Monday
As a France fan, I felt for Argentina as I watched the World Cup final: like the French squad, the Argentinians learned how Spain’s superb midfield can suck the life out of any attack, no matter how potent. It didn’t matter that, in the course of this tournament, Kylian Mbappé and Lionel Messi smashed through World Cup scoring records. Once they confronted the Spanish it was like (here are the two literary examples that came to mind) they were trapped under Sylvia Plath’s bell jar and crushed by the torture stones in Arthur Miller’s Crucible.
I’ll get to those passages in a moment. First of all, however, earlier in the tournament Argentina had me thinking of a different literary work. Its late game heroics reminded me of how Mac the Knife wriggles out of trouble time after time in John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera.
Mac is the charismatic highwayman and charming bigamist at the center of the 18th century musical, which Bertolt Brecht later appropriated for Three Penny Opera. He escapes the hangman’s noose twice in Gay’s play, although the second time requires a miraculous reprieve.
The scene is as follows: After capturing Mac a second time, the prison authorities prepare to hang him instantly and his fate seems sealed. At this point, however, the play goes meta—the movie Wayne’s World does something similar—as someone watching it begs the beggar author to change the ending:
Player. But, honest Friend, I hope you don’t intend that Macheath shall be really executed.
Beggar. Most certainly, Sir.—To make the Piece perfect, I was for doing strict poetical Justice.—Macheath is to be hang’d; and for the other Personages of the Drama, the Audience must have suppos’d they were all either hang’d or transported.Player. Why then, Friend, this is a downright deep Tragedy. The Catastrophe is manifestly wrong, for an Opera must end happily.
Luckily for Mac, there’s a quick fix:
Beggar. Your Objection, Sir, is very just, and is easily remov’d. For you must allow, that in this kind of Drama, ’tis no matter how absurdly things are brought about—So—you Rabble there—run and cry, A Reprieve!—let the Prisoner be brought back to his Wives in Triumph.
I’m aware that certain people—most notably the Egyptian coach, whose team was up two goals on Argentina with 11 minutes left in regular time—think that the fix has been in for Messi’s team. And certainly we have seen top-down reprieves in this tournament, most notably with the U.S.’s Florian Balagon. But just as we can’t help rejoicing when Mac pulls off yet another miraculous escape, so most neutral advisors revelled in the artistry of Messi, who whether with a goal or an assist saved Argentina time after time.
The magic ran out against Spain, however, as Messi, like the French attackers before him, had no room to maneuver. Expertly maintaining ball control while breaking up most of Argentina’s passes, the Spanish were like the torturers squeezing the life out of Giles Corey:
Proctor: Then how does he die?
Elizabeth, gently: They press him, John.
Proctor: Press?
Elizabeth: Great stones they lay upon his chest until he plead aye or nay.
Plath’s novel, about the mental breakdown of a college-age woman, has its own graphic account of suffocation. The novel, I’m fairly certain, borrows its central metaphor from a famous Joseph Wright painting, An Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump. In it, a scientist methodically pumps out the air to prove something (what? that birds need air to breathe?) while the spectators demonstrate a range of emotions. I identify most with the woman who can’t bring herself to look and with the child who gazes in horrified fascination. An objective scientist might have seen Spain’s performance against France and Argentina in the same light: a masterful imposition of will on a previous vibrant life form.
Here’s Plath taking the metaphor and applying it to her protagonist:
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
And
If Mrs Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street cafe in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
And:
I sank back in the grey, plush seat and closed my eyes. The air of the bell jar wadded round me and I couldn’t stir.
For much of their time against Spain, France and Argentina felt as though they couldn’t stir but were stewing in their own sour air. The Spanish press crushed the life out of them. They were trapped in a bad dream.
