Denny’s Revisited: or, An Actor’s Antinomy

A few essays back, I mentioned that I was writing a play with my friend, John Turrentine. We completed the script in mid-June and, on one magical night at the end of July, performed the show with a cast of intrepid friends. I am happy to report that it was well-received by about 100 people whom we managed somehow to cram into the wooded yard of a college professor beneath the widespread arms of a live oak and the watchful summer stars. 

But as every incurable thespian can attest, the high of a great performance is always followed by a stretch of low spirits. And this time around, having spent almost a year in the glamorous work of creating the story and characters, in the unglamorous work of actually writing the script, and then in the arduous work of bringing it to life onstage, my spirits were bound for quite the trough, indeed. 

They began their decline within an hour of striking the set and departing with the cast for the obligatory post-performance jaunt to Denny’s. That’s not to say they weren’t still high, of course: it had been a marvelous show, everyone had done a fantastic job, and the audience had been receptive. It was a deeply gratifying experience. The symptoms of impending nosedive, however, began to show themselves when, in a momentary lapse of madness, someone posed a question: “Why do we act?”

With this cast, all of whom have strong opinions and love to argue, this is exactly the sort of question to spark spirited discussion. 

“I think we have to remember that theater,” put forward one actor, “is always about giving a gift to others.”

I didn’t quite disagree, but at the same time… well… John and I had often pondered precisely this issue after many an exhausted autumn night spent chipping away at the script. We would sip our Woodford Reserve and puff smoke, gazing down the twilit lanes between avocado trees in the orchard surrounding John’s casita, taking comfort in knowing that our labors would eventually be rewarded by a performance. But was it the act of performing that would reward us, or was it warming the hearts of our audience? During those starlit conversations, I found myself wondering: por que no los dos?

I’ll tell you por que. In the dim Kantian corners of a Catholic conscience there lurks a chronic suspicion of pleasure, above all of the pleasures of excellence. It’s virtually impossible for one of us to receive a compliment on a job well done without feeling like we’re suddenly teetering on the brink of hell — and that the gentlest little breeze of pride will send us careening down into the pit. We instinctively leap back from that brink by insisting that any pleasure we feel has nothing to do with our motivation as artists; that creativity is, after all, a participation in the divine gift-of-self which began in Genesis; that art can even be considered a kind of incarnational kenosis-in-miniature… and on, and on, and (oh, so unconvincingly!) on. 

The benefit of ritually repeating that instinctive leap in my conversations with John was that I began to wonder whether the instinct was correct. Once you restrain the impulse to leap, after all, what’s actually wrong with living for applause…? But no matter how often I paused to pose that question, whether because of that irrepressible instinct or because of something deeper in my soul, I couldn’t entirely cast in my lot with Lady Gaga (thank God). I didn’t like tut-tutting the pleasure of performing, but I also didn’t like embracing it whole hog. 

For nine months I bounced between extremes in an internal conflict to make Hegel smile, and over that time, although I did not reach a synthesis, I did managed to wear down the edges of the antinomy, so that it came more to resemble Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr engaged in a glassy game of chess than Voldemort taking on “the only one he ever feared”. 

Thus, by the time I sat in the midst of that punch-drunk conversation at Denny’s at the end of July, I was more than ready to engage. Over midnight coffees, chocolate shakes, and capitalism’s latest take on the pancake, we worked our way to a consensus that ran something like this: an actor’s goal is to entertain the audience, which he knows he is doing when he can feel himself “playing the audience like a fiddle” or “holding them in the palm of his hand.” Putting it that way inseparably links the pleasure of performing with giving the gift of a performance to an audience…

…but while that consensus may have been good enough for government work and giddy thespians, it still didn’t resolve my antinomy. And now that my spirits have returned to a state of (comparative) equilibrium, which can be a little boring, I want to revisit our conversation that night.

The operative word in our consensus — call it “the Denny’s principle” — is “entertainment”, which does the heavy lifting, providing the all-important link between the elements of pleasure and gift. But did we actually answer the question, or did we simply punt on it? 

You see, “entertainment” isn’t a reputable word. That a book, movie, or show is entertaining isn’t enough to justify enjoying it. At both extremes of the ideological spectrum, entertainment is treated with suspicion. Plato first formulated the ‘conservative’ complaint about entertainment (namely, that it relaxes a people’s martial instincts and encourages them to identify freedom with license), but there have been more recent critics on the far left (like Slavoj Žižek, or Roger Waters of Pink Floyd fame) who see entertainment as one more tool of late capitalism to castrate the revolutionary impulse of the working class.

What gives? What actually happens when we’re entertained? It seems to me that a good performance elicits an ecstatic response from the audience: they are drawn out of themselves, but always into something else. Consider the words we use to describe an actor’s performance: it is “compelling”, “seductive”, “arresting”, “absorbing”, “irresistible”, and so on. What do all of these words have in common? An involuntary, but not necessarily unwelcome, loss of autonomy: a compelling performance leads people to identify with this or that character in a story — which is why it’s so enticing. They become one with the character, they participate in his role in a story, they taste his suffering as well as his redemption: their lives, if only for a moment, have a readily intelligible meaning. 

I think this phenomenon is at the root of political hostility to creativity. For entertainment can be used to mislead the masses and lead them by their collective nose. No one knew this better than Plato — but not, pace Josef Pieper, because he thought such blatant manipulation repugnant to human flourishing. The Republic features an elaborate (and, ahem, tyrannical) mechanism by which to wrest the manipulative power of entertainment from poets and actors and to place it securely in the hands of the ruling class. It is not art which Plato feared but artists, whose turbulent personalities and ill-considered ideals render them unfit to play with the Promethean fire burning in their souls.  

Plato prates a lot about music, but if there was ever a “man that hath no music in himself”, it was he. The Shakespeare reference is apter than you might think: he actually engaged in “treasons and stratagems” to build a flesh and blood version of his ‘republic’ in Syracuse with the help of the city’s power-hungry aristocrats. (To no great surprise, it didn’t work.) No one has done a better job of whitewashing contempt for poetry, or of blurring the distinction between art and propaganda, than Plato. 

But… my objections to Plato notwithstanding, he has a point. Artists — particularly entertainers — are often some of the most sensitive and depressive individuals. It’s easy to dismiss their sorrow as a function of chronic substance abuse (which sounds a lot like ‘They had it coming’), but I think that’s both callous and superficial. There’s something deeper at play, something endemic to the artistic temperament which inclines a person both to exalted creative highs and to abysmal lows relieved by chemical oblivion. 

“What is a poet?” asks Kierkegaard in Either/Or. “An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music.” Assuming for the moment that Kierkegaard is correct, which I think he is: why are artistic souls predisposed to anguish? I see at least two interconnected reasons — both related, unsurprisingly, to beauty.

It’s a truism that artistic people have a heightened sensitivity to beauty. But in this world, that amounts to a life sentence in the gulag of disenchantment. Sure, one can go the Thomistic route and insist that beauty is “convertible with being,” which amounts to saying that everything, insofar as it exists, is beautiful. But while I’m not prepared wholly to reject the Thomistic position, I’ll confess to finding it less plausible with every passing day. The mental acrobatics required to evade the obvious objection can turn even the most down-to-earth Thomist into the intellectual equivalent of a third-rate hibachi chef, whose dancing with knives distracts you from the dubious quality of the meal he is preparing. 

More particularly, I think that an early and deep sensitivity to beauty matures, perhaps paradoxically, into a profound sense of its absence. Think of Edwin Muir’s marvelous poem “In Love for Long”, or of those heartbreaking lines from The Wall: “When I was a child, I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look, but it was gone. I cannot put my finger on it now; the child is grown, the dream is gone: I have become comfortably numb.” 

Chasing these fleeting glimpses of beauty fuels the second furnace of anguish. Using craft to capture a snapshot of their glimpses may allow artists to infuse a patch of pigment or a spilth of ink with some of beauty’s radiance, but at a great price. Artists catch these glimpses with compromised eyes, because they always regard these sunbursts of transcendence from a safe distance. “Poets treat their experiences shamefully: they exploit them,” aphorizes Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. I think he’s onto something. There is a certain dissociation required for producing art, an ability to step beyond the here and now of an emotionally charged moment to ponder the look on a friend’s face in a moment of vulnerability, or to admire the shimmer of moonlight on a lover’s eyes. 

Nowhere have I found this aspect of the artistic temperament explored so unabashedly as in Natsume Sōseki’s haunting little novel, Kusamakura. The narrator, an aspiring painter, visits a lonely mountain inn in search of inspiration. He finds it in the innkeeper’s mysterious daughter, Nami, with whom he has a few strange and unsettling encounters. But where a normal novel would explore their relationship, Kusamakura explicitly refuses to explore anything so banal or ‘earthly’ as a concrete romance: 

I’m a painter and, as such, a man whose professionally cultivated sensibility would automatically put me above my more uncouth neighbors, if I were to descend to dwelling in the common world of human emotions … I have removed myself for a while from that sphere of human feelings, and during this journey I feel no necessity to rejoin it. Were I to do so, the whole point of my journey would be lost. I must sieve from the rough sands of human emotions the pure gold that lies within and fix my eyes on that alone. For now, I choose not to play my part as a member of society but to identify myself purely and simply as a professional painter, to cut myself loose from the entangling strictures of gross self-interest, and to dedicate myself fully to my relationship with the artist’s canvas — and of course my disinterested stance applies also to mountains and to water, not to mention to other people. Under the circumstances, I must observe Nami’s behavior in the same way, simply for what it is. 

I haven’t read enough Sōseki to know whether or not Kusamakura’s narrator is his mouthpiece, and consequently whether he considers such emotional dissociation a virtue or a vice. But it takes no great insight to conclude that the narrator’s emotional condition is unquestionably monstrous. Such a man could never appreciate the sort of priceless moments which Mervyn Peake so charmingly describes in Gormenghast: 

She was weeping with joy. Her only answer was to place her hand upon the headmaster’s. They drew together — involuntarily. For a while there was that kind of silence all lovers know. The silence that it is sin to break until of its own volition the moment comes, and the arms relax and the cramped limbs can stretch themselves again, and it is no longer an insensitive thing to inquire what the time might be or to speak of other matters that have no place in Paradise. 

Of course, artists can’t always be creating, no more than they can resign membership in the human race. And here, rubbing shoulders with their fellow mortals, the emotional distance which makes for great art engenders what can only be called a social pathology. Few people desire to live “in the moment” as much as artistic types, precisely because they are constitutionally incapable of doing so for more than a few minutes. All their awareness of the world — and themselves — is mediated by this emotional distance; they subject every fragment of internal experience to acute analysis. These are the people who leave a party convinced they’ve offended someone with an offhand comment because they would have been cast into an existential tailspin if someone had said it to them. If it’s a chore being friends with such people, imagine actually being one of them, privy to the madness of their internal monologue. 

Now, this isn’t to say that artistic people must embrace emotional dissociation to become great artists, or that they are necessarily condemned to live in incurably melancholic solitude. But I submit that artists tend by a kind of psychological gravity in both directions, and can only be saved from terminal velocity by the interposition of equal or greater forces of the spirit. Perhaps that’s what keeps artistic collaborations alive: they are the aesthetic equivalent of binary stars. And undoubtedly, the artistic impulse needs to be governed by the higher aspirations of the soul — the mind’s search for truth and the will’s for the good — the way a comet is governed by the sun: a gorgeous conflagration that doesn’t dominate the sky. But absent these rival centers of gravity, artists — performance artists above all — will sink to the abysmal depths from which Schubert wrote Winterreise, which concludes with a song that speaks in a voice of unspeakable sorrow and solitude. 

So how does the Denny’s Principle hold up? Am I any closer to resolving my antinomy than we were in late July? I really can’t say. I can’t escape concluding that audiences thrill in self-forgetful ecstasy to performances which actors and writers can only produce because they have pitched their tents on the barren frontiers of human existence, the better to take it all in. Audiences experience a momentary reunion with the human spirit writ large, a reunion which the artists who make it possible must witness from a distance, like Moses looking at the Promised Land from afar… 

…if all that’s true, then why do we act?

Because we must. 

What better cure for dialectical constipation than a little brute simplicity?

We must act for both reasons enshrined in the Denny’s principle: ourselves, and others.

First, ourselves. Despite everything I’ve said about the dark side of the artistic temperament, there remains one fact that brightens the darkness and makes it bearable: that doggone pleasure of performing, which makes so many of us afraid for our souls. In the end, it shouldn’t, if for no other reason than that it’s not just our pleasure. If you have an artistic gift, you know what I mean: it’s what Eric Liddell says in Chariots of Fire: “I believe God made me for a purpose, for China. But He also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.” He also made me an actor, and when I’m onstage, I feel His pleasure. 

But second, others. Those of us blessed with the gift of bringing stories and characters to life should never forget those who don’t have the same blessing, but who can’t live without the stories any more than we can. I’ve quoted this before, but Stephen King’s introductory comments to Nightmares and Dreamscapes are insightful and bear repeating: “I don’t talk about this much, because it embarrasses me and it sounds pompous, but I still see stories as a great thing, something which not only enhances lives but actually saves them. Nor am I speaking metaphorically. Good writing — good stories — are the imagination’s firing pin, and the purpose of the imagination, I believe, is to offer us solace and shelter from situations and life-passages which would otherwise prove unendurable.” 

Life is difficult. Entertainment is an invaluable way of lifting the human burden from the shoulders of our fellow men and women. Sure, “entertain the deflated” isn’t one of the spiritual works of mercy, but “comfort the sorrowful” is, and such comfort often involves providing a moment’s escape from thinking about things that weigh on the heart. If entertaining our brothers and sisters helps them find the courage to wake up tomorrow and continue plodding through this valley of tears, that should be enough. 

And so maybe there is something to that kenosis-in-miniature business, after all. If St. Teresa of Calcutta is right that Jesus’s aching “I thirst” spoken from the Cross is not a symptom of defeat but an expression of His insatiable desire for the salvation of souls, then perhaps our own delight in the emotional and spiritual crucible of performing expresses something similar. In the midst of all the struggle, agony, self-doubt, and self-loathing which perpetually gnaw an artist’s heart like Nidhogg munching Yggdrasil, there persists a quiet confidence that this is how we do our part to save the world. 

And how do we know? By the look on their faces.