Retired Dreams: Dom Casmurro, Myth and Modernity by Paul B. Dixon (review)

Abstract

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 of such 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 of poststructuralism is also insightful: "What has since been elaborated by Foucault and Derrida was more than latent in Brecht and Artaud: there is a sense in which power lives by theater, the duplicity ofmere appearance, by which the audience is deprived of power" (42). Finally, Blau makes some stimulating points about the audience created by the entertainment industry through its endless statistical analyses and its packaging and repackaging of art as a commodity. All in all, The Audience is a fascinating but often an overwhelmingly difficult book to read. Steeped as it is in contemporary critical theory and cultural critique, much of the book is probably not accessible to scholars and teachers of a traditional ilk. Literary scholars may also find the work disappointing since Blau never adequately deals with the connection between audience and readers. Still, the book is an important and insightful contribution to performance theory and cultural criticism.