Page 73 [73]
OCR
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
