36. The space between the words
Real-life aposiopesis and literary aposiopesis are different. In real life extreme emotion needn’t be the reason why someone breaks off from speech.
I spent most of the summer of 1990 watching classes at the Atlantic Theater Company School of Acting in Burlington, Vermont.1 The vast majority of these were taught by William H. Macy. Some were taught by other members of the Atlantic Theater Company. A couple were taught by David Mamet.
I hadn’t planned to spend my summer that way. Initially, I’d just arranged to go up for a few days, which was something I’d done before. I’d visited the company in 1988 when they’d been based in Montpelier, Vermont. On that occasion I’d tried sitting in on a few of Macy’s classes and found them incomprehensible. I’d watched a lot of students presenting scenes which had seemed to me very bizarrely acted.
Apart from a general sense that I had no idea what was going on or what I was looking at, I remembered very little about the acting classes I’d observed on that first visit in 1988.
I did remember a class in which Macy had taught the students how to deal with the ellipses in Mamet’s work, those sentence fragments and partial words and phrases that most of us associate with his writing for the stage.
I don’t remember which particular Mamet play a pair of students had prepared a scene from that day, just that after a certain amount of discussion Macy had looked down at his shoes for a second and then looked up again and said that maybe it was “time to talk about the dot-dot-dots.”
The phenomenon of someone breaking off from speech has a fancy name in academic circles. Classicists call it aposiopesis, from “apo,” the Ancient Greek for “from,” and the verb siōpáō meaning “to fall silent.”
There is, I see, a website that offers the expression “I can’t even—” as an example of aposiopesis, but the English-language examples of the phenomenon that are offered most frequently are “Why, you—” and “Why, I oughtta—.”
A once-famous example of aposiopesis toward the beginning of the Aeneid could almost be translated “Why, I oughtta!” In Book I, when Neptune is upbraiding the winds for conjuring up a storm at sea without his permission because Juno wants to make as much trouble for Aeneas and his shipmates as she can, Virgil has the sea god begin a line with the words “Quos ego—,” which in the context literally means “You whom I [will]—” It’s the beginning of a threat: Neptune is about the tell the winds what he “oughtta” do to them. But there’s no verb. The sea god interrupts himself, deciding what he probably ought to do is focus on quelling the storm.
This instance of aposiopesis was once so famous that Flaubert could reference it in the first chapter of Madame Bovary. Into the uproar that follows the young Charles Bovary’s humiliation during the schoolroom scene, Flaubert has the schoolmaster shout: “The whole class will copy five hundred lines!”
Like Neptune’s ‘Quos ego’ in the Aeneid, this furious exclamation checked the outbreak of a new storm.2
Rubens painted that scene from the Aeneid—“Neptune Calming the Waves.” An alternative title for the painting is “Quos Ego.”
The expressions “I can’t even—,” “Why you—,” and “Why I oughtta—” are unlike the instances of aposiopesis generally found in ancient oratory and poetry—and, for that matter, in Mamet’s work—because they were created to be left unfinished. No one speaking those words has any interest in completing the thought.3 What gives them their power is what’s left unspoken—as when someone says “If you don’t mind . . .” without articulating what it is they want you to do or stop doing. The point is to cast your boorishness as so extreme that it needn’t be put into words.
A proper aposiopesis usually involves a shift in thought, a logical gear change. Poets and orators traditionally used the device to convey a state of heightened passion. The idea was that the character or the speaker was so overwrought that cogent speech had ceased to be possible (cf. Mark Antony’s: “My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.”)
Real-life aposiopesis and literary aposiopesis are different. In real life extreme emotion needn’t be the reason why someone breaks off from speech.
And indeed what Macy—who after all was talking about the simulation of realistic speech—told the acting students about the dot-dot-dots that day in the summer of 1988 was this.
He said there were a limited number of reasons why a person would break off from speech. It might be—he suggested—that they’d thought of a better thing to say. It might be that they’d thought of a better way to say what they were saying. It might be that they didn’t think some utterance needed to be finished.
It was, I remember, that third reason Macy gave for aposiopesis that caught my attention that day, and I remember coming up with a lot of hifalutin theories about the space between the words in Mamet’s plays. Could you, I wondered, learn more about characters from what they didn’t say than from what they did? Was there stuff that you could discover or intuit about a character from the assumption that some word or thought didn’t need to be finished? And if that character proved, in the theater, to be right, if it turned out that we all knew how some word or thought should finish, was there stuff you could discover or intuit from that about language or about society or about ourselves?
Was there a lot of social commentary and satire lodged in the spaces between the words in Mamet’s plays? If so, then no wonder he would have felt he had to invent a new way to teach acting. Method acting might actually pose a danger to his work because of the way it tended to subordinate the text to some notion of an actor’s artistic integrity. It never cared all that much about the words a characters spoke, only that the feelings behind whatever words were spoken be “real” and “authentic.” That approach might work with O’Neill and the other “great American realist playwrights,” but it would be death to a playwright who wanted the words spoken onstage be uttered exactly as he’d written them—down to the very syllable.
That was one thing I remembered about watching classes at the Atlantic Theater Company Acting School in 1988.
The only other thing I remembered was that everyone kept talking about something called “The Dirty Joke Game.”
I feel I might as well use the school’s current name. At the time I visited the acting school run by the Atlantic Theater Company, it was called the Practical Aesthetics Workshop, a fact which I never thought did anyone any favors.
From Mildred Marmur’s translation in the Penguin Random House edition.
It’s been pointed out to me that when Ann Dvorak says “Why you—” in the 1932 Scarface because George Raft won’t dance with her, she sounds like she wanted to finish the thought.