The Audience by Herbert Blau (review)

Abstract

252Rocky Mountain Review do American writers find inspired innovators in France; rather "the most fertile lessons in U.S. writing today are being learned from Latin Americans such as Borges, Cortázar, and particularly García Márquez" (208). Gene Bell-Villada is one of a handful of scholars in the field of Hispanic letters who write with authority, precision, and flair. However, even he is not immune to the dangling-modifier syndrome. For example, of the Patriarch he states, "Starting out as a homespun populist who made direct contact with the people, curing their stud bulls ofworms and fixing their sewing machines, his hunger for power led him to systematically eliminate all rival generals . . ." (156). But this outstanding scholar merits an accolade for a careful reading of García Márquez's oeuvre and an awesome knowledge of foreign literatures. GEORGE R. MCMURRAY Colorado State University HERBERT BLAU. The Audience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. 383 p. Herbert Blau's aim in The Audience is to explore what might at first appear a simple question: What is an audience? From the opening pages of his book, Blau follows recent critical theory and abandons traditional assumptions about audience—its nature, its power, its role in creating or interpreting meaning in the theatre. For Blau, the concept of audience as a group ofindividuals with a shared body ofvalues and common expectations for drama (or other art form) is no longer tenable. From such a view, an audience "seems like the merest facsimile of remembered community paying its respects not so much to the still-echoing signals of a common set of values but to the better-forgotten remains of the most exhausted illusions" (1). Even the integrity and stability ofthe individual spectator's response to a work, Blau asserts, are problematized by the ambiguities involved in the very act of representation. Throughout The Audience, Blau views audience as a convention—or, more properly, as a figure of speech. Blau then explores various metaphors for audience—an appealing strategy since the theatre is persistently used as a metaphor for making sense of the world. The members of an audience are at once consumers, voyeurs, eavesdroppers, participants, witnesses. Ultimately, Blau writes that the audience is not so much a gathering of human beings, but "a body of thought and desire. It does not exist before the play but is initiated orprecipitated by it; it is not an entity to begin with but a consciousness constructed. The audience is what happens when, performing the signs and passwords ofa play, something postulates itself and unfolds in response" (25). The book is indeed a meditation on this "happening" and its relations to representation, alienation, repression, and power. Blau's prose style is simultaneously exhilarating and maddening. The book deliberately becomes a self-conscious performance, an intimidating yet often playful mixture of allusion, extensive quotation, and dense jargon from poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Although the primary focus ofthe book is drama, Blau continually engages in a wide-ranging cultural critique that Book Reviews253 sends the reader spinning from Aristotle to Oliver North, Restoration drama to film, body art to Shakespeare, and more. In placing his study in the context of late twentieth-century literary theory and cultural criticism, Blau relies heavily on the work ofsuch figures as Barthes, Benjamin, Foucault, and Lacan (to cite only the most frequently quoted writers); this tendency alone contributes significantly to the book's complexity. The end result is a sometimes brilliant, sometimes mystifying text that some readers may simply find unreadable. Yet Blau's text forces his readers—the book's audience—to test out the very roles for an audience that he attempts to describe. The nature of the book and its theoretical framework make it impossible for Blau to offer definitive conclusions from these meditations. But the book does offer a compelling new analysis of some venerable critical problems. Although Blau often focuses upon traditional dramatic texts from ancient Greece and Renaissance England, his work is especially good in exploring the role of the audience in modern and contemporary drama and in performance art and experimental theatre. Blau's treatment of Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud as precursors ofpoststructuralism...