Fry's Cosmic Vision

FRY'S COSMIC VISION THE "UNDERPLAY OF OPPOSITES" which Derek Stanford finds in Christopher Fry's plays' deserves further study. As Stanford points out, Fry's antitheses grow out of the confusion of appearance and reality, or the elusiveness of truth; and as Stanford implies, they sometimes take the form of moral dilemmas. However, the extent and complexity of this underplay have not been suffiCiently explored, nor has there been a sufficient attempt to relate these dilemmas to the dramatist's view of life. This is such an attempt. Fry's dilemmas are never simple, even when they seem so. Sometimes one merges into another, making a tangle of confusions. Values shift, chance defeats intention, and the dividing line is blurred between reason and passion, sanity and madness. The confusion appears not only in the minds of men but also in external nature, and ultimately in the mind of God. These conflicts are, of course, well suited to Fry's language of paradox-sparkling in the comedies, somber in The Firstborn . In the latter play, Moses expresses man's despair at these confusions when he cries, "What must we say/ To be free of the bewildering mesh of God?" But the dramatist does not conceive of God as a deliberate source of confusion, nor as an irresponsible Being whose right hand neither knows nor cares what his left hand does, but rather as a spirit operating under the principle of "divine non-interference." This is an active principle which pervades all of life, and allows men, nature, and institutions to make mistakes and try again. This principle unifies God's duality by giving it a purpose. The following examples, which include selections from all Fry's plays, show the extent of his concern with the cosmic dilemma. In the simplest of the plays, The Boy with a Cart, the shepherd boy Cuthman refuses to believe the friends who climb the hill to tell him his father is dead. He refuses to go down where one kind of truth must give way to another. "Up here," he says, "my father waits for me at home...." In A Phoenix Too Frequent, a young widow whose love for her dead husband has caused her to entomb herself with him is shaken in her intention by the intrusion of a handsome soldier. Trying to rationalize the new feeling in her heart, she exclaims, "What appears/ Is so unlike what is. And what is madness/ To those who only observe, is often wisdom/ To those to whom it happens." The soldier, loving her for her constancy to her dead husband and distressed by the knowledge 1. Derek Stanford, "Comedy and Tragedy in Fry," Modem Drama (May, 1959), n, 3-7. 355 356 MODERN DRAMA February that to win her he must destroy that constancy, says that "joy is nothing/ But the parent of doom." In The Lady's Not for Burning, the materialist Jennet and the disillusioned idealist Mendip disagree about the nature of reality. Jennet believes only what she can see and touch-only essential fact-·but Mendip tells her that fact is "the bare untruth." Nature's mystery, he says, has been wasted on her-"Creation's vast and exquisite/ Dilemmal where altercation thrums/ In every granule of the Milky Way," and where the argument goes on eternally in the sun, in the moon, and in every acorn that drops to earth. Mendip is concerned with nature's eternal flux: rotation of seasons, revolving of planets, waxing and waning of the moon. He finds no absolutes in the natural world, but rather a persistent duality. According to his view, it is not possible to point a finger at any aspect or mood of nature and call it "real," for at that moment the mood changes and a new aspect comes into being. The world, he says, is "as contradictory/As a female, as cabbalistic as the male.! A conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays/ Heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven." Thus he not only emphasizes the absence of ordinary reality in nature, but also hints at a theological problem which is developed in later plays. Mendip's viewpoint is not consistent, however, for...