Real-life with its dramatic events was always an object for real art which aimed to reflect the comprehensive tragedy happening now and then in a world around. Were those events of a large scale, such as war, epidemic, famine or were they of a local dimension, such as political and social reactions, they always remained an important part of history worth to be covered in order not to be repeated by future generations.
The role of an artist in presenting such life scenes was outstanding at all times. Exactly because the art still remains the most active remedy to bring the dramatic history essence to ordinary people, artist is the only person able to carry this sacred mission. To understand the role of an artist in a world life, we are going to consider two eminent art masterpieces: drama Twilight: Los Angeles by Anna Deavere Smith and the novel The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West. Analyzing those two works, we will try to examine how Anna Deavere Smith explains and values her role as an artist in the “Introduction” to “Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” in relation to the way Tod Hackett envisions his role as an artist in “The Day of the Locust”.
“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” is the fourteenth Anna Deavere Smith’s work. The play focuses on the civil unrest that happened in April, 1992 in Los Angeles. The riot began after white officers of police were accused of cruel beating of black man Rodney King, but then were released for no wrongdoing.
The one-woman show has neither plot nor a storyline. It consists only of numerous monologues of real people that actually present the story of Rodney King’s trial.
In Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 Anna Deavere Smith presented herself as various persons, by means of using their own words and by replicating their speech, behaviors, clothes, in a varicolored set in the violent reaction on Rodney King’s trial and verdict in 1992. Such outstanding portraits combine victims, observers, and other witnesses who have never been within the same building, ever be allowed to talk to each other. Anna Deavere Smith evaluates her role as a dual one: from the one hand she is a playwright, from the other hand she is a performer.
In her unusual style of performing, characters from real-life speak with Smith’s voice. All of them are of different skin colors and races: black, white, Asian, Latino. Anna Deavere Smith says that she is able to speak the same words and can precisely reproduce the deep sentiments held by so many different people living around. She enables her audience to listen and to hear what they exactly might otherwise disregard.
Although Smith conveys each character’s difference through the particular rhythm and cadence of his or her language and gesture, and includes the unresolvable contradictions in the multiple versions of truth each character is convinced of, a certain “sameness” is also revealed. For all characters appear with the face of Anna Deveare Smith. Smith’s face can thus be interpreted as a mask that momentarily erases but doesn’t deny difference (Taumann 301).
Anna Deavere Smith notices, that depiction of psychological and social reactions of the race riots of Los Angeles residents is rather realistic and thought-provoking. And critic Greg Evans has hailed Smith as a “profound talent” who “gives absolutely equitable and eloquent voice to the myriad communities touched by the riots and to individuals who otherwise would go uncounted” (95).
This is Anna Deavere Smith values herself as an artist.
Another role of an artist is shown in the surrealistic work The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West.
Tod Hackett considers himself as an artist wasting his divine talents as a scene painter. The disorienting scene in which Tod crosses the studio, passing by painted decorations of Paris and Greek temples, Napoleon’s Waterloo and deserts, illustrates how 20th-century culture mixes up all that is beautiful and grand in the past in its greedy, insatiable jaws.
The central idea depicted in The Day of the Locust is not only to show the attempts of art-director to make big in movie industry. Tod is a witness to the sad breakdown of human purpose. He sees dreams filled with nothing but avaricious emptiness, smashed aspirations and impulses making essence of American Dream.
West’s novel depicts the Hollywood dream as a desperate, morbid, and violent response to modern meaninglessness; its characters’ quests for physical and spiritual health reveal the emptiness enveloping the so-called “seekers”. The novel is based on a crucial and disturbing premise of Hollywood fiction: that characters of extreme desperation reveal truths about society in the main and that Hollywood eccentricities reveal truth about America as a whole. A dark future for America is prefigured through the absurd present of the West Coast (Palmer 45).
Tod Hackett’s eyes see the real Hollywood, different from the gorgeous one described in glamorous magazines of that time. Fake cowboys, bit players, vacant-minded Midwesterners, washed-up vaudevillians and bit players appear before him from the pages of his novel.
Of course, like a surrealistic literature work The Day of the Locust is full of symbols. Biblical allusions are present from the very beginning of a novel. The title implies one of the plagues God sent to Egypt to punish pharaoh for his sins and destructive actions. The acts of destruction are observed in the novel as well. The bloody cockfight, Tod Hackett’s painting “The Burning of Los Angeles” is only the few examples. At last the dramatic climax of a novel has a lot of similarities with Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah.
Tod recognizes that he is the personification of locust. He creates something worth money and not the real approval. This fact provokes imaginary violence that becomes more powerful day by day. We can see his intentions to destroy everything he is able to see. And when the throng takes him away, he feels like the part of this throng. And that day can be fairly called the day of the locust.
In conclusion I would like to notice that comparing two artists, I defined the only their role in art: to describe reality and the most burning problems how they really are, without suppression or embellishment. The only difference is that Anna Deavere Smith evaluates her role as the role of a third party between “actors” and audience. Tod Hackett, on the contrary, is supposed to be the “leading actor” and the main character.
Regarding the value of art and literature, I have my own beliefs and convictions. I evaluate any art, first of all, taking into account its functions and purposes. I appreciate art that exists for people’s sake. Art for art’s sake is worth nothing. Only such criteria as communication, art for psychological and healing purposes, art for political change, expression of the imagination add more importance to art in my estimation. Literature is an integral part of art. Its value consists in the beauty of form as well as in emotional effect on readers. I appreciate literature works if they carry psychological moral sense and make the reader reconsider his/her points of view.
Bibliography
Evans, Greg. New York Theatre Critics’ Reviews (1964-1965). New York: Critics’ Theatre Reviews, inc., 1994.
Palmer, Barton R. Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Taumann, Beatrix. Strange Orphans: Contemporary African American Women Playwrights. Königshausen & Neumann, 1999.