The Hidden Plot

Notes on Theatre and the State

Edward Bond

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781408169940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

An important, urgent book of essays from Britain's most challenging dramatist: "...a great playwright - many, particularly in continental Europe, would say the greatest living English playwright." (The Independent)

This collection of passionate and polemical essays deals with drama from its origin in the human mind to its use in history and the present. It explains the hidden working of drama behind the state, religion, family, crime and war. It is a revolutionary understanding of the human world with drama at its centre. A ruthless critique of the theatre's present state and its trivialisation as entertainment by the media, it reveals and sees a radical new theatre for the future. Edward Bond is internationally recognised as a major playwright and a leading theoretician of drama. He is the most performed British dramatist abroad. This is his latest and most important account of the meaning and practice of theatre as we start a new millennium.

The Reason for Theatre

The Child

The origin and basis of theatre is imagination. Imagination takes the form of images, words, sounds, gestures, dreams, stories, vague and often admonitory perturbations and reality. It is not reverie, fantasy or arbitrariness. It is logical and has consequences in itself, reason and life. If it were fantasy we would imagine only what was pleasant – and doubtless sometimes what was unpleasant for others. Freud believed all dreams to be wish-fulfilments. He had to explain why some dreams are nightmares. We have to understand why often imagination turns to loss, danger, dread – the Tragic.

Other animals think and solve problems. Their relationship to the world is more purely rational than ours. Primates have an elementary ability to reason. Only humans have imagination. Other animals have no use for imagination, they live naturally according to their instincts. They have no culture and make choices only in relation to facts – ‘Do not leave cover, predators are near.’ Unlike humans they do not invent enemies.

Non-human animals are concerned with what and when but not with why. Imagination is needed to ask why. Imagination and not reason makes us human. We are self-conscious. Imagination and self-consciousness cannot exist without each other, they are aspects of each other. The rational is a priori to our reasoning. It is derived from objective reality. The ability to reason does not make us rational. It is our imagination that reasons. Imagination is not prior to imagining, it is wholly human. Reason seeks the rational, imagination seeks the logical – either as fate or freedom. Reality is indifferent to our irrationalisms. We may or may not survive errors of reason, but if we imagine illogically the consequence is our destruction, individually or collectively. If we are to be human there is a logical practice of imagination. More, the logic of imagination requires us to be human.

There is no gap between an animal and the place where it is. It fits its place – its territory and niche in evolution – just as its instincts fit its skin. The newborn child – the neonate – is aware of itself but not of place. It is a monad – one thing which is everything, an infinity in which every point is the centre and the self. It is itself and the universe. We know that the neonate only imagines it is the universe, but for it imagination and reality are one. This structures the functioning of the self – structure reflects the self. Leibniz said the monad has no window on the world. The neonate does not imagine the world, its imagination creates the world as the child and the child as the world. That is how we become a self. The double meaning of imagination confuses later understanding because in essential ways imagination continues to create reality. Consciousness cannot leave the imagination because it cannot leave the self.

The newborn child – the neonate-monad – is formed by its experiences. These are elemental experiences of itself and objective reality – comfort, discomfort, peace, dread. The newborn child is on both sides of its skin. There is no outside so it generates its own experiences. Its self is bound into imagination as language is bound into grammar. It endures. The neonate-monad creates the others’ attentions, they are its elements in the way warmth and cold are elements in the adults’ world. What if the guardians’ smiles are like the sun in the adults’ sky? – the child is its sky because there is no outside. If the child quarrels with the world it quarrels with itself.

The monad has no window on the world and no door on time. It exists in eternity. All its events are elemental, cosmic, total. For it the traumatic is the ordinary. The neonate has no psychology for the reason the world has none. It does not inflict pain on itself, it is its pain and pleasure. Happiness is the imagination’s desire, the Tragic is its idea.

The Tragic is not only the neonate’s experience but also its idea because it incites responses and results in behaviour. Tragedy is ontological, a presence that may wander or wait in any point of the universe which is the child. As the Tragic is ontological it is a question. Ontological questions have no answer. When all else is explained, all other questions answered – the answers lead to the unanswered ontological questions. We try to explain – and answer – the ontological questions by the transcendental. This corrupts the self by corrupting imagination. The transcendental is always violence because it imposes as answers what are really questions. Really the ontological is ‘nothingness’ – or in human terms the Tragic, the implacable. Imagination, selfconsciousness, remains paradoxical. Imagination is unconfined by any boundary yet reality may coerce it – force it to reflect on itself – with either humanness or the Tragic.

The neonate-monad is actor and act, agent and event, cause and effect. If (an impossible example) it took up a cup to drink it would be mover and moved, cup, drinker and water. The cup would be the water and the water the cup. The water would drink the drinker. Each thing would be an aspect of a Spinozist reality apprehended in a universal mind – otherwise mind would be a series of catatonic events without imagination and self-consciousness, of effects which could never teach us causes. The neonate accepts responsibility for the Tragic because no act by it (the sole actor) could remit or eliminate the Tragic. Before the child speaks it has only one question: to be or not to be.

From the beginning the neonate’s elemental experiences induce responses and behaviour and so create elemental ideas in the imagination. The neonate has no iconography or language waiting to represent ideas. The monad is prior to grammar, but innate grammatical structures might respond – register themselves in the neonate’s experience before it speaks, as if echoes of unspoken speech. The responses might begin to structure the neonate’s experiences, it might begin to make profound Kantian patterns of itself by becoming conscious of itself as if it were its own other – and in this way, in the gap between itself and its other, create the vertigo of nothingness. Its skin is not yet a barrier, it is as if the new child passes over it in and out of death, and death might as well be internal as life be external. The Tragic is the neonate’s recurring mortality, which it meets on either side of its skin. It lives its death and dies its life. It knows the Tragic and the tragic desire for pleasure. The child knows – is – this. It exists in this way until its skin becomes time and it enters the others’ world. The new child lacks a psychological self but perhaps its selfhood will never be greater. In the beginning everything is elemental, cosmic and total. The new mind does not experience itself passively, it is already its own riddle. Adults can understand this state only by imagining it, but it is their reality. Imagination never forgets though it is often forgotten.

When the neonate smiles it cannot know it is not smiling at – on – itself. It seeks relationship with itself and this is also relationship with the real world it cannot yet distinguish. Imagination is born with its twin, the reasoning mind. The neonate does not take pleasure in the pain it creates in itself. Masochists require another to inflict pain on them or are themselves surrogates for another: another must represent their own other – in the masochist act or demeanour the masochist seeks the self which is lost when reason and the Tragic are sundered.

In the patterned chaos of its experience the new mind rests on one thought: it has a right to be. This is not a mere physical or emotional reaction, an impulse – it is an existential imperative because it discerns a pattern of cause and effect and so knows itself as the site of cause. It thinks its self recognizes it. This is the basis of the mind’s coherence and without it there can be no self-consciousness: because there is no coherence, cause and effect have not been imagined. The child’s idea that it has a right to be, to live, is fundamental to the mind because its notion of cause and effect is synonymous with the idea of that right – the right is the cause and the effect is the self. Without the idea of this right the mind becomes mad. Madness is the opinion we have of ourselves. This is the functional origin of madness and it leads to the psychology of madness, in which imagination and reason are sundered and so cause and effect made irrational. The idea of the right to be in the world endures – for the same reason that it originates in the child, as a concomitant of coherence – in adults as the desire for justice. This is the origin of Value. All other values are practical, instrumental derivatives of this: the pragmatic cannot create this Value, nor in themselves can the sensory experiences of pain and pleasure, because masochism (and social submissiveness) sunders reason and the Tragic so that humanness is lost – we become Valueless. The mind is drama. How else could mathematicians find mathematics to be beautiful? The mind’s structural need, without which it cannot be coherent, is the desire for justice. It is obvious that the transcendental would simply be a misrepresentation of the mechanical were it not for this human Value. Value is brought into the world by the self-consciousness of the human mind – and necessarily by any other self-consciousness (if there be any) in the universe. It is a practical, imperative idea – immanent not transcendental. Imagination is the need for justice, and self-consciousness expresses its idea.

The monad is morality – is and not has because as the monad is its own experience it cannot distinguish between fact and judgement of Value. In it, is is ought. In adults fact and judgement of Value are put asunder but the monad’s creation of Value remains the basis of the understanding of right and wrong, not that any particular thing is right or wrong, but of right and wrong as an existential idea – ‘existential’ not to limit its future intellectuality but to denote its origin. It is the rationality of the child’s being in the world. The origin of Value is the cause of our freedom and bewilderment. As it is created but is not an object, it also creates its opposite. Because the new child is wholly egotistic its morality is atrocious.

In the monad the neonate’s imagination is literal, the imaginary is the real and there is no distinction between the two. In time it learns that its skin is a barrier and beyond it are places and people. The monad opens a window on the world. It is as it is when grammar is articulated by new words, they articulate the original grammar. Just as language cannot leave its grammar, mind cannot leave its origins, which are like a grammar. But in imagination there is also a logic of exclamations and other vocalizations of pain, fatigue, happiness. It is painful to cry and pleasurable to sigh with happiness. Imagination is the self carried into self-consciousness.

If the child entered the real world by a total break the self would lose consciousness. There would be coma and chaos. As the child enters the world the world enters it. Imagination is content and context. Imagination structures experience as a map. The map is the site of story. The first map is the neonate’s. Later maps are imposed on this and on each other. The self is a palimpsest of maps. Each map informs earlier and later maps but each is distinct – over time the child acquires new selves derived from new experiences and knowledge, and each self is appropriate to its stage of development but each remains distinct. It is as if the selves existed on the same plane, not fitted into one another in the manner of babushka dolls. In the silence a babel of storytellers waits to speak – which one speaks depends on the situation. Maturity does not modify the potency of earlier selves. Any later real or imagined event may invoke any appropriate self. That is why we may behave out of character, or in ways which afterwards – often soon afterwards – surprise or appal us. All our experiences remain raw. The selves remember. When we introspect we ask: tell me a story. Adulthood is the way we accept or fail to accept responsibility for our selves, especially our early elemental selves. Imagination is the way we accept or fail to accept responsibility for the world. If we become society’s story (its ideology), society speaks to us according to its needs in a situation – often it is that which causes us to behave in ways that afterwards surprise or appal us. But there are limits to our corruption. The first map, on which the Tragic gave meaning to our need to exist, is not obliterated. The Tragic watches over our humanness and no one can escape the tragedy which is their self.

The growing child necessarily retains the practical conviction that it has a right to be in the world. It is an egotistical conviction but it means that the world should be a good place in which the child is at home. Otherwise it would have to use violence to change the world. The neonate is God alone in the world and a God can use violence only on another. The neonate has the idea of the Tragic but not of evil. Evil is meaningless, it is not an idea. Only evil events can be described.

We have our proper names but the words we use to describe what is human are also our names because they are names for our imagination: good, bad, right, wrong, mind, reality, God, society, patriotism, religion and so on. These words have meaning and are about meaning. The word ‘table’ is descriptive, but the words we use to describe ourselves are also prescriptive. But all words may be self-words. The self has no fixed being. Partly we retain the neonate’s identification of itself with its place, it becomes us in imagination. We cannot say that reason supersedes imagination, or emotion supersedes reason, or spirit supersedes mind. Self-words recreate themselves in relation to each other. They are not stable but there is a logic to their relationship. The logic decides what happens to individuals and what will happen to us collectively.

The growing child enters the world consciously. The neonate’s imagination was structured as creator of the world. Now the child seeks to be at home in the world but finds it to be a house of discord. The imagination’s imperative is to find meaning in the world.

Children cannot be taught, they can only create. We give children lessons, but the world did not give the neonate lessons – it created the world. It lived itself as the world and created its own experiences. Children create but do not learn because what they know must have entered the mind creatively. A growing child is sui generis, its own context. Facts belong to existing systems and so the child cannot think that B precedes A. But the child gives systems a context. If this were not true of simple objects we would have no aesthetics – and consequently no ethics: kings are not enthroned on kitchen chairs. This is also true of cause and effect, circumstances and their consequences. Knowledge is the use we make of it.

Imagine a mosaic. A child asks us what is the missing piece. We supply the missing tessera and the child enters it into its picture. A table has the same meaning for most children because it has the same use for them. But a table is often the site of crises. This makes it a self-word. This gives it meaning. Puritans put a table in the place of the altar in their church because they wanted God to be in the kitchen as well as the church. Changes put pressure on the tesserae because the picture – the social use – changes. Often the pressure is violent. We strain to hold the tesserae together but the interstices may open into gaps. It is as if the interstices were strands of a net but the gaps between the strands are sealed with coloured glass. We are looking for a picture that our living destroys. We try to hold the picture together by violence but the violence destroys it. When we try to give fixed transcendental meanings to self-words it is as if we attacked the picture with a hammer. We use a map to guide our journey which the journey destroys.

The world cannot ‘happen’ to us. Nor may our instincts. Children create their instincts by the way they experience them. The self is a story. The story relates experience to the real world. The story is logical How does instinct relate to it? Are instincts autonomous? Does story repress, shape, incorporate them into itself, make them its agents? Instinct is taken into story. For instance, anger is an instinctive capacity but anger’s causes belong to story. Instinctive force is as real as a table’s solidity, but the stronger the instinct the more it is bound by story. Even the earliest emotions are echoes of story.

Augustine’s struggle to replace carnality with celibacy was not reason repressing instinct. Would he have sought celibacy if the story of God the Father had not already been told? Story’s events are not simply explanations but causes. Did fear of his own father make Augustine repress his carnality? What was his mother’s role in the repression? Why was he converted in a garden and not in a church or a shop? In another story Eve was tempted in a garden. Some of any story’s events may be secret and coded. Sometimes story uses the power of the desire for knowledge as a means to avoid the inconvenience, embarrassment or danger of knowing. It is often so in the ideology of religion and culture.

Instinct does not determine story but it has power, as water has weight. Water’s flow depends on events and topography. In story the equivalent of these latter are events determining instinct. Story is creative not reductive. Instinct is incorporated into story but no more determines it than ink determines what is written in it. In story a ‘murdering-instinct’ might become the motive to burn down a house or build one. If I can afford to build an extension to block my neighbour’s view I will not burn down his house – he may burn down my extension. Instinct is not repressed but is used in story to relate the individual to society. Drama and story are one in the way that imagination and selfconsciousness are one. Drama is reality’s logic, the logic of change. We could but do not understand the logic. Understanding it means altering the relationship between self-words. But as they are prescriptive that means changing ourself. Eventually reality changes their meaning and so changes us. But it does so violently because we do not understand the logic. Violence is always logical. We cannot escape this dilemma, it is as if the interstices between the net’s strands were blocked with glass. The logic may be explained but this is of little use. The words are bound together in anomie, ennui, crises and drama. If it were otherwise, the human problem would have been easily solved but we would not be human.

Children enter the real world through the monad’s self-creativity, they anthropomorphize the world, create it in their own image. The child gives objects human subjectivity. This is the stage of the pre-real. Trees speak, chairs are tired, storms angry, winds spiteful, plates hungry and demons wait in the dark. Through anthropomorphy the child remains coherent, supplies effects with causes, and finds meaning so that the storyteller may be told. The story is protean but logical. The storyteller always has one foot in the real world because the story is told to enable us to live. In story one object becomes another roughly in the way a spirit is said to enter a juju. A child’s block of wood may ‘be’ a car or dog. The child cathects objects with Value – the world impersonates the child. This is the pre-real. The child is no longer sealed in the monad. Its act of making the wood-block car shows – and the wood-block car itself shows – the child’s right to be in the world. Children’s play is a use of justice. Christianity does not record the monad-time when God created Himself but it records the pre-real, the time when the child created things and their world. Eve is a bone taken from near the heart, a wood block turned into a woman. God’s miracles all derive from the child’s game with the wood block. In the pre-real world a child relates the elemental monad world to the external world. The elemental is still the child’s way of being pragmatic, its story is still the map of the world. It creates it and is not passively imprinted with it. As it maps the world so as to exist in it, it puts itself in the map and maps the world in itself. All creation creates the creator. The child creates itself as it creates the wood-block car. The child’s power to put the wood-block car in the world has greater consequences for us than the power of factories to make cars.

The child makes itself human by anthropomorphizing the world. Its story contains a practical understanding of the world, of what and when. It also designates Value. The child does not distinguish between Value and fact. Its story binds it to the world because the story gives the world meaning. It does not distinguish between story and itself the storyteller. The pre-real child is at a threshold. It is its own creator but the world is autonomous. The pre-real child begins to distinguish between agent and act. The child cannot create the world ex nihilo. Instead it gives birth to it – a human not divine act. The child enters the world by having it taken from it as a child is taken from its mother. Otherwise the world would bring the child its death. Then the child could develop only as part of history and history is blind. Each child comes to its term with reality differently, in its own way. It happens over time (yet is anticipated), at some times calmly, at others in crisis. Reality is not presented to the child in a consistently humane way. Children find meaning in what at first to them seem random events, and the linkage the child finds between the events gives the child its character. Each child is different because it links experiences differently. The child takes – imagines into reality – the character it defines for itself in relation to the vicissitudes of being in the world. Character is expectation.

The world starts to exist beyond the imagination. The mind is conscious of the real only through imagination, it is conscious of it only as it is self-conscious. Self-consciousness does not become a ‘real’ part of the world. If it did it would abolish its own need to be and we could not create a culture or go mad. The creator must be outside what he creates. We have no self, we seek a self. Imagination creates reality by investing it with Value and so with consequential meaning. Value does not exist in reality, only in imagination, but it is real because it is necessary to selfconscious apprehension and use of facts. Physical and instrumental systems have the meaning of their consequences, but Value gives meaning to consequences, not only as practical as...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Letter to Tom Erhardt
• A Writer’s Story
• Our Story
• Language
• Modern Drama
• Drama
• Le Théâtre de la Cité
• Letter on Translation
• Pearl White: Notes on the TE of the Text
• The Site
• Letter on Design
• I Wrote a Poem
• Notes on Theatre-in-Education
• Oranges
• Rough Notes on Justice
• Rough Notes on Intolerance
• Notebook, 31 January 1996
• The Eschatology of Bread: Christ and the Bearded Lady (Notebook, 3 August 1995)
• Social Madness
• William Shakespeare’s Last Notebook
• The Labyrinth
• The Faustian Trap
• The Reason for Theatre
• Lear War
• Notes on Coffee for Le Théâtre National de la Colline
• Letter on Brecht
• The Seventh of January Sixteen Hundred and Ten
• People Saturated with the Universe (Notes on The Crime of the Twenty-first Century for Le Théâtre de la Colline)
• Imprint Page