Creating Communities: Towards a Description of the Mask-function in Literature 9783839441862

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword: Literary Masks as Agents of Revelation and Formation of Collective Beliefs
Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks
Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks
Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello
Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater
Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One
Chapter Six: Conclusion
Bibliography

Citation preview

Nourit Melcer-Padon Creating Communities

Lettre

To Mischa

Nourit Melcer-Padon was awarded a PhD summa cum laude from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her interests range from literary theory to socio-historical studies, with special focus on the ambiguous relationship between fiction and historical reality. She lives in Jerusalem where she is the chair of the English department at the Hadassah Academic College and has been pursuing a post-doctoral research of 17th century Livorno at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nourit Melcer-Padon

Creating Communities Towards a Description of the Mask-function in Literature

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Shira Melcer and Nourit Melcer-Padon Printed by docupoint GmbH, Magdeburg Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4186-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4186-2

Table of Contents Acknowledgements  | 7 Foreword: Literary Masks as Agents of Revelation and Formation of Collective Beliefs  | 9 Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks  | 13 Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks  | 35 Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello  | 59 Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater  | 101 Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One  | 143 Chapter Six: Conclusion  | 189 Bibliography  | 209

Acknowledgements Many people deserve my infinite gratitude upon the publication of this book. First and foremost, I would like to thank my dearest friend, Michal Porat, who not only gave the title to the book, but without whom I would never have started this enterprise in the first place, and Prof. Zephyra Porat, without whom I would never have finished it. The countless talks and emails I exchanged with Zephyra turned this oftentimes gruesomely difficult endeavour into an ongoing conversation I was privileged to enjoy for many years. I am profoundly grateful to Prof. Sanford Budick, who agreed to supervise the thesis that led to this book, and whose guidance was precious at every stage of the work. I cannot thank him enough for his never-ending patience on the one hand, and his insistence on clear thinking and precise wording on the other. His meticulous, uncompromising scholarly approach will remain an example of methodical academic excellence I will always admire and strive to attain. I thank my family for putting up with me and my wild pursuit for so long. Without the support of my parents, Hanna and Sergio Minerbi, of Rita Melcer, my mother in law, my amazing children and chiefly my husband, who has helped edit these pages time after time without so much as a complaint, this would have indeed been a very lonesome feat. Special, heartfelt thanks to Prof. Ruth Fine, and also to Shlomit Davidovitch, Dudi Peli, Prof. Henry Abramovitch, Prof. John Gibson, Suki Nahum, Tamar Gat, Isa Ben-Rephael and Eti Cohen, for their encouragement and sympathy, and particularly to Prof. Stella Butter, whose unequivocal support became the key to the present outcome.

Foreword: Literary Masks as Agents of Revelation and Formation of Collective Beliefs

Years ago, I witnessed a fight between my daughters. “Take off that mask!” screamed the younger one, pointing at a cat’s mask the older one was wearing, which was evidently scaring her. Of course the older one kept teasing the younger sibling, and refused to take the mask off. Exasperated, the younger one cried: “Fine. Don’t take it off. I will go outside and grab a cat, I will qwetch it and put it on my face, and then I’ll show you!” This episode forcefully demonstrated the potency of masks, their deep-rooted effect and their power to impact historical reality. Yet it also demonstrated the existence and operation of two distinctive kinds of masks: the mask my older daughter was using and the mask my younger daughter threatened to fabricate. The older one’s mask is commonly used in carnivals or costume parties. It is a mask which is known to be false, covering a factual individual identity of the person using it. The second mask is quite different: had my younger daughter been able to do as she threatened, and turn a real cat into a mask, this mask would have allowed her to become the cat, to embody its nature and spirit, and possess its (apparently) scary attributes, instead of merely resembling a cat. Masks can thus be differentiated according to their functions which are in turn related to their historical development. In the course of a long cross-­ cultural history, masks have evolved. Today’s masks carry traces of their previous phases and of their transformation over time according to their use in rituals, in the theater and in carnivals, and finally in fiction. Masks operate in both religious and secular frames. As agents of identity transformation, they assist in superficial transformations as well as in deep-rooted ones. The most complete transformation occurs for the person donning a mask during a ritual. For the duration of the ritual, this person is identified with his mask, to the point of voiding himself of his own identity in order to become the mask-invoked deity: both man and mask together constitute a vessel which brings the invoked deity to life among its believers and triggers its efficacy.1

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As Johan Huizinga explains: “when a certain form of religion accepts a sacred identity between two things of a different order, say a human being and an animal … the essential oneness of the two goes far deeper than the correspondence between a substance and its symbolic image. It is a mystic unity. The one has become the other. In this magic dance the savage is a kangaroo.”2 Yet not only is the dancer transformed, but as a result of participating in the ritual, all the members of the community are transformed as well, and become other than they were before. When a ritual mask dances, it is thus activated by the whole community: the dancer and all the participants in the ritual. The power and efficacy of ritual masks stem from the sanctioning of each member of the ‘mask-community,’ a community in turn created by the transformation undergone while the mask was dancing. Moreover, ritual masks assist in generating strong bonds between the members of this community and solidifying its essence. Whether or not the theater was born directly out of ritual practices (a much debated question that cannot be adequately discussed here),3 masks were transposed from ritual to theater. No longer used to invoke a God for the community, theater masks were nevertheless instrumental in the creation of a collective experience for what may be called the theatrical community. The collective experience in the theater is similar to the collective experience of ritual since it consists of the creation of a collective imaginary, a subject that will be central to the present study. Masks were later transposed into novels. Although they were secularized and their medium had changed, literary masks still relied on the collective ritual experience manifest among ritual believers and theater audiences, to invoke and trigger them and recreate a collective imaginary. Textual masks are necessarily invisible and intangible, yet they can be detected by their functions. Since both ritual masks and theater or carnival masks were transposed into novels, one must make a clear distinction between literary masks whose functions are reminiscent of older kind of ritual masks, that I have termed ‘personification masks,’ and masks whose functions relate to relatively later theater and carnival masks, that I have termed ‘impersonation masks.’ Like ritual masks, fictional personification masks have a major role in forming their belief community and constantly reaffirming it. A personification mask-character embodies the collective values of its society, and reveals these values to the readers by the character’s behavior. In rites of believing, whether of religious, political or social communities, the efficacy of a personification mask depends on each member of the community, and on the projection of each participant’s fragment of the collective image onto the mask. Similarly, in rites of reading, the personification mask is recomposed by each member of the implied reader-community, a community that is simultaneously being defined by the co-production of the personification mask in the act of reading. The use

Foreword

of literary masks thus enables the writer to reach out of the books’ pages and create a doubly responsible community of readers: both because the readers assisted the writer in activating the mask, and because they are made to realize that what is reflected on the mask pertains to personal, collective unconscious elements within the individual psyche, to follow the elucidations of Carl G. Jung and of Erich Neumann, the same elements which have produced this specific mask in the first place. Modern-time individualism encourages the consideration of the imaginary as a personal, private matter, yet the incidence of personification masks in fiction makes it clear that personal imaginaries are merely part of a collective imaginary. The paradox regarding personification masks is that through a recognition of their existence, one also recognizes one’s individual personality to be a personality that embraces a greater self, a self that embodies and represents a collective spirit. Accordingly, Personification masks prove that readers are neither as solitary nor as free as they may believe themselves to be. By activating the masks, each reader is made to recognize (to varying degrees) personal, ethical responsibility for the contents embodied by masks. The masks’ power thus stems not only from the power of imagination, but also from the pragmatic impact their operation has on historical reality. As unlikely as a readers’ revolution may seem to the more pessimistic among us, the power of personification masks my younger daughter sensed when she threatened to become a cat, is quite considerable. It is up to each of the readers to realize and assume responsibility for the activation of literary masks encountered in fiction and to vigilantly criticize these masks. This attitude will in turn ensure that future literary masks will embody reformed values and reflect a better society.

N otes 1 | Peter and Roberta Markman explain that “the lifeless mask must be animated by the wearer in order to ‘live’ in ritual, thus demonstrating the integral relationship of spirit and matter.” See: Peter T. Markman and Roberta H. Markman, Masks of The Spirit: Image and Metaphor in Mesoamerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 191. 2 | Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of The Play Element in Culture, trans. Huizinga and unknown translator, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), p. 25. 3 | Three representative examples of the disparate views regarding the birth of the theater are those of (1) Phyllis Hartnoll, who considers Greek tragedy to be a direct development of the Dythyrambs, sung around Dionysus’ altar; though the evolution of the act of worship into a tragedy was slow, the altar was kept in the center of the stage of the earliest plays. See: Phyllis Hartnoll, The Theater: a Concise History (London: Thames

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Creating Communities and Hudson, 1998), p. 8; (2) David Napier claims that ritual and drama are related but did not necessarily stem one from the other and that there is no basis for the belief that all drama is directly related to rituals. Nevertheless, Napier admits that there is no way to determine the exact nature of rituals in pre-classic Greece and one can only rely on what has become known from the sixth century BCE onward. See: A. David Napier, Mask, Transformation and Paradox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 33, 42; (3) Victor Turner, for his part, claims that “the roots of theater is in social drama .... there is, therefore, in theater something of the … sacred, mythic, numinous, even ‘supernatural’ character of religious action – sometimes to the point of sacrifice.” See: Turner, From Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publication, 1982), pp. 11-12.

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

The most obvious difference between masks used in fiction and masks used in rituals or in the theater is that in fiction the presence of masks is not self-­ evident, since the purely verbal medium precludes the tangible embodied visibility that facilitates the immediate recognition of masks in ritual or in the theater. Nonetheless, the claim made here is that literary masks not only inherited the functions of their two historical predecessors, the ritual and theatrical masks, but that these functions are operative in fiction in ways similar to the functions masks perform in rituals and in the theater. Literary masks are divided according to their two major discernible functions, which are closely related to the functions of their two previous manifestations, as ritual masks1 and as theater masks. The function related to theater masks is that of impersonation: an impersonation mask stages one private mask-identity concealing another private identity, with playful or deceitful intent, in acts of manifest duplicity. Impersonation masks are artifacts used for purposes of disguise, concealment or deceit, which hide feelings and truths. When a reveler at a carnival dons a mask for example, he is still considered to be himself underneath the mask. The mask allows for a temporary change of behavior and identity, one which does not usually endanger its user. Using impersonation masks merely entails foregrounding one persona rather than another while retaining the same subject underneath the mask. The same is true of an actor using such a mask. A duality between the actor and his mask-act must be created for the actor to maintain his sanity. Just as the carnival is limited in its duration, so the theatrical convention clearly differentiates between an actor’s identity and his various possible, interchangeable stage identities. Impersonation masks can be visible or not, since in effect any role-playing as well as titles, names, modes of behavior, besides the more obvious masks such as articles of clothing or face-covers, can be considered an impersonation. In modern times, impersonation masks have become synonymous with falseness and are sometimes considered purposefully deceitful and even evil. This view of impersonation masks both explains and stems

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from a modern concept that what is seen on the outside is merely a false cover for some truth or reality lying inside, yet the origins of this view should probably be sought earlier, in the attitude of the Church towards theatrical practices.2 The function related to ritual masks is that of personification: a personification mask materializes one person as the embodiment and manifestation of many participants in a common collective identity. Personification masks reveal, rather than hide, truths about a society’s beliefs and fantasies. While impersonation masks deal with the relationship of the individual to his society, personification masks deal with the relationship of the individual to the rituals of society. The agent creating identity in impersonation masks is the individual who invents himself by adopting this mask. The agent creating identity in personification masks is not the individual but rather the collective. Personification masks also allow access to the shared collective imaginary in addition to beliefs that are common to a given society. Although the imaginary is at present generally thought of as a private, individual matter, personification masks clarify the fact that all personal imaginaries are parts of a collective imaginary since all such masks are the result of group production. Personification masks are therefore useful tools for detecting the shared community reality that is projected onto them and transforms its users. In rites of believing, whether of religious, political or social communities, the efficacy of the personification mask depends on each member of the community, and on the projection of each participant’s fragment of the collective image onto the mask. Similarly, in rites of reading, the personification mask is recomposed by the reading act of each member of the implied reader-community, a community that is at the same time being defined by the co-production of the personification mask in the act of reading. To sum up, the traditional communities in which masks are fashioned and deployed are comprised of the ritual and theatrical communities. Literary masks assist in producing an additional community, a community of readers, who co-produce the masks in their act of reading, at the same time as the community itself is created and sustained by the personification masks that embody the community’s common collective imaginary projected onto them. The functional differences between masks divide them into two major groups, of impersonation masks and of personification masks. Popular carnivals and the theater make visible use of impersonation masks, though personification masks are also used in the theater. Rituals rely on personification masks to embody the collective beliefs of their community as they are projected onto the religious symbols particular to each religion. Masks serve to incarnate the spirit that the collective shares, whether in church institutions, theater institutions or political institutions. This spirit must be projected onto a person, be it a priest, an actor or the king, to be manifest and effective.

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

The historical changes that masks have undergone did not alter their functions, rather they altered our perception of these functions. Early theatrical practices already made use of both kinds of masks, as did early novels. Today, both kinds of masks are still used in fiction and what has changed is the readers’ perception of personification masks. Based on the assumption that reading is a solitary activity, readers do not usually realize they are sharing their reading experience with a community of readers, and yet such a community is created with the assistance of personification masks. Every member of the reader community participates in piecing the mask together in the process of reading, and in projecting values and beliefs onto the personification masks. The reason personification masks are effective in the various communities in which they are used, whether social, religious or literary, is that the collective content projected onto them is not merely present outside the self but is also a projection of the collective unconscious residing in the self of each member of the community. Personification masks are thus the embodiments of the collective unconscious, which are at the source of the collective imaginary of a given society. The importance of personification masks, as writers who use them demonstrate, is in their capacity to bring about a change in a society’s values if that society realizes that what is projected onto the personification masks must be changed.

A. C oncep tual Tools It is widely held among cultural anthropologists that masks are effective artifacts used in collective rites of character formation and transformation. Anthropological studies, as well as cultural and social studies, examine the pragmatic function of the artifacts used in religious or social rituals such as theatrical performances. The analysis of semiotic systems carried out in these fields of study concentrates on how the sign system works, with what purpose and to what effect. Sign systems are instrumental in modeling a collective identity and imprinting it into the self-awareness of each member of the community. I suggest that similar questions as those guiding anthropological and cultural studies are relevant in the analysis of the functions and intended effects of masks in fiction, specifically regarding those masks that are the descendants of ritual masks and whose functions are maintained in fiction. The questions pertinent to the study of fictional masks regard the community frameworks in which masks are fashioned and deployed and the nature of their roles in each framework. Other aspects of these questions regard the influence historical changes may have had on the functions of masks, and whether there are functional differences between fictional masks, ritual masks

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and theater masks. The role masks play in the formation of dramatis personae in fiction, in modeling and manifesting the collective spirit or identity of society present both within the self and outside the self, will be at the center of the discussion. In order to develop a theoretical model and conceptual tools with which to examine literary masks in the texts under discussion, it was necessary to follow the steps of several thinkers whose work stems from the same crossroad as literary masks do, between anthropological considerations and cultural or literary semiotics. Wolfgang Iser’s work was the starting point of this research. Iser not only coined the term “literary anthropology,”3 but also traced in The Fictive and the Imaginary the philosophical development of human nature and its definitions. Iser examined the works of several writers and thinkers from the point of view of the cultural techniques that model the individual. One of these thinkers is the sociologist Cornelius Castoriadis, whose conclusions regarding the role of the collective imaginary in sustaining the structure of society and its institutions contextualizes the social scene in which masks operate. Another angle pertinent to the study of literary masks is provided by Jean-Paul Sartre, who read the works and lives of Gustave Flaubert and Jean Genet from a sociological point of view, analyzing collective psychoses through the prism of masks. In these texts Sartre examines how each of the writers interact with their audience and readership in the process of creating masks. This process conjointly manufactures the mask in the collective imagination of writer and readers. Sartre emphasizes the presence of a collective imaginary operating in and through each individual of that collective. The readers contribute to the creation of the imaginary construct through their own psyche, in which the collective imaginary is seen to be embedded as well, especially when triggered by the text. In these studies, Sartre explicitly discusses the writer as ‘embodier’ of his generation’s collective psychosis in a mask-character, who is presented for the collective judgment of an audience. Sartre’s texts are also invaluable in understanding the centrality of the theater, even in the writing of novels, for the collective creation of personification masks. An example of this collective creation of a personification mask is foregrounded by Iser as well, in Staging Politics, in his examination of Shakespeare’s Henry V. In certain ideological times and places, such as in the era of modern fiction, the social self, or the impersonation mask one uses in order to function in society is also used for self-invention and free-play, as stressed by Iser.4 Yet whereas Iser and Castoriadis are mainly concerned with the social self, and the impersonation masks one puts on for the purposes of social interactions, the collective self, personified in a personification mask, transcends the regular social community identity. Undoubtedly, the ultimate recognition of the exis-

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

tence of impersonation masks one produces as pertinent to one’s social role is performed, as Iser suggests, by a single consciousness. Nevertheless, the paradox regarding personification masks is that through the recognition of their existence, one also recognizes one’s individual personality to be a personality that embraces a greater self, a self that embodies and represents a collective spirit. This becomes clear when one considers ritual practices. Rituals release their participants from everyday activities, since the time and place of the ritual are specific to the ritual and are set apart from the ordinary time and place of the habitual community’s coexistence. The self-identity of the participants of a ritual is distinguished from their everyday social identities. The ritual self is thus a self that exists beyond the social self, and exists in each and every member of the community taking part in the ritual. It is this collective community self that the personification masks embody. This is the reason that Carl G. Jung’s and Eric Neumann’s analytical research on collective elements in dreams, myths, and cultural manifestations proved to be of the utmost importance for the understanding of the nature and functioning of personification masks. Jung and his followers’ writings are relevant to the study of masks because these writings seek an ontological foundation for the force of the archetypes and their outer expressions. One of these expressions is the mask that is postulated on the existence of a universal, collective unconscious, existing within the self. Jung examines collective codes and traditions as embodiments of instituted practice, mirroring the interaction between the individual and the collective. Yet Jung is aiming at a perception of the individual personality that enlarges the scope of the self beyond the individual, private identity, to a self that encompasses a collective unconscious as well.

B. Test C ases : L uigi P ir andello and Patrick W hite Two modern, secular writers explicitly declare their use of masks. These writers are Luigi Pirandello and Patrick White, both of whom use impersonation masks as well as personification masks. In their writing, they allude to religious ceremonies and invite the readers to recognize the characteristics of the masks that originated in ritual and whose functions are operational in community character formation. Patrick White’s novel Memoirs of Many in One is the core exemplum for my investigation because it is a novel that both traces the two earlier stages of the mask and, in my opinion, concretely represents the current summit in the development of the fictional mask. Not only does Memoirs allude to previous texts in the fictional tradition, it actually points to specific texts by earlier authors. Each of the plays and novels exemplifies a salient feature of fictional

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masks. These works are Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Imre Módach’s Tragedy of Man and Goethe’s Faust, as well as an indirect reference to medieval morality plays. My reading of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, which is the play that White made the focal point of Memoirs of Many in One, will be followed by a reading of two plays by White, Big Toys and Shepherd on the Rocks, in order to examine the use White makes of masks in the theater, before moving on to examining his use of masks in his novel Memoirs of Many in One. But even before reading Shakespeare and White’s plays, I will open the discussion with Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author and with his novel The Late Mattia Pascal. There are striking similarities between Pirandello and White in their understanding and use of both kinds of masks in their works, despite important differences in time, language and place. Moreover, Pirandello is known as a master of mask deployment in fiction. In an introductory comment to the play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello instructs the actors to wear masks. Although it is a modern play, breaking new ground in modern theater conventions, it still makes use of visible masks, a use which must be addressed directly since it emphasizes the transition masks have undergone from being visible artifacts to becoming fictional elements in prose. A reading of The Late Mattia Pascal will allow us to follow the detailed construction of an impersonation mask in fiction and of its concomitant function as a personification mask in the text.

C. P ir andello ’s U se of the D ouble F unction of M asks Pirandello’s works deploy both kinds of masks, in their functions of impersonation and of personification. Most of his critics, interested in Pirandello’s theories regarding illusion and reality, focus on his use of impersonation masks, as an expression of the tension between the world outside the character and the character’s internal life.5 The individual’s crisis became emblematic of the modern existentialist experience of uncertainty and alienation, and the impersonation masks became in turn emblematic of this existential angst.6 The mask is presented by Pirandello as one of the necessary evils of socialization.7 By means of the mask, the individual can change his identity and social role, and as Susan Bassnett-McGuire pointed out, Pirandello was interested in “the ironies inherent in belief in a single absolute identity. Many of his plays and prose writings center on the clash between a fixed notion of identity and the multi-faceted nature of man’s social role … Pirandello explored the dichotomy between the mask, which may be assumed as a disguise, and the face that may or may not exist behind it.”8

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

Yet Pirandello’s masking devices are multifaceted, too, and call for an examination of his use of personification masks, that have not received the same attention that impersonation masks have. Indeed, Pirandello presents characters who misguidedly believe that, by using impersonation masks, they can free themselves of their social constraints. Some characters unwittingly personify at the same time the modern notion that one can fashion oneself in any way one chooses by using impersonation masks. Some also personify the desire to elude their responsibilities by playfully pretending to be someone else. Such is Enrico, in Enrico IV, whose real name is not known, and who maintains his friends’ impression that he is mad and irresponsible for his actions by continuing to pretend to be the historical King Henry IV, long after he has already recovered enough to realize the truth about his condition. Mattia, the main protagonist of The Late Mattia Pascal, is another character who exploits the possibility of self-invention by an extensive use of impersonation masks. Yet at the same time, Mattia embodies the fantasy that one can reinvent oneself and start life over again. Mattia and Enrico embody the modern illusion that one can choose to fashion oneself as one pleases. Both characters are punished for their transgressions of social conventions and for their misuse of their masks. Their punishment is similar to the punishment that the misuse of a ritual mask would entail, since they are both banished from normative society. Pirandello’s masks are thus not to be taken lightly: they are not just playful artifacts and their use – and especially their misuse – may have severe repercussions. Masks cannot be used differently than their socially accepted conception allows, nor can they be discarded, as two representative Pirandellean characters prove. The effort that the young boy in “Canta l’epistola” (“He Who Chants the Epistle”) makes to rid himself of masks costs him his life. Moscarda, the main protagonist of Uno, nessuno e centomila, thinks he can “peel” all his masks off and become free of society, only to discover that he remains linked to society even in his remote refuge, where he falsely believes himself to be living with no masks. Pirandello’s use of masks leads us to the conclusion that there is no point in trying to go against the masks since their use in society is both necessary and inevitable. As some of his other characters demonstrate, a clever use of masks can be beneficial for their wearer, such as the husband’s mask in “La tartaruga” (“The Tortoise”), that ultimately protects him from an impossible marriage and allows him a new future, or the sorcerer’s mask in “La patente” (“The License”), that provides the main protagonist’s livelihood once he realizes he cannot be rid of it in any case. Most importantly, Pirandello’s personification masks prove that masks cannot be dismissed as false artifacts, as impersonation masks could lead one to believe, but should also be understood to be artifacts that can embody and

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reflect real feelings that must not be ignored. This is apparent in Pirandello’s use of masks in “Marsina stretta” (“The Tight Tailcoat”). The comical ripping of the coat-mask allows its wearer to give expression to his outrage at the unfairness he witnesses. His character embodies higher moral values, and the ripping of the mask allows these values to come to the fore, substituting one set of conventions with another, morally superior set of conventions. The establishment of a better mask saves the otherwise tragic fate of a young girl. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the mother and daughter characters embody real feelings and their juxtaposition with the other characters reflects and exposes these characters’ (and the audience’s) cynical attitude. As we shall see, in his use of personification masks, Pirandello also suggests that in each of the separate “characters” an entire community identity is personified, in and through the cooperation of the other characters and of the audience. His personification masks allow him to hold an accusing mirror up to his cynical implied audience and to his cultural period. The necessity of a common effort to bring about change in society’s personification masks is apparent in Pirandello’s works. Such change entails a change of values and can only be carried out if each individual member of the community realizes not only the necessity for change but also his or her personal responsibility in bringing this change about that could then lead to renewed hope and to a better society. Pirandello’s masks are thus used for two interrelated functions: the masks criticize the present situation by embodying and reflecting the ills in need of change, engaging the readers’ recognition of this need and hopefully in responsible action towards a better future. Some masks are also used to reflect a different and better reality that will become possible once society embraces morally superior values that will subsequently be embodied and reflected by new masks.

D. M asks as the K e y to the A rtistry of Patrick W hite ’s M emoirs of M any in O ne In his public speeches, White accepts his share of the collective self and addresses himself to the collective component of his audience. In one particular speech, delivered on August 2, 1984, at an advanced stage of his creative life as a writer, the ideological identity White describes and targets is insincerity. This speech, entitled “In This World of Hypocrisy and Cynicism,” delivered as a lecture on the theme of The Search for an Alternative to Futility,9 evokes the collective community feeling that paradoxically exists in the fashioning of every individual.10 In this speech, White points to the universal practice of hypocrisy and duplicity and to the reigning pessimistic and cynical ideology which views all

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

people as masked, and all masks as necessarily delusional. He acknowledges that he and his audience are part of a society that has been disappointed in its leaders, “the politicians in their politician suits,” politicians who wear masks that allow them to become “divorced from life” and to have “lost contact”11 with the needs of those they are supposed to represent. Yet White does not share the conclusions many draw from this situation. Those who view the world as hypocritical and duplicitous use this claim as an excuse to do nothing. Their philosophy supports the alibi impersonation masks afford: if the truth can never be reached and everything is meaningless, then there is no point in trying to protest or change the present situation. Such a view leads to despair of any possible change. White admits that his own single voice, with which he tried to be heard by politicians, was ignored, and that he received no response to the many letters he sent to various public figures. And yet White believes one should not give up, and that there is an alternative to the reign of the false impersonation masks of corrupt politicians. By agreeing to speak in public on this and other occasions, White is performing in his own personification mask, which is created and supported by the audience listening to him. Through this personification mask White can embody another facet of the collective spirit and the faith each individual should have in the possibility to change society by uniting and speaking up together. As White says, “you can’t do much on your own. We must unite – those of us of similar vision in Australia and throughout the world – those of us who have lost faith in our leaders.” Uniting is “the only way we can overcome despair and the sense of futility so many of us are suffering from.” White concludes that it is our duty to unite “in creating faith in life and humankind.”12 White thus believes masks to have the opposite function to hiding the truth, namely that of incarnating and personifying the moral options available to human nature. He believes in the power of each individual to bring change, and especially in the joint contribution each individual could bring to the social and political scene. He is connecting, by means of the mask, between each individual and his or her collective national identity. The “We” exists by each person’s very presence in the audience, by the collective upholding of a personification mask that calls for change. As an artist, he feels he has a special responsibility to uncover lies and expose the values that upheld the impersonation masks, and facilitated the work of corrupt leaders. He uses personification masks in his writing to embody and expose the ills he targets, masks which embody these values and expose them for what they are. Yet the persona as mask of the public speaker that he and his audience create and share in his speeches invites a glimmer of hope that this personification function of the mask might serve a constructive purpose. This hope derives from White’s trust in the power of people of goodwill, who, when working together, can make their will prevail. A mask that embodies this will could be an alternative to illusion

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and deception. What artists can do to help alter their social reality is to reinvent masks that would provide an alternative and put an end to the rule of the hypocritical masks. Personification masks needn’t only personify bitter alternatives. White uses masks not just to criticize and mock the collective hypocrisy but also to stage collective feelings of bonding and togetherness. In one mask technique he thus offers two alternative functions, with positive or negative outcomes. As in Pirandello’s, so in White’s writing, the personification mask has another face, which can be positive when it manifests and sustains strong collective feelings of love and hope. White’s speech connects his use of personification masks in his ideology, in his writing practice and in his private life. In both his life and in Memoirs of Many in One, marriage is exposed as yet another personification mask of the accepted social conventions yet at the same time as an alternative to solitude and cynicism, enabling one to fulfill an important part of the self. In his own life, White “clung to Lascaris,” his partner, “as the man who saved him from the worst suffering of all, loneliness.”13 The two had met during World War II, and although “war has always been against the marriages it makes,”14 their union lasted over four decades. Manoly Lascaris, for his part, stayed with White despite his bad temper and bad manners, defending him in the face of criticism. “What made suffering … worthwhile for Lascaris was the conviction that White was a great novelist and that he had a part in his success.”15 In White’s novel, the wedding ring gnaws into Alex, his protagonist’s finger, and the war indeed is a poor match-maker in her case: her husband, whom she married during World War II despite her parents’ misgivings, commits suicide. But her editor, Patrick, does manage to live in a marriage of sorts with her daughter after Alex’s death, achieving a kind of wholeness and a recognition Alex had striven for but had not been able to reach on her own. Unlike Alex, who did her utmost to separate herself from her family and from Patrick, Patrick realizes that Alex is a part of him that cannot be exorcised even after her death, and his coming to terms with this allows a consciously shared life rather than a solitary, unfulfilled existence. The artistic device White used to stage the prevailing collective fantasy of his age in Memoirs of Many in One is thus not made up of a single personification mask, but rather of two, personified by White’s complementary dramatis personae of Alex and Patrick. As we shall see, Alex embodies the dominant prevailing trends that value the cult of the self-fashioned individual who pursues his or her goals even at the price of a solitary, misunderstood life, and in total disregard of others. The staging of this mask-character is invariably carried out within a community frame, and such staging only underlines the values the mask embodies and that White criticizes by exposing this mask to his readers’ scrutiny. Patrick, the editor, personifies the alter-

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

native to Alex’s mask. His mask embodies the realization one arrives at in adulthood, that other people are not just a part of one’s experience in life but literally part of oneself. Solitude is a delusion, for even in solitude one is never completely alone. The alternative to solitude and cynicism is to be found in the other, and in the realization that the self is not single but composed of many.16 White depicted various group portraits in his writing, such as family portraits, portraits of an anarchic avant-garde theater group in Memoirs of Many in One, or portraits of aristocratic circles in pre-WWII London and of cattle raisers in Australia in The Twyborn Affair. The various groups, whether composed of a single family or of many members of a convent, are the frameworks that sustain the mask-character’s personification function in the novels. White hoped that exposing the values that needed to be changed in the masks he used in his writing would eventually foment the necessary change. Masks embody truths that cannot be accessed in any other way, and provide group-portraits in one visible individual mask-character for the readers to judge. At a time when nihilism and philosophies of the absurd turned emptiness into a fashionable trend, White felt the need to render his criticism of the complex compound self in the grips of these philosophies in a way that would be visible and tangible to his readers, that is, embodied in masks. White tried in vain to show his genre of writing to be a translation of plastic mediums into a verbal medium.17 To his editor and friend, Ben Huebsch, White explained, “always something of a frustrated painter, and a composer manqué, I wanted to give my book the textures of music, the sensuousness of paint, to convey through the theme and characters of Voss what Delacroix and Blake might have seen, what Mahler and Liszt might have heard.”18 White’s effort to make his ideas visible included turning Voss and A Fringe of Leaves into an opera and a film. Nevertheless, he was frustrated that his critics did not see his art for the archeology of the mask, of history and of faith that it was. In 1970, White was not awarded the Nobel Prize since the Academy decided it could not award the prize to “an author whose latest work elaborates on the not at all attractive conclusion that the artist steps over dead bodies in order to give free sway to life; that he consumes people as the raw material of his art.”19 Had the members of the Royal Swedish Academy realized the nature of the personification masks used by White, perhaps they would have seen past their superficial reading of the text. White used masks to embody, reflect and criticize the very same elements the Academy found offensive. Far from stepping over dead bodies, White’s masks confronted the readers with the embodied and renewed presence of the dead members of the community and with the collective history the community shares. His masks remind each reader that the dead and the living share the same collective archetypal

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contents and that this content is as relevant today as it always was. The fact that White had chosen to write certain novels, such as Voss, as fiction based on a real occurrence, did not mean he was producing a chronicle. A writer’s imagination, shared and supported by his readers’ imaginations, is precisely what can fill the gaps in the dry facts and add soul to the narrative.20 White had borrowed particular facts from the writings produced by historians at the time of the expedition of the flesh-and-blood explorer Leichhardt to the same extent that he had relied upon details of his own experiences in the Egyptian desert, although he was writing about the Australian desert in the novel.21 In other words, the fact that his story was based on true occurrences did not detract from his artistic rendering of the same. Without the safe distance of time, White knew his readers to be uncomfortable with the picture of themselves that he forced them to look at, through the use of his mask-character. As he goes on to say in his memoirs: Voss’s controversial origins led to strife with Leichhardt’s academic guardians and confusion amongst the thesis writers. All demanded facts rather than a creative act. In time I was forgiven, Voss canonized, and it became my turn to resent the misappropriation of a vision of flesh, blood, and spirit, for translation according to taste, into a mummy for the museum, or the terms of sentimental costume romance. Half those professing to admire Voss did so because they saw no connection between themselves and the Nineteenth Century society portrayed in the novel. As child-adults Australians grow resentful of being forced to recognize themselves divorced from their dubious antiques, surrounded by the plastic garbage littering their back yards; they shy away from the deep end of the unconscious. So they cannot accept much of what I have written about the century in which we are living, as I turn my back on their gush about Voss. (If there is less gush about that other so-called ‘historical’ novel A Fringe of Leaves it is perhaps because they sense in its images and narrative the reasons why we have become what we are today.) 22

Readers focus on the literal plot in the literal setting, whereas White believes more attention must be paid to the function and nature of the dramatis personae. The personification mask-character forces the readers to realize that the character they are judging is an embodiment of their own beliefs. It is the product of their own society, regardless of the time depicted by the novel, and it is their responsibility and their duty to alter the mask and the values it embodies when necessary. White’s last novel, Memoirs of Many in One, has received relatively little attention in comparison to his other novels. Critics mostly concentrate on thematic interpretations relating to political, linguistic, mystical, metaphysical or psychoanalytical issues, none of which explains the art of this unusual text.23 Some have pointed to the biographical details borrowed from White’s life that

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

indeed abound in the novel. Alex, the main protagonist, can be read as being made up of compound features borrowed from the Greek aunts of Manoly Lascaris, White’s lifelong partner,24 and the character of Patrick, the editor of Memoirs, not only shares White’s name, but also his one-time employment. Yet such details have usually been used to buttress a particular thematic interpretation, rather than being read as part of White’s artistry of masks.25 The presence of masks in the text has not been explained, nor has the use White makes of various kinds of theater. That White chose for the character of Patrick in Memoirs the role of editor is not a mere coincidence, considering the fact that this is a mask-character. During World War II White served as an army censor, reading other soldiers’ letters and approving what the recipients of the letters would read. This occupation, which White terms in his own official memoirs one which entailed “guarding the common good against any excesses of human emotions,”26 is also telling of the nature of personification masks. The accepted “common good” of society is embodied in the masks and reflected on them, making that “good” debatable and open to criticism and change. White’s late effort to underline the role of masks is apparent in his autobiography, as well as in his biography, written by David Marr yet supervised by White, who was also involved in the work, and most of all in Memoirs of Many in One. In this novel, the compounded collective spirit is embodied in one mask-character, a mask that dramatizes an image of a psyche in which many, not one, are present. Wolfgang Iser’s model of the implied reader (followed by the school of reader-response theory) is based on the premise that this reader is a single reader.27 Yet the very presence of masks in certain fictional texts raises a central question about this premise. Whether one is part of a ritual community, part of an audience at the theater, or part of a community of readers of a fictional text, the question remains the same: what is the relation between one’s response as part of the community and one’s response as oneself only? Clearly, neither a believer reciting psalms in church, nor a member of a theater audience is alone, yet readers of fictional texts also participate, unwittingly, in a collective activity. Although writers and readers are considered to be solitary, Patrick White’s text challenges this concept in his many dramatizations and explicit commentaries regarding his persona as the editor of his protagonist’s ramblings. This is already indicated in the full title of the novel, Memoirs of Many in One by Alex Demirjian Gray edited by Patrick White. The co-existence of the private self and of the community in one mask is addressed by White from many different angles and is tested in each community that the mask protagonist is made to visit and mirror. The most prominent mask White uses in the novel is that of the main protagonist, Alex. White uses the unlikely mask-character of this somewhat mad elderly woman to embody modern ideals of eternal youth and

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self-fulfillment. Alex’s quest for meaning and self-fulfillment, and her aspirations for artistic expression, are implicitly condoned or sanctioned by her society, which encompasses the readers as well. Readers may even admire Alex’s rebelliousness and obliviousness to, or disregard for, her advanced age and its limitations despite the ridicule her actions elicit. There are many social scenes in the novel, and White uses his main mask-character to reflect each community that Alex visits, one after another. This mask’s awkward journey criticizes both the communities she visits and the mask itself, since it is the product of the community it mirrors in each episode. Only in this way can a scene such as Alex’s appearance at the Hitler Hotel (MMO: 445) for example, be made intelligible and connected to the rest of the novel. While the mask-character performs in this scene, its community, made up of an “American herd of businessmen and politicians” advances, “snouts to the ground as though rootling after a rare crop of truffles” (MMO: 45). Only if the mask is recognized as a personification of this society and its central figures, which it criticizes at this point, is it possible to connect the scene to the choice of name for the hotel. White includes himself in the crowd he criticizes. He is targeting those who did not refrain from going into a hotel bearing the name of Hitler. The name of the hotel did not make the fascist footfall ring in their ears, and they willingly participated in the events taking place inside the hotel, even if it made them behave like pigs. The many were magnetized by blatant evil, and responded to their own incarnation in the mask dancing before them. Alex and Patrick together present the reader with one compound psyche. Patrick, the editor of Alex’s memoirs, is the one who insists on the historical details of her life, while Alex does not even date her letters or her diary entries. Patrick is used as the conscious and responsible part of the narrated self. Although he recognizes and assumes responsibility for his unconscious counterpart, embodied by Alex, he resists it by clinging to the historical real. From the reader’s point of view, Patrick is used as a mediating consciousness within the text, which facilitates the mission of recognizing the collective ‘we’ within the self as it is projected onto the masks. Through Patrick, White suggests that  the reader is as bound to his private collective self as Patrick is to Alex, and is not free to turn away from it or ignore it.

E. P rincipal A rgument The mask function in literature is a mode of individual and communal activity that is primary in many literary works and has achieved a retrospective exemplary status in the works of Pirandello and White. The agency of the

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks

mask is derived from the collective subject, modeled by the collective imaginary, and embedded in both writer and readers. Though readers may feel that they are solitary in the act of reading, each reader shares his or her reading experience with a community of readers. This community is created with the assistance of the personification mask, which the writer and each of his readers co-create and piece together as they read. The mask defines its own community to which each of the readers belongs once he or she has actively participated in bringing the mask to life. This is a community upon which the mask itself relies for its existence and functioning since it is the readers, we may say, who generate it. Far from being outmoded, literary masks are quite alive in fiction, deploying the two main functions of impersonation and personification, and are not merely used for playful or deceitful purposes. Literary masks have a real, pragmatic impact though they are invisible and intangible imaginary constructs. These masks embody and reflect the values of their readers’ community, which are rooted in the collective unconscious. Therefore, masks do not depend on a specific belief or on particular rituals in order to function. Since the content embodied in them is collective and at the same time exists subconsciously in each reader’s psyche, the function of the literary mask cuts across cultures, creeds, geographical locations or time specifications. Importantly, literary masks are operated by the readers who participate in their co-creation. Literary masks raise the readers’ conscious access to the archetypes by which historical events are governed, and they are therefore key agents of cross-semination of history and fiction. The masks the readers co-produce embody and reflect the values of their society, forcing them to face and pass judgment on the values which have fashioned the masks that the readers actively bring to life. These readers are made doubly responsible for the masks, for their present nature and operation, as well as for the potential changes the masks may undergo. Literary masks are thus effective in raising each of the reader’s awareness of his or her personal responsibilities for the values of their community, validating at the same time the importance and capacity of each single reader to bring about changes in these values and consequently to society and to the nature of future masks. Pirandello’s and White’s works are particularly interesting for the study of the function of literary masks because their texts rely upon and inherit the cultural legacy of the Western tradition that has culminated in them. Not only do Pirandello and White make a conscious use of masks, but they also regard their works as closely related to the history of their times and are aware of the potential impact their use of masks may have on the future fiber of their respective societies.

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N otes 1 | Ritual masks have been studied extensively by anthropologists. Masks from Africa, Europe, the Americas or from Asia vary in shape and texture but not (not significantly at least) in a range of functions that includes law enforcement devices, crafts used for entertainment purposes and as embodiments of the God that is collectively believed in. See George W. Harley, Masks as Agents of Social Control in Northeast Liberia (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Press, 1950), pp. 7, 11, 17, 21, 26, 27. In the religious function, the person wearing the mask becomes a tool for the apparition of the deity. The mask wearer’s identity is usually kept secret and is in any event irrelevant. In many ritual communities, not only the identity of the wearer of the mask is kept secret, but the masks themselves can only be seen by a small number of select people, such as the elders of the village, and are often forbidden to the sight of women and young children. Some masks only ‘dance’ once in seven, ten and even sixty years. See Andreas Lommel, Les Masques (Paris: Braun, 1970), p. 42; Harley, ibid. p. x. 2 | The decline of the Roman Empire also saw a decline in tragedy, as political satire replaced moral debates, and improvisation comedy, which arrived from Naples to Rome, became popular. See: George Freedley and John Reeves, A History of The Theater (NY: Crown Publishers, 1968), pp. 48-9. The religious aspect of the theater had also diminished towards the end of the Roman Empire, yet statues, effigies and altars to the gods still marked the theater as the domain of pagan gods. Tertullian, and later Augustine, demonstrated why theater practices “were fundamentally incompatible with a Christian view of the world.” Importantly for the subject of masks, Remigius of Auxerre, in the 9 th century, followed Augustine’s concern with true and false representations, and made a categorical distinction between person and mask, which still prevails, considering that “masks could represent the contingent and transient qualities of a person, but not a person’s substance or true nature.” See: Donnalee Dox, The Idea of the Theater in Latin Christian Thought: Augustine to the Fourteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 12, 67. Despite the Church’s condemnation of those who attended spectacles rather than the Mass, neither theatrical practices nor the use of masks stopped. The Church eventually integrated the theater into its own practices, in morality plays and religious processions. Masks became symbols of the devil, more often than not in the shape of a goat. See: Romulus Vulcanescu, “Rural Masks in European Cultures,” in: Mircea Eliade ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), vol. 9, pp. 271-2. The threat presented by the theater, which was condemned for immorality, continued to be a major concern of the Church from the early councils to the council of Trent (1545-63), which excommunicated actors. Even a philosopher such as Pascal termed the theater as dangerous for a Christian life. See: Larry F. Norman, “The Theatrical Baroque: European Plays, Painting and Poetry, 1575-1725,” Fathom Archive, University of Chicago Library, Digital collections 2001. http://fathom.lib.uchicago. edu/2/10701023/. (Accessed 5 February 2009).

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks 3 | The cross-semination of anthropology and literature, two highly inter-related disciplines, has long been established. Their combined approach doubtlessly contributes to a deeper understanding and more meaningful interpretation of cultural phenomena. Some noteworthy examples from by now a vast bibliography, (aside from the work of Wolfgang Iser, to which we shall return below), include: James Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary Tradition (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Victor Turner and Edward Bruner eds. The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana and Chicago: Illinois UP, 1986); Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); Fernando Poyatos ed. Literary Anthropology (Amsterdam, Phil.: John Benjamins, 1988); Kathleen M. Ashley, ed. Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990); Nigel Rapport, The Prose and the Passion: Anthropcology, Literature and the Writing of E. M. Forster (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1994); and E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck eds. Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies (Berkeley: California UP, 1996). 4 | Iser’s focus, especially in The Fictive and the Imaginary, is on the capacity of the fictive to inspire the play element in the individual imagination. The play element liberates the individual reader from his real-life constraints and from the pressures of the collective. Iser uses the metaphor of the impersonation mask to demonstrate the boundary-crossing entailed by the “de-pragmatization” that reality undergoes when it is turned into fiction. Such boundary-crossing is likened to the use of impersonation masks because while the subject seems to become another when using such a mask, he maintains his previous identity underneath the mask. Thus, there ensues a to-and-fro motion in the mind of the reader of fiction: while he is aware of entering a fictive world when reading a novel, he is also still aware of his own reality. It is in this to-and-fro motion that the play element finds its expression, an element that frees the reader’s imagination from its usual social constraints. See: Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, pp. 78-79, 224, 236-7, and 303. All further references to this book will be noted F&I in the text. I must add here that Iser’s texts are very complex, and I do not presume to provide a description of his position regarding ethical issues and the imaginary, which would require a separate study. I am only pointing to Iser’s concept regarding the play element in fiction since it is related to the difference between the functions of impersonation masks and those of personification masks. 5 | Impersonation masks were considered to be Pirandello’s tools of criticism of the entire knowable world, which proved to be a mere illusion. Pirandello viewed masks as necessary because they make people’s co-existence in a society possible, but also considered them to be emblematic of the tension between art and reality, and of his contention that eternal art is superior to transitory life, as he expressed in his essay On Humor. Life cannot be stopped in order to be examined, since it is in perpetual movement, and what was viewed a moment ago is no longer the same a moment later. James McFarlane considered Pirandello’s “obsessive preoccupation with masks” as a “determination to replace the illusionistic counterfeiting of reality by the recognition of the

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Creating Communities profounder reality of illusion.” See: James McFarlane, “Neo-Modernist Drama: Yeats and Pirandello,” in: Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane eds., Modernism 18901930 (Hardmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 561. Only art can freeze life, reflect and represent it, in an endless effort to capture the living experience, and only art is immutable and permanent. According to Oscar Brockett and Robert Findlay, Pirandello was concerned with the tension between appearance and reality, but he questioned whether a more reliable truth is to be found when the mask is stripped away. See: Oscar G. Brockett and Robert Findlay, Century of Innovation: A History of European and American Theater and Drama since the Late Nineteenth Century (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991), p. 209. Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni would add that Pirandello’s structural factor is one of unmasking. The role of the writer, as is expressed in On Humor, is to remind one of the harsh reality of the unknown. See: Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni, “Reluctant Pilgrim: Pirandello’s Journey toward the Modern Stage” in: John Lois Di Gaetani ed., A Companion to Pirandello Studies (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 49. 6 | See Raymond Williams, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Chatto and Windus, 1968), pp. 165, 341. Basnett-McGuire points out that “the irony of Pirandello’s concept of the mask, however, is that it does not hide an accessible truth. Once the mask is lifted, what remains is a series of other masks stretching into infinity because there can be no single true identity beneath. Just as life flow cannot be halted, truth cannot be established as identifiable.” See: Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Luigi Pirandello, Modern Dramatists Series (London: MacMillan, 1983), p. 27. 7 | Roger Oliver saw the mask as “a metaphorical construct” of Pirandello’s plays, establishing “the relationship between theater and life.” Oliver explains the term ‘costruirsi’ (to create oneself) which Pirandello uses in his essay On Humor, in terms of the creation of a persona, a mask that “can be a protective as well as a destructive mechanism for both the individual and society.” See: Roger W. Oliver, Dreams of Passion: The Theater of Luigi Pirandello (New York: New York University Press, 1979), pp. 12-13. Giacomo Debenedetti viewed Pirandello’s mask as emblematic of the human condition, which redefines the individual self and at the same time it is also emblematic of the tension between the individual self and the social self. See: G. Debenedetti, Il romanzo del novecento (Italy: Garzanti editore, 1971), p. 410. MacClintock notes the contrast and tension between the social mask and the natural face in Pirandello’s play L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù, see: Lauder MacClintock, The Age of Pirandello (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1951), p. 191. Finally, Gian Paolo Biasin considers the use of the mirror in Uno nessuno e centomila a “doublement de soi [which] points to the idea of the mask, which in turn points to the conception of reality as a social construction.” See: Gian Paolo Biasin, Literary Diseases (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975), p. 103. 8 | See: Susan Bassnett-McGuire, Luigi Pirandello, pp. 3, 102. Fiora Bassanese, for her part, remarked that “masks and by extension, identities are constantly shifting, evincing one of Pirandello’s defining concepts: the multiplicity and changeability of the human personality.” See: Fiora Bassanese, Understanding Luigi Pirandello (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), p. 79.

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks 9 | A speech delivered by Patrick White at La Trobe University in Melbourne. See: White, Patrick White Speaks (London: Penguin Books, 1989), pp. 151-158. 10 | One may wonder how White’s title is relevant to the theme of the lecture, of finding an alternative to futility. I would like to suggest that White’s speech can be read through the prism of the dual functions of masks, of deception and of incarnation, and that White’s alternative to futility lies in the masks’ capacity to incarnate collective ideals for each individual. In fact, this is the underlying meaning of White’s use of masks in his fiction. 11 | Ibid. p. 152. 12 | Ibid. pp. 152, 153, 158. 13 | See in White’s biography: David Marr, Patrick White: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 312. 14 | Patrick White, Flaws in The Glass: A Self-Portrait, (New York: Viking Press, 1981), p. 100; hereafter FG. 15 | Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 357. 16 | White himself admits that “as an artist, my face is many-faceted, my body protean, according to time, climate and the demands of fiction” (FG: 153). In other words, as a novelist, he lends his body to the collection of voices in him in order to bring this united voice into existence in his writing. White is aware of the toll such an existence has on him, when he is mistaken for his partner’s father though both of them are of the same age: “perhaps it is the price a novelist pays for living so many lives in one body” (FG: 113). 17 | In a conversation between White and Thelma Herring and G.A. Wilkes, White said: “I find words frustrating as I sit year in year out reeling out an endless deadly grey. I try to splurge a bit of colour – perhaps to get a sudden impact – as a painter squeezes a tube.” The conversation is quoted in: Peter Wolfe, Critical Essays on Patrick White (G.K. Hall & Co.: Boston, 1990), p. 34. Lyndon Harris points to White’s own correlation of “painters” with “writers,” and sees it as “an indication of how White sees himself, as a painter in words.” See: Harris, “The Peculiar Gifts of Patrick White,” in: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 19, No. 4 (autumn, 1978), p. 466. 18 | A conversation between White and Huebsch, as reported in White’s biography. See: David Marr ed., Patrick White: Letters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 318. 19 | See: Ingmar Björkstén, Patrick White: A General Introduction, trans. Stanley Gerson (St. Lucia, Queensland: Queensland University Press, 1976), p. 92, as quoted in: John Colmer, Patrick White (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 56. 20 | The tension between the value of archives as opposed to that of memoirs underlies Memoirs of Many in One: Hilda, Alex’s daughter, keeps the family archives religiously, while Alex tries to write her memoirs. Alex claims that “archives are only half the truth … Archives have no soul” (MMO: 21). According to White, only if turned into a fictional mask-narrative by a writer with the assistance of his readers, can archives acquire a soul. The mask-character embodying the writer in the novel, Patrick White the editor,

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Creating Communities invites the readers to judge for themselves which is more valuable, archives or memoirs, when he says “whether archives or memoirs contained the truth it might be difficult to decide” (MMO: 16). All references to this novel are noted MMO in the text, and taken from: Patrick White, Memoirs of Many in One by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray edited by Patrick White (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1986). 21 | White confessed he had borrowed “details of the actual expeditions from the writings of those who found themselves enduring the German’s leadership. The real Voss, as opposed to the actual Leichhardt, was a creature of the Egyptian desert, conceived by the perverse side of my nature at a time when all our lives were dominated by that greater German megalomaniac [Hitler].” See: Patrick White, Flaws, p. 104. 22 | Patrick White, Flaws, p. 104. 23 | Several critics found Memoirs to be one of White’s lesser achievements, such as Rodney Edgecombe, who qualified the novel as a “lightweight work,” or Lawrence Steven’s existentialist reading of White’s works, in which he declared that “if Memoirs of Many in One were representative of White’s work … he would not warrant consideration as a major novelist.” See: Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, Vision and Style in Patrick White: A Study of Five Novels (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989), p. 159, and Lawrence Steven, Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction (Waterloo, Canada: Laurier University Press, 1989), p. 153. Elisabeth Webby and Margaret Harris have labeled the novel “quirky.” See: Elisabeth Webby and Margaret Harris, “Patrick White’s Children: Juvenile Portraits in Happy Valley and The Hanging Garden,” in: Cynthia vanden Driesen and Bill Ashcroft eds. Patrick White Centenary: The Legacy of a Prodigal Son (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), p. 270. John Beston, for his part, finds that Memoirs is “more remarkable as an exercise in game-playing and self-mockery than as a literary endeavor.” Beston goes on to claim that this novel “is a flight of fancy that White allowed himself at the end of his career as a novelist, and he spent less care on its structure, characterization and style than in any previous novel .... Memoirs of Many in One does not sustain the image of White as the careful craftsperson that his previous novels convey.” See: John Beston, Patrick White within the Western Lierary Tradition (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010), pp. 15, 359-60. For a comprehensive review of White’s critics, and a comparison between the reviews White’s work received in Australia and in the rest of the world, see: Alan Lawson, “Unmerciful Dingoes? The Critical Reception of Patrick White,” Meanjin Quarterly 4 (1973), pp. 319-392. 24 | White describes Manoly’s aunts in his memoirs, see: Patrick White, Flaws, pp. 101-2. 25 | Mark Williams claims that by choosing the name ‘Patrick White’ for the editor of Memoirs, White “situates himself within the novel … with a mixture of nostalgia and self-mocking deflation.” See: Mark Williams, Patrick White, Modern Novelists Series (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 154. David Tacey finds the use of Patrick White’s name to be a “playful literary device [which] confirms what we have always suspected:

Chapter One: The Double Function of Literary Masks the mother is the actual ‘author’ of the work.” See: David J. Tacey, Patrick White: Fiction and the unconscious (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 200. 26 | Patrick White, Flaws, p. 103. 27 | See: Wolfgang Iser, How to do Theory? (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 37. Iser stresses that his reception theory does not deal with a real reader but rather with an implied one. The implied reader, engaged in the act of reading, is modeled by Iser on a single subject consciously processing the text and letting his awakened imagination carry him away from real life constraints to free play and self-fashioning. See also: Iser, F&I, pp. 224-230.

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Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

A. P ersonification M asks : V essels of C ollective P resence The collective component of rituals is clearly visible, and so is the collective physical presence of the audience at the theater. The personification mask as a central element in ritual is empowered by the group, and one might think that in order for the collective component to be extant, the tangible presence and physical action of both the participants and of the mask is necessary. Yet personification masks exist and retain their function in fiction, even though they are devoid of physicality and visibility. Their function is to assist in making the collective existence present for each reader. The solitary reader of a novel does not physically experience the presence of the collective, yet his solitude does not exclude or exempt him from the collective, rather it allows the reader to experience the group from a distance. The presence of masks in the text helps raise the reader’s awareness and consciousness of collective contents in his own psyche, and subsequently to judge consciously what has been disclosed to him by the masks. Patrick White addresses a modern audience from his own distance of a solitary writer, but one who is extremely self-conscious, since a large measure of self-consciousness is required to experience separateness alongside the collective, that is, both encompassing the self and in the self. In his late works, the problem of a conflicted, complex selfhood is staged in three forms of writing: in his biography, the writing of which was closely followed and assisted by White; in his autobiography; and in his novelistic memoirs. Fiction and particularly the novel is the focal point of my discussion here, and in White’s case, Memoirs of Many in One is the fictionalized personal history of a self and of the collective in this self. Some of White’s previous novels already anticipated the mode of writing of Memoirs of Many in One, such as A Fringe of Leaves or Voss, in which diary entries, epistolary and autobiographical genres were used, but not to the point of becoming the shaping elements of the entire novel, as

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is the case in Memoirs of Many in One. This novel is written in the form of a memoir, yet it is an unusual one, containing the letters and diary entries of one protagonist, all edited by another protagonist. Memoirs of Many in One, a genre unto itself, thus encompasses three other genres, making this novel itself a compound of many in one, a mask for the writer’s psyche, in addition to that of the mask-characters that White uses. White recruits classic ritualistic and theatrical frames, that he uses as backgrounds against which he casts the writer-psyche in two mutually complementing masks, that of Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray and that of Patrick, the editor of her many disorganized papers. In this novel, the two mask-characters represent two facets of a psyche, one embodying the self as possessed by its collective content and the other the self as coming to terms with this content, processing and integrating it into a conscious, responsible self. In addition, White’s setting of the mask-characters in alternating ritualistic, theatrical and literary frames, delineates the historical transition of personification masks, as well as their efficacy as artifacts in each of these settings. The ritualistic and theatrical settings help sustain the effect of the mask in prose fiction, adding to its fictional visibility and ensuring that the reader will become aware of the mask in one or more of the registers in which it performs.

B. The Three R egisters of M asks : J.P. S artre ’s B iogr aphies of G ustave F l aubert and J e an G ene t Two issues are especially pertinent to a discussion of personification masks in Pirandello’s and White’s works: first, the three registers in which masks operate, according to their historical transition from ritual to theater and finally to novel; second, the different manifestations of collective productions of personification masks. Pirandello deploys a multitude of masks in his writings, and the majority of these masks are impersonation masks. White too, allows his mask-character in Memoirs of Many in One to toy with a multitude of costumes and disguises. Yet especially in this novel, White’s principal preoccupation with masks is aimed at the artistic production and modeling of masks that embody collective thinking, in other words, in personification masks. He tests the functioning of his main personification mask in various social frames, in ritual frames of several convents, in ritual theatrical frames of avant-garde productions, and in various literary frames. Jean Paul Sartre, I believe, is the only writer who examines the co-existence of these three registers in terms of personification masks, recognizing their trans-literary functions as personification masks. Sartre contextualizes the personification masks that Gustave Flaubert and Jean Genet created in their writing from a biographical perspective, emphasizing their childhood, during

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

which they were ritually molded into the social masks they were made to embody. He also points to the role of the theater in the lives of Flaubert and Genet, to the use Genet makes of personification masks in his theater productions and to the actual construction and enactment of a personification mask experienced by Flaubert and his school friends.

1.

The Ritual Register

In his studies of Flaubert and Genet, Sartre deployed the interrelated elements that construct the writer as a member of his community on the one hand, and as a fictional writer on the other. Sartre emphasized, more extensively in Flaubert’s case, the role of the collective rituals of the family and of the Church in the personalization process. Significantly, Sartre gave the name “personalization” to an entire volume of the five volumes that make up his study of Flaubert (in its English translation). Sartre’s theoretical assumption is that the rituals which fashion the collective self are very similar in any social context, whether they are performed in church or in the theater or in the novel. In Sartre’s view, collective rituals resurrect the group and restore the practice of often forgotten religious beliefs, even in a secularized community that no longer comprehends the rituals it is performing. Through the ritual, the group becomes possessed, once more, by the ritual’s content. The key function of ritual personification masks, as one of the tools of ritual, is to bring about this possession by means of the imaginary. Sartre illustrates the ironies of the collectively instituted self, created through communal ceremony, by quoting a passage from Flaubert’s letter regarding the baptism of his niece. Instead of seeing the baptism as a gathering of individuals, each of whom participates in producing a collective rite, and who are bound to this rite by practical relations that they produce and sustain, Flaubert derides what he sees. He describes all the people taking part in the baptism as “robots, manipulated by a forgotten rite that seeks to be reborn. Teleguided, inhabited by gestures that force themselves to be made without then being understood, they are bound to a dusty habitus that vampirizes them” (FAID: 4/ 174).1 The personification mask is one of the ritualistic tools with which the ritual imprints its participants with a “dusty habitus.” Whether the participants in the baptism are aware of it or not, this mask is what directs them to behave according to a ritual whose raison d’être they may have forgotten. As Sartre explains, “here Gustave is acting the artist .... For him, religious practice is playing the fool, and the ceremonies of Catholicism are as much mummeries as the antics of fetishism.” Nevertheless, at the same time, Gustave knows that “‘the religious instinct’ tends of itself to become particularized: thus, stupid as they seem, ceremonies are inseparable from it – they incarnate it .... Religion is wholly incarnate in the cult rendered to the fetish” (FAID: 4/

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172-3). Gustave derealizes the priest, the public and the child “in a first totalization” by claiming that no one knows what they are doing. However, despite his sarcasm, Gustave understands perfectly well that his family and the officiating priest are “obeying a strictly social and utilitarian imperative,” since the greater part of Rouen is Catholic, and would be deeply shocked if the child were not baptized. People would stop talking to Gustave’s family and his father would risk losing clients in his doctor’s practice. Gustave mocks the priest, who is presented as one who “has just dined” and is “red-faced,” who “hurriedly muttered Latin that he did not understand” (FAID: 4/ 172). To this Sartre adds, that certainly the priesthood is also a bureaucracy: baptism and marriages are daily duties that must be swiftly expedited; but we are unaware of just how deeply the priest appreciates the act of baptism, the religious meaning he gives it – Gustave alone determines it, out of anticlericalism as well as a taste for totalization. This very taste compels him to blend himself, a ‘portion of humanity,’ with the audience – unjustly. For if there is anyone who is not unaware of the meaning of the ceremony it is Gustave; we have just seen that he considers it to be the ridiculous incarnation, stereotyped by centuries of repetition, of our pure, and vague sense of the religious (FAID: 4/ 173-4).

Flaubert reinserts himself into an active participation in the collective rite by ridiculing it, a ridicule which only underlines his deep understanding of the binding element of a shared ritual. His “taste for totalization” engenders an artistic reversed personification mask that embodies the value of the rite. It is “Gustave, by his totalizing refusal to comprehend, who transforms the present into a magically resurrected past. From this moment, it is the imagination that perceives. If the ceremony is a resurrection, the group that restores it without comprehending it, in the absolute gravity of religion, must be possessed by it” (FAID: 4/ 17). Thus it is Gustave’s “aesthetic distancing” from the presently performed rite that “will remain living as long as it is kept alive by Catholic communities,” which create “‘a ceremony of a distant religion, exhumed from the dust’” (FAID: 4/ 174). Sartre is here quoting from Gustave’s letter. Whether the writer expresses reverence for religious rites or derides them, the significance for his text lies not in the verbalized attitude towards religion but rather in the writer’s very preoccupation with the ritual. The writer may rely on his readers’ estrangement or lack of respect for the Church and its officials and invite readers to ridicule Church rituals. Yet readers who are able to see the writer’s construction of a reversed personification mask based on the ridiculed rites may notice that as in Flaubert’s case, so in White’s, the Church and its rituals occupy a central position, regardless of the negative or positive attitude expressed towards it in the writing. In Memoirs of Many in One, both attitudes can be discerned. Alex “shot inside the great cathedral opposite and scrubbed” the remains of the lipstick she had stolen at a store, scrubbing herself “with

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

holy water from the stoup, not without twinges for what [she says] I might be contracting from so much holy slime … I dried myself on a pamphlet advertising a retreat, then I sat for a moment to give thanks to Whomsoever it is in this gloomy Irish sanctuary” (MMO: 39). Alex’s total irreverence for the place and cynicism directed at those who believe that holy water can cleanse a felony, does not detract from the fact that as a mask embodying her community values, she is herself at the same time imbued with Church rituals – enough, at least, to enter the Church in the first place, regardless of its denomination. White allows another character, Alex’s mother, to voice a feeling many secular readers could share: “‘though I am not a believer,’ Aliki assured us, ‘the smell of an Orthodox church is consoling.’” (MMO: 15). White’s preoccupation with religious rites and the meaning they may still contain in modern times is refracted through the many episodes his mask-character takes part in as a nun. Though these are put on the same level as her “mystic” episode, or her theatrical episodes, the underlying need she repeatedly expresses, towards the end of her life, for the absolution of her sins, cannot be brushed away as just another cynical remark about institutional religion. Most importantly, the underlying fragmented narrative is itself based squarely on a Christian morality play, emphasizing to this modern mask-character and to its co-producers, the readers, that Church rituals and the collective self they address are still present and even, to a certain degree, valid in their lives. Alex ends her days in a Catholic hospital staffed by nuns, with her daughter and friend at her side. This return to the midst of a community that Alex had tried to evade is similar to an instance that Sartre sees as proof of Flaubert’s intrinsic participation in the collective rites of his society. Despite his deriding utterances towards the Church, which, as we saw, constitute a reversed personification mask of the attitudes he derides in others, Flaubert left Paris to return to his parents’ home, following the seizure he suffered in 1844. Flaubert, like many other people, who, according to Sartre, “return to die in the midst of their family,” do so not so much because they are seeking physical help, but because they want to recuperate their death by socializing it as a communal adventure of the group from which they came and which will survive them .... Death … will become … a determination of communal life surpassed but preserved, instituted as an imperative of the sensibility and as a repetitive ceremonial. The dying person desires to live his death as a passage to eternity by discovering it in the eyes of those near him as an archetypal event that will henceforth be maintained in the form of a celebrated eternal return (FAID: 4/ 91).

In something very like the same way, both Flaubert and White demonstrate that the mask-character is used in their texts for purposes of social binding,

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notwithstanding their ridiculing of social practices, in this case of religious practices.

2.

The Theatrical Register

A major part of Sartre’s detailed study of Gustave Flaubert is devoted to his school years, and to the creation of the character of the ‘Garçon,’ an imaginary character invented by Flaubert and a small number of his school friends. The mask of the Garçon provides a private case of the collective creation of a personification mask, which at the same time defines the mask’s community of believers. In the case of Flaubert and his friends, the mask is physically activated, when each member of the community takes his turn in acting out the part as dictated by the mask. Such activation is suggestive of, or parallel to, an audience at a play or readers of a text, since the mask is an imaginary mask, and relies, like a ritual mask, on the collective belief and participation of its community. The Garçon is an archetype (FAID: 3/ 116) that binds the boys to each other through their collective enactment of his role. As Sartre explains, “the Garçon must be a fiction .... The young actor knows, moreover, that the character is not his creature: it is collective property .... he is acting under control, and the sacred character of the representation frees him and justifies him” (FAID: 3/ 336). The Garçon incarnates that which cannot be articulated: acting the role of the Garçon together creates a new cathartic ritual for this secret fraternity, or young “freemasonry” society, a ritual that would be incomprehensible to anyone but them, and yet this “passion” is in every way reminiscent of a religious passion, of the Christian passion in whose light they were all raised. Co-acting the role of the Garçon creates a “primitive psychodrama,” an act performed by a single person yet invented by everyone, since “the spectators are Garçons in progress,” whose “common production of the comic realizes the integration of the actor-spectators” (FAID: 3/ 337) and allows them to be bonded together and love each other. The Garçon is therefore not only the fruit of a collective creation but also expresses this collectivity in each of the boys as they take turns in enacting the character. The Garçon does terrible things, defecates in front of the bust of King Louis-Philippe, and takes pleasure “in the lowest and filthiest jokes” but ultimately is nothing more than “a bourgeois” who “laughs at himself in a sufficient bourgeois fashion to provoke the gross laughter of a bourgeois public” (FAID: 3/ 150). The Garçon, as part of the boys, part of Gustave, laughs at what it both embodies and reflects – themselves and their society – for “to laugh at everything, one must put oneself in everyone” (FAID: 3/ 121). The Garçon is above all a collective expression of the boys’ own social values, of the very foundations their community is based on. The Garçon allows

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

them to reject the bourgeois ideology they resent, yet they do not realize that the Garçon is itself constructed by the same ideology, that is, by the same values they reject (FAID: 3/ 337). Flaubert’s future œuvre, as Sartre explains, will depict a conscious ‘unmasking’ of his society while at the same time being himself an embodiment of his class collective ideology, and whose “class being is thereby affirmed by the very movement that would allow [him] to transgress it” (FAID: 5/ 134). Both Pirandello and Patrick White understood the importance of theater for the creation of a mask character and its supporting community, not only in their dramas but also in their novels. Specifically in Memoirs of Many in One White stages his protagonist within several theatrical productions, and the theater is indeed the most obvious place for the staging of collective scenes. At the same time, White uses the theater to undercut and criticize his mask character, stressing Alex’s complete misunderstanding of the role of the community in the strength and operation of her mask. Whether acting a Shakespearean part or a radically modern part, Alex wants glory and recognition as a star actress, but not participation in the community that collectively supports this mask-­ image. In the same way that Flaubert’s childhood invention of the ‘Garçon’ character serves him to criticize the bourgeois class he is himself part of, Alex belongs to the leisurely set that can afford to attend cocktail parties or set off on a quest of self-fulfillment. White uses his mask to criticize those who sanction her aspirations by making it embody modern convictions of the possibility to fashion oneself in total disregard of, and opposition to, everyone else. It is in the theater that her mask is exposed most effectively and where the role of the community in the shared creation of masks becomes especially clear. The theater provides a preliminary framework for the examination and explanation of processes the audience undergoes when watching a play, which are similar to the effects that prose has on its readers. The roles that both audience and readers are called upon to perform when watching a play or reading a novel are also similar in White’s renditions. We can turn to Sartre’s comments on a play by Jean Genet entitled “The Blacks,” to understand the role of the members of the audience as active participants in the creation of the fictive reality and the characters inhabiting it. In this play, a group of black actors are facing the audience, and, says Sartre, the effect it has on a white member of the public is one of unease, which is the author’s intention .… The black who is reproached by whites, unable to communicate because of the white’s refusal to communicate, still wishes to play out the comedy to the end. He is himself in real life a theatrical subject. He acts a play and he acts it because the play, as Genet would have it, is imposed by the whites, but has become second nature .… Because an actor who plays the comedy on stage, by virtue of the fact that we also make him play in real life, shows us, in some part, his truth in that way, but by the same token

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Creating Communities he partly hides it. We do not know what this actor is in the depth of his own being, and it is just the discomfort of knowing this, or realizing that the actor is more than an actor, that creates our sense of anxiety and makes us ill at ease. The more the black plays the part we want him to play, the more we think in depth about him. 2

The audience is drawn into the play by being made to realize its own responsibility in creating the fictional world and the personification masks presented to it on stage. The imaginary thus entails the active participation of the audience: it is a collective imaginary, co-produced by the playwright, the theatrical cast and the audience. The audience must achieve recognition and thereby responsibility for the mask it helps create on stage; in similar manner, readers must undergo a process which turns their re-creation of the text, through their reading it, into a voluntary possession by the text. They then become co-responsible participants in the coming to life and animation of the literary mask, which holds a role in each reader’s personal imaginary, though it is a product of the collective imaginary (SG: 498, 500).3 The actors of a play will do their utmost to convince the audience of the authenticity of the feelings they bring to life, which they allow the audience to experience through their communication and acting out of these feelings. Sartre depicts this process in no uncertain terms, going as far as using the terminology of contagious diseases: “the moment they play their parts … action gives way to passion .... This, when expressed is an appeal to reciprocity … the actor wants to persuade by contagion .... The only means of making the play exist for us is to infect us with it .... The more we identify with him, the closer we are to sharing his belief” (FAID: 1/ 160-1). A belief community is thus established in the theater, a community in which actors and audience take part, trapped in the person of the character acted out on stage: “every interpreter of the role is forced to singularize the monologue .... He seeks to contain us in the character, to imprison us in the world of belief” (FAID: 1 /161). The use of the theater in the novel is part of the writer’s effort to include the reader in the text by allowing him to join the audience of a theatrical production depicted by the text. The theater is a prime location where the mask is staged when it is put into use, brought to life and exposed to the scrutiny of the reader.

3.

The Novelistic Register

In the co-production of the fictional mask, both writer and reader are collective in nature, and enact segments of the collective imaginary in the cognitive processing of the persona-character that they necessarily act out in every day life. The implied community replaces the single author and the single implied reader. Each member of the ritualized community embodies, through his or her very participation in the community, the collective image he or she acts out

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

without usually being aware of it. Sartre used the same model to diagnose the shared cultural psychosis and its self-designed personification in the figures of Flaubert and Genet. Writing and reading is here shown to take possession of writer and reader and involve a co-production of a co-produced self. By following the personal histories of these writers, Sartre delineates the cultural identity crisis of their times. He concludes that if Flaubert’s Madame Bovary “made him instantly famous with a resounding success” it can only be explained through the fact that his readers “recognized themselves” (FAID: 5/187) in the text. Fiction evidently became part of new rites of incarnation and healing by recognizing collective elements as they were constructed into mask-characters and projected onto them. Later on, Flaubert created other characters that shared the same characteristics of the Garçon in his writing, such as Yuk, God of the grotesque, an ugly, eternal clown in Smarh. The Garçon would also find his way into Madame Bovary, “reduced for the needs of the novel” (FAID: 3/ 113). The Garçon is vulgarity personified, a collection of all that Flaubert finds ignoble in himself and in his fellow bourgeois, which he underlines and intensifies to the level of caricature in the character of Homais in Madame Bovary. Homais, the village apothecary, is the epitome of the bourgeois, ridiculous in his clever stupidity and in his aspirations of grandeur. The novel ends with society’s rewarding of these aspirations and of the values embodied by Homais: “Since Bovary’s death three doctors followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him. He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.”4 The annihilation of the Bovary family and the triumph of Homais, supported by “public opinion” is also the victory of the Garçon. Bourgeois ideals win, society chooses to perpetuate itself in its ‘Homais’, preferring to uphold its institutions to the humanitarian assistance it should provide all its members, even those who are different, such as the shouting madman in the novel – or the Bovarys. Flaubert studied his culture, using masks as his preferred testing tools. He looked at the community’s codes of living through this prism created in the novel, the personification masks of embodied codes. Flaubert saw the interest which every detail, every utterance he heard around him, could provide his writing, as one can appreciate even in his compilation of the ludicrous Dictionary of Received Ideas, in which he humoristically satirizes the values of his society as they are expressed in its use of language and everyday speech. Flaubert embodied himself in several of his characters (FAID: 5/ 605), and is remembered for answering “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” at his trial, when asked whom he had modeled his character by. Sartre explains this expression in the same terms as those he used to explain Flaubert’s taking upon himself the role of the Garçon. The character “penetrates him from the outside and is discovered to be himself

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in passivity, or if you like, he is himself the great creature lying between the lines, a creature that only the act of another will awaken. And through a drama with an inverted sense but an analogous structure, he can also pull the act from outside thanks to the beliefs his game inspires in others” (FAID: 1/ 166). Flaubert, who is himself first modeled by the ritual masks imprinted on him by his immediate family, then by the masks confronting them by incarnated codes of class, belief and education, is finally modeled by the masks he invites his audience and readership to co-produce in the act of viewing and reading.

C. S taged P olitics and the C ollective P roduction of M asks : W olfgang I ser and C ornelius C astoriadis Flaubert, the acclaimed nineteenth century writer of wealthy bourgeois origins, was nevertheless an outcast in Sartre’s view – very much like Genet, the orphaned ‘enfant terrible’ of twentieth century modernist French theater. Both Flaubert and Genet were collectively modeled by their society and by their era, and both took revenge on society by flinging back at it the very persona that this collectivity had fixed them into, a personification mask they used in their writing.5 Clearly, Sartre’s focus was on each writer’s personal revenge on the collective carried out by forcing their audience and readers to participate in the production of hateful personification masks. Patrick White devotes large parts of his novels to the mirroring of his social environment, which becomes molded into his mask-characters. Yet he is not interested, as Sartre was when he wrote about Flaubert and Genet, in a specific individual’s outlook, but rather in grasping and projecting the values of entire social segments. In The Fictive and The Imaginary, Wolfgang Iser addresses the issue of collective embodiments in one single figure from two major aspects. Although not his principal object of study, Iser is aware of the collective elements in the reader’s experience, and examines them in various kinds of theater, as well as on the social scene, by introducing the theory of Cornelius Castoriadis. Iser claims that Castoriadis’ theory of the social imaginary “universalizes the imaginary” (F&I: 212), when he depicts the collective imaginary and its functions in social institutions. In another book, Staging Politics, Iser discusses the imaginary collective and its embodiment in a single dramatis persona. Iser analyses the artistic creation of the personification mask of King Henry V in Shakespeare’s play of the same name. Iser points to the collective creation of the mask of the king by the collaborative imagination of all his subjects, strengthened by the fact that the words are voiced by the chorus, a unified collective body on stage.6 This text is highly relevant to White’s own reference to another Shakespearean play in Memoirs of Many in One, as we shall see later on.

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

As mentioned in Iser’s The Fictive and The Imaginary, Castoriadis’ claim is that the individual is the product of society. The imaginary is pragmatic in that it institutes society, which then creates the individual. Castoriadis’ thesis is especially important where personification masks are concerned, since the collective, not the individual, is responsible for the fashioning of the individual’s personification mask. Like Carl Jung, Castoriadis points to the antitheses between the collective modeling of the subject and the self-fashioning of the subject. Castoriadis coined the term ‘radical imaginary’, which he viewed as existing “as the social-historical and as psyche/soma. As social-historical, it is an open stream of the anonymous collective; as psyche/soma, it is representative/affective/intentional flux” (IIS: 269).7 There is a strong interrelated relationship between the social-historical element in society and its subjects. The creative role of each individual’s imagination within society lies in his or her contribution to the positing of forms-types/eide other than those that already exist and are in force for the society, an essential, inexpungible contribution, but one that always presupposes the instituted social field and the means that it supplies, and that effectively becomes a contribution (something other than daydreams, whimsy, delirium) only to the extent that it is taken up again on the social level in the form of the modification of the institution or the positing of another institution (IIS: 264).

Castoriadis thus regards individual imagination only as part of the social imaginary and as containing elements from the social imaginary. The individual will always remain connected to society by partaking in the imagination which structures him as well as participating in society’s constitution by contributing to the changes that can be brought about in social institutions; yet at the same time, it is society that separates him and turns him into an individual with a private world. If the individual, created by society according to the model Castoriadis deploys, were to look at himself in the mirror, what he would see would not be just himself but his society and the mask it has created for him, or in Castoriadis’ words, … the constitution of the final ‘identification model’ for the individual. At one of its poles, this model is a social imaginary signification which concretizes and articulates the institution of the individual by the society in question (the hunter, the warrior…). Mediated by the individual’s own history, it possesses a second pole in the singularity of the individual’s creative imagination … However, through this ‘identification model’, what is invested is still also always an ‘image’ of the individual for himself, mediated by the ‘image’ which he imagines he is giving to the others” (IIS: 315). 8

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What is true of the image that Castoriadis describes is also true of personification masks, which are constructed by society for its individuals. Such masks can be observed outwardly but they also function inwardly, within the individual, as an expression of the collective imaginary in the self. The use of a personification mask by the individual is an expression of the collective element in the self. It is this collective element which makes the others capable of understanding what is reflected by the mask. The self is only created to the extent that it can integrate into itself these collective components which are the ones that produced the mask. According to Castoriadis, “the ‘product’ has to exist in and through the actual social imaginary before it can and in order to be ‘real’. The counterpart in the individual is the imagination” (IIS: 264). I propose that this counterpart in the individual, in the form of a personification mask, is one of the products of the social imaginary. It mirrors the social imaginary and therefore does not stand on its own. In addition, the personification mask has a unifying power, since it is part of the social imaginary that constitutes socialization. The personification mask, as part of the social imaginary, is embedded in the collective unconscious, where it has socializing functions similar to those it has in the historical world.

D. The M asks W e W e ar in E veryday L ife : Two  A rche t ypes  R ele vant to M emoirs of M any in O ne 1.

The Archetype of the Great Individual

Two archetypes are especially relevant to the study of White’s novel, that of the Great Individual and that of the Persona. Patrick White’s main protagonist, on her quest for the meaning of her life, seems to want nothing more avidly than to be a great person, a royal figure. She presents herself as “’the Empress Alexandra of Byzantium and Nicaea’” at the door of the cocktail party she attends (MMO: 67), and calls herself “’Princess Alexandra Xenophon’” in her conversation with the cab driver (MMO: 158). At the theater, she relishes dressing up as Cleopatra and bossing everyone around. Short of a royal, she strives to be a great actress, a great artist, or at least God’s understudy (MMO: 87). One could easily construe her megalomaniac aspirations to be the signs of infantile egocentricity or the delusions of an old schizophrenic.9 Yet White points to a Jungian reading that deepens the role of the mask-character in this novel. Deriding his Jungian critics,10 White lets his mask-character admit to an eclectic education which includes “dear old Father Jung, who, I am told, I misinterpret” (MMO: 54).11 I would like to follow out White’s mention of Jung, and suggest that the Jungian archetype relevant to this novel and to its masks is not the anima or the Great Mother, as others have suggested, but rather the archetype of the Great Individual.

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

According to Erich Neumann, the Great Individuals of a society are the transmitters of the collective canon (OC: 371), the medicine men, the prophets, the leaders, but historically the Great Individual “is most accessible to us in the role of the god-king and, later, the king” (OC: 428).12 Through the king’s personification of the collective contents of the people, his image or mask makes the transpersonal contents existing in each personal psyche accessible.13 Personification, or the projection of transpersonal contents upon specific persons, is, according to Neumann, the most important result of “secondary personalization,” both within the individual and within a society (OC: 339). The process of secondary personalization is a “persistent tendency in man to take primary and transpersonal contents as personal, and to reduce them to personal factors… directly connected with the growth of the ego, of consciousness, and of individuality… [this is] also connected with the process of introjection and the interiorization of ‘outside’ contents” (OC: 336). The individual who has successfully undergone individuation or secondary personalization is one who has managed to assimilate collective psychic contents which were already ingrained in his ‘psychic constitution’ and turn them into his own personal psychic materials.14 Thus, the possibility for the creation of a private and distinct individuality largely depends, according to Jung, on the individual’s capacity to integrate collective unconscious materials within himself. Contrary to modern encouragement of individuals to strive for the establishment of a unique individuality, Jung explains that “human individuality is nothing in its own right, but rather the accidental product of forces contained in the objective environment.”15 The selfhood of the individual is therefore not constituted solely as a result of his or her own efforts. As Jung described it, “The term ‘self’ seemed to me a suitable one for this unconscious substrate, whose actual exponent in consciousness is the ego .... The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguration of the ego. It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself” (CW: 11/ 259).16 Read against Jung’s explanations regarding the inborn presence of the collective unconscious within the self, Alex’s trendy modern efforts to fashion herself by escaping her family and her society seem futile and pathetic, especially since she endeavors to do so at such an advanced age. An adult individual, in Jungian terms, is one who has managed to come to terms with the necessary integration of transpersonal contents within the self and has reached a consequent measure of individuation. Alex tries to attain a distinct individuality not within herself, but rather by adopting one fashionable belief after another, accumulating nothing more than meaningless experiences. She does not approach a “self-regulation” of psyche that “governs the maturation of all personality” and that entails an integration of all the authorities of the personality within the self (OC: 412-3).17 Since Alex cannot consciously

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experience any part of her archetypal content, she succumbs to it, and is in fact completely in its grip. Alex claims to be a performer and an artist, willing to sacrifice everything for her art. Yet she gets the role of the Great Individual wrong as well.18 Despite her grandiose declaration, Alex is not thinking, as Great social Individuals do, of the sacrifice she would make for the sake of humanity. All Alex is willing to sacrifice are her children, for the sake of her own selfish pleasures. She considers herself a “defecting mother” (MMO: 125) and she says of her daughter, Hilda, that “she is one of my burnt offerings to the jealous god” (MMO: 53). This allusion comes right after Alex’s escapade at the seaside, where she stays at the Dobbin’s cottage for the night, pretending to be a child once again, and therefore devoid of responsibilities towards her own children. It is during this night that Alex dreams of dancing at the Hitler Hotel, and the next day she looks at Mollie Dobbin preparing bread. The loaves “looked to me like babies awaiting birth or burial.” As she is driven away from the cottage she sees Mollie rushing in to take the burnt loaves out of the oven, “the babies my surrogate mother and I had prepared for their holocaust” (MMO: 48, 51). White here criticizes not only his own mask-character, but through her the whole of humanity that had stood by as real human babies were being sacrificed to a Nazi Moloch. On her theatrical tour of the outback, Alex claims not to be “deterred by rebuffs” and asks Patrick in her letter to him: “isn’t it what we expect when we lay our necks on the block for art?” (MMO: 128-9). The sacrifice she mentions here reminds us of yet another queen, Marie-Antoinette, beheaded by the republicans. Beheading, in psychological terms, is a removal of the ego from its sovereign seat. The drama of transformation into a self that recognizes the share of the collective in that self is performed in an alchemical marriage, as described by Jung.19 The king, the symbolic representation of the ego in the self, shares the Mercurial bath with the queen, and is in danger of drowning in this substance, which represents his own unconscious content. The king’s subsequent rebirth through his marriage to his gender opposite also enables him to reach wholeness. Yet wholeness can only be achieved on condition that one accepts the decapitation of the king, the shifting of the ego from its royal seat, and a conscious acceptance of the importance of the place of the other within the self.20 White shows in his novel, that even if artists may be today’s hero incarnations of the Great Individual archetype, artists too must be able to control their consciousness. Only in such a way can the artist make order of the internal chaos we all share and turn dreams or piles of paper into organized works of art. As Neumann explains, in the process of “centroversion,” or “self-formation” of the personality, which is the nucleus of the developmental trend of the second half of life and a part of the secondary personalization, the power of the archetypes in the psyche must be broken down. During this process, the

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

strengthening of the ego should simultaneously undermine the unconscious contents which are then incorporated and ‘digested’ by the psyche, contents that are thus assimilated and made conscious.21 Nevertheless, the assimilation of external and internal collective contents which is one of the results of secondary personalization, has become more dangerous for modern man. The transpersonal contents that used to be projected onto gods are now projected onto people, which “leads to a necessary but exceedingly dangerous confusion of the person with the archetype.” Neumann here refers to the social scene, and adds that “a healthy collective culture is possible only when secondary personalization is not carried to the point of absurdity” (OC: 335-9). This is precisely the danger White warns against in his use of a mask-character which is completely swamped by her own archetypal contents, and seeks recognition as a Great Individual. White’s mask points to other historical megalomaniacs on whom our collective unconscious archetypal matter was projected, and with whom people identified, and allowed their over-inflated egos to bring about destruction and the near annihilation of entire peoples. The dramatization of the humbling of the ego is embodied by White in a would-be artist. The artist, even more than the king, feels that his or her creative power is god-sent. As Alex says: “it seems I shall never be humble. Are artists ever?” (MMO: 127). Yet artists must also recognize the fact that there is a great power behind their ability to create a work of art, which is never entirely their own. Acknowledging this dependency, is another reason why White’s persona in the novel is only allotted the role of editor of the narrative, the collector of fragments who tries to make sense of all the materials – and forces – that he has inherited. In his autobiography, White confesses to a turning point in his own life, a moment at which he “was truly humbled” after the poor reception of his novel The Aunt’s Story, and after he fell into the mud on the farm he and Manoly were trying to run in Castle Hill. “I lay where I had fallen, half-blinded by rain, under a pale sky, cursing through watery lips a God in whom I did not believe” (FG: 144). White’s “exercise in organized humility” followed, as he and Manoly looked for a church where they could share a prayer, an exercise that soon ended for lack of a congregation they wished to join. White stresses that his “inklings of God’s presence are interwoven with my love of the one human being who never fails me” (FG: 145); religion, for White, is part and parcel of human relationships. White stages a similar scene for his mask-character, yet this scene does not bring her to any recognition or understanding. After her failed appearance as Dolly Formosa, Alex rises at dawn and steps outside her hotel room. “I walk barefoot, down the creaking stairs, along the sticky hotel lino, stained by grease, alcohol, semen and wine, past the stagnating kitchen” (MMO: 138). Outside, Alex experiences what could have amounted to a mystic revelation, in the form of an aborigine she sees across from her. She cannot

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see his face, nor her own on a picture she then picks up from the street, since it has become blurred. Yet Alex’s self-effacement, which could have been part of a salutary process of dethroning her ego, is devoid of self-awareness, and therefore unproductive. Physically stepping into collective refuse on the hotel stairs can no more humble Alex than drive home her own belonging to this collective. Her marriage to Hilary was a failed marriage, from which Hilary tried to escape and finally did when he committed suicide. Her ego is inflated and swamped by the archetype of the queen, the Great Individual, with which she identifies to the point of complete egotism. Alex refuses to take responsibility for any part of their common life, only confessing to the killing of Hilary’s dog. Her episodes as a nun, married to God, are also a failure: the only remnant of her various efforts at marriage and wholeness is the wedding ring which gnaws into her finger. Since Alex did not attain an integration with the archetype of the Great Individual, she can neither sacrifice herself for her art nor even perform the one line she is given at the theater. When the performance requires that she be interred in the sand, and breathe through a straw until she is supposed to come out and say her line, Alex thinks that “mortal life, I am convinced, is more than I can sacrifice to an artistic death at the Sand Pit Theater” (MMO: 151) and she springs out of the sand without waiting for her cue. Instead of the line she was told to say: “‘I am the spirit of the land, past, present, and future’” (MMO: 150), she cries: “‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’” (MMO: 151). Alex is not capable of acting the “spirit of the land,” which is precisely the collective content of the archetype that has her in its grip. Instead, Alex the mask-character, will indeed be resurrected, as we shall see, in another mask, the skull of Santa Chiara.22 Alex’s failure is Patrick’s, the editor’s, triumph. Patrick understands Alex, his own gender-opposite, with whom he shares the same blue eyes, the same soul (MMO: 25). Although he too, like Alex, is a performer and an explorer “in search of the unanswerable, the unattainable” (MMO: 88), he embraces the collective in him and outside of him. He recognizes what he let loose in writing about characters who “could be the offspring of my own psyche” (MMO: 16) as well as his responsibility for the specific traits of these characters. He never denies Alex the part she plays in his psyche, and does not try to ignore her, nor expects to be rid of her, not even after her death. White clearly prefers Patrick’s acceptance of a married-like relationship with Alex’s daughter, the wholeness her boiled eggs provide him and the banality of the tooth paste he shares with her, to the egomania and royal aspirations exposed through Alex’s mask. Patrick White is aware of the dangers in the added freedom that artists enjoy as Great Individuals. It is Alex’s artistic aspirations he fears most. Alex identifies with her personification mask and is inflated by the archetype of the Great Individual to megalomaniac proportions. In the grips of her ego, she can

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

no longer be separated from her mask. White allows Alex to use as many impersonation masks as she likes, from names to clothes to lipstick, deluding herself that she can invent herself by using them in complete creative liberty. This profuse use of impersonation masks also liberates the reader up to a point, because he can laugh at her or consider her mad, and therefore think he is unrelated to one such as her. Yet White forces his reader to also see the collective elements Alex embodies, and the reader’s own responsibility towards Alex for being the way she is. White does not invite the reader to identify with these collective elements nor with Alex, but rather to criticize them, to hopefully bring about an alteration of values.

2.

The Persona

Jung’s use of the term Persona has been followed widely, not always according to his own definition, which included a second meaning in addition to the classical one. Since it is a term strongly associated with masks, I would like to elucidate here the two major functions of the Persona, which correspond, indeed, in Jung’s understanding, to the two uses of fictional masks, that is, as impersonation masks and as personification masks. The conventional, classic meaning of Persona, as used by Jung, is related to the social face of an individual, to his or her public character. It is the identity of the self as perceived by the self and by society. Jung chose the name ‘persona’ for this component of the self because he referred to it as a kind of mask, similar to the ones used by ancient Greek actors for playing their roles. The persona is a mask that outwardly presents an acceptable version of the self to society while it protects the private self. Society’s expectations of the individual are very great, and must be taken into account by anyone who wants to succeed in society. Yet, Jung points out that “no one could completely submerge his individuality in these expectations; hence the construction of an artificial personality becomes an unavoidable necessity .... What goes on behind the mask is then called ‘private life’.”23 As Neumann adds, the persona is a “defense mechanism against, and a means of adaptation to, the collective” (OC: 351). The manifestation of the persona would therefore be observable in a person’s official title, in the airs he puts on, in the role he plays in society, and so on. In this sense, the function of the persona is similar to that of impersonation masks. Nevertheless, the persona, which seems to be a conscious, personal element of the self, is rooted according to Jung in something greater than the personal. In this sense, the persona is closer to personification masks, since it encompasses collective contents. As defined by Jung, the persona is not merely a singular construct of one specific individual, rather it also has an a-priori universal and unconscious aspect. It is, as Jung explains, “an arbitrary segment of collective psyche.” By definition, the persona’s contents is collective:

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Creating Communities It is, as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks. When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask for the collective psyche. Fundamentally, the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. 24

The seemingly private nature of the persona is attained by each individual as a result of the process of secondary personalization. Neumann explains that the development of the persona component is “the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or those deemed ­desirable by the collective” (OC: 403). In other words, the individual must, during his formative years, become aware of the collective pressures outside of the self and form a persona, in accordance with the social conventions of his time and place, which will mediate between himself and the collective and at the same time safeguard his self from the same collective forces that are manifest within him. Importantly, the persona is an agent in the process of centroversion, and therefore protects the individual not only from the collective powers outside the self, but also the dangerous collective archetypal contents of his psyche within the self.25 Since it is formed as a result of secondary personalization, during which archetypal materials become personal by being refracted by the prism of the personal psyche, the persona is also a conscious component of the self, a consciousness which allows the self to consider itself a unique individual. The persona assists in the individual’s inner relationship between his unconscious matter and his conscious self, between the inner collective elements and the ‘personal’ self, similarly to the way that it assists him in the relationship between his self and the society outside the self. The persona thus exhibits the double function of masks: it is like a conscious, personalized impersonation mask, yet at the same time it is like a transpersonal personification mask, since it also contains an unconscious, universal aspect with which the self must come to terms to remain healthy.26 Since my focus is on the collective elements of personification masks, Jung’s persona assists in understanding the collective, archetypal nature of personification masks that seem, at the same time, to be private constructs. To use Jung and Neumann’s terms, when the persona archetype is incarnated in fiction, it has a dual expression in the masks used in fiction, related to aspects of the Great Individual archetype. Masks can be an outer expression of the persona, and in this case they are impersonation masks, used for various social purposes. Similar to the examples brought by Jung regarding historical

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks

reality, such would be names or titles fictional characters are made to take, roles they are made to play, clothes, makeup, veils, or any element that assists in the disguising of an identity different from the mask displayed. These masks are consciously used by the characters, who are aware of their different identity behind the mask. Such, for example, is the identity Pirandello’s Mattia Pascal fashions for himself when he decides to change into Adriano Meis, as will be seen later. These masks stem from the collective element in the self, in the sense that they are used on the social scene. They are used for personal purposes that involve the individual’s interaction with his society, and are used as a response to society’s expectations and demands on the individual. Seen in the context of Jung’s persona, the personification mask differs acutely from the impersonation mask. Personification masks are used to personify transpersonal collective contents, and make visible collective elements related to the archetypes of the self, such as the Persona archetype and the archetype of the Great Individual. By imposing such a mask on a character, the author is able to disclose and put in focus collective ideologies, symbols, images and beliefs, which have fashioned society and its personification masks. Through the use of a personification mask, the readers are made aware of the effects of certain collective unconscious contents, and at the same time are made to realize that they too are partly responsible for the construction of this particular mask. The readers are made to piece the mask together as they read, and assist in the gradual construction of the mask in the text. This process makes the readers doubly responsible for the creation of the mask: both because they assist the writer in bringing the mask to light and in activating it, and because they are made to realize that what is reflected on the mask pertains to the personal, collective unconscious elements within their own selves, the same elements which have produced this specific mask in the first place. A personification mask is imposed by the author on the character, who is therefore usually unaware of the mask. The mask-character is thus used to personify transpersonal contents, such as the characters Patrick White uses in his play Big Toys. The three characters in this play display the masks of the stereotypical high society lady (who is constantly busy with superficialities such as gossip or her appearance), the labor union leader (who claims to be more moral than the others while having an affair with a married woman), and the rich lawyer (hiding behind the letter of the law to advance his egotistical schemes). In other works of Patrick White, other characters are used to embody the Great Individual archetype in personification masks. Such are Danny Shepherd, in one of White’s play, Shepherd on The Rocks, whose ego-inflation makes him consider himself as a new Jesus, or Alex in Memoirs of Many in One. Certain personification masks, however, are consciously used by the characters. Such are Shakespeare’s Cleopatra or Antony. Cleopatra’s royal mask and Antony’s mask of the great military leader are masks with which they identify

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and which they have become one with, to the point that Cleopatra is called “Egypt” and Antony is called “Rome.” They are the collectively recognized Great Individuals of society, and act accordingly. White’s juxtaposition of Alex, the aspiring Great Individual, with the role she plays in the theater, as Cleopatra, completely exposes and defeats her mask and turns her heroic quest into the ridiculous ramblings of an old woman. White thus criticizes the society that has produced and enabled a mask-character such as Alex to come into existence, in the hope that the disclosure of the mask will bring about desired changes in the values of society. White presents Alex for the readers’ judgment. The judgment entails an introspective motion in the reader and will hopefully lead to a subsequent change in society’s values.

N otes 1 | Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821-1857, trans. Carol Cosman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). All references to this text will appear from here on as FAID followed by the volume number and the page number. 2 | Jean-Paul Sartre, Politics and Literature, trans. J.A. Underwood, John Calder (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), pp. 40-1. 3 | Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor & Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman, 2nd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963). All quotes from this book will be referred to from here on in the text as SG. 4 | Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling (New York: Dover Publications, 1996), p. 247. 5 | Sartre explained what it was that Genet achieved by writing texts people find so repulsive. Sartre believed Genet would say to his shocked reader that “the disgust you manifest when confronted with my books is a magical effort to reject that Other who is no other than yourself” (SG: 502). In other words, Sartre identified in Genet’s text the intention not only to draw the readers into the text but also to force them to realize that what repulses them is not him and his words but rather that part of themselves which is him, and which made him the way he is. 6 | See: Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics: The Lasting Impact of Shakespeare’s Histories, trans. David Henry Wilson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 176. 7 | Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 1987; hereafter, IIS. 8 | Catoriadis’ notion of the ‘image’ which the individual “imagines he is giving to the others” is very close, as we shall see, to Jung’s idea of the existence of a Persona in its outer manifestation. 9 | Direct allusions to schizophrenia do appear in the novel (MMO: 17, 94), and Alex’s behavior can also reinforce the notion that she is just a crazy old woman, but such a reading would be very reductive.

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks 10 | Some of White’s critics who pointed to the influence Jung had on White’s writing are John Colmer, David Tacey, Karin Hanson, and James Bukman-May, to name a few. 11 | Alex’s words mirror White’s. In a letter to an actress and friend, Kerry Walker, White wrote of the essay Tacey had sent him: “like all obsessed characters, he [Tacey] tries to tie his subject down in the strait jacket of his system and finds I don’t fit. Of course I’m no expert on Jung, only picked a few bits which suited my purpose, just as I’ve picked a few bits from Christian theology and the Jewish mystics.” See: David Marr ed., Patrick White: Letters (Chicago,: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 566. White further toys with his allusion to Jung’s theories, in the derisory names Alex gives Patrick, of “Reverend Mother persona” (MMO: 90) and of “Puccini persona” (MMO: 89). 12 | Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R.F.C. Hull, 10 th ed. Bollingen Series XLII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). From here on, all references to this book will be noted OC in the text, followed by the page number. 13 | Neumann specifies that “whenever a critical situation arises, be it individual or collective, an appeal is instantly made to the transmitters of the canon. Whether these are medicine men, prophets, and priests, or commissars, leaders, ministers, and officials, will depend upon the canon” of the given society (OC: 371). 14 | Neumann writes, “the advance of secondary personalization can be observed in literature too, where mythological motifs turn into fairy tales and finally into the earliest romances” (OC: 338). In White’s novels, history serves as the background through which personal histories are refracted. White uses ordinary, every day occurrences to embody the sedimentation of generations of repressed, collective and personal ancestral memory. He thus demonstrates that past, both private and collective memory, can be accessed by imagination, which is used to re-invent history, recollecting its fragments into a coherent narrative, whose gaps are filled by the author. 15 | C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W.S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, 7th ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 171. 16 | Carl Gustav Jung, H. Read, M. Fordham, G.A. Adler eds, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). From here on, all reference to C.G. Jung’s collected works will be marked CW in the text, followed by the volume number, and page number. 17 | Neumann points to the “doubling of archetypal and individual features,” and explains that “the kind of experience we shall have is prescribed by the archetypes, but what we experience is always individual.” This doubling shows itself clearly in “a phenomenon of great importance for the formation and development of personality, namely the creation within it of various ‘authorities’.” These authorities are the ego, the totality of the psyche, the persona, the anima (or animus in women), and the shadow. That these authorities appear as ‘persons’ “is consistent with the fundamental teaching of analytical theory that all unconscious contents manifest themselves ‘like partial personalities’” (OC: 349-350). 18 | Great Individuals, as creators, “form the progressive element in a community, but at the same time they are the conservatives who link back to the origins .... the hero …

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Creating Communities becomes alienated from the normal human situation and from the collective. This decollectivization entails suffering, and he suffers at the same time because, in his struggle for freedom, he is also the victim and representative of the obsolete, old order and is forced to bear the burden of it in his own soul. The significance of this fact has already been pointed out by Jung, who speaks of the fatal compulsion that draws the hero towards sacrifice and suffering” (OC: 377-8). 19 | Jung discusses in psychological terms the mystic marriage of the king and queen, which plays an important part in alchemy, and their immersion in the bath in which they are united. See: C.G. Jung, The Psychology of Transference, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1983), pp. 79-84. 20 | As Jung explains, “the unrelated human being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a ‘You.’ Wholeness is a combination of I and You, and these show themselves to be parts of a transcendent unity.” Jung adds in a footnote, that he does not mean the synthesis of two individuals, but “the conscious union of the ego with everything that has been projected into the ‘You.’ hence wholeness is the product of an intrapsychic process which depends essentially on the relation of one individual to another.” See: Carl G. Jung, The Psychology of Transference, pp. 82-3. 21 | The process of centroversion which assists the formation of the personality “knits the originally diffuse contents of consciousness into a single system … strengthening the stability of the ego.” Centroversion is one of the “methods by which the ego detaches itself from the unconscious and forms itself into a relatively independent system, in other words, how the individual personality is built up” (OC: 315-6, 320). 22 | In Pirandello’s novel The Late Mattia Pascal, Mattia voices the same idea at the end of the novel, when he expresses the notion that he will come to life again every time his writings are read, an idea Pirandello expresses in many other instances, such as in Six Characters in Search of An Author. 23 | C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 193. 24 | C.G. Jung, Ibid. pp. 157-8. 25 | C.G. Jung, Ibid. p. 148. In this context, Jung clarifies the paradoxical nature of the persona as one of the expressions of the collective unconscious within the self which nonetheless functions as an agent of individuation and personal identity: “although the ego-consciousness is at first identified with the persona – that compromise role in which we parade before the community – yet the unconscious self can never be repressed to the point of extinction … The purely personal attitude of the conscious mind evokes reactions on the part of the unconscious, and these, together with personal repressions, contain the seeds of individual development in the guise of collective fantasies. Through the analysis of the personal unconscious, the conscious mind becomes suffused with collective material which brings with it the elements of individuality.” See: C.G. Jung, Ibid. p. 158.

Chapter Two: The Creation of Personification Masks 26 | Jung points out the dangers of a dissolution of the persona, which would result in mental illness, as a result of a ‘swamping’ of consciousness, resulting from the release into consciousness of unconscious elements and impulses “whose existence one had never before suspected. All the treasures of mythological thinking and feeling are unlocked. It is not always easy to hold one’s own against such an overwhelming impression.” Nevertheless, “the dissolution of the persona is … an indispensable condition for individuation.” Ibid. pp. 282, 297. As part of the process of individuation, or secondary personalization, the collective materials must be broken down into small, ‘digestible’ pieces, in order to be incorporated into the self without endangering it. The persona must on the one hand be built by the self to protect it outwardly in front of society, and at the same time, or subsequently, it must be dissolved, in order for the self to be able to come to terms with the internal collective elements, and form one’s individual self.

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Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

A. F rom S ix C haracters in S earch of an A uthor to  M at tia P ascal Sartre conceptualized the pragmatic function of masks in modeling and staging the collective subjectivity of both writer and of his community. The agency of the mask is derived from the collective subject, modeled by the collective imaginary embedded in writer and readers alike, and consciously manipulated by the writer. Through his discussion of masks, Sartre also demonstrated the inter-relation between the artist and his community, and the masks’ role in the mutual cross-semination of history and fiction. Sartre’s theory is exemplified in Pirandello’s practice. Pirandello deployed two structures and dynamics of impersonation and of personification in both fictional and theatrical masking, aimed at raising the audience’s consciousness to collective subjectivity and its historical agency. The structure, dynamics and effect of masks on the audience and readers displays the same strategies conceptualized by Sartre. No longer physical artifacts, masks are nonetheless effective literary constructs. Despite the changes masks have undergone, their essential, permanent qualities are evident even when they become intangible and invisible, as they are in literature. These qualities are those which make up the “maskness” of the masks, qualities that both allowed masks to survive their transfer from one genre and era to the next and made them effective and relevant in each. The theater is especially important in the history of the masks’ transference since it constitutes a middle phase between ritual and literature, in addition to constituting a ‘laboratory’ of sorts for the use of masks in fiction, as we saw in the case of Flaubert and Genet. A transition is made in the theater from the palpable accessibility and presence of masks in ritual to an “as-if” accessibility on stage. Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is a salient example of this. This particular play provides the opportunity to discuss a modern dramatist’s use of visible masks as part of the theatrical apparatus, as well as the

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establishment of mask-characters, who do not wear masks, but who have the same functions as those of the masked characters. The centrality of masks to Pirandello’s work as a whole can be explained on several levels. Pirandello’s cultural inheritance includes the masks of the Commedia dell’Arte. The influence of the Commedia can be detected in his theatrical trilogy, particularly in Six Characters in Search of an Author. Commedia characters are stock characters, representing set features and characteristics that do not change, regardless of the plot line they participate in enacting. Each Commedia character has its own set of idiosyncrasies and mannerisms, which dictates his or her behavior in any given circumstance. Stock characters are characters devoid of any attribute other than the attributes of the specific mask they are activating, similarly to ritual masks that operate independently of their wearer’s personal attributes when they are put in use. The use of a Commedia stock-character in Pirandello’s play exemplifies one of the aspects of personification masks and draws attention of his modern audience to the existence of masks on stage. Yet the most typical Commedia character in Six Characters in Search of an Author is not using a mask, as opposed to the other six characters: this is Pirandello’s ironical way of stressing that stock characters need not be masked to function as masks.1 Pirandello’s interest in masks is one of the most noted manifestations of the surge of renewed interest in masks which took place at the turn of the 20th century up to the mid-1930s, on the part of plastic artists, performance artists and writers.2 In his philosophy as well as in his work and use of masks, Pirandello was influenced by the ideas of his time, by his own heritage and by other writers.3 Reality, as it was experienced up to World War I had been shattered, and Pirandello, like many other artists, was looking for a way to express his angst and solitude. As Roger Olivier wrote, “Pirandello needed a means of artistic expression that allowed him to explore the fragmentation and alienation of life as he saw and experienced it, while at the same time communicating the suffering caused by these conditions. The solution to his problem was, of course, umorismo.”4 Published in 1908, L’Umorismo (On Humor) is Pirandello’s philosophical treatise, in which he illustrates his conception of what humor is, by providing a vision of an old woman and the viewers’ reaction to her: I see an old lady whose hair is dyed and completely smeared with some kind of horrible ointment; she is all made-up in a clumsy and awkward fashion and is all dolled-up like a young girl. I begin to laugh. I perceive that she is the opposite of what a respectable old lady should be. Now I could stop at this initial and superficial comic reaction: the comic consists precisely of this perception of the opposite. But if, at this point, reflection interferes in me to suggest that perhaps this old lady finds no pleasure in dressing up like an exotic parrot, and that perhaps she is distressed by it and does it only because she

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello pitifully deceives herself into believing that, by making herself up like that and by concealing her wrinkles and gray hair, she may be able to hold the love of her much younger husband – if reflection comes to suggest all this, then I can no longer laugh at her as I did at first, exactly because the inner working of reflection has made me go beyond, or rather enter deeper into, the initial stage of awareness: from the beginning perception of the opposite, reflection has made me shift to a feeling of the opposite. And herein lies the precise difference between the comic and humor. 5

The writer of humor places himself on the one hand in judgment towards that which he perceives, and on the other hand detaches himself from it in order to be able to analyze what he sees. As Pirandello explains, “from this analysis and decomposition, however, there arises or emerges a new feeling which could be called … the feeling of the opposite.”6 What changes, through the mediation of the humorist, is not the woman’s image but our perception of it, and our awareness of elements that are not farcical is heightened, as the humorist’s perception overrides our initial one. Pirandello adds that “humor could be considered a phenomenon of doubling in the act of artistic conception. The conception of the work of art is essentially nothing more than a form of the organization of images.”7 Thus, the use of masks serves Pirandello to point out the conflict between what is perceived on the surface and the inner realities underneath this outward appearance. The masks Pirandello uses in his many works are therefore principally ­impersonation masks, which construct a cover for those elements that the humorist will then disclose. Exposing the underlying image is what creates the reversal of expectations which is the essence of humor in Pirandello’s mind, what he calls the ‘feeling of the opposite.’ The masks also serve to delineate another of Pirandello’s concerns: the dualism between life and form, the movement of the life flux and its necessary imprisonment in static, lifeless forms, which are in turn destroyed by ongoing life. Life, according to Pirandello, can only be experienced and felt as one lives it, yet in order to know anything about it, to make sense of an essentially senseless matter, one needs the form.8 For Pirandello, masks are thus emblematic of the tension between true and constructed, relative reality. Art can only capture a moment of life and represent it, freezing it in a specific form, in which it will forever be imprisoned, yet that is not life, since living is only carried out in movement and perpetual change. Art can perhaps provide an illusion of being, yet without a form there is no living at all. Pirandello demonstrated these interrelated ideas in countless examples, using visible or invisible masks for his characters, as well as sculptures, mirrors and photographs, which illustrate the doomed attempt to capture the moment. Masks, rejected or adopted by his characters, are as inevitable as they are inescapable, as Pirandello demonstrated in his works.

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Pirandello’s sentiment regarding masks is also related to the ideas dealt with earlier, of another one of his contemporaries, Carl G. Jung. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Jung used the metaphor of the mask to explain the archetype he termed the Persona the inner mask that the individual is driven to construct by the elements of the collective unconscious in his psyche, and which serves him or her outwardly, in order to function in society. Pirandello’s conception of masks as being part of the psychological structure of the individual is similar, and he writes: “Everybody straightens up his mask the best he can – that is, the external mask, for we also have the inner mask, which often is at variance with the outer one. And nothing is true! Oh yes, the sea is true, the mountain is true; the stone, the blade of grass are true; but man? Unwillingly, unknowingly, he is always wearing the mask of whatever it is that he, in good faith, fancies himself to be.”9 Pirandello’s ‘persona’ mask is a multi-layered one, since beneath the outer layer of the social mask, the individual is also entrapped in one or more inner mask-constructs which form his identity in his own eyes. Contrary to Jung’s Persona these inner layers of masks are not necessarily felt in a conscious manner, and the individual may be quite unconscious of their existence, convinced that these masks constitute his ‘real’ identity. Pirandello concludes that there is no way for the individual to ever know himself, since cognition is already contained in a form, in a mask. To know oneself, the individual must think of himself within the boundaries of at least one mask, and usually within several overlaying masks. The most natural place for experimentation with masks is the theater, though Pirandello wrote many novels and novellas as well, and the presence of masks is apparent in all his works.10 Significantly, Pirandello’s plays were published under the collective title of Maschere nude (Naked Masks), perhaps suggesting that at the theater the nature and functions of masks were better displayed and more readily understood. Pirandello was known to act out the various parts he allotted his characters, lending each part his voice, whether they were inserted in novels or plays. Patrick White too shared Pirandello’s particular method of ‘writing by acting out the roles’ when constructing his plots and characters. In addition, the occupation with the theater is very central to both writers, a feature which is apparent in their novels as well as in its more obvious residence in plays.

B. S ix C haracters in S earch of an A uthor Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author is doubtlessly Pirandello’s most famous play, and is especially interesting for the present inquiry because Pirandello instructed that the six characters wear masks. Through an analysis of this play and its use of masks one can follow the functions of

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masks that are sustained even when masks are not visible, which is the case with the other actors in the cast. This particular play thus provides the opportunity to discuss a modern dramatist’s use of visible masks as part of the theatrical apparatus, as well as the establishment of mask-characters, who do not wear masks, but who have the same functions as those of the masked characters.11

1.

Two Opposing Mask Communities

The list of characters who take part in the play appears at the beginning of the play and is divided into two groups. One group is made up of seven characters, six of which are members of the same family and are referred to by their roles, such as ‘The Father’ or ‘The Stepdaughter’. The seventh character in this group is Madame Pace, to whom we shall return later. The second group is made up of sixteen actors, whose names are not mentioned either and who are differentiated only by their roles at the theater, such as the director and the actors as well as the usher, the stage hands, the prompter, the technician and so on. This list stresses that Pirandello considered the reality of the theater as one of action, and therefore anyone who has something to do with the production of the play has a role as a character in the play. According to Pirandello’s stage directions, the six characters are to wear masks, as opposed to the rest of the cast, including Madame Pace, although she belongs to the group of the six characters. This visible division between the six characters and the rest of the actors is a belated addition of Pirandello’s, since he only added the requirement that the six characters use masks several years after the first production of the play. Another differentiation exists in the cast, between two belief communities, which differ in their approach to masks. One community considers masks at face value, as artifacts useful for the fake impersonation of roles, and which conceal the truth. The other community acknowledges the personification quality inherent in masks and their capacity to mediate between the potential feelings they evoke in their audience and the potential feelings they already embody for the community. Importantly, the division into two belief-community groups cuts across the obvious and visible division into two group of actors according to whether they are masked or not. Pirandello uses one community of belief regarding masks, represented by the characters of the mother and the daughter, and sets it against another community, which is constituted by the father-character, the director, the actors and the stage hands. As artifacts, masks have not changed much in their transition from ritual to the modern stage. What has altered is how people think of masks: whereas ancient theater-goers understood the reality effect embedded in the masks’ action to be an inherent part of masks, modern theater-goers tend to think that

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masks need not be taken seriously since they are playful, deceitful artifacts used to alter the genuine identity of the actors using them. The juxtaposition of the two communities’ attitude to masks re-installs the ritualistic attitude to masks and the functions of personification masks before an audience that has by now become accustomed to see only the impersonation function in masks. The affinity of Pirandello’s masks to ritual masks hinges on qualities of ritual masks: the masks’ interchangeability, their interference with the normal time-line of the spectators, their fixity and their need to be activated. The roles of the six characters do not require a specific person to perform them: the fixed expressions on the masks assures that any actor playing the part of that character will get it ‘right’, expressing the required emotion and performing the part according to the prescribed instructions embedded in the mask itself. Pirandello’s decision that the six characters use masks displays and stresses one of the major elements of masks which has survived their transposition from ritual into the theater, namely that they are artifacts ready to be used by anyone. Ritual masks have predetermined functions that are put to use every time a particular mask is used, regardless of the characteristics of the person chosen to don it. When masks are transposed into the theater, they are made available to any actor wishing and able to use them, and the actor’s identity is as immaterial to his performance as a ritual dancer’s identity is to the ritual. A mask always creates a type, which remains the same even if several different actors use it. Like ritual masks, theater masks are waiting for a person to fill them and activate them according to the purpose for which they were made, and are not open to the actor’s interpretation. They can be effective only in the pre-inscribed way they were designed.

2.

The Physical Presence of Masks on the Stage

The first production of Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author was performed in Rome in 1921. The audience, accustomed to conventional theater practices, was appalled by the bare stage, the lack of scenery and the raised curtains that welcomed them. They were not prepared for the interaction of actors and stagehands, and even less for the appearance of the six characters. The few supporters of the play and the many dissatisfied customers who felt they had been cheated out of their theatrical outing ended up in blows in the street after the performance. The play was received much more enthusiastically in Paris and later in Berlin; however, in 1925 Pirandello felt the need to write a preface to the play which was his retort to his critics and to the solutions other producers had come up with, regarding the appearance of the six characters. In the preface he added to the play, Pirandello admits he belongs to the kind of writers interested in the universal values “which have been soaked” into the figures and landscapes he writes about. He explains the universal meaning of

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

the six characters as being what each of them expresses: “the deceit of mutual understanding irremediably founded on the empty abstraction of the words, the multiple personality of everyone corresponding to the possibilities of being to be found in each of us, and finally the inherent tragic conflict between life (which is always moving and changing) and form (which fixes it, immutable).”12 Each of the six characters realizes in his or her “person the true and complete ‘human type’,” another emphasis on the masks’ expression of the universal, Jungian feelings and values according to which they were fashioned.13 Aside from the preface, Pirandello added new stage instructions as well, the most noteworthy of which indicate that the six characters should use masks in the following manner: To stage the play one must take every possible precaution to achieve the effect that these SIX CHARACTERS are not confused with the company of ACTORS. The arrangement of the ACTORS and the CHARACTERS (indicated in the stage directions) when they go on stage will undoubtedly be helpful: for example, using different kinds of coloured lighting by means of special reflectors. But the most efficacious means suggested here is the use of special masks for the CHARACTERS … This [the masks] will also be a way of representing the profound meaning of the play. The CHARACTERS, in fact, should not appear to be unreal figures but rather created reality, the creations of immutable fantasy; therefore, more real and substantial than the changeable naturalness of the ACTORS. The masks will help to give the impression of the figure created by means of art and fixed immutability in the expression of its own fundamental sentiment, which in the case of the FATHER would be remorse; revenge for the STEPDAUGHTER; disdain for the SON; grief for the MOTHER (who will have permanent tears of wax fixed in the discolouring under her eyes, and along the cheeks, as seen in the paintings and statues of the grieving Virgin Mother in churches; also her clothing should be of a special material and style, not extravagant, but with severe pleats and a kind of sculptural voluminousness …) (SC: 9-10).14

In these stage directions, Pirandello encapsulates three key elements in his definition of the essence of his masks. The first element is that the characters belong to a theatrical reality which is a “created reality,” a reality crafted and made into art by human beings, set apart from a reality created by God. The second element is the “immutable fantasy,” another quality which distinguishes between the permanent reality of the masks and private human fantasies which are evanescent. Pirandello illustrates the immutability of the imaginary by evoking the image of a statue of the “grieving Virgin Mother in churches,” whose pleats have “sculptural voluminousness.” The church points to the third element, that of the collective, since the church is an institution created by the collective and historically sustained by tradition, which therefore transcends personal experience. The imaginary, according to Pirandello, is thus universal,

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permanent and collective. These three elements operate in the created reality of Pirandello’s secular masks, which he found to be the theatrical element that best conveys these ideas to the audience. Most stage directors chose not to use masks in their production of this play. Nevertheless, any director who chose to follow Pirandello’s instructions would gain what seems almost too obvious to mention: the physical presence of the masks on stage. The presence of the masks, not suggested or alluded to, but right there, in front of the audience, would make it clear to the audience that there was something laid out for investigation, especially since some of the actors on stage wear masks while others do not. Those directors who were opposed to the use of masks counted on the audience to be able to differentiate between the two kinds of actors. Since acting constitutes a kind of mask-wearing as well, such an interpretation, which cancels the use of masks, is possible. Nonetheless, the physical presence of masks on stage heightens their effect. The most important quality of masks is their capacity to embody, convey and arouse feelings, a capacity literary masks inherited from ritual masks, and which endows them with a potential reality effect. This effect is potential because feelings only become real when they are expressed and realized, in this case by actors and for an audience.

3.

The Nature and Life of Masks

Reacting to some productions in which the six characters were presented as ‘extra-terrestrial’ creatures, Pirandello wrote that “making the characters appear like shadows or phantasms” was an error which must be avoided. Instead, the characters should be presented as “superior and more potent beings because they are ‘created realities’, forms of art fixed forever, immutable, almost statues in contrast with the mobile naturalness, changeable and almost fluid, of the actors.”15 In these lines, as well as in his new preface to the play, Pirandello reiterates one of his main ideas already formulated in his essay L’Umorismo, namely that art is a fixed form, but, far from being consequently dead, it is “alive, every time as new … hence, always, as we open the book, we shall find Francesca alive and confessing to Dante her sweet sin, and if we turn to the passage a hundred thousand times never repeating them mechanically, but saying them as though each time were the first time with such living passion that Dante every time will turn faint. All that lives, by the fact of living has a form, and by the same token must die  – except the work of art which lives forever in so far as it is form.”16 Pirandello’s explanation underlines the affinity between his masks and ritual masks, which are alive only when they are being used and ‘danced’ by the people donning them. In the same way, the six characters are only alive when they are being acted, which is their main plight and the reason they appear on stage, looking for someone to perform them.

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Besides the obvious use of face masks, the six characters’ ‘maskness’ results from their affinity to ritual masks in several additional ways: the masks create a unity of time and space for the audience who is watching the play, similarly to the way time and space is changed for the duration of the ritual for its participants. Trapped in their roles, the characters are also trapped in having to repeat them, like ritual masks that are always used for the same purpose, and the time of the performance is always the present time. As the mother character exclaims: “it’s happening now. It happens all the time! My anguish is not over, sir! I am alive and present all the time and in every moment of my anguish which renews itself, alive and always present” (SC: 51). The characters are always the same, like their wooden counterparts, never changing, and are always used for the same parts. The characters can therefore be considered as masks themselves, quite literally stock characters, forever awaiting the actor who will perform the part and bring them to life. In addition, the characters’ parts are not assigned to them only, but are potentially interchangeable with those of the other actors of the play. As soon as they come up on stage, the actors find they are watching the characters “as if they were the audience at a play” (SC: 13) and the following dialogues between the director, the actors and the characters further demonstrate this exchange of places. In the course of the play, the director takes over the part of the leading man in order to show him how he is meant to perform the part, and the characters interfere with the actors’ acting, as a director would, whenever they feel it is not accurate enough, according to the nature and action they know to be that of their particular masks. The characters express their dissatisfaction with the actors’ performance and end up performing their own parts, instead of the actors. The confusion created by the characters’ presence on stage goes further: the director tells the daughter to listen to the leading lady’s performance: “be quiet, please and watch! You can learn from this!” (SC: 45) disregarding the fact that the daughter character is the part and therefore knows it better than he does. The actors protest when the characters use their hats, which were borrowed for the scene at Madame Pace’s house (SC: 43), forgetting this is all an illusion and that they will be able to get their hats back at the end of the rehearsal. The father asks the director who he is, to which the upset director answers: “what? Who I am? I’m me!” but the father does not relent and says: “and if I were to tell you that it isn’t true, because you are me? … we are all playing a game [to the Director] and you, then, could allege that it is only a part of the game that the gentleman over there [indicating the Leading Man] who is ‘himself’ has to be ‘me’, who on the contrary, am myself” (SC: 54). This confusion emphasizes one clear statement made by the playwright: all the actors put on a mask when they play a role, not just those playing the parts of the six characters, and as soon as they do so, they become the role. The director said earlier to the leading man, regarding the parts in the play they are rehearsing, that it is a “game of assigned

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roles, according to which you, who play your own role, purposely become the puppet of yourself” (SC: 9). The director admits that he and his actors are puppets as much as the characters they play. Added to the fact that the actors do not have names, their assigned roles turn them into stock characters too, like the six characters.17 As for the characters, Pirandello grants his puppets a life of flesh and blood but he does not release them from their wooden prison. Offstage or on stage, their life is bound together by their mask-parts, since the characters’ role is the role of the mask itself, as the father says to the director: “the only acting we do is that role for which each of us has been cast or which others have given us in life” (SC: 29). Who are these “others”? The production suggests it is the entire community of the theater, which co-produces this double life and the roles it prescribes. In another play by Pirandello entitled Enrico IV, a character named Landolph, who was hired to play the part of one of the fake King Henry’s councilors, complains about the difference between himself and his co-actors and the real councilors who lived at the time of King Henry: [W]e are just here with no one to give us content or to give us a scene to act out .... The form is there but the content is missing. We’re worse off than the real secret councilors of Henry IV, because, of course, no one gave them a part to play either, but they, at least, didn’t feel that they had to play a part. They played their part because they played their part: in other words it was not a part, it was their life … We, on the other hand, are stuck here, in costumes like these, and in this splendid court … for what? Nothing… like six puppets hanging on the wall waiting for someone to come and take them and make them move this way or that way and to make them say something.18

Lolo, the actor playing Landolph, complains of being a form without content, with no one to produce him, or include him in a play in which his mask can act. Worse off than King Henry’s councilors who lived their parts at the time, and were sanctioned in their acts by society, Lolo and his friends do nothing, like six puppets, a clear reminder of the six characters, hanging on the wall awaiting to be put in motion. His vivid emotions put into words an element of theatrical reality: for a theatrical reality to be real it must be ‘performable.’ The passage from Enrico IV illuminates the six characters’ plight and their absolute dependence on finding a performer to act them out, to activate them and bring them to life as any mask must, or they will no longer be part of a relevant theatrical reality. The interchangeability between characters and actors in Six Characters in Search of an Author establishes all role acting as acting within a mask. The mask-characters are also used in this play to validate the fictive reality of the work of art. For the duration of the play the masks are used to raise the cred-

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

ibility of the existence of their reality and establish it as parallel to the reality the audience is accustomed to. The father-character goes as far as claiming the characters’ fictive reality is more real than that of the actors: “if we (again he indicates himself and the other characters) have no other reality beyond the illusion, it would be also a good idea for you [the director] not to trust in your own reality, the one you breathe and feel today within yourself, because – like that of yesterday – it is destined to reveal itself as an illusion tomorrow.” (SC: 55-6). By saying this, the father not only validates the characters’ reality, he undermines that of the actors. If the actors’ reality is real here and now, but only an illusion once it is belongs to the past, then, claims the father, it follows that the actors’ reality is as fictive as that of the characters’, and that they are therefore on equal footing. By reducing the actors to the same status as that of the characters, Pirandello elevates the status of masks, which must now be taken at least as seriously as the actors. In addition, this equation between actors and characters highlights the two different attitudes towards masks, which, as mentioned earlier, cuts across the groups and regroups all the participants on stage according to their attitude to masks and not according to their roles or to whether or not they are actually using a mask.

4.

Characters against Actors

From the moment the characters enter the theater, interrupting the rehearsal of another play by Pirandello, Il Giuoco delle parti (The Play of Parts), they disturb the director and the actors. At first, the director tries to get rid of the intruders but he succumbs to the Father’s obstinate arguments and there follows a long philosophical debate about reality and fiction. The debate delineates two opposing mask-philosophies: the director and actors’ cynical approach and laughing dismissal of the characters, on the one hand, and the characters’ belief in their own feelings and therefore in their legitimate ontological existence, on the other. The plot in the characters’ drama has already been set in motion, the events they are recounting belong to the family’s history. Yet the relations between the characters continue beyond the narrated story that triggered them and are at the heart of the masks’ reality. The complex relationships in an essentially dysfunctional family arouse heated arguments and strong feelings, which are readily recognized by the audience whose identification is secured because the range and diversity of sentiments divulged on stage are part of the audience’s human experience and ever-present range of possibilities. Thus, while the cause for the eruption of these feelings may be termed unreal, since it is the story of fictive characters, the effect of the narrated events on the audience is quite real.

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Two characters stand out in Six Characters in Search of an Author for their incapacity to convey feelings: the father-character and the son-character. For all of the father’s talk of feelings, claiming that “inside us [the characters] we carry a drama full of pain” and that “the passion in us drives us to this,” he himself is driven by thoughts rather than feelings (SC: 13-4). He married the mother not out of love, but because he “always had these aspirations towards a solid moral sanity” (SC: 21), a statement that makes the daughter roar with laughter, since he is the man who nearly had sex with his step-daughter. The father answers the accusations regarding his frequenting prostitutes by saying: “each of us – on the outside, in front of others – dresses in dignity, but inside himself he is well aware of these uncomfortable things … what’s lacking is the courage to say these things” (SC: 24). Lacking courage is hardly the father’s only drawback: he is incapable of expressing his feelings, neither by talking about them nor by expressing them in some other way, be it by actions or just gestures. He accuses the mother of “never having guessed any of my feelings” (SC: 23) yet by saying so, ironically he discloses his own shortcomings, and his own incapacity to convey his feelings. The father is blamed by the daughter for his “intellectual complications,” and by the son for never having cared for him, or gotten to know him. The son is emotionally crippled as a result of the father’s treatment, and tries to stay away from the other characters. He says: “what I am going through, what I am feeling, I cannot, nor do I wish to express .... I am not a character that has been ‘realized’ dramatically” (SC: 28). Both father and son exemplify by their incapacity what a mask character must do in order to be realized dramatically: masks must be able to convey feelings in order to arouse feelings in their audience. Unlike them, the mother and the daughter do just that: the daughter’s every move is a passionate one, and the mother’s is a loving one. The mother answers the father’s accusations that she did not guess what his feelings were, as he had expected her to, with facts about his own actions: he took her son away from her and decided she was to live with another man. It’s the actions that count, not his grand ideas, the intentions he never conveyed or his repressed feelings. As specified in the stage directions, the mother is wearing a mask with wax tears, fixed in an eternal expression of sorrow. Her tears are real, because their effect is real: they evoke compassion in whoever looks at her and her actions comply with her mask. She terms the father’s remorse “crocodile tears” because of his “throwing away all ‘human’ encumbrance, every chaste aspiration, all pure sentiment, idealism, duty, modesty and shame” (SC: 25). His tears are as virtual and ineffective as his other miscommunicated emotions. A mask that realizes the unreal must be exposed, expressing real feelings, if it is to convey them to the audience. The actors, who resent having to improvise the unwritten parts of the characters, cannot do so because of their cynical attitude of incredulity towards the masks. Moreover, they are incapable of lending

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

themselves to understanding the feelings the characters talk about and arouse. It is easier for the actors to dismiss their own feelings as illusions than to have to deal with them and it is certainly easier to dismiss the feelings evoked by the characters and to laugh at the terrible tragedy the characters unfold on stage than to have to take them seriously and face them. The masks embody feelings, but require actors to express them, as feelings must be acted out to be conveyed, to be real. Yet these modern actors have lost the capacity to identify and understand the feelings conveyed by masks or to act them. At the end of the day, it is the actors who are unmovable, since nothing reaches them or moves them while it is the mask characters, rigid in their fixity, who tell very moving tales manipulating the audience towards recognition and identification.

5.

Six Masks in Search of a Performer

The six characters are in search of someone to perform their story, rather than in search of an author, as the name of the play would have us think. They do not need an author but rather someone to express and convey the feelings they potentially are. The entire theatrical community, including the audience, is responsible for activating the feelings the masks embody. The characters’ story has already been written, but not performed, which is primordial if they are to actualize themselves as functioning masks, since like all masks they must be put into use in order to become effective tools. The characters claim to be in search of an author, since they have been created by an author but not been put to use, and they think an author may assist them in being fulfilled in their roles as masks. An author is not to be found, and the director is easily tempted to try and fill that role himself (SC: 29), by listening to the characters and writing down their story, which he will then have his actors perform. The actors deem the director’s enthusiasm vain (SC: 30), while the director believes this to be an opportunity to stage a play without having to satisfy an interfering author’s every whim. He is quickly disappointed, as the father is as hard to please as any stereotypical author, present at every rehearsal (SC: 48). The father considers himself to be the author of the play, and even of the wife’s new family (SC: 22), hence his responsibility towards her and her children. He reminds one of Fileno, another character in search of an author, in the short story “La tragedia di un personaggio” (The Tragedy of a Character), which served Pirandello as the basis for the play. Fileno claims to be an author himself, challenging his own author who has created him, and looking for another, better author instead, one who would appreciate his true worth.19 What becomes clear is that the reason the author is not to be found is that one singular author does not exist. Rather, each story has many authors, as is the case in Six Characters in Search of an Author. The authors of the play

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are not just the original, not-to-be-found author, the director and the father. Rather, the entire community of the play is co-authoring the characters: the playwright, the actors, the audience, the director, as well as all the stagehands. What each of the characters represents is the staged co-creation of characters, the many authors in one representative character. The action that takes place on both sides of the footlights thematizes the mutual production of theatrical identities and plots by the collective imaginary, common to the writer and the cast as well as to the audience. The mask function is therefore an agent of shared identity. As such, it is resisted by both actors and members of the audience, each of whom believes in his or her own individuality. Pirandello makes his players resist masks so as to stage a revolt of so-called individual creativity against collectively created roles and tales. Pirandello’s interchangeable masks show the aspiration to personal authenticity to be nothing other than a collective or archetypal aspiration for individuality, craved for by each player. This aspiration is the ideal pursued by the entire audience and Pirandello suggests that individuality is itself a mask, if by individuality one means something uniquely one’s own. Like the ‘humans’ watching the play, the masks too are made to express personal points of view and as many interpretations of what ‘really took place’ as there are characters. The subjectivity of each character’s perception of the story and their individual recollections of past events will produce a different yet equally plausible account of what took place, an account that must necessarily be inaccurate, since, as the director exclaims: “This is the theater! The truth goes just so far!” (SC: 48). The many clashing points of view are also part of the fabric of the collective reality of the masks, reflecting at the same time the collective fabric of the reality of the audience. Each character believes his story to be his own created story, yet this belief is merely an illusion. The uniqueness each fixed character strives for underlines each mask’s illusory individuality while mirroring the audience’s aspiration for individuality even as its members sit amid a mostly despised collective. Thus the ideal of a self-created character is exploded, and individuality reduced to a point of view, rather than a character-forming device. In this, too, the characters resemble their wooden counterparts: although a specific mask maker carves the lines of the mask he produces, this mask remains meaningless without a community of believers to pour content into it, and make it perform the belief it was created to represent.

6.

The Audience and the Commedia dell’Arte

The community of the theater is similar to the ritual community in many ways. Richard Schechner even uses ritual terms to describe the experience of the performing actor, as one possessed by something other than himself:

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

“multiple selves coexist [in the actor] … Just as a puppet does not stop being ‘dead’ when it is animated, so the performer does not stop being, at the same level, his ordinary self when he is possessed by a God or playing the role of Ophelia.”20 The actor, for Schechner, is a kind of shaman of the theater, like a wooden artifact animated by a greater spirit, a vessel enabling the transference of greater spirits into the midst of the community. The audience’s participation is a prerequisite of the theatrical performance, like that of the members of the tribe in a ritual. In Six Characters in Search of an Author, the audience itself becomes another stock-character, in addition to the ones on stage, whose performance is necessary and relied upon for the unfolding of the play. Pirandello uses several devices to incorporate the audience into the play, in ways that at the time were revolutionary. As mentioned earlier, when the audience is admitted into the hall, it is immediately introduced onto the stage by the lack of dividing curtains, and made a part of the events by devices such as the entries of the director, the leading lady and the six characters through the aisles where the audience is sitting. The audience is presented with the rehearsal of the second scene of another play, bearing another name, Il Giuoco delle parti (The Play of Parts), rather than the expected beginning of the play the audience has come to see that night. This device puts the audience on the same level as the actors, who can pick up from where the previous rehearsal stopped the day before. Another stratagem to introduce the audience into the play is to include it in the criticism the director is expressing at the author of the play.21 The allusion to the Commedia dell’Arte draws the audience, and especially an Italian audience, further into the play, counting on its familiarity with this kind of theater, when it recognizes Madame Pace for the Commedia stock character that she is.22 Each of the Commedia’s stock characters had his or her prescribed costume, gestures and role. The good characters were always good, the bad always bad, and their role in the plot unfolding on stage would be understood the minute any of them came on. The masks used by most of the characters were not the only reason for them to be puppet-like in their acting, as Pierre Louis Duchartre explains: “the most individual actor was always careful not to dominate his ‘role,’” but rather become “so submerged himself within it that he became an integral part of the character portrayed.”23 Over the years, certain roles were traditionally filled by actors from specific regions, and so Pantalone would be a character that always spoke in Venetian patois, while the doctor, Gratiano, spoke with a Bologna accent and in nonsensical Latin.24 The comic effect of Commedia characters was thus enhanced by their accents, which became one of their stock character features. Accordingly, Madam Pace’s speech is a mixture of a deformed Italian combined with a kind of Spanish.25 Her appearance as an exaggerated buffoon-like caricature,

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a version of La Ruffiana (the Commedia Madam), and her odd speech is similar to that of the comic yet evil Capitano. Her traditional role, like that of Capitano’s, is meant, among other things, to provide comic relief for a stressful moment in the play. The feminine characters of the Commedia which boasted a name were those of the lover or her servant, while Madame Pace is a highly improbable candidate of a love affair, and ironically, her name is the only mask Pirandello accords her. Another feature of the Commedia relevant to this play is that of apparent improvisation. The six characters’ entry, staged as bursting into the theater, and the director and actors’ bewilderment when the two groups meet, is meant to suggest their appearance is as surprising to the actors as it is for the audience. Pirandello stresses the similarity between the characters’ appearance on stage and Madame Pace’s appearance, since she too seems to ‘materialize’ when evoked by the daughter character, and only when the setting is modified enough to make her appearance possible. The acting in the Commedia has often been mistaken for an act of improvisation, whereas in reality the mask-like fixity of each of the actors’ roles provided the actors with a blueprint for their acting. Actors were not supposed to invent their actions or their words: they performed a stock role which contained a limited range of possible actions in a conventional situation for each specific character, as well as the manner and content of speech that a particular character was expected to utter in that specific situation.26 Upon the appearance of a given character the audience would know immediately both what the situation was about, whether a love scene, a scene of jealousy, or of adultery, and what each character was supposed to do and say. Pirandello clearly considered improvisation to be nothing else than the actualization of the role of a stock character, which necessarily limits the actor’s possibility of introducing into his acting more than his prescribed character allows. Two of the actors in this play protest against the stage-manager’s intention to go along with the father-character’s wishes, and work without a proper script, which would entail the need to improvise their parts “like in the ‘Commedia dell’Arte’!” (SC: 30). Yet the actors’ protest is unnecessary since there is neither need nor possibility for improvisation.27 Pirandello forces the actors to do what they would rather not do, namely take the characters seriously, and become their loudspeakers. Pirandello worded his criticism of modern theater and modern actors in the page of explanation for his play Questa Sera si Recita a Soggetto (Tonight We Improvise). There he wrote that the announcement of the play would arouse great curiosity, yet be shot down in advance by the critics, because they would deem it impossible that in these modern times one could find actors capable of improvising like those of the time of the Commedia dell’Arte, who could act with the help of a mere skeleton-script, a set repertoire and traditional masks

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

which assisted them in their work.28 Pirandello’s covert criticism of his critics conceals his lament for the theater of times past and for its actors who could, as Duchartre explained, become one with their roles. The masks, as Pirandello mentions, were one of the cues that actors of the Commedia were capable of deciphering in order to perform their parts, which is just what the actors of Six Characters are incapable of doing. These modern actors do not consider masks useful for their acting but rather see them as an obstacle and are convinced they are the ones who should give the masks meaning. The actors no longer belong to a community such as that of the Commedia, and even less so to a community such as that of the ancient Greek theater in which masks were used to assist the eruption of feelings. Actors in ancient theaters understood the value of masks for their acting while actors in modern theaters can neither use the masks to convey the feelings evoked by the masks nor those their roles demand.29 Madame Pace in Six Characters in Search of an Author is a grotesque character, in outfit and behavior. Despite the laughter her appearance and speech provoke, the scene itself is a tragic one, and is revealed as an attack against the father and his previous claims to genuine feelings. While he was busy with high philosophy, the daughter had to undergo terrible humiliation under Madame Pace’s cruel treatment and the mother lived in constant excruciating pain. Pirandello does not just set the characters against the actors in this play, but also uses masks to debunk the father’s cynical attitude, which, despite his being a mask-character himself, is antithetical to the effect masks produce. Masks evoke, embody and transmit real feelings, and in order to convey this message forcefully Pirandello chooses a mask-character who fails to realize it himself. The father-character embodies the resistance to masks, which is particularly ironic since he wears a mask himself.

C. I l F u M at tia Pascal 1.

The Rules of the Game

One cannot talk of a transposition and development of literary masks in Pirandello’s work from one genre to another, but rather of a continuous study of the subject of masks in his novels, dramas and short stories. Though Pirandello wrote novels and short stories long before he wrote plays, publishing The Late Mattia Pascal in 1904 seventeen years before Six Characters in Search of an Author, his use of masks is already established in his fiction in a manner similar to that which he will later make of them in his plays. The father-character in Six Characters in Search of an Author bears many similarities to Mattia, the main protagonist in this novel. Pirandello contrasted the nature of the father-character with the text he was made to speak, emphasizing

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this disparity to draw attention to the hypocrisy of his professed feelings. Throughout the novel Mattia’s actions and use of his invented impersonation mask are contrasted with the personification mask that he is. Despite the text these characters are made to say, both characters are used as mask-embodiments of the ideas and values Pirandello was targeting in his audience and in his readers. The Late Mattia Pascal is especially interesting, from the perspective of masks,30 for two main reasons. First, the construction of a literary mask is necessarily a cumulative procedure, more so in prose than in plays, because the immediate visual effect of the theater must be translated into words read from a page. A detailed description of the construction of Mattia’s impersonation mask, as he becomes Adriano Meis, presents such a process. Secondly, and most importantly, is the use Pirandello makes of his mask-character to debunk his character’s philosophy and actions. Mattia is convinced he can reinvent himself, changing his name and history. After all, Mattia believes, an identity is nothing more than a mask, easily discarded for another. This philosophy also denies the part anyone else could have in the determination of his identity: Mattia disclaims the role of his family and upbringing, as well as that of his community, in the fashioning of his mask-identity. Mattia not only disregards the part his community has in his being who he is, as well as his own social obligations, but he also disregards the risks involved in toying with an impersonation mask. Although impersonation masks are usually used for play and carnival, no one can abuse them any more than they can abuse ritual masks.31 In this novel, Pirandello shows the impossibility of using masks against the rules, and the dire social consequences for a protagonist who thought he could make his own rules. In addition, the ethical issues involved even in the use of an impersonation mask, which is supposedly a mask made for play, are forcefully brought to the fore. The father-character in Six Characters was made to uphold a similar philosophy of masks to that of Mattia’s, considering masks to be meaningless, deceitful artifacts. Yet he was still a member of a community, a family, as were the other characters on stage. In Mattia’s case, Pirandello assists his delusion of total freedom by setting him in scenes almost empty of other people. Pirandello manages to create the impression that Mattia is indeed all alone, convinced, in his newly acquired identity, unattached to anyone, that he is free to take off one mask and use another as playfully as he pleases, and indeed reinvent himself time and again. Despite what Mattia may believe, Pirandello shows that masks are constituted and upheld by the community, and that one is not able to totally disconnect oneself from the community, neither outwardly nor within oneself. Mattia is eventually made to pay for his asocial conduct and his misuse of his identity mask, even though, wooden puppet that he is made to be, he does not seem to be overly affected by the punishment.

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

2.

The Construction of an Impersonation Mask

The title of the novel The Late Mattia Pascal seems to indicate that the reader can expect to be presented with a story about a person, now deceased, by the name of Mattia Pascal. Yet the pages preceding the beginning of the story are told by Mattia himself. Mattia’s state of mind is at best doubtful, since he admits that “one of the few things – perhaps the only one – that I know for certain is that my name is Mattia Pascal” (MP: xi).32 Not only is Mattia still alive, but as he says at the end of this introduction, “for the moment… I have died twice, but the first time was a mistake, and the second… well, you may read for yourself” (MP: xiii). The author is counting on the readers’ participation not only in following the narration and in judging its content, but also in activating the mask. Since a literary mask is similar to its wooden, inanimate ritual counterpart, which must be donned and operated to come alive and fulfill the part for which it was conceived, presenting Mattia as a ‘dead’ character invites the readers to become partners in bringing him to life, by putting this mask to use in the process of reading. Such a strategy is more suited to the writing of a novel than a play, since it is more easily operable with words than with visual props such as the theater would require. In his play, we saw that Pirandello presented the audience with the finished version of the mask rather than with a ‘dead’ mask as he does here. The construction of the mask in the case of Mattia thus starts with this enigmatic beginning and the mask is to be constructed backwards, from the static form of a dead mask-character, which must be activated by the reading.33 Mattia narrates the circumstances that led to the end of his first life, and proves to be an unreliable narrator, a happy-go-lucky fellow, shallow and lacking in feelings for others. The distance Mattia expresses towards the narrated events and towards the other people in his life turn him into a spectator of his own story, despite the fact that as the narrator of the story he should have enjoyed a privileged position. Such distancing adds to his presentation as a mindless, unfeeling puppet-character. Far from the image of the persecuted underdog he presents of himself, Mattia is the main instigator of much of the upheaval in the lives of those surrounding him. No moral value seems particularly important to him. He betrays his best friend: having promised to assist his friend in courting the girl he is in love with, Mattia convinces the girl to marry him instead. He also cuckolds his hated manager by fathering a bastard son with the manager’s wife, who is herself Mattia’s previous, and easily abandoned, girlfriend. After both his mother and his beloved baby daughter die, Mattia no longer feels connected to anyone in his village. He takes the first possible opportunity to flee from what he considers to be a stifling life, assailed as he is by his many creditors and detestable mother-in-law. As he learns by chance several

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days later, he is not missed, since a body is found in the village’s mill and is identified as himself. Mattia does not come forward to prove he is alive but rather decides to use this coincidence to start a new life. Combined with his lucky winnings at the casino he chances into on his way, Mattia is well equipped for his new project. Rather than going back to the village, assuming his responsibilities and paying his debts, he flees from every possible group of people that were part of his being Mattia, and he continues on his way till he reaches Rome. Completely rid of his previous obligations, as well as of his identity as Mattia Pascal, this opportunity allows him to reinvent himself, beginning with a new name, Adriano Meis, as well as a plausible biography. “This pursuit, this imaginative construction of a life that had never really been lived but had been pieced together gradually from other lives and from places until it was mine and felt mine – all this process brought me a new, strange joy, not without a certain sadness too, in the first days of my wanderings. It was my occupation. I lived not only in the present, but also for my past, that is for the years that Adriano Meis had not lived” (MP: 92). Mattia believes he is capable of inventing himself anew, and thus sets out to experience a coveted ‘second chance’ at life. Mattia is a personification mask, embodying the spirit of his time: the rising value of individualism as well as the belief that one can fashion oneself regardless of one’s origin and family, social circumstances and economic situation. Above all, Mattia embodies, like the father-character after him, the modern skeptical mask-philosophy, which considers all masks to be deceitful, playful artifacts one can use and discard at will. As the embodiment of the belief that one can invent oneself, Mattia will construct and use the impersonation mask of Adriano Meis, only to discover that there are limits even to masquerading. Mattia takes several pragmatic steps to concoct Adriano’s mask, which is built from the outside. Mattia changes his clothes and alters his appearance to look less like his previous self. Looking in the mirror at his newly shaven face, it is the mask that dictates the role: “I had to be a philosopher perforce with a face like that” (MP: 85). Pirandello’s cynicism, directed at his mask-character in this last remark, is obvious even at this stage, but far more so at the end of the novel, since Mattia remains a wooden puppet more than a fleshed-out character despite his ordeals, and he certainly does not become a philosopher with any deeper understanding than that which he displays at the beginning of the novel.

3.

A Problematic Transformation

Although the new mask of Adriano Meis liberates Mattia from all his responsibilities, and provides a temporary freedom for him to do as he pleases, it has no content, no past anchored in real life and no memories; it is merely an emp-

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

ty shell, which will prove unsafe and easily challenged. Accordingly, Mattia gradually discovers that putting on an invented mask creates new problems he must surmount. Since he does not legally exist, and has no official papers of any kind, many privileges are denied him. He cannot apply for employment; he cannot own a house; he cannot be acknowledged as a hero when he protects a woman on the street for fear of being questioned by the authorities, nor can he complain to the police when he is robbed. He cannot even own a dog, as a faithful and more importantly silent partner, since once again, owning a dog would require registration and paying dog taxes. “For the first time,” Adriano thinks, “this boundless freedom of mine was no doubt beautiful but that it was also something of a tyrant, since it wouldn’t permit me even to buy a little puppy” (MP: 97). He realizes that he has become not only a foreigner like so many other foreigners in a big city, but “a foreigner to life” (MP: 102). Another discovery Mattia makes, albeit after two years of travel, is that he is lonely and wishes to have social contacts. A mask is of no use without the participation of a community, and especially without the community’s acknowledgment and belief that the mask used by a person, comprised of his looks, his name and his family history, represents his identity. “I was afraid I would no longer be satisfied or happy alone with my own company. And then, as I touched my face and found it clean-shaven, as I ran my hand over the long hair or touched the spectacles on my nose, I felt a strange emotion; I seemed no longer to be I, it was as if I weren’t touching myself… if everything I had imagined and constructed concerning Adriano Meis was of no use for other people, to whom was it useful? Me? But I could believe it, if at all, only when others believed it too” (MP: 107). In other words, not only Adriano’s identity but also his sense of self depends on other people. Without such feedback, he would cease to exist, even for himself. By becoming Adriano, Mattia has reinvented the form, the mask, the physical appearance, but not the content, which consists not only of the construct of the self each person puts together throughout his life, but also of the construct of that person put together by others. Living as Adriano, Mattia feels he is less himself than he was before, and yet he does not feel he is Adriano, not only because he knows he is not, but also since other people repeatedly put that identity in question. Each outer challenge on the mask cracks it and makes it less efficient. The mask of Adriano Meis into which he slipped so easily begins to endanger its wearer, while, as Mattia will soon discover, his previous identity as Mattia is no longer a valid one. When Mattia, now Adriano, decides to settle as a lodger in a house in Rome, his newly-acquired identity is strengthened by accumulating interactions with the other characters he encounters there. However, relationships with other people also imply new obligations towards them. When Papiano, the absent landlords’ son-in-law, appears on the scene, Adriano realizes that the best thing for him would be to leave the house. Papiano is quite displeased to discover the

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existence of a new lodger, especially since he notices the affection Adriana, his late wife’s sister, obviously has for Adriano. He considers Adriano a threat to his own status in the household. Nothing forces Adriano to stay, yet he too has become involved with Adriana. Her almost identical name, as well as the feelings he believes she arouses in him, indicate she is indeed perfect for him. He no longer wishes to leave, nor to abandon Adriana to Papiano’s obvious mistreatment. Mattia’s mask now begins to crumble, as soon as it is contested by Papiano’s overt suspicion of Adriano. His landlord, Paleari, announces that a puppet theater is giving a presentation that evening, and Mattia envies the puppets for their lack of feelings: “lucky marionettes! … no anguish or perplexity, no hesitations, obstacles, shadows, pity  – nothing!” (MP: 146). One of the aims of the inclusion of this episode at this precise point in the narrative is to debunk Mattia’s self-deception. All the time Mattia thought he could do as he pleases, inventing himself, with no one to answer to, neither a God nor a ‘Geppetto’ inventor, he was no more than a puppet on a string. His writer now redirects his steps, tearing down Mattia’s illusions of safety and forcing him to change masks again. Papiano brings along a person he presents as Adriano’s relative, since they bear the same name, and all the Meis are known to be related. Though alarmed, Adriano manages to diffuse the situation by making the ‘cousin’ believe whatever stories he tells him. Nevertheless, it is clear to him that Papiano is challenging him and trying to undermine his favorable position with Adriana. When he suddenly hears what he believes to be a voice from the past, Adriano becomes more concerned: it is the voice of a Spaniard he recalls having met at the casino on his way to Rome some years before. Adriano is immediately convinced to undergo an operation on his crooked eye, the only remaining outstanding physical feature that could identify him as Mattia Pascal. The operation is a success, but to no avail. Although Adriano now looks less like Mattia, his looks alone cannot resolve the impasse he is in. Mattia has allowed himself to become close to Adriana and to kiss her, and he fully realizes that she could be hoping to become his wife. Assuming he told her the truth, she would be implicated in his transgressions as much as him, since he is ironically “dead but still married!” (MP: 191). Mattia could forge documents, and carry on living as he does, not missed by any of the members of his previous life, while able to become attached to those of the new one. He could take his new bride abroad and try his luck there. As he had no qualms about lying and cheating before, it is certainly not lying in itself that prevents Mattia from doing so at this point. Yet the option of living a lifelong lie does not arise. The reason Mattia does not consider maintaining the mask of Adriano forever as a conceivable option, is that for a mask to be efficient, two conditions must be kept: the community in which the mask operates must recognize the mask and identify it as belonging to its wearer, and more importantly, the man don-

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

ning the mask must believe in it too. As Mattia does not believe himself in the mask of Adriano Meis, he cannot stand up against the slightest threat that could bring him to make mistakes that would expose him. Mattia is definitely not strong enough to maintain a life full of tension, led under perpetual threat. In order to reinvent himself under the name of Adriano Meis, Mattia had to disconnect completely from his community, and he now finds himself in the same situation again. Killing off Adriano Meis becomes the most logical solution, and also the easiest: all there ever existed of the mask of Adriano Meis is left on the river bank, his cane and his hat, with the invented name and address. But Mattia is still trapped in his own mask-narrative, even after he kills Adriano Meis. For a few days, he is as outside of existence as a breathing protagonist can be, for he is neither Mattia Pascal nor Adriano Meis, who are both dead. He, whoever this ‘he’ is, as both identities are as non-existent for the moment, takes “…these two dead men out for a walk in Pisa” (MP: 228). Mattia’s limbo stage,34 on his way to try and be reborn once more, is thus set in comic terms rather than tragic ones. Pirandello is relentless in both irony and poignancy in describing this outlandish scene, which is only so for Mattia and for informed readers – anyone else on the street would simply see a man going for a walk. “Oh it was a charming stroll! Adriano Meis, who had been there before, wanted to act as guide to Mattia Pascal. But Mattia, upset by the things that he kept turning over in his mind, shook off his companion rudely… But I remembered how Adriano Meis, two years before, while strolling through the streets of Pisa, had been annoyed in the same way by the equally nasty shade of Mattia Pascal… The best course was to pay no attention to either one. O white campanile, you could lean to one side; but I, between those two, could move neither to left nor right” (MP: 228). The equation between the mask of Mattia Pascal and that of Adriano Meis is thus established: if both of them are dead, the question now arises as to what kind of mask the third one the writer concocts for his protagonist would be.

4.

No Going Back

Changing back to being Mattia Pascal from being Adriano Meis entails donning yet another mask, which is once more fabricated, in a few stages, starting with the hat. Having killed Adriano, Mattia goes to buy a new hat as soon as he gets off the train, “the size and shape of the hats Mattia Pascal always used to wear” (MP: 226). Mattia also decides to cut his hair, to look more like his previous self, however, once the hair is cut, the new hat is too big and slips over his eyes. This comic scene is also indicative of Mattia’s new status: he may no longer be Adriano but neither can he fit back into being Mattia, and must therefore fill the hat with paper for it to fit his head, as a puppeteer would do with an old, dilapidated puppet.

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Mattia goes back to Miragno, the only place where people can recognize him, and where his name and his past still exists in the memories of others. Yet taking off the mask of Adriano Meis is not sufficient to be able to be Mattia again. From within the mask, Mattia is no longer his old self, and from without the mask Mattia learns that his many social and legal transgressions prevent him from even trying to formally be Mattia again. On the outskirts of the city, he stops by his brother and then by his friend, Pomino. Mattia discovers that Pomino has married his own wife, who believed she had been widowed, and that the couple has a child. The couple is alarmed: Mattia’s ‘return’ to life turns his wife into a bigamist and their child into an illegitimate child. Consequently, Mattia agrees to remain ‘dead’, in order to safeguard his friend’s new family. He finds refuge in the dilapidated and deconsecrated church of the village of Miragno. Every time Mattia broke a mask, to become Adriano, or to become Mattia once more, he also transgressed ethical boundaries; thus, a connection between the narrative of mask and the narrative of ethics was established. This connection is further emphasized when related to the Church. Although Pirandello did not spare the Church his pointed criticism, he upheld social institutions and believed in their role in the life of the collective. The church, now empty of believers, and therefore empty of faith, still serves as a library, a repository of memory and record. It is to the librarian, rather than the absent priest, that Mattia will make his confession of sorts. It is also the librarian’s idea that Mattia writes his memories, similar to a therapeutic penance, and it is he who “will keep the secret of everything written here, as if he had heard it all in the confessional” (MP: 250).35 The Church, which enshrines the coded beliefs and practices of the community, is also the institution responsible for its ethical fashioning and for the reinforcement of such values even in secular, skeptic times depicted in the novel. Religion is present in daily life, and some people still believe in it, as does Adriana. When Mattia first became a boarder in her father’s house, she put a small stoup above his bed, with holy water collected at the church of San Rocco opposite the house. Mattia mistook it for an ashtray, and the stoup was removed and replaced with a proper ashtray (MP: 117). Mattia’s lack of respect for religion and social norms is most critical when it comes to the marriage sacrament, a contract sealed and sanctioned by the religious establishment. Mattia disregarded the sanctity of marriage by betraying his wife and fathering an illegitimate son, by flirting with another woman and especially by rendering his wife’s second marriage void upon his return to Miragno. His wife is still married to him, but is also married to his friend, subsequently raising an illegitimate daughter, another outcast created by Mattia’s transgressions. No community, secular or religious, can function without some sort of regulation, especially concerning marriage. Even if the society is no longer religious, still its institutions are in need of protection for its own continuance. One of the

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

tools with which society protects itself are the masks it imposes on its subjects. Mattia is faced with the impossibility of living without a mask, and finds himself forced to live in a third mask, that of the ‘late Mattia Pascal’, since both of his other masks are no longer valid. The mask of Adriano Meis was left on the riverbank, and is now useless, and Mattia’s original mask cannot be re-used, since Mattia has not “regained my [Mattia’s] individual characteristics. My wife is the wife of Pomino, and I can’t really say that I’m myself. I do not know who I am” (MP: 250). The mask of the ‘late Mattia Pascal’ is the mask Mattia will wear until his “third, last and definitive death” releases him (MP: xiii). His status is that of an outcast from society, a society to which Mattia’s transgressions no longer allow him to fully belong. Aside for breaking the obvious social taboos of marriage and shaking off his responsibility for the engendering of children, Mattia is made to pay for the misuse of his two masks, the original one of Mattia Pascal and the invented one of Adriano Meis. Clearly, personification masks, which embody and convey transcendental spirits into the midst of the community, are only used according to strict rules, yet impersonation masks too have rules according to which they must be used. When these rules are broken, even playful impersonation masks can become dangerous for the community, and such transgressions must therefore be punished.36 Mattia is punished by being made to lead a zombie-like life, as is the fate of breakers of taboos in ritual societies.37 Above all, he has misused his mask and has now become a living-dead-man, a punishment all the more effective because it also serves as a vivid warning to the rest of the community, and prevents others from thinking of doing as Mattia did. Mattia will live on the outskirts of society, neither married nor able to marry and raise a new family. His sole occupation will be the recording of his deeds for the sake of future generations, a record that will be kept in the church, still the site of moral guidance. As far as Mattia the wooden puppet is concerned, this third mask is the perfect fit for him: he is finally free from responsibilities, spending his life surrounded by inanimate things, by books, rather than having to interact with other people. While not everyone may find this status enviable, it is nonetheless the position Mattia had craved from the beginning and he is quite pleased that he “will stay on as librarian, all alone at Santa Maria Liberale” (MP: 70). In his mask of ‘the late Mattia Pascal’, Mattia is now completely identified with the mask, a body without life, the cynical reverse of the description in his landlord’s theosophical books, of the time when he was Adriano Meis. In these books, Mattia as Adriano, had read that “the dead – the really dead – were in my very same condition, the ‘husks’ of the Kamaloka, suicides especially … ravaged by all human appetites but unable to satisfy them, since these spirits are without their carnal body, but are unaware they have lost it” (MP: 118). As opposed to people whose bodies can be dead while the spirit lives on, Mattia’s

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spirit is condemned to only live within the pages he writes, each time his mask is brought to life by a reader.

5.

Pirandello and his Masks

The Late Mattia Pascal was Pirandello’s first literary success, and it already deploys his beliefs concerning masks, their necessity and their use, a subject that would remain of paramount importance in his future works. Although Pirandello is mainly interested in impersonation masks, he regards them on both social and literary planes as essential for the continuation of both. On the social level, masks, created by society and imposed on its members, are imperative for society’s continuation. Pirandello’s many characters show this to be true in various ways. Mattia, as we have seen, believed he could use masks to evade his responsibilities, and masks were used both to prove him wrong and to punish him for trying. The father-character in Six Characters in Search of an Author used the mask as a respectable cover for his immoral behavior, explaining that “each of us – on the outside, in front of others – dresses in dignity, but inside himself he is well aware of these unconfessible things that pass through the secrecy of his heart” (SC: 24). Enrico, mentioned earlier, thought he could toy with the carnival mask to get back at his friends, only to be trapped in his own concoction and to be considered mad for good; the lawyer in Pirandello’s short story “La Carriola” (“The Wheelbarrow”) manages to maintain his sanity and his mask as a respectable member of society only by indulging in a daily secret ritual with his dog; the ‘sorcerer’ in another short story, “La Patente” (“The License”), uses the juridical system to provide a formal seal for his mask of sorcerer, a hated mask others have made him wear, but which he decides to turn to his advantage since he cannot be rid of it, however much he tries.38 Whereas these are examples of characters who use the mask to hide their thoughts and deeds, other Pirandellian characters try to take the mask off, more or less successfully. One such character is Professor Gori, in a short story entitled “Marsina Stretta” (“The Tight Tailcoat”).39 Gori, who is wearing a tailcoat which is much too tight for him, is to be witness at a wedding he has helped bring about between one of his old, beloved students and a well-to-do young man. However, on the morning of the wedding, the ceremony is about to be canceled, because the bride’s mother died in the night. The groom’s mother is only too happy to use this pretext to cancel a wedding she was never in favor of, while Gori realizes on the spot that unless the marriage takes place, his ex-student will be ruined, penniless and without any protection. The professor is fuming, and in his anger he gesticulates enough for his tailcoat to tear and one of its sleeves comes off. In the midst of this comical situation, he takes immediate action, and commands everyone surrounding him. He takes the

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flowers which were meant to embellish the wedding to the dead woman’s room to honor her instead, makes the bride change her wedding dress back to her old black school uniform, and rallies the groom to his side. Despite the groom’s angry relatives, the couple is first officially married at the municipality and then hurriedly married at the church as well. If Gori has managed to save the day, it is thanks to his torn mask: “Fuori della grazia di Dio per quella marsina stretta, aveva invece trovato, nell’irritazione, l’animo e la forza di ribellarvisi e di trionfarne” [Outside the grace of God because of that tight tailcoat, [he] had rather found in his irritation the spirit and the strength to rebel and triumph].40 The Italian expression “fuori della grazia di Dio” is used to refer to a state of exceeding anger; yet Pirandello chose this particular expression to introduce God in a reversal of words and meaning. Two elements are apparent in reading this story, the mask and the Church. The bride’s clothes as well as the professor’s tailcoat are the obvious masks, which society expects people to use for the occasion of a wedding. But when this ceremony is threatened by another, the funeral, the professor uses the correct clothes, making the bride change into black, in order to attend the funeral and show respect for her dead mother, but only after she is married. When his mask is torn, allowing him greater physical movement as well as peeling off the restraint he showed beforehand out of accepted politeness, the professor is free to do the right, moral thing by the bride. He calls on God and His institution, the Church, to support him, albeit in a back-handed manner, paying the church a quick visit with the couple to seal their already officially legalized marriage, since the Church is still stronger than the tailcoat. Without suggesting that Pirandello was excessively religious, it is nevertheless quite clear that he recognized the Church as a binding social institution. As we have seen in The Late Mattia Pascal, although the village church no longer serves for prayer, it is still central in its capacity as a unifying and regulating social institution. The same can be noted in another of Pirandello’s novels, Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No-one and a hundred thousand). The wife of Vitangelo Moscarda, the main protagonist of this novel, makes a remark about his nose being slightly crooked to the right. This remarks sets Moscarda in an opposite motion to that of Mattia’s. Whereas Mattia tried to painstakingly build a substitute mask-identity for himself, Moscarda does his utmost to discard his own mask in order to ultimately fuse with nature. Moscarda is shaken by the fact that others see him differently than he knows himself to be, and so they produce as many ‘Moscardas’ as there are people who see him. His erasing of himself as others see him, is made in an endeavor to leave only that which is the real self. He feels he must rid himself of his father’s legacy, his job as a usurer, and all his money that has provided him his bourgeois existence. He gives away all his possessions, disengages with other people, and finally, all alone, he takes refuge in one of the institutions he used to donate money to, an old age

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home outside town, where he has all the mirrors covered so as not to see his own face, bearing the infamous nose. Moscarda has come as close as possible to the ‘peeling off’ of all his masks, at the price of being considered mad by all those who know him. In the remote home, Moscarda takes pleasure in walking outside early in the morning, when the world is “about to be discovered” anew each day. He claims that he can only live by being reborn, one moment after another, forcing himself not to think, and renewing the void he has made in himself of all vain human constructions. One of the layers Moscarda has ‘peeled off’ is that of institutionalized religion. Through a humorous chat with his wife’s dog, Moscarda ridicules men for their need to build elaborate stone constructions in order to attain a “sentiment of God,” which they believe can only be reached inside a church. He claims to have the sentiment of God within him, and that it has always been sufficient for him to feel it inside himself, without needing such mediation. Yet it is to the institution of the Church that Moscarda turns in order to retain some of his money, so easily discarded earlier on. Despite his criticism aimed at the priests who are more than happy to receive his money, it is nevertheless they who are in a position to help Moscarda. For his part, Moscarda is shown to have no qualms in criticizing those whose assistance he seeks, especially since he is considered to be a mad man.41 Moscarda declares that some people may be in need of praying, since they are thinking about their own death. He, on the other hand, has no such need, because he dies every second and is reborn without any memories, “alive and whole, not in myself any more, but in everything outside.”42 These are the words that end the novel. Yet Moscarda is as much a comic character as Mattia, a mask-character who must contend with his last mask, that is a part of him, despite his wishes and actions. He may deny the existence of this mask, but to no avail. Even in this extreme condition, when a protagonist believes himself to be completely alone, and totally outside of a stifling society, he is reminded, along with any reader who may have been convinced to believe in the possibility of escape, that some links, slight as the distant sound of church bells Moscarda can hear from his remote monastery, still remain within the self too, and that those links are provided by the Church, a repository of the collective social self. In the days during which Mattia is significantly blindfolded, after his eye was operated upon, Signor Anselmo, the theosophist, launches into a long explanation on the nature of the human condition, claiming that what makes people different from trees is their sense of life, which “acts like a little lantern that each of us carries with him” and that what makes people different from each other is their many various colors. According to Anselmo, the color of pagan virtue could be red and that of Christian virtue violet, yet for both it is true that “The light of a common idea is fed by collective feeling; but this feeling splits

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into factions, the lantern of the abstract term still remains, of course, but the flame inside splutters and flickers and dies down, as in all so-called transitional periods” (MP: 163). Pirandello uses his masks to convey this collective feeling and the impossibility of living without masks and completely outside society. Although he deals mostly with impersonation masks, and shares his era’s belief that underneath a false mask there is a ‘real’ or ‘true’ self, it appears that for Pirandello, the truth would still have the form of a mask. Peeling one mask after another off, there will always be yet another mask underneath, rather than Calvino’s seemingly empty knight’s shield.43 In Pirandello’s writing, the mask underneath all others is sometimes a personification mask, as is the case of the father-character, of Mattia, or of Moscarda, a mask made to embody and reflect collective values, whereas in other cases Pirandello uses impersonation masks only, as in some of his short stories. Despite their being cast into a specific shape, an inanimate form, it is through literary masks that Pirandello can bring the imaginary to life. As the father-character in Six Characters in Search of an Author is made to explain, He who has the luck to be born a live character can even laugh at death. He will never die. The one who will die is the man, the writer, the instrument of the creation. The creation never dies. And for it to live forever, it need not have exceptional talent or the ability to work miracles. Who was Sancho Panza? Who was Don Abbondio? And yet they live eternally, because, being live germs, they had the good fortune to find a fertile matrix, a fantasy that knew how to raise and nourish them, to make them live for eternity! (SC: 14).

With typical Pirandellian cynicism one can conclude that even Moscarda can only achieve the kind of perpetual, eternal freedom in life that he seeks as an artistic creation and through the use of his mask, within an imaginative fiction. As we saw in Six Characters in Search of an Author, Pirandello was very much aware of his theater audience and relied on the participation of his audience both to advance the plot and to promote his ideas, through his use of literary masks. The masks also serve Pirandello to draw the readers of his novels into active participation in the construction of the mask and in the deployment of the plot. In addition, and in a similar way to the theater, the masks are used to criticize the readers in his novels too, since they are made to realize they are co-producers of the masks. The self-knowledge achieved by the collectivization of the self that Moscarda attempted to reach can only be done through his mask. Moreover, the artificial product that is the mask can ultimately be used to acquire an affirmation of the life of the imaginary. As Pirandello wrote, “the conception of the work of art is nothing other, finally, than a way of organizing images. The idea of the artist is not an abstract idea; it is a sentiment, which becomes the center of the interior life, which takes over the spirit, shakes it and,

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shaking it, tends to create a corpus of images.”44 Some of the shapes in these images are literary masks.

D. F rom L uigi P ir andello to Patrick W hite The drama of the family in Six Characters in Search of an Author is one of non-seeing: the father does not see the plights of the other members of the family, yet expects the mother to guess the feelings he represses, and which, as a result of his repression, she cannot see; the mother does not see her son for so many years that he refuses to see her and acknowledge her as his mother; the adults do not see the little girl approaching the pool dangerously and drowning in it, and the younger son shoots himself behind a bush where he is discovered too late. The masks’ visible presence on stage enhances the tragic irony of the situation and of the dialogues: the result of the enacted drama is already embodied in them and carved on the surface of the masks, yet the drama must be re-enacted time after time. Among other qualities, the functions of personification masks are effective thanks to their visibility, yet visibility demands recognition. In traditional societies, the community seeks the revelation of their bonds and of the sacred power that binds them. The masks allow a realization of feelings and at the same time a validation of the existence of these feelings, enabling recognition of their existence. In Western society, faith in the divine mercy embodied in the statues of the Virgin Mary and her child is consciously shared by the community participating in the institutional practices that honor her. Yet these practices are considered outdated or even obsolete in modern secularized society. Pirandello is well aware that the communities of modern theater audiences and critics he addresses do not seek revelation and only recognize that there is nothing to recognize. Pirandello repeatedly points to what is plain for all to see: the actions of the characters on stage. The story of the six characters is about their search, not for an author but for someone to materialize them, to act out the potential embedded in them. This potential consists of the feelings they can convey and evoke. The characters are an artistic creation, waiting to be materialized and brought to expression by the actors for the audience, their goal being to materialize feelings in the audience. In their skeletal dramatic structure, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and White’s Memoirs of Many in One deploy the same mask function, that of personification, which is resisted by actors and audience, characters and readers alike. In the play, the mask of icy indifference to the story the characters tell and to their feelings displayed by the father-character, is matched by the icy indifference of the director and of the actors. As far as the father-character and the cast of ‘human’ actors, the director and the stagehands are concerned,

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visible, believable feelings can and should be ignored. Pirandello hints that resistance to recognition and revelation of feelings on which the function of personification masks is postulated is common to the audience as well. In contrast with traditional communities, for which the statue of Mary with her wax tears (visible on the mother-character’s mask) personified and inspired feelings, the expectations of modern theater audiences allow them to see only crocodile tears signifying nothing. Pirandello assigns another function to his personification masks, that of embodying what he terms ‘romantic procedures’ so that he can oppose them by exposing the masks, as he explains in his preface to the play. Pirandello exasperates his own characters by perpetually rejecting their wish to be acted, which causes great eruptions of passion: “this inflammation of their passions – which belongs to the realm of romantic procedures – is humorously ‘placed,’ located in the void. And the drama of the six characters presented not as it would have been organized by my fantasy had it been accepted but in this way, as a rejected drama, could not exist in the work except as in a ‘situation,’ with some little development … continually sidetracked, contradicted (by one of its characters), denied, and (by two others) not even seen”.45 The characters are used to embody both their author’s rejection of them and his “discreet satire on romantic procedure” which their act allows him to stage at the same time. In other words, the masks are the vehicle for both the action and its debunking. As we shall see in the next chapter, White’s mask-character, Alex Gray, is used in a similar manner. Alex’s mask is fashioned in such a way as to embody the romantic ideal of an egotistic, artistic individual, a mask which is at the same time condemned by her writer and by her co-producers, the readers, for being and behaving according to the character the mask delineates. The writer can count on the readers’ condemnation of the attributes he provides his mask-character because he is putting the character in a situation in which, blind to her own ridicule, Alex is made to exaggerate, distort and mirror values the readers would otherwise continue to admire, undisturbed. Both Pirandello and White end the mask-characters’ ‘eruption’ with a gun shot: in Six Characters it is the young boy who shoots himself at the end of the play, and in Memoirs of Many in One, Alex shoots blanks at her audience towards the end of the novel. Pirandello explains the decision to include the gun shot: “it breaks up and disperses the sterile experiment of the characters and the actors, which has apparently been made without the assistance of the poet. The poet, unknown to them, as if looking on at a distance during the whole period of the experiment, was at the same time busy creating – with it and of it – his own play.”46 The writer depicts a mask, created by his society. He then lets it loose in the invented drama, allowing the mask to embody an illusion of freedom of action, which is used to debunk what the character stands for, turning the mask into a powerful tool of criticism of society’s values. The gun

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shot startles Pirandello’s audience, engaging their attention and allowing an identification with the leading lady who enters, full of sorrow, and says of the boy: “He’s dead! Poor boy! He’s dead! How awful!” For a moment one could expect that the drama will stop or be altered, but the leading man immediately states the obvious: “What dead? It’s make-believe. He is just pretending! Don’t believe it” (SC: 65). The director demands that the lights be put on, and in the sudden lighting of the entire stage the audience is reminded it is at the theater, where the same action will be repeated in the next performance. The play ends with stage instructions that a frozen scene of the characters be presented and “remain fixed there like shapes in a dream” (SC: 66), and the daughter-character comes out, looks at this scene and bursts out in shrill laughter, which she repeats as she exits through the main aisle and finally from outside the hall. White’s mask-character is made to break all theater conventions and shoot at its audience. After her death, her laughter too can still be heard. It is the celebration of the masks’ victory: through them, the writers have managed to engage the audience’s (or the readers’) attention and identification despite themselves, and this laughter will remain with the audience and the readers when their work is completed. Pirandello staged two communities, opposed to each other in their attitude to masks. The group of mask-less actors, director and stage hands were, to various degrees, engaged observers in the action of resisting the recognition and displaying of feelings. The group of mask-characters was divided between the female characters, who displayed their feelings in their actions, expressions and words, and the male characters of the father and the son who resisted feelings. The mask function in Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author manifested, modeled and translated the feelings embodied and evoked by the masks in theatrical reality. Masks served a contradictory, double purpose: on one hand they were used to hide and resist feelings in order to prevent or evade the recognition of their existence; on the other hand, they were used to rebuke the non-recognition of the same feelings. Like Pirandello, who wrote poetry, theatrical pieces and fiction, Patrick White too wrote several plays besides his novels. An important feature of Memoirs of Many in One is that in this novel the theater is intertwined with biographical and historical writing, and White uses them all to expose the collective mask embodied by his main protagonist. It is as if White collapsed into this novel the results of his previous experiments of the decade prior to its composition in both novel and theater writings. When White was thinking of a fitting translation into French of the title of Memoirs of Many in One, he wrote in a letter to Jean Lambert, his translator: “the title of Memoirs of Many in One – Triples Mémoires doesn’t seem to me to convey the book … would it be possible to suggest a company of actors which make up the central character? Would Comédiens du Moi sound just silly?”47 Clearly, White intended his main

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protagonist to represent a collective portrait in one character, not merely a portrait of society but an evocative embodiment of a whole group in a single mask. In addition, White intended that the collective element should be reinforced by the community-forming capacities of the theater, which is central in this novel. In Memoirs of Many in One, the leading protagonist, in this case a failed mother, personifies many more communities than the two communities Pirandello’s stage limitations allowed. In addition to the family community, afflicted by parental non-recognition, there are, as in Pirandello, the community of the modern theater, director, actors and critics, but also representatives of the ritual church community such as nuns and monks; of the community of high society, busy in the social display of riches in lavish parties; and finally, representatives of people in the larger community, such as a taxi driver, policemen and shopkeepers. Using similar strategies to Pirandello’s (such as making the father- and son-characters personify not only their own resistance to feelings but also the director’s, the actors’ and the implied audience’s expectations), White stages not only the audience for the main protagonist’s play but also the implied community of readers as co-responsible for the production of the personification mask. As White wrote in his formal memoirs, Flaws in the Glass, “a writer may write about you” (FG: 148), which is most apt in this context, as indeed White wrote about the society of his times, which he considered implicated in the creation of its own unrecognized masks. Pirandello, for his part, used his masks as part of his expressed reaction to the upheavals of his time. As he said: “mine has been a theater of war. The war revealed the theater to me: when passions were unleashed I made my own creatures suffer these passions on the stage.”48 Guidice, Pirandello’s biographer, who quotes these words in his book, added: “the war had overturned people’s defences and had shattered the superstructures erected to defend many voluntary and involuntary, collective and individual, hypocrisies. It was the triumph of death … thus many individuals found that Six Characters in Search of an Author reflected faithfully the crisis that had taken place within each of them.”49 Despite the fact that the play had not been written directly about World War I, many people found that the dichotomy between the characters and the actors reflected similar feelings in each of them; Pirandello had managed to reflect the anxieties of his times, made more palpable when personified by the masks. One major anxiety was the sensation of the effacement of the self, which was a reigning feeling from the industrial revolution onwards, and which became more apparent in World War I, the first mechanized war. World War  I marked the beginning of the use of almost identical khaki uniforms by all sides, meant to conceal rather than identify, of massive centralized drafting and automatized remote-control killing, introducing tanks, chemical weapons and airplanes to the battle fields.

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The nefarious results of World War I were a mere prelude to World War II, the war that plagued Patrick White. White too reflected the residues of the war in his writing, from Auschwitz to Hiroshima, and the various resulting attitudes of his contemporaries in the co-created personification mask he put on his protagonists, in the case of this novel on Alex and Patrick. Like the plot in Pirandello’s play, which presents an elaborate family history whose tragedy originated in flawed recognitions, White weaves a personal family tragedy together with the tragedies of twentieth-century history. The leading protagonist’s mask of non-recognition personifies the flight from recognition of the sack of Smyrna and of Hitler’s deeds on the part of English, American and Australian societies. Alex’s devoted daughter, Hilda, and her life-long friend and Editor Patrick, visibly display the feelings collectively resisted and denied by modern avant-garde codes and practices. Unlike Pirandello, who allowed the female characters to display feelings, White’s main female protagonist is the one who is as icy-cold as the mask she is using, while most of the males are the ones who recognize and display feelings, especially her male counterpart, Patrick, who is not afraid to assume the place left empty by Alex with her daughter when she dies. Again, like Pirandello’s main father-character, White’s protagonist’s egotism is excused by an aspiration for personal authenticity. Alex’s search for the real meaning of her life is presented by White as nothing more than part of the collective illusion of the existence of a unique self. Her battle with her daughter about the authenticity of her memories and their superiority over Hilda’s cherished archives, another form of delusion as far as capturing the real is concerned, is also a part of the web in which White entangles his protagonist as he exposes her quest as an expression not of her personality but of a collective drive. White uses masks in a dual function for his protagonist: on the one hand, Alex uses masks for purposes of impersonation, changing names and robes, but on the other hand she is made to use masks as tools for personification, when she personifies a collective fantasy on the theater stage, in her role of Cleopatra. The pursuit of recognition which defies recognition is staged by the avant-garde theaters and actors whose company Alex seeks. The repression of traditional theatrical practices is much more elaborate in White than in Pirandello. While Pirandello introduced contrasting theatrical codes by allusions to personification in the Church and in the Commedia dell’Arte, White goes further and lets his experimental theater perform Shakespeare’s great tragedy of love, Antony and Cleopatra. Yet, as we shall see, in Alex’s production and acting of this play, there is no room for personified collective codes but only for herself and her misreading of the play. “I would never wish you to think, as I have done, on this horrible thing which really drives one mad: that if you were beside another and looking into his eyes – as I one day looked into somebody’s eyes – you might as well be a

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello

beggar before a door never to be opened to you; for he who does enter there will never be you, but someone unknown to you with his own different and impenetrable world.”50 Patrick White had read Pirandello’s work, and copied this passage from Enrico IV into his notebook.51 At this point in the play, Enrico is talking to his four servants, all dressed in period costumes to maintain the charade of the eleventh-century court they participate in to humor Enrico. Enrico is believed to have gone mad twenty years earlier, as a result of a fall from his horse during a masquerade, and become ‘stuck’ in the role of King Henry IV of Germany. In the passage copied by White, Enrico confesses to his servants that he knows perfectly well that he is playing the part of the king, and therefore is not mad as everyone thinks he is. Living outside of life, like Mattia Pascal, Enrico also has reasons to enjoy his part. His madman’s mask allows him to avenge himself of his beloved Mathilde for preferring Belcredi over him at the time preceding his fall from his horse, as well as avenging himself on Belcredi for ultimately winning Mathilde, and because he suspects Belcredi of having caused his fall by kicking the horse. Yet in the same breath that Enrico admits he is sane, he realizes the impossibility of quitting his disguise. Though he knows his servants wait for him to be in bed in order to put on the electric light, by now such light is too strong for Enrico’s eyes and he asks for his eleventh-century-type lamp. Enrico goes on to advocate his chosen way of life, that of freezing time, which has the advantage of never having to change: “and sad as is my lot, hideous as some of the events are, bitter the struggles and troublous the time – still all history! All history that cannot change, understand? All fixed for ever!” (EIV: 195). Enrico is thus made to voice Pirandello’s philosophy regarding the juxtaposition between an inevitably ever-changing reality and the immutability of art. The doctor, called upon to try and release Enrico from his state of madness, explains that “we must take into account the peculiar psychology of madmen; which, you must know, enables us to be certain that they observe things and can, for instance, easily detect people who are disguised; can in fact recognize the disguise and yet believe in it; just as children do, for whom disguise is both play and reality” (EIV: 174). The doctor’s explanation clarifies the difference between an impersonation mask, which is used for play or deceit, and can be removed, and a personification mask, which, according to him, children and madmen regard as real. Earlier in the play, Mathilde recalls the time of the accident, when they were all wearing masks for the masquerade, gathered around Enrico right after the fall from his horse. Enrico was then the only one no longer wearing a mask, yet, as Mathilde says: “I shall never forget that scene – all our masked faces hideous and terrified gazing at him, at that terrible mask of his face, which was no longer a mask, but madness, madness personified” (EIV: 159). Once again, the personification mask of the madman is described as having become an integral part of his identity. Enrico is

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apparently not mad at all, but rather imprisoned in his mask, because Enrico, like Mattia, has trespassed the rules of the game, and a seemingly harmless carnival mask has been turned by his actions into a personification mask of madness itself.52 Enrico is incapable of quitting his mask, as his conversation with his servants proves, and he is led by this misuse of his mask to commit a crime, when he stabs Belcredi, probably to death. This last breach with society seals his mask on his face for good: Enrico can either confess to being sane and be imprisoned for murder, or retain his mask of madness, and remain imprisoned in it till he dies. As we have seen in this brief survey of Pirandello’s work, Pirandello has staged both impersonation masks and personification masks in his works, in a wide variety of uses and misuses. His examination of the use of masks focuses on the individual’s relationship with his or her society. Pirandello demonstrates that masks have a key role in countless human situations. Patrick White’s use of masks, on the other hand, is less centered on the individual and more on the masks’ value as containers and embodiments of collective elements in society. The masks are fabricated by collective elements, and White uses them to reflect these elements, compelling his readers to acknowledge the collective values which each of them upholds. Clearly, both Pirandello and White advocate the use of masks, considering them a lesser evil than the individual’s loneliness and feelings of insignificance in the life offered by the modern world, a world which believes itself to be rid of masks. Far from treating masks as deceitful artifacts, in both writers’ texts the masks receive the privileged status of useful artistic creations, deriving their major attributes from sobering, community-created ritual masks rather than from playful carnival masks.

N otes 1 | The mask-characters of the theater are the skeletal versions of the mask-character Pirandello deploys in more detail in his novel The Late Mattia Pascal. Yet Pirandello ultimately reduces the main protagonist of this novel to his mask, to a puppet who will not manage to escape his invisible strings. In addition, Pirandello uses the sanction that the misuse of a personification mask entails against his mask-character. 2 | The first phase of renewed interest in masks started during the later part of the 19 th century, when a revival of interest in early forms of Western theater, such as ancient Greek drama and the Commedia dell’Arte (as well as in Asian theatrical forms, particularly in the Japanese Noh theater), was noted in artists all over Europe. For a comprehensive list of artists who worked with masks, as well as a list of anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers and critics interested in masks and other performing objects,

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello see John Bell’s introduction in: John Bell, ed. Puppets, Masks and Performing Objects (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), pp. 5-10. As Sears Eldredge explains, the theater artists who used masks did so in order to break with realist and naturalist theater and “‘retheatricalize the theater,’ and the mask became symbolic of this antirealistic movement.” Eldredge adds that “during the second decade of the twentieth century, while horrible destruction was occurring on the battlefields of Europe, the mask emerged for many artists as a symbol of the dislocation between Western humanity’s inner and outer worlds and of the anarchy occurring within each of these worlds.” See: Sears A. Eldredge, Mask Improvisation for Actor Training and Performance: The Complete Image (Evanston, Illinois, Northern University Press, 1996), pp. 12-14. The second phase of the renewed interest in masks, which took place after WWI, was of a different character than the previous phase, and was part of a renewed interest in primitive arts of various parts of the world, especially memorable in the paintings of artists such as Picasso and Mattise, and other fauvist and primitivist painters. As Walter Sorell explains, “after the First World War, when all the old values collapsed with the empires and traditional ideas, the search went on for the forgotten primitive forms and sources which were resurrected in basic modern dance, in the volcanic stammering cries of Expressionistic despair, in the Dadaistic fury of self-defiance, and in phantasmagoric Surrealism with its glazing of Freudian imagery. The mask returned, reflecting and revealing the savage instincts of man let loose again.” See: Walter Sorell, The Other Face: The Mask in the Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), p. 15. 3 | Luigi Chiarelli is often considered one of the sources of Pirandello’s work; his grotesque play La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face) preceded Pirandello’s Pensaci, Giacomo (Think of It, Giacomo) by a few years and used a similar idea regarding the difference between the face and the mask. Anthony Caputi points to Pirandello’s sensitivity “to the innovative and experimental work going on around him” and to his relationship with other artists and friends, such as Bragaglia and De Chirico, among many others. See: Anthony Caputi, Pirandello and the Crisis of Modern Consciousness (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 109. 4 | Roger W. Olivier, Dreams of Passion, p.155. 5 | Luigi Pirandello, On Humor, trans. Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa, Studies in Comparative Literature Ser. 58 (North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 113 6 | Luigi Pirandello, Ibid. p. 113. 7 | Luigi Pirandello, Ibid. p. 120. 8 | As Daniela Bini points out, “the process of knowing, that is, of establishing a cognitive relation between subject and object, becomes a process of creating images, ideas that cannot but be subjective. This relativistic view of the world is the main source of inspiration to Pirandello.” See: Daniela Bini, “Pirandello’s Philosophy and Philosophers” in: Claudio Cambon ed., Pirandello: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967), p. 22.

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Creating Communities 9 | Luigi Pirandello, On Humor, p. 139. 10 | Pirandello’s L’umorismo is also related to the theater, as Roger Olivier points out, since humor is an “intimate mixture of laughter and tears, of comedy and sadness.” Olivier underlines the strong link between Pirandello’s conception of humor and his interest in the theater, and adds that “Pirandello’s use of the metaphor of the mask allows him to make a firm connection between the mimetic art of the theater and the reality it reflects. His plays become an exploration of the role playing, both on and off the stage. Whether the actor uses the physical mask or not, each role he assumes is a mask he places between the audience and himself.” See: Roger W. Olivier, Dreams of Passion, p. 13. 11 | My article, “Six Characters in Search of a Performer: The Ontology of Pirandello’s Mask-Communities,” based on this chapter, was published in: Pirandello Studies, Vol 35: 2015, pp. 56-74. 12 | Luigi Pirandello, Naked Masks: Five Plays, ed. Eric Bentley, trans. Edward Storer (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1952), Appendix I, Preface to Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1925, p. 367. 13 | Ibid. p. 371. 14 | Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, trans. Mark Musa (London: Penguin books, 1995). The words in bold letters appear so in the text. All references to the play will be marked SC hereafter. 15 | Letter of Pirandello to Ruggeri, 1936, as quoted by Caputi, Pirandello and The Crisis of Modern Consciousness, p. 117. 16 | Pirandello, Naked Masks: Five Plays, p. 372. 17 | In another part of the trilogy, Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise), Pirandello included two pages prior to the first page of the play. On the first of these there is a framed announcement of the play, with dotted lines where the names of the main actors and actresses should be filled in, and which are to be changed according to the actors performing every evening. The second page contains the author’s reflections regarding improvised acting. See: Luigi Pirandello, Maschere nude (Milano: Mondadori, 1922), pp. 5, 7. 18 | Luigi Pirandello, Henry IV, Act I, in: Six Characters in Search of An Author and Other Plays, p. 75. 19 | Luigi Pirandello, “La tragedia di un personaggio” (“The Tragedy of a Character”) in: Novelle per un Anno, C.A. McCormick ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), pp. 71-78. 20 | Richard Schechner, Between Anthropology and Theatre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 6. 21 | The director replies to the leading actor’s complaint about having to wear a cook’s hat: “What can I do if France can’t produce any good theatre and we are reduced to putting on Pirandello’s plays which you have to be lucky to understand and which are written in a way never to please either critics or actors or public.” See: Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, p. 8.

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello 22 | James Fisher explains the renewed interest of Pirandello and other 20 th century dramatists in the Commedia dell’Arte in the masked actors’ capacity to “rise above realistic illusion to create larger-than-life and universal human symbols … Many of them [20 th century iconoclasts] were drawn toward a kind of archetypal Jungian vision which reduced and also transformed life into a handful of single plots and stereotypical figures that confront us with spiritual and intellectual glimpses of our deepest beings. The characters of the Commedia became the expression of the universally human.” See: James Fisher, The Theatre of Yesterday and Tomorrow: Commedia dell’Arte on the Modern Stage (Lewiston, N.Y: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), p. 10. 23 | Pierre Louis Duchartre, The Italian Comedy (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), p. 34. 24 | To this day, certain towns are still linked to specific Commedia characters, such as Bergamo, which is traditionally the Zannis’ town and accent. 25 | The use of distinctive dialects created a dissonance which underlined the strangeness of each character and was a major source of humor. See: Paul C. Castagno, The Early Commedia dell’Arte (1550-1621): The Mannerist Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), p. 88-89. 26 | See: Allardyce Nicoll, Masks, Mimes and Miracles: Studies in the Popular Theater (New York: Cooper Square, 1963), p. 218; Silvio D’Amico, Epoche del teatro Italiano (Florence: Sansoni, 1954), p. 45. 27 | In Questa sera si recita a soggetto, Pirandello further delved into the idea of improvisation. The roles of the characters are specified on the program of the play, but their names are not, seemingly in order to allow a new name to be written whenever the actor performing a part changes. In such a way, as well as by making the actors mingle with the audience during the recess for example, Pirandello underlines the fact that each performance may be an independent, unrepeatable occurrence, yet it is limited to the framework of the play executed in every performance. 28 | Luigi Pirandello, Questa Sera Si Recita a Soggetto, p. 7, my translation. 29 | Giovanni Antonucci explains that the role the Greek theater was not to create illusion but to reach a ‘truth’ through the revealed ‘fiction’, which was assisted by masks. Naturally, this dialectic was not an end in itself, but the most direct means to reach the objective of tragedy: catharsis. Later on, Antonucci adds that Pirandello, as well as Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw and Chekhov, looked back to the classical theater as one which dealt with issues of truth, as far as the ‘real’ problems of the individual and his society were concerned. See: Giovanni Antonucci, Storia del teatro Italiano nel Novecento (Rome: Studium, 1986), pp. 38-40, my translation. 30 | My article “Mattia Pascal’s Punitive Mask,” based on this chapter, was published in: Italica, 92/2: 2015, pp. 358-374. 31 | As Bakhtin pointed out, masks, as much as the ritual of carnival of which they are an inseparable part, must obey the rules of carnival, the first of which is the limited time in which a carnival is held and during which masks are permitted to be used. “The feast is always essentially related to time … carnivals celebrated temporary liberation

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Creating Communities from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal.” Carnivals were effective devices to give a counter-equilibrium to the pressures of daily life by allowing a short, all-encompassing trespassing of social conventions. For a day, and sometimes longer (as long as three months out of a year in some medieval cities), all the rules were broken, and the entire community would indulge in a completely different conduct than on normal days: “carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people … they [carnivals] sanctioned the existing pattern of things and reinforced it.” See: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1968), pp. 7-13. Roger Caillois writes that “carnival masks are a brief compensation for the decency and prudence that must be observed the rest of the year.” See: Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games, trans. Meyer Barash (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 131. No society would survive a never-ending carnival, and by the same token, no society suffers impersonation masks to be used beyond their allotted limits and for other purposes than the ones they were made. 32 | Luigi Pirandello, The Late Mattia Pascal, trans. William Weaver (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995). All references to the novel will be marked MP hereafter. Mattia Pascal’s name is in itself indicative of one of the main issues underlying the novel, namely the tension between belief and skepticism. Matthew was the apostle chosen to replace Judas in order to witness the resurrection of Christ, sealing by his presence the sanctity of the occasion. Pascal, on the other hand could indicate two opposing meanings: ‘pasqua’ means Easter in Italian, and is once more reminiscent of the time of Jesus’ death and resurrection, much like Mattia’s resurrection at the end of the novel; Pascal also reminds one of Blaise Pascal, whose skepticism brought about much discussion and upheaval. Mattia, for his part, would certainly fit into Pascal’s notions of profitability as a mode of conduct. 33 | In similar manner, we shall see that Patrick White begins his novel Memoirs of Many in One after the death of its main protagonist, the mask-character named Alex Gray. 34 | Giancarlo Mazzacurati considers Mattia to be in limbo not at this point of the narrative, but rather at the end of the novel, after the protagonist’s return to Miragno. Mazzacurati reads the novel in terms of time, and claims that the protagonist is deadalive towards the end of the novel, since he has voluntarily exited time, and lives as a “personaggio-fuori,” an outsider to social time. I would like to argue, as I demonstrate further on, that despite Mattia’s status as a living-dead-man at the end of the novel, he remains an integral part of his society. More present than offenders who are imprisoned, “The Late Mattia Pascal” continues to live in the village, a visible deterrent to all the other members of the community, and a warning of what will happen to anyone who succumbs to fantasies of irresponsible freedom, as Mattia has done. See: Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Pirandello nel romanzo europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995), pp. 196, 21213, 219, 238.

Chapter Three: From Theater to Novel: Luigi Pirandello 35 | Patrick White’s protagonist in Memoirs of Many in One is also writing her memoirs, and she too is given paper and pen at the psychiatric hospital where she is sent towards the end of the novel as part of her therapy; she makes several confessions after her own fashion. In A Fringe of Leaves, the main protagonist is encouraged by her mother-in-law to keep a journal, as a means of socialization. 36 | Another character of Pirandello’s, who misused his impersonation mask is Enrico IV, mentioned earlier. Enrico was also forced, in the end, to lead a life-sentence within an invented mask. This character’s real name is not even mentioned. The reason for this is that he lost consciousness when he was injured, falling off his horse, during a masked-carnival for which he was dressed as King Henry IV. When he came to, he was convinced of being the real medieval king. Yet he continued to pretend to be King Henry, causing his sister and those hired to assist him to alter his entire surrounding to fit 14 th century requirements in order to allow him to carry on the pretense, long after he actually regained understanding of his situation. The identity of King Henry IV is thus the only one he is given by Pirandello in this play. Pirandello leaves open the possibility of interpreting Enrico’s behavior either as that of a madman, who never fully regains his wits but who does realize he is acting a part, or as that of a man who may have lost his memory for a period of time but who has long regained it and maintains the charade all the same, continuously toying with the people around him. Whatever the interpretation, Enrico is finally trapped in his own invented mask, because the play ends after he has stabbed his opponent, probably to death. Enrico is no longer free to decide to prove his sanity because if he did so, he would be imprisoned. On the other hand, by not admitting to being sane and responsible for the stabbing, he remains imprisoned in his mask of King Henry IV, labeled a madman for the rest of his life. 37 | Examples of people who were punished and turned into zombies, dug out of the grave they had been interred in alive for varying periods of time, and made to work as mindless slaves can be found in: Wade Davis, The Serpent and The Rainbow (London: Collins, 1986), pp. 76-77, 136-142. 38 | Luigi Pirandello, Novelle per un anno, pp. 95-110. 39 | Ibid. pp. 19-33. 40 | Luigi Pirandello, “Marsina stretta” (“The Tight Tailcoat”), Novelle per un anno, p. 33, my translation (this edition of the collection of Pirandello’s short stories is printed in Italian, though the introduction is written in English). 41 | Luigi Pirandello, Uno, nessuno e centomila, 22 nd ed. (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1991), pp. 194-204. 42 | Ibid. p. 225. 43 | Italo Calvino’s “Il cavaliere inesistente” (“The Nonexistent Knight”) is the story of the chivalrous exploits of a knight by the name of Agilulfo, who turns out to be nothing more than an empty suit of armor, the epitome of the idea of perfect knighthood and valor. See: Italo Calvino, Il cavaliere inesistente (Turin: Einaudi, 1959). 44 | Luigi Pirandello, L’Umorismo, in: Saggi, poesie, scritti varii, Manilo Lo VecchioMusti ed. (Rome: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1965), p. 134, my translation.

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Creating Communities 45 | Luigi Pirandello, Naked Masks: Five Plays, pp. 373-4. 46 | Ibid. pp. 374-5. 47 | David Marr ed., Patrick White: Letters, p. 613. The title of the book in French was finally published as Mémoires éclatés d’Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray. 48 | Quoted by Gapare Guidice, in his biography of Pirandello, from Marcello Gallian, “Intimo dissidio,” Quadrivio, 18 Nov. 1934. See: Gaspare Guidice, Pirandello: A Biography, trans. Alastair Hamilton (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 118. 49 | Ibid. 50 | The quote from Pirandello’s play Enrico IV is taken from the translation Patrick White is likely to have read, by Edward Storer (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1922). See: 30 August 2009, http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/lp/e4.htm. The available printed edition dates from 1952. See: Luigi Pirandello, Naked Masks: Five Plays, p. 193. 51 | Patrick White’s literary notebooks 1939-1941, Series 2, Item 2, part 14. See: 30 August 2009, http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/cdview?pi=nla.ms-ms9982-2-2. 52 | The original text in Italian, of Matilda’s words, reads: “Non dimenticherò mai quella scena. Di tutte le nostre facce mascherate, sguajate e stravolte, davanti a quella terribile maschera di lui, che non era piú una maschera, ma la Follía!” The more precise translation of “la Follía” would be “madness itself,” rather than “madness personified” as Edward Storer translated. See: Luigi Pirandello, Maschere nude: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore & Enrico IV (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1954), p. 119.

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater A. P ersonification M asks in t wo P l ays and a N ovel B ig  Toys , S hepherd on The R ocks and M emoirs of  M any in  O ne Artistically, White experiments with the same technique in the theater, in his autobiography and in his novels. His plays Big Toys (1977), Shepherd on the Rocks (1987) and Netherwood (1983) were written in the same decade that he wrote his autobiographical trilogy, The Twyborn Affair (1979), Flaws in the Glass (1981) and Memoirs of Many in One (1986). In both theatrical pieces and fictional writing White depicts group portraits staged through group practices. In Shepherd on the Rocks and Netherwood, as well as in Memoirs of Many in One, the collective fantasies which are lived but not recognized step out of the lunatic asylum into the living room. White focuses on the personality/persona duality and its omnipresence in every theater of communal activity. White’s plays are important in that they show his effort to bring out the inner collective in a collective fantasy. In his plays, he tries to tackle the problem of staging the collective imaginary in a mask, bringing out the inner psyche and showing its expression in outer social practices. White relies in his use of literary masks on the Christian tradition of embodiment and personification, in which the figure has a tangible role. What is no longer as immediately present in fiction today was common practice in medieval times, when fiction used embodiments of the Word of God, embodiments of the Trinity. Wolfgang Iser best described the ternary nature of medieval secular literature, in which “the space between the letter and the spirit had to be bridged .... Letter and spirit have always been overarched by a third dimension, and this hierarchical stratification has its foundation in the medieval world picture, which foregrounded itself in the relationships it imposed on letter and spirit. This sign relationship is ternary in nature; it emerged in late antiquity and was persistent until it began to become problematic in the Renaissance.” Iser quotes Michel Foucault on “the impending reshuffle of an inherited tradition”: Foucault explains that “ever since the Stoics, the system of signs in the Western world had been a ternary one, for it was recognized

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as containing the significant, the signified and the ‘conjecture’” and adds that from the seventeenth century onward, the sign system was reduced to the binary one commonly known today. The purpose of personification was to manifest the effectiveness of the spirit, since, as Iser writes, “the letter is absorbed by the spirit in order either to picture the invisible or to prove the spirit’s effectiveness in concrete situations” (F&I: 36-7). Viewed in this light, the literary mask is the equivalent of the third element, uncommonly searched for in today’s ‘binary’ fiction, and the agency of the mask is to provide an embodiment of the collective community spirit within the self. In all the works discussed here, fragments of traditional rituals are intertwined with modern ritual games.1 In Big Toys, the modern ritual games are placed at the center and targeted, while the traces of traditional rituals are only present in the memory of two of the characters. In Shepherd on the Rocks, written ten years later, and closer to the novel Memoirs of Many in One both in date of publication and thematically, White brings the older tradition to the fore. A counterpoint is kept between the older traditional ritual, which is parodied, and the modern ritual. Whereas in the earlier play, the impersonation mask almost completely takes over, in the later play, as well as in the novel, the personification mask becomes overpowering and dominant. In the plays and in the novel, White stages two competing traditions of unmasking: the modern, cynical one which claims nothing is real, and all masks are impersonation masks, against the older tradition that reduces the effect and importance of impersonation masks and creates personification masks that have a real effect on those using them and on their community. For the purposes of analysis I will discuss each work separately, though the mask-elements White uses in all his works are inter-connected. In the two plays we shall read, Big Toys and Shepherd on the Rocks, White deploys mask-elements that he uses more elaborately in the novel Memoirs of Many in One. In both plays, White establishes mask-characters as public figures, sustained by their community, as are the characters of Antony and Cleopatra in the Shakespearean play that White will use in his novel to stage his main protagonist, on her quest for self-assertion and public recognition. As we shall see, it is precisely the community element which gives the mask its validity, that Alex blindly tries to exclude, whether as an actress at the theater or as a member of her various social settings. She will find that masks, sustained by no one, cannot function.

B. B ig Toys with R e al C onsequences In Big Toys, Patrick White staged three mask-characters in three roles of public figures, public embodiments of specific ideas, through which he attacks the proliferation of atomic weapons, which he considered to be one of the major

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

threats to Australian and world peace.2 White considered himself personally responsible, as a writer, to bring about a change on the world political scene. He admits to have been reluctant to take part in public events but finally felt he “must pull [himself] together” since he was “letting down so many people.” He adds in a later speech, that writers especially, “have an increasing responsibility towards this country.”3 White publicly attacked President Reagan, as the main figure responsible for the propagation of nuclear weapons. He referred to Reagan as a “hypocrite,” the leader of many other politicians all busy “staging state funerals as theatrical functions … and [who] prepare blow-waves and suiting for the next TV appearances.”4 White attacked these politicians’ abuse of their public mask, epitomized by Reagan’s image, and their cynical blindness to the potentially disastrous outcome of their decisions. Not all leaders must be like Reagan, and White also mentions other leaders, such as Mahatma Gandhi, whose integrity White saw as a blunt contrast to leaders such as Reagan. He quotes Gandhi, who said that “I am a Christian and a Hindu and a Moslem and a Jew. The politician in me has never dominated a single decision of mine.”5 White underlines Reagan’s previous career as a film actor, a “cowboy” and a “B-Grade movie President,” equating his political actions to theater-acting, except that the theater he performs in now is the theater of real life, where his decisions, based on capitalistic interests, turn a B-movie into a bomb. Each of the three characters in this play is a type, representing recognizable ideologies: Ritchie Bosanquet, the rich lawyer, his wife Mag, the high-society lady, and Terry, the socialist leader. The community that upholds and sanctions the three characters’ masks is constantly present in the background of the action and of the dialogs. It is composed of Mag’s friends with whom she gossips on the phone or at the hairdresser’s, of Ritchie’s public at the trials he takes part in and of Terry’s “mob” of socialist party members and crowds at his rally. Ritchie embodies the cynical members of a modern society who consider life to be a game in which all is permissible, a game in which masks are exchangeable, one of many tools used to attain their egotistic goals. Ritchie’s goal is to make more money and gain more power by manipulating the law and the truth to advance his and his clients’ political and financial interests. Devoid of ethical qualms, he ignores the widespread effect that the increase in the use of nuclear weapons could have as a result of his machinations. Fashioned after Reagan, about whom White said: “Reagan seems to me a perfect example of somebody unable to imagine the real,”6 Ritchie too, is busy with his uranium mining schemes, regarding them as part of the great game he is manipulating to his advantage, in total disregard of the very real lethal outcome of their use. He is a “toy master” (BT: 47), wearing a “play-suit” (BT: 31), who exclaims: “Uranium! Plutonium! Mystic words flaunted by people like you to terrify a confused public” (BT: 33).7

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Terry Legge is a public figure as well, since he is the leader of a labor party. Brought home after a rally by Mag, Terry will, like everybody else in Ritchie’s life, be manipulated into playing along to Ritchie’s advantage at a trial he is involved in. To Ritchie’s exclamation regarding the “mystic words,” uranium and plutonium, that cannot be real or threatening if they are mystical, Terry retorts: “never less mystic! Never more real!” (BT: 33). Terry is far from being perfect himself, as we shall see, yet he does have clear notions of what is right and wrong, notions according to which he was brought up and which are his guidelines. It is these basic values that make him stand up to Ritchie and refuse his bribe of a Ferrari at the end of the play, and it is these values that make clear to him that Mag’s behavior is wrong. Mag, a married woman, brings Terry into an empty penthouse and straight into her bedroom, under the pretext that she wants to show him the view from the window and that “it’s cosier than the others in winter” (BT: 8). Terry is uncomfortable, worried about her husband finding them there, because “where I come from – if a man and a woman go into a bedroom – that’s for real” (BT: 10-22). Neither Mag nor Ritchie, who does return home earlier than expected, feel the pangs Terry expresses. That Terry and Mag do end up in bed is part of the game, a behavior which is condoned by their social milieu and, pointedly, by her husband, because it helps Ritchie in manipulating Terry into perjuring himself on the witness stand according to Ritchie’s wishes. After they have sex, Mag suggests Terry get up, and she says, as “[she starts to drag back the sheet, but finds that he is hanging on to it] Don’t tell me the Irish Puritan doesn’t want to reveal himself … after all that’s been revealed” to which Terry answers “I wasn’t taught to show myself … to anybody” (BT: 22). Whereas for Terry nudity is real, and has real implications, for Mag and Ritchie nudity is just another impersonation mask they can toy with whenever they find it convenient. Terry’s upbringing makes him uncomfortable, although he has by now drifted away from his Catholic upbringing as well as the socialist ideals he is supposed to represent, clad as he is in “clothes … as trendy as, though cheaper than those MAG is wearing” (BT: 8). Though Terry admits to being a “lapsed” Catholic, Mag says: “none of you ever quite lapse. I thought I saw a little Irish-Catholic-Puritan lurking inside that sharp gear.” To Terry’s question regarding her own background, she answers that she is “a shaky Methodist” (BT: 11), but later on adds that she too, unlike Ritchie, came from a working-class family. It is not sexual magnetism that attracts them to each other but rather their common denominator, their older ritual mask, which is the creation of their working-class background, and which introduced them as children to communal experiences at one church or another. Indeed, they belong to different religious denominations, yet they both shared in communal rituals during their formative years and these rituals were imprinted in them long before they could even be consciously aware of

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

them. As Terry says, “whatever becomes of you afterwards, the past matters” (BT: 11). The communal personification mask with which they were brought up is still strong and underlies the impersonation masks they adopted later on in life. These cynical impersonation masks are empty, because they are not used to convey the ritually imprinted community spirit, an emptiness experienced by Mag, in contrast to the strength of the ritual mask which attracts her to Terry. In Ritchie’s case, his background is not discussed, but it can be assumed to be different than that of Mag’s and Terry’s by this omission. The background of a rich boy, probably brought up in private schools, is quite far from that of the other two. White does not romanticize the working class either, though, and Mag says: “Oh yes, hard-working class. Decent? It depends…” and tells Terry of her flight from an abusive father who was about to rape her (BT: 23-4). Mag has learned to enjoy the pleasures Ritchie’s riches can provide. She is a public figure too, the high-society lady, whose every action is recorded and gossiped about.8 Mag is made to embody a nihilistic existential pessimism as much in vogue as her stylish dresses, as she symbolically looks down at Sydney from high above, from her penthouse balcony which seemingly opens on a void. She takes part in a socialist rally to come to better terms with her own fashionable guilt feelings, but is not deterred by the fact that the rally also serves a purpose which fits perfectly into her husband’s schemes. Substituting the traditional ritual, White shows Mag and Ritchie to be engaged in their own “kind of ritual game which Terry is unable to grasp” (BT: 14), perpetuated in the expensive gifts Ritchie gives Mag, the sapphire necklace and the red Ferrari Terry refuses, which Mag receives instead as she turns on “the ghost of a ritual smile” (BT: 52). Theirs is the new ritual, of hypocritical and cynical elite society, which believes that “today what is important is style” (BT: 47), a society for which the image is more important than the values it does or does not represent. Mag recognizes that she and Ritchie are “so much alike … in so many ways. But there’s another part of me which you – probably nobody – will ever understand – some infinitesimal core of good which hasn’t been quite smothered by all this expensive drag” (BT: 18-9). She thinks Terry, as a socialist leader, represents the values of her upbringing, though she is also the first to de-romanticize her working-class background. Yet to her, Terry still represents what should have been the leading moral behavior of her life: “I should – like Terry should have – in the witness box … what he said here about … the spirit which moves … human beings” (BT: 49). Both Terry and Mag recognize the power of the mask, since both share a Christian past. White suggests they could have benefited from their past communal experience, which each of them has suppressed. The emptiness Mag feels in her life could have been filled, had she only clung to her past community. Instead, by being with Terry, Mag can entertain the illusion of being like him, since he stands for what she knew in her past, yet the mere thought of

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women of his social status, scrubbing floors, their “arms red to the elbow,” is enough for her to recant. Terry realizes he has fallen prey to his own imagination of what he expected women such as Mag to be like, as he tells her: “you’re like what … I thought I never wanted” (BT: 22). He claims to love in Mag “what you don’t know you’ve got,” though he understands he mustn’t “because the rest of it’s too rotten” (BT: 23). As to Ritchie, he is indifferent to his wife’s affair with Terry because he can exploit it for his own ends. Mag for her part is loyal to him despite the physical betrayal, because he sustains her way of life and their common goal: money and power. Ritchie does not spare his criticism of Terry. As he says, Terry, the man of principles, the Marxist, will “deny himself the pleasures of friendship with a man of the wrong political colour, but a spot of adultery with the man’s wife doesn’t seem to dim his ideal.” Terry admits that when Ritchie “scratched me” he found “the same vein of corruption on which the Bosanquets are powered” (BT: 27), yet he answers Ritchie’s accusation of his affair with Mag by saying: “I’ve known priests pretty adept at adultery, but you don’t wipe the Holy Ghost because of a human fall from grace” (BT: 28). Terry is explaining the content of his older, ritual mask, whose validity does not depend on one individual’s behavior, but rather on the entire community which upholds it, and whose spirit it embodies. For all of Terry’s professed higher morals, the end of this scene provides a visual equation between Terry, Mag and Ritchie, when Ritchie manages to fasten the clasp of the emerald necklace he gave Mag on Terry’s neck, to Terry’s utter horror, just as Mag walks back in (BT: 35). Mag herself loses patience with both of the men earlier on: “how I hate both of you! I don’t know which is worse than the other. But don’t tell me, anybody. I know I’m the worst” (BT: 25).9 By the end of the play, Ritchie is exposed as the master of ceremonies, in charge of the game, and Mag says of the Ferrari: “you are written all over it. Ritchie Bosanquet’s Big Toys… Big Circus… Big Shit…” (BT: 48). Nevertheless, each of the mask-characters, with his or her different background and professed values, is corrupt to some degree and all are equally to blame for the nuclear disaster to which their games are leading the entire society. As Terry realizes, the game “rubs off on all of us” (BT: 41), on all those willing to take part in it rather than publicly disclaim it, and especially on those members of society who are, like them, public figures. The law, which is supposed to protect society from the likes of Ritchie, was bankrupt in court since it is the law itself that has allowed Ritchie to manipulate it into having his way. Ritchie is satisfied that Terry witnessed at the trial the way he had wanted him to, and tries to pacify Terry’s possible pangs of conscience: “nobody could find fault with your performance in the witness-box. You behaved according to the letter of the Law” (BT: 46). White’s words in a 1981 speech are pertinent here, in which he spoke of “lawyers who observe the letter

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

of the Law while ignoring its spirit.”10 The spirit of the law, which should be the ethical content and guideline of the written law, has been dealt a cynical hand by Ritchie. Terry understands that well, and answers Ritchie that he may have acted according to the letter of the law “but not according to the gospel I was brought up on .... The spirit which inspires human beings to rise above their human deficiencies … That’s not Law … It’s not even politics” (BT: 46). Ultimately, Terry’s mask of forgotten values wins, since he walks out on the opportunity to have a Ferrari and to become part of elite society. As he says to Ritchie earlier on: “they say that if you take the OBE you’ve had it” (BT: 26).11 In the end, Terry clings to his not always faultless mask, which nevertheless still contains its spirit, rather than crossing over completely and embracing Ritchie’s. As to Ritchie, despite his cynicism and scorn of Terry’s values, he too is subject to unconscious archetypal, collective forces. When, towards the end of the play, Terry wants to find out why Ritchie had invited him to his house again, Ritchie says: “Oh, yes… [Suddenly remembering something else of great importance, but perhaps irrelevant to his main theme] What I wanted to tell you is a dream I had … I was rolling on a bed of penny-royal. Know penny-royal, Terry? .... A kind of mint, I think. Used to grow in my grandmother’s garden. That is where it must have been. I was rolling in this delicious herb – its fragrance all around me – juices flowing. I turned over to bury my face in a green bolster … when I realised there was something else – something to curdle my breath – and looked – and saw that I’d crushed a batch of freshly hatched chickens. There they were – all bloody – mangled…” (BT: 44-5). Even failed leaders such as Ritchie had a grandmother and a childhood, though his cynicism does not allow him to deal with dreams or with their contents, indicative as they may be of his lethal political actions.12 Terry is disgusted by Ritchie’s dream and asks him what he did, and Ritchie answers: “I woke myself up. In that way, dreams are easy to handle.” In Ritchie’s world-philosophy, dreams are not real and waking up easily disposes of them. To this Terry answers: “what you must learn is how to wake yourself up to reality,” which is harder to do than dismissing a dream by waking up. Terry’s reality may be different from Ritchie’s, in which there are profits to be made from a “stinking kettle of fish,” and yet, even Ritchie admits he and Mag need Terry “to exonerate us … in our own eyes as well as yours [Terry’s] …” (BT: 45). Though Terry has willingly joined in the game, he refuses to continue to play along with Mag and Ritchie or to receive their bribe. Terry is also the only one who is aware of the political and social outcome of their game. As he is leaving, he says to Ritchie: “we had some … fun, didn’t we? .... perhaps we’ll meet after the explosion. It won’t be the horse-and-buggy show our mob might have staged. Not what the Doug Stannards and Ritchie Bosanquets – whatever their nationality – let loose. It’ll be the biggest, gaudiest toy that ever escaped from a child’s hand” (BT: 51).

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White’s own answer to the likes of Ritchie – or Reagan – is twofold: unity and faith. Instead of “cosy links” between politicians, which would make us “as safe as we were in the days when Hitler struck up an alliance with Stalin”13 he suggests a different kind of unity, between all the common people since “we are all in it together, all classes, all colours.”14 White sees the “positive side of the nuclear threat” in the “greatest opportunity for unity,” and adds, “the spirit may triumph where politics (the League and the United Nations), socio-­political faiths such as Marxism, Italian Fascism and German National-­Socialism – all have failed. I see our only hope in faith, charity, and in humbling ourselves before man and God.”15 In another speech, White clarifies that when he calls “on all our reserves of faith” he is referring to all denominations and creeds, whether Russian Orthodox, Protestant or Catholic, and commends the actions taken by the various churches in protest against nuclear weapons in East Germany, The Netherlands or Australia.16 White clearly prefers the old rituals which relied on masks and their agency, which were instrumental in uniting the community and in bringing the spirit into its midst, to the cynical new rituals of a society of lonely individuals who believe they have no more use for rituals or ritual masks.

C. S hepherd on the R ocks Based on a true story, considered by some people “the greatest scandal in Anglican history,”17 White “translated the story into an epic religious revue to suit his own purposes”18 when he wrote his play Shepherd on the Rocks. For White, this is a play about a failed shepherd involved in “varieties of religious experience,”19 staged in a double ritual frame, first of theater and circus, and then of a traditional, though disjointed, Christian ritual. In White’s literary discourse, ritual personification masks are connected to a discourse of the spirit, since they incarnate and manifest contents of the collective unconscious in the individual. A clear incarnation of the spirit can naturally be found in the Church, which is where White locates this play. Here too, as we saw in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, two contradictory mask-philosophies are operative, the traditional one and the post-modern one. The question is raised more forcefully when dealing with masks used in religious rituals, but it remains the same: is there anything incarnated in the mask or is it just a false cover with no content? Modern cynics would say all masks are empty, false and deceiving, while even a lapsed Catholic, such as White considers himself to be, would find that the efficacy of the mask cannot be doubted and that there is indeed content to the mask. This play, written and published almost at the same time as Memoirs of Many in One, contains similar techniques for the deployment of mask-elements that appear in the novel as well. In both genres White presents the same kind of discordant mask, composed of a counterpoint between traditional, ritual

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

fragments and a dominant post-modern anti-mask culture. The play provides White less space and especially less time in which to deploy his ideas as well as his mask-character and its functions.20 The staging, the gestures and the costumes are of primordial importance, especially where masks are involved, since they afford an immediate visual medium that must replace the length of description and the scope of a novel. White’s stage directions are meticulous and aimed at involving the audience already at the sensory level, besides relying on the audience for the interpretation of other mask elements and effects discernible in the dialogues. White uses the main mask-character of Danny Shepherd, at one time a vaudeville actor and at present the Rector of Budgiwank, to conduct a manifold critique, of the society that created this mask, of the Church, and of the mask itself. Married to Elisabeth, and the father of five children, Danny has greater ambitions than just providing guidance to his flock. As a priest he is using the mask of a public figure and a spiritual leader, and one could argue that his responsibilities towards his parishioners are greater than those of Terry’s to his voters in Big Toys. Danny takes his somewhat anachronistic vocation as a priest to Christ-like lengths: he tries throughout the play to gather as many communities into his single flock as he can, a reminder of the first, idyllic Christian community, in which everyone knew everyone else. Aside from his own family and his parishioners, he tries to draw into his community’s embrace several prostitutes, circus actors and a film star, all of whom he collects on his trips to the city slums.21 Danny’s mask is that of a megalomaniac, encompassing post-modern individualistic and anarchic ideas, alongside the traditional mask of the priest. Danny’s aspirations, as well as his literal understanding and over-identification with his mask, result in an inflation of the character to the point that the mask’s own content overflows it, and in the destruction of the character. As can be expected, Danny’s superiors, the Dean and the Archbishop, do not approve of Danny’s physical involvement with the prostitutes he proposes to save, nor with the publicity and popularity his experiment seems to attract, which may become a subversive movement within the Church. They have Danny followed by a private eye and receive reports form the local police of his town. They are not averse to bribing witnesses at the trial Danny is put on, and which results in his defrocking. Ruined, Danny resorts to his former vaudeville acts but is not very successful. He performs one last time at a circus, before willfully climbing into the lions’ cage and being eaten alive.

1.

The Stage Directions

The most obvious strategy White uses to both construct his masks and ensure the audience’s participation in this construction is through the use of extremely detailed stage directions, lighting and sound instructions, as well as the actors’

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costumes and positioning on stage. The lighting assists in creating the right atmosphere, and in shifting from one focal point on stage to another, when the light fades on one part of the scene to illuminate another part. As the play opens Danny is illuminated, kneeling, with his back to the audience “the light hovering over him is in the beginning restrained, to suggest spirituality” (SR: 175).22 Later, when Danny sits on the train to the city, the “light contracts slightly, cocooning Shepherd in his own world of faith and fantasy,” and it is against this setting that Danny’s soliloquies, laying out a mixture of various ideas, are acted. Danny is calling on us to witness that “warnings are all around us”; this is the first of his apocalyptic utterances, the likes of which the public would be familiar with from various Adventist missionaries. Danny uses allusions to doomsday as a moral justification for his acts in the next scenes, including his sexual relations with the prostitutes, which are especially legitimate since “carnal love is not a sin if he wills us to experience it” (SR: 178). When Danny makes his appearance in scene three, he is likened to Jesus by the prostitutes of King’s Cross, one of whom, Queenie, says “only He gives me strength” (SR: 181). This vision is enhanced by White’s stage directions, which instruct to stop the sound and the light when Danny appears on the scene, and everybody except for him is “turned momentarily to statues” until Danny enters Queenie’s room, upon which “the figures frozen at street level … come to life” and all say “variously, though not in unison, and flat: He’s come, he’s come” (SR: 181-2), as they would to the savior Himself. Indeed, Queenie refers to Danny as the one who will “save me from myself,” and Krish, the Indian student adds: “He is love. All love! The cosmos” (SR: 182). The darkness also serves White, in order to fill in parts of the scenes which he chooses not to stage but rather to hint at, such as in scene five, when “during the darkness, a pricking of lights from the rectory windows. Snatches of pop music. Plunking of a guitar. A drunken brawl and smashing of glass” (SR: 191), all of which suggest the occurrences during the night after Danny brings the prostitutes back to his parish. The various kinds of music assist the lighting in creating the right atmosphere. The scene at the rectory opens with traditional church music, and Elisabeth, Danny’s faithful and virtuous wife, leads the choir of children in singing the hymn Rock of Ages. This music is made to contrast with Danny’s departure for the less glorious parts of Sydney, and with the music that is heard to accompany Danny’s vaudeville act in scene twelve (SR: 215). Another sound effect used to stage occurrences economically but also to draw the audience into the action on stage, are the voices of “male and female alternating” media commentators, which remind one of the Greek chorus. These voices report what is happening at Budgiwank, when Danny’s experiment begins, then when his license is suspended. Finally, after the trial, the commentators report the effects of Danny’s defrocking on the parish of Budgiwank and on the Church (SR: 199, 207, and 213).

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

White is well aware of the visual effects he can achieve on stage and uses them to construct his stock mask-character. The two more mysterious characters in the play are introduced with their backs to the audience: Danny and Dick the private eye. Dick is first seen sitting with his back to the audience on the same train Danny takes to Sydney in scene two. His identity will be revealed to the audience through his actions, which will give clues about his identity and his mission, and only later will these hints be confirmed in the dialogue. In scene three, he is the one who points out to Danny that his dog-collar has fallen underneath the seat of the train, recalling Danny to his priestly duties, an allusion he does not understand. This hint assists in laying the ground for the audience’s understanding of Danny and his actions, an understanding which will be strengthened when it is reconstructed backwards, after watching the rest of the play. Dick reappears on stage several times in scene three, following Danny’s every move from afar in pantomime-fashion, when he visits the prostitutes. Scene four finds Dick seated again with his back to the audience, this time in the Archbishop’s library, and his role as a private eye is clarified by his repeated secretive posture, by his typically film-noir appearance, “crumpled suit and stringy tie” (SR: 186), and by his words. Dick reveals the information he has gathered about Danny, whom he was paid to follow, and adds unrequested information about the Church officials and their business. As to Danny, his posture at the beginning of the play naturally suggests a private moment, heightening the privacy of prayer, but in Danny’s case it also underlines his attitude to his community, including the audience, which is an egotistic, disregarding attitude. This effect overrides the effect of privacy and lingers in the mind of the audience, especially in retrospect. Another staging device White uses in scene seven is toying with the fourth wall, at first to underline the reluctance which Rainbow, the actress, is demonstrating in response to Danny’s advances. As opposed to Queenie and Bee, the prostitutes who followed Danny on the strength of his promises, Rainbow is less convinced. While Danny would love to have sex with her too, she is disenchanted with his project, which is epitomized in the meager meal of grated carrots and raw cabbage the rectory can provide. She advances towards the audience, with Danny “behind her, till both are halted by the fourth wall” (SR: 201). When Danny suggests that “between us [Rainbow and himself], we could inspire a whole new breed of believers,” Rainbow answers: “we’d look silly, Dan, if we started breeding without a ring,” stressing what should have been Danny’s view, not merely as a married man but especially as a priest who performs marriage sacraments and supposedly believes in their sanctity. Danny makes it clear that he has no intention of leaving his wife, especially since there seems to be no need to do so on his part: “Tib knows that carnal love is no longer carnal if it elevates the spirit” (SR: 202). In response to these words, Rainbow “removing herself from the bed, again advancing towards fourth wall, followed by Shepherd”

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answers “I wonder which of you – Saint Elisabeth or Danny the Shepherd – is into conning yourself,” voicing what must have been on the minds of many in the audience, and then she escapes Danny, as “she does a couple of high kicks, blows him a kiss, runs downstairs and off right” (SR: 202). The confines of the fourth wall are broken several times during the play, in the same manner and for similar purposes as those of Pirandello in Six Characters in Search of an Author. When the parishioners enter the stage to share in the newly-formed congregation Danny has concocted, they do so by entering through the audience, inviting the audience to participate in what is to happen next as part of the congregation (SR: 193). In scene thirteen, the young man and woman divers in wetsuits “rise up through the audience on the edge of the stage (beach) and stand there glistening and panting” (SR: 217). White thus enlarges the physical capacity of the stage and allows an imaginary sea into the hall, in addition to making the audience part of the community of whale-savers on stage. Whale-saving is a subject which has always met with wide support from the public. White would have been aware of the whale’s symbolical and secular-religious meaning for environmentalists in a postmodern world, and of their magnetism and capacity to unite people globally in an effort to save the stranded whales, in the same way that he wished people would unite concerning the banning of atomic weapons, as we saw in Big Toys.23 Yet at the same time, White uses Danny’s mask to criticize relentlessly a society which is so eager to save the whales but not a fellow human being like Danny, who happens, by this point in the play, not to belong to the trendy set any more. Danny’s ideas may have been misguided, but his congregation became as much a tourist attraction as the sites where whales can be watched. The community ought to be more responsible for its own behavior towards all of its members and develop critical judgment. The divers leave the stage in the same manner they entered: “they wade, then slide down into the sea, and off through the audience” (SR: 218). Another technique White uses to encompass the audience and include it in the action, both here and in Memoirs of Many in One, is that of allowing the onstage audience of the play-within-the-play to interfere in the show by snoring, whistling and shouting remarks, embarrassedly laughing and giggling, voicing what some of the members of the audience of the play must feel at that point (SR: 214-16). As in Pirandello’s play, where the audience is involved in ascertaining the death of the children on stage, though clearly fictional, so here too, the audience is made part of the verdict at the end of the play. Even though the lions have been shot and Danny is clearly dead, already mourned by his wife and the prostitutes, and Wormald, the circus owner, is already inquiring with the policeman about claiming compensation for his “amateur casual performer… and lions – two bloody lions,” those who close the play are Dill and Tilda. Tilda warns Dill not to put his finger in the cage because “they mightn’ta had enough,” and Dill says “dead … dead … all dead … in’t they?” to which Tilda

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

answers, “[ fronting the audience, expressionless face, downbeat delivery] you never know” and the lights fade (SR: 231), leaving the audience, if not with a doubt, at least with a pertinent, nagging thought, regarding their judgment of Danny. The commentator’s voice is heard at the end of scene ten: “the more detached observer is inclined to react with tenderness towards one on whom time will probably have to pass the final judgment, deciding whether he is criminal or victim” (SR: 209), inviting the audience to continue judging Danny long after the play is over, as the British public has done seventy years after the Stiff key scandal.24 White uses his mask-character not only to draw the audience into the play but also to criticize the audience, the most blatant instance of which is at the end of Danny’s trial, when the lawyer says: “the most extraordinary thing about this case is that none of the women connected with Danny Shepherd seemed to realise he’s a raging priapist.” Bee, in “shocked incomprehension” tries out the word: “preeapust?” White’s stage directions follow: “the word is taken up, ‘Preapust? Preapust?’ Being whispered on every side. The figures of the characters spotlit on the floor wag their heads from side to side like crazed puppets echoing the mysterious word. General blackout” (SR: 213). It is quite likely that many members of the audience, like the public at the trial, do not know the meaning of the word the lawyer has used. In this way, White turns everyone, public and audience alike, into mindless puppets, easily led by people such as the lawyer, through their ignorance, to become crazed both by the system and by the likes of Danny, to blindly think as they are directed, rather than judging matters for themselves.

2.

The Costumes

White’s characters in this play are stock-characters, stereotyped not only by their actions but first of all by their appearance and their clothes, as we already saw in the case of Dick, the private eye. White leaves very little to his future directors’ decisions, and his stage directions seem to be written in order not only to be followed when the play is presented on stage but also when it is read, exemplifying both White’s meticulous eye for detail and his appreciation of the effectiveness of prose-writing even when he is writing for the theater. Elisabeth is “a big woman, plump and motherly” as befitting a hard-working mother of five (SR: 175); Lily Thripp is “a dark moustachy madam, probably of Mediterranean origin, dressed in plain black crumpled satin” (SR: 180); Queenie has “an elegant figure as revealed by her neo-mini. She is carrying a large gold bag which might contain all her possessions,” while Bee is a “jolly-looking girl, not overly made up, wearing an abbreviated uniform with ‘Cafe Black-and-White’ embroidered on the bib” (SR: 180); the circus Strong Man “is wearing loose baggy trousers, gathered at the ankles, above heavy boots. A coat hooked to one finger is slung over one shoulder, the muscular torso visible through a navy singlet” (SR: 183); the lady parishioners arrive at church, “their

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skins are carefully powdered. One is dressed in pale blue floral cotton. The other in pale pink, they are gloved, carrying small purses, capable of holding little more than hankie and cough lozenges. Prayer book in other hand” (SR: 193); Feelia Rainbow is “probably 40, though make-up helps her pass for less. A mop of floating yellow hair above a cap of natural black shaved to the bone above cheeks and at nape. Luscious face, large diamond cross on her bosom. Lots of other junk jewellery. Clothes of whichever the trend of the moment may be” (SR: 197); Grice, the sergeant is “in his police uniform” (SR: 199); Lady Sonia Slitzkin “is wearing many jewels, and a dress slit up on the sides, with cowls back and front, no longer fashionable. She is far too blond, hair-dressed, lipstuck. An elderly arthritic, she is carrying an elegant walking stick” (SR: 208); the divers are in wetsuits, and Tilda, “a middle-aged woman” is “dressed in cheap floral cotton, a man’s long woollen underpants instead of stockings, a shawl, strong boots, and a man’s cap back to front” (SR: 217); Wormald, the circus owner is a “middle-aged gent in flash-cut but shabby suit, cheap Akubra, diamond ring, chewed, extinct cigar, down-at-heel, pointed shoes” (SR: 223). When Tilda reappears on stage in the last scene, she is a close reminder of Pirandello’s farcical, Commedia dell’Arte Madame Pace: “this evening she is dressed in what looks like hoarded or second-hand finery including: squashed organdie bridesmaid’s hat, white satin shoes, silk stocking, small sequined purse” (SR: 229), and her appearance, as she delivers the last lines of the play mentioned above, is a visual counterpoint to Danny’s tragic death, continuing his own juxtaposition of circus clowning and religious practice even after his death. The most meaningful costumes, in terms of the construction and use of the mask, are those worn by Danny himself. When the play begins Danny is “dressed in a pepper-and-salt suit, with a clerical collar,” the picture of a modern cleric. Yet Danny is about to leave for Sydney, “performing a few soft-show steps across the room” on his regular journey to the city (SR: 175). On the train, Danny stuffs his clerical clothes in a bag and “he is now in shorts, T-shirt with motto ‘I Luv Everybody’, and joggers” (SR: 178). Only at the end of the delivery of Danny’s soliloquy of his ‘credo,’ as the train pulls into the station, is he made aware by Dick, the private eye, that he has dropped his clerical collar under his seat, symbolic of his auto-de-frocking of his priest-mask. Danny takes off his clerical mask in order to save the prostitutes through sex and false promises, convinced he can put it back on and take it off again according to his own volition, misunderstanding the importance and significance of his collar, as defining his being and his actions. The clerical collar is as important as the Word found in a sacred scripture, since the embodied community spirit always appears clothed by one or another of these masks. Danny deliberately defrocks himself, expecting his actions to contain the same import as when he was wearing his clerical mask. White undercuts and ridicules the allusion to Christ he has started in scene three, when he ‘froze’ the other characters’ movements upon the arrival of Danny, the ‘savior.’ Com-

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

plementing Danny’s Jesus-like apparition, and since the statue of Jesus on the cross is customarily naked but for a loin-cloth, Danny is shown “naked except for briefs” (SR: 184), standing on the landing between his visits to Queenie’s and Bee’s rooms. The end of the scene finds Danny, “standing forward, head raised, eyes closed, arms extended wing-like behind him” in Bee’s room, challenging the Church institution, as Jesus could be imagined to have done towards the rabbinical institutions of his time: “O lord, you’ll have to inspire me some more … arm me with arrows to destroy that evil doctrine of original sin and rout Archbishop Bigge and his army of lesser devils” (SR: 186). Danny’s challenge to Archbishop Bigge does not remain unanswered, and reappears in the next scene. At the beginning of the play, Danny is compared to another priest, his friend Teasdale, already in scene one. Tom Teasdale is a retired priest, who fills in for Danny at the parish when the latter is away on his Sydney escapades. Tom is “an older, slower parson with white hair, white clipped moustache, stiff dog collar and a dark clerical suit, a bit shabby, but neat” (SR: 176). Tom confesses: “when I retired I couldn’t escape a feeling of guilt” because his retirement did not bring to an end his ordainment as a priest: he still wears the outfit, he is still capable of performing services and most importantly, he still feels committed to his duty to the parishioners. As opposed to Teasdale, the virtuous country priest, Danny takes off his habit when he is supposed to be a functioning parson, and abandons his parishioners. Still in opposition to Teasdale, White also introduces two Church politicians, who do wear the frock but misuse it to their profit and to that of the Church. These are Dean Bartholomew Shute, a “seemingly worldly cleric, about 40, dressed in a natty charcoal suit and modern dog-collar” (SR: 186) and Archbishop Wilfred Bigge, “a tall, austere man” whose “suit is of a dark grey, less fashionably cut than the Dean’s. Above the purple stock, his dog collar is of the old-fashioned, stiff variety” (SR: 188). The clerics, like every other character in the play, are stereotyped: the older, more ‘stiff’ Archbishop, and the younger, trendy Dean, are, as can be expected, intent on ridding the scene, the “soul – the whole spirit of our Church” of the threat of “one individual” whose name needn’t even be mentioned (SR: 187). The Archbishop would have Danny committed “and avoid the scandal of an unfrocking.” Yet he prefers to “strengthen our case with evidence on a grand scale” when the case goes to court and therefore decides to “wait and see what comes out of the Experiment at Budgiwank” (SR: 189-90). The scene ends with the exasperated Archbishop, complaining about Dick, after the latter’s departure, “filth – indignity – whatever one has to endure – it’s all to be borne in the name of Christ” (SR: 190), in much the same terms as Danny used on the train to express his ideas, when he said that “man is also the warthog of creation. Let us accept – embrace – all that is excrescent – hairy – sweat” in the name of the true faith, which is to be found if one follows him (SR: 178).

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The Archbishop may not, unlike Danny, be sleeping with prostitutes to advance salvation, but he is handling the more mundane monetary business of the Church, which includes dealing with people like Lotzi Kovacs and the “Ideal Cities Development Corp.” (SR: 187); he does drink on the sly “for medicinal purposes” (SR: 190); and he does not think twice before employing Dick or before bribing the witnesses to Danny’s trial. Dick, who refuses to pass judgment on Danny, “a ’uman being – with the same faults as many of us,” who has seen through the Archbishop’s machinations and who has decided to retire after the Danny affair is over, is the one who both promises to do his duty and who acts upon his promise. Like Terry in Big Toys, the imperfect proletarian character is used as yet another point of criticism when set against the rich and powerful, making him, in contrast to Bigge, Shute and Danny, the only conscientious character. Dick’s presence also underlines the difference between himself and the equation White makes between Bigge and Danny through the use of the same clerical mask. The comparison between Bigge and Danny, subtly started in scene four, is spelled out again at the end of scene six. White writes in the stage instructions: “Bigge, when left alone, is an austere, equally tormented version of Shepherd,” and Bigge says: “Oh, Lord, you will not deny me the strength to carry on in your name what we know to be right.” Shute, who has accompanied Grice, the policeman, out of the study, re-enters and finds Bigge drinking his “little medicinal necessity” again. They speak to each other using their nicknames, and Bigge says: “Bat [short for Bartholomew Shute] and Wilf – you make it sound like a vaudeville act” (SR: 201), drawing another line of similarity between Danny and them. The archbishop admits to his own shortcomings, yet the great difference between him and Danny is in the use of the mask. Danny has been acting alone, based on his private understanding: “long ago, when I was in showbiz – I realized – I think – what God expected of me” (SR: 175), while Bigge knows the entire institution of the Church to be behind him, since he is acting within this institution and not against it, albeit according to what the institutional “we” know to be right. A personification mask is not open to a single person’s interpretation, but must, in order to function, be upheld by the community – and be taken seriously. Danny treats the clerical mask as a playful impersonation mask, which can be taken off or put back on whenever he pleases, and he treats his responsibilities in the same way. He disperses his followers rather than gathering more as he claims, since he manages to maltreat everyone, lying, cheating and taking advantage of others to promote his own ideas. He abandons his appointed flock of parishioners, half of whom have stopped coming to church altogether. He abandons his own family; he is disloyal to his wife, both physically and financially; he takes advantage of her, makes her work instead of him and ultimately makes her, too, abandon their children; he takes

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

advantage of Teasdale, and of Queenie and Bee whom he also deludes with false promises. Scene five finds Danny with his cassock back on again and wearing heavy boots, which he proudly exhibits to Elisabeth, “lifting his feet to show dew and grass seed,” after tramping around the parish, “making sure the regulars will be in church to welcome their new friends,” the prostitutes he has brought back with him (SR: 192). Yet even this renewed clerical zeal does not stop Danny from pursuing his bigger scheme, expressed in the sermon he delivers to his enlarged congregation. Danny, as boastful and engulfed in his over-inflated ego as to be blind to anyone but himself, finds no problem in preaching the opposite: “there is no room for vanity in the humble – unlike the politicians and bureaucrats of life – unlike the stone-hearted figures which adorn our cathedrals.” No doubt White joins Danny in his attack against bureaucrats of all kinds, and Church bureaucrats among them, yet his criticism is predominantly aimed at Danny. A priest’s duty is first and foremost towards the members of his congregation and his family, all of whom Danny betrays, lies to and takes advantage of. Instead of being physically present for his flock, he is “everywhere” (SR: 197) and nowhere. Humility can be achieved by identification with Jesus, the symbol of humility, the very symbol Danny pretends to be himself. While Jesus sacrificed himself for the good of humanity, Danny will commit an empty suicide. Danny would rather ‘skip’ to the last scene, that of a “holocaust such as history has not experienced – then of course we may sense justice as we float through space, vaporous creatures in our journey towards redemption or eternal damnation” (SR: 196). Yet Danny’s apocalypse, which will wipe everything out and enable a new beginning, is to occur without having learned the lessons of humility, which could then result in communion. The image of total self-abnegation, devotion and unconditional love is embodied and alive, right next to Danny, in the figure of his “inexhaustible Saint Elisabeth” (SR: 192), who believes in him though she knows him to be a “failed” shepherd (SR: 195), but Danny is blind to the meaning of her devotion. He is a minister who is incapable of pronouncing one whole prayer and is only heard mumbling bits of the traditional prayers before he “dries up” (SR: 175, 192), representing an individualistic, modern quest for self-fulfillment, promoting his megalomaniac visions rather than thinking of the good of his flock, many of whom have by now dispersed. He thinks he can reinvent everything, but nothing he says is new. Most importantly, as a public leader, he cannot use the language, the idioms and images of the Church that has made him into the public figure that he is to further his own purposes, when his ethics are contrary to Church ethics, any more than he can use the clerical mask, which depends on its community of believers, to debunk that very mask. The Christian tradition relies on the spirit being embodied and personified, and it

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is in this context that we should regard Danny’s proposed ‘naked,’ unmasked and unmediated love of God. No sooner is the sermon over, than Danny is again seen running, “wearing a T-shirt with motto: ‘I love everyone in need of Luv’, shorts and joggers” (SR: 197), for his double-act with Feelia Rainbow. Only after his license is suspended in scene nine, is Danny “wearing a conventional clerical outfit” again (SR: 208), and that for the sole purpose of getting Lady Slitzkin to donate money to his by-now ruined project. When the media commentators announce his license has been withdrawn, Danny’s voice is heard: “the case is not ended. Only God can unfrock me,” and when he appears he is “still dressed as a cleric” (SR: 213). While it is true that once ordained, a priest is rarely defrocked by his superiors in the Church, since by becoming a priest he has become one with God, it is also expected that a priest wearing a cassock be the recognized representative of the Church, saturated with the Church spirit, rather than being a “sorta religious… on and off – on and off. Like everybody” (SR: 219), as he is described, since a priest is not like ‘everybody’ but is supposedly a spiritual leader and an example to ‘everybody’ else. Now that Danny can no longer earn his living as a priest, he performs, “dressed in a clown’s frock, frill round the neck, and white pate. He is holding a red, bulbous clown’s nose,” with Elisabeth at his side as a stooge (SR: 214). When the audience, disenchanted with his recitation of lyrics of dubious taste, prefers to catch the bus home, Danny pulls off the clown’s outfit, to reveal another of his costumes underneath, that of a “dress suit,” complete with “silk hat and silver topped cane” for his vaudeville-style song and dance (SR: 215). Danny is incapable of maintaining an audience for any of his acts, and he and Elisabeth wander off on foot, in search of a place where no one has heard of them and where they might start again. Danny is wearing his clerical cassock once more, as well as “a crumpled, dirty clerical collar” (SR: 218), the same he had let roll under the seat on the train. “He is using a thin, torn-off sapling as a staff, which adds to the air of pilgrimage already established by Elisabeth [who is dressed in a long white shift, barefoot and hobbling]. He is wearing dark glasses” (SR: 218-9), emblematic of Danny’s blindness to others and to his duties.

3.

The Whale and the Lion

After his defrocking, failed theatricals and economic ruin, at the opening of scene thirteen Danny is compared to the beached whales. Symbolic archetypal creatures,25 from the biblical fish encountered by Jonah and Job’s Leviathan to Melville’s Moby Dick, whales are used by White on several levels. The underlying, traditional narrative is brought to the fore. Jonah, the reluctant prophet, who was never disconnected from his community and who finally became the

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

most effective redeemer when the entire community of Nineveh turned to God, is an inescapable antithesis to Danny, a self-appointed prophet, who loses his flock on the way, and who manages to save no one, not even himself. Danny has become the whale, symbolic in its size to his huge aspiration to gain dominion over all of God’s creation. The comparison between Danny and the whales can be understood as symbolizing either his megalomaniac aspirations, or the overflowing of the archetypal matter his mask is meant to convey, since the whales are stranded.26 Danny is exhausted and confused, “like the whales when they lose their way” (SR: 219), and like the whales whose blood fills the sea, “savaged by the rocks” (SR: 221), Danny has been ‘savaged’ by the rock of the Church, and Danny tries to turn his condition into that of a martyr, but Elisabeth won’t let him: “we’re not martyrs. You know it. We’ve started life as human beings,” she tells him, and by this point, she admits to preferring the bourgeois picture Danny derides, complete with “a bunch of everlastings on a lace doily,” to the life he has given her (SR: 221). Where Danny is most convincing to his audience is when he uses a childhood story, which would be familiar to any English-speaking public, the story of Dick Whittington. In his last performance, fittingly located in a town called Jerusalem, Danny retells one of the versions of the popular story, of the young boy whose cat made his fortune by eating mice. As with the whales, here too, White makes a multi-faceted use of the story and especially of its cat. Danny’s religious outbursts are always connected to sex and he admits he has “always been devoted to my pussy. Who led her Dick to London Town – alias Jerusalem, New South” (SR: 227), or in other words, Danny realizes that his addiction to sex was the beginning of his fall. Another hint at addiction to sex being the source of Danny’s problem appeared already at the trial, when the lawyers used the word ‘priapist’ to describe Danny. Though Danny evidently seems to enjoy his sexual encounters, priapism is a condition in which the patient is incapable of refraining from intercourse, due to a constant involuntary erection; and since it is an illness sometimes related to sickle-cell anemia or to cancer, it explains Danny’s death as being part of an incontrollable condition.27 His son’s prediction that Danny will leave for Sydney, because he “can’t help it” (SR: 175), contrary to Elisabeth’s wishful thinking that he stayed home, seems to hint in this direction as well, as one more partial explanation of the Danny phenomenon. Added to this is the fact that wild cats, such as lions, have a permanently erect penis, since they have a bone holding it up. Once more, as with the whales, Danny becomes the symbol which kills him, instead of becoming one with his mask of priest. Soon afterwards, and after another tirade at the expense of the Church in the form of a song about blood-sucking mosquitos, Danny goes on to his most lyrical delivery. “The lights fade. A mix of faith music soars through the theatre: Salvo tambourines, whale song, Kol Nidre, ‘O for the wings of a dove’ (Master Lough’s

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version). Hindu, Greek Orthodox liturgy, ‘Alleluia I’m a bum’, ‘My Redeemer’.” The music is subdued and Danny appears once more, “he is now dressed in a cross between a medieval monk’s robe and a contemporary cassock. He is wearing a thin grey wig, varlets’ cut, face grey, drawn, ascetic” (SR: 229). Set against this potpourri of religions, and with his dress a mixture of traditional and modern registers, supposed to allow everyone to rally behind him, Danny formulates his final argument. “Are you for magic? I am. Inadmissible when we are taught to believe in science or nothing. Nothing is better, science may explode in our faces. So I am for magic. For dreams. For love … I refuse to believe – what certain scientists, academics, and a variety of non-human beings try to persuade me – I should say US – because you are part of ME – and we are all part of one another” (SR: 229). As always, White’s arguments are entangled, and must be pulled apart strand by strand. One of them is the magic-science dichotomy. While magic is appealing to the general imagination, it belongs to the realm of transcendental powers, with which one can come into contact more safely, according to White, through the use of mediating masks such as a priest mask, which Danny has done his utmost to be rid of. Furthermore, science contains an element of deterministic cause and effect: water will freeze at zero degrees Celsius, and cats will instinctively eat mice, to link back to the name Danny gives the cat in the story. In Danny’s retelling of the story of Dick Wittington, he names the cat according to its prey, “Mousey” (SR: 227-8). A cat cannot really help itself from eating a mouse when it sees one, nor will the lions be able to withhold themselves from killing Danny when he enters their cage, as Danny well knows. Yet what is natural for scientific data and for animals, ought not to be for a leader such as Danny the shepherd, who should have been able to control his urges and respect his community in carrying out his duties. Another strand contained in this speech is both what Danny was incapable of, and what White wishes an enlightened society to do: be responsible for one another through a recognition that we all have a community-component in our psyche. Danny is indeed part of us, whether we care to admit it or not, and it is we who have permitted him to carry on as he did. The shepherd steps into a lion’s cage,28 and rather than being saved, as his name suggests, the biblical allusion is reversed and he is eaten alive by the beasts, an admission of his failure as a priest but not as a mask which embodies his society’s skepticism. The more obvious traditional layer of the biblical Daniel hides another, that of Samson. Danny has replaced the Strong Man when he enters the lions’ cage, and is compared in this context to Samson who killed a lion with his bare hands when God was with him. While Samson was blinded, Danny’s blindness is self-imposed. Next to the heroic Samson, Danny is an amateur. When he is asked, towards the end of the play, whether he belongs to a union of actors, he answers: “God recognizes a pro. It’s the

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

Archbishop who expects you to join a union” (SR: 225). Danny failed in his attempts to create a substitute for the institution of the Church. Although White does not spare the Church and its representatives the criticism he feels they deserve, their upholding of the personification mask is still preferable to him to Danny’s total misunderstanding of it. The clerical mask he was given when he was ordained was not his to toy with as he pleases, and though the Church has its rituals, some of which resemble in every way a big show, there is still a difference between these ‘theatricals’ and Danny’s vaudeville clowning. Symbols must be agreed upon and accepted, and must have a common history for the community in order to become meaningful, in the same way as personification masks are.

D. F rom The ater to N ovel : I ntroduction to W hite ’s M emoirs of M any in O ne In both Big Toys and especially in Shepherd on the Rocks, White’s theatrical art relies heavily on visual elements in order to assure his message reaches the audience within the restricted time and space frames the theater provides. His detailed stage instructions and costume instructions helped create a specific scene peopled by specific stock characters, all of which are called upon to assist the main mask-character in conveying White’s ideas. In the same way that his theater is closer to prose through the use of elaborate stage instructions, his prose writing in Memoirs of Many in One will be seen to rely heavily on various theatrical conventions and strategies, which make the mask-character more fleshed-out and efficient in its purpose. As opposed to the somewhat outdated mask of a priest White gave his protagonist in Shepherd on the Rocks, he allows Alex, his main protagonist in Memoirs of Many in One, a protagonist with aspirations to theatrical acting, to use a mask which would be more accessible to his readers, that of Queen Cleopatra in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra popularized through its many stage and productions and cinema adaptations. Alex, who tries to become queen simply by putting on what she believes to have been Cleopatra’s outfit, manages only to have the effect of a ridiculous clown-like figure in the gear of a would-bequeen for her audience and for the readers. By using this strategy, White makes sure that his protagonist’s determination to appropriate her personification mask by trying to use and abuse it is highlighted. Alex, as we shall see, tries to do to Shakespeare’s play what Danny did to Christian scriptures and liturgy. Through Alex’s failed efforts, White also demonstrates the futility of trying to manipulate a personification mask. Another prominent strategy of staging and exposing his personification mask, which White used in Shepherd on the Rocks, is the juxtaposition of a

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modern, egocentric mask with a fragmented, underlying traditional mask. In Memoirs of Many in One, this strategy is deployed throughout the novel, and Alex’s mask of a modern, individualistic and aspiring artist is counterpointed with a medieval ritual mask. Individuality in the twentieth century is defined as distinctive from collectivity, if not in total opposition to it. One’s identity is defined first of all as the ‘I’, the self, and only then is the self defined as part of a nation, a religion, a society. White shows that his protagonist’s pursuit of her identity as a self by means of revolt against identity with her society is itself an archetype of the collective unconscious which sanctions the formation of individuality at all costs, and considers the lonely but fulfilled artist an enviable state of being. White’s protagonist will fail to achieve individuation because she seeks it the wrong way: instead of embracing the collective within her she does her utmost to fly from it. The spirit of the group is lived by each member but not recognized as a co-produced identity until one representative, in this case White’s main protagonist in Memoirs of Many in One, personifies it. She is made to be an indicator of modern cultural spirit, the embodiment of the spirit of rich egotism excused as individualism.

1.

Personification Masks: for Queen or for Madwoman

When Alex announces her decision to leave on a theatrical tour of outback Australia, her daughter Hilda and Patrick, her editor, wonder which parts she will be expected to play. Alex answers: “some of Shakespeare’s more interesting characters – both female and male … my Viola, Titania, Hamlet, Lear, my Rosalind, above all my Cleopatra” (MMO: 120). Already at this point, Alex tries to appropriate the role she is about to perform, which will be “my” Cleopatra, rather than Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare is not an unexpected choice for an English-bred Australian. Yet interestingly, White does not include Henry IV or Henry V in Alex’s list, although he probably had him in mind when he named Alex’s son Hal, a proper name for the son of an actress aspiring to a royal role. Shakespeare’s Henry could have been an ideal choice for White when he casts his protagonist in a theatrical piece, especially if we read him as Wolfgang Iser does when he explains the mechanism of the collective imaginary as operative in creating the mask of King Henry V. In his discussion of Henry V, Iser explained the role of the collective imaginary in generating the figure of the King, yet clearly this mechanism is not restricted to kings but includes all leaders. Iser quotes the prologue to Henry V, which, significantly for our discussion here, is spoken by the Chorus, the community’s representatives on stage. A few lines of the same prologue are particularly pertinent: “And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,/ On your imaginary forces work/ (…) For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings” (l. 17-18,

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

20). The poet is thus appealing to the imagination of his audience. The chorus also represents the audience within the play, and is able to engage the collective imagination of the audience and what it has stored in its collective memory and project this imaginary picture onto “our kings.” By this procedure the kings will receive the power and image necessary for them to rule. As Iser explains: The events and the character, then, can assume reality only in the thoughts of the audience, and what cannot be depicted of the monumental events must be imagined. The text therefore cannot be viewed as mimesis of a historical reality, but comprises instructions for the imagination to picture the reality intended. Metaphorically speaking, the text is a musical score whose notes are given, and have to be brought to life by the audience’s imagination called upon to play the score. 29

Although Iser does not explicitly label this activity on the part of the audience a function of a fictional mask, he nonetheless provides a definition of the mask in its function of personification. The image that the king presents is not his own private face but a face projected onto him by the audience’s imagination, as modeled by the dramatist’s imagination: the image of the king is therefore the collective production of royalty as a mask. Any aura surrounding the King is produced by his subjects, who glorify his image and lend it its eternal life. In Henry V, “nearly all the characters give expression to a certain aspect of the King’s ideality.”30 The physical reality of the King is thus the instrument for personification. White had Shakespeare’s Henry V further in mind when he made his protagonist invent her own act and call it Dolly Formosa and the Happy Few, an expression of Alex’s elitist aspirations. Several times in the course of the novel, Alex expresses the slogans of a fashionable, misunderstood artist, priding herself that few but select people will eventually understand what she is presenting. More importantly, by making her perform this act, White traps his protagonist in her own misunderstandings: Alex misunderstands Henry’s words, which prophesy that the happy few who were there to win the battle along with their King will themselves share a part of his mythical glory, which they will be able to tell to their grandchildren: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” (4.3.60) as Henry says in Shakespeare’s text. Significantly, what Alex also misunderstands is that by taking part in the battle, these happy few will physically uphold the personification mask of the image of the King. Alex refutes her part in any kind of brotherhood, seeking lonely self-fulfillment, which she thinks she will be able to find in the part of Cleopatra, blind as she is to the fact that Cleopatra too, like Henry, is a Queen only thanks to her community. In addition, when White chooses the part of Cleopatra for Alex, an unusually powerful Queen and therefore a female counterpart to Henry, he seems to show his protagonist that gender is yet another category given to the individual by the

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community, despite Alex’s conviction that she can play any part regardless of gender.31 Antony and Cleopatra places White’s readers in a particular mind-frame and with particular expectations. Specifically, what White found ready-made in Shakespeare’s play is the technique of the construction of collective elements into a character or a figure who incarnates community codes and ideals, masks sustained by corporate bodies, sharing and exhibiting their common ideology. The voice given to these figures is the expression of their societies’ beliefs, a society present on the stage in countless stock characters, such as servants and soldiers, who are there to support and empower the created embodiments of their beliefs. By casting his protagonist as Cleopatra, White can demonstrate that the technology which produces personification masks exists in every place and time, whenever there is a society upholding a strong collective image in need of projection onto masks. The collective imaginary pre-exists in a collective fantasy, before it finds a figure capable of magnetizing it and embodying the projected fantasy. The figure on which the fantasy is projected does not necessarily have to be a king or a leader, but can be a representative figure, even one which is quite remote from the idea of a leader, especially in modern times. White stresses this point when he creates his main character: she is no princess or renowned artist, and still, even this mad old lady can be made to wear a personification mask, embody and represent her society’s codes and values. The universal collective fantasy of the pursuit of youth is thus crystallized in a character as physically unsuitable to this role as Alex Gray, a character who makes White’s target and criticism more readily apparent, especially when she is made to play the part of a queen like Cleopatra, the embodiment of femininity, the mythical Oriental beauty and enchantress.

2. Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: the Creation of the Community of the Mask Patrick White found in Shakespeare’s play the elements that served in the creation of the personification mask of an Egyptian Queen and of a Roman leader. He followed Shakespeare’s method of translation of these mask elements into the components of drama within his novel. By means of a large deployment of actors on the stage, a wide panorama which is alluded to outside the stage, and a complicated plot which involves many participants, Shakespeare manages to conjure a significant community, which makes his leading characters’ masks very powerful. Shakespeare’s cast is composed of six royal figures: the three triumvirs, Pompey, Cleopatra, and finally Octavia. These six figures are surrounded by twenty-eight named friends, attendants and followers, and many others whose number is not known, but

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

who are composed of messengers, servants, soldiers, captains, sentries, guardsmen, ladies in attendance as well as a soothsayer and a clown. This large number of extras constitutes a crowd of anonymous stock characters, who represent the ideals and beliefs of the larger, silent community. Such a formidable cast is hardly astonishing, since the play evolves around many royal figures representing different courts, and each royal figure is created, both in historical reality and in the theatrical one, by its followers. The crowds surrounding each royal endow him or her with a personification mask, or what has been termed the second body of the king.32 It is this mask, which gives the royal figure the power to rule. Shakespeare’s panorama in this play is exceptionally wide: from Rome in the west to Syria in the east, the action on stage shifts quickly from Alexandria to Rome, to Athens, to Actium and back to Rome and Egypt. Those parts of the action that are not enacted on stage are reported by an incessant coming and going of messengers and ambassadors keeping the most static of scenes in continuous motion. The participants in this great commotion are all leaders of people in the region and their soldiers. Caesar, Antony, Lepidus on the Roman side, Sextus Pompeius on Pompey’s and Cleopatra on Egypt’s are the main protagonists, but King Orodes of Parthia, King Bocchus of Libya, King Archelaus of Cappadocia, King Philadelphos of Paphlagonia, King Adallas of Tracia, King Manchus Arabia, the King of Pont, King Herod of Jewry, King Mithridates of Comagene, King Polemon of Mede, King Amyntas of Lycaonia, are all mentioned as taking part in this global war as well, clearly implying that the plot before us is an all-encompassing one, both geographically and demographically, and that the outcome of the events will decide the fate of the entire known ancient world. As a consequence of this wide reach, the plot is woven like a mesh made of several intertwined plot lines, which revolve around the major protagonists. The audience witnesses the unfolding of great historical events and is made to participate in the piecing together of the motives for each move and of its results. These textual strategies take part in the creation of personification masks, represented by their respective wearers. Each main protagonist-mask represents his country’s political goals, which are opposed to those of the other protagonists’ countries. Cleopatra is interested in expanding and strengthening her kingdom through her alliance with Antony; Antony recognizes his duties to Rome, which dictate his return to Rome, his marriage to Caesar’s sister and his campaign against the Parthians in defense of Rome’s borders; Pompey wants to secure his country’s safety and borders by waging war against Rome but is also willing to settle matters through an agreement; Caesar wants to safeguard the borders of the Roman empire but at the same time is looking for a way to achieve sole power in the empire. From the start, the play displays oppositions as its framing theme: opposition between West and East, Rome and

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Egypt, between male and female, between pragmatic reasoning and emotional reactions, between the zeal of the soldiers and the pleasures of the court. This complex framework of conflicting positions presents a wide range of opinions, allowing each member of the cast as well as of the audience to become engaged and actively participate in the creation of the personification masks.

3.

Further Textual Strategies for the Creation of Personification Masks

Aside from the textual elements mentioned above, several other elements are active in the writer’s creation of personification masks. These provide a faithful picture of the community’s conventions and ideals regarding its chosen figures and of the communities’ sanctioning power. In addition, the collective imagination is called upon to empower the personification masks even in their physical absence. Finally, the repetitions that Shakespeare uses throughout the play provide further reinforcement for the collective portrait of the community through an accumulation of its enactments. Both Antony and Cleopatra are well aware of their given role and position, and of the power and duties these entail; they also identify with their maskrole. In addition, they are aware of their community’s expectations of them, though in Antony’s case, it is his disregard for these expectations that brings about his fall. The tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra is that they cannot consider themselves to be separate beings as well as royal figures: they are not independent of the members of their society, since they cannot be the grand figures their roles dictate without being community figures as well. Antony’s tragic error is that he is incapable of realizing what it is that makes up his personification mask and his identity specifically as a Roman leader, and in which geographical location he can function as such. He believes he can be a Roman leader while residing in Egypt at the side of his Egyptian consort, and up to a point he manages to do so. However, once he participates in the public demonstration concocted by Cleopatra upon his return to Egypt in Act 3.6, he has completely crossed the lines to the Egyptian side. His public appearance at the side of Cleopatra clad in the robes of Isis,33 the Egyptian deity, is described from the Roman side by Caesar as a betrayal. Maecenas and Agrippa, to whom Caesar recounts Antony’s actions, react accordingly: Maecenas says: “Let Rome be thus informed” since it is the public’s right to know that their leader has defected, and Agrippa adds: “Who, queasy with his insolence already,/ Will their good thoughts call from him” (3.5.20-2).34 The Roman public, already critical of Antony’s ramblings with Cleopatra prior to this public demonstration, accusations regarding which were voiced immediately at the beginning of the play, will have no more patience with him after his clear act of siding with Cleopatra against Rome. As Caesar rightly and shrewdly calculates, Antony’s act provides

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

ample justification in the eyes of the Roman public for his declaration of war against Antony and Egypt. After Antony’s death, Caesar calls his men to his tent to further justify his actions by showing them letters that prove how he, Caesar, “was drawn into this war” (5.1.74), in case Antony’s noble Roman death altered public opinion again in his favor and set the public against Caesar. In life or death, Antony, the Roman leader, can only be Antony in Rome and in the service of the Roman people. His personification mask was created by the Roman community, not the Egyptian one, and it cannot suffer what it considers to be a desertion. “Sir, sometimes when he is not Antony/ He comes too short of that great property/ Which still should go with Antony” (1.1.59-61) says Philo to Demetrius after they witness Antony declining to listen to the messengers from Rome, preferring to go for a walk with Cleopatra. This notion of ‘Antony not being Antony’ is repeated several times in the play, by Antony himself, when he blames the wine for his behavior and for making him not himself (2.2.978) as well as when he talks to Octavia and says: “If I lose mine honour, / I lose myself” (3.4.22-3), since his honor is a major ingredient of his public mask and of the Roman ideal. Antony blames himself for ordering his ships to retreat dishonorably from the battlefield following Cleopatra’s ships. Antony says, “I have fled myself” (3.11.8), repeating the notion that his honor is inseparable from his self as a leader. Canidius too claims that “Had our general / Been what he knew himself, it had gone well” (3.10.25-6). The defeat is due to the fact that Antony had not been himself, the courageous and independent leader they knew him to be before his days in Alexandria. Cleopatra also expresses the notion that Antony is measured by his capacity to live up to his ideal image, to his mask, without which he simply is not Antony at all (1.143-4). Antony is as identified with his personification mask of a Roman leader as a ritual dancer is with the mask he wears for the performance of the ritual. Thus, after his first defeat, Antony praises his men and says: “I wish I could be made so many men, / And all of you clapped up together in / An Antony” (4.2.18-19). “An Antony” therefore is, or should be, a mask containing many souls, a mask which is made up of all the people who create it and uphold the ideals this mask represents. These people are the ones who look up to the figures who enact their own fantasies, and try to model themselves upon them. The personification masks of Antony and Cleopatra are so effective, that their physicality is superfluous and neither of them needs to be actually present on stage for the mask to be fleshed out by their courtiers. They are constantly watched, followed and gossiped about, idealized and criticized.35 What their courtiers say about them is reinforced by what they say about each other, as well as what is said about them by their peers, and even by their foes, such as Pompey, who thinks Antony’s “soldiership / Is twice the other twain” (2.1.35-6), twice the man Lepidus and Caesar are together. All these descriptions confirm

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the a priori public image already common in the minds of the simple soldiers and maids. This image is so powerful that their followers would like to fashion themselves according to the personification masks they put on their leaders, such as Charmian, who would like the soothsayer to “Find me to marry me with Octavius Caesar, and companion me with my / mistress” (1.2.27-29), and Antony’s men, who “make their looks by his” (1.5.59), as though sharing in the personification mask of their idols would make them somewhat greater too and at the same time seal their bonds between each individual and the other members of the community in worship of their leader. A powerful tool in the construction of the personification mask of both Antony and Cleopatra, which allows it to be effective even in their physical absence, is that of the collective imagination and the exaggerated image it creates in the mind of members of the community. Both Antony and Cleopatra are made to be larger than life, god-like. Cleopatra is likened to Hera and Venus (2.2.210), and she dresses as Isis in her public performance (3.6.17). If she is a goddess to her subjects, she is understandably made into a witch or a demon in the eyes of the Romans, since another people’s gods must be made evil and illegitimate in the eyes of those who belong to the ruling Roman faith. The Romans are convinced she is more of a woman than normal women, and as a consequence provokes endless, dangerous sexual appetites, as Enobarbus explains to Maecenas: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale / Her infinite variety. Other women cloy / The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry / Where most she satisfies” (2.3.245-8). Antony is likened to a demi-Atlas (1.5.24), to Hercules, Mars (1.1.4) and to no less than “The god of Jupiter” (3.2.10). Cleopatra’s tears “are greater storms and tempests / than almanachs can report” (1.2.144-5), and she herself announces that she is made of the two higher elements: “I am fire and air; my other elements / I give to baser life” (5.2.283-4), while Antony feels so bold as to say: “Let Rome and Tiber melt and the wide arch / Of the ranged empire fall” before “such a mutual pair” as Cleopatra and himself, who “stand peerless” (1.1.35-42). The couple compares itself to the mythological couple of Aeneas and Dido (1.3.20) and Antony repeats this comparison after what he believes to have been Cleopatra’s suicide, when he proposes to join her in death where they will outshine Dido and Aeneas: “Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops / And all the haunt be ours” (4.14.53-4). Antony is completely turned into a myth after his death. Cleopatra says of him: “His legs bestrid the ocean, his reared arm / Crested the world; his voice was propertied / As all the tunèd spheres” (5.2.81-83) and concludes her long list of similes by saying “An Antony were Nature’s piece ’gainst fancy” (5.2.97), making Antony’s image compete against imagination itself. Caesar seals the play by instructing to bury Cleopatra “by her Antony” for “No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / A pair so famous” (5.2.352-354), relegating the image of these lovers to glorious, deified myth.

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

These glorifying descriptions and deifying similes clarify that Antony and Cleopatra’s love affair is not a private one, but is itself a part of their personification masks. Consequently, they are never alone, and their most intimate moments are made public, since they are always surrounded by ladies-in-waiting, soldiers and courtiers. What could have been considered a private relationship between two lovers for any couple is not so with Antony and Cleopatra and their every word is pronounced in front of witnesses. Their relationship cannot be a private one since it is part and parcel of their personification masks: not only are Antony and Cleopatra’s roles created as a result of their subjects’ projected image but so is their relationship, which reflects and makes visible the ideals and imagination of the Western world regarding the required attributes of the perfect Roman soldier and the most desirable of Oriental women, ideals which are both projected onto their masks and which determine their relationship. Their subjects consider it their right to witness and comment on any one of Antony and Cleopatra’s actions, including what could have been considered part of their private lives had they not worn personification masks, since their subjects are responsible for the creation of the masks their idols wear in the first place. The play begins with Demetrius and Philo, two of Antony’s followers, who complain about their leader’s infatuation with Cleopatra. Philo voices the fact that Antony is not a private person, free to do as he wishes, but is endowed with a “captain’s heart” (I.1.6). It is therefore scandalous in their eyes that Antony, “The triple pillar of the world” should be transformed “Into a strumpet’s fool” (I.1.11-12). His heart is not his own, neither literally nor metaphorically. Antony and Cleopatra’s love life is as much a result of the projection of the image their community has of them as are the political powers endowed on them by their masks. As Enobarbus says of Cleopatra’s passions, that they “are made of nothing but / the finest part of love” (1.2.142-3), meaning that a woman such as Cleopatra, who epitomizes the ideal of romantic love and sensual lust, cannot but live up to her image. The cultural background against which Shakespeare wrote this play is the Western Christian image of ideal masculine and feminine qualities. Antony represents the ideal Roman warrior, noble, brave, dependable and loyal, while Cleopatra represents the ideal of female beauty as well as other, derogatory female attributes that are granted to beautiful and powerful women such as inconstancy and fickleness. Cleopatra is both aware of this image and shares in its creation. She worries about her looks, and allows herself to behave not only as expected of a queen with endless power to order people around, but as expected of an ensnaring, beautiful woman, who can toy with her lover as much as she pleases. Unlike Romeo and Juliet, another of Shakespeare’s famous couples, who could be taken out of the community in order to consummate their love, Antony and Cleopatra constantly conduct their love affair in front of members of their community and they are never once alone.

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Perhaps the most effective of textual strategies for the enhancement of the personification mask is repetition. Through repeated actions the community-created masks gain strength: what has led to their creation is so strong that it is repeated. Repetitions in this play are of particular significance, the second part of the repetition adding importance to the first. The soothsayer’s session with Charmian, in which he predicts her death, is repeated in his session with Antony, in which he warns Antony to stay away from Caesar whose guardian angel is stronger than Antony’s. Shakespeare uses the popular device of fortune telling twice to seal the fate of the protagonists in advance, first that of the Egyptian lady and then the greater one, that of the Roman leader. Another repetition is found in the two occasions on which Antony is made to say a few lines while he is alone on stage. On the first occasion, Antony decides to return to Egypt, despite his marriage to Octavia which should have bonded his ties with Caesar and with Rome: “though I make this marriage for my peace, / I’th’East my pleasure lies” (2.3.38-9). The next time Antony speaks alone on stage is after his final defeat, when he knows he shall not see another day: “Betrayed I am. / O, this false soul of Egypt!” (4.12.23-4). The second time is a clear resonance to the first, pointing once more to the reason Antony was defeated: he chose Cleopatra and the Egyptian people over Octavia and the Romans. Another set of repetition highlights this conclusion: Antony orders his ships to fly from the battlefield following Cleopatra’s ships not once, but twice (3.10 and 4.12). If after the first defeat Antony can reconcile with Cleopatra and set out to fight again, even winning a battle against Caesar on land, the second time he ventures at sea is fatal and irreparable. This repetition, of Antony’s ships following Cleopatra’s, reverberates another: the two times Antony followed Cleopatra and came to dwell in Egypt. After the first time, he returned to Rome and acknowledged his public obligations, whereas after the second time there was no longer any possibility of return. These numerous repetitions enhance the attention given to the presence and visibility of the masks in the text and underline their actions. The two final cases of repetition are the most dramatic ones. Antony’s mask cracks completely when he refuses to listen to his generals, Canidius and Enobarbus, who warn himagainst accepting Caesar’s challenge to fight him by sea where his forces are weaker than on land and where he depends on Cleopatra’s ships (3.7.27-53). This scene is immediately repeated when a simple soldier, whose name is not mentioned, begs Antony not to fight at sea. Although Antony dismisses him with no explanations, the soldier says: “By Hercules, I think I am i’th’right” (3.7.67). Not only is Antony, whose personification mask embodies Rome, following Cleopatra, whose personification mask embodies Egypt, but he is turning his back on Rome and on its people, represented first by his general and then by the rank and file soldier. Although the war ends with a Roman victory, Cleopatra wins on the cultural level, since this is a war between

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

Isis and Mars. The soldier’s hero, Hercules, is overpowered by the Egyptian Queen and by the Egyptian gods in whose grip Antony has put himself. The device of repetition culminates in the two protagonists’ deaths. They both commit suicide, making their deaths equally noble and true to the requirements of their personification masks as leaders of their people. Yet what is more important is that both are preceded in death by their inferiors, whose names are purposefully similar. Eros kills himself rather than killing Antony (4.14.94), while Iras falls dead at her mistress’ feet (5.2.286). Both Eros and Iras enact their communities’ ideals, shared and represented by Antony and Cleopatra, which demand a noble death from its leaders rather than a shameful submission.

4.

The Power of the Mask

After Antony’s death, Caesar comes to see Cleopatra at her monument, to entreat her to submit to his protection and to being publicly exposed as part of his triumphant return to Rome. “Which is the Queen of Egypt?” (5.2.111) asks Caesar when he enters the scene. The fact that Caesar cannot recognize Cleopatra once her status as a queen is threatened and diminished is not surprising: only if she still has followers can she wear the personification mask of a queen. Without it, she is no different from the other women. Indeed, when she prepares to die she asks to be clad in her royal symbols: “Show me, my women, like a queen. Go fetch / My best attires” (5.2.226-7), “Give me my robe. Put on my crown. I have immortal longings in me” (5.2.274-5). Cleopatra’s “immortal longings” are answered by Charmian’s straightening of Cleopatra’s fallen crown after Cleopatra lies dead (5.2.12-3), and Cleopatra still remains the great Queen in the pages of history books despite her death. Yet her robes and crown are not alone in creating Cleopatra’s personification mask and legend. Far from proving the devaluation of the personification mask, Caesar’s words enhance its great value, especially at this point, in which Cleopatra is about to cease being a woman altogether and to become a Goddess. Caesar has removed Cleopatra’s historical public image, only to replace it with mythological status. When Cleopatra is no longer distinguishable from other women, she is brought down to the level of gender-collectivity. The more impersonal she becomes, the closer she can be to a god. While Caesar thinks he has exposed the real Cleopatra, what he has actually disclosed is the universal woman, stressing the source of the power of her personification mask. Stripped of all her attributes as a queen she still possesses her power as an archetypal woman: both she and everyone else in her community still believe that she is the incarnation of womanhood.36 Shakespeare does not treat her as an individual but as a public figure. As opposed to Antony, she has not turned her back on her own community, and

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even if she has not served them well by losing the battle to the Romans and thus ending the rule of the Ptolomaic dynasty over Egypt, her image and her mask remain untarnished. Especially since the Egyptians will now have to suffer foreign rule, the personification mask of their Queen, which embodies their collective Egyptian values, must be kept intact.

5.

From Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to White’s Memoirs of Many in One

Patrick White’s aim in this novel, as attested by its title, was to construct an embodiment of a collectivity in one composite portrait. He turned to the classical theater, where he found the way to depict community representations and where the technology of mass-production is plain to see. White followed Shakespeare’s technique of producing a collective image, an embodiment of group ideas, in a personification mask. On the level of the cast, he too chose both a male and a female mask-characters, supported by a great number of many other characters of varying degrees of importance, constituting the community within the text and alluding to the community outside the text, both communities being the joint creators of the personification masks. White’s setting is also a wide one: from Smyrna to Greece, to Egypt and Australia. In White’s novel, however, the community is not divided as in Shakespeare’s play into two major community groups, since White focuses on the Australian community, and the other communities are mentioned as part of the past of the main characters, emblematic of many Australians’ backgrounds. As to the plot, White’s novel also includes many intertwined episodes, real or imaginary, populated by various communities, all involved in the creation of the mask. The numerous groups, the fantastic scenes White depicts, the various frames of institutional practices such as the Church or the psychiatric institution which he makes his protagonist experience, are all used to emphasize the personification function of the mask. In White’s novel, as in Shakespeare’s play, the building of the collective image is assisted by repetitions and by the accumulation of enactments that allow this image to become visible in the personification mask. The fixed expression of a theater mask, the repeated expression on the faces of many actors, as well as actions which are in plain sight on stage, are translated in the novel into a recurrence of actions in the plot. In novels, visibility depends on sequential actions, which are visible because they are performed several times or by several people. The more an action is repeated, the plainer the emotions or urges that are at the source of the action. The story of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra was already known to his audience before the play opens, and had become part of the underlying common cultural elements of his community, similar to myths.

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

For his part, White’s novel demands a highly involved reader. He begins the novel after Alex’s death, and then proceeds to various re-tellings of the plot, which must be pieced together. By doing so, White establishes an anchor in the past upon which he can build as if the story were familiar to his readers, making his protagonist’s life-story worth hearing since the writer deemed it interesting enough to re-tell. In her ultimate act of rebellion against her social ties, Alex is made to join a theatrical group, and perform before the bourgeois community of outback Australia. Despite her burning failure on the theatrical tour, Alex decides to perform in two other modern theaters on her return from the tour, oblivious to the inner contradiction between her craving for public recognition from the very same community she is doing her best to flee.

6.

What Alex is Allowed to do to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra

Acting, for Alex, is an act of subversion, since what appeals to Alex is the opportunity to appropriate the text and the part and use both to promote her individualistic aspirations. She is convinced that in a modern theater, where everything is permitted and all theatrical conventions have been torn down, she will be able to do as she pleases. What Shakespeare so painstakingly constructed, namely a text in which the working of the collective imaginary is embedded in the personification masks of his main characters, she is busily de-constructing, subverting his intentions and downsizing his play and its characters to her needs. To start with, she diminishes the director, whose role is so unimportant in her eyes that she compounds it with that of the manager, whose name is as negligible, “could be Barry, or even Craig, Wayne?”(MMO: 124), and whom she coaches carefully, so he knows what to say (MMO: 131). As soon as she has him under her thumb, Alex can set about re-casting the actors, cutting out as many parts as she can. She clears the stage so she can dominate it and shine as a single star: “I persuaded the director to cut the role of Octavia … Octavia is dispensable. For that matter I could have dispensed with some of the men – Caesar with those thin shanks covered with a fuzz of sandy hair, and alas, a puny Antony, graduated from NIDA 37 a couple of months before the tour” (MMO: 131). By clearing the stage, Alex disregards the retinue which sustains and makes a Queen, as made clear in Shakespeare’s play. Alex follows the stereotypical modern trend of destroying the original text in order to appropriate it and make it her own. She considers the original text rather boring, full of “tedious battles with which Shakespeare litters his work,” and which can consequently be cut out. Even the part that she does recite, has its “longueurs,” and can be summed up in a line of “so on so on so on doh doh de doh” (MMO: 132-3). The two pieces of Shakespeare’s text that

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do make their way into the mouth of White’s protagonist, are a few lines from the description Enobarbus gives of Cleopatra’s first meeting with Antony, on her magnificent boat outing on the Nile, and bits and pieces of Cleopatra’s last scene, when she commits suicide. Enobarbus’ description of the Queen clad in golden cloth, on her boat of purple sails and silver oars, which “beggared all description” and which is likened to Venus surrounded by Cupids (2.2.200-214) is the concoction and the outcome of the collective imaginary, which upholds the position of the Queen as a legendary beauty. This is as much a part of her second, official, body of the Queen, as are her staff or her crown. What Alex does not understand is that if she takes out the dramatic apparatus nothing is left of the Queen. In addition, Shakespeare’s Cleopatra requires a gifted performer who shows herself fully aware of her personification mask of a royal figure, whether in her acts of jealousy before Antony, or when she speaks to Caesar or even to the least important servant. White’s protagonist’s performance is a very poor one, encumbering the readers with the street names of the actresses who play the parts of her ladies and commenting about other actors during the performance, completely misunderstanding the requirements of her role. Having cleared the stage and butchered the text, Alex sets out to appropriate the part of Cleopatra, first of all by nicknaming her Cleo, “my Cleo” (MMO: 128), diminishing Shakespeare’s character to fit her needs as she did to the text. She appropriates Cleopatra to the point of declaring “I am Cleopatra. I know” (MMO: 123) and assuring Patrick in her letter to him that dispensing with the part of Octavia is perfectly alright since “Cleopatra herself shared my opinion” (MMO: 131). Yet Alex could not be made to be more remote from Cleopatra: while Cleopatra was a tragic historical figure, who represented a whole society, a nation, Alex has no retinue, other than a devoted daughter and an old friend. The cab driver, who takes Alex later on to her performance at the Sand Pit Theater, is surprised at the name Alex gives herself, “‘Princess Alexandra Xenophon’,” and says: “in a democratic country  – and from a bloody phoney princess! If it was Di, say – or Alexandria…” (MMO: 158). Unlike the community of Alexandria, which made Queen Cleopatra and which White purposefully puts in the cab driver’s mouth, no community recognizes Alex as a ‘real’ princess, not even a modern one such as the community of Princess Diana. Alex’s personification mask is therefore not one of a princess, let alone a queen of Cleopatra’s magnitude. She is a self-proclaimed princess, a personification mask only of the group of egocentric individualists for whom self-fulfillment is the highest value. Alex’s audience laughs at her: her act is funny, unprofessional and clumsy, a far cry from Shakespeare’s great tragedy. Moreover, White does not allow Alex to be completely transformed into Cleopatra and disappear into her costume, since she is herself a mask, which must remain visible. The mask of Cleopatra is used by Alex as an impersonation mask. After putting on her

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

makeup, which is a “lengthy operation,” Alex is very satisfied with her transformation: “I could not help feeling pleased with myself as my glance roamed from dirty navel to bloody talons and ditto toenails – except the one whose toe had got jammed in a door” (MMO: 130). The toe remains undisguised, emblematic of Alex’s misguided understanding, which translates and downsizes the personification mask of Queen Cleopatra, the second body of the Queen, created and sustained by the collective imagination of her entire community, into her own toe. Alex does not realize that a tragic heroine like Cleopatra has no private identity or truth, but only that which the community has given her and without which she does not exist. White has turned Alex into a clown, and Shakespeare’s tragedy into a hilarious farce. There is nothing tragic about the way Alex performs her part of Cleopatra, and her use of this theatrical mask is a deliberate transposition form tragedy to comedy. Everyone laughs at her, the audience as well as the critic who finds Alex’s Cleopatra “‘very, very funny’” (MMO: 135). Yet whereas Shakespeare’s clowns used distortion to bring about awareness and were themselves aware of what they were saying and doing, Alex is not. When the rest of the theatrical group leaves town, abandoning Alex behind, she walks into the street and picks up “a snapshot lying in the middle of the street. The figure at least is mine, limbs daubed with Nile silt, crimson talons, lacquered toenails, except for the one removed by jamming in a door. But the face has come out blurred, it could be anybody’s” (MMO: 140). The mask of Cleopatra can indeed be anybody’s: any actor who would don the mask would be able to pretend he or she is the character of Cleopatra. He or she would be able to do it more or less successfully, depending on their interpretation of the role. Using a mask as impersonation is not enough to become a Queen. Alex picks up the picture in the street, yet neither this public place nor Shakespeare’s text succeed in driving home to her the nature of the source of power given to Cleopatra by her personification mask, that is, by the community.

7.

The Role of the Community

White’s representation encompasses the wider community too, besides the theatergoers. Alex writes letters to Patrick while on the theatrical tour: “there is a drama attached to each town” (MMO: 127), she reports. The drama is not confined to the theatrical stage but takes place among the people Alex both derides and depends upon for an audience and for her own existence. Intent on her individual glorification and her effort to avoid the very same community she depends on, Alex refuses to stay with private local families, and insists on a room at an hotel. Yet the hotel’s name is invariably “the Royal, the Imperial, the Commercial, or whatever,” as indicative of the existence of a community as any local family, and the audience is to be found in the street as well as in

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the theater: Alex admits “I could have toppled with disastrous results into my devoted audience in the street below” (MMO: 128). However much Alex tries to dismiss the local bourgeois ladies, experts at preparing sponge cakes and Pavlovas, White demonstrates that Alex is not only part of her community but more importantly, that whatever she does, this community cannot be taken out of her system. After the performance, Alex arrives at the buffet, where the Pavlova “was a masterpiece of the Country Woman’s craft. A passion-fruit seed made straight for the only hollow tooth in my head and stayed there to martyrise me” (MMO: 135). The irony in White’s use of a passion-fruit seed to physically represent the community in Alex’s existence is not lost: the passion of Christ is both shared by the community and is itself a cornerstone in the constitution of the community. An allusion to the communal sacraments is also clear in Alex’s swallowing of the passion-fruit. This allusion to passion-fruit is a repetition: White already anticipated this passion-fruit seed by making Alex declare long before the tour that she was “prepared to tour every Australian outback town, devour however many sponges and Pavlovas in however many bourgeois lounge rooms after the nightly performance, in hopes of biting on a clue buried along with the passion-fruit seeds and the toothache at the heart of the cake” (MMO: 89). Nonetheless, when Alex actually bites into the cake, she does not understand the clue that the passion-fruit was to give her, namely the participation of the community not only in her audience and as judges of her genius but in her own existence. White has exposed his mask-character to the audience’s boos and to criticism, yet he also forces us to see that we all have a role and a responsibility in the mask’s nature. While Shakespeare could rely on his audience’s familiarity with the workings of the personification mask of the Queen and its participation in upholding it, White must recreate both recognition of the mask’s existence, and especially, recognition of the community’s part in its creation. No longer a religious community, bound to its masks by common beliefs as the ritual community used to be, modern society is nevertheless also part of a community which shares common values. These values may not be recognized as being as important as religious beliefs, yet they are binding too and must be acknowledged by the community in order to make it realize its share in their creation and in their effect. White relies on the theater for the fashioning of his character as a mask-character as well as for the deployment of the mask’s actions and philosophy. A modern character, White places her in modern theatrical settings, and the mask is used, among other things, to also criticize and deride modern theater practices. Significantly, the use of traditional theater in White’s Memoirs of Many in One is not restricted to Shakespeare’s play since White draws on earlier, medieval theatrical conventions as well, as a framing device for the entire novel and as the fragmentary legacy of past practices still apparent in modern times.

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater

N otes 1 | May-Brit Akerholt found White’s plays to exhibit a “ritualistic drama” that moved towards “the opening of an inner world.” See: May-Brit Akerholt, Patrick White, Australian Playwrights Series, Monograph No. 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988), p. 1, as cited in a review by Margaret Yong, published in: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 85, No. 2 (Apr., 1990), p. 429. 2 | David Marr reports White saying to Peggy Garland that he was “glad I’ve had my say about hypocritical, plutocratic, contemporary Sydney society. I’ve also been able to say what I think about uranium and atomic weapons. Now of course I’m the most awful Commo to many people.” See: David Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 576. 3 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, pp. 151, 178. 4 | Ibid. pp. 102, 177, 178. 5 | Ibid. p. 108. 6 | Ibid. p. 179. 7 | Patrick White, Big Toys, in: Collected Plays Vol II (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994), Australian Dramatists Series [hereafter: BT]. 8 | In the same way that White realized all politicians were not necessarily the same, as in the Reagan-Ghandi comparison, Marr tells of Lady Maie Casey, the wife of the newly appointed Governor-General of Australia, who could be contrasted with Mag. As opposed to Mag, Maie Casey was “one of those rich figures White admired for breaking free and making lives of their own.” See: Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 461. 9 | This scene is reminiscent of Pirandello’s L’uomo, la bestia e la virtù (The Man, The Beast and Virtue), a tragicomedy in which the badly-behaved, betrayed husband confronts his wife’s lover and in which it is ultimately not clear which character is donning which mask, that of the man, the beast or of virtue, since all three behave equally badly and deceitfully to each other. 10 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, p. 91. 11 | The OBE is the Order of the British Empire: “The Order of the British Empire recognises distinguished service to the arts and sciences, public services outside the Civil Service and work with charitable and welfare organisations of all kinds. It was created during the First World War in 1917 by George V .... Valuable service is the only criterion for the award, and the Order is now used to reward service in a wide range of useful activities. Citizens from other countries may also receive an honorary award, for services rendered to the United Kingdom and its people. There are more than 100,000 living members of the Order throughout the world.” See: http://www.royal.gov.uk/ MonarchUK/Honours/OrderoftheBritishEmpire.aspx (accessed 29 August 2009). 12 | The herb in Ritchie’s dream is the pennyroyal, a toxic herb known already to the Romans and used in folk medicine since, as a natural abortifacient. This explains why Ritchie dreams about dead chicks, which will be their fate if he carries on with his plans for the excavation of uranium. See: I.B. Anderson, W.H. Mullen, J.E. Meeker, S.C. Khojasteh-Bakht, S. Oishi, S.D. Nelson , and P.D Blanc, “Pennyroyal toxicity:

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Creating Communities measurement of toxic metabolite levels in two cases and review of the literature” in: Ann Intern Med 124, 1986, pp. 726-734. See: http://www.annals.org/cgi/context/ full/124/8/726 (accessed 30 August 2009). 13 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, p. 100. 14 | Ibid. p. 101. 15 | Ibid. p. 125. 16 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, p. 109. 17 | White based his play on the true story of the Rector of Stiffkey, the Reverend Harold Davidson. Charged by the Church authorities of immoral conduct with women, he was tried, found guilty and defrocked. Davidson spent the rest of his life performing stunts, until being killed by a lion in a Skegness amusement park in 1937. See: Leo McKinstry, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/659822/posts, published on 04/06/2002 (accessed 30 August 2009). 18 | David Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 631. 19 | Ibid. 20 | Marie-Louise Ayres, curator of manuscripts at the National Library of Australia where White’s papers are kept, notes that “when we contrast manuscripts for his novels with those for his plays, we can also see that White struggled much more with the latter, and surmise that prose really was his ‘natural’ form. Unlike his novels – where character names are decided early and kept, and where little changes from first jotting to final novel – the manuscripts for his plays show him changing titles and character names, adding and subtracting characters, and not infrequently slipping from dialogue to prose in early drafts as he struggles with what is to come next.” See: Marie-Louise Ayres, “My mss are destroyed,” in Australian Book Review: the Leading Independent Australian Literary Review, April 2007, http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Current/AyresreviewApril07. htm. 26 Jan. 2209, accessed 29 August 2009. 21 | The shepherd thus creates a community of believers on stage, in addition to the community comprised of the audience off stage. In both church ritual and theater, the ‘we’ is experienced by literally being together in one performance community, as opposed to the solitary reader of a novel. In this play, White is already trimming the ‘weself’ down to the elements that can be transposed into the novel, including the use of personification masks. In a manner similar to the shepherd’s effort to constitute his own audience as it were, White will send his protagonist in Memoirs of Many in One to try and collect hers, just as unsuccessfully. 22 | All quotes from the play will be taken from: Patrick White, Shepherd on the Rocks, in: Collected Plays Vol II (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994), Australian Dramatists Series [hereafter: SR]. 23 | As William Swatos writes, “environmentalism may be seen as the first genuinely political movement to issue from postmodernism.” Swatos notes that “although in its death throes the modern project attempted to throw off visible religion, modernity’s roots are thoroughly religious” and adds that “out of this symbolic universe, however,

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater has come the political entity known as the International Whaling Commission (IWC) … Since the 1970s, it has become a political force designed to impose the ideology of environmentalism on a global scale with regard to the whale … The IWC … is predominantly symbolic, and it is relatively easy for most world powers to offer it ritual service.” Swatos ends his article by noting “the fluidity of implicit religions and their nature and function in our time – particularly the question of the extent to which ideologically modern and postmodern ‘secular religions’ adequately capture the core of what it is to be religious.” See: William H. Swatos, “Iceland” in: Research in the Social Scientific Study of Religion, eds. J.M. Greer, D.O. Moberg, M.L. Lynn (Greenwich, Conn. and London: Jai Press Inc., 1996), 7: 98-108. 24 | The affair of the Rector of Stiffkey, Harold Davidson, is still making headlines, in articles written by a reporter, Leo McKinstry, A Love of Sinners (The Rector of Stiffkey), published on 04/06/2002, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/659822/posts (accessed 30 August 2009,); in an article written by the current vicar of Stiffkey, John Penny, Time to Forgive The Stiffkey, published in the Guardian, 24 November 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2008/nov/24/2 (accessed 30 August 2009), and which ends with a plea not to judge the original vicar too harshly: “in Jesus’ words: ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone’;” as well as in an article written by the vicar of Stiffkey’s granddaughter, Karilyn Collier, who calls on the Church to restore her grandfather, while another letter is also included in a box in the article, written by the granddaughter of the Chancellor of the Norwich diocese who presided at Harold Davidson’s trial, and who voices the anger of his former parishioner. See: Karilyn Collier, My Innocent Grandfather, Church Times, 06/07/07, http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/­ uploads/documents/issue_7530%281%29.pdf (accessed 29 August 2009). 25 | According to Neumann, whales are to be considered as sea-dragons, representing the individual’s unconscious and the struggle with the whale, from which the individual must come out victorious: “this is shown most clearly in the hero myths which take the form of sun myths; here the swallowing of the hero by the dragon – night, sea, underworld – corresponds to the sun’s nocturnal journey, from which it emerges victoriously after having conquered the darkness” (OC: 154-5). 26 | In nature, whales occasionally swim in the direction of the beach and become stranded and dehydrated when out of the water. For many years now scientists have been undecided as to the reasons for the whales’ behavior, whether the whales come to shore when they feel they are about to die, or whether they follow a misleading leader. Danny’s unfashionable religious ideas could make him seem to be a deceptive leader, like a leader of beached whales. 27 | “Priapism is an uncommon condition that causes a prolonged and often painful erection, which occurs without sexual stimulation. In one-third of the cases, the cause of the disorder is unknown. The remaining cases are caused by an associated condition, including sickle cell disease, pelvic tumors, pelvic infections, leukemia, genital trauma or spinal cord trauma and medications or recreational drugs.” See: Male Sexual

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Creating Communities Function: Priapism, University of California Medical Center, November 3, 2008, http:// w w w.ucsfhealth.org /adult/medical_ ser vices/urolog y/male_ sexual/conditions/ priapism/signs.html (accessed 29 August 2009). 28 | Pirandello’s novel Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio, operatore, ends when his protagonist, a cameraman, is struck dumb and becomes identical with his machine, his arm mechanically continuing to turn the handle of the camera regardless of what the camera is recording, when he is made to record an actor being eaten alive by a lion in his cage. In this case, the protagonist becomes ‘glued’ to his mask as a result of his participation in what the author considered a dubiously ethical occupation (that of a cameraman), which he believed turned men into machines. Pirandello’s ambivalent views regarding the film industry are also part of his criticism in this novel, and he uses his mask to demonstrate them. On the one hand, he feared films would empty the theaters and on the other hand, he ended up collaborating actively in the adaptation of his own work for film, as in the case of Mattia Pascal. 29 | Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics, p. 176. 30 | Ibid. p. 179. 31 | Later on in the novel Alex tries to use the Kouros mask, whose gender is unclear, since it represents an effeminate male youth. For details regarding the Kouros mask, see chapter five. 32 | Ernst Kantarowicz explains the nature of the King’s two bodies, and shows, according to the documents of the crown lawyers of Queen Elisabeth I, “how closely the legal speculations were related to theological thought … to the medieval concept of the king’s character angelicus … it represents, like the angels, the Immutable within Time.” Kantarowicz explains the mysticism of the Elisabethan judges thus: “the King’s two bodies thus form one unit indivisible, each being fully contained in the other. However, doubt cannot arise concerning the superiority of the body politic over the body natural.” Most relevant, is Kantarowicz’s discussion of Shakespeare’s King Henry V and and The Tragedy of King Richard II. Kantarowicz claims that Shakespeare, whether versed in the major legal matters of his time (as he believes him to have been) or not, “the simile of the King’s Two Bodies” would have seemed very appropriate to him since “it was anyhow the live essence of his art to reveal the numerous planes active in any human being, to play them off against each other to confuse them, or to preserve their equilibrium, depending all upon the pattern of the life he bore in mind and wished to create anew … if that curious image which from modern constitutional thought have vanished completely, still has a very real and human meaning today, this is largely due to Shakespeare. It is he who has eternalized that metaphor. He has made it not only the symbol, but indeed the very substance and essence of one of his greatest plays: The Tragedy of Richard II is the tragedy of the King’s Two Bodies.” See: Ernst Kantarowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 8-9, 25-26. The explanation Kantarowicz provides also sustains the idea of the transference personification masks have undergone from ritual practices to theatrical practices.

Chapter Four: Patrick White’s Theater 33 | Isis was believed to be an especially powerful goddess, of immense magical power, as well as sharp of tongue. Significantly for Cleopatra, “the goddess’s name is written in hieroglyphs with a sign that represents a throne, indicating the crucial role that she plays in the transmission of the kingship of Egypt.” In addition, Isis “was regarded as the vital link between deities and royalty.” See: George Hart, “Isis,” in: The Routledge Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 79-80. 34 | All quotations from this play are taken from: William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, David Bevington ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 35 | Kerasia Stratiki discusses the heroic cult of ancestors, kings and legendary warriors, and explains that “there are cases in which the physical existence of a hero cannot be verified … in certain cases, the heroic entity has been invented as a ‘personification’ of the values that it is used to represent. The glory of the hero rebounded on his descendants; the hero represented a model which they tried to imitate; interaction between religion and politics is evident in the establishment of the heroic cult.” See: Kerasia Stratiki, “The Greek Heroes as a ‘Personification’ of the past in the present,” in: Emma Stafford and Judy Herrin eds., Personification in the Greek World: From Antiquity to Byzantium (London: The Center For Hellenic Studies, King’s College London Publications 7, 2007), p. 76. 36 | Sara Munson Deats points out that “Cleopatra’s admirers, like her detractors, often treat her as an archetype and emblem, rather than a complex, interiorized dramatic creation.” See: Sara Munson Deats, Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 15-26. 37 | NIDA is the Australian national theater school. See: http://www.nida.edu.au/ ­(accessed 26 January 2009).

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Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

A. A utobiogr aphy as C onfession 1.

The Structure of the Novel

Memoirs of Many in One, Patrick White’s last novel, and without a doubt a complex one, is more explicable when considered from the point of view of masks and their workings in the text. This novel can be considered an imaginative summa of the literary mask, both in fiction and in theory. As mentioned before, this novel is part of White’s self-reflective autobiographical trilogy. In writing Memoirs of Many in One, White is fashioning his own death mask.1 White’s use of the mask-genres of memoirs and biography displays how masks can operate either as biographical agents in history, or as imaginary agents embodying the collective imaginary in narrative fiction, or both, as in this case. Memoirs of Many in One is not only about various narrative masks and their functioning, but also about the art of novel-writing as a mask. The underlying historical background, incarnating the contents of the collective unconscious,2 is embodied in both personae-masks and plot-masks. Erich Neumann explained the first phase of the creation of a personal psychic content within each individual to be the result of experiencing the transpersonal outside the self and projecting this transpersonal content upon gods and mythological figures. The second phase is the subsequent introjection of the transpersonal content, reduced to personal factors, which then become part of the personal psyche. Neumann traces this process “in the language of symbols, in ritual, myth, dreams, and childhood reality, these [transpersonal] contents are ‘eaten,’ ‘incorporated,’ and so ‘digested’” (OC: 336). The transpersonal, collective unconscious contents must therefore be downsized to ‘bite-sized’ pieces in order for the individual to be able to ‘digest’ and incorporate them into his self. In similar manner, the particular historical heritage underlying the life and character of a given people is downsized into the private psyche of each individual of that specific society by the mask-narrative, which contains and

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reflects the collective history of the people. An author of fiction can enhance the readers’ capacity to come into contact with their historical heritage by the use of his imagination, inviting the participation of the readers’ imagination, by filling in the gaps a bare chronicle may provide, and thus making forgotten histories come alive again. This process of appropriation can be termed a secondary personalization of the narrative, by means of the mask-narrative, the necessary vessel for past voices and collective histories.3 In this novel, White stages a fictional mask-character named Alex. Through her adventures at the end of her life he depicts the journey of the ritual mask from its original sacred institutional frame, through the secular theatrical frame, and finally to narrative frames of epistolary and memoir form. The skeletal structure of this novel constitutes the mask-plot, a plot consisting of collective elements in one paradigmatic story. This plot follows the lines of a mystery and morality play in two opposing renderings. The main plot is a modern version of the story of satanic rebelliousness, based on the common denominator White found between Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Faust, and Imre Madách’s The Tragedy of Man. What results is an essentially romantic interpretation of the story of Man’s fall in a subversive reading which sees Satan as glorious in his defiance, separating himself from the family of God in order to create himself. The sub-plot is based on the traditional, Christian reading of the biblical story of the fall. Man, who has been tempted by Satan or by his incarnation, falls from grace and as a result undergoes change. There ensues a recognition of guilt and a new consciousness which leads to repentance. Man is then reconciled with God and the plot ends in the happy reunion of the lost son within the community of God. These two opposing plot lines are represented in the novel by two complementary mask-characters, the main plot by Alex and the sub-plot by Patrick, her editor. Alex’s mask is the embodiment of an ambitious Satan-like would-be artist, on a quest for self-fulfillment through the destruction of conventions and the denial of social links and responsibilities. She does not reach consciousness nor feel any need for repentance, yet her mask ‘cracks’: she is writing an autobiography of sorts which is her version of a confession, and though she derides all traditional practices, she feels the need for absolution of her sins on her approaching death. She knows, or senses, residual, fragmented ancient rites, which point her in the direction of a religious or mystic framework through which absolution may be obtained, treated in the modern way like an item that can be purchased at a shop. What follows are a series of separate scenes, very much like those a mystery play would stage using a different wagon for each ‘tableau’.4 Rather than the medieval scenes of a saint’s life, each of Alex’s life scenes depicts a different community setting and each is a station on her double quest, for meaning and self-glorification on the one hand and for absolution on the other. Alex is allowed cynical aspirations to sainthood, and says “I may

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

qualify as a candidate for canonisation” (MMO: 107), yet is accused of satanic features: “you are a foreign devil. You have evil powers. No one in these parts has a blue eye” (MMO: 80). These contradictory claims stand for her opposing quests, fashioned according to both a saint’s mystery play as well as a subverted, glorified Satan morality play. Alex’s mask, which embodies modern individualism and separateness in the name of creativity, is counterpointed by Patrick’s. He acts out the need to acknowledge one’s inner community and responsibilities. Patrick is the representative of the sub-plot, in which the morality play is not subverted. Instead of Alex’s rebellious rejection of and separation from her community, Patrick’s plot ends in wholeness, achieved through the recognition of his faults as a creator and a kind of marriage with Alex’s daughter Hilda. Towards the end of the novel, Patrick reintegrates Alex into the folds of the community, by means of her mask, in a religious setting.

2.

Paradigmatic Plot and its Subversion: Two Attitudes to Masks

In his reading of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Wolfgang Iser has described characters and plot which function in ways similar to those White uses in Memoirs. Most of Bunyan’s characters, Iser noted, were stock characters which are “only functional, representing an abstract idea” alongside Christian, the main character, and his companions Hopeful and Faithful, “who are far more than just embodiments of a single idea. In them the reader has to recognize the reflection of his own doubts as well as his own hope.” Though Iser differentiates between these two groups of characters, his definition of the functions of both groups is identical to various functions of mask-characters in Memoirs of Many in One. The plot of Pilgrim’s Progress is not completely dominated by the prevailing Calvinistic values at the time of its composition, since it includes episodes that “are the direct descendants of medieval secular romances, finding their way into this exemplary conduct-book despite the Puritan abhorrence of literature.” Iser goes on to say: “obviously, the fictional humanizing of theological rigorism must have fulfilled an elementary historical need .... From this historical observation, we might draw a conclusion that will apply to all forms of fiction … namely, that literature counterbalances the deficiencies produced by prevailing philosophies.”5 In ways similar to Pilgrim’s Progress, White’s mask-characters and maskplots are two channels he uses for the embodiment of collective historical and social elements in the narrative. Similarly to what Iser observes in Pilgrim’s Progress, the sub-plot in Memoirs has been marginalized by the main, modern plot and functions in the novel as a penitential counterpoint to the cultural unconscious which underlies the main plot. The infiltration of the older, medieval

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plot, into the modern plot suggests White’s contention that the moral values it stands for should, to use Iser’s words, “counterbalance the deficiencies” he saw in modern times. In Memoirs of Many in One the two strands of plot, written along the lines of a mystery and morality play, depict the protagonist’s pilgrimage, in two contradictory paradigms, which simultaneously deploy two opposing attitudes to masks within the text. Memoirs of Many in One’s most obvious plot traces Alex’s spiritual autobiography. White draws the picture of Alex’s egocentric search for meaning and self-assertion, which she proposes to achieve by artistic means as an actress in the theater. This narrative, following post-modern trends, is fragmented from the start and becomes more fragmented as it proceeds. The protagonist, unable to say “I,” disintegrates into a shattered “I I I” form of expression while the author disappears. On this plot level, Alex embodies the modern ideal of the great creative ego, structured on the archetypal Promethean celebration of Satan which White believes to be at the core of the modern cult of the artist. Accordingly, Alex plays the part of the gloriously defiant rebel in the name of narcissistic individualism. She also incarnates the modern effort to destroy traditional conventions as well as masks, which are considered false. The truth is believed by her generation to exist beneath all the social conventions, which must therefore be exploded. The individual’s self-discovery and fulfillment are the most highly regarded values. According to the society which has fashioned Alex’s mask, such self-discovery can only be achieved on one’s own, by escaping society. A former refugee, displaced and broken away from her original roots, Alex is now a fugitive from her family and from any traditional framework. Yet this master plot is merely a modern ritual plot producing a modern ritual mask of a character seeking separation and self-glorification. Ironically, this mask is the embodiment of the post-modern resistance to embodiments and aversion to tradition, traditional institutions, and ethics. The earlier, counter-paradigm sub-plot involves Patrick in his function as Alex’s editor. The novel begins after her death, when Patrick is approached by Alex’s daughter Hilda, who asks him to edit her mother’s memoirs, letters, and diary entries. Patrick reluctantly agrees and is presented with a mountain of papers overflowing Alex’s writing case. His work consists of piecing the fragments together, thereby re-composing the character. Patrick unifies the fragments he inherits with his own memories of Alex’s life. Contrary to the main plot, the sub-plot strives to integrate an abundance of details into one coherent character and a vast cast of characters into one mask-community, all of which are parts of an overall action. This plot is designed according to a ritual narrative, unifying the novel in one all-embracing action structured around the ritual of penance and healing. Unearthing and resurrecting the more ancient Christian ritual, buried in the cultural unconscious, requires considerable effort on the part of the reader, yet it is essential for understanding the novel. The

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

attitude to masks in the sub-plot is the opposite of that of the main plot. In the sub-plot masks are presented as real and capable of real effects on the lives of those who come into contact with them, as they embody and express the values and beliefs of the community to which they belong. To sum up: in both counterpoint plots White is rehearsing a collective ritual. The first depicts a post-modern secular ritual of irresponsible separation and ensuing fragmentation while the second is based on the Christian tradition. The post-modern plot has the upper hand and exiles the Christian plot to the subtext, yet it is present in the main plot as well. By using both plot lines, White is positioning his art on the map of the cultural history of the mask in ritual, in theater, and in the novel. This positioning takes place in both traditional and post-modern settings. Since the form in which the novel is written as well as its main plot follow the requirements of a post-modern mask, White can introduce his more traditional values into the sub-plot, debunking and criticizing the mask created in the main post-modern plot, while anchoring both plot strands in the literary tradition which provides continuity for both characters and plot lines.

3.

Unusual Memoirs

The death of its main protagonist does not end the drama of Memoirs of Many in One but rather begins it. Yet instead of being the personal accounts and reflections of an individual, written towards the end of that individual’s life, as the genre of memoirs would lead the reader to expect, this text is a co-production between Alex Gray and Patrick, her editor. The reader is forewarned of this complexity by the title of the novel, Memoirs of Many in One by Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray edited by Patrick White. The use of a character in the role of editor, bearing Patrick White’s own name, allows the author and this character in turn, to step in and out of the frame he has created, in a way which is only possible to achieve in novel form. Importantly, by introducing an intrusive editor, White ensures that Alex’s memoirs cannot be considered to only be her own. In this manner, her professed search for self and meaning becomes a joint representation from the start. The writer-self and the written-about-self are staged throughout the novel by means of the co-production that is Patrick’s final edition of what Alex has left in writing. In the role of the biographer, Patrick provides a family tree as well as details about Alex’s parents and parents-in-law, a family portrait, and a portrait of her society, as a proper biographer would. These details anchor Alex within the continuity of a family line, a community, and its traditions. In addition to being the biographer, Patrick is also the narrator and the historian of the story, as well as the locus of conscious commentary and composition of Alex’s practices, while Alex never reaches a comparable

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degree of integrated consciousness. Nevertheless, White calls this text her ‘memoirs’. Since his aim is to portray a compound self, he presents us with many authors in one. Another expectation that the genre of ‘memoirs’ raises in the reader is that this text will contain the writer’s retrospection and will entail understandings she may not have possessed at the time the described occurrences took place. Yet Alex lacks the perception and self-consciousness she should have acquired by the time she is ready to write her memoirs. Instead, we are presented with the story of her multiple, failed attempts to attain an inner truth, which includes several episodes as a nun, as a high society lady, and as a theater actress. She repudiates her community in each and every setting: antagonizing her own immediate family, her friend, the members of her society, and finally her audience, at which she shoots with a gun. The use of four different genres of writing – epistolary, biographical, diary writing and drama – within one text delineate four textual strategies Alex is allowed to practice when she tries to evade her own story, before she is brought to a stop and cannot write anymore. A textual dimension is thus added to her theatrical rebellion against her society and to her mystical efforts to detach herself from her community. Each of the four genres of writing serves Alex to further her ambitions, seemingly working against her writer, by rebelling against a more conventional and linear rendering of the plot.

4.

Writing: a Tool for Escape or for Unification

Alex’s appreciation of writing as an elevated, artistic means for escape and assertion of independence is encouraged by her society. Two members of her family write: as a reaction to her own experiences as a refugee during World War II, Alex’s mother wrote about Bouboulina, a female pirate queen who led the war against the Turks (MMO: 16), and Alex’s husband, Hilary, who left her to write his memoirs. When Alex finds Hilary’s hideout with Patrick’s help, she confronts him: “‘was there any need to walk out on us to do it?’” (MMO: 27). This question reflects the paradox of the modern writer, especially the writer of memoirs. On the one hand, memoirs are supposed to give the reader an historical and social context for the events described; on the other hand, modernism has sanctioned the idea of the lonely artist, who must detach himself from his society to be able to fulfill his creativity in glorified solitude. White fashions the society Alex lives in, and which is reflected in her mask, as an Americanized, “all-for-me” (MMO: 146) society, which believes in transcendental, Romantic ideals, of eternal youth and God-like artists who need to separate themselves in a desert or a forest to be able to create themselves and their Art. Yet whereas Emersonian characters devoted to self-reliance, or mythological American explorers, would abandon civilization and go into the

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

wilderness to fulfill their personal drives, farcically, Alex barely leaves the living room.6 White seems to suggest there is no need for an artist to flee his society for the sake of his art, and a writer who decides to write memoirs certainly can’t ignore the society in the midst of which the memoirs were formed. Though White himself was an Australian expatriate for many years, unlike many other Australian expatriate artists he chose to go back to Australia and remain there, where he wrote the vast majority of his works. He considered his years away as enriching, but that it was “a good thing to be close to one’s roots” and agreed with Guy Innes, a journalist who had suggested that when he went back to Australia, “the colours will come flooding back onto your palette.” Innes’s remark was a “gentle criticism” of White’s first published novel, Happy Valley.7 Though written in London, the novel was based not on his London experiences but on his experiences as a jackeroo in Australia, during the two years he spent in Australia upon returning from a public school in England and before going back to London. As David Marr, his biographer writes: “To turn away, now, from his London existence and begin to draw on that hidden Australian life, took considerable courage .... If he was going to be an artist they [his years in Australia] had to be faced.”8 Though he “found consolation” in the Australian landscape, White felt he “could not come to terms with the inhabitants, either then [upon returning from school] or again on returning to Australia after World War II” (FG: 49). After fourteen years abroad, White did return to Australia permanently, and in a speech he gave as he was writing his autobiography, he quoted a friend and a painter who had said about herself that “‘I started a house and studio in the South of France thinking I could paint there in detachment and ideal surroundings. But you can’t. Even abstract painters can’t afford to sever their roots’.”9 An artist must be able to maintain contact with his roots to create his art within his own personal context, as well as within the context of the society in which he was raised and in which he lives. Despite much criticism of the Australians, their values and behavior, White embraced them and considered himself one of them. His first “foray into public debate” was an article he wrote, as an answer to a journalist’s criticism, regarding his return to Australia and his choice to remain there, which he ended by writing: “most rewarding of all, are the many letters I have received from unknown Australians … To me the letters alone are reason enough for staying.”10 White had entitled his article “The Prodigal Son.” The religious allusion was certainly intentional and pointed to the notion that separation, in this case from one’s original community, was a sin. In the eyes of the Church, the son sinned by breaking away from the family of God. White admits to the sin and, like the prodigal son, expects to be embraced by the country to which he has returned. The article is one of many acts of penance White kept undertaking: “my work

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as a writer has always been what I understood as an offering in the absence of other gifts” (FG: 143). White denies his character the realization he had reached himself, of the presence and necessity of the collective within the self as well as the wish to provide a redeeming offering. Alex’s escape to outback Australia is as useless in her effort to shake off the collective as that of Voss’s expedition to the desert, or of Ellen’s refuge in A Fringe of Leaves on the island inhabited by Aborigines, since they all take their inner collective with them, as is most apparent upon their return, whether dead or alive. White provides his main protagonist with the sense that she must be pardoned and that her journey is a pilgrimage. Yet, for all her efforts, Alex does not reach the level of consciousness to which her quest might have led her. Had she accepted the community self as an integral component of her extended, larger self, rather than strive to expel it; had she realized her mask was a community production, she could have achieved an integrated image of herself. Patrick her editor, for his part, does reach both a level of consciousness and of integration, and his achievements are juxtaposed with Alex’s failures, proving there could have been another way, had Alex been fashioned differently by her writer.

B. The N ovel as The ater In order to understand the centrality of theater to this novel and to its author, one must go back to White’s autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, as well as to Patrick White’s official biography, written by David Marr. This biography is special, not only because unlike many other writers’ biographies it was written with White’s close collaboration, but also because White’s works are used by the biographer to explain elements in White’s life. What may be called White’s biography as a writer can best be composed by a combined reading of all three of his fictional biographies, including Memoirs of Many in One. The novel, as part of this biography of White as an author, is especially poignant since White claimed, when referring to Alex: “‘she is me.’” White even thought of having his picture taken as Alex for the cover of the novel.11 In his autobiography, White explains his attraction to the theater: “my mother introduced me to actual theatre at an early age; we were always going, and I cannot be grateful enough for that” (FG: 244). Marr underlines White’s testimony regarding the theater: “Had White been able to act, he might not have written a word. He still dreamed of his Lear, his Hedda, and the vaudeville routines he would perform – if he had the knack. His imagination was essentially theatrical, and the best of White’s characters are not only astonishing inventions but great performances. At his desk he acted all the roles. When he spoke of the creative process, he used the language of the theatre. Characters

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wandered across the stage of his imagination for years – the spinster, the artist, the dame, the boy, the laundress – but not until a couple of them came face to face and began to speak did a novel begin.”12 Like Pirandello, White considered his characters to have an essence of their own, and he thought of some of his characters in terms of stock characters, each of them designated by a specific mask. In addition White’s characters are not only his because they are his inventions but also because, like an actor, who lends his body and soul to his act, White lends them his soul.13 Alex is a mask also in the sense that when the novel begins she is already dead, reduced to the black skull divulged at the end of the novel. White takes this artifact, breathes his own life into it and allows it to perform its ‘dance.’ A mask is a mere artifact if not put into motion by the body of the dancer, and White lends himself, both in and out of the text, to give life to his mask and allow it to function in the novel. White’s repeatedly expressed love for the theater never left him. Though he most regretted not having been an actor, his writing for the theater allowed him to remain in close contact with the theatrical productions of his plays. He continued writing plays throughout the time he was writing novels as well. Yet among the many novels he wrote, only two feature theatrical themes and framing, The Eye of the Storm and Memoirs of Many in One. Memoirs of Many in One, which is framed as a morality play in its entirety, also contains several specifically theatrical episodes. White uses these episodes to present his protagonist as an aspiring actress who erroneously believes she can fashion herself as a unique actress through her appropriation of the staging and of the text. White underlines the constitution of the individual as part of the community and the community as part of the self, set as it is against the protagonist’s many useless efforts to extricate herself from a community she loathes. The choice of theater as a framing device for his protagonist’s aspirations and actions introduces the very community she tries to evade as an a priori presence as well as a collaborator in her effort of self-assertion, since she is the embodiment of the values of this modern community, which considers self-assertion a legitimate and worthy achievement. The constant presence of an audience, of varying numbers, and by extension of the readers, is also an ironical reminder of the impossibility of complete detachment from the community. The complex self White examines in this character is made up of three components: (1) the ego-self: (2) the empirical, unique self; the community-self; (3) and the moral-self, which is called upon to recognize its belonging to its community and its responsibilities towards it. White’s representations are illuminated by Erich Neumann’s explanation of the development of human consciousness as a doubling of archetypal and individual features, and the manner in which the development of personality entails a formation within it of various ‘authorities’:

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Creating Communities Besides the ego, analytical psychology distinguishes as such authorities the self, i.e., the totality of the psyche, the persona, the anima (or animus in women), and the shadow … The formation of psychic authorities as psychic organs has a very cogent meaning for the individual, since they facilitate the unity of the personality … As the personality develops, it must take in wide areas of the unconscious. The task of the authorities is to protect the personality from the disintegrative forces of the collective unconscious without breaking the vital link with it, and to guarantee the continued existence of the individual without impairing his contacts with the group and the world (OC: 350-1).

The character White fashions is a fragmented character, as is visually expressed on the printed page by Alex’s occasional use of “I I” or “I I I” instead of a unitary “I,” a complex representation of a composite, fragmented subject, with the mask as catalyst for the de-construction as well as the re-construction of the character. This fragmentation is due to Alex’s resistance to the collective element within her, in the same way that in her actions she tries to resist the collectivity to which she belongs outside her self. The collective unconscious, when it is neither recognized nor integrated into the individual self, can lead to megalomaniac eruptions as a result of a flooding of the individual that produces cases of psychosis, as demonstrated by Alex.14 Alex’s egotism and shunning of her society is, in effect, explained by Neumann: “when the individual falls away from the cultural fabric … he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically inflated private world … Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the ego-sphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence” (OC: 391-2).

1.

Theater and the Staging of Selves

White’s mixture of writing and theatrical genres in Memoirs of Many in One creates various arenas of self-assertion for Alex Gray. To this composite genre of writing, White adds a further dimension, by carefully mapping the complexity of each ‘self’ in a theatrical frame, in which the protagonist’s compound, trio-self – of ego-self, community-self and moral-self – is deployed in aesthetic form. Alex is acting and dancing wherever she goes, whether at the park, in a store, on the bus or at Lady Comebychance’s cocktail party. She is convinced that she can be rebellious at an alternative, Avant-Garde theater, in what seems to be a convention-breaking milieu. Yet White shows that even there, there is a community of which Alex should have been part and that the modern breaking of conventions is in itself conventional. Alex’s pilgrimage culminates in a trial of the moral-self, when she is alone in the theater at night, under the watchful red eye of a rat, a judging conscience whose tail reaches her bare skin under her fur coat and forces her to realize she can never really be alone (MMO: 162).

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Alex’s last performance as an actress, which directly follows this trial, leads to her hospitalization in a mental institution. Her efforts to escape the community have failed and she is reintegrated into its institutions by force. Alex is incapable of integrating her community-self and refuses to accept her moral-self. Writing, White suggest, could have been a means for integrating the three selves had she been capable of such writing. The assumption at the mental institution to which Alex is brought is that a patient can be treated by creative use of his imagination, such as writing, as a method of personal reintegration. Since Alex cannot integrate the social self within the self, she is not able to write either. At the mental asylum she is brought to an abrupt full stop on the paper the nurse gives her and can no longer write (MMO: 174). Her memoirs, although supposedly as personal as the contents of a diary, are not her own, since they will be gathered, written and published by another, an editor by the name of Patrick White. The next scene in which she takes part is played out at her deathbed. White reduces Alex to an actual mask, to her own black skull, in order to reintegrate her both physically and mentally into her community. Alex is dying in a Catholic hospital staffed by nuns who would probably see to it that she receives the last rites. In addition, the description of her dying skull resembles the skull of St. Chiara, which is central to Alex’s last theatrical appearance, of her inanimate mask itself, of St. Chiara in her crypt in Assisi. That is where the physical mask will remain for all to see and be reminded of what it represents. Like Liberian ritual masks, the mask is reassembled into the bosom of the community by being put in the ancestors’ sacramental abode.15 The community, embedded as it is in the individual psyche at birth, is not something one can shun or detach from oneself. In White’s fiction, the pre-existing psychic structure of an embedded collective operates as fate. As Marr explains, “in Patrick White’s world there are no accidents of birth. We are what we are born to be, free to shape the lives fate has given us. What we inherit can never entirely be denied. Escape is impossible.”16

2.

Alex’s Many Performances in and out of the Theater

In the name of uniqueness, Alex constantly performs. Every entrance into a room is an entrance onto a stage, and she accepts her daughter’s flowers like a star actress facing her audience (MMO: 64). She uses her clothes like the impersonation masks of an actress to perform and enter a role, such as her husband’s old army coat, her sari, an ageless Chanel suit or her sumptuous chinchilla coat. Her closet is full of “dresses dangling listless till animated by my body, each one a ghost of past perfumes and performances” (MMO: 105). She proposes to dance on every occasion: at the ball, at the park, for the Dobbins’. Dancing is an inevitable part of her routine, yet it is a conventional, patterned

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behavior that she does not fully control. Dancing agglomerates her with her society rather than give her a means for solitary stardom. Richard Schechner’s definition of what performance is highlights Alex’s miscalculation regarding dancing: Performances mark identities, bend time, reshape and adorn the body, and tell stories. Performances – of art, rituals, or ordinary life – are ‘restored behaviors,’ ‘twice-behaved behaviors,’ performed actions that people train for and rehearse. That making art involves training and rehearsing is clear. But everyday life also involves years of training and practice, of learning appropriate culturally specific bits of behavior, of adjusting and performing one’s life roles in relation to social and personal circumstances.17

Alex would rather ignore the social component of her behavior. She allows herself to act and speak with no inhibitions, purposefully disregarding others for the sake of her self-legitimized uniqueness. Yet, as Schechner would say, everything she does, is part of a “twice- behaved behavior,” whether she has breakfast with her daughter or tries to execute dance steps in a duo vaudeville act with the ‘mystic’ she has collected at the park: “we are standing confronting each other on my bedroom floor. We might never have gone through the dance routine in which the glass surface becomes the sawdust trail of ordinary life. But haven’t I set out to rise above ordinariness?” (MMO: 104). Dancing does not raise Alex above ordinariness, not even when White pairs her with a minor, ridiculous counterpart in the philosopher-poet, a guest at Lady Comebychance’s cocktail party, who is “trying to reconcile classical ballet with gravity” and disappears into the wings, “executing a mad fouetté” (MMO: 69). Ironically, White drives his point home forcibly by casting his mask-protagonist in flight from her community in the theater, which constitutes a community of its own, including the audience, the critic, the actors and all those participating in the theatrical production. Once again, as the novel’s title suggests, these are to be the memoirs of many in one embodiment. The “many” refers not only to Alex and Patrick, but to the entire community. At the theater, another meaning of ‘many in one’ is achieved when each member of the audience can see the other members of the community who physically share the theatrical experience in the same space and at the same time, when “everybody is arriving for the opening night at the Sand Pit” (MMO: 165). The theater, Jean-Paul Sartre believes, is not far from older rites: “the theater, once formalized, must retain its ceremonial character … the dramatic elements and the ceremonial elements becoming one and the same.”18 The community is part of the action of the mask in both ritual and theater. Like the ritual dancer, who brings the mask to life for the community, the actor engages the audience’s imagination and willing cooperation in the formation and realization of his role. White’s choice of theater to both represent the community and test his mask-character’s actions is therefore

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quite natural, since the actor wearing the mask, or playing a role which is also a mask, represents and reincarnates the spirit of the community. Dance, mask, and theater serve together to present the relation between being and doing, between the mask as a figure of its society and as a means for patterned behavior and performance of the community’s ideologies. To best shape his mask-character, White uses the theater as a natural habitat of masks. White casts his mask-protagonist as an instrument for the staging of the self, spotlighting the self in different theaters, from Alex’s first role as Cleopatra, a role which she exploits to promote her illusions of grandeur, to performances at the avant-garde Sand Pit theater, which is also the stage of her last performance, in a modern version of a morality play.

3.

Revolution in Avant-Garde Theater

White’s depiction of the modern theater indicates that despite its transgressions of traditional or conventional theatrical practices, modern theater still retains the community-forming capacity of traditional theater. This is the background against which White wants his protagonist’s personification mask to work in order to reflect the modern community’s ideals, the “I” culture collectively formed and expressed in Alex’s acts, which openly attack the community. White’s choice of the modern theater is compatible with the mask he creates for his protagonist, since Alex is made to believe that by joining an anarchistic theater, whose purpose is to denounce society’s evils and bring about its destruction, she can free herself from society’s demands on her and finally allow herself to express her personal artistic talents. The idea of starting on a theatrical adventure comes to Alex’s mind when she is having a picnic in the park with her daughter and her editor. Alex remarks that “our food is spread on one of those tables installed by the Park authorities for the convenience of picnickers, and students who like to write their theses on them. The tables are bolted to concrete blocks to ensure permanence, but every so often, members of the public in a fit of joie de vivre, or hate, uproot a table and hurl it into the muddy waters of the lake” (MMO: 118). This passage would remain a simple anecdote, if Alex hadn’t added: “I feel almost strong enough to uproot the table at which we are sitting and hurl it into the lake beside us” and immediately after this, Alex, “seized by a brainwave,” announces she will be going before very long, on a “really fantastic project” in which she will “play some of Shakespeare’s more interesting characters” (MMO: 120). White implies that Alex’s acting is itself an act of anarchism against her society, an act that will culminate in her shooting at her audience during her last performance at the Sand Pit Theater. Repudiating the collective elements in her projected endeavor, Alex scorns the other actors in the theatrical group with which she proposes to travel on a tour of outback Australia. Nonetheless,

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she will become part of a theatrical company, of a community, despite herself. Alex’s co-actors are presented as a collectivity, engaged in group activities such as spending time together at the bar or at after-show parties, at rehearsals and at the various stations on the tour. The theatrical group Alex joins later is a de-personalizing shared collective: “today and the days which follow we spend putting the play together (democratically) from our shorthand notes and x-ray plates of the fatal diseases most of us are suffering from” (MMO: 158). The roles are typical, stock character roles, encapsulating patterned action: “a girl in specs insists on playing a foetus ‘… an only too obvious starting point …’ A lady with a ginger moustache sees herself as an urban guerrilla. ‘This is a play of action, surely  – of revolution  – and no action is possible today without urban guerrillas’” (MMO: 158-9).19 In the same way as she would join a social sub-set by joining the “members of the public” who throw tables into the lake, if she could, Alex’s wish to act in the theater inherently involves a community as well, and one which she views as revolutionary as the “members” of the table-throwing sub-set. Her anarchistic activity cannot be conducted without the assistance of other would-be anarchists, nor without the cooperation of the very public she abhors and believes she revolts against by acting before it. White emphasizes that the professed manifesto and action of avant-garde theater is one of exploding masks and conventions, and is popularly known, as voiced by the taxi driver who drives Alex to the Sand Pit Theater, to be “full of Commies and poofs” (MMO: 158). Yet revolution by means of theatrical activity is not Alex’s private invention, nor is it as much of an anarchistic act as its supporters would like to believe. Wolfgang Iser explains that various modern forms of drama, “from the Happening through the living theater and street theater,” all “negate the traditional structure of drama, which is based on a representative function. This literature offers itself as a continuous event, its content being the artist himself, or the audience, or even – as in living theater – the intermingling of play and revolution.”20 Iser goes on to say that despite what they believed to be innovative ideas, and the efforts to break the barrier between fiction and reality, “the revolutionaries are still descended from the aesthetic idealists. Literature has become reality in the form of the anarchic game, but it is a fallacy to believe that by negating something, you have already grasped its otherness … With pure negation, the revolution remains dependent upon that which it negates.”21 The same kind of reversal within its own practices occurs in the modern theater when it comes to masks: the revolutionaries, who thought they could destroy society by tearing away its masks and laying bare what they claimed was the naked truth – the true otherness – of society, can only do so by using masks themselves, those of the “urban guerrillas” mentioned above. White seems to be telling these so-called mask-destroyers that masks may be exchangeable but not dispensable, and prefers responsible masks to irresponsible “urban guerrillas,” like Alex and her co-actors. Towards the end of the novel, White makes Alex her-

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self call the bluff of this kind of theater, when she terms the play she is about to take part in a “non-revolutionary revolutionary play” (MMO: 167).

4.

Unmasking the Happening

At first glance, it would seem that White could not have chosen a theater more remote from the dramaturgy of masks than the ideologies of unmasking that are part of the manifesto of the living theater and of the theater of the absurd. White, however, chose this kind of theater for his protagonist precisely because he wanted to use his mask-character to display the community beliefs that demand a stripping of masks yet which, he shows, depend all the same on masks. Modern audiences and actors may believe that masks are deceptive and express nothing. White is out to prove to them, within their own structures, that the opposite is true. The masks hide nothing. On the contrary, they reflect the image of the twentieth century, an image based on the ideal of egotistic self-fulfillment and an aversion to institutions, rituals and ethical principles. White points to the fact that there is nothing new in modern theater practices, especially not the ones related to efforts to explode masks and get rid of what is considered hypocritical and false. Alex is excited because she is going to perform at the “innovative” Sand Pit Theater, where “the audience is confounded by actors rising up live out of the sand where they must have been buried for what seems like several hours.” Yet Patrick retorts: “nothing innovative in sand. Beckett used it years ago,” to which Alex answers: “the Chinese Emperors dropped to the possibilities of sand long before Beckett … Then, what about the Desert Fathers? … Alex Gray accepts sand, silence, and nothingness as the possible way to something more positive than life” (MMO: 144). White introduces the same concept of transcendental yearning, aimed at a nihilistic self-assertion of the personal ‘I’, in two seemingly unrelated ways. The juxtaposition between the Desert Fathers and Beckett demonstrates that the ancient effort to reach closer contact with God through stripping away all material belongings and community relationships is not far from the modern ambition to strip everything away, in Beckett’s case as far as an unsaying of language, in the name of a search for authenticity and the ‘naked’ truth.22 For Alex, both the ancient and the modern versions of nihilism are two expressions of a stripping away of masks that could supposedly enable the individual to attain some form of transcendental enlightenment. Alex’s own mystical search is also put on the same level as her theatrical endeavors. In both cases, she uses impersonation masks to get ‘into’ the part, such as costumes and makeup at the theater or a nun’s habit or a gray dress “for a pilgrimage” (MMO: 36). Both at the theater and on her mystical search, she is prepared to strip naked for the sake of reaching the great unsayable “I,” as she threatens to do in the park and on the street (MMO: 86, 155) and as she does on

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stage, to her audience’s audible protest (MMO: 137). Nakedness, for Alex, is just another mask, to be used like any other when she finds it necessary for her act. Yet none of these masks bring Alex closer to the profound understanding she claims to seek. Alex understands everything literally, blind to the implications of her acts, convinced as she is that it is enough to go through the motions, in pantomime fashion, in order to reach her spiritual goal. The closest Alex gets to a mystical experience, somewhat reminiscent of the Desert Fathers, occurs after her failed “Dolly Formosa” act at the end of which she sheds her “midnight robe, and my naked body conjures up the archetypes of birds, serpents, insects” (MMO: 137). The next day, when Alex walks out of her hotel barefoot “into the plain beyond … the desert,” she says: “if I were at least a shadow, but I am not, I am nothing now … Grain of mica. I drop to my knees.” What Alex sees in front of her is the mask of God, God in the image of man, a replica of herself: “I look up and he is kneeling opposite in exactly the same position. We are a few yards apart. I cannot see his face, because it is gilded by the sun’s glare … I can feel the stream of understanding which flows from this miraculous Being, bathing my shattered body, revitalising my devastated mind” (MMO: 138-9). It is at the end of this passage that Alex picks up her own picture from the street, as mentioned in the previous chapter, and sees that her face too, like that of the god-like creature she saw in the desert, is blurred (MMO: 140). This is a scene in which Alex is experimenting with the erasing of the self, but, being devoid of self-awareness, she is no closer to understanding the meaning of her life. White depicts the tug of war between the innate wish that exists in each individual, to be reunited with God into one long-lost wholeness, and the artist’s attempt to work out a fictional marriage of opposites, between the image of the great godlike Self and the personal, conscious self. Through Alex, White acknowledges the human wish to dissolve into nothingness in order to reach God as well as another manifestation of the same wish, the sensation of having attained a God-like self, a God-image inflating the self from within, swamping the self and causing megalomaniac eruptions such as Alex’s last act at the theater. White is conducting a reverse motion towards ancient times through the use of the mask, not necessarily directed at the gods of those times or at using older ritual institutions, but searching for a way which can give expression to the greater inner collective. He is not after an ontological or metaphysical answer for modern quests but after an ethical one. A traditionalist, White honors conventions and continuity and endeavors to sustain access to the bonding power of ritual. The artist, according to White, is the one capable of invoking and processing the “We,” the greater, all-encompassing “I,” present in each individual, by providing an image, a mask, to contain this greater “I” without deifying it. White’s alternative to mysticism23 and nothingness are masks, which are real even when imaginary, and which can channel the God image in the

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self, keeping it within safe boundaries, while at the same time representing the “We” and making it accessible to the self and in the self. Alex aspires to be God’s understudy (MMO: 87), or the second body of an artist-God, in the same sense that a king’s second body is his court and Christ’s second body is his Church. Remaining in the world of theatrical projections as God’s proxy, the Holy Spirit, is precisely the part Alex is required to perform.24 Yet for all her pretensions and declarations that she is a professional actress, Alex is incapable of delivering the one sentence she is asked to cry out as she emerges from the sand: “I am the spirit of the land, past, present, and future” (MMO: 150). The reader will have noticed that the final phrase of this sentence appeared earlier in the narrative when Alex was trying to gather herself in the kitchen and take a tray into the living room where Patrick was waiting. “If only I could nip upstairs first and read all I have written about Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray, past, present and future. To confirm that I am I” (MMO: 89). The writing, which has created Alex’s mask, could also confirm her unified existence, yet that is precisely what she can only sense without succeeding in doing. Instead of the line she was given, she comes out of the sand before her cue and shrieks: “‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’” (MMO: 151), a sentence which discloses, despite her declarations to the contrary, the collective, religious nature of her acting as well as her impending death. After the performance, she looks at herself in the mirror and is satisfied to see she “still radiated the strength of will of those who are being saved up for some final scene in the terrifying theatre of life. You couldn’t refer to ‘death’, as Hilda and Patrick might if they dared abandon their bourgeois discretion. I raised my arms. They are still wiry enough to swing from a trapeze … I exercise my hands, my fingers. They are not so arthritic they could not handle a gun, take aim, and pull the trigger on a chosen target” (MMO: 152). Since Alex’s mask embodies and represents an unpredictable, sick person, as long as she can perform the mask is still alive, potentially threatening in its unpredictability. This is the moment in the narrative when she is preparing for the final act in which she will overstep the conventions of the theater, but not the dictates of her mask, and shoot at her audience.

5.

Religion in the Theater

White, himself of a Protestant upbringing, claimed that his “spiritual self always shriveled in contact with organised religion” (FG: 74), yet he recognized the social values of church-going (FG: 71). He valued the Catholic Church for its elaborate rituals, and saw in the theater a fit compensation for those who did not receive such an upbringing. He reports approvingly his director friend Jim Sharman saying that “he regretted missing out on a Catholic childhood, but had got into theatre instead” (FG: 244). That White chose to fashion a mask of a

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“Puccini persona” (MMO: 89) for the editor in Memoirs, bearing his own name, and to cast his female counterpart Alex in the role of Suor Angelica (MMO: 89) is readily explained from this double point of view of White’s feelings towards Catholicism and theatre. In his autobiography, White recalls watching Puccini’s opera Suor Angelica, which, he claimed, “conveys the essence of Italian Catholicism.” He adds: “I’m pretty sure I’m not a Protestant hovering on the brink of conversion … It was the humanity of Sutherland’s interpretation which moved me that night at Suor Angelica” (FG: 238). In brief, it is not the particular beliefs and rites of one church or another that attracted White, but rather the profound human knowledge he found them to contain and the social frame they provided for the individual, not only in the outer world but also, and especially, in the individual’s inner world. Catholic Church rituals, in White’s eyes, provide a perfect theatrical stage for the acting out of collective values and images. White thus respected the traditional rituals provided by other belief systems, and though not sharing his partner’s Greek Orthodox faith, it is this faith that White believed upheld their forty years’ relationship (FG: 102). White’s view of faith and God focuses on a communal element, which, at the same time, he experiences as a very intimate feeling.25 As an older man, whose friends begin to die, he realizes that “a person doesn’t collect [friends], he is collected” and admits that he “was wrong and vain enough to think that I could get along under my own steam – just as years before the egotist in me had rejected God as unnecessary” (FG: 243).26 The mask, for White, is a central agent in communal ritual practices, but not necessarily intertwined with religion. The practices he would like to bring to the fore are ethical practices, and he treats the mask as a mediator between the personal self and the collective self. Catholicism inspires White’s sense of theatrical performance. By assigning Patrick a double persona, of ‘Mother Superior’ (MMO: 87) and of ‘Puccini Persona’ (MMO: 89), White shifts the ritual scene of the Church to the theater. The further transition of the ritual scene into the novel does not affect the purpose of the performance, which remains one of penance and a psychological transition. The Church practices pointed to by Alex and Patrick are used to develop a Jungian recognition of a collective self and an acceptance of the community, both within the individual and without. Through the use of Alex and Patrick, White clarifies that it takes at least two to uphold one mask. Jean-Paul Sartre best explained the collectively sustained function of the mask in a theatrical ritual when discussing the ritual of burglary that was performed by Genet and his partner: what Genet requires of his accomplice at the ritual moment of the burglary is a transfiguration: the thief must rise to the plane of the sacred, his temporality must become a liturgical time, he must wear a mask and tragic rag, he must reflect to Genet the sudden brilliance which Genet feels that he himself is emitting … Guy and Genet … are united

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One because they play the same role at the same time: they are two embodiments of a single ‘persona’ which they reflect back and forth to each other. 27

Insisting on the interchangeability of ritual mask and theater mask, Sartre shows that the persona is “a collection of gestures” whose essential characteristic “is that it has already been made … It is a unit that is already constituted … something like dance steps,”28 reminiscent of Schechner’s definition of dance as a ‘twice behaved’ behaviour. Sartre underlines the sacred nature of the gesture: “it is a sacrament” which “contains a power.” Sartre goes on to explain that “acts have aesthetic and moral value only insofar as those who perform them are endowed with power … The original power of sacralization comes from the community and has its own law … [The] worshipers kneel before the reflection of their collective power.”29 The dance of the mask is a circular one: the power of the performance is bestowed on it by the community that uses the mask to assure or sustain its power. White does not impart these realizations to his mask-character, which he fashions as an embodiment of an egotistic society. As part of her rejection of her community, White makes his mask-character try to invent her own ritual, rather than adhere to that of any given church. White is using Alex to reflect some of his criticism of the Church and its less virtuous members, in the same way he uses her to criticize the members of the elite at their cocktail party, at which her presence and behavior reflected the corrupt values of the hostess and guests or of the avant-garde theater artists she joins at the theater. Nevertheless, White’s main use of Alex is to debunk her own mask, which, void of community and accepted ritual practices, has neither meaning nor power.

6.

Rituals and their Communities

The unifying theatrical setting of the novel is White’s modern version of a morality and mystery play. White fashions his mask character as a modern ‘Everywoman,’ who, like the original Everyman, is sent on a pilgrimage of sorts at the end of her life. The journey starts at home, and she has an encounter with her son Hal, several meetings with Patrick, and several chats with her daughter Hilda. In addition, she is made to go through the various community-settings that her life has led her to, and encounter its many different members, such as Greek and Egyptian societies before the war, Australian soldiers during the war, refugee communities, various churches and nun communities, a high society ball and cocktail party, bourgeois buffet dinners, theater companies and theater audiences, and also encounters with derelicts in the park, policemen, shopkeepers, and a taxi driver. Through Alex, White highlights the values of these communities. Mirrored in her behavior, such as the dancing at the Hitler Hotel and the symbolic sacrificial burning of children as if to Moloch (MMO:

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51, 53). “I know them all. I am them all,” says Alex of “the Smyrna Breetish, the great Joneses and Llewellyns, the Brustalls and the Brummages” (MMO: 52), whom she embodies and mirrors. True to her mask, Alex claims to be on a trendy quest for meaning, and will do anything for recognition, even at the expense of her own children, her personal sacrificial gifts, to whom she refers as “my burnt offerings to the jealous god” (MMO: 53). The subtext of her quest is her proclaimed wish for forgiveness and atonement for her sins. The novel is accordingly strewn with allusions to the pilgrimage Alex feels she must pursue. There are many occasions on which Alex mentions her sins, the most severe being killing her husband’s dog. She derides whatever feelings of responsibility she might have for Hilary’s suicide, although she is the one who drove Hilary out of their house, and perhaps to kill himself in the same shed where she shot the dog: “I suppose one would call it suicide, technically anyway, only half a murder” (MMO: 73). Prior to standing in judgment before some higher instance, perhaps the Pantocrator (MMO: 81), she would like to wash these sins off. She proposes to do so in an ‘instant’ manner. She is willing to “say a rosary or two” (MMO: 111) or have the dog she collects in the park with the ‘mystic’ lick her sins off: “Dog has been sent to atone for the evil I was born with – to lick me clean” (MMO: 101). In case any reader has missed her game, Alex spells it out: “Oh, Dog! Oh, God! He has landed on my bed … the purple tongue waiting to savour the salt of human flesh, or do his real job of absolving sin” (MMO: 106). The “big black dog” (MMO: 87) that Alex collects together with the mystic in the park is none other than the earthly mask of Satan, as he appeared in Goethe’s Faust. His satanic nature is also the reason he cannot be contained. Alex knows “there won’t be any question of a priest hole for a dog … Mystics can be contained … a dog never” (MMO: 93). Alex wants forgiveness and absolution and has a vague notion this could be obtained from God, through a church practice, but she would just as soon embrace some other mystic mumbo-jumbo or the work of the devil if it provides her with the power she seeks. She is convinced she can decide how to go about obtaining absolution, inventing her own ritual to fit her needs, disregarding the fact that one cannot invent a ritual action any more than one can invent a ritual mask. What Alex tries to do to religion is similar to what she endeavoured to do to Shakespeare’s play. She would like to appropriate whatever religious beliefs and practices she chooses, cut them up and pick and choose which pieces to use and in which manner; in short, to make up her own rite. In the same way that she thought she could be queen by putting on Cleopatra’s costume, she treats the nun costume as an impersonation mask. She thinks it is enough to put on a nun’s robe to partake in the benefits of the ritual and wants to invent her own mask, as she invented her many flamboyant names, each of which she mistakenly thinks gives her a new identity (MMO: 9). But a personification mask has

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

no meaning separately from the ritual itself, not even that of an extinct community, such as the ancient Greeks. All that is left of their rites is fragmented and indecipherable since we no longer have the key to understand them. Alex is put on the island of Nisos, where she is given access to these ancient rites by coming “across the torso of the kouros. The portable archaeological finds have been moved to the museum in Athens. Why they overlooked the kouros torso is a mystery, unless he was left for my coming … Has my psyche, perhaps, conjured him out of an existence we shared in Alexandria, Luxor, or Abu Simbel?” (MMO: 77-8).30 The kouros is an integral part of ancient Greek culture. Alex fails to understand the requirements of its use or its meaning, although she is physically present where it was once used. Alex imagines she becomes the torso by putting it on as an ancient mask, yet she cannot make it come to life. Although she unknowingly creates her own access to the personification mask by becoming the mask,31 neither this, nor being in the place where it was created, is sufficient for her to come into contact with the content and meaning it once held. Rituals embody collective ancestral traditions, reenacted and passed down from one generation to the next. Some cultures have died, their ritual practices forgotten and meaningless to people today, their personification masks nothing more than artefacts or museum exhibits. Yet church rituals are still effective because many people still believe in them and uphold them, including the friends of Alex’s children, whom Alex derides: Hilda’s “agnostic Presbyterian” (MMO: 88) and Hal’s “Jewish priest” (MMO: 56). If Alex wants to benefit from the rite of penance she must follow it as do the other members of the specific belief community, according to the established rite. Like many other rites, the rite of moral penance has been repressed to the margins of collective culture yet it can surface, as do repressed materials in the personal psyche, in symbols.32 Alex performs a pantomime of ritual gestures, devoid of content. She goes down on her knees (MMO: 138), she tries to clean herself by “sloshing the sheets around, over the stone, rubbing them against the corrugated board … I am pure as this sheet I have laundered … I hold this glistening banner against the light. ‘You wouldn’t see a whiter sheet anywhere in Australia’” (MMO: 1601). Alex remains unaware of the meaning of her symbolic activity, and cannot benefit from it in order to reach a responsible consciousness, any more than she can benefit from the rituals she alludes to and which she has emptied of meaning.33 Her private repertoire of penance will culminate in her ‘finale,’ the scene of the last judgment. Alex does sense the strength rites can have, as when she is about to marry Hilary: “the approaching sacrament … made her tremble and visualize a future breaking open in front of her” (MMO: 13). Later, disillusioned by a failed marriage, she complains about “the wedding ring which fits too tightly. More than once I thought of having it sawn off, then I decided it would come in

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handy during chapters of my convent life. I am alone in this house with a ring which has eaten into my flesh” (MMO: 102). The ring is the only visible sign of her belonging to her community, a sign she would remove completely if she didn’t plan to use it as a prop in her theatricals as a nun, and therefore as a sign of her pretended marriage to God rather than to a man. Yet, here too, Alex treats a personification mask as an impersonation mask and empties it of meaning. The ring is a sign that many in her secular society still wear, such as the two ambulance men who carry her to the hospital: “they are both, we are all, ringed” (MMO: 176), she notices, though for her the ring has long lost its original power. A ring is also symbolic of society itself, as a community of inter-connected people. “We are all ringed” because we all belong to social circles. Patrick notes that on her deathbed Alex has aged all at once and that “at the centre of this ancient creature, the darkened arms like writhing mangrove branches ending in twig claws, on one of which a wedding ring shone” (MMO: 182). At this final moment, too, the ring symbolically stands out as a reminder that Alex has failed in her attempts to flee the community to which she is bonded by her ring, at the moment, indeed, in which she is about to be gathered again into its midst. Outside its community frame, a ritual has no meaning. As a result of secularization and the change of times and values and the dissolving of family patterns, the wedding ring has lost much of its significance because people no longer consider it a binding symbol of a sacred sacrament. Alex fails to take upon herself the significations of the various religious rites she mentions, for the same reason that she failed in her use of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. For a collectively produced and upheld rite, whether religious or not, to have meaning and function, one must follow, imaginatively at least, the rites as they were instituted by that particular collectivity or by the believers of a certain religion. In addition, one must realize that a religious faith provides for the spiritual needs of a given community, as a community-body, as well as of the individuals within that community. By rejecting the community element in the rite, and trying to reinvent the rite whichever way she chooses, Alex misses out on its possible effectiveness for her own self. The ‘rite’ Alex tries to concoct is made of fragments of various religions, past and present, of mysticism and psychology. The fragmentation of Alex’s every action is another of White’s criticisms directed at Alex’s society. Alex is hard to contain, about to burst at the seams. She is overflowing, like her many pieces of paper spilling out of her writing case and suitcase. White tries to contain her in her impersonation masks, in her names and dresses, in her husband’s army coat and her own chinchilla coat, in the priest hole in her closet, where she proposes to stash away the mystic she has collected in the park. A diary is another form that could frame one’s mind according to collective ideals, as White has shown in his novel A Fringe of Leaves. There, Ellen is urged by her

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

mother-in-law to keep a journal, “a source of self-knowledge and as an instrument of self-correction,”34 in order to improve herself, the writing of which is an ethical task that necessarily involves an act of confession. Memoirs, usually written retrospectively, shape the memory of events in a certain way. In Memoirs of Many in One White underlines the importance of the shape by providing an editor, whose job it is to make sure that this disheveled character does have a shape. Yet Alex’s memoirs, as a text, remain fragmented, confusing and hard to follow despite Patrick’s editing. This is a textual expression of the intractable, overflowing collective elements within Alex, which she would rather ignore than confront. These collective elements will burst out at her final performance as an archetypal “predatory bird” (MMO: 168).

7.

Alex’s ‘Act’ of Penitence

White makes Alex remember her experiences as a nun in both an Orthodox order and a Catholic one. “Aren’t you getting your Churches mixed?” Hilda asks Alex, to which Alex answers: “Oh, I’ve had my Roman interlude too. I’ve had to try everything” (MMO: 36). Accordingly, Alex irreverently mixes bits of practices and goes as easily into an “Irish sanctuary” (MMO: 39) as an Orthodox chapel (MMO: 76), a building she considers a “reassuring mass” (MMO: 80) or on a Catholic picnic (MMO: 107). As one of the nuns in this picnic, Alex hears another nun’s confession to a childhood theft of some jelly beans, and says: “‘I absolve you, darling – if Father X.D. or whatever, and the Lord Himself, don’t’” (MMO: 115). Clearly, Alex is familiar with the necessary conditions for a Catholic absolution, the first being that penance must be done before a priest, yet treats the role of the priest as another role she decides to perform, voiding this part of the sacrament of its possible effectiveness for the nun. According to the Catholic Church, only a priest, who acts as a judge, can heal the individual of his spiritual illness, which afflicts him “in the moral order, that is, in the sphere of his freedom and responsibility.”35 In the more serious cases of cardinal sins, the bishop or even the Pope may be called on to assist, as the direct representatives of God. Alex challenges one and all, trying to take on the roles of priest and God. When seeking for absolution for her own sins, Alex continues to get it all wrong, either because of her imperfect understanding or because of her perverse unwillingness to take the rite seriously as a rite. She disregards what a proper Christian sacrament of penance entails: to begin with, the sacraments “presuppose man’s quest for God,”36 while Alex’s modern quest is for a self-assertion and self-promotion as means to the discovery of the meaning to her life (MMO: 35). Three acts are required of the penitent as part of the sacrament: contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The most important part is the contrition, the penitent’s sincere sorrow and complete change of mind.

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Having confessed to a priest and accused himself of his sins, the penitent must carry out the penance imposed on him by the priest. Alex follows none of these acts. She makes a confession of sorts to her daughter and her friend, whom, as we saw, she enrobed with the mask of ‘Mother Superior’ for the part. Yet both of them already know what she did, and she is busier trying to shake off her responsibility for killing of Hilary’s dog, and possibly for Hilary’s death, and blame them for judging her than express any repentance. There is no change of mind in any of Alex’s words or actions. She declares that her self-inflicted penance consisted in serving Onouphrios the Orthodox monk on the island of Nisos (MMO: 35). She kneels down and she prays on several occasions, but she is merely playing a part, in similar fashion to her theater performances. To her, the penance is instrumental for her self-advancement rather than for a spiritual cleansing. To attain that any means will do: “could I come at swallowing my Mystic’s spittle if I managed to assemble Patrick and Hilda at the same time to witness my self-mortification and acknowledge my sanctity?” (MMO: 94). Once more, Alex is ready for yet another theatrical act, ignoring an essential part of the sacrament, which demands that it be a private, secret confession, conducted between the sinner and a Church-appointed priest. Giving Patrick the role of “Reverend Mother Persona” (MMO: 90) is not enough to activate the sacrament. As a mask-character, she reflects both the misuse of the mask of sacrament, which is the result of the skepticism and irreverence of her age, and of the uncontrollable inner universal feelings and needs which modernism and secularization have left unanswered. Alex misses out on the profits she could have gained from the public aspect of the sacrament. Most of all, she misses out on the communal dimension of the rite. In the formulation of having confessed and carried out his penance, “the sinner is restored with the healing grace to share the divine life, welcomed back by the father; at the same time the sinner is reinstated in the community, and again shares the community Eucharistic table. God can forgive sins secretly but it is appropriate for the sinner to be reconciled outwardly, visibly, with the church community. The community itself is healed as the penitent is healed.”37 The sacrament of penance, albeit the most private of sacraments, has a public aspect since the sinner cannot take communion as long as he has not performed the necessary measures of penance. The community pressure on the sinner is therefore quite substantial and would keep in check all those who might try to evade their personal responsibility, and by doing so affect everybody else, since penance is an act of “reconciliation with the community as well as with God” and belongs to “the liturgical celebration of the whole Church community.”38 Writing her memoirs and having them published is a public act. Yet writing her memoirs cannot be considered a part of Alex’s confession, because it is not performed as participation in a

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

community but rather as a narcissistic act; moreover, because they are published posthumously, such a ‘confession’ cannot assist in Alex’s reintegration within her community, as the proper act of sacrament could have done. As to Alex’s personal responsibility towards her community, she only shows a faint recognition of her community’s very existence when she repudiates any responsibility for it.

8.

The Theater of Judgment

Alex turns everything into theatrical material. Her choice of avant-garde theater is also part of her effort to dispose of her bad conscience. Within the anarchic practices that this kind of theater seems to offer, she tries to discard whatever qualms she may have has by a blowing up of conventions. On her way to her last performance at the Sand Pit Theater, Alex is already prepared for her performance and for its results. She has taken the gun she will be shooting, a premeditated action whose consequences will not surprise her. As the taxi driver drives off, Alex wonders: “have I recruited a witness for the prosecution in the trial I must face sooner or later?” (MMO: 158). From this point until Alex is locked up in the asylum, the trial she is so fearful of takes place. Since she fantasizes a tribunal, it must be carried out in a public place, which for Alex is naturally the theater. Armed with her chinchilla coat, her faithful mask, which “will provide armour of a kind” (MMO: 155), she chooses to stay behind when all the actors go home and the director agrees, “if it’s martyrdom you’re after!” (MMO: 161). She lies in the dark, “awaiting dawn and judgment” (MMO: 163). Even when empty, a theater is a public place, and White suggests that it can never be completely empty, since Alex is not to be alone: the small red eye of a rat serves as judging conscience, watching her (MMO: 162). Alex’s blind search for healing is unwittingly carried out through ritual practices, and through a public trial, which is especially necessary for a collectively created figure. These practices point to what she could have achieved but emphatically does not. The audience, that arrives the day after Alex’s confrontation with herself and the rat in the dark, is “galvanised in row after row of denim chic” (MMO: 168), a uniform mass awaiting her action. Alex too is waiting: “I am waiting to perform some act expected of me in the context of a play, dream, my own life – whichever … I must act of my own free will. I do” (MMO: 167-8). Alex expresses once more the modern belief that the individual is free to act especially when he or she does so egotistically and regardless of others, who are thought to limit one’s freedom. Sartre could offer White a profound model that is contrary to this modern belief embodied by Alex. Sartre determines freedom of action by the self’s relation to others, since “an existent which makes known to itself what it is by means of something other than it … is what we call a free existent.”39 The other’s

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freedom is a limit to the self’s freedom, yet because the soul is free and perpetually recovered by freedom, the self’s choice is freely limited by freedom itself. The self is thus absolutely free and absolutely responsible for his situation, but paradoxically, is never free except in a given situation. In his discussion of words and their functions in having freedom, Sartre exemplifies the limit the other puts to the self’s existence, which limits the self’s freedom: only within a sentence can a word receive a real function as a designation. In an analogous or even highly similar way, the ‘I’ can only function within the limits delineated by the other or others. As soon as a freedom other than the self’s arises confronting the self, the ‘I’ begins to exist in a new dimension of being.40 Similarly, the mask is only meaningful within the specific framework of a ritual and only meaningful when it is activated in the ritual, like words when they are used within the framework of language, as pointed out by Sartre. In White’s novel, the issue of boundaries and their transcendence is a central one, including the boundary between one’s freedom and one’s mask. Alex believes herself to be alone in her mask-act on stage, yet she is acting within a ritualistic situation which involves the community of the theater, and her freedom of action is determined by her responsibility towards the audience. The spectator is manifestly turned into a consciousness of the imaginary spectacle.41 The “Great Moment” arrives, and Alex, who feels as though she is “surrounded by a whole mythology of Hindu gods and goddesses” assumes “the form, mime[s] the motions of a huge predatory bird,” a mask set in motion. By shooting blanks into her audience she shows that she is not only irresponsible but blind to the contract between performer and audience, which has not been abolished by modern theater (MMO: 168). Alex’s act is totally aggressive to the members of the audience, since they do not know that the bullets she is shooting at them are blanks. As far as they are concerned, she has created a life-threatening situation, which cannot be acceptable even to experienced modern theatergoers. The results are grave: “hit by a blank, a victim falls in the third row … a further sprinkling of blanks produces a heart attack” (MMO: 1689). Once again, as in the case of the kouros mask, Alex resorts to an unknown ritual as the basis for her invented action, in this case a Hindu ritual that she does not understand but which is nevertheless present in her, as are other elements which are part of the archetypal collective unconscious. The form of the “huge predatory bird” which she assumes is that of Prometheus’ vulture, its claws about to tear into the entrails of her audience, in the name of her creativity.42 On the verge of ritual success, of actually joining the community, Alex once again fails completely. By this point in the narrative, the collective archetypes have overflowed the mask which barely contains them, since they dangerously “overflowed the boundaries set by an eyebrow pencil” (MMO: 168), and allowed the mask to shoot as she does. In the audience, throughout the shooting “a figure sits it out … her laughter resounds so madly it suggests she may have

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

grasped the reason for the exercise. In the center of the pan-shaped face she has painted a crimson cupid’s bow to match my own overflowing mouth” (MMO: 169). Alex’s mask was efficient enough for one person in the audience to grasp its collective content, which in Alex’s case is already overflowing in the mouth, and the woman in the audience can mirror both Alex’s mask in her own mask and the overflowing of collective matter in her “maniacal laughter.”

C. The M ad W oman and the M onster under L ock and K e y Patrick is aware that he and Hilda are responsible for indulging Alex and allowing her to do as she pleases in “the fantasy life we have helped her create for herself” (MMO: 143). They are quite alone in their caring for Alex, for which she is totally ungrateful. Alex is not a character with whom it is easy to identify or whose ramblings and acts are readily understandable and acceptable. When she is finally stopped, at the end of her last performance, she isn’t surprised to find Prof. Falkenberg, her psychiatrist, awaiting her at the end of her performance, with the “familiar canvas sleeves” which restrain her on the way to the asylum (MMO: 169). The readers are not particularly surprised either: from the first entry of Alex’s journal, they are informed of the existence of Prof. Falkenberg, who already had Alex committed in the past and who, Alex is afraid, would do it again (MMO: 22). Hilda admits to Patrick that she is on the point of despair, and that “‘Mother must be committed’” (MMO: 62). Already at that early stage in the novel, Patrick thinks Falkenberg should be contacted, and says: “‘better one of you in a straitjacket than two’” (MMO: 63). Another monster we would rather not identify with and, as a society, would prefer to see under lock and key is Jean Genet. Genet uses the mask imposed on him by society to take his revenge against society for what he considered to be society’s injustice towards him. Like Alex, who repeatedly shoots at her startled audience, Genet annoyed and shocked his audience and his readers by breaking conventions and taboos. A social outcast from birth, Genet spent most of his adolescence and early adulthood in prison for theft, vagrancy, smuggling and homosexuality. He started to write in prison, from which he was ultimately extricated by the intervention of Cocteau, Sartre and over forty other writers who petitioned the government on his behalf, when he was about to be deported to Nazi Germany. Genet became one of the leading figures in Avant-Garde Theater. His writing is purposefully provocative in both subject-matter, which unapologetically depicts the harsh world of thieves, homosexuals and prostitutes, as well as in the grotesque and haunting language he uses. Yet his monster-mask is not his own, but is the result of a co-creation with his audience. Genet uses this mask to get back at the society that has rejected him. As Sartre puts it,

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Creating Communities the good citizens had endowed him with a fictive and monstrous Ego which he was unable either to assume or reject; he wants to return it to them and install it within them. In order to make sure that he is substituting his own self for that of the reader, he talks about himself in the first person. Now, regardless of who the writer is, when the sentence starts with “I” a confusion arises in the reader’s mind between this “I” and the writer’s, “since in order to understand the sentence, I [the reader] must relate the ‘“I’” to a subjectivity, it is to my own that I refer. That is the way in which a reader of novels spontaneously identifies himself with the character who is telling the story. 43

Thus the monstrous ego is co-manufactured, and the mask contains both its wearer and all of those, in this case the readers, who participated in creating it. Reflecting the impact of Genet’s use of masks, the same is true for the method in which Alex is created by White, so that Alex cannot say “I.” The co-created mask is actually made of many “I I I.” Both Genet and White force us to realize we are part of the unlikable mask we are shown, which is at the same time part of a mask of ourselves. Alex only exists through the readers: it follows that she is her readers. ‘Many in one’ forces the implied community of readers to realize what they have created, that for which they are responsible. Their responsibility is enhanced, as Sartre noted, by the use of the first person singular of the protagonist. Iser clarified Sartre’s point when he explained that the reader “produces an experience of reality which is real precisely because it happens, without being subjected to any representational function. Reality, then, is a process of realization necessitating the reader’s involvement, because only the reader can bring it about.”44 The readers activate the reality of the imaginary and at the same time they are made responsible for their creation. The writer manages to annoy the readers, but by doing so he reaches a collective demon inside each of them and exposes it. It may seem surprising that White does not stop at criticizing society through Alex or at criticizing her for what she does, but he emphasizes the difficulties of the mask – any mask – itself. The mask protects the masker and can allow him to disengage from moral judgment and obligations; it can restrict the masker’s outlook and allow the masker to play irresponsibly, as does Alex does. In fact, it is very close to White’s purpose to de-glamorize the mask, making it as banal as possible, common-place and used by everybody, and not just by eccentrics such as Alex or Genet. White holds the a mirror not only up to society but also up to the mask itself, the product of society, a reflection of a reflection. In the following passage, the mask is represented by each individual’s eyeball, with an intended Emersonian pun on the word “I”: Sometimes I think it’s a case of glass eyes. From observing people I believe almost everybody has one. Including myself. But nobody could have two, could they? I have heard my own eye go clunk as I drop it into Grandfather Gray’s little agate cup which I

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One have stood in the icon corner and where so many visitors (particularly friends) stub their cigarettes. I didn’t know how anybody could mistake this little cup in transparent agate for an ashtray, standing as it is in front of the icons. Perhaps they wish to express their contempt for saints. Nobody could guess that this is where I drop my eye to give the socket a rest. They could, I suppose, have it in mind, and foresee how ash will irritate the socket when I replace my eyeball. Friends often know better than enemies how to hurt. This is why Hilda and I, who are worse than friends – mother and daughter – have such a disastrous effect on each other (MMO: 146-7). 45

Rather than allowing Alex to completely evade her society as she claims she wishes, White makes this mask-character see the masks of the others, which in turn see her, as though they are all facing each other in a circle. Alex’s mask, which has become an integral part of the masker but is nevertheless artificial, has been taken off and it is looking at itself as well as at its audience, the society. In the passage above, the impossibility of Alex’s wish to invent her own version of a ‘fresh’ religion and rites is further clarified: no one but Alex knows the little agate cup to be anything but an ashtray and no one recognizes the icons for what she sees in them.46 A religion, by definition, cannot be invented or upheld by one individual. Friendship and family ties, which are not based on commonly experienced ritual practices, whether religious or secular, dissolve; friends drop their garbage into the individual’s sacred agate cup; and mothers and daughters become “worse than friends” without the proper channeling of archetypal feelings. One symbolic means for the channeling of these feelings is introduced in the shape of a boiled egg, Hilda’s equivalent of the reassuring ‘British cup of tea,’ which she produces when she feels Alex needs to be calmed down. Yet the round egg, a symbol of perfection, is also White’s reminder to Alex that the road to perfection passes through a unity with her community and her family. Hilda offers Alex a boiled egg when Alex thinks of having a dinner party for all the people she has known in her life (MMO: 53), and again when Alex and Hilda come back from the park, and Alex wonders “am I losing control of my Australian child?” (MMO: 86). Alex cannot adopt Hilda’s proposition, but Patrick can, and for him too Hilda boils eggs when they are living together (MMO: 184, 191).47

D. The Tr agedy of M an When Alex is interned at the psychiatric asylum, the superintendent, whom Alex mockingly calls the Colonel, brings along Alex’s first visitor, the aged Professor Falkenberg. Alex and Falkenberg, another mask-character donning “a pocked mask time has forced … [him] into wearing” (MMO: 170), perform for

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the last time together, their life-long ritual of the couple in Madách’s romantic poem The Tragedy of Man (MMO: 19, 173).48 This poem, which was written as part of the rebirth of the national Hungarian ethos,49 reverberates with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Goethe’s Dr. Faust. Because of White’s extensive use of The Tragedy of Man it is worth our while to go into it in some relevant detail. In Madách’s poem, Lucifer condemns the creation of the universe as futile, since man will soon aspire to be God. He challenges God, believing himself equal to Him, since he already existed before God created his angels and therefore does not owe Him reverence. God chases him out of Heaven but grants him his “creative portion” of Heaven (scene 1),50 the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, with which Satan is content, since they are enough to spread anarchy by tempting the vain Eve and the proud Adam. Adam awakes after eating the fruit, and says: “So this is mine. The wide world is behind me./ This plot shall be my home. I’ll master it” (scene 3). After the fall, Lucifer predicts: You too will come to dust, it is quite true, But in a hundred forms you’ll live again And never will you have to start afresh Since when you err, your son will bear the blame, You pass on to him your feebleness, your gout All that you feel, experience and learn Remains your own throughout a million years (scene 3).

White would seem to join Madách easily in his conclusion: the shared past of all the previous generations cannot be discarded as Alex and her revolutionary artists might think, and nothing can be invented by the new generations except as part of an ongoing process. In Madách’s poem Adam is then made to dream his future on a journey throughout the centuries from Ancient Egypt to the 19th nineteenth century. Satan takes Adam and Eve from one station of human civilization to the next, and in each they are made to act out roles as people from those centuries and so become vividly aware of man’s achievements, but also of man’s folly. Eve appears each time at the end of the period, and refreshes Adam’s weakening spirit and hope. Both Adam and Eve “act out Humanity’s tragic destiny in their struggle with Lucifer,” a struggle which in itself is “their salvation.”51 From one century to the next, Adam grows older and less hopeful. The penultimate scene is a futuristic ice-age, which brings Adam to declare that all is hopeless and that he wishes to kill himself. In the last scene, Adam is awakened from his dream, a young man once more. Eve arrives and announces that she is pregnant, restoring Adam’s hope but also making him fall to his knees and announce that God has vanquished him. The poem ends with God’s words of encouragement

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to Adam and Eve, and with his last sentence: “Man, I have spoken: strive on, trust, have faith!” (Scene 15). Based on Goethe’s Mephistopheles and Milton’s Satan, Madách’s Lucifer is malicious and his purpose is to prove that God’s creation was a failure. At the end of the poem, God says to him: And you too, Lucifer, you are a link Within my universe – and so continue: Your icy intellect and fond denial Will be the leaven to foment rebellion And to mislead – if momentarily – The mind of man, which will return to me (scene 15).

White redirects these words at Alex and at the “Happy Few” (MMO: 168) who have produced her personification mask. Like Lucifer, Alex thinks she knows everything and can at least be “god’s understudy” (MMO: 87), if not replace him altogether. Like Lucifer, her megalomaniac convictions allow her to think she can create what she chooses. In god-like fashion, she claims to have created her son, invented him from the “womb of my imagination” (MMO: 53, 55) and she would like nothing more than to take over the plot, recreate and master it. Alex’s thirst for freedom is like Prometheus’, but while he was bound to a rock and Milton’s Satan was locked outside the gates of Heaven, Alex is the prisoner of her own aspirations. In the taxi, on her way to her last ‘creative’ performance, Alex notes: “we were sliding past houses and gardens, and railings, railings” (MMO: 156) which make her think of a prison; when Hilda and Patrick go to St. Damien’s to visit the dying Alex, using the same taxi, Patrick comments he sees “railings, railings” (MMO: 180), echoing Alex. The artist is never as free as he imagines. In the same way that Madách proves to Adam that in his various future existences he will have to follow in his ancestors’ steps, White reminds Alex and her “urban guerillas” that they could benefit from their cultural heritage, rather than fleeing from it or presuming to reinvent it. Moreover, not only are they incapable of detaching themselves from society, but through their rebellion itself they constitute another link to it. The churches are empty, and by the time Patrick and Hilda arrive there, St Francis’ garden in Assisi has become a disappointing “sodden garden … not a bird in sight. They must have been shot by the Italian hunting classes” (MMO: 188); the elite and the intellectuals shoot the birds St Francis was renowned for talking to, and do not cultivate the nature that was part of his cult. The traditional communities are fashionably dead, leaving the individual with no instruments for embodying the collective psyche in his personal psyche or for enabling access to the inner collective, which, as a result, becomes dangerously overwhelming and eruptive, as it is in Alex.

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Neumann’s insights regarding the role of the elite in the forming of ethical values for the entire community are quite relevant here. According to Neumann, the personal responsibility of the elite towards the practices of the group is very great, since he claims that “ethical values are created as a result of a revelation by the ‘Voice’ to the Founder Individual … later taken up by an élite which the Founder personality gathers around himself and is subsequently imposed by them as a collective standard on the whole tribe. The creative individuals who found ethics display equivalent religious and ethical attitudes in their own personal lives … The élite then proceeds to educate the collective in the principles of this new ethic.”52 It is the duty of the creative artists and of the elite to delineate and personally follow ethical values, since the rest of the collective will follow them. Creative artists especially, more readily than other individuals, are capable of coming into contact with collective archetypal images and express them, in order to provide vehicles for the embodiment of these collective forces. In his later writings, Neumann expands on the creative artist’s part in channeling the archetypal collective imaginary into symbols, such as masks, which can contain and control them: “the creators form the progressive element in a community, but at the same time they are the conservatives who link back to the origins … By means of the symbol, the archetypes break through the creative person into the conscious world of culture. It is this deeper-lying reality that fertilizes, transforms and broadens the life of the collective, giving it and the individual the background which alone endows life with a meaning” (OC: 377). Had Alex looked for ways to remain in contact with her society rather than ways to run away from it, she would have come closer to attaining her goal of finding meaning in her life. Accepting her collectively-created mask would have advanced her progress towards experiencing a unique self-aware character. Transferred from the asylum to St Damien’s hospital, Alex is closer than ever to a ritual community, though she is not a Catholic.53 Surrounded by nuns, Alex is dying. At the last moment, “when the last of human frailty makes contact with the supernatural,” Alex makes an effort to raise herself from her pillows: “‘Is it this – then…?’ she whispered, whether in horror, or ecstasy” (MMO: 183). No one around her presumes to know what “this” is, what Alex saw at her dying moment, and whether she gained some great understanding.54

E. A le x is still with us Before her ‘trial’, Alex already knows that in her case the judgment will not end with her death, but will be carried on continued during the ‘great séance’ over which Patrick will preside, when her memoirs will be read by “the parasite students and academics who eat out your liver and lights – your heart” (MMO: 164). White’s evident sarcasm aimed at his literary critics is also a poignant reminder

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to Patrick, Hilda and his readers that Alex will not easily be disposed of by her death. Not only does the novel start after her death, but Alex’s mask lives on, and its content, its ‘heart,’ is constantly renewed for the next critic to dive into, like Prometheus’ liver. After Alex’s death, Hilda proposes to Patrick to go on a tour of the places which played a part in Alex’s life, in Greece and Italy, and she thinks such a tour “might lay a few ghosts” to rest (MMO: 184). Later, Patrick refers to the trip as “the final act of exorcism which one understood to be the object of our journey” (MMO: 189). As it turns out, the trip proves to be an impossible mission. Alex’s ghost cannot be exorcised. Alex’s presence is perpetuated in her masks, some of which are used by Hilda, such as the lipstick which Hilda finds in her bag and which “must have been there for ages” (MMO: 190). Hilda “saw the journey as a pilgrimage,” picking it up where her mother left off, and she now even has her own performance, like her mother before her (MMO: 187). As to Patrick, he becomes fed up with Hilda, claiming to understand “the mother’s attitude to her daughter” (MMO: 187) as he didn’t before, and also to see the mother in the daughter: “it could have been her mother speaking” (MMO: 188). Patrick and Hilda reach Assisi and ask for directions to see the church of Santa Chiara. One recalls that the hospital in which Alex would end her life was a Catholic institution, called St. Damien’s (MMO: 177). It cannot be accidental that White chose this name for the hospital. The historical Santa Chiara (St Clare) was for many years the abbess of the convent of St Damien in Assisi,55 and so the name of the hospital is an early clue in the text that this is the place where Alex is going to be found after her death. The priest who accompanies them says: “‘you know she’s a fake, don’t you? The mask – the head – they were manufactured by the nuns. They’d be poor Clares indeed without such a source of revenue’” (MMO: 188). White manages to use the mask for a double purpose: on the one hand, he criticizes the Church for exposing mass-produced relics and for expecting its followers to believe in them, and on the other hand, he suggests that fake or not, these relics really do work because they are believed in by many. The mask is even effective enough to scare modern, secular Protestant Australians. As Patrick draws closer to the glass casket to take a better look at Santa Chira’s shriveled mummy, he “heard a choking sound and clattering” behind him: “Hilda was making a getaway, as fast as she could, up the steps leading from the crypt” (MMO: 189). Patrick does not look at Hilda escaping because he is at that moment too engulfed in “re-living a personal relationship with a barely human figure in another setting .... I would have sworn I could see a thread of garnet-coloured blood trickling from a corner of Santa Chiara’s mouth” (MMO: 189). That White intended the word “mummy” to resound as “mommy” for Hilda is clear, and what the relic looks like makes Patrick see Alex as she was at her dying moment at the hospital, when a “black skull fell back against the pillows, a trickle of garnet-coloured blood escaping from one

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corner of the mouth” (MMO: 183). Blood, “a juice of quality most rare” that was used to seal the pact between Mephistopheles and Faust,56 and that could be found on the vulture’s claws in Prometheus’ myth, is the sign of the devil in the artist. Besides embodying the romantic image of Prometheus, the independent artist, Alex assumes the role of the predatory bird herself in her last act at the theater and at the end of the performance, she also sees Prof. Falkenberg as endowed with a predatory beak like hers (MMO: 172).57 According to Alex, the theater critic is like a bat (MMO: 166, 169) and so are the nuns at the hospital where she dies: “‘nuns – Valkyries – bats with blood dripping from their jaws – as they flew overhead – in the days when I was a prospective Saint” (MMO: 182). At the beginning of the novel, when Alex recalls various nun episodes in her life, she wakes in the night and looks at herself in the mirror: “I encountered a ravaged ghoul, member of an order to which I have never belonged in memory, Sisters of the Sacred Blood. It was dripping from my mouth” (MMO: 57). The trickling blood on Alex’s skull, which Patrick could swear he see saw on Santa St Chiara’s, is emblematic not only of her embodiment of the archetypal predatory bird but also emphasizes the life which is still flowing in the mask, a historical life, from time immemorial. Alex’s mask, now returned to its ancestral abode in the midst of the community, was from the very beginning of the narrative a vessel for the presence of ancestral spirits in the text. The first time that White allowed Alex to speak, when she considered starting her memoirs, she was not sure where to begin. “In any case THEY will be watching, from inside the house, from the garden, the Park, or most disturbingly, from above” (MMO: 17). This passage, immediately followed by Alex’s forgetfulness of her husband’s death, her old cat’s death, and the allusion to her previous hospitalization in a mental institution, reinforces the reader’s conviction that Alex is suffering from dementia. Yet it is through the least likely mask of a mad woman, who denies her community and her responsibilities to her family, that White chooses to demonstrate that the spirits of the past can be accessed, suggesting at the same time that they can probably be accessed easily if the readers care to listen to their voices, since they are everywhere all the time, in the house, in the park and, most disturbingly, above us.

1.

The Mask: a Tool for the Enforcement of Mutual Responsibility

Both in Greece and in Italy, Patrick can see the sights and the people Alex used to talk about and even hear the sounds she described (MMO: 185). In Naples, he and Hilda witness a biker grabbing a bag from a man on the street, and Hilda hurries Patrick away “from what she decided was none of our business;” yet “again, in Rome, while exploring the Corso, a man dropped dead at our feet, fol-

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lowing gunfire from behind the grille … Hilda reacted as in Naples, but on this occasion I could hardly expect it was none of our business. I distinctly heard the anarchic laughter of Alex Gray from behind the palazzo grille” (MMO: 186). The spirit of Alex’s mask lives on and serves this time as a conscience, recalling Patrick, despite Hilda’s reluctance, to the mutual responsibility one should have for other people, even if they are strangers in the street. Patrick settles down with Hilda upon their return to Australia, and he is now sleeping in Alex’s bed and enjoying her daughter’s care (MMO: 191-2). He manages to do what Alex couldn’t, share a suitcase with Hilda (whereas Alex sat on her own suitcase containing her many letters) and come to terms with an intimate common life with another person, albeit a platonic marriage of emotional convenience. Patrick considers this common life with Hilda to be part of Alex’s revenge, who years before had told him he “‘should marry Hilda. I [Alex] don’t mean for sexual reasons … but so that she could have something to look after, I’m no use to her, we know. But you, you silly old thing …’” (MMO: 192). Once more, the mask is doing its job, in bringing the most unlikely of people together, to share a common existence, the trivially of a shared toothpaste, but more importantly caring for each other; the mask will continue doing this work for those willing to adopt its teachings since, as Patrick says of Alex, “we were … never quit of each other” (MMO: 192).

2.

The Writer’s Responsibility

A few pages into the novel, Patrick describes his conversation with Alex’s parents prior to her wedding to Hilary. Alex’s parents are displeased with their daughter’s choice of a husband, and her mother turns to Patrick, the groom’s friend, and says: “‘half the children born in war or revolution are unwanted. Can you not do something, Lieutenant White, to help us?’ She was looking at me hopefully, but without expectation. ‘How can I alter the course of history?’ It was what they knew” (MMO: 13). Alex’s parents looked up to Patrick, who, endowed with a uniform and the rank of lieutenant, seemed as though he had some power to help them. His answer does not surprise them, as they did not really expect him to be able to cancel the marriage: “it was what they knew.” As a lieutenant in the army Patrick could not change much, perhaps, but as the assigned editor of Alex’s memoirs he can do a lot, especially after her death. The conversation between Patrick and Alex’s parents reveals White’s thoughts regarding the role of the writer in society. White believes the writer is responsible towards society and can indeed contribute to the alteration of the course of history. A writer can and should judge what he sees, and help to change the values which model the historical self. These values give the masks used by a society all their force and legitimacy. Uncovering the masks

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and criticizing the values that both gave rise to the use of masks and made this use effective, can, in the long run, bring about a change in society, a change that may be brought about from within the writer’s text. In Flaws in the Glass, White described how during World War II he became unoccupied while waiting for relief forces in Tobruk and found refuge in the books he read: “As blood flowed, and coagulated in suppurating wounds, as aircrafts were brought down in flames and corpses tipped into the lime-pits of Europe, I saw Dickens as the pulse, the intact jugular vein of a life which must continue, regardless of the destructive forces Dickens himself recognized” (FG: 96).58 Thus, while the madness of the war waged on, the writer’s role was to preserve the logic, sanity and ethics of peaceful times. In Memoirs of Many in One White does the same, even though he seems only to be presenting the uneventful story of a somewhat bizarre old woman in a more or less consistent plot. Yet his portrayal of Alex is related to historical occurrences and the ravages and aftermath of WWII, which are intertwined with her memories and interwoven in Patrick’s editorial introduction and explanations. This portrayal of occurrences levels a pointed criticism at a world that had gone mad during those years, crazy enough to produce many aspects of the mask-character of Alex. The war had caught White in the US, yet he felt compelled to fly back to England and join the army, despite the entreaties of his friends that he stay behind. During what he termed ‘the theater of war’ in his memoirs and biography, White was stationed in Alexandria as a soldier in the British air force intelligence. Unlike the “‘old boys’,” the British officers who “appeared shaven and spicked up even at the moments of worst crisis,” White belonged to a “ramshackle detachment … amateurs cast by fate in a classic play” (FG: 93). The soldiers of his unit would frequent cabarets and whores and become thoroughly drunk. “The most difficult part of the performance came when I had to round up my pilots for the journey back. From being a pander I became a conscience” (FG: 91). A conscience is not something one ‘becomes’ but rather listens to. Yet White’s persona, in Flaws as well as in his other fictional portraits, is a mask; originally that of a care-free youth, the war has turned it into that of a conscience. White recognized and embraced the collective in himself and thus could claim to have become a conscience. After the war, he did not go back to the US as he had thought upon leaving it, but back to Australia. White was fashioning his identity, which he saw as part and parcel of the “need for a national identity,” that was problematic in a country “still in the melting pot,” where “most of us … are still uncertain in ourselves. Australia will never acquire a national identity until enough individual Australians acquire identities of their own.” Such an identity may be found in each person’s collective unconscious: “what may be our salvation is the discovery of the identity hidden deep in any one of us, and which may be found in even the most desperate individual, if he cares to search the spiritual womb which

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

contains the embryo of what can be one’s personal contribution to truth and life.”59 Despite his natural shyness and his resentment of public appearances, White took a public stand on public matters such as his country’s involvement with nuclear armament, as well as environmental issues. In his speeches, he expressed his belief that “we are all to some extent to blame [for World War II]! That is one of the terrible truths.”60 Private individuals cannot hide behind their leaders and consider themselves blameless, neither for the occurrences of the war nor for its aftermath, and in any event, as White wrote to Peggy Garland, he believed “that individuals may do much to repair the damage that has been done.”61 White links World War II to his understanding of the future: “if any of us is to survive a nuclear holocaust, those survivors will know it happened because a majority of the world’s population was too inert, too hedonistic, too ignorant, too complacently wealthy to organise timely resistance to the leaders who devised it.”62 White took part in rallies and demonstration and above all wrote articles which stated ideas similar to those expressed with artistic means in his plays and novels. Clearly, in White’s eyes, a writer is a public figure since without a public his art would not exist, and as such he has responsibilities towards his public. In Memoirs of Many in One, the mask is a vehicle for the embodying and awakening of the sleeping conscience of his public. White’s allusion to Madách’s poem in Memoirs of Many in One, in this context, seems clear to me for two additional reasons. First, White was writing the Australian epic, and was conscious of the need for a national revival in Australia, similar to that which Madách’s poem alluded to and gave rise to in his Hungarian public. Secondly, by turning to European literary origins such as Goethe, Milton, and Madách, White evidently warns Australians of the dangers lurking for a society in which the collective unconscious has been unleashed and allowed to ravage the streets. The figure of Satan is an embodiment of modern individualism which can cause, among other things, blindness to one’s social responsibilities towards others. Megalomania, and the inflation of the self which is also embodied and represented by Satan, is made to reverberate in respect to Hitler. Australians or Americans dancing at the “Adolf Hitler Hotel, Washington DC” as Alex does (MMO: 44), must be reminded that what happened in Germany can happen anywhere else and that they are responsible for their masks, not only their production and nature but also their necessity as containers safeguarding collective unconscious materials. Moreover, White is conscious of his own responsibilities as a creator.63 He may have let his mask-character behave wildly,64 yet he has also introduced into his text the audience’s boos and laughing comments about Alex’s performance. His hope is that his readers realize that the pathetic old mask they are presented with is the outcome of their own society’s values and that the mask is their responsibility, to endorse or to change. Yet while Shakespeare could rely on

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his audience’s familiarity with the workings of the personification mask of the Queen, for example, and the audience’s participation in upholding this mask, White must recreate both the recognition of the existence of the mask and especially the recognition to the community’s part in its creation. In fact, where White remains what may be justly termed a classic writer is precisely in his use of a dramaturgy which sustains and is sustained by masks. Art, for White, has remained traditional in many ways and even the modern theater is already a hundred years old and is no longer a novelty but part of the canon. In Memoirs, White upholds the tension between classical tragedy, which portrayed collective figures representing clear social codes and his modern protagonist, who wants to appropriate the story for her private use. True to his times, White produces a text that abides by post-modern style, yet his writing also proves post-modernism has not completely done away with plot, drama, and characterization. Two kinds of fragmentation that White exposes play a major role in the text: the fragmentary philosophy of modern society, and the fragments of older traditions which emerge in the modern plot-line. As Sanford Budick points out, “although we are accustomed to thinking of the phenomenon called tradition as a handing down of an integral whole of meaning … it is far more accurate to say that, on the personal as well as the public levels of our experience, cultural tradition exists only as a participation in a constellation of fragments.”65 White’s novel is a clear example of the fragmentary inheritance modern culture must be content with: the older, morality play is apparent in fragmented form within the text of the modern plot and the modern plot is itself a mere collection of fragments. Both plot-lines are unified by the underlying structure of the morality play. In a similar way, by using what are essentially two parts of one mask-character, Alex and Patrick, White seems to be trying to provide a unifying pattern for the character-mask, a “constellation of fragments,” to use Budick’s term. Together, Alex and Patrick, female and male, each upholding artistic pretensions while being at the same time the other’s critic, form one unified mask made of all its co-existing fragments. Such a mask, made of the consolidation of its fragments, becomes an accessible, visible kind of mask that a modern novel can use. As a modern writer, White must introduce the discussion of moral issues in a well wrapped gift-box that is acceptable to his reluctant readership, that is, if he wants to awaken his public to its collective aversion to ethical issues. White’s masks thus not only survive their historical transposition into the novel, trailing their ritual context, but are still useful for collective purposes. White shows that society’s rituals need to be re-examined and re-invented to fit modern society. This endeavor is possible on condition that society comes to recognize and takes responsibility for its inner collective by finding ways to channel and sustain it through new symbols and new masks.

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One

N otes 1 | Marr describes how White, who was already sick, wrote Memoirs in only three months and spent a mere four on a second draft, before handing it in to his publisher. “Both energy and patience were lacking for the typing of a third draft” (Patrick White: A Life, p. 624), which was unusual for the meticulous writer that White was. White was clearly aware time was becoming short for him. 2 | David Tacey reads White’s work from a Jungian point of view: “each White book is a variation upon a single myth relating to the figures of the great mother and her eternal youth.” See: David J. Tacey, “Patrick White: The Great Mother and her Son,” in: Journal of Analytical Psychology 28 (1983), p. 166. Specifically, he viewed Memoirs to be “an attempt to trivialize and abuse his [White’s] work, to vent his rage upon his tragic fortune. There is a chilling awareness throughout of his own defeat.” He explains Alex, the main protagonist’s behavior in terms of escalating madness, and opposes other critics who have become enraptured with Alex, succumbing to White’s manipulation, since he claims that “White urges us to sympathize with Alex Gray, to see her as a creative individual who is stifled by social convention and is forced to extreme measures in order to survive.” See: David J. Tacey, Patrick White: Fiction and the unconscious, pp. 201, 207. James Bulman-May is another Jungian critic, who deciphers what he considers to be White’s alchemical code, and finds that in Memoirs White “paraphrases Mercury’s statement, thus acknowledging his lifelong dedication to the alchemical process.” See: James Bulman-May, Patrick White and Alchemy (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty, 2001), p.19. Another critic, Karin Hansson, found metaphysical and psychological background to White’s work in both Jung and Blake, and drew attention to the use White made of symbols, repetitions and recurrent patterns, pointing to the “simultaneous existence of static and dynamic components in White’s fiction.” See: Karin Hansson, The Warped Universe: A Study of Imagery and Structure in Seven Novels by Patrick White (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1984), p. 26. 3 | Since the present study is focused on the creation and function of mask-characters, further research is necessary to fully assess mask-narratives as key technologies of the secondary personalization of narratives. Such research would follow the trail of Northop Frye’s analysis of archetypes in fiction and his discussion of genres, or modes, in terms of their level and degree of narration, in his Anatomy of Criticism. Other works which come to mind in this context are Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in 19 th century Europe, Frederick Jameson’s The Political Unconscious and Paul Ricœur’s Time and Narrative. 4 | Phillip Zarrilli writes, regarding such plays as the Chester cycle, that “where pageant wagons were used, they provided stages for the tableaux in the procession and/ or the performances at certain stations along the way in the procession … the manuscripts were written by different hands at different times.” See: Phillip Zarrilli, Bruce McConachie, Gary Jay Williams and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei, Theatre Histories: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), p. 77.

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Creating Communities 5 | Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction From Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 12-13, 25, 28. 6 | One could also claim that like many other Whitean characters, Alex is living her romantic ideals in her own imagination. Pointedly, in the case of Memoirs of Many in One, White parades his quixotic character among the various social groups that assist in constructing her mask and in both allowing and sustaining her delusions. For a general comparison between White and Flaubert in the fashioning of heroines in the grip of their own romantic imagination as their only locus of meaning, see: John Beston, Patrick White within the Western Literary Tradition (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010), pp. 25-45. 7 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, pp. 20, 16. 8 | David Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 150. 9 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, p. 81. 10 | Ibid. 17. 11 | David Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 626. 12 | Ibid. pp. 494-5. 13 | Using an editor for the memoirs of his protagonist and giving him his own name is itself a self-reflective strategy in the writing of masks. White writes: “I only have confidence in myself when I am another character. All the characters in my books are myself, but they are a kind of disguise.” In addition, White’s use of the character of an editor as the one responsible for the text is a professed act of humility on White’s part as a writer. Like Alex, who is finally cleansed of her vanity in the asylum through her act of penance (MMO: 171), White subordinates himself to his masks, admitting that a creative artist can only co-create a work of art with those collective elements he manages to come in touch with. 14 | Jung notes that “it is a psychological rule that when an archetype has lost its metaphysical hypostasis, it becomes identified with the conscious mind of the individual, which it influences and refashions in its own form. And since an archetype always possesses a certain numinosity, the integration of the numen generally produces an inflation of the subject.” See: Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Vol 11 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), p. 315. On the subject of ego-inflation, Neumann writes: “all states of inflation and possession are accompanied by a restriction of consciousness … Every inflation, every self-identification of the ego with a transpersonal content – and that is the precise meaning of hubris, in which man imagines himself to be equal to the gods – inevitably results in downfall.” Neumann goes on to explain the example provided by the Nazi movement as a result of ego-inflation of the movement’s leader and the psychological reaction of his followers. See: Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Eugene Rolfe (New York: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), pp. 42-3, 88. 15 | At the end of the life of each member of the tribe, his personal “pocket” mask is put together with all his ancestors’ masks in a sacramental pile. Each person is thus

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One reassembled into the midst of the community by means of his mask. See: George Harley, Masks as Agents of Social Control in North East Liberia, p. 4. 16 | David Marr, Patrick White, p. 4. 17 | Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 28. 18 | Jean Paul Sartre, Politics and Literature, pp. 40-1. 19 | The city is the place of dwelling of the city people, socially modeled and doubtlessly masked. Escaping the city in order to go back to nature and presumed genuineness won’t rid one of one’s mask, as White clarifies in another of his novels, Voss. Voss, the main male protagonist, fantasizes that authenticity beyond masks exists, and deludes himself that the almost uninhabited desert is a space where masks are no longer necessary. Not only does he find that masks are not shed in the desert, but even in death, this German romantic character does not escape his mask, as a statue of him is erected by the survivors of the failed journey and he is eternalized in stone. 20 | Wolfgang Iser, Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 199. 21 | Ibid. p. 200. 22 | In Flaws, White admires a young woman who came to a ball representing, in her skimpy outfit, the ‘Naked Truth.’ He admits “I was fascinated by her, the high heels, her nakedness, her courage. And here we still were, years after, the Mad Hatters among us, fascinated by the flimsy, not quite assessable Truth.” See: Flaws, p. 225. White, who always felt self-conscious about not knowing which clothes to wear for public occasions, criticized, among other things, his contemporaries’ hypocritical search for ‘truth’ while clad in designer clothes and identifying with various status symbols. 23 | Patricia Morley claims that the vision from which White’s novels spring “belongs to the tradition of mysticism, which seeks direct experience or immediate awareness of God, and sees the soul as something wholly distinct from the reasoning mind with its powers.” Morley claims further that White’s mystic vision is ultimately Christian, though he was influenced by Jewish mysticism. See: Patricia A. Morley, The Mystery of Unity (New York: Harper Torch Books, 1965), pp. 2-3. Laurence Stevens considers White’s texts to be dealing with “human wholeness emerging from dissociation” rather than from transcendent realms. See: Laurence Steven, Dissociation and Wholeness in Patrick White’s Fiction (Ontario: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1989), pp. 6, 12. David Coad examines the religious and metaphysical aspects in White’s work, while Charles Lock and Hilary Heltay read the texts from a linguistic point of view. See: David Coad, Prophète dans le désert. Essais sur Patrick White (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1997), Hilary Heltay, The Articles and the Novelist: Reference Conventions and Reader Manipulation in Patrick White’s Creation of Fictional Worlds (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1983), and Charles Lock, “Patrick White: Writing Towards Silence,” Stand Magazine and Kenyon Review, New Series Vol. 2 Nr. 4/Vol. 3 Nr. 1 (March 2001), http://www.people.vcu.edu/~dlatane/stand-maga/index.html (accessed 30 August 2009).

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Creating Communities 24 | According to Jung, “as a psychological symbol the Trinity denoted … a process of unconscious maturation taking place within the individual. To that extent the three Persons are personifications of the three phases of a regular, instinctive psychic occurrence that always tends to express itself in the form of mythologems and ritualistic customs.” He adds that “regarded as a psychological symbol, the Trinity represents the progressive transformation of one and the same substance, namely the psyche as a whole.” Concerning the Holy Ghost, Jung writes: “through the intervention of the Holy Ghost … man is included in the divine process, and this means that the principle of separatedness and autonomy over against God – which is personified in Lucifer as the God-opposing will – is included in it too.” See: Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, Vol 11 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958), pp. 193-6. Alex would want nothing more than to be “included in the divine process” to use Jung’s words, yet is incapable of doing so due to her negation of, and incapacity to come to terms with, the collective components both outside and inside her self. 25 | White is aware of the strength of masks and of their capacity to convey collective, universal feelings, which he is capable to recognize even when the mask is foreign to him, and he can feel that “something of the Hebrew archetype entered into me” (Flaws, p. 112), or take part in a religious procession in Athens. White joined a queue of people waiting to kiss a glassed-in icon, and recalled his experience: the saint had “a face as archetypal and unadorned as that of the peasant who has just fainted [of excitement]. Though the glass was wiped after each kiss with a wad of cotton wool, I had been brought up to fear ‘germs’. Perhaps I could not exclude the divine ones, anyway I bent and kissed the air this side of the contaminating glass, and shuffled on, full of regret for my hygienic Protestant upbringing” (Flaws, 115). 26 | In an interview with Craig McGregor, White said: “religion. Yes, that’s behind all my books. What I am interested in is the relationship between the blundering human being and God. I belong to no church, but I have a religious faith … everyone has a religious faith of a kind.” See: Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks. The collected Essays, Articles and Speeches of the Nobel Prize Winning Novelist (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 19. 27 | Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Pantheon Books, 1963), pp. 319, 321. 28 | Ibid. pp. 321-2. 29 | Ibid. pp. 322-4. 30 | Kouros statues were put in temples as offerings to the gods by wealthy families, or put at the tombs of members of these families. The statues were usually carved in marble and represented a standing youth. The influence of Egyptian sculptures is apparent but only relevant for the earlier statues, made before the 7th century BC. After this period, the Greek sculptures became more refined. See: Ancient Greece Org., Greek Art: Kouros. 26 Jan. 2009, κóρη is the Greek word for a girl, a virgin maiden, and the feminine form for κόρος, or κοΰρος, which means son, male infant. See: Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 980-981. The statues usually represented an effeminate youth with long braided hair.

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One The choice of this mask-statue for Alex has, to my mind, a double purpose. On the one hand, White stresses Alex’s inability to choose her gender, which is another one of the masks he finds society imposes on the individual. On the other hand, Alex as a mask is herself part of the double-gender mask embodying Patrick White in the text, made up of Alex and Patrick. The use of the Kouros mask can be seen in the same light, as indicative of White’s own claim to contain both male and female components within his writer-self. As he said to Ronald Waters, Alex “‘is myself in my various roles and sexes. It gives me great scope’.” See: Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 622. The fact that White was also a proclaimed homosexual can also be hinted at here, but to seems less important than his bringing forth the many characters that inhabited his imagination. 31 | Alex vividly describes her becoming the Kouros torso in the following episode with Onouphrios the monk, before returning to her human form: “I [Alex] lay down beside the monk … I felt heavier than my actual body, my stone head and plaited locks weighing down the straw-filled pillow, my torso, and my rigid arms and thighs up to where they had been broken off” (MMO: 80). 32 | As Erich Neumann explains, the operation of the psychic health of the collective is due to “the same compensatory tendencies in mankind which can be shown to exist in the individual psyche.” (OC: 363). 33 | Neumann explains that “like the individual symbol, the social symbol valid for the group is produced by the ‘equal collaboration of both’” the conscious and the unconscious origins. He goes on to say that “so long as the symbol is a living and effective force, it transcends the capacity of the experiencing consciousness and ‘formulates an essential unconscious component’ – the very reason why it is so attractive and disturbing.” Ibid. pp. 366-8. 34 | Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 73. 35 | Ronald Lawler and Donald W. Wuerl eds., The Teaching of Christ: A Catholic Catechism for Adults (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1976), p. 482. 36 | Ibid. p. 484. 37 | Ibid. p. 482. 38 | Ibid. pp. 489-90. 39 | Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), p. 584. 40 | Ibid. pp. 629, 653-659. 41 | According to Sartre, “the best example of the ‘we’ can be furnished by the spectator at a theatrical performance whose consciousness is exhausted in apprehending the imaginary spectacle … [the] spectator .... in the very upsurge which makes him a consciousness [of] being a co-spectator of the spectacle.” Ibid. p. 535. 42 | Alex had already alluded to Prometheus earlier in the novel, on her way to the highsociety cocktail, where White emphasizes the layering and co-existence of earlier myths still relevant in modern times: “I refused myself the luxury of fossicking through the past, perhaps ending on some Aegean rock, my liver pecked at by a great predatory bird, its beak shaped like a scimitar” (MMO: 66).

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Creating Communities 43 | Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, p. 498. 44 | Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader, p. 227. 45 | White parodies Emerson’s famous passage in Nature, where the “I” becomes a transparent eyeball, “a part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is a trifle and a disturbance.” See: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (New York: AMS Press, 1968), p. 10. In the introduction to Nature, Emerson also wrote that in a solitary outing into nature, man can reclaim an original, innocent relation to the universe, and attain “a religion by revelation to us, and not through the history of theirs.” Ibid. p. 3. 46 | As we saw earlier, Mattia was the only one who did not understand that the little stoup of water placed near his bed by Adriana was meant to contain holy water, and turned it into an ashtray. Whereas Alex invents rites, the meaning of which she alone understands, Mattia does not understand the meaning of the rites that everyone around him acknowledges. 47 | The egg also appears in the episode at the Dobbins’ house (MMO: 42), the couple Alex proposes to have as adoptive parents, as part of her enactment of the child-archetype. Molly Dobbins prepares a fried egg for Alex and herself, rather than a boiled egg, which remains whole after cooking. Alex’s failed attempt to return to childhood, probably representing her severed relationship with her own parents, is represented in Alex’s mind as “the unhatched, shell-less eggs dragged from the innards of a slaughtered hen” (MMO: 47). 48 | An extended analysis of White’s inclusion of Imre Madách’s poem in this novel has appeared in my article “Patrick White’s Hungarian Connections,” in: JASAL, Vol 15, No 3 (2015): Australian Literature / World Literature: borders, skins, mappings. 49 | Patrick White would have probably known Madách’s work in theatrical form, which is consistent with his staging of Alex in various theater productions, although Madách’s poem was performed in the theater for the first time only after his own death. The work “has always been the subject of scholarly, ideological and political debate, as well as being constantly in the repertoire.” The poem received “disparaging comparison to Faust,” according to Tamás Koltai, in his article entitled “the Tragedies of Man,” published in The Hungarian Quarterly, Volume XXXVIII, No. 147, autumn 1997. 26 January, 2009, http://www.hungarianquarterly.com/no147/p145.shtml. M adách’s popularity in Hungary was also based on his poem’s arousal of national feelings. The Hungarians had believed Hungary could one day liberate itself from the French under Louis XIV’s rule, without outside help. “This belief, born out of the utter hopelessness of Hungary’s future … has remained a characteristic trait of the astonishing and for many readers incomprehensibly optimistic conclusion at the end of the profoundly pessimistic poem Thoughts in The Library (c. 1850) by Mihály Vörösmarty, and Imre Madách’s drama Tragedy of Man (c. 1860).” See: Paul Lendvai, The Hungarians: A Thousand Years of Victory and Defeat, trans. Ann Major (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 132.

Chapter Five: White’s Tour de Force: Memoirs of Many in One 50 | Imre Madách, The Tragedy of Man, trans. George Szirtes, 3 rd ed. (Budapest: Corvina, 1998), 27 Jan 2009, http://mek.oszk.hu/00900/00918/html/. All references to this poem will be taken from the online edition of this translation. 51 | Madách, Imre, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 13.05.2008. 52 | Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, p. 62. 53 | On the relation between hospitalization and ritual, William Noonan wrote that although “hospital administrators, doctors, and staff are not likely to perceive their procedures as rituals, or as elements belonging to a rite of passage … For a system intent on promoting health, the greater the extent to which the health care field becomes aware of how its procedures function like rituals, the greater the potential there is for providing its members with the facility to maneuver through the most difficult transition of human existence: suffering and death.” See: William R. Noonan, “Western Hospitalization for Surgeries as ‘Rite of Passage’,” in Michael B. Aune and Valerie De Martinis eds., Religious and Social Ritual: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 295. 54 | This moment is quite different from the moment of recognition White allowed another one of his characters on his death bed, in a short story entitled “The Age of Wart.” Almost autobiographical, containing many details from White’s own life, this is the story of a friendship between two schoolboys. The narrator catches an ugly wart from his friend, a wart that, for all its ugliness, will symbolize their attachment. The narrator tries to get rid of the repulsive wart, and succeeds, yet at the same time the two boys’ lives drift apart: Tancred, the other boy, drops out of school and the narrator is taken away to England by his parents. Through war and the life that ensued, the narrator receives glimpses of his friend’s whereabouts and occupation which are related by other people, and never stops looking for him, admiring him from a distance and resenting in his friend what he senses and knows to be his better and his twin. At the narrator’s own deathbed, he discovers the wart has grown back, and his friend “has come. He is holding my hand in his. I who was once the reason for the world’s existence am no longer this sterile end-all. As the world darkens, the evil in me is dying. I understand. Along with the prisoners, sufferers, survivors. It is no longer I it is we. It is we who hold the secret of existence we who control the world WE.” The key to human existence lies in human relationships, between two friends, between all the ‘we’ that constitute an individual’s outer and inner society, without which he remains sterile. See: Patrick White, Three Uneasy Pieces (London: Penguin Books, 1988), and pp. 27-59. 55 | St. Chiara, or Clare, was the “Cofoundress of the Order of Poor Ladies, or Clares, and first Abbess of San Damiano; born at Assisi, 16 July, 1194; died there 11 August, 1253.” See: Kevin Knight ed., “St. Clare of Assisi.” New Advent, Catholic Encyclopedia. 27 Jan 2009, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04004a.htm (accessed 27 January 2009). White uses the term “poor Clares” as we see in the text above, which is the name by which the members of this order are still known today.

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Creating Communities 56 | Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust, trans. Philip Wayne (London: Penguin Books, 1981), pp. 88-9. 57 | Falkenberg’s name is clearly reminiscent of a falcon. 58 | Dickens would have served White, along with Shakespeare, as a source of paradigms for the construction and functioning of masks in fiction, in his wide use of personification masks and stock characters. 59 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, pp. 114-5. As we saw in chapter two, Castoriadis’ words are relevant here, since he claimed that the individual always remains connected to his society by partaking in the collective imagination which has structured him, while at the same time participating in the constitution of his society and in the changes each individual can bring to its institutions. 60 | Though there is no evidence that White read Neumann, Neumann’s words come to mind here: “those who saw and failed to act, those who looked away because they did not want to see, those who did not see although they could have seen, and those, too, whose eyes were unable to see – each and every one of these is actually in alliance with evil. We are all guilty – all peoples, all religions, all nations, all classes. Humanity itself is guilty.” See: Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology, p. 26. 61 | David Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 229. 62 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, p. 164. 63 | As a creator of Alex’s memoirs, Patrick is made to realize his responsibility for the mask of Alex: “I I – the great creative ego – had possessed myself of Alex Gray’s life … and created from it the many images I needed to develop my own obsessions, both literary and real” (MMO: 192). Yet Alex’s ‘I I’ is not identical to Patrick’s. Through Alex, White expresses a Jungian concept of the self, which can strive to achieve wholeness. Since this wholeness is made of the self as well as of the collective-self, no single part of the whole can pronounce a separate ‘I’ of his own. Patrick’s ‘I I’ is the expression of his coming to terms with the impossibility to say a single ‘I’ as a creator, as well as a further expression of the medieval sub-plot which considers a declaration of a single, royal ego to be sinful. 64 | White parodies the notion of a creator’s responsibility when he put it in Alex’s mouth: when she is about to perform and shoot at her audience, she says: “I am the Creator. Perhaps for that reason I am afraid of what I let loose, of what I have created” (MMO: 166). For all its derisive aspect, her utterance expresses one of White’s main concerns. 65 | Sanford Budick, The Western Theory of Tradition: Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 225.

Chapter Six: Conclusion A. C ritical A ssump tions : F ollowing I ser , C astoriadis , S artre , J ung and N eumann The study of the functions of literary masks has shown them to be remarkable fictional constructs. Although invisible and intangible, these masks have retained the efficacy and the pragmatic impact of their historical predecessors, the ritual masks and the theater masks. In tracing the transformation that ritual strategies had to undergo when they were transferred into the theater and then into the novel it became clear that ritual, ceremonial elements evidently present in the theater, are brought into the literary text by its mask-characters. Since they inherited their functions from ritual masks and theatrical masks, literary masks had to be defined according to their functions, and thus were divided into personification masks and impersonation masks. The common conception of masks is that they are playful or deceitful artifacts, of no more consequence than a temporary disguise of the real self. While this may be true of impersonation masks, the impact of this use on the lives of the characters has been shown to often be quite serious. Evidently, even seemingly playful impersonation masks must be used according to their collective sanction, and characters disregarding this suffered the consequences of their actions. The collective factor in the use of masks is even clearer when one considers personification masks, since these masks do not hide anything, but rather reveal the community’s beliefs and values as projected onto them and embodied in them. Personification masks function as vessels of collective unconscious matter, making this content accessible. The use of such masks in the text allows the readers to come into contact with the collective matter present in each of them, as he or she becomes engaged in reconstructing the mask in the act of reading. Part of the terminology necessary for the discussion of literary masks, as well as the conceptual framework regarding their operation, was conceived following several thinkers, whose texts dealt, each from his particular angle, with elements related to the collective imaginary and its manifestations in fiction.

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Wolfgang Iser’s work was especially enlightening; his contention that literature and anthropology have much in common was a useful starting point for an examination of personification masks and the functions they share with ritual masks. Like their historical predecessors, one of the functions of personification masks is to define their belief community. Yet whereas Iser’s work concentrated on the solitary reader and in the freedom he or she enjoys in the de-pragmatized reality fiction provides,1 personification masks prove that readers are not as solitary nor as free as they may believe themselves to be. By actively participating in piecing the masks together as they read, readers co-create and bring to life the masks which the writer introduces into the text, allowing them in turn to become effective tools in the creation of their community of readers. The readers are thus made to realize that their own private imaginary is part of a collective, universal imaginary, which is embodied by the masks. In addition, the readers are made to face their double responsibility for the masks: for assisting in their performance in the text and for fashioning the masks in their present representation. Iser’s analysis of Shakespeare’s depiction of the collective imaginary’s production of the personification mask of King Henry V by his soldiers provided a good example of how personification masks are created and upheld in fiction. The second body of the king is the clearest instance of a personification mask in a literary text, and its role in bonding the king’s community, based on a common imaginary content which in turn sustains the king’s mask, was aptly described by Iser.2 Iser was thus clearly aware of the contribution of the collective to fiction, although he did not include the collective as one of the elements of his theory regarding the mechanism of fiction.3 His major interest lay in the individual reader, reading the product of an individual writer, whose text provides the reader with the opportunity to explore many alternative individual personalities. Iser described the historical development of the concept of fiction in The Fictive and The Imaginary. To amplify the sociological and political conception of the collective imaginary, he devoted a section to discussing Castoriadis’ theory of the “radical imaginary,” introduced as the “unfathomable precondition for the institutionalization of society.”4 Iser also noted that “Castoriadis’ theory highlights the creative character of institutionalization,”5 and hence the role of fiction in society and vice versa, of society in fiction. Nevertheless, this does not imply that Iser built his theory on the collective imaginary, since on the contrary, he insists that fiction de-pragmatizes the real world, and that the imaginary and its fictional manifestations put the historical political and social anchorage in brackets. Iser’s focus consistently remained on his idea of the imagination as a space of liberation of the reader’s creative subjectivity, since according to him, the de-pragmatized space of the imaginary enables the free creation of the self.6

Chapter Six: Conclusion

To understand the pragmatics of the social imaginary, and the impact of pragmatic productions of the collective on the individual, it was necessary to turn to Castoriadis, who demonstrated the role of the collective in the fashioning of the social subject and in the creation of the individual’s personal identity. Castoriadis pointed out the antithesis between the collective modeling of the subject and the self-fashioning of the subject. While society cannot exist outside the individuals making it up, each individual paradoxically depends on society for the constitution of his or her separate existence.7 Castoriadis’ theory is important for the understanding of the collective element within the self, its unifying and constitutive power for the individual, specifically for the individual imaginary, which participates in the creation of personification masks. Importantly for the subject of masks, Castoriadis considers the imaginary to be pragmatic in that it institutes society, pointing to the pragmatic implications of the use of personification masks as imaginary constructs on historical reality. Castoriadis was also a practicing psychoanalyst, who acknowledged that it is incontestable that “psychoanalysis makes an essential contribution to our understanding of social phenomena, whether economic, political or religious.”8 Yet it is to Jung that one must turn in order to understand the structure and dynamics of the collective psyche and its production, specifically for an understanding of the psychological mechanics of collective literary co-production, of author and readers. Jung’s extensive study of archetypes and the patterns of their manifestation in symbols, myths and dreams, as well as in religious practices, folklore and fairy tales, is highly relevant to the study of literary constructs such as masks, collectively produced and collectively sanctioned. Impersonation masks, and more especially personification masks, relate the individual to his or her society, delineating the community of the mask and indicating the limits of their usage. Most importantly, personification masks doubly connect the individual to society, by mirroring society’s values, and thereby raising the individual’s consciousness of the existence of binding archetypal matter within the personal psyche. Jung’s elucidations of the archetypes of the Great Individual and the Persona were especially relevant, since masks inherently imply a double design for the individual, both private and collective. The Persona, usually considered to be the individual’s privately invented protection in face of the demands made upon him or her by society, has an additional function, as Jung explains. The second function of the Persona is to protect the individual from the collective unconscious elements within his or her own psyche, which can become dangerous if they are not properly addressed in the course of the maturation process. Each individual must come to a conscious realization of the archetypal forces that operate within, and to fragment them in order to be able to then integrate them into the self. Ultimately, the individual can enjoy his or her creation of a persona in the sense of an impersonation mask, a cover that protects

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the individual from outer society on the one hand, and in the sense of a personification mask, gain the defense the persona can provide the individual against internal collective matters on the other hand. When incarnated in fiction, the persona archetype has a dual expression, related to the functions of impersonation and personification of the literary mask. Impersonation masks are used as external manifestations of the persona archetype, consciously used by the characters for various social purposes. Personification masks are used to embody and reflect collective contents, which become apparent on a mask-character. Personification mask-characters, in turn, can be aware of their mask, like Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, or not at all aware of it, as White’s Alex. The juxtaposition of the two masks creates a comic deflation and exposes Alex’s mask to the scrutiny of her readers, inviting their judgment. The use of the mask-character of Alex allows the readers to realize the collective values she embodies. The readers’ criticism of the mask’s nature and action can bring about recognition of the necessity for change in society’s values. The mask provides each and every reader the mandate to strive for such change and encourages the recognition of his or her power to do so, despite the ostensibly negligible impact of a single reader. Eric Neumann, Jung’s disciple, pursued a different direction in examining the separate personal ego, released from the collective psyche and its archetypal contents. In his book The Origins of Consciousness, Neumann, more explicitly than Jung, traces the development of the empirical personal ego in the process he termed “secondary personalization.” Neumann emphasized that the development of a distinct personal individuality paradoxically depends on the individual’s capacity to integrate and process collective unconscious materials within his or her consciousness and turn them into personal materials. Neumann stresses that the goal of developing consciousness is what he calls “centroversion,” a process involving a tense balance between the ego and the collective that leads to “secondary personalization.” As a result of this process, the persona can perform a double function, at once luring the ego into inflation by swamping archetypal agents and at the same time defending it against this very swamping. Neumann stressed the dangers of submerging the personal ego into the inner collective agencies as he or she seeks “wholeness.” Failure to undergo a centroversion process, which results in secondary personalization and in the creation of a double-use persona, leads to the inflation of the ego and to a dangerous swamping by archetypal forces. As we have seen, in his two main characters, Alex and Patrick, White presented the two opposite outcomes of the process of secondary personalization, the megalomaniac manifestations of Alex’s failure to undergo this process, and the wholeness Patrick successfully manages to achieve in himself and his immediate circle. Neumann provided tools for exploring the interrelation between the workings of the collective psyche and the artist’s ego. He explored the psychology of

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the creative artist and the warring marriage between the collective archetype of self and the individual conscious ego.9As we saw earlier, Neumann’s texts were especially relevant to a study of Patrick White’s works. White tried to reduce to coherence the chaos of the clashing sides of his many-faceted personality, the male and female, admittedly anti-social while enmeshed in every way in his society.10 Neumann emphasized that by means of symbols, it is through the creative artist that the archetypes become present on the cultural scene, transforming the life of the collective and providing a background against which the lives of all members of society are endowed with meaning. The role of the artists is to be, at one and the same time, “the conservatives who link back to the origins” and the “progressive element in the community” (OC: 377). Personification masks embody and reflect archetypal materials, linking to the origins, and can be agents of progress, bringing changes to society’s values. Therefore, they can serve as prime artistic tools in the hands of the writer, assisting him or her in fulfilling the role in society Neumann indicated for the artist. Jean-Paul Sartre’s focal point, as in several of Neumann’s books, is the individual personality of the creative artist. In The Family Idiot and in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, Sartre analyzes on both psychoanalytical and social levels, Flaubert’s and Genet’s integration of their public, social self with each artist’s private personality. Like Castoriadis, Sartre deals with society’s institutions and their imprint and modeling on the individual artist. As a theoretician of the imaginary, Sartre’s approach combined the three approaches mentioned above (of the imaginary as the locus of freedom for the individual, of the imaginary as the collective matter binding individuals to each other and to society, and of the imaginary as the collective material whose integration enables individuals and thereby society to lead healthy mental lives) to the theory of imaginary production in general and mask-production in particular. In his biographies of Flaubert and Genet, Sartre delineates the place of the collective imaginary in the psychological lives of these writers but also in the pragmatics of their social lives. Sartre’s biographies bring forth the three registers in which fictional masks operate in accordance to their historical development, namely the ritual register, the theatrical register and the novelistic register. Sartre’s work was especially interesting in his depiction of the various manifestations of collective productions of personification masks in Genet’s life, theater and fiction. The role of collective rituals of family, church and theater in the fashioning of Flaubert and Genet’s collective selves, which were used in turn in their fashioning of their mask characters in their writing, was highlighted by Sartre. Sartre showed that masks function as binding ritualistic tools, bringing about the group’s possession by often-forgotten ritualistic content by means of the imaginary. The binding function of masks also holds a central position in Pirandello’s and White’s works, regardless of their own, as well as their readers’, modern attitude towards religious rituals. As we have seen, the meaning that

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ritual practices may still contain in modern times is made present to characters such as Pirandello’s Mattia or Moscarda, White’s Mag or Danny Shepherd, despite their disrespect and even contempt for the Church. The underlying fragmented narrative in Memoirs of Many in One, based on a morality play, emphasized most of all the continuous presence and relevance of collective rituals even in the life of a self-proclaimed, rebellious artist such as Alex. The importance of the theatrical register for the creation and operation of the mask was made clear in Sartre’s analysis of Genet’s play The Blacks. The playwright relies on his white audience’s unease at the sight of a completely black cast, heightened by “slow incantations” which prepare the audience “for an act of sacrifice, which is in fact never carried out as it is the imaginary murder of a young white woman.”11 Genet turns the black actor into a theatrical subject, acting a play which has become second nature because imposed by the whites. Genet gives voice to the black character within the limitations of the theater, yet it is precisely as their “dramatic actions” which are a “repetition and exaggeration of the roles in which others, namely the whites, have cast them” that the blacks will not change, once “the dramatic elements and the ceremonial elements” become one and the same. What is suggested by “this unaltering ritual, this act of sacrifice which is in fact not taking place, is the disappearing presence of the black who hides his black truth at the same time as he manifests it.”12 The role of the audience in the co-creation of the black personification masks in the case of this play is violently forced upon them by Genet, yet it is indicative of the role of the audience of other plays. The audience’s active participation in the repetitious ritualistic ceremony that brings the masks to life on stage contains the same elements that also operate in the active participation of the readers of a fictional text in the activation of fictional masks. Sartre’s analysis was thus useful for understanding how personification masks are created and upheld in both theater and fiction.13 Clearly, both Pirandello and White realized the centrality and usefulness of the theater in the creation of a community and in activating the mask-characters they created, and they introduced the theater into their fiction as an effective background for the staging of their mask-characters. The role of society in the formation of the personification masks that Flaubert and Genet created and used was represented on the novelistic register, in their writing. The nature of the collective co-creation and enactment of a fictive mask-character was further clarified in Sartre’s description of the invention and acting out of the character of the Garçon by Flaubert and his school friends. Sartre’s detailed description provides an opportunity to closely examine the simultaneous creation of a personification mask and its community of believers, since this community was restricted to Flaubert and his friends. The members of the Garçon community were bonded together by actively participating both in inventing the mask and in taking turns in acting the

Chapter Six: Conclusion

role of the Garçon. On a small scale, Sartre described the mask-mechanism that is operative on the larger scale of a theatrical production and its audience, or of the readership of a novel. Sartre showed that Flaubert, and Genet too, used strategies similar to those used to create the Garçon when they created mask-characters in their writing, forcing their readers to co-create hateful masks as part of these writers’ revenge against what they considered to be the evils society had inflicted on them. The odious mask-characters created by Flaubert, by Genet and also by Pirandello and White, invited the readers to criticize these characters, as well as those who were responsible for their nature, namely the readers themselves.

B. P ir andello and W hite : simil ar at titudes to masks A surprising affinity was disclosed between Luigi Pirandello and Patrick White. Though Pirandello died in Italy three years before White was to publish his first novel in Australia, this distance in time and place does not detract from the similarity resulting from their anchorage in the same cultural climate. Their literary practice bears many resemblances, particularly with regard to the modern and post-modern culture of masks. Both reacted in their writing to what they observed, and used literary masks as effective tools to mirror the trends and beliefs their period produced, as well as to express their feelings about them. Both writers turned to a ritualistic frame, the theater, which served as a laboratory for the analysis of the use of masks. The theater provided them with blueprints for the modeling of mask-characters, and an inbuilt community, the audience, whose presence is as necessary as that of the actors for the activation of the masks being used. Like a role in the theater, the importance of a mask-character when it is transposed into the novel lies in what that character does, in its dramatic conduct, which is like a pantomime, conveying the collective message upon which it is built. Both writers had a similar method of writing, which meant ‘lending’ themselves to their characters, acting their parts in their heads before putting them down on paper. Pirandello was known to gesticulate profusely as he was working, acting out his dialogues with invisible characters, while White’s characters would be “rehearsing noisily in his imagination.”14 In a manner reminiscent of Pirandello’s cynicism and characters, such as Fileno or the father-character, who begged their author to take their words into account, White makes his mask-character Patrick say: “insistent characters like Hilda, Alex, Hilary, Magda make you suspect their lives count for more than the flesh and blood of your own creating” (MMO: 61). Mask-characters seem to have enjoyed a privileged status in the mind of these authors. Through the use of masks in their prose, both writers enabled solitary readers

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to identify and recognize collective archetypal matters upon the masks and in themselves, similarly to the way that spectators at the theater react when presented with actors on stage. Although the readers’ activity is indeed a solitary one, it is nevertheless part of a collective ritual, and the unifying means is the mask. Pirandello and White use one mask-character to embody the ingrained collective values of an entire community. As we saw, Pirandello used the father-character in Six Characters in Search of an Author to embody a whole community of modern disbelievers in masks. White, for his part, also personified entire communities in one mask-character, such as the members of Danny’s flock or the prostitutes in Shepherd on the Rocks, personified by Danny, or the politicians personified by Ritchie the lawyer in Big Toys. Through the use of both impersonation and personification masks, the two writers deploy a pair of competing ideologies, a traditional and a modern one. They allow their characters to use impersonation masks as expressions of their characters’ modern belief that they can fashion themselves however they choose. Yet these impersonation masks are used to debunk the characters’ actions rather than to condone them. As we saw in Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the traditional ideology upholds masks as powerful artifacts, whose use is to be taken seriously due to its potentially grave implications. This ideology is made to clash with the modern one, which considers masks to be nothing more than false, playful layers, covering the real, unchanging self. In White’s writing these two mask ideologies are present as well, and are constantly made to collide with each other, as they are in Pirandello’s text. Pirandello’s and White’s preference for the traditional personification masks over the modern use of impersonation masks is clear. Pirandello included a Commedia character in the cast of his play, while White used the almost forgotten morality play as the framework for his ‘post-modern’ novel. Both writers found that these long-neglected art forms were still alive and relevant for their audiences, and enhance the functioning of their mask-characters. As we saw, Neumann would explain the writers’ reliance on traditional materials in these terms: “the creators form the progressive element in a community, but at the same time they are the conservatives who link back to the origins” (OC: 377). The origins, to use Neumann’s term, are still relevant since they are made of archetypal materials, which are in turn contained in the masks the writers use. As Neumann explains further: by means of the symbol, the archetypes break through the creative person into the conscious world of culture. It is the life of the collective, giving it and the individual the background which alone endows life with a meaning. The meaning of religion and art is positive and synthetic, not only in primitive cultures, but also in our own over conscious culture, precisely because they provide an outlet for contents and emotional compo-

Chapter Six: Conclusion nents that have been too rigorously suppressed … the positive forces of the collective unconscious which have been excluded struggle for expression in the creative person and flow through him into the community (OC: 377).

Pirandello and White manage to translate this collective unconscious material into a language the present audience may understand, by giving it the shape of a mask, which contains and reflects the collective archetypes. The writers’ use of personification masks for their characters shows that the subject using the mask is more played upon than playing, since the forces playing upon him are inner collective powers. As Jung pointed out, the activity of the collective unconscious in the personal psyche is such that at certain times “the conscious personality is pushed about like a figure on a chess-board by an invisible player.”15 Pirandello’s and White’s view is opposed to the concept of play and the irresponsible use of impersonation masks, and to the modern cult of self-fashioning and assumed freedom. Their view is also opposed to Iser’s notion that the imaginary allows for liberating play. Rather, the personification masks are the writers’ tools for their readers’ conscious recognition of the collective powers that influence them, of their personal responsibility towards the nature and fashioning of the masks and of the values embodied by them. Some mask-characters, such as Patrick in Memoirs of Many in One, undergo integration and transformation, whereas others, such as Alex, are trapped in their personification mask and are merely used to embody, mirror and criticize their society’s values. Yet the transformation these writers are after is in their readers, by means of their mask-characters.

C. Patrick W hite and the mask of the G re at I ndividual The collective message is ingrained in the personification mask-character’s construction, and is especially visible when the mask-character is either a stock character or a public figure. The character is made to embody and represent an archetypal idea in whose manifestation the readers and the writer participate. The more obvious examples include the minister Danny Shepherd, or Terry, the socialist leader, but the personification mask used for other characters turn them into stock characters too, such as Alex in Memoirs of Many in One, a wouldbe actress seeking a stage and a public. No matter how much Alex tries to evade her personification mask, she cannot, since she is her mask, a stock character of her epoch, a ludicrous representative of her class ideology. She tries to break the codes of her society, but by doing so she is acting according to the role her mask defines, as a rich elitist whose code of conduct is precisely the breaking of codes. Even the number she promises to tattoo on her arm is a clear allusion to the Nazi segregation of people according to their group-belonging rather than

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as individuals (MMO: 48), and is at the same time a chilling reminder that she belongs to her society, however much such a notion goes against her popular claim of glorified solitary individuality in the name of select genius. As White discerned, personification masks of stock characters or public figures are more easily apparent in Shakespeare’s text, in whose period the existence and consciousness of ritual codes and of the aesthetics, rhetoric and politics of masks were clear and in common use. Shakespeare’s text provides crowd scenes, as well as repetitions in the action, which assist the construction and activity of the personification mask. The juxtaposition of White’s mask-character with Shakespeare’s Cleopatra delineates the change that has occurred in the attitude to masks in modern times, and at the same time reinforces Alex’s mask attributes as a representative of her class and her era while also adding to the ridicule and criticism of the mask. True to her class and her generation’s attitude to masks, Alex constantly exchanges countless impersonation masks, such as costumes, lipstick, names and dresses. Her nakedness is nothing but another impersonation mask: she disrobes in the hope of attaining some great truth, be it through mysticism, cynicism or nihilism, all fashionable ideas of her age, as easily exchangeable as her masks. She embodies a longing for some lost idea or sensation of God. Her stripping in the theater or in the park is another manifestation of her belonging to the age of secular mask-destroyers, who believe that truth and God can be achieved through a stripping off of masks. For Alex, in Nietzschean fashion, God is not dead, but is now in her self, as a great artist, one version of the Great Individual. The archetype of the Great Individual, in Neumann’s terms, is the main archetype White is targeting by his use of personification masks. As Neumann explains, the necessary process of secondary personalization that each person should undergo as he or she matures entails recognizing the collective forces within the self and integrating them into the self. The collective unconscious is manifest when projected upon Great Individuals, on their personification masks, and can be reintegrated within the personal psyche in this process of secondary personalization. The dramatis personae of personification are the embodiments of this collective psyche, the masks upon which it can become visible. The writer can deliver this collective content, bringing it into the common life of the society, as a midwife of the collectively repressed materials, or as White calls Patrick, his fictional, personified self, “the spirit guide” at Alex’s great, final séance (MMO: 164). White’s alternative to Alex’s mysticism of nothingness, and her Beckett-like experiments in the theater of sand is the mask, and the past voices that it contains. He prefers history, rituals and masks to Alex’s nihilistic attitudes. Masks may be created covers but belong to reality, past and present, and to life rather than to the realm of empty ideas, or fashionable cynicism. Pirandello would

Chapter Six: Conclusion

agree with White on this point, and as we saw in his play, the way to oppose modern cynicism is by treating the mask as something real, although invented. Pirandello’s mask-philosophy makes it clear that he prefers the use of masks to an alleged naked truthfulness upheld by his contemporaries. Although he recognizes the higher value of real life, he points to the impossibility of experiencing any part of it without the mediation of created artistic structures such as masks. Despite their ‘bad reputation’ as hiding the true nature of those using them, Pirandello shows masks to be invaluable in social relations, and to have very real, pragmatic impacts though they are indeed imaginary constructs. The role of masks as agents in the cross-fertilization of history and fiction is thus clarified. Fiction raises the consciousness of every reader or member of the theatrical audience to the collective elements in the psyche, and to his or her own insertion in the community. The community subject is at once part of fiction and of history, and the mask has a major role in its fashioning. Masks in narrative fiction, although unquestionably fictional, thus have a pragmatic function in historical practice as well. In White’s case, this is immediately apparent in his use of the genre-mask of memoirs and biography, which in itself points to history. Alex’s memoirs, one facet of which consists of White’s own memoirs, also point to the complexity of the mask’s makeup. The memoir-mask, like the character-mask, such as Alex’s Santa Chiara’s mask, is shown to be the product of mass-manufacture, made by many and containing many in one single constructed mask.

D. M asks and imaginatio n Significantly, Patrick White insisted that the jacket of Memoirs of Many in One would not bear his name as author of the novel but only as his own invented mask-character, Patrick White, the editor of the memoirs written by another mask-character, Alex Xenophon Demirjian Gray.16 Patrick is the recorder of secondary personalization narratives, the editor of inherited stories, many of which he received second hand, or collected from letters, diary entries and archives. Memoirs of Many in One includes an ongoing discussion between Hilda and Alex regarding the status of archives in their capacity as recorders of the historical truth as opposed to that of a recounted story. Hilda claims archives are objective and reflect the truth about the past (MMO: 84), unlike Alex’s unintelligible recollections. Alex, for her part, denounces archives as “silly papers,” only providing half the truth and as having no soul (MMO: 21). White seems to suggest that neither bare archives nor diaries can produce a story. An act of narration is necessary in order to produce a story, in the composition of which gaps are filled and threads are tied together by the writer’s imagination. The resulting narrative product is necessarily a fiction and as such a lie.

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Not even the story of a live witness can be considered the real or true story, since one person can never pretend to render the entire picture of a given occurrence. Yet some authors, with more or less pretenses to historical accuracy, felt the need to provide the testimony of a witness in order to lend credibility to the narrative they wrote, and importantly, to engage their readers in the text.17 Even an ancient historian such as Josephus Flavius, who set out to write an account of the war between the Jews and the Romans in the first century CE, found it necessary to claim that two women had survived the Gamla massacre (66 CE) and had told him what had taken place in the fortress when it was overtaken by the Roman troupes. The women’s testimony was thus presented by Josephus Flavius as the only source of information for the events he described. The truthfulness of his written account is undercut by his own tale of two other women, the convenient survivors of the Massada massacre (73 CE), who were again the only ones capable of divulging what took place during the last hours of the Roman siege. The issue here is not Josephus Flavius’ credibility, which has been both supported and challenged, but the fact that the stories of Gamla and Massada have survived thanks to the use of the device of mask-characters and the creation of a mask-narrative. It is precisely Josephus Flavius’ use of such narrative, supported by two mask-characters, which could be processed as secondary personalization and thus imprinted in the collective memory of the Jewish people and allowed to become part of its history.18 Whether an author is recounting his own true story, reconstructing an historical case or inventing a complete fiction, he needs a tool that can clarify to his readers the history he is recounting. A mask-narrative transforms the account into the personal story of its mask-protagonist, a framework through which alone the reader can come into contact with collective elements processed by the secondary personalization of history, and thereby appropriate the past. The mask-narrative, fashioned as the individual story of a mask-character, downsizes and crystallizes the story as a specific episode the reader can relate to; at the same time it includes the reader in the story, turning her or him into a witness to the events, despite differences of time and place. White included a part of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in his novel, for his mask-protagonist’s misuse. Shakespeare’s text had itself been influenced and adapted from Plutarch’s “The Life of Marcus Antonius,” and reverberates Plutarch’s values, adapting dialogue and imagery, down to the purple sails, the golden poop and the silver oars of Cleopatra’s sumptuous barge. Yet, as David Bevington points out, Shakespeare’s “remarkable borrowing also illustrates the transforming power of Shakespeare’s art, for he repeatedly adds touches of personification, and puts the whole into the mouth of Enobarbus, a wry, humorous Roman soldier whose sardonic perspective adds persuasiveness to the gruff but admiring portrait of the Egyptian queen … On a larger scale, Shakespeare excerpts from his source in a way that gives it dramatic shape.”19 Shakespeare,

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as the author of the fictional work, uses Plutarch’s text for his own purposes, which are not only an historical account of the event. He thus lends himself and his imagination to the text, and the text in turn reverberates and engages the imagination of the community on and off the stage. Shakespeare’s secondary narration of Plutarch’s text is ‘downsized’ by White’s secondary allusion to it through Alex’s misinterpretation of it. White’s use of a shrunken version of Shakespeare’s great text allows it to enter the life of his pretentious mask-character in accordance to his fashioning of her. No longer set against Shakespeare’s times, in which princes were still raised to become the personification masks of kings, in the midst of a culture which supported these masks, and whose actors were capable of representing what is in essence a paradigmatic archetype, Alex’s personification mask is downsized by the very means through which she seeks her aggrandizement. Her meager efforts to become the legendary queen even for the short-lived time of the performance receive the same treatment she administers to her co-actors. She insists that no other member of the cast can act properly, downsizing them to a Caesar with “thin shanks covered with a fuzz of sandy fur” and a “puny Antony,” to a banal “Charmian/Linda and Iras/Sue” (MMO: 131-2), who can never possibly aspire to greatness, not even as actors. By deflating her co-actors, Alex is also deflated herself. White seems to suggest that the only way to control a personification mask whose archetypal content causes its over-inflation is precisely by turning it into the ludicrous mask of a clown. Like Flavius, White uses a witness who can tell Alex’s story after her death, having been part of many episodes and heard many stories that made up her life. Patrick, too, assists White in reducing Alex to the minimal size of her life, by providing details of her breakfast, set on the same level as details from her past experiences during the sack of Smyrna or of her relationship with her husband. Alex’s mistreatment of her fellow actors starts at home, in her mistreatment of her family, her bullying of Hilary, and later Hilda and Hal. It is in the scene of Hal’s visit with Alex that White introduces the elements participating in the creation of imaginary narratives. Alex pretends to have invented her son rather than having given birth to him, like any other mother, and to be, together with Patrick, “the creators of the finished wretch,” although Hal admittedly “originated as Hilary’s sperm” (MMO: 53). Alex admits that Hal “had such a delicate nose there were occasions when I could have bitten it off and returned it to the womb of my imagination” (MMO: 55). The creators of the imaginary character and of his story are indeed those capable of ‘chewing’ past histories into small bits and reconstructing them, processing them in their imagination, in order to produce their renewed birth in their present form. The mask of editor is used by White, among other reasons, to point to the nature of the composition of this narrative, a narrative which admits to its own fictionality and construction as a mask-narrative, similarly to a text using

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mask-characters admitting to their being fictive artifacts. In this novel, two sets of communities are given voice by this mask-narrative, like two choruses within the text: the inherited community of a vanished tradition that White brings back into consciousness, and the present community that White uses his mask-character to target and criticize and the mask-character’s additional role is in making collective contents visible and accessible. The mask-narrative’s role lies in transforming tradition into a narrative as well as making the readers realize their own lives are saturated with encapsulated histories. White’s art is devoted to listening to a vanished past in every small detail of the most banal life, exposing the extraordinary in the ordinary. He proceeds by inventing previous secondary personalization narratives whose traces have been shattered and are to be pieced together with the help of the readers, uniting them with both present and past communities. Through the mask-narrative, the spirits of the past become real. The mask is the poetics of the historical incarnation of the collective unconscious, both in personae and in the plots they are made to act in. That Alex, as a mask-character, is made to access her own ghosts in her sleep and in her dreams (MMO: 25, 34) and that she points to the inescapable “reality of dreams” (MMO: 105) is in line with White’s view that we could all learn a lot from the Australian Aborigines’ metaphysics. “As I [White] understand, ‘dreaming’ can be interpreted as his [the Aborigine’s] links with the past, his spirit life, his connections with trees, rocks, landscape, his totems, in more sophisticated terms, his spirituality, God (however much it may shock some of us to hear that word, an affront to our intellectuality). As I see it, loss of faith, our ‘dreaming’ is the prime disaster which has overtaken most of the world in the later part of the twentieth century.”20

E. H istory and the responsibilit y of writer and re aders In his book Staging Politics, Iser discusses Edward Hall’s chronicle of the Lancaster and York families, which he terms “the major landmark in English Renaissance historiography,” and observes that Hall’s approach is based on his conception of “history as a moral drama, the conditions for which are rooted in human behavior. Writing history therefore becomes a mirror in which human beings may look at themselves, and uncover the otherwise hidden propellants of their actions … [Hall] also believes that the great ruler sets an example which, if followed, will prevent what Hall sees as the very basis of history – the repetition of archetypal situation” (SP: 37-38). According to Iser, Hall found solace for historical upheavals in the fact that he viewed history as cyclical, and therefore foreseeable and calculable. Renaissance historiograhy “was taken to be a meaningful sequence of vivid imagery that furnished paradigms for learning and self inspection” (SP: 39). The individual was to

Chapter Six: Conclusion

imitate the “model ruler” (SP: 39), who would provide guidance to life in a world he found hostile. One could argue that Hall’s historiography already belongs to fiction. As Iser explained, fiction de-pragmatizes history, and writing about history makes it less real and therefore more easily given to reflection, and turns history into paradigmatic material the readers could use “for learning and self inspection,” as cited above. Iser shows how Renaissance historiography makes the archetypal pattern of history manifest and accessible, by imitating paradigms laid down by the Great Individual. Pirandello’s and White’s texts indicate that these writers would agree that history influences fiction, by providing it with writing materials and topics for exploration. Yet they would probably go a step further, and claim that fiction too has a special function regarding history. Both writers use fictional personification masks in order to raise to conscious accessibility the archetype by which historical events are ruled, not so much to imitate, as Hall would have instructed, but to criticize and alter the masks and thereby present and future history. By drawing the monstrous portrait of the Great Individual, who incarnates the archetype of the ideology of his age, the reader will be made to recognize it as a self-portrait, and hopefully assume responsibility for the mask of the Great Individual. Recognition on the part of each separate individual of the present shape of the Leader’s mask is the only means by which a required change can be brought about, following which the values of society will change, and with them future Great Individuals and their masks will change too. The writer’s responsibility is to make the archetypal pattern of history manifest and accessible to conscious remedying, embodied in personification masks, to trouble “the spirit, the conscience, the dormant imagination of the average man,”21 to use White’s words. As Jung explained, such an activity on the part of the author is part of his creative drive: the creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in which the age is most lacking (CW, 15: 82).

A writer can, and should, take personal responsibility for historical occurrences, and make each of his readers assume his own private responsibility by presenting him with the image of his beliefs, in the shape of a personification mask. Faced with the mirror of his own society that the mask-character holds up to the reader, the reader would become aware of the common archetypal content that has fashioned the mask-character the way it did. Repudiating White’s

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mask-character and what it represents, for example, would make the reader conscious of his own ideals that have fashioned this mask, and his rejection of the mask would bring him in consequence to alter his own values. Awareness and responsibility are the writer’s tools of altering history, tools which, through the use of constructed literary masks, can eventually alter his and his readers’ collective ideology and values. White was quite aware of the evils brought about by a blind worship of Great Individuals, such as Hitler. He warned that what had occurred in Germany could take place in Australia as well, and criticized those who thought “that Lucky Australia is too far away – it can’t happen here. When everything can and does happen where you are.”22 Other Great Individuals could be dangerous too, such as monarchs and politicians, be it “Führerin Thatcher” or “Cowboy Reagan”23 and his atomic energy plans, or local Australian politicians. As White wrote in one of his speeches, history could not be forgotten: “there was the Liberal party politician urging our youth to become storm-troopers and herd us all back to dear old days of not so long ago. Astounding when the families of many Australians were herded by storm-troopers into cattle trucks, gas-chambers, ending up in the lime-pits of the Nazi campaign to extirpate European Jewry.”24 White took seriously figures that are the embodiments of archetypal content, such as royalty, since the symbol was still powerful despite the fact that the times of effective monarchy were over. White was very uneasy about Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s visit to Australia: “the Monarchy may only be symbolic, but it is a very potent symbol – by turns simple and insidious. Let us not be too easily charmed by the snapshots of domesticity – seduced by Prince Philip’s fried sausage. Let us receive the Monarch with the dignity she deserves, but let us keep our heads as she walks amongst us, the myth made flesh, wearing a democratic smile.”25 Thus, the fact that the royals were also people who, like everybody else ate sausages, did not detract from their being first and foremost walking symbols, embodied in their royal personification masks. White felt that his role as a responsible author, interwoven in his society, “members of the universal family of whom I am one,”26 was to expose this society’s possession by archetypal contents. Only in such a manner can people become aware of their society’s ills and strive to alter them. As Neumann explained regarding the psychological aspect of the individual assuming responsibility for collective contents, “the individual assumes responsibility for part of the burden of the collective, and he decontaminates evil by integrating it into his own inner process of transformation. If the operation is successful, it leads to an inner liberation of the collective, which in part at least is redeemed from this evil” (NE: 130). What White demanded of himself, and of his listeners and readers, was nothing less than a personal commitment, based on the common collective imaginary: “I’d like them [every Australian] to rootle round

Chapter Six: Conclusion

in their unconscious and find this personal identity, the moral strength which is floating there … I am one of you millions of beings. Being in itself can be a contribution if it is a concerned being.”27 A writer can strive to alter the course of history, by relying on the common imaginary ingrained in each person, and by making the archetypal pattern of history manifest and accessible for conscious, responsible refashioning in each of his readers. The moral responsibility of both writer and reader, consists of assuming responsibility by each person for his own small role in history, as one more carrier and potential incarnation of the archetype. White assumes responsibility for his mask-character, since he is the one who has let the archetype loose by embodying it in this particular mask-character. Now it remains for the readers to follow suit.

N otes 1 | Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, pp. 2-4. 2 | Wolfgang Iser, Staging Politics, pp. 175-181. Iser explains that the king’s image is not merely upheld by the characters in the text, but also by the audience or the readers: “the King does not take on his almost superhuman charisma merely by overcoming his enemies, and the spectators are called upon continually to supply it through their imagination … Such an interaction is prestructured by the text” (Ibid. p. 178). In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Iser does mention masks when he uses impersonation masks to exemplify the state of double, simultaneous awareness made possible by fiction, an awareness of the real world and at the same time of the fictive world. For this purpose, he discusses the masks used by the princes in Spencer’s Shepheardes Calender, who pretend to be shepherds so as cunningly to win their ladies’ hearts. The princes remain in possession of their princely identity while being aware at the same time of their borrowed, false identity as shepherds. This double awareness, provided by the impersonation mask, is likened by Iser to the condition of the reader of fiction, who is capable of remaining aware of both realities, the historical and the fictive, in the act of reading (F&I, pp. 34-46). 3 | Ibid. especially pp.1-4, 247-296. Iser claimed elsewhere that the eclogues in Spencer’s Shepheardes Calender were typical of fiction in general, because fiction “is at one and the same time both more and less than the reality it refers to; it is less because it is not real, and it is more because it makes reality accessible” (Prospecting, p. 81). Iser concludes this chapter by saying that “fiction takes its characteristic features from its interaction with the given reality within which it is produced, and so fiction itself is bound to change in relation to the context to which it responds.” Iser goes on to say that whereas literature was once an important “means of orienting behavior,” this is no longer the case today (Prospecting, p. 97). I would like to argue that the use of personification masks in modern and post-modern fiction maintains the quality of

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Creating Communities fiction noticed by Iser, of orienting its readers’ behavior, especially influencing their future behavior and the future nature of the masks. 4 | Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, p. 206. 5 | Ibid. p. 219. 6 | By and large Iser’s intent in his explanation of Castoriadis’ theory was to sustain his own argument that the imaginary “reveals itself as a form of play.” As Iser explains, “Castoriadis argues that whatever ‘is’ between the inconceivable beginning of the psyche and dependence on the naturally given, has its being through the imaginary, which – if we carry the argument a little further – reveals itself as a form of play … The interchange of denotation and connotation in the self-referential signifier, and the reciprocal implications of legein/teukhein [in Castoriadis’ terms] are not yet in themselves games but open the way for various types of interplay that permit us to grasp what Castoriadis calls social creation … The radical imaginary is therefore present as perpetual playing.” See: Wolfgang Iser, The Fictive and the Imaginary, p. 221. 7 | As Fabio Ciaramelli explains, despite the difference between the psyche and the socio-historical beyond the social individual, both share a common element, a level of meaning created by the imaginary. See: Fabio Ciaramelli, “An Introduction to Cornelius Castoriadis’ Work,” JEP, Nr. 6 (Winter 1998), p. 1: http://www.Psychomedia.il/jep/ number6/castoriadis1.htm (accessed 23 August 2009). 8 | Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth, trans. Kate Soper and Martin H. Ryle (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 199-200. 9 | Neumann devoted several books to the subject of creative artists (The Creative Man, The Archetypal World of Henry Moore and Art and The Creative Unconscious) in the fields of plastic arts as well as literature, such as Henry Moore, Leonardo da Vinci, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Georg Trakl. 10 | For Neumann, as Camille Paglia comments, “art exists as form, materials, and technique and not just content … In the Jungian way, Neumann sees the creative man as ‘bisexual,’ even ‘feminine,’ because of his high ‘receptivity’ … he [Neumann] had an awareness of the spirituality of art as well as a sophisticated understanding of the creative process.” See: Camille Paglia, “Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother,” in: Arion, 13.3 (Winter 2006), pp. 12-13: http://www.bu.edu/arion/volume13/13.3/ paglia.pdf (accessed 23 August 2009). 11 | Jean-Paul Sartre, Politics and Literature, p. 40. 12 | Ibid. p. 41. Genet’s tactic in this play is reminiscent of Pirandello’s in Six Characters in Search of An Author, made especially clear in the masks’ presence on stage. Pirandello’s mask-characters remind the audience of their immutability and the repetitious nature of their performance, yet at the same time provides them with the strength and ability to initiate their story, which is the reason they come on stage. As we have seen, Pirandello relies on his audience’s prior assumptions regarding masks, and it is through them that he manages to drive home an attack on the prevailing cynicism of his times.

Chapter Six: Conclusion 13 | Iser, too, referred to fiction in literary discourse, as opposed to fiction in philosophical discourse, as a “staged discourse” which generates an aesthetic potential. Prospecting, p. 241. On page 257, Iser clarifies that all structural features in fiction “provide a framework for the game … The structural features, however, assume significance only in relation to the function meant to be performed by the play of the text.” 14 | Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 630. 15 | Carl Gustav Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 170. 16 | About White’s argument with his editor regarding the writing on the book jacket, see: Marr, Patrick White: A Life, p. 628. White’s strategy in having his mask-character’s name and profession printed on the jacket of Memoirs of Many in One was so successful, that the copy I have (bought as a second-hand copy from a public library, and still bearing its stickers) was cataloged under “Gray” for the author’s name, according to the librarian’s understanding of what he or she had read on the jacket of the book. 17 | One famous literary example comes to mind: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, supposedly translated from a manuscript in Arabic, written by a fictional character named Cide Hemete Benengeli. 18 | George Steiner points to the presence of the past in the minds of future generations: “it is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. These are often highly structured and selective as myths. Images and symbolic constructs of the past are imprinted, almost in the manner of genetic information, on our sensibility. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the pictured and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. Its test is its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past. The echoes by which a society seeks to determine the reach, the logic and authority of its own voice, come from the rear. Evidently, the mechanisms at work are complex and rooted in diffuse but vital needs of continuity. A society requires antecedents. Where these are not naturally at hand, where a community is new or reassembled after a long interval of dispersal or subjection, a necessary past tense to the grammar of being is created by intellectual and emotional fiat.” See: George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), http://www. anti-rev.org/textes/Steiner71a/body.html (accessed 30 August 2009). I would like to suggest that in the case of a mask-narrative this fiat is contained in the mask-characters used by the author, whether the story is a real historical account or an invented fiction. The narrative is a mask-narrative when its contents consists of “images of the past,” to use Steiner’s term, which have undergone a secondary personalization and become part and parcel of a given society’s memory. 19 | David Bevington, Introduction, Antony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 3. 20 | Patrick White, Patrick White Speaks, p. 154. 21 | Ibid. p. 69. 22 | Ibid. p. 101.

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All print, e-book and open access versions of the titles in our list are available in our online shop www.transcript-verlag.de/en!