The Fever
Sometimes I was fine. I remember one morning—a marvelous blue sky—I had my hair cut. Gentle hands molded my hair so that it fit over the shape of my scalp like a cap. Then I bought myself a pair of comfortable socks, and then I looked at them carefully, and I bought two more pairs, because it's not easy to find the kind of socks I like! Then I went to a sweet little restaurant and had lunch with a woman in a lemon-yellow suit whom I'd known since I was eight. But then I got into a taxi, and as I was riding across the city, that feeling, that sickness, filled me up again. It seemed to start in my stomach and move out through my legs, my chest. And my stomach was beating, it was just like a heart. A cold sweat on my forehead and neck. I wasn't me. When the taxi arrived, the person who got out of it wasn't me. I was nowhere. The person who paid the driver was actually no one.
The Fever (1990) by Wallace Shawn
A nameless person from a privileged world, suffering from a sense of disconnection from his (or her) comfortable life, travels to a country in the midst of civil war. Suddenly deliriously ill, the narrator collapses in a hotel bathroom, and confronts an internal chorus of conflicting voices: dreams of comfort, images of physical and economic violence, accusations of indifference, and cold-blooded arguments in favor of oppression. The central question: what, if anything, is a morally consistent way to live in the world as it is?
Notes
When Shawn first performed The Fever to a general audience in 1991, delivering the monologue from a chair on a bare stage at the Public Theater, it was received with a mixture of confusion, disgust, outrage, and condescension—mostly the latter, in the form of reviews that said it was about "liberal guilt" and offered to refer the author to a good psychiatrist. I think that was a grievous misunderstanding, to put it mildly, but one that the play itself suggests. The narrator is literally sick, and argues many contradictory things with equal passion. But what is the source of the sickness?
Simply, it's the awareness of injustice, and of the limitations of the practical reasoning that guides a well-intentioned person. Although Shawn is not blind to the beauties of the world—there are heartfelt passages in the play devoted to simple pleasures, art, and ordinary fellowship, and these are probably the most lucid and serene lines he's ever written—he suggests that the machinery of our lives is being fueled by fires of exploitation and greed. Most of us avoid looking at the fires for long, and the act of avoidance stokes the fires.
What would make looking so intolerable? Our desire to be good and to think of ourselves well—assuming we have such a desire—combined with uncertainty about the proper scope of morality. As Shawn said in his afterword to Aunt Dan and Lemon, "if my relation to each and every peasant in Cambodia is indeed exactly what the principles of morality would demand it to be, it's a miraculous coincidence, because it takes a lot of effort to behave correctly in regard to my friends, and from one end of the year to another I never give those peasants a single thought." Closer to home, there are more immediate questions of boundaries:
Yes—a beggar can be beautiful. .... Yes, you think—there's money in your purse—you'll give her some of it.
And a voice says—Why not all of it? Why not give her all that you have?
Be careful, that's a question that could poison your life. Your love of beauty could actually kill you. If you hear that question, it means you're sick. You're mentally sick.
The play presents a number of defenses to this challenge. The simplest and most attractive one: "I'm doing whatever I possibly can"; we can't all be saints. Less attractive, but undeniably common: "I worked for that money"; "If we give you more, we'll have less"; "Without the poor to do awful work, we would spend our lives doing awful work"; "What they have is what they deserve". And in a paranoid passage that echoes Aunt Dan, all the beggars and peasants in the world are seen as potential Robespierres or Pol Pots: "They want to rise up and finish us, wipe us off the earth as soon as they can".
The latter line of reasoning clearly can lend support to active evil—illustrated by Shawn first in Aunt Dan and later in The Designated Mourner, in which Jack rationalizes fascist violence in terms of the vague threat of "the dirt-eaters". But Shawn suggests that we are all vulnerable to that paranoia and evil, whenever we half-recognize an injustice but recoil from thinking it through, for the sake of our security. The narrator finds a kind of peace only after letting go of every defense, every claim to righteousness.
There are several huge challenges in presenting the play.
One is its construction as a fluidly shifting stream of language. Not only is there no visible action specified, but the progression of arguments is not straightforward; it doubles back again and again, the only clear pattern being an increase in extremity. The style alternates between conversational and lyrical. The text is not formless—there are clear shifts and spaces for the audience to breathe and absorb meaning, but these may be obscured in the rush of images and the spectacle of watching the performer's emotional writhing, especially if the performer has a very distinctive persona. (To my mind, this was a problem with Shawn's own performance, at least in the recording I've heard.)
Another is that despite its generic setting, the play assumes a certain amount of knowledge—or at least curiosity—about history. Its stories of war and oppression and torture in an unspecified country, justified by the threat of a Communist revolt by the poor, and the suggestion that these are done in the name of "our way of life", are not fantasy or a theoretical exercise. They happened again and again during our lifetimes, most specifically in Central America; you could argue over whether these were just awful mistakes, relics of the Cold War, or imperialist business as usual, but it is undeniably true that atrocities were committed and justified in exactly those terms. Shawn was specifically motivated to write the play by the wars in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. Many of his friends and original audiences would have been at least dimly aware of those wars and the arguments for and against them. Many other citizens are not, and the current conventional wisdom that "Communism is dead" (and that we now face a more real threat of violence from people who really do hate us) may make these stories seem less immediate. But that conventional wisdom can be turned around to make the play's moral questions even sharper: suppose we assume that there is no viable alternative to the way our society works now; then how far will we go in giving our allegiance to anything that seems to preserve our way of life?
And another is that the audience may just refuse to identify with the narrator. His or her stories about "normal" life involve hotels, orchestras, literary discussions, and the occasional party at an expensive restaurant. Though those stories aren't exactly Shawn's own, they draw from his background and would be familiar to his friends, to whom he originally presented the piece. In the American middle class, as well off as we are compared to the rest of the world, many people still feel more helpless than comfortable; they may be tempted to see "the fever" as a special pathology of the rich, unreasonable for others. But it mustn't be forgotten that the central challenge in the passage quoted above—"Why not give her all that you have?"—is a challenge to anyone who isn't a beggar, whether what you have is $100,000 or $100. Like Jesus's most direct commands, it threatens whatever you feel is yours. It is meant to be unreasonable.
Why is The Fever a play, and not an essay or a poem or a polemic? It doesn't clearly present how things are, or even how they should be; it documents a process, an exchange between "characters" who have strong reasons for their incompatible demands, a struggle that already exists in some way in the mind of anyone who thinks about these questions, a crisis in which the only hope lies in an embrace of agonizing paradox. This is also what makes me think of the play as a religious piece, though Shawn would surely not describe it that way. Its language is firmly rooted in the experience of life and the reality of beauty, but it leads us into a very dark place, where the basis of our selves is in question and life is an urgent mystery.