BUILDING THE NEW CITY OF GOD:
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 32; Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.32.1.0117
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Biblical Studies and Interpretation
ResumoWhat is the use of writing plays?—what is the use of anything?—if there is not a Will that finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods with heaven for an environment, and if that Will is not incarnated in man, and if the hero … does not by the strength of his portion in that Will exorcise ghosts, sweep fathers into the chimney corner, and burn all the rubbish within his reach with his torch before he hands it on to the next hero?—Bernard Shaw, Letter to Henry James, 19091 In his brilliant book, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007), Roger Griffin describes the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century as alternative modernisms, “revitalization movements” responding to the crisis of modernity and seeking to realize a “temporalized utopia.”2 Griffin does not see a rigid line separating this type of political modernism from cultural modernism, and he delineates two general types of modernist artists: epiphanic modernists, such as Joyce and Beckett, and programmatic modernists, such as Shaw: “There is a common matrix behind modernism in the bewildering heterogeneity of concrete manifestations…. [T]his matrix is usefully seen as the search for transcendence and regeneration, whether confined to a personal quest for ephemeral moments of enlightenment or expanded to take the form of a cultural, social, or political movement for the renewal of the nation or the whole of Western civilization.”3 Programmatic modernists, such as Shaw, seek to “inaugurate an entirely new era of society within historical time.”4 Certainly Shaw made no secret about his intention of changing the world, both with his playwriting and with his more overtly political work, as he reminds us in the preface to Man and Superman when he says that “‘for art's sake’ alone [he] would not face the toil of writing a single sentence.”5 Shaw saw his work as a writer and dramatist as an extension of his work as Fabian socialist and propagandist of the Life Force; viewing him as a programmatic modernist, I believe, can bring new insights to his work. Moreover, Shaw's lifelong desire to see humankind and societal institutions transformed can be compared, and even linked, with his desire for urban renewal, also expressed throughout his life and with equal intensity.Nineteenth-century British society was characterized by a powerful sense of social and economic dislocation. Famously denominated “two nations” by Benjamin Disraeli in Sybil (1845) and envisaged as potentially manifesting in two different species by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895), the unprecedented disparity between rich and poor presented a terrifying shock to the conscientious observer. The increase in urban population and slums throughout the nineteenth century had become alarming, and Shaw had been horrified by the dirt, poverty, and drunkenness found in run-down areas of the city ever since he first encountered them in the Dublin slums as a boy: “Thus were laid the foundations of my life-long hatred of poverty, and the devotion of all my public life to the task of exterminating the poor and rendering their resurrection for ever impossible.”6 Joseph V. O'Brien similarly records the “cracked walls, leaky roofs, rickety stairs, broken windows, worm-eaten floors” of nineteenth-century Dublin as well as the staggering mortality rates; for example, in 1845 a local medical officer examined three thousand poor families and concluded that “22 percent of children did not survive the first year of life, 52 percent died before their sixth year, and only one-third of the working class as a whole survived beyond twenty years.”7 The situation was probably not much better for the poor in London when Shaw arrived there in 1876. In fact, another historian, J. W. Burrow, has said that to the nineteenth-century progressive Englishman “London, too, with its swarming yet partly invisible masses of the unhealthy, ill-fed poor, became something of an obsession.”8 The immensity of the problem certainly obsessed Shaw throughout his life, and of course his first play, Widowers' Houses, is about just that: the London poor and their vile living conditions, along with the profit system that ensured its continuation.While Shaw was concerned about the alarming dislocations of urban modernity, he also regarded modernity itself as the solution to many of the problems it created. Poverty was the greatest crime, Shaw believed, but its eradication by industrial or scientific means was a real possibility; and it was rather the frightening misuse of this awesome potential by a fatally flawed capitalist system that was the problem, perpetuated by the ineffectual and opportunistic politicians who stood in the way of positive change. During the years of the British Socialist Revival, it seemed to Shaw and others that the harnessing of this prodigious power for the world's good was within reach, as socialism seemed bound to soon supersede an incredibly wasteful capitalist economy. Nonetheless, as the twentieth century arrived, capitalism seemed more entrenched than ever; the urban environment became more chaotic as the population in London exploded; and Victorian morality, which Shaw had done much to relax in his early years, seemed by the 1920s to have dissolved completely, freedom and liberty coming to mean, apparently, the unleashing of the appetitive and undisciplined self. While Shaw could claim, in his “Preface” to Sidney and Beatrice Webb's English Local Government: English Prisons under Local Government (1921), that “it is no exaggeration to say that civilization is perishing from Anarchism,”9 his response under these conditions was often a more forced optimism and a misguided hope that the changes he longed to see would come from the new breed of dictators that emerged after the war, who seemed the very antithesis of the impotent politicians who plagued both Britain and Western nations generally.We get an early glimpse of what these changes might look like, as well as the creative superman most responsible for their manifestation, in Shaw's great 1905 play Major Barbara. Shaw needed to believe the world could be cleansed of chaos and disorder, poverty and crime, and his inability to resolve the political problems dramatized in his previous play, John Bull's Other Island (1904), led him, in the words of Nicholas Grene, to the “innocent totalitarianism” of Major Barbara,10 with its superman figure Andrew Undershaft. To understand Major Barbara, it is necessary to consider briefly the earlier play, Shaw's only major play set in his native country. The Land Purchase Act of 1903 had given small Irish farmers an opportunity to purchase leaseholds and become landlords themselves. Shaw gives a very unflattering view of the new Irish landlords in John Bull, showing that their greed and desire to imitate their old masters will simply perpetuate the old problem of the exploitation of labor. Furthermore, these new landlords lack efficiency and organization and will be unable to develop the land sufficiently to bring Ireland into the twentieth century. The central premise of the play focuses on Broadbent and Doyle, partners in a London firm of civil engineers, as well as in a Land Development Syndicate, going to rural Ireland to acquire more land. Broadbent, a British capitalist with political aspirations, attempts to woo support by announcing his plan to “bring money here: I shall raise wages: I shall found public institutions: a library: a Polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. I shall make a Garden city of Rosscullen.”11 While this sounds like visionary programmatic modernism, we know that Broadbent lacks the altruism required of Shaw's heroes, and the whole scheme is designed to yield huge profits for the capitalists even as the utopia Broadbent describes remains unfulfilled.Yet despite Broadbent being the target of much of the play's satire, we are left standing in awe of his energy and determination: he is a force of nature, capable of great good if once divorced from his acquisitive propensities. Shaw describes him in the stage directions as “a robust, full blooded, energetic man in the prime of life … always buoyant and irresistible.” And later he describes him sweeping Nora “into the garden as an equinoctial gale might sweep a dry leaf.”12 Surely such a creature must have been evolved by the Life Force for something more exalted than the mere fattening of his own predacious self. Broadbent represents the power of big business, which in 1904 still had its nerve center located in London. While Shaw mocked England and excoriated capitalism all his life, he was nonetheless also strangely drawn to the unparalleled power each possessed. He saw the industrial machinery of modernity as an opportunity to build a world where disease and poverty were no longer so ubiquitous. Rather than rejecting worldly power as being antithetical to a life of the spirit, by 1905 Shaw had come to see the necessity of marrying the two; and this culminates in his next play, Major Barbara, where he attempts to unite them, whereas in John Bull we see only their inability to come together and the depressing consequences of such estrangement. In a sense this had always been Fabian policy, which believed it could infiltrate the halls of power, the world of government at least, if not business, and convince the leaders of all parties of the necessity of transitioning to socialism. But now Shaw seems to believe in the necessity of a partnership with the captains of industry as well as with the leaders in politics, if the world is to be saved.In Major Barbara, the productive energy and efficiency of big business unites with the forces of altruism. Perivale St. Andrews is utopia in miniature, a microcosm of what Shaw hoped to see spread across the globe: poverty has been eradicated, crime is presumably negligible or nonexistent, cleanliness and order are the norm, and the violence necessary to maintaining such an order is, by the end of the play, in the hands of modern-day philosopher-kings, such as Plato first described in his own literary utopia, The Republic. The genius behind this success is Undershaft, who is Broadbent shorn of his comical penchant for self-deception. Undershaft recognizes that his own good and the world's good are one and the same, and he has ordered the complex of Perivale St. Andrews so that it is a comfort to his workers, who are well paid, fully insured, and will receive a pension upon retirement; he has created a Garden city much like the one Broadbent claims he will bring to Rosscullen in John Bull, with libraries, schools, and nursing homes. Everything is clean and orderly and its inspectors in the third act are enthralled, Cusins calling it “perfect! wonderful! real! It only needs a cathedral to be a heavenly city instead of a hellish one.”13 As in his two previous plays, John Bull's Other Island and Man and Superman, Shaw employs hell as a metaphor, but in this play it is only the addition of the former evangelist Barbara Undershaft that is needed to convert the Garden city into a “heavenly city,” a new city of God.Shaw's devotion to world betterment, the intensity of his longing and the example of his own experience as a self-made superman, led him to put his faith in the new class of dictators who arose in the desperate years that followed the end of World War I. These leaders—Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler—were all self-made men, like Undershaft (and Shaw himself), who variously professed a devotion to remaking the world on the ash heap of a failed liberal capitalist system. They were, in the words of Karl Popper, “utopian social engineers,”14 and their programmatic vision was as much aesthetic as it was political. Speaking of Plato, Popper observes that when the “artist-politician” is intent on full scale “canvas cleaning” he “must eradicate the existing institutions and traditions. He must purify, purge, expel, banish, and kill. (‘Liquidate’ is the terrible modern term for it.)…. The view that society should be beautiful like a work of art leads only too easily to violent measures.”15 Shaw was not a violent man, but he greatly admired these bold and assertive men of action who had embarked on political careers with the presumed intention of refashioning the world along aesthetic lines. These were provisional supermen, who by ruthless action could compel order and efficiency, mold an unruly and recalcitrant population into a disciplined social body, and therefore clear the ground for the true supermen who would evolve biologically in the distant future. Some have argued that this side of Shaw developed only after World War I, when it became especially apparent that parliamentary liberalism would be unable to achieve a more stable and egalitarian world;16 but in 1927, Beatrice Webb, who knew Shaw as well as anyone, remarked that his “naïve faith in the Superman, before whose energy and genius all must bow down, is not a new feature in Shaw's mentality.”17Webb was right, Shaw's faith in the superman was apparent well before 1927, especially notable in his depiction of Undershaft (and Caesar too, in his 1898 play Caesar and Cleopatra); but it was only after the war that such “supermen” actually emerged on the political scene, and it was to them that Shaw looked to lead the way into the future. With the success of the Bolsheviks in Russia and Mussolini's dramatic triumph in Italy, a new epoch seemed to be dawning. Hitler would only add to the expectation with his rise to power in Germany. What Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler all demonstrated was both superior will and a desire to create a new system on the “putrefying corpse,” in Mussolini's memorable phrase, of a moribund liberalism. The very temporal coincidence of these revolutionary regime changes seemed to indicate to Shaw that this was a manifestation of the Life Force, a quantum leap of Creative Evolution to a more efficient political system and one more apposite to the needs of modern urban society. That was Shaw's hope, anyway; and he admired these men for their audacity, their willingness to stand beyond good and evil and attempt to create a vital new social and political order, in fact a new civic religion to replace an enervated Christianity. In reference to Mussolini and Hitler, Griffin remarks that because they were “[f]reed of the moral and institutional constraints of liberalism, democracy, Christianity, and humanism, both dictators attempted to use the unprecedented concentration of state power to enact primordial longings for a rooted, ordered world, its horizon once more fixed and framed by myth, its population cleansed of the cultural, social, and human embodiments of chaos, ambivalence, and degeneracy.”18 Undershaft is likewise free of these “moral and institutional constraints,” believing that violence is “the final test of conviction, the only lever strong enough to overturn a social system, the only way of saying Must.”19 For Shaw, Western democracy was a chimera, and only through bold action, such as Mussolini's “march on Rome,” would capitalism be hurried to its grave. When Undershaft declares that “the ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it,”20 it might easily be Mussolini speaking.While before the war Shaw occasionally dramatized his vision of the superman who would renew man and metropolis—as in such plays as Caesar and Cleopatra and Major Barbara—after the war this theme became dominant. Interestingly, Shaw's first major play performed and published after the war, Heartbreak House, clearly evinces despair rather than hope of renewal. But Shaw had a propensity for countering despair with hope, and despairing plays with utopias. We have already noted his following up the stalemate in John Bull with the promise of utopia in Major Barbara, and he follows the tragicomic Heartbreak House with one of his most utopian plays, Back to Methuselah (and in the midst of the Great Depression he would follow up the despairing On the Rocks with the exotic utopian fable, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles). In truth, Shaw's inveterate optimism was a defense mechanism for an all too acute realism, a realism easily leading to despair. Although Shaw was challenged for his support of Mussolini by the anti-Fascist socialists Friedrich Adler and Gaetano Salvemini—a debate that played out over the month of October 1927 in the pages of the Manchester Guardian—he refused to relinquish his faith. Even his satire on the dictators, Geneva (continually revised through the late thirties and early forties as circumstances changed) ultimately expresses the faith he had in them to rebuild society: people, institutions, and cities. Bombardone, Shaw's caricature of Mussolini, speaking for Battler (Hitler) as well, says that “if you ever had God's work to do you would know that he never does it Himself. We are here to do it for Him. If we neglect it the world falls into the chaos called liberty and democracy, in which nothing is done except talk while the people perish.”21 Earlier, Bombardone remarks to Newcomer (who represents the British Parliamentary view) that, “Half a dozen such obstructionists as you could spin out to two years the work I do in ten minutes. The world can endure you no longer. Your place is in the dustbin.”22 By “work” here Shaw means urban renovation as well as institutional reform. In a letter to Emil Strauss, dated 4 August 1942, Shaw articulates this view explicitly: You think that because I applauded Mussolini and Hitler until they went off the rails, and contrasted their effectiveness and that of the two Napoleons with the impotence of the British Parliament, I became a worshiper of dictators and despaired when they went wrong. But I do not shoot a dictator until he sells out. And I do not become an Imperialist when I point out that Louis Napoleon could and did rebuild Paris whilst the British Parliament could not even build a bridge over the Severn.23But while the superman figure and his or her inherent ability to transform cities and institutions is a major theme of the plays of the twenties and thirties, I want to argue now that one play that might not seem to fit this category actually fits it as well as any other.The Millionairess is a dramatic allegory of fascist power. On the surface, this 1935 play appears an amusing comedy with no underlying political theme, and we might be tempted to agree with Shaw that it “does not pretend to be anything more than a comedy of humorous and curious contemporary characters such as Ben Jonson might write.” Yet Shaw goes on to say, in the second clause of this first sentence of the preface, that nonetheless The Millionairess “raises a question that has troubled human life and moulded human society since the creation.”24 The remainder of the preface considers that question and molding force, which is the “mysterious power that separates” the natural ruler from the rest of us (176). Shaw titled this essay “Preface on Bosses,” and it is a fascinating exposition of his political realism; it also provides a glimpse of the complex feelings that were inspired by those gifted with this mysterious power, such as Mussolini and Hitler, the admiration as well as the anxiety that such power induced: Would they live up to their potential, or would such awesome power unhinge them?The play itself, which concerns the capricious behavior of a spoiled millionaire and her eventual engagement to a benevolent Egyptian doctor, would seem to have nothing at all to do with politics. Yet when viewed as an allegory, its political meaning becomes apparent enough, especially with the aid of the preface. “Preface on Bosses” considers the attributes that make an individual, such as William the Conqueror, “irresistible: the physical strength and ferocity of a king of beasts, the political genius of a king of men, the strategic cunning and tactical gumption of a military genius” (180). But behind such obvious admiration there is fear—for, as Shaw says again in the preface, without a “religious or political creed all autocrats go more or less mad” (194).As Shaw demonstrates in Major Barbara, it is power wedded to the good that will lead us to the new city of God, and in fact the principal theme of the two plays is identical. In the earlier play, it is Undershaft's union with Barbara that weds power to goodness; and in The Millionairess, it is Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga Fitzfassenden uniting with the Egyptian doctor, an altruistic servant of Allah, which does the same. Thus she represents the power of a Mussolini or a Hitler, a power fascinating and irresistible, yet dangerous and unpredictable if not wedded to a higher disinterested purpose, which is represented by the Egyptian doctor. Shaw recognized great potential in Mussolini and Hitler; they each had prodigious energy, were fearless, and commanded the respect and obedience of their citizens. He greatly approved of their political programs (or “nine-tenths” of it anyway, according to a speech he wrote in 1940 for the BBC)25—as each removed paralyzing obstacles, such as parliamentary deadlock.Since their will was law, Shaw hoped they were united to the Life Force and would usher in a new postcapitalist era, such as Lenin and Stalin had already inaugurated in Russia—in 1931, Shaw would visit Russia so he could see for himself the urban, agrarian, and social renewal the dictators had instituted. In On the Rocks, a deeply pessimistic play about a prime minister's failed attempt to bring socialism to England, Sir Arthur finally concludes that he is not the man to bring a socialist society to England, and realizes that he “shall hate the man who will carry it through for his cruelty.”26 If Mussolini and Hitler were aligned with Creative Evolution, they could do wonders despite—or even because of—their cruelty. But if they were not, let the world beware. By uniting the eponymous Epifania with the benevolent servant of Allah, the Egyptian doctor, Shaw unites fascist energy and vitality with public service and genuine altruism. Epifania is a natural ruler, a master spirit designed to give orders and be obeyed. She is a force of nature, variously likened throughout the play to a hurricane, a lightening flash, a tornado, an earthquake, and an avalanche (231, 243, 271), who will do anything to have her will. She is dangerous, but her will is irresistible and her ability to get things done is unmatched.Odd as it might seem, in an essential way Epifania resembles the godlike central character of Shaw's great 1913 romance, Pygmalion. Both characters are depicted as forces of nature, and although Shaw is not uncritical of his creations, he ultimately views them as existing in a realm beyond good and evil, as superior beings that the Life Force has lodged within to an uncommon degree; they are drivers of Creative Evolution. Higgins is Shaw's representation of the great creator—part scientist, part artist, part god—and he lives in a realm above that inhabited by mere mortals. This makes him socially difficult, like Epifania, but he is the driving engine of the race. It is no accident that Higgins's area of reform is the English language, as Shaw himself was preoccupied with phonetics his entire life and longed to see the English alphabet reformed; not surprisingly, this intense desire was part of the same impulse for control in social and political matters. Like Epifania, Higgins is cold and hard, obsessed with his work and frequently cruel. Shaw believed that the supermen of the future would be cold and yet possessed of a mesmeric power. These supermen, whether the provisional supermen of today or the genuine supermen of tomorrow, are always destroyers as well as creators. Higgins must destroy the old Eliza if the new one is to be born, and he is relentless in his task. For Shaw, the supreme quality is the ability to improve the world, to make something better of it. Higgins has nothing but contempt for Freddy, and when Eliza threatens to marry him, replies, “Can he make anything of you? That's the point.”27A year before Shaw died, when he was ninety-three and had learned that a plaque was to be erected in front of his childhood home, he remarked that he would rather “see it blown to smithereens”; and at about the same time, he said that writing a play was for him “my way of building a house.”28 Shaw realized that destruction often precedes creation, and he claimed that he wanted to see London blown to smithereens and rebuilt: “The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal,” his spokesman Tanner says in his Revolutionist's Handbook, “than he who should rebuild another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it.”29 While Eliza can be read as a metaphor for impoverished London, Higgins is the benefactor who must destroy and rebuild it. Like the unattractive city Shaw wanted to see transformed, Eliza is initially “Not an attractive person”: she is dirty, dressed in threadbare shoddy clothes, her hair is in tangles, and, as “she needs the services of a dentist,” no doubt exudes a foul odor—she is in fact repulsive.30 Her speech and primitive noises are disgusting as well, and Higgins tells her that a “woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live.”31 The play makes clear that Shaw wants to see exterminated the conditions that produce such foul persons, and furthermore that he would like to see as many Cinderella-like transformations as is humanly possible. Higgins is one of those rare creatures capable of effecting such transformations, and Shaw describes him as a force of nature: always “thundering” and “storming,” he is a “hurricane,”32 a peremptory creature born to command, who frequently threatens violence against his refractory pupil. At the same time, although Higgins lacks his creator's godlike poise and at one point almost loses his self-control and attacks Eliza,33 he nonetheless clearly possesses an inordinate capacity for self-control to have mastered not only his science, but to have accomplished the superhuman task of transforming Eliza. Higgins, Shaw believes, should not be judged by the same moral code that lesser mortals must abide by, for he is a creature of another sort. Shaw puts it this way in the preface to Farfetched Fables: “The Life Force, when it gives some needed extraordinary quality to some individual, does not bother about his or her morals…. Apparently its aim is always the attainment of power over circumstances and matter through science, and is to this extent benevolent; but outside this bias it is quite unscrupulous, and lets its agents be equally so.”34 Higgins and Epifania are thus both destroyers and creators, but their new creations—unlike that which they replace—are clean, sanitized, productive, and efficient.Before Epifania can channel her prodigious energy into projects that bear the imprimatur of programmatic modernism, she must first come under the spell of the Egyptian doctor. The Life Force attracts the right individuals to each other, and when Epifania sees the doctor she elicits a similar response to that of Cusins when he sees Barbara for the first time. Prior to their meeting, Epifania is willful, but we see no higher purpose to her actions. When the doctor reveals that it was a stipulation of his mother's that any woman who wishes to marry him must pass a test, taking two-hundred piastres and earning “her living alone and unaided for six months,” Epifania unhesitatingly takes the challenge (245). Henceforth she begins to transform the environment, but at a cost.Epifania's first move is to enter a dreary and impoverished sewing shop run by an unimaginative couple who fear change and innovation. Epifania's imperiousness at first fails to intimidate the couple, but it does not take long for her to cow them into submission. In the preface to Geneva, written after both Mussolini and Hitler had proved failures in 1945, Shaw considers whether or not they would have been happier as obscure nonentities, and concludes that the question is irrelevant, since “they were kept too busy to bother themselves about happiness.”35 And that quality, tireless work in the service of something higher than the self—famously extolled in the preface to Man and Superman36—a quality Shaw here ascribes to the fascist dictators, he also transfers to his allegorical dictator Epifania. When she says that she wants “to work, to work. I am in a hurry to get to work,” and the couple asks what kind of work she can do, she answers, “Brain work…. Managing work. Planning work. Driving work” (251). As she begins to take over the sewing shop, she frequently exhorts the couple to do as she says, and by the end of this very short act she has taken control of the couple's business, improving its efficiency and slashing away wasteful expenditures. Finally, as she gets ready to leave, she says: “There is not enough work here for me: I can do it all in half a day every week.” Then this whirlwind departs, leaving the stunned wife only able to say, “Do what she tells us, Joe. We're like children” (255). With these words the act closes.Epifania next transforms the dilapidated riverfront inn, the Pig & Whistle—the site where she had kicked Blenderbland down the stairs, seriously injuring him—into a flourishing five-star hotel, The Cardinal's Hat. We learn that the provenance of the Pig & Whistle dates back to the time of William the Conqueror, yet it has been virtually unchanged all that time. Shaw seems to borrow from the second part of Goethe's Faust here, as modernization requires the sacrifice of another old couple. For Epifania to achieve her transformation, the old couple who had run the Pig & Whistle for years must be removed, and when Patricia asks the hotel ma
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