王祖友

(河南理工大学,焦作,454003)

Susan Harris Smith is Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, teaching dramatic literature and turn-of-the-century American Cultural studies. She is the author ofAmericanDrama:TheBastardArt(1997/2006),MasksinModernDrama(1984),PlaysinAmericanPeriodicals, 1890-1918 (2007) and co-editor with Melanie Dawson ofTheAmerican1890s:ACulturalReader(2000). Having published many articles on modern drama in scholarly journals, she also serves as committee member of academic affairs and supervisor of graduate program at the University of Pittsburgh. In her pressing time, Prof. Smith allows me to conduct this academic interview with her in her cozy office room several times.

WangZuyou: Professor Smith, thank you for granting me this opportunity to have a conversation with you. Your monograph,AmericanDrama:TheBastardArt, looks at the many often conflicting cultural and academic reasons for the neglect and dismissal of American drama as a legitimate literary form. Covering a wide range of topics such as theatrical performance, the rise of nationalist feeling, the creation of academic disciplines, and the development of sociology, Your study is a contentious and revisionist historical inquiry into the troubled cultural and canonical status of American drama, both as a literary genre and as a mirror of American society. What prompted you to write this book?

SusanHarrisSmith: There are mainly four academic reasons that prompted me: first, the generic hegemony, that is, the dominance of poetry and prose over drama in the literary history of American literature; second, the debatable “Americanness” of American drama; third, the problematic location of American drama in higher education curriculum; and fourth, the concern over American drama’s cultural position. I became concerned over the lack of attention paid to American drama by American literary historians and critics as early as 1985. At the Salzburg Seminar then, Emory Elliott and Sacvan Bercovitch led the seminars addressing issues pertaining to the reevaluation of American literature. Welcome and needed though this reconsideration was, it focused exclusively on poetry and prose. The absence of drama from consideration at the seminar and from more than a passing reference in the literary history of American literature troubled me, and since then I have been asking questions about what has proved to be a complex cultural phenomenon. A short version of my preliminary study, “Generic Hegemony: American Drama and the Canon,” first presented at Modern Language Association in 1987, was the focal article for a discussion with other scholars over the problem inAmericanQuarterly(March 1989). That article was developed into the first chapter of this study.

Wang: Why is there the generic hegemony and the discrimination against drama in the literary history of American literature?

Smith: It is a complex issue. In Ancient Greece, hegemony denoted the politico-military dominance of a city-state over other city-states. In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the geopolitical and the cultural predominance of one country upon others; from which derived hegemonism, the Great Power politics meant to establish European hegemony upon continental Asia and Africa. In the 20th century, Antonio Gramsci developed the philosophy and the sociology of geopolitical hegemony into the theory of cultural hegemony, whereby one social class can manipulate the system of values and mores of a society, in order to create and establish a ruling-class Weltanschauung, a worldview that justifies the status quo of bourgeois domination of the other social classes of the society. In my book, hegemony, in its plainest sense, means dominance. Hegemony in the term “generic hegemony” is what I appropriated to the overriding dominance of one genre over the other.

The simplest explanation of the discrimination against drama is that in the culture at large and in higher education few Americans read plays, let alone American plays. The roots of genuinely native American drama lies in an spontaneous, oral tradition such as minstrel show. The nonliterary origins are further prejudicial to readers because these always have been considered to be vulgar, low-class, and more recently, sexist and racist entertainments.

But even when imported drama and American imitations of European models finally triumphed over lingering puritan prohibitions and became an accepted part of the literary output, drama still remained in the cultural shadows. To a large degree the unique constrains on production of texts and a retrograde copyright system limited the availability of a wide variety of dramatic material. Recently, dissemination of dramatic literature has depended on prominent (and usually popular) theatrical production; a published play is a secondary phenomenon, and afterthought in an economically driven system. This commodification also represents a simple confusion of “texts” in which a production supersedes and displaces the script and privileges a director over a playwright.

Wang: In your bookAmericanDrama:TheBastardArt, you mentioned “the problem of the Americanness of American drama and its cultural work”, will you please expound on the nature of the problem and its solution?

Smith: The very idea of an essential “American” literature is being strenuously questioned. Nonetheless, until recently, critics, historians, and anthologizers took it for granted that they could define and point to the central texts of American literature. Their enshrined values are implicit in the texts they chose to canonize; the desired image of a progressive America rested firmly in a preoccupation with historical situations and with topical verisimilitude, with native characters and indigenous forms rather than cosmopolitan imports. The few who wrote in favor of American drama valued and valorized a democratic hegemony through what they understood as “civilizing” discourse and dramaturgical strategies of containment. The perceptions of “of the Americanness of American drama and its cultural work” are illusions rigorously imposed in defiance of what was really happening in American theatres and in American drama. As a consequence of American literary historians ignoring or dismissing American drama in general, in particular the pluralistic voices of resistance, the voices of women, African American, ethnic groups, leftists, and experimentalists, to an astonishing degree, also have often been left out of history.

Wang: Why do you think the problem of American drama in the American higher educational curriculum needs to be understood not just as the problem of drama in the curriculum, but also as the problem of the minimal cultural capital of drama in American literary studies and as well as, of the creation of and justification of disciplinary fields and hierarchies within universities?

Smith: The advocates of American literature as a respectable subject had to fight hard to establish a disciplinary area, and American literature as an acceptable “field” did not come into its own until after World War II when it surged into the university on the tidal wave of patriotism. The development of professional journals and organizations followed with the creation ofAmericanQuarterlyin 1949 and the American Studies Association in 1951. If those who professed American literary studies had to battle the entrenched prestige of English studies, those wishing to profess American drama had to fight harder. In fact, in Shumway’s recounting of the move from marginality to security of American literature as a discipline, poetry and prose dominate; drama is but a shadowy presence both in the canon and in the discipline. Shumway credits F. O. Matthiessen’sAmericanRenaissanceas fixing the American canon. The heroic tragedy on a mythic scale became the stuff of American novels rather than the stage. This has some bearing on the fate of American drama, so does the fact that many American playwrights drank a stiffer and more proletarian brew than Emersonian milk. But more of an impediment was the inescapable link of the drama to the stage.

In the struggle to legitimate areas of study and to claim materials to be studied, the dramatic text was a critical component to Theatre department. Theatre department could strengthen their claim to the whole area of study, a claim that in turn would be undermined by departments of English, for departments of English were reluctant to lose the seminal figure of Shakespeare but they were just as reluctant to take on the undesirable bag of American drama. Ron Vince, in “Theatre History as an Academic Disciple,” argues that English departments have so much appropriated drama as their responsibility that Theatre departments have been left with almost only practical training.

Both academics and Little Theatre proponents tried to establish systems of inequality, subordination,and qualified inclusion with respect to each other, and both attempted to exclude or deny commercial theater. The commercial theater had its trade journals just as academics had their scholarly journals and the experimental theaters had their arts and crafts magazines. In each venue, the nature and value of drama was reconfigured to suit the specific ends of the discipline or cultural enterprise; each configuration represented an essentialist and separatist impulse that has had the undesirable consequence of fragmenting approaches to drama so that, in the academic versions of its several venues, drama is now relegated to a marginalized borderland in higher education except for the relative success of strongly vocational theatre practice programs in acting, management, and technical aspects at a very few universities.

Wang: On page 177 ofMasksinModernDrama, you note that “[d]espite the remarkable profusion of muckraking plays and their connections with the novel and essay, many general literary historians also were silent on the subject”. So will you please elaborate on this subject?

Smith: Between 1905 and 1917 a school of popular realists flourished in American theater as a counterpart to the journalists of exposure, every exposure made by the journalists found an echo in the theatre. From municipal corruption to juvenile delinquency to miscegenation to tenement house conditions, the muckraking playwrights followed the journalists who covered a panoply of social ills. Monroe Lippman and Lois Gottlieb both have documented the large number of plays frankly skeptical or openly satiric of big business, which form a through-line from the muckraking movement through the “dramas of attack” of the 1920s and the 1930s and which were arguably distinctively “American” plays. Bloomfield notes that the reformist zealotry had its costs; the dramatists became so absorbed in details and with faithful reproductions of the reporters’ stories that by 1912 the plays dwindled into little more than mechanical still lives empty of psychological insight.

Wang: Susan Sontag inAgainstInterpretation(1966) bemoans that “Most American novelists and playwrights are really either journalists or gentlemen sociologists and psychologists.” Do you agree or disagree?

Smith: I agree in that she was writing about the Realism of the 50s & 60s which was very concerned with social, psychological and political issues. For instance, Arthur Miller’sAllMySonswould be an excellent example of the focus on family dynamics, the psychological effects of guilt, and a political context (WWⅡ).

Wang: In evaluating American drama, does realism still have a stranglehold on most historians of American drama?

Smith: Yes, by and large realism continues to have a tyrannous and iron grip on most historians of American drama and is understood to represent an “advance.” The last chapter in Jack Vaughn’sEarlyAmericanDramatists(1981) is entitled “Realism Achieved,” and in it he argues that this achievement marks a welcome “reform” of American theatre. Another recent manifestation off the phenomenon is Gerald Berkowitz’s critical history,AmericanDramaoftheTwentiethCentury(1992), in which he argues that realism “was far more useful and natural to American drama” than the other experiments of the teens and twenties. Not only does he push the organicist approach, he also erases much dramatic literature that does not fit the paradigm. For instance, there is no mention of Maria Irene Fornes, of Gertrude Stein, of Joan Schenkar, or of Adrienne Kennedy. John Guare gets one paragraph for The House of Blue Leaves, Ntozake Shange gets one sentence forforcoloredgirlswhohaveconsideredsuicide/whentherainbowisenuf, and Megan Terry is referred to as “antitextual.” All minorities are ghettoized in one chapter. Women get one chapter but only three women, all arguably realists, Wendy Wasserstein, Beth Henley, and Masha Norman are considered.

Wang: What are the five kinds of social masking? Is there any fundamental difference between them?

Smith: In the first category, there is an unresolvable conflict between the public mask and the private face, such as Eugene O’Neill’sTheGreatGodBrown(1925). In the second category, the imposed mask can confer or deny dignity, but it does fix the personality. In Peter Handke’sKasper:AClownPlay(1967), the power of the mask is so great that the wearer metamorphoses, albeit reluctantly, to accommodate the mask. In the third category, the self is defined by externals; the only definition of self is in the role or the mask. In the plays of this category such as Jean Genet’sTheScreen(1966), unmasking heralds physical death. In the fourth category, which includes Yeats’sAFullMooninMarch(1935), a delicate harmony can be realized in the antithesis between mask and face. In the fifth category, they may mask for political protection or out of cowardice. In many of Michel de Ghelderode’s plays, such asANightofPity(1921) and Miss Jairus (1934), the need for social masks stems from fear.

There is no fundamental difference between them. In every category, the dramatists insist repeatedly that social interaction and social definition are theatrical and artificial. In fact, the mask is often a specially theatrical one, that of a clown, for instance. Also the mask is a constant reminder that there are three levels of action: the real world of the spectator, the fictional world of the characters, and the play-acting world of the actor. The stage itself, the proscenium arch, the curtain, no longer are enough, these dramatists feel, to separate the audience completely from the theatrical illusion. All these worlds are false, they insist, though taken together they form an elaborate metaphor for the real world, which is no more than one of play acting and mask wearing on private and public levels.

Wang: On page 171 ofMasksinModernDrama, you state: “There is a larger context implicit in such masking; beyond the merely physical and social uncertainties lie metaphysical and cosmic anxieties.” This statement is pregnant with meanings. Will you please substantiate your interpretation?

Smith: The defiant or protective mask, inspired by helplessness, fear, or a sense of fleeting joy, expresses man’s dependence on external forces. The cruel mask is a weapon against a threatening world, the stiff mask is a protective shield against an intrusive world, the comic mask a playful device by which reality is transformed into a game, into a theatrical illusion. On the simplest level, group masking temporarily alleviates the anxiety. Roger Caillois argues that masks are the true social bond, for in the “simulation and vertigo” of masking the temporary ecstasy assures the cohesion of social life. Further,an individual,in becoming an indissoluble part of the collective, is renewed by the temporary transformation. Michael Bristol explains the phenomenon in terms of the carnival: Every man participates in the violation of social hierarchies and, masked, becomes a king. Such masking expresses not only man’s dependence on a cohesive society but also his spiritual doubts and needs Allardyce Nicoll suggests: “Religiously, philosophically, and aesthetically the mask consecrates the effacement of immediate reality for the benefit of a vaster reality.” Man’s desire for such a concrete reality is a direct consequence of his cosmic anxiety. The mask is an essential symbol of man’s defiant affirmation of his being, of his place in society and in the universe, of his tenuous freedom. Carnival masking expresses both social and cosmic anxieties. There is a larger context implicit in such masking; beyond the merely physical and social uncertainties lie metaphysical and cosmic anxieties.

Wang: InMasksinModernDrama, you write that “[t]he mask externalizes an interior state, but more importantly, it dramatizes it as well.”Will you please illustrate this idea with examples from the masks in modern drama?

Smith: I think that any mask does this work—if we understand the mask as indicative of a lack of freedom, of fixity of purpose, of being caught in a frozen attitude, of being trapped in an obsession, we can “read” the mask to “get” what the one idea is, comic or tragic. This has a wide range of possibilities from the heroic mask of Cuchulain in Yeats’sTheOnlyJealousyofEmertothetemperaments of the “Characters” in Pirandello’sSixCharactersinSearchofanAuthor. For instance, as the stage directions note, “The masks will help give the impression of a face constructed by art and fixed immutably each in its own fundamental emotion, which is REMORSE for the Father, REVENGE for the Stepdaughter, DISDAIN for the Son, SORROW for the Mother...”

Wang: Your bookPlaysinAmericanPeriodicals, 1890-1918 examines over 125 American, English, Irish and Anglo-Indian plays by 70 dramatists which were published in 14 American general interest periodicals aimed at the middle-class reader and consumer. You begin the book Plays inPlaysinAmericanPeriodicals, 1890-1918 (2007) by setting forth a methodology of studying literature “that relate the extraordinariness of imaginative literature to the ordinariness of cultural process and that attempt to understand their connections to a historical period”. Is this methodology adopted under the influence of the “cultural turn” which emphasized the causal and socially constitutive role of cultural processes and systems of signification?

Smith: The cultural turn was a movement among scholars in the social sciences to make culture the focus of contemporary debates within the discipline. The cultural turn has been a wide array of new theoretical impulses coming from fields formerly peripheral to the social sciences, especially post-structuralism and various forms of linguistic analysis. It also describes a shift in emphasis toward meaning and away from a positivist epistemology. There were “foundational works underlying and facilitating the turn to cultural forms of analysis; they were: Hayden White’sMetahistory:TheHistoricalImaginationinNineteenth-CenturyEurope(1973), Clifford Geertz’sTheInterpretationofCultures:SelectedEssays(1973), Michel Foucault’sDisciplineandPunish(1977), and Pierre Bourdieu’sOutlineofaTheoryofPractice(1977). As this list implies, the cultural turn gained mass prominence in the early 1970s. It is reasonable to assume there is some influence upon a scholar works in the general cultural ethos, in my case, the specific or direct impact comes from Raymond Williams with hisTheLongMarch(1961) andMarxismandLiterature(1977), and Richard Malin Ohmann’sSellingCulture:Magazines,Markets,andClassattheTurnoftheCentury(1996).

Wang: What was the cultural ethos during the transitional late 19th century and the early 20th century in American history? Why do you want to place drama at the center of “shared social space”?

Smith: Given the periodicals’ complex involvement with current issues, one might expect the plays to be fully engaged with compelling and urgent national problems as well as with passing fads and fancies. During the time under consideration in my book (1890～1918), the United States faced “closing of the frontier” and the end of the “Indian problem,” yawning discrepancies between rich and poor, industrial strife and strikes, a severe four-year economic depression (1893～1897), the Spanish-American War, the disgrace of urban tenement housing, calls for regulation of big business, mandated segregation, and rising tides of immigration to name but the most obvious. This was also the investigative or “muckraking” period of journalism (1902～1912), which coincided with Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Furthermore, the United States, with its entry onto the world stage as a rapidly developing imperialist power, was consolidating an international as well as a national identity. Given that all these subjects were discussed and debated as well as fictionalized extremely in the periodicals, one might expect them to have been the subjects of the plays as well. Therefore, I think there is every reason to think of a periodical as “shared social space” in Brodhead’s terms, that is, that every form of literary production is “bound up with a distinct social audience: in its production each addresses and helps all together some particular social grouping, a portion of the whole public identified by its readerly interest but by other unifying social interests as well”. In particular, I want to place drama at the center of that “shared social space” and tease out some of the radiating connections from the plays, not the least of which is the question of who was welcomed into that space, who was excluded and why. In fact, one of the most interesting things about studying the plays as a body of work is the degree to which the drama did and did not participate in those debates; the work of the drama does not always “map” neatly onto the work done by the fiction and the essays in the periodicals.

Wang: What makes you think “the periodicals had a conservative, nation-building agenda predicated at worst on nativist, Anglo-Saxon supremacy and at best on sentimental humanitarianism”?

Smith: The exclusion of African Americans underscores the larger cultural dominance of whiteness or “Anglo-Saxonism” in the conceptualization of Americans enacted through the differential allocation of social and material privileges along racialized lines. From the perspective of the racialized ideal, Africans, Asians, nonwhite Latin Americans, and in the 1920s, southern and eastern Europeans did not belong in the republic and could never be accepted as full-fledged members. They had to be expelled, segregated, or subordinated. The playwrights of these decades were concerned with “environmental reality, the presentation of a believable society (both rural and urban) and carefully crafted language deemed appropriate for the time, place, and characters of the play” as well as “dramatic structure, selection of sensational event, and conventional conclusion to the central problem of the play. Nearly all of the American work that ventured into topical material in these years verified ‘traditional values’ of the age”. One could argue that a democratic society whose public space is a normalizing commercial culture denizes individuality, that under the weight of homogenization the autonomous self shrinks into a socialized self without much originality or vitality. On the other hand, the claim of the periodicals was that they actively contributed to the production of cultural energy and social progress and, further, that the individuals became complete only as members of the whole when they engaged in the pursuit of the yoked democratic desirata: economic prosperity and social cohesion. For the most part, the drama in the periodicals participated in the division of the nation into the visible and the invisible, perpetuating an imagined and wholly inauthentic construct that enabled crippling class and racial hierarchies.

Wang: How were the periodicals and the plays in them instrumental in promoting and maintaining the boundaries between “high” and “low” culture?

Smith: One way for a periodical to secure an elite cultural zone was to resort to the traditional “high” cultural forms, genres, and themes that signaled “refinement” and “good taste,” a strategy that was suffused with paradox. The move to create absolute hierarchical categories produced an imaginary nation in which mundane and tawdry material concerns could be ignored and transcended for higher ground and in which the legacy of Western art and culture was sustained and naturalized. The emergence of such a cultural hierarchy in America has been thoroughly examined in Lawrence Levine’s history of the division into “highbrow” and “lowbrow” or “serious” and “popular,” distinctions, which significantly, were derived from the phrenological terms used in the practice of determining racial types. The periodicals and the plays in them certainly were instrumental in promoting and maintaining the boundaries between “high” and “low.” For instance, given that for centuries, throughout Europe verse was accepted as the “natural” medium for serious drama, it is not surprising that many of the serious plays in periodicals are in verse and that many of the verse plays are serious; claims to “high” culture were made by writing plays in elevated language and/or with a classical, historical, or Biblical theme.

Wang: On page 146 ofPlaysinAmericanPeriodicals, 1890-1918, you summarize, “cultural displacement was a flexible, polyvalent strategy that afforded the dramatist four freedoms: the license to dramatize exotic or erotic subjects outside the genteel parameters, to naturalize religious miracles, to authorize romantic racism and monarchism, and to colonize other cultures for specific national ends”. Are there similar freedoms that contemporary dramatists are entitled to?

Smith: Cultural displacement is manifested in several ways including the settings in a time and place other than contemporary America, a place remote from the genteel middle-class reader’s experience. Early assessments of this kind of cultural displacement marked the move as essentially “Romantic.” For instance, of Josephine Preston Peabody’sTheWings(1905), a verse play set in Northumbria in A.D.700, George Baker observed that as a Romantic, Peabody characteristically turned away from the present and its demand for realistic treatment and instead turned to the historic past, which allowed her to initiate Shakespeare and Marlowe and to “protest against submerging beauty in photographic fact.” I want to suggest that more than the rejection of a mundane realism and a claim to higher aesthetic ground, cultural displacement was the deployment of a flexible, polyvalent strategy that afforded the dramatist four freedoms. First, the writers were able to dramatize suicide, adultery, fallen women, and sexual depravity, all subjects outside the pale of a normative American middle-class context. Second, cultural displacement also widened the arena to include the naturalizing religious miracles, which fell outside the Protestant norm. Third, it authorized romantic racism and monarchism, which ought to have been anathema in a democratic republic. Fourth, it permitted a de-nationalizing and naturalizing project in which the plays of Irish and Anglo-Indian writers were appropriated and reimagined as serving “American,” specially national, needs. That all these happen in verse suggests that poetry was understood to be a “higher” form, a shield of responsibility and a proper lens through which sensational or questionable material could be filtered and authorized.

There are similar freedoms that contemporary dramatists are entitled to, but, as cross-cultural communication fast marched on and multiculturalism became a vogue, there is much more restriction from cultural consideration on the freedom dramatists would rather enjoy to their heart’s fill, if I reason it right.

Susan Harris Smith’s Major Critical Books:

1984.MasksinModernDrama. California: University of California Press.

1997/2006.AmericanDrama:TheBastardArt. (Paperback edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2007.PlaysinAmericanPeriodicals, 1890-1918. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.