In:
Modern Drama, University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress), Vol. 49, No. 3 ( 2006-09-01), p. 396-401
Abstract:
2006 links Ibsen and Beckett, coincidentally, by accidents of death and birth, ‘‘things dying’’ and ‘‘things new-born’’ held in unlikely fusion by our subliminal need to celebrate significant centenaries or by our habitual scholarly inclination to find significance in the serendipitous. How do we accommodate the crashing gears of nineteenth-century realism to the postmodern world of the absurd or read the nothingness at the core of Ibsen’s many onions in the context of the nothing-to-be-done that defines the experience of postmodern sensibility? It is the assumption of this journal, as Alan Ackerman has indicated in his ‘‘Prompter’s Box’’ preface, that Ibsen defines ‘‘the historical moment that makes modern drama modern’’ — that he is, as Martin Esslin argued at the Ibsen sesquicentennial, ‘‘one of the principal creators and well-springs of the whole modern movement in drama,’’ organically linked even to dramatists like Beckett, whose anti-illusionist techniques seem to deny any indebtedness to Ibsen’s dramatic paternity. The link, Esslin suggested, is not technical but thematic, an existential vision fundamental to the subject matter of modernity: ‘‘the problem of Being, the nature of the self, with the question of what an individual means when he uses the pronoun I. How can the self be defined? Can one even speak of a consistent entity corresponding to an individual’s self?’’. The drift of Esslin’s argument is that Krapp’s Last Tape is a modernist emanation from the central preoccupation of Peer Gynt and that the image of the onion, with its core of nothingness, expands outwards from Ibsen to incorporate the existential quandary of Beckett’s entire oeuvre.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0026-7694
,
1712-5286
Language:
English
Publisher:
University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)
Publication Date:
2006
SSG:
9,3
SSG:
7,24
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