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

left wondering whether, in our times of patchable hearts, a good physician
might not save the mangled party. Indeed, the effect that is fondly supposed
to be final may, beyond the play, start a young doctor of genius upon some
stupendous career of life-saving. So, shall we wait for the doctor and see
what he says and then ring down the curtain? Impossible--there is no time
for further suspense; the man, whoever he is, has paid his debt and the play
is over. The right way, then, is to add, after "debt," "It is too late to
call a doctor"; that is, we introduce the word "doctor" as a kind of
symbolic or masonic sign--not meaning, say, that we (the messenger) are
sufficiently learned and sufficiently unsentimental to know that no doctor
will help, but conveying to the audience by a conventional sign, by this
rapid "doctor" sound, something that stresses the positive finality of the
effect. But actually there is no way of making the suicide quite, quite
final, unless, as I said, the herald himself be a doctor. So we come to the
very curious conclusion that a really ironclad tragedy, with no possible
chink in cause or effect--that is, the ideal play that textbooks teach
people to write and theatrical managers clamor for--that this masterpiece,
whatever its plot or background, 1) must end in suicide, 2) must contain one
character at least who is a doctor, 3) that this doctor must be a good
doctor and, 4) that it is he who must find the body. In other words, from
the mere fact of tragedy's being what it is we have deduced an actual play.
And this is the tragedy of tragedy.
In speaking of this technique, I have begun at the end of a modern
tragedy to show what it must aspire to if it wants to be quite, quite
consistent. Actually, the plays you may remember do not conform to such
strict canons, and thus are not only bad in themselves, but do not even
trouble to render plausible the bad rules they follow. For, numerous other
conventions are unavoidably bred by the causal convention. We may hastily
examine some of these.
A more sophisticated form of the French "dusting the furniture"
exposition is when, instead of the valet and the maid discovered onstage, we
have two visitors arriving on the stage as the curtain is going up, speaking
of what brought them, and of the people in the house. It is a pathetic
attempt to comply with the request of critics and teachers who demand that
the exposition coincide with action, and actually the entrance of two
visitors is action. But why on earth should two people who arrived on the
same train and who had ample time to discuss everything during the journey,
why must they struggle to keep silent till the minute of arrival, whereupon
they start talking of their hosts in the wrongest place imaginable--the
parlor of the house where they are guests? Why? Because the author must have
them explode right here with a time-bomb exposition.
The next trick, to take the most obvious ones, is the promise of
somebody's arrival. So-and-so is expected. We know that so-and-so will
unavoidably come. He or she will come very soon. In fact he or she comes a
minute after it has been said that the arrival will occur perhaps after
dinner, perhaps tomorrow morning (which is meant to divert the audience's
attention from the rapidity of the apparition: "Oh, I took an earlier train"
is the usual explanation). If, when promising the audience a visitor, the
speaker remarks that by the by so-and-so is coming--this by the by is a
pathetic means of concealing the fact that so-and-so will play a most