Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Fifteen: Mystery, Drama, Surprise

We love a mystery. In life, in literature, at the theatre and the movies. From the comparatively new-fangled genre in which the reader or listener or watcher is as in the dark as the characters, to the much older one in which we know everything but the characters on the page or the stage don't, we love seeing it all unfold, seeing the gradual peeling away of the layers of concealment, the draperies and lies and misunderstandings and accidents, until the truth, awful or otherwise, is revealed at last. There is something (mysteriously) satisfying about watching deluded mistaken confused characters thrash about and get everything wrong for five acts or five hundred pages. Oedipus gradually realizing that everything he thought he knew is false. Lear catching on that he'd got everything all wrong, and done it out of sheer stupidity and vanity, too, as the Fool keeps helpfully reminding him. Emma Woodhouse ignoring abundant clues and misreading every word, smile, look, move of everyone around her. Dorothea Brooke and Isabel Archer and Margaret Schlegel walking open-eyed and confident into the loathsome web while all their sisters and cousins and friends try to warn them. They are blinded, deluded, enchanted, they can't see the fangs - because there are no fangs to see, only cold selfish egotism, which is easier to hide than fangs. 'There's no art/To find the mind's construction in the face' says Duncan sagely - and in comes Macbeth, to illustrate the point.

That is one reason the world is so mysterious and disconcerting and sometimes terrible: the fact that often fangs bear no resemblance to fangs. 'Look like th'innocent flower,' says Lady Macbeth, 'But be the serpent under't.' Life is full of those flowery serpents. There are so many bits of it to remind us of those animals that look like fruit, worms, sticks - either tempting or harmless - so that poor deluded creatures bite the offered delicacy or wander near the innocuous stick or log - and then snap, crunch, gulp. Or perhaps life reminds us more of crevasses hidden under layers of snow. The crevasse doesn't want us, it's not hungry, there is neither appetite nor malice involved when we step on the snow and fall in. Just a meaningless break in the ice hidden under meaningless snow.

Shakespeare is full of appropriate quotations for this subject, because he was obsessed with it, he returned to it early and late, he never got tired of it or to the bottom of it. From disguises and surprises in Comedy of Errors and Titus Andronicus to mistakes and enchantments in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, he scratched away at the confounding difference between appearance and reality, at how easily people can fool us and we can fool them, at the horror, rage, anguish that often results when we discover the truth at last. Or, sometimes, the joy, relief, reconciliation. Cordelia forgives Lear, Desdemona absolves Othello, Hermione forgives Leontes, Imogen and Postumus and Cymbeline are reunited and all is forgiven. Shakespeare enjoyed enacting both - tragic misunderstandings and breaches, and blissful reconciliations and reunions. 'We two alone will sing like birds i'th'cage/...And take upon's the mystery of things,/As if we were God's spies.' It seems reasonable to think he both liked them himself, and knew that his audience liked them.

We did like them, and we still do like them, they're the stuff of soap operas, novels, movies, the stories we make of our own lives. The peaks and valleys interest us more than the more humdrum everyday flatland of understanding each other well enough, getting along fine, agreeing quite adequately. That's good for purposes of real life, it's pleasant and happy and companionable...but we want drama too. Some of us want it so much that we create it in real life, provoke quarrels for the fun of reconciliation, or even for the fun of the quarrels themselves. Others of us run a mile from people like that, and prefer to watch and read drama rather than participate in it. Some of us like 'to bear all smooth and even,' as Claudius puts it, while others of us like turbulence and change, highs and lows, tragedy and ecstasy. Manic-depressives who go on lithium often miss the intensity of those peaks.

Mystery is probably necessary to those highs, as it is necessary for drama. Drama depends on our not knowing how things will turn out. It's considered bad form, a spoiler, to reveal the end of a novel or play or movie - as in the joke about the innocent in the ticket queue for 'Titanic' overhearing people say the ship sank. 'Thanks a lot, now I don't want to see it!' Innocent exclaimed indignantly. Well yes. Part of the thrill of quarrels and estrangements is not knowing how they'll turn out. Will we wound each other in ways that will never heal? Will we discover some profound, significant, life-altering truth? Will we advance to some new as yet unimaginable plane of mutual understanding? Will we just bore and exasperate each other rigid? We don't know; life is full of possibilities; there is much risk, as there is with climbing Everest, but it's worth it. We think.

So mystery goads and lures us onward, to see what happens next. There is no drama without mystery. Surprise me! we tell each other impatiently, ironically, seriously.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated mid August 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done
12. Mere
13. Influence
14. Other Minds

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