Trip in the Wayback Machine

January 13, 2000

Henrik Ibsen - Hedda Gabler

- one of his most influential plays, The Dolls House, focuses on a woman who believes she loves her husband, but soon realizes that she is unloved by him and leaves; at the time, the play was controversial because of this aspect.

- most of Ibsen's plays revolved around certain issues. His plays are sometimes called "problem plays," and later perceived as character sketches or character studies.

- Hedda Gabler is, supposedly, a character of great depth and complexity.

- Hedda is a fierce individualist and proud of her family, etc.

- Her marriage at the age of 30 seemed quite percuilar; since Tesman approaches professorship, she desires materialistic wealth in order to be happy.

- The aunt was not upset upon hearing the death - runs parallel to Thea's reaction to Eidet's death, same with Tesman's reaction at the end.

- Hedda is surrounded with shallow and transparent characters...

- The allusion to the wine-leaves in Eilert's hair refers to Dionyesus, the god of wine and excess. Eilert represents what Hedda wants to do; Hedda is heemed into routine, at times on the verge of tedium.

- Hedda flirts with the judge, but does not initiate an affair.

- Hedda does not want to come under the power of the judge; she kills herself to escape it all - scandal, Tesman, and etc.

- Conventionally, a character rebels against society; but in Hedda Gabler, the rebel is a product of society - the dancing and glantary: idyllic conception of life.

- Hedda has very strong emotions, and the dramatic elements creates the atmosphere of its conclusion.

- Hedda and Eilert were once almost lovers. Her apprehension about society's expections leaves her afraid of her own sexual desires.

- Hedda and Thea are contrasting characters, foils.

- Hedda tries to destroy everything during the play. Her "beautiful" death at the end triumphs over everything that trampled her.

1) Why is the play named after her?
2) How does her vision of her father affect her life?
3) Why does Hedda play a frenzied dance melody before her death?

- Hedda was raised under the influence of her military father; that translated into her married life.

- Hedda's manipulation and control over Locuborg - drinking and killing - was her desire to do something to gain control over her life.

- Hedda's suicide could also be a custom to escape dishonour - possibly a final conformist act.

- Is there a psychological nature to Ibsen's plays.

January 27, 2000

Luigi Pirandello - Six Characters in Search of an Author
(Sei Personaggi in Cerca d'Autore)


- An early twentieth century play, part of a shift away from realism.

- Pirandello is very important to modern drama, due primarily to this shift.

- He does not present a slice of life, he concerns himself with theoretical and philosophical issues - identity and reality, etc.

- He explores the inability of language to express what is "intended", the difficulty of communicating with another.

- He explores the variability of personality - life illusion to stage illusion.

- Note the relativity of perception to time, place, mood, personality, and even the state of one's digestive process.

- the play is about embodied characters who may or may not be "immortal". In spite of the author's death, the characters in the play live on, in search of another "creator". They live on as far as their author allows them to.

- The characters enter to plead to the actors to play their story, as the actors rehearse "The Rules of the Game".

- Characters found a platform for their story. They insist their story is much more significant than the one the actors are currently undertaking.

- This puts the notion of reality in question; the theatre is inadequate in portraying reality.

- Pirandello critiques the usual conventions of the play. Much of the play is a critique of the medium of theatre.

- The producer tries to produce a more sentimental scene, despite the sorrid scene involving the father and stepdaughter.

- There is a paradoxical notion that theatre is truer than life; fixed fictional characters may be truer than the ever changing real beings, the actors.

- Characters on stage are expected to be consistent and not "out of character", i.e. father is fixed in one moment of his life, with the stepdaughter.

- The author left the little girl or boy without personalities: undeveloped character.

- The characters are frustrated in their attempts to extend their fixed identities. They do not, like human beings, have to try to unify the various aspects of their personality and identity.

- It is very difficult to portray the various aspects of human personality.

- Human beings have moods, impressions, expressions, social masks, beliefs that can't be fully integrated; the problem is that we try to unify these aspects, and Pirandello believes this integration is impossible - some often try, rather futilely, to rationalize the discrepencies that arise in life.

- As the history of the family unfolds, the outer action merges with the inner action.

- As the chaos of the final scene unfolds, reality and "make-believe" blur together. The traditional narrative is partially embedded into the unconventional?

- Henry Barrackson, in his ideas regarding the immutability of human identity, and Ibsen's strong grasp of "inner life" influence Pirandello. Ibsen portrays the inner life of characters, even though the inner thoughts of the characters are not available to the audience.

- Pirandello may be seen as an influence on Camus, Beckett, and other contemporary absurdists.

- Are there ways the character can achieve independence from the author? In literature? In "everyday"?

- Think about the play "within" the play.

- Is the boy dead? In what ways is he? In what ways is he not?

- Henri Bergson - talked about intuition; he said time is an experienced duration; emphasized the creative process over the scientific process; a forerunner of existentialism?

- Even when they found an author, they never found an author.

- Their illusion is their independence.

- The "actors" are portrayed as hams?

- The characters can't escape their roles, the son tries to escape the cyclical performative.

Guinness

The Guinness sign reflects my image back to me, here in this "beer-room". The great unknown, the veritable mystery of life, lies before me, with my gaze turned upon itself. The Guinness sign reveals my inner defiance, my fire, my lack, my absence, my fear, my desire for kitsch, my eros, my playfulness, and misery...that's there somewhere...somewhere...misery that's not mine, but foisted upon me by circumstance. I slam my head into the sign. The crowd converges over me, chattering aimlessly, as I bleed over into the unknown.

Tis' better to have loved and lost...

More than love, less than lust, I felt inexplicably drawn to her. Lovelier there are lovelier ones than her. Her uniqueness savages the plainness of appearances. She is a fearsome creature, delivering me to pain at every turn. I want her punishment, a relentless stream of heartbreak, pain, and sorrow. I want to shed those ecstatic tears. I want to feel pleasure and pain in equal parts. Death by pleasure and pain rolled into one...what bliss! Misery...I want to live with misery on my head. The marks...the wounds...display my love for her.

Will

The wonky ceiling fan dangles precariously as it finishes its revolutions. It shall fall onto my balding skull and finish me off for good. Can I will it to fall? Will? What an odd thing will is. Can you decieve yourself and every one else? You have no will, why fake it? The fan shall dangle precariously for the night, but I can't will it to fall - it will do it on its own accord, when gravity overpowers its weakened structure. There is no will. Will becomes a miraculous overcoming of all human limitations in the noetic mind and rendered useless, a pipe dream.

MUST

I stared, attempting to will an impossible transformation. Nothing. Only Stillness. Still just a pathetic creature contemplating the empty universe without any means to change it. Action, so elusive, so far from convention, appropriated by expectation. You MUST, they goon. Where to then? Liberty is a MUST, you must spend, consume, dispose, fuck, spawn, cherish, and on and on and on. MUST is a loaded word. Everything's loaded.

Eighteen

In adolescence I lived according to an erroneous assumption: life begins at eighteen. To the uninitiated, eighteen years as a living, breathing, and - most importantly - consuming creature is like the sudden burst of a cocoon – the unveiling of an idyllic life free of constraints. Alas, the uninitiated, blessed with a belly-full of optimism, often grow up to be twenty-nothings smoking pot in their parent’s basement. For others, eighteen is like any other any other grey non-descript milestone marking the long winding path leading to an anticlimactic end – dribbling onto an adult bib while being spoon-fed by an obese nurse, that is if you’re lucky. For me - because my own account assuredly has an unparalleled internal significance - eighteen was an inauspicious occasion. I made love to my seventeen year old girlfriend for the first time as a legal person. And somewhere in the dank recesses of my wretched mind, she remains a nubile forbidden seventeen; pink boundless lust stretching from head to toe.

The event has significance only in the larger historical context. It was to be our last encounter; the relationship soured and we went our separate ways. She moved on. I didn’t. That’s eighteen for me – a sumptuous fantasy suspended in the cold comfort of fleeting eternity.

“Eighteen years young and never to be the same,” my father told me with his mouth half-full with partly chewed birthday cake. Somewhere at this imaginary moment, when the reader discovers the writer’s wretched word, someone on the verge of an eighteenth birthday bathes in a porcelain tub of once immaculate waters spiritised by self-inflicted crimson. Another steps deliberately onto the seat of a black swivel chair – positioned and readied for the bed sheet noose. Another chooses a spectular sudden end and empties the barrel of a handgun into their skull. On my eighteenth, thoughts darker than these disturbed the ubiquitous sense of optimism orbiting me, the ever so special birthday boy. But nothing came of it. An instinctive fear of death and a boundless weariness about the vast unknown assurances that lay beyond held me back from the abyss. Nevertheless, there are those bold, brave, and honest souls who choose to end it in the prime of their youth, on the cusp of maturity, rather than bear the lukewarm stagnation of those etc. years following eighteen. They are pure Beings, who stand defiantly against the tide of change, and destroy themselves rather than be swept along. You see, those who idealize eighteen as the completion of freedom are naïve enough to believe that freedom is simply the ability to mortgage debt, drive a car, buy smokes, buy alcohol, legally buy pornography, and etc. Alas, when you’re eighteen, sugary presumptions are hard to swallow. You choke a bit, cough it up, and meticulously examine the hideous bile of naïveté; its beauty lies in its chameleon nature, its ability to take any form evolved by an enchanted mind. Naïveté has its origin in a most narcissistic emotion, romantic love. As a hapless romantic, still dwelling on unrequited affection, I can tell you that I am at once honest and duplicitous, self-deprecating and invariably self-absorbed. Alas, that is the condition of a stubborn fool still green and in constant fear of his surroundings, clinging to a long lost impossibility - with utter disregard to present or future.

One who passes through eighteen stands before a long portentous road snaking towards an unavoidable conclusion: death. In order to distract from the omnipresent possibility of having to face their own mortality, individuals convince themselves that they are in love with someone else – their “better half”, “partner”, or “beloved” – to repress a prior and essential impulse for self-love.

Woody Allen may have been onto something: "What's wrong with masturbation? It's sex with someone I love."