Marc Estrin

THE MIKADO

I’m a Gilbert & Sullivan nut. Gilbert’s lyrics are one of only three things that make me glad to be a native speaker of English. The others are Shakespeare and Finnegans Wake. All, I believe, though they have been translated, are basically untranslatable. I knew Arnold had to play Jack Point to Ariel’s Elsie. But I wanted to get in something about The Mikado, since hanging over my computer — along with Brecht’s “Die Wahrheit ist immer konkret.” (Reality is always concrete.) — is Pooh Bah’s magnificent excuse for making up a fiction: “Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”

ARNOLD’S FIRST G&S

Though he had no time to join an opera workshop in spring semester, he did take an evening out to attend the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players' production of The Mikado at Agassiz. Is is possible Gilbert & Sullivan had not penetrated mid-century Texas? At any rate, Arnold had never heard of them until 

The Mikado came up in his Soc Rel Imperialism seminar as an example of colonialistic cooptation of non-white cultures. And then there was the review in the Cynic:

"The Mikado" Book by Bill Gilbert, Music by Art Sullivan, "PG-45" -- Mature sense of humor but virtually no adult situations. Sexual innuendoes include a lady "who dresses like a guy," some public kissing, a left shoulder blade, a left elbow, a right heel, and a bare right arm. Implied violence includes knifes, hangman's nooses, an executioner's axe, death by burial alive, a sabre cutting through cervical vertebrae, boiling oil, melted lead, a severed head standing on its neck and bowing to people, tigers, thunderbolts, and a suicidal dickey-bird. Children - you have been warned!

When he saw the comment, hard upon the seminar, he thought both it and the production itself were yet more examples of Harvard insensitivity, its scornful, provocative attitude toward the rest of the world, of the very stance the radicals were so exercised about. Would Harvard perform a minstrel show? A girly show? It might. Ah, the wonders of unconscious self-parody. He went to confirm his suspicions, arriving early enough to study the program and plot summary for a vituperative essay: 

But he who went to scoff remained to pray. By the time three protestors had walked out --just before the first act finale -- their signs (HARVARD/RADCLIFFE JAPANESE-AMERICANS AGAINST RACISM; THIS PRODUCTION DEMEANS WOMEN; DOWN WITH IMPERIALISM!) almost invisible against the brightly lit stage, Arnold had come to the conclusion that Gilbert & Sullivan were perhaps the most trenchant social and sexual critics of all time. What idiots! How ridiculous to protest this biting analysis of -- exactly racism, sexism, sexism plus ageism, and imperialism! Even he, a hick from Mansfield, could see through the satire to its value implications. By the end of the show, he had notes scrawled all over the program, and the guts of his paper well-imagined in his head. 

How dense those protesters were not to see it. They should be applauding the liberatory insights of the show. When Pooh-Bah came out during the bows with a hastily scribbled picket sign, DOWN WITH OPERA!, the audience -- and fellow cast members -- gave him a riotous ovation. That protest surely cost the movement more than it gained.

But these were his more political reflections on the show. What affected him most personally was the part about "Hitler" -- about how the world is made crazy by words.

Pooh-Bah's excuse for lying: “merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.” A logic triumphant only in theatrical performances. The garrulous William Schwenk Gilbert had fired him further into a holy war on the tyranny of words.

When he returned to his room, Arnold pulled out his collection of letters from Billie Jo. He had no difficulty locating one of her early locker-notes, a quote from Ezra Pound, planted to intrigue and snare him:

Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports. If a scientist falsifies a report either deliberately or through negligence we consider him as either a criminal or a bad scientist according to the enormity of his offense, and he is punished or despised accordingly. 

If the artist falsifies his reports on any matter in order that he may conform to the taste of his time, to the proprieties of a sovereign, to the conveniences of a preconceived code of ethics, then that artist lies. If he lies out of deliberate will to lie, if he lies out of carelessness, out of laziness, out of cowardice, out of any sort of negligence whatsoever, he nevertheless lies and he should be punished or despised.

What is the crime-fitting punishment for the doltish literalism of those, like the protesters, who can’t see through the potential tyranny of the word? What should be the fate of the James Saltonstalls and the Liz Aronsons who cannot understand that word is not identical with thing, that people and events in the world are not the same as verbal formulations about them? That was the function of great writing, of great artists like Gilbert & Sulliven -- to show this disjuction, to show it so memorably, that no one might ever mistake Hitler for Hitler again! He would surely get involved next semester.