Editing The Author in Literature Part 1 (section)

==== Breaking the Fourth Wall ====
In drama parallel strains were evolving. The Theatre of the Absurd had been deconstructing some of the fundamentals of the art of drama. Since they said that language is a human construct and it is impossible to convey your feelings to one another, the plays of this genre were filled with nonsequiturs where two actors would talk incoherently about inconsequential and unrelated things without making any sense.

The entire point of the play would be to convey the claimed irrationality of life, the illogic of language, and the meaninglessness of drama.

Bertolt Brecht

Some great artists like Samuel Beckett managed to wring one or two good pieces like Waiting for the Godot, but the genre in general was thoroughly deconstructed from within with the destruction of dialogue, action and plot.

Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Jean Genet were some of the hacks in this new industry of Theatre of the Absurd.

Bertolt Brecht the Marxist dramatist and ideologue from Germany deconstructed drama from the other end. The Fourth Wall is a convention in the drama. In any theatre, the stage has generally three walls behind and on the two sides of the artist.

The front is obviously open for the audience to see what is happening on the stage. However, the artists behave as if the audience is not present and as if there is an invisible fourth wall. They don’t notice the audience and this is called ‘maintaining the fourth wall’.

Brecht argued that the drama is unreal and the audience shouldn’t be misled to believe that it is real and hence the fundamental stage ethic of the artist – to maintain the fourth wall – has to be broken deliberately many times throughout the drama.

He said that it was necessary to make the audience realize that the drama was not real. In his plays, the actors would deliberately converse with the audience in between and remark upon what was happening in the audience. It was one step further in the deconstruction of the traditional play.

The poetry saw the same degeneration. The paucity of space here does not give full freedom to remark upon this genre here, but suffice to say that what started as individual innovation in late medieval times when Shakespeare started using blank verse profusely got degenerated in modern times into free verse. In blank verse, rhyming was abandoned in favor of rhythm, but by modern times even rhythm was abandoned.

Any notion that poetry is meant to be recited was also abandoned and just about anything started to be passed off as poetry. Any tinkering would qualify as artistic innovation. All of this started off with the belief that the individual can create art without any divine inspiration; that authors can create new stories.

The humility that goes with this traditional worldview that the artist is just a conduit for expressing the glimpses of the Ultimate Truth; and that higher truths just flow through him with divine grace was the first casualty upon the introduction of the author.

At first, it resulted in an explosion of creativity. But soon the usual avenues were exhausted and the personality of the author with all its eccentricities and idiosyncrasies started imposing too much upon his art.

The author was becoming too imposing upon literature. As a result, the postmodernist era saw revolts ‘against the author’, but ironically they made the idiosyncratic imprint of the author even more significant upon his.

Most of the modern literature has no plot, no story, no hero, no concept of good and bad, no chronology, and no coherent dialogue. They are at best, confused, and confusing parallel narratives delivered in the inebriated state of the narrator, not necessarily making sense in either time or place. The reader truly can make of them whatever he wants to.