What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

One of the great monuments of 20th century European theatre is Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello. A few biographical details, quickly: Italian; 1867 to 1936; short stories, novels, plays; Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

Six Characters was first performed in 1921. Like many daring works, it divided before conquering the public. It made Pirandello famous around the world. It was a play like none before it. It starts with a bare stage, a space not pretending to be a living room or a garden or anywhere else, but only that: a bare stage. Eventually some actors wander on, soon joined by a director, a prompter, a prop man and the various other members of a theatre company. They are about to rehearse a play. Now, the device of a play within a play is not so revolutionary. Shakespeare used it in Hamlet, for example. But that is a finished play within a finished play. Here, at the start of Six Characters, the inner mechanics of that artifice called theatre is displayed with complete nudity, so to speak; the actors appear as themselves, standing around, chatting, smoking, reading a newspaper, and the normally hidden director and others are out in full view. It all has the appearance of real, ordinary life. Then—and this is where the Pirandellian revolution starts—the doorkeeper apologetically interrupts the director to inform him that some people are here to see him. The director is annoyed. A rehearsal is never to be interrupted! But these people, they’re insisting, says the doorkeeper. In fact, they’ve already made their way to the stage, six of them, a man, a woman, a young woman, a young man, and two children. The director asks impatiently: Who are you, what do you want?  

The Father replies: “We have come in search of an author.” They—that is, the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy, and the Child—are characters abandoned by an author. They’ve come to this stage hoping that the director will become the author who will allow them to fulfil their purpose. They are met by disbelief and consternation on the part of the director and the actors. After all, they are not ghosts, these characters, they are flesh and blood. Yet they insist that they are characters. Do they apologize for their strange status? Not at all, because, “you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”

The words “real” and “true” come up often in the play. They are at the heart of what the play is about. The fanciful premise of characters appearing in real life is never abandoned during Six Characters. On the contrary, it is insisted upon throughout. What Pirandello aims to do is blur the distinction between the real and the true, the concrete and the imaginary. Because what is real may not contain any truth beyond a base material factuality and what is true may not need the stamp of reality to be any more true. Such insistence is not twee literary fancy. Much of life is illusion. Who you were yesterday, Mr. Harper, when you were a Young Turk of the Reform Party, has vanished. It was real, but then it vanished. Who’s to say that who you are today won’t once again disappear into a haze as you move into who you will be tomorrow? Billions of people on Earth have similarly disappeared, their reality dissipated into nothingness, first in subtle ways as they mutated from one incarnation into the next as they grew up and then grew old, and then wholly and concretely as they were swallowed up by the oblivion of death. Look at the literary character, on the other hand. A character is always who he or she is, never changing, permanent, immortal. Every audience that has seen Hamlet has, eventually, died, but Hamlet remains, alive and unchanging in the pages of the play. As the Father says at one point, a character “is always ‘somebody.’ But a man…may very well be ‘nobody’.”

More twee fancy, you might huff. But think of it this way, then: art is the essence of life. Art is life minus the humdrum, the ordinary, the mundane. In a novel, a character never wastes the readers’ time with a trips to the supermarket or with the brushing and flossing of teeth, and in a play the viewer is spared the Hellos and the How are yous and the other banalities that pepper our daily speech. That is left out because the novel and the play are there to relate only the essential. That being so, they do indeed have a truth greater than that of much dull and inane reality. If you continue to insist that novels and plays nonetheless lack reality, shouldn’t that be said with pity rather than arrogance? Don’t we want life to be more like art? Many, many people would like that, I suspect. And some people actually pull it off. Isn’t that a common expression, to say of someone who makes a vivid impression upon us, that he or she is a “real character.” That’s right out of Pirandello!

Pirandello’s point, as I see it, is to question the content and appearance of reality. Reality is less real than it might appear. And truth can be hard to see, let alone accept. Another way of putting it would be to say that life is more a product of the imagination than we realize. So we too, at times, are characters searching for an author, for direction, for meaning, while at other times we are actors, consciously—or perhaps unconsciously—playing our role. 

I hope you get to see Six Characters in Search of an Author on stage one day. I saw a modern version a couple years ago in London. It was bracing stuff. 

I’m sorry the translation I’m sending you is not very good. It’s nearly sixty years old and in dated British English. One character even exclaims, “By Jove!” It makes me cringe, but it’s the only one I could find on short notice. And the book is falling apart, too. But that’s only the passing reality of an otherwise truthful work of art.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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