NOVEMBER 1, 2010
The Spy
IF I WERE A CHARACTER in a play, the lack of real privacy would make me feel wary, anxious, and suspicious. One way or another I’d sense the quiet, attentive presence of the public. I’d always be conscious that my words were being heard by others, and while that might be appropriate for some of my lines (certain clever remarks are made to impress as many people as possible, and in fact there are times when one regrets not having a public to appreciate them), other lines would, I’m sure, require a real, not a fictitious, intimacy. And they would be crucially important for understanding the plot: all the interest and value of the play would hinge on them. But their importance would not loosen my tongue. On the contrary, I would scrupulously observe the rule of secrecy, as I’ve always done. I would simply choose not to speak. I’d say: “Let’s go to another room; there’s something important I need to tell you that no one else should hear.” But then the curtain would fall, and in the next scene, we’d be in the other room, that is, the same stage with different props. I’d glance around and sense something indefinable. . I know that in the fictional world of the play there are no rows of seats out there, and, as a character, I’d know it better still, because it would be the basis of my existence, but even so. . “No, I can’t talk here either. .” I’d lead my interlocutor to another room, and from that one to yet another. . Realizing eventually that the stage would follow me to the ends of the earth, I would, of course, be able to stay out of trouble by making banal remarks that gave nothing away, which would mean sacrificing the interest of the play. But that’s precisely what I would never be able to sacrifice, because my existence as a character would depend on it. So there would come a moment when I would have no choice but to speak. Even so, I’d hold out, gagged by an overpowering distrust. My lips would be sealed; the keys to the plot (the ones in my possession, at least) would not be revealed, no, never! As in a nightmare, I would look on helplessly as a large or small, but significant and perhaps even crucial, portion of the work’s aesthetic value disappeared. And it would be my fault. The other characters would start to move and act like lost or mutilated puppets, with no life or sense of destiny, as they do in those botched plays where nothing ever happens. .
Then, and only then, would I grasp at my last hope: maybe the audience would guess what it was I had to say, in spite of my refusal to come out and say it. Hardly a realistic hope, because I’d be hiding facts, not just comments or opinions. If what I have to reveal, to someone in particular, with the utmost discretion and for very specific reasons, is that I’m a secret agent working undercover, and if that piece of information has, logically, been kept hidden in everything I’ve said so far and will say in the future (a competent author would see to that), how are the people in the audience supposed to guess? It’s preposterous to hope that they could deduce it from my silence or my scruples about privacy, because, after all, I could be hiding any number of secrets: rather than a spy, I might be the illegitimate son of the master of the house, or a fugitive who has adopted the identity of the man he murdered. .
Crazy as it is, banking like this on the spectator’s superhuman intelligence is the flip side of a fear that is also fairly absurd, but often turns out to be justified: the fear of being found out in spite of everything. The reason I refuse to speak, and behave so circumspectly, to the point of taking precautions based on a superstitious hunch (the feeling that one of the four walls really is missing and that there are people sitting in rows of seats listening to what I say), is that I have secrets to keep, dark secrets.
But isn’t this exactly the wrong thing to be doing: harboring the hope that my secret will be guessed? How could it even occur to me to call this a “hope,” in real life? The cause of this wild aberration is art, the world of art into which I have ventured by becoming a character. In art, there’s a condition that takes precedence over all others: it has to be well done. Which is why I have to be a good actor, in a good play; if I don’t act well, the play will not produce the desired effect, and the performance will collapse. In this field, more than in any other, “doing it well” and simply “doing it” are synonymous. So if I dissociate them, because of my hypersensitive wariness, all I have left is hope: a ruinous hope, equivalent to death. Because my secrets are so terrible that I couldn’t survive their revelation. This is something I hadn’t realized until now, until I found myself in this fix, and I’m tempted to say that I entered the fatal game of art in order to come to this realization.
Up until now I have lived in the certainty that my secrets are safe; they’re in the past, and the past is inviolable. I’m the only one who has a key to that chest. Or so I believe, at least: the past has been shut off definitively, and its secrets, my secrets, will never be revealed to anyone, unless I start divulging them, which is something I have no intention of doing. Sometimes, however, I’m not so sure that the chest is closed forever. Time might turn back on itself somehow, in a way that my imagination is unable to foresee — even though (or because) it’s precisely my imagination that is generating these wild conjectures — making the hidden visible. But then I always come around to thinking that the past really is secure, inviolable, sealed, and that if worrying is what I really want to do, there are better things to worry about. So many, in fact, that if I started counting them, I could go on forever, because there’d always be something new. But they all converge on the center, the spot to which I’m rooted at the center of the floodlit stage, in my restless paralysis, quivering, bathed in a cold sweat. .
There’s an actor joined to me. I can’t separate him from myself, except by means of negative statements: I don’t know what he wants; I don’t know what he can do. I don’t know what he’s thinking, either. . He’s a statue of fear, an automaton of apprehension, a fiber-for-fiber replica of me. The author has written him into the play, as a doppelgänger. The idea has been done to death: one actor playing two characters, who turn out to be twins or doubles. Given the limitations of the theater, the two characters have to operate in distinct spaces if they are to be played by the same actor. In between, there’s always a door, an entrance or an exit, a mistake or a change of scenery. The staging dislocates the spaces, but also, insofar as it builds up the fiction, establishes a continuity between them, creating the horrific prospect of a face-to-face encounter with the double. And it’s possible to go a little further, approaching Grand Guignol, and actually represent the encounter, with the help of makeup, costumes, and lighting, as long as the audience is not too close. (Note, however that this applies only to modern theater, because in ancient times, masks made physical distance unnecessary.) In cinema, montage solves the problem perfectly. In the theater, unless you resort to dubious tricks (or you have a pair of actors who are really twins), the process of making the double a theme has to become a theme in turn, so that the two identical characters turn out to be one in the end.
Looking back at what I’ve written, it all seems rather muddled, and if I want to be understood, I need to say it differently (not by means of examples, but, once again, by making it the theme). Sooner or later there comes a time when being correctly understood is vitally important. The hidden cannot endure without that transparency, against which it becomes visible. The hidden: that is, secrets. I have secrets, like everyone else; I don’t know if mine are especially shameful, but I take all sorts of precautions to prevent them from coming to light. It’s natural for people to feel that their own affairs are important; the self is a natural amplifier. When the person concerned is a character in a dramatic performance, at the very center of the plot, the amplification reaches deafening extremes. The whirlwind of the action forbids any kind of detachment.