Birth of a Notion: Pirandello’s Shoot! The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator
After Verdi’s death, in 1901, Italy’s sense of cultural preeminence suffered a crisis of confidence. The most complacent of European cultures had touted a protean exuberance throughout the previous century, dissembling its redundancies with increasingly exotic ornamentalism. That there happened to be no such country as “Italy” until halfway through that century hardly ameliorated its artistic self-¬glorification.
Nonnation though it had been, Italy was, culturally, more richly sedimented than any other. With Verdi’s death, an uncomfortable perception that sediment had effectively buried innovation prompted a yearning for renewal—convulsive renewal, if necessary. A forward-¬looking, unified Italy needed art that reflected the new century’s technical prowess and attendant anxieties, its discoveries in biological science and psychology. And that, plus a world war, was what the new century, and Italy, got.
Nearly every established art form became open to prodigious reinvention, a process spurred by the nascent technology of cinema. But at least one seminal Italian art had ossified in the process. The novel of the late Risorgimento had become entrenched in nostalgic muddle and baroque fantasias of eccentric aristocrats, noble peasants, Xanadu palaces, and bucolic claptrap. Typifying a somewhat ghoulish noblesse oblige and necrophiliac delectation of the beautiful was Gabriele D’Annunzio—at the time, the most popular writer in the world. A bourgeois epigone of Huysmans gripped by ludicrous political ambitions, D’Annunzio personified a nationalist mentality costumed in the raiments of Francophile symbolism. (The popular joke ran that D’Annunzio became a pincushion for Mussolini’s cultural medals.)
During the frenzy of impossible coalitions and colliding rapacities for political dominance between 1918 and Mussolini’s assumption of power in 1922, many prophetic and powerful voices disrupted the mannerist banalities of a status quo marooned in reveries of faded glory. The legitimate avatar of upheaval was Gramsci, who would instead become its martyr. The nerve meters of the culture were, primarily, poets: Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Montale, Bertolucci, and Leonetti, among others.
Cinema injected an infantile frenzy into the plastic arts, which aped the innovations of Paris with pictorial hyperkinesis. The moronic worship of technology became, with Futurism, a moronic celebration of militarism. The notion of war as the world’s hygiene was not Marinetti’s invention but rather the spirit of the age.
As the contradictions of postwar politics dissolved into dictatorship, nationalism and fascism tamped much of the best Italian literature into cautious hermeticism on the Left, while the Right flaunted atavistic bombast and colonialist racism to match the necropolitan architectural flatulence promoted by Il Duce.
If I am getting considerably ahead of Luigi Pirandello’s 1915 novel Shoot!, it’s probably because the bulk of worthwhile literary works that followed it did so at a remove of many years, while Italian novels of 1915 barely seem worth discussing.
Shoot! for that matter, is itself only marginally worth discussing, and I concede that discussing it is a bit of a canard. Its principal claim to contemporary interest is its depiction of preindustrial filmmaking in Italy. Pirandello paints this pantomimic enterprise as one of boundless crudity and opportunism, its end product as a destructive, idiotic sham. The life of the film set is permeated by capricious eruptions of chaos that, however remote from the streamlined manipulations of the present day, constitute the ugly birth trauma of a monstrosity that would swallow the world. The point is unambiguously driven home by the twin sacrifices (a hapless zoo tiger and the “big game hunter” character actor hired to shoot it) effected by the film-¬inside-¬the-¬novel, a production of unlimited stupidity that proceeds on the understanding that if things run awry the footage can simply be inserted in some other film exactly like it.
Shoot!’s intimist psychological subplot relies so heavily on inference that its design becomes simultaneously incoherent and repetitively overinsistent. This book’s busy traffic in empty secrets epitomizes the studied perversity and timid existentialism avant la lettre of the type Pirandello, in his lesser moments a gas leak of avuncular homilies, “humanized” into strident, self-¬important, sentimental twaddle.
It’s a sad fact that anyone unfortunate enough to win the Nobel Prize has almost certainly deserved it. (Only Sartre ever had the wit to turn it down.) Pirandello, by importing his meandering notions of paradox into the plays that cemented his reputation—those gabfests of solipsism acclaimed as “experimental”—fully earned the golden shower that the invention of dynamite has bestowed on the world’s best-¬loved literary fossils at the nadir of their prowess. (I exempt the courageous Harold Pinter from the recent slew of sclerotic preciosities.)
The more adventurously Pirandello launched into formal novelties, the more glaringly his penchant for triteness exposed itself. His most celebrated play owes more of its fame to its title than to anything in it. An audience that has sat through a production of Six Characters in Search of an Author has surely repined for the straightforward inanities of Edna Ferber, or a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, or even a Virna Lisi sex comedy on TV. Pirandello’s six characters do not need an author. A simple act of euthanasia would be a far greater kindness to them, and a real relief for the audience.
Fortunately, transports of exuberant sophistry and clueless persons wandering onstage only struck Pirandello as beguiling ideas during fallow spells, and between bouts of visionary hiccups he crafted a formidable oeuvre—As You Desire Me, The Imbecile, Henry IV (well, yes, experimental, but astutely resistant to fatuous conundrums), Naked—and a spellbinding succession of precise short fictions, steel-¬eyed miracles of prose in which he accomplishes something harsher and more nakedly irremediable than he does in his novels.
Shoot! is decidedly a different can of worms—a dingy freak show of slob entrepreneurs, squabbling families, and vampish “actors” who, canned or otherwise, are definitely worms, languidly betraying everyone around them while betraying themselves with even more bilious contempt, surrendering whatever high-¬flown ambitions they came in with simply to make one another miserable and themselves a little richer.
The subplot involves the cine-¬struck daughter of an incompetent screenwriter and his paranoid wife. This seems to promise a fresh menu of queasy surprises, but the sidebar folly quickly stammers into the narrative equivalent of Tourette’s syndrome.
When throes of obsessive love, especially throes with no discernible rationale, begin cluttering dozens of pages, novels often unravel in redundancies of unmerited paradox. In Pirandello’s novel, a third sacrifice compounds the impression of gratuitous and improbable complication, as the naive Luisetta, the screenwriter’s daughter—fully aware that Nuti, ex-¬lover of the vulpine Varia Nestoroff and future victim of the panicked tiger, has mistaken Luisetta in fluish delirium for his first love, Duccella—offers herself as a surrogate love object inevitably destined for rejection when Nuti’s lucidity returns. Worse, Luisetta manages her burgeoning attachment to Nuti with an adolescent petulance, suffocating the reader with numbing tantrums of hysteria. Perhaps the one deft jolt of hilarity occurs when the actual Duccella, traced by the eponymous character Shoot to her squalid desuetude in Sorrento, turns out to have lost her looks and become an extremely corpulent nun. A sad hilarity, perhaps, but a fat nun is better than nothing. Still, too much of this veiled, arbitrarily paced, portentous, and implausible narrative tries to baste a silk purse from a sow’s ear and instead reconstructs the whole pig, stuffed with sawdust.
Again, what does ring true is the sinister novelty of an art that seeds its future corruptions even as it’s being invented, that achieves its moments of excellence strictly by accident and defines success as complicity with failure. From a menagerie of prediluvial movie stereotypes and the impression that they’ve been clipped from fan magazines and mounted on cardboard, Shoot! anticipates the onset of global inauthenticity, the hologram inexistence produced by perpetual mediation via images. The novel’s narrator, a cameraman, understands that his role of recording life without recourse to emotion has inexorably transformed him into a thing—moreover, a thing capable only of duplicity and the encouragement of other people’s humiliation: “I study people in their most ordinary occupations to see if I can succeed in discovering in others what I feel that I myself lack in everything that I do: the certainty that they understand what they are doing.”
Shoot has reduced his involvement in life to the hand cranking of the cinema camera. He has no emotions available for the people in front of the camera, and thinks of himself simply as a hand rather than a person. “The machine is made to act, to move, it requires swallowing up our soul, devouring our life. And how do you expect them to be given back to us, our life and soul, in a centuplicated and continuous output, by the machines?”
Such a reflection, regardless of numerous longueurs of horseshit, isn’t bad. Shoot! is at least as speckled with verisimilitude as a Pearl S. Buck novel, and, as it was written by Pirandello, we can assume he had at least a few larger fish to fry. Still, without that Nobel Prize under his belt, I suspect we would regard Pirandello as a rather less interesting writer than someone like Kurt Vonnegut.
Yet something does transpire in his work that, regardless of its often torturous disclosures of the obvious, raises it above writing with no metaphysical dimension or urgent purpose, and in this connection Pirandello has a legitimate, even compelling connection with the time we live in now. At the outset of the modern era, he smelled the rotting carcass of its close.
I say this because, tiresome as I find most of his work, and despite the trivial egocentrism so widely inscribed in his plays, he intuited an important truth about how humans are with one another, even if he never fully grasped what that truth happened to be. And in fairness, few writers ever fully grasp their own truths, even if they’re lucky enough to have any.
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Billboard Text for the Americas Festival in Vincennes, 2006
It’s not an especially comfortable thing to name a “favorite” book, or piece of music, or work of art—but if name one I must, Jane Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies is probably the North American novel I read more frequently than any other, by which I mean, about six times a year.
Two Serious Ladies is a perfect book. Jane Bowles never wrote another novel, but if a writer can write one flawless, inexhaustibly pleasurable book—Rilke’s Notebooks of Maria Malte Brigge, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, Jean Echenoz’s Piano, or Two Serious Ladies—he or she can die happy. Of course, Jane Bowles never realized what she had achieved, and she did not die happy, but what she left us—and I include her single play, her letters, her short stories, and her fragmentary dialogues—will give others pleasure as long as there are readers.
Two Serious Ladies begins with the story of Christina Goering, a willful eccentric Jane Bowles whimsically named for the infamous Nazi. Christina has a determined but almost somnabulistic quality; she drifts into situations and relationships vaguely believing there is something quite crucial about them, yet she has no idea what that might be, and she is perfectly willing to abandon attachments she has just made when a new person invites her into his or her orbit. Her willfulness consists in her indifference to the disappointments she causes those she discards.
At a party in Manhattan (Christina lives on an unnamed Staten Island), she crosses paths with an old friend, Mrs. Copperfield, who is about to embark on a trip she dreads, with her husband, to Panama. Mr. and Mrs. Copperfield may well be drawn from Jane and Paul Bowles, as he loved nothing more than getting on a boat to some faraway place and she was terrified of going anywhere. (Mr. Copperfield strongly resembles the Paul Bowles I knew, an implacably curious but emotionally gelid personality.)
The structure of Two Serious Ladies has, as far as I know, no direct precedent in literature. Neither the lives nor the happenings in the two women’s lives are at all intertwined, nor do they “alternate” the way novels rich in subplots do. The book simply, abruptly, abandons Christina Goering in mid-¬novel, so to speak, and jumps into the story of the Copperfields in Panama. Pages 35 through 112, in fact, completely preempt any mention of Christina Goering and the odd menagerie of characters who’ve ended up living with her in a rundown house she’s perversely bought, out of no necessity, when the house she originally owned was more desireable in every way. In the third section, the Copperfields become invisible and Christina’s story resumes—in the final pages, once again, she has a brief encounter with Mrs. Copperfield, this time in a restaurant where a petty gangster who’s picked her up has left her alone at a table while conferring with “business associates.”
What happens in Two Serious Ladies is peculiar enough, but what’s miraculous about it is the way things happen. Like Christina, Mrs. Copperfield is a live-¬in-¬the-¬moment woman of impeccable breeding; her relation to what happens around her is, with two or three brief exceptions, deliciously passive. She is content with the simplest pleasures—alcohol, primarily, and an attachment she forms to a rather demanding, immature prostitute named Pacifica. Considering that she, like Christina Goering, is rich, her comfort in settings of squalor and desuetude makes her charming and odd—a timid woman who can rise to formidable imperiousness when she absolutely has to. She only becomes agitated when someone she neither understands nor likes becomes unwelcomely interested in her.
Christina loves the small oddities of a small life, but has a proclivity to make them unpleasantly cryptic for others, and exhibits a restlessness alien to Mrs. Copperfield. She takes dreary trips on the island’s streetcar and a ferry to a truly hideous town across the water to New Jersey (in all likelihood, Perth Amboy), as if embarking on a wondrous adventure.
Two Serious Ladies has a dawdling, childlike presentation of events: neither serious lady has complicated thoughts about the future, or the present, and no thoughts at all about the past. They live in bemused confusion about what might happen next, but neither possesses enough anxiety to have apprehensions about it.
I’m not sure it’s possible to convey the flavor of this book without quoting it at length, so I shall.
Mrs. Quill, who runs a seedy hotel in which Mrs. Copperfield feels entirely at home while her husband trapises around in the rain forest, is taken by a hustlerish “investor” to the luxurious Hotel Washington, where she is seized with a strong desire to buy a souvenir with “Hotel Washington” inscribed on it. A waiter tries to sell her an ash tray, but the hotel’s assistant manager stops him. Then the “investor,” having learned to his horror that Mrs. Quill has virtually nothing in her bank account, disappears, leaving her with the bill for their drinks. The assistant manager, sensing her helplessness, humiliates her.
Overwrought and tearful, she phones Mrs. Copperfield, who rushes to her aid, and insists on meeting the man who made Mrs. Quill cry. She demands that this troglodyte sit down and talk things over with them. He is visibly aghast. Mrs. Copperfield then unleashes the full resources of her background.
“You won’t understand this but I shall tell it to you anyway. I came here for two reasons. The first reason, naturally, was in order to get my friend Mrs. Quill out of trouble; the second reason was in order to see your face when you realized that a bill which you never expected to be paid was to be paid after all. I expected to be able to watch the transition. You understand—enemy into friend—that’s always terribly exciting. That’s why in a good movie the hero often hates the heroine until the very end But you, of course, ¬wouldn’t dream of lowering your standards. You think it would be cheap to turn into an affable human being because you discovered there was money when you had been sure there was no money forthcoming. Do you think the rich mind? They never get enough of it. They want to be liked for their money too, and not only for themselves. You’re not even a good hotel manager. You’re definitely a boor in every way.”
Jane Bowles devised a brilliantly original technique to splice two almost completely disconnected narratives into perfectly harmonious movements of the same story. Each mirrors the other in ways that are both logical and inexplicable. Two Serious Ladies captures the haphazardness of human connections in a world of transience. The two brief moments of contact between its subjects constitute the book’s sole concession to “plot.” It’s the finest novel ever written by an American, actually, the only one I’ve never repeatedly picked up without reading straight through to the end.
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