CAV & PAG
If a perfume manufacturer were to adopt the "naturalistic" aesthetic, what hind of scents would he hottle?
paul valery
While we all know that every moment of life is a living moment, it is impossible for us not to feel that some moments are more lively than others, that certain experiences are clues to the meaning and essential structures of the whole flux of experience in a way that others are not. This selection is, in part, imposed by experience itself—certain events overwhelm us with their importance without our knowing why —and in part is due to a predisposition on our side, by personal temperament and by social tradition, to be open to some kinds of events and closed to others. Dante's encounter with Beatrice, for example, was given him, but he would probably not have received or interpreted the revelation in exactly the way that he did if the love poetry of Provence had never been written. On the other hand, many people before Wordsworth must have experienced feelings about Nature similar to his, but they had dismissed them as not very relevant.
Every artist holds, usually in common with his contemporaries, certain presuppositions about the real Nature concealed behind or within the stream of phenomena, to which it is his artistic duty to be true, and it is these which condition the kind of art he produces as distinct from its quality.
Suppose that a dramatist believes that the most interesting and significant characteristic of man is his power to choose between right and wrong, his responsibility for his actions; then, out of the infinite number of characters and situations that life offers him, he will select situations in which the temptation to choose wrong is at its greatest and the actual consequences incurred by the choice are most serious, and he will select characters who are most free to choose, least in the position to blame their choice afterwards on circumstances or other people.
At most periods in history he could find both of these most easily among the lives of the rich and powerful, and least among the lives of the poor. A king can commit a murder without fear of punishment by human law; a poor man cannot, so that, if the poor man refrains from committing one, we feel that the law, not he, is largely responsible. A king who steals a country is more interesting dramatically than a starving peasant who steals a loaf, firstly because the country is so much bigger, and secondly because the king is not driven, like the peasant, by an impersonal natural need outside his control, but by a personal ambition which he could restrain.
For many centuries the dramatic role of the poor was to provide comic relief, to be shown, that is, in situations and with emotions similar to those of their betters but with this difference: that, in their case, the outcome was not tragic suffering. Needless to say, no dramatist ever believed that in real life the poor did not suffer but, if the dramatic function of suffering is to indicate moral guilt, then the relatively innocent cannot be shown on the stage as suffering. The comic similarity of their passions is a criticism of the great, a reminder that the king, too, is but a man, and the difference in destiny a reminder that the poor who, within their narrower captivity, commit the same crimes, are, by comparison, innocent.
Such a view might be termed the traditional view of Western culture against which naturalism was one form of revolt. As a literary movement, nineteenth-century naturalism was a corollary of nineteenth-century science, in particular of its biology. The evidence of Evolution, the discovery of some of the laws of genetics, for example, had shown that man was much more deeply embedded in the necessities of the natural order than he had imagined, and many began to believe that it was only a matter of time before the whole of man's existence, including his historical personality, would be found to be phenomena explicable in terms of the laws of science.
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
The difficulty for the naturalistic writer is that he cannot hold consistently to his principles without ceasing to be an artist and becoming a statistician, for an artist is by definition interested in uniqueness. There can no more be an art about the common man than there can be a medicine about the uncommon man. To think of another as common is to be indifferent to his personal fate; to the degree that one loves or hates another, one is conscious of his or her uniqueness. All the characters in literature with universal appeal, those that seem to reveal every man to himself, are in character and situation very uncommon indeed. A writer who is committed to a naturalist doctrine is driven by his need as an artist to be interesting to find a substitute for the tragic situation in the pathetic, situations of fantastic undeserved misfortune, and a substitute for the morally responsible hero in the pathological case.
The role of impersonal necessity, the necessities of nature or the necessities of the social order in its totality upon the human person can be presented in fiction, in epic poetry and, better still, in the movies, because these media can verbally describe or visually picture that nature and that order; but in drama, where they are forced to remain offstage—there can be no dramatic equivalent to Hardy's description of Egdon Heath in The Return of the Native—this is very difficult. And in opera it is impossible, firstly, because music is in its essence dynamic, an expression of will and self-affirmation and, secondly, because opera, like ballet, is a virtuoso art; whatever his role, an actor who sings is more an uncommon man, more a master of his fate, even as a self-destroyer, than an actor who speaks. Passivity or collapse of the will cannot be expressed in song; if, for example, a tenor really sings the word "Piango," he does not cry, a fact of which some tenors, alas, are only too aware. It is significant as a warning sign that the concluding line of Cavalleria Rusticana, "Hanno ammazzato compare Turiddu," and the concluding line of Pagliacci, "La corn- media e finita," are spoken, not sung.
In practice, the theory of verismo, as applied to opera, meant substituting, in place of the heroic artistocratic setting of the traditional opera seria, various exotic settings, social and geographic. Instead of gods and princes, it gives us courtesans (La Traviata, Manon), gypsies and bullfighters (Carmen), a diva (Tosca), Bohemian artists (La Boheme), the Far East (Madama Butterfly'), etc., social types and situations every bit as unfamiliar to the average operagoer as those of Olympus or Versailles.
Giovanni Verga was no doctrinaire naturalist. He wrote about the Sicilian peasants because he had grown up among them, knew them intimately, loved them and therefore could see them as unique beings. The original short story Cavalleria Rusticana which appeared in Vita dei Campi (1880) differs in several important respects from the dramatized version which Verga wrote four years later and upon which the libretto is based. In the short story the hero Turiddu is the relatively innocent victim of his poverty and his good looks. Santuzza is not the abused defenseless creature we know from the opera but a rich man's daughter who knows very well how to look after herself. Turiddu serenades her but he has no chance of marrying her since he has no money and though she likes him, she does not lose her head. Her betrayal to Alfio of Turiddu's affair with Lola is therefore much more malicious and unsympathetic than it is in the opera. Finally, the reason that Turiddu gives Alfio for insisting upon a fight to the death is not Santuzza's future—he has completely forgotten her—but the future of his penniless old mother.