Re: Is this why any discussion of PELLEAS... is pointless?

this Belgian playwright (29 plays), poet, essayist an beekkeeper has faded from the
scene...except for his operatic contributions to Debussey's "Pelléas et Melisande"
and he also wrote "Ariane et Barbe-blelu" with Paul Dukas especially in mind...

You could also say..."how the mightly have fallen" in terms of the survivability of
his dramatic oeuvre...but he was the first Belgian writer to win the Nobel Prize in
1911 for literature but his works have faded from the scene...

Funny...but his first plays were written for performances by marionettes fearing
that flesh and blood actors would be unable to bring off his pieces...

Pat wrote:

On Jul 8, 9:07 pm, Richergar <richer...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If I were to tell you that you were right, but not nearly Right
enough, it would be symbolic of what the issue is.

You are also accurate. The whole Symbolism movement (which had strong
roots in Belgium, which may well have been part of the problem,
especially if you are French) was well before any real understanding
of semiotics (assuming there is any understanding of semiotics, and
appreciating that not everything is as it semes to be).

But there are schools of thought that imply or suggest that certain
concepts can be represented without ever being quite verbalized
exactly. Psychoanalysis as an intellectual system takes as a given
that you can never really look directly into the Ucs (the mind-system
of the unconscious), and that what you 'see' in dreams, even when it
is the subject of study, is always at one remove from what really
'happens' in the dream.Thus, words, even the 'words' of a patient or
experimental subject, are not really thought to get to the 'essence'
of the dream. Without saying it the same way, Chomsky's grammar
theories had the same notion behind them, and the whole 'school' of
mid 20th century French letters (sic) which dealt with deconstruction
had, at base, the same notion.

The real question is whether anything in human experience is really
'pre-verbal', and, as you say, it's hard to demonstrate that, other
than in various banlieus of rmo.

On Jul 9, 2:32 am, Pat <pfin...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 8, 2:46 pm, Richergar <richer...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I don't know Maeterlinck's work all that well, but he was a Symbolist,
and it's possible that in a sense he was trying not to express what he
was getting at directly in words, but rather to use word symbols as
conveyors of the 'ideas' he wouldn't otherwise articulate, or didn't
think could be articulated.

On Jul 8, 5:59 pm, Pat <pfin...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 7, 7:47 pm, aesthete8 <art...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

- How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it
in words.

Maurice Maeterlinck

=========================

A rather strange thing for a playwright to say, don't you think? One
might expect such an observation from a painter, an architect, a
composer, possibly even a mathematician or scientist -- but not from
one whose gift it is to use words to help us understand ourselves,
each other, and the world we share.

Pat- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

=======================

Yesss, but ... Words are already 'symbols.' They're organized
collections of letters that different populations have agreed have
certain meanings, and that only populations familiar with the language
in question have a clear understanding of what the letters mean (in
that language). Taking that to a second level and saying that the
word 'spring' (for example) not only represents a small body of
water whose source is of a certain type, but is also symbolic of
youth or insight or macaroni and cheese, requires the reader to
understand a second layer of language. Metaphor is the very stuff of
literature, but metaphors, however subtle, need to be more or less
comprehensible.

I'm not sure that a 'word symbol' can represent something for which we
have no word or combination of words -- and if you can provide me an
example of such a case, I think that paradoxically that would prove my
point --- because you will have used words to explain your
interpretation.

But perhaps I have diminished my idea by trying to put it in words...

Pat- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

=======================

I'm not saying that there aren't human emotions and reactions which
don't lend themselves well to verbal explanation. Fear - horror -
lust -anger - love - patriotism all of these are beyond words in a
sense. And music and and the visual arts - can express many of them
in ways that touch us to the innermost reaches of our soul. Even the
meter and rhythms of poetry - and Maeterlinck wrote quite a bit of
poetry - can add a frisson of flavor to words, but I don't believe
that "Pelleas" and "Blue Bird" were verse dramas in the traditional
sense-- but I could be wrong about that. I have not read the plays.

I think that stagecraft was the vehicle for much of his 'symbolism' --
light and shadow, bright and pale colors, music and stage action, can
all have extra-verbal effects on the audience. But unless he was his
own director, stage manager, and so on his only means of conveying
his intentions to his confederates was through the vehicle of ...
words. This is probably why recordings of the opera "Pelleas" prove
tedious to many -- the visual language of the stage (not always well
invoked in practice) is not there to assist in convening the dreamy
mood of the play/opera.

Pat

Pat

.

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