The Stage Struck Out
On Thackeray's compulsive need to show the machinery
Thackeray opens the anthology -- and the entire eight-volume enterprise -- with an essay about theatre and the compulsion to look behind it. The choice is not accidental.
The gift and the problem
Thackeray's best writing has an unusual texture: he lets you feel something, then pulls the curtain aside just long enough to remind you that you're feeling it. In 'The World Behind the Scenes' he takes you backstage at a theatre in Paris -- the ropes, the flats, the actresses in their dingy dressing rooms between scenes -- and he does it not to debunk but because he cannot help himself. The disenchantment and the enchantment arrive together.
This is the Thackeray signature, and it's what makes him different from a simpler kind of satirist. He doesn't see through sentiment. He sees through it and keeps feeling it anyway. The theatrical metaphor is apt: he is always both in the audience and watching himself be in the audience.
Why the anthology opens here
Editors Spofford and Gibbon could have opened with something heroic -- Lincoln, Burns, one of the great orations. Instead they open with Thackeray noticing that the opera singer is eating a sausage between acts. The effect is to set a tone for what the anthology is willing to do: take the literature seriously without taking the literary posture seriously.
The anthology is full of mourning and declamation and high sentiment. But it opens with a man who cannot quite let himself off the hook for caring. That double awareness -- 'yes, this matters, and also, look at this sausage' -- turns out to be a better introduction to the Victorian literary character than any encomium could be.
What holds up
What survives in Thackeray is the refusal to choose between the sentimental and the clear-eyed. His characters are always caught between these two -- loving something and knowing exactly what it is. The world behind the scenes isn't ugly; it's just human. And Thackeray seems to find that a relief.
Place this essay next to 'The Ballad of Bouillabaisse' (p.17 in the same volume): a poem about a tavern meal that becomes, by the end, a lament for everyone who has died since Thackeray last sat in that chair. The move is identical. You start with a sausage and end up at a grave.