The Elephant Man as Dramatic Parable

The Elephant Man as Dramatic Parable JANET L. LARSON What is an elephant compared to a man? Brecht, A Man's a Mall [T]he more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, hercurious crudities, her extraordinary monotony. her absolutely unfinished condition. ... Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. Wilde, "The Decay of Lying" [Scripture says] that God is a hidden God, and that since the conuption of nature, He has left men in a darkness from which they can escape only through Jesus Christ. ... Vere tu es Deus absconditus. Pascal, Penseesl In 1977, Foco Novo, a radical fringe group named after a play by Bernard Pomerance about South American guerrillas, first produced The Elephant Mall in England; early in 1979, the play opened in mid Manhattan at St. Peter's Lutheran Church, a worShip space built into the Citicorp Center; a few months later, the production was moved to a Victorian theater on Broadway, where it has enjoyed a long run.' This brief production history suggests the broad span ofreference in this most recent Pomerance play: beginning in radical politics, it ends in metaphysics. and in between. it directs questions of aesthetics and ethics against show business, theatrical illusion, and all kinds of imitative performance from language learning to orthodox religious discipline and the imitation of Christ. This thematic range makes for some incoherence: a few critics have justly observed that the play contains too many allusions, without development, too many ideas which the theater audience can scarcely take in. Yet the incomplete web the allusions weave entangles many who have seen this play in a JANET L. LARSON mysterious enchantment that invites interpretation. The very multiplicity of themes and evocations is also essential to the power of adrama that expands its own dimensions through a dynamic of parable. Unfolding through multiple reversals, questioning its own premises while challenging the expectations of its hearers, The Elephant Man grows larger as we experience it and invites the audience to enlarge its own critical perceptions and sympathies. In its parabolic movement, Pomerance's play extends itse1fbeyond its leftist critique as well as its absurdist anguish to offer a slender opening for transcendent religious hope. These surprising expansions make The Elephant Man of considerable interest as dramatic parable to students of the modem theater. In the history ofthe freak John Merrick, popularly known as the Elephant Man, Pomerance found a subject that invited both leftist and absurdist interpretations , but finally eluded them. Merrick was first of all the archetypal social victim of the Victorian city - a misshapen child of the workhouse who eventually sought out the circus as the only means of earning his livelihood. Exploited, banned as "indecent," and at length abandoned by his managers, Merrick was fortuitously rescued by the young surgeon Mr. Frederick Treves, then rising in his profession. Treves brought Merrick to the London Hospital to study the incurable disorder (neurofibromatosis) that had made a "chaotic anatomical wilderness" of his body.' But the scientist also sought to cure the creature's sense of humiliation and to make him "a man like others."4 Treves's The ElephantMan and Other Reminiscences, published thirty years after the experience, tells an affecting rags-to-riches story of Merrick's last years at the London Hospital (1886-1890). It is well known that his aristocratic circle oflate Victorians studied, domesticated, and exalted the Elephant Man, a strange cult figure altogether suiting the needs peculiar to the fin de siecle. Like Little Nell in Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (which forty years earlier had given impetus in the nineteenth century to this sort of worShip), Merrick was perceived as a figure of saintly suffering "ennobled" by troubles which he never resented, always forgave. Treves's account suggests the tone of this worship: [the Elephant Man] had passed through the fire and had come out unscathed. ... He showed himself to be a gentle, affectionate and lovable creature, as amiable as ahappy woman, free from any trace of cynicism or resentment, without agrievance and without an unkind word for anyone. I have never...