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FURTHER EXAMINATION OF THE BONDIAN ÁPPROACH
the relation of reality and fiction; the concept of self and radical innocence;
and the role of the audience as defined in the difference between approaches
of Bond and Brecht. Finally, I summarise my findings.
Confusing Reality and Fiction — Ideology
Bond argues that although “the universe is meaningless”, human beings
need to understand the world they live in, they need to make meaning of their
surroundings, because “a child that finds no meaning for anything would
become demented”.*** Understanding the surrounding reality is the process
of giving meaning to meaningless matter, and events happening around us.
Bond explains it through an example.
Physical cause-and-effect occurs in nature. It makes us aware of itself. But we
read into this our understanding of why things happen in nature. We know why
the rock falls, the rock doesn’t know. So for us nature has this extra dimension.
But how do we know the reason for cause-and-effect, the meaning it has for us?
[...] It’s as if there were a gap between cause and effect. We explain why the effect
follows the cause.?°7
The gap referred to by Bond above is a central element in his theory. The gap
between cause and effect in this case, or between matter and its value, or action
and its meaning are filled up through the use of imagination, and the meaning
or the value of reality is actually created in the mind of the individual as it
structures these interpretations into an image of the world. Bond explains
that “we can know the objective world only through our subjective presence
in, and awareness of, the objective world. It’s as if there were two realities:
the objective reality and the subjective, conscious, reality”, 5 this latter one is
the understanding of the objective reality in the mind. This subjective reality
is constantly re-created as individuals experience events and Bond also links
it to the formation of the self, a topic that I will discuss in the following
section.
When we do something in the real world, in the objective reality, our
actions are guided by our understanding of it, our subjective reality. Even if
we understand the gap between the two, we cannot help but act according to
our subjective understanding of what we are doing, but at the same time we
also cannot defy the laws of nature, we cannot be solely in an imagined reality.
255 Bond: A short and troubled essay, 8.
256 Ibid.
57 Edward Bond: Drama and Reality, unpublished notebook entry 6th December 2011, 1.
2588 Edward Bond: Creation of imagination, Unpublished notebook entry, Personal
communication, 3 September, 2012, 1.