The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: Paula Rego and Martin McDonagh, a visual and literary dialogue

Dossiê A arte como transfiguração da realidade The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: Paula Rego and Martin McDonagh, a visual and literary dialogue ANA GABRIELA MACEDO* Abstract: Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman (2003) has directly influenced Paula Rego’s compositions that bear the same name (200405). I propose to look at the work of both artists in the light of a shared conviction: the belief that “the first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story”. There lies the right of the storyteller. And the freedom of the artist is to reject becoming a “legislator of mankind” and to elude censorship through strategies that involve the ambivalence of the absurd, as well as transgression. Rego claims that the overpowering presence of the world of instincts, the grotesque and the abject in her work, are “naturally” there, as something moving and palpitating at the heart of the very reality she depicts. Keywords: Storyteller, absurd, grotesque, transgression, censorship. DOI: https://doi.org/10.34619/awgm-owob * CIÊNCIA ID: 201C-2113-1706 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7823-0613 Universidade do Minho, Escola de Letras, Artes e Ciências Humanas (ELACH), Centro de Estudos Humanísticos da Universidade do Minho (CEHUM), Campus de Gualtar, 4710-057 Braga, Portugal [email protected] Faces de Eva, 48 – Dossiê32 A arte do contador de histórias e o dever do contador de histórias: Paula Rego e Martin McDonagh, um diálogo visual e literário. Paula Rego criou em 2004-05 um conjunto de composições (pastel e litografias) inspiradas na peça de Martin McDonagh The Pillowman (2003), à luz de um princípio partilhado por ambos: “o dever do(a) contador(a) de histórias é contar uma história”. Este pretensamente inocente axioma assenta no princípio da rejeição da função social do artista enquanto “legislador” da Humanidade, face à sua liberdade e ao seu direito de iludir a censura e rejeitar o autoritarismo. Daí o recurso estratégico ao grotesco, ao absurdo e à transgressão, que tanto a artista como o dramaturgo privilegiam declaradamente na sua estética. Palavras-chave: Contador(a) de histórias, absurdo, grotesco, transgressão, censura. My painting is like an interior story (Paula Rego, cited in Lacerda, p. 3) The first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story (Martin McDonagh, The Pillowman, p. 7) Is fiction (and art) an imitation of reality or is it the opposite? And how does fiction/art affect (if at all) reality?(1) The play The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh (2003), first presented at the Cottesloe, The National Theatre London, in November 2003, directed by John Crowley, is an allegorical parable of the “dangerous” power of literature – a semi-burlesque, grotesque, Kafkaesque, or any other form of “esque” play, as its protagonist ironically claims (p. 18). The Portuguese version of 1. I am indebted to the comments and suggestions I received by many colleagues while working on this essay. I want particularly to thank Professor Claus Clüver who kindly read an earlier version and offered me thoughtful questions and essential insight which I incorporated in the present version. I also want to thank Professor Noël Carroll (2011) for discussing the play with me and sending me his own essay: Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman or the Justification of Literature, Philosophy and Literature 35 (1), 168-181. As always, I am extremely grateful to Paula Rego’s family to allow me the reproduction of the artist’s works included in this essay. I particularly wish to thank her son, Nick Willing. An earlier version of this essay in Portuguese was published in my volume on Rego. See Macedo, A. G. (2010). Paula Rego e o Poder da Visão: A minha pintura é como uma história interior (pp. 130-144). Cotovia. 33The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: 31-47 Ana Gabriela Macedo the play, O Homem Almofada, was translated and directed by Tiago Guedes, and it had its première at Teatro Maria Matos, in Lisbon, in September 2006; the following year, in September 2007, the play was performed at Teatro São João, Porto.(2) This was Tiago Guedes’ first incursion in the theatre as director, being primarily a film director, while inversely Martin McDonagh already had a firm career as playwright before he launched himself into film. The Pillowman has a complex and somewhat paradoxical plot which deliberately I will not attempt to summarize, since the sequence of stories that compose its narrative thread permanently challenge each other and elude any conclusions. Rather than attempting (in vain possibly), to disclose all the “puzzles” of the play (a word used by the protagonist), I will just suggest that it revolves around the character of a writer, Katurian, whom we first encounter at a “police interrogation room”, charged for crimes he claims he has not committed, but which he vaguely understands are related with the supposed “children stories” he has written, which would be more aptly described as mock or anti-fairy tales, such is the vision of childhood that pervades them. In fact, most of the tales are horror stories full of abject details, which the reader comes to know in a dismal scenery that inverts the traditional idyllic situation of fairy tale readings, as these are read aloud to us by the police agents during the writer’s interrogation process. And why is Katurian, the writer, incarcerated? Here lies possibly the most important narrative twist of the play, deeply imbricated in the metaphorization of horror and fear of each of the tales, and expanding to the whole allegorical dimension of the play as a political narrative. In all their matter-of-fact pragmatism, the police are, clear and bluntly, after what they call “the real meaning of these stories and the writer’s motivation” (McDonagh, 2003, pp. 14-15), which they assume can only be political, since in “real life”, real crimes have been perpetrated modelled after these narratives. Later in the 2. The play received wide critical interest in Portugal. A review by Helena Simões (2006) underlines the coherence of the dramatisation achieved through the representation of the detached cruelty which produces an effect of impersonality where the materiality of the body of the actor is subdued under the rhythm of the fictional representation. As an example of these theatrical effects, the author signals the use of an animation, the screening of the story “The Girl who wanted to be Jesus”, which contributes to make the link from the fiction to the imaginary of the writer as character present in the space of the performance. According to Simões (2006), the performance emphasises a mixed register of “authenticity and theatricality” (the play between fiction/reality pervading the text), and it shows that the body. of the author is able to penetrate the spirit of the text and make it “speak” beyond words or concepts (p. 34). Faces de Eva, 48 – Dossiê34 play we hear, through yet another shocking revelation of the writer’s ulterior motivation, told in the form of a personal story in Katurian’s own voice, a flashback of his childhood memories – that his horror vein is rooted in his childhood, while listening to his brother being tortured by his own parents in the room next to his, as part of their perverse “educational” plan to boost his already lively imagination and thus make him into a writer.(3) Paradoxically, if literature engenders real crimes rather than imaginary/fictional victims created by the writer’s imagination, then, one could only infer that literature is truly powerful. Here lies the sombre allegorical pun of this play, anchored in its somehow amoral morality. Despite the gore content of his stories and the possibility of their having caused “real” crimes, Katurian, surrogate author, actor and main protagonist of the play, is tragically decided to sacrifice his own life and that of his mentally handicapped brother to save his stories from being destroyed, since, as he repeatedly claims throughout his narrative, “the first duty of a storyteller is to tell a story” (McDonagh, 2003, p. 7). Hence, as theatre critic Michael Billington (2003) writes in a review of the play,(4) it is not so much the personal experience of Katurian that is at the core of these mock-gothic tales but, more precisely, the “dangerous power of literature”. And he adds: “Martin McDonagh is playing with big issues to do with literature’s power to outlast tyranny, rather than writing from his experience” (Billington, 2003). Likewise, as Paul Taylor (2003) argues, the play is “a pitch black comedy” which raises profound questions: “Can art corrupt and cause damage? Is it parasitic on suffering and does its survival count for more than human life (including the artist’s own?) […] How better to frame a writer suspected of dissidence than by reducing the relationship between art and the world to the crudest model of cause and effect?” (n.d.). The play has also been called an “imaginative grand guignol in a scary police state”. The critic, Michael Coveney (2003), asks: “Should writers 3. In the Portuguese stage version of the play, the director Tiago Guedes chooses to offer this biopic tale to the audience at the end of the performance, in a naïf manuscript version, as if written by a child, to raise spirits from the dense atmosphere of the play, he adds. (I interviewed Tiago Guedes by phone on the 6 October 2007). 4. The reviews here quoted were accessed through internet from NewsBank, inc. UK and Ireland newspapers (pages not identified in most cases). It proved not just critically useful but also sociologically revealing to read through the reviews of the play in the daily and weekly newspapers following its première in London. 35The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: 31-47 Ana Gabriela Macedo be brought to task for dealing in violence, child abuse and blasphemy? Tupolsky [who calls himself the “bad cop” in the play] has one answer: it sends a good signal” (pp. 17-18). Indeed, most of the reviewers and critics of the play called attention to its extravagant imagination, its bizarre and often disturbing moral content.(5) A second kernel of this play which works as an extended allegory – taking Katurian as a postmodern variation of Scheherazade, relentlessly telling his stories, not so much to postpone the moment of his impending death, but to save his stories from being destroyed, has to do with extreme forms of both denouncing and challenging censorship. Katurian’s defence of his tales with his own death, despite their abject or objectionable content, is simultaneously unsettling and moving. His Borgesian(-esque) labyrinthine tales of primeval fears and childhood nightmares are in themselves dramatizations of the power of storytelling, mirror images of the traditional gore, therefore inscribing themselves in a tradition of children’s narratives, although challenging and subverting it to an almost intolerable degree. As Victoria Segal (2003) sums up in a sharp review of the play, “unsentimental as the best fairy tale, making jokes about the unthinkable. It is an attraction-repulsion dynamic […] a brash delight in saying the unsayable” (n.d.), she argues. The responsibility of the writer for the tales he engenders and the art he creates and therefore the moral duty of the storyteller, are the crucial issues in the play. In a syncopated language and a dizzying rhythm that combines the succession of brash dialogue between Katurian and his two jailers, and the epiphany moment of storytelling which functions as a metanarrative and a suspended (fictional) time in the global time of the dramatization, the play relentlessly asks disturbing questions on the concept and the value of authorship and creativity in everyday world. On the one hand, where does the authority of the writer lie, what are its limits and what is the borderline between freedom of speech, immorality and therefore censorship; on the other hand, what about the authenticity of literature and its moral duty: should the artist be a legislator of mankind? And finally, what is the nature 5. An essay by Nicholas Addison (2006), focuses almost exclusively on the issue of sexuality in the play and in Rego’s pictorial vision of it. Despite the undeniable importance of sex and sexuality in the play as well as in Rego’s triptych, we believe that these should not overshadow other equally central issues in both works, such as the play of domination, the political games of power and subversion of hierarchies, which writer and painter relentlessly examine and challenge. Faces de Eva, 48 – Dossiê36 of the fiction-effects the writer creates in the “pseudo-real” world of literature, or otherwise, what is (if any) the social impact of literature, which is equivalent to ask, what is the power of literature?(6) “Detective Tupolski”, as he pompously likes to call himself, voices these concerns explicitly in the play, when he explains to Katurian why he is blindfolded in a police interrogation cell, accused of some dismal crimes he repeatedly claims to know nothing about (“I’ve never done any anti-police thing, I’ve never done any anti-state thing” (McDonagh, 2003, p. 5): “Why would there be a linkage, your stories, you being taken here? It isn’t a crime, you write a story”, Tupolski says. “That’s what I thought”, replies Katurian. “Given certain restrictions…” Tupolski adds: “The security of the state, the security of the general whatever-you-call-it. I wouldn’t even call them restrictions.” “I wouldn’t call them restrictions”, seconds Katurian. “I would call them guidelines”, says Tupolski. “Guidelines, yes”, repeats Katurian (McDonagh, 2003, pp. 6-7). To die for his stories… the perversion of censorship consists in taking the storyteller literally, in seeing literature/art as an illustration of reality, and therefore forcing the writer/artist to confess (and die for) a crime he has not committed – an issue which the story “The Three Gibbet Crossroads” splendidly allegorises (McDonagh, 2003, pp. 17-18). There are three criminals each in an iron gibbet: one has got “murderer” written outside on a placard, another “rapist”; the third, left to starve to death in his iron gibbet, knows he is guilty, but does not remember the crime he has committed. When a highwayman comes along and looks at the three criminals, he ignores the rapist, sets the murderer free and, without a word, “raises his gun and shoots him [the third criminal] through the heart” (McDonagh, 2003, p. 18), for the nature of his crime was unnameable. “What are you trying to tell us in this story?” asks Tupolski the writer. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. It’s supposed to be just a puzzle without a solution”, answers Katurian to the infuriated cop. And he adds in a candid, matter of fact manner, which camouflages the pervading irony 6. See Martha Lavey’s (2006-2007) (critic and theatre director) insightful review of The Pillowman, in the American theatre journal Backstage: “He (MM) addresses, through the vehicle of his playwriting, the concerns that his playwriting invokes: what is the responsibility of the playwright? How does an individual’s imagination – how does the artist? – articulate with the common good? Is that parameter legislatable? Should it be?” (n.d.). 37The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: 31-47 Ana Gabriela Macedo that characterizes the whole tone of the play: “That’s something-esque. What kind of ‘esque’ is it? I can’t remember. I don’t really go in for that ‘esque’ sort of stuff anyway, but there’s nothing wrong with that story. Is there?” And Tupolski replies: “No, there’s nothing wrong with that story. There’s nothing in that story you would say the person who wrote this story is a sick fucking scummy cunt. No. All this story is to me, this story is a pointer” (McDonagh, 2003, p. 18). Such is the censor’s perplexity before the duty of the storyteller – to “tell stories”, however grim they might be, and consequently to hold responsibility for them. A true dilemma? An absurd quest? An answerless, unfathomable perplexity? I propose that we keep these questions in mind, throughout our debate on the leitmotifs of the play. In this respect, one could argue The Pillowman is beyond doubt a Borgesian-esque tale, akin to Jorge Luis Borges’ tale “The Secret Miracle” (1981),(7) where a Jewish writer from Prague, Jaromir Hladik, is arrested by the Gestapo and condemned for a crime he claims he knows nothing about; however, unable to refute any single charge, he cannot escape his death sentence (pp. 118-124). Like the Pillowman, this is a self-referential, palimpsestic narrative, in which the writer’s moral quest is grounded in the responsibility to his oeuvre alone, no moral duty or social aim involved. As Michel Foucault argues in the essay “Language to Infinity” (1986), where he closely interprets Borges’s tale, to write is always a way to “postpone death”, since language is a labyrinth, a continuous play with mirrors where “doubles reverberate”.(8) It is the creation of literature (its “irreality”, claims Borges) that justifies the writer, and not the “effects” (moral or otherwise) of his writing. The protagonist of Borges’s tale, Jaromir Hladik, only asks God to grant him the time to finish his last work: “to finish this drama which can justify me and justify you, I need another year. Grant me these days. You to whom the centuries and time belong” (Borges, 1981, p. 122). Hladik as well as Katurian are arrested for a reason unknown to them, (is it because he is a 7. This tale is a brilliant analysis of the value of literature and its immateriality, and at the same time an allegory of the function and social authority of the writer. 8. “Writing so as not to die, as Blanchot said, or perhaps even speaking so as not to die is a task undoubtedly as old as the word. […] We know that discourse has the power to arrest the flight of an arrow in a recess of time, in the space proper to it” (Foucault, 1986, p. 53). Vide also in this context Foucault’s (1986). A Preface to Transgression. In, Language, counter-memory, practice (D. Bouchard Ed.): Cornell U. Faces de Eva, 48 – Dossiê44 In both artists, visual memory and the evocation of a phantasmagorical reality – either through visual or narrative recreation and the re-visitation of the past – are so intricately tied in the “tales” each of them re-enacts, that the viewer/reader cannot tell one apart from the other. Disturbing childhood memories, a stifling world of social, religious or political repression, censorship, whether interior or exterior, violence and injustice emerge time and time again in the work of both artists, as inverted mirror images of an estranged, nightmarish reality come true.(21) REFERENCES Addison, N. (2006). Acknowledging the gap between sex education and the lived experiences of young people: A discussion of Paula Rego’s The Pillowman (2004) and other cautionary tales. Sex Education 6(4), 351-365. Billington, M. (2003, November 14). The pillowman: National, London 3/5. The Guardian: Theatre. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2003/nov/14/theatre Borges, J. L. (1981). The secret miracle. In Labyrinths (pp. 118-124). Penguin Books. Carroll, N. (2011). Martin McDonagh’s The pillowman or the justification of literature. Philosophy and Literature, 35(1), 168-181. Coveney. M. (2003, November 21). An arresting performance, Daily Mail. Foucault, M. (1986). Language, counter-memory, practice. (D. F. Bouchard Ed.). Cornell U.P. Lacerda, A. de (1965, December 25). Paula Rego nas Belas Artes. Diário de Notícias, pp. 3-4. Lavey, M. (2006-2007). The pillowman. Backstage, 1. Lopes, A. (2001). Rimas de berço (P. Rego, Trans.). Relógio d’Água. (Original work published 1989). Macedo, A. G. (2001). Through the looking-glass: Paula Rego’s rhetoric, an “aesthetics of danger”. Textual Practice, 15 (1). Macedo, A. G. (2005). Scandalous bodies: Visual poetics and the politics of representation. In P. Stoneman, A. Leighton & A.M. Sánchez-Arce (Eds.), European Intertexts: Women writing in English in a European context. Peter Lang. 21. 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Apollo Magazine, 20-27. Pomar, A. (1996). Se a palavra fosse visual: Pintura de histórias [If the word was visual: Painting stories]. Tabacaria, 2, 19-23. Rego, P. (1994). Nursery rhymes. Thames and Hudson. Rego, P. (1999). O crime do padre Amaro/Father Amaro [The crime of Father Amaro]. Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Rego, P. (2001). Celestina’s House. Abbot Hall Art Gallery. Rego, P. (2003). Jane Eyre. Marlborough Graphics. Rego, P. (2006). The pillowman. Marlborough Fine Art. Rodrigues, A. (1988, June). Carta de Lisboa: Ultrapassar a arte [Letter from Lisbon: Beyond art]. Colóquio Artes, 77, 62-63. Segal, V. (2003, November 23). Are you sitting comfortably? The Sunday Times, Culture 19. Simões, H. (2006, September 27). O homem almofada e nós [The pillow man and us]. Jornal de Letras, 34. Taylor, P. (2003, October 17). A violent kind of Pillow Hack?. The Independent: Arts, Theatre. Willing, V. (1988). Inevitable prohibitions. Preface to the catalogue Paula Rego. Serpentine Gallery. Data de submissão/ Submission date: 23/10/2022 Data de aprovação/ Approval date: 30/11/2022 Esta revista tem uma licença Creative Commons – Attribution – Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) / This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial (CC-BY-NC 4.0) license Faces de Eva, 48 – Dossiê46 IMAGES COURTESY OF PAULA REGO’S FAMILY Paula Rego Fig. I – The Pillowman, 2004 (Triptych) Pastel on board, 180x120 cm 47The art of storytelling and the duty of the storyteller: 31-47 Ana Gabriela Macedo Fig. II – The Shakespeare Room, 2005 Pastel on board, 110x120 cm