Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (31 page)

CROMO
. Yes, but how? How did they appear?

COTRONE
. Right on cue. And right on cue they said what they had to say: isn’t that enough? All the rest, just how they appeared and whether they are real or not, that doesn’t matter. I just wanted to give you a sample, Countess, to prove that only here can your
Fable
come to life. But if you insist on taking it out amid the world of men, so be it! Away from here, however, I shall have only my companions to offer in your service. I place them and myself at your disposal.

At this point, fortissimo from offstage comes the thunderous noise of the Mountain Giants riding down into the village to celebrate the wedding of Uma di Dornio to Lopardo d’Arcifa with wild music and shouting. The walls of the villa tremble at the sound
.
QUAQUÈO, DOCCIA, MARA-MARA, LA SGRICIA, MILORDINO, MAGDALEN
burst onto the stage in a state of high excitement
.

QUAQUÈO
. Here come the giants! Here come the giants!

MILORDINO
. They’re coming down from the mountain.

MARA-MARA
. All on horseback. Dressed up to the nines.

QUAQUÈO
. Do you hear that? Do you hear? They’re like the Lords of the Earth.

MILORDINO
. They’re on their way to church for the wedding.

DIAMANTE
. Come on, let’s go and see.

COTRONE
[
with a powerful commanding voice that halts all those who were about to run off with
DIAMANTE
]. No. Nobody move! Nobody show his face outside—not if we want to go up there and offer a performance. Let’s stay here and see about the rehearsal.

COUNT
[
drawing the
COUNTESS
aside
]. Aren’t you afraid, Ilse? Don’t you hear them?

SPIZZI
[
joining them, terrified
]. The walls are shaking.

CROMO
[
following suit
]. It’s like the wild ride of some savage horde.

DIAMANTE
. I’m frightened! So frightened!

They all stand listening, tense with fear, while the music and the uproar die away in the distance
.

Curtain

Here is the action of the third act (or fourth ‘moment’) of
The Mountain Giants,
as well as I can reconstruct it from what my father told me and with the meaning it was intended to have
.

This is as much as I know and, though I have unfortunately done it less than justice, I trust I have made no arbitrary changes. But I cannot know what, at the end, might have emerged from the imagination of my father which, throughout the penultimate night of his life, was busy with those phantoms—so much so that in the morning he told me that he had suffered the terrible strain of composing the whole of the third act in his head and that now, with all obstacles overcome, he hoped to get a little rest. He was also glad to think that, as soon as he was well, it would take him only a few days to set down everything that he had conceived during those hours of the night. I cannot know, and nobody can ever know, whether, in that last act of mental composition, he may not have found another shape for the dramatic material, different developments for the action, or higher meanings for the Myth. All I learned from him that morning was that he had found a saracen olive
.
^*
‘In the middle of the stage’, he said with a smile, ‘there is a large saracen olive; and this solves all my problems.’ And since I didn’t understand, he added: ‘To hitch up the curtain …’. Then I realized that he had been worrying about this practical question, perhaps for days on end. He was delighted to have found the answer
.

The third act is set on the mountain, in an open space before a dwelling of the ‘Giants’. It opens with the arrival of the actors, tired from the journey, pulling their cart and accompanied by some of the Scalognati; the whole group is led by Cotrone.

The arrival of these strange and unexpected visitors arouses the curiosity of the inhabitants—not the ‘Giants’ who never appear on the stage, but their servants and the crews of workmen employed on their massive projects. These are all seated at a great banquet upstage, where the long tables seem to extend over a vast space out of sight of the audience. Some of the nearer banqueters get up to enquire about the newcomers whom they regard with a blend of astonishment and attraction as if they were beings dropped from some other planet.
Cotrone finds an overseer with an air of authority and explains the intentions of his companions: they are actors and have everything ready to offer this distinguished public an artistic spectacle of the very highest order in the hope of adding lustre to the wedding festivities which are already under way.

From this first scene, with the orgiastic songs and shouting of its Gargantuan banquet and its dancing fuelled by noisy fountains of wine, it is clear what kind of entertainment the ‘Giants’ provide for their people and how those people enjoy it. So the actors lose heart when they realize that these folk have no notion whatsoever of what a theatrical performance involves, and things become even worse when someone who has heard of the theatre comes forward to persuade all the others what great fun it is; for it is soon all too obvious that he is thinking of the Punch and Judy shows with their thumping and spanking, of the slapstick of clowns, or the exhibitions of nightclub dancers and chanteuses. But, while Cotrone goes off with the Overseer to propose the performance to the ‘Giants’, the actors take comfort in the hope, which they try to argue into a certainty, that the masters before whom they are to perform cannot possibly be as uncouth as their servants and workers; and even if it may be doubted whether they will grasp the full beauty of
The Fable of the Changeling Son
, they will at least listen politely. In the meantime they have trouble warding off the coarse chattering curiosity of the rabble around them as they wait impatiently for Cotrone to return with an answer.

But Cotrone returns to report that, though the ‘Giants’ accept the offer of a performance and are willing to pay handsomely, they unfortunately have no time to spend on such things, so many and so great are the tasks to which they must attend, even at this festive time. So let the performance be for the people who benefit from being offered the means of spiritual elevation every now and then. And the people greet this gift of a new amusement with a frenetic enthusiasm.

The actors are divided in their response. Some, led by Cromo, say they feel they are being fed to the lions, there is nothing to be done before such abysmal ignorance, better give up the whole project. Others, like the Countess, emboldened by the very spectacle of beastliness that disheartens and appals the others, declare that it is precisely before such ignorance that the power of art should be put to
the test; and they have no doubt that the beauty of the
Fable
will conquer those virgin souls; and there is the ecstatic Spizzi, already girding himself for this extraordinary performance as for an enterprise worthy of some noble knight of old, persuading the hesitant to join him by shaming them with his example. The Count meanwhile would at least like to shield the Countess from the surrounding vulgarity that disgusts and embitters him.

Cotrone sees and tries to point out the unbridgeable gap that separates these two worlds that have been brought so strangely into contact: on the one hand, the world of the actors for whom the voice of the poet is not only the highest expression of life, but indeed the only certain reality in which and through which life is possible; on the other hand, that of the populace who, led by the ‘Giants’, are intent on vast projects to possess the powers and riches of the earth; in this huge unceasing common effort they find their norm, and in every conquest over matter they fulfil a purpose of their lives and take pride in an achievement that is both shared and deeply individual. But Ilse is so happy and so eager for the test that Cotrone has to admit that anything is possible and that she may even triumph, intense as she is. ‘Quick, quick,’ she says, ‘where do we perform?’ ‘Right here where people are already gathered for the banquet. All we need to do is fix up a curtain to hide the actors while they make up and put on their costumes.’

In the middle of the stage there is an old saracen olive, so they hang the curtain on a cord stretched across from the tree to the wall of the house.

While the actors are getting ready, nervous and constantly disturbed by people peeping in and calling others to come and jeer, Cotrone decides it would be a good idea to tell this uninformed audience something about the play. He goes out through the curtain to speak to them, but is immediately greeted by an outburst of jibes, catcalls, shouts, and rude laughter. The Magician returns cast down; they have not let him say a word.

‘Don’t let such a little thing get you down, we’re used to it,’ says Cromo the character actor in dry consolation; ‘you’ll soon see how it turns out.’

The actors explain to Cotrone that he was shouted down because he has no experience with an audience: but now one of them will go out instead—Cromo, who is already dressed and has his Prime
Minister’s nose on, will improvise an introductory explanation; he will know how to get their attention by starting off with a couple of jokes. And indeed a noisy chorus of approving laughter, applause, and cheers of encouragement soon testifies to his success.

The reception given to Cromo does something to raise the spirits of the actors so that Ilse, Spizzi, and Diamante, the most eager and ardent of the troupe, can dismiss the fears of Cotrone who now realizes that it will end up badly and makes one last despairing effort to dissuade them. He sadly reminds them of the happiness they are giving up, he recalls the enchanted night they spent at the villa when all the phantom spirits of poetry came to life in them so easily—and could still continue to live if only they would return and remain there for ever.

Meanwhile the hilarity aroused by Cromo is so great that he too fails in his attempt to put the audience in the right mood for the poetic spectacle that is being offered. Cromo returns wet through and dripping with water because some spectators have turned a hosepipe on him to add to the fun. On the other side of the curtain bedlam has broken loose: they are shouting for the actors to come out and for the play to begin. What can be done? Ilse, who is alone on the stage at the start of the
Fable
, moves away from her husband and Cotrone and steps beyond the curtain, as if to a supreme sacrifice, resolved to fight with all her strength to impose the word of the poet.

At this point, the basic conflict, now about to explode into dramatic action, has already been set out. Inevitably the fanatics of art, convinced that they alone are the true guardians of the spirit, faced by the incomprehension and derision of the Giants’ servants, will be led to despise and insult them as people devoid of all spirituality; the other side, fanatics of a very different ideal of life, cannot believe the words of such puppets as the actors seem in their eyes—not because they are dressed up, but because the spectators sense that these poor devils, so fixed and earnest in their tone and gesture, have, for some reason, placed themselves definitively outside life. Puppets: and as puppets expected to provide amusement. After the initial amazement, the great groans of boredom and the crude questions (‘Who’s she supposed to be?’, ‘What’s she on about?’), the audience tell the Countess to drop her inspired declamation of incompehensible words and give them a nice little song and dance. Frustrated by Ilse’s persistence, they begin to turn violent. Behind the curtain the drama of
Ilse’s struggle with her public is reflected in the agitation of the other actors and the anxious reactions of Cotrone and the Count. Ever more threatening, the gathering storm suddenly bursts onto the makeshift stage when the Countess hurls insults at the spectators and calls them a bunch of brutes. Spizzi and Diamante rush to help her; the Count faints. Cromo shouts that they should all get started on a dance and goes onto the stage himself in an attempt to divert the public’s unbridled anger away from Ilse. The pandemonium outside can be seen in the shadowy images cast on the curtain, gigantic gestures, huge bodies locked in combat, cyclopean arms and fists raised to strike. But now it is too late. Suddenly there is a great silence. The actors re-enter carrying the body of Ilse, snapped like a broken puppet. A brief last agony and Ilse dies. Spizzi and Diamante, who had rushed into the fray to defend her, have been torn in pieces: no trace of their bodies can be found.

The Count comes to himself and cries out over his wife’s body that men have destroyed poetry in the world. But Cotrone understands that nobody is to blame for what has happened. No, it is not that poetry has been rejected, but only this: the poor fanatical servants of life, in whom the spirit does not speak today but may yet speak someday, have in their innocence broken, like rebellious puppets, the fanatical servants of art who are incapable of speaking to men because they have withdrawn from life—yet not so far withdrawn as to be content with their own dreams but still seeking to impose them on people who have other things to do than believe in them.

And when, deeply mortified, the Overseer arrives to offer the apologies of the Giants, together with fitting financial compensation, Cotrone persuades the grieving Count to accept. Almost angrily the Count announces that, yes, he will accept; and he will use this blood-money to erect a noble and eternal monument to his wife. But one senses that although he weeps and protests a noble fidelity to the dead spirit of Poetry, he feels suddenly relieved, as if freed from a nightmare; and the same is true of Cromo and the other actors.

They depart as they came, carrying the body of Ilse on the cart.

Stefano Pirandello

M
ANY
years ago (but it seems like yesterday) a nimble little handmaid entered the service of my art, and although she is no longer young she is still perfectly good at her job.

Her name is Fantasy.

She is a bit of a joker and somewhat malicious and, though she likes to dress in black, it cannot be denied that she is often downright bizzare; nor can it be thought that she always does everything in earnest and in the same way. She sticks a hand in her pocket and pulls out a cap and bells, shoves it on her head, red as a cockscomb, and dashes off. Here today, there tomorrow. And she amuses herself by bringing home the most discontented folk in the world for me to draw stories, novels, and plays out of them—men, women, and children, all involved in strange inextricable situations, their plans have been frustrated and their hopes dashed, and often, indeed, it is truly painful to deal with them.

Well now, several years ago, this handmaid Fantasy had the unfortunate inspiration or ill-omened whim to bring home a whole family. I have no idea where or how she fished them out, but she was convinced that they would provide me with material for a splendid novel.

This was the group I found before me: a man of about fifty, wearing a black jacket and light-coloured trousers, with a frowning air and eyes that spoke of mortification and defiance; a poor woman in widow’s weeds holding a four-year-old girl by the hand and with a boy of little more than ten at her side; a bold seductive-looking girl, also wearing black but with an equivocal and brazen ostentation, trembling all over with a keenly-relished biting disdain for the mortified older man and for a youth of about twenty who was standing aloof and self-absorbed as if he despised them all. In short, the six characters who are seen coming onto the stage at the beginning of the play. And first one and then the other, but often one overpowering the other, they embarked on the story of their misfortunes, shouting at me as each argued his or her own case and thrusting their disorderly passions in my face, much as they do in the play to the unfortunate Director.

What author can ever say how or why a given character is born in his fantasy? The mystery of artistic creation is the same mystery as birth itself. A woman in love may desire to become a mother, but the desire alone, however intense, will not suffice. One fine day she will find herself a mother without any precise awareness of when it began. In the same way an artist
absorbs so many germs of life and can never say how and why at a given moment one of those vital germs finds its way into his fantasy to become a living creature on a plane of life superior to mutable everyday existence.

I can only say that, without having consciously looked for them, I found them there before me, so alive that they could be touched, so alive that I could even hear them breathe, those six characters who are now seen on the stage. And all present there, each with his or her secret torment, bound together by the birth and development of their intertwined affairs, they were waiting for me to grant them access to the world of art, constructing from their persons, their passions, their adventures, a drama or at least a story.

Born alive, they wished to live.

Now it should be said that I have never been satisfied with portraying the figure of a man or a woman, however special or characteristic, for the mere pleasure of portrayal; or with narrating a particular episode, happy or sad, for the mere pleasure of narration; or with describing a landscape for the mere pleasure of description.

There are certain writers (and not a few) who do take such pleasure and, once satisfied, seek nothing more. These are writers more accurately defined as being of a historical nature.

But there are others who, beyond such pleasure, feel a more profound spiritual need, so that they cannot accept figures, episodes, or landscapes that are not imbued, so to say, with a distinct sense of life from which they acquire a universal significance. These are writers more accurately defined as philosophical.

I have the misfortune to belong with the latter.

I detest symbolic art in which the representation loses all spontaneous movement to become a mechanism, an allegory—a futile and misconceived effort because the very fact of giving an allegorical meaning to a representation shows that we are dealing with a fable which of itself has neither literal truth nor the truth of fantasy, being made only for the demonstration of some moral truth. Except occasionally when it serves an elevated irony (as with Ariosto), such allegorical symbolism cannot appease the spiritual need of which I speak. Allegorical symbolism starts from an idea, indeed, it
is
an idea which evolves or seeks to evolve into an image. What I speak of, on the contrary, seeks in the image, which must remain living and free throughout its expression, a meaning that gives it value.

Now, however hard I tried, I could not find that meaning in those six characters. And so I judged that it was not worth bringing them to life

I thought to myself: ‘I have already afflicted my readers with hundreds and hundreds of stories: why should I afflict them yet again with the misfortunes of these six poor devils?’

And thus I sent them packing. Or rather I did everything I could to send them packing.

But not for nothing does one give life to a character.

Creatures of my spirit, those six were already living a life that was their own and no longer mine, a life that I no longer had the power to deny them.

So much so that, when I persisted in my determination to drive them from my mind, they continued to live on their own account, almost completely detached from any narrative support, like characters from a novel, escaped by some miracle from the pages of the book that contained them. They chose certain moments of the day to reappear before me in the solitude of my study, sometimes one by one and sometimes in pairs, coming to tempt me, to suggest this or that scene for representation or description, arguing the particular effects that could be achieved, the singular interest that could be awakened by a given unusual situation, and so on.

For a moment I would let myself be won over; and every time this concession, this slight slackening of resistance, was enough to give them a longer lease of life, an increasingly concrete presence, and therefore a greater power of persuasion over me. Thus it gradually became more difficult for me to go back and free myself from them, and easier for them to come back and tempt me. At a certain point they had become a real obsession: but then, all of a sudden, the solution flashed upon me.

‘Now why,’ I said to myself, ‘why don’t I represent this extraordinary situation of an author who refuses to give life to some of his characters, and the situation of those characters who, born in his fantasy and already infused with life, cannot resign themselves to exclusion from the world of art? They have already detached themselves from me, have their own life, have acquired voice and movement; on their own, therefore, in this struggle for life that they have had to wage against me, they have already become dramatic characters, characters who can move and speak on their own; they already see themselves as such; they have learned to defend themselves from me; they will also know how to defend themselves from others. Well then, let them go where dramatic characters usually go to have life—on a stage. And then let us see how it turns out.’

That is what I did. And naturally what happened was what had to happen: a blend of the tragic and the comic, of the fantastic and the realistic, in a totally new and highly complex humorous situation: a drama which, simply through the characters who carry it and suffer it within, breathing, speaking, and self-moving, seeks at all costs the way to its own realization; and the comedy of the vain attempt at an improvised stage performance. First, the surprise of those poor actors of a theatre company rehearsing a play by day on a bare stage without flats or scenery; surprise and incredulity at the appearance before them of those six characters who
announce themselves as such and in search of an author; then, immediately afterwards, provoked by the sudden faint of the black-veiled Mother, their instinctive interest in the drama which they glimpse in her and in the other members of that strange family, an obscure ambiguous drama suddenly invading an empty stage unready to receive it. And the gradual growth of this interest as they see the outburst of the conflicting passions of the Father, Stepdaughter and Son, and of that poor Mother—passions that, as I have said, seek to overpower each other with a tragic, lacerating fury.

And there we are: now that they have taken the stage, that universal significance, first sought in vain in those six characters, is found by the characters in themselves amid the agitation of the desperate struggle that each of them wages against the others and that all of them wage against the Director and the actors who fail to understand them.

Without wishing it, without knowing it, in the strife of their troubled souls, each one of them defends himself against the accusations of the others by expressing, as his own living passion and torment, the same pangs that I myself have suffered over so many years: the illusion of mutual understanding, irremediably based on the empty abstraction of words; the multiple personality of every individual according to all the possibilities of being to be found within each one of us; and finally the inherent tragic conflict between life which is ever-moving, ever-changing, and form which fixes it, immutable.

Two especially of those six characters, the Father and the Stepdaughter, speak of that atrocious inescapable fixity of their form, in which both of them see their essence expressed for ever and immutably—that essence which for the one means punishment and for the other vengeance. And they defend it against the artificial affectations and involuntary mutability of the actors; they try to impose it on the conventional Director who seeks to modify it and adapt it to the so-called requirements of the theatre.

On the face of it, not all the six characters have been developed to the same level, but this is not because some are figures of first and others of second rank, in the sense of leading parts and supporting roles (which would be a matter of the elementary perspective essential to all theatrical or narrative structure); nor is it that they have not all been fully formed for the purpose they serve. All six are at the same point of artistic realization, and all six are on the same level of reality, which is the play’s level of fantasy. Except that the Father, the Stepdaughter, and also the Son are realized as mind, the Mother as nature, and as ‘presences’ the Young Boy who observes and performs a single gesture and the Little Girl who is wholly inert. This fact gives rise to a new kind of perspective among them. I had had the unconscious impression that some of them needed to be more fully realized (from an artistic standpoint) and others less, while yet others
would be barely sketched in as elements of an episode to be narrated or represented.

The most living characters, the most fully realized, are the Father and the Stepdaughter who naturally come to the fore, lead the way, and drag along with them the almost dead weight of the others—the Son who comes reluctantly and the Mother, a resigned victim between the two children who have practically no substance beyond their appearance and who need to be led by the hand.

And yes, indeed! Indeed, each of them needed to appear in exactly that stage of creation which they had reached in the mind of the author at the moment when he wanted to send them packing.

If I think back on my intuition of that necessity, on my unconscious discovery that the solution lay in a new perspective, and on the way I managed to create it—all these things seem miraculous. The fact is that the play was truly conceived in one of those spontaneous illuminations of the fantasy where, by some marvel, all the elements of the mind respond to each other and work together in divine accord. No human brain, working in cool consciousness, however hard it struggled, would ever have succeeded in grasping and satisfying all the requirements of the play’s form. So the explanations that I shall give to clarify the significance of the play should not be understood as intentions that I conceived in advance of its creation and which I now set out to defend, but only as discoveries that I myself have made in tranquil retrospect.

I wanted to present six characters who seek an author. Their drama fails to be represented precisely because the author they seek is lacking; what gets represented instead is the comedy of their vain attempt, with all that it contains of tragedy in that these characters have been rejected.

But can one represent and reject a character at the same time? Obviously, if one represents him, he must first be accepted into one’s fantasy and then expressed. And in fact I did accept and realize these six characters: but I accepted and realized them as rejected and in search of another author.

Now I should explain what it is of these characters that I have rejected. Not themselves, obviously, but their drama which, no doubt, concerns them first and foremost, but did not concern me in the least, for reasons I have already suggested.

And for a character, what is his drama?

In order to exist, every creation of fantasy, every creature of art, must have his drama, that is, a drama which allows him to be a character and by virtue of which he is a character. This drama is the reason for the character’s being, the vital function that he needs in order to exist.

In these six, then, I accepted the being while refusing the reason for being; I took the organism and entrusted to it, instead of its own proper
function, another more complex function into which its own function entered only as a basic fact. A terrible and desperate situation this, especially for the two characters, Father and Stepdaughter, who more than the others, insist on coming to life and are aware of themselves as characters, meaning that they are absolutely in need of a drama, their own drama which is the only one they can imagine and which they now see denied them. It is an ‘impossible’ situation from which they feel they must escape at whatever cost, a question of life and death. It is true that I have given them another reason for being, another function, which is precisely that ‘impossible’ situation, the drama of being in search of an author, of being rejected. But that it should be a reason for being, that for them who already had a life of their own it should have become their true function, necessary and sufficient for their existence, this they cannot even suspect. If someone were to tell them so, they would not believe him, for it is impossible to believe that the sole reason for our existence lies wholly in a torment which appears to us unjust and inexplicable.