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Page 14
CHAPTER IV
ATTENTION
The mere perception of the men and women and of the background, with all
their depth and their motion, furnishes only the material. The scene
which keeps our interest alive certainly involves much more than the
simple impression of moving and distant objects. We must accompany those
sights with a wealth of ideas. They must have a meaning for us, they
must be enriched by our own imagination, they must awaken the remnants
of earlier experiences, they must stir up our feelings and emotions,
they must play on our suggestibility, they must start ideas and
thoughts, they must be linked in our mind with the continuous chain of
the play, and they must draw our attention constantly to the important
and essential element of the action. An abundance of such inner
processes must meet the world of impressions and the psychological
analysis has only started when perception of depth and movement alone
are considered. If we hear Chinese, we perceive the sounds, but there is
no inner response to the words; they are meaningless and dead for us; we
have no interest in them. If we hear the same thoughts expressed in our
mother tongue, every syllable carries its meaning and message. Then we
are readily inclined to fancy that this additional significance which
belongs to the familiar language and which is absent from the foreign
one is something which comes to us in the perception itself as if the
meaning too were passing through the channels of our ears. But
psychologically the meaning is ours. In learning the language we have
learned to add associations and reactions of our own to the sounds which
we perceive. It is not different with the optical perceptions. The best
does not come from without.
Of all internal functions which create the meaning of the world around
us, the most central is the attention. The chaos of the surrounding
impressions is organized into a real cosmos of experience by our
selection of that which is significant and of consequence. This is true
for life and stage alike. Our attention must be drawn now here, now
there, if we want to bind together that which is scattered in the space
before us. Everything must be shaded by attention and inattention.
Whatever is focused by our attention wins emphasis and irradiates
meaning over the course of events. In practical life we discriminate
between voluntary and involuntary attention. We call it voluntary if we
approach the impressions with an idea in our mind as to what we want to
focus our attention on. We carry our personal interest, our own idea
into the observation of the objects. Our attention has chosen its aim
beforehand, and we ignore all that does not fulfil this specific
interest. All our working is controlled by such voluntary attention. We
have the idea of the goal which we want to reach in our mind beforehand
and subordinate all which we meet to this selective energy. Through our
voluntary attention we seek something and accept the offering of the
surroundings only in so far as it brings us what we are seeking.
It is quite different with the involuntary attention. The guiding
influence here comes from without. The cue for the focusing of our
attention lies in the events which we perceive. What is loud and shining
and unusual attracts our involuntary attention. We must turn our mind to
a place where an explosion occurs, we must read the glaring electric
signs which flash up. To be sure, the perceptions which force themselves
on our involuntary attention may get their motive power from our own
reactions. Everything which appeals to our natural instincts, everything
which stirs up hope or fear, enthusiasm or indignation, or any strong
emotional excitement will get control of our attention. But in spite of
this circuit through our emotional responses the starting point lies
without and our attention is accordingly of the involuntary type. In our
daily activity voluntary and involuntary attention are always
intertwined. Our life is a great compromise between that which our
voluntary attention aims at and that which the aims of the surrounding
world force on our involuntary attention.
How does the theater performance differ in this respect from life? Might
we not say that voluntary attention is eliminated from the sphere of
art and that the audience is necessarily following the lead of an
attention which receives all its cues from the work of art itself and
which therefore acts involuntarily? To be sure, we may approach a
theater performance with a voluntary purpose of our own. For instance,
we may be interested in a particular actor and may watch him with our
opera glass all the time whenever he is on the stage, even in scenes in
which his r�le is insignificant and in which the artistic interest ought
to belong to the other actors. But such voluntary selection has
evidently nothing to do with the theater performance as such. By such
behavior we break the spell in which the artistic drama ought to hold
us. We disregard the real shadings of the play and by mere personal side
interests put emphasis where it does not belong. If we really enter into
the spirit of the play, our attention is constantly drawn in accordance
with the intentions of the producers.
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