Realism and abstractionism in Otakar Zich's Theory of dramatic art and Samuel Beckett's experimental dramatics

In his book Estetika dramatického umění Teoretická dramaturgie (1931; Aesthetics of Dramatic Art A Theoretical Dramaturgy) Zich maintains – in opposition to Richard Wagner’s theory of the Gesamtkunstwerk wherein all arts are equally entitled – that in the dramatic theatre the actor’s art must dominate over all the other arts. Jan Mukařovský, on the other hand, differentiates between drama as an autonomous verbal work and as a component of the theatrical performance where it has to compete with the other arts for structural dominance. In this piece I tackle the question where to place Samuel Beckett, one of the classical authors of modern drama, within this controversy between those two Prague theoreticians. I regard Beckett’s Act I: A mime for one player, Act II: A mime for two players and Come and Go: A dramaticule as an experimental series, in which the author demonstrates the formal-structural and semantic potentials of two texts without verbal speech and one text with verbal speech. By creating in his “mutes” first a monologue situation and then a dialogic situation, Beckett makes us aware of a leak or zero-position in their structures, caused by the lack of speech. As a result of the zero-position, the percipient’s efforts to find out the total sense remain unsatisfactory. Otakar Zich as well as Jan Mukařovský differentiate between the author as a real, psychophysical personality on the one hand and the central subject within a work of art on the other. The real author remains out of consideration in a structural analysis where the central subject is an imaginary point from where the whole structure becomes visible. In my contribution I therefore prefer the expression “abstract author” in order to hint at the fact that the real author, although being the producer of the work, is not necessarily able to analyse what he or she has produced. Yet in building his experimental series Beckett seems to have become aware of the abstract author’s central point, which changes in each of the three short plays. [ Theatralia 22 / 2019 / 2, Supplementum (23—38) ] https://doi.org/10.5817/TY2019-S-3