Transcription
Tonight, you'll hear a very distinguished panel in a lively and often heated discussion. The panel consists of Marshall McLuhan, the head of the Center for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto; W.H. Auden, perhaps the most illustrious poet in English today; Buckminster Fuller, inventor, architect, and thinker; and Jack McGann, Irish actor and foremost interpreter of the plays of Samuel Beckett. Ideas recorded them at the fourth annual Seminary and Irish studies held recently at the University of Toronto. The ostensible subject of their discussion is theater and the visual arts, but as you'll hear in a moment, that topic is soon forgotten as two modes of perception clash—that of Professor McLuhan, who was one of the most famous interpreters of contemporary 20th-century cultural trends, and that of W.H. Auden, who cheerfully admits to being a 19th-century man and sees no reason to change. Professor Norman Jeffers, a Yeats scholar and editor of Yeats' collected works, who is Chairman of the English Department at Leeds University in England, is in the chair.
Perhaps we might begin by asking Mr. Auden, when he writes a play, whether he wonders what it will look like on the stage and whether he has views about it, or whether they are realized by producers or not.
I have to begin by saying that I, I, I don't regard myself really as a playwright. I regard myself as the writer of opera; re—uh, of course they're both dramatic words, but um, when you obviously when you are writing something you have an idea of how you think it should look, but one isn't a professional; one hands it over to a stage designer and knows it isn't right. My collaborator, Mr. Jessman, and I did the Bertolt Brecht for Hunt Van Vanza, based on the back eye of your rities. Well, we did have then a scenic idea, which is that um, clothes that people are wearing can be a variable Shand uh for their character, so that we plan—and I'm glad to say our stages are agreed with us—that, for example, Panus looked like one of, of medieval Catholic uh monarchs; Theus was to look like an archdeacon; CMOS was like a fa story of character, I mean hundreds of years old; um, and when you really saw the, the, the mean course we changed it to from women own there to double thing, then they had to look like beats, and it worked; that's all I could say. And our stage designer knew this, uh, which I, I mention SAR to how one does visualize certain things when—
Trying—Mar, would you like to comment on that in the light of your views of what happens today?
Well, the idea of putting on masks, power energy, corporate masks, it's um a very large subject, and um clothing as language is one that I'm sure that we have an actor here who could tell us a good deal about. Mr. McGann, I should like to hear Mr. McGann's views on the interpretive powers of costume.
Yes, well, I'm in agreement uh to this degree: the costume as well as setting, design, and direction uh are all in fact part of a basic rule in that they are aids to an actor and no more, and as such should be simple and unobtrusive. Um, they should never try to say, "Look at this costume," "Look at my direction," "Look at my setting." All these things, including lighting, are all there to serve the purpose, that is the actor and the spoken word, which are the most important things that the public have come to see and hear. Uh, you know you've heard the phrase, "They came away humming the sets." Well, this has been a fault of many of our scenic designers, and that they are too prone to show their skill at uh uh designing a set which overwhelms the actor to such a degree that he is obscured and the set is far too elaborate. I personally, uh I'm involved in the theater and will always be involved in the theater where the emphasis is on simplicity.
I think we should at that point ask Mr. Buckminster Fuller how he is tackling this problem, because he is starting, as it were, from scratch to design a theater in Oxford.
First place, I never have, never before designed a theater, and so it's really a very exciting venture for me, but I, I think at Oxford we were being interviewed by a newspaper about what the theater was going to look like, how people would feel in it, and I said that if anybody even noticed my theater, I thought I'd be a failure, failure. My, my determination really is to subsume completely the, my structuring, and uh that, that I'd say is the very essence. The, the Oxford theater is, is a very small one. Samuel Beckett had very strong ideas of what he wanted, and he wanted to have great versatility of presentation, so that it will be able to do, do theater, the pum, have to be able to do the Greek, and have to be, do the, the in the round, and be changeable from one to the other again without making people feel this. I don't have any feeling of mechanics at all. And furthermore, the Ox theater has a very special requirement: it has to be underground. The, the city of Oxford and the University have, have decided that no building should be above the ground except ex, except, except the doitor for, for the students to live in; they're so crowded today, so that we, we have to put it under the quadrangle.
Does that also mean underwater?
And also does mean underwater? Yes, so suppl, this is suppl, it be, it be, it'll be, we—
Well, now I would like to ask Mar McLuhan, if I may, how he sees the theater in our terms here. Is a theater being built underground? I think he has views of the theater being something which also takes off a little bit from the ground. We've just seen Apollo 14, which has some visual effects going with it; it's a new type of theater obviously, and um there is another very observable form of theater, namely student activists as they present themselves in new settings and uh new with new scripts, and um as they call in the New Media to assist their presentations. Since uh Sputnik, the planet has gone inside a man-made environment of satellites, and uh this makes everything on the planet simultaneously present to consciousness. They call it ecology, but when everything happens at once and everybody is involved, there is no audience; there are only actors. I think this is a new dimension of the Electric Theater: the role of the audience as actor I think is worth watching, and it might be possible to have comments from the panel on the varying degrees in which the audience has participated in the action in the past in theater. I suppose the mass is the greatest form of theater possible and the one in which the audience is necessarily participant, in which there is no audience.
I'm, say Mr. K, I profoundly disapprove of audience participation.
I think your audience, your audience was participating.
No, I think that the whole point, when I go to the, go to the theater, if I look and I, I don't take part in the action; I observe, and this to me is, is, I, I know what goes on now, and I think it's an apping, a, that's of Distinction in the, the public and the private life, that you know people take off their clothes in public now on the stage. Well, that's a thing privately, but stage it seems to be very, very important. I, I, I'm profoundly conservative on this point, that I, that's why I mean this terrible thing that happened, for example, with TV is that it turns all historical fact into fiction, so that you know people show films of people being blown up in Vietnam; people roar with laughter. It's all part of the film, and this practises me very, very much indeed. Ian, it's not about the people intend, but I think it's a very, I think TV is a very, very wicked medium; that's all I can say.
Do you feel, do you feel—I, I'm interested in this because I have steadfastly reserved moral judgment on all media matters. I think the, the telephone, the telephone is a very wicked instrument, by all of course, but not as bad as the motorcar. Uh, these are extremely an, anable and malignant forces in our midst. I am quite aware of—in fact I have studied them very, very carefully—but I am also aware that one of the greatest dramas of our time is man hunting for sure. No, this is um a hidden drama, but it does provide an enormous amount of entertainment in many media. In your own work, Mr. Auden, you have spent much time exploring the ways in which our new culture in this century destroyed the unconscious and destroyed the, or rather pushed the unconscious up into the private psyche, destroying private identity.
I don't think so. The destruction of the simple, the simple process by which the unconscious was pushed up into consciousness by, with the help of electricity, Freud and Jung, is a one of the big dramas of our time, and it's true the private identity, the private individual has been swept aside by this huge surge of the unconscious up into consciousness.
It's not how I feel about things. I know I'm rooted in the 19th century, and um—
Are you expressing preferences or observations of fact?
What I simply, what I know about myself. I read more and more as I get older how rooted I am in the 19th century. I mean, thank, I mean thank God, you know, I can remember the world before World War I, and thank God I was brought up to know that I a member of the upper middle class profession. I'm terribly grateful for this. No, this um, this is a circumstance that is very theatrical; it, it is part, part of your own mask that you use, the public school schol voice. I, I mean if, if I or if some Canadian were to put on the CL school voice, he would at once appear as an actor on a stage. Well, I'm obvious there. I have an Ox accent, though of course the English say I have a mid, mid-Atlantic accent. I have shortened my a as an Englishman.
I think you might have some very interesting things to say about language as mask, as an actor's mask.
It's not—well, I think one of the things is when you're younger you have to wear a mask. It's only the last few years I felt I can really speak in the first person, um, J, because I think, you know, it takes a long time to find out who you are, and part of way, I mean one of things you are coming to America for example, it's said, I agree entirely with what some said, Mom said, you know, in order to understand your own country you have to live in other—
Mr. Auden, will you please comment on the relation of the English language and proy to jazz and rock?
I don't ask about them.
Well, you hear them; you can't, you can't help it.
I do, I, I don't have to hear them, but I live an apartment in New York.
I don't have to hear them. Ah, not we, you know, y, you are now in the city of York. Toronto is York. Yeah, and there is the University of York nearby, so you better clarify. You mean York, England?
No, I mean in New York. I, I mean I live, I live, and I don't have to hear it.
You're, you're very lucky; you can turn these things off. I don't have them on, but even in air travel you can, you can turn them off. Well, there, there they just Smouse music they have on Mo, they don't have rock, rock music on. Mozart and Bach were the music of their day, no background music, they, I mean the, I mean the, for example which obviously, well the Goldberg Variations were, were sleeping pills, but, but I don't have to hear the rock, because you can't, you can't miss it if you, whether you try or not. Now there is a very thing, Mr., there's a very strange thing. Rock can only be sung in English; no other language on Earth can carry Rock rhythms, because as far as popular songs concerned, I think German is much better language, but it is not as able to carry Rock RM.
No, I'm sure it is, but I mean, I, I like um German uh LS like, after and to our, I sit on the, I sit at the bar and I have no money. This I appreciate. I don't know if the audience has noticed, but more and more people are now ready to talk about their dreams, and this may well be a return to the kind of stability—Oh my God, how boring! [Laughter] One unpunctuated this is uh, um, I mean they're boring the same way the lunatics are. I happen to be thinking about this; I have to give a Freud memorial lecture, but nothing seems to me less interesting about dreams, nothing more in artistic um than the dreams, because they're ably forless or also repetitious. I've only once in my life haded Dre I thought was sufficiently interesting to write down. Um, [Laughter]
Would you venture to commit it to the oral tradition?
No. I wonder if could we ask Mr. McGann how he feels about audience participation? Does he feel this is an infringement on his trade union, or would he define the kind of participation he would like from an audience?
While I, all the call involvement uh rather than participation, uh, and then, and you know theater remains still the only three-dimensional medium. We thought every other media is two-dimensional, and as such doesn't require an audience at all, but it's vastly different playing to a camera, whether it be television or the cinema or in radio to a microphone. I'm playing to a live audience from which there is a direct connect uh response and feeling and an indeterminate mystique which I can't explain, but uh I am very concerned about uh an audience with involvement with what is happening in the, on the stage. Uh, an actor gets a very keen awareness after a number of years as to whether the audience are being involved in what he is doing or saying, and this involvement I think is particularly important to theater uh and without it uh I don't think actors could have this extra dimension that the theater needs.
You think, rather, well, don't you, about television as a means of education through the world, but do you think that we have two passes an audience in television which can be acted on?
I find—I don't know if other people share this today—but so many people don't actually listen to what you say. Years I, but I think that you do find quite often in talking to someone that they have taken in about a third, and the rest of the time no doubt they've been watching the visual that you've presented to them, but our ears have got a little dead in this curious way. They selected—talking about, talking about that you know what happened with the, with tape recorders, because I know Truman Capote was being interviewed on tap record, the tape broke down, so he said, "All right, we go on," "Oh, but I'm not used to listening to what you [Laughter] say." Mr. McGann might be interested in the immediate prospect of four and five-dimensional TV, that is with the total image of the actor in the room, holographic, they call it. This is an immediate, it is now an engineering fact and is can be a popular available kind of experience at any time in any home, but whether this will change acting and the problems of the visual organization of theater is another question.
I rather suspect that we are missing the game and not noticing how cinema has extended the bounds of theater, globally, travel log style. I don't think there's any part of the planet in which most people have not been undersea as well as above the sea many times. Every child, by the time he gets to school, has been with Cousteau under the sea into the most amazing territories, and I'm not saying this is good or bad; it simply happens to all children today. They have, there is no world of fantasy they have not visited on television, Sesame Street or animated cartoons and so on. The extensions of language into gesture of a massive and extensive type is happening. I, I personally am not prepared as a private individual to make value judgments about anything that is so massive. I'm, I'm, I, I really do think it does take a certain amount of 19th-century egotism to confront uh this massive thing with a private point of view.
Well, I quite highly agree. I do it, I me, it is arrogant, but I am arrogant.
Well, good. And do you, do you think that you would, you inculcate this as an attitude in others?
Yes, I would.
Good. Believe—let me ask Mr. McGann what does he think the Greeks might have done with PA systems if they'd had them, with PA systems such as we have here?
Oh, they would have resented them very much, because they placed, they place so much value on the power of the, the vocal power, their own vocal power to reach an audience from any part of the auditorium that they would have scorned, as opera singers today would G the use of microphones and uh I think any actor personally who uh can produce vocally the effect necessary to uh fill the theater would be deadly against the use of microphones or have to distort the voice in some way. Yeah, you know I think if he has vocal equipment to be able to reach an audience without the use of PA, yeah, then it's all better.
Would they have shunned the gramophone and radio? Would they have turned them off?
I'm perfectly prepared to say we ought to turn off radio and television today, now and forever. I mean, I'm perfectly prepared to make that as a practical political suggestion. I don't think we would miss it.
That's not practical. I wish it were. I think for survival, if I was a censor for survival, Mr.—let me suggest that not on moral grounds but on survival grounds—
Well, there's not so much different treatment. All right, I suggest that I GL heartily concur with Mr. Auden, but I do suggest that on more, on survival grounds we might well consider the need to turn off TV for good, because the power of television to upgrade the Oriental and Negro image, for example, to the point where it crushes the white image is so tremendous that it can only result in a blood bath, because the white will not take it. I suggest therefore, politically, if you want to save a fantastic blood bath on this planet, which would be very dramatic and very cathartic and very tragic in the Greek sense, uh, I suggest we turn off TV totally for good.
Is it not too late?
No, won't happen, but because it, it's game. All I'm doing, Mr., all I'm doing, Mr. Auden, is up, uping your value judgment.
Yeah, sure. I don't think your value judgments amount to a hoot, because you are a 19th-century man.
Sure. And I am aware, and I think I am aware, because so are you. I am aware of 20th-century actualities, and these—
So am I, but I don't—
No, you are. I, I didn't say I didn't, I don't venture to approve or disapprove; I merely suggest that you know, if you see, if you see a fire, you quickly try to douse it. When I see TV or these electric forms dissolving every aspect of human individual, I, I say turn it off, but who's going to turn it off? They prefer to burn down, for sure. They prefer—but it doesn't mean, I mean it won't, it won't happen, but, but it's not getting—I'm not saying it to happen; we're doing it to ourselves; nobody else is doing it to us.
Exactly. All right, then why won't it happen?
Uh, because people like the damn [Laughter] thing. The children in the fiery furnace.
Do you think, do you think we can ape the children in the fiery furnace and enjoy the whole thing?
Well, I can't, but obviously they do. Uh, I mean TV's m, the games. You can see a tennis match or new—you are, you are, you are missing the name of the game, sir. You are actually imagining that those little images you see on TV are TV; they are not. What is TV is that firebox, fire stream pouring out of that tube into your gut. Yeah, now that is TV. What you see on TV has nothing to do with TV. I'm talking about the actual physical injection of those fire particles into your inside. It's called an inner trip.
Well, of course, I don't, I, I don't have a TV and I wouldn't dream of having one.
I know. You, you merely suffer the consequences of TV without enjoying it.
But I wouldn't enjoy it. I, because one thing, for example, taste in, in England or in Europe, I can look at TV CU. All right, I'd like to see old movies, very good, but yeah, exactly. So cut with the commercial. You know who can't enjoy it. Have you not learned to enjoy our commercials as art form?
No, I know that if you're real TV B, you think the, the commercial is the best thing. I, I know the people, the commercial people who produce Sesame Street, but it's off for me.
Um, I think we have a, a feeling obviously on the part of the panel, which I should think, looking at the audience, may well be shared by a very large number of them also, and it really, I think, is that people forgotten how to do nothing intelligently. Now here you have four Grecians who are obviously very skilled at this, because they're very energetic, they produce a great deal, and the real answer is that they can fill their time by thinking. And I think what they're suggesting really is the danger of television is that it fills time and allows people not to think.
No, no. I also fill my time by reading.
True, but that's thinking in a sense.
I, you don't, don't, don't fall into that British habit of supposing that McLuhan is against the book. Myar, I'm, what to say. I didn't say you were against it, but you got the time of the book was over. Lens is the moment of superabundance.
No, the book never had it so good.
No, but it is no longer constitutive of the culture that we live in, and the book will abound and super abound in the next few decades because it is obsolete. Obsolescence is not extinction; it is superabundance.
Uh-huh. Well, I don't think, you know, but I, I personally make my living out of the book. I make my living, I teach it, I revere it, I study it. I study your work, sir, as a matter of fact. I have to give a lecture on you tomorrow morning.
My God! Well, all right. Yes. This, me, theater and the visual arts; a discussion between Marshall McLuhan and W.H. Auden. Also present on the panel were Buckminster Fuller, Jack McGann, and the moderator, Professor Norman Jeffers. The discussion was recorded at the annual University of Toronto Irish studies seminar and was edited for broadcast by Judy Stman.