Shaw's Comedy of Disillusionment

Abstract

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 of project and action, "always great with things to come" — 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.”