EXPRESSIONISM

EXPRESSIONISM

[For students of Indian Universities]

Dr. S. Sreekumar

1. INTRODUCTION

Expressionism is a movement in art that originated in Germany and remained popular from 1910 to 1924. The movement began to decline by 1925 and the Nazis whose influence was growing at that time suppressed the movement for political reasons.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Expressionism as a style of painting, music, drama etc., in which an artist or writer seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world”. However this definition does not tell us much about the various facts of the movement and “expressionism itself was never a concerted or well-defined movement” (Abrams).

In Europe, Expressionism started as a revolt against the realistic trends in art and literature that dominated the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it became clear to everyone concerned with art that realism had outlived its utility. Thus art needed new forms of expression if it had to face the challenges of the twentieth century. Expressionism fulfilled this need to some extent.

II. Realism/Naturalism and Expressionism

We have stated the basic tenets of Realism in another post (refer to earlier posts). Thus there is no need to repeat that here. Realist conventions and modes dominated the nineteenth century theatre. These conventions were given a boost by the invention of the picture frame stage and the master-switch. Such devices helped the realists to separate the stage from the audience and made it possible for the drama to replicate life in all its minute details. Drama became “a slice of real life”. Dramatic conventions like ‘soliloquy’ and ‘direct address to the audience’ that had existed for more than two thousand years began to be frowned upon with displeasure. These were considered artificial as none behaved so in real life. The realists were concerned with what could ‘actually happen’ in ‘real life’.

During the same period, social problems gained precedence over individual tragedies and emotions, the stock themes of drama from the time of the Elizabethans. Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy blamed the society and its institutions for the ills of humanity. They tried to represent their ideas in realistic modes. For anybody looking for a model of realistic presentation, Galsworthy’s picture of a shady financier in The Forest offers one:

Adrian Bastaple is a man with thick trunks and rather short neck, iron-gray hair once dark, subfuse rather olive complexion, and heavy-lidded eyes with power in them. He may be sixty-five and wears a frock coat with a dark cravat of the nineties, with a pearl pin. He speaks without accent, but with a slight thickness of voice, as if he were lined with leather.

Such photographic realism was the hallmark of Galsworthy and Shaw against which the expressionists rebelled.

III. Expressionism—Growth and Development

As it has been already stated, Expressionism originated in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. The most important precursors of the movement were Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin (Painting), Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud (Poetry), Fyodor Dostoevsky (novel) and August Stridenberg (drama).

Expressionism became a popular movement in Europe by 1910. Painters like Emil Nolde, Franz Marc and Oskar Kokoschka used “jagged lines” and garish scenery to depict objects and forms, violently upsetting the realists. This new style in painting caught the imagination of the creative writers. German poets like Gottfried Benn and Georg Trakl followed the painters by violently upsetting the standard metre, syntax and images. Soon the movement entered the field of Prose fiction where Franz Kafka’s became models of expressionism. Kafka’s fiction used symbols to present a nightmarish vision.

However, it was in drama that expressionism exerted its lasting influence. German playwrights like Georg Kaiser and Ernest Troller ushered in a decade of expressionism (1910-1924) in the German theatre. Kaiser wrote twenty-four plays. From Morning to Night, The Burghers of Calais and the Gas (a trilogy) are plays that made Kaiser the most prominent expressionist in Europe. Kaiser’s characters are fragmented personalities and the dramatist looks forward to the New man who can create a complete man through synthesis. Kaiser is more concerned with the inner life of man and he found that expressionism and not conventional realism was better suited to his purpose. Ernest Troller, another German dramatist of the period, combined realism with expressionism and derived benefits from both. His plays like Transformation and Masses and Man view human life objectively. Troller believes that man can yet hope to redeem himself through his action.

With the advent of the Nazis expressionism retreated from the German stage. The Nazis suppressed expressionistic dramas and the movement almost disappeared from the German theatre. But it gained popularity in America by that time. Though American drama began on a realist note imitating Ibsen, Shaw and Chekhov it was very soon influenced by the ideas of European theatre. The periodic visits of the European troupes to America and the formation of a Theatre Guild in 1918 by the Washington Square players speeded up the process of transformation from realism to expressionism.

In American drama, Eugene O’Neill was the leader of the expressionist movement. Though he claimed that his expressionist plays like The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones were written before he saw any expressionistic play, it is difficult to believe his claim because there are so many similarities between his plays and those of the Germans. For instance, O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape closely resembles Kaiser’s Dynamo. O’Neill’s other dramas like The Great God Brown and Mourning Becomes Electra also make use of expressionistic style. After O’Neill, it was Thornton Wilder (Our Town), Tennessee Williams (The Glass Menagerie) and Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman) who made extensive use of the technique. Though the golden age of expressionism is only a part of the literary history it nevertheless still has votaries in Jack Gelber (The Connection), Jean Claude  Van Italic (American Hurrah), Amiri Baraka (Slave Ship), Adrienne Kennedy (Funny House) and Sam Sheppard (Fool for Love).

IV. Characteristics of Expressionism

1. Now let us turn to some of the characteristic features of expressionism. Expressionism tries to portray things, which are beyond the grasp of conventional realism. The dramatist uses symbolic devices to show the feelings of the characters. In Amri Baraka’s expressionistic drama Slave Ship, the dramatist wants to convey the horrors experienced by the blacks when they were transported from Africa to America. Baraka shows a slave ship, the black slaves are chained to the floor. The ceiling is just three feet above their bodies. This cramped space, more than anything said and done, brings out the “cultural degradation blacks have experienced” (John Lahr). The critic adds, “nothing is more shocking, revolting or obscene than the fact of the cramped violence of the space”. Baraka’s audience will watch this “tableau of psychic castration” only with horror. Throughout the scene, no English is spoken. Only Yoruba, the African Language, is heard. No realistic representation could have replaced this scene and given the same impact. J.W. Mariott points out: “Naturalism is based upon superficial observation of detail—a mere photography; but expressionism has been likened to an X-ray photograph.

2. In an expressionistic drama individuals are not important. Therefore the dramatist does not attempt to present any character realistically as Galsworthy does with his financier in The Forest.

3. In a conventional drama, there is always a protagonist endowed with noble ideas or passions. The audience gets emotionally involved with him. But in the expressionistic drama, characters rarely exist as such. They are denuded of heroism or other noble qualities and represent more the animal instincts than the human traits of man. The audience too does not identify with such characters. We will find it difficult to identify with Jones or Yank, protagonists of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape respectively.

4. Moreover, characters also do not develop in an expressionist play. They remain till the end as they were at the beginning.

5. Expressionists show profound interest in the psychology of the individual. In O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones only the first scene is realistic. From the second scene onward, the drama becomes psychological. The panic and fear in the mind of the half-civilized Black is shown in a succession of scenes, mostly expressionistic. The drama returns to realism in the last scene.

6. In most expressionistic dramas realistic dialogue is not attempted to. Sometimes they resort to a dialogue that is violent, telegraphic and enigmatic. On the dialogues, The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama says:

Expressionistic drama uses an elliptical, telegram-like style in which syntax is compressed, often a staccato, machine-gun style abounding in stichomythic phrases....The expressionist does not make a statement; he lets loose what we have come to recognize as the expressionist ‘Schrei’ (scream).

The Hairy Ape employs this kind of language. In the first scene of the play the stokers speak in telegraphese:

‘Give me a drink here, you!

‘Ave a wet!

Salute

Gesundheit!

Skoal

Drunk as a lord, God stiffen you!

Luck

The dialogue goes on like this for twenty eight speeches. In some other expressionistic plays the characters become rhetorical. They burst into song or speak verse.

7. Similarly, the stage design for the expressionist play is often fantastic. Sometimes a cashier’s cage in a bank is created on the stage. Lighting is also peculiar. Shafts of light of different colors sometimes intersect to create an unrealistic atmosphere. Max Reinhardt, the producer of several expressionistic plays of Stridenberg, introduced modern devices like the revolving stage and special effects of lighting and sound. Actors in some plays use masks or paint themselves in lurid colors. The overall effect of all these make theatre a disturbing experience.

8. In O’Neill’s the Hairy Ape when Yank goes in the Fifth Avenue, he sees human beings moving like robots. Nobody sees him. When Yank calls them they do not hear. When he dashes angrily against them they merely say with mechanical politeness “I beg your pardon”.

9. The expressionistic theatre fails to convince the common theatre-goers. It contains a large number of abnormal people that one may not meet in daily life. The authors of these plays are followers of some creed or other or preachers of some doctrine they deem to be of paramount importance. They transform the stage into a pulpit. Moreover, whatever may be the doctrinal quarrels among them, they allow a rare sign of unanimity in declaring that life is rotten. All of them find nothing but triviality in the soul of man. Such constant denial of the positive aspects of life makes these dramas dreary and wearisome.

V. Expressionism—an Illustration

In American Literature, expressionistic techniques were employed by many dramatists like O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. We have seen to some extent O’Neill’s use of the technique in The Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. Here we look into the works of another greet dramatist Tennessee Williams who has authored several successful plays like A Street Car named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Battle of Angels, Cat on the Hot Tin Roof, The Glass Menagerie etc. he employs the expressionistic techniques successfully in his dramas. Here we shall consider the play The Glass Menagerie .

The Glass Menagerie is a memory play. In the prologue, Tom, a ‘one-man chorus’ and also a character in the play, addresses the audience directly. “I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth.  I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion”. Then he speaks about what the audience is going to witness.

    “Being a memory play...it is not realistic”, and

“I am not the narrator of the play. And also a character in it”.

Tom says that there is only one character in the play—“the gentleman caller”—who comes from the world of reality. All others including the fifth character (Tom’s absconding father) are mere illusions.

The stage is divided into two parts. When Tom stands in the ‘downstage’ area he is the narrator. When he enters the ‘upstage’ he is a character in the drama. In the very first scene, the characters sit around a dining table. But eating is indicated by gestures only. As the scene comes to an end there is music: “The Glass Menagerie”.

At the beginning of the second scene the screen in the background is lighted with the image of blue roses. The legend on the screen is——“Laura, Haven’t you Ever Liked Some Boy? Similarly, the legend of the fifth scene is “ANNUNCIATION’, of the scene in which the gentleman caller comes is ‘TERROR’ and when he goes away the legend on the screen is “GENTLEMAN CALLER WAVING GOODBYE”.

The last scene of the play is a brilliant amalgamation of realism and expressionism. “Tom’s closing speech is timed with the interior pantomime. The interior scene is played as though viewed through sound-proof glass” (Williams). While tom speaks of his life thereafter, we can see Amanda trying to calm down Laura on the stage, of course, Amanda does not say anything to Laura. Hers is only pantomime. As Tom says “Blow out your candles, Laura—and so good bye...” We see Laura blowing out the candles. Thus the two modes——expressionistic and realistic——merge here.

Dr. S. Sreekumar