Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I trust he's not going to say he minds our stirring up his sluggish soul.
All right, he may be more interested in what we're imitating than he is in us.
But how are we going to imitate these events without calling on our sensations and passions?
If we gave a frigid performance he'd just walk out.
Anyway,
one can't perform frigidly.
Every event must simulate us,
so long as we're not entirely without feeling.
-There is no event, heated or cold
in which a unique subjectivity does not connect with other singularities.
It is impossible for singular individualities to meet in an event without a revolt,
a reconnection of an action and an encounter,
either political or emotional.
-Oh, I've got nothing against feelings.
I agree that feelings are necessary if representations,
imitations of events from people's social life are to be possible,
also that such imitations must stimulate feelings or even revolts.
The only thing that worries me is whether your feelings enhance with your imitations.
My main interest is in these events from real life.
So let me stress once more that É feel I'm an intruder and an outsider in this building,
like someone who has not come in to enjoy a sense of comfort
and would have no hesitation in generating discomfort,
as he has come with quite a particular interest.
The particularity of my interest so strikes me
that I can only compare myself with a man, let's say, who deals in scrap metal
and goes up to a brass band to buy, not a trumpet but simply brass.
All the same, what I am looking for here is for events between people.
I'm looking for means by which incidents
between people can be imitated for certain purposes.
-Actually, I'm beginning to feel a little of the same discomfort you have mentioned yourself.
Imitations such as we supply, as you so dryly put it,
are naturally of a particular kind in so far as they are designed for a particular end.
You'll find this point discussed already in Aristotle's Poetics.
He defines tragedy as an imitative representation of a self-contained,
morally serious action in heightened speech.
Not narrated but performed by the persons taking part in it, stimulating pity and terror,
and thereby bringing about the purging of these emotional states.
In other words, it's a matter of imitating your events from life,
and the imitations are supposed to have specific effects on the emotional constitution.
Since Aristotle wrote that, theatre has gone through many transformations,
but not on this point.
One can only conclude that if it changed in this respect it would no longer be theatre.
-So you think it's hardly feasible to distinguish your imitations from the purposes you pursue?
-Impossible, impossible!
-But I need imitations of events from real life for my purposes.
What can we do about that?
-Let me remind you, imitations cut off from their purpose
would no longer be theatre.
-What would a Marxist do?
-He 'd treat the case as a historical one, with causes from that period and effects in that period.
-And the moral problem?
-He'd treat the moral problem as a historical one, too.
He would observe the usefulness and operation of a particular moral system
within a particular social order and he would fix the sequence of incidents so as to clarify this.
-All the same, I don't think it would be easy to learn this new method of representation
either from the old plays,
which indeed do only try to stimulate the emotions, by a few indications and reminiscences of reality,
or from their naturalistic alternatives.
We might perhaps take genuine court cases out of the law reports and rehearse them
or make our adaptations of well-known novels,
or represent historical incidents as ordinary everyday ones, as the caricaturists do.
-We actors depend entirely on the plays we get given.
We don't just see one or two of your incidents and then imitate them on the stage.
So we'll have to wait for new plays
which would make the kind of performances you have in mind possible.
-That may mean you'll have to wait for ever.
-It seems to me that your liking for popular images
has rather diverted us from that desire of the audience
for knowledge on which you want to base your way of making theatre.
These images want to inspire repulsion with their earthquakes, fires, atrocities and the blows of fate.
-We've not been diverted, we've only gone back.
The essence of this art is insecurity.
The earth quakes and opens up.
The city suddenly goes up in flames.
Governors are menaced by a change of fortune.
And insecurity is at the root of desire for knowledge too.
The signals for rescue and redress may be richer or poorer
according to mankind's ability to help itself.
-So it's possible to enjoy insecurity?
- It's an ill wind that brings nobody any good.
People want to be made just as insecure as they really are.
-You don't want to get rid of this element of insecurity in art, then?
-Not at all. Not at all.
- So it's back to pity and terror after all?
-Don't jump to conclusions.
I'm reminded of a photograph which one of the American steel companies
used for a newspaper advertisement.
It showed Yokohama after its destruction by an earthquake.
A chaos of collapsed houses.
Between them, however,
still towered one or two fairly tall buildings of reinforced concrete.
Underneath was written 'Steel stood'.
-This is lovely! Such a society we have built, so prepared for an event.
-What are you laughing for?
-Because it's lovely.
- That photograph
was an unmistakable tip to art.
Sometimes, escaping takes unusual forms.
Through these city nightmares you'd walk with me,
And we'd talk of it with idealistic assurance,
that it wouldn't tear us apart.
We'd keep our head above the blackened water.
But there's no room for ideals in this world.
And you're gone now.
Do you think our desires still burn?
I guess it was desires that tore us apart.
There has to be passion,
a passion for surviving,
and that means detachment.
Everybody has a weapon to fight you with,
to beat you with when you are down,
There were too many defenses between us,
doubting all the time,
fearing all the time,
doubting all the time,
that like these urban nightmares,
we'd blacken each other skies.
-Note the difference between
strong and crude,
relaxed and loose,
quick and hurried,
imaginative and distracting,
thought out and concocted,
deep-felt and emotional,
contradictory and nonsensical,
clear and emphatic,
useful
and profitable,
rhetorical and boastful,
stately and
pompous,
delicate and feeble,
passionate and
uncontrolled,
natural and accidental.
-From the point of view of art we can say that our progress has been as follows.
We have taken those imitations of reality which release all sorts of emotions and passions
and tried to improve them without concern for the latter, by arranging them in such a manner
that anyone seeing them is put in a position to actively master the imitated reality.
We have found that more accurate imitations
lead to the release of emotions and passions
and in fact, that emotions and passions
can further the mastering of reality.
-There's really
no longer anything surprising in the fact that art was almost ruined
at first by applying it to a new business, that of destroying men's preconceptions
about their life together in society.
Nowadays
we can see that this happened
because art tackled that new business
without abandoning one of its preconceptions about itself.
Its entire apparatus was designed for the business
of making men accept their fate.
The apparatus was ruined
when the part of man's fate in its productions
was suddenly taken by man himself.
In short,
it wanted to promote the new business
while remaining the old art.
Accordingly
it did everything hesitantly,
half-heartedly,
egoistically
and with a bad conscience.
But nothing suits art less than this.
Only by giving itself up, did it win itself back again.