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ABOUT THE PLAYS and A PLAYWRIGHT'S NOTESABOUT THE PLAYS By George Weinberg Tom McCormack's original three play-descriptions on this tab were almost as facts-only as a police blotter. I objected, claiming a modest posture on a website is as misplaced as it would be in a print ad. He replied: "There are limits to my modesty, George, but I'm stuck with that posture because when a writer brags about his own work he usually seems to me foolish and repugnant." That's Tom admitting to a dilemma many people of accomplishment understand: He'd like to boast or defend himself, but he senses it would repel more judges than it would win over. So I devised a compromise: I'd rewrite and sign the descriptions and opinions, and he'd let me print them here. I wanted to do this because I felt that by being so unadventurous about self-promotion after the death of both his producer and his agent, Tom was badly under-serving the playwright and his body of work. I'll therefore temporarily usurp the role of advocate and publicist. In doing it, I'll follow this maxim: Extreme talent deserves extreme acclaim. I'll try to appeal to two appetites. The first is the legitimate entrepreneurial craving of producers and agents who want to be involved in theater but also want a robust and continuing return on their investment of time and money. The second is the appetite of those who would exult in reading someone whose quality of writing is unexcelled by any other playwright alive. For the entrepreneur: Tom McCormack's ENDPAPERS, drew critical raves and flash-fire word-of-mouth that resulted in a cumulative audience of more than 40,000 viewers. The total entails a surprising fact: ENDPAPERS was one of the three or four most popular Off Broadway plays in the entire first decade of the new century – and it was Tom's first play. With the right professional support, he could ultimately be among the most respected and successful American playwrights. For readers, actors, theater-devotees, and others: McCormack's work is everything we hope for in theater: inventive, moving, funny, ultra-smart, filled with adroit high-carat lines uttered by vivid, original, unforgettable characters, and reflecting profound and novel themes. It's also quintessentially theatrical in a way that shows why, though film, tv, and the web thrive, live theater will always be with us. For corroboration of this extreme acclaim, see the folder "Reviewer Reactions to ENDPAPERS". I hope you will begin your script-reading with his farce, RAVISHING THE MUSE. It's the best farce since NOISES OFF. G.W. A famous artist, whether he's a singer, actor, painter or writer, is a whirling magnet for people who, one way or another, all want "a piece of him". A flight of these raptors -- male and female -- descends upon Burn Fargo's dinner-party. Uncaged havoc ensues, and we learn a great deal about what an artist and his muse can do for -- and to -- each other, and everyone around them. We go to a farce to laugh. Once RAVISHING’s ingenious situation has been set-up, its rapidity and tickle-level of funny lines are overpowering. RTM's high laugh-index and ingenious variation on the creation-within-a-creation conceit prompt comparisons to NOISES OFF. Add this: Not since BLITHE SPIRIT has so inventive an "unearthly" element levitated a farce/comedy. And this: RTM has an igniting musical motif and finale by Scott Joplin -- and it's already on a dvd. New general-market farces are rare, though audience appetite is always there and the dollar-return for a successful farce can be immense and long-lasting. Witness: The Broadway revival of Marc Camoletti's BOEING BOEING began previews in April 2008, recouped by September, and ran eight months before starting what was billed as a 45-week national tour. As I write this in February 2010, it is still touring – at this moment in Jackson, Mississippi. (BOEING BOEING in English originally opened in the 60s in London and ran for seven years. It became a Jerry Lewis/Tony Curtis movie.) Few non-musicals in recent years have matched Ken Ludwig's farce, LEND ME A TENOR -- 476 performances on Broadway, and productions in 25 countries in 16 languages. Neil Simon's only outright farce, RUMORS, had 535 performances on Broadway, outrunning many of his more famous plays. Of everything Thornton Wilder wrote, it was his farce, THE MATCHMAKER, and its spin-off, HELLO, DOLLY, that provided the continuing income to support him in his later years. But, a farce during times like these? Recall Wendy Wasserstein's comment on the health of farces during dark times: She noted that BLITHE SPIRIT was written and opened during the London blitz, and it ran for four-and-a-half years. Wendy observed there is “nothing as humane as sharing a laugh with strangers in the dark.” Kaufman and Hart's YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU opened during the Great Depression, and ran for 837 performances. Joseph Kesselring's ARSENIC AND OLD LACE ran for 1,444 performances in New York during World War II. Camoletti's other farce, DON'T DRESS FOR DINNER, has evidently been playing somewhere in the world ever since 1985, increasingly in American regionals over the last decade. It opened in Chicago in late 2008, and the Tribune hailed it for its "Recession-busting laughs...The good times are back just as they appear to be collapsing everywhere else." Many good legit farces have become successful movies, but it's a happy mystery why nothing on a screen can match the moments of special comic intensity that can be achieved only by live actors on a stage. Theater pros know that a great farce will travel the globe, be revived often, and thrive indefinitely in regional theaters where extreme comedy has always had box-office power. It can be a cash-machine for decades. PROBLEM PLAY PROBLEM PLAY was inspired by a haunting anecdote about a math professor mortifyingly caught up in the controversial Monty Hall/"Ask Marilyn" brouhaha. (Marilyn Vos Savant had given her answer to a famous game-show probability puzzle. Literally thousands of academicians attacked her. The tale of their subsequent fall from sneering arrogance to abysmal humiliation made the front page of the New York Times.) Tom's story started with Monty Hall, but grew into a deeply personal father-daughter drama. It tells of a young woman's life-bending "misadventure"; a gifted professor falling victim to an Iago-like adversary; a clawing hate, and a shielding, insulating love. During the process, Tom reworked Monty's simple puzzle into an electrifying coup de theatre. A persistent strength of Tom's is character-driven stories. In Jana who has fled from fame, and Professor Caleb Hobson who runs toward it, he has invented two seizing, fully-rounded action-engines. The brilliant, vicious, mysterious Halley will excite questions for which the audience will imagine more answers than Halley will explicitly offer. The play's subject is this fundamental human concern: Our limitations, what they do to our dreams, and what we do to live with them. Its title, PROBLEM PLAY, has multiple meanings. Five actors, one set. The third new work is INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM, a cerebral, sexual, violent play with a final scene, a final moment, so vivid, powerful and heart-cracking that many of us will never forget it. It begins when Bren, a rugged, reclusive 27-year-old with a history, arrives to rent a remote shack on a Connecticut beach while he writes a revolutionary philosophical essay that is, on the surface, about language. But it turns out the rental is not a shack, and it is not remote. It is attached to an oceanfront estate and a family that won't allow him to be a recluse -- not the demon-wracked computer-whiz daughter; not her mother, a gifted linguist who translates Nobelist authors and can say naughty words in twenty languages; and not her father who is far more complex than he originally seems. Eventually we come to see Bren's “Incompleteness Theorem" is not confined to language -- it is an inescapable theme in the lives of almost all of us. INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM is a four-character tragedy. A great tragedy, well done, makes for the opposite of a glum night at the theater. Mary Renault wrote that in ancient Greece the prostitutes had two things they loved above all else -- figs and a good cry at the theater -- and philosophers since Aristotle's time have tried to explain this universal fondness for a great "sad" story. In INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM, we get to know the characters in the profound, thorough, and intimate way that only a tragedy provides. When a tragedy is good enough -- and Tom's is -- we see not just an episode, but the full arc of the characters' lives. So although it has a cast of only four -- Bren, Kit, Elga, and Kurt -- this play may have more bravura roles, more challenging ideas, more high-voltage scenes, and more memorable, fully-realized stories than anything else you'll read this year. PROFILING The one-act on this site was suggested by a real event that made international news and reverberated all the way to the White House. But in PROFILING, the action, dialog, and characters -- a Caucasian cop, "Kevin Costello", and an African-American Ivy League professor, "Remond McArdle" -- are imaginary. They would have to be, because we still know surprisingly little about the real event. Despite all that media coverage, very few specific details about who said and did what were ever made available. Theater insiders have expressed unanimous enthusiasm for the following idea of how to expand this half-hour play into something of useful box office potential: PROFILING presents the two men as equally right and equally wrong -- with consequent grim implications for the future. If two other writers were to create one-acts presenting the same characters but contrasting versions of the clash and "culpability", the three Rashomon-like variations could provide ninety minutes of running time -- a full night of theater. My guess is that writers of decisiveness and speed -- fantasize Mamet or Sorkin or even Woody Allen -- would take only minutes to accept or reject the notion, and another half-a-week to produce completed scripts. Given the amount of attention the original event got, the three-part evening could win enough media coverage on and off the theater-page to make it the most discussed stage-production of the season. -- GW A PLAYWRIGHT'S NOTES The more general ruminations about theater below are not by me but by Tom. It's a selection of notes, often set down after long dinner-conversations, when I urged him to amplify and put into written form some of the things he'd just said. There's no need for you to look at them now unless you're still not persuaded to read a script or three. In which case, do look at them now; you'll encounter a mind that's creative even in his non-fiction. It may spur you to want to see if he's also creative when he's being creative. He has experience musing this way: He is the author of the only book ever written about the editing of novels. -- GW There is no THE "meaning" of any work of art. The reader should be helped by a writer to "think about" or "understand" what's been written when the piece is non-fiction. But if the work is creative, made-up, then rinsing out the ambiguities and multiple possible interpretations is often the wrong thing to do. Its effect is usually to diminish and falsify. Flannery O'Connor once said it takes every word of her story to tell what it is "about". When I was working on the original play-descriptions, I avoided asserting "meanings" or "themes" because pronouncements like that restrict a work's apparent scope, and hobble viewers' imaginations. Talk of its "meaning" tends to suggest the play is merely a useful ladder leading up to the real value: a non-fiction lesson. For me, the value of a play -- or movie, opera, symphony, dance -- is in the multi-rung ladder itself, the story and its effects at each rung, including the view from the top. If the rungs can evoke tensions, laughter, gasps, rills of deep assent, a playwright should leave it to the viewers to conjure their own "meanings and themes". Ideally, a play will make viewers' minds throng with new notions, but the notions will be as various as the viewers' histories and receiving apparatuses. There is, in the end, no THE "meaning" of any work of art. Be wary of anyone who insists you state what you want your play to say, announce what its message is. The closest allowable question is: What effects on the audience do you hope for from this or that element in the play? Except for a few passing rants, Shakespeare didn't write HAMLET to say something. He wrote it to do something -- to those who saw. A question about the effect-wanted can be valuable in nudging the writer to look again at a passage he may have written unthinkingly. If the writer is a smarty-pants, he should be slow to wield stonewalling cleverness. ("Would you put that question to Mozart after he's just called for a given note in a melody?") Instead, he should seriously focus on the questioned element -- especially if a quick poll shows the effect of a scene/speech/etc is not what he wanted. "You say your aim is to fill us with admiration for Carly's intellect as she destroys Henry's theory, but the way you've written it the dominant feeling we come away with is that, sure, she's smart, but she's also cold, callous, and condescending." It's a mistake to ask a creator to produce syllogisms proving that his strokes must be aesthetic triumphs. That'd be roughly like asking for a proof that everyone must enjoy the taste of coffee ice cream. But that has a corollary: If no one likes what a playwright's written, he can forget about constructing an argument that proves anyone ought to like it. For a careful, reflective writer, it can be oddly gratifying when he finds he has put an ingredient in his script and he can't articulate the reason for its "necessity" -- and yet he feels with a soul's certainty it has to be there. Orwell felt the signal mark of Dickens's genius was "the unnecessary touch". Sometimes, only long after writing certain seemingly renegade passages has the writer become explicitly aware of their justification, of why he initially intuited they were useful there.
Believing a given stroke is absolutely right or wrong helps many artists; they like a sense of certainty that allows them to move on. But the only defensible measure of the stroke's worth is its effect on its viewers, and viewers vary. It's the lucky artist whose guide is solely whether or not a stroke pleases him -- and there is sufficient audience that responds the way he does. Many writers, including me, have this as one of the criteria they try to adopt when deciding what to put in and what to leave out: cut anything that harmfully brakes the momentum of the storyline. But "don't harmfully brake" is not identical to the "always advance" fiat: "Any spoken line of dialogue that is not written for the express purpose of furthering the plot reduces the quality of the play." The fiat is vacuous anyway, because there's no decision-procedure for accepting something as advancing the "plot". Does the Queen Mab scene in ROMEO AND JULIET advance the plot? "Of course it does!" "No it doesn't!" The presence or absence of plot-advancement is disputed rationally – and inconclusively. The harmful loss of momentum, however, is for a given viewer discerned conclusively by sensibility: he feels it. While the writer may want everything in the story to contribute, he doesn't want it in the same way as a logician or mathematician looking to provide all and only the steps in a proof. His story is a demonstration, but it's not an argument, and no matter how cerebral the writer is, some of the most gratifying moments for him are when he finds, flowing out of his fingers, lines that make him happily, silently, shout, "Where did that come from?" It's an error to believe that to be compelling a story has to contain solely plot-advancing action. You also need, among other things, compelling characters, and though observable action does characterize, not all of character is conveyed that way, and not all characterizing action advances the core plot. The most brazen examples of non-advancing but highly cherishable moments on a stage are the great arias in opera, and certain "showstopper" moments in musicals. An ornery (and disputable) assertion: Some musical numbers do advance the plot, but, paradoxically, the most memorable ones don't. Meantime, we would not choose to be without Shakespeare's great "arias". There is a large part of each of us that is not displayed in any overt action. It's not unreasonable to advise playwrights they should avoid choosing for a lead character someone whose richness is too internal, a person extremely interesting for his thoughts and feelings rather than for his public acts. There has never been an interesting play (or novel or movie) about an editor like the great Maxwell Perkins doing his essential thing -- editing. The stage is the wrong medium for the stories of such characters. But Hamlet, of course, for much of the early part of the play, is just such a character. Yes, he has public speeches and actions, but if anything they veil his essential thoughts. Shakespeare, however, had gifts far beyond the common reach, so he could sink "impossible" shots. Moreover, he lived in a theatrical age when unframed soliloquies could flourish: Today, the writer of a multi-character show who wants the hero or villain to reveal his or her thoughts "privately" to the audience must contrive a pretext. E.g. she is an actress at acting class, and the teacher has required her to improvise a personal monologue; we get that the teacher is sitting in the fifth row, and the actress is talking to her. We the audience seize on such pretexts to allow us to accept the moment. Usually, we don't want to be "taken out of the play" by the likes of an undisguised soliloquy or an old-fashioned "aside". In the movie "Good Will Hunting", the character Will is even more indecisive than Hamlet. Technically, Will is a dramaturge's bane. He grapples with no manifest "conflict", he has no explicit overriding goal he is pursuing. Throughout most of the movie there is no answer to the standard dramaturgical question: "What does he want?" (No ghost has told him to avenge anything.) He experiences occasional local wants -- he itches to give the solution to a math problem, or to beat up the bully of his childhood, or to thwart the analysts who would "cure" him. And yet our interest does not sag even though his local actions aren't prompted by his conscious pursuit of a core goal. It helps that the actions are successful "anecdotes", they're absorbing in themselves, they do characterize, and, by showing us Will has something special, they grip us with a core –- though very general –-question: "What will become of this special guy?" (Meantime Will does have a couple of very compelling "arias".) Moreover, despite the fact that each of the stand-alone anecdotes is merely the scratching of a transitory itch Will has, in an oblique way they do forward the plot: by moving someone else to a story-advancing action. Right up till the last minute, all the conscious pursuing of an over-arching story-goal in GOOD WILL HUNTING is by others. An academic textbook-writer, enjoying the opportunity for paradox, might assert that the "protagonist" is not Will; it's Sean, the psychotherapist. No, another might say, it's the M.I.T. professor. Still another, reading from his "Appreciation of Literature" textbook, may say, "No-no – the protagonist is the person who precipitates the core-action, and that's Will." From all of this, two truths for writers emerge. First, the most useful questions for the creator come not from academics but from people in the battle's trenches -- the producer, director, or even an actor searching for his character. Second, even those on-the-firing-line folk can ask the wrong questions. They do it because, often, though justifiably bothered by a defect in the play, they can't precisely identify it, put their finger on the specific cause of their unease. Confounded, they snatch a damagingly inapt though commonplace question to convey their concern. An example is, "Whose play is it?" Questions like that are based on suppressed false premises that assume there are "fact of the matter" referents to terms like 'protagonist' and 'whose'. In addition, "Whose play is it?" insinuates that no matter how many characters the play has, there can be only one character with a story and outcome of crucial concern to the audience. Granted, fictions tend to have dominant characters whose storylines should not be neglected, but no single character "owns" TWELFTH NIGHT. The playwright's job entails building appetites, expectations, and, one way or another, resolving them (though not necessarily with a happy ending). In fact, I never saw a good multi-character play where I wasn't eager to know the fate of several and sometimes all of the people. If a play's momentum is being harmed by a wandering narrative focus, or an overload of attention-dividing irrelevant vignettes, or a confusingly unbraided story-cable, the critiquer should address those problems specifically. A fuzzily general query is more likely to stall remedy than quicken it.
A producer of insight will –- not always but often -- secretly feel that the casting of a given show is almost more important than what the playwright has contributed. The producer presses on because he believes great surgeons can save mediocre hospitals. Good playwrights pray for good casting because they know even great hospitals can't survive poor surgeons. In one of my plays there is a character, Bren, of such requirements beyond the words I supply that I'm hard-pressed to name more than three actors who might suspend audience disbelief, be the play's salvation. But they're mostly in film those actors, rarely in theater -- and besides, two of them may now be too old. So I may have written an unproducible play because I've written an uncastable part, the way composers have occasionally written operas unstageable because of arias for which there were no voices. The words I wrote are utterable, but if the character "Bren" is successful -- if he has to have the effect the play depends on and that I claim I "saw" as I wrote -- it will in goodly part come not solely from my words but from a persona the actor emanates. I won't despair yet, because I'm aware that sometimes the best "play doctor" is a great casting director.
Some titles come easily; they just "belong". When I added on a farcical room to my theatrical house, the title RAVISHING THE MUSE moved right in with the presumption of kin arriving home. The title 'INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM' had to fight its way through. This was in part because the play itself evolved, mutated, during its long gestation. As I chipped away the marble that I thought was not the play, what began to appear was very different from the shape I expected. While it emerged, various audience-friendly titles offered themselves: ON THE RIVIERA, OCEANDANCE, STORYTELLERS. I know some people will think all those titles are invitingly warm compared to INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM, and I regret that. But the longer, painfully abstract title felt like the honest one in the end, and the writer in me was afraid to be so cowardly as to reject it. I expect I'll be pressed to put some promising concrete in that immaterial abstraction. I'll listen. I mention all this for beginner playwrights who may fear they don't have the right stuff because they're so often unsure their stuff is right. I'm told that every time NOISES OFF is revived in Britain, Frayn makes changes. There is even evidence that Shakespeare revised that greatest of plays, HAMLET. As he should have. Playwrights can be showered with dramaturgical suggestions. There's much to be said about how to profit from, and how to avoid damage from, those advisers. I'll confine myself to one remark: Above all, the playwright needs to resist cries for script alterations when he discerns his adviser's real reason for balking is that he's never seen anything like this before. ["Beware: Here be philosophy!" The following, final, piece is very long, nerdy, and, for doing most creative work, useless. Much of it originated with notes made in preparation to write a play with a central character who used to be a professional philosopher. Thus the piece deserves a fourth adjective: 'incomplete'. -- TM] THE FOUR STAGES OF A WRITER'S "ACT OF ART". I recently read this Samuel Johnson remark about Shakespeare: "His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct." Johnson had an insight, but this time it was inchoate, and sharded by several confusions. Still, it gives me the pretext to talk about creative acts, and, glancingly, about that tattered but unbowed notional flag, "art". To show more clearly how Johnson and others may have gone astray on an aspect of creative work, I first need to convey several things, including the distinction between what I'll call "generic" and "specific" intuitions in writing. And to do that, I have to back up and precariously try to parse the "act of art". Any "act of art" is an event with four parts or stages. ("Acts of art" can range from envisioning the over-arching structure and effect of a complete work, all the way down to finding a specific bit like "the right word". It's understandable that we refer to the writing of a play (or novel, movie, poem) as if it were a single act, one work, as in "a work of art". But it's always a multiplex of countless creative acts. When Shakespeare wrote, "The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets," the single sentence was the result of a number of separate artful strokes.) The four stages of a writer's creative act are: 1) a craving for an effect; 2) imagination of the specific material that will produce the effect; 3) conjuring of the words to "express" that material; 4) judgment and selection. The first stage is a craving for an effect on the sensibility and awareness of anyone viewing the work. This first stage is a "generic" yearning in the sense that the specific satisfier of the effect-wanted is not yet identified. These generic needs vary in their degrees of generality. Textbooks and playwriting classes tend to focus on teaching generic needs in a drama, and these textbook "requirements" are very general, allegedly applying to every narrative: "The playwright must show there is something important at stake for the main character." "A play is like a living creature; the characters/actors, with their action, dialog and personas, bring it nourishment and energy; but a goal-and-obstacle is its oxygen; if you don't supply it in the first eight minutes your creature will be dead." "Show, don't tell." "If there's a gun on the wall in the first act, etc.") They're alleged to be general rules, and they are learnable. Beginning writers, not yet experienced enough at their craft and art to have absorbed such appetites into their creative natures, have been known to tack lists of such rules on their bulletin boards. It's true that these memorized "rules" will often mechanically lead a writer to be aware of generic needs here and there in a story. But it's also true that writers regularly feel generic cravings for effects that aren't implied by dramaturgic rules. This is because as the writer proceeds, presenting his characters and the situation in his work, the cravings become more specific, approaching ultimate explicit satisfiers. "Right in the first scene I need to start the reader caring about Jenny, rooting for her." "I need scenes early on that convey what Ben wants, and also why Walt is opposing him." And yet more specific: "I can't just assert that Turing is smart, I need a scene that displays his ultra-braininess." "I need to convey early on that Zack had occasion to learn martial arts, but I can't do it so obviously that everyone realizes it's a set up." "I need a scene showing Nick dominating Emily; in particular, cutting her off from her mother." "I need an adjective to convey what her smile was like." "I now have to deliver a final, resolving confrontation between Bart and Erica." (The writer is usually sensing a need or appetite in the audience -- or in himself -- but a comparable intuition is a writer's sensing not a conscious yearning but a readiness in the audience, an opportunity for a winning surprise. I could argue that a half-dozen of the most memorable chapters in all the world's novels do nothing to advance the plot, but we as readers are nevertheless immensely grateful they are where they are. Admittedly, such excursions are harder to justify in theater than in other genres.) The knowledge and fulfillment of very general generic requirements in drama is what I'd guess Johnson had in mind when he wrote the word "skill". Johnson's underlying thought here seems to be this: Comic bits don't require "thinking", they "just come to" certain people, the way music -- in the broadest sense -- just comes to others; in contrast, each utterance or action in a tragedy has to be "figured out", using a skill –- the way, say, a sculptor uses his skill at shaping marble. By relegating to the level of mere learnable skill a writer's gift for conceiving desirable generic dramatic effects, Johnson seemed to underestimate such inspirations. These intuitions can be as artful as any "instinctive" bit in a comedy. In fact, I'd guess the question, "What made him think of it?" has arisen in experienced theater savants more when watching dramas than comedies. Yes, the question comes to them when they're observing specific action and dialog in a scene, but their wonder is stirred by the writer's thinking of such a scene at all. Shakespeare did it repeatedly. Miller did it in DEATH OF A SALESMAN. Kushner did it in ANGELS IN AMERICA. Theater is at its most theatrical when it glides momentarily into surreal memories, imaginations, derangement. When Shakespeare wanted his next line to convey the eerie feel of disastrous Rome, that was a generic choice. Only thereafter did his ultra-gifted mind conjure the images and sounds, and only after that those specific notion-summoning words. The intuitions of that generic effect-wanted right here, of the "material" that will produce it, and then of the apt words, are three separate actions in the mind of the writer. For some writers, the narrative seems to flow out of their hands with such easeful speed they’re unaware of any premeditation, or any time-interval between the initial notion and the word. In fact, though, the cravings -– generic and specific -- can last for an imperceptibly small fraction of a second, or for weeks. Sometimes it’s satisfied so quickly that the mind can’t distinguish between the notion and the word the notion coaxes up -- as, for example, when we talk, or when we envision a certain species of feline and our mind, prompted by the notion, instantly retrieves the long-associated word: "Tiger!" But the majority of writers talk of the frequent time-consuming struggle to find the images and actions -- and then the words to express them -- that will produce the effect they want. The notion always precedes the word in the writer. This is demonstrated more vividly by an example where we obviously have the image/notion/effect in mind before the word: "Gretchen's smile – what's it feel like, what's the adjective? 'Cold'. No. 'Gelid'. No. 'Reptilian!' Yes!" "What's the name of that actress, you know the one, she was in that movie – it was set in Berlin…" To avoid a long ramble in philosophies of language, mind and ontology, I'll simply assert that when Hannah Arendt wrote, "All thinking is in words, speechless thought cannot exist," she had it flat wrong. Writers struggle to find the right words -- how could that be if their thoughts are in words? How could you ever mis-speak yourself? Rock-climbers, chefs, chess-players, even tennis-players -- they're thinking all the time, just not with words. In the listener, it's not a notion retrieving a word, it's a word retrieving notion. The notions the word (or sound, image, gesture, aroma, etc) calls forth will in largest part be determined by the listener's lifetime of previous associations with that word. Repeated juxtaposition of the notion and word creates the association in the mind. Since most of us who speak the same language tend to have similar notion associated with a given word, we usually manage serviceable communication. I should stress "similar". Your notional tiger and mine are never exactly the same. Nor are the notions that come to our minds with any word. I can't even replicate in every detail in my own mind a notion I had before, because all notion is indeterminate, indefinite, multiplex and transitory. If you say "New York", what comes to my mind morphs like a writhing cloud. The German logician considered the "father" of philosophy of language began his first essay on the subject with the announcement that his subject was going to be "sameness": "What is it for two discrete entities to be the same?" Notice what his question unquestioningly assumes. Words don't have "meanings"; they have associations. If I say to you, "Ekorre," what comes to mind? But if I say that word to a Swede, what comes to his mind is a notion of a squirrel. "Oh, but that's only because he was taught the meaning of 'ekorre' and I wasn't." No; such "teaching" is solely association, repeated juxtaposition. That associating activity in a learning mind accounts for everything that "words have meanings" is said to do, and it avoids the multitudinous errors entailed by the concept of "meaning" there. Ockham's razor would have us discard the notion that there is a mind-independent entity, its "meaning", for everything we call a "word". But a philosophic barber with an Ockham hope would be disappointed. The word 'meaning' will always be with us. An optimistic philosopher might try to confine its use to something like this: "We can say the notion that comes to my mind when I hear/read a given word is 'Its meaning for me'. That way we avoid talking about 'THE meaning'!" It's a fair try, but it will never catch on. All of which reinforces the argument that the notions a writer stirs in his listener's mind will be as various as the viewers' histories and receiving apparatuses. When I was twenty-two, I was told by a man I respected that Mallarme simply cannot be translated. The tone, taste, echoes, and notional associations of the original French for a literate French person cannot be replicated in the stirrings evoked by any English vocabulary. In the years thereafter, I realized that "translation" is always a matter of degree, and, in fact, that even when we read a poem written in our own language we will never replicate exactly the notion in the mind of the poet as he wrote it, nor in the mind of any other reader. Even the poet himself will not experience a replication of his original stream of consciousness when he rereads his poem years later. "Okay, but that's too general. What specifically should Carla say and do?" Then comes the more specific suggestion of imagination: She should get him up to dance. When the suggestion is put to sensibility, it says, "Yes. It's worth trying. But come back to me when you get ultimately specific -– i.e. when you put into words the action and dialog." If the satisfier is itself generic – "It should be a dance" – imagination presses on until it reaches its goal of specific doings. The vision suggests the type of dance, something extravagant, and imagination contributes another, further, specific element: words. "Up! On your feet! We have to practice our improv." When Johnson said that tragedy was only "skill", he evidently wasn't seeing how often the sensing of desirable effects at given moments is not simply something learned; it can be as "inspired", artful, as the conjuring of its specific satisfier. Johnson was also wrong in his apparent assumption that there is no "thinking" prior to a comic intuition. Anecdote: When I was at college, our lunch table was largely peopled by smart guys. There was one among us who could never claim to be the highest scorer on "IQ tests". No mathematical logic, no physics, clouded his collegiate day. A situational moment would frequently arise that we all sensed harbored a funny like a coin at the bottom of a swimming pool. While the rest of us "clever" guys were still dog-paddling toward the ripples, the non-nerd among us would already be at their center, and diving below. He repeatedly would pop to the surface with the precise witty articulation the rest of us sought. I felt there was no denying he was simply faster than we were at a certain kind of cerebration. We all knew roughly where the coin lay, but it had to be plucked out and polished, and he was speedier than we at the task. His specific kind of cerebral adroitness and quickness reminded me of a gifted mathematician at work, someone who could just "see" the solution before others. When we watch a mathematician flash immediately to a solution, we assume something we'd be content to celebrate with the honorific, 'thinking', took place even though we ourselves had no direct glimpse of it. It's the same with quick wit, finding the humor. Given that we tend to celebrate "thinking" over "mere instinct" -- which we assume "any idiot" might have –- we should accept that "being funny", like drama, requires cerebration about the effect, directed by a keen humor-compass. It selects the pertinent elements, sequences them to maximum effect, and finds the right words or actions. It's a cerebral gift of a complexity Johnson didn't grasp when he called it "instinct". 'Instinct' tends to be a word summoned up by people when they have no other idea of how to "explain" a purposive act. (I could always get to the coin eventually, but rarely with the quickness of masters of repartee. This, plus countless "I shoulda said" experiences, is what told me, "Go be a writer –- at a desk where there's no clock ticking.") I have, in that description, mashed together the second and third stages in a way I shouldn't. The first stage says, "I want this effect." It's always general, like "Look smart! Be funny! Show contrition!" The second stage is imagination's coming up with suggestions of specific events or other ingredients it says will do the trick: "Jenny can sell her ring so she can give Celia the money for the trip." "Have Turing come forward to give a dazzling lecture on cybernetics to a 'class' (i.e. the audience)." The viewers don't have to follow the lecture; the point, the effect wanted, is to give them the feeling they are in the presence of "genius" –- just as, in GOOD WILL HUNTING or SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISCHER, to have that effect, the audience need not understand the problems the young heroes solve. There is a third stage –- finding the optimal words to express the ingredient. (T.S. Eliot, in his theory of the "objective correlative", overlooked this stage. He called for "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events", but he apparently failed to appreciate that the objects aren't the "formula" that readers encounter on the page; they encounter words. A layman and a good writer may both bend themselves to describing the same hurricane, or battle, or a certain slant of light on winter afternoons, but the good writer will come through while the layman is dumbfounded.) The fourth stage is sensibility's tasting imagination's offering intended to achieve the effect, and passing judgment: "Yes, that scene would do it," and "Yes, those words will do it," or, "No, that’s not the right adjective. Try again." Put differently, Johnson's error was somewhat akin to assuming a sculptor's "skill" at shaping marble is identical with a gift for envisioning what to shape it into. I recently read Ben Brantley's review of the London production of Alan Bennett's new play, "Habit of Art". It depicts W.H.Auden grappling with the challenges of putting together a script for a musical (the music for this imaginary production would be composed by Benjamin Britten). Evidently, playwright Bennett chose this situation because he believed the struggle to create a work of art had the makings of a good story. As he wrote, Bennett was preoccupied by some aesthetic problems like those I've touched on here. Brantley comments that Bennett wanted to reflect on, among other things, "the relative importance of will and talent in artistic creation." From that description, Johnson might anticipate a discussion of his skill/instinct distinction. It seems to me Bennett gave himself a difficult assignment, but I very much want to see what he's done with it. I crave seeing "Habit of Art" when it comes to New York, and then having dinner at my place with Bennett and Sam Johnson. I see the situation. I have the characters. I'm already imagining the specific dialog…But, wait -- I see problems….No, I don't think I should try to make a play of it. To paraphrase Johnson, "It's a conversation to be a part of, perhaps, but not one merely to observe." |
