Heartbreak House: Shaw's Ship of Fools

Heartbreak House: Shaw's Ship of Fools SALLY PETERS VOGT I IT IS EASIER to accept Shaw's judgment that Heartbreak House is his greatest play than to make critical sense of it, for the play can present obstacles even to the sympathetic critic. Throughout, the plot line is interrupted, expectations for further actions are undercut, and wildly improbable events occur. These irregularities are most glaring in the burglar's intrusion (Act II), the often contradictory responses of the characters, and the unpredictable denouement. Since such devices abound in farce and "absurdist" drama, critics have noted resemblances between Heartbreak House and, say, nineteenth century Dublin farce, as wel1 as plays of Beckett and Pinter. In contrast to these works, however, Heartbreak House is didactical1y ordered: Shaw bodies forth a simple statement on the future of England in two metaphors- the ship of state and the ship of fools. Uncovering the dramatic relation between these venerable tropes and the further relation of the tropes to the surface action lays bare the play's principle of coherence. The dramatic unification of didacticism and art in Heartbreak House is at once sui generis and also the realization of a generic form. This is the same form that underlies aUegory and fable, both of which have been briefly noted in discussions of the play.' Shaw himself lends support to the notion that the play is a fable: " It has more of the miracle, more of the mystic belief in it than any of my others, and, too, it is sort of a national fable or a fable of nationalism.'" Shaw's 267 268 SALLY PETERS VOGT statement must be seriously considered, since this particular conjunction of form and content, that is, fable and religion, preoccupied him throughout his career- from as early as 1878 in his unfinisbed verse drama, Passion Play, to his Farfetched Fables of 1948. In fact, the form perfected in Heartbreak House is the one Shaw favored in his last thirty years. Critics, however, have tended to treat Sbaw's statement indifferently. Underlying this critical predisposition are two related assumptions about the fable: it is a relatively unimportant part of the play's structure, and it is an inherently flawed form. As a result of such assumptions, the organizing principle has not been uncovered, even while subtle interpretations have increased our appreciation of local details. But unless we are forever to be content witb viewing Heartbreak House as a powerful but defective dramatic action, we must precisely ascertain how all parts fit into a single didactic whole. We shall then view the play's idiosyncrasies and irregularities no longer as deviations from a form, but as necessary instruments of Shaw's intention executed witbin precisely defined limits. It is obvious tbat Shaw's intention involves his thesis statement about England. Since this is the only thing obvious about the play, Shaw's comment on successful allegory is instructive, revealing as it does his dramaturgic bias: "There is only one way of dramatizing an idea; and that is by putting on the stage a human being possessed by that idea. ... Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, does not, like his unread imitators, attempt to personify Christianity and Valour: he dramatizes for you the life of the Christian and the Valiant Man.'" Shaw's view of allegory resembles the modern conception of "apologue ." This generic category denotes not only beast fable, but also a broad class of prose fiction subsuming both allegory and fable. According to Sheldon Sacks, in an apologue "characters are represented in complex relationships in a narrative manner and choice of style designed to alter our attitudes toward or opinions of the world we live in. The attitudes themselves are formulable critically as statements about the external world, though the aesthetic response required fully to appreciate the apologue need not go beyond an altered 'feeling'- a sentiment- about the external world.'" Although Sacks is concerned with prose fiction and we are concerned with dramatic fiction, it is possible to make the appropriate adjustments so that Sacks's conception can help us understand the generic form shaping Heartbreak House. For our responses to Heartbreak House are not grounded in our concern...