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Bernard Shaw's Dramatic Dialectic
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15198 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
5,663 Words |
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Bernard F. Dukore
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"I don't believe in morality," an amoral painter named Dubedat tells a group of doctors in Shaw's play The Doctor's Dilemma (1906). As if to justify his outlandish assertion, he offers what he considers a rational explanation: "I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw." Aiming to dispose of the matter, one of the doctors claims that nothing further need be said of this perverse writer who pretends to understand science, morality, and religion, yet irrationally opposes vaccination. "Bernard Shaw?" responds another, older doctor. "I never heard of him. He's a Methodist preacher, I suppose." The artist, "scandalized," vigorously denies the inference as if it were a criminal charge: "He's the most advanced man now living: He isn't anything." This sequence of jokes--partly on the doctors, partly on the artist, and partly on Shaw himself--is a convenient point of departure to examine the dialectical nature of the plays written over half a century by this prolific Irishman, a master of paradox who paradoxically lived most of his life in England. From Shaw's dialectical dramatic method, this essay will proceed to explore his social views, dramatized dialectically; then the religious ideas behind them, the role of emotion in his plays and, finally, returning to the point of departure, the dialectical nature of his comedy.
Although the fact that Shaw's self-proclaimed disciple is an artist might suggest the character is the author's spokesman, several factors warn us against this notion. To begin with, Dubedat denies, inaccurately, that Shaw believes in morality or anything else. As the doctor who deprecates Shaw recognizes, the playwright deals not only with morality but also with science, religion, and medical ethics--a list one could extend to, among other subjects, philosophy, politics, economics, music, art, photography, and education.
Furthermore, Shaw's so-called follower is socially unprincipled, dishonest, and deceitful. The titular doctor considers it a dilemma to choose whether "to go through life and find all the pictures bad but all the men and women good, or to go through life and find all the pictures good and all the men and women rotten," but Shaw himself found the choice easy. A year after he wrote this play, in his preface to The Sanity of Art, he repudiated the demand for "unlimited toleration of apparently outrageous conduct on the plea that the offender is a genius, even if by the abnormal development of some specific talent he may he highly skilled as an artist." However great a painter and draftsman Andrea del Sarto may have been, "He was a swindler all the same; and no honorable artist would plead on his behalf that misappropriating trust money is one of the superiorities of that very loosely defined diathesis which we call the artistic temperament."
Nor does the anti-Shavian doctor represent the sentiments of the author who opposed inoculation, which is that doctor's specialty, even fixation. In short, Shaw eschewed the notion that a dramatist should employ a character as his raisonneur, or mouthpiece. No character speaks entirely for him and through several in the same play may voice some of his opinions, they also have views opposed to his. In the passage quoted at the start, Shaw emerges as more moral than the scoundrel who considers himself Shavian and more intelligent than the anti-Shavian doctor whom the play has earlier revealed to be a humbug, but Shaw does so through their interaction.
Likewise, Misalliance (1909) lacks a raisonneur. In one scene, for instance, a working-class intruder
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