Reading as text production

Now that I have „read“ myself „out“ of „Chekhov“, and there is no Shakespeare waiting to be read  or anything else to amaze me 😢 AND I am in „home office“ indefinitely because of the corona virus, I should finally find the time and elaborate on the concepts I used to describe and improve my reading …

Well, there WAS something to amaze me which has to be mentioned, though I couldn’t write about it. That is, I couldn’t go back to it because it was too sad. As planned, I saw „Cyrano de Bergerac“ with James McAvoy in the leading role in the Cinema, and it was just stunning. It was definitely bad timing, so immediately after what was supposed to become my theatre event of the year, but I readily agreed with the text Claudia sent me immediately after she had seen it in London: „James McAvoy is God!“ (Had to, even though I stopped admitting any more gods as my personal Olympus is already crowded.) I have rarely seen anything so emotionally precise – where I knew every split-second with absolute certainty what the character was feeling. But what I admired and enjoyed even more is the way he dealt with the poetic language. I wrote about this in my blog a few times, but there has never been anything quite like it. There probably wasn’t an opportunity like this before as, after all, the play – in the ingenious new adaptation by Martin Crimp – doesn’t only deal with one of the greatest love stories of all times AND with the impact of political repressions on the cultural élite. It is also a play about the POWER of poetry. What it can do, and where it fails. And something as powerful as this had been beyond my imagination.

(I noticed that I have just spent my personal „best actor“ award for 2020 – and left out 2019! There was so much great cinema – totally disregarded by the jurors, the Oscar nominations turning out so boring that I didn’t even watch … - and, nonetheless, it was probably something quite old: Ralph Fiennes as Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth in „Schindler’s List“ which I hadn’t seen at the time – for achieving something nobody had before. He played the „Unmensch“ in a way that I HAD to watch. And I created a new personal award for “best actor/actress playing a character that nobody cares about” (which I unofficially gave to Brian Protheroe for his brilliant and unconventional vignette appearances in RSC productions at least two times) and now officially grant to Tanya Reynolds as Mrs. Elton in the recent cinema adaptation of “Emma”, roughly for the same reason. She was the first actress who played Mrs. Elton as if she was a real human being, not a comedy character. Awesome!!!)

But, whereas I absolutely enjoyed „Uncle Vanya“ until the end (though not that much in the beginning!), I noticed that, after the emotional peak when Cyrano is declaring his love for Roxane in Christian’s voice – after the poetry is gone and misery begins to show its naked face - I kind of blocked it. I didn’t WANT to feel anything like this. I suppose it is this ABSOLUTENESS I cannot deal with anymore … It seems that there are people one cannot get to stop talking. I am somebody, once I have started, I cannot get to stop writing. But, comparing my two recent theatre experiences, I just noticed something important about myself. When I read Chekhov, one of my most important finds was that I always get the impression that life is GOING ON, and therefore – even though the misery got at me much more than, for example, in “Shakespeare” -  I just couldn‘t give up on any of these characters. At least not on those I diagnosed as being still alive and suffering. And why my favourite bit of the play is this moment where Dr Astrov is reaching out to Vanya because he cannot accept his ABSOLUTE misery. (And I might not be the only person that reacts to “Chekhov” in this way, as we got into speculating about what might happen if Professor Serebryakov actually died!) Tragedy is not the most „tragic“ bit of life - once it is OVER. The most tragic is actually in comedy  - which Chekhov regarded his plays to be! - because the greatest comedy is about what happens to people once they have been chopped down to what they are. Obviously, I have come to regard this „chopping down“ as something we have to ACCEPT in order to have a proper life and some degree of happiness. (Thence, maybe, my obsession with Demut/humility?) There are two extremes here that both become ultimately tragic. I cannot even imagine what Vanya is supposed to do after having been chopped down to THIS (apart from topping himself!). But neither is it a reasonable option to run up the walls in the way Cyrano does all his life. If somebody can bring him so close to me as James McAvoy did, I easily understand that – for him! – there is no choice, and he probably wins my empathy, maybe even admiration. But, in the end, I couldn’t bear with him because it is just STUPID. The chopping down even is the essential WORK we – or „the world“ – have to do so that we can BEGIN our lives and not get stuck in the same stupid treadmill fed by illusions that have become stale. And ESPECIALLY the people who have succeeded in living their dream instead of dreaming their life – I suppose I cannot have any idea how much „chopping“ they had to do to get there!

So, that might be it – except for something I’ll (definitely!) just mention – for the record. It turned out particularly interesting to deal with two totally different contemporary ADAPTATIONS of historical fiction. It would be such an intriguing thing to look into – especially as it is something I am often dealing with implicitly when I am reading a play and then see how my reading of it changes when it gets on the stage. Basically, reading something like „Antony and Cleopatra“ or, just now, „Cymbeline“, I automatically include one or even two additional time frames – apart from my own contemporary world as reference: the time where the action is taking place and the time the play has been written. On the stage – even though, I am certain, in case of a relevant production or adaptation, people are doing exactly the same! - one of the main concerns has to be how to TAKE OUT these two time frames to make it convincingly contemporary without losing essential context. (Which sometimes pops up as a dilemma, as I noticed expressly watching “Uncle Vanya” on behalf of the bit about men and women being able to become friends only after the sex issue is moved out of the way.) To my astonishment – even though Martin Crimp’s adaptation is absolutely striking where he explores the parallel between rhymed poetry and contemporary poetry slamming and rap lyrics – in my experience, Connor McPherson ultimately had been more successful. (Though that’s my age and socialization, no doubt. „Kids“ would certainly judge differently!) Apart from that - even more than contemporary PRODUCTIONS – these adaptations are such a great opportunity to see what other people have READ. And there is a great transition to the theoretical section of my blog.

An adaptation of a work of historical fiction for the stage is so interesting for me because it results in a direct MANIFESTATION of the activity I am dealing with in my blog. I called it „Reading Shakespeare“ from the beginning, but I didn’t really know why. I just liked the title. (Apparently, I implicitly knew most of what I was going to find out!) As I went back in time recently, looking at my early posts, I discovered that I have used the term REALLY READING in my very first post about „The Taming of the Shrew“. I didn’t really know then what I meant, I was just beginning to find out, but that was the moment when I noticed the DIFFERENCE.

I became aware recently that I don’t care much about the term – even tried to swap it with something like „deep reading“, but, after I went back to how it was created spontaneously, I decided to keep it. And it is this activity of Really Reading that manifests itself in something like a written adaptation of a play. Reading the translation of the Russian original and then seeing the adaptation on the stage – as in case of “Uncle Vanya” – or seeing the adaptation and activating my knowledge of the historical text – as in case of “Cyrano de Bergerac” – makes me WITNESS what another human being thought about this text. What was important for them, what they left out, and how – sometimes even why! – they changed the meaning the historical context suggests. Basically, this is what „we“ are doing when we are reading, on a different level, on another scale, but every time when we enjoy a fictional text and it becomes personal and important to us. It shows in what way reading is not a trivial occupation – to finally find out what happens in that book, pass the time, reproduce content and feelings we know well already, all of which it can ALSO be! – but some kind of active and relevant EXCHANGE.  An exchange between me – as the reader of a fictional text – and the text – as this obscure object just waiting for what I would do with it, and, in turn, doing all kinds of unexpected things with ME.

Really Reading has therefore the distinctive feature that it ALWAYS results in some kind of new text being „written“. In the case of an adaptation, we actually can walk into Foyles and buy a copy of this text while the play is shown in the West End - as we did when we saw “Uncle Vanya”. Most of the time, though, reading is going on unnoticed as no text ever manifests itself. Nonetheless I got convinced that there is ALWAYS some kind of text being written - while I am reading, and afterwards to memorize an experience I enjoyed. Now this observation appears trivial, but, when I started to do this, it has been one of my most relevant discoveries in the department of Really Reading that I ALWAYS produce a text after I have seen a film or play that I liked or found memorable in any way. Quite often even consciously, on my way home from the cinema or at some point while I am watching, but not always. Strictly speaking, this is something that cannot be proved, but there was one experience of „negative“ proof that ultimately convinced me of it. It was when I saw „The Desolation of Smaug“ and walked out of the cinema and became instantly aware that I couldn’t „read“ the film. That I wasn’t able to produce the text that would have told me what the film actually meant for me. As I have certainly written somewhere in my blog, this disagreeable experience was revoked when I saw the third film, but it is not something likely to be forgotten. It is this kind of unpleasantness or failure, though, that often leads to finding out something essential because It makes me aware that I am dealing with something that is real, not “just in my mind”. It is how I came to EXPERIENCE Really Reading as an activity of TEXT PRODUCTION.

It is also important in this context that reading, though a necessary part of text production, as to the AMOUNT of activity involved is only a small part of it. I believe that the biggest part of my obsession with actors is the discovery that great actors are usually uncommonly gifted and skilled readers. Probably the best proof that reading actually is a SKILL: when I can see this kind of result. We usually never become aware how we learned it. The actors I love, I love mostly because I discovered that they are reading what I am reading, just so infinitely better and closer - and „truer“ - than I ever could. Nevertheless, it is just a small part of the skills they USE to produce their text, probably somewhere in the one digits, and probably mostly unknown to themselves. It is not, actually, what actors DO. Even for those that consciously consider it as a substantial part of their work –  by producing their own text, actually writing diaries and backstories for their characters – all this only ends up indirectly in the text we see. As important as it may be for them to make the text in their mind more substantial, and to know so exactly what the character is about, most of it we don’t SEE. What we see and hear is what they achieve to “translate” by the superior awareness and control they have of every means of expression (face acting, voice, accent, body language, posture, movement and so on …) This is the material from which we then produce OUR text, which might not be at all what they read or intended! It MIGHT be, of course, and I have at least some proof, through commentaries or interviews, that it has partially been the “same” text we were reading. But, ultimately, the only text I control to some degree is the text I produce. 

As I am usually dealing with complex works of fiction, like films and series and theatre productions, and much less with books, just trying to read the final credits makes me aware of the amount of activity required for making a film that includes very little reading or no reading at all. But I wrote a post already at Christmas 2018 - when I saw this film about Dickens writing „A Christmas Carol“ - that I find increasingly interesting as it deals with the issue of how much of activity, and calculation, and prerequisites come into the production of a simple STORY which are purely “economical” or otherwise have nothing at all to do with the text we are reading. Nonetheless, without all this, the story wouldn’t have come into existence or wouldn’t have turned out the way it did.

Reading is a decisive part of text production but only a small one. It is, however, the only part that is available to everybody, and the only one that turns the text into the “end product” of a production process. And it is this singular and incomprehensible opportunity of experiencing something without actually DOING it.