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Rhyme and Panache
by Anthony
Burgess, 1984
In my new version of Cyrano de Bergerac for the Royal Shakespeare Company, you will hear
a lot of rhyme, but you will not always be able to predict when the rhymes are
coming. In other words, the
principle is rhyme without heroic couplets, except in two major arias of Cyrano,
where the regular slam of an expected pattern seemed to be called for.
We do not take kindly to rhyme on the British stage, but neither a prose
nor a blank verse Cyrano seems to be to be acceptable.
Both have been tried, and the panache
of the big-nosed hero seems to be much diminished without the dandyism of rhyme.
This term panache is important. It
is a noble word and very much Cyrano’s own.
It is the last word of the play, and translates literally as ‘white
plume.’ But Cyrano has given it a
metaphorical signification which cannot easily be rendered by an English term.
Indeed, English does not try, and panache
has been adopted into our language to mean a kind of elegant assertiveness, a
chivalric allegro con brio quality
(there we go again, calling on a foreign expression), not really congenial to
the British, with their tendency to understate and underplay. By panache Cyrano
seems to mean a kind of flamboyant grace, an extravagance of gesture which can
be expressed as much in defeat as in conquest.
Cyrano wins fights and contests of wit, but he is essentially a loser:
his ugly great nose ensures that he cannot succeed in love, and his whole story
is one of amorous failure. Stoicism
is his line, but not the grey grim stoicism of Seneca—rather a celebration of
defeat by means of the plumes and trumpets of victory.
In a musical version of Cyrano I wrote for Broadway (I seem to have devoted too much of my
life to Cyrano) I had the following lines:
To follow your chivalric calling
When the Alps and the Pyrenees are falling,
To file your nails when the doomsday trumpets crash:
That’s panache.
It
is, too.
Cyrano continues to be an attractive character, even in an age when
chivalry and plumed display seem to be out of date.
There is total defiance of authority but no brutality of language or
gesture. There is failure turned into triumph. There is mastery of many techniques but not boasting about
the mastery. There is an ugliness
which consoles the ugly. We are
disposed to pity Cyrano but we are not allowed to:
he is well aware of the possibility of pity and is armed against it.
What makes him piquantly up to date is his outer-space dimension:
he has, he says, visited the moon. He
would, were he alive today, hate the corporate state, but would avoid political
activism as likely to impair his individuality. He has learned how to live with nothing except his own mad
talents. He does not live in the
stockbroker belt, but he does not live in the ghetto or commune either.
He has the qualities of a folk-hero but he has the greater authority of
actually having existed as a historical personage.
His friend Le Bret wrote his life, and he himself as the father of
science fiction as well as a respectable poet and dramatist.
But it is Rostand’s romanticization of him that has driven out the
biographical truth. There is Cyrano
de Bergerac (Savinien), there are ‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ and Cyrano
de Bergerac. Cyrano de Bergerac
may be a romantic, dated play—in spite of its well-made structure—but
‘Cyrano de Bergerac’ is a great hero.
--Anthony
Burgess, 1984
Anthony Burgess is
the author of over 40 books, the writer of thousands of articles and the
composer of several musicals (one of which was a version of Cyrano
de Bergerac) and symphonic works. At university he studied linguistics and is fluent in several languages.
He is a master manipulator of words:
in one of his most famous novels he invented a slang of Russian and
American; in another he created a hypothetical Indo-European base for language.
But for all his fascination with communication and celebration of the art
of language he did not begin writing until he was 38.
He was, until that time, a composer—of symphonies, conceti—while
serving in Malaya after World War II. In the early fifties he was told he had an incurable brain tumor and six
months to live. It was then he
picked up his pen to write about his experiences in the East in an effort to
build up a nest-egg for his surviving family and, perhaps, something to be
remembered by. The result was his
Malayan trilogy. He is, of course,
still writing. His most recent works include EarthlyPowers,
the film script for Quest for Fire, The
End of the World News, a musical version of Ulysses
called The Blooms of Dublin and a
novel written on symphonically structured lines called Napolean
Sympnony (and the symphony to go with it).
He will, of course, be most widely known for his controversial novel
later made into a major film: A
Clockwork Orange.
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