A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  8. God was not without his warts. He knew it. In addition to the four great words, He had said host of angelic scriveners, and now he shouldered the blame. Better by far was the host of human ones, because they filled libraries instead of burning them, and when one of their works was done and found its place on some shelf, indexed and alphabetized, and sometimes even opened, they didn’t try to elbow one another out of all gaze. Artists may shame themselves by competing for fame and prizes, but the excellence of one book never diminishes the excellence of any other; excellence begets excellence more often than not. We might strip sacred works of their rank, for they certainly have disgraced themselves, and return them to common decency—an action all to the good—but I fear those who favor them will not have it. Because they contain the word of the One God. If we cannot make scripture into history, myth, and literature, we should not be allowed to lower literature into the inky realm of the sacred.

  9. God had created the scriveners for a not entirely laudable purpose. It made Him less responsible for all the divinely inspired balderdash they’d filled the earth with, but the glut had grown embarrassing. Not all of these fellows had Chrysostom’s golden throat. He thought about tossing the lot out of heaven and into some fiery pit, but He remembered in time that there was no heaven in His system, only in theirs, and no hell in His, either. Hell was their damn doing, as well. He could have cried erase, as He had considered crying earlier; however, He remained tied to His vow like a pony to a post, and docile and content in regard to Himself. So He spoke through the forks of the scriveners’ tongues and wrote them off. Go roast your toes in your own lies, He said, stroking the beard some said He had, letting the no-longer-holy host be swallowed up in the fog of their own illusions. I’ll catechize the four I can count on.

  10. round

  vast

  empty

  dark

  SPECTACLES

  Mr. Barnum has carefully sectioned a few grapefruits for use in a salad and refrigerated them in a glass bowl. Later, when he retrieves the bowl from the refrigerator, it slips from his grasp and falls to the tile floor, shattering there in a violent spray of sharp nasty pieces. The break is spectacular: the burst shockingly noisy, the shards innumerable, the distance they fly astonishing, as are their complex ricochets and the obscure small places in which their evilly intentioned edges have sought to hide. Grapefruit juice forms a sticky splash upon the floor, where chunks of fruit seem to float now in a circle of glistening fins. The plastic film he had stretched across the top of the bowl has been shredded and lies beside the puddle in a damp shrivel. If the mischance took seconds to complete, searching for slivers and scrubbing up the gummy juice will steal a valuable half hour from Mr. Barnum’s dinner-party preparations. Are the grapefruit sections so important to his salad he must repeat their extraction? He settles for canned mandarin oranges. A bit too sweet for watercress, but what the hell.

  The bowl was a servant. It would chill the fruit, endure the dishwasher, then return to its cupboard to await reuse. Any plastic container could have performed as well—or better, because the fall would not have broken it—better, because its surface would not have been as slippery. None of Mr. Barnum’s guests would have said, with uncalled-for cruelty, “Humphrey, this grapefruit tastes as if it had been chilled in plastic.” Or mocked him with smacks of satisfaction: “Nothing beats good French glass for chilling the hell out of grapefruit.” Like good help, such implements make no sound and leave no trace. Unlike the set of Royal Copenhagen china Mr. Barnum had been willed by his grandmother, they are not destined for the stage. On hand-painted salad plates, oak-leaf lettuce looks glorious, the cress is positively girlish, while rounds of radish, white as wash, stay confidently crisp. There will be several rooms to tidy, linens to wash and iron, silverware to polish. These dinner parties, always a bit theatrical, will need many hands backstage, many invisible participants.

  Neither the juice that spilled nor the fruit that fell, not Mr. Barnum himself, who uttered a half-completed oooh as the bowl fled his hand, no … only the damnable dish has, as we say in English, made a spectacle of itself. Had Mr. Barnum, in a fit of pique, thrown the bowl, he might have been thought to be causing a scene. Of course when we speak so, we speak loosely, for spectacles depict catastrophes without consequences, or they are the performance of symbolic rituals intended to impress an anticipated public. The coronation of King Edward VIII, with its marching bands and men on horse, its caissons and carriages, its solemn ceremonials, was an extravaganza in the purest sense, while the spectacle the king was about to make with Wallis Warfield Simpson, a commoner thin as her scruples, a divorcée and an American to boot, was a spectacle only metaphorically—just a screaming headline for the tabloids; since the general opinion later was that Edward was compelled by the archbishop of Canterbury to choose between sin and sovereignty, and wasn’t disgracing the monarchy on purpose. When the United States smart-bombed Baghdad, they hoped to produce a spectacle: A population reduced to watching, unharmed by the explosions though shocked by their damage, and in awe of American marksmanship, might, and expertise. But spectacles do not bear frequent repetition. Fear departs as awe recedes, and soon the population is back about its business and ready to complain if a single rocket goes astray. Anyone who has doubts that the official war was theatrical should consider how its victory was used to threaten other nations with the same show of considerately deadly force: awe for Egypt, shock for Syria, foreboding for Iran, and unsettling suspicions for the Saudis. During World War II, the bombing of London was tactical, that of Dresden a crime of spite, but neither were spectacles.

  It was a war meant to be heard and seen, enjoyed in an old Roman way, reported in medias res like a tennis match or a football game, although it had no Handel to write new music for its fireworks display.

  This century looks to be a short one, one of spectacle, a Gotterdämmerung for camera crews, so it might be wise to consider the place of spectacle in the scheme of things, in as much as spectacles need more than a lot of artful plotting for their realization, though they do want that; they need an audience to shake up and amaze, countless invisible participants to prepare the scene, great quantities of cash, actors and objects who can be seduced to perform, and interests, however poisoned or perverse, to satisfy and serve.

  Spectacles are a branch of visual rhetoric, since they are constructed according to an understanding of what their audiences are and the precise effects on them such spectacles are desired to produce. The challenge that the promoters of the war on Iraq so triumphantly met was to carry out an invasion of another country while suffering minimal damage to their own forces and such minor injury to the enemy’s civilian population that it would not seem to its spectators that a war had been fought at all, but, rather, that something merely warlike had occurred; while at the same time impressing the rest of the world with the overwhelming might and destructive power of their forces. Brevity is the soul of war as well as that of wit. Gertrude Stein, with her usual prescience, declared that “war is dancing.” She may have had American Indians in mind. After the drums had got the warriors’ dander up, fiercely painted faces and howls for blood might frighten their enemies away. To avoid the lack of seriousness for which this remark was criticized, she could have said that war “would be dancing”—the Baghdaddy Bounce perhaps. In any case, it was a tune to suit the temper of the times.

  After the war was over, after the bombs were gone, after a few stores were looted and some significant statues pulled down, a riot broke out—entirely unanticipated, though what happened at the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring might have been instructive had it been remembered. On that occasion, heads were umbrellaed, ears were boxed by handbags, faces slapped with rolled-up programs. Not for the first time had an organized spectacle been followed by an unruly one. Innovation tends to be underappreciated.

  Spectacles have no moment of origin in human history. Where society is, they are, with suitable ceremony kni
tting groups together while dismaying others, producing displays of wealth and power, making knights out of knaves and murders into executions, validating sovereignties, creating gods, and certifying the mergers of families, financial houses, even nations. Yet when the king is crowned or God is praised, the point of the procedure is presumably not the requisite posture of obeisance, the imposing presence of the Grenadier Guards, or the quality of the gems sewn into the hem of the royal robes, but reverence proper to the Lord, fealty due the state, the security promised by a safe succession. Nevertheless, it was spectacle that gathered the crowds. It was spectacle that solemnized the occasion. It was spectacle that reassured loyalty and strengthened convictions.

  Some periods and places in history have been more inclined to see their world through spectacles than others. Let us for a moment leave Humphrey Barnum to his mopping up so we may revisit the English court during the early seventeenth century in order to get a seat at one of its major amusements: the masque. Like Stein’s image of modern war, the masque was mostly dancing, but, like opera, it called upon all the principal arts to achieve its effects, and was as collaborative in its creation as film. All of us have seen Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers waltzing away on a crowded floor, and how the other dancers have drawn a circle of admiration around them. In some such similar way, a chosen few of the masqueraders would suddenly command the scene (to no more real surprise than the extras have for Fred and Ginger), and interrupt the ball’s intrigues with a play whose parts were kept simple enough, at first, for amateurs to enact. Ben Jonson wrote a number of these for Queen Anne, who was disposed to spend the sums they required, provided that she got to play the lead. He might have initially thought that a young architect fresh from Italy and intriguingly named Inigo Jones was to assist him, but he came to be annoyed by Jones’s emphasis on cosmetics, clothes, painted curtains, and carpentered contrivance, and feel the burden of the court’s expectation that the designer would continue to call for pomp and put Ben’s poetry to Inigo’s service. It got so a ruffle would overtake a rhyme, a simulated storm quite drown a stanza, and special effects receive the applause the poet’s lines had already bowed too low for.

  Jonson’s anger with Jones may have contained some anger at himself, for from the start of their collaboration, the poet had called for spectacle, and he had gotten spectacle. Then spectacle itself had spanked his pride. I shall paraphrase a few of his stage directions taken from the middle of The Masque of Beautie, one of his better and earlier confections. The curtain was to be drawn upon an island floating on calm water. In the middle of this island should sit the Throne of Beauty. It was to be divided into eight squares. Into each square a couple of maskers were to be placed, sixteen in all, and in the center of the throne should stand a translucent pillar, aglow with lights of several colors. Arches were to sustain the roof of the throne, which was also to be decked with lights and garlands. Jonson also called for “little cupids in flying posture” and at the cornice more wreaths and more lights. Ladies representing the eight elements of Beauty—some of them with breasts exposed—were to be represented in sumptuous garments: Splendor, Brightness, Springtime, Gladness, Proportion, Loveliness, Dignity, and Perfection. At the top of the throne, Jonson wanted a statue honoring Harmony to preside. And we are only beginning his instructions, which I have simplified and severely shortened. Except that the bared bosoms were the idea of Inigo Jones, otherwise a fierce Puritan, in this moment overcome by frippery.

  The ladies of the court, who vied for the honor of a part, rehearsed their steps for weeks, while professional singers practiced Jonson’s songs. The court orchestra was available. It knew when to play loudly in order to smother the noise that Inigo Jones’s machinery made when the sea roiled and the earth quaked. A hundred men went to work preparing the royal banquet hall for the coming performance. Its ceiling was freshly adorned with scudding clouds. Bleachers were built for the audience and an elevated seat for King James. Throngs came, lines were long, and many had to stand, as if packed in a modern commuter train, to catch a few words and a bit of music, even though they were well out of sight of the stage. The point, after all, was to be there so you could afterward say you had been. These galas occurred not once but at every Twelfth Night for many years, and the canvas cover of the hall grew heavy with prior paint and former clouds.

  Jonson’s first masque, to which The Masque of Beautie was a sequel, cost the empire three thousand pounds, a huge sum for those times, though not the average outlay for a grade-B movie now. When, a year later, the queen asked for yet a grander spectacle (for it is the need of spectacles to exceed themselves), one to be called The Masque of Queens, the machinery required to make special its effects—a clockwork of cogs and wheels—was so marvelously contrived that the queen held rehearsals for the operation of Jones’s contraption itself, so that the sight of its intricate workings could be enjoyed. The budget for the entire affair had been set at a thousand pounds, but expenses overran that limit as immediately as Achilles would the tortoise, if he were released from Zeno’s paradox. The bill for fabric not yet cut and sewn exceeded two thousand. What fanciful conceits, what clever rhymes, what melodious intonations could stand against such expenditures? Jonson was nearly up for it. He called for witches. Jones gave him Hell, out of whose smoking maw the crones emerged. Jeremy Herne, the dancing master, made the ladies whirl like dervishes while Jonson’s meters managed to keep up. The second scene, in which the queen and her ladies descend in chariots upon whose bumpers the witches had been bound in order to show how knowledge and fair virtue have triumphed over ignorance and evil, is even more outlandish than Hell’s howls and holy smoke, to the point that the audience’s natural wonder at what’s been done is eclipsed by the question, How did they do that?

  It was not long before Inigo Jones’s costume sketches were being collected, his impact on fashion everywhere felt, and expectations concerning his next exploit with water, smoke, elaborate props, delicate scrims, and painted drops were everywhere intense and eager, especially about his heaving, shifting stage. Conflicts of opinion between the queen’s architect and the king’s poet became public. It was a characteristic of the period that these differences should turn, in effect, upon an interpretation of Horace, whose definition of poetry as “ut pictura poesis” was a commonplace of criticism. Jones and Jonson agreed that poetry was a speaking picture, but Jones’s stress was upon picture and Jonson’s upon speaking. Pictures were mute and needed poets to give them words that would elucidate their meaning. The visual and the verbal: They were combatants in a war that had gone on for a long time—Jones and Jonson were just another pair of champions—and just as the English court masque or Louis XIV’s ballets at Versailles would fall like the monarchs out of favor, the spectacle and its allurements would survive and assume another guise with other enemies in other eras.

  Throughout the medieval period, the Church had carefully confined intellectual study to authorized and holy texts, and even among those of the public who might be able to read, only a select few were allowed so much as a peek at the Word of God. Instruction in matters of the faith was performed by pictures; consequently, painters—visual artists of all kinds—were commissioned to illuminate pages and adorn walls, to carve figures and design windows that would depict and applaud the Christian message. The masses were illiterate and spoke a vulgar tongue. Their culture was crude and had been created close to those sharp edges of want and necessity that were likely to sever the lines of life at any luckless moment. God’s Word might beat in the heart of things, but ordinary language was no more than the body’s bad breath. Kept chaste and forced into clerical service, thus from a surfeit of both denial and privilege, the Latin language died.

  Vigorous local lingoes rushed from the marketplace to take over Latin’s solemn academic duties; and great poets and philosophers were ready to give these native tongues eloquence, grace, wit, beauty, learning, weight, and earn them, therefore, honor and respect: Dante and Rabelais, Montaigne and
Marlowe, Hobbes and Descartes, Shakespeare and Jonson. The triumph of the raw, rambunctious word was soon complete. But this did not mean that all of the medieval schoolmen’s textual habits had been broken by one bull browsing in the china shop. Jonson’s erudition, his reverence for classical authorities, his lists, his logic chopping were clear holdovers from the past, as was the importance of public ceremonies for kings similar to the dependency on costume, choir, and spectacle on the part of the Pope and his cardinals.

  In Italy, for example, the theater’s loyalty to Aristotle’s unities of place and time had made it difficult for scene designers to strut their stuff. They found themselves obliged to dress actors for only one round of the clock and create settings for a play—long forest glade or drawing room, battlefield or busy square. Moreover, the philosopher’s objections to the use of deus ex machina discouraged gods from dramatically descending from Olympus upon those clouds they customarily arrived on just in time to cut the plot’s recalcitrant knot. Audiences, starved for action, had to be appeased; stage managers hungered for a challenge; for costumers, only nudity would have been worse; so between the play’s scenically frozen acts, they staged elaborate intermezzi that featured apparatus rather than actors, spectacle instead of speech: moons rose, suns set, comets crossed starry skies, patrons opened their purses, and the customers cried happily for more. “No expense has been spared,” as the circus posters used to boast, and for any would-be Midas in attendance, it was like watching gold pile up upon the stage.

  In 1545, the architect Sebastiano Serlio said, “The more such things cost, the more they are esteemed, for they are things which stately and great persons doe, which are enemies to niggardlinesse.” And Stephen Orgel, from whose wonderfully informative essay on “The Poetics of Spectacle” I have lifted this quote, goes on to say that “The means of drama, the age asserted, was spectacle, its end was wonder, and the whole was an expression of the glory of princes.” (The Authentic Shakespeare, London: Routledge, 2002.)