The Story Telling Experience
An exploration of communication as a vehicle for interpersonal relationships.
| Milo walked sadly to the window and squeezed himself into one corner of the large armchair. He felt very lonely and desolate as his thoughts turned far away – to the foolish, lovable bug; to the comforting assurance of Tock, standing next to him; to the erratic, excitable DYNNE; to little Alec, who, he hoped, would someday reach the ground; to Rhyme and Reason, without whom Wisdom withered; and to the many, many others he would remember always. And yet, even as he thought of all these things, he noticed somehow that the sky was a lovely shade of blue and that one cloud had the shape of a sailing ship. The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a deep rich green. Outside the window, there was so much to see, and hear, and touch – walks to take, hills to climb, caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the garden. There were voices to hear and conversations to listen to in wonder, and the special smell of each day. And, in the very room in which he sat, there were books that could take you anywhere, and things to invent, and make, and build, and break, and all the puzzle and excitement of everything he didn’t know – music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then someday make real. His thoughts darted eagerly about as everything looked new – and worth trying. “Well, I would like to make another trip,” he said, jumping to his feet; “but I really don’t know when I’ll have the time. There’s just so much to do right here.”
– Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth. |
Introduction
These days, whenever I’m able to listen to a story teller, or to somebody telling a story to a young child (and this person is indeed a story teller at that moment as well), I experience something that is uniquely different from any of my other experiences. Further, this experience isn’t at all an unpleasant one; it’s as if I’ve become enchanted with the entire enterprise of the story, the story teller, and everyone else involved at that point; as if I’m suddenly “in tune” with the world that I’m in while, at the same time, I’m also far away from it in the make-believe world of the story. I’m convinced that it would be impossible for me to give an accurate description of what it is that I mean by this, and why it occurs, for the very reason that I’m not sure what it is myself. I think it is especially hard for anyone to remember any experience, as experienced, that has happened in the past. To remember all of those little details that combined to form an experience, and then to “combine” them again in your head to recapture that experience is extremely difficult; in fact to recapture the actual experience is impossible, you must be satisfied with a “ghost” experience which can only indicate what it was like. So what I’m left with in trying to write about the magic of being exposed to story telling are my own vague ideas about it. However, I also think that this “magic” I feel is not at all an isolated event, that we all feel the same thing to some extent, and I hope that in the course of this paper, while I’m talking about my own experiences, I am also talking about something that we all have in common and can experience together.
The art of communication is an essential factor in both our personal and our interpersonal development. After we are born into this world the first thing that we have to do is learn to interpret the actions of those “things” which are not ourselves; the effects that they can have on us and the effects that we can have on them. If we don’t learn how to interact, how to “communicate”, with our environment in this way then we can never develop beyond the stage of a “mindless” entity concerned only with its immediate physical needs. Such communication need not be on a written level, as is readily apparent by the fact that we got along quite alright without the aid of the written word for thousands and thousands of years, but it also need not be on a verbal level. At least this is true up to a certain point.
Helen Keller was, at first, unable to communicate in any of the ways which we normally would; being unable to express herself either verbally (except as an infant would) or in written form. Nonetheless she did communicate and this is seen by the fact that she was able to live independently from those things around her. This independence was, of course, highly limited, but it did exist when she played in the fields outside her house, or in the garden, etc. Such purposeful behaviour was a clear indication that she had come to interact with her world in some way. However, past that point, it becomes obvious that she had to learn how to communicate in a substantive way with those around her if she was to be independent (and self-supporting) in the normal sense of the word. Once she met Anne Sullivan she became able to do this.
While it’s certainly true that Keller’s physical handicaps prevented her from experiencing the world visually and aurally, as well as just initially depriving her of accepted communicative skills, I would still argue that these skills are necessary if not for the individual (a deaf-mute dyslexic is an extreme example, although even here a certain level of competence still cannot be reached), then for the social group. In the context of this paper, then, I will take as a premise the fact that we need to communicate either orally or in written form in order to understand both ourselves and those others around us. With this in mind, something needs to be said about the difference between these two essential modes of communication: the written word and the spoken word.
The written word acts as an expression of communication in a much more impersonal way than does speech. This is not to say that the reading, or writing, of text cannot be a deeply emotional or meaningful experience; in fact, in some ways it is easier to write about what we feel than it is to talk about it. However, in terms of personal interaction, this is not an accepted means of social discourse (just consider how unthinkable it would be to discuss something of grave importance with someone by means of a letter if you had the opportunity to discuss such matters with them in person). This is because the text is not “alive” in the same sense that the oral voice is, and when your desire is to communicate in a personal way with someone, you need to have a way of communicating that is “alive” in just this sense; the text cannot be alive for the very reason that the emotional content and explicit meaning available from the spoken word can only be guessed at, or at most, implied by the written word.
In his introduction to Improvisation: Discovery and Creativity in Drama, Michael MacOwan says: “In my ignorance, I was greatly blessed in the people I found to work with: first Miss Iris Warren, who had found methods by which the right use of the voice could release the most real part of people, and make easy the manifestation of their best emotional and imaginative life…”1 Whether or not MacOwan uses the word “voice” in the broad sense, where voice is the mode of representation of the message rather than just acoustic sound, I wish to appropriate it to mean the former (I should also clarify that I am presently using “text” to mean the written word). In such a sense he is perfectly correct, in my opinion, that voice is responsible for the expression of our emotional and imaginative life, and, I would hasten to add, for our understanding of this part of the speaker.
But before I get carried away I should point out that the voice in text is not entirely excluded here. While, as I’ve argued, text cannot be alive in the same sense as speech for the purposes of personal communication, it can certainly be alive, both emotionally and imaginatively, when it comes to communication between the text and the reader. By this, I mean to say that I can read a book and be deeply moved by the characters in that book and that, as I sit in my chair, the voice of the book has “talked” to me in a meaningful way (even if I can’t reply to it or anyone else).
When we approach text that is meant to simply communicate information to us, such as restaurant menus, food labels, street signs, etc., we take this at face value. In some sense we do respond to such things, when we visualize the food the menu represents, or have an image of a friend on the street upon which we find ourselves, however, for the most part we have no real emotional or imaginative response to them; there is no emotion or imagination in the voice of these texts. It is when such things are conveyed originally, or with emotion and with imagination, that we are able to gain something from them; we can only get as much out of something as has been put into it.
When we read a history book we are presented with such simple information as above, but it is offered in a narrative form. It offers to us an account of somebody or something that we can identify with, and it does so in a way that says, “I’m not just describing something, I’m telling you about something.” At this point we begin to see the text “talking” to the reader, it has a story to tell. And more than this, when it tells the story it creates a world in which the story is told. Even if this world is a mirror of our own, it is not our own; the characters in the book are people we aren’t, they have been to places we haven’t, and they show a different outlook on our world than the one we have. In other words, each of us lives in our own subjective world, and can only have access to our experiences. When we are exposed to a “different” world we are allowed to entertain the thought that there is a different world, and we can imagine what it might be like if we were to be in that world. The history book is then a way of looking at a different world, at exploring the differences that each of us has in comparison to everyone else; we can for a moment “be” someone new, someone different, and, hence, someone exciting because of this.
This theme of escapism is provided both by the content of text, as well as by the voice of that text. If the same voice that was used in the history book above could be used again in a fairy tale, then the element of escapism would be increased. Just consider the difference between “John Smith was born in Amarillo, Texas, spent most of his life fighting for black rights, and then died in a plane crash” and “Zorig Nall was born in the Valley of The Giants, spent most of his life fighting for Gnome rights, and then died in a flying carpet collision”. While the two have the same voice, if we can allow that, the second is much more intriguing imaginatively because of its content, which postulates a world completely beyond our experience.
In fantasy, or in just “fiction” to an arguably lesser extent, we are offered greater vehicles for escape than in the more “realistic” narratives. Of course the content of these works must also be tempered with voice, since even the most exciting of ideas may be ruined by poor presentation. The unfortunate aspect of fantasy writing today is that, while the ideas may be innovative, the majority of people that take to writing them down do so in a very poor way (it is also the case that most fantasy writing isn’t innovative). This tends to indicate to most people that their best recourse to enjoyable escapism is in the more consistently excellent written works which deal with more realistic matters.
But I don’t mean to say that just because something is more escapist it gives us more emotional satisfaction than something which is less so, nor do I want to imply that escapism can be objectively defined so that A is more escapist that B. The things which we gain enjoyment from, and the ways in which this is gained, are highly subjective. It might be argued that for someone a history book is more escapist than a fantasy book, while for someone else the reverse is true, and therefore, for each person, the book that they find most enjoyable is the one which is more escapist. Then again it’s perfectly possible that a doctor might find much more satisfaction in treating patients, in a non-escapist way, then in watching a mystery movie (if, in fact, anything that you enjoy isn’t a form of escapism from those things which you don’t enjoy). But, in any case, what I wish to present here is the thesis that the fairy tale provides a world more dissimilar to our own than does a history book. And, on a personal level, I would like to note that such fictional works are for me more escapist and more enjoyable than any other.
At this point I wish to turn from the written to the verbal, however I don’t want to look immediately at such things as the story teller. Before that, I want to consider the verbal in the context where there is no interaction between “talker” and “listener”. In parallel to the above discussion of the written, it is appropriate to first consider such things as announcements in grocery stores of the latest food special, the captain of an airplane announcing the plane’s present altitude, etc. Such announcements serve the same purpose as the menu or street sign; all that they do is convey simple pieces of information. In spite of the existence of a verbal voice, that voice is monotonous and dry, conveying nothing of real interest to the listener. In other words the spoken words aren’t even alive in the same sense that the written words of a compelling novel could be considered alive.
As with the history book, the next “stage” of voice might be something along the lines of a documentary or news story. This form of medium creates a world of a sort, and a different world from the one in which we each live. We are able to “escape” to this world in much the same way as we would to that of the history book. Finally we can compare the fictional film to the fictional book, placing the fantasy themes in this medium at the “top” for the sake of argument. In all of this, the analysis of escapism and enjoyment can be used in a similar fashion when applied to this form of communication and, so, I need not go over that aspect again.
However, one thing that must be addressed is the essential difference between the written and the spoken. When we listen to a dialogue, say on the radio, there is an element of voice there that is not present in a similar dialogue in a novel. In the former we can actually hear the inflections which point to explicit emotions that are being communicated, whereas in the book these inflections are either missing or incapable of full expression. Whoever the “author” is of such aural activity, they have a much greater capacity to make the listener understand the message that they wish to express.
| In a novel about the way in which the inmates of the asylum of Charenton performed the persecution and assassination of Marat under the direction of the Marquis de Sade, we would gain understanding of the situation and no doubt feel something of the impact of a play under such conditions. But if we actually sit at a performance of the play by Peter Weiss which interprets the same material, we know with our whole being in a way in which no novel or poem could possibly affect us.2 |
Then again, while we may be able to better understand the message of an author in works where we are able to hear the voice that she wishes us to hear, this doesn’t necessarily mean that it will offer us a greater element of either escapism or enjoyment.
The following is a quote concerned with the difference between the “reality” of theatre as opposed to the “unreality”, and hence more escapist fare, of film, but the comparison applies equally well between the “real” film and the “unreal” novel.
| For [film theorists Christian Metz and Andre Bazin] the relation of the unreal to the real is of prime importance for understanding the qualitative difference in the spectator’s experience of theatre and film…Describing these spectator experiences in theatre and film, Christian Metz contends that theatre is too ‘real’ in itself to give much impression of reality; therefore the viewer can more fully engage in a fictional world in the film than in the theatre…In addition, Metz contends that in theatre the spectator is more aware of the actual reality of the theatre (scenery, props, actual space), making it much more difficult for the ‘reality’ of the fiction to take form…In film, however, Metz believes that because the spectator is not so consciously aware of the real bodily presence of the actors (due to their ‘low degree of existence’), he or she can experience the fictional world in its own rights, as its own ‘reality’.3 |
It would seem that, according to both of these people, escapism has to do with the imagination, and that such imagination can only be constrained by the intrusion of the real world from which we are trying to escape. The actor on the screen imposes upon us the visual image of the character, limiting our imagination to that one image. But in a book we are free to let our minds wander, under no constraints at all; we can escape to whatever realm most suits our temperaments rather than the author’s. (And the same analysis may be applied to the spoken voice in a radio dialogue as compared to the unspoken voice in a novel.)
At this point I need to draw upon my own experiences to supplement what has been said. In looking back on the times that I’ve read novels and watched films, I am able to apply the above analysis and see how well it described my experiences. When I read a novel I do, in fact, feel a greater sense of escapism, and I think that this is so for the very reasons proposed – that my “new world” is made entirely out of my imagination. “In Saint Genet, Sartre tells an anecdote about how Genet as a child was compelled to give up a knife that he found. Genet discovered that the loss was a gain, because the knife – and the dragons that he slew with it – were more real to his imagination when it was only real to his imagination, because then his mind wholly possessed it.”4
So, with Metz, Bazin, and Sartre, I would have to argue that the farther removed from those things which remind us of “this world”, the more “unreal”, and escapist, things become. However, I cannot also claim that this makes the experience any more enjoyable. I have the distinct impression when watching a film that I am more personally involved; that I am there, trying to help whoever it is that I’m identifying with to overcome any obstacles in his path, or to just feel his life with him. I can feel myself actually in the film in a way that I could never do in a book, and because I can identify with film characters more than with novel-characters, the emotions that I feel are much more intense in that medium (it is rarer, for example, for a book to invoke tears than it is for a film to do the same). Further, I am unable to say which experience I enjoy more; it depends entirely on my mood whether I want to think about other places or to feel about them.
It is at this point that we can begin to consider what is so important about communication in a socially interactive sense, above and beyond that of the mere exchange of information. In doing this I also hope to reveal something about the unique experience that comes from story telling, in terms of both the story teller and her audience. It is my opinion that the understanding of the importance of communication is revealed in this unique experience of story telling, and vice-versa, and that to understand one is gain insight into the other.
I have already said that communication with our environment is essential for our personal and interpersonal development. What I haven’t yet stressed, even with the example of Helen Keller, is just how much other people make up that environment within which we live. We need people to talk to, to be with; when we are alone, separated from either anyone at all or people we know and care about, we become lonely and depressed. As human beings we have a natural need to be with other people, to feel in some way that we are needed. Marc Oraison says that “…the total absence of human company soon becomes quite unbearable…Here again, a drawing I saw recently seems to me to express this better than any lengthy explanation: it shows a man all alone in a magnificent landscape of mountains, with the caption: ‘How much lovelier it would be if there were someone to say , “How lovely!” to!'”5
It is through our communication with others that we can enjoy our need for human company. Of all the forms that this communication takes, the most common is that of plain discussion between two or more people. We meet each other on the street and talk about the weather, we visit friends and discuss more private matters, we talk to loved ones about even more private matters, and we intentionally meet people we don’t know that well at parties – with the intention of getting to know them better. And while all of this is going on we are listening to these other people telling us about themselves, about how they view the world around them. As in the case of the book or film we are again exposed to another world, and while this world may not be nearly as articulated or complete, while it may be lacking in imagination (content) in comparison to the book or film, it certainly has a far greater emotional impact (or, loosely, voice). We are now faced not just with an inflection laden communication which carries an explicit message, but we are a part of it. Whereas before it didn’t matter how we responded to the text, now we are a part of it (in a much greater sense than in a deconstructionist view).
| …a man becomes who he is through the feedback he perceives from others around him…We are known by the identities of the people with whom we work and play. Without these people we are forced into alienation and social schizophrenia, a most painful mode of existence. Thus psychic self-preservation depends, to a large extent, on the individual’s ability to participate with others in small groups. In addition, there is a great deal of personal pleasure that may be derived from groups. With more leisure time available to us, we become surfeited with solitary pursuits. Most of us seek our recreation through interaction with others.6 |
Next consider another aspect of human, and oral, interaction: that of the stage play. If we remember Metz and Bazin, and the rest of the discussion regarding fictional worlds and escapism, we can see that film is more imaginary than is the play. However, by nature of the fact that we are actually regarding living people as opposed to unresponsive celluloid, there is that emotional impact again. We know that the performance we are watching is different from any other performance, that it can never be just a repeat. We are also aware of the fact that they are performing for us, that we are important to them. Because of this we “hold our breath” as we watch what they do.
| The dramatic experience is an intensification of living experience, realized by the selection and reordering of significant moments, and it exists in the communication between actors and audience physically present in one place. This communication takes place at every level: mental, emotional, physical, visual, aural and aesthetic.7 |
| The atmosphere of a play exists in its emotional content, and as this builds in the rhythmic shaping of the drama we rise to moments of great height or intensity – the climaxes. Again, it is easy to see how much the atmosphere of the play is a physical condition built up by relationships between people or between a person and his imagination, or between a person and the physical world. It is possible to realize something of this in reading, but nearly always living it out modifies or heightens the mood.8 |
For everything that has just been said of stage plays, the same can be said of improvisational theatre, to both a greater and a lesser extent. To start with, by the very nature of improvisation, the imaginative, escapist, aspect of it will almost certainly be that much less because it will be less coherent by virtue of its being less thought out, more “on the spot”. But, even in spite of this, the emotional content will be all the greater.
Philips says that “true willingness to participate [in a group]…is a function of the capacity to relate to others…But most of us are not at ease in our relations with others. Many of our interpersonal interactions are fragile. We feel that we are walking on glass when we talk with many of the people we are required to talk with. A sense of reticence pervades our communication behavior because we know that certain topics exacerbate hostilities, stir up antagonisms, and cost us a great deal in emotional energy.”9 In other words, we are afraid to do many things because we think that we will not do them well and will embarrass ourselves. This is true of seminar presentations as well as acting out characters in a play for a large group of people. When what is being acted out has no script, as in improv theatre, the feeling of being “exposed” is even greater. But by the very nature of this fear the emotional reactions to success, or failure, are that much greater also. Further we, as the audience, are also much more emotionally attached to the performers as we can readily sympathize with what they are going through. As with characters in a film, we can “root” for them but in improv theatre, and to a lesser degree in the stage play (although remember that much more emphasis is placed on “doing it right” in the latter, even if it might be easier to actually perform), we also root for the actors as well because they are there in front of us, real.
In counterpoint to the intensification of the emotional aspect of the human dynamic in these examples, we can examine more closely the decrease in the imaginative which has also been a consideration.
| Because the film is unaware of our existence, we are presumably more protected from the event, more sheltered in the ‘dark room,’ and this protected vulnerability allows the viewer to identify with the characters in the film’s fictional world. Here both Metz and Bazin are claiming that the distance inherent to the film experience itself – the unreality of the film images and the film’s lack of awareness of its audience, creates a psychological protection that allows for an intense imaginative involvement with the unreal fictional universe ‘which becomes the world.’10 |
It is this awareness between the observed and the observer, which creates an emotional vulnerability, that is so much responsible for both the level of emotional and, negatively, imaginative involvement. In fact, it would seem that the conclusion to be reached from this is that, for the most part, the farther removed you are from reality, from your own experiences, the less you can identify, and so feel, for the world in which you find yourself. I won’t pursue this line of thought any further, except to say that it makes sense to me that this should be so.
In the last couple of pages I have left the notion of individual communication to look at communication in larger groups, but I wish to return now to such an individual viewpoint. I have been involved in a role playing (game) group for around ten years now and it has become so much a part of my life, as a means of communication and personal interaction, that I believe it to be important to my discussion. It is also related to the idea of improv theatre in the sense that, except for the lack of an audience, that is exactly what it is.
The idea behind role playing is that you take the role of certain characters in a certain world. Then, under the direction of a “game master”, you proceed to play out these characters reactions to the world and the world’s reaction to them (the game master is responsible for the “world’s reaction”). In this way the group of players construct a narrative in a way parallelling the narrative constructed by improv actors. The two differences between these forms are that in the role playing situation the narrative is more strictly governed, and that the performers are also, literally, the audience as well. The former is not an essential difference in the interactive communication that is being discussed here, but the latter most certainly is.
The role playing setting is as much an “escalation” from that of group discussions, as talked about earlier, as is the play but, at the same time it maintains the individual communication aspect which the play lacks. In role playing there is a very small number of people involved, all labouring under the fact that they must do the “right thing” with their characters, just as the actor must worry about his performance. The emotional connection between performer and audience is much more immediate, and particularly so since each person is, alternately, performer and member of the audience. Another important aspect is the fact that such a group of people doesn’t just get together and then “drift away” again. Normally such a group forms a relationship, in a strong sense, and this makes their personal interactions all the more intense; and by the nature of the breakdown in the performer/audience distinction, as with close friends and loved ones, everyone needs to contribute equally to the group in order for it to be “successful”.
| The ideal of a successful relationship with someone else is based first of all on a notion of ‘mutuality’; in other words one can only think in terms of success if both parties – to take the simplest kind of case – have an impression of success, or more precisely of some kind of satisfaction to themselves. Looked at more closely, that satisfaction may be expressed as a sense of being more fully, and being happy to be oneself…A purely allegorical image may serve to illustrate this: that of a sonata for piano and violin. Only to the extent that each instrument, because of the other, plays its part and only its part, as determined by the part of the other, will the sonata be a success.11 |
Finally, we can now consider the case of the story teller and, hopefully, be able to understand something about the experience involved, as well as the basis for communication which lies behind it. Philips says the following:
| The intimacy of closeness is achieved through mutual knowing that there are some shared things that are not available to others. There is a feeling of exclusiveness and exclusion that pervades the relationships. In a sense, it keeps others out, and this too is important, for a person’s value depends on the extent to which he shares this feeling. The warmth that comes from knowing that you are a selected interpersonal partner of a person whom you have also chosen is worth the loss of many superficial acquaintances. And each person has his capacities and limits. Closeness is reserved for a few. To come close to too many people risks exhaustion, for closeness carries with it the obligation both to care and to serve. The needs of the other take on an importance similar to one’s own needs. This kind of extension can be made only in a few cases.12 |
Whenever I listen to a story teller, there is a hush that falls over the audience with me, and it’s more than just the respectful silence of one person for another, as in a movie theatre. There is a sense of magic in the air; we ask the story teller, by our silence, to “take us away” to another world. And while I am transported to this world by her words, I am aware that every other person in the room with me is also seeing a similar world. We share this experience together and I know that I am part of a special group, special because we share this special experience. Further, there is none of Philips’ “exhaustion” that comes from this closeness, because it is a temporary experience; for the duration of the story we are close, but then afterwards we can go our separate ways without worrying about further emotional commitments.
Story telling is unique in that it combines this uncommitted emotional bond between the people involved, and that it also maintains a level of imaginative experience. Unlike the play or the novel, it manages to contain both the imaginative and the emotional (one of those rare exceptions where the one doesn’t exclude the other). That the emotional content is there, by virtue of the shared physical presence of everyone involved, has already been examined, but the imaginative is easily explained as well. A radio play is more imaginative than a film, if the theory is accepted, by the fact that there are no visual distractions. Similarly the told story is even more imaginative because there is only one “voice”, only one person communicating and communicating to you. You can close your eyes as you listen, and be almost as carried away into a far-off world as you would by a book, if, in fact, not to the same extent, if the narrative is good enough.
On the subject of the imaginary, that need of ours for escapism, I would like to say a little more, and then return again to the story telling experience. Hodgson and Richards say that “a retarded boy of fourteen at the end of a four-day holiday drama course, during which he had been difficult and apparently unresponsive, finally took part in an improvised play in front of parents and friends, and was so delighted at finding he could improvise effectively that he said in amazement, ‘Hey, I can talk.’ [They go on to say that] very often the children whom we regard as dull because they are unresponsive to the usual academic approach are in need of an imaginative awakening.”13 It does in fact seem to be the case, at least in my experience, that the most emotionally troubled people are those who don’t have this capacity to escape, to dream and let their imaginations “run free”; they seem locked in their troubled present unable to “let go” and release their tensions. It is this imagination which is so apparent in the youngster and which, unfortunately, can be characterized by some as “immature” or “childish” when seen in adults.
| The most valuable form of escape for the human being is surely that which may well help us to forget for a while the situation around us, but that by its very nature gives us some insight or develops awareness, so that when we return we bring something constructive which enables us to live on in the situation with a greater sense of understanding and appreciation. This is not a substitute for everyday living, nor is it a means of pleasantly dreaming of a world free from problems in which someone like us will play the leading part. In any situation pursued for any length of time we find ourselves so close to the details that we become in danger of losing sight of the whole or getting it out of perspective. What we need is a means of stepping back from our situation and of viewing it from as many different angles and distances as possible, in order to return with a fuller realization of its significance.14 |
Brecht also believed that the exercise of imagination was necessary for us to cope with everyday life, but he didn’t want us to be emotionally involved with theatre characters:
| By advocating that the theatre created only ‘partial illusions’ – highlighting our recognition that we are witnessing a fiction, Brecht wants to stress that ordinary events when viewed from a surprising perspective can alter our perception of life. By taking scenes that have some similarity to real-world phenomena and presenting them in a self-consciously theatrical way (that is, recognizable made distant, a reformulation of the romantic theory of the familiar made strange), Brecht wants to suggest the contingency of phenomena and to awaken the spectator’s critical examination of their causes: if the event should be altered and could be altered, then the spectator will have learned to take a more active stance toward similar phenomena and their causes in his or her own world. By forcing the audience to take a more critical attitude, Brecht hopes to actually make theatre more ‘geared into reality,’ that is, make theatre have real-world implications.15 |
But in opposition to Brecht were both Jerzy Grotowski and Antonin Artaud, who believed that emotional involvement was absolutely necessary in the relationship between audience and performance. As Chaim says of Grotowski, “[he] wants to do away with the emotional withdrawal and the psychological protection characteristic of western theatre because he wants theatre to be ‘very serious indeed,’ attacking ‘essential and fundamental’ matters ‘directly, without distancing.’ Grotowski is saying that life is real and that he is treating its reality; to distance it would suggest unreality.”16
So, it would appear that Grotowski wishes to deny the imaginary in favour of the emotionally laden “real” as a means of confronting our own lives. I have to take a position that lies somewhere between Brecht and Grotowski. I think that it is necessary for us to escape in the imaginary, as Hodgson and Richards also seem to indicate, but at the same time we must maintain a level of emotional attachment. To deny such emotions, or to strictly control them as Brecht came to believe in his later career, is to alienate ourselves from what we feel in our everyday lives.
We need to be exposed to something that is as imaginary as Brecht’s theatre but also as emotionally involved as Grotowski’s. To return to story telling, it is this which contains both elements, but it doesn’t do so in a way that theatre could hope to imitate. This is so because the imaginative aspect is contained in the narrative itself, while the emotional is contained not in the narrative but in the setting in which the narrative takes place; the imaginative comes from one source and the emotional from another. So, while you are carried away to another world, you are also experiencing the “be-ing together” of the people around you, that personal interaction, without any of the pressures that would normally make you worry about how you should respond to them – all you have to do is listen.
Of personal development through our interaction with others it might be said that “understanding is taking place on a dual plane, for at the same time as we are finding out about ourselves and our personal relationships with other people we are also learning to understand others so that we can realize more fully in what ways they are like us and in what ways they are different.”17 And after the story has ended, there is still a moment while the magic slowly fades away, when we find ourselves still bound to those people around us by the shadow of the experience that we just had. During this brief moment we are able to see them without the feeling that we are “walking on glass”, as Philips puts it, and we are able to develop emotionally some more through the understanding that this gives us of them, and of ourselves.
But this experience can’t be restricted to the audience. When I hear a story I feel this connection, not only to all those “with” me, but also to the person who is telling it, and, although it is not the same kind of connection, it exists nonetheless. (The connection that I feel to the story teller is harder to pin down; there is gratitude and a sense that I would return the “favour” if I could think how.) And there must be something that the story teller himself feels. Oraison says that “in friendship or genuine love – in varying ways – one wants to be able to give oneself. One wants, so to say, to be at once the giver and the whole of the gift.”18 Or, perhaps in those famous other words, there is as much joy in giving as in receiving. The story teller is able to see the magic in the eyes of his audience, and to know that he is responsible, that he has formed this temporary bond between them. It must be that the feelings we feel for the story teller are reciprocated in such a way.
In the past few pages, I hope that I have managed to show that communication is as much a means of relaying information, as it is a display of a vital need for humans to be with others. While there may be “music to play, songs to sing, and worlds to imagine and then make real”, Oraison is right, and it would be so much less enjoyable if there weren’t someone to play to, sing to, or imagine with; even Milo had to have his Tock and Humbug.
Bibliography and Secondary Sources
Chaim, Daphna Ben. Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984.
Hodgson, John Reed and Ernest Richards. Improvisation: Discovery and Creativity in Drama. London: Methuen, 1966
Juster, Norton. The Phantom Tollbooth. New York: Windward Books, 1972.
Oraison, Marc. Translated by Rosemary Sheed. Being Together. Garden City: Image Books, 1971
Phillips, Gerald M. Communication And The Small Group. Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1973.
Bazin, Andre. Translated by Hugh Gray. “Theatre and Cinema,” in What is Cinema?, vol. 1. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967.
Grotowski, Jerzy. “Holiday,” The Drama Review 17. March 1973. Metz, Christian. Translated by Michael Taylor. “On the Impression of Reality in Cinema” (1968) in Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Psychology Of Imagination. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
Willett, John ed. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964., p. 9.
The film, The Miracle Worker.
Sean Kane, Molly Blyth, and all the other students of CuS 225.
The wonderfully talented story teller, Alice Kane.
My friends and family.
Endnotes
- Hodgson, John Reed and Ernest Richards: Improvisation: Discovery and Creativity in Drama, p. x.
- Ibid., p. 127.
- Chaim, Daphna Ben: Distance in the Theatre: The Aesthetics of Audience Response, pp. 51-52.
- Ibid., p. 16.
- Marc Oraison: Being Together, p. 13.
- Philips, Gerald M.: Communications And The Small Group, p. 5.
- Hodgson, John Reed and Ernest Richards: (op. cit.), p. 15.
- Ibid., p. 163.
- Philips, Gerald M.: (op. cit.), p. 10.
- Chaim, Daphna Ben.: (op. cit.), p. 59.
- Oraison, Marc: (op. cit.), pp. 92-93.
- Philips, Gerald M.: (op. cit.) pp. 169-170.
- Hodgson, John Reed and Ernest Richards: (op. cit.), p. 8.
- Ibid., pp. 14-15.
- Chaim, Daphna Ben: (op. cit.), p. 30.
- Ibid., p. 39.
- Hodgson, John Reed and Ernest Richards: (op. cit.), p. 24.
- Oraison, Marc: (op. cit.), p. 79.