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November 3 1999 Susan Sontag's Pyramus and Thisbe |
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When theatre audiences and plays meet, when books and readers encounter each other, we must speak of events rather than objects. Theatre productions and texts are never static things, they rather generate constant movement, permanent change, such as, for example, change of perspective, of focus, of sympathy, of memory. When speaking of texts, particularly dramatic texts, it is therefore useful to remember that in the interaction between spectators and a play several clearly defined vectorial energy lines can be discerned. Thus a play is anaphoric in referring back to information already given: this challenges the viewers' memories, it forces them to combine, to compare, to add up. For example, when Egeus, Hermia's father, on seeing the lovers come out of the forest at the end of act IV of MND, says: "I beg the law, the law, upon his head", we must remember the very first scene of the play, we must remember Theseus's judgment on that occasion, and we must compare the then and the now: in this comparison Egeus's request will probably strike us as utterly irrelevant after all that has happened in the forest. The contrary energy line to the anaphoric is the cataphoric, the force that points forward, with or without the audience realising it. The audience will realise that they are told about the future when they listen to prologues or when they watch introductory dumb shows. In the mechanicals' prologue the lines: "Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade, He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast" the audience will know what kind of trouble lies ahead. Similarly, in this season's production of MND in Basel, Bachmann's decision to have an opening dumb show that anticipates the various switches of loving attachment, exploits the energy of the cataphoric. On the other hand, the audience may only dimly realise that they are obliquely told about future events. In drama, such oblique or hidden cataphoric pointers to what is yet to come are usually called dramatic irony. Arguably, when Lysander utters the famous line: "The course of true love never did run smooth" he points both backward to Hermia's and his predicament of paternal condemnation, but he also points forward to all the trouble to come, for instance his sudden - in some productions even rather violent - wooing of Helena. |
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Not only is there a backward and forward movement to be performed by the theatre audience, there are also permanent forces that carry the viewers outside the confines of the stage. Such exophoric forces - other than the physical reality of being a spectator in auditorium, maybe with shocked neighbours that are booing the play - are mainly of two kinds: they either carry the viewers into the real world of past or present social reality or history, or they carry viewers into the world of other plays, other texts. Such references to other literary works are commonly called intertextual. |
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Plays will often tend to exploit these energies - the anaphoric, the cataphoric and the exophoric - cumulatively, i.e. a specific utterance may refer back to something said before while at the same time pointing forward and simultaneously containing a reference to social reality as well as to another literary or dramatic work. Such nodes of concentrated centripetal forces will be numerous in Susan Sontag's short playlet The very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe, and I will refer to them when I come to talk about it, but first I would like to start with some examples of the intertextual insofar as they are relevant to the story of Pyramus and Thisbe as told by Sontag. |
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This story is mainly based
on Ovid's version in his Metamorphoses, a poem which
Sontag has exploited elsewhere in her work, and I think the
example is instructive for her method of rewriting an old
story. In her novel The Volcano Lover we find the
following passage: |
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Beneath the layering of history, everything speaks of
love. According to the local folklore, the origin of many
Neapolitan sites is an unhappy love story. Once these places
were men and women, who, because of unhappy or frustrated
love, underwent a metamorphosis into what one sees today.
Even the volcano. Vesuvius was once a young man, who saw a
nymph lovely as a diamond. She scratched his heart and his
soul, he could think of nothing else. Breathing more and
more heatedly, he lunged at her. The nymph, scorched by his
attentions, jumped into the sea and became the island today
called Capri. Seeing this, Vesuvius went mad. He loomed, his
sighs of fire spread, little by little he became a mountain.
And now, as immobilized as his beloved, forever beyond his
reach, he continues to throw fire and makes the city of
Naples tremble. How the helpless city regrets that the youth
did not get what he desired! Capri lies in the water, in
full view of Vesuvius, and the mountain burns and burns and
burns ... (Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: 96) |
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We can thus generalise that in using intertextual references to Ovid and Keats, Sontag investigates the possible functions of stories in a specific social context while at the same time, truly simultaneously, both establishing and querying the viability of the stories she is using. This multiple functioning of a narrative and dramatic intertext we can also observe in her use of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe. |
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In my account of Sontag's
story of Vesuvius I have so far silenced one important
aspect: the representation of the mountain as one that
"burns and burns and burns" is both threatening and at the
same time a bit pathetic; this burning lover cuts a slightly
comic figure as well. He is a bit foolish. This combination
of the threatening and the foolish, of the tragic and the
comic, also informs the drama of Pyramus and Thisbe. This
can be observed even in the Ovidian tale itself. In Ovid,
when the two tragically dead lovers are finally immortalized
in the fruit of the mulberry tree, whose berries tend
towards black when they are ripe, thus commemorating their
blood and reminding us of our duty to mourn, Pyramus and
Thisbe have become fixed emblems of self-sacrificing and
faithful love unto death. But there is a short passage which
casts some doubt on their arrestation in a heroic pose.
Thisbe has discovered Pyramus's body and she cries (in
Arthur Golding's translation of 1567): |
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Make aunswere O my Pyramus: it is thy Thisb, even she |
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But before considering her text, an instructive look at a sculpted freeze. Astonishingly, the narrative of Pyramus and Thisbe is retold in a romanesque work of art, sculpted in four sequential scenes on the four sides of a column capital in the minster of Basel. On the face of it, Ovid's pagan love story with its tragically sinful suicidal ending seems to be oddly displaced in a Christian cathedral. As the gravedigger's allusions at Ophelia's grave make quite clear, suicide was considered to be a severe sin. The transplantation of the story thus inevitably raises the question of its function and relevance in the new context. The answer usually given is allegorisation of the old story. In the collection of legends called Gesta Romanorum Pyramus appears as a representative of Christ: |
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Pyramus's suicide thus allegorically stands for Christ's self-sacrifice on the cross to save the souls of all of mankind. In this allegorical reinterpretation of Ovid's tale Thisbe represents the human soul, the soul which is pursued by the satanic forces of evil - the lion - and which is liberated by the intercession of her saviour's self-sacrifice. Thisbe's own suicide is presumably reinterpreted as her following the saviour in total abandonment of worldly concerns through fasting and good works. One scene on the column depicts the moment when Thisbe discovers her dead lover Pyramus, or rather, in its allegorical reinterpretation, the moment when the human soul faces Christ's self-sacrifice, a moment which merges shock, mourning and the recognition of absolute faith, indeed faith unto death. In more general terms, Ovid's tragic love story has thus been transmuted into an allegorical version of Christ on the cross, a scene which was not yet pictorially represented in romanesque churches, perhaps because of its painful and suicidal implications. (Pfendsack, 50-52.) Transplanting Ovid's tale has thus allowed the artist to express the so-far inexpressible, to overcome a taboo by allegorizing a heathen tale. But in allegorizing Ovid, the artist had to focus on very specific elements of Pyramus's character, in particular on his suicide as self-sacrifice for the sake of love; he has omitted the component of the grotesque misreading of signs: absolute faith cannot tolerate the notion of misreading or error. The notion of error is supplanted by that of deliberate "misleading": it is the devil's mouth that has the power to mislead humankind. |
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In order to warrant the integrity of his work, the artist thus had to edit the old tale. In using surprising exophoric, intertextual energies to visualise his point, he had to adapt and yet do justice to the tale he was using. It is the sculptor's structure of emphases which points to truly crucial hermeneutic paradoxes of Christian faith inherent in interpretations of Christ's crucifixion: the sculptor had to emphasise self-sacrifice while muting suicide, applauding victory while acknowledging defeat, depicting triumph while representing mourning, asserting power while showing weakness. |
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In contrast to this ultimately heroic religious allegory, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream has tilted the balance against heroic interpretations: Bottom as Pyramus is mainly a fool, although there are traces of the heroic in Bottom's dream. (Whether there are also traces of the violent and aggressive rapist - a kind of Vesuvius - in Bottom, as it is suggested in Bachmann's version, will have to be discussed in our December session.) Despite this definite bias towards the comic, the performance of the interlude of Pyramus and Thisbe is both ludicrous and deadly serious, as Quince announces poignantly: "very tragical mirth". As a wedding gift this representation of the death of lovers does indeed seem rather inappropriate, even macabre. But the gift is appropriate, because it does not awaken the memory of death, it rather obliterates it. By laughing at his and his fellow mechanicals' ludicrous representation of tragic events, the audience temporarily ban life-threatening memories from their awareness. Pyramus thus has a kind of talismanic or exorcistic function; his appropriateness lies in his very contrariety. Contrariety is the principle that informs the mechanicals' wedding gift: it mentions the unspeakably inappropriate in such a way that Pyramus and Thisbe become a kind of human sacrifice: the two have to die in order to ensure a long and happy life to Theseus and Hippolyta, to Lysander and Hermia, to Demetrius and Helena and to all of us in the real audience. If the romanesque sculptor's Pyramus is a self-sacrificing heroic Christ that warrants eternal faith, Shakespeare's Pyramus offers himself as the audience's sacrifice that ensures eternal love. We accept his sacrifice laughingly, because he is a fool, and in so doing we forget about Thisbe, whose self-sacrifice is not based on error. |
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If Pyramus as a tragic fool
in A Midsummer Night's Dream thus exhibits and
palliates private fears that are engendered by the
transition from a single state to a union in marriage, Susan
Sontag's version of the same tale thematizes fears,
anxieties and concerns that are generated by a marriage of
both private and bodies. |
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Susan Sontag Wall: Thus have I, Wall, my part
discharged so; THISBE: It's not here anymore. Enter the SPIRIT OF NEW YORK. SPIRIT: O city, I recognize you.
Your leather bars, your festivals of independent films, your
teeming dark-skinned foreigners, your real-estate predators,
your Art Deco shops, your racism, your Mediterranean
restaurants, your littered streets, your rude mechanicals
-- SPIRIT OF NEW YORK vanishes. THISBE: Well, I suppose it won't be
too bad. Since New York isn't America, this city still won't
be -- They see a procession of venders, including some Russian soldiers, coming across an empty field. PYRAMUS: And to think that was no
man's land. They drink. PYRAMUS: Freedom at last. CURTAIN. |
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Susan Sontag's text is obviously loaded with historical and intertextual references. What makes it unique, is the way these references are intertwined and put to allegorical use. The rewrite is set in Germany after the fall of the wall in 1989, and the dialogue between Pyramus and Thisbe reveals that they come from these two formerly separated Germanies. Thisbe is from the West, Pyramus from the East; they used to be lovers despite or across the Wall, now they have met beyond the wall. |
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Even the generic indication opens the referential fireworks; "interlude" functions both as an intertextual as well as a cataphoric reference: the mechanicals' play within the play is called an "interlude" in MND several times (1.2.6), and the notion of the interlude will be developed in the course of the playlet, as we shall see. |
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In the epigraph, the intertextual and the cataphoric overlap again. Depending on the German translation - Wand vs. Mauer - the historical allusion may already establish itself, while the lines are openly declared to be a quote. The wall has played its part, both in the play within the play and in history, and it is to this exit or disappearance that Pyramus and Thisbe refer to in their opening exchanges. The playlet thus opens with private memories, blaming the wall for preventing the lovers' union, while in Shakespeare the lovers blame the wall while it still stands between them. Their disagreements seem as yet harmless, lovers' playful jealousy, with Pyramus blaming Thisbe for thinking too much about the wall rather than him, and her responding by telling him he is over-sensitive, a "ninny", which again alludes to "Ninus tomb" where the lovers meet in Shakespeare, mispronounced by the mechanicals. But this is cataphoric: Pyramus's sense of jealousy is well justified. |
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Since the Wall separated them, it was constantly on their minds, particularly Thisbe, who can go to all the fancy places in West Berlin, but not with her Pyramus ("Paris Bar"; "Arsenal"), and presumably it would have been less "terrible for the Turks in Kreuzberg" if it had not been for the wall. Would it really? Thisbe is here caught in an illogical enumeration of examples, and thus blaming the wall is exposed as a game that is too easy to play. Pyramus does not notice this, and raises the generic question which simultaneously operates as the historical one: In Ovid the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe was a tragedy, maybe even in Shakespeare, but what genre, i.e. what historical predicament, for the pair of lovers from the east and the west, who - it emerges - are also meant to stand for their respective peoples, the Ossis (Pyramus) and the Wessis (Thisbe)? Thisbe is afraid of a third generic or historical option, which to her seems even more threatening than either the tragic or the comic: to become "normal". Becoming ordinary lovers, a German couple like so many others, seems a threat: on the intertextual level this means the abandonment of the heroically immortal status, on the personal level this means that being lovers across the Wall makes them special, and on the politico-historical level it means that Germany will become a country like any other. But this is Thisbe's worry, not Pyramus's, who queries what the new-won freedom may mean in practice, a reflection quite alien to Thisbe, who already expresses a nostalgic longing for the special status their love may have received by the existence of the Wall. This insensitive expression of nostalgia, which exposes the differences in their respective perspectives, shocks Pyramus, but she thinks he takes things too seriously, although that is not the way she puts it - she rather generalises: "you people are so serious!" Pyramus becomes a generic Ossi, but he overlooks this, explains his seriousness with his suffering, but she also wants to have suffered. It is Pyramus who first realises their dialogue is drifting into a quarrel, although Thisbe denies this. The sound of wallpeckers distracts them, and Pyramus wishes he had his tape recorder with him. It is true that his line "It's a Sony" is probably pronounced with pride rather than irony, but Thisbe's response - only referring to the new-won access to consumer goods - is patronising insofar, as she does not realise that Pyramus wants to record the sound of history in the making. Again, as Pyramus asserts that the wall was awful but was good for his character, Thisbe insists on nostalgia, which he didains. And Thisbe wants to have it both ways: she wants to continue in being different, but she perceives that the east becomes just like the west. So again she turns a statement about an individual into one about a collective, and the phenomena of change she mentions are all the negative traits of the west: "trash", "beggars", no discipline in traffic. |
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It is at this point that the Spirit of New York enters, addressing Berlin as an alter ego of New York, with the Shakespearean "rude mechanicals" alluding to the working classes. But Thisbe opposes the notion of Berlin as a multicultural melting-pot, rather sees her city as an intellectual center, like Berkeley. But the Spirit does not accept this, he thinks the intellectual center is only an interlude, just as the history of the last sixty years was only an interlude. This reference to German history between 1939 and 1989 as an "interlude" is on the one hand anaphoric, taking up the Shakespearean designation of the play within the play a version of which we are just reading, but it is also strongly exophoric, referring to guilt which is now forgiven, and it is cataphoric in that it predicts an inevitable historical development. Is this Spirit of New York the lion of the intertexts? Hardly, even though his statements are rather well-roared. The Spirit is rather like the audience of Shakespeare's play within the play: he or she represents the New Yorkers who first read the present dramulet in the March 4, 1991, edition of the New Yorker magazine. Indeed, the mood of the Spirit of New York is not unlike that of the audience in Shakespeare's play: they are critical and somewhat facetious, but overall benevolent, well-meaning, and partly acknowledging similarities with themselves in what they see. In Sontag's dramulet, the Spirit of New York represents the New Yorkers who tell the Berliners: "Ihr seid New Yorker." |
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The two lovers accept the Spirit's verdict, and think that the city's fate - if destined to become like New York - could be worse, and Pyramus cynically adds that such a development presupposes that Berlin remain "shabby as well as full of unwelcome foreigners". Wavering between optimism and pessimism they opt for money (Thisbe) and power (Pyramus), although Pyramus does not quite wish to abandon the principle of solidarity, "thinking of those less fortunate", a thought Thisbe does no longer wish to entertain: "I want to forget these old stories". To which Pyramus suddenly and surprisingly does resort to nostalgia, saying that "History is homesickness". But he has in mind a homesickness that is different from Thisbe's previous evocation of nostalgia in that he refers to a history that reminds him of former values which provided an intellectual home. Certainly they cannot agree on any shared intellectual guides any more. Goethe is too bourgeois for Thisbe, who despite her abjuring of thinking about those less fortunate is the type of the left-wing intellectual who will prefer Schiller to Goethe, if indeed she has to choose between the two, and Benjamin is too close to Marxism to be palatable to Pyramus after all he went through. |
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Since there is little left they can share, the lovers - or is it the former lovers? - take a stroll, watching the free market in operation: "Everything is for sale", as Pyramus states flatly. And he prefers this state of affairs, because now they "don't have to die". This reference to their fate as literary or dramatic figures signals closure, while at the same time confirming the arrival of a more benign historical period. This does call for celebration, although on a rather subdued note. There is no champagne, only an eastern copy of American Coca Cola, and the toast to freedom is marred by Thisbe's final insensitivity: her supposition that Pyramus is an ecological pig just like his eastern peers. |
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Reading this dramulet is
quite a unique experience, because we simultaneously
perceive the two as figures in an Ovidian verse tragedy, as
private lovers and as personifications of two formerly
divided nations. Textual existence, private existence and
public existence all overlap in exhilirating confusion. Such
disorientation about the generic status of what we are
reading may well correspond to the two protagonists' sense
of disorientation. In Shakespeare's version Wall says: |
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And this the cranny is, right and
sinister, |
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Sontag's rewrite is thus not a story of a double suicide in the name of love, it is rather a comic account of the death of a love affair and the beginning of domestic quarreling. What kills their love is still closely connected with the old story: they both misread the signs some beast has left behind. Sontag thus makes both figures share responsibility, and in fact one might argue she has tilted the balance against Thisbe. Signs or traces are still the catalyst of their disagreements. The trace of the lion's paw and the blood-stained mantle are still the source of misunderstanding, the telltale signs which mislead Pyramus into misjudging Thisbe as dead, except that now he misjudges her as spiritually dead, as a nostalgic red who used him for occasional emotional slumming; and conversely they mislead Thisbe into mistaking Pyramus for a still-born materialist and ecological pig. Thus while in Ovid misreading of signs confirmed the lovers' consistent truthfulness, misreading of signs in Sontag leads to painful recognition of change and changeability. |
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There is of course no denying the signs. Just like the blood-stained mantle, the signs are undeniably present. Thisbe does express an apparently insensitive longing for the wall. Insensitive she is, since she thus conflates her symbol of private romance with the symbol of public repression, and this conflation is insulting to Pyramus. But they both neglect to investigate the cause of Thisbe's paradoxical nostalgia: it is easier to attribute it to a weakness in her character than to look for causes beyond her self. As for Pyramus, it is quite true that he displays signs of fascination for the newly accessible material wealth, although his desires are modest. By identifying Pyramus's desire for recording the wallpeckers with the desire for western gadgets, Thisbe denies both his individuality and the complexity of his bewilderment. Even worse is her denigration of him as the stereotypical eastern litter-bug who will pollute the land with western debris. With this implication, Thisbe ruins the celebration of new-won freedom and metamorphoses the celebration into hung-over lamentation. Pyramus's protest: "What do you take me for?" is well-taken: he defends his integrity which is denied by Thisbe's insult, because she does not recognize him any more. |
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In Sontag's rewrite Thisbe's blood-stained mantle has thus been hidden away, but its function has been greatly enhanced. It is expanded to include all the signs that allow value judgments about your loved one and all your neighbours. Unfortunately, these new signs are confusing and unreliable, and the old sign-posts--even such formidable figure-heads as Goethe or Benjamin--have become useless. This loss of reliable guides leads to a massive metamorphosis: Pyramus and Thisbe depersonalize each other into representatives of everything they hate about the other's mass societies. They do not die a physical death, and their fate is therefore not tragic, but by denigrating each other's individual behavioural patterns as mass phenomena they kill off whatever emotional closeness and shared ideals there may have been. |
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And yet Susan Sontag's playlet is not primarily, certainly not principally, a moralising tale about mutual misunderstandings. As I mentioned in discussing her handling of the Ovidian metamorphosis theme in The Volcano Lover she likes to investigate the excess or surplus energies in narratives, forces that cannot be balanced out, energies that reside in the taken-for-granted but ultimately unexplained presences such as the rapist's desire, the volcano's burning interior, the misleading lion. |
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Where indeed is the lion? The lion is the beast that has left all the misleading tell-tale signs that confuse Pyramus and Thisbe into killing off their love for each other. The lion is the cruel historical past between 1939 and 1989. Even though the diabolical force of the lion's misleading signs has been tamed by the interlude of sixty years, the beast's traces can still confuse the lovers and make them trivialize their former passion, but it can no longer induce self-slaughter. This more benign version of deception and self-deception allows the reconciliation which is ultimately central to Sontag's playlet. |
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Ovid's tale has thus been rewritten again; it has been turned into a political and historical allegory. What was rigidified and petrified in Ovid has become reanimated, allowing for a longue durée of an awkward marital union. By dramatising the clash of discrepant responses of two lovers to a moment of historical change, it depicts the fragility of our nobler emotions - such as love. |
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It is true that the former
lovers' hung-over, new role as the prototypical quarreling
couple which will stick together through thick and thin is
highly unromantic - and this antiromanticism makes for much
of the comedy of the drama -, but this domesticated role has
the virtue of survival. The conspicuous absence and yet
lurking presence of the lion in Sontag's play reminds us of
the function of political drama: it is to take risks and to
awaken the slumbering beast of history, in fact to stick the
hand into the lion's mouth, which is the mouth of evil
power, in order to be delivered from the lion's mouth, i.e.
ex ore leonis. |
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