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THE THEATRICAL STORY 219
Complex units
The smallest elements of the stageplay— and consequently the theatrical story— are complex units as compared with the elements accessible to the camera. The reason is that, because of its dependence upon stage conditions and its concomitant emphasis on humanly significant action, the theatrical play does not admit indefinite breakdowns. Of course, it may suggest them in varying degrees. Shakespearean plays, for instance, are relatively transparent to unstaged nature, introducing characters and situations which might as well be dispensed with in a strictly compositional interest; and these seeming diversions and excursions evoke, somehow, life in the raw— its random events, its endless combinations.5 Also, a Kammerspiel may come so close to its characters that it sensitizes the spectator to imperceptible psychological undercurrents and their physiological correspondences. Yet even the most subtle, most open-ended stage play is hardly in a position to implement its suggestions and carry analysis beyond a certain point.
The fact that the elements of which it consists— behavior patterns, passions, conflicts, beliefs— are highly complicated aggregates can easily be seen. Take the modern novel: Joyce, Proust, and Virginia Woolf coincide in decomposing the smallest units of older types of the novel— those which cover a series of developments as they occur in chronological time. These modern writers, says Erich Auerbach, "who prefer the exploitation of random everyday events, contained within a few hours and days, to the complete and chronological representation of a total exterior continuum . . . are guided by the consideration that it is a hopeless venture to try to be really complete within the total exterior continuum and yet to make what is essential stand out. Then too they hesitate to impose upon life, which is their subject, an order which it does not possess in itself."6 But the theater goes far beyond any epic genre in forcing such an order on life in its fullness. A glance at the microscopic elements of, say, the Proust novel suffices to reveal the gross nature of the units which form the irreducible cells or nodal points of the stage play.
Film not only transcends human interaction but resembles the novel, modern or not, in that it tends to render transient impressions and relationships which are denied to the stage. From the angle of film the theatrical play is composed of units which represent a crude abbreviation of camera-life. To say the same in cinematic terms, the theatrical story proceeds by way of "long shots." How should it proceed otherwise? It is constructed for the theater, which indeed requires that analysis be curtailed for the sake of dramatic action and that the world onstage be visible