By contrast, Europeans, but especially British tend to have the right balance between the emotional and the intellectual/introspective. For that matter, Russians tend to go to much into social/philosophical while abandoning the personal/emotional... Woj
----
This is the heart of the matter and it is something that only a few writers I've read understand well enough to create these kinds of layers---done in terms of `naturalism' which is something different than `realism'.
One of key features of theater is that everything has to be said. There are no voice overs, no master narrative. If somebody didn't say it, imply it, or make some gesture toward it, or if it can't be found quickly as an implication of what another character said or did, then most likely it doesn't exist as a dramatic element of the composition. This forces the writer to compact and compound the dialogues, monologues, and character interactions, timing, appearance or absence with all the implications of emotive, dramatic, and symbolic meaning that he or she can manage. Because this is pretty much a Herculean task, the stage director becomes something like a master conductor and the players become something like master soloists in a concert. Or more simply, a play doesn't exist until it is played, and played well. This peculiarity of the stage is why Beckette insisted on directing most of his own plays, while he still could. There is so little dialogue/monologue in his work that B went to extraordinary directorial lengths to creat a stage presence as a gestalt---as if the presence on stage was an unseen character, where the actors were reduced to masks, caricatures, and almost empty hulls.
My own opinion is that American actors and actresses don't read enough---or write. It takes a long time to figure out this dimension in literature---and it takes an especially long time familiarity (or some intimate identification) with an individual work to create this level of interpretation.
If you want to get a Hamlet that is more than the sad end to a mama's boy with his balls in his mouth and his head up his ass, you've got to work at it. I dropped in on a Shakespeare class for several weeks at the Uni of Iowa, in the grad level drama dept where the prof took Hamlet apart scene by scene just as a director would, in other words from Shakespeare's point of view. I did the same thing occasionally (with a buddy from Iowa) at SF State out here. There was an especially good drama teacher there, who was also an actor and occasionally appeared in professional productions. He looked like Othello, but I've forgotten his name. These were some of the best lit classes I ever had, because they deal directly with the multiple layers of a narrative.
It's this kind of detailed thinking about dramatic arts that made it possible to transformed Romeo and Juliet into West Side Story.
For some bizarre reason my son and his buddies were assigned Romeo and Juliet in the seventh grade. I had to go through part of it scene by scene as if I was re-creating West Side Story, in order to make it `real' to them. I told them, the opening scene is Romeo and his gang squared off in a show down with swords drawn on Juliet's father's pages (I think). Boys with knives acting tough, showing off dicks. Street gangs in the mall, where everybody has a little sister and her virginity is the issue. No dirty Jet dick is getting near my baby sister... Too late dude. I had her last month, and now I am working on your mother. So just in case you can't figure it out, your father's an fool, and you act just like him.
Stuff like that.
But getting back to how to compound a narrative with more than just an emotive naturalism or the build up to some dramatic act, like killing the main character. Some works manage this level and many more and appeared to me almost transparent.
There is a truly great example of how to creat this sort of transparency in multiple layers in Joseph Conrad's The N-word of the Narcissus.
Yes it is rife with 19thC racism, in its paternalistic, great white father way on one level. But, if you can get beyond that, and it takes considerable doing for modern US readers, you can get to see how a single character's fate determines, or rather encapsulates the heart and soul of a sea voyage from Bombay to London around the Cape. The title character (Jim Wait) was hired in Bombay as the cook's mate. At first the crew literally fall in love with Jim. But along the east coast of Africa Jim falls sick and gets sicker, the further they head toward the Cape and colder waters. Jim is rescued or kept alive by his ship mates in a storm near the Cape or just after. I forget. Here is the after the storm passage:
``On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest. Through the perfect wisdom of its grace they are not permitted to meditate at ease upon the complicated and acrid savour of existence. They must without pause justify their life to the eternal pity that commands toil to be hard and unceasing, from sunrise to sunset, from sunset to sunrise; till the weary succession of nights and days tainted by the obstinate clamor of sages, demanding bliss and an empty heaven, is redeemed at last by the vast silence of pain and labour, by the dumb fear and the dumb courage of men obscure, forgetful, and enduring.
The master and Mr. Baker coming face to face stared for a moment, with the intense and amazed looks of men meeting unexpectedly after years of trouble. Their voices were gone, and they whispered desperately at one another.--"Any one missing?" asked Captain Allistoun.--"No. All there."--"Anybody hurt?"--"Only the second mate."--"I will look after him directly. We're lucky."--"Very," articulated Mr. Baker, faintly. He gripped the rail and rolled bloodshot eyes. The little grey man made an effort to raise his voice above a dull mutter, and fixed his chief mate with a cold gaze, piercing like a dart.--"Get sail on the ship," he said, speaking authoritatively and with an inflexible snap of his thin lips. "Get sail on her as soon as you can. This is a fair wind. At once, sir--Don't give the men time to feel themselves. They will get done up and stiff, and we will never... We must get her along now"...''
Then as the ship follows up the west coast of Africa, some of the crew set up a mystical death watch over Jimmy. During the end phase of the death watch there are moments of labor revolt, as the crewmen contemplate their own fate and Jim's immenant death at sea. Mention of owners, cargo, what's it all for? Simply this? Mutiny is threatened. The captain with uncanny insight, commands Jim to hole up even if he as been pretending all along. The captain sees Jim is in fact a few weeks or maybe days away from dying. It is a moment of grace granted to a man for his own dignity.
``And in the confused current of impotent thoughts that set unceasingly this way and that through bodies of men, Jimmy bobbed up upon the surface, compelling attention, like a black buoy chained to the bottom of a muddy stream. Falsehood triumphed. It triumphed through doubt, through stupidity, through pity, through sentimentalism. We set ourselves to bolster it up from compassion, from recklessness, from a sense of fun. Jimmy's steadfastness to his untruthful attitude in the face of the inevitable truth had the proportions of a colossal enigma--of a manifestation grand and incomprehensible that at times inspired a wondering awe; and there was also, to many, something exquisitely droll in fooling him thus to the top of his bent. The latent egoism of tenderness to suffering appeared in the developing anxiety not to see him die. His obstinate non-recognition of the only certitude whose approach we could watch from day to day was as disquieting as the failure of some law of nature...''
Each leg of the journey after Jim's death, gets colder and colder, in my mind, even as the ship makes better time and sails more easily as if a huge burden has been lifted, and the voyage heads to the north Atlantic and home. All the spirit and comraderie die with each passing degree of latitude, until at last a bleak, hollow crew, man the Narcissus up the Thames into a commercial dock lined with warehouses and wet quays. Home is the white coldness of empire and capital. The ship's crew disembarks and heads for the shipping office to collect their pay. All the rich color of human adventure, all the trials and tribulation are gone, all the danger, all of life itself has bled out and they are returned to the cruelly empty streets where they go their separate ways, as if they were carrying away pieces of flesh like small carrion birds from a once great beast, home to chew on and remember.
Through out the whole novel, we never actually meet or see the narrator of the tale, until the very end. He emerges from his own narrative just as the ship makes dock. He speaks to other characters as if he has disappeared as the narrator and joined the story in another point of view. Outside the pay office the narrator has a brief conversation with one of the other mates, where he declines to go drinking and walks by himself down the street. It is as if he is made suddenly real and all his narrative magic is gone.
(I got lost all day re-reading passages of this novel. It was a cold wet day and nothing else to do, but forget work. Apologies to Dennis Claxton's excellent post on LA skid row. Just a point on that. Patient dumping starts in the governor's office and the legislature as they cut Medical (also in DC as President Bush and the Congress cut Medicaid) and proceeds to the county and local hospital billing offices were they are forced to decide between housing the homeless in beds for free, or turn them out to the streets to get sick and come back, as they always do.)
CG