1. a. A formal meeting of members, representatives, or delegates, as of a political party, fraternal society, profession, or industry.
b. The body of persons attending such an assembly: called the convention to order.
2. An agreement between states, sides, or military forces, especially an international agreement dealing with a specific subject, such as the treatment of prisoners of war.
The above description of convention is from the free online dictionary and leaves much to be desired when coming to an understanding of a convention. While some conventions are customary and most customs, conventional there is a very distinct difference between the two. They are not synonymous. Conventions presuppose the applications of language. A convention is a description; it is how we describe the world. In effect all conventions are language conventions. The shaking of hands is not a convention, it is a custom. The convention is something like the description ‘this is a gesture of good will’. Of course if we are shaking our hands at someone we may describe it as saying ‘goodbye’ or ‘hello’. If our hand is a raised clenched fist that we are shaking we may describe the activity as ‘ranting’, all these descriptions are conventions. Again the description is the convention and not the activity; the activity may or may not be customary. I will demonstrate later why this distinction is important to the arts.
Items 1. a. & b. in the above definition are clearly different senses of the term convention but item 2. is a classic example of how a convention is understood. We understand that prisoners of war are doomed to be treated in some way but a contract between nations describes what particular way they will be treated and this description (the convention) is what is applied to determine if the contract has been fulfilled. Item 3. above is wrong; it is only by custom that north is at the top of most maps. I’ve dealt with item 4. so I will attend to the role of convention in the arts.
One of the more common prosaic conventions is the describing of the movement of the earth as ‘the sun is setting’ or the ‘sun is rising’ (See Sorry, Earnest the Sun doesn’t Rise in this blog). We know the sun doesn’t set or rise but, customarily, we invoke a convention; we describe it that way. We could equally say the horizon was turning toward or away from the sun and be describing the same events.
One reason this distinction is important is that we are always free to create a new convention but the attempt to create a new custom is something of an oxymoron. A custom in the sense we are discussing it is a habitual, commonly followed or traditional practice such as decorating a Christmas tree or walking on the kerb side of the pavement when escorting a guest.
By definition a custom is not new but in the arts we often confront a new convention created to help us understand what it is we are viewing or listening to. Indeed, often the first step in the evolution of a custom is the creation of a new convention. For the most part conventions in art are imperative; we must accept them in order to grasp the work. Conventions provide us with a context which allows us to adjust our thinking about how a new aspect of our art-reality is to be understood.
In Nineteenth century theatre it was customary to open the curtain before the beginning of a performance. The opening of the curtain prompted the description “The performance is beginning.” In the theatre today it is not unusual that the dimming of the lights on the audience prompts the description that the play is beginning. In many instances the set evoked the convention of place in a play though sometimes a description in the program provided an understanding of time and place such as; ‘Act I, Midnight, a country road.’
A convention entails an agreement to describe events in a particular way. The agreement comes about by logical necessity and not because we choose to be condescending. In the game of chess we may doubt that the queen is a wanton hussy but if we do not acknowledge the convention that she is the most powerful piece on the board we will be limited in our ability to understand the game. Just as an astronomer must describe the sun as setting to share our everyday understanding of the event, so too, must members of the audience describe the events of a stage play as real. Macbeth is really killed though some may facetiously reply: “But the actor is not really killed!” The retort is factitious because it is outside the bounds of the convention. It is like saying: “The queen may be the most powerful piece on the board but she has a wooden head!”
Aeschylus, like many writers to follow, used the text to establish his convention of time and place as he does at the beginning of the AGAMEMNON. The first actor to speak is a watchman.
Oh God, for an end to this weary work.
A year long I have watched here, head
on arm, crouched like a dog on Agamemnon’s
roof. The stars of night have kept me company.
I know them all, and when they rise and set.
Those that bring winter’s cold and summer’s heat –
for they have power, those bright things in the sky.
And what I watch for is a beacon fire,
a flash of flame to bring the word from Troy,
word that the town has fallen.
The scene is set, though the play is performed in an open theatre in broad daylight, the audience must accept that the action begins at night at Agamemnon’s palace else what follows will make little sense. The convention of time and place is imperative; it has been forced upon the audience.
I’ve used an example from theatre because the on-line dictionary uses the example of the aside promoting it as a convention. But the aside is a custom; it is how it is described that is the convention. An aside takes place when two or more characters are present on stage and one of them speaks to himself or the audience and the other characters are described as not hearing or not seeing the event. The very nature of the aside requires that the other characters do not acknowledge it for to do so would provoke an entirely different order of events. By the same token the audience must describe the other characters has having not heard or seen the aside taking place else their following responses will not be understandable. In Euripides’ Hecuba the Trojan queen addresses herself in the presence of Agamemnon:
You poor wretch – I mean myself when I say ‘you’-
Hecuba, what am I to do? Am I to fall at the
Knees of Agamemnon here or should I bear my
troubles in silence?
In this scene Agamemnon recognizes that Hecuba is wrapped in her own thoughts but he is not allowed to be described as hearing what she speaks though an audience of thousands hears it clearly. Similar asides exist in Old and New comedy and are common in the works of Shakespeare and Nineteenth century Melodrama. In each instance we must describe stage onlookers as not hearing else we have no way of explaining their failure to respond to the speaker of the aside. The description is forced on us by the nature of the proceeding events which would be very questionable but for the convention we use. The audience need not describe other characters confronted with an aside as hearing but not acknowledging the aside unless they demonstrate this is the case.
The quality of a work of art is a direct result of how we are obliged to describe it; the conventions we must use. A few years ago some student actors staged a production of Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair. The play requires that one character menace another with a gun and eventually shoot him. Surprisingly, the actor used what was clearly a toy cap pistol. Though the weapon had much of the detail of an actual gun it was unmistakably a toy. When questioned on this point, the students argued that the audience would accept the toy as actual. They would describe the gun as real because that was how they understood it. The students insisted that it was merely a convention and the audience would go along with it. The students were wrong. No doubt some sympathetic members of the audience may go along with such a corruption and say something to the effect: “Oh, I understand. That toy cap pistol is supposed to be an actual gun” but this is not the way conventions work. Conventions in theatre work by imperatives and imperative to the above example is that whatever else the audience may care to admit, it must admit that what it saw was not a gun. The first rule of the theatre is ‘Don’t show the audience what you don’t want them to know, they can’t ignore it.’
The students were not satisfied. They countered with the argument that most actors use a replica weapon on stage which was not an actual gun. Why was this action correct and theirs faulty? The students failed to grasp that, in the latter case, the audience had no information from the stage that allowed them to describe what was used as a replica. The audience had no choice but to describe it as an actual gun. Individually, some members of the audience may have suspected that what was being used was a replica which would not fire but this suspicion was not based on any information received from the production. This was not the case with the student’s production. They had, in fact, forced their audience to describe their instrument as ‘a toy gun’. They had corrupted the convention they were trying to establish.
It is not unusual in comedies that authors and directors deliberately corrupt conventions for the purposes of satire. In Mil Perrin’s light little comedy called The Flaw one character threatens to kill another with a cap pistol. The victim replies: “But that’s a cap gun!” To this his assailant retorts: “So what? This is only a play!” The gun is fired and the victim falls to the floor in a manner that can only be described as ‘having been killed’. The way the victim falls, clutching his chest, forces the description onto the audience who respond with laughter as they recognize the deliberate corruption of a convention.
When we wish to create new conventions in the theatre we must so organize events that a new description is forced onto the audience. In Peter Shaffer’s Equus six horses dominate the stage and vivify the play but there are no actual horses used on stage (though this was not the case with the film). The point is, the text requires that the horses be actual rather than imaginary. The author recognizing the difficultly of using actual horses on stage forced a convention onto his audience. Six adults wearing gleaming wire frames, each outlining the head of a horse, dressed in nondescript costumes and wearing raised shoes allowing them to sway and stamp in graceful equine movements obliged their audiences to describe them as horses. It was a classic example of how theatre conventions work. The play is about a seventeen year old boy’s psychological attachment to horses and would have failed had the technique of the dancer/actors, who portrayed the horses, shown a flaw and forced a
contrary description onto the audience. The dancer/actors must camouflage their own personalities and shape and force the audience to project a description upon them.
The audience needed no preparation to accept this convention. If they wanted to participate in the theatre they had to oblige. They could deny the convention only by showing it to be corrupt; by showing another convention that was imperative and negated the former; by showing how the actor/dancers gave themselves away as human figures through their lack of control.
All art forms and their works impose conventions on their audience, some prosaic and some very specialized. In Part II we will discuss the visual arts and how conventions provide clues to how we understand particular works.
Launt Thompson
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