The Death and Life of Drama

by Lance Lee

  5. Nietzsche, p. 102. The actual passage is, “That same nature addresses us through Dionysiac art and its tragic symbolism, in a voice that rings authentic: ‘Be like me, the Original Mother, who, constantly creating, finds satisfaction in the turbulent flux of appearances!’” Our ultimate identification at the end of tragedy with “mystical Oneness,” Nietzsche, p. 23, like the lyric of the lyric poet who “beholds the ground of being,” Nietzsche, p. 39, or “genius in the act of creation merges with the primal architect of the cosmos,” Nietzsche, p. 42, all speak to the nature of the transport tragedy takes us on, breaking down the individual ego, to put it in modern terms, in the name of an oceanic identity with the becoming, creative nature of reality itself.

  See the discussion on Winnicott in “The Lost Poetics of Comedy” in Chapter 7.

  5. The Cooked and the Raw

  1. When “climax” is italicized, the climactic action at the end of Act 3, or the End, that finally resolves the conflict is referred to. “Crisis” italicized refers to the crisis at the end of Act 2, or the Middle, in which we see the effort undertaken by the protagonist in Act 2, or the Middle, brought to a point of actual or apparently impending failure. It is the emotional nadir of a screenplay and drama.

  2. Nietzsche, pp. 20–21. His definition of the Apollonian, repeatedly returned to and developed in his argument, begins here.

  3. Schulberg, p. 128.

  4. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966). Schopenhauer’s key work is usually known as The World as Will and Idea.

  The Freudian libido is generally thought of as the human sexual drive, but Freud means that fundamentally and broadly as our procreative urge and will to live and grow; only later did he erect it into Eros and oppose Thanatos to its life drive. See the discussions of Freud in chapter 2, “The Heavy as Opposed To …,” and of Winnicott in chapter 9, “The Lost Poetics of Comedy,” in this book.

  5. Robinson Jeffers, Selected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 104.

  6. Winnicott, pp. 86–94. See discussion of Winnicott in chapter 9, “The Lost Poetics of Comedy,” in this book.

  7. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Ellen Frothingham, 2nd printing (New York: Noonday, 1961). Lessing is in part concerned to show what is appropriate to achieve the effect of beauty in each medium: a cry may be evoked in Virgil’s lines on Laocoön, while omitted with equal justice from the sculpture, and yet be enacted in drama. It is the loss of the individual in the general that is at root in much of what Lessing has to say, which, in terms of handling emotion, means achieving a cooked effect, or one that is naïve in Nietzsche’s sense. Lessing specifically quotes Virgil’s “clamores horrendos ad sidera tollit” (p. 20) which may express Laocoön’s pain yet is fine to hear, an example of a language effect absorbing an otherwise direct expression of emotion.

  The lack of necessity to beauty is a striking point in Lessing, and anticipates Freud’s view of beauty as one of the essentials of civilization whose necessity isn’t immediately apparent in terms of survival value. But that entire attitude only betrays a shockingly limited view of human nature, one, unfortunately, most of us subscribe to.

  8. Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Miller’s Tale,” in The Portable Chaucer, trans., sel., and ed. Theodore Morrison (New York: Viking, 1960), pp. 133–154.

  9. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It, and Other Stories (New York: Pocket Books, 1992), p. 112. I have cited Maclean’s story here as well as the film: both refer to Paul as beautiful. But, interestingly, in the novella Norm goes on to add, “He should have been—you taught him,” referring to Paul being beautiful. That is left out of the film and would have detracted from our concentration on the paradox of beauty and early death through gambling in Paul and on the nature of fate; in a work of fiction it does not detract, adding an additional layering. It goes to the heart of the difference between drama, which concentrates and excludes, and fiction, which, like the epic, is comparatively inclusive.

  6. The Smart and the Dumb

  1. Nietzsche, pp. 51–42.

  2. Hamlet, I, 2, ll.129–159, p. 22–23.

  3. Hamlet, I, 5, ll. 87–88, p. 46.

  4. Hamlet, II, 2, ll. 609–610, p. 77.

  5. Hamlet, II, 2, ll. 553–610, pp. 75–77.

  6. Hamlet, III, 1, ll. 56–90, pp. 80–82.

  7. Hamlet, V, 2, l. 361, p. 174.

  7. The Lost Poetics of Comedy

  1. Lee, pp. 117–122.

  2. Aristotle, p. 59.

  3. Winnicott, pp. 19, 40, 69. He first uses the phrase (p. 19) in the context of the threatening quality of the “not me” to the infant: such an object must be attacked, meaning mastered. He does not yet develop the use of destruction to create an object’s reality, and does not follow through on the threatening quality of an object existing apart from our control, our “me” area of existence. One could argue civilization itself in part arises from the effort both to master and domesticate threatening—because not subject to our magical control—natural phenomena.

  His second use (p. 40) identifies play as a thing in itself. As play is directly expressive of ourselves and broadens into shared cultural experience, and is not the Kantian “thing in itself,” an ultimate expression of the “not me,” Winnicott’s purpose in using that characterization is to indicate play’s equivalence with other psychic phenomena, like the libido. It exists in its own right as a feature of mental structure and is not reducible to something else.

  His third use of the phrase (p. 69) is within the context of the creative impulse as a thing in itself, meaning again a fact of psychic structure and, in the context here examined, as a feature of healthy living. Losing the creative response to reality makes it seem at once unreal and meaningless. Historically, it must be associated with the presence of an individual functioning as such, not identified with a given role or a natural phenomenon. Here Winnicott is in error, for our creative impulse is unlikely to have developed evolutionarily in the last thousand years or so but to have existed fundamentally and developmentally with other mental structuring elements for a very long time. Moreover, identification with a role or natural phenomenon does not indicate a lack of creative response but a fixity of creative response instead.

  Finally, a word of caution. Although Winnicott speaks of the use of an object, and of how the destructive impulse creates the “not me,” independent quality of that object through its failure to destroy the object, there is no implication that thereby reality is created out of an act of the imagination. Rather, such an act allows us to appreciate objective existence: that appreciation is created. This is not a minor creation but the attainment of sanity itself. In the case of cultural “play” activities, however, the other implication of the destructive impulse literally creating reality holds, where works of art/imagination or elements within these (like characters and their purposes in a screenplay) survive destruction and so achieve a reality apart from the private self, the “me” of the “me vs. not me” dichotomy. They do so, moreover, beyond the transitional or cultural third area, as artifacts.

  4. The remarks following here thread through Winnicott’s argument in Playing and Reality, cited above.

  The following works are also of interest.

  F. Robert Rodman, MD, Winnicott: Life and Work (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2003). Rodman’s is an exhaustive, excellent work on Winnicott with useful chapters on Melanie Klein (pp. 106–131, 245–263) and an excellent review of Winnicott’s great, late work, pp. 264ff. There is also an exhaustive listing of Winnicott’s published work.

  D. W. Winnicott’s key works, in addition to Playing and Reality, for those interested are:

  Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (London: Tavistock Publications, 1958).

  The Child, the Family, and the Outside World (n.p.: Pelican, 1976). It was first published in 1964.

  Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environme
nt (London: Hogarth Press, 1965).

  Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry (London: Hogarth Press, 1971). This is a masterful book recounting brief courses of treatment with child patients. It must be remembered Winnicott was a practicing pediatrician for over twenty-five years, and his work was grounded in profound familiarity with children.

  The Piggle (London: Hogarth Press, 1977). This is certainly one of the most moving and touching case studies in the psychoanalytic literature.

  The key works for Melanie Klein for interested readers are:

  The Psycho-Analysis of Children (London: Hogarth Press, 1932).

  Contributions to Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1948).

  Envy and Gratitude: A Study of Unconscious Forces (New York: Basic Books, 1957). This work is at once electrifying to read and on reflection deeply repugnant, with its exposition of an instinctual death drive expressed through envy, evoking a psychoanalytic vision of “fallen man.” It is perhaps a key to the frequent evangelical fervor of her devotees.

  Narrative of a Child Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1961).

  5. Kantian reality is essentially Freud’s reality, where “me” becomes ego, superego, and id and “not me” the

  external world of objects. It is a view of reality that for psychoanalysis leads into the elaborate language of introjection, projection, and the almost infinite and confusing variety these can undergo through schizoid operations, like Nash in A Beautiful Mind splitting off aspects of himself into what he perceives as other persons, like Charles. Any perusal of psychoanalytic papers will immediately involve the noninitiate in a bewildering hall of projective/introjective mirrors. Drama overlaps psychoanalysis here in speaking of identification without ever explaining how it could be, as opposed to what it is believed to be. Winnicott’s third, shared area of experience both provides an escape from these psychoanlytic absurdities and has profound philosophical implications with regard to the true nature of reality.

  6. Henri Focillon, The Art of the West, vol. 1: Romanesque Art (London: Phaidon, 1963), pp. 102–143. I am indebted to Focillon’s discussion of the evolution of Romanesque decoration, which planted the idea firmly in my mind of the internal evolution of a style past its moment of maximum achievement into an increasingly telling loss of its initiating spirit, as if possessed of a life of its own.

  7. Aristotle, p. 59.

  8. Freud, pp. 33, 45ff.

  8. The Weight of the Past

  1. Aristotle, p. 104. The telling sentence is, “This [metaphor] alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.” The resemblance involved is that we say, metaphorically, that one thing is another, not like, as in a simile. Moreover, the recognition that this is a “mark of genius,” meaning an innate gift, gets at a further implication that, however a writer may have an eye for resemblances, he either has a gift for metaphor, or the identification of the seeming different, or does not. The implication is fatal for the idea of imitation, of one thing being like another; that way lie talent and commonplace and not particularly telling writing. The other way implies the creative gift to a high degree, the ability to erect another reality through the imagination we recognize as our own as well as stun us with unities we had not been able to see for ourselves.

  A second implication for Aristotle is as revealing: what “cannot be imparted by another” cannot be taught, nor can it be imbibed through a “how to” literature. Understandably, the author of the first Poetics didn’t pursue these implications. Good writing instructors know that they don’t create writers: they bring experience to bear for someone already a writer but at the beginning of his or her efforts. The only amelioration of this truth is the other truth: that creativity is far more widespread than commonly asserted, at once Winnicott’s point and observable in the special setting of a writing class, however few in there actually have the inclination to bend their creativity into a professional writing career.

  I might add I understand genius in an Emersonian light of our common humanity writ large.

  9. The Weight of the Wrong Decision

  1. Schulberg, p. 133.

  10. The Nature of the Hero’s Journey

  1. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series 17, 2nd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 246.

  2. Campbell, p. 246.

  3. Campbell, p. 245.

  4. Campbell, pp. 317–318.

  5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Oversoul,” in Essays, First and Second Series (A. L. Burt Co.), pp. 190–213.

  A key expression of this belief is, “Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the Eternal One,” pp. 191–192. As we introspect and come to know ourselves most thoroughly, we find we become in touch with this under/overlying divine spark/common soul, so that simultaneously when we are most universal in our selves we are most individual.

  Campbell pursues a very similar line of thought in The Hero with a Thousand Faces when he writes, “The way to become human is to learn to recognize the lineaments of God in all the wonderful modulations of the face of man,” Campbell, p. 390, and, “The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul,” Campbell, p. 388. This is part of the modern hero’s task of returning spiritual significance to our experience of the world/self.

  The profoundest questing is into oneself to find the common self; the simplest level of the questing is the action-adventure variety, the sort in which the hero as warrior indulges in The Hero with a Thousand Faces and which we see reflected in film in the literal action-adventure genre and our various heroes of external deeds as they take us on the dramatic hero’s journey outlined in these pages.

  6. Campbell, p. 362.

  7. Campbell, p. 336.

  8. Campbell, p. 337.

  9. Campbell, p. 342.

  10. Campbell, p. 388.

  11. Rodman, pp. 323–348.

  12. Campbell, p. 388.

  11. The Death and Life of Drama

  1. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. Sheila Stern, ed. Oswyn Murray (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). The text is based on the famous lectures delivered in Basel in 1872 but not published until now. They present a radically unromantic and hardheaded view of Greek achievements, particularly Athenian, through the Hellenistic Age by Burckhardt, who is most famous for his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The young Nietzsche was deeply influenced by Burckhardt, even as he leaped past him with regard to understanding the nature of classical tragedy and its dual religious and entertainment roles in Athens in the fifth century, and in the philosophical depth he could bring to his reflections.

  2. Burckhardt, p. 226.

  3. Burckhardt, p. 264.

  4. Burckhardt, p. 262.

  5. Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, in The Oedipus Cycle, trans. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace, 1949), p. 44, first strophe.

  6. Oedipus at Colonus, in ibid., p. 145.

  7. Euripides, The Bacchae, in The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Phillip Vellacott (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), p. 209.

  8. Nietzsche, p. 107.

  9. Nietzsche, p. 108.

  10. Nietzsche, p. 136.

  11. Freud, pp. 109–110.

  12. Burckhardt, p. 281.

  13. Freud, p. 112.

  14. Hamlet, III, 2, ll. 20–25, p. 87.

  15. See note 5, chapter 2, above.

  16. Simon Schama, A History of Britain, vol. 1: At The Edge of the World (New York: Hyperion, 2000). Schama is a distinguished historian, and his popular BBC program, A History of England, was broadcast in 2000–2001. Prior works includes the Dutch Golden Age, the French Revolution, and Rubens and Rembrandt (Rembrandt’s Eyes). Landscape and Memory is a brilliant examination of how culture, history, and landscape intersect in certain key, mode
rn myths to create and reveal national psyches.

  His work on the Elizabethans spreads over several chapters. For a more detailed look at Elizabeth, the reader could try Alison Weir’s Elizabeth the Queen (London: Pimlico, 1998), or the readable older biography by J. E. Neale, Queen Elizabeth (London: Reprint Society, 1942). There is no lack of material on the Elizabethans or Elizabeth. Alison Weir has some unusual conjectures, such as a suspicion the elder Cecil was behind the suspicious death of the first wife of Robert Dudley, Elizabeth’s favorite.

  17. Schama, p. 332.

  18. Schama, p. 369.

  19. Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare: The Man behind the Mask (Boston: Little, Brown, 1999). Holden is a noted writer and biographer but not a Shakespearean scholar in the sense of devoting a lifetime to that single topic. This is at once his strength and weakness, allowing him to draw together academic strands impartially, while without an academic standing to put him on a par—in their own minds—with Shakespearean specialists. Nonetheless, he takes issue with Harold Bloom that there is “not enough to know,” p. 1, to write a revealing life of Shakespeare, although Bloom does admit we can learn to recognize Shakespeare’s “temperament, sensibility and his cognition” (Holden, p. 3).

  For my purposes, Holden presents an entirely readable and conjecturally solid outline of Shakespeare’s life, reasonably filling in the “lost years” before Shakespeare shows up in London. He puts the events we are sure of in a clear Elizabethan context, whether concerning Shakespeare’s early education or later status as a gentleman. I think we are unlikely to go further, as the sense of mystery about Shakespeare is so canonical that it is likely to endure until technology allows investigative time travel.

  20. Hamlet, V, 1, ll. 189–201, p. 154.

  21. William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Cambridge Edition Text (Garden City: Garden City Publishing, 1936), V, vi, ll. 346–350, 356–361, p. 979.