Marxist Moments

Coming soon: Aesthetics: Marxism’s Achilles Heel?

See below this post: History and Drama

Interim Report

          Apologies for not keeping up the blog recently. A combination of (minor) health issues, the Royal Wedding at Windsor, and a major piece that I will be blogging shortly which turned out to take rather longer to write than I thought it would. But the hand is back on the tiller, as it were.

          Meanwhile, what’s been happening here and there recently as we cull the news?…. But first, an observation. It seems that whenever a TV soap is losing out in audience figures to its rivals, it creates a major Who Shot JR? episode – i.e. one catastrophe or another – that has audiences glued and draws viewers away from other soaps. This is now what is happening with the Tories in our present politics. We all thought Mrs May was doomed and through results of a combination of her lamentable errors would soon be out. And the people would recognise this shambles of a government for what it is, what with ministers openly slating each other and even the PM. 

Then – a last-minute reprieve! (Of one sort or another.) The PM is saved, at least till next week! This is soap-opera at its most viewable, and the trouble is that it is driving Labour and Jeremy Corbyn off the main pages and bulletins. If the Tories can keep up the torrid in-fighting we may see them pulling off yet another victory (however slim) from the jaws of death. That is if they can prolong the agony until such time as Press and people have forgotten who Jeremy Corbyn is.  Through no fault of his own.  Labour is desperate to be a party of unity but in fact is riven by very deep class fissures: that is, between a working-class and a middle-class element that in other times would have been Liberal. The Tories are a party currently of disunity and dwindling membership but at least all Tories think roughly the same: different enough to put on a little show now and then, but in class terms strikingly regimented when it comes to corporate neoliberalism in general. Of course bits of biscuit can be thrown to the ducks from time to time especially just before a general election, to allow a squeak in – and failing that, the constituencies can be scaled down in numbers to suit the Tories anyhow.

          The Skripal poisonings. In the i the canny Mary Dejevsky went over Yulia Skripal’s public statement and found that it raised more questions than it answered. Why didn’t Yulia blame Russia? In fact she says she hopes she’ll be able to return to her homeland in the future. There was no naming of the nerve agent that allegedly poisoned her. Was it a substance or a spray?  Where, exactly, did it take place? Why – beyond ‘Russia’ – have we had no suspects named whatsoever, even now? We have been advanced no motive for the crimes. Well, whatever: the alleged incident encouraged the British government to rally virtually the whole of the Western world to the anti-Russian cause. But now Donald Trump wants Russia to rejoin what used to be called the G8. So either the poisonings don’t matter or at least one of our leaders doesn’t really believe the story.

          Then we have the unveiling of the US’s F35B Lightning II, the most expensive aircraft of its kind and the most technically advanced of a new breed of ‘stealth’ fighters: that is, those that elude radar. The UK has ordered 48 of these jets from America at a cost of £9.1 billion, with the purchase of 90 more in the offing. Unfortunately, the craft are reported by a US  congressional committee not to have anything like the range needed to carry out long-distance missions. So they will need to be re-fuelled in mid-air by craft that cannot elude radar. Countless further billions will be required to develop a fleet of ‘stealth’ re-fuelling craft as well. Thank God Britain is in the black and looking forward to a strong overseas trading economy after leaving the EU,  and meanwhile we should be able to attack France.

          Finally, on 4^th June (Daily Telegraph Business), the IMF said that it had uncovered something like $12 trillion in so-called ‘phantom investments…investments in empty corporations almost always passing through well-known tax havens’. In other words, the money has been discovered, but nobody knows what’s happened to it: i.e. in the form of investing in anything. The IMF suggests finding ‘a better means of keeping track of the flow of funds’…

          I find it necessary to make my introduction briefly autobiographical:  having had an interest in both history (as a school subject) and theatre since boyhood, I opted for drama or ‘show business’; over a lot of years, I worked in it as a writer and script editor, producer and director. I made a mid-life ‘sideways move’ when I went over to an academic career in contemporary history, serving for yet more years as an historian and university teacher. I ended up having known both professions fairly well. (I wasn’t totally unique: one of the other staff history lecturers had had a previous working life for many years as a professional actor. Perhaps not surprisingly his lectures could be electrifying.)

          I could not escape my drama background when becoming a historian if I tried. I am the same person who worked in drama who was also deeply attracted to the study of history. Drama has its theoretical side - called dramaturgy - and I was always interested in that, but my work was necessarily orientated to the severely practical: writing, editing, directing and producing.  And, in the process, delivering audiences – or not, as the case might have been.

          This may not strike the reader as a very rigorous background, intellectually speaking. But there is a certain rigour lying in a drama practice whose results are often experienced in starkly contrasting terms of success or failure, or hovering uncertainly in between, which can be more frustrating than outright failure and is indubitably more frequent than either.  Complete disaster (if not frustration) resulting from one’s work and research is probably less frequent in the academic world of the historian than it is an everyday occurrence and risk in drama. Every public, for any medium, has to be won over each time and then engaged with the goings-on. Obtaining this result is a recognised and respected skill amongst dramatic practitioners, be they directors, producers, actors, writers and so on, though many may not grasp (or even wish to grasp, if too much “theory” is perceived as inhibiting creativity) the underlying structural fundamentals of achieving it. Knowing and doing can be two different things, but there is a knowing that is potentially possible, which is what dramaturgy is concerned with.  One area where the two endeavours are remarkably similar (while we are discussing success and failure) lies in the business of obtaining grant funding. As in historical research, much professional / community drama relies on funding bodies and has to make similar applications on similar types of form. Successful attracting of finance seems to come from a person remarkably similar in both fields: the one adept at convincing bodies to part with their money through a detailed and properly-worded steerage of proposals and estimates via bureaucratic committee-set forms and formulae.  This is a specialist ability whose outcome in the actual work may or may not come to obtain only the most tenuous claim to posterity’s attention.  I have known professional playwrights whose talent for gaining bursaries from official bodies was in almost inverse proportion to their creative ability, for above all they had mastered the committees, the forms and the estimates. The resulting play, which might be commissioned by a particular theatre for a guaranteed short run of, say, three weeks, did not have to meet with any marked success from the public, or achieve full houses, since the length of its run did not rely on daily box-office receipts. Credits for such productions (some quickly forgotten, if they ever registered, with the theatregoing public) soon build up a systematic dramatist’s portfolio, facilitating future grant funding and so on ad infinitum. Likewise, there may be historians whose ability to achieve funding for research projects will not necessarily be indicative of an outcome in a study of significance to the longer-term contribution to knowledge.  Ideally the two types of ability ought to go together (and I suggest they are more likely to do so within the historical discipline), but at the same time I hazard that this could breed a mentality in both areas which comes to identify ‘success’ primarily in terms of raising money, for which we might apply the adage: the goal is nothing; the journey is all.   

          The orientation of drama production towards the notion of success is what led me to a view of science as a human praxis whose purpose is never neutral but orientated also to human success, whatever the necessary objectivity of its instrumentalities. Both science and drama are aimed to reveal their respective insights into “the truth”, and for both “the truth” of the object in question is manifested in the success of the enterprise: for the scientist in the successful uncovering, measuring, predicting and/or harnessing and manipulation of scientific objects by dint of the object’s apparent response to what turn out to be correct scientific hypotheses and procedures; for the drama practitioner “the truth” purveyed in the dramatic exercise is “proven”, whatever the private misgivings of some professionals (and rivals), by the successful courting of an audience with the result of audience involvement and enthusiasm, perhaps with the play in question becoming established more or less permanently in the repertoire - or, in the media, being repeated and aired all around the world.  

          Drama is centred on human beings whether they are personified as humans or as animals, spirits or objects (as in much children’s theatre and in movie cartoons and computer-generated features).  Drama is always about the human condition. A disaster movie featuring avalanches is not about avalanches as such but ultimately about their impact upon human beings: the fears they invoke in people, the changes they wreak on a community and on the personalities and relationships of surviving individual human beings. The avalanche may be the “shock and awe” aspect of the spectacle of the movie (and spectacle is important in certain movie genres), but if that were all there were to it, the film would be pretty empty – as the failure of a string of Hollywood epics too reliant on the potency of special effects and not relying enough on human interest may show.  The theme of such a movie, however simple it may be, will evoke human awe for natural disasters, human vulnerability when up against the forces of nature, and the humility – and perhaps more generous humanity – that mighty natural elements on the rampage must induce.  Any drama or comedy for the stage is not about the objects on the stage (or apparently off-stage) but about the human beings wandering amongst those objects, whatever the nature of their interaction. Drama is necessarily “human centred”.

          Drama is focused, more specifically, on human motivation. To discover what a character is, find out what he or she wants – and wants more than anything else in the world, whether in the negative sense of escaping or avoiding something or in the positive sense of obtaining something, be it material, spiritual or whatever.  The plot is the worked-out story of the pursuance of (usually conflicting) human needs, whether in comical or in serious or melodramatic terms. The most serious – and commonest - flaw in the creation of a dramatic character is for the author to have supplied too weak a motivation, one that leaves the character insufficiently driven. It is the driven-ness that makes the drama and creates the story.

          There is also the specificity of dramatic situations, the unrepeatable uniqueness. Every story is about this character and group of characters, not about some other. Too generalised a concept of human life, one that is too abstracted from the specifics of particular lives and living, will seem only arid and perhaps over philosophical or didactic – or, on the other hand, too routine - to an audience. Even the medieval mystery and miracle plays on the grand themes of human destiny in biblical terms – the plays that form the beginnings of modern drama after the classical – are wonderfully endowed with small character touches of individual foible and personality, right up to God himself.

          The mention of those plays brings in another aspect: one might call it the dialectical opposite to the uniqueness, which is universality. A boy-meets-girl story is given its appeal through the freshness, realism and vigour with which the particular young persons are endowed, both in the writing and in the acting. But the temptation to see them as too individual or peculiar, that is as having a story so unique as to lack all relevance to members of the audience in their own lives (often encountered by the script reader as self-indulgently obscure longeurs on the part of the writer), has to be counteracted. Highly individual and unique elements are interpenetrated with situations, images and emotions that are universal: love as the universal condition of human beings, with which we might all identify in varying degrees of empathy. Fortunately there is no limitation of scope on this account. Good drama has to avoid the pitfall of stereotyping or over-generalising character and exploiting too-routine situations on the one side and – on the other – the pitfall of situating the story too far away from recognisable concerns that the audience might otherwise be able to read into it.  Drama exemplifies the truth that universal situations and problems are always encountered through the medium of specific events, people and environments: the first is inseparable from the second. 

          With this goes a tension that I suggest operates both in dramatic and in historical practice: the tension between ‘realism’ and reality. This can manifest itself, for example, in the work of that dramatist who has gone for the portrayal of ‘ordinary, everyday folk’ which yet seeks to cast them into – say – tragic adversity. But experienced tragedy has a propensity for bringing out highly unusual qualities, whether in life or in drama, and in the process revealing a reality lying beneath ‘realism’. One might refer to this as an opposition of the ‘typical’ and the ‘real’.  In drama, some kind of play development is required to turn ‘typical’ characters into real characters. In drama, life may be ‘typical’ until a series of events or cataclysms draws the reality out from under it. But if the dramatist in question has set his or her mind to the depiction of ‘typical’ people, come what may, are these characters capable of carrying the tragedy, of standing out from the crowd because a kind of fate has marked them to do this?  If not, then the tragic effect is not realised. If, in history, we substitute social, statistical, demographic trends and figures (and one sort of theory or model or another arising from these) for ‘realism’ and actual recorded events for ‘reality’, we might see how such a tension could arise in historical practice – experienced as a conflict between ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ evidence.  More than one historian has pointed to the pitfalls lying in the availability of ‘too much’ statistical evidence rather than its paucity or unavailability, for its abundance can make the business of historical narrative and interpretation tortuous.

          Drama requires human agency: characters in plays must be progenitors of their own destinies, given the circumstances in which they are landed. Dramatic characters in a good play can never be passive lay figures: each one contributes, positively or negatively, and not always deliberately, to the outcome. Because of this central feature of dramatic practice it is difficult for me to avoid a bias of my own towards history as the “history of men, real men” and women in the formulation of Marx and Engels; self-willed persons operating within inherited conditions and conventions. These motivated persons, individually and collectively, have laid schemes and plans and designs and formed movements that came to fruition, or came to grief, or were variously modified in various outcomes. Not to speak of occasionally practicing deception, whether on themselves, on each other or perhaps on posterity. Thus I found it impossible to embrace any concept of historical determinism that stresses the ineluctability of destiny or the passivity of human actors, whether individually or in the mass, though this does not rule out the grip of what they have inherited, the legacy or “dead weight” of their past, which is a challenge to any new departure or to dealing realistically with new obstacles and problems.  If anything it is my non-academic drama background that immunises me from the appeal and blandishments of, say, the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser, which denies the centrality of the human subject in history in favour of the centrality of “structures”.  But Althusser is only one of the more thoroughgoing of theorists in this respect; his programme has been carried further along in a wholesale “denial of the subject” which forms the intellectual agenda of postmodernism. Postmodernist critical theory has certainly become the orthodoxy of film studies in particular and cultural studies in general, but my own reading of drama, and my lengthy practical experience in it (though I must not succumb to the hubristic temptation of making too much of the latter) denies me very much in the way of pleasure from the reading of effusions of that body of theory.  

          History is eventful and unrepeatable; its human actors may bear comparison with one another as being from within one era and another but they are not successive clones. History is conflictual or else there would be no events to depict and interpret. Its natural medium is time passing. In all this there are more than slight or whimsical resemblances between history and drama.

          Drama’s instrumentality lies in its play upon human emotions. Without emotionally committed responses to it a play will be a dead thing. How can this possibly relate to a dispassionate and objective study of history?

          It is easy enough for tear-jerking melodrama to induce sentimental emotion – that is, emotion for the sake of emotion. A movie of this kind, typically catering for a perceived women’s audience more susceptible than the male to “feelings”, used to be called a “weepy”.  Legitimate drama does not quite work in this way, but through the instrumentality of shifting subjectivities. Like history, its natural medium is time passing, and our the audience’s apprehension of and empathy with subjectivity in individual characters shifts through time and the unfolding of the drama. We go for this protagonist, but in the course of dramatic time we go for that protagonist as the one with whom we empathise or sympathise; we spectators are for this one and then we are for that one, to the point where we find ourselves on both or all sides of the conflict. An additional complication in the shift of our sympathies is that individual characters themselves appear to alter either through dramatic pressure upon them or through successive revelations about them. Out of this we achieve an emotional synthesis through a process of successive engagements, with this and then that character, or with one character going through transformation before our eyes. The problem with melodrama is that it accords all “good” to one side and all “bad” to the other, and in this sense melodrama is debased drama, imposing a morality or pre-conceived moral parameters. It does not, as in legitimate drama, depart from within itself. Drama – perhaps much like the pagan mythology from which it derives - transcends “good and bad”, which is why a great drama, whilst appealing also to unashamedly emotional and even sensationalising tendencies, will have a fundamentally different effect from the melodrama because through its structuring it forces its audience to feel for each side – or for each side of a single character - similarly if not always simultaneously. One’s view of Hamlet, for example, or Macbeth or Othello, cannot but develop into a certain complexity; the resulting conflict in ourselves as audience leads us to what might be termed – after Aristotle – a purgation.  Drama taught me as a historian that one will engage in committed fashion with each historical actor and/or collective manifestation in turn; the result of which is a complex process of engagement, disengagement and re-engagement which differs from a superficial and spurious assumption of impartiality from the outset (and, in drama, a superficial automatic reflex of sympathy-empathy also from the outset).  This “shifting subjectivity” in historical study is reflected by the various about-turns experienced in the course of primary research. It is unlikely that any historical researcher is not emotionally engaged with his or her material in the course of research, and it is unlikely that one who studies, for example, Napoleon for ten or twenty years will feel the same about him emotionally at the end of that time as at the beginning, given the accumulation of knowledge and insight. Theatre audiences, too, are put through the experience of testing and deepening their responses against seemingly conflicting “facts” and arguments. And this could also go on for ten or twenty years, if for example one sees the same play of Shakespeare’s several times over that period and perhaps comes to different conclusions each time (influenced, no doubt, by different productions, themselves evolving through our collective and long-time experience with the same play). I have responded to that classic Ealing comedy The Man in the White Suit many different ways through my many times of having seen it. When I first saw it as a child, I thought it was funny. In my more romantic adolescence I saw its story as that of the supreme individual pitting himself against (parental?) insensitive authority. Later on I saw it as the forces of capitalism crushing the spirit of human freedom. In time – as a professional myself if in a less exalted way - I came to admire its purely professional accomplishment – its direction, angles of shooting, cutting and so forth. Over time, however, my feelings and responses to it have become – I believe, anyhow – more complex than any one of the above manifestations though in a sense my current reaction incorporates all of them. Perhaps a definition of a great picture is that of its being able to evoke responses on so many levels, sometimes simultaneously in one viewer.

A “whodunit” poses an interesting instance of delayed melodrama and moral judgment in all this: we have to suspend our judgment on who is “good” and who is “bad” (i.e. the killer) finding to ourselves that most or all of the characters seem to all be pretty bad or all quite good or at least harmless, some maybe better than others. Then, when the killer is unmasked, we revel in his or her sheer, unadulterated badness, and so the melodramatic is restored to the whole offering, which up till then in certain whodunits may have been more forensic than dramatic.

 Historians are rightly suspicious of any history depicted more or less simplistically in terms of “good guys” and “bad guys”, but the sense of detachment derived from successive engagements with first this and then that historical protagonist (individual and/or collective) is resolved in a synthetic commitment which is more than purely intellectual, just as the synthetic commitment outcome in the audience for legitimate drama is more than purely emotional. In cases both of history and of drama because a process of apprehension has had to be gone through which has, in the course of this, picked up all sorts of complications that make undiluted intellect on the one hand or undiluted emotion on the other impossible responses.

          There are certain similarities in dramatic and historical problematics. One of these is to do with periodisation. What are the compelling reasons for setting such-and-such a topic between the years 1820 and 1890 as opposed to setting it between, say, 1780 and 1870? Periodising a study poses one of its greatest challenges, since history left to its own devices stretches back eons and otherwise simply goes on and on. The emerging periodisation of a study has to do with what one comes to want to say about the topic, one’s particular interpretation in the light of considered evidence. In drama, this problematic for the playwright can be termed point of attack and resolution – the one commencing the play and the other finishing it. When, in the assumed sequence of events, does the action of the play itself begin, and where along the way might one effect a significantly culminating ending? Again, as with the historian, this depends on what the theme of the play is, what the author is trying to say through it, what statement about the action taken as a whole is to be made. Historians who have a more or less contingent or non-thematic view of the histories they are undertaking are likely to find periodisation particularly arbitrary. They are somewhat like the substandard dramatist who, being weak on the interpretation of the dramatic events he or she is trying to depict, will find both a convincing point of attack and a resolution hard to come by.

          Related to that problematic is the one of narrative versus structure, diachronicity versus synchronicity. Plays depict not only courses of events but also the structure of situations which forms a more or less static or stable foundation and constant background for those events. The stage is both a setting for dynamic action and a static tableau. Scenic construction requires a multi-layered approach: stage traffic (entrances and exits) and stage business and action have to be integrated with the dialogue in a form of elaborated structure. In a comedy, for example, aural wit is blended with appropriate scenic design and lighting and scenic action, perhaps slapstick. Drama is deep structure as well as storytelling in the medium of dramatic time: establishing the relationship between the two is a major problematic. Similarly, and without prejudice so far as my views on Althusser remain, the historian is faced with the tension between narrative unfolding in a time sequence and devotion to a structural analysis of situations which are “outside of time” when considered as such. A history with no structural analysis would be children’s storybook history; on the other hand, a history without chronological drive and direction would more closely resemble sociology with a period setting.

          Another problematic, already alluded to, lies as between specificity and universalisation. Every play must focus on specific individuals in specific settings, yet a play which does not provide something of more universal relevance and significance, through a theme, would be of little interest to those in the audience who had not themselves come up against or experienced the specificities. When we speak of an in-joke we refer to something shared amongst members of an exclusive set which cannot be shared by outsiders; the dramatist will have to take that group’s experience and impart to it a comedy in which anyone can share, which means introducing some or other element of universality elevating the in-joke to something of wider implication. This problematic may be less clear to the historian, who in any case is usually dealing in highly specific history. Still, that history has to be contextualised from time to time, and historians will recognise a distinction to be made between the historian and the antiquarian. The antiquarian might be said to delight in amassing arcane facts for their own sake, like a hobbyist collector, rather than concerned to draw wider-embracing thematic conclusions.

          Where historical and dramatic practice may be said to contrast is in their respective appeals to contrasting forms of truth-telling. Broadly speaking, the historian appeals to the correspondence theory of truth, whereas the dramatist subscribes to the coherence theory of truth. A history is validated by its correspondence to the real world whereas a drama is validated by its internal cohesion which lends strength to its plausibility. History need not be plausible; indeed, historians are rightly suspicious of any historical construction of events which is so plausible as to seem more convincing than the evidence (and evidence is often very awkward) may warrant. Drama need not refer to any real event in the outside world in order to seem to impart a significant truth about human life. Yet there is an interesting degree of overlap. If the historian cannot come up with a coherent interpretation his or her treatment may well be superseded by one that can, and even the emphasis in the original research may be called into question. If the dramatist evinces no understanding of human behaviour in the real world – and, indeed, carries out no research whatever on the subject matter – the play will fail to correspond to human experience and might stand accused of failing to depict accurately or realistically the environment or characters it depicts.

          I will not in this paper venture forth into dialectical propositions as affecting both history and drama, with one exception: something to do with syntheses of preceding conflictual elements, or negation of the negation. In drama, the form of the play is a process of conflict between forces leading to an outcome that transcends both. The most time-honoured ending of a comedy is marriage, that is, reflecting an instinctive recognition that marriage is a qualitatively different state and a synthesis out of whatever relations existed before. Outcomes of developments incorporate what they have superseded. I will offer only one example from history but the reader is invited to find others: Louis XVIII of France did not simply succeed to the Bourbon throne in 1815 as if nothing had happened meanwhile. He attempted to reconcile previous conflicts, under Revolutionary and Bonapartist regimes – with his dynastic restoration. Historical developments do not simply succeed each other, they supersede each other. There is a temptation to embed a “law of progress” in all this, but “progress” as commonly understood may be far from what is going on here and there. Hitler superseded all middle-European movements of anti-Semitism and xenophobia and brought on a qualitative change – Nazism – that descended into a barbarism we are still attempting to reconcile with a concept of what it is to be “modern”.

          Perhaps it remains for all this to be developed in rather more detail; for the present a paradigm of drama is put forward as being just as suitable a means of approaching history as any other that I have read and considered. The intention here is not to suggest that all this intimates an elision of historical study into fictional drama – that is, to reduce or collapse history into a form of fictional literature and entertainment. Indeed, we must make these various comparisons in the process of making our distinctions. It is merely to suggest that an art such as drama has something to offer towards a comprehension of historical projects, and that this is a useful corrective against those views advanced which advocate a strictly dichotomous science/non-science approach to historical study; that is, to say that history should be modelled necessarily upon a scientific paradigm such as might suit a social or physical science. And – by the same token – saying that if history does not reach this requirement satisfactorily, then – ineluctably – it must be a kind of fiction, presented as an array of fictional tropes and genres. Yet if one conceives of history in the broader sense of Wissenschaft or learned study, then this consideration of a parallel artistic paradigm spoken of in the same breath with history should present no problems.  Perhaps those with some experience in the actual fiction industry are in a useful position to be able to distinguish between fiction and interpretation, while some of those who have spent their lives wrestling solely with the conundrum of fact may be more vulnerable to the abstracting blandishments of a ‘critical theory’ that collapses fact into fiction.