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Recital of the Dog
In classic works such as Hurlyburly and Streamers, David Rabe's depictions of violence and the dark side of the human psyche have won him widespread acclaim. In Recital of the Dog, a painter who has left urban chaos for the country soon finds his hopes of tranquillity shattered by a marauding intruder-a dog that torments his small herd of cows. Desperate to restore order to his world, the man shoots the dog, unwittingly unleashing a nightmare on himself. This is a tale of creation and destruction, crime and punishment, rife with insight and black comedy.
320 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 1992
60 people want to read
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March 10, 2019
David Rabe, on his birthday March 10
The brutalization of war and other violence, the dehumanization of both victims and perpetrators, identity confusion, madness, a pathology of disconnectedness and alienation, misogyny; these are the themes of Rabe's plays and novels of toxic masculinity, the anchorages of his world.
Authoritative and devastating when speaking as a witness of history about events he has lived, the three early Vietnam plays The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers, have a visceral punch even today. Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam may be read with them as a coda.
And then David Rabe blossoms and becomes strange; with a retelling of a Chekov tale in The Black Monk and its companion play A Dog Problem, a version of Aeschylus's Oresteia titled The Orphan and also about the Manson Family cult murders, and Good for Otto, which put America on the couch.
His most conventional work may be Dinosaurs on the Roof, an evening's conversations between two women, one waiting for the Rapture and her friend whom she has asked to feed her dogs when she is gone, referential to both Waiting for Godot and The Brothers Karamazov.
His most universal and important play is A Question of Mercy, which everyone should see. A brilliant interrogation of the morality of euthanasia to end suffering, it extends the arguments of his antiwar theatre and critique of state power to the personal sphere of a doctor and his AIDS patient.
But then we have Recital of the Dog; a series of visions of the damned, a descent into madness, a reimagination of Blake's strange theology unified with the Absurdist Nihilism of Samuel Beckett. Glorious, terrifying, and densely layered with references, this is the apex form of his art and understanding and the equal of any other literary masterpiece.
On Recital of the Dog: I kept hoping there was a talking dog, perhaps making hieratic pronouncements regarding the afterlife as the Voice of Anubis amid the chanting of a monastic chorus, with all manner of profane harlequinade, in a story about a theatrical performance of the Judgement of Souls, both cast and audience being the dead and the lost causes and forgotten gods who are their judges- oh well, I shall have to write it myself.
Great literature will do that; draw you into the story, make you want to write replies and extensions, engage you in its ideas, change who you are. The works of David Rabe have always met this criterion for me; also they pose questions which invite us to test their merit.
Recital of the Dog explores the categories, qualities, and relationships between Ideal and Real realms of being, and as in all of David Rabe’s work the possibilities of negation and catastrophic failure between ideas and their objects, signs and their referents, resulting in dehumanization and the loss of value and substance as in Sartre’s Nausea or Camus’ The Stranger.
Encompassing a criticism of Authority as inherently evil and the idea of nation and state as illusory and a control system of malign lies, the works of David Rabe are both a revolutionary song of liberation and protest and a conservative defense of the core value of freedom and the heroic myth of individual conscience and a stand on principles against force as an absolute and sacred right on which America and western civilization are built.
This duality of vision, of substance and of surfaces, together create our reality and ourselves, and we have spent millennia negotiating that image and exploring its consequences. David Rabe investigates the fault lines and boundaries of our civilization and its premises and effects in people’s lives, and finally asks, can a real thing equal the transcendent idea of it?
Yes, it can. Autonomy precedes any free society of equals, as an example. But we must each find our own humanity, meaning, and value, as lived experience and truths written in our flesh.
The brutalization of war and other violence, the dehumanization of both victims and perpetrators, identity confusion, madness, a pathology of disconnectedness and alienation, misogyny; these are the themes of Rabe's plays and novels of toxic masculinity, the anchorages of his world.
Authoritative and devastating when speaking as a witness of history about events he has lived, the three early Vietnam plays The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, Sticks and Bones, and Streamers, have a visceral punch even today. Girl by the Road at Night: A Novel of Vietnam may be read with them as a coda.
And then David Rabe blossoms and becomes strange; with a retelling of a Chekov tale in The Black Monk and its companion play A Dog Problem, a version of Aeschylus's Oresteia titled The Orphan and also about the Manson Family cult murders, and Good for Otto, which put America on the couch.
His most conventional work may be Dinosaurs on the Roof, an evening's conversations between two women, one waiting for the Rapture and her friend whom she has asked to feed her dogs when she is gone, referential to both Waiting for Godot and The Brothers Karamazov.
His most universal and important play is A Question of Mercy, which everyone should see. A brilliant interrogation of the morality of euthanasia to end suffering, it extends the arguments of his antiwar theatre and critique of state power to the personal sphere of a doctor and his AIDS patient.
But then we have Recital of the Dog; a series of visions of the damned, a descent into madness, a reimagination of Blake's strange theology unified with the Absurdist Nihilism of Samuel Beckett. Glorious, terrifying, and densely layered with references, this is the apex form of his art and understanding and the equal of any other literary masterpiece.
On Recital of the Dog: I kept hoping there was a talking dog, perhaps making hieratic pronouncements regarding the afterlife as the Voice of Anubis amid the chanting of a monastic chorus, with all manner of profane harlequinade, in a story about a theatrical performance of the Judgement of Souls, both cast and audience being the dead and the lost causes and forgotten gods who are their judges- oh well, I shall have to write it myself.
Great literature will do that; draw you into the story, make you want to write replies and extensions, engage you in its ideas, change who you are. The works of David Rabe have always met this criterion for me; also they pose questions which invite us to test their merit.
Recital of the Dog explores the categories, qualities, and relationships between Ideal and Real realms of being, and as in all of David Rabe’s work the possibilities of negation and catastrophic failure between ideas and their objects, signs and their referents, resulting in dehumanization and the loss of value and substance as in Sartre’s Nausea or Camus’ The Stranger.
Encompassing a criticism of Authority as inherently evil and the idea of nation and state as illusory and a control system of malign lies, the works of David Rabe are both a revolutionary song of liberation and protest and a conservative defense of the core value of freedom and the heroic myth of individual conscience and a stand on principles against force as an absolute and sacred right on which America and western civilization are built.
This duality of vision, of substance and of surfaces, together create our reality and ourselves, and we have spent millennia negotiating that image and exploring its consequences. David Rabe investigates the fault lines and boundaries of our civilization and its premises and effects in people’s lives, and finally asks, can a real thing equal the transcendent idea of it?
Yes, it can. Autonomy precedes any free society of equals, as an example. But we must each find our own humanity, meaning, and value, as lived experience and truths written in our flesh.
Displaying 1 of 1 review