All the dead voices…
They speak all at once
Each one to itself …
To have lived is not enough for them
They have to talk about it
To be dead is not enough for them …
Waiting for Godot

We are in for a sequentiality of improbable possibles…
Finnegans Wake

Contrary to usual assumptions, Ibsen's cycle of 12 naturalistic plays, from Pillars of Society to When We Dead Awaken, is extremely learned work, closer to the writings of James Joyce or T. S. Eliot than to the typical drama of modern realism. The cycle is filled with the sense of history, the accumulations of the spirit of man. Its learning is deeply ingrained in its art, dictating form as well as content: it is unlike the learning of, say, Man and Superman, which is more or less on the surface for the audience's immediate comprehension and enjoyment.

This is a recording. A man comes out on stage, stands down-center and begins to breathe. He stands there for a long time. His head is tilted slightly up, his eyes seeming to fix on a point in the balcony. His shoulders are down and his chest is not blown up, but his elbows ride high to the rear as if to suggest a soldier at attention. He wears a white sleeveless undershirt and untapered dungarees. And he doesn't move. Once or twice he wobbles an inch. Perhaps he does this deliberately: homing, by approximation, on the dead center of his gravity. For the rest, the only movement you see on stage is the occasional rippling and stretching of his undershirt across the bellows of his breath. No one can say this man's presence is sympathetic; and no one can say it is hostile.

Nothing tastes staler than the revolutions of the day before yesterday; the bitter flavor of great expectations disappointed clings to them; they make us feel superior for having seen through their ridiculous pretensions and sorry for our. fathers and grandfathers for having been taken in by them. That Naturalism in the novel and in the theatre still leaves such an aftertaste on our own palates is, in a way, a tribute to the intensity of emotion it aroused in its day and the length of time during which it acquired and held a dominant position. After all: it was in the 1870's that Zola shocked the world with his new concept of Naturalism; Ibsen's Ghosts was first published in 1881; Strindberg's Father in 1887, Miss Julie in 1888; Hauptmann's Before Sunrise had its first performance in 1889; Chekhov's Seagull in 1896.

Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, encircle nascent ideas with stolid values, and annihilate experiments by marketing distorted replicas. The “news” is a deadly enemy of what is new, and premature identification may ruin for a lifetime authentic identity.

My first thoughts revealed that I was not very precise or concrete about politics. I turned up some hard prejudices against student radicals. I believed student leaders to be deeper into revolutionary rhetoric than radical action. I dismissed many actions on American campuses as either “escalated panty raids” or “senseless disruption.”

Jean-Luc Godard, that paragon of paradox, takes time out in La Chinoise to rewrite film history by challenging traditional notions of what is real and what is not real. Lumière, Godard argues through a mouthpiece character, was no more a pioneering realist than Méliès was a mere magician. Lumière did photograph the reality of trains steaming into a station or of workers filing out of a factory, but these were painterly subjects fashionable with the Impressionists of the late 19th century. By contrast, Méliès may have staged the state visit of a Balkan monarch to France with actors and fake sets, but nonetheless he transformed the cinema into a kind of Brechtian newsreel. Hence, Méliès came closer to reality and modernity through artifice than Lumière did through literal reproduction.

From the early twenties, when the Paris Dadaists enacted the Trial of Maurice Barrès in the St. Julien le Pauvre Park, to the recent theatrical events of a political nature performed in the streets, there is a long story of militant outsiders and antiartists for whom the cultural industry is just another aspect of capitalism and, as such, must be destroyed. On the other hand there are non-political Fluxus-type events, arty-farty happenings, and street shows such as those organized by the Groupe de Recherche de l'Art Visuel which claim to be “unintentional” and not aimed at the destruction of the existing social structure. These events are still concerned with the history of art, of theatre, or of culture in general and tend to be quickly absorbed into the art market, the “avant-garde” department of Madison Avenue, and wind up as the latest form of entertainment for Jackie Onassis. It is important not to confuse the art of revolution with its commercial and bourgeois imitation.