The final excerpt from Margaret Atwood's book Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing.
Here's the excerpt on Prospero.
And the excerpt on The Wizard of Oz. They're all of a piece.
This excerpt is on Mephisto, the lead character in Klaus Mann's book Mephisto. Haven't read the book, but I know the movie haunts me. Here we go.
The third illusionist I promised you is the actor Henrik Hofgen, from Klaus Mann's 1936 novel Mephisto. Hofgen is an artist -- a real artist. He's an actor, and a very good one; his best role is Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust. But the novel is set during the Third Reich, and Hofgen becomes his own Mephisto; he tempts the susceptible Faust part of himself, and leads himself down the unholy road to worldly power. To get this power, he cuddles up to the Nazis, not because he believes their creed but because that's where the goodies are. He betrays his erstwhile left-wing friends, including his best pal Otto, and throws over his lover because she's black. " 'The theatre needs me,'" he says, "'and the regime needs the theatre.' " How right he is -- totalitarianism is always somewhat theatrical. And, like the theatre, it leans heavily on illusion: grand facades, with squalor and string-pulling behind the scenes.Posted by sheilaFinally Hofgen is visited by a messenger -- a young man bearing a message from Otto, who has just been tortured to death by the SS. The message is, roughly, We shall overcome, and when we do, we'll know who to hang. Hofgen is unnerved by this visit. " 'What do people want from me?' " he whimpers. " 'Why do they pursue me? Why are they so mean to me? I'm only a poor actor!' "
When things get tough, Mephisto dumps his costume and reverts to the frightened human being behind the illusion. But does that let him off the hook for the things he's done in order to obtain his high position and his loot, with his art as both disguise and instrument?
In all such magician or wizard or illusionist figures, the question of imposture, of trickery, of manipulation for power of one kind or another, is never very far away. It seems that when the artist tries for a sphere of power beyond that of his art, he's on shifty ground; but if he doesn't engage himself with the social world at all, he risks being simply irrelevant -- a doodler, a fabricator of scrimshaw, a fiddler with bric a brac, a recluse who spends his time figuring out how many angels can prance on the head of a pen.