Well, look what I found on my computer! In 2001, I attended a course on philosophy called “Changing Perceptions of Human Nature”. If I had known all they would talk about were Western Philosophers, I wouldn’t have attended it. Nevertheless, I did learn alot of useful things, and it turns out that one of the assignments in the course required students to keep a journal. I wrote 5 journal entries: and I posted this one up because it gives some insights into what I consider when I write my stories. The entry is about the work of Erving Goffman, who was my favourite philosopher in the course. Descartes is an idiot. (And I think I got a bad mark for this assignment).
My Views on Goffman
Goffman’s views on human nature is particularly interesting for me, because he believes that the concept of the self is created through social encounters and the way people try and present themselves in a certain social situation. Certainly, he is not the only philosopher to look at human nature through a social perspective, but he is different in the sense that he uses a dramaturgical approach in his arguments. Having a great deal of interest in writing myself, I find his views rather surprising and should I say – helpful. While characters created for literary purposes are no substitutes for real people, his thoughts give structure and framework to a creative process that otherwise cannot be learned from a book.
The basis of the self and its behaviour in Goffman’s work is the Primary Interpretive Framework (PIF), which is a set of assumptions about appropriate behaviour in certain social situations each person learns in early childhood. To draw literary parallels, You can say that this is the first and most crucial step in creating a character for a story – determining the background and a past for the character. Surely, you wouldn’t expect a character living in 11th Century Europe to have similar behavioural or speech patterns to those living in the 20th Century – each period are governed by different social rules. To heighten the sense of reality in a story, the relevant characters must first speak, think and have the morals the reader would expect them to. Only when the social code of the times have been created can the characters start to interact, and the story start to unfold.
This leads onto the next part of Goffman’s theory – that “underlying all social interaction, there is a fundamental dialectic between reality and appearance”. When the characters meet each other in a scene, there could well be story elements under way that the characters don’t know about. Some characters may know things that others don’t. You cannot set up a situation and assume all the characters know the backstory – it’s not realistic to assume that. Characters who have just arrived at the scene will either have to figure out for themselves what is going on, or ask someone there to explain to them. Like real life, that person may not necessarily explain what is truly happening for their own reasons. And so you have a situation where everyone has their own motives, with the reader being the only one who knows what is truly happening.
Which brings us to another part of Goffman’s theory; the way in which the performed character’s self emerges through activity in conjunction with other characters or with props. From a writer’s point-of-view, this is the most important part of developing a character – not only do you have to impress the character’s designated personality upon the reader, but you also have to create character dynamics between the different characters’ personalities. I must say that at times the relationships between the characters are even more important than the personalities the characters originally have – because there are certain elements in a personality that can only be drawn out through interacting with another character. A heroic character can express their heroism through actions, but no one is going to know that this same heroic character has a jealous streak in them unless they are placed in a situation (with the right characters) which brings out this trait.
Overall, I’m fairly impressed with Goffman’s ideas; they may not necessarily apply to real life, but they apply to situations that try to imitate life – the creation of worlds in literature and film. From a philosophical stand-point his ideas may be no more valid than that of other philosophers, but I find it certainly has more relevance with my life and my understanding of humans than the other theories offered.