William writes:
"This is where Cheerskep and I part company. He would say the author has
the duty to be as clear as possible in stirring another to perceive what he or
she intends to convey."
I plead not guilty to this, William. I do want maximal clarity in any
non-fiction I write. But in "fiction" (including playwriting) I aim for maximal
effect -- in terms of inducing laughter, emotion, and absorbed interest.
Strangely, this often entails refraining from explaining too much, from bending
oneself to maximal clarity. I agree with you that "life" seems to have inherent
ambiguities, "mixed" emotions, evident indeterminacy.
As an earnest student, especially in philosophy, I worked hard to be
constantly as clear as I could, and when I began "creative" writing I soon saw
I
needed to abandon that aim. Early on it wasn't easy to do. But eventually I
achieved what was for me the paradoxical position of telling dramaturges they
were
often wrong when they asked for elements to be "explained".
I knew the playwright Wendy Wasserstein. In her later years I could see what
I intuited was her plays being dramaturged to death, ossified by Wendy's
readiness to accept kibitzing, demands for characters to "spell things out".
I've
frequently mused that Shakespeare was lucky to be writing before the rise of
critics could get at him with their "What does this MEAN?" questions.
William further writes:
"The ideal art intention is none at all. The ideal meaning is none at all --
impossible to achieve yet worthy to seek."
Since when I use the word 'meaning' I mean solely notion -- the notion in the
mind of the speaker, and the notion in the mind of the audience -- I'm in
favor of there being lots of "meaning" in the hall. The work itself, say I,
always has no meaning at all -- but I certainly would not want to create
something
that occasioned no notion at all in my audience.
But I happily accept that the notions in the minds of my audience will never
be identical to those in my mind. Admittedly it's vexing when someone doesn't
"see the humor" in one of my would-be funny lines, or doesn't like a character
I'm fond of. But there have been other moments when some viewers, for
personal reasons, "saw" a moving aspect of a scene or character that I myself
was not
feeling when I wrote it. It'd be absurd of me to tell them they are "wrong"
to do this. That'd be like my insisting the "meaning" IN the work can be only
what I had in mind when I created it. Since I maintain there is no meaning IN
the work, I never commit the "intentional fallacy".
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