I asked John:
Do this, John: Give us an example of what you hope to find when
> you successfully pursue access to Emily's deciding?
John replied:
"I'll get back to you in this tomorrow, but meanwhile I'll give you an
example of what Nabokov did find when he successfully pursued access
to Flaubert's deciding:
"I want to draw attention to Flaubert's use of the word 'and' preceded
by a semicolon. This 'semicolon-and' comes after an enumeration of
actions or states or objects; then the semicolon creates a pause and
the 'and' proceeds to round up the paragraph, to introduce a
culminating image, or a vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy,
or amusing." He then quotes several instances of this technique at
work in "Bovary", and goes on to enumerate several other comparable
techniques in the book."
I respond:
Nabokov's reflections on Flaubert's use of the semi-colon do have their
interest, and, indeed, their utility for would-be "creative writers". I'm a
playwright. I have learned that theater professionals are regularly irked by
what they consider an excess of "stage directions" in the script, especially
speech-delivery instructions ("angrily", "dismissively", "ardently",
"slowly", "oozing contempt and boredom").
Still, as a playwright listening to actors give my script its open-book
first reading, I used to be startled occasionally by an actor's "misreading" -
delivering the line with a totally wrong tone because he didn't grasp what
the character was "thinking" as he spoke.
To keep the "stage directions" to a minimum, and yet enhance the chances
the actor would "get" what the character was about at that moment, I worked at
developing a "craft" of using typographical and punctuational guides, much
like what Nabokov was discussing in Flaubert.
Dramaturgy textbooks tend to struggle at conveying a distinction between
what might be called the "craft" and the "art" of playwriting. I think there
are certain generic "lessons" that a playwright can learn, and that therefore
can be taught. In an arbitrary verbal stipulation, I'd call the things that
can be learned "craft". This is not to diminish their importance. I aim
to occasion a.e.'s in the audience, and the canny use of learned craft can
be key to that.
Nevertheless, the learnable elements of craft are a cut below the
unlearnable inspired inventions and decisions always displayed in plays that
occasion
a.e.'s in me.
To the extent that a study of a given playwright's use "craft" would
satisfy John's desire to understand the "making" of "a work of art", he could
find
a wealth of it in the many handbooks and "how-to's" available on the
playwriting shelf in the library.
Those of you who are still reading this unexciting posting may find some
interest in the following paragraph that now appears in the front matter of
any script I write:
SCRIPT NOTE
Deciding a pre-production script-style for silent readers and the company
simultaneously can be problematic. Many of the stage directions,
word-stresses, three-dot pauses, and phoneticized accents in the script are
primarily
for lay-readers, designed to convey attitudinal postures and expressions,
emphases, potential pacing, and other clues their inner eye and ear may not
easily contribute. They are descriptions of what I saw and heard as I wrote, so
perhaps they may be helpful in discerning authorial intent, but they are not
an attempt to micro-manage the director or the actors. I write this
preemptive note for those hands-on theater-professionals who much prefer not to
be
treated as other than exactly that - creative professionals who know their
art.
