SOURCE: "Fictional World and Dramatic Text: Václav Havel's Descent and Ascent," in Style, Vol. 25, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 310-9.

Because the theory of fictional worlds concentrates primarily on narratology, work on drama is rare. The reason for this lack of interest lies in the very nature of the theater, which involves the audience's entering an "as if" world. This characteristic of a theater performance is attributed almost automatically to the text of drama. So, for instance, the construction of the dramatic world in the rendition of Keir Elam presupposes a spectator; it is more the world of theater than that of written drama which he has in mind. Moreover his elements of a fictional dramatic world, such as "a set of physical properties, a set of agents and a course of time-bound events," are not distinctive features of drama as a literary text. Elam's elements suggest that the fictional world of drama is similar to that of narrative. Yet, as I will point out, the dramatic text enjoys a unique position among literary genres. Its two layers, the dialogical and the extradialogical discourse, mark its special structures and provide distinctive devices for creating a dramatic fictional world. And it is theater that combines both textual and extratextual features (stage movements, props, nonverbal sounds, and so forth) and that assumes a spectator. In contrast, a drama is the entirety of the text that, though designed for the theater, hopes as much as any other text for a reader.

A distinction between the two types of discourse was first elaborated by representatives of the Prague Linguistic Circle, who initiated a new approach to the problems of drama and theater. At best, drama had been treated as a marginal literary genre and at worst as mere material for the theater performance. The Czech aesthetician Otakar Zich is an example of this approach. In his Estetika dramatického umení (Aesthetics of Dramatic Art), he separates drama from literature and refuses to regard the dramatic text as a work in its own right. The dramatic text is only part of the work of art. Hence for Zich, dramatic art means not so much the text as the performance based on a text. His only exception is texts that as literary works are what Miroslav Procházka calls "self-sufficient."

In contrast to Zich, Jirí Veltruský, a member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, maintains that "drama is a work of literature in its own right" and that "it is a text that can, and mostly is intended to, be used as the verbal component of theatrical performance." The provocative title of Veltruský's important article "Drama jako básnické dílo" ("Drama as a Poetic Work") reflects its author's understanding of drama as literature focuses on the literary characteristics of dramatic texts.

As Veltruský emphasizes, "the semantic construction of a play relies on the plurality of contexts that unfold simultaneously, relay, interpenetrate, and vainly strive to subjugate and absorb one another." He indicates that all the different semantic contexts create semantic unity: the plot "provides all those semantic changes with a single motivation." Veltruský speaks in this context about "a central operative subject" controlling the different semantic contexts. Such an opinion strips the dramatis personae of their determination as representatives of actual persons and emphasizes their identities as literary constructs. The "central operative subject" is implicitly inherent in the special organization of the dramatic text. Its peculiarity lies in the distribution of the text: that is, in the distinction between the discourse of the characters and the extradialogic text.

In drama's capacity as a literary genre Veltruský regards dialogue as its most distinctive feature. In this he follows the ideas of Jan Mukarovský whose articles on dialogue and monologue hold their place among the fundamental works of Czech structuralism. Mukarovský lists three essential aspects of dialogue: 1) "The communication between the participants designated as the relationship between 'I' and 'you'"; 2) The relationship between the participants of a discourse and the real, material situation which surrounds them at the moment of the discourse; 3) "Dialogue is impossible without the unity of theme" (The Word and Verbal Art).

The importance of the last point is underscored by an ironic Czech folk saying: "Já o voze, on o koze" ("I talk about a cart, he talks about a goat"). Such a splitting of theme is also described by Peter Szondi, who takes his example from Chekhov's play Three Sisters, where a deaf person speaks to one of the characters. Szondi calls such a dialogue of participants lacking a common theme "aneinder-vorbei-Reden" ("talking past one another") and concludes that by this device the dramatic form itself is questioned.

Veltruský complements Mukarovský's theory with a special feature of dramatic dialogue: "Unlike the ordinary dialogue of everyday life, dramatic dialogue is both the sequence of alternating utterances made by several speakers and an utterance made by a single speaker, the author. The speeches attributed to each character are constructed in such a way as to be intelligible not only to the other character, but also, to the reader" ("Basic Features"). The unifying force of the author lies in the coordination of all constituents of the dramatic text.

Concentrating on the fact that the extradialogic text is transposed into another semiotic system, namely that of performance, Veltruský offers an explanation for why its role has been underestimated. It has generally been considered a mere instruction ("stage directions") for transforming the text into a theatrical performance and therefore subordinate to the main text: that is, the discourse of the characters. Veltruský observes that the less extradialogic text is employed, the shorter the gaps between each reply; the longer the extradialogic text, the greater the distance between the discourses of the characters. As a result, more physical action will be inserted in the latter case. Hence, both text layers are complementary. For this reason, the extradialogic text cannot be reduced to a framework of the discourse of the characters nor to directions for performance.

Depending on the epoch, literary trend, theater tradition, and so on, the extradialogic text might also perform the function of narrator. In spite of its rudimentary nature the extradialogic text approximates even the different narrative modes. And it is this part of the dramatic text that can primarily be endowed with authentication force. The "authentication function" is, according to Lubomír Dolezel, "absolutely essential for the construction of fictional worlds. It determines, first of all, what exists and what does not exist in the world and, no less importantly, assigns specific modes of existence to the fictional entities."

In opposition to narrative textures with a strong authentication force, Dolezel places the skaz: "The skaz-narrator constructs a non-authentic fictional world whose mode of existence is uncertain, ambiguous, where everything is open to doubts." In drama, a similar effect is achieved by a contradiction between the two layers of the dramatic text. One of the most notorious examples is the ending of Beckett's Waiting for Godot:

Estragon: Yes, let's go.

(They do not move.)

The action announced in the dialogue contradicts the nonaction indicated in the extradialogic text. The extradialogic text of Waiting for Godot, like the skaz-narrator's, does not fully authenticate the fictional world. On the contrary, the reader as much as the spectator of this play (for the nonaction indicated in the extradialogic text can easily be transformed into performance) faces doubts about the nature of Beckett's world. As this example shows, the authentication of the dramatic fictional world is negotiated in two kinds of textual contrast: the semantic confrontation between the discourses of the different characters and that between the characters' discourse and the extradialogic text. These diverse sources of authentication support each other, conflict with each other, or do anything in between. Obviously, authenticating the fictional world of drama is a rather complex undertaking, which offers a spectacular range of different solutions.

Václav Havel's Zahradní slavnost (The Garden Party) will be used to illustrate the authentication of the dramatic fictional world. In Martin Esslin's view, the play belongs within the Theater of the Absurd. The Garden Party, however, is a special, Czech variety of this category. In the 1960s, critics often labeled contemporary Czech drama "model-drama," a tag based on certain features that these plays have in common: presenting a possible world and modeling rather than depicting or representing the actual world. In contrast to the existential core of such plays as Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the Czech authors construed a model of a hypothetical world, one where political and moral issues of power distribution are raised.

Esslin states that The Garden Party "displays a mixture of hard-hitting political satire, Sweikian humour and Kafkaesque depths." He applies the worn-out clichés used as a rule by Western critics introducing a new work of modern Czech literature. But Havel follows different traditions: on the one hand, logically constructed models of a world (represented by Sartre or Camus) and, on the other, the Dadaist and surrealist tradition of "free," playful, hyperbolized language. The events in The Garden Party follow the pattern of a weird chess game played by Hugo Pludek, the protagonist: "Instead of a total victory one time or a total defeat another, he prefers to win a little and lose a little each time." Havel's play opens with Hugo playing simultaneously the black and the white figures and ends with the protagonist's announcing a checkmate. The four acts present a game within a play. Hugo's other game—a play on words—is a means to ascent in his career. He pursues it in different places (at home, at the gate of the garden where the party takes place, at the office of Ministry for Inauguration) and eventually returns to the starting point without actually coming back. Although he succeeds at this game, he is defeated as a human being: his identity vanishes. So the closing checkmate is, in fact, a defeat of Hugo by Hugo. The world of The Garden Party resembles a tightly meshed mechanism where the ascent of a character also means his concurrent descent.

Hugo's character depends on the construction of as well as the destruction by his basic deictic definitions:

Me? You mean who am I? Now look here, I don't like this one-sided way of putting questions, I really don't! You think one can ask in this simplifying way?… Truth is just as complicated and multiform as everything else in the world … and we all are a little bit what we were yesterday and a little bit what we are today; and also a little bit we are not these things. Anyway, we are all a little bit all the time and all the time we are not a little bit … some only are, some are only, and some are only not, so that none of us entirely is and at the same time each one of us is not entirely….

(The Garden Party)

Hugo suffers not only the loss of his identity index by undergoing a transformation from "I" into "we." When his own parents fail to recognize him, his pronominal status is questioned. The pronominal chaos reaches its peak when Hugo, in a dialogue with his mother, refers to himself as "he," imitating the impersonal speech of politicians:

Hugo: He [i.e., Hugo] has a friendly word for everyone, even for the simplest folk. As a matter of fact, I'm counting on it myself. I've come here to have a little chat with him and see if perhaps I might not give him a hand with this or the other. What about that nice cup of coffee?

Mrs. Pludek: Yes, of course, as soon as our darling little Hugo arrives.

Hugo: He's not home yet?

The deictic transformations entail the destruction of the protagonist's persona. According to Jindrich Honzl, "verbal deixis serves as a semantic filter that enables the dramatist to create and image of the world and of people…. Such a semantic filter, which does not admit images undesired by the dramatist, alters the profile of those real elements out of which the representation of a human being and his behavior is created in a play." Though Honzl relates his notion to ancient drama, the deictic transformations in The Garden Party can also be considered a "semantic filter" generating ambiguity in the fictional world.

Hugo's career is the final evidence of his identity loss. The promising son turns out to be a lost son. In the dramatic fictional world, however, he still retains his function of agent. The extradialogical text guards the status of the figure by providing its authentication.

The world in which Hugo rises consists of words. Like Hansel who, in Grimms' fairy tale, gathers stones to find his way back, Hugo collects words that guide him. In the second act, he memorizes such combinations of words as "lyrical-epic verses." This phrase then becomes a weapon to defeat a man from whose utterance it was originally taken. Hugo equips these overheard words with a new logic, so that their original meaning is twisted. As his discourse becomes more and more "sophisticated," the words lose their meaning more and more until a semantics of nonsense is brought about. In contrast to the nonsense of Alice in Wonderland, the nonsense of Hugo's utterances expresses the mechanistic character of the world of The Garden Party.

The plot of The Garden Party is modeled on the Bildungsroman, in which the hero sets off to explore the world. On his way, he faces various difficulties, finds himself in the thick of adventure, and finally settles down as a better man. Hugo, too, is a sort of pilgrim. But his journey is different: he progresses and regresses at one and the same time. His voyage starts at home, which is not a homely place at all since there is no difference between private and public life in the world Hugo tries to conquer. And unlike the Bildungsroman hero, he is not in the end a better man but ceases to exist altogether as a person. He lives on only as a legend in telegrams sent to his father's friend. Kalabis, and in the dialogues with his parents, where he speaks of himself as of someone else:

Hugo: So your Hugo is liquidating not only the Liquidation Office, but the Inauguration service as well?

The positive hero of socialist realism is kin to the protagonist of the Bildungsroman. The Garden Party rebels against this poetics. The positive hero is a spokesman for the socialist ideology, capable of reforming his surroundings for the better. Hugo, however, is anything but a conqueror of the "old and rotten world of the bourgeoisie" or a spokesman for the "right philosophy of the working class." Quite the contrary: Hugo makes his career "because he clearly has in his veins the healthy philosophy of the middle class!" His character demonstrates the fusion of two ideological layers—middle-class beliefs and vulgar Marxism—which make up the base of Havel's absurd fictional world. Hugo's father's reflection is worth quoting:

You can't fry chickenweed without straw. And why? Whereas all other classes in history kept exchanging their historical positions, the middle classes have come down through history untouched, because no other class has never tried to take their position, and so the middle classes never had anything to exchange with anybody and have thus remained the only permanent force in history.

A monologue of this type displays empty words, a desemantization of the dialogical text. A similar effect correlating the dialogical and extradialogical texts indicates that the utterance is comprehended literally and as a result entails action not at all intended. So, for instance, an exclamation "mami" is meant as a confirmation that Hugo accepts the offer to fraternize with the director and to see the latter as if he were a mother. The extradialogical text, though, announces "Hugo's mother." A short exchange between Hugo and his mother clarifies that the clamor was meant figuratively.

In his introduction to the Czech edition of the play. Jan Grossman, the former producer of the Theater on the Balustrade where The Garden Party was first staged, points out that the generating mechanism of Havel's first two plays is the cliché. Grossman even claims that the cliché is the real protagonist of The Garden Party. It is this special use of language that assumes a pivotal role. Marxist vocabulary merges with parodied proverbs into new phrases. Havel's concept of "gag" here jumps to the fore. In the essay "Anatomie gagu" ("Anatomy of the Gag"), published at the same time as his first play, Havel writes that a gag consists of a combination of automatisms.

Language consisting of elements of the new ideology combined with the distorted folk tradition signals what Herta Schmid calls "Verlust der Geschichtlichkeit" ("loss of historicity"). The Garden Party presents a distortion of the language and hence the dissolution of both the collective and the individual memory. So at the end of the first act, for instance, both parents use quotations from Czech literature. These fragments manifest how limited individual memory is. The parents' dialogue develops what is already indicated by their first names, Oldrich and Bozena, names that refer to a couple who represent the Czech national myth. The world of The Garden Party is that of determined national entity. The proverbs and their parody create an atmosphere of the Czech folk tradition artificially exhumed and peddled by the official ideology.

The Garden Party exhibits a contrast between both text layers as the contrast between a speech and action, akin to that mentioned in Waiting for Godot. In the first act the family expects the father's friend, Kalabis:

Pludek: (To Mrs. Pludek) If he doesn't come, somebody else will! (Just then the door-bell rings.)

Mrs. Pludek: Nobody will come! Nobody will write! Nobody will call! We're alone. Alone in the whole world!

Hugo: And there are more and more Japs every day. Did somebody ring?

(Peter enters.)

Mrs. Pludek: Peter! Go and hide in the pantry! Kalabis is here!

Kalabis has not arrived, contradicting the announcement in the dialogical text. As a result the cause-and-effect order of the actual world is reversed. The succession of ringing a bell and the expected announcement of a guest customary in the actual world is here violated. Moreover, the text underlines the contradiction between the action expressed by the extradialogical text and the utterance of the person. Breaking the law of the actual world raises the "as if" character of the dramatic world.

Yet another relation between the two discourses appears in the course of Hugo's apprenticeship in the world he is about to conquer. Accumulating combinations like that of the "lyricoepical verses," Hugo mumbles them "for himself." An aside is a typical device that as a rule provides the audience a surplus of information and in consequence produces so-called dramatic irony. But Hugo's murmur breaks this norm: it does not shed any light on the action or on any of the characters. On the contrary, when Hugo eventually repeats these mumbled words, his utterance proves that he only had been practicing the nonsense. Hence it is not only the expressions themselves that underscore that empty words with no enigma are involved. The very way the two text layers are juxtaposed results in an ambiguity similar to that of skaz.

Hugo's ascent is signaled by a nose made out of papier-maché that originally was a sign for Plzák's superiority. In the fourth act this prop also indicates Hugo's descent, his loss of identity. Hence the nose epitomizes the fictional world as a unit, where the opportunism destroys both the collective and the individual memory.

Investigating Beckett's Quad, the German semiotician Schmid comes to the conclusion that "the absence of all traditional means of drama, reveals the constant inner form of dramatic theater, that means a theater, which is governed by the verbal element." One can add that it is the very organization of the dramatic text that keeps this inner form together. The Garden Party shows the consistency of a dramatic fictional world in spite of the ambiguity displayed on different levels. Moreover, it is the ambiguity that emphasizes the fictional status of the presented world. This is how the text points to itself, becomes self-reflexive.

Most of the dialogue of The Garden Party is constructed according to the principle of "aneinander-vorbei-Reden." Instead of verbal exchange, the dialogue resembles a chain of fragmentary soliloquies. Even though the utterances are attributed to different persons, they often do not have distinct characteristics.

As a consequence, The Garden Party exposes the limits of human communication. The figures do not address each other in order to communicate; words serve another purpose: ritual. The very core of it is the "metaphysical dialectic," a term Havel coined in an essay published shortly after the opening night of The Garden Party. There Havel specifies metaphysical dialectic as the attitude that follows very much the logic expressed by Hugo: "In fact, they were both sort of right and sort of wrong, or rather, on the contrary, both were wrong and both right, weren't they? I mean, they were, were they not?"

Havel's target in the essay is the dominating vulgar and dogmatic understanding of dialectic and the neglect of its virtual philosophical qualities. He objects to the fact that the dialectic became a fetish: "Instead of the dialectic helping reality, it is the reality that serves the dialectic." Both the play and the essay about it try to disclose the mechanism of this absurd reversal.

The steps Hugo takes are akin to the pattern of the Dutch painter M. C. Escher's impossible configurations in, for example, Ascending and Descending, where the staircase leads simultaneously up and down. Concurrent ascent and descent is the overall pattern of the course of events in The Garden Party. At one point, the offices for Inauguration and for Liquidation fuse, a synthesis of thesis and antithesis. In accord with this dialectic principle, the play exhibits both the construction and deconstruction of its fictional world. At the end, when the bureaucrat Plzák crawls out of Hugo's cupboard and addresses the audience with "And now, without any sort of ado—go home!" Havel pays tribute to Brecht's "V-effect" (defamiliarization). He erases the opposition between the fictional world and the actual world. This breaking of the fictional into the actual is the final authentication of the dramatic world.