The Futile Encounter In The Plays Of John Whiting

Abstract

THE CURRENT REVALUATION OF THE PLAYS of John Whiting, done, unfortunately, for the most part, posthumously, offers us a good illustration of significant formal transitions in modern drama: the artistic reconsideration of the nature of dramatic form accomplished by the plays themselves; and the critical reconsideration of formal aesthetic structure. To a large degree, the disintegration of form, in its conventional sense, is the result of the process begun in the Renaissance with the disintegration of the conception of an ordered universe: the movement from the concept that form exists within the structure of the universe itself, which is imitated in art, to the concept that the individual consciousness is the source of any form which exists, bringing a subjective order to that which is otherwise chaotic. Correspondingly, our increasing understanding of the metaphoric process, related to our understanding of the function of the unconscious, has given us a way to respond to the subjective ordering of experience and a notion of form more complex than the conventional interaction of character and plot.