The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl Page 21

  ‘In other words’, Shaw said to Voltaire, ‘it is apparent to you, as it is to my own Irish eighteenth-centuryism,53 that Shakespeare’s dramatic personages are not collections of assorted traits, each of which gets its turn to display itself during the action, but that his personages say and do whatever will be most effective at the particular moment they have reached in the drama. If we want our children to enjoy and understand art, we must teach them to impersonate not a character (or, for the matter of that, a tree or a house) in the work of art, but the artist. Shakespear chooses certain words to put into Macbeth’s mouth not in order to display Macbeth’s character but in order to make a certain effect on the audience, while incidentally fulfilling the metrical requirements of blank verse. Lady Macbeth sleepwalks not because she is the sort of woman who would sleepwalk but because Macbeth is the sort of play that benefits from the eerie and pathetic effect of a sleepwalking scene – which incidentally also provides an opportunity to shew up the medical profession in a manner undertaken more comprehensively and systematically by my own play The Doctor’s Dilemma.’

  ‘In the theatre’, Voltaire said ‘(and I speak as one who has written both novels and plays), there is need for only the thinnest minimum of self-consistent character on which to string a dramatis persona together. Audiences can be easily gulled into supposing there is more of such consistency than there truly is, because their eyes assist their own deception: they cannot help seeing that a given dramatic personage is played by the same actor all the way through.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Shaw, ‘such consistency of character as a dramatic personage needs is needed principally to assist the actors. Their profession consists of the childish activities of making-believe, dressing up and shewing off. Unlike children, however, they have to take part in those activities punctually, regularly and in circumstances both frightening and fatiguing. If you allow them to suppose that they are undertaking a subtle and complex character-study, you encourage them to believe in the seriousness of their activity and you thereby promote in them the courage and perseverance to do it. In a novel, on the other hand, where the reader moves at his own pace and can go back to re-examine any passage that gives him doubt, and where there are no visible actors for his imagination to rely on, it may be necessary to endow the personages with a more plausible and naturalistic semblance of coherent characterisation. It was probably because I was too busy with ideas to have time to polish the characters that I failed as a novelist – or to be precise, that I wrote novels exactly as though they were plays, consisting of nothing but dialogue and stage directions.’

  ‘You failed’, Gibbon said to Shaw, ‘only because, through the accidents of history, the novels you were attempting to write were Victorian novels. You would have taken to the genre with ease had your ambition been to emulate, for example, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which consists entirely of letters – that is to say, of dialogue. Or again, although you admired and appreciated them, you could not, in your historical situation, wholly model your own novels on those of Jane Austen, who was born into the same century as Voltaire, Laclos and myself and knew, by the light of the Enlightenment, that “character” is only a veneer, though she made it a highly polished and attractive veneer. It is quite apparent that in her books X marries Y not because that is in the least “in character” for either of them but because they are compelled by the ruthless and inexorable demands of the symmetry of the fiction’s design.’

  ‘She was more merciless to her creatures even than I was to mine‚’ Voltaire agreed, with a sigh of respect. ‘She was concerned wholly with relationships: the relationship, that is, of one section of her design to another, and the relationship of one motif in her material to another, which she exposes in the light of a most admirably unwavering irony. I am not in her class for toughness. I never managed, as she did, to isolate the Oedipus situation as the crucial relationship in human affairs. Letting my fancy stray into the exotic, I was incapable of her relentless concentration on the domestic but cardinal problem of whom the children are to marry and whether the parents will permit them to. Even so’ (Voltaire’s voice became brisker) ‘I think I may claim that my fancy was not distracted either by local colour or by bizarre characterisation. I did single out and stick to the essence; and no doubt it was because I had understood that the essence consists of relationships that I was able, as soon as I became aware of it, to appreciate Freud’s concept of psychology. You see’ (and here Voltaire turned towards God), ‘we were all shocked to hear you speak seriously of people’s responses being “in character”, terminology I myself would use only in a joke, because it implied that you had retreated from Freud and had reverted to a static psychology – if not positively a medieval one. You will be explaining next that a person’s response is governed by the proportions of fire and earth in his constitution.’

  ‘Explanations of just that kind’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘pass daily for 20th-century psychology. Whole institutes spend time and money on drawing up charts shewing the proportions of introversion and extraversion in a person’s character. It is not necessary – indeed it is scarcely possible – to demonstrate before starting that any such dichotomy actually exists, because it is admitted straight away that everyone contains a mixture of the two. However, since it can be expressed in diagrams, this activity, like alchemy and astrology before it, readily passes for “scientific” and mathematically measurable. It therefore appears to be a respectable means of achieving what it has come into existence to achieve, which is of course to distract the 20th century from the dynamic psychological concepts of Freud.’

  ‘Psychology apart,’ Gibbon said, ‘the only area of 20th-century thought that is retarded enough to retain the static concepts of character is politics. You will find politicians still busy weighing one another’s characters, with all the solemnity that I and my contemporaries brought to such a figment of a task but with none of our wit or our steady hand with a finely balanced antithesis. As recently as January 1973 one British politician publicly diagnosed in another the traits “stubborn” and “rash”, and yet went on, as soberly as a judge or an analytical chemist, to pronounce that those “faults” shrivelled away when they were “put in the scales and weighed against his qualities”. It is quite possible that politicians still believe that “faults” and “qualities” of character are entities which have a palpable existence – together, no doubt, with those “scales” in which politicians can determine their relative weights with such conviction of infallibility.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Shaw said, ‘since character doesnt exist, people believe whatever they like about it. As I remarked of myself,54 I began my career as a dramatist by lifting characters bodily out of pages of Charles Dickens, and discovered that I thereby produced an effect of daring innovation and originality.’

  ‘Not only did you produce that effect,’ Voltaire said; ‘you actually were a daring innovator and original. Character is so insubstantial and so little to an artist’s purpose that you and Dickens could use the same characters and yet make utterly different original effects.’

  ‘Character is indeed so insubstantial’, the psychoanalyst added, ‘that the very characters who, in the pages of Dickens, were universally recognised as human, warm and fleshly-and-bloody, were accused, when they reappeared in the pages or on the stages of Shaw, of being dehumanised, intellectualised and mere mouthpieces for ideas.’

  ‘It is an inexplicable paradox’, Shaw said, ‘that people regularly regard ideas as dehumanised, but passions, emotions and violent actions as human. Yet the truth is that ideas are the most human of those things. All the others we humans share with other animals. But ideas are things which only humans have.’

  There was a moment’s pause, of general agreement, round the table and, during it, Shaw bent down and patted the sheep as though to console him for his want of ideas.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Well,’ God said, placing his forearms on the table rather in the manner of a sphinx.
‘Well. You have all made it splendidly clear that the reason I can’t simply make people believe what I say has nothing to do with character. However, you have not made clear what the real reason is. And neither have you, which is more immediately important to me, given me the smallest indication of what action I ought to take.’

  ‘I thought that was obvious,’ Shaw said. ‘You must, of course, issue a manifesto – or, as I suppose Voltaire is about to say, a godifesto.’

  ‘I suppose I was,’ Voltaire agreed. ‘Or a deifesto at the least.’

  ‘But how can I know that anyone will believe it?’ God asked.

  ‘You cant,’ Shaw replied. ‘You are about to turn professional author, and you must take your chance, as professional authors always do.’

  ‘I would recommend you’, Gibbon said, ‘not to read the reviews. Those that dispraise you will disturb you by condemning you for things you in fact never said. Those that praise you will disturb you even more, by praising you for things you in fact never said and, moreover, would never dream of saying.’

  ‘But there must’, God protested, ‘be some outcome.’

  ‘No storyteller worth his salt’, Shaw said sternly, ‘knows the outcome while he is at work. Did I not give you fair warning of that by affirming that when I was writing a play I never invented a plot but let the play shape itself, which it always did even when up to the last moment I did not foresee the way out?55 Did I not even add that I often did not see what the play was driving at until some time after I finished it, and that even then I might be wrong? Did I not demonstrate the same thing in practice by writing my tale about the adventures of the Black Girl in her search for God and then adding a note in which, the story being written, I proceeded to speculate on what it meant?’

  ‘Have I not warned you’, Voltaire asked, leaning towards God, ‘more recently and in a way that should have come more personally home to you, that not all fictions are autobiographical? What you call the outcome may be beyond your comprehension or may seem irrelevant. Shaw liked to give his outcomes an exact ironic point (though, if I may, as a fellow-dramatist, make a technical observation, he was very bad at curtain lines); but even he admits that the point of his points remains open enough to be speculated on. My own irony was often more surrealist. Both ironies are justified by the designs they occur in, and both make the same ultimate point or non-point. We do not know whether we belong to a severely determined universe, in which only art is free to be surrealist and random, or whether the universe is random, pointless and absurd and the art we create is the only ordered and designed element in it.’

  ‘If you did not take those warnings’, the psychoanalyst said, turning in his turn to God, ‘were you not warned by one of the few bad blunders ever made by Freud? Freud naïvely assumed56 not only that all fictions are autobiographical but that they are all wish-fulfilment fantasies, which led him to suppose that an author writes a novel merely in order to fulfil his own desires through the hero. What Freud failed to notice is that the author’s loyalty is transferred from his hero or his own ego to the work of art itself, and that the wish the author is truly striving to fulfil is that the book shall be a good one.’

  ‘To make it so’, Gibbon said, ‘the author must accomplish what the design requires – which may cost the hero, and indeed the author, dear.’

  ‘The author’, Shaw said, ‘is a mere instrument in the grip of Creative Evolution, and may find himself starting a movement to which in his own little person he is intensely opposed.57 It is Creative Evolution that dictates the design.’

  ‘You,’ the psychoanalyst said to Shaw, ‘are externalising a force you dare not locate in yourself. It was because you were frightened of psychology that you had to invent meta-biology.’

  ‘You were afraid of psychology’, Voltaire added to Shaw, ‘because of what you termed your delicacy. And it was the same thing that made you afraid of art. Even the most intellectual elements in art, namely the design and the ideas, are sensuous: if the artist gets them right, their rightness is a matter of pleasure, not external logic. You were so deep a puritan that you could not admit you wrote art for art’s sake58 but had to pretend it was for Lamarckianism’s sake. However, for art’s sake I can’t be sorry, since the products of your pretence were works of art.’

  ‘They were also, for the most part,’ Shaw replied calmly, ‘dramas; and to externalise an inner psychological force is merely a commonplace of dramatic technique. As I pointed out in my Preface59 to Saint Joan, Saint Joan, like Socrates before her, described as the external experience of hearing voices what less dramatic people would call the inner experience of having thoughts. Indeed, in the Epilogue to the play itself I brought the dead Joan back to life in a dream dreamt by the Dauphin. It was a useful dramatic convention, and it aptly illustrated the fact that the dead Joan has remained alive in the thoughts of the living right up to modern times:60 but in using it I did not imply that the dead really express themselves through the dreams of the living – any more than the appearance, in a comparable episode in Man and Superman, of not merely several dead persons but the very devil himself implies that I believe in personal immortality or in the literal existence of the devil and all his works.’

  ‘I suppose’, Gibbon remarked musingly, ‘that in a dialogue of the dead (a literary convention much in vogue in my day, thanks to the classical and sceptical influence of Lucian, who had, by the way, no more belief in an afterlife than Shaw or I), the epilogue would be transacted among the living.’

  (‘That reminds me,’ God said, looking round and scanning the oleanders in an unfocussed way, ‘I keep having the feeling that somehow Erasmus ought to be here. I’m blessed if I could say why he should be: yet I wonder why he’s not.’

  ‘Ignorance, Sir, pure ignorance’, boomed the shade of Dr Johnson, who chanced at that moment to cross the oleander avenue, accompanied still by Boswell.)

  ‘If you are thinking of including epilogues in your professional career,’ Shaw said to God, ‘I should counsel you, from my own experience,61 to forearm yourself to resist the advice of well-meaning persons who will assure you that your work would be excellent if you would only cut out the epilogue.’

  ‘I trust’, Voltaire remarked to Shaw, ‘that I shall not be mistaken for a well-meaning person. But if you are thinking of Saint Joan, my advice to you would be to keep the epilogue and cut out the play. It is your only wholly bad one – which is no doubt why it is your most famous one. Though you agreed when we all savaged poor God’s amateurishly static concepts of character and drama, you yourself saddled Saint Joan with a purely static construction. Your play is nothing but a succession of tableaux illustrating, you suppose, medieval life. It would pass for a village pageant whose producer was severely under the influence of the pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, it is to your visual nullity that I ascribe the whole disaster. I surmise that, when you turned critic of painting, you read Ruskin, in the hope no doubt of scraping some knowledge of the subject from a writer you could make something of because, although his subject was the visual arts, his greatest talent for the English language. It was from Ruskin’s bigoted Protestantism that your own bigoted Protestantism borrowed the notion that anything you approved of in Catholicism could be labelled Protestantism-in-advance-of-its-time. This idea of Ruskin’s is virtually the sole idea in Saint Joan. By the time you were writing, its mild paradox was unlikely to give offence anywhere except in your native island. Saint Joan became your most acceptable play in the eyes of people who devote themselves to not being offended. Its pageant-form and unnecessarily large cast made it an ideal choice for putting on as the school play; and in addition you endowed Joan with just that static type of “character” which invites schoolmasters to set examination questions asking for it to be described. In fact, of course, Joan’s “character” consists chiefly of the spurious rustic dialect you put, not very consistently, into her mouth. Had history permitted you to make her an Irish peasant, you would not have been able to make such a senti
mental fool of yourself.’

  ‘I confess that I too’, God said very gently, ‘have sometimes thought that in that play you were a little over-kind to the religious point of view. But perhaps I cannot judge, because my self-interest is concerned.’

  ‘Your Joan was such a plaster pre-Raphaelite saint’, Voltaire said, ‘that all right-thinking people declared that you’d given up joking and had written a great play at last. They meant that you’d temporarily given up disturbing them. You came back to your senses only with the Epilogue. It was the very point where you might have sunk yet further over your head in sentimentality. You might have implied that killing rebels doesn’t greatly matter, since the soul is immortal and here’s the poor girl’s ghost to prove it and send the audience home tearfully happy. Instead, you were bold and offensive enough to admit that, if people could resurrect Joan, they wouldn’t.’

  ‘It was on almost the same point’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘that you anticipated or coincided with Freud’s theory of the ambivalence of emotions62 in your dialogue of the dead in Man and Superman.63 There you cause your dead Don Juan to remark: “You may remember that on earth – though of course we never confessed it – the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.”’

  ‘Indeed,’ Gibbon put in, ‘you went on from there virtually to anticipate Freud’s theory that the way people state a fact about their unconscious is to deny its truth.64 For when your Doña Anna answers Don Juan’s remark with a horrified “Monster! Never, never”, your Don Juan observes placidly: “I see you recognise the feeling.”’

  ‘In fine,’ said Voltaire, ‘your dialogues of the dead are often the liveliest parts of your plays. Certainly that is true of Saint Joan, where the pageant scenes are so immobile that the actors might as well be dead. It is only in the Epilogue that your play touches tragedy, because it is only in the Epilogue, where she is already dead, that your heroine truly dies.’