From Macbeth to Macbett

From Macbeth to Macbett ROSETTE C. LAMONT •• "THE TITLE OF MY PLAY has two t's so that people won't get it confused with that of Shakespeare's, familiar, I imagine, to a good many." When interviewed, Ionesco the Prankster - he who enjoys saying that he belongs to "the cabaret school of literature" - is sure to make his entrance. The author of Macbett, however, though still in commanCl of his great sense of humor, is a serious political thinker. Like Picasso's drawings based on Manet's Le Dejeuner sur l'Herbe, Macbett is art· on art. Yet the aesthetic aspect here is, if not forgotten, transcended. Politics is lonesco's concern in his latest play, as it was in Rhinoceros, but whereas in the latter the playwright presented a monstrous happening, a moment of savagery, of regression to the beast in the development of civilization, the present play deals with the relentless, cyclic return of destruction, the playing and the playing out of political ambition. Twentieth-century writers have grown aware that literature neither copies nature, nor holds a mirror up to it; literature echoes other works of literature. As a Gothic church rises upon the site of a Romanesque chapel, often enclosing within its structure the skeleton of the former temple, so does a work of literary imagination enfold within its flesh of words the delicate architecture of previous creation: Dante-Virgil, Joyce-Homer, Proust-the French seventeenth century, T. S. Eliot-world literature. In France, it was Baudelaire - incidentally Ionesco's favorite poet - who first denounced nature, decried the "natural." (In Mon coeur mis it nu, the poet states: "La femme est naturelle, c'est-a-dire abominable.") Closer to our time, Kafka, explicated by his self-proclaimed heir, Alain Robbe-Grillet, who allowed Roland Barthes to instruct him in structuralism, brings proof that a hero of fiction lives nowhere but on the printed page. lonesco also affirms that a play is an autonomous universe, an invention of the mind. As such it can best be 231 232 ROSETTE C. LAMONT comprehended by other such inventors. Thus, one might say that the best reading of Strindberg's The Dance ofDeath would not be a critic's essay, but Friedrich Diirrenmatt's Play Strindberg. Like the latter, Macbett could be considered a subtle, imaginative reading of Macbeth. It is this and more. It is also a questioning of our world through the work of a great ancestor who becomes an intercessor. The whimsical surface of the form is but the sugar-coating around the medicine administered by one who discovered for himself that murder is considered by some, who call themselves men, a superior form of entertainment. A reader might well inquire, in all innocence: "But, isn't this also the message of Shakespeare's tragedy?" One nods affirmation. Shakespeare, indeed, illuminates those "black and deep desires" (I.iv) his protagonist would like t~ keep hidden within the night of his tormented heart. Never was "vaulting ambition" more pitilessly exposed than in this poem of murder and a throne's conquest. The innocent reader keeps on questioning: "Then, why write a tragi-comedy based on a tragedy, itself derived from Holinshed's Chronicles?" The obvious answer, "To retell the story for our time," does not satisfy the mind. Why tell again a tale well-told, unless it is to make it say something new? The questioning voice keeps prying: "Does Macbett say something else?" "Not really." "What is it then? What do you achieve by repeating the same statement in a different form?" The answer, paradoxically , is to be found in Hamlet. A story told more than once, told with variations, is a familiar Elizabethan device. If these variations are found within a single work we speak of a "double plot" or of "multiple narrative lines." It is Francis Fergusson's contention in The Idea of a Theater that this technique is essential to establish ironic parallels. Bringing into his discussion of Hamlet both Moulton (Shakespeare the Dramatic Artist) and William Empson (Some Versions of the Pastoral) to re-inforce his view that "the minor plots are essential parts of the whole composition" since they help to...