On Apr 7, 2010, at 5:18 PM, [email protected] wrote: > I wrote: > >>> I FELT 'Red' as a play was bad, a narrative failure. >> > Michael responded: > > "How does one go > about determining whether the work IS defective." > > > The all-caps stressing of the most "telling" words is mine. > > I asserted what I felt. I went on to give the reasons why I felt that way. > As I often do, I failed to summon up the optimal locutions for what was on > my mind. I let that malignant word 'to be' slip into the statement. > > Only carelessness would allow me to say on a philosophy forum that a work > IS defective. I think, however, I was accurate enough in citing the factors > that made me feel the way I did. (I neglected to report that I often felt > repelled by the haranguing posturing on the stage -- but I can't deny some > others might like that sort of thing. It bothered me that I felt numerous > sequences were non-credible, but I admit some others might not be so bothered. > > But it's not true that my "complaint is that the play does not present > things as [I] expected to find them," or that it does not "follow the academic > rules of depicting scenes". I like surprises in narratives. If, say, > I read a whodunit and the author does not tell us whodunit, my > disappointment and my criticism would not be generated by his going "outside the . . > . paradigm". Hell, O'Neill did that, so did Ionesco, so did Pinter. My > complaint would be that the author left me frustrated and feeling slightly like a > fool for having spent time on the whodunit. I cited general things about R > ED that give me -- and, I claim, a great of other play-goers -- a feeling of > being unsatisfied, even irked -- and I don't go to theater to feel that way.
Well, I may have misphrased it, too. My point wasn't whether there IS an ontic category called "defective" or not, but that you went into the theater with a mental set of standards, a paradigm or some formulation, expecting that the play would satisfy you in the way plays satisfy, and you wound up not being satisfied that way. You said, "But I felt RED as a play was bad, a narrative failure." I can understand how you can say, "I felt it was bad," but how can you say "I felt it was a failure"? The latter assertion is a judgment. That's the point I was getting to, but unfortunately I dragged the verb "to be" across my train of thought and misled you! It seems to me that you were frustrated because the play did not deliver what you expected (a certain form of narrative, development of characters, etc.). Perhaps "Red" merely eschewed those components of play-making that you expected to find in favor of another approach. Or then again, perhaps it was as you described, a poorly made play. BTW, your description reminded me of ancient Greek plays, which declaimed a lot and portrayed relatively little (as I remember from reading them a long time ago). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
