Modern Drama

What constitutes a character on the modern stage? Sarah Balkin’s Spectral Characters: Genre and Materiality on the Modern Stage expands the concept of character, tracing a lively history of texts in which authors materialize their [End Page 113] metaphors, manifest the imaginary, and extend vibrancy beyond the living. Balkin’s definition of “spectral” spans the supernatural (ghosts, vampires, tele-paths) as well as the dubiously material (invisible objects, animated props) and the socially constructed (collaged hearsay, fictional friends). She suggests that these inclusions were useful to dramatists such as Henrik Ibsen, Oscar Wilde, and August Strindberg in bringing about modern drama and that they ought to be useful to theatre scholars because “[r]econceiving character in turn-of-the-century theater as made up of other people, objects, and genres helps us sidestep the impasses of reflexivity, meaninglessness, and emptiness that traditionally cap narratives about modern drama” (124).

The volume resists a limited definition of “modernism” as conditioned by depersonalization, stating instead that, in the development of the modern stage, characterization actually becomes increasingly capacious; that humans are amalgamations and can be easily transformed; and that “the human body is not a stable given” (2). Balkin consistently underlines the innovative nature of the dramaturgical strategies she discusses by describing contemporary productions. Two crucial forms of spectrality to which Balkin returns throughout the book, and which she argues can comprise a self-standing character, are forms that are imaginary – created through characters’ thoughts or suspended in the imagination of the audience) – and forms that exhibit deadness, defined not through literal death or dissolution but through transformation or reconfiguration. Though this broad definition of the spectral initially feels diffuse, the book persuasively expands the temporal and generic boundaries of modern characters, as well as helpfully adding to the discourse on spectrality set down in, for instance, Andrew Sofer’s Dark Matter (2013), Marvin Carlson’s The Haunted Stage (2001), and the collection Theatre and Ghosts (2014), edited by Mary Luckhurst and Emilie Morin.

The introduction emphasizes the dramaturgical proximity of Gothic melodrama and realism by showing the former’s investments in staging psychic phenomena. This section pioneers the useful term “material occult,” a play on Peter Brooks’s “moral occult” and Charles Lamb’s “material sublime,” as “a concept that emphasizes the materiality of supernatural and imaginary forces on the modern stage” (16). Balkin tracks the invention of spectral characters via nineteenth-century stage technologies such as Pepper’s ghost, vampire traps, and Corsican traps, which drew characters and audiences toward concrete visualizations of occult phenomena.

Chapter one investigates Ibsen’s realism, suggesting that scholarly focus on causality and motive neglects to acknowledge the many supernatural, ghostly, and networked phenomena that influence affect and plot alike in his works. In case studies on Ghosts (1881), Rosmersholm (1887), A Doll’s House [End Page 114] (1879), and The Master Builder (1893), as well as in a productive investigation of acting methods, Balkin shows how interiority and psychological complexity are revealed through the dead and non-human. Ibsen’s characters also are spectral, in part due to his “retrospective method, in which most of the story occurs prior to the play,” a recurring fidelity to the ghost stories anteceding each plot (33). Although the move away from motive is persuasive, certain definitions of spectrality appear unspecific. For instance, Balkin writes that, at the end of A Doll’s House, without becoming dead or a ghost, Nora becomes spectral because she is provocatively absent and ripe for sequel, living on in the spectator’s imagination, or she extends beyond the boundaries of a singular, material character because her conscience is shared rather than personal. To this I ask: in what instance are characters not subject to iteration, interpretation, or sequel? And in what instances can conscience, affect, or feeling ever be described as exclusively personal rather than shared and dependent on an admixture of perspectives?

The next chapter explores collectively constructed characters that reflect Victorian society’s investment in illusion and concealment. In Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889), characters play at “realizing personality” (52). This term first refers to reifying the personality to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were dedicated by giving him a concrete persona and fabricating historical evidence. Then, in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), personality is realized as “fiction rendered corporeal”: the composite and paradoxical character of Ernest is “an embodied critical commentary on the social present” (63). Wildean spectrality occurs when identity is fictive: Gwendolen and Cecily become spectral in their extension into author–narrator roles; Jack is spectral in his conflation with a manuscript. Even though such diverse definitions of the spectral can feel scattered, the conclusion that spectrality allows Wilde to show that “characters succeed in inhabiting a paradox in perpetuity” (67) is an exciting and original summation.

Chapters three and four describe Strindberg’s investigations into the symbiosis between living and spectral characters, a commingling that results in both “theatricalized stasis” and the depiction of “death as an activity” (74). Chapter four looks at what Strindberg calls “‘characterless’ characters” (122) – that is, palimpsestic, transient, idea-based, or spooky characters. Spectral figures here include The Dance of Death’s (1900) vampiric, autobiographical narrators who “drain vitality and meaning” from persons and institutions (73). Balkin introduces the stimulating idea that deeply banal bourgeois conversation can resemble telepathy and suggests that this vampiric method of “narrated erasure (crossing out),” as in gaslighting or fictionalizing, proves dramaturgically preferable to “theatrical histrionics (acting out)” (88). The [End Page 115] roman à clef Black Banners (1904) depicts narrative possession by a telepath, which results in memories being rewritten, rendering the subject “a medium for absent others” (94). The Ghost Sonata (1908) plays with “reverse anthropomorphism” wherein material objects are dramaturgically linked to the dispositions of their owners (98).

The book’s most lucid and fascinating section, chapter four, best represents the volume’s aim to expose “the folly of hard demarcations between realist and modernist dramaturgy or between epic and dramatic form” (122) through Strindberg’s own alternating engagement with and rejection of Ernst Haeckel’s monism during his turbulent “Inferno period” (106). The book as a whole seems to crystalize around this chapter and to propose that a monistic, spectral dramatic universe connects Ibsen to Beckett. It details the history of Strindberg’s parascientific experiments and alchemical education, which inspired a generic departure from naturalism to mysticism and back again. Balkin’s reading of The Black Glove (1910) shows that affects and objects can be joined in an occult network that represents Strindberg’s turn to a monistic “imbrication of human and nonhuman agencies”; for instance, pantomime and electrical failure become blended and sympathetic, unseating dualities of immaterial/material, life/death, and mind/body (109).

The final chapter expands the definition of “spectrality” into its late modernist or absurdist afterlife, submitting that Jean Genet, Arthur Kopit, and Samuel Beckett carried forth the spectral torch into the mid-twentieth century. It discusses sensual, shared interiority and free-floating motive in The Maids (1947), noting (to my particular delight) Genet’s depiction of servants as spectral effluvium, a reference to Strindberg’s conception of “dematerialization” as synonymous with putrefaction. The titular corpse and cavalcade of props in Kopit’s Oh Dad, Poor Dad (1962) and the location of Beckett’s Reader and Listener in a material book in Ohio Impromptu (1981) further show how selves can be immaterial and consubstantial and suggest “the noncommunicative functions of language” in creating corporeal change (145).

Overall, it is illuminating to witness Balkin conjure stark demarcations and then run them through with a stake: the delineations between realist and modernist dramaturgy, epic and dramatic form, and dead and living characters are all summoned and slayed. For Balkin, the theatre “troubles absolute distinctions between life and death, as well as activity and inactivity. In this sense theater might be called an old vibrancy that attunes audiences to the activities of dead and dark matter, as well as human actors” (119). Spectral Characters, too, reanimates dead dualisms and summons vibrant attention. [End Page 116]