Shaw's Comedy of Disillusionment

Abstract

Shaw's Comedy of Disillusionment STANTON B. GARNER, JR. UNDERSHAFf YOll have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. BARBARA Well, take me to the factory of death; and let me learn something more. There must be some truth or other behind all this frightful irony. Major Barbara, p. 128.1 A number of years ago, the New Yorker printed a remarkable cartoon, at once ludicrous and poignant. It consisted of a snowman. assembled with more eagerness than skill, stick arms propped awkwardly in its sides. Leaning slightly forward, it stared into the middle distance with an expression of alarm and despair. As the cartoon's caption explained it: 'The snowman realizes what he is." Frozen both physically and spiritually in its icebound anagnorisis, the snowman enacts a gaze which lies at the heart of Western drama. For while drama clearly lies within what Susanne K. Langer calls "the mode of Destiny" - springing along its vectors ofproject and action, "always great with things to come"z - it is no less characterized by those moments when forward movement halts, when the dramatic character must confront himself in the stillness and silence which uniquely characterize the theater as an artistic medium. Typically, such pauses are also moments of truth: the guiding motivation of a misperception collapses in the face of the real state of affairs, and the character must reconstruct his understanding of himself and others in light of his new realizations. Othello, driven by an increasingly blinding delusion, is brought to the point where delusion ends, in the realization of how he has been manipulated, what he has done, and how deeply it has cost him. Othello realizes - more fully and tragically - what he is, and his concluding speech reflects this insight: "I pray you, in your letters,! When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,! Speak of me as 1 am.,,3 Shaw's Comedy of Disillusionment Although our Aristotelian heritage has stressed the centrality of such reversals and recognitions in tragic drama, it is arguable that comedy constitutes the more fertile ground for disillusionment as a dramatic subject. Comedy, after all, combines a conception of character organized much more tightly around fixed ideas with a principle of multiplication that generates increasingly intricate lines of action and brings characters into increasingly inevitable collision. Perhaps the most highly developed form of both these tendencies can be found in the comedies of Ben Jonson, where radically delineated characters - each dominated by a ruling preoccupation, or "humor" - are propelled along lines of action continually subject to interruption. Voltore, Corvino, and Corbaccio all hover around Volpone's sickbed, each driven by a notion ofhis own centrality deftly manipulated by the SUbtle Mosca. The logic of Jonsonian comedy leads to the exposure of these preoccupations, and individual characters suffer the sudden disillusionment of discovering that events are sharply different from what they supposed. Quintessentially Jonsonian, and typically comic, is the moment in Act V of Volpone when the three suitors (and, to a lesser extent, Volpone and Mosca) stand gape-mouthed, "out of their humors," exposed to the Venetian Avocatori and to themselves . No dramatist came closer to Jonson's fascination with delusion and disillusionment than George Bernard Shaw, whose plays are dramatic matrices of characters and their positions, animated by pulses of revelation. In this design, Shaw was helped (as he so often was) by his nineteenth-century dramatic backgrounds, particularly the legacy of the well-made play. This legacy provided Shaw with a dramaturgy founded on discrepant and incomplete awareness among characters, and a dramatic logic founded on misperception and subsequent discovery. A Scribean comedy sends a number of characters into motion, each lacking some important piece of the scheme of events, and multiplies the intricacy of error until it is resolved in a clarifying denouement. Disillusionment, the exposure of inaccurate understanding, is asine qua non of the well-made play. If "disillusionment" seems too strong a word for the moments of exposure in Scribean drama, it is because the consequences of illusions, and their loss, are in the end very slight. Error, in the world of the well-made play, constitutes an aberration, and its correction makes...