Against Interpretation

by Susan Sontag

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  If After the Fall fails as a serious play because of its intellectual softness, Rolf Hochhuth’s The Deputy fails because of its intellectual simplicity and artistic naïveté. But this is failure of another order. The Deputy has been put into awkward English and, clearly, Hochhuth couldn’t care less about the truth of Aristotle’s observation that poetry is more philosophical than historical; Hochhuth’s characters are little more than mouthpieces for the exposition of historical facts, exhibits of the collision of moral principles. But after the way in which Miller turns all events into their subjective reverberations, the artistic weakness of The Deputy seems almost condonable. The Deputy has all the directness toward its subject that Arthur Miller’s play lacks. Its virtue is precisely that it refuses to be subtle about the murder of the six million Jews.

  But the production by Herman Shumlin is as far from Hochhuth’s play (as written) as that play (as written) is from being a great play. Hochhuth’s crude but powerful six to eight hour documentary in play form has been put through Shumlin’s Broadway Blendor and emerges as a two hour and fifteen minute comic strip, and a dull one to boot—the story of a handsome, well-born hero, a couple of villains, and a few fence-sitters, titled The Story of Father Fontana, or Will the Pope Speak?

  I’m not of course insisting that the whole six to eight hours must be played. The play as written is repetitive. But a theater public that is willing to sit through four or five hours of O’Neill could surely be persuaded to sit through—say—four hours of Hochhuth’s play. And it is not hard to imagine a four-hour version that would do justice to the narrative. From the present Broadway version, one would never guess that the noble SS Lieutenant Kurt Gerstein (a true person) is as important a character and as much the hero of The Deputy as the Jesuit Father Fontana (a composite figure based on two heroic priests of the period). Neither Eichmann, nor the notorious Professor Hirt, nor the Krupp industrialist—all important characters in Hochhuth’s play as he wrote it—appears at all in the Broadway version. (Among the dropped scenes, one particularly misses Act I, Scene 2, the party given by Eichmann.) By concentrating exclusively on the story of Fontana’s vain appeals to the Pope, Shumlin has gone far toward burying the historical memories which Hochhuth’s play aims to keep alive. But this drastic simplification of Hochhuth’s historical argument is not even the worst offense of Shumlin’s version. The worst offense is the refusal to dramatize anything really painful to watch. Certain scenes in The Deputy are excruciating to read. None of this—the terror and torture, the gruesome boasts and banter, even the recitals of unimaginable statistics—has been retained. The entire horror of the murder of the six million has been reduced to one scene of police interrogation of some Jewish converts to Catholicism, plus a single image repeated three times in the course of the play: a line of bent, ragged figures shuffles across the dark rear of the stage; midstage stands an SS man, his back to the audience, yelling something that sounds like “Move along now!” A conventional image; an entirely palatable image; an image which neither stirs, nor disgusts, nor terrifies. Even Fontana’s long monologue, the speechifying scene on the freightcar headed for Auschwitz—the seventh of the eight scenes in Shumlin’s emasculated version—was cut just before opening night. Now the play moves directly from the confrontation between the Pope and Father Fontana at the Vatican to the final scene in Auschwitz, of which all that’s left is the amateurish philosophical debate between the demonic SS doctor and Fontana, who has donned the yellow star and elected martyrdom in the gas chambers. The reunion of Gerstein and Fontana, their appalling discovery that Jacobson has been captured, the torture of Carlotta, the death of Fontana—all are omitted.

  Although the decisive damage is already done by the version which Shumlin has carved from the play, it should be noted that the production is in most ways inadequate as well. Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s slim allusive sets belong to another director; they are lost on a production utterly lacking in the slightest subtlety or stylization. The actors are no more but no less inept and unskillful than the average Broadway cast. As usual, there is the same over-statement of emotions, the same monotony of movement, the same mélange of accents, the same flatness of style that makes for the low level of American acting. The leads, who are English, seem more gifted—though their performances are thin. Emlyn Williams plays Pope Pius XII with a hesitant stiffness of movement and speech, presumably designed to indicate Papal solemnity, which aroused my suspicion that he was indeed the late Pope, exhumed for the occasion, and in an understandably fragile condition. At the least, he looked suspiciously like the life-size statue of Pius XII behind glass near the entrance of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Jeremy Brett, who plays Father Fontana, has an agreeable presence and lovely diction, though he floundered badly when he had to convey real despair or terror.

  These recent plays—and some others, like Dylan, which it would be a mercy to pass over in silence—illustrate once again that the American theater is ruled by an extraordinary, irrepressible zest for intellectual simplification. Every idea is reducible to a cliché, and the function of a cliché is to castrate an idea. Now, intellectual simplification has its uses, its value. It is, for example, absolutely indispensable to comedy. But it is inimical to the serious. At present, the seriousness of the American theater is worse than frivolity.

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  The hope for intelligence in the theater is not through conventional “seriousness,” whether in the form of analysis (bad example: After the Fall), or the documentary (weak example: The Deputy). It is rather, I think, through comedy. The figure in the modern theater who best understood this was Brecht. But comedy, too, has its enormous perils. The danger here is not so much intellectual simplification as failure of tone and taste. It may be that not all subjects can be given a comic treatment.

  This question of the adequacy of tone and taste to serious subject-matter is, of course, not confined to the theater alone. There is an excellent illustration of the advantages of comedy, and of its peculiar dilemmas—if I may pass to the movies for a moment—in two films recently showing in New York, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator and Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Bomb. The virtues and failures of both films seem to me oddly comparable, and instructive.

  In the case of The Great Dictator, the problem is easily discernible. The entire conception of the comedy is totally, painfully, insultingly inadequate to the reality it purports to represent. The Jews are Jews, and they live in what Chaplin calls the Ghetto. But their oppressors don’t display the swastika but the emblem of the double cross; and the dictator is not Adolf Hitler but a balletic buffoon with a mustache named Adenoid Hynkel. Oppression in The Great Dictator is uniformed bullies throwing so many tomatoes at Paulette Goddard that she has to wash her laundry all over again. It is impossible to see The Great Dictator in 1964 without thinking of the hideous reality behind the movie, and one is depressed by the shallowness of Chaplin’s political vision. One cringes at that embarrassing final speech, when the Little Jewish Barber steps up to the podium in place of Der Phooey to call for “progress,” “liberty,” “brotherhood,” “one world,” even “science.” And to watch Paulette Goddard looking up at the dawn and smiling through her tears—in 1940!

  The problem of Doctor Strangelove is more complex, though it may well be that in twenty years it will seem as simple as The Great Dictator. If the positive assertions at the close of The Great Dictator seem facile and insulting to its subject, so may the display of negative thinking of Doctor Strangelove soon (if it does not already) seem equally facile. But this does not explain its appeal now. Liberal intellectuals who saw Doctor Strangelove during its many preview showings last October and November marvelled at its political daring, and feared that the film would run into terrible difficulties (mobs of American Legion types storming the theaters, etc.). As it turned out, everybody, from The New Yorker to the Daily News, has had kind words for Doctor Strangelove; there a
re no pickets; and the film is breaking records at the box-office. Intellectuals and adolescents both love it. But the sixteen-year-olds who are lining up to see it understand the film, and its real virtues, better than the intellectuals, who vastly overpraise it. For Doctor Strangelove is not, in fact, a political film at all. It uses the OK targets of left-liberals (the defense establishment, Texas, chewing gum, mechanization, American vulgarity) and treats them from an entirely post-political, Mad Magazine point of view. Doctor Strangelove is really a very cheerful film. Certainly, its fullbloodedness contrasts favorably with what is (in retrospect) the effeteness of Chaplin’s film. The end of Doctor Strangelove, with its matter-of-fact image of apocalypse and flip soundtrack (“We’ll Meet Again”), reassures in a curious way, for nihilism is our contemporary form of moral uplift. As The Great Dictator was Popular Front optimism for the masses, so Doctor Strangelove is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.

  What is good in The Great Dictator are the solitary autistic acts of grace, like Hynkel playing with the balloon-globe; and the “little man” humor, as in the sequence where the Jews draw lots for a suicidal mission out of slices of a pie, and Chaplin ends up with all the tokens in his slice. These are the perennial elements of comedy, as developed by Chaplin, over which has been pasted this unsatisfactory political cartoon. Similarly, what is good in Doctor Strangelove has to do with another perennial source of comedy, mental aberration. The best things in the film are the fantasies of contamination expounded by the psychotic Gen. Jack D. Ripper (played with excruciating brilliance by Sterling Hayden), the super-American clichés and body movements of Gen. Buck Turgidson, a Ring Lardneresque businessman-military type (put together by George C. Scott), and the euphoric satanism of Doctor Strangelove himself, the Nazi scientist with the right arm that hates him (Peter Sellers). The specialty of silent-film comedy (and The Great Dictator is still, essentially, a silent film) is the purely visual crossing of grace, folly, and pathos. Doctor Strangelove works another classic vein of comedy, as much verbal as visual—the idea of humors. (Hence the joke names of characters in Doctor Strangelove, exactly as in Ben Jonson.) But notice that both films rely on the same device for distancing the audience’s feelings: employing the same actor to play several key roles. Chaplin plays both the Little Jewish Barber and the dictator Hynkel. Sellers plays the relatively sane British officer, the weak American president, and the Nazi scientist; he was originally supposed to take a fourth role as well—that of the Texan, played in the film by Slim Pickens, who commands the plane which drops the H-Bomb that sets off the Russian Doomsday Machine. Without this device of the same actor playing morally opposed roles, and so subliminally undermining the reality of the entire plot, the precarious ascendancy of comic detachment over the morally ugly or the terrifying in both films would be lost.

  Doctor Strangelove fails most obviously in scale. Much (though not all) of its comedy seems to me repetitive, juvenile, ham-banded. And when comedy fails, seriousness begins to leak back in. One begins to ask serious questions about the misanthropy which is the only perspective from which the topic of mass annihilation is comic.… For me, the only successful spectacle shown this winter dealing with public issues was a work which was both a pure documentary and a comedy—Daniel Talbot and Emile de Antonio’s editing into a ninety-minute film of the TV kinescopes of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Viewed in 1964, the hearings make a quite different impression. All the good guys come off badly—Army Secretary Stevens, Senator Symington, lawyer Welch, and the rest, looked like dopes, stuffed shirts, ninnies, prigs, or opportunists—while the film irresistibly encourages us to relish the villains aesthetically. Roy Cohen, with his swarthy face, slicked-down hair, and double-breasted, pin-stripe suit, looked like a period punk from a Warner Brothers’ crime movie of the early thirties; McCarthy, ushaven, fidgety, giggling, looked and acted like W. C. Fields in his most alcoholic, vicious, and inaudible roles. In that it aestheticized a weighty public event, Point of Order was the real comédie noire of the season, as well as the best political drama.

  [Spring 1964]

  2

  The currency of exchange for most social and moral attitudes is that ancient device of the drama: personifications, masks. Both for play and for edification, the mind sets up these figures, simple and definite, whose identity is easily stated, who arouse quick loves and hates. Masks are a peculiarly effective, shorthand way of defining virtue and vice.

  Once a grotesque, a figure of folly—childlike, lawless, lascivious—“the Negro” is fast becoming the American theater’s leading mask of virtue. For definiteness of outline, being black, he even surpasses “the Jew,” who has an ambiguous physical identity. (It was part of the lore of the advanced position on Jewishness that Jews didn’t have to look like “Jews.” But Negroes always look like “Negroes,” unless, of course, they are unauthentic.) And for sheer pain and victimage, the Negro is far ahead of any other contender in America. In just a few short years, the old liberalism, whose archetypal figure was the Jew, has been challenged by the new militancy, whose hero is the Negro. But while the temper which gives rise to the new militancy—and to “the Negro” as hero—may indeed scorn the ideas of liberalism, one feature of the liberal sensibility hangs on. We still tend to choose our images of virtue from among our victims.

  In the theater, as among educated Americans generally, liberalism has suffered an ambiguous rout. That large streak of moralism, of preachiness in such plays as Waiting for Lefty, Watch on the Rhine, Tomorrow the World, Deep Are the Roots, The Crucible—the classics of Broadway liberalism—would be unacceptable now. But what was wrong with these plays, from the most contemporary point of view, is not that they aimed to convert their audiences, rather than simply entertaining them. It was, rather, that they were too optimistic. They thought problems could be solved. James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie is a sermon, too. To make it official, Baldwin has said that the play is loosely inspired by the Emmett Till case, and one may read, on the theater program under the director’s name, that the play is “dedicated to the memory of Medgar Evers, and his widow and his children, and to the memory of the dead children of Birmingham.” But it is a sermon of a new type. In Blues for Mister Charlie, Broadway liberalism has been vanquished by Broadway racism. Liberalism preached politics, that is, solutions. Racism regards politics as superficial (and seeks some deeper level); it emphasizes what is unalterable. Across a virtually impassable gulf, the new mask of “the Negro,” manly, toughened, but ever vulnerable, faces his antipode, another new mask, “the white” (sub-genus: “the white liberal”)—who is pasty-faced, graceless, lying, sexually dull, murderous.

  No one in his right mind would wish the old masks back. But this does not make the new masks wholly convincing. And whoever accepts them should notice that the new mask of “the Negro” has become visible only at the price of emphasizing the fatality of racial antagonisms. If D. W. Griffith could call his famous white supremacist film about the origins of the Ku Klux Klan The Birth of a Nation, then James Baldwin could, with more justice to the overt political message of his Blues for Mister Charlie (“Mister Charlie” is Negro slang for “white man”), have as well called his play “The Death of a Nation.” Baldwin’s play, which takes place in a small Southern town, opens with the death of its brash, tormented Negro jazz musician hero, Richard, and ends with the acquittal of his white murderer, a resentful inarticulate young buck named Lyle, and the moral collapse of the local liberal, Parnell. There is the same insistence on the painful ending, even more starkly presented, in LeRoi Jones’ one-act play Dutchman, now running off-Broadway. In Dutchman, a young Negro sitting on the subway reading and minding his own business is first accosted, then elaborately teased and taunted to the point of rage, then suddenly knifed by a twitchy young hustler; while his body is being disposed of by the other passengers, whites, the girl turns her attention to a new young Negro who has just boarded the train. In the new post-liberal morality plays, it is essential that
virtue be defeated. Both Blues for Mister Charlie and Dutchman turn on a shocking murder—even though, in the case of Dutchman, the murder is simply not credible in terms of the more or less realistic action that has gone before, and seems crude (dramatically), tacked on, willed. Only murder releases one from the mandate to be moderate. It is essential, dramatically, that the white man win. Murder justifies the author’s rage, and disarms the white audience, who have to learn what’s coming to them.

  For it is indeed an extraordinary sermon that is being preached. Baldwin is not interested in dramatizing the incontestable fact that white Americans have brutally mistreated Negro Americans. What is being demonstrated is not the social guilt of the whites, but their inferiority as human beings. This means, above all, their sexual inferiority. While Richard jeers about his unsatisfying experiences with white women up North, it turns out that the only passions—in one instance carnal, in the other romantic—ever felt by the two white men who figure importantly in the play, Lyle and Parnell, have been with Negro women. Thus, the oppression by whites of Negroes becomes a classic case of resentment as described by Nietzsche. It is eerie to sit in the ANTA Theatre on 52nd Street and hear that audience—sizably Negro, but still preponderantly white—cheer and laugh and break into applause at every line cursing white America. After all, it’s not some exotic Other from across the seas who is being abused—like the rapacious Jew or the treacherous Italian of the Elizabethan drama. It is the majority of the members of the audience themselves. Social guilt would not be enough to explain this remarkable acquiescence of the majority in their own condemnation. Baldwin’s plays, like his essays and novels, have undoubtedly touched a nerve other than political. Only by tapping the sexual insecurity that grips most educated white Americans could Baldwin’s virulent rhetoric have seemed so reasonable.