Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 2 Number 2, August 2007
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Gabor, Olivia G. The Stage as ‘Der Spielraum Gottes’. (Studies in Modern German Literature Vol. 98) Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. ISBN 0-8204-7197-6. $ 49.95 (pb).
Reviewed by
The University of Winnipeg
The particular joy in reading this book comes from the detailed analyses Gabor does of four important plays in the German modernist canon all of which relate to questions concerning religion; Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s Jederman [Everyman or Every One] from 1911, Wolfgang Borchert’s Draußen vor der Tür [Outside the Door a.k.a. The Man Outside the Door] from 1946, Bertolt Brecht’s Der gute Mensch von Sezuan [The good Human from Szechwan a.k.a. The Good Person or The Good Woman from Szechwan] from 1941 and Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Ein Engel kommt nach Babylon [An Angel comes to Babylon] from 1954. For me, the frustration of the book comes from Gabor’s repetitive interpretation of her analyses, namely that all the examples of caesurae, lacunae, paradoxes, ‘Sprachnot,’ [want of language] ‘Sprachkrise’[crisis of language] linguistic breakdown and other evidence of language’s descriptive insufficiency she is so convincingly able to cull from the texts always lead her to conclude that these are suggestive of the presence of the divine, hence the title, The Stage as God’s Playroom/space. As Freud reportedly said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, in this case one feels the need to say that sometimes a lacuna is just a lacuna and though nature abhors a vacuum and Nothingness cannot be described, it does not mean to say that God will fill every vacuum or become Nothing (though some will argue that No-thing or Being in fact is God).
Gabor proceeds from a rather monolithic understanding of modernity and modernism as a programmatic “rejection of the supernatural” (10). This seems to me to entail too abstract, indeed too restrictive a view of modernity. Not all modernists buy or bought into “God is Dead” as the death of all forms of spirituality. Though one could list numerous examples of modernist artists with interests in the supernatural, let it suffice here to refer to the likes of Schönberg and Kandinsky as examples of defining modernists with deep spiritual commitments. Be that as it may, to give Gabor the point, it is certainly indisputable that organized religion has experienced a drastic decline in validity during the time invoked by the words modernity and modernism. In this period language has become unmoored from meaning in ways theorized by Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Benjamin, thinkers that are foundational to Gabor’s study and whose work she puts to good use when showing the ‘Sprachnot’ evidenced or artistically used in the four plays. Gabor’s claim that the divine may be sensed or suggested where the signification of language is suspended, is an interesting proposition. It could, perhaps, be seen as the inverse of George Steiner’s claim “that any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.” (Steiner, 3). The problem, though, with both her and Steiner’s claims, as thought-provoking as they are, is that it is incredibly difficult for any writer or critic to make an individual spectator/reader experience that this is so, that break downs in language or indeed that successful communication may suggest the presence of anything other than a good or bad story badly or well told. Gabor’s claim clearly holds true for her and I respect that but another may experience lacunae in language simply as part of the human condition (however much that person may wish to rail against it or wish for a means of transcending this frustration) - and this too would be a true claim.
Gabor is conscious of this problem when she states that, “Another factor Dürrenmatt is aware of as he writes and stages his plays is the impossibility of assuming a spectator’s reactions.” (204) Likewise, she is aware that the mentioned problems of language offer only “the potential for the sacred to assert itself in secular texts.” (212). This potential, though, requires a Kierkegaardian leap of faith on the part of the individual spectator/reader to be realized and such a leap of faith must be chosen. Only by choosing faith in the divine can the divine be felt. The choice is key, not the validity of the claim. The ineffable is just that, whatever that may be taken to mean. Once a leap of faith has been taken a person may frolic in a world where all things are manifestations of the divine, much like the angel in Dürrenmatt’s play – or not.
In the end, though, despite this problem in making her claim stick (or at least my unwillingness to buy it), Gabor’s analyses of the plays make the book well worthwhile the read.
Though it is natural for a book in this fine series that all German quotations are in the original language, it would nonetheless have been interesting to see what Gabor’s translation of longer and crucial passages would have been. That Kierkegaard should be rendered in German rather than in a standard (i.e. the Hongs’) English translation puzzles me as does the fact that a quote from Foucault is in English when all other French quotations are left in the original. These are just tiny quibbles, of course.
WORKS CITED:
George Steiner, Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.