Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles: A New Approach

Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles: A New Approach FREDRIC BERG In 1933, seventy-six-year-old Bernard Shaw journeyed east to India. The troubling effect this visit can have on Westerners is documented in much of twentieth-century English literature and has recently been ubiquitous in film and television. The Indian subcontinent during the British Raj was the most vivid theatre for the playing out of the clash of cultures between East and West, and one can easily assume that it must have had its effect on the mystically prone Shaw. Shaw's passage from India was a sea voyage to New Zealand during which he wrote "without any premeditation whatever," The Simp/etan of the Unexpected ls/es, a play he described as "openly oriental, hieratic and insane.'" It was produced the next year in New York. The critical reaction was decidedly mixed, in teoms of both the play's merits and its interpretation, and its impact was minimal. Twenty years later, by the time of Shaw's death, the play was being dismissed'as "silly" by Edmund Wilson, which prompted Katherine Haynes Gatch to declare feebly that the master had written a deliberately silly play so as to "provoke a revulsion against silliness.,,2 Subsequent critics have seen the playas everything from an attack on British colonialism to a promotion of Shaw's philosophy of Creative Evolution to a defence of Fascist death camps and Stalinist purges as a means for society to weed out the nonproductive and undesirable (with one critic.going so far as to state: "In ... The Simpleton ... Bernard Shaw the thinker discloses his intellectual bankruptcy.")' But whatever their interpretation, most critics agree that the play suffers from a flawed structure in attempting to combine the divergent pulls of creative Utopia and the destructive day of judgment, agreeing with Eric Bentley (who otherwise seems to ignore the play altogether) that its structure is "flimsy."4 More recently, Valli Rao has attempted to refocus the discussion of the play by examining it within the context of Indian religions. Shaw's only port of call in India was Bombay, and, while he spent much of his visit in his Modern Drama, 36 (1993) 538 Shaw's The Simplelon oj Ihe Unexpected Isles 539 stateroom granting interviews to the Indian press, he still devoted considerable time to the exploration of Indian religions: he visited two local Jain temples, discussing their religious art with his guide, Hiralal Amritlal Shah, and was visited by Jeddu Krisbnamurti, the adopted son of his old fellow Fabian, Annie Besant, who had gone to India years before to pursue its religions (and whom, owing to both their advanced ages, Shaw was unable to meet with on his visit)5 In particular, Rao places great emphasis on the influence of the Jain religion on The SimplelO/!: We learn from allusions in Shaw's writings that the stark contrast between the ideal that the Jain religion contains and the reality to which it had accommodated itself, impressed itself strongly upon Shaw's mind. Again and again, in the years to come, he returns to the message implicit in the Jain images, in an attempt to understand the fall of man when viewed as a fall from true religion into idolatry, from what in the Blakean world is a fall from the spiritual to the material, from an imaginary grasp of reality to an effort at a literal hold of apparent reality. The attempt to understand man's fall in terms of a fall from true religion to idolatry may indeed be seen as forming a major impulse in the make-up of The Simpleton 0/ th.e Unexpected IsJes.6 However, the one common thread in all of these approaches to the play is their reliance on external influences, and it is not my purpose here to explore or challenge any of them. Instead, I offer another possible interpretation, one which approaches the play in terms of Shaw's own internal psychology and also helps to reconcile the apparent structural problems of the play. I feel the important points to consider in dealing with The Simpleton are where Shaw had just been...