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 Interrogations
By
Kassandra
An
eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.
Number
Four: Showtime
Everyone
from Epictetus to Shakespeare to Goethe has helpfully informed us
that all the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.
Shakespeare (naturally enough for an actor-playwright-shareholder)
couldn't get enough of the idea. 'When we are born we cry that we
are come/To this great stage of fools.' 'Life's but a walking shadow,
a poor player,/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage'. But
he is far from alone: the metaphor has a wide currency. We recognize
ourselves in these similes; we know we are a histrionic sort of
animal. We need to be - it serves us well. We have to play a part
often enough, whether at work or at a dull party or merely queuing
at the post office.
But
theatre is of course more than merely utilitarian and functional.
It is also the house of play, a building in which art and lying
intersect: where fantasy and make-believe, wishing and dreaming,
play and invention, illusion and imagination become real and solid.
What happens on stage - unlike in a novel or painting or even a
film, which by the time we see it is merely a strip of celluloid
in a can - really happens, right in front of us. Actual breathing
three-dimensional people literally move and talk and do things in
real time and space as we watch - but they only do it as actors.
They are really doing something, but what they are doing is, not
what they are pretending to do, but rather, pretending. We think
(while we suspend disbelief) we are watching them talk to a ghost,
duel, plot murder, but we are really watching them pretend to do
those things. It's called 'acting', which by custom and habit sounds
more dignified and art-related, but pretending is what it is in
truth.
It's
all quite surreal and absurd, fit to baffle the proverbial visitor
from another planet - a room full of silent people sitting in the
dark, watching an open box in which grown-ups in costume pretend
to be other people. No doubt it is that very absurdity that gives
the metaphor its power. Life is brief and absurd, we do always lie
to one another and collude in the pretense, we are always performing
and pretending.
And,
indeed, things are not always what they appear, there often is a
different reality behind what we see, and perhaps another behind
that. Tables and rocks are not solid, the sun does not rise and
set, the starlight we think we see tonight is billions of years
old, the moon is not the same size as the sun. Hume said in 'A Treatise
of Human Nature', 'The mind is a kind of theatre, where several
perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide
away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.'
The mind is as deceptive as the theatre, and vice versa. That is
no doubt why we feel so at home there, settling in with a mix of
excitement and familiarity as the curtain goes up, because we are
about to enter our favorite condition - being fooled.
The
theatre is where daydreaming and fantasy, normally private and singular
and interior, become public and external and shared. We are in a
crowd of people all participating in a fantasy, all imagining ourselves
in a world other than the real one. There have always been people
who spied a danger in this group illusion. The Puritans didn't want
people imagining alternatives to God's world. Rousseau didn't want
people sullying and complicating their pure and simple natures with
cityfied refinements like theatre. But others such as Schiller,
Keats, and Oscar Wilde pointed out that play and imagination and
artifice, far from being corruption or pollution or smudging of
our original human purity, are central to our mottled, patchy, composite
nature. The pious would have us accept the world as a given that
it would be rude to reject or alter or improve. It is impious artists,
playwrights and actors and poets and storytellers, who dare to envision
a different one.
Kassandra
is the pen name of Ophelia Benson.
.
Interrogations
will next be updated early September 2002
Previous
Interrogations
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