Don't Let What Really Happened Get in the Way of the Truth: Reflections on Theatre, Ethics, and "The Moral Order"

Don’t Let What Really Happened Get in the Way of the Truth Re®ections on Theatre, Ethics, and “The Moral Order” Rosemarie K. Bank It seems altogether appropriate that this address comes toward the middle of a conference called “Theatre and the Moral Order”—neither a keynote sounded at the beginning of things, like a paean signaling a battle charge, nor an endnote, echoing, at the ¤nish , the matter sounded throughout—appropriate because, while “the moral” is always of the moment, “the moral order” is retrospective. In “The Storyteller,” Walter Benjamin draws the relationship between the two as that between the perpetuating remembrance and the reminiscence that expresses it. Since, in my view, moral orders are constructs, not “facts,” we need to address that larger thing, the ethical—the principles and rules of which the “right conduct” or “customs” of the moral are the re®ection—from which moral orders (the performances of those principles and rules) are constructed. Though we can already see “the moral” as an acting out, a performance of what I elsewhere call theatre culture, a middle position lets us look back from the space of the now, toward a beginning that has already begun, and ahead to an endgame that has not yet been played, to triangulate a discourse too often positioned in such binary terms as then and now or good and evil. In the midst of things we will move from ethics to theatre and back to ethics, with stops in the history of the American (septentrional) and U.S. theatre . I have in view the story of (theatre) history re®ected in a National Public Radio broadcast I recently heard in which the storyteller spoke of an incident that happened to him in the sixth grade (or such), which he had reminisced in his writing into a tale at some remove from “what really happened.” Inevitably, the day came when he told the tale to an audience that had in it one of his sixth-grade classmates. Certain of the exposure and rebuke that must inevitably follow his perversion of “the truth,” the storyteller braced himself as the audience member confronted him—and effused that the storyteller had perfectly captured the incident and accurately remembered the details after so many years. Let us see what we may think of our (hi)stories when, as Theodor Adorno observes in Minima Moralia, “The ungenuineness of the genuine stems from its need to claim, in a society dominated by exchange, to be what it stands for yet is never able to be.” The beginning, then, has begun.1 Three ancient words reverberate in the consideration of “ethics” as a contemporary construct: ethikós = of morals, ethnikós (from éthnos = nation), and ethos = character (in the moral sense—and we can readily connect ethos to ethics/ethikós). When the Greeks began to classify types of knowing—the dialectic (primarily philosophical) from the rhetorical (primarily political) from the aesthetic (primarily beautiful), and so on—they did so in the context of logos, the Greek word for speech, an ambiguous and sometimes mystical concept which may refer concretely to a word, words, or an entire oration, or may be used abstractly to indicate the meaning behind a word or expression or the power of thought and organization or the rational principle of the universe or the will of God. On the human level it involves man’s thought and his function in society, and it further includes artistic creativity and the power of personality. 2 Our own less-elastic language drives a wedge between what is said and what is done at the same time that it glides silently across the abyss separating thought and deed, as in these de¤nitions of ethics from my dictionary: “the principles of morality, including both the science of the good and the nature of the right; the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions; the science of the human character in its ideal state.” It seems, then, that “ethics refers to rules and standards of conduct and practice,” and morals “to generally accepted customs of conduct and right living in a society, and...