Blogging "Aviva" - Entry 10

For Entry 9

Wise Words

From David Mamet's "A National Dream-Life":

The play is a quest for a solution.

As in our dreams, the law of psychic economy operates. In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious (rational) mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question posed is one which can be answered rationally, e.g.: how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect, our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete - we feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.

The struggle to articulate the root of drama is one of words, which is why I tend to think writers and critics are drawn to psychoanalysis as a literary treatment: we fail to have the words to adequately describe the "dramatic" experience, hence we label the experience an expression of the subconscious.

I tend to think this is slightly inaccurate (though nonetheless instructive) in understanding what (to the extent we're able to) is moving in a particular work of drama. It's a quest within a quest, which is why Shakespeare's unfolding theatrical metaphors are so lasting: it's the heart of the question "what's the meaning of life?" The best way to tackle that question is through analogy and metaphor (life as theatre) though ultimately it obscures the specific truth (which is unknowable anyway). The comedy mocks this fact. The tragedy laments it. The rest fall somewhere in between or all over that spectrum.

The complexity Mamet refers to, I think, is only complex because of our humanity, our inability to know. It is, at the same time, rather simple and timeless, but we can only deconstruct through the lens of the complex.

The writer's search for words is the protagonist's quest for a solution.

Both end in failure.


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