Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
A new journal for theatre minima and organum posts exclusively can now be found here.
Monday, 24 March 2008
... in contemporary America, according to the New York Times' second-
... a little sweet escapism sounds pretty appealing to me right now. Failing a quick end to the mortgage crisis or a major turn for the better in the spirit-sapping violence in Iraq, we may all have to settle for a big slice of blueberry pie. Can I have some whipped cream on mine, please?
Posted at 9.49 am in /Miscellaneous
Permanent link to this story
Monday, 24 March 2008
Glossary: Notes from a conversation with a playwright. At home,
we
read Shakespeare with a dictionary by our side, or from a fully-
Shakespeare and the Greeks knew that plot was little more than a hook to hang a play on. Notoriously, Shakespeare devised few original stories, relying instead on Holinshed, Plutarch and Ovid; the Greeks devised their plots from the Homeric epics and other traditional stories. (In our own time, Brecht similarly scavenged from the past.) But Shakespeare and the Greeks were after more than a good story, or even more than any story, so many of these stories defying lucid straightforward narrative; the Jacobeans, especially, created plots which are hopelessly convoluted, ill-constructed, and the machinations of Shakespeare's history plays are frequently beyond logical explanation. Interestingly, narrative itself as we conceive it is anchored in the three a priori assumptions of the phenomenal world as outlined by Schopenhauer and Kant: time, space and causality, the basis of sufficient reason. A place in time (be it the 24 hours of the Aristotelian play or the dozens of years of A Winter's Tale), a place in space (Illyria, the stage before us) and plot (one thing happens because another thing has happened just before it).
But what of those plays, constructed in language, that seek to limn the noumenal, the world that lies beyond the sufficient reason of the world of appearances? A language directed towards the pushing-forward of narrative, a language and structure that limns rational story and not irrational sensibility, remains the prisoner of sufficient reason and therefore of the phenomenal world. Language put to this use, as Schopenhauer and Kant remind us, is impossibly limited when attempting to elicit the noumenal pulse that lies beneath the phenomenal appearance. So language must become lyric, poetic: theatrical and tragic language aspiring to the condition of music, that form that confronts us most with hints of the noumenal.
The condition of our theatre: "But this is the kind of literary play in which the actors seem secondary to the words. You suspect that it might be better read than performed," says one critic. "Superb dialogue," says another, but it gets "the texture right at the cost of content." Which is to say, perhaps, narrative significance.
Plot and narrative are everywhere: film, television, newspapers, novels, short-stories, comic books, video games, even figurative painting and sculpture. Story is necessary, but perhaps one must think of it as a necessary evil, the occasional poison that nonetheless has healthy effects on the body. For it's not the story that counts, but the language that the story elicits from the dramatist: the poetry that touches the noumenal lying within the phenomenal. The story can just as well come from a Lifetime movie-of-the-week as the Iliad. But in whatever realism that desiccates American theatre now, it's a rational realism (one must be clear to provide a map for the audience, god forbid they try to write one in their own imaginations) that denies the place of the irrational music that touches the thing-in-itself. Our critics (and most of our theatre practitioners as well) seem to believe that poetry has no place on the stage: it should stay in books, as ink-on-paper, where it belongs. In this conclusion, the possibilities of language in the theatre, and the theatre itself, remain castrated.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 9.18 am in /Organum
Permanent link to this story
