STEREOTYPES AND CULTURAL MEMORY: ADAPTATIONS OF OSKAR LUTS’S SPRING IN THEATRE AND FILM

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

1. Introduction Stereotypes as social phenomena gain their power from everyday practice, social agreement, and tradition. Usually they have a lengthy historical background that gives the power of perpetual validity to symbolic and speech acts that are performed using stereotypes (see e.g. McConachie 1992). To attain a deeper level of generality, stereotypes must be explicitly or implicitly shared by an entire community. And the bigger is the community, the bigger the legitimacy of the figure. Both theatre and film provide stages for acts of collective commemoration, actors do so by embodying characters and performing stories and audience by perceiving and remembering them. Whereas films, once recorded, become part of the stable archive of collective memory, theatre as a series of embodied acts lacks preservable material artefacts. The primary carrier of a production is human memory: the memory of both the performers and the spectators. Thus, theatre can be considered an art of memory--an art of remembering, recalling, reminiscing and reiterating. In his book The Haunted Stage (2003), theatre researcher Marvin Carlson draws our attention to theatre's reiterative and preservative nature. According to Carlson, reiteration in theatre proceeds on at least four levels: spatial (theatre buildings), dramaturgic (plays), material (primarily actors) and the level of reception. Such repetitions also give rise to phenomena which we call stereotypes. Theatre buildings simply frame performances, although the stage in itself-unlike airplane black boxes or the many other places that function as memory banks-does not preserve anything, rather it is designed to be an empty place free of former connotations. But plays (especially classics) and actors are the main sources for the preservation and creation of stereotypes. Since theatre directors and actors are also members of the community, where particular stereotypes circulate, they can predict the reception of audiences and are therefore able either to strengthen or deconstruct stereotypes. Consequently, theatrical performances can become rituals of remembering - reproductions of the past, acts of recollection, which are at the same time attempts to impose interpretations on the past and to sculpt the mind, and through this to shape social identity (Burke 2003:48). In this article I will focus on stereotypes as cognitive phenomena for perceiving, collecting and memorizing new information, as well as on cultural mechanisms of representation and preservation of collective myths and traditional values. The phenomenology of stereotypes is exposed by studying their formation, petrifaction and decomposition more broadly in culture, and more specifically in theatre. As an empirical example I draw on the Estonian novel Spring by Oskar Luts, and on its interpretation in theatre and film. 2. Formation and function of stereotypes in cultural memory In scientific discourse, stereotype (Greek stereos 'solid, hard' + tupos 'print, figure') is a term most often used in psychology and sociology. Both social psychologists and cognitive psychologists state that generally people tend to simplify the reality, collecting knowledge rather at the molar level in unifying similarities than handling every single feature in its pure form. Thus the creation and application of complex fixed images, a form of cognitive figure usually defined as stereotypes, is one of the primary means for occupying the world. Stereotypes are mostly not created by an individual person, instead they are passed on from one person, group or generation to another through education and life practice. Thinking in stereotypes has gathered additional strength and functionality in an age where the grand myths and tales about the way the world operates have lost their validity and credibility. Stereotypes have much in common with mythologies: they primarily consider and explain the mystical Other, the strange, be it another nation or gender, the two concepts most closely associated with identifying a person and stereotypical thinking, but more broadly all unfamiliar features. …