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

to bring about than natural death. But, as I have explained, the murderer
remains, and the effect is not final.
So we come to the third method, suicide. It can be used either
indirectly, with the murderer first killing the hero and then himself, so as
to remove all traces of what is really the author's crime, or it can be used
directly with the main character taking his own life. This again is easier
to pull off than natural death, as it is rather plausible for a man, after a
hopeless struggle with hopeless circumstances, to take his fate into his
hands. No wonder, then, that of the three methods suicide is your
determinist's favorite. But here a new and awful difficulty arises. Though a
murder can be, la rigueur, staged directly before our eyes, it is
extraordinarily difficult to stage a good suicide. It was feasible in the
old days, when such symbolic instruments as daggers and bodkins were used,
but nowadays we can't very well show a man cutting his throat with a
Gillette blade. Where poison is employed the agonies of the suicidee can be
too horrible to watch, and are sometimes too lengthy, while the implication
that the poison was so strong that the man just fell dead is somehow neither
fair nor plausible. Generally speaking the best way out is the pistol shot,
but it is impossible to show the actual thing--because, again, if treated in
a plausible manner, it is apt to be too messy for the stage. Moreover, any
suicide on the stage diverts the attention of the audience from the moral
point or from the plot itself, exciting in us the pardonable interest with
which we watch how an actor will proceed to kill himself plausibly and
politely with the maximum of thoroughness and the minimum of bloodshed.
Showmanship can certainly find many practical methods while actually leaving
the actor on the stage, but, as I say, the more elaborate the thing is, the
more our minds wander away from the inner spirit to the outer body of the
dying actor--always assuming that it is an ordinary cause-and-effect play.
We are left thus with only one possibility: the backstage pistol-shot
suicide. And you will remember that, in stage directions, the author will
generally describe this as a "muffled shot." Not a good loud bang, but "a
muffled shot," so that sometimes there is an element of doubt among the
characters on the stage regarding that sound, though the audience knows
exactly what that sound was. And now comes a new and perfectly awful
difficulty. Statistics--and statistics are the only regular income of your
determinist, just as there are people who make a regular income out of
careful gambling--show that, in real life, out of ten attempts at suicide by
pistol shot, as many as three are abortive, leaving the subject alive; five
result in a long agony; and only two bring on instant death. Thus, even if
the characters do understand what happens, a mere muffled shot is
insufficient to convince us that the man is really dead. The usual method,
then, after the muffled shot has cooed its message, is to have a character
investigate and then come back with the information that the man is dead.
Now, except in the rare case when the investigator is a physician, the mere
sentence "He is dead," or perhaps something "deeper" like, for instance, "He
has paid his debt," is hardly convincing coming from a person who, it is
assumed, is neither sufficiently learned nor sufficiently careless to wave
aside any possibility, however vague, of bringing the victim back to life.
If, on the other hand, the investigator comes back shrieking, "Jack has shot
himself! Call a doctor at once!" and the final curtain goes down, we are