TRANS-

Revue de littérature générale et comparée

11 | 2011
Trahisons

The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional

Approach

Andrés Pérez-Simón

Publisher
Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle

Electronic version
URL: http://trans.revues.org/443
DOI: 10.4000/trans.443
ISSN: 1778-3887

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11 | 2011, Online since 08 February 2011, connection on 30 September 2016. URL : http://
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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 1

The Concept of Metatheatre: A

Functional Approach
Andrés Pérez-Simón

Introduction: anti-illusionism and modernist theatre

1 A common denominator of modernist dramatic works is the fact that they foreground the
conventional nature of the theatrical stage. The separation between stage and audience is
now a porous one, subject to constant revision. Nikolai Evreinov’s A Merry Death (1909),
for example, revisits the legacy of the commedia dell’arte in order to arrive at a new
interaction between stage and auditorium. The figure of Pierrot, converted to a
disoriented and melancholic character, speaks for the authors who want to redefine the
institution of theatre in a time when their artworks are treated as just another
commodity. This is not an isolated case, as Pierrot recurrently appears as a tragicomic
figure during the modernist years embodying the tension between the idea of an
autonomous art (art for art’s sake) and a new theatrical praxis. In A Merry Death, Evreinov
reveals the subjection of commercial drama to bourgeois mores when the actor who
impersonates Pierrot confesses at the end of the play that he has enacted the role of
offended husband against his friend Harlequin only because it was the proper thing to do
before an audience. Another good example of this critical practice is Josef and Karel
Čapek’s The Fateful Game of Love (1911), a play whose action takes place in a permanent
“now,” a present tense to be actualized in every performance. This game or play (the
word hra in the title has, in Czech, both meanings) consists in the staging of the
conventional plot of love and jealousy by a commedia cast introduced by Prologue, a
theatre-manager who is only worried about the economic success of the play. The troupe
of actors who play the roles of fictional actors are perfectly aware of the presence of the
spectators, and they engage in discussions that range from the (awful) taste of
contemporary audiences to the existence of a censorship of an economic and moral
nature.

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 2

2 The two examples cited above contrast with the basic tenets of illusionist theatre as they
appear codified in a critical tradition that goes from Denis Diderot to Konstantin
Stanislavsky. Diderot, one of the first theorizers of the illusionist fourth wall, conceives
theatre as a succession of tableaux unified by the artist’s single point of view. This idea of
dramatic tableau, as Roland Barthes observes in his essay “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein,”
implies the existence of “a pure cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible
and incorruptible; everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains
unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into
light, into view” (70). The “irreversible and incorruptible” stage exerts a unifying control
over the spectator’s gaze, thereby determining both the observer and the observed. In the
twentieth century, Stanislavsky also endorses the existence of a fourth wall separating
stage from viewers. In fact, he regards the presence of the spectators as an anomaly, for
they are an obstacle to the actor’s natural retrieval of subconscious energy. The goal of
his system of acting is, precisely, the correction of this anomalous situation. To “restore
the natural laws, which have been dislocated by the circumstances of an actor’s having to
work in public,” Stanislavsky explains, a system of acting “should return him to the
creative state of a normal human being” (Building 281).
3 In stark contrast to Stanislavsky’s view, modernist theatre sees the existence of theatrical
audiences as a constitutive characteristic of the theatrical event, not as a factor to be
corrected or neutralized. The appeal to the audience is usually made through the laying
bare of the artistic devices, an operation that breaks the illusion of reality and demands a
critical involvement on the part of spectators who are not treated as simple voyeurs. In
the first three decades of the twentieth century, the ideal of a total dissolution of the
barrier between stage and audience was progressively substituted by a critical approach
to the fourth wall, as dramatists and directors reflected on the ideological implications of
this physical separation. In this respect, the theory and practice of Brecht’s theatre
represents the most coherent attempt to reevaluate the distance separating stage from
audience. Brecht’s dramaturgy matures in a context of increasing politicization of the
stage, usually from left-wings activists who, like Piscator, were inspired by the activities
of the Russian artists in the early Soviet years. The Wagnerian mystic gulf, the great
symbol of the separation between stage and audience, was perceived with mistrust by
those artists and thinkers who saw filling the orchestra pit, as Benjamin would put it, as
the most urgent task of contemporary theatre. Brecht, continuing but also reforming
Piscator’s orthodoxy, preferred to foreground the division between stage and audience
instead of merging both realms with architectural reforms.

Metatheatre: a theoretical incursion

4 There is a corpus of modernist dramatic works, epitomized by those of Brecht and
Pirandello, that responds to what one can expect from a theatre that comes preceded by
the prefix ‘meta’: self-reflectivity, a critical relationship to previous models and, even
though it is a very generic idea, complexity. The distinction between self-referential and
mimetic dramaturgies is, in the final instance, a question of theatrical levels rather than
an absolute separation of two irreconcilable essences. In this respect, William Egginton
observes how “there can be no theater that is not already a metatheater, in that in the
instant a distinction is recognized between a real space and another, imaginary one that
mirrors it, that very distinction becomes an element to be incorporated as another

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 3

distinction in the imaginary space’s work of mimesis” (How 74). It is not by accident that
scholars such as Elinor Fuchs, Martin Puchner, and Alan Ackerman, as well as Egginton
himself, have advocated in recent years the adoption of the term ‘theatrical’ or
‘theatricalist’ in lieu of the more popular ‘metatheatrical.’ Be it through the mediating
presence of asides, prologues and choruses, the incorporation of puppets commenting on
the stage action, or the adoption of theatrical traditions that foreground the artificial
nature of the stage (commedia dell’arte, Chinese and Japanese classic theatres), there is no
need to present a play within a play in order to emphasize the artificiality of the
theatrical stage. But, what is the origin of the “meta” prefix in the field of theatre
studies? The idea of metatheatre or metaplay first appeared in Lionel Abel’s collection of
essays Metatheatre, published in 1963. Abel coins this term to define “a comparatively
philosophic form of drama” (v) characterized by its self-conscious nature. In contrast to
the catharsis-oriented Greek tragedy, Abel argues, the hero in the works of Shakespeare,
Cervantes, and Calderón remains “conscious of the part he himself plays in constructing
the drama that unfolds around him” (167). The device of the play within a play, so
important in the Baroque, is present in works such as Hamlet or Life is a Dream, yet Abel
indicates that the concept of metatheatre goes beyond the use of this specific device:
the plays I am pointing at do have a common character: all of them are theatre
pieces about life seen as already theatricalized. By this I mean that the persons
appearing on the stage in these plays are there not simply because they were
caught by the playwright in dramatic postures as a camera might catch them, but
because they themselves knew they were dramatic before the playwright took note
of them. What dramatized them originally? Myth, legend, past literature, they
themselves. . . unlike figures in tragedy, they are aware of their own theatricality.
(134-135)
5 The notion of metatheatre is not exclusive to one artistic period. Abel applies it to the
self-reflexive dramaturgies of such modern playwrights as Pirandello, Genet, and Brecht.
At the core of Abel’s theoretical edifice stands his argumentation about the impossibility
of tragedy in baroque and modern drama due to the “theatricalized,” self-referential
condition of these two periods. One of the great advantages of the concept of metatheatre
is the fact that, once it has been liberated from historical constraints, it becomes a valid
analytic tool for the study of historical series. As Puchner puts it in his preface to Abel’s
collection, “Nineteenth-century realism and naturalism thus are for modern drama what
Greek tragedy is for baroque drama, namely, the “realist” precursor of the later self-
absorbed metatheatre” (Introduction 14).
6 Abel’s idea of metatheatre can be traced back to the early 1960s, when the prefix “meta”
enjoyed extraordinary prominence among art critics thanks to Clement Greenberg’s
theorizations of abstract painting.1 Abel was also responding to a parallel movement that
took place in the area of literary theory in the wake of Jakobson’s famous study on the six
functions of language. As it is well known, Jakobson presented his model of six functions
of language at the 1958 Indiana Conference on Style. His paper “Linguistics and Poetics”
was published two years later in the proceedings Style in Language, edited by Thomas A.
Sebeok, and any further commentary about its influence on twentieth-century literary
theory would be redundant here. In the pages to follow, I propose a historical
reconstruction of Jakobson’s model in order to demonstrate how his 1958 classification
descends from the tradition of the Prague School (a research group he cofounded in
1926), and to what extent it diverges from the Prague School project of interartistic
semiotics. In particular, I argue that, by rendering Mukařovský’s original aesthetic

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 4

function as the poetic function, Jakobson closes the door to the inclusion of social and
ideological phenomena in the realm of literary criticism.
7 Jakobson’s six elements of verbal communication are the following (I am reproducing
here the graphic arrangement presented in “Linguistic and Poetics”):

CONTEXT

ADDRESSER MESSAGE ADDRESEE

CONTACT

CODE

8 And the functions corresponding to these six factors are:

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE POETIC CONATIVE

PHATIC

METALINGUAL

9 In strict terms, only two of Jakobson’s functions can be considered new contributions.
More exactly, it is only the case of the metalingual function, for the concept of the phatic
function is derived from Bronislaw Malinowski’s anthropological research, as well as the
transmission model of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver
in the 1940s. In “Linguistics and Poetics,” Jakobson defines the metalingual function as
the one that predominates “Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check
up whether they use the same code” (69). Metalingual operations are present in our
everyday exchanges, and their importance is particularly visible in the processes of
language learning. My claim is that the metalingual function cannot be made equal to
metatheatre due to the fact that there is no position of outsideness in theatre that can be
compared to the abstract patterns of utterances such as “The word “apple” has five
letters” or “Could you rephrase what you just said?”. Even in the case of Brecht’s ‘epic’
devices, what occurs is a shift of attention to the theatrical conventions—a focus on the
message itself, in linguistic terms—rather than a description of the code from an outside
position.
10 If the metalingual function is not the linguistic equivalent of metatheatre (with all the
connotations of self-awareness, self-reflexivity, etc., present in the latter), the most
plausible solution would seem to be the adoption of Jakobson’s poetic function. The
substitution of the poetic for the metalingual function, however, does not produce a
totally satisfactory solution either. In order to prove the insufficiency of Jakobson’s
terminology, I propose a close reading of the definition of the poetic function in
“Linguistics and Poetics”:

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 5

The set (Einstellung) toward the message as such, focus on the message for its own
sake, is the POETIC function of language. The poetic function is not the sole
function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all
other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent. This function,
by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs
and objects. (69-70)
11 Jakobson became familiar with the concepts of Einstellung (set, orientation) and dominant
in the early 1920s, when he was one of the most active members of the so-called Russian
formalist school. The idea of palpability can also be traced back to these years, since it is a
translation of oščutimost’, a term Shklovsky coined to describe the consequences of
deautomatizing effects. The formalist origin of these three concepts demonstrates the
existence of multiple theoretical layers in Jakobson’s famous model. In addition, his talk
of “the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” is evidence of the legacy of the
Prague School, an intellectual endeavor he joined in 1926 as one of the founding members
of the Prague Circle. This dichotomy of signs and objects is central to my argumentation,
as I will show later, but there are other aspects of the poetic function that deserve special
attention now. I am referring to the very use of the adjective “poetic,” a terminological
decision that limits its range of application to the realm of verbal art. Why does Jakobson
restrict his analysis to linguistic materials? In 1958, when he delivers his paper at Indiana,
Jakobson is especially interested in the development of a “poetry grammar.” Having
arrived in the United States in the early 1940s, he devoted himself exclusively to
linguistic research for more than a decade—it is in this period that he writes his famous
paper on aphasic disturbances. Then, when he returns to literary studies in 1958, he is
convinced of the existence of an empirical criterion that demonstrates the existence of
the poetic function. It consists, as he puts it in “Linguistics and Poetics,” in the projection
of “the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (71, his
emphasis).
12 Leaving aside the phatic and metalingual functions, incorporated by Jakobson to his 1958
model of communication, the other four functions are known to Prague scholars as early
as the mid-1930s. The key difference here is that, instead of a poetic function,
Mukařovský speaks of a multivalent aesthetic function. Jakobson himself adopts this
terminology in his Prague years, as can be inferred from “The Dominant,” originally a
lecture he delivered in 1935. To prove my statement, I will simply quote two brief
excerpts from “The Dominant”:
In the referential function, the sign has a minimal internal connection with the
designated object, and therefore the sign in itself carries only a minimal
importance. (44)
a poetic work cannot be defined as a work fulfilling neither an exclusively aesthetic
function nor an aesthetic function along with other functions; rather, a poetic work
is defined as a verbal message whose aesthetic function is its dominant. (43)
13 The first excerpt anticipates Jakobson’s theorization of the relation between sign and
reality; in the second excerpt, one can see how Jakobson speaks of the aesthetic function
even when the work in question pertains to the realm of verbal art (“a poetic work is
defined as a verbal message whose aesthetic function is its dominant”). It is evident how,
in the context of the Prague School comparative semiotics of art, the aesthetic function
appears as a more encompassing concept than Jakobson’s later poetic function.
Therefore, if one proceeds in accordance with this wider approach and substitutes the
aesthetic for the poetic function, the result is the following chart of artistic—not only
linguistic—functions:

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 6

REFERENTIAL

EMOTIVE AESTHETIC CONATIVE

14 We thus arrive at a four-function model that can also be rendered in terms of 3 + 1: three
communicative functions plus one aesthetic function. The main precedent for this hybrid
scheme is Karl Bühler’s organon model of language, published by the German
psychologist and linguist in 1934. In his Sprachtheorie, Bühler distinguishes three
functions of language: Darstellung (presentation), Ausdruck (expression), and Appell
(appeal). These three functions correspond to the three elements of verbal
communication and, in consequence, are always present in the communicational
exchange. The functions do not exclude each other and, depending on the predominant
orientation of the speech, one can speak of an emphasis on the referred object
(presentation), the speaking subject (expression) or the utterance’s recipient (appeal).
Bühler’s Sprachtheorie takes everyday verbal communication as the basic, non-marked
situation of analysis, a move that constitutes a radical departure from the practice of the
philosophers of language, philologists and linguists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century.
15 Bühler’s research is directly relevant to the evolution of Prague School semiotics because
his organon model situates language in an intersubjective paradigm, therefore
compensating for the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology (Mukařovský’s most direct
philosophical influence). For, in contrast to Bühler’s model, Husserl confines language to
the inner realm of expression. Husserl distinguishes between two types of signs:
expressions and indications. As Peter Steiner explains, indications, for Husserl, are
merely contextual signs, while “the true realm of expressions is the solitary mental life,
where words do not indicate because their meaning is directly “present” in the subject’s
consciousness” (“In Defense” 416). Very different from Husserl’s description, Bühler’s
shifts the attention to the use of verbal signs in a contextual social interaction, and
signals the path for Mukařovský’s later incorporation of social aspects into a
comprehensive semiotic theory. After reviewing the terminology in Bühler’s organon, the
group of four artistic functions appears as follows:

PRESENTATIONAL

(Darstellung)

EMOTIVE / AESTHETIC CONATIVE / APPELLATIVE

EXPRESSIVE

16 In Mukařovský’s own account, “As a presentation (Darstellung) the linguistic sign

functions vis-à-vis the reality signified by it; as an expression it appears in relation to the
speaking subject; as an appeal it is addressed to the perceiving subject” (“Poetic
Designation” 67-8). The idea of a presentational function, often translated (incorrectly)
into English as “referential,” highlights the capacity of the sign to produce realities
(world-creating signs). This creative facet is less explicit when the concept is translated as

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 7

referential function, as Jakobson does in “Linguistics and Poetics.” With respect to the
expressive and appellative functions, terms equivalent to the emotive and conative
functions in Jakobson’s model, the difference is not substantial.
17 Mukařovský expands upon Bühler’s Sprachtheorie by conceptualizing a fourth function,
the aesthetic, which brings to the fore the structural components of the artistic work.
This idea of an “orientation toward the expression itself,” an expression that Mukařovský
uses in several of his essays of the 1930s, has been too often misunderstood as a simple
translation of the old principle of art for art’s sake. Yet what Mukařovský argues is
precisely the opposite of this, for it is due to its aesthetic orientation that the work of art
is able to weaken the transparent relation between signs and reality. The illusion of
transparency that is inherent to realist-naturalist drama (theatre as a slice of life)
epitomizes the tendency toward informational redundancy or, to put it in linguistic
terms, lexicalization. Contrary to this, the presence of non-mimetic codes in modernist
theatre foregrounds the fact that the stage is not a passive copy of external reality, but a
space that now questions ‘lexicalized’ identities and clears the ground for new social and
ethical evaluations.

In lieu of conclusion
18 Once these terminological changes are implemented, the circle seems finally closed, and
Jakobson’s model can be now traced back to the four-function model developed by Bühler
and Mukařovský in the 1930s. The existence of an aesthetic rather than a (linguistically
determined) poetic function, however, does not totally resolve the question of how
aesthetic and non-aesthetic elements interact in the history of art. This is something that
goes well beyond the limits of the present essay. As a final note, I would like to mention
Mukařovský’s own struggle with the ambivalent notion of the aesthetic function
19 At first glance, it seems a safe move to define the aesthetic function as the predominant
one in artistic realms such as literature, sculpture, etc. Nonetheless, Mukařovský
denounces the limitations of this theoretical stance when it comes to explaining the
presence of the aesthetic function in the society of his time:
as soon as we go beyond the realm of art, difficulties arise. On the one hand, we
continually find ourselves attempting to consider the aesthetic function as
something secondary which may exist but is not necessary; on the other hand, the
aesthetic function compels our attention outside of art so frequently, turns up in so
many of the most varied manifestations of life, and even appears as an essential
component of habitation, dress, social intercourse, and so forth, that we must think
about its role in the overall organization of the world. (“The Place” 31)
20 Writing in 1942, Mukařovský finds himself needing to explain the particular nature of the
aesthetic function in an epoch when “life outside of art has become very strongly
aestheticized” (“The Place” 32), a statement very similar to Benjamin’s well-known words
on the fascist aestheticization of politics. In fact, Mukařovský refers to the
“aestheticization of physical culture” (32) as one example of the strong presence of the
aesthetic function outside art.2
21 Despite their antithetical conditions, the crisscrossing of the practical and the aesthetic
functions is frequent both in art and in everyday life. In fact, Mukařovský notes, the art of
theatre constitutes a paradigmatic case of the practical function appearing “frequently
coupled with, indeed even blended with, the aesthetic” (“The Place” 47). In “Significance

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 8

of Aesthetics,” a paper also written in 1942, Mukařovský reformulates the dichotomy

practical/aesthetic function in terms that echo Shklovsky’s concept of ostranenie:
An absolute restriction to the practical attitude, of course, would unmistakably lead
eventually to total automatization, to a restriction of attention to already obtained
and exploited aspects. Only the aesthetic function can preserve for man vis-à-vis
the universe the position of a foreigner who keeps coming to unknown regions with
fresh and keen attention, who is constantly aware of himself because he is
projecting himself into the surrounding reality and is constantly aware of the
surrounding reality because he measures it with himself. (“Significance” 22)
22 Mukařovský’s theory of functions is not free from contradictions, especially when it
comes to codifying a function, such as the aesthetic, which can only be defined in
negative terms.3The unresolved aspects of Mukařovský’s model have to be explained, at
least in part, by the hostile historical conditions of his late structuralist thought, which
coincides with the German occupation of Prague. And Mukařovský would never resume
his research on this issue after War World II, as he had renounced structuralism in favor
of Marxism in order to keep his professorship at the Charles University of Prague. Despite
its unfinished condition, Mukařovský’s functional division is of particular value when
applied to modernism, a period characterized by the blending of the two functions
studied by the Czech scholar.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abel, Lionel. Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form. Ed. Martin Puchner. New York and
London: Holmes & Meier, 2003.

Barthes, Roland. “Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein.” Image, Music, Text. Ed. and trans. Stephen Heath.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. 69-78.

Čapek, Karel, and Josef Čapek. Lásky hra osudná.Prague: Městská knihovna v Praze, 2010.

Egginton, William. How the World Became a Stage. Albany: State University of New York P, 2003.

Evreinov, N. N. A Merry Death. Life as Theater: Five Modern Plays. Trans. and ed. Christopher Collins.
Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1973. 1-19.

Jakobson, Roman. “The Dominant.” Language 41-46.

________. Language and Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1987.

________. “Linguistics and Poetics.” Language 62-94.

Mukařovský, Jan. “The Place of the Aesthetic Function among the Other Functions.” Structure
31-48.

________. “Poetic Designation and the Aesthetic Function of Language.” The Word and Verbal Art.
Ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. 65-73.

________. “The Significance of Aesthetics.” Structure 17-30.

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________. Structure, Sign, and Function. Ed. and trans. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven:
Yale UP, 1978.

Puchner, Martin Introduction. Tragedy and Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form. By Lionel Abel.
New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 2003. 1-24.

________. Stage Fright. Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama. Baltimore and London: The John
Hopkins UP, 2002.

Quinn, Michael L. “Negative Structure in the Functional Scene: The Prague School and
Communicative Ethics.” Jan Mukařovský and the Prague School. Eds. Vladimir Macura and Herta
Schmid. Postdam: Universitat Postdam, 1999. 48-61.

Stanislavsky, Konstantin. Building a Character. Trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood. New York:
Theatre Art Books, 1949.

Steiner, Peter. “In Defense of Semiotics: The Dual Asymmetry of Cultural Signs.” New Literary
History 12.3 (1981): 415-435.

NOTES
1. See Puchner’s introduction to Abel’s Tragedy and Metatheatre 1-4. As Puchner observes, it is in
the late fifties and early sixties “when the literature, painting, music, and theatre produced in
the first half of the twentieth century are canonized, when prominent scholars engage the often
hermetic, puzzling, and complex works of high modernism, introducing and explaining them to
the academy and to the a wider public. The formulation they commonly use is that these difficult
works do not seek to represent the world, but are rather “about” art itself…. There existed no art
form in the twentieth century that did not acquire, sooner or later, the prefix meta”
(Introduction 2-3).
2. In “The Place of the Aesthetic Function,” Mukařovský gives the example of the goldsmith’s
and the baker’s craft to prove how the aesthetic function is present in elements with practical
functions—for him, the color and the smell of the baker’s craft are also aesthetic elements. He
concludes that there is “no sphere in which the aesthetic function is essentially absent;
potentially it is always present; it can arise at any time” (35). Mukařovský criticizes architectural
functionalism because Corbusier “proceeds from the premise that a building has a single,
precisely delimited function given by the purpose for which it is built” (37), an unambiguous
position that limits the buildings to a single function.
3. As Michael Quinn notes, Mukařovský constructs the category of the aesthetic function
“negatively, that is to say, nowhere and everywhere” (“Negative” 51). Quinn criticizes the
graphic arrangement proposed by Jakobson in 1958, and later by Steiner in his introduction to
Mukařovský’s Structure, Sign, and Function, because in both cases the aesthetic function stands in
an equal relation with the rest of the functions. In Quinn’s view, “Mukařovský’s free aesthetic
function inherits, at the level of communication ethics, the political difficulties of access and
exclusion that have troubled Schiller and other post-Kantian theorists. The difficulty of the
logical status of free aesthetic functioning seems to me to be the reason why the borderless
aesthetic is so resistant to graphic illustrations like Steiner’s and Jakobson’s” (“Negative” 54-5).

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 10

ABSTRACTS
This essay reviews the highly popular concept of metatheatre or metadrama, whose first
formulation appeared in Lionel Abel’s collection of essays Metatheatre in 1963. Abel’s
contribution in the field of theatre studies took place in the wake of Roman Jakobson’s model of
six linguistic functions, which Jakobson had introduced in a conference held in Indiana five years
before the publication of Metatheatre. In my review of Jakobson’s model, I argue that neither the
metalinguistic nor the poetic function can fully explain the existence of multiple self-referential,
anti-illusionist devices in twentieth-century dramaturgies (a few examples from the modernist
years are discussed in my essay). In order to shed new light into Jakobson’s model, I propose a
return to the four-function model developed by Jan Mukařovský, the most important critic of the
Prague School, in the late 1930s. Mukařovský expanded upon Karl Bühler’s Sprachtheorie (with
the functions Darstellung, presentation ; Ausdruck, expression ; and Appell, appeal), by
conceptualizing a fourth function, the aesthetic, one that brings to the fore the structural
components of the artistic work.

El presente ensayo examina el hoy muy popular concepto de metateatro o metadrama, que
apareció por primera vez en Metatheatre, de Lionel Abel, una colección de ensayos publicada en
1963. Esta contribución de Abel al campo de los estudios teatrales se basó en el modelo de seis
funciones lingüísticas de Roman Jakobson, que Jakobson había presentado en una conferencia en
Indiana cinco años antes de la publicación de Metatheatre. Al analizar el modelo de Jakobson,
argumento que ni la función metalingüística ni la función poética pueden explicar correctamente
la existencia de múltiples mecanismos autorreferenciales y antiilusionistas en la dramaturgia del
siglo veinte (en mi ensayo, hago mención a algunos ejemplos del periodo modernista). Para
ofrecer una nueva lectura del modelo de Jakobson, propongo un retorno al modelo de cuatro
funciones desarrollado por Jan Mukařovský, el crítico más importante del Círculo de Praga, a
finales de los años treinta. Mukařovský expandió la Sprachtheorie de Karl Bühler (con las tres
funciones Darstellung, presentación ; Ausdruck, expresión ; y Appell, apelación), al añadir una
cuarta función, la estética, que destaca en un primer plano los componentes estructurales de la
obra artística.

AUTHOR
ANDRÉS PÉREZ-SIMÓN

Andrés Pérez-Simón trabaja como profesor visitante de literatura española en Indiana

University. Es doctor en Literatura Comparada por la Universidad de Toronto, donde
antes completó también su Másters en la misma especialidad. En España escribió su
primera tesis doctoral en el campo de la literatura inglesa, con un trabajo sobre el teatro
de James Joyce y el capítulo “Circe” de su novela Ulysses. Completó estudios de
Periodismo y de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada en la Universidad
Complutense de Madrid. En la actualidad, trabaja en la preparación de un manuscrito
sobre teatro modernista europeo, con especial atención al corpus experimental de

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 The Concept of Metatheatre: A Functional Approach 11

Federico García Lorca. Además de su trabajo en el campo de los estudios teatrales, Pérez-
Simón tiene especial interés en la traducción literaria y en la novela hispánica del periodo
de entreguerras. Ha publicado artículos de investigación sobre Jorge Luis Borges, Miguel
de Cervantes, Carlos Saura, Tom Stoppard y James Joyce, siempre desde una perspectiva
comparativista.

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