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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
There is a constant parallelism between the two worlds. Bond says that “we see
and practice all things in two realities: physical reality and imagination. They
always interrelate”. Imagination is the human function that is able to fill
the gap created by the meaninglessness of matter, it is through our imagination
that the subjective reality is formed. The imagination uses different structures
in this process, one of these is the story form, the structure of narratives.
According to Bond the connection between narratives and the creation
of subjective reality can be traced back to when children give meaning to
the world by anthropomorphising objects, natural phenomena: “Animals and
trees talk, storm and wind are angry, the chair groans. These ‘beings’ are
arranged into stories which provide meanings. A story is a form of philosophy.
It involves imagination and so it involves the self — that which first sought
meaning, an existential relation to the world”.?°°
Children arrange the meaning they give to things and their relationship
to the world through stories. Bond argues that this is not only true on an
individual level, but also on a social one. He says that “all cultures interpret
reality through the extravagant use of imagination and this means that
reality is imagined”. Bond uses the term ideology to cover these culturally
transmitted interpretations of reality. There are so many interpretations of
this word that in his book titled Ideology Eagleton”® lists sixteen different
definitions of the word on the first pages. It is useful to offer a graspable
explanation of how Bond uses it. He describes ideology as “society’s story”,
a narrative through which “society speaks to us according to its needs in
a situation”, % a narrative that explains or helps individuals accept the given
social and economic structures of that specific society. ‘Society’s story’
encodes values and offers a social identity to individuals living in a culture
and becomes the reference points of their thinking, of their meaning
making. Ideology becomes a collective subjective reality, the codification of
the meaning of material reality in narrative structures.
Though ideology is mostly conveyed linguistically, Bond points out
that it “uses the whole of practical reality, its objects, acts and structures,
to make itself concrete”.2%* Narratives can be present on flags or shoes, in
coins and buildings. As Katafiasz?® points out, the way we use most of our
objects becomes automatic, it becomes a part of our unconscious, we become
unaware of how we use them, and also how they come to influence what
259 Bond: The Cap, xv.
260 Tbid., xxiii.
261 Bond: A short and troubled essay, 5.
262 Terry Eagelton: Ideology: an introduction, London, Verso, 1991.
263 Edward Bond: The Reason for Theatre, in The Hidden Plot, London, Methuen, 2000, 117.
24 Bond: Creation of imagination, 2.
Kate Katafiasz: ‘Stop acting!’: Drama, ideology and the psyche, Rua’ Tarbawyah, Qattan
Centre for Educational Research and Development, 23, 2007/1.
265
076.