Two recent masterpieces gave me pause.
I seldom link those words – masterpiece and recent. Masterpieces, by their nature, are infrequent – “once in a lifetime” – unicorns, in today’s parlance. Experiencing two in a week dizzies. One was a new opera – “Innocence” – presented by the Metropolitan Opera. The other was a stage play, “Giant,” which landed in Manhattan having garnered lavish laurels in London for script and star. John Lithgow’s performance as the aging, raging children’s author Roald Dahl quivers in memory willy-nilly. The vitality, variety, and virulence of this pathological anti-Semite enthrall. We have read of such hatred, smearing swastikas on temples, massacring worshippers, but to witness such abhorrent behavior – from a writer beloved by generations of youngsters – unsettles. Lithgow’s Dahl is despicable, unforgivable, unforgettable. To applaud his performance feels almost culpable.
The story of “Innocence” is even worse: the emotional fallout from a school shooting a decade earlier. How this vile act wrecks the lives of all it affects – survivors no less than victims – rivets the attention and wrings the emotions. After the close of both these shows, the audience hesitates before lifting their hands to clap. How can one clap at such calamities!
That’s what gave me pause. The artistry of both these productions is exquisite and extreme – but that’s not today’s concern. What puzzles me about both shows – and much contemporary art – is moral inconclusion. We witness them as we might a bloody car-wreck, repulsed and enthralled. How terrible, we think. But what are we to make of these horrors? That murderous anti-Semitism and school massacres are abominable goes without saying: but what’s the takeaway here, the implicit peroration?
Today’s drama traces its origins from medieval morality plays, produced by the church to enlighten the illiterate about good and evil. Show-biz was – and is – more effective than sermons at driving a message home. Exhortations from a pulpit must be endured while those from a stage can be enjoyed. For roughly three centuries, from Shakespeare’s day till the twentieth century, dramatic presentations tended to imply if not proclaim a moral. Most TV dramas still do. To feel after a show, one doesn’t quite know what it “was about” leaves viewers queasily dissatisfied. Tie up a fable with a moral and one might stow it safely in mind.
As community crumbled in the twentieth century, so did certainty about right and wrong. Relativism nudged aside communal creeds. “It is so if you think so,” wrote Pirandello. Radical doubt became intellectual fashion. G.K. Chesterton, a fan of religious faith, put the problem pithily (Chesterton one must read with a pith helmet): “The problem,” he said, “is not that people do not believe in anything; it is that they believe anything.”
I quit the theater, after both masterpieces, awed and cowed. The art was immersive, yet the message elusive: what were we to make of it all? My spirit flailed for some Therefore not to drown in a sea of Who-knows. That these evils are rampant in our time we understand: but what are we to do?
I foresee a new age of faith. Not because God swoops down with a message refutable by none, but because human yearning envisions myths when we need them. Am I God’s creature or He mine? Impossible to say – and why should it matter? God exists if I believe in Him; if not, not.
Ages hence, the dubiety of this moment may strike our descendants as odd. How, they may ask, could our ancestors have endured so much doubt? How, without a confident sense of right and wrong, can humans know how to be?