. Nikolai Evreinov and Monodrama In 1908, Russian author and director Nikolai Evreinov gave a lecture entitled “ Introduction to Monodrama ” at the Circle of Art and Literature in Moscow. Evreinov's theory of a dramatic world structured around the inner experience of a single protagonist was not wholly novel, but he was the first to fully articulate a theory for the form. Evreinov defined monodrama as a “ kind of dramatic presentation which, while attempting to communicate to the spectator as fully as it can the active participant's state of mind, displays the world around him on stage just as the active participant perceives the world at any given moment of his existence on stage. ” 1 Essentially, Evreinov sought to convey the subjective experience of a strong central protagonist with such power and immediacy as to evoke in the spectator the illusion that he or she has merged with that protagonist, sharing fully in the experience depicted. To achieve this goal, efforts are required of both the playwright and the director/ designer. The playwright is called upon to structure his or her play so as to reflect the internal psychical experience of a single protagonist. If the playwright successfully conveys through the text and plot this experience of interiority, it then becomes the job of the director and designer to create a mise-en-scène that approximates the protagonist's perceptual experience, as Evreinov notes, “ The basic principle of monodrama is the principle of the stage representation's coalescence with the active participant's representation. In other words, the external spectacle must be an expression of the internal spectacle ” (191). If these efforts are successful, then, more than just empathising with the character, “ the spectator ‘ coexperiences ’ along with the active partici- Forum Modernes Theater, 25/ 2 (2010), 179 - 194. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen pants ” (184). Indeed, Evreinov concludes, “ To induce the illusion in the spectator that he is turning into the participant is the chief task of monodrama ” (191). At the heart of Evreinov's theory is an intriguing, and quite possibly insurmountable paradox. Evreinov notes: Any psychologist takes it to be elementary that the world around us inevitably undergoes transmutations, due to sense impressions; and the notion that the object of an impression inherently is what it in fact borrows from the subject of an impression is not an exclusively psychological phenomenon. All our sensory activity undergoes the process of projecting purely subjective transmutations onto an extrinsic object. [. . .] The world around us borrows, as it were, its character from the subjective, individual ‘ ego. ’ [. . .] And it is modified as we modify, as our mental mood alters: the cheerful glen, the cornfield and the forest that I admire as I sit carefree with my beloved will become nothing more than a bright green patch, yellow stripes and a dark border, if at that moment I am brought news of a misfortune befalling someone close to me. (192 - 3) This presentation of subjectivity was very much in accord with the state of psychology and philosophy of mind in Evreinov's day, and has largely remained so. Theorists such as William James, Henri Bergson, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as psychologists such as Freud, Jung, and Lacan, all at various points expressed a view of a world understood in great measure through the subjective experience of the individual mind's contact with and impressions of (and upon) an outside world. Evreinov's goal is to attempt to approximate this subjective experience, unique to the individual, in artistic form. However, the great problem for any art form attempting to portray this experience is grounded in the difficulty (if not impossibility) of such communication in practice, as is expressed in the following remarks: Consciousness can find in its experience only what it has itself put there. Thus the experience of communication would appear to be an illusion. A consciousness constructs - for x - that linguistic mechanism which will provide another consciousness with the chance of having the same thoughts, but nothing really passes between them. 2 (Maurice Merleau- Ponty) The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's. Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. 3 (William James) The greater number of emotions are instinct with a thousand sensations, feelings or ideas which pervade them: each one is then a state unique of its kind and indefinable, and it seems that we should have to re-live the life of the subject who experiences it if we wished to grasp it in its original complexity. 4 (Henri Bergson) While such assessments would seem to doom even the slightest possibility of success for Evreinov's project in any medium, the theatre is dealt a double blow by such considerations. Even if it were possible for an individual's vision to be conveyed as though directly from the mind of the author, the nature of the theatrical process itself places obstacles (that is to say, intermediaries) between the author and the spectator. The director, designers, crew, and the myriad collaborators in theatrical production, no matter how dedicated to presenting the playwright's vision, cannot help but act as interpreters - ensuring that the link between author and spectator is mediated by the visions, capabilities, and individualities of those who take part in the production process. Consequentially, for some writers, both before and after Evreinov, this problem of stage representation proved so insurmountable that while they may have had a dramatic conception for their work, it seemed preferable to avoid the stage altogether. 180 Kurt Taroff Closet Drama The concept of closet drama - plays written to be read rather than performed - has existed since at least the Roman era, and gone through several vogues of popularity, often, as in the cases of Hrotsvit's religious plays and the Interregnum in England, out of necessity. The Romantic era, however, saw the rise of a trend in closet drama based largely in conceptual concerns of what the play itself was trying to convey, and what the theatres could (or could not) provide. The English Romantics (and in many cases their Continental brethren), believing that the highest form of art was one that linked the mind of the spectator/ reader with that of the author, largely eschewed the physical stage for a ‘ mental theatre ’ to be performed only in the mind of the reader. 5 It was the Romantics, lead by Coleridge and Charles Lamb, who championed the belief that Shakespeare was better read than performed. And their view was not simply retrospective. Several of the major English Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Shelley, and Byron - created plays that twentieth century critics have looked at as “ a new kind of allegory in which villain and heroine represent conflicting aspects of the hero's self with the hero's problem to reconcile his internal conflict through self-development. [. . .] Such a drama is monodramatic in that it exists as the perception of a single observer. ” 6 And while monodramas need not necessarily be closet dramas (nor closet dramas monodramas), it is no coincidence that most, if not all, of these plays were written for the closet. One rationale behind the Romantic closet drama was that even if it were indeed possible to ever fully communicate to a reader the contents of the mind of the dramatist as he or she composed the play, the concreteness of stage production would ensure that the vision that would become hardened in the spectator's mind as the material of the play would be not that of the author, but rather that of the designer and the actor. In reading such works, however, the ‘ mental theatre ’ , as Byron called it, formed in the mind of the spectator, might not be precisely what the author had in mind, but at least it removed the intermediaries of the manager, designers, and actors. In this way, the spectator is free to stage the play without limits in his or her own mind, and if the play is designed as such, might well imagine themselves experiencing the events of the play through the central character in a true monodrama. Evlyn Gould, explicating a passage by Flaubert, and speaking in reference to the author's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of Saint Anthony), notes, “ By means of a ‘ thrusting stiletto ’ (or a ‘ cutting style ’ ) that would penetrate deeply into the mind of its reader, that same reader would benefit from a pleasure not unlike Antoine's. The chance to glide on smooth surfaces - the pleasure of the movement of thought itself - would be for the reader like the saint's own fluid mental voyages. ” Gould ultimately asserts that “ La Tentation demands that we become its subject. ” 7 In this, the closet monodrama potentially has another major advantage over the stage - the removal of the protagonist's body (the body of the other whose subjectivity we are meant to share) and the opportunity to place ourselves fully in the position of that protagonist. Furthermore, such a theatre avoids the technical limitations of the stage that lay bare its unreality all too clearly, distancing us from full immersion in the world of the play. The desire to create as direct a link as possible between author and spectator/ reader may be seen through the frequent identification of the Romantic writers and their central characters. Langbaum notes that “ in borrowing the poet's eyes we also borrow the past experience behind them ” , 8 and continues, asserting that the plots of these plays are 181 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind about the self-development of an individual with whom the reader can identify himself to make the poem an incident in his own selfdevelopment as well. For the poetry of experience is, in its meaning if not its events, autobiographical for both the writer and the reader. 9 Charles Lamb's rationale for the superiority of reading Shakespeare focused on the opportunity for a reader to share an experience with the author in a way a spectator never could: “ Lamb considers tragedy the highest poetic genre, thanks to the emotional identification it inspired, and Shakespeare the supreme tragic poet, thanks to his ability to lose himself entirely in his creations. A similar annihilation of self should ideally occur in the spectator. . . but the physical reality of the stage constantly works against this. ” 10 This desire to create for the reader a simulacrum of the author's imaginings during the process of writing the work is enhanced by the fact that many critics have seen the heroes of these plays as avatars for the authors themselves. The reader, then, is expected to approximate in reading the process of the author in writing, even as the author, during this process, imagined himself as the protagonist. The Romantic dramatic author thus accomplishes a merging of these three heretofore distinct positions - author, protagonist and reader. We will see this concept re-emerge in theoretical discussions of monodrama in the early twentieth century. Intimating the continuity between French Romanticism and Symbolism, Evlyn Gould sees a similar process at work in Stephane Mallarmé's closet drama Hérodïade (begun in 1864, and a lifelong project of Mallarmé's, unfinished at his death), in which the “ formal representation of the mind's inner rhythms, both repeats and elicits (or elicits because it repeats) the echoes of the interior scenes of both readers and writers. ” 11 Gould is careful to note, however, that although Mallarmé (and by extension other writers of such dramas of subjectivity) may enter into the subjectivity of his protagonist, that protagonist is not a representation of Mallarmé himself: This is not a “ spectacle du Moi, ” the writer does not stage himself; his own ego or personality has been sacrificed to the performance. It is the unanchored spectacle of a kind of reified subjectivity, an event, in which, theoretically, readers and writers are joined. 12 The model Gould proposes here is instructive for a great many monodramatic works as conceived by Evreinov: both author and spectator dissociating from their respective egos, and meeting in the shared experience of a central protagonist. Bakhtin: The Novel, Monologism, and Monodrama A recurring concern in discussions of closet drama is the use of stage directions that would seem impossible to perform on stage. Martin Puchner speaks of such works as belonging to the “ exuberant ” type of closet drama, which he defines as containing “ an excess of theatrical action ” . These are plays “ whose constant changes of scenes, large casts of characters, sudden appearances and disappearances, and strategic mixture of hallucination and reality wilfully exceed the limits of theatrical representation. ” 13 This description could refer to a great many of the subjective visions of monodrama. Rather than seeing these as plays which are ripe for physical representation but merely lack the technology or medium for such representation, Puchner views the exuberant closet drama as a move to a completely different genre; one with the trappings of the theatre but a far more prevalent narrative element. Using the “ Circe ” chapter of Joyce's Ulysses as 182 Kurt Taroff his major example, Puchner argues that in the exuberant closet drama (at least its modernist incarnation), stage directions are most profitably seen not as instructions to a director or scene designer, but rather as an independent and authoritative narrative voice. In the creation of this new hybrid form, “ the closet drama not only rejects the [form of] theatre but also needs to create a different, literary one in its stead ” . 14 The problem of closet drama (particularly those closet dramas focused on notions of subjectivity) is at its centre a generic concern. The question must be asked why the authors of these closet dramas, if they were indeed set on avoiding theatrical representation, chose to write in dramatic form at all, rather than in the form of the novel, which underwent its greatest period of growth, power, and innovation in this very same period. A possible answer to this question comes in the work of one of the great proponents of the novel as a genre, Mikhail Bakhtin. After Dostoevsky (his prime example), Bakhtin argues, the novel is characterised by: A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices [. . .] What unfolds in [Dostoevsky's] work is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single, authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights, and each with its own world. 15 Bakhtin contrasts the heteroglossia of Dostoevsky's novels (and of the novel as a form in general) with what he perceives to be the monologism of the theatre: The rejoinders in a dramatic dialogue do not rip apart the represented world, do not make it multi-leveled; on the contrary, if they are to be authentically dramatic, these rejoinders necessitate the utmost monolithic unity of that world. In drama the world must be made of a single piece. Any weakening of this monolithic quality leads to a weakening of dramatic effect. The characters come together dialogically in the unified field of vision of author, director, and audience, against the clearly defined background of a single-tiered world. The whole concept of dramatic action, as that which resolves all dialogic oppositions, is purely monologic. A true multiplicity of levels would destroy drama. 16 What Bakhtin saw as a damning flaw is seen as the very goal of theatre for Evreinov, who argued, “ Our mind is limited in its capacity for perception . . . A readjustment in the objects of our concentration provokes mental fatigue and consequently a weakening of the ability to perceive. [. . .] So the true object of a dramatic performance must be seen to be an emotional experience, and [. . .] it should be the emotional experience of a single mind, not several. ” 17 Marvin Carlson has mounted a stout defense of the heteroglossia of the theatre, noting that Bakhtin “ refers almost invariably to tragedy, and especially to classic tragedy, noting such phenomena as the regularizing poetic form, the focus on the hero, with other characters merely reflecting his concerns, and the drive of tragedy toward the resolution of differences. ” 18 Carlson goes on to dispute Bakhtin's argument for monologism in the form of the dramatic text, with reference to playwrights such as Calderón, Shakespeare, and Ibsen. But his most telling argument, at least with reference to the question of monodramatic closet drama, comes when he speaks of “ the theater's inevitable heteroglossia ” , conditioned by “ the whole production apparatus, including the director and potentially a whole range of contributing artists working on scenery, lighting, costumes, and so on. ” 19 As we noted earlier, this same model of collaboration, while perhaps ensuring that the stage is a heteroglossic place, acts against the expres- 183 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind sion of a single vision - the monologic world that Bakhtin derided. The written drama, either before it gets to production or with no intention of ever reaching the stage, has no such problem. At the heart of Bakhtin's vision of the dialogic, polyphonic, and heteroglossic novel lay the figure of the narrator: “ We acutely sense two levels at each moment in the story; one, the level of the narrator, a belief system filled with his objects, meanings and emotional expressions, and the other, the level of the author, who speaks (albeit in a refracted way) by means of this story and through the story. ” 20 For Bakhtin, the novel's particular advantage comes from an intricately intertwined system of dialogues, at the center of which stands the narrator, who acts as intercessor between the author and his characters. The narrator, though telling the author's story, tells it in his own voice and in his own world, which is not the author's. This gap between narrator and author is made even more palpable in the case of a third-person narrator setting forth the tale of a separate and equally independent and fully valid hero. Thus begins a mélange of interwoven dialogues involving variously: author, narrator, hero, and all of the individual characters (each of which is fully individuated and valid, with independent and distinct worldviews). And here we begin to see why the novel may prove unsuitable to the creation of a completely singular subjective viewpoint: the multiple levels created by the gaps between author, narrator, and character work against the portrayal of a “ single emotional experience ” . Indeed, if the narrator is the conduit of the hero's story, then whose experience is it that we share - narrator or hero? Even in the case of first-person narration, the hero in the guise of narrator and the hero as character in the story are not co-identical: “ The ‘ speaking ’ subject (the agent of the speech-act, to update the terms) and the ‘ spoken ’ subject (the grammatical subject of the utterance) can never coincide. ” 21 Such a gap, Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests, is true not only in fiction, but in lived experience itself: “ Between the self that analyzes perception and the self which perceives, there is always a distance. ” 22 Nevertheless, the potential advantages of first person narrative proved tantalising to Evreinov, who suggested that the heroes of monodrama “ be designated by the simple but expressive first-person pronoun ‘ I, ’ [. . .] I should prefer this not only [. . .] because in that form [. . .] ‘ the most intimate pulse can best be felt, ’ but simply out of practical considerations. ” 23 Ironically, however, Evreinov's first experiment with monodrama, The Representation of Love, demonstrated the limitations both of the use of the ‘ I ’ , as well as of narration in general, as solutions to the problem of the representation of subjectivity. The Representation of Love's hero/ narrator, begins the play in the guise of the character C. S. (Cattarhal Subject), sitting on a park bench, recounting the story of his lost love to another character, H.T (Hemorroidal Type). C. S. introduces the character of ‘ I ’ , himself at a younger age, who then plays out the memory of his affair. ‘ I ’ takes over the telling of the story, reading all stage directions aloud in first-person, even as he plays out the action, while reading all stage directions for his lover ( ‘ She ’ ) in the third-person. Spencer Golub argues that “ This produces a narrative effect, the sense of having an additional angle of perception on the action. ” 24 In fact, the narrative effect is doubled here, and as a result produces three levels of stage interaction - the older C. S., ‘ I ’ as narrator, speaking directly to the audience (or to H. T.), and ‘ I ’ in the immediate world and time scheme of his relation to ‘ She ’ . Such division of perception makes it difficult to ascertain at which level a spectator is meant to merge with this tripled character. Ultimately, narrative form presents an inherent obstacle to unity of perspective 184 Kurt Taroff invested in a central protagonist, presenting an intriguing and instructive paradox. While the stage, with its many collaborators, works against a monological presentation, the novel's multi-layered, heteroglossic world, facilitated by the intercession of narration, is equally resistant to such an aesthetic. And while a naïve spectator may choose to ignore the artifice of the stage and the apparatus of theatrical production, the narrator cannot so easily be elided from the text of which he or she is an integral part. And while Puchner claims that in the modern closet drama the function of the narrator is present in the form of stage directions, I would suggest such cases are rare (Puchner offers few beyond “ Circe ” , which, as it appears within Ulysses can only tenuously be called a closet drama), and are exceptions that prove the rule. The closet drama may then offer the clearest path to both the elimination of narrative polyphony and the ‘ nuisance ’ of stage collaboration, and the best opportunity for a direct link between author and reader. Picard and Sologub: Playing the Author As intimated earlier, many of the Symbolists shared the Romantic poets ’ suspicion of the stage. Even Maurice Maeterlinck, whose works enjoyed considerable success at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, was a theatrical skeptic: “ I always enjoy reading a play far more than I do seeing it acted, for on the stage the delicate symbolic essence of what every thoughtful writer wishes to convey cannot but escape. ” 25 However, there was also a significant strain in Symbolist thought, influenced strongly by Wagner, that saw in a gathered audience (as in the audiences of Greek Tragedy) the potential to create a unity out of multiplicity; as Nietzsche suggested, “ Here we have a surrender of individuality and a way of entering into another character. And this phenomenon is encountered epidemically: a whole throng experiences the magic of this transformation. ” 26 The search for reconciliation between the desire for an audience and the suspicion of the stage was likely a central factor in the ideas of Belgian symbolist Edmond Picard (a member of the Les XX group of artists, which included Maeterlinck), who in 1887 wrote an essay entitled, ‘ Lettre sur le Monodrame ’ , in which he bemoaned the state of contemporary theatre and called for its renovation. Picard decried the obsession with pictorial detail in stage setting, and proclaimed that the “ great masterpieces of dramatic art ” , such as Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust, were incapable of being performed on contemporary stages, “ without sacrilegious mutilation ” . 27 Not only, Picard believed, did the obsession with scenery render some of the great works of dramatic art practically impossible to produce, but the very dependence upon visual representation of every aspect of the scene served to alienate the spectator from the performance. As a solution, Picard proposed a radical minimalist alteration of the theatre. Picard's essay envisions a single actor (the author, or, perhaps, a stand-in for the author) who would read the play to the audience in its entirety - setting the scene with, as Picard calls it, “ a truly literary description ” , before reading the play, performing each role, “ varying his tone and accentuation just enough, and mimicking only to the extent necessary to present the illusion of the play ” . 28 Picard maintains that by forcing the spectator to create the world of the play in their own imagination through the suggestion of the décor by the speaker, increased audience involvement in the play's action will naturally follow. Picard's vision demonstrates a very close link to another of Mallarmé's lifelong, never realised projects, The Ideal Book, which may have been part theatre and part poetry reading, and which Mallarmé intended to exert strict control over in terms of the 185 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind specific movements and actions of the actor. And as Martin Puchner notes, “ Just as the stage and its props are not mimetic signs [the performance of the Book was to be in Mallarmé's own library, which represented nothing so much as itself], the actor does not impersonate a character, but rather Mallarmé himself. ” 29 This emphasis on the representation (or speaking presence) of the author on the stage suggests an insistence on the writer's authority to maintain a Prospero-like control over the revels he creates with his words in the minds of the spectators. Bridging the gap between the French Symbolist anti-theatricality and Nikolai Evreinov's avid embrace of the stage is one of the founders of the Russian Symbolist movement, Fyodor Sologub. In his essay, “ The Theatre of a Single Will ” , Sologub complains bitterly that “ The modern theater presents a sorry spectacle of fragmented will and therefore disunited action . . .. Just as the unique will of I reigns supreme in the macrocosm, so in the little circle of the theater spectacle only one unique will should reign supreme - the will of the poet. ” 30 Like Picard, Sologub imagines the playwright (or a reader standing in for him), placed at the front of the stage (though in this case over to either side), reading the title page, character lists and stage directions of the play. Unlike Picard, Sologub does imagine a set, but declares that whatever scenery there is “ must be one-dimensional ” , and that “ it is also best that all dramas be played in a single setting ” . 31 Sologub also permits the presence of actors on his stage, though he has difficulty containing his contempt for those actors: The actors come on stage and do what the author's stage directions prompt them to, as they are read aloud, and speak what the play script sets down. If an actor forgets his lines - and when do they not forget them! - the reader reads them, as calmly and as loudly as all the rest. 32 Sologub's actors, then, are reduced to little more than puppets, echoing practitionertheorists such as Mallarmé and Edward Gordon Craig, among others, who wish to see the actor replaced by a marionette who may more fully respond to the control and desires of the writer/ director. (While the emergence of the director in this context reinforces the notion of a more unified control over the stage, it also creates a new dialectic between writer and director, alleviated only, as we shall see, in cases where the writer directs his own work.) Furthermore, the actor posed an additional problem in the tendency (similar to that of settings, as discussed earlier) to make specific and concrete what had previously existed in the mind's eye of the writer and had the potential to be similarly (though uniquely and subjectively) reimagined in the mind of the reader. Jonas Barish records that “ For Anatole France, it is pointedly not the bad actors, but the good ones, who spoil plays: their egregious individuality spills over and drowns everything. ” 33 Barish goes on to suggest that for the antitheatrical modernists, marionettes “ hold out the hope that the theatre will be able to free itself once and for all of its humiliating dependence on live players, and take its place alongside the other arts, where the artist's will is law. ” 34 As Barish's assessment suggests, much of the resistance to the stage among the modernists (as evidenced by an essay such as “ The Theatre of a Single Will ” ) can be attributed, as noted earlier, to the collaborative nature of the theatre in opposition to the desire for a unified approach to the work of art invested in the writer (and, starting around this time, the director). The actors, designers, and even stage crew can only stand in the way of the complete realisation of the vision formed in the psyche of the writer. As Gould argues, “ It is precisely the lack of control over the total dramatic effect, over the part of drama . . . over the material realities of represen- 186 Kurt Taroff tation contained in the actor's act but lost to the writer's, which keep [the writer] from doing what he does best. ” 35 Puchner argues that a determination to reduce (or inasmuch as possible, eliminate) collaboration was a key factor in the rise of the director in the late nineteenth century, noting that “ This motivation is particularly evident in the case of Craig, whose polemical attacks on theatre were in the service of gaining full control over the production process and thus eliminating all of the contingencies associated with collaboration. ” 36 For Evreinov's part, it is clear that he welcomed the sort of ‘ flattening ’ that Bakhtin decried. According to Spencer Golub, Evreinov asserted that “ in any play, we are essentially seeing the character from a single, subjective point of view, the author's ” , and consequently wondered, “ Why not accept this as a condition of art in general and allow the artist free rein to explore the power of this impulse in conscious agreement with his audience? ” 37 This integration of author and protagonist stands as a logical extension of Sologub's ever-present author. But the fact that Evreinov also acted as director for his own work demonstrates his determination to keep control of the production process narrowly controlled in the hands of a single figure. And while he may not have been able to rid himself of collaborators such as actors and designers, he did manage to unify three uniquely powerful theatrical figures into one playwright/ director/ dramatic protagonist. Innovation and Representation: Evreinov and Craig Evreinov was well aware of his colleagues' resistance to the materiality of the stage, and in his theory of monodrama (despite its passionate call for unity of vision as an essential element of the theatrical process), as in the rest of his life in the theatre, he mounted a vigorous defense of theatricality in the theatre: Lately there has been much clamor in favor of abolishing scenery. And indeed it ought to be abolished in drama as soon as it hinders more than it helps. But can it not develop into something else? For monodrama this is almost a question of life and death. [. . .] The author of a modern drama, in my interpretation, will fix both these moments in the character's environment in a stage direction; he will pedantically demand of the set-designer an instantaneous transformation of the cheerful landscape into a meaningless medley of a clamorous green, unnerving yellow and sullen olive, and he will be right in his pedantry. 38 Evreinov appeals to the remarkable possibilities presented by the new advances in stage design, and in this same section speaks admiringly of Craig. It is surely one of the great ironies of the 20 th century avant-garde that between 1909 and 1912, while experimentalists such as Evreinov and Meyerhold were working in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, Craig was working in collaboration with Stanislavski at the Moscow Art Theatre, which had by now become reviled by the Avant-Garde as staid and passé, as typified by Valery Briusov's vitriolic “ Unnecessary Realism ” ; an essay which appeared in the same volume as Sologub's. But this irony is heightened by the fact that what Craig was directing at the MXAT was a production of Hamlet in an interpretation described by Stanislavski himself as ‘ monodrama ’ . 39 And furthermore, the production was meant to be the first public demonstration of Craig's theory of screens, a method of continuous on-stage set changes that would allow action to flow without the need for the curtain to fall. The screens had significant conceptual implications on the notion of temporality. Martin Puchner, suggesting that Gertrude Stein's drama is par- 187 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind ticularly better suited for the page than the stage, presents an instructive argument: Subjected to the temporality of the theatre, the audience cannot control the time, place, or speed of reception and must submit to the pace of the performance. There is no way of assuring that the performance conforms to the desires of any particular audience member, with the result that the audience and performance are almost always out of sync. One solution to the a-synchronicity is the act of reading, for readers, in contrast to viewers in the theatre, can adjust the speed of reading, as well as its time and place, to their own sensibilities and needs. 40 Paradoxically, for Evreinov, Craig, and subjectivist playwrights (such as Strindberg in his ‘ Inferno ’ period), the problem is not that the theatre is too continuous, but that scene changes and intervals mean that the stage presentation must be interrupted, and those interruptions often have no relation to the successful conveyance of the author/ director's idea. In addition, Puchner's approval of the reader's ability to put down their book for a moment to contemplate, and perhaps ‘ catch up ’ to the text would in no way be considered an advantage to Evreinov, who sees the real-time functioning of the theatre as a key element in his effort to align the experience of his protagonist to the spectator. To the extent that we may be said to stop and contemplate life in the midst of it, life itself does not stop when we do; when we put down the book to contemplate it, the book does stop. Evreinov wishes us to share the experience of the protagonist in real time, without interruption, chosen or unchosen. If we contemplate a moment in the play, that contemplation takes place in an ulterior space, just as in life (or, alternately, the continuing action of the play may move into the ulterior space, just as intentionality works in everyday living). As described by the French painter Piot: Craig's aim seems to be to achieve, by means of simplification, a musical ebb and flow of the scene, bringing it into the time-scheme so as to link it with the play. [. . .] There has always been an antagonism between the movement of the plot and the immobility of the scenery: if the scene could change in harmony with the development of the plot, this would provide an entirely new source of expression. 41 Such a method of staging is very much in accord with ideas such as William James's stream-of-consciousness, Henri Bergson's duration, and monodrama in its potential to allow a free flow of time and experience onstage. In addition, Craig's screens potentially offer a solution to the problem of instantaneous changes in place or circumstance, precisely what Evreinov was calling for in his plea to modern stage designers. Ultimately, Craig's screens for Hamlet collapsed during final dress rehearsals and set changes had to be done behind a curtain. Craig, who was not present, believed that Stanislavski had intentionally sabotaged his work, a grudge he held until his final meeting with Stanislavski in Moscow in 1935. The idea was only ever realised in limited fashion, but continues to play a prominent role in the history of stage design. Medium and Message: Subjectivity and Genre I would like to conclude with a discussion of the nature of genre and representation, and an argument that it is not theatre itself that stood (or stands) as the greatest obstacle to the goals that precipitated the writing of closet dramas, but rather the relative strengths and weaknesses of any medium of representation engaged in an effort to create an immersive experience of subjectivity. While most of our discussion to this point has focused upon the limits of the stage - its inability to reproduce the fruits of the 188 Kurt Taroff author's imagination with sufficient accuracy or subtlety - for many in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the problem was not that the stage was incapable of doing enough to meet their vision, but that it did too much. While Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk was an inspiration to Evreinov and many others, Mallarmé was among those who (like Brecht later in the century), felt that Wagner's spectacle lulled his audiences into a “ passive trance ” , denying them responsibility for or access to independent interpretation of or active participation (mental or physical) in the performance. 42 Mallarmé saw an alternative in the re-separation of the arts, with particular emphasis on the form of dance. Collaborative in nature, like the theatre, dance is arguably just as resistant to monologisation. However, while the theatre's combination of the visual and the text has a tendency (or at least the capacity) to provide a complete, digestible story to a passive spectator, dance tends to work much more in the abstract, as Evlyn Gould surmises: The dance is then a form of theatre which cannot fix representations on one side of the footlights and a spectator or subject on the other but one which promotes a mobile interchangeability of subjects and objects. The strategies of the dance performance as Mallarmé reads them are thus reminiscent of [. . .] what Jean-François Lyotard envisions as a kind of rotating proscenium arch that simultaneously distinguishes and confuses the audience and the stage, the theatre and the world, reality and fantasy, catching a spectator somewhere between the intensities of his or her own unconscious desires and those emanating from bodies and signs on stage. 43 If theatre presents a world as given, as something outside an observer, one which requires little, if any effort for a spectator to complete in his or her mind, the dance provides free-floating symbols that require (or at least welcome) a reaching back into one's own mind. In the process, the spectator makes the performance his or her own, and the dance takes place in the mind just as much as on the stage. An example of the potential for dance to escape some of the concretisation of the theatre comes from Mallarmé's admiration for Loie Fuller, who achieved fame in Paris in the 1870s dancing with large veils that obscured much of her body, in distinct variation from the common dance attire of the period which emphasised the body of the dancer. Puchner argues that “ these veils represented for Mallarmé the model of a gestural ballet as disengaged as possible from the individual corporeality of the dancer and thus as close as possible to pure fiction. ” 44 It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mallarmé believed he had found, in dance as a genre, and in Fuller in particular, a solution to the problem, discussed earlier, of the stubborn individuality and reality of the actor on the stage. Devoid of voice or even shape, the dancer becomes a cipher, open to a wide-range of interpretations and connotations. Ultimately, Mallarmé opined, “ Dance alone, by virtue of its evolutions, along with mime seems to me to necessitate a real space or the stage./ In a pinch, paper suffices to evoke any play: assisted by his multiple personality, each being able to play it for himself within, which is not the case when it comes to pirouettes. ” 45 And yet, this very inability of the spectator to play for himself the dancer's pirouette works against a merging with character and full immersion, as the spectator appreciates the virtuosity of the dance rather than becoming fully immersed in it. Furthermore, the lack of text in dance only serves to heighten the paradox, as it extends the necessity of the spectator calling forth their own imaginative powers in ‘ completing ’ the performance, but at the same time limits the spectator's ability to establish a firm grounding within any sort of plot or narrative. 189 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind An opposing perspective of the rationale behind closet drama, rather than looking at contemporary forms, sees an answer in technologies that would later be born. Hassan El Nouty, speaking of the Romantic form, sees not a deliberate attempt to overshoot the capabilities of the stage in order to foreclose the possibility of visual representation, but rather an “ Ideal Theatre ” , which strove toward a representation of anything and everything that could be imagined in the mind of the artist. In El Nouty's conception, such a theatre was waiting for a technology that would permit the realisation of these visions - a dream destined to be fulfilled by film and later video. 46 Strikingly similar assessments have been made by later twentieth century critics concerning the proper medium for Evreinov's theory of monodrama. Spencer Golub argues that, “ Monodrama as a form was ultimately outstripped by the cinema (especially the German expressionist cinema) which it anticipated, ” 47 while Sharon Carnicke opines, “ Cinema has been more successful than the stage in handling such extreme subjectivity. ” 48 Laurence Senelick, speaking of Craig's production of Hamlet, points to the idea of author/ hero conflation, but also asserts the superiority of film for monodramatic purposes when he says, “ The monodramatic eye of the designer/ director fusing with Hamlet's mind's eye might best be portrayed by a camera lens. ” 49 The assertions of the superiority of film as a medium for these types of subjective visions are based, for the most part, on two specific rationales. First, as explicitly stated by Senelick above, is the notion that while theatre is faced with the problem of presenting us with a physical representation of the protagonist with whom we are supposedly merging in the form of the actor playing that character, the medium of film, as in the firstperson ‘ I ’ of narrative form, offers the ability to eliminate such physical representation and the possibility of allowing us to see through the protagonist's eyes (for which the camera now substitutes). But, as the Russian semiotician Yuri Lotman has written, point-ofview perspective is not the panacea it might seem: Many experiments have proved that shooting long sequences of film from the viewpoint of one of the characters results in a loss in the sense of subjective focus rather than a gain, since the audience starts to interpret the shots as normal scenic filming. In order to present a sequence of film as embodying the point of view of a particular character, it is necessary (through montage) to alternate the shots taken from his point in space with shots which fix his position from somewhere outside him, from the audience's (i. e. ‘ nobody's ’ ) point of view or that of other characters. 50 In addition, it would seem that the disembodied voice of the protagonist is likely to distract the viewer and even further distance the spectator, who, even if they are seduced into identification through point-of-view, knows that the voice that they hear is not their own. Film, then, is subject to largely the same problem as theatre to the extent that it must physically represent the character through whom we are supposed to be experiencing the drama. The other reason for the assertion of film's superiority for the purposes of monodramatic presentation comes from the fact that while Evreinov may have appealed to the scenic innovators of the early twentieth century such as Craig to produce the instantaneous changes in scenery, mood, and even character demanded by his theory, the theatre could not then, and arguably still cannot compete with the cinema's ability to seamlessly and ‘ magically ’ affect such changes. Any attempt to do so on stage is likely to provide a stark reminder of the stage's theatricality, while film retains a remarkable ability to present a sheen of ‘ reality ’ to even the most fantastical events. 190 Kurt Taroff And yet, like the skeptics of Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk, film's illusionistic superiority is not welcomed by all. Contemporary avant-garde theatre director Richard Foreman, in the preface to his play Film is Evil: Radio is Good, suggests: No matter how exotic the adventure portrayed on the screen, the fact that it's filmed convinces the spectator that it takes place in the “ real world. ” [. . .] Film, by its very nature, works in our consciousness to limit our options. [. . .] Silent film comes closer to evoking this more complete kind of transcendence because of its strangeness [. . .] But what concerns me here is the present impact of contemporary film, as opposed to the more positive psychic effects of radio, poetry, and, of course, the theatre. [. . .] A painting leaves gaps that the viewer's vibrating consciousness must fill - more gaps than film does. [. . .] A good painting is a reference to a system of perceiving reality, rather than a stand-in for reality itself. The same for poetry and poetic theatre. But film runs the danger of handing its audience a dead substitute for reality, rather than a lively way of alluding to it. 51 Ironically, Foreman is now focused more on film work than theatre. Nevertheless, we see again here the idea at work that the presentation of a complete picture, rather than involving the spectator more deeply in the artwork at hand, instead distances them from it, forcing them to view it (or worse yet, passively receive it) as an outsider. It is worth noting that Evreinov's theory has been subjected to strikingly similar critiques in recent years, with Sharon Carnicke suggesting that he was susceptible to charges of hypocrisy: Evreinov had complained that realism on stage left little to the imagination, and hence, cut the audience out of the creative process of theatre. Rather than co-creating the world of the play, spectators at the Moscow Art Theatre were at the mercy of the director by being presented with ready-made choices in the most minute details of the set and environment of the play. In all but its non-realistic style, the same could be said for monodrama. Evreinov tried to create all the variations of the protagonist's perceptions for his audience, again leaving nothing to the imagination. Monodrama was far from a suggestive theatre which freed the imagination of the audience. 52 In this struggle between over-representation and minimalism, we get some sense of the futility of seeking the ideal form for the depiction of subjective experience. Each medium, it seems, seeks its own style for such expression and it is fascinating to see the intellectual cross-currents between these styles and the philosophical concepts in which they are grounded. Early in this essay, we looked at several views on the veritable impossibility of communicating the stuff of consciousness between individuals, and the obstacles that this presented to artists intending to represent consciousness. In this same vein, Louis Gillet, in speaking of Joyce's attempt to recreate consciousness in Ulysses, labeled it, “ An illusory project, because no language exists which can translate what is beyond language. ” 53 Indeed, the problem of representing thought in language proves a greater obstacle to the novel than it is to film or theatre. For while film and theatre may visually portray the world as it is perceived by the protagonist, the novel must resort to words if it is to attempt to describe that same landscape, and though we may often articulate thoughts to ourselves, our impressions of the scenery around us rarely express themselves linguistically. Edouard Dujardin, whose 1887 novel Les Lauriers sont Coupés (The Bays Are Sere) and its attendant theory of monologue intérieur served as an inspiration to Joyce, keenly felt this problem: “ Total reproduction, real ‘ reproduction of the film of consciousness ’ is something almost impossible to 191 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind imagine. And that is why we have several times made clear that interior monologue must not render thought ‘ raw, ’ but give the impression of it. ” 54 And in a variation of Puchner's assertion of the novelisation of the closet drama in work such as Ulysses, Dujardin suggested a theatrical equivalent for his novelistic form: One can wonder whether, after having taken up such a place in the novel, interior monologue is not destined to go into the theatre, in order to renew it, so to speak. We can well imagine, in the course of a dialogue, a series of ‘ disguised ’ monologues which would differ from the ‘ disguised ’ monologues of Racine in that, instead of being the translation into rational terms of the character's thoughts, the latter would be expressed anterior to their logical organization, that is to say as they come into being and in an apparently ‘ raw ’ state - in other words, in which the character would let the intertwined voices of his heart speak directly during the dialogue. 55 Rather than utilising the myriad and unique tools of the stage in his attempt to translate the method he had conceived for his monologue intérieur from the purely linguistic medium of the novel, Dujardin remained firmly ensconced in that linguistic mode. Surely this is, in part, a reflection of Dujardin's native medium as a writer, but it nevertheless demonstrates the varying tools and methods that each artistic medium can bring to bear in attempting to portray the experience of consciousness. In a letter to Dujardin dated April 8, 1888, Stéphane Mallarmé wrote in praise of Les Lauriers sont Coupés: I can see you have set down a cursory method of notation that turns upon itself, whose sole aim, independent of large-scale literary structures, poetry or decoratively convoluted phraseology, is to express, without misapplication of the sublime means involved, everyday experience which is so difficult to grasp. So there is here less a happy result of chance than one of those discoveries we are all tending towards in our different ways. 56 While Mallarmé's interest in and praise for Dujardin's novel primarily demonstrates the French symbolist concern for interiority and subjectivity, his comments may be interpreted in a far broader manner. For this depiction is at the centre of the varied experiments that this article has recounted, along with many others in the years since. This goal of the depiction of “ everyday experience, ” as we have seen throughout this article, may not only be “ difficult to grasp ” , but perhaps even impossible. Each form, indeed each individual work of art, attempting to approximate this experience must grapple with the limits and advantages afforded by their respective media. Perhaps, then, the question of which medium is best suited for the depiction of subjectivity and consciousness is the wrong one to ask. Instead, it might be said that artists in all media (and increasingly, across media) are engaged in a quest, likely an endless quest, for “ those discoveries we are all tending towards in our different ways. ” Notes 1 Evreinov, Nikolai. “ Introduction to Monodrama. ” Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists: An Anthology. Ed. Laurence Senelick. Austin, 1981, 183 - 199 (187). Parentheticals refer to this text. 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception. London, 2002, 207. 3 James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, 1981, 221. 4 Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will. Mineola, NY, 2001, 17 - 18. 5 George Gordon, Lord Byron, quoted in Erdman, David V. “ Byron's Stage Fright: The 192 Kurt Taroff History of His Ambition and Fear of Writing for the Stage. ” ELH 6. 3 (1939): 219 - 45, 231. 6 Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience. New York, 1963, 63 - 65. 7 Gould, Evlyn. Virtual Theatre from Diderot to Mallarmé. Baltimore, 1989, 139, 140. 8 Langbaum 1989, 48. 9 Langbaum 1989, 52. 10 Carlson, Marvin. Theories of the Theatre. Ithaca, N. Y., 1993, 224 - 225. It is worth noting that Jeffrey N. Cox has identified “ monodramatic traits ” in Lamb's 1802 play, John Woodvil. Cox, Jeffrey N. In the Shadows of Romance: Romantic Tragic Drama in Germany, England, and France. Athens, OH, 1987, 43. 11 Gould 1989, 160. 12 Gould 1989, 164. 13 Puchner, Martin. Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore, 2002, 15. 14 Puchner 2002, 92. 15 Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Minneapolis, 1984, 6. [Italics are Bakhtin's.] 16 Bakhtin 1984, 17. 17 Evreinov 1981, 186. 18 Carlson, Marvin. “ Theater and Dialogism. ” Critical Theory and Performance. Ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor, 1992, 312 - 23, 314. 19 Carlson 1992, 319. 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, 1981, 314. 21 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. “ The I That Tells Itself: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Narrative Identity. ” Narrative 16.1 (2008): 1 - 15, 6. 22 Merleau-Ponty 2002, 49. 23 Evreinov 1981, 197. 24 Golub, Spencer. Evreinov: The Theatre of Paradox and Transformation. Ann Arbor, 1984, 40. 25 Maeterlinck, quoted in Barish, Jonas. The Antitheatrical Prejudice. Berkeley, 1981, 339 - 340. 26 Nietzsche, Friedrich. “ The Birth of Tragedy ” in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. New York, 1967, 64. 27 Picard, Edmond. Discours sur le Renouveau au Théâtre. Bruxelles, 1897, 112. [Translation K. T.] 28 Picard 1987, 116 - 119. 29 Puchner 2002, 69. 30 Sologub, Fyodor. “ The Theater of a Single Will. ” Russian Dramatic Theory from Pushkin to the Symbolists: An Anthology. Ed. Laurence Senelick. Austin, 1981, 132 - 148, 136 - 137. See also translation by Daniel Gerould in TDR 21. 4 (1997): 85 - 99. 31 Sologub 1981, 145. 32 Sologub 1981, 139. 33 Barish 1981, 343. 34 Barish 1981, 344. 35 Gould 1989, 51. 36 Puchner 2002, 10. 37 Golub 1984, 37. 38 Evreinov 1981, 192 - 193. 39 My discussion of Craig's production of Hamlet at the Moscow Art Theatre is heavily indebted to Laurence Senelick's Gordon Craig's Moscow Hamlet: A Reconstruction (Westport, CT, 1982). 40 Puchner 2002, 102. 41 Piot, letter to Jacques Rouché, quoted in Bablet, Denis. The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig. London, 1981, 122 - 123. 42 Puchner 2002, 71. 43 Gould 1989, 153. 44 Puchner 2002, 80. 45 Gould 1989, 218 n. 46 Hassan El Nouty, Theatre and pre-Cinema, cited in Gould 1989, 37. 47 Golub 1984, 46. 48 Carnicke, Sharon. The Theatrical Instinct: Nikolai Evreinov and the Russian Theatre of the Early Twentieth Century. New York, 1989, 78. 49 Senelick 1982, 190. 50 Lotman, Juri M. “ Point of View in a Text. ” New Literary History 6: 2 (1975): 339 - 352, 351 - 352. 51 Foreman, Richard. “ Preface to Film is Evil: Radio is Good ” . Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater. Ed. Ken Jordan. New York, 1992, 150 - 152. 52 Carnicke 1989, 77 - 78. 193 Screens, Closets, and Echo-Chambers of the Mind 53 Louis Gillet, quoted in Dujardin, Edouard. Interior Monologue in The Bays Are Sere; and, Interior Monologue. London, 1991, 115. 54 Dujardin 1991, 116. 55 Dujardin 1991, 144. 56 Stéphane Mallarmé, quoted in Anthony Suter, preface to Dujardin 1991, 87 - 88. 194 Kurt Taroff