Professional Documents
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can never have full access to anything he can satisfactorily call truth.
It has been two years since Adrian was last in this country; since that time
he has talked with Allison Wolfe, who provided him with two pieces of fac
tual or invented information: first, Maya and Marcus imported girls and held
orgies for writers, whom they subsequently blackmailed; and, secondly, the
ceiling in Marcus’ house is bugged. Though Adrian knows his source is a
gossip, the play begins with the somewhat tentative American alone in the
Archbishop’s room, lifting the cushions and the lamp, peering into the open
piano, and looking searchingly at the cherubim in the ceiling. The
microphones become the arbiter of Adrian’s behavior as he and the theatre
audience test the probability that someone is listening and wonder about
Maya and Marcus’ relationship to the Secret Police that have possessed their
private lives. Adrian speaks of an op-ed piece he wrote for The New York
Times attacking their country, but Maya hardly reacts; when he pur
sues the issue further, she changes the subject: is she underwhelmed by an
American writer’s liberalism, expressed freely from outside her country’s
boundaries, or does she wish to protect her friend, who has also been her
lover, from the listening ears?
If the possible presence of the microphones gives Adrian the feeling that he
is counterfeiting his speech and if Maya’s possible complicity creates an
uncertainty in his trust, so also does a recent crisis in Adrian’s personal life
contribute to his doubts about human behavior and about art. Ruth, the
woman he traveled with last trip and whom everyone always assumed was his
wife, returned from this country severely depressed. But a pill reclaimed her,
turning her into an active and productive woman, freed from the suicidal
urge. Adrian connects the medication with the power of the government,
questioning the control any human being ultimately has over his or her own
life. And, just as seriously, he questions the validity of art that assumes
psychology has something to do with human behavior.
Adrian’s return to this country, then, is not simply a response to nostalgia
or to lust, nor is it wholly an attempt to recreate the feelings he would like to
record. It is the life-or-death quest of the artist to connect with a justifying
truth that accommodates both his writing and life. As long as Adrian cannot
validate the connection between motivation and behavior nor accept a power
that neutralizes the human will, he cannot dispute Maya’s contention that
“ It is unnecessary to write novels anymore” (10). But his experience in this
country repeatedly frustrates what he would like to believe about human
behavior and, in turn, his faith in the validating power of art. For under the
Archbishop’s ceiling, he sees fragments of what may be the truth, but he is
unable to see anything whole.
Adrian’s quest brings him in contact not only with Maya and Marcus, who
may be government agents, but also with Sigmund, a dissident writer who
takes masochistic pleasure in tempting the government to censure him and
who will not leave the country even when threatened with imprisonment.
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Adrian never learns whether he can trust Maya and Marcus, whether Sig
mund is courageous or foolish, or whether, as an American, he is capable of
understanding what motivates any of them—if indeed even they can under
stand. He had left the pompous Parisian symposium on the contemporary
novel and come to this country, where he could “ sit down again with writers
who had actual troubles” (7). But at the end of his stay, he can only repeat
his original epistemological question:
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is a lie and fiction reflects it, then fiction is truth and is worth defending. The
Archbishop’s ceiling becomes a powerful world-stage metaphor, transform
ing all human action into performance and endorsing the false even as it
precludes the possibility that anything but the false can exist.
But within the world prescribed by the microphoned canopy, each of the
characters creates, interprets, and revisions the truth, lying or not lying in
order to shape an accommodating and an effective reality. The visitors do not
know for certain whether the room is bugged or not, and the two
residents—Maya and Marcus—claim that they do not know for sure either.
Yet Marcus operates confidently beneath the cherubed plaster, using his
power, which rests either in knowledge or in naivete, to orchestrate action.
In the corridor outside the Archbishop’s room, Marcus tells Adrian that he
has always warned writers about the microphones; Adrian, not knowing
whether or not to trust Marcus, challenges him to repeat this comment within
the room. Later in the play, when word comes that the government is return
ing Sigmund’s manuscript, Adrian is only further confused. He does not
know whether this is part of a plan to get Sigmund to leave, whether Marcus
is director of that plan, or whether his own threat to expose the government
was indeed overheard and made a difference. Adrian needs to know what the
gesture means, but Maya explains “ it is nothing. . . . They have the power to
take it and the power to give it back” (78).
If truths regarding others are elusive on this foreign turf, truths about
himself are equally so, and Adrian’s quest necessarily leads to a self-
evaluation that is fundamental to his identity. Each time he questions the
motives of the government or of Marcus or Sigmund, Maya dismisses his in
quiry as naive, convinced no American can understand what being a part of
such a country is like. Even Sigmund is out of patience with Adrian, accusing
him of pretending engagement when he is merely a scientist observing
specimens. For despite his efforts at participation, Adrian is finally only an
observer, secure in his reputation, his wealth, and his smugness.
But it is Marcus who asks the critical question that demands that Adrian
separate his personal self from his artistic self. In the early stages of their con
versation, Adrian speaks openly of how he would react to the destruction of
Sigmund’s manuscript. Encouraged by Marcus’ gestures to continue, he pro
mises to go on national television and to bring the matter to the attention of
the United States Congress. However sincere his original intention, though,
his threats and promises sound hollow as the microphones become not mere
ly a presence but Adrian’s audience: Adrian is performing for the govern
ment, participating in a power play directed by the authorities. And if he can
not be anything but a contrived self under the Archbishop’s ceiling, can he be
any more real even in the corridor? Marcus suggests that Adrian’s concern
for Sigmund’s manuscript is really a concern for the story he is recording and
creating:
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am I talking, Adrian—the New York Times, or your novel, or
you? (71)
Adrian does not know the answer. But the charge contains an acknowledge
ment of the theatricality that seems to be the only form of behavior possible
in this arena, where rooms may or may not be bugged, where friends may or
may not be trusted, and where writers may or may not be capable of living
lives as something other than clinicians. Sigmund sums up the action in a
comment that endorses Adrian’s earlier reservation and makes authenticity
impossible: “ Is like some sort of theatre, no? Very bad theatre—your emo
tions have no connection with the event” (79).
The play’s setting—a room with a four-hundred-year-old ceiling, styled in
early Baroque, with the Four Winds blowing through puffed-up cheeks and
angels and cherubim holding up the plaster—adds a special contemporary
irony to Adrian’s efforts at understanding power. In this country, God has
yielded to the Secret Police, figures of angels concealing the omniscient
microphones that represent absolute power. In such a world, it may well be
unnecessary to write novels anymore—or at least to write traditional novels
that imitate life. For the contemporary novelist, whose theorists bored
Adrian at the Paris conference, the coherent, affirming form of mimetic
literature may no longer connect with the real. But, in such a world, where
life itself is artificial, where the microphoned ceiling prescribes human action,
art asserts itself as creative, not recreative, power.
The novelists who assemble under the Archbishop’s ceiling approach their
artistic commitments in special ways. Marcus continues to write in the
realistic mode, but as Maya observes, “ he can’t write anymore; it left him. . .
it left him!” (75). Sigmund insists on exposing the government, involving
himself in literature as an expression of political discontent, but he is ineffec
tive. It is Adrian, unsettled by the power of the microphones to reorder reali
ty, who sees contemporary literature as a fictive construction no more or less
valid than life. For, as Christopher Bigsby points out, “ in the Archbishop’s
palace,” which becomes, metaphorically, both literature and life, “ there are
no certainties; there is no touchstone of veracity, no proof of sincerity and
authenticity” (95). Under the Archbishop’s ceiling, the world is a stage.
WORK CITED
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