"Владимир Набоков. Эссе о драматургии (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

suddenly becomes not only fair, but supernaturally fair--and this leads me
to one of the most important points in the dismal technique of modern drama.
The weather, as I say, had been feverishly changing throughout the play
in accordance with the feverish changes of the plot. Now, when at the end of
the play neither of the two ships is meant to sink, the weather turns to
fair, and we know--this is my point--we know that the weather will remain
metaphysically fair after the curtain has gone down, for ever and ever. This
is what I term the positive finality idea. However variable the moves of man
and sky may have been during the four acts, they will retain forever that
particular move which permeates the very last bit of the last act. This
positive-finality idea is a direct consequence of the cause-and-effect idea:
the effect is final because we are limited by the prison regulations we have
adopted. In what we call "real life" every effect is at the same time the
cause of some other effect, so that the classification itself of causality
is merely a matter of standpoint. But, though in "real life" we are not able
to cut away one limb of life from other branching limbs, we do perform this
operation in stage drama, and thus the effect is final, for it is not
supposed to contain any new cause that would explode it somewhere beyond the
play.
A fine specimen of the positive finality motif is the stage suicide.
Here is what happens. The only logical way of leaving the effect of the end
of the play quite pure, i.e. without the faintest possibility of any further
causal transformation beyond the play, is to have the life of the main
character end at the same time as the play. This seems perfect. But is it?
Let us see how the man can be removed permanently. There are three ways:
natural death, murder, and suicide. Now, natural death is ruled out because,
however patiently prepared, however many heart attacks the patient endures
in the exposition, it is almost impossible for a determinist playwright to
convince a determinist audience that he has not been helping the hand of
God; the audience will inevitably regard such a natural death as an evasion,
an accident, a weak unconvincing end, especially as it must happen rather
suddenly, so as not to interfere with the last act by a needless display of
agony. I presuppose naturally that the patient has been struggling with
fate, that he has sinned, etc. I certainly do not mean that natural death is
always unconvincing: it is only the cause-and-effect idea that makes natural
death occurring at the right moment look a little too smart. So this first
method is excluded.
The second one is murder. Now, murder is all very well at the beginning
of a play. It is a very uncomfortable thing to have at its close. The man
who has sinned and struggled, etc., is doubtlessly removed. But his murderer
remains, and even if we may be plausibly sure that society will pardon him,
we are left with the uncomfortable sensation that we do not exactly know how
he will feel in the long years following the final curtain; and whether the
fact of his having murdered a man, however necessary it might have been,
will not influence somehow all his future life, for instance his
relationship with the still unborn but imaginable children. In other words,
the given effect breeds a vague but quite disagreeable little cause which
keeps moving like a worm in a raspberry, worrying us after the curtain has
gone down. In examining this method I assume, of course, that the murder is
a direct consequence of a previous conflict and in this sense it is easier