INFLUENCES, PART 3
VOLTAIRE
Voltaire
(1694 - 1778), with whom I was perhaps slightly acquainted through high school
history classes, came smashing into a far more central location in my life with
his satirical novella Candide, which
I picked up one day from my father's amply-endowed bookshelf and took to reading
on an impulse. (The cover picture
of the crazed pirate and helpless woman showing a lot of leg had little to do
with it.) What impressed me most
about this little book was how Voltaire was able to take on such heavy topics as
religious intolerance, hypocrisy, and persecution, brutal war, pillage, and
rape, the thoughtless and callous waste of human life which characterized the
world into which he was born, natural disasters (God, where are you?) and
multitudinous other calamities, and to treat it all with a light, ironical, and
humorous but restrained voice without engendering our outrage as modern readers
(how dare he???), or sabotaging
himself with our resentment (what poor
taste!) On the contrary, his
remarkable tone, so unsuited for such weighty topics (it at first seemed),
somehow coated all the madness of the human race with a visible layer of
absurdity, stripping away the solemnity and piousness which give the crimes of
the world the 'moral' space they require in order to be perpetrated.
His mocking tone, linked to a clear vision free of blind loyalty to the
Ideals which separate men from their common sense, was a thousand times more
powerful than one battery of cannons firing upon another.
He rose above the endless carnage around which the world seemed to
revolve, gave Reason a new voice, and a higher place to stand...
Although Candide is considered
just a small part of Voltaire's contribution to the world (he was one of the
great thinkers and personalities of the Enlightenment, which gradually nudged
Western civilization away from savage wars of religion towards democratic and
secular practices), this little book instantly became one of my literary maps.
It taught me how the most serious topics can be taken on with a serious
spirit, but in a satirical manner, without capsizing; it showed me how humor can
walk among the landmines of bitter realities without blowing up, and how the
comic voice, so long as it retains its compassion and connection to the
suffering of others, can sometimes break past the deadlock of opposites battling
opposites, and come to the aid of others from a new and unexpected angle.
'Sometimes, the greatest weapon to use against injustice is the laugh.'
MOLIERE
Moliere
(1622-1673), was another of the French literary giants, a brilliant playwright
known for the production of such masterpieces as
Tartuffe,
The Misanthrope,
The School for Wives,
The Affected Ladies, and
The Physician In Spite of Himself.
I remember settling down to reading an
edition of his collected plays in the green, attic-like room in which I resided
at the time, and lighting up with delight at his unsparing caricatures of the
hypocritical, the pretentious, the pompous and the dull.
All the vices of normal society which we are sadly accustomed to tolerate
to the point of not seeing, or even plunging headfirst into ourselves (we are
educated by the failings of others to expect less of ourselves), he exposed then
tore apart with his brilliant comedies.
Shining a light upon the preposterous, he delegitimized the routine, and
gave the world the option of changing.
Or, if one believes that change is impossible, at least he gave to us the
chance to vent, to mock the absurd for one honest evening in the darkness of a
theater, or in the sanctuary of a library...
In the manner of the best French writers, including Rabelais and (more
particularly) Voltaire, he was pressured and threatened during his life by
powerful forces which did not appreciate his seeing eyes and his challenging
spirit. The fact that he persevered
to give us the works he did is a testament to his courage as well as his genius.
RABELAIS
Rabelais
- my God, another Frenchman???? - lived from 1494 - 1553, and is best known for
the tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel,
which are extensive, learned, rowdy, fantastical (in the sense of preposterously
unreal) and satirical. The tales
involve enormous giants (16th-century French versions of Paul Bunyan?) with
gigantic appetites and equally huge requirements for adventure, as well as not
very well-behaved monks, engaged in quests, wanderings, battles, and encounters
with social realities in need of poking.
Simultaneously playful and mind-expanding (especially for the public of
the day which best understood this material),
Gargantua and Pantagruel
earned Rabelais great praise, among friends, for his imagination, humor,
joie de vivre, literary cleverness,
and soul-abundance, while among enemies he was roundly condemned for blasphemy,
obscenity, disrespect and in general the failure to be grim.
I at once fell in love with this humanist physician turned writer,
mesmerized by the gushing nature of his creativity, which seemed to come into
being in the manner of a dam breaking rather than in the manner of an accountant
counting pennies. Not just his
liberated and daringly open material, but his
style of giving birth, resonated with
me and encouraged me to approach my own writing with that same spirit of
freedom: not cringing, not limiting, not taming, not transmuting gold into
safety by self-censoring at the outset (at least wait till someone shows up with
an axe), not whittling away a universe until one is left with one perfect atom
(give me the unruly, unwieldy universe!), not taking out the wrinkles which make
the story more alive!
Vive Rabelais, as spectacular in
stature as the giants he wrote about! Truly
one of my influences...
JONATHAN SWIFT
And now,
on to someone who was not French! -- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) --
who was Irish!
Swift, well-known for his biting ironical skills, best evidenced by
A Modest Proposal, was also a
brilliantly imaginative satirist most successful in the creation of his
undisputed masterpiece, Gulliver's
Travels. Of course, the picture
above is not of Swift, but of Gulliver (unless something happened in Swift's
room one night which has yet to come to light).
In these tales, an Englishman by the name of Lemuel Gulliver traveled to
many exotic lands, including the realm of the Lilliputians, a tiny, war-like
people whose sense of glory and self-importance perfectly emulated the pride of
the world's nations and armies, whose mighty agendas were thereby cast into
perspective. (It is, perhaps, our
myopia which ruins us. What a gift,
then, is Swift's Gulliver, literally rising above the chaos to view the world as
it is... and the way Gulliver put out fires ... got to love the guy!)
Later, Swift sent Gulliver on to a land of giants where he learned the
meaning of powerlessness, that feeling which the subject classes and races of
the earth have most often experienced alone - but now, through Gulliver's
plight, more could share in it, and even partake of the valuable lesson that
benevolence from the top down is not synonymous with fairness, and does not
guarantee the 'weak one's' safety.
And then there was a land of brilliant horses, so much more noble than humans
who paled in comparison; and besides that, a magnetically-levitated island
hovering in the sky, home to great thinkers who had no common sense.
(Their clothes did not fit, they frequently walked into one another, and
their wives cheated on them while they abstractly pondered the mysteries of the
Universe.) Swift's fantasies instantly
appealed to me, as they have appealed to millions.
As a child, I simply loved the adventures, the storybook images and the
fantasy elements; as an adult, the keenness of the social observation and
critique, presented through those elements.
Swift is up there with the great satirists of all times, and is
necessarily on any contemporary satirist's list of major influences...
CERVANTES
Miguel
de Cervantes (1547-1616), is another of my major influences.
Of course, this Spanish literary genius is best known for his masterwork,
Don Quixote, one half satire of the
medieval-derived chivalrous romance still popular in his day, and one half paean
to the Obsolete, somehow noble in the context of its demise.
In the end, the mockery of the figure of the Knight (a role sustainable
in modern times only via the path of delusion) seems to some of us to be
transformed into a tragic homage to the outdated archetype:
a kind of commentary on the cruelty and stale practicality of the times
which have converted him from a heroic and admirable role-model into an absurd
character who is the laughingstock of his age. The
novel (two now joined as one) is filled with amazing incidents, hallucinations
brought on by enthusiasm, and misperceptions.
These are comical and immensely enjoyable in and of themselves.
But in the overall context, one is left not to mock Don Quixote, but to
cherish and revere him. He has
become the saint of all impossible causes, of all unattainable dreams, of the
fight to breathe another air that is not so practical, of the desire to be bold
in a world tailored to the tame, and lofty in a world recreated for souls that
crawl. Besides this allure, the
true life story of Cervantes is also deeply moving to me.
The author of Don Quixote is
an amazing example of courage and perseverance - nothing was handed to him on a
plate, and if it were not for his extraordinary will, we would never have heard
of him at all - not a single ray of light would have escaped from his personal
ordeals. He was in his early days a
soldier, badly wounded in battle (in fact, he lost the use of his left arm from
a gunshot wound). He was later
captured by Algerian pirates and held as a slave for five years before his
family was able to put together a ransom sufficient to earn his release.
Later, due to misunderstandings with the King of Spain's bureaucracy, he
was imprisoned for several months more. Through all these struggles, something
which needed to be born stayed alive inside of him, growing all the while in
power as his pain scarred him, and left many of his surfaces ruined.
Cervantes knew it was there, felt it coming, and on account of it would
not quit. Somehow, at the age of
57, he finally brought Don Quixote to
life, brought forth the fruit of all his suffering and what it had done to his
mind, and not been able to do to his mind.
It is an astounding achievement, and an inspiration to any writer who has
faltered in the early part of the race.
Long live the hero of La Mancha, battler of windmills!
CHARLIE CHAPLIN
And
then, of course, we have Charlie Chaplin (1889 - 1977)!
It may seem strange, at first, to place him here amidst a listing of
literary figures, but then, again, was he not an artist as they were artists?
And what an artist! Creator
of a deluge of silent shorts, he went on to write and star in such
feature-length film classics as The Gold
Rush, Modern Times, and
City Lights (silent), and
The Great Dictator (talkie).
Although best known for his principal film persona of "the tramp" - a
scrappy, funny, quite imperfect, but usually good-hearted magnet for calamity
and hard luck - I love the picture of him above,
out of costume, in which one can
discern the intelligence and the hunger to succeed of the young performer, who
had survived real poverty and tragedy to find the perfect vehicle for his
salvation in California's rising motion picture industry.
Charlie is for me one of the consummate artists of all times, and a
special inspiration to me for a myriad of reasons, foremost among these being
his ability to combine hilarious comedy, with incisive and timely social
commentary, and deeply-moving personal drama, which is at the same time
emotionally intense and universally comprehensible.
All in the same movie, he could get you to laugh your head off, to cry
your eyes out, and to awaken to, or recall, pressing issues of social justice.
The mix was harmonious, perfectly blended - with so much going on, the odds of
something coming apart, and of everything then falling out of balance, and
sinking the whole project, were astronomically high - and yet, time and time
again, he pulled it off: somehow, the slapstick did not cancel out the
heartbreak, the pathos did not crush one's ability to laugh, the social critique
did not drown out the personal story.
Instead of pulling you in different directions, the elements combined to
create one powerful organic experience. Amazing!
Charlie was truly one of the giants of our planet's cultural history,
and he must surely count as one of my major influences, stimulating me to write
in a more visual way (seeing clear scenes and images, as a motion-picture
director), and inspiring me to attempt the same daring mixture of comedy and
seriousness in order to produce an effect of greater depth and impact (the
comedy outflanking the barriers always erected in the path of seriousness, the
seriousness saving the comedy from the irresponsibility of excessive lightness
in a world of great need). Without
a doubt, Charlie belongs on this page, along with Voltaire, Moliere and Swift
(but do they belong with him?)
^
Charlie in his most recognizable form as "The Tramp."