Occasional Prose (4 page)

He quotes Pirandello’s definition of humor as the “sentiment of the contrary”—a feeling in which critical recognition of what ought to be mingles with compassion for what is. Pirandello had used as an example Manzoni’s parish priest, Don Abbondio, in
I Promessi Sposi
, asking: “Who is Don Abbondio? He is what you find in the place of what you would have wanted.” The contrary of your expectations of the ideal figure of the perfect priest. “The down-to-earth, dispirited shadow of cautious Don Abbondio falls across the sacerdotal ideal.” But that definition of humor—or the comic—comes very, close to Chiaromonte’s own definition of the real. Don Abbondio is a little piece of reality, and pity, as with Chekhov, is the agency that allows us to perceive it. “Pitiless realism” was detestable clearly, to Chiaromonte and as remote in his eyes from the real, which would shrink from its touch, as any other form of “graphic” representation that took itself for the truth.

Chiaromonte, it must be remembered, was a modern, a deep-dyed modern, going tirelessly into battle against the fallacy of representation. That is, he was very much an “engaged” intellectual of his time, having entered the fray in the twenties to do his bit in the vanguard onslaught on the continuum of appearances which the majority still took to be solid and durable, despite the shock of the First War that had demonstrated—as plainly, one would have thought, as an earthquake—the crack or “fault” in the substratum. The demolition work had already been begun by the cubist sappers before the war, but in the theatre Pirandello was the first to expose the fissure, which was why he was the hero of the Jackals. Chiaromonte notes the fragmentation of the Six Characters (1922), as after an explosion.

For those who came later it is hard to appreciate the passion and valor of the modernist undertaking; we forget its unpopularity. And when we remind ourselves that it had no evident political overtones and yet evidently voiced a protest of some radical, disturbing sort, we are puzzled to determine where that protest, almost a war cry, was coming from. The rejection of old forms—i.e., of old ways of seeing—was proclaimed in martial language reminiscent of field dispatches; there was continual news of “break-throughs” on one front or another, and the term “vanguard” or “avant-garde,” having been borrowed from the military, was appropriated with bold finality by artists. In fact, as Duchamp made clear, the movement was aimed at subverting Art, perceived as a bundle of tricks, and it often took its cues from science and advanced technology. The discrepancy between appearance and what lay underneath was repeatedly “proved” by modernists in a variety of fields. There was no “break” with reality—only a tremendous shattering of surfaces. Honesty, an ever-greater honesty, was the rallying cry responded to by architects and furniture designers as well as by wordsmiths like Joyce and Pirandello. What had happened to the Six Characters, Chiaromonte notes, was that a
fact
had exploded among them.

Anyone who knew and loved Chiaromonte will recognize that an intransigent and fearless honesty was a basic trait of his character. Still the value he set on modernism in the theatre (when he could dispense with it more readily in the other arts) may seem bewildering if we do not grasp what he conceived the theatre’s function to be. His ideas on this score were highly independent, at any rate not current in his profession, where few ideas of what the theatre is or could be are ever framed in the shape of a thought. Meditation had convinced him that the theatre, among the arts, had a special, privileged position in that its forms—comedy, farce, tragedy—constitute means by which reality is met and accepted for what it is, i.e., that which is ineluctable and cannot be altered. No other mode of seeing and rendering experience possesses this capability.

Among literary forms, the novel deals with the subjective ego and its dreams and reveries, which in principle are only limited by the exhaustion of the novelist’s imagination, but the theatre deals with men and women acting and interacting in a physical space and hence rigorously limited in their outward motions. Each, as he moves, encounters the boundaries that define the others’ outline. These boundaries, at the start of the play, may go unperceived by the characters, who picture themselves as free; it is the discovery of them, swift or gradual, the knocking up against them, rebounding, attempting to circumvent them, that make up the agon, never a straightforward contest between two individuals (Antigone vs. Creon), but between the one and a dense plurality. This plurality may be conceived as Necessity, the Law, the Divine, or simply the Others (Sartre’s
Huis Clos
)—whatever name is given under the prevailing dispensation to a limit felt to be
there
, outside, constraining human action, and which, when accepted and measured, in some way liberates the higher faculties for an act of contemplation.

Agon (though I do not recall that Chiaromonte says this) originally meant an assembly, a gathering, rather than what took place in it, and the social character of the theatre, the being together for a limited space of time in a limited but populous space, surely comprehends both the audience and the drama or interplay they watch. The silent participation of the spectator in the give-and-take of dialogue, which is nothing less than a continuous
exchange
, emphasizes the togetherness (if the word can be excused) of the dramatic situation, just as the solitude of the reader engrossed in a book mirrors the subjectivity, represented often by the narrative “I,” of the novel’s consciousness.

Dramatic action, being circumscribed, has a logic far more compelling than that of the strung-out incidents in a novel or tale; within a closed circle, everything follows
necessarily
, unfolds from what is implicit. This is just as true of comedy as of tragedy, in fact, I would add, more evidently so, since the comic turnabout demonstrates as exquisitely as any syllogism the sequence of somebody’s chickens (Tartuffe’s, Count Almaviva’s) coming home to roost. Chiaromonte’s principle of the drama as reasoning action can be extended, moreover, to fit the characters, who are often logicians, reasoners, even hair-splitters (
vide
Shakespeare, Shaw), litigants, like Bérénice, like Antigone, forcefully stating their case, pleaders like Uncle Vanya.

Yet if the theatre, as Chiaromonte says, has a unique relation with what is and cannot be otherwise, this relation—strangely enough, as it would seem at first glance—has always been posed in terms of masks and illusion. Not only are the playactors pretending to be what they are not—Oedipus or Caesar—but the theatre loves disguises (“Enter Duke disguised as Friar”), in other words travesty, double impersonation, for the “Duke” disguised as a friar is an actor twice dissembled. Worse still, Viola, in
Twelfth Night
, traveling about disguised as a youth, Cesario, is not just a girl dressed up in boy’s clothes but a boy (the actor) dressed up as a girl dressed up as a boy. The sphere of ultimate, irreducible reality which is the stage is also the licensed sphere of illusion. Actors, flesh-and-blood creatures, induce our belief in immaterial brain-products, inventions of an unseen author. Meanwhile the reasoning, debating action pursues its irreversible course through a mirage of false semblances, error, mistaken identities, till it arrives at anagnorisis: the knowledge that nothing can be done to controvert that which is laid down (doom)—Oedipus is the slayer of Laius; Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane.

Chiaromonte liked to contrast masks with illusion, preferring the mask (characteristically) because it is frank: the man in the mask is clearly an
actor
, not someone who is half-persuading you with grease paint and false whiskers that he is King Lear. For my part, I do not see that the difference is important except in terms of styles. The masked actor will be skilled in histrionics—the mode of declamation, close to song or chant; the actor in grease paint will be skilled in the mode of mimesis. But nobody is really deceived in the second case: we know that Laurence Olivier in blackface is not a real Venetian general. And in antique comedy and tragedy there must have been some force of illusion working
through
the mask; otherwise why would the Greek word for actor be “hypocrite,” one who plays a part, who pretends?

It appears to me that the whole business of dressing-up and make-believe, the “magic” of the theatre, must be a prime ingredient. We consent to the pretense, just as children consent to the notion that the man in the red suit and white whiskers is Santa Claus down from the North Pole even when they are sure there is no Santa Claus and pretty sure that they recognize their uncle. The longing to be deceived, to “dress up” or otherwise alter reality, is both satisfied by the stage and dispelled, as we are obliged to watch it objectively, at work in the dramatis personae. If my contention is right, it does not undermine Chiaromonte’s fundamental thesis; it confirms it.

The stage, he says, is the place where men who, unknown or known to themselves, have no choice but to play parts (of king or model housewife or gallant, it does not matter) are slowly divested of their outer garment—the protective casing of hopes, dreams, fictions—and confronted with naked reality. The actor, willing or unwilling, in each of us perceives his prototype on the stage, a walking shadow, the shade of a shade. The theatre is seen finally to be its own subject: a cleansed, stripped model of the world of the watchers beyond the proscenium arch, who, led to examination by the dramatic logic, recognize their lives as they truly are. When this recognition is forcible, the theatre becomes a tribunal, as in Ibsen and Genet: the watchers, the bourgeois of the audience, are on trial.

Now insofar as we are all actors or doers (it comes to the same, for doing, as exposed on the stage, is mere feinting, shadow play), the mask we put on is only a metaphor for the illusion we project whenever we appear among others—Yeats’s “sixty-year-old smiling public man.” The incomprehensible mixture of reality and unreality that we are aware of in the acts we perform is dramatically present in the situation of the actor, who consents for our pleasure to be someone both real and unreal. In short, he is a voluntary scapegoat, and if it is his own face—flashing eyes, noble brow, jutting chin—he uses to fabricate the mask, the nightly sacrifice can be more moving. This indeed is the theme of Pirandello’s
Trovarsi
(
Find Yourself
), whose pitiful heroine is a famous actress. Still, I do not deny that mimesis is more suited to comedy than to tragedy, where to observe the play of facial gesture, judge the “rightness” of this or that bit of stage business, agree that this is just the hat Tesman’s well-meaning aunt would wear, may become as distracting as taking a quick inventory of the contents of Claudius’s wassailing hall.

Chiaromonte probably owed to Pirandello his original insight into the theatre as a sequence of actions performed by actors—a fact so obvious that nobody had taken note of it. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” and “Life’s a poor player” might have pointed in the right direction if those soliloquies had not passed into schoolroom commonplaces, so that what was being said in them, like the purloined letter, was overlooked. The persistent application Chiaromonte made of this seemingly simple and self-evident idea led him to discoveries that illuminate the whole nature of dramatic art, ancient and modern, and that throw light too on the nature of narrative.

On a bare rehearsal stage,
Six Characters
confronted a troupe of actors with, so to speak, a troupe of actees. What Chiaromonte applauded, with emphasis, in this play was that Pirandello had dismantled the theatre of its bourgeois trappings and restored it to something like its primary form, as though a Romanesque church had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of baroque chapels and Victorian marble angels and returned to its original intention of worship.

Heuristic too for Chiaromonte, who could be said to have gone to school to Pirandello, was the play’s approach to time. The
fact
that had exploded among those six people, reducing them to modernist-looking bits and pieces, fragments of their former “academic,” illusionist personalities, had already exploded before the start of the play. At the curtain’s rise, the action had finished; what remained was to rehearse it, go over and over it in the hope of searching out its meaning amid the debris. With this stroke, we are back in Attic drama, where the action, so to speak, has already happened when the first strophes are pronounced. It is not just a matter of the dramatist plunging swiftly
in medias res
. For the Attic spectator, the story he was going to witness was over and not to be tampered with; it lay in the sacred past of myth and, in Oedipus’s case, even antedated the unwitting protagonist, having been told before his birth by prophecy. What remained was to re-enact it and, with the aid of the Chorus, search out its meaning.

To a lesser extent, this was still true of the Elizabethan theatre and the theatre of Corneille and Racine. The plots of
Hamlet
and
Phèdre
presented no surprises to the audience, whose detailed foreknowledge of what was going to happen next made suspense of the modern kind impossible. The spectator of Shakespeare’s time who went to see a tragedy or a chronicle play (it was different with comedy, which offered new or little-known plots that had the effect, almost, of improvisation) entered the theatre in a frame of mind that freed him from care about externals. He had left behind the anxiety so common in his daily life as to how things were going to turn out; he could not hope that Lear would get his crown back or Regan and Goneril reform, as he might with his own disagreeable daughters.

I stress this point because it is crucial to Chiaromonte’s thought and yet all but inexplicable, I fear, to today’s playgoer, even one repeatedly exposed to the “alienation effect.” How can a big question like Lear’s getting his crown back (with the aid of the French alliance and a landing at Dover) be regarded by anybody in his right mind as non-momentous? Is this critic utterly indifferent to the things that concern us, that we struggle for—power and daily bread and the rights of old age? Certainly such matters, embracing the whole political realm, are a subject of legitimate concern. But not, I repeat, for the stage. True, for those people on the stage we feel something akin to suspense—a kind of fear and agonized longing that the thing we know is coming will not arrive. Also a natural wish to see the wicked punished—that much at least—which comedy usually satisfies; tragedy more rarely. In tragedy the wicked man will often turn simply into a sufferer (Macbeth, Claudius at his prayers), so that you hardly know how to tell him from a good man. In bringing its actors face to face with an ultimate reality, tragedy purges them of faith in norms and outcomes. “Ripeness is all,” King Lear was led through madness and the experience of extreme violence to conclude. The spectator, reconciled by foreknowledge to the irreparable, arrives, ideally, at the same vision. The unpopularity of the theatre with contemporary people is a warning sign that King Lear’s point of view is now pretty well beyond comprehension.