Introduction: Faces on the Stage and Faces in the Stalls

Abstract

Separated by about one hundred years, James’ reflections on the blurring of theater and audience in the recognition of the social type, and the literalization of the ‘drama of everyday life’ in a clever legal maneuver of Minnesota bars struggling to preserve smokers’ rights¹ trace a movement from novelistic insight to quotidian practice. Contemporary with James’ novel, Pound’s reflections on the impermeable core-less object intervene to indicate some of the sinister undertones to the flattening of man into type long before such fears were a routine part of intellectual culture and social thought. Collectively, these literary and journalistic moments offer an entry point into the central focus of the work that follows: the culture of performance anxiety.

It came over him in especial—though the monition had, as it happened, already sounded, fitfully gleamed, in other forms— that the business he had come out on hadn’t yet been so brought home to him as by the sight of the people about him. She gave him the impression, his friend at first, more straight than he got it for himself—gave it by simply saying with offhand illumination, ‘Oh yes, they’re types!’—but after he had taken it he made to the full his own use of it. It was an evening, it was a world of types, and this was a connexion above all in which the figures and faces in the stalls were interchangeable with those on the stage.

Henry James, The Ambassadors (1903)

An Object

This thing that hath a code and not a core,

Hath Set acquaintance where might be affections,

And nothing now

Disturbeth his reflections.

Ezra Pound, ‘An Object’ (1912)

Maple Wood, Minnesota—All the world’s a stage at some Minnesota bars. A new state ban on smoking in restaurants and other nightspots contains an exception for performers in theatrical productions. So some bars are getting around the ban by printing up playbills, encouraging customers to come in costume, and pronouncing them ‘actors’… Owner Brian Bauman explained. Shaping the words in his hands like producer envisioning the marquee he said: ‘We call the production, “Before the Ban!” ’ The smoking ban, passed by the Legislature last year, allows actors to light up in character in theatrical performances as long as patrons are notified in advance. About 30 bars in Minnesota have been exploiting the loophole by staging the faux productions and pronouncing cigarettes props, according to an anti-smoking group.

‘Minnesota Bars Skirt Smoking Ban by Declaring Patrons as Actors,’ Foxnews.com , March 6, 2008