Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006

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ACTING AND ARCHETYPES

A point of departure

by 

Per Brask

 

For decades the neuroscientist Benjamin Libet has been investigating the gap in time between our brain's physiological readiness to act and our conscious decision to do so, a fact he was the first to discover.  "The brain initiates the voluntary process first. The subject later becomes aware of the urge or wish [...] to act, some 350 to 400 msec after the onset of the recorded RP [readiness potential] produced by the brain." (Libet, 134).  Libet has furthermore stated that although our intention to act precedes our conscious awareness of it, this does not disprove the concept of Free Will, though it somewhat modifies our everyday notion of it.  Libet's experiments recorded sufficient time for what he calls our conscious veto (Libet, 137). That is, we are able to modify the arising action or to veto it.

 

Does this have an impact on the acting process and the way we tend to teach it within the standard Stanislavski-derived pedagogies?  I believe it does.  One frequently notices a certain slow responsiveness in performances by students as well as by professionals, a sense of lagging behind, an uncalled for ponderousness.  Acting teachers or directors tend to overcome this by instructing students or actors to "think on the line," which works as far as it goes, though students tend to feel rushed and disconnected when they follow the advice.  Some deeper preparation than knowing the given circumstances, the objectives and the obstacles, seems to be called for, an immersion into the patterns of behavior, the unconscious tendencies, which could be imagined to arise prior to the conscious actions of a character.

 

"Let us [...] imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world."  (Hillman, 23)

 

An actor might productively seek out the archetypal part, the metaphoric aspect of her role (the aspect that, as archetype, she may imaginatively be able to see through, to wear, as it were, as a pair of contact lenses that determine what she sees and how, consequently, she automatically responds), and derive from this the power for her performance.  It is, however, important not to fixate and become rigid in the interpretation of the archetype because, "Myth is as fluid as water: without forfeiting its character, it assumes and vivifies whatever shape the conditions of time and space may require." (Larsen, 335).

 

"The archetypal perspective offers the advantage of organizing into clusters or constellations a host of events from different areas of life.  The archetype of the hero, for example, appears first in behavior, the drive to activity, outward exploration, response to challenge, seizing and grasping and extending.  It appears second in the images of Hercules, Achilles, Samson (or their cinema counterparts) doing their specific tasks; and third in a style of consciousness, in feelings of independence, strength, and achievement, in ideas of decisive action, coping, virtue, conquest (over animality) and in psychopathologies of battle, overpowering masculinity, and single-mindedness."  (Hillman, 24).

 

It is not archetype or myth as anecdote but myth and archetype as dynamic even fluctuating perspectives we're after.  We’re looking at imaginal patterns of the life force as represented in a fictional character.  

 

When We Dead Awaken (1899) by Henrik Ibsen provides us with a myth of the creative process itself and an archetype of the artist.

         Professor Arnold Rubek has been a functioning sculptor, albeit a dissatisfied one, since his international break-through with his masterpiece "Resurrection Day."  Four years ago he obtained a young wife, Maja, but their relationship is faltering.  Maja has been unable to re-ignite his creative fire.  The bear-hunter Ulfheim, however, has been able to open the floodgates of Maja's sexuality.  When Professor Rubek's old muse, Irene, the woman who modeled for him while he worked on "Resurrection Day," shows up at the spa where he and Maja have retreated, his hopes of rediscovering his old creative drive through her are set aflame.  

         In Rubek's mind, the (unresolved) sexual tension between himself and Irene, the model for “Resurrection Day,” was responsible for the success of his masterpiece.   The sexual tension was necessary but its energy had to be channeled into his work, much to the frustration of Irene who felt that her life was destroyed by Rubek's physical inattention which she experienced as soul-sucking exploitation, eventually causing her mental breakdown.

         At 71, Ibsen, the artist, wrote his last play about an artist using the people around him for artistic ends, an artist who is finally swept out of life together with Irene as they stride in dangerous weather towards the top of the mountains.

         If spirit as archetype may be said to strive for transcendence, purity, ideas, going beyond and the soul as archetype to desire connection, relationship, experience, nearness, then Rubek and Irene are of the spirit while Maja and Ulfheim are of the soul.  If so, Ibsen identifies Rubek's creativity as of the spirit.

         Human self-consciousness, our ability to watch ourselves, provides the impetus for the reflection that generates creativity.  The restlessness of dissatisfaction with the way things are and the quest for making them different begin in self-awareness.  Art is one of the means of making things different as well as being one of the ways in which we provide images for ourselves for further reflection.  Creativity is, then, a function of self-consciousness.  However, its processes may be rooted in ideas and strive for clarity and certainty, or, they may be rooted in personal life-experience and observation.  The first kind of creativity can lead to impressive theoretical understandings, whereas the second form seeks insight into the mysteries of life and meaning often termed wisdom, myth and archetype.  Ibsen's art is generally of this second kind and is the reason for its continued interest. Rubek's art seems to have been more inclined towards the first kind.  At least his description of “Resurrection Day” suggests that it may have been propelled more by fascinating ideas than it was by an exploration of mysteries.  Rubek speaks of  “Resurrection Day” in terms of a woman waking from the dead, a young woman who was to be “the noblest, purest and most ideal woman.”  Not exactly like real humans one encounters in life, but the so-called eternal woman, what the German Romantics called “Das Ewig Weibliche”, an ideality that may have tyrannized women – a men’s relations with them.  Though Rubek seeks such ideality in Irene and Maja, Ibsen’s depiction of both of them is recognizably human, as persons living with and through specific conditions.

         For the actor playing Rubek, the tension between soul-needs and spirit-needs in this version of the artist archetype is the key to finding similar contradicting drives in himself to fuel the performance.  Likewise, perhaps, the actor might work in subtle ways trying physically to manifest this tension.  A physical emphasis on his head along with thin-looking legs, and perhaps a growing paunch, created collaboratively between actor, director and costume designer, might suggest a character who is not entirely in contact with the earth, or his metabolism, a character always in his head, driven by spirit, seeking ever higher ground, while his soul cries out for a place to just be and grow.

         How might the text be approached in such a way that the archetypal level becomes part of the performance?

         At the very start of the play Rubek and his much younger wife Maja are sitting on the lawn outside a spa hotel on the Norwegian coast, reading newspapers and drinking champagne and seltzer:

"MAJA (sits for a moment as though waiting for the professor to say something.  Then she lowers her newspaper, and sighs).

RUBEK (looks up from his newspaper):  Well, Maja, what's the matter with you?

MAJA: Just listen to the silence!

RUBEK (smiles indulgently): Can you hear it?

MAJA:  Hear what?

RUBEK: The silence.

MAJA: I certainly can.

RUBEK: Perhaps you're right, my dear.  One really can hear the silence.

MAJA: God knows one can.  When it's as deafening as it s here -

RUBEK:  Here at the baths, you mean?

MAJA: Everywhere in Norway.  Oh, down in the city it was noisy enough.  But even there, I thought all that noise and bustle had something dead about it.

RUBEK (looks hard at her): Aren't you happy to be home again, Maja?

MAJA: Are you?

RUBEK: I?

MAJA: Yes.  You've been abroad so much, much longer than I.  Are you really happy to be back again?

RUBEK: No, to be perfectly honest.  Not really happy.

MAJA:  There, you see.  I knew it.

RUBEK: Perhaps I have been abroad too long.  This northern provincial life seems foreign to me.

MAJA (eagerly, pulling her chair toward him):  Let's go away again!  As quickly as possible." (Ibsen/Meyer, 215-216)

 

Looking at this very first beat of the play in terms of objectives, we may reasonably suggest that Maja wants to persuade Rubek to leave the spa because it's boring and that Rubek wants to discover what Maja is complaining about this time.  This is very straightforward and very playable.     In addition to this straightforward reading of psychological realism, we can discover yet an other level, one of archetypal resonance; a level which may bring something to the beat beyond its introduction of an older man and his young wife having a not altogether happy holiday experience.

         Were we to read the beat archetypally, we would pick up on Maja's name.  Maja [Maya] is the Hindu Goddess of Illusion.  Maja is trying in the beat, it seems to me, to make her boredom Rubek's problem.  She is attempting to create an illusion for him.  At a, perhaps, deeper level she may be said to be a shape shifter, someone who becomes what you want her to be or, better, makes you become what she needs you to be. She creates illusions: some kind of sprite pushing her needs onto someone else, making them see the world as she sees it.

         As Robert Ferguson has pointed out, Rubek's name in Norwegian can be read as an anagram of "kerub (angel)" (Ferguson, 423) or cherub.  And Rubek is indeed a man who strives to be at a higher level, to be above the mob, to have a special status.  In his relationship to Maja in this beat, he may be seen as her Master, who impatiently needs to find out what his "funny little creature," (Ibsen/Meyer, 216), his pet, as it were, desires now.

         (Ibsen may well have chosen the names Maja and Rubek (kerub) inspired by his wife.  Suzannah Ibsen was a student of Theosopy).

         This level of the beat might at least have some residual presence in the finished show, in whatever style is chosen for the production, if the actors took the time during preparation, by themselves or in actual rehearsals, to find physical expressions for needy Sprite and impatient Master, á la Chekhov's Psychological Gesture (PG).  Indeed, at this level, it is possible to give the Sprite some sense of nervousness, because she senses that she's about to lose her Master and wants to put fate in another direction.  And the Master can be made cruelly dismissive.  Actors could then play through their relationship using their PGs and gibberish, finding vocal qualities that support their PGs and their needs.  (A similar process is described by Charles Marowitz in The Other Way).

         Having played their relationship in this beat in this wild manner (and I do mean that it should be wild), actors would have a solid archetypal basis for getting back into the dialogue as written and the polite restraint it suggests, because they're now better able to "see through" the character and to sense its target and the stakes, in Declan Donnellan terms.  As Donnellan explains with regards to an actor playing Juliet, "Irena needs to step through Juliet's senses, to see, touch, hear, smell, taste and intuit the changing universe that Juliet inhabits. Irena must abandon all hope of ever being able to transform herself into Juliet, or show us Juliet, and instead set about the miraculous but realisable task of seeing and moving through the space that Juliet sees and inhabits." (Donnellan, 83).  Hence, the point is to use the archetype to get behind the eye balls of the character (another way of stating the need to get to the character's intention prior to consciousness), and see whatever he/she sees in the other and in the world; to sense what pulls the character outwards.

         "There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life.  Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action.  When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis."  (Jung, 48) (Jung seems at least partially right in this understanding of instinctual drives, though he does seem to leave room for Libet's conscious veto).

         Probed through archetypal figures and relationships, a production may be lifted beyond the "emotional self-indulgence" and the "too private"(Ferguson, 424) concerns on Ibsen's part with which critics like Ferguson fault the play.  Indeed, the lives of Rubek, Maja and Irene may turn out to have a good deal to tell us all.

 

WORKS CITED:

Mind Time: The Temporal Factor in Consciousness by Benjamin Libet. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2004

A Blue Fire: Selected Writings by James Hillman edited by Thomas Moore. NY: HarperPerennial, 1991 (org. Pub. 1989).

A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell by Stephen and Robin Larsen. NY: Anchor Books Doubleday, 1993.  (Org. 1991)

Når vi døde vågner [When We Dead Awaken] by Henrik Ibsen, (1899).  In Ibsen Plays: Four. Trans. By Michael Meyer. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

Henrik Ibsen: A New Biography by Robert Ferguson. NY: Dorset Press, 2001.

The Other Way by Charles Marowitz. NY: Applause Books, 1999.

The Actor and the Target by Declan Donnellan. NY:Theatre Communications Group, 2002.

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung,Vol.9, Part 1.  Princeton University Press, second edition, 1968