President Ubu

 I have mentioned before on this blog that I have a tendency when reading great works of the theater to suddenly picture in my mind's eye the costumes and setting re-staged for the Trump era. I don't want this to be the case. I don't like the ex-president invading my thoughts any more than I like him invading my news feed. But I can't help it. So many plays, in both the farcical and the tragic vein, deal with the excesses of human folly and arrogance being cut down to size. The spectacle of hubris punished is, after all, the classical template of drama. And when a twenty-first century American sees one of these swaggering theatrical leads strut out onto the stage, who else can they think of but our clownish yet terrifying ex-president? And if we accept that a historical production could well be re-staged with the lead actor now done up in orange clown make-up, what better play to serve as our vehicle than Alfred Jarry's proto-surrealist masterpiece, Ubu Roi?

It would have been argued in prior decades, perhaps, that Jarry's eponymous protagonist is too extreme a caricature to be portrayed in the costume of any real-world politician. Father Ubu, as he is known in the play, is after all a comically exaggerated monster of appetites. Driven solely by pride, cupidity, and gluttony, he is both a watchword of lust and an utter craven. In short, he puts one in mind of Plato's theorized template of the "tyrannical man," whose soul is given over into the custody of his basest hungers. He is, in this respect, a universal archetype, not to be reduced to any one time and place, but rather representing an aspect of the human soul: the devil in all of us who must perennially be wrestled to the ground by our better natures--the part of us the poet John Davidson had in mind when he said: "If the whole world was a cake he had the power to take,/ He would take it, ask for more, and eat them all."

On Egdon Heath

Obsolescent Angst

 Conversations about AI are getting harder to avoid: mostly because they are no longer meandering speculations about what might be; these days, they are reviews of what's already occurred. As a result, we are all starting to grapple with the melancholia of obsolescence. The obsolescent angst, if you will.

A couple months ago, of course, I would have waved aside the notion that machines might one day be able, say, to create an original work of visual design. "Oh come on," I would have said, "what a ludicrous sci-fi scenario. Save it for your screenplay. Never gonna happen." Now, when I draw breath to say the same thing, friends text me images generated by AI that were created in less than a second--all of them utterly convincing, impossible to distinguish from the work of a human intelligence, and no more acts of plagiarism than most products of the human imagination, which likewise works through a process of agglutination rather than creation ex nihilo. 

The Tragic Vision

 As a teenage socialist I turned to Brecht's Mother Courage hoping to find there some good Marxist dogmatics-- a real-life instantiation of Brecht's theoretical commitment to abolishing the individualism and fatalism of the bourgeois theater. Yet, when the play was done, I found that the scene that lingered longest and moved me the most-- as it has perhaps many prior readers-- was one that concerned a highly individual action: it is the moment when the deafmute Kattrin-- knowing that an army is about to ambush and massacre a town of sleeping villagers-- climbs into a tree and beats a drum in order to warn the civilians; putting herself on the firing line in order to save the lives of innocents. 

What strikes one about the scene is not only its poignancy-- but also its utter incompatibility with Brecht's ostensible commitments. I suppose one can say that it serves the play's overarching antiwar message; but it does so in a humanistic way that by no means aligns with the theory of "epic" and revolutionary theater that is supposed to govern the whole. After all, in his didactic mode in the same play, Brecht generally scoffs at sacrifice (think of the song "How Fortunate the Man with None"). He mocks morality as null when faced with the problem of an empty belly. All such "noble suffering" and individual self-immolation is supposed to be made unnecessary by a coming world which-- instead of demanding martyrdom-- instead renders it unnecessary by abolishing the conditions that called it forth. 

The Anomalous Bicephalus

 At various times during the Trump presidency, I fantasized about famous plays that should be re-staged for the contemporary era, with costuming and set-pieces redesigned (plus maybe a few key names and lines of dialogue altered) so as to make an implicit commentary on political events. Most of my picks had probably occurred to others: a rendering of Richard III, with the increasingly despotic and isolated central character cast in the image of Trump himself, and the various henchmen whom he betrays and executes bearing the names of former members of the administration whom Trump had cast out; Ionesco's Rhinoceros reimagined to refer to the contagion of Republican election denialism, or perhaps to the more literally infectious spread of COVID-19 under Trump's insouciant watch... and so on. 

But all of that was before I learned of a play by Dario Fo that requires even less re-envisioning to establish its contemporary relevance. For it turns out that Fo--the Nobel Prize-winning playwright best known for his political farce the Accidental Death of an Anarchist--was also the creator of a forgotten 2003 work that features both Vladimir Putin (twenty years younger then, but just as vicious), as well as a bombastic, thin-skinned, right-wing, overly litigious and possibly mobbed-up media figure with an eerie tendency to make excuses for Putin's atrocities. In Fo's case, the thin-skinned politician was Silvio Berlusconi. But there is no reason why a contemporary restaging of the play could not cast him with a spray-on tan. Skin, after all, can be orange as well as thin. 

An Epigraph for Election Day 2022

Leafing through the mellifluous yet frequently indecipherable collected poems of Wallace Stevens during odd evenings the last few months, I found the book to be of greatest use in general as a tool to fight insomnia. (I mean that in the least derogatory way possible. I just literally find it a helpful means to lull the mind to sleep while engaging it in a diverting but non-taxing activity that does not involve backlit screens. There is a certain level of difficulty and obscurity that verse can attain at which it completes the horseshoe and becomes simple to read again--the mind submits and stops trying to make particular sense of it.) 

But one poem in the volume woke me right up. It seemed to have a special emotional urgency: particularly for this looming election day.  

De Selby's Paradox

 In Flann O'Brien's posthumously-published surrealist satire, The Third Policeman, a side character of some importance is a certain crank scientist and mad philosopher by the name of de Selby (who also appears in this role in O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive). Through the use of various side-discourses on the fictional theorist's postulates (sometimes confined to footnotes), O'Brien (real name Brian O'Nolan) satirizes the scientific method. He does so specifically by having de Selby first point out a seeming paradox or inconsistency in our everyday working understanding of the world, and then using these difficulties to arrive at an utterly zany conclusion. 

As O'Brien's narrator describes the mad scientist's "customary line" in his own terms: he proceeds by "pointing out fallacies involved in existing conceptions and then quietly setting up his own design in place of the ones he claims to have demolished." (A real-life practitioner of the de Selby method might be found in the great Charles Fort, who used the inexplicable accounts of scientific anomalies he found in newspapers to argue, among other things, that intergalactic cross-dimensional vessels must sometimes breach our reality in order to lure us up for dinner. "Maybe we're fished for, by supercelestial beings" as a character in William Gaddis's The Recognitions summarizes the theory.)