As I was getting ready to type up a new idea for a possible future blog entry, I had the chance to browse the texts I had published so far, here at the Nova site. It occurred to me that most of the entries, if not all, focus on elements of culture and learning I admire. I suppose it is easy to write about the things we know and like. But what of those that rub us the wrong way? What of culture and lifestyle choices that we disapprove of, scold and try to have them removed from our purview? Could we write about them without the danger of running on empty?

Since I have spent the better part of this past month enjoying the company of my nieces and nephews, and their august advice on matters of friendship, sports, TV shows, disaster films, and of course, yummy foods, I decided to write about matters that do make me uncomfortable, cultural ails I would rather society did without. Borrowing from Naomi Klein’s terminology, and her work on ‘Fences and Windows’ (borders and break-troughs in the struggle against globalization), I will try to picket my own fences, and ask you to offer a way out of that fenced existence.

Fence 1: Trash. Not the human-kind, but the man-made one. What I do mind is how impervious we have become towards mounds and mounds of our own filth. We sit in our favorites outfits, sip on our favorite drinks, surrounded by love and valor (we hope!), all in the midst of so much filth: bags and bags of all sorts of remnants, to our eating, drinking and living habits. And we sit, and smile, and pretend not to notice. I often wonder, as we master the pretense where it might take us next – what else are we going to teach ourselves not to notice: pain, agony, violence, love?

Fence 2: Free Time. I am told that we live in the freest and most democratic of all human eras. I am sure you’ve heard the same. Indeed, there are so many benefits to being human today: from the medicinal to the technological. But it does make me wonder – if we have indeed improved, as individuals as well as a community, how come we have so little time to give ourselves, and one another? Do not get me wrong, I am the first to reap the benefits of surround cinema, but my thinking goes along the lines of ‘spending time with the ones we love’ or at least the ones we care about but are shy to admit how much. When was the last time we talked, took walks, played a game that did not involve a gadget? Laughed, without passing on judgment? I hear myself using this ridiculous phrase – ‘am so swamped today. Have a million things to do. no free time’. Really? Not even close. That I have a number of things to take care of, I do. That I love what I do, indeed that is a yes. That I am lucky I get to do what I love and believe in, sure. But ‘a million things’? No. Instead of escaping to the allure of the darkened screen, or the whiteness of the page, I can put on a pair of sneakers, and just walk out the door. No agenda, no pre-made plans. And if my parents, or my nieces, or my beloved wants to come, well, that I am sure is a gift. One that did not cost a penny or even asked for a tax receipt.

Fence 3: Language. I enrolled at the Department of English at Sts. Cyril and Methodius because of the love of language. When I think about my choice then, and the work I do now, I often wonder why English and not Comparative Literature. Was it the love, sheer want, to read and think and write in the language of my choice? It must have been. We seem to be born to a language, to a culture; if we are lucky to more than one. But in this cultural lottery we are not the ones buying the ticket. We simply need to learn how to live with the outcome. I have been lucky here as well: I got to like the ticket quite early on. Yet, the language of my education, the one of my professional literacy, plays by different rules. And I have spent the better half of two decades tracing its progress. Teaching helps. Reading is a necessity. TV and multimedia are a must. However, what I have noticed, when allowing myself that critical insight, is a significant change in all of my languages. And I am not refereeing to the inevitability of a change in register when the conversation’s interlocutors change. Verbs, nouns, pronouns, not to mention adjectives and adverbs, get ‘shelved’. We do not bother to even think things through: rules of grammar, the basics, no longer apply. Yes, we can blame hip-hop, text messaging, even Skype for ‘robbing us of the want to communicate properly’. Or whatever new piece of technology our scientific minds have invented to improve the standards of living in the 21st century. But that will take us only as far as our own backyard. The truth of the matter is, we, people of today, are lazy. And it seems, at least at the moment, that all this free time we have accumulated due to the nature of our digitalized lifestyles gives yield to more and more trash: cognitive as well as fecal. Shame.

If permitted to borrow from critic Eric Sundquist, realism as a genre has been especially successful at maintaining its notorious allusiveness in the eyes of the body of critics. Whether these attentive “feelers of the public’s pulse” have taken to regard realism as almost interchangeable with naturalism or verisimilitude, drawing on the precepts of nineteenth century art/literary theories, or opting for a more open (‘progressive’) interpretation by looking at realism as a critical concept that is simultaneously a site of ideological struggle between different critical positions, it seems that the genre which marked the literary and theatrical practices of the late nineteenth century is quite hard to “pin down”. However, what is useful to keep in mind when discussing the form and content of a ‘realist work of art’ is the multi-discursiveness of realism as a concept. In her essay on the creative vitality of the Provincetown Players and their employment of realism “as the mode in which to express their most critical and progressive political ideas”, the critic J. Ellen Gainor reminds us of this often dismissed, composite element of realism. (Gainor, J. Ellen, “The Provincetown Players’ Experiments with Realism”, found in Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition, edited by William W. Demastes, Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1996, p. 53.)

Straightforward and precise in her opening statement, Ms. Gainor refuses to play along the lines of certain recent feminist theatre criticism which has fashioned a rather limiting extrapolation (in reverse) of realism by identifying it “as a mode antithetical to its goals.” Instead, she is interested in an in-depth re-examination of such trends within contemporary theatrical scholarship by discussing how certain “realist” works (namely, three plays from the Provincetown Players’ repertoire, including Susan Glaspell’s anthologized work, Trifles), contest the same formalist position that tends to dismiss them at face value, based on their ‘ideologically suspect’ physical attire, i.e., form. Ms. Gainor approaches her critical reading of the Provincetown Players by focusing her attention on reassessing particular representative statements that have come out from the anti-realist camp affiliated within feminist/ Marxist/ poststructuralist/ ”Brechtian” theory, by pointing out the socio-specific and historically-pertinent circumstances which situate the body of work associated with the group, as well as their impact on the Little Theatre movement in the first two decades of the twentieth century, in a unique interplay with (retrieved) Brechtian principles of realism.

Under the dutiful eye of George Cram Cook, the group’s productions of American plays by American playwrights, in small, nurturing, community-reared spaces, stand out as an important but rather forgotten (or better forsaken) part of American dramatic traditions. As Ms. Gainor notes in her article on the group’s experimentation with form and content, the context of the early decades of the twentieth century in regards to the situation on the American stage begs a reshaping of conventional (Euro-centric) understandings of the concept of realism, i.e., a “realist work of art”. Her study of three distinct works by the Players, in particular Susan Glaspell’s treasured ‘little gem of a play’, Trifles (1916), is based on such a careful re-examination; Ms. Gainor “reads” Glaspell’s work as an act of conscious subversion of the codes of realist dramaturgy, as Glaspell manages “to break down the very processes of mimesis and identification theoretically integral to the realist form” by using “these same subversions to highlight her feminist agenda.” (Gainor, p. 63)

What better (or more innovative way) to expose the problems of a patriarchal hegemony than by involving its most powerful ‘tool’, the conventional narrative strategy of a realistic representation which denotes the authenticity of ‘our world’?

Ms. Gainor traces Glaspell’s trajectory by observing some of the playwright’s techniques at achieving such an insurrection of the practices of realistic dramaturgy; for example, in Trifles, Glaspell centers the action of the play around what is hidden, hinted at, trivial to the ‘naked eye’. By removing the two principal figures of the play’s storyline (Minnie Wright and her murdered husband, John Wright) from the stage, and thus centering the play’s unfolding on the traditionally marginal characters (Mrs. Peters, the sheriff’s wife, and Mrs. Hale, the wife of a neighboring farmer) and their growing bond of identification with the absent ‘murderess’, Glaspell creates an environment, a realistic setting, which is far from monolithic. As an audience, we are challenged to follow the journey that the two women undertake, in the small, confining space of the absent woman’s kitchen, step by step, discovering the actual realism of Mrs. Wright’s grim life. This version of reality, as Ms. Gainor attests to in her article on the Provincetown Players implementation of ‘realist techniques’, is consistently contrasted to “that to which women are taught to aspire, which would, in conventional realism, reinforce ideological codes,” allowing Susan Glaspell the playwright to “expose problems of ideology and political perspective in the dominant culture.” (Gainor, pp. 64-65)

Therefore, this ‘turning of the tables’ on the analysis of realism, which is closely connected to a “theatre firmly grounded in concrete material and cultural conditions for its creation”, exposes formalist theoretical principles and their inadequacy to accurately encapsulate the aesthetic merit of plays which belong to the local historical moment surrounding the Little Theatre movement, particularly its proponents, the Provincetown Players. Perhaps Ms. Gainor’s work will be followed by other attempts, on the behalf of cultural critics and literary scholars (disregarding their geographical, social, political context), to ‘free’ realism from stagnant suppositions that preclude its elemental nature as a signifying practice akin to bourgeois representations (but with a claim on all classes!). It is the ‘how’ (and not the ‘what’) of realism which will readdress the process of canonization, which in turn, will learn to value textual artifacts on the grounds of their historically-specific universality rather than “a putative transhistorical…significance.” (Gainor, p. 67)