Page 73 [73]
CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
generates. We would become unfit for the life of culture”.*** To feel at home
in a culture we have to make some of its stories our own, interiorise some
of the understandings about our material and social surrounding. These
become parts of our selves. Bruner explains that “the symbolic systems that
individuals used in constructing meaning were systems that were already
in place, already ‘there’, deeply entrenched in culture and language. They
constituted a very special kind of communal tool kit whose tools, once used,
made the user a reflection of the community”.””
This has a twofold impact, on the one hand we are often not aware that
the stories we rely on as explanations of occurrences are cultural narratives, and
on the other hand the stories often offer a false sense of justice, manipulating
the human yearning for justice. Bond explains that a DE “shows the artificiality
of human behaviour”.”* He describes the culture we live in as a created fiction
and says that “the power of ideology is that it uses the humanising force —
our appetites, passions, needs — that binds us to the reality of nature, to bind
us to its psychotic fictions. We free ourselves from these fictions only by using
the same force”.”*! Bond claims that by understanding the created nature
of what we understand as reality we are able to question it. Ihe situations
on stage are recognised as fiction by the audience, so Bond suggests that in
drama “putting fiction into reality can isolate and dialecticise the fiction
already in it. It is a practical way to steal ideology’s clothes”.*” His plays are
stories, but he selects incidents that are central in understanding the relation
of the individual and society and opens them up in such a way “that they can’t
be captured by the story but must be examined for themselves in relation to
the story”.# These incidents become DESs.
The TE [DE] can use the cathexis of the ‘biological frisson’ to make the event
social. The same things are seen differently. TE breaks down the incidents and
uses their components. The use relates to other events in the drama. It shows that
events do not happen ‘naturally’. They are made up of part-events. Each part-event
is an occasion for interpretation and choice. TE puts the moment into the crucible
of the gap so that it may be examined. Part-events produce a meaning for the total
event. Instead of victims of events there are constructors of events.”“*
238 Ibid.
239 Tbid., 11.
240 Edward Bond: Pearl White, Notes on the TE of the Text, in The Hidden Plot, London,
Methuen, 2000, 45.
Edward Bond: The Third Crisis, in The Chair Plays, London, Methuen Drama, 2012, xxxix.
22 Bond: The Cap, xli.
243 Edward Bond: Edward Bond Letters, Volume 1., Ian Stuart (ed.): Camberwell, Harwood
Academic Publishers, 1994, 43.
244 Bond: Pearl White, 45.
©
24
&
726