Drama Producing Truth

Part 1: Pattern, Sumbolon

There is a common technique in dramatic storytelling of building the action of the story over a truth that has been hidden and fragmented. Over the course of the story, characters will encounters pieces of that hidden truth but it is only when they share their incomplete knowledge with each other and join their pieces of truth together that the larger buried truth becomes visible to the characters. There is a goodly chance that the conclusion prescribed by the truth that was hidden then revealed was known by the audience — directly or obliquely — from before they took their seats and what they really want to see is how the acting troupe chooses to portray the process of exposing the truth of their drama.

For example, Foucault (2000) recounts the structural elements of Oedipus’s story: the heavens claimed he killed his father, but it wasn’t until a peasant gave testimony that “Oedipus was adopted; his father is not his father” that the fragments of truth show the machinations of truth grinding along regardless of mortal action. Going the opposite way in the story of Ion, the earthly knowledge of the basket Ion was abandoned in reunites him with his estranged mother and compels the knowledge of the gods to be brought by Athena such that all of the knowledge about Ion is brought together to justify his claim on leadership in Athens. (Foucault, 2010)

What we are meant to see in this theatrical representation is as follows: 

“This figure of the broken and rejoined parts… is the famous technique of the sumbolon, the Greek symbol. It is an instrument of power and its exercise whereby a person who holds some secret or power breaks some ceramic object in half, keeping one part and entrusting the other to an individual who is to carry the message or certify its authenticity. By fitting these two parts together it is possible to verify the authenticity of the message, that is, the continuity of the power exercised. Power manifests itself, completes its cycle, maintains its unity by means of this little game of separate fragments of the same whole, a unique object whose overall configuration is the manifest form of power.” (Foucault, 2000, p. 22)

This process of piecing together hidden truth did not stop with the Greeks. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest riffs off of Ion’s story with the man who was abandoned as a baby needing to reclaim the nobility of his birthright. When chances come together that when the nanny who had lost him as a baby is reunited with the luggage he had been misplaced in (that he subsequently kept for many years), the lower mortal knowledge is assembled. From there, the characters swiftly consult the higher knowledge of books — not quite heaven, but close enough — to reveal that the baby had been christened as Earnest. In this way the full truth of his high-class birth that had been known but then was broken apart and lost for years became re-assembled and with this reconstructed truth he was free to live happily ever after and marry… his cousin. (Don’t think about that last part.)

Part 2: Anti-Pattern, Counterfeit

What is fascinating about Hamlet, however, is how it plays as if it is working a sumbolon but then counterfeits it in a way that audiences routinely fall for. 

Here’s how it works: in Act 1, scene 5, when the (apparent) ghost tells the prince that the prince’s suspicions against his uncle are correct and his uncle murdered his dad (Ghost: “know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown.” Hamlet: “O, my prophetic soul! My uncle!”), the prince accepts this as true immediately vouching for it to Horatio (Hamlet: “Touching this vision here, It is an honest ghost—that let me tell you.”) despite the ghost having made a clear reference to everything being lies (Ghost: “And in the porches of my ears did pour The leprous distilment, whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man…” — fact check: words are what go in ears; there are no chemical poisons that go in ears). So as critical readers/viewers we should have questions about the knowledge of heaven so presented here versus the human proclivity for confirmation bias.

Yet so often we don’t! So often we instead come to Act 3, scene 2, when Hamlet intends to “catch the conscience of the King” (Act 2, scene 2) with a presentation of The Murder of Gonzago — chosen to suggest that Hamlet knew his father was poisoned by his uncle — that even professors of literature jump to Claudius’s fleeing the play (King: “Give me some light. Away!”) and accept Hamlet’s interpretation of the event (Hamlet: “I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.”) while blithely skipping past what Claudius actually saw presented to him. Because what Claudius is presented with is not how Claudius killed his brother, but rather how Claudius will be killed by his nephew (Hamlet: “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king. … He poisons him i’ th’ garden for his estate.”) which makes Claudius’s sudden fear well-warranted.

Hamlet, caught in the grips of his confirmation bias, does not notice this flaw in his methodology. Had Hamlet actually wanted to get an earthly confirmation of his father’s murder, he might have investigated a bit — maybe asked some questions of the servants at Elsinore? But he doesn’t. Instead in Act 2, scene 2, he first praises the reporting of the acting troupe (Hamlet: “they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time”) and then asks their lead to corrupt their chronicles with his fan-fiction (Hamlet: “You could, for ⟨a⟩ need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines, which I would set down and insert in ’t, could you not?”), counterfeiting the element of truth they were supposed to bring to the sumbolon. (The greater irony is that he would engage in that corruption but failed to change the one-word relationship between Lucianus and Gonzago to “brothers” as would have fit his purpose.)

As a matter of pattern, Prince Hamlet’s ready treachery shows up again when he — completely unnecessarily — counterfeits orders to England for the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hamlet’s assumption of princely prerogative seemingly exempts him from any genuine secondary inquiry: he hates his uncle and heaven tells him why, his friends obey his uncle (their king) and thus deserve to die. His actions that are contrary to the assemblage of sumbolon can, like the exemplar dramas listed above be tied to his birth, except that there were no questions about the auspiciousness of Prince Hamlet’s birth: as revealed to the audience by the peasant gravedigger in Act 5, scene 1, “young Hamlet was born…” “that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras” (“Every fool can tell that”). Put another way, unlike all of the other characters of dubious origins, Prince Hamlet’s’ inability to ask honest questions and be open to truthful answers was part of him from his birth.

In the end, Hamlet’s being motivated by grievance over truth brings him to a bloody end as his father’s empire — won within living memory — is immediately annexed by young Fortinbras. In the dramatic assembling of sumbolons, Earnest got married, Ion got Athens, even Oedipus was able to relieve the plague against Thebes by sacrificing himself to the truth; for the ignoble and incurious Hamlet, however, “the rest is silence” (Act 5, scene 2).

Part 3: Telling Your Truth

We are talking about this here because gaining admission to a university — getting the university to extend an invitation to you — relies on storytelling. It relies on you providing a narrative that proves your worthiness to the university’s institutional needs and objectives. To this end, it is important that you be able to tell a good story and this is easier when you realize that good stories are formulaic. As Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero With 1000 Faces, one of the simplest and most common formulas is “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder (x): fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won (y): the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man (z)” (2020, p. 52).

Ignoring the over-simplification and over-generalization Campbell was prone to, there are two things I want to look at in this formula as relates to writing a story of self-advocacy:

1. What’s the risk? Kids today rarely go out into a region of “supernatural wonder,” their definition of “adventure” is strangely devoid of any hazard or adversity, risk or fear — “Fear! The crack that might flood your brain with light!” as Tom Stoppard put it (1967, p. 15) — and this is why the affluence-signaling charity vacation is no longer a recommended topic when writing for college admissions. Thus the first point isn’t that you need to try harder to get to a region of supernatural wonder, but rather that you must accurately depict the stakes — the risks, the crisis — in the story you tell. They don’t need to be big, but they do need to be real and they need to result in a real change in you. The poet Julia de Burgos wrote “que en todo me lo juego a ser lo que soy yo” — that is, roughly, I gamble my all to be what I am. How do you show yourself sacrificing for or betting on yourself?
2. Can you prove the reward? Campbell’s last step is having power to benefit those around you as a result of the risks you took. Father Rohr (2023) paraphrases this as “The classic hero is one who goes the distance, whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others.” This is where we cycle back to the sumbolon: it’s one thing to come back and proclaim that you’ve attained the knowledge of the heavens over there somewhere, but it’s a different thing to re-complete that ring by materially proving it with beneficence. You don’t really know it if you don’t really show it, and and this is where kids — having been bustled through high school and about to transition away into far-flung college freshmen in our individualistic culture — skip the step of showing that they’re able to re-deploy the internalized value of their story. This is the gap between eating grandma’s food and being able to cook the traditional recipes she got from her grandmother for a potluck, the gap between serving as a club president and rallying the team to stand up at a school board meeting to protect your funding, the gap between digging wells in Africa and subsequently digging into municipal water policies for your home county and state. If you want to see a really sharp example of this done well, check out this College Essay Guy stream at 14:20: the girl ventures forth to Yosemite, encounters an injured bird, and then comes back home able to bestow similar kindness on people around them — this is structural perfection.

The point is this: Telling a good story can be pretty easy, it’s just paint-by-the-numbers formulaic whether one chooses Campbell’s mythic pattern or cribs from Save the Cat. Why is our baseline structure formulaic? Because

In writing, what needs to be stored are not only spelling and background knowledge but also things like the ways to vary sentence structure or begin a paragraph. When inexperienced writers try to compose longer pieces of writing, they need a written plan to follow so their working memory isn’t constantly trying to figure out what to do next, interrupting their train of thought. … Teachers need to break down the components of the process into manageable chunks and guide students through practicing those chunks in a logical sequence while providing prompt feedback. Psychologists have called this approach deliberate practice, and it’s crucial to developing mastery and expertise. (Wexler, 2019, p. 224).

… which is to say that as you won’t be able to develop your style of storytelling you’ve offloaded your structural concerns from your waking mind.

And style, not actual creativity, is what is valued by readers. Nietzsche, prophesying the modern parade of Spider-Man and Batman reboots, explains that “these hackneyed little tragi-comedies are always presented, at each of their unnumbered and innumerable performances, by new actors, and accordingly do not cease to find interested spectators: … So much depends on new actors, so little on the piece” (1879, p. 107) and that should both alleviate your concern that your story isn’t unique enough while simultaneously dissuading you from letting ChatGPT tell that story for you as so many of your peer group is.

So don’t worry about formulating the most creative telling of a story. We can work on improving your writing together (💰). But first you have to have some semblance of a good story to tell.

It is for the sake of cultivating a good story that I tell my 16ish-year-old students to ensure that they’re trying a lot of things, and then quit most of them to focus on where they want to get good, to develop their distinctive abilities to the point where they can encounter a point of crisis and then be improved by going through that moment of crisis to the ongoing, habitual benefit of those around them. And we start work on this before we write a practice essay, before we take a practice SAT, before we write down the first college we intend to visit because it is the thing that is most given over to chance.

References

Campbell, J. (2020). The hero with a thousand faces (30th Anniversary Special edition). Joseph Campbell Foundation.

Foucault, M., Faubion, J. D., & Foucault, M. (2000). Power. New Press.

Foucault, M., Gros, F., Burchell, G., & Foucault, M. (2010). The government of self and others: Lecture at the Collège de France 1982-1983. Macmillan.

Nietzsche, F. (1897). Human, All Too Human II. Function (Kindle).

Rohr, R. (2023). Falling Upward, Revised and Updated: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Jossey-Bass.

Shakespeare, W. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/hamlet/read/

Stoppard, T. (1967). Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead. Grove Press.

Wexler, N. (2019). The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–And How to Fix It. Penguin Publishing Group.