In “The Age of the World Picture” (1938), Martin Heidegger contends that modernism connotes the world conceived and grasped as picture (as opposed to “a picture of the world”); to be “modern,” he maintains, is to be immersed in an ocularcentric system that situates itself before the subject and everything, including the subject, stands together within the “picture.” What makes humanity modern is its situatedness amid this picture, so that we may, in common vernacular, “get the picture”—grasp the world through visualization, observation, and pictorial framing. Although never engaging deeply with Heidegger, Amy Holzapfel's thoughtful examination of nineteenth-century realism draws similar conclusions by emphasizing the correlation and impact of photographic technology on seven dramatists: Eugène Scribe, Alexandre Dumas fils, Victorien Sardou, Émile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, and Gerhart Hauptmann. Calling into question the received wisdom that the dramas of these playwrights largely produced facsimiles of reality, Holzapfel argues instead that the science of observation and the advent of photography encouraged a nineteenth-century realism that facilitated nuanced metatheatricality and heightened self-consciousness; the drama was engaged with “the relationship between the visual perception of an object in the outside world and the corresponding sensation experienced by and within a body that perceives it” (10). Building on the visual theories of Goethe, Baudelaire, impressionism, and numerous art and scientific studies on perception, empathy, and multiple angles of observation via photography, Holzapfel persuasively maintains that realism was not so much the positivist adherence to rationalism and the affirmation of the status quo, but rather engendered an irrational subjectivity and contradictory viewpoints in theatre that blurred certainty and destabilized objectivity.
In each of the five main chapters, Holzapfel calls attention to a painter or photographer who directly or indirectly influenced the playwright under investigation. Chapter 1 is devoted to Scribe, with Dumas and Sardou additionally examined, in order to support what the author calls Scribe's “actions of seeing” (22). Scribe's visualization in plays such as The Glass of Water (Le Verre d'eau, 1840), is juxtaposed alongside the images of Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin's Soap Bubbles (1734), whereby both the painting and the play “depict domestic worlds governed by things,” yielding “specific bodily and gestural behaviors” (23). This emphasis on physicality in the dramas of Scribe, Sardou, and Dumas, moreover, tracks a movement from pictorial stasis to bodies in motion, inspiring a tactile realism that not only privileges the visual over literary discourse but also emphasizes “the fluid integration of two senses: vision and touch” (24). In the next chapter, the author examines Zola's naturalism by comparing it with the photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (known as Nadar) and others whose photographs of the denizens of poverty parallel Zola's plays. Zola's naturalist theatre resembles photography in its “way of accessing unseen truth by employing a visual medium (in Zola's case, the theatre) that … had the power to render apparent a realm of inner existence never before seen” (65). This almost Kantian theme of fleshing out the noumenon—the thing in itself—through the optical is made manifest in Zola's play Thérèse Raquin through Madame Raquin's perspicacity: she possesses “a keenness of sight, a visual acuity that penetrates beneath reality's surfaces to comprehend a deeper truth” (76), which is the murder of her son by Thérèse and her lover.
Holzapfel continues this examination of deeper truths through acts of seeing in the next chapters, analyzing the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Hauptmann individually as they relate to photography. “Ibsen's Ocular Realism” (Chapter 3's title) was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite art movement and the invention of the glass plate in photography—the latter enabling montage imagery, where photos could not only record reality but superimpose multiple images upon the frame. “Like the Pre-Raphaelites,” Holzapfel says, “Ibsen emphasizes the subjectivity of the way various figures see or fail to see an object as it materializes before them in the visible world” (89). “Strindberg's Composites” (Chapter 4), too, sought to unearth the unseen, employing a “trope of penetrative discovery” yielding “an inner self that could not be seen from the exterior”; Strindberg, she adds, “conceived of both theatre and photography as archives for the origin of the self … platforms that could render visible what only the mind could assemble: the total self, visually composed and reenacted on a stage” (122). As a result, “Strindberg's naturalist drama is not, then, an attempt to mirror reality exactly but to present a vision of the self as an archive staged by the ‘mind's eye,’ an assemblage of roles that, taken together, comprise a modern theorization of the eternal, total self.” His composite thus functions “as a methodological strategy for Strindberg's naturalist characterizations and as a serious threat to the foundations of the conception of the individual self” (132). “Hauptmann's Lived Perspective” (Chapter 5) inculcates visuality and empathy in his plays as an emotional fuse igniting an audience’s motivation to change the world socially and politically.
The book misses some scholarly works that make similar claims. Michael Goldman's Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear (1999), for example, analyzes Ibsen's complex use of visuality, especially in The Wild Duck, and Strindberg's biographer Sue Prideaux considers the dramatist's immersion in theatre and photography, emphasizing the playwright's ocularcentricity in much the same vein. Holzapfel also plays fast and loose with realism and naturalism, sometimes arbitrarily applying one or the other indiscriminately. Georg Lukács provides a lucid definition of these terms that might have served as a template; or, the author might have derived her own definition differentiating them. Notwithstanding these caveats, this book valuably contributes to the study of nineteenth-century dramatic realism, governed by copious research and a sustained thesis that successfully challenges theatre historians and theorists. The author's concluding question throws down the provocative gauntlet to theatre scholars when she asks: “What if realism has never been the struggle to produce an exact copy of nature on stage, as in a naïve understanding of photography, but rather the attempt by a dramatist to make visible on stage how the subjective eye perceives, and, in the process, transforms reality” (185)? What if, indeed.
