Hall, Fo, and theatrics of role and story

I'm reading a group of essays by Edith Hall concerned with Athenian theater, and came upon this:

In the twentieth century, theatrical roles became a notoriously
politicized issue. At the Moscow Art Theatre a hundred years ago,
Constantin Stanislavski focused on the actor’s conviction in the
naturalistic realization of a role. But his critics always urged that
this school produced self-regarding actors, who erected a wall be-
tween themselves and the voyeuristic audience: quintessentially
bourgeois theatre. Brecht insisted that the actor destroy the role
in order to present it as a manufactured entity, enabling the maintenance of critical distance. And for Dario Fo, acting means ‘recounting’: the actor must find the story rather than the character. Fo has urged that inherent in ‘the people’ is a collective dimension different from the individualizing tendencies of the bourgeoisie; this consciousness is supposedly expressed in ‘popular’ entertainment
forms that require actors to enter into dialogue with the audience,
rather than to display themselves for inspection.

The above is from Hall's The Theatrical Cast of Athens, chapter 1, where she addresses the question of which is primary, role (character) or story (plot). Hall's frame of reference is wide, and reflects decades of attention to the theater of Athens and well beyond. (And I'm grateful that she posted a free digital version of her book to Academia.edu).

I especially like her inclusion of Fo, whose Mistero Buffo I was privileged to witness in Florence in 1973.

Words fail to convey what Fo, using a public street, did there. To adapt Hall's mini-taxonomy (because it helps), one might describe it as Fo's finding a way to combine the vivid individuation of Stanislavski with an overlay of gestures, expressions and comments aimed to include the spectators in the scene. This connection opened the "fourth wall" (parabasis) to us, reminding us of both our genre awareness as an educated audience, as well as of the distance of history. We were at once the captive crowd on the streets of medieval Fireneze or Siena, and the 20th century latecomers, acutely conscious of the "collective dimension" undreamt of without the dialogic mimesis of Fo's genius.

Dario Fo

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Unmasking heaven: Paradiso 30

It's often remarked that the late canti of Paradiso are redolent with Virgilian echoes, prompting commentators to ponder why, since Virgil ceded his guiding role to Beatrice in Purgatorio 30, his text seems to return with such sonorous and imagistic presence 30 cantos later.

An indirect approach might help. I'll break it into three parts - the critical impasse that the pilgrim experiences, and moves beyond, in Paradiso 30; the presence of some of Virgil's most far reaching passages in the canto, and finally an effort to read Dante's juxtaposition of his own poetic impasse with Virgil's tale of Orpheus's defeat and Aristaeus's renewal in the Fourth Georgic.

As noted previously, Paradiso 30 seems to partake more intimately of music than of statement, description, or question and answer. The muted opening scene of earth's shadow bowing to the sun is a sort of preludium that modulates into the equally quiet confession that the man who loved Beatrice since he first saw her perhaps half a century earlier, who would follow her still, cannot keep up -- she has risen to a level beyond his art.

ché, come sole in viso che più trema,
così lo rimembrar del dolce riso
la mente mia da me medesmo scema.

For as the sun the sight that trembles most,
  Even so the memory of that sweet smile
  My mind depriveth of its very self. (30.25-27)

The poet is about to have his power of sight strengthened to a point of being able to look unhindered at anything. But before that, just the memory of the changed Beatrice is overpowering -- it blots out the mind in the act of remembrance. Remembering dismembers.

The poem is interweaving antinomic extremities: On one hand, the poet says he's split, divided from his own memory, from his muse, from his mimetic powers as poet -- as his voyage brings him ever closer to that Reality which exceeds the realism of his artistry.*

Yet at the same time, in the very moment of this decisive defeat, his powers of vision are expanded and strengthened:

“Sempre l'amor che queta questo cielo
 accoglie in sé con sì fatta salute,
 per far disposto a sua fiamma il candelo.”

Non fur più tosto dentro a me venute 

queste parole brievi, ch'io compresi 

me sormontar di sopr' a mia virtute;

"Ever the Love which quieteth this heaven
  Welcomes into itself with such salute,
  To make the candle ready for its flame."

No sooner had within me these brief words
  An entrance found, than I perceived myself
  To be uplifted over my own power,   (30:52-57)

Led by Virgil to the top of Purgatory, the pilgrim there was crowned and mitered over himself (Purg. 27). Here the words of Beatrice enter the poet and empower a self-surmounting, a rising above oneself. Then,

e di novella vista mi raccesi
tale, che nulla luce è tanto mera,
che li occhi miei non si fosser difesi;

And I with vision new rekindled me,
Such that no light whatever is so pure
But that mine eyes were fortified against it. (30:58-60)

As extraordinary as this novella vista is, however, it merely permits the pilgrim to see foreshadowings (umbriferi prefazi) -- the river, the sparks and flowers. To see that which is foreshadowed by these figures, he still must "drink" of this light to cure a lack in himself.

Up to this point, one could argue that Paradiso has been accommodating itself to the Pilgrim's limitations. His vision is strong, but he's still seeing illusion, a mask.

After his eyelids drink in the river's light, the mask is removed, and the pilgrim beholds the glorious courts of heaven. We are now in the throes of the paradox built into the canto: coming from nature, we do not have the poetic means to extricate and explicate what lies behind the appearances of nature. Yet that apparent dead end has an unanticipated twist.

A look into the return of Virgil's text seems necessary here.

========

*For a very helpful distinction between the poetics of realism vs. the nature of reality, see the fine commentary, Dante and Reality / Dante and Realism (Paradiso) by Teodolinda Barolini. 

II. Virgilian echoes

The sense of intuiting divinity without being able to speak it is Virgil's limit -- he intimates a numinous reality within the natural world, but lacks the revelation to be able to speak it.

This sense of something looming behind is present from the richly Virgilian echoes in the canto's opening:

quando 'l mezzo del cielo, a noi profondo,
 comincia a farsi tal, ch'alcuna stella
 perde il parere infino a questo fondo;

When the middle of the heavens, to us profound,
  Begins to make itself such that here and there a star
  Ceases to appear so far down as this depth,

This is a modified form of Longfellow's translation - the original is here: Par. 30:4-6. The link of cielo . . . profondo prompts many commentators to point to a passage that seems to have its own profundity in Virgil's fourth Georgic:

His quidam signis atque haec exempla secuti  220
esse apibus partem divinae mentis et haustus
aetherios dixere; deum namque ire per omnes
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum.
Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,
quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas;  225
scilicet huc reddi deinde ac resoluta referri
omnia nec morti esse locum, sed viva volare
sideris in numerum atque alto succedere caelo.

Led by these tokens, and with such traits to guide,
Some say that unto bees a share is given
Of the Divine Intelligence, and to drink
Pure draughts of ether; for God permeates all—
Earth, and wide ocean, and the vault of heaven—
From whom flocks, herds, men, beasts of every kind,
Draw each at birth the fine essential flame;
Yea, and that all things hence to Him return,
Brought back by dissolution, nor can death
Find place: but, each into his starry rank,
Alive they soar, and mount the heights of heaven.

Bees exemplify the kind of sign that lends credence to a reading of the world as instinct with divine motion through all things, leaving no place for death. Such passages make Virgil much more than the singer of Roman history and conquest.

Virgil had used the same phrase in the Fourth Eclogue:

Adgredere o magnos—aderit iam tempus—honores,
cara deum suboles, magnum Iovis incrementum!
Aspice convexo nutantem pondere mundum,         50
terrasque tractusque maris caelumque profundum!
Aspice, venturo laetentur ut omnia saeclo!

Assume thy greatness, for the time draws nigh,
dear child of gods, great progeny of Jove!
See how it totters—the world's orbed might,
earth, and wide ocean, and the vault profound,
all, see, enraptured of the coming time!

The tone carries prophetic power -- the foresense of a child whose birth will shake the fixed contours of earth and sea and sky, leading to a paradisal new epoch.

Dante is summoning these heightened, luminous moments in Virgil's text, moments in which something shines through a teeming world filled with tears, violence, and war. At the end of the Fourth Eclogue, the poet calls upon a child and its mother to smile, because in this mutual smile he sees the sign of a better future. Juxtaposed with the smile of Beatrice, along with the Virgin and Child, these lines might have struck Dante as harboring an extraordinary premonition, that of a seer doomed never to know what his prescience so vividly foretells. 

If Dante shared the then-common view of Virgil's poetry as vatic, its profundity was in the mode of the pilgrim's novella vista of the river, sparks, and flowers -- a realm of umbriferi prefazi beneath the mask of nature.

When that mask is removed, as occurs after the pilgrim, like a famished infant, "drinks" from the river, there is no longer a translucence of something discerned obliquely in the depths. Taking off a mask is an instantaneous act in which the veil is not seen through, but lifted away -- a literal act of revelation:

Poi, come gente stata sotto larve, 
che pare altro che prima, se si sveste 
a sembianza non süa in che disparve,  

così mi si cambiaro in maggior feste 
i fiori e le faville, sì ch'io vidi 
ambo le corti del ciel manifeste. 

Then as a folk who have been under masks
  Seem other than before, if they divest
  The semblance not their own they disappeared in, 

Thus into greater pomp were changed for me
  The flowerets and the sparks, so that I saw
  Both of the Courts of Heaven made manifest. (91-96)

The moment in a plot when a key player is unmasked often pivots the tale. It can "turn into" a comedy, if the "boy" desperately in love with the male protagonist turns out to be a beautiful woman; it turns tragic if the honest friend turns out to be Iago. Moments of unmasking are moments of truth. Depending on that truth is the determination as to what genre of literature, what sort of story, we have.

For readers of the Commedia, the unmasking of heaven is that moment. The pastoral world of Virgil's Elysium -- that pregnant dream -- is peeled back, replaced by a maggior feste beyond his Roman guide's ken.

Virgil's text here suffers a destiny much like the starry night at the canto's opening -- its lights are dimmed by a divine light that doesn't move through the world, but rises from a place beyond, dispatching the stars into the depths of a brightening sky.

e come vien la chiarissima ancella
del sol più oltre, così 'l ciel si chiude
di vista in vista infino a la più bella.

And as advances bright exceedingly
  The handmaid of the sun, the heaven is closed
  Light after light to the most beautiful; (30:7-9)

This has already become too long. The third part will be in a subsequent post. 

Parabasis in Paradiso 30

Forse semilia miglia di lontano
ci ferve l'ora sesta, e questo mondo
china già l'ombra quasi al letto piano,

Paradiso 30 does not reveal all its audacity at once. Its gentle opening gives no hint of what's to come. Strangely, it puts us squarely back on Earth -- questo mondo -- at dawn. We have been moving at accelerating speeds through the highest realms of stars and the crystalline sphere. Now, curiously, we're back on terra firma, watching the stars "lose their appearing" as the eastern horizon brightens.

The presentation of this dawn is literally down to earth -- we have no warrior gods or mutual titanic destructions of Night and Day, as Sophocles gave us in the gorgeous first ode of Women of Trachis. Indeed the bending, or bowing, of the shadow of night has a plainspoken quality. Today anyone can look into the heavens before sunrise and see the mezzo, the "middle" of the sky, gradually absorb the stars into profound depths, and think that this passage tells it just as it is.

The mode is heightened a bit by the figurative ancella del sol, but a handmaid is hardly cut from the cloth of the high style. The sense of granular gradation as the night's starry points vanish in morning light is meditative, calm, simple.

This is not what we might have expected, at this crucial transition from the maggior corpo of the Primum Mobile to the pura luce of the Empyrean. All sorts of dazzlement might not have seemed out of place here as we accompany the pilgrim on the final stage of his journey. The canto will soon touch themes of triumph and various kinds of overpowerings. In short order the pilgrim will abandon all hope of describing his guide; he'll be emblazoned in a blinding light that empowers him to see anew; he'll stand at the pool of light within the rose, whose layered tiers, soaring to unimaginable heights, mirror each other vertically as well as horizontally, and he'll hear Beatrice's final words as she tracks Pope Clement's damned soul's plummet into questo mondo, where gravity and momentum conspire to plunge the shaky ankles of Boniface VIII deeper into the bowels of hell.

The canto's puzzlingly erratic shifts in tone and styles of speech, and its rich phonetic effects, seem to work more as music than as any linear mode of statement. 

Erich Auerbach often marvels at Dante's command of a robust style that manages to encompass a lively vernacular while drawing upon a sublimity without seeming strained or resorting to empty rhetorical artifice. One might ask what other poet has ever sought to combine all these stylistic levels into a mere 148 lines. Who other than Alighieri would dare modulate from the humble prose of earth to the sublimity of the milizie -- the Courts and armies of the Heavenly rose -- only to leap from such glory into the low comic farce of papal simoniacs reaming new depths under Satan's towering shadow?

This audacity acquires a comic aspect when we consider that the poet also chooses this canto to admit artistic defeat:

Da questo passo vinto mi concedo
più che già mai da punto di suo tema
soprato fosse comico o tragedo:

Vanquished do I confess me by this passage

  More than by problem of his theme was ever

  O'ercome the comic or the tragic poet;

If the stars were overpowered ever so gently by dawn's entrance, the poet here steps out of his usual narrative mode in a kind of parabasis, and speaks openly, nakedly, of being overcome by his theme. Indeed he doesn't stop there - he goes on for 15 lines acknowledging with a craftsman's practicality that the job has now exceeded his tools and wit, before proceeding to tackle the series of astonishing poetic acrobatics I've just described.

That this congeries of disparate levels of materials works is due in part to the fact that we do not see it for what it is. The art hiding art here is in full view, in the form of the artist taking off his mask and telling us he lacks the artistry to keep up with deep change in both his theme and his mediatrix.

For Aristophanes, parabasis was a moment when theatrical illusion was dropped, and the chorus addressed the audience (as George Burns and Bertolt Brecht would do) as if they were sitting at a bar, outside of the mimetic world of the play, talking about things entirely irrelevant to the fiction being enacted. (For the New Testament, parabasis was a kind of error, a violation and break from the moral order.)

Dante comes at his parabasis from two sides: First he breaks the continuity of the forward motion of his journey to speak of his lifelong love for this woman. Then, as poet, he confesses that he's outclassed, and no longer can hope to represent the new state of her beauty.

Dal primo giorno ch'i' vidi il suo viso
 in questa vita, infino a questa vista,
 non m'è il seguire al mio cantar preciso;

ma or convien che mio seguir desista
 più dietro a sua bellezza, poetando,
 come a l'ultimo suo ciascuno artista.

From the first day that I beheld her face
  In this life, to the moment of this look,
  The sequence of my song has ne'er been severed;

But now perforce this sequence must desist
  From following her beauty with my verse,
  As every artist at his uttermost. (28-33)

Vidi . . . viso . . . vita . . . vista . . .the play of abiding and changing consonants mirrors on the level of sound how something so formally similar can become so radically other as to disrupt the ability of art to make anything of it.

He speaks of questa vita, as he spoke of questo mondo, at the very moment he is moving beyond "questo" entirely. He's speaking to us from a place that is neither the location of the pilgrim who is outside space in the mimesis of the poem, nor of the poet making that mimesis. This speaking is placeless and timeless -- a voice that is "in" the text, but breaks with the mimetic illusion to offer a meta-comment about an absence in the text -- to admit that nothing in his powers can represent Beatrice, who was his mediatrix -- his mezzo -- up to this point. For the remainder of Paradiso 30 we hear Beatrice, but don't see her (we'll get another view of her in a later canto), just as we here read the poet's words that spell the end of the mimetic mode we have experienced up to now.

It's as if the persona, or mask, of the pilgrim has fallen away, and poetic technique has failed, leaving only this pointing to a thisness spoken by one who can only speak of this life, this world, because he is neither alive nor in this world.

We'll look at a second occurrence of parabasis in Paradiso 30 in the next post.

Euripides' Hippolytus and the powers of fiction

Before Theseus explicitly remands Hippolytus into exile, saying,

Go forth from this land with all speed as an exile, and come no more either to god-built Athens [975] or to the borders of any land ruled by my spear.

Right before saying this, he points to the unimpeachable evidence, the witness whose testimony is irrefutable:

. . . but why do I wage this contest against your speech when this corpse, witness most reliable, lies near?

τί ταῦτα σοῖς ἁμιλλῶμαι λόγοις νεκροῦ παρόντος μάρτυρος ;

We must consider the irony that Hippolytus, who wanted to suppress all women's voices, is here condemned by the "clearest," or "most reliable" [σαφεστάτου] words of a woman who is not merely isolated from all other women. Phaedra, though dead, has testified so authoritatively that Theseus sees any mitigation of the harsh sentence of banishment as tantamount to giving his entire life the lie:

if I am to be bested by you when you have done this to me, Isthmian Sinis shall no longer attest [μαρτυρήσει] that I killed him but say it was an idle boast, and the Skironian rocks near the sea [980] shall deny that I am a scourge to evil-doers.

This is another one of those moments when Euripides takes his theatrical creation to the limit. Just as Hippolytus gets so carried away by his scheme of using wild animals to inhibit women's speech in the city -- a suggestion so ludicrous as to nearly bring laughter -- so here, Theseus, whose entire life story is filled with fabulous tales, says that his own literary identity would be destroyed if he failed to be consistent with it.

It's a bit like Don Quixote in the second volume of Don Quixote having to grapple with the fabled Name he has acquired as a result of a book about his knightly adventures being read by his neighbors. Theseus, a figure of myth, here argues that he must condemn his son because if he did not, the dead monsters of his fables would rise and give him, as we say, the lie. He would no longer be Theseus the slayer of monsters, he would be someone pretending to be that fictional figure. A fictional figure in a play is claiming that if he does not act in accord with his fictional tales, he will be seen to be a fiction.

Theseus, in a sense, would evaporate -- as would the play -- if the spell of the performance were shattered by pointing to itself as a piece of theatrical fiction. The place where this happens in Greek theater is not usually in tragedy, but comedy. At certain moments in the work of Aristophanes, the characters leave and the chorus steps forward (parabanein) and speaks to the audience. The disruption is radical, as the chorus doesn't even talk about things or persons in the play we are watching. This is called the parabasis:

In Greek comedy, the parabasis (plural parabases; Ancient Greek: παράβασις, plural: παραβάσεις) is a point in the play when all of the actors leave the stage and the chorus is left to address the audience directly. The chorus partially or completely abandons its dramatic role to talk to the audience on a topic completely irrelevant to the subject of the play. 

For example, in the play The Wasps by Aristophanes the first parabasis is about Aristophanes' career as a playwright to date, while the second parabasis is shorter, and contains a string of in-jokes about local characters who would be well known to the ancient Athenian audience (e.g. the politician Cleon).

This breaking of the frame, of the illusion's fourth wall, is not unfamiliar to fans of U.S. comedy. Think of George Burns' direct comments to the viewer about the goings-on with Gracie in Burns and Allen, or the hilarious disruptions of story lines found in the films of Mel Brooks, committed by Mel Brooks. The moment they step outside the frame of the fiction and speak as themselves, we laugh as the illusion explodes.

When Theseus claims that Sciron would come alive to testify that he was never killed by Theseus, he is stretched nearly to the edge of his reality. Indeed, if the rocks testify that he was not a scourge -- βαρύν - to evil-doers, they are saying something like this: The root meaning of βαρύν is "weight," or "heaviness," which then extends to the sense of "grievous, stern, strict, deep, serious."

If Sciron's rocks, which are certainly heavy, were to deny Theseus's solid, massive seriousness, then suddenly he and the play itself would lose gravity. Euripidean tragedy is not at the opposite extreme from comedy, it is uncannily near by.

This adjacency becomes more relevant in light of the fact that Theseus is asserting the validity, legitimacy and truth of his own history at the same instant that he is denying all weight to the history and reality of his own son. Standing "face to face" with Hippolytus, Theseus sees only a fiction, a figment invented by Phaedra. The Hippolytus whom Theseus and all of us have known, the priggish devotee of Artemis, is a lie, a thing of no weight, annihilated by the the dead woman's script. The true boy is the lying bastard who raped his father's wife; nothing that he can bear witness to or do will make any difference.

At this moment, Theseus does not step forward, disrupting the scene with some comedic gag that would explode the tensions and gravitas of the play into a shambles. But he almost has. Though he mocks Hippolytus for reading books, Phaedra's little book is as real to him as the tales of Sinis and Sciron. The power of this corpse, witness most reliable, compels Theseus to expel Hippolytus, to put him outside the boundaries of Athens and Troezen forever (symmetrically reversing Hippolytus's expressed wish to banish all women).

Weightless, Hippolytus is sent beyond the fourth wall, outside the framed space of the play and of the state. To his father and friends, it is as if he were to fly off the face of the Earth. States and tragedies cannot exist without gravity, Euripides appears to say. The continuity of the spectacle of Theseus, of the State, and of the Hippolytus is protected, but at a very high cost.