A symphonic and sustained phantasmagoria, the novel has attracted considerable political comment because of the author’s difficulties under Stalin’s rule. Yet this reader suspects Bulgakov would have been ill at ease even under less despotic rule. His sense of the absurd, his social satire stretched to universals, his dazed reaction to the procession of experience, all make him a worthy successor to Gogol.
In their objective particularizing, the Pilate sections reminded me of Flaubert’s Salammbo, though I remain puzzled over thematic aspects of these passages which Bulgakov seems to wish to affirm as authentic by draining them of their supernaturalism, an odd compensation for the constant supernatural characters and sudden scene-shifting throughout. Perhaps the reader is meant to be caught off-balance.
Rabinal Achi (Tedlock)
One expects, I suppose, too much from an artifact like this, a vestige of pre-Columbian drama preserved in what looks like good condition by the merest chance.
It is many years since Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson’s picture of the Mayans as peaceful gentlemanly scholars has been devastated by decoding of the glyphs, most of which turn out to be records of the power of rulers proven by their military victories very like those found in Egypt or Babylon. So here the drama centers on the same sort of theme, the ritual submission and sacrifice of a conquered nobleman, performed in a highly ritualized atmosphere and bedecked with luxurious mythological context.
Tedlock, a participatory anthropologist (he prefers the term “dialogic” anthropologist) who had himself initiated as a shaman, a poet and founder along with Jerome Rothenberg of the influential Alcheringa, is surely the ideal guide for a work of this sort. His edition of the Popul Vuh is probably the best both for artistic and scientific reasons, but this work left me disappointed. While the Popul Vuh provides a fascinating, provocative, and dramatic creation story, the Rabinal Achi offers mainly aggression, though clothed in stately and operatic mythological and rhetorical finery.
A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Williams)
This late play, first staged in its final form in 1979, is theatrical and entertaining with considerable comedy as well as the author’s characteristic pathos. The reader may sit back and enjoy the lines of the extravagant Dorothea, her Teutonically weighty roommate Bodey, and her waspish coworker Helena. Often richly comic but sympathetic nonetheless, each is defined by the blinders they wear. The trajectory of the plot is clear from the outset, lending dark shadows to the scene, heightened by the presence of Sophie Gluck, a frantic, grieving, and mentally ill neighbor. The conclusion of the play, in which Dottie decides to join the picnic excursion, accepting the presence of Bodey’s brother in spite of his poor taste, beer, and cigars, indicates that she will survive despite her lover’s betrayal, though with radically reduced expectations.
The stage set is unusually significant in this play. The discordant and shabby décor of the ladies’ apartment is the occasion for humor, not squalor or real despair. If this play never reaches the heights or depths of Williams’ masterpieces, it is funnier than most, and the characters, though recognizable, are sufficiently individualized to engage the audience for the hour and a half of this extended single act. Williams was a master of the stage, and these four women, though quite unlike one another, are all quite amusing to those of us in the audience as they all do their best to pursue happiness, through frustration, poor judgement, and repeated defeat. There is, perhaps, a sort of courage, if not good taste, in the “fierce purple carpet.”
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