THE HAUNTED STAGE: THE THEATRE AS MEMORY MACHINE. By Marvin Carlson.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,2001. pp. 200. $47.50 cloth.
The thesis driving The Haunted Stage is that theatre, from its earliest manifestations to the present, is constitutively “haunted.” Although all art forms reuse their materials, Marvin Carlson insists on a close correspondence between the memories of individual spectators and the apparently universal tendency of playwrights, actors,directors, designers, and managers to “recycle,” respectively, narrative elements, gestures, concepts, sets, and building designs. After an overview chapter,the book divides into chapters that parse theatrical recycling: “The Haunted Text”; “The Haunted
Body”; “The Haunted Production”; and “The Haunted House.” Ghosting Carlson’s own text are epigraphs by Herbert Blau and Joseph Roach that address theatre’s memorial tendencies. For Blau,who may have coined the term in Take Up the Bodies(1982), “ghosting” names the memory trace that precipitates theatre’s illusory effects, including the desire to banish illusion. For Roach, ghosting is part of a theoretical story in which a culture’s “orature” and “surrogations” performatively resist history’s official texts and monuments. Carlson weighs in as the historian who will document the ubiquity of ghosting in word, body, and performance site. It’s a fine idea and there are important
virtues in the study, especially when it transcends the limitations of its premise.
This clearly written book takes us on a scholarlyand personal journey, linking Carlson’s expertise in ancient and early modern theatre history to his enthusiastic theatre-going in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. The opening chapter juxtaposes the foundational texts of three theatrical traditions—Aristotle’s Poetics, Bharata’s Natyasastra, and Zeami’s writings on Noh drama—but the study frequently recurs to panhistorical juxtapositions (The Fantasticks with Kabuki katas and Andrei Serban’s Hamlet, for example). This rapid movement across time enables a valuable
subtheme—the tendency of the romantic and realist theatres not to contradict one another, as is usually taught, but to echo each other’s individualisttemper in favoring “exact and specific settings, unique to each situation and free of the memories of the theatrical tradition” (12). Equally exciting are Carlson’s discussions of the recycling of proverbs, folktales and fabliaux; of opera plots; and of concepts in the postmodern stagings of Daniel Mesguich,Tadeusz Kantor, and others.
Such sections compensate for the conceptual problem of basing a book on a characteristic so ubiquitous that pointing it out again and again narrows rather than deepens our appreciation of its value. As Carlson says, “The theatre’s reuse of already familiar narrative material is a phenomenon seeming as old as the theatre itself and developing along with the theatre, from the enactment of sacred texts to the contemporary Broadway musical” (44). While amassing examples of recycling is Carlson’s project, the result of such a vast sweep is that scholarly truisms are themselves recycled in the midst of dubious analogies.
Commedia dell’arte features predictable pairings, as does Greek New Comedy, and one finds this feature, a few paragraphs later, in Gilligan’s Island and Seinfeld (45–47). Wonderfully subtle examples suffer from this slippery analogizing. Carlson cites the
late eighteenth-century memoirs of Tate Wilkinson, who recalled seeing the same painted flat “of Spanish figures at full length and two folding doors in the middle,” in Covent Garden productions from 1747 through the 1780s. Wilkinson writes, “I never see those wings slide on, but I feel as if seeing my very old acquaintance unexpectedly” (122). Carlson compares this comment to Mark Twain’s account in Innocents Abroad, in which Parisian sites, known only in books and pictures, suddenly come alive—“like meeting an old friend”— for Twain’s characters. Wilkinson’s unexpected “old acquaintance” is a perfect example of the haunting Carlson aims to describe. Apart from similar diction in the two citations, what has Wilkinson’s involuntary experience to do with the touristic revelry Twain celebrates and satirizes? The heuristic power of the examples is vitiated by the claim that they are alike.
One of the pitfalls of analogizing is a persistentahistoricism. Audiences, the study argues, enjoybeing haunted; they take pleasure in recognizing lines of business, settings, props and actors they’ve seen before. Indeed “audiences . . . use their memories of past performances of [popular] actors to orient themselves to the interplay of characters in the new production” (111). What this orientation might yield is not articulated, as Carlson eschews an interpretive stance of his own. Unlike Wilkinson’s “unexpected” experience, memory for Carlson is a stable voluntaristic component of human agency; one calls up the file card of a previous experience and happily “uses” it to further one’s pleasure.
And one does this whether seated in an Attic Greek amphitheatre, a nineteenth-century opera house, or The Wooster Group’s Performing Garage. Theatre preserves “historical memory,” Carlson concludes, but this study shows instead that theatre preserves, for the initiated, the history of its own recyclings. There are exceptions to this problem. In “The Haunted Text,” post-Napoleonic theatre is linked to the historical moment of nation-building. Here recycling is mentioned not to augment an ideal inventory but rather to clarify theatre’s relation to “a new national consciousness . . .” (33). Similarly,in “The Haunted Body” theatre is an eager player in publicity and celebrity machines, despite the tendency of romantic and realist traditions to stress unique dramatic words. Postmodern directors like Daniel Mesguich, to whom Carlson dedicates the book, discard modernist originality for self-reflexive citationality. Yet how theatre’s recyclings contribute specifically to “social memory,” the book’s ultimate claim (173, my emphasis), remains unargued.
Still, there is much to relish in The Haunted Stage,especially when Carlson’s gift for detailed historical narrative makes “haunted houses” like Mnouchkine’s Cartoucherie and Brooke’s Bouffes du Nord come alive. Here the author is in his element, limning a rich and changing object instead of a putative ideal audience. And I appreciate Carlson’s refusal to be politically correct. He might have ironized Mnouchkine’s performance-coded food service at Cartoucherie or the way in which BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) annexed the Majestic Theatre for Brook’s Mahabharata and turned
it into a copy of his Parisian Bouffes, “down to the types of decay and even the colors of peeling paint on the auditorium walls” (160). In the latter instance recycling becomes suitably complex: was this an instance of Americans slavishly imitating a famous European venue? A typically capitalist knock-off of a successful commodity? Or an attempt to produce historical continuities where none exist? Tactfully, The Haunted Stage lets us decide.
ELIN DIAMOND
Rutgers University
