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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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When Steven Dietz switched off his word-processor after finishing Fiction, he was wrapping up his twenty-fifth play. In his mid-forties at the time, he was—and remains—one of America’s most prolific playwrights, although he has never enjoyed a major success on Broadway. Instead, he has seen his work performed in regional theaters throughout the country, managing, as he has said—and reversing an old showbiz adage—to have made a living in theater without ever having made a killing.
Born and raised in Denver, Dietz attended the University of Northern Colorado, graduating in 1980 with a degree in Theater. He launched his career as a director at the Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, and eventually began writing plays of his own. Recalling the genesis of Fiction, he says he remembers once writing the line, “What if instead of dying with your secrets you had to live with your secrets?” From this, eventually, flowed the idea of a play about what happens when a husband and wife read each other’s diaries. |
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THE SETTING.
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Like many contemporary plays, Fiction is written to require little scenery, few props, and simple costumes. The playwright tells us that the time and place of the play are, “The present and before. Various American cities. And Paris.” And he specifies that the setting consists of nothing more than, “A table, a desk, and a few chairs.” Further, “Though all the characters will also play themselves as much as twenty years younger, a change in physical appearance is neither called for nor encouraged.” Which means not only no fancy juggling of the wardrobe, but also no messing about with age-makeup and gray hair.
Obviously, such a play has clear practical advantages: for one thing, Fiction is far less expensive to produce than a drama calling for two or three fully-built rooms with doors and windows, and costume changes for every act. However, the scenic economy also serves a thematic end. The title tells us what the play is about: it shows how writers—and the rest of us, for that matter—spend most of our time living in imaginary worlds made up inside our heads. Hamlet says that “there is nothing neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” In this play about authors inventing experiences that others mistake for truth, Steven Dietz is telling us that there is nothing neither real nor false but writing makes it so. Life is mind-made, so there’s no need for settings that surround characters and actions with the concrete details of time and place. Suggestion is all that’s needed. The imagination does the rest. |
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THE PLOT.
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As the play begins, Linda and Michael are at a café in Paris arguing about what was the greatest rock and roll vocal performance ever. She champions Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” while he endorses John Lennon’s version of “Twist and Shout.” Their conversation, often playfully insulting, weaves back and forth between affectionate abuse and musical analysis, as if they were a long-established couple with years of such banter between them. However, as the scene ends, each says to the other, “Nice to meet you,” and we realize that this was their first encounter. But certainly it will not be their last. We have been watching love at first sight.
Immediately the action moves ahead two decades. Michael addresses the audience while we watch Linda teach a class in creative writing. As they chatter on, we learn that they have been married for twenty years, that she has written an esteemed first novel about South Africa called At the Cape, and that he has become a “noted and successful author.” Nothing but a stream of good news, it seems, until we reach the scene’s last, shocking line. Says Michael, “And if the doctors are to be believed, in three weeks she will be dead.” Following this stunning news, another quick transition brings us to their home where they are discussing her illness. Suddenly Linda announces two requests. The first is that after her death, Michael read her diaries. The second is that she wants to read his—now. Michael, obviously reluctant, nevertheless agrees to his dying wife’s wish, and the next day she sits down to explore her husband’s secrets. Before plunging in, she recalls her college writing teacher who published a successful “memoir” detailing her “daring travels in Africa, India, Southeast Asia.” One night in a bar the teacher drunkenly advised her former student to, “Remember baby: the lies begin when we lift the pen.” Less than a year later, this putative adventurer was dead by her own hand, her diaries revealing that she had fabricated all of her exotic experiences. With this caveat posted at the gates of her own husband’s journal, Linda ventures into the unknown territory of Michael’s hidden life. She begins by reaching “back over what I thought would be a vague but appropriate number of years—toward quote, unquote: ‘simpler times.’” This choice lands her at The Drake Colony, a sort of camp for writers, where Michael spent a summer several years earlier. She had been there herself two years before Michael’s visit, working on At the Cape, a presumably autobiographical story about a young American woman’s encounter with racial and sexual violence. Thanks to her recommendation, Michael was accepted to the colony to work on his own writing. And so the reading of the diary begins. From this point on, the action on stage occurs on two temporal levels: the present of Michael and Linda in which she reads his journals and he copes with that fact; and the past, where we see various scenes from the journals being acted out. The first scene from the past is Michael’s arrival at the writers’ colony. He is barely through the door when he meets Abby, a staff member at the Colony, and is instantly smitten by her. He writes: “She is all a man will ever know of the life he failed to live.” As Linda in the present reads the line aloud we realize that she is taking the first step on a journey through her husband’s past that will bring her great pain. And yet she persists. When present-day Michael comes home to check up on his ailing wife, she orders him out of the house so that she can continue to read without his interruptions. Before he goes, however, he picks up one of the volumes of his journal, opens it, and tears out a leaf, which he puts in his pocket. This, of course, leaves Linda—and us—wondering what could possibly have been on that page. As soon as he leaves, Linda plunges back into her reading, eagerly following the diary’s account of Michael’s developing infatuation with Abby. Initially she resists his overtures, dismissing him at one point as a “smug little pathetic fraud.” But then one night she shows up in his room with a bottle of wine and a new attitude, asking him, as she moves closer, whether people ever use him “to get to your wife.” Abby, it turns out, not only admires Linda’s South African novel, but she also knew Linda when the latter was at the colony writing it. At the moment of seduction, Abby seems to be drawn less to Michael than to his gifted wife, perhaps not so much relishing the idea of possessing him as of supplanting her. MICHAEL [in the past]: Would you like to meet her? Since the stage directions inform us that Michael and Abby did not in fact kiss when Linda imagined they did, we might assume that they also did not proceed with “the rest” that she imagines. Then again, maybe they did. Once more we are confronted with the unreliable, fictional nature of remembrance. In any case, we shift from this moment directly into the present as Michael returns home after his day spent killing time. He enters the house, they look at each other, and he says, “Sorry . . . . I stayed away as long as I could.” With this ambiguous apology, the first act comes to an end.
Act Two begins with a scene that is “similar to the opening of the play” in that Michael and Linda are seated at a table with coffee cups before them. The “tone” of their relationship, however, is markedly different. Instead of the flirtatious banter of the Parisian café, we have the long pauses and ominous silences of marital discord. Finally, Michael takes the bull by the horns and demands that they “have it out,” that they “do it and be done with it.” In response, Linda carries to the table a small stack of Michael’s journals, a mere five or six out of the dozens of notebooks he has filled. These few journals, she informs him, are the only ones that “do not mention Abby Drake. These few alone are free of her. The rest— (looking at all the other journals) –well . . . you know.” And what the rest contain are accounts of romantic encounters in places like Venice, Prague, and the Isle of Skye—a story of illicit love that has spanned continents and gone on for years. After a brief silence, Michael declares that “It never happened. . . . I made it up. It’s all lies.” Of course, Linda doesn’t believe him, and so they have to face the last weeks of her life tiptoeing through a marital minefield. Finally Linda asks to see the page Michael tore out of the journals before giving them to her. He shows it to her, and it is blank. “I wanted you to imagine the worst,” Michael says. “And,” she replies, “the worst did not happen.” This line ushers in a major reversal in the plot, a complete and sudden turnabout in the situation from what is has been to its virtual opposite. Having heard about Linda’s illness, Abby herself shows up to say goodbye, only to learn that Linda’s cancer treatment has been amazingly successful, and that the threat of imminent death has lifted. And so it now seems Michael and Linda will have to go on living with their hastily exposed secrets. The next few scenes return to the chronological shuttling between past and present that we saw in the first act, confronting us with a succession of fresh revelations. During a remembered rendezvous in Paris, Abby challenges Michael to tell Linda the truth about their relationship: “You had a fling at a writer’s retreat. You spent a month with another woman and then you never saw her again. Hey, that’s what those places are for.” So, we assume, Michael was at least partially truthful in telling Linda earlier that he had “made it all up.” There was no ongoing romance, only a month-long fling, supplemented by a writer’s irrepressible imagination. After giving Abby a single volume from her own extensive diary, Linda appears again in her role as writing teacher, explaining to her students that her husband—who has come to view himself as a “hack” fabricator of popular fiction—once wrote a very good novel in which any action performed for the last time by the dying main character would be marked by an asterisk. At which point, she herself utters the word, “asterisk,” and disappears from the play. Michael then steps in to explain that, though the doctors brought Linda’s cancer under control, the cure proved worse than the disease and resulted in her death from pneumonia. And so, as he promised he would, Michael begins to read his wife’s diaries. And, like his wife, he is drawn immediately to the Drake Colony. Once again, Abby Drake is a major figure, but this time her role is not sexual but literary. She reads the first version of Linda’s South African novel and dismisses it as a “coming of age story” fundamentally lacking in candor. Abby, too, has had her own experiences in South Africa, and these enable her to judge the truthfulness of Linda’s work. And as it turns out her criticism is accurate. Linda’s story deals with a terrible experience from her past—a rape—in a way that is fundamentally dishonest. She distorts the facts, thereby undermining the book’s artistic integrity. But Linda’s diary breaks off before revealing the results of Abby’s criticism. There is a missing volume: that portion of her journal that Linda had earlier given to Abby. Only when Abby shows this to Michael does he understand the importance of the relationship between these two women. As it turns out, Abby’s criticism of the first draft of Linda’s novel hit home. Acknowledging the falseness of the tale she has told about herself, Linda challenges Abby to divulge her own story. Which she does. And it is this narrative, Linda confides to her diary, that provides “a new story for my book . . . . “ And so Linda’s At the Cape—which Michael has always assumed to be autobiographical—was in reality Abby’s story about her terrifying coming of age in South Africa. “I chose her, Michael,” Abby says as the play nears its end. “Chose to tell her my story. And she told the truth.” Just before the final curtain, the action shuttles back again to the past, and we return to the scene of the play’s opening: the café in Paris where Linda and Michael first met. He is looking for a place to sit; she is at a table with an empty chair. And as the play ends, their lives are about to merge into the stories—true and untrue—of their future. |
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THE CHARACTERS.
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Michael, Linda, and Abby are all educated, literate, highly verbal people, sophisticated foreign travelers, and talented conversationalists who are comfortable with cultural subjects that run the gamut from The Beach Boys to Dante and Bartok. They are, in other words, very much alike. What distinguishes them is that two are writers, while the third is the subject of their stories.
Concerning the two writers, Linda and Michael, the author provides little in the way of personal or social background. What he does furnish, especially in the first scene, is a vivid impression of two people who are in love with the magic of art, and especially with the power of words. Thus, when we first see them, they are arguing—eloquently, wittily, even brilliantly—about music. Michael is passionately defending John Lennon’s version of “Twist and Shout” as the greatest vocal performance in the history of rock and roll; she is equally vehement in her advocacy of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” LINDA. Their musical choices tell us a fair amount about each character. The Joplin song, Linda’s favorite, is a passionate declaration of female sexual submission: But each time I tell myself that I think I’ve had enough, Mythology and literature are full of characters who, literally, sacrifice themselves for love. There is Prometheus who, out of affection for humanity, steals fire from the Gods and gives it to mankind. His punishment is to be chained to a rock and to have his liver pecked at by the eagles of Zeus. Then there is the pelican, a bird thought by ancient observers to feed its young with blood drawn from its own breast, and thus a frequent symbol in art and poetry of self-sacrificing devotion.
Janis Joplin presents herself in “Piece of My Heart” as an erotic variation on these mythic figures, as a self-sacrificing victim on the altar of passion. There is no pain she will shirk, no humiliation she will not embrace as the price of love. Does Linda’s attraction to this masochistic anthem tell us anything important about her character? We do learn later in the play that she has written a novel in which she portrays herself as a sexual victim, raped by a South African government official. It is this novel that Abby dismisses with heavy sarcasm as a story about a girl who suffers heartbreak, “gets really sad and speaks in metaphors.” Linda wants to see herself as an exploited female victim—someone, like Janis Joplin, who is missing a piece of her heart, though in her case a piece stolen rather than yielded in passionate abandon. But Abby will not allow her to persist in this self-deception. Instead, detecting the novel’s dishonesty, she forces Linda to admit that in fact the sexual encounter occurred in the official’s house, to which she had come voluntarily, knowing his wife would be away; that she offered no physical or verbal resistance to the man’s overtures; that in the end the most she can affirm is that “it felt like” rape. In other words, she has used her novel to reconfigure what was actually a furtive and shame-ridden encounter, substantially initiated by her, into an act of brutal victimization. She has fictionalized herself into a pseudo-Janis. As interesting as her choice of song is the argument she makes to defend it. As she tells Michael in their very first encounter, I for one am able to set aside my own personal tastes. . . . I am able to look beyond my own whims and wishes and see the TRUTH. . . . I am able to recognize that that woman, in that song, took something from the air and made it flesh and blood and bone. She sang that song and . . . that song stayed sung. In taking “something from the air”—something outside herself—and turning into her own “flesh and blood and bone,” Janis Joplin performs an artistic feat like Linda’s. Linda too has taken “something from the air,” namely Abby’s story, and established total emotional ownership of it. Janis, the artist, plays the role of a woman completely defined by self-sacrifice, by the surrender of her heart. Likewise, Linda the artist sacrifices her own narrative, the heart of her own experience, surrendering instead to Abby’s story. As a further parallel, both Janis and Linda have tragically shortened artistic lives. Janis killed herself with drugs and alcohol, while Linda, having told Abby’s story, never writes another successful novel. It’s almost as if she has been cannibalized—or perhaps vampirized—by this other woman, who not only evicts Linda from her own novel but also seduces her husband. Perhaps this usurpation by Abby of key areas of Linda’s life helps explain the strange detail Michael reveals about his wife at the beginning of the play. Her given name is actually “Belinda,” he tells us, but she loathes it, and insists on the abbreviated version. “When I dare to ask why . . . she throws me a look . . . [that] says: ‘Do you really want to wade into the maelstrom here, honey?’ . . . So I change the subject.” Why might she hate her name? Well, for one thing, there is its etymology. Many sources tell us that “Belinda” means something like “beautiful snake,” a pretty off-putting label, especially when compared with the root meaning of Abby (or Abigail): “my father is joy.” So Linda drops the “Be-” prefix, and settles on the diminutive, which means, much more comfortingly, “pretty” or “beautiful,” a name that can stand up to “daughter of joy.” Then there is the fact that “Belinda” is the name Alexander Pope gave to the central female character in his mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock. It is Belinda who is the victim of the ludicrous transgression that gives the poem its title—a non-crime in which a love-smitten beau dares to steal a snippet of a young lady’s pampered tresses. As a student of literature, Linda would surely know about her namesake, and would perhaps recognize an embarrassing similarity between the comically exaggerated rape in the poem and the fabricated “rape” that she describes in the novel mocked by Abby. The most important dramatic fact about Linda’s character is that she gets the ball rolling—she initiates the play’s central action—by insisting that she and Michael read each other’s journals. Why does she do this? Surely she must assume that her husband’s diaries will contain personal revelations that will pain her and perhaps diminish him. She certainly knows that her journal will expose her long-concealed secret as a writer: that the story she tells about South Africa is not her own but Abby’s. In other words, she knows that she will be exposed as a kind of fraud, like the drunken writing teacher she encountered at the bar years earlier. So why does she go looking for this kind of trouble? Again, her embrace of the Joplin song suggests an answer. Like Janis, Linda seems to regard heartbreak and humiliation as badges of emotional honor. We can catch a glimpse of this attitude as she describes to Michael how she felt after reading his journal account of his affair with Abby at the Drake Colony: I forgave you. . . . I read about your month together. . . . and I cried my damn eyes out—and I forgave you. . . . Damn, that felt good. I couldn’t WAIT for you to get home so I could tell you how goddamn EVOLVED I am. . . . [W]hen I closed that journal I loved you more than the day I married you. In Linda’s initial view, betrayal and pain—Michael’s lopping off of a little piece of her heart—actually help her to become a spiritually larger, more fully developed human being. What could be more Joplinesque than that? At least, that is her first response to finding Abby in one of her husband’s journals. But that spirit of indulgence disappears as she continues to find Abby in volume after volume of Michael’s diary. Her tolerance turns to anger, real pain replacing the too-easily forgiven heartbreak of her initial response. In other words, we catch her deceiving herself about her capacity for suffering, just as she did in writing about her own sexual experience in South Africa. Linda, then, is a complex figure. As an artist, she fails to tell the truth about herself, but she succeeds brilliantly in telling Abby’s story. However, she deceives her husband, and the world, by pretending that that story is her own. She also misleads her students, young people who come to her to learn how to write. Instead of telling them that her one successful novel is based on another person’s life, she claims that it is “based on a trip I made to South Africa.” Art, she implies, is autobiography. In fact her drunken former professor gave her far better advice in the ladies’ room: “Remember . . . the lies begin when we lift the pen.” Presumably it is her view of herself as an artist bravely searching for the truth that explains her demand that she and Michael read each other’s journals. But when she finds far more in Michael’s diary than she bargained for, the brave search turns into an all-too-human surge of anger and resentment. As she says in praising Janis Joplin’s perversely ecstatic celebration of heartbreak, “I can see the TRUTH.” However, in her own life, she seems unable to accept the consequences MICHAEL. His favorite song, as we have seen, is John Lennon’s version of “Twist and Shout”—a horse of an entirely different color from “Piece of My Heart.” The author also gives Michael a favorite writer: Dante Alighieri, the medieval Italian poet. What do these preferences reveal about his character?
Let’s begin by looking at the song. Its lyrics boil down to the simplest of demands: “Shake it up baby. Twist and shout. . . . C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon. . . .Work it on out. . . . You look so good. . . . You got me going now. . . You twist so fine. . . . Twist a little closer. . . . Let me know you’re mine. . . . ” The song is pure joy, sexual excitement unmixed with any obvious taint of pain or loss. There is none of Joplin’s heartbreak, self-immolating masochism, or jealousy. At one level, we might see Michael’s fondness for “Twist and Shout” as the mark of a man who is seduced by simple pleasures, a man who will become the kind of writer who manufactures such pleasure for his readers. As his career develops, we recall, Michael goes from despising popular fiction to becoming an immensely popular—and rich—producer of it himself. Like the hack novels he will write, “Twist and Shout” is totally painless and easy to consume. But the relationship of the man to the song is not as simple as that. What occurs in “Twist and Shout” is a simple drama: the singer begs the dancer to come closer and closer as a way of showing that she is his. However, the lyrics never move us beyond the dance floor, so in fact the singer never actually achieves the consummation he craves. The song ends with four inarticulate, harmonically ascending cries of “Ahhhhhhhhhh!”—expressions of yearning never fulfilled. In the end, “Twist and Shout” is about expectation, about waiting and hoping for bliss without ever achieving it. It’s the song, as Michael explains, that you long for when “you’re well into your cups at your fifth bar of the night and bumming a smoke . . . when your head is nothing but smoke and lies. . . .” A man in that condition is a man most likely alone. So Michael’s favorite song is a celebration, for lonely drunks, of imaginary ecstasy. How does his love of “Twist and Shout” accord with his fondness for Dante, whose words he plagiarizes in attempting to woo Abby? When she demands to hear something Michael has written, he responds with a passage from Section XI of La Vita Nuova, a collection of prose and poetry celebrating Dante’s love for Beatrice, the woman who became his muse: Whenever she appeared, I felt I had not an enemy in the world. I glowed with a flame of charity which moved me to forgive all who had ever injured me. And if at that moment someone had asked me a question . . . my only reply would have been: ‘love.’ Later in his journal, he returns to Dante, quoting yet again from the same work. Why this fascination with a thirteenth century poem, and what does it have to do with “Twist and Shout?” To answer these questions, we need to remind ourselves of the details of Dante’s relationship with Beatrice. The first time the poet laid eyes on her she was eight years old and he was nine. Instantly smitten with love for this angelic girl, Dante spent nearly a decade haunting the streets of Florence stealing occasional glimpses of her. He was finally rewarded with another meeting nine years later. Dressed in white, she actually greeted the ecstatic young man. He immediately returned to his room where he had a dream in which Beatrice, appearing in the arms of a God-like figure, devoured his burning heart. After this second encounter, he would never see her again. Instead, she married another man, and eight years later, at the age of twenty-four, she died. But Dante spent the rest of his life thinking and writing about Beatrice, ultimately imagining her in The Divine Comedy as the woman who would guide him through Paradise to the Beatific Vision of God. We might say, then, that “Twist and Shout,” with its never-realized promise of bliss, is Dante and Beatrice for drunken rockers. Lennon’s song and Dante’s poetry are two sides of the same coin: the currency of longing for an idealized—and never-to-be-known—woman. And it is in just such a state of longing that Michael spends his life following his first encounter with Abby at the Drake Colony. As he says to her when they meet in Paris after a dozen years apart, “I am Dante and you are my Beatrice.” While it’s true that he and Abby did spend a carnal month together—unlike the real Dante and Beatrice—it is also true that after that first passionate involvement, their affair was purely imaginary, something that existed only in Michael’s mind and on the pages of his journal. And also like Dante, who never mentions his actual wife in his poetry, Michael in his writing is mum about Linda. In a way, all this is consistent with what Linda says about Michael in her diary entry recording their first meeting: “His name is Michael. And, shockingly, he is EVEN A GREATER SNOB THAN I.” The dictionary tells us that “snob” means someone who “rebuff[s]” ordinary people or things, preferring whomever or whatever he considers to be superior. The word is derived from “cobbler,” a generic term for a member of the lower classes, and thus suggests a person pretending to be other, and better, than he is. A snob, then, is a kind of fantasist—which suits Michael perfectly. Moreover, he is a snob who ends up practicing exactly what he despises. On first moving into the Drake Colony, he demands that his room be repainted to obliterate any traces of the former presence there of a writer named Donovan Cooper, whom he scorns as a “titan of literary commerce,” an author who leans “right into the gaping maw of pop culture.” By Act II, however, Michael has “supplanted Donovan Cooper as the novelist Hollywood most desires.” He has become his own negation, and so must snobbishly reject himself. Michael, then, is an instance of a recurring figure in Western literature and philosophy: the man who longs for what is not, for another reality surpassing the banality in front of his eyes. He is Plato and the Forms, Kant and the Ding an sich, Marx and the Revolution, and, of course, Dante and Beatrice. As he tells us in his own words—not Dante’s—he seeks “the innocent ecstasy of the unattainable.” Michael’s last act in the present-time world of the play is to inform us that he has donated Linda’s diaries to the University—“All but one.” What he has withheld is the volume containing the fact that it is Abby’s story that is told in Linda’s most famous novel. Thus, entirely in character, the final act of this fantasist, dreamer, and modern-day Dante, is to preserve the myth of his wife’s identity. ABBY. At their meeting in Paris, Abby says to Michael, “You don’t know me. You don’t know a thing about me.” She may well be right. After all, Michael hasn’t seen her in twelve years, during which time the entire extent of his communication with her has been two letters and a phone call. Instead of getting to know Abby, he has been inventing fantasy weekends at exotic places with her, all the while churning out his popular novels, and living his life with Linda. To Michael, Abby is an idea, a fictional character who was briefly real in the distant past. Much the same can be said about Linda’s relationship to Abby. They shared intimacies at the Drake Colony—in their case sexual secrets rather than sexual relations—and then parted ways. Like Michael, Linda went on to write about Abby, but all she knows about her are the details of her South African nightmare. As far as the rest of her life is concerned, Abby is a blank slate to Linda. So Abby is a kind of paradox: she occupies an immense amount of mental space in the imaginations of the other two characters while remaining essentially unknown to them. Abby’s role in the play, then, is to force others to reveal the truth about themselves while she remains a mystery. Thus, she immediately detects the dishonesty in Linda’s manuscript about the government official who allegedly raped her, and forces Linda to admit what actually happened. At the Drake Colony she calls Michael a “smug little pathetic fraud.” When he retorts by dismissing her as a “literary leech,” her response is devastating: “At least your wife knows how to write.” At their meeting in Paris, she pushes him to admit that original thinking is not his “strong suit.” And then she tells him that he and Linda should have “made children, instead of books. . . . Something genuine and tangible that might look you in the eye and call your bluff. . . . You thrive on your fictions.” And, of course, it is Abby who gives Michael the missing volume of Linda’s diary containing the secret of At the Cape. By remaining essentially unknown, Abby illustrates a fundamental problem about the relationship between art and reality. No novel, or poem, her enigmatic presence suggests, can ever penetrate to the heart of another’s identity. Dante can spend his life imagining Beatrice without ever getting to know her. |
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THE THEMES.
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As Abby’s character shows, there will always be a gap between the world as it exists in a writer’s imagination and the world as it is in itself. Indeed, the relationship between art and reality has been one of the enduring themes of Western thought.
Plato believed that art was no more than an inferior imitation of the material world, which itself was a debased copy of the true, immaterial forms of things. Thus art was an imitation of an imitation, and consequently harmful and deceptive to a soul seeking to experience reality. In the ideal republic, all art was to be strictly censored, and some kinds of art, such as tragedy, were to be banished altogether. Aristotle, Plato’s student, disagreed with his teacher, insisting that our attraction to art is both natural and good. His argument runs like this: Art is imitation. To imitate something well is to grasp its essence, to understand it more deeply, and so to increase our knowledge of the world. Thus, man, the rational animal, being naturally disposed to take pleasure in learning, will naturally delight in art because of its ability to enlighten through imitation. A new complication entered the debate about art and truth with the arrival of Christianity. Many of the early fathers of the Church were—legitimately—appalled at the obscenity and violence on view in the Roman theaters. They tended to generalize this disgust, and to condemn secular art as a whole, urging their fellow believers to shun “the spectacles” as liturgies of the devil, and to turn their attention instead to Scripture, which contained all the poetry and truth anyone could desire. By the Middle Ages, then, the debate about art had settled into a conflict between Christian Platonists, who thought it dangerous, and Christian Aristotelians, who thought it had something to teach us. The former believed that “poetry” was essentially a kind of lying, whose effect was to lure the soul away from ultimate reality—God—and deliver it over to the world, the flesh, and the devil. The latter, the Aristotelians, insisted that, in Sir Philip Sidney’s words, the poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.” In other words, artistic creations make no deceptive claims to literal accuracy about the world. Instead, they are exercises in the divine gift of imagination, “pictures what should be, and not stories what have been. . . .” Art exists to tell us truths not to convey facts. Fiction is yet another variation on these themes. Michael fills his journal not with factual accounts of what actually happened between him and Abby, but rather with fantasies about what “might” or “should” have occurred. He writes as a disciple of Aristotle and Sidney—the advocates of poetic license. Linda, however, mistakes his journals for literal truth. Perhaps this is the case because Linda has learned a lesson in art-making that is quite different from Michael’s approach. Having had her initial, dishonest manuscript ruthlessly eviscerated, she goes on to write another book in which she sticks to the facts—the true story told to her by Abby. This is the book that makes her name as an artist, and so she has come to assume that to imitate reality is to copy it faithfully—a paradoxical variation of Plato’s view. So what, finally, does the play tell us about the relationship between fiction and real life? On the one hand, Linda writes a fine novel by sticking to the truth. On the other, she mistakes Michael’s fictions about Abby for reality, an aesthetic misjudgment that risks the destruction of her marriage. In short, then, there is no final answer to the question. Art is both true and false; the traffic between fiction and reality travels on a two-way street. |
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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION.
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1. How much can you tell about people based on their tastes in music, movies, and books?
2. Are you attracted to people on the basis of these tastes? Or, conversely, put off? 3. Why does Linda ask to read Michael’s journal? 4. Would you want to read the private diaries of a very close friend? Or of a family member? Why? Why not? 5. Would you want such a person to read your journal? Why? Why not? 6. When you read fiction do you find it “truthful?” If so, what does that mean? Isn’t there a contradiction involved? 7. Do you think people actually do make up imaginary relationships as Michael does with Abby? 8. Do you think it was wrong of Linda to allow people to think that At the Cape was the story about her own experience? Why? Why not? 9. Can you think of writers in real life who have made other people’s stories the basis for their fiction? 10. Why does Abby say she “forgives” Linda? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? |
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SONG LYRICS.
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Well, shake it up, baby, now, (shake it up, baby)
Twist and shout. (twist and shout) C'mon c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, baby, now, (come on baby) Come on and work it on out. (work it on out) Well, work it on out, honey. (work it on out) You know you look so good. (look so good) You know you got me goin', now, (got me goin') Just like I knew you would. (like I knew you would) Well, shake it up, baby, now, (shake it up, baby) Twist and shout. (twist and shout) C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, baby, now, (come on baby) Come on and work it on out. (work it on out) You know you twist your little girl, (twist, little girl) You know you twist so fine. (twist so fine) Come on and twist a little closer, now, (twist a little closer) And let me know that you're mine. (let me know you're mine) Ahhhhhhhhhh(low) Ahhhhhhhhhh(higher) Ahhhhhhhhhh(higher) Ahhhhhhhhhhh(high) Well, shake it up, baby, now, (shake it up, baby) Twist and shout. (twist and shout) C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon, baby, now, (come on baby) Come on and work it on out. (work it on out) You know you twist your little girl, (twist, little girl) You know you twist so fine. (twist so fine) Come on and twist a little closer, now, (twist a little closer) And let me know that you're mine. (let me know you're mine) Well, shake it, shake it, shake it, baby, now. (shake it up baby) Well, shake it, shake it, shake it, baby, now. (shake it up baby) Well, shake it, shake it, shake it, baby, now. (shake it up baby) Ahhhhhhhhhh(low) Ahhhhhhhhhh(higher) Ahhhhhhhhhh(higher) Ahhhhhhhhhhh(high) Didn’t I make you feel, oh honey, like you were the only man I ever wanted, that I ever needed ? Oh ho, honey, didn’t I give you nearly everything that I ever had to give ? Oh, you know I did! Break another little piece of my heart, darling, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Have another little piece of my heart, baby, baby, baby, You know you got it, if it makes you feel good. I want you to feel good now, yeah!!! Say come on, come on, come on, come on and take it, Take another little piece of my heart now, baby! Break another little piece of my heart, darling, yeah yeah yeah yeah. Have a, have another little piece of my heart, baby, baby, baby. You know you got it ¡º alright!!! Say! whoaa, have another little piece of my heart now, daddy, Break it, break it, break it, I want you to want it, take out the inside of me, Have another little piece of my heart now, baby, baby, baby. You know you got it, if it makes you ¡º I want you to feel good, lord, alright!!! Yeah!! |
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OTHER STUFF.
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This is another translation of the Dante passage Michael quotes to Abby. It’s La Vita Nuova, section XI.
XI The effects on him of her greeting INFO ABOUT DANTE AND BEATRICE
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) The greatest Italian poet and one of the most important writers of European literature. Dante is best known for the epic poem COMMEDIA, c. 1310-14, later named LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. It has profoundly affected not only the religious imagination but all subsequent allegorical creation of imaginary worlds in literature. Dante spent much of his life traveling from one city to another. This had perhaps more to do with the restless times than his wandering character or fixation on the Odyssey. However, his Commedia can also be called a spiritual travel book. "It were a shameful thing if one should rhyme under the semblance of metaphor or rhetorical similitude, and afterwards, being questioned thereof, should be unable to rid his words of such semblance, unto their right understanding." (from Vita Nuova, c. 1293) Dante Alighieri was born into a Florentine family of noble ancestry. Little is known about Dante's childhood. His mother, Bella degli Abati, died when he was seven years old. His father, Alighiero II, made his living by money-lending and renting of property. After the death of his wife he remarried, but died in the early 1280s, before the future poet reached manhood. Brunetto Latini, a man of letters and a politician, became a father figure for Dante, but later in his Commedia Dante placed Latini in Hell, into the seventh circle, among those who were guilty of "violence against nature" - sodomy. Dante received a thorough education in both classical and Christian literature. At the age of 12 he was promised to his future wife, Gemma Donati. Dante had already fallen in love with another girl whom he called Beatrice. She was 9 years old. Years later Dante met Beatrice again. He had become interested in writing verse, and although he wrote several sonnets to Beatrice, he never mentioned his wife Gemma in any of his poems. One of his early sonnets Dante sent to the poet Guido Cavalcanti, which started their friendship. Dante also dedicated his first book to Cavalcanti. The work, LA VITA NUOVA (1292), celebrated Dante's love for Beatrice. The nature of his love had its roots in the medieval concept of "courtly love" and the idealization of women. According to another theory, Beatrice was actually a symbol of 'Santa Sapienza', which united secret societies of the day. Harold Bloom in The Western Canon (1994) sees Beatrice as Dante's greatest muse, his invention, who saved him "by giving him his greatest image for poetry, and he saved her from oblivion, little as she may have wanted such salvation." Dante married in 1285 Gemma Donati but his ideal lady and inspiration for his poetry was Beatrice Portinari. She married Simone dei Bardi in 1287; she was his second wife. When Dante was asked why he still continued unhappily to love her, he answered: "Ladies, the end of my love was indeed the greeting of this lady, of whom you are perhaps thinking, and in that greeting lay my beatitude, for it was the end of all my desires. But because it pleased her to deny it to me, my Lord Love in his mercy has placed all my beatitude in that which cannot fail me." Beatrice died in June 1290, at the age of 24. After Beatrice's death, Dante withdrew into intense study and began composing poems dedicated to her memory. From Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae and the writings of Thomas Aquinas he found much consolation and intellectual stimulation. |