Arthur Miller and the Art of the Possible

While commenting on the difference between playwriting and screenwriting in his Preface to Everybody Wins, Arthur Miller used the following illustration to illuminate his point about the subtextual dimension of the theater:

If a telephone is photographed, isolated on a table, and the camera is left running, it becomes more and more what it is-a tele phone in all its details...Things go differ ently on a stage. Set a phone on a table under a light and raise the curtain, and in complete silence, after a few minutes, some thing will acctete around it. Questions and anticipations will begin to emanate from it, we will begin to imagine mean ings in its isolation-in a word, the phone becomes an incipient metaphor. Possibly because we cannot see its detail as sharply as on film or because it is surrounded by much greater space, it begins to animate, to take on suggestive possibilities, very nearly a kind of self-consciousness. Something of the same is true of words as opposed to images. The word is not and can't be any more than suggestive of an idea or sensation; it is nothing in itself. ("On Screenwriting and Language" vi)

Indeed, in itself a word is nothing.If we believe the struc turalists, a word is a symbol, a signifer or sign, a marker of meaning that points to something, some referent or vast reservoir of negotiable meanings beyond itself. The diacritical nature of language inevitably means that even small differences in sound and sense will produce tremendous variance in the determination and reception of meaning. Even more significantly, and perhaps more problematically, if we take a post-structuralist approach to language, a word points to an endless chain of linked signifiers, and given the arbitrary nature of the signifier and the system of which it is a part, this endless linked series of associations inevitably multiplies the potential meanings of every word and every sequence of words forming sentences in written texts. The nuance that every word takes on and generates in the reader's mind is affected by the nuances all these words have in combination with each other, and all of this is then complicated by unanticipated associations which generate a host of linked associations and impressions, which collectively form unexpected meanings as they stimulate the reader's imagination and even tap into the unconscious. Perhaps for this reason, then, Miller, almost sounding a little like a deconstruct!ve theorist, characterizes the word as nothing, but for Miller in its very nothingness lie the richness, density, and infinite possibilities of the word. After all, Miller tells us, "a description in words tends to inflate, expand, and inflame the imagination, so that in the end the thing or person described is amplified into a larger-than-life figment" ("On Screenwriting and Language" v). And that is the crucial part of the equation for the playwright: how to generate, shape, and string together words; how to invent and hone theater language in such a way that what is created constructs metaphorically an impression of reality that is powerful and suggestive enough to stimulate an imaginative response within the audience. As Miller recognizes, the possibilities inherent within the whole dramatic event are limitless, for the fundamental indeterminacy of meaning- an indeterminacy that Roland Barthes says inevitably results from the plural nature of the play text as a discourse that can be experienced only in the art of production- poses no nihilistic threat in Miller's world. Such indeterminacy instead opens up the possibility for rich speculative and imaginative discovery and generates endless opportunities for creative and diverse interpretations- possibly, even, a reinscription of oppositions, both with his own work and in the life and condition of humanity he depicts in his art. Miller's comments on the limitless and constantly mutating accretions accumulating around the words spoken and objects presented on the stage not only call attention to the subtextual dimension of the theater, but also show why this very important feature of dramatic art makes the theater what Miller described in 1999 as "the art of the possible" (Echoes 312).

Although in his commentary on the difference between the cinema and the theater Miller does not give enough credit to good film directors who can skillfully use the camera's eye to capture, isolate, and present certain aspects of individual objects or scenes on the screen in such a way that endows these scenic images with tremendous symbolic significance, he does make an important point about the special nature of theatrical presentation that causes words and objects on the stage to gather accretions around them and take on a subtextual dimension that knows no bounds. Whether it is the word or the scenic image, lighting or sound, gesture or action, the language of the theater resonates with extraordinary suggestiveness at almost any moment in a good play. And that suggestiveness resonates with a stream of endless associations and impressions that change not only from performance to performance but also for every new audience. Christopher Bigsby effectively describes the magical transformation that occurs during a theatrical performance: