Vs. Representation

THERE ARE TWO WAYS OF RELATING to the audience during the performance of a story. The difference is clearest in theater. In a representational play, the actors all act as if there were a fourth wall between them and the audience. If they look in the direction of the audience, they give no sign of seeing that anyone is out there looking at them. Instead, they pretend that they're seeing only what would be there if the play were real-another wall of the drawing room, or the rest of the Forest of Arden. This technique helps the audience maintain the illusion of reality (or, as it is commonly called, the willing suspension of disbelief. Though of course the audience knows they are watching a play, the actors do as little as possible to remind them of it.

Of course, no play is ever perfectly representational. For instance, if the actors sit down at dinner, the major characters-or at least the taller ones-tend to group themselves on the upstage side of the table, the side farther from the audience, so they will face the audience. Furthermore, the script generally has people speaking in coherent language, often with complete sentences, which real people rarely do. If you know what to look for, you'll see the actors, the director, the lighting technician, the makeup artist, the playwright, and everybody else working very hard to sustain the illusion of reality.

All this is in the effort to deal with the audience's constant query: "Oh yeah?" And despite the players' best effort to be "real" David Belas-co, a naturalistic producer at the turn of the century, once transplanted an actual apartment, stained wallpaper and all, to the stage), the fact is that even the most representational theater is still being presented to an audience, with reality distorted in a thousand ways in order to help the audience receive it.

Presentational theater, on the other hand, tears down that imaginary fourth wall. The actors don't just admit the audience is there, they make constant contact with the audience. This style is at its extreme in the art of stand-up comedy, where the actor even talks to the audience about the audience's response. (Comedians are actors playing a role, of course- you don't think Johnny Carson or Rodney Dangerfield or Howie Mandel

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or Elayne Boosler are really like their comedic personas, do you?) The actors and the audience are engaged in continuous conversation.

Somewhere between the two extremes are the plays where the actors don't usually speak right to the audience, but still don't attempt to recreate reality in full. Shakespeare's plays were originally performed on a nearly bare stage. If you needed the Forest of Arden, an actor would say, in effect, "Here we are in the Forest of Arden." If they were at a castle, somebody would say, "For three days we have waited here at Caernarvon Castle," and this told the audience all they needed to know; their imagination would supply the trees.

We aren't talking about the difference between romance and realism here. We're talking about the storytellers' relationship with the audience. In fiction, the representational writer never addresses her audience. The narrator never expresses a personal opinion. All the focus is on the events, and everything is expressed through the point of view of a character in the story. In a representational first-person account, the narrator has clearly in mind who it is she's talking to, and it isn't the reading audience. Think of John Mersey's The Wall, where he carefully maintains the illusion that the novel is actually a journal written by a participant in the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. When I read the book at the naive age of seventeen, I was completely taken in; it took several days of baffling searches through the library for more information before I finally realized that the book was fiction. I remember very well the depth of the illusion and how much more power it lent to the story; when I later wrote my historical novel Saints, I very carefully framed it as an absolutely representational document, complete with a "historian" as the narrator and phony acknowledgments to people who are either disguised or never existed at all.

On the other hand, fiction can be highly presentational. Kurt Von-negut is a prime example. He speaks directly to the audience; he refers to himself; the author's hand is so obvious in the story that the reader never forgets that he is reading fiction.

Sometimes the boundary between representational and presentational becomes hopelessly muddied. William Goldman's classic The Princess Bride is both at once. The romance itself is plainly presentational-the supposed author, "Morgenstern," makes comments and asides to his audience. But Morgenstern's story is "framed" by a present-day story narrated by a sort of pseudo-William Goldman as a modern screenwriter who is rediscovering the Morgenstern classic he adored as a child. The present-day "Goldman" constantly interrupts the flow of the romance to comment on Morgenstern or on his own reaction to the story. Yet the frame story itself, about Goldman's experiences as a screenwriter in Hollywood, is absolutely representational. Goldman sustains the illusion that, while the romance by Morgenstern is fiction, it really is by Morgenstern. It is, in other words, a presentational story within a representational one, and if that sounds hopelessly confusing to you, I assure you that it isn't. Goldman manipulates the complex structure so flawlessly that I used the book as a basic text in my freshman composition and literature class the year I taught at Notre Dame. After understanding the structure of The Princess