It's slowly coming together. I'm reinventing the status quo. The census man cries foul. I wipe my hands on my apron and sic the dogs on him.
As a consequence of performing the duties of my new position, I'm learning brevity. I'm thinking more about structure. I'm thinking of people's feelings. I'm thinking about the words that fall trippingly off the tongue, stinging and bruising and beating and such. I'm thinking I'll take a long lunch.
Kidding. Joke. My work ethic's Kevlar'd. Embrace new verbs!
"I've got a darkness... that I have to feed... I've got a sadness... that grows up around me like a weed..." Jukebox, Ani DiFranco.
AND now, old reader--I say "old reader," just as, if I were talking to you, I should say "old man," because I know you are a man, and a young one to boot. No women, speaking generally, are dramatists, or seem to desire to become so. Seeing how they dominate all other branches of imaginative literature, this is curious. I suppose it is that they are undramatic by nature. Their whole mental organisation is opposed to the directness, the silence which constitute, as it were, the two thunder-clouds from which the lightning of "action" (that is, "drama") springs. Take George Eliot, who, of all women writers, approaches the nearest in her instincts to the dramatic. Two splendid scenes of hers occur to me at this moment, both pregnant with drama in its highest form, and both spoilt, from a dramatic point of view, by eloquent description and philosophical comment. The one is Silas Marner's finding of the child; and the other the death of Maggie Tulliver and her brother, Tom, swamped in the flood, by the old mill, where as children they had lived and played. Scenes such as these, in the hands of a true dramatist, would be made to speak for themselves, and say all that could be said, without one word from the author. Every line of argument or explanation weakens incident. It is like draping a statue. But a woman's mind, I am sure, could never be made to grasp this fact. A woman would never be content to let the audience imagine her hero's grief and despair. When Reginald returns to his home to find a note from Anastasia, announcing her departure with Alphonse, the foreign villain, it would never be sufficient, in her idea, for Reginald to exclaim, "My God!" and sink into chair, L.C. "as Curtain, &c." She would give Reginald a ten minutes' soliloquy, in which he would explain to the house by the aid of heartrending adjectives that he was awfully upset--that he should never have believed it--that he could'nt understand it--and that he had loved her with a love, &c. But enough on this subject of women (women are always leading us men astray), and the impossibility of their becoming dramatists. It is of, and to, the people who can and may become dramatists that I wish to say a few parting words.
PLAYWRITING: A HANDBOOK FOR WOULD-BE DRAMATIC AUTHORS. BY A DRAMATIST. 1888. From Gaslight
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