Sarah Ruhl
one hundred essays I don't have time to write*
*Please consider these essays as starting points. Consider them starting points for someone else to finish.
24. The future and story telling
In life (forgive the pomposity of starting a sentence with the phrase: in life. I used it to distinguish from “in art.”) In life, we do not know what will happen in the future. In art, we may or may not know what will happen in the future. We might be watching a predictable story or a story based on a known myth, in which case we know the future as it is unfolding. However, in some pieces of art, we do not know the future. Narrative itself is an accumulation of knowledge about the future. We begin in the present and end in the present and in the middle is an accumulation of future possibilities.But: is it important to know the end or to not know the end? Are we imitating life when we do not know the future? Or are we imitating life when we do know the future, i.e. that we will all die one day? And, in any case, is it important to imitate life? I enjoy watching things where I know with certainty what the ending is (Greek tragedy, for example), but I have no idea how the production will get there. I also enjoy watching things that are wildly unpredictable.
How do we know what we know as a story unfolds and when is knowing overrated. In fairy tales the structure is: we know and then we know and then we know some more and the story ends. In well-made play structure we know then we know some more and then we know “the real” hidden secret which happened before the play began. This plot structure claims to be more real because it has an important hidden reference point which happened before the play began, which is to say, it happened not on stage, which, in a sense, makes it more real. In fairy tales there is no real world that precedes the fiction, there is only the fiction that continually unfolds. One might argue that by creating a reality that precedes the fictional world we actually make the illusion less real because there is less power in the watching of it.