A elite virou uma entidade contra a qual são debitadas na conta até terremoto, furacão e tsunami. Tudo de errado “neste país” é, claro, culpa da elite. A ignorância atinge o pico da escala Richter, pois até quem é da elite dá pau na elite; basta algo dar errado. Mas há um problema de conceito e entendimento gravíssimo. Se a elite é “o que há de mais valorizado e de melhor qualidade, especialmente em um grupo social”, como informa o Houaiss, como pode o melhor produzir o pior? Caberia a essa elite a responsabilidade e a culpa por todos os males do mundo? Seria a elite o grande satã?

Acho perfeito o conceito sociológico de elite elaborado pelo italiano Vilfredo Pareto: indivíduos que se destacam dos demais por suas qualidades superiores em todas as áreas de ação humana e, por isso, compõem uma minoria distinta do resto da sociedade. O interessante desse conceito é que carrega consigo uma mistura de sentidos classificatório e valorativo, desembocando numa aristocracia. Assim, temos os melhores, que são a elite, na política, na economia, nos esportes, na literatura.

E aí você me pergunta: mas, Garschagen, aristocracias não são perenes, o que impediria a mobilidade social? É aí que a teoria de Pareto fica ainda mais interessante. Ele não entende aristocracia como algo eterno, analisando a história como um cemitério de aristocracias. Bom, não? A esse movimento, Pareto batizou de circulação das elites, capaz de assegurar o equilíbrio e a longevidade do corpo social.

E a coisa vai adiante. Como? Se não houver circulação das elites, ou se o processo ocorrer lentamente, há uma degeneração porque quem assume o topo das esferas de ação humana são indivíduos de qualidade inferior. Em contrapartida, nas camadas inferiores da sociedade vão se acumulando indivíduos de qualidade superior. A conta, como se vê, não fecha, provocando crises, perturbações e violência. Geralmente, há revoluções para derrubada violenta da elite governante, elite essa que não é formada pelos melhores.

Pareto, de trivela, ainda dá um chute na teoria marxista da luta de classes, o que é sempre saudável e faz bem pra pele. O que diz o moço? Há uma luta constante entre a elite no poder e quem está de fora, independente da classe social. As classes sociais, aliás, poderiam ser extintas que a luta para a circulação da elite continuaria sem cessar.

A teoria de Pareto dá um outro cacete nos esquerdinhas adeptos de um levante: a revolução socialista é, apenas, a tomada de poder pela elite burguesa socialista. Só. Acaba, dessa forma, toda a construção ideológica do discurso segundo o qual seria possível um governo das massas. Não há como um governo, que é dominado por uma elite, uma minoria, pretender ser igualitário com o discurso vazio da soberania popular. Como explica sensatamente Mario Grynszpan, no instrutivo ensaio A teoria das elites e sua genealogia consagrada.

Voltando à vaca fria, como, então, conciliar esse discurso tolo que há no Brasil contra as elites se o conceito consagrado de elite rechaça tal pantomima? Não há como o melhor produzir o pior; e o pior, quando chega ao poder, é derrubado pelo melhor, eis o resumo da teoria de Pareto, que, claro, não pode ser aplicada ao Brasil, especialmente com esse governo do “nunca antes neste país”.

É possível fazer uma defesa das elites enquanto conceito. Mas ao imaginar sua aplicação e defesa no Brasil fico um tanto quanto atordoado. Quem está no poder político é elite por ter conquistado e deter o poder. Mas seriam esses que vemos aí os melhores da sociedade brasileira? Se sim, estamos lascado; o nível é baixíssimo e não há salvação. Se não, onde estão os melhores? Na literatura, sabemos, eu e você, caro leitor: a turma que aparece comumente celebrada não é a melhor. É claro que existem os bons celebrados, mas são minoria. E não seria a minoria a elite per se? Se essa horda é celebrada não temos a celebração da elite, mas da legião, que é maioria, e, por essa condição, está excluída da elite.

Talvez o problema central da vulgarização da literatura pátria e da má qualidade dos escritores de auditório seja a celebração da maoiria em detrimento da minoria, a nossa elite literária que, por ser elite, e, por isso mesmo, discriminada, vive à margem e é tratada, não a pontapés, mas com um silêncio igualmente nefasto e ensurdecedor. No Brasil, mata-se o talento pela indiferença.

Não conheço grupo social mais vilipendiado do que a elite. De um tempo para cá, finalmente, está havendo uma reação instrutiva contra todas as bobagens ditas a respeito da elite. Destaco, dos textos que li, dois, um do sempre bom Demétrio Magnoli, em O Globo, outro de Marcelo Otávio Dantas, na Folha. Reproduzo os textos e comento no post lá de cima:

N’O Globo (23/08/2007):

O STF diante da história

Por Demétrio Magnoli

A elite está na moda. Na fábula mil vezes repetida por Lula, todo o mal provém da “elite que governa este país há 500 anos”. No discurso dos intelectuais que se imaginam “orgânicos”, há uma permanente “conspiração das elites” contra o governo.

Foi sob a influência de Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) que, nos anos 30, uma corrente da sociologia substituiu o conceito marxista de divisão da sociedade em classes pelo paradigma entre “elites” e “massas”. No Brasil, a obsessão pela elite coincide com a chegada de Lula ao poder. Antes, fiéis à linguagem marxista, os petistas invocavam os “trabalhadores”. Depois, sem o saber, tornaram-se “paretianos” e passaram a invocar o “povo” ou os “pobres” - isto é, as “massas”. O discurso reinventado reflete adequadamente a novidade de fundo: a ascensão de uma nova elite política.

“Elite”, assim no singular, que se reproduz ao longo de séculos, sempre igual a si mesma, só existe na matreira delinqüência intelectual de Lula. Na sociologia, existem elites políticas, econômicas, intelectuais, religiosas. Há, sobretudo, uma “circulação das elites” - um fenômeno cujos indícios, entre nós, abrangem o elegante declínio dos quatrocentões paulistas, a decadência ruidosa dos usineiros nordestinos e, também, a configuração de uma “classe política” que faz do cargo público uma plataforma para a ascensão social. Renan Calheiros, um homem de origem humilde, é a ilustração mais atual desse último processo.

A dissociação entre a elite política e a elite econômica se acentuou no Brasil após o fim do regime militar, ainda que a segunda continue capaz de veicular seus interesses por meio da primeira. A trajetória de Calheiros não é a exceção, mas a regra, no Congresso Nacional. Sob esse aspecto, não há novidade na ascensão da nova elite petista. Formada por indivíduos de classe média, com raízes no sindicalismo e na universidade, essa elite adventícia pratica o tradicional intercâmbio de poder e conexões políticas por carreira, renda e patrimônio. As suas invectivas contra a “mídia”, que revela essas estratégias, mal escondem um sentimento de revolta diante do que se lhes afigura como “preconceito”: afinal, não fazem o mesmo que tantos outros, antes deles?

Elites tendem a aderir às regras de funcionamento do sistema no qual se processou sua ascensão. A nova elite da estrela vermelha renunciou há muito à idéia de transformação social e, nos seus hábitos, não se distingue das demais frações da elite política brasileira. A sua singularidade é pertencer ao PT.

“Certa ou errada, é a minha pátria” - a divisa clássica dos nacionalistas, reinterpretada pelos comunistas, produziu incontáveis abjurações: “Não se pode estar certo contra o partido”, diziam os militantes que “retificavam” seu pensamento para alinhá-lo às móveis verdades do Comitê Central. O silêncio dos petistas acusados no episódio do “mensalão” se inscreve nessa lógica, mas tem motivações diferentes. Os velhos comunistas acreditavam que o partido era o instrumento indispensável de salvação da humanidade; os dirigentes e quadros petistas acreditam que só o partido pode salvar a si próprios.

O PT é o alicerce sobre o qual se ergue a rede de relações sociais que propicia a ascensão da nova elite política. É por meio do partido, com sua hierarquia e suas correntes internas, que se processam as indicações para os cargos públicos e se tecem as conexões com o mundo empresarial. Não se rompe com o partido, nem mesmo depois da expulsão, como atesta o caso de Delúbio Soares. Em contrapartida, o partido vela pelos seus na hora da desgraça, oferecendo-lhes demonstrações de solidariedade e legenda eleitoral ou, pelo menos, advogados e ajuda financeira oculta, como atestam os casos de José Dirceu, José Genoino e Silvio Pereira.

A denúncia oferecida pelo procurador-geral da República ao Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF) tem relevância histórica, pois é a primeira peça judicial que desvenda o novo padrão de corrupção política engendrado por essa elite. As redes de corrupção tradicionais operam ao redor de uma camarilha política informal, que controla um segmento do aparelho de Estado. A rede do “mensalão” operou sob a égide de uma máquina partidária centralizada, dirigida a partir do âmago do Poder Executivo e ramificada em diversos órgãos públicos e empresas estatais. A operação não estava a serviço do enriquecimento imediato de um grupo de pessoas, mas da consolidação e reprodução futura da nova elite.

O plenário do STF deliberará, nos próximos dias, sobre a abertura da ação penal. Juridicamente, o que está em jogo é apenas a conversão em réus de 40 indivíduos. Mas, no plano político, começam a ser definidas as regras do jogo da “circulação das elites” no Brasil.

Na Folha ( 03/09/2007):

Excelência, defina ‘elite’

Quando alguém me pergunta qual o principal problema do Brasil atual, não hesito em responder: a falta de precisão vocabular.

Vivemos sob o império dos sofismas, em que toda ilegalidade tem direito a um eufemismo, todo impostor, livre acesso à honradez, e toda bravata, o status de argumento. Num ambiente semelhante, o debate público, sério e fundamentado, se torna inviável.
Exemplos existem aos montes, mas talvez nenhum deles seja tão grave quanto a utilização que se vem fazendo do termo “elite”.

Toda vez que um de nossos dirigentes precisa livrar-se de acusações, desqualificar opositores ou simplesmente neutralizar qualquer crítica, a palavra “elite” surge como o pecado feito verbo. Ela encarna tudo o que há de ruim e malvado, o dolo em essência, o egoísmo mais nocivo, a traição sempre à espreita.

Curiosamente, essa “elite” não tem rosto. Ela é sempre o outro -o inimigo, o desafeto, o adversário, o opositor. Em suma: o dissenso.

Diz-se pertencer à “elite” o indivíduo ou instituição que ouse questionar os atos do poder.

Em qualquer língua do planeta, esse substantivo afrancesado -”elite”- inclui o estamento dirigente da nação. Salvo no idioma falado pelos próceres de nossa República.

Aqui, ministros de Estado, secretários de governo, parlamentares, magistrados, diretores de bancos e empresas estatais, nenhum se julga parte da “elite”. Tampouco são vistos como integrantes da “elite” usineiros heróicos, empreiteiros amigos, marqueteiros audazes ou banqueiros satisfeitos.

Já o cidadão de classe média que manifesta publicamente o seu desagrado com o Estado de anomia do país é, de imediato, acusado de tramar o eterno retorno das desigualdades sociais e da concentração de renda. A ofensa é absurda, mas poucos se dão conta disso.

Ora, quem paga os elevadíssimos impostos que, já de algum tempo, são cobrados no Brasil não pode ser acusado de responsável pelo atraso da nação. Os verdadeiros culpados são aqueles que tomam esses impostos sem investir corretamente na educação do povo e no desenvolvimento de nossas forças produtivas.

As “bandas podres” existem, disso não resta a menor dúvida. Mas hoje, tal como ontem, elas vivem em conúbio com o Estado. O atual governo não moveu uma palha para mudar tal quadro. Pelo contrário, especializou-se em lotear cargos e apadrinhar o fisiologismo. Além disso, encampou a ortodoxia monetária tucana, continuando a desperdiçar o arrocho fiscal no enriquecimento dos grandes investidores nacionais e estrangeiros.

Como pode então que os dirigentes continuem a ver nas vaias de alguns ou nas críticas da imprensa a mão conspiratória da “elite”? Dá vontade de dizer: “Excelência, defina elite!”.

O uso sofístico do conceito de “elite” teve sua origem em nossa intelectualidade. Foi ela quem ensinou aos atuais homens de poder a conveniente manipulação da antinomia elite-povo e quem primeiro se auto-excluiu da tão odiosa “elite brasileira”.

Ao passar décadas tratando a “elite” como um bloco monolítico e, sobretudo, ao fazer de conta que um país justo se possa estruturar sem elites técnicas, científicas, intelectuais, políticas, burocráticas, artísticas e econômicas, nossa intelectualidade transformou o conceito em um mero clichê ao dispor das lideranças populistas de viés autoritário.

Basta-lhes agora dizer “eu sou o povo” e todo questionamento passa a estar identificado com a insatisfação da “elite reacionária”. Basta-lhes repetir “o povo chegou ao poder” e o papel histórico da democracia se cumpre, tornando-se ela um instrumento obsoleto. Para que alternância de partidos se quem está de fora é a “elite”?

O atual debate sobre a crise aérea espelha à perfeição os efeitos nefastos desse pântano conceitual. Todas as críticas são ditas “provenientes da elite”. O próprio tema dos aeroportos em pane e do caos regulatório do setor é tratado como um assunto menor, de exclusivo interesse da “elite”.

Dois aviões já caíram. Quantos mortos a mais serão necessários para que os governistas de plantão acordem de seu transe?

Nenhum povo jamais foi redimido pelo sucateamento dos setores de ponta da economia. Em um debate público sério, estaríamos agora discutindo a crônica incapacidade de nossos governos em assegurar a modernização da infra-estrutura do país. Ao insistirmos na utilização oportunista de conceitos, continuaremos enfrentando crise após crise. O Brasil ficará para trás. A pobreza se eternizará. E a democracia descerá pelo ralo.

Até que enfim, de volta à arena. Muitos assuntos, muitas idéias, algumas boas brigas, o bom humor de sempre e o uísque a postos. Estou aqui escolhendo assuntos e preparando alguns textos. Me aguarda que volto logo. E, no início da noite, a versão da música de Tati Quebra Barraco para um escritor nativo. “Ele está descontrolado!”, se é que você me entende. Se não entendeu, mais tarde saberás! Ahhhhhh!!! Muleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeque!!!!!

Ainda não é hoje que conseguirei escrever aqui. Tentarei amanhã. Não me abandone, ok?

Para finalizar, um texto sobre a relação entre Shaw e Oscar Wilde, o outro genial escritor irlandês, que encontrei no site da The Shaw Society:

Wilde’s Disgrace

The recent demise of the Home Secretary David Blunkett brought to mind Oscar Wilde’s downfall in 1895 when he launched an ill-advised prosecution against the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel for publishing a statement that Wilde was “posing as a sodomite”. They both formed an inappropriate intimate relationship which turned sour and caused them to pursue law suits through the courts which eventually caused events to turn against them. Whilst Wilde’s consequent suffering stands in the scale of an Oedipus compared to Blunkett’s Willy Loman we might concur with George Bernard Shaw’s observation of public sympathies, when he said in a letter to Frank Harris in 1918 that “it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the Crucifixion could be proved a myth and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine percent of its devotees.”

The public persecution and demise can make a martyr of its victim, even the popularly disliked Charles I. It is not only that the suffering caused can seem hugely disproportionate to the gravity of their wrongdoing but it is also the capricious nature of fate which presumably could have been very different had they made the right choices at the right time. However, in the case of some public figures such as former Conservative MPs Jonathan Aitken and Jeffrey Archer (who, like David Blunkett and Oscar Wilde, fuelled their own downfall through court actions), their fate seems to have been roundly deserved. To some extent this is because they were seen as the bully in the affair who tried to use libel actions in a tyrannical fashion to suppress media free speech. Also they were male Tory MPs who used blustering pomposity to fuel their careers and defend hypocrisy and repressive values. The inexorable feeling that they each had it coming was palpable.

To Wilde’s contemporaries, Shaw amongst them, it seemed clear what would happen if he pursued the Marquess of Queensberry through the courts. He was urged to go abroad but he brushed advices aside. However, he was already trapped in his position, not only between a fanatical father in the Marquess of Queensberry who was baying for his blood but a petulant and voracious young spendthrift in Lord Alfred Douglas who wanted rid of his father’s intrusive presence.

The Wilde was lacking money to travel, so much so that, on 1 March 1895 The Avondale Hotel refused to allow him to removed his luggage so he could travel to Paris as he had planned and instead he had found himself in the office of solicitor Charles Humphrey initiating his court action. Furthermore, although Lord Alfred Douglas mother and brother Percy had promised to cover the lawyers’ fees and Douglas gave him £360, Wilde had already paid Humphreys 150 guineas and had sold personal possessions to raise £800 to prevent creditor’s bailiff’s entering his family home in Tite Street, Chelsea. After he was sentence to two years’ hard labour in Reading prison he was made bankrupt by Queensberry and his lawyers for the court costs he owed amounting to £700.

In addition to this, as Charles Humphreys reminded us in the opening address before Great Marlborough Street magistrates court on 2 March in respect of the charges against the Marquess, “Mr Oscar Wilde was a married man living on the most affectionate terms with his wife and family of two sons.” He could not therefore simply take off and leave his family to face creditors and vicious rumours unless he wished to ruin his whole life. Certainly he may have escaped jail but not the battering of his reputation which had only recently reached its apex following the success of The Importance of Being Earnest.

It was clear that the Marquess would not stop his bullying tactics unless Wilde took court action after he made an attempt he made to sabotage the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with a “bouquet” of vegetables. Wilde tried to have him bound over to keep the peace but Humphreys wrote to Wilde that none of the theatre staff would testify and so it could not be done. The year before the incident, Queensberry had appeared at Wilde’s house in Tite Street, accompanied by a prizefighter and threatened him in his own house. At the same time Queensberry was continually writing letters to his son more or less accusing Wilde of sodomy.

No doubt there were to be benefits for himself but had he considered these more carefully he might have realized that these would fall woefully below what he was putting at stake. “Oscar was not combative, though he was supercilious… he liked to make people devoted to him and flatter them exquisitely with that end.” However, Shaw continued: “ Pugnacious people, if they did not actually terrify Oscar, were at least the sort of people he could not control, and whom he feared as possibly able to coerce him”.

Though Wilde was clear in accepting “formal responsibility” he spent much of De Profundis berating Lord Alfred Douglas for leading him astray with his excessive demands and monopolizing his talents. On the one hand he maintained: “I must say to myself that neither you nor your father, multiplied a thousand times over, could possibly have ruined a man like me: that I ruined myself: and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand”. On the other hand, he admitted: “ I ceased to be Lord over myself. I was no longer the Captain of my Soul and did not know it. I allowed you to dominate me and your father to frighten me… in your hideous game of hate together, you had both thrown dice for my soul and you [Lord Alfred Douglas] happened to have lost.”

Indeed Lord Alfred Douglas and the marquess had also trodden a fine line themselves. It has been reported that Queensberry’s defence barrister, Edward Carson, was prepared to enter a guilty plea until the very last minute when evidence from one of the former rentboys, Charles Parker was turned up. Lord Alfred Douglas narrowly avoided prosecution himself under the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The reasons given by the Director of Public Prosecutions are fairly spurious and suggest that the evidence that convicted Wilde was not good enough to convict Douglas. Great stress is made of the influence Wilde must have exercised and the weakness of Douglas’ character but this can hardly be a defence unless he was suffering from some mental deficiency so could be treated in the same way as a minor. There have also been tentative suggestions that Queensberry had some kind of hold on Lord Rosebery with threats to expose his homosexuality.

The Shaw revealed Wilde’s insistence on going to trial as partly his “fierce Irish pride… It was his tragedy that people asked more moral strength from him than he could bear the burden of, because they made the very common mistake… of regarding style as evidence of strength… Now Wilde was so in love with style that he never realized the danger of biting off more than he could chew: in other words of putting up more style than his matter would carry. Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.”

It is no secret that we often expect more from our public figures than they ever deliver and the whole process of politics can be seen as the management of public disappointment. Yet public figures are still happy to fuel this misperception by making promises both public and personal to inflate their fragile positions which they cannot keep. It is true of Irish dandy poets as much as of tough talking northern home secretaries. It is a dull truism to say nobody is perfect but our most disastrous flaw is always to expect less of others and more of ourselves up until the point we coming crashing into reality. Shaw’s retrospective comments came 25 years too late to help Wilde but 86 years too early to help Blunkett.

PS: Ficarei sem acesso à internet durante alguns dias. Volto assim que puder. Não me abandone, ok?

Furtei daqui esse prefácio de Shaw para o livro Three Plays by Brieux:

How to Write a Popular Play (1909)

1

The formula for the well made play is so easy that I give it for the benefit of any reader who feels tempted to try his hand at making the fortune that awaits all manufacturers in this line. First, you “have an idea” for a dramatic situation. If it strikes you as a splendidly original idea, whilst it is in fact as old as the hills, so much the better. For instance, the situation of an innocent person convicted by circumstances of a crime may always be depended on. If the person is a woman, she must be convicted of adultery. If a young officer, he must be convicted of selling information to the enemy, though it is really a fascinating female spy who has ensnared him and stolen the incriminating document. If the innocent wife, banished from her home, suffers agonies through her separation from her children, and, when one of them is dying (of any disease the dramatist chooses to inflict), disguises herself as a nurse and attends it through its dying convulsion until the doctor, who should be a serio-comic character, and if possible a faithful old admirer of the lady’s, simultaneously announces the recovery of the child and the discovery of the wife’s innocence, the success of the play may be regarded as assured if the writer has any sort of knack for his work. Comedy is more difficult, because it requires a sense of humor and a good deal of vivacity; but the process is essentially the same: it is the manufacture of a misunderstanding. Having manufactured it, you place its culmination at the end of the last act but one, which is the point at which the manufacture of the play begins. Then you make your first act out of the necessary introduction of the characters to the audience, after elaborate explanations, mostly conducted by servants, solicitors, and other low life personages (the principals must all be dukes and colonels and millionaires), of how the misunderstanding is going to come about. Your last act consists, of course, of clearing up the misunderstanding, and generally getting the audience out of the theatre as best you can.

Now please do not misunderstand me as pretending that this process is so mechanical that it offers no opportunity for the exercise of talent. On the contrary, it is so mechanical that without very conspicuous talent nobody can make much reputation by doing it, though some can and do make a living at it. And this often leads the cultivated classes to suppose that all plays are written by authors of talent. As a matter of fact the majority of those who in France and England make a living by writing plays are unknown and, as to education, all but illiterate. Their names are not worth putting on the playbill, because their audiences neither know nor care who the author is, and often believe that the actors improvise the whole piece, just as they in fact do sometimes improvise the dialogue. To rise out of this obscurity you must be a Scribe or a Sardou, doing essentially the same thing, it is true, but doing it wittily and ingeniously, at moments almost poetically, and giving the persons of the drama some touches of real observed character…

2: WHY THE CRITICS ARE ALWAYS WRONG

Now it is these strokes of talent that set the critics wrong. For the talent, being all expended on the formula, at least consecrates the formula in the eyes of the critics. Nay, they become so accustomed to the formula that at last they cannot relish or understand a play that has grown naturally, just as they cannot admire the Venus of Milo because she has neither a corset nor high heeled shoes. They are like the peasants who are so accustomed to food reeking with garlic that when food is served to them without it they declare that it has no taste and is not food at all.

This is the explanation of the refusal of the critics of all nations to accept great original dramatists like Ibsen and Brieux as real dramatists, or their plays as real plays. No writer of the first order needs the formula any more than a sound man needs a crutch. In his simplist mood, when he is only seeking to amuse, he does not manufacture a plot: he tells a story. He finds no difficulty in setting people on the stage to talk and act in an amusing, exciting or touching way. His characters have adventures and ideas which are interesting in themselves, and need not be fitted into the Chinese puzzle of a plot.

3: THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE

But the great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life. This sounds a mere pious phrase of literary criticism; but a moment’s consideration will discover its meaning and its exactitude. Life as it appears to us in our daily experience is an unintelligible chaos of happenings. You pass Othello in the bazaar in Aleppo, Iago on the jetty in Cyprus, and Desdemona in the nave of St. Mark’s in Venice without the slightest clue to their relations to one another. The man you see stepping into a chemist’s shop to buy the means of committing murder or suicide, may, for all you know, want nothing but a liver pill or a toothbrush. The statesman who has no other object than to make you vote for his party at the next election, may be starting you on an incline at the foot of which lies war, or revolution, or a smallpox epidemic or five years off your lifetime. The horrible murder of a whole family by the father who finishes by killing himself, or the driving of a young girl on to the streets, my be the result of your discharging an employee in a fit of temper a month before. To attempt to understand life from merely looking on at it as it happens in the streets is as hopeless as trying to understand public questions by studying snapshots of public demonstrations. If we possessed a series of cinematographs of all the executions during the Reign of Terror, they might be exhibited a thousand times without enlightening the audiences in the least as to the meaning of the Revolution: Robespierre would perish as “un monsieur” and Marie Antoinette as “une femme.” Life as it occurs is senseless: a policeman may watch it and work in it for thirty years in the streets and courts of Paris without learning as much of it or from it as a child or a nun may learn from a single play by Brieux. For it is the business of Brieux to pick out the significant incidents from the chaos of daily happenings and arrange them so that their relation to one another becomes significant, thus changing us from bewildered spectators of a monstrous confusion to men intelligently conscious of the world and its destinies. This is the highest function that man can perform–the greatest work he can set his hand to; and this is why the great dramatists of the world, from Euripides and Aristophanes to Shakespeare and Molière, and from them to Ibsen and Brieux, take that majestic and pontifical rank which seems so strangely above all the reasonable pretensions of mere strolling actors and theatrical authors.

4: HOW THE GREAT DRAMATISTS TORTURE THE PUBLIC

Now if the critics are wrong in supposing that the formula of the well made play is not only an indispensable factor in playwriting, but is actually the essence of the play itself–if their delusion is rebuked and confuted by the practice of every great dramatist, even when he is only amusing himself by story telling, what must happen to their poor formula when it impertinently offers its services to a playwright who has taken on his supreme function as the Interpreter of Life? Not only has he no use for it, but he must attack and destroy it; for one of the very first lessons he has to teach to a play-ridden public is that the romantic conventions on which the formula proceeds are all false, and are doing incalculable harm in these days when everybody reads romances and goes to the theatre. Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audiences until he has cured them of looking at the stage through a keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court. The cure is not a popular one. The public suffers from it exactly as a drunkard or a snuff taker suffers from an attempt to conquer the habit. The critics especially, who are forced by their profession to indulge immoderately in plays adulterated with falsehood and vice, suffer so acutely when deprived of them for a whole evening that they hurl disparagements and even abuse and insult at the merciless dramatist who is torturing them. To a bad play of the kind they are accustomed to they can be cruel through superciliousness, irony, impatience, contempt, or even a Rouchefoucauldian pleasure in a friend’s misfortune. But the hatred provoked by deliberately inflicted pain, the frantic denials as of a prisoner at the bar accused of a disgraceful crime, the clamor for vengeance thinly disguised as artistic justice, the suspicion that the dramatist is using private information and making a personal attack: all these are to be found only when the playwright is no mere marchand de plaisir, but, like Brieux, a ruthless revealer of hidden truth and a mighty destroyer of idols.

Daqui peguei frases brilhantes tiradas da peça Pigmalião:

Pygmalion (1912)

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

–Preface

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

–Preface

If the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among its most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.

–Preface

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

–Higgins, Act I

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!

–Higgins, Act I

I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.

–Higgins, Act II

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

–Higgins, Act II

The woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east.

–Higgins, Act II

What is life but a series of inspired follies?

–Higgins, Act II

I don’t want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.

–Liza, Act II

Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of.

–Higgins, Act II

You have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.

–Higgins, Act III

Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

–Nepommuck, Act III

There’s always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

–Pickering, Act IV

I have to live for others and not for myself; that’s middle-class morality.

–Doolittle, Act V

Oh! If I only could go back to my flower-basket! I should be independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes.

–Liza, Act V

Independence? That’s middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

–Higgins, Act V

Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of self-respect for me.

–Liza, Act V

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

–Liza, Act V

Every girl has a right to be loved.

–Liza, Act V

Aqui você pode ler alguns dos excelentes prefácios que Shaw escreveu para as próprias peças. Reproduzo o trecho inicial do prefácio de Pigmalião:

Pygmalion

With a Preface and a Sequel

Bernard Shaw, 1916
Preface to Pygmalion.
A Professor of Phonetics.

AS will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an illnatured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Aqui você pode ouvir entrevistas concedidas por Shaw para a BBC.

Retirei daqui as obras de Bernard Shaw:

As peças:

Androcles and the Lion
The Apple Cart
Arms and the Man
Bernard Shaw: Selected Plays
Bernard Shaw’s Plays: Major Barbara, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, Too True to Be Good
The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Vol.1: Plays Unpleasant: Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderers…
The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Vol.2: Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar…
The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Vol. 3: Major Barbara, Passion, Poison and Petrifaction…
The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Vol.4: Misalliance, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Fanny’s First…
The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Vol.6: Saint Joan, The Apple Cart, Too True to Be Good…
The Bodley Head Bernard Shaw: Vol.7: Geneva, Cymbeline Refinished, ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden…
Caesar and Cleopatra
Candida
Candida and How He Lied to Her Husband
The Devil’s Disciple
The Doctor’s Dilemma
Getting Married
Great Catherine
Heartbreak House
Heartbreak House and Misalliance
John Bull’s Other Island
Last Plays: In Good King Charles Golden Days/ Buoyant Billions/ Farfetched Fables/ Shakes Versus Shav/ Why She Would Not
Major Barbara
Man and Superman
Man of Destiny
Misalliance / The Fascinating Foundling
Monologues from George Bernard Shaw
Mrs. Warren’s Profession
Overruled
The Philanderer
Plays by George Bernard Shaw: Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, Man and Superman
Plays Extravagant: Too True to Be Good, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, The Millionairess
Plays Pleasant
Plays Political: The Apple Cart/ On the Rocks/ Geneva
Plays Unpleasant: Widower’s House, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren’s Profession
The Portable Bernard Shaw
Pygmalion
Pygmalion and Arms and the Man
Pygmalion and Major Barbara
Pygmalion and My Fair Lady
Saint Joan
Three Plays for Puritans: The Devil’s Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra …
Widowers Houses
You Never Can Tell
Also Recommended: Ten 10-Minute Plays

Outras obras

Bernard Shaw and Gabriel Pascal (Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw)
Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence
Bernard Shaw on Cinema
Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews: 1884-1950
Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch
Bernard Shaw Theatrics: Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw
“The Black Girl in Search of God” and Some Lesser Tales
The Complete Prefaces
The Complete Prefaces: 1930-1950
Dear Mr Shaw (Harcover)
Dear Mr Shaw (Paperback)
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
Major Critical Essays
Major Critical Essays: The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Perfect Wagnerite, The Sanity of Art
Music in London
Not Bloody Likely!: And Other Quotations from Bernard Shaw
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring
Press Cuttings
The Quintessence of Ibsenism
Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw: Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells
Shaw: Interviews and Recollections
Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey: A Correspondence and a Record
Table Talk of G.B.S.: Conversations on Things in General Between Bernard Shaw and His Biographer

Biografias e estudos sobre Shaw:

1992: Shaw and the Last Hundred Years
The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies
Bernard Shaw
Bernard Shaw (Gill’s Irish Lives)
Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography
Bernard Shaw: A Critical View
Bernard Shaw: A Guide to Research
Bernard Shaw: A Psychological Study
Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman
Bernard Shaw: The Drama Observed
Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition
Bernard Shaw: The Pursuit of Power, 1898-1918
Bernard Shaw, Frank Harris and Oscar Wilde
Bernard Shaw’s Novels: Portraits of the Artist as Man and Superman
The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw
Dictionary to the Plays & Novels of Bernard Shaw: With Bibliography of His Works
Edwardian Shaw: The Writer and His Age
Florence Farr Bernard Shaw’s New Woman
G.B. Shaw: A Critical Response
GBS and Company
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (Modern Critical Views)
George Bernard Shaw and Christopher Newton: Explorations of Shavian Theatre
George Bernard Shaw: His Religion and Values
George Bernard Shaw and The Socialist Theatre
Heartbreak House: Preludes of Apocalypse
The Marriage of Contraries: Bernard Shaw’s Middle Plays
Men and Supermen: The Shavian Portrait Gallery
Philosophy of George Bernard Shaw
Playing Joan: Actresses on the Challenge of Shaw’s Saint Joan: Twenty-Six Interviews
Position of Bernard Shaw in European Drama & Philosophy
Pygmalion’s Wordplay: The Postmodern Shaw
Shaw and Science Fiction
Shaw in His Time
Shaw’s People: Victoria to Churchill
Shaw’s Sense of History
Shaw: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies
Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of George Bernard Shaw

Em português há:

Teatro:

A conversão do pirata
Cândida
Casa de Orates
César e Cleópatra
Homem e super-homem
Major Bárbara
O dilema do médico
O homem e as armas
O homem e o destino
Pigmalião
Santa Joana
Volta a Matusalém

Ensaios:

Quem sou o que penso

O teatro das idéias

Novelas:

Aventuras de uma negrinha que procurava Deus