Sunday, 17 November 2019

'Memory is biased. None of us is a Proust, existing in a corked roomful of memories'

Arthur Laurents | Psychological Realism

Thus far we have deliberated on Realism in theatre, within the rubrics of ‘Art for Truth’s Sake’ that seeks to emphasise on a greater fidelity of real life both to texts and to their staging as well!

Realism takes under its wings some of its associated genres that include Naturalism, Social Comedy, Social Realism and their related ilk!

Realism hence focuses on ‘real life’ situations, real people in real life-situations, who have to grapple with real-life’s daily problems. In short, realism on stage, seeks to focus on ‘what people do’ and ‘why they do’ it, in a given context, and thereby holding a mirror up to the audience themselves, by telling them all, ‘Look, this is exactly what you guys experience in your daily lives. This play is just another slice off your lives!’ they seem to say!

At the same time, there is yet another realism that became prominent in theatre during the first half of the twentieth century - psychological realism.
Psychological realism is essentially character-driven! So instead of focusing on people at large, psychological realism focuses on an individual character, and tells us, why they do, what they do, by seeking to give us all a peek into their inner lives and struggles. Most of such plays, hence seek to portray the individual vis-à-vis their society!

One other special feature of psychological realism is the language used by its characters, a method that was fine-tuned to perfection at the deft hands of a Miller and a Williams! Added, amongst this postwar duo, the latter could be said to best exemplify to this credo! His lines were poetic at most places, with figurative language used by his characters with such felicity!

Arthur Laurents is one such playwright of the postwar epoch, who dabbled in psychological realism, with equal gusto and vigour. His characters exhibit a propensity to emotional turbulences, anxieties and self-doubts, leading to a lack of self esteem on them!

Arthur in his autobiography titled, Original Story By, I repeat, Original Story By, published in the year 2000, gives us a glimpse into his mind, his myriad themes and his major preoccupations with psychological realism.


Hence, Arthur’s autobiography could also be called his manifesto of sorts, as he delineates the reasons for his character’s flaws, their misery, their self-doubts etc. Some of his observations are real slices off life that have such intense import!

But at the same time, Arthur Laurents is also quite unabashed and brazen on many counts in this highly intriguing, yet controversial read of sorts!

Well, as autobiographies are wont to do, Arthur’s too is no exception!

So worthies first: Original Story by hence gives us all a glimpse into the reasons for his characters’ loneliness, their inner struggles, their troubles, their chaotic present, etc. Arthur traces them all to the fact that they don’t have the guts to accept themselves as flawed beings! (flawsome, in today’s parlance!)

Learning to accept themselves, with their foibles, and their weaknesses are a single yet a major step towards self-fulfillment in their lives, he avers. Arthur also attributes personal insecurities of some of his lead characters, to the prejudiced, biased perspectives of society, their cliched norms and conventions! (He says this on a personal note, too!) This conformity to tradition and to age-old laws has taken the sanity and the peace out of his character, oops characters, he opines!

However, Arthur in a sequel to this, his autobiography, regrets for some of the things that he had so audaciously given out in such brass-necked fashion!

In the sequel titled, The Rest of the Story: A Life Completed, he doles out some apologies as a penitent prodigal son, with more of a sheepish feel on his brass-necked defiance of the past! Interestingly he had finished this second part to his memoir, exactly one week before he passed away in 2011.

The introduction to this second part of his memoir has been penned by David Saint! The last few lines of the introduction real strike a chord with us all!

Here goes –

David Saint in his Introduction to Arthur – Arthur Laurents’s – autobiography -

The third and last time I heard Arthur say he could no longer write was sitting together in a waiting room at Mt. Sinai a few days before his death.

I was trying to encourage him to fight this pneumonia, and he said,

“David . . . my hands are shaking so badly I can’t use the computer, my vision is blurry, I can’t write anymore. If I can’t write, I can’t live.”

I knew then he had finished the rest of the story.

The story was over and so was he.

That was just a vignette from off David Saint’s introductory words to Arthur Laurents’s second part memoir!

Now over to Arthur Laurents and his memorable lines from off his second memoir! And dear reader, it would do well to remember that Arthur penned, this, his second part to the memoir when he was 93 years old! And within one week after he had done working on this, his memoir, he passed away. Now that’s a literary soul of the highest literary acumen and prowess!

Here goes a few snatches from Arthur -

This is clearly a memoir about change. But I don’t want to just talk about change, especially how I have changed. You have seen some of that in this chapter; you know who I am today. But I want you to see me as I was and then witness the changing. To accomplish that, each of the following chapters is going to be written from the perspective I had when the events took place.

The next chapter will, in all likelihood, contradict me, who I am today, what I said in this chapter. The chapter after that may well contradict both, present a very different man in the next after that. That’s what change does: it changes your perspective. It changed mine and me. Watch.

Then he adds to say, in Chapter Two to the book, that,

Memory is biased. None of us is a Proust, existing in a corked roomful of memories.

Now that’s a point worth a ponder, and that when it comes from a memoirist of his stature!

Do read this memoir and the first (controversial) one too, if you really wanna get a feel of Arthur’s tryst with psychological realism amongst a host of such other life’s ways and sways off his pen!

To be continued…

image: amazondotcom

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