Other Views, Other Islands: Shaw’s Sense of Paradox

by Joley Wodd

There is a species of paradox known as the Irish Bull, a logically absurd statement that paradoxically reveals a kind of truth. By contradicting our expectations, paradox shocks us into and out of our sensibilities, leaving us marked with the knowledge of something new. The word comes from the Greek, and literally means beyond or beside opinion. Shaw’s story is rife with such ‘beyond opinions’, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, a Dubliner in London, and a socialist living in the aftermath of the industrial revolution. In one sense, as a Protestant choosing to live in London, he is a John Bull, yet he remains Irish – an Irish Bull, something alluded to in his one play set in Eire, John Bull’s Other Island. Being neither entirely Irish nor English, he is marginal to both his home and adopted islands, existing as two things at once, yet not fully either. He saw himself as ‘a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it’, and once stated ‘I am an Irishman without a birth certificate’. This paradoxical perspective informs his art – ‘An Irishman has two eyes’, he told G.K. Chesterton, one for poetry and one for reality. Shaw’s use of artistic paradox is so pervasive, his style so distinct, that it has marked our language with the term Shavian, an idiom that now stands alongside Dickensian and Shakespearean.

Shaw’s paradoxes function on many levels: they occur in his own approaches to the literary process; in his attitude towards literary conventions and past role models; and in his embedded social commentaries. The persistence and sustainability of his art merits a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, and Penguin Classics is acknowledging this by re-issuing eight of his most popular works; these include three books of his early collected plays, the philosophical pieces Man and Superman and Major Barbara, the comedies Pygmalion and Heartbreak House, and the 1925 Nobel Prize–winning Saint Joan.

Shaw employs paradox to criticise, entertain and educate his audience and their society. ‘He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches’, he writes at the end of Man and Superman; yet true to Shavian form, it is his art that teaches, educating by doing. He creates these educative paradoxes by juxtaposing different ideas of civilisation, social class, dialect, speech acts, and even writing styles like essay and drama – his work is language for both the eye and the ear. In 1903 Beatrice Webb identified Man and Superman as ‘a play which is not a play’, but a work of multiple juxtapositions where ‘all the different forms [illustrate] the same central idea’. Critic Max Beerbohm was in agreement, calling Man and Superman perfect art, by which he meant perfect artifice. Yet Shaw knew that art requires substance as well as style: ‘He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains.’

One aspect of Shaw’s style can be seen in his extended essays that masquerade as prefaces, though even Shaw acknowledged they have ‘practically nothing to do with the plays’. In the preface to Major Barbara Shaw claims not to echo thinkers like Nietzsche, Ibsen or Schopenhauer, yet five paragraphs on he invokes Schopenhauer, followed Nietzsche, and then a number of other philosophers. He carries the ironic moment further by asking why critics never acknowledge England’s own thinkers in his work (such as, obviously, himself); the underlying implication is that theatre critics will find whatever they’re looking for. This may be why Shaw entitled this section ‘First Aid to Critics’.

Shaw did all he could to manage audience response to his work; he even ghost-wrote and published confrontational interviews with himself that served to display key points of his plays. He wanted his audience to recognise their own misconceptions, to react viscerally to the situations he depicted, and to participate actively in the mechanics of his dramas. With Widower’s House the audience was to be ‘thoroughly uncomfortable’ yet artistically entertained. This play, a deliberate inversion of Victorian middle-class conventions, portrays a conniving daughter who turns down a marriage proposal because her father’s dowry, earned as a slumlord, is refused by her suitor. The audience (who would have been middle-class if they were at the theatre) became quite indignant. Shaw addressed them afterwards, agreeing that the play was indeed disgraceful, and he expressed his hope that such scenes would not occur in middle-class London for much longer. Even though Shaw appeared to be admitting the failure of his play, the audience had actually participated in a Shavian event, becoming implicated in the play’s own premises.

Shaw also wished to curtail hasty assumptions based on literary conventions. For instance, the conquering figure of Caesar is familiar from history, yet in Caesar and Cleopatra Shaw highlights his indiscriminate kindness in a manner that flummoxes the audience’s expectations of a war lord – his Caesar treats prisoners as guests who are free to leave, a leader who can be kind in cold blood. Dick Dudgeon, the disciple in The Devil’s Disciple, turns out to be the play’s Christ-like figure. Prostitution is seen not as a moral sin in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, but as a product of the Victorian social environment. The Devil of Man and Superman makes Hell into something we might see as Heaven, where all pleasures can be experienced while attention is diverted from eternity. Shaw’s hedonistic Don Juan, however, chooses a hellish Heaven over heavenly Hell, claiming the purpose of the famous Shavian Life Force is for humanity to gain understanding of the self, and this cannot be done when one is continually diverted.

Pygmalion, Shaw’s popular romance that inspired the musical My Fair Lady, is rife with Shavian literary paradox. The play reverses the classical myth of the King of Cyprus who, having carved a statue of a woman, is so enamoured with it that Aphrodite (the Goddess of Love) brings it to life. Pygmalion’s Professor Higgins, who acknowledges that the lower-class Eliza’s life was more real when she lived in the gutter, brings the flower girl to a kind of death by phonetically sculpting her into a faux duchess. Eliza remains literally statuesque until she finds love with Freddy Pickering; yet without Higgins’s help neither Eliza nor her father would have been able to leave the gutter and improve their quality of life. In the end, art teaches and reforms, but only when acted upon – and it is up to the audience to act upon what they learn from the circumstances in the play. Pygmalion was wildly popular, which Shaw mistrusted: ‘There must be something radically wrong with the play if it pleases everybody, but at the moment I cannot find what it is.’

In the award-winning Saint Joan, Shaw presents his audience with two characters who act with justifiable yet mutually contradictory beliefs. ‘There are no villains in the piece’, Shaw wrote in his preface, ‘It is what men do at their best, with good intentions, and what normal men and women find that they must and will do in spite of their intentions, that really concern us.’ This forces the audience to judge the moral implications of the play for themselves, and draws them into a dramatic participation with the work. Shaw further challenges any moral assumptions of both his heroine and her executioner in the dramatic epilogue. Were Joan to live today, Shaw informs us, she would again be put to death, ironically by the very people witnessing and responding to the drama because ‘mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic’. Once again his art implicates the audience in its own machinery, becoming an event as the audience must ask if they accept Joan as a saint because they are told to, or if they could recognise saintliness for themselves. The ironic implications continued when Shaw won the Nobel Prize for Saint Joan, a literary canonisation that essentially conflicts with the iconoclastic spirit of the work. In a letter to a friend, Shaw wrote ‘The Nobel Prize has been a hideous calamity for me… It was really almost as bad as my 70^th birthday’. He in turn used all of the award money to establish an Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation.

Shaw does not go easy on his audiences, and he holds in stark relief the political responsibilities for the social conditions he presents. Above all Shaw held that poverty is ‘the greatest of our evils’ and ‘the worst of our crimes’, and humanity cannot realistically advance until poverty is eliminated. ‘We must reform society before we can reform ourselves’, Shaw wrote to H.G. Wells, ‘…personal righteousness is impossible in an unrighteous environment’. He prefaces Mrs Warren’s Profession by noting that prostitution would not exist were it not for our ‘underpaying, undervaluing, and overworking women so shamefully’. In Major Barbara, the Salvation Army represents an approach to poverty that clashes with Andrew Undershaft’s gospel of ‘not to be poor’; yet Shaw tells us, ‘At present we say callously to each other ‘If you want money, earn it’ as if his having or not having it were a matter that concerned himself alone’. Shaw witnessed from his own marginal position how poverty marginalizes others, leaving them beyond the support of civilisation. In the Shavian world, there are no evil people, only evil circumstances to be identified, attacked and eliminated.

In the end, Shaw confronts his audiences with the mirror Jonathan Swift had polished years before. Both Protestant, Anglo-Irish, marginally-positioned writers consider inherent absurdities in certain accepted principles of their worlds, and follow these principles to their logically absurd conclusions. In A Tale of a Tub’s digression on madness, Swift observes that happiness is ‘a perpetual Possession of being well Deceived’. If this is so, Man and Superman’s dominion of happily diverted attention is the essence of being well deceived, and Hell becomes a metaphor for madness. Heartbreak House embodies this Hell of madness and deception, as the hilariously –drawn, half-mad Captain Shotover attempts to reach the ‘seventh level of concentration’ through rum, and his houseguests create such a pandemonium they manage to miss the Great War. What is Shaw suggesting? In a sense Shaw’s art can be seen an extended modest proposal, a ‘beside opinion’ in which the logic of a situation is shown to be absurd. In exploiting that absurdity he paradoxically reveals social truths he observes from his marginal position, but others may not. Shaw offers us these other perspectives. It is left to the audience to learn from the paradoxes he portrays and act on those revelations. To remain self-deceived after having been shown a new truth just may be madness, and for Shaw it would have been madness not to share what he understood.

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