Memories, Hopes, Dreams, Wishes, Desires

What we find in tales is not life, nor even a representation of life.

Francisque Sarcey, the great French drama critic of the XIX century, had this to say about art:

All the arts of imitation are representations of life. All have for their purpose the placing of nature before our eyes. What other object has painting that that of portraying for us either scenes from life or places which serve as a setting for it? And does not sculpture strive to render for us the images of living creatures, now single and now joined in groups. We may say with equal truth of all the arts that they are representations of life; in other words, copies from nature.

Tous les arts d’imitation sont des représentations de la vie humaine. Tous ont pour but de nous mettre la nature sous les yeux. Est-ce que la peinture a un autre objet que de nous figurer soit des scènes de la vie humaine, soit des lieux où elle s’encadre? Et la sculpture ne s’efforce-t-elle pas de nous rendre des images de créatures vivantes, tantôt isolées et tantôt réunies en groupe. De tous ces arts, on pourrait dire tout aussi justement qu’ils sont des représentations do la vie humaine, en d’autres termes des copies de la nature.

(From Quarante ans de théâtre: feuilletons p. 125. The English translation is from Brander Matthews’ translation, A Theory of the Theater p.20)

This is surprising, since already the Impressionists had begun to paint not ‘copies from nature’ but refigurements of what they saw, and put on canvas a bit of what they felt of what they saw.

We have learned in the West a bit more about the psychology of human perception since Sarcey wrote those words some 130 years ago. (In India they knew all this some 3,000 years ago.) We know that what we think we ‘see’ is no more than an excitation of some cells at the end of our optic nerves, from which the chemical messengers in our brain cells store the impressions. And we know that what we ‘remember’ is no more than an impression of those impressions. The impressions seem to be there, locked away for as long as we live, maybe, but what we can dredge up from them readily is only a sketch or approximation of those impressions.

What then could art be, but an attempt to capture those impressions? An impression of those impressions itself, rendered through the rough means of the medium itself.

Art is more or less abstract, and only music is more abstract than words.

It is true that Sarcey wrote of the ‘arts of imitation’ which include painting and sculpture and, for him, the theater. But a play is a tale as much as it is an imitation of life: it is an enactment of a tale, in fact, and a representation not of life but of a story. At its bottom a play is a tale much as the first tales told around the camp fire. Then one talesman would have voiced his different characters with different voices, and added on the voice of his own narrative; in a play the narrative is acted out, and different actors play the various parts. But the direct lineage to the theater from plain tales is clear.

Tales, then, are far removed from ‘la vie humaine’ and are more like memories, and memories are notorious for their inexactitude. In short, to paraphrase Mark Twain, every memoir is a lie; and every work of fiction is a lie atop a lie.

This distinction is not an idle one. We talesmen must bear it in mind, for if we can say that our tales are not copied from life but rather from memories, hopes, dreams, wishes, desires, then we can see how this plays into our strategies of toying with and exploiting the memories, hopes, dreams, wishes and desires of our audience.

And if we in the audience allow the tales we hear to be but drafts of memories, hopes, dreams, wishes and desires, then we will have a good basis on which to judge a tale and how well it works for us, and we will have a good guide to lead us to those tales, and those types of tales, that will best serve to satisfy us in our own memories, hopes, dreams, wishes and desires.

(Composed on keyboard Tuesday, March 25, 2008)