Affirmative Antinomies of Naturalist and Realist Theatre

Abstract

This article explores the essential antinomy rooted in the affirmative practice in relation to the aesthetic genres of naturalist and realist theatre. The aim is to look at how the genres’ critical potential interacts with political hegemony and outline some of their aesthetic features in relation to politics. By drawing on Raymond Williams's definition of realism and naturalism as being highly variable and inherently complex aesthetic terms, I argue that naturalist and realist theatre are stylistically interrelated and operate in the space of real hegemonic politics. From this conceptual basis, this article examines Kirk Williams's analysis of naturalist drama in an attempt to expose two interrelated ideas. First, the conceptual structure of hegemony, understood as a condition in which complex and unpredictable sets of power relationships are stabilized temporary, is found at the making of most naturalist and realist drama. Second, the representational constitution that binds illusionist aesthetics of reality with the course of hegemonic politics is further revealed by closely inspecting realist and naturalist theatre as material expressions of socio-political and economic discourses. This process displays, I argue, an antagonistic articulation, in the sense of ‘putting something together’ as it is deployed by Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's political theory. But the struggle to fix meaning and define reality temporary brings affirmation to effectively occupy so much a coercive space as an antagonistic one. This paradoxical process is at the centre of the antinomy of the affirmative in the aesthetic genres of realist and naturalist representation.