Ends and Means

a contrapuntal essay

The problem of using "ends justify the means" logic to defend torture is that virtually every war criminal believes some threat is strong enough, or some perceived "good" important enough, that the atrocity committed is justified.

At Reason, Jim Henley shreds the utilitarian argument for torture (via The Edge of the American West, where dana does a good job exposing the "ticking timebomb" scenario as a fantasy for "thought experiments," not a real situation for the real world). Henley presents the familiar "you have a terrorist in custody who knows where a bomb is hidden, and many innocent lives are at stake" scenario. But Henley twists the hypothetical's rules:

"But you’re also sure this particular terrorist is a pervert! And he tells you that if you’ll rape your own child in front of him, he’ll tell you exactly where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And you’re sure that he will, because your intelligence is that good in exactly that way."

Henley then exposes

"the real misdirection of the ticking bomb scenario. It’s always presented as a 'What would you do?' dilemma, but in truth it has nothing to do with you. The proper question is: 'What should we allow officials embedded in the security bureaucracy to do with impunity? What shall we let their bosses order without legal repercussion?'"

I'm reminded of John Howard Yoder's What Would You Do?, where Yoder exposes some of the assumptions within the "If a violent person is attacking your family, wouldn't you use violence to stop him?" question? Conflating some of Yoder's ideas with some of my own, here are some assumptions inherent to that question.

One assumption: Your violent defense will be successful. If a violent person (presumably armed) is attacking my family, why on earth would I assume that I could violently defend them? My attempt would likely fail, and quite possibly make things worse.

Another assumption: A violent defense is your only option. Could I consider sacrificing myself to save my family? Could I try mount a distraction to allow my family to escape? Could I try talking to the person?

Another assumption: This hypothetical can be used to justify a large-scale war. That's absurd. Even assuming you are using this hypothetical to justify a defensive war, the more accurate hypothetical would be "If a violent person were running through a crowd to try and hurt your family, would you throw a grenade into the crowd to stop the person?"

Literature offers exploration of ends and means, too.

In John Fowles' The Magus, Conchis is ordered by a Nazi to bludgeon a man to death; if he doesn't, a whole crowd of innocent people will be executed. As Conchis approaches the man, the man speaks the word "eleutheria," the Greek word for freedom. Conchis sees in this Nazi resister "every freedom, from the very worst to the very best." He sees that:

"I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defence of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages."

In The Magus, Fowles presents an existentialist dilemma: Conchis rejects utilitarian reasoning in order to assert his own "freedom."

I've written about utilitarianism in Graham Greene's The Quiet American before. Fowler finds Pyle's utilitarianism abhorrent. Pyle is willing to sacrifice many lives to his value of democracy; he sees these lives as acceptable "means" to achieve an "end." In order to stop Pyle, Fowler contributes to Pyle's death: in other words, Fowler is willing to view Pyle as an means, too. He weighs Pyle's life against the lives that Pyle would be responsible for taking in the future, and makes a utilitarian decision. Of course, the fact that Fowler and Pyle are rivals for the same woman complicates the simplicity of this decision.

Literature also offers us an example of the ethical way to respond to torture and following orders. In King Lear, while the sadistic Cornwall is poking out the eyes of Gloucester, one of his servants objects, trying to make his master stop. From his lowly position, this is an act of disobedience. But he sees an atrocity being committed, and attempts to intervene rather than be complicit. He is unable to help Gloucester, and he is killed for his troubles; perhaps, however, he saves his soul. And if I were ever to direct King Lear (I'd like to imagine the twists of chance and life that would lead that to happen, but I can't), I know how my production would have Gloucester appear during this scene:

image from Wikipedia

(This is closer to what I would like my contrapuntal writing to be. Instead of a unified, developed thesis, one idea leads to a somewhat related idea and so on, finding unexpected connections and not developing a point in a systematic direction, but exploring it in a flexible way. I'm not where I want to be with it, but I'm getting there).

Addendum

--this post grows out of a frustration with seeing "It works" used as a justification for torture, as if the effectiveness of great cruelty justifies great cruelty (or, if you prefer, you can replace "cruelty" with ILLEGAL ACTS). If you are trying to stop a window salesman from knocking on your door once a month, kicking him in the stomach is cruel (and illegal) regardless of whether "it works."

--perhaps I should explain: I would not use images of Abu Ghraib in a production of King Lear to try and make a political point (which would be both incoherent and obvious). It would be an aesthetic choice to connect with the audience. It would be an attempt to make the cruelty of the scene (and play) familiar to the audience, rather than distant.

art to the marrow

a contrapuntal essay

If literature is just for pleasure, I don't need it: I can seek better pleasures elsewhere.

If literature is just for the appreciation of beauty, I don't need it: the world is full of great beauty uncreated by man or woman, and I can appreciate that.

If literature is just for the exploration of ideas, I don't need it: ideas don't require literature for exploration (and there is, after all, plenty of nonfiction to read).

This is not to say that literature doesn't offer pleasure, appreciation of beauty, exploration of ideas. It does offer those things to me, but that alone might be insufficient for literature's dominant place in my life. So why do I read literature?

For language. All poetry is ultimately "about" words, about language itself. Literature offers language in ways creative and energizing (aside: I'm just beginning to learn Italian, and finding the joys and challenges of immersing into a new language). And for stories. Centuries of human history (I think of Homer. I think of fairy tales) speak to the human desire for entertainment through narrative. But still for something else.

I sometimes tire of a detached, analytical critique of the aesthetic. I sometimes tire of the way we often talk about literature. For what I want literature to offer me can't quite be approached on those terms.

I want literature that reaches to my sinews, to my very marrow. I want literature to reach me in the depths of my soul, and to touch the heart of how and why I live. I want it to teach me, but to teach me not just intellectually, morally, but spiritually, passionately. I want to feel the literature in my very being, for it to grasp onto the core of a lived life.

This is not a common experience, and sometimes it is not felt immediately. It is not all literature which reaches me so strongly. King Lear does. My body and soul leap with energy when I encounter King Lear, or even when I simply talk about King Lear. King Lear has told me something I can barely put into my own words, that I can only encounter in the play and hope others can too. Dostoevsky, too, touches me with rare depth. Weeks, months, years later, the characters and images from Dostoevsky's great novels continue to haunt me, to call to me in moments both quiet and loud. Since reading Demons, a certain image of those two characters who had gone to America will enter my mind. I don't even remember their names or personalities, but I see them laying and suffering in a small dark room, and I see them later living in the same building but simply not talking to each other, because of what they shared. Why, from that entire book, is that the image that clings to me? I cannot say. Since reading The Idiot, I feel all the darkened places where Rogozhin and Prince Myshkin meet. Their meetings may work at an intellectual level, but I don't think those darkened places: I feel them. Some lines of Wordsworth's poetry cling to me and periodically emerge. Perhaps Wordsworth was my "first poet," and thus will always be there for me to measure all other poetry against.

I demand much from literature, and though I rarely find what I demand, I don't know whether I've found it until much time is passed. Wordsworth's language cries to me still. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky make demands of me, requiring me to examine and re-examine myself. And I need them to. I seek in literature the very stuff of life.

This essay is, a bit abashedly, Romantic. I offer no program of reading, no literary theory, nothing useful to understanding or appreciating literature. In fact I am writing about that which (for me) transcends such ways of thinking and reading. I don't wish to cheapen what reading literature can and has offered me. It demands the romanticized language I'm using: reading literature has been a spiritual guide to my soul.

Literary Studies and the Humanities (or, it's all interdisciplinary)

a contrapuntal essay

Teaching in the Humanities, I find that there is nothing I read that isn't potentially relevant--even concretely useful--to my profession. Reading John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus (second edition) suggests to me that debates within literary criticism also exist within theology.

There is the larger issue of the relevance of historical understanding of the contemporary context around the texts. Yoder does cite historical context of the gospel writers' words ("historical and literary-critical grounds" (42)), and this seems proper for a historical (and theological) understanding of the work (as aside: while the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's "seminaries and colleges generally teach a form of historical-critical method of biblical analysis, an approach that, broadly speaking, seeks to understand the scriptures and the process of canon formation with reference to historical and social context," the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod "teaches Biblical inerrancy, the teaching that Bible is inspired by God and is without error. For this reason, they reject much--if not all--of modern liberal scholarship"). I think a scholarly, critical understanding of historical context for biblical texts is enlightening for our understanding.

I'm not, however, convinced this historical understanding is necessary for literary criticism, by which I mean criticism of artistic works like fiction, drama, and poetry. Historical context may enlighten an understanding of a given work, but it may also be distracting from understanding a particular work, taking attention away from the text itself and to extra-textual information about the author and his/her society and times. For example, I think of Romeo and Juliet not as a great love story, but as a story of civil war and family rivalry--the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues dominates the text, really, and the relationship and destruction of Romeo and Juliet are problems inherent to the family feud. Perhaps I could follow the path historically (Shakespeare living and writing during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, the Tudor dynasty being the one that came out of and ended a long period of English civil war, etc. etc.). Perhaps that historical and political understanding influenced Shakespeare (in fact, I think it probably did). But if I start following the path of history back to the War of the Roses, I've moved away from Romeo and Juliet, and there is plenty within Romeo and Juliet to encounter on its own (I'm a defender of the play: I think if Shakespeare had written nothing but this play, it alone would be a masterpiece to justify Shakespeare's place as a titan of English poetry).

Here are some passages from Yoder's book that are relevant to literary criticism, and my own views.

"Hans Conzelmann [...] likewise argues that although it is part of the scholar's task to seek to evaluate his documents and reconstruct the events behind them, the first interest of the student of any text must be what the author of the text means to say" (4).

I think this claim depends on the reason the "scholar" is reading. For an historian or theologian reading a text, an understanding of intent is useful if not necessary. But for reading literature, I mostly reject the necessity of authorial intent. I certainly don't think my first "interest" as a "student of any text" is the author's intent; my first interest as a (let's try the term on) "literary critic" is to engage with the text. If I move away from the text itself to an attempt to understand the author's intent, then I am not interpreting the text as it is, but the text as it may have been intended to be. But perhaps a "reader" of literature is not the same thing as a "scholar" as Conzelmann or Yoder would define it.

"What it means that every reader of a text has and owns a specific perspective, as over against seeking or claiming some kind of quasi-neutral 'objectivity,' is itself part of the continuing debate among scholars about proper method" (14).

I certainly embrace subjectivity over objectivity in literary studies, and this is much easier in literary studies than in other fields. Biblical exegesis is a lot like literary criticism--it engages in close attention to the text to understand it. But theology has consequences--that literary interpretation of the biblical text is used to support or create theological positions. What are the consequences of subjective interpretations of literature? No negative ones that I can perceive. If person A has a vastly different understanding of King Lear from person B, that hardly matters to person C--it's doubtful either person A or person B will use their differing interpretations of King Lear to set up a system of belief for person C. It's just fine that in reading literature, we don't attempt a "quasi-neutral 'objectivity," and it doesn't matter that there is no such thing. We are free to engage with the texts as individuals, and our subjective understandings mostly lack consequence.

"The prerequisite for appropriate reading of any text is the reader's empathy or congeniality with the intention and genre of the text. We do not ask someone hostile to the discipline of mathematics to read a mathematics text expertly. To read a text of the genre gospel under the a priori assumption that there could be no such thing as 'good news' (whether as a true message or as a genre) would be no more fitting" (14-15).

I'm not certain this is true. I suppose in some sense it is: if Person A believes novels are a waste of time and shouldn't be bothered with, I probably needn't read Person A's review of Moby Dick. But a reader lacking "empathy or congeniality" for a field may find important critical insights while engaging with the text. Marx was certainly hostile to capitalism, but that doesn't mean he didn't find keen insights into how capitalism works. I'd be interested in reading a hostile outsider's critique of texts from fields like Economics, or Psychology--that critique might bring with it useful insights.

In reading Yoder's The Politics of Jesus, I've found passages that could directly be applied to and debated within literary studies. But as a reader and teacher, I hardly need such explicit connections to make my reading relevant to my teaching. I often find much of my pleasurable reading coming up during discussion, during lecture, in teaching composition and in teaching literature. I don't always know that what I've read will come up, but then during class, it suddenly springs to my mind, and organically fits into what we are up to. The reading from my "personal" life is never entirely separated from my professional life--but then, my professional life is not entirely separate from personal life, either. My sense is that English teachers tend to love reading on a personal level, and go into the profession because of that love.

On Reading and Influence

There are interesting posts going up everywhere on the most influential writers to particular individuals (see To Delight and to Instruct, Not of General Interest, and So Many Books). It is an interesting topic. I certainly know what people, what classes, what experiences have formed me; before sharing what writers have influenced me by their writing (and my reading) alone, I need to reflect seriously.

When I think of writers who have influenced me, I take quite seriously the meaning of "influence." To claim that somebody I have never met but have read had an impact, I am suggesting that the writer affected my understanding of myself, humanity, or the world, even to the point of altering my behavior. I am saying I wouldn't interpret reality the way I do if I didn't encounter this writer, and that it is possibly my actions have been influenced by this writer.

I'm surprised to say that as a reader of poetry, no poet has had such an influence. My favorite poets (Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton, Hughes, Harrison, Duffy) have not actually changed me (other than making me love poetry). And there are several writers that did influence me at one time, but whose influence has, I think, waned. Stephen King, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Alexandre Dumas, Jean-Paul Sartre--at one point they did color the way I viewed myself and the world I lived in, and I can even recall moments when I behaved the way I did because of these writers. But I don't know that any of these writers are responsible for how I currently live and think (though I cannot discount that their influence has left a permanent imprint).

And that leaves the writers who permanently formed me, who who still linger with me, who still have the power to influence how I interpret events, interact with people, and consider my identity.

The writers of the four gospels. I know that nothing I ever read will impact me the way reading the Bible on my own as a teenager impacted me. The gospels provided the metaphors by which I view the world, bolstered my liberal politics, taught me to seek God, taught me to seek a meaningful life, showed me how to behave in the world. It is the Jesus I encountered alone in these four stories that profoundly influenced me.

The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes. And nothing taught me the futility of existence, the randomness of the universe, the emptiness of life, the unimportance of the earthly world, quite like this book.

Henry David Thoreau. "Life Without Principle" still informs my view of work and how I spend my time.

Martin Luther. I read Luther during a formative time of life, though I cannot say for certain whether it was Luther's writing or Luther's biographers (Roland Bainton in particular) that taught me. It is not just Luther's understanding of Christianity that affected me; learning about Luther's life (particularly from my history teacher, John Buschen, and from Luther's biographer Erik Erikson) helped me to understand myself.

John Fowles. I still feel The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman frequently. Not least of all, Fowles taught me about Hazard, about random chance in our lives. He taught me much, much more, including how to read.

John Howard Yoder. Yoder is the writer that permanently grounded my pacifism in Christ.

William Shakespeare. For one work: King Lear. It is one thing to try express nihilistic ideas; it is another altogether to experience Lear. To read Lear is to immerse oneself into a cosmos, one of vast open space vulnerable beneath the large indifferent heavens. It is not to think so much as to feel intuitively. Oh, it makes me think, certainly. But the better thoughts it provides me are not articulated in words, but in images, in emotions, in tones. To even explain how I feel King Lear cheapens it; what Lear immerses me into cannot be put into any other than Shakespeare's own words.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Among the influences specified here, there is obviously a powerful influence of Christianity. But so too is there a powerful influence of existential, atheistic, nihilistic doubt and disbelief. It is Dostoevsky who occupies, in my mind, that realm that is not in between these extremes, but is both at the same time.

Henry IV, Part One

What joys does this play offer an actor?  The personal and political relationships are complex, subtle--there are infinite ways to play most of these characters.  The shades of meaning, the ambiguity of purpose--so many of the characters offer the chance for original interpretation (particularly if the actor shows some bravery--most of the characters could be played dully, too).  The language is evocative: most of the characters are capable of creative imagery, clever turns of speech.  Falstaff did not meet my expectations in print, but alive on stage, he must be something altogether new.

My favorite passage:

Glendower:  I cannot blame him. At my nativity

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes

Of burning cressets, and at my birth

The frame and huge foundation of the earth

Shaked like a coward.

Hotspur:  Why, so it would have done at the same season if your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.

Glendower: I say the earth did shake when I was born.

A close second:

Falstaff: 'Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day.  What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me?  Well, 'tis no matter; honor pricks me on.  Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on?  How then?  Can honor set to a leg?  Or an arm?  No.  Or take away the grief of a wound? No.  Honor hath no skill in surgery then?  No.  What is honor?  A word.  What is in that word honor?  What is honor?  Air--a trim reckoning!  Who hath it?  He that died a Wednesday.  Doth he feel it?  No.  Doth he hear it?  No. 'Tis insensible then?  Yea, to the dead.  But will it not live with the living?  No.  Why?  Detraction will not suffer it.  Therefore I'll none of it.  Honor is a mere scutcheon--and so ends my catechism.

The Merchant of Venice

A Reader-response tour through Shakespeare's plays continues.

In acts four and five, I found myself more riveted to the text than I can ever recall being while reading Shakespeare.

If the world is a stage, what matter is the role we choose to play. 

Antonio: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage, where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

Gratiano: Let me play the fool, (I.i. 80-83)

Though the world as stage is a common expression in Shakespeare, this particular passage uniquely hits me.  The emphasis is on the characters acting their roles--and if the world is a stage, we the players must consider our roles upon it.

I have a recurring dream in which I am an actor, but while on stage I struggle to remember my lines, my blocking, the scene I'm in, even the play I'm in.  I sometimes think this dream is where I play out my tension in life, where I may feel like I am acting a part, and I fear that soon an audience will discover that I really don't know what I'm doing.  And I'm also a recovering existentialist, so I do find this focus on the roles we choose to play interesting.   So there are reasons a passage like this draws me.

But it also makes me think about the importance of character in drama.  In fiction or poetry, there are many elements of the work that can be ascendant.  But in performed drama, character must be ascendant--it is the actors upon the stage which must command our attention.  If 20th century dramatists like Beckett, Pinter, or Stoppard worked toward abolishing the traditional conventions of drama, perhaps their greatest challenge was smashing consistent characters.

Shylock

Is any racism in the play offset by the playwright's giving to Shylock this, as poignant a passage as any in Shakespeare?

"I am a Jew.  Hath not a Jew eyes?  Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?  fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?  If you prick us, do we not bleed?  If you tickle us, do we not laugh?  If you poison us, do we not die?" (III.i)

I have trouble believing it was an anti-Semite that wrote these lines.  Furthermore, when Shylock is accused of cruelty, he counters the accusation by referencing the cruelty of the Christian world.  In Act 3, scene 1:

"And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?  If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.  If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility?  Revenge.  If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example?  Why, revenge.  The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

And in Act 4, scene 1, lines 90-100:

"Duke: How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend'ring none?

Shylock: What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?

You have among you many a purchased slave,

Which, like your asses and your dogs and your mules,

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them.  Shall I say to you,

'Let them be free, marry them to your heirs!

Why sweat they under burdens?  Let their beds

Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates

Be seasoned with such viands'?  You will answer,

'The slaves are ours.'"

Appearances and Disguise

In Act 3, scene 2, Bassanio has a lengthy speech on distrusting appearances, and later in the play Portia and Nerissa disguise themselves as men.  I've noted before that the disconnect between appearance and reality is a common theme in literature and in my lit course.  It goes further: in the composition class I teach this semester, our first unit is on Fairy Tales with an emphasis on Cinderella.  A common theme we find in Fairy Tales is deceit, disguise, and the importance of distrusting appearances.  This is theme is runs deep--it is old and ubiquitous, appearing in stories from many ages and told for many audiences.

Antonio's Nonresistance

I often read books on religious pacifism (notably works by Yoder and Tolstoy) which emphasize the Christian command not to return evil with evil, to respond to threat of violence with internal and external peace.  Antonio's words as he prepares to face his own violent death strike me as an expression in the Christian pacifist vein:

                               "I do oppose

My patience to his fury, and am armed

To suffer with a quietness of spirit

The very tyranny and rage of his." (IV.i.11-14)

Mercy and Justice

I might also here reference one of the firmest lessons I took from the religion of my youth--because you are forgiven your sins, you must forgive others their sins against you.  Says a disguised Portia:

"Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That, in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation.  We do pray for mercy,

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy." (IV.i.203-207)

Jesus tells a parable about a servant being forgiven a large debt, then demanding immediate payment from another servant for a small debt; when the master who forgave the large debt hears about that, he gets angry and punishes the servant.  This theme is shown in the treatment (or is it cheating?) of Shylock--he cruelly withheld mercy, and is thus treated with no mercy.   Yet I see a contradiction.  Isn't it a form of "justice" to withhold mercy from Shylock because he withheld mercy?  And didn't Portia just tout mercy over justice?  To follow the standard Portia asked of Shylock, they should now mercifully forgive Shylock, letting him go on his way without punishing him.  Though the Duke and Antonio grant him some leniency, they still do punish Shylock (pretty severely, I would think).  Shylock gets his "just" reward because he demanded justice instead of mercy--and the very people who asked him to show mercy are not now willing to show him terribly much mercy at all.

The theme of mercy gets a more light-hearted treatment in Act 5, when Portia and Nerissa forgive their husbands for giving away their rings.

Sprigs on a Barrel Organ

Dostoevsky's underground man insists on irrational motivations driving human behavior, and that furthermore, these irrational drives are directly tied to free will.  Here's what Shylock has to say:

"Some men there are love not a gaping pig,

Some that are mad if they behold a cat,

And others, when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose,

Cannot contain their urine; for affection,

Master of passion, sways it to the mood

Of what it likes or loathes.  Now for your answer:

As there is no firm reason to be rend'red

Why he cannot abide a gaping pig,

Why he a harmless necessary cat,

Why he a woolen bagpipe, but of force

Must yield to such inevitable shame

As to offend, himself being offended,

So can I give no reason, nor I will not." (IV.i.48-60)

This passage perhaps makes us sprigs on a barrel organ: though we don't know the psychological reasons we loathe certain things, nonetheless we do, and are compelled beyond our will to respond in certain ways to those things we loathe.  It is not a free unreason--there are many schools of psychology that could try take us beyond "there is no firm reason."

Richard III

It is a play that largely belongs to the angry, mourning women lamenting their losses at the hands of Richard.  It seems filled with the motif of time periods.  It may be a compromised work; today we don't care for our writers to create their works with concern for the political powers (but then, much of Western civilization's paintings are tainted by power and money too, right?).  A few issues stand out to me.

Obsession with the Shadow Self: Self-Love and Self-Hate

In Richard's first speech, he laments the boredom of the current time period; he'll have nothing to do

"Unless to spy my own shadow in the sun

And descant on my own deformity" (I.ii.26-27)

An odd line, I thought, but probably just a chance for Shakespeare to dig at his villain's (and the current dynastic family's villain's) physical flaws.  But then another line resonated in a similar vein:

"Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass

That I may see my shadow as I pass" (I.ii.262-263).

Suddenly we have a pattern.  Richard twice invokes a desire to examine his own shadow.  Once he muses on examining his own shadow to pass the time, and shortly after discusses examining his shadow through a mirror (taking himself a step away from the actual shadow).  A contrast: the sun, his shadow.  The sun representing, perhaps, God, King, Goodness, the shadow representing all of Richard's flaws.

But Richard is going to perform many dark deeds throughout the play.  This focus on his own shadow (not himself or his deformity, but the shadow of his deformity) on one hand shows a fixation on his own evil.  But on the other hand, it shows a desire to distance himself from this evil.  He doesn't want to look at himself; he only wants to look at his own shadow.  After that, he doesn't even want to look at his shadow; he wants to examine his shadow through a mirror as he walks away from it.

I think this becomes interesting when Richard wakes on the day of the battle, after ghosts have cursed him to despair and death in the night:

"What do I fear?  Myself?  There's none else by.

Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.

Is there a murderer here?  No.  Yes, I am.

Then fly.  What, from myself?  Great reason why!

Lest I revenge.  What, myself upon myself?

Alack, I love myself. Wherefore?  For any good

That I myself have done unto myself?

O no! Alas, I rather hate myself

For hateful deeds committed by myself.

I am a villain.  Yet I lie, I am not.

Fool, of thyself speak well.  Fool, do not flatter" (V.iii.183-193)

If there was ever a better written expression for the conflicted self, self-hatred and self-love combined into a self-fear, I haven't read it.  Certainly, shortly after Richard bucks himself up for war by denying his conscience:

"Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;

Conscience is but a word cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!" (V.iii.309-312)

But is that conflicted self that lingers with me--objectively illustrated by a desire to examine one's shadow, an act requiring both self-love and self-hate.

Justifying War

We see the Tudor hero Richmond and the Tudor villain Richard inspire their troops with different justifications for war.  Both are familiar.

Good Richmond buoys the troops by claiming they fight for God.

"God and our good cause fight upon our side" (V.iii.241)

"One that hath ever been God's enemy

Then if you fight against God's enemy,

God will in justice ward you as his soldiers" (V.iii.253-255)

"Then in the name of God and all these rights,

Advance your standards, draw your willing swords" (V.iii.263-265)

Written at a time when belief in the divine right of kings was a foundational principle for government, there is sincerity here.  Still, Richmond is making a power play: he's waging a war to remove another king and place the crown on his own head.  He claims, of course, that he fights on God's side, but he's certainly not an objective student of God's will ("God insists I wage a war to make myself King" is hardly convincing).  But then, many killers and warmongers justify their murders and wars by claiming God is on their side.  it is often that in a war, the religious on each side calls on God to justify its own cause.

Evil Richard calls for war by demonizing the enemy and by calling on fears of what will happen if they don't fight and win.

"A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,

A scum of Britains and base lackey peasants,

Whom their o'ercloyed country vomits forth

To desperate ventures and assured destruction.

You sleeping safe, they bring you unrest;

You having lands, and blest with beauteous wives

They would distrain the one, distain the other." (V.iii.317-323)

"Shall these enjoy our lands?  Lie with our wives?

Ravish our daughters?" (V.iii.337-338)

Richard dehumanizes the enemy, and calls upon fears of what this monstrous enemy will do to the good people's peaceful homes.  They, then, become just warriors: they are merely defending peace by waging war.  Earlier, Richmond makes a similar claim:

"To reap the harvest of perpetual peace

by this one bloody trial of sharp war" (V.iii.15-16)

Of course, perpetual war can be justified by these claims.

Syntax and Ambiguity

"Now is the winter of our discontent" (I.i.1)

In isolation, the wonderful first line has clear meaning: the bad time is now.  But that line is part of a clause:

"Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York" (I.i.1-2)

This clause also has a clear meaning: the bad time is now over.

The beauty of the syntax also finds meaning in the speaker.  For Richard, the "glorious summer" is his own "winter of [...] discontent:" he's not happy.  And as the play is about to detail Richard's rise to power, it is also going to detail England's "winter of our discontent" which is, in Richard's time, occurring now.  The play is the winter of discontent, even if the clause means the winter of discontent (which includes a long civil war) is over.

The syntax is genius.

Acting and the Creative Act

A contrapuntal essay

In "The Existential Clown" in The Atlantic, James Parker writes about actor Jim Carrey as an artist, whose films show a consistency of vision:

"Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self."

I might take this in a few different directions. In emails with my friend Rob (a writer and proponent of Auteur Theory) we have discussed whether an actor can really be an auteur, who really controls the vision of a film or films, who should, differences in stage and film, that sort of thing. But there are other directions, including artistic intent. If Carrey did not play roles in these films as part of a larger artistic vision, if indeed his primary goal is to make people laugh and he doesn't bother with anything remotely approaching "a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self," then can his filmography really amount to this? Can we the viewers (or just Parker) examine the ouevre for its results, without bothering with the intentions of the comic actor? Or maybe we could look about and find other actors who, in their acting alone separate from writing or directing, show a consistency of character, theme, explorative subject (John Wayne comes to mind). Or we could be more subjective: are there certain actors you follow in the same way you might follow a writer, a director, a musician? Does having a "favorite actor" mean quite the same thing as having a "favorite writer"? And how is it different?

I like all these lines of inquiry, but I'm interested in reflecting on acting as a creative act. When I speak of a Shakespearean production, I would tend to refer to "Actor A's Character" rather than "Director B's Play" (for example, to me this is "Gibson's Hamlet," not "Zeffirelli's Hamlet"). It is the actor who interprets and creates the character. If I see a film or stage version, it is not the choices of the director I will relish, but the choices of the actor. Of course the actor is not independent: he/she relies on the initial creation of character and words by Shakespeare, as well as the vision and support of a director. But what artist can work in isolation with total freedom from interference or influence? A writer does not invent the language he/she works in, even if he/she invents his/her own version of it.

But let's move to television. David Chase created The Sopranos, but I think it was really Tony Gandolfini who created Tony Soprano. Certainly Chase invented him, but it was Gandolfini who gave him life, who gave him shape, who thrusts Tony Soprano into my consciousness. Gandolfini is a creative agent. Gandolfini is the artist who passed a character from the realm of imagination into...well, my imagination (when I started watching the DVDs I did have dreams about him). Could another actor have done so? Maybe. Maybe not. But I want to credit the actor for making the character what he is, and I do believe it is the actor as creative agent that reached me.

That's not to say that's always the case. Larry David is probably more responsible than Jason Alexander for the genius of George Costanza, but Michael Richards is largely the creator of Kramer.

And maybe we get back to the old problem of Jack Nicholson's Randle Patrick McMurphy against Ken Kesey's Randle Patrick McMurphy. They're not quite the same McMurphy, are they? I don't think Milos Forman made a different McMurphy. And while I can have serious discussion about the differences between the film and novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I cannot really articulate why Nicholson's portrayal of McMurphy is not quite the McMurphy of the book. I can only say that Nicholson is a great actor, an artist, a dominant presence that makes a character his own. Simply by having Nicholas play McMurphy, McMurphy becomes something other than what he was in the text (of course, right? He's an aesthetic creation, and so that aesthetic in words on a page is different than an actor on a screen. That's not what I want to address here; I'm still asserting that Nicholson created a character).

So maybe I'm only thinking of the brilliant actors here (but, in the same way proponents of Auteur Theory mainly think of the brilliant directors). What of the average actors? What of the lousy actors?

But let me raise a problem (and suggest this whole line of inquiry is either pointless or impossible). I love the film The Aviator for its portrayal of character; I thought Leonardo DiCaprio was brilliant (I'm rather interested in OCD). One scene in particular lingers with me: Hughes is in a restroom, and he doesn't want to touch the door to get out, so he quietly waits until somebody else enters the restroom so that he can leave without touching the door.

The scene is wonderful: I recall the quiet and the focus. But whom do I really credit for the scene? Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, director Martin Scorcese, or writer John Logan? And this may also get at why I can't quite accept Auteur Theory. I think it likely the scene worked so well because actor, director, writer, and even a host of others contributing to the creation of the scene made it work. A singular, controlling vision? That doesn't matter; what matters is the resulting scene, a scene with many contributors to its brilliance (though perhaps Auteur Theory is a way to understand an ouevre, not a particular film or a particular scene).

I'm interested in the ways that an actor creates. I'm interested in the way an actor can be an artist. I'm interested in why different people watch things and what they're looking for when they watch. And I'm interested in how we talk about these things.

Let me finish by noting that in some ways, the subject of acting and the theater haunts my dreams. I have recurring dreams (nightmares, I suppose) about somehow making a mistake and ruining a stage show. In particular, I sometimes dream that I'm in a play, and perhaps I don't know my lines, perhaps I don't know the blocking, or often it's more serious: I don't know what character I'm playing, or I don't even know what play I'm in. In my dreams, I often find myself on stage in front of people with other performers, not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing and aware that I'm ruining everything. Please, try that on Freud.

(These contrapuntal essays are taking a distinct shape toward a) rambling directionlessly and b) asking a bunch of questions I'm not bothering to answer (I really hate the latter trend in my writing and will work toward toning it down). What I'm finding in these essays, however, is that it is not the result that makes it contrapuntal, but my mindset whiile writing. I'm willing to ramble and raise questions and lose focus. It's a method, a way of thinking, and thus the writing and thinking goes where I don't expect when I begin)

Zeitgeist, Literature, Science

A contrapuntal essay

In "The Relevance of Animal Experimentation to Roman Catholic Ethical Methodology," James Gaffney discusses the medieval church view (most prominantly expressed by Thomas Aquinas) that cruelty to animals was not inherently sinful, but that cruely to animals could lead one to a cruel disposition and cruelty toward humans. Gaffney writes

"Shakespeare reminds us that such ideas were current later in the Renaissance. thus, in Cymbeline, the queen's plan to test slow and painful poisons on 'such creatures as we count not worth the hanging--but none human' elicits from her physician the admonition that 'your highness shall from this practice but make hard your heart.'"

One doesn't have to look hard to find the ideas current at a time working their way into works of literature (and I'm reminded of John Fowles' suggestion that bad novels tell us more about the time period they were written in than good novels). Sometimes this is in mere passing, though sometimes writers particularly focus on exploring the ideas of the time. Mikhail Bakhtin writes that

"As an artist, Dostoevsky did not create his ideas in the same way philosophers or scholars create theirs--he created images of ideas found, heard, sometimes divined by him in reality itself, that is, ideas already living or entering life as idea-forces. Dostoevsky possessed an extraordinary gift for hearing the dialogue of his epoch [...] He heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is, the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews."

And indeed, in Dostoevsky's great novels, he seems to tweak out the consequences of the religious and political thoughts and movements of his era.

I actually think it is primarily new scientific theories, new discoveries, and technological advancements that lead to a zeitgeist, a worldview common to a culture of a place and time. It is also political and economic events, but it is often new scientific insight that advances people to new ideas, new ways of seeing the world. Think of the giant shifts in thought after Columbus's trip to America. Think of the astronomical discoveries about the earth's place in the universe. Of human forays into outer space. Of life at the cellular level. Of how the printing press, railroads, flight, telephone, television, internet change us.

I also think of Darwin, and more broadly the new geological and biological ideas of the 19th century. Isn't reaction to such new ideas central to Victorian thought (or do I only think this because I've read The French Lieutenant's Woman too many times)? Which naturally brings me to Alfred Lord Tennyson. In In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson expresses his anxiety over the new scientific theories on geology and biology. He does not "invent" these ideas. I also doubt he was the first or only Victorian to react to Lyell in the way that he did. But you can read Tennyson's poetry if you want to explore the Victorian zeitgeist, if you want to see how Victorians responded to the scientific insight at the time. It's not the only reaction, but it is a prominent reaction. In Memoriam A.H.H. is perhaps an expression through poetry of the spirit of the time.

As I said, it is scientific insight, whether it be theory, discovery, or advancement, that moves the zeitgeist. But sometimes in literature these ideas are exposed or explored. Literature may articulate the consequences of an idea.

King Lear

I'm reading all of Shakespeare's plays in a year; this is the fourth.

A Thrill To Teach
I don't enjoy teaching anything more than I enjoy teaching King Lear.

I often struggle with the scene one blowup between Lear and Cordelia (Lear clearly overreacts to a pretty inoffensive statement, but can't Cordelia see she is publicly embarrassing her very proud king-father?). This semester I turned this moment to my students: what do you make of this scene? The resulting discussion was probably the best of the semester: many different students shared many different ideas on this critical moment in the play.

But I love talking about this play: King Lear gives me energy and passion. Often when talking about the play, I find myself just speaking authentically, naturally, without obvious plan or pose. It is a play I feel deeply, and so I teach it deeply.

Visualization and Reading
When I read I ask myself: am I visualizing this occurring on stage, or am I visualizing it in the "real world"? It is often actually both. But then there's another question of visualization: what do I picture when characters describe events that occur offstage? Then I usually visualize the events occurring in the real world.

But King Lear offers another visualization entirely: what do I visualize when a character lies about what is occurring? When Edgar (disguised as Tom o' Bedlam) tells Gloucester (who is now blind) that he is standing at the edge of a cliff looking far down below (when he is not), Edgar's deception is so evocative that my mind's eye is standing on that cliff, looking down at the abyss.

It's not so strange, I suppose: when I'm reading words, it doesn't terribly matter whether a scene is actually occurring, being described, or being lied about, for whatever the situation I'm reading words and visualizing unconsciously.

Antony and Cleopatra

I'm reading all of Shakespeare's plays in a year: this is the third.

Reader-response
Reader-response theory recognizes that when encountering a work of literature, the individual brings with him or her all sorts of experiences with life and literature. An honest approach recognizes this, and may find insight in the text.

I'm a junky for watching good TV series on DVD. And after seeing Rome, my visualization for characters like Mark Antony and Cleopatra is still stuck on James Purefoy (not, oddly enough, Charlton Heston) and Lyndsey Marshal. Sometimes an actor's appearance and representation sticks in the mind, forming the character. I expect that for my entire life, James Purefoy's Mark Antony will be my Mark Antony. Purefoy's movements, facial expressions, voice, and speech rhythms will always linger in my memory.

My question is whether this connection of a literary character to a actor's portrayal is based on my own memory, or on the strength or weakness of the text. I encountered Hamlet before I had seen any actor portray him, and so when I read Hamlet, my mental visualization is independent of any actor. So too with memorable characters like Macbeth and Lear. But I expect that Kenneth Branaugh will always be Henry V for me. Is this solely because of the chronological order I encountered the work, or because of the strength of the work itself? After all, at this point I can occasionally read a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest without seeing Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy.

Or it could be in the quality of the play. For whatever reason, Shakespeare's literary Antony couldn't shake Purefoy's Antony from my memory.

Suicide
Perhaps only Dostoevsky made suicide more a prominent element of his work than Shakespeare. I can see why suicide is such a pressing theme for literature. It is the place where human will confronts nature, chance, or fate. It is the direct confrontation of free will and death. It is the ultimate show of despair at the cosmos or mere circumstance. In Dostoevsky, I think it is the rejection of the belief that human beings are machine-like animals, preprogrammed creatures without will concerned only with survival: in Dostoevsky, suicide shows that there are other motivations (like ideas) that guide human behavior.

Shakespeare's plays are littered with murders and suicides, and eloquent characters capable of insight into just what suicide may mean.

Macbeth

I am reading all of Shakespeare's plays in the course of a year; this is the second.

I still think of the character Macbeth as a proto-existentialist (in the emphasis on action, the rejection of morality, the weariness with life, the mockery of existence's absurdity), but that doesn't mean I think of Macbeth as a proto-existentialist play (in the same way that King Lear may be). Nature itself balks at Macbeth's crime, and aside from the bloodshed, the drama of the play obviously comes from the psychological conflict and development of the Macbeths.

I imagine the character Macbeth as a terribly difficult stage role to play: the success of a staging of Macbeth must rely heavily on the lead actor's ability and understanding. I thought season two of Slings & Arrows gave this a solid treatment.

Hamlet

I am reading all of Shakespeare's plays in the course of a year; this is the first.

Why Hamlet endures: death
Death is the universal reality, and Hamlet is consumed with it. Hamlet meditates on death as annihilation, on the mysteries of the afterlife, and on the physical aftermath of the body. Laertes shows concern for the ceremonial rites to commemorate death. There is discussion of the religious/moral impact of death, about whether characters are able to be absolved of sins before death. Death is the universal theme, and so Hamlet will always have universal appeal.

Why Hamlet endures: language
The plot is familiar, and the emotional impact may be lost, but the language endures and will endure. This is just spectacular poetry, indescribably great. The wordplay is genius, and the poetry awesome. Even trying to find words to express the beauty and brilliance of Hamlet's language seems cheap.

Why Hamlet endures: pretentiousness
Most people who read or watch Shakespeare these days are intelligent, and probably self-aware of intelligence. And so it would not surprise me if most readers of Shakespeare have at some point thought, consciously or unconsciously, something like the following:

"I'm very, very smart. It's my lot to be surrounded by small-minded fools: some of them have positions of authority over me, and many of them are out to get me. But I have more wit and insight than any of them: I'm smarter than them all."

Such readers find a character to relate to in Hamlet.

Reader-Response: Pacifism
If Shakespeare ever set out to write a play to say "Revenge is folly. Violence is folly. Vengeance is cyclical, and only brings about more bloodshed. All violence, whether evil or 'righteous,' can only bring horror," he would have succeeded in Hamlet. Of course I don't think Shakespeare set out to write Hamlet with such a precise goal, but the play still speaks to me as a pacifist.

Fortinbras
I used to see a conventional catharsis in the ending of Hamlet: the country was sick, there was a great purging, and now Fortinbras comes to restore order and health. Then I saw the '06 Hamlet at the Guthrie in Minneapolis: Fortinbras is portrayed as a preening, ambitious warmonger, and ascension to the throne is a continuation of corrupt and brutal power. Now when I return to the text, I don't see how I missed it. Throughout the play, Fortinbras is only referred to for his belligerent nature and behavior. And at the end, when examining the carnage at Elsinore, he can only speak in terms of warfare, and he can only honor the deaths with the trappings of warfare. Whatever sickness was purged in Denmark, Fortinbras can only be expected to bring carnage.

I recommend...

Slings & Arrows, a funny and moving show about Shakespeare performed on stage.

Torrential Downpour

Stupid Year Project
A couple of days ago I randomly told my brother that I would read or re-read all of Shakespeare's plays in the next year. This is the wild project that could undo me. I'm starting with Hamlet (season one of Slings & Arrows got me hyped for a re-reading), and I'll continue to blog about the experience throughout the year.

The Wire
I don't care if you judge me a philistine: I prefer television to film. A well-done TV series can engross me in ways a film just can't. A film has around two hours to bring me to another world, and it's a rare film that can pull it off. But a TV series, with its hours and hours of episodes, can bring me deep into characters and settings and stories. I feel engulfed in a good show, sucked into a world of possibilities.

And so my wife and I are ready to wrap up The Wire--just three episodes to go. It's a show that took some time to grow on us--it wasn't until the final episode of season one that I found myself engrossed. It's an emotionally wearing show--it often leaves us sapped. But I don't know what can replace it for us.

When do you give up on a book?
I'm half-way through Marc Bekoff's Animals Matter, and I'm thinking of stopping. The book introduces a lot of the key issues, but I don't find it philosophically rigorous, scientifically detailed, or well-written. There is writing on animal rights issues that is a lot better than this. But I may continue--there are some specific issues Bekoff addresses that I wish to explore further.

OCD
My particular obsessions sometimes come in the form of distrusting my senses. Later I mull it over. "Did I really snap the seatbelt into place while putting in a child seat?" "Was that really the number I saw on the scale?" "Am I sure I didn't run somebody over with my car back there?" I never quite trust my senses or my memory, and frankly my wife is a saint for tolerating me. This distrust is also why as a teacher I'm heavy on lists--I need to write down any task I need to do.

Mostly Vegan
I barely believe this. I went mostly vegan on March 30th, and as of today I've lost 50 pounds.

Reading: context and memory

Near the end of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a dancing bear gets shot--it is but one more act of violence in a book full of senseless, meaningless violence. As I read the incident, I couldn't help but recall Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," when Endicott orders a bear that was dancing with people to be shot.

Near the beginning of Shaw's Man and Superman, Ramsden tries to console Octavius over Whitefield's death by telling him "it's the common lot." Reading this, it is hard not to recall Gertrude's admonition to Hamlet that "Thou know'st 'tis common; all that live must die/ Passing through nature to eternity" (Hamlet dismisses her with "Ay, madam, it is common"; no matter how true it is, it is pretty shoddy consolation to tell a mourner that death is the common lot).

I don't know that either McCarthy or Shaw intended an allusion (though the parallel in the death of the dancing bear in Blood Meridian and "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" offers intriguing symbolic meaning). What's more, it doesn't matter if these parallels were intentional. As a reader, the connection has been made in my head. As I am reading, I can't ignore my memories of earlier works I've read: the parallels pop into my brain whether I seek them out or not. These parallels may mean much, or they may mean little and I might pass over them quickly.

But while reading one work, I have the memory of everything else I've ever read (or at least, everything that I remember of everything else I've ever read). As I'm fully engaged with a text, that text may remind me of other things I've read. It may provoke me to stop and consider the texts.

For reading, that means at least two things, I suppose. It means we rarely read in a vacuum: we bring ourselves and our memories of past reading to the reading experience. It also means that finishing a book does not truly mean finishing a book: that book could come back to you at a future moment, in unexpected context.

Edmund and Lear

Somehow, while grading exams on King Lear, it suddenly struck me how the following soliloquy from Edmund could provide context for how we discuss the entire play:

"This is the excellent foppery of
the world, that when we are sick in fortune,
often the surfeits of our own behavior, we
make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon,
and stars; as if we were villains on necessity;
fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves,
and treachers by spherical predominance;
drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced
obedience of planetary influences; and all that
we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An
admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay
his goatish disposition on the charge of a star."

The play as a whole emphasizes the possibility that nature or the gods are malevolent or indifferent. Perhaps, indeed, the cosmos or God is indifferent to human suffering and human behavior. But...doesn't Lear bring his tragedy on himself? He disowns Cordelia and banishes Kent. He turns the kingdom over to his greedy daughters Regan and Goneril. He makes mistakes; his own character and his own actions bring on suffering for himself, his kingdom, and Cordelia. It isn't just Lear, of course; he and others are also victimized by the play's villains. But again it is not nature or the gods that make people suffer further: it is evil people that cause further suffering. The good, loyal characters suffer because of the machinations and actions of Edmund, Cornwall, Regan, and Goneril.

So perhaps Edmund is speaking to the audience directly here. He's warning us not to get distracted by all the foolish characters who continually muse on "nature" and the gods. They're distracted: it is distinctly human behavior that brings on the suffering of the play. It's silly to lash out at indifferent or malevolent gods, to complain about the emptiness of the cosmos. Human suffering is brought on by the mistakes of good people and the machinations of evil people.

In the play, Edmund and Lear speak not a single word to one another. Perhaps, in a very indirect way, Edmund in this passage speaks to Lear. But perhaps Lear doesn't even need the message. It is possible that Lear and Edmund are the only two characters that never actually lash out at "nature." After Lear is cast out into the storm, he recognizes he can't blame "nature," but must blame his daughters:

"Rumble thy bellyful. Spit, fire. Spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters.
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness.
I never gave you kingdom, called you children,
You owe me no subscription. Then let fall
Your horrible pleasure."

Here Lear recognizes it is bad people that caused his suffering; indeed, throughout his insanity in the storm, Lear repeatedly fixates on the betrayal by his daughters. Other characters experience suffering and speculate on the gods; Lear experiences suffering and pins it on a human source. And later, Lear recognizes that it was his own mistakes, telling Cordelia

"I am a very foolish fond old man"

and

"You must bear with me./ Pray you now, forget and forgive. I am old and/ foolish."

In Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom writes that Shakespeare never allowed Edmund and Lear to speak to each other "because they are apocalyptic antitheses: the king is all feeling, and Edmund is bare of all affect." They had nothing to say to each other, according to Bloom, because they were opposites: Lear is all emotion, full of whatever feeling possesses him, while Edmund is "ice-cold, indifferent." Insightful, yes, but it also highlights one of my frustrations of Bloom's reading of Shakespeare in that book. He places all emphasis on characters, and explores very little of the ideas. Bloom as a reader loves unique characters (a reading mode I could appreciate if Bloom didn't so frequently lash out at anybody who reads Shakespeare differently than he does).

Let me provide another theory:

Edmund and Lear have nothing to say to each other because they already know the same thing. While many of the characters in the play spend time making grand claims about indifferent nature and the malevolent gods, Edmund and Lear each recognize that human affairs are governed by human character and human behavior. Each recognizes that it is not something outside of humanity which causes the greatest of human suffering, but the frailty and evil of humanity itself that causes the worst of human suffering. In the IDEAS of the play, Edmund and Lear have nothing to say to each other because they both embrace the same "truth."

Is King Lear a play about an indifferent universe, about a lack of divine justice? Perhaps. But perhaps Edmund warns us not to look to the stars for an answer to human suffering. Perhaps we see in the tragic hero Lear a character that never attempts to blame "nature." Perhaps King Lear reminds us not to speculate on "nature" or "the gods" when we should look to humanity for answers to human suffering.

And an extra thought
I can't help but think Moby-Dick is involved here somewhere. Doesn't Moby-Dick explore the relationship between that which humans are responsible for and that which is beyond human control? Ishmael says:

"chance, free will, and necessity--no wise incompatible--all interweavingly working together. The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course--its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events."

And doesn't Moby-Dick often tempt us to consider Ahab and the sorry souls on the Pequod victims of "fate" or of "nature," when we should also look to human character and human behavior to explain events?

Teaching "King Lear"

I love teaching King Lear. Just love it. I struggle to make it a discussion: instead I usually read significant passages and expound on their greater meaning and significance. I feel a bit like either mad Lear or the Fool, running around in front of the class yelling and frothing and laughing. Such fun.

"When we are born, we cry that we are come To this great stage of fools."

Torrential Downpour

"In short, anything can be said of world history, anything conceivable even by the most disordered imagination. There is only one thing that you can’t say–that it had anything to do with reason."
In a recent post, economist David Berri writes about books applying economics to other subject, and discusses the idea (as expressed by Tim Harford) that

"Rational people respond to incentives: When it becomes more costly to do something, they will tend to do it less; when it becomes easier, cheaper, or more beneficial, they tend to do it more. In weighing up their choices, they will bear in mind the overall constraints upon them: not just the costs and benefits of a specific choice, but their total budget. And they will also consider the future consequences of present choices."

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky raises an objection against (among other things) the belief that human beings will behave according to their own best interests, if they could only be taught them. The man from the underground suggests that human desire cannot be easily quantified, and further suggests that "reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s intellectual faculties, while volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean of the whole of human life including both reason and speculation."

It again strikes me that the mode of thinking Dostoevsky argues against is precisely the mode of thinking in economics. The man from the underground seems to suggest that people's desires transcend simple definitions of "incentives," that humans can and do behave against their own incentives or best interests (primarily in order to assert their free will, to prove they are not sprigs on a barrel organ), and that humans can't really be expected to act according to reason (as they often don't).

I'm chasing after windmills.

Finishing a book
I've been carrying Dostoevsky's The Idiot around with me for about a month. I'm a horrifyingly slow reader (ah, but I remember what I read fairly well, better than most, I think), the timing has been bad (finals week grading, Holiday visiting, lots and lots of football), and frankly taking care of a one year old limits reading time.

As I've been in Dostoevsky's world, it has felt to me as a world without beginning (since I started it at a Final, associating it with last semester, which seems worlds away by this point) and no end. And now, I'll soon be leaving this world. It's a bit...disorienting. In my thesis on John Fowles' The Magus, I argue that Nicholas the narrator's suicide attempt is inauthentic, because the weight of the pages after this chapter convince the reader that the attempt will fail. And the weight of pages of The Idiot has seemed interminable, as if the events could carry on forever (Dostoevsky's seeming lack of structure contributes).

But now I've got less than 90 pages, and it's terribly obvious that events will end. I know they soon must. And yet nothing in the book is occurring as if any denouement is on its way.

But the next book I plan to read is Dostoevsky's The Adolescent, so I won't be out of his world for long. I've really be working through the master's major works. Dostoevsky is my desert island novelist--I don't think I would need any other novels but his.

(and if you're curious, my desert island playwright is, of course, Shakespeare, and I do not have a desert island poet, as the infinite varieties and beauties of poetry cannot allow me to limit myself to but one poet).

Watching
Here's what I've been watching over winter break:

Day Watch. OK.
The Big Lebowski. Very funny.
Superbad. Very funny.
The Brothers Solomon. This is the sort of movie my wife and I frequently watch and often love: it's not technically "good," and it's low budget and unknown, but it is filled with genuinely creative, funny moments.

I've also been rewatching season two of The Sopranos, and occasionally rewatching episodes of season nine of Seinfeld.

And lots and lots of football. Miserable, miserable football.

Brief response to Bloom on Lear

If Harold Bloom would like to argue that the ideology of feminist literary theory causes a misreading of King Lear, he might be able to wage a solid argument.

But if Bloom is suggesting that an individual woman reader's experience reading King Lear is invalid if she doesn't like Lear, he's saying something else altogether.

The former suggests an ideology can lead to misunderstanding of a writer who wasn't writing with such ideology--a fair point.

The latter suggests the only valid reading of King Lear is the universal reading, i.e, the male reading. The latter suggests a woman cannot read King Lear as a woman and read it accurately; the latter suggets that to understand King Lear, a woman may be required to read it like a man.

This is the worst excess of criticism: when a critic universalizes his own reading, taking his particular tastes and developing a larger theory for it. Such criticism requires other readers to read literature only as that particular critic reads literature--it forces one's personal mode of reading onto everybody else and says that one's personal mode of reading is "proper" and everybody else's is inaccurate.

We can all of us only read as ourselves. I cannot read as Harold Bloom; he cannot read as me. I also cannot read as a woman, and I would not require a woman to read as a man.