Cronograma de ejecución

Leaving the castle to go questing normally involves a cost or a burden to those left behind. Someone must mind the castle while the knights are gone. And here we see an essential element in the feminist protest, for it has traditionally been the role of the male to go aquesting, while the women are left behind to their domesticity. Increasingly today it is the ideal to provide equality of opportunity to the sexes in just this sense – to provide women with the opportunity to leave the castle for the challenge of the wild unknown, and to challenge men to take their fair turn at mopping up the castle. I argue that this can be read as a move to provide equality of seriousness to the possible life stories of women and men.

The athlete who trains for a sport is thereby drawn away from domestic responsibilities and chores. The gambler is likely as not to play with the rent money, with only secondary thought given to who will pay the cost of losses. Those who seek cheap thrills by experimenting with drugs, engaging in profligate sexual adventures, or simply bumming around the land are imposing some increment of cost on the collectivities of which they are a part, with such benefits as accrue from these adventures going only to the adventurer. Touching another facet of seriousness, the scientist, the literary scholar, or the explorer engage in their quests and searches at the expense of the large social collectivity. Here the hope is that benefit will eventually return to the collectivity in the form of advanced knowledge, new discoveries, and fresh insights – or at least in the form of a diverting tale.

Since adventures are in this sense costly, it follows that societies will generally consider it in the collective interest to regulate access to certain forms of adventuring. The ancient Hebrews had no use for pagan sport. Neither did the Puritans. Sport for both societies was considered to be unproductive, costly, and therefore not serious. Recreational drugs are commonly banned, not out of arbitrary meanness, but because of the cost their use incurs to the collectivity. Gambling has a truly ancient history of conflict with the rules of the collectivity, and more often than not is banned. The Crusades of the Middle Ages can be seen as adventurous escapades, the legitimacy of which would have been quite suspect had they not been framed in the context of high religious purpose. Adventures that can bring no rewards to the collectivity are commonly regarded as not serious.3

Goffman describes the Calvinistic solution to life’s problems as dividing one’s activities into those which can have no harmful effect and

those which are sure to produce some small gain. On such a plan nothing can go wrong. The problem with this in our current era is purely psychological. We are likely to regard a life lived on Calvinistic principles to be overly serious and very dull.

It is an open question how much the sense of a need for the wild and unpredictable is a matter of individual temperament and how much a matter of the temper of an age. I suspect it is both. The compulsion to avoid complete domestication is neither a cultural nor an individual constant, but something that is itself freely varying and unpredictable. The compulsion to adventure is in a sense a compulsion to play, and is so very often an avoidance of seriousness. The reciprocal compulsion is the compulsion to seriousness. It is possible to have both.

Some forms of staged or play contests pretend to great seriousness – perhaps the bullfight is the most conspicuous example; but grand opera is contrasted with light opera, and serious music from music that is merely entertaining. Goffman (1967) cites Hemingway’s description of bullfighting as a kind of ultimate action, complete with the inevitable moment of truth, real swords, real blood, and so forth. But still, I would argue that the whole elaborately staged frivolity is nothing but another example of a domesticated public adding excitement to their lives through vicarious enrichment. I suspect that real struggles to the death normally have a rather different tone, and for the dying person at least, the struggle does not really count as an adventure, for unlike other thrilling experiences, the hope for a return is here quite reduced.

Conrad’s description in Heart of Darkness expresses the non-sportive character of the struggle:

I have wrestled with death. It is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an unpalatable grayness, with nothing under foot, nothing around, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid scepticism, without much belief in your own right, and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom then life is a greater mystery than some of us think it to be. I was within a hair’s breadth of the last opportunity of pronouncement, and I found with humiliation that probably I would have nothing to say. (1981, p. 119)

This is serious. But it is not a permanent or stable seriousness, at least for Conrad or Marlowe, who lived long enough to write about this gray mortal struggle, even finding thought and voice enough to make considerable pronouncements. So it is that just about anything can

somehow be assimilated into one’s self-narrative, should the adventure be one that is survived.

Adventure is truly described as an escape, as a release from the dead and deadly. It is creative and constructive, even as it is sportive and risky. It is life-creating and enhancing, even as it departs from the hard material seriousness of the rational world. Adventure creates story and contributes to the realization of completed identities. Seriousness is at risk in every venturing forth. But without the venturing forth there is no seriousness. Without the possibility of adventure, domesticity becomes a ludicrous reduction of life, and cannot be serious. Also, seriousness reasserts itself inevitably at the last to characters constructed by even the most frivolous series of naked spasms. Some see this restoration to seriousness as one of the moral advantages of death and war. The search for equivalents continues.

Acknowledgments: I owe a debt of gratitude to Ted Sarbin for reading an

initial draft of this manuscript and for making a number of suggestions for change. I also wish to express appreciation to Ken Gergen and John Shotter, who organized a symposium at the “International Conference on Self and Identity” held at Cardiff, Wales, in July 1984. At that conference an initial and abbreviated version of this chapter was presented.

NOTES

1. The source of this and much additional information in this chapter concerning gambling is the report of the U.S. Presidential Commission on the Review of National Policy Toward Gambling, based on survey research conducted in 1974 (Kallick, Suits, Dielman, & Hybels, 1979).

2. The necessity of relating the adventure leads to the observation that the photographic industry has probably done more to promote the tourist industry than the tourist industry has done to promote photography, which is the usual way of regarding the matter.

3. It is interesting to note that hunting and fishing, skilled activities which once constituted the most serious of human work, and war, the most serious of human conflicts, have been transformed into sports in the modern era. And activities performed purely for pleasure, such as playing baseball, football, or racing horses, have become serious professional businesses. These are further examples of transformations to and from the ludic.

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Storytime: Recollecting