American Drama and the Postmodern: Fragmenting the Realistic Sta ...

they problematize the whole hermeneutic enterprise, questioning whether anyone can read another person “objectively.”

Recognizing the problems such as Murphy’s grappling with realism, 1990s scholars initially tried two quite opposite approaches to the issue of definition. William Demastes opens Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition by noting that such a definition does not even exist.¹ Demastes’ dismissal of the whole project of defining realism seems self-defeating. But on the next page, as he considers two central texts, The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman, he astutely concludes: “The point is that realism is not an either/or proposition. Rather, there is a sliding scale in effect, and depending on critical leanings, an audience may accept certain levels of theatricality but still identify the work as fundamentally realistic” (xi). The idea of a sliding scale makes more sense for the term, but it is interesting that here, instead of trying to define realism, he places the burden of determining what is “realistic” on the perception of “the audience.”

Such an assertion opens the door to Althusser’s description of Ideological State Apparatuses: “Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to the Real Condition of Existence” (294). Realism purports to present “the relationship of individuals to the real conditions of existence,” but by inserting “Imaginary” into the title, Althusser makes clear that what an audience witnesses (in realistic drama) is not reality, but what it imagines to be real. The difference is clear in every class I teach, for what I take to be “realistic” has to do with staging: the duplication of physical environment. What my students often mean by “realistic” is both psychologically probable and likely according to their ideas of normal. When they say a play is realistic, they mean the characters behave in a way they take to be the way people behave in “normal” or real life. But such an understanding obviously changes from decade to decade, as different theories of pop psychology permeate the culture, and alter what one takes to be realistic or normal behavior. As Althusser implies, the definition is always in flux in the culture.

Perhaps to avoid such indeterminism, Ruby Cohn offers a minimalist but exact attempt to define realism in the opening of Retreats from