Joan of Arc Part 2

Now I will write my impressions of the four Joan of Arc plays I have recently read. Although I am not connecting on a very immediate level with the whole Joan of Arc legend, and do not have anything to say about it that promises to contribute to the vast existing body of knowledge on the subject, there is always a fascination and thrill, you must understand, for people like me in declaiming on such classical stories as have continuous and widespread popularity among people with pretensions. When I was looking for these pictures, there were tens of thousands of images of the Maid to choose from: statues, movie stills, handkerchiefs, salt shakers, posters, medals. And yet in all my life I have never talked to anyone about this subject, or encountered one Joan enthusiast to my knowledge.

Anouilh--L Alouette (The Lark) 1952

(Note: the apostrophe on my home keyboard all of a sudden does not work. This is the one of course for quotation marks also)

I can only consider that I have half-read this, as I read the American adaptation by Lillian Hellman, which struck me as, at the very least, not getting the authorial voice of a midcentury French playwright and penseur accurately enough. Five years ago I would have made a day of going down to Cambridge, having lunch at John Harvard's ale house or one of those places that serious intellectuals and cool people never set foot in, buying a few liter-bottles of imported mitteleuropeen beer at the gourmet market and picking up a copy of the original. Now however I dashed into a second-hand store on the way to Brattleboro (I do like Brattleboro though. If it were a woman I would both desire to dance with it and feel that it was attainable to me to do so) for New Year s Eve dinner, wife and babies sitting in the still running car, grabbed the questionable adaptation and endured a witty observation from the bearded fellow at the cash register that I must have known what I was looking for. So you see how tenuously I am clinging to maintain the forms even of a provincial pseudo-intellectual.

Of the four plays delineated here, The Lark has the virtues of appearing to correlate most with the actual events of history, or such of them as seem verifiable, as well as being more about the actual figure of Joan (Arc?) herself in a more signifigant proportion than the other plays. Her trial forms the structure of the play, the great events of her career being recalled in flashbacks. The tone of the action and dialogue, while somber, is rendered rather gently overall despite the threatening and grisly circumstances; I wish I could trust my adaptress more, however. I did like that rather than ending with Joan reduced to a pile of cinders on the stage, in the translated version at least, there is a flashback to the hour of her greatest triumph, the coronation of the Dauphin at Reims. In this American version the play comes off as, if not affirmative, at least offering hope that life contains nobility, or the possibility of it, after all, which strikes me as an unusual and rather too neat position for a French artwork of that era. It is the sort of thing that would probably cause me satisfaction and comfort if I were to see it as a playgoer, and any theater that enables the likes of me to be comfortable...well, you know what must be said about that. If I ever make it back to a big city, I will have to keep my eyes peeled for a copy of the original. I know I can order it off the Internet, but...it isn t urgent.

Schiller--Die Jungfrau von Orleans-1801

Though Schiller is, as far as I can tell, still regarded in the German speaking world as one of their very greatest authors--as high as number 2 in some polls--he is hardly read at all, and even that I suspect in a very desultory manner, in the Anglosphere. His power, or perhaps it is his Romanticism (the Germans going to much further artistic extremes in this movement than the English generally did) do not register strongly in English to my mind. Five to ten years ago again I probably would have tried to at least struggle through the original to try to get some feel of the poetry; especially as I love plays written in verse, which is a method I think is ripe for a revival, and which frankly I am surprised has lain dormant so long. It gives a dignity and a grandeur, and, if done at all skillfully, a pleasure, to one's story that is much harder gained by plainer dialogue.

To give an idea of how big Schiller is in Germany, there are I believe 7 or 8 museums dedicated to him, mainly in houses where he lived, which incidentally would not constitute a bad basic tour of that important and to my thinking still largely mysterious nation: 2 in Marbach-am-Neckar, where he was born, 1 (plus his grave) in Weimar, one in Jena, one in Leipzig, 1 in Dresden, one in a town called Bauerbach. Here is the Schiller-National Museum in Marbach. This is not just a Schiller museum, but an archive of German literature generally (I think; I cannot find any substantial information in English on this institution), but still, it is named after him, it is in his hometown, there is at least one large statue of him on the grounds. The edifice is certainly most impressive. In Portland (Maine), where I went to high school, there is a very dignified late Victorian statue of Longfellow presiding over one of the major intersections downtown. This might be the only real monumental-type public statue of a poet, I mean where he is elevated and large and dressed extravangantly and is sitting in an expensive chair and so forth, that I am aware of in the United States. I cannot think of any others at the moment. I am not going to argue that there ought to be more. Such things are as they are. Our American poets perhaps do not strike us as grand or good enough to be statue-worthy, but then again good monumental statuary has the effect of making people and events more likable. On the other hand, how many Schiller museums will Germany be supporting and how many Schiller monuments maintaining in a hundred years? It is hard to imagine as many as it does now.

But to address the play: the liberties and Romanticism--Joan's falling desperately in love with one of the English leaders, her dying in battle instead of the stake--as are noted in every modern critique of this play, become too much by the end to hold the reader's confidence. The first half, before one is certain where things are leading, is engaging enough. I like the extended emphasis on the heroine's family and village life, and the nature of the setting in which she receives her visions, which was passed over more quickly or disposed with altogether by the other authors. I think a more sober or tempered Romantic treatment would work well on this story. Although Joan is more brilliant than everyone she encounters, she is not an intellectual, nor learned, nor anguished, nor emotional, nor in way real way intimately accessible in point of her actual character. She has always been understood as a symbol of a number of desirable and usually impossible human qualities, which is the essence I suppose of true Romantic art, as well as religious iconography, which ought to be taken into consideration in any treatment of this subject. The play is not rated highly among Schiller's works, and I did not get much more out of it than what I have related, so I will let it go and move on to the next.

Brecht--Die Heilige Johanna der Schlacthofe (St Joan of the Stockyards)--1929

For those not familiar with this play, it is actually set in the meatpacking district and stock exchange of contemporary Chicago, and deals rather obliquely at best with the Joan legend. The Joan character actually resembles Major Barbara more than the Maid of Orleans, and the scenes of her proselytizing the wretched and the unemployed in exchange for a cup of soup are almost as if lifted from that other play, which, however, had the advantage over this one of being much funnier and having some cleverer ideas and twists of the plot. The various, neverending business scheming and manipulation of prices made my eyes glaze over pretty quickly, and reminded me of why the calls one increasingly hears from conservative and high-testosterone American critics for a new race of manly novelists to address the world of high-powered, ultra-competitive business rather than their own sensitive feelings and petty grievances is likely to go unheeded. The day to day action and conversation of the respectable business world, as well as its etiquette, its publications and the apparent inner lives of its protagonists are not simply uninteresting; most of this is deadly and inhuman, and as if willfully so. The realm of art has apparently not yet found the form or the attitude--or the necessity--to raise its players and issues to the level of high culture, such as great minds recognize when confronted with it. This is not something I am just throwing out. I have worried about this for many years, given the centrality and ascendance of business values in our society as well as the widespread sense that modern American would-be writers have holed themselves up in their bedrooms, terrified of and overwhelmed by the very vitality of their nation. Now I don't think it is wholly true that authors have ignored business altogether, though I concede the entrepreneur or corporate ladder climber is rarely depicted as a hero deeply admired by the author. And secondly, I have to say that the more time I spend as an adult around corporate and other self-consciously professional-type people, the Kafkaesque or absurdist approach to understanding the ethos of this world seems the most plausible option, which is I suppose what our author (Mr Brecht) is saying at some level too, though I wouldn't really know from reading him. I would be curious to see one of his plays performed sometime, in Germany (I have realized that I can best endure live drama, as well as opera, in the country and language of origin, in a setting that I can imagine to resemble that in which the play was originally performed; thus I enjoy the faux-Globe that was put up in London and the Statny opera-house in Prague [formerly in Austria, remember!], however inferior the experts assure me their actors and singers are, as if I could tell anyway). I am positive I would glean more of what I am supposed to be gleaning from that than from further reading in translations of this author. I am not of the school, as should be discerned by now, that lower and even minute levels of understanding, in inferior minds, of great works of art, are utterly worthless, least of all to the mind concerned, as some apparently hold.

Brecht still has his fans. Someone should get hold of her and have her write a guest piece about why she likes Brecht. I am old and conventional and not especially good-looking, so it's unlikely she would respond to me. (If my link doesn't work, which it probably won't, go to the meet-me page on Hotornot.com and search for women with the keywords "Bertolt Brecht". There is only one).

Shaw--St. Joan-1924

This was the most enjoyable to read of the four, probably because it was the only one originally written in English. I thought the preface a very good piece of writing, both as an overview of Joan s career and for the many ideas about the type and quality of mind she possessed that duller or inattentive writers either missed entirely or grasped at inexactly or without succintness. George Bernard Shaw always had very distinct, pet ideas about the world, such as that well over 99% of the human population in any age and level of society were incontestable morons whose thoughts or troubles were of no real significance, and he could not resist topical jokes at the expense, as he imagined, of the lesser end of his audience (one of the English adjuncts at Joan s trial for example argues as proof of her heresy that she claims her saints spoke to her in French and not English). Pound, comparing his writings about his native Ireland to Joyce, thought it necessary to call him a ninth-rate coward. This type of declamation is a characteristic of a certain brand of hot and quick mind that I have always been envious of; for my own part I can only say that Shaw's work has not, compared to the other, the sensibility of the totality of a human being, or an atmosphere, of, shall I just say it, the spiritual influences at work in human society and culture. How far that is a matter of courage I do not pretend to know, but it probably has more to do with it than it seems at first appearance, or that most people--most bourgeois, certainly--would want to admit.

I would write more, but it has already taken me fifteen days to write this bloody report, and I can't even remember the damn play anymore. Granted, I was away for ten of those days, but come on. My life is slipping away while I try to write one coherent idea about what I am supposed to make of Joan of Arc. And I'm not done with her yet either! I am going to give this up and start on something else. This will all eventually lead somewhere if there is enough accumulated mass in it, that I believe.

Another Reading Update

Brecht--Die Dreigroeschenoper (I cannot resist a good untranslated title in a semi-recognizable foreign language. Sorry.)

Plays make up a significant portion of the readings on my list, quite possibly 20% or 25%. I am not much of a theatergoer, especially when it comes to anything serious, and at this point almost probably will never become one. I have in the first place some slight jealousy and irritation issues when confronted at close range with actors and theater people generally, mainly because they don't recognize me as one of their kind, i.e. a fellow artist and intellectual--not that anyone else does either, but in the privacy of home or a large library one is not confronted with the contrast between himself and real people so starkly. In small theaters with fairly high status actors and an audience that one can presume to be rich, educated, expensively and carefully dressed, and to have some claim of current possession of the literary canon, such as the Folger in Washington, the almost pornographic physical and intimacy and intellectual competition of the whole environment is too much for me. The one time I was there some years ago, ostensibly to see Romeo and Juliet I was possessed throughout the performance with a strong desire to run up on the stage and yell "Look at me! Look at me! I am serious! I have read Shakespeare! I have read a lot of books! I have a high IQ too!" Of course I restrained myself, but I am always much less agitated when the show is finally over and I am safely ensconed at the bar with a mug of beer and a plate of fries and don't have to pay attention to other people any longer.

My issues with actual theater attendance aside however, I generally enjoy reading plays--most of the older ones were originally intended to be entertainments after all--though having been raised, so to speak, on the triple decker novel, the comparatively skeletal frame and scope, the brevity and swiftness of most plays when read is something I have never quite adjusted to, and as a result I often have especial trouble remembering the details and plots of them. They do not, for whatever reason, impress themselves much upon my mind, except perhaps after one has read a lot of a certain author or of a certain epoch, and then mainly as a composite of the types.

Bertolt Brecht promised strongly to be an author that I was not going to get the point of, as I am exactly the sort of man that he pointedly set out not to write for. He was moreover born in Germany in 1898, the same year as Jacob Klein and 1 before Leo Strauss, the exact contemporary to numerous other formidable, formidable minds, among whom he stood out as one of the very most important. The circa-1955 blurbs on the dust jacket of my copy of his book are also strong signals that I should probably not be attempting to read this material: "...every other living playwright seems more or less trivial." Whenever they say this you know you are not going to win. Goodness, once the totality of creative talent in the theater world of 1950 with the exception of one figure is established as more or less trivial, that more or less indicts everyone else with any connection to it not involved in a Brecht production as similarly frivolous, including the audiences, for supporting and subsiziding such a cultural desert; and having done this, what in God's name hope is there for the likes of me or one of my non-German speaking, American public school and liberal arts college-bred contemporaries to penetrate through to whatever it is that is so essential in the plays of Bertolt Brecht? The prospects are not very promising. Another blurb assures that "at last, we have Brecht...translated into a language that resembles the Queen's English rather than German-American." Oh my. This also reminds me of another author out of one of my favorite categories of modern literature, the super-serious-white-African-Communist-woman who really detests the United States for being politically unconscionable, shamelessly materialistic and intellectually frivolous, Doris Lessing, who took a moment in The Golden Notebook to ridicule the stupid Americans for turning "Mack the Knife" (which is originally a song from this serious and intellectually demanding play I am gradually getting around to talking about, for anybody who might be confused) into a swinging pop song for teenagers to dance to at the malt shop. Personally, I think this was a rare stroke of brilliance on the part of the Americans--would we could do more such stylistic pilfering and watering down of European, or any high culture, Indian, Chinese, whatever, if that is something we have a talent for--but I am both a biased and culturally blinded observer, in this instance.

Now the Threepenny Opera is modeled upon Gay's Beggar's Opera, which I have read once, and which I took, as far as I was able to take it, to be a comedy based on the hilarious idea that the moral codes, behaviors, institutions, etc of the lower orders of society bear in certain broad details resemblances--fleeting ones anyway--to those of more substantial people. While in Gay and 18th-century England the mirror showing us how repulsive we really are is played for laughs, carries little more sting than a light rebuke and seems to assume we could even improve our characters if we weren't so lazy and actually wanted to, in Brecht and Weimar Germany the laughs, while still sought, are certainly not meant to be light, the rebukes are meant to reverberate harshly through the mind of a sentient being at least, and the attitude regarding people's abilities to substantially improve their vile characters is pessimistic at best. Given the time and the place it is easy to say that such an assessment of the human condition was prescient and necessary. The whole Zeitgeist of that generation of Germans is exceedingly difficult to get one's mind past when dealing with the products of its intellectuals, even those many who emigrated and denounced Nazism and earned for themselves a place of some honor in history. I think the problem is that the general darkness that pervaded that generation's outlook upon everything, however rightly, was of an intensity that is not really common in human cultural history, yet because these people were so influential both in Europe and in the United States where so many took positions in universities and wrote for publications and directed research and set the intellectual tone in many of these for 30 years, many smart people have become convinced that this is the attitude towards humanity and its prospects that a serious person has to take, at least in the modern world, as long as certain conditions and problems persist. I don't think this is quite right; but I have a lot of diffidence when it comes to try to argue the point.

Much of this is because the German emigres were so technically and incontestably smart. When they arrived in the United States, whether they went to Hollywood or New York or Los Alamos or the University of Chicago, the natives did not have much to offer them apart from money and security, towards which many of the emigres appear to have had mixed and/or guilty feelings towards to boot, and they (the natives) seemed to have been able to offer little resistance to the newcomers' intellectual force overwhelming their own whenever representatives of the two groups collided. While this had indisputably many positive effects upon the quality of learning and culture available in America, I have always had a very ambivalent relationship to such of the emigres as survived to my own day that I encountered, and especially with those of their chosen proteges. I do not quite want to say that I have a different 'spirit', or that I have a 'more' Anglo-Saxon/Irish sort of intellect, but I do distrust the German method of categorizing and systematizing their ideas of truth, which seem to have a stronger inclination to obliterate such as are even slightly incompatible with them.

In doing some research on Brecht I discovered that he was a big proponent of the idea of "Epic Theatre" in which the ideas of the play would be more important than the story being acted out and the individual characters portrayed. Either there is more to it than this that I missed or he was extremely successful in his goal, because I have certain had it drummed into my skull for 30 years that anything serious is always about ideas first and the story and characters are handy conventions in which to dress them. It had not occurred to me that people may not have consciously subordinated plot and characterization to greater themes on a broad until the 1920s, but I suppose it is plausible.

My genuinely excellent edition of Brecht's plays has 11 pages of notes on the Threepenny Opera written as far as I can tell by the author himself under such headings as "The Reading of Dramas", "Tips for Actors", and so forth. He is an exceedingly mistrustful author. The bourgeois of course deservedly take the biggest beating, but this extends to the theater itself, as a bourgeois institution serving bourgeois audiences and bourgeois economic interests. He sees the theater as resisting his attempts to transform it, which I suppose it would do; impatience with the stubbornness and disgraceful behholdenness to the bourgeois of the institutions one is attempting to transform however is a common complaint in all the arts during that period. The great sin of the bourgeois and the art that is made for him, as far as I can make out, is that he prefers to be flattered with lies than to be confronted with truth, and the fascinating thing of course is that we are to suppose this is unique to the bourgeois, and that truth and constant moral self-criticism are subjects of intense concern to all people who have not been infected with this state. The crux of the argument I suppose is that the bourgeois is so compromised that he is neither morally good nor morally free, but unlike the slave or the wretched pickpocket, he frequently imagines himself to be both, which is disgusting to a real artist or philosopher, or any other uncompromised human being. This is probably true, but I don't think Brecht is the right artist to convince me of it thoroughly.

I have more to review, butI will put them on another posting.