Arquivo de Notes | Page 256 of 281

The Distance Between the Audience and the Artist

Nothing represents the distance between the audience and the artist as well as the theater, and there is no great play immune to booing at first performance. Understandable fact, since the great dramatic effect is averse to pleasant. The playwright, therefore, can measure his own success by the negative reactions and, if he receives applause, perhaps he is a minor artist. So is dramaturgy. The stones show his strength and the natural thing is that flowers are not thrown but by an audience that has passed unscathed to him. Is that only in dramaturgy?…

____________

Style Is Abundance of Expressive Resources

The goal of every great artist should be to erect, in the long run, a complex and multifaceted monument. That is why minor artists are the ones who, annoyingly, only repeat the same processes. To do so, to seek emphasis on the same idea, the same impression or the evocation of the same feeling, is not, as some suppose, a demonstration of style, but evidence of a limited creative horizon. Style is expressiveness, power, conciseness, rhythm… Style is abundance of expressive resources, exactly the opposite of the artist’s capacity to repeat to exhaustion the same processes.

____________

The Great Human Problem Is Whether or Not There is Purpose

The great human problem is the problem of meaning, whether or not there is purpose. And it is not human life and work but the answer. This simple question surpasses all others, it goes through reality in the most intimate details. When all seems well, when fortune decides to show its whip, the problem remains evident, always waiting for an answer: for what? Thinking about it we have, therefore, the necessary tool to measure our dimension, to evaluate our existence and to decide, alone, what we should or should not do.

____________

The Alter Ego in Literature

Some literary characters were fortunate to be classified by critics as the author’s alter ego. Others were born with the stamp from the master who gave birth to them. Alter ego… magical epithet capable of endowing any character with immediate depth, inciting his steps with the weight of real life. Funny! I cannot think of literature that does not contain, to a great extent, the weight of the author’s reality. It is simply impossible for me to imagine a writer writing by giving up his impressions of life, his experiences, his judgments about himself and others, the details of existence that only he notices, the observations he makes about the environment in which he lives. If he is painting an environment, for he will take as his basis an environment he has already witnessed or imagined; if he is describing a character, for he will use the examples that life has given him. Sensations: the simple fact of imagining them in depth is also to feel them, and it is not possible to judge that the author is immune to the feelings that he himself evokes. How would he know to describe them if he were unable to feel them? Thus, the alter ego, a term of multiple senses, can, in psychology, expose an interesting and complex deviation of personality, in literature usually exposes a personality obsessed with himself: the author.

____________