Edward Bond Letters: Volume 5

Ian Stuart, Ian Stuart, Ian Stuart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134355693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

First Published in 1994. Edward Bond Letters, Volume V, contains over thirty letters and papers covering Bond's controversial views on violence and justice, plays, writers and directors, and a postscript that is Bond's discussion of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. The explosive content of these letters applies to Bond's plays and society as a whole; Bond believes that all violence is the manifestation of an unbalanced and dangerous society. As with the four preceding volumes in this collection, Edward Bond is critical of present theatre, but at the same time his observations are useful in indicating how theatre can be changed. Bond's illustrations provide accompaniment to the letters.

Chapter One

Acting and Directing

Michael Fuller

Hollywood, California 13 January 1988

Dear Mr. Fuller,

Thank you for your letter in which you tell me that you are preparing a production of The Sea.¹ I will try to comment on the points you make in your letter. Of course it’s difficult to comment on acting in this way. It would be easier to demonstrate. Against that, having to write forces one to define and generalise, and that is clearly useful. On the other hand, how much worse off we would be if we had only Brecht’s written theories and the comments of his earlier collaborators (Lotte Lenya: “Brecht never spoke about his theories - they didnt matter in rehearsal.”) without the priceless examples of his Berliner Ensemble productions.

You say that the actor’s job is to discover the character within himself and that the director’s job is to arrange the performances and put them into some sort of epic framework. Of course, I’m manipulating what you say into a contentious paraphrase - but it’s not too unfair: where you wish to get outside these restrictive but supportive confines you become vaguer. You say (I quote): “the actors tap emotional reality. They expose it. At the height of the exposure - the zenith of nakedness, they comment upon it; they dance it; they sound-movement it; they laugh at it - point at it - THIS objectifies it. The staging is pictorial-symbolic - a physical manifestation of an idea, a theme.”

This is nonsense - but attractive nonsense for which I have a lot of sympathy but no tolerance… It needs to be worked on. You say: “(epic) requires the actor to make the same personal commitments in Realism, but then to comment on it instead of act it out.” You also say: “Actors work to tap emotional reality… They bring characters out of themselves… all characters already exist within one, and have to, since one has been 5 or so.”

This suggests that people work on themselves in the way you suggest a director works on characters - and this seems to me the basis of a profound misunderstanding. Some time ago I had a letter from someone in the drama department of the University of California, in which at a critical moment he switched from an argument about an event on the stage (a rape) to the same event on the street - and argued as if there were a continuity of subject.² This is probably due to the same basic mistake.

Clearly not all characters can exist in an infant and equally clearly reactions to a stage rape are not the same as to those of a street rape (at the most naive level, we dont warn Gertrude the cup is poisoned - but we do shout rape when we see it on the street). So there isnt a continuity between stage and reality in a naive sense. Suppose Im born in 1890 and in 1914 I have to portray a young first world war pilot: how could that character exist in me in 1895 - aeroplanes hadnt been invented. But the inventor of aeroplanes had? No - flight may have been impossible by physical laws - it happened not to be - and so the inventors didnt exist in 1895: they existed merely retrospectively when certain laws of aerodynamics were discovered. This may seem a pedantic point, but I hope to make clear why it isnt: when the physical laws were incorporated into human reality, the human condition changed. So you’d have to argue that of course characters dont exist in infants, but that potentials do - no doubt characteristic universals in humans, such as the ability to feel angry, to laugh, to speak a language, to fall in love, etc.

My argument is this - and I dont want to fully argue this philosophically here because it would require a too long excursus, though I certainly think the argument is possible. So instead I’ll say it’s better if we proceed as if what I say were true - because this would enable us to tackle the problems of acting practically and fruitfully. The philosophical problems are in any case complex. Suppose like Chomsky you argue that there are in the mind innate grammatical structures which are then filled by a learned language - so that the structures can be filled by German, Latin, etc. - and that the third angle of the triangle consists in the learned-language’s practicality in the real world (it enables the character to live). Here the innate structure is ghost-like - in physical terms, a structure without shape (if that’s imaginable). A structure with only abstract characteristics - like an invisible wall of glass controlling egress and ingress. Practical reality (the world in which we speak about the world and our actions in order to live) then (as it were) paints a picture onto this glass-screen - though you have to think of a content - in passing: the philosophical blur is then how did they get there since they would seem to be outside normal evolutionary disciplines - but there are possible answers: think of the structures as extendibles (as, say, elements of mathematics) or like those little curled comic toys children have - you blow into them and they unroll, extend, with your breath and - into the bargain - make a funny screech! You couldnt operate on the infant’s head and find the spoken language electronically coded in the synapses of its brain prior to learning - as you could learned experience. (Though the mechanical techniques for this sort of exploration are crude and limited, they are still available for elementary exploration). So reality, experience, has to give content to an abstract ability. And if a child didnt hear a speaker (as with deaf children and - it’s said - abandoned children later found as adults) they wouldnt learn a language - the innate structures in the mind (at least in so far as they are not merely aspects of other intellectuating abilities, such as that of discerning continuity in varying shapes) would remain sterile, dead, have no presence.

But you are talking of characteristics which are precisely the opposite: anger, joy, etc have an absolute, existential existence which is part of the “presence of reality” - and just as a chair must exist before people name it, so joy, sadness etc exist before people can experience them - indeed such emotions are seen as inductors and corrigents of human experience, indeed as given elements in consciousness. So a baby sucks the nipple because it is hungry? - but who taught it that hunger is desire for food and that you fulfill a need by ingesting milk from a breast? It seems obvious because it’s simple and even a baby can do it! - but actually it has to be learned - and in a way is even more complex - than going into a restaurant, reading a menu, using cutlery, counting money and calculating a tip in such a way as to show a mental attitude towards a state of physical repletion or perhaps annoyance. The relation between hunger and feeding is learned. It’s pre-language learning, and all infants that survive infancy learn the same lesson - but it puts learning (the structure of the world with cause-and-effect) at the most basic level of human experience. A child that experiences hunger isnt human - any more than a stone on which the wind howls is sighing. What makes the infant human is that it learns a lesson: it connects hunger with repletion and learns what to do. The lesson becomes a boundary of its humanity - as integral and foreign to it as its skin. It is defined by the lesson, it learns learning. Soon of course it will learn to use learnings as weapons (you could refer to my argument about tools and weapons in Human Cannon to see this working in extended social and political structures). There is an idea that there is an innate mushy human nature which has somehow to be trained, coerced and repressed in order to turn the little animal into a human being. Supposing you walk in a field and there are lumps of clay everywhere. You dont point at them and say: what badly made pots. A pot is a structure created by a human being who has been taught by a culture. Only with the culture does pottery become possible and (as technology imposes its pressure on the community) necessary. So is say an emotion like joy an abstraction which is put into a context - thus forming an intermediate instance between abstract language structures and idealistic notions of a pre-given soul?

For our present purpose we need to say only that emotions only exist in context. This seems a banal conclusion after the argument so far. But it’s a vital point. Emotions arent emotions! - but statements. Imagine an old-fashioned printer’s work-bench: there is his tray of metal letters which he can form into words and lines. The letters exist prior to the use of them in printing. We think of emotions in this way - and it’s a mistaken way of thinking. The emotions dont pre-exist: the letters are created by the words. Or imagine a book which says: I intend to learn the alphabet and thus become a more interesting book - that’s a more exact description of the humanising process. For humans, the letters dont create the words and sentences - but vice versa. There isnt an innate, existential, feeling, emoting self: the self is created by intellectuations. My quarrel with Brecht is that he probably has a seventeenth century, Cartesian attitude to mind which saw a radical distinction between feelings and emotions on the one hand and reason on the other. But to think about a social problem is to disentangle badly written lines - and you cant cut off emotions from meanings anymore than you can cut off the tides from the sea. In practice, of course, Brecht certainly acknowledges this - there couldnt be any human communication without this acknowledgement.

The oddity about the human brain is that it has a capacity infinitely beyond its apparent needs. A primitive culture may count on its fingers - and may perhaps count no further than three. For the members of a culture to be able to do this means that the whole of mathematics is possible for them, as a process of cultural discoveries (an obvious example is the Islamic creation of algebra). Yet the human mind - once it can observe the practicality of its hands - observes that cause-and-effect is a general truth (practically) - will immediately apply this lesson to everything: so the most primitive communities speculate about the nature of the stars and the changes of the seasons and the content of darkness etc. even when they can only count to three - no other animal does this, it merely acquires isolated skills which it cannot generalise into a philosophy - it never asks questions - merely (at most) confronts enigmas which the world forcibly presents to it. This human oddity means that reality is explained long before it’s understood. The explanations arent random but rigidly confined: they relate the individual to his society, they explain society as a projection of the cosmos (god or something like that). This is true of adults: they necessarily imagine a reality and necessarily act accordingly. This isnt to say that eighteenth century Puritans are filled with hate and they must discharge it on witches: the belief in witches is a product of society, of its ideas - and the ideas create fear. So in witch-crazes we dont see the old Adam, the ancient human nature, rearing its ugly head: we see the ideas of an advanced, increasingly more civilized, technically capable society, an increasingly scientific society (it’s important), responding to misunderstood facts: I can make a machine work in an orderly way - presumably the devil must be creating such disorder and hysteria in these women. We always interpret reality imaginatively, we cant have science, mathematics, technology without doing so - the capacity of the brain is greater than its confirmable contents, and must be.

Then what is the position of children - those who can be told stories, and those even younger who exist only on signs, messages floating to them in bottles over a dark ocean? How quickly children despair! - how quickly their world crumbles! They have no philosophy or theology - only a few signs. And yet their brain has its infinite capacity. If the primitive person counts only on three fingers - then his hands have fifty million fingers, the uncounted ones. Little of him is god, and much of him the devil - within his limited world he may be more godlike than say the European in his space-rocket (Levi-Strauss is certainly right about such things) - but the gods have to learn to do the devil’s work - it’s the only way in which human beings can be made. This means that the child will live strongly in its imagination: and that its first lessons will be an attempt to instil cause-and-effect into the imaginary. Why? - in order to humanise itself. In telling and believing fairy stories the child is trying to take responsibility for the world. If there are ogres, then the child must learn to live with them - if the giant cant be taught to cry he must be cut down. He cant be propitiated. That is why children are extremists. A businessman may concentrate on the Stock Exchange, a soldier may concentrate on the enemy: areas of his mind - which must be responded to - are occupied for him by external social powers. The child cant manage this, it can only question: it has all the responsibilities of Einstein and Newton and Plato - and it’s that which makes the child a poet and artist, he must incorporate cause-and-effect into the imaginary: it has to have a reality as great as that of sticks and stones, otherwise the child will despair. In this way the child may humanise the little kingdom it has, and place much of the world in it - but it will be profoundly wrong about the world. When the child imagines it is trying to be an adult; when adults imagine, they are very often trying to be like children. That is the tragedy of art.

There is no other way of producing the human mind than this. It’s the consequence of our biological development and the nature of objectivity and what an objective statement is. Although I think structuralism provides very useful aesthetic and dramatic tools I dont think it explains human behaviour because it does not see the mind as a diachronic structure. Imaginatively the child will have structured the whole of the world - just as a religious person sees every part of the world as either God’s or the devil’s: there isnt an area beyond the three fingers which can be filled with general knowledge. All knowledge will either relate to or be achieved by a mind which is imaginatively holistic. Curiously, the child sees the world in highly political terms - it’s a matter of power, rules, obedience, rewards etc.; the child relates to these things before it has a grasp of social constitutionality. This probably creates our secondary needs. If hunger is a primary need and leads to a certain sort of learning; then a secondary need, here, is a need for a child to establish good relations within spheres of power - the child has a political need before it has political tools, expressions etc. This is why, it seems to me, the imagination is one of the most politicized of all parts of the mind - and why politics often uses its language. All political movements, of any depth, create their own aesthetics - and this is both an objective need (how to create new truths and distribute them) and also a subjective need, a subjectivity in change needing new supports and structures.

So of course I agree with you that our imagination has its origins and dynamics in the nature of human infancy and childhood. If humans were rigidly innately programmed for any society (not a biological possibility, of course) then there could be no history - since social practice couldnt change, there would be no need to respond to new technology organisationally and subjectively because new technology couldnt be created. This is only possible because human beings begin without knowledge and then socially learn - and a biological consequence is: the brain with a capacity larger than its contents (and therefore able to learn, and needing to appropriate infinity) placed in a society where its owner is physically incapable of full-knowledge and full-anticipation, must have its foundations in the imagination, and must achieve its psychological impulses and energies within the area in which the imagination relates to reality. A young person’s early efforts at drawing with a pencil have imaginative, creative value - early efforts at using a knife or wiring an electric plug are merely inefficient: but, the imaginative is profoundly social and political.

I dont want to go too deeply into the psychology of children, but perhaps I could say that these secondary needs often become primary. The secondary needs imply some social experience and learning. Hunger is not a basic need because it has no meaning until it’s comparable with repletion - a child may be taught what hunger is because it has previously been fed, for instance. But a secondary need has a further characteristic: it involves a structure in the imagination. This makes it stronger than a merely physical need, and not weaker as you might suppose. We run society in order to eat - but when necessary people will starve themselves to death for their causes, risk their lives, be celibate - climb mountains to test their self-image and so on. Really, we need only eat, copulate and shit - history and the vast world communities are created by secondary needs, they are the fruit of the imagination, and so are technology and science - as far as the existential human being is concerned. Is that an odd thing for a dialectical materialist to say? No - Im not saying that technology is an objective creation of the imaginary - the world is objectively real and structurally positive; and technology, once it incorporates various forms of energy (physical and formal) certainly applies pressure on society and subjectivity (that’s why there is history); but human drives, energies, ambitions always exceed their needs, their...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Principal Correspondents
• Chapter One Acting and Directing
• Chapter Two Theatre Events (TEs)
• Chapter Three Politics
• Chapter Four Productions
• Index