Three Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, The Mountain Giants (Oxford World's Classics) (32 page)

I cannot fathom, therefore, what could justify the charge made against me that the character of the Father was not what it should have been in that it overstepped its capacity and position as a character and sometimes encroached on and usurped the functions of the author. I understand those who cannot understand me and I can see that the accusation comes from the fact that this character expresses as his own a mental torment that is recognizably mine. Which is perfectly normal and has absolutely no significance. Quite apart from the fact that the mental torment suffered and lived by the character of the Father derives from causes and reasons that have nothing to do with my own experience (something that of itself shows that the criticism has no substance), I want to make it clear that one thing is my own inherent mental torment, a torment which—so long as it has an organic place there—I can legitimately reflect in a character; another thing entirely is the activity of my mind in the realization of this work—the activity, that is, that succeeds in creating the drama of these six characters in search of an author. If the Father were to participate in this activity, if he were to collaborate in creating the drama of being without an author, then and only then would there be some justification in saying that on occasions he becomes the author himself and therefore not what he should be. But the Father suffers and does not create his existence as ‘a character in search of an author’. He suffers it as an inexplicable fatality and as a situation which he rebels against with all his strength and seeks to remedy. He is indeed, therefore, ‘a character in search of an author’ and nothing more, even if he does express as his own the mental torment that is mine. If he participated in the activity of the author then that fatality would be perfectly explicable insofar as he would see himself accepted, even if only
as a rejected character—accepted nonetheless into the creative matrix of the poet; he would no longer need to suffer the despair of being unable to find anyone to affirm and construct his life as a character. I mean that he would accept with a good grace the reason for being that the author gives him and would renounce his own without regrets, casting off the Director and the actors to whom instead he has turned as his only recourse.

There is, however, one character, the Mother, who cares nothing about being alive (if we consider being alive as an end in itself). It never even dawns on her that she is not alive; nor has it ever occurred to her to wonder how and why and in what manner she lives. In short, she is unaware of being a character, insofar as she is never, even for a moment, detached from her role. She does not know she has a role.

This makes her perfectly organic. In fact, her role as Mother does not in itself, in its naturalness, involve any mental activity; and she does not live as a mind; she lives in a continuity of feeling that is never broken and therefore she cannot acquire awareness of her life—which is to say of her existence as a character. And yet, despite all this, she also, in her own way and for her own ends, seeks an author. At a certain point she seems happy to have been brought before the Director. Perhaps because she too hopes he can give her life? No: because she hopes that the Director will make her act out a scene with the Son into which she would put so much of her own life. But it is a scene that does not exist, that has never and could never take place. That is how unaware she is of being a character, unaware of the life she can have, all fixed and determined, moment by moment, in every gesture and every word.

She appears on stage with the other characters, but without understanding what they are making her do. Obviously she imagines that the rage for life which possesses her husband and daughter and which is the cause of her own presence on the stage is only one of the usual incomprehensible eccentricities of that tormented tormenting man, and also—horrible, most horrible—another equivocal act of rebellion by that poor erring girl. She is completely passive. The events of her life, and the meaning they have assumed in her eyes, her own temperament—these are all things that are spoken by the others and which she contradicts on only one occasion, which is when the maternal instinct rebels within her and rises up to make it clear that she never chose to abandon her husband or her son. Because her son was taken from her and her husband himself forced her to leave him. But she is rectifying matters of fact: she knows and explains nothing.

In short, she is nature—a nature fixed in the figure of a mother.

This character gave me a new kind of satisfaction which should not be passed over in silence. My critics usually define all my creatures, without exception, as ‘unhuman’—this being apparently their peculiar and incorrigible nature. But with the Mother the vast majority have been kind
enough to note ‘with genuine pleasure’ that at last my fantasy has produced ‘a very human figure’. I explain this praise as follows: this poor Mother of mine is totally bound to her natural behaviour as Mother, denied all free mental activity, little more than a lump of flesh, fully alive in her functions of procreating and breastfeeding, nursing and loving her young; she has, therefore, absolutely no need to use her brain and she realizes in herself the true and perfect ‘human type’. This must be the case, because nothing in a human organism seems more superfluous than the mind.

But even with that praise, the critics were trying to get shut of the Mother without bothering to grasp the nucleus of poetic values that the character signifies in the play. A very human figure, yes, because mindless, unaware of what she is, or not concerned to explain it to herself. But not knowing that she is a character does not prevent her from being one. That is her drama in my play. And it is when the Director urges her to think that the whole story has happened already and therefore cannot be the cause of new lamenting that this drama bursts forth most strongly as she cries: ‘No, it’s happening now, it happens all the time. My agony’s not feigned, sir. I’m alive and present, always, in every moment of my torment which is itself renewed, alive and ever-present.’ This she
feels
, in an unconscious way that makes it inexplicable: but she feels it so terribly that it never even strikes her that it might be something to explain to herself or to others. She feels it and that is all. She feels it as pain, and this pain immediately cries out. Thus she reflects that fixity of life in a form that also, in a different way, torments the Father and the Stepdaughter. In them, mind: in her, nature. The mind rebels or, as best it can, seeks to profit from the situation: nature, if it is not aroused by sensory stimuli, weeps at it.

Conflict between form and the movement of life is the inherent and inexorable condition not only of the mental but also of the physical order. The life that, in order to exist, has become fixed in our corporeal form, gradually kills that form. Nature thus fixed weeps for the continuous irreparable ageing of our bodies. In the same way, the tears of the Mother are passive and perpetual. Revealed in three faces, given significance in three distinct and simultaneous dramas, that inherent conflict finds in this play its most complete expression. Moreover, in her cry to the Director, the Mother declares the particular significance of artistic form, a form which does not confine or destroy its own life, and which life does not consume. If the Father and the Stepdaughter were to keep starting their scene a hundred thousand times over, always, at the given point, at the moment when it must serve to express the life of the work of art, that cry would resound—unchanged and unchangeable in its form, but not as a mechanical repetition, not as a return determined by external necessities, but rather, each time, alive and as new, suddenly born thus for ever, embalmed alive in its incorruptible form.
Thus, always, on opening the book, we shall find a Francesca alive and confessing to Dante her sweet sin; and if we return to that passage a hundred thousand times, then a hundred thousand times Francesca will say those words again, never repeating them mechanically, but saying them each time for the first time with such intense and sudden passion that every time Dante will swoon. Everything that lives, by the very fact that it lives, has form and therefore must die; except for the work of art, the one thing that lives for ever, insofar as it is form.

The birth of a creature of human fantasy, a birth that is a step over the threshold between nothingness and eternity, can sometimes happen suddenly, brought about by some necessity. An imagined drama needs a character who does or says a certain necessary thing; thus such a character is born and is exactly what he or she had to be. This is how, amid the six characters, Madame Pace is born and why she seems a miracle, indeed a trick, on that realistically presented stage. But it is not a trick. The birth is real; the new character is alive not because she was alive already, but because she now has an opportune birth befitting her nature as a character who might be called ‘obligatory’. What has occurred, therefore, is a fracture, a sudden change in the scenic level of reality, because a character can be born in this way only in the poet’s fantasy, and certainly not on the boards of a stage. All of a sudden, without anyone noticing, I have changed the scene, gathering it back into my fantasy but without removing it from the eyes of the spectators—I mean that, instead of the stage, I have shown them my own mind in the act of creation under the appearance of that very stage. When what is visually observed suddenly and uncontrollably shifts from one level of reality to another the effect is that of a miracle performed by a saint who makes his own statue move, which in that moment is surely no longer wood or stone. But the miracle is not arbitrary. The stage, partly because it accepts the reality of the six characters, does not exist of itself as a fixed and immutable fact—just as nothing in this play exists as given and preconceived: everything is in the making, everything moves, everything is an unforeseen experiment. Thus there may be organic shifts even in the reality-level of the place in which this unformed life changes and changes yet again in its quest for form. When I first thought of having Madame Pace born there and then on that stage, I felt that I could do it, and I did it. I certainly would not have done so if I had realized that this birth, instantly, silently and unobtrusively, was unhingeing and reshaping the reality-level of the scene; I would have been paralysed by its apparent lack of logic. And I would have inflicted a fatal injury on the beauty of my work. I was saved from this by the fervour of my mind, because, despite the deceptive logic of appearances, that birth from fantasy is sustained by a genuine necessity in mysterious and organic relation to the whole life of the work.

When someone tells me now that this play does not have all the significance it could have because its expression is disorderly and chaotic and because it errs on the side of romanticism, I can only smile.

I can understand why such an observation has been made: because of the apparently tumultuous and unfailingly disorderly way my work presents the drama in which the six characters are involved; there is no logical development, no proper sequence of events. Very true. Even if I had gone out of my way to do so, I could not have found a more disorderly, a more bizarre, a more arbitrary and complicated—in short, a more romantic—way of presenting ‘the drama in which the six characters are involved’. Very true. But I have simply not presented that drama; I have presented another—and I am not going to keep repeating what it is—in which, among other fine things to suit all tastes, there is actually a discreet satire of romantic procedures. It lies in those characters of mine, all so heated by their strife for primacy in the roles that each of them plays in a given drama, while I present them as characters in another play which they neither know nor suspect, so that all that passionate agitation, so typical of romantic procedures, is ‘humorously’ situated, based on the void. And the drama of the characters, not organized as it would have been if accepted by my fantasy, but presented like this, as a drama rejected, could only exist in my work as a ‘situation’, with some small development, and could only emerge in hints, stormy and disordered, in violent foreshortenings, in a chaotic manner, constantly interrupted, sidetracked, contradicted; by one of its characters denied, and by two others not even lived.

There is, in fact, one character, the Son, who denies the drama that makes him a character and who derives all his prominence and significance from being a character not of the play in the making—for he hardly figures as such—but of my representation of it. He is, in short, the only one who lives solely as a ‘character in search of an author’; the more so in that the author he seeks is not a playwright. And this too could not have been otherwise. Just as the character’s attitude is organic to my conception of the work, so it is logical that, given the situation, it should generate greater confusion and disorder, and yet another element of romantic conflict.

But this organic and natural chaos is precisely what I had to represent; and to represent a chaos in no way implies representation in a chaotic and hence romantic manner. And that my representation, far from being confused, is very clear, simple, and orderly is proved by the clarity with which audiences all over the world have grasped the plot, the characters, the fantastic, realistic, dramatic, and comic levels of the work; and also by the way the unusual kinds of significance that it encloses have emerged for those with a more penetrating vision.

Great is the confusion of tongues among men if such criticisms can be expressed in words. No less great than this confusion is the perfection of the intrinsic order, the law which, obeyed in every point, makes my work classical and typical and which forbids any words at its tragic conclusion. When, indeed, everyone has understood that life cannot be created by artifice and that the drama of the six characters cannot be presented without the author to give it significance, the Director remains conventionally eager to know just how things turned out. At his urging, the Son then recounts the conclusion, the facts of the case in their concrete succession, without any meaning and therefore with no need of a human voice. That conclusion, stark and senseless, is triggered by the detonation of a mechanical weapon on stage, and it shatters and dissolves the sterile experiment of the characters and the actors, made apparently without any assistance from the poet.