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Morality Play
Barry Unsworth
Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, $22.50
by Marc Romano
There is always a temptation, when one sets about writing a historical novel,
to let the characters do a little too much talking about present-day concerns.
Sometimes this is done consciously and to good effect, as for instance in Umberto
Eco's The Name of the Rose, whose tale of shady doings in the medieval
monastic world probably taught more people about current critical theory than
a dozen MLA conventions could ever hope to (even if for some unhappy reason they
were to be televised). In other cases the result is less successful. Caleb Carr's
The Alienist, with its plot based around Freudianism avant la lettre, came
across as forced and wooden. Because the mystery could just as well have taken
place today, the reader was left to wonder why, except as a mere literary exercise,
the novel was set in 19th century New York. Morality Play, Barry Unsworth's
12th novel (but only his second to appear in hardcover on this side of the Atlantic)
has the misfortune, too, of using history as a device rather than recreating it.
Morality Play begins well enough. It is winter in northern England sometime
during the Hundred Years' War, when a 23- year-old errant monk named Nicholas
Barber stumbles across a troupe of actors debating what to do with the body of
a dead colleague. After some argument, Nicholas is accepted into the troupe as
the dead man's replacement and hastily apprenticed in medieval stagecraft by the
group's master player, Martin Bell.
The troupe is due to stage a Christmas performance in Durham, the communal money
supply is low, and there is also the problem of how to arrange a Christian burial
for the dead player. Unsworth, who is very good with his physical descriptions,
is memorable on the hard way to transport a corpse:
He had begun to smell foul the day before. Traveling on the cart with
him one noticed it more, the jolting of the cart moved his body under its covering
of red cloth and with these stirrings of movement the smell of his dissolution
came dank and unmistakable on the chill air. It grew stronger by the hour and
we had no oil or essence we could use to cloak it. . . . It was raw weather
with a thickening of mist in the air and our spirits were low.
So it is a lucky thing when they discover a town just over the next hill. The
troupe suits up and parades in, hoping to rent a barn, put on a play for quick
cash, and bury the corpse. Nicholas, however, has a self-declared nose for premonition
and his foreboding precedes the players into town:
Death rode with us on the cart, he was there in the midst of our panoply
and fanfares while we wooed the staring folk for their custom. Certain too that
Death waited for us there, for he can be here and there together at the same
time. By God's grace I came out from the town again, Death waits for me still.
In town, the recent murder of a young boy named Thomas Wells, ostensibly by the
Weaver's daughter (as in a morality play, the names of all generic characters
are capitalized), has the populace in a glum and somber mood. Nicholas makes his
first appearance on stage without humiliating himself, but the take at the gate
is small, and the impending financial crisis weighs on Martin Bell. He draws Nicholas
aside and confides in him a radical idea:
"The story of the Fall is an old one, the people know how it
ends. But supposing the story were new?" "A new story of our parents
in Paradise?" "This murder you were talking of," he said, "we
heard something of it on our way to see the priest." I am gifted with foreknowledge,
as I began this account by saying. Sometimes we do not know we are waiting until
the awaited thing arrives. It arrived now with these words of his.
Under Martin's urging, the troupe begins to form the Play of Thomas Wells with
an increasing level of obsession. They use a new kind of staging based not on
the morality play figures of the Devil's Fool or Adam or Mankind, but on Thomas
Wells as "the type of all." And this is where Unsworth's novel loses
its narrative objectivity.
In the course of a collective discussion it becomes clear that Martin has been
doing more investigating into the murder than anyone in the troupe suspected,
and Nicholas is taken aback:
"So this idea was in your mind already?" He looked at me
steadily. "It has been in my mind for years now that we can make plays
from stories that happen in our lives. I believe this is the way that plays
will be made in the times to come."
Martin's portentous announcement provides the engine of Morality Play.
It presents a visionary take on the future of drama that fires the players to
burst from the constraints of Figure acting -- not only into the realm of realist
individualism, but into a place beyond even that, in which the very playing of
Thomas Wells' murder becomes, figuratively, its reenactment. The novel depicts
a sudden, spontaneous, and yet supremely artificial reprise of the evolution of
modern drama. To believe in the device that provides the novel's motivation --
that Martin's anachronistic stroke of insight sets the psychological stage for
the players to solve the murder as they improvise their way through performances
of it -- the reader has to believe that the plot is unveiling not only a murder
mystery but also the development of theatrical modernism. This development is
told, not shown, in a series of editorial asides by Nicholas -- as for example
when he is pondering, after the first performance of the play, the deeper significance
of what Martin has wrought.
He wanted a play with strong scenes, one that would disturb the people
and send them away changed. Is that a true play? And he wanted money. He won
us over, but to win us over was his role. He was prompted in the lines that
he spoke, as were we all. Some fascination of power led us to imprison ourselves
in this Play of Thomas Wells.
The second half of Morality Play, the on-stage resolution of the mystery
of Thomas Wells' murder, is believable, then, only insofar as the reader chooses
to accept Unsworth's argument. The players investigate the murder by day, then
spontaneously act it out by night. As even more facts emerge -- that Thomas' body
was not covered with frost when it was found, as it should have been, that the
Monk, who has accused the Weaver's daughter, could not have been able to identify
her from afar in the winter gloaming, and that the Monk, a Benedictine, has long
held a grudge against the Weaver, the leader of a local revivalist sect -- the
evidence begins to point away from the Weaver's daughter toward the Monk himself.
Yet when the second performance of the play is interrupted by news of the Monk's
death (by a hanging that must have been sanctioned by some seigniorial authority),
it becomes clear that the malefactor is someone in the household of the Monk's
employer, Richard de Guise. When the players zero in on this in the course of
their third performance, they are interrupted by a squad of de Guise's pikemen,
who forcibly remove them to the Castle. De Guise wants a command performance of
the play that has, in effect, accused him of the murder of Thomas Wells.
At this point, the reader has perhaps noted a number of lapses in the novel, none
very significant on its own but all adding up to a distinct sense of mistrust
about the coherence of the tale. In an argument among the players after the first
performance, for instance, Nicholas notes that "We were all in that state
of exhaustion where an embrace or quarrel seemed equally natural," which
would seem perfectly realistic until one counts back the days and realizes that
no more than a week has passed since Nicholas first met the players, too brief
a time for him to fall so completely into their collective psychology; Nicholas'
forebodings and premonitions are too often used as a dramatic bridge between chapters;
Martin's obsession with the play, and his charismatic hold over the other characters,
is not enough to explain their perseverance in the face of the danger involved
in accusing the all powerful de Guise; and two key pieces of evidence are gathered
in one day from Flint, the man who found Thomas Wells' body -- both times in exchange
for the sexual favors of Margaret Cornwall, a member of the troupe. (Flint, it
seems, is a fortuitously randy fellow and Margaret, conveniently enough, is an
obliging ex-whore.) Incidentally, it is odd that a Yorkshire woman like Margaret
should have the last name "Cornwall" in the 14th century, when mobility
among the underclass was functionally nil.
By performing before Richard de Guise, the players get themselves condemned to
death -- yet a deus ex machina luckily intervenes. De Guise is hosting a joust,
and one of his guests has been mortally wounded. Someone has to perform the extreme
unction for him, but the Monk is dead. Just as de Guise is pronouncing judgment
on the players, his daughter bursts in:
"It was mother sent me," she said. "She has heard from
a maidservant that one of the players is a priest. Perhaps that is the one,
who is dressed so."
Nicholas is, granted, a priest. But one of the pillars upon which the novel rests
is precisely that in 14th century England a priest was forbidden to perform on
stage under penalty of death, so all the players have taken great pains to conceal
Nicholas' true identity. Not only that, but much stress is placed on the fact
that de Guise has held the players incommunicado
in the Castle, at his utter mercy, which makes Martin's bravado in playing out
the "true" Play of Thomas Wells before him so, well, brave.
A deus ex machina being just that, Nicholas uses the pretext to slip out of the
Castle and back to town, where he tells the whole story to a King's Justice who
has been hovering in the wings throughout the novel. The Justice has in fact long
been trying to impose royal authority on renegade seigneurs, and solving of the
Thomas Wells' murder -- which involves such Gothic elements as a disinterred body,
a dark de Guise family secret, homosexual pedophilic rape, the Plague, and Benedictine
power plays -- becomes his means of doing so.
Those familiar with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger will recognize many
of that novel's concerns resuscitated in Morality Play: the hero at loggerheads
with the religious establishment of the day, the small utopian community in which
he finds refuge, disease (plague in both cases) as a plot catalyst, the use of
a catchall historical diction that is modern in vocabulary but archaic in tone,
even the device of the play within the novel (an amateur staging of The Tempest,
in the case of Sacred Hunger). But Sacred Hunger worked as a historical
novel, with an internal logic and coherence that made its treatment of race and
racism resonate well with the problems of the here and now, simply because it
didn't try to make the connection obvious. Morality Play ultimately fails. The
historical shift from morality plays based on stock Figures to modern drama based
on psychological realism was a qualitative leap: it demanded more from audiences
than the absorption of didactic lessons. Psychological realism, in other words,
is stage art rather than stagecraft, and, like historical fiction that rings true
rather than is merely crafted, it asks its audience to draw its own conclusions
about the significance of what it is depicting. That, in the end, Morality
Play never manages to do -- it is determined to tell modern readers about
the history of drama, and that is what it does, even at the expense of its own
credibility as a historical novel.
Death in the Andes
Mario Vargas-Llosa
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24
by Joseph Lease
Death in the Andes is good, ambitious fun and Mario Vargas-Llosa asks us to take
the possiblities of storytelling very seriously -- to assume they are profound.
Layering a
political allegory on top of a mystery story -- two detectives in a remote mountain
region of Peru must solve a series of unexplained disappearances -- Vargas-Llosa
seeks to balance two readings of Peruvian culture: a political reading and a mythological
reading. Although its mythic representation is rich and full, Death in the Andes
finally
falls far short of the aesthetic and intellectual richness it could have achieved,
limited by a flat, unimaginative, and conventional
political representation. With a story that centers on witches, the Shining Path,
showgirls, mutes, environmentalists, gangsters, vampires, and ancient nature religions
it is remarkable that Vargas-Llosa is able, for the most part, to keep things
unsentimental. And given the political context of the novel, Vargas-Llosa's desire
to
apprehend Peruvian experience by way of myth comes across as both anachronistic
and heroic. Here is his local embodiment of Dionysius:
Sure, he was more than an itinerant pisco peddlar, everybody knew
that; more than the leader of some folk musicians and dancers, more than a performer,
more than the owner of a travelling whorehouse. Yes, sure, that much was clear,
but what else was he? A Devil? An Angel? God?
. . .Then she told me. She travelled with Dionisio's troupe a pretty long time,
sleeping outdoors wherever they happened to be when it grew dark, huddled together
against the cold, going from fair to fair and market to market, living on money
that people at the fiestas gave them. When they had a good time on their own,
far from other people's eyes, the troupe went wild. Or, as Dionisio says, they
paid a visit to their animal. The wild girls moved from loving each other to
attacking each other. From petting to scratching, from kicking to biting, from
hugging to shoving, without ever stopping the dance. "Didn't it hurt, mamita?"
It hurt afterward, mamay; with the music and the dancing and the drinking, it
was wonderful. You forgot your worries, your heart pounded, you thought you
were a hawk, a pepper tree, a hill, a condor, a river.
As the virile lyricism of this passage demonstrates, Vargas-Llosa wades more naturally
into the textures of history, sexuality, and myth than virtually any prominent
US novelist . But to work, Death in the Andes would require a political
imagination equal to its compelling mythic perspective. "We've gotten used
to cruelty," one of Vargas-Llosa's reluctant detectives remarks early on:
if anything in this disillusioned century can still be called "universal,"
it might be that statement. Addressing this moral numbness -- waking the reader
up -- is a central responsibility of postmodern fiction. Sometimes Vargas-Llosa
succeeds. Passages in his description of Sendero violence shimmer with a matter-of-fact
journalistic intensity:
In groups of three or four they went directly to where those on the
list were sleeping and pulled them from their beds. They captured the mayor,
the justice of the peace, the postmaster, the owners of the three stores and
their wives, two men who had been discharged from the army, the pharmacist and
moneylender Don Sebastian Yupanqui, and two technicians sent by the Agrarian
bank to instruct the campesinos in the use of irrigation and fertilizers . .
. By then, day had broken . . . Older boys and men predominated in their ranks,
but there were also women and children, some of whom could not have been older
than twelve. Those who did not carry machine guns, rifles, or revolvers had
old shotguns, clubs, machetes, knives, slingshots, and sticks of dynamite on
bandoliers, like miners. They also carried red flags with the hammer and sickle,
which they raised over the bell tower of the church, on the flag pole of the
town hall, and at the top of a pisonay tree with red flowers that overlooked
the village. While the trials were being held -- they did this in an orderly
way, as if they had done it before -- some of them painted the walls of Andamarca
with slogans: Long live the armed struggle, the people's war, the Marxist-Leninist
Guiding Principles of President Gonzalo, Death to imperialism, revisionism,
the traitors and informers of the genocidal, anti-worker regime.
The effect is not unlike Malraux' Man's Fate or Sartre's The Age of
Reason -- perhaps adapted for public television. For the most part, however,
Vargas-Llosa falls far short of Malraux and Sartre: he lacks what might be called
intellectual compassion, or compassion for visionary ideas. Like many on
the Nobel short list, Vargas-Llosa too often makes virtues out of what aesthetic
common sense would acknowledge to be dull and conventional choices. Prestige accrues
to such conservatism; it seems "of the people," or rather, in the most
charming way, "middle class." Here is what passes for pointed satire
in Vargas-Llosa's narrative:
Before they began, they sang hymns to the proletarian revolution in
Spanish and Quechua, proclaiming that the people were breaking their chains.
Since the Andamarcans did not know the words, they mingled with them, making
them repeat the verses and whistling the melodies for them. Then the trials
began. In addition to those on the list, others, accused of stealing, abusing
the weak or the poor, committing adultery, and engaging in the vices of individualism,
had to face the tribunal composed of the entire village.
Over the last 40 years writing has generated a number of formally demanding ways
to embody experience in language and to involve readers in what anthropologists
call the thick description of a cultural/political moment. Although Death in
the Andes is an engaging narrative -- full of nice touches, such as a frightened
detective whose ignorance keeps him alive, and another detective who pines for
his lost love so rapturously that he has no time to investigate anything else
-- Vargas-Llosa's craft, his involvement with narrative and with his reader, finally
slides into a cynical, complacent range of gestures. One of Vargas-Llosa's running
gags in Death in the Andes is that victims are consistently unable to recognize
that they are about to die until after the last minute. The funniest and saddest
variation on this theme comes when the Shining Path captures and executes two
well-intentioned, quixotic, environmentalists:
The first one they questioned was the driver, followed by the technicians,
and then Canas, the engineer. It was growing dark by the time he came out. Senora
d'Harcourt realized with some surprise that she had been standing for ten hours
with nothing to eat or drink. But she did not feel hunger, or thirst, or fatigue.
She thought about her husband, grieving more for him than for herself. She watched
Canas walk out. His expression had changed, as if he had lost the certainty
that had animated him during the day, when he had tried to speak to them. "They
hear, but they don't listen, and they don't want to understand what you say
to them," she heard him murmur as he walked past her. "They're from
another planet."
The resolution of this scene betrays the novel's weaknesses:
When it seemed to be over -- her mouth was dry and her throat burned
-- Senora d'Harcourt felt very tired. "Are you going to kill me?"
she asked, hearing her voice break for the first time. The one in the leather
jacket looked into her eyes without blinking. "This is war, and you are
a lackey of our class enemy," he explained, staring at her with blank eyes,
delivering his monologue in a voice without expression. "You don't even
realize that you are a tool of imperialism and the bourgeois state. Even worse,
you permit yourself the luxury of a clear conscience, seeing yourself as Peru's
Good Samaritan. Your case is typical."
Senora d'Harcourt versus the one in the leather jacket. He explained, staring
at her with blank eyes. A voice without expression. Yeats wrote, out of our arguments
with ourselves we make poetry: here, Vargas-Llosa is only making rhetoric. He
has not bothered to imagine a worthy antagonist, a dopplegänger who could
accuse him (for surely -- as the words "your case is typical" suggest
-- Vargas-Llosa must wonder if he is a tool of the bourgeois state who permits
himself the luxury of a clear conscience; all serious, public writers must wonder
that). I offer no opinion about Sendero Luminoso, but as a response to Maoist
revolutionary violence this is not adequate -- and, what is more important, as
a response to ordinary human evil this is not adequate. n
Jackson's Dilemma
Iris Murdoch
Viking, $22. 95
by Molly McQuade
One of the stylistic distinctions of Iris Murdoch's 26th novel is her handling
of dialogue. People are always checking up on each other, often over the phone,
their words staccato, brisk, mundane:
`Were you out?' `I turned the phone off.' `Of course, you were working.
Are you all right?' `Yes.'
Though little is directly stated or even implied, emotion is piling up behind
the words. Buttoned-up or banal as they may sound, these conversations are efforts
to retrieve vital information, to secure a hopeful state of mind, to console or
compensate for tragic blunders -- to survive. The dispatch and concision of the
characters' talk are deceptive; paradox flourishes in the space between social
courtesy and inner turbulence and dismay. Murdoch's characters are drawn from
a variety of classes and professions in contemporary London -- they range from
servant to self-made Jew to Canadian gadabout to disgruntled pseudo-aristocrat
-- and their urgent exchanges respond to the abrupt reversal that is the occasion
of her plot: on the eve of her wedding to Edward Lannion, Marian Berran decides
to ditch him; then, to everyone's alarm, she disappears. Jackson's Dilemma is
a moral suspense story in which the friends and family of Marian and Edward attempt
to locate the runaway bride, fathom the causes of the break-up, and regain their
own equilibrium. But it is also about how words habitually get in the way of understanding
and compassion, and (a characteristic theme of Murdoch's) about the primacy of
unwelcome emotion -- the turbulence that sends rationalists, philosophers, and
sentimentalists off track, even as it may also redeem or rescue them. This is
one of Murdoch's most trim and fleetly purposeful novels. The beginning concentrates
on the search for Marian. Her whereabouts are concealed from the reader as from
her friends, who worry and badger one another about what might or should happen
next. Plot dominates, offered to the reader as an object of reflection and fun.
For, through an unlikely series of coincidences and acts of personal willfulness,
the central breach is clarified and nearly everyone available for matrimony pairs
off, although not quite as expected. The jittery ebullience of Murdoch's mating
dance evokes the 1920s, suggesting an amatory Charleston -- one driven, however,
by desperation, since these unconventional people are bent, with hysterical longing,
on conventional union as their source of happiness. These are people trying to
do what they imagine is decent; stoic, well-intentioned men and women who want
to do the right thing. The reader sympathizes, but comes to doubt them as well;
if they keep putting their best foot forward, it's because repression and remorse
compel them to. What good are they really doing? Benet, who feels responsible
for encouraging the marriage -- and also for all the troubles its failure has
caused -- is a middle-aged former civil servant, a devotee of poetry, and an informal
student of Heidegger; he lives in a capacious country house inherited from an
uncle he feels he will never live up to and never loved well enough. And though
this Uncle Tim is constantly eulogized by his surviving cronies as a moral standard,
he too provokes the reader's unease. A good-hearted colonialist with vague spiritual
inclinations, Uncle Tim soldiered and travelled and worked as an engineer in India
before returning to take up residence in his "grand house," not far
from Edward Lannion's estate -- there to reread his favorite books, utter charmingly
oracular adages, and extend social kindnesses. His aura of heroism is qualified
somewhat by his eccentricity. In remembering Tim, his friends take care not to
dispell the aura; they seem afraid of learning more than they could bear. Uncle
Tim is responsible for the presence among them of the enigmatic Jackson, a domestic
who had once offered his services to Benet, only to suffer rebuff as a low-life.
Tim intuitively grasped Jackson's wisdom and usefulness, and took him on both
as a servant and spiritual companion. After Tim's death, Jackson stays on with
Benet; active, working-class, alive, he functions as a moral guide for Benet.
In the drawing room manner of the sensitive English, Benet's set sometimes disparages
Jackson's murky past, yet they need him to repair both their houses and their
lives. Jackson can fix electrical problems and mend romances, and does so with
a laconicism that contrasts with the urgent prattle that surrounds him. Jackson
refuses to explain himself to those "above" him, and this allows him
to play a role of his own invention in their midst. A servant by choice, he turns
his service into a kind of freedom. Morally and materially, he serves as Benet's
boss, one Benet is grateful to have. Still, to the people he consorts with, Jackson
remains exotic and unknown. Is his service really free? After all, he's fundamentally
independent, quick to judge, and smart. Why does he stay? Is he silent because
he doesn't want to speak or because he feels he can't? Should he speak? Such are
the puzzles Jackson poses to the reader, who is baffled by him much as the novel's
characters are. He is a figure in perpetual transition. He enters Benet's life
trailing obscure clouds of soulful merit. Eventually he attains the ambiguous
status of employed "friend." As a novelist's fantastical device, he
advances the plot. Yet when all is said and done, he remains inexplicable. Jackson's
Dilemma ends in a headlong rush of frantic happiness, as the love story comes
round in a nervous, seemly curlicue. Yet the novel does not neglect the destructive
power of emotion, and their newfound happiness is not entirely convincing. Marian
and Edward marry, but not one another, in a surge of panicky bliss. Several friends
do likewise, easing Benet of his guilts and leaving him freakishly jubilant. Jackson
is fired by Benet in a fit of genteel pique, and despite his humiliation, returns
when Benet repentently woos him back. Through all this, only Jackson is able to
scrutinize the suffering, step in, and alleviate some of it, perhaps because he
has no stake to cling to and a clearer gaze. The others make fools of themselves
in fits of passion and decorousness; he alone declines to laugh. Murdoch suggests
that we would be well advised to follow Jackson's example of critical empathy.
But Jackson keeps his own counsel to the end, and the action of this deft novel,
with its swift succession of short numbered chapters, is left cleanly open to
interpretation. Ultimately, we find ourselves pondering the seductive vices of
society, the uncanny virtues of the outsider, and the inevitability of loneliness.
Originally published in the February/ March
1996 issue of Boston Review
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